Chapter 211: Internal Problems |
"Still reading, are we?"
Karna's voice drifted over from behind, carrying a trace of lazy resignation.
Arthur had been intently leafing through the records in his hands. Hearing this, he paused slightly, raised an eyebrow, and turned around.
The afterglow of the setting sun filtered through the latticed window, dancing upon the tips of Karna's pale blonde hair and casting a faint halo around him. Arthur gazed at his companion, who by all rights should have been drowning in work at the Ecclesiarchy's Sanctum, a fleeting look of surprise crossing his eyes.
"Since when did you start taking a page out of Rameses's book?"
Arthur closed the ledger in his hands, the parchment pages rubbing together with a soft rustle.
"Have you finished mentoring your students? Is the propaganda for the Ecclesiarchy handled? Have you completed the ideological reviews within the successor Space Marine Chapters? Is the reorganization and communication with the local Imperial Cult finalized...?"
He listed the tasks off at a leisurely pace, and with every item he named, the distant bells of the grand cathedral seemed to chime in time.
"Stop, stop!"
"Even my own mother didn't nag me this much."
Arthur tactfully dropped the subject. Shaking his head, he looked back down and reopened the ledger, his gaze returning to the dense, encrypted text.
"Look, just let me hide out here for a bit,"
Seeing that Arthur wasn't going to press the issue, Karna's entire demeanor relaxed, and he collapsed heavily onto a nearby wooden bench.
He tilted his head slightly, glancing down at the Adeptus Astartes stationed below. Even though they could barely conceal their fervor, the Space Marines maintained their stoic expressions and ironclad discipline. Karna let out a soft sigh, his tense shoulders finally dropping a fraction.
Karna understood the sheer fanaticism of the Imperium's citizens, but there were times when it simply became too much to bear.
Recently, five Primarchs had converged on Macragge. Everyone from high-ranking Nobles to destitute pilgrims—who could only afford their interstellar voyage by indenturing themselves as menial laborers on Imperial vessels—flooded toward the planet, as if they had finally found an outlet for their zealous devotion.
The deafening cheers of hundreds of millions of people crashed like tidal waves. Tears streamed down the wrinkled faces of the elderly, youths hoisted crudely fashioned holy symbols high into the air, and children perched on their parents' shoulders. Every single one of them screamed the names of the Primarchs until their voices grew hoarse.
They were pinning every last scrap of their hopes and dreams entirely upon him. The sheer, crushing pressure of it was infinitely more terrifying than his past life's experiences of venturing into impoverished mountain villages to do relief work.
The memories of those desolate villages overlapped with the endless sea of humanity stretching out before him. The desperate, yearning eyes were exactly the same, yet the sheer weight of expectation here was millions of times heavier.
But he couldn't just turn a blind eye, either.
In this universe, Faith was a tangible, objective force. If you didn't conquer that ideological high ground, someone else would—and if that happened, there was no telling what horrors these people might end up worshipping.
Karna thought of the countless masses struggling to survive in the Underhive. He thought of the wretched souls seduced by heretics, and the twisted, mutated abominations he had personally witnessed—bodies warped beyond recognition by their devotion to the Evil Gods.
At the very least, he could actually convert their Faith into clean water and nutritious rations to feed his followers, rather than rewarding them by making them sprout extra tentacles or xenos organs.
Thinking about this only made Karna feel an even more profound sense of burden.
Humanity under the rule of the Imperium was incredibly resilient and deeply devout. If they weren't pushed to the absolute brink—to a point where merely existing was sheer torture—they would never dream of turning to heretical cults.
In a grim universe like this, having a halfway-decent entity to worship was practically a blessing.
"Are you still analyzing historical case studies of the Icarus Protocol? Why not read the actual, up-to-date combat reports sitting right there?"
He casually swiped a couple of pastries from the desk. With a nimble flick of his fingers, he performed a sleight of hand, sliding a document bearing the heavy wax seal of the Imperial Cult directly in front of Arthur.
"The representatives from the Imperial Cult came looking for me,"
he said.
Arthur lifted his gaze from the tactical logs, briefly skimming the sealed document. His brow furrowed imperceptibly.
"It's just the annihilation of a single Mechanicus exploratory fleet. There is no tactical value to be gleaned from it,"
he replied, shaking his head with a flat, dismissive tone.
In the past, the Ironwing had waged entire wars of annihilation and technological reclamation against fully fortified Forge Worlds. Wiping out a mere fleet was nothing but a minor footnote in their grand strategic campaigns.
Yet, the rhythmic tapping of his fingertips against the edge of the parchment betrayed his underlying concerns.
Tarentus was applying pressure.
The Forge World of Tarentus was one of the more powerful Adeptus Mechanicus factions firmly entrenched within the Ultramar Segmentum.
During the latter stages of the Tyranid Hive Fleet invasion, an exploratory fleet—primarily composed of industrial engineering contingents—had pushed into the disaster-stricken sectors.
On one hand, they intended to annex the Forge Cities that had suffered catastrophic losses during the invasion, absorbing their remnants to expand Tarentus's own technological reserves.
On the other hand, the Ultramar Segmentum boasted numerous independent industrial worlds, such as Calth. The Adeptus Mechanicus had constantly sought to suppress the production capacities of these secular worlds in order to solidify their own absolute monopoly over the segmentum's industrial output.
In theory, a technological detachment from a Forge World arriving in a ruined sector was akin to providing humanitarian technical relief.
After all, unlike the bloated Imperial Nobles, the cogboys could actually rebuild the ruined manufactorums. Even if they only skimmed off ten percent of the final production capacity for the Imperium's tithes, being utterly fleeced by the Tech-Priests was an acceptable bitter pill to swallow. Besides, it was hardly the first time the Mechanicus had swooped in to blatantly war-profiteer.
The Eastern Fringe, heavily ravaged by the Tyranid Hive Fleet, was a blank slate where ambitious factions could aggressively expand without fear of significant losses. Romulus already had a crystal-clear roadmap for the sector's reconstruction, and with the dutiful assistance of various Space Marine Chapters, he had successfully installed STC systems across the core Planets.
However, despite repeated, stringent warnings, this Mechanicus exploratory fleet acted completely deaf. They even possessed the sheer audacity to launch a covert military strike to seize an active STC for themselves.
The immediate consequence was that the leading Magos of the expedition suddenly—and entirely coincidentally—suffered a catastrophic neural-circuit infarction. This tragic malfunction caused the entire fleet to inadvertently plunge into a black hole, vanishing without a trace. Naturally, Tarentus was rather furious about the whole affair.
Due to the sudden and highly suspicious demise of that Magos, a proprietary neural-implant technology controlled exclusively by Tarentus—one capable of artificially granting a baseline mortal latent psychic aptitude—was lost forever.
This meant that moving forward, Tarentus would be forced to crawl to other rival Forge Worlds and beg to trade for similar technology.
Or worse, they would be reduced to relying on the Imperium's Astropaths to maintain the logistical communications of their exploratory fleets.
And for the insular Adeptus Mechanicus, placing their vital lifelines into the hands of the wider Imperium was absolutely unacceptable.
Yet, the grand Parliament of Magi had utterly failed to dig up a single shred of evidence. An entire, heavily armed exploratory fleet had simply vanished into thin air, without leaving so much as a stray bolt or gear behind.
Everyone vaguely knew exactly who had orchestrated the accident, but no one possessed the sheer suicidal courage required to point the finger directly.
As a result, Tarentus had been forced to eat the catastrophic losses themselves. Spitefully, they had filed grievances directly with Mars and subsequently began aggressively finding excuses to make life miserable for other Imperial departments.
In this ensuing bureaucratic cold war, the Imperium blinked first. To placate the enraged Tech-Priests, they were forced to hand over the highly lucrative reconstruction contracts for the Damocles Gulf—a sector heavily battered during the brutal campaigns against the T'au Empire—to Tarentus.
"Long story short, during this little spat, the Imperial Cult tried to dogpile on the Mechanicus. Now, the Tech-Priests are threatening to slash their production output in retaliation, so the priests are coming to us for backup."
"These High Lords really are spineless when push comes to shove,"
Karna couldn't help but remark with a heavy sigh.
"The Imperium is still far too reliant on the Adeptus Mechanicus."
Arthur sighed softly. Unlike the Wings of Dawn—who could casually execute an uncooperative Magos and string him up as a warning at the slightest provocation—the wider Imperium was forced to navigate a treacherous web of politics and compromises.
"However, the Mechanicus also needs an out to save face. They wouldn't dare completely sever ties with us right now, at least not until they've managed to reach a unanimous internal consensus."
He maintained a thoroughly indifferent attitude toward the tantrums of the machine cult.
Friction was entirely normal. Honestly, if you didn't end up fighting a minor war every other day, you'd forget you were living in the 41st Millennium altogether.
The core issue the Imperium currently faced regarding the Adeptus Mechanicus was simple: the Tech-Priests were utterly obsessed with hoarding knowledge, yet vehemently despised sharing it with outsiders.
During the 30K era, the Emperor had been physically present to keep them firmly in line, so they were at least somewhat willing to apply their sacred data for the greater good. But in the 40K era, they hoarded their secrets jealously. Even when the Inquisition and the Adeptus Arbites teamed up to forcefully audit their technology tithes, the Tech-Priests couldn't resist heavily encrypting the data blueprints before handing them over.
In the era of 30K, the Imperium still possessed vast swathes of brilliant Mortal scientists, having successfully absorbed powerful factions like the Selenar Gene-Cults. By 40K, however, the Adeptus Mechanicus held an absolute, unbreakable monopoly over all advanced scientific fields, directly causing the Imperium's overarching era of technological stagnation and decay.
In terms of raw military might, the Adeptus Mechanicus—which was internally a fractured, disorganized mess—wasn't necessarily stronger than the collective armed forces of the Imperium.
But winning a war against them was utterly pointless.
The Imperium simply didn't possess the technological experts or industrial logistics masters required to replace them.
Back in the Great Crusade, all eighteen Space Marine Legions possessed the martial prowess required to burn the Mechanicus to the ground. Yet, why was the First Legion the only one officially granted pre-emptive strike authorization under the Icarus Protocol?
It was precisely because the First Legion was the only force that maintained a completely independent, fully functioning industrial base, raising and training their own tech-adepts entirely outside the Mechanicus's sphere of influence.
And now?
Even if the Tech-Priests handed over an entirely intact Forge World on a silver platter, there wasn't a single soul in the modern Imperium who actually knew how to run the damn place.
That underlying dependency was exactly why the machine cult was growing increasingly brazen and unchecked.
However, the Wings of Dawn didn't fear this leverage in the slightest.
Because they truly had zero need for the Adeptus Mechanicus.
For cutting-edge research, they had an ongoing partnership with Cawl. Within their own ranks, they had brilliant technical minds like Dantioch. Thanks to their supernatural capacity to directly absorb and perfectly record data, knowing a single fragment meant knowing the whole picture. They had absolutely no fear of experiencing a technological dark age.
As for industrial output, they could rely on the materialization of Souls to bypass traditional supply lines. Their grand expeditionary fleets had fully replenished their massive warships as well. The immense Fighting Force currently at their disposal was more than enough to force the Mechanicus to swallow their pride and tread carefully for the foreseeable future.
'We already have everything we could possibly need. Threaten us with sanctions? What a joke.'