Chapter 170: Stargate Project (Patreon)

The civil war among the space Necron was good news for Heydrich. Letting those dogs bite each other and grind themselves down slowly was certain to cause him no trouble.

Still, Heydrich greatly coveted some of the Necron's technology, especially the World Engine. The thing was the manifestation of an Aeon's mechanism on the physical-universe side, and with it they could even patch the Great Rift and the Eye of Terror.

The opening of the Great Rift did Heydrich more good than harm, but he still didn't want to let it go on forever. Given the chance, he'd love to repair such things.

After all, in theory, if the Great Rift and the Eye of Terror were sealed up completely and the Paths then spread across the universe, this universe would transform rapidly. Crazier, maybe, but never more of a cesspit.

For now, though, Heydrich could only daydream. There were only a handful of World Engines, and each was a Necron superweapon. If he led an attack on one, they would definitely call for backup, and he didn't yet have the strength to take on the entire space Necron empire head-on.

So the matter would have to wait. Pearl kept searching for a Necron dynasty that was not very strong yet held a World Engine, but Heydrich knew such a convenient shortcut was impossible and had never counted on it.

However unhinged Heydrich might look day to day, most of that was just his own taste for mischief. When it came to big matters, the affairs of his faction or major movements within the Imperium, he acted with great caution. Or rather, at such times he disliked convoluted schemes and preferred to simply crush everything with overwhelming mass and his own power.

In any case, Heydrich was in no hurry. Compared to the space Necron, there was something else he needed to build.

Two enormous "grand-scale oscillators" floated right in front of him. Of course, these things weren't really grand-scale oscillators at all. A true grand-scale oscillator's energy was far more violent. In essence, it used that raging energy to fold space and punch straight through it, then built a portal to send an army across.

That was technology of the most formidable Old Ones in the whole Warhammer universe, and even Heydrich fell a little short of it. Or rather, it wasn't so much falling short as a matter of his own personal style.

After Heydrich's string of haphazard modifications, the thing had become a giant firecracker that blasted straight through a sector.

Now that he had abandoned the direct-teleport plan, he could only switch to the second mode: stable teleportation. And that kind of capability was hardly nonexistent technology.

Take the portal that the space Necron Overlord, driven into a frenzy by Heydrich's Men of Stone, opened to summon the Triarch Council directly. That was a portal, plain and simple.

It was just that humans couldn't use it. Perhaps only the super-alloy bodies of the space Necron could withstand it.

Of course, Heydrich, protected by Path energy, could use it too, but that had no practical value.

He already possessed an ability unique to Star Rail: like other Emanators, he could cross the stars directly by drawing on Path energy. But that was useless to the Imperium as a whole. What was truly needed here could only be called a budget substitute for the Trailblaze Path.

Trailblaze truly deserved its reputation as the white moonlight of nearly every Emanator, the radiant one that got away. Heydrich now felt that Trailblaze had become his own white moonlight.

But since the white moonlight wasn't here, that didn't mean Heydrich had no other way.

"Let's call this the Stargate Project. I need stargates to build a fast teleportation network."

Heydrich looked at the thing in his hands and started thinking. The stargates he had built were not all-powerful.

Above all, there was the matter of stability, so he couldn't let them teleport too far. For example, going straight from the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar to Imperium Nihilus was absolutely impossible. Even the distance between two gates couldn't be too great.

The limit was three hundred light-years at most, in other words roughly one sector of the Imperium. That wasn't a big problem, though. He could chain jumps from gate to gate.

"The gates need to be big enough for a ship on the scale of the Mountain Array, so in that case… Hm, no, wait. This is a teleportation circle."

It was at that moment that Heydrich realized something. The device he'd built wasn't actually that large.

But it could create a teleport field across a wide area right in front of him that led straight to the destination, so there was no need to set up planet-scale defenses.

"I just don't know where to start. Holy Terra or Macragge?"

Heydrich began to think it over. Once the work began, they would have to be set up as groups of portals, forming one stable network, not one in the east and one in the west, scattered everywhere.

That would be completely pointless. He just couldn't decide where to begin.

Macragge was a good choice. It was the Ultramarines' homeworld, his own forge world was there too, and the Plague Wars still lay ahead.

It was also an important route for the Tyranid swarm, and with the support of his own portals, it could be stabilized very well. Heydrich knew that in the Warhammer universe, a stable rear was absolutely vital.

As long as the rear stayed stable and supplies could be shipped in without interruption, nobody in this galaxy could take on the Imperium of Man head-on.

But there was another place even better suited than Macragge, and that was Holy Terra.

It was the true core of the Imperium of Man. The problem was that connecting it would cause a lot of trouble.

The first reason was that the situation there was far too complicated. Macragge and the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar were, in essence, the Ultramarines' one-voice hall, and the Ultramarines had the most complete organizational structure in the entire Imperium of Man, so they had a natural advantage.

Holy Terra was different. It was a true gathering place for every kind of monster and demon. Heydrich couldn't be sure that nobody there would cause him trouble. At present he didn't yet have the strength to destroy Holy Terra… no, wait, to make all of Terra shut up completely. And that was assuming he didn't personally act.

The second reason, and the most important, was that damned Goldie. Heydrich had no desire to see the guy at all. Mostly because he could do nothing right and everything wrong.

Heydrich didn't know whether it was the Emperor's own fault or the doing of that wondrous British writer. Either way, he trusted the Emperor not one bit, and he had only one demand of him now…

Old man, just lie down nicely and don't cook up any messes for yourself.

"Then let's start with Macragge. I need to talk it over with Guilliman's chief steward and the other four heroes. Go bring him here. The pressure on you all will be much lighter from now on."

Heydrich was about to go looking for Guilliman's chief steward, and there was no helping it.

Macragge's first in command was Guilliman and its second was Calgar. But one had gone to Holy Terra and the other to Vigilus. Calgar had even taken the First Company Captain with him, and the First Company Captain was, in the end, only a First Company Captain.

So Macragge's real third in command was the newly appointed Chancellor of Macragge. Only because he was there could Calgar lead the great army on campaigns for decades, even centuries, while Macragge kept running smoothly.

Of course, Guilliman had changed a great deal now. History had proven that having a mortal govern a single planet was already the limit.

Going beyond one planet was not power to a mortal but a form of torment. The High Lords of Terra were like that, and so were the Planetary Governors.

That was why the sector of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar was now run by four Marines. It took four Ultramarines, those super clerk-workhorses, to govern one sector properly, which showed how serious the problem was.

So the only ones truly suited to be Planetary Governors were the Custodes.

The Imperium had thousands of sectors, which matched the number of Custodes well. It was quite possible that the Custodes had been the governors of each sector in the Emperor's original design, though that was only one possibility.

And so, before long, in front of Heydrich's throne…

The Chancellor of Macragge and the four heroes Guilliman had appointed all gathered there. While Guilliman was away, Heydrich held the authority to command the entire Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, and not merely because of the written order Guilliman had left behind.

It was because Heydrich had enough prestige and power. In other words, he could make the whole Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar shut up.

The four were Severus Agemman, former First Company Captain of the Ultramarines; Botan, Captain of the Second Company of the Genesis Chapter; Baltus, Captain of the Doom Eagles; and Decimus Felix, a Primaris Space Marines and Captain of the Eleventh Company of the Ultramarines.

With the four Ultramarine captains plus the Chancellor of Macragge, these five could now decide every matter on Macragge.

And so, very quickly…

"This, this, this…"

After seeing the materials in Heydrich's hand, the five of them stared at one another in stunned silence.

"I've already perfected the STC template, so it can go straight into mass production. But the process for making it is too complex, so output won't be high in the short term."

To prevent the inheritance of knowledge from being cut off again, apart from a few particularly blasphemous items, Heydrich's routine experiments were all specially recorded and observed. The observers were Pearl's Men of Stone, plus Viktor or the Mechanicus adepts he had trained himself.

The actual results were somewhat disappointing, though. It was just as the people next door in Star Rail put it…

A genius's flights of fancy are enough for ordinary people to spend a lifetime trying to understand, and the so-called geniuses merely follow in Zandar Kuwabara's footsteps, and even those footsteps are only the ones he chooses to reveal.

After all, Nous was also Zandar Kuwabara, just the embodiment of his pure rationality. And never mind him, even the Iron Curtain that Lokhust, his split-off avatar, put together had the qualifications to ascend to Aeonhood.

One could only say that guy was truly formidable, having come close to creating two Aeons all told.

Naturally, all those people could do with Heydrich's procedures was record them mechanically, and then… there was no "then." Heydrich's methods did have a certain slapdash quality to them. It would take those people several years to fully absorb the technology.

In the end, with no other choice, he could only produce an STC template.

The result wasn't bad, though. His Mechanicus adepts could now reproduce the original STC template.

With the STC template mother-machine in place, they could manufacture in bulk. But in Heydrich's eyes that meant little. It was fine as an emergency measure.

He intended to rebuild the Golden Age's complete technology tree, and the courses he needed to make up had to be made up. After all, Heydrich's domain wasn't like Britain, America or Russia, places where whole industrial systems had been severed from within.

"But this… this is real?"

Guilliman's chief steward looked at Heydrich as he spoke. To them, the thing was extremely useful.

"When have I ever lied to you? I have three sets of portals in hand right now."

He now had to build the single most important core and make it a starport linking every corner of the realm.

The gates could only teleport in pairs, but with enough of them, a network could still be built.

"Where do you plan to put it?"

Severus, the former First Company Captain, looked at Heydrich with a grave expression. He knew this matter was entirely Heydrich's call.

"My craftworld isn't suitable. I need to cruise through the various sectors. If I made it the core starport, I'd lose my main advantage, mobility. Besides, I have a special terminal that can connect to the starport from anywhere. But there's only one, and you can't use it…"

Saying this, Heydrich looked at the others, because the thing required the power of the Path of Erudition.

Only Heydrich qualified for that right now. No one else could manage it.

"You mean…"

Hearing Heydrich's words, Severus showed a look of dawning understanding.

"That's right. I plan to put it on my forge world."

This time Heydrich did have a bit of a selfish motive, though it wasn't really selfish. His forge world had very thorough defenses, even stronger than Macragge's.

Mainly it was because the area around it was already wrapped in vast amounts of Heydrich's memory-essence, along with a powerful Soul-Banishing Death Field.

With that double insurance, unless the four Chaos Gods came at him four-on-one like ten thousand years ago, nothing could go wrong. Give Heydrich enough time and even a real four-on-one wouldn't scare him.

What's more, Heydrich knew exactly how much profit a core port could bring, and it would also solve his most pressing problem.