Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

==Olamic Quietude==

Editor's Note: May have to rewrite, threads talked about making Olamics "brain in a jar" remotely piloting robot bodies to avoid the issues with a post-scarcity society curbstomping everyone.

The Olamic Quietude are a bastion of isolation in a sea of mostly Imperial space. A highly-technologically advanced human society, the Olamic Quietude survived the Dark Age of Technology by uploading their minds as A.I. and resleeving them into robot bodies. New citizens of the Quietude are born by growing new brains and uploading them as soon as possible into mechanical bodies. The Adeptus Mechanicus hate the Quietude with a frothing vengeance, making A.I. is bad enough but actually becoming them is tech-heresy of the highest caliber. Others in the Mechanicus don’t just hate the Quietude for tech-heresy but because on some level the Quietude represent the logical extrapolation of Mechanicum ideals, replacing every part of the body with machinery, and it scares them.

The Imperium via the Vlka Fenryka tried to make peaceful contact with the Quietude during the Great Crusade. A society with that much Dark Age-era technology would be a huge boon to the Imperium. The Quietude attacked the contact team without provocation and vivisected the survivors. Seeing the state of the rest of the galaxy, particularly the near-absence of common Dark Age technology like A.I. (which made the Imperium seem downright backwards to the Quietude), the Quietude considered themselves the only true successors to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion and the rest of humanity as nothing more than devolved savages.

Russ and Bjorn were quite angry. Russ in particular. He wanted to rain nuclear fire on them from orbit, smash their ships and pitch them into the nearest gravity well, topple their orbital dockyard and drop it on the capital city and hunt them down to the last man, take any sufficiently unaugmented women as war-brides and adopting any children and dependents. Yes he promised after the Scouring of Skand Wars that he and his people would never do this shit again and the tradition would be retired but he felt the Old Ways could be brought out again just for this one special occasion. They had insulted the Imperium, they had insulted his Legion and he had friends in the contact team and he knew that they died badly.

In the end the Steward managed to calm him down enough to call him off and the Olamic Quietude dodged a bullet. The Imperium would have won, in time, but the cost would have been astronomical. Despite being restricted to a handful of planets, of which only their frozen homeworld was inhabitable in the strictest sense of the world, the high tech base of the Quietude and their ability to restore from backup would mean it would cost numerous Imperial soldiers to permanently kill one Quietude one. It would have been a bloodbath, and would have been all for a world that had little to no strategic or resource value whatsoever. The Steward told Russ the next time the Quietude attacked the Wolves he would allow them no quarter.

As a result, the Imperium adopted a cold war quarantine policy towards the Olamic Quietude. Quietude ships in Imperial space are shot on sight as well as vice versa. Thankfully, although the Quietude had warp capability they weren't expansionist and didn't seem interested in expanding beyond the dozen or so nearest worlds to their frozen homeworld. The Quietude initially believed that the Imperium would implode. They weren't the first big interstellar empire that had arisen around them. All the others had died, this one would too. By the time it looked like they were here to stay it was far too late for the Quietude to be able to do anything about it and claim what they saw as their birthright. To the Imperium the Quietude were, and would continue to be, a problem for later. The problem is that unlike the Adeptus Mechanicus the Quietude have no prohibitions on inventing so their technology is constantly improving. Sooner or later, the Quietude is going to have to be dealt with, as eventually the force multiplication of Quietude technology is going to outweigh the Imperial advantage of numbers.

That said, the Quietude have their weaknesses, even if they don’t project them to outsiders. First, they get screwed over by catastrophes just as badly as the Imperium does. When the War of the Beast broke out, the Quietude were hit just as hard as the Imperium and as such were in not position to take advantage of the weakened state. The Harrowing screwed them over. The death screams of the possible Man of Gold screwed them over. The Black Crusades screw them over. Every time they get screwed over their technology get knocked back quite a bit and they have to rebuild, not enough that they lose all their gains but enough that they have yet to reach the critical tech-levels they need to go on the offensive. Half the time they engage in brushfire hostilities and posturing with the Imperium it’s to prevent the Imperium from figuring out this little fact and wiping them out while they are weak.

Additionally, because the Quietude are not reproducing like organic humans, their population is gradually getting whittled down by attrition and each citizen of the Quietude controls an increasing proportion of the Quietude’s power base and processing power. So while Quietude tech base is increasing their population drops. This means that while it is difficult to kill a Quietude soldier, as time goes on the permanent death of a soldier represents a bigger loss to the Quietude. The obvious solution to this from the Quietude’s standpoint would be to grow more people, but that would mean the already existing populace would have to give up some of their bandwidth and processing power due to the increased population, which they aren’t interested in.

Ten thousand years later between the 12th Black Crusade, the increase in hostilities with the Necron Star Empire, and the appearance of tyranids on the other end of the galaxy, the Olamic Quietude sees the strains on an overtaxed and attacked on all sides Imperium. Despite being damaged by the 12th Black Crusade themselves, they smell blood in the water and are mobilizing for war. 

They have taken the ancient listening posts on the worlds at the border, killing the crews and exterminating the service towns that grew up around them. They are very much prepared to take as much as they can while the Imperium is distracted elsewhere. Their fleets are assembled, their soldiery constructed and trained and they are going to methodically and meticulously take and settle and turn to war world after world until they take Old Earth. What will life be like under the Olamic Quietude? Nobody will ever find out. They don't leave survivors. At least none that the Imperium can find. Baseline humans and any human not of their realm are seen as some sort of tribal barbarian or primitive lesser animal. They have made so far no distinction beyond civilian or soldier, adult or child.

Ljot's Landing is an inhabited world not very far from the Olamic Quietude exclusion zone. Very similar to the Quietude homeworld in that it's a half frozen semi-wasteland. And it is a Fenrisian Colony, with a chapter of its very own. The call has been put out. The Valkyries are rising, the Wolves are awakening and Bjorn is at long last going to be allowed to settle the long, long held and unfulfilled grudge.

They killed everyone, the men, the women, the children, making no distinction between combatant and non-combatant except for the way they killed them. The soldiers were killed where they stood with their strange weaponry, leaving eerie ashen sillhouetes wherever the Quietude's weapons hit home. What they did to the civilians was worse, taking what they wanted, the brains, the spines, sometimes the internal organs, and leaving the rest. Butchered bodies half-buried under snow littered the fields and streets, at first resembling the bodies of dead animals, except for the fact that their corpses were mostly drained of blood and their wounds were made with the precision of a surgeon instead of the tearing marks of an animal. Even if they did not have enhanced senses the Space Wolves could have smelled them, reeking with that stale, clinical odor from being treated with so much antiseptics and antimicrobials that the bodies would not decompose naturally for months and the carrion birds would not touch them.

No one in the Imperium knows why the Quietude are doing this. The leading suggestion is the Olamics are taking the brains, lobotomizing them, and incorporating them into their neural network as extra processors as a twisted form of mercantilism. Throughout the history of humanity and other species people have often sought to circumvent the overexplotation of local resources by stealing them from someone else. Only in this case the resource in question isn’t gold, or wood, or land, but bandwidth via brains.  Others point out the Quietude could easily vat-grown brains if they wished. It's possible if the Quietude tried to grow more brains those brains would be by Quietude law considered citizens, and therefore must be treated as people and not resources. But by Quietude standards outsiders aren't people and thus there are no such restrictions. On the other hand, maybe there is something specific they want from these brains, perhaps using the memories to gather information on what the Imperium has been up to. Or, perhaps, the Quietude are having fun. They butchered the people of Ljot’s Landing because it upsets the Fenrisians and the Think Tank remembers how enjoyable it was to vivisect the members of Russ’ diplomatic team thousands of years prior.

The Emperor isn’t happy about the situation, but he realizes just as the Quietude do that the galaxy is due to erupt into all-out-war any day now. The Quietude have to be taken out of the way now rather than later when they could potentially cost the Imperium the war by taking advantage of their weakened state or divert resources better used elsewhere. So the Vlka Fenryka are given the go ahead to wipe them out. Bjorn’s response? “By Hal, it’s about time”.