The Subsector Project

From the collated recollections of 790.M41 Col. Yrnest Ramos (Ret.), Formerly 33rd Hemlock Voluntarius Rifle Regiment

Caomer Subsector – Placid – 883.M41

CLASSIFIED – PATRICIAN – ORDOS CAOMER

  The first war for Placid, what a bloodbath. We barely survived- by which I mean the whole sector. High command committed so many soldiers, so much materiél, it was lunacy when the heretics were knocking at the door across the subsector.

We needed to consolidate, to defeat the enemy in detail, pick him apart in the battles we knew we could win, rather than sinking every body we had into the corrupted mire of Placid in the hopes that we could stall him a little longer. I think that’s what Pedrot understood that the rest of the generals didn’t want to admit, and what eventually led to the withdrawal. Saner heads prevailed, thank the Emperor.

But for a while we bloodied the archenemy on Placid, in the mud and muck, feeling it suck at our boots. Every week brought a new regiment, fresh-faced and bright-eyed from muster. We were eager to stem the tide of heretics who flowed from Ca’Bellus, and stick a bayonet into old Berukial’s guts.

That’s how I felt, at least, standing in the trenches with my head full of sermons and my belly full of slab rations. It didn’t last very long, by that time the engagement had become grinding, rather than decisive. Each side sought to bleed each other on barbed wire, rather than win in an all-out engagement.

Too often, the enemy spent their lives on rituals- dark traditions conjoining forth foul beings from the Warp. Placid was not, as such, warp-touched, but it was touched by the warp, as they say. The bodies we poured against them only seemed to heighten the power of those entities, although I won’t claim to understand how a platoon of Hemlock grunts dying makes a creature with nine faces shrug off a Krak missile to the torso.

Ask the inquisitors, they claim to know everything, and they were there. Until they weren’t. Them and the preachers, too few holy men, too many trenches.

  It was a few months in, long enough for the shine to come off the campaign, but not long enough to make it feel hopeless yet. I was a trooper, just another rifle in a company of rifles. I had nine others in my squad, and we called ourselves ‘The Emperor’s Executioners’ for reasons I cannot remember. Righteous young men, fighting in a righteous war, you know the drill. At least we got that right.

I remember Trooper Devereux, he was a character, always chortling about something. We shared a foxhole and harangued each other with yarns of our heroism. If you believed everything he said, he’d barged down Chancellor Berukial’s door and gunned down his heretic astartes honor guard single-handedly, and only left the arch-traitor alive because he ran out of ammunition due to a clerical error. A grade-A scamp if I’ve ever met one.

On the other side of the hole was Pei, a short, effete man, always fretting about mud in his boots. But if you ever wanted to know the worst possible outcome, he would always have foreseen it a dozen times over. I don’t think I ever saw him smile unless he was fawning over one of those news bulletins the commissariat puts out. A true professional in the realm of complaint and overt despondency.

  We never saw the traitors who completed the ritual, never even knew it was happening. The chanting came every night, so an increase in volume heralded nothing but Devereaux tossing a handful of fragmentation grenades in the direction of their lines. So he did, and as he turned to me to make some quip, the shift happened.

A moment of disorientation, of the ground sliding beneath us, and we were somewhere else. More than that, I cannot say. We were simply in one place, in our trench, then in a moment which seemed to stretch for seconds longer than it should, we were displaced.

I found out later, troopers from four different regiments for over a kilometer in each direction had vanished, and ended up where the Executioners did, in the pit. There was nothing else to call it, it was always just ‘The Pit’ to us. A hundred meters by a hundred meters on each of four sheer, glass-smooth thirty-meter walls. It was open to the skies above, to a visage of low azure clouds and distant stars, but completely impossible to escape from. Almost a thousand soldiers were suddenly displaced by warp sorcery into an enclosed space.

Then Pei was vomiting on my boots, and Devereaux was yelling about what he was going to do to ‘those bastards’, and hundreds of other conversations merged in an instant. Then a moment of silence before the confusion, the masses shouting and trying desperately to restore their own sense of place and order. Imagine it, that many guardsmen amalgamated in one place- no weapons, no officers, no idea where we were.

Did I not mention that? No one above a line trooper made it through with us. They were simply left behind, butchered to a man by the heretic assault that followed our disappearance. For a while, high command thought we’d been destroyed, or turned traitor ourselves, before we were picked up again.

I confess, it took us a while to marshal ourselves, panic reigned for almost an hour until we got ourselves under control. After we realized we weren’t in immediate danger, we took stock: Almost the entire 33rd Rifles, four demi-companies of one of the Placid secondary regiments (the 75th home guard if I recall correctly), the Faedrun 5th Sappers who had been in the midst of rotating up to blow a hole in the heretics, and part of a Vostroyan artillery regiment who had been on the edge of our back line (obvious sans earthshakers).

They timed it well, admirable for such filth to put a cogent plan together, but I assumed their dark masters put them up to it. The rabble we’d faced to that point showed none of the cunning it would’ve taken to track our troop movements with such accuracy.

In all the confusion, I’m sure we lost a few dozen quality soldiers while we were still milling about. Most of us didn’t notice the archway until we’d started to form up into squads as best we could, reestablishing command structures by seniority instead of rank. By the time we’d organized up enough to realize we only had one feasible way out, enough had disappeared to tell us that it was a false choice.

The gateway was a little taller than four meters, perhaps a little wider than the cargo doors on one of those ministorum prefab bunkers. I call it a gate, or an arch, or a portal, but most other survivors simply call it ‘the door’. I find that simplistic, because what it did to us was not what a door does, and I do not want to imply it as anything other than an arcane construct.

The portal was made of cold, dark, polished stone, unlike the surrounding granite of the pit. Its construction was seamless to the naked eye, but when you ran your fingers over it, you could detect patterns worked into it, perhaps worn down with time or made by creatures with tools much finer than ours. It seemed to avoid the eye, you might slip past it a few times, but once pointed out to you, it was hard to look away.

Three men could’ve comfortably marched abreast into the tunnel beyond. It continued for thirty meters, and made a sharp, right-angle turn. I cannot say where it went after that, as no one has ever been recovered who passed over the threshold of the archway. The earth simply swallowed them whole, no lights, no sounds beyond the turn.

No matter what promises were made or equipment was provided to the scouts, they never once fell back from the corner. In ones and twos, fives and tens, men who saw the Door as an escape route denied to us by conventional means took it. Our numbers thinned slowly, until we watched a whole demi-company of the 75th Home Guard march in there. They were led by some big brash flamer trooper, Borris, confident and foolish as all his ilk, singing songs the whole way through. We listened to their songs, and their footsteps, as they faded to nothing, their backs straight as they ignored our shouts and calls for a report. After that, 

My squad was all there, less Sergeant Zorl and Corporal Hjorbelvec. I took comfort in their presence, even though I didn’t have seniority at the time to control my own destiny. I felt confident that, even disarmed as we were, we would have each other’s backs. I felt unsettled by the Door, but it wasn’t my chief concern. With so many mouths, we had to focus on rationing what we had on us. However, once we had taken stock, our thoughts strayed towards the object of our hatred, to strike back against our captors!

Needless to say, Devereaux and Pei had very different ideas about what that strike back should look like. Pei identified our complete lack of weaponry as a flaw, and was accused of treason against the God-Emperor. I was forced to intercede upon his behalf, in order to point out that we also had no foe to fight, and no way to scale the cliffs surrounding us to ascertain such an opponent. Devereaux pointed towards the Door as, if not our salvation, at least a way to meet the enemy in righteous combat.

Many shared the latter’s viewpoint. Without a single common leader, the pit began to bleed from our number. Squad by squad, or in marshalled groups by company, men began to march into the cliffside. The feeling of obligation to reinforce those who had already departed, assuming they had indeed rejoined combat, led to urgency. Squads jogged double-time into the maw of the Door, disappearing around the bend.

I was split, on one hand craving action, anything apart from sitting on this unknown rock far from the front lines, but on the other feeling the weight of the sorcery which had brought us there. My compatriots seemed enamoured with the desire to charge into the earth, but alarm bells rang in my mind, contravening that instinct.

Days passed, numbers dwindled still further, the Placidians were the first to be wholly depleted, then the Vostroyans. We men of Hemlock thankfully did not march as a regiment, but our total losses were in the region of two hundred guardsmen. The others spat at us as they passed, certain of their contact with the archenemy. I’m sure they did, in one way or another.

On the tenth day, the Executioners were met in our discontent. Devereaux ranted and raved, and I could see the light of mania in his eyes, the good humor for which I had oft-vaunted him replaced with zeal. His words swayed our compatriots, leaving myself and Pei as the only two in obstinate refusal to enter the cavernous hole. They cursed us as faithless, as abandoning the light of the Emperor’s conviction. I believe, had they been armed, they would have cut us down, along with the hundreds of others who had been unconvinced.

The last I ever saw of Trooper Devereaux was in his backwards glare of contempt. The Emperor’s Executioners were depleted by his actions, but he saw himself as wholly rightfooted, until the very end. I fear I will never be rid of his disgust; he speaks to me in the dark of night, calling me to war, beseeching me to aid him in his battle by virtue of our friendship. Despite this, I pray to the God-Emperor that he met his end swiftly.

  The face of the ‘commissar’ who found those of us that remained, emaciated and depleted from a month of undernourishment, was drawn and affronted around the augmetic repairs making up most of his skull. We’d held out,  resisted the allure of duty, of the swelling darkness within the Door. He vindicated us, assuring us that we’d done the right thing, and had stayed true to our oaths by not charging headfirst into the pathways which lay below.

It had been a trap set by the archenemy, he told us. To weaken us and lure us in with the prospect of a noble death versus that of starvation. The Door, so readily available and present, represented turning away from the light of the Emperor’s benediction, whereas the suffering of the pit was a holy burden foisted upon us.

We hadn’t been displaced any great distance, simply to a desolate moon which orbited far out from the planet for which the Placid system draws its name. Ignored, unnoticed, we had been placed there, and it was only providence which had dispatched the frigate on a scouting mission away from Admiral Pedrot’s orbital offensive.

I was not going to argue with a commissar, and at the moment, I think I even believed him. The alternative was execution, death for each and everyone one of us. Had the ground war been proceeding better, or we had been exhibiting outward signs of corruption, the man would have put us to the sword. A trained regiment and change was needed at the front, however, and we would be redeployed right back into the firefight upon our return to Placid.

I sought to vent my rage, my frustration on the enemy. Indeed, we scored many victories against the archenemy before we rotated back from the front. I had no other choice, I could not admit what I’d seen, to myself or to the other survivors of the 33rd. Pei insisted, to his dying day, that we keep this secret from everyone, his circumspect nature again saving us from an untimely demise.

Yet Pei is gone, and I am alone, in the twilight of my service and unable to fight the sickness in my lungs. To allow this to be forgotten would be an even worse fate.

  The bulk lighter which lifted us from the pit had been modified, a black raven cutting through the atmosphere, with most portholes covered for the duration of our flight. However, the job had clearly been rushed, and had been insufficient to stop my curious eyes from piercing the veil.

Hundreds of pits of different sizes stretched unseen around ours. Avians circled them, carrion birds, picking at remains I could not see, but which were undoubtedly rotting in the sun.

As we rose, the larger structure became clear- a vast, eight-pointed star.