Chapter 23

441. Martyrdom is a coin toss, don't force it: I wouldn't say Martyrs are the backbone of the Imperium, but they're definitely one of the vertebrae. But you can't just do it whenever you want. It's a bit like trying to have sex, if you don't let it happen naturally, odds are you're going to end up with a las round in your head with nothing to show for it. Martyrdom needs to happen with a servant of the Emperor valiantly dies fighting a battle they thought they had even the slightest chance of winning, or they were fighting for a greater cause. You can't just send a hundred men to charge a machine-gun mess and try to honor them when they get cut down. Your soldiers will just throw you out of the trenches buck ass naked while sarcastically saying that you could easily show those dead troopers up.

442. You can't eat Ork teeth: I hate a lot of you people. Not all of you, but a lot of you. First of all, you can't eat teeth. This...this is really basic shit people! AND YOU CAN'T EAT THAT EITHER FOR THE RECORD! Second of all, Orks consider their teeth to be money, so they consider eating them to be a waste. So if for some reason you make Ork teeth stew, an Ork is going to charge over the barricade, smack you on the head for being a "zogging git" and then proceed to dig through your stomach to get the teeth back. Either by shoving his fist down your through or by punching through your rib cage. The end results are pretty identical piles of red mulch.

443. Power Mauls can't be used as shower brushes: You know what power mauls are called sometimes? Shock mauls. Apparently Arbites sometimes want to electrocute their prisoners, other times just hit them with something dense and heavy. I don't know what the difference is, but screw it, the Arbites are actually one of the more competent organizations in the Imperium. (Note I said competent, not moral) But even they get their dipshits. I've actually been in an Arbites base where they were pulling a dead rookie out of the shower because someone had told her to use her maul in the shower. I wasn't sure who I hated more, her for doing it, or her comrades for pulling something like that and not backing out the second they realized she was taking them seriously. Well, they all got killed by the local commander losing her shit and smashing their heads in, so I'd say it all worked itself out.

444. Sacred wine isn't for chugging: This isn't a first hand experience assholes, stop sniggering. Anyway. Sacred wine is, like many parts of the Imperial Faith, something we take very seriously. It is meant to be sipped during sacred ceremonies only. It is not something you break out during keg night. Because when the Ecclesiarch wakes up and sees thirty odd drunk dip shits helping themselves to the wine he blessed yesterday, he's going to freak out, grab my sister's flamethrower, and open fire at the open casket. Some body parts landed 500 meters away and he called it a sacred act to restore the Emperor's dignity. You know, I have to admit, I kind of see where he's coming from.

445: Being investigated for heresy is ALWAYS a bad thing: I once met a woman who was being investigated for heresy because being shot in combat turned her on. I'm not usually one to advocate for the Inquisition going after the Imperial populace on little evidence, but that did seriously look like some Slaanesh shit. But the part that threw me off was that the lady was HAPPY about it. Because it was a chance to prove her purity. Let's just say I had a pretty good idea whose intestines were being thrown over the battlements of our mountain fortress the next day. For the record, I don't think she's dead. And she still probably thinks that she'll be exonerated any day now.

446. Do not proposition an Inquisitor:...No. No. NOOOOOOOOOO! Just-no. See, there are two ways that this can go. You can find an Inquisitor that wants nothing to do with you. In that case, particularly if you do it more than once, you're trying to fornicate with some of the most powerful people in the Imperium, and they will not take it well. Base case scenario, neutered via bolter. But the other scenario? They'll end up taking you up on the idea. Let me just tell you this. You'll have wished you had gotten the bolter neuter.

447. Power tools are not dental tools: My standards somehow manage to get lower every year, and I've been kicking around this galaxy for a lot of years. as I hope I've established. When I found this corpse, I thought that either she had been tortured by the Inquisition or murdered by a ton of Orks. Because her lower jaw? It was gone. Utterly gone. But no, it turns out that she had a rotting tooth and wanted to save some money. I guess a pair of pliers was too high class for her or some horseshit. Seriously, a pair of pliers and a shot of rum, that's how I got my baby teeth out...like I said, my mom was a bitch.

448. Do not fire capital ship weaponry unless you have a target: The thing about warships is that they mainly fight in space, and their weaponry developed because there was no concern about leveling friendly cities. Most of the time that's true, but sometimes warships battle either just outside or within a planet's atmosphere. When that happens, well, the planet itself tends to come out worse for wear. So it'd help if you didn't fire every last macro cannon on a battleship before the Chaos cruiser even comes within weapons range. Because the base I was returning to from a patrol got turned into a new canyon out of nowhere. At least we got some use out of that canyon. Throwing the asshole captain into it mainly.

449. Stupidly long dresses are impractical on the battlefield: This thing...ok. You people are in for a wild ride. Ok, now imagine someone wants to wear a really long dress in an urban warzone. Run of the mill dumb for the most part. But there was this one woman who took it oh so far. She tried to put Adamantium plates in it, she tried to put shield generators on it, she tried to wear a crown made out of Adamantium with shield generators on it, and I'm not even talking about how stupidly frilly or gaudy it was! It was a MESS! She could barely move, it got caught on everything, and no matter how much protection it provided, she ended up being such a bullet magnet that it didn't matter. The only benefit it provided is when we had to retreat, half a dozen cultists tripped over her corpse and got stuck in that Emperor forsaken thing.

450. Try to get moral standards that don't suck: So there was this one utterly insane bitch we had to deal with at one point. Private warlord who owned a planet out in uncharted space, you know the deal, lost colony that the Emperor either never found or has been off the radar for thousands of years. She styled herself a noble ruler ignoring how she had slaughtered millions of people to secure her power. But here's the really fucked up thing about her. We were pressing in on her capital city, and a blue blood kid got caught in the crossfire and was killed by mistake. It sucks, but sadly it happens. But this bitch? She acted like it was the worst atrocity ever committed by human beings and claimed she would wipe every last person in the Imperium out because of this, and ordered a sortie against us. Yeah, that turned the battle from a projected long slog into an easy win. Seriously, she killed millions, MILLIONS of people, but one kid dying is an unforgivable crime? Lady. Get unfucked priorities. After you pull those thousand odd bullets out of your skull

451. Nuclear explosions are not an effective method of propulsion: I swear, half of this book needs to be filed under "no, I'm not talking about Orks," because I'm starting to think that we're going down to their level. Nuclear weapons, sometimes known as atomics, are nasty things. You drop it, things die fast, things die slow, not a whole lot is gonna grow in that area anytime soon. Someone tried floating them behind a warship and then detonating it so that the warship could ride the shockwave forward. We now have half of an irradiated warship and one very dumb corpse.

452. You cannot use Baneblades for sneak attacks: General rule of thumb. If it's bigger than a decent sized house, it can't be used for death, barring some advanced space combat shit or some sort of psyker bullshit. But yeah. Baneblades. The universal Imperial Guard symbol for "fuck you" towards everyone who pisses us off. You can't sneak up on someone with that thing unless they're blind and deaf. I doubt even the Raven Guard could pull that one off. And while it would be appealing to metaphorically sodomize an enemy army with one of those things, it's a waste of a perfectly good tank. And it's kind of pathetic for a Baneblade to try and storm out of a forest, only to find a hundred different anti-tank guns aimed at it (because, shock of all shock, the sound of that engine carries) before getting torn to shreds and only getting one shot off. That fucking missed.

453. Make sure you hire mercenaries that will listen to you: Mercenaries are a massive mixed bag. On the one hand, there are mercenary companies out there that rival the most respected regiments in terms of reliability and effectiveness. On the other, you have the common dipshit who owns a gun and nothing else and figures it can't be THAT hard to be a merc. So you really should check to see if the mercs you hire will attack when you say attack. And not just stay at the base shoving cake in their mouths while the Orks thrash us. We would've shoved that cake up their asses if there was any left, but there wasn't. So we settled for shotguns.

454. Make sure you have a sustainable population: A few hundred people isn't a lot. I mean, I guess it depends on what you're talking about. It's a lot if you're talking about direct family members or sexual partners (or both if you're a twisted fuck) but for a planet it's downright puny. So if you try to settle a planet with only a few hundred people, things are going to go south very fast. Cousins are going to start fucking cousins, and that always goes downhill fast when breeding gets involved. A few generations down the line, and I really don't want to talk about the nasty shit that happens, and the diseased kids suffer because "i wanna fuck cussie."

455. COMMUNICATE!: Ok, so intelligence is pretty much needed for an empire the size of the Imperium. Over a million planets spread across tens of thousands of light years, a huge amount of them relying on resources from others to keep functioning. It's a colossal undertaking, and I may take the piss out of the Administratum, but there had got to be billions, maybe more, of people busting their asses off in both the Adeptus Administratum and Adeptus Astra Telepathica to keep this thing running. But when it fucks up, it fucks up hard. We had forward naval scouts checking nearby systems for enemy ships, long term scouting. The scouts went quiet, and the main force stopped sending information out their way. Apparently this was a mixture of paranoia and spite. Paranoia over not wanting transmissions to be intercepted (understandable) and the scouts rebelling against the authority of his commander (in a fuck you dad way) and the commander trying to show him who was boss. Both forces got eaten by Tyranids, so they can compare dick sizes in a Hive Tyrant's stomach.

456. Go on your self righteous rants AFTER the shooting stops: So, not too long ago, we were dealing with a minor revolt of penal legionaries, and we had a couple of Chimeras strafing the building they were holed up in. At first, it was going well, we were racking up a decent kill count, even though they weren't front line Chimeras. And then one of the gunners decides that she wants to run her mouth. She should have been reloading her stubber, but nooooo, she has to go on about how self righteous she was and how holy her cause was. Yeah, I ended up having to take her place, because, mother of all shocks, penal legionaries don't give a shit. About anything.

457. Realize when you're in no position to make threats: Threats are a funny thing. Most of the time, they're not actually carried out, there just put out there to tell someone "you're going to do what I tell you to do," and it either works or is full of shit. But in order for a threat to work, you need to either mean it, or be a good enough liar to trick someone into thinking you mean it. Both of which fall apart if you're in a position where you're in a position where you clearly can't carry out your threat. We had a cultist captured, we had grilled him for all the information we were going to get out of him, and we were trying to decide what to do with him. He looks at me with a toothy smile and said a bunch of vile things that I won't be repeating, but he made it clear that he intended to do them to everyone I loved. I smiled, put a hand on his shoulder, drew my plasma pistol, shot his dick off, then blew his brains out. Try doing half the shit you said you were going to do now.

458. Understand that your men can break and retreat: Look. If you want people who will charge blindly to their deaths, throwing their lives away in the name of giving up everything in a desperate attempt to hurt the enemy, get the Death Korps. Guardsmen that haven't been conditioned to see themselves as expendable. Will. Break. If you throw them at an impregnable fortress in pointless human wave tactics, or tell them to hold the line against impossible odds, they will crack. Even the hardest of veterans have a point where they realize the situation is hopeless and they just bolt. It doesn't matter that you could technically win if every soldier fought to their last breath, the common soldier doesn't know and doesn't care. We aren't Orks. So when you order men to hold the line against a swarm of Tyranids that never end while they tear apart your numbers, don't be surprise when you walk onto the battlements and find them deserted. With the exception of the thousands of mouths hungry for stupid asshole.

459. Slaves aren't good for anything other than making you feel powerful: Slaves are unskilled and unmotivated. 90% of the time they have no kind of training other than being sent out to do some sort of monotonous and back breaking task. They are good if you have a high need for people lifting heavy stuff, but the second you need them to do anything complicated, you'd be better off paying a trained professional. I mean, slave soldiers are a thing, and it's a shit show. They can't shoot straight, don't understand tactics and, worst of all, they don't want to fucking be there. It was supposed to be a sweep, a thousand slave soldiers defending against an attack by a hundred Chaos cultists. We were supposed to move to the town the slaves were defending and use it as a jumping off point. Instead, we had to retake it because the slaves had panicked and been slaughtered. By a bunch of primary school cultists who stole their dads' guns. No I am not making this up, fuck you.

460. Take note if your enemies have cybernetic appendages: My happy place in writing this book is talking about deaths that I caused. So sit back and get a snack, I've had a shit da...shit we...shit mo...I've dealt with a lot of shit and I want to talk about the time I made someone more miserable than I was.

See, I was fighting a penal legionary who thought she would try her hand at rebellion. Through a long and asinine series of events that I am nowhere near ready to go into, we ended up in close quarters in a brawl. She was down on the ground, I was going for my dropped gun, and she grabbed my non cybernetic leg from behind. Now she had a knife, so I'm pretty sure the plan was to either cut my foot off, or carve my leg open. Key word being was, because I smashed her face in with a kick from my metal foot.

See, the thing about cybernetic limbs, hands and feet is that they're a lot stronger than normal limbs, and you have to adjust for that. Avoid getting hit by the more powerful limb, and note when the cybernetic isn't for the entire limb. If she had had a grip on the ankle connected to my cybernetics, I wouldn't necessarily be screwed, but my situation would've been a lot less ideal.

Then again, I'm 90% sure she did Frenzon, so she might not have been in the best state of mind. She hit like someone who did Frenzon behind the latrine with her asshole friends, but I'm still walking and she isn't.