Chapter 383: Salvaging the War Engines
The moment the chief maintenance tech spotted Kian, his expression went slack with shock.
"My lord, you're still alive!"
Kian waved that off, in no mood to explain.
"Luca's dead. His Knight needs an heir. Did he leave any descendants? Children, nephews, cousins, anyone with a claim?"
Knight-piloting was a high-risk profession. However powerful the machine, the more powerful the weapon, the higher the mortality rate on the battlefields it saw. When a pilot died but the Knight itself could still be salvaged, someone new had to be found to drive it.
Succession for a Knight suit worked the same way it had for medieval European knights. A knight who died in battle passed his warhorse, armour, sword, land, and title to his son. If the son was gone too, the claim passed by proximity through the extended family, brothers first. If no brothers remained, it fell to the wife's side of the family.
The chief tech shook his head.
"Lord Luca never married. No wife, no children. And he had already become a Freeblade, my lord. He renounced his family's honor and his own surname."
Luca's situation was unusual. He'd severed every tie to his house cleanly, given up even his name. Any relatives with a strong claim to succeed him were dead besides, Throne Mountain itself had been leveled, there was no one left to even go looking for.
As for distant relatives through marriage with only a weak claim, given the current state of the world, no one even knew if any of them were still alive. And even if they were, none of them would dare press a claim this weak. Luca had renounced everything by becoming a Freeblade in the first place, which wiped out even those thin claims entirely.
So, whether by practical reality or by formal law, this battered, wrecked Cerastus now had no rightful owner at all.
Kian asked, "What will you and your people do now?"
He wanted to take the Knight with him, but he wanted the maintenance crew's input first.
"My lord, if we cannot repair this war engine, our only path left is to take our own lives, in atonement."
Kian said, "I'll take it with me. I'll use what connections I have to try and get it repaired. Understand?"
The chief tech fell silent for a moment, then bowed deeply to Kian.
"My lord, you need not ask my permission. We are merely components of this war engine. A component's duty is to function, not to think."
Kian clapped him on the shoulder, momentarily at a loss for words.
In the universe of Warhammer 40K, every major power loved reducing people down to objects. These tech-priests, however little flesh remained on their bodies, were still people, and yet their entire existence had been bound entirely to a machine.
Wherever the Knight went, they went. Whoever piloted it, they served.
What Kian didn't know was that during the time between his own death and the cultist forces still lingering nearby, Luca's attendants had walked right past the enemy soldiers to reach the wreckage, and the cultists hadn't so much as glanced their way.
That kind of bonded servitude, that reduction of a person to property, wasn't just accepted by the attendants themselves, it was accepted by the wider society too. Even enemies didn't bother them, the same way nobody paid attention to a delivery drone passing by.
Once Luca's Knight had fallen, these attendants had simply switched into maintenance mode and walked straight to it. The cultists hadn't cared, because nobody cares about a food-delivery robot walking past.
Understanding the man's answer, Kian clapped him on the shoulder again.
"Get your people to work with my men. Use the heavy equipment to haul Luca's mount onto the transport. We're heading to the Forge World after this. They can produce whatever parts a Knight needs there. We'll get it fixed. And after that, you'll be working under me."
The chief tech acknowledged the order and relayed instructions to his fellow attendants in binary cant.
His people swapped in for Kian's soldiers, loading up the heavy transport vehicles and hauling Luca's Knight aboard the shuttle.
Four loyalist Knight wrecks still remained on the field. Kian asked the chief tech.
"I take it I can't touch those?"
The tech nodded.
"My lord, those war engines belong to their respective Houses. With their pilots dead, the succession process has already begun. Working from strongest claim down to weakest, a suitable pilot will eventually be found. If you'd rather not start a conflict with a Knight House with a long lineage, it would be wisest not to touch them. And the Mechanicus temples themselves will defend their sacred machines from outside seizure as well."
Kian had no interest in claiming property that already belonged to someone. That wasn't the kind of thing he'd stoop to. He turned his attention to the four corrupted Knight suits instead.
"How come these four Chaos-touched Knights don't have any attendants left with them? Every other wreck out here has a crew."
The chief tech explained.
"My lord, they all took their own lives. Once a war engine's pilot pledges to Chaos, the machine spirit inside becomes corrupted along with him. The attendants cannot resist their pilot's will, they cannot desert on their own, and they would never willingly serve corruption either. Suicide was the only path left to them."
Kian clicked his tongue. That was the tragedy of this whole bonded-servitude system, right there.
"I want to take these four as well. Shouldn't be breaking any taboos there, right?"
Sure, the suits were thoroughly corrupted, plastered with skin, skulls, and Chaos runes all over the hull. But bring them back, hose them down, slap on a fresh coat of paint, and they'd be good as new for resale.
The chief tech offered a serious warning.
"My lord, these war engines have been deeply corrupted by the Dark Gods. Recovery should be undertaken with great caution. The machine spirits inside are already dead, and the Chaos corruption readings are well past acceptable levels. Restoring them to usable condition would require major overhaul and intensive purification, at minimum a full century of prayer just to clear the corruption. That Preceptor in particular carries a corruption reading in the four digits, alone."
Anything touched by Chaos left a lasting trace, and the Imperium had equipment capable of measuring exactly how much. An ordinary person's baseline corruption typically read somewhere between 0.01 and 0.1. A rank-and-file cultist might run as high as 10. Someone visibly mutated, or as heavily corrupted as that warlord back at the Baron's city, might read in the low hundreds.
But this Preceptor, dead and lying there as wreckage, still read in the low thousands.
"If this thing isn't handled properly, it could become a corruption source in its own right."
"That's fine," Kian said.
"Watch this. I'll bring the corruption right down to zero."
He called over a few soldiers, grabbed some bottles of Holy Amasec, and started smashing them against the Preceptor's hull.
Then he splashed on some promethium fuel and set the whole thing on fire.
Flames tore through the wreck, burning away every scrap of skin, every skull, every Chaos rune scrawled across the plating, until the entire Knight was charred black from end to end.
Once the fire finally burned itself out, the Preceptor lay there, scorched and blackened, a genuinely pitiful sight.
But underneath the char, not a single internal component had actually taken damage. Knight suits were remarkably durable. With adamantium plating and an adamantium skeletal frame, an ordinary fire that never even broke a thousand degrees couldn't have hurt it if it tried.
Kian had the chief tech step forward and check the readings. He pulled out his corruption-detection device, scanned the hull, and found the corruption reading had genuinely dropped to zero.
How on earth had that worked?
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