own, and more importantly a prestigious assignment that would keep him far from the fighting. He
had soon learned however that the lot in life of an official propagandist was rarely a happy one.
Even less so when it was his duty to put a brave face to a conflict as prone to sudden reverses and
unmitigated disasters as was the war in Broucheroc.
We are losing this war, he thought, so lost in the depths of his own misery now he was barely
aware of any wider implication. We are losing this war. That is the reality and yet I have barely an
50
hour to find some small piece of good news that will allow the newsletter to pretend otherwise. An
hour. It just can’t be done. I need more time.
Hearing the sound of his office door opening, Delias looked up to see Shulen shuffling through
the doorway. Mouth working soundlessly, his body twitching with uncontrollable palsies, Shulen
tottered towards him with a wastebasket in his hands, the ugly scar left by the ork bullet that had
addled his brain clearly visible at his temple.
“What is it, Shulen?” Delias sighed.
“Cuh cuh cuh… cleaning!” Shulen said, stammering out a spray of spittle as he stooped to start
shovelling the papers littering Dellas’ desk into the wastebasket.
Aggravated, for a moment Delias idly wondered if there was a way of making Shulen bear the
blame for his problems. I could tell Commissar Valk it is all Shulen’s fault, he thought. That we
were just putting the finishing touches to the latest edition when Shulen blundered into the
typesetting hoard, knocking it to the floor and destroying all our work. If the commissar decides to
shoot the useless oaf in retribution, I for one would not miss him. Just as quickly he realised for the
plan to work the other members of his staff would have to support his story. Pheran and the others
would not wear it. They had always protected Shulen, coddling him like some idiot child, and would
be sure to oppose any attempt to make him the sacrificial goat. Then, abruptly, Delias caught a
glimpse of the words written on one of the crumpled pieces of paper in Shulen’s hand and knew he
finally had the answer.
“Stop that!” he snapped at Shulen, reaching out with a metal ruler to rap his knuckles. “Leave
the wastebasket here and go tell Pheran I will have the copy for tonight’s edition ready for him in
fifteen minutes.”
“Fuh fuh fuh…”
“Fifteen minutes,” Delias said, retrieving the paper he had seen in Shulen’s hand and smoothing
out the creases so he could read it. “Now, get out of my sight.”
It was a contact report, reporting an ork assault in Sector 1-13 two and a half hours earlier. What
interested Delias more was the attached account of the event that had presaged the assault. A single
lander bearing a company’s worth of battlefield replacements had crashed in no-man’s land.
Reading it, Delias realised it was exactly what he had been looking for. Granted, the course of
events would need a little rewriting. To keep Commissar Valk happy what had been an entirely
futile waste of human life would need to become a resounding victory. All the basic substance of
what he needed was there already: he would only have to change the details and the events in Sector
1-13 should suit his purposes admirably. Yes, this is exactly what I need, Delias thought, quickly
running through a series of potential headlines in his mind. Enemy Assault Defeated By Landing
From Space. A Sector-Wide Breakthrough. Orks Retreating in Disarray. Then, the hairs rising at the
back of his neck, he thought of a new headline and knew he had cracked it.
Orks Defeated in Sector 1-13: Jumael 14th Victorious!
Smiling, Delias picked up a stylus and began to write a glowing report of the battle, carefully
embroidering the account with a variety of the stock words and phrases he had developed over the
years in the course of his duties. Heroic resistance! Brave and resolute defence! A triumph of faith
and righteous fury over Xenos savagery! Occasionally, as he paused to construct some new sentence
full of rhetorical zeal and fire, he felt the vague stirrings of his conscience troubling him but he
ignored it. It was not his fault he was forced to lie and twist the facts, he told himself. The truth was
always the first casualty in warfare. As an information officer, sometimes it was his task to be
creative: to do otherwise would be to risk offering aid and comfort to the enemy. Yes, it was a
matter of duty.
And, after all, it was important to do everything humanly possible to keep up the morale of the
troops.
51
“A fire.” Davir said as they sat in the firing trench. “That’s what I would like to see. A fire to burn
down General Headquarters and torch all the stupid bastards inside it. If another blaze could
somehow be ignited at Sector Command as well then, all the better. It wouldn’t be that difficult.
Give me a grenade launcher and a couple of phosphorus rounds, and I would have both damn places
on fire in no time.”
Appalled, Larn listened in disbelieving silence. In the last half an hour since they had reached
the trench, Davir’s constant stream of complaints had slowly given way to extended musings in
which he openly discussed methods of killing the General Staff responsible for the progress of the
Broucheroc campaign. Though even more extraordinary to Larn’s mind was the fact that the other
men in the trench had simply sat there and listened to it, as though it was the most normal thing in
the world to talk lightly of mutiny and sedition. As Davir’s monologue wore on, Larn found himself
with fewer and fewer doubts as to the reasons why the war in this city seemed to be going so badly
if these men represented a representative cross-section of the city’s defenders.
“Of course, I accept it will be difficult getting close enough to use a grenade launcher,” Davir
continued. “What with the security perimeters around both buildings being so heavily patrolled and
defended. But I have already foreseen a solution. It is only a matter of stealing the right credentials,
and I can be inside the perimeter and killing the members of the General Staff before you can say
poetic justice.”
These men can’t be Guardsmen, Larn thought as he looked at the faces of the four men sitting
around him in the trench. Granted, they fought off the ork attack well enough two hours ago. But
where is their discipline? Their devotion to the Emperor? It is as though all the traditions and
regulations of the Guard mean nothing to them. How can they just sit here and listen to this man
spew treason without taking action?
“You would never get away with it, Davir,” the Vardan sitting opposite Davir said. A tall thin
man in his mid-thirties, his name was Scholar. Or at least that was what the others called him.
Whether it was his profession or a simple nickname, given his stoop-shouldered build and the
owlish cast of his face, the name seemed to fit him.
“I am afraid it is a question of there being major flaws in your modus operandi,” Scholar said,
fingers playing unconsciously at his chin as though stroking a nonexistent beard. “Even granting
that you manage to obtain the necessary credentials, I doubt the perimeter guards would be willing
to stand idly by while you shoot grenades at their generals willy-nilly. There are rules in the Guard
against the wasting of ammunition, after all. Besides, even if you could somehow elude the guards,
you can be sure that the buildings housing General HQ and Sector Command have both been
extensively fireproofed. Not to mention equipped with damage controls systems, blast shields,
extinguishing devices, and so forth. No, Davir, I think you will have to find some other method of
getting your tally.”
Could they he joking somehow, Larn thought. Is that it? Is this all some kind of joke, intended to
do no more than help them pass the time? But they are talking about murdering officers! How could
anyone mistake that for a laughing matter?
“Then I will simply have to seize control of an artillery battery,” Davir said. “A few high
explosive rounds aimed at the GHQ building and I should kill a few generals at least.”
“But you wouldn’t want to do that either,” the third one, Bulaven, said earnestly. A hulking
figure with a thick neck, brawny arms and a broad bearish build, Bulaven was the fireteam’s heavy
weapons specialist. He also seemed the only man among the group to harbour anything in the way
of concern for the lives of his superiors. “If you start killing generals, Davir, who would we have
left to give us orders?”
“You talk as though that is a bad thing, pigbrain,” Davir spat. “It is thanks to those arseholes in
General HQ and their orders that we are in this mess to begin with! Not that I expect us to suddenly
starting magically winning this war when they are all dead, you understand. Killing them couldn’t
make it any worse. At least doing it would give me some small moments of satisfaction. Orders?
52
Phah! As though they ever achieved anything with all their damned orders other than making things
ten times worse. You want to know about orders? Ask Repzik. If it hadn’t been for some fool
ordering Battery Command to withhold artillery support during the last attack, he’d probably still be
alive. For that matter, what about our new friend here? You all saw what happened to that lander
earlier. Ask the new fish what he thinks of the orders that sent him halfway across the galaxy just to
make landfall on the wrong planet.”
Abruptly, the other men in the trench turned to look towards him. Fully aware he must have
looked like a rabbit caught in the searchlights of an oncoming vehicle, Larn could only gawp back at
them, unsure of what to say.
“Perhaps he is still in shock?” Bulaven said, his tone solicitous. “Is that it, new fish? Are you in
shock?”
“Wetting his pants in fear more like,” Zeebers, the fourth man in the trench, said. Thin and wiry,
of average build, Zeebers looked younger than the others: perhaps in his mid-twenties where Davir
and the rest were in their early to mid-thirties. Red-haired, with a pitted and pockmarked face,
Zeebers looked nastily towards Larn and sneered at him. “Look at him. If his skin was any greyer
you wouldn’t be able to see him against the mud. You ask me, he’s afraid if he says what he really
thinks some commissar will hear him and have him shot.”
“Hhh. Not much to be worried about on that score.” Davir said. “You hear me, new fish? You
can speak freely. Granted, time was we’d always be getting commissars coming to the line to lead
attacks and so forth. Thankfully, our friends the orks soon put paid to that. Any commissar who was
crazy enough to want to join a frontline combat unit got himself killed off long ago. The commissars
left now tend to be those with a sharper instinct for their own survival. Sharp enough to stay away
from the front at any rate. So, come on, new fish. You must have an opinion? Let us hear it.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Scholar. “I for one would be fascinated to know what you think.”
“Come on, new fish,” Zeebers said, his tone harsh and goading. “What are you waiting for?
Gretch got your tongue?”
“Don’t rush him,” Bulaven said, more kindly. “Like I say, I think he’s still in shock. I’m sure
he’ll tell us in time.”
Faces expectant, the Guardsmen fell quiet as they waited for Larn to answer. Uncomfortable,
painfully aware of the four pairs of eyes staring at him in silence, for a moment Larn could only sit
there with his mouth open, the words dying on his tongue before he could even say them. Then,
thinking about all he had seen and heard in the last few hours, in a voice thick with misery he gave
them the only answer he had.
“I… I don’t understand any of this,” he said at last. “None of it. Nothing that has happened to
me so far today seems to make any sense.”
“What is there to understand, new fish?” Davir had said. “We are stuck in this damned city. We are
surrounded by millions of orks. Every day they try to kill us. We try not to let them succeed. End of
story.”
“A concise summary granted, Davir,” Scholar had said next. “Though you omitted to mention
the promethium. And the stalemate. Not to mention some of the wider parameters.”
“Fine, Scholar,” Davir had shrugged. “I think you’re wasting your time, but you tell him all
about it then. While you’re at it, you might as well tell him how to go about brushing his teeth and
wiping his backside. After all, I wouldn’t like to see the consequences if the new fish here somehow
got those two vital functions mixed up. Whatever you do, do it from the firing step. It is still your
turn to stand watch. And remember: just because we have to nursemaid a war virgin doesn’t mean
the orks have forgotten they want to kill us.”
53
“You see them?” Scholar said a few minutes later, standing pointing into no-man’s land from the
firing step next to Larn while Davir and the others sat playing a card game on the trench floor below
them. “That dark grey ragged line about eight hundred metres away? That’s the ork lines.”
Looking through the field glasses Scholar had lent him, Larn followed the direction of the tall
man’s pointing finger to stare into the wasteland before them. There. He saw it. A sinuous line of
ditches that ran the entire length of the sector on the other side of no-man’s land. Watching it, from
time to time he saw a gretchin or ork head suddenly come into view. Only for the head to then
swiftly disappear as its owner dropped out of sight below the parapets on the ork side once more.
“I don’t understand how I didn’t see it before,” Larn said. “Having the field glasses helps. But it
seems so clear now. How could I have missed it?”
“It is a question of perception.” Scholar said. “You have noticed how grey the landscape is? The
mud, the rocks, the sky, even the buildings? When a person first arrives here the details of the world
about them can easily be lost in the same monotonous tone of grey. But there are subtle differences.
Differences you become slowly aware of the longer you spend in this city. You have heard how
some jungle-worlders have forty different words for green? In reality of course those forty words
correspond to different shades of green. Shades which would all look the same to us. But to them,
their perceptions heightened by living their entire lives in a green environment, the difference
between each shade is as obvious as the difference between black and white. It is the same here in
