Chapter 345: Plans for the Future
Day two. Kian finished his preparations, and his men had largely recovered their strength.
He gave the order to open the gate to Red Zone Three, and the Governor complied. The heavy iron door slid open slowly.
"Everyone, listen up. We move in combat formation. This is the enemy's last stronghold, their final nest. Anybody who lets their guard down and buys it in there isn't going to find anyone to complain to about it."
With that, Kian led the group inside. This time, his own loadout had changed.
He'd left behind the twin heavy-barrel lasrifles mounted on both arms. Excellent for mowing down low-tier targets, but the enemy here potentially included true Genestealers, elite-tier threats.
A Genestealer's chitinous carapace carried real defensive value, dense enough that it might take dozens of consecutive laser hits to bring one down. And given how fast the things moved, landing that many hits with a low-power weapon wasn't a realistic bet.
So Kian had swapped out the twin heavy lasrifles for a power greatsword in his left hand and a bolt rifle in his right.
The power greatsword was the only thing in his current arsenal that could actually trade blows with a bio-generated disruption field. If a Genestealer closed to melee range, he could go blade to claw with it for a few exchanges and hold his own.
The bolt rifle was the mortal-pattern precision bolter Nor'n had forged for him, exceptional armour penetration. A single round landing on a Genestealer, built to shrug off small arms fire, would punch straight through without slowing down.
That wasn't the whole of his loadout, either. Mounted above his head was a gun of its own.
The Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubber with the wrathful machine spirit had been bolted directly to the top of his heavy power armour.
He'd installed a small mobile turret mount at the back of his neck, just above the collar, and set the Stubber into it. A neural interface running off his spine connected directly to the auto-turret, letting him fire it by thought alone.
As for aim, the thing's baseline was essentially wherever Kian happened to be looking dead ahead. Whatever he glared at, died.
As for the problem of the Stubber never running out of ammo or overheating, Kian had that covered too. With an adamantium barrel, overheating was practically a non-issue. It could fire a hundred thousand rounds without breaking a sweat.
And if he needed the thing to shut up once a target was down, he could use his psychic power to yank the quick-release barrel clean off with brute force. No barrel, no shooting. Instant mute.
With Kian in the lead, the group filed into Red Zone Three one after another. This time, nobody rushed straight into the housing blocks to search. They set up a firing line first.
Some soldiers hauled in Lumberer Stubbers and set them up on the spot. Others shouldered rocket launchers.
Kian had drilled the seriousness of this into everyone so many times over that the whole group was on edge, advancing carefully, step by step.
No sooner had the firing line finished setting up than it was needed. Something moved in the darkened housing block ahead.
Kian glanced at his auspex readout and saw a cluster of red dots light up in the dark residential block ahead.
"All units, contact ahead, suspected hostiles. Everyone stay sharp!"
In a flash, bayoneted lasrifles, freshly mounted Lumberer Stubbers, rocket launchers, and the newly issued plasma projectors all swung to face the darkness.
The weapon lights and shoulder-lamps weren't powerful enough to reach far, and the group couldn't make out what was ahead, just distorted shapes flickering in and out of the gloom.
But everyone could hear it now, the sound of a huge number of footsteps coming from the dark housing block ahead, mixed with an odd, scattered clatter, something like hooves striking metal decking.
Kian pulled a flare from his belt, yanked the pin, and hurled it forward with everything he had.
The flare sailed more than two hundred meters and landed on the main thoroughfare of the residential block, bursting into a wash of white light.
In that light, Kian and his men got their first real look: tens of thousands of grotesquely deformed, purple-skinned monstrosities, some with three arms, some with four, faces twisted into snarling masks.
These things looked almost human and almost not, human and insectoid features warped together in a way that turned the stomach.
These first and second-generation hybrids, roughly human-sized, wore armour plating hammered together from sheet steel, sturdy enough to shrug off the local PDF's power-reduced lasrifles.
Their three or four arms carried machetes, improvised nail guns, or low-power lasrifles clearly looted from PDF stockpiles.
Their faces were fitted with mining respirators, hoses running down to small oxygen canisters at their hips.
That was it, Kian realized. That was how so many of them had stayed active in the thin air this whole time. They'd been running their own oxygen supply the entire time.
He didn't waste another second. He roared the order.
"Open fire! Full firepower, kill every last one of these xenos filth!"
He swung the Demon-Cleaver in his left hand, and golden flame erupted along the blade.
The Stubber mounted above his head spat fire in a long, snaking burst, and his vox-amplifier carried his bellow across the field.
"For the Emperor! Death to the xenos!"
His men caught fire with him, letting out a battle roar of their own, and every weapon in the line opened up at once.
A storm of beams and rounds and Stubber fire tore into the darkened street ahead.
The hybrids that had just massed in the street took the full brunt of it, the wall of firepower ripping through their bodies and scattering them in a spray of blood and gore.
Screams that were half-human, half-insectoid tore out of their throats, and against a properly organized military force, these street-thug-tier xenos died in droves within seconds.
Kian planted himself right at the front of the line, flaming greatsword in one hand, bolt rifle in the other, the Stubber above his head roaring without pause.
He cranked his vox-amplifier to full volume and bellowed over the din of gunfire.
"This is the Emperor's domain! This is the soil of the Imperium of Man, a home that belongs to all of humanity! Any xenos, any heretic that dares lay a hand on this sacred ground will meet righteous judgment! To be torn apart, to be blasted to pieces, to be burned alive, that is the only fate that awaits filthy xenos! The Emperor protects! Humanity endures!"
Around him, wave after wave of gunfire arced past and slammed into the enemy mass ahead, shredding them apart. The whole scene looked like something out of a painting, genuinely magnificent.
Once he'd finished delivering that rousing speech, Kian switched to a private channel and got Little Joel on the line.
"Did you get that on record?"
Behind him, Little Joel had a camera rig slung over one shoulder.
"Commander, got the whole thing."
"Good. Take it back and cut it into a proper promo reel. Show it to some other Planetary Governors, see if it doesn't drum up a few more contracts."
That was the plan. Kian had decided he was committing fully to the mercenary-for-hire life among the stars.
Working under an Inquisitor opened doors to more places than he could count, and he intended to use every opportunity to build up his own foundation.
He wasn't just going to work contracts, either. He meant to hunt down old battlefields and lost ruins, track down forgotten warships and weapons.
And he wanted to learn the economics of every world he passed through, what each one produced, what it needed, so that when the time came to run his own independent trade operation, he'd already know exactly how to make it profitable.
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