Chapter 11: New Elites
When Duvette walked out of Commissar Hoffman's room, a bolt pistol now sat in the holster at his hip. The data-slate went inside his coat.
He opened the slate with his biometric and found two items: an audio file and an official document.
"Let this recording serve as witness. I, Leonard, Commissar of the Ash Watchers 101st Regiment, do hereby grant, under the authority of wartime provisions, the full commissarial appointment of Probationary Commissar Duvette Erdmann..."
A field promotion.
Duvette stopped walking and turned to look at the door he had just closed.
Through the narrow gap at the door's edge, the oil lamp's light was gone. The room had returned to dark. He could sense it, the way a person can sometimes sense a presence's absence more clearly than its presence: the quality of aliveness that had been in that room was no longer there. Whatever remained of Leonard Hoffman was fading fast, like the last flicker of a flame that has consumed all its fuel.
He stood there for a moment.
As Hoffman's appointed deputy, he would likely step directly into the position. That was how it worked in the field. A commissar had the authority to elevate a probationary commissar to full rank, but the Officio Prefectus still needed to issue official confirmation afterward, or the appointment could be challenged. In the worst reading of it, an unconfirmed promotion in a combat zone could be construed as a breach of authority.
The Officio Prefectus's administrative efficiency was not, to put it diplomatically, remarkable. On an active front, waiting months or longer for headquarters to process the paperwork and dispatch a replacement was simply not practical. Field succession was standard. After the campaign concluded, an auditor would arrive and conduct a thorough review of the circumstances.
Duvette exhaled. He turned and kept walking.
He had a stop to make before the regimental command post.
Back through the heavy door and into the general ward, he found the sign for the common critical ward partway down the corridor and changed direction. He wanted to check the state of Stroud and Anderson before anything else.
The general critical ward was larger and less quiet than the senior officer section. Individual rooms here held a dozen beds each. Most of the patients were too far into exhaustion or blood loss to make much sound. The ward ran on heavy, labored breathing and the occasional suppressed sound of pain.
Duvette stepped aside for two orderlies running an empty stretcher in the opposite direction and continued forward. In his field of vision, the green name markers for Stroud and Anderson appeared ahead, both associated with a room on the right side.
Both of their status indicators had shifted from Dying to Seriously Wounded.
He sat down on the bench outside the door and did not go in. They needed the rest and he needed a moment to organize his thinking.
He was looking toward Anderson's bed through the room's window when something new appeared above the big man's position. Text, gold-colored.
[Potential Elite: Heavy]
Duvette looked at it. He had not seen that marker over Anderson before. Loyalty was now showing at 90%. Possibly there was a threshold.
He did not deliberate. The prompt was already there.
[Spend 100 Emperor's Wrath to soul-bind Anderson Walker?]
He selected yes.
The skill tree that appeared was different from Stroud's. Where Stroud had the Shadow Branch, Anderson's read:
[Bulwark Branch]
[We are the unbreakable shieldwall. We are also the unstoppable heavy hammer.]
[Starting Skill: Iron Physique]
[No movement speed penalty when equipped with heavy weapons. Recoil penalty greatly reduced. Melee strikes carry knockback and crushing effects. Additional physical damage against lightly armored targets. Physical resilience further enhanced. Minor resistance to small-caliber projectiles.]
Duvette read through it and nodded once.
Anderson's already unreasonable physical capability was about to become considerably more unreasonable.
He stood, looked at the closed ward door one more time, and turned away. Let them rest. He had a colonel to find.
The snow outside had worsened.
The flakes were coming down in heavy clusters now, white chaos against a grey sky, already building into a substantial layer underfoot. The wind had acquired an edge that got through the collar of his greatcoat immediately and located the burns on his back with accuracy.
"I wonder when I'll actually get the black coat," Duvette muttered to no one, pulling the collar of his grey guardsman's greatcoat tighter. The commissar's black greatcoat was the visible marker of the rank. Without it, there was a gap between what he had been formally given and what he looked like.
The frontline position ran along the western edge of Heras, what had been the industrial and warehouse district at the city's outskirts. The buildings and open ground had been converted into a defensive network. Broken concrete road barriers, sandbag emplacements, coils of wire layered at intervals and disappearing into the snowfall in both directions.
He walked through it, passing soldiers in incomplete cover behind damaged emplacements, lasguns pointed toward a snow-covered plain that had no visible horizon. Further out, occasional flashes of orange marked ongoing exchanges somewhere in the distance. The artillery was intermittent and carried on the wind. Some other regiment pressing an attack, most likely.
He found the command post in a half-collapsed warehouse toward the defensive line's interior. One corner of the roof had been opened by a shell impact. The cold came through the gap without obstruction. The walls were solid enough to provide basic protection.
Two sentries at the door, grey Ash Watchers uniforms, faces reddened from the cold.
"Identification." The left one stepped forward, voice not quite flat in the wind.
Duvette patted the holster at his hip. "Duvette Erdmann, formerly Probationary Commissar, currently substantive Commissar. I need to see Colonel Nathan."
The sentry looked at his face for a moment. "Congratulations, Duvette... sir. The Colonel is on the second floor."
Duvette pushed through the heavy canvas over the doorway.
Inside was not noticeably warmer but at least the wind was not directly present. The ground floor held stacked supply crates and several non-commissioned officers gathered around a heating unit, hands extended toward it. In the corner, a communications rig of advanced age was being operated by an operator with a headset on, speaking quietly into the receiver.
He took the metal stairs to the second floor. The upper space was divided by temporary partitions into several working areas. The largest was open: a long table covered in maps, several officers standing around it.
He found Colonel Nathan Fox immediately.
Tall and lean, somewhere around forty, with hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes and grey hair cut close to the skull. He wore a standard Astra Militarum officer's uniform with heavily worn flak armour strapped over the outside. A handgun and combat knife at the hip.
He was bent over the paper maps on the table, a red pencil in one hand and a blue one in the other, marking positions with both, his brow tight.
"Colonel." Duvette stopped in the doorway and saluted.
Fox looked up. His gaze moved to Duvette's face, then down to the bolt pistol at his hip, and something moved through his deep-set eyes. Not quite a smile.
"Congratulations, Duvette. Looks like the old man decided you were worth keeping."