Chapter 212: Night Planting
A month passed without incident.
Kian held his sector. No enemy contact, no significant disruptions. His position sat well behind the active front line, which had pushed several hundred kilometres further north. The fighting out there was serious and getting worse — he could track it through the battalion's vox net — but back here the war was something you listened to rather than participated in.
What the vox traffic told him was grim. The forward PDF regiments had stopped making distinctions. Farmers working fields, families sheltering in settlements — it made no difference. The calculus had simplified to the point of erasure. After the killing came the sweeping — immature crops stripped from the ground, rebel supply caches emptied, everything loaded and sent south.
Every day, cargo haulers rolled back through his sector toward the Hive, loaded with agricultural produce. The war was working, in the blunt mechanical sense that wars sometimes work.
Kian tracked the front line on a map in his tent, updating it daily from the vox reports. The fighting was too far away for him to reach it. So he trained.
His two hundred household soldiers were handed to the regiment's veteran NCOs with instructions to work them as hard as the NCOs thought appropriate. He assigned several of the more capable recruits to the artillery company to learn gunnery — a discipline with genuine mathematical prerequisites, which created immediate problems given the near-universal illiteracy of the group. The artillery company commander said it couldn't be done.
Kian told him to do it anyway and see what happened.
One evening, midway through studying ballistic functions until his vision blurred, a sentry appeared at his tent.
"Battalion Commander — unknown personnel observed outside the perimeter. Your attention requested."
Kian put the stylus down with some relief and followed the sentry to a timber observation platform at the outer edge of the position.
He raised his field scope and switched to low-light mode.
Roughly two kilometres out, in the cultivated fields, a dozen figures were moving furtively. Digging.
Road mines. His first thought.
The distance and the darkness made detail difficult. He kept watching.
"Ten good soldiers. Follow me."
Fifteen minutes of careful movement across open ground. The squad spread into a loose encirclement. When the cordon was complete, Kian came up off the ground, weapon raised, torch on.
"Nobody move! Hands where I can see them! Move and I shoot!"
The squad came up from all sides simultaneously, lights blazing, shouting the same.
The figures reacted by collapsing. Several dropped to their knees immediately. One pressed his face directly into the dirt and appeared to be attempting to become part of the field.
This was not how a sabotage team behaved.
Kian approached carefully and looked at what he'd found.
Farmers. A dozen of them, kneeling in turned earth, surrounded by planting tools.
They hadn't been planting devices. They'd been planting crops.
Somehow, a pocket of the civilian population had survived the PDF's sweep — in root cellars or forest hollows or somewhere the main advance hadn't reached. And then, apparently, they'd decided the most pressing use of their survival was to come out at night and put seeds in the ground.
Kian lowered his weapon and looked at the oldest of them.
"What were you thinking? You understand you could be shot on sight out here?"
The man was shaking badly enough to affect his speech.
"My lord — we're not rebels. We have no weapons. We don't want trouble. We're farmers. We want to grow food and feed our children. We—"
He stopped. He was looking at a semicircle of weapons and he clearly believed he was already dead.
Kian made a sound of mild exasperation.
He pointed his weapon at the freshly dug earth.
"What are you planting?"
"P-potatoes and maize, my lord. They grow fast, they yield well. Enough to feed our families."
Kian looked at him for a long moment — long enough that the man's composure made one final, unsuccessful attempt to hold. The smell of fear became quite specific.
Kian gestured for his soldiers to lower their weapons.
"Fine. I'm not going to ask whether you're rebels or farmers — it doesn't matter right now. I'm going to pretend I was never here.
You want to plant, plant. But from here to the road is two kilometres. Nothing living comes within two kilometres of that road. And no maize — I won't have tall-stalk crops giving cover to anyone approaching our position.
Break either condition and I put incendiary rounds through everything you've grown. Understand?
Now go. Stay out of sight during daylight. If another PDF unit finds you, I can't help you."
He walked back to the position without looking back.
The farmers remained where they were for a moment, each looking at the others. Then the eldest picked up his tool.
"Stop staring. Get the seed potatoes in the ground, then back to the cellar. We found a good one tonight."
Each evening after that, Kian found himself scanning the two-kilometre line with his field scope before turning in.
Word must have spread through the surviving civilian population with some speed, because the night planting crews grew. First a dozen. Then thirty. Then, by the end of the second week, over three hundred people working the fields in the dark, moving by moonlight, planting in silence.
He hadn't expected anyone to survive the sweep in those numbers.
He watched them work and felt something he couldn't quite articulate. These were people who had lost almost everything and responded by trying to grow food. In the middle of a war. At night. Because the alternative was to wait and starve. The 41st Millennium was an almost perfectly designed engine for killing human beings, and here were several hundred of them quietly refusing to cooperate with it.
He kept scanning the line. He didn't order anyone to investigate.
The second month brought a supply run back to the Hive, from which Kian returned with another two hundred household soldiers. He distributed tinned guana-flesh rations to the veteran NCOs — ten tins per soldier trained to crew standard on a heavy stubber.
The NCOs became immediately and intensely motivated educators. Kian's household force developed working competency on Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubbers and basic Chimera operation within weeks.
He was considering whether to rotate all three thousand Underhive soldiers through the position in batches when the vox net produced something unexpected.
Second Battalion — Hans's unit, holding the forward sector — had made contact.
Not with rebels.
With other PDF.
[End of Chapter 212]
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