Chapter 6D
Hapela Theta Rho 1 really was a miserable place to live. It was so radioactive during the day that it was lethal to anyone who wasn't buried deep under many many meters of the solid iron of the surface. And it was so cold that anyone without a heated space suit would freeze solid in second on the surface!
Egg was absolutely FREEZING in her mile deep room in the subterranean city of Eggs Guard. Hiding behind a mile of solid iron, Egg was completely safe, even safer than on the Gloriana class battleship the "Nightmare Asylum"! Absolutely NOTHING could get at her down here!
The sounds of even the periodic cyclonic torpedoes that futilely attempted Exterminatus of the planet could not be heard down here. They were just down to deep.
The Steel Brethren had very carefully designed this place for the sole purpose of keeping Egg and her loved ones safe. The city had no other industry besides things related to the defence of the Alpha plus.
It had taken many millions of people many weeks with industrial melta guns to carve this city out of the raw iron of the planet, and it was guarded by hundreds of thick blast doors along it's only approach tunnel. The construction was still ongoing with plans for ever deeper levels built over the next few months!
Teleportarium disruption fields encased the entire city to prevent any unwanted intrusion and void shield generators provided additional protection. Thousands of miles of cunning tunnels filled the upper (but still a mile down) levels of the city proper, forming a maze that was very easy to defend against anyone who burrowed down from the surface.
Absolutely all power and most materials came from a stockpile of resources the chaos forces had taken with them, the entire Hapela Theta Rho system was completely barren of everything except iron and lacked any energy sources. Every last unit of energy had to be carefully husbanded to ensure that the limited nuclear fuel lasted as long as possible, and that meant that it was heated only just enough to keep everyone alive if they dressed in winter clothing!
Oh holy Slaanesh it was cold!
Egg shivered in her heavy synthetic fabric winter clothes, even her face covered by a thick scarf and insulated goggles. The only thing that was warm was the radioisotope thermogenerator power supply of her armoured psychic nullifying helmet, but this heat was deliberately radiated over a large surface area of the helmet's surface so that it was merely lukewarm!
The only light that Egg had to see with was the light from her tiny high efficiency LED flashlight and the feeble little green light on her helmet that indicates it was functioning properly. She shivered as she gave the flashlight a shake, recharging the battery by some internal system that generated power when shook. It was so dark here!
The city of Eggs Guard was home to 3 million people, almost all something in the military. No one ever entered anymore as a security measure, and no one ever left. They had nothing at all except their own supplies and these supplies had to last long enough for Egg to master her powers ten years from now!
The 5 planets of the Hapela Theta Rho system were now a perpetual war zone between the forces of chaos and the Imperium of Man.
The outermost planet Hapela Theta Rho 5 was now an impregnable imperial fortress world, home to millions of imperial guard soldiers and now even had it's own planetary governor as an official imperial world!
Hapela Theta Rho 2, 3 and 4 were heavily contested war zones of trenches and bunkers. During the lethal radiation of the day all sides had to hide deep under the iron ground, emerging only during the relative safety of night to attempt to capture more ground from each other in deadly trench warfare.
Only Hapela Theta Rho 1 was completely under Chaos control, and that was only because of Egg herself was here and the imperial forces feared her terrible psychic wrath. They instead resigned themselves to lobbing long range nuclear weapons at the planet from afar, meaning that no one could safely work on surface construction projects.
The surface of the planet was now wreathed in a faint red glow from all the nuclear detonations heating up the top few meters of surface iron to melting point. It was just a shame that none of this heat reached Egg through the mile of sluggishly heat resistant cold iron! The planet even had a very tiny faint atmosphere now from all the detonations, they were just THAT constant!
Every few days Egg and her loved ones were relocated to an even deeper level of the city, following the construction efforts as they melted and cut their way ever deeper into the iron core, ever further from the dangerous surface. Egg liked this because at the start of each relocation the new sections still held a tiny amount of the residual warmth from the cutting torches and melta guns. It was just a shame that it never lasted long!
The entire planet was covered in small isolated garrison cities like this one, all of them burrowing ever deeper ahead of the melting caused by the atomic bombs. It was a continual race against time for those other cities who were much closer to the surface than Eggs Guard and had much less resources available for digging.
Compared to these miserable lesser cities Eggs Guard was a safe and secure metropolis with abundant supplies of nuclear fuel and a highly established industry that produced synthetic food and recycled the air, and manufactured everything the city needed.
***...
The planet Hapela Theta Rho 4 was a much more grim place as the nighttime face of the planet erupted in another nightlong cycle of vicious war. With the lack of warp travel these planets were vital staging area for the various fleets to store fuel and ammunition, as well as providing some much needed physical cover by hiding behind the planets from enemy laser beams.
Millions of Imperial Guardsmen in spacesuits battled against millions of mutant and heretic soldiers in spacesuits in brutal trench warfare supported by space marines and vehicles on both sides.
Chaos Colonel Otto Armstrong cursed to himself in his command bunker as his regiment of chaos militia fighters got mauled in the latest imperial attack by the Mia Rho 101st and Cadian 234th infantry regiments. The Night Lords had flanked the Cadian 234th infantry regiment but had then fled from the synthetic diamond tipped armour piercing bullets of the Mia Rho 101st's standard issue combat rifles! The fucking cowards!
With the flank attack thwarted the two Imperial Guard regiments had then barrelled into Colonel Armstrong's unsupported militia regiment and it was a massacre!
This terrain was simply not suited for combat! Before men had arrived here this planet had been a perfectly smooth sphere of solid iron, with nothing more than inches deep impact craters from meteor impacts to mark the surface. It had no cover of any kind and the men could not dig fox holes or trenches into the ground without some kind of industrial strength metal cutting torches or meltas!
It had taken armies of workers with meltas to burn out the crude trenches and bunkers the men took cover in, and with the fuel shortages these defences were simply inadequate!
Colonel Armstrong understood the strategic situation, he knew just how vital it was to keep the Imperial forces from claiming this vitally strategic planet for as long as possible. Their lives all depended on the Alpha Plus now, they needed to buy her more time to master her powers!
The display of her awesome powers during the space battle of Hapela Theta Rho 1 had been very impressive but also very unstable. A number of chaos ships had been accidentally crippled by the little girl's powers, causing significant loss of life. The Alpha Plus simply was not stable enough yet to be deployed safely in every single battle, and deploying her constantly in battle before her training was complete opened her up to suffering from the lethal perils of untrained warp use!
Colonel Armstrong had no doubt that the little girl would do her duty, so it was also up to every member of the chaos armed forces to do their duty as well. These were the people of chaos, fighting to protect their families and children from the Imperial tyrants who would kill them all.
Otto Armstrong himself was a family man with many sex slaves and a wife (who was also a sex slave). He loved his women the way that any man in the galaxy loves their long term female lovers, they might be his slaves but he considered them all as being his wives. He treated them very well and they had borne him a multitude of children.
Otto's entire military career was all about providing for his "wives" and children. He fought so hard for each promotion because it meant a pay rise to better provide for his large family. He worked himself to the bone with discipline and devotion, the epitome of a dedicated professional soldier, all for the sake of providing for his family.
Colonel Armstrong was not an evil man, he was not unnecessarily unkind and he did not try to hurt people. He owned female slaves as lovers but that was just one of the most common types of romantic relationship in this chaos worshipping culture. His slave women all called him "Husband" and the relationship dynamic was a genuine polygamous romantic relationship between a husband and his mostly happy wives.
He loved his kids regardless of whether they were from his "official" wife or from one of the other slave women, and had made sure that they were officially registered to avoid them inheriting slavery from their mothers. His children had grown up free and would all share in the inheritance if he died.
And Colonel Armstrong was not alone in not being a particularly evil person. On the whole most of his regiment were men with families and friends outside of their military roles. Almost all of them had a special someone back home on one of the ships who was right now praying to the chaos gods for their safety.
These fighting men and women could be a little deranged sure, that was just what chaos did to people, but that didn't make them automatically evil. All were individuals with their own stories and their own place on the scale of morality. They certainly didn't deserve to die just for fighting to protect their people from extermination!
Otto sighed in relief as a detachment from the "Indigo Foundation" mutant hoard flanked the Mia Rho 101st infantry regiment and slowed their momentum sufficiently for the remaining troops of Otto's regiment to hold the line without falling back. They had only just avoided being completely routed!
This really was a miserable place for any soldier to die, Otto was just glad that today at least he would not be joining the multitudes of dead here!
For many long hours his regiment of chaos heretic militia soldiers stubbornly held the line against endless waves of the massive 100000 strong Mia Rho 101st infantry regiment. The Mia Rho soldiers hailed from one of the most heavily polluted and overcrowded hive worlds in the entire Imperium of Man, human lives were VERY cheap for them making them completely expendable for attrition warfare.
The Cadians had enough sense to hang back as the Indigo Foundation mutant hoard viciously flanked the advance, but the Mia Rhos just advanced implacably no matter how many casualties they took! They were all eager to die for the Emperor to earn their many virgins in paradise, positively throwing themselves into the lines of fire to enter paradise all the faster!
These men were MANIACS! Even Khorne worshippers had more battle sense then these fanatics!
The regiments of Mia Rho were famously known as the "1000 Bullets". Each soldier was issued with a mass produced auto gun that took only a very rare caliber of ammunition produced almost nowhere else, and each gun came with a supply of 1000 synthetic diamond tipped bullets that could cut into even space marine power armour. The catch was these were the ONLY bullets they were ever given!
The Mia Rho soldiers were not expected to SURVIVE long enough in battle to fire all 1000 bullets! Those who did simply took unused bullets from their dead comrades to keep fighting! These men existed only to act as very hard hitting cannon fodder, and the imperial guard had an inexhaustible supply of replacements for them!
The chaos forces could not replace their own losses so easily, every life lost made the chaos forces weaker. The chaos women were frantically getting pregnant to produce more soldiers but it would take years before these new generations were old enough to help the war effort. Little by little the chaos forces were getting steadily weaker.
Mauled but defiant the forces of chaos cheered as the deadly radioactive neutron pulsar star lurked just over the horizon. Combatants from all sides frantically evacuated themselves and their (relatively few) surviving wounded deep under ground into the overcrowded bunkers that sunk into the walls of the trenches.
The desperate chaos workers swarmed out of the trenches and gathered the bodies and equipment of the dead as others laid mines and other traps. With seconds to spare the workers fled below ground.
The pulsar Hapela Theta Rho rose over the horizon and bathed everything with lethal x rays and gamma rays in a rapidly pulsating beam. The gamma rays in particular were strong enough to penetrate many meters of solid iron. No space suit or power armour could protect against this amount of gamma radiation, Egg had been protected by hiding in the shadow of the planet Hapela Theta Rho 1 during the space battle.
A space ship's thick metal hull and superstructure could absorb enough radiation to make only the closest 20 to 40 meter of internal space on the side facing the pulsar dangerous, the lines of metal walls and metal machinery quickly absorbed the gamma photons to a safe level beyond this. But on the ground there was simply no armour thick enough to provide this protection.
Battle tanks easily survived the radiation on the daytime surface with only minor damage to electrical systems from the intense electromagnetic pulsing of the pulsar, but any crew inside the tanks at the time had every cell in their bodies killed and sterilised by the complete and utter destruction of their DNA. Even a TYRANID could not survive this level of radiation, no biological life could!
The battle field was now completely lifeless, anything not taking shelter underground was now dead as it was possible to BE dead. Nothing moved, all was still. The land mines and other mechanical objects were unaffected by the blaze of radiation, the nonliving explosives unaffected by x rays and gamma rays. Until the pulsar dipped back below the horizon this battle field would remain completely undisturbed.
Deep below many many meters of the thick solid iron surface of the planet the chaos forces desperately prepared for the next night. They had many wounded mutants who's mutations allowed them to survive being shot in the hard vacuum of space without having all the blood sucked out, but very few normal human wounded. The space suits were designed so that the different body sections were separated by an airtight gel seals stopping the entire suit depressurising if an arm or leg was punctured, but it still was usually lethal to expose any bleeding wound to the hard vacuum!
The workers had collected a very plentiful harvest of dead today, the Mia Rho 101st had gotten VERY close to the trenches. Ammunition and equipment had been salvaged in abundance, giving Colonel Armstrong's regiment diamond tipped armour piercing bullet battle rifles to defend against enemy space marines and armoured storm troopers!
Even better, they had gathered THOUSANDS of DEAD BODIES! Food was in very short supply here and these bodies would give them full bellies today!
The vacuum of space had completely dried out this human meat, keeping it fresh. The insulated space suits had also kept the meat from reaching the near absolute zero temperatures of the surface of the battlefield, meaning that it took less of the precious energy to thaw it enough to safely eat!
The soldiers greedily undressed the dead bodies and sawed them into chunks, putting the chunks on top of the heat sink of the portable deuterium plasma fusion generator that was recharging their las gun batteries and providing the bunker with power. When the meat was sufficiently warmed the men and women eagerly ate the chewy dry flesh like jerky.
The soldiers celebrated surviving another day, consuming their bounty of meat and fucking each other passionately, knowing that this might be their last day alive. They mourned their dead in ceremonies, and then ATE their dead just as the dead would have wanted. They were all comrades and all of them eagerly encouraged their fellows to get a good meal out of them once their time came, they were made out of meat and were glad to help keep their comrades from starving.
Colonel Otto Armstrong celebrated with the regiment, mourning each fallen by name and joining with them in the celebrations.
The soldiers had enormous respect for their burly Colonel, 14 years ago he had been a lowly private like the rest of them, and had risen through the ranks by hard work, valour, skill, and just a little bit of corruption. It had taken HUGE balls to blackmail Chaos Champion of Slaanesh Wendy Sevenson into securing his promotion from a mere sergeant to a company captain, and even bigger balls to survive the lethal politics to become Colonel of an entire regiment! The enlisted soldiers always had more respect for officers like Otto who had formerly been as low ranking as them, it made him "one of them" and gave them hope that they too could rise through the ranks without going to some very expensive military academy they could never afford.
Colonel Armstrong encouraged the soldiers valour in combat, issuing medals and awarding battlefield promotions to replace casualties. He had a lot of work to do but he made time for his soldiers, they deserved no less. He was proud of them, just so terribly proud, and he would give these brave heroes the RESPECT they deserved!
***...
Inquisitor Horatio Hoffman frowned grimly as he heard the reports that the chaos forces on the 4th planet of the Hapela Theta Rho system had resisted yet another advance without any significant gains in capturing ground. The imperium NEEDED the 4th planet completely secured to be certain of cutting off any attempts by the enemy of fleeing with the Alpha Plus!
The chaos forces continued to construct subsurface laser batteries to snipe at ships in orbit, preventing the Imperial fleet from using the shadow of the planet for outside repairs on damaged ships! The only way to repair some of the space ship damage was by repair teams doing space walks, but the only places a space walk could be safely performed was behind the radiation absorbing bulk of one of the planets!
There of course had been grand plans to build giant metal sheets thick enough to absorb the gamma rays and then tow them to a suitably strategic location in orbit so ships could hide behind them for repairs, but this was ridiculously impractical! They needed results NOW!
Every day they delayed Egg Sevenson got better trained in the use of her powers and became more dangerous! This was not the time to get bogged down in lengthy engagements, they needed to kill Egg Sevenson while she was still unstable or they would NEVER get this chance again!
The Inquisition didn't give two shits about capturing this worthless system for the Imperium. They didn't come here to set up huge space infrastructure projects like the Imperial Navy was considering. They came here SOLELY to kill an Alpha Plus psyker, this was the ONLY thing that mattered here!
The new Imperial Governor of Hapela Theta Rho 5 was spouting all kinds of mad schemes about the industry and infrastructure of his new planet, wasting resources on constructing a viable thriving colony here. Horatio was all in favour of expanding the boarders of the Imperium, but in reality this place would be at best a 4th rate imperial mining world once Egg Sevenson was dead. It had a lot of useful metal sure, but the location was absolutely terrible!
Killing Egg Sevenson was not going to be easy even now. Even if they captured every other planet and shot down every ship in the chaos fleet they still had to somehow destroy her down on the ground of Hapela Theta Rho 1! They couldn't just leave her stranded down there and hope that she starved to death, once she mastered her powers she would be able to use her psychic powers to SINGLEHANDEDLY power the entire planetary power grid and turn the planet into an industrial forge world below the surface until she had enough production capabilities to build a fleet of chaos warships large enough to escape the system!
The ONLY way to stop this was to capture the 4 outer planets as quickly as possible and then harass the Alpha Plus on the surface with endless waves of soldiers fighting both below ground and on the surface all the time until sheer lack of sleep caused her to either suffer the perils of the warp (which might result in daemonic possession which was a BAD thing) or become so exhausted that she can no longer use her powers.
If they DIDN'T secure the 4 outer planets then the chaos forces on the ground would just keep sniping ships with subsurface laser batteries, which would destroy troop transports and buy Egg Sevenson time to sleep! She MUST NOT sleep or train, it was IMPERATIVE to keep the pressure on until exhaustion defeated her!
Once she was fully trained this would still work, but it would cost even more lives. The need to SLEEP was the only real weakness of a fully trained Alpha Plus, but a fully trained one was a much more efficient killer who could buy themselves more time for short naps. And as long as the naps added up to about 6-8 hours a day, a fully trained Alpha Plus could keep fighting indefinitely!
"These delays will cost millions of lives later, stop wasting TIME! We need that planet captured NOW!" Horatio demanded of the Imperial Guard general in command of all Imperial Guard forces in the system.
"Yes Inquisitor, as soon as the sun goes down we will continue advancing on the chaos held section of the planet." General Douglas Steele said cheerfully.
"No you fool, not when the sun goes down, RIGHT NOW! Your men have industrial melta guns, I ORDER you to order them to burn out a tunnel underground to reach the enemy bunkers before sundown! The night's fighting will begin inside the enemy's own line is that understood general?" Inquisitor Hoffman ordered with authority.
"Yes Inquisitor, right away!" General Steele replied and raced off to give the order.
Finally some progress might be made now Horatio thought.