Warhammer: Empire Reboot

The younger generation tends to leave.

The Imperial Holy Land has not yet been infiltrated by the Foundation Sequence, and Navigators and Star Speakers remain an indispensable and scarce resource there.

While Guilliman's administrative reforms are progressing, the field of subspace navigation has not yet been affected.

Going to the Holy Land will at least keep your job for several decades.

The older generation hesitated, as many families had been rooted in the shadows of the empire for thousands of years, with their businesses, connections, ancestral homes, and ancestral graves all located here.

Leaving on a whim is like uprooting a family that has existed for thousands of years.

Ultimately, approximately 70 percent of the Navigator families and 80 percent of the Star Speakers Guild chose to relocate to the Imperial Holy Land.

On the day of departure, the waiting hall of Calisto Spaceport was packed with navigator families.

Their luggage was piled up like a small mountain. Some carried star charts and nautical logs that had been passed down for thousands of years, while others carried urns containing the ashes of their ancestors.

Several young navigators stood by the porthole, glancing back at the dark starry sky of the empire.

At the cargo terminal of the spaceport, a transport ship fully loaded with refined promethium is setting sail.

Two men in gray stood on the bridge, expressionless, staring straight ahead.

An old captain, a veteran who had been running shipping in the shadows of the empire for forty years, happened to pass by the waiting hall.

He glanced at the families of navigators dragging their luggage, preparing to leave, and then at the transport ship on the dock, guided by the gray-clad men.

His deputy asked, "Boss, how long do you think they can last at the Holy Land?"

The old captain took out his pipe from his pocket, lit it, and took a puff.

"on one's last legs."

He exhaled a puff of smoke. "Those gray-clad men's navigation systems, you'll know once you've used them. Zero deviation, zero latency, 24/7 online, and they can even call for help. What can a navigator compare to? That weird eyeball on their forehead? What a joke. The only reason the Holy Face still needs them is because the Marksman's hand hasn't reached there yet."

The deputy pressed further, "What if one day the Seal Bearer's influence extends to the Holy Face?"

The old captain tapped his pipe and shook the ash onto the ground.

"Then they'll have to leave the Milky Way."

The deputy thought he was joking and chuckled.

The old captain didn't laugh. Whether it was a joke or not, we'll know in a few years.

The Solaris affair and the Great Migration of Navigators stirred up far more profound waves in the dark side of the Empire than the events themselves.

From that time on, every transport ship, every merchant ship, and every patrol boat of the Empire's dark side had a gray-clad man standing on its bridge.

They are navigators, communicators, security systems, and call terminals for immediate support.

They are the capillaries of the bee swarm reaching into the starry sky.

The route of each ship is monitored in real time by the swarm network.

Interstellar shipping in the shadows of the Empire became safe and efficient.

Under the swarm's surveillance, the pirates' living space was compressed to almost zero, smuggling and black market shipping were precisely targeted, and merchants who evaded taxes were caught red-handed.

Unless, of course, one is willing to choose to walk blindly through the dark side of the empire...

Every route, every ship, and every ton of cargo in the Star Sea is under Lawson's control.

Just like the administrative systems, armies, supply depots, and factories on those planets.

On the surface, all of this is under the banner of the Imperial Double-Headed Eagle.

…………

The story of the navigator and the star talker only occupies three lines in the swarm mind's log.

Lawson glanced at it and flipped over.

For the dark side of the empire to achieve unification, the old order must give way.

For millennia, families of navigators and the Star Speakers have monopolized interstellar travel, reaping enormous profits. Now, they are being superseded by more efficient alternatives, much like the workshops that were crushed by the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution.

Lawson would not feel sorry for them, just as a steam engine would not stop turning for the tears of a textile worker.

His attention has shifted to something more important.

Swarm Intelligence compiled a complete report on the changes in the Empire's dark military production capacity over the past four years and projected it onto the three-dimensional star map of the Domination Court.

The icons for the ten thousand planets are color-coded by type: blue for nesting worlds, green for agricultural worlds, orange for conscription worlds, and gray for mining worlds.

And red is what forges the world.

Of the ten thousand planets, sixty forged worlds, each no smaller than the Agrippina primary planet, were incorporated into the swarm system.

These sixty red dots are distributed across more than a dozen star sectors.

Giant forging furnaces, refined metal smelting towers, plasma cutting arrays, ceramic steel die casting workshops, ammunition production lines, and tank assembly plants—most of these facilities were rendered semi-paralyzed after the Great Rift, lacking either raw materials, manpower, orders, or all three.

Lawson made up for it all.

Raw materials are continuously transported from the mining world and recycling centers.

The workforce is filled by the cornerstone sequence and selected local technical talent.

Needless to say, the military, infrastructure, and civilian needs of ten thousand planets are enough to keep the sixty world-casting production lines running at full capacity for decades without interruption.

In four years, the combined production capacity of these sixty casting worlds has recovered to 85% of what it was before the Great Rift, with some advanced production lines even exceeding their historical peak.

Lawson turned to the military equipment section of the report and smiled with satisfaction.

Power armor production line.

He even felt a sense of relief that his hard work had finally paid off.

Four years ago, the origin of Lawson's power armor was a story of hardship.

They pieced together, patched up, and cobbled together what they found on the battlefield—from enemy corpses, from wrecked ships, from boarding the Iron Warriors, from Dante and Calgar, and from the treasury of the Black Huron—to arm nine warbands.

Beneath the paint job of each power armor lies three or four parts from different sources, a mix-and-match style comparable to the assembled goods found on the Black Market.

Those days are over.

Of the sixty Forge Worlds, seven possess complete Astartes-class power armor production lines.

Two of them, Hephaestus-IV and Iron Mother, still retain the extremely valuable Terminator armor production capability.

Terminator Armor, the Empire's top-of-the-line individual protective gear, so thick that it's a mobile fortress that can withstand being stepped on by a Titan and still survive.

Previously, all the Terminator armor units in Lawson's possession were spoils and gifts, totaling less than three hundred, and he treated each one like a precious treasure.

Now he has his own production line.

The T-001 deeply integrated the production process of Terminator armor with the technology of direct connection of living metal nerves, and developed the standard model of the Swarm Terminator.

This improved Terminator armor eliminates the traditional machine soul system and single-person neural direct connection to the throne, replacing it with a zero-delay wearable solution that uses living metal for electrical connection.

Any combat soldier can put on the armor in three seconds, without surgery or a break-in period. They can put it on and fight, and take it off after the battle.

Total production over four years: 24,000 Astartes-class standard power armored vehicles.

Three thousand two hundred Terminator armors.

With the inventory accumulated through various channels, Lawson now possesses over 40,000 power armors.

His combat sequence limit is 210,000.

With 40,000 power armor units deployed, the coverage rate is only 19%.

Far from enough.

But the production line is already in place.

The seven power armor workshops that forge the world operate in three shifts, with an annual production capacity of 6,000 standard armors and 800 Terminator armors.

At this rate, within five years, Lawson's 210,000 combat troops could achieve 100% power armor coverage.

On paper, Lawson only has nine legitimate Astartes chapters of 1,000 men each.

In reality, he commanded a super army of 210,000 men, whose overall coordination efficiency was several orders of magnitude higher than that of any imperial military force.

Who is qualified to investigate?

Dante? The old man wished Lawson were as strong as possible.

The courtroom? The Grand Inquisitor placed Lawson on the "Emperor's Personal Handling List" four years ago, which, in layman's terms, means he's pretending to be blind.

Guilliman? The Primarch is far beyond the Immortal realm, separated from the Dark Side by an entire rift. Even if he knew Lawson's true military strength, given his pragmatic reformist style, he would most likely just frown and continue dealing with the mountain of official documents in front of him.

So Lawson's 210,000 combat suicide soldiers were openly hidden beneath the shells of nine thousand-man battle groups.

Besides the power armor, another production line is of particular interest to Lawson.

Raptor fighter jet.

The name was chosen by Lawson himself.

Four years ago, the Eldar of Saim-Han Ark presented a nearly 98% complete STC (Soldiers Traverse of the Golden Age) aerial combat platform as compensation.

T-001 gave an assessment on the same day he received the data, and the design level of this STC far surpasses any of the Empire's current fighter jets.

Four years have passed.

The raptor was transformed from blueprints into steel.

Lawson brought up a 3D model of the raptor, which slowly rotated in the holographic projection of the Dominion.

It is 45 meters long and has a wingspan of 36 meters.

The aerodynamic design of the Golden Age still exudes a timeless beauty even 40,000 years later, with its flat, diamond-shaped fuselage, variable-sweep main wings, and twin vertical tails with embedded thrust vectoring nozzles.

The Empire's most powerful active-duty Thunder fighter has a top speed of Mach 2.2.

Raptors doubled that number.

More importantly, the Raptor is a dual-domain platform, capable of operating in both the atmosphere and vacuum environments.

It can take off from the ground, penetrate into low Earth orbit to intercept enemy landing craft and orbital vehicles, and then dive back into the atmosphere to carry out ground attacks.

Within the Empire's current operational system, atmospheric fighters and space fighters are two completely independent systems, each with its own production lines, pilots, and logistics systems.

The Raptor can do the work of two planes in one.

Its weaponry is equally overwhelming, with a twin-mounted heavy laser turret on both the back and abdomen, boasting a range and armor-piercing capability more than twice that of similar Imperial weapons.