Chapter 3(Why)

Jessica Lincoln held her 3D printed assault rifle tightly in her hands as she stood on the deck of one of the hundreds of crudely 3D printed plastic row boats in the massive rebel convoy moving through the network of huge sewer canals underneath the under hive.

The death toll from the purges and murder had been so catastrophic that the very few surviving Heretical Poor gutter whores and their children had 3D printed weapons and banded together for mutual survival in the face of the constant military purges. The whores were out gunned, out matched, and reduced to moving around constantly in the sewers to evade the Ecclesiastical police forces.

Jessica looked anxiously to the demonic "she-man whore demon" she had helped to summon, as the bizarre thing sniffed at the air for any enemy soldiers ahead.

"Is it clear?" Jessica asked the she-man demon fearfully.

The she-man whore demon couldn't talk, but it nodded elegantly, indicating that the way ahead was safe.

Jessica gave a silent prayer of thanks to the poor whore goddess of chaos for keeping the way ahead clear, and the she-man whore demon smiled at Jessica in approval for her prayer.

The convoy of boats continued paddling as silently as possible through the sewerage, relying on the hundreds of she-man whore demons they had summoned to show them the way to safely avoid the Ecclesiastical police patrols. Without the helpful demons the convoy would have died hundreds of times over the course of the last 3 weeks, the demons seemed able to smell danger and guide them to safety at every turn.

Jessica ran the palm of her hand over the fleshy pale blue dreadlocks that grew from the she-man whore demon's head like hair, and the demon sighed very softly in pleasure at the touch. The touch of the demonic skin made Jessica thrill with sexual pleasure, and she felt a comforting warm tingle in her vagina from this supernatural thrill.

The she-man whore demons were bizarre creatures, neither man nor woman but somehow both at the same time. They were the same as a human, only with far too many boobs, no noses, dreadlocks of flesh for hair, weird clawed feet, and arms ending in long razor sharp blades of dark blue bone. The gutter whores had never seen these creatures before they had summoned them, and didn't know what they were called, so had named them "she-man whore demons" for want of a better name.

Jessica Lincoln, Chloe Smith, and Amy Brown had teamed up with thousands of other Heretical Poor gutter whore survivors, and had by that stage become so fully radicalised by the military purge against them that they had become militant extremists. No longer would they be merely harmless tax evaders who didn't hurt anyone or disturb the peace, no longer would they refuse to become truly heretical chaos worshippers!

They had been perfectly happy to just live their lives in peace, but the Emperor had not let them just live out their lives peacefully. The Emperor himself had started this, the Emperor had hated them first even when they LOVED him, and the Emperor's shocking cruelty and brutality had forced their hands to take up arms against him.

What had galvanised them to worship chaos was the propaganda stories about terrible chaos heretics being able to summon giant chaos space marines in unholy blasphemous rituals. The Ecclesiastical police forces had been wiping them out so fast that they had NEEDED to summon chaos space marines just to stay alive. They had so far been unable to summon the wanted space marines, but they had had more luck in summoning these she-man whore demons by trial and error in different worship rituals.

The gutter whores collectively called themselves just that, they WERE gutter whores by occupation, so as a group they called their newly founded chaos cult "the Gutter Whores". It perhaps wasn't a very imaginative name, but gutter whores were generally not known for their imaginative academic prowess.

The Gutter Whores had known precisely nothing about the chaos gods except what the propaganda told them. They didn't even know the names of the chaos gods, or what their demons were called, so they had had to "learn by doing" so to speak.

According to the Vipp propaganda, the chaos gods were the gods of "poor", while the Emperor and his saints were the gods of "rich". Everyone knew that goodness and virtue were synonymous with richness, the richer you were, the better you were both morally and spiritually, and the Emperor rewarded the virtuous by making them rich, that was WHY they were called the Virtuous Class in the first place.

Just as the Virtuous were all rich, the evil were always poor. The more evil you were, the poorer you were, and so it made sense that the poorest of the poor were called the Heretical Poor, because poverty and heresy went hand in hand, they were poor BECAUSE they were heretics.

The chaos gods were therefore often referred to as "the Poor Gods", because they were gods of evil, and evil was poor by definition. The Poor Gods were four in number, but the propaganda never told their names. The propaganda described the Poor Gods as "the Poor Whore", "the Poor Leper", "the Poor Liar", and "the Poor Murderer".

Because the Gutter Whores were themselves poor whores, it made sense to them to choose to worship the chaos goddess of Poor Whores. The Gutter Whores had had no idea how to go about worshipping the Poor Whore, but they had simply tried their best to pray to her. The Poor Whore herself had then visited them in dreams, and whispered glimpses of her will to them in a very vague sense.

The Poor Whore seemed to relish whorish behaviour above all else, and the Gutter Whores had engaged in ever bigger orgies of sex with each other to please their new goddess. The Poor Whore had rewarded their orgies by summoning she-man whore demons to aid them, and these demons had kept the Gutter Whores alive for the last 3 weeks of ever worse purges.

The boats moved cautiously to the next ladder to a manhole up in the under hive, as directed by the she-man whore demons. The demons alone could sense if it was safe to exit out of a given manhole at a given time to scavenge for food, they warned which manholes were being watched or guarded, and this kept the Gutter Whores alive.

The Gutter Whores were all praying desperately to the Poor Whore to stop the purges, billions of people had died, the hive was heavily depopulated in fact! The Emperor was a genocidal maniac to slaughter so many people, never in the history of Vipp had so many people died like this!

The Gutter Whores desperately wanted to get revenge on the hated Emperor for what he had done, but at the moment they were barely surviving the Ecclesiastical police purges and could only run rather than strike back.

Jessica prayed with all her might. What they needed was a miracle...

***...

Lord Commissar Samuel Jackson was furious as he shouted at the fat pig of a Planetary Governor who ruled the planet Vipp.

"What do you MEAN you might have difficulty providing 20 billion men to the Imperial Guard this year!?" Samuel Jackson shouted at the man.

"Well my Lord Commissar, with all the recent purges against heresy, we seem to have inadvertently killed off over 50 percent of our population..." Governor Donald Elon Zuckergates mewled feebly in apology.

Samuel grabbed the overweight man by the scruff of the neck and started strangling him.

"The Departmento Munitorum does not CARE about your pathetic problems! You WILL pay the Emperor his due in men for the Imperial Guard, or the Imperial Guard will come to Vipp and personally crucify you from the highest spire and replace your fat ass with a new Governor who will do his DUTY!" Samuel shouted at the choking sack of human blubber.

Donald Elon Zuckergates nodded fearfully in agreement, and Lord Commissar Samuel Jackson stopped choking the fat creep.

"I will do it, I don't know how, but I will find the men for the tithe," the Governor mewled desperately.

"See that you do BOY, or your fat ass is getting nailed to a cross!" Samuel warned with deadly authority.

The Governor wet himself in fear and waddled off out of the room, and Samuel felt nothing but contempt for the man. If that fat sack of shit didn't cough up 20 billion soldiers for the Imperial Guard then Lord Commissar Samuel Jackson would personally hammer in the nails as he crucified the Governor's fat ass.

The annual tithe on the planetary governors was the REAL tax that the Emperor demanded, and the governor would wish he had never been born REAL FAST if he did not pay up every last soldier!

He would pay or he would die.

***...

Planetary Governor Donald Elon Zuckergates was in trouble, TERRIBLE TROUBLE! It just wasn't FAIR!

How was HE to know that the Heretical Poor actually comprised not just 1 percent but actually the vast majority of the population! How was HE to know that the wanted segments of the population would get so caught up in the hysteria against heretics that they would murder anyone who they didn't like or didn't like the look of, whether Heretical Poor or not!

Before he had known it over half of the population was dead and the remaining population was in complete anarchy! The formerly teeming hive cities were now charnel pits of dead bodies and out of control fires, the population was killing each other in armed mobs, and even after ALL of this, the currency was STILL inflating!

It had been an honest mistake! It wasn't Donald's FAULT! EVERYONE makes mistakes from time to time! Why couldn't the Imperium just be reasonable about the annual tithe of soldiers given the unfortunate problems that had befallen poor unlucky Donald!? Surely he could be just a LITTLE late at paying his taxes, it was only reasonable right?

It was all his advisers fault, THEY had been the ones who gave him incorrect information about just how much of the population was Heretical Poor! Donald had not known that the vast majority of the population had lived in those smelly shantytowns! Donald had not realised that the Heretical Poor alone were the massive breeding base that produced every single one of the men that were sent to the Imperial Guard!

The surviving men were all of the respectable classes employed in either the Ecclesiastical police forces or in the important licensed factories and industries that generated all the wealth of the Virtuous Class, and if 20 billion of the industrial workers were conscripted into the Imperial Guard then it would cost the Virtuous Class a FORTUNE! It might take GENERATIONS to rebuild the production enough to make the sort of profits the Virtuous Class were accustomed to!

If Donald paid the tithe from the workers, then the Virtuous Class would personally blame him for costing them a fortune, and might have a lethal coup d'état to replace him with a new Virtuous Class Governor! But if Donald DID NOT pay the tithe, then the Imperium WOULD kill him in some truly hideous way!

Donald was sweating all over with terrible fear for his life, it was a truly horrible feeling to be afraid for your life! Why couldn't he be shown mercy, he was a Virtuous man after all!

Donald Elon Zuckergates fled into the safety of his personal pleasure palace, and took refuge in his bedroom with today's batch of whores. He needed to calm down, to think of a way to solve this problem without being murdered by anyone.

Donald thought furiously and he suddenly saw his option to save himself. He could draw the 20 billion conscripts from his Ecclesiastical police forces that were in reality what passed for the Vipp Planetary Defence Force! It was perfect!

20 billion men taken from the Ecclesiastical police forces would represent a significant reduction in his forces, especially if he had to send 20 billion each year until the population repopulated itself with breeding, but this shouldn't be a problem. With all the extensive recent purges their were SURELY no heretics left, so he didn't NEED to have a large defence force.

The planet Vipp was surely the safest it had been in centuries. Far better to save money by conscripting the Ecclesiastical police Planetary Defence Forces. What could honestly go wrong?

Donald Elon Zuckergates sighed in relief and called the Lord Commissar that he could expect the complete tithe before the week's end. The Lord Commissar was delighted and told Donald that he would get to go on living without crucifixion, for which Donald was very much relieved!

Donald then made immediate arrangements to conscript 20 billion of his best Ecclesiastical police men into the Imperial Guard, and called off all remaining purges due to the sudden lack of police manpower.

Finally this whole nightmare would be over and Donald would be out of danger!

***...