None of this is my fault, understand? You can blame my producer, since it was his decision to cut costs by booking travel with the camp followers of the 119th Chorzin Grenadiers. You can blame the Munitorum clerk who decided to make money selling Officio Prefectus uniform pieces on the side. You can blame the colonel for getting himself killed. And I guess you can blame me, a little bit, for agreeing to star in Commissar Delecta’s Lustful Appetites, Vol. MCDXII. 

Hey, a girl’s gotta eat.

We were a week in the void, hitching a ride with a regiment rotating back from the front. So there I am, crammed into half a cabin with my teeny, tiny, little uniform, which looks fake as shit but it doesn’t matter because I’m only gonna wear it for five minutes tops, and my plastek bolt pistol which looks kinda real, and my big coat which actually is real because some gunk-head bought Militarum “surplus.” Which I’m pretty sure is illegal. I’m sitting there reading the script – not the most edifying thing in the galaxy – and thinking, how in the name of the Throne did I end up here? 

But then the whole ship shakes, and the lights flicker, and there’s a loud crash from somewhere. And all hell breaks loose. 

The lights go off and stay off, except the creepy red emergency lights. I run outside, ‘cause I gotta find out what in the name of the Throne is going on. But it’s chaos out there. People are screaming, running, hiding. Kids are wailing. There’s soldiers everywhere.

Just when I’m thinking I might ask them for help, they come running up, shouting, ‘Commissar! We need you!’

For a second I’m totally thrown, and then I realise I’ve got the coat on and it’s buttoned up so they can’t see how little I’m wearing underneath. I want to say, no no, you don’t understand, but there’s no time because suddenly we’re moving, three of them and me scrambling to keep up. 

I’ll tell them when I get a moment, I decide, only I can’t find a moment because now we’re surrounded by soldiers, ducked behind cargo pallets, and before I can ask why, something zips right past my face and smacks into the soldier behind me and knocks him off his feet.

Holy Throne, I think, someone just shot that guy!

‘Get in cover, commissar,’ someone shouts. I duck down behind a box with the rest of them, and now I can hear a zip and whine and, occasionally, a snap-crack like a whip. Some of the Grenadiers are shooting over the tops of the pallets.

‘What the hell is going on?’ I scream, but I guess it sounds commanding rather than terrified, because one of the soldiers says, ‘raiders, Mamzel. They’ve boarded us.’ And then I really look at him, and I realise that he’s probably even more scared than me, because he’s practically a juve. They all are. I’m not even thirty standard and I’m the oldest person here.

So I go, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ because I need an adult, but one of the kids points to something on the ground I can see just well enough to know that I don’t wanna see any more. I’m trying not to puke, and meanwhile a few of them put their heads together and then they’re coming back over and handing me something. 

I can’t see what it is too clearly so I reach out my hands and then the lights flicker again and, oh shit, I’m holding a sword. A real sword. I almost drop it, but I manage to get a grip on the not-sharp part without slicing myself open. And just when I’m trying to figure out what to say, someone shouts, ‘here they come!’

I’m about as terrified as I’ve ever been, but then the raiders arrive and I guess I was saving some more terror somewhere. They’re huge men wearing chains and scraps of armour, and they’ve got these nasty-looking hooks and knives and axes. They’re screaming their heads off, and so are the Grenadiers, and so am I. The Grenadiers have bayonets, and they’re stabbing and shooting, and the raiders are stabbing and hollering, and there’s blood everywhere now, and then there’s me, stumbling around trying not to drop this sword and also holding my coat closed with one hand because I’m still, uh, dressed for work underneath. 

One of the raiders comes for me, a big guy with a huge chainaxe. He’s roaring. It’s roaring. There’s this horrible mist of blood coming off it, and I’m just about to pass out from terror when someone cannons into me from the side. ‘Look out, Commissar,’ says one of the kids, and then whoosh, the axe comes down and the kid basically falls apart. The raider looks over at me and grins, his face all bloody, and right then I slip on the blood and fall onto my ass. Perfect timing. So he jumps at me, and I just scream and roll over, and then my thumb slips on the blood coating the handle of this sword and finds a button. PZHOW! 

The whole blade lights up electric blue, nearly blinds me, and I instinctively thrust out my arm to get this blinding light out of my face, and thokk, it sinks into something. And then it dawns on me that I’m not dead, so I look up, and there’s this huge raider impaled right through the neck laying next to me.

That’s when I pass out.

I woke up in the infirmary. I got an awkward talking-to from a real commissar, who said that I was being considered for both a court-martial and an award for valour. I didn’t end up getting either; I guess the whole thing was such an embarrassment that they just decided to sweep it under the rug. We never ended up shooting Commissar Delecta, either. 

Shame – I liked the uniform.