It was only a short while ago that the Sector Governor had learned of this matter from his own steward.
The thing was, before this he had only ever crossed paths with Heydrich a handful of times, knowing merely that such a person existed.
What exactly he looked like, the Governor had long since forgotten—but now, seeing that this person’s mood remained steady, not interrogating him over whether he was harboring heresy or xenos, it indicated that this individual was most likely the very one standing before him.
Moreover, as Sector Governor, he did know a thing or two.
That white aquila—not the Imperium’s double-headed eagle.
Any Astartes qualified to bear such a marking was an exceedingly ancient existence.
Just how ancient, he could not say, but one needed only to look at the conduct of the Inquisitor before him to understand.
In that instant the Sector Governor’s vision nearly went black.
He couldn’t quite make sense of it—what on earth was this ancient being doing, lurking within his own household?
If something were truly the matter, all he had to do was reveal his identity.
“Could it be there is heresy within my family as well?
Or have I done something to profane the Golden Throne?”
It was just that, at this moment, no one paid the slightest heed to the Sector Governor’s wild imaginings.
Heydrich’s attention was not on him at all, but rather on the data-projection screen behind them.
Right now he could clearly see every district of the entire hive from here, especially the lower-hive, which had already fallen by more than half.
A great many of the lower-hive’s personnel had temporarily withdrawn into the mid-hive to take refuge.
This was not the Sector Governor’s mercy.
Rather, a population of that scale, if left in the lower-hive, would become fodder for Chaos, and so pulling them back from the front line was the best choice.
Besides, the lower-hive was, after all, not the under-hive.
Here lay the important industries of the sector’s various nobles, and these industrial workers still had some use.
“You few, stay behind.
The rest of you, out first.”
At this moment Heydrich pointed at several people around him, among them the Mechanicus sage who had not had time to leave.
The Inquisitor, the Sector Governor, and a few key generals of the Planetary Defense Force—a small handful in all.
As everyone knows, the bigger the matter, the smaller the meeting.
Now, at this moment of life and death for the hive world, Heydrich had no time to bicker pointlessly with the various factions.
All the more so since what he was about to do, by the Imperium’s standards, was profane in the extreme.
But that mattered not.
After all, when it came to profanity, who could possibly be more profane than the yellow-skins?
As for command authority, Heydrich took it over quite naturally.
There are some things that, if your station is not high enough, doing them will damn you beyond redemption—but if your station is high enough, then it makes no difference.
In any case, Heydrich intended to take all responsibility upon himself.
As for this ten-thousand-year-old codger’s guise, to him it was a matter of no consequence either.
When it was all over, he would simply dust off his backside and walk away—as if the Inquisition could ever find him.
“Yes, sir.”
Hearing Heydrich’s words, the others dared not say anything.
One by one they quickly departed.
They knew the situation was urgent now, and all they needed to do was obey orders.
After all, if the cultists truly breached the hive, not a single one of them would come to a good end.
Glancing left and right to confirm that most had already left, Heydrich took out a mustard-seed dimension he had earlier found within a Necron tomb.
“Gulp…..”
Upon seeing that mustard-seed dimension, the Archmagos of the Mechanicus beside him instinctively swallowed.
This was a creation of the space Necrons—hard currency among their Mechanicus.
But fortunately it was not an STC template, so it would not throw them into a frenzy of seizing it—at least it wasn’t worth offending a ten-thousand-year-old codger over such a thing.
Yet very quickly this Archmagos of the Mechanicus froze, for at that moment a tall figure appeared.
The Necron Cryptek—also known as the Necron Grand Tech-Tyrant, the dream lover of the gear-boys; though the above is, of course, pure nonsense spouted by Heydrich.
“We have placed several Blackstone obelisks upon this planet.
They are all hidden within the various space-rifts opened across the world.
Simply opening them can seal Chaos out entirely.”
With more than a little envy she gazed upon the creature of flesh and blood before her, seized by an urge to tear it apart and drape it over herself.
But this urge was in turn suppressed by another force she herself could not name.
It was just that this utterance also made Heydrich pause for a moment.
“This Necron Grand Tech-Tyrant is a girl?”
Muttering to himself, Heydrich went on to add:
“The Necron obelisk is a Blackstone artifice, made specifically to counter the Warp.
Although activating it at full power can shut the Warp out entirely, doing so is equivalent to unleashing the Soul-Banish….”
Only when he had said this much did Heydrich realize that the Great Rift had not yet opened.
The Silent King had not yet released the Soul-Banishing Death Field, so even if he explained, they wouldn’t know what he meant.
“It will sever the connection between soul and body.
Having lost the flesh as an anchor, the soul will gradually dissipate within the Warp, while the body becomes a walking corpse.”
Of course, this had nothing to do with Heydrich—his soul was not in the Warp.
Such a sundering posed no problem for him.
Besides, the Soul-Banishing Death Field had its limits too.
Those Astartes and fanatics of the Imperial Cult such as the Sisters of Battle were essentially unaffected, and could even, by their faith, tank Gauss weapons head-on.
This minor dynasty absolutely could not deploy a Soul-Banishing Death Field covering hundreds of light-years like the Silent King’s, but covering this one planet was really not much of a problem at all.
“So we can only open it to a certain limit.
Those mortal cultists, stripped of the blessing of Chaos, are nothing but lambs to the slaughter.
But those higher Warp entities, such as the Greater Daemons and the Daemon Princes, cannot be directly banished in the short term.”
On this point Heydrich had already made his assessment.
Daemon Princes and Greater Daemons could not linger long in the physical universe to begin with.
But to directly use the Soul-Banishing Death Field to exile them was not really possible—or rather, doing so would be essentially equivalent to dropping an Exterminatus on Kuent.
By then, of these three hundred billion people, perhaps fewer than ten million might survive.
So he would absolutely never open the Soul-Banishing Death Field to its maximum level.
“This is already a good enough outcome.
Robbed of the power of their wicked masters, the cultists are utterly fragile.”
Hearing this, Inquisitor Gers spoke up quite bluntly.
As for cooperating with the space Necrons, he had no objection whatsoever.
After all, everything has its order of priority, and when it comes to allies, the Necrons are in fact the most reliable in the galaxy.
They would never sell out their teammates and flee for themselves the way the Aeldari did.
Before achieving their goal they would not betray you—though if you happened to get caught in the wake of their methods, well, that was another matter entirely.
Deal with Chaos first; these xenos could be dealt with later.
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