DEATH OR GLORY Sandy Mitchell Sandy Mitchell «Death Or Glory»
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A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL DEATH OR GLORY Sandy Mitchell Sandy Mitchell «Death or Glory» For my grandmother, Lillian Wright, whose enthusiasm for all things science fictional infected me at an early age, and who would have been delighted to know I'd grow up to earn my living writing the stuff. IT IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die. YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battleflects cross the daemon‐infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio‐engineered super‐warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever‐vigilant Inquisition and the tech‐priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever‐present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants ‐ and worse. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re‐learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods. Sandy Mitchell «Death or Glory» Editorial Note: With the exception of a few short fragments, all the extracts from the Cain Archive, which I have so far prepared for dissemination among the gratifyingly high number of my Inquisitorial colleagues who have expressed an interest in reading them have come from a relatively short period of his long and eventful career: from the commencement of his attachment to the Valhallan 597th in 931.M41 to an incident in 937M41, roughly a third of the way through his service with that regiment. Of the shorter extracts, three concern his first assignment, to the 12th Valhallan field‐artillery, and the remaining one his period of service as an independent commissar attached at brigade level in the year 928. Of Cainʹs subsequent activities as the Commissarial liaison officer to the Lord Generalʹs staff and a tutor of commissar cadets at the schola progenium following his official retirement, not to mention his intermittent involvement in inquisitorial affairs at my behestin the years following our first meeting on Gravalax nothing has so far been said beyond occasional allusions in the disseminated portions of his memoirs. It was with this consideration in mind that I decided, with the present volume to return the narrative to its beginning, so to speak. The circumstances of Cainʹs arrival among the 12th field Artillery early in 919.M41 and his subsequent baptism of fire against the tyranid horde threatening the mining colony on Desolatia has already been covered in one of the shorter extacts, as has his participation in the subsequent campaign to cleanse Keffia of the infestation of genestealers preceding the splinter fleet concerned; anyone wishing to read a fuller, and somewhat less candid, account of these activities is referred to the early chapters of his published memoirs, To Serve the Emperor: A Commissarʹs Life. In either event, there seems little point in repeating them here. Though these incidents laid the foundation stones of the heroic reputation which, true to form, he continues to insist throughout the memoir that he doesnʹt realty deserve, it was his activities during the first Siege of Perlia which truly consolidated it, and it is therefore that campaign which I have chosen to concentrate on in the latest extract. Astute readers, with access to the right Inquisitorial records and the appropriate security clearances, will probably be able to deduce another reason for my interest in what to the rest of the galaxy seemed little more than the routine cleansing of an ork incursion from an isolated Imperial backwater. Cainʹs actions in this campaign were to have unforeseen repercussions both for him and for the Imperium at large. A dozen years later, in his first reluctant activities as a clandestine agent of the Inquisition, and almost seven decades after that, when the thirteenth Black Crusade cast its baleful shadow across the entire segmentum and he found himself having to defend Perlia for the second time. The latter incident still lay a year or more in his future at the point this memoir was written, however, so all references to the siege refer only to the first one, and any implications of hindsight are mine alone. As usual, I have broken Cainʹs somewhat unstructured account into chapters for ease of reading, and interpolated material from other sources where I felt it necessary to place his typically self‐centred narrative in a wider context. Apart from this, and the occasional footnote, I have left him to tell his own story in his habitually slapdash fashion. Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos Sandy Mitchell «Death or Glory» ONE IF I'VE LEARNED one thing in the course of my long and discreditable career, apart from the fact that the more blatant the lie the more likely it is to be believed, it's that an enemy should never be underestimated. A mistake I made a few times in my younger days, I have to admit, but I was always a fast learner where keeping my skin in one piece was concerned; which accounts for the fact that, not withstanding the odd augmetic or two, most of it's still where it belongs. Of course back in the twenties1 I was far more naive, having managed to emerge from a couple of early scrapes with the beginnings of the reputation for heroism which has followed me around like Jurgen's body odour ever since, and a fine conceit of myself I had as a result you may be sure. So picture me then in the relatively carefree days of my youth, cocky and overconfident, and still basking in the kudos of having single-handedly saved Keffia from the insidious genestealers who had almost succeeded in undermining our glorious crusade to eradicate them from that remarkably pleasant agriworld. (In actual fact, several Guardsmen and a couple of Arbites had accompanied me,2 but the newsies hadn't let that inconvenient fact stand in the way of a good story.) In the manner of all good things the war had finally come to an end, or to be more precise petered out to the point where the locals could clean up their own mess with the aid of a long overdue inquisitor3 and a couple of squads of Deathwatch Astartes, and the 12th Field Artillery were being pulled out for reassignment along with everyone else. 'So where the hell is Perlia anyway?' I asked, raising my voice above the growling of the Trojans hauling our limbered-up Earthshakers out onto the apron of the main cargo pad of Keffia's premier starport. By which I mean that it had a proper rockcrete landing field, and some rudimentary repair and maintenance facilities for the shuttles that grounded there. Most of the others were little more than cleared fields, where the shuttles from the grain barges in orbit could simply load up and depart again without undue ceremony. No wonder the ''stealers'' had found the planet so easy to infiltrate. Lieutenant Divas, the colonel's subaltern, and the closest thing I had to a friend in the battery, shrugged, his fringe falling into his eyes as usual. 'Somewhere to spinward I think.' If he was going to say anything else he was forced to give up at that point, as a heavy-lift cargo hauler screamed in overhead, its landing thrusters kicking in at the last possible moment, and dropped to the rockcrete with an impact that resonated right up my spine through the soles of my boots. Clearly the pilot wasn't about to take our victory for granted just yet, coming in as though the landing zone was still potentially hot; and given the number of cultists and hybrids still at large, I couldn't altogether blame him for that.4 I shrugged in return, as the howling of the engines died away to a level where my voice might just be audible. 'I'm sure the colonel will fill us in when he gets back,' I bellowed, and turned away, already dismissing the matter from my mind, content to let Divas deal with the tedious job of supervising the stowage of our precious artillery pieces on his own. He nodded, absurdly eager as always, positively looking forward to the next war. 'I hear they've got a bit of an ork problem,' he yelled back. Well that didn't sound so bad. Never having encountered the greenskins before I was sure they couldn't be nearly as intimidating as the genestealers or the tyranid horde I'd already faced and bested.