# Losing the Colonel



## Dalriadian89 (Jun 11, 2008)

This is the first of a series I've been writing. This is the only polished one and its sorta halfway. I just wanted a bit of feedback for my work so far...
Let me know what you think...

Cheers :good:

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A snow fell upon the ground. The General's kilt hung damp from his waist. His cloak was white with the snow that rested on it. He stood facing out to the harsh snowy tundra before him. His adjutants stood within the tent behind him, beside him stood his specially adapted Chimera, painted white with a black hawk on the turret. He sighed. The cold seemed not to affect him. He knew his beard and eyebrows were covered with snow but he failed to feel the cold.

His second in command stepped out of the tent is a fur lined greatcoat and touched his arm. The General turned to face his friend. The look of despair in his eyes saddened his companion. The General nodded and returned into the tent.

“Who is ready to move right now,” he asked as he returned inside.

His already fierce features looked almost bestial covered in snow. Commanders ready to move nodded or spoke aloud their acknowledgement. The General strode forward and stabbed a finger at the map.

“All of you assemble in defensive formation around the base of this hill. We have to get our division back to the line in as much of a fighting state as possible. All of you will send signals back to me at the top of the hour with your progress, in between that you will send out distress signals in the direction of the line. Understood? Good, go now.”

With the mobile commanders gone he was left with ten Colonels. Their infantry had lost its transport in the ice. Even the tech-priests couldn’t unfreeze something at the bottom of a frozen sea. They looked forlornly at their commander. Would he abandon them? It would be a harsh but well chosen solution to speed up their reunion with the Imperial forces on this icy rock.

“Sir,” breathed an old Colonel. He looked dishevelled and cold. He would not live another two days if there was no other cover for him, the General decided. His men would die shortly afterward, too as they ran out of food. 

“Save it Uri Ivanovich, I have made my decision,” he announced quietly. The wind outside was growing and that meant more blizzards and more dead men. “I don’t know if I can get you back. I haven’t got enough room, even on the tanks and the artillery, to sit ten battalions of you. I can only leave the decision to you. You can double back to the ice caves we holed up in two days ago, and hope that the Traitors’s don’t find you, or you can ask your men to make their own minds. They can follow on foot or be carried on the available space. They’ll be just as cold but twice, maybe three times, as fast. That is all I can do right now, with what I’ve got.”

He leant on the table and waved them out. He held a hand aloft as the old Colonel reached the door.

“A word, Uri.”

The Colonel nodded and returned to the table. His grey beard was frozen and his bionic hand seemed to be frozen in its closed fist.

“Remind me, Uri Ivanovich, how you got that,” asked the General.

“Sir, it was an Ork. He bit my hand off as I tried to punch him,” whispered the Colonel.

The General looked closely at his subordinate. Uri was one of his better commanders but he was near death. There was little that could be done. It would be five days at least before they reached the line, if it was where the General expected it to be. That was as likely as the Traitors forgetting them, but their best hope in their desperation.

“Uri, will you tell me now or wait till the end,” asked the General.

The Colonel looked as if he would cry. He was near enough to breaking point. The General’s question broke through the stone façade that the Colonel had maintained for almost forty years.

“My leg is black and so is my torso. The medics say that I will be dead by the morning after next, but in constant pain until the throne releases me.”

The General knelt in front of the seated Colonel and kissed his cold cheek. The Colonel was crying now. The hand of death was on him and he feared it, as all men did.

“My friend, there is nothing they can do,” asked the General in obvious disbelief.

“Nothing at all. I am as dead as that Ork who took my hand.”

The Colonel sighed. “I won’t go. Leave me here in the snow with my pistol. I am dead already and the Emperor’s mercy awaits me. Nothing else.”

“The men would admire you if you told them that Uri Ivanovich. Even in facing your death you remain as heartedly devoted to the Emperor as Macharius himself.”

*

The cold wind whipped the flags of the static vechiles. Their engines howled and grunted as they warmed their cold parts. Inside men pushed the clothes of the dead men into the slightest gap in the doors to block the wind. Transports were filled with twice their usual load of men as troopers huddled together sharing warmth. Fires were surrounded by as many as a thousand men, all desperately trying to restore the feeling in their hands. At a word from the loud hailers attached to their transports, they departed and the fire blew out.

The General stood on the turret of his Chimera. Surveying the scene he waved his arm above his head and the 404th began its slow but steady progress across the snow. Units began to move off behind them. Soon all were moving save the General’s Chimera and a Commissar’s Vanquisher Leman Russ.

“Sir, we must go,” called Commissar above the noises of the engines and the wind.

The General looked toward the cold features of the Commissar. What utter stupidity to misunderstand such a base thing as loyalty to a comrade. He ignored him and turned from the scene of thirty thousand men moving to face a solitary old man with a grey beard and a pistol.

“Uri Ivanovich, I will miss you in years to come,” he called to the Colonel.

The Colonel smiled and called back to his superior, “I will miss you General, wherever it is I go from here.”

The Colonel pulled himself up as best he could beneath his furs and saluted.

The General returned the gesture with a tear in his eye. How could such folly lead to such horrific losses? Old friends’ dead and blue, frozen bodies leaving a trail hundreds of miles long through snow drifts hundreds of feet high. He truly would miss Uri. An old friend and trusty commander lost to the Imperium. But not from the Emperor’s arms. He stamped his foot down on the turret and he felt the Chimera lurch forward.

As he ploughed through the snows he sat on the turret with his great cloak wrapped around him. He watched Uri’s waving figure grow small. Then he saw the man reach for his pistol and raise his arm once more. He saw Uri fall, crumpled, to the ground long before the noise of the Laspistol reached his ears. He bowed his head and begged the Emperor to show mercy upon his dearly departed friend and then he shook his head and climbed into his command tank.

Uri might be in the Emperor’s arms, but there was a duty to the rest that Uri would never forgive him for forgetting…


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## zahariel (Feb 28, 2008)

this is good write some more pity about that colonel dying sounded cool how he got the bionic hand


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