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Title:
Finest Hour
Series: Warhammer 40K: Astra
Militarum
Author: Sam Ryan
Rating: 3
of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages:
42
Words: 13K
Publish: 2025
A
lot happens in these 40 pages. It all centers around the “Colors”
of a regiment, a flag of honor. One of the Sergeants starts with it
in the beginning of the story and every time someone has it, they die
and someone else picks it up to continue the charge against the Chaos
Cultists who have infiltrated an ice world. One new conscript runs
away and leaves his comrades and leaders to die. In the end, he picks
up the Flag and takes it back to the regiment while they are
retreating. He is given a hero’s welcome and thus a coward is
turned into a hero.
I think the flag went through about five different people? It’s even used as a weapon to kill a Chaos cultist at one point. Then coward boy uses it as a tourniquet on a Kreig soldier and carries him to the retreat point and everyone thinks he did it on purpose (saving the flag that is). The kreig soldier dies so nobody knows the boy was a coward who let everyone around him die.
That juxtaposition of cowardice and perceived bravery is a big part of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It’s not just the humans either, as I’ve seen that literary tendency in the Tau and the Necrons. Little doses of it are tolerable but it gets rather depressing in novels or in a series.
★★★☆☆
From the Internet
The narrative follows newly conscripted Cadian infantryman Mathias Thorne during a brutal betrayal by heretic forces. As the Astra Militarum takes heavy casualties, a combined force of Cadian, Elysian, Krieg, and Vostroyan troopers mount a desperate counteroffensive.
The story focuses on a symbolic regimental banner passed from one dying soldier to the next in the chaos of battle. When the flag lands in Thorne's hands, he must summon the courage to carry it back to Imperial territory
