Chapter 259: Bolt Carbines, Part Two
"Best single infantry weapon I could source. Ten per battalion. Guard your positions."
General Zeppelin left the briefing and retreated to his private chambers, and that was the last anyone saw of him for a while.
His personal quarters occupied the centre of a large enclosed garden at the tower's mid-levels — three storeys, classical architecture, the kind of building that communicated old money and older taste. The garden had apparently been spectacular once: rare flora imported from a dozen worlds, Victorian-style pavilions, Romanesque statuary.
All of it had been torn out. Flamethrowers had been used to harden the bare ground.
The reasoning was sound. Every structure, every plant, every decorative element was potential concealment for something that moved faster than a human eye could track. The garden now offered clean sightlines in every direction, bathed in enough artificial lighting to banish every shadow.
Kian's assigned section was a gateway in the white marble perimeter wall — fifty metres of frontage, his to hold.
Since this was the General's personal residence and Kian had a vested interest in the General's continued goodwill, he pulled in all hundred and fifty of his power-armoured private soldiers and positioned them along the wall. Somewhat excessive for the assigned sector. The General, when informed, was visibly moved in the specific way of a man who had been very frightened for several days and was encountering unexpected competence.
The General's own soldiers delivered the weapons allocation shortly after: a detail carrying armoured crates, an officer presenting himself with a salute.
"Battalion Commander Voss. Ten bolt carbines for your regiment's allocation, fifty bolts apiece.
Bolt rounds are scarce — issue them to your most qualified marksmen only.
Firing restrictions lift in ten minutes. Allow your shooters five rounds each to calibrate for recoil."
A second set of cases followed. Opened. Currency, neatly stacked.
"Hazard pay from the General. One hundred thousand Agri-Scrips per man. The situation is serious. He asks that you give it everything."
The detail withdrew.
Kian's private soldiers erupted.
One hundred thousand each? The sound of thirty men simultaneously recalculating their near-term life plans was audible.
Kian waved a hand. "Split it between you."
A hundred thousand Agri-Scrips barely registered against his current operational budget. Scattering it through the ranks cost him nothing and bought him the kind of motivated loyalty that no order could produce. He turned his attention to the bolt carbines.
He lifted one from the case and held it.
The form factor was longer and heavier than anything in the standard PDF arsenal — imagine a Lasrifle that had been significantly reconsidered in the direction of mass and consequence. The muzzle carried a large compensator that, according to the technical brief, absorbed sixty percent of recoil.
The remaining forty percent, for a normal human soldier, would still be enough to interrupt breathing and cause involuntary movement.
Specifications: 25mm calibre, fifteen-round drum feed, semi-automatic. Weight: eighteen kilograms unloaded.
Eighteen kilograms. For a weapon a human was supposed to aim and fire repeatedly. Kian ran the numbers: a standard PDF trooper, even a strong one, would struggle to keep this stable. In powered armour it was manageable. For Kian, with his current physical statistics and the armour's servo-assistance, it felt roughly equivalent to handling a standard carbine.
He set the weapon down and picked up a bolt round.
Two thumbs wide. A full palm's length. Five hundred grams, for a single cartridge.
In his internal assessment framework, this was a Grade 8 round — the highest-tier ammunition he had encountered. Penetration values: all single-person powered armour he had encountered to date, with energy to spare. Side and rear armour of a Chimera transport. At appropriate range and angle, most things a human or near-human could wear.
Aeldari warplate, the briefing noted, was constructed from wraithbone — a psychocrystalline material with significant properties in the Immaterium, well-suited to the Aeldari's natural psychic affinity. It was fast, precise, and not primarily designed for raw physical stopping power.
A Grade 8 bolt entering Aeldari warplate would penetrate. The mass-reactive charge would then detonate inside the wearer.
One hit, Kian thought. If it connects.
The tower-wide address system crackled.
All units. Firing restrictions are lifted. Twenty minutes of live-fire testing authorised. All units, twenty minutes free fire.
The estate erupted.
Kian stood on the wall, loaded the drum, aimed at the servants' quarters on the far side of the garden, and fired three rounds.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Three metres of muzzle flash. Each shot sounded less like a rifle and more like something structural giving way. The servant house wall across the garden — solid stone construction, Imperial standard — took two rounds and stopped existing as a coherent surface.
"Throne."
He turned the weapon over in his hands with genuine reverence.
The live-fire test continued for twenty minutes. By the end of it, General Zeppelin's garden estate looked as though it had been used to settle a significant disagreement. The General, presumably somewhere in the interior, did not emerge to inspect the results.
He said we could test the weapons, Kian thought. Technically.
Several days passed.
The General had established a routine of notable consistency: wake, eat under heavy guard, play board games with his head steward, eat again, sleep under heavy guard. The list of nobles the Aeldari warrior was working through still had names on it. None of those names were his, yet. He was not taking chances.
The head steward — a man of considerable professional dignity who had served the Zeppelin household for decades — had now lost to the General at five-in-a-row three hundred and fifty-nine times in succession.
Not because the General was skilled.
Because the steward had correctly identified that the General's continued psychological stability was a household priority, and had been quietly losing every game for days.
The General leaned back from the board after game three hundred and fifty-nine with the expression of a man who had achieved transcendence.
"I have mastered it. This game holds nothing more for me."
The steward glanced at the board. Five in a row. The man had been playing five-in-a-row for a week and believed he had solved the game.
I would suggest chess, the steward thought, but I suspect I'd be losing at that for the next month.
"Your insight is, as always, remarkable, my lord."
A servant appeared in the doorway.
"My lord — Lady Zeppelin is — she wants to go shopping. She's already at the gates. We can't stop her."
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