In a demented epoch, man must make the ultimate sacrifice.
War has always been a great danger to mortals, and in this regard nothing has truly changed since primitive man first bashed in the skull of his enemy with a rock, for in a forsaken future of plasma cannons, chainaxes and graviton crushers, foes still maim and slay each other without abandon. All across a seething galaxy teeming with life, the war gods hold sway with supreme power over the fates of lone mortals and great empires alike, and a cycle of endless slaughter is the rule of the day. Interstellar warfare presents enormous challenges, not least logistical ones, and an incessant state of total war mobilization will hollow out and cannibalize the warring society from within. On the sea of stars, navies manned by tens of millions of crewmen clash in bursts of destructive energy sufficient to leave green worlds barren. In the field, armies numbering in the billions face unspeakable horrors as the full might of advanced military technology is brought to bear with little to no inhibition.
The challenges of war across the stars are staggering, and can easily bleed prosperous economies and their gargantuan population numbers white, inviting chaos and turmoil on the home front as stability plummets. All too many voidfaring empires exerted themselves to the very limit in order to win large conflicts, only to suddenly break apart from inside as the home front collapsed. The internal risks of war exhaustion and demoralization can doom dynasties who have ruled for millennia, and the external risks of enemy invasion can destroy all the fruits of untold generations of toil and ingenuity. Yet such perils must be faced, and crushed underheel, for the ten thousand year old Imperium of Man will let no one foe stand in its way, and it will annihilate any rebels who wish to win independence from its harsh tyranny, as the God-Emperor decreed. After all, an empire that never had any qualms about killing its own taxpayers en masse in peacetime will not shirk away from the harrowing maelstrom of total war.
And so Imperial Tithe is gathered from a million worlds and uncountable voidholms, in a flood of men and materiel, in a barrage of starships and ground vehicles, in an outburst of Imperial might by an interstellar realm that has long since learnt to compensate its decaying technological base and screeching inefficiencies by callously increasing the input in a broken calculation of great numbers which aim to hammer the foe asunder, or at least grind the enemy down through sheer attrition. In such a crude equation, human value becomes a laughable concept. Behold the billions in the armies and the hundreds of billions in the industry and bureaucracy, and know that wretched man is nothing but a cheap and easily replacable component in a vast, faceless system where hands, heads and spines ever more must pick up the slack where ancient machines break down, and the ability to repair or replace them no longer exist among the living.
In the Age of Imperium, man no longer dominates the Milky Way galaxy with such overwhelming force that no foe dare stand against him. Instead, the scavenging survivors of the Age of Strife managed to gather human power anew, armed with a poorly understood patchwork technology salvaged from the wrecks and ruins of the ancients, relying on the copying of old blueprints and schematic guesswork. The Horus Heresy struck the young Imperium hard, and sounded the final death knell for any chance of a renaissance for human science and invention. Ever since, almost all human colonies across the galaxy have been ruled by the smothering iron fist of the Imperium of Man, locked inside a decrepit star dominion of paranoid oppression whose bickering and self-serving factions consistently choke any frail first steps toward a renewed blooming of intellect and worldly curiosity. Knowledge is power: Guard it well.
Bogged down in a dysfunctional morass of its own making, the Imperium of Man masters but few subtle tricks, and its default solution to any problem is to throw more bodies at it. Thus an armed exodus of men, women and child soldiers are shipped out to ten thousand different war fronts, while blinkered hordes of labourers keep the rusting wheels of Imperial industry turning through immense toil and lethal self-sacrice. A plethora of vastly different human cultures exist throughout the million planets and innumerable voidholms of the Imperium, yet all share a narrow-minded fanaticism and intense religious devotion, trusting in the protection of the Holy Terran Emperor. And so zealous barbarians stand shoulder to shoulder with pious peasants and superstitious hive city scum within the Astra Militarum, taking up simple, mass-produced arms and body armour that were chosen both for their dependability, ease of manufacture and cheapness.
Most of the lighter armaments and infantry protection of the Planetary Defence Forces, Voidholm Militias and Imperial Guard are markedly inferior to the weapon systems and armour suits reserved for the God-Emperor’s utterly brainwashed elite corps and enforcers, such the Militarum Tempestus or the Adeptus Arbites. One primary reason for this state of affairs is the need to equip the blindly loyal forces of internal suppression better than the potentially rebellious regiments they may one day have to eradicate, and thus rig the deck in the Imperium’s favour. Another head cause for the shoddy equipment of the Astra Militarum is the fact that most infantrymen and vehicles will not survive for long in warzones to begin with, so why waste precious resources on technological bells and whistles and advanced tactical training when both the tank and its crew anyway will be dead within four Terran months after deployment? When your foremost strength is an overwhelming force of numbers, you need to churn out cheap and crude wargear to equip ever new short-lived mass armies numbering in the billions of soldiers, to replace the last set that died out all too quickly. The Imperium needs to play a ravenous numbers game, foregoing any focus on technological sophistication in wargear for sheer mass-production on a gigantic scale. After all, quantity has a quality all of its own.
It is said that one man’s death is a tragedy, while the death of one million is a statistic. To better understand the plight of the common Imperial infantryman, let us behold such an instructive tragedy of a mere single death among untold hundreds of millions of casaulties, one victim among many in a distant war under a strange sun.
The verdant mining world of Zikaru is the third moon of the teal gas giant Parmashtaq, the seventh planet of the crowded Evar system, within the Gevura sector in southern Ultima Segmentum. At the start of the 8th century of M40, the backwater Tech-Priests on Zikaru watched helplessly as the final breakdown occurred for an advanced continent-spanning lace of piped irrigation systems and largely automated desalination facilities. None of their prayers, meditations and oracular pilgrimages had yielded a working answer to the failing intricacies of the poorly understood agricultural irrigation systems that fed all of Zikaru with huge quantities of foodstuffs. The panicking Tech-Priests on the third moon first erupted in armed hostilities as they blamed each other, and then agreed on a tenuous ceasefire while they scrambled to pool their stunted knowledge and come up with a rudimentary emergency system reliant on primitive tech and massive input of manual corvée labour, which eventually solidified into a permanent feature of Zikaruan agriculture. This process of infighting and amateur engineering took over a decade to hammer out, a waterless decade which saw emerald green fields turn to desert and crop yields plummet on the agri-continent of Caraculum.
Within one year, food prices skyrocketed, leading to upper caste hoarding while mass starvation and cannibalism plagued the very poorest mineworkers. After two years, all of the moon’s governatorial granaries were empty, while Imperial Governor Zakhrut XXI had found all his efforts to import massive amounts of foodstuff blocked by his personal enemies offworld. On the third year, massive strikes shook the entirety of Zikaru as miners of all castes shouted for free food now to their starving families. This was met by massacres from the local forces of order, which only fuelled the fires of dicontent. On the fourth year, three-fourths of of Zikaru was tearing itself apart in a chaotic mess of civil war and cannibal raids, leading to the ousting and retreat of the Governor’s loyal forces to the parched agri-continent of Caraculum, which the Adeptus Mechanicus (and its ration-prioritized press ganged workers numbering twohundredthirthy million) was busy restructuring wholesale with primitive dams, pools and canals, as well as strategic tree and bush planting in order to bind the dusty top soil with roots.
On the fifth year, Zikaru had lost eighteen percent of its population, and all continents and islets oustide Caraculum were in a state of warlord anarchy. Still, a precarious situation of mass worker die-off was stabilized as an old bushwack nomad’s trick at last paid off, namely to cake in the seeds of nimsu reed in clay or dung before planting in the desert. This new source of nutrients kept most of the corvée labour force above starvation level, and the staved-off disaster on Caraculum allowed Imperial Governor Zakhrut XXI to rebuild his forces. On the sixth year, the Governor ordered his armies to land at the mining moon’s two small billion-strong hive cities, yet the expeditions ended in a military catastrophe, and Zakhrut XXI was killed in a palace coup, replaced by a royally incestuous power couple of his eldest son and daughter. The new rulers were in turn branded as obscene heretics and swiftly slain by the patriarch of a cadet branch of the royal dynasty, and thus Yezeri Firee III ascended to the throne in Caraculum, while the most powerful Zikaruan warlords outside the agri-continent started to coalesce into warring cliques, most of which had separatist ambitions toward the Imperium. With the governatorial forces depleted thrice over thanks to inept generalship, the race was on for whom of the magnates would outsmart his opponents and conquer all of devastated Zikaru.
On the seventh year, a much delayed Adeptus Administratum Tithing fleet arrived to the Evar system, and Yezeri Firee III failed in his attempts to make his rump state uncontactable. When the Administratum assessors arrived to the third moon of Parmashtaq, they discovered both its sorry state of civil collapse and the reigning Imperial Governor’s clumsy attempts to adopt vox and astropath silence. The Administratum master assessor in orbit around Zikaru was greatly vexed both by the moonside chaos and transparent fake muting of communications, so he thus overreacted and lashed out in petty rage by hiring the services of an Eversor Assassin from the shadowy Officio Assassinorum. One cloudy night, a single drop pod descended toward the crisis capital on the agri-continent of Caraculum. When the people of the city awoke, they found that divine retribution had struck the Governor’s temporary palace, with all top officials, ministers and vezirs having been slain, lying in pools of their own blood together with every single member of the household staff, guard force and dynasty members present in the fortified palace. Not a single human being in the temporary palace survived the mysterious rampage. The usurper Yezeri Firee III was found chopped into tiny pieces in the bed of his favourite mistress, and the rest of that year was spent in vicious power struggles within the royal clan.
The master assessor’s ostentatious Eversor strike had achieved nothing of value for the Imperium of Man, but it had soothed the bureaucratic potentate’s flaring temper. Content with the reports received on the palatial slaughter, this Administratum overlord contacted the Departmento Munitorum and informed them of the sorry situation on Zikaru. In response, Astra Militarum regiments were mustered on nearby worlds and from neighbouring systems, and shipped off to the turbulent mining moon in a remarkably fast flurry of voidfaring activity. On the eighth year, a force of half a billion Imperial Guardsmen had been collected and deployed moonside to begin the pacification of all continents other than Caraculum. A few warlords capitulated and insisted that they had remained loyal toward the Imperium of Man through the whole ordeal, but most warlords banded together in a patriotic coalition for Zikaruan independence, and threw their hardened warriors into a united front against the offworld foreigners. The Imperial suppression force managed to do what no warlord nor Governor had succeded in doing during the previous years of societal freefall: Namely, to unite Zikaru, or most of it anyway.
Warlord coalition resistance toward Imperial forces proved much harder than anticipated, and the Zikaruan freedom fighters managed to galvanize subtantial parts of the reduced population through vigorous propaganda campaigns that painted the Imperator’s loyal servants as nothing but leaching oppressors and greedy foreigners seeking to plunder their beloved homeworld. In the great struggle that ensued, Zikaru would see yet more of its populace killed off by war and all its accompanying hardships, until less than half of the mining moon’s pre-troubles population remained once the dust had finally settled. Over a course of nine years, great campaigns of mostly blundering grand strategy were conducted by a bickering Astra Militarum general staff, who often contradicted each other and refused cooperation on grounds of personal honour and ancient House feuds, all the while firing up the fighting spirit of their troops by promises of loot, slaves and a fine place in the afterworld for all martyrs of the God-Emperor’s righteous hosts.
It was in this brutal environment of bitter war against rebellious native cannibals that the Frejian 5947th infantry regiment of the Astra Militarum landed, as part of a wave of reinforcements during the fourth year of Imperial reconquest, in preparation for the bloody Fascinus offensive. The Frejian 5947th was a young regiment, having yet to earn its colours, and its swaggering soldiers yearned to prove the new unit’s mettle with a reckless manly bravado. The infantry regiment was deployed as part of the 803rd Frejian division, commanded by Hostis Legatarch Snorri af Kulsack. This able veteran general found himself slotted into a rigid schedule of frontal human wave attacks, and in this unimaginative position ordained from above, all his skill and experience could amount to little more than directing his division’s mortars and rocket launchers toward clearing likely enemy heavy weapon hideouts before the advance began.
Their objective was to capture a hostile fort designated Castra Priapus, and they had readied themselves for the upcoming assault by offering fervent prayers to His Divine Majesty in His guise as the lord of hosts, while their regimental clericus militarii had wandered among this band of brothers and galored the lads with blood-boiling tales of the foe’s sins, blasphemy and atrocities. Thus the Frejian Guardsmen cultivated an earnest hatred for their filthy foe, and many vowed to bring home anatomical trophies from at least three slain traitors. It was to be a seminal offensive for the upstart 5947th Frejian infantry regiment, and one of its daring warriors was private Vittur Menelik, of Völse company. Vittur eagerly followed the regimental-wide order to fix bayonets, and he endeavoured to prove his fortitude and courage in the face of death.
And so the Frejian infantry climbed over the top of their trenches as vox-amplifiers rang out litanies of hatred, and these cocky young men charged over no-man’s land, into the testing ground of combat where heroes and cravens alike are made through the proof of their deeds. Private Vittur Menelik followed his squad sergeant Rod Böllur and joined in a thousand-throated battlecry. “Freji stands!” the men shouted as they rushed over a lunar landscape of craters, vehicular wrecks and corpses, yet their warcry was soon drowned in a tornado of hostile artillery fire, while a staccato of heavy stubbers and the rapid whiplashes of multilasers opened up from the enemy lines.
Sergeant Rod fell amid the barbed wire in front of the first line of enemy trenches, yet his squad pressed home the attack. Vittur, that gutsy man, cast himself into the jaws of death without deviant thought of self, lasgun blazing as they stormed the first trench line, and then the second, and then the third. Vittur was always at the forefront of the attack, and this loyal son of the Imperium covered himself in glory, slaying half a dozen foes by grenade, las bolts and bayonet. The Frejian soldiers risked life and limb and showed no mercy to any enemy who wished to surrender, but instead cut them down on the spot and charged on through winding trenches and over pockmarked grounds battered by ordnance to win through with their bold assault. They were heedless to their own losses, and a feverish battle rage descended upon the Imperial Guardsmen.
Kill! Kill! Kill!
Yet our gallant hero met his grisly end while running toward the fourth line of trenches at Castra Priapus. All of a sudden, a heavy stubber bullet from an advanced gunnery nest slammed into private Vittur sideways and went through both groins, as the after-action report of Völse company phrased it. It was the dread of males everywhere, for this gelding hipshot proved to be the bane wound of the valiant Frejian soldier. The flak codpiece that protected the wearer’s manhood from front angle hits was of no avail, since the heavy stubber shot had entered the Guardsman’s body from the flank of his unarmoured hip, dooming him to an emasculating demise. The agony was almost blinding, yet Vittur Menelik did not fall unconscious, but lived through every moment of it all, until death eventually released him several minutes later. The sideways phallic wound had also shattered both of his hips. This heinous mutilation of the infantryman’s membrum virile brought the Frejian intense pain, and like a bull turned into an ox would he never more father children nor know a maiden ever again.
Thus private Vittur Menelik lived a deedful man, yet died a whimpering eunuch. Hardened veterans who saw the gory dying of this strapping young fellow would shudder and twitch forth protective hand gestures whenever they recalled his baleful demise. They said he experienced unimaginable torment, and froth came from his mouth before he started vomiting blood, and all the while perspiration poured from Vittur’s face. The agony was so great he could not bear it. No man could. Witnesses described how the eyes of the Frejian Guardsman were wide open from shock as he sat on his knees, swaying backward and forward while pressing his arms around his stomach. They all agreed that the brave warrior suffered more in the short time that he was dying thus nastily, than any other man they ever saw in war. It was dreadful to look upon him, and all the other horror of the battlefield paled in comparison. He sat there in total pain, mouthing a High Gothic mantra over and over in between the vomiting of blood:
“Imperatore Terrae, domine salva animam meam.” Emperor of Earth, o please save my soul. It was an unmanning death, yet nevertheless a hero’s death. And so Vittur Menelik of the Frejian 5947th passed away on Zikura, devout in his faith and ritual worship to the very last. All mortal men should strive to follow his example. Vittur’s departure had been somewhat of a Caesarean death, wounded in his sword, as it were, akin to how one betrayed great leader of men once died most brutally during the bygone Age of Terra. Traitors truly are the lowest forms of scum, wherefore we must hunt them down and slay them all, lest they do unspeakable things to us and our kin. Suffer not the traitor to live!
Behold that fallen stallion of war, fearless and true to his species and lord. He truly knew the meaning of sacrifice, yet it was only his corporeal vessel of dust and clay that bled that day. What suffered on Zikaru was merely the inconsequential matter that make up the flesh of the worthless creature that is man. For wretched man is a sinner who should burn in hellfire, yet the shielding goodness in the heart of our celestial master and saviour allows man to transcend his base nature if his soul is pure and his spirit is strong. Know that the God-Emperor demand the ultimate sacrifice from each man, and nought else but total devotion and submission to His divine will may suffice.
Behold Vittur Menelik, martyr of our cause. He happily met his end with virtues intact and warrior’s honour upright. He died bravely in service to the Emperor of mankind, and who could ever wish for anything more in this vale of sorrows we call life? Behold!
Remember the self-sacrifice of those fallen in battle, for in their dying moments can be glimpsed what it means to be human in the glorious Age of Imperium. Remember!
Rejoice in the death of our faithful, for the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Imperium. Rejoice!
Let not their sacrifice be in vain, but follow instead their example and take up arms in the name of His Divine Majesty of Holy Terra. Rise! Join the pure ranks of the martyrs. Rise, mankind! Meet death and destruction, and fear not injury, for the Emperor protects.
Ave Imperator.
And so it is that men, women and children willingly throw themselves unto certain death and mutilation. They do this for the sake of their Emperor. And they all die in service to the sacred hierarchy of the Imperium of Man, that interstellar colossus on feet of clay that will burn through the people with callous disregard, the flesh of man being but yet another expendable resource for the rulers of the Imperium to use as they see fit. And as the lives of trillions are wasted in a doomed effort to stem the decline of human power in the Milky Way galaxy, the gravely wounded and the dying among these warriors across the stars may hear, as if in a fever dream, the melodious harmony of an angelic choir.
Or the laughter of thirsting gods.
Such is the fate of mankind, in the darkest of futures.
It is the fortyfirst millennium, and there is only pain.
