Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘We don’t need to assign a scouting party to each objective,’ Brok­law said, replacing Proktor at the hololith controls, to the markedly increased agitation of the hovering tech-priest. He poked at them for a moment, overlaying long, looping paths across the locations the Administratum adept had highlighted. ‘Two or three should be enough, if we’re prepared to wait another couple of days for them to complete the circuit.’

‘Works for me,’ Kasteen said, and I nodded my own agreement. Not that it was strictly necessary, given my position outside the chain of command, but we’d worked together long enough to trust each other’s judgement, and it never hurt to have the record show that the regimental commissar was on side too. She indicated the longest of the loops. ‘Shambas can take that one. The Sentinels will move faster over broken terrain than the Chimeras can.’

‘It’s what they’re for, after all,’ I concurred. The Sentinel troop was on our SO&E35 as a scout unit, although the walkers’ ability to move ­rapidly through a combat zone and deliver a considerable punch with their multilasers when they reached their objective made them pretty useful for hit-and-run attacks, or outflanking a static or slow-moving enemy, too. If Kasteen hadn’t thrown them in against the eldar Dreadnoughts, turning the xenos’ own tactics against them, things would probably have turned out far worse. ‘Who else are you sending?’

Kasteen shrugged. ‘I’ll get Sulla to assign one of her platoon commanders to sort it out. A couple of squads apiece ought to do it.’ Which made sense. The two vehicles could watch each other’s backs, and in the event of one being disabled by mishap or enemy action no one would be left stranded in the wilderness – although the ride back would be uncomfortably crowded.

‘That’s what I’d do,’ Broklaw said, and sighed with as close as he ever got to visible frustration, at least with a civilian within earshot. ‘But what I wouldn’t give for a Valkyrie or two.’

I nodded; with a couple of the sturdy aerial transports at our disposal we could have checked out all the sites in a matter of hours. The 597th, however, had no aerial assets of its own, relying on liaising with other regiments when they were required – or, if there was no other alternative, the local planetary defence force. As we were the only Imperial Guard regiment on Drechia, however, the first was not an option, and since the eldar had shot down all the local aircraft in the early days of their campaign, neither was the second.

‘And if wishing made it so, Horus would be the Emperor,’ I concluded, falling back on one of the platitudes from my childhood which censorious adults used to use to manage over-inflated expectations,36 though inflecting it as a joke, in case it was taken for a genuine rebuke. ‘We’ll just have to make do with what we’ve got.’

‘We always do,’ Kasteen said.

Four

Our Sentinels went stomping off into the swirling, blood-tinged snow shortly after dawn the next day, their pilots waving cheerily from the open cockpits, despite the bone-freezing temperatures which had me watching on a vid screen from the relative warmth of the command centre – a former planetary defence force facility into which we’d been welcomed on our arrival with every outward courtesy and barely concealed resentment. It was far from the first time the 597th had found itself in this kind of position, though, and I’d been able to bring the commanders round fairly quickly by asking their advice about local conditions (which we generally ignored) and chairing interminable liaison meetings until we were actively cooperating as much as could be expected under the circumstances.

In the interests of keeping our reluctant allies on side I’d invited their lord marshal (who, in a less protocol-obsessed society, would just have been the most senior general and addressed as such) and a handful of his aides to join us for a briefing on what we were up to, and to witness the departure of our scouting parties. In the interests of staying warm, and keeping them out from under the feet of the rest of the regiment, I’d offered to keep them entertained with a pict show while Kasteen and Broklaw got on with some proper work. Needless to say my inflated reputation more than came into its own here, our guests delighted to be hobnobbing with a Hero of the Imperium, while I was perfectly happy to stay out of the wind, drink tanna, and not get shot at by any passing eldar.

‘I imagine you wish you were going with them,’ the lord marshal said, cradling the bowl of tanna Jurgen had just handed him, while breathing through his mouth until my aide had moved a couple of paces away. Which was the sort of thing people imagined all the time, although why they might think I was eager to put myself in imminent danger of a messy and painful death after having narrowly avoided one so often before was beyond me.