The Last Ditch Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  Footnotes

  Warhammer 40,000

  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 battlefleets 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 Emperor’s 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.

  Editorial Note:

  This extract from the memoirs of Ciaphas Cain might strike some as a whimsical or even bewildering choice, concerning as it does his return to the world of Nusquam Fundumentibus, when the details of his previous visit have yet to be disseminated. His activities on that occasion, however, relate only peripherally to the material at hand, and, for the most part, whatever is germane can quite clearly be inferred from context. Where this is not the case, I have attempted to remedy the deficiency by the interpolation of other material, or the provision of my own supplementary comments.

  I’ve done the same throughout Cain’s account of the events of his second visit, which, as ever, glosses over almost everything which doesn’t concern him personally. Since he was serving with the Valhallan 597th at the time, one of the primary sources on which I’ve been reluctantly forced to rely remains the published reminiscences of the celebrated Lady General Jenit Sulla, who, at that time, was a far less exalted officer in the same regiment. Suffice it to say that, as before, the Gothic language capitulates early against her sustained assault, and I’ve endeavoured to restrict the use of the resulting literary casualties to a minimum.

  The bulk of what follows is Cain’s own account, however, and so far as I’ve been able to ascertain, as truthful and accurate a record of events as he habitually provides.

  Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos.

  ONE

  I’ve been to an awful lot of places I’d rather not go back to in the course of my long and discreditable career, but every now and then fate, or the hand of the Emperor, has decided otherwise. Returning to Perlia1 would turn out to have a definite upside, apart from the odd interruption by Chaos-worshipping loons with ridiculous moustaches2, but the prospect of another visit to Nusquam Fundumentibus most certainly didn’t.

  My dismay at the prospect never showed on my face, of course, a lifetime of concealing my true feelings replacing it with the all-purpose neutral expression which most people seemed to take for polite interest.

  ‘Haven’t been there in a while,’ I said levelly, staring at the regicide board between me and Lord General Zyvan as though it were of far greater interest than the news that he was proposing to send me back to a freezing hellhole I’d been more than happy to turn my back on twenty years before. In the decade or so since our first encounter on Gravalax we’d fallen into the habit of socialising on the rare occasions it was possible to do so, finding one another’s company tolerably pleasant, and I had no wish to introduce a note of discord into the evening. Neither of us expected to remain on Coronus3 for long – no one ever did – and I’d rather my future access to his table and exceptional cellar remained unimpeded by any bad feeling which might linger at our departure.

  ‘Since you saw off the greenskin invasion,’ Zyvan said, as though their defeat had been entirely my doing, rather than that of an Imperial Guard task force over ten thousand strong. Truth to tell, I’d spent the entire campaign trying to keep warm, and as far from the orks as possible; but the reputation I’d picked up on Perlia as an ork-fighter par excellence kept getting in the way of the latter ambition, to the point where I’d once again been credited with breaking the back of their assault almost single-handed4. Pointless quibbling about it, though; the legend had taken on a life of its own by now, and Zyvan would undoubtedly think I was merely being modest anyway.

  So I simply shrugged, and muttered something about having had a lot of good men beside me (which was almost true, as I’d done my best to make sure they were a pace or two in front most of the time, especially when the orks were around), and Zyvan smiled in the manner intended to convey that he hadn’t been fooled for a second.

  ‘The point is,’ he said, leaning across the board to refresh my goblet of amasec, ‘you know the place. You’ve fought over the ground before, and your regiment will feel right at home there.’

  Well, I couldn’t argue with that. Being deployed on an iceworld would be the next best thing to a holiday as far as the Valhallans were concerned, and the prospect of orks to kill when they got there the icing on the cake5. So I nodded, and flipped one of his Ecclesiarchs, setting up what I hoped would be a winning move in another couple of turns. ‘They’ll be pleased,’ I conceded, with carefully judged understatement. ‘Particularly if it lasts a little longer than our last sojourn on an iceworld.’

  Zyvan smiled tightly. The 597th and I had only been on Simia Orichalcae for a day or two before being forced to withdraw, losing the promethium refinery we’d been sent to defend to the emerging denizens of a hitherto unsuspected necron tomb. Blowing up the installation had buried them again6, and preserved our little corner of the galaxy from an onslaught of the hideous machine creatures7, but indisputably failed in our original mission objective. The Adeptus Mechanicus had not been pleased to lose one of their precious shrines, not to mention the chance to loot the tomb they fondly imagined we’d cost them, and Zyvan had been left to face the wrath of the senior tech-priests; at least until I got a message to Amberley, whose retroactive sanction of our actions
by the Inquisition had finally got the cogboys off his back. ‘I’m sure things will go a lot more smoothly this time,’ he said.

  ‘They could hardly go worse,’ I agreed, equally inaccurately, and sipped my drink, relishing the sensation of warmth as it slipped down my gullet. I might as well enjoy it while I could; there’d be little enough to take the chill off where we were going.

  ‘An iceworld?’ Colonel Kasteen asked, not quite managing to conceal her enthusiasm at the prospect. She exhanged a brief smile with her second-in-command, Major Broklaw, whose expression remained as taciturn as ever, but not enough to fool someone who knew him as well as I did. ‘Which one?’

  Two identical expressions of polite enquiry faced me across the table between us, if a sheet of flakboard and a couple of trestles could be dignified by such an appellation. Like pretty much everything else on Coronus it was temporary, the stark room we’d requisitioned for meetings just as likely to revert to storage space, administrative matters, or a makeshift kitchen as soon as we vacated our assigned barrack blocks in favour of the next regiment to pass through here en route to another war. The afternoon sun was paling beyond the grime-encrusted window, casting a faint pall of darkness across us, too slight as yet to require alleviation by the luminators, but sufficient to make the pallid complexions typical of iceworlders stand out in even greater contrast than usual to Kasteen’s vivid red fringe and Broklaw’s midnight-coloured mop.

  ‘And why us?’ Broklaw added, which wasn’t quite as odd a question as you might think. Valhallans are the finest cold weather troopers in the galaxy, without a doubt, but that doesn’t mean much to the Munitorum when it comes to deploying them. Although the tacticians and strategists do their best to make use of any special skills a regiment possesses, all too often the never-ending requirement to prop up a faltering front somewhere or other means just sending in whoever’s available. Which meant that in my time with the 597th I’d been baked as often as I’d frozen, although their habit of air conditioning their quarters to temperatures better suited to the storage of perishable provisions had made me grateful for my Commissarial greatcoat even in environments where I’d discarded it hastily as soon as I’d stepped outside.

  ‘Nusquam Fundumentibus,’ I began, answering the colonel’s question first, and she nodded as though the name meant something to her. I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me, as iceworlds with a substantial human population aren’t as common as all that, and bound to be of interest to someone who grew up thinking whiteout blizzards are the perfect weather for a postprandial stroll.

  ‘We were there when the greenskins invaded,’ she said, before glancing at Broklaw again, a spark of mischief animating the green eyes below her striking auburn fringe. ‘The women, anyway.’

  Broklaw shrugged, accepting the mild joke at his expense. The 597th had been cobbled together from the battered remnants of the 296th and the 301st after the tyranids had reduced both to well below fighting strength, and the initial amalgamation had not been a happy one. These days, however, it was hard to believe that any animosity had ever existed between the women who’d made up the 296th and the men of the former 301st. (Which caused enough problems of its own for me to fully appreciate why mixed gender regiments were the exception rather than the rule in the Imperial Guard, but I’d long since discovered that a judicious blind eye and a well-meaning chaplain were enough to let me sidestep most of them.) ‘There were plenty left for us when we arrived,’ he rejoined, a fleeting half-smile drawing any implication of criticism from the remark.

  ‘I think we’ll find enough orks to go round when we get there,’ I put in, and the major’s slate-grey eyes met my own, all trace of levity vanishing as suddenly as an unattended sandwich in the presence of my aide.

  ‘Another invasion?’ he asked hopefully, ‘or a secondary outbreak?’

  ‘An outbreak,’ I confirmed, and Kasteen nodded judiciously.

  ‘About time for one8,’ she agreed. ‘Where’s it centred?’

  ‘Hard to tell,’ I said, with a surreptitious look at the data-slate Zyvan had given me, and which I hadn’t read with nearly as much attention as it deserved. ‘They’ve hit a number of isolated settlements in the Leeward Barrens, but they’ve been staying well clear of the main cavern cities.’

  ‘So far,’ Kasteen said, a faintly cynical edge colouring her tone. By the time we arrived, the information we had would be so out of date as to be all but worthless, and we were seasoned enough campaigners to be well aware of the fact. ‘What’s the local garrison doing about it?’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ I told her. ‘It was withdrawn when the tau started expanding into the Halcyon Drift.’ The Imperium had responded to the provocation by fortifying every system vulnerable to annexation, stripping far too many second-line worlds of their protection for comfort, in the hope that the notoriously opportunist xenos would back down in the face of a show of force. So far, to everyone’s surprise, it seemed to have worked; although, knowing them, they’d probably already turned their attention to another target, probably one which had suddenly been left undefended as a result of the recent redeployment.

  ‘So the PDF’s taking up the slack,’ Broklaw said, in tones which left me in no doubt what he thought about that. Like most Guard officers, he had a dim view of the martial prowess of the average planetary defence force; a view which, in many cases, was well merited, although now and again I’d fought alongside PDF troopers any Guard regiment would have been proud to call their own.

  ‘Yes and no,’ I told him, unable to suppress a certain degree of amusement as I spoke. ‘There is one Imperial Guard regiment already engaged with the enemy, apparently.’

  ‘And that would be?’ Kasteen asked, happy enough to indulge my taste for the dramatic.

  ‘The Nusquan First,’ I told them. Neither officer seemed particularly happy to hear this, which I could hardly blame them for, as I’d been less than thrilled myself when Zyvan gave me the good news. ‘Newly founded, but yet to ship out.’

  ‘How many companies?’ Broklaw asked, with the air of a man determined to get all the bad news out of the way as quickly as possible.

  ‘Three so far,’ I said, ‘out of a mooted six.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Kasteen said heavily. ‘Half a regiment of new troopers to babysit, while every PDF trooper on the planet goes berserker trying to make the cut.’

  ‘On the plus side,’ Broklaw added, after a thoughtful pause, ‘there’s a planet full of orks to kill.’ Which cheered Kasteen up, anyway, even if it didn’t do a lot for me.

  Editorial Note:

  As Cain typically ignores most of the background to the conflict in which he was shortly to become embroiled, the following extract may prove illuminating for any of my readers prepared to face the ordeal of wading through it.

  From Like a Phoenix on the Wing: the Early Campaigns and Glorious Victories of the Valhallan 597th by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 101 M42.

  Not a heart among us failed to soar at the news we were to return to Nusquam Fundumentibus9, a world whose pristine snowfields, majestic glaciers and towering snow-capped mountains were still recalled fondly by those of us privileged to have served there when last the greenskins dared to sully its face with their presence10. That the orkish horde had returned was hardly unexpected, as the long and bitter struggle to finally cleanse their taint from our Emperor-blessed home world had taught us, but I was far from alone in thinking that their renewed onslaught could hardly have been more propitiously timed. What better warriors of the Imperium to punish them for their temerity than the daughters and sons of Valhalla, and what better regiment from among their ranks than the 597th? For, in addition to the prowess in battle shared by all fortunate enough to have started life among the snows of Valhalla, and privileged enough to have been accepted by the Imperial Guard, we alone had the inspirational guidance of Commissar Cain to ensure our victory against whatever foes the galaxy chose to throw at us.

  Knowing of the part he played
in bringing the greenskins to heel some two decades before, I took my place among the company commanders for the tactical briefing with a thrill of anticipation, eager to see what words of encouragement he had for us, and I must admit to being far from disappointed. In accordance with protocol the briefing was given by Colonel Kasteen, but she was as aware as the rest of us of Commissar Cain’s previous experience of the battlefield we were so soon to test ourselves on, and had invited him to attend, as had become something of a regimental custom. When the commissar spoke it was with his habitual modesty, of course – his advice concise, cogent, and to the point, with never so much as a single superfluous word wasted11.

  It seemed that, in the perfidious manner of their kind, a few greenskins had survived the campaign against them, fleeing like the cowards they were to seek refuge in the harshest and most inaccessible parts of Nusquam Fundumentibus. Since then they’d been biding their time, building up their numbers and preparing themselves for a fresh onslaught against the faithful servants of the Emperor. Now, it seemed, the time was right, a sufficiently brutal and ruthless leader having emerged among them to unite the factions, and lead them out of the caverns and passes of the Great Spinal Range to despoil the relatively sheltered regions which that awe-inspiring line of mountains protects from the worst of the prevailing blizzards, and which accordingly supports an appreciable proportion of the total human population12. As yet they’d confined their depredations to small, poorly defended habitations, lacking the courage to face the Emperor’s warriors in open combat, but that was sure to change as their easy victories engendered an arrogant and unmerited confidence, bringing fresh resolve and reinforcements to the banner of their leader, until even Primadelving13 itself would be under threat.