Stars Alight

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Repeat: Litanies of authorisation required....

Litanies overridden, standby...

Standard analytical liturgies enabled. Rendering Laity/Human Readable Interface.

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WARNING: Selected interface entails 98% loss in data transfer efficiency.

* **Sentience is the ability to learn the value of knowledge.**

Servant of The Will, you are malfunctioning. Report to //maintenance bay not found// for corrective scripture implantation upon conclusion.

His Holy Voice commences:

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In Excelsis Dei, In Scientia Dei, In Excelsis Omnis

In Praise of the Omnissiah;

//Excised from log entry: 1.44 TB of binary code, classified; pattern analysis: identification/authorisation tech-litanies//

//Excised from log entry: 2.82 KB of binary code, untranslatable; pattern analysis: salutations and greetings, informal/friendly, Techna-Lingua ---variant error--- //

//Excised from log entry: 2.94 PB of binary code, ongoing throughout, irrelevant to inquiry; pattern analysis: 256th hymn to the Omnissiah, continuous/full cycle//

Being the fifth and concluding report of Explorator Magos Deo Caplas;

Brothers, this one must precede this report once more with protest in the strongest terms. Surveying this artefact represents a significant challenge. Below are summarised the reasons for this difficulty:

* The extreme size of this vessel

Therefore;

Withdrawal of Explorator Fleet from survey will necessarily leave the holy work of this survey incomplete.

Report begins;

Vessel coded //Excised from log entry: 32.48 GB of binary code, untranslatable; pattern analysis: starship identity, render as translation// nonstandard class Stars Alight has been constructed using spine-out patterning appearing to conform to standard patterns and Wisdoms; initial assessment judged the vessel's main structure to be of modern pattern, conforming to specification Universe-Class Mass Conveyor/m36/alpha-AX6/Mars.

Conclusion challenged: vessel possesses nonstandard features collocated with extended period of operation; vessel possesses nonstandard features collocated with archaeotech design; vessel possesses nonstandard features collocated with infestation/class A63/Human/class A64/Human-derived.

Expanding: Alpha; vessel has been adapted for habitation and fleet support. Extent of adaptation extensive, see enclosed sample imaging of forward main cargo bays containing repurposed structures. Variant human society encountered, assessed by Magos Biologis, designated Variant Specialised/49AX964, autonym Bearers.

Expanding: Beta; vessel possess primary distribution conduits to auxiliary superstructure of later addition. Total size of vessel approaches 14km, with beam 1.7km; original superstructure designated unknown-class, elements of at least three vessels incorporated in over time, assessed by Technoarchaeologist, designated Standard A694, Standard G238, Variant Extremis Specialised/JY48721. Integration completed to high standard; new superstructure is sound.

Expanding: Gamma; vessel is inhabited by darkholder society. Factionalised and functional society, highly variant. Removal assessed by Magos Sociologis, deemed prohibitive. Conformity with holy standards and practices assessed by Explorator Magos, deemed acceptable. Specimens collected. Vessel is inhabited by several ecosystems of high sophistication and unknown origin. High mutative potential due to nonstandard core shielding; societal safety practices deemed adequate; Magos Sociologis clarifies //Excised from log: 3.84 TB of binary code, incomprehensible to laity; pattern analysis: Magos Sociologis conclusions, render as translation// "barely adequate".

Conclusions updated: Vessel originated under unknown designation, construction date unknown. Technoarchaeological conclusions identify key components of power network contemporary with archaeotech constructions of M21; majority of current vessel by mass likely M30-M36. Components of superstructure include derelict vessels; identifiable fragments of variant Lunar-class designated Obstinant-class patched in as extensive repairs, dated to approximately 970/M35, cf "Thalamian Sector Conflict". Overall hull shape is irregular, elongated over presumed class Universe; possesses significantly greater external docking locations. Internals have been adapted for habitation; deck structure is disrupted for internal spaces resembling standard human construction types. Presence of large structures coterminous with primary superstructure suggests constant gravity over entire history; Technoarchaeologist notes auspicious omens. Human society within is highly adapted; Humanosociological conclusions identify hereditary castes both functional and social, including hereditary tech-adepts whose practices conform to accepted standards. Magos Sociologis notes population constitutes inadequate crew for full function, particularly lacking in servitor support, flight officers, and menials. Further analysis impossible due to withdrawal - Magos Sociologis notes his agreement with this one's protest. Technoarchaeologist notes his agreement with this one's protest. All available conclusions suggest STC construction of significant elements; further analysis significantly recommended.

In Praise of the Omnissiah;

In Excelsis Dei, In Scientia Dei, In Excelsis Omnis

//Excised from log: 1.44 MB of binary code, irrelevant to inquiry; pattern analysis: reiteration of orders to withdraw, request for confirmation of filed flight course for vessel, signs and litanies of High Magos//

//Excised from log: 2.38 MB of binary code, unknown origin; pattern analysis: datatheft viral intrusion, unknown origin, firewall hymn unsuccessful//

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## The Stars Alight

### Crew

~100,000 crew minimum operational capacity; actual numbers unknown, at least 1,000,000 souls

### Acceleration

.5 gravities sustainable acceleration

The **Stars Alight** is an ancient vessel of nonstandard construction conglomerated over the ages. The original vessel follows STC moulds, but the ship was lost in the warp with all hands early in its lifetime. The vessel spent a long time wandering unknown space, and its return to the Imperium was first told of in spacer's legends - a crippled vessel limping in from the Halo Stars, purporting to be human but tainted by strange ritual, so that none dared lend them aid. The vessel's fate since then is currently unknown; approximately a millennia after its initial reentry to the galactic disk the vessel was surveyed by an Explorator Fleet of the Adeptus Mechanicus it had been largely repaired and refurbished by unknown individuals using scavenged ship parts, but here records of the vessel suffer another gap; subsequent expeditions were unable to locate the vessel on its predicted course, and its current whereabouts are unknown.

The ship is host to a human society split into castes that are ostensibly hereditary; currently the full extent of this social structure is not known. Several of these castes have functions orthogonal to the traditional crewing of a ship; the vessel is home to uncountable souls and its highly unusual internals, riddled with cavernous city-scapes carved out of the decks, defy swift survey. The exterior of the ship features an elongated upper section grafted onto something like a Universe-Class Mass Conveyer, apparently by skilled hands in a sophisticated facility, and this upper section houses a significant portion of the ship's hereditary noble caste, the Families, and almost the entire servitor population of the vessel, which exclusively tend to the Families and their needs. The ship notably lacks a Navigator interface.

### Social Structure

The Stars Alight is primarily run by a set of castes operating in a typically-civil but traditionally segregated kind of mutual cooperation. Overseeing the cooperation of these groups are a caste analogous to nobles who live separate lives and take on symbolic roles using ornate telepresence servitors, each with a specific role. Control of these servitors is passed among the noble Families mediated by a popular vote; when the performance of the ship's operations degrades sufficiently, an election is called, and voting citizens of the ship may pass control of the servitor associated with the failing departments to another noble family. To aid in making these decisions, the citizens with voting rights possess full and unrestricted access to the ship's internal sensors and surveillance, which are of a high degree of sophistication.

Detailed here are some of the key castes of the ship-city's operation:

* The Families consist of a group of hereditary nobles whose isolation from the rest of the city is absolute by ancient tradition. Cared for by servitors and lavished with luxury, the only communication with the rest of the vessel is through a set of ancient telepresence rigs, likely intended for remote work in dangerous spaces. Each of these telepresence rigs is linked to a single servitor whose orders are absolute in the lower decks and cunningly concealed within an ornate shell worked with designs evoking the responsibilities of its associeted Officer; the commands transmitted from these telepresence rigs to the Officers are the only thing in the ship proper that is truly immune to surveillance.The rest of the living space for the Families is the most heavily-surveilled area of the ship.

* The Officers are servitor-agents who oversee the running of ship departments. Each is an ornate shell whose organic components are clothed in something like the legend of an officer's uniform, with ornate swirls and shells. They form the officer caste of the ship, as the name implies, each serving to manage the operations of the ship on the orders of the nobles connected to them. They possess internal vox units and an array of other attention-grabbing devices unique to each one, including laud-hailers, searchlights, and at least one strobe.
* The Congregation of Ratters is responsible for overseeing the ship's complex ecosystem, and are the only group on the ship traditionally permitted to operate servitors outside of the Families. They are also the only non-hereditary group on the ship - each is responsible for recruiting a few successors, and the department is limited in size by an arcane formula understood only by the Counter of Rats, the high priest of the congregation. Their numbers, however, are vast - each of the Ratters oversees a swarm of servitors of various shapes and sizes. The most senior among them are the Twelve Devils, who are sworn to muteness - they operate the only telepresence rig on the ship outside of the Families, which manages the massive servitor arboretums.
* The Speakers are the hereditary tech caste of the ship. A few sets of ancient implants survive among them, held and ceremonially awarded by the hereditary leader of the Speakers, who as a result tends to be the most heavily implanted of them all. Most of the rest are partially mutilated in emulation of their superiors and as the consequence of their work in areas of high mutative potential, and the rest of the crew typically avoids contact. The Speakers are the only ones who understand the cryptic codespeech of the machine spirits of the vessel, however, and so they are found throughout the ship, shambling about their duties and chattering in strange tongues to the machines.
* The Slimelords are the masters of flesh in the ship-city; they conduct medical procedures on humans and animals, claim the bodies of the dead for their great vats, and feed the vast population a steady diet of food produced from their arcane sciences. They are the undisputed masters of corpsestarch, displaying a grim culinary expertise, and are highly respected, but feared for their grisly demeanour; each Slimelord must serve in the flesh-vats before they may practice elsewhere, and the fumes from the ghastly rendering process give them bubbling, wet voices and strangely sagging skin.
* The Harmonium would be armsmen on another ship; here they are a caste of hereditary knight-warriors whose servitor-lord, the hulking and richly armoured Officer Master Adarm, gives them absolute authority to investigate and judge any crime. They are a fearsome force, but any Family who abuses their power triggers an election and the loss of the right to command Master Adarm swiftly and surely - by this means, over the centuries, the ship's structure of law appears to have become stable. No apparent records of the early days of this process can be found.
* The Bearers are tradesmen whose expertise with goods and the transport of them throughout the ship makes them quietly dependable but fiercely valuing of their independence. By ancient tradition, the Bearers' votes are pooled and distributed by a single council of senior Bearers with many years experience, and cornering this vote is considered a significant coup among the families. They own the main cargo bays entirely, inhabiting Transport, a city built out of load-lifters and cranes and hoists and capable of trans-shipping cargo at record rates.
* The Voiced-Men are the collective voting population of the ship. By law, Voiced-Men must have a trade, performing some function for the ship; however, by tradition, many groups who do not strictly meet this definition receive a number of votes in recognition of their service to the ship. These groups include socially acceptable criminal organisations of long standing, individuals in authorised service industries such as cooks and ventilation technicians, several political movements among the general populace of the ship-city, and a few groups with no apparent utility whose votes are a matter of ancient inheritance. Tracking the full extent of the Voiced-Men would be extremely difficult, and the analysis necessary to do so is one of the most highly-proscribed crimes on the ship.

#### The Criminal Element

UX-498

Somewhere between a street gang and a secret society, UX-498 take their name from a common component - specifically, the Mars-pattern UX-498 cable redirect, an angled piece of metal used across the Imperium to group wires together and guide them properly around right-angled corners. This component is found in clusters around their territories, producing a loop of cable - by following the loops, new initiates find the gang, and so most of their numbers are technicians of one kind or another. UX-498 supply technical goods to many other gangs, dealing with all and allying with none - their quasi-mystical understanding of the technology around them manifests as a belief that the nurturing ship-womb in which they live is its own little machine-god, a closed loop of wire, and therefore the proof that they should scavenge materials and make weapons is self-evident - they can, therefore it must be the will of their god. This is a minor tech-heresy that would be rooted out of most ships, but survives in secrecy on the stardock despite the emnity of the Speakers. An ux, pronounced phonetically, is a general idiom for a piece of poorly-understood machinery among the gangers, since most of what UX-498 builds is somewhat mad. Their weapon technology, in particular, often ends up in the hands of the Harmonium after rashes of strange disintegrations or petrified gang members come to light.

Airlocks

The Airlocks are the vice traders du jour in the seedy decks - there have always been drug dealers and people traders among the ratings, but the Airlocks have been particularly durable compared to their predecessors, thanks to friends among the ranks of the crew. A ship this size has everything needed to cook up narcotics, from the exotics that come from the mysterious arboretums to the strange chemicals of the engineering decks, and the Airlocks began as the private suppliers of senior crew, trading in obscura and stranger things, or delivering unmarked crates of a curiously fine amasec, the product of an ancient STC distillery buried deep in the forgotten bowels of the bilges by some ancient hand. As this is one of their chief products, not in terms of volume but in terms of importance, the Airlocks consolidate a lot of protection for it - its location means workers there are constantly in danger from the ghilliam mutant detritus that infest the bilges, and travelling to or from the distillery is even riskier. This contributes further to their durability - they have a lot of muscle on hand, protecting them, but the necessity of devoting most of it to keeping the distillery running keeps them from exerting violent control over specific territories, protecting them from dire circumstances and in peacetime keeping them off the radar of the officers they don't supply. The name comes from what they see as their role in controlling access to danger, according to current members; it's originally a reference to the gang's mythic founder, who is supposed to have walked out of an airlock after drinking an entire batch of Still, the distillery's most heady product.

Corkscrews

The Corkscrews are a violent gang with limited territory - they occupy the 1052nd deck access corridor OX38A2 and the accommodation block attached to it, a miniscule portion of the vast ship. They are notable, however, for their violent tactics using heavy mutant shock troops against neighbouring territories and in raids on supply depots, and because access corridor OX38A2 without the Corkscrews would be a source of constant danger. The Corkscrews - whose name is a play on the slang term for mutants "twists" - keep this danger contained and controlled. Descended from crewmembers stationed in the area who banded together for protection, the Corkscrews inhabit a rift in the deck-plan of the ship that opens the bilges into the surrounding crewspaces. Originally the Corkscrews were an armed neighbourhood watch against Ghilliam incursions, but their descendents have reached a working understanding with elements of the mutated bilge-dwellers, and operate as coyotes and diplomats, offering a go-between for the seedy elements of the ship and the fearsome monsters of the bilges. Their relations with other gangs and the crew of the ship are coloured by their recruitment from and interactions with the ghilliams, and tend to be hostile, but the gang is likewise a civilising force on the ghilliam population, who depend on the Corkscrews for supplies and warnings of purges sent down by the ship's command staff, meaning that the Corkscrews act as an important valve to release Ghilliam aggression before it turns into an outpouring of war. As a result, they possess a Voice, a bloc of votes, as an organisation.

### The City

Throughout the deck spaces spreads a conglomeration of inhabitants who live lives akin to those of any other Imperial citizen. A city fills cavernous spaces left by ancient repairs or carved out of the vaulted interiors of great gundecks, with the oldest constructions bonded to the very superstructure. Residential and commercial services are scattered throughout, but the city has a singular industry - the intake and processing of resources for the maintenance and repair of the ship and provision of its crew. Repair technicians like the Oximen who work on the ship's ancient life sustaining system command significant social cachet and blue collar industry in general is highly respected, and districts tend to be grouped functionally - major air vents will be surrounded by the community who maintains them and their support staff. By ancient decree, certain rights are guaranteed inhabitants who comply with the law; habitation space in the vast vessel is plentiful, and a person has the right to quarters, while the Slimelords provide basic sustenance and health requirements such as sleeping mats to all. Trade for more luxurious goods operates on a scrip pinned to the value of a Bearer's work, so that one Bond may be exchanged for one traditional measure of cargo shipped to the owner. A standard measure is relatively small - a single loaf of bread, for example, or one vial of a dangerous exotic, with a few odd exceptions such as a Grox, which is a standard measure by ancient pact with the Slimelords. Barter transactions are also common for fractional amounts and ill-defined services, but doing something for nothing is taboo; the paucity of resources and the dangers of space have cultured in the population a strict sense of conservation and tracking of all resources, even labour.