Chapter 227: How Many Enginseers Does It Take to Change a Lumen Globe?
Kian opened the command Chimera's auspex. The display populated with red contacts — biological signatures, densely packed. Over four thousand of them, with a subset moving considerably faster than foot speed. Cavalry.
Rebel main force. Three kilometres away, separated from Kian's column by a broad cornfield.
The corn was the only reason they hadn't been spotted yet.
Kian keyed the all-units channel.
"Combat deployment. All units — battle formation, prepare to engage."
The column stopped. Chimera turrets traversed toward the field. Infantry dismounted and set up weapons. The organised noise of a force preparing to fight spread through the farmland.
Kian watched the auspex, tracking the contacts as they drifted slowly toward his position. He had time before contact. He began issuing precise corrections.
"Machine gun thirteen — shift left five centimetres. Vehicle four — right ten metres. Everyone keep fingers off triggers until I give the order.
Antonius — tell a joke. Morale purposes."
Silence on the vox net.
Kian clicked his tongue.
"Since Antonius is apparently shy, I'll do it. Standard human adult has thirty-two teeth. So — who only has two?"
Nobody answered.
"The answer is Enginseers! Because they replaced the rest with machinery and all that's left is the upper and lower chassis!"
Dead silence. Young Joel's confused voice eventually came through.
"Sir — why does that make it two?"
"Because upper jaw, lower jaw — two! It's structural humour!"
Still nothing. Kian tried again.
"All right, different one. A Techmarine is trying to connect a data-interface to a piece of ancient equipment. He tries the ritual connection cable. He applies blessed oil. He recites the prayer of awakening. Nothing happens.
A junior Enginseer quietly says: 'My lord — I think the connector is inserted upside down.'
The Techmarine explodes: 'Impossible! The ceremonial text states the connector must be inserted into the corresponding port — it says nothing about which way is correct! This means BOTH orientations are valid! Continue the prayers!'"
Silence.
Kian hit the console.
"You people have no culture whatsoever. I'm pulling out the big one.
How many Enginseers does it take to change a lumen globe?"
He waited for someone to ask for the punchline.
What he got instead was: "Sir — contacts emerging from the cornfield. Do we engage?"
Kian snapped back to the screens. The forward Chimera's picter feed showed figures pushing out from between the corn stalks — soldiers in mismatched civilian clothing and militia kit, carrying improvised weapons and locally-manufactured autoguns. They stopped when they saw the line of armoured vehicles and dismounted infantry waiting for them.
Everything about them said rebel.
"Open fire. All weapons, fire for effect."
The fusillade was immediate and comprehensive.
Autogun volleys at close range against unarmoured targets. The 40mm autocannon on the Chimera variants cycling through high-explosive rounds, each detonation throwing fragments across a wide arc through the standing corn. The lasgun-turret Chimeras firing continuous bursts — each beam a thick red line that vaporised whatever it touched, the misses igniting the corn itself, pulling burning corridors through the field.
The rebel force had walked into a prepared firing line at contact range. They had no time to organise a response. The front rank went down in the first seconds. The survivors behind them were still processing what had happened.
Kian ignored the immediate engagement and kept his eyes on the auspex. The main body was still in the field — four thousand contacts, mostly prone now, caught in the open behind their own forward elements.
He keyed the private channel for the two heavy-suit operators.
"Old Kae, Little Kae — eight hundred metres, direct bearing. Fire a full basic load. Now."
Old Kae and Little Kae had been assigned the heavy reactive suits for reasons that had nothing to do with their fighting experience and everything to do with their literacy. Factory workers' sons from the Mid-Hive, they'd both had schooling — enough to understand numbers, enough to operate the fire control system.
The helmets' ballistic computers were designed for simplicity: adjust barrel elevation, and the display shows the projected impact range in metres. When the readout said eight hundred metres, you fired.
Both men dropped to one knee, settled the grenade launcher stocks against their shoulders, and walked the barrel elevation up until the display confirmed the range.
They fired.
THOOM-THOOM-THOOM-THOOM—
Forty-millimetre grenades arced out at autogun cyclic rate, following the parabolic trajectory into the cornfield's rear sections, falling among the four thousand rebels who had gone to ground and were trying to understand why their advance had stopped.
The rounds landed among them.
Screaming. Fragments cutting through prone bodies. Some rounds landed directly on individuals, some detonated close enough to spray shrapnel across clusters of soldiers.
Each heavy suit was feeding from a three-hundred-and-fifty-round supply box on its back. Two suits, seven hundred rounds total, firing continuously into a mass of four thousand people in the open with no overhead cover.
The rebel main body came apart.
In the rear of the column, the Mechanicus repair vehicles had their own internal vox channel. An Enginseer who had been listening to events with some tension eventually broke the silence with a question he'd been holding.
"That commander — earlier, he said something about changing a lumen globe and Enginseers. What was the punchline?"
Long silence on the internal channel.
Then Antonius's voice, very flat:
"You don't need any. Because the Archmagos will declare the lumen globe to be in an Unacceptable State of Innovation, seal it with purity bonds, apply the blessed oils, and conduct daily prayer over it. The facility operates in darkness for five hundred years and this is recorded as acceptable."
A longer silence.
"...That's actually funny."
"Yes," Antonius said. "It is."
[End of Chapter 227]
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