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Chapter 28: Who Keeps a Diary?
"Every body was burned to ash. The dogtags were collected and submitted. Only officers of Colonel Fox's and Commissar Hoffman's rank get their names on the memorial that will be erected when this is done. The soldiers who died beside them leave no mark that proves they ever existed. Perhaps we are the only ones left who remember them."
"In any case, my first real mission is over. I suppose I should think about what comes next."
"I need to work out how to acquire a Lord Commissar's designation. With that, it might be possible to claim a trophy world and see out my remaining years somewhere comfortable. Though every way I think about it, that feels more like wishful thinking than a plan."
"The current date should be around 744.M41, which is genuinely not good news. The Damocles Crusade should be concluding around now, which means the Imperium's main forces will be turning their attention to the Tyranid invasion next. I can't seriously be sent to the Battle of Macragge. That prospect is thoroughly depressing."
"The most pressing question right now is why no one from the Commissariat or the Departmento Munitorum has come to find me. Have I remembered this wrong? They haven't sent anyone to review my conduct on Farrak IV. That makes no sense at all. Knowing the Imperial bureaucracy's instincts, even if I had done nothing wrong I should have been sitting in a holding room somewhere for weeks by now."
Duvette put down his pen.
What sort of person keeps a diary? Apparently, the sort of person he was. He was bored enough that writing in it had become a reasonable way to manage the time and discharge some of the unease sitting at the bottom of his chest, and he was not particularly worried about anyone reading it.
He wrote in the language of his previous life. Han Chinese, the tongue he had grown up with. In the current age of the Imperium, it was a dead language in the most complete sense of the word, not merely unused but utterly lost, along with every other language he had known before: Chinese, English, and everything else that had once been familiar to him. Tens of thousands of years of war and civilizational collapse had erased them entirely.
The language of the Imperium's upper registers was High Gothic, which had its origins in the common tongue used for interstellar colonization during the Dark Age of Technology — ancient, sacred, and sufficiently obscure that fluency was confined to the Imperium's senior leadership, Ecclesiarchy priests, Inquisitors, certain Astartes, and senior Tech-Priests of the Mechanicus. Low Gothic was what had become of High Gothic after ten thousand years of evolution, degradation, and absorption of dialects from millions of inhabited worlds.
Perhaps a sufficiently learned Inquisitor might notice that what he was writing was a language at all. Perhaps a Primarch, with whatever breadth of knowledge a mind like that carried, might do the same. But he could not seriously imagine either scenario arising. The probability was too low to spend attention on.
Duvette stretched, worked the stiffness out of his shoulders, and looked around his cabin.
A small room on the middle deck of a troop transport. The ship was called the Siren's Fury — a whale-class transport, large enough to carry several complete Astra Militarum regiments along with their heavy equipment: Leman Russ tanks, Basilisk artillery pieces, all of it. Right now it was traveling through the Warp, the Sea of Souls, under escort by two Sword-class frigates.
The battle for Farrak IV was over. The Imperium had won.
Two weeks since it ended. His wounds had healed faster than they had any right to, which he no longer found surprising. He and the Ash Watchers 101st had boarded the Siren's Fury along with their transfer orders, and beyond those orders nothing had come. No messages. No communications from any administrative authority. Nothing.
He could not persuade himself to feel relaxed about that.
He checked the status panel.
[Current Command: Ash Watchers 101st Regiment]
[Total Strength: 1,698] [Experience: Veteran (70%)]
[Overall Supply: 100%] [Overall Morale: 98%] [Overall Loyalty: 100%] [Overall Stability: 90%] [Chaos Corruption: 3%]
[Active Passive Bonuses: Steel Ring (Beginner), Forced March (Beginner), Indomitable]
They had lost a third of the regiment on Farrak IV. Sixteen hundred and ninety-eight soldiers remained, and he was still their de facto commanding officer, which was procedurally illegal by any reasonable reading of Astra Militarum doctrine. That particular irregularity was one of several things that should have generated some official response by now.
The legitimacy of his field promotion. The unauthorized underground operation. Extensive contact with Chaos-affiliated rebel personnel and a battlefield soaked in Warp energy. The unresolved question of who actually commanded the 101st Regiment in the absence of both its colonel and its commissar. Any one of these should have produced paperwork. All of them together should have produced a very uncomfortable conversation at minimum.
Instead: nothing. Not a word since the transfer orders.
He looked at his pocket watch, stood, and put the diary into the pack hanging on the wall. Time.
Yesterday, when they boarded, he had received an invitation to a victory banquet on the upper deck. He was treating it as a reasonable social obligation while privately noting that any gathering organized under circumstances like these had the potential to be considerably less celebratory than advertised. On the other hand, he was a newly appointed commissar and not a figure of sufficient importance to warrant an elaborate approach. If anyone wanted to deal with him, they would send someone with arrest authority and not bother with the setting.
He stood at the small mirror and straightened his uniform. This one was properly his own — a new commissar's uniform, properly issued, not Hoffman's coat worn on borrowed authority. He put it on correctly, checked the result, and walked out.
The Siren's Fury's upper deck was a different world from the middle and lower ones. The air was cleaner, the circulation systems more substantial, and the smell that reached him when the lift's doors opened was a layered blend of ceremonial unguent and various aromatics that the Ecclesiarchy had decided were appropriate for spaces that housed officers. He walked toward the central hall.
On the way, he passed various officers he did not know, nodding where nods were exchanged. He noticed that the looks he received from unfamiliar faces had a quality he could not immediately categorize. He decided it was probably the Farrak IV effect; word traveled, and the circumstances of that engagement were unusual enough to have generated some kind of reputation whether he had intended one or not.
He attributed it to that and kept walking.
The central hall of the upper deck was well attended. Officers in dress uniforms stood in conversational clusters throughout the space. Gold-trim servitors — their higher cognitive functions removed and replaced with simpler command sets, their movements precise and mechanical — moved through the room carrying glasses of amasec sourced from some agricultural world's vintage reserves. The banquet was serving grox steak. That was a genuine extravagance, and he noted it without fully understanding what it was in service of.
He took an amasec from a passing servitor and sipped it. The victory on Farrak IV had been unambiguous by any measure, but it did not seem to him like the sort of victory that warranted this level of ceremony. He stood in a corner of the hall and watched the senior officers work through their conversations, and thought without any particular sentiment about the Ash Watchers currently occupying the lower decks, in air that smelled considerably different from what was reaching him now.
Then someone caught his attention.
A woman in an Inquisitor's robes, white hair, one eye the color of a cut gemstone. Her features had a quality that reminded him of something from his previous life, a specific geographic inheritance he had no equivalent word for in any language currently spoken in the Imperium. She was striking in a way that communicated, with equal clarity, that proximity was not being invited.
She was speaking with someone across the hall when she seemed to notice his attention. She turned her head and looked at the commissar standing in the corner.
He registered, at that distance, that she was wearing an eyepatch on her right side. Only the left eye was visible: that deep, clear red. Looking at it from across the room produced in him a sudden, specific sensation that he had no prior experience of, something like the feeling of having left something important uncovered, a secret left in the open that he had believed was safely buried.
The white-haired Inquisitor raised her glass slightly in his direction. She smiled once, the way people smile when acknowledging someone they intend to speak with later, and then she turned back to her conversation and was absorbed into the crowd.
Friendly enough, on the surface.
Duvette drank his amasec and did not feel better.
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