Chapter 248: A Shuttle of His Own
Kian sent men to load the Captain's tins — his on-hand stock wasn't sufficient, but the strategic reserve vault had plenty.
He pulled out his black card and headed down to run it through the vault's access terminal.
The place was alive with activity.
Hundreds of workers moved through the vast underground space, hauling construction materials, sealing off redundant side passages, and framing up multi-storey residential blocks where his growing population could be housed. Another crew was working on the wall-mounted crane rigs — once the power feeds were restored, those cranes would be drafted into the ongoing construction effort.
His weapons and munitions workshops were in full production. Over three hundred workers staffed them, turning out a hundred thousand rounds of mixed-calibre ammunition per day along with fifty-odd PDF-pattern autorifles. The senior artificers were currently reverse-engineering a Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubber, working toward a heavier crew-served infantry weapon.
The armour school was running too. Little Joel had gone up to Mid-Hive and recruited a cohort of intellectuals — students who'd fallen through every crack the hive had to offer. Sixty of them held Level 4 educations and had been sent to the Forge Temple to train as Leman Russ operators. The rest — over five hundred more Level 4s — were being cycled through Chimera driver training and basic officer coursework.
Tens of thousands of workers. Five hundred vehicles moving in organised patterns across the cavern floor. The whole vault hummed with the noise of something being built.
The Captain took it all in with undisguised interest.
"You've carved out quite the domain. A proper warlord's operation."
Kian led him toward the container stacks, which workers had already shifted to a consolidated corner of the vault.
"The planetary administration rotted out a long time ago. They don't concern themselves with what happens down here anymore. If I were running this world, I wouldn't tolerate an armed private force like mine for a second.
Speaking of which — your forge world has a far tighter production economy. The ruling class must have considerably more grip on local power structures. Do you still get gangs and warlords?"
The Captain nodded.
"Everywhere. Any system with political factions has power vacuums, and power vacuums breed armed groups. But because our world is wealthy — because there's actually something worth having — our gangs are considerably more dangerous. Per capita powered armour ownership. Extensive cybernetic augmentation.
Can you picture a world where the Adeptus Arbites need to send every single officer into the Underhive in full heavy power armour, carrying crew-served weapons, just to enforce basic compliance?"
Kian raised an eyebrow.
"Your gangers have power armour?"
"Standard kit for the serious ones. If you ever want to study truly refined criminal enterprise, my world would be an education."
Kian grinned. "I'll hold you to that. Getting a ship of my own is going to require a trip to a forge world eventually anyway — might as well make it yours."
They reached the container stacks. Kian's people had already completed the inventory: five thousand eight hundred and thirty-seven empty containers, one thousand one hundred and forty-two fully stocked.
He pressed his black card to the nearest terminal.
Click. The indicator flashed green. The container doors swung open to reveal dense racks of military-drab tins.
Kian pulled one out, cracked the lid with his combat knife, and handed it to the Captain.
"Best canned food this planet produces. Quality tier — who'd get rations like this on your world? Officers? Senior staff?"
The Captain pinched a piece of meat between two fingers — pale, marbled with white fat — and chewed it without ceremony.
"Good. Dense. The spicing is correct." He wiped his hand on a handkerchief. "On my world, you give a frontline trooper a tin like this, he'll volunteer for any suicide mission you care to name.
Most of our population subsists on synthetic starches, mineral salts extracted from stone, and vitamin tablets. Our Munitorum conducted a study — issue one regiment of PDF infantry a single allocation of quality rations, and their combat effectiveness increases fivefold within the week. Full commitment to the last man, no retreat, eighty-five percent probability."
He held up the tin.
"Lord Voss. On my world, canned meat is a strategic resource."
Kian shook his head slowly. "On ours, the soldiers don't eat like this either — but I can't imagine a single tin being the thing that makes a man die on his feet. Culture shock, I suppose."
"You'll understand when you see it."
Kian ran his black card through ten container locks in sequence. All guana-beast rations. His workers brought the forklifts in, loaded everything onto military trucks, and ran the convoy up to the surface, where the Devourer transport was waiting with its cargo bay open.
Ten thousand tins. One full load. The Devourer sealed up and climbed skyward.
The Captain watched it go, then turned and embraced Kian without warning — a genuine, bone-compressing grip.
"Ten years. My crew has been waiting ten years on this world for this contract to move even a single step forward. This is only a beginning, but a beginning is everything. It's hope."
He stepped back, and Kian could see he meant every word.
"From this day, Lord Voss — you are my friend."
Kian clapped him on the shoulder.
"Glad to hear it. Now — about those ten thousand tins. Any chance I could trade that goodwill for a shuttle?
I want to make a personal reconnaissance run to Garden Isle. The sooner I see the ground, the sooner I can plan the livestock operation properly."
"Done, no argument."
The Captain pulled out his personal vox-unit and made a single call. Thirty minutes later, a small dark shape appeared in the sky above the hive's outer ventilation cluster.
It descended steadily, growing from a dot to a brick — a blocky, utilitarian, magnificently no-nonsense vessel roughly ten metres across in every direction, which settled onto the ground in front of them with a heavy mechanical thud.
An Aquila-pattern shuttlecraft.
The Captain smiled. "She's yours. And as a gesture of goodwill toward our partnership, I'll loan you the pilot until you find a replacement. She'll serve you until you've trained your own crew."
Kian walked slow circles around the shuttle, unable to contain himself.
Finally. After everything — the Underhive, the gangs, the politics, the blood — he finally had a ticket to orbit.
"Range? Fuel type? Weapon hardpoints?"
The Captain rattled it off:
"Aquila-pattern shuttles accept multiple grades of promethium. On high-density aviation-grade fuel, full tanks give you approximately five thousand kilometres of range.
Standard configuration is unarmed, but she has mounting points at the nose, ventral hull, and both wingtips, with a weapons console fitted in the cockpit. Loadout is your choice."
[End of Chapter 248]
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