Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

== Terranis ==

In the original story Terranis survived, barely. I suggest we keep it like that. The 'Nids couldn't eat the planet because every time they got a digestion pool and giant drinking straw arrangement set up something unfortunate kept happening to it and the only way to stop that from happening was to exterminate the last of the Terranites, which was proving difficult in the extreme.

The rest of the Imperium just assumed that Terranis was dead. They lost contact with it 20 years ago and their only curiosity about the place was why the Shadow in the Warp was still there 20 years later, but unless they were prepared to travel to the edge of the Shadow and spend decades to centuries at sub-light trying to reach the planet they couldn't know. And they always had better stuff to divert those sorts of resources to. Sadly resource diversion and interstellar level triage was why Terranis was left for the 'Nids in the first place, Terranis was deemed an acceptable loss in the grand strategy. The Kriegers sticking around was them either not getting the orders, being used as a diversion or just being characteristically stubborn/uncooperative.

'Nids remain on Terranis and in Terranis orbit for the better part of 40 years before the Terranites and Krieger forces bleed them dry beyond the point where they can maintain the Shadow. Then the one remaining astropath on the planet sends out a brief report on the situation and the Imperial brass is absolutely fucking dumbfounded. That planet was written off as "unsalvageable" even with off-world help. It should not be alive. It shouldn't have been capable of resisting. They really shouldn't be getting any sort of report from the place. It sure as shit should not have been winning a game of attrition against the Dreaded Star Locust. But it is. A 'nid siege was a race against time based on how much materiel they had left versus how much biomass the 'nids had. You can only have so much explosives to blow up the drinking straws and you are essentially playing chicken as imagined by Dorn and Perturabo where either the hive ships starve to death or you run out of bombs. The Derivatives said 'fuck that' and improvised fresh explosives from tyranid bodily fluids. Some of those are pretty volatile, use the homebrew for the artillery and mines, use the vintage stock for the big shit like the capillary towers and dread the day when you have to try and make a 'nid snot bob big enough take one of those fucking things out. It won't let shit last indefinitely unless you can also make the artillery shell of out actual shells (maybe they can) but it could help you last a lot longer.

Which is not to say that the Terranians would have it their own way. The 'nids are nothing if not adaptive and although they can't stop making volatile mucus and still have useful weapons they wouldn't be limited to ripper variants. After the first few failed attempts to eat the bastion cities and the thining of the ground forces the Hive mind will either send down one or more Norn Queens to spawn an army locally to cut down on travel time and expending resources on space-to-ground pods or they are going to start spawning legitimate creatures rather than weapons. Shit with digestive systems and reproductive organs and the ability to survive for extended periods of time. This is also assuming that the Terranians absolutely salted all the earth everywhere when the planet became irretrievably tyrannoformed. Which they probably did quite effectively because when it comes to fucking up a planet down all the way back to pre-terraformed state whilst still living on it the Kriegers have prior experience. 'Nid fleet can't go because it'll starve to death in transit if it can't recover the expended bio-matter and it can't do that until the bio-matter stops planting IEDs on it's drinking straws and gets digested properly. Maybe if it hadn't been so effort/resource conservative when it first arrived shit would have gone down different but it had no way of knowing the tried and tested maximum efficiency method would be insufficient this time. It does highlight a rather funny weakness in the tyranids though. When the tyranids begin to digest the planet most of their biomass, including the warrior forms, is tied up in the digesting pools. The Hive Mind can't give commands to the pools like it can to the hive ships and bioforms so the ground is being held by a skeleton crew. In theory by this point all non-tyranid life on the planet is dead anyway so it doesn't matter. But if not...well you get Terranis, and all the Hive Mind can do to compensate is pupate new bioforms out of the rippers lying around. If it were a larger Hive Fleet that could spare more resources Terranis would have been in big trouble.

Imperium send in an Ordo Xenos team with Deathwatch accompanying them to confirm that this isn't a clever ruse. They find a planet knee deep in 'Nid chitin and the ground stained in xeno blood. It looks a bit like Cadia, a bit like Krieg and a lot like Hell on the day they couldn't get the fires to light. And amidst the carnage and corpse fields continents wide they find the bastion cities, Krieg away from Krieg. But also not Krieg. It's like Krieg but Krieg made human, humanity restored to the Kriegers. Everybody is masked and uniformed, and then you see this mini-kriegers giggling. All is dusty and gloomy but you hear music in the distance. And old and crippled Krieger that somehow has survived is telling tales about the wider Imperium. They are survivors that don´t lose the hope in the face of an unbeatable enemy. If people send to Krieg end depressed, in Terranis find what really means being an imperial citizen. They will never surrender, not even faced with the Armageddon, because they are the last light in the galaxy.
 It's real fucking difficult to tell Kriegers from Terranites and among the mixed children, referred to by the old Kriegers as the Derivatives, the distinction is meaningless.

Most people will be a more than a little perplexed with the Derivations. Even kriegs will not understand what the fuck has happened. They have survived an impossible situation. Yeah, they seem like the standard Kriegers, but they are not. Remember that they don´t have vitae-wombs. They have families and a home that they love. Where the kriegers are a bunch of nihilistic fellows, these guys just plain and simple have adapted to a death world. They probably fight with tactical acumen as an attrition war against nids is a fucking nightmare. They hold the line an then return with their families. True, like the kriegers there aren´t civilians in their culture... but they have a culture, is only that theirs is extremely militarized, and that is not that rare in the ND galaxy. They have a lot in common with other deathworlders troops like the Catachans, that just plain simple have adapted. Esencially, a less sugary version of the guys from Love and Krieg.

For the old Inquisitor Kryptmann, on one hand he would really, really love them. Terranis derivations are absolutely fantastic: The devotion of the Kriegers. Tactical acumen. Better liked by the Ad-mech for not having to use Vitae-wombs. Probably partial immunity to nids toxins. Smell genestealers cults and probably know like a million recipes to eat them and cook them and turn them into weapons. They are the children that he never fathered. Probably Terranis is the only place in that he can feel like home. On the other hand, the idea of basically becoming the tyranids to defeat the tyranids would be disgusting and he would have a first hand look at the kind of arguments people are making in the Imperial Army that soldiers need to be more like Krieg. As proud as he is of his unfathered children he doesn't want to force others to become as shit as him.

For the first time since the Civil War there is internal dispute on Krieg. Are these Terranite people Kriegers now? Are their half-breed children? Are the old veterans who were born on Krieg still Kriegers? Are the old veterans renegades or are they some glimpse that salvation is possible? Is this the rain washing their sins away?

Kriegers don't have violent disputes among their own kind any more outside of practice wars. But they have also had no real differences of opinion since the end of the nuclear war either. The rest of the galaxy is in constant uncertainty but they have always prided themselves on being the immovable center of certainty. They have always been 100% sure on what they are, what everyone else is and on what to do about it. But now the generals can't agree on a subject despite all having all of the same available facts. It's hard to tell because the regiments continue to operate as freakishly well as always but the upper layers of the Stratocracy get really fucking nervous when you mention Terranis.
Of the planet Terranis itself in 999M41, the Imperial Army has arrived in force. They can spare the numbers now. The orbiting bioships were malnourished and weak and were cut down by the navy assets with little trouble and the ground forces are landing in the cleared areas and killing fields around the bastion cities. The standstill has tipped, the siege is lifted and across the planet the Tyrannids are being hunted down and hounded to their stinking holes and nests. Terranis is being cleansed and already the Administratum is drafting plans for it's rebuilding.

Terranis held.

Now that the 'nids danger has passed, The only true resource is a lot of experienced badass soldiers. So they, like Catachans fight because his people back home need the resources. It's only been 30 years so most of the more durable and non-organic shit from their old civilization will be left behind. They can salvage to get a boost with the whole rebuilding society thing for short term gains but the planet is going to need the attention of the AdBio for terraforming work. Thankfully it still has a breathable atmosphere so there must be enough normal biological action in the sea and soil at the microscopic level to sustain it. Maybe it won't take that long. Give it 30 years and the toxins will have broken down and planting of plants to see what will grow and what won't can start. 30 years after that and the background radiation will be getting low enough across the least nuked areas to be considered "almost safe". 30 years after that and it will only be the worst salted areas that are no-go.

In 200 years Terranius could be a Civilized/Agri-world with good martial traditions. Not long after that and they can be paying full tithe rates.

=== Terranis and the Hrud ===
The inhabitants of Terranis are less xenophobic than the Kriegers, largely due to the actions of the Hrud.

The Hrud were a godsend on Terranis once the siege begins, because they essentially granted the human populations immunity to Tyranid infiltration. Hrud are quite defensive of their homes, and even if they are able to slip around any tyranid organism through their spacial folding the Hive Fleet takes the air and water and everything else living when they leave a planet and Hrud need to breathe same as everyone else. Hrud are also very good at sniffing out Genestealer cults, with many of their seemingly random killing sprees being revealed to be eradication of a genestealer presence, which on a world where the Hive is getting desperate because the usual maximum-efficiency tactics aren't working would start seeking alternate means of disrupting the local defenses. 

Once, at the beginning, the defenders were angry and on edge whenever the Hrud would suddenly and violently pulp a seemingly random person on the spot. Then they started getting the reports of outposts devastated by someone seemingly going rogue, of genestealers passing as human long enough to weaken defensive lines right before a Tyranid attack, and of parasite forms that would latch on to a host without them ever knowing, showing no signs before they spontaneously erupted with dozens of tiny chittering lifeforms eating their way out from inside the unsuspecting host.

The Hrud have learned since then too. Rather than the immediate violence towards the affected, they just glide into the mess hall or the barracks and gently tap the unfortunate soul on the shoulder, and the message is clear. They whisper quiet goodbyes and distribute their gear, then stand up and leave with the Hrud, the rest of their gear being returned for sanitation later.

Their bodies cannot be recycled into food for their remaining fellows- Untainted organic matter is at a premium, but they are no longer untainted. Instead, their biomass is used to make Saltpeter and bait for traps against the roaming hunters, a primitive system that nevertheless allows them to aid their comrades one last time, screaming defiance against the tide of flesh from beyond the grave in one last brilliant flash of fire and force and spite, a gout of light against the darkness before fading to ash and smoke that are useless to the all-consuming foe.

As a rule, the Hrud aren't reliable. However, Terranis is possibly the only instance in which they make an exception to that rule. They're not workers, of course, they're not helping maintain the equipment and by and large they're still oily and evasive as all hell to the point where even vague estimates of the local numbers are impossible to form. The caveat is that any Hrud's number-one priority is the survival of the Hrud, and when faced with tyranid Armageddon, the survival of the Hrud is directly linked to the survival of the human populace.

It's not that the Hrud aren't useful, it's that they aren't reliable workers. They don't keep timetables, they kind of follow orders but their attention span is not brilliant and the only ones who they make any effort to cooperate are the tribal elders of their kind. The elders can ensure that there is one obedient hrud at the checkpoints and gatehouses at all times but they can't guarantee that it's the same one so you're constantly having to train new staff. Also the space folding thing they do is unnerving as balls to watch and they are secretive little bastards by nature. People also used to complain that they never took the hoods off to be identified but then one day after much asking one did and it was a fucking horrifying cross between a xenomorph and a cockroach. After that people stopped asking them for facial identification. Not that identifying them is needed to ensure that they aren't tainted, the hrud are if anything more thorough about purging hrud genestealers than human ones.


They can't get ordered out on scouting missions, but they still show up and warn about incoming Tyranid waves. They can't be ordered to man the checkpoints, but they tend to hang out by them anyways, sometimes only revealing their presence when they detect an infiltrator. They are not organized beyond the loosest interpretations of the word, but they are creatures inclined to flight before fight who have nowhere to run, and that desperation if nothing else leads them to be more helpful than their kind usually are.

Also the fact that everybody is wearing gasmasks all the time helps mitigate the ssaak; doesn't stop it completely, since it's not entirely physical, but does enough to slow it down that the normal rotations of the garrison keep most of the troops from suffering more than minor side-effects.

Also they steal unattended things. Not anything of real value but they are a nuisance.

The Terranites still have no idea exactly how many Hrud are on Terranis beyond "more than we thought". Before the war they thought there weren't any so that's not very helpful.

In a way, the fact that the Hrud are so repulsive and reviled makes the fact that the Terranites are practically cordial with them an even greater source of discord for the pure Kriegers. It's not just any filthy xenos that they're accepting of, but the one considered more pest than people by the majority of people in the Imperium.

As for the Terranites, anyone who survived the Hive Fleet by their side is all right by them, and the fact that the Hrud would bring them information that normally would have cost them precious lives and kept their strongholds secure goes a long ways towards fostering good sentiments. They're all brothers and sisters of the muck and filth, after all, and the tunnels that became many of their bases of operations were once the Hrud's homes.

More interesting is how the Hrud of Terranis were affected, and how the rest of the Hrud would see them. The hrud see themselves as a collective, with no social divisions between them, but the Hrud from Terranis are putting this ideas to the test as much as the Derivatives are for Krieger philosophy. The rest of the galaxy might not notice the difference, but to the rest of the Hrud the Terranis stock probably seem reckless and borderline suicidal.