The Price of Duty (Warhammer 40,000) by Matt Smith

Author:Matt Smith [Smith, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2019-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Matt Smith is one of Black Library’s newest authors, and the Warhammer 40,000 short story ‘In Service Eternal’ is his first. He is based in Norwich and spends his spare time working on his Raven Guard army and training in martial arts.

An extract from Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies.

The thing I’ve always found most annoying about the eldar, apart from their psychotic sadism and their almost visible aura of patronising smugness, is their habit of popping up where you least expect them. Like the ones who came charging out of the depths of the mine workings on Drechia, for instance, laying down a lethal spread of razor-edged discs from their small-arms as they came. Within seconds, half the troopers with me were down, either diced so thoroughly the burial party was going to need buckets to collect them in, or incapacitated beyond the point of any form of retaliation apart from harsh language.

Not wishing their sacrifice to have been in vain, I lost no time in diving for cover behind a comfortingly solid-seeming outcrop of rock. Once there, I snapped off a couple of shots from my laspistol in the general direction of the enemy, trying to ignore the little sparks left by ricocheting shuriken which seemed far too close to my nose for comfort while I did so.

‘Where in the warp did they come from?’ Lieutenant Grifen snarled, more rhetorically than because she really expected an answer.

‘Who cares? They’re dying right here,’ Magot, her platoon sergeant and closest friend, returned, lobbing a frag grenade at the first group of Guardians to have broken cover as she spoke. It burst in the middle of them, and the two closest promptly went down, crimson trickles leaking through the newly punched rents in their green-and-purple armour.

The surviving members of Grifen’s command squad were already returning fire with their lasguns, picking off the rest of the xenos who’d been incautious enough to attempt to try following up their initial advantage by closing to chainsword distance. A big mistake if you wanted my opinion, which I doubted the pointy-ears did; they’d obviously counted on the element of surprise to overwhelm us completely, before charging home against dazed and disorientated soldiers in no fit state to defend themselves. Which might well have worked against the local militia rabble who’d been trying to contain their raids up until now, but unfortunately for them, what they got instead was battle-hardened Imperial Guard veterans who dived for cover the moment the shooting started, and immediately began giving as good as they got. But that was the 597th for you; I’d been fighting alongside them for the last couple of decades, and seen them take on pretty much anything the galaxy had to throw at us. A handful of overconfident eldar would hardly make them break sweat.

Grifen tapped her comm-bead. ‘Second and fifth squads, circle back. We’re under fire,’ she voxed, before turning to me for approval. ‘With any luck they’ll catch them from behind, and we can take out the lot between us.

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