The Great Purge (Part 1)

The banquet hall was in utter ruin. Huron had hacked its expensive furniture and exquisite ornaments to pieces with his power sword, and only then did he manage to barely calm down.

Looking at the servants of the Watt Family who were paralyzed on the floor with terror and dared not resist, he connected to the Chapter's communication channels and issued commands to the high-ranking Chapter officers who were on standby: "According to contingency plans, take control of hive traffic and purge all noble stronghold factions. Also, launch all battle-ships capable of duty and blockade the orbital space."

"Kill all enemies and resisters without exception. Take those who surrender into custody for judgment."

"Understood." Every member of the Chapter immediately moved out according to the plan.

The captain of the First Company led over eight hundred Astartes aboard Thunderhawk Gunships to assault the Spire from high altitude, while the Second Company coordinated with Astartes from the Chapter's four other non-combat departments to blockade and purge all noble factions, starting from the upper hive.

Odinson took command of all regular forces, beginning to order the armed police to blockade the main traffic routes of the upper, middle, and lower hives, while the Special Operations Division started preparing for assault missions.

The first to suffer were the PDF soldiers of the Palatos Hive.

Due to the clever little fancies of the nobility, they were mostly outsiders recruited from other hives.

Not only did they speak different languages, but they also lacked any close relatives or friends within the hive, making them able to execute various suppression orders without any psychological burden.

Therefore, Odinson ordered teams spearheaded by a few Astartes, accompanied by the Special Operations Division and armed police, to swiftly surround each PDF barracks and broadcast demands for their immediate surrender.

Most of the PDF soldiers, who were busy chatting and playing cards, surrendered at the first sign of trouble.

Their training level was not much to speak of to begin with, struggling even to reach the level 1 rating in the system assessment, so naturally they had no inclination to fight to the death.

Not to mention that the God-Emperor's angels had descended in person, the opposing soldiers were all wearing powered exoskeletons, and they had even driven Chimera Fire Support Vehicles right up into their faces.

If anyone hesitated even a little in surrendering, they were likely to catch a bullet.

They didn't even understand what was happening; as a military force only slightly better than a gang, could anyone expect them to fight to the death for the nobility against the God-Emperor's angels?

They'd better make up the pay and rations embezzled on regular days first!

The surrendering PDF were disarmed by the armed police, stripped of all weapons, and then locked inside their barracks in a form of virtual imprisonment.

As for the few obstinate ones who resisted and the portion of the PDF troops who had grown too attached to doing dirty work for the nobility, they were swept away with thunderous methods by the Special Operations Division and the Astartes.

Tens of thousands of bolters roared in unison, backed by the breaching heavy firepower mounted on the Chimera Fire Support Vehicles and the plasma weapons wielded by the Astartes.

The defenses of the PDF barracks were no different from paper-mâché; apart from a few defensive fortifications built around the main structure of the hive, the rest—whether duracrete or plasteel fortifications—were blasted to pieces.

The Astartes led the Special Operations Division charging through the breaches into the encampment to prepare for urban combat, and the PDF soldiers who witnessed this scene instantly suffered a collapse in morale.

Though Planet Badab was not the homeworld of the Astral Claws, the Astral Claws had chosen the space station above it as their Chapter Monastery.

For centuries, the people on Badab Primus had grown up listening to stories of the God-Emperor's angels, and now that they discovered they themselves were the ones being disciplined by the God-Emperor's angels, naturally they held no heart for resistance.

The Astartes bypassed these mortals kneeling on the ground, charging straight into the command room of the PDF barracks to cut down all high-ranking officers attempting to make a last-ditch resistance.

Having resolved the combat-ineffective yet numerically vast PDF forces, everyone immediately fell back to defend: the Astartes moved to purge the noble factions located in the upper hive, while the Special Operations Division and armed police went to purge and hem in the noble factions of the middle and lower hives.

In truth, there were virtually no noble factions left in the lower hive; the infrastructure projects of the Astral Claws had absorbed five billion people, benefiting nearly every underhiver family, and the few who failed to grasp the situation were immediately given a physical education by their surrounding neighbors.

Yet to prevent remnants of the nobility from fleeing down to the underhive or even the deep hive and causing trouble for subsequent operations, sealing the passages between the middle and lower hives remained necessary.

This task was handed over to Old John, who had transitioned from a drill instructor to a senior officer.

He was now responsible for commanding a full twenty armed police divisions of fifty thousand men each, alongside a special operations division of ten thousand.

To be honest, he never would have dared to dream of this in the past; in less than a year, he had gone from scum of the underhive to the commander of an army group.

Actually, not just him, but everyone in the command post had previously been underhivers; none of them could have imagined they would reach this degree today.

Old John patted his cheeks, reined in his wandering thoughts, and walked up to the command post's sand table to inspect the troop deployments for any omissions or leaks.

As the largest and most populous hive on Planet Badab, the underhive of Palatos spanned six million square kilometers, roughly equal to the area of half a United States.

Moreover, unlike the United States with its vast expanses of undeveloped and unused land, virtually every inch of land in the Palatos underhive showed traces of underhiver activity.

Coupled with the complex environment unique to hives, attempting to completely blockade the zone between the middle and lower hives using merely over a million personnel was an absolute fairy tale.

Yet he could not simply blow up the passages between the middle and lower hives, or the trouble brought by subsequent repairs would likely prove greater than the noble remnants.

Thus, Old John chose a compromise solution.

He ordered the armed police to use intelligence previously extracted through the interrogation of various gang bosses to mark out the hidden personal passages of each noble family.

Then they directly hauled high-density plasteel blocks to plug the exits shut, ensuring that even if those nobles used the passages to reach the underhive, they would only be sealed tight inside the plasteel blocks.

Through hundreds or thousands of years of management by the Palatos nobility, such covert passages were ubiquitous, and a workforce of just one million was entirely inadequate to cover every single one.

Not to mention that a significant portion of manpower had to be diverted to maintain the curfew and control of the underhive, adding frost to snow for an already impoverished supply of personnel.

Old John had previously wondered why the Chapter Master hadn't dealt with the gangs and nobility sooner; now he understood that insufficient manpower was at least a major reason.

Only, he harbored a slight doubt once more: everything had been going smoothly just prior, so why had a full-scale conflict with the nobility suddenly broken out?

If there had been more time to prepare, to demobilize some administrative personnel and form a few more armed police divisions, things wouldn't be as stretched thin and leaky as they were right now.

Still, complaining was useless; when one encountered a problem, one had to devise a way to solve it.

And Old John's solution was to utilize those tens of millions of administrative personnel, mobilizing the two hundred million laborers who had been following along and working for over half a year, sending them to replace the armed police divisions in plugging those passages.

As it happened, this work required no technical skill, and for laborers who had spent over half a year doing civil engineering, it was second nature.

Furthermore, everyone had witnessed firsthand the actions of the Astral Claws over the past half-year, prompting the laborers to respond with enthusiasm.

Though they didn't know what had happened, for the sake of their own interests, they naturally voted with their feet.

After all, they didn't know what would happen if the Astral Claws won, but they would definitely suffer if they lost. Even a mere return to their previous lives was something they could not endure.

What more was there to say? Let's get to work, brothers!