Peace Given To The World
The command post was dimly lit by a handful of multifunction displays and the soft infrared glow of the machinery, more than enough for the enhanced men and women there working quietly, managing the thousand different facets of an occupation action. It had once been a military base fighting the invasion, but the impassioned defense of its soldiers was rather insufficient when matched with the cybernetic superiority of the Magnate invasion. When the Eternal Dawn's forces had moved in, they had found it more than adequate-the high-bandwidth fiberoptics could be repurposed, the sturdy design was enough to stop shrapnel, and it was out of the way enough that defenses could be emplaced around, including a handful of point defense lasers, "hedgehogs".
"So, I'm pleading with you here, for your sakes. Don't fuck with us, or I'll have to kill you all." He spoke his own words softly, going over them. Psych Impact had given him their tactical recommendations, but yet, they didn't work. Those in Melian's Hope should have known it was futile, that they had the power to hold the planet, that no help would be coming short of a miracle-and God was on his side, not theirs. Even so, they decided tempting divine favor was a great idea, and even heavy-handed outright threats matched with the carrot of enhancement and authority had failed to significantly stem the tide.
"Exarch Castar. Your orders?"
No doubt the enemy would have thought him heartless, cold, and inhuman. That wasn't true. He felt for those who had been lost to insurgent ambushes, the wounded, and so he chose to inflict this sorrow on them, to prevent anyone who he cared about from being lost. "We've given them a month to cut this out, Deacon Stone. We've warned them a dozen times. Go into the town of Stonecrest. Psych Imp and Panopticon suggest with Cert 70 CI 95 that most of the insurgency is working from there. Go in heavy and don't leave until they learn that when we say something, we keep our word."
"Exarch. Clarification requested? Maximize civilian casualties in reprisal?" Deacon Stone asked the question in the cacophonous tactical argot for Templars by habit, trying to focus on the tactical situation and not the specifics of the orders. The artificial language helped him think of this as a puzzle, rather than as murder. Exterminating an entire town for the deaths of scarcely a dozen.
"No, Psych Imp says that it'd be counterproductive, and I'd have called in strikes if I was planning on that instead. I need you and your ops teams to find every major town leader, everyone with influence, everyone who might be able to organize. Bureaucrats, military veterans, civil leaders, religious ones. Then kill them. If you don't find them, then find their relations and take them hostage. Allow them to trade their lives for the lives of their family. Let them see that we, too, can play with the gloves off. Civilian casualties beyond that are irrelevant either way. Your call."
The Lux Dei commander nodded and snapped off a salute, her matte black biomech arm drinking up the light. She had lost it in a near miss by a infantry rocket launcher, chose to amputate the elbow joint and accept a biomech spare to get back into the fight faster. Unlike her commander, Stone wasn't a full conversion or close to it, the only cybernetics she had accepted before the invasion relatively minor systems-biomonitors, metabolic boosters, drug autoinjectors, pain suppressors. But the toll of headhunter attempts and field operations had taken her flesh and her duty outweighed her loyalty to her parents' Purist heritage, and so she allowed herself to be turned into a patchwork bit by bit. Fractured bones had been removed, replaced by self-healing hyperplastic. Damaged muscle groups were pulled, replaced with carbon-fiber and polymer, bioelectric implants were rewired to support not only her armor, but her new modifications as well. One of her gold-colored eyes had been marred, replaced by a glassy black-lensed prosthetic. With a little makeup, she could have been the monster in an old horror movie.
It would be more than fitting.