By the time the midday ration bells had echoed through the streets of New Kato, the construction of the orbital shipyard had already roared into motion.
Legions of massive drones mobilized beneath a sky choked with ash and perpetual twilight, their piston-driven limbs pounding like war drums as they hauled weight that no human could hope to lift.
Colossal industrial lifters moved entire slabs of alloyed metal, each one the size of a standardized hab-block, toward the staging zone.
On the surface, the project seemed nothing short of madness.
A shipyard, not merely suspended in planetary orbit, but engineered to drift, maneuver, and fight in perfect tandem with the fleet.
It would not be a static dock, chained to the gravity of a single world, but a mobile war engine, able to engage in warfare while still birthing vessels of war.
An orbital citadel, capable of fabricating and repairing capital ships amid the swirling chaos of void combat.
A floating sanctum of war, engineered not just for survival, but supremacy.
This was not Imperial doctrine.
This was something far beyond it.
And if the Mechanicus ever learned of it, they would purge entire star systems to claim its secrets.
....
The metal comprising Tyrone Hive's ancient substructure could be alloyed with other native minerals, producing a new breed of ultra-dense, hyper-resilient composites.
Even the citizens of Tyrone Hive had barely scratched the surface of what they stood upon.
The Hive was ancient beyond record, its metallic foundations predating the Imperium itself.
Some whispered that Tyrone had once been a world-city, a continent-spanning metropolis ruled by kings now forgotten, entombed beneath layers of time and dust, long before the Imperium's rise.
By the time the Emperor first set foot upon its scorched soil, the Hive's structure already loomed, alien and unchanged, defiant against the erosion of centuries, almost exactly as it stands now.
It had endured.
It had persisted.
Until now.
....
Qin Mo stood atop a low-hovering transport drone, surveying the immense floodplain of alloyed metal that had been gathered, a shimmering ocean of forged potential.
He closed his eyes, his mind sketching invisible blueprints in the void.
The shipyard hull would span over 100 kilometers in diameter. It would not be merely large, it would be colossal, an industrial megastructure unmatched by anything in this sector.
It needed to house Matter Printers the size of manufactorums, capable of fabricating entire capital ships simultaneously.
It required Dimensional Stabilizers, to anchor the Dimensional Engine, an FTL system so advanced it rendered Imperial warp drives primitive by comparison, like cave drawings scratched into stone walls.
If Qin Mo could acquire Gloriana-class Battleship schematics, the shipyard could manufacture three 28-kilometer-long warships simultaneously.
The outer hull demanded shielding resilient enough to endure planetary-scale bombardments, capable of withstanding the wrath of gods and the fury of suns.
This was not just a shipyard.
It was a fortress.
A monument to the impossible.
....
"You're going to shape the entire shipyard hull alone?" Grey's voice crackled through the vox, thick with disbelief.
Qin Mo ignored him.
Instead, he reached out to Shapeshifter, his enigmatic, semi-conscious ally.
〈"Didn't you say my strength would only grow with time?"〉
〈"When did I say that?"〉 A faint, distorted voice replied, glitching and fractured, like a broken cogitator.
〈"Apologies… My consciousness is… unstable…"〉
〈"Doesn't matter."〉 Qin Mo dismissed the excuse. 〈"I called to ask for advice."〉
〈"No advice."〉 Shapeshifter's tone grew irritated.
〈"Just build it. I'm busy with something important. Don't bother me unless absolutely necessary."〉
Qin Mo exhaled, then added: 〈"Fine. But before you go, next time you give me a prophecy, be precise. Don't just say 'a Chaos worshiper', tell me which god they serve, what their capabilities are, and when they'll act. I want a structured report. Like a data log, understood?"〉
A brief pause.
〈"...Understood…"〉
The link cut out.
Qin Mo smiled faintly.
Then he raised his hand and reality shifted.
He did not need to think.
He did not need to hesitate.
The secrets of the universe were written into his very being.
He extended his awareness across the entire construction zone.
He felt everything: the metal beneath the ground, the hovering drones, the hauling transports, the pyramids of alloyed material stacked like offerings to forgotten gods.
All of it existed within his grasp.
His power unfolded like a storm breaking through the veil of silence.
Gravity twisted. Solid metal liquefied into molten rivers of silver, dancing to a song only he could hear.
Structures dissolved, not from destruction, but from being deconstructed atom by atom.
Raw elements purified themselves, merging at an atomic level into alloys stronger than ceramite, denser than adamantium, and more flexible than living bone-steel.
No impurities. No weaknesses.
This was not fire-forged alloy.
This was cosmic metallurgy.
The laws of physics themselves recoiled and bent under his will.
Tides of shimmering alloy surged, forming the shipyard's skeletal framework.
He wove strands of thermoplasma like silk, manipulating heat and atomic cohesion with casual precision. Invisible flames flickered in and out of reality, altering atomic bonds.
Light itself warped, bending around the structure, unsure of how to behave in the presence of something that defied every law it obeyed.
Some areas were pitch black, absorbing every photon.
Others shone with spectral brilliance, as if lit from within by phantom stars.
The drones around him shuttered and glitched, their optics unable to process the spatial and temporal distortions unraveling around them.
Gravity ceased to function.
The shipyard's skeleton rose into the air, suspended in midair like a divine relic, untouched by the soil of any world.
This gravitational distortion would persist until the shipyard reached orbit.
It would never again touch the ground.
At the center of it all stood Qin Mo, unmoving, his eyes ablaze with crackling arcs of blue lightning, sculpting reality with thought alone.
For a heartbeat... he saw something impossible.
A figure drifting in the void of space, planets like marbles suspended around it, motionless, unbound by gravity.
At first, his mind recoiled at the impossible.
Then, slowly, he understood.
The Star Gods were not beings confined by physics.
They were physics.
They did not observe reality.
They defined it.
....
The maelstrom of cosmic energy subsided.
The anomalies of creation faded.
Only then did Qin Mo regard his creation, and realize his miscalculation.
The shipyard was not a traditional dockyard.
It was a colossal, black sphere, one hundred kilometers in diameter.
A perfectly symmetrical construct, so flawless it could serve as a scientific reference model for absolute geometric perfection.
Its surface was flawless, mirror-smooth, untouched by tool or weld, as if reality itself had crystallized into form.
Qin Mo studied it for a long moment.
Then he shrugged.
"It'll do."
He turned away, unconcerned.
If anything, this might be better.
It was no longer just a shipyard.
It was a fortress, a command nexus, a monolithic weapon platform.
A Doomsday Moon.
As he departed, the drones marched into the sphere's abyssal interior, their directives unwavering.
Internal construction would begin immediately.
And soon, Tyrone Hive would no longer be just a hive city.
It would be a capital.
A rising power.
And for the first time in its long history, the Imperium would not stand alone in the void.