Boromite Miner Tas Geren’do

In the depths of the Chryseis 3 lanyrinth lives the venerable Rock Father, Tas Geren’do, one of the first to raise the alarm about the Chryseis Shard. It Boromites working for him who escaped the deadly nanosphere on the Chryseis planets through the gate into the Antares Nexus, where they were picked up by other factions and the Outcast Rebels.

Tas Geren’do is a venerable Rock Father whose long and colourful past was spent – or more accurately misspent – chasing riches, dreams and women. As a young mercenary fighter he fought for the Ky’am Freetraders, quickly gaining a reputation for determination and daring, and rising to take command of his own company. After falling out with the Ky’am he became a treasure-hunter and adventurer – and a successful one at that!

Tas Geren’do’s spacecraft was a familiar sight in the border regions of the Determinate, his band of adventurers feared and admired wherever they went. Boromites with a taste for adventure and danger flocked to join his company. Tas Geren’do himself was a familiar sight in the gambling dens and shadier Freeborn pleasure craft.

That was all a long time ago. His adventures have taken their toll over a long lifetime. He has already lived through six major reconstructive rejuvenations. Following his last rejuvenation Tas Geren’do turned his hand to the newly discovered crystal mines at Ch’ym. It was said that a fortune waited for anyone courageous enough to brave the terrifying silicate life-forms that inhabited the sub-surface warrens of that unwelcoming world and Tas Geren’do was nothing if  not courageous.

Soon riches began to flow into his hands once more. That was until he was caught in a rock fall and so badly crushed that even the advanced reconstructive regeneration techniques of the Panhuman Concord could not entirely save him. As a Boromite he was unwilling to endure transition into a machine, but there was no time to grow an entire clone body. Instead, they regenerated what they could and melded what could be salvaged of his human body with a machine interface. He now considers himself lucky as his new machine body has an integrated borer drone and is a full-blow suspensor platform, so can carry up to three miners along with him.

Tas Geren’do’s miners were the first to discover the Chryseis Shard’s locus was on Chryseis 3 and it was he and Batu Delhren who discovered its location. Whilst the paair could have destoyed the shard, they were severaly hampered by the fight between the Algoryn, Ghar and Concord and outwitted by the Chryseis Shard’s use of usurped Concord weapon drones. Whilst Batu escaped, Tas elected to stay behind and continue working, hoping also to drive from the planet the Ghar Rebels and Outcasts who had taken refuge in its labyrinthine interior.

Several yeas on from the Chryseis crisis, Boromite workers still feel the urge to make a pilgrimage to Chryseis 3 to help Tas clear the planet of the Ghar infestation and help him mine and explore the riches of its interior.

And to earn some of the wealth for themselves and their clan, of course!

Tas Geren’Do, Venerable Rock Father

Tas Geren’do and his bodyguard is an upgraded Boromite Command unit within the Boromite Clan Workface selector (see the PDF Army Lists) and cannot be taken in any other selector. Tas counts as a Unique Rock Father as far as selector restrictions are concerned. The veteran gangers in the squad are replaced with the veteran work gangers shown below.

Replace the unit’s stats with those below at +3pts over the Rock Father (total +5 = 15pts).

Tas Geren’do’s half-human, half-machine body combines several familiar, Antarean technologies. His machine body counts as a suspensor platform, which can carry up to three gangers along with him. His assortment of mining and prospecting tools is best regarded as a combined compactor maul and a borer buddy (+1 Str in HtH; temporary +2 Cover bonus to Res if the unit is stationary). His Res stat includes that of his armoured body, an internal reflex shield generator and an integral HL booster matrix that only applies to Tas’ armour (as on personal skimmers). Whilst neither reflex armour, booster nor borer can operate in the area of effect of a scrambler, they cannot be targeted separately from Tas.

The squad’s lectro-lashes and Tas’s lectro-lash attachment are a necessity for dealing with recalcitrant lavan creatures, but are rarely used in combat: the squad prefers ‘mining’ their enemies with their compactor mauls!

	M	Ag	Acc	Str	Res	Init	Co	Special
1 × Rock Father Tas Geren’do with compactor maul, lectro lash; in suspensor platform with integral booster and borer matrices, implosion grenades	6	6	6	6	8(10)	8	10	Command, Follow, Hero, Tough 2, Wound, Unique, No Sprint
2 x Veteran Work Gangers with compactor mauls, reflex armour, implosion grenades	4	5	6	6	6(7)	6	9	–

Unit upgrade options are as the Rockfather’s unit upgrade options, minus a borer buddy.

Tas Geren’do’s Chryseis Story

From The Chryseis Shard

The Chryseis system seemed like just the sort of place to end his days, or so thought Tas Geren’do. To start with, it was quiet. The kind of long, deep quiet you get in all self-sufficient backwater worlds at the edge of Panhuman space. The ship that carried his mining company to Chryseis had been the first to pass that way in nearly three years. That was over twenty years ago. In all that time no more than a dozen ships had made the passage, regular packet craft carrying updates from the border regions of the Concord Determinate interface. The most recent of these visiting craft lay docked on the planet’s orbital even now, a Standard-Four Concord freighter, the first in nearly two years.

The home world of the Chryseis system was reckoned a paradise by its occasional visitors. Life flourished in abundance upon a world still largely untouched by civilisation. The sparse human population lived in idyllic communities, scattered among the woodlands and along the coasts of the planet’s placid oceans. No one wanted for anything. As for the wider universe, the great civilisations of the Panhuman Concord and the embattled empires of Antarean space, few Chryseians gave such things a passing thought. For they were, after all, citizens of the Panhuman Concord, where thought and concern were wearisome tasks long since delegated to machine-intelligence. Their IMTel shard embraced and protected them all. The shard took care of everything. The shard was everywhere.

Tas Geren’do had not liked the home world, what little he had seen of it, with its indolent people, warm sun-filled days and cosseted habitation domes cradled among carefully manicured woodland. Geren’do had not expected to like the planet with its thoughtless, happy people, but it was not his final destination: he had come to work, as necessary to his kind as food and laughter was to ordinary humans. He was of a race created in ages past, genetically engineered to labour in the cold asteroid mines of Borom, made for one purpose only. He belonged to a people who were at the same time human and yet not human at all. Geren’do was a Boromite. Or at least half of him was. The other half was pure machine.

Far beyond the orbit of the home world lay another and very different planet. This was a world with barely any atmosphere at all, practically devoid of life, cold and barren, dark rock and deep oxide deserts: the mining planet of Chryseis 3. Here was somewhere more suited to the physiology and temperament of a Boromite. A Boromite’s scaled hide was indifferent to cold and a Boromite’s lungs built to breathe thin and noxious atmospheres. Strong Boromite limbs and dense, heavy bones dealt easily with the hardships of physical labour. Most of all, in the mines and tunnels he would find that which he most desired in his strange, muscular heart. He would work. And with work came honour. And with honour came peace.

Tas Geren’do craved nothing more than peace now that he was an old man, and but half an old man at that. His keratinous skin had grown pale and the scales about his face long and translucent with years. The crusted flakes of his beetling brows hung low over his eyes, giving him a kind of disapproving and ill-tempered appearance.

Once, Tas he had been a young gang fighter, as courageous, hot-blooded and ambitious as any. Once he had courted and won the favour of more guildesses than he could remember. Once! Who was he kidding? He had been young six times at least. How he had earned the crystalline credit to pay for the rejuvenation tanks was a story in itself. Now he had reached the end of the line. It wasn’t that rejuvenation a sixth or seventh time wasn’t technically possible, it was just there wasn’t enough of him left to rejuvenate.

Melding with the machine had been the only option left to him after the rockfall. A hand, an arm, even a whole limb could be regenerated or replaced with an organic, that much was routine, but his injuries were too great for such minor procedures. A full body cloning would have worked two or three rejuvenations ago, but no more. They regenerated what they could. The machine had configured itself around what was left of his body, replicating the functionality of organs and limbs that were no longer there.

Geren’do found it an uncomfortable synthesis at first. The machine part of him made him feel exposed to the shards, the integrated machine intelligences of the Panhuman Concord. It was like having a hundred voices in your head and a thousand eyes at your shoulder. For a citizen of the Concord it was perhaps something approaching normality. For a Boromite, a member of a secretive and insular people, it was a nightmare.

It was to escape that nightmare that Tas Geren’do sought out the thinly sharded world of Chryseis 3 where, in the remote mines and surrounded by the natural radiation of the rocks, he was isolated from the world’s intrusive nanosphere. Here he had built a new life for himself, his final and perhaps his hardest life, but a life in which he would – at last – find peace. And peace he had for more than twenty years.