Sandy Mitchell - The Emperor's Finest

Editorial Note:

This selection from the Cain Archive is taken from a relatively brief but far from uneventful, period of Cain's life, when he was attached to the command staff at brigade headquarters as an independent commissar. Reviewing the records of these half-dozen years, it's not hard to see why he arranged to be reassigned to a regiment on active service at the earliest opportunity, as even this would have seemed relatively safe in comparison to some of the assignments which came his way, a consequence of his unwanted reputation for heroism which he seems to have found both natural and inconvenient in the extreme. (A reputation which, true to form, he continues to insist throughout the current extract is completely undeserved. Many of my readers have taken this claim at face value, and many others have construed it as a rather engaging blindness to his own virtues, having known him personally, I tend to the view that the truth is a little more complicated than either postulation.)

I have already disseminated several of his subsequent exploits with the Valhallan 597th, and see no need to recapitulate the circumstances of his finally getting his wish. Instead, I've chosen to concentrate on what may have been the pivotal incident of that period of his life, the consequences of which were to reverberate for decades to come. With hindsight, too, we can discern the first faint breath of wind destined to become a storm which threatened to engulf the entire Eastern Arm by the turn of the millennium.

I was also influenced in my choice of material by the reflection that this selection answers a number of questions raised and left open by some of the previous extracts I've edited and circulated among my fellow inquisitors, not least of which is the nature of his connection to the Reclaimers Astartes Chapter; and the circumstances surrounding his involvement in their ill-advised boarding of the space hulk ''Spawn of Damnation''. Since the details of his appointment as Imperial Guard liaison officer to the Chapter, and his eventful journey to meet them, have been covered in one of the short extracts I've already disseminated, I've chosen not to repeat the material here, but to begin Cain's account of events with the Viridia Campaign itself.

As always, I've endeavoured to clarify matters where appropriate, by the use of footnotes and the interpolation of additional information by other hands, especially where Cain's habit of concentrating on the relatively trivial incidents which affected him personally threatens to lose sight of the bigger picture. The bulk of what follows, however, is unadulterated Cain, and as idiosyncratic as ever.

Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos.

IT'S NOT OFTEN I'm happy to find myself heading into a war zone as fast as the warp currents can carry me, but in the case of the Viridia Campaign I was prepared to make an exception. My journey there had been eventful, to say the least. Having taken passage on an Adeptus Mechanicus transport heading in roughly the right direction, I found myself fleeing for my life through a necron tomb world, which my hosts had been incautious enough to start poking around en route. If it hadn't been for the fortuitous arrival of a ship from the Reclaimers Astartes Chapter, there would have been no survivors of the affair at all. As it was, I'd escaped by the skin of my teeth, and more luck than anyone has a right to expect. I don't suppose anyone will believe a word of it, though, so I'll get on with a tale I can prove. As I doubt anyone's ever going to read these ramblings of mine, it's all academic in any case.

I can't say I remember much about my first few days aboard the strike cruiser Revenant but that's hardly surprising given the condition in which I boarded it. When I came to, it was to find myself in a spartan sanatorium, occupying a bed which seemed far too big for me, while faces I didn't recognise swam in and out of the mist which seemed to be hovering just in front of my eyeballs.

'Commissar,' a voice which sounded impossibly deep, rich, and resonant asked. 'Are you awake?'

For a moment I doubted that, still comfortably insulated from reality by the pharmaceuticals cluttering up my bloodstream. To my drug-addled mind, the voice sounded like that of the Emperor Himself, and I found myself wondering if I should have spent a bit more time in the temple, and a bit less in bars, gambling dens and bordellos, but it seemed a little late to be worrying about that now. If I had indeed arrived at the Golden Throne, I'd just have to hope its occupant was in a good mood, and try to steer the conversation on to safer ground at the earliest opportunity. Then one of the indistinct faces swam close enough for me to focus on, and memory belatedly kicked in.

'I think so,' I husked, vaguely surprised by how thin my voice sounded. For a moment I wondered if it was due to disuse, and feared I'd been unconscious for weeks, but as my faculties began to trickle back, I realised that it simply sounded feeble in comparison to the one which had addressed me. Almost at once, memory followed, and I relived my desperate dive through the necron warp portal, and my arrival aboard their ship just in time to encounter a Space Marine boarding party. 'The metal creatures,' I asked urgently 'Are they dead?'

'A debatable point,' one of the trio of giants surrounding me said, and smiled, in a somewhat unsettling manner. A mechanical claw, which looked as though it would have been more at home attached to a power loader, hovered behind his shoulder, in the manner of a tech-priest's mechadendrites.

The one looming over me shot him a reproving look and turned back to the bed I was lying on. Though thinly padded, it seemed damnably hard for an infirmary. 'You'll have to excuse Drumon's sense of humour, commissar. It's not always appropriate.' A hand as broad as a dinner plate slipped behind my shoulders and helped me to rise to a sitting position, bringing more of my surroundings into view. Gleaming metal surfaces, burnished like a drill sergeant's boots, were everywhere, making the place feel more like a Mechanicus shrine than a place of healing. If it hadn't been for the pervasive aroma of counterseptics, and the icon of the Emperor, in His aspect of the Great Healer, gazing at me sternly from the wall opposite, I might never have realised I was in a sanatorium at all. Most of the equipment I'd expect to see in such a place was absent, perhaps tidied away in the featureless metal lockers ranged against the wall, and what little there was still visible meant nothing to me. 'I'm Apothecary Sholer, of the Reclaimers. And in answer to your question, their vessel was destroyed.'

Which didn't exactly answer the question, of course, but it sounded good enough to me at the time. (Knowing what I know now about the necrons, I wouldn't even have bothered to ask, but it was the first time I'd encountered them, don't forget. These days I wouldn't count them out if the entire planet they were standing on had been razed.)

'Ciaphas Cain,' I said, inclining my head courteously and immediately wishing I hadn't. 'I believe I'm your new Imperial Guard liaison officer.'

'That's my understanding too,' the third giant said, speaking for the first time. Like the others, he was dressed in ceramite armour of a dull, off-white colour, with yellow gauntlets, although his was inlaid with a great deal more ornamentation than the suits of his comrades. He bowed his head. 'Captain Gries, commanding the Viridian Expeditionary Force. It appears your reputation was less exaggerated than we believed.'

'Indeed,' the Techmarine Sholer had introduced as Drumon said, his mechanical claw flexing slightly as he spoke. 'Few men could have escaped unscathed from a necron tomb world.'