Askin took a steep drink from his flask, willing the burning in his throat to wash away the truth.

They were all going to die. It was an almost calming thought that eased the stress tearing through him with its certainty. He knew it deep down that whatever he did there would be no forgiveness and nothing like mercy. The Administratum didn't work that way and even a simple error would be punished beyond belief.

This was not a simple error.

Raxis III was a peaceful world that hadn't seen combat in his entire lifetime. Spared the horrors that plagued the rest of the galaxy and yet even at times such as these it was required that they maintain a few basic necessities.

You must always be vigilant for the signs of heresy.

A small standing army of PDF troops enough to meet their own needs. But it wasn't like they were near the frontlines, the most that they got to deal with was parades and bluster and perhaps very rarely a raiding ship that was vaporised in orbit by the planetary defence guns.

An armoured core centred around a dozen battalions of tanks. Perhaps not enough to fight off a full scale Ork invasion, but certainly enough to hold the line until another planet could be contacted. Enough that they would not dishonour themselves if the Imperium called them up.

The first line of tanks existed, carefully sealed in preparation for the day they would be deployed. The second line looked almost as good, only one defectively sealed tank out of a hundred.

The back of the storage yard hadn't had a single serviceable tank. Due to rot where they'd been improperly sealed, due to time where they hadn't been replaced and a good number of them to actual tampering. Electronics stripped free; radios harvested.

It must have been going on for years, possibly before he'd been born. But there was no chance an Inquisitor would accept that answer. There was only one answer they would give.

You must always be vigilant for signs of heresy.

Some of the parts had been shipped in from an Admech forge world. You couldn't quietly set up a new Baneblade production facility no matter how hard you tried, they wouldn't even be able to get the schematics. Someone one day was going to have to admit that every record up to that point had been falsified. Their military was a paper tiger just waiting to collapse.

When it came out there would be hell to pay, heads rolling as every politician, serviceman and civilian who should have reported it were held to blame. The survivors would spend every waking moment being made to put it right, funds pulled from every other department in service to the war effort.

Or maybe it would be an actual war, and they would desperately need the tanks only to come and unseal them and find they were worthless.

When he'd stood for his position, when he'd sworn his oath to the Governor that he would serve the people on Raxis III to the best of his ability he'd had such hopes. Everything had been on the upward swing for the last twenty years as the Governor had launched a full blown overhaul of the medical system that had brought it within the price range of the average worker. And in the wake of their efforts the whole world had come alive from the malaise that had characterised the decades before.

Efforts to drive back poverty, to house the homeless and to show the people that the Imperium truly cared had all born fruit as management had found the resources to start improving the quality of life of the average citizen. Funds used to clean up the cities themselves, to purify the air of the taint spilled from factories. It was as if with just a touch the governor had found the money and resources needed to put the people first, and they had loved him for it.

Well, there had been more money to go around, it had just been carved out of the military budget. Was that so wrong? Should the military consume everything to the point where it sucked the life out of the very people it was meant to protect?

They had hoped for a brighter future.

He would not be the one to silence it.

He took another swig as liquid courage flowed through his veins once more. His smile slowly becoming steadier as he settled back into place.

Today he signed it off, a blue light flashing across the screen with every tick as every other man before him had done so. All checks had been conducted and he deemed the armoured core of their military perfectly fit for purpose. It would waste away a tiny bit more, and with the funds dedicated to it they would buy happiness for the people.

Perhaps in the future they would curse his name, and he would go down as a traitor worthy of a thousand punishments.

But yesterday the world had been on the edge of ruin, smog suffocating the survivors and with a youth dropping like flies to despair as they gave up on the Imperium. Better an undefended world than a corpse languishing in its own rot.


AN: So a classic Tzeentchian plot makes entire armies disappear into nothing. And in general the easiest way to make that happen is if they exist on paper only in the first place.

Making the punishment when something is reported harsher only makes people push to avoid reporting in many cases. And at harsh enough levels the Imperium is just shooting itself in the foot constantly.