Memnihn's Folly

The great majority of the time, the Adeptus Biologis are a vast boon to the Imperium. From the mundane tasks of interstellar empire, like public health and agricultural output, to the creation of the Astartes and a dozen lesser types of augmented soldier, to great feats like devising poisons to cripple splinter fleets or making harsh worlds bloom.

 

That said, when they fuck up, they can really fuck up.

 

The agri- world of Patreunov was having a feral ork problem. Although they had managed to beat off the Waaagh, fully a third of the planet was overrun with the hyper-invasive fungus, and slowly spreading. Aside from the constant effort of culling the orks and squigs, every acre of land consumed by the fungus was unavailable for agriculture. The usual methods, of massive fungicide use or intense irradiation, would poison the land for decades and likely have additional knock- on effects. Still, other options were slim to none, and the world's governors were about to start the spraying programs when Magos Memnihn, of the Biologis, presented herself and offered an alternative.

 

The Magos had been working for over a century on an alternative, biological, method of culling ork spore fields. Not a disease- too close to Nurgle, and anyway the Waaagh-infused flesh of orkoids was unnaturally resilient- but a predator. Genetic sequences from dozens of deathworlds (and maybe just a little bit of tyranid here or there) across the galaxy combined into a single voracious killer. Individually small, but with a ferocious pack hunting instinct that would see even nobs swarmed under by hundreds. Explosively breeding, to the point that they were born with the next generation already gestating within their infant forms. Capable of consuming ork, grot, squig, and the fungal networks from which they sprang alike.

 

She assured the skeptical nobles that every precaution had been taken. The creatures had been engineered to consume only ork flesh, and found all other possible food sources so revolting they would ignore them even as they starved to death. Multiple genetic time bombs had been inserted into their sequences, to ensure that they could only reproduce for a limited number of generations before hereditary malformation overtook them. They were vulnerable to a number of toxins that humans were completely immune to, so if all else failed they could just be gassed en masse. And, of course, there had been a number of small- scale tests demonstrating that all of these precautions worked. This test was merely the last step before general deployment, and it would never have gotten this far if the concept was not sound.

 

Reassured, and enticed by the prospect of getting rid of the feral orks without having to re- terraform half his planet afterwards, the governor gave his assent. A few thousand vat-grown breeding pairs were released within the area infested by the orks. Within a few years there were millions, busy consuming their way through the creeping green fungoids. The orks, and the ecosystem supporting them, fought back. Of course. They were orks and thus could do no different. But they could only slow the spread of the hyper- specialized predators, not with the simple weapons still left available to them. And as the predators began to die off as programmed, assent was eagerly given for new and larger waves to be released. It looked as though the world would be cleared in mere decades, and without much in the way of lingering environmental damage.

 

But life... finds a way.

 

Across the accelerated generations, mutation set in. One by one, unnoticed, the genetic time bombs failed, and the faulty genes were spread to newly released waves by natural crossbreeding. The DNA sequences rendering all non- orkoid flesh revolting failed in a single specimen, and with new food sources opened up to it it outcompeted its rivals, spreading the failure far and wide.

 

By themselves, these would still have not been catastrophic. But then the unnatural vulnerability to those highly specific poisons was lost, and catastrophe became inevitable.

 

When the deviations were first detected, Magos Memnihn attempted a targeted culling program, trying to expunge the faulty genomes without having to destroy the rest of the organisms. However, the artificial creature's reproduction rate rendered such a course impossible; the traits simply diffused too fast across the population. Finally, the Magos unleashed her prepared stockpiles of tailored toxins, slaughtering millions of her creation. But not enough. The stockpiles were insufficient to saturate the entire range they had spread to, and tens of thousands survived even in areas that had been sprayed thoroughly, having never inherited the genes of vulnerability.

 

When the last holdouts of the feral orks were confirmed to be wiped out, there was no celebration. They were too busy trying to contain the things which killed them.

 

Every attempt to wipe out the manufactured beasts, or contain their spread, met with failure. They were slowed by fences, by poisons, by PDF kill sweeps, but not stopped. They simply spread too fast, recovered from losses too fast, to be so easily expunged. Worse, a creature designed to prey on orks naturally had no fear of doing the same to humans; thousands died, and increasingly large segments of the planet had to be abandoned.

 

Eventually, a desperate strategy of scorched earth had to be enacted. Vast swathes of land were burned and poisoned. Immense irrigation projects were destroyed to return land to desert. Natural geological barriers were rendered impassible.

 

With further expansion blocked by these created deserts for lack of food, the monsters soon turned on each other. Their rapid expansion and insatiable hunger had resulted in them eating everything down to the bedrock. There was nothing left to eat but each other, an obviously unsustainable state of affairs. A couple of years later, and the last of the monsters was gone.

 

The battle had been brutal and the effects long lasting. Tens of thousands had died, nearly half the planet had been scoured, and it would take centuries for the world's output to return to what it once was. Memnihn was stripped of her rank and honors, and devoted the remainder of her life to repairing the damage.

 

The long term effects of the disaster, besides the devastation of Patreunov, was to spur on the creation of the Ordo Mutatio. Previously overseeing the Biologis had been the responsibility of the Ordo Machina, since the Biologis was technically a subdivision of the Mechanicus. This incident, along with several others happening in roughly the same century, made it clear that this arrangement was badly flawed. Thus, the Mutatio was split off from the Machina, and soon grew into a truly independent organization.