Chapter 174: Tyranids Guard the National Gate, Genestealers Die for the State (Patreon)

Watching the Administratum battleships slam down, the Planetary Governor let out a long breath of relief.

Tax collection in the Imperium was actually a mess. Every year, countless tax ships vanished into the Warp.

Some were lost forever. Others turned up a thousand years late, or a few hundred years early.

In any case, the Imperium usually only checked the records on whether a tithe had been paid. As long as there was a record, there was no real problem.

Where the tax had actually gone, nobody cared. And since these ships had been knocked down by the Tyranids, it had nothing to do with him anyway.

Even if you sent a divination psyker, it wouldn't help. The Tyranid swarm had settled the matter.

That gave him plenty of room to maneuver. He still owed his own tithe, but he could skim the tithe aboard these warships, or most of it, and pocket it.

As for accusations of collusion with the Tyranids…

The Planetary Governor suggested that Holy Terra award him a medal. After all, a man could collude with Chaos, collude with the space Necron, even collude with the Greenskins.

But collude with the Tyranid swarm? He had never seen a single case. Not one.

___

Meanwhile, aboard Macragge's Honour, Guilliman wore the face of a man deeply constipated.

A great mass of blue things stood before him. After parting ways with Heydrich, Guilliman had resupplied through the tavern, and along with the supplies came Heydrich's reinforcements.

It was a huge force of high-grade Tyranid combat units, including Tyranid Warriors, Lictors, Tyranid Carnifexes and Hive Tyrant.

Of course, Heydrich hadn't offered them to Guilliman. His chancellor had demanded it. Ultramarine to the bone, the man had clearly decided to find someone tall to take the hit.

In other words: I've handed it over, and whatever happens next is your problem, venerable sir.

Nor was it that this chancellor of Macragge, effectively its Planetary Governor, lacked backbone. The things were simply far too blasphemous.

Whatever Heydrich had kept for himself, be it the Norn Emissary or the Tyranid Hive Fleet, had been laundered clean. It barely looked related to the Tyranid swarm anymore. A few Tyranid elements remained, but nothing to worry about.

What the Ultramarines got, though, was a horde of Tyranids in a coat of blue paint, as raw and authentic as a plate of Nine-Turn Large Intestine.

One look at them and the whole Ultramarines chapter was shaken. Even Titus, ever calm and rarely ruffled, went numb. Leandros was ready to quietly kill the lot.

Then the Ultramarines showed their politician's streak once more and tossed the problem to Guilliman at the first opportunity.

The pressure was off their shoulders, and they couldn't be bothered with the rest.

As for Guilliman, who had caught that pressure…

He had gone completely numb, or rather, resigned himself. There was nothing he could do about the pile of bizarre things Heydrich kept producing.

After all, you couldn't hold the Dragon Emperor of Cathay to the Imperium's rules. The man was far too old. He was so seasoned that whenever you tried to argue him into following the rules, he always had some even more outrageous thing the Emperor had done to throw back at you.

The damn Arthurian legend: the Emperor had a fling with an Eldar, and his adopted son stabbed him.

Guilliman suspected Heydrich of taking snide jabs at the Emperor, but he had no proof. When he asked an Eldar serving as farseer, he got a conclusion that drove him up the wall. It was all true.

Guilliman had only one thought: could that memory be deleted?

Obviously not. Rogal Dorn could seal away his own memories when he had the resources, but Guilliman had no way to do it.

After all, the seats he had prepared on Macragge for his brothers had never been more than those two. Heydrich had teased him about that, too.

"Continue back to Holy Terra. At least we've taken in a large batch of fresh troops."

Guilliman drew a deep breath once more, then looked out through the viewport of Macragge's Honour at the Warp beyond.

The Warp seethed with distortion, but to him it was nothing much. There was no whispering noise in his ears.

Heydrich was much the same. When he had nothing else to do, he found watching the Warp rather relaxing.

The Warp was full of twisted, corrupting things, but Heydrich's soul wasn't in there. To him, it was like watching strange sea creatures at an aquarium, or playing Dead Space through a screen.

It could be nauseating at times, but that was about it. The main reason was that the things of the Warp couldn't corrupt you unless you put a filter on them.

Of course, to Heydrich this was only a small matter. He had far more important things to handle.

"Fresh troops…"

Hearing this, Cato Sicarius, Guilliman's second-in-command, was speechless.

He found it blasphemous. But given that the Great Ultra One, just back at full health, had taken Kairos Fateweaver's ambush in Guilliman's place, he chose to keep his mouth shut.

That alone counted as a great service.

Kairos Fateweaver was one of the very top Greater Daemons, ranking fourth or fifth at his normal strength.

With full preparation, he might even contend for the top three. He was like the Emanators of Star Rail: their baseline combat strength might not be extraordinary.

But once they were fully prepared, the dirty tricks they pulled could threaten even an Aeon with a fall.

Kairos was much the same. His normal combat strength was nothing special. He couldn't see the present, so fast melee units could spin him like a top. But once he was prepared, it was a very different story.

Clearly that trap had hit hard. If Guilliman had stepped into it, he might really have been captured, and even if not, he could have been plunged into complete helplessness.

So these things were truly blasphemous, but they were also truly useful.

"Next I may have to face my other brother, Magnus. For us, this is good news."

Guilliman said it with a blank face. Chaos had always been the Imperium's taboo, and not merely because it killed. It carried terrifying corruption. These things were different. Without corruption, nothing would spread. They looked a little blasphemous, but that was all.

From what Guilliman knew, the Inquisitors each kept a few strange things of their own.

If it came to blasphemy, Guilliman felt he was nothing next to those Inquisitors. His own things had no real connection to the Warp at all.

"Right…"

Hearing Guilliman's words, Cato Sicarius could only agree, carefully.

___

Soon after, on the other side, inside Heydrich's craftworld:

"Life is so wonderful. Next, let's see whether Ambull intestines can make Nine-Turn Large Intestine."

Heydrich turned to the Palace Guard beside him. With the Battle of Baal over, he had used the power of the Path to expand his Palace Guard once more.

It was still a long way from the Custodes' ten thousand, but there were a dozen of them now. This one, from the Emperor's Children, served as his cook. Luckily he hadn't been led astray by Akurduana, and his cooking was at least decent.

As for that other one's cooking, Heydrich had tasted it exactly once, and then… there was no then. Heydrich had forbidden him to cook for him ever again.

The man's cooking was terrible on a conceptual level, something the whole Emperor's Children had collectively confirmed.

How to describe that awfulness? Heydrich couldn't take it and threw up on the spot. It wasn't bad flavor. It was a nausea from the depths of the soul. It made Heydrich wonder whether the guy had come under the gaze of something Nurgle-related.

Heydrich would say there was nothing he was afraid to eat, but anything of Nurgle's frightened him on sight. At the very least, no one should eat Nurgle's things, and absolutely must not.

"Ambull intestines…"

Hearing Heydrich, the Palace Guard stood there dumbstruck. Then he fell into thought, and a moment later left Heydrich's room.

The Ambull was an important livestock animal of Warhammer 40K and quite widely distributed, mainly because it could grow fat on rocks.

So the Imperium had many Ambull graveyards, which were worthless rocky planets. You simply waited a while and went to round them up, and Macragge had quite a few.

This one had clearly gone off to hunt Ambull. To him, they were nothing much.

"How is the stargate project coming along?"

Silly as it all was, Heydrich had never forgotten what he had to do.

Without the Trailblaze Path, he could only rely on his own abilities to create enough technology.

The neighboring Star Rail offered little to learn from here, mainly because the Trailblaze Path was too strong. Even if an Aeon died, its Path remained and the Star Rail could still be used. That had successfully suppressed a great deal of technology.

"A dozen or so are finished, and we're discussing them with the Ultramarines now. Many want to reach Holy Terra, but that's impossible. Future contact with Holy Terra can only go through the tavern. There's nothing more to say on that."

Hearing Heydrich, the weary, weathered middle-aged man before him answered in a tired voice.

This was Heydrich's chancellor. Pearl handled the day-to-day exercise of authority, but a chancellor was needed to help Pearl with complex matters.

Still, the old rule held: one person ruling even a small or medium planet was the limit of a mortal. Even in modern Earth, only one power can truly run a country of more than a billion people. As for India, you say? Isn't it really only a hundred million?

Imagine, then, the pressure on this chancellor, facing Cathay's ever-exploding population.

He had risen from the very bottom through Heydrich's examination system. Personal connections were hard to avoid in Heydrich's system, but there were no clans in it. Heydrich himself had yet to form a clan of his own.

That was partly because Heydrich had founded it so recently, and partly because his standards were strict. The only way into his administration was to pass the exams. If you failed, everything else was worthless.

It was much like the Ming dynasty. Take a certain emperor obsessed with cultivating immortality. He might skip court for decades, but his Grand Secretaries were nearly all formidable.

Not one of those men of humble origins who had clawed their way up from the bottom was weak. They were far better than the Imperium's current officials, who inherited their posts through family.

What's more, getting such men to dissolve like salt in water, to melt into the old ways, would be no small task.

Yet this man, only in his thirties, who had Heydrich's Abundance blessing and had undergone a rejuvenation operation, had hair turning gray.

He had very little time to rest. He could manage maybe two or three hours of sleep a day. The main problem was a shortage of hands. The population was exploding at an outrageous rate.

"Keep negotiating with the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar. I've also found time to hand-build another twenty pairs. They go to Imperium Nihilus, where things aren't good right now."

Heydrich's expression turned rather grave. His Garden World lay in Imperium Nihilus.

In just a few years it had already faced dozens of invasions, large and small. None had touched the planet itself. The antimatter legion in orbit and the Astartes left behind, working with the auxiliaries, had smashed them all. But that was obviously not good news. It meant the sector was no longer safe.

There must be a great many planets nearby held by xenos or Chaos, and he would have to deal with every one.

The Warp could be used, but Heydrich's principle was to avoid it whenever possible. The Eldar webway was also an option, but it wasn't his own. Fine for the occasional emergency, but he must never depend on something he could not control.

So he had to rely on the stargates, a technology he fully mastered. Besides, he had now completed the first stage of accumulation.

The young warriors needed battle honors, and his goods needed more buyers. Producing weapons and equipment required ore. Matter conversion existed.

But it was like Japan, fallen on hard times, recycling rare earths out of old air conditioners: it ate into production capacity and drove costs up.

Moreover, he had completed the first phase of his plan: building his own complete system. His population base had reached a certain level, and from here the task was to expand step by step.

Of course, Heydrich still had no intention of competing with the Imperium, and certainly not in the Ultramarines' homeland, the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

He had chosen to build his forge world there in the first place because Ultramar was relatively safer than Imperium Nihilus, though not by much.

But it was certainly better than Imperium Nihilus, which was why he had only this one planet there. His second forge world would surely be in Imperium Nihilus, since that was his main battlefield.

He planned to bring ten planets fully under his control within a hundred years. That was a different matter altogether from the Emperor taking a million stars in three hundred years, but it was more stable.

"Yes…"

Looking at the A-Ruan Pouch in his hands, Cathay's chancellor sighed wearily.

He then left Heydrich's room to coordinate with Pearl. Fortunately, the stone man's processing power was immense, and it eased his burden considerably.

Heydrich was at ease about this. His own temperament dictated certain limits. He could set the direction of action and deliver the final word when necessary.

But in ordinary times he could never be that airtight, so Pearl and the Palace Guard had to help carry things out. According to Heydrich's plan, once the planets expanded further, these Palace Guards would sooner or later go to important planets and serve as Planetary Governors.

Above all, the stargate node worlds needed at least one Palace Guard in command to be safe.

Soon after the chancellor left, another man came before Heydrich.

It was none other than Dante, a blond, handsome man nearly three meters tall once armored.

An ordinary marine stood around two meters twenty, about the build of O'Neal. After becoming Primaris, the height reached two meters fifty, and in power armor he was taller still.

As a particularly huge specimen, Dante now looked close in height to a standard Custodes.

"Congratulations, the surgery went well. Now you can keep serving the Imperium and Goldie, ahem, ahem, the Emperor."

"My lord, please have mercy on me…"

Hearing Heydrich, Dante went numb.

The surgery had gone smoothly and never even brought him near death. So Dante had not seen Sanguinius manifest. He had simply woken to find himself Primaris and youthful again.

He now had practically permanent life, but Dante felt no joy at the news.

"The Knights of Blood has been fully reformed, and the gene-seed is very stable. All of us Blood Angels have completed Primaris conversion, and the Black Rage and the Red Thirst have vanished completely after your technique."

"Isn't that good? The equipment I gave you can be used right away."

Heydrich produced no equipment for ordinary marines, since he had only Primaris Space Marines. So all his gear was designed around Primaris Space Marines, and that was naturally what Dante and the others got. Heydrich was generous, but being generous was one thing and opening a whole new production line was another.

"But none of them changed like I did, even though it gave many of my brothers a new life."

Dante pointed at himself, utterly crushed. The Lion had appointed him Regent of Imperium Nihilus, with the authority to command everything there.

As for the Lion himself, he had of course reluctantly become the Warmaster of Imperium Nihilus.

_______

Walnut’s note: I decided to keep this note because I thought it was funny.

[Author's Note: Why are people saying I'm an AI? The only thing I use AI for is fixing typos, and that's the built-in one in the Writer Assistant. Though a lot of the time, even the AI can't catch all of my typos.]