Chapter 171: Heydrich's Follow-up Plan (Patreon)

The Stargate Project was something Heydrich had thrown together as an emergency measure. After this war, the problems with the tavern had proven far too serious.

He was in much the same boat as the Imperium: he had troops he couldn't deploy, though at least supplies could get through. Even so, the effort had left him limping on a bad leg. There was another reason he hadn't brought the project out back at Baal.

He had no navy. A fleet needs a stable space environment to operate, and back then the swarm would have wrecked it with ease. Besides, Baal, deep in Imperium Nihilus, was much too far from here.

Now the timing was about right. Armageddon's war had ended early because of his own intervention. Heydrich suspected that ending was only a rest in the music, though. Bonebreaker's main horde hadn't lost all that much, and the fellow would very likely come back.

Still, there was no problem in the short term. The Tyranid front was much the same. The Great Devourer had surely been beaten into a psychological shadow, so Tyranid activity in the galaxy from here on would be cautious, perhaps even broken up into smaller groups.

As for the Necrons, they were mired in civil war. That meant that for the next few decades at least, the only thing Heydrich had to face was Chaos. And the largest Chaos offensive of late had been the Stars of Calamity, not far from here.

Now his craftworld was here, and so was the forge world that mattered most to him.

His army couldn't avoid this fight, and since it couldn't be avoided, the only choice was to charge in and settle it head-on.

"So apart from linking my forge world and the Macragge Stargate, I plan to put the rest here."

As he spoke, Heydrich marked a point on the star map. It was a fortress at the position closest to the Stars of Calamity.

If Mortarion wanted to enter the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, he would have to come through here.

In truth, an Ultramarines army had been stationed here all along. But that so-called army, facing a Primarch with his hands finally free and leading troops in person, hadn't held out for long. The story barely even mentions it.

After that, Mortarion was let into the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, where he blew things apart from the inside and battered the Steel Ball, an extremely old forge world, badly.

Now Heydrich intended to link this place directly with a Stargate. And unless Chaos blanketed an entire star system, nothing could block this portal.

"This place is… Will we truly face a Daemon Primarch in the future?"

The group stared at the spot Heydrich was pointing to on the map and exchanged glances. Linking directly to Macragge was no problem.

After all, Macragge was the very heart of Ultramar, and it held that position mainly because of its extremely stable Warp route.

That route led reliably to the large region nearest Macragge, which was the core of the whole sector and of several neighboring ones.

But the region he'd pointed to was rather remote. They had heard it was having some trouble, and had even sent a Astartes company to help defend it. But if a Stargate were placed there…

It would mean they would face only one possibility: the Daemon Primarch Mortarion.

They had long heard rumors that a Daemon Primarch had appeared, even in T'au territory.

But it was only a rumor, with nothing concrete to back it up. If it was true, though, the pressure on them was truly terrifying.

After all, Macragge was hollow inside right now. Guilliman had taken a portion of its strength, and Calgar had taken another.

In the original timeline, they didn't have enough strength to stand against Mortarion until Guilliman returned with the Indomitus Crusade fleet. These days, even Heydrich got a headache facing such things.

Four of the Daemon Primarchs were especially troublesome, because they had masters.

A masterless dog can be beaten at will, but a dog with a master is a different matter. Even Heydrich couldn't be sure what would happen if those Primarchs begged their patrons, the Dark Gods, to descend in person.

After all, there was the time Khorne descended into Angron and, in a single blow, pierced the Emperor's Champion and wrecked the Canticle Engine. And that was the Canticle Engine, destroyed by a guy who was under a debuff.

Heydrich had no confidence he could win that fight. In that case, he couldn't go flipping the table every time he felt like it.

When he'd fought the Tyranids and the Orks earlier, it was mostly their backers that mattered, and the Great Devourer couldn't come down himself. Or rather, he was coming down in person every moment of every day, but it was the usual GW problem.

In the background lore they're ridiculously powerful, and then the instant they land on the table, they blow up. Showing up all the time means never really showing up.

As for the Ork's Gork and Mork, Heydrich could only say that back at Ullanor they hadn't shown up, and in the War of the Beast, humanity's best chance at extinction, they hadn't shown up either.

Anyway, as long as Heydrich didn't truly wipe out the Orks, there wasn't much of a problem. Incidentally, Bonebreaker was only one part of the Orks. He couldn't even represent most of them, because the Orks were a scattered mess. They didn't record history at all, which doomed them never to amount to anything.

The Imperium of Man could only hold together by rallying under the Emperor's banner, but the Orks had nothing like that.

So the Orks were a kind of mirror image of humanity. Whether you wanted to make the Orks great or to destroy them, neither was possible.

It wasn't that the Orks never had far-sighted leaders. It was just that such Orks died faster, dealt with by their own kind.

So against them, Heydrich could flip the table and be done with it. Against Chaos, flipping the table at will was another matter.

"Sigh, I'm still too weak."

Heydrich couldn't help sighing. He just didn't have enough power. If he could simply elbow all four Dark Gods flat, he wouldn't need to prepare this much.

"So that's two spots taken care of. For the last one, where do you think it would be best to connect?"

With two locations settled, Heydrich took out the last Stargate and handed it to the group.

"…"

In an instant, everyone present exchanged glances. What they wanted to ask was whether it could go straight to Holy Terra.

Of course, that was unlikely. Macragge was extremely far from Holy Terra.

Heydrich couldn't remember exactly how far, and the official material had probably never said. But going by the galaxy map and the galaxy's actual size, it would take tens of thousands of light-years, so linking there directly might take hundreds of zeroes.

Besides, these passages were extremely fragile. If even one or two nodes were destroyed, the whole thing would collapse.

So in Heydrich's eyes, the network had to be laid out at least like a spider's web, with three or four routes into every region. That way it would hold up far better against risk.

Once he decided where to lay it, he would have to build it layer by layer, not rush it against the clock like the Emperor's Great Crusade. That would be more stable.

After all, this time Heydrich didn't have to race the Warp. He didn't need to exploit the window of a few hundred years after the birth of Slaanesh.

Only by building power without relying on the Warp could one truly fight the Dark Gods of the Warp.

In that case there was no need to hurry. He could take his time and lay a solid foundation, so this was only the first step.

"My lord, what is the output of these Stargates?"

Just then, Macragge's chief steward looked over at Heydrich. The little old man, seventy or eighty years old, had a shrewd glint in his eyes.

To modern people, seventy or eighty means the end of life. But for the Imperium's high echelons, with rejuvenation treatments, living three or four hundred years was no problem, as long as you weren't killed or worked to death.

"The first year will be small, maybe five or six pairs. After that, we can add seven or eight pairs every year. Exactly how many more depends on the supply of resources."

Although Heydrich had set it as his top priority, he couldn't possibly push production to its limit in a short time.

But the demand for these things was practically limitless. Millions wouldn't be too many.

Or rather, demand was practically limitless, because the thing was neither as stable as the Emperor's webway project nor as free of side effects.

"Now I need to prepare several more STC templates, so that this doesn't get lost again in the future…"

Anyway, Heydrich had already decided that if he got the chance, he would slip away. The problem was that he needed to make preparations before he did.

The main issue was that he couldn't find anyone from the Dragon Nation. These pale-skins simply didn't care about preserving heritage, down to their bones.

And it wasn't only technology. Look at their attitude toward history. People say the Enigmata factions deal in Fabrication of history, but look at the world today. There's even a name for the Western pseudo-history theory.

How does the West do history? A bunch of so-called scholars set up a salon and start chatting with each other, and history gets decided in the chatting. So they are the real History Fictionologists, and that's how a mass of BUGs appear.

Then the West loves producing demigods, Alexander the Great above all. By their account, he reached the East and conquered it, and then ran into the Great East.

The result was that the Great East pulled out its detailed history books and asked them to compare dates. After that, there was no after that, and they changed the East into India. That's why Western historians hate the Great East most of all. Why is your record so detailed?

So don't expect these pale-skins to value heritage. Just look at the Adeptus Mechanicus today. The Celestial Empire, by contrast, has almost never had a major line of heritage broken. The only ones that might have been lost are those with mostly cultural value and little practical value.

So all Heydrich could do was prepare a large number of STCs and hope that nothing truly broke after he slipped away. As for reproducing the actual technology, he could only leave that to his people to research slowly. After all, his creations had a certain beauty of Ork reckoning to them.

[Author's Note: PS: There's one more update, but it might be a bit late.]