Starting from the Planetary Governor - Chapter 409

Chapter 408: Ashes of the Dead

“This is not bad.”

Nides, or Sidney Blevins, looked at a sand cave found by his battle brothers and expressed satisfaction.

“Let’s go here.”

“We still have to pay attention. We must set up sentries and we will take turns to rest.”

“I want to meet with Martins, but not in a way that he can surprise us. We have come this far for more than 30 years. The original decision was made by us together, and I have not let any of you down. So far, we have only lost one battle brother. I hope that this time, no one among us will die.”

The other seven people around him did not respond immediately.

Everyone seemed to fall into a kind of silence.

One of them broke the atmosphere and said, “I am a little doubtful now, whether we should really be like this. Perhaps, it is not good to be like the past 30 years, at least…”

At this point, he couldn’t say anything more.

After a while, another person took over the conversation: “If we just want to survive and don’t want anything else, then why don’t we go to find the traitor Zhong Jihua? He will definitely accept us. Why do we have to try every means to lure them out like we did when we came to Martins, and worry about whether he will kill us all?”

Someone else said: “Indeed, if I go to Zhong Jihua, I would rather die.”

“Okay, why do you all look like loyal subjects of the Empire? If we were really that loyal, we should have died thirty-seven years ago, or at least died with Fan Haozhe nine years ago.”

…

The brothers who lived and died together were about to quarrel.

In fact, similar arguments were not rare in the past. Their situation is special. After more than thirty years of being confused and lost, even a space warrior would feel helpless and even unable to reconcile with himself.

This is a very dangerous signal. Don’t think that venting some things will be better. On the contrary, as long as the situation cannot be changed, then wanton venting will only make the connection between them fragile, and make the seemingly solid relationship crack, and one day in the future, it will completely explode.

This is the problem that Blevins, as the leader of the team, has always tried his best to avoid.

Every time there is a sign of such a thing, he will speak up forcefully and put an end to any possible arguments.

No matter what his battle brothers think in their hearts, whether they regret their past decisions, or have any new ideas for the future, they should keep it in their hearts and not express it.

Of course, he also understands that it is only a temporary solution.

But if there is a permanent solution… they have thought about looking for Zhong Jihua.

However, most of the brothers think that it is better to die.

It is true that they have betrayed. In that battle, they could have returned to the team, but they think that the Atonement Expedition has no end and no one can survive to the end.

This is a desperate journey, and it also contains resentment towards the Empire.

Why? The glory accumulated over thousands of years of history of the Chapter, and the sacrifices made in the Atonement Expedition over the past few decades, are not enough to compensate for a sin?

Obviously, the Empire thinks it is not enough. They are unwilling to die and perish. So, in the war to suppress the rebellion more than 30 years ago, they had the opportunity to reunite with Martins and others, but they eventually chose to leave quietly, hiding their identities and wandering around.

Sometimes they would disguise themselves as normal Space Marines, get some subsidies, and save some people by the way; but more often, they would erase their signs and wander among some gray groups. Sometimes they were looters, pirates, and sometimes mercenaries…

They would carefully assess the degree of danger in the battle.

They no longer had the mission to fight to the death for any goal, so they would not lose their lives for these actions that had no honor and were just for survival.

However, they did not want to endanger their mother group, nor did they want to become the real enemy of the Emperor.

At the same time, for some reasons that they themselves did not say clearly, they always kept an eye on the Phoenix Mother Group. Sometimes they would move directly to the area where the regiment was fighting and observe from a distance. There were even several times when they took action at critical moments, saved some battle brothers, but did not meet them and left directly.

About 25 years ago, after they completed a looting and supply, they heard the news from the mother group again. They were fighting a war against the Chaos evildoers. The traitors who had nothing to do rushed over with the mentality of “just go and see”.

In this battle, the regiment suffered heavy losses.

Of the regiment that originally had only more than 200 people left, half of them were stuck in the quagmire.

This was something they could not save.

They only had eight people, and they had no way to get out of the battle situation that more than 100 battle brothers could not escape.

They could only watch sadly from a distance.

In fact, this was most of the scenes they saw when they followed the mother group in the past. The scenes where they had the opportunity to save their battle brothers and retreat quietly were absolutely rare.

However, this time, something completely different happened.

When these more than 100 people faced a desperate situation, they made an amazing move: their leader, a Phoenix Captain, went out to negotiate with those evil cult traitors.

Blevins was also familiar with that captain, whose name was Zhong Jihua.

Of course, people like Blevins who were watching from a distance did not know the specific content of the communication,

but they could see the results.

The group of fighting brothers led by Zhong Jihua stopped fighting and even opened their defenses, allowing the cult traitors to pass through their defense zone. They stayed in their camps, not firing a single shot, no longer resisting, and no longer contacting the outside world.

Then, there were sporadic sounds of fighting in their camps.

Of course, it was not an invasion by foreign enemies, but an internal cleansing among the Space Marines.

Obviously, not everyone was willing to accept Zhong Jihua’s behavior. In the Space Marine group, the number of people who were willing to die for honor, for faith, and for the Empire was the largest.

In the end, after the cleansing was completed, only about sixty or seventy Phoenixes came out of the camp.

Then, Zhong Jihua took the survivors and went deep into the area occupied by the cult traitors and disappeared there.

In the end, the cult rebellion problem on that planet was solved, but no one on the Empire side, whether it was the planetary garrison or the Phoenix Warband, knew that Zhong Jihua’s group had betrayed the Empire. They had always believed that Zhong Jihua’s company had been sacrificed in the war.

And until the cult rebellion was resolved, Zhong Jihua’s gang had never appeared again. The

Phoenix lost a company, and in the starry sea, there was a warband called “Ashes of the Dead”. They believed in tyrants, their bodies had mutated, most of the members had grown horns, and the overall paint of the power armor was dark red with gray stripes.

Although the number of the Ashes of the Dead was small and the time of its establishment was short, they had done a lot in the past twenty years.

They looted the Empire’s ships and massacred entire ships. Afterwards, in the wrecks that people found, blood covered every corridor, every room, and every wall; on the bridge, in the assembly square, in the ship’s church and other places, there were bloody eight-pointed stars and skulls piled up into small hills. This is a typical appearance of those who have sacrificed to Khorne;

they have also assisted the cultists in slaughtering the worlds of the human empire. In the past 25 years, they have appeared in at least four cases where human worlds were destroyed or hives were slaughtered;

they even united with other warbands to attack an imperial fleet carrying gene-seed taxes handed in by the Space Marines, and snatched a batch of gene-seeds to pollute and strengthen themselves.

They even merged with another warband and gained dominance…

Blevins and others once met their “old comrade” Zhong Jihua in a pirate alliance base. Zhong Jihua once “kindly” invited them to join, but they refused with great difficulty.

The only loss of their first battle brother was when they broke through the siege.

They did betray, and even became deserters in disgrace, not living and dying with their warband. However, they may be worthy of the title of “traitors”, but they are definitely unwilling to go along with Zhong Jihua.

Surrendering to Chaos, worshipping the tyrant Khorne, purging their own battle brothers… Blevins and his gang really couldn’t do such a thing, and they were ashamed to be associated with them.

But sometimes they would also think that after the mother group was destroyed in the Atonement Crusade, there might be only themselves and the Ashes of the Dead left in this universe.

No.

Zhong Jihua’s gang, whose names/beliefs/paints/logos were all changed, how could they still be called the Phoenix? The Phoenix is a symbol of indomitable spirit, a phoenix reborn from the ashes. The new name that the gang took, “Ashes” and “Dead”, obviously completely abandoned the tradition of the group. The Phoenix

finally came to an end.

However, just when they were wandering in the universe in a daze, not knowing where to go, or even what the meaning of life in the future was, they heard that the mother group had ended the Atonement Crusade!

But there were only seven battle brothers left, so what was the point? Now the number of people in the mother group is even less than that of these traitors!

However, when they heard the news about the Phoenix, they had already been deeply integrated with a multi-star political entity called the ‘Alliance’.

The current mother group seemed to be fighting for a star zone leader named ‘Gu Hang’.

They didn’t know what happened in the middle, but from the latest intelligence, the situation of the regiment seemed to be unexpectedly good.

The entire regiment not only did not look dying, but recovered quite majestically. Especially the news of the battle of Koroja came out. Under the leadership of Governor Gu, a big demon was actually destroyed, ending the invasion war directed by him personally!

Although, in that war, it was the man named Gu Hang who grabbed the greatest fame. Those who knew about the war were all admiring the wisdom and bravery of this commander-in-chief, the governor’s composite identity, and his powerful psychic power.

However, under Gu Hang’s reputation, those who were interested could still see the contribution of the Phoenix. This group of space warriors who should have been destroyed helped Gu Hang to a great extent, and showed a scale of at least a hundred people in the battle.

People who don’t know about the Phoenix and don’t pay attention to it may not think that this is a big deal. But in the eyes of people like Blevins who have been paying attention to the situation of the mother group for decades, this is a miracle.

They know that the chapter has lost all its arsenals and gene seed libraries in the last battle that ended the Atonement Crusade. Under such circumstances, how could it be possible to grow from a size of seven people to more than a hundred people in less than ten years?

Not to mention the success rate of the gene seed implantation surgery, it is impossible to have so many seeds alone!

Could it be that Holy Terra or the Martian Order allocated the gene seed tax that the Phoenix had previously handed in to support the chapter?

This is really a strange thing!

Space Marine chapters also have to pay taxes, but they don’t pay Imperial taxes, don’t provide in-kind taxes, and can even ask the Empire or some Forge Worlds for equipment. However, they still have to hand in one-tenth of all the gene seeds produced by the chapter within a certain period.

In name, this is to allow the Empire to check and monitor whether the Chapter’s gene-seed is still pure and uncontaminated; in addition, it is also to “save” the Chapter, so that when the Chapter suffers losses in the future, the previous gene-seed can be provided to the Chapter to help the Chapter recover.

But in fact… the former may be a legitimate reason, but the latter is almost bullshit. A Chapter, without a crisis of extinction, what gene-seed do you need? If there is a crisis of extinction, why don’t I use the gene-seed to create a new, obedient Chapter, but support you old Chapters with countless rich histories that may not be obedient?

It is a foolish dream to ask the Empire to feed back the gene-seed it has eaten. Perhaps, it may happen to some Chapters with very special identities and backgrounds, but the Phoenix is obviously not one of them.

As a result, this thing really happened to the Phoenix?

No matter how unbelievable this matter is, after thinking about it, this is the only possibility.

Can Martins, that kid, also conjure up gene-seeds out of thin air?

It is precisely because the mother group has shown signs of recovery that the eight “wandering ghosts” have the idea of coming to find the mother group.

In other words, it is to warn the mother group about the existence of the “ash dead”.

As for whether they actually have some unrealistic expectations?

Only they themselves know.

(End of this chapter)