Chapter 63: Reorganization and a Minor Incident
In the days that followed, the air still carried the unspent smell of gunsmoke and the charred reek of burning bodies. Duvette had no time to sit with the relief of having survived. He put everything he had into restoring the regiment to fighting order.
Per the latest Departmento Munitorum directives, the Eisenmark 11th Heavy Armoured Regiment and the surviving remnants of the Ash Watchers 101st were to be formally merged. Duvette also drew from the PDF a selection of veterans who had distinguished themselves in the fighting and folded them into the new establishment.
In the Astra Militarum's vast and rigid military system, reintegrating several badly damaged regiments into a single coherent unit was an entirely common task. It was also, in practice, an enormous headache.
Departmento Munitorum bureaucrats needed only to stamp a seal on parchment. For the commanders on the ground, taking soldiers of different backgrounds, different combat habits, and in many cases different accents and faces, and forcing them into the same camp was a reliable way to start a hundred smaller conflicts before breakfast.
Putting armoured troopers who lived and breathed engine oil and took pride in the precision maintenance of their vehicles alongside infantry who had spent years grinding mud into their trench coats was the beginning of a disaster in the making.
What gave Duvette a measure of relief, however, was that the outright bloodshed he had been expecting did not materialize.
The 101st and Eisenmark soldiers had just survived, side by side, a full night of brutal close-quarters fighting against the greenskin tide. They had seen each other bleed for it.
After that kind of shared ordeal, the surviving soldiers showed surprisingly little resistance to the idea of being merged into a single regiment. Blood and casualty lists had done what no amount of administration could have — they had bonded the two formations to each other before anyone had a chance to object.
What the camp contained now was, at worst, habitual bickering.
Infantry complained that the tank exhausts had blackened their kit. Armoured troopers cursed at infantry boots tracking mud into the precious drive assemblies of the Leman Russ. All of it was manageable.
To restore proper structure as fast as possible, Duvette redistributed the officers.
Dylan, Stroud, Finn, and Anderson — the experienced officers — took responsibility for commanding the 101st's remaining infantry, the newly integrated PDF soldiers, and the former armoured regiment's auxiliary infantry.
Kleist, despite having been reduced to Major by the Departmento Munitorum, kept full responsibility for the Eisenmark's vehicles.
That was Kleist's area of mastery, and Duvette needed a sharp armoured blade. What he did not need was a subordinate who deferred to him on everything and lost the quality that made him useful in the first place.
It was still deep night.
The distant artillery had gone fully silent. In its place: the crackling of fires throughout the camp. Around those fires, 101st soldiers and Eisenmark men were at a volume that suggested a serious drinking competition was underway.
Duvette stood alone in the shadow at the camp's edge, hands in the pockets of his black greatcoat, paying them no particular attention. The fighting was effectively over. Second-line troops getting through a quantity of poor-quality alcohol was not a disciplinary matter worth addressing tonight.
Then a deep and deafening engine sound tore through the night sky.
Duvette looked up and watched as a flight of Thunderhawk gunships screamed overhead. The plasma trails from their engines burned white-bright lines across the darkness, driving hard for the upper atmosphere and out of the planet entirely.
The Ultramarines were departing. He had expected it. The entire 2nd Company had come in person, and now they had finished what they came for and were leaving at the speed Macragge's recall demanded.
A cold wind crossed the plain. Just as Duvette lowered his gaze, a line of translucent text resolved in front of his eyes.
[Congratulations on successfully participating in and reducing the greenskin threat. Emperor's Wrath +500.]
He looked at the notification for a moment. Five hundred points.
Against the sky-blotting approach of Hive Fleet Behemoth, five hundred points felt like a calculation from a different war entirely. Add a zero and it still would not be enough.
But thinking back on it, the System had not issued a clear active mission with defined objectives since Farrak IV. That was worth noting.
The thought had barely finished forming when a new mission notification appeared without warning, hanging in his field of vision.
[Participate in the battle against ??? and survive. Reward: ???]
He stared at it.
Could this thing actually hear him thinking?
"This is absolutely insane," he muttered. "Could it be that the... the Emperor is genuinely watching over me?" He shook his head and pushed the thought aside. Going deep on the nature of the System right now served no practical purpose and led nowhere useful. Perhaps someday he would understand what it actually was. But his only task right now was survival — his own, and that of his people.
He shifted his focus and pulled up the detailed command display.
[Current Command Authority: Ash Watchers -- Eisenmark 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment]
[Total Strength: 2,857 (all personnel)]
[Heavy Vehicles: 12 Leman Russ main battle tanks, 5 Hydra anti-aircraft tanks, 2 Trojan ammunition transports] [Experience: Elite (0%)]
[Overall Supply: 50%] [Overall Loyalty: 80%] [Overall Morale: 100%] [Overall Sanity: 90%] [Chaos Corruption: 0%]
[Passive bonuses active: Steel Ring (Intermediate), Forced March (Beginner), Indomitable, Threat Sense (Beginner)]
[Active skills: Focused Volley (Level 2), Emperor's Gaze (Beginner), Silence, Burn the Boats, Overload Drain (Level 1)]
On any secondary battlefield this force would be a decisive instrument — heavy enough to turn a fight, experienced enough not to need hand-holding doing it. Against the approaching hive fleet it was a drop of water measuring itself against an ocean.
"Duvette!"
A low voice from somewhere in the open ground to his right, carrying unmistakable anger with a lid barely on it, interrupted his thoughts.
He closed the display and turned.
Kleist was coming toward him at a deliberate stride, the Major's face the color of old iron, a muscle ticking steadily at the corner of one eye.
At Kleist's side, Stroud was being moved along at half-drag, the bald man's feet doing as little work as possible in what was clearly not a voluntary attendance.
By the firelight of the camp, when Duvette got a proper look at both of them, he had to work at keeping his expression straight.
Kleist's hair, which under normal circumstances was maintained with an almost aggressive precision, was a ruin. It sat on his head in a state that could fairly be called a bird's nest. More striking still: on the right side of the Major's pale cheek, there was the distinct impression of half a boot print, dried mud and all, pressed clearly into the skin.
Stroud was not in a better condition. A large patch of skin had been scraped from the tattoo on his signature bald head, the left side of his face had swelled to a considerable size, and there was dried blood at the corner of his mouth.
The moment they stopped walking, both of them launched into mutual accusation with the energy of two creatures who had been building pressure for some time.
"Colonel-Commissar! Look at the conduct of your infantry! This man is a fraud with no floor to how low he will go!" Kleist jabbed a finger at Stroud's face and roared.
"Absolute rubbish! You lose, you pay — do you understand how gambling works? Those gentlemen sitting in their iron boxes happen to have atrocious luck, and when their stakes run out they decide to start throwing punches? You armoured bully who cannot stand losing!" Stroud bellowed back, the swelling in his cheek giving his voice a slightly unhinged quality.
"You dare bring up the stakes? You loaded the dice! I saw it myself!"
"That is called tactics! In battle do you also demand the xenos engage you in a fair fight?"
They went back and forth, the exchange generously seasoned with vocabulary of strongly regional character. Duvette let it run long enough to reconstruct the sequence of events from the overlapping accusations.
In the short days since the reorganization, Stroud's gambling instincts had reasserted themselves with full force. The 101st soldiers, long since familiar with his methods, had no interest in sitting down with him. He had therefore turned his attention to the newly integrated Eisenmark troopers.
The Eisenmark armoured crews received solid compensation and generally had money available.
The outcome: through a combination of flattery, misdirection, and dice that had been given certain mechanical improvements, Stroud had, in a matter of evenings, separated the participating armoured troopers from the majority of their pay and personal valuables.
When the Eisenmark men identified the problem and established that Stroud had been playing with altered equipment, the outraged troopers went directly to Kleist. Kleist heard that his men had been systematically defrauded by a veteran infantry schemer and immediately went to find Stroud. Words, going by the physical evidence on both of them, had given way to hands at some point in the exchange. Both parties had concluded they needed the regiment's senior officer to settle the matter.
Duvette looked at the two men in front of him with an expression of complete and genuine exasperation. Between them they had at least sixty or seventy years of military experience. They had both fought through the previous night's battle without breaking. They had brawled like new recruits over a card game.
"Enough." He cut them both off cleanly.
Kleist and Stroud went quiet. The edge of the camp came back to silence.
Duvette looked at Stroud.
"Produce the cards."
Stroud flinched and made an attempt at context. "Boss, what actually happened here is..."
"Produce them. And the loaded dice." Duvette cut him off. "Everything you won from the Eisenmark soldiers goes back. All of it. Nothing kept."
Stroud's swollen face collapsed as though he had just been informed of a personal bereavement. With extreme reluctance, he dug into his pockets and produced several worn decks of cards and a handful of dice, dropping them on the ground in front of him.
"Boss, this really is not fair — they were the ones who..."
"Would you like to serve as reactive armor on a Leman Russ track assembly? I can arrange that for you immediately, if it is fairness you want." Duvette said it with his eyes half-closed.
Stroud snapped to attention. "Understood, Commissar! Returning everything immediately!"
Duvette looked at Kleist. "Major Kleist. As their commanding officer, maintain control of your soldiers. If they cannot identify a trap at a card table, they have no business complaining when the xenos ambush them on a battlefield."
"I have no interest in seeing brawls in this camp. If there is a next time, both of you are on latrine cleaning detail for a month. Clear?"
Kleist still had something sour in him, but he was aware enough of his own culpability to keep it down. He came to attention and gave a salute. "Clear."
With that settled, both of them turned and left.
They were twenty meters away and Duvette could still hear Stroud's quiet lamenting about being left with nothing, while Kleist was making detailed suggestions about applying a tank's main gun to the bald man's skull.
He watched them disappear into the firelight and shook his head slightly.
He said nothing more. This pack of rogues. These wretches. These impossible men, clawing their survival out of the mud one way or another.
Duvette raised his head and looked at the deep and silent spread of stars above.
Whatever methods they used. However much friction lay between them.
"I hope everyone makes it out," he said quietly. The words dissolved in the cold night wind before they had gone anywhere at all.