Chapter 21

401. Storming a Tomb World is something you do never: There has been a grand total of one time I landed on a planet that we knew was a Tomb World before we landed on it. Two or three times we figured it out the hard way, one of those incidents is where I lost my foot. This instance, however, was the stuff nightmares were made out of. Ten million troops were sent to invade this place. Of course, a planet is a big place, so these ten million men weren't meant to take the whole place, just establish a foothold that we could use to launch further waves of forces on. I was meant to be part of the second wave that arrived three months after the initial landing. It had been a massacre. We ran into a few fleeing ships on the way out, and when we got to the planet, the surface was littered with corpses. We don't even know if the force got into the Tomb World itself. The local Lord General wanted to press on, saying that anyone who argued against her would be branded a traitor and shot. Yeah. She promptly had three different Commissars pumping bolt rounds into her for, and I quote, "deliberate squandering of the Emperor's men and materials." When a Commissar thinks you need to die for wanting to charge in head first, it says a lot

402. Fuck fighting fair: You know what fighting fair has gotten people? A lot of friendly corpses. Nothing else out there will fight fair, so don't return the favor. And on the off chance something will fight fair, here's what you do. Wait for it to bow, pretend that you're bowing, then shoot it in the face. Bam, it's dead, you win. If you feel bad, here's what you do. Grow the fuck up. We are not playing a game here. War is everyone on one side pulling every dirty trick they can to kill everyone on the other side. If you want to fight fair, you shouldn't act surprised when the Ork you were trying to challenge to a formal duel thinks that the constant bowing means you have a back problem. Which he tries to fix. A little too enthusiastically.

403. Assisting suicide isn't a good idea: Suicide is something that, believe it or not, the Guard tries to avoid. The majority of people in the Guard do it for the understandable reason that enough people have died in the Imperium's wars, and the ones that don't have the pragmatic (but still feels like the shavings of Nurgle's foreskin) reason of not wanting to waste good soldiers. Either way, if you find someone who wants to commit suicide, talk them down, give them something to drink, find a friend of theirs. They're gonna be ok and they need to know that. You do not FUCKING HELP THEM! Because when that soldier's family finds out that you found him on top of a cliff and you responded by giving him a shove off, thinking you were helping him, they're going to make you go look for him. THE QUICK WAY DOWN!

404. Fuck tassels: I know I had an entry about how the battlefield wasn't a fashion show, but tasselsget their own entry. Have any of you actually seen a tassel? I have, and it's both impractical, AND an eyesore. They just dangle around, completely clashing with whatever tone the rest of the outfit was trying to say. It's like an Inquisitor with his dick out. So when one woman has a pair over her FUCKING NIPPLES I tell her it's going to end badly, she doesn't listen, and lo and behold, they get caught in a fucking tree, she falls down while we were all running from a Carnfiex and, well, you can guess what happened next. Honestly felt kinda bad for her. Then I learned she was a blue blood and said "Well, that's fucking typical."

405. Do not come to the Guard to get laid: I'm not saying don't get laid once you're in the guard, trust me, if you can find a willing and eager partner, it makes a life of war and ultraviolence a lot more bearable. But if it's your sole reason for coming, you're kind of stupid. As in, I'm surprised you made it to the age of two stupid. This one guy. This one FUCKING guy. His priorities were so fucked I'm surprised they weren't pregnant three times over. He had a list. A fucking list. Of the types of ladies he wanted to fuck. I still have it, I've been mainly using it to try different combination of swear words when I'm not using it as a napkin, mainly because I've no respect for the man. He wanted to bone, and I quote, "an Inquisitor, a Sorita, a Felinid, a princess, and a Catachan." And then when he showed it to me, he ripped it out of my hands and scribbled down that he also wanted to bone a Space Marine's daughter and a noblewoman. I tore the list out of his hand and told him that he better drop the shit if he wanted to live a day, because the Guard was a life and death matter, not a meet and greet. He ignored me. He turned up dead the next day. Killed by a lone, wounded Tyranid. As in, it was a single, half viscerated Ripper. And he lost to it.

406. There is a time and a place for digging trenches: Trenches are an odd thing. If there's an overabundance of them, battles can quickly turn into some of the most miserable forms of warfare we have ever experienced as a species. That being said, I can't deny that if an enemy is shooting at me, and we have a friendly controlled trench nearby, you can bet your purity seals I'm going to be in it. Here's the thing though, there actually has to BE a trench, and those things don't occur naturally. You have to dig it, fortify it, and plant mines and razor wire in front of it if you can. But this takes time. Even if you have a team that has years of experience digging trenches, you need time. So when a hundred Valkyries drop off a few thousand men armed only with entrenching tools, the Orks aren't going to sit and wait. In fact, they're going to think that the soldiers were trying to dig a mass grave, and the dipshit Orks will try to put something in it. Always trust on the stupid to give the even more stupid exactly what they were asking for, even if they didn't realize it.

407. Recognize what mines will work on: Mines can be utterly devastating if in the right hands. Turning the stretch of land between enemy and friendly fortifications into a field of death, where the enemy is afraid to take another step, on the off chance that it'll lead to death. Unfortunately, the nature of mines requires the victim to step on them, and if they don't, we're out of luck. Maybe there's some super advanced version of a mine a Forge World is keeping a tight wrap on, but I've never heard of it. So we're stuck with the more basic version. As such, one needs to keep in mind that enemies that float or fly are pretty much invincible to mines. It's kind of embarrassing to plant a bunch of mines, only for a few thousand Dark Eldar skimmers to fly right over it. Particularly if one skewers you on a spear, drives back to the minefield, and slams you into the ground while they drive over it. Small condolences, the spear went through her head, so she was probably long dead. But hey, the mines were the ultimate destructive force, just like she said. Now if only she could learn that an ultimate destructive force needs to be aimed at the right people. I doubt she would though, if she had lived she probably would've had us plant an even bigger minefield for the next day.

408. Cannibalism is not an effective long term method of receiving nourishment: Look, I've commented on Emperor's Mercy (oh sorry, "Civilian Relief Rations) Rations more than once. Yes, I know I can't prove they're people, but we're all thinking it! What else do you think the Imperium does with all the bodies its daily activities earn it? They ain't opening cemeteries for billions of dead soldiers, that's for damn sure. Where was I going with this again? Oh right. The point is, the totally not people rations are an emergency step only. Funny as it may seem, a species that takes eighteen years to reach maturity is NOT an idea food source. This one little enclave of inbred nobles (I mean they're all inbred, but these ones were particularly bad) thought they would show how superior they were to their serfs they were by eating them. Yeah, ran out of food in a month and starved to death. Here's an idea, LEARN WHAT CROP ROTATION IS INSTEAD OF FUCKING YOUR SIBLINGS!

409. No stupid ass gun mods: You know how revolver auto pistols have six chambers? That's because they work. Trust me on this, my daughter-in-law sat me down for six hours straight gushing about the inner workings of slug weapons, I've learned a fair bit about them. And do you know why most don't have twenty chambers? Because that's stupid, and so is anyone who tries to do it. When we were, uh, "recruiting" my daughter-in-law (things started with us shooting at each other, long story) we encountered a gunslinger that was trying to dual wield auto pistols with twenty chambers. The thing overbalanced the gun, and the only reason he didn't shoot his own dick off was that the gun jammed. He sucked so much his suck collapsed in on itself. I'm sure it was a small comfort to him before my daughter-in-law decided people like him weren't worth dying for and brained him and six other gunslingers before defecting to the Guard.

410. Power trips are a waste of time and are often suicidal: You ever notice that you can tell if someone's a walking, talking collection of feces by how they react if they're given a position of power? If they're a decent person, they'll throw themselves into the work, take time to learn what responsibilities are expected of them, or start stressing out so much they start drinking (I relate). But then there are the people who use it to live out their juvenile little fantasies of having the most basic bit of power. Everything from generals who order men to die in the millions because they're insecure about the size of their dicks (Chenkov) or the Administratum clerk who gets petty revenge by denying resupply to those who insulted his haircut one time. Yeah, see, here's the thing. You deny soldiers the supplies they need to survive, you have no right to complain when one leaves a grenade in your breakfast. Although I have a right to complain when half of his intestines splatter over the back of my head. Why does everyone's revenge gore land on me?

411. You can't run something over if it's bigger than the vehicle: As much as we like to attribute vehicle kills to mounted weapons, you'd be surprised at how much of it goes to xeno and heretical filth being crushed under wheel and tread. Heh. Never get tired of that crunching noise. Of course, the way this works is that you need to be actually able to fit the thing UNDER the vehicle. So around a dozen cultists? Slam on the acceleration. Orks? Bit tougher. One or two you can get, half a dozen if you're in a Leman Russ, but anything more and you risk smaller vehicles getting jammed. But a Necron Stalker? For fuck's sake. One of the most pathetic things I ever saw. She drove directly at it. Nine times. See, the thing about Stalkers is that the majority of their body is off the ground, being supported by six legs. She was trying to aim center mass. Kept going back and forth until the Stalker, possibly out of pity, lowered itself a few feet so she could splatter herself against its hull..

412. Artillery cannons are not an effective method of delivering supplies: You'd be surprised how dangerous it can be to be a supply runner in this forsaken galaxy. Supply convoys are a favorite target of bandits and enemy raiders, they know it, and they risk the dash from the base to the front line, so that we can get the supplies we need to keep fighting. So trying to come up with an alternative so that these people are out of danger is an admirable goal. Some, such as air drops or underground tunnels, are good workarounds. Shooting the supplies at the forward trenches via Earthshaker, however, isn't. I was told that we would be getting fresh rations after we had just barely beaten off a siege. Ok, sounds good. So I was on the upper levels of the base we were holding, keeping an eye out for the transports, a couple of sharpshooters nearby. I hear some artillery cannons and the next thing I know, the man next to me is dead. A fucking potato in his skull. So I got in a Chimera, had someone get on the Vox to stop further death by tubers, found the idiot who thought this would work, and reported him to the local Commissar. He promptly got beaten to death with a bag of potatoes.

413. Tanks make for poor real estate: One of the most poorly thought out things I've ever seen in the Imperial Guard, note that I said poorly thought out, not suicidal, is the concept of turning Leman Russes into houses. Now, if you don't think about it for more than two seconds, it has some sort of appeal. You can fit a small family instead, it's sturdy, its well insulated against the weather, it almost seems like a good market to go into. Then it hits you exactly what you'd have to do to make this happen. First, you have to actually get some Leman Russes, which is hard to do when the Imperium needs all the tanks that it can get. Even ones that have been torn apart are guarded jealously by the Mechanicus, in the hopes that they can be restored. Now, let's assume you managed to somehow scrape one up. Now you need to strip out all the inner parts that get in the way of it being something you can actually live in. Without snapping some fingers off in all the gears that you're working with. Or accidentally blowing a shell. But hey, you managed to make a house out of a tank. Congratulations. You now have a house that directly resembles a priority target for when the planet is invaded. As I watched a dipshit couple who had done this burn, I really wondered how they thought a shack was beneath them.

414. No, you can't drift, stop asking: Apparently there's this thing where you stop accelerating but maintain your moment when driving a vehicle. This enables you to maneuver your vehicle in more complex ways than moving left or right while still maintaining the direction of your momentum. In theory anyway. More often than not it ends with people slamming into walls, other people, or just going off a cliff. Or into other people, forcing them into a wall, which gave out, sending them all down a cliff. Admirable in a way. Being that idiotic and pathetic takes concentrated effort and real dedication, though I'm not sure I'm comfortable praising someone so cocksure that they're just about ready to stick their dick into a Tyranid feeding pit.

415. Do not spit alcohol onto an open fire: You know, a hundred or so entries ago I wonder if half of these entries were the result of people dealing with the decaying state of the galaxy extremely poorly. Certainly not impossible, although one would hope that someone who wants to end it all wouldn't choose such a painful route. Case in point, this entry. Have you ever seen a man run around with the inside of his mouth on fire? I have, and it's rather hard to put out. The guy is so busy flailing around that it's kind of hard to shove a fire extinguisher nozzle down his throat. It was kind of funny for the first two seconds, but then he somehow managed to set the building on fire. No idea how that one happened. Did he try and put it out by kissing the wall? I doubt the wall cared for that.

416. Electricity doesn't bring people back to life: Zamora really needs to write her own book on medical examples, but this is one that I'm stealing. In some cases, controlled amounts of electricity can restart the human heart, and after that the person can be revived if the correct procedures are followed. But anything other than an intact heart failing and there's not really much it can do. So don't hook your dead girlfriend up to the city's power grid and try to jump start her whole body. Because if you do it'll lead to one smoldering corpse and one smoldering idiot who thought with his now shriveled and charred cock instead of his fried and popped brain.

417. Don't stick your finger in a gun: I honestly think people crawled out from under a rock yesterday if we're pulling shit like this. For reasons best known to the insane, stupid, and insanely stupid, some people try to stick their fingers in the barrels of enemy guns. This has resulted in the loss of fingers, hands, and in the case of a plasma rifle, an entire arm. All three tend to lead to death, once blood loss and shock kicks in. Apparently there's a legend of a saint being able to use a single finger to deflect a bullet back at his assassin. Just one problem. HE WAS A SAINT! YOU FUCKING AREN'T!

418. Shortcuts are never worth it: Do you need to get there as fast as possible otherwise people will die? If not, take the longer, more established route. Because let me tell you. EVERY FUCKING TIME! If it's not bandits, it's serial killers. If it's not serial killers, it's cultists. If it's not cultists, its xenos. If it's not xenos, its rebels. If it's not rebels, it's a bunch of fucking cunts who holed up there just to piss me off, I SWEAR! Point is, shortcuts may as well be renamed "Prick alley," so don't bother going down one unless you want to be up to your eyes in pricks...Emperor that came out different than I thought it would.

419. Spend some time doing some reading: Yeah, you be surprised what a bit of reading from time to time could do for you. Just make sure it's not the Uplift Primer (unless you're looking for an ironic laugh, and even then you can do better) and try to actually educate yourself. That way you might learn some actually useful things. Like "hey, that mushroom has nutritional value," or "hm, this water has indications of being poisoned, I better avoid it." Or you could just say books are for loser scribes and never read one. Then fail to understand what a comet is and kill yourself in a panic induced attempt to appease the angry Emperor. I swear someone is raising people like this on purpose.

420. None of it fucking matters: You all get that right? There's no point to any of it. We're never going to fucking win. We fight, we die, we do whatever we can to stop all of them, and it's never enough. Fuck, it's not a case of being enough. We just can't win. It's not just us either. There's no point to any of what any of them are all doing out there. I told you not to romanticize what the enemies of man do, well, let's take it one step further. Let's point out why not only should they not be romanticized, their actions are all futile.

Orks. Just keep spawning and keep killing. Let's say they overrun the entire galaxy. Then what? They just keep spreading and spreading and spreading. Eventually there's just gonna be a point where the galaxy won't be able to take it anymore. They apparently need food, water, and oxygen to SOME degree. There's a reason we don't find Ork colonies on barren moons. Yes Orks fight amongst themselves more than any other species, but even then they still spread more rapidly. And once a Warboss gets a WAAAAAGH going, the only thing that can really stop it is outside influence, or another WAAAAAGH swallowing it up. Making the second WAAAAAGH even bigger.

So I see this going one of two ways. Either the Orks splurt their corrupted seed over every last planet in the galaxy, spread out of control and eventually bleed every last biosphere dry, or they eventually turn the galaxy into such a vicious playground for their war games that they eventually just smash every last planet there is. Different paths, very same fates.

Dark Eldar. Emperor, these guys have got to be the most pathetic lot of the bunch. Let's dedicate our entire existence to keep the god we helped create from actively eating our souls. Let's do that FOR FUCKING EVER! Do I even need to point out the problem with that? The rest of the galaxy isn't going to sit around to let them keep doing that. Either another bigger and more powerful faction that isn't actively staving off total annihilation every waking second is going to wipe them out, or the majority of all life in the galaxy is wiped out and they no longer have people to torture, so Slaanesh eats them all. Speaking of which, ways in which that total destruction of life in the galaxy may happen.

Tyranids. Look, they're really basic, really fucking basic. They swallow up planets and move on. There's only so many planets. And I'm not just talking in the galaxy, I'm talking about the universe as a whole. Some twats say that there's an infinite number of galaxies, but eventually the Tyranids are just going to reach the point where it all becomes too much. Either they swallow up too many galaxies and multiply to the point where they just can't find enough food in a galaxy to sustain themselves, or they drain enough galaxies that the gaps between ones that are left is just too great for them to make it through without starving to death.

Necrons. Seriously, does anyone know what the fuck they want anymore? Something something, return to an organic state of being? Maybe? I don't fucking know. Well, I suppose they're the one that has a sliver of a chance of actually succeeding. Provided that they finish their beauty sleep in time, and I'm not so sure that's going to happen. It'd be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. Easily the most technologically advanced race in the galaxy, leaving both the Eldar and the Tau in the dust, and the majority of them aren't doing anything as the galaxy goes to shit. That and they have those Destroyer things, the ones that still want to kill all organic life, and the rest of the Necrons don't seem to be doing anything about that. So yeah, good luck with that. Also they seem to be incapable of actually making more of themselves. Oh sure, they can repair damaged ones no problem, but every time one of their Tomb Worlds get destroyed, they're one step closer to being permanently fucked. Because I don't think they can make more of themselves. And it happens slowly, but it happens.

Chaos. Motherfucking Chaos. The Ruinous Powers need us to live. You know that right? This is just something that makes sense when you think about it. They thrive off of our actions, desires and hatreds. So long as life in the galaxy exists, Chaos will live on. Daemons are eternal, reforming their bodies no matter how many times we kill them. The Emperor was the only one who could truly kill creatures like that, and he's in no shape to do it now. But Chaos needs us, and that means if they win, their very source of existence is wiped out.

All of those above are self destructive in their own way, or simply have no way to propagating their own continued existence even if all their foes were to drop dead the next day. That leaves the Eldar, the Tau, and us. And sadly, all three of us are just as fucked as everyone else.

The Tau. Yes, they have some fancy tech. Yes, they've got some impressive feats. It's even rather unique and astounding that they've gained so many minor allies. The only reason they're still around is that everyone is too busy with more important things. With the possible exception of the Dark Eldar, practically every other force out there could wipe the Tau out if their attention wasn't divided. Hell, the Tyranids may end up doing just that in their rampage to eat fucking everything.

The Eldar. It's weird to say that, out of all the enemies of man, these ones were probably the ones that had the greatest chance of surviving. Between their work with the Harlequins, Corsairs, and that new all Eldar united faction they have, and the fact that they're the closest a species is to being truly united, they had the best shot. And the best shot in this case is utter dogshit. They're slipping away, Craftworld by Craftworld, unable to replace their own dwindling population fast enough. And you know what? They known it. Pretty much all of them have given up hope that they'll survive. The only ones who haven't is this "all Eldar welcome" cult thing that a lot of the traditional Eldar hate, and they've got some God of Death thing going on that's gonna try and kill Chaos or something. Yeah, good luck with that.

And finally...us. The Imperium of Man. Look at the last ten thousand years of our history. Yes, we've fought long and we've fought hard, we've made our enemies bleed. But will it matter in the end? We've done nothing to curb the Ork population of the galaxy, the Eldar still fuck with us on a regular basis, their hedonist Dark cousins frequently raiding us with us doing a lousy job of stopping them, the Tyranids are gobbling up world after world, we don't even know where the majority of Necrons are, and Chaos recently stuck its dick inside Cadia and finally broke that bulwark. We are fighting on a thousand different fronts and WE! ARE! LOSING!

We're spread too fucking thin! We can't be everywhere at once and every year we lose more and more ground! We regress further each time, have less resources to work with, less soldiers to call upon, and rarely do we counter this. And even if we somehow do things around by around a hundred different miracles, Chaos is eternal. We'll keep fighting an eternal foe until something slips and they crush us all. Assuming the Imperium doesn't collapse in on us.

It doesn't matter how it'll happen, all roads lead to the same place. One of a few powers overrunning the galaxy and then dying off, the ones who can't do that being doomed to die. And we're one of those factions. You must know it by this point. We've been fighting for ten thousand years and what do we have to show for it? Our pathetic continued existence in a slowly shrinking Imperium. There's nothing. It's pointless.

Yes I am writing this at four in the morning after I had a nightmare about the Chaos Lord torturing me to death for the seventh night in a row. Yes I am drunk as I write this. But does that actually change anything? It's fucking M42 and everything is just getting worse. There's nothing...fucking nothing...nothing…