NOVEL WEB Chapter Twenty-Seven
While on my daily walk, I reflect on the last four months. I spent the first month learning sufficient imperial cloning technology and designing, with the help of the research matrix, a generic servitor and its equipment and implants so that I can grow the clones around the implants, rather than hack up bodies like an ork mad doc.
In my spare time, I hunted down seven AI kill switches, but had to leave them in place until I could learn to repurpose them safely.
With the first batch of servitors underway, I finally had the time to learn about my own modules and underwent a slew of upgrades. E-SIM gave me an entirely new skeleton, along with new, vacuum resistant skin, artificial connective tissues and electromechanical wires added to my muscles. These physical enhancements were followed with all the mind enhancing modules I could cram in my skull without resorting to the polymer tissue replacement.
Feeling emboldened by my academic success, I head for the navigator’s spire. I haven’t explored it yet, but I read up on how luxurious these pseudo-prisons are and I want to see how true it is.
As I walk, I practise with my mind modules. I can’t use them properly yet; no matter how much they enhance my capabilities, they still take significant practice. The concurrent conscious cascade, for example, lets me run ten instances of myself simultaneously, but I can’t manage more than two. One works in conjunction with the rapid decision engine, and savant learning accelerator, letting me parse and comprehend massive amounts of data at a rapid rate.
My other stream focuses on my movements, unconnected to the other mind modules, as otherwise it’s like I’m living my life in slow motion. Yes it’s awesome, but when the rapid decision engine is linked to my movement, not only does every step take forever, but when I blink, it feels like I’m falling asleep. There’s no need to run every facet of my mind like I’m in a high stakes shootout every second of the day.
E-SIM already didn’t have enough power to sustain all my modules simultaneously, and the new modules exacerbated the issue, so last week I spent the last of my kill count on doubling the warptap’s maximum stealthed power draw. I’d hoped that upgrade would be free, as it is a tier one upgrade, but only the one I started with was free.
I was, at least, spared learning how it works, though in this case it was because the creators didn’t want to give up their core technology so easily. Considering the E-SIM project’s mission statement to prevent stagnation from over reliance on technology and promoting learning, I thought hiding the information was rather hypocritical.
I arrive at a new section of the ship. Sitting on top of the spine of the Distant Sun is a massive superstructure, covering the back quarter of the ship. It’s called the cathedral, and is a strange mix between a gothic cathedral and the layered superstructure on a luxury motor yacht, with large buttresses and stained glass windows. It has two main decks #C1 and #C2 and the navigator's spire is right at the top, overlooking the cathedral and much of the ship.
You’d think placing the most valuable crew members in the most vulnerable spot would be a bad idea, but navigators are psykers. Not only does no one want to be anywhere near them in case they get upset and explode into a demon spewing portal, they, shall we say, keep everything ‘in house’ and spend their days gazing at the corruptive sludge of the warp. They already have three eyes and, over time, they mutate so horribly they can go crazy and it’s safer to jettison the spire than send your crew up against a rapidly regenerating, soul flaying monster.
Distant Sun’s archives have a lot of stories. With pictures.
I regret my curiosity.
The cathedral is nowhere near the auto-temple, which makes no sense until I remember the whole ship is viewed as a temple to the Omnissiah, the Mechanicus’ god of knowledge, so really, the auto-temple is more a side chapel in a big cathedral, than a separate building of worship.
I reach for the button to call the lift for the navigator’s spire and miss it the first two pokes.
Regaining my coordination is an ongoing pain, not only am I now two metres tall, but all my joints have been reworked to more mechanically sound designs, replacing the evolution driven disasters like the knee joint.
The physical upgrades, like the toughened void skin, make it much more difficult to accidentally injure myself, which, given how many times I’ve tripped in the last couple of months, I’m grateful for the added resilience. I even tweaked the black skeleton recipe and ate a sample of the Distant Sun’s hull so I could make my noggin extra tough.
No more grey matter venting for this sucker.
The lift door pings and slides open with a quiet woosh. I step in and the lift hauls me up the spire, taking its sweet time as it goes through an armoured airlock. The doors open onto a security checkpoint. Unlike most of the ship, the tower is warm and the air is good enough that the small grill around my neck opens, drawing in fresh, sweet air.
I pass through two scanners and peer through armourglass at the dozens of screens filling the small security room and grimace. The room is locked by a bolt on the inside and there’s a withered body, cradling a laspistol slumped in the chair. Half its skull is missing and the remaining pieces are charred.
Is being a security guard really that boring?
The dead guard isn’t wearing Belacane livery, or a mechanicus uniform, but a grey, three piece suit with sea green enamel buttons, a dark red shirt and an ocean blue cravat. House Rey'a'Nor is embroidered on his shirt collar and a tiny mechanical silver spider is pinned on his jacket lapel.
If my house uniform looks even half that good when I finally get my Writ of Trade, I will be delighted.
Continuing through the narrow corridor. I finally reach the entrance hall of the navigator spire. The entrance hall is wide and tall, it has more in common with a church than a house. At the far end of the hall is another armoured door with a spiral staircase, in a glass tube, ascending behind it.
Decorative pillars line the room, top and tailed with gold gilded pilasters and skirting, depicting silvered planets caught in webs. The theme carries through the rest of the rooms, with store cupboards and kitchens just as elaborate as the dining hall and master bedroom. Much of the decorations have been damaged by fighting.
Dry, withered bodies fill room after room. Not a single one belongs to the mechanicus. All three hundred and seventy-seven bodies are house Rey'a'Nor personnel. The blackened nursery and blasted school room are distressing.
There’s one final room I absolutely have to check. Climbing the spiral staircase, I trip when my scanner chirps it’s pure platinum. Putting aside my incredulity, I continue upwards.
At the top is a thick metal door covered with mechanicus warding runes, angular shapes cut in silver inlay seemingly float before the door and walls, even though they are clearly fixed within the metal surface.
The door opens inward to an octagonal room lined with more runes. Large, arched windows make up much of the room and everything is lined in intricate stonework resembling an elaborate summer pavilion. Beyond, lies the armoured hull of the Distant Sun, twinkling with lights and showing the multitudinous paths and hatches criss crossing the hull.
The exterior looks more like an elaborate stone garden with imperial reliefs hiding hundreds of guns, but nothing can disguise the massive lance battery squatting in on the front third of the ship with two massive barrels, each one hundred and twenty metres long.
It’s impressive, but my most powerful weapon is a tenth of the size of the prow cannon on a battleship, a weapon bigger than the smallest warp capable vessels.
You know what would solve that problem?
My own battleship.
That savant module is firing on all cylinders today.
Wading through the fleshy splatter, I approach the throne. A captain is the absolute authority on his ship, yet here, in this isolated tower, sits the one person who can contest a captain’s power.
Well, not anymore. The navigator and his attendants are sprinkled across the room. The navigator’s serpentine lower half is curled around the decorative, golden throne and his torso stretches across the floor in powdered chunks.
I pick up his skull. A black gem lies in the centre of his forehead. I tap the gem and it disintegrates. Swirling dust whips about the room and I stagger back, flinching. Grey fog manifests around the skull and seeps into my skin.
Panicking, I rush from the room. As I scurry down the stairs, E-SIM blares a notification into my skull.
“Data recovery underway. Navigator gene unlocked. Tier four upgrades available.”
I skid to a halt in the entrance hall and mutter, “I did not see that coming.”
Bringing up the data, I see a third of the greyed out enhancements now have percentages associated with them. None are in double digits.
“What are the numbers?”
“The chance of success, should you take the modifications.”
“It’s a choice,” I sigh. Not one I want to take though. Space magic is cool and all, but I don’t want to be mutant demon bait and being a psyker would limit my implant options.
I don’t want to be a hermit on a ship either and by the time I returned, if I only travelled at near light speed, the Imperium would be dead. Probably. At least I can still take shallow warp dives. All is not lost, but the thought of dying alone and forgotten squeezes out a cold sweat.
Shaken and desperate, I go through the navigator’s spire with much more care and find nothing. I’m not quite sure what I was looking for and when everyone was clearly dead, I can’t work out why I was searching so frantically.
After a week I take a break to outfit my new servitors.
Dressed in mesh suits and fixed into powered exo-frames, these flesh robots are indistinguishable from a human until you try to talk to them. Rather than welding tools to bone, the exo-frames hold their equipment so I can vary loadouts and adjust my crew’s capabilities in under a minute rather than spend days doing grizzly surgery.
In addition to their basic, close fitting frames, these servitors posses the imperial equivalent of my mechanical heart, repair mechanisms, and skeleton. Between their internal and external support, these servitors should run with minimal maintenance for decades, rather than rot away within a handful years.
The servitors also have a mind impulse unit and a minimal savant implant. Unlike most servitors, these ones actually get better at the tasks you give them and can share solutions with each other. So long as their brains remain flesh, it doesn’t count as machine learning.
The servitors don't network with each other either and only communicate with a central database which is managed by my auto-taskmaster. This means they can’t download solutions, or coordinate without permission. There will be no accidental hive minds.
No tech heresy here, inquisitor, sir! I have only reused the salvaged implants of my dead compatriots that could have gone to fine officers. I promise I’ll build more implants on my own time with my own resources to replace them.
Then put them in more servitors.
Chuckling, I send the servitors to the room filled with busted tanks and set them to build new cloning facilities.
Seeing everything turn out so well, I continue my examination of the navigator’s spire and my fresh mind discovers my first secret compartment, one filled with navigator maps for the Koronus Expanse and Calixis sector.
From my reading, I know these maps have a psychic implant and can’t be stored digitally. These maps are hoarded and each family has their own set of maps. They are the foundation of a navigator family’s history and wealth and utterly incomprehensible to me, a swirling mass of colours that I see through my tongue and whisper to my eyes.
A single glance brings me to my knees and I return them to their hidden compartment.
It is with significant caution I resume my search and, at last, beneath the four poster bed in the master bedroom I find my salvation.
A chapel.
A sarcophagus.
A child.