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Vainglorious – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

I’ve seen a fair few worlds in my century or so of rattling around the galaxy, though few indeed could be described as ‘fair’, bearing in mind how close I came to losing my life on most of them. For the most part these visits were as short as I could manage, given that wars or other unpleasantness were the main reasons for my presence, and being where people or other things aren’t doing their best to shoot or dismember me is, on the whole, more congenial.

It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that return visits to any of them have been few and far between, and with the exception of Perlia, where I’ve finally found some semblance of a home, distinctly unwelcome.

The other exception, of course, was Coronus, through which I passed so often I lost count of the number of occasions quite early on in my career. Given the number of regiments typically quartered there, not to mention the plethora of warships floating about the system, I felt as safe on Coronus as anywhere in the galaxy – which is probably why I let my guard down at a crucial moment, with almost fatal results.

Ironically, I was in a particularly good mood at the time, which doubtless went some way towards blunting my habitual paranoia. I’d recently arrived back from Fecundia, where my single-minded attempts to preserve my own skin had somehow been interpreted as crucial in preventing a strategically and logistically vital forge world from disappearing down the gullet of a tyranid hive fleet, and had reported in to the office of the Commissariat with my usual sense of vague trepidation. The trouble with having a reputation like mine is that people tend to believe it, with the unenviable result that every time a particularly foolhardy or suicidal assignment cropped up, my name was at the top of the list of gung-ho idiots to try and palm it off on. As the official commissarial liaison officer to the lord general’s staff, I was able to sidestep most of these attempts at giving a Hero of the Imperium a suitably glorious and messy demise, of course, regretfully citing the pressure of my diplomatic duties, but I was uncomfortably aware that that particular excuse was going to wear pretty thin before very much longer.

‘Cain. Welcome back.’ The familiar, faintly querulous tones of Lord Commissar Mavin greeted me as I entered, and my heart made a distinct shift in the direction of my boots. I knew him of old: an unimaginative plodder well into his second century, who would probably be found in a quiet corner of the office one day by someone wondering why they hadn’t spoken to him for a couple of weeks, and where the smell was coming from. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t envy him a little too – fortune had favoured him with an undemanding desk job about as far from a combat zone as it was possible to get, which had been my overriding ambition since the day I first tied my scarlet sash.

‘Lord commissar.’ I arranged a smile on my face, and shook a hand which felt like a desiccated sparrow’s corpse. ‘A pleasure as always. Still minding the fort, I see.’

As usual, the flattery sparked an answering twitch which might have been a smile, or perhaps a sign of dyspepsia.

‘Someone’s got to keep the files in order while you youngsters go gallivanting around the sector putting the fear of the Emperor into the unholy,’ he responded, in what, for him, was quite a friendly fashion. Resisting the temptation to point out that I was almost a centenarian myself, despite the odd juvenat treatment over the years leaving me looking considerably younger, I took the proffered chair. As I sat down, Mavin pottered over to one of the filing cabinets lining the walls and extricated a thick wodge of documentation. He dumped it on the cheap flakboard table between us with a resonant thud, and began leafing through it. ‘The Quadravidia thing went off all right?’

‘I got diverted,’ I said, wondering how much of it he was actually reading. ‘To Fecundia.’ Throne help us, if he really needed bringing up to speed on my activities since the last time I was on Coronus we’d be here for hours. I began to regret turning down the hot grox bap my aide, Jurgen, had offered me that morning – typically, it had vanished into one of his webbing pouches ‘for later’ as soon as I’d finished shaking my head, although I suspected when it emerged again only one of us would find it even close to palatable.

‘Indeed.’ Mavin paged on. ‘Quite a coup for you, it seems. Got the t’au to withdraw, formed an alliance against the encroaching tyranids, saw them off with no help I can see from the little grey heathens, and it seems the truce is still holding.’ A remarkably succinct summation which missed practically everything significant. ‘And got the cogboys owing us a favour into the bargain.’

‘I can hardly take much credit for that,’ I said, knowing that refusing to do so would simply make whatever kudos was going round adhere more tightly to me.

‘Nevertheless.’ Mavin closed the file with an audible snap. ‘We feel that a success on this scale leaves you perfectly placed to take on another challenge. One which, in its own way, you might feel is even more daunting.’

And here it came, the fool’s errand guaranteed to crown my career with a glorious last stand and a hero’s death – although a coward’s life had always seemed a far better option from where I was sitting. No point panicking before I even knew what I had to weasel out of, though, so I plastered an expression of polite enquiry across my face, and raised an eyebrow.

‘We?’

‘Our entire complement,’ Mavin said. ‘We’ve discussed it at length, and everyone feels you’re the perfect man for the job.’

‘How gratifying,’ I said, my last hope that at least some of my colleagues might be persuaded that I wasn’t the right man after all vanishing as fast as the contents of an unattended smorgasbord while my aide was around. ‘And this job would be?’

‘You’ve been to Perlia, I believe,’ Mavin said, changing direction as abruptly as Jurgen at the controls of a Salamander. I nodded confirmation, trepidation beginning to give way to bafflement.

‘Not for a long time. About sixty years, give or take.’ A disquieting possibility occurred to me. ‘The orks aren’t back, are they?’ Because if they were, who better to see them off again than the man everyone believed had ensured our victory the last time.

‘Not that we’re aware of,’ Mavin said, looking faintly surprised at the question. ‘No more than usual, I suppose.’

Pretty much anywhere the creatures had once infested was prone to the occasional outbreak of marauding warbands, but I’d have thought the local planetary defence force would be more than capable of dealing with them without calling for Militarum assistance; one thing the experience of a full-scale invasion would certainly have left them with would be an almost Valhallan level of expertise in killing greenskins.

Malin paused, inserting a dry little cough, probably for dramatic effect. ‘The job we have in mind would be a vital one, ensuring the future of Imperial rule in the Eastern Arm for generations to come.’

In other words, a suicidal foray against overwhelming odds, which probably meant some desperate attempt to head off a newly detected tendril of the tyranid hive fleets. Unless the t’au were already taking advantage of the instability to further their own agenda, in spite of the assurances they’d given – Throne knows, we’d do the same in a heartbeat if we thought we could get away with it. Or perhaps the Great Enemy was up to something, which never ended well, particularly if daemons were involved.

Such speculation was pointless, though, so I suppressed it firmly, before I pitched myself into an even greater funk.

‘My duties to the lord general’s office–’ I began, adopting a tone of polite regret, in an attempt to prepare the groundwork for a plausible excuse when the time came to deliver one. To my surprise, however, I got no further before being interrupted by a wheezy chuckle.

‘I told them you’d dig your heels in,’ Mavin said, in the faintly smug manner of a cantankerous pedant who’d just been proved right. ‘Retirement’s never going to sit well with a man like Cain, I said. We all know you’d rather go down swinging a chainsword when the Emperor calls you to the Golden Throne at last, but perhaps you’ll at least hear me out?’

‘Retirement?’ I said, blinking like Jurgen trying to assimilate some strange and alien concept, like the possibility that socks could be changed before they were capable of standing up by themselves. ‘What do you mean, retirement?’

I must have spoken a little more forcefully than I’d realised, because Mavin looked quite disconcerted, and the tone of his voice became almost excessively conciliatory.

‘No one’s doubting your fitness for active service, far from it, and we all appreciate your reluctance to lay down your arms while you’re still capable of wielding them so effectively. But sometimes the path of duty takes us in directions we’ve never considered, or would prefer not to go.’

‘That’s certainly true,’ I agreed with feeling, because I’d spent most of my life being taken in directions I’d rather have run away screaming from. Then, conscious of the sort of thing the sort of man he thought I was would probably say at this juncture, I added, ‘No offence taken, I was just somewhat surprised. I’ve never shirked my duty before’ – which was one of the most barefaced lies even I’ve ever told – ‘and I’ve no intention of starting now by ignoring the advice of a colleague whose counsel I’ve always valued.’ The fact that I hadn’t valued it particularly highly was neither here nor there; the implied flattery smoothed over any lingering awkwardness, and if he felt he’d done a good job of persuading me when I took him up on the offer, that would be no bad thing either.

You have to remember, I was quite genuinely astonished at the proposal: retirement was something I’d literally never expected to live to see, not least because it so seldom happens to anyone in the Astra Militarum. No one ever asks for it themselves, because the Inquisition tend to regard such a request as shirking one’s duty to the Emperor, and therefore treasonous, so it’s an honour, or privilege, which tends to arrive entirely out of the blue, invariably with some kind of price tag attached. Since the price was unlikely to include being shot at so often, or spending quite so much time in a state of bowel-freezing terror, I adopted an expression of polite interest and waited for him to continue.

‘Perlia has changed a good deal since you saw off the orkish invasion,’ Mavin said, giving me far too much credit – although since that was pretty much everyone’s impression of the incident, I’d long since learned to live with it. ‘A huge amount of resources have gone into the reconstruction effort, and the Munitorum has reinforced its defences considerably.’

‘That seems prudent,’ I said, doing my best to recall where the hell the system was in relation to us, and, more importantly, the ’nids and the t’au. To the best of my recollection it was comfortably far from the tyranid line of advance, and sufficiently removed from the t’au border, to be as safe from either as anywhere was.

‘Quite,’ Mavin agreed, doing a pretty poor impression of actually caring. ‘But of more interest to us is the establishment of several new Imperial institutions on Perlia, to improve its strategic and tactical value at a subsector level.’

‘I see,’ I said, nodding politely and wishing he’d get to the point. ‘From which I’m to infer the Commissariat intend to establish a presence there?’ An administrative posting to a relative backwater would suit me down to the ground, although I couldn’t for the life of me see why they’d bother; any Imperial Guard units in-system would bring their own commissars with them, and local militias don’t need supervising that closely.

Mavin chuckled again. ‘Not as such,’ he said, ‘although we do have need of a commissar willing to take up residence there for the foreseeable future. One, as I said, not afraid of a challenge.’

‘Challenges go with the job,’ I said, still trying to fathom what he was driving at, ‘and I doubt anything there now will be quite as daunting as the one I had to deal with on my last visit.’ Which just goes to show how much I knew.

‘This would certainly be different,’ Mavin agreed. ‘One of the new Imperial institutions I mentioned is a Schola Progenium. Which means we will, of course, be needing a dedicated commissar with an impeccable service record to take charge of the commissarial cadets, and prepare them for service in the field.’

‘I’d hardly call my service record impeccable,’ I said, masking my astonishment behind the sort of show of modesty he’d probably be expecting. ‘I’m immensely flattered to be considered, naturally, but surely someone a little more by-the-book would be more suitable?’

‘The book’s one thing, ducking las-bolts quite another,’ Mavin said. ‘And, to be blunt, your proven ability to do the latter counts for a great deal more than being able to quote the litanies of command verbatim. If you can pass on a bit of your knack for surviving the battlefield to our successors, everyone will benefit.’

‘I can’t argue with that,’ I said, having had no intention of doing so in the first place. The Emperor, it seemed, was finally buying me a drink for doing His work for so long, albeit reluctantly, and I certainly wasn’t about to turn it down. But on the other hand, it probably wouldn’t do to seem too eager. ‘How long do I have to consider it?’

‘How long do you think you’ll need?’ Mavin responded, reasonably enough. ‘We’d like you to start by the turn of the year, but if you decide against it we’ll have to start considering other candidates. So the sooner the better, really.’

‘Well,’ I said, doing a fair job of feigning indecision, ‘it’s a tremendous honour, and I’m bound to say the chance to leave a lasting legacy of service to the Imperium is tempting, to put it mildly. But I wouldn’t feel right about accepting without speaking to the lord general first. We’ve served together for a long time, and I owe him that much at least.’

‘I’d expect nothing less,’ Mavin said, no doubt thinking he had me convinced, and could afford to show a little forbearance. ‘I’ll look forward to hearing your answer.’

‘I’ll let you know tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I happen to be dining with him this evening, and, as you say, it’s in no one’s best interests to spin these things out.’

Mavin’s face twitched again in another probable smile. ‘Until tomorrow, then,’ he said.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
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