40 Thousand Reasons

Chapter 151: Chains

Finding the former Imperial Navy Battleship would have been quite hard without the aid of a certain C'tan, a cheater who cheats and can look through stable Warp Gates to observe a different part of the galaxy as if using a telescope.

It was simply laying in orbit above a Maiden World named Dread Pearl, and inhabited by the descendants of the Navy crew, all kinda crazy and useless to me.

I decided to simply deposit the former crew on the surface, hid the giant ship in my Tesseract, beside the Blackstone Fortress, and continued on my way, heading towards the Ork Worlds of Hundred, Undred Teeth.

Left unchecked, these Orks would certainly become a dangerous pest, and they already had thousands of small ships and a couple bigger ones, for example a Space Hulk called Fist of Gork and a massive Battlekroozer named Da Wurldbraka.

None of the humanity's forces in the Expanse would be able to deal with them, and that left me.

And here, without any witnesses I could cheat too.

Entire Ork planets became empty while the system's sun grew a bit brighter for a second. No doubt the Orks would spawn again, or appear from a Warp Rift, but not these. These Orks burned as sacrifice for the good Emperor of Mankind, Adam, First of his Name. It seems he really was that Adam too, since he was quite old.

My tesseract captured the Ork ships, even Da Wurlbraka, but that Space Hulk was still too massive for my powers. We had to break it into 30 fragments, before the Tesseract was able to lock onto the shattered pieces and bring them in.

Expensive use of torpedoes and Nova Shells, but just the metal alone could serve to construct a thousand battleships.

I'll have to inventory the contents later, as there was too much. An entire Astartes Chapter fleet, with full stores of Land Raider tanks and Thunderhawk gunships and power armor suits, but no sign of people aboard those 66 mangled ships. The Fire Hawks Chapter too.

I didn't really need all this, but if the Emperor wanted to give me gifts, I could only humbly accept them. I knew those guys were just fine at the side of the Emperor, in an undead-burning-immortal-angel kind of just fine.

Unceasing Duty, in perpetuity for the Legion of the Damned.

Was I too jaded? Perhaps, but the horrors of the 40k universe were starting to get to me.

Even more so when my fleet stumbled onto a trading void-station filled with desecrated bodies and bloody marks of chaos rituals. I could only send the station into the sun, and vow to avenge their deaths.

I did have Navigators after all, and a couple of them could track 'scents' in the Immaterium.

By next week, we found them, a Chaos group called the Saynay Clan, formed around a band of traitor Space Marines and a dozen Chaos cultists, dealing in slaughter and ritual sacrifice.

Then even had a decent sized fleet, four battle barges and 30 cruisers plus 200 escorts, but that only fed the nearest sun with extra atoms to burn.

The sooner I had enough Blanks to fill all the Astartes Chapters the better.

Not that I wasn't doing my fucking duty every single day, with seven women in a row, and the same for my children, and their children. We all worked hard to save the damn galaxy, and all I heard was that I was too lucky!

It wasn't luck that brought me here in the blasted Expanse, hunting down traitors and Orks.

Anyway, it was time to head back, and steal one last battleship, the Majestic Light. This might mean a hard fight with other Imperial factions or Chaos forces involved in the Antian_Sector.

********

My nurse, Catherine sensed my muscles tense, and resumed her massage, pouring more oil on my back and helping me relax with gentle fingers.

"There's going to be another battle, my lord?" she asked in a knowing voice.

"Very likely, my dear Catherine. And I promise I won't cheat, unless they cheat first." I answered in a joking tone.

"It's not cheating if the God-Emperor aids you in battle, Lord Lancefire. Now turn around, and let me help you relax." she demanded while pouring oil over her breasts.

That did seem a great way to relax indeed.

I enjoyed her special massage with a dreamy grin, until my spear raised for battle for the eight time today.

"Oh? It looks like it's my lucky day!" the former Adepta Sororitas quipped with a wide smile and eagerly impaled herself on my lance.

I let her enjoy her hard-earned prize, because she'll soon switch places with Helena and join my daughter Andrea and the infocyte on the recruiting job.

Sadly, most of the Rogue Traders they've found were not interested in any alliance, too suspicious or corrupt or both. Even on Footfall, there were five Rogue Traders that barely escaped with their lives, mostly because they were too destitute to commit big crimes. But that Winterscale was really too much, praying on his fellow men with casual indifference and even selling convoy routes to pirates and Corsairs to kill off the competition, if he didn't do it himself, hidden from prying eyes.

I didn't mind them trading with xenos or using their weapons, as it was clearly in the mandate, and I did that myself very often. But too many such Dynasties dealt in slavery, piracy and drug trades, which meant selling Imperial citizens to aliens, even to be served as food. That was not okay, nor were sponsoring various heretic cults and deals with Chaos forces.

On the way back, we made a stop at Lucin's Breath, where the Winterscale Dynasty had a gigantic operation in mining nephium, a psycho-active drug extremely addictive and expensive.

"Everyone on the surface, drop everything and evacuate the planet right now!" I demanded on the vox caster, while stealing all the weapons I could find, plus all the STC containers filled with processed nephium.

Soon after, my fleet began opening fire with lances on the more distant mining pits and wells, forcing the workers to evacuate faster.

In less than a day, a million workers embarked on transport ships and ran for Footfall, while the planet burned in their wake.

The price of nephium would skyrocket soon enough, and then my surveillance girls will find the nephium traders very fast. And then kill them and steal their thrones.

Then find the buyers and watch them and so on. A death cult was very useful for things like this, because death was their profession.

We passed by Footfall and then the Jericho-Maw_Warp_Gate, ignored Port Wander and its fabulous wonders and headed straight for the Corruptis Warp Rift in the Antian Sector.

"Captain, there is a Demon World behind the rift. It's called Braxas and...can't look anymore. Horrible things there, as you can imagine." The Navigator spoke on the vox channel as my fleet held station some 40 thousand kilometers away from the huge purple rift.

I couldn't imagine what the Navigator saw, but I trusted him enough. If he said it was horrible, it was possibly much worse.

So I glanced to the side, where Veteran Brother Semnai was clenching his left fist so hard that his glove was creaking.

"Wanna lead a deep-strike and burn that place, Brother Semnai?" I asked a bit curious.

The man turned to stare at me for a second. "If that's how you decide to spend my life, Master Lancefire." he replied while his eyes began turning black. Maybe a tiny bit too angry?

I nodded cheerfully. "It will be amazingly fun, and you get to launch an Exterminatus on a Demon World! What say you?"

"I say...it better be the best fun in my life, my lord. I never had a lover though...too late for that, huh?" the Veteran Lamenter mused melancholically.

"Meh, I don't recommend Ogryns. Maybe a catgirl, we have catgirls, right?" I wondered a bit confused.

"Felinids, my lord. Your wolf would be more acceptable." he answered with a nod at Canis, who tilted his head in confusion.

"Not sure if cats or dogs are more acceptable for heretic relations. Better stick with Orgyns. Some of them are even smaller than you." I commented wisely.

"Woof!" the Space Wolf agreed after measuring the Lamenter for height.

"For the Emperor and the Primarch!" Semnai proclaimed and smacked his chest loudly.

"Give them hell, Semnai!" I answered with a grin.

In an hour, a sacrificial corvette with an Exterminatus warhead entered the rift, carrying Brother Semnai, while I struggled to follow him with the Sounding Board's empathic tracker.

"It's a very long rift, my lord" he muttered while purple walls flashed by.

"Keep your eyes opened for any ships. We always need more ships." I advised him seriously.

"Seriously? You're trying to loot more...I think that's an Apocalypse-class battleship." Semnai muttered as the corvette passed the old relic.

"Stop and touch it. With your hand." I demanded on a whim.

"That's insane! This is a Chaos Warp Rift! There might be a billion demons outside the hull." the Lamenter lamented in despair.

"So? You have a Null Wand and your body can withstand the vacuum for hours." I answered without any worry.

"The Emperor protects!" Semnai grumbled as he parked the corvette beside the battleship and opened a hangar door to the void.

"This is fun, my friend. Now touch it!" I demanded again.

"This is not fun! It's freezing and my skin is stuck to the hull!" he yelled in my mind.

"It's only a flesh wound. Now...let's see...twist, drag, no. Not working. Back to your original mission, Astartes! We'll have to tractor the battleship out with chains." I said in a sad voice.

"If I hadn't lost my dermis for this, I'd be laughing, my lord. Haha. It is a bit fun!" the Astartes Veteran quipped at my misfortune.

Damn tesseract couldn't grab things from another dimension, which sucked though.

Chains were so mundane!