Chapter 216: Growing Their Own Food
The 81st's soldiers retreated with whatever dignity they could salvage. The 109th erupted.
They had held their ground, absorbed the pressure, and come out ahead. Ten loaded haulers sitting on the road said so clearly.
Zeppelin turned to the assembled soldiers, still grinning.
"Brothers — get those ten loads distributed. Your families eat tonight."
Kian raised his voice above the crowd.
"Three cheers for General Zeppelin!!"
The response was immediate and loud enough to travel. Zeppelin's expression did the thing that senior officers' expressions do when junior soldiers cheer for them with genuine feeling — he tried to maintain dignity and mostly failed. He looked at Kian the way a man looks at a younger relative who is both exhausting and irreplaceable.
If the boy would show any initiative in the right social direction, something could be arranged. Pity.
The officers gathered in the command tent — Zeppelin, Leo, the three battalion commanders, Hans propped up on a field cot with a bandaged abdomen and the general air of a man reconsidering certain life choices.
Zeppelin explained the redistribution failure.
"This one is on me. I couldn't protect my people.
Regiments one hundred through one hundred and ten — my entire group — drew rear-area and logistics assignments across the board. None of you got to the front. None of you had the opportunity to take anything for yourselves.
As for the redistribution pool — you know what the Hive looks like right now. The upper nobility got there first. They're hoarding. Their storage facilities are full and they won't release a gram to military dependants. The redistribution chain ran straight into their warehouses and stopped."
The tent went quiet with the specific quality of people who have nothing useful to say.
Leo exhaled. "Can't entirely blame the General. The primary assault assignments all went to regiments under one hundred. That's simply how the order of battle worked out."
This world's PDF numbered five hundred regiments, serialised one through five hundred. The lower the number, the stronger the unit — the first ten were essentially Astra Militarum reserve formations. When it came to distributing the most profitable assignments, those numbers meant everything.
Regiments above one hundred waited until those below had taken their share. Regiments above one hundred might wait indefinitely.
Hans muttered something from his cot about how the army had spent years avoiding any combat whatsoever and had now managed to produce a situation where everyone was fighting over the right to fight.
Zeppelin could feel the resentment in the room. Resentment that went unaddressed had a tendency to redirect itself upward toward whoever was present, and he would be the available target.
He was genuinely unable to fix the food problem through normal channels. His group simply hadn't been assigned the access.
He looked at Kian. He had a feeling.
"Battalion Commander Voss — any thoughts on how to address this?"
Every officer in the tent looked at Kian.
Kian heard his name and his mind went immediately to three hundred civilians working fields in the dark by moonlight.
"General — how long do you estimate this campaign runs?"
Zeppelin considered. "Until the rebels hurt badly enough to start negotiating, or until the synthetic starch facility comes back online. The way things are going — eighteen months, minimum."
"Eighteen months." Kian let that sit for a second. "That's four or five full crop cycles."
The tent was quiet. Rudolphson was the first to follow the logic, and his expression shifted.
"You're talking about growing food ourselves."
"Exactly. We can't go to the front. High command has us fixed in place — hold the road, hold the position, don't move. Fine. We don't move.
But there's something our defensive sectors have plenty of, and that's farmland. Everything around these positions is cultivated land — high-yield seed varieties, worked soil, irrigation already in place. Put seeds in the ground and two to three months later you have a harvest. Do it in rotation and you're pulling food out of the ground continuously."
Zeppelin straightened. Then a concern surfaced.
"My soldiers have no agricultural experience. Can this actually work?"
Kian smiled.
"They don't need experience. There are surviving civilians all through this area — farmers who hid when the main advance swept through, displaced people from further north. Gather them, give them protection, have them teach our soldiers what to do.
If we put the land around all ten of your rear-area regiments under cultivation — hundreds of thousands of acres — we're not just feeding soldiers and their families. We're producing enough surplus to put a meaningful dent in the Hive's overall shortage."
The idea landed in the tent like something physical. Every person present had been operating with one framework for solving the food problem — take it from someone else by force — and hadn't considered that the alternative existed.
Which was understandable. These were military officers. Their training optimised for applying controlled violence to problems. It took a different kind of thinking to look at contested farmland in a war zone and see an agricultural operation.
Zeppelin turned it over carefully.
"What are the risks? What could go wrong?"
Kian answered directly.
"Protecting the harvest once it exists. We grow food, other PDF units see it and want it. Or high command issues a requisition order and takes it through official channels. Our people do the work and someone else takes the result.
That's the real threat — not the farming itself. The farming is straightforward. The politics of keeping what we grow is the actual problem."
That was the core of it. The logistics and the agricultural technique were solvable. The institutional predation was the variable that could destroy the entire effort before it produced anything.
Zeppelin sat with it.
Then his hand hit the table.
"We plant. Starting today, every rear-area regiment in my group gets land under cultivation. If we can't find a fight to send our people to, we feed them ourselves.
And as for protecting the harvest — I couldn't get my people a share of the fighting. I can at least hold a line around what they grow."
[End of Chapter 216]
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