Golden light drifted down through the psionic-covered shelter, fragments of spent energy dissolving into drifting halos without direction or owner.
In the dim shelter, they looked like stars.
Like a ceiling of night sky.
Stars and gold light spread across the dome above them, breathtaking and still.
Like a cathedral.
By the hour, it was night.
The players had already logged off for the day.
This was the time Aldric usually left Annie to settle the miners down.
Annie knelt on the ground.
She had seen everything.
She had recorded everything.
In the video, Aldric held the dome in place, then crossed the floor one labored step at a time and lowered himself into that chair.
The image was both defeated and impossibly tall.
The high-level Modeling Optimization module was still working.
Like a perfect god protecting them, who had sheltered them all by burning himself out.
Annie’s eyes burned with fervor mixed with extreme pain.
Tears ran down the white-patched skin of her cheeks.
She had watched her angel become a prisoner of the ship.
For them.
“Our angel…
the God-Emperor…
incarnation…”
“He is suffering in our place…”
“What right do we have…”
The pale yellow statue seemed to gleam with gold.
Every miner knelt in prayer.
They followed Annie, kneeling before the statue.
God-Emperor above.
Federation above.
The Federation’s God-Emperor…
above…
“It’s because we didn’t try hard enough that our angel…”
“We offer our loyalty to our God-Emperor.”
Ignorance moved through the room like something alive, sowing seeds of fervent belief in a figure called the Federation’s God-Emperor.
Annie was carrying out her assigned task of settling the miners.
In the only way she believed was correct.
Time passed.
When the last of the miners had found some peace and gone to rest, Annie remained kneeling on the floor alone.
The white markings on her skin stood out more sharply than ever in the quiet.
“Angel”
she retched.
The body’s response to grief too large to contain.
She was in pain.
She was grieving.
Her angel, pinned to that chair like a god bound in chains.
The grief in her was profound.
She had quieted every miner’s fear.
But she couldn’t calm her own guilt.
She curled up on the ground until she saw the warm side of the statue.
“God-Emperor…
made flesh…
angel…
I will…”
The golden light settled over her.
as if merging into her skin.
…
Aldric had known the outcome long before it arrived.
Septimus had told him.
With rock-borers tearing through the ground below them, structural collapse was only a matter of time.
Becoming a psionic bio-battery had always been inevitable.
The depletion of psionic energy left him exhausted, but a nightmare pulled him back before he could fully rest.
“Why am I dreaming?”
He was a Commander, and also a powerful psyker.
A fleet commander didn’t necessarily command a psionic corps, but he had to be a psyker himself.
Otherwise an enemy psyker could reach him directly, and no defensive arrangement would reliably stop that. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Having a psionic corps on hand didn’t solve it either.
No one could stay on guard forever.
Psykers did not dream without reason.
In the dream, every person on a planet had knelt before something radiating gold light.
He could just make out what they were calling it.
The God-Emperor.
The memories were hazy and fragmented.
“Could this be the psionic drain?
Has it gotten to the point where I’m having nightmares??”
He admitted he loathed the name of the God-Emperor, that foolish human bastard.
But even that wasn’t enough to give him nightmares.
Back in the Federation, when sleep wouldn’t come, he had sometimes signed an execution order for some local deity to help him sleep.
He reached inward and checked his psionic reserves.
He murmured to himself.
“The depletion rate is lower than I estimated.
Did I miscalculate?”
His psionic energy was still being managed through the Force game module, which had mitigated much of the risk, but caution was still the wiser approach.
“Alright.
Let me adjust the game while I can.”
He couldn’t leave the ship for extended periods, but he could still direct the players from inside the warship.
He was thinking about which direction to develop the game.
Strategy or tactics.
Strategy meant game modules oriented toward the wider picture, with buffs that applied across the full map.
Tactics meant enhancing individual combat capability for each soldier.
He hadn’t yet developed a full understanding of this star sector’s combat structure.
The unusual ork warband, the Imperium’s planetary defense forces, both belonged to the strategic system
The modules he had used before, the minimap, friend-or-foe identification, fog-of-war clearing, the overhead view, shooting correction for players, ballistic optimization, semi-immersive mode, all of these belonged to the large-formation combat category.
All strategic.
These lower-tier modules had been designed to let players lead their soldiers in coordinated team engagements.
But the psionic disturbances he had witnessed made him reconsider the underlying logic of this Imperium.
Something had lifted an entire continental plate.
And there was the local deity that had called itself the God-Emperor.
He had maintained his reputation, capable of unlocking advanced modules, precisely to prevent the emergence of individually powerful creatures.
If his psionic abilities couldn’t handle it, he would have to resort to the system’s trump card.
“If I had a Federation battleship…
no, even a cruiser would do.
Even if it were a god…”
One warship, and Aldric could show everyone exactly how he had once led a single fleet to pin down a Rift-breaker Calamity and beat it into submission.
With players now operating as individual explorers, the camp’s development strategy would need to shift accordingly.
Multiplayer coordinated combat had a balancing effect on infantry engagements, or more accurately, it amplified them.
Under those conditions, fighting opponents was roughly like running a human player against AI opponents in a standard shooter.
Drool getting rushed by orks at close range was the equivalent of that balance breaking down entirely, turning the AI skirmish into a close-quarters boss encounter.
The multiplayer combat module, in its higher-tier form, did carry individual soldier enhancement.
“I’ll push the armor system out first.”
Announcement: Armor system update.
Players may visit the engineering section to purchase new armor.
Installment payment available for those short on Reputation.
Every player let out a breath.
As the exploration pushed deeper, keeping the miners alive had become increasingly difficult.
Everyone moved toward the engineering section immediately.
No one had any Reputation left.
They all chose installment without discussion.
At the engineering section, Antor had two types of armor available.
The first was standard armor fabricated from high-strength steel.
The second was a half-plate designed specifically for miners, built for ease of movement while digging and for reducing the chance of injury during excavation work.
Both armor types came fitted with a basic powered exoskeleton system.
Handmade, though you wouldn’t have guessed it from looking.
The only obvious limitation was that neither could match Federation standard-issue armor.
Reth stayed close to Drool’s side.
He had already prepared himself to put on the standard armor.
Everything Drool had said made it clear the armor was being readied for him.
And now Drool was standing there, running a test on a new set.
*Bang Bang Bang*
A round fired against the standard armor plate.
The impact left a dent.
It did not punch through.
A third probably wouldn’t hold.
The material wasn’t thick enough, and going thicker would start interfering with the exoskeleton system beneath.
Antor explained.
“Full-body coverage with this standard armor.
The powered assist tops out at four hundred kilograms of supplementary force.”
“Looks decent enough.”
Drool bounced in place twice while wearing the set.
Nothing restricted his movement.
Apart from the material being inferior to military-grade, it was nearly identical in form.
Built directly from the original schematics, just substituting high-strength steel.
“Reth.
Put on my armor.”
Reth blinked.
He thought he had heard it wrong.
What?
Wear the Captain’s armor?
The logic of it didn’t make any sense to him.
“Captain, that’s your armor.
Why would you give it to me?”
“What, are you saying it’s damaged?”
“No, no, it’s not that…”
He had seen it.
He had heard the story.
The scar on that armor had come from an ork explosive round.
That was a mark of honor.
Every veteran of Pit Three had talked about it.
Every miner who had been part of that defensive engagement knew.
Among all the Captains in the camp, Drool had been the most relentless.
“That’s your Glory, Captain.”
Drool lifted one shoulder.
“Then let my Glory protect my soldier.”
Handing over his own armor system to a miner was something none of them could quite process.
Reth kept his head down and accepted it.
Federation military armor could handle a rock-borer’s attack without difficulty.
An adult borer’s bite against that armor left only a shallow mark on the surface.
It would need to bite the same spot five or six times in a row, without any deviation, before there was any chance of breaking through.
Drool turned back to continue testing his new armor.
Then a faint sound reached him from behind.
He turned around.
His miner Reth was crying.
“Captain.”
Drool saw it.
The head lifted just slightly.
The person in front of him.
Or more accurately, just a boy.
Dark, bright eyes full of tears.
Drool stood there.
The stream chat went off.
“Hold on.
Is the NPC actually moved right now?
The NPC’s emotions are too real!”
“Stellaris dev team, genuinely impressive.
With this much talent, why make a game?
Do something more personal and turn it into real money!”
“Is this a hidden cutscene?
Some kind of CG bonus?”
“Honestly though, it tracks.
We’d rather our soldiers die less, even if it means they end up better equipped than we are.”
Drool smiled and laughed.
He was becoming increasingly obsessed with this game.
He had started treating this miner NPC like a real person without even realizing it.
“Alright.
What are you crying for?
I still need you to mine for me.”
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