Chapter 165: Heydrich's Daily Gossip About the Emperor (Patreon)

Soon Heydrich, Guilliman and the Lion were seated once more inside Macragge's Honour.

As for the Blackstone Fortress, Heydrich had tucked it away in his A-Ruan Pouch for the time being. Whatever might be left inside, he no longer cared.

Anyone shut in there was as good as dead anyway. Guilliman and the Imperium's forces had already pulled out, and whatever remained wasn't friendly, so there was nothing to agonize over. Heydrich actually wanted to suggest that the Imperium's warships could be thrown in as well. One trip in and out would clear away all the junk inside.

After all, Imperial warships were a showcase of every species imaginable. You could find anything aboard.

"You're saying war broke out in the Netherworld?"

Having heard the Lion's briefing, Guilliman felt his skull buzzing.

The sons of Sanguinius, the one all the Primarchs held up as their shining ideal, along with his remains, had nearly been swallowed by the swarm. The sons of Sanguinius had given the most in that war and suffered the heaviest losses.

But the main force was still Heydrich's Titan legion. Without nearly a hundred Titans slamming down and making the swarm's infestation tactics crash and bleed, none of the rest would have been possible.

Even now, though, Heydrich still hadn't figured out why those bugs insisted on fighting him to the death in the Netherworld.

"Next, you'll be heading back to Holy Terra. If the Mechanicus on Mars starts pulling stunts, remember to tell me. As for the Dark Angels' Ikaros Contingency, thanks to some divine genius's handiwork, it's pretty much a dead letter now."

As he said this, Heydrich shot the Lion a glance. The Lion met that look and didn't dare let out a single word.

The Ikaros Contingency of the Dark Angels had been a blade hanging over the Mechanicus's head. But after the Lion's Boarding Action on Caliban, and Caliban's destruction, the so-called contingency had become useless.

The full Ikaros Contingency was no simple protocol, after all. It contained a staggering, almost terrifying amount of Golden Age technology. The General Cannon the Lion had given Perturabo was only a tiny part of it.

But after the great explosion of Caliban, and ten thousand years on top of that, it was hard to say how many of the Lion's trump cards remained. Add the oil-guzzlers' savage ten-millennia of development and all the grave-robbing they'd done in that time, and the Dark Angels had long since lost any ability to restrain the Mechanicus.

People talk about Horus's Great Heresy, but in truth, if even half of Horus, Guilliman and Lion El'Jonson had stayed loyal, the so-called Great Heresy would have been a joke. Without the Four Gods stepping in personally behind the scenes, it never would have grown to that scale.

"Go easy on them. Mars is still the Imperium's most important forge world. Even I can't force them under pressure."

At Heydrich's words, Guilliman pressed a hand to his forehead. Just mentioning the subject gave him a headache. He didn't doubt this man's ability. He just worried he might fail to hold back and blow Mars to pieces.

After all, Guilliman had seen what Heydrich pulled on the Metalica, and in the end it was Guilliman who had stepped in to mediate before it was over.

So now Guilliman seriously doubted whether those so-called ancestors of the Mechanicus had really been the Cathay Empire.

Or rather, perhaps it was precisely because the Cathay Empire met its Destruction, and its technology lost its complete inheritance and its restraints, that things had turned out this way.

To people back home, a technological gap so deep that you can no longer build your former peak equipment sounds rather abstract. But that's only the view from inside the country. Just look outside.

Look at how Britain and America have declined and you'll understand. America still has something left to show for it, but Britain is a country with more generals than armored vehicles.

"Don't worry. Beneath it lies the Void Dragon that Goldie sealed away in the medieval era. Well, that was one of the few decent things that guy ever did."

"Uh…"

Once Heydrich started his usual gossiping, Guilliman and Lion El'Jonson went straight into playing dead. Heydrich wasn't going to touch that thing anyway, even if the creature really did break free.

Even with the Emperor stuck on the Golden Toilet and unable to get up, he could deal with it. But being able to handle something and being compelled to stir it up were two different matters, and besides, the Mars oil-guzzlers' productivity was still excellent.

Their kowtowing rituals in particular were running much faster now, as the Great Rift continued to widen. The widening Rift meant more ghouls and phantoms in the galaxy, but the catch was that it only made outbreaks more frequent.

The ceiling on the corruption they faced hadn't changed. And since the ceiling hadn't changed, the Rift's widening meant that the efficiency of kowtowing, or of blessing components, had gone up.

So the overall efficiency of the Mechanicus and the Imperium was rising. Naturally, that rise couldn't compare with Heydrich's.

Never mind that nearly everything Heydrich made carried a touch of a Path and would simply annihilate itself against the Warp. He also held a complete technology tree and the Necron technological system, and none of that required any kowtowing.

"Right, Dante is anxious to find me, so I'm off. The Netherworld and Baal still have plenty of aftermath for me to handle, so you two keep talking. And, Lion, what you need to do now is go to the Rock and see how much of your family fortune is left."

"Uh…"

"Oh, and if you can, bring me back a few of those robed little men. They should be an unfinished race of the Old Ones, apparently meant to counter Warp corruption in the future. It's a pity the Old Ones never finished them before the space Necron and the Aeons wiped them out."

Just before leaving, Heydrich reminded the Lion, and the corner of the Lion's eye twitched.

Caliban's little men had once frightened off a Tzeentch changeling daemon directly, so they were most likely a creation of the Old Ones. Their main purpose was probably to be a race that could counter Warp corruption, but sadly they had clearly been wiped out before completion.

In that respect they were much like the Greenskins, and both were likely half-finished products of the Old Ones.

The Lion's twitching eye had its reasons. As everyone knew, the Dark Angels were a Legion full of secrets, but having secrets in front of Heydrich was hardly possible.

This was a man who tossed out the Emperor's little stories one after another. All the Lion could do was pray that he wouldn't blab the Dark Angels' little secrets everywhere.

Of course, he needn't have worried. Heydrich had no interest in the Dark Angels. His main target was only the Emperor, and he wasn't about to bully the younger generation.

*

Soon, after transiting through the tavern, Heydrich arrived on a brand-new planet. It was none other than the Blood Angels' homeworld, Baal.

"By my count, Dante should be back about now…"

Looking at the blood-red land, Heydrich muttered to himself. With the Netherworld war over, the so-called celebration had lasted less than a day before everyone went their separate ways.

First, the tavern's transport capacity had been pulling Heydrich's main force back, and after these past few days that was basically complete.

Second, Dante had taken the Blood Angels' main force home to Baal through the Warp the old-fashioned way, and that wasn't a big problem. The Warp might be unstable, but a movement within a single sector was manageable. Dante had no intention of using Heydrich's transport, and since they'd brought their own fleet, it was time for them to return.

As for the sons of the War Angel, their losses in this war could be called heavy or light, depending on how you looked at it.

Mostly the Death Company and that pack of blood-thirsty creatures had all but died out, which also amounted to a detox for the Blood Angels. The reason for such heavy losses was that Heydrich and Dante had used them as cannon fodder, just as the Emperor used his ghoul legion ten thousand years ago.

The rest of the normal battle-brothers had fought on Heydrich's positions. Roughly a thousand had fallen, but that was no big problem. Compared with the original thirty-odd thousand Blood Angels of whom only three digits had survived, it was a different matter altogether.

Heydrich's reasons for coming to Baal were simple, and there were two of them. The first was to help them deal with the Black Rage and the Red Thirst, which was no great difficulty for him.

The second was…

The Blood Angels were simply too poor. Compared with most Chapters they were wealthy enough, but those were successor Chapters. Parent Chapters as poor as theirs were rare indeed. You could call them heroically broke.

Never mind comparing them to the Ultramarines' parent Chapter. They couldn't even match some well-off second-founding successors.

They had no hope of keeping up with the other parent Chapters. The Imperial Fists recruit on Holy Terra itself, and all their supplies come directly from the Mechanicus on Mars. The homeworld of the Salamanders and their Swarthy Uncle is barren, but the barrenness is mostly a matter of grain output, or rather biological supplies. The planet itself is rich in high-quality ore.

The Salamanders have always been few in number, too. Their total wealth might not match the Ultramarines', but their per-capita wealth is terrifying.

The other First Founding Legions were doing fine as well. The Iron Hands are tightly bound to the Mechanicus. They're a little heretical, but they're really not short of money. The Raven Guard, shaped by Corax's influence, turned out to be rather good at farming and management, so they're now the second most numerous in the Imperium after Guilliman's Ultramarines.

The Space Wolves and the White Scars aren't wealthy either, but they're much better off than the Blood Angels. They had kept an STC template from the Mechanicus, which is why that lot deliberately targeted them.

They had handed over everything they were supposed to, but the Mechanicus kept dragging its feet with endless red tape. On top of that, the Blood Angels' gene-seed problem was the worst of all gene-seed, so they had always lived in poverty.

So Dante was already considering whether to just throw in with Heydrich outright. A force as small as the Blood Angels was no problem at all for Heydrich.

He did sometimes run tight, but mainly because he poured huge amounts of production into Titan legions, and building his forge world had consumed a lot as well. Space Marine upkeep was nothing much to him, neither too much nor too little.

Especially since he owned a forge world, the problem was minor.

After about a century of accumulation, his forge world's output would rival that of the Mars forge worlds. For now it couldn't, mainly because the forge world was only about forty percent complete.

The remaining sixty percent of production would only unlock once the scattered facilities were gradually completed and the population grew. Even so, Heydrich had built nearly a hundred Titans, plus a fleet sufficient for Guilliman to return to Holy Terra and for Calgar to reinforce Vigilus.

Under those circumstances, Space Marine upkeep alone really wasn't much for Heydrich. After all, his forge world drew directly on the resources of the entire Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

The Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar couldn't match their peak, but what they had accumulated over these ten thousand years was still considerable.

Boom!!!

But as Heydrich was lost in thought, explosions kept sounding all around him.

"How long has it been, and they still haven't finished clearing out Baal's Genestealers?"

Watching the hive's raging civil war with some bemusement, Heydrich was a little speechless. Another world without Genestealers might be doomed, but that certainly didn't apply to Baal.

After all, Baal and its moons were designated as the Blood Angels' homeworld, and such homeworlds paid no tithe. They weren't even strictly required to pay the gene-tithe. The Imperium did set a quota for the gene-tithe, but it was nowhere near as harsh as the tithe.

The main reason was that many Chapters were teetering on the brink of annihilation from time to time. At such moments, let alone paying the gene-tithe, they even had to apply to the Mars Mechanicus for gene-seed support.

Add the Mechanicus's dreadful management, and some Chapters ended up with strange things mixed into them.

Take the Emperor's Children within the Blood Angels' ranks, for example. Some were survivors of Isstvan whom Sanguinius had taken in, but most came from the Mechanicus not taking the matter seriously.

Moreover, the Emperor's Children and the Blood Angels have a lot in common. Both get turned into handsome men by their gene-seed, and in a darker joke still, the Emperor's Children's gene-seed was more stable than the Blood Angels', so they had been issued a batch of Emperor's Children gene-seed.

Of course, that was mainly a problem for successor Chapters. The parent Chapter's gene-seed stocks were still sufficient.

In that case, the Genestealers were pure negative assets. And having just come through a great war, the Blood Angels were now somewhat allergic to these Tyranid things.

"My lord, there are too many Genestealers, and we moved our main force to the Netherworld, so the strength we have left is limited."

Just then Dante found him, looking exhausted. Clearly this pencil-pushing workhorse was under heavy pressure.

"Mm. By the way, I have a Primaris procedure here that's theoretically very dangerous. Want to try it?"

"Please do me first!!!"