by Dan Abnett
A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
THE ARMOUR
OF CONTEMPT
The Lost - 03
(Gaunt’s Ghosts - 10)
Dan Abnett
It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred
centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne
of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the
gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his
inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly
with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the
Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are
sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his
eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested
miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their
way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the
Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on
uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the
Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-
warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial
Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant
Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to
name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely
enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens,
heretics, mutants—and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold
billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody
regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.
Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has
been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of
progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future
there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars,
only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the
laughter of thirsting gods.
Chaos claims the unwary or the incomplete.
A true man may flinch away its embrace,
if he is stalwart, and he girds his soul
with the armour of contempt.
—Gideon Ravenor,
The Spheres of Longing
“The twenty-second year of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade saw a period of renewed fortune for Warmaster Macaroth’s main battle groups. Flush from swift and decisive victories at Cabal Alpha, Gerlinde and Zadok, the Warmaster’s forces made a vigorous advance into the disputed Carcaradon Cluster, and threw the principal hosts of the archenemy overlord (‘Archon’), Urlock Gaur, into hasty retreat. Macaroth’s intention was to scatter and destroy the Archon’s musters before they could form a cohesive line of resistance in the Erinyes Group.
“To Macaroth’s coreward flank, and increasingly left behind, the Crusade’s secondary battle-groups—the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Crusade Armies—maintained their efforts to drive the forces of Magister Anakwanar Sek, Gaur’s most capable lieutenant, from the margins of the Khan Group.
“Weakened by problems of morale and logistics, and the fact that the bulk of its manpower came from new and recently founded regiments (the majority of experienced and veteran Guard units had been routed to the main line), the second front had begun to stagnate by the start of 777.M41.
“To compound the problems, the armies of the second front often found themselves outclassed by the highly proficient ground forces fielded by Sek. It is likely many of the second front commanders would have incurred Macaroth’s severe displeasure, had the Warmaster not been so singularly occupied with his own objectives. However, General Van Voytz of the Fifth made strenuous efforts to rally the second front, in particular by promoting a series of uncompromising actions to liberate certain worlds previously regarded as ‘lost causes’.
“Van Voytz dubbed his strategy ‘Crush and Burn’, and its purpose was to restore pride to the second front through the systematic purging of worlds that had, until then, seemed incontrovertibly the possessions of the archenemy.
“ ‘Crush and Burn’ had the desired effect, though the vast expenditure of resources necessitated by the policy was later questioned by the Munitorum. Confidential position papers also reveal that, in one particular case, there was an altogether different motive behind these costly liberation efforts.”
—from A History of the Later Imperial Crusades
WALKING GLORY ROAD
I
RIP was an acronym, and it happened in the Basement. There were two hundred and forty-three scalps in the detail, the majority of them there for the “P” part of the name. On the first day, Criid didn’t know anybody, and stood alone, hands in pockets. That earned a few words of elucidation from the instructor, Driller Kexie.
“No bloody Guardsman, not even a wet-fart scalp like you, parks their hands in their pockets!” Kexie opined. Kexie was two-twenty tall, and looked as if he had been woven out of meat jerky. He spoke in a slow measure, as if he had all the time in the world to wither and abuse, and the words came out of his dry, lipless mouth like tracer-shot: hot, bright and burning. If he shouted at night, you’d see his words stitch up the dark like phosphor tears.
Driller Kexie had a stick. For reasons no one in the detail ever fathomed, he called it “Saroo”. It was a thick spar of turned hardwood, forty centimetres long, and resembled both an officer’s baton and the leg of a chair. Kexie liked to reinforce certain words and phrases with Saroo. At “wet-fart scalp”, Kexie stroked Saroo against Criid’s left hand, which was still in its pocket. A flash flood of acute pain flared across the knuckles of Criid’s fist. On “like you”, Saroo visited Criid’s right hand. The words “parks hands” brought Saroo right up between Criid’s legs. Criid dropped onto the metal decking, sucking air.
“Upright, hands at your sides. No other posture is acceptable to the God-Emperor, to me, or to Saroo. Are we clear?”
“Yes, driller.”
“Ech,” Kexie said, tilting his head on one side. He had, they would discover, a habit of punctuating his speech with that particular sound. “Ech, call that a clean loader?” “Ech, what a shit-soft attempt!” “That the best you offer, ech?”
“Ech,” he said, “I don’t believe that Saroo can hear you, scalp?”
“Yes, driller!” Criid shouted. “We are clear, driller!”
“Get up,” Kexie sniffed, and turned back to the others.
Some of the others were greatly amused. The first day was scarcely ten minutes old, and already one of their number was prone on the deck with pain-wet eyes.
They were an ugly lot, most of them the flotsam of various regiments. Criid had already put a name to three or four of the most prominent. A nickname, at least. There was Fourbox, who was a tall, heavy-set joker from the 33rd Kolstec. He was on RIP, he had proudly declared to them as they gathered, for being “rubbish at everything”. Lovely was a female tanker from the Hauberkan. She was on her third repeat of RIP, though this was her first taste of Driller Kexie. “I don’t like orders,” she had replied when Fourbox asked her what her reason for being there was, and left it at that. Lovely had a real edge to her. Dark haired and tanned, she seemed as risky as an unsheathed knife in a kitbag.
Boulder, as was often the case with Guard nicknames, belonged to a youth who didn’t deserve it. Boulder was small and scrawny, a stick-thin go-nowhere, another Kolstec like Fourbox. Criid supposed the sledgehammer irony of the Imperial Guard had stuc
k Boulder with his handle. Though he was small, and looked picked-on, it was hard to empathise with him. He had a shrill cackle, and used it to signal his delight at the pain of others. Boulder had been sent on RIP by his commanding officer “for fixing a bayonet to a rocket launcher, haw-haw-haw.”
In Criid’s opinion, less than ten minutes old, Wash was the real poison in the detail. Wash reminded Criid of Major Rawne: tall, dark, handsome and venomous. He knew he looked good, even in the faded RIP issue fatigues, and he regarded all of them with a dismissive silence. When, as they first assembled, Fourbox had asked him “what he was in for”, Wash simply hooded his eyes and turned his back.
“Oooh, hard man, haw-haw-haw!” Boulder had sniggered, and Fourbox and some of the others had laughed along.
Wash had turned, extended the index finger of his left hand, and inserted it into Boulder’s mouth, pushing the fingertip up over the front teeth until it wedged, painfully, in the roof of the gum, tenting the lip and philtrum against Boulder’s nostrils. Boulder had snorted in distress but, like a fish on a hook, had been unable to pull free.
“I am not ‘hard man’,” Wash had said. “I am not your bloody friend. You want me, you ask for Wash. And you never, ever want me.”
With that, he let Boulder’s lip go. Everyone was suitably respectful of Wash from that point.
“Tanith takes a dive!” Fourbox chortled when Driller Kexie put Criid on the deck. “First and only, they say. First and only to get a smack!”
“Tanith’s tearing up,” Boulder joined. “Look, look! Like a little girl! Boo hoo! Haw-haw-haw!”
“Go home to mama, little Tanith!” Fourbox sang out.
“She’ll wipe your eyes and make it all nice again,” Lovely sniggered. “Mwah! Mwah!” she added, pantomiming kisses. “All better now!”
“My mother…” Criid began, getting up. “My mother would gut you fethers…”
“Oh, I’m so bloody scared!” announced Boulder. “So scared, I wet myself haw-haw-haw!”
“I know your mama,” Fourbox called. “She wriggled a bit, but she was all right. She still writes to me. “Oh, Boxy, when can we be together again? I long for your hot—”
“Enough!” Driller Kexie tracered. “Staple your lips, you wet-farts. Ech, I’ve seen some details in my time, but you take the brass arse. Muscle up, in a line! Come on, come on! Get up and get in it, Criid. Drill order. Is that a drill order, shit-wit? Get to it! Six lines, now! Come on!”
Kexie walked the lines, twirling Saroo in his calloused hands.
It was cold in the echoing vault of the Basement. Their breath made smoke in the air. Like all bilge spaces, the Basement was unheated and raw. Its walls were a ferruginous stain of rust and metallic gangrene, and the air smelled of the stale urine and solvents that had leaked down-hull.
“All right, ladies and ladies,” said Kexie. “I’m assuming that’s the best you can do. Frig, I’ve seen foundees dress a better rank. You are shit, you hear me? The lowest of the low. You are RIP, and making your life a misery is my purpose, given to me expressly by the God-Emperor of Mankind himself. Ech, I have to turn you into proper bloody Guardsmen. You come to me as wet-farts, and I send you back as real soldiers. Or… you die.”
He paused and ran his gaze along their silent rank.
“Anyone got anything funny to say about that? Come on, now. Speak openly.”
“Well, you can try,” Lovely suggested.
Saroo struck her in the throat, and then across the back of the head as she went down.
Lovely lay on the decking, choking. Criid moved to help her.
“No one bloody move. No one! Let her soak it up. Anyone else got a comment? No? No?”
Kexie stopped pacing and stood facing them. “Welcome, you sons and daughters of bitches, to RIP detail. Let us be sure we understand what those letters stand for. ‘R’ is… I’m waiting?”
“Retraining, driller,” they murmured.
Kexie smacked Saroo into his palm. “I don’t believe Saroo can hear you…”
“Retraining!” they yelled.
“And the ‘I’ is for…?”
“Indoctrination, driller!”
“Getting there. Good. And the ‘P’? You all know what that means?”
“Punishment, driller!”
Kexie nodded. “Good and good. Ech. So let me do a head count. I’m guessing most of you scalps are here for ‘P’ purposes. Show of hands.”
Most of the detail, including Boulder, Wash and Lovely, raised their hands.
Kexie nodded again. “And who’s in for ‘R’?”
A handful, including Fourbox.
Kexie swung Saroo in his hands. “Imagine my surprise if any of you are here for ‘I’. Anyone?”
Eight hands rose. Criid was one of them.
“Shit,” said Kexie. “Eight of you? All right, you eight. Front and centre.”
Criid came forward alongside the other seven. They looked like boys, all of them, with that long-limbed, round-shouldered, malnourished air of puberty.
“Look and learn, you wet-farts,” Kexie told the rest of them. “These eight are virgins. Cherry bloody scalps. Never seen a day of hot war. Never fired in anger. You’d bloody well better make sure none of them do better than you, or I will personally take a bolt pistol to the sides of your heads and grin when I twitch the trigger.”
Kexie regarded the eight ‘I’ candidates.
“Deck-thrusts, fifty reps,” he said. “Now.”
After an hour of reps, the detail ran ropes for three hours or so, and then did circuits of the Basement with weight loads. By the time five hours were done, they were numb and mindless with fatigue.
“Switch, ropes!” Kexie yelled.
Fourbox, sweaty and flushed, could no longer haul himself up the knotted ropes to the Basement’s roof.
“Anyone fails, the whole detail repeats!” Kexie informed them.
“Spit on your palms,” Criid whispered across to Fourbox. “Spit on your palms and you get a better grip—”
Fourbox did so, and began to ascend.
“Who taught you that?” he grunted.
“My father,” said Criid, several metres higher and going strong.
“What’s his name?”
“Which one?” asked Criid.
II
The lights down the roof of the Basement began to switch off, each bank dying with a loud rr-chunk. The members of the detail were scattered like battlefield dead on the practice mats, panting and moaning. Their sweat-soaked fatigues stuck to their bodies. They lay on their backs, holding their hands out like faith healers, away from any contact. Fat with friction blisters, their palms were too inflamed to bear touching anything.
“Right here, tomorrow, at oh six hundred,” Driller Kexie told them. “Not a minute later, or Saroo will want to know why. Assemble and salute me.”
Drill Instructor Kexie stood, slapping Saroo against his right thigh, as the RIP detail slowly got to its feet and formed ranks.
“Six weeks,” Kexie said. “Six weeks walking Glory Road
to planet-fall. God-Emperor, I’ll have turned some of you into fighting bloody Guardsman by then. Today was a disgrace. Tomorrow, you’ll do better. Dismissed.”
Kexie wandered over to Criid as the detail broke up.
“Sorry about the hard whacks, Criid,” he whispered. “I didn’t realise you were here on indoctrination.”
Criid nodded. “That’s all right, driller. You weren’t to know.”
“No, I wasn’t. Shame. Now put the bloody mats away.”
The rush-woven practice mats were heavy, and twelve metres square. Hauling and rolling them into their lockers would have been a significant feat for anyone, let alone a person with brutally blistered hands.
“You’re kidding?” said Criid.
“Are you refusing an order, scalp?” Kexie asked.
“No, but—”
Saroo paid Criid a rather more prolonged visit, smacking into places where the bruises
wouldn’t show.
After Kexie had gone, Criid lay on the deck for a long while, drenched in pain, and then got up and put the mats away. It took a long while. Fourbox, Lovely and half a dozen other members of the RIP detail were lingering by the hatch. They’d all seen what the driller had done. Finally they came over and helped Criid with the mats.
“I can do it,” Criid said.
“Driller really beat on you,” Fourbox said. “You all right?” The mischief had been robbed from his face. He looked genuinely worried.
“Yes. Look, I can do this.”
“Be quicker if we help,” said one of the others, a thin boy called Zeedon.
“Kexie’s a bastard,” Lovely said. “Think I might stick him good.”
“Yeah, sure you will,” Fourbox said.
“I got a blade,” Lovely snapped. “I’ll stick the bastard, he comes near me with that rod again.”
“Don’t,” said Criid.
“Why not?” Lovely asked. “He’s got it coming…”
“Don’t be stupid. Attack an officer?” Criid said. You’ll be executed. Summary shots behind the ear.”
“Be worth it,” Lovely said, but she no longer sounded so sure.
“Driller’s doing his job, don’t you get that?” Criid said. “This is the Imperial Guard. Drill discipline and hard knocks. That’s what gets us to the grade and keeps us there. If you expect any different, Throne knows why you ever signed up.”
“You sound like a bloody commissar,” one of the others said.
Criid smiled. “First compliment I’ve had today.”
“What’s your name?” asked Fourbox.
“Criid.”
“What, like the holy Imperial creed?”
“No. Double ‘i’ not double ‘e’. It’s a Verghast name.”
“I’m going to call you ‘Holy’,” said Fourbox, alighting on a nickname in the time-honoured Guard way of zero consideration. “Yeah, ‘Holy’. Got a good ring to it.”
“Whatever you think best,” said Criid.
“Who’s that?” asked Lovely suddenly, pointing. On the far side of the Basement deck, a figure was standing in the shadows of the main entry hatch. A woman, tall and slender, wearing dark combat gear and the pins of a sergeant.