Chapter 388: Rest and Refit Before Departure
Kian died again, and this time chose to respawn aboard the Inquisitor's flagship.
By then the fleet had finished resupplying, with less than half an hour left before the jump into the Warp. Loudspeakers and red alert lights blared through the ship's corridors: all non-combat, non-essential personnel were to return to their quarters and remain silent immediately, or risk being shot on sight by the patrols.
Naturally, nobody dared say a word to Kian. He wandered the corridors like he owned the place, and everyone he passed stopped and saluted.
He drifted eventually into the flagship's main cargo hold, a space several football fields wide, packed with heavy equipment. Leman Russ tanks, Chimera transports, void fighters, shuttlecraft, and Knight suits, all parked here. The hold doubled as a makeshift repair bay. The ship's onboard fabrication equipment could service heavy hardware, and small components could even be lathed on site.
Small parts only, of course. This was still a warship first and foremost, and combat readiness came before anything else. Still, plenty of vessels in the 40K galaxy functioned as flying factories, capable of manufacturing while underway. That was the kind of ship Kian really wanted for himself someday: something with real combat capability that doubled as a mobile production line. Fly to a world, ask what they needed, produce it on the spot, sell it, and move on. That was the business model he had his eye on.
Right now, a crowd of tech-priests were swarming around Kian's salvaged Knight suits, dismantling and repairing them. The moment he arrived, he saw three squire-suits up and moving, bounding around inside the massive hold. The chief maintenance tech stood nearby with a data slate, running diagnostics on the three active units.
Kian walked over.
"How's it looking? Where do we stand on the Knight suit assessment?"
The tech bowed to him and gave his report.
"My lord, the picture isn't great. Starting with the Cerastus, that one's in the best shape of the lot. Its command throne only took minor damage, and modest repairs should restore full combat function. The Hellstrike chainsword is intact, but the powered gauntlet is a total loss and needs full replacement. The chest plating is destroyed in front, and punched clean through in back by a powered lance. It needs two major armour plates replaced, twelve secondary plates, forty-three adamantium skeletal struts of various sizes, and a substantial amount of internal servo mechanisms. That's not a small bill either. All of it is adamantium-grade material."
Kian's teeth ached just hearing it. Fixing up something this size properly, there was no telling what it would cost him.
The chief maintenance tech kept going.
"The Preceptor is in far worse condition. It took the Hellstrike chainsword straight through, and the command throne is a total loss. The chainsword also damaged the power pack on its back, which needs replacing too. Beyond that, both the powered flail and powered lance are badly damaged, effectively unusable now, and roughly thirty percent of its armour needs to come off and be replaced.
The other three Cerastus units all have varying degrees of damage as well. Across the board, we're looking at weapon replacement, armour replacement, and command throne replacement.
One more thing, my lord, if I may. Even once all the repairs are done, the Preceptor and the three Cerastus units will still need careful handling. They were all under Chaos influence at one point. Your purification ritual worked, corruption in all four suits reads zero now, but that also killed off their machine spirits.
That's going to raise the piloting burden considerably. It'll take a pilot with real mental fortitude to fly a soulless Knight suit."
Machine spirits were a strange, half-mystical thing. The bigger and more intricate a piece of machinery, the more likely a spirit was to emerge in it. Something the size of a Knight suit had essentially a hundred percent chance of one. Knight suits were even designed from the ground up with machine spirit integration in mind.
A Knight suit with a living spirit had its own personality, and it would pick its pilot. Pair it with a pilot it got along with, and the spirit would actively help, lending force in sync with the pilot's own movements. Pair it with one it didn't like, though, and the spirit might strike back through the command throne with a psychic shock strong enough to kill the pilot outright.
That was exactly why Knight suits had a reputation for being hard to pilot. A weapon system with its own personality, of all things. But there was no getting around it either. A Knight suit with a living spirit handled noticeably faster and better than one without. A soulless Knight suit was just cold machinery, doing exactly and only what the pilot told it to, stiff and unresponsive by comparison.
Worse, a soulless suit was vulnerable to daemonic corruption. A body with no soul inside was just an empty shell. If a daemon ever spotted one and slipped in, it could seize the Knight suit outright, and that would be the end of it.
Kian wasn't in a rush about it, though. These five Knight suits were his fixed assets now. He'd get more value out of them down the line, once conditions allowed.
He turned his attention to the three active squire-suits, rebuilt from the wreckage of eight.
"How are these three doing? Combat ready?"
The chief maintenance tech answered.
"Yes, my lord, all three are in excellent shape. Right now they're only equipped with melee weapons, though. We'll need to refit them with some heavy weaponry. I'd recommend pulling autocannons off a few of the Chimera transports, or fitting heavy las-cannons and rocket launchers, to get them ranged capability quickly."
Kian nodded, telling him to load on as much ranged weaponry as the frames could carry. Melee was too dangerous. Better to stack up on range and mobility, hit hard and pull back fast.
"By the way, who's piloting these three right now? They're moving pretty smoothly. Looks like they're dancing."
Sure enough, the three six-meter squire-suits were tap-dancing, circling each other in the hold, their massive metal feet striking the deck plating in rhythm.
"Ah, my lord, the pilots are your retainers, the three you call the Traffic Light Trio. They've asked whether they can paint the squire-suits red, yellow, and green. Do we have your permission, my lord?"
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