Chapter 386: Debt Relief
The old Knight aristocrat felt a wave of raw humiliation wash over him.
"Ngh! No... please, no! Just don't let word get out about the High King falling to Chaos. I'll do anything you ask!"
Kian let out a wicked little cackle and leaned in close to the old man's ear.
"Come on. Inside. Let's talk this through in private."
And so, with visible reluctance, the old noble followed Kian into a small room and shut the door behind them.
More than an hour later, the old man emerged, face burning with shame. In that hour, Glory had taken on ten years of Secundus-496b's tax debt.
During that conversation, Kian had leaned on the old noble, pressuring him into agreeing to shoulder ten years' worth of tithe obligations on behalf of Agri-World Secundus-496b.
Kian had an idea. He figured that while he was flying across the galaxy at Trasolh's side, he could build up connections and use them, bit by bit, to offload Secundus-496b's crushing tax burden elsewhere. He meant to save the place, and eventually turn it into his own private trading post.
His roots were there, after all. He knew people there. Governor Zeppelin, the planet's ruler, was practically his adoptive uncle. Handled carefully, that connection could open a lot of doors.
But there was a condition: Secundus-496b couldn't be strip-mined into ruin along the way. A century of debt repayment would otherwise turn a half-agricultural, half-garden world straight into a cemetery world, and that wasn't acceptable.
Kian meant to save it, one offloaded year of tax debt at a time, planet by planet, as he traveled. Glory was the first success: through a bit of leverage, he'd shifted ten years of the burden off Secundus-496b's books.
Of course, the local Knight lords hadn't agreed purely out of fear. There were other reasons too. For one, Kian was more or less the world's savior, and its nobility owed him a debt of gratitude. For another, what he'd asked for wasn't much. Glory was already a tax-exempt world, rich in resources. Ten years of another world's tithe burden was nothing to them.
And it wasn't as if they had to pay it off in ten years flat. They could stretch it over twenty or thirty, easing the strain even further. On the books, all that mattered was that ten years simply vanished from Secundus-496b's ledger.
With that, Kian felt his debt to Glory as its "savior" was settled too. Neither side owed the other anything anymore.
The whole affair gave him an idea. He could go around doing this everywhere. Passing through so many worlds, he was bound to run into tax-exempt or lightly taxed ones sooner or later, worlds he could talk into shouldering some of Secundus-496b's debt.
If he could offload fifty or sixty years of it this way, the agri-world's ecosystem wouldn't be wiped out completely. It would have a real shot at recovering.
And once he became a roving trader, he could run a fixed circuit between Secundus-496b and Forge World Primo-496a. The two worlds had been built to complement each other from the start, a round trip between them took only two years. The agri-world needed what the forge world made, the forge world needed what the agri-world grew. Working both ends for a few years, he might just make back enough to buy himself a warship.
Better still, Secundus-496b was home. He could claim land there and farm it himself, self-sufficient, and his own homeworld wouldn't tax him a credit for it.
With that in mind, Kian set himself a small goal: from now on, whenever he passed through a new world, he'd look for a way to shave more debt off the agri-world's books.
Once the ground sweep wrapped up, the Inquisitor prepared to move on to the Forge World to deal with the Ork crisis, though resupply would take three more days first.
Kian used those three days to have the chief maintenance tech strip every squire-suit down and rebuild them into three working units, figuring he might need the extra firepower for the Ork fight ahead. He also had the tech draw up an assessment of the damaged Knight suits, a full parts-and-materials list for getting everything back in fighting shape.
With that handled, Kian checked with Trasolh to see if there was any other business to attend to before departure. There wasn't.
So he went back to the Sanctum, lay down on his bed, popped a pill, and closed his eyes.
A moment later the pill took effect, and Kian died, painlessly.
Before he went this time, he silently fixed his intent: respawn at his old home Sanctum.
Sure enough, when his consciousness came back and he opened his eyes, he found himself back in the Underhive.
He took a deep breath, stood up, walked to the comm station, and dialed a number.
A little over half an hour later, Kian was quietly escorted to the Governor's estate, where he met with Governor Zeppelin.
"Huh? Since when did you grow your hair back?"
Kian squinted at the head of hair on Zeppelin, genuinely confused. This guy had lost every strand to radiation exposure ages ago. How was it growing back now?
Nearly a year into his term as Governor, and visibly running to fat, Zeppelin let out a long sigh and pulled off his wig, revealing the bare, gleaming scalp underneath.
The steward chimed in from the side.
"A wig, young lord. A wig. You understand how it is. A man loses something, he starts caring about it more than he ever did before. All he can do is fool himself with a fake one.
Speaking of which, why are you back? Is everything all right with your work under the Inquisitor?"
Before Kian had left, he'd told them he'd find ways to come back using unusual methods from time to time, and not to be alarmed when it happened.
"Nothing wrong on the Inquisitor's end. I'm just back for a couple days. How's the planet doing? Fill me in."
Governor Zeppelin walked Kian through everything that had happened since he'd taken office. Broadly speaking, the century-long debt repayment system was running smoothly now.
The planet's surface had already taken serious damage. Every scrap of valuable vegetation had been harvested and hauled away. Hundreds of the world's atmospheric fighters had been converted into crop-dusters, flying pesticide runs around the clock. The whole planet had been carved up into farms of every size, every ounce of nutrients in the soil being wrung out to grow grain, which merchant vessels parked in low orbit then carried off.
Within a few years, once the soil was stripped of everything, the surface would turn to desert.
That wasn't a real problem, though. By modern human standards of technology, a desert world was nothing serious. With the right methods, the ecosystem could still be restored, so long as no one resorted to violent industrial extraction. The moment massive black drills tore the crust open in earnest, there'd be no coming back from that.
Zeppelin and the steward chattered on about the state of things, until Zeppelin brought up something that made Kian genuinely angry.
"We've got dozens of cargo ships parked in low orbit right now, waiting to haul our wealth away. A few of the captains spotted the wreck of that Sword-class escort frigate drifting near the planet, and it's given them ideas.
I've heard rumors that someone's been trying to contact a faction capable of repairing Sword-class frigates, to come patch the thing up and sell it off."
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