no love for the flares

>>4869233
it's rare that a drawfag would bother with this

Despite being a troll, I have to admire your persistence.

That's not Flare.


THIS is Flare.

>>4869273
what makes you think it's the original troll?

Sure

>>4869303

The thought of more than one person being damaged enough to do this every fucking day is too depressing to consider.

>>4869273
OC because this girl. It annoys me.

>>4869233

I just realized...

Flare has only one wing...

And that I knew it's name when I saw the pi-

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

Here.

WHY IS SHE A TURKEY

Flare is not even turkey shaped this image is inaccurate this is a run on sentence spicalums

Oh man look at her big, beautiful eyes. I love flare, hope someone draws this.

mamba

Somewhere out behind a black wall of monsoon rain and beyond our wire, the Vindicaire laughs.

I laugh too.

Naked except for a Cadian tri-dome mark XI helmet bearing the sigil ‘412’, I rise up from my bed of wet clay in the bottom of a slit trench. I climb, scuttling like a crab, to the top of a sandbagged bunker. Mud-soaked and shivering, I hunker down. I listen. Holding my breath, I listen and I wait, afraid to breathe.

I grunt. I stand up, ramrod straight. I tuck my chin into my Adam’s apple and I strut to the edge of the bunker top, fists-on-hips like a Whiteshield Instructor.

I say, “LISTEN UP, MAGGOT!” I do an about-face. March back, about-face again. Looking sharp, standing tall, lean and mean. “DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?”

I’m a stone-cold comedian yelling punch lines into No Man’s Land. It's a midnight comedy show in the last days of the Pavonis Starport siege. I am show business for the shadow-things that crawl and slither out in the darkness beyond our wire. At any moment forty thousand heavily-armed, frenzon-crazed Greater Good individuals can come in screaming from out of the swirling fog.

I say, “BLESSED IS THE MIND TOO SMALL FOR DOUBT! THOSE I CANNOT CRUSH WITH WORDS l WILL CRUSH WITH THE TANKS OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD! GIVE ME BUT A THOUSAND MEN WHO ARE CRAZY ENOUGH TO CONQUER HELL AND WE’LL DO IT! ZEAL IS ITS OWN EXCUSE! SEND MORE ORKS! SEND MORE ORKS!”

I wait for a reply. I listen. But nothing happens.

I pick up a broken broom handle. On one end of the broom handle is nailed a ragged pair of red silk panties—Maria’s Drawers. I lift the broom handle and I wave the red silk panties back and forth like a battle flag.

The only sounds from beyond the wire are creaking frogs and the drumming of the monsoon rain.

I throw down Maria’s Drawers. Then, with both hands, I give the Vindicaire the finger.

Midnight. The Aquila is out. Ghosts are out.

The winter monsoon is blowing so hard that it is raining sideways. Meanwhile, the silence beyond the rumble of the rain is growing larger.

I sit down in an old aluminum lawn chair on top of an abandoned perimeter bunker at Pavonis Starport 6. Cold bullets of monsoon rain wash mud from my body. With my battered khaki-grey helmet shielding my face, I lean back and get comfortable. My right hand is touching the wet metal of a field vox under my chair.

Between my bare feet is a heavy bolter set up on its bipod legs. I pick up my long black killing tool. It makes me feel less naked when I hold it.

A smooth feed might save my life, so I adjust the heavy belt of clean golden bullets. Every fifth round is a red-tipped tracer. When I am one hundred percent satisfied that there are no kinks in the belt, I slam the feed cover down hard and jack a round in the chamber. Happiness is a belt-fed weapon.

The Vindicaires laughs, a cold black laugh.

Maybe if I ignore the Vindicaires he'll go away. If you try to debate philosophical issues with the Vindicaire, and lose the debate, well, he just comes right up and kills your ass. The Vindicaire has never talked to me and I am very disappointed. I could use the distraction of stimulating conversation. Life at the starport has always been tired but wired. Now that the siege has been lifted we need something to keep our mind occupied because boredom makes us think too much.

Meanwhile, the Vindicaire comes every night and the suspense is killing me.

At Starport Combat Base 6 in Pavonis Province of the planet Kronus, the Imperial Guard has sometimes lacked grace under pressure, but we have stuck it out, just the same. We have burrowed into this dead hill like maggots. We have clung to the burned edge of reality and we have not let go.

This is it, the big game. The championships. The Regiment’s honour is at stake. This is the biggest game of your life and you're playing it for keeps. You're playing with the black ball. A sudden move at the wrong time could be your last. A slow move at the wrong time could be your last. And not moving at all could be fatal.

The Guardsmen of Kronus hate the Vindicaire but we need him very much. In Kronus you've got to hate something or you will lose your mind.

There are a lot of stories about the Vindicaire.

Along the Green Coast, the Vindicaire was a Catachan Lieutenant who inspects defensive positions at bridge security compounds. The next night, they get hit by Ork Kommandoz.

North of Victory Bay, the Vindicaire is a salt and pepper team of snuffy grunts who guide the Guard patrols into L-shaped ambushes set by the Eldar.

Elysian Drop Troops claim a probable kill for shooting the Vindicaire in the Panrea Lowlands. The Vindicaire was a human, tall and pale, with black hair, wearing a black stealth suit and a red headband, and armed with a folding-stock flechette rifle. Recon swears that—and this is no shit— the human was the boss, the leader, of the Eldar patrol.

The Vindicaire started visiting Pavonis the night after the siege was lifted by Operation Pegasus. But only one Guardsman at Pavonis has ever seen the Vindicaire's face.

There was no moon that night, but one of our scout snipers had the Vindicaire targeted in a starlight scope. As he sighted in, the scout sniper described the Vindicaire's face to his spotter. In midsentence the scout sniper went plain fucking crazy.

When they medevaced the scout sniper at dawn the next morning, he still had not said another word.

The Vindicaire has many names. Supa-Dakka. The Aquila Eldar. The Soft-Skinned Flash Git. Raven Cusser. Imperitau. Master Blaster.

But whatever name we use, we all know in our hearts the true identity of the Vindicaire. He is the dark spirit of our collective bad consciences made real and dangerous. He once was one of us, a servant of his Divine Majesty. He knows what we think. He knows how we operate. He knows how Guardsmen fight and what Guardsmen fear.

The Vindicaire is an Imperial Guard defector who deals in payback. Slack is one word the Vindicaire does not understand.

Like his Eldar comrades, the Vindicaire is a hard-core night fighter. When the day turns black and the sun goes down, everything beyond our wire is overrun by the Eldar, one more time. Every time the sun goes down, we lose the war.

Every night, the Vindicaire is on the prowl, armed with an Exitus sniper rifle. The Vindicaire attacks without warning from out of the darkness, the one incorruptible bearer of the one unendurable truth.

“Go home,” the Vindicaire says, every night. And we want to go home, we really do, but we don’t know how.

“Go home,” the Vindicaire says, without mercy, over and over, again and again, punctuating his sentences with cracks from his rifle

A hit from an Exitus is just the Vindicaire’s way of telling us that we are running out of slack.

During the past week the Vindicaire has wasted Lieutenant Cen Andron, Sergeant Bayer, and that skinny native, Larium. And he killed Edddard Mils, Harrick, and that medic everybody loved, Jieyn Archid. Then he killed Baetrius, my friend. He probably even killed Jergaul, the meanest, hardest Shock Trooper I ever knew.

Every night the Vindicaire comes into our wire and talks to one Guardsman. There are no philosophers in a foxhole. Any dumb trooper who starts to think too much becomes dangerous, both to himself and to his unit.

While I wait for the Vindicaire to attack, I keep my eyes turned outwards to avoid looking at the damage we have inflicted upon ourselves. For months we have been shelled, shelled every day, shelled by the numbers, sometimes as many as fifteen thousand incoming rounds per day. Rusting shrapnel lies scattered across this wire-strapped plateau like pebbles on the beach. The rinky-dinks beat on us with their hard enemy metal and we give the finger to the big guns in Eres and we say: “They can kill us, but they can’t eat us.”

What lasbolts coming out of the dark and one hundred thousand rounds of heavy Astartes and Tau ordnance coming in a day have failed to do, we have done to ourselves. We are blowing up our bunkers. We are tearing up our wire.

Last week a secret evac convoy rolled out of Pavonis carrying a garrison of five thousand men eleven klicks east to Landing Zone Bellarius, leaving behind only a few hundred Guardsmen from Delta, Charlie, and India companies as security for the 11th Agrapinaa Combat Engineers and their heavy earth-moving equipment.

In two days the flying cranes will carry off the last pieces of sacred techno-sorcery and the last of the Guardsmen grunts on Kronus will sky out on gunships. Then, when night falls, the jungle will emerge from out of the darkness and will move like a black glacier across the red clay of No Man’s Land and will silently consume our trash-strewn fortress.

And back in the Worlds, no one will ever know about our self-inflicted Siege of the Imperial Palace.

Cold and wet, holding my bolter across my lap, I wait.

At zero-three-hundred, prime time for a ground attack and our peak killing hour, Sedewitz, our vox-operator, hops over the sandbagged trench line along the perimeter and slides down into the wire while heavy monsoon rain slants down, battering him in translucent sheets.

Down in the kill zone, Sedewitz moves through budding gardens of metal planted thick with deadly antipersonnel mines. Stepping cautiously through shaped charges, trip flares, and tanglefoot, Sedewitz quietly and efficiently robs dead men of their postage stamps.

Tau grunts hang in our wire all the time, little blue and green and pink mummies who have paid the price, enemy military personnel who got caught in the wire and gunned down, their mouldy mustard-colored khaki armour and weapons splotched with brown, their nostrils clogged with dried blood, bugs crawling on their teeth.

Enemy sappers crawl into our wire every night. Your basic operational model Tau will take six hours to crawl six meters. Sappers cut attack lanes in the wire, tape the wire back, and then smear the tape with mud. They turn our shaped charges around. Sometimes a gung ho sapper will get close enough to heave a fourteen-pound satchel charge into a perimeter bunker. Those who don’t blow themselves up on an antipersonnel mine get hung up in the wire or trip a flare. Then we demonstrate Cadian hospitality by grenading them and shooting them to death.

Incoming patrols sometimes bring in confirmed kills and throw them into the wire as war trophies.

The Tau Hunter Cadres like to probe us with ground attacks. They drag their wounded off to tunnel hospitals. They bury their dead in shallow graves in mangrove swamps. Wasted Tau unlucky enough to get left behind hang in the triple strand concertina wire until maggots hollow them out from the inside and they fall apart.

Rotting corpses can get to smelling pretty bad sometimes. We really should bury them, but we don’t. Nobody likes to police up dead xenos. You grab confirmed kills by the ankles or by the wrists and their arms and legs come off in your hands like sticks. If you try to pick up what’s left of the torso sometimes your fingers slip into an exit wound and then you’re standing there with a handful of maggots.

Besides, we enjoy throwing dead xenos into the wire. A dead xeno hanging in our wire in less than mint condition is a handy audio-visual aid to keep our enemies honest. We want everybody we do business with to know who we are and what we stand for and take seriously.

Now down in the rain in the dark Sedewitz is digging into mildewed pockets for colourful bits of gummed paper.

It all started when Sedewitz pulled an R&R after being shot through the hips. He took the mag-train to the Order of Serenity’s main hospital at the starport, scarfed up all the hot food and local delicacies, and took long hot baths with naked Hospitaller jailbait.

“I’m a wired Lance Corporal who is short, short, short,” Sedewitz said when he came back from the Bay. “I’m so short I could fall off a dime. I’m so short the xenos probably can’t even see me.”

In the starport Sedewitz sourvenired himself a small black stamp album. Now he’s back in-country to pull his tour of duty in a world of shit. Only he’s different now. He has changed. Now Sedewitz is a dedicated stamp collector.

Enemy postage stamps depict exciting scenes of war and politics. Fire Warriors shake hands with smiling humans under a Tau banner wreathed with stars. Columns of ragged and forlorn Imperial prisoners of war are marched off to Or’es Tash’n prison camps. A vulture gunship with an over-sized Aquila on its side plunges to earth in flames to the cheers of a multi-racial militia crew behind the village anti-aircraft gun. An old grandfather walks along a rice paddy dike, a hoe in one hand and a rifle in the other.

I watch Sedewitz, hunched over a suspended carcass, indulging himself in his grubby hobby. I know that it is my job to climb down there and drag his ass back behind the wire where it belongs.

I know that I should do that, but I don’t. I need him as bait.

“Damn,” Sedewitz says, gently shaking his leg loose from a wild strand of tanglefoot that has caught him in the ankle. He bends down to another shredded lump of shadow and frisks it for diaries, wallets, thrones, love letters, and crumbling black-and-white photographs of xeno girlfriends. Everything that looks like it might have postage stamps in it gets stuffed into one of the cargo pockets on the front of his baggy khaki trouser legs.

In the monsoon rain Sedewitz is a black silhouette. His poncho is outlined by silver blips. He is a perfect target. Tau snipers in the dark can hear the rain bouncing off Sedewitz’s poncho. The Vindicaire can see the black buttplate of Sedewitz’s rifle, slung barrel-down to keep the rain out of the bore.

I should try to save Sedewitz’s bacon, but I won’t. I can’t. Cadians are not elite planetary shock troops anymore. We have been demoted to expendable seafood. In Kronus we’re only cheap live bait, impaled on a hook, wiggling until we draw fire and die. Dying, that’s what we’re here for, our Schola Progenium instructors would say: “On their blood is our Imperium founded.”

I pick up the handset to Sedewitz’s field vox. The handset has been taped up inside a clear plastic bag. I whistle softly. I grunt. I say, “This is Sacred Oath, Sacred Oath, One Platoon Actual. I want illumination, ladies. I want illumination and I want it immediately fucking now.”

One Platoon is sleeping, totally exhausted after an twenty-hour day fending off another attack and loading up the evac columns with our gear.

An endless convoy of trucks has been hauling off live howitzer shells, wooden pallets stacked high with cases of rations, mountains of plywood and building beams, and tons of sheets of perforated steel planking torn up from the airfield.

One Platoon is cutting a few hours of well-earned sleep. Time to wake them up. Time to wake the whole base up.

The handset sizzles with static and someone says, “Roger. Pop one. Shot out.”

I heft my bolter to port arms the way they do it in the propaganda vid-picts and I squint harder and harder into an expanding darkness. But my night vision is not what it used to be after sucking too much nurglite gas in Deimos. There’s no movement. No muzzle flashes. No sound but the rain.

One word from me and the Vindicaire will be in the bottom of red-mud swimming pool shitting Armageddon steel. If a frog farts I will bury that frog under a black iron mountain of Imperial bombs. And even if this dirty zero-zero weather keeps the big birds grounded I can always get arty in. One magic set of two-word six-number map coordinates spoken into my vox handset and the cannon cockers get wired and in forty seconds I can crank up more firepower than a Death Korps artillery division.

Somewhere in the rear a mortar tube fumps.

My finger squeezes up all the slack on the trigger. I take a deep breath. I’ve got the jungle covered. I’m looking forward to working the bolter and cutting up the black night with red lines of bullets.

Five hundred yards downrange and moon high, a mute pock. Light, vast, harsh, and white, spills out across the black sky, melts, then floats down with the rain. An illumination flare sways under a little white parachute, squeaking and dripping sparks that hiss and pop.

I hold my breath and freeze. Now is not the time to make a wrong move. The Vindicaire is just waiting for me to do something stupid like a PDF maggot.

Down in the wire, Sedewitz stops and looks up at the light. Near Sorry Eli, our pet skull, Sedewitz hunkers down, pounded by cold gusts of wind and monsoon rain.

Black laughter drifts in from No Man’s Land. Sedewitz turns outwards and slowly unslings his rifle. Behind his rain-fogged visor his eyes are big in his face.

There is the sound of a metallic wine bottle popping open and there is the moment of perfect silence and then one Exitus rifle hits Sedewitz and Sedewitz does a very bad impression of Saint Ollanius aboard Horus’ Battle-Barge and in silent slow motion Sedewitz’s head dissolves into a cloud of pink mist and then bam. Sedewitz slides into one of a million red muddy craters all over the area and sets off a mine, blown away, killed in action and wasted, shot dead and slaughtered.

Sedewitz’s headless body is a contorted blob of wax in the ghost light of the illumination flare. One arm gone. One arm converted to pulp. Shortened legs bent too far and in the wrong directions. Ribs curving up incredibly white from inside a glistening black cavity which, as though on fire, is steaming.

Abruptly, illumination fades. Night falls on my position. A shadow walks across my field of fire.

I cling to the cold metal of my bolter, my mouth dry, teeth gritted, finger aching, hands white, knuckles bleeding where I’ve bitten them, sweat stinging my eyes, stomach pumping in and out, and I’m shaking.

The Vindicaire knows where I am now. He knows where I live. Out there beyond the wire in that deep black jungle the Vindicaire can hear the sounding of the gong that is the beating of my heart.

I try to let go of the bolter, but I can’t let go.

Hunkered down, I hold my breath, afraid to fire.

The Snake, who likes to tell people who don’t know any better that he is our Platoon Sergeant, is cutting himself a big piece of slack up in his luxurious bunker. The bunker was constructed to the Snake’s precise specifications by the engineers in exchange for six duffel bags full of obscura. No doubt the Snake is sitting on his rack, drinking cold beer, and watching ‘Ciaphas Cain, Hero of the Imperium’ reruns on his battery-powered, Tau-subtitled pict-caster.

I wait until dark, pull on some rotting jungle combats and some mouldering combat boots, and crawl out of the rat’s nest of crumpled body bags and parachute silk I’ve made for myself inside my half-shelter. The time on the ground is oh-dark-thirty. Time to walk lines.

I have walked lines hundreds of times at Pavonis Starport. Tonight everything is new and strange. I feel like a blind man after some sadist has moved all the furniture. In the moonlight I’m falling down all over the place like some kind of fucking snot-nosed PDF. The bulldozers of the Eleventh Engineers have definitely wasted my area. Even the bunkers are not where they are supposed to be. I feel lost. My hometown has been taken away, stacked, burned, or evacuated.

The Imperial Guard moves in mysterious ways.

Every twenty meters I stoop down and tug at the barbed wire with det cord crimps to see if the wire has been cut. The tugging scares up bunker rats big enough to stand flat-footed and butt-fuck a six-by. I scan the tanglefoot to see if it looks tight enough to hold the weight of falling dead men. I check the position of each shaped charge. We paint the backs of our shaped charges white so we can count them in the dark and see that they are still facing outwards.

I keep one eye on the darkness out beyond the wire. While fireteams of highly motivated mosquitoes try to scarf me up as their midnight chow, I wait for the shadows beyond the wire to turn into people. At night we enter that world where all men are phantoms.

There are things out there in the dark, things that move. Maybe a torn and decaying sandbag being blown around by the wind. Or a stray water buffalo. Or a patch of night thrown down by a cloud passing in front of the moon. Or maybe those black dots shimmering out there at five hundred yards are cold and hungry fire warriors silently colliding and massing for a ground attack.

Or maybe the Vindicaire. The Vindicaire could be out there, sighting me in.

Tomorrow we blow the wire. Growling brown bulldozers will plough down the last of our bunkers and Pavonis Combat Base 6 won't be here anymore. The Imperial Guard won't be here anymore. Until then, the hills are full of heretics and Pavonis is their hobby. Enemy recon teams eyeball us from the ridgelines, probing for any sign of slack. They still want this fog-cursed place.

Life in Combat Base 6:

Inside the only guard bunker still standing in our area, our New Guy is busy choking his lizard. The New Guy's teenaged horny brain has left Starport Combat Base 6 and has gone back to the filthy hive-borough and has wrapped itself up inside Maria’s pretty red panties. He groans, abusing Imperial property, polishing his bayonet, just a little early-morning organ practice to cut the edge off the cold; the Guardsmen have landed and the situation is well in hand. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

I hop down into the bunker.

A field vox buzzes. I pick up the handset while the New Guy fumbles frantically with the buttons on his fly.

Some fucking wogue lifer standing vox watch in the Sandbag City command post demands a sit-rep, then yawns out loud.

Instead of saying "all secure" in a mechanical monotone, I say with an exaggerated tau accent: "This is Aun'El Shi'Ores speaking. Situation normal, all fucked up."

The fucking wogue lifer on the vox laughs and says, "Wait one." Then he says to someone in the background, "It's Falker. He says he's a bluey." Both wogues laugh and talk about how crazy I am and then the vox voice says, "Affirm, Falker. Roger that," and I put down the handset.

The PDF is waiting for me, standing almost at attention.

Since the Vindicaire started wasting the Cadian grunts with the most T.I.--time in--all I've got left are PDFs. The replacement pipeline pulls rosy-cheeked kids out of the underhives and ships them to Pavonis. Half of my people are switched on Catachan Devils, but Black Lucas Bastonne has ordered the Devils to stand down and to stand by for mutiny. The Grim Reaper, Major Travin, chooses to pretend the mutiny does not exist.

Meanwhile, PDFs have to be watched. Along about midnight, when the Vindicaire walks and talks, PDFs wet their pants. Nobody wants to die alone and in the dark.

I try to scare the living shit out of PDFs. The wrong kind of fear can kill you but the right kind of fear can keep you alive. PDFs do not see with the hard eyes of Guardsmen. Not all Guardsmen see those black facts that are as hard as diamonds, only the quick. The dead are gun-babies who can't get wired to the program, and pay the price. Here it's grow up now, grow up fast, grow up overnight, or you don't grow up at all. There it is. The usual ration of civilian bullshit is poison here. lasbolts are real magic. Lasbolts don't give a damn that you were born stupid.

Only on the battlefield is hypocrisy fatal.

>>4869233
sure, i'll draw it...

New Guys will bore you to death if you give them half a chance. They tell you scuttlebutt. They complain. They pop up with platitudes they've found in the Primer, silly shit about the origins of the universe and the meaning of life. They tell you where they went to boot camp, about petty gang duels they've won, and they show you pictures of teenaged girls they claim are their girlfriends. They tell you what they think they've learned about themselves, The Emperor, and the Imperium, and they tell you their opinions about Kronus. That's why New Guys are so dangerous. They're thinking all the time about how light refracts through water to create rainbows they’ve never seen and about how the sky is so blue and why a seed grows and how they used to cop a feel on Maria and so they don't see the trip wire. When they get killed, they have so many things on their minds that they forget to stay alive.

‘’What's your name there, dipshit?"

"Private Owain, sir." He steps forward. I shove him back.

"Been holding the line long, whiteshield?"

"All week, sir."

I turn away. I don't laugh. After a few cadence counts, when I trust myself, I do an about-face.

"The correct answer to that question is 'all fucking day.' And stow the boot camp 'sir' shit, lard ass. Shut your skuzzy mouth, fat body, and listen up. I am going to give you the straight skinny, because you are the biggest shitbird on this planet of shitbirds. Don't even play ‘sheathe your sword’ when you're supposed to be pulling bunker guard in my area. You will police up your act and get squared away with a sense of urgency, or you are going to have your health record turned into a fuck story. In the Guard dumbasses do not finish at all and monsters live forever. You have to fight fire with fire. A few weeks ago you were the hot-rod king of some underhive juvie gang, stumbling around in front of all the girls and stepping on your dick, but be advised that in the Guard will be the education you never got in the churches. You aren’t even born yet, sweet pea. Your duty is to stand around and stop the bullet that might hit someone of importance. Before the sun comes up, private, you could be just one more tagged and bagged pile of non-viewable remains. If you're lucky, you'll only get killed."

The New Guy looks at me as though I've slapped him, but does not reply.

I say, "We are crusaders in the ever victorious armies of the Golden Throne and we are as happy as pigs in shit because killing is our business and business is good. The Emperor, through our divinely ordained chain of command, has ordered you to Pavonis to get yourself some trigger time and repay some of your eternal debt to Him. But you are not even here to win the D-F-M, the Dumb Fucker's Medal. The only virtue of the stupid is that they don't live long. The Emperor giveth and the M-4 Kantrael taketh away. There it is. Welcome to the world of zero slack."

The New Guy swats away a whining mosquito, looks at his boots, says sweetly, hating my guts, "Aye sir."

I don't say anything. I wait. I wait until the PDF dipshit looks up, looks at me. He snaps to attention, a ramrod up his ass, his chin tucked in. "Yes, SIR!"

I stroll down the muddy catwalk of rope-handled ammo crates. I pick up a short black cardboard cylinder from the firing parapet. I tear off black adhesive tape from around the cardboard cylinder until it breaks open. An olive-drab egg drops into my hand, hard, heavy, and cold. There is tape around the spoon; I tear it off.

I say, "I know you've seen all of Ciaphas Cain’s war stories. You probably think you are in the Great Crusade now and that this is your chance to set the Universe right. In the last verses of this story I'm supposed to turn out to be a sentimental slob with a heart of gold. But you're just another fucking New Guy and you're too dumb to do anything but draw fire. You don’t have a single drop of Cadian blood in your veins so you don't mean shit to me. You're just one more nameless Munitorum-issued goggle-eyed human fuckup. I've seen a lot of ol' boys come and go. It's my job to keep your candy ass serviceable. I'm the most switched on private in this ‘Crusade’ mash-up, and I will do my job."

I hold down the spoon on the grenade with a thumb and I hook my other thumb into the pull ring. I jerk out the cotter pin. I put the pull ring into my pocket.

The New Guy is staring at the grenade. He thinks now that maybe I'm a little scrambled--"crazy." He tries to move away but I punch him in the chest with the frag and I say, "Take it, New Guy, or I will get crazy on you. Do it now."

Awkward, stiff, and scared shitless, the New Guy touches the grenade with his fingertips to see if it's hot. His trembling fingers get a grip on the spoon. I let him breathe his bad breathe into my face until I'm sure he's got control of the spoon, then I let go.

The New Guys holds the grenade out at arm's length, as though that will help if it goes off. He can't take his eyes off of it.

I say, "Now, if you need gear, do not go to supply. They sell all of the good stuff on the black market. Supply will not issue you any gear, but they might sell you some. No, what you do is you wait until you hear an inbound medevac or until somebody says that some dumb trooper has been hit by incoming. Then you double-time over to the field hospital. Outside of the field hospital there will be a pile of gear the medics will have stripped off of the dying trooper. While the doctors cut the guy up, you steal his gear.

"After that, the first thing you need to know is that your autogun is a piece of shit that can barely scratch my flak armour’s paintjob. If you can’t replace with a real weapon then try to remember to always tap a fresh magazine of bullets on your helmet in case it's been in your bandolier long enough to freeze up due to spring fatigue. The second thing you need to know is this: don't even piss in my bunker. You need to pee, you just tie it in a knot. And the last piece of skinny I've got for you, New Guy, is this: don't ever put a band-aid on a sucking chest wound."

The PDF nods, tries to talk, tries to pull some air down and cough some words up at the same time. "The pin..." He swallows. "Do you want me to be killed?"

I turn to go. I shrug. "Somebody's got to get killed. It might as well be you. I'm not training you to keep you from getting killed. I'm training you so you don't get me killed."

What's left of One Platoon's Catachan hunker down in total darkness smoking lho sticks and giggling like schoolgirls and telling jungle stories. I smoke my share and somebody else's share.

"Listen up," I say, doing my famous impression of the voice of Lucas Bastonne. "This is no shit, trooper. The true story of the Reclamation of Kronus. So your Cadian Shock Troopers up in the Gate were all lho-heads, right? And all of the good lho plantations were in the Eastern Fringe."

My invisible audience of Catachan troopers groans, then cheers.

"Back on Cadia, lho sticks were five hundred thrones a pack. In Victory Bay, it was free. To the Cadians, this was incredible."

Someone says, "Hey, man, keep on the grass!" and the Catachans laugh.

A shell comes in squealing, squealing like a stuck pig, a fat iron Traitor pig bred in the Vandean Coast to have a thirty-second hard-on for Cadians. But instead of boom there's only a silly whomp as the shell detonates in a mud hole. Concussion shakes the bunker. Sand falls from the ceiling of perforated steel planking, logs, and sandbags.

Someone coughs, then chokes. I shake sand out of my hair and scrape damp sand from the back of my neck. Someone pounds the choker on the back. The choker hawks up a loogie and spits it onto the back of my hand. "Shit," I say, as I wipe off the back of my hand on somebody else's leg.

Lucas Bastonne continues: "So this guy named Lucas Alexander came up to Segmentum Command, see? He was a genuine pict-caster hero who got--no, listen--who got himself chosen Governor, now, he was chosen Governor because his face--no, really, this is no shit--because his face--yes, his face--accidentally got engraved on all of the fucking pennies!"

The Catachans laugh, howl, and beat on sandbags with fists and rifle butts. They tell me how full of shit I am and they threaten to pee.

Whomp. Shrapnel bites into oil drums, sandbags, and wood.

"So the DamCadians loaded up with rolling papers and bolt pistols--yeah, yeah, that's right--their pistols were all really big--and they put these really big dope fuses into their cannons and then they all rode on steamboats down to Victory Bay, Kronus.

"Down in the Tau Quarter they scored about one ton of Necromunda Gold from some native musicians they met in a strip joint on Saint Ollanius Street."

We toke in silence but with enthusiasm.

Finally, someone says, "Okay, man, so what happened then?"

Lucas Bastonne says, "What happened then? Well, let's see...The 412th all got hammered out of their minds together and then the war was over and everybody got laid. Of course, the DamCadians lied about it and old Uncle Alex changed our name to the ‘Liberators’ and told the Blood Ravens that they won and so that's what they put on The pict-casters."

The Catachan grunts laugh and laugh.

Someone says, "Hey, Falker, do your Ciaphas Cain! Yeah, that's it! Do Ciaphas Cain in the dark!"

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "Falker, m'man, you are a humorous person. So tell us the rest of it, man. What happens next?"

"How the fuck do I know?" I say in my own voice. "I'm just making up this bullshit as I go along."

Black Lucas Bastonne laughs and a Dreadnought's fist pounds me on the back in the dark. Black Lucas Bastonne says to someone, "Shoot me the handset, brother." Then he talks in a very low voice, calling in his November Lima, his night location, which is at an ambush site outside the wire, and his Papa Lima, his present location, which is about three hundred yards east of Hill 881 North. He gives the grid coordinates and a sit-rep of all secure, grunts, and drops the handset.

I say, "Pulling another hairy mission, L.B.?"

A booming laugh, then a pause. "Yeah, man. Life is real hard out here in the bad bush. We pulling a definite number-ten hump. Transmission ends." Another laugh. "I wish I was a Governor and Alexander was a grunt."

>>4870508

Who the fuck wrote that? DO THEY KNOW ANYTHING?

"You have got to belay all this 'Catachan Confederacy' bullshit, L.B."

Pause. "Sergeant Falker, you got a personal problem? Hey, brother, what evil lurks in the hearts of men, I do know. You got a problem, m'man, run it by me. I will reach out and make it good, because Black Lucas Bastonne is a problem solver."

"LPs, L.B. I need LPs."

"Hey, man, don't even talk to Black Lucas Bastonne about no fucked up listening posts and none of that other gung ho Ciaphas Cain Cadian shit. I no longer choose to participate in the mindset of morally disoriented bloodthirsty chucks. Black Lucas Bastonne has smoked more than his share of little blueys and ‘skins, from Victory Bay to Or'es Tash'n and down in the Green Coast. But no longer do I desire to relate to this oppressive and corrupt environment."

The Catachan Guardsmen cheer while Black Lucas Bastonne continues, talking with the tone of a backwards feral world preacher delivering a fiery sermon: "Catachan Confederacy secedes from your Kronus death trip."

With one voice the men in the bunker say, "Amen."

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "Rich Nobilis kids lounging around their spires moving pieces on the board just wasting they time. Dumb grunts is stopping this evil war, a--men, and they won't never know the truth back in the Worlds, the truth that the grunts have the power, the real power, because the fucking Ministorum lifers and the corrupt nobilis are not even going to admit the facts, not even."

Black Lucas Bastonne waits for the "Right ons" to die down, then continues. "This heavily armed and highly motivated reinforced rifle squad of deathworlders will go back to the Green. We be tin-starred marshals of revolutionary justice. With my squad back in the Green I could take over half of Catachan. Peace through superior firepower! Firepower to the people! History is not over yet! History collects its debts!"

The squad cheers so loud and claps so hard that for a few moments even the banging of the shells outside is drowned out.

I grunt. I say, "We got to have LPs. We're light. A ground attack could walk right over the wire. The xenos know that something is going down and until we sky out we're wide open to get hit. I got no time for your bullshit political crap, L.B. I'm not interested in politics."

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "Falker, m'man, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. Or maybe you be here as a tourist? Politics is not hard to understand. Politics is somebody's shock-maul upside your head. Hey, man, can you dig my progressive talk? Don't you know why the Vindicaire is here, man? The Vindicaire has come to take your Cadian ass to school. Bone Six, that bad ol' Vindicaire, he everywhere, man. He maybe sitting in this bunker with us right now."

I say, "L.B., I'm sick of listening to your treasonous sermoning."

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "Why, you silly Kasr trash, you are misinformed. The Cadians is not the enemy. We be brothers-in-arms. One day, by and by, you will see the revolt of the Cadian people. That's some cold shit, man, but there it is."

"The Devil is a gold man, the money man. They tell us we are small. But we not small, we tall, we be kings, and the Governor is not Him on Earth in a black limousine. They calling you 'hive scum' too, Falker. You just ain't got the word."

I say, "Sounds like a giant liquor-store robbery to me, L.B. Rich people got all the money. You take the money away from them. Then you got the power."

"We won't fight for power," says Black Lucas Bastonne, "we will fight to say that Uncle Alex ain't no damned uncle of mine. Uncle Alex he say to these Kronus, you can live, but you can't be men. Dance and sing for us and be little slaves, Mr. Blueys, and we might be big-hearted and let you live. Uncle Alex say, 'Stick 'em up, your balls or your life.'"

Black Lucas Alexander's voice booms inside the bunker: "Segmentum Command find it impossible to relate to why these Kronus folk stand up and fight. The gold man don't care about nothing that much no more, he fat, he forgot what it like to fight. They traded in they balls for a palace, a household maid, and a lifetime supply of juvie drugs, a long time ago. Dignity, m'man, that's what the Kronus want, and that's what my Deathworlders want. I'm a Catachan with a brain, a Catachan brain, and I am a very dangerous person. We are men! We want our dignity! If they fuck with us, they are going to die. Nobody ever calls me scum when I'm carrying my grenade launcher."

"FUCK YEAH!" someone says, and the bunker shakes with shouts of "RIGHT ON! RIGHT ON! RIGHT ON!" until everybody is hoarse.

I say, "I want LPs. Get me some warm bodies that can move like they got a purpose, L.B. All I got standing lines are PDF gun-babies. Name your price. Six cases of amasec, next resupply."

A shell hits very close to the bunker. Whomp. The bunker trembles.

"What's wrong with these blueys?" someone says. "Can't they take a joke?"

Black Lucas Bastoone laughs. "Mister Aun'el ain't even about to waste a pretty boy like me." He laughs again, enjoying himself. "Falker, you are a real bone-headed box of rocks. I ever tell you that?"

I say, "L.B., I am not the Emperor and you are not Sanguinius. I want three LPs out, most ricky-tick. That's immediately fucking now. Do it now, L.B. or you will wake up with a piece of this world nailed to the side of your head."

Before Black Lucas Bastonne can reply, we hear Snake’s loud mouth at the bunker entrance. Snake never stops talking; sweet-talking everybody on the planet is Snake's hobby.

Everyone relaxes. If the Snake has left his personal bunker it means that he has received an all-clear from Hill 881 South and the incoming is over. For now.

MORE MOTHEFUCKER MORE

"Is Black Lucas Bastonne here?" says the Snake's voice in the dark.

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "Get out of my face, hiver."

"Sergeant, I've got orders from the X.O. I'd like to have a word with you in private if I could."

"Negative."

"Sergeant, it was the Major's understanding that you and your squad were out on a night ambush."

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "You been misinformed."

The squad laughs.

"Sorry?" says the Snake. "What did you say?"

"It don't mean nothing," says Black Lucas Bastonne. "Not even. You must have me confused with somebody who gives a shit."

The Snake says, "Well, that's not why I stopped by. Actually, we need to discuss an operation. The Major has decided that one last search-and-clear sweep, on the last day of the evacuation, would be a nice addition to One Platoon's already outstanding combat record. If your people score a good body count, there might even be a promotion in it for you."

Black Lucas Bastonne laughs. "Shit. The Reaper he want to run up a body count of Deathworlders. Want to counter-frag me. Guvner Alexander he say we be the anchor of the northern defenses. We be the gallant little band holding the pass at Pavonis. So if we be here to fight, why we bugging out? This my last opportunity to be the 13th Mordant. Pardon me if I just hunker down here until somebody inspires me with leadership."

The Snake says, "Sergeant, the Major has issued written orders--"

"Decent. I'm all out of Uplifting Primers and skin mags to wipe my ass with. Seen, chump?"

"Sergeant, the Major is your commanding officer."

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "The Reaper's orders don't mean shit to me, Frater. He a fucking wogue lifer the other OTHER fucking wogue lifers left behind to shitcan him. Now he letting the Hangman loose on every Catachan that leave Pavonis alive. I'm ready to bust caps on his ugly ass."

"Respect the rank, Sergeant, not the man. He is an agent of the Emperor’s might."

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "Snake, you are tedious."

I say, "Snake?"

"Yes?" says the Snake. "Who's there?"

"It's me. Falker."

"Excuse me, Private Falker, but this is between me and the Sergeant. Official platoon business. Now, I realize that as the former Platoon Sergeant--"

I say, "You got Stumpy and Lumpy with you?"

"Who?"

"Your bodyguards. That little skinny skuz and the retarded fatbody."

From out of the dark comes the voice of Haskell, "Hey, go fuck yourself, Falker. That's not my name."

"We never did anything to you," whines Lumpy.

"Good. I just wanted to know where you were."

The Snake says, "Sergeant, you will saddle up and stand by for a movement order."

Black Lucas Bastonne laughs his big booming laugh. "Snake, you like one of them ol' bizarre shit-eatin' mamba we got back in the Green, man, crawlin' 'round down in the undergrowth. You some kind of mu-tant. You adapted to this world of shit and you thriving on it, you just love it here, you can't get enough. You be prayin' that the war don't never end. You the little-boy king of Fat City in Kronus, you livin' off the tit. You like some kind of back-shooting pink spider, man, and you do scare me. Deadly poison taste like fine wine to a mean little mother like you, because you are the product of a diabolical mind."

The Snake says, "I don't mean to be critical, Sergeant. But, after all, I am the Platoon Sergeant. Is that not correct?"

"On paper," someone says.

The Snake says, "But, Major Travin--"

"Shut up, Snake," I say. "Stow it and belay it and you can just double-time the fuck out of my area. The Grim Reaper can sit up in Sandbag City in starched skivvies, scratching his balls and playing war with his grid maps and his grease pencils and giving himself the Macharian Cross every time he zaps a mosquito. That's just fucking outstanding. Saints preserve him. But this area is off limits to that fucking wogue lifer and his brown-nosers until we give him a One Platoon passport, and we are not going to give him one. You want something from One Platoon, you don't even talk to Black Lucas Bastonne, you talk to me. I may be a slick-sleeved private to you, but I'm still H.M.I.C. around here."

"H.M.I.C.?"

"Head Motherfucker in Charge."

"Is that a fact?" says Snake.

I say, "Be advised, nobody from One Platoon is going to run any more of your dumb-ass sweeps. We will not pull patrols. We will not set ambushes. We will not go out on ops.

"Jergaul took his squad out to waste the Vindicaire. Against my orders. They've been missing in action for a week now.

"No way I'm going to piss away any more of my people defending a position that the lifers have already decided to shitcan," I say.

Haskell says, "What's wrong, Falker? No balls for a fight?"

I say, "I'm holding myself in reserve for the assault on the Eye of Terror."

The Snake says, "And what about the Guardsmen in your platoon?"

I say, "I'm holding them in reserve too. How can I be a hero if I can't have my fans?"

"Falker," says the Snake, "I am not your enemy. Why can't we work together and try to get along. For the good of the platoon."

I say, "Snake, the only reason you like to get close to people is so that you won't miss when you decide to shit on them."

"But, Jon--"

>>4870653
>"Head Motherfucker in Charge."
Falker makes me feel 200 percent manlier.

I say, "You're a slick little silver-tongued monster, Snake, and you are on my list."

Haskell says, "Falker, you're paranoid."

I say, "That's a rog on your last, scumbag. It's only after you stop being paranoid that they get you."

"Now, Falker," the Snake says, "let's be reasonable. You are entitled to your opinion, of course. I can respect that. But you and I can work together. I mean that. I'm being sincere now."

I say, "Like you worked with Lieutenant Hyeral?"

Pause. Someone moves in the darkness. "Who?"

"LIEUTENANT HYERAL, motherfucker," says Black Lucas Bastonne. "Remember Lieutenant Hyeral? You should remember him. You had the man iced."

Snake says, "If you're talking about some kind of fragging incident--"

"He was an outstanding company commander!" says Black Lucas Bastonne, almost growling. "The Sir was one hell of a decent man. He was people, you son of a bitch. Lieutenant Hyeral was people!"

Someone says, "That's affirmative. He was a good Kasrkin and a good officer. And the Sir had more balls than he knew what to do with."

The Snake says, "I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about. I've never heard of the man. He sounds like--"

Someone says, "You never heard of him?"

The Snake says, "It never happened. I don't believe that there ever was any such person. Can anyone prove that this so-called Lieutenant Hyeral ever actually existed? Maybe you're just a little bit confused on that point.

"Anyway," the Snake continues, "he had it coming. We've got an important job to do in the Eastern Fringe, a Cadian job. Sacrifices have to be made. We've got to keep our head until this Inquisitorial craze blows over. It's a heretical world and Xeno aggression must be defeated at any price. What's wrong with spraying a few people with promethium if it makes the world a better place to live in? We are killing these people for their own good. Inside every alien is a human being trying to get out."

Black Lucas Bastonne spits. "If the Astartes turn their guns on us is because this here war got nothing to do with the Emperor or the Imperium. "

The Snake says, "But let's not worry about the past. What's done is done. That's blood under the bridge. Let's try to be constructive. There's no point in our talking in circles about unpleasant things which may or may not have happened."

"You murdered Lieutenant Hyeral," I say. "Nobody gives a shit about your black-market deals. You can sell fake Eldar war-banners and chrome-plated shrapnel and you can flog off picts of Maria’s crotch in tight leather pants. You can run watered-down amasec and stepped-on obscura and nobody cares if you trade off military equipment to the Tau by the truckload.

"But Lieutenant Hyeral caught your ass in the ville. Inside that steam-and-cream full of twelve-year-old whores that you own with that fat Gunner Sergeant from Eres.

"You were trading a truck loaded with crates of hand grenades for a bodybag full of raw ‘slaught. I wasted your customer. Remember? The bluey-lover who had a Tau Auxilia officer's credentials sewed up inside his hat. Then the Sir dragged your ass up to the command post and turned you in to the Grim Reaper. I was there, Snake. I saw the whole thing."

Haskell says, "Falker, you're just a cynical misfit with an overly active imagination. So where's your evidence? Are those just words, or do you have some groxskins on the wall?"

Every man in the bunker can feel the strain in the Snake's voice as he struggles to maintain his self-control: "Private Falker, I can certainly understand your resentment of me. You've got more time in than I have. You’re one of the Originals. Once part of the Kasrkin, no less. A decorated hero and you've been busted in rank. You've been under a lot of pressure, I know. I understand."

Snake pauses, then continues: "No one here believes that you wanted to kill your own best friend. What was his name? Baern? It was harsh of the Commisariat to strip you of your stripes for failing to recover his body. I constantly reassure those who fear you because you have blown away a fellow Kasrkin. And I do not believe the reports that you run around naked, that you sleep in mud, or that you are afraid to come out in the daytime. These stories are exaggerations, I'm sure."

The Snake's voice drones on in the dark. "We have had honest differences of opinions in the past, Private Falker, but I do want you to know that I have always had a lot of respect for you."

I say, "Eat shit and die, you miserable worm. You PDF shitpump. You rear echelon mother fucker. You and the rest of this mud-piss, dog-fucking planet doesn’t even deserve the steam off my Cadian holy water. You Wouldn’t even know what to do with it."

Someone says, "The Snake sells roger copy shit!"

Black Lucas Bastonne says, teasing, "Hey, Snake, when we be talking about the bounty you got posted on the Kasrkin's head?"

I say, "L.B., don't argue with the little puke. He's not even there."

"You right," Black Lucas Bastonne says. "Yeah, you right. He not even there."

The Snake says, "Look, guys, I really do want to get to the bottom of this problem. It would be productive if we could clear it up once and for all. But I guess we'll just never know for sure. I only wish I could be more helpful. Maybe this Lieutenant you're talking about was killed in action. Or perhaps the Vindicaire got him."

Someone says, "Bullshit. That melta-bomb was set up inside the Sir's bunker. That means that the Vindicaire can walk on wire."

The Snake says, "I don't know all the facts of this case, but I am going to find out. I promise you that. I'll file the papers to request a Commisariat investigation. They will file an official report of the alleged incident."

"Just shut up," I say. "Just shut the fuck up."

"What?" says the Snake. "I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that."

Black Lucas Bastonne says, "The man say for you to shut up. You do what the man say or I will beat the bad out of your ass."

The Snake makes another speech: "Now, Sergeant, there's no reason for anyone to get upset. Let's all try to stay calm, okay? You may be right. Maybe if we can all just relax and think this thing through, we'll be able to find a logical explanation. But I do think we should at least try to get all the facts before we start jumping to any hasty conclusions."

The Guardsmen in the bunker are silent, waiting. On the vox, the Confessor Militant is droning ‘Imperator Rex Eternum’.

Suddenly the bunker is half filled with half-light from illumination flares popping outside.

Frozen in the cold magnesium light, Black Lucas Bastonne's face is a hard mask of ebony. He's glaring at the Snake.

Black Lucas Bastonne wears jungle utilities dyed black. Around his neck hangs a heavy necklace of grenade pins. He's big. Black Lucas Bastonne started out in life as a black giant and monster, got tough in the Green, grew strong enough and tall, then took up body building.

The Snake is pale and innocent, with a pug nose, chubby cheeks, and freckles. He's wearing a garish short sleeve shirt, blue shorts, sandals and a fur cap with the Aquila in big white on the front. The Snake, unlike the rest of us, is not carrying a weapon. The Snake is slapping his palm with a swagger stick. The swagger stick has a polished bolter shell casing on the tip

Haskell sits on a bamboo footlocker in the corner of the bunker, poking at a ringworm scab on his ankle with the point of a bayonet. He's a skinny red-haired little rat-bastard with a face like a hungry weasel. He looks up, stabs the bayonet into a sandbag, shifts the pump-action shotgun on his lap to port arms.

Lumpy is near the bunker entrance, cringing into a shadow.

Black Lucas Bastonne gets up and walks, stooped over, stepping his way through a dozen Catachans in black jungle utilities. He leans down into the Snake's face and grunts. "The Kasrkin knows that you the beast because the Kasrkin is a blue-eyed prophet of His Word."

From a scuffed orange jungle boot with a dogtag in the laces Black Lucas Bastonne produces an ivory-handled straight razor. Snick. Out flashes six inches of fine surgical steel of the sharp shiny kind, for freelancers only.

Black Lucas Bastonne's Dreadnought fist twists into the Snake's shirt and jerks the Snake forward like a doll. The straight razor whips up to the Snake's pink throat.

Black Lucas Bastonne says to the Snake, "You want to belay them lies, or do you want a glass eye?"

Haskell makes his move. I dive across the bunker. I grab his collar and pull him down. Before he can get his shotgun out of the mud I lay Keban’s hellpistol hard upside his head.

Haskell slumps, groans, starts up again. I admire him for a cadence count, then I beat him unconscious with the butt of my pistol. His head is as hard as a shell casing.

The squad does not move.

Someone says, "Violence party! Violence party!"

"GET SOME!"

I cock my arm to souvenir Lumpy a love tap across the face.

Lumpy drops his lasrifle and slides on out of the bunker.

I can hear him running away, slogging through the mud.

Locked in Black Lucas Bastonne's grip, the Snake struggles desperately. When he sees that his bodyguards are gone, he starts bawling and lunging. Black Lucas Bastonne has got the Snake in a death grip and he won't let go.

Light from illumination flares continues to be reflected into the bunker. Something very hairy must be going down outside. There's shouting, movement, and scattered small-arms fire.

Here inside the bunker the only sound is the Snake trying to whine and breathe at the same time. His face is twisted into a spasming mask of stark terror.

The Snake beats Black Lucas Bastonne in the face with his swagger stick. Black Lucas Bastonne shakes his head to clear his vision, as though annoyed by a fly.

Black Lucas Bastonne presses the blade in just under the Snake's left eye. "Gonna cut him!" he says to me. Then to the Snake: "Make you a believer!"

I do a chin-up on Black Lucas Bastonne's arm, which is about the size of my thigh and as hard as a boulder. "Negative," I say. "Stand down, L.B. We can't waste him. You're not back on Catachan doing your thing with a razor."

Black Lucas Bastonne looks at me. "Sure we can kill him. Who's going to stop us?"

I dig into my thigh pocket and pull out my det cord crimps. "Here. Take these."

"What?"

I say, "Come on, frater. Cut me a trade."

Black Lucas Bastonne shakes his head. "No. No way. Bullshit. Later for that."

"Do it, L.B. Trust me."

Black Lucas Bastonne groans and says, "Falker, m'man, you better thrill me." He hands me the straight razor and takes the det cord crimps.

The Snake's bulging eyes follow the movement of the straight razor from Black Lucas Bastonne's hand to mine. The Snake is bucking against the sandbagged bunker wall in a sort of spastic seizure of terror; he is going out of his mind with fear.

"Choke him," I say to Black Lucas Bastonne, and Black Lucas Bastonne chokes him.

Snake gags, moans, slobbers, and spits. His tongue sticks out, a slimy red garden slug.

Black Lucas Bastonne looks at me, then at the Snake, then back at me again. I nod. "Get his tongue," I say, and Black Lucas Bastonne digs into the Snake's mouth with the crimping pliers and clamps a grip onto the Snake's tongue.

The Snake's eyes are bulging out of their sockets. I hold the blade flat on his tongue and he gags and I smile and say, "Are we communicating?"

When the Snake whimpers and his eyes beg, I say, "Nos es totus Damnatus, Snake--tough shit. Be advised, mercy is not what I do best." I pull the razor and the blue blade slices smoothly through the Snake's tongue an inch deep, splitting the tip. Blood squirts out with such force that it shoots all the way across the bunker and splatters in a shiny wet pattern across the gray wall of sandbags.

Black Lucas Bastonne releases his grip on the Snake and the Snake drops to his knees. Blood pours out over the Snake's lower lip and drips down his chin like drool. The Snake makes a horrible nonsound, with his hands in front of his face, afraid to touch.

Someone says, "Bleed him some more! Payback. For the Sir."

Haskell moans, rubs his head, tries to get up.

I yank the Snake’s head back, blood pours down his throat onto my hand. The stained razor gleams dully.

Outside the bunker, small-arms fire pops up urgently a hundred yards down the perimeter and incoming mortar shells start falling.

MOAR DAMNIT MOAR

I step outside in time to see Private Owain, the PDF conscripts, waddling past the bunker at the double, squealing in his high-pitched voice: "SAPPERS IN THE WIRE! SAPPERS IN THE WIRE!"

As the scattered small-arms fire is picked up all along the perimeter, Black Lucas Bastonne's people double-time out of the bunker and we all haul ass into the shit.

Earthshaker shells arc out over our heads. Recoilless rifles belch flechette darts in murderous prickly clouds. Anti-personnel mines explode, raining deadly steel balls. Blips of red light blink across the fields of fire and interlace into wavering hypnotic patterns.

Ignoring the fact that our supporting arms are slaughtering them, crack assault troops from the Tau warrior castes, the heroes of the Eres Badlands, aliens harder than grenades, pour into attack lanes blown in our wire by their pathfinders and human sappers teams, crawling through our wire under fire.

The sappers shove shaped charges—long tubes packed with explosives--into the concertina, tanglefoot, and mine fields. The sappers detonate the charges by hand, blowing themselves into bloody chunks of meat for the Greater Good so their friends can get at us.

As I double-time along the perimeter I check the slit trenches for non-hackers, slaught freaks, and obscura fiends. I drag out the sleepy, the confused, and the angry. Every Guardsman at the Starport is bone tired, fed up, and wasted. But they are Imperial Guardsmen, the Hammer of the Emperor. So they get their heads and asses wired together, grab their rifles, and double-time toward the sound of the guns.

I ignore the Snake's junkies. The junkies don't even carry weapons anymore. Three obscura addicts have climbed up onto the black metal carcass of a burned truck. With faces like empty rooms and eyes like slivers of egg white, they watch the battle.

Plasma bursts scorch the earth.

I dive into the guard bunker in One Platoon’s area, twisting my ankle in the process and knocking a chunk of skin off of my damned knee.

Ollianus and Hendral are already on scene. Hendral, temporary O.C. of Two Platoon, is manning the field vox, calling in close air support. He says to me, "The birds are in the air. Thunderbolts and Marauders."

Ollianus stands on a firing parapet of dirt-filled rope-handled artillery shell crates, calmly sighting in with the sniper's scope on his Kantrael manufactured high-powered Long-Las. On quiet days when Tau grunts with a piece of slack sit swapping scuttlebutt and scarfing up a few rations, 3000 meters downrange, sometimes BANG, their commanding officer's brains come out, leaving the Tau Fire Warriors squatting in the treeline with mouths open because they never even heard a shot.

"Ollianus," I say. "Want some, get some."

Ollianus looks back at me, grins, gives me a thumbs-up.

I should remind Ollianus that this is not the time to be an artist, and that he should burn cells. But I know that Ollianus has his own style. Ollianus has said many times, "I am the aristocrat of snipers--I only shoot officers."

Ollianus's sniper rifle kicks, crack-ka, and somewhere in beautiful downtown Or'es Tash'n there's a bluey mama who does not know that she no longer has a son.

One Platoon is on the firing line, selector switches on full automatic purgation, putting out the rounds, chopping brass, breathing through their mouths, eyes big, necks way down into their flak jackets like muddy turtles, assholes puckered to the max, balls up in their throats, slapping fresh cells into their black lasrifles with a jerky rhythm and holding the triggers down.

Boom.

"Oh, FUCK."

"Shit."

"Railgun," I gasp, once the dirt and debris clears - Ave, Imperator, morituri tus saluta.

"Son of a bitch!"

"THERE! REFERENCE DANGER TREE 3 O’CLOCK 700 METERS-" bright noise drowns out my words.

"Where?" says Ollianus, scanning with his sniper's scope. "Come on...come on..." He adjusts his sling for a tighter grip. "Come on, baby..." Ignoring the pulse rifle fire punching holes into the outboard side of our bunker, Ollianus sets the dope on his weapon and squeezes off a round. Crack-ka.

Ollianus looks back at us, grins, gives us a thumbs-up. "Grease one. Ah, be advised, Starport Six, that's one confirmed on your Railgun" He wiggles his eyebrows, makes a face, and laughs, a dark-haired handsome boy with perfect teeth. He leans back into his sniper's scope, laughs, and then, crack-ka, shoots somebody else.

Is that a repurposed Vietnam-era story?

Do carry on.

Is this from a book? Where can I get it if it is?

Fuck man, why do you have to wait until Flare threads to post this?

Lasrifles are whacking and whacking and pulse rifles are thrumming and thrumming and the two sounds collide, blending together in an unending roar like the passing of a train on a rickety track.

On the perimeter to the left, Black Lucas Bastonne's squad of Catachan is making a stand. Sappers are heaving in satchel charges and laying ladders on top of the wire. Hardcore tau grunts and their human dogs hit the wire running. And as fast as they come up, Black Lucas Bastonne and his men kill them, chop, chop, blood on the wire.

Gray smoke from our eartshakers and medusas drifts over our position. The smoke stinks of cordite and smells like the sulfur that burns in hell. Sand fills the air, a fine red mist. Our bunker is shaking nonstop now as the sandbagged walls absorb incoming small-arms fire and the thud of grenades.

"Shit," says Hendral, dropping the field vox handset. "The zoomies say E.T.A. two-zero minutes."

Ollianus squeezes off a round, crack-ka, and says, "They're coming through the wire."

The whole base is lit up now, with dozens of illumination flares wobbling down under small white parachutes, leaving faint luminescent worm trails. Everything looks phony, lifeless, stark, and stagy, like an abandoned set for a low-budget educational vid. The battlefield before us is a noisy, black-and-white outdoor classroom for student gravediggers. Cold white light of abnormal intensity casts shadows that are dark, deep, and deformed.

I look to my left. I say, "Hendral, call this in to the C.P.--reaction force to Sandbag City. I want them to set in and stand by for a movement order. Tell the cannon cockers to stand by to fire on Black Lucas Bastonne's position at my command. Black Lucas Bastonne is going to be overrun."

Hendral grunts. "You got it, Falker."

The blueys have sent their cannon-fodder at us. Gue'vesa and Kroot Auxiliaries are coming at us in a human wave assault, a swaying wall of massed men and xenos, pouring into our wire, spilling into the gaps blown by the sappers. When they're hit, dying enemy grunts remember to fall flat across the wire so that their friends in the next wave can use their dead bodies as stepping stones. They come in through stubber and lasrifle fire, mines, grenades, and bolter rounds. They come in through salvos of artillery shells that weight ninety-five pounds each. The assault waves come on in, crashing into the thin khaki line, soaking up all of our ordinance and our anger and hit by so many shells and bullets that they can't fall down.

An ocean of highly motivated blue midgets ready to pay the price is flooding up the hill, bringing His judgement for those who do not have true faith in His Divine protection.

As I burn up cells in my lasrifle I feel proud to be attacked by these brass-balled little hardasses, and proud to be killing them. The most inspiring thing I've seen around here lately are these Tauphiles and the way they attack. They come in lean and mean, the best light infantry since we made planetfall and had our identities stolen.

Ollianus looks back at us and says, "Black Lucas Bastonne is being overrun."

Black Lucas Bastonne's squad of Catachan Guardsmen is standing tall in the perimeter trench.

Black Lucas Bastonne stands flat-footed above the trenchline, bigger than a Primarch, and fires his heavy bolter point-blank into a rolling wave of about one million kroot warriors. Black Lucas Bastonne and the Catachans fight hand to hand until they are cut off and surrounded.

Ollianus, Hendral, and I are all out of the bunker quicker than a bluey can proselytize his garbage, hauling ass down the slippery catwalk, jerking F.N.Gs to their feet.

By the time we double-time to Black Lucas Bastonne's position there are fifty Guardsmen with us, from four different platoons, and we're pumping, pumping, a little adrenaline cocktail to cleanse the blood, pumping on wild animal anger and righteous indignation, pumping, pumping, we are Cadian Shock Troopers and we have come down to battle, and by the Emperor we can't wait to kill anybody who fucks with our friends, we're running into the black metal whirlwind like big-assed birds, we are all going to die and we just can't wait because life in the shit is a rush and we feel alive and perfect and goddamn beautiful, because we are being who we came here to be, and we are doing what we came here to do, and we are doing it really good, and we know it.

Black Lucas Bastonne hangs tough, firing his heavy bolter until the barrel glows red and white. But a Gue’vesa flame thrower roars across the trenchline and then Black Lucas Bastonne is a black man wearing fire as formal attire and his bulky body jerks like a puppet and he dances as lasrifle cells in his bandoliers cook off, and then the bolter in his hands blows up, and Black Lucas Bastonne is still standing, while advancing Fire Warriors move around him and out of his way. He holds on to his throat with both hands, like a man trying to strangle himself, or like a man trying to pull off his own head. And he falls.

We hit the Greater Good-propelled blueys in the left flank and we cut them up good. We pop their arms and legs off. We spread out above the perimeter and isolate each pocket of Fire Warriors inside our wire and we blast them until they are unrecognizable chunks of dead meat encased in hard shells. We shoot them at such close range that they explode in bright gouts of blood, the duckboards under our feet becoming slippery with their body juices.

We jump down on top of them in the trenchline and we beat them to death with entrenching tools and we stab them in the face with combat knives and we chop off their heads with machetes.

Then we stand up in our perimeter trench and face outboard and fire a blinking stream of hard red light into balls, bellies, and thighs, and we cut them down as they come up the hill.

Somewhere someone is swearing at the God-Emperor and somewhere a chorus of non-hackers, begs, "MEDIC! MEDIC! MEDIC!"

We don't care. Fuck the wounded and fuck their candy-ass personal problems. We don't have time to listen to their crying. The flood of little blue soldiers is falling back, out of our reach, and this drives us crazy.

We climb out of the trench line and slide on our asses into our own wire and we climb over dead Tau piled three deep and we kick tangled, blasted strands of barbed wire out of our way and we chase the retreating wall of noise and muzzle flashes, and at every movement, scream, and sound we fire our hot rifles blindly until we run out of ammunition. Then we rob ammunition from our dead.

By battle magic a Kroot pops up in front of me. He runs at me, firing as he comes. Magic jerks my lasrifle out of my hands. The Kroot is firing his energy staff, spraying the area with thirty rounds of pulse fire to cut himself a path.

Dirt jumps up off the ground and hits me in the face.

I draw my hellpistol from my shoulder holster and I shoot the Kroot in the chest. He comes on, firing, fighting-staff fixed and pointed at my chest, razor sharp blades gleaming off the tip in the moonlight. I can see clearly his alien face, his wide, sharp beak, the quills sticking out like needles on his head, his soulless Kroot eyes. I shoot him in the chest twice and the bolts of energy jerk him up, but he's still coming.

Fingers of hot air tug at my khaki clothes like magic, holding me fast. I feel like a buffoon without any lines to say in a slapstick morale-raiser. I'm expected to stand here and look tough while this alien witch guts me with a spear. The situation is pretty damned embarrassing. How far can a dead xeno run?

I don't know what I'm supposed to do, so I shoot the Kroot four more times before he slams into me like a slender linebacker and knocks me down and runs over me and then I'm falling and when I hit the deck with my face a major earthquake hits the Starport and my eardrums burst.

After the blackness fades to sunlight and the earthquake is over, I'm sitting on the ground among butchered things, works of the black art I have helped to create. The Tau dead all look like failed contortionists. Stretcher bearers and medics are picking through the dirty red driftwood of battle, Tau, half-Tau, and pieces of Tau. The stretcher bearers load up with friendly wounded and carry them away, leaving behind dead Troopers wrapped in muddy bodybags.

Guardsmen walk by without speaking, their eyes locked on the horizon but not seeing, eyes rimmed with red, eyes locked inside sweaty faces caked with dust thrown up by the shells, the unfocused eyes of the half-dead staring in astonished disbelief at the strange land of the half-alive

Hendral is standing over me, yelling, but I can't hear anything. I put my hands on my ears.

Dead on the ground beside me is a Kroot with pink plastic guts piled on his chest. The guts are crawling with black flies. On the dead Kroot's ankles are loops of comm wire his friends would have used to drag his dead body off into the jungle.

A squeaky voice real far away says, "You shot his heart out! You shot his heart out!"

I say to Hendral: "Huh?"

Suddenly my field of vision is invaded by the ruddy face of the Grim Reaper, the dumbest Major in the 1st Kronus Liberators and one of the biggest shitbird on the planet. He's yelling. His voice fades in and out, which is fine with me, because judging from the scowl on the Reaper's face he's not saying anything I want to hear.

"I'll run your ass up on charges!" the Reaper says to me. He leans down, thumbs out his collar, taps his gold rank insignia with a bony forefinger. "I will have you shot by sundown!"

Smiling, I say, "You're on my list, Reaper. The Emperor Protects."

The Reaper sneers, struts away.

As my hearing returns, Hendral gives me the straight skinny. The Reaper is going to write me up on an Article 15, office hours, because the Snake told the Reaper that the reason we were caught off guard by the ground attack was because I was sleeping on guard duty. But I won't face a court-martial because the Snake, as my Platoon Sergeant, stood up for me and asked the Reaper to go easy on me because I'm crazy.

The ground attack was only a probe in force. Our grungy counterattack was a waste of time and good troopers. The Reaper had already issued the order for the rifle companies on our flanks to retreat. Pavonis Starport would have fallen on its last day in existence if the Marauders had not arrived. The bombers dropped a tight pattern of two-thousand pound blockbusters one hundred yards outside our wire, saving our asses, one more time.

The Snake, Hendral explains, is being put in for the Iron Cross for heroism under fire because he claims he personally led the counterattack. And the Snake will be awarded a Medallion Crimson for a painful mouth wound he received during brutal hand-to-hand combat with elite Tau troops. Finally, the Reaper plans to recommend the Snake for commission and the rank of 2nd Lieutenant due to meritorious service.

Hendral is asking me if I feel okay and if I am I sure I'm not hit when the Reaper and the Snake swing by. The Snake glances over at me, preens a little, and smirks a lot. Haskell and Lumpy follow three paces behind. Haskell gives me what is supposed to be a real mean look, then gives me the finger.

The Reaper puts his arm around the Snake's shoulders and says, "I do like to see the arms and legs fly!" The Snake nods and nods, tries to smile, tries to speak, winces in pain, and Hendral and I get a quick glimpse of the heavy black thread knotted through the tip of the Snake's tongue. Hendral is confused when I start laughing hard enough to crack a rib.

The Snake looks over at us, puzzled, and I roar.

No John, you are the Tau

Some switched on Corporal from Three Platoon souvenirs us a couple of cans of warm rotgut. There's mud in my booze but I don't care; there's mud on my teeth. All I can think about is how the rising sun hurts my eyes. I want to crawl up into my half-shelter and sleep for one thousand years.

Hendral helps me to stand up. But before we climb back up to the perimeter, Hendral and I drink a toast to the Cadian and Catachan dead in the mud at our feet, individuals so highly motivated that they stood toe to toe with a force 5 times their size, even after they bombed and shot them and burned them and killed them, in so many, so many times.

I say, "We can't beat these people, Hendral. We can kill them, sometimes, but we are never going to beat them."

Hendral crushes the empty beer can in his hand and throws it away. He looks at me and says, "The Emperor protects."

Somewhere a medic says, "This one's still alive. Stop the haemorrhaging and clean away the mud."

After the battle I strip naked and curl up inside my half-shelter and I have my nightmares.

In my nightmares she stands before us shining like the sun, dazzling us, blinding us. Impossible to comprehend and whispering death into the ears of troopers, her black shadow comes in the night and claims us again and again and again and again and again and again and again...

The obsidian monolith looms ahead wreathed in eldritch light and flame. The Monolith is vomiting an endless host of silver horrors. We charge on heedless, screaming like madmen. Keban is clutching the Colours out front as we crash into them and board their tombs. Lorn V is engulfed in light. The Eldar-

Eldar warriors are like the land itself and their bodies are made of earth. The Eldar have magic powers which allow them to sink into the soil and disappear.

Like dark sharks the Eldar glide through an ocean of endless white. With cold lidless eyes, with predator's eyes, the Eldar swim silently just under our feet, preparing to strike.

The Eldar slink away from Tyrea through their webways, carrying their heads and arms and legs. Back in their craftworlds they will sit in shadows while their pretty Eldar girlfriends sew the shrapnel-torn extremities back on with oversized needles and heavy black thread, and apply silken bandages. During the night the pretty Eldar girlfriends will heal the red-edged and black-stitched wounds with herbs and the root of the wild banana tree and hot bowls of soup and lots of kisses.

The Guardsmen fill up the soil with Eldar bones, really fill it up, totally, so that the Eldar raiders can't find one ounce of earth in which to hide. She refuses to surrender, and chooses to die. The bones of the staring Eldar stack up and cover the wind-swept plains of Tyrea and pile up higher and higher until they blot out the sun.

Humans fear the dark, so they leave Tyrea and call in victory.

On a night when there's no moon to shine on their magic, the Eldar bones reassemble themselves into people. Finally, talking and laughing, the Eldar are free to walk hand in hand across the surface of their own land, the land of their ancestors-

The duel plays out over and over again. Cool and imperious, she parries Keban’s slash. She flows like quicksilver. The spear dances in her hands seeking, searching, probing. Keban can’t keep this up forever and we try our best to cut our way through her guards. His sword crackles with energy as he raises it high to parry another thrust. A feint. She pulls the blade back and slashes down the length of his chest. Keban collapses forward, vivisected, spilling his warmth into this foreign soil.

I am too far away and an Eldar witch bars my path. Grief and fury drives me mad and add strength to my blows. Baern comes from behind it and slides his short sword through its armpit and into its black heart. The Eldar falls at my feet but Baern and I are already moving past him before he touches the ground.

Keban’s head is resting in Hendral’s lap. He reaches out slowly, gently and Jergaul clutches his hand, ‘’My boys. Good boys. I’m proud of you... Good lads.’’ He gives one last shuddering sigh and abandons his broken-hearted children.

I relive the rape of our Regiment. We stand within the cavernous holds of the troop carrier, a ragged band of survivors who should not be. Eight thousand descended. Only one under-strength Kasrkin platoon returned. Lt.Hyeral calls us to attention. The new C.O. tells us we are his; that we belong to him now. He promises us victory and glory to match the laurels we earned under the Old Man, but we don’t care. We just want vengeance.

Lieutenant Hyeral salutes and lies, ‘’Long have we wished to serve under you, sir.’’

Colonel Alexander smiles pleasantly and returns the salute before walking away. A month later, we are ordered to take back Kronus under a new name and new colours, the dead replaced with native scum and remnants from other units in the sector. The 412th was sacrificed to satiate one man’s overweening ambition; only the discovery of Taldeer’s presence on Kronus quells the mutinous mood of the remaining Cadians as they are spread out amongst the new-comers.

Wafting out from the darkest recesses of my brain, I play out the pursuit into the mountains and our betrayal. The valkyrie is on the deck and burning bright. We crouch in its wreckage preferring the flames to the Orks. The vox has gone dead and none of the channels respond. Keban is dead and Hyeral has made me the new mother for the last orphans of the 412th. We fight our way clear and the hunters have become the hunted. Only 12 of us make it back to Imperial lines. Afterwards, we realize the truth: We were not meant survive. Lieutenant Hyeral decides to pull up the stakes and we vanish inside the mass of Imperial troops fleeing the Astartes before we can be terminated.

In my nightmare my friend Baern is down, shot through both legs, his balls shot off, an ear gone. A bullet through his cheeks has torn out his lower jaw. Baern is being shot to pieces by a sniper in the Tyrean lowlands. The sniper has already zapped Venris, our point man, and has mutilated two Kasrkin who went out to save Baern--Iacton and Tybalt. The sniper is shooting Baern to pieces so that the rest of the Kill-Team will try to save him and then the sniper can kill us all and Baern too. Jergaul is screaming at me as his squad restrains him from rushing headlong to his death.

One more time, in my nightmare, Baern stares at me with eyes paralyzed with fear, and his hands open to me like language and I fire a short burst from my hellgun and one round goes into Baern's left eye and rips out through the back of his head, knocking out brain-wet clods of hairy meat. And Baern is dead, shot through the brain. The Vindicaire...

Click. Click-click.

What is that sound? I wake up. I grab my rifle. It must the Vindicaire. The Vindicaire has come to gut me.

Click. Click-click.

I track the clicking sound until I find Hendral inside an empty bunker a few meters down from my shelter. Hendral is hunkered down in the dark, dry-firing his bolt pistol into his head.

I climb into the half blown-out shelter. I squat down into a shadow. I don't say anything.

I don't look at his face. Hendral is a recruiting poster Shock Trooper, with a square chin, steel-gray hair, and a neatly trimmed mustache. But now his face is oily with sweat and contorted. His eyes are wild. He looks like a drunk who's about to cry. But he won't.

Hendral is a Kasrkin, the elite of the elite, but he became one just recently, Lorn V was his first mission so he's still mostly human. And since Donlon died at Victory Bay when the Blood Ravens betrayed us and I lost my last link with reality, Hendral has been my best friend.

I'm afraid to die alone, but even more afraid to go home.

About a month ago, Hendral and I were riding security for a resupply convoy. I was hitching a ride with Hendral and one of his squads in a chimera mounted with a stubber.

We were rolling through one of those jam-packed cardboard villes that straddle Route 1 leading to the starport. The natives were picking through garbage piles to find something to eat.

We saw this little native kid trying to eat a piece of insulating foam, and it made us laugh, because the little native would take a bite, make a face, spit it out, then take another bite.

The squad was catching some sleep, lying on the double layer of sandbags on the back of the chimera. Hendral and I were standing by the stubber, eyeballing the natives. We hadn’t yet realized the full extent to which the planet’s population had betrayed the Imperium.

Going by like a fever dream was a parade of skinny natives in white conical hats, small squares of crops waiting to be harvested and half-ton grox with brass rings in their noses and PDF troopers in brand new uniforms and firetearms of teenaged whores who flashed bee-sting tits at us, and we watched farmers hunched over, toiling away at soil contaminated by industry, pulling out bad weeds.

I was eating fruit cocktail out of a gallon can with my fingers, pawing through the sticky fruit, picking out the cherries.

The convoy slowed down in the ville, and this ugly Native kid with a cleft palate comes running up, selling cherryapple slices on toothpicks. "You give me one lho-stick! You give me one lho-stick!"

Suddenly the ugly native kid swung his cardboard box full of cherryapple slices up into the opened top of the chimera

Hendral was the gunner in the stubber mount. He swings the stubber around and his whole body shakes boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom and the kid exploded and was splattered all over the side of the road like a butchered chicken.

Then the chimera came apart and Hendral and I floated up and the squad was sucked into a vortex of translucent black fire and then as suddenly as that it was all over and Hendral was trying to help me up out of the road.

My head had hit the road hard. Hendral lifted me up and I spat out grit and on the ground all around us were pieces of men. Some pieces were moving, some not. All of the pieces were on fire. The chimera was on its side and on fire and every one of Hendral's people was a legless ball-less wonder.

"You're plain fucking crazy," I say to Hendral, trying not to think about the painful past.

Hendral looks at me, then looks at the gun in his hand. "The Emperor Protects."

I shrug. I say, "Sorry 'bout that."

Hendral says, "I'm a Kasrkin, Jon. Hell, I love this damn Shock Trooper Regiment an' shit. But Pavonis was never a battle: it's been a publicity stunt. And Shock Troopers are not elite troops; we're movie stars. The Guardsmen on Kronus were just show business for the propaganda people. We're straight men, feeding lines to the Tau. The Brass has demoted us to being live bait for xenos and heretics. We're nothing more than glorified forward observers, recon for an avalanche of bombs and shells and orbital lances. They’ve taken all of the fun out of killing. We might as well just prop up some wooden Guardsmen like duck decoys and double-time back to the Gate and join the Interior Guard and make lots of babies."

I don't say anything.

"Hunker down, they say. Dig in. But Cadians are not construction workers. We don't dig. We get wired. ‘’Holding our positions’’ is not part of our creed. We are stone-hard kickers of enemy ass."

I say, "I heard that."

"Last week there must have been two platoons of nobilis pukes in spit-shined khaki jackets strutting around Pavonis, making exciting pict-caster shows, telling the civilian pukes back in the Worlds that we'd won another big victory and that the siege of Pavonis had been broken and how the Kronus Liberators had held Pavonis, blah-blah-blah, but how it sounded was that somehow the viewers at home deserved to take a bow for what Guardsmen did alone. And no one, not even you, talks about the Astartes turning on us."

I say, "That's affirmative."

Hendral looks up at me. "So now we're sneaking out the back door like Eldar who can't pay the rent. The evacuation of Kronus is a secret back home but it's not a secret from our enemies."

"There it is."

"So whose side are we on?"

I say, "We're trying to be the good guys, Hendral, but we're trying too hard."

Hendral says, "Before we came to Kronus, the Tau slept in this piece of shit bunker. Tomorrow night they'll be sleeping in it again. What goes around comes around. But what about the eighty-six thousand good grunts that got hit here? Do you think those guys will ever forget the price we paid to hold Pavonis? And what about the guys who died here? What about Baern?"

"Well," I say, "if I felt that bad, I wouldn't kill myself. I'd kill somebody else."

"Get out of my face, Falker. Asshole."

"You're term is almost over again, Hendral. Don't extend this time. You're short. Rotate back to Cadia and get franchise to some Eden world. Cut yourself a piece of slack. You owe it to yourself."

"Hell, Jon, I wouldn't know what to do with myself on some paradise planet. The only people I've ever understood and the only people who ever understood me are these hard-headed raggedy-assed grunts."

"So stand on the ramparts and knock up the women."

He looks at me, almost laughing. "Shit."

I grunt. "Shit."

Hendral says, "Remember back when Baern was our squad leader in Victory Bay? Remember the girl?"

I look at my boots. "Yeah, I remember. That damned Victory Bay."

"She came right up to us in the middle of a firefight," says Hendral "Inside the Citadel. She pushed that little cart up and was selling recaf with ice, under fire."

"'Where are the Tau?'

"And the girl said, 'You Tau.'

"We said, 'You baby traitor.'

"And she said, 'No Tau. Tau number ten thousand.'

I say, "Let it go, Hendral. That's ancient history."

But Hendral is already running the Victory Bay story in his head: "Some dumb Guardsman was crying. I don't know his name. Just some dumb grunt with a personal problem.

"The girl squatted down in front of the grunt. She was so cute. She picked up his helmet--she could hardly lift it--and put it on. The helmet completely covered her head. She looked funny. The grunt laughed. He stopped crying and lifted the helmet off of her. She giggled.

"The little bitch ran over to her cart and got the grunt a cold bottle of recaf and opened it an' shit and ran back and gave it to him. 'I souvenir you,' she said, 'Guardsman number one!'

"The Guardsman laughed again, leaned back, and was chugging the drink. The lil gunbaby pulled a frag out of her ice bucket, jerked out the pin, shoved it under the open flap of the grunt's flak armour and held it on his bare chest as he finished chugging the recaf.

"Then the grunt looked down, remember? Remember that look on his face? He looked down and then the grunt and the little girl melted into a ball of smoke and then noise turned them into shit."

"I know," I say. "I remember."

Hendral says, "Jon, when babies blow themselves up to kill a Guardsman, something is definitely wrong with the program. I came here to Kronus to kill heretics, not little kids. Little kids don't become heretics until they grow up. But even Kronus babies come out of the womb armed to the teeth and hating troopers, Falker, and I don't know why. How can we wean them from the propaganda printed in their mother's milk? I'm supposed to be a professional fighting man. How is it going to look when I stand before the Golden Throne if I get killed by a little kid? It's not dignified. Who are we, Falker? We're Shock Troopers. We're supposed to be the best. What's wrong with us?"

I stand up. "I got to go police up some dead xenos."

Hendral looks up, surprised. "But you can't just go off somewhere and police up dead xenos. Not now. I'm going to kill myself."

I say, "Without any rounds?"

"I was just practicing. I got rounds."

I say, "Okay, so what am I supposed to do?"

"Well, you know, you're supposed to talk me out of it, an' shit."

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

Hendral thinks about it. "Well, you know, you say, 'life is good.'"

"Life is good."

Hendral says, "No, it's not."

I say, "You're right. It’s hell. Life is a nightmare."

Hendral is not sure what to say next. Then: "Why don't you tell me how much I'd be missed?"

I nod, thinking about it. "Yeah, okay. Well, I'd miss you, Hendral. And Ollianus. Maybe. I mean, Ollianus never liked you, but he'd probably miss you. The PDFs won't miss you because they're too dumb to know who you are. Black Lucas Bastonne would miss you, but he's off on a one-way tour with the KIA travel bureau. And even if Black Lucas Bastonne was alive he'd probably just say Nos es totus Damnatus, tough shit, sorry about that."

"The Emperor Protects." Hendral nods. "There it is. Sorry 'bout that." He laughs.

I say, "Want a cold amasec?"

"That's affirmative on your last," says Hendral, looking up, brightening. "I sure could use one."

I say, "Well, when you find some slack, Hendral, you be sure to souvenir a big piece for me."

The monsoon rain is coming down hard and cold and the PDF I put through Grenade School is falling asleep on guard duty, hunkered down in a hole where the guard bunker used to be, a poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders like an Indian blanket.

Catching dream-time, the New Guy nods forward, pulls himself a little rack time, then jerks his head up, opens his eyes, and looks around.

Within two minutes Owain's eyes narrow down to slits and his head nods forward again. When you're on guard duty, sleep is the most valuable thing in the world.

Staring into a night as black as Hell's steel door, I slide past the dozing New Guy and down into our wire.

I salute Sorry Eli, a human skull mounted on a stake in the wire. The promethium-blackened skull is wearing a conical tau water caste hat.

Naked except for a beat-up old battered helmet on my head, and armed with a grenade launcher, and with Sedewitz's field vox on my back, I double-time into No Man's Land across a post-atomic dark and bloody ground.

Rumour says that the brass have been debating about using nuclear weapons to protect Pavonis, which has already been the target of more bombs and shells than any place in the history of of Kronus. The zoomies, on average, fly bombing missions within two miles of the Starport every five minutes and drop an average of fifty thousand bombs a day.

From sterile red soil which has been blasted with more firepower than a six-pack of Krieg Judgement Days, dragons of ground mist rise up to swallow me. Gigantic bomb craters pockmark the deck. If I fall into a shell hole I'll either break my neck or drown.

Mud sucks at my naked feet and slows me down the way it always does in nightmares when the monster is chasing you. The sucking of the mud is embarrassingly noisy.

A star cluster flare shoots up, to the north. I squat and freeze. Somebody on a night ambush is coming in early. They must have wounded.

I don't care if it's plagarism, I'd totally buy this shit if it was a book. MOAR

I wait until No Man's Land is silent, so silent that even the frogs have shut up. Then I hump, and every piece of darkness has something mean and ugly hiding in it, and every shadow is full of ghosts with iron teeth, but I don't care.

Somewhere to the west, up in the black and brown silence of the Hyperion Peaks, in a small clearing in the brush in a place without a name, Baern is dead where I left him. Baern is dead from the blast I put through his brain.

Venris is there, and Tybalt, and Iacton. They're all up there somewhere, men who died not at a place but at a grid coordinate, scattered bones now, torn apart by carrion-eaters and ants. I want to live with the carrion-eaters and the ants. I want to be with my friends.

The Vindicaire laughs.

I stop and listen. The Vindicaire laughs again.

The grunts standing lines on the perimeter hear the Assassin and get wired. There's shouting and movement. In ten seconds illumination flares are going to be popping up all over this A-O.

I get a feeling that tells me I am in the process of becoming someone's favorite sight picture.

The Vindicaire starts talking but I can't quite hear what he's saying and I hope that the grunts on the perimeter can't hear him either because the Vindicaire's grasp of the situation is too damned precise and if we listen to him we'll all go plain fucking crazy.

Using my ears like an animal, I stalk the Vindicaire. My ears pick up each dot of sound.

Danger. No hesitation. I throw myself down into a crater and a solid slug lifts a chunk of dirt in front of me, splattering my face with mud.

Dark shadows danced and turn into monsters and larger, darker shadows swallow them.

Someone screams into my ear: "MORE ILLUM! MORE ILLUM! EMPEROR'S MERCY, MORE LIGHT!"

In the Imperial Guard a mine detector means that you close your eyes, put your foot out, and feel around. As I probe for mines with my toes I have a fantasy in my brain housing group in which my battle tactics turn out exactly as planned.

My fantasy of how I can be a hero begins inside my mind:

...I have talked tough to the Vindicaire and I have debated, and because I am so interesting the Vindicaire has listened, and because I am so clever I have kept the Vindicaire stumped on complex philosophical questions. In fact, the Vindicaire is so determined to win the debate that he fails to notice that the sun has come up.

From a cloudless blue sky four Imperial Navy Air Wing camouflage-painted thunderbolt fighter-bombers on Tac-Air standby slide in low and booming, locked and cocked and zero on fuel. In my fantasy I speak the magic secret formula of numbers into Sedewitz's field vox. I say, "Watch my smoke to target and expend all remaining."

Flames shoot out of the tails of my fantasy Thunderbolt bombers as they hit their afterburners and roll over, banking gracefully. Navy pilots perform a ballet of aircraft and boon in to give the Vindicaire a taste of the only true art form, the surgical air strike.

Fantasy silver promethium canisters and fantasy black bombs tumble down from the aircraft. Salvation in very small packages. Promethium canisters tumble down two at a time, end over end, floating, glinting in the sunlight, followed by a pair of Xs on black dots--snake eyes and nape, want some, get some.

The sky opens up and a piece of the sun breaks loose and falls down through airless space to the earth and the piece of sun hits the earth and splatters sacred gold fire across No Man's Land, a world of hurt coming down, rolling flames and thudding explosions.

Inside the boiling rage of the orange and black fireball the Vindicaire and I die horrible deaths as all of the air is sucked out of our lungs by force and we suffocate and in the next red moment our bodies are burned to the bone and beyond and we are two nameless Crispy Critters trapped forever inside a red and black daytime nightmare...

But that's only a fantasy.

One moment I'm trapped inside a piece of the sun, and the Vindicaire and I are getting payback for burning Kronus alive, and four Navy pilots are voxing in, "Ah, roger that. Two confirmed, K.B.A., Killed By Air." And the next moment my beautiful happy fantasy is over and I'm abruptly back in the real world. It's dark, I'm cold, and it's raining.

>>4869233
>Yes flare paladin would be sweet.

She wouldn't be a paladin for long...

Hunkered down in the dark, butt-naked in a bombed-out wasteland. I'm muddy and stung by shrapnel. And my feet are cut all to shit.

A lone illumination shell from the mortars section hisses up in a high arc, pops, burns, pours down a football field of harsh white light.

The air I'm breathing turns into bullets and angry blips of red neon try to find my eyes. I know that the PDF was sleeping, woke up when the Vindicaire laughed, got scared enough to shoot his own shadow, started working his rifle without remembering that I ordered him to use a frag or call in arty so that he wouldn't give away his position.

The PDF, Private Owain, has just fired a shot in anger; he's not a New Guy anymore.

I hear footsteps.

A hot sledgehammer hits me and knocks me down. I try to get up. My mouth goes dry in an instant and my stomach turns sour. I can't breathe. I've been shot. That fucking PDF has shot me and I try to say to him: "You're in the hurt locker now, sweet pea." But all that comes out is a cough.

I lift myself up onto an elbow and I hold my grenade launcher in one hand and I fire, bloop, at the expansive target of the PDF's ignorance. There's a silence and then the PDF's area comes all to pieces in slow motion. A cadence count later, the fragmentation round thuds.

The whole perimeter opens fire. Tracer rounds probe the darkness.

I think maybe I'm dying.

Cold hands grip my ankles. I kick. I try to kick the hands away but they are too strong. The field vox on my back snags on a root and is pulled off. I'm being dragged away, toward the jungle.

Struggling to stay conscious, I try to talk tough to the Vindicaire. I want to see the Vindicaire's black bone face.

My head bumps on a rock and I drop my launcher.

While my mind drowns in a red and black river, the Vindicaire is dragging my body off into the jungle to bury me alive in the Eldar webway as a wire-strapped fetus stuffed forever into a silent wraithbone wall within an eerie, impenetrable twilight realm.

I can smell the moist black stink of jungle and I think, halfheartedly, so this is dying, it doesn't mean nothing, not even.

Suddenly the darkness is cold, solid, and total.

I see a floating light. But I am a Kasrkin of Cadia and I know that what I am seeing is a false light, a phosphorescent glow imprinted upon the jungle floor by the decayed remains of some animal that has died there.

...more?

Please tell me it ends like this

>>4871540
I mean please tell me it doesn't end like this

As my eyes focus I can see that deep down in the bottom of some of the little holes are hard brown eggs. My shoulder is hot and itchy. I can't stand it anymore. I scratch hard, digging into brittle flesh with dirty fingernails, exposing the tunnel system constructed under my skin by heretical worms.

Maggots come out of the holes. Maggots as white as egg flesh crawl out of the holes. Blind worms with shiny brown heads burrow beneath the thin yellow surface of my skin. Maggots crawl out of my skin through the tunnels they have made. Maggots pour out of the holes by the hundreds, wiggling wildly and squirming.

The jungle gets lighter and lighter and then brighter and brighter until the jungle is as lit up as a nighttime carnival. Every tree trunk and every plant and every leafy vine begins to radiate a strange green-yellow phosphorescent light.

Razor grass and creepers and each leaf and gnarled root and even the interlocking triple-canopy roof of the jungle glows with light. All around me are living jungle plants full of a perfect wondrous green, and I am bathed in a warm green light of blinding intensity and everywhere I look I see jungle vines and ancient trees with light glowing deep down inside them and I surrender to the hypnotic enchantment of the world of green light and the Vindicaire drags me deeper and deeper into a vast and beautiful forest of green neon bamboo.

The Vindicaire laughs.

I laugh too until I see the Farseer.

no, No! WHERE IS THE MORE OF THIS AND WHY AM I NOT SEEING IT

>>4871764
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>>4871819
0/10

>>4871590
ohyou.jpeg
also 3-way fund it

>"The Guardsman laughed again, leaned back, and was chugging the drink. The lil gunbaby pulled a frag out of her ice bucket, jerked out the pin, shoved it under the open flap of the grunt's flak armour and held it on his bare chest as he finished chugging the recaf.

In the grim darkness of the future, there is only ;_;

I am 12 and what is this

>>4871927
gb2 /b/ spambot

>>Is This a Vietnam Rewrite?
Yes
>>Is it Fucking Awesome
YES

tl;dr

Oh god i want more. Is there more? If not, can i get the sauce of the original material?

needs more skaven porn

>>4871996
tl;dr Guardsmen being HARDCORE and NOTSUCK, also going apeshit insane.

in b4 Oniontrain draws OPs request like the whore he is.

>>4872019
This thread stopped being about OP's troll faggotry a long, long time ago.

>>4871590
I saw what you did there.

>>4872019
what happens if it isnt oniontrain who delivers?

I really can't decide if this is a rewrite or not. Certainly not from a single source, jesus christ, and some of it has to be original. Dear christ do I want more. where's the author? Is this Leibowitz? Cause up till now he's the only /tg/ writefag I've seen pull off shit like this.

>>4872489

BURN THE WITCH!

>>4872585

WITH FIERY HOT LOVE!

.....

It seems I like rape roleplay.

DAMN YOU /TG/!

Writer, have you read Dispatches? Some of it seems like it may have unconsciously come from there. If not, what books are you taking some of this from, because this is good.

>I sit down in an old aluminum lawn chair on top of an abandoned perimeter bunker at Pavonis Starport 6. Cold bullets of monsoon rain wash mud from my body. With my battered khaki-grey helmet shielding my face, I lean back and get comfortable. My right hand is touching the wet metal of a field vox under my chair.

>Between my bare feet is a heavy bolter set up on its bipod legs. I pick up my long black killing tool. It makes me feel less naked when I hold it.

REQUESTING SOMEONE DRAWFAGGING THIS.

>>4873253

someone should 1d4chan up the story so far.

>>4873456
fucking feet

>>4874461

Source on Flare plz @_@

>>4873253

Why does Flare has a dedicated (and shitty) drawfag.

>>4874616
Because Flare is awesome?

>>4874616
You know the scavengers feasting on corpses are getting progressively more pathetic.
It starts with the predator who brought the animal down and ends with worms and maggots.

What the hell is this Flare business?

>>4874684
Faggotry of the lowest order. Just report it.

>>4874683

Well I could understand B&. He was the first to do Flare torture and eventually did Flarebadass. But the whole array of faggots trying to promote Flare as "cool"?

What the hell, /tg/? What the hell?

>>4873253

So why does /tg/ get butthurt over Flare?

>>4874723
Some people just give that impression by not being able to ignore it. And being really loud about it to boot.

All the smart ones just ignore the whole shit.

Hey could anyone post some more Flare pictures please? :3

Actually are they any Flare fansites?

I'd like to see Flare the paladin standing on a pile of corpses, including: a dorf, an angry marine, the Lady of Pain, and Kamina.

Flare has an anonib page

>>4873253

OH EM GEE FLARE PALADIN

neck is long and she lacks cute, but ITS STILL FLARE PALADIN THANKS

http://anonib.com/_flare/index.php?t=34#p100

Why'd the Vietnam 40k story stop ;_;

There's more.

>By the time we double-time to Black Lucas Bastonne's position there are fifty Guardsmen with us, from four different platoons, and we're pumping, pumping, a little adrenaline cocktail to cleanse the blood, pumping on wild animal anger and righteous indignation, pumping, pumping, we are Cadian Shock Troopers and we have come down to battle, and by the Emperor we can't wait to kill anybody who fucks with our friends, we're running into the black metal whirlwind like big-assed birds, we are all going to die and we just can't wait because life in the shit is a rush and we feel alive and perfect and goddamn beautiful, because we are being who we came here to be, and we are doing what we came here to do, and we are doing it really good, and we know it.

FUCK YEAH IMPERIAL GUARD

Fuck flare, where's the rest of Vietnam 40k

>>4877857
It ended with that 'witty' Love Can Bloom reference.

>>4877857
ends with a LCB referance

>>4873253

>>4878588

HOLYCRAPMOREFLAREPALADIN WOO

>>4879965
If you swallow that monocle, you're sleeping outside again.

>>4878588
So Flarepaladin is going to be the summer /tg/ mascot?

>>4880661
Now it is, I'll be posting it everyday.