Chapter 387: Building His Own Knight House
Kian was furious. That Sword-class frigate wreck was one he'd personally cleared, he already thought of it as his.
But thinking it through, there wasn't much he could do about it. A warship drifting derelict in the void was basically unclaimed treasure. Whoever had the means to haul it off, it was theirs. If Kian tried to stop them, they might just decide it was safer to scuttle the thing outright rather than deal with him.
After stewing on it for a bit, he calmed down. Repairing a warship wasn't something anyone pulled off overnight, not even seasoned void traders. It would take years, maybe decades. It came down to who moved first.
The Inquisitor's next stop was the Forge World, and there was no telling what opportunities might turn up there. Kian still remembered the goodwill he'd built with Nor'n last time. Fighting alongside the Inquisitor at the Forge World, running into him again, who knew what might come of it. Maybe he could talk him into helping repair the frigate.
Either way, the ship wasn't going anywhere. It came down to who had the resources, and who moved fastest.
Having a warship someone else had their eye on gave him a little urgency, but there wasn't much point stressing about it now. This was downtime.
Kian shoved the whole matter out of his head and moved on to other things with Zeppelin. He mentioned he'd managed to shave ten years off the planet's debt, leaving only ninety years to go. Zeppelin grinned like a kid who'd just been handed a present.
Kian laid out his plans going forward: more worlds, more chances to offload debt. He told Governor Zeppelin to go easy on debt collection in the meantime, not to push the extraction too hard, to leave room for the ecosystem to recover down the line. Zeppelin said he understood.
From there, Kian headed to Lady Nightingale's tower and found her waiting. She'd become the new head of House Campella by now, and was well along with a visibly rounded belly. She looked a little startled when she saw him walk into her room, then smiled.
"You're back?"
Kian nodded.
"I'm back."
The two of them spent the next two days deep in conversation. When Kian had originally left the planet, he hadn't been able to bear walking away from everything he'd built there, and he'd also wanted to give the people loyal to him something to hold onto. So he'd chosen to start a family with Lady Nightingale and leave behind a bloodline of his own.
Now, watching her belly grow rounder by the day, an idea struck him. What if, once the kid was old enough, he had him trained to pilot a Knight suit?
A man like him needed his own Knight House. Recruiting one secondhand was so beneath him. Grow his own Knight House from scratch, now that would be doing it right.
He ran the idea past Lady Nightingale. She giggled.
"And how many children exactly am I supposed to have to build you a whole Knight House?"
Kian let out a wicked cackle.
"Doesn't matter, we've got rejuvenat physicians on hand, childbirth won't take anything out of your body. And if that's still too much trouble, we could use artificial gestation pods, way more efficient. Then one day I just march out an entire legion of my own children, each one piloting a Knight suit, sweeping the battlefield clean of heretics and Chaos filth!"
Lady Nightingale cut him off immediately.
"No! Absolutely not the pods! They have to be born naturally. Only children born of my own body are sacred!"
If Kian actually meant this Knight House business, and wasn't just talking nonsense, then there was no way she was handing off the right to bear his children. The head of a Knight House was its High King, which made her the Queen. Being Queen of her own Knight House, now that had a certain ring to it.
Kian moved on to other business.
"Have you been drinking the holy water every day, like I asked?"
Before he'd left, he'd given Lady Nightingale a large supply of water that had been sanctified at the Emperor's Shrine. Water infused with the Emperor's psychic power like that could ward off Chaos corruption when consumed. She and their child had been shielded from any Chaos taint from the moment of conception. There was no telling what kind of child that might produce. Would he glow gold?
Lady Nightingale nodded and rubbed her belly with obvious tenderness.
"I drink it. That water with the holy power in it, every single day.
I have a feeling this child is going to turn out to be something extraordinary..."
The two days passed in a blur, and it was time for Kian to head back. Trasolh's fleet was about to depart, on the verge of entering the Warp, and Kian needed to be there to oversee things. Not that he was especially dedicated to duty, mostly it was that his assets were on that fleet. Knight suits, six thousand elite troops, he couldn't afford to lose so much as one of either.
After saying goodbye to Lady Nightingale, Kian went to check on his holdings on the planet. The Underhive wasn't the chaotic mess it used to be. Every rat down there had been dragged out and put to work farming the surface, and the Underhive itself was being converted into industrial and chemical processing zones. The whole district was now under the Kae family's control, managing the underhive factories on the Governor's behalf. The Kaes had risen right alongside Kian, climbing into the planet's management tier.
Kian had the Kae father and son show him around the Underhive. Everywhere he looked, factories and reactors were going up. The hive's lower levels were steadily industrializing, laying groundwork for the debt repayment ahead.
Looking over the growing industrial base, another idea occurred to him. Secundus-496b currently exported raw materials, and raw materials were cheap. Could he find a way to shift from repaying debt with raw goods to repaying it with finished products instead?
He asked Old Kae: "With the industry we've got now, can we produce any weapons or equipment worth using toward the debt?"
Old Kae was a man who thought things through, and he understood exactly what Kian was getting at the moment he heard the question.
"Boss, I know you're after replacing raw material payments with manufactured goods, but our industrial base is too weak to produce anything a tax collector would count as valuable. Take weapons, the most valuable category. All we can manage right now are cheap solid-slug automatic rifles, and those greedy tax officials won't take those. Not unless we can produce lasrifles, or heavy artillery. Only weapons like that get counted as real value toward the debt."
Kian's eyes narrowed as he weighed the idea. If he could get Secundus-496b mass-producing lasrifles for debt repayment, that alone might shave another five or ten years off the tithe.
Building most Imperial technology required an STC template, essentially a set of engineering blueprints. But a lasrifle was more like an AK-47, most worlds already had the design in open circulation.
Kian decided that once he reached the Forge World, he'd bring in a consultant to assess the situation and put together a proposal for getting Secundus-496b producing its own lasrifles.
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