Chapter 452: Knight Fortress
After giving Kian the key to waking the Knight, the Titan's Adjutant strolled off, heading back toward the Titan Temple.
Every tech-priest he passed along the way bowed low, deeply deferential. To them, this man wasn't a person at all, but an organ of the Titan itself, carrying out the Titan's will.
The Adjutant made his way to the base of the towering Reaver Titan, over forty meters tall, and stepped onto the lift, rising from the Titan's feet toward the command cockpit far above.
On the way up, the Titan's entire surface was visible, studded with point-defense guns, a swarm of technicians crawling over them, performing maintenance.
These crew members were nothing more than ordinary weapons operators, with no neural link to the Titan at all, and their standing reflected that: unremarkable.
There were plenty of others like them inside the Titan's frame, technicians managing power conduits, engines, auspex arrays.
They were support staff only, not literal components of the Titan itself, and so they were never afforded the reverence given to an Adjutant.
With a heavy thrum, the lift reached the topmost level, and the Adjutant strode into the Titan's interior.
As the Titan's living memory-store, a literal part of its body, he needed to return to his slot the moment his task was complete.
Amid the Titan's complex mechanical architecture up top, a small access hatch had already opened, waiting for his return.
The Adjutant strode toward it, only to be stopped by someone blocking his path: Magos Ferrocore.
The worm-like, heavily augmented Ferrocore stood in the doorway, and his radically modified form seemed, for once, to carry a note of genuine deference.
"My lord, does the sacred engine have any instruction for me?"
The Adjutant's expression showed nothing at all.
"I am a component. A component only functions. It does not think."
Ferrocore's mechanical hands wrung together, anxious.
"My lord, I have served this sacred engine for fifty years. A full fifty years. I ring its bell three times a day, without fail!
Does the engine truly have nothing for me? Not even a single fragment of instruction, a scrap of binary code, a moment of data-echo..."
The Adjutant regarded him with perfect calm, his flat, expressionless face somehow radiating an oppressive, unbearable weight onto Ferrocore.
"I am a component. A component only functions. It does not think."
Ferrocore drew his head in, his hulking mechanical frame slumping, and slowly stepped aside, clearing the way.
The Adjutant walked into the Titan's interior, and the mechanical door sealed shut automatically behind him, cutting off Ferrocore's desperate, longing gaze.
Ferrocore trudged back to his own chamber, dejected, a steel room with a massive one-way transparent wall on one side, facing directly out onto the Titan's forty-meter face.
He threw himself against the glass, several mechanical arms pressed flat, running frantically over the Titan's features through the barrier.
His vox crackled with a burst of static, and a dozen or so of his mechanical legs trembled erratically.
Thousands of compound-eye units across his several mechanical eyes stayed locked on the Titan, cataloguing every plate of armour, every single rivet, into his vast cognitive array.
His computerized mind flooded itself with photo and video captures of the Titan, over and over.
Thousands of terabytes of data logged every single second, only to be purged moments later for lack of storage, and replaced with fresher footage, endlessly...
Meanwhile, over at the Knight outfitting hangars, a dense crowd of tech-priests packed the space, shoulder to shoulder.
Getting real combat effectiveness out of a Knight required a substantial logistics apparatus behind it.
Fortunately, this was a forge world, and tech-priests were the one thing never in short supply. The moment Kian put the word out, droves of them came flocking in, eager to interview for the position.
By now, Kian had assembled a full logistics corps, five hundred bound tech-priests for each of his two Knights.
These priests had voluntarily surrendered their status as human beings, standing before the Knights and pledging themselves in full.
"A component functions. It does not think!"
They repeated the phrase endlessly, willingly objectifying themselves down to mere property.
The lead of each Knight's logistics team carried the title of chief maintenance tech.
One had come with Kian all the way from Glory. The other had been recruited locally.
Once the two of them put their heads together, they wasted no time exercising a bit of initiative.
"My colleague and I have already liquidated all our personal property and knowledge holdings, accumulating a substantial reserve of value here on this forge world.
We can trade that value for a great many things."
"In that case, let's trade it in for two Knight fortresses."
A Knight fortress was a massive rectangular steel box, standing nearly thirty meters tall, roughly twenty meters wide and deep.
In shape, it resembled a medieval keep, fitted top to bottom with a heavy array of anti-air guns, las-cannons, and heavy bolters.
All of it wrapped in thick ceramite plating, and functionally, it served exactly the purpose its name suggested: a fortress.
Except this particular fortress had an absolutely ridiculous trick up its sleeve. Fitted around its base were several disposable rocket boosters, allowing a warship to literally hurl the whole fortress straight into the heart of enemy territory!
With its formidable firepower and defenses, the fortress could plant itself right at an enemy's throat like a spike, then lower its drawbridge and release the Knight and its retinue of knightly guardsmen sheltered inside.
It was, in essence, a brutally hardcore method of Knight deployment, dropping a full fortress, Knight and all, directly into the enemy's beating heart.
Once the two chief maintenance techs had settled on their plan, they brought it to Kian, laying a full fortress proposal out in front of him.
The gist of it: the two of them would cover the funding and labor to build the fortresses, while Kian would supply the manpower to actually operate them.
A single fortress carried nearly a hundred weapon emplacements from top to bottom, all requiring trained operators, and they wanted Kian to form a proper Knight retinue to crew them.
Each fortress could hold at least two hundred weapon operators, one full Knight, and two squire-suits.
The squire-suits could be swapped out for four Leman Russ battle tanks, or four Chimera transports plus three hundred infantry.
Kian said he understood, and immediately reached out to the private troop contingent aboard Inquisitor Trasolh's flagship, specifically to Reyes, Luca's old retainer, asking him to select a thousand men to form the new Knight retinue.
For a long stretch of time after that, Kian holed up at the Titan Temple, watching the two fortresses rise from their framework, while also drilling the newly formed retinue.
While he quietly developed his forces here, something big was stirring on the Ork front.
North of humanity's defensive line, tucked inside a canyon, sat a small city with a population of over half a million.
That entire population existed to serve a single purpose: an intercontinental substation.
The substation's job was to transmit power from a hive city with a power surplus to another hive suffering a critical shortage.
The Orks had never bothered with this place before. Most of its population were substation workers, with barely any military presence to speak of.
Orks, drawn as they were to the roar of battle, had simply never taken any notice of it.
But now, without warning, an unusually powerful Ork force had launched a sudden assault on the city.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you