Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The security of the bottom nest, the allocation of resources, the operational data of the cultivation pond, and the progress of seaweed transportation—all of these were within expectations and did not require his personal handling.

The distributed decision-making system based on swarm intelligence can automatically handle more than 95% of daily tasks.

Lawson wanted to hear something else.

The information flow of swarm intelligence differentiated into an independent sub-thread in his mind, reporting information from the direction of the shipyard.

Three thousand non-combatant suicide soldiers were deployed in batches to the four orbital docks outside the No. 3 Nest City by the Ministry of Justice ten days ago.

They were dressed in gray overalls, mingling among tens of thousands of real dockworkers.

They are learning.

Imperial warships, those steel behemoths that are thousands of meters long, carry tens of thousands of crew members, and traverse interstellar space using subspace engines, are the most core strategic assets of human civilization in this cruel galaxy.

Each warship's operating manual is tens of thousands of pages thick, covering dozens of subsystems such as engine systems, weapon arrays, shield generators, life support, navigation systems, subspace Gale force fields, and communication arrays.

A qualified Imperial Navy technical officer needs to study at the academy for ten to fifteen years and then train on a warship for five to eight years before he can independently take charge of the daily maintenance of a subsystem.

Three thousand elite soldiers must thoroughly understand everything in the shortest possible time.

Swarm intelligence offers an advantage that ordinary learners can never have: synchronized knowledge.

But theory is one thing.

There are many technical details in warship operation that cannot be learned from manuals, such as the special winding method after the wiring has aged, the abnormal noise of a certain type of plasma tube under high load, and the exhaust valve on the third deck of the engine room that needs to be turned counterclockwise by one-third turn with the left hand and then turned back half a turn to completely seal it.

These things only exist in the muscle memory of veterans and decades of experience.

That's why Lawson needs real veterans.

Herman Frederickson, 57 years old. Senior Engine Maintenance Technician, Department of Justice, Second Nest Division, 34 years of service.

Lawson remembered the name; Herman was among the first to sign up when the suicide squad was recruited for the expedition to the agricultural world.

The medical examination revealed that his heart valves had degenerative changes and could not withstand a sustained overload of more than four Gs. He was eliminated.

Then he returned to his post and continued repairing the auxiliary cooling circuit of the No. 3 plasma reactor, which had been under repair for twenty years.

A non-combatant was assigned to Hermann's squad as a "newly assigned maintenance apprentice".

Hermann glanced at the young man.

Have you ever worked with engines?

"No."

"Hands out."

The assassin stretched out his hands, his ten fingers rough and his knuckles wide.

Herman squeezed his fingers to feel the flexibility of his joints.

“Okay,” he said. “Come with me. Let’s start by recognizing the tools.”

From that day on, Herman Frederickson had an apprentice who was excessively diligent.

This apprentice has an absurdly good memory; he can perfectly replicate any operation after it has only been demonstrated once.

He could learn the names and uses of tools, the routes and numbers of pipelines, and the meanings of the readings of various instruments after just one lesson.

Herman initially thought he had stumbled upon a genius, but later realized that this kid wasn't a genius; he was a sponge, absorbing everything he saw, and never forgetting what he absorbed.

"Which city the hell are you from?" Herman asked one day while tightening a cooling pipe connector.

"Number Two Nests, Ninth Floor of the Lower Nest."

"That place has produced some excellent skilled workers,"

Hermann handed him the wrench: "Here, you tighten it. Turn it counterclockwise by one-third of a turn, pause to feel the engagement of the washer, then turn it clockwise by half a turn. Don't use brute force; this type of sealing washer is made of synthetic rubber, and it will break if you overtighten it."

The assassin took the wrench, held the pipe with his left hand, and operated it precisely with his right. He turned it one-third of a turn counterclockwise, paused for half a second, and then turned it half a turn clockwise.

The force and angle were exactly the same as Hermann's demonstration.

The moment the wrench was used, this operational technique was simultaneously transmitted to the remaining 2,999 suicide soldiers in the dock through swarm intelligence.

From then on, any assassin who encountered this model of cooling pipe connector would handle it in exactly the same way.

Hermann nodded in satisfaction. "Not bad. Much better than those idiots in the legal department I used to work with. Those bastards could still break the gasket even after I taught them three times."

The assassin's lips curled up slightly.

“Master Hermann taught well,” he said.

"Stop flattering me." Herman snorted, but his expression visibly relaxed. "Come here, I'll teach you how to read the pressure curve of reactor number three. What's written in the manual and what actually happens are completely different. The manual says the normal range is 1200 to 1600 Pascals, but this reactor has been used for forty years, and the sealing layer has deteriorated significantly. The actual safe range is only 1100 to 1400 Pascals. If it exceeds 1400 Pascals, you have to manually depressurize it. You have to take action before the automatic protection circuit responds, otherwise the entire compartment will explode."

Similar learning processes are taking place simultaneously in the four docks.

In the weapons section of Dock One, a suicide soldier was learning how to load and calibrate the ship's main guns from a white-haired gunnery instructor. The instructor's left arm was a crude mechanical prosthesis, a souvenir left from a gun barrel explosion accident twenty years ago.

"Listen up, kid,"

The instructor tapped the breechblock of the cannon with the knuckles of his prosthetic leg, making a clanging sound: "The manual says to wait six seconds for the breech to cool after each load. But in actual combat, you don't have six seconds. If the enemy's green-skinned assault ship is within 3,000 kilometers and still accelerating, you'll have to fire the second shot in two seconds at most. Barrel life? To hell with barrel life, you'll live long enough to fire the third shot first."

In the navigation cabin of dock number three, another suicide soldier was learning how to calibrate a bird divination device.

Her teacher was a female sergeant in her forties with deep-set eyes and fingertips that were blackened from years of contact with psionic conductors.

"The oracle is theoretically designed to detect the presence of matter in the surrounding space by detecting subspace fluctuations. However, in the Dark Side of the Empire, subspace storms generate a lot of interference echoes. The manual teaches you to use the standard filtering protocol to filter them, but the standard filtering is about as effective as toilet paper in this sector."

The female sergeant took out a crystal prism about the size of a thumb from her toolbox. Its surface was covered with runes as fine as hair.

"I ground this myself. I put it into the gap between the secondary and tertiary signal processors of the bird divination device, and it can reduce the intensity of interference echoes by 40%. Don't ask me about the principle, I don't know the principle either. It's probably because the physical structure of the crystal happens to resonate and cancel out some kind of subspace wave in this frequency band. Anyway, it works. I've ground seven in my life, and three of them broke. This is my last spare one."

The assassins had already encoded the prism's shape, size, engraving pattern, installation location, and effect parameters, and synchronized them with all three thousand companions through swarm intelligence.

The swarm intelligence system simultaneously accessed the crystal optics and wave dynamics knowledge the suicide squad had learned from geophysics, completing a cross-analysis. The female sergeant's makeshift method was effective because the crystal lattice structure of the crystal prism created Bragg diffraction at a specific frequency band, scattering subspatial interference waves into the blind zone of the avionics sensor. This principle can be mass-produced using industrial crystal growth technology.

This analysis result was marked as high priority and stored in the Swarm Intelligence technology reserve, awaiting Lawson's review.

Deep inside the engine room of Dock No. 2, Herman Frederickson sat on a thick cooling pipe, handing a thermos to his apprentice beside him.

"Want a sip?"

"Thank you, Master." The assassin took the thermos and took a small, symbolic sip. The liquid was recycled water mixed with industrial alcohol; in the shipyard, this was the best drink available.

"You learn things really fast."

Hermann leaned against the pipe wall, rubbing his stubble with his greasy fingers: "I've been doing this for thirty-four years, and I've trained dozens of apprentices, but I've never seen anyone as fast as you. It normally takes at least three months for a normal person to learn the basic operation of a cooling system, but you were able to work independently in half a month."

"It's probably because he did similar work in a factory before," the assassin said.

"Can the junk in the factory be compared to a warship engine?"

Herman scoffed, but didn't delve into it further.

The people in the bottom nest all have their own secrets, and not prying into other people's past is a basic rule of survival.

He was silent for a moment, then suddenly said, "Do you know why I signed up for the expedition to Planet Two?"

The assassin looked at him.

Herman stared at a bare cable on the opposite wall.

The insulation of that cable had been mostly peeled off, exposing the dark red copper core inside. He had been looking at it for five years, and every time he submitted a report requesting a replacement, it was rejected by his superiors on the grounds of insufficient budget.

"My wife died on the first day of the riots."

Hermann's voice was flat: "She was in the factory on the fourth floor of the nest. She couldn't run when the crowd rushed over."

The assassin remained silent.

“He was trampled to death,” Herman said. “Just like that, he was trampled to death. Afterwards, when I went to collect the body, it took me a long time to recognize him.”

He unscrewed the lid of the thermos and took a big gulp of industrial alcohol diluted with water.

The spicy liquid slid down my throat, burning a line of fire.

"I knew I was going to die when I signed up. Twelve gigabytes of overload, my broken heart couldn't take two minutes. But I didn't care. I had no good life to live anyway. If I die while sailing for the angels' army, it'll be a righteous death."

"I failed the physical exam." He laughed self-deprecatingly, "I don't even qualify to be cannon fodder."

The silence lasted for more than ten seconds amidst the low-frequency hum of the engine compartment.

“But now that I think about it,” Herman tightened the lid of his thermos and stuffed it back into his tool bag, “it’s probably for the best that I didn’t go. Staying would have allowed me to teach you a few more tricks. You kids learn quickly, and you might come in very handy in the future.”

He stood up and vigorously patted the rust dust off his trouser legs.

"Alright, stop sitting. This afternoon I'll teach you how to disassemble the fuel injection array of the No. 2 auxiliary engine. The manual for that system was written five hundred years ago and doesn't match the current configuration, so I'll have to teach you step by step."

The assassins then stood up.

"Yes, Master Hermann."

They ventured deeper into the engine bay. A jungle of pipes overhead, of various diameters, crisscrossed, steam and condensation seeping from the joints, the air thick with the smells of metal and engine oil.

This is the scene deep within the heart of the warship, devoid of glory and brilliance, only filled with oil stains, noise, and decades of repetitive labor.

The empire's warships are powered by these people.

Hermann walked ahead, pointing out the various pipes and equipment to the apprentices as he went.

His voice was mostly drowned out by the low-frequency roar of the engine, but the assassin's hearing was far superior to that of ordinary people, and every word was received completely.

These veterans—Hermann, the one-armed gunnery instructor, the crystal-polishing sergeant—had no idea what they were doing. They thought they were just teaching a few promising young apprentices how to repair ships.

They were unaware that behind these apprentices' brains was a super network covering the entire planet, and that every piece of experience they had accumulated over decades was being extracted, encoded, synchronized, and integrated in real time.

But this is not important.

Importantly, once the three thousand suicide soldiers have completed their training, each of them will possess the combined experience of all the veterans in the four docks.

They will become the most comprehensive technical experts in the history of the Imperial Navy, proficient in the operation and maintenance of all systems including engines, weapons, navigation, communications, shields, and life support.

Once swarm intelligence gathers, integrates, and optimizes this knowledge to form a complete knowledge base for warship operations, this knowledge can be instantly synchronized to any newly created suicide soldier, just like the twelve thousand melee combat modes.

From now on, Lawson can have as many warship technicians as he needs.

Ten thousand, one hundred thousand, one million. As long as he has enough life points, he can summon a complete fleet of crew members at any time.

Lawson opened his eyes.

On the holographic projection table, a three-dimensional model of the Oberlus galaxy slowly rotated.

The first main star, the second agricultural world, and the third nest city world.

The three planets are like three chess pieces, placed on a chessboard with the stars at the center.