The Tau Colonisation Project

A new system, an old order

The Orokin did not look at Tau with an explorer’s curiosity. The resources and habitable space of the Origin System were straining under the empire’s consumption. The ruling class found its solution not in changing that order but in moving it to another star system.

In the records the undertaking is sometimes called The Plan or The Project. It was not a single ship or a single experiment. Rival and complementary projects ran side by side to reach Tau, to shape regions there fit for human life, and to establish permanent transit between the two systems.

NARRATIVE — The Orokin did not see a new home in the sky. They saw a new empire that was not yet theirs.

Why was Tau so difficult?

Tau lay outside the Origin System and was extremely hard to reach by ordinary travel. For human colonists to arrive, three problems had to be solved:

1. The vast distance between the systems had to be crossed.
2. Regions on Tau had to be made suitable for human life.
3. A Solar Rail had to be built to supply the colony permanently.

Albrecht’s Void research offered hope for the first. But a portal being possible did not mean that carrying thousands of people safely had been solved.

The terraformer proposal

Archimedean Perintol proposed sending machines to Tau ahead of any people. They would adapt to whatever conditions they met, reproduce themselves, transform the planets and build the Solar Rail between the Origin System and Tau.

The danger was obvious: a machine that adapts and reproduces without limit could slip its creators’ control.

Against that risk the Orokin built a fault into the design. Known afterwards as The Flaw, it caused the machines to lose their ability to reproduce on exposure to the Void. They could therefore travel the long way to Tau, but could not multiply if they returned through the Void.

Those machines would later take the name Sentient.

CANON NOTE — At this stage the Sentients were not yet an independent civilisation at war with the Orokin. They were adaptive, self-replicating terraforming machines designed to prepare Tau.

The second road: the Zariman

The terraformers’ journey took a long time. Some groups within the Orokin did not want to wait for results. Under Executor Tuvul, another project prepared to carry colonists to Tau in one great Void jump using a Reliquary Drive.

That ship was the Zariman Ten Zero.

The Zariman was no warship but a colony vessel with its own habitats, its own schools and thousands of families aboard. The passengers were not only to travel; on arrival they were to found a new society. That is why the children were taught about the Void, about time and about the space around Tau.

Yet the scale of the plan did not mean its risks had been accepted. Unrest began once the colonists learned what form the journey would actually take. The administration restricted their rights; Tuvul withdrew from the project. The preparations went ahead regardless.

Two disasters heading for the same goal

The two main arms of the Tau project were now in motion:

• adaptive machines that would take the long road and transform Tau,
• and the Zariman, which would carry people across the Void in a single leap.

Neither would complete its task the way the Orokin had planned.

The machines would change on Tau, would think, and would understand that their creators would consume this new system too. The Zariman, instead of reaching Tau, would be lost in the Void.

The project the Orokin began in order to found a new empire would in the end give rise to both the Sentients and the Tenno.

What did we learn in this chapter?

The colonisation of Tau was not one failed mission but a single vast, interlinked programme. Creating the Sentients as advance terraformers and sending the Zariman with human colonists were two roads to the same goal. In the next chapter we will see how the machines at the heart of the first road were designed: The Making of the Sentients.