Any Imperial Hive World is a mess. A failure of humanity and civilization at best, and a giant slaughterhouse of carnage and misery most of times.

Necromuda had all this and made it worse, with thousands of Hive Cities competing for the worst place to live in in the galaxy. Sure, the upper spires where the Nobility and Administratum scribes lived were fancy and clean, but it went bad rapidly as you reached the hab-blocks and the macro-factoriums that produced consumer goods, corpse-starch and other useful items.

The underhives going kilometers deep underground were war zones contested among gangs, cultists, mutants and genestealers, with the sole exception being the planet's capital or Hive Primus . Here, the underhives were dead silent, and completely empty. Then I remembered I did sent Primarch Khan here some time ago, on a quest to find the Van Saar STC.

"What a shit world, Lord Lancefire. I reached 1000 kills in my first day, last time I was here with my Primarch." Captain Khan spoke as the holoscreen lit up with familiar Noble sigils attempting to impose their pitiful rules on my Crusade Fleet. Necomunda sure looked like a great live training field for my Astartes and tech-marines, almost like a planet-sized Space Hulk infested with all manner of disposable critters.

Sure, some manner of polite words will be needed with the current Planetary Governor, but that was still only a polite gesture. I didn't need the agreement of the local authorities.

Lady Valeyne sighed instead, while her hand clenched hard on the Null Staff. "At least 14 Inquisitors are present, plus a hundred more lower ranks like Interrogators and Throne Agents. Half of them are suspected Isstvanians." she revealed in a tired voice.

I continued my own search, locating Hive Secundus now overwhelmed by Tyranid Genestealers and quarantined by Penal Battalions. A group of separate hive cities formed a cluster called The Skull, now overrun by Orks. Hive Arcos was inhabited only by a Chaos Cult, and also quarantined. There was also a giant crater where the Cinderak_City was located, home to a good deal of Ironhead Squat Prospectors , another splinter of the Votann Leagues disguised as regular abhumans.

I should displace the squats first, and find out what they knew. My Librarians should be able to obtain their cooperation.

My mind expanded for a second, and the short cloneskeins vanished from the entire star system, now trapped in my tesseract labyrinth. This included their wheeled vehicles, the Land Trains and their 'hidden' Votann Core buried in a crashed spaceship that produced the very crater they were based at.

Valeyene glanced at me with a frown, then sighed again. "Alaric and Semnai, we're going down to the Governor's Spire. And you dear husband, underhives only...for now." she declared in a confident voice, then teleported with her Deathwatch escorts.

'Assuming command over the Thalax Legions. Let's start with Hive Arcos and the Corpse Grinder Cult ." Spartan spoke from his hidden command center aboard the Black Lament.

Almost 2 million power-armored cloneskein cyborgs got displaced on the surface levels of Hive Arcos, and began killing everything in sight, while a single Vigil of Silent Sisters followed them in their Silent Dreadnoughts. Among the Lorica suits cyborgs there were also 40000 Blank pilots who got injured during the Crusade and received a new lease on life as supersoldier cyborgs wearing Terminator-grade power armor. Quite useful when dealing with lesser daemos and rogue psykers, while the local Lord of Skin and Sinew will be handled by our stronger Pariah Sisters.

The regular Auxilia regiments got the far easer task of engaging the Orks infesting the Skull complex, where their tanks and Sentinels could provide excessive levels of fire support, and the air force of bombers and ground assault drones will be able to bomb the Orks as they rushed out for a proper fight. The new Sentinels with Sollex Lascannons and Plasma Mortars performed admirably, but we still lacked enough numbers of those expensive walkers. My House Knights added their new Neutron Lasers when Ork meks and Stompers dared to rush out from the hives, proving rather overkill in most cases. Black painted Ork walkers still needed 2 or 3 hits, because why not? Surely, painting your mek black provided the equivalent of a foot of adamantium armor, right?

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As always, the Astartes got the worst job, and were sent to engage the genestealers of the Cult of the Second Son in Hive Secundus, starting from the top spires and working their way down towards the spawning pools in the underhive. The Primaris Marines with the Khan gene-seed were especially effective in melee combat with the genestealers, while the tech-marines and their Guardian walkers provided fire support.

The extra etheric detectors provided by the Zath Shard before he left were proving extremely useful now, with every Astartes Captain and Lieutenant equipped with one, as well as some recon squads and Void-Masters in charge of the umbilicals and supply locks for our spaceships.

To my surprise, Primarch Khan had failed to locate the real STC of House Van Saar, despite cleaning Hive Primus underhives and all the connecting tunnels. I could see the underhive filled with shattered walls and exploded vaults, machine shops and heretek factoriums despoiled of machine tools and nerve-stapled servitors. Obviously a great deal of machinery was extracted from the place, but not the STC constructor. The thing was hanging like a ripe fruit under the main starport, disguised as a regular fusion generator, no doubt due to its constant radiation leaks.

Right now, various Archeoteks of the Van Saar were still hard at work inside the STC, scanning and editing STC templates in a familiar manner. Maybe even more competent than my own edit method, since I wasn't an experienced STC technician with thousands of years of code programming and subtle power adjustments.

Ever better, while the STC was damaged and leaked radiation, it was also not locked or restricted to a single type of machine like most STCs I've seen til now.

Everything from weapons, suits and implants, as well as anti-grav platforms like the Grav-cutter and the larger Grav Cruiser which were used as troop and supply transports.

Yoink! The starport left a groan of ease and respite as the hanging fruit vanished in my tesseract, alongside the precious Archeoteks and their invaluable expertise. These were not the same kind of religious tech-experts as the normal Tech-priests of the Mechanicus, so I could use them for my own gain once back in the Lancefire domain.

Not to be a scum thief, I began repairing and re-arranging the system with metal asteroids and ice comets getting moved in separate Lagrange points for ease of exploitation, as well as allowing my Breath to clean up the toxic air and seas, and upgrade the Eye of Selene spacestation into a proper defense fort with extra adamantium armor and Void shields.

It took two weeks for the minefields and asteroid fort line to become operational and integrated with the Governor's military force, while Lady Valeyne undertook her own investigation. It was mostly her Alpha psyker powers and forced confessions to be fair. As we departed from the Hive World, a Strike Cruiser of the Imperial Fists departed towards Terra carrying the corpses of 8 Inquisitors declared traitors by my wife, and 88 of their acolytes as well, with blood-signed confessions and other forms of evidence attached, like notebooks and ship logs.

While the Hive World was still a bloody mess, nobody could fix that. I could steal 100 billion young girls for my own eugenic program in the Fringe, mostly as salt-wives for the Catachan soldiers and colonists. It didn't even matter, as an Universe mass-conveyor had arrived from Terra with a trillion immigrants stored in stasis to replace the local casualities and re-populate the lost hive cities. There were still about 400 trillion humans living on Necromunda, so another trillion was only a drop in the bucket.

I was thinking about grabbing the nice conveyor for myself, when a message with the Emperor's House codes arrived directly on my implant. 'Omnissiah's Judgement has found ye not guilty. But do make sure the 85 transport ships return. The Exodus must continue.'

The Blade traced the message to the bridge of the mass-conveyor, where an auramite warrior was just mag-locking his phone-size transponder to his belt.

The Custodes eyes turned golden and he turned to look right at me, despite the large distance and no method of detecting my tesseract sense. Damn bullshit Emperor!

I wanted to go home already.