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Etherdrive was less dangerous than the stardrives of the gue’la, kroot or even Demiurg. Slow but safe, it had returned to vogue after recent prototypes had proven disastrous. The ship arrived back in reality like a buoyant object surfacing from beneath water, residual luminescent matter washing away from it in all directions. The matter and energy intrusion from the slipspace realm was less than alien drive systems but there were still precious minutes when disruptive energies skittered across the hull as they dispersed.
Running lights began to illuminate on the vessel, and sensor drones flicked out from the immensity of the khaki vessel’s hull. Weapons pivoted and traversed in their positions, ready to engage any ambush. One by one across the many tor’kan of its length, lights came on, bringing an element of home to the remote environment it had arrived in.
Kor'el T'au Shamasa Uvash'a woke a few moments later as her cryostasis chamber disengaged, command drones drifting toward her in the freefall environment of the ship’s command centre, projecting a wall of information on their transit.
‘Welcome back El’Shamasa,’ the nearest drone bobbed its disc like head, ‘We have completed all six hundred and twenty five dives without incident, we are now in system designated Four Two One of the Salaminia Sector.’ The drone’s voice was smooth and gentle, without clear gender signifiers.
She smiled, ‘Thank you, Oe-Na-Kri.’ The feat of navigation was one that would have qualified as a miracle even a century ago, they had travelled a distance that would take light more than two thousand Tau’cyr to catch up with them. They had made the journey in a little under half a Tau’cyr in sidereal time, leaving the close proximity of the Nem’yar Atoll and journeying across the starless gulf between one of the galaxy’s spiral arms on their mission.
A gestural command called up a status diagram showing the Voidstar and its attached ships. All showed the healthy gold with some components shaded down to a copper where systems damage had accrued that the ship’s drone network had not been able to repair without Fio caste expertise. There was nothing too serious though.
She could work with this.
Moving from the cryopod, umbilicals disconnecting along her spine-brace with the motion, she propelled herself from the sleep pod onto the reserve bridge. Had an emergency awakening been required, the same spinal shunts would have filled her bloodstream with stimulants and she would have had to lead the battle from the spherical stasis chamber, but now she could at least relax a little. Crossing a membrane that shimmered in the air with a glyphic warning to one third gravity, she let her hooves click to the deck, and pulled on a long coat adorned with the triangular symbol of the Air Caste.
She reached a screen painted across the near wall and activated it, showing dozens of others.
Oe-Na-Kri rested in the air behind her as she looked at the other members of her bridge team in their own pod compartments.
‘Good work everyone, the T’au’va has been served today,’ Shamasa made the sign of castes as one with her hands, turning to her communications officer, ‘Vre’Misa as soon as you are able, please convey my congratulations to Fio’el Nadra, tell her to take as long as needed before we advance further into the system.’
‘When our Ancillaries are ready, clear them to detach and take up defensive positions,’ Shamasa said.
The briefing room had a transparent dome that looked out onto the desolate space above the command personnel of the Voidstar-as they filtered in. The ship was one of the Empire’s largest, but no longer newest, the Explorer-class battleship was the longest serving hull type in the Empire, but more and more they were being replaced by the Custodian-class battleship as a combatant, allowing surviving Explorers to return to their original calling. It had spacious facilities, and the new refurbishment had allowed for better psychological health on long missions such as this. The Voidstar’s current build definition was the Fe’saan XXIX Long Range Experimental built of the venerable Explorer, and much of the old ship boasted new upgrades.
This included the fittings that occupied the core of the briefing room, built to accommodate the many species of the Empire. The gravity was set at T’au standard, which was a challenge for Shamasa, her bodyglove mitigating this a little and supporting her movements.
The large triangular table of wood from the forests of Pech had been a gift from the Kroot Shaper Kral’dan to the previous commander when the ship had fought in the wars of the Third Sphere Expansion. She took her place in a conformal chair along one side of it, near to a point, waiting for her department heads, escort commanders and expeditionary leaders joined her.
‘I regret everything,’ Uriah Gershwin said, he arrived with a tone of quiet reservation, and she remembered to turn her mouth up in acknowledgement of the obvious humorous intention of the statement as he sat down beside her with a surprisingly large cup of recaff. The scent of the human drink was quite intriguing but she had found the taste a little acrid.
‘You know, the stasis pod isn’t really sleep,’ she said, gesturing toward the stimulant.
‘That must be why I feel tired,’ he said.
She’d been told the drink was habit-forming, and she didn’t need to question it, so simply shrugged in agreement, ‘We will all feel better when we are working, I dare say,’ she said.
Following her eyes, he grinned, and gulped the hot drink down.
Gellacheen was the next to enter, the Brachyura hovered on the back of a transport drone that took the form of a disc about a meter across, with a low rail around it and controls should he wish to direct it manually. Delicate and spindly, he resembled the sea-life common on many worlds, which gue’la called crabs or crustaceans, a mottled sand shell and delicate manipulator claws were adapted for his homeworld, but on the Voidstar, he had a reputation as a master of technology to equal of the irascible Fio’el Nadra, and he was less reclusive. Docking his transit drone at the table, he click-clacked a greeting that the drone translated. ‘Work is underway to make our engines ready for immediate action if needed captain, Seneschal.’
Gershwin nodded, he had been a void-master to the Rogue Trader Laurent D’Orsio until that trader’s fleet had been broken and hounded to the Eastern Fringe, where they had finally thrown in with the T’au. Gershwin and his ancestors had long served as pursers and managers of the family’s investments, but the great Tyrannic Wars had brought hard times for the D’Orsio Dynasty, and rivals with longstanding grudges, and worse, creditors, had made Imperial ports hazardous. The title was purely a courtesy now though, as the D’Orsio Dynasty had officially dissolved into the T’au Empire’s Commerce Protection Fleets; Gue’vesa’O D’Orsio and his flotilla still plied the eastern fringe, but Gershwin had been requisitioned for this mission, for reasons that hadn’t been clarified.
‘Good to hear,’ Gershwin said, ‘will we be seeing El’Nadra?’
‘Alas not,’ Gellacheen said, ‘Fio’el Nadra sends her apologies, but she is keen to oversee the impact externally herself.’
Shamasa gave a gentle incline of her head, ‘Of course,’ she said.
Further acceptance was forestalled by the arrival of Shas’el Lu’sel, whose hooves beat out a brisk rapping noise as she paced into the room with customary speed. ‘Kor’el,’ the Fire Caste commander said, making the Sign of Reunion.
‘Shas’el,’ Shamasa said, rising and returning the gesture.
‘Are we to know our objective at last?’ the young Fire Caste commander asked, as she took her own seat.
Shamasa smiled, ‘I know no more than you, but we have sealed instructions from the Fifth Sphere command, and I look forward to learning more, as you do.’ She could understand Lu’sel’s exasperation, while the Voidstar and her escorts were potentially capable of fighting, the strong Fire Caste contingent assigned to the mission under the young commander’s authority, as senior-most of four primary hunter cadres embarked on the Voidstar, equipped with a surprising amount of heavy battlesuits including rarer types, suggested they faced a risk of ground combat, and to not be told what was expected had doubtless preyed on Lu’sel’s mind.
‘Well,’ Lu’sel said, drumming her fingers on the plush armrest of her conform-chair with impatience, ‘I am sure it serves the T’au’va, but the sooner we are informed the better our troops can prepare.’
Other members of the Voidstar’s command crew filtered in, and when all were settled, each of the senior representatives input their own cryptographic keys, Gellacheen acting on behalf of the Earth Caste representative who wasn’t present, and Gerchwin on behalf of the non-T’au contingent.
A shimmering hologram of an Ethereal appeared above the central disc on the wooden table, calming voice speaking. ‘Crew of the Voidstar, I am Aun’vre Chi’mor’ she said, ‘the information that is about to follow is of great value to the Tau’va, now that you have arrived at your first deep range waypoint. Now that you have crossed the great void between the spiral arms of our galaxy, it will aid you to understand the nature of your mission. Your ship is designated for exploration, and those of you who are Tau will note that its crew is more diverse than most Kor’vattra ships, especially with Gue’vesa. This is a key part of your mission.
‘Many of you may understand a little of Gue’la history, for you this information may be old, but the Imperium of Man is not the first Gue’la interstellar culture, the history of habitation in the galaxy is ancient indeed, many exo-archaeologists have written lengthy papers on these topics. But what does come through clearly is that many older empires once achieved greater scientific progress than we currently possess. The first Gue’la Stellar Polities appear to have lasted for many tens of thousands of Tau’cyr, prior to a great collapse.
‘Oral histories tell of this being when mind-science first manifested, or when their version of drones first obtained sapience and violently overthrew their species, or of the first Gue’ron’sha being used in fierce wars.’ Aun’chi’mor paused, allowing the scope of these rumoured pieces of ancient history to be considered, ‘We would dearly like to know more of these times, to guide the Empire and ensure that the mistakes of that age are not repeated,’ she said, ‘but more than that, we have heard rumours of the ancient technologies, far surpassing what the Gue’la Imperium retains, still to be found. That is your destination,’ she said.
The image shifted to show a star map of their locality, built with long range telescopes, the ship’s own systems composited their position in along with a group of stars that glowed with a golden hex around them, their destination. Shamasa estimated that they must be about thirty dives away, close.
‘Some generations ago, on an artefact world I shan’t name,’ Aun’chi’mor said, ‘we found an incomplete database approximately twenty thousand Tau’cyr old, this listed tens of thousands of locations, with partial information in them, only the smallest part of the positional information was recoverable, alas, and many of the identified sites that we could reach or assess from other recent maps were found to be sites where the Imperium has major industrial activity, especially their machine cult.
‘This world, designated Eta-Rho-Eighteen in the recovered ancestral-gothic tongue, is the only one we have so far been able to reach without any presence on Imperial maps. It is hoped that you will encounter one of two things. Either a human culture isolated from the Imperium, at any level of development,’ Por’el Ju’tan, the ship’s first contact specialist perked up at that, ‘or a world that might have been untouched since the fall of the Gue’la golden age, which might allow us to obtain firsthand information about that culture, the reasons for its fall, and perhaps, technological information about it. Astral drift means we cannot be wholly certain which star within this volume is Eta-Rho-Eighteen, but we have a high degree of confidence that it is one of them. Everything we know, or have speculated, about Eta-Rho-Eighteen, is now available to you. Remember that when United in Purpouse, we can mend the mistakes of the past.’
The image faded out.
The Voidstar remained on station for sixteen rotaa after the message was decoded, repairs were essential, and the remainder of her crew needed to be revivified and given post-cryosleep medical assessments, more than which the aft of the ship’s main cargo bays was opened and the disassembled components of two more support ships were lofted into space and tested, these were messenger craft, modified for long range work. They could be used as scouts, but they were also the only way to report the mission’s progress back to the fifth sphere’s sept worlds.
They brought the all-ships total of the expedition to six vessels, the only parts of the empire for thousands of light-tau’cyr in all directions.
In the ship’s battle-domes, Shas’El Lus’el’s troops prepared for close environs, ancient cities and irradiated worlds. As they transited to the nearest of the systems though, their estimates were swiftly disproven.
‘What is it?’ Lus’el asked.
The main bridge of the Voidstar was positioned above its prow, part of a wide conning tower that gave an uninterrupted view of the space ahead of the ship, on the transparent crystal of the main window the gue’la ship hung, oblique to the plane of the system, like a dagger, adrift in a cloud of debris.
Shamasa stood before the window, the fluidic crystals within the transparency had shifted to form a magnification surface, some elements fluorescing to display speculative information. ‘Gue’la machine-caste, certainly by the markings, something called an Explorator craft?’
‘It’s an Ark Mechanicus,’ Uriah said.