And another.
“Yes, sir, as you say: your battery runs like a well-oiled machine. But you must concede that,
seeing as we are unquestionably under bombardment, a mistake must have occurred somewhere…”
Another pause.
“Yes, of course, sir. You concede nothing. Yes, I understand. No, sir, you are correct. General
Headquarters is not known for promoting fools to the rank of captain…”
And so it went on, while from above Larn heard the distant roar of explosions as the
bombardment continued. Until, at last, he heard a door open behind him and turned to see Sergeant
Chelkar step grim-faced into the dugout. Then, as the group of assembled Vardans huddled in the
dugout silently parted to give way before their sergeant, Larn saw Chelkar stride purposefully over
to Grishen at the comms system.
“Yes, sir.” Corporal Grishen said, raising his eyes as he saw Chelkar approach him. “Naturally,
you are right. If there is any mistake here it was ours in being present in a sector scheduled for
bombardment. But, if you will excuse me for a moment, my company commander has just entered
the room. Perhaps it would be better if you and he discussed this matter directly.”
“What is going on, Grishen?” Chelkar said, laying the shotgun he had been carrying down
across the table before him. “Why in hell are those idiots still shelling us?”
“I am on the line to the captain commanding the battery in question now, sergeant,” Grishen
said, diplomatically releasing the “send” button on the vox-corn so his listener at the other end could
no longer hear them. “I have tried to explain things to him, but he refuses to accept anything I say.
He claims that according to his situation map this entire sector fell to the orks three days ago —
meaning he would be quite within his rights to bombard it even if he didn’t already have signed
orders from Battery Command telling him to do so. And as for ending the bombardment? He says in
keeping with his orders the shelling will cease in precisely one hour and twenty-seven minutes’
69
time. Not a moment sooner. He is most definite on that point, sergeant. Frankly, some might even
say a little intransigent.”
“I see,” said Chelkar. “Hand me the vox-com, Grishen. I want to talk to this son of a bitch
myself.”
“This is Sergeant Eugin Chelkar,” he said, taking the headphones and pressing the button to
activate the vox-com. “Acting regimental commander of the 902nd Vardan Rifles. Who am I
speaking to?”
For a moment, like Grishen before him, Chelkar went quiet as he listened to the voice on the
other end of the line through his headphones. Then, his tone becoming grave and forceful, he spoke
once more.
“Captain Meran, the 16th Landran Artillery?” Chelkar said. “I see. Well, I have a message for
you, captain. No, I am well aware you outrank me, but you will listen to what I have to say all the
same. I am giving you two minutes, captain. Two minutes. And, if this bombardment hasn’t ended
by then, I am going to come over to whatever hole you are hiding in and kick you up the arse so
hard that you will taste leather every time you swallow. Not that you will have to worry about that
for long, you understand. The arse kicking will only be for my own amusement. After that, I fully
intend to put a shotgun blast through your skull. Have I made myself clear?”
Again, there was another pause while Chelkar listened to the captain’s reply on his headphones.
“No, it is you who does not understand the situation, captain,” Chelkar said after a moment. “I
don’t give a damn about your rank or your orders. Nor do I care if you report me to the
Commissariat. In fact, please feel free to do so: if nothing else, they can serve as pallbearers at your
funeral. What you fail to understand is that, even if you have me arrested, there is an entire regiment
of men standing around me who are quite prepared to make good on my threat. And, if you think the
Commissariat will be willing to arrest an entire frontline combat unit to save you, I think you
overestimate your own value to the war effort of this city. Oh, and by the way, captain, the
chronometer is counting down. You now have only one minute and twenty seconds to make a
decision. Chelkar out.”
Giving the vox-com and headphones back to Grishen, Chelkar stood waiting beside the table.
Listening intently, like every other man in the dugout to the sound of shelling going on above their
heads.
“I don’t understand,” Larn whispered. “Surely the sergeant has just written his own death
warrant by talking to an officer that way?”
“Maybe,” Bulaven whispered back. “You don’t know Chelkar though, new fish. In seventeen
years I have never seen him be afraid of anything. If there is something that needs to be done, he is
the man to do it. Whatever the cost. All the same, I wonder if even he has gone too far this time. If
the captain should vox a complaint to the Commissariat…”
“Ach, you are both like children frightened of your own shadows,” Davir muttered beside them.
“You especially should know better, Bulaven. When has Chelkar ever failed us? The sergeant
knows what he is doing. These artillery monkeys always think frontline troops are crazy to begin
with. This arsehole captain won’t dare call the Commissariat. Trust me, he is probably already
soiling himself in fear and is giving the order to cease fire even as we speak.”
Above, as though in confirmation of Davir’s opinions, the guns abruptly fell silent. At first no
one spoke, all of them listening to hear whether the shelling would begin again. Until, as the seconds
passed into a full minute with no further sound of explosions, it became clear the bombardment was
ended.
“There, you see, Grishen?” Chelkar half-smiled. “It is simply a matter of knowing how best to
talk to these people to get your point across.” Then, taking up his shotgun once more and turning
away from the corporal, Chelkar noticed every man in the dugout was looking at him with faces
caught in expressions of awe and gratitude.
70
“It was nothing so much,” Chelkar said to them. “Still, it was probably better that I let our friend
the captain think he was going to have an entire regiment after his blood if he didn’t stop the
shelling. If he’d known the 902nd Vardan was only made up of a single company perhaps he would
have felt man enough to take us all on. It is not unusual for these rear echelon heroes to have a
bloated sense of their own abilities.”
At that the men smiled, some even laughed in nervous relief. Seeing the mood of reverence had
been successfully dispelled, the sergeant’s manner became more business-like.
“All right,” he said. “Now, enough of this hiding underground. Back to your posts. We don’t
want to leave the firing trenches undefended and make the orks think it is a worthwhile time
launching another attack. Go on. Get moving, all of you.”
As the men in the dugout began to hurry out towards their trenches again, Larn’s last sight of
Chelkar came as he saw the sergeant turn to towards Corporal Grishen once more with further
instructions.
“Grishen, I want you to contact General Headquarters,” he heard the sergeant say. “Inform them
Sector 1-13 is most certainly not in ork hands and make it clear we would consider it a great
personal favour if they would adjust their situation maps accordingly. Oh, and you had better try
voxing Battery Command as well to ask them if in future they could please refrain from ordering
people to shoot at us. It probably won’t work, of course. But I suppose we should at least pretend we
believe the men in charge of this war have some idea of what it is they are doing.”
71
INTERLUDE
As Above, So Below
or
Grand Marshal Kerchan and the Genius of Command
By any standard of measurement, the war was going badly.
Brooding as he sat through yet another interminable briefing His Excellency Grand Marshal
Tirnas Kerchan, Hero of the Varentis Campaign and Supreme Commander (All Forces) of the Most
Glorious Armies of the Emperor in Broucheroc, considered the facts he had learned so far that day
and found there was nothing there to please him. For the best part of two hours now, from his place
at the head of the long table inside General HQ’s Central Briefing Room One, he had listened as a
succession of his commanders read aloud their latest situation reports to the assembled General
Staff. Through it all, through all their pasty-faced dissemblings and pathetically transparent attempts
to lay the blame for their failures on others, the message at the heart of each man’s report was
exactly the same.
They were losing the war.
“Grand Marshal?” he heard his adjutant, Colonel Vlin, whisper from his chair by the side of
him, breaking his train of thought.
Disturbed from his despairing reverie, the Grand Marshal abruptly realised he had lost track of
the briefings. Looking up he saw the eyes of every man at the table were turned to gaze his way,
nervously awaiting his reaction to the substance of the last report. For a moment, unable to
remember the name of the man standing before him who had presented it, he found himself stymied.
“Yes, good. Very good.” Kerchan harrumphed, then floundered. “Most cogent and concise. An
excellent analysis, General… ah…”
“Dushan,” Vlin said sotto voce, raising a sheath of papers in front of his mouth to hide the words
as he spoke them.
“Yes, General Dushan,” the Grand Marshal said, inclining his head toward the officer in
question and giving him a curt nod by way of encouragement. “Your grasp of the situation is to be
commended.”
Clearly relieved, his face all but beaming at the praise, the ferret-faced Dushan puffed out his
chest with pride and bent forward in a low bow in grateful acknowledgement before taking his seat
once more.
Look at him, the Grand Marshal thought sourly. The man is an idiot. Still he is hardly unique in
that regard. I am surrounded by idiots. This whole damned city would seem to be staffed from first
to last with idiots, cowards and incompetents.
Briefly, the Grand Marshal idly wondered whether it might not be better to make an example of
Dushan. To denounce him, here and now, and order him taken away to stand court martial on
charges of incompetence. That might put the fear of the Emperor into the rest of them for a while, he
thought. Force them to buck their ideas up for fear they’d he facing more of the same themselves. As
attractive as the idea was, he found himself forced to dismiss it. He had just praised the man, after
all. To go back on that praise so quickly might make him seem indecisive. No, like it or not, for the
rest of the day at least the idiot Dushan was beyond arrest, almost as inviolable to the Grand
Marshal’s powers as the body of an Imperial saint. It was a matter of maintaining the proper respect
72
for the chain of command. Once the Grand Marshal had given voice to an opinion on a man there
could be no turning back.
And besides, thought Kerchan, I was the one who gave Dushan his position in the first place. To
punish him for his inadequacies now might be perceived as an admission I was wrong to promote
him. No matter what, a Grand Marshal can never admit to having made a mistake. He must be seen
to be infallible. To give credence to any thought otherwise would be to fatally undermine the rightful
awe every Guardsman naturally feels for the wisdom of their superiors. Well, the awe that most of
them feel anyway. It is the nature of war that, occasionally and inevitably, there will always be
dissenters.
With a distant stab of quiet anger, the Grand Marshal found himself remembering the officer
whose place Dushan had taken on the General Staff. What was the man’s name, he thought. Minor?
Minaris? Minovan? He was about to turn to Colonel Vlin to ask him the name of Dushan’s
predecessor, when abruptly it came to him. Mirovan! That was the man’s name. The remembered
name brought with it a clearer picture in his mind of the individual to whom it belonged and Grand
Marshal Kerchan found his bleak and unhappy mood growing even darker.
Of all the men on his staff, Mirovan had always seemed the best and brightest. An exemplary
field officer with an admirable record of citations for bravery behind him, Mirovan had made
general in a creditably short space of time. If the man had any flaw at all, it was in the one single
characteristic Kerchan could never abide in a subordinate.
Insolence.
Mirovan had been so insolent in fact that two weeks ago he had even had the temerity to
question one of the Grand Marshal’s military decisions during a staff meeting. Enraged, Kerchan
had demoted the man on the spot, busting him down to the rank of common trooper and ordering
him to be immediately posted to a frontline combat unit. Next, in a hasty decision the Grand
Marshal now bitterly regretted, he had promoted the man’s less than able second-in-command, the
men-colonel Dushan, and ordered him to serve on the General Staff in Mirovan’s place. Though he
had felt quite sure humbling Mirovan had been the right thing to do at the time, the Grand Marshal
now experienced a troubling sense of ill-defined unease. In many ways Mirovan was an admirable
man, he thought sadly. Certainly, he was a damn sight more competent than most of the toadies and
feckless lackeys who bedevil me sitting around this table day after day. I wonder what happened to
him?
“He was a good man in his way,” the Grand Marshal said. “It would be a pity if such a man were
dead.”
All around the table, the others were staring at him. Kerchan realised he must have inadvertently
spoken his musings aloud, interrupting the flow of conversation around him as the members of the
General Staff discussed the significance or not of Dushan’s report. On every side of him, as though
not entirely sure how they should react, generals stared towards him with expressions ranging from
uncertainty to quiet trepidation. Even the ever-faithful Vlin seemed to be looking at him strangely.
Kerchan, however, felt no embarrassment. If nothing else, a lifetime spent commanding soldiers had
taught him a simple truth. A man with the absolute authority of life-or-death over others should
never feel any need to have to apologise for his own behaviour.
“I was remembering Mirovan,” he said, turning to look toward General Dushan. “After his
demotion he was given over to your command, Dushan. What happened to him?”
