Chapter 12 – The Hive Fleet
Five Days after Arrival In-System
Rex stared at the piece of Archeotech. The Archeotech could not stare back, but that hardly mattered.
The Dark Age of Technology was humanity's Golden Age, an era of unparalleled scientific advancement that allowed them to possibly rival even the ancient Eldar and Necrons at their respective heights, even surpassing them if some sources were to be believed. Technological wonders that could not be made by modern means. Most of the technology in use across the modern Imperium was based off that height, inferior copies and imitations that could never live up to that of their forebears. If the Mechanicus tech-priests barely even understood how the things they used on a daily basis functioned, they would have no hope of understanding the majesty of the Archeotech they so coveted.
It was, in other words, the holy grail for Rex, who should be capable of understanding such wonders and creating new versions of them for his own uses on a vast scale with his industrial ability, assuming there wasn't some roadblock like Necrodermis.
And, indeed, there was not. There were no unique materials he could not replicate, nothing that required him to manipulate particles beyond his sub-atomic limits, no need to tap into the strange power of the warp for it to function. He even understood everything, in its entirety, with little difficulty. He'd have called it simple, but saying that about this particular piece of technology would have been an insult. It was a masterful work of art as much as it was a tool, one that could not even begin to be properly appreciated by the brutes of the Imperium.
And it was useless to him.
The archeotech was a terraforming machine, similar in appearance to an Ares and filled with various compartments, tools, and other wonders that could turn a barren rock into a fairly temperate and at least relatively pleasant world with an atmosphere, weather cycles, even an ecosystem with the clone-seeds it possessed as it worked in concert with hundreds of other such devices over the course of months. Perhaps for humans it might be of massive benefit in their expansion to new planets, but to him…
He didn't need an atmosphere to function. He didn't need good weather to function. Fuck, he barely needed a planet! Just give him enough space, time, and raw matter and he could literally create a planet if he wanted to.
The cloning tech was at least somewhat interesting. Sure, it was currently limited to the DNA samples it already had on file, ranging in wildlife from various kinds of bacteria to larger kinds of plants and animals. Nothing particularly unusual and almost all creatures he was fairly certain were earth-based or at least derived from creatures of that world. If he were to gain new samples, he could quite easily create other kinds of clones, but even that wasn't particularly useful to him. Despite his use of their armor, he didn't actually need a clone army nor did he really want one.
He had found the terraforming machine abandoned in the depths of one of the hive cities, long ago having lost its power, the organics it carried either withered away or expended. It had been the nesting ground for a large pack of strange mutant humans that had attacked him the instant his Riflemen had appeared. His squads had no issues cutting them down with their new lasguns. His Locusts had begun infiltrating the archeotech before he'd even realized what it truly was, at which point he'd sent a few Patents to fully disassemble the device along with another ten squads of Riflemen and a large swarm to guard it. His excitement had soon given way to disappointment after he realized just what the purpose of the device truly was.
He'd checked if there was anything that could be weaponized if just modified a bit. There was nothing, at least nothing that would serve as a replacement for his other weapons, except maybe the weather manipulation aspects of the device. He could create massive storms or blizzards, but that would just be destructive and virtually pointless except in highly specific circumstances. Still, he kept it in mind for future possibilities.
There was one thing that was provably useful in the device: the materials it was made of. Unlike necrodermis, these were just various compositions of ceramite and plasteel, things he already had, but the crystalline latticework that they were forged in was quite interesting. It made them just a bit stronger than other mixes of ceramite and plasteel, as well as lighter and even less expensive, at least in terms of metal consumption. They were stronger than his precursor metals as well and he quickly got to work modifying his designs and existing troops with the new blend. It increased their cost by a bit, but he hoped their increase in effectiveness and durability would be worth it.
He supposed it was better than nothing, even if he was still a bit frustrated that he had yet to acquire any ancient superweapons. Or even any large, battleship-grade weapons, which would have come in handy for the other problem in this system.
He turned his main focus back to the Hive Fleet. At its current pace, he could see it would be around two months, twelve days, and sixteen hours before the first bioships arrived and another four hours before the massive, continent-sized Hive ship that made up the center of their force joined them in orbit. There were many bioships within that vessel that occasionally flew out before ducking back in, something they did so often that he couldn't get a solid count of them. Normally, he should have been able to guesstimate based on the number of individual heat readings his sensors got, but the ship just looked like a massive, solid blob to him. Whether that was because of the Hive ship's own heat or because there were just so many tyranids packed together in there, he really didn't want to think about it.
His expansion into this system had been unusual. Rather than use fabricators to build a balance between factories and acquiring new sources of income or even just doing the latter as had become the norm for him, he'd focused entirely on creating new factories and fabricators. With well over six hundred star systems to draw resources from, this was something he could do easily. There were three uninhabited worlds in the system and he covered them all in factories, both on the ground and in orbit. Two of those worlds had several moons as well, ten in all, but he had other plans for those.
This wasn't something he would do normally, even if he did end up in another system with life in it. It was because he was on a schedule and not a very large one that he was purely rushing his ability to construct troops, vehicles, and ships. He wasn't sure if his forces could manage a fight against the tyranids on the ground, not with the sheer number of them and humans they could feed on. In space, however? Maybe.
So, while he sent a few squads to deal with the relatively low-level threat of genestealer cultists and gangs in the hive cities, the bulk of his attention had always been on the hive fleet and his preparations to face it. If he lost, so be it, he lost relatively little and it wasn't like the tyranids would come looking for revenge. If he won, however…
He wasn't sure what he would do if he won. He was sort of flying by the seat of his pants here. He had acted more out of worry that he would be a bad person than any actual care for the people on the planet, which sort of invalidated his decision anyways. Even if he had once been a human, there were so many layers of separation between these humans and himself now that they might as well have been different species. They didn't matter, not to him and apparently not even to each other given the anarchy that had taken hold of the world. He wasn't even sure they were worth saving, he'd already acquired much of the tech they had. Fuck he really was a shitty person, wasn't he…
The rifleman rocked and Rex felt his focus return once more.
Whether the humans were worth it or not, he had decided to at least try and save them from the tyranids. The few ship designs the humans had on these hive cities were shuttlecraft, but they helped him create an amalgam gunboat that drew elements from his Omega-class battleship (which really didn't deserve the name at a mere three hundred meters long. From the records he had found, that was smaller than even a destroyer used by the Imperium). It was two hundred meters long, had powerful engines, light armor, a hundred splinter cannons and a bow-mounted lascannon that was significantly stronger than anything else he had at the moment. Laser weapons worked well scaled up it seemed, far better than heat lances and splinter rifles anyways, and he replaced many of the largest weapons on each of his designs with similar guns. He also made a note to figure out just how far he could take that scaling.
He dubbed it the Gnat-class, since that was basically what it would be relative to the Hive ship. He sent the first wave, four thousand strong, straight towards the Hive ship, to get a feel for the thing. They'd responded by dispersing a massive swarm at his approach, close to a hundred thousand bioships, each of which was larger than his own ships by various margins, yet also far slower.
Tyranid space tactics were… interesting, to say the least. Their ranged weapons used some kind of acid that melted through even his DAoT-grade mix of armor, but these attacks weren't particularly speedy or difficult to dodge. It was just the number of them, but even that wasn't too large of a hurdle for him with his sensors and powerful engines. When he did get hit, his ships were often destroyed, but he hadn't designed them to be tanky. He noted, with some amusement, that many of the acid blasts would contain a core pod holding clusters of tyranids, sometimes over a hundred. Likely, they were meant to board ships struck by the blasts and wreak havoc on the insides.
Fortunate, then, that his ships didn't have insides. At least, nothing spacious enough for more than a few dust locusts floating side-by-side. As a result, these tyranids were left floating through the depths of space.
A few of their faster ships attempted to ram or, rather, bite his vessels with their teeth, but this was even less likely to succeed. His craft were just too nimble.
His own ships were doing quite well, surprisingly. The slow tyranid ships that relied upon chemical thrusters for maneuvering were easy pickings for his swarm of gnats. Each of his ships were averaging more than three kills and that number was continuing to tick higher with time as days began to pass. The issue was much the same as it had been with the Orks: the tyranid numbers never seemed to decrease and there were far, far too many of them.
By the fourth day of battle, his ships had killed nearly twenty thousand of the small tyranid escort craft and even managed to destroy nearly a hundred of the larger tyranids that were akin to battleships. He'd lost roughly half of his own fighting force, yet the tyranids seemed to only ever stay the same or increase in numbers. He even saw a few bite down on their dead and drag the corpses back to the hive ship, presumably to have their biomass reabsorbed and used to birth new ships. That was… disturbing, how similar it was to his own methods of warfare.
He wasn't sure how fast the process was to birth a new ship, but the Tyranids clearly had numbers to spare even if it took a while. And even over the four days of battle, the hive ship had not slowed down even slightly. Still, it had given him an idea of space combat and how the Tyranids fought. He could assume they had similar tactics on the ground, at least when it came to their dead and use of ranged and melee attacks. He made a note to take the same route he had with Ork Spores: scorched earth. No biomass to reclaim, few tyranids to fight against, at least in the long run.
His gnats hadn't managed to do much more than gain him information, but that was hardly a loss. He'd known they wouldn't do much against the Hive ship, let alone against the fleet itself, he'd just wanted to test his first proper combat space-ship in a real fight.
The true plan were the two moons presently on an intercept course with said fleet.
Give me my precious stones my precious