The Great Chaos Petrochemical War.
*book 8 of the women of the Night Lords series*
Chapter 1G
Down on the surface of a chaos daemon world, chaos worshipping billionaire petrochemical tycoon Joseph Wong shouted angrily at his chaos space marine bodyguards to protect him as gunfire exploded throughout the methane gas rig he owned.
"Protect me, damn it!" Joseph shouted at the very expensive chaos space marine mercenaries, as savage heavy bolter fire missed him by inches!
"Yes Mr Wong," dozens of deep chaos space marine voices replied in unison.
Joseph sighed in relief as a wall of armoured bodies formed up protectively around him to shield him from the lethal fusillade of gunfire.
Joseph nearly crapped himself in his expensive business suit as a frag missile exploded in the midst of his protective huddle of chaos marines!
The lethal fragments narrowly missed him!
"Get me the fuck out of here!" Joseph yelled at his bodyguards.
"The thunder hawk gunship is destroyed Mr Wong, your escape is cut off until our reinforcements arrive sir," one of the chaos space marines bellowed over the deafening explosions.
"FUCK! Then keep me alive long enough to escape, damn you!" Joseph shouted in rising panic.
"Yes Mr Wong, this way please sir, we will take up defensive positions inside the rig until reinforcements arrive," the chaos marines told him.
Joseph yelped as more frag missiles exploded amongst the tight huddle!
He scrambled desperately as his bodyguards led him to the relative safety of the baroque guts of the deep sea gas rig.
Small arms fire was pinging all around him and he was painfully aware that his finely tailored business suit would not even slow a bullet down if it hit him!
Joseph Wong was not a space marine, he was a businessman in his 40's, and less than useless in a live combat zone like this!
Joseph was the owner and founder of Wong Petrochemicals, a chaos aligned mining and refining company, that supplied natural gas and petrochemicals to the energy starved forces of chaos in and around the Maelstrom.
Joseph Wong was a brilliant chemical engineering prodigy, with a particular talent for extracting profitable chemicals from seemingly worthless places.
A devout Slaanesh worshipper who followed Slaanesh in his aspect as the god of career excellence and perfection, Joseph had studied chemistry so religiously that he now boasted that he could now rival even the Dark Mechanicum chemistry Magi in his chemical mastery!
In the resource starved forces of chaos a man like Joseph could make an absolute fortune, and Joseph had done very well indeed!
The group of bodyguards led Joseph into the central pump room of the gas rig, pushing him into the relative safety of a broom closet and fortifying the pump room entrances with heavy machinery to act as defensive cover.
Joseph curled up in a ball in his broom closet as heavy gunfire sounded from just outside the pump room.
Joseph cursed as stray bolter rounds hit the primary gas pump motor and disabled it, that equipment was expensive!
Bolter rounds were shooting wildly through the room, causing catastrophic damage!
Joseph was horrified at the thought of the money he was losing every second the shot up pump machinery wasn't pumping, this was eating into his profits!
Joseph rocked back and forth on the floor of the broom closet, his self preservation instincts warring with his greedy desire to repair the pump machinery himself right now and get the highly profitable gas pumping once more.
In the end self preservation won out and he cowered fearfully as he watched his expensive gas rig being shot to bits!
Joseph had made his great fortune from the putrid oceans of diarrhoea on the festering Nurgle daemon world of Alpha Plus Sanctuary.
The planet was to most people simply a nightmare, a planet wide endless ocean of the very filth of Nurgle himself, with widely scattered tiny putrid islands forming the only land masses.
Where others had seen only a hellish wasteland, Joseph had seen profits beyond his wildest dreams!
Even in small quantities, diarrhoea by its very nature tends to produce copious amounts of methane and other gases found in flatulence.
When that diarrhoea is then concentrated in a planet spanning supernatural ocean, the amounts of gas produced became truly astonishing.
Extracting this gas had been simple for a man like Joseph and he had established gas mining rigs all over the planet and made billions.
But as the current gunfire testified, owning a highly coveted natural resource was absurdly dangerous in the forces of chaos!
Joseph was forced to spend more and more of his hard earned billions on military forces to protect himself and his investments.
Joseph watched in horror as a frag grenade suddenly flew into the pump room.
He scrambled in blind panic behind a crate of cleaning chemicals in the broom closet.
Moments later the grenade went off with a BANG and a horrific fireball engulfed the pump room as the grenade blast ruptured one of the primary gas lines and ignited it!
The broom closet was now hellishly hot, and the pump room itself was now a roaring inferno of burning gas!
Joseph was trapped with nowhere to run!
Desperately he hid behind his meagre cover in a vain effort to escape the terrible heat, this was the end!
Chaos space marines suddenly burst through the flames in fire blackened power armour.
The marines physically dragged Joseph screaming through the jets of flame, setting his priceless suit ablaze in the process!
"Ah, it BURNS!" Joseph screeched as he was roasted alive!
Joseph was carried out of an open door and screamed in sudden cold as his blazing body was hosed down with a fire hose by his bodyguards!
Joseph was still alive!
"This way Mr Wong Sir, the reinforcements are en route, we must get you to the roof landing pad for evacuation," one of the bodyguards told him.
Joseph blinked through his badly burned eyelids and with his horribly burned throat he rasped, "th-thank you for getting me out of there!"
"I trust that your gratitude will also include a suitable pay bonus, Mr Wong," the bodyguard replied greedily.
"Yes, anything! Just save me!" Joseph insisted frantically.
"Very good Mr Wong," the greedy mercenary said.
Joseph squawked in pain as he felt his raw burned body being gripped tightly by hard armoured fingers.
"Ouch, be gentle, that hurts like a MOTHER FUCKER!" Joseph screamed.
Joseph sobbed and whimpered as he was carried away in the middle of a tight huddle of power armoured bodies.
The entire rig was now steadily catching fire, Joseph knew that it was beyond saving now. Soon the entire rig would explode!
The sounds of gunfire were intensifying as the bodyguards battled their way to the roof carrying Joseph.
The BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of bolter fire was so loud all around! It was fucking terrifying!
Joseph couldn't see a thing through the press of bodies, he was so hideously burned that he couldn't focus properly.
Joseph's head was hanging limp and he was losing consciousness, he was sure that he was dying!
The sounds of gunfire and frag missiles were insanely loud and it sounded like a full scale battle was being fought.
He was going to die here, he just knew it!
His vision was going grey and he was dying from his burns.
He couldn't go on any longer!
Just before he passed out from his burns, Joseph heard the distinctive roar of a squadron of thunder hawk gunships.
After that he knew nothing more, nothing but black oblivion.
***...
Alpha Legion neophyte Demetrio Acosta cursed as the hired space marine mercenaries of the Damned Company of Lord Caustos carried the assassination target Joseph Wong away to safety aboard a thunder hawk gunship!
This was extremely unfortunate for the Alpha Legion forces of the Brotherhood of Toth warband, they needed Joseph Wong taken out to get the best possible outcome for their plans.
The Brotherhood of Toth was in desperate need of hydrocarbons for other plans they had in the wider theatre of the entire Maelstrom.
While only numbering a single chapter in terms of actual chaos space marines, the Brotherhood of Toth also commanded tens of thousands of battalions of loyal chaos cultist soldiers, and this vast army of cultists in turn fielded over a million armoured vehicles of one type or another.
This army was further serviced by millions of logistical vehicles like trucks and the like, and all of these millions of various vehicles required vast amounts of fuel to run.
It just so happened that the entire Maelstrom was also currently experiencing the most crippling fuel shortage in ten thousand years, and there wasn't enough fuel to go around!
A few months ago the last of the great hydrocarbon oceans on the legendarily rich Dark Mechanicum petrochemical mining world of Tazakeo Prime had completely and totally run dry.
Tazakeo Prime had previously supplied over 50 percent of all petroleum fuels to the entire Maelstrom, had done for ten thousand years in fact.
The planet had originally been covered pole to pole with extremely deep oceans of high quality hydrocarbons, so abundantly available that it had taken ten thousand years of merciless mining to completely drain them.
Well, at long last, those abundant hydrocarbons were all completely gone, and the formerly cheap hydrocarbon fuels had now exponentially skyrocketed in price as the remaining supplies on other planets were completely inadequate to meet the insane demands.
Billions of lesser chaos worshippers on the daemon worlds of the Maelstrom were currently starving to death, as the lack of fuel crippled logistics of food supplies and motorised farm machinery became inoperable.
The price of fuel was now absolutely insane, and the greedy individuals who controlled the remaining supplies were taking merciless advantage of these inflated prices, charging an absolutely OUTRAGEOUS fortune for their fuel!
The blasted Wong Petrochemicals company was one of the worst of these price raising culprits, and was being difficult about giving the Brotherhood of Toth the fuel they needed at a price the Brotherhood of Toth was prepared to pay.
So that meant that Mr Wong had to die, die and be replaced by someone else who would bow to their demands!
At least that had been the plan...
Demetrio ducked for cover as another massive explosion rocked the entire gas rig, the priceless gas rig was rapidly deteriorating as more and more of it caught fire.
The rig was now utterly useless, and was steadily exploding as the heat of the fires ruptured ever more gas pipes and storage tanks, adding to the terrible inferno!
The gas rig workers had already fled away in boats, and the Damned Company of Lord Caustos had already disengaged in one of their thunder hawk gunships.
Even the reinforcements had pulled back now, and Demetrio and the other Alpha Legion space marines were now left in possession of a rapidly exploding gas rig...
The Alpha Legion weren't stupid and they didn't hesitate to get the fuck out of there, fleeing to their waiting nuclear submarine from which they had managed to attack with such complete surprise.
Demetrio and the others leapt onto the diarrhoea covered roof of the submarine down in the "water" from the metal walkway they had been standing on.
The submarine quickly fled away from the death trap of a gas rig as the explosions got worse, traveling at surface depth since the chaos space marines were still on the roof.
Demetrio watched from the roof of the submarine as, about a minute later, the entire rig blasted itself apart in an almighty fireball!
The explosion hurled burning bits of mangled wreckage high into the air in all directions, splashing into the diarrhoea ocean all around the submarine with colossal hissing splashes.
A few smaller fragments bounced harmlessly off the roof of the submarine, thankfully not doing any damage.
"Damn, we could have saved ourselves a lot of bother if we had simply blown up the rig with a torpedo while Wong was on the thing," mused a chaos space marine named Pedro Silva.
Demetrio personally agreed with this, but their orders had been to kill Wong WITHOUT destroying the insanely valuable gas rig the Brotherhood of Toth had wanted captured intact, to supply them with fuel.
In the end they had failed in both of these mission criteria...
Demetrio and the others quickly entered the submarine, and closed the hatch behind them so that the submarine could submerge before the thunder hawks started blowing holes in it, and the submarine dropped safely below the surface of the turgid diarrhoea ocean.
The group of chaos space marines and neophytes marched through the claustrophobic corridors of the brutal nuclear submarine, assembling as best as they could fit in the command bridge.
Demetrio and the others debriefed with the submarine captain, and an astropath sent a highly encrypted message to the chaos lord and other leaders of the Brotherhood of Toth, informing them of what happened.
Now they had to proceed to their rendezvous point and await further orders. This mission had been a complete debacle!
This mission failure was a problem, but, like all Alpha Legion plans, they had multiple contingencies in place that were flexible enough to cope with this unfortunate outcome.
Right at this very moment the Brotherhood of Toth was launching simultaneous surprise attacks from submarines on dozens of gas rigs, timed to take maximum advantage of the confusion caused by the assassination of Joseph Wong.
These attacks wouldn't all be successful, but enough of the attacks would take and hold gas rigs to give the Brotherhood of Toth a steady fuel supply.
If the assassination had been successful then Wong Petrochemicals would have passed to the ownership of Joseph's inexperienced teenage son Tim Wong, who would be much easier to intimidate into making concessions than his father was.
Indeed, Tim would likely simply give them all the fuel they wanted just to make them go away!
Now, instead of a pushover son running the company, they would have an extremely enraged Joseph Wong, who would now most likely refuse to even give them the time of day, let alone negotiate with them or sell them fuel!
This might be a problem, but so long as they held the gas rigs they captured, they would have enough fuel to deploy some of their massive army of amphibious chimera transports and expand their tactical options.
The next move was completely dependent on what Joseph Wong did next...
***...
"Mr Wong Sir, can you hear me Sir?" an unfamiliar female voice entered Joseph's consciousness.
Joseph groaned in pain and nodded, not opening his eyes.
"Mr Wong, my name is Kim, I'm a nurse. I need you to try opening your eyes, so the doctors can examine you Sir," the female voice said gently.
Joseph grimaced and gingerly opened his eyes. When his vision cleared he saw that he was in a hospital bed, with a gaggle of doctors and nurses looking at him very respectfully.
Joseph sighed, so he wasn't dead after all it seemed?
After a pause, Joseph let the medical people do the job they were paid for, and he was given an extremely thorough examination.
Joseph discovered that he had tubes sticking out of his bandage covered arms, and he could breathe properly once more and felt almost back to normal! The last he saw of himself he had been roasted like cooked meat!
He was clearly getting the best care his considerable wealth could buy!
Joseph marvelled as he lifted up his bandages and saw flawless skin underneath! He wasn't even disfigured!
The doctors explained that Joseph had been given new skin, a new throat, new eyelids, new lungs and a bunch of other replacement parts, to replace everything damaged by the burns. Joseph grimaced, this all sounded extremely expensive!
Joseph put his greed to one side with effort, knowing that no price was to great if it saved his exalted self from being horrifically disfigured and disabled. The whole POINT of being a billionaire was to improve his own wellbeing after all!
When the doctors had finished explaining everything, Joseph demanded to be put in contact with the head office of Wong Petrochemicals immediately.
Slaanesh only knows what might have happened to his company while he was unconscious!
A video phone display monitor was folded down from the ceiling by extremely respectful nurses, and Joseph immediately called his executive staff, to be informed of everything that had happened while he was unconscious.
"What do you MEAN the Alpha Legion stole twenty three of my gas rigs?! Put Alpha Legion Chaos Lord Paxton Tsao on a conference call, right the fuck now!" Joseph demanded angrily, after listening for a while.
"Lord Tsao is not answering the call Mr Wong", an office underling informed him after a brief delay.
"I BET he's not! You tell that greedy asshole, that if he doesn't give those rigs back right NOW, then I will blow the fucking things up! And he can kiss my yellow ass before I will sell him so much as a drop of fuel after this!" Joseph shouted in a rage.
"Yes Mr Wong Sir," the executives said respectfully.
Joseph could hardly believe the sheer evil mindedness of Chaos Lord Paxton Tsao of the Brotherhood of Toth warband!
For weeks that slippery asshole had been acting extremely friendly towards Joseph, clearly merely to lull him into a false sense of security, before then trying to have him assassinated without warning in cold blood!
Joseph had recognised the colours and insignia of the chaos space marines that had tried to kill him, they were all unquestionably Brotherhood of Toth!
Before, it had simply been business, but Paxton Tsao had now made this unforgivably personal!
This meant war!
***...
Alpha Legion neophyte Demetrio Acosta lay down on his specially enlarged naval bunk, on the nuclear submarine he and his cell of 50 chaos space marines were currently operating from.
His lady friend Hilda Rolfe was asleep and snoring, laying naked on his chest, having already satisfied Demetrio earlier in the night. The submarine was almost perfectly silent, the night's sleep untroubled and peaceful.
Demetrio himself was neither fully awake nor fully asleep, literally half awake, as he rested one half of his brain at a time while the other half remained fully aware. This was one of many useful abilities granted to him by his space marine gene seed organs.
At present the entire contingent of Brotherhood of Toth space marines stationed on the planet were lurking in the safety of a fleet of these nuclear submarines, leaving the highly dangerous task of holding the gas rigs from enemy recapture to the expendable companies of heavily armed chaos cultists.
The cultists were equipped with lots of melta guns and plasma guns for this mission, to stand up against enemy chaos space marine power armour if necessary.
It was a thousand times safer to be on these submarines at the moment...
These submarines used ancient 21st century technology for their propulsion systems, simple nuclear fission reactors fuelled by extremely inexpensive thorium rods. The Alpha Legion often made use of submarines for stealth and reconnaissance purposes, and the Brotherhood of Toth had scores of them, that they mostly kept stored in the cargo holds of their space ships.
The Brotherhood of Toth had discreetly flown over the oceans when they first arrived on the planet and had deployed the entire fleet of submarines, lowering them down from the space ship's undercarriage cargo doors on steel cables fastened to tether points on the roofs of the submarines.
The submarine Demetrio was on was nearly 100 meters in length, had three floors of deck space, and could quite comfortably hold 50 space marines even on top of the normal crew (and occasional female companions).
It was named "the Dynamo" (he wasn't sure why it was named this) and for the foreseeable future duration of this planetary mission, it was his home.
The Dynamo had enough nuclear fuel to last 3 years before needing more thorium, and had enough space saving dehydrated food on board to last 6 months.
The Dynamo recycled all water used onboard, and completely reoxygenated all the onboard air with it's electric atmosphere scrubber. It moved silently, it's hull disrupted enemy sonar, and it used passive acoustic sensors to give it unrivalled intel about it's physical surroundings without giving away it's position.
The Dynamo even had psychic scrying disruption runes carved all over it, to prevent enemy psykers from locating it, and in the completely non-transparent diarrhoea they were currently submerged in, the Dynamo couldn't even be seen from the air if it was even only a mere meter below the surface!
The airforce of Wong Petrochemicals had been randomly bombing the oceans with depth charges to try to destroy the submarines, but they clearly had no idea where the submarines were, and had so far not even come close to hitting them in the vastness of the oceans.
Hilda stirred on Demetrio's chest, groaning softly. The half of Demetrio's brain that was currently awake smiled at the young woman affectionately.
Hilda was a strikingly beautiful blonde woman, 17 years old, slender and desirable. She was a feudal world peasant girl who had been enslaved by Joseph Wong's cousin, and had been living on one of the local islands. Demetrio had very cheerfully stolen the slave girl for himself and Hilda so far didn't seem to mind her theft in the least!
Hilda smiled back at him and gave him an affectionate kiss on the mouth, before then settling back down to sleep. Demetrio had taken the liberty of paying a local surgeon to make Hilda's flesh resistant to his acidic saliva, as this had previously seriously hampered Demetrio's sex life with Hilda, and Hilda could now freely kiss him like this without fear of acid burns.
Demetrio smiled at Hilda's spontaneous act of affection, glad that he had taken her with him on the submarine. It made his stay a LOT more pleasant being able to go to bed with this woman each night!
Demetrio was 18 years old, right at the end of his neophyte years. As soon as this current mission was over, he would receive his black carapace final gene seed organ and become a fully fledged space marine.
Demetrio couldn't wait, this was everything he had ever dreamed of!
Demetrio had always been in the Brotherhood of Toth, he was the orphan son of Brotherhood of Toth chaos cultists, recruited as a neophyte precisely because he had no living relatives, who might form family ties to divide his loyalties.
He had been recruited as part of a squad of neophytes, trained to act as a team rather than an individual, just another head of the one hydra, that made up the whole.
He had been exhaustively trained, psycho-conditioned and educated to be an utterly loyal super soldier, with 6 gruelling years of combat experience already, fighting ever since being first recruited into the neophyte ranks at the age of 12.
Now at the end of his neophyte years, Demetrio was a burly 8 foot tall, 200 kilogram, bullet resistant killing machine. He could see and hear far better than any natural human, healed almost instantly, and had a wide range of useful abilities, from spitting acid to being awake while sleeping!
Soon he would don a suit of mark 5 power armour along with the rest of his squad of neophytes, and together he and his squad mates would become a fully fledged chaos space marine squad!
So soon, yet still so far away...
***...