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Milos blinked as the sack came off. He had been marching, blindly, with the rest of the company. He was standing in a large camp. Pre- fabricated buildings stood in neat rows all around. They surged off in all directions. Milos couldn’t see with the tears streaming down his dirtied face. He had been marching for a great deal of time and his boots were torn and leaking mud.

He was standing in a clearing. The ground was made of well compacted dirt, toughened still by the cold. There was a xeno standing in front of him, flanked by two xeno warriors. His sight had improved. He struggled to wipe his eyes but couldn’t. He was manacled, by feet and hand, and he was chained by the waist to the man in front. The xeno was short and hirsute save for a single braid of black hair. Its skin was a dull grey- blue and it was swathed in thick, ornately decorated robes. Tau. Evidently the little bluie bastard didn’t like the cold much. It lacked a nose and was wheezing, hacking, like an influenza sufferer.

It cast a black eye over the assembled prisoners and spoke. It was a smooth language, like running water yet by its very nature perfidious and manipulative. Beside it stood a white armoured warrior, who inclined his head reverently to its elder. One chain of prisoners was taken and punted along. One man fell over. A warrior kicked him repeatedly with a cloven foot. The man scrabbled, trying to gather his teeth. The tau fired its blocky rifle into the chain, breaking it. The man stood unsteadily and tried to walk away. Another figure, this one a human, approached the man, a bayonet in his hand. Milos could not see past the man in front of him for a moment. There was a cry of pain and the man fell down, silent.
The human wiped the bayonet on his fatigues and holstered it. He faced the crowd. He was a darkly handsome man, fit for a propaganda poster. He had the air of a commissar, and a twinge of regret played across his face. It was displaced by a wide, unsettling smirk. The robed Tau inclined his head towards the man who in turn returned the gesture.
The man spoke. “Men of the Guard, officers and soldiers, hear me now!” he spoke, affably. “There is no rescue, no evacuation points, no fleet in orbit and no hope for you. The Corpse-Lord has abandoned you as he abandoned me. You will not die here, on one condition” he paused for dramatic effect. Warriors roughly unlocked the manacles, taking a great deal of time, elbowing and manhandling far more than was necessary.

The man threw his arms in the air, like an idiot and yelled “Any who is willing to embrace the Greater Good, step forwards”. It may have worked if anyone knew what in the warp that was. What Milos knew of it was that it was a heathen xeno concept only followed by the weak and the deviant, that it promised an earthly paradise to those who would turn from the Emperor and annihilate their souls. The company Priest had gone into great detail.

No one stepped forward.

The man shook his head and muttered something the Tau language. The warriors harangued and drove the crowd past a pair of wire gates. The group was split into several lines and herded into sheds. Milos stood against the wall as a short, overweight Tau came into the shed. It was musty and a strip light provided poor lighting. The tau took the soldiers one by one, cropping their hair and customary beards with a dull razor. Milos grimaced and blinked back tears as the tau took a fleck of skin off with the razor. He hadn’t been without a beard since he was a teen. The cold stopped the blood flow and the wind bit harder into him. The Tau had granted the small mercy of allowing the men to keep the great coats and ursine hats.

The quarters were putrid. The shed were leaky rockcrete constructs with shabby tin roofs and no facilities. They had occupants- dirty, downtrodden people with sunken eyes and emaciated figures. Milos started when a man bumped into him. The man looked up. It was clear he was blind- cataracts had clouded over the lenses. The man staggered and fell, his head making a cracking sound as it struck the permafrost soil. A few men went to help him only to be warned off by a burly human guard.
The guard sauntered over to the man, with two others. He berated the man, called him “Emperor Lover” and kicked him in the groin. The man let out a weak groan and coughed feebly. The guard smirked at his also grinning comrades and produced a wire noose.

Sergeant Tsuvari, a trooper that Milos knew vaguely, muttered “Cowards. Stringing up an old man simply because they want some sport.”
Tsuvari took a rockcrete brick that was lying on the ground next to the shed and rushed out of the crowd. He struck the guard on the jaw. There was a crack and the jaw dislocated. The guard fell to the ground, choking on teeth and blood whilst trying to reattach the left side of the jaw.
The two guards are too sunned to move at first. The whole square stills. Milos had never heard such silence. The shambling men in the other sheds look on, their haunted, empty eyes lighting up for a moment. The felled guard squawks something and scrabbles for his bayonet but can’t quite manage it, his arm flailing wildly like a drunken man falling down a flight of stairs.

A Tau steps out of a nearby guard hut. This one was scarred, his blue skin marred by a lightning fork pattern of grey scar tissue. He strode over to the crowd and went up to Tsuvari. The Sergeant was still standing over the two prone bodies, not having planned this far ahead, if at all. He hurled the brick at the Tau and bull rushed the guards. He swung a fist into the solar plexus of the first. The second thrust at him with the bayonet. It sliced into Tsuvari’s thick left forearm, getting caught in the bone. Tsuvari roared like an ursine and grabbed the guard’s head with his right hand, digging his thumb into the guards left eye. It popped with a squelch and the guard screamed in pain.
The Tau took out a strange sword, curved in its form and dug into Tsuvari’s shoulder. The sergeant screamed and tried to turn but couldn’t. He sank to his knees and reached for the blade. The Tau barked an order and everal warriors took the stricken guards away. Tsuvari and the old man were dragged off. The crowd dispersed. Milos crawled into the inadequate bed and spent the night swatting bugs.

The soldiers awoke the net day to find a scaffold constructed in the clearing. It had the sergeant and the old man on it, hanging by their necks. Tsuvari had a sign around his neck that read “Emperor Lover”. Milos couldn’t help but feel a little envious.

Nice story I want to read more now.