After the briefing, Sapper Troy had been minded to spend some time brushing up on his hand to hand combat training. Troy's unarmed combat skill had been rated by his regiments drill instructor as "just barely acceptable" which was about average among the Morghastian First, a regiment which Troy was coming to realise had been nothing more than a glorified PDF, just with better equipment.
The enhancements he had received since joining Lady Skarkon's service had the potential to change that though. The subdermal palting and skeletal reinforcements, while hardly making him invulnerable, allowed him to shrug off blows that would have flattened him before. The blackbone implants which reinforced his frame also granted power to his strikes. If before, the force of his blows had been like hitting with a rubber hose, now they were like striking with a wooden baton. Now it was just a matter of adapting his fighting style to take full advantage of the enhancements, which meant fewer punches, and more elbows and knees.
One glance inside the training room put a halt to those plans however. Nearly every inch of the combat cage, and much of the outside floor was littered with what appeared to be the remains of about half the training servitors. No. In fact, it was the remains of actual combat servitors. In the centre of the rubble, a hulking brute of a man who Troy judged to be Brother Aret was bludgeoning one poor servitor into a state of decommission with what appeared to be its own severed arm. Another half dozen combat servitors stood waiting just outside the cage.
When a circular saw blade broke off the mangled servitor, whistled through the air and lodged itself in the doorway next to Troy's head, he formed the opinion that Brother Aret was doing enough hand to hand training for the entire ship on his own, and he left.
If Troy wasn't going to fight, then he was going to eat. He went to the kitchens, stopping by his quarters to drop off his kitbag and pick up his dataslate. Her Ladyship had forwarded on the schematics for the fortress for him to study.
The kitchens were dark and almost empty when Troy entered. The only occupant was a single servitor, its modified tongue and saliva glands allowing it to lick clean every inch of every pot, pan, bench top and oven of the kitchens. Troy went inside and opened the door of the larder. Cold air and sterile white light spilled out from its door as Troy stepped inside among the floor to ceiling metal shelves . The first step in preparing a good dish was good ingredients, and Lady Skarkon's kitchens had those in abundance. Knowing what he wanted and where to find them from his previous visits, he gathered the ingredients he needed and went back outside.
The second step to making a good dish was good preparation, and once again the Dreygur's kitchens were well equipped to allow for that, with every kind of tool, utensil, pot, pan oven, stove, cooker, broiler, boiler, or other kind of food preparation device that Troy could think of, and many he did not recognise .
Outside the larder, under a single light on a heavy stone benchtop, he laid out the ingredients into different bowls and set to work with 5 different knives. Taking up the filleting knife, he set about jointing the Termanian ground fowl, separating out the different parts, taking care not to traumatise the flesh or break the notoriously weak and splintery bones. With that done, he took up a short bladed vegetable knife and quickly sliced the Gassian onions, wiping the blade clean before doing the same with a trio of celruth ribs. He used the side of a broad carving knife to smash two cloves of garlic and then tore apart a couple of handfuls of fungus caps with his fingers, taking care not to bruise or crush them. With a chef's knife he chopped up half a handful of chives to fine confetti. Wiping the carving knife clean, he sheared off two thin slices of smoked porcus loin and chopped it into short thin strips.
The third component of a good dish was the recipe. Troy well knew that a recipe is not just about ingredients. A good recipe also included instructions on how to prepare food and how to cook it. Good cooking was not just about dumping everything in the one pot, bringing it to boil and hoping for the best. Different ingredients cook faster or slower and at different temperatures. The type of pot or pan something was cooked in would affect the texture and the taste. How an ingredient was prepared could affect the final flavour. Some ingredients needed to interact with each other before a third was added. Ingredients merely represent potential, the preparation and the recipe determine whether that potential is reached.
He placed a cast iron pan on the oven and poured in a generous amount of oil. Letting the pan warm up, he returned to the stone bench, placed the legs and thighs of the fowl in a cloth, poured in some flour, added a sprinkling of salt and spice, doubled over the cloth and tossed the contents to coat the fowl in the flour. The legs and thighs had to go into the pan quickly. Too long in the flour and they would dry out and turn mealy. Taking the fowl thighs from the cloth he placed them skin side down in the oil, which was now hot and let them brown before turning them and repeating the same. Once both sides were lightly browned, he removed the legs and thighs and placed them in a steel dish next to the heated pan to keep them warm.
Next into the pan were the torn fungas caps, which he kept separated from each other to allow them to brown individually, quickly turning them with tongs before they were overdone. Scooping them out all at once with a spatula, he dropped them into the steel dish with the legs and thighs.
The smoked porcus strips went in next, and once they went crispy were followed by the onions and celruth. Turning the heat down, Troy waited for the onions to give off an aroma, then added the smashed garlic cloves and a minute later the browned fungus caps. He let the vegetables to cook for several minutes, allowing the fungus caps to release their juices. He added half a cup of amasec and allowed the pan to ignite with a pink flame.
Troy poured a quarter cup of lycopersicum paste into the pan and let the mixture cook for another few minutes while he boiled three small schallop pearl onions, leaving the skin on. While they came to the boil, he ventured back to the other end of the kitchen and opened the cellar door, it's musty smell greating him as always. He stepped down the half flight of stairs just inside the door and selected a decent bottle from the pinot noir section. He thought about trying something of true quality, but decided that he wasn't suicidal.
Shutting the cellar door, he returned to the pan. He splashed in about three cups worth of wine and placed the bottle back on the bench to breathe.
He sniffed the cork and poured in some stock, then reduced the heat under the mixture to a simmer, slowly turning it into a sauce. While that happened, he removed the schallop onions from the boiling pot and removed their outer skins. He then added the legs and thighs, ladling the sauce over them and left it to simmer. He added herbs. Returning to the stone benchtop, he activated the dataslate.
The Fortress was as Skarkon had described it. Situated in the middle of a large crater, there was no line of approach that could offer concealment or cover for attackers.
In the shape of a cross quadrate, the fortress seemed to have been designed with function in mind over form. The walls were made out of very thick plascrete and have no immediately obvious weak points. It wasn't huge, being only 150 metres across at its widest points.
Each of the arms had a small docking bay for aircraft and at the centre, there was a cluster of communications towers with a central command bunker. Tunnels and corridors connected it all together.
There were four subteranean levels, the lowest of which contained the power generators. There were three plasma generators, which seemed like overkill to Troy, but he supposed that this was the Inquisition here, and they weren't known for doing things by halves. Although he hadn't encountered one before, that scattershroud projector probably ate up a lot of power on its own, and may very well have been kept on a separate system to the rest of the base. It would also make reasonable sense for there to be a backup generator in case of emergency. It was a fortress after all.
Inside, the corridors were separated by a series of blast doors and heavy duty maintenance hatches. The hatches wouldn't be much trouble and would be easy to open with well placed krak grenades. The blast doors would be much tougher. Troy would have to see about aquiring some melta bombs.
The underground tunnels were designed to last. Krak grenades wouldn't cut it. A krak missile, hitting flush might put a hole in it. Demo charges would be the way to go.
The base was well covered with cameras, both within and without. Some of the cameras were obvious, some were concealed. The base defence did not rely on the weak flesh of tired soldiers to be alerted to danger.
The defence systems were formidable. Multilasers were dotted throughout the base and covered every line of approach to the base. Each landing bay had a pair of surface to air missile launchers. Troy decided to recommend that Lady Skarkon select a method of entry other than from the air.
From reading the details of the base materiel, Troy figured that if fully manned, the fortress could hold out for a year, with only a moderate reduction of defensive capability. Normally, stormtroopers could be expected to last at least twice as long as regular soldiers, and would be able to maintain superior combat effectiveness even with reduced food, water, ammunition and other supplies, but on a planet like Hamara, a siege would only last as long as the power generators. Once the power dropped out, so would the air supply, and even stormtroopers can't fight if they can't breathe.
With his initial view formed, Troy rose from the benchtop to check the fowl. The sauce had reduced nicely. He turned the fowl parts over. Inhaling the aroma, he added another pinch of herbs and the schallop onions. Dipping the tip of his finger into the pan, his neurological dampener numbing the pain signals, he took a quick taste and added more salt before leaving it to simmer under cover for another 20 minutes.
Troy hadn't been able to select a pan with a cover when he entered because the kitchen servitor hadn't got around to cleaning any of them yet. Improvising, he took another, larger fry pan and placed it over the first, partly sealing in the heat.
Quality ingredients, proper preparation and a good recipe. It tasted good already.
Returning to the benchtop, he poured himself a glass of wine and stared intently at the layout of the fortress, spinning the image around to regard it from all angles. It wasn't the most formidable structure he'd seen, and he'd cracked open tougher nuts before. But on each of those occasions, he'd had an army with him.