‘No, no, no, no. That fuel is for the Crusade. It’s the war effort. Do you know how much–?’
Regara cut him off. ‘It’s tainted, man. A million Guard turned to Chaos, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘But we can’t... we... I need authority. Can’t just destroy it.’
‘Do it,’ Regara told him in no uncertain terms. ‘Do it, or I will come over there and do it myself, orders be damned.’
‘I can’t, major. I simply can’t. It’s not protocol, it’s not–’
Regara severed the link, slamming the receiver cup back in its holder. ‘We need the gunships,’ he muttered, partly to Culcis, partly to himself. Then louder, ‘Get them up. We march for Sagorrah.’
The Volpone had to run through the encampments. They were just under thirty men but at least the presence of the Kauth’s banner seemed to keep the belligerence felt towards them by the other regiments to a minimum. Widespread fighting had broken out. There were even firing exchanges. Sagorrah had descended into hell.
It was with some relief that they reached the Munitorum bastion alive and unscathed.
Regara and Culcis muscled their way past the few troops that Ossika had left that weren’t suffering the effects of the blood-fuel and found the Munitorum clerk at his desk.
‘Major,’ he warned, shuffling through paperwork, trying to find the correct documentation to sanction such a measure as destroying the fuel. ‘Major, you cannot do this.’
Sensing its master’s distress, the lexicanum-servitor came forwards from its shadowy perch to intercede. Culcis shot it with his hellpistol.
‘Step aside,’ he told Ossika, training the weapon on him.
‘You cannot,’ he repeated, eyeing the twitching lex-savant on the ground, but he was moving. ‘It’s not protocol.’
‘Hang protocol,’ snarled Regara, pushing the clerk out of the way so he could get to a long-range voxsponder set in a brass casing behind the desk.
He raised the commander of the Valkyrie fleet swiftly. A terse explanation followed, the conversation riddled by static.
‘Burn it, burn it all,’ the major concluded. His face was grim when he set the receiver down again and he turned it on Ossika. ‘Too late, now. Fire is coming to Sagorrah, and with it the salvation of thousands.’
From the hillside, below the ridge, a flame storm rippled the horizon line like a bright orange ocean. In the distance, the fifty-strong fleet of gunships were pulling away and making for higher orbit, the smoke of their missile contrails lingering in the air like a threat. The incendiary payloads had done their work, igniting the promethium wells and vanquishing the tainted fuel in a series of glorious explosions.
There would be ramifications, Culcis knew. Major Regara would shoulder them, despite the fact he had undoubtedly saved almost a million Guard soldiers in a single, decisive act. Only a man with Regara’s self-belief and arrogance could have even countenanced such a move. But it wasn’t bravura; it was necessity that drove him.
It had once been called Sagorrah Depot, but now the vast plain that burned below was simply a sea of fire. The flames rose high, caught by the wind, their edges blackening as the fuel cooked off and so too the poison that had afflicted so many.
In a valley behind where Culcis and Regara stood, the regiments who had survived gathered. Orders had been received from Macaroth himself; the Crusade reserve was mobilising for war and that included the Volpone 50th. Some would not return to glory, some had fallen. Culcis was determined they’d be remembered. He took the scrap of cloth from his equipment and tied it around the barrel of the lasgun he was carrying. Planting the stock in the ground, he smiled as the ragged banner snapped on the breeze.
‘What is that, lieutenant?’ asked Regara, raising an eyebrow.
‘Honour,’ said Culcis simply. ‘Honour for the dead.’
The major, for his part, didn’t respond or object. He merely took in the view. The flames stretched for kilometres. It was as if the entire horizon burned.
Culcis joined him, feeling something jabbing him in the chest. He reached into his pocket and found the pair of cigars Hauke had given him in the slums. He’d completely forgotten about them. He offered one to Regara.
‘Sir?’
The major took it after a short pause, nodding his thanks discreetly.
An errant pool of burning promethium thrown out in the initial explosion provided Culcis with a light. He then used his own cigar to light the major’s and the two men smoked a toast. The fire, rising all the while, threw a lambent glow over them both. It was warming.
Culcis supped and raised his cigar, blowing out a smoky plume.
‘To dogs in the sun, sir,’ he said, his eyes filled with reflected flame.
‘Dogs in the sun, lieutenant,’ Regara replied.
Behind them, the first of the drop-ships were landing. The troops of Sagorrah were being re-appropriated across the planet to fresh fronts. War was calling.
Sandy Mitchell’s Ciaphas Cain novels are a source of constant pleasure for me, and proof that you can always find a new approach in a shared setting like 40K. They’re understated, subversive and very funny, and it delights me that the universe of Warhammer 40,000 can happily support a series that has humour at its heart.
A Good Man is also understated, and perhaps a little untrustworthy. It takes us back to Verghast, setting of the third Gaunt novel Necropolis, and we arrive just after the last of the fighting, in time to be lured into the shadows of the ruins of the wartorn hives, and inveigled by unscrupulous and unreliable individuals...
Dan Abnett
A GOOD MAN
(Sandy Mitchell)
As the tide of war swept across the Sabbat Worlds, most of us could be forgiven for taking more notice of its rise than of its ebb. But after the battlefronts moved on, leaving rockpools of conflict and its aftermath beached by their withdrawal, the vital task of restoring the Pax Imperialis was only just beginning. On world after shattered world, a veritable second crusade of those with the necessary expertise to manage the reconstruction followed hard on the heels of the first.
Which was how Zale Linder came to Verghast, around the middle of 771, among a swarm of Administratum functionaries charged with the restoration of good order there. He wasn’t much to look at, so typical of his brethren that he might have escaped notice altogether, had he not worked so assiduously at coming to my attention; but that was to be later, and to really appreciate his story, I suppose we’d better start at the beginning.
We can only imagine Linder’s reaction to his surroundings when he first set foot on the shuttle apron at Kannack. Armed men were everywhere, in the uniforms of PDF regiments, or the Imperial Guard units left to garrison the planet, and the scars of the recent fighting were more than evident on the port facilities surrounding him. Come to that, as most of the shuttles approaching the Northern Collective overflew the glass-walled crater where Vannick had once stood, he’d probably seen some of the worst devastation even before his arrival.
For a man more used to the musty recesses of a scriptorium, the noise, bustle, and constant tang of combustibles from the surrounding manufactoria must have been disconcerting in the extreme. Nevertheless, by all accounts, he rallied at once, chivvying the small knot of brown-robed Scribes towards the rail terminal, though few of them were quite so quick to adjust to their new surroundings as he was.
The echoing hall with its multitude of platforms, from which services departed to destinations throughout the North Col and beyond, probably seemed as alien to the Administratum adepts as the landing field had been, but they found a local service into Kannack itself without much trouble. The Verghastites had become used to off-worlders by this time, particularly bewildered-looking ones speaking strangely-accented Gothic, and the booking clerk who wrote out their tickets in a flowing copperplate hand directed them to the correct platform with all the polite deference due to customers he’d overcharged by about five per cent.