I've been on Death Row for seven years, eight months, forty days, and nine hours. I don't know why I keep count. Nobody ever makes it out alive. Drekk, but the brassies want to get us there as quickly as possible though. I suppose that's just the way in the Astra Militarum though. The brassies want most of us dead as much as the enemy does; and both of them like to plot our deaths in excessively inventive ways. Especially us on Death Row in the 22nd, and for some reason, especially me. Maybe that's down to being there for almost eight years; or it could be that we made the mistake of surviving the insanity of the brassies and this made them think that we were competent for plans of even more insane proportions. Butcher and Pockets like to joke that my chain-smoking will kill me before the brassies do. I'm not so optimistic.
This probably needs some explaining, since the Weissar 22nd is kept out of the spotlight. The high-and-mighty AM brassies don't like it when the lowly gang scum do the jobs that the 'honourable' regiments can't. The Cadians still don't like us much after we decided against a bayonet charge across no-man's-land, and just blew up a stack of mining explosives under the entrenched slit-heads that were giving them so much trouble. If they'd just asked politely like we did, the miners probably would have done it for them. To the brassies, there probably isn't much distinction between my unit and a penal legion, if any. Telling truth, and I didn't say this, they're right. We don't wear the explosive collars, but most of us were criminals – and most of us still are, just out of the sight of anyone that would give a drekk.
A few decades ago, someone on Weissar got the bright idea that they could save the trouble of shooting the underhive gangers by having us 'volunteer' for the AM, so that somebody else could do it for them. So, yes, we're criminals. We're just allowed to kill people for the Emperor now, or at least, whichever brassie reckons they're acting for him at the time. Twenty-five years or life. Not the Weissar motto, but it might as well be. As the 22nd, or the "Double-Deuce", we have our own of course: "We get twice as much drekk as everyone else". See why I'm not optimistic?
So that's us. The 22nd Weissar Infantry Brigade. Me? I'm Smokey. One of the surprisingly large number of women in the Brigade, even if I don't look like one. I'm tall and lean, with nothing particularly womanly about me. I picked up the habit of shaving my head when I ran with the Black Scythes, and kept it going. Picked up a scythe tattoo from them as well, over my left ear. I'm a Corporal in Black Company, in the grenadier battalion – the "Death Row" battalion. And if the 22nd gets twice as much drekk as everyone else, we get double that. Which leads to my seventh year, eighth month, fortieth day, and ninth hour, where someone was determined to get me killed again.
Smiler was giving the briefing. The name was a joke, because none of us had ever seen him smile. We're funny people like that, and not particularly inventive with our nicknames, as you'll no doubt come to notice. He was a powerfully-built man, who was unfortunately short – something he made up for by being excessively loud. All of his briefings were delivered at NCO Parade Ground Shout, and so was everything else he said.
"We have been ordered to quell an uprising in the Saint Geraldine Military Penitentiary. The grenadier battalion will be spearheading the operation."
"We finally going to prison, Smiler?" I said. "Someone trying to stop us getting discharged?"
The squad laughed at that. Smiler didn't obviously, because he'd been born without the capacity to laugh. He was swelling up like a disgusting, frog-like creature I once saw on tour on Lanagain. He hated being called 'Smiler', on account of being the only volunteer in a squad of 'volunteers', and as such, the only one that considered himself a professional soldier, rather than a professional murderer. He didn't like being thought of as on our level.
"Would you like to be the first trooper into the Penitentiary, Corporal Strauss?"
"No," I said.
"Well, shut up."
I decided to keep my mouth shut with a lho-stick for the rest of the briefing. It glowed intensely bright in the dark room. Most would have found the darkness impenetrable, but we were all out of the long-dead undermines below Hive Tertius, and darkness suited us fine. Even the metal of the troopship was a comfort - better than a land barracks where there's always some kind weather. I never thought I'd miss the undermines until I was getting drowned in rain on Lanagain.
"Isn't this a job for the black-hats?" Butcher said.
"No," Smiler said, and left it at that.
"Why?" Butcher asked, not getting the hint.
"Because."
"Because?"
"Because."
Butcher opened his mouth to ask something else, and I gave him a lho-stick to shut him up before Smiler put him through the prison door first. As much as I liked the thought of continuing the briefing until I was discharged sometime in the next seventeen years, Butcher was the squad medic, and I wanted him somewhere behind me in case I ended up getting slogged half to death by some bastard with a pipe. Even if his medical training had mostly come from performing procedures on smoked-out gangers behind his meat-shop, I fancied my chances of making it to eight years with him around than without.
"We will also be working alongside a unit of stormtroopers."
There was a chorus of groans. Even Smiler seemed unhappy about it, but his face was in a constant state of unhappiness, so he could be grinning like the Emperor had just handed him the keys to Terra at the thought of working with 'professional soldiers' for all I knew.
"They'll be inserting from the roof on another block, so they'll be out of our way."
"Let's just hope they stay that way. Might think we're part of the riot," someone said – probably Jammy. In spite of being the oldest trooper in the entire Brigade and the closest to discharge, he was also the most drekking dour. I stubbed out the lho-stick on the bench next to me.
"The stormtroopers have been ordered to stick to their own mission parameters, which is far enough away from ours to prevent any friendly fire."
"What about unfriendly fire?" I said, to a small ripple of laughs. I immediately lit another lho-stick before Smiler actually put me through the prison door first. Like I said, we're not inventive with our nicknames.
"They have their mission; we have ours," Smiler said, once he'd managed to calm himself down enough. "You won't even know that they're around. We'll go in, crack some skulls, leave. Pict-maps of the Penitentiary will be circulated to each section, so make sure you study them and get your bearings before we go in."
"Do we have any allies on the inside?"
It was the first question that Smiler didn't immediately glare at, and as usual it came from Surt. I'll cut short and say a surt is a drekking big and drekking smart animal that lives in the mines. Looks a bit like the result of a mole that's been knocked up by some kind of horse. Guess what Surt looks like.
"The MPs were overrun pretty quickly, and fell back into the medical wards. They're holed up there with some Sisters-Hospitallers of the –," Smiler consulted his dataslate, "Order of the Most Exalted Healer Saint Geraldine."
There was a murmur of excitement at the thought of some very grateful, probably very attractive Sisters. And yes, I play for that team. Keep it in your drekking pants. I'm not interested in a dangling sausage and eggs; and let's be honest, it looks like a hairy mine-rat.
"Smiler, would you say that aiding these defenceless medical personnel – and the heavily armed MPs with them – should be a key objective of our mission?"
I was half joking.
"As it happens, Corporal Strauss, that will be part of Black Company's primary objective, if you'd all shut up and let me get to that." Smiler sighed and rubbed his eyes, then persevered with the briefing. We all hoped that one day, we'd actually make such a mess of a briefing that he cried.
"The battalion will be inserting through the entrance hall, where Cable Company will establish a forward-ops base and remain in reserve. Black Company will push through Cell Block Ten to link up with the MPs in the Penitentiary."
"And the Sisters," I put in.
I ignored the whistles directed at me, but punched Chunks, who was sitting next to me, for gesturing what he assumed I'd be getting up to with the Sisters. It wasn't even accurate. I mostly put up with it because at the very least, they won't turn me in to the black-hats for my 'unnatural sexual activities'. Besides, there's more than a few of the men that find their way into each others' bunks. Just the way it is: you get what you can get tonight, because tomorrow everyone will probably get accidentally incinerated by one of our own Hellhounds while suicidally assaulting a slit-head gunline. Or something like that.
"After linking up with the MPs and securing the medical ward," Smiler said, ignoring the interruption, "We will get them back to the entrance hall for a debriefing with the intelligence officers, and then let the rest of the Brigade take over and clear out the rest of the Penitentiary, supporting them where needed. Understand?"
There were vague murmurs that Smiler took to generally mean we did, and that the slower members of the squad would just tag along with the ones that actually knew what was going on. Then the general chatter started up, most of which was complaining, trying to work out whose job it should really be, and how we might be able to pass off our assignment to some other unit.
Most members of the AM like their job; or are so fanatically devoted to it that they're willing to charge into a tyranid swarm with nothing but a lasgun. They're idiots. Really – the Cadians? Idiots; the Kriegers? Suicidal idiots; the Valhallans? Well, they're idiots just for living on a planet made of ice, so maybe the ones in the AM are the smart ones. Still, all idiots. The only advantage to this is that there's a never-ending supply of regiments to put in front of ours, but none of the brassies seem to want to honour them with the glorious death they want, and instead put us there instead.
"Mess in an hour, we move out tomorrow morning." Smiler was about to leave, and then stopped at the door. "One last thing. The new company commissar wants an evening roll call. Just don't look like a drekking mess."
The chatter stopped. For the first time since the briefing started, Smiler had our undivided attention and silence. Look, I'm sure there are some good commissars. We've all heard about them, and how they heroically didn't shoot all of their men for not ironing their uniforms correctly. But they never end up in Black Company. The ones that do tend to be the tight-arsed, gung-ho, "For glory and the Emperor" types. The kind that would get us killed charging into an ork mob if they hung around long enough. It's a shame, really, that they all tend to end up dying tragically before they can do any of that. Our last one accidentally cut his head off while shaving. The one before that was unfortunately killed by a misfiring hellgun. Butcher swore to the Chief Surgeon that in his experience, a misfire can look like the effects of a hand-cannon round if it happens at point-bank range. Besides, there wasn't enough of the head left to contradict Butcher's assessment.
The squad's bad mood didn't dissolve by the time we filed into the mess-hall. For a nice change, we'd landed ourselves on a standard Imperial troopship. That sounds bland as all drekk, but when you've been stuffed into the hold of a requisitioned merchant freighter that was previously transporting agri-crop fertiliser, you start appreciating the bland, standard, Imperial troopships, and how they don't stink like choke-gas. The food was even average, or at least, better than the soy-porridge we'd been getting on the freighter for our three-squares.
Smiler was sitting with some of the other sergeants and Lieutenant Schess, probably working out how to get us killed faster, so we took the free time to indulge in some more complaining about just how useless the MPs were at their job, and if they were as efficient at keeping their own prison in check as they were at interfering with some of our completely legitimate scrounging, they wouldn't need us to clean up their mess. At least, until a drekking black-hat showed up.
"How's it going, Troopers?" He said, sitting down in an empty space between Spark and Blackeyes.
He was young, barely old enough to grow the stupid moustache on his lip that I'm sure he thought made him look authoritative. Spark fidgeted with his sloppy eggs and blackened ersatz-ham steaks. Blackeyes just stared at the black-hat, and I could see her already plotting out the black-hat's imminent accident. Fortunately, Spark and some of the other engineers had made some improvements to the lighting so we didn't have to go around with photolense goggles on all the time; and the mess-hall was dark enough that we could shoot murderous looks at the black-hat without him noticing. I knew of a certain airlock with a finnicky latch, and figured I would tell her about it later.
"Think I'll need to have a word with the cooks," the black-hat said, sawing at his own black ham steak as we all thought about sawing at his neck. "I'm sure there's some kind of regulation against serving this to the Emperor's Finest, am I right?"
At this, Spark pushed his plate away, muttered that he wasn't hungry, and left the mess hall. I passed the rest of my food to Surt, who had already started on Spark's leftovers, and lit a lho-stick. I don't eat much before getting deployed, and besides, the black-hat was putting me off it. Our cooks make a decent jug of caffeine though, and usually get us some good stuff before we go in, so I make do with that instead. Most AM units march on their stomach; ours marches on caffeine and lho-sticks.
I eyed the black-hat over the battered tin cup, and thought about how I could get him into that airlock. Another commissar, one with a bigger and blacker hat than his, had no doubt told him something about getting in touch with the troopers under him. To give him some credit, the black-hat kept trying in spite of our silence.
"What about this prison business, eh? Should be a nice in-and-out. Good mission to get one's feet wet on."
And that was it. He was going to get us killed doing something he thought was heroic. I shot a glance at Blackeyes before she actually stabbed the black-hat in the neck with her fork. Our black-hats always tragically die from accidents, and we like to keep it that way. Actually murdering black-hats is just asking for trouble.
"I don't know. Seems dangerous enough to me," I said, and stubbed out the lho-stick next to his plate. "Better keep your eyes about you."