Leave in orbit [strike cruiser 1] Emperor's Spleen and Warmonger, carrying 9th company, 2 units of auxiliaries, the prognosticator, and a techmarine or two.
Leave on the surface whoever among the crew and auxiliaries will volunteer to live among and rule the Zahgun.
Instruct the prognosticator and 9th company captain to help our mortal volunteers with learning the language and whatever else they need help with.
Strike Cruiser 1, the Dawn's First Light, Warmonger, and Nova Frigate 1, Gilded Rider, are left above the planet, and volunteers from the rest of the fleet are moved under the command of the Prognosticator, a Techmarine who is willing to mess about with alien technology, and a squad of other Marines who are considered "least likely to go on a xenocidal rampage, at least unprovoked," and who are also willing to stay and build up these Xenos as a means to aid humanity. The Prognosticator is to lead the mission and teach the human volunteers the Zahgun language, and the Zahgun Low Gothic if possible. The crews aboard the three ships will be shuffled around amongst the rest of the fleet to ensure that nobody (including and especially considering Techpriests) too hostile to alien life remains on station here, and the Techpriests that remain are willing to work with alien tech and figure it out and work with aliens to make tech for them to use, all in service of humanity.
The volunteers are NOT to exceed a quarter of the crew of the ships departing (if we even get so many volunteers), such that we can continue to operate effectively, and to ensure that, if pressed, the three ships remaining above the Zahgun planet will be capable of extracting all humans from the system. Gilded Rider will operate as a courier whenever great discoveries are made, and to assist in moving the tithes from the Zahgun homeworld back to our own.
This group is to: 1. Assist the Zahgun in unifying under a single government that will be amenable to our needs. 2. Begin the process of implementing the manufacturing changes suggested by Brother Audenach, who will most assuredly be remaining here to oversee those improvements (and to grant the Chapter Master some sweet, Emperor-blessed SILENCE on occasion). 3. Carefully, starting in the manufactorums and in the Planetary Defense Forces we're helping them to set up, start using humans to act as teachers, such that the individual Zahgun can spend more time doing and less learning...we'll check in with this line of society alteration at a later date. 4. Learn all they can about the Zahgun's culture, technology, and all that, to send to us later. 5. Ships in orbit will make a thorough survey of the system and its resources. 6. Have one of the Techpriests who is particularly fond of alien tech start working up ways to alter Imperial tech to work with the Zahguns' physiology, especially tech that'd allow them to operate in space, their mode of locomotion being incredibly well-suited to zero-gee or low-gravity worlds.
OK that got ridiculously long, but I want this thing to run on autopilot for awhile so that we don't need to be constantly revisiting them. The tithes they'll send will be, if I understand correctly, initially very small, but any bit helps at the moment.
You spend the better part of a Terran day contemplating the proper course of action, sequestered deep within your quarters, and come to the conclusion that the Zo, the Za-... the Xenos, shouldn't be left alone. If they are to be assimilated, if they are to be yours to control, they must likewise be yours to defend, and to that end, you inform the fleet, Chapter, crew, and auxiliaries all of your intentions. The results are mixed. When you leave and walk through the Battle Barge, the fire in the eyes of the Astartes, awed at their new Chapter Master, has flickered into doubt, and you know that you have overestimated their willingness to know the alien, so that mankind might subdue it and the alien thus serve mankind in life, rather than in death. You expected a handful, even most, but every one save for Audenach seems to feel the same, burning revulsion to them and their reverence toward your position dampened by proximity. This is a worrying development. Word will doubtlessly spread through the Chapter and may lead to a loss of trust in you, unless the fires are stoked and kept alive, until you can find fuel to make them blaze once again. 9th company has no outward complaints, nor does the Prognosticator or the second that you allowed him the choice, to relieve him of his duties from time to time, nor do the techmarines who have been tasked to, worse than to salvage but to
uplift the Xenos, but you know that within their souls they stew with hate. A burning malice and loathing for the alien and for its works, but for now, their oathbound duty to the Chapter and by extension, to you, is far stronger. In time, you hope you can bring them around to your way of thinking.
The crew of over four-hundred thousand souls who've spent years, if not decades at a time confined almost entirely within the cramped, lightless and labyrinthine hulls of your assorted vessels, prove more receptive to the good news. They muster a full total of 800 souls, genuinely willing and able to set foot on alien soil and reshaping their savage society. You can't help subconsciously doing the math. Of the roughly 410,100 men, women, and children scattered across six ships, 800 were willing,
0.0019% of your total crew were willing to set foot on the Xenos' rock. You let them go and are thankful that many agreed. You don't expect them to martyr themselves attempting to purge the Xenos by hand but you wouldn't be surprised if they were to make the attempt. By the Emperor, looking at the Xenos from a personal perspective, completely divorced from their utility, you can't blame them. The shelled, glistening horrors bring your twin hearts to spasm in revulsion. Among the auxiliaries you're expecting no better reception and... are promptly surprised by the quarter-of-a-million hardened souls throwing themselves at the feet of any Astartes they can see and scraping and begging at the tops of their lungs to garrison the planet. They scrape and cry, grown warriors who've seen sights that would've crippled lesser men in fear and fought them, all, reduced to wailing, clinging to your power armoured boots, all discipline lost, desperately pleading for the chance to be left here, on this sweltering hellhole,
anywhere but Antwir.
This is utterly universal among them. You attempt to make them see reason, to know the true perfidy of the Xenos abominations, but they are completely unmoved. You try to tell them of their malice, of their inhumanity, they tell you of wild-eyed cannibals and needle-tongued eye-gougers waiting to spring out of the burst-weed bushes. You make a last, desperate resort, and repeat their responsibilities, their duties to steward and guide forth a kindred utterly unknown to man, and they reassure you, tears in their eyes, voices cracking from overexertion, screaming in the hoarse lunacy of a cornered ape, that they are far lesser, far gentler than the ordeal of boiling drinking water back on the nightmare that is Death World #14/2. Eventually, you stop using your servo-arms to peel them off of you and on realizing that there's no other way to dissuade them or prevent them from knifing each other's backs and tearing each other's throats out over a perceived limited amount of places, you make a drastic decision, and hold a raffle. It is completely impartial, completely orderly, and there is no cheating or refusal to participate. All auxiliaries in the 1st Fleet take a raffle ticket and all draw them, under the sight of the Astartes' boltguns, and file into two separate groups, one despondent as though the souls were drained from their once-human husks, one in the same, rapturous state of joy as a pilgrim being told they were en-route to Terra, to there gaze on the Golden Throne.
By the end of the entire ordeal, you're starting to wonder whether or not it's worth it to keep a permanent human population on Death World #14/2- Antwir, but then you remember how effective they're projected to be in combat and rebuke the atrophied remains of your empathetic conscience. Soon enough, the humans, 50,800 of them, from various places and a very narrow range of backgrounds, are disembarked onto the surface, along with the two Prognosticators. The rest of the Astartes of 9th company are firmly rooted in
The Emperor's Spleen and refuse to budge from that place. (With one, quietly foot-tapping exception.) Alongside it are
The Warmonger and
The Gilded Rider, both instructed to manage the Xenos World's logistical affairs and if need be, its defense. The remainder of the fleet propels itself to the edge of the system, not looking back, and shifts into the Warp. You contemplate all that has come to pass over these last two months, and shake your head, because there is nothing else you could've done to safeguard what space the Chapter holds. Deep inside of yourself, you sit at your workbench, buried subconscious stirring, staring down at the Xenos' "shellcracker" pattern rifle bullet, and dare not think it aloud.
Do these aliens deserve a planet to call their own, too?All that's left is to wait...
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Topic: Renegade Space Marine Simulator (40k) (Read 26064 times)