REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!Chapter 62: Good Luck, Commissar Duvette
Some ten hours later. A room at the edge of the camp.
Kleist and Volkov sat across from each other in silence, working through poor-quality alcohol with the determined patience of men trying to achieve a specific effect. They were attempting to numb what had become, in the intervening hours, a quietly frantic interior.
They had prepared themselves to die. Under the Astra Militarum's unforgiving legal code, no justification changed the arithmetic: a junior officer drawing a weapon and shooting a serving Major General was capital mutiny, indefensible by any argument they could construct. The only outcomes available to them were a firing squad, or having their consciousness stripped out and the remainder of them converted into servitors.
"No regrets." Kleist swallowed a mouthful and his face worked through the effort of keeping it down, but the grey-blue eyes were steady. "If it happened again, I would put that round into Anthony's skull without changing a thing. He betrayed our brothers bleeding on the front line."
Volkov nodded without contradiction. As the regiment's commissar, he had not moved to stop the killing, which made him an accomplice by any reading of the statute. He found he did not particularly mind. He was brushing the dust from his uniform with methodical care, straightening his collar. The execution order could arrive at any moment. They would face the Emperor with a soldier's appearance, at minimum.
Duvette stood to one side with his back against the cold iron wall, watching both of them with something approaching speechlessness.
He had not told them about the Lord Inquisitor's promise. Partly because he had no certainty her word was good, and the Departmento Munitorum's efficiency and its variables were not something anyone could predict with confidence. And partly, if he was being entirely honest with himself, there was a small private satisfaction in watching them sit there and sweat.
Then a sharp, synchronized sound of military boots arrived from outside, accompanied by raised voices and commotion, and the door was pushed open without ceremony.
A squad of fully armed Departmento Munitorum provosts poured into the room. Their weapons came up and the muzzles swept across every person present. Behind them, a pale-faced official in a wide formal robe with senior Departmento Munitorum insignia on his chest strode in, carrying several parchment scrolls sealed with wax.
The 101st veterans and Eisenmark soldiers tensed and moved toward their weapons. Duvette and Kleist each signaled their men to stand down.
Kleist straightened, lifted his chin, and waited for his death sentence. Volkov brought his spine to attention.
The senior official ignored both of them completely.
His gaze moved through the room and settled on Duvette, still leaning against the wall. The official crossed to him at a brisk pace and produced, on that pale face, a smile so strained and unnatural it appeared to be causing the man physical discomfort.
He glanced at one of the scrolls as though confirming a detail, then read aloud. "Commissar Duvette Erdmann."
"That would be me." Duvette came off the wall and stood straight.
The official unrolled the thickest of the scrolls, cleared his throat, and began.
"In recognition of Commissar Duvette's exceptional command capability demonstrated during the planetary defense operations on Farrak IV and at Saint Calais, his absolute loyalty to the Emperor, and his considerable contributions to maintaining the order of the Imperium's armed forces under conditions of extreme adversity."
"Bearing the personal signature of the Lord Militant, effective immediately, the Departmento Munitorum's supreme ruling formally bestows upon Duvette Erdmann the sacred military rank of Colonel-Commissar."
The room went as silent as a sealed vault.
Kleist and Volkov both raised their heads. The expressions on their faces shared a quality that could only be described as disbelief.
In the long military history of the Imperium, the rank of Colonel-Commissar was a near-mythological rarity. It meant the holder carried simultaneously the commissar's absolute authority over life and death and the highest direct command authority over front-line forces. To hold both at once was, in practical terms, to stand outside the ordinary chain of command and above it at the same time.
The official presented the scroll to Duvette with both hands, and with it a dark gold medal bearing the Colonel-Commissar's insignia. He then dismissed his attendants with a gesture, reached carefully into his inner pocket, and produced a letter in a black envelope.
"This is..." The official lowered his voice and moved as close to Duvette as decorum allowed. "Something that a certain very important personage required me to deliver to you personally."
Duvette took the letter. The envelope had no writing on its surface, only a seal pressed in deep crimson wax: the letter I, bearing a skull. The Inquisitorial rosette. Duvette pocketed it in his coat's inner breast without any visible change in his expression.
With that suffocating sequence of events concluded, the official finally turned to face Kleist and Volkov, who had been waiting for their deaths.
The barely-concealed awe on his face vanished. What replaced it was the cold efficiency of a man performing an administrative function he found baffling but had no authority to question.
"Colonel Kleist. Commissar Volkov." He unrolled a second scroll, his voice going stern. "Your act of shooting Major General Anthony inside the command tent has severely violated the limits of Imperial law. By statute, the murder of a senior officer by a subordinate constitutes indefensible mutiny and is punishable by execution."
Kleist closed his eyes and waited.
"However." The official's tone turned on that single word at a speed that suggested he wanted it out before anyone could stop him. "In consideration of your significant meritorious service in protecting the civilian evacuation column and resisting the alien invasion, and with confirmation from the Departmento Munitorum that Major General Anthony unlawfully ordered artillery fire upon friendly defensive positions, constituting serious prior command dereliction. The law does not bend, but the Emperor's mercy is boundless."
He drew a breath and delivered the remainder at considerable speed, as though finishing quickly might make the outcome sound more plausible.
"The death penalty is waived. Commissar Volkov, for failing in your supervisory duty, you will be immediately transferred from this war zone and dispatched to forces in another stellar system to continue serving as commissar, pending further assessment of your conduct."
"Colonel Kleist, for impulsive conduct and disregard for military order, your rank of Colonel is stripped effective immediately and you are reduced to Major."
He looked at Duvette one final time to complete the transfer of authority. "The Eisenmark 11th Heavy Armoured Regiment is to retain its formation. However, as a consequence of Kleist's reduction in rank, said regiment and all attached forces are transferred in full, effective immediately, to Colonel-Commissar Duvette's command and jurisdiction. Judgment complete. May the Emperor watch over you."
The official had no intention of spending a single additional second in that room. He departed with the provost squad at something approaching a walking run.
The room went silent again.
Kleist and Volkov looked at each other. Their eyes met and held, and between them was a shared sense of absurdity so complete it had no obvious place to settle. They had expected a firing squad. They had mentally prepared last words.
What they had received was administrative reassignment.
A killing that should have ended both their careers and their lives had been smoothed over with the bureaucratic non-punishments of a transfer and a demotion.
"What in the Emperor's name just happened." Kleist looked at his own hands, then at Duvette. "Have the Departmento Munitorum gone entirely mad? Major? I killed a Major General and they reduce me one grade?"
Volkov looked at Duvette for a long moment, then at the fresh Colonel-Commissar medal on his chest, and let out a slow exhale. "It seems we kept our lives not because of any mercy in military law." He straightened, came to attention, and gave Duvette a clean military salute. "Take care of yourself, Commissar Duvette."
He asked nothing else. He turned and walked out to take receipt of his new orders. Kleist remained behind, still somewhere between stunned and unmoored.
Duvette walked out alone. He found an unoccupied corner away from the camp's main movement and confirmed no one was within earshot before he produced the black envelope with the Inquisitorial wax seal. He pressed his thumb against the seal until it broke.
The letter unrolled. A few lines only, the handwriting sharp and cold on the page. The content was direct and made no apologies for being either.
When you read this, I will already be aboard the warship leaving this sector. The intelligence core has been safely recovered. As a reward for your excellent performance, I have honored my promise. I had the Lord Militant personally sign your promotion order. The title of Colonel-Commissar is the reward you have earned.
As for those two foolish colleagues of yours, I preserved their lives as an incidental courtesy and had the Departmento Munitorum revise its judgment. The Eisenmark heavy armoured regiment â€" consider it an additional gift. You now have your own direct armoured force and the highest command authority to go with it.
But do not celebrate yet, Colonel-Commissar. Remember what I am telling you now. Every Astra Militarum soldier posted around Macragge has been completely locked to the defensive line. Very soon, you will face something of an entirely different order of threat.
A true catastrophe is coming to the Realm of Ultramar. There is no escape from it. There is only fighting until you die or until it ends.
If you manage to survive what follows, perhaps we will meet again. Good luck, Commissar Duvette.
Duvette let out a long breath. He produced the windproof lighter he kept on him and held the flame to the corner of the parchment. It took. He stood there and watched as the letter burned to ash and dispersed in the camp's murky air.
Night was settling in. Stars coming through the sky above.
But looking up at them, Duvette found nothing of the feeling that humanity sometimes projected onto the stars â€" of territory to be conquered, of horizons worth reaching. What he saw was a darkness with no floor, populated by things that hungered without end, and by death arriving in numbers no single life was built to contemplate.
He had just pulled himself clear of one impossible situation, and had been shoved directly into another with a greater depth and no visible bottom.
He was finding, more and more, that in this particular galaxy, the future offered very little that could honestly be called hope.
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