Once Kaides confirmed the factory core’s energy shield was up and running, strong enough to withstand a standard orbital bombardment, Andrallo finally called the war-bodies in to bring the captured Astra Militarum back with them.
In this engagement, several hundred thousand Astra Militarum troops had been all but wiped out, with only a few thousand left clinging to life.
Once their morale was confirmed broken, the war-bodies halted their attack per their engagement protocols and took the survivors prisoner instead.
“We did run into some resistance, though.
Among the troops were political enforcers called commissars, and Ecclesiarchy priests.
They refused to surrender under any circumstances and forced the other soldiers to keep fighting to the death, so we executed them.”
The war-body gave its report to Andrallo, while the prisoners sat bound in the hall, every word of the exchange perfectly audible to the Astra Militarum troops.
Everyone present, along with the handful of Sisters Hospitaller among them, had already fallen into despair.
Ever since they’d faced down a landscape swarming with war-bodies, their will to fight had been utterly crushed.
A thousand-strong wave of ultimate, fully upgraded Dreadnoughts bearing down on them, forget the Astra Militarum, even an entire Astartes Chapter would have been kicked to death without a second thought.
The commissars were already dead.
The Ecclesiarchy priests had been burned to charcoal by psychic lightning.
Every senior officer was gone.
There was no one left to command them, no one left to tell them what to do next.
Should they resist?
But how?
Even the Leman Russ tanks and Chimera transports had been blown to scrap by those massive humanoid machines.
Some of the Astra Militarum had even watched a war-body hurl half a Leman Russ hull through the air, smashing straight into the forward command post.
Should they charge?
For the Emperor?
But with the commissars and Ecclesiarchy priests no longer there to drive them, with no threat of execution hanging over them, and with even the golden light that symbolized the Emperor’s mercy already crushed by the enemy, what reason did they have left to march to their deaths now?
The underground factory, meanwhile, kept churning out machines of every kind without pause, unarmed war-bodies filing past the prisoners in an unbroken line.
Off in the distance, specialized construction units fitted with engineering equipment kept expanding the facility.
Explosions rang out continuously, and yet the whole room barely trembled.
“Chief, new intelligence has come in.” The blue-skinned mutant spoke up again.
“The warships in orbit have opened fire on us.
Looks like they’re using oversized-caliber shells and energy weapons, but none of it can breach our shields at all.
They just don’t have the output.”
That news finally crushed whatever hope was left in the Astra Militarum.
A shield the Navy itself couldn’t break, short of bringing planet-scale weaponry to bear, there was nothing left to do but throw infantry at it and hope.
But who was left to save them now?
The Astra Militarum braced themselves for torment, for sacrifice, for whatever came next.
Just as despair settled over everyone, a line of three-meter-tall, six-wheeled spherical vehicles rolled up, and a gentle woman’s voice rang out.
“Does anyone here need medical attention?
It was clearly a synthesized voice, and yet it carried a gentleness rarely heard anywhere in the military.
The Astra Militarum’s day-to-day consisted of being screamed at by commissars or ordered to their deaths by superiors, and even the women among them had long since hardened into the same rough, masculine bluntness as everyone else.
The Astra Militarum troops found themselves nearly entranced just listening to it.
If the Ecclesiarchy priest had still been alive, he would have screamed “heretic!” without a second thought.
“Hmm~ No one’s speaking up?
Then I’ll just go ahead and follow standard medical protocol myself~”
The medical unit’s spherical housing slowly unfolded, and a canister released a green mist that settled over a large cluster of Astra Militarum troops.
As they breathed it in, their skin began to writhe, splitting open in long fissures that wept black, silver, and green fluid.
The wounded, who’d been grimacing in pain a moment before, relaxed at once, ailments that had plagued them for years finally easing.
In truth, those fluids were the byproduct of green nanites breaking down harmful matter inside their bodies, shrapnel, toxins, pathogens, tumors, all being cleared out and expelled.
A number of Astra Militarum troops with severe physical injuries were set aside separately, their wounds badly deteriorated, the stumps of severed limbs already beginning to rot.
The Imperium had Astra Militarum to spare in whatever numbers it needed.
Rather than waste precious medicine on grunts this expendable, recruiting a fresh replacement was simply the more economical choice.
But the medical units’ entire purpose was treating the wounded.
They deployed force fields to block each patient’s brain from receiving pain signals from the body, then used blades of folded space to effortlessly excise the rotting flesh, before finally inserting nutrient feeds around the wound sites.
Under the combined action of gene compounds and nanites, the nutrients being fed in were converted directly into bone and living flesh.
Under everyone’s stunned gaze, the Astra Militarum’s ruined bodies mended themselves at a rate visible to the naked eye, restored to ordinary human wholeness in under half an hour.
The Astra Militarum troops stared at their newly regrown limbs, feeling their bodies surge with fresh vitality, and the emotion they’d kept bottled up for so long finally broke loose.
They dropped to their knees, weeping, thanking the Emperor, before catching themselves and hastily redirecting their thanks to the medical machine in front of them instead.
“Heh heh~ This was all on Chief Andrallo’s orders.
If you want to thank someone, thank him.”
Once it finished with this group, the medical unit rolled off at once toward the next cluster of Astra Militarum troops, continuing on with its work.
Off in the distance, Andrallo simply watched the Astra Militarum in silence.
He still looked ragged all over, still wearing the same armor from his days as a Slaanesh Astartes, polished up but otherwise unchanged.
He still had that same monstrous look about him, his face never having fully recovered, bald head, sharp teeth, a long tongue, solid black eyes.
However you looked at it, he looked exactly like a traitor, and yet he was, undeniably, the one in charge here.
The Astra Militarum felt like their minds were about to short-circuit.
Even the attached Sisters Hospitaller wore expressions of pure confusion.
No one could work out what Andrallo was actually trying to accomplish.
What was the point of healing them at all?
Was it just to raise their value as future sacrifices?
But Andrallo had no interest in dealing with any of them further, and simply waved a hand, telling his subordinates to take them away.
Once all the prisoners had been led off, Maen and Charlotte came over.
The two sisters looked at Andrallo, who’d gone quiet, and asked, puzzled:
“My lord, why did you take these prisoners in?
Didn’t you say you were going to…”
What they meant to say was that he’d planned to use these people’s flesh and bones as an offering to the dead, but the two Westminster sisters found the words caught in their throats, and neither could bring herself to finish the sentence.
Do you feel anything when you snap a bayonet in half?”
Andrallo shook his head, fury and pity showing in his eyes at once.
As hundreds of thousands of Astra Militarum troops had died, Andrallo had caught glimpses of a few whose souls had held firm, and yet every last one of them had felt so utterly empty inside.
The entire lives of these Astra Militarum soldiers flashed before Andrallo’s eyes.
They’d been born into despair, with no childhood, no tenderness, nothing but endless exploitation and servitude.
Their parents worked themselves to death, and while they were still children themselves, they’d already had to go work in factories, or turn to banditry just to survive.
Every single day, the state religion was drilled into them, demanding loyalty to the Emperor, forbidding any doubt whatsoever.
Any hesitation, any dissatisfaction, was met with brutal punishment.
Most of them had simply been conscripted into the war.
Sometimes they were thrown onto the battlefield before their training was even finished, charging forward to the shouts of commissars and officers, only to die without ever understanding why.
Those at the bottom had no idea why they were supposed to be loyal to the Emperor, only that saying otherwise meant death, and the lives of relentless exploitation they actually lived only made the whole idea sound more absurd.
Sure, the Emperor would watch over them.
Andrallo had seen that golden psychic power himself, some Warp entity’s own power made manifest, but how many of them would ever actually receive that kind of attention?
The Astra Militarum, Andrallo thought, might as well be compared to grey livestock.
The instant the state religion and the commissars driving them to their deaths were themselves killed off, the whole group’s morale collapsed instantly, and they surrendered without offering any resistance at all.
Andrallo looked toward Maen and Charlotte, his eyes full of confusion, an emotion so deep it looked bottomless, unsettling enough to raise gooseflesh on both sisters.
“Maen.
Charlotte.
Tell me everything you know about how ordinary people actually live in the Imperium of Man.
I want to understand exactly what kind of regime this really is.”
The sisters exchanged a glance.
They’d watched Andrallo shift from fury to something more like helpless resignation, and although they had no idea what exactly had happened, the outcome itself was good, Andrallo hadn’t gone through with anything terrible after all.
Both of them let out a breath of relief.
“Of course.
We’ll tell you absolutely everything we know!”
…
And deep within the surging tides of the Empyrean, the god who governed change let out a mocking laugh.
“How interesting!
Reining in his own emotions like that.
You really do fascinate me.
Well then, in that case, let’s add a little something extra to the mix!”
The god plucked at the threads of fate, and the tides of the Warp surged once more, more beings that didn’t belong to this place setting course toward outcomes all their own.
“Andrallo.
Don’t you dare disappoint me now.”