The banquet hall was a complete wreck. The expensive furniture and exquisite ornaments had all been hacked into garbage by Huron's Power Sword. Only then did he barely calm down.
Looking at the Watt Family servants sprawled on the floor in terror, too afraid to resist, he opened communications with the Chapter and issued orders to the senior officers already on alert. "Follow the contingency plan. Control Hive City traffic and purge every noble stronghold. Also, have every available warship launch and seal off the orbital routes."
"All enemies and resisters are to be killed without mercy. Those who surrender are to be detained for trial."
"Understood." Everyone in the Chapter immediately acted according to plan.
The commander of the First Company led more than eight hundred Astartes aboard Thunderhawk Gunships in a high-altitude assault on the Spire. The Second Company, meanwhile, worked with Astartes from four other "non-combat departments" of the Chapter, beginning in the Upper Hive to blockade and purge all noble forces.
Odinson took command of all conventional troops, ordering the Armed Police to seal off the main transport routes through the upper, middle, and lower Hive City, while the Special Operations Division began preparing for assault missions.
The first to suffer were the PDF Soldiers of Palatos Hive.
Because of the nobles' little schemes, most of them had been recruited as outsiders from other Hive Cities.
Not only did they not speak the local language, they also had no relatives or friends in the Hive City, allowing them to carry out all kinds of suppression orders without any psychological burden.
Thus, Odinson ordered several Astartes to lead the Special Operations Division and Armed Police in swiftly surrounding every PDF barracks, then began broadcasting demands for immediate surrender.
Most of the PDF Soldiers who had been chatting or playing cards surrendered at the first sign of trouble.
Their training standards had never amounted to much. Reaching even Level 1 in the system's evaluation would have been a struggle, so naturally they had no desire to fight to the death.
Not to mention that the God-Emperor's Angels had come in person. Every soldier on the other side wore Exoskeletons, and they had even driven Chimera Fire Support Vehicles right up to their faces.
If they surrendered even a little too slowly, they might catch a bullet.
They had not even figured out what was happening. They were an army only slightly better than a gang of bandits—how could anyone expect them to fight the God-Emperor's Angels for the nobles?
The nobles could start by making up the rations and pay they had been skimming!
The surrendered PDF were disarmed by the Armed Police, stripped of all weapons, then locked back inside their barracks in a form of imprisonment.
As for the few who stubbornly resisted, along with those PDF troops who had grown attached to doing the nobles' dirty work, they were swept away by the Special Operations Division and the Astartes with thunderous force.
More than ten thousand Bolters fired in unison, supported by the breaching Heavy Firepower mounted on Chimera Fire Support Vehicles and the Plasma Weapons carried by the Astartes.
The PDF barracks' defenses were little better than paper. Aside from a handful of fortifications built around the Hive City's main structural framework, all the Duracrete and Plasteel works were blasted into fragments.
The Astartes led the Special Operations Division through the breaches, prepared for street fighting within the camp. The sight immediately shattered the PDF Soldiers' morale.
Although Badab Primus was not the homeworld of the Astral Claws, the Astral Claws had chosen its Space Station as their Chapter Monastery.
For centuries, the people of Badab Primus had grown up listening to stories of the God-Emperor's Angels. Now that they found themselves on the side being punished by those Angels, they naturally had no will to resist.
The Astartes stepped over the Mortels kneeling on the ground and charged straight into the PDF barracks' command center, killing every senior commander who attempted to put up a last stand.
After dealing with the weak but numerous PDF forces, everyone immediately returned to their assigned fronts. The Astartes went to purge the noble forces in the Upper Hive, while the Special Operations Division and Armed Police moved to clear out and contain noble forces in the Mid-hive and Underhive.
In truth, there were barely any noble forces left in the Underhive. The Astral Claws' infrastructure projects had absorbed five billion people, and nearly every Underhive family had benefited. The few who failed to see reason had promptly received physical education from their neighbors.
But to prevent surviving nobles from fleeing into the Underhive or even the Deep Hive and causing trouble for later operations, it was still necessary to seal off the routes to the Mid-hive and Underhive.
This task was handed to Old John, who had transitioned from instructor to senior officer.
He was now responsible for commanding twenty Armed Police divisions of fifty thousand men each, along with a Special Operations Division of ten thousand.
To be honest, he had never dared dream that in less than a year, he would go from being Underhive trash to the commander of an entire army group.
It was not just him. Everyone in the command staff had once been Underhivers. None of them had imagined they could rise this far.
Old John patted his cheeks, reined in his wandering thoughts, and walked over to the command center's tactical sand table to check for any gaps in the troop deployment.
As the largest and most populous Hive City on Planet Badab, Palatos's Underhive covered six million square kilometers, nearly half the area of the United States.
And unlike the United States, which had vast tracts of undeveloped land, virtually every inch of Palatos's Underhive bore signs of Underhiver activity.
Combined with the Hive City's uniquely complex environment, completely sealing off the area between the Mid-hive and Underhive with just over a million men was pure fantasy.
Yet he could not simply blow up the passageways between the Mid-hive and Underhive. The trouble caused by repairing them afterward would likely be even worse than dealing with the noble remnants.
So Old John chose a compromise.
He ordered the Armed Police to use the intelligence gathered from interrogating gang leaders to mark all the hidden private passages belonging to the noble families.
Then they would directly haul in high-density Plasteel blocks to seal the exits. Even if the nobles used those routes to reach the Underhive, they would only end up trapped behind the Plasteel blocks.
After centuries, even millennia, of operation by Palatos's nobles, such secret passages were everywhere. A million men were nowhere near enough to cover them all.
Not to mention that a considerable number of personnel had to be assigned to maintain the Underhive's curfew, making their already limited manpower even more stretched.
Old John had once wondered why the Chapter Master had not dealt with the gangs and nobles sooner. Now he understood that manpower shortages were at least one major reason.
Still, another question troubled him. Everything had been fine before, so why had a full-scale conflict with the nobles suddenly erupted?
If they had been given more time to prepare, demobilize some administrative personnel, and form more Armed Police divisions, they would not be so short-handed now, leaking everywhere.
But complaints were useless. When problems arose, one had to find a way to solve them.
Old John's solution was to use those tens of millions of administrative personnel to mobilize the two hundred million laborers who had already been working for more than half a year, replacing the Armed Police divisions in sealing off those passages.
The job happened to require no particular technical skill, and for laborers who had spent over half a year doing construction work, it was familiar territory.
Moreover, everyone had witnessed what the Astral Claws had done over the past half year, so the laborers responded enthusiastically.
They did not know what had happened, but for the sake of their own interests, they naturally voted with their feet.
After all, no one knew what would happen if the Astral Claws won, but if they lost, the laborers would certainly suffer. Even simply returning to their previous lives was unbearable to them.
So what were they waiting for? Let's get to work, brothers!
Before you continue