Defender of the Imperium Omnibus, page 1
More tales of the Astra Militarum from Black Library
• CIAPHAS CAIN •
by Sandy Mitchell
CIAPHAS CAIN: HERO OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 1-3 in the series: For the Emperor,
Caves of Ice and The Traitor’s Hand)
CIAPHAS CAIN: DEFENDER OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 4-6 in the series: Death or Glory,
Duty Calls and Cain’s Last Stand)
CIAPHAS CAIN: SAVIOUR OF THE IMPERIUM
(Contains books 7-9 in the series: The Emperor’s Finest,
The Last Ditch and The Greater Good)
THE MACHARIAN CRUSADE OMNIBUS
by William King
(Contains the novels Angel of Fire, Fist of Demetrius and Fall of Macharius)
HONOUR IMPERIALIS
by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Rob Sanders and Steve Lyons
(Contains the novels Cadian Blood, Redemption Corps and Dead Men Walking)
YARRICK: THE OMNIBUS
by David Annandale
(Contains the novels Imperial Creed, Pyres of Armageddon and the novella Chains of Golgotha)
SHADOWSWORD
An Astra Militarum novel by Guy Haley
STRAKEN
An ‘Iron Hand’ Straken novel by Toby Frost
ASTRA MILITARUM
A Legends of the Dark Millennium anthology by various authors
Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Introduction
SECTOR 13
DEATH OR GLORY
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Footnotes
DUTY CALLS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Footnotes
TRAITOR’S GAMBIT
Footnotes
CAIN’S LAST STAND
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Footnotes
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Baneblade’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
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 Astra Militarum 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.
INTRODUCTION
It’s hard to believe I’ve been writing the Cain books for eight years now, and I’m about to start plotting the eighth one in the series. I guess time really does fly when you’re having fun. That’s an average of a novel a year, not to mention the short stories that have accompanied them, two of which are also collected in this volume.
The first of these, Sector Thirteen, was originally written as a companion piece to For the Emperor, the very first of the novels in the sequence. Despite this, it was edged out of the first omnibus by lack of space: so here it is at last, just ahead of the fourth novel, which is the first in the overall timeline (confused yet? I promise this will all make sense eventually.) The other short piece, Traitor’s Gambit, came out as a limited edition chapbook at Games Day 2009, and this is the first time it’s been collected anywhere.
The three novels in this omnibus make up a very loose story arc, following Cain from almost the beginning of his career to its end, with an intermediate stopover in his time with the 597th, the regiment he serves with during the first three books in the series (Shortly after the events of Caves of Ice, and some years before The Traitor’s Hand). This worked so well I’m trying it again with the next few, kicking off with The Emperor’s Finest, which I’ve just finished, and which at last answers one of the most common questions I get asked at signings: how Cain ended up attached to a Space Marine Chapter, dodging genestealers aboard a space hulk.
Attentive readers, and there seem to be an awful lot of you out there, pick up on the references to untold stories Cain scatters throughout his memoirs, and often ask me when I’m going to write a particular one. The short answer to this is that I don’t really know; quite often these casual asides just pop up out of nowhere while Cain’s describing something, and in most cases I’m as surprised as you are. Then, months or years later, while I’m plotting a new story, I suddenly know what he meant, and where it fits into the bigger picture.
The fact is, you see, that over the course of those eight years, I’ve got to know Cain so well that writing a story around him hardly feels like work any more (although, as any professional author will tell you, it takes a lot of hard graft to make a story seem effortless). In fact, I feel I’ve got so far into his head by now that I can more or less rely on him to dictate his own actions, once I’ve set up the initial situation.
Which is one of the most important principles of writing fiction: story and character are the same thing. Sorry about the sudden lurch into italics, but I can’t emphasise that enough. Plot’s just what happens. Story is who it happens to, why they care, and what they do about it.
In practical terms, that means I can let Cain do a lot of the work for me, which is something every author appreciates in their characters. I still need to come up with a plot for each book, of course, but it doesn’t have to be nailed down too firmly – the initial idea can even be as nebulous as ’what would Cain do if he was surrounded by enemies, with nowhere to run?’ Thinking about that immediately sets up a number of possibilities, which, with a bit of work, leads to a rough chain of cause and effect, stretching in two directions, forward from that point, as he tries to solve the problem, and ends up creating further difficulties which need to be overcome before eventually reaching his goal; and backwards, as I try to set up a sequence of events which would lead him to that point in the first place (The end result, in this case, was Death or Glory).
Once I’ve got a chain of events I’m happy with, and which seems consistent with Cain’s outlook on life, I’ve got the skeleton of the story in place. Getting it down on paper, or at least on the computer, gives me enough of an outline to bounce off the editorial team at the Black Library for comments. Again, I can’t emphasise enough how important it is for a writer to be able to get this kind of support. Not everyone’s lucky enough to have professionals they can pass things to for feedback, of course, but it’s vital to get another pair of eyes on your work. Only when someone else reads it do you realise that just because something was in your head, it doesn’t mean it’s made it onto the page!
When the outline seems solid, it’s time to start the real work of telling the story. At which point Cain makes his presence felt again. To use an overworked analogy, the map is not the road, and the outline isn’t a condensed version of the book. As individual scenes start to flesh out, and Cain interacts with the other characters, he invariably starts nudging the story in other directions. By now, though, we’ve been through so much together, that doesn’t worry me any more. I know we’ll eventually get to the conclusion the story must have in order to work. The path we take together might meander a bit, but there’s nothing wrong with taking the scenic route.
I might almost go so far as to say that by this time Cain seems more of a collaborator than a character; but I won’t, because he’d probably want a share of the royalties. We both hope you enjoy this book, though.
Sandy Mitchell,
January 2010.
SECTOR 13
Of all the worlds I’ve visited in my long and discreditable career, I suppose Keffia stands out as one of the most pleasant. In the abstract, at least; we were there to fight a war, don’t forget, so there was plenty to keep the mind occupied, but in the main I look back on my years there through a faint haze of nostalgia.
Being an agri-world, the landscape was almost completely rural, so my overriding impression was one of endless plains of lush greenery cut across by isolated roads, which occasionally intersected at quaint rustic villages where nothing much seemed to have changed since the Emperor was in short trousers. The climate was pleasant too, the small ice caps trickling clear fresh water into all three continents from large polar mountain ranges, while the narrow equatorial band was mercifully free of any landmass worth fighting over. There were a few small island chains, where tiny inbred communities fished and grew tropical fruit, but they were too insignificant to have attracted any enemy attention and were ignored by our side too after the initial sweeps.
All in all I was pretty pleased with life. My inadvertent heroism on Desolatia a couple of years before had won me a little notoriety among the Imperial task force, and I’d been able to capitalise on that quite nicely. Even after all this time there were still sufficient senior officers and Administratum functionaries wanting to shake my hand to keep me comfortably occupied attending receptions and seminars far from the fighting, so that I frequently found myself away from my unit for days on end. A deprivation that Colonel Mostrue, our commanding officer, bore with commendable fortitude, I have to say.
Even while I was at my post things were hardly onerous. The 12th Valhallan Field Artillery were parked well behind the lines, as you’d expect, so I’d had little occasion to face the enemy directly. Indeed, since we were engaged in a protracted campaign to cleanse the planet of a genestealer infestation, there was seldom anything to fire our guns at in any case. The war was a subtle one for the most part, of counter-insurgency and surgical strikes, with the enemy seldom massing in numbers sufficient to justify an artillery barrage. The occasional exceptions to this were renegade units of the local Planetary Defence Force, which would turn out to be riddled with ’stealer cultists with depressing regularity, and turn their guns on the Guard or the local units sent to deal with them until our overwhelming superiority in numbers and firepower had their inevitable effect.
Like most agriworlds, Keffia was sparsely populated by Imperial standards. This made our job of cleansing the place both easier and harder than it might have been. Easier, in that cities were few and far between (I think there were no more than a dozen on the entire globe), which meant that the dense concentrations of population a ’stealer cult needs to really take root and hide in were absent, but harder in that the cult had instead become attenuated, spreading its tentacles widely in small pockets of infestation rather than remaining sufficiently concentrated to root out and destroy in a single strike. The upshot of all this was that we’d been forced into a protracted campaign, cleansing the world province by province, one brood at a time, and we’d already seen three winters come and go since we’d arrived here.
Some, of course, found the slow pace of the campaign frustrating, not least my crony and closest friend in the battery, Lieutenant Divas, who, as always, was chafing at the bit, eager to get the matter over with and move on to the next war.
‘We’re making progress,’ I told him, uncorking the bottle of well-matured amasec which had somehow found its way into my kitbag after the last round of hand-shaking and finger food I’d been dragged off to. ‘Both the northern continents are completely clean already.’
‘But they were only ever lightly infested to begin with,’ he rejoined, finding a couple of teabowls in the clutter on my desk which Jurgen, my aide, had failed to tidy up before disappearing on some mysterious errand of his own. ‘The majority of the ’stealers were always down south of here. You know that.’
‘Your point being?’ I asked, pouring the amber liquid with care.
Divas shrugged, looking uncannily like a bored child getting tired of the current amusement.
‘I don’t know. We could be here for years yet, if something doesn’t change.’
‘I suppose we could,’ I agreed, trying not to sound too pleased at the prospect. That would have suited me fine, my adventures with the tyranids on Desolatia striking me as more than enough excitement for one commissarial career. (Had I but known, of course, it had just been the prelude to a lifetime of narrow escapes from almost certain death. But back then I had yet to develop the innate paranoia which was to serve me so well in my subsequent century of running for cover and shooting back when I couldn’t avoid it. The prolonged period of relative quiet had lulled me into a false sense of security, which a few years later would have elicited nothing more than a vague sense of waiting for the other boot to drop.) So, as I poured the drinks, I had little inkling of the fact that the turning point of the entire campaign was no more than a few hours away, and that once again I would find myself caught up in the middle of events over which I had not the slightest control.
The irony was that I’d had my chance to avoid it, but at the time I thought I was being remarkably prudent in not doing so. You see, Colonel Mostrue had never quite shaken the feeling that I’d been less than honest about my supposed heroism on Desolatia, when my attempt to save my own neck had inadvertently stumbled across a swarm of ’nids which would otherwise have annihilated us, and my subsequent panicked dash back to our own lines had drawn them neatly into the killing zone of our guns.
He’d never said anything directly about it, of course, but after that he made a point of creating subtle opportunities for me to prove my mettle, which generally amounted to nudging me in the general direction of trouble and looking out for any overt sign of reluctance to put myself in harm’s way again. Luckily my side trips away from the battery had limited his opportunities for such amusements, but on a couple of occasions I’d been left with no alternative but to tag along with a forward observer unit with every outward show of enthusiasm so as not to undermine my fraudulent reputation.
As it turned out, these little expeditions hadn’t been nearly as unpleasant as I’d anticipated. On each occasion we’d taken some fire from the cultists as soon as they realised we were sitting out ahead of our own lines calling in their positions to the battery, but to my well-disguised relief the subsequent barrages had taken care of that before they got close or accurate enough to be a real nuisance. To all intents and purposes they’d remained a distant threat, despite the occasional las-bolt putting a dent in the sandbags protecting us. Indeed, in all of these minor engagements I had never even seen the enemy close enough to tell whether they were true hybrids or merely their human dupes.
All that was about to change, though, when the colonel stuck his head into my office the morning after my chat with Divas.
‘Commissar,’ he said, nailing me with those ice-blue eyes, which always seemed to see a lot further into me than I was comfortable with. ‘Do you have a moment?’
