The Greater Good

  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 latest extract from the memoirs of Ciaphas Cain is of interest in several respects, not least in the insights it gives into the workings of tau diplomacy, a weapon in their arsenal at least as potent as a cadre of battlesuits, if rather less liable to make a mess of the carpet.

  Although the tau empire is currently co-operating with the Imperium in a joint campaign against the tyranid hive fleets, they can hardly be considered reliable allies, given their notorious opportunism and their obsessive pursuit of the so-called ‘Greater Good.’ Which, let us be clear, would be rather more accurately translated into Gothic as ‘the Greater Good of the Tau, and the warp take the rest.’ I leave drawing any parallel with our own attitude towards the arrangement to those more cynical than I.

  Which brings us back to Cain who, if not instrumental in the forging of the pact, undoubtedly played a major role in preventing its premature dissolution, which would have been to the ruination of us all. His motives for so doing were, of course, entirely personal, at least by his own account. As ever, I leave it to the reader to weigh how far he may be taken at his word.

  As has become my habit over the preceding volumes I have left his narrative as close to how I found it as possible, doing little more than breaking it down into chapters for ease of reading, and inserting additional explanatory material whenever required to elucidate the occasional obscure reference, or provide the wider context generally lacking in his woefully self-centred account of events.

  Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos.

  ONE

  Say what you like about the tau, and I’ve said plenty myself over the years, they know how to put on a good war. In fact, if you ask me, they were making rather too good a job of it in the closing phases of the Quadravidia campaign; I’d been expecting a hard fight, having butted heads with the little blue[1] blighters on more than one occasion, but they were giving us a lot worse than that. By the time I arrived in the capital, dodging plasma bolts every foot of the way, our defences were crumbling all over the planet, and it was clearly only a matter of time before they overran the last remaining Imperial enclave altogether.

  ‘Quadravidia cannot be allowed to fall,’ General Braddick insisted, in flat-out contravention of what everyone crowded into the command bunker beneath what was left of the local Guard garrison already knew to be inevitable, the febrile glow in the depths of his slate-grey eyes making the unhealthy pallor of his skin even more noticeable. You can only substitute recaff and stimms for sleep for so long, and the time to redress the balance in his case was well and truly past. He raised his voice over the distant rumble of exploding ordnance, which, to my distinct and well-concealed alarm, was noticeably louder than it had been that morning. As if to underline the fact, dust motes jarred from some recess near the ceiling tumbled lazily in the shafts of setting sunlight sneaking in through the firing slits. ‘If it does, the entire subsector goes with it.’

  Which was why the tau had struck at Quadravidia in the first place, of course, its position at the nexus of several warp routes making it the natural conduit for Imperial military transports on their way to prop up the steadily eroding buffer zone between the two powers.

  ‘That may be overstating the case a little,’ I said, brushing my sleeve free of the specks which had settled there, and trying not to sound as if retreat was the best option I could think of by a long way. ‘But the general is quite correct in considering the ramifications of an orderly withdrawal.’ Which were more than likely to include a firing squad for cowardice and incompetence, at least so far as he was concerned. Hardly fair, given that he’d hung on grimly in the face of overwhelming odds for months; but someone would have to take the blame for the fiasco, and it certainly wasn’t going to be the morons from the Munitorum who’d sent the Guard in under-strength and under-equipped in the first place.

  ‘You think we should pull out?’ one of the senior staffers asked, spotting a potential lifeline: if the celebrated Ciaphas Cain recommended turning tail, they could hardly be blamed for following my advice. That was what commissars were supposed to be for, after all, considering the wider picture.

  ‘I’d be on the first shuttle,’ I said, completely truthfully, with just enough of a smile to make them think I was only joking. ‘But as General Braddick has just pointed out, that isn’t, unfortunately, an option.’ Not because I was having an uncharacteristic rush of noble self-sacrifice to the head, you understand, but because anything larger than a servoskull taking to the air would be shot down by the tau before it had time to clear the pad, and we didn’t have anything left in orbit capable of making warp in any case.

  As if to underline my words, and because the Emperor sometimes shows a taste for the dramatic as well as a nasty sense of humour, a faint tremor shook the command bunker, and another rain of dust pattered off the peak of my cap.

  ‘Reinforcements are on the way,’ Braddick said, in the tone of a man who hopes to make it true by saying so with sufficient conviction, and I nodded.

  ‘They were certainly due to be dispatched,’ I agreed, clinging to the faint shred of hope even more tightly than the general. I’d been assured of that just prior to my own departure, aboard the small relief flotilla which had arrived about six weeks before, and which my old dining companion Lord General Zyvan[2] had hoped would prove sufficient to bolster our defences until he could pull a large enough task force together to raise the siege and send the tau scuttling for home. And so it would have done, if the tau hadn’t had the same idea, and sent a relieving force of their own to match it.

  On the plus side, I suppose, we’d managed to deprive the xenos of the easy victory they’d hoped for, and would undoubtedly have seized by now if the extra division of Catachans I’d arrived with hadn’t proved so tenacious, but from where I was sitting it looked uncomfortably as though all we’d managed to do was delay the inevitable. I was sure Zyvan was doing his best to get a proper relief force together, but the tyranid hive fleets had been striking ever deeper into the heart of the Imperium over the past few years, and all too many of our resources were being diverted to contain them; the promised reinforcements could take months to arrive,
if they even got here at all.

  ‘Then we hang on,’ Braddick said, his shoulders slumping with weary resolution, at odds with the sharp creases of his typically ornate Mordian tunic, and I nodded soberly.

  ‘I don’t see that we’ve any other choice,’ I agreed, all too conscious of the irony.

  The thing was, you see, that I needn’t even have been there in the first place. My current position, Commissarial Liaison Officer to the Lord General’s staff, had left me in a position to pick and choose my assignments to a far greater extent than I’d ever dreamed possible in the earlier stages of my long and inglorious career, where circumstance and the long arm of the Commissariat had kept shoving me into harm’s way despite my best efforts to let it gallop past unimpeded. Of course my entirely unmerited reputation for dauntless courage and flamboyant derring-do meant that I was hardly in a position to follow my natural inclination and remain indefinitely on Coronus[3], watching my aide, Jurgen, deal with most of the paperwork passing through my office while I wondered how soon I could slope off for lunch. Maintaining it meant showing my face at the front line from time to time, to encourage the troops and remind Zyvan how lucky he was to have me around, while keeping as far from the enemy as possible in the process.

  With this in mind, a quick jaunt to Quadravidia had seemed just the ticket; as I said, we’d expected the relief flotilla I’d hitched a ride with to tip the balance of the war there decisively in our favour, so I should have been able to keep out of trouble without too much difficulty once we’d arrived. More to the point, it would keep me comfortably out of the way of the encroaching hive fleets. I had no desire to end up as a blob of goo in a reclamation pool somewhere, which seemed all too likely if someone decided they needed a Hero of the Imperium around to keep the troops steady in the face of so many scuttling horrors. So, making myself scarce while the high command drew up their plans for the latest attempt to contain the tyranid menace was only prudent.

  To cut a long and dismal story short, we arrived in good order, and disembarked by drop-ship, the orbital side of the starport facilities having failed to survive the first tau onslaught[4]. We were harried a bit on the way down, of course, but the Navy had enough fighters still in the air to keep most of the fleas off our backs, and we took only a few losses, digging in around the planetary capital for the most part. Braddick and his Mordians were delighted to see us, especially once our first counter-attack had thrown back the enemy forces to the outer hab ring, and for the first week or so it really looked as if we had the xenos on the run; although I was seasoned enough a campaigner to realise that reclaiming the entire world would be a long and arduous process.

  So much the better, I’d thought, envisaging a long spell comfortably behind the firing line, while Zyvan and the Navy got ready to tackle the ’nids. With any luck I could spin things out here long enough to get back to Coronus well after their departure.

  So the appearance in orbit a fortnight later of a fleet of tau ‘merchantmen’ [5] came as a pretty unpleasant surprise. By luck or base cunning, probably the latter knowing them, they popped into the system a couple of days after the Imperial flotilla had left for Coronus, and had a clear run for the planet, the gunboats of the SDF[6] having been swept from the sky in the course of the first incursion.

  All of which left me without the proverbial paddle. I wasn’t dead yet, though, and I’d been in tighter spots than this before now, so I dispensed a few encouraging platitudes, bade everyone in the bunker a good night, and withdrew, ostensibly to go and make sure the troopers on our perimeter were keeping up to the mark. I was by no means certain the final assault would come tonight, but if it did the command bunker would be a singularly unhealthy place to be. I had no doubt that the technosorcery of the tau would have pinpointed it to the millimetre, and that it was top of the list for a visit from one of their strike teams.

  ‘Good meeting, sir?’ Jurgen asked, materialising from the shadows, his unique and earthy aroma greeting me a good three seconds before he had time to open his mouth.

  ‘I’ve had better,’ I admitted, with more candour than I’d normally employ. But Jurgen had served with me for nigh on seventy years by that point, saving my miserable hide more often than either of us could count, and I owed him as much honesty as I ever gave anyone.

  Our brief exchange was punctuated by heavy weapon discharges flickering in the distance like a gathering storm, lacerating the grey overcast of early evening, stark against the red-tinged sky. Not all the red was due to the sunset either; hab blocks were ablaze in a dozen places throughout the beleaguered city. Unfortunately the firestorms hampered our movements as much as the tau, if not more so: the xenos were able to hop about in their anti-gravitic vehicles pretty much as they wished, instead of having to grind their way along laboriously cleared routes like our Chimeras and Leman Russ were forced to do, only to end up in the middle of an ambush as like as not.

  ‘Tanna, sir?’ Jurgen said, producing a flask from somewhere among the tangle of webbing he was habitually festooned with, and I took it gratefully. The evenings were chill here in the equatorial mountains, where the capital had been founded, although why they hadn’t put it somewhere a little more clement was beyond me[7].

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, sipping the fragrant beverage, and savouring the tendril of warmth which oozed its way down into my stomach. ‘Shall we go?’

  ‘Ready whenever you are, sir,’ my aide assured me, scrambling into the driving seat of the Salamander we’d requisitioned from the transport pool shortly after our arrival. The engine was grumbling quietly to itself already, Jurgen being far too seasoned a veteran to risk even the second or two’s delay that firing it up would take if we were caught flat-footed this close to a combat zone.

  I clambered into the passenger compartment, returning the salutes of a squad of Guardsmen double-timing it past us in the direction of the main gate as I did so. With reflexes honed by decades of exposure to Jurgen’s robust driving style, I grabbed at the pintle mount for support an instant before we jerked into motion.

  It was as well that I did, for in regaining my balance my eyes drifted skywards. Black shapes were moving above the buildings the fading light had now reduced to stark-edged silhouettes; etched against the crimson glow, the gracefully sinister curvature of their surfaces betraying their origin unmistakably.

  ‘Incoming!’ I voxed, opening fire with the storm bolter as I did so, quietly cursing my luck. The attack I’d anticipated, and come so close to avoiding, had arrived.

  EDITORIAL NOTE:

  It will hardly come as a surprise to most of my readers that, beyond a few desultory complaints about the air temperature, Cain says little about Quadravidia itself. The following extracts may go some way towards remedying this deficiency.

  From Interesting Places and Tedious People: A Wanderer’s Waybook, by Jerval Sekara, 145.M39.

  Quadravidia will be a familiar destination for most seasoned travellers in and around the Damocles Gulf, since it has the great good fortune to be situated at the confluence of no fewer than four warp currents of unusual swiftness and stability. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this is a world, or, to be more precise, an entire planetary system, which tends to be passed through rather than visited. Indeed, it is quite possible to transfer between vessels aboard one of the many orbital docks and void stations which ring it about without ever setting foot on the planet at all.

  Nevertheless, it can be worth breaking a longer journey here for a prolonged sojourn, or even making it the intended destination of an indefinite stay. Though it’s true to say that at first sight the principal cities around the equator offer little to the discriminating wayfarer, consisting as they do almost entirely of starport facilities, the vulgar commercial institutions deemed necessary by those engaged in trade, and the habitations of the artisan classes apparently required in depressingly high numbers to ensure the efficient running of both, Peakhaven is as gratifyingly cosmopolitan as any planetary capital in that region of space.<
br />
  Set high in the mountain range which sprawls along the equator, bisecting the western continent, its streets and avenues cling to the sides of peak and valley alike, the highest ramparts of which wall off the worst of the noise and bustle of the starport. This is thus confined to a broad depression, some three or four kilometres across, surrounded by higher mountains. It goes without saying that lodgings should be sought on the outer wall of the rim, since the intervening mass of granite effectively muffles most of the sound of the constant shuttle traffic. The sight of it is quite spectacular, however, particularly at night, when the engine glows make a constant vortex of light in the darkness, like the sparks above a forge.

  Smaller towns and villages are, of course, to be found elsewhere on the two continents, but contain little of interest.

  From The Crusade and After: A Military History of the Damocles Gulf, by Vargo Royz, 058.M42.

  Though checked by their first confrontation with the Imperium’s might, the expansionist ambitions of the tau were far from blunted. The next two hundred years were marked by periodic clashes between the two powers, as frontier worlds were annexed, defended, reclaimed, and in many cases lost again. Indeed, Semplaxia was to change hands seven times in all, before ultimately being lost to both sides as the outliers of Hive Fleet Kraken smashed into the Eastern Arm, although such a case was exceptional. For the most part, what the tau gained by subterfuge or the force of arms they kept, although the Imperium made them pay a heavy price, and were even able to claim some notable successes of their own, such as the reclamation of Gravalax in 931.

  Had the forces of the Emperor been able to concentrate their full might on the upstart usurpers, things would have been very different of course, but the last quarter of M41 was riven with conflict on every front. To the ever-present menace of the orks and the fell designs of the Traitor Legions was added the gradual awakening of the necrons, who began to attack human outposts in ever-increasing numbers, while the eldar continued their piractical raids seemingly at will. Perhaps fortunately the tau, too, were beginning to fall foul of these enemies and others more and more frequently as their sphere of influence expanded, preventing them from engaging in an all-out invasion of Imperial space.