Sterbelicht - One Sacrifice At A Time Against The Galaxy (40K)

It was chaos in the council chambers of the Glimmering Federation, and Primary Clerk Argent was mired in despair.

Simply put, there was too much to do.

Currently the council was arguing over the shape of the new organization. Nobody was calling it the Inquisition, because everybody present wanted very badly to ensure it was as distant from that awful body of oppression as possible. But it would fulfill the same role, and the arguments for how to achieve that purpose raged. They were probably going to be called the "Eyes of the Federation." Which was good enough for Argent, they just needed to move on.

The next item on the agenda was the military budget, and Argent had helped F-891 rehearse their argument for the last month. The Federation required more Andromeda-class choirships, but that fact had gotten lost in committee. Even now, the leading proposal for resolving the many planetary combat quagmires called for building five more Taurus-class troopships, because some councilmember had gotten confused and thought there had been a typo.

After all, surely the Armies of the Federation required more hulls to transport bodies, platforms to launch fighters from, and orbital bombardment capable ships? It made sense to a layman that these were the things that won wars.

Argent sighed, tuning out the agitated babble and leaning back against his bench. He could hear F-891's voice in the back of his head, reciting the numbers that conveyed that the Federation's difficulty was not hulls, or guns, but warp transits. They needed the flexibility of the Andromeda, to increase the flexibility of the fleet and allow rapid supply shipments delivered by civilian shipping.

The worst part was that Argent knew the argument over the topic would still take the rest of the day. He only hoped it didn't take the rest of the week. Regardless, afterwards they would rotate back around to establishing the "Eyes of the Federation."

His datapad buzzed, and Argent pulled it out to read the message, nearly ready to start pulling his hair out. His request to address the council had been bumped down the list again, after a proposal on subsidizing and standardizing the construction of Cathedrals to the Star Child. With long practice he suppressed his desire to scream and got up from his bench to leave the council chamber. There was no chance he would be able to present his case today, or likely anytime in the next month.

As he crept out of the chamber, staying low to avoid causing a disruption, he calmed himself. This was no malevolent actor. The Glimmering Federation was growing, and every one of these issues was vital to its future. But the council reorganization had not even finished a decade past, and inefficiencies still plagued the new system, borne from additional councilmembers being added and subsequent demands on the bureaucrats and clerks that supported the council. Information packets got lost, or were badly organized and contained the wrong data.

And that was what he wanted to address the councilmembers about. They'd already voted to leave the Magi of Qulach's Forge be, and the matter was done and settled to most of them, with no need to revisit it. But they had made the vote a biased report - some mix-up had led the briefing on the matter to indicate that the Order of the Rising Sun had made a pact with the Tech-priests to depart the planet once the fighting was done. A seprate part of the report had estimated that the majority of the planet's Mechanicus leadership was becoming more friendly with the Star-Mechanicum, and might decide the join peacefully.

Those forces were also badly needed across the Federation, especially on Sagat VII, where waves of Nurglite corruption battled with what few forces could be spared. It was not a bad decision, but it was one made with incomplete information.

Argent had already had words with Cannoness Hiersha, whose Scribe-priests had drafted the report. It had contained too much wishful thinking, and the only accurate part had been the estimates of the casualties incurred if the Glimmering federation should try to capture the planet by force. If the report was entirely to be trusted, then the only sensible course of action was to let Qulach's Forge join the Federation peacefully, some twenty to fifty years hence, and use those forces to properly suppress Sagat VII.

The report had seemed off to Argent, and he had sought clarification, and the only agreement made with Qulach's Forge was a temporary ceasefire until Chaos was cleansed from the planet. The Federation would not be betraying their word, or that of their knights, by conquering the planet as they had done so many others. And while some tech-priests had converted to the Star-Mechanicum peaceably, they were only a thin layer of shining light over an ocean of horribe orthodoxy. Qulach's Forge would never join the Federation peaceably, and their every moment was a wellspring of suffering and death for all who lived underneath their cyborg overlords.

The parallels to the birth of the Candlekeepers made Argent want to vomit. They could act, right now, and the Galaxy would be a better place for it. But a mixup in the paperwork meant that the Federation was going to miss the chance to right this wrong, and would have to content itself with every other good deed they had done.

With a sigh, Argent left the room, reviewing the schedule once more. He'd already sent a request to the Choirs for intervention, but they were busy singing new melodies. The Lamenters were occupied with cultists, and every contact he had was scattered to the corners of the Federation, overseeing integration of new planets and the restoration of the civilian infrastructure. Every arm of the Star Child was occupied, and now its hands would release a prize unneeded.

Edit: I try not to take a stance on voting with Omakes, but in this one there seemed to be a very strong agreement that the vote was influenced by a misunderstanding of the conditions, and I wanted to try to communicate what that may have looked like on a governmental scale. Big governments make a lot of mistakes too, folks.

Edit: Holy shit did the Qulach Mechanicum just shit the bed. o-o