V3 Chapter 117: The Reaper Wearing a Commissar's Coat
After the Ecclesiarch was taken away, every High Lord who had taken part in the assassination attempt on Duvette, or in the attempt to sabotage Guilliman's reforms, received their final judgment.
Those who held out in resistance were executed. Their confidants were stripped of their identities and, after reformation, turned into servitors in service to the Imperium's own institutions. The families behind them had their assets seized, their hereditary powers revoked, and were exiled to worlds far from Terra.
The purge touched a great many of the Imperium's senior officials, though very few people ever came to understand the full course of events.
To everyone else, all that was known was this: on the very day the Imperial Regent returned to Terra, an assassination attempt against his closest representative had taken place in the Outer Palace.
Once the assassination failed, an enraged Guilliman had ordered the arrest of everyone involved.
Some of the High Lords had refused the Imperial Regent's order, mobilising whatever forces they could still command into open rebellion, and were crushed completely within less than two days.
The Administratum's Supreme Administrative Hall was breached. The rebels in the War Office's controlled district were wiped out. The Adeptus Arbites' own split ended fast once the Custodians stepped in. The Lord High Admiral's flagship was boarded by the Minotaurs Chapter, nearly half its critical sections scoured clean in blood, and command of the fleet fell at last into loyal officers' hands.
Throughout it all, though, what left Terra's officials most afraid was the commissar who stood at the Imperial Regent's side the entire time.
Duvette Erdmann.
That name had already spread across a great many of the Imperium's worlds long before Guilliman's return. His face turned up on recruitment posters more often than not; Astra Militarum soldiers sang of his battlefield exploits; and the Administratum's own propaganda arm had taken to calling him a legendary hero the Emperor Himself had granted mankind.
He'd earned honours no ordinary man could ever hope to touch in a lifetime, and had lived through wars that could have destroyed an entire Legion outright. Now, this legendary commissar had followed the awakened Primarch to Terra itself, and had been granted the standing of Special Commissioner of the Imperial Regent.
At one public assembly before the Imperial Council's senior officials, Duvette had stood at Guilliman's right hand, while Captain-General Trajann Valoris stood at the Primarch's left.
Everyone who saw it understood at once exactly what standing this mortal in the black coat held in the Imperial Regent's own regard.
Over the three months following the end of the High Lords' rebellion, Duvette became a frequent presence across every one of Terra's administrative departments. Carrying the Regent's own inspection decree, he cleared out, one by one, the officials who'd secured high positions through family connections, backroom deals, and outright corruption.
Whenever that black commissar's coat appeared inside an administrative hall, a batch of senior officials would be taken away. Some stood trial. Some were sent to penal worlds. The worst offenders were sent to the reformation factories.
Once these people left, they were rarely seen again. But some officials soon noticed a handful of oddly familiar clerical servitors had joined their own departments.
Some recognised the remaining shape of a face on one of the servitors. Others worked out the original owner's identity from the mark a ring had once left on a mechanical arm. No one dared speak of it openly, but the silent fear spread fast through the whole of Terra's administrative body regardless.
Decrees that had once dragged on for months without ever being completed now got processed within days. Officials who'd made a habit of extracting some benefit from every single dispatch finally learned to actually read what they were signing before putting their name to it.
To Duvette, these changes were satisfying enough, as far as it went.
Putting down the High Lords' rebellion had earned him another ten thousand points of Emperor's Wrath. Counting the nine thousand he'd had left over after his earlier use of his abilities, he'd now built up a full nineteen thousand points.
A stockpile of power that size put Duvette in a rather good mood. As for the officials' fear of him, he didn't much care one way or the other — he even found himself enjoying, a little, the way they suddenly turned honest the moment they laid eyes on him.
He wasn't going to stay on Terra forever anyway; his abilities were still best put to use on a battlefield. Still, helping Guilliman clear out a few of these worms before he left was, at least, a decent enough use of the authority he'd been handed.
At that moment, Duvette led a group through the interior of a vast dispatch-processing hive complex. The thirteen Shadow Wolves of Luna were spread out around the group, and several scribes from the interim Reorganisation Committee followed close behind, cradling their data-slates with obvious care.
Paper dispatches awaiting review were stacked high along both sides of the narrow passages, and still more documents sat sealed away on metal racks dozens of tiers tall. Servitors responsible for hauling files moved slowly along their rails, mechanical arms delivering bundle after bundle of paperwork to one department or another.
Duvette leafed through the list in his hand, his gaze moving slowly between the names and the crimes attached to them.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. Another whole crop of greedy little worms." He shook his head. "These people really do breed everywhere, like cockroaches."
Twenty-seven people within this dispatch complex required investigation by the Inspectorate, six of whom already had evidence against them clear enough to act on.
Some had sold priority review slots for the highest-urgency dispatches. Some had deliberately withheld distress reports arriving from war-torn worlds. Others had altered file numbers to redirect supplies meant for the front line straight into their own families' hands.
One official's habit of sitting on dispatches had left three worlds without reinforcements in time. By the time the relevant paperwork finally cleared approval, the major cities on those worlds had already fallen into Xenos hands.
Duvette knew exactly how that lot would react the moment they saw him coming. They'd probably drop to their knees, smear his boots with tears and snot, and beg him for a clean, quick death.
That was simply how it went. These people knew perfectly well there was no escaping guilt. Their only remaining hope was to die cleanly, rather than be reforged into a servitor doomed to endless, agonising labour until the last organ still working inside them finally gave out.
Whenever he ran into someone like that, Duvette usually just walked up, gave the top of their bald head a light pat, and let the Inspectorate's own personnel take them away. Whether they ended up shot, or as a new fixture inside some archive tower, was for the tribunal to decide.
The closer they drew to the dispatch complex's great mess hall, the more clearly the noise ahead of them carried. Clearly, the clerks inside had no idea yet that the Imperial Regent's own Special Commissioner had already arrived in their district.
"Lively in there." Duvette said, low.
He glanced down at the last name on the list.
Fabian Gelferin. Attached to the Administratum's Dispatch Complex, Final Review Office. Seven Hundredth Rank Terran Scrivener, primarily responsible for assessing and filing the highest-priority dispatches.
This one's charge was a little unusual.
Fabian had, on multiple occasions, used his official access to enter sealed archives, and had privately read historical records the Imperium had classified as forbidden from dissemination.
He'd copied down parts of what he found, hiding the pages inside his own quarters and office, in an attempt to reconstruct the true shape of the Imperium's history out of dispatches spanning different eras.
By the old standard, this alone would have been more than enough to earn him a death sentence.
If whoever investigated him suspected he'd come into contact with heretical knowledge, he might even have been handed straight over to the Inquisitorial Tribunal.
But while reviewing the dispatch complex's access records this time, the Inspectorate's own personnel had come across the private notes Fabian had left behind.
The material passed through Tyrion's review before reaching Guilliman, and the Imperial Regent needed only a short span of time to reach his decision.
Guilliman needed people who dared to search for the truth, and who also had the skill to handle archival work.
The newly established Order of Historical Truth would be responsible for restoring the history that had been falsified, and reorganising ten thousand years' worth of the Imperium's archives. Fabian's name had already been placed on the first list of candidates.
"Lucky bastard, this one." Duvette closed the data-slate.
Duvette reached the mess hall's door, and looked up at the sealed metal gate before him. Just as the scribe behind him started forward to announce their arrival, the Shadow Wolf beside him had already driven a kick straight into the door.
With a tremendous crash, the heavy door slammed inward, and the noise inside the mess hall cut off at once. Hundreds of clerks turned toward the doorway in the same instant, staring at the commissar in the black coat, and the white-armoured giant standing behind him.
Someone recognised Duvette, and their tray hit the floor at once. Fear spread through the crowd fast; several officials from the list had already gone white in the face, and one of them had already begun edging quietly backward.
Duvette swept his gaze across the clerks, their expressions shifting fast from slack-jawed shock to outright terror, and let a reasonably friendly smile spread across his face. He raised a hand, and gave everyone in the mess hall a small wave.
"Hello there. Lucky, lucky boys."
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