[The fleet Admiral's name was Perez.]
[She commanded the Imperial Navy contingent that was loyal to the Alliance of Six from the bridge of the battleship Supreme Bloodline, and when the Cathedral of Ascension broadcast went out across every screen on Terra, her orders to the fleet followed within minutes. Firing solutions were requested on Phalanx. The Solar System fleet, or the portion of it that had been quietly aligned with the conservative faction over the preceding months, began to move.]
[They were not fast enough.]
[The first measure you had put in place weeks before the assault on the Cathedral: a Terminator squad, boarded under the guise of additional protective detail for the Fleet Admiral, standing quietly on the bridge beside the command throne with all the innocuous patience of personnel who had been told to wait. When the broadcast ended and the order to engage Phalanx was given, they were already in position.]
[Perez did not survive the next sixty seconds.]
[The second measure: instructions given to the same squad in advance, for the event that the first measure produced complications. In that case, their mission transitioned automatically to bridge destruction and void shield shutdown. This would have opened the ship for a boarding action by the Imperial Fists, who would then coordinate with your Minotaurs to eliminate the remaining loyal crew. The two Chapters cooperating to clear a traitor's flagship in the middle of a Solar System engagement was not an outcome Admiral Perez had modeled in her plans, because the two Chapters were visibly and apparently hostile to one another.]
[The second measure was not necessary. But it had been there.]
[Field Marshal Asharil, the Alliance's ground forces commander, was handled by a Callidus. In the years since Guilliman's return, the Officio Assassinorum had been quietly realigning its loyalties. Asharil had not noticed.]
[Before the assault on the Cathedral had even been given the formal order to proceed, a spear from Valerian's hand had removed the Alliance's ground command. The Adeptus Custodes had made their choice, and having made it, they had made it completely. The Terran planetary forces passed to the reform faction's control within the same hour.]
[The sixth month brought more acid rain.]
[You spent it finishing what you had started.]
[The Alliance of Six had been six: Talion, Drachmar, Slester, Fadix, Perez, Asharil. All six were dead. But the conservative faction was not six people. It was hundreds of thousands of people: officials at every level of the Terran administrative structure who had built their careers on the patronage networks that the Alliance controlled, who had spent years learning which decisions to advance, which to delay, and which to make quietly disappear. They did not disappear when their patrons died. They went to their offices the next morning and continued doing their jobs.]
[You did not accept this.]
[The Hive City Legion, the network of trained and armed civilians you had been building in the outer settlements since the second month, moved against the Ministry of Justice's security installations first. They knew every passage. They knew the faces of the officers who had extorted their neighbors and the officials who had diverted supply routes for private sale. What they brought was not Astartes precision but something equally effective: local knowledge applied at scale, simultaneously, across the entire city. The Ministry of Justice's enforcement apparatus, which had existed for centuries as a conservative faction instrument, lost most of its operational capacity in a week.]
[The Minotaurs and a reorganized portion of the Terran planetary forces handled the secondary operations: the administrative compounds, the private residences of officials above a certain grade, the secure vaults that held the documentary evidence of decades of diversion and corruption. The Imperial Fists provided oversight. The Sisters of Silence were present for any site where psykic activity was reported.]
[The Prayer Districts, which had served for a generation as the Lord Administratum's personal operational territory within the city, were the worst. The ground there was wet for reasons that had nothing to do with the rain by the time your forces were finished.]
[In the seventh month, you stopped.]
[The reason was straightforward: the Terran administration needed enough qualified personnel to continue functioning, and you had reached the point where further removals would begin to damage the reform faction's ability to govern. There would be wrongful cases in what you had already done. There always were. But the alternative, which was to leave the conservative machine intact and watch it reconstruct itself over the following decade while Guilliman's crusade kept him away from Terra, was worse. You accepted the accounting and moved on.]
[The reformist Speaker of the Senatorum and the Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica had been visiting you at the Minotaurs' operational base throughout the fifth and sixth months. They had come with caution initially, then with increasing regularity, then with something that resembled genuine collaboration. They had questions about your identity. Everyone did, by this point. The rumor that Chapter Master Moloc had been replaced by the soul of an unnamed Primarch had spread through the noble class with the speed of something that explained too many observable facts to be dismissed. The new Ecclesiarch had visited three times. He arrived smiling each time, and his pilgrim processions through the outer city had been growing larger with each week. You watched him carefully and filed the observation.]
[Guilliman had expressed, through the appropriate channels, that your methods were excessive. You had noted his objection. You had also noted that his plan, the surgical political settlement, would have left the administrative infrastructure intact, and you had continued operating.]
[In the seventh month, you halted the operations and submitted a formal communication to the Senatorum explaining that the security clearance process for the remaining conservative-affiliated personnel was complete.]
[In the eighth month, the newly reorganized Council gave you effective authority over appointments to the vacated positions in the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice: the two departments that had suffered the greatest personnel losses and therefore needed the most reconstruction. You used it to fill those positions with people drawn from the outer settlements and the lesser administrative bodies, individuals who understood what the Terran population actually experienced and who did not owe their careers to anyone currently in a position to call in the debt.]
[Approximately nine hundred thousand low- and mid-ranking officials were dismissed across the broader administration: not executed, not tried, simply removed from their positions and reassigned to civilian status in various hive districts. They would be processed. They would receive whatever Terran citizens received. Some of them would appeal, and some of those appeals would succeed, and the process of sorting the genuinely corrupt from the merely compliant would run its course over years. This was acceptable. The alternative was ten thousand more executions, and you had decided in the seventh month that Terra needed to learn how to govern itself rather than simply continuing under a more acceptable set of controllers.]
[Only now, at a slight remove from the intensity of the preceding months, did you understand something clearly: Trajann Valoris's decision to join your operation rather than remain neutral had been the decisive variable. Without the Ten Thousand, the conservative faction's military options on the surface of Terra had remained viable. With the Adeptus Custodes standing beside the Minotaurs and the Imperial Fists, those options had collapsed entirely. Valoris had understood what was at stake and had made his choice, and his choice had mattered in ways that the outcome would not have otherwise permitted.]
[You had not thanked him. It was not the kind of arrangement that invited thanks. But you had noted it.]
[In the final weeks of the eighth month, you submitted proposals to the High Council.]
[They addressed three things: the supply lines to the outer settlement districts, which needed to be restructured under administration that was no longer the Ministry of the Interior's property; the governance mechanisms for the hive civilian population, which had functioned for ten thousand years as a system for maintaining order rather than sustaining life and needed to be rebuilt from a different foundation; and the resource allocation for the Indomitus Crusade, which Guilliman needed and which the conservative faction had been quietly withholding or delaying for months.]
[The Crusade proposals passed without debate.]
[The civilian administration proposals passed after negotiation.]
[The supply line restructuring passed with conditions attached that you did not particularly object to.]
[Outside the Council chambers, the new Ecclesiarch was leading another procession through the streets of the outer city. His congregation had grown again. You watched the feed from a distance and thought about what that smile meant and whether it was something you needed to address before you left.]
[You had not yet decided how much time remained.]