Cains last stand, p.1
Cain's Last Stand, page 1
Backlist
More tales of the Astra Militarum from Black Library
• CIAPHAS CAIN •
by Sandy Mitchell
Book 1: FOR THE EMPEROR
Book 2: CAVES OF ICE
Book 3: THE TRAITOR’S HAND
Book 4: DEATH OR GLORY
Book 5: DUTY CALLS
Book 6: CAIN’S LAST STAND
Book 7: THE EMPEROR’S FINEST
Book 8: THE LAST DITCH
Book 9: THE GREATER GOOD
Book 10: CHOOSE YOUR ENEMEIES
OMNIBUS: HERO OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 1-3 in the series: For the Emperor, Caves of Ice and The Traitor's Hand, as well as the short stories 'Fight or Flight', 'Echoes of the Tomb' and 'The Beguiling')
OMNIBUS: DEFENDER OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 4-6 in the series: Death or Glory, Duty Calls and Cain’s Last Stand, as well as the short story 'Traitor’s Gambit')
OMNIBUS: SAVIOUR OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 7-9 in the series: The Emperor's Finest, The Last Ditch and The Greater Good, as well as the short story 'Old Soldiers Never Die')
• GAUNT’S GHOSTS •
by Dan Abnett
Colonel-Commissar Gaunt and his regiment, the Tanith First and Only, struggle for survival on the battlefields of the far future.
THE FOUNDING
(Contains books 1-3 in the series: First and Only, Ghostmaker and Necropolis)
THE SAINT
(Contains books 4-7 in the series: Honour Guard, The Guns of Tanith, Straight Silver and Sabbat Martyr)
THE LOST
(Contains books 8-11 in the series: Traitor General, His Last Command, The Armour of Contempt and Only in Death)
Book 12 – BLOOD PACT
Book 13 – SALVATION’S REACH
Book 14 – THE WARMASTER
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:
I must confess to feeling a certain amount of relief in finally being able to present the latest extract from the Cain Archive to my fellow inquisitors for their perusal, this volume of his memoirs having turned out to be by far the most difficult editorial task I’ve tackled to date. Readers with sufficiently long memories may recall that in my preface to the third volume I mentioned the material therein had formed an extended digression in Cain’s account of his activities during the Thirteenth Black Crusade; suffice it to say that it was far from being the only one, and several of these anecdotes were at least as long as his account of the Adumbria campaign. In part, I suspect, his inability to stick to the point for very long was because the events he was attempting to recount were still relatively recent, and he simply felt more comfortable recalling more distant, less immediately painful memories.
At the risk of sounding a trifle self-congratulatory, however, I think I’ve succeeded in patching together a reasonably coherent account of Cain’s activities during the Second Siege of Perlia, with no more visible signs of editorial interference than usual. Whether or not it was worth the effort, I leave to your judgement.
Attentive readers who have been following this little hobby of mine for some while should realise at once that this volume links thematically with both of the immediately preceding ones, finally resolving a number of matters which began to unfold almost at the outset of his career. Even more importantly, the finished document gives us the closest thing we’re ever likely to have to a reliable first-hand account of what may well have been a decisive blow against the Black Crusade itself. Which is not to diminish the nobility and sacrifice of so many of the Emperor’s faithful servants in those harsh and terrifying times; but if Cain is indeed accurate in his recollections (and despite his other faults, which he remains disarmingly candid about for the most part, he is at least consistent in reporting things pretty much as he experienced them), it can hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that had he not acted as he did, the Great Enemy would have had ultimate victory pretty much within their grasp. On the other hand, I can’t quite shake the disquieting suspicion that the eventual consequences of the way matters were so unexpectedly resolved may turn out to be almost equally catastrophic. That particular shoe has still to drop, however, and at the very least Cain’s resourcefulness has brought us additional time to prepare if the worst should come to pass.
But enough about my problems. Despite the considerable amount of work required to render it into a coherent form, I’ve been as scrupulous as ever in my attempts to remain as true as possible to both the spirit and the letter of Cain’s reminiscences. Where necessary I have, as usual, added explanatory footnotes and material from other sources in order to provide a wider context to their author’s perennially self-centred view of events; the rest is entirely Cain’s own words.
Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos
CHAPTER ONE
I can never see Perlia from orbit without experiencing a peculiar mixture of emotions. On the one hand, the memories of my first sight of that world, and the narrowness with which I escaped making no more of a mark on it than a small crater shortly thereafter, thanks to an orkish fighter pilot using my lifepod for target practice, come back with startling vividness every time I look down on it from outside the atmosphere. On the other, I’ve grown tolerably fond of the place in the last few years; after almost a century of rattling around the galaxy, in mortal peril more often than not, it’s still a refreshing novelty to have somewhere to call home. Thus it was, as our shuttle shrugged off the last of the atmosphere on that fateful day early in the last year of the old millennium[1], I found myself gazing out of the viewport in something of a pensive mood.
‘Tea, commissar?’ a familiar voice enquired at my elbow, and Jurgen’s face appeared in the reflective armourcrys, occulting the soothing panorama of blue, green, and umber mottling the void beyond an instant after my nose had forewarned me that he’d begun to lean in my direction.
To say that the years had been kind to my aide would be something of an exaggeration; it would, perhaps, be more accurate to say that they were distantly polite to him, when they could be bothered to acknowledge his presence at all. What was left of his hair had turned white decades before, although most of it had long since abandoned his head completely, revealing a scalp as mottled with psoriasis as his face had always been in the patches visible between his ragged eruptions of facial hair[2]. He was still as vigorous as I was, though, thanks to the juvenat treatments Amberley had discreetly provided for him.
Despite the number of life-threatening errands I’d run for her over the years, I was under no illusion about which of the two of us she regarded as the greater asset among her little stable of associates. Even heroes of the Imperium are two a credit compared to blanks, and having benefited from his inexplicable ability to nullify the powers of the warp on more occasions than I care to contemplate, I could well understand why she valued his assistance so highly.
‘Thank you, Jurgen,’ I said, accepting the mug of tanna he held out to me with surprising ease, as, despite the confined space of the passenger compartment, my little knot of commissar cadets had chosen to sit as far away from the pair of us as they decently could. For that I could hardly blame them; my aide’s bouquet was pungent enough at the best of times, and his propensity to airsickness tended to exacerbate it even more than usual. ‘Most thoughtful.’
‘You’re welcome, sir.’ An expression somewhat approximating a smile appeared briefly on his face before wandering away again, and he replaced the cap on the flask carefully before stowing it somewhere among the profusion of webbing his torso armour was habitually festooned with. ‘I’ve got some sandwiches in here somewhere too, if you’d like one?’
‘The tea will be fine,’ I said hastily as he began to rummage through a couple of pouches, apparently at random. His relief at being outside the atmosphere at last was palpable, and I began to breathe a little less shallowly as I sipped the fragrant beverage, watching our adopted homeworld recede behind our reflected faces. I was beginning to show the weight of years myself, truth to tell, patches of white appearing at my own temples despite the periodic juvenats my seniority and supposedly heroic status had bestowed upon me. Well, I could hardly complain about that: after some of the things I’d seen and done it was a wonder the whole lot hadn’t turned to snow decades ago.
By this point I’d been living on Perlia for around six years, off and on, enjoying what was supposed to be a peaceful retirement. From time to time it actually had been. To my vague surprise I’d quite taken to the role of pedagogue, and the young pups I’d been put in charge of at the schola progenium someone had seen fit to found there since my last eventful visit[3] were a great deal less troublesome than a Guard regiment. It probably didn’t hurt that I was the first instructor they’d had with a relatively lax attitude to the standards of discipline usually enforced in such institutions. I’d found very early on in my own career that a subtle approach was far more effective in inspiring loyalty among the troops than simple intimidation, and it seemed to me that imparting this lesson by example would greatly increase their chances of future survival. (Not to mention the fact that it annoyed most of the Emperor-botherers who ran the place, which was always amusing from my point of view.)
Unfortunately, though, I hadn’t been left to enjoy the relative tranquillity for long: the tyranid hive fleets had chosen the year of my arrival to begin their onslaught against the Eastern Arm, and I’d been called back to the colours on several occasions since. Sometimes by the Commissariat, who seemed to believe that my presence too close to the firing line for comfort might make the scuttling horrors spit out the latest world they were attempting to devour, or at least make it unpleasantly indigestible, and almost as often by Amberley, who, like most of the Ordo Xenos in the Ultima Segmentum at the time, found her hands uncomfortably full, and seemed to find it necessary to delegate a good deal of the ensuing crisis management to those of us among her cadre of acolytes with a proven talent for survival[4].
At any event, I’d been away from Perlia for quite some time when I returned home towards the end of 998, to find that quite a lot had been going on there in my absence. Luckily the main ‘nid advance had bored on past the system, as I knew only too well, having been stuck right in its path, but it hadn’t escaped entirely unscathed. A vanguard fleet had wandered in about eight months before, looking for an easy target to replenish their store of biomass, and our system defence squadrons had had their work cut out keeping them away from Perlia itself.
As it turned out they’d succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation, only a few warrior forms making it as far as the surface, and being swiftly dispatched by the PDF, but the price of victory had been a heavy one. All the outlying installations had been either overrun or abandoned to allow the fleet to concentrate on defending the planet itself; now the dust had settled, every void station and off-world habitat had to be cleansed of whatever chitinous horrors had gone to ground there before they could be got running again.
Which is why I found myself staring out of the viewport of the schola’s battered old Aquila, which I strongly suspected only remained spaceworthy so the Navy cadets could get used to being void sick without inconveniencing the captains of the sector fleet, and the seminarians from the Adeptus Mechanicus shrine adjoining our grounds had something to practice their rituals of maintenance on.
‘Time to rendezvous with the troop transport?’ I asked, turning in my seat to regard the double row of cadets, most of whom made a hurried attempt to look as though they’d been sitting upright and paying attention instead of playing regicide on their data-slates or swapping salacious holo-picts. The obvious exception was Cadet Nelys, who was already bolt upright, and wouldn’t know how to slouch if I ordered him to; Emperor’s teeth, I sometimes thought the lad slept at attention.
‘Seventeen minutes, commissar.’ A clear contralto, clipped and precise, cut through the sheepish murmur of wild guesses and mumbled excuses, a fraction of a second before Nelys could get his reply out, and he flushed, no doubt irritated at being beaten to the punch by the only girl in the squad[5].
‘Well done, Kayla,’ I said, despite not having a clue whether she was right or not; she’d put Nelys’s nose out of joint, which was good enough for me. The lad had all the makings of an ideal commissar: pious, zealous, and apparently convinced that a sense of humour was something which only happened to other people. Which is the main reason I’d made it my mission in life to get him to lighten up a little before he graduated; with an attitude like that he was a friendly fire accident just waiting to happen as soon as he got assigned to a real regiment.
‘Commissar,’ Cadet Kayla acknowledged curtly, her cap wobbling slightly over the pad of glossy brown hair she’d stuffed under it. Her refusal to adopt the short crop of her fellow cadets was the one sign of femininity I’d so far seen her allow herself. Apart from that, she was almost as relentless as Nelys, although I strongly suspected that this was more because she felt the need to justify her presence in an otherwise all-male environment. Emperor knows, it can’t have been easy for her; but she was more than making her mark. If I’m honest, I thought she was one of the most promising of the bunch, and would probably go far once she’d developed a little more confidence in her own judgement.
Which was the opposite of my concern about the lad sitting next to her. Donal worried me, although I couldn’t have said why, exactly; not truthfully, anyway. His assessments were all satisfactory, and his combat skills a little above the average. He was bright, too, of that I had no doubt, although not as perceptive as Kayla, and had the rare ability to think on his feet and take immediate advantage of any unexpected circumstance that came up. The plain fact was, he reminded me of myself at that age, which meant that although I had no clearly discernable grounds for disquiet, I never felt entirely able to trust him.
He must have noticed my eyes resting on him for a moment, because he nodded at me with every outward sign of respect. ‘Will you be going in with us yourself, sir?’
‘Well, I had been planning to sit here with my feet up sipping tea,’ I said, inflecting it like a joke, and everyone laughed dutifully except Nelys, who just looked confused. Fat chance of that now, though, and I couldn’t help wondering if Donal had spoken up on purpose, intending to undermine my authority if I appeared to be shirking, which is precisely the sort of thing I used to pull on my own tutors. ‘But if you feel you need your hand held, I’ll tag along.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we all feel better knowing you’re watching our backs.’ As usual, there was no overt trace of sarcasm in his voice, though I found myself searching for it nevertheless.
‘If you’ll all get your slates out, you’ll find a schematic of the objective,’ I said. What the hell, I had their attention now, so I might as well get on with the briefing. ‘Asteroid 761 kappa. A mining hab we reclaimed from the bugs six months ago.’
‘Then why are we going back?’ Kayla asked.
Precisely my own question of three days before, as it happened, so I nodded judiciously.
‘Good question. Unfortunately we won’t know the answer until we get there. All we know at this stage is that the Administratum reported losing contact with the miners about a week ago, and requested the SDF to take a look. They haven’t got the manpower aboard a system defence boat to muster a boarding party large enough, so they requested some backup from the PDF, who thoughtfully provided a platoon of fungs[6] just out of basic. Which means they’ll be jumpy, especially if it turns out the first sweep missed a few ’nids, and they’ve been snacking on the civvies. Which means in turn that you get some much-needed field experience.’ Herding a bunch of PDF trolls shouldn’t be all that taxing, and would be the perfect opportunity to see how well my cadets were able to perform away from the schola. ‘Any questions?’
‘How are we going to be deployed?’ Kayla asked. She looked at the schematic of the mine again. ‘Those tunnels seem far too narrow for any large concentration of troops.’
