Chapter 471: The STC Template
For a long stretch of time afterward, every Ork Boy who crawled out of the mushroom fields got seized by the Great Gretchin-ists and forced into the operating queue.
The little-heads, now running on stolen Ork Boy bodies, found themselves with an endless well of energy, chattering and causing chaos nonstop, every single day.
The big-heads, meanwhile, still carried an Ork Boy's combat-hungry brain inside their skulls, and it wasn't uncommon to see a whole crowd of them brawling amongst themselves.
The problem was, their bodies were now frail Gretchin frames, so the fighting never amounted to much, and they'd wind up wheezing and exhausted within minutes.
Still, on the whole, Great Gretchin-ism was thriving, a scene of chaotic, thriving life bursting out in every direction. They'd even written a song for the occasion, sung across the entire movement:
"Big head, little boy, little head, Gretchin true,
A matched-up pair of Gorkamork fools, two poor souls stuck with each other's due~
Big heads with tiny hands, little heads with hands so grand~
Big hand grabs the little hand, thwack thwack, they scrap and brawl,
Fight, fight, tat-tat-tat-tat, and in a blink, it's WAAAAAAAAAGH for all~"
In short, every day, the Gretchin kept working tirelessly toward the second stage of Great Gretchin-ism~
Meanwhile, after his respawn, Kian went back to drilling his troops, while also sweeping the battlefield for valuable salvage.
Tech-priest Boothe handed him a new assignment, one that, if completed, would earn him 100 million in value.
The mission: travel to a specific Ork-held hive ruin, beneath which sat a special facility, containing something called an STC template.
An STC template, in Warhammer terms, was a production blueprint, and it came in many forms.
Some STC templates were nothing more than a data-drive, containing the manufacturing schematics for something like a Leman Russ.
Others were entire, massive automated factories, capable of manufacturing Leman Russ tanks fully autonomously, from raw materials alone.
Templates like these had been abundant during humanity's Golden Age.
Back then, humanity's colony ships needed to establish new civilizations from scratch on distant worlds, and so they carried vast libraries of STC templates with them, everything needed to bootstrap a functioning society from nothing.
The Golden Age's technology had been absurdly advanced, capable of feats that bordered on divine, things like a Leman Russ for every single household.
Which meant the STC templates humanity produced back then were correspondingly, unimaginably valuable.
Recovering even a single genuine STC template and handing it over to the Mechanicus would net an absolutely enormous fortune.
The specific STC template Tech-priest Boothe wanted Kian to retrieve was a one-meter cube of solid steel.
Inside, it held wafer-thin sheets of adamantium, each roughly the size of a piece of paper, and each sheet was inscribed with an enormous amount of microscopic text, invisible to the naked eye, encoding the technology to manufacture something in exhaustive detail.
Templates etched into hard physical materials like this were actually fairly common, because data stored in electronic memory units degraded easily over time, but information etched into steel or stone could survive for millions of years.
According to Tech-priest Boothe, this particular one-meter STC cube contained the complete manufacturing process for the Sentinel walker.
Within the taxonomy of war-machines, the Sentinel was roughly the equivalent of a motorcycle.
Physically, it consisted of two long mechanical legs, with a motorcycle-style saddle seat mounted between them.
The pilot sat there, controlling the two legs to move forward and back.
The Sentinel was fast, and remarkably agile, its two mechanical legs able to move nearly as quickly as a motorcycle in a straight line.
It could also navigate rough terrain, wreckage-strewn cities, and mountainous regions with ease, making it an extremely capable reconnaissance unit.
But despite its reconnaissance role, its weaponry was firmly on the same tier as a tank's.
Mounted in front of the Sentinel, directly ahead of the pilot, was a large ballistic shield, itself fitted with a heavy bolter, flamer, plasma cannon, or some other anti-armour rocket launcher.
In short, it was a lightly armoured, high-speed, high-firepower budget unit.
The moment Kian received the assignment, he threw himself into it with genuine enthusiasm.
Not for the 100 million in value, though. What he really wanted was a chance to make a copy of the STC template.
A Sentinel, whether kept for his own use or sold off later once he went independent, would make for an extremely valuable asset either way.
And don't forget, his life's ambition was to become a Rogue Trader, and a Rogue Trader without decent merchandise to sell wasn't much of a Rogue Trader at all. Time to start stockpiling now.
Aboard Trasolh's flagship, Kian's force was assembling on deck, preparing to drop.
Kian pulled his two chief maintenance techs aside into a corner and murmured quietly:
"I've got a friend, and, through certain, uh, special circumstances, an official STC template's going to pass through his hands.
Hypothetically, if he made a copy of the information inside while he had the chance, what would happen?"
The two chief maintenance techs exchanged a wary glance, and one of them asked, suspicious:
"My lord, this 'friend' of yours, that's not you, is it?"
Kian waved his hands quickly, protesting with total sincerity:
"Of course it's not me. Don't go putting words in my mouth. I'm just asking, hypothetically, what would happen if someone copied an STC template?"
The other chief maintenance tech, the one who'd traveled with Kian all the way from Glory, knew him far better by now, and played along with the framing:
"My lord, I would strongly advise your friend against it.
An STC template is one of the Mechanicus's most sacred, most precious possessions. Beyond its raw practical value, its symbolic weight is even greater. It's considered a treasured fragment of knowledge left behind by the Omnissiah himself.
Unless an Archmagos explicitly grants a world authorization to reproduce a template, no copy may ever be made.
Anyone caught copying an STC template without authorization would face the most severe punishment imaginable."
The local chief maintenance tech added:
"There was a genius on our planet once, who, while reviewing ancient pre-Terran archives, discovered that a certain Asian style of chef, while preparing beef noodle soup, could slice cuts of beef so thin they were nearly translucent, like cicada wings.
Deeply inspired by this, he invented a fully automated slow-slicing execution device, capable of delivering over a hundred million individual cuts to a condemned criminal automatically, while keeping the subject alive throughout the entire process.
If, hypothetically, your friend ever dared to copy an STC template, that would very likely be the punishment awaiting him."
Kian drew in a sharp breath. Brutal. Absolutely brutal. They'd actually taken Lanzhou beef noodle technique and turned it into a torture device for ordinary people?
Still, Kian wasn't especially worried. The Imperium of Man was, functionally, a medieval empire in space, and whoever had the biggest fist was the one who mattered.
And right now, on this particular planet, the biggest fist by far belonged to Inquisitor Trasolh.
His fleet was bombing Ork positions from low orbit every single day, and the million-strong army and dozens of Knights he'd brought along were sweeping every combat zone across the planet.
Kian figured, given the current balance of power, he could probably take a dump on an STC template right in front of the local Mechanicus and they still wouldn't dare touch him.
Still, brazen as he was, one hard technical obstacle the chief maintenance techs raised genuinely stumped him.
"And besides, my lord, an ordinary person wouldn't have the means to crack an STC template's encryption anyway.
Electronic STC templates carry electronic encryption. Physical templates like this one carry paragraph-level cryptographic encoding woven directly into the text itself.
Cracking that encryption is far beyond an ordinary tech-priest's capability. It requires, at minimum, a Magos-level priest, and even then, it would take an enormous amount of time to decode."
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