Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Thanks to his earlier defense of the main hive, Lin at least had somewhere to rest his feet.

The civilians who had originally been organized for evacuation filtered back into the hive city. Lin hauled the food production lines down off his Forge Ship and managed to repair several Corpse-starch lines besides.

With the Astartes stepping in, Port Sanctus recovered a basic order under a wartime footing. Survivors from the other stricken hive cities began migrating toward the main hive, and on the whole the situation held steady.

With the Imperial fleet gone and the planetary governor's head already off his shoulders, a stabilized Port Sanctus was clay in Lin's hands, his to knead however he pleased. Little enough remained on its surface, true, but population alone was the most precious resource of all.

Using that stability as his foundation, Lin opened a fresh round of recruitment aimed at the civilians who had lost homes and families alike.

He lacked the perfect conditions he'd enjoyed in the underhive, but so long as he could offer food better than Corpse-starch, his terms held plenty of appeal for these people.

Nor did Lin expect the newly recruited civilians to fight as fearlessly as his underhive army. He simply packed them into the civilian vessels Vladilena had requisitioned under the pretext of evacuation and ordered those ships to set course for Cath Maximus.

The Warp routes remained in chaos, but with a World Soul to guide him, long-range transit through the Warp was an achievable proposition for Lin.

These people would be assigned by the Forge Worlds as production-line workers or as reinforcements for the Astra Militarum, pumping fresh blood into Cath Maximus.

Then those requisitioned civilian ships would return from Cath Maximus, and together with the Astra Militarum's own transports, they would bring Lin the Astra Militarum forces from Hays.

Tempered by fire, the underhive army still numbered some two hundred thousand. They were, by now, a force worth fielding.

Lin intended to forge this army, which had stared down the threat of daemons and refused to break, into a formation answering directly to him. With Neos and the various Chapter Masters as witnesses, Lin granted them a glorious name: the Port Sanctus Immortals.

They were drilling on Port Sanctus even now, following the new doctrine Lin had laid out for them.

With Hellhound war-vehicles serving as their vanguard, and CMC power armour and siege tanks expected to arrive as reinforcement before long, the tactical templates inherited from the Imperium no longer suited these underhive troops.

This was the first sizeable force Lin possessed that leaned on no other Imperial power, that belonged to him and him alone. He meant to use it as a proving ground, arming them with wholly new military thinking and technology.

How well it would work remained for real combat to decide, but Lin felt optimistic about the results of their training.

If all went smoothly, he might one day be able to name Neos a mortal Lord Militant.

Of course, beyond the underhive army, he had also recalled the Astra Militarum regiments on Cath Maximus under the banner of defending Terra. Given a little more time, Lin would return to Terra with two million mortal soldiers backed by siege tanks and a small Titan Legion.

Add to that the fifteen hundred Astartes of the Ultimate Wall, and even on a Terra about to be swept by storms, that was enough to buy an admission ticket.

Vladilena did not fully understand the strength Lin had assembled, but she could see that he was pushing every chip onto the table.

The Battle Moon bearing down on Terra had been dealt with. The greenskins still ran riot across the whole Solar Segmentum, but the direct threat to Terra had been more than halved. As she saw it, the wisest move available to Lin now was to cut himself loose from the Ultimate Wall, take the profits he'd already scooped up, and vanish somewhere far away.

Instead Lin kept raising his stake on Terra, and that unnatural behaviour left her deeply uneasy.

"If you aren't planning a rebellion, then you have some other purpose."

Seeing the Inquisitor finally voice her worries to him, Lin, busy bustling about with his Felyne in tow, recognized his opening.

"For the sake of all those transport ships you rounded up for me, let me give you a piece of advice, Lady Inquisitor. Do you know what your colleagues helped Mars take off that Battle Moon? An ork spatial teleportation apparatus. The very device that lets a Battle Moon skip the Mandeville Point and appear directly above a planet."

Lin never came out and said that another Battle Moon would appear over Terra. His leading phrasing sent Vladilena's suspicion straight at Mars instead. "What does Mars want with xenos technology like that?"

"Perhaps they'd like to teleport the whole of Mars somewhere else, free of Terra's authority at last, and crown themselves kings of their own domain."

It was an absurd suggestion, and yet, considering the character of the cogboys, what Lin offered carried an uncomfortably high plausibility.

Shaken by the news, Vladilena had no intention of lingering. She meant to carry it back to the Inquisition at once.

Before she left, though, she didn't forget to demand a prisoner from him.

"That traitor Astartes who was masquerading as the planetary governor. In the name of the Inquisition, you will hand him over to me."

"As it happens, he's already gone."

"Gone?"

"Indeed. His people ran the whole withdrawal from the Battle Moon, and he's an Alpha. With his talent for disguise, who could have stopped him from walking out?"

Vladilena's suspicious gaze swept over Lin. She didn't much believe the story, but her urgency to get the news back to Terra made her yield. "I'll trust you. I would rather you didn't use that trust of mine to play any games."

A Soul Drinker arrived just then, apparently with something to report to Lin. Unwilling to talk further in front of an Astartes, Vladilena took her leave. The "Soul Drinker" watched her retreating back, then lowered his head.

"Catching the eye of a madwoman from the Inquisition is no fun at all."

"You should worry about yourself instead, Occam. How did that investigation I gave you turn out?"

The Son of the Hydra shed his disguise, his pauldron shifting from the purple chalice of the Soul Drinkers back into a cold, coiled serpent. "Your guess was right. There is something wrong inside the Soul Drinkers."

"Mm-hm. How wrong?"

"I couldn't burrow into their inner circle that quickly without assassinating the Chapter's senior officers. But their Chapter practices a strange ritual: they devour the corpses of the dead in order to live out that person's memories firsthand."

"The ritual grows out of their unusually developed gene-sensing neurology. Their Priests hold a Chapter text called The Catechisms Martial. I never saw the contents, but I'm certain they use it to teach their warriors to accept and to relish what makes them different."

Lin clicked his tongue. The ritual struck him as a touch too extreme.

After the Legions were broken into Chapters, plenty of Chapters had developed customs more barbaric than anything the Space Wolves practiced. Even so, eating corpses ranked at the far end of the scale.

The Soul Drinkers hid their peculiarity well, though. The custom was only ever enacted when their Priests held internal rites.

Had Lin not sent an Alpha warband with a Night Lord among its ranks, he might never have gotten a clear read on the Soul Drinkers at all.

"Looks like I need to raise my guard where the Soul Drinkers are concerned. Their Chapter Master supports the return to Terra. Maybe he has his own reasons for it…"

"Maybe. But staying here won't dig up anything more." Occam neither agreed nor argued. "The job's done. Shouldn't you be giving me a ship?"

A traitor asking Lin for a ship would have gotten nowhere. But his status had been upgraded from traitor to collaborator.

Working with grey-area figures who hadn't fully tipped over into Chaos was ordinary business for the Mechanicus. So long as the other party could supply something of value, man or dog, they could get something good out of the Mechanicus in exchange.

Being played earlier had put Lin in the mood to erase this warband, but they had also proven their worth in the unexpected destruction of the Battle Moon. When Occam volunteered his willingness to keep working together, Lin didn't turn them away.

So long as they could be put to use, Lin had no aversion to traitors.

An Alpha whose loyalty could never be verified, however, hardly counted as a force he could trust. Even without any plan to slaughter the mule once the grinding was finished, he had no desire to keep that sort of "talent" close at hand.

Maintaining a limited partnership, using the man to shore up his own thin information network, was the correct approach.

He could supply the one thing these turncoat warbands found hardest to obtain, and that alone put him on the stronger side of any bargain.

He handed Occam a permit token and told him to go collect an unarmed light merchantman from the spaceport himself.

Actually receiving the ship left Occam surprised. "You're really just letting me walk away?"

"I'm confident enough to do it. Where do you plan to go next?"

"Who knows. Terra, perhaps. You have my contact details. Reach out when you need me. I do charge a fee, mind."

Before leaving, Efron came running over specifically to press the point again and again: Lin must never reveal Efron's identity as a Fallen Angel. Only after Lin gave his word did he depart with Occam, satisfied. Not until their little merchantman lifted from the port did Lin discover that Occam had left him a message.

"I'll be watching you."

Lin shrugged, realizing he would probably have to raise his security level a notch once he got back to Terra.

What occupied him more at the moment, though, was that ork throne capable of channeling the power of "I reckon". With Occam sent on his way, he wanted to see exactly what technologies the thing might unlock for him.

But the sudden absence of an assistant to pass him wrenches tipped him off that something was wrong.

"Hold on. Where's my cat Tom?"

Aboard the light merchantman.

"That seneschal who's been dead for ages promised us a destroyer." Malik was unhappy with Lin's arrangements. "A single merchant hull is unbelievably stingy."

"That isn't important."

Occam stroked the Felyne in his arms. "At least we still have a cat."

The warband's members exchanged glances, unable to fathom why their leader was so besotted with this xenos creature. Still, none of them raised an objection.

Only Koda, the Thousand Son sorcerer, stepped forward. As the warband's Navigator, he needed their heading confirmed.

"Where are we going?"

"To Terra. We infiltrate the Shanzheng."

"That sounds a little too reckless."

"The Emperor's Trials fear no challenge. And I'm quite certain that what happens there next will be worth more to us than everything we've been through so far."

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