Chapter 351: A Little Warp Trick
With the assignment accepted, Kian headed back to his Sanctum to pick out gear.
Since this was a diplomatic mission, he skipped the heavy power armour this time and went with a standard-pattern suit instead.
Standard-pattern or not, this particular suit had been personally reinforced by Nor'n. It carried adamantium reinforcement, an expanded power cell, and, more importantly, it looked amazing.
Thanks to the adamantium, the whole suit had a dark gold sheen, a longsword emblem on the chest, and sacred script engraved across both shoulders. Thoroughly stylish.
For weapons, Kian went light: the Demon-Cleaver, an adamantium shield, and his bolt rifle.
He loaded up an accessory pack with a stock of stims and consumables, then headed out.
He made his way to the bow of the ship, where a magnetic launch tube waited, over eighty meters long, capable of firing a range of ordnance. The photon-lance skiff fell well within its launch parameters.
The skiff itself was, bluntly, just a rocket. No other features to speak of, every design point dumped into raw speed.
Inside the ship, the magnetic rail would accelerate it first, then the engine would ignite for a second burn.
Two stages of acceleration, and the thing could hit speeds ten times faster than the fastest vessel in the entire fleet.
By now, Kian stood fully geared up in front of the skiff.
The hatch had already been opened, revealing a cramped little chamber inside. He'd be curled up in a space too small to even move his fingers comfortably for three straight days.
Magos Robert explained the process nearby.
"To keep you from turning into paste the instant the launch fires, you'll be submerged in a life-support gel. After a three-day transit, you'll arrive at the target world and plant yourself straight into the surface. Once you're out of the launch capsule, contact the nearest Knight House as quickly as possible and arrange an audience with the High King. You'll need to convince him to commit at least one Knight House to accompany the Inquisitor to the Forge World and help repel the Orks. It shouldn't be too difficult. High King Budas is a man who values honor, and like his forefathers, he still upholds the ancient pact between the first High King and the Emperor. If the Emperor's sacred domain is under threat from xenos, Budas isn't the type to look away."
Kian eyed the cramped interior of the skiff and felt a distinct twinge of dread. Anyone with claustrophobia had no business taking this job.
"What exactly am I eating and drinking for three days? And how am I supposed to relieve myself?"
Magos Robert handed him two tubes of gel.
"The first is a purgative. Drink it now, and within half an hour it'll clear out any excess waste and fluid from your system. The second is a nutrient gel. Once ingested, a jelly-like substance will coat your stomach and intestines, releasing nutrients and hydration slowly over time. Between the two, you won't need to relieve yourself for three days, and you'll be fully sustained."
Kian took both tubes and drank the first one down.
Half an hour later, he emerged from the latrine feeling noticeably lighter.
He drank the second, and felt a cold, clammy sensation settle into his stomach.
A few Enginseers helped position him properly, and he climbed into the skiff and lay down. A blue fluid slowly began filling the space around him.
The skiff's systems sealed shut around him, and he was locked in.
Magos Robert's voice came through his earpiece.
"My lord, launch in one minute. Total transit time, three days. You're welcome to play entertainment media through your armour's helmet display, or inject yourself with a sedative and sleep through the whole trip. May the Omnissiah watch over you, and let's hope your skiff doesn't collide with anything strange along the way. A craft built purely for speed like this carries essentially no armour. Even a mid-sized piece of space debris would be, well... tsk tsk..."
"Tsk tsk my ass! If it's that dangerous why didn't you mention it earlier?! What the hell—"
WHOOSH!!!
The magnetic coils fired, the skiff shot out of the ship, and vanished into the void in an instant, cutting Kian's half-finished string of curses off mid-sentence.
Half an hour later, the skiff's rear engine finished its final acceleration burn, exhausting the last of its fuel, and pushed the terrifying little single-occupant craft to a genuinely absurd velocity.
There were very few things in this universe fast enough to catch a man-made craft moving that quickly.
Sealed inside the life-support pod, Kian found himself thoroughly bored. Three whole days, and he couldn't exactly do nothing the entire time.
As for watching something on the helmet display to pass the time, he decided against it.
Every film the Imperium put out was propaganda through and through. Barely three seconds of plot before someone started shouting praise to the Emperor.
The male and female leads would be lying together in bed, all romantic tension, and you'd think, alright, here we go, tissues at the ready.
Then the lead would pull a sacred text out from under the covers and say, "Darling, what a beautiful night. We shouldn't waste it. Come, let's study the scripture together."
And the female lead would respond like an absolute simpleton, eyes lit up with stars, "Oh yes, let's! We must never forget the Emperor's grace. Let's study all night long!"
Movies like that, Kian would have to lose his mind before he'd sit through one.
As for drugging himself to sleep through the whole trip, he didn't want to do that either, felt like a waste. Might as well meditate instead.
So Kian meditated. For a solid, unbroken stretch of time.
And somewhere in the middle of all that meditation, he actually stumbled onto something interesting.
First, he realized that the coordinates of realspace and the Warp didn't correspond to each other in any fixed way.
To put it crudely: say your position in realspace is X-1, Y-1. Open a portal into the Warp, and you might find yourself at X-114514, Y-350234 instead. Close that portal, open a fresh one on the exact same spot, and the Warp-side coordinates would be different again.
That was his first discovery.
His second discovery had to do with the portal-casting Silentium had worked out earlier.
Silentium had previously developed a portal spell, one that burned through psychic power and mental strength to pull daemons out of the Warp and into realspace.
Which got Kian thinking. If you could pull things out of the Warp, could you push things into it instead?
He suspected the answer was yes. A portal wasn't just a one-way conduit for energy, it should be able to exchange matter both directions.
He'd killed plenty of daemons by now, and every one of them had come dragging bits of realspace material with it, dropping loot all over the ground when it died.
If things could come out of the Warp, then logically, things ought to be able to go in.
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