Chapter 3

The best part of retirement, the former Lord General Militant decided for the umpteenth time, was the incredibly comfortable furniture.

No more hard seats and harder beds. No matter if it was a Chimera or a Baneblade, a camp-stool, a Valkyrie, a regional barracks or a Munitorum troop transport, they all seemed designed with malice aforethought to make you want to be elsewhere, angry enough to shoot first and never ask any questions.

Murder on the back and neck, never mind the buttocks when you’re idling for hours in a cramped space. He wondered very briefly if that was a requisite part of Inquisition training for its attack dogs.

The plushness and wonder-working tech behind those incredibly comfortable massaging chairs and those perfect beds, it worked positive miracles for his body, spirit and mind, almost as much as the rejuvenation.

Most plebs probably imagined sumptuous feasts as a great attraction of wealth and position, but Governor-General Korun had acquired a real taste for the ramen-flavored rations bars Vista provided the regiments with, with the clam chowder flavor taking second place. The goulash wasn’t bad, and then there was teriyaki, hot and sour, and...

His cooks were completely scandalized, and his guests never knew. The jokes from his personal guards never stopped, but he didn’t give a damn. Admittedly, three a day were meant for an active guardsman rather than a desk-cooped Governor-General who had considerably too much paperwork and official audiences to handle, and he was starting to get a bit thick around the middle.

There was no time to even think about an exercise regimen, alas.

“Inquisitor, Lord Admiral, Lord General, Magos,” he merely nodded at the SDF and PDF commanding officers who answered directly to him. He preferred not to even think about the Lord Commissar.

“The latest craziness from Vista is completely unexpected and a bit much,” he smiled slightly when even the hard-bitten Inquisitor reacted with a barely perceptible twitch. “We are gathered here to see what Vista needs,” he nodded at the magos managing the entirety of the system’s industry and infrastructure, including the astropathic relays and shipyards, and most of its education facilities, “and what we can send without exposing the sector. Magos?”

Every eye turned to the tall silver-masked woman in stylized plate-armor bearing the gold sunburst bursting out of a silver cog on its breasplate, blue-black hair spilling behind her to float just above the lush purple carpet in a faintly-luminous waterfall, two scandalously cute, fat, gem-eyed silver-blue sheened metallic birds replacing the customary servo-skulls hovering above each of her shoulders.

“First in order, there are no predicted threats to the sector for next three years, that’s as far as we could see,” Milene Tyrosh Sigma-K8 remarked. “We can use most anything you can send, no need to quibble about that. We don’t know exactly what is coming, that is veiled, but it’s sure to be monstrous. Oh, no artillery, reconnaissance or light regiments, the first would need void-protection to be of use and are of very limited utility on space assets, the latter would be slaughtered for little return.”

“That bad?” Lord General Jonas Kline blinked.

“Considering classic Chaos patterns, they open up with swarms of mutants, heretics, infected abominations and broken slaves, followed by traitor-guard units. Light regiments can make their mark there, and mostly only there, as the main combatants are daemon engines and traitor marines, stiffened with dreadnaughts, fallen knights and chaos titans.

“Winnowing the chaff can be left to heavy turrets, war servitors and kill-automata, of which there is a plenitude, and they will not run out of ammunition. The price paid in human lives for such regiments would be ... inefficient,” Governor-General Korun managed not to snort at the rationalization of basic humanity.

Admittedly, sending heavily-armored troops would not be a problem, given the twelve system-based manufactorums producing six hundred thousand Vista-pattern void-sealed carapace bio-armors every single week without fail. The most impossible part of that armor was its ability to repair itself, just by immersing the damaged part in a solution of water, salt and the nutrient bars supplied to guardsmen.

“Thirty-six million heavy and siege infantry,” the Lord General said curtly after consulting his data slate.

“The Ferren shipyards will complete the construction of two battle-cruisers, seven cruisers, twelve light cruisers and forty-one escorts within the next year. That much can be safely sent, as an absolute minimum,” SDF Admiral Harkken Ernst offered.

“Considering the completion of the most recent wave of planned monitors last year and the added strike-hangers for the X-wings, I think we can double that or a bit more, depending on what the Navy sends,” his deputy raised his own opinion.

“If you do that, I can triple the strike-wings in four years and add ten heavy defense stations,” the Magos nodded sharply. “Even entirely without a mobile fleet, it would make for a formidable defense. Approximately three times what is likely to be needed in the next five centuries.”

“The Inquisition conclave for the Anastasia, Ferren and Kursis sectors has very little to send,” Inquisitor Tersson admitted with obvious reluctance. “We’re at the tail-end of the supply chain, and we’ve barely managed to build a proper network. A regiment or three of stormtroopers with four Ordo Malleus inquisitors and their retinues, a grand cruiser, three cruisers, eight light cruisers and nineteen escorts.”

Went unsaid was the local Inquisition’s self-imposed limits, to accept nothing from Vista. Wisely, in his opinion, as the Governor was well aware of how little he could do against those Forge Worlds, and how long he would last if he attempted anything of the sort. Most of his own children were taking lessons in their academies, at the insistence of his wives.

“The squadrons we can send have already been mobilized,” Lord Admiral Meynar Gentes declared pompously, with an accompanying wave of his arm. The noble-looking man whose lapel should have sagged under the weight of brightly polished medals could give a speech with his arms alone, and was infamous for accidently killing nine crewman by talking too wildly.

For all that, the Hydraphur-appointed admiral was mostly competent, if a major blow-hard. His tales of boarding actions seemed to grow ever more bloody the more he shared them, and he was never too shy for yet another retelling to spread word of his ‘martial valor’.

Seducing the favored daughter of the local Pontifex-Mundi had inflated his ego by an unhealthy degree, and the feud between the Navy and the Ministorum was an ongoing headache. Even the local Arbites were growing weary of jailing shore-parties and congregants of the Imperial Cult, especially during the Sanguinala celebrations or the Saint-day of Reclamation, when everyone went a bit too wild and property damage soared.

“Two battleships, four Overlord-class battle-cruisers, eleven Lunars, eighteen light cruisers and seventy escorts. That’s the most that will allow us to keep up patrols, if just barely, and leave one battlegroup centered on my Admiral Katarina,” the Emperor-class battleship had recently completed a refit, and its primary weapon, squadrons of Fury Interceptors and Starhawk Bombers, would find little favor with Vista in any case. The Magos had certainly made her opinion clear on these ‘outdated platforms’, several times.

The Imperial Navy’s contingent might sound like a small affair, but in practice it wasn’t. The worlds supported by Vista had outsized SDF forces they could easily maintain with locally trained tech-adepts, while the Navy assigned to his sector had relatively few examples of Vista-produced starships, most having been purchased by distant, more wealthy or heavily-embattled sectors.

It also meant that the patrols were a sop to the Navy’s pride rather than a true necessity, with only the heavy-weight battleships necessary to hold back a serious assault. The various SDF did a lot of ‘regional training exercises’ and a good third of their active starships were usually seconded to the sector Navy at any time.

“Forge Tanelorn will provide the logistical support,” the Magos announced. “Just relay your needs, the sooner the better. Little time remains to us before the battle begins.”

From the abominable collection of the moronic slaves of Darkness, the Khornate berserkers were his personal favorites. Just offer them a fight and win it, and there you are, done with that brand of madness. Given the disparity in firepower and the Warp-shattering power of the daughters of light or harnessed blanks, Vista forces rarely had any problems achieving victory.

The Nurglites were disgustingly pathetic and genuinely unpleasant to deal with, and Excess cultists were almost as bad, leaving a lingering bad taste that took a while to fade. Dealing with every last one of them was occasionally difficult, as they tended to scatter in shock once the hammer fell, and a single missed heretic was a seed of corruption that could birth endless trouble.

There was a reason inquisitors had a perfectly justified reputation for excessive murder-violence and planetary annihilation.

It was the schemer-sorcerers that always gave him a headache, since he could never quite understand what they were plotting for. It was a basic issue of cognitive dissonance that he wasn’t sorry for, since he didn’t really want to get into their heads, but logic simply didn’t function well when trying to catch them all.

The local hive world the Ghosts he was supporting worked on served as a good example.

Blood cultists would have tried a straight-forwarded memetic infestation of the Arbites and PDF, followed by a violent uprising. Filth cultists would have infected the laborers and underhivers, forming a horde of contagious and hard-to-kill abominations. The sybarites would have tempted the upper ranks: The nobles, Administratum, Ecclesiarchy and the top ranks of the armed forces, taking overt control.

It was their standard modus operandi, predictable, logical, playing to their strengths, almost as easily countered as the Ultramarines who slaved according to their Sacred Codex.

These Alpha Legion agents, corrupted by the Abomination of Lies had ... no, he still didn’t really know what their plan was. It involved sorcerous rituals, presumably for mass summoning of Daemons.

But the architecture of the ritual locations made no sense.

The sacrifices and reagents were mixed and faulty.

There were eighty-one internal betrayals that resulted in more cultists killing each other, even a couple of traitor marines falling to krak grenades and melta charges, than Vista’s forces had managed to remove.

It was stupid, senseless, contra-logical.

The worst thing about the idiotic, backstabbing schemers was that their failures sometimes rebounded into a twisted success of sorts, killing or corrupting billions. If he had any hair left, he’d have torn it all away in absolute frustration.

The plasma-driller on his fifth mechadendrite melted the servitor-skull that popped up from the service-chute. The sergeant’s multi-melta finally disintegrated a sufficiently-sizable passageway through the wall, and he sent in twelve spider drones on each vector – above, on each side and in direct pursuit, skittering on the metallic ground with deliberately-audible clicking noises. Records indicated that psychological attacks were surprisingly successful against schemer-type cultists.

Fourteen cultists and a sorcerer fell to a concentrated barrage of volkite-fire and plasma bursts. Burning heretics and their belongings was the best method to ensure no corruption remained, and doing it in battle saved a lot of follow-up work and removed the chance for ‘luck’ to work against them.

Battering down the six Alpha Legionnaires was more difficult, since the one closest to them had a ready storm shield. The results weren’t pretty, with nine dead Ghosts, cut to pieces by power-weapons backed by the superior strength of space-marine augmented by the servo-muscles of the warp-tainted and densely-spiked Mark IV Maximus-pattern power armors, and twenty-two wounded, eight having lost limbs.