The Quicksand Singularity ArQive: Array.init:0

A0T4.2 The Ëchüha Incident (Parts 2+3)

Something about this operation was different, off. Hvórþ could feel it in his bones like a visceral wrongness. Every instinct in him screamed it as it did in every Dropkick Demon under his command. They weren't being sent in as the hammer of the Imperium's wrath. They weren't doing high stakes intel gathering, they weren't taking names and kicking ass, hunting HVTs or establishing beachheads deep behind enemy lines.

Clearing the way for a Blister Blitz in an absolute clusterfuck was their bread and butter and no matter what Katzali had to say, Hvórþ knew this wasn't that. They weren't here on another ordinary high stakes recon operation either. It wasn't going to be just another Europasday in Shittsville because Shittsville had already came and went a long time ago. The star had already gone supernova, and the black hole was long through feeding on its corpse. Where they were going was colder than ice, colder than the space between stars, colder than the tombs of emperors whose bones had turned to dust three ages ago and had already been forgotten in the endless paper cathedrals of imperial bureaucracy.

Put simply, the planet was dead.

From what Hvórþ had been given from previous UAV reconnaissance operations, the situation was unlike anything he had ever seen before. All that was left of the little princeling's palatial spaceport was crushed bones of imperial splendour. Skeletons and fragments of buildings, unrecognisable as to what they once were, rose out of piles of rubble and drifts of ash and dust, as if defiant to the wrath of the gods themselves. What shape anything once might have taken could scarcely be imagined. The scene was one of total devastation, unlike anything mankind could produce by the means suggested.

When he'd first been given still frames from UAV recons, he'd thought only a nuclear armaggeddon of a variety not seen in five ages could have obliterated everything to such an unfathomable, unrecognisable degree. But there were no such craters, no glassed impact sites, no fallout detectable anywhere on the surface. Radiation scans showed only moderate elevation, more consistent with high volcanic activity than nuclear bombs, and the ruins suggested a more conventional demolition by way of shelling and bombing and urban warfare.

The scale of it was completely unbelievable. Whatever war caused this was so far beyond the limits of human tolerance that Hvórþ questioned whether or not the Rimworlds had staged some manner of defence here. But this...this was no Rimworlds homeland defence. Those always brought First Marines, and First Marines had a way of making their presence unambiguous, unmissable even. Hvórþ had seen it. He had seen what the AFR's gods of war were capable of and had prayed every day since then to never see it again. When no signs of their handiwork were to be found, Hvórþ neither praised the gods nor felt any form of relief.

There was only one answer to the question of who did this.

What had happened to this backwater oubliette for the disgraced son of Imperial royalty was self-inflicted. The perpetrators and the victims were the Imperium herself. All that could be seen in every scan, recording, and VScape was the aftermath of Imperial weaponry turned inward, with not a scintilla of evidence of anyone else being involved.

It was civil war. There was no other option.

Despite what all the data read, Hvórþ could not reconcile that. The Rimworlds, or, for that matter, any civilisation fighting off a hostile force until there was nothing left to fight over made some sense to him. Humanity had a long and storied history of fighting off invaders even when it was only for the pure principle thereof. This wasn't that.

It was civil war. Brothers killing their brothers, fathers killing sons, mothers killing daughters, the most brutal form of fighting. Fighting few had stomach for, fighting that could not go on, but did. And it went on. It went on and on and on, until every centimetre of ground had been fought over so totally that, by the time all was said and done, whatever they were fighting for in the first place had been replaced in its entirety with pure hatred of their enemy, until they were fighting just to fight, to destroy the enemy. Driven by an insatiable desire to exact some petty vengeance over the totalising destruction of everything they had once been fighting over, they had fought until no one was left to fight over it anymore.