Herald of the Stars: Chapter One Hundred and Sixty-Five

Martez Clark, My Blind Third Eye, Archie Cook, Dennis McColl, Tucker Palmeri, and Excalibur Gaming. Thank you, all of you, for donating to Herald of the Stars. I love spending my days writing and I couldn't do so without your help.

With more than two hours before the Drukhari assault group arrives, I am able to regroup all my vessels, cripple the last of the Drukhari escorts, and relaunch my strike craft. I order them to intercept the Drukhari assault group and tie up as many of their fighters as possible so that the defensive fire of my void ships can focus on the Impaler Assault Boats.

Trader Modren’s converted Carrack doesn’t have many strike craft left, but they muster sixty interceptors to patrol around the fleet.

The Drukhari assault group does a fair job of slipping past my strike craft, using their superior speed and manoeuvrability to avoid the guns of my modified class one D-POTs that we’re calling the Sagitta-Class. Not a great showing for my new primary interceptor, but they do keep the Razorwings and Voidravens from my modified  class two D-POTs, the Macross-Class, which unleash hundreds of missiles at the Drukhari.

No matter how manoeuvrable they are, the Drukhari strike craft can’t out fly a missile, nor do they have enough countermeasures. At the last moment, the Drukhari fire all their own missiles. They don’t have anywhere near as many, but their implosion missiles are particularly devastating, gouging huge chunks of mass from my strike craft, crippling most of the Sagitta-Class interceptors, but only destroying a few.

At the end of the exchange, every single Drukhari fighter and fighter-bomber is wiped out and my damaged strike craft are in no position to chase the Impaler Assault Boats. My strike craft return for repairs, towing the disabled craft and Drukhari wrecks back to my fleet and leaving the Impalers an almost free run on the Ardent Bane.

The two Drukhari cruisers stop popping in and out of our range and retreat, moving much further away. I continue to receive updates from my Warforged and keep sending reinforcements. They’re doing rather well and estimate an additional six to ten hours of fighting to reach engineering. However, the Drukhari have swapped out their splinter weapons and started turning blasters, haywire blasters, and shredders upon my boarders.

The imperial equivalent would be lascannons, lightning guns, and shotguns. These weapons are much more effective against cyborgs, and if it wasn’t for the conversion fields they all have, the Warforged would have started losing ground. As it is, they’re now taking casualties. The hundred and twenty Warforged and five Vanguard Armour that I’ve teleported onto each vessel so far will not be overcome any time soon though.

With my own craft fairly well grouped, we coordinate our defensive fire and start shooting at the assault boats. There’s something odd about how they’re moving about, but I can’t quite work it out.

After a tense five minutes, only thirty assault boats get through. They burrow into Ardent Bane, a particularly unpleasant sensation when I am so closely connected to the vessel.

Bedwyr starts issuing orders so that my Heralds can intercept the boarding parties, only rather than disgorge troops, the assault boats explode, obliterating huge chunks of Ardent Bane and wrecking the starboard side.

Huge plumes of water, over thirty kilometre’s long, jet out into space as multiple reaction mass tanks are breached. A macro-cannon munitions storage detonates too, disabling all of the macro-cannon batteries on the starboard side and vaporising four percent of Ardent Bane in an explosion that sends a debilitating rattle throughout the vessel, cracking welds and starting fires on nine decks.

The only good thing to come out of this attack is that the Eldar killed a significant portion of their previous assault. They still have over fifteen thousand boarders running about butchering the ratings and ruining all my bulkheads; with such a large breach, many sections of Ardent Bane are rapidly depressurising.

For a moment, I am in shock, rapidly processing everything that is happening and rethinking my plans. This is the closest I have come to death in many years and it is a most unpleasant reminder of how fast, and how badly, something can go wrong.

Some two hundred thousand people are at risk of suffocation as Ardent Bane loses air and fills with smoke. Fire suppression systems engage and the environmental sustainer strains to keep enough air available.

“Ardent Bane, at current expenditure, how much breathable air do we have left?”

++There is no meaningful limit. Nine percent of Ardent Bane is compromised, mostly in the outer hull. Automated cut offs have already been engaged. Four hours until the majority of the compromised areas are uninhabitable. Seven weeks of reserve atmosphere is available if you wish to maintain those areas.++

Well, that’s not as bad as I thought.

“Keep the majority of the compromised areas at low pressure until everyone who can evacuate has done so then inform me of potential casualties before you cut them off. Do not maintain air in areas where there are boarders or fires and minimal numbers of crew in the same space.

“Cut off any areas that are losing their entire atmosphere every hour, regardless of casualties. Inform the crew in compromised areas that they must evacuate and direct them to the nearest exit. If they are injured, or cut off, direct them to safe rooms where they can hold out and provide the damage control teams the data they need to prioritise and rescue them in time. As for those with no hope, place me in contact with them. I will speak to them in person, listen to their final requests, and bless them as best I can.”

++Executing Commands.++

Over the next hour I hold over seven hundred different conversations with people who are going to die because of the orders I have issued to minimise material losses and avoid compromising the remainder of Ardent Bane, or because they are too injured to live long enough for a team to rescue them.

Most are rather stoic about their approaching deaths, all are terrified, and many are angry. I record their last words, letting them ramble, or set up nearby vox to play their favourite hymns and lead them in prayer, depending on their preference. Several complain about their officers and the abuses they have suffered and two tell me about atrocities they have witnessed while working for Trader Modren, and of the other individuals involved.

It is a depressing litany to listen to and I do not enjoy the angry words I endure. I don’t even have to do any of this, but even after all my years in this hellish galaxy, I just can’t turn a blind eye to the suffering, even if I can issue the required orders without hesitation.

Even as I oversee these last rites, the battle continues. Raphael and Lyre are still alive and the hangar being cleared of xenos corpses. Every couple of hours the two Navy officers try and talk their way into my command structure, but Bedwyr is having none of it.

During one of the exchanges, Raphael distracts the Heralds long enough for Lyre to attempt to breach the digital security on the shuttle with a palm sized device. I recognise the codes and scoff. I removed all of those overrides decades ago and the Machine-Spirits within the D-POTs are really Data Guardians, the Machine-Spirits' Dark Age of Technology precursor. No Imperial codes of any kind are valid on them unless I put them there, which is something I would only do for export models.

Returning my attention to space, I realise we’ve no way of catching the Drukhari Fleet with our void ships as the enemy are now in full retreat and much faster than us. Clearly Yhunon Urach decided to cut his losses and probably has some plan in place to stop Sciéno from resurrecting like he thinks she will. My escorts could still catch them though.

I haven’t completed all my objectives yet and I am unwilling to let the Drukhari go, especially as they still have my Warforged on board. The Stellar Fleet coordinates with Trader Modren’s unruly captains and the Imperial Navy, scraping together an assault group, a mix of strike craft and shuttles that form around four Adder-Class frigates, a Tempest-Class frigate, and a Claymore-Class corvette.

I would have liked to take Cobalt’s four Meritech Shrike-Class raiders as well, but they’ve been converted into monitor vessels and up-armoured. They just don’t have the speed that they used too. We do collect three Fury Interceptor squadrons from the damaged defence platforms though. They’d been put into storage and have only just become available.

The escorts begin their chase, surrounded by two hundred strike craft and enough shuttles to transport forty thousand troops. I had hoped to take the Drukhari cruisers with my Warforged, but the sadistic arseholes have armed their slaves and are using the last of their proper troops to push terrified people towards my teleporting troops to keep them occupied.

I think they’re trying to make the Warforged run out of ammo, but it isn’t working as all of them have a Marwolv pattern lasgun, gun dogs, and a lot of other weaponry. If they arm enough slaves the lasguns might overheat or charge slower than they can fire though.

With the teleport assault stalled out I can either abandon my elite troops or go all in on a mass assault that will have to get past the Drukhari defensive fire, the exact thing I’d been hoping to avoid in the first place with the teleport assault.

Both options suck, but while I hate to trade men for wealth, those two cruisers are huge prizes. Sure, I already have six Drukhari escorts cracked and broken, but these are pirate ships likely stuffed full of valuable goods and captives, exotic weaponry, and hulls that can be turned into Warp fuel, or power the wards on my knights and other arcane workings. Removing Drukhari vessels from play is always good too as Commorragh has a much lower production capacity than the Imperium

Slowly, the gap begins to close and the Sunsear laser batteries fire once again, chipping away at the large, yet somewhat fragile, Drukhari vessels. Four hours into the chase, and with over two hundred Warforged now on each vessel causing havoc, something important breaks. The cruiser starts losing power and its holofield drops. The light cruiser loses two main thrusters. Both vessels lose a third of their velocity.

Finally my own fire is properly effective and my vessels pick off the gravity sails and defensive turrets on the cruiser, slowing it further. Both enemy vessels fire back at the closing escorts, but every time they pop a shield, my escorts rearrange their battle line to shelter the recovering vessel. While they all take some damage to their armour, no critical systems are affected.

Seven hours into the chase, the assault group surges forward. The strike-craft ravage the hulls further and finish denuding them of defensive turrets, taking sixty percent casualties. The shuttles move into land.

Four modified Class three D-POTs, the newly designed Vitrum-Class, launch their torpedoes, crippling the main thrusters on both cruisers badly enough to send them into an awkward spin that makes landing on them far more tricky. Six shuttles are damaged while landing on the hull. It doesn’t make much difference though as troops pour into the enemy vessels and sweep through them.

With so many paths to defend and few troops remaining after the Warforged chewed through almost all of them, the remaining measly crew complement can’t hold the vessels. Both cruisers are overwhelmed and captured, including their captains, several dozen officers and three Haemonculi. There’s still no sight of the third light cruiser that escaped earlier, but I don’t expect that we’ll ever see it again.

After the battle, Mattius expresses his gratitude, opening his personal vaults and gifting the Stellar Fleet and Imperial Navy with master carved ivory and raw pearls. With his enthusiastic cooperation we begin clean up operations, purging the Orks and hunting down the Dark Eldar escape pods as well as start construction of an outpost on Haddon’s Throne, the distant moon around Cobalt VI that we bartered for previously.

We spend six weeks securing the Drukhari vessels and looting them. During this time I also claim the rest of Trader Modren’s fleet, using the Space Marines to arrest all their officers. Ardent Bane is patched enough to stop leaking air and the boarders are neutralised, three thousand of which are captured, including some Rak’Gol.

The rest of my fleet, Red Knoll, four escorts, and ten Moth-Class leave the shelter of Cobalt VI and travel to Cobalt IV. My reinforcement lend their crews, and perhaps most importantly their administrators, to sort through the vast amount of personnel I have acquired, adding two hundred and thirty thousand freed slaves to my personnel count.

A census is taken, officers are interviewed, and Fleet Command and I spend days going over it all discussing what to do about the poor condition and education of Trader Modren’s ratings. The voidsmen aren’t much better either.

After some extensive sleuthing, eighty percent of Trader Modren’s senior officers are handed over to the Imperial Navy. The junior officers only lose fifteen percent. Two more penal regiments are formed, taking me up to eight Stellar Corps regiments. With me outnumbering everyone else and over a full company of Space Marines looming over everyone, Raphael and Lyre are outwardly cooperative, but they never stop trying to break into my systems, or pull data from Trader Modren’s vessels.

After blocking a third attempt, I remove all system guest rights. I also loosen the restrictions of the Machine-Spirits on the captured vessels and update their protocols so that they can properly defend themselves from unwanted intrusions. It’s annoying to keep defending them with E-SIM. This doesn’t stop the Navy officers from trying again, so I invite the pair of them over to Iron Crane on the pretence of handing over the data of Trader Modren’s misdeeds and all those connected to him.