Warhammer 40K in a box

Chapter 213 Reinforcements Arrive
In the 40k Empire, the power of a planetary governor is, to some extent, unlimited.

As long as you pay the tithes due on the planet in full and on time, you will be a qualified governor of the empire and have fulfilled your obligations.

On this basis, the Empire will not interfere with what you want to do on your own planet.

You can be as arrogant and extravagant as Emperor Yang of Sui, or more cruel and ruthless than Emperor Jie and Emperor Zhou, or you can be as diligent as the Qin Emperor and Emperor Wu of Han, and be idle for decades, or you can practice your ideas like an idealist and conduct social experiments.

Utopian socialism, social Darwinism, populism, nationalism...

As long as you want, whether it is to burn Rome like Nero, or to turn all cities into grasslands like the Mongols, or to build a huge arena and watch people fight each other every day...

It's all about the freedom of being a planetary governor.

Even some extreme people kill the people under their rule for fun every day, and that is not unacceptable.

Selling the people under their rule to the Mechanicus as mechanical servants can even be considered an effective means of generating income.

It was also for this reason that when Chen Xi ordered that all the hundreds of thousands of criminals on the Rostov II be handed over to Sage Christen to be transformed into mechanical servants, no one except the criminals themselves had any objections to this.

Is it just the criminals' own objections? Sorry, it doesn't matter.

To the Empire, they are just a group of sinners who have let down the Emperor. They are worthless negative assets of the Empire.

The only reason they are still alive is simply because the Emperor loves humanity and is willing to show them mercy even though they are sinners.

Although human lives are consumable in the Empire, it is strange that the Empire does not carry out the death penalty in most cases.

Or to be more precise, the Empire does not have the death penalty, which simply takes a person's life.

Generally speaking, if the crimes committed by a person were not serious enough to require death, he would often become a prisoner and perform various forms of labor to serve the empire to atone for his sins.

Although this period may be the rest of his life, or even include his descendants, it is not a direct deprivation of life.

When a person's crimes are so serious that they require death to pay for them, the Empire will often not kill them directly, but will transform them into mechanical servants, so as to maximize their final value and provide the Empire with the last obligations they can fulfill.

The most serious of these is to be transformed into a penitent servitor, a living corpse that is always immersed in eternal repentance and pain.

But don't get me wrong, for the Empire, making servitors is a form of punishment, but killing someone is also a form of punishment. It's just that usually in this situation, it's not just one person who dies.

Because in the Empire, the death penalty is only imposed when a person's crime is so unforgivable that all traces of his existence must be erased, and he is not even worthy of being kept as a warning to future generations as a penitent servitor.

This is usually called excommunication, which means killing those with the most serious crimes, transforming some of those with more serious crimes into mechanical servants, and punishing some of those with less serious crimes as prisoners.

There was no limit on the proportion of persons to be put to death in the excommunication, or on the extent of the excommunication.

It might be to wipe out an entire family, or to kill ten clans based on their personal relationships, or even to wipe out an entire city or even the entire planet.

Of course, although the power of a planetary governor is great, it is not completely unlimited.

After all, while the Imperium might not care about your internal affairs, if you go too far, like initiating Chaos worship or an alien invasion, the Inquisition or the Adeptus Astartes won't sit idly by. At that point, whether a planetary governor can keep his head depends on the Emperor's mood.

And usually, the Emperor was not in a good mood.

But then again, most planetary governors know exactly where their bottom line is.

After all, although the empire's tax collectors and inquisitors don't come often, when they do, it's no joke.

Therefore, smart governors usually enjoy their power while carefully avoiding the "red lines" that may attract the attention of the empire.

And everything Chen Xi did was exemplary by the standards of a planetary governor.

So when the reinforcements arrived, the Inquisition did not bring him any punishment, but instead rewarded him with an Imperial Medal of Honor (Honorifica Imperialis).

This is a medal awarded to imperial soldiers who have performed many heroic deeds. Anyone who receives it will be regarded as a natural imperial hero.

Generally speaking, this is awarded to soldiers of the Astra Militarum, and as an inquisitor, Chen Xi is not qualified to receive it.

But due to various considerations, this medal was still worn on Chen Xi's chest as a reward for his two defenses of the holy land of the state religion and the important world of the empire.

However, this does not have much practical significance for Chen Xi. Even if he is given a basket of Terra Stars, it is not as practical as giving him two more regiments of Star Army reinforcements.

But as the planetary governor and inquisitor of the Empire, he still needed to appear grateful on the surface, as if he valued honor so much.

But these are actually trivial matters. What is really important is to make appropriate strategic arrangements for this unplanned expedition after the reinforcements arrive.

The scale of the reinforcements coming to support was too large. The Ecclesiarchy, the Inquisition, the Astra Militarum and the Imperial Navy made coordinating the command enough to be a headache.

In comparison, the 100,000 noble private soldiers who came along with them were very easy to arrange. Chen Xi sent them to the other two immigration planets in the sub-star zone.

Due to insufficient troops, Chen Xi did not provide any reinforcements to the two newly opened colonies in the sub-star region. They didn't even have a decent garrison.

In other words, these two planets are either fine or, once attacked by the Necrons, they will be unable to resist at all.

But surprisingly, these two planets were not attacked.

Considering that these two planets may become important strategic fulcrums in the future, he still sent reinforcements to the two imperial worlds after the reinforcements arrived, even though they were only 100,000 private soldiers of the nobles.

As for the remaining one million Crusade troops and two hundred thousand Star Army, Chen Xi did not let them disembark. Instead, he planned to wait until the expeditionary command was established and the strategic direction was determined before considering the deployment of the troops.

After all, there was no problem for them to stay in the transport ship for a while.

But if it were to unfold on the planet, the consumption would be enormous.

(End of this chapter)