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You only think you know what cold is. The void trooper’s habitation, despite his ship traveling through the cold of space, will run a climate from chilly to warm depending on the ship and the location of his quarters. The Valhallan Ice Warriors are famous from system to system for their resilience to the climate of their world. But I tell you their coldest day would be a delight we could only dream of on this forsaken ball of ice.
Almost nothing lives on Winter's Grasp save us, if you call this a living. Besides the rare burrowing creatures huddling around the odd thermal pocket nothing but us stirs here except maybe dark furtive echoes of an ancient past, or worse. No one can show their face on its surface and live. Most of us exist locked away deep underground with nothing but reactors to provide just enough warmth to keep you from freezing solid in your sleep. The few surface installations and the spires for theplanetary administration and their courts stare up into a black sky. An eternal night filled with stars. Pathetic stars including our own, which little more than a cruel joke in the sky. It travels lazy from horizon to horizon staring at us from a distance so great it contributes nothing but a dim suggestion of what other planets might call a day. At the poles, carbon dioxide freezes as solid rock. Even at the equator, to remove your mask is to have your eyes and face begin to freeze solid within a second.
A man can hate his lot in life, hate it with such a burning passion it seems to keep him warmer even on a planet like ours. And yet we cling to life while we have it, miserable and thin as it is, grasping for one day more. One day more, to rise and work in the mines, or to stand guard over the workers. One day more to muster and hope for the slim chance of being drawn off world from the PDF into a regiment that might be somewhere else, anywhere else in the universe but here. Anywhere.
In the planetary archives there are records which suggest this planet was warm and green once. They say the men of the ancient past had created little suns that orbited the planet and kept the cold at bay. Nobody cares. Whatever beauty or life this planet held in its past is as dead as a man whose environment suit fails him. Whatever machinery those ancient men had left behind has been picked over and stripped of anything useful by the Mechnicus long ago. All that remains for us here is to dig. We dig for the metals that are refined to run the reactors. We dig for rare minerals sought to keep the forges of other world turning out their mechanical wonders. We dig for the fabled deposits of minerals so rich it would put us on the map again. Perhaps. We dig, hoping not to uncover anything rumored about from the ancient fall of this world into darkness and ice. The unfortunate man who digs up anything from that time, if not driven insane or killed outright by it, would be surely killed by the Inquisition for having seen it.
I wasn’t personally involved in the last occurrence of that sort, except that it was my squad that strictly followed our orders to retrieve the record tapes from the surveillance center. Our orders were to retrieve them and take them to the inquisitor without looking at them. And we could solemnly swear we did not look at them. We looked at the copies we made afterward.
A company commander, or commissar, or inquisitor might marvel at why guardsmen will risk certain death to find out about things they aren’t supposed to. Certain death is one thing, but uncertain death is another matter. It’s one thing to know full well how the enemy will approach you and tear your body or soul apart. But to not know, to not have any idea when, where, or how you might meet your fate, that is unsettling. The guardsman ought to have a right to know what horrors may befall him, perhaps giving him a chance to gain an advantage or at least knowing when there’s nothing more he can do.
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