A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  DEATH OR GLORY

  Sandy Mitchell

  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.

  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 Cain's subsequent activities as the Commissarial liaison officer to the Lord General's 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 Cain's 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 Commissar's 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 doesn't 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. Cain's 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 Cain's 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

  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 twenties[1] 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 inquisitor[3] 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. After all, the popular image of them was of uncouth, slow-witted barbarians, which meant that, if anything, they were considered a bit of a joke, at least by those fortunate enough not to have actually faced them in the flesh, so I plastered a self-confident grin on my face and left him to it.

  Wynetha[5] had taken a few day's leave to see me off, and I could think of far better ways of spending my last evening on

Keffia than watching sweaty gunners lug heavy objects about.

  IN THE EVENT, the night passed more than pleasantly, and I found myself stifling a yawn at several points in the briefing the following day. The windows of the conference room had been left wide open to admit a breeze, sharp with the chill of approaching autumn, and I found myself unusually grateful for its assistance in keeping my eyes open. All the battery commanders'[6] were present, trying to look interested, while Colonel Mostrue, our commanding officer, regurgitated the information that had been passed on to him and the rest of the regimental commanders by the Lord General or someone equally exalted. In later years I was to be privy to the higher level briefings myself, of course, and find them a great deal more candid, not to mention worrying, but back then I still took a lot of what I was told at face value. 'Are we boring you, commissar?' Mostrue asked acidly, turning his ice-blue eyes in my direction. He'd never quite believed my hastily improvised explanation for being the inadvertent hero of Desolatia, when my perfectly natural attempt to make a run for it before the ''nids'' arrived had simply succeeded in luring an unsuspected flanking attack into the killing zone of our guns. Mostrue was too canny to let his doubts about my character show openly. Instead he tried to needle me at every opportunity, no doubt hoping I'd let something slip to confirm his suspicions. As usual I refused to respond, meeting the challenge head-on, as though I considered it nothing more than light-hearted banter.

  'Far from it,' I assured him, allowing a visible yawn to get out in the process. 'Bit of a late night, that's all, lot of paperwork to get through before we pull out.' Both of which were true statements, and if he chose to link them in his mind and draw the wrong conclusions that was hardly my fault. In fact, I had delegated most of the routine stuff to Jurgen, my malodorous and indefatigable aide, and was confident that he would deal with it in his usual meticulous fashion.

  Despite his unprepossessing appearance, complete lack of social skills, and an all-pervading body odour that could fell a grox, Jurgen had turned out to be the ideal aide, at least in my case. For one thing, he was doggedly literal in following orders, unimaginative enough to simply accept whatever I told him without question, which meant that he had soon become an indispensable buffer between me and some of the more onerous aspects of my job. For another, he had turned out to have an almost preternatural talent for scrounging, which made my life a great deal more comfortable than it might otherwise have been (and probably his own as well, although I was careful not to enquire about that). At the time, neither of us was aware of his greatest asset, nor would be until our fateful encounter with Amberley on Gravalax a decade or so later,[7] but I was to benefit from that as well on a number of occasions without ever realising the fact.

  'Then I suppose we should be grateful that you could spare the time to join us at all,' Mostrue replied, not sounding in the least bit grateful, despite his words.

  'You know me,' I said, nodding as though the colonel had paid me a compliment, and pouring myself a fresh mug of recaff. 'Duty first.' Given the Valhallans' love of low temperatures I'd taken to making sure there was a hot drink waiting for me whenever I had to sit through a meeting with the regiment's senior command staff.

  'Quite,' Mostrue said dryly, turning back to the portable hololith. A star map appeared, the Keffia system easily identifiable in one corner from the cluster of contact icons marking the positions of the Imperial armada assembling in orbit. There seemed to be rather more ships there than I remembered, and I remarked on the fact.

  Mostrue nodded, thinly masking his displeasure at being interrupted. 'That's correct. Our transport vessels and their escorts have been joined by a battle group from the sector fleet,' I sipped my recaff, which had suddenly become unpalatably bitter, a flutter of apprehension beginning to make itself felt in the pit of my stomach: that meant we would be on our way to a major war zone by the sound of things. I tried to quiet the nagging sense of foreboding. Even if that were the case, we would still be deployed well behind the front lines, far from the main bulk of the enemy forces. That was why I'd gone to so much trouble to secure a posting to an artillery unit in the first place, so that I could stay well away from the fighting, and by and large it had worked. The exceptions had been terrifying, of course, but I'd come out of those incidents hailed as a hero, and there was no reason to suspect that my luck wouldn't continue to hold on Perlia, wherever that was. I tried to remain calm, and sound insouciant.

  'Sounds like a big operation then,' I interjected, more for the pleasure of putting Mostrue off his stride again than anything else.

  'It is.' The colonel nodded, as though the remark had made sense. 'And it's still only one flotilla among many. Reinforcements are being brought in from all over the sector.'

  The palms of my hands began to itch in earnest. This was beginning to sound more serious by the moment. Mostrue did something to the hololith, centring an otherwise unremarkable system a couple of subsectors away Noticing that it was indeed to spin-ward, Divas grinned at me, and I nodded an acknowledgement. 'And this is where most of them are going. Perlia.'

  'It doesn't look particularly remarkable,' I said. Mostrue shook his head. 'That's because it isn't,' he replied dryly. 'Apart from the fact that it's been targeted by this.'

  The picture in the hololith changed abruptly, eliciting a couple of startled intakes of breath from among the cluster of officers around it. A couple, older than the rest, flinched, reflexively reaching for their side arms before composing themselves.

  'An ork,' I said. I'd seen holos of them before, and even a couple of preserved corpses at the schola progenium, but this one seemed particularly impressive. I assumed (wrongly as things were to turn out) that Mostrue was projecting it a little larger than life size for dramatic effect. It was as heavily muscled as most of its kind, more so if that were possible, and wore a ramshackle suit of armour apparently assembled from random pieces of scrap. It carried a crude form of bolter, large enough to be hefted by a member of the Astartes, in one vast misshapen hand as though it were no more than a pistol, and a huge axe in the other. Small red eyes glared hatred from under the thing's overhanging brow.

  'Not just any ork,' Mostrue said. 'According to the lord general, this is their leader, Gargash Korbul. He's united the greenskins of several tribes, and declared Waaargh![8] against the Imperial worlds right across the subsector.' He pronounced the ork word with noticeable distaste, and, as I was subsequently to discover, not nearly enough volume or saliva to get the true flavour of it. After giving us a moment longer to absorb the full ghastliness of the greenskin warlord, he switched the image back to the star map. 'So far they've struck here, here, and here.' Systems helpfully turned green with ork contact icons as he pointed. 'For the most part these incursions have been contained, however, at least for the time being. The critical system is this one, Perlia, where the bulk of the Imperial industrial capacity is. If they take that, they'll have all the resources they need to roll right across the subsector.'

  'Then we'd better make sure they don't get it,' I said, summing up the mood of the meeting. Mostrue nodded.

  'It sounds quite simple when you put it like that,' he said. His ice-blue eyes rested on mine for a moment, and I suppressed a shiver, which wasn't entirely due to the iceworlders' preference for wide-open windows. 'Let's just hope your confidence isn't misplaced.'

  Editorial Note:

  Since, as usual, Cain doesn't bother to put anything he describes into a wider content, this seems as good a point as any to interpolate an overview of the situation he was to find himself so unexpectedly thrust into. The book comes from covers the main points as well as most popular accounts of the first Siege: readers wanting more detail are referred to Broedenour's thirty-seven volume work ''Waaargh! and Peace: The Siege of Perlia and its Neighbouring Systems''. (Had the author of this magisterial work not been tragically killed by a toppling library stack before its completion it would undoubtedly be regarded as the definitive work on the subject. As it is, it remains an unsurpassed work of reference for anyone interested in the minutiae of the first nine weeks of the two-year campaign.)

 

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