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Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

The thing I’ve always found most annoying about the eldar, apart from their psychotic sadism and their almost visible aura of patronising smugness, is their habit of popping up where you least expect them. Like the ones who came charging out of the depths of the mine workings on Drechia, for instance, laying down a lethal spread of razor-edged discs from their small-arms as they came. Within seconds, half the troopers with me were down, either diced so thoroughly the burial party was going to need buckets to collect them in, or incapacitated beyond the point of any form of retaliation apart from harsh language.

Not wishing their sacrifice to have been in vain, I lost no time in diving for cover behind a comfortingly solid-seeming outcrop of rock. Once there, I snapped off a couple of shots from my laspistol in the general direction of the enemy, trying to ignore the little sparks left by ricocheting shuriken which seemed far too close to my nose for comfort while I did so.

‘Where in the warp did they come from?’ Lieutenant Grifen snarled, more rhetorically than because she really expected an answer.

‘Who cares? They’re dying right here,’ Magot, her platoon sergeant and closest friend, returned, lobbing a frag grenade at the first group of Guardians to have broken cover as she spoke. It burst in the middle of them, and the two closest promptly went down, crimson trickles leaking through the newly punched rents in their green-and-purple armour.

The surviving members of Grifen’s command squad were already returning fire with their lasguns, picking off the rest of the xenos who’d been incautious enough to attempt to try following up their initial advantage by closing to chainsword distance. A big mistake if you wanted my opinion, which I doubted the pointy-ears did; they’d obviously counted on the element of surprise to overwhelm us completely, before charging home against dazed and disorientated soldiers in no fit state to defend themselves. Which might well have worked against the local militia rabble who’d been trying to contain their raids up until now, but unfortunately for them, what they got instead was battle-hardened Imperial Guard veterans who dived for cover the moment the shooting started, and immediately began giving as good as they got. But that was the 597th for you; I’d been fighting alongside them for the last couple of decades, and seen them take on pretty much anything the galaxy had to throw at us. A handful of overconfident eldar would hardly make them break sweat.

Grifen tapped her comm-bead. ‘Second and fifth squads, circle back. We’re under fire,’ she voxed, before turning to me for approval. ‘With any luck they’ll catch them from behind, and we can take out the lot between us.’

‘Good thinking, lieutenant,’ I said, keeping my voice conversational with the ease of a lifetime’s practice at concealing visible signs of panic. She hadn’t been an officer for long, and I suspected she was still harbouring doubts about her ability to manage a whole platoon instead of a single squad. But the strategy seemed perfectly sound to me, if I remembered the layout of the tunnels around here correctly. ‘But right now I’m wondering how they got here in the first place.’

And, more importantly, whether there were any more where these ones had come from. Needless to say I’d never have been anywhere near the place if I’d thought there was a chance of running into serious opposition, which was why I’d decided to accompany Grifen’s platoon that day: if anyone asked, I was there to see how she was getting on with her new command and provide any help she might need in adjusting to her greater responsibilities. In actual fact it was because I’d got heartily tired of the eldar’s fondness for sudden aerial attacks, which had seen me dodging strafing runs by the one-man speeders our troopers referred to as jetbikes, despite the obvious lack of either jets or wheels, almost from the moment of our arrival. Not to mention the aircraft, which – though mercifully few – we lacked sufficient Hydras to defend against effectively, and which accordingly were left free to maraud almost at will. Since aerial assets were strikingly ineffective down holes in the ground I’d jumped at the chance to tag along with the group sent to check the tunnels for any sign of enemy infiltration, only to find that, not for the first time, I’d become the butt of one of the Emperor’s little jokes.

‘There’s nothing on the auspex,’ Magot said, with a glance at the unit she’d pulled from one of her webbing pouches, but that hardly came as a surprise. With all the ore, and the rock it was embedded in, surrounding us, its range would be limited at best. ‘We’ll have to do this the hard way.’ Which tended to be her preferred option in any case. She gestured towards the tunnel mouth in front of us. ‘Get in there and flush them out.’

‘If there are any left down there to flush,’ I said, already certain that there would be. In my experience, enemies only came in two quantities: too many and far too many.

And far too many was what we’d been facing here for more than a month.

The eldar had first appeared on Drechia a couple of years ago, in relatively small numbers to begin with, grabbing a consignment of freshly dug merconium before vanishing as suddenly as they’d arrived. The planetary defence force was predictably slow and ineffectual in their response to the initial incursion, with the inevitable result that the raiders returned in ever increasing numbers. The planetary governor had believed the assurances of whichever members of her extended family were in charge of the local defence forces that they were able to cope, despite their complete lack of understanding of military matters, with the inevitable result that, by the time the Imperial Guard were called in to clean up the mess, the xenos were rampaging about the place pretty much as they pleased.

Which meant that the 597th and I had been diverted from our planned return to Coronus, and landed with the unenviable task of attempting to put a bit of backbone into the defence of the place. A proper task force would have been a far better option, but with the tyranids encroaching ever deeper into the gulf, the resources required to assemble one in a hurry simply weren’t available, and until they were we’d just have to do the best we could on our own.

I’d complained about it, of course, not expecting anyone to take a blind bit of notice, and – to my complete lack of surprise – no one had; one of the definite downsides of my absurdly inflated reputation was the average Munitorum flunkey’s apparently unshakable belief that the mere fact of my presence would guarantee victory whatever the circumstances. So, with the orders confirmed, there was nothing else for it but to get on with the job and try to keep my head down as usual.

‘It’s not going to be easy,’ I said as the door closed behind the Administratum drone, who’d departed with almost unseemly haste after delivering the briefing documents, which, as usual, I hadn’t the slightest intention of bothering to read. I glanced through the armourcrys viewport along the length of the void station’s docking arm, to where our troop ship, the encouragingly named Indestructible IV, was partially visible behind the bulk of an Armageddon-class battle cruiser which – judging by the rents in its hull plating – had recently been on the wrong end of a necron lightning arc. ‘We’ve got an entire planet to protect, and just one regiment to do it with.’

‘Technically, it’s not really a planet,’ Major Broklaw said, glancing up from one of the data-slates the scribe had left, already getting on with the job of ploughing through the verbiage so Colonel Kasteen and I could benefit from his much more succinct and useful summary – one of the habits which made him such an effective executive officer. ‘It’s a large moon. One of a dozen inhabited ones, orbiting an isolated gas giant.’

‘So we’ll be tunnel fighting,’ I said, feeling a cautious surge of optimism. For an old underhiver like me, that was pretty much as good as it got, if you ignored the ‘murderous xenos trying to kill you’ part. An environment I felt completely at home in, knew better than the enemy, and dark enough to find somewhere to hide without anyone noticing if things went seriously ploin-shaped.

Broklaw shook his head. ‘It’s a really big gas giant. More of a protostar, really.’

‘The moons are warm, then?’ Kasteen picked up another of the data-slates, and called up a pict of the surface of Drechia. My heart contracted, along with my stomach.

‘Warm enough for us,’ Broklaw said happily, gazing at the snowfields and glaciers as though they were a gift from the Emperor. Which, for a Valhallan, they probably were. ‘Drechia’s an iceworld.’

‘That’ll make a change,’ Kasteen said happily. These days her red hair had a dusting of white in it, despite a juvenat treatment or two (which, I’m bound to say, was equally true of Broklaw and myself, except that his was still predominantly black, and mine the same nondescript hue it had always been beneath the speckling), but the cheery prospect of mucking about in bone-freezing temperatures which could kill an unprotected man in a matter of moments made her look a decade or two younger at once. ‘And the troopers will be happy.’

‘That they will,’ I agreed, taking a closer look at the data-slate despite myself. As I’d expected, the Adeptus Mechanicus had been busy in the first few centuries of colonisation, thickening the atmosphere and warming it up from unliveable to merely lethal, not just on Drechia, but on many of the other local bodies too. ‘What about the rest of the system?’

‘Nothing we need to worry about,’ Broklaw assured us. ‘The protostar and its satellites are independent of the rest of it. They have their own governor, Administratum and infrastructure.’

I skimmed through the relevant pages, my eyes and synapses ricocheting from the dense columns of population and tithing statistics like a bullet from an ogryn’s skull, and nodded as if I’d grasped the fundamentals as quickly as he had. ‘Makes sense,’ I said. ‘It’s just like a miniature solar system on its own, stuck out near the halo. Running things from Ironfound would be a logistical nightmare.’

‘That it would,’ Broklaw agreed, calling up a diagram of the system as a whole. The hive world around which everything else orbited (administratively speaking) was less than a quarter of the way out from the star at the centre of things, the vast majority of inhabited worlds, moons and asteroids petering out no more than an equal distance beyond that; only a few isolated void stations or chunks of worthless rock punctuated the vast gulf between their outliers and the protostar, which, for all practical purposes, might just as well have been in another system entirely. ‘Even a vox transmission would take a couple of hours to get there, let alone ships.’

I nodded. ‘Month or more, probably,’ I said, mindful of my own long coast into Perlia aboard a saviour pod from a similar distance out, some thirty years before. Which was why we were being sent straight there; the rest of the Ironfound System was probably blissfully unaware of the eldar raiders harassing their distant neighbours, and unwilling to help against them even if they weren’t for fear of attracting the xenos’ attention. We could be at least that long in the warp, of course, if the currents of that ocean of unreality happened to be flowing in the wrong direction, but at least we’d get the job done when we arrived – which is more than could be said for whatever dregs of the Ironfound planetary defence force the authorities there would be willing to get rid of. ‘Do we have a departure time yet?’

‘Twelve hours and counting,’ Broklaw said. ‘Should be long enough to get everything moved over to the freighter they’ve found for us, if we hustle.’ But his brow was furrowing even as he spoke, for which I couldn’t exactly blame him. Twelve hours might sound like a long time, but when you’ve got around four thousand troopers to herd, along with their vehicles, weapons, rations, ammunition, personal effects and the instruments of the regimental band, it can be eaten up hellishly fast, believe me. Especially when a double-figure percentage of them have already been granted permission to disperse among whatever diversions they can find on a pressurised ration can floating in several billion cubic kilometres of frak all.

‘I’ll get Sulla on it,’ Kasteen said, happy to pass the buck down the chain of command to her second most senior subordinate.

‘Good choice,’ I agreed. Sulla had begun her career as a quartermaster, and retained a talent for logistics which made her positively relish a challenge like this. I rose, with the best show of reluctance I could feign. ‘And I suppose I’d better start rounding our people up. There can’t be too many bars and gambling dens on a void station this size.’ I still intended to make use of as many as possible before we left, though, especially as I now had a perfect excuse to make the rounds.

‘Good luck with that,’ Kasteen said. ‘I’ll send out a general recall message, but there are bound to be plenty who’ve switched off their vox-beads.’

‘Sounds like we’ve a busy night ahead of us,’ I said, which, although it turned out to be true, was as nothing compared to the job awaiting us on Drechia – which, in turn, was to pale into insignificance once the true nature and scale of the threat we were facing eventually became clear.

Click here to buy Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies.

For Judith, for remaining married to a writer
in spite of the obvious drawbacks.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Vladimir Krisetskiy.

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