Chapter 13

241: No Basilisk charges: I know they're technically called Basilisk tanks, but lets wake up and stop pretending the Emperor's existence mean we can act on every last infantile instinct without the universe putting its boot up our collective asses. They're artillery pieces. We do not throw them at front lines Yes, you "can" technically have them adjust their cannons so that a forward assault is "possible" but can and possible do not get rid of stupidity. Basilisks are just too damn fragile for that, and every time an idiot thinks that the best way to worship the Emperor is to blindly charge at the enemy (I have to say, I missed the page in the Lectitio Divinitatus where he encourage this crap) and to die a stupid and pointless death. For the Emperor or something. You'd think that the Emperor would want you to take the Basilisk and actually do something useful with it, but no, according to the inbred donkey children (Tyranid donkey children possibly) he wants us to throw our lives away pointlessly. I'm disgusted that so many people have such a low opinion of the Emperor's intelligence. Still, they're all dead now. They can beg for his forgiveness.

242: You cannot kill a Baneblade with a power sword: Emperor on his throne give me strength. People think that because Saint Sabbat did it, they can do it. She was a fucking reincarnation of a SAINT! The Emperor's light was flowing through her! So I'm not surprised that she was able to slice off the tank's cannon and then impale the driver. YOU! ARE NOT! HER! Baring the trillion to one half chance that this book found its way into the hands of Saint Celestine (If that somehow happened, it's a privilege to have you back), YOU ARE NOT A LIVING SAINT! You trying to charge a Baneblade with a sword, even if it is a power sword, is akin to the Orks throwing rocks at Necrons, except it doesn't end with the upside of dead Orks. And the blood stains are harder to get out of the city streets. What? They put me on sanitation a lot.

243: You cannot destroy Chaos from the inside: Some people think that they're smart and that they can infiltrate cultists. Maybe for a day or two you can pull it off, but after that things just start utterly falling apart on you. You get found out, you have to kill a baby because Chaos can't cum unless an infant has been murdered, or you just get killed in Chaos infighting. But even if you can get beyond that point, there's still the problem of actually dealing with the gods. What are you going to do? Try and stab them in the back? Ask Skarbrand how that works out. Oh wait Khorne punted hm across the galaxy. Please don't try and tangle with Khorne, I can't handle another entry. I do not want to know what it looks like when the god of war puts his boot up a human ass.

244: Remember that hidden weapons are a thing: So often a person is demanded to leave their weapons at the door, to prevent assassination attempts. This seems like a foolproof way to stop it, but sadly it isn't. Generations of tinkerers have found new and inventive ways to slip the tools of murder into secure locations, and they're just getting better. There's this thing called a soft sword now, that can take on the appearance of a piece of cloth until it hardens into a blade. So just assume everyone in a secure location has a hidden weapon, don't just stand around relaxing, because it's fucking embarrassing if I have to explain to someone about how three guards were murdered with a man's underpants.

245: No, you cannot have a motorcycle: No. Stop asking. I don't care how cool you think you look. If you want one that bad, save up your backpay and buy one when you retire. On the battlefield, they're utterly useless. Light, unarmored, exposed, and unarmed. Not a single thing it's good for. Except maybe scouting and message running. So yes, if we're on a planet where the racket of the local wildlife is so loud that it drowns out the roar of an engine, or every single vox and micro-bead was have breaks, then you can use a motorcycle. Then get killed in three seconds by a Ork who thought you were challenging him to a race.

246: Kroot weapons suck: Hey, get this. The Kroot work for a fairly advanced alien race, and still use their shit weapons back from when they were stuck on their home planet. Oh sure, the rounds do more damage now, but I got a hold of one (this was back during my first mission that I mentioned in 67) and I got off six shots before I realized it was slightly more powerful than my lasgun and held around one tenth of the ammo. Because those six shots were all it had, and it was fully loaded. Oh, but it had a blade on it. I guess the Tau suck so much at close quarters combat they thought that was impressive. So yeah, don't bother, not when they so often pal around with Tau. The horse-people have much better guns to steal, (fuck me, I'm turning into an Ork). Just remember 67

247: Keep your fucking helmet on: I know I said our armor sucks, but it's still armor. Don't go prancing around with a bare head to show to the world, that just screams "please put a bullet in my skull, I want to show off how little I'm storing up there." I know that Space Marines do it, but they're skilled enough to get away with it, and even then, goddamn Cato Sicarius wears a helmet, so there's got to be some benefit to it. At least you won't die a death as humiliating as "desperate rebel threw a bottle." Fucking told him to put it on, but nooooooooo.

248: Don't turn your nose up at a heavy stubber: I know that stubbers and outguns, have a rather well earned reputation of being that thing you get when you can't even get a lasgun, but they're far from useless. Heavy stabbers may be primitive, but they still get out a lot of decent sized bullets at a fast rate. I've used heavy strubbers before, and they're not bolters, but anything that can gun down half a dozen Orks that are charging me with choppas is doing something right. I got better off than the guy next to me, who was just ineffectively blasting away at them with his lasgun. Got two of them before a third put an axe head into his gallbladder. And pancreas. And liver. And lungs. And brain.

249: Know the limits of psykers: Psykers can do really scary, mind bending, turning reality into their toy things. Some of them. Most humans aren't particularly powerful psykers, with the average being somewhere from low to moderate. We've got some high level ones, mainly Space Marine Librarians. Psykers need to know and respect these limits, otherwise shit gets nasty. My daughter was lucky enough to avoid the Black Ships, but even then she had to go through a five year training program, and still had to be officially sanctioned. After that, she knows she can only do so much. She can't, oh just off of the top of my head, try and posses a Chaos Space Marine. Was in orbit when someone on the ground tried to do it, and I could see the explosion from a view port. I later learned that the marine in question was a Thousand Suns Sorcerer, and he had used the connection in reverse to tear open a portal to the Warp. So yeah. Don't hang a sign in the Warp that says, "fresh throats and assholes this way."

250: Vox-casters cannot get outside of a star system: I swear, at times I wonder if more than 1% of the Imperium's population actually know how it's run. A Vox can get from one planet to another planet if it's in the same star system, and that's about as good as it can get. Anything beyond that, you need Astropaths, a particular type of sanctioned psykers that have had a microscopic portion of the Emperor's soul imprinted on them. Yes, we have to piggyback off of the Emperor's soul just so that we can talk to each other, that is how fucked the Imperium is. Most of the populace seems unaware of this, so there was an awkward moment where we had ten million soldiers ready to go to stop Dark Eldar raiding parties that were plaguing nearby sub-sector, but we didn't know which specific system. Here's the problem though, and I think you've already figured out where this is going, the idiot in charge of the local garrisons was trying to call us on vox. It took the better part of the month for this to get sorted out, and the Dark Eldar had gotten bored and moved on. For some damn reason they hadn't taken him to Commorragh to wrap his dick in barbed wire, which would've been justice, but at least the Inquisition shot him at a sun. It's something.

251: Have a mark that your friends and family know: I've got 23rd EDR tattooed on my right hand. My wife has the symbol of the Iron Hands painted on her bicep. My sister has the Aquila carved onto her back, half of it is a scar and the other half is a tattoo that was used to make something out of the scar. Zamora has a birth mark in the shape of her family crest (A hellgun crossed with a power sword, both over a skull) on her palm, a result of her family playing with genetics. My daughter-in-law has old gang markings on her forehead, the most noticeable being a skull with a bullet in one eye. My daughter has a sword tip in her leg, one that you can just barely feel if you know where to look, that couldn't be safely removed in surgery. It's important to know all this, because you may have to dig through a pile of bodies to see if anyone you know is there. It sucks, but you need to do it. And if you get it wrong, you may wake up a year later to find an angry spouse standing over you with a knife. Because you told the colonel that they were dead, when in reality they were wounded, you just saw a corpse that looked like them. Oh, and you caused them to be abandoned on a barren planet for a year.

252: Know when you use certain types of grenades: My daughter fills the role of grenadier in her unit, and that means she has to have the right grenade in her launcher at the right time. Even if it's something as simple as chasing between frag and krak, it will most likely end up being the difference between life and death. The last thing you need to do is shoot an ineffective frag grenade against an armored Ork. Or, and this actually happened once, one grenadier shot an Emperor forsaken plant grenade at a Warboss. Why are they a fucking thing?

253: Treasure hunting ends badly 99% of the time. Yes, I know I spent time hunting down a ripper pistol, but that wasn't treasure hunting. Treasure hunting is running off after fanciful ancient caches of wealth and technology that are lying in some mysterious location. I was going after a piece of equipment that I knew was real and wasn't half myth. Ninety-five times out of a hundred, you just end up wasting your time and the treasure wasn't actually there. five time out of a hundred, you find it and it wasn't nearly what it was cracked up to be. And of those five times, four of them will involve something inevitably guarding it, whether it be turrets, Eldar (Cunts value their relics so much that they'll kill us to keep it safe, but they still leave it on a dusty rock) or local fauna, that will violently murder you.

254: Don't underestimate Rak'Gol: Luckily there's a 99% chance none of you will ever see a Rak'Gol. This entry is for the unlucky sons of bitches that make up the other 1%. Rak'Gol are the only intelligent xeno species native to the Koronus Expanse, so it's rather fitting that even Orks would call their technology shit. Unfortunately, rather like the Orks, even though their technology looks like a bunch of scrap was shoved together and then banged with a wrench, it's got a brutal effectiveness to it. Axes coated in radiation, bullets that are the product of a regular bullet and a bundle of barbed wire hate fucking each other, and rifles that fire so much at such high speeds that it should melt by all rights. This is without getting into how durable these fuckers are, and that's before they indulge in a cybernetics fetish that would make the Iron Hands blush. Throw the heaviest things you have at them right away. I've seen hundreds of men sent off to board their ships, thinking it would be an easy fight. They never got off the transports, which came back with a fresh coat of red paint lining the interior. Plus a bit of yellow and brown.

255: Blades are not lollipops: I don't know what primary school students you're trying to scary, but no one who doesn't see Genestealers in their own shadows is going to be intimidated by that. So stop trying to slurp your blades. If you're lucky, you'll just slice it open. If you're not, you'll be on your knees, trying to figure out when the entire thing went. Oh, and then one of the idiots I have to work with did it on a blade he had coated with poison. Convulsions so violent that he ended up breaking some of his bones, followed by him choking on his own vomit. Just so he could show off.

256: Torture is a crude and ineffective way of gathering information: There's a reason the Inquisition utilizes threats/light smacks followed by threats/psychological manipulation/psychic probing/drugs over just hurting someone as much as possible. Fear is a good way to get someone talking without thinking, information ripped from a mind can only be faked by the most skilled of psykers, and the Inquisition has had a long time to perfect truth serums. The only time they go all out in just trying to cause as much pain as they can, it's more of a punishment than trying to get information. Less talented soldiers don't realize this though, and they carve up captured soldiers with a knife, asking where the enemy attack is coming from. They kept saying they didn't know, something that would've been confirmed as true had any Inquisition methods been used, but the brilliant interrogators didn't believe them. Eventually the captured rebels said that they were planning a rear assault just to make the pain stop, and the whole army got switched around. Yeah, the attack had meant to be a full frontal one that turned into a rear attack by sheer luck on one end and bottomless stupidity on the other.

257: Know the limits of psykers again: I mentioned this before, we're low on the spectrum when it comes to raw psyker power. There's something I couldn't fit in the last entry because it was a whole other kind of problem. See, psykers have this thing called "push" where they can push themselves beyond their limit at the price of having Warp related fuck ups being more likely. Needless to say, this should not be used likely, and only as a last resort. If an idiot commander keeps pushing his sanctioned psyker to shoot more lightning bolts at Kroot, he really shouldn't be surprised if the poor bastard explodes. And then a frakking Ebon Geist jumps out and decapitates him.

258: Needle weapons are shit: Oh people love to go on about needle weapons. They're so rare and eloquent, absolutely silent, a single shot is fatal due to the poisons that it injects into the body because of eloquent design and eloquent technique and eloquent, eloquentness as defined by a self absorbed prick. Except then reality hits and it turns out those things have absolutely zero stopping power, so anyone with even vaguely competent armor is going to be wondering why that rare and valuable looking gun is so utterly worthless. Then killing the person who might as well be shooting blanks. Hope you didn't have to suck/lick too many people for that thing Mr. "Look at me, I'm a highly trained assassin now."

259: Learn the difference between an overcharge charge pack and a hot-shot charge pack: See, there's a very big difference between the two. An overcharge pack gives your las rounds a bit more punch at the cost of being reduce to twenty shots, while a hot-shot pack is extremely powerful at the price of you getting exactly one. The difference between the two is gunning down a line of charging cultists, and blowing the first one to bits before you click your trigger and have a recreation of your eternally placid cock/dry pussy before getting hacked to pieces.

260: Respect your leaders if they have earned it: I know…I know, this might sound rather hypocritical. I haven't exactly had the nicest things to say about the leadership of the Imperium. That's because I'm calling out the shit ones KUBRIK FUCKING CHENKOV! Yeah, I know your trigger happy ass will get a copy of this book one day. Tactics Tactica Imperialis, read it for once in your Emperor forsaken life. Sorry, lost my train of thought. Here's the thing though, when a leader actually proves themselves worthy of respect, you need to show it to them. Take, for example, the colonel and the CO of the 23rd EDR

She was raised on a rich hive world that happened to be in the path of that Chaos Lord. Way down the line, but still in the path. Because the people running it actually had a survival instinct, they raised around ten million troops to assist in the counter attack and to keep the mess from snowballing into a Black Crusade. The colonel, freshly promoted after proving herself in fighting off a couple of minor Ork warbands, was given command of a ten-thousand men, then sent into the thickest part of the fighting. Only 2139 of her men were still alive twelve months later.

Now I know what you're thinking, I thought you were talking about a leader worthy of respect, this one could only keep 20% of her men alive. See, here's the thing, 99% of all Imperial forces deployed to that planet died, on account of a continent sized portal into the Warp being ripped open from the planet's populace being sacrificed in a blood ritual. Even the Space Wolves that had been on the planet barely had any survivors. Compared to the rest of the bloodbath that was that mess, her men had an outstandingly high survival rate. Because she got them out of there.

She took a force of around a hundred volunteers and personally led them in a rear guard after everything had gone to shit. Against a horde of angry Daemons. The only survivors were her and two others who dragged her back to the transport, even though she wanted to stay and cover them, even though she was fraked up beyond belief. Was in intensive care for six months while the survivors from that planet were cycled off the front line and a Cyclonic Torpedo was shot at that planet.

After extensive reconstructive surgery, including most of her face having to be replaced by a metal mask that covered everything except her eyes and mouth (family heirloom) she wanted to give her men more time to rest, considering half of them had been wounded and the other half were in a bad state mentally. But the Imperium, in their infinite wisdom, decided to have them form the core of the 23rd EDR.

Despite all of that, she managed to make the 23rd EDF an effective unit through hard work, drilling and a shit ton of luck, plus the help of it actually getting competent soldiers. Not enough to prevent stupid incidents, but I suppose we can't ask for too many miracles.

Anyway I got off topic. During the clean up campaign that took place a year or two after the failed Black Crusade, we were going from planet to planet, taking out holdouts of Chaos forces. Supposed to be moderately difficult, but we managed to pull it off without too much trouble due to using, shock of all shock, tactics. Not just mindlessly sending in soldiers, Mr. Chenkov.

But we get some idiot who wants to play hero. A Lieutenant who had gotten her platoon folded into the 23rd EDR after the rest of her regiment had been wiped out fighting off the attempted Black Crusade, and she wanted to be a hero. She thought SHE should be leading the 23rd EDR, not a woman in costume who lost most of her soldiers. Took her men, ran off, spent seven days hiking in the wilderness, and literally walked into a Baneblade. At least I think it was literally, the bloodstains would be hard to get that way if she hadn't. Meanwhile, the colonel used a combination of spotters, Earthshakers, and strategic ambushes to flush Chaos out of their hiding holes and into kill zones. Because that keeps people alive. The right people anyway. She's earned my respect.