Chapter 257: The Tithe of Arms (Patreon)

The transport craft shuddered as it broke free from the ocean world’s atmosphere. A sheath of blue fire rippled across its plating before it finally pierced the upper reaches and rose into the silence of void, engines burning like stars against the night.

The curve of the planet fell away beneath it, replaced by the skeletal immensity of the orbital starport hanging in high orbit.

The starport was not alone. Dozens of colony ships loomed across the orbital ring, chained together by docking bridges like pearls threaded on a necklace of steel. Their hulls were mountainous in scale, armored yet elegant, vessels designed not for war but for the migration of entire civilizations.

But within the heart of the starport itself, docked in its deepest anchorage, floated five vessels of a different breed, immense behemoths, their prows bristling with weapon arrays, their hulls layered with ablative plating.

Each colony ship was required to fill its holds with settlers in orbit first. Only then could they transfer to the starport, where they would be laden with vast quantities of supplies, machines, and weapons before venturing out into the unclaimed wilderness of frontier worlds.

“I truly wonder,” Qin Mo muttered at last, his voice low, as much to himself as to those gathered. His eyes lingered on the colony ships, their silent engines dormant yet thrumming with promise. “This colonization drive was not ordered by me. Who, then, issued the supplies and armaments?”

Across from him in the troop-bay, Anruida raised a gauntleted hand. Holo-documents and encoded agreements filled the air in a glittering projection, records and data he had already investigated.

Though Anruida was, like all Thunderborns, a living engine of war, armored and armed to the extreme, he bore a dual nature, engineered as both soldier and statesman. His genetic enhancements and war-plate made him a terror on the battlefield, yet he was equally trained to sift through the ledgers of guilds and the veiled words of administrators.

In his view, bureaucracy was just another battlefield, and sometimes a scribe’s quill required the threat of a sword at its side.

“The Talon Sector suffers a peculiar ailment,” Anruida explained. “Each system may have a dozen habitable worlds, yet almost the entire population crams itself onto a single planet. In the past, the masses endured it. But now, they cannot. Those penned in barrack-like hive-blocks, stacked upon each other like livestock, are the most eager to volunteer, and to pay both labor and funds for the privilege of new lands."

The holo-feed shifted, revealing images of the hive-cities districts of men and women that sold their possessions, hoping to purchase a berth upon a colony ship.

“Next are the enterprises: livestock merchants, mining cartels, construction guilds… each eager to fund expeditions. For them, colonization means profit, not only after settlement, but even during the act of founding itself. The materials and equipment were all purchased from us. Some engineering houses have even designed whole new classes of machines for frontier use.”

Qin Mo studied the holo-vids. He saw legions of mechanized tools: vast industrial equipment, drones and piloted machines, tracked juggernauts able to traverse jungles; others that swam the abyss of alien seas.

The Talon Sector tolerated corporations. Unlike the wider Imperium, where unlicensed commerce was stamped out as heresy or rebellion, Qin Mo permitted sanctioned enterprises to thrive so long as they bent the knee.

The Administratum tolerated their small-scale commercial ventures, and much of the sector’s civilian technologies and industrial output came from them. 

And while his Administratum ensured the bare minimum for survival, bare minimum was far from sufficiency.

“Even the Knight Houses have lent aid,” Anruida went on. “Lady Donna of House Lannis from Talon-II regularly deploys her Knights to hostile worlds, slaying great xeno-beasts, or purging dormant ancient war-constructs, to ease the settlers’ burdens.”

Qin Mo listened in silence, unease threading through his thoughts.

Large-scale colonization was both a blessing and a danger: new worlds, new breathing room for billions, yet each step forward was a boot pressed upon the skin of the unknown. And the unknown bled monsters.

The galaxy was littered with tombs. Some were ruins of dead empires, others prisons for ancient horrors. If the colonists awoke a Necron dynasty slumbering beneath the soil, then disaster would follow.

The thought lingered like a blade at his throat, for Qin Mo knew the galaxy too well. There was no shortage of horrors waiting for the careless hand of man to stir them.

Then again, he mused, perhaps it was just as well. Better to step upon the mine now and defuse it, than leave it hidden for later generations.

If a Necron dynasty really exists here and awoke, then it must be destroyed. Let the foe come, steel would meet it, and soil would rise against the flood. Always, there was a way.

“Another matter,” Anruida said. “This year, the Imperial tithe-fleet has not arrived. When they came last, it was I who received them. The tithe officers aboard were… circumspect. They hinted that the Dimensional Engines we forge were of no true use to Terra. Unless the Talon Sector was willing to pay the tithe in raw resources or industrial output, they would cease coming altogether.”

“Where is the nearest tithe-fleet now?” Qin Mo asked.

“Barely a hundred light years away.” Anruida displayed a star-map, the fleet’s sigil marked in orange runes.

Qin Mo thought a moment, then commanded: “Dispatch one of our naval fleets. They are to bring the tithe-ships here under escort. See that every last Dimensional Engine is loaded aboard their holds, and then guard them, system by system, until they reach the Sol System itself. I will not have our offering discarded into bureaucratic void.”

Hearing this, Anruida raised an eyebrow, thinking that while this approach was a bit crude, it was feasible.

Yet he could not help but voice his doubt. “If the Imperium itself is indifferent to our tithe, content to abandon collection altogether, why do we not simply withhold it?”

Qin Mo’s reply was firm. “Because humanity must cease to depend on warp travel. The Imperium may not yet comprehend, but one day they will. When they do, they must already have the Engines in their hands, in sufficient number, ready to re-fit their fleets. Even if they dismiss them now, the seed must already be planted. The galaxy is no place for delayed wisdom.”

Anruida allowed a bitter smile. “I confess, lord, I doubt the Imperium will ever learn.”

“Let them,” Qin Mo said. “What matters is that the one destined to return will learn.” He spoke words Anruida could not parse, and would not dare to question.

The transport soon docked in the starport. The massive umbilicals latched onto the vessel with thunderous clangs, pressurized corridors extending like iron tongues to swallow the ship whole. Soon after, Qin Mo and Anruida boarded a small ship to return to the capital Hive World of Talon I.

Yet that “hive world” was a hive in name only. The surface was a scarred wasteland, poisoned and stripped to bedrock by millennia of industry. Where once oceans had flowed, there now stretched plains of ash. Where once mountains had stood, there now rose slag-heaps of blackened steel. Its skies were a choking haze, and only a single titanic Hive City still endured as the beating heart of the world.

To attempt planetary-scale terraforming with the Nexus Firmament was impractical, for it would require the displacement of an entire population of billions first, and the destruction of the city that still anchored the sector’s governance.

Yet as the sector’s capital, the Hive-World was indispensable. Here, the sector’s veins converged: the Legion’s command, the Navy’s fleet-yards, the bureaucracy’s endless archives from across the sector, all nested within the Hive’s shadow.

Furthermore, the secrets of the colossal manufactoria in the underhive had yet to be fully investigated.

So, five years past, the stone-men governors had begun the grandest undertaking in the sector: to remake the world entire. They did not seek to restore the poisoned wasteland, but to replace it. To bury the hive beneath an ocean of new construction, to raise fresh cities upon desert plains, to evacuate populations in waves and rehouse them in planned bastions of megacities.

Every district was planned as part of the whole, every manufactorum linked into a wider chain of production, every dome-farm not only fed their own districts, but supplied trade routes across the sector. Even war was integrated: defense rings were built into city foundations, shielded artillery bunkers disguised as civic towers, and military garrisons designed to double as centers of learning and governance.

With each completed project, another district was sealed, rebuilt, and reborn. With each passing year, Talon I crept closer to transformation and when the works were complete, the hive world’s buried mysteries would be fully unearthed, and the entire planet transformed into an ideal city-world.

It was a vision of singularity: a world as one city, a city as one world. Not patchwork, but unity. A city-world that would outshine even ancient Terra’s cradle.

Matter-printing technologies and other advanced sciences fueled the effort. Factories consumed raw matter and disgorged it as hab-blocks, arterial roadways, and armored walls. Automated crawlers scoured wastelands, their treads leaving behind skeletal frames of towers. Overseer-AIs directed traffic in construction zones as if conducting orchestras. The project advanced with a rhythm of inevitability: swift, orderly, unrelenting.

From the bridge of the ship, Qin Mo gazed upon the hive-world. The surface below was nothing but forests of steel. At one pole, a blazing triangular forge-zone flared like a brand. At the south pole, a city-sized research bastion awaited activation. There, Qin Mo intended to study the Talon of Horus itself.

Compared to the time of endless war, these were quieter times. Few matters pressed him, save perhaps the battles raging at Baal, and the Iron Men’s mothership locked in its grisly evolutionary duel against the Tyranid swarms.

Before beginning his research, he had one last order for Anruida.

“In days to come, the Talon Sector may face invasion. It may be xenos. It may be warp-spawn. But we cannot permit our core worlds to become the battlefield.”

Anruida understood at once: the Sector must be ringed in bastions, an outer wall of fire.

That was simple enough. The only complication was that the bordering systems lay outside Talon’s direct jurisdiction. Beyond collecting tithes, the Imperium scarcely involved itself.

“Transmit to the outlying systems,” Qin Mo commanded. “Whatever troubles plague them, if they call upon Talon for aid, they shall have it. On one condition only: they must declare before the stars that they are part of the Talon Sector.”

It was an old tactic, but one that had proven effective before. Even before the Sector existed in name, it was how Qin Mo drew the surrounding systems into his orbit. It had worked then. It would work again.

“Yes, lord.” Anruida bowed, accepting the order.