That only raised more questions. I could speak three dialects of Cretacian Gothic, for it was one of the six hundred mongrel threads of the Imperium’s root tongue I studied in the course of my training. The weapon had been crafted for her, that much was undeniable. The scripture along the bolter’s side proved it, though what deeds she had performed alongside the Flesh Tearers Chapter that claimed Cretacia as their home world, I could not guess.
The weapon, so monstrous in delicate human hands, was rendered usable by a streak of thumbnail-sized suspensors attached to the stock. The rare antigravitic coins – three tiny thimbles of bronze – buoyed the weapon by countering its weight.
She carried the bolter slung over her back, on a thick leather strap.
‘My lord regent,’ she said, not bothering to smile. ‘We must speak.’
The Imperial Regent of Cheth nodded. His expression showed indulgence, as if he had any right to refuse her demand. ‘Yes, inquisitor. Indeed we must.’
He was fat to the point of being grotesque. By my estimate, he had fewer than thirty seconds to live.
II
Cheth was a world like ten thousand others.
Populated, clad in a clanking grey covering of industrial cities, yet claiming neither a forge world’s honour, nor a hive world’s flesh resources. It paid its Imperial tithes in coin and trade to the subsector capital, which in turn shipped them to the sector hub, and theoretically on to the coffers of Holy Terra. The last Imperial Guard founding was eleven years ago, and raised almost two hundred thousand fresh Guardsmen, known under the collective regimental name ‘Cheth Sixteenth Rifles’.
The regiment’s nickname for themselves was less official, and obscenely biological. I see no need for its inclusion in this archive.
Cheth supported its own colonies on two nearby mining moons, and maintained a standing defence garrison of one million souls. The Cheth defence force was the usual mixture of veteran ex-Guardsmen and career soldiers, unified with a minor percentage of volunteers who possessed little more training than how to load and shoot straight. A million bodies between invasion and conquest, though. No small figure. Sheer weight of numbers counted where expertise did not.
Even the heavens were well-defended. Thirty-seven weapons platforms orbited the world, and Cheth was a frequent resupply point for Imperial Navy patrols.
Any invader coming to Cheth faced a long, grinding struggle to overthrow a well-defended and entrenched government, making it an unenviable task for the Imperial Guard, should they ever be summoned there.
Even for a contingent of Space Marines, there was no guarantee of an easy victory, or a fast one.
Cheth’s delicate infrastructure was ruled by the office of the Imperial regent. Unlike many Imperial worlds answering to a lord governor or governor militant, the seat of the Imperial regent was a spiritual post as much as a temporal one, named in honour of the man who would rule the world in lieu of the absent God-Emperor of Mankind.
How very quaint.
But Cheth differed in one crucial way to ten thousand other Imperial worlds. Those worlds were loyal. Cheth was not.
While deviancy, dissidence and apostasy were hardly rare in the great kingdom humanity had carved across the stars, it was rare for a world in the Imperium’s heartlands – with no evidence of former corruption – to fall into sedition. Cheth turned sour, rotting at the core of its government, with the taint threatening to spread to the rest of society’s ruling tiers. From there, the spread would never be contained. I knew all of this after studying the Inquisition’s briefing data en route to the world. It made for bleak reading.
The wider Imperium had two choices. The first was to wait for public evidence of rebellion, and thus declare a crusade of reclamation; the second was to cut out the cancer at the world’s core before it could infect planetary society.
Inquisitor Annika Jarlsdottyr of the Ordo Malleus had chosen on the Emperor’s behalf, as was her invested right. She’d kept us at her side for a third consecutive operation, citing that ancient truth: the best way to win a war is to strike before the enemy can fire the first shot.
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