Chapter 210: Internal Affairs
"Still reading, still reading."
Karna's voice came from behind, tinged with a languid helplessness. Arthur, who had been engrossed in the records in his hands, paused and turned his head with a raised eyebrow. The last rays of the setting sun danced on the tips of Karna's pale golden hair, creating a faint halo. He looked at his companion, who should have been busy in the ecclesiastical sanctum, a flicker of surprise in his eyes.
"Why are you starting to act like Ramesses?" Arthur asked, closing the codex in his hands, the inscribed pages making a soft, scraping sound as they met.
"Have you finished instructing your students? Have you handled the church's promotional materials? Have you completed the ideological alignment within the successor chapters? Have the restructuring talks with the local Ecclesiarchy been concluded...?"
He counted them off, unhurried. With each item, the great bell of the distant cathedral seemed to toll softly.
"Stop, stop!" Karna quickly raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Not even my mother nags me this much."
Arthur fell silent, shaking his head. He looked back down at the records, his gaze returning to the dense, coded text.
"Ah, just let me hide for a bit," Karna said, relaxing as Arthur didn't press him further. He flopped onto a nearby bench. He glanced sideways at the Astartes below who, despite their barely concealed excitement, were still maintaining a disciplined, stern-faced formation. He let out a soft sigh, the tension finally leaving his shoulders.
Karna understood the fervent faith of the Imperial populace, but sometimes, it was just too much. With five Primarchs now gathered on Macragge, everyone from the highest Imperial nobles to the lowest pilgrims who worked as indentured laborers on void-ships just to drift through the stars, had flocked to Macragge as if they had finally found an outlet for all their hopes and fears.
The sound of a hundred million people cheering, a sea of humanity filling the plazas, the tear-streaked faces of the old, the young holding up homemade holy symbols, children perched on their parents' shoulders, all screaming the Primarchs' names until their voices were raw... The weight of their expectations was terrifying, far more so than when he had done poverty alleviation work in the mountains back in his old life.
The memory of those impoverished mountain villages overlapped with the sea of faces before him. The same hopeful eyes, but the weight here was a million times heavier.
But he couldn't just ignore it. In this universe, faith was a tangible force. If you didn't occupy that high ground, someone else would. And then, who knows what they would end up worshipping. Karna thought of the masses struggling in the underhives, of the pitiful souls seduced by heresy, of the bodies he had seen with his own eyes, twisted and deformed by their faith in the Ruinous Powers.
At the very least, he could turn that faith into real food and water for his followers, instead of making them sprout a few extra tentacles or alien organs. The thought brought another wave of immense pressure. The people of the Imperium were resilient and devout. If they weren't pushed to a point where living itself was a form of torture, they would never turn to heretical beliefs. In this galaxy, to be able to believe in something reliable was a kind of luck.
"Still analyzing past cases of the Icarus Protocol? Not going to look at the current battle-reports?" He casually swiped two pastries from the table, and with a flick of his fingers, pushed a document bearing the seal of the Ecclesiarchy in front of Arthur as if by magic.
"The representative of the Ecclesiarchy came to see me," he said.
Arthur's gaze lifted from the tactical logs. He glanced at the document, and his brow furrowed almost imperceptibly. "It was just the annihilation of an explorator fleet. There's no reference value." He shook his head, his tone flat. The Ironwing used to fight wars of annihilation and technological recovery against entire forge worlds. Dealing with a single fleet was just a small part of those larger operational plans. But the way his fingertips tapped on the edge of the document betrayed his thoughts.
Tarentus was putting on the pressure.
The forge world of Tarentus was a relatively powerful Mechanicus faction within the Ultramar Sector. In the late stages of the Tyranid invasion, an explorator fleet, composed mainly of technical teams, had entered the disaster zone. On one hand, they intended to annex the forge-cities that had suffered heavy losses in the conflict and expand their own technological reserves. On the other hand, because of the existence of numerous industrial worlds like Kaus in Ultramar, the Mechanicus had always tried to reduce the production share of these worlds to strengthen their own industrial control over the sector.
In theory, a technical team from a forge world was coming to provide technological aid. After all, compared to the Imperial nobles, the tech-priests could at least actually build factories. Even if they only gave the Imperium a tenth of the final production capacity, it was a fleece the Imperium could accept. And this was not the first time the Mechanicus had taken advantage of a crisis.
The eastern fringe, ravaged by the swarm, was a region where one could act freely without worrying about losses. And Romulus already had a clear plan for the sector's recovery, and with the help of the various Chapters, had already installed STCs on the core planets.
But after repeated warnings, this explorator fleet had turned a deaf ear, and had even launched an operation to seize an STC. The result was that the leading Magos had suffered a "sudden cerebral component failure," causing the fleet to "fly into a black hole" and vanish without a trace. Tarentus had a rather large opinion about this.
Because of the Magos's sudden death, a neural implant technology that Tarentus had mastered, which could artificially grant psychic potential to an individual, was completely lost. This meant that in the future, they would either have to trade with other forge worlds for similar technology, or rely on the Imperium's astropaths to operate their explorator fleets. And placing their lifeline in the hands of the Imperium was absolutely out of the question.
But the Magos Council had no leads. The entire explorator fleet had vanished as if into thin air, without leaving so much as a single screw behind. Everyone had a vague idea of who was responsible, but no one dared to point a finger.
So Tarentus had to foot the bill for their own losses, and at the same time, filed a complaint with Mars and began to make trouble for other Imperial departments. The Imperium, in turn, was the first to back down, and had to assign the recovery work of the Damocles Gulf, which had been severely damaged in the war against the T'au Empire, to Tarentus.
"So, in short, during the conflict, the Ecclesiarchy wanted to get in on the action, but now their production capacity is going to be cut, so they need our help..."
"These High Lords really can't handle the pressure, can they?" Karna remarked.
"The Imperium is still too reliant on the Mechanicus," Arthur sighed. Compared to them, who could execute an uncooperative Magos without a second thought, the Imperium had much more to consider. "But the Mechanicus also needs a way to save face. They don't dare to truly break with us now, at least not before they reach an internal consensus."
He remained calm about the Mechanicus's reaction. Conflict was normal. If you didn't have a fight every now and then, you wouldn't even know you were still in the 41st Millennium.
The current problem the Imperium faced with the Mechanicus was their love of collecting knowledge, but not their love of sharing it. In the 30k era, because the Emperor was physically present, they were willing to put their knowledge to use. In the 40k era, they preferred to keep it for themselves. Even when the Inquisition and the Adeptus Arbites came to collect a technology tithe, they couldn't help but encrypt the technology they handed over.
In the 30k era, the Imperium had a large number of mortal scientists. Factions like the Selenar gene-cults of Luna had been fully integrated. But in the 40k era, the Mechanicus had almost completely monopolized the high-tech sector, leading to a general technological decline in the Imperium.
In terms of military strength, the Mechanicus, itself a fractured entity, was not necessarily stronger than the forces the Imperium could muster. But winning a fight was pointless. You don't have the technical experts. You don't have the production experts. Of the eighteen Legions of old, all had the strength to take on the Mechanicus. But why was only the First Legion granted the priority firing rights of the Icarus Protocol? Because the First Legion was the only one with an independent industrial production system, and its personnel were trained completely independently of the Mechanicus.
And now? Even if the Mechanicus just handed a forge world over to the Imperium, there was no one in the current Imperium who could run the thing. That was why the Mechanicus had grown more and more audacious.
But the Dawnbreakers didn't have that problem. Because they truly did not need the Mechanicus.
For cutting-edge technology, they had their cooperation with Cawl. They also had technical experts like Barabas Dantioch. Because of their information-imprinting ability, one was all, and they had no fear of a technological fault. For production, they had psycho-materialization. Their fleet of large warships had been replenished during the crusade, and the combat forces at their disposal were more than enough to make the Mechanicus think twice for the time being.
We have everything we need. Sanction us? Sanction us with what?
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