Chapter 18

341. Don't frag officers at the worst possible moment: Look, I don't want to take too much of a moral high ground here, you've read this book, you know who I am. But first of all, make sure the person you're fragging deserves to be fragged (Chenkov) and second of all, pick a time that doesn't suck. If you're on a transit ship, far away from the front lines, or in the middle of a lull in the fighting, that's a good time. When the Orks are smashing into your defenses, jumping over the crumbling walls, and butchering everything that moves (including a couple of their own) it's a bad time. Particularly when you have to run out to a surrounded and stranded outpost in order to get to them. The Orks took pity on the guy and decided to transport him to the outpost. By strapping him to a rocket. They legit thought they were helping.

342. Going straight for the enemy leader rarely works: A common tactic in battle is to decapitate the head of the army, the general, lord, Hive Tyrant, whatever, and send the army into disarray. It's a decent concept, as massive organized armies heavily depend on someone to keep them all acting as a cohesive whole. Tyranids in particular fall apart when their leader is dead. But the thing is, it's usually really hard to GET to an enemy leader. They're usually on the wrong end of an army, have bodyguards of the highest quality, and themselves are a very hardened target. So a direct charge, trying to drive a wedge into the front of the enemy army and force your way to the very back? Kind of stupid. When it comes up to forward assaults, we don't do very well compared to everything else out there. Didn't stop commander dipshit from trying to force a hundred-thousand men into a wall of claws and teeth to get to a Hive Tyrant. At least he got eaten by a Carnifex. Swallowed whole. I think I heard some screaming from inside the stomach.

343. Support staff are vital and we would all die without them: When people think of war machines, they think of people like me, the boys and girls in the Imperium Guard, fighting on the front lines. The thing is that for every soldier fighting against the enemies of man, multiple people are needed to keep things running from behind the scenes. Maintaining vehicles, building weapons, growing food, everything an army needs to run, someone has to work on it. I've seen a lot of debate on what the exact ratio is, but even the lightest estimate think that it's 1:3, with some saying it's as high as 1:20. So while the idea of arming every single person on a planet has its appeal, it's the dumbest thing you could do. Congrats, 100% of the populace are now enlisted. And within a month there was a planet wide famine, ammo shortage, a general breakdown of infrastructure, and ten million people were dead. No one even invaded, all the deaths were the result of everything falling apart. We were sent in just to work to get everything going again. Planetary Governor had a weird chip on her shoulder. Said something about people "not wasting time knitting by the fire." Except that knitting was for winter clothing in late autumn. A good chunk of the deaths were from soldiers who didn't have proper warmth.

344. Little creepy girls need to fucking die: You ever see a girl walking backwards on all fours, on the wall, with a spinning head? Kill it. Yeah, no exorcisms, no prayers, no holy rites, just KILL IT! A few hundred las rounds to the face and burn the body. Every time I've seen that happened, it stops there. Whenever people try to just get the daemon out (and of course it's a daemon, what else would it fucking be!?) people die. Have you ever seen a priest running around with a creepy as fuck little girl hanging on to her neck by her teeth? I did. I told him to just throw the kid out the window and into the volcano that we were hovering over, but he didn't want to listen.

345. Battlefield nobles aren't actually that important: It's depressing how many people think blue bloods are somehow vital to the Imperium. As opposed to reality, where if 95% of them died, the quality of life in the Imperium would skyrocket. But if you're a stupid twat who thinks that only rich, inbred pricks can make important decisions, the ones that go off to fight aren't part of the decision making. A lot of people don't get this, and even I didn't until I met Zamora, but regimented nobles rarely inherit anything. Only first and second sons and first and second daughters inherit anything. Even then, usually only the eldest does, the other three are used for political marriages or held on to be a back up. If a noble isn't in that category, then mommy and daddy buy them a nice set of armor and a shiny rifle before sending them off to fight. That's it. They're fancy cannon fodder, the only difference between you and them is that they're more shiny. And only a handful of them are like Zamora and take their jobs seriously. Sometimes they get recalled if everyone else in their family dies, but aside from that they're just soldiers. So a charge into Eldar controlled land to save ten of them isn't called for. Especially when they have a Wraithknight that kills 5,000 people before we can kill it. AND IT FUCKING FALLS ON THE NOBLES! Ugh, maybe that last part was for the best. They weren't worth 500 men each. And hey, with their death, the Eldar did something useful. That's twice I've seen them be truly helpful in my life without having an ulterior motive. Once per century. Maybe they can get it up to twice next century. (Not holding my breath)

346. Bling doesn't increase the effectiveness of a weapon: Ok, there's no getting around the fact that the most famous weapons ever used by the champions of the Imperium have been utterly coated with gold, jewels and other shit like that. Pretty much every weapon used by the Primarchs and Chapter Masters fall into this category. But here's the thing, all that stuff is there just to look good. Those weapons were effective and deadly because of the master crafted inner workings of them, not because they were shiny. Quite a few people (nobles mainly) don't seem to get this and demand weapons be crafted for them on the basis that the more expensive it is, the better it is. I, and I am not joking, saw a noble try to use a solid gold bastard sword at one point. He swung it once at a Necron and it broke clean in half. The Necron just stared at him before punching the idiot's head off. Apparently he was so stupid that the Necron didn't want to waste any energy from its flayer on him. I know it wasn't out of energy, because five seconds later this same Necron had noticed me, and another five seconds later I was missing a foot.

347. NEVER and I MEAN NEVER, try to impersonate an Inquisitor: Look, I can (in a vacuum where common sense isn't screaming that it's the dumbest idea ever) understand the appeal of this. You chisel out the symbol of rock and paint it black, red, and gold, and you have something that will fool the paranoid and the gullible. The second you go under any major scrutiny, you will be found out and things will end badly. One overly pleased woman flashed a forgery like that at me, and I got suspicious when she would only show us it for a second before putting it away. Then she panicked when I asked if she could see it again. Long story short, this ended with her making a break for it with my family in hot pursuit, hopping across half the tables in the canteen, her taking a nasty fall out of a third story window, and landing right on top of a REAL Inquisitor. And she wasn't happy to find someone impersonating her Ordo.

348. Tanks and infantry NEED each other: If someone ever asks you "what's better, tanks or infantry," then that person is officially an idiot who doesn't know the first thing about the nature of warfare. The various branches of service, navy, infantry, tankers corps, air force, are not in a competition to get the most kills from each other. They need to work together as a seamless whole in order to cover fields that they couldn't accomplish by themselves. Tanks can't storm buildings and infantry can't smash through heavy defensive lines, (no matter what that fuck Chenkov says) the two need to work together. Otherwise you get a brother and sister, each a commander of a different regiment, who feel the need to prove that they're smarter than the other. And then proceed to try and ram tanks through tiny breaches in gates and have infantry slam into the walls of reinforced bunkers. I think the only reason more people didn't die is that the rebels got a little weirded out and felt sorry for the poor saps under the command of brother and sister moron. So they just had a sniper team kill the dipshits and let the rest of the army retreat.

349. No, you can not get a teleportarium: I don't think people understand just how rare and valuable teleportariums are. They're Archeotech, which means that, like Terminator Armor, we can't actually make it anymore. Any teleportarium we have is going to be on a 10,000 year old ship that was around during the Great Crusade/Horus Heresy. Ships that are not going to be used idly and not presented to any unnecessary risk. Your ass is not going to be teleported just to take care of a few thousand drunk, lost Orks who crashed on a moon orbiting a minor colony, you're taking a Valkyrie. So don't try and and sneak onto one of these ships and jump into the teleportarium when no one is looking. You'll end up inside a rock, dying instantly.

350. Bugs can kill, don't whine about the spray: Death Worlds, it's easier to list the things on them that don't try to kill you. I'll probably mention something from them again before this book is over. But yeah, bugs. Sometimes they're the size of your head and travel in swarms of hundreds. Other times they're just barely visible and just need to prick you in order to kill you. Either way, when a local starts spraying some foul smelling gunk on you, saying it'll keep the insects away, shut up and let them do their job. If you don't, you're inevitably going to drop out of sight for ten seconds, and when we go looking for you, we're going to find a skeleton that's been picked dry. Hungry little bastards. Ate every last bit of him. Even the three centimeters he must have been compensating for.

351. Don't hop from rooftops to street level: I've talked about gravity before, right? That thing that you feel on every celestial body of significant mass? It's kind of a bitch. So you people may want to keep that in mind should you ever find yourself on the top of a roof and you think a ladder or a fire escape is too slow. Now, granted, if there's no other way down and you need to get going to save your life, by all means, do it. Particularly if you're only two stories up. But anymore than that and things are going to get ugly. Minor chaos incursion in a local city. Some big name kid, famous for a lot of sword tourneys, wants to be a hero. Jumps five stories into the middle of a Chaos horde. Utterly shatters both of his legs and is torn apart within minutes. As opposed to the local thing of, I don't know, chucking grenades into the thick, tightly clustered enemy formation? Nah, just jump into there with your tourney sword. Which also shattered.

352. Make sure you know how to hold a sword: I've been told by some people who study ancient history on Terra that there was once a point where humans didn't use swords, just guns. Erm. Ok. Whatever you say. I'm not sure if he has his history right, because swords always have been a good fallback option. Obviously, firearms are the preferable option, particularly if you're not a Space Marine, but swords are just effective, much more so than a knife, when you're in a tight spot and you need to kill something. Avoid being in that situation if you can, but be prepared for it in case it happens. Which means, you know, actually know how to hold a sword. Preferably in a way that doesn't cause it to go spinning out of your hand after the first swing. Into the back of a Chaos Space Marine, whose attention is suddenly turned on you, before he decides to show you the proper technique. Including how to stab someone so hard that they're torn messily in half. Well, at least she didn't suffer. For long.

353. Realize when you need to hit the brakes: If you've ever seen any of the dozens upon dozens of vehicles we field, you know all of them move rather fast. Even the slower tanks can get respectable speeds, and even something as slow as 50 KPH is still covering a good deal of distance. You close your eyes for a second, open them, and you're in a very different place from where you were. So while it is a good idea to chase down a scouting Ork buggy to make sure they can't report back to base, it's not such a good idea to do it on a rocky cliff edge. And I'm just going to say it, Chimeras can't make jumps very well. Even if they got rather close.

354. Fire spreads: My sister had a...phase...when we were younger. A "gather things up and set them on fire" phase. And you know what? Even the four year old her was smart enough to ask me to be on stand by with a bucket just in case things got out of hand. Sometimes the two of us got a little drenched, but no one ever got burnt, so I call it a win. But in warzones, fire gets thrown around a lot, and there's no one on standby to keep it under control. And if we're on a particularly arid planet/part of a planet, or just a region that has been suffering from a drought, things can quickly get out of control. So while using fire to smoke out rebels that are dug into slums has some merits, if the buildings are tightly clustered together and dry as bones, things quickly go south. My sister loves fire, and even she thought this was a bad idea. But this freshly deployed Sister of Battle had something to prove and charged in, flamer blazing. Yeah, fifteen hours later the fire finally died down, my sister utilizing some clever counter burning to stop it from getting worse, a dozen city blocks were gone, and the idiot who started it all was nowhere to be seen. She refused to get out of the first building that went up in flames, saying the Emperor would protect her. The idea that he would exert any energy to save someone like you has got to be one of the most insulting things I've heard in my life.

355. Taming giant monsters rarely works: Ok, you're getting that new Death World entry earlier than I thought you would. While everything from the apex predators to the plants with teeth try to kill you, the apex predators are what tend to get the most attention. For obvious reasons. Naturally, the more insecure guardsmen (or Death World inhabitants who contribute to the name of the planet because they're not savvy enough) decide that they want to tame it. Something, something, "effective weapon against the enemies of man." Look, if you go to Catachan and find something that the locals haven't been able to tame, it's probably not something you can domesticate. You know, unless you capture a baby and keep it locked in a cage its whole life, and if you do that it kind of loses the qualities that make taming an apex predator appealing. Otherwise, these over confidant idiots run up to the latest thing with two hundred teeth, hit it with a whip, and...well, the Catachans breath a little easier because now the thing is full and they don't have to worry about it for a bit

356. One shot weapons are terribly designed: I'm struggling to think of any weapon that has a shot of one that doesn't also have a superior version with a larger magazine. I mentioned hand flamers having piss poor magazines way back in number 138, and they're actually better than this kind of stuff. Single shot las rifles, single shot pistols, single shot shotguns, I mean, why? It has some value if you're an assassin who has to conceal the weapon and only needs one shot before slipping away, but what's the point in any other situation? The most common explanation I hear is that some guardsmen want a holdout weapon. Something they can draw when their backs are against a wall and they've run out of everything else. Might I suggest you pack an extra power cell for your lasgun instead? Both take up the same space and the cell offers sixty shots as opposed to one. You'd think it'd be an easy choice to make. One overeager kid decided he wanted to draw a dinky little autopistol instead of taking more ammo. I don't even think it penetrated the skull of the Gaunt he shot it at. Mainly because that Gaunt didn't seem to be slowed down when he was ripping the kid's arms off. Oh yeah, some of the autopistol versions of these one shot weapons tend to be absolute garbage in terms of caliber. Another reason to not bother.

357. Prepare your food properly: This is what happens when someone decides spoiled rich kids who have had everything handed to them make good soldiers. First things first. Is it local water? Don't drink it unless it's either been boiled or put through a water purifier. Best case scenario, you spend the next five days with the runs. Worst case scenario, you catch a disease the locals adapted to ten thousand years ago but you never experiences in your life. And then all the fun stuff that comes with that, the vomiting, the failing organs, the deadly fevers. This is all without getting into the fact that some soldiers are so sheltered they don't seem to understand that you need to cook meat before you eat it. They seriously thought they could just rip it out of the animal and eat it. Yeah, choked to death on her own vomit.

358. Make sure you actually protect the person you're supposed to be guarding: Being a bodyguard can be a soul crushingly boring job. Frankly, boring is my ideal kind of job. You can only be thrown into the meat grinder so many times before you appreciate the comfort and safety of being assigned to babysit a rich brat. I mean, usually it's rich brats. Once I played bodyguard to Zamora and that was actually a lot of fun (I guess even when you're the fifth daughter out of fifteen kids, you still need protection, even though Zamora is so good with a plasma rifle her needing protection is clearly just for show) but that was very much an outlier. Still, you ARE protecting someone, and you can't slack off too much. Even if the person you're protecting thinks they don't need it, you better do it. If they got killed while you were gone, there's going to be someone very unhappy with you that will take your head off. Every time.

359. Kill, don't talk: When you have someone on the business end of a weapon, kill them. Unless you have specific orders to take them prisoner, just kill them, right then and now.. No witty lines, no rubbing in how great you are, no making them beg for mercy, just kill them. Whatever you think you have to say that is oh so clever, it's not worth it. It's also probably not as clever as you think it is, it takes a lot of time to come up with something properly clever. You think I come up with this shit on the fly? There's a reason I've been taking a year and a half to write it. There was a very stupid cunt who tried to pull this on me. He could have killed me, but he wanted to gloat. He ended up taking a tumble into a ten story deep pit, got kicked in the nuts, had his nose broken, and then his legs were blown off by a krak grenade. Should've killed me when you had the chance you fucking stupid son of a bitch!

360. Do not kill the child of someone powerful: HEY, GUESS WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO LATELY!? Remember the assassination mission I mentioned back in 340? Well good news and bad news. Good news, I succeeded. I mean obviously, I wouldn't be here writing this chapter if I hadn't. Hell, entries 358 and 359 were based on what I encountered. I was inserted onto a Chaos controlled world through means I'm not allowed to go into unless I want the Inquisition to cut my bollocks off, and I successfully assassinated the son of the Chaos Lord. He's number 359, the stupid prick. It was a clean kill, we confirmed his death, and we got away with no losses. So, all's good right? No casualties, no one captured, target down, sounds like an ideal assassination mission?

One problem. Before he died, the Chaos Lord looked into his mind, and saw what he saw before he died. She saw the man who killed him. IE, she saw me. She knows who I am, and the thing that almost made me blow my brains out on the spot? She recognized me from her first crusade. And that arm of hers? It turns out the rumors about it don't come close to describing it. I saw it tear two Chaos Space Marines apart (the bastards mentioned in number 358) without any trouble. One of them a Plague Marine, and those fuckers are as durable as they come.

You know, I always had a feeling that I'd be writing my own entry in this book. I like to think I'm more clever than the average guardsman, and in some ways I can be, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm just as mortal and fallible as everyone I've written down in the previous 359 entries. The only reason I survived the Chaos Lord all those years ago is that I was beneath her. I was an ant that wasn't worth the effort of crushing. Well, I've gone and changed that. She'll be heading towards this planet now. I know her, she won't be content to have a lackey kill me; she's going to kill me herself.

I always knew my days were numbered in the Imperial Guard, it's just that I never knew to what degree. Turns out, less time than I thought. With the havoc the death of her son will incur, along with some sabotage my Harlequin friend of convenience is planning in the near future, her further conquests should be delayed by a few months. Maybe a year. That's an odd feeling. I've got less than a year left. I can't just transfer off of this front, and even if I could, I know she'd find a way to track me down. She's coming for me.

And...I think I know what I'm going to do. I'm not sure. I've talked it over with the Colonel, and she's ok with my idea. She's trying to pull some strings and convince higher ups about it. As for what my plan is? Well, I'm not comfortable talking about it. Maybe in the last chapter of this book I'll go into detail, but for the moment it's private. Sorry.

I'm going to end this chapter here. The one good thing is that after that assassination mission, I got some much needed leave time. My whole family did. I'm going to go spend some time with them now. We have...a lot to talk about. Stay safe out there.