Horatio maintained his smile.
He knew the favor Farida spoke of was not a casual favor in everyday language, but a contractual obligation, an unconditional adherence, and a must-do, a 'favor' guaranteed by reputation and honor in the noble context.
"Of course, do I even have a choice?" Horatio raised an eyebrow, his hands clasped behind his head, his feet propped on the console in front of him, and he smiled indifferently.
Given his current predicament, owing a favor was nothing compared to losing his life.
That's why he had initially tried to create a confident implication of 'if you help me, I will surely repay you,' all to get something for nothing and lead this girl to bet on him.
Thus, when the Female Hunter-Duke was willing to negotiate terms with him, his desired goal had already been achieved.
[I don't fear you raising the price, I fear you not naming a price.]
"Everything must be according to my instructions. I will take you to my father's study, where there are no guards. He personally represented the Imperial Navy in the investigation of the incident eight years ago, and there might be things you want to know in there. But I must warn you, leave no trace, or I will kill you before he finds you."
"Looks like the risk isn't small."
"Nonsense, I've never been in there myself. If he finds out I brought a strange man in…."
"Don't want to go in or not allowed to go in?" Horatio raised an eyebrow, looking at Farida's face, trying to read her expression.
"Not allowed to go in…" Farida's gaze darted away nervously, and she mumbled softly.
Horatio smiled with satisfaction.
[Quite cute.]
"Then you trust me quite a bit. Don't worry, I won't betray my teammates."
The Female Hunter-Duke hummed contentedly: "Then I'll take that as your agreement."
"Of course, I owe you a favor, what do you want me to do to repay it?"
"Keep it for now, we'll decide later."
Horatio took a deep breath, adjusted the soft seat, and leaned back.
"Then I'm sure this favor will appreciate in value," Horatio chuckled.
"I hope so."
The shuttle suddenly stopped moving forward, and the vector engine nozzles began to adjust downwards, the craft ascending vertically.
Horatio looked out the window; it was pitch black, with only a string of navigation lights silently glowing.
"We're almost at the Upper Hive. Look forward to it."
"Hmph, what kind of scenery could there be…" Horatio snorted, appearing indifferent.
Although he hadn't seen what the Upper Hive on this planet looked like, considering some of the settings he had read, since it was a Hive City, the Upper Hive would probably be just that.
He guessed it would be full of towering steel forests and thick exhaust pipes, as well as pyramid-like Hive City surfaces, with the atmosphere polluted by various industrial wastes, perhaps even raining blood-red acid.
[Discussing environmental scenery with a Terra native from the 3K era, isn't that a bit like showing off in front of an expert?]
The Female Hunter-Duke confidently raised the corner of her mouth, silently opening the light-sensitive adjustment of the windshield. A visible green film slowly spread from the area in front of the driver's seat across the entire glass.
"Three seconds until we reach the surface. Three… two… one."
As the Female Hunter-Duke's words fell, a dazzling golden light penetrated the windshield into Horatio's eyes, causing extreme discomfort and even pain to his optic nerves, which had long lived underground in the Hive City and were accustomed to that lightless environment.
After a while, once the light-sensitive reflective film fully covered the glass and took effect, the light was finally not as dazzling as before.
Horatio blinked his dry, stinging eyes, tentatively opening them a crack.
"Oh, oh…" Horatio swallowed, muttering to himself.
Soaring colossal structures rose from the ground, reaching into the clouds, resembling mountains yet towering above them, as if they were the carved beams and painted pillars of the sky itself, a surging shock straight to the heart.
The sacred Imperial Skyhawk emblem on the exterior of each building shone with dazzling golden light under the sunlight, and countless white doves fluttered their pure white wings, flying over the solemn and sacred Bishop's Cathedral.
Below, high-speed rail tracks, like dragon bones, crisscrossed, with various vehicles, grav-cars, and shuttles coming and going in an endless stream.
All around, vast gardens, botanical gardens, artificial lakes, and glazed palaces were scattered like stars, adorning the city with considerable beauty, even extravagance.
The entire planet's surface had been developed with unimaginable capital into humanity's ideal vision of future life. The surface air was no different from Terra, and the climate was even more comfortable and pleasant.
Horatio looked up at the sky, and through the clear blue sky above, countless colossal ships of various types, from all corners of the Imperium, continuously appeared on the planetary shipping lanes, forming a brilliant star chain of dazzling flames emitted by bead-curtain-like plasma engines.
"Abyss Port is an artificial planet. From the day it was born, its atmosphere and habitable facilities were already activated. This is a great creation that is difficult to replicate. You won't see a Hive City planet so close to a Garden World anywhere else."
"…" Horatio was speechless, finding it hard to imagine this was a world from a grimdark story.
Prosperity, splendor, grandeur, shock, order, novelty, legend… every word praising the greatness of human civilization could be applied to the scene before him, but it was only barely satisfactory.
Horatio could feel that even if the world was dark and lightless, resilient humanity was working hard to keep the flame of civilization alive in the darkness.
When the shuttle lowered its altitude and merged into the city's orbital network, the close-up view of the ground also became clear.
Horatio lowered the cabin window, leaned out, and looked around. The vast difference between the Upper and Lower Hives struck him in the most intuitive way—everywhere here was poles apart from the Middle and Lower Hives.
Ample light, fresh air, clean ground, new buildings, orderly streets.
Horatio took several deep breaths of the clean, floral-scented air, a refreshing coolness rushing into his lungs, dispelling the impurity in his pulmonary cavity.
The shuttle passed through the commercial district. Outside high-end tea restaurants, Upper Hive ladies and nobles, with their children, leisurely enjoyed afternoon tea, tasting various high-quality wines and beverages. The families were happy and cheerful, with no hint of sorrow from life's pressures on their faces.
Enthusiastic service staff, with warm smiles, provided thoughtful guidance and services to the nobles who came for travel and vacation. Even the usually stern Hive City Law Enforcement wore gentle smiles, providing service to any Upper Hive person who needed help.
"How is it?"
Horatio sat back, sighed, and nodded slightly: "Awe-inspiring."
"Your choice of words is quite refined," the Female Hunter-Duke snorted, but there was no pride on her face; instead, a sense of solemnity arose.
"I've never seen such a striking sense of disparity. They are all devout Imperial citizens, yet their lives are completely different…" Horatio turned his face to look out the window. As someone who grew up on Ancient Terra in the 3K era, he was seeing such a massive and bloated giant society for the first time.
Abyss Port, as a vast, complex, and enormous artificial planet, theoretically has enough habitable area to accommodate trillions of people.
However, based on the results of the closest census a century ago, Abyss Port's registered permanent population is only fifty to sixty billion. Even if an additional hundred billion unregistered residents from the Lower Hive and Underhive are estimated on top of the counted population, it is still a drop in the bucket compared to the theoretical full capacity.
Under the pleasant climate, the entire surface is the exclusive living area for the over ten billion Upper Hive people and nobles.
The canvas for the nobles, the architecture and urban planning, naturally wouldn't be clustered together to form bloated and chaotic Hive City megastructures like in some harsh-climate Hive Cities, but rather uniformly planned and arranged across the entire planetary surface.
To use an analogy, the surface aesthetic of Abyss Port is more like Coruscant from Star Wars than a Hive City planet from the Warhammer world.
"My mother, the governor, once lobbied the governor to support her surface civilian expansion plan and persuaded my father to establish a foundation, setting up ten billion gothic coins in poverty alleviation funds, to allow Middle Hive people to move to the surface as much as possible, reduce underground residential area development, and further improve the utilization rate and population coverage of surface public facilities."
[Hmph, what an idealist who dares to dream.] Horatio couldn't even imagine how much resistance that would face.
"The resistance must have been considerable."
"The Adeptus Mechanicus opposed it because their underground forge enclaves required a large labor force; Upper Hive representatives opposed it because they were responsible for the construction and planning of all projects on the entire planetary surface; the nobles opposed it because they were the primary investors and simply did not want ants breathing the same air as them."
"What about the Imperial Navy?"
"The Navy supported it, and not out of my father's personal favor."
"It seems they have a bit of humanity after all, given that many Sailors started from humble beginnings."
"Not entirely. Their support had more strategic considerations. All Starports and freight zones are not far from the surface, and they wouldn't go deeper than 100 meters underground. Moving the population up made it easier for them to recruit Sailors."
"…Alright, so in the end, did your mother's plan proceed?"
"With the Navy's support, some port areas were piloted, but with her death, no one has continued this work for eight years. Those who moved up were either driven back down or conscripted into service. Now, only the 'Vegas' area remains, a… half-dead mess, the place we just passed, and also the area you are most familiar with."
"Yes… both familiar and strange," Horatio was somewhat lost in thought.
It was a massive area, so large that even after years of working there, Horatio was only familiar with one percent of the land.
It was also the proudest achievement of that governor, Farida's mother, when she was alive.
It used to be synonymous with ideals, hope, future, harmony, beauty, and unity.
It was the only three-dimensional, high-density population living and consumption area on the entire planet that could simultaneously see the landscapes of the Lower, Middle, and Upper Hives, directly facing the planet's administrative district, and integrated with the largest civilian Starport, the PW-P-15 Megaport Freight Zone.
And now, eight years of neglected management.
While the 'Vegas' area was full of bright lights and neon, it also had immense wealth disparity. The pitiful police force was only enough to protect the communities where the rich lived, law and order were virtually non-existent, and it had become a giant crucible, a microcosm of the entire Abyss Port society.
Wanderers, thieves, murderers, pickpockets, and prostitutes preferred to call it 'Ecstasy Vegas.'
Because there, murder, prostitution, robbery, disease, theft, fraud, rape… lawless crimes were constantly unfolding in every corner of this great crucible.
It's no exaggeration to say that the current 'Vegas' is a super-sized, replicated Night City, home to hundreds of millions of people.
Well… outwardly splendid, but inwardly rotten. Even if the surface was dazzling, it couldn't change the fact that this was a garbage world.
This is very K-hammer.
The immense oppression and darkness re-extinguished the little bit of surprise that had finally ignited in Horatio's heart.
Perhaps he shouldn't have had any unrealistic fantasies about this grimdark world from the beginning, after all, this was the desperate 41K world!
The shuttle's altimeter was constantly climbing, entering an artificial platform that could be called an aerial Garden World, clearly a living area for people even nobler than the Upper Hive residents.
"We're almost there. Put on your helmet and pretend to be from the Adeptus Arbites."