New State, Core Bridge.
"Load them all. Every single one."
A dozen-odd storage chips scavenged from the black market were plugged into the data ports of the holographic projection table.
With a humming burst of data readout, the air at the centre of the hall began to distort. Countless points of light converged, attempting to construct a complete three-dimensional star map.
What appeared before Andy, however, was not a clear, well-annotated navigation chart.
It was a shattered jigsaw puzzle riddled with black holes, dead zones, noise, and corrupted data.
Andy stared at the fractured mess of light and shadow for a long, long moment of silence.
This thing had cost him dozens of crates of high-purity antibiotics, plus a pile of hard currency he'd taken from Helios.
And this was the result?
It didn't even qualify as a full sector overview — just a vague collection of annotations along the lines of "maybe there's a star here" and "people probably died somewhere around here."
But honestly, this was normal. Star maps had never been objective geographical survey data.
You thought you were buying a map? No. You were buying someone's logbook, written in blood.
With Warp travel so utterly dependent on the light of the Astronomican, a safe corridor today could become the centre of a Warp storm tomorrow. A planet that existed last month might be devoured next month by some xenos whose name no one could even pronounce — or simply blown apart by an Inquisitor.
So star maps in circulation tended to have a shelf life shorter than a mutant's, stuffed with the seller's subjective guesses and outright fabrications inflated for profit. The chips Andy had managed to buy — ones that actually held readable data — meant the black market traders at Port Landing had at least a shred of conscience left.
Andy reached into the holographic display and swept away the obviously corrupted and duplicated data.
What remained were three relatively legible, reasonably annotated major regions. All three extended outward from their current position at Port Landing, stretching deeper into the Koronus Expanse.
Andy had to choose one direction.
He turned his gaze to the northeast on the star map first.
A dense cluster of star systems, marked on the holographic display as [The Heathen Stars].
Just from the name alone, it was obvious the Imperium wanted nothing to do with the place.
Intelligence suggested this region had the highest population density in the Koronus Expanse — and the most tangled web of competing factions.
"Six, run an analysis on this area."
Andy ordered.
Six's blue electronic eyes flickered, pulling up the relevant database entry: "The Heathen Stars. Primarily composed of human colonies never formally reclaimed by the Imperium, pirate strongholds that have turned against the Imperium, and large numbers of small-to-mid-tier xenos civilisations. Trade activity is frequent, but order is essentially nonexistent."
In Imperial parlance, the word "heathen" carried an extremely broad definition.
It didn't necessarily mean lunatics corrupted by Chaos, sacrificing people daily to summon daemons. In the Imperium's official lexicon, if you didn't worship the Emperor — or if you worshipped him in the wrong way — you were a heretic.
And if you accidentally ended up worshipping some six-legged impersonator of the Emperor? Well, nothing left to say — start praying to your bolt shells.
Most of the humans in the Heathen Stars still maintained human technology and lived their own lives, occasionally trading with Eldar, Squats, or whatever xenos they could get along with. Presumably the xenos there were also relatively reasonable to deal with.
For Andy, these people weren't exactly upstanding citizens — but compared to Chaos worshippers with three kilograms of filth for brains, they were practically adorable little angels.
Andy rubbed his chin. "This place doesn't sound bad."
Population meant productivity. Trade meant resource circulation. And being outside Imperial jurisdiction meant strong political tolerance — nobody would care whether Andy and his ship were operating off the books. As long as he had resources, he could establish himself here.
Of course, that kind of "freedom" came with a price. And it was usually a steep one.
In the Heathen Stars, with no unified authority to enforce order, the law of the jungle applied in its most naked form. You could negotiate a deal with a planet's ruler today and wake up tomorrow to find he'd sold you to the Dark Eldar as a plaything. Or you could finish building a factory on some world only to have a passing Ork warband flatten it the day after.
The concept of honouring contracts was effectively zero. Betrayal and double-crossing were standard daily operations.
To survive here, you had to stay permanently on edge, and you couldn't trust anyone.
After weighing everything up, Andy tentatively listed [The Heathen Stars] as a candidate option.
Then he looked to the northwest on the star map.
That entire region was blanketed in a dense overlay of red high-danger warning markers.
[The Foundling Worlds].
Hiss.
Even the name sounded like nothing good.
Intelligence indicated this was a death zone — ancient curses, severely elevated Warp radiation, and all manner of nameless horrors. Many of the planets in this region still bore the ruins of human civilisation, but no living souls remained.
And the name "Foundling Worlds" itself was soaked in religious metaphor and despair.
In the Imperial mindset, these were planets abandoned by the God-Emperor. A world stripped of the Emperor's protection was like an infant dropped into a wolf's den. The malice of the Warp would rapidly consume such places. The boundary between reality and unreality would blur. The laws of physics would begin to warp.
Venturing into such places meant facing not only a hostile physical environment, but the monsters that crawled out from the depths of the human soul.
Andy zoomed in on the map.
At the edge of the Foundling Worlds — directly west of Port Landing — was an extremely prominent marker.
A massive icon of a skull and crossbones.
[The Undred-Undred Teef.]
With a small annotation beside it: "Extremely dangerous. Greenskin infestation!!"
Andy's eye twitched.
How were these old acquaintances everywhere — following him around like a rash?
The Undred-Undred Teef was a vast Ork empire. These greenskins had a wildly dysfunctional tech tree — everything cobbled together from scrap — but their sheer numbers and aggression more than compensated. Most critically, for a builder-type player like Andy, Ork greenskins were unambiguously the worst neighbours in the entire universe, bar none.
The Ork social structure contained no concepts of "peace," "trade," or "development." Their minds held exactly two things: fighting, and finding someone harder to fight.
You couldn't reason with them. You couldn't do business with them. They didn't need complex industrial systems — because as far as an Ork was concerned, if I reckon this gun can shoot, it shoots. They didn't need agriculture either, since they were the fungus — die, become spores, grow a new batch of little Orks and Grots next year.
If you lived next to them, your only option was to build walls and guns around the clock, then wait for them to come crashing over like a tide, hurling themselves at your defences until they drained you completely dry.
"No. Absolutely not."
Andy decisively marked the northwest with a massive red X.
He needed to grow, to accumulate — not to spend himself in a pointless war of attrition against greenskins. And Orks were dirt poor. Even if you won, there was no loot worth having — just rotten meat and broken junk. Pure loss.
Finally, Andy turned his gaze due north.
That was the route toward the Halo Stars — and the single most incomprehensible region on the entire star map.
[The Hecate Gap.]
The map suffered a massive fracture right here.
No star systems were marked. Only a swath of chaotic, distorted gravitational readings and Warp-space data.
Sisyphrang added from nearby: "Andy, the map seller specifically warned us — this is the one place we absolutely should not go."
"Apparently it's a scar in realspace. Physical laws fail there regularly. A lot of ships go in and never come back out."
"And the ones that do make it back — the crew have all gone mad. They claim they saw... whales?"
The Hecate Gap. Andy did have some memory of this place. It was the great barrier that completely separated the civilised from the truly wild.
Beyond it, to the north, lay the genuine deep Halo Stars.
The spatial structure there was extraordinarily unstable. The veil of realspace was stretched paper-thin. Conventional navigation equipment would fail completely, and even starlight arrived distorted.
Getting through required not only top-tier vessels and shielding, but the kind of navigational ability that could completely ignore physical interference. This was why the Halo Stars had remained undeveloped for tens of thousands of years — the threshold was simply too high, high enough to turn back 99% of all who attempted it.
"Whales?" Andy seized on the detail. "You mean Void Whales?"
Sisyphrang gave a slow nod, looking a little pale. "Honestly... I don't know what you mean by Void Whales specifically. But from what they described — it's something with a body length of at least several thousand kilometres. Alive. A living... void catastrophe."
Void Whales were entities that completely defied human biology. They weren't necessarily even carbon-based. They drifted through the void, feeding on Warp energy like plankton, their bodies so massive they generated their own gravitational fields.
To them, a human starship was roughly equivalent to a slightly firm grain of sand.
Blundering into one of those things was essentially a guaranteed restart from zero.
Andy stared at the region marked as the Gap, then looked past it at the darkness beyond — the stretch labelled [The Halo Stars].
That was his ultimate destination.
The Halo Stars were buried in relics of the Dark Age of Technology — the final pieces of his civilisation-building ambitions. But he also knew the Halo Stars held more than treasure. They held things older and more terrible than Chaos.
And they held secrets even the Emperor was unwilling to name aloud.
Like the legendary Rangdan Xenocides — that terrifying force that had nearly annihilated entire Space Marine Legions — with no small number of remnants still hiding out there.
And the Enslaver — ancient horrors capable of consuming stars.
This place was like a sealed Pandora's box. It might hold the hope capable of saving humanity — but the price of opening it might be unleashing a despair far more terrible than what lay inside.
Andy pressed his fingers to his temples. A headache was forming.
He found himself suddenly regretting something.
Regretting why his past self had spent all his time obsessing over faction unit rosters, Primarchs, and the eternal drama between the Chaos Gods.
"If I'd known I was going to get transported here, I should have memorised those Rogue Trader rulebooks — the ones thick as actual bricks!"
Andy muttered bitterly in his head.
Though, to be fair, it wasn't entirely his fault.
Most Warhammer fans focused on the grand narratives — the War in Heaven, the Horus Heresy, the Badab War, the Macharian Crusade. Who in their right mind would bother studying the geographical minutiae of some backwater region like the Koronus Expanse?
Pure waste of time.
And that was exactly Andy's situation now. He understood the big picture. But when it came to actually navigating this particular patch of ground? He was completely blind.
"Alright, enough of that."
Andy shook the clutter out of his head and turned back to Six. "Give me a comprehensive evaluation — which direction should we go?"
Six was silent for several seconds, clearly running a complex weighted calculation.
"Based on current resource status, hull integrity, and potential returns," Six offered, "this unit recommends prioritising [The Heathen Stars]."
Andy nodded.
That matched his own thinking exactly.
For a builder-type playthrough, the most important things were territory and population. Fighting Orks generated nothing. Gambling everything against some ancient super-xenos was just suicide. Only by going to the Heathen Stars — establishing order within that chaos — was there a sensible development path.
"Then it's decided." Andy stood up and swept his hand forward. "Next destination: the Heathen Stars."
"We're setting up shop there."
"Understood. Course has been set."
The New State's engines roared to life once more.