Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

The name gave Lin a start. It had only been an idle question, but now he turned his head back around and looked the man over again, from head to toe, inside and out.

In a corner known to very few, the Emperor had erased the history of the days when, under the alias of Neos, he had bragged and chased women during the Dark Age of Technology. But Lin's ancestors had been genuine higher-dimensional beings, so of course he had heard of that dubious apocryphal tale.

Neos was the Emperor — such was the principle of recurrence!

He stared at the man for a good long while, yet no matter how he looked, the fellow seemed to be nothing more than an ordinary person.

The population of the Warhammer world was counted in the trillions, and shared names were extremely common. It was hardly strange that there should be a Neos here who was merely an ordinary man.

After all, there was even a planet called Erebus somewhere out in Ultramar.

Still, he had to make certain.

"Neos... that's a fine name."

Lin clapped the man on the shoulder. His expression stayed the same as ever — there was none of the vision that had occurred earlier, when the World Soul had possessed Admidel and been driven out the instant it came into contact with Lin.

That, at the very least, proved the man wasn't ridden by the Golden One.

"I can tell you're a learned man — not like the original residents of the underhive. Though I never ask a man about his origins."

As he spoke, Lin hauled the weakened Colonel up from beside him and gestured for the two of them to shake hands.

Colonel William clasped hands with Neos, and the plague upon his body showed no sign whatsoever of being healed.

The situation was a far cry from the little girl the Emperor had descended into during the Plague War.

But then, come to think of it — ever since he'd taken his seat upon the throne, the Golden One had developed a taste for possessing female avatars. Why would he ever come down wearing the skin of some ordinary middle-aged man?

Perhaps it was nothing but a coincidence of names, not worth dwelling on.

Lin relaxed a little. Although the thing he was scheming toward could ultimately lead to the great work of humanity's revival, he had no intention of dealing so soon with that thing that was neither clearly man nor god.

"Colonel, you come from the Planetary Defence Force, so you must have studied the basic drills of an army. I don't expect this crowd to become fine soldiers, but I do hope that when they march onto the battlefield, they'll be something more than mere cannon fodder."

William caught Lin's meaning. "You mean to turn them into an army?"

"Precisely."

"But to deal with the underhive alone, we don't need this many—"

"Colonel, if you've been paying attention, you should have noticed that for several days now they haven't sent us a single shipment of supplies from above. Our objective is not merely the underhive. Rather, the underhive may well be the cleanest place left in this entire hive city now."

The Colonel's face went first blank, then fearful, and finally settled into relief. Lin had no wish to probe into the workings of his mind. He turned to Neos. "As for you, Neos — so long as you're willing to throw yourself into our cause, we can become the best of comrades."

"It would be my honor, my lord." Neos lowered his head once more. "I only wonder what it is I can do?"

"Since you were the first to step forward, I've decided that you shall serve as the regimental commander of this newly formed armed force, and continue to lead these underhive dwellers down the right path."

Lin encouraged him: "Don't worry about not knowing how. You need only serve as a spiritual symbol. Of course, you may also follow behind the Colonel and learn the art of command — it will do you good later on."

In a few short sentences Lin had settled the general direction of what was to come. He signaled for someone to help the Colonel away to rest first, then summoned the representatives of the various Chapters, bidding them join him and Neos in distributing to these refugees the protein bars they were owed.

The personal presence of an Angel of the Emperor gilded this distribution with a coat of divine grace. When the residents actually received their food, they burst into cheers even more fervent than before.

Lin knew what to call this look.

It was called hope.

"I don't understand why it's turning out like this," Lancelot muttered in complaint over the comm channel.

Unlike the other Chapter Masters, who had long since witnessed Lin's methods, this Black Templar did not view these underhive dwellers in a favorable light. "They're nothing but a mob of refugees who, until just recently, were running riot alongside the cultists."

"A coin is defined only by the way it is used. These underhive dwellers will become an asset to us."

"If they surrender to us so easily, how can we trust that they won't turn their coats on the battlefield when they face those foul things?"

"They are human. A man must first secure his survival before he can develop any higher aspiration," Lin explained. "So long as we can guarantee them food and warmth, they will naturally incline toward the brighter cause. Such is human nature, always, Lancelot. Every person is a single body with two faces."

Such matters were perhaps a little hard to grasp for a great boy who had been chosen to join the Black Templars in his early teens. Lancelot wanted to ask something more, but Lin's hand had already brushed over one pitiful resident who had been tainted by pus while attacking the cultists of Nurgle.

That refugee's body had already begun to break out in blisters, but this faint clinging profane force of Nurgle was dispelled the very instant Lin's constitution touched it.

The man looked at his own body in disbelief, as if he couldn't credit that he had simply been restored to normal — but Lin had already moved past him, going to make contact with the next subject.

Lancelot held his breath. He followed reverently behind Lin, without the slightest lingering doubt.

This effect wasn't actually what Lin had intended. But ever since the Black Dragon had illuminated part of his true essence for him, Lin had found his command over his own constitution growing ever more practiced.

Only, this dispelling effect was limited to those cultists who had been only lightly tainted. As for the more heavily corrupted — their very lives had already been bound deeply to the profane force of the Warp, and to dispel the Warp-force from their bodies was to strip away their lives. Even Lin could offer them nothing but a clean death, as a final mercy.

Fortunately, they had already built up enough prestige that this practice of killing certain individuals stirred up no unrest. On the contrary, much like binding so-called witches to the stake in the Middle Ages, it drove the crowd into an even greater frenzy.

It was hard to say whether this was good or bad, but at the very least it made integrating these refugees a good deal easier.

While distributing the protein bars, Lin also completed his head count. Gathering the data the Astartes had tallied up, he found that this band numbered three hundred and fifty thousand strong.

Of those, some three hundred thousand were people who could figure out where a trigger was and put a weapon to use the moment they picked one up.

For the underhive as a whole, this number wasn't much, but it was enough to meet the standard of a single Astra Militarum cannon-fodder regiment.

The regimental establishment of the Astra Militarum ranged from a few thousand to several hundred thousand men — this depended chiefly on whether they were an elite armored regiment or merely fodder used to fill the line.

Adding in the several units of Planetary Defence Force that the Governor had previously reassigned down to them, Lin would have three hundred and fifty thousand mortals at his disposal to serve as auxiliaries.

The remaining underhive dwellers, who had not been won over, were not to be trusted when facing daemons. And considering how scarce the remaining military strength on this planet was, Lin had no hope of mobilizing any more underhive residents.

So long as he could fully arm the manpower he now had, then no matter what foul thing that steward had summoned, Lin felt he possessed the means to oppose it.

True, of all these people, only the Planetary Defence Force could be called a proper army, and even their equipment was a step below that of an Astra Militarum cannon-fodder regiment — to say nothing of the three hundred thousand underhive dwellers who weren't even fully equipped.

But Lin had never worried about the quantity of equipment.

After all, he had a... rather special assistant.

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