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Ciaphas Cain: The Bigger They Are – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Ciaphas Cain: The Bigger They Are

by Sandy Mitchell

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed while rattling around the galaxy, it’s that people have an almost infinite capacity for finding ways to amuse themselves, of which sports of one kind or another seem close to the top of the list. I’ve often been grateful for my time on the scrumball pitch of the schola progenium, running and dodging having turned out to be surprisingly useful skills in later life, but since being handed my scarlet sash at graduation my interest in contests of skill tends to be confined to those on which wagers can be placed. And few such contests were quite as bizarre as the one I was currently watching, from the planetary governor’s private box on the uppermost tier of the nullball stadium in the capital city of Traego.

Nullball was something of an obsession among the local population, although it was hard to see it catching on anywhere else, given the prodigious amounts of energy it took to energise the grav-plates flooring the stadium. The opposing players darted through the zone of weightlessness the plates created. They pushed off from the transparent wall enclosing the arena, from the stadium floor, and from one another, in an attempt to wrest control of the ball and direct it through goals spaced at sixty-degree intervals around the circular pitch. Every time someone succeeded in this endeavour, the ball plummeted a score of yards to the ground – which, given that none of the players was able to change direction between kicking off and colliding with something solid again, seemed faintly alarming to me.

‘What happens if someone follows the ball through the hole?’ Colonel Kasteen asked, the same thought evidently having occurred to her, and the governor raised a languid eyebrow.

‘They’ll be fine,’ she assured us, reaching for her goblet of some lightly chilled local beverage, and pointed in the general direction of the nearest player. ‘Those packs they’re wearing are personal repulsors. They hardly ever fail. Oh, well played!’ She began to clap by reflex, forgetting the drink in her hand and slopping half of it, which wasn’t much of a waste, given how it tasted. Having encountered it at the palace reception shortly after our arrival, I’d made a beeline for the amasec decanter as soon as refreshments had been offered.

‘Very reassuring,’ Kasteen said, pretending to be interested in the game, although I knew her well enough to know that most of her attention would be on the vox-bead in her ear, and the periodic reports she was getting from regimental headquarters.

The 597th had been on Traego for a couple of months by now, mopping up the remains of an attempted coup d’état led by a cousin of the governor so inept that he hadn’t even bothered trying to get the planet’s militia onside, expecting them to fall into line the moment he announced his claim to the throne. An expectation in which he’d been so profoundly disappointed that, by the time our hastily diverted troop ship had made orbit, he and his cronies had already been executed. All that was left to shoot at were the few insurgents who’d had the sense to withdraw while they could, and continued to make nuisances of themselves with hit-and-run raids which advertised their positions nicely.

All in all, then, our brief sojourn on this backwater world was as close to a holiday as anyone in the regiment could remember, and we intended to make the most of it; I had no doubt that the Munitorum would find us a proper war to get on with soon enough.

I turned away from the frenetic action in front of us to glance out across the city, the hab-blocks and manufactoria lining the bay glinting in the mid-afternoon sun, the ocean beyond the harbour scintillating as the light caught the ever-changing wave tips. Not a shell crater or a burned-out vehicle in sight. Unused to seeing a city substantially intact, I sipped at my amasec, savouring the novelty.

Then my comm-bead crackled.

‘Colonel, commissar,’ the unmistakable voice of Major Broklaw, Kasteen’s second-in-command, greeted us. ‘There’s something strange on the auspex.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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

Ciaphas Cain: The Bigger They Are © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Ciaphas Cain: The Bigger They Are, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-676-6

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