Chapter 199: The Rebel Marshal
The room went quiet. The official stared at the table, thinking.
Kian waited. The man said nothing. Kian decided to add weight to the scales.
"Within one month, the Hive's food reserves will be critical. The upper hierarchy will have to act. And even if the high command doesn't care about the lower levels — the rank-and-file PDF soldiers will.
You know how bad PDF discipline gets. The moment those men understand their families are going to starve, some of them won't wait for orders. They'll self-organise. Ad hoc raiding parties, moving into your territory — killing, burning, taking whatever they can carry.
Think about that picture. Armed men with nothing to lose, operating in small groups through your settlements. How many of your people die in that scenario?"
The official sat with it. The image was not comfortable.
The rebel movement had gained momentum largely because the PDF was so thoroughly rotten — soldiers who fought without conviction, like the crumbling imperial armies of any dying era. That corrosion was precisely why the rebels had been able to push the Planetary Governor back into the Hive.
But men fighting for their families were a different creature entirely. That kind of motivation had no ceiling.
The official stood and walked toward the door.
"I must relay your words to the Marshal. Wait here."
He left. Kian allowed himself a quiet smile.
Getting the Marshal's personal attention meant the matter was as good as resolved. If the Marshal turned out to be genuinely unreasonable — if he refused cooperation after all of this — then he could wait for hungry PDF soldiers to start conducting their own agricultural policy through his settlements.
While he waited, Kian had Parson unload the fertiliser from the haulers. It was a gift — Parson distributed it to his farmers on the spot.
Kian spent the night in the camp.
The next morning, the official returned.
"The Marshal requests your presence. Come with me into the city."
Kian mounted up without objection, and rode with the official into rebel-held territory.
An hour later, a city appeared.
It was a modest place — mostly one and two-storey stone buildings, no significant skyline, but substantial in area. Kian turned to the official.
"What's this city called? Population?"
The official glanced at him and said nothing.
Kian made a dismissive sound. "Classified, is it. Right."
He searched his memory of regimental maps. The settlement matched — Whitepaper City, he thought it had been labelled. Named before the revolt for its primary industry: the entire surrounding region had been given over to paper production, with every available tree harvested for pulp.
Population — this was a Marshal's capital, and people had been relocated here from surrounding areas. Kian estimated around two hundred thousand residents.
What struck him riding through was how primitive the conditions were. People were carrying water on shoulder-poles. No power infrastructure. When the rebellion had taken hold, the Hive had cut external energy supply to rebel territories — and without that supply, technological life had quietly unwound itself back to pre-industrial patterns.
He was escorted to a walled paper mill on the city's edge — razor wire along the top, elite rebel soldiers patrolling the perimeter. These were proper troops: autoguns, Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubbers, and the occasional lasrifle glinting in the light.
Kian was walked through under armed escort, up to the top floor, into a sparse receiving room.
The Marshal was a man in his mid-forties. He wore a well-cut noble's formal coat. A laspistol sat at his hip.
Minor noble. Kian clocked it immediately.
The rebellion had drawn from everywhere at the start — farmers ground down past endurance, PDF soldiers broken by impossible discipline, nobles on the outer edge of the aristocracy with nothing left to lose. All of them together had built something that swept the planet.
While Kian assessed the Marshal, the Marshal assessed Kian.
"Who are you? What is your standing? I need to know whether your words carry weight."
Kian straightened with dignity.
"PDF battalion commander with active field authority. Underhive gang leader. Mid-Hive production operator. Upper Spire Baron. Pious Crusader of the Imperium, commended by the Planetary Confessor himself. Baron Kian Voss.
Sufficient standing?"
The Marshal blinked.
"You're a noble as well. Interesting. Sit down."
Two armed guards took positions behind Kian as he settled into the chair. The Marshal sat across from him.
"I am Baron Dillar — patriarch of House Dillar. That was my former title. Now I am Marshal Dillar.
You've brought word from the Hive. I want to hear it directly from you."
Kian went through it again — the Chaos contamination event, the destroyed starch facility, the incoming food shortage, his proposal for a grain exchange.
The Marshal thought for a moment.
"I understand the Hive's situation. But my territory supports perhaps five or six hundred thousand people. My food surplus is limited. I couldn't feed a Hive of ten billion under any circumstances."
Kian waved a hand.
"I'm not asking you to feed the entire Hive. I need to feed the Confessor's parish.
A man of my scale — managing one parish district is already ambitious."
The Confessor's parish was substantial by any measure. He was a mid-ranking Ecclesiarchy official, presiding over one of the major district cathedrals, with a network of street-level chapels beneath him staffed by preachers. A Hive Confessor of his standing could influence several million people.
Kian's goal was to accumulate enough food to hand to the Confessor for distribution as disaster relief — building goodwill with one of the most connected men on the planet. He was realistic enough to know that if a full famine broke out, even the Confessor couldn't save everyone. But saving some was better than saving none.
"Here's the arrangement," Kian said. "You mobilise a grain supply for me. We formalise a trade — fertiliser for food. In return, I use my contacts to designate your territory as a protected zone. When the food riots start and the desperate come looking, your settlements stay off the target list."
The Marshal leaned back. After a long pause:
"My soldiers will destroy any wolves that try to take what our people have earned."
Kian said: "PDF soldiers fighting to keep their families alive will become the most vicious wolves this planet has ever produced."
Silence again — but this time Kian could read the Marshal's face. The man was ready to move.
He'd been a minor noble. He knew exactly what PDF infantry looked like when they were cornered and furious. Hungry soldiers operating in self-organised raiding columns through his farmland — the body count would be catastrophic.
And if cooperation with Kian could purchase real protection from that scenario—
"Let us discuss the terms of this arrangement…"
[End of Chapter 199]
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