Chapter 343: Side Work, Part 4
Kian's forces were clearing districts at an impressive pace. His plan was to finish all six yellow zones in two days, leaving the remaining four days free to focus entirely on the three red zones.
With help from the local PDF units and civil officials, day one went even better than expected, three yellow zones cleared outright.
Kian actually put in real effort on this one. Working off the map the Governor had provided, he had his men crawl through every suspect duct and conduit in the district, dragging out Stealers and putting them down wherever they found them.
Across the three zones, they killed just over fifteen hundred Stealers total. Not a huge number, all things considered, which suggested the Governor really had been keeping a tight lid on things.
Day two, Kian led the sweep into the remaining three yellow zones.
That was when things got interesting. Because the Governor had cut the air supply ahead of time, Yellow Zone Five erupted into open rebellion.
A mob of civilians poured into the streets waving signs, demanding the Governor step down and the air rationing be lifted.
They marched through the district hurling molotov cocktails and improvised battery-bombs, surrounding government buildings.
Chaos everywhere, like the Governor's whole administration was about to collapse.
The Governor couldn't just sit on his hands. He called Kian directly.
"My lord, please, help me put this uprising down. But I must insist, no mass casualties!"
Kian's forces had just finished Yellow Zone Four and were moving into Yellow Zone Five. His soldiers had already formed a line, facing off against the crowd.
Kian said, "My apologies, Governor, but our agreement was that I'd clear out the Genestealers and their hybrid offspring for you, in exchange for one interceptor. Putting down a civil uprising wasn't part of the deal. And these are Imperial citizens, aren't they? You can't just have them beaten down like animals. You ought to sit them down and reason with them properly, lay out the facts, and I'm sure they'll come to understand your difficult position, and go home to raise their children like good citizens."
There was a long silence on the other end. Then the Governor's voice came back, almost dreamy.
"My lord, I couldn't help but notice your forces are a bit light on anti-armour weaponry. As it happens, I recently traded with a group of tech-scavengers for a hundred plasma projectors. Trouble is, the recoil's too much for my own men to handle, so..."
At that exact moment, the mob had gathered in the plaza and chained up the Governor's statue.
Several hundred of them, gasping and heaving in the thin air, hauled on the chains until they brought a multi-tonne stone monument crashing down.
It hit the ground with a thunderous crack and shattered into rubble.
One rioter clambered onto the wreckage, wheezing violently, and screamed with everything he had left in his lungs.
"Governor! Step down! Lift the air restrictions!!"
Kian watched the scene unfold and his expression darkened.
"These aren't ordinary rioters anymore. Full response, now!"
At his order, the power-armoured soldiers surged forward and began working the crowd over.
The people in front of them were just ordinary citizens, driven into the streets by nothing more than the misery of thin air. And given the Governor's request to keep casualties minimal, Kian had told his men to just disperse the crowd, nothing more.
Problem was, none of his armoured soldiers were carrying anything as gentle as a riot baton. All they had were fists reinforced by power armour, and a single open-handed shove or backhand was more than enough to send a person sprawling.
Three thousand armoured guards laid into a crowd of nearly fifty thousand, and within moments the mob was scattered, several hundred people left on the ground with broken bones.
Kian snapped over the comm, "I told you to minimize casualties! What the hell is this?!"
Lieutenant Rudolphson's voice came back. "Commander, these void-born are just that fragile. Their bones snap if you so much as tap them. We were already holding back!"
Right, Kian remembered, these were void-adapted colonists. Brittle as glass.
He waved his men on to resume the Stealer search, then got back on the comm with the Governor.
"Governor, that mob just tore down your statue and pissed all over your legacy, more or less, and all you want me to do is scatter them?"
It struck him as oddly out of character for the man.
"There's something you don't know, my lord Inquisitor. A few years back, our asteroid experienced an extremely rare seismic event. It fractured the rock layer housing our population, and a massive volume of air vented straight out into the void. Nearly four million people died of oxygen starvation in that single event. Our total population now stands at only sixteen million, which is a dangerously low line for us. If our numbers keep dropping, the entire world stops functioning. So..."
Kian understood then. Of course. It wasn't like every Planetary Governor actually cared about his own people, and that went double when Genestealers were involved.
From everything Kian knew of Governors as a breed, most of them were feudal die-hards who couldn't care less whether the common folk lived or died. Find a rock layer infested with Stealers, and the usual answer was to just vent the oxygen and suffocate everyone in it, problem solved.
This world, though, was short on population. That was why the fat Governor was willing to pay out an entire interceptor for a careful, casualty-conscious cleanup. He genuinely had no other choice.
Kian shook his head and sent his men back to work.
By the end of day two, all six yellow zones were clear. Next came the three red zones, the worst of it.
The red zones were where the Governor had first discovered the infestation, and where it had spread the deepest.
Here, Kian was likely to run into serious numbers of armed Stealer hybrids.
And the Genestealer itself, the 40K answer to the Xenomorph, was an absurdly dangerous thing in its own right. It could generate a bio-field directly from its own body.
The same principle as the disruption field on a power sword, essentially.
Wrap that field around its monomolecular claws, and it could punch a hole clean through almost anything.
His armoured troops could handle standard combat fine, but against an actual Genestealer, it was less a fight than a single stab and done.
At midday on the third day, Kian had his men stand down and rest for half a day to recover their strength, then gathered everyone at the tunnel leading into Red Zone One.
Before the great gate opened and they entered, Kian delivered one final warning.
"Listen closely. We're entering a red zone now. There may be a large number of xenos hybrids in this district. If anything looks off, shoot first, warn after.
Watch especially for the true Genestealer. Fully upright, it can stand as tall as two and a half meters, but curled up it looks more like an oversized feral dog.
It moves fast, it can run through sewers, maintenance ducts, cable conduits, anywhere it fits.
If you see something moving too fast to track, something that can tear a squadmate apart with a single swipe, don't hesitate. Run. Call me in to deal with it.
Also, I've already coordinated with the Governor. He'll be dropping the oxygen in Red Zone One down to the point of unconsciousness. That should cut down the odds of a mass Stealer swarm forming, but it also risks Imperial citizens dying of asphyxiation.
So we move fast. We finish the screening before the air runs out on these people.
Move out, warriors! For the Emperor! Purge the filth of the xenos!!"
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