Kian made his way to the Mid-Hive chapel, intending to ask Confessor Pious to recomnd a master swordsman.
When he arrived, he found the Confessor, Sister Teresa, and every priest and deacon on staff out front, ladling food to a crowd of starving civilians.
A nuclear detonation had gone off inside the Hive. PDF units were still out in the corridors and transit routes, seizing food shipnts and filling their own pockets. The artificial starch plants wrecked during the last rebellion still hadn't been repaired. Ordinary people couldn't afford to eat. The Hive was operating in a state of near-anarchy, with nobody in authority taking responsibility for civilian welfare. Without Kian's cheap food distribution network, the death toll from starvation would have been catastrophic.
His processing facility sold half its output and donated the rest to the Ecclesiarchy, who put it straight into the communal pot. Whatever else you could say about Baron Voss, twenty-first century instincts about basic human welfare translated reasonably well to the forty-first millennium.
The Emperor's statue outside the chapel was as tall and imposing as ever. Beneath it, Ecclesiarchy personnel stood in rows behind enormous cauldrons of puffed rations, serving out bowls to the crowd. Tens of thousands of Mid-Hive civilians had queued up. The clergy worked the line with one hand on the ladle and one eye on the conversion opportunity, reciting scripture between servings.
Confessor Pious and Sister Teresa were at the front of the distribution, working the densest part of the crowd.
Kian didn't interrupt. He found a side entrance, slipped inside, and a novice led him to a reception room and brought tea.
While he waited, he noticed several books on the wall and, out of curiosity, pulled them down.
Most of it was Imperial theology: doctrines of the Imperial Truth, hagiographies of saints, behavioural codes for the faithful. He read through several volus.
The overall impression was sothing like the most restrictive strains of neo-Confucian moralism applied to every aspect of daily life. The texts were saturated with suspicion of pleasure, knowledge, and individual desire. Personal happiness was frad as indulgence. Curiosity was danger. Suffering was gift. The greatest grace the Emperor could bestow on any soul was simply to allow it to continue existing.
To a mind shaped by the twenty-first century, the ssage was blunt: your desires are corruption, your instincts are treachery, and contentnt is heresy.
What struck Kian, reading through it all, wasn't the ideology itself. It was that it worked. In a civilisation of trillions spread across a hostile galaxy, with Chaos actively preying on human weakness, this kind of psychological architecture had a genuine function. That was the part that sat uneasily.
He'd been reading for several hours without noticing when footsteps finally approached from outside. The Confessor entered, visibly exhausted, and lowered himself onto the wooden stool across from Kian with a tired smile.
"Warrior of the Emperor. The Emperor's protection over you grows stronger each ti I see you. I can see your soul burning golden."
Kian blinked. The old man could actually perceive the Emperor's influence on him. That was not nothing.
"My lord, I saw the distribution outside. How bad is the situation right now?"
The Confessor exhaled slowly.
"Because of your food supply, no one in our parish has starved. Two million people are managing to subsist. But word has spread to other districts that people here can eat. Refugees have been arriving in large numbers. Our population has swollen from two million to three and a half million, and more co every week. If this continues, the relief system will collapse under the weight of it."
He looked at Kian with quiet hope.
"Warrior of the Emperor, do you have the capacity to provide more? There are more of the Emperor's people who need feeding."
Kian rubbed his jaw, thinking aloud.
"More food isn't the problem. The 109th has agricultural operations running across a large stretch of reclaid rebel territory, and that output is ongoing. General Zeppelin's ten regints are also farming their sectors. If I ask him, they'll redirect supply into the Hive. Between all of that, we can cover more mouths.
But hand-outs alone aren't sustainable. Feeding people indefinitely without giving them anything to do isn't a solution. We need to put them to work."
The Confessor's expression brightened.
"I knew you'd have a plan. Please, speak. On behalf of the Emperor's people, I am grateful."
"The approach is straightforward: work-for-food. Here's the question, my lord. If I supply the Ecclesiarchy with grain, can the church absorb large numbers of new recruits? Novices, lay missionaries, support staff. People who co in, learn the liturgy, participate in the distribution work. It gives them a role, a structure, a reason to be sowhere. They stop waiting for a bowl to appear in front of them and start being part of the operation."
The Confessor considered this.
"I can bring the proposal to the Planetary Bishop. If we mobilise the Ecclesiarchy across the full Hive, we could likely absorb two to four million unemployed in this way."
This was, in part, deliberate flattery on Kian's part. The Confessor was a principled man, but he was also an Ecclesiarchy man. Watching the church expand on a world where it had been struggling was not sothing he'd object to. Offer him a path that fed the hungry and grew the institution at the sa ti, and the answer was going to be yes.
As expected, the Confessor's tired face visibly softened.
"If that is truly possible, Warrior of the Emperor, it would be a great blessing. I am grateful for your generosity.
But to be honest with you: four million is a fraction. This Hive holds ten billion souls. At least six billion are living at the edge of starvation. Even your efforts and mine combined cannot reach them."
"My lord, I know. Six billion is beyond my capacity and yours. That scale requires the Planetary Governor. I can manage tens of millions at most, not billions.
But here's another option to consider alongside what we've already discussed: we mobilise the able-bodied from inside the Hive and send them out to the farming corridors. Put them to work on the reclaid rebel land. They grow their own food, they feed themselves. We take half the surplus and bring it back in to support those inside who can't work. What do you think?"
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