Chapter 4D
The Inquisitorial battleship Dictator of Righteousness was received fearfully by the chaos worshipping pirate base of Theta Derdark.
Theta Derdark was a tiny moon orbiting a gassy ice giant which itself orbited around a cold brown dwarf star. The ice giant that Theta Derdark orbited was nowhere near anything like the habitable temperature zone of the feeble chilly star and was not that far off absolute zero in temperature.
The only warmth of any kind on the tiny moon was the warmth generated by the pirates technology, using standard deuterium plasma fusion generators for power to run the settlement's heating systems. The only reason that anyone lived here was because all the better places were taken.
The pirates had originally been Imperial privateers on the payroll of an Imperial governor just outside the Maelstrom, but a change in politics had seen them chased out of Imperial space by the Imperial Navy. They had taken refuge in the Maelstrom but had found that every world worth taking was already claimed by much stronger groups, so they had claimed this miserable place for want of anywhere better.
Eduardo Garcia had very deliberately chosen Theta Derdark because it was so weak and easy to intimidate, the tiny pirate ships were absolutely no match for the mighty Retribution class Battleship "Dictator of Righteousness". If they had any information whatsoever then Inquisitor Garcia would extract it.
Inquisitor Eduardo Garcia and his retinue of heavily armed elite soldiers marched through the chilly streets of the underground pirate base, sending the poverty stricken locals fleeing for safety. One of Eduardo's massive mutant soldiers kicked down the door to the pirate king's presidential office and the Inquisitor marched in like he owned the place.
The King of Theta Derdark yelped with terror at the sight of a power armour clad Inquisitor with the full badges of official status standing inside his presidential office, the King had been born in the Imperium and knew exactly what an Inquisitor was and how terrible their wrath!
The King begged for mercy, clearly expecting the Inquisitor to burn him at the stake for heresy.
Eduardo smiled cruelly and said, "what is mercy? I have no understanding of the word. You will tell me everything I want to know, whether willingly or not!"
***...
"I do NOT accept TEETH as a form of currency you stupid Ork!" Wendy was shouting at a xenos merchant over a communications monitor.
Egg sighed, she was SO sick of listening to Wendy's dodgy trade deals!
Just as Egg and the others had feared, Mum had gone crawling back to Wendy. Mum was saying the usual shit like "she's changed for REAL this time" and "I want to give my marriage another chance". It was so tiring!
Wendy was certainly putting on a good act of repentance this time, but Egg didn't trust her. You can't just hold extremely public auditions for "the next wife", testing thousands of skanks and whores in bed to see how they compared to Mum, just because Mum had been absent for TWO MONTHS, and then expect your wife to overlook that sort of behaviour!
At least that is if Mum had any sense whatsoever when it comes to relationships! Unfortunately Mum had a common sense blind spot when it came to Wendy and kept returning no matter how bad Wendy was for her.
Even now Mum was sitting gazing at Wendy with lovesick smitten eyes, completely in love with the unfaithful lesbian. Mum was so silly sometimes.
"You give us da guns and we give ya da teef!" The Ork merchant bellowed back at Wendy over the communications screen.
Egg wished that someone would at least give the Orks elocution lessons, they were so jarring to listen to!
The combined fleet of Night Lords and Iron Warriors was currently in orbit of the ridiculously named Ork planet of Smashabashastompa, attempting to trade with the moronic creatures. The Orks were extremely friendly to anyone selling them guns but they seemed to expect arms dealers to take absurd forms of currency!
Egg was amused by the Orks, but could only take so much of listening to them bartering with Wendy!
Egg looked at the mountains of toys that she had been given by Wendy in an attempt to bribe her to cooperate. Massive plastic doll houses big enough to house the homeless were set up for her in a dedicated play area of the gigantic cathedral-like room that was Wendy's work office!
Dolls and plush toys of all shapes and sizes were set up before Egg invitingly. Tea party sets, toy ovens, a complete extravagant wardrobe of dolls clothes and dolls shoes, all of it was hers now! Egg had drooled over the toys and couldn't help herself but play with them.
The now one year old Patrick was crawling all through the play area, putting everything he could find in his mouth as the bewildered nanny slaves kept taking away things small enough for him to choke on. Violet was trying to put the squirming crawling baby into dolls outfits that were big enough for him and giggling at the results. The mutant baby was currently dressed in a bright pink floral dolls dress and looked adorable!
Egg was suddenly hit in the face by an extremely soft plush toy and looked at Mandy who poked out her tongue. Egg promptly returned fire with thrown plush toys of her own and a giggling plush toy war erupted until Wendy got accidentally hit in the back of the head with a teddy bear.
The Ork on the screen promptly asked to buy the projectile teddy bear as Egg and Mandy hid in a dolls house from the annoyed Chaos Champion. Wendy crawled in after them with supernatural speed and caught them both, giving them both a spanking with supernatural strength for such a small woman, her strength and speed the result of a recent Chaos Gift Slaanesh had given her!
Egg and Mandy rubbed their smarting backsides as Wendy returned to her trade negotiations with the Ork merchant. They settled down to a new game of dolls inside the huge doll house they were hiding in, making sure they didn't annoy Wendy this time.
Wendy was a different kind of Chaos Champion from the kind normally seen on the battlefield, she used money and greed as her weapon of choice and had been blessed by Slaanesh with an astonishing ability to make money through corrupt business dealings. She was the chaos lord's chief money maker to keep his fleets funded and supplied and could probably sell ice to a Valhallan!
Wendy absolutely surrounded herself with wealth but was simultaneously a terrible miser. She was greed in human form, only spending money on either investments or on her own pleasures unless compelled by others to give money.
Egg was not sure which of Wendy's business endeavours were the worst, but the list included "investment charities" which fed the starving but only in order to make 4 times as much in return, or bartering merchants right down to a pittance and then robbing them later to get back all of said pittance so the merchants were left with nothing (using a third party robber that couldn't be traced back to her), and of course it included a massive slave trade business!
Wendy had fallen in love with Mum (who was her sex slave) and liked her so much that she had married her before Egg had hatched from her egg. Mum's psychic lust aura drove Wendy absolutely wild like no one else could and the stuff the pair got up to in the bedroom was absolutely filthy!
The objective difference between Mum being Wendy's sex slave and being Wendy's wife was hazy at best, but the biggest difference was that a wife had enough emotional leverage to get away with being estranged from Wendy. If they ever got divorced then Mum would go back to being just another slave of Wendy's and simply be put back to work in the sex industry or sold to someone else.
Mum could not say no to having sex with Wendy whether she was a slave or a wife, but that was just physical stuff that Wendy could do with anyone. What Wendy really wanted was true emotional connection with a real relationship, and you can't just force a slave to provide that.
At the end of the day the wicked miser wanted to be loved, which was her biggest redeeming feature. Wendy was definitely towards the evil end of the good-evil spectrum, but still had some genuine humanity and sparks of goodness left in her that the chaos gods had not smothered fully.
The game of dolls with Mandy and Egg went well until Patrick crawled over and slobbered on everything with his baby spit! He was just OBSESSED with putting the colourful toys in his mouth!
Grossed out by the baby spit on all the toys, the girls evacuated from the giant doll house as the nanny slaves attempted to clean up the slobber on all the toys. Egg and Mandy instead ran up to Mum on the luxurious couch she was seductively reclining on and snuggled up to her happily.
Mum put an arm around each girl and lovingly cuddled her daughters on either side of her. Mum was gazing devotedly at Wendy, proudly wearing her replacement wedding ring on her finger (the Iron warriors had stolen the original wedding ring off her finger), proudly letting everyone know that she was the proud wife of Wendy once more.
Mum was not a strict lesbian like Wendy was, in fact Mum was not fussy at all about who or what she was willing to sleep with. Mum was a devout Slaanesh worshipper who seemed to be sexually attracted to everything in the known universe, a terminal sex addict with absolutely no standards or scruples whatsoever when it came to raw physical acts of sex.
Slaanesh worshippers like Mum and Wendy did not put much value on physical sex acts, having sex with other people was not considered cheating (in fact it was practically a religious requirement for Slaanesh worshippers). What Mum and Wendy took much more seriously was EMOTIONAL faithfulness in a relationship, sex was just sex but romance and emotional connection was seen as absolutely sacred!
What Wendy had done that was so unforgivable was try to find a new wife to replace Mum on an emotional level, holding public auditions for the role shamelessly! 4 months ago Wendy had tested out thousands of potential replacement women for Mum before realising that Mum was actually what she wanted all along! But by then the damage to the relationship had already been done.
All of it just because Mum and the crèche had been taken into protective custody after an assassination attempt on Egg's life and Wendy had been unable to contact Mum for 2 months and just got sick of waiting!
Mum had absolutely exploded when she found out and had wanted a divorce, seeing a return to her previous sex industry role as preferable to having her heart so badly broken! Wendy had talked Mum into delaying divorce and the pair had been simply estranged for 4 months.
Poor Mum had spent 2 of those 4 months crying heartbroken tears and had been completely emotionally messed up. The crèche kids had been messed up too to be honest, in betraying Mum Wendy had betrayed all of them.
And now when Mum was finally getting over Wendy and moving on with her life, Wendy had shamelessly grovelled for Mum to give the marriage another try and stupid Mum had gone crawling back to her!
Wendy had then spent a fortune of her ill gotten gains to bribe the entire crèche into not talking Mum out of the marriage! The thing's that people will do for love huh, even evil people like Wendy.
Egg and Mandy squabbled with each other for Mum's attention as Mum in turn tried to focus on what Wendy was doing. In the end both Egg and Mandy made so much noise that they interrupted the unethical trade deal with the Orks and Wendy gave them both another spanking.
***...
Chaos Champion of Slaanesh Wendy Sevenson was extremely annoyed as she spanked the brats yet again, time was money and the little brats had cost her a fortune with every delay in closing the deal!
Wendy felt extremely unappreciated as her brother the Chaos Lord Luke Sevenson once again made Wendy deal with the money while he got to do all the fame and glory stuff! Wendy was absolutely sick of being treated like a cross between a money pot and a paper pushing shit kicker!
Luke might be good at killing people but he was a poor financial planner who had no clue how to actually run the financial aspects of a massive fleet. People had to get paid, plunder had to be sold, repairs had to be paid for. Countless thousands of things needed to be done to keep a mighty fleet and it's armies running and ALL of those things cost money, a HUGE amount of money in fact!
Wendy had spent her entire life keeping her stupid brother and his stupid space marines out of financial and administrative ruin!
Luke and Wendy were both surviving members of a truly gigantic original crèche made up of scores of chaos children. Over the long centuries their crèche brothers and sisters had sadly dropped like flies and their crèche was now getting relatively few in number.
The most recent crèche sibling to die had been their poor sister Alyssa, vaporised to ash by a firestorm frigate opening fire with it's lance cannon on the hive city she was staying in! Wendy dearly missed her sister so much, centuries together suddenly at an end!
The crèche Luke and Wendy had grown up in was now over 300 years old, at least what's left of it was. Together this crèche made up the core of the Sevenson Royal family, and together their crèche had risen to power in an orgy of blood and violence. Luke and Wendy together ruled their crèche, Luke was the muscle and Wendy was the brains behind that actually organised everything.
Wendy had a disturbingly close relationship with her brother Luke. In fact she was currently pregnant to Luke! He had impregnated almost every woman on the damn ship already and couldn't even keep his cum out of his own sister!
Despite her petite appearance Wendy was heavily pregnant, the appearance of a flat belly was a supernatural gift of Slaanesh that bent and folded space inside Wendy's body, letting her fit an unnatural amount of "stuff" inside her tiny petite body. She not only had a baby hidden inside her spacial folding, but also her massive daemonic muscles that gave her her strength and speed, if she were to conform to normal space curvature then she would be the size of a space marine with all of her daemonic muscles!
Wendy was a type of chaos champion that was rarely seen but absolutely essential to the forces of chaos, an Administrative Chaos Champion who actually did all the real work!
Every Chaos Lord worth his salt had at least one Wendy type champion to do the tedious work involved in organising and financing the running of their fleets and domains. Without the Wendy's of the galaxy pushing paper then every one of Abaddon the Despoiler's black crusades would have not even made it outside of the eye of Terror before the ships ran out of fuel and the crew mutinied because they had not been paid!
Wendy was the fat spider who sat right in the middle of a corrupt web of finances and payrolls. SHE was the one who made sure that everyone got paid on time, SHE was the one who bought and ordered every single bullet and every last drop of fuel. Without Wendy this entire fleet simply would not function!
Right now instead of spending quality time with her newly reconciled yummy wife Octavia, Wendy was having to peddle Luke's spoils of war to some moronic Orks! It just wasn't fair!
"We give ya LOTS of teef for da nukes!" The Ork merchant offered in what was apparently a very generous offer, distracting Wendy from her angry thoughts.
"You can take your teeth and shove them up your ass! I don't want your fucking teeth, they are worthless to me! I want gold, human currencies, precious stones, stuff like that! Humans don't trade in teeth!" Wendy screamed at the Ork in rage.
"Why ya want dat worthless stuff?" The Ork merchant asked incredulously.
Wendy was rapidly reaching the end of her patience with this stupid xenos, Orks had to be the DUMBEST fucking spacefaring race in the entire galaxy! Why did SHE have to deal with this!
It just wasn't FAIR!
***...
The Retribution class battleship "Dictator of Righteousness" entered orbit of the Ork planet of Smashabashastompa, finding the planet's surface nuked to oblivion and the chaos fleet gone.
Spelled out across the planet's scorched surface, giant nuclear weapons craters spelled out in giant letters visible from orbit the words "HERE'S WHAT I THINK OF YOUR TEETH"!
Inquisitor Eduardo Garcia gazed at the display in utter amazement. The words were spelled in the distinct form of low gothic used only by a small number of Night Lords factions including the "Royal family" faction he was pursuing. It could only be the work of the combined fleet harbouring Egg Sevenson!
In orbit of Smashabashastompa was the blasted apart remains of an entire Ork fleet, mostly Onslaught attack ships and the occasional kill cruiser, as well as chunks of chaos ships but no actual chaos wrecks. It was obvious that an extremely one sided space battle had taken place here recently.
The Ork ships had been completely obliterated by what could only be the legendary firepower of the dreaded "Nightmare Asylum", a fearsome Gloriana class battleship that was the flagship of Night Lords Chaos Lord Luke Sevenson. No other class of vessel could have dealt out the sheer amount of damage the Ork ships had suffered!
For many hours the Dictator of Righteousness combed through the orbital wreckage and debris field, finding a few hundred Ork survivors in random pressurised chunks of space ships as well as a wealth of other information. For many hours more Inquisitor Eduardo Garcia tortured and interrogated the Orks for information and got a good idea of what had happened here.
The Night Lords Chaos Lord had apparently gotten his psychotic sister Wendy to attempt trade negotiations with the Orks. Suffice to say that these negotiations had broken down and Wendy had viciously nuked the planet before then obliterating the entire Ork fleet in orbit. The chaos fleet had then simply stolen everything they wanted from the wreckage in orbit and ruins on the ground and then simply left.
The entire spectacle was a wake up call to Inquisitor Garcia that he was in over his head with his current tactics. The Dictator of Righteousness was a mighty battleship by normal standards, but against a Gloriana class Battleship which was supported by an entire chaos war fleet the Dictator of Righteousness alone didn't stand a chance. Eduardo had to be smarter than this or he would simply be obliterated just like these Orks!
What he really needed was for some other people to do the bulk of the fighting for him...
***...
Senior Iron Warriors Warsmith Gustaf BitterHeart's emotional brain hemisphere sneered as he read the anonymous tipoff his astropaths had received, so the Steel Brethren traitors were teaming up with the Night Lords to destroy Gustaf BitterHeart were they?! Gustaf's emotional hemisphere was not surprised in the least!
The Steel Brethren were traitors to the entire Iron Warriors Legion, banished from the legion by the primarch Perturabo himself for their treachery during the Dispute of Iron thousands of years ago. Ever since then various detachments of the Steel Brethren had fought against Iron Warrior legion's interests in the name of "revenge", Bah!
According to the tip off the Steel Brethren had joined up with a new upstart faction of Night Lords called the "Royal family". The Royal family had somehow gotten hold of a priceless Gloriana class battleship and had apparently agreed to use it to drive Gustaf BitterHeart's forces out of the Maelstrom, because of some debt the Royal family owed the Steel Brethren!
What arrogance! The fools obviously didn't know that no matter how hard an armour was, the TRUE Iron Warriors would find a way to crack it!
"Be wary, we don't know who sent this information and also don't know if it is correct or not," Gustaf's logical brain hemisphere warned.
"So what if it's "true", the Steel Brethren are traitor scum who don't deserve such niceties as true and false!" Emotional hemisphere Gustaf screamed at Logical hemisphere Gustaf.
"That certainly is a... novel idea. Are you suggesting that the rules of logic act differently for different people based on how you feel about them?" Logic hemisphere asked.
"Enough of your babble! I want to attack the Steel Brethren, any excuse will do!" Emotion hemisphere raged back.
Gustaf BitterHeart was in a very real sense a man of two minds. In his one body dwelled two completely different people who somehow had to agree on how they shared control of their one body. The two people were known to each other as Emotion and Logic, each occupying one hemisphere of Gustaf's brain, a result of spending far too much time exposed to the warp.
Occupying the right hemisphere was Emotion. Emotion was spontaneous, reckless, subjective and emotional, all raw passion and feeling. Occupying the left hemisphere was Logic. Logic was patient, cautious, objective and logical, always calculating and never out of control. Given the choice both hemispheres would happily kill the other hemisphere, but could not survive themselves if they did so instead they were forced to find some way to cooperate.
The two hemispheres were over 10,000 years old, the man "Gustaf" that they together made up had fought in first the Great Crusade and then later in the Horus Heresy itself. They had only survived this long by learning how to get along, and in particular they had only survived because Logic almost always determined Gustaf's final actions.
Emotion was nothing more than a parasite and a nuisance, forever threatening to ruin careful plans with reckless insanity. But thankfully Emotion was also a very weak parasite in the long term, he had no method and no process, always got impatient in an impasse first and let Logic have his way.
It was the way of the universe, logic and mathematics would always be stronger than emotions and whims. Every creature with a mind had it's own meaningless subjective emotions, differing not only with the subjective experiences of other creatures, but even differing between one day and the next in the one individual creature. It was absurd and meaningless, completely different from how logic and mathematics worked.
The emotions said that one plus one equals different numbers at different times depending upon how one felt at the time. But logic said that one plus one ALWAYS equals two regardless of how an individual felt about this. This meant that in a war between Logic and Emotion, Logic would always inevitably win.
Logic thought carefully about the anonymous astropathic message and decided that he needed more information before making a decision about it. The message had been highly emotional but vague in actual details about a lot of questions that Logic needed answers to. He had many means at his disposal to follow up on this however, ranging from chaos sorcerers to physically sending out ships to investigate directly. Logic logically decided to use every method at his disposal all at the same time.
Emotion raged at Logic's hesitancy to simply attack first and ask questions later, and used his veto power to stop Logic from beginning investigations. Emotion then tried to order the shared body to order an immediate attack from the Iron Warriors fleet but Logic used his own veto power to block this unwise decision.
Both Logic and Emotion could (and frequently did) veto the actions of the other, both could only do anything if the other did not veto. This led to stalemates that resulted in the body of Gustaf BitterHeart remaining still. The other Iron Warriors simply assumed that Gustaf was always very deep in thought and they considered him to be very wise. At the end of these bitter veto battles the impatient and impermanent Emotion would always eventually give in to the eternal unchanging patience of Logic, resulting in wise decisions.
As a result of these battles for supremacy the Iron Warriors Warsmith that was Gustaf BitterHeart always took a long time to do anything, but when he finally did act his actions were among the wisest and most sensible of any Chaos Space Marine in the entire Iron Warriors legion. It was because of this solid dependability that Gustaf had risen through the ranks to become a Warsmith and Perturabo himself considered Gustaf to be one of his more dependable servants.
Gustaf had risen far indeed. He now commanded 4000 Iron Warriors Chaos Space Marines and ruled 5 star systems in the southeast of the Maelstrom on behalf of Perturabo. His worlds were massive factories of war that churned out a never ending flood of new escort warships for the Iron Warriors fleets.
He currently had thousands of Iconoclast class destroyers awaiting transport to waiting Iron Warriors fleets throughout the Maelstrom. Perturabo's fleets in the Maelstrom burned through Iconoclast class destroyers at a fearful rate and it was Gustaf BitterHeart's job to continually supply more to replace these losses.
Perhaps it would be prudent if the next convoy of 2000 Iconoclast class destroyers took a slight detour to see what the Steel Brethren were up to?