Chapter 484 - 484: Exterminatus

With fuel finally secured, the Gargant's battlegroup regained full combat readiness, free to march on its next target.

Inside the Gargant, Blackiron hungered for revenge against Old Fart Kian, but he couldn't sense the man's location anywhere.

Which left the question of where to strike next open for debate: the Mechanicus temple, or humanity's main hive?

Blackiron knew the Mechanicus site held a colossal human war-machine of its own.

Since arriving on this world, the Orks had captured a fair number of humans, and had already learned about the existence of a Titan.

Three-Arm had even organized a dedicated task force before, specifically to try and seize it, only for the whole force to be wiped out by those little red-robed men.

Blackiron's first instinct was to push for the Titan Temple, to claim the Titan for his own army, giving him two colossal war-machines to WAAAGH with.

But he kept feeling something pulling him toward the main hive instead, a sense that if he went there, he'd get an incredibly, incredibly satisfying WAAAGH.

This was the Ork's innate war-instinct at work, drawn irresistibly toward conflict. The main hive was arming its entire civilian population at that very moment, and the surge of raw biological, warlike intent radiating out from it had reached the greenskin senses across the planet.

For an Ork, that pull was simply irresistible. Blackiron stopped fighting the instinct and roared:

"WE'RE GOIN' TO DA SHRIMP-TIN-CAN HIVE! WAAAAAAAGH!!!"

The nearly ten million elite Orks surrounding him roared back in unison:

"WAAAAAAAAGH!!!"

At the main hive, once its population learned the Gargant's battlegroup was marching straight for them, a wave of pure terror and equally pure fighting resolve erupted through the population.

They accelerated fortification efforts, distributed weapons faster than ever, preparing themselves for a final, all-or-nothing battle against the greenskins.

At the very moment tens of billions of people were bracing for a fight to the death, Kian sat in Inquisitor Trasolh's office aboard the flagship, mid-conversation with him.

Kian asked:

"This xenos force has built themselves a full Titan-class unit and broken through the Astra Militarum's defenses. What's your plan going forward?"

Trasolh let out a heavy sigh.

"This planet is beyond saving. The evacuation protocol has already been initiated.

The forces I deployed to the surface are being progressively recalled to the fleet.

I've offered the Governor evacuation slots for 300,000 people. He'll select 300,000 high-value personnel for extraction, who will be transported to other worlds to continue serving the Emperor.

Once the evacuation completes, I will issue Exterminatus."

Exterminatus is the highest-level judgment the Imperium of Man can impose on a planet.

It can be carried out through several methods: igniting the entire atmosphere, blanketing the world in fire to sterilize it completely.

Or deploying a planet-wide viral bomb, exterminating all biological life across the surface.

Or, the most basic method, saturation nuclear bombardment, using ultra-high-yield warheads to blanket the world in permanent radioactive fallout, blocking out sunlight for good.

Trasolh continued:

"The Governor has provided me with a hundred warheads, each exceeding a hundred-megaton yield. At the final hour, I will target them at the junction of the planet's two major continental plates.

The resulting detonation will trigger tectonic upheaval, igniting volcanic eruptions across the region.

The fallout from the nuclear detonation, combined with volcanic ash, will blanket this planet for over three hundred years, killing 99.999% of all life.

Three hundred years without a single ray of sunlight reaching the surface. That's more than enough time to let the greenskins rot away entirely."

Trasolh spoke with genuine weight, partly for what was about to happen, the deaths of over fifty billion people, and partly because this decision was about to put his entire career as an Inquisitor to the harshest possible test.

Exterminatus, the highest judgment the Imperium can pass on a world, is most often issued by an Inquisitor. But once issued, that Inquisitor faces the most rigorous scrutiny imaginable afterward.

An entire coalition of departments would convene, investigating whether Trasolh's decision to issue Exterminatus had genuinely been justified.

If those experts found even the faintest hint that the order hadn't been strictly necessary, Trasolh would pay the most severe price imaginable.

And the Imperium's culture ran deep with martyrdom expectations. Even if, in the end, it was fully proven that his decision had been entirely justified, and he faced no formal consequences, there would still be pressure, from somewhere, for him to atone by taking his own life.

Because at the end of the day, fifty billion lives and an entire world had died. Someone had to bear responsibility for that.

Even if Trasolh's judgment had been flawless, someone would still expect him to martyr himself for those fifty billion souls and that lost world.

Exterminatus is the kind of order that, justified or not, never leaves the one who issues it unscathed.

Kian frowned and asked:

"Is there truly no other option left? It has to come to Exterminatus?"

Weariness flickered across Trasolh's eyes as he rubbed his temples.

"Just now, the Governor launched another forty nuclear missiles, each over 5,000 tonnes yield, against the xenos Titan.

Two-thirds were shot down the instant they cleared the atmosphere. The rest struck the Titan's void shield, and the majority of the blast energy was simply absorbed, no damage inflicted at all.

The Knight House retinue I brought with me has already lost four Knights and eight squire-suits.

They stood before the xenos Titan, it fired a single volley, and they were nearly wiped out entirely.

Even the Astartes are helpless against this. At this scale of combat, they can't even close the distance safely, they'd be annihilated just like any ordinary soldier.

Unless the Emperor Himself intervenes directly, or some demigod descends onto our world, then yes. We are entirely out of options."

Trasolh was genuinely trapped in an impossible position. If some other world had suffered a greenskin catastrophe like this, he could simply have left and washed his hands of the matter, no need for Exterminatus at all.

But this was a forge world. If he abandoned it and let the Orks fully conquer it, the sheer war-making potential they'd unlock here would be catastrophic, more than he could ever hope to contain.

As a sub-sector Inquisitor, if this greenskin force built its own fleet and began rampaging freely across his jurisdiction, the fallout he'd face for that would be even worse than issuing Exterminatus outright.

In short, Trasolh had drawn the short straw entirely.

He could accept the consequences of issuing Exterminatus and face the inevitable inquiry afterward.

Or he could do nothing, let the Orks conquer the entire planet, build a fleet, and run rampant across his entire sector.

Two piles of shit. He had to eat one of them.

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