407th Chasseurs

Raising & Tithe

The 407th was raised under emergency conditions. The Votann had broken through the trade worlds of the Segmentum Pacificus; the Departmento Munitorum needed armoured formations at once. Ketterhold was already a penal world with standing garrisons and armament capacity—the regular tithe (one tenth) would have sufficed. But the casualties of the preceding 406th raising had been so high that the world's governor had been threatened with execution. To save his own skin, he did not simply deliver the tithe of the ranks—he emptied the prisons.

Every soldier was drawn by lot. Not sorted by prison, but taken from labour columns, cell blocks and forced-labour camps. Some were gravely convicted, some lightly; many were victims of misfortune or misunderstanding. They received ten days of training. They received cast-off uniforms. They received the clear order: Die usefully or die below. The result was not discipline, but desperation—and desperation is sharper than any training.

The home world lost the entire population of its prisons: cooks, scribes, craftsmen, unlicensed physicians, priests without temples. Ketterhold was a place for people who were permitted to be nowhere else. When they departed, an entire network of ways of life was torn apart.

What the Homeworld Lost

The prison cemetery fell into neglect. Ketterhold—like all penal worlds—had a cemetery for prisoners whose names were no longer known. The dead were buried there without priest, without ceremony, without witness. Someone had to speak the rites—not out of faith, but out of respect for the form. That was the task of the Outcasts. A dozen men and women whose only duty was not to forget the names entirely. They now fight somewhere beneath alien skies. The cemetery is no longer visited.

The Homeworld

Ketterhold is a world of rock and chains. It lies at the edge of an ion storm and has no natural harbour. The climate alternates between brooding humidity and scorching drought. The continents are cut through by mountain massifs whose gradients turn many a march into a martyrdom. The Imperium did not establish a colony here but a prison—because no other place was so isolated, so merciless and so difficult to leave. People who had to be removed from society came here. Generations lived in underground cells and in labour camps on the surface. They learned to work with rock. They learned to press water from stone. They learned not to flee, because there is no place to which one could flee.

This shaped their character: tough, without hope, violent under pressure. The people of Ketterhold know that the world does not want them to live. They are on this world because they are being punished. That makes them loyal or wicked—both at once. They despise weakness, because here weakness is a death sentence. They accept authority, because authority is the only thing that preserves them from complete anarchy.

The Disadvantage They Carry

Soldiers of Ketterhold cannot understand that other people have hope. They hold that every person beyond their world has lied, or has lied to themselves. They do not regard cooperation as friendship, but as temporary ceasefires. This cost the regiment dearly when it was ordered to negotiate with local chieftains on the world of Korvas. The soldiers of the 407th insulted them because they did not grasp that peace was impossible. They put a local chieftain to death. The local uprising that followed cost 73 men—without a single hit on the enemy. The commissar serving under Colonel Kess could have executed two dozen soldiers for it. He did not. He merely wrote in the log: Ketterhold does not unlearn; it only fights the world itself.

Regimental Culture

The barracks—or what remains of them, for many troop quarters are now nothing but tent canvas and ration lists—smell of oil, sweat and gunsmoke, overlaid by Munitorum alcohol: cheap, poisonous fuel that one should not drink, but does, because it is the alternative to sobriety. The work is done in silence. Repair, cleaning, ammunition checks—all without song, without chatter. There is a marching song, but no work chorus. The reason is simple: the 407th learned to be silent on Ketterhold.

Superstition is stubborn. Every tank has a name—not that of the tank commander, but that of the soldier who first rode it. Some crews speak to their machines as if they were fellow prisoners. They say that the iron answers. The Colonel no longer forbids it. The priests of the Ecclesiarchy protest, but the soldiers of the 407th have no time for the soul—only for what keeps them alive.

The dead are burned when there is time. When there is no time, they are left on the battlefield. There is no ritual for it; there is only the mute understanding that the dead man will fight no more and therefore no longer exists. No one weeps. No one tells of him. No one speaks his name a second time.

The brandy ration is drunk alone, not shared. It is the only right a soldier retains.

The Commissariat

The commissars of the 407th are feared, but not hasty. They know that mutiny is possible among such people—they are convicts, after all. Yet they also know that the fear of the commissar is smaller than the fear of the home from which they came. The commissar is known. The commissar has reasons. That is better than the caprice of the prison. And so the 407th has a silent understanding with its commissars: the commissar executes no one without reason, and the soldier obeys, even when the reason is questionable. Twice a commissar tried to break this pact—both times the commissar vanished. A shot, at night, no body found. The next commissar understood the message.