Chapter 225: Discount Space Marines
The escort mission was, by any honest assessment, extremely dangerous.
The target location was five hundred kilometres from Hive Tenebris — directly inside the active combat zone where PDF and rebel forces were currently destroying each other with significant enthusiasm. Send a column out there and it would be as likely to be engaged by friendly forces as hostile ones. Kian had personal experience with how PDF units treated other PDF units in the current environment. He'd done it himself.
Then there was the boring machine's mobility profile. The intelligence station's data put it at thirty-plus metres in length, ten metres tall, ten metres wide. Nuclear reactor power plant driving twelve sets of heavy tracks. Theoretical maximum speed: thirty kilometres per hour on optimal flat ground.
Thirty kilometres per hour was the theoretical number. Over broken terrain, through a warzone, with any bridges that needed crossing requiring either engineering work or alternate routing — the practical average would be considerably lower.
Escorting something that moved like a geological process, through an active combat zone, while both PDF and rebel forces operated in the area — this was not a sensible undertaking for bone augmentation alone.
The second intelligence item was what changed the calculation.
The underground facility's completed thirty percent had been operational before the rebellion. It had housed an armoured battalion. Twelve Leman Russ battle tanks.
The Leman Russ was one of the Imperium's principal heavy battle tanks — produced in greater numbers than almost any other armoured vehicle in the Imperial arsenal. Seventy to eighty tonnes, 120mm battle cannon in the main turret, operational speed seventy to eighty kilometres per hour. This agri-world couldn't manufacture them — they'd been imported from a neighbouring forge world before the conflict started. For reasons that remained unclear, they'd been sitting in the underground facility ever since, unused.
Antonius's offer: escort the repair team to the facility, recover the boring machine, and everything else in that facility belonged to Kian.
Twelve Leman Russ tanks. Several hundred assorted vehicles. One regiment's worth of weapons and equipment. Sitting underground, unclaimed, waiting.
Kian walked back and forth in the Sanctum for several minutes.
Twelve tanks.
He slapped his knee.
"Fine. We're doing this."
He assembled his three thousand private soldiers at the former Alchem-Hounds compound and selected the best thousand. He paid them a full year's wages on the spot and told them they were going on an operation that would pay another year's wages on completion.
The response was enthusiastic.
Infantry equipped — a mix of Sanctum-produced four-piece armour and PDF-pattern ballistic plate, autoguns throughout.
Transport — sufficient military haulers for the full force.
Armour — eleven Chimera transports: one command variant, four lasgun-armed, six autocannon-armed. Trained crews for all of them, built up over the months on the road.
Powered armour contingent — the full household guard kit: one infiltration suit, two heavy suits, twenty standard suits, sixteen converted dive-frame suits.
Silentium, brought along as the strategic reserve and dressed in a standard reactive suit for protection.
Kian himself in the infiltration suit, helmet sealed, command systems active.
He needed authorisation to move a private force through the combat zone. Colonel Leo, asked if he had anything useful, produced a movement pass and a special-operations tasking order. With those documents, the column could operate freely in the war zone without being stopped at every checkpoint.
He voxed Antonius and told him to meet at the ventilation shaft access outside the Hive.
When Kian arrived, the tree line around the shaft was packed. Eleven armoured vehicles, fifty-plus haulers, over a thousand soldiers in various configurations of armour, a handful of powered suits moving among them like walking buildings.
Three large vehicles approached from the direction of the Hive — clearly Mechanicus in origin, the gear-and-skull sigil prominent on the bodywork. Repair vehicles. Antonius stepped down from the lead unit with a dozen red-robed Enginseers behind him.
He looked at Kian's assembled force.
"You're ready. Shall we proceed?"
"One moment." Kian gestured at the column. "Tell me what you see."
Antonius surveyed the assembled soldiers, vehicles, and armour.
"Personnel. Autoguns. Chimera transports. Cargo haulers. Powered armour."
Kian held up a finger and made a tutting sound.
"Wrong. Look more carefully.
I am the Discount Chapter Master. The heavy suits are Discount Terminators. The standard suits are Discount Astartes. The infantry are Discount Astra Militarum.
We are the Discount Space Marine Chapter."
Antonius stared at him.
"Then I suppose I am a Discount Techmarine."
Kian's expression lit up. He clapped Antonius on the shoulder.
"Yes! Exactly right! You're the Discount Techmarine! Add a Discount Apothecary and the roster is complete!"
Antonius thought: you're also missing a Discount Librarian, but he had no intention of prolonging this.
"Then, Discount Chapter Master — five hundred kilometres away, your Discount Sacred Relic awaits. Are you ready to launch your Discount Great Crusade?"
Kian laughed, climbed up onto the lead Chimera's hull, drew the Power Sword, and pointed it forward.
"Brothers!! Forget what's behind us! Forget what's ahead of us! Let the galaxy burn!!"
[End of Chapter 225]
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