“It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.”
Private Vulkanus Lotharius crouched on the ground by a small stove with the rest of his squad, taking another swig from his amasec, and letting the burning fluid warm his throat on this brisk twilight on the agri-world of Boltzmann b. Already its pale sun had set, the last vestiges of daylight fading away into the night. The sod hovel the squad was staying was barely large enough for them, huddling in front of that stove that spewed smoke into their faces. But it was building with a roof and warmth in a cold night, and on Boltzmann, where nights could last many days, and over half the year was spent in complete darkness, the soldiers of the Imperial Guard were happy to call any shelter home, even if they only slept in it once.
Throne of Terra, he thought, I can barely get a buzz on this stuff anymore.
It wasn’t always like this. When Vulkanus had first volunteered to be relieved from the front lines for occupation duty, he used to get hammered every night, blacking out every dinner, waking up feeling like an Ork had smashed his skull several hours later. He had requested a transfer from a combat unit after hearing of the extra amasec rations occupation units received. Then he learned why they gave out such generous amounts of liquor. Occupation duty was dreary work, travelling from village to village to clear the settlement of surviving xenos and heretics. There was no open combat; it was shooting fish in a barrel, day in, and day out.
Finally, there were the enemies themselves. From what he gathered from the Commissar, several decades prior, a race of xenos called the Equestrians had mysteriously appeared on the planet, and immediately began to turn other humans into xenos with their blasphemous sorceries, most prominently a vile potion that robbed them of their souls, binding their will to their ruler Princess Celestia. It was his job to destroy any xeno and their collaborators in the enemy settlements the Imperial Guard occupied, particularly those who had renounced humanity and the Emperor’s light, a job that he had performed gingerly over the past Terran year and a half or so.
“So a journalist from Oculus Dormiens Numquam is coming this afternoon,” said Private Villicus, a large, red-faced man who sat opposite from Lotharius, as he poured out a cup of amasec by the table.
“So is that the important visit the higher-ups have been talking about all week?” asked Sergeant Macharianus, “All this time I thought a famous Confessor, or an Inquisitor or a General or some shit would be coming.”
“Apparently,” replied Villicus, taking a sip, “he’s coming here to film our occupation work.”
“Really? Well, I could think of more important visitors for a lot more important purposes,” said Vulkanus.
“Like Sanguinius,” replied Marksman Sayler, a narrow-faced man with round glasses, filling up a glass just as Vulkanus put his bottle down onto the table.
“Sanguinius, Private?” said the Sergeant, “Don’t you know he’s dead and has been for some amount of time?”
“Yes, that’s what he was before, but I have a friend who works in the planetary telepathic commission— he’s not a witch, he hears the other psykers on other planets and he writes down what they say— and he told me that Sanguinius has been resurrected by the Emperor and was appointed Regent of the Imperium Nihilus directly from His will.”
If true, this would be a particularly relevant piece of information. Boltzmann was situated on the edge of Ultima Segmentum, with its the sector almost completely cut off from the wider Imperium save for its immediate neighbours ever since the Days of Binding over half a century ago.
“Don’t you think your friend’s factoid would be a bit more well known if it were true, Sayler?” asked Vulkanus.
“Yeah, but for now they’re keeping it a secret,” replied Sayler, who put down the glass for a second as he spoke, “Now here’s the thing: Sanguinius is leading an army of archangels re-forged in his image to reconquer the worlds lost in the Imperium Nihilus. There are millions of them, all with great golden armour and wings, nearly twice the size of a normal angel, and they’re heading directly towards the sector, my friend told me, and they’re due to arrive maybe even next year. It’s the new Great Crusade.
“If the xenos hear about it, they’d obviously have to start making preparations. They’d train their witches to be extra strong, to keep the Barrier around their country going, and they’d start fortifying their cities, building bunkers, and you know, that kind of defensive shit. I mean, he’s Sanguinius, and the xenos are just candy-coloured Ponies, but if they start fortifying now it’ll be a lot harder for us to make offensives on their ground in the meantime, so high command is keeping it a secret until they actually start landing their drop pods here.”
The room heard nods and murmurs of approval as Sayler took another sip from his glass.
“Well, private,” said Sergeant Macharianus, “assuming you’ve got an honest friend, I guess we won’t be staying here for long.”
“By the Emperor, imagine if we get posted to Orgetoricanext!” exclaimed Villicus. Orgetoricawas a paradise world, renowned in the sector for their towering mountain ranges, health spas and sports resorts.
“What’ll you do?” asked Sayler.
“I don’t know,” Villicus replied, “I think I’d go to a hot spring first. Marching around this Emperor-damned planet is hard work even for me, and I think the hot water’ll do my joints good. Maybe order some a glass of fine amasec, get three—”
There was a knock on the door, as a small-statured woman entered the cottage, behind her another woman carrying a camera as.
“Oh, hello Guardsmen. My name is Matilda Gail. I’m a reporter from the ODN, and I’m here to interview you about your service. I believe you’ll be working this afternoon?”
“Yeah, any minute now actually,” said the Sergeant.
“Right. So before you begin, I want to talk to you a little about it and your thoughts about your duty— Lyse?” Gail said as she stood in front of the camerawoman and made a gesture to her, who flipped on a button.
“Ladies and gentleman, right now I am in the village of Saint Gereon, which was liberated from the Equestrian xenos by the brave men and women of the Imperial Guard barely 72 hours ago as a part of Operation Faith Unyielding. The xeno warriors may have retreated, but the battle isn’t over yet. I’m here with a squad of rear-line guardsmen who are tasked with destroying any xenos remaining in the village.”
The guardsmen cheered, saying hello to loved ones or other friends and family they may have left behind at home. Vulkanus did his best to smile, giving the camera a thumbs-up.
“According to their commanding officer, the formal extermination will begin in just a few hours. Before you go, guardsman, would you like to talk a little bit about your duty?”
Gail pointed to Vulkanus.
“Oh, I, uh, am glad to, yeah. I’m uh... Guardsman Lotharius.”
“Can you tell me a little bit about your work in occupation duty, Lotharius? How did you begin?” asked Gail.
“Oh, well you see, I was actually, um, a frontline soldier before I... volunteered for occupation duty.”
“Really? Can you tell us why?”
He knew well enough why he join. Practically everyone in the squad knew too, for they joined for the same reason. Vulkanus looked to the Sergeant, then to the Commissar. Both mouthed words at him and made gestures. Neither spoke, but he understood what they were trying to communicate to him well enough.
“Well, I understood that... frontline combat... is important, but, um, you need troops... in the rear to... occupy it, well. You, er, know that saying, right? ‘Capturing it was easy, but holding it is hard?’... Well, I wanted to, you know, make it easier... to hold it, like.”
The sergeant nodded to him, and Vulkanus gave the camera another awkward smile.
The interview continued for several minutes as Gail continued to ask him questions, about his life as part of the garrison troops, the experience of occupation duty, and why he felt it was important. Every time, Vulkanus answered with whatever answer he thought would be in the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer if it had a section about what to do: he talked about how surviving xenos needed to be exterminated as abominations in His eyes, and that heretics in occupied territory could form resistance cells that could cause the Imperium to lose the recently-liberated territory, which could cause even more soldiers to die in the line of duty. He claimed he felt proud doing the Emperor’s work, particularly one so important for Imperial security. Eventually, Gail thanked him for the interview, and exited the cottage with the camerawoman.
As she closed the door, the squad went back to sitting at their previous positions, going back to their conversation about the resurrected Sanguinius and his army of archangels. Vulkanus, however, just sighed and looked down at the table, before turning to Sergeant Macharianus.
“Look, maybe this isn’t the best moment for this, but can I talk to the Lieutenant after we do this extermination?” he asked.
“Well, yeah, I can see if you can talk to him afterwards, but can I ask why?” Macharianus replied.
“Well, I think both you and I know that everything I said back there was bullshit. And it’s not that I don’t want to do my duty for the Emperor, it’s just that I think I’d be able to serve Him better somewhere else. Maybe I can go back onto the front lines or something.”
“Okay, Private, but is there any particular reason for that?”
Vulkanus sighed.
“It’s just.. It’s just that it’s so fucking boring here. You go into one village. You eliminate the threats. You go to another village. You exterminate the threats there. You move onto the next village. Like, you know that saying: ‘war is months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror’? Now I feel that there isn’t even that in my life now. I like the terror. I like being on the front. It’s exciting. Even if those fucking Ponies were beat me to death with their fucking hooves while staring at me with those, big, wide, fucking puppy-dog eyes it would be more interesting than this shit.
“Back here I don’t even feel like I’m a soldier. I feel like I’m a pest exterminator. I mean, why do they even have the Guardsmen to do this shit, huh? Why can’t they just take all the pest exterminators on the planet, make them into, like, the Adeptus Pestexterminatoricus or some other High Gothic bullshit, and have them all go into each village we take, so they can herd all the xenos into a barn they covered in a tent or some shit, and fumigate them for a week or two? That wouldn’t be so hard, would it?”
The other guardsmen nodded in approval, as Sergeant Macharianus took out a lho-stick and began to smoke it as he began to speak.
“Private Lotharius, you have served the minimum term for occupation duty, and as such there’s nothing stopping you from transferring out of the unit if you want to, but before you do so, private, and before you other privates get any ideas in your heads I want you to listen to this.
“First, you very well know your ‘Adeptus Pestexterminatoricus or some other High Gothic bullshit’ already exists; that’s what rear-line work is for. Secondly, the Inquisition can’t do all the xeno and heretic extermination by themselves, that’s why we exist, too, so they don’t have to destroy them all and take up resources better used elsewhere. Then there’s this.
He took out another lho-stick, lighting it with the butt of the previous one and smoking the second one. The squad’s chattering of approval had fallen into a murmur.
“Do you really think any of us wants to do this work? I’ve been working in occupation duty for five Terran years now, and do you think it’s because I like it? Private, it’s the Emperor’s will that we are to spread across the stars, and in order to do so it falls to men like us to remove any threat to our destiny. I know you think it’s boring that we have to do all this clean up duty, but going back to the rear-line workers for a second, do you think they don’t? Do you think they like doing their task for the Emperor? No.
“But what if every Guardsman in occupation duty decided, ‘fuck it, this is boring, I’m going out where the real combat is?’ The answer is, Private, that all the xenos and heretics would all revolt the moment we left; and that’s what would happen if every Inquisitor in the rear said ‘fuck it, I’m going out to Uppergroxasshole IV because I’m going to hunt down the Chaos cult I heard about because that’s more exciting than the shit I’m finding myself in right now.’
The second lho-stick was finished now, and Macharianus lit up the third one as he did the second. The murmuring had fallen into complete silence at this point.
“Behind every xeno face, no matter how innocuous like a Pony’s is a cold, soulless interior. With every beat of the heart in every waking moment they’re planning how to destroy humans like you; innocents like your mother or father, or your sweetheart back home or the old man went around the hab-block selling promethium cans. Every second those xenos are still alive is another second they can devote to their schemes, and every day that passes that their hearts are still beating is another minute where another innocent on this planet dies because of your inaction.
“Private, you’re in occupation duty not because you want to, you’re here because you need to. Maybe you wanted be here at first, but the Emperor doesn’t care about your feelings. You’re here because you need to be here. And He doesn't care if this is the most boring job in the galaxy— this is a job that needs to be done for the greater good of all mankind, and you need to do it, so do it, for His sake, and for the sake of everyone else in this damned galaxy. You can still redeploy if you want to, but before you do so I want you to think long and hard about what I’ve just said before you do so, got that?”
The entire squad burst into cheers after the speech was completed. Macharianus looked into his lho-stick pack and found it was entirely finished.
“Sergeant,” said Villicus, “you should have been the one the chick interviewed, eh?”
“Oh, it was nothing,” the sergeant replied, “Just remember that I’m just an NCO, and I’m supposed to keep you guys in line.”
The squad continued to drink for a few more minutes before the sergeant major entered the cottage and told them they had to get ready to begin extermination. They grabbed their equipment; Macharianus his laspistol and the rest, including Vulkanus their lasguns as they exited the building. The sun had already set, and the black, moonless night was already in its infancy.
As they left the village, and walked through the fields, Vulkanus thought about what the sergeant said, about duty and doing what the Emperor entrusted him no matter what. And it was true, he thought. Sometimes you need to get something done because it needs to be done, not because you want to do it. And he will do this thing, he decided; maybe it will be his last, or maybe many others will follow it. But what was sure was that tonight was a new beginning.
Night had already fallen by the time they got to the ravine by the old copse. The night was black as an abyss— no moon circled the world they were on, and the sky above them was clouded that night, the light of the stars blocked save for in a series of distant lights near the horizon. Yet twisted remains of trees were still visible in the light of unicorn auras surrounding their shovels as they and their pegasus companions went to work digging long trenches in the ground, their candy-coloured coats already sullied by the soil they unearthed.
In front of Vulkanus and his squad were hundreds of Ponies huddled together, standing in their midst. Small foals grabbed their mothers’ legs, some sobbed into their legs, bauling out tears until their eyes ran dry. Yet many more, mainly the older ones remained silent. They may have not known that much of the world around them, but they knew enough that something like this would happen to them for a long time.
There, by one of the trenches stood Mathilda Gail, standing in front of the camera as she interviewed the Commissar.
“You see,” he said, “making them dig the trenches themselves instead of having our sappers do so is the best way to demoralise them. You really have to let them know of the fate they’re facing, and what better—”
“PLEASE! You can’t do this to us!” suddenly interrupted a faded orange pegasus mare in the copse, fluttering above the air, “We never betrayed the Emperor! We kept true to Him! They made us do it! Please, sir—”
“SHUT UP YOU CUNT!” shouted the Commissar. He picked up a pebble by his foot, and threw it at the pegasus, hitting her perfectly in the middle of her forehead as she fell immediately. Seconds later, a voice, perhaps no more than three years old began to wail louder than the rest of the young ones in the crowd, repeating “GRANDMAMA!” over and over again.
“By the Golden Throne...” the Commissar muttered as he fired his bolt pistol into the crowd until the crying stopped.
“I’m sorry, you’re not supposed to shoot before the commanding officers gives his orders, but the brat was really, really loud this time. Apostates like that, they don’t know that the moment they take the Potion they betray humanity just as much as those who do so willingly. It’s the act of abandoning your own humanity that’s so vile in the Emperor’s eyes, not the intention. Um, where was I again?” he asked Gail.
“You were talking about letting them know their fate,” she answered.
“Ah yes, and the best do it than to force them to partake in it themselves. Yeah. It should begin any moment now. You’ll see.”
Thank the Emperor I didn’t have to go over to the youngling myself, thought Vulkanus. The young ones were the worst— they always stamp and scream and scratch, and the exterminations always had more young ones than adults. A few months ago a small human boy (that village had a mixed population of apostate humans and xenos; this one had xenos alone) even bit his arm as he tried to restrain him until he drew blood, and it took Saylor smashing the kid’s skull in with the butt of his lasgun for him to stop.
He looked over to the edge of the ravine and saw some people in uniform with a variety of instruments, such as horns, drums, flutes and trombones. Great! He thought, music! The bands playing music always took his mind off the job at hand, and he always appreciated it when they had the bands playing as he worked.
“INTO THE TRENCHES! NOW!” barked the Lieutenant. Some of the foals and children, as well as some of the adults began to sob quietly as they were separated from their families, human adults moving into one short edge, adult Ponies in the middle and the children and foals on the other. Guards standing by the trenches made sure the prisoners didn’t escape, prodding them with the butts of their lasguns as they moved.
“Positions, soldiers, make ready!” he shouted again. Vulkanus and several other guardsmen made their way to directly above the short edge of the trenches. Vulkanus for a brief moment looked at the band once more as he began to hear the sound of brass and percussion. He knew this song— it was his favourite aria from a comic opera he watched shortly before being conscripted. In it, the heroine confessed her undying love for her fiancé, all the while unaware that the man she was singing it to was the hero’s long-lost identical twin. He smiled as he listened to the upbeat, bouncy melody.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the extermination is about to begin!” said Gail, in a hushed, excited tone.
“Aim...”
The rest of the soldiers, Vulkanus included, aimed their guns at the xenos.
“FIRE!”
Cracks of the full-auto lasgun fire joined the chorus of wails and sobs, the gunfire which grew ever louder as the guardsmen fired. The darkness of night for a brief second gave way to a terrible brightness emanating from the barrels of the guns. Bathed in the light of their rifle, the trenches looked like canals filled with blood as their occupants seemed to buckle and disappear into its depths. Vulkanus didn’t care. Even as he carefully aimed down his sights at a screaming mare clutching a small foal in her magic aura, he didn’t even bother to focus his attention upon the hecatomb in front of him. His mind was back at the theatre, drinking with his friends at home and enjoying one last night before joining the Guard.
He fired, her eyes exploding into blood, the foal’s eyes following shortly. He blew off the face of a small orange Pegasus, screaming in agony before a second shot took him out dead. An old green Earth Pony, who was half-buried under bodies reached out, and her hoof was shot clean off by a stray lasbolt. A hecatomb unfolded as the Guardsmen fired into the civilians, each old mare and young colt screaming in pain, screams their strained and bleeding vocal chords were never shaped to make, the lucky ones dying as soon as they were hit, the unlucky begging Celestia, Luna, Twilight, anyone who could hear their prayers to be released from their broken, bleeding bodies.
Eventually, as the charges were drained and the magazines emptied, the light faded away like the sounds of pain and crying. The music stopped playing, and only a few quiet moans remained, a hoof or wing twitching in a last grasp of post-life. The trenches were filled with gore and viscera, the body of one flowing naturally into another. If were any bodies intact, whatever they in life were no longer recognisable. Male and female, young and old were heaps of dead meat, their indeterminate remains lying lifelessly beneath the feet of the guardsmen. The bright coats of the Ponies were gone; only the red of blood and the white of bone were reflected through as the camerawoman shone a light into one of the trenches.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like the extermination has been completed. Very few signs of life seem to be coming from this trench, or the rest of the trenches, for that matter.” she said.
“Very few, but not nonexistent,” continued a voice. The camerawoman lifted the camera up, revealing the face of the Lieutenant, “you always miss one or two xenos; let’s see now... and it looks like we have one right... here.”
He pointed downwards towards a small pile of juvenile corpses. Muted whimpers could be heard coming from just below the surface. “Lotharius?”
Lotharius rushed to the Lieutenant’s side, helping him pull out a small hoof. Blood spurted from a vein as they nearly tore off the leg. They found a small Unicorn colt; his coat was completely covered in blood to the point that it was impossible to determine his original colour. His other foreleg was blown off, leaving a bloody stump of bone as he screamed that he wanted “his mommy” over and over again as he was lifted up by Vulkanus.
Well it’s a good thing you’ll be meeting her soon, Vulkanus thought. Luckily the xeno youngling was so much in pain that he had no energy to resist him. Vulkanus placed one arm against the youngling’s back and another against his crown, pushing into his neck until he heard a loud snap, like a pencil breaking, and all was silent once more. The darkness of night about them now seemed even darker, the night air even colder in the stillness.
“Yeah, this one was pretty easy, so I could finish it off without much effort. My arms hurt though,” he said, trying to massage one arm in the other, before trying to wipe the blood off his coat, “the rest will probably die in the next few days. There’s no point in destroying the rest of them, they’re probably too mangled to survive for long.”
“Guardsman... Lothair, was it?”
“Uh, it’s Lotharius, yeah?”
“Mind if you say a few words for the folks back home before we sign off for the night?”
“Yes, of course.”
Vulkanus smiled at the Sergeant, who smiled and gave him a thumbs up back. He knew what he had to say to her, and to everyone on his homeworld who may be watching tonight. He took out a lho-stick and began to smoke it.
“It’s not easy, exterminating xenos, particularly exterminating them so frequently like you do in occupation duty. As you can imagine, it could be pretty exhausting, holding up a gun all night, or finishing off the survivors. Sometimes, doing this day after day after day even gets boring. But then I remember what a wise man told me. You don’t do jobs because you enjoy them, even if you do. You do them because the Emperor gave you a duty: and without our diligence like what we did today, who knows how many of these xenos will grow up and hurt people like you, or me, or your friends? Worse still, they might turn you into one of them, an empty shell forced to do the will of their leaders to destroy humanity. Even if you don’t enjoy your duty, you still have to get it done, not for your enjoyment, but for the good of the people around you, and for the good of the people even on other worlds that you may never meet, even for the good of the Emperor himself.”
