-----------------------------
If we reach 8 comments, . You have five hours from the time this chapter is posted. If we reach the goal, the next chapter will be posted in eight hours.(Valid comments must include information about what you like or dislike about the story, what you would like to see about the story, or any questions you may have about the story, as the devil is in the details.)
-----------------------------
If there are spelling mistakes, please let me know.
Leave a comment; support is always appreciated.
I remind you to leave your ideas or what you would like to see.
-------------------------------
05.02.905.M38
-------------------------------
I was forced to direct a large-scale planetary purge. We went house by house, reading minds and executing everyone who had had a direct or indirect connection to the attempted demonic plot. We had been minutes away from that cursed planet becoming a world ruled by a mutant heretic, and I was not going to allow anything like that to ever even brush against such a possibility again.
There were many collaborators. Too many. And the worst part was that they were not in the upper echelons, as logic would suggest, but in the lowest strata of society. That was precisely why they slipped beneath our radar. Our surveillance had always been focused on the nobility, administrators, and positions of power, because they are usually the ones who lead or finance cults. This time, it wasn't like that.
The bastard who led the cult came from a family fallen from grace. A minor noble branch, forgotten, irrelevant in the eyes of the control systems. By not investigating those collapsed lineages in depth, it turned against us. If a full review had been carried out months earlier, when we took control of the planet, the portal would never have opened. Instead, now we had to deal with the consequences.
The battle severely damaged the mining tunnels. Almost half of production was rendered unusable. Collapsed infrastructure, galleries contaminated by warp residue, and entire zones permanently sealed. The economic impact was immediate.
The following days were worse. Mutant births began to be reported, outbreaks of collective psychosis, mass suicides. Social control started to fracture. New cults emerged spontaneously, all orbiting the same ideas of Tzeentch—reinterpreted, distorted, mutating from one cell to another like an infection.
I had no alternative.
I ordered the total purge of the planet.
A large part of the population had already been sent to colonize moons before the main events, which forced me to extend the investigation to other star systems. In the process, we eliminated several incipient cults that had formed on newly colonized worlds. I cut the problem at the root before it could replicate.
All things considered, the blow was manageable. It was only necessary to reap the lives of twenty million people to eradicate the dilemma completely. Considering the scale of the disaster avoided, it was an acceptable cost.
The mines, being low-quality basic minerals, were abandoned. There was no sense in investing resources in their recovery. In time, colonization will resume in other regions of the planet where richer and more stable deposits exist. For now, no.
The planet will remain uninhabited.
Time must pass. The secondary effects of the portal need to dissipate completely. I am not going to risk latent warp residues affecting a civilian population again. Until that happens, this world will not see human presence.
Because of this, I immediately modified the annexation protocols. From now on, the entire population of a target world would receive medical nanobots and tracking chips before even being relocated off-planet. In addition, I ordered a significant expansion of preventive mental screenings. There would be no more "clean" annexations based on assumptions. Every mind would be inspected.
The problem was obvious: that required more Ghosts. Many more.
And I didn't have them.
The portal had cost me more than one hundred and twenty Ghosts killed in combat. Spells, warp distortions, attacks that could not be blocked with armor or reflexes alone. In practical terms, I had lost more than a full year of recruitment—probably more. With a total force of barely fifteen hundred operational Ghosts, the loss represented almost ten percent of my best men in a single battle.
It was unacceptable.
As soon as the new year began, I committed resources at full scale to expand the Ghost network. I had to leave a permanent garrison of a thousand Ghosts on each planet under direct control. To achieve that, I needed to multiply production capacity by ten.
That meant massively expanding genetic laboratories and artificial womb complexes. It was not an option; it was a strategic necessity, because a single open portal meant losing the entire planet due to the effects it caused on the population. I would not face a similar situation again with insufficient forces.
The bottleneck remained the same. Although around a thousand Terran babies with Ghost genomes were produced per cycle, only ten percent reached an acceptable psionic index for the program. Among natural births, the figure was even worse: barely eight or ten viable candidates per year from a population that had already reached seven million Terrans.
Recruitment was ridiculously low for the threats we faced.
That had to change. And it would change, even if I had to completely rewrite the biological limits of our species.
That led me to order a massive collection of new genetic material from all my operatives. We had to determine whether the direct use of genetic material from active Ghosts could increase that proportion. Repeating the existing model was not enough. It had to be forced.
Everything, as always, ended up being reduced to a single variable: the budget.
We lived in a completely closed economy. The only things that came in and out were exchanges authorized by the State with other powers—in this case, Imperial planets. Our main export was food. It was easy to produce, did not require complex processes or pretending it was Imperial technology, and it sold well even on saturated worlds. Hunger was always a useful constant.
The problem wasn't selling. The problem was converting those Imperial thrones into resources that were actually usable.
Our main markets were industrial planets in the region. At best, they paid in thrones, a currency of limited value to us. In many other cases, they tried to pay with "technology": servitors, vox equipment, or heavy machinery the Dominion had stopped using centuries ago, back when we couldn't find functional equivalents. Much of that machinery depended almost entirely on manual labor, consumed absurd amounts of energy, and polluted the air until it became unbreathable in a matter of days. To them, it was modern equipment. To us, obsolete scrap.
Much of the technology the Imperium considered advanced was archaic by Dominion standards. Integrating it was not only inefficient; it demanded time, specialized personnel, and resources I was not willing to waste
Most of the nearby planets offered nothing of real interest—except for the mining worlds. The problem was that the ones truly worth exploiting lay far beyond our sphere of influence. Expanding the Ghost network that far would have been reckless. They were densely populated planets, with a high probability of psykers, Sisters of Battle, and even Space Marines present. It was not a front I wanted to open now, not after having lost so many Ghosts.
I couldn't send our warships either. We did not follow the Imperium's construction doctrine. Many of our vessels were built around the Yamato cannon, not macrocannons or thermal lances. We would stand out like a purple thumb in the void.
Imperial merchant ships, however, did not.
Imperial bureaucracy was our best infiltration route. Trading under their own banner allowed us to move where a war fleet never could. It was risky—there was always the possibility of being discovered—but no riskier than what we were already considering: launching open piracy operations.
After consulting and evaluating scenarios, I decided to initiate a new project.
I assigned the task to several Ghosts of absolute trust, operatives who did not yet have a planet assigned to govern. I needed individuals with independent judgment, the ability to improvise, and total loyalty. This was not a mission for novices.
I ordered the abduction of several Agria merchants. Their ships were seized along with their crews. Two major merchant vessels were completely emptied and immediately refitted. We filled them with Dominion naval personnel awaiting deployment, along with massive cargoes of servitors. They would be sent to trade in distant systems.
Naturally, we replaced their engines with ours—faster and more efficient.
Not everything was perfect. We had no astropaths. But the classic excuse could always be played: the astropath suffered a collapse, died in transit, severe migraines, warp interference. Temporary excuses, not permanent ones, but sufficient for limited journeys.
The target was the inner systems: mining planets with massive Imperial populations, where mineral output had to be colossal and food consumption equally high.
For a week we carried out all the necessary modifications—engine replacements, crew adaptation, full loading of the holds with food. One of the Ghosts read the mind of the captured merchant, extracted every useful memory, and then subjected him to physical modification surgery to replicate his appearance. It could have been done with psionic illusions, but a trained psyker would have detected the anomaly. I preferred something permanent.
When everything was ready, we took the first step.
Two Universe-class Mass Conveyors departed to trade using the captured merchant charters. The mission was simple: observe, negotiate, gauge reactions, and determine whether trading with the Imperium under its own identity was viable.
If it worked, the next step would be obvious.
I would order that every merchant crew arriving at Agria in search of food be replaced—systematically.
Then my attention turned to the T'au. The process of transferring control was still ongoing. Millions of T'au had to evacuate planets that were now Dominion property, and the process was slow. The T'au lacked sufficient mass-transport capacity to move populations of that size, and removing all their people would take years. We did not allow them to use our military ships to accelerate the evacuation. That problem was theirs.
Dal'yth had been renamed Augustgrad. Many officers preferred to put a bullet in their heads rather than keep pronouncing a name imposed by the T'au.
We installed a transposition matrix and established a temporary military camp. As long as T'au ships continued to arrive regularly, we could not permanently fortify the planet. We were not going to make it easier for them to obtain photographs or data that would allow them to understand how our defensive systems worked.
For the moment, there were no plans to introduce a civilian population. Augustgrad was a frontier world and had to be treated as such. Its function was clear: to become a planetary fortress. Multiple surface defense systems, orbital batteries, and space stations would be built there, preparing it for the next war against the T'au—one that would inevitably come in one or two centuries, when they deemed themselves ready to strike back.
Until then, the planet was exclusively military.
It had effectively become a regimental world. All future troopers in training were transferred there. They carried out cleanup operations, cleared debris, removed the rotting bodies of T'au trapped beneath collapsed structures, and maintained planetary order. It was part of their training—discipline, endurance, and early exposure to the reality of war.
As the days passed, the situation among the T'au worsened. Famine began to spread. Food shortages plagued the T'au Empire, largely because many of their agricultural worlds had been destroyed during the conflict.
I let the days pass while starvation began to kill the millions of T'au trapped on our planet. There was no hurry. I knew that sooner or later the pressure would force them to act.
When contact finally came, it was through Water Caste diplomats who had spent several days trying to reach us with their request permission to use military vessels to accelerate the evacuation of their population.
The response was immediate and negative.
They were reminded, without ambiguity, that the entry of a single T'au military ship into Terran space would be considered an act of war.
However, we did agree to negotiate.
Not over evacuation—but over food.
We agreed to sell food at a deliberately inflated price. The T'au had no traditional monetary system; they usually adapted to the local currency when necessary, but their economy was based on a mix of communal production and exchange of goods for services. That was not a problem for us. Payment would be made in already refined minerals and alloys.
The T'au urgently needed food. The destruction of much of their agricultural capacity had caused a severe production collapse, and hunger was spreading across their worlds and among the populations trapped on Augustgrad. That turned the negotiation into an extremely lucrative business.
Soon, numerous T'au ships began arriving loaded with minerals. Each shipment was exchanged for food, which was then distributed among the planet's starving population. With each trip, they evacuated as many of their people as they could.
Meanwhile, we moved entire food shipments through the transposition matrix, redirecting cargo from Agria and New Korhal, selling all surplus food production while sending back every shipment of minerals—expanding our industry as never before, with more resources than we had ever possessed.
-----------------------------
If there are spelling mistakes, please let me know.
Leave a comment; support is always appreciated.
I remind you to leave your ideas or what you would like to see.
-------------------------------