Chapter 341: Side Work, Part 2
Kian asked, "Governor, what exactly is the situation? Walk me through it."
The Governor laid out what was happening on their asteroid.
Their world was carved out of a stable asteroid, tunnels and chambers hollowed through the surface and the interior until the whole rock was riddled with open space.
Close to twenty million people lived there, across five or six hundred generations.
The asteroid produced almost nothing on its own. Power came from a handful of fusion reactors buried in the rock's core, food came from synthesized starch, and water came through trade with passing freighters.
It was a trade world, and trade meant visitors from every corner of the sector, which meant more than a few xenos species had slipped in over the years.
Man-eating Catachan flora, feral hive-rats that chewed their way out of shipping crates, and, worst of all, the highly destructive Genestealers.
Genestealers were one of humanity's great enemies, an infiltration organism of the Tyranids.
Essentially the 40K answer to the Xenomorph, close to human in height and build, expert infiltrators whose sole purpose was to slip into a human world unnoticed.
Once inside, a Genestealer would go to ground and infect humans with Tyranid genetic material.
Infected humans developed an overwhelming reproductive drive and would find some way to bear the creature's offspring.
The first generation of hybrids came out twisted, mostly Tyranid in appearance, with only faint traces of humanity, low intelligence, and vicious tempers.
Once that first generation bred, the second generation showed fewer Tyranid traits and more human ones, though they were still monstrous.
By the third or fourth generation, the human traits overwhelmed what remained of the Tyranid ones, and from a distance they looked like ordinary people.
When that fourth generation bred again, the offspring were pureblood Genestealers.
Purebloods, first and second generation hybrids (monstrous), third and fourth generation hybrids (passable as human), then purebloods again. That was roughly the shape of the infestation's ecosystem.
So why would Genestealers bother breeding out so many hybrid generations on a single world?
To hollow out the local government and military from within, until the planet could no longer defend itself.
Then they'd broadcast the coordinates, and somewhere out in the dark a starving Hive Fleet would come and strip the world clean.
The Governor told Kian he'd first confirmed the infection three years ago.
But by his own estimate, the Genestealers had actually arrived at least six years earlier.
Their world was an asteroid habitat, its population living in hollow chambers carved into the rock and connected by a web of long, narrow tunnels.
The asteroid had originally been a penal world, a place where convicts from across the sector were shipped to do the dirty work of development.
Because of that, security was tight, and movement between districts was heavily restricted.
And even under those conditions, by the time the Governor caught wind of the infestation, the thing had already built up quite a foothold.
Three rock-cities confirmed infected, six more suspected, and close to three hundred thousand people now under suspicion.
The Governor said, "I've sealed off three red zones and six yellow zones completely. Lord Inquisitor, if you can simply clear those districts for me, that interceptor is yours."
Kian thought it over. "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to fully clear out Genestealers? You wipe out one nest today, and ten-odd years later another one crawls up in its place. They're like cockroaches. You can't kill them all."
The Governor sighed, helpless. "My lord, all we can do is clear them out periodically. We can't exactly let the xenos half-breeds run wild, can we? If you can wipe out the main infected population for us, we'll handle the stragglers ourselves, slowly."
Kian asked again, "Don't you have your own military? For a long-term cleanup job like this, wouldn't it make more sense to use your own people?"
"My lord, we do have soldiers, but our combat strength is poor. Our people have lived on this asteroid for generation after generation, and the gravity here is very low. We may look tall and imposing, but our bodies are frail. The half-breeds these Genestealers produce are strong, every one of them. To us, their muscles feel like steel cable and their bones like rebar. One solid hit from them and we snap. Our own soldiers take unbearable casualties in these sweeps, which is why we need to hire warriors like you, people who grew up under real gravity."
Kian started weighing the risk against the reward against the time it would cost.
By the Governor's own account, the infestation was only six years old, which meant it could have produced at most three generations. And the combat strength of generations one through four was, frankly, no better than a baseline human, arguably worse. The first and second generations had stronger bodies, sure, but they were half-Tyranid mongrels with impaired intelligence.
By the third or fourth generation, intelligence was basically back to human norms, but by then they'd lost most of the physical edge too. A properly organized human force could put them down without much trouble.
The one to actually respect was the Genestealer itself. Its raw combat output matched an Astartes, arguably exceeded one, but its overall combat effectiveness was mediocre.
Drop an Astartes and a Genestealer onto a derelict hulk full of tight corridors and blind corners, and the Genestealer had maybe a sixty percent chance of winning through ambush alone.
But put the two of them in an open arena and let them go at it straight, and the Genestealer would get pounded into paste.
Kian had three thousand power-armoured guards under his command, most of them sponsored by Zeppelin, all equipped with lasrifles, hand-picked elites out of the PDF.
Turning them loose on the hybrids would be like sending grown men to fight children.
But if they ran into an actual Genestealer, there was a real chance it could pick off a few dozen of his armoured guards through ambush alone.
So the question was: was trading a few dozen dead power-armoured guards for one interceptor a good deal?
Kian decided it was.
The Fury Interceptor was no small thing. This wasn't some atmosphere-only fighter from the old three-K era.
The Fury Interceptor was sixty meters long. A proper flying slab of reinforced steel.
It could carry an enormous weapons load: autocannons, laser cannons, every flavor of bomb and torpedo.
Built for void combat, technically, but it could also operate in atmosphere for short stretches. All told, an extremely versatile piece of hardware.
To put it in perspective, this was the Governor asking Kian to go clear out a den of troublemakers, and if he succeeded, handing him the equivalent of a top-line stealth fighter as payment.
The Inquisitor's fleet was resupplying here for six days. Six days of cleanup work should be enough to put a real dent in this planet's cockroach population.
Whether more of them crawled up after that was, frankly, no longer Kian's problem.
Kian stood, and shook the Governor's hand.
"Deal."
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