The Emperor's Finest

THE EMPEROR'S FINEST Sandy Mitchell

Editorial Note:

This selection from the Cain Archive is taken from a relatively brief but far from uneventful, period of Cain's life, when he was attached to the command staff at brigade headquarters as an independent commissar. Reviewing the records of these half-dozen years, it's not hard to see why he arranged to be reassigned to a regiment on active service at the earliest opportunity, as even this would have seemed relatively safe in comparison to some of the assignments which came his way, a consequence of his unwanted reputation for heroism which he seems to have found both natural and inconvenient in the extreme. (A reputation which, true to form, he continues to insist throughout the current extract is completely undeserved. Many of my readers have taken this claim at face value, and many others have construed it as a rather engaging blindness to his own virtues, having known him personally, I tend to the view that the truth is a little more complicated than either postulation.)

I have already disseminated several of his subsequent exploits with the Valhallan 597th, and see no need to recapitulate the circumstances of his finally getting his wish. Instead, I've chosen to concentrate on what may have been the pivotal incident of that period of his life, the consequences of which were to reverberate for decades to come. With hindsight, too, we can discern the first faint breath of wind destined to become a storm which threatened to engulf the entire Eastern Arm by the turn of the millennium.

I was also influenced in my choice of material by the reflection that this selection answers a number of questions raised and left open by some of the previous extracts I've edited and circulated among my fellow inquisitors, not least of which is the nature of his connection to the Reclaimers Astartes Chapter; and the circumstances surrounding his involvement in their ill-advised boarding of the space hulk ''Spawn of Damnation''. Since the details of his appointment as Imperial Guard liaison officer to the Chapter, and his eventful journey to meet them, have been covered in one of the short extracts I've already disseminated, I've chosen not to repeat the material here, but to begin Cain's account of events with the Viridia Campaign itself.

As always, I've endeavoured to clarify matters where appropriate, by the use of footnotes and the interpolation of additional information by other hands, especially where Cain's habit of concentrating on the relatively trivial incidents which affected him personally threatens to lose sight of the bigger picture. The bulk of what follows, however, is unadulterated Cain, and as idiosyncratic as ever.

Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos.