When the shelling finally stopped, Andrallo stood in the middle of a crater, a Daemonette clutched in his left hand and the head of the Slaanesh warband’s Chaos Lord dangling from his right.
After the planetary defense force’s overwhelming barrage, there was no trace of life left anywhere.
The once-beautiful streets had been reduced to rubble and dust, with only a few load-bearing pillars still standing.
“Whew~ Good thing I got into that cellar.
Otherwise I’d probably be dead too.”
Even thinking back on it now, a lingering chill ran through him.
He’d originally planned to just tank the shelling with his own body, but the moment the first shell hit, he’d changed his mind fast.
Ground combat in Stellaris was just a screen and a string of numbers.
Andrallo wasn’t about to bet his actual life on being able to shower in artillery fire and walk away fine.
The battle had also given Andrallo a real, unclouded look at exactly what an Astartes was capable of.
“Superhuman reflexes, massive strength from all that gene-engineering.
Still way too weak next to my own template, but plenty against ordinary humans.”
Still, an Astartes couldn’t exceed the limits of a biological body.
Their brains might register a surprise attack in time, a plasma pistol shot, say, but their bodies simply couldn’t move fast enough to dodge it.
But nothing was absolute.
Some Space Marines bonded to daemons could draw on psychic power to push past the limits of a human body entirely, doing things an ordinary Astartes simply couldn’t.
Andrallo was one of those.
Even so, none of them had any way to survive a full artillery bombardment.
Death came for them regardless, and that gave Andrallo a newfound respect for exactly what he was dealing with.
Once he’d finished clearing the battlefield, Andrallo received a psychic call from Maen and Charlotte.
The planet’s Governor had requested a meeting, something urgent he wanted to discuss.
Following their directions, Andrallo made his way to an artillery position where the bulk of the defense force was gathered, the very battery that had fired the shells that just swept the district clean.
Seeing Andrallo approach in a state of complete disrepair, Maen and Charlotte rushed over at once to check him for injuries.
“My lord, what happened to your arm?
Is that a burn?
I’ll find someone to treat it right away!”
At Maen’s call, a medic from the defense force hurried over at once, but the moment he laid eyes on Andrallo’s strange armor, he froze completely and dropped straight to the ground, too terrified to move.
Seeing the medic collapse where he stood, Charlotte snatched the medical kit away and took over herself.
Andrallo looked around and saw fear written across the faces of most of the defense force.
If it hadn’t been for the crew and the Westminster sisters standing beside him, he had no doubt they’d have simply opened fire.
Before long, several armored vehicles packed with soldiers rolled in from a distance.
According to the defense force, they belonged to the local Governor’s own private troops.
Andrallo took in the fully-armed soldiers riding those vehicles, weapons loaded and ready, then glanced at the ragged, underfed, half-equipped defense force standing beside him, and his opinion of the Governor dropped several notches on the spot.
Andrallo and the two Westminster sisters climbed into an armored vehicle and rode straight for the Governor’s estate.
Along the way they passed vast stretches of farmland, fire and ash everywhere, the crops meant to feed the population burning back and forth in flames the war had lit.
As the convoy drew closer to the Governor’s estate, the landscape around them changed dramatically.
At first there was nothing but sprawling farmland and massive agricultural machinery.
Then the city appeared, clusters of food-processing plants spreading out across the land.
But once they reached the city’s core, the plain fields and grimy factories gave way entirely to sight after sight of lavish, opulent palaces.
Andrallo stared, stunned.
He’d assumed the Governor’s estate would be, at most, some kind of large manor.
He hadn’t expected anything on this scale.
He thought back to the defense force he’d just seen at their position, and the civilians he’d passed along the way.
Nearly all of them looked half-starved, and only a handful of officials looked like they’d ever had a decent meal.
“Maen, Charlotte, why would a world starving people like what I just saw exist on an agri-world at all?
Food is the one thing this place shouldn’t be short on.”
Charlotte looked at him, puzzled, confusion clear in her blue eyes.
“My lord, isn’t that just how it is?
This whole planet is the Governor’s personal property.
Everything it produces belongs to his family.
Everyone else has to pay for what they need to live.”
Andrallo went quiet.
It had never once occurred to him that people could still go hungry in an age of interstellar travel.
Back in Stellaris, even a slave’s rations came out to roughly half of what a ruler got.
Seeing Andrallo say nothing, Charlotte started to step forward and ask more, but Maen pulled her back.
Let him have a moment.”
No one spoke for the rest of the ride.
Andrallo stared fixedly out the window at the buildings and the people outside, his superhuman eyes and memory carving every face into his mind.
On every one of them, all he could read was despair and numbness.
The convoy moved quickly, and before long Andrallo laid eyes on the Governor himself, a man who looked like he’d stepped straight out of some old European portrait of nobility, a hollow smile, lavish clothing.
If not for the mechanical augmetics visible on his body, Andrallo might have thought he’d been dropped into Victorian England.
The Governor, plainly nervous, offered Andrallo his thanks.
When he heard they’d escaped from a Chaos warband’s own ship, his cheek twitched faintly, but he composed himself again almost at once.
The Governor granted them lodging on the planet, and arranged a private suite specifically for Andrallo.
Maen and Charlotte chose to stay with him regardless.
The arrangement unsettled everyone in the Governor’s household.
They worried Andrallo might still be that same Slaanesh Astartes underneath, worried he intended to do something blasphemous behind closed doors.
In truth, the three of them simply didn’t trust the Governor at all.
In the time that followed, the remaining World Eaters on the planet were hunted down and killed, while the surviving Slaanesh Astartes went into hiding, doing everything they could to avoid being caught by Andrallo.
The Governor did keep his word, at least, taking in the group of them who’d fled the Chaos warband’s ship.
They were taken in as employees.
The civilians remained civilians, the workers remained workers, and the crew were folded straight back into local units, shouting “For the Emperor” as they threw themselves back into the fight against the cultists.
House Westminster’s own private troops were traded off as a bargaining chip, absorbed into the Governor’s forces, and the sisters used the exchange to pry loose a few pieces of noble secrets on Andrallo’s behalf.
A fallen phoenix is worth less than a chicken, as the saying went, and Maen and Charlotte were only women without any claim to inheritance to begin with.
But what the sisters gave up let Andrallo fully understand the social structure and economic layout, not just of this world, but of the surrounding systems as well.
For all of it, Andrallo had only one thing he wanted to say to the Governor:
“Vermin!!”
The Governor had more than enough strength to have crushed the Chaos warbands outright.
Andrallo had seen every kind of artillery piece and armored vehicle stationed around his family’s palace, the outer perimeter of the estate was ringed with heavy gun emplacements.
With that much firepower sitting idle, the man had still sent out distress calls for outside help, and still hadn’t bothered to properly supply his own frontline soldiers with weapons or food.
This was the very first human government Andrallo had encountered since arriving in this world, and it turned his stomach.