165 – Trouble Magnet

165 – Trouble Magnet

Commissar Ciaphas Cain was a lauded Hero of the Imperium. One of, if not the most famous and influential one currently alive. Imperial propaganda had spread word of his deeds far and wide, and for good reason. For a man who had only his chainsword, laspistol and charisma to rely on, he had survived some encounters Astartes would have fallen in.

He was also suffering from a severe case of impostor syndrome, a result of his entire career being built upon the ‘fake it till you make it’ mentality. Which was kinda funny considering all the crazy stuff he’d survived.

To the Imperium, he truly was the epitome of a patriotic hero every young guardsman should aspire to imitate. He himself was likely his own greatest critique though, never believing a single word of the praise sent his way to be deserved.

As far as I knew though, he was retired and living out the last few decades of his life on the planet of Perlia after nearly three centuries of service to the Imperial Guard. So, what was he doing here? Perlia was on the other side of the Tau Empire, beyond the Damocles Gulf that housed its border with the Imperium.

It was clear from his few fragments of thoughts I’d subconsciously caught that he would rather be facing an Ork Gargant naked than spend another minute on this planet.

Sounded like a fun story. A perfect distraction.

Also ... I held myself back from narrowing my eyes lest he somehow caught wind of a much darker idea popping into my head.

Fate was something I still couldn’t be sure was real. If it was, it was a fair bitch to both me and this poor man it led before me. Because, what better way was there to test whether Fate and plot-armour was real than to try killing the man who seemed to be saved by both every other day.

Every single novel I’d read with him as the main character, he survived mostly through dumb luck and a handy little pocket-Blank that followed him around.

Could I kill him, or would Fate somehow save him by some extremely unlikely happenstance, just because he was a ‘named character’? Would a meteor land on top of my head? Would the Blank working as his attache somehow give me enough of a problem to allow him a small window to escape?

I was just dying to figure out the answers to all those questions.

“Provide a distraction, is it?” He chuckled. “What kind?”

Nuh-uh. I thought, barely holding back a rueful roll of my eyes at the suggestive edge that entered his tone. I’m taken. Not that you need to know that.

“Stories, maybe?” I offered, my gaze jumping down knowingly at his scarred arm and then over at the barely visible holster at his hip, hidden under a baggy overcoat. “I’m sure you’ve collected quite a bit. You don’t seem like the kind to live a boring life.”

“I’m afraid the kind of stories I have aren’t fit for this atmosphere,” he said with a sad shake of his head. “Nothing ruins your appetite quite like hearing what a dead man smells like.”

“Can’t be much worse than that tea you’re drinking,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “And I can live without the gritty details ... tell you what! I’m sure you haven’t heard the news, but I’d bet you’d find the little tidbit I’d heard interesting. The whole capital is in turmoil, it’s downright chaos over there. You tell me a fun story and I tell you all about what’s happening over there?”

“Chaos ... ?” He mumbled, and I could almost hear the panic alarms going off in his head as he rubbed his palms on his thighs. “What kind?”

“Nuh-uh.” I waggled my finger before his face. “Fun story first. Like ... how about the story of how you ended up all the way over on this backwater planet?”

“By hitching a ride on a voidship of course,” he said with fake calm, and the only reason I didn’t believe his charming smile was that I could feel his emotions. “Thought it would be a nice, calm place to retire.”

“That wasn’t much of a story, was it?” I tsked, giving him a mild glare before letting up. “Oh, well. I’ll take some pity on you. Some strange monster fought a floating sorcerer right outside the royal palace in the capital. Hundreds died in the crossfire and apparently half a dozen city blocks had been levelled. Some say the Eternal Queen was among the victims.”

That was less than ideal if I really wanted the population of this planet to become my citizens, so that would have to go. Plus, I would have been an even greater hypocrite to allow civilians to die when I could stop it from happening with fairly little effort than I already was.

With a slight grimace, I made a drone that looked exactly like my Avatar and quickly switched it out with myself as I Blinked back to the ship with my Avatar. That drone would do its best to stick to the Commissar while I handled the cultist outbreaks, and I’d retake its place once that was done. I didn’t see it taking all that long with no Greater Daemons among the attackers as far as I could tell.

Not that those things usually just popped up out of nowhere. Rituals to summon them took exorbitant sacrifices to facilitate, and anything of the sort wouldn’t have slipped past my attention.

*****

Life was such a fragile thing, a single mistake or a moment’s hesitation could put an end to one that had lasted centuries. It didn’t matter that he had survived Orks charging at him by the hundreds, that he had snuck through a waking Necron Tomb and nor did it matter that he had fought off traitor Astartes and a Warboss with just his chain sword.

If Cain took just a single second more to spot the vehicle rolling down the street, or more accurately, the idiot dressed in vibrant velvety clothes leaning out its side with a las-rifle held in her hands, he would have died then and there. Right in the doorframe of a quaint little cafe on a backwater world on the very edges of the known galaxy.

As it was, his instincts flared up the moment he saw the round barrel of the lasgun. It was never a good sign when you could see into its dark belly, it usually meant the weapon was aimed right at you. He just had a moment to catch a bright orange light blossom in the barrel before he threw himself on the ground.

The familiar hiss of the lasbolt flying past his head reached his ears, along with the smell of burnt hair. That was far, far too close for comfort.

He would never really call what he did next ‘scampering back into the cafe on all fours’, rather, it was a tactical repositioning of himself while keeping his centre of mass strategically close to the ground. That sounded much better, even if it essentially meant the same thing.

Back inside, he watched another few lasbolts fly in through the open door and splatter across the back wall, scorching fist-sized holes into it. Glass shattered around him as the bolts struck the front windows and all the remaining customers inside screamed in fright.

By some astronomical luck, none of them got hit. Not even the beautiful white-haired woman he had been chatting with just moments ago despite one bolt smashing the chair she’d been sitting on into smouldering fragments.

He once again entertained the thought that she was that Sorceress-turned-Daemon-Prince in disguise that had been trying to eat his soul for a better part of a century.

He dismissed the thought again, catching the woman huddling under the table with a fearful expression on her face. Emily would never have acted like that. That woman had a planet’s worth of pride even when she was just a mortal Sorceress. It had only gotten worse when she ‘ascended’ into that horrid monstrosity she now was.

His back pressed up against the wall of the cafe which was blessedly built of bricks and not wood, Cain hastily extracted his laspistol from its holster and pressed the comm-bead hidden in a pocket into his ear.

He only heard static.

He allowed himself only a second to lament his fate and curse his past self for agreeing to this ‘little excursion’ as Amberly had called it before he huffed in a quick breath. His eyes snapped open and fixated on the door leading into the back.

He had to get the frak out of here and quick. If those lunatics had a Krak missile launcher — with his luck being as it always was, he was sure they did — he needed to get out of here yesterday if he didn’t want to be blown into a hundred bloody bits.

How he was going to get back to the safe house with the cultists hunting him, he had no idea, but he would have to do it somehow. The alternative was death or being stuck on this backwater while the others fled.

Something had gone horrendously wrong in the capital if what that woman had said was true. Her story didn’t sound feasible, but if it was, the planet’s entire cultist population was about to start running amok like a bunch of headless chickens.

He had to either get off the planet, or hide somewhere to wait it out.

Grimacing as another lasbolt struck the wall he had been hiding behind, he psyched himself up and launched into a crouching sprint for the back door. He just hoped his luck would hold out for long enough to see him to safety one more time.