---o---
"Open a channel to them."
As the massive warships slowly closed in, Zhou Ye had been deliberately reducing his speed, letting his vessel take on the appearance of something tired and vulnerable. Very quickly, the Oliveira Dynasty's merchant vessels and warships had him surrounded on all sides.
Sokk's face broke into a radiant smile. Honor was beckoning. The feeling of glory filled his mind completely. He could already picture the screaming terror on the other man's face.
"Oh. You have come out in full force."
The familiar, unhurried voice reached him, and the anticipated sound of fear did not follow. This produced in Sokk a very unpleasant sensation. The pleasure he had been expecting simply was not there. The desperate screaming had not arrived, and in its absence he felt only emptiness. He needed to hear that man's screaming. Only that could restore the sense of glory he was reaching for.
"All hands, boarding positions. Make him suffer."
Sokk settled back on his flagship's command throne and said it in a measured tone, one leg crossed over the other, watching the other vessel. He needed that screaming. He required it to make the glory feel real.
---o---
Aboard the Hyperion.
"Thirty-nine Terminator squads standing by. Teleport beacons locked. Captain, your Terminator count keeps going up."
Ai-chan had long since stopped knowing how to respond to Zhou Ye quietly fabricating ever-larger quantities of Terminators without drawing attention to the process.
"Firepower has been insufficient. And Terminators are more efficient against this category of target. Have thirty-nine Centurion squads, each leading a Terminator unit, conduct simultaneous boarding strikes against all of these vessels. Primary objective is destruction and incapacitation. Secondary objective is locating the Warrant documents. Confirm their position."
Zhou Ye said it with casual ease.
Once he had the documents and a sample of the Oliveira family's bloodline, he could fabricate an entire lineage of Homunculi using the Authority of Creation. As for the ships' Machine Spirits, those could be replaced with his own AI constructs or re-cultivated from scratch.
"And furthermore..."
He said it quietly and rose gently from his seat.
In that instant, an enormous combined force field radiated outward from his position as its center, a barrier of terrifying scale and density. Not one of those warships was going to leave this area.
---o---
"They are closing on us fast. The three forward vessels are almost within boarding range. Their boarding torpedoes are loaded and ready to fire. They are about to..."
"All forces. Board now."
Sokk watched the battered-looking merchant vessel ahead of him and gave the command with audible excitement. One thousand boarding troops stood ready. The torpedoes were primed.
At his command, in a flash of released energy...
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Several muffled detonations. The torpedoes fired.
But.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
The torpedoes produced massive explosions. Every single one of them detonated in open space, brief and brilliant fireworks dissolving into nothing. Every boarding party that had been aboard those torpedoes was gone.
"...!"
Sokk stared with wide eyes. He did not fully understand what had just happened.
In the next moment, every vessel in the fleet simultaneously erupted in alarms.
"What is happening!"
Sokk shot to his feet, his expression somewhere between disbelief and incomprehension.
Then the screens opened, and he saw something that stopped his breathing.
Squads of Space Marines in pristine Terminator plate were moving through his ships, led by the even rarer sight of Centurion Warsuit operators. They were cutting through everything in front of them.
His mind came to a complete stop for a fraction of a second.
"When did... Chaos Astartes... wait. No. Those are not Chaos Astartes. What is happening. Why is this happening!"
He could not understand it. Why were Astartes boarding him? And how? There were no Astartes warships anywhere in this vicinity.
The interior of every Oliveira vessel had, in the span of moments, become a killing ground.
---o---
"Astartes! What is the Oliveira family doing!"
Looking at the boarding torpedoes that had become open-space fireworks, and at the Terminator squads with their Centurion leaders materializing throughout their warships, the hired soldiers screamed.
In the narrow corridors of a warship, with conventional weapons, facing a Terminator squad was not entirely without options. A soldier willing to trade their life could create meaningful difficulties for even a Terminator unit.
But the question was: what were they being paid?
Zhou Ye had considered resistance carefully. He had deployed modified Primaris Terminator squads, each suit personally enhanced and equipped with additional shielding. The standard loadout had been supplemented with his own weapons, including the gravity cannon, a single shot of which could generate a hundred-fold gravity wave across several kilometers of corridor, reducing anything that was not an Astartes-grade entity to compressed matter almost instantly.
The gravity cannon was, as corridor-clearing tools went, objectively extraordinary.
But.
Clatter.
The hired soldiers dropped their weapons and put their hands up.
They were not insane. They had not been corrupted by Chaos. What they wanted was better pay, not a chance to die for a merchant family by charging Emperor's Angels.
Astartes standing in Power Armor had a documented effect on enemy morale even when doing nothing at all. The long centuries of the Imperial faith's conditioning meant that even warriors saturated with the influence of the Ruinous Powers could not fully suppress the instinct of terror toward the Emperor's Angels. The cultists on Aestia who had been capable of fighting Astartes directly had represented the absolute elite of heretic combat forces.
Former Astra Militarum veterans serving as hired soldiers were a different category entirely. Charging an Emperor's Angel was not something they experienced as brave. It was something they experienced as sacrilege.
The first man dropped his weapon and knelt with his hands raised.
In the same instant, the closely aimed fire from a Terminator's weapon passed precisely around him and struck the soldier directly behind him who had been half a second slower to decide. Blood and fragmented material filled the corridor briefly.
The others looked at what had just happened, and then every single one of them made the same decision simultaneously.
Three hundred thousand surrendering in an organized fashion took almost no time at all. Getting a Terminator squad to individually kill three hundred thousand people, even at their combat efficiency, would have required considerable effort. Three hundred thousand choosing to kneel required essentially none.
---o---
Aboard the flagship.
"Why is this happening. Right, they are fallen Astartes. Traitors to the Imperium. Send a signal to Quintus immediately. There are Chaos Space Marines here. Traitors..."
"This is Inquisitor Chris. I require the Oliveira Rogue Trader Dynasty to cooperate with our ongoing operation."
A voice cut through the channel before Sokk could finish his transmission.
Inquisitor Chris. He had heard about the active Inquisitorial presence at the Quintus Hive and had been reaching out to available private military assets.
Sokk grabbed at this like a man drowning.
"Help us. We are under attack by Chaos Astartes."
He sent the distress message immediately.
The response he received back was not what he expected.
"We are currently transporting urgent cargo on behalf of a significant personage on Holy Terra. My sincere apologies, Inquisitor. We are unable to comply with your requisition at this time."
"...What?"
Chris looked at the message in his hand for a moment, then looked out at the fleet that was now several points of light deep in space, steadily moving away.
He said nothing.
A Dynasty deploying every asset it possessed meant it was moving something important. The reference to Holy Terra's personage was not something he wanted to pull on. Nothing connected to Holy Terra's political structures ever resolved cleanly.
He could not requisition them now. They were already well out of range. And if he could not catch them, there was no mechanism to hold them accountable.
He shook his head and turned his attention back to the Hive below. He had already taken control of the local PDF and had used the Astartes' authority to mobilize two Astra Militarum regiments currently stationed in the system for rest and resupply. The purge operation was underway. He had no people to spare.
---o---
Zhou Ye's eyebrow moved slightly.
"Chris. What is he doing here?"
He looked at the incoming message with a faint crease in his brow.
Chris's presence was an unexpected variable. He had privately assumed he would never encounter that particular Inquisitor again. The timing was apparently the result of the possessed Inquisitor situation at the Altera palace.
He considered it for a fraction of a second. An insignificant variable. Proceed as planned.
As for the possessed Inquisitor himself, after the man had shot himself in a final act of loyalty, Zhou Ye had given the departing soul one clean, decisive strike and scattered it completely. Left alone, a soul that had been host to a Greater Daemon tended to drift into the Warp and become something a daemon could use. He could not restore the man. But he could prevent that outcome. Permanent rest was the best available gift.
"The Warrant documents are the next objective. Machine Spirits are genuinely troublesome. These constructs are not simple programs. Cracking them will take some time."
He pulled his attention back and resumed his work.
The Machine Spirits of ancient dynasty vessels were something distinct from ordinary software. Centuries of reverent attention from the family's members had shaped them into something that occupied a category of their own. Zhou Ye was currently conducting a full invasion of the connected systems, trying to identify and reach the core flagship through the network, and simultaneously guiding his Terminator squads toward their objective.
The surrendered private soldiers would not be killed. No corruption, no problem. He would bring them back to the planet. A brief exposure to his own modification process and they would be his people. His world needed population and they were available.
---o---
Aboard the Oliveira flagship.
"You absolute fool. That man is an Astartes Chapter's representative. A planet that fertile and that isolated was obviously chosen as a Chapter's home base. They simply sent a civilian intermediary to conduct their trading."
The sound of breaking glass preceded the sentence. A wine cup had just been shattered against Sokk's face.
His father Danac stood at the center of the flagship's command deck, fury radiating from him in every direction.
By the God-Emperor's mercy. They had attempted to board an Astartes Chapter's vessels.
If they had known Astartes were involved they would never have done this. Never. The planet had almost certainly been discovered by the Chapter and chosen as their homeworld. The civilian intermediary had been sent out to conduct trade and generate income. There was nothing unusual about that arrangement. Many Chapters operated self-sufficiently and had trade agreements with Rogue Traders and the Adeptus Mechanicus as a matter of course.
That was the most charitable explanation available and the only one they could afford to work with right now. Whether this had been a deliberate trap or whether the Chapter had simply decided to retaliate for provocation was not something they had the capacity to analyze in their current position. Either way, retaliation through official channels was essentially impossible. The High Lords could not intervene meaningfully at this distance or at this speed. And even if they could, no reasonable High Lord would want to involve themselves in a conflict between a Rogue Trader Dynasty and a Space Marine Chapter where the Dynasty had fired first.
"You idiot!"
Sokk felt a tremendous impact against the side of his face and went airborne. His father moved directly to the command throne and took control of the situation.
Against Astartes tactical teams, the hired Astra Militarum veterans who constituted the bulk of the Dynasty's private soldiers were not going to resist. Not without corruption driving them past the instinct. Against beings they had been culturally conditioned to regard as demigods of the God-Emperor, the calculation was straightforward, and they all arrived at it at roughly the same speed.
Only the Dynasty's personal household guard, a small number of dedicated warriors sworn to the family, attempted resistance. There were not enough of them. Against Terminator units that had been modified by Zhou Ye to incorporate additional shielding layers, the household guard produced no appreciable effect.
Danac was now transmitting to Zhou Ye as quickly as he could manage, trying to find a resolution.
---o---
"Why. Why. Why did this happen."
Sokk lay on the deck with several people standing on him, and he already knew that regardless of how this concluded, his personal outcome was catastrophic. He had ordered a boarding action against an Astartes Chapter's transport. He was already dead by any practical measure. The family would transfer every responsibility to him, and then present either his head or the rest of him in Servitor form to the offended party as a gesture of good faith.
"Do you hunger for power? For endless and boundless pleasure?"
A voice reached his ear from somewhere very close.