Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

Nevertheless, as the battle continued to rage, Commissar Cain’s frustration at being, for once, out of the thick of the fighting palpable in his voxed exhortations of encouragement, the balance began to tip inexorably in favour of the xenos interlopers. For a moment, indeed, every woman and man of us held her or his breath, preparing for the onslaught, resolute in our duty and our loyalty to the Golden Throne until, with a loud huzzah!, our Sentinel squadron burst from the cover of the abandoned warehouses surrounding us to take the enemy by surprise in their turn. Caught between this fresh threat and the newly emboldened convoy escorts, the eldar began to waver, only to see one of the Dreadnoughts chewed to pieces by a Hydra, which had followed the example of the Chimeras and redirected its fire towards the targets on the ground. Strictly against standing doctrine, but under the circumstances I felt the gunner’s show of initiative was justified, if not actually commendable.

That was the final straw, and the whole pack turned, retreating in remarkably good order, but retreating none the less.

So ended the first major battle with the eldar, but it was a victory I felt was hard won – so much so that the thought of how close we had come to defeat continued to worry me for some days afterwards, spurring us all on to do our utmost to ensure our ultimate victory.

Three

‘How are we supposed to keep the bastards contained when we don’t even know where they’re coming from?’ Kasteen asked, glaring at the hololith in the command centre as though it had just said something deeply offensive about her parentage. At the moment there were no confirmed enemy contacts marked, although a few runes indicated possible sightings within the last day or so. Since they’d all been reported by local militia units, who never ventured out of their comfortably heated transports or beyond their assigned patrol areas around the most populous hab zones, none of us were inclined to give them much credence though. ‘And where the hell do they go afterwards?’

‘Just what we’ve been asking ourselves ever since they first arrived,’ our constant, unwelcome and uninvited guest put in dryly. Kelso Proktor was our liaison with the local governor’s office, a fairly thankless task to give him his due, since the governor herself had barely so much as acknowledged our presence. In fact she’d made it abundantly clear from the moment of our arrival that she resented the imposition of an Astra Militarum regiment on her world, remaining convinced in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that her own local militia would have had the xenos interlopers on the run in short order.28 Proktor was dressed in the grey vestments of a senior Administratum adept, and everything about him, from his pallor to the tenor of his voice, seemed designed to blur the boundary between the man and his clothing. On the plus side, I’d noticed, he tended to say what he thought regardless of how it might be received, took the time to consider whatever information was to hand before offering an opinion, and displayed occasional signs of a sense of humour rare in a bureaucrat of his eminence – which, I strongly suspected, went a long way towards explaining how he’d managed to hack off the governor enough to be assigned to us.

‘Ciaphas?’ Broklaw looked at me appraisingly over the lip of his tanna bowl, squinting a little through the rising steam. Through long habit I’d made sure (or, to be more accurate, made sure Jurgen made sure) that the samovar was close to the main briefing area, where I spent the bulk of my time ostensibly analysing what meagre intelligence we’d been able to gather about the enemy and their movements. Though the Valhallans around me, manning vox and data lecterns for the most part, were in shirt sleeves, the air temperature was still hovering at levels more suited to the preservation of meat, and a ready supply of warm beverages was at least as essential to my relative comfort as my Commissariat-issue greatcoat (for which I’d been constantly grateful since first being assigned to a regiment from an iceworld). ‘You’ve seen more of the eldar than the rest of us. What do you think?’

I shrugged, as though my previous encounters with the creatures had been of little interest or concern, although they’d taken me as close to death as I’d ever been on a couple of occasions.29 ‘We were hardly on social terms,’ I said, noting the shadow of a smile on Proktor’s face at the remark with a flicker of gratified surprise. Kasteen and Broklaw had become used to my pose of self-deprecating humour over the years, and it was nice to see that it still worked on other people. ‘But they seem to get around by using some kind of tunnels through space. Which is why they’re so damnably hard to pin down, of course.’