Chapter 5: Chapter 5

Planetary defenses on Earth (our Earth, not 40k Terra) remained active and ready to fire, even with the trespassing Imperial fleet floating past Neptune (again, our Neptune, not theirs). It had taken nine days since the initial arrival of the Imperium to lead to the end of this whole unwelcome fiasco. Now I had to worry about the implications that this solar system might be a duplicate of actual Sol, or whether it’s their system that’s the copy. The AIs were running through the global archives to verify our history at the moment, and I’m not sure which result I’d prefer to discover.

In the meantime, while the trespassers were allowed to loiter for a while more, we pored through the knowledge held in our spoils of war. Interrogation of the prisoners had been quick enough, the usual methods of sticking some enchanted compliance implants worked well enough on enhanced marines as it did on our wastelanders. Out of potential PR, we only went through those unlucky fucks who made planetfall on Nexus soil, the armies on Mars were simply kept in a makeshift detention center and left alone until they were returned.

Well, except for the Mechanicium priests though. Thanks to my metaknowledge, I singled out that bunch of red-robed cyborgs for thorough studying, hacking into the systems of the higher ranking ones to plunder everything they had instead of bothering with the truth chambers or implants. Eva found their security protocols laughable - assuming she actually could laugh at all - and if anything, it took time to break in simply because of how haphazardly layered their defenses were. Like how even a jumble of junk metal could slow down a railgun shot.

Considering that the Magos’ are supposed to have some of the more secure encryptions within the Imperium, it’s still not saying much for them.

Good to know we could actually pierce through their defenses with little effort though. It’d make inevitable future operations against them all that much easier.

We also scoured them of their rampant implants and prosthetics, partly out of curiosity on how such inferior designs worked. And mostly because I knew it’d piss ‘em off, the priests were sent through the arches to be restored back to peak humanity before being stuffed into a captured destroyer. How they fared in a ship left on minimal life support was a non-issue.

Never liked the Martian techno-theocracy, never will.

Martians aside, an average spehss mahreen was an intriguing jumble of lines. Beyond the usual human stats floating around them, my console view also noted how their implants had basically melded their enhancements into the lines of each Marine’s genetics. So putting them under a healing arches would restore them as the augmented post-humans that they were, instead of regrowing puny human limbs like what the Mechanicum priests had to endure.

Remove the implants though, and the arches would be sloughing off most of their flesh, organs and blood as it tried to regrow the Astartes a more normal, mortal body. Interesting bit of trivia, but a ultimately non-practical use other than to humiliate the enemy.

As for the primarchs, as far as the console is concerned their extra organs were grown in them instead of implanted, so the healing arch trick probably wouldn’t work on them. And their stat blocks were worse, much worse. The first meeting with Horus was almost distracting with how much of a wall of text the stats and values around him were. Meeting the other primarchs was no different, though thanks to heavy time dilation I got the time to note unique lines in each of them, like extra stats for Sanguinius’ wings, or a few Canis Helix lines for Leman Russ.

I swear, these primarchs were worse than the old gods I snuffed out back on my world. I’ll have to effectively freeze time if I’m going to figure out how the stat values were interacting with one another. That, or hope that the samples I took from Horus and Angron was enough.

As a comprehensive guide - a codex, if you will - was being digitally constructed, information dragged out of the few psychic Librarians we managed to capture was also being studied by our occultists in Vault Gesserit. My order to expand and heavily secure a new wing for researching Imperium psykers and their Warp-related fuckery was already underway, so the prisoners would be dealt with with a cautious touch until then. At least the existing console lines in Tiberium made the crystals effective in draining the energies of the Immaterium without making any changes, so our standard T-shard weaponry was still going to remain effective all around.

Which meant that for all intents and purposes, we could treat the Warp and all its related byproducts as just another metanatural event. I’ll have to experiment a bit more to find the limits to our existing protections, just in case. A shame these Crusade-era Marines had no warp-tainted relics to study.

Hm… Maybe I should speed up research into interstellar travel methods as well, preferably ones independent from the Warp drives the Imperium uses. Because, you know…jumping into an unstable sub-dimension that’s just waiting for a glitch to tear out your soul isn’t the best way to travel. And while I knew that using our existing matter-shunting network to teleport between planets in this system had no latency issues, I actually had to get to another star system in the first place to test if that holds true for interstellar distances.

Either way, we still need strategically fast space travel.

Personally, I’m hoping the Heighliner project succeeds. That, or the Kobol Spools project. Supposedly, our eldritch tech makes both options theoretically plausible, but there were too many fiddly moving parts even for the small scale tests to make me feel comfortable about them right now.

Well, here’s to hoping there’s something among the junk tech of the Imperium to help us with a breakthrough or two. Honestly though, I’m not too optimistic about it. Nobody is, not after we actually sifted through the captured ships, the Mechanicum bits and the Astartes’ gear. Save for a few things that were obviously magitech like the Warp drives, void shields and psyker stuff, the Imperium’s gear was shockingly shit.

I mean, their plasma tech for example, as cool as it all looked, was actually crappier than our third-gen iterations. The Nexus had just finished our ninth-gen plasma tech a few months ago, for the record. Sleek, miniaturized rifles that ran quieter, deadlier and far colder than the previous versions and punched as hard as our second-gen PPCs. The components were runed up as well, to make sure the bolts hurt anything even remotely metanatural. Far from the bulky, unstable chunks of explosive metal that the Imperium used.

Sure, it’s due to the console tweaks I made to the base materials, but still.

And the augmentations on the Mechanicus techpriests were about as haphazard as the graftings from the cyborg clans the Nexus put down in the eastern Chinese region a year ago. The only improvement was the fact that these tech worshippers didn’t let their grafts rust away. I think Eva and some of her siblings were offended just from deciphering everything, considering how often the briefings included notes reminding the reader every so often as to how the construction, interface, and software of the augmetics could be done in a variety of better ways with even the most basic Nexus tech.

Basically, Fallout tech, as retro as it looked, served as a rather considerable foundation when compared to the conventional tech of the Imperium of Man. Then again, I suppose that should be obvious, if raiders and scavengers were able to hammer together working energy guns with centuries-old scrap metal and vacuum-tube-level electronics.

As I flipped through more reports of Imperium tech, Eva’s voice chimed in the command room. “Mixed signals received at the edge of Jupiter. Mundane energy readings have dissipated.”

That’s fast. So something blinked into the system and then vanished? There was a second’s pause before Eva returned.

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“Refining filters… Confirmed, trace amounts of mundane energy readings detected, heavily displaced but emanating from multiple distinct sources of varying strengths. Multiple Type-H metaphysical readings detected. Trajectory suggests an intercept to Mars or Earth.”

Type-H… That’s the new category of psychics, basically our Librarian prisoners. So, psykers with stealth tech, huh? They’re sending the Raven Guard over?

“Keep track of them, but keep our defenses and fleet as is. Let’s see if we can play dumb to draw them in.”

“Acknowledged.”

I sent out more orders to mobilize the troops and get the other AIs to prepare firing solutions, but then a glance at the update on our mysterious trespassers surprised me. They were moving a bit too fast compared to the Imperium’s ships previously. Did the Emo Marines have faster ships?

Wait, I’m looking at this wrong.

“Eva, what’s the estimate on the number of Type-H contacts in the arriving force?”

“Converted to baseline standard, the sum of detected Type-H readings is an aggregate of approximately six thousand Librarians.”

Okay, I definitely don’t remember the Raven Guard fielding that many psykers in one place. And even if Magnus has the cunning to send more of his Thousand Sons to conduct an ambush, I don’t recall that legion being so sneaky. So, who else stealths and is psychic?

Fucking space elves.

“Update my orders,” I instructed Eva, “Prepare to counter a highly mobile force that relies on hit-and-run tactics, and is likely to utilize eldritch bullshittery. Ready the Tiberium siphons as well.”

And then to the troopers’ channel, “Keep to Tiberium weapons, especially for melee. The enemy might have elements that like to get stuck in. Full alert, just in case they have teleport capability.” With that, and the swarms of Sentinels floating around every hallway in regular patrols, Tupile was secure enough for the time being.

Good luck with the Eldar trying to board our fully automated ships. The Galacticas were nothing but AI-controlled machinery stuffed together and covered with armor, with only enough tunnel space for Sentinels to move about. There was no bridge, no docking bay, no decks to accommodate human crew, let alone teleporting invaders. If the space elves teleported in the wrong spots - and there were many of them - they’d end up blended by the fabricators or incinerated by our engine feeders.

Something else to ponder about was whether the Imperium trespassers might or might not have knowledge of the approaching alien fleet, though they’d definitely pick it up once we got into combat. Which means we’ll be performing to an audience who’re keen to study us again.

Eh, we’ll need prisoners for Tleilax, so I guess showing off a bit is a fair price. What’s a bit of an exhibition battle for some knife-eared, hedonistic space elves?

Tupile’s command room was filled with my girls, advisors, company commanders, and a few hand-picked journalists. We watched on the hologram display as the blips drew closer to Mars and Earth. Eventually, a few Martian outposts got their telescopes pointed in the right direction and relayed to us the first glimpse of the alien threat.

As expected, they were sleek, barbed vessels, dangerous yet clearly fragile things. After getting an approximation of the vessel’s energy readings, Eva helpfully cataloged nineteen battleship-equivalent ships, thirty-two cruisers, and the rest of them were escorts. None were even close to our battleships’ size, and even with their energy readouts being obscured, I bet none of them have the firepower to so much as scratch us. Break our shields, maybe, but punch through our hulls after that?

I’d like to see them even leave a scratch.

If I remember rightly, Eldar ships rely more on speed and guile instead of shields and hulls. Guess we’ll try shooting one of the smaller ships first to see how much damage we do before deciding on whether to go full boarding actions or not.

It took a couple of hours before they got past Mars, and by then the command room was filled with nervous energy. People left and returned for coffee breaks, but I kept in my seat throughout, trying to get my meta-knowledge straight. The Dark Eldar flavor of knife-ears enjoy slave taking, use very interesting and very exotic tech, and are supposed to be non-psychic. This was supposedly true even before they fell into the Kabal system. So how come they’re registering as Type-Hs?

Guess we’ll need to cut open a few to find out.

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