Chapter 249: On the Island
The moment the shuttle was his, Kian started planning the Garden Isle operation.
He settled into the co-pilot's seat and gave the pilot his orders: Garden Isle, best speed.
The pilot ran through pre-flight and lifted off. Kian watched every hand movement with the focused attention of a man intending to learn this himself, and kept interrupting with questions about what each control did.
The shuttle climbed to a hundred kilometres before levelling out and turning toward the island.
"Why do we need to go this high first?"
The pilot answered without taking his eyes off the instruments.
"My lord, the rebel forces on your world are equipped with anti-air systems. When we first arrived, one of our shuttles passed over rebel-held territory and got painted by a medium-range SAM radar. That battery's rated engagement ceiling is over eighty kilometres. A hundred is the safe floor."
"Right." Kian nodded. "Rogue PDF heavy weapons. Ten years of attrition though — breakdowns, ammunition expenditure, no resupply. There can't be many left functional."
Half an hour of flight later, the pilot began his descent.
"My lord, we're approaching the target. You should be able to see it through the viewport."
Kian looked down.
Open ocean spread below them, grey-green and vast, and beyond it — Garden Isle. A volcanic island, heavily forested, rising dark green from the water. The distance from the mainland was over fifty kilometres. Even from altitude, Kian could make out dense tree cover, ornamental gardens gone wild, and the white geometric shapes of noble villas scattered across the hillsides.
Exactly as he'd expected: minimal hostile presence. Before the war, Garden Isle had been a retreat for the Spire nobility — summer estates, pleasure grounds, nobody working there who didn't belong to a household. When the fighting started, the nobles had fled back to Hive Tenebris. The people they left behind were servants, and servants stayed.
Kian could see villages — several of them, each housing perhaps a thousand people — with figures moving through cultivated fields. When the shuttle passed overhead, they stopped working and stared upward. Several started running after it.
"Take us around the perimeter. Full circuit."
The pilot obliged.
Population estimate, eyeballing it: under three hundred thousand. That tracked with pre-war figures. Three hundred thousand household servants maintaining the island's infrastructure, catering to perhaps a thousand nobles — that was the formula that kept a leisure estate running at Spire standards.
These people could be absorbed as labour, Kian thought, watching the fields pass below. But I'll need to neutralise whatever passes for leadership down there first. Question is whether they've gone full insurgent or just stayed put.
"Infrastructure looks intact," he noted. "Solid construction, roads clear, water sources visible. No power, but that's fixable."
The shuttle continued its sweep. Kian's attention was drifting across the coastline when something caught his eye.
"There — go that way."
The pilot banked toward the coast. Below them, a shipyard came into view.
Dozens of large cargo vessels sat in berths. Hundreds of smaller craft. Pleasure yachts listing in their moorings. Ten years of abandonment had left them all streaked orange-brown with corrosion, salt-eaten and weathered.
"Bring us down on the largest one."
The pilot set them down on the deck of a vessel the size of a small aircraft carrier. Kian told him to stay with the shuttle, drew his torch, and went below.
A ship this size could move tens of thousands of people in a single run. If it was salvageable, his transport problem solved itself.
The interior was dark and rust-streaked, the corridors stripped bare — everything removable had been taken years ago. Kian worked his way down level by level until he reached the lowest deck and found the engine compartment.
Three storeys tall, a single massive powerplant. He spent half an hour going over it methodically.
The engine casing was intact. The power conduits running from it were intact — still coated in heavy grease, well-protected, no corrosion. The hull showed no water ingress.
Ten years sitting idle, but the core machinery had survived.
This thing can be brought back. Full refit, but it's doable.
He was about to head up to the bridge when his vox crackled.
"My lord, we have a situation. Approximately one thousand personnel converging on the vessel. I would recommend returning to the deck."
Kian moved.
He came up through the hatch at a jog and found the pilot standing beside the shuttle with a lasrifle raised, sighting down toward the dockside. Below, the pier was packed — a dense crowd pressing forward, all of them dressed like farmhands, none of them visibly armed.
"Report."
"Island residents, my lord. They saw us land and came running."
Kian moved to the rail and looked down. The crowd filled the dock below — weathered faces, rough clothing, hands empty of anything threatening. They were jostling to get closer.
"CITIZENS," Kian called down. "HOLD YOUR POSITION. STATE YOUR INTENTIONS. Are you here to seize me, fit me with an identification collar, and administer correction with a copper-buckled belt?!"
He was readying himself to sprint back to the shuttle.
An elderly farmer pushed to the front and called up in a cracked, uncertain voice.
"My... my lord? Are you a noble, my lord?"
"I am."
"Then— are you coming back? Are the lords coming back to the island?"
Kian took his hand off his weapon.
The old man's question was followed immediately by the crowd collapsing to their knees — every single one of them, the whole dock, a wave of bodies going down simultaneously.
Kian stared.
"What— WHY. What is this. You people are going to give me a rash."
The elder pressed his forehead to the dock planking, and when he looked up his face was streaming.
"My lord! You've finally come! We've been waiting — we've been waiting so long—
My family has served the nobility for generations, my lord. When your lordships left ten years ago, we were entrusted with the gardens. We have tended them every day. Not a single flower has been neglected, I swear it on the Emperor's Throne—"
The rest of the crowd had begun weeping too. Through the tears, though, smiles were breaking out — ragged, unguarded, genuine relief.
The nobles were coming back.
The nobles were coming back, and that meant the world made sense again.
Kian stood on the ship's rail, looked down at three hundred kneeling people crying with happiness at the sight of him, and underwent a rapid internal recalibration.
"Right. I see. Stalwart defenders of the feudal order, every one of you."
"My lord, this is dangerous—" the pilot started.
"Look at their faces." Kian was already climbing down. "That's pure, uncut loyalty to the established hierarchy. Nobody in that crowd is going to hurt the man they've been waiting a decade to see."
He dropped to the dock and walked into the crowd.
"Citizens! I have returned! Not with oppression — " he caught himself, " — I mean, not only with oppression, but with a glorious future! Stand up, please, you're making my back hurt just looking at you."
The crowd surged to their feet, talking over each other.
"The lords are really coming back—"
"I told you! I told everyone they'd come back!"
"My lord — have the rebels been defeated? Will the other noble houses follow? Will everything go back to the way it was?"
Kian fielded questions for several minutes, increasingly bemused.
Why do they want this so badly? Is it genuinely uncomfortable to not have someone's boot on your neck?
The honest answer, which Kian worked out as the crowd pressed around him, was that he'd risen to nobility too fast to understand what household service actually meant in the hive's social structure.
The three hundred thousand people on this island were not the lowest rung. Household servants of the Spire nobility occupied a social position roughly equivalent to upper Mid-Hive citizens — educated, protected, fed properly, with status and identity derived directly from their masters' standing.
The moment the nobles fled, that status collapsed. Three hundred thousand people who had defined themselves through service found themselves with nothing — no masters, no purpose, no position. They had spent ten years as castaways on an island that was supposed to be paradise.
Of course they wanted the nobility back.
Without the lords, they were nobody.
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