Chapter 218: Military Farming
Within days, word came back from Zeppelin. High command had approved the military farming operation.
The General had gone to his superiors and made a simple offer: his ten regiments would voluntarily relinquish their claim to redistributed food. They would not draw from the common pool, would not place demands on the Hive's supply chain, and would sustain themselves independently. In exchange, whatever they produced would remain in their hands — no requisitions, no taxation, no official hands in the harvest.
The planetary leadership was trying to feed ten billion people on an empty larder. The idea that ten regiments would simply remove themselves from the problem was received with immediate and unconditional enthusiasm. Approval came back the same day.
The military farming operation now had official backing.
Kian started that night, going out to meet the civilians he'd been watching farm in the dark. He found them at their usual work and explained the new arrangement directly — they didn't need to hide anymore. Come out in daylight, work the fields properly, and they'd have protection. He swore it on the Emperor's name.
He'd have wire and mines around the perimeter within days. Other PDF units wouldn't be able to enter without navigating the deterrent. The random killing that had characterised the main advance wouldn't reach this area.
The farmers looked at him — a uniformed soldier making promises — and made the only calculation available to people with no good options. They agreed.
He followed several of them back to where they'd been living and found what PDF sweeps looked like from the other side: root cellars dug into hillsides, entire families sealed underground in the dark, surviving on stored food and hoping the soldiers above moved on. Dozens of people in each cellar, and more scattered through the forest.
It took several days to gather them all. He ended up with over three hundred civilians.
He told them: daytime work, no more night operations. Soldiers on the perimeter, watching for threats from outside. He had spare field uniforms pulled from regimental stores and distributed to the farmers — if another PDF unit somehow penetrated the perimeter and saw people in military dress, they'd hesitate before firing. It was a thin protection, but a real one.
Kian drove to Whitepaper City to negotiate machinery with the Marshal.
The Marshal agreed to everything without significant discussion. The political situation had clarified his priorities considerably. PDF forces had been operating without constraint through the surrounding territory — towns burned, populations scattered. Whitepaper City existed under the protection of its baronial designation and nothing else. A man in that position didn't argue with his protector over tractors.
The fertiliser that had been promised to the Marshal would now stay in Kian's operation for his own fields. The Marshal agreed. The grain supply arrangement to the Hive would continue. The Marshal agreed to that too.
Kian drove back with ten large agricultural machines — the deep-tillage type, built for this world's vast flat plains. Imperial agricultural equipment was built to scale. Each unit was the size of a small building in motion, capable of turning thousands of acres in a single day.
He lined them up across the fields, put soldiers at the controls, and ran them.
Behind the machines came farmers with hand tools, breaking the turned earth into workable soil, sowing seed, spreading fertiliser. One day's operation produced over six thousand acres of prepared ground — the equivalent of fifty-six standard playing fields, ready for planting.
The machinery was incomplete — some units had been stripped for scrap metal before Kian arrived. Full mechanised cultivation across every stage wasn't possible. Planting and harvest would still need human hands.
Leo solved that problem by driving to the forward areas and coming back with over ten thousand displaced civilians.
These were people the main advance had left with nothing — homes destroyed, food gone, waiting in rubble. Leo brought them south and gave them somewhere to be.
Kian organised them immediately. Ten to a squad, hundred to a company, thousand to a battalion. He pulled iron farm tools from his Underhive supply chain and got them equipped. He told them to cut timber and build shelters. Then he pointed at the fields.
Within a month, the full hundred-kilometre road corridor had crops growing on both sides. The earliest-planted sections were already showing green shoots above the soil.
Kian called the team leaders together one afternoon.
"From this point on, you're under my protection. As long as you're in this operation, nobody takes your lives casually.
First harvest — you take half, I take half. Any objections?"
The team leaders went to their knees before he finished the sentence and began calling him names that implied a level of moral virtue he wasn't entirely comfortable with.
In a countryside where people were dying randomly, a protected piece of land with a fair crop-share arrangement was the best thing most of them had seen in months. They had no objections.
The 109th's soldiers took the protection of the fields very seriously — not out of abstract principle but because the crops were theirs and they intended to eat them. Armed patrols ran continuously along the field perimeters, day and night.
When the mine allocation arrived, the defensive line went up at speed. Warning signs marked the wire at intervals — Minefield. Rebel guerrilla countermeasures in effect. Some sections had actual mines. Others had signs and no mines. Nobody outside the regiment knew which was which, and nobody was willing to find out.
The farming corridor became, by any reasonable assessment, a functioning agricultural development zone inside an active war zone.
Under professional farming management, the crops grew visibly stronger by the day. The soldiers checked on them constantly.
The near-term revenue stream was also operational.
A convoy of twenty cargo haulers came south from the forward areas and reached Hans's sector to find a substantial crater blocking the road.
The lead vehicle stopped. An officer climbed down and opened his mouth to say something strongly worded about road maintenance standards and the personal failings of whoever was responsible for this section.
He got as far as the second sentence.
The Lumberer-pattern Heavy Stubber on the nearest Chimera put a burst across the road ten metres in front of him. The officer sat down involuntarily in the dirt.
Hans — back on duty, abdomen healed, apparently bearing no lasting psychological damage from the experience of being shot — leaned out of the Chimera's cupola.
"Watch your mouth. Next burst goes closer."
[End of Chapter 218]
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