‘By the Throne, what’s that smell?’ Fallon pushed aside the flaps of the tent and stepped into its poorly lit interior.

‘Rations.’ The Kid glanced up, before returning his attention back to the cans on the heater. Fallon groaned softly, loosening the straps of his armour. The tan carapace of the 678th Dolan Heavy Infantry more than living up to the heavy part of the regiment’s name after 4 hours of sentry duty. He was about to place his lasrifle on the gun rack when a voice rang out from the rear of the tent. 

‘SAFETY!’

‘Yes Sarge.’ Fallon checked his weapon, muttered a brief entreaty to the Omnissiah to preserve the favour of its machine spirit, then returned it to its resting place. ‘You blow a few holes out of one barracks room, and they never let you forget!’ He winked at The Kid, who grinned back, managing for a second to appear even younger. Fallon would have bet a month’s wage that he’d lied about his age to the Adepts at the recruitment office, not that they’d have cared. ‘The Lieutenant won’t forget’, Sarge called, ‘you were trying to juggle, and you nearly took his ear off!’

‘Then how would he keep his hat on?’ Fallon drawled sardonically. The Kid giggled. Fourteen, thought Fallon, fifteen max.

‘The Commissar hasn’t forgotten either.’ Sarge pushed her chair back from the desk and swung around to face the Guardsmen. The field cogitator she’d been hammering a report into lit the end of the tent with a tepid green glow. The grin dropped from Fallon’s face. The twelve lashes in front of the assembled company had been painful and humiliating enough; the barely suppressed smirk on the face of Commissar Vandamar as he was assigned six months of latrine duty was a memory he’d prefer not to revisit.

Deflated, Fallon slumped onto a chair next to The Kid. He considered the cans on the heater. ‘So, what delicacies have the Departmento Munitorium seen fit to bless us with today?’

‘Um.’ The Kid scrabbled around the floor before handing over a crumpled foil packet. Fallon took it, smoothed it flat against his knee and studied the print on its side. Beneath a simple, stylised Aquilla, bold and confident letters in Low Gothic declared: ‘Departmento Munitorium of the Astra Millitarum. Rations Ready to Eat. Nutritious meals designed to aid the able Guardsman in combat’. A smaller line grudgingly admitting: ‘Guaranteed no more than 50% corpse starch’.

‘Oh Terra!’ Fallon moaned, ‘Are you trying to kill me? Sarge! What happened to the real food?’

‘All gone, resupply next week.’ She’d turned back to the cogitator, aggressively two-finger typing on its battered keys. She paused, pulled a Bac stick out of a crumpled packet with her teeth then hunted around her desk for a lighter. ‘At least it isn’t that self warming muck.’

‘The tech-priests say it’s good for you,’ The Kid offered, ‘everything you need to fight the Emperor’s foes and win.’

Fallon fixed him with a withering glare, ‘Ever seen a tech-priest eat one?’

‘Um…’

‘Exactly!’ He crumpled the foil and let it drop to the floor, not bothering to read what further dubious claims the R.R.E might make. ‘What about the trades Sarge? We got a good deal off that Tallarn regiment that came through last month.’

Sarge had found her lighter, the end of the Bac stick flared orange as she drew in a deep breath. She held it for a couple of seconds then exhaled a blue grey cloud that drifted up towards the brass gargoyle face of the air re-circ unit in the roof of the tent.

‘Gone too. It’s that ‘til next week,’ She nodded at the R.R.E. crate on the floor, ‘unless you can find a new trade.’

‘That’s not likely’, Fallon considered, ‘there’re no new regiments due in anytime soon.’

‘What about the Mordian 57th?’ The Kid ventured.

‘No,’ Fallon sighed, leaning back, ‘they aren’t talking to me anymore. Or rather,’ he corrected himself, ‘the conversation they want to have might involve slightly more violence than I’m comfortable with!’

‘Why’s that, Fal?’

Fallon kept his gaze on the tent’s lumen strip,  considering the question. ‘Their regimental mascot, a pedigree grox, has disappeared, and they believe that I may know something about it.’

‘Do you, Fal?’

‘All I’m saying is that it’s fine to have 1400lbs of prime steak as your mascot when you’re on parade, but only a total idiot would actually bring it on deployment!’ The chatter of Sarge’s keys was interrupted by a snigger, but The Kid looked uncharacteristically appalled.

‘But, but it was an officer!’ He exclaimed.

‘What…’ Fallon turned to face the youth, radiating confusion, ‘…are you on about?!’.

‘It was an officer!’ He stammered, ‘I was talking to a girl in the mess, one of the Mordians, she said it was Colonel Scales. She said they give it a rank so everyone treats it right! She said they have to salute it and everything!’ The Kid’s words tumbled over each other as he became more distressed. ‘You can’t eat an officer, Fal! You’ll be sent to a Penal Legion! The Commissar will shoot you!’

Fallon sat, silenced by this revelation. Sarge had ceased her abuse of the cogitator, and contemplated the scene with an amused gaze. ‘They salute it, Fal. It’s an officer!’ The Kid mumbled, a vision of a commissariat firing squad haunting his near future.

‘Look, kid,’ Fallon finally offered, ‘what do the Commissars do?’

‘They maintain discipline?’ he replied, mentally reaching for the appropriate pages of the Astra Millitarum Infantryman’s Primer.

‘And…’

‘And, and they promote morale?’

‘Exactly! And what is better for morale than a full belly? Now our Commissar Vandamar is very keen on morale, especially his own, and with that in mind I would like you to consider this’, Fallon leaned in conspiratorily ‘where exactly did you think the Commissar has been getting his grox steaks from this past week?’