Chapter Three

"I claim this world in the name of the Emperor of Man and His Imperium. I bring justice and truth for the loyal, punishment and death for the guilty, and the spoils I take by my own hand."

— Ansellion Aquairre, Lord Captain of the Caelestis Imperium

His Glorious Aspirations. Frontier System.

While I had been tempted to make a warp jump straight to another universe as soon as possible, and to never look back, that wasn't what I ended up doing because while I felt certain it would work it be would extremely foolish for me to utilise an untested piece of technology in such a way. Aside from that my cruiser would only be able to operate without support for so long. If could find enough raw materials we could expand our time away from port from months to years, but one day I would need to take my ship to a space dock that could handle an IOM cruiser and so I'd have to come back to the forge-world.

With those thoughts in mind, I'd gone along with the plan the Ad-Mech had come up with. Which was to jump to a frontier system far from the forge-world to find out exactly how much time got shaved off the journey while using a warp route known to be stable. The route wasn't used very often since it led to the edge of the space from where the astronomicon could only be faintly made out. Retracing the journey would be simple enough since the warp in this part of the galaxy allowed for safer and more stable trips.

This was partly why the drive was being tested so far from Mars or one of the Forge Worlds closer to Mars. The other reasons involved the fact that forge-worlds didn't always share technology and information despite them being unified under one banner. Also out here in this remote part of the Imperium, there was less chance of any enemy agents finding us and performing acts of sabotage.

"Report, Number One," I said.

Rather than converse with the crew directly, something that unnerved me a little since so many of them were servitors or close to it given their sheer amount of cybernetics, I made use of my first officer's experience with starship command. He was able to quickly gather up the desired information and he was able to present it to me without much delay. I really should see about getting a raise.

"As we hoped the projected journey time was cut in half," he told me.

Due to the messed-up nature of warp travel that just meant the time we'd spent travelling was half of what it would have been for another ship, how time would have progressed for the rest of the universe was another matter and we wouldn't know until we returned to the forge-world. Assuming things went well we'd arrive back there in half the time a trip to the frontier system and back should have taken, and all without needing a navigator since I felt fairly certain that any psyker with enough power could simply will this ship to go where it needed to go as long as they knew where they wanted to go. Although a navigator would be the best choice to do should the drives somehow ever be replicated since they had experience with the warp.

"Lord-Captain!" called out a voice "We are picking up something on the scans".

The Master of Etherics had actually mentioned something about consulting machine spirits of foreseeing or some such rubbish. Due to my perspective as a 21st-century human, I knew that the technology all around us only seems as if it has a will of its own in the form of a machine spirit, I simply paid lip service to such things, as I didn't wish to be burned at the stake for being a heretic, and everything for me worked just fine. As such, I did my best to filter out most of the mumbo jumbo and to understood what they all really meant.

"Any idea what the augur is picking up?" I questioned.

I didn't get much information.

"A group of fast-moving objects" I was unhelpfully told.

I decided to go with my gut on this. I'd been warned that there would be groups out that didn't want the IOM to start using a better form of warp drive and while the drive couldn't be replicated that might not always be the case. Besides if it did allow this ship to reach other universes then it would allow me to expand the influence if the Imperium to place its enemies couldn't follow. One day I might bring back some sort of technology that greatly altered the balance of power in this galaxy. Groups like Chaos and Eldar might learn of that due to their warp powers and move to stop me before I could change things.

"Battle stations" I ordered, "Raise the void-shields".

So absolute was my will while on this ship that my commands were carried out right away and this was good because it takes time for even a smaller IOM warship to power up its weapons and shields. It isn't like Star Trek, there's no single button or simple series of buttons to press that does everything for you.

"We need to get out of here," I said to my First Officer.

Unlike jumping into hyperspace, going into the warp is not a simple matter. The warp drive is a very complex and poorly understood piece of technology in which you get around the whole lightspeed limit issue by travelling through what can best be described as Hell in the style of Event Horizon only with a shield to protect you. Lucky for us this ship had a very advanced warp drive and we'd not entered the system near anything with a gravity-well strong enough to stop us from getting back into the warp.

Navigation of Warpspace can be achieved in two ways: the calculated jump, which is what humans used before navigators and limited to a few lightyears, and the piloted jump I was about to do a piloted jump as we'd not ventured too far into the system to jump. Whoever had decided to ambush hadn't waited long enough before the attack, if they had we'd have been able to simply leave. It also mattered that this wasn't a battleship and that the Dauntless-class cruiser was meant to scout for the fleets, so it was rather nimble for an IOM ship.

Once a spacecraft activates its Warp-Drive, it is plunged into a dimension very different from the material universe. It is convenient to imagine Warpspace as consisting of a relatively dense, almost liquid, energy, devoid of stars, or any sort of light and life. But that is not the truth, it is in fact a nightmare realm full of all our fears, self-loathing and nightmares. It should also contain our virtues, dreams and kindnesses in equal measure, alas the War in Heaven between the Old Ones and the C'tan screwed up any kind of balance, and it didn't help that those stupid space elves had murder-fucked another chaos god into existence.

This was something I tried to keep out of mind as I leaned back in the command chair and linked with the drive's machine spirit which I knew to really be its complex operating system. Since it was much more advanced than other warp drives, this combined with the fact that we were on a ship more much nimble than other IOM vessels, and because we had extra power, I should be able to get us back into the warp before we all got killed.

Before I focused totally on my tasks, which was to get myself, with everyone else tagging along since we were all on the same vessel, out of not only this solar system but this universe. I imagined that I had cool psyker powers and I tried to reach out to them to sense who was coming after us. Powers or not I didn't know was on the ships now coming after us, I just somehow understood that they were psyker tricks to disguise themselves and that they meant to destroy us.

With that in mind, I focused my will and drove the cruiser into the warp as soon as I could. I desired to lay low, to go someplace where I would not have to worry about advanced enemies in a world that I knew well and wouldn't mind exploiting.

I smiled as we entered the warp with my destination in mind.