June 3rd at 12:41pm
After Commissar Bryce delivered her report, High Command conducted a thorough investigation into every aspect of the Planetary affair. The inquiry lasted several years and reached levels of Imperial authority far beyond planet Chagoth itself. In the end, neither Bryce nor her companions passed judgement upon Commissar Stulton. That burden fell instead upon the Imperium he had spent his life serving.

The so called “Red Reach Inquiry” was conducted entirely behind closed doors. Its findings were distributed only among the highest levels of the High Commissariat, the Administratum and the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Following the inquiry, a Mechanicus expeditionary force invoked the authority of the Treaty of Mars and assumed control of all facilities, records and biological assets connected to Red Reach. Imperial authorities on the planet, lacking any real force, offered no resistance. Within weeks, access to the mining complex was restricted, the flow of the compound P1-10 for the Pixie-Dust drug was sealed and entire archives disappeared behind Mechanicus sanctions.

The first riots began four days later.

Hive workers abandoned manufactorums. Entire districts descended into violence as millions of addicts suddenly found themselves without access to the substance on which their lives had come to depend. The Imperial authorities responded with curfews first, then martial law and then mass executions to no avail.

However, Commissar Stulton had anticipated the crisis years before. In what many imperial remembrancers would later describe as his final act of governance, he had ordered vast quantities of food, medical supplies and equipment to be stockpiled within the now-empty barracks and depots once occupied by the Imperial Guard and guarded by a non-military force of Famularian sisters.

Hungry Chagothians soon gathered in their millions outside recruitment offices, where Imperial officials offered regular meals, shelter and a steady wage in exchange for military service. What had begun as a planetary catastrophe gradually transformed into a vast reservoir of manpower. Through a mixture of desperation and sacrifice, a looming civil collapse was converted into one of the largest recruitment drives in the history of the planet. In the following years, Chagoth Primus would provide ten times the number of soldiers originally promised to the Venisae Crusade. Entire generations would disappear into off-world wars before ever reaching adulthood.

Billions of ordinary Chagothians unable to serve perished during the years that followed as famine, disease and civil unrest claimed far more lives than the riots themselves before the Imperium finally began repaying the tithes in the form of food shipments and emergency supplies. Entire districts vanished, countless settlements were abandoned and generations grew up knowing little but hunger.

And yet, the catastrophe Stulton had feared never fully materialized. Chagoth Primus endured, battered, famished and drained, but it endured. And by the standards that truly mattered to the Imperium, the planet emerged from the crisis not weakened, but more useful than ever before.

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