A Monster in Hell: A 40K Story

Chapter-15

"The development of a safety net is crucial to our victory over the Orks. Take a stronghold of the Orks, like Ullanor and Gorro were in the old days, and many Ork settlements are now. We need to make sure that Ghazghkull, who is the most powerful Warboss in the galaxy since the War of the Beast 8500 years ago, and entrap him in a Zone called a Safety Net for our convenience. Give him an illusion of being able to travel outside to recruit other Orks and escalate conflicts as he is known to do. Make sure that all Orks capable of interstellar travel flock to his banner. Make it look genuine, like the Battle of the War Valley, which was the final and most decisive battle of the Cadian War. Trap them in a sector by luring them into thinking that the particular area is an important sector of the Imperium, when in reality it is not a very important loss. This plan will take decades, even centuries, but eventually we will have all the Orks in the galaxy cordoned into a single area, ripe for extermination through pincer movement. This plan will take decades, even centuries, but it is 94% likely to succeed. In addition, we can also engage in conflicts and hound Ork fleets entering the zone to join Ghazghkull, further weakening their armies. After that clean-up, all that will be left are the Feral Orks, which can be dealt with." Annihilator Primus explained his grand plan to the assembled Council.

The past month had been a better month than most of the time I had spent here. Annihilator Primus was an asset to the Imperium, providing technology that was rolled out in droves. Not to mention that it had already set in motion the plan to make more Castigators, and where inferior Titans took the Imperium decades or even centuries to manufacture, an entire Legion of a hundred Castigators would be ready in a few months. By the time 999.M41 rolled around, Abaddon would be cooked by the sheer power of the Castigators. Everyone was shocked. Mainly because what Dark Age STCs were capable of.

I was leading my unusually-good-for-40k life. Fucking around with four women, passing Directive after Directive, occasionally taking part in frontline combat. My new Directive ordered the various secondary weapons STCs provided by Primus to spice up the two loose Battlefleets I was creating.

This was when I received a report from Macharia. Daemons had invaded the Hive World, killing millions in a devastating charge. Some cultists in the Underhive had summoned Daemons, evading capture even as the combined might of our Arbites, Sororitas and even some Astartes bore down upon them. They were eventually killed after slaying thousands of Arbites, more than a hundred Sisters, and at least twenty Marines. 

The fact that such a cold-blooded attack of such a magnitude could take place in a Shrine World was unfathomable, yet it did. Then the Daemons attacked. The first wave absolutely wiped out the uppermost layers of the Hives, and the second wave came from the bottom, displacing the foundations of many Hives and leaving almost no survivors. Chaos Marines and Chaos-aligned Titans were brought in, leading to a devastating battle for seven days before the Daemon invaders were brought to heel. Much of the planetary infrastructure had been destroyed. There were very few survivors of the Daemonic invasion and the corresponding Imperial retribution, which as always was conducted with little regard to collateral damage. There were barely a few thousand survivors from the original thirty billion plus strong population.

Personally, the carnage was not repulsive enough for it to feel disgusting to me, but if you ask me I can give a graphic description. Several bodies found were mutated beyond recognition, malformed with uncountable plagues, violated in unimaginable ways or covered in blood and gore. That was saying if we found most of the bodies at all. Most of it was fire and ash and burning rubble across the planet. The destruction of life and planet was extremely damaging to the productive fabric of society in general. 

The devastation of Macharia was a loss on an unprecedented scale. Macharia was located in the Cadian system itself, the crowning glory and second capital of the Imperium Nihilus. It would lower public morale and give Imperium Sanctus a chance to call us weak.