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I understand that as the rules read that a member of the royal court may not deploy along side the shard.

But, is there any ruling preventing a member of the court from joining the shard after deployment?

For example:
Deploy as normal
Have Criptek leave current squad, and join the shard
Use VoD to port shard where needed.

Apologies if I am missing something important to all of this, my codex has temporarly been taken away

RC members are not ICs. They cannot leave whatever unit they are a member of. This also means they cannot join other units after deployment.

Ah, so I did miss something completely relevant.
Thank you for clearing that up.

And even if they were independent characters (which they are not), the C'tan Shard is a unit that always consists of a single model and therefore can't be joined by an IC.