TWO
Unless you're an Astartes, being shot is an experience you will never get used to nor will you ever forget. Brushes with death are like snow flakes – they might all melt into a nice uniform puddle after a few minutes but at the time each and every one is unique. I'm certain that Cain can remember all the times the Emperor decided to spare his life for a little while longer and aside from a couple of augmetic fingers he seemed to have escaped the worst of it in relatively good order. As for myself, I was never so lucky. Sure, it could have been a whole lot worse; that lasbolt could have gone through my eye socket and pulped my brain and ended my career right then and there. By the Emperor's grace, though, I had flinched just enough that the lasbolt just merely raked across it, frying my eyeball into a raisin and scorching all the skin around it.
On the bright side, at least I never had to pluck that eyebrow again.
Downside, of course, was that for those few brief minutes it felt like somebody had replaced my eyeball with a burning coal. I spouted enough profanities to give a priest an aneurysm and if I had been a bit more coherent I would have used what willpower I had left to organize a firing squad for Penlan. Cain was quick to get the corporal as far away from me as possible in the off chance a hand managed to find its way to my laspistol. Only the liberal application of painkillers and sedatives finally stopped the cussing and the threats of retribution and my pain-induced insanity subsided. When the drug-induced haze finally lifted I was in the medicae bay, hooked to a few machines that made little ping noises every fifty-seven seconds (yes, I counted. You'd be amazed what your mind will turn to when you're stuck in bed). An all-too chipper physician explained the total extent of my injury, not that I couldn't deduce what the outcome was going to be by mere process of elimination. I had taken a lasbolt to the eye – you either died (or were left severely brain-damaged) or you lost the eye and had a wicked scar to show at parties. Since I'm writing this it's obvious I didn't die and since I could think clearly enough to note that the doctor had at least three uniform infractions my brain was functioning just fine.
The left half of my face still felt relatively numb from the hurried surgery needed to scrap out jerkied bits of my eye that dangled from my optic nerve like a piece of fish bait. Since it was a lasbolt everything had been cauterized instantly so there wasn't any bleeding but a doctor did have come by every day at noon for a week to clean out more dead tissue and pus from the socket. I won't bog you down with the rather unsettling details but simply imagine this: picture that gunk you get in your eye after a night's sleep that you have to sweep out of the corner of your eye. Now imagine that's your whole eye and you have to scrape that out every morning. Thankfully by the week's end the doctor felt it was safe enough to put in a temporary prosthetic to 'plug the hole' while I wait for an augmetic replacement. He basically shoved in a polished brass ball and called it a day. On the up side it didn't itch as much after that.
When I first awoke, I was surprised to see Cain sitting next to the bed, toiling away on a dataslate. Apparently he had accompanied me all the way from his office in what the doctors took as a profound sign of his concern for his fellow commissar but I suspected he was just using it as a means to get away from that Beije fellow. I didn't really care what the reason was, just grateful for the company.
"Commissar Cain, where's Penlan?" I asked immediately, twisting my head all the way to the side since he was sitting to my left.
"Someplace safe," he answered, not batting an eye away from his dataslate. "She's going to be scrubbing latrines for the next few weeks so that'll keep you from finding her too."
"Sir, she almost blew my brains out and you're giving her latrine duty?"
"If your brain is okay why do you seem to be forgetting what we had been discussing before your mishap?" I had figured he was going to pull that card on me so I didn't make an argument out of it. I was disappointed and angry; a part of me had wanted to prove myself to Cain, not to mention to myself, and now I was likely to miss most, if not all, of the Adumbria campaign. Even if I did manage to talk my way out of the medicae bay early, I wasn't going to be able to shoot straight with only one eye. I'd be relegated to desk duties until I could get a biotic fixed. "You'll be okay…Penlan's streaks of bad luck always have a way of turning out for the best."
You couldn't blame me for not sharing Cain's optimism at that point. What was currently running through my head, other than what I would do to Penlan if I ever got my hands on her, was how I was going to get myself transferred back to headquarters. Think what you might of me but back then I was definitely not the stalwart material I was when my career ended. That degree of pain and agony was nothing I was interested in going through again if I could help it and while dataslate cooking might not be the most glorious of services to His Divine Majesty it was at least a career I could see an positive end to.
Since there was nothing more to gain by sitting at my bedside, Cain handed the dataslate over to me. I noticed that it was the same one I had been handed earlier and promised to get working on. Now you might think that it was a bit cruel for Cain to be still palming off work to me even though I was in the medicae bay but that simply demonstrated just how perceptive Cain was to the idiosyncrasies of those under him. Short of a bottle of amasec, a dataslate was the easiest way to get my mind off my currentle troubles. Grinding through the pages and pages of nigh-indecipherable Administratum jargon had an oddly calming effect for me. Kind of like fitting a jigsaw puzzle together only your reward is the reaffirmation of the fact that the Administratum is full of narcissistic blowhards who couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. And they wonder why things get so bogged down when it came to paperwork? Half the time I needed to take notes on the notes and my only saving grace was that at least the people of the Administratum were generally an unimaginative lot when it came to their Gothic.
As I fought my way through layers and layers of low Gothic that bore some semblance to disciplinary manifests and updated protocols, my mind drifted to my days back at headquarters. I wonder if anybody ever fixed that recaff machine. I swear by the Golden Throne that just being in close proximity to our office and its endless head-banging idiocy had tainted the machine's spirit.
Of course, if it hadn't been for that recaff machine I wouldn't be in the situation I am now, happily droning on into a dataslate while a servitor comes along to refill my tanna bowl every hour. I suppose I should probably elaborate.
Before being posted to the Valhallan 597th, I had been assigned to work at the Segmentum Commissariat headquarters, toiling through dataslates for stretches that were best measured in days. At the time, I was under the 'direction' of Commissar-General Haeg, an oversized man with more chins than brains, whose brilliance ended at the top of his overly polished boots (and I should know, he usually assigned me to polish them when he got upset with me), and with more metal pinned to his coat than I currently have got in my body (which is considerable). He also had a horrible tendency to talk while eating a sweetbun or a grox-meat sandwich, as though coherent speech needed an immediate influx of fuel just to keep sputtering like an Ork buggie, resulting in an endless spray of bread flechettes. He was a man whose glory days were about as far behind him as the Golden Age of the Imperium.
Before you ask, I'm able to fling such insults around with impunity because the man is quite dead and hardly missed, least of all by the firing squad.
However, at the time the man had an all-commanding authority over that which made up our department of the Commissariat. Haeg would spend less time performing his assigned duties and more time droning on and on about his glory days on the battlefield where every trooper stood steadfast behind him as he charged into battle. I imagined that if he was even half his girth in his glory days then most troopers stood behind him for the obvious cover he provided.
"Why back in '83 when I was still attached to the 420th Cadian…it was the battle at Thiepval Ridge where those cowardly heretics had taken up position along the ridgeline," Haeg droned on a seemingly uneventful day at the Commissariat, peppering bits of dough across my dataslate and dunking several large bits into my mug of recaff. "Now the colonel insisted that we call up more artillery to start harassing the enemy positions, trying to push them out into the open. But I reminded the officers that the general wanted that ridgeline taken and by the Emperor I wasn't about to let a bunch of bolters and stubbers take away all the glory that was rightfully ours. If they didn't order the soldiers to fix bayonets and to get their arses in gear I was going to have the whole lot of them executed for cowardice! Now I tell you what, I marched those boys right up that hill and we gave those heretics what for!"
And if I recall my history classes from the schola correctly he also succeeded in getting over half of the 420th Cadian regiment wiped out in the process. The crowning irony is that they still gave the man a medal for that. That medal also happens to sit atop of my mantle as a reminder to the power of stupidity.
"I'm sure the heretics were very surprised to see you, sir," I replied sardonically, though Haeg seemed oblivious to my tone as he was to the rest of reality. For reasons of the obvious rarity of my kind, Haeg had gone to great lengths to secure my attachment to his department, which, if anything, gave motivation for me to get away from the desk. However, my first few months with the Valhallans had made the enduring of his old war stories seem like pleasant alternative. As I smiled and nodded with a judicious application of feigned awe that came only from years of having to listen to the man, I made a quick excuse of needing to refill my recaff, which was technically true (not that I had been drinking it lately), and made myself scarce, forcing the old Commissar-General to lord over somebody else for a while.
Enter our malevolent little recaff machine, which many of us at the office had nicknamed 'Little Horus' for his daily betrayal of promising us the much needed drinks we required to get us through the day. According to Adders, a fellow commissar whose laid-back demeanor provided an invaluable support to shore up the buckling walls of my sanity, Little Horus had been tormenting our headquarters for as long as anyone can remember and likely even longer than that. Yet, for every part of it that was malevolent, there was another part that was equally cunning, as though it knew just how much to torment us to ruin our days but not enough to force us to call in the cogs to get the thing re-sanctified (and even when we did, they said there was never anything wrong with it). I was muttering some simple litanies of cooperation while I surrendered my mug to Little Horus in hopes that I would be rewarded with a fill of hot recaff, or at least a mug of recaff…hell, an intact mug was actually considered a positive result at times.
"Come on…cooperate and I won't need to get judicial on your arse," I muttered bitterly, tapping several of the buttons in vain.
"You're sounding a bit more irritable than usual," Adders commented, appearing at my elbow with his own almost empty mug to duel with Little Horus over. Adders was the closest friend I had back then, his carefree yet chivalrous attitude providing a small island of comfort in a rolling sea of frustration and stupidity. Most importantly, he didn't want in my pants, which was more than I could say for a few of my fellow commissars (though in Adders case, it wouldn't have been unwanted). "Haeg proving to be more monotonous than usual?"
"Among other things," I answered with a sigh, moving onto the next step of negotiations with Little Horus, which involved thumping it a few times. "High Command wasn't very happy with my Technosorcery Prospect Status report…apparently I forgot to put a cover letter on it."
"Didn't you get the memo about that last week?"
"Nooo…" I corrected him, "I was double-verifying those judicial proceeding reports. All three-frakking-thousand of them, remember?"
"Oh right," Adders said, sipping his recaff thoughtfully, "how is that going anyways?"
"As fast the Emperor wills it," I answered, which was my way of saying slower than I'd care to admit. After a few more strings of profanities and several hard taps on the buttons, Little Horus finally spewed out my recaff, though a quick sip revealed it to be cold as usual. Horus also managed to spit a glob of recaff onto my shirt, much to my non-existent amusement. "The committee wants my analysis done by next week and High Command won't read my report until I slap a damn cover letter onto it, not to mention Haeg keeps asking me about that damn conference on Kashyt X he wants me to accompany him on…"
"I wouldn't trust being left alone in a hotel with that old man."
"No shit! What gave that away?" I had to be careful not to let my voice get too boisterous, less I wish for other ears to catch wind of me. The cold recaff did little to keep my temper calm, though watching Adders go through his own ritual of compliance with Little Horus did provide some amusement. He didn't really know enough High Gothic to iterate proper litanies and his attempts to repeat what I used were bad enough to make most Ecclesiarch priests hang their head in dismay. Eventually, though, even Little Horus felt sorry for the lad and would barf out a trivial amount of recaff, also ice cold. At least one of the cogboys on the floor below us was nice enough to fix up a heating plate for us so most of us were content with whatever Little Horus spat up.
"Look on the bright side…"
"Which would be what? That sexual assault would at least give me a reason to shoot the bastard?"
"While true, and slightly mutinous, I was actually referring to my predicament." Adders, being a recaff addict, wasn't satisfied with what Little Horus gave him and went about a second attempt to appease the machine's spirit, butchering his High Gothic worse than before. "Haeg needs some sensitive dataslates babysat while in transit to Haud Reverto. Honestly, since that incident with the sonic resonator and his liquor cabinet Haeg has just wanted to get rid of me for as long as humanly possible."
Not surprisingly, Adders perception of the world didn't extend very far beyond his own little bubble, as he didn't even seem to contemplate the consequences his absence would have had on me. Traveling through the warp was a gamble every time, not just with your life but also with your time of arrival. It was a confusing issue and one that made you want to know less the more you thought about it. I thought my day was just about hitting rock bottom when Adders' negotiations with Little Horus resulted in a stream of hot recaff nailing me square in the face.
"That does it!" I hollered, caring not for repercussions or potential hitting somebody hitting somebody with a ricochet. I drew my laspistol, shouted something about His divine wrath and blasted a hole straight through Little Horus, sending sprays of recaff in all directions.
Unfazed by the sudden burst of rage, Adders gave me a scrutinizing gaze over the rim of his mug. "Perhaps you should take my spot. You could use the time away from the office."
"Nonsense, I feel perfectly fine now. Better, in fact," I protested as I wiped the recaff from my face. With its last breath, Little Horus let out an appropriately timed blast of recaff right into my trousers. After a letting loose a flurry of lasbolts I took a moment to reconsider Adders proposal. He might have had a point after all. Too bad I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
The vessel I was traveling on was a meager cargo transport known as the Blessed Bounty, which spent most of its time ferrying munitions and other supplies from one side of the segmentum to the other. It wasn't a luxury yacht but the simple fact I was free from the chains of my desk was all the luxury I needed at the time. There was no paperwork to be done, (particularly the kind needed to explain a battle damaged recaff machine) no boots to polish, and no oversized Haeg prattling about the regiments he's led (or managed to get slaughtered). The captain of the vessel seemed to be an amicable enough guy and he invited me to dinner a few times during our voyage, not that we had a great deal to talk about. I never considered myself to be very good company; I had no war stories to share and little more than trivial anecdotes from my days as a cadet to tide him over. He was a civilian captain and I was a commissar, I had about as much in common with him as I did with an Eldar.
Between the minimal crew and decks upon decks of massive cargo holds and empty corridors, I spent most of the voyage on my own, not that I was bothered by the isolation. If anything, I felt I could use some time to myself. Life on most Imperial worlds brought whole new meanings to the word 'cramped' so the extra elbowroom was appreciated if anything. I even managed to step up a small firing range in one of the cargo rooms between crates of rations and medical supplies. With all the crates of ammunition lying around it wasn't hard to keep myself entertained (as common practice, most cargo convoys carried more supply than actually requisitioned with the assumption some of it may be lost while in transit).
There was one definite highlight to my time aboard the Bounty and his name was Devian, one of the bridge crew who unfortunately spent most of his time toiling away on it. I don't remember exactly what his duties entailed, since my knowledge of space ships and space travel was 'big metal thingie carrying me from planet A to planet B,' but what time we did get to spend together we didn't waste talking about jobs and duties. Alas, since most of our lives revolved around our jobs and duties, it left conversations particularly light, not that we ever did a whole lot of talking. We did…well, what you would expect a young man and woman to do when you stick them in a confined space for a long period of time. He wasn't even very interesting and only average in terms of looks but he had the distinct advantage of being the only man in my age bracket so it was less of a choice and more of a lack of options on my part unless I wanted to try out some of the girls in the mess hall…and don't you dare picture that.
Between gunnery practice, my romps with Devian, and the occasional game of regicide with the captain, which I still suck at by the way, time passed by pretty quickly, at least as well as I could tell. Time linearity was one of those things that went out the airlock when you traveled through the Warp. However, even my limited understanding of the Warp told me something was wrong when we made the transition back to real space. Rather than the relatively smooth transition that felt like riding on the back of a Leman Russ, it was far more violent and abrupt, not to mention hit you in the gut like an angry ogryn. The second thing that tipped me off was the haste in which Devian leapt from the our bunk, barely even answering my question of what the frak was going on before zipping up his pants and bolting out the door. He said something along the lines of 'stay put' when he left but if he thought I was going to just sit around and jiggle my mask (old Krieg saying) than he obviously forgot whom he was dealing with. Even if the most I could do was hang around the bridge and remind the crew whose life was hinging on their success, with a little help from my laspistol if need be, then that was precisely what I was going to do.
When I caught up to Devian, he was already waiting for an elevator, or more specifically he had been waiting for an elevator and by the time I had arrived he had deduced that the elevator was no longer functioning; a fact accentuated by the sudden bellowing of the alarm system. Loud sirens and flashing red lights rarely meant good things and it motivated us to move for the stairs with all speed. I didn't even care that my shirt and greatcoat were flapping open as I ran through the halls.
"Shouldn't the captain make some sort of announcement?" I asked after I realized that nothing else had accompanied the blaring alarms. A generic alarm with no accompanying announcement just led to confusion rather than a state of readiness. There was one possibility but I dared not think about it, instead praying hopefully that this was all just some glitch with the ship's automated systems.
"Well, he might just be too busy yelling at the crew to get to work to make an announcement. Aside from you and a couple passengers it's just the crew and they'd know once they reached their work stations," Devian tried to reassure me, leading me through a series of closed bulkheads and narrow stairwells. He explained to me that such an abrupt transition back to real space was usually the result of a problem with the engines or the navigation system. The truth, unfortunately, was a hell of a lot worse.
The first clue to how bad things had gotten was when we came to the hatch leading to the bridge, which lay on the deck about a dozen feet from the actual opening. A thick smear of blood across it didn't help alleviate my fears. Taking the lead, I drew my hotshot and slowly advanced to the doorway. What I saw inside still gives me nightmares to this day. It looked as though an Ork mob had gone through the bridge, half the equipment was smashed to pieces and the remnants of the bridge crew were strewn across the room like grox meat in a butcher's shop.
"Merciful Emperor," Devian muttered between heavy gasp as he tried to keep his lunch down.
However, it wasn't the piles of mutilated corpses that had left Devian pale with terror and I completely dumb-struck. That honour was left to the hulking daemonic beast that now stood where the captain's chair used to be, complete with little bits of said captain dangling from between its massive, fang-laden maw. It was clear now what had transpired – it was a textbook case of a daemonic incursion, likely from the sudden expiration of the ship's navigator. And if the textbooks were anything to go by it also meant there was going to be a brief and very bloody massacre to follow. For what felt like an eternity, Devian and I merely stared at the horror, which lumbered on four muscular, canine-like legs, its numerous eyes burning with hatred and flooding the whole chamber with an air of malevolence. Copious amounts of black, tar-like pus oozed from its body, covering it in an oily coat that dripped to the floor like slow-melting snow, leaving one of the worst stenches in the air I had ever come across (and I once shared the backend of a chimera with Jurgen).
"Wh-what do we do?"
I'd like to blame Devian for getting the daemon's attention, since it swiveled its head straight in our direction and let loose a roar with such ferocity that it blew my cap right off its black-haired nest, but chances were it was going to notice us regardless. There was nothing left alive on the bridge aside from us and for all I knew it was aware of our presence the whole time.
"I shall feast upon your souls!" the daemon yelled in a voice that for some reason reminded me of an evil version of Haeg, except with a mouth full of blood and flesh instead of bread.
As a commissar, it was my duty to be the very embodiment of the Emperor's divine and uncompromising will and as a child of Krieg I was expected to be able to stare into the very face of Death and wave it hello. All that went out the airlock when it came to the thought of having my very soul defiled. "Leg it!"
Now any experienced general will tell a Guardsman straight away that when faced with a daemonic being the best strategy is to attack it like any other threat using lasfire on the smaller ones and heavier anti-tank weaponry on the larger beings. The reason, they would argue, is that any daemon in the material realm is as vulnerable to weapons fire as any other hideously large creature with hide as thick as tank armour and with enough firepower any daemon can be brought down. About ten percent of the time, this is the strategy employed. The rest of the time however, the real strategy is just to bog the daemon down to buy yourself time to do one of two things: bring in the biggest guns you've got or simply wait the daemon out. Since there were no big guns on this vessel my only hope to survive was to stall the bastard. Without a host and outside of the warp, the daemon would last for only a few minutes at best, which I can tell you from experience feels like a thousand years when the thing is trying to suck out your very essence.
Now my actions might have seemed a bit unbecoming of a commissar but there was tactical merit to my decision, regardless of the motives. I had a couple of laspistols and a terrified civilian at my disposal – what the frak was I going to do? If I were a lesser person I could've thrown Devian at him for the few brief seconds it would have bought me but I wasn't that heartless and, more specifically, not that desperate…yet.
After frantically firing my laspistol, we bolted down the hall with the daemon lumbering ferociously in pursuit. We tried shutting a few of the corridor doors behind us but the creature had no trouble bashing its way through them, though it did buy us a few seconds. Devian, his voice taking the first hint of hope since we started our mad dash for survival, pointed out a set of heavy-duty blast doors that were just up ahead. It wasn't a squad of daemon hunters but it was a start. As he dropped the blast doors I used a nearby terminal to try and access the ship's intercom. Thank the Emperor most runes of activation were the same across vessels so it didn't take me very long to get it online.
"This is Commissar Ariel Abel," I began, hearing my voice echo through the halls around me, "there has been a daemonic incursion on the bridge. All hands are to immediately arm themselves and make their way to the mess hall until further notification."
"The mess hall?"
"It's a big room, it's close by, and there's only one way in. Best shot we have of making it through this in one piece," I explained, reminded by a heavy thud at the blast door that there was still a big angry daemon trying to kill us.
When Devian shouted out that we were only a short distance from the mess hall, I foolishly allowed myself a brief, fleeting moment of hope that I was going to get out of this ordeal in one piece. Reality, though, came crashing down on top of us, or more specifically, it came crashing down on Devian in the form of a warp-spawned horror not much larger than a ketchit hound. It was stupid to think that only one daemon had managed to make it onto our ship and the little horror fell upon Devian with all the speed and fury of a Tyranid gaunt, tearing apart his chest with its massive sickle-like talons.
A daemon that small, though, was easy prey and it fell quickly to a well-placed bolt from my hotshot. It screeched loudly in pain as it fell to the ground, melting into the floor panels as it was dragged back to the hell it called home. For one of the few times in my life, though, I cursed myself for actually being too quick to act as I stared down at Devian who, through some twisted miracle, was still alive, if just barely. Alas, there was nothing I could do for him and I knew it the instant I saw his blood-smeared eyes staring back at me, pleading silently for help. Even if I could drag him to the mess hall without the daemon catching up to me, the medicae facility here was far too simple to be of any hope. I swallowed hard even though my mouth felt painfully dry all of a sudden. I said my farewells and gave him the only thing I could, the Emperor's Mercy, and continued on my way.
By that point, my surroundings were familiar enough that I could make my way to the mess hall without any guidance. Devian's death did, at least, warn me to the possibility of more of those scything little terrors and when I heard their distinct skittering in the grating above me I knew I was about to get company. Unfortunately, it was right at the worst possible time as a handful of those creatures dropped from an air vent, barring the route I needed to take. This time there was a good half-dozen of them at least (you'll understand if I didn't have time to take a head count) so I cut down the first side-corridor I could find, taking a moment to blast a few of them before continuing through the detour. So preoccupied was I with blasting my pursuers that I failed to notice that there was somebody up ahead of me and I didn't notice until I ran smack into her.
Letting out another string of unlady-like profanity, I quickly scooped up my laspistol and continued firing at the daemons behind me. Once the last one was dragged back to the Warp, I turned to address whoever had the audacity to ignore my orders, not to mention get in my way. The woman standing in front of me had to be one of the other passengers since she wore a rather tattered cloak and looked about as lost as I had been moments earlier.
"What the frak are you doing out here?" I demanded while glancing over my shoulder ever few seconds to make sure the hall was still clear.
"I…I was trying to find my way to the mess hall...and then…"
Her stammering was interrupted when I saw a few more daemons in pursuit, which I quickly popped with a trio of lasbolts to the face. "And lemme guess, you don't have a gun on your either." She shook her head, citing that she had never held a weapon a before. At the time, I figured she was just some grubby passenger trying to get to a more civilized planet in hopes of forging a better life, which just serves as testament to how unobservant I can get. I had neither the time nor the will to drag another civilian along, let alone a woman who looked to be on the verges of hysterics already. I was contemplating my choices when a loud screech from behind alerted me to the presence of another batch of little terrors.
She shrieked, quite loudly and directly into my ear to boot, "Do something!" What a master of the obvious, I thought, as I started blasting at the increasingly growing horde of monstrosities. "What are we going to do?" she shouted as she realized, just as I had, that standing my ground wasn't an option. I should have just shouted at her to run, bolted, and hoped that I could just run faster than her, but I was just too damn nice of a person to let that happen. Glancing around for an idea, I noticed a service tunnel off to the side. I took the woman by the hand and shoved her into the tunnel.
"Run, hide, and pray to the Emperor they don't find you," I ordered, slamming a nearby rune to shut the service entrance door, as well as putting a lasbolt into it just to be on the safe side. Why did I not follow her into the tunnel? I hate narrow spaces. I'm not claustrophobic but extremely narrow confines unnerve me, not to mention it left little room to move in case of an emergency and if there were more of those things in the tunnel ahead of her, I wouldn't be able to get a shot off with her in the way. That small act of charity would come back to haunt me and not just because it gave those creatures more time to close the gap on me.
As I continued on my not-so-merry away, I realized I was most likely heading further and further away from the mess hall, which left me cursing my previous actions as it meant that there was likely no help for me. All I had was a bunch of cargo holds and some empty quarters. Then truth dawned on me – I was on a cargo transport carrying, among other things, weapons and munitions for a Guard unit. I ducked into the first cargo hold I could find and prayed to the Emperor that it had something large and, preferably, highly explosive. Thankfully, the crates I was looking for were all conveniently labeled 'Danger: High Explosives' so they weren't hard to find.
Praise the Emperor, the first crate I opened up had an Imperial grenade launcher in it: explosives and multiple shots, which was just what I needed. I managed to load it up just as the little terrors came pouring into the cargo room, at which point I blasted the living frak out of them. It was at times like those that I wondered if I had missed my calling when I decided against joining the Adepta Sororitas, though I would always be prompt in reminding myself that I would've looked absolutely ridiculous in power armour.
"Well, that takes care of that little problem," I said with a slight hint of satisfaction.
Of course, as you'd expect, the moment I thought the worst of it was over, reality came tearing through the door like a mad grox. The bigger one had finally caught up to me and now it had me trapped inside a cargo hold. I leveled the grenade launcher, desperately trying to remember if I had fired five shots or six shots (in all that excitement, I kinda lost track), when a mucus-like tendril launched from its back and grabbed me by the leg. Then faster than you could say 'frak me' I was hoisted up into the air, dangling almost helplessly above it. I say almost because I had managed to keep a hold of the grenade launcher, not that it was doing me a lot of good as a second tendril had seized the arm which held it. As several more tendrils latched around my frame, I was reminded of a particularly disgusting holofilm that a friend of mine had shown me back in my schola days (when faced with death, your mind can wander in very strange directions). I could feel the creature beginning to work its dark sorcery, as ethereal tendrils began wrapping around my very mind, a cold emptiness spreading throughout my body.
Somehow, I managed to gather enough will to squeeze the trigger and I discovered that I had, indeed, only fired five shots earlier. The sixth went way off-course, hitting the ground before it had reached minimum distance and bounced back into the air. It must have landed right into the ammo crate I had pulled it from cause the next thing I knew there was a massive explosion and I was knocked into the air. By nothing short of a miracle, several other crates detonated in a similar fashion, no doubt cooking off grenades and bolter rounds in every direction. I don't know how I managed to not get hit in all the chaos but the fall did knock me senseless for a few moments. By the time I regained my senses, the daemon was being pulled back into the warp, its tendrils flailing in a vain attempt to keep a hold onto me and the material realm.
Our ship drifted for a little while until one of the other vessels in the convoy was able to give us a lift. Without any bridge crew and especially no navigator, there wasn't anybody left to man the ship the rest of the trip. A shuttle would eventually be sent back to retrieve the cargo but that didn't matter to me, as my mission's parcel went with me the rest of the way to Haud Reverto. Despite how horrid my trip was through the Warp, I had little interest in staying on that dirtball of a world and booked the first transport I could back home – this time managing to secure a ride on a military cruiser that happened to be heading in the right direction. Thankfully, the trip back was completely uneventful, which gave me time to reflect on my brush with death, not to mention finalize my after-action report. Since I didn't want to risk getting the attention of the Inquisition, I left out a few points, notably the part where the thing almost ate my soul like a hot grox sandwich.
Word apparently traveled faster than I did, as I was oddly greeted with jovial celebration when I returned to the office, with Haeg wrapping a flabby arm around my shoulder and pressing me against the folds of his flesh. He proclaimed something about how his keen intuition had first led him to seek my service, all between mouthfuls of sweetbun, and that we should all be honoured to have worked alongside me. Confusion didn't begin to describe how I felt, since I hadn't even submitted my after-action report so I was lost as to how they were aware of what had transpired on my little voyage.
While fellow commissars and various Administratum quill-pushers continued to applaud, Haeg led me back to his office where another equally well-endowed and heavily-awarded Commissar-General was waiting along with a scrawny little civilian who I learned later was a representative from the Munitorium.
"Commissar Abel, I want to introduce you to an old friend of mine, Commissar-General Higgins, the Hero of Baitin Hill," Haeg introduced, somehow managing to shower everyone except Higgins in bread flakes.
"It is quite an honour to meet you Commissar Abel," Higgins greeted as salutes and handshakes were exchanged. "Fine job you did there miss, first class if I do say."
"Um…pardon me sir for sounding a little stupid but…which job are you referring to?" I asked hesitantly, curiosity overriding my better judgment to just let things be.
"Why, the rescue of Lady Peche, of course."
"Who sir?"
Lady Peche, as you probably guessed, happened to be the ragged young lady that I had so hastily offloaded into a service tunnel back in that side corridor. Turned out the Lady Peche was the daughter of some inordinately wealthy governor, who happened to have a peculiar, and rather naïve, habit of taking her vacations in cognito in order to avoid what she considered to be the overly-obtrusive security detail her over-protective father would have otherwise insisted accompany her. Somehow she got the idea that after I had shoved her into the service tunnel, which turned out to be devoid of any daemonic creatures, I heroically took on the rest of them in order to cover her escape. That only got further embellished by the reports from the surviving crew members, who got it in their head after hearing the stories from Peche that I had done similar to the crew, stowing them away someplace safe while I single-handed purged the ship of its daemonic infestation.
Seriously, how in the warp did somebody get that crazy idea? Did people always embellish stories like that? I am a bit ashamed to admit that I didn't do much to argue with their claims, as perhaps a part of me really did want to think I could have planned all that out as heroically as they thought, not to mention it was getting me attention for something I did, rather than for something I was.
So, Higgins and Haeg decided that my talents would be better off put somewhere more useful, and by useful they meant dangerous. Frankly, the thought of being attached to a front line regiment was sort of appealing since any plan that got me away from Haeg was good enough for me. Higgins thought it would be 'do me proper' for me to be attached to a regiment where a true Hero of the Imperium could show how to fight His Majesty's enemies. After pestering me for some first-hand details of the incursion, I just handed over my after-action report, which just made things worse. If they thought I was a damned hero for fighting off a bunch of little ones, when they read about the big one they just thought I was the greatest thing to grace the Imperium since Ollanius Pius.
Eventually, I managed to weasel myself free of the two Commissar-Generals, who went about the favourite pastime of their kind, trading war stories and gloating about who ordered more heretics slaughtered (and of course omitting how devastated their regiments got in the process). Retreating to the safety of my desk, I was greeted by a warm mug of recaff and a friendly smile from Adders.
"Guess it was a good thing I let you have that assignment," he commented as he sat on the corner of my desk. "I probably would've run off screaming if I saw a bunch of daemons boarding the ship."
"I'm sure you would've done the same as I did," I insisted, partaking in the warmth of my mug. "How's Little Horus by the way?"
"Surprisingly more cooperative ever since you taught him not to mess with you." I laughed, relieved to hear that my outburst hadn't cost the office its recaff supply. "Did…you do something with your hair? It looks different."
I paused briefly, pretending to be puzzled as I glanced up at the white locks that now adorned the top of my head. My discovery of my hair's sudden change in hue occurred a while back, which had resulted in a startled shriek that, thankfully, nobody heard. The fact that even Adders didn't notice the obvious, or perhaps was way too polite to point it out right away, just confirmed my original reasons behind never mentioning it to anybody. Nobody noticed. I had long hoped that Adders, at the very least, would've noticed but, in the long run, it was better that he hadn't. It made lying about it all the easier.
"I had to get it trimmed a bit after all the scuffling. Thanks for noticing."
A week later I was back on board a transport on my way to rendezvous with the Emperor's Beneficence and the assignment that would change my life forever. I eventually told Commissar Cain the story, just shortly before he boarded the transports down to Adumbria, but I left out the near-soul-eating and hair thingie as well, though I would one day learn that keeping secrets from someone as astute as Cain was no simple task.