The Regrettable Ice-World of Juridicae

The formidable Sergeant-Major Drake looks back on a lifetime of unfortunate injuries. Just a bit of fun, I had actually jotted down the idea for a story like this some months ago. It owes a lot to a short story by Michael Moorcock lampooning his own fantasy characters, and also to Bill The Galactic Hero. 1,800 words Writing time : A morning Finished : 2 Sep 2007 Download as Word file

It was whispered in the barracks of the Jopall Thirteenth Indentured Regiment that there were only two things the fearsome greenskins were truly afraid of. The awesome Emperor Titan of the Legio Annihilatus was one, and the other was Sergeant-Major Drake.

This was not, in fact, entirely true.

The greenskins looked upon one as an apocalyptic god of war whose shadow falling on a battlefield would whip them into a lather of primal savagery that was almost religious in its fervour. The Titan, on the other hand, they thought would make a nice hood ornament for the Gargant they were building.

The only people who were actually terrified of Sergeant-Major Drake were the footsloggers of the Thirteenth Regiment. And the non-commissioned officers. And quite a few of the officers and senior regimental staff as well. In fact, ever since Sergeant-Major Drake had proven, as rations ran low on reconnaissance deep in the fly-blown jungles of Gethsemian, that when he said he ate lieutenants for breakfast, he actually meant it, most everybody who ever met Sergeant-Major Drake vowed to never repeat the experience, and also to become strict vegetarians.

Sergeant-Major Drake, of course, was well aware of this. He did not enjoy the effect he had on others, for Sergeant-Major Drake did not enjoy anything at all, not even kittens, but he knew that it was absolutely essential that his presence provoke fear in even the stoutest of hearts. He had taken great pains to ensure it, for Sergeant-Major Drake had been rebuilt by the Tech Priests of the Mechanicus more times than a troop-ship latrine.

His physical appearance alone was bad enough, he thought, examining himself in the mirror as he shaved with a power-claw ripped from an ork Warboss, but his first line of attack on morale-starved soldiery – his orbital bombardment, he liked to think of it – was his voice.

Tyranid ripper swarms on Pylolololus Major were to blame. One of them had not noticed his terrible demeanour until it was too late and had been panicked into pressing its assault. Before it lay sliced and diced on the grass at his feet it had succeeded in tearing his voice-box out. Due to an outbreak of near-terminal laryngitis in the regiment owing to a shipment of Chaos-tainted whistles, the Mechanicus had no ready replacements for him, so they had pressed into service the first suitable augmentation at hand. The loudhailer had previously been used by Lord General Bianchi to address over a million troops at the beginning of the Ampersand Crusade. Now its mighty floral brass trumpets adorned Sergeant-Major Drake’s tree trunk-like neck, and the hum of the transformer could be heard over a mile away at night.

Sergeant-Major Drake had been unable to partake in many stealth missions thereafter, but his ability to communicate with naval fleet elements in close orbit simply by shouting had proven to be a greater asset.

His bite had once been even worse than his bark, as the unfortunate lieutenant whose passing has already been lamented could have attested had he survived, but after the incident on Kasabian Eph-Zharp Minor, however, that was no longer the case. A greenhorn had dropped his primed frag grenade in the middle of a midnight assault. Rather than see his squad torn to pieces, Sergeant-Major Drake had chosen to defuse the situation by biting through the grenade. He succeeded in removing the detonator cap and saving his men, but the cap exploded in his mouth causing non-trivial dental wounding. In the heat of a major land push, the Mechanicum adepts had panicked in both their fear of their incandescent but now jawless patient and their laudable desire to see him back on the battlefield as soon as possible (the two are not thought to be connected), and installed the first device that would fit. Unfortunately, it was a special forces breathing apparatus – known locally as a snorkel – and Sergeant-Major Drake returned to the frontlines only hours later with a jaw reconstituted from bales of barbed wire and a thin metal pipe sticking straight out from where his mouth used to be.

Using the ingenious and borderline-psychotic mind with which the Emperor had blessed him, Sergeant-Major Drake had the pipe sharpened and fitted with a miniature chainblade running along its length, lending him a unique and terrifying close-combat proboscis with which he could impale opponents and siphon off their vital bodily fluids. He could no longer, he regretted, eat lieutenants for breakfast with his lethal combat-straw, unless, of course, they were first turned into soup.

His shaving complete, Sergeant-Major Drake stiffened the joints in his legs. This was an essential part of his morning ritual, for reasons that will soon become clear. During a boarding action for which he received both the Macharian Cross and an unusual marching style he contrived to fall through a weakened deck-plate while leading the ratings in a counterattack. He became involved with certain sub-floor wiring and found himself wedged upside down with the majority of his upper body protruding into the corridor below.

Stubbornly refusing to admit to his troops – when they entered that same corridor in a state of some tactical confusion – that his predicament was profound, he instead insisted that he had taken up a fiendishly clever position from which to direct the assault and waved them on into battle. Such was his reputation and indeed, loudness, and so furiously did he beckon with his sidearm that not even the sight of Sergeant-Major Drake’s torso emerging from the ceiling could lead any of them to question his orders.

So it was that when the rodents that infested the vessel found his lower parts (although not, as we shall see later, his groin) sticking uselessly up from the decking in the corridor above and started to consume them, Sergeant-Major Drake was honour-bound not to mention it to his men. With the stoicism for which he was famous he simply issued his orders in even greater volume than before. His kicks, while famously capable of depriving a man in the family way, proved less than useful against the abnormally large rats.

Despite Sergeant-Major Drake’s tactical nous the Eldar reavers whose vessel this was countered his counterassault and began to push his ratings back. Just as the damnable xenos swarmed over hastily erected barricades below the rats above finished their repast on Sergeant-Major Drake’s lower quarters and he dropped from the ceiling like a stone, landing square atop the Eldar leader and killing him. Thus was the counter-counter-assault broken, the Macharian Cross won and the ship taken shortly thereafter.

The matter of Sergeant-Major Drake’s mobility much vexed the Tech Priests, for the convoy was not bound for war and carried little in the way of augmetic legs. Hastily improvising – for Sergeant-Major Drake was not a patient one left for long in any ward where one wished one’s other patients to flourish – the enginseers of the Mechanicus assembled the convoy captains and learned from them the contents of their holds.

For reasons lost to the historians and archivists of the Administratum, the annual harvest festival on the world of Davisham Diminished 7th has long involved the hunting of dangerous wild animals by the planet’s renowned Avian Cavalry, who ride the fearsome Davisham Battle Fowl. From the backs of these terrifying and vicious creatures, whose exacting resemblance to giant chickens should never be noted near a proud native of Davisham, have the noblest soldiers of Davisham spread the glory of the Imperium of Man, and also considerable and pungent fertiliser.

The holds held fresh-bred Battle Fowl bound for the harvest festival and one was sacrificed for the greater good of the Imperial Guard. In a laudable but ultimately back-firing effort to ensure that Sergeant-Major Drake’s new method of locomotion did not arouse startled glances, the backward-bending leg joints of the giant broiler were replaced with freely-rotating ball-joints taken from shipboard plumbing supplies.

So it was that Sergeant-Major Drake’s early morning ritual necessarily involved stiffening these ball-joints as otherwise he found they had a tendency to flail in all directions independently of his forward motion. Many a passing footslogger had been struck unconscious by a wayward lower limb, many a staff officer alarmed into self-urination as a triple-toed boot whipped inches past his face as Sergeant-Major Drake executed an about-turn and, if only for this reason, Sergeant-Major Drake was given a wide berth around camp. His gait had become legend, his oddly scratching footsteps as feared as his shout, and his devouring of a singularly enormous roast chicken following his shipboard surgery was talked about in hushed tones by the regiment’s envious chefs.

In similar manner, albeit with less involvement of chickens, had Sergeant-Major Drake’s entire left arm been replaced with the dispensing claw from the mess drinks machine and his eyes replaced with a cyclopean vid-camera mounted in his forehead which he could also use to project slides from his impressive pictorial collection of coastal-flowering shrubs. Many long evenings in the Thirteenth Regiment flew past with the aid of Sergeant-Major Drake’s slideshows, although his over-loud commentary could cause fish to die in nearby lakes.

He was also the only non-commissioned officer in the entire Jopal Indentured army to possess one of the rare and fabled power-weapons, given to him by a grateful Tech Marine of the Iron Hands for his part in an intestinal insertion into a tyranid bio-ship. Sadly, the technology had been inadvertently miniaturised following a drunken bet between the two Mechanicus surgeons tasked with implanting it, but Sergeant-Major Drake was still the proud possessor of the only power-thumb in the Imperium of Man.

There was, however, only one augmentation that Sergeant-Major Drake regretted. Perhaps regretted was too strong a word – he was no connoisseur, but he could appreciate the art of the augmetic surgeon, perhaps more than any man alive, and this was indeed a miracle of the craft: perfect in every detail. It was therefore unfortunate, he thought, gazing not for the first time into his regimental issue undergarments, that when his groin had been explosively inconvenienced by the pin-point accuracy of the Tau snipers, the female Tech Priests who had installed the replacement organ had been from the ice-world of Juridicae.

It was not their fault, he knew. Although they were Adepts of the sterile Mechanicus they were also women, and would doubtless have had occasion to glance upon the membrum virile of the men of their homeworld, perhaps in the pursuit of some scientific endeavour of understanding. That they had endowed him with what they had seen he could not blame them for, but it was, Sergeant-Major Drake ruminated, a sad and personal misfortune that it was so very, very cold on that particular planet.

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