Imperial creed, p.1
Imperial Creed, page 1
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.
PROLOGUE
The doom began with Mistral. It would reach far beyond that system, and there are those of us who feel its effects to this day. But it began with Mistral. It began ten years before the arrival of a freshly minted commissar named Sebastian Yarrick.
Throne, was I ever that young?
The vector of the doom was Preacher Guilhem. Called to the Ecclesiarchy from birth, he had ministered to the manufactorum workers of Mistral for more than a century and a half, moving from one baronial holding to another. Only rarely did he preach in the chapels of the homes belonging to the great families. In all those decades, he had never sought advancement, and it had most certainly never been offered. He was one of the anonymous millions of low-level servants of the Adeptus Ministorum, those priests whose lives are a single, unending sacrifice to the glory of our God-Emperor. This did not make him a saint. I never met him, but Rasp would come to hear much about the man. He was a vicious old bastard. Defending the faith against the heretic and the xenos demands an indomitable rigidity, but Guilhem had reached a point in his life where holy dogmatism had become little more than bitterness and a generalized resentment towards anyone whose behaviour rubbed him the wrong way. Which, by now, had come to mean everyone. The men and women who worked the weapon forges of Mistral were drones, so exhausted by the end of their shifts that their demonstrations of faith, however honest, lacked the fire Guilhem demanded, and any shred of intellectual engagement. He responded with sermons whose spiritual worth had, over the years, been eroded a grain at a time until they had been reduced to a core of hectoring abuse. He had lost his calling, but he did not know it yet.
On the day Guilhem took the first steps that would lead to the deaths of millions, he spent twelve hours preaching to rotating shifts of workers in the chapel of Vahnsinn Manufactorum 17, on the edges of Hive Arral. It took the full twelve hours for him to remind every worker of that forge of the duties of faith and the unworthiness of the individual. Twelve hours of sermons, of projecting his voice to the back of the nave without the aid of a vox-speaker. It was deep night when, his responsibilities to Vahnsinn 17 discharged for the week, he set off on the long hike from the chapel to the hab complex where he would sleep for a few hours before heading off to the next manufactorum, there to begin the cycle again.
The paved route to the habs was circuitous, winding between several open-pit mines and immense materiel warehouses. Guilhem took a shortcut instead. He scrambled over slag heaps and wandered through a wasteland of dark red rock and eternal, corrosive wind. About a kilometre from the chapel he was walking over a flat, scoured plain, squinting against the incessant sting of dust. He’d taken this route before. The area wasn’t a well-frequented one – the seams had proved unpromising. Because little work had been done here, he had no reason to believe the ground was unstable.
On this day, it was. The rock beneath his feet vanished, leaving only air. He dropped down a narrow chute. The walls battered him from side to side as he fell. He heard cracks that he would not know until afterwards were his left arm being smashed like porcelain. His head took so many blows, coherent thought was so much broken glass when he hit the bottom.
He lay where he had fallen for a long time, writhing. His lungs were flattened, and it was half a minute before his screams had any sound. Then they bounced off the rock, distortions of his pain coming back in his face. Hours passed, perhaps even a day, and the truths sank in one by one. No one would find him. Death would not be quick, but it would come, and it would be painful.
If he had not taken that shortcut, if he had walked two paces to the right over the plain, if he had broken his fool neck on the way down… So many ifs, so many moments that could have prevented the damnation to come. But of course he took that path. Of course he fell. Nothing was avoidable. Everything was preordained.
I’ve seen too much to have any real faith in chance.
I don’t know how long it was before he heard the whispers. He must have been down there for a considerable span, lying broken in the endless night. I know something of what he went through. I have weathered my own such fall. What I don’t have for him is sympathy. He was the voice of the Imperial Creed in that small corner of the Imperium on that particular day, and his responsibility to remain true to it was no less than that of the Ecclesiarch himself. He failed in his duty.
Dereliction disgusts me. There is only one answer for it. And every fool who resents the role of the Commissariat should look to the example of Preacher Guilhem. He was one man. He was insignificant. Yet his failure had an incalculable cost.
His failure was not that he heard the whispers, but that he listened to them. Perhaps they had always been present on Mistral, waiting for a receptive ear. Perhaps they were called by the desperation of a weak man. What I know, and what matters, is that they offered Guilhem a bargain, and he took it. The man who had blustered and browbeaten all within earshot gave up everything he was sworn to uphold when faced with his own death. He was rotten, hollow, and his will snapped as easily as his bones.
He was also a fool. He gained nothing in the bargain. When he emerged from the pit, his body renewed, he had bought himself very little more time. He would be one of the first to die in the name of his new mission. And with every step he took towards the hab complex, the doom came marching for us.
CHAPTER 1
OBSERVE AND LEARN
1. Yarrick
I watched the deployment embarkation as if seeing one for the first time. There was a strong element of truth to that impression. During my years as a storm trooper I had taken part in many mobilizations, many invasions, but I had always been in the midst of the troop formations – one cog among thousands of others, marching into the drop-ships. Now, briefly, I stood apart from the great mass of the troops. I was on a balcony overlooking the loading bay of the Scythe of Terra. For the first time I saw the full spectacle of a regiment about to enforce the Emperor’s will. The perspective drove home the magnificence of the engine of war that was the Imperial Guard. Below me was the 77th Mortisian Infantry Regiment. The sons and daughters of the dying hive-world of Aighe Mortis stood at attention in phalanxes of geometric perfection. They were no longer individuals. They were a collective entity, a massive fist as clockwork and unwavering in its precision as the limb of any Titan. I saw and understood how right and proper was the anonymity I had known before. I had been completely replaceable. I was still, only now I was required to understand why.
This was what I was learning from my new vantage point, in my new identity, in my new uniform. The peaked cap and the greatcoat with its epaulettes creating an imposing silhouette, the colours of authority and discipline embodied in the dress black and the crimson collar: this apparel obliterated the identity of its wearer as surely as had my storm trooper armour, or the khaki fatigues of the Mortisians. But where the troop uniforms merged the self into a force-multiplying whole, my garb stood out. Visibility was vital to the commissar. He had to be seen in order to inspire courage and fear. The clothes were the symbols of authority, of righteousness, of discipline. They were what bore the meaning of the rank. The actions that were carried out when they were worn had to be worthy of them, and were crucial to maintaining their power and honour. The actual individual under the cap was irrelevant.
So I thought.
I was not alone on the balcony. I was there with Dominic Seroff. Together we had been the terror of our dorms at the schola progenium. Smiling fate had seen us in the same platoon, inflicting terror of a different sort on the heretic and the xenos. Now, as I answered the calling I had felt for as long as I can remember, Seroff too had donned the black coat. I on the right, Seroff on the left, we flanked a legend. Lord Commissar Simeon Rasp had summoned us to witness the final minutes before embarkation. On a grand podium opposite the hull doors, Colonel Georg Granach held forth to the soldiers of the regiment, praising their faith and zeal, and prophesying martia
‘Tell me what you see,’ Rasp said.
I glanced away from the troops, and caught Seroff looking my way. Each of us was inviting the other to speak first and get it wrong. The set of Seroff’s mouth told me he was willing to let the silence stretch to embarrassing lengths. I knew his canniness. He knew my eagerness. I had already lost. It was simply a matter of recognizing that fact.
Seroff looked too young to be a commissar. He had somehow made it through our dozens of battle zones without picking up a single scar. He still had the face of a joker. With his blond curls struggling to push his cap off his head, I wondered how seriously troopers would take him as a commissar. I sometimes wondered how seriously he took his role himself. The contrast with Rasp bordered on the grotesque. The lord commissar waited, impassive, for one of us to answer. His eyes did not move from the floor of the bay, but I knew he was watching us both. His hair, now invisible under his cap, was a close-cropped and dirty white. His angular features had a youthful strength thanks to juvenat treatments, but they had also been sharpened by long experience. He did have scars. The most noticeable was a harsh ‘V’ that ran the length of his cheekbones, coming to the point just below his nose. It was a souvenir of an encounter with the eldar. The xenos who had branded him had not survived.
I took a breath, bowed to the inevitable, and answered. ‘I see what I did not fully understand before now,’ I said. ‘In the Guard, the individual is irrelevant. It is the mass–’
Rasp raised a finger, cutting me off. ‘No,’ he said. His voice was quiet but drew attention with as much force as if it were drowning out the colonel’s vox-amplified speech. ‘If that were true,’ Rasp said, ‘there would be very little need for commissars.’ He pulled his bolt pistol out of his holster. Holding the barrel in his left hand, he placed the stock in his right, keeping his fingers open. ‘Not one of my fingers is strong enough, on its own, to hold this pistol and fire it.’ He closed his fist, lifted the pistol one-handed. ‘With all of them working as one, I am lethal.’
Seroff frowned. ‘Isn’t that what Yarrick said?’
Rasp shook his head. ‘You are both missing an essential element. If I were to lose even one of my fingers, I could still fire the weapon but my accuracy and my speed would be compromised. Lose the thumb or the forefinger and I will be hard-pressed to do more than simply hold the gun.’ His eyes, a cold blue so pale they were almost white, flicked over each of us in turn, judging whether his instruction was sinking in. ‘Am I making myself clear?’
‘The collective strength is created by that of individuals,’ Seroff said.
‘Ignore the importance of specific positions at your peril,’ I added.
Rasp returned the pistol to his belt. ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘It falls to us, to you, to preserve the health of the whole by ensuring the proper functioning of the part. And should the finger be gangrenous…’
‘Sever it,’ I said, ‘and take its place.’
Rasp gave a single nod. The lesson was over.
We listened to the rest of Granach’s speech. He had moved on from broad considerations of regimental honour to the specifics of the mission. Or at least, he had pretended to do so. What he said was little different from any number of commanding officer exhortations I had heard, back when I had been one of the thousands on the embarkation deck. Granach struck me as working from a script, one he had trotted out many times before. He spoke with energy and enthusiasm, but his delivery was over-rehearsed. The more I watched him, the more I saw a man discharging a difficult but necessary duty, one he would be happy to see over and done.
Rasp grunted. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I hope you’re noting the colonel’s oratory. I have the greatest respect for his tactical prowess, but he is no rhetorician. What, in your estimation, is the problem here?’
‘Too familiar,’ I said.
A thin smile from the lord commissar. ‘Precisely. How many times have you both heard the same vague thoughts, assembled with very similar words?’
Seroff shrugged. ‘Isn’t it all an inevitable but necessary ritual?’
A single shake of the head, as precise and emphatic as the one nod earlier. ‘Is it necessary that the troops be addressed? Yes. But the address should never be ritualized. Its truth becomes robbed of urgency. It fails to inspire. Have you read the Legomenon Victoriae of Lord Commander Solar Macharius?’
I had. Seroff hadn’t. He tried to bluff by looking very focused and interested, as if he were comparing a Macharian address to Granach’s current effort and would come up with a cogent answer in another few moments.
Rasp wasn’t fooled. ‘Correct that lacuna, Commissar Seroff. You will see the true art of the military speech. Read but one address and you will be already well launched on a new crusade. When you stand before warriors, you must inspire them.’ He made a sweeping arm gesture towards the deck. ‘I know, as do you, that too many of those soldiers are, whether they know it themselves or not, politely waiting for Colonel Granach to finish so they can get on with it. That is not how it should be.’ He favoured first Seroff and then me with a hard look. ‘That is how it must never be when you speak. Your authority will inspire fear in the troops who fall under your eye. This is right and necessary, but it is not enough. The mere sight of you must grant them fire. And when they hear you, they must be happy to give up their lives.’ He paused. ‘At great cost to the enemy, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I agreed.
Rasp listened to Granach a few moments more, then grimaced. ‘Word for word,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘These generalities are death,’ he told us. ‘Except in cases of necessary secrecy, tell these loyal servants of the Emperor why they are about to kill and die. Let them know the stakes. Give them a sense of purpose. Tell them why we are here. You heard General Rallam’s address to the commanding officers. His style is rather too clipped, but he was precise.
‘Commissar Yarrick. Tell me why we are here.’
‘We have come, at the request of Cardinal Wangenheim, to suppress a heretical uprising led by Baron Bartholomew Lom of Mistral.’
A snort. ‘True, but rather bluntly put. If you were speaking to your charges, you would find more of the poetry of war in your soul, I trust. I once heard you when I visited the schola progenium, Yarrick. I know what you are capable of. But yes. We have come to quell the turbulent Baron Lom.’
Rasp looked up, away from the assembly. His gaze drifted to the outer hull doors. He seemed to be staring through them, as if he could see Mistral turning below.
‘Lord commissar?’ Seroff asked.
No answer at first. There was a faint tightening of his jaw, the only sign of an internal debate. Finally, he said, ‘You are political officers. You know this, but I wonder if you have grasped the full implications of that fact. Your duties are to guard against deviation. The realities will mean rather more. Necessity will drive you to swim in murky waters.’
He fell silent. He hadn’t disclosed anything truly revelatory. He had articulated that which was never said, but understood by all but the most naïve. There was something else he was on the verge of saying. I hesitated before speaking, but as the seconds mounted in silence, I realized that the moment was slipping away. I decided to be direct.
No, that’s a lie. I didn’t decide. I have always been direct. That is my special curse. It is also, I know, why I have been seen as a curse myself. That’s a thought to keep me warm at night.
‘Are the waters of Mistral murky?’ I asked.
Rasp made a noise in his throat, a stillborn laugh. ‘So the local expression would have it. It’s been years since I last set foot on its surface. But I would be surprised if matters have changed for the better since then.’
‘They can’t have,’ Seroff said. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.’
‘True. And yet…’ Rasp frowned. He thought for a moment, and then his expression cleared. He had come down on one side of a hard deliberation, and was now at peace with his conscience. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this mission appears to be very straightforward – an insurgency that is beyond the abilities of local forces to contain, but that is nevertheless limited in scope. Our rapid triumph is a certain conclusion, and is therefore not to be trusted. When matters are at their most cut-and-dried is when you must be most wary.’
