Author's Note: For those interested, there are now eight advance chapters on P-atreon (remove the spaces and dash): p-atreon/ SkySage24.
"There is something I wish to show you," The Emperor said, as the two of them flew through the skies of Terra. They were still above the Imperial capital for now, so the air around them was clear and cold but in the distance, the toxic clouds of pollution that still choked most of the planet were clearly visible even to mortal eyes.
"What is it this time?" Isha asked, half-dreading the answer as she remembered the last thing the Emperor wanted to show her. But part of her attention remained on the clouds. The healing and restoration of Terra had not precisely escaped her mind, she had continued her work on it. But it had certainly become less and less of a priority ever since her children arrived near Sol.
Given the recent strides she and the Emperor had made, he would likely agree if Isha requested that she be allowed to accelerate the terraforming process. It might not have been a priority for her, but the people of Terra deserved to live in a clean, healthy world where every breath did not poison them and it shamed Isha that she had forgotten that.
"It will be easier if you simply see it for yourself," George waved a hand before he noticed her expression. "It is nothing like the Golden Throne," He added. "It is tangentially related, but nothing which will disturb you."
Isha refrained from voicing her scepticism, instead following his flight path. She hoped the Emperor was right, she wasn't in the mood for any more shocking revelations this year…or this century, for that matter.
They arrived at the edge of the Imperial Capital, at one of the mountains that was still in the process of being fortified and hollowed out. Watchtowers protruded from the stone, and a thick golden ring encircled the peak,
Isha sensed at least several thousand life signs within the mountain, though that was still not even a tenth of the population one could find in Terra's hive cities.
The Emperor phased through the rock into the mountain, gesturing for Isha to follow. With some wariness, she turned intangible and entered.
The inside of the mountain had been hollowed out, but it wasn't anything like a hive city or even the Emperor's Palace. There was a large cavern where construction was still ongoing. Workers laid power lines, hammered and chiselled away at the rock and carried equipment everywhere under the sharp gaze of their foremen.
Of course, everything stopped when the Emperor appeared, seemingly in a flash of gold light.
Everyone immediately stopped, cries of surprise across the room as everyone bowed and knelt.
"At ease," the Emperor said, his voice resonating across the cavern as Isha re-solidified behind him. "Return to your work."
Everyone did so, though they kept sneaking glances at the Emperor as he marched down the cavern.
Isha followed him into the wide sweeping halls which were still similarly under construction. The workers all regarded them with awe, and guards clad in thick, bulky onyx-coloured armour (Lucifer Blacks, they were called, if Isha recalled correctly) only bowed until they reached the enormous central chamber.
As they stepped inside, it became obvious that the entire chamber was wide and circular, an entire arena of seats built into the walls still under construction. Roughly a thousand had been completed, but going by the work still ongoing, Isha estimated that was only a tenth of what the Emperor intended.
There were sections of the wall that were exposed and unfinished, revealing machinery made from a glittering material which Isha quickly recognized as auramite, with power cables that reminded her of smaller versions of the ones that had been attached to the Golden Throne.
"What exactly is this?" Isha asked slowly.
"The beginnings of the Astronomican," The Emperor answered. "It is a psychic beacon I am designing, one powered by myself that will shine across the entire galaxy, and make it easier for the Navigators to map and direct ships across the currents of the Warp. Furthermore, it will serve as a symbol of the Imperium, a light to shine the way for all mankind."
It was characteristically bold and ambitious, Isha had to admit. Such a psychic beacon would be a powerful symbol indeed (and Isha, suspected, useful to the mythology of the Imperial Truth). She had seen similar things in the past, the workings of younger civilizations delving into melding warpcraft and technology (humans were one of them, in fact). But the most similar example she could think of was what the Necrons had done in the Aftermath of the war, after the Old Ones and C'tan had fallen, but the galaxy had continued to teeter on the brink of ruin.
The Necrons had taken the shards of their former masters, and used them as beacons, creating machines which forcibly projected the power of the Yngir shards into the Warp, both radiating a great light and forcibly quelling the Warp into calm, repelling Warp predators.
But Isha suspected even those machines would pale in comparison to the Emperor's Astronomican. Yngir shards were powerful, without a doubt, but they were still only shards, fragments of their former selves.
The Emperor was intact and whole, powerful enough to crush entire pantheons of lesser gods into line if they still existed.
Any Warp beacon powered by him would be…incredible. Isha could see it in the eye of her mind, a golden flame burning across the galaxy. Not kind, but undeniably resolute, sending daemons shrieking and fleeing from its light, making the shadows of the Chaos Gods themselves recede from how bright it was.
But one question remained.
"This is a rather major risk, is it not?" Isha observed. "The Astronomican will take up a considerable amount of your power and attention. And if the Imperium is dependent on it, if anything were to pull your attention away from it for even a moment…the consequences would be catastrophic."
"I can handle it," The Emperor said confidently, and Isha believed him. For all his flaws, power and will were not things the Emperor lacked. "It will be a limiter on my power, and I will not be able to do things such as split myself into multiple avatars, but it is a necessary sacrifice. But you are correct, the Imperium being entirely dependent on the Astronomican would be a vulnerability, and something Chaos would wish to exploit. I have faith in myself, but I would be a fool not to consider that they might have some way of sabotaging me. Which is why I wish for your help in reinforcing the Astronomican, and perhaps expanding it."
Ah. So that was what this was about.
Isha considered the matter, but in the end, there wasn't any reason for her to say no.
"Very well. Do you have a copy of your plans for the Astronomican's machinery?" Isha asked briskly.
George nodded, and a golden projection flickered to life in between them, depicting the mountain they were in right now, with machinery inlaid into rock, along with finished versions of the incomplete chambers and hallways they had seen on their way in.
But it wasn't just the mountain. The construction spread out into the entire region around it, into effectively an entire city built solely to channel and focus psychic energy into the most powerful psychic beacon in the galaxy.
Vaul would have understood the design flawlessly with but a glance, would have known exactly how to streamline and improve it.
Isha was not her brother, but she understood the basics of what the Emperor was aiming for, at least.
"We'll need to go into details over these plans later," Isha said finally. "But to begin with, we need to replace all the auramite with wraithbone."
George nodded, having expected as much. "I look forward to putting my skills into practice."
"Indeed," Isha circled the projection, her eyes flickering to the golden arena around them as her lips twisted into a frown. "What is the purpose of all these seats?"
"A contingency," George explained. "I can ignite and maintain the Astronomican myself, but I am uncertain how difficult they may become the further I move away from Terra. And I cannot simply stay here for the entirety of my campaigns. I had intended to train a choir of psykers to help fuel and focus the Astronomican and perhaps take over it entirely if necessary."
Isha hummed. "A reasonable plan, given the resources previously available to you, but there's no need for that anymore. We can create wraithbone batteries and you can store psychic energy in them as needed. Some trained psykers will be needed to oversee and maintain the machinery still, but not nearly this many. It would be an unnecessary risk to make the beacon dependent on mortal psykers in any case. The toll it would take…" Isha trailed off.
Maintaining a galaxy-wide warp beacon would be a difficult task for her children, even before the Fall. For human psykers, who lacked the instinctive control the Old Ones had engineered into the Eldar, whose training was but a shadow of the education the Dominion would have been able to give even with Isha's knowledge added to the Emperor's own?
The casualty rates would be enormous. Even those who survived would live difficult lives, perhaps confined entirely to this chamber.
No need for any such cruelty and inefficiency when Isha and the Emperor could do better.
George seemed pleased by her words. "That is good to hear. I will need to overhaul the construction plans considerably, but it will be better to manage the Astronomican that way. On the subject of wraithbone batteries, if they are a viable method of powering the Astronomican, I had an idea."
"Oh?" Isha asked curiously, looking up from the projection.
"Before the Age of Strife, humanity had a network of warp beacons across the galaxy," George explained. "I designed quite a few myself, though the precise workings of each beacon tended to vary greatly depending on who built them, where and with what resources. Even the most powerful were not equal to what I envision for the Astronomican, however. More importantly, the entire network was shattered by the warpstorms, though perhaps a few beacons survive out there. I had discarded the idea of rebuilding the network since proofing them against Chaos would be extremely difficult, and building even a single beacon would consume a great deal of time and resources. With wraithbone, however…"
Isha pondered the idea, turning it over in her mind. "It is perfectly viable, yes. However, building the entire network will still take a great deal of time, and none of the smaller beacons will be as powerful as the Astronomican."
"No matter," George said, waving a hand. "It is a long-term project, I understand, and will likely take centuries to complete. But it means there will be redundancies in place. In any case, the Astronomican has other purposes that the warp beacons do not."
Other purposes? Isha wondered what they were for a moment before it came to her. It was so obvious that she was embarrassed it hadn't occurred to her the moment the Emperor explained his intent.
"You are trying to gain a foothold in the Warp," She said softly. "To carve out your domain, a warp realm where you can create an afterlife for your people?"
George nodded, his eyes shadowed. "I cannot save the souls already lost, but…I owe mankind this much, at least. They should have a choice between oblivion or eternal damnation. Having a realm in the Warp under my control will also add to my strength, and lessen the influence of Chaos."
"I understand," Isha agreed. "Well, I can certainly ease the process for you, so let's begin."
But even as the Emperor launched into an explanation for the entire machinery of the Astronomican and exactly how it worked and what it did, Isha's attention was only half on him.
The question of rebuilding her domains in the Aethyr were was something that had been nagging in the back of her mind for years, but Isha had had no answers, nothing she could even think of that would work.
The Emperor's Astronomican was a fine plan for him, but Isha could not replicate it. Trying to do so would only be leaving herself vulnerable to Slaanesh, ripe to be devoured.
But the Astronomican did give her an idea. An idea which Isha instinctively wanted to reject and never think about again, but…could she afford to?
Was there any other way?
Isha couldn't help but be afraid that there wasn't.