Time Is Running Out

Commissar Yarrick studied the battle situation displayed on the holographic map. Under the command of that pig-headed governor, the sacrifices and bloody battles of the Planetary Defense Force had been utterly meaningless. Having kicked himself into Hades Hive on this damned subcontinent, the governor simply let the soldiers on the main continent die.

That terrified pig had concentrated all his forces on defending Tartarus Hive, treating the other three Ork clans as if they did not exist. The steadily retreating Planetary Defense Force had not even managed a decent counterattack, fleeing in disgrace like Gretchin driven by Orks' whips.

Reports delivered two days ago stated that the Orks had invaded the subcontinent. During this season of volcanic activity, they had split into two routes. Two of the three clans advanced east, cutting straight through the Pale Mountains toward Hades Hive, while the remaining clan moved west into the mountains, heading for Helsreach Port.

Yarrick knew perfectly well that he had no time left to waste. He had to unite every force available within the entire hive city to resist the Ork invasion. God-Emperor above, he did not care in the slightest whether he lived or died. He only hoped to save this world, which belonged to The Emperor, from the greenskins.

He was afraid—afraid that his sacrifice would be meaningless, afraid that all his devotion would vanish like smoke. But he could not show even the slightest hesitation or panic. Commissars were the strongest backbone of the Imperium's armies. Even if everyone else chose to submit, a commissar would only curse those cowards aloud, then raise whatever weapon he held and die for The Emperor.

Yarrick sorted through the pile of documents on his desk and walked out of his office. A soldier saluted him at the door.

"Soldier, pick your best squad. You're coming with me to meet the gangs in the lower levels."

Toxic air, deadly mutant beasts, and dark, lightless corners—passing beneath a swaying pillar, Commissar Yarrick surveyed everything in the lower levels of Hades Hive.

This was not his first time in a hive city's underlevels, but the appalling conditions beneath Hades Hive—or rather, beneath the hive cities of this industrial world, Armageddon—still exceeded his imagination. On the way through several enormous abandoned refineries and industrial transit elevators, the barrel of Yarrick's bolt pistol had never once cooled.

The enormous fish living in industrial wastewater—if those things could still be called fish—had only a tail and dull eyes that suggested anything fishlike about them. No matter how he looked at it, Yarrick could not believe that a monster covered from head to toe in the pointed legs of arthropods was an edible fish.

The wastewater flowing down from the upper levels received virtually no treatment before being dumped into the depths of the planet. To industrialists and nobles, purifying and recycling industrial wastewater was both troublesome and expensive. For centuries, the waste had been discharged downward without restraint, until contamination of the entire underground water system had become irreversible.

The soil on the surface had been saturated by deep-layer wastewater. The chemical toxins within could make the needle of any detector twist itself dead and never return. Forests and vegetation that had once been lush and thriving had died beneath the dual pollution of wastewater and exhaust fumes. Even now, only the center of the main continent retained vast Equatorial Forests. Those forests had survived the contamination of wastewater and exhaust, adapting to them and forming a unique ecosystem. Catalyzed by chemical agents, the plants within had become huge and vicious. They could easily swallow an entire Leman Russ tank into their tough pods, then use absorbed chemical wastewater to corrode it into a pool of molten metal before absorbing that as well.

The mutant animals, each with wildly different forms, were impossible for any Imperial biologist to classify. New mutations emerged almost every day. Every few weeks, a new creature appeared while an old one went extinct.

That was why these hive cities had been built inside towering, heavy metal walls and beneath colossal mechanical domes capable of blocking the planet's periodic dust storms and acid rain.

"Sir, we're almost there. Go left at that marker made from Hades Scorpion shells, and we'll see the Chameleon Gang."

This short-haired, wiry soldier with a steel ring through his nose was the result of the Planetary Defense Force recruiting from the lower hive. Supposedly, he had been a small-time thug scraping by in the underhive gangs. Only a few days after joining one, he had been arrested by Adeptus Arbites enforcers and sentenced to serve in the Planetary Defense Force. He did not care much, though. Scraping by in the lower levels was scraping by, and scraping by in the Planetary Defense Force was the same. The only difference was changing from being easily shot by a gang boss to being shot by a commissar. Formally, there was not much distinction.

Though Yarrick disliked this gang-born soldier's flippant attitude, after witnessing the nobles' obscene extravagance and Von Strab's tenth-generation-only ultimate idiocy, his temper had improved considerably. With such an abysmally low baseline before him, merely being a gang soldier muddling through life seemed like remarkable progress.

As he passed the statue assembled from Hades Scorpions, Yarrick's bionically enhanced ears caught the sound of machinery rising. Without the slightest hesitation, he fired toward the noise. In the light of the bolt impact, he saw a gang-made automatic machine-gun turret. Its barrel and ammunition feed had been blown apart by Yarrick's shot, and it began to burn.

"Truly impressive marksmanship. I never thought a big shot like you would come to a place where trash like us barely survives. What an honor."

A burly man clad head to toe in armor welded from construction steel plates crouched on a pipe above Yarrick's head, holding a well-maintained meltagun pistol. Though melta weapons generally suffered from limited range, there would clearly not be many opportunities for long-range combat in this terrain-choked hive city. The power of a melta weapon was enough for anyone with a sound mind to turn their opponent, their cover, and even the floor beneath their feet into a blazing pool of molten metal.

Yarrick watched the man above him with a dangerous expression, but he too did not dare act rashly. Emperor knew whether this gang-modified meltagun pistol fired a melta stream or melta shot. If even a little of it touched him, he would not be leaving here alive today, and his sacred oath and duty to defend this world for The Emperor would come to nothing.

"He's an old enforcer of the Chameleon Gang. They call him Flamethrower Mod," the soldier with the nose ring quietly informed Yarrick.

"I am Commissar Sebastian Yarrick. I came here to discuss an important matter with your leader."

"Let me guess. You want trash like us to fight those Orks and die for you?"

"Not die. Serve The Emperor with Loyalty."

"The Emperor, The Emperor—it sounds nice enough. If The Emperor could really hear our prayers, we would not be living in this damned place."

Yarrick forcefully suppressed the urge to curse aloud and ignored Lede's disrespect toward the holy Emperor. He forced out a sentence through clenched teeth. "That is because you are too cowardly."

"What did you say? You dare call an old enforcer who has fought and crawled through the lower levels for decades a coward?" Furious, Lede raised his meltagun and aimed it at Yarrick and his soldiers.

An MK8 Melta Gun

"The Emperor never made you live in such a hopeless place. You chose it yourselves."

"Oh, heavens! Listen to the absurdity I'm hearing! The moment we crawl out of the lower-level sewers, those damned nobles and officials loudly denounce us as traitors to the Imperium, then send in those people dressed like toy soldiers to slaughter us wholesale. And now you tell me we chose all this ourselves? If they did not have The Emperor's approval, how could those officials use His name to act so recklessly?"

"The Imperium only cares about the Imperial Tithe and Loyalty. It does not care who rules a planet. Do you understand?"

Yarrick's grim eyes stared fixedly at Lede. He swore that if this fool dared show even the slightest further disrespect toward The Emperor, he would kill him even at the cost of his own old life.

"Uh, you mean if we swear Loyalty to the Imperium and pay taxes, you won't interfere with us?"

"Yes."

"You're lying!"

"I swear in the name of the great God-Emperor: if there is even half a lie in my words, then let me be shamed after death and forever never behold the holy radiance of the Golden Throne!"

Hearing Commissar Yarrick make such a venomous oath, Flamethrower Lede, who knew only how to fight and throw his weight around, was somewhat stunned. Could it really be as he said? Did the Imperium truly never care how a planet was ruled, caring only whether its taxes were paid and whether it remained Loyal? Still hesitant, Lede decided to ask one final question.

"The Imperial Tithe. How much is it, exactly?"

Yarrick gave several figures, and Lede found them difficult to accept. (In truth, I do not know how much Armageddon's Imperial Tithe is either. The book says this world has five quadrillion people—Emperor knows how taxes would even be collected from that many—but it must be far lower than the taxes levied by planetary governors and nobles. After all, they use The Emperor's name to exploit people however they please. And the Imperium's Imperial Tithe may never have changed since the Great Crusade.)

"You're lying!"

Hearing the uncertainty in Lede's voice, Yarrick bared a cold smile. "Imperial commissars never lie."