Inside the factory district, the rebellious mutants worked with tense, practiced efficiency to set up their defenses.
Word had already reached them that Andrallo was coming.
To the local population, Andrallo was their great savior.
To this band of mutants, an Astartes with that kind of combat power might as well have been Death itself.
But that name meant something entirely different to the mutant leader running the factory.
Exa Kaides had blue skin, long pointed ears, and two grooves carved into either side of his skull, strange patterns marking his hairless scalp.
Kaides had led the mutant uprising the moment the Chaos warband invaded.
The other slaves had been stunned that this strange mutant possessed knowledge no ordinary person could hope to match.
It had taken him only a week to work out how every machine in the local mine and factory functioned, and he’d gone on to push their capabilities far beyond their original design.
If the Adeptus Mechanicus ever found out about this, they’d make every one of them pay dearly for it.
But these mutants had already been slaves under the Governor’s thumb for years.
There was nothing left for them to lose.
Under Kaides’ leadership, the mutants killed their overseers and enforcers and seized control of key raw material sites, while Kaides himself hand-built several machine tools inside the factory and used them to fabricate tools and weapons of every kind.
Even the oldest workers among them couldn’t identify half of what he made.
They simply took it as a gift from the Emperor himself.
“God-Emperor, thank you for sending us Kaides, our savior!
For freeing us from this sea of suffering!”
With a production base of their own, Kaides turned out ammunition in real quantities.
Suitable mutants were folded into a militia and put through intense training, and before long, they’d even repelled a small detachment of the planetary defense force.
But today, even Kaides couldn’t stop himself from trembling.
He’d felt something enormous.
His own gene- and psyker-altered eyes could see, plain as day, the psychic light churning and rising along the horizon.
Whoever it belonged to was clearly a complete novice with psychic power, and yet Kaides was certain, even so, that this person could kill every living thing on the planet with nothing more than an outward release of it.
A guard came running up.
“Lord Kaides, the Astartes named Andrallo has arrived at the edge of the factory grounds.
He says he wants to see you.”
“Already?!”
Kaides flinched.
He hadn’t expected the man to move this fast.
But there was no avoiding it now.
All he could do was steel himself and go meet him.
Meanwhile, out beyond the factory, Andrallo’s group had a bad feeling of their own.
All they’d heard was that mutants had taken the factory.
No one had told them the mutants had turned the place into a fortress.
Staring at the layers of fortifications and artillery emplacements stretching into the distance, the defense force soldiers and crew present started wondering if an entire military unit had defected. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
Maen and Charlotte worked frantically at their side, casting every divination and detection they could manage.
They wouldn’t allow Andrallo to face any threat unprepared.
But the two of them hit a wall almost immediately.
“My lord, we can’t divine or sense anything inside that factory at all.
The Warp disturbance over there is too strong.
Every one of our powers is failing completely!”
Maen and Charlotte bowed their heads, frustrated and ashamed, humiliated by their own helplessness.
Andrallo, though, didn’t seem bothered in the slightest.
If anything, he tried to reassure them.
“This one’s out of your hands anyway.
You two stay back with the guards for now.
I’ll go have a word with this mutant leader myself.”
The Westminster sisters tried to talk him out of it, but Andrallo refused outright regardless.
Whether or not this Kaides turned out to be the one he knew, having anyone else nearby was still too dangerous.
In the end, Andrallo walked out alone to the middle of the open ground, a stretch of land that had clearly seen a battle not long ago, pockmarked with craters and reeking of burnt powder, scattered fragments of limbs still visible in the scorched earth.
He fed a thread of psychic power into the ground beneath him, one of the safeguards he kept ready in case this wasn’t the person he thought it was.
But whoever was in charge over there played by the rules.
No one attacked while Andrallo stood alone in the middle of the open battlefield, and after a stir of activity, a single figure emerged from the fortified position across from him.
“Mr.
Andrallo.
I’m Kaides.
I’m here to negotiate on behalf of the mutants.”
The instant Andrallo laid eyes on him, he froze completely, standing there in silence.
Shock and pure elation flooded through him at once, until he couldn’t hold back a burst of laughter.
“Ha ha ha ha!
Kaides, Exa Kaides!
It really is you!
Don’t tell me you don’t even remember me?
When we pulled you out of that escape pod back in the Dhurgol system, you were still just a kid.
Look how much you’ve grown since then.”
The words left everyone within earshot completely lost.
Not one of them had any idea what Andrallo was talking about, and a few of the crew members even wondered if he’d relapsed and gotten high again.
But to everyone’s shock, the mutant leader Kaides went rigid as if struck by lightning, staring at the strange giant in front of him, and asked in a trembling voice:
“Mr. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Andrallo?
Chief?!
Is that really you?”
“Of course it’s me.
You haven’t forgotten what you said, have you, back when we finally pieced together those relics and found the answers about your own people?”
Exa Kaides lifted his head, pride and gratitude ringing through his voice.
“Of course not!
You gave me a home.
I swore that whatever the journey brought me, whatever I learned along the way, I’d share it with you, with everyone.
And I meant it!”
Andrallo was grinning from ear to ear by now.
He clapped his hands together and shouted back over his shoulder:
“Stand down, everyone!
Come meet our friend Kaides!”
On his side, Kaides gave the same order to his mutants, and both groups, following their respective leaders, walked into the factory together without either side really understanding what had just happened.
Compared to the easy familiarity between Andrallo and Kaides, the local population, defense force, and crew still carried a fair amount of tension toward the mutants.
The two groups fell in behind their respective leaders, the divide between them still plain to see.
Together they made their way into the factory, and the sight that greeted them the moment they stepped through the doors left the planet’s own people frozen in place.
Workshop after workshop ran entirely on its own, unmanned.
Aside from a handful of mutants monitoring the data, all anyone had to do was feed smelted raw materials into the machines, and within moments, identical weapons rolled out by the dozen.
The whole process ran with almost no human hands involved, and for people who’d spent years chained to a production line themselves, it was hard to believe a factory like this could even exist.
A few of the more well-traveled crew members frowned, though.
Some of them had fought on Forge Worlds before, and had seen factories like this firsthand.
The Adeptus Mechanicus called them STCs, Standard Template Constructs, artifacts from the Dark Age of Technology.
Some were no bigger than a data chip.
Others were an entire factory in their own right.
But whatever form they took, every STC shared one thing in common: they were absurdly convenient.
Feed them raw material, and they produced whatever they were built to produce.
The crew found the whole thing almost absurd.
If a nothing agri-world like this could turn up something as valuable as an STC, why hadn’t the Governor ever gone to the Adeptus Mechanicus for help?
If word of this ever got out, enough Adeptus Mechanicus agents would show up hunting for it to bury that Chaos warband a dozen times over.
What the veteran crew didn’t know was that every one of these automated factories had been built from scratch by Kaides himself, using nothing but his own hand-built machine tools.
Andrallo watched line after line of automated production, and behind his helmet, his grin stretched from ear to ear.
His turn had finally come.