But soon, a practical problem stared them in the face.
"Boss Andy!"
Bower ran over, drenched in sweat, clutching a manifest in his trembling hands. His voice was shaking.
"We can't fit anymore! We really can't fit any more!"
"There's too much equipment! Six alone takes up an entire shuttle!"
"There are still two hundred and thirty-two people without seats!"
Bower pointed toward the large crowd behind him.
Gamma-9 gritted his teeth and drew the bolt pistol from his waist, striding toward the group.
"I'll go talk to them!"
A resolute red light flickered in Gamma-9's lone eye.
"For the Sage's Great Work, for the preservation of core data, someone must stay behind to hold the line! This is an honor! It is a return to the Omnissiah—"
"Get back here!"
Andy grabbed Gamma-9 by the shoulder, cutting off the commissar-style speech before it could even begin.
"Who told you to send them to their deaths?"
Andy's electronic eye swept coldly across the hangar.
"I didn't spend all those resources on them just to have them act as cannon fodder here! Human resources are resources, and non-renewable ones at that!"
"But—" Gamma-9 stammered, "there really are no seats left on the planes!"
"If there are no seats, can't they drive themselves?!"
Andy pointed toward the shadows in the corner of the hangar, where dozens of vehicles were parked.
There was the "Underhive Joyride"—the van that had undergone multiple modifications and been fitted with thick composite armor—along with dozens of armed off-road vehicles and assault bikes that, while battered, were still functional.
These were the assets Andy had brought all the way from the Underhive, originally intended to be abandoned aboard the Newport.
"This—"
Bower glanced at the vehicles, then at the swirling yellow sands outside and the approaching Land Behemoths.
"Boss, this is the Wasteland! There are tens of thousands of tons of Land Behemoths out there! If we charge out in these scrap heaps, isn't that suicide?"
"Staying on the ship is certain death; charging out gives us a fifty-percent chance!"
Andy let go of Gamma-9 and strode up to a high platform.
"Everyone, listen to my orders!"
Andy's voice boomed through the loudspeakers, drowning out the sound of distant artillery.
"Those without seats, get to the vehicles!"
"If you can drive, you're a driver; if you can't, get on a machine gun turret! If there's truly no room left, hang onto the sides of the trucks!"
"Load every remaining heavy weapon, ammo crate, and grenade onto the vehicles!"
Andy pointed toward the heavy vehicle ramp at the end of the hangar, which was still in the process of opening. "We are going to force a breakout!"
"Carve me a path of blood!"
The crowd erupted!
The soldiers, who had been prepared to meet their end, felt the flames of survival reignite in their eyes. They didn't need flowery words about sacrificing for the greater good; they just needed a chance to live, even if that chance required them to fight for it with their lives.
"Move! Move! Move!"
"You there! Go pre-heat the Joyride's twin engines!"
"Get the rockets onto the trucks! Forget the crates, just toss them in loose!"
Over two hundred people leaped into action with staggering efficiency. The once-stagnant formation of vehicles roared to life, the cacophony of engines merging into a surging torrent of steel.
"Ben."
Andy shoved a large-caliber bolt pistol into the hands of the young man, who served as Roger's second-in-command.
"You lead the team. Take the Joyride. You're the vanguard."
"Remember, don't get bogged down in a fight, and do not stop. Once you're out, head north and run like hell!"
Ben stared at the gun in his hand, his body trembling with excitement.
"Understood, Boss Andy! Mission guaranteed!"
Ben gave a clumsy military salute and hopped onto the Underhive Joyride.
VROOM!!!
The Joyride's twin engines roared, and the twin-linked heavy stubber on the roof swiveled toward the hatch.
"Shuttle flight, take off!"
Andy issued the final command. The shuttles rose first, exiting through the upper hangar bays.
Immediately after:
CLANG
The heavy vehicle ramp slammed onto the wasteland sand, kicking up a massive cloud of dust.
"CHARGE!!!"
With a roar from Ben, the Underhive Joyride led the way, charging out from the belly of the Newport. Following closely behind were over a dozen off-road vehicles packed with soldiers and countless screaming motorcycles.
The massive starship Newport looked like a mountain of burning steel, tilted and embedded in the earth, venting plumes of black smoke. And from its belly, countless tiny black dots poured out like a flood breaching a dam.
The vehicles had no formation to speak of; they relied entirely on speed and sheer numbers. Every vehicle was covered in clinging soldiers, and every soldier was firing at the surroundings.
The explosions of CBS high-explosive bolts, the thud-thud-thud of heavy stubbers, and the whistle of rockets shattered the silence of the wasteland.
On the perimeter, the approaching Zaith Land Behemoths were clearly caught off guard. They had expected a piece of fat waiting to be carved; who would have thought a swarm of vehicles would suddenly explode out of it?
BOOM! BOOM!
Several rockets scored direct hits on the Behemoth's treads. While they failed to snap the thick metal plates, they caused the titan to shudder.
The convoy used this opening to slip like eels into the Behemoth's firing blind spots. They wove through the massive gaps in the treads, leaping over craters and ruins.
Sitting in Shuttle No. 1, Andy watched the long trail of dust stretching across the wasteland through the porthole. The tiny convoy looked fragile beneath the feet of the gargantuan Land Behemoths, yet it was resilient.
"Stay alive," Andy whispered.
The shuttle flight pulled up, gaining altitude and accelerating north.
Inside Shuttle No. 1
The interior of this craft had been completely gutted. The massive cargo hold contained only Six's main body and a ring of crude folding chairs.
Andy, Saul, and Sisyphron—along with a pained-looking Roger—were squeezed into this narrow space. As the hatch closed, the outside noise was cut off.
HUMMM—!
The engines engaged, and a powerful surge of thrust pinned them to their seats. The shuttle shot out of the Newport's hangar and into the sand-filled wasteland of Zaith.
Roger remained pressed against the porthole, staring back fixedly. His brothers and the people he had brought from the Rust Brotherhood were back there.
"Stop looking," Andy said from across him, checking a data slate. "It'll take them a while to arrive."
Roger turned back, his eyes bloodshot. "Andy... can they really fight their way all the way here?"
"What else?" Andy didn't look up. "You're the leader; don't you trust the people you trained?"
"But those Land Behemoths are so huge—"
Compared to Roger's agony, Priest Saul and Sisyphron were much more composed.
Saul was focused entirely on checking the clamps securing Six to ensure they hadn't loosened. To him, as long as the equipment and technology remained, everything else was secondary.
Sisyphron was busy calculating the logistical loss of this escape. Although he mourned the supplies they couldn't bring (mainly surplus ammunition and significantly over-budget aerospace materials), he was mostly relieved to be alive.
The shuttle flight skimmed the ground at high speed. To evade the Land Behemoths' anti-air radar, they flew extremely low, nearly shaving the tops of the ruins.
"Correcting heading—"
Six's voice patched directly into the shuttle's flight systems via data cable.
"Target coordinates confirmed: 34 degrees North, 112 degrees East."
"Distance: 450 kilometers."
"Destination: Fort Horizon."
Andy sounded out the name, sensing something odd.
"Horizon?"
The name sounded... unlike something a modern Imperial would come up with. A name like "Horizon," filled with a spirit of exploration and classical romanticism, belonged to a much older era.
"Your intuition is correct, Excellency Andy," Six replied. "According to this unit's database, that is an ancient settlement that existed on this planet before the Great Crusade."
"In that era, this planet was not called Zaith."
"It was a standard human colony possessing highly automated agricultural and industrial systems."
Four hundred and fifty kilometers was only a thirty-minute trip for a shuttle flight running at maximum capacity. When the yellow sands ahead cleared and the silhouette of a magnificent city appeared on the horizon, even the well-traveled Andy couldn't help but sit up straight.
"Well, damn..."
At the sight out the window, his eyes gleamed with the greed of an old farmer spotting fertile black soil.
Beside him, Sisyphron practically leaped out of his chair! He pressed himself against the glass, mouth agape, letting out a very impolite exclamation: "Holy crap! What the hell is that?!"
Sisyphron had lived his whole life in Forge Seven. In his worldview, cities were supposed to grow upward. Upper Spire, Mid-Hive, Lower Hive, Underhive—layers stacked upon layers, crushing each other, never seeing the sun.
But this thing in front of them—
It was flat!
It featured an incredibly standard grid layout, with wide, straight main roads crisscrossing into the distance. There were no metal domes blotting out the sky, no oppressive vertical pipes. Just vast stretches of flat, paved ground.
To the east were clusters of industrial factories; though some had collapsed, the sense of orderly industrial beauty remained. To the west were neat residential districts, with individual buildings arranged in tidy rows, even leaving space for green belts in between.
"This—this is such a waste!"
Sisyphron pointed at the wide streets below, his voice trembling. "If this land were in the Hive, you could build thousands of floors and house millions of people! They just left it empty? They can... actually see the sky?!"
Priest Saul's reaction was even more intense than Sisyphron's.
His electronic eye whirred frantically, making a series of clicking sounds as it struggled to focus. He muttered to himself, his voice tinged with clear anger: "How... how sacrilegious a design!"
Saul pointed at the buildings below, which showed no distinction between high and low status.
"No spires, no layering! The industrial zone and the residential zone are on the same level?!"
"This is a provocation to the Holy Hierarchy! This is chaos!"
"How could the planners here allow lowly workers to breathe the same air as themselves?"
"Utterly thoughtless. Don't they feel that something is wrong?!"
The two continued to point and criticize.
Andy's reaction, however, was entirely different. He couldn't help but sigh in admiration. "Now this is right! This is a place meant for people!"
Compared to the hopeless 3D labyrinth of Forge Seven, this place was paradise. Here, as long as you had the materials, you could spread your base out as far as you wanted! Logistics vehicles could blast across the ground without ever having to cram into those ancient gravity elevators!
If the Newport hadn't crash-landed, and if they hadn't been forced into this pathetic abandonment of ship, Andy might never have found this treasure. This was truly a blessing in disguise.
"Prepare for landing," Andy ordered. "Land in the plaza of that industrial zone."
The shuttle flight began to decelerate, descending slowly. Just as they passed over the city center, near a black tower that looked like some kind of monument...
Suddenly.
BEEP—!
On Andy's retina, the long-dormant STC radar suddenly screamed to life. A golden light pulsed frantically at the location of that black tower.
[Identified Homologous Signal—]
[Distance: 5 Kilometers.]
[Signal Signature Match: STC Standard Template Construct—Fragment—Xenos Tech Analysis Station.]