I have had a few names over the years but the one I prefer most is Cerise, it was the first l was given. I was made in 836.M39 on a planet called Kantrael. After about a decade in a storage rack during transport, I was given to Garamy, a handsome young boy with a cleft chin and violet eyes. As his Drill Sergeant instructed, Garamy gave me my first name and began to train with me.

       First he learned disassemble me, clean and anoint my components in holy oils and then reassemble me all while reciting the proper prayers to the Omnissiah. Afterwards he learned to shoot with me and after some practice, he'd learned to stop casting his shots high to compensate for the bullet drop of solid shot firearms, and he'd excelled in his class at marksmanship. After a number of years of training operations, countless more trips to the firing range and sessions cleaning and blessing my parts, the boy I had been issued to had grown into a smart, strong,  responsibile young cadet. My power readout glowed with pride when he'd been told to paint that white stripe around my receiver to match the one on his helmet.

       Despite his training, his first time carrying me into a real battle, I could feel how nervous Garamy was. It hadn't occurred to me until then that Garamy didn't know I was brand new off the rack when I was issued to him and we'd be sharing our first taste of combat together. He kept praying to my machine spirit to impart to him a measure of the skill with which other troopers had fought with me in the past. Regardless of the lack of experience between us when he finally saw the enemy, some great big bellowing green beast, the tremble in his hand steadied. Under the guidance of his Sergeant, he and his squadmates cut into the howling menaces with precise laser fire, dropping them one after another. After the last of the savage aliens was felled they proceeded out into the field, stabbing bayonet knives into the carcasses to ensure the creatures were really dead.

        A week later we were back on a ship on the way to meter out the Emperor's fury to the enemies of the Imperium, the white stripes now painted over. Garamy was no longer a cadet but a soldier of the Emperor and I was the weapon with which he would bring death to heretics and aliens. After a few years and a number of deployments Garamy was brought home to Cadia for additional training, apparently he had passed selection and he was chosen to join the ranks of the Cadian elite, the famed Kasrkin!

         It was a bittersweet moment for both of us when Garamy handed me over to the armorer. He would almost certainly be issued one of my more powerful cousins, the revered hellgun. A lasrifle being the weapon of a line trooper, that was who would be carrying me into battle and after a thorough acid bath, a fresh coat of paint and lacquer and a reconsecration of my components, that's who I was issued to. As units take casualties those who survive are often consolidated into other units to bolster their numbers, sometimes forming entirely new units. A Corporal named Larmen was one such survivor. He'd no sooner signed the forms from the armorer than he'd begun to complain that he'd prefer a weapon with a bit more power and a solid shot. Apparently in the unit he'd come from, he was one of a pair of troopers responsible for the employment of a heavy bolter, one of the large caliber cousins of the weapons carried by the blessed Astartes. He named me Pipsqueak. Regardless of what he was used to, I was determined to prove my worth to this arrogant machine gunner. After a few months practice and cleaning in the hold of a starship in transit to the next battlefield, the Corporal had stopped his complaining, focusing instead on refamiliarizing himself with the standard issue weapon that he had.

      Garamy's unit had been mechanized infantry and so he normally rode in a lander with the tanks to a beachhead held by troops who'd landed right after the initial bombardment. Larmen, however, was in one of the Valkyrie dropships following the squadrons of Vulture fighter bombers swooping in low to clear an area to land in and establish that beachhead. That was the plan at least, but the forces of the arch enemy had other plans.

      As soon as the Vultures sped off and the Valkyrie began to power in for a landing, the heretics emerged from their holes and began their counter attack, hoping to take the impetus out of the invasion. An explosion rocked the Valkyrie violently and it began to fall, spiraling out of control with only one engine and one wing and the fuselage came apart when it impacted the ground hard.

      Larmen awoke in a disheveled state pain flooding his senses as he gripped me for support as he tried to sit up, his leg pinned under some peice of scrap metal, his movement however drew the attention of something in the smoke. The massive figure approaching menacingly and Larmen struggled to bring me to bear on the hulking figure clad in an ancient, dull metal suit of power armor devoid of any paint except yellow and black hazard stripes on one pauldron and even through the haze he knew what was picking through the remains of the dropship, finishing off his squad. He'd managed to get the sling unstuck and even get one ineffective shot off into the traitor Astartes' battleplate before the Legionairre battered me aside and drove his sword through poor helpless Larmen.

     For nearly a decade I lay there in the mud, twenty feet from the long since picked clean corpse of Corporal Larmen in the aftermath of the failed assault. The sounds of industry could be heard as a work gang of Dark Mechanicum slaves picked over the battlefield, determining what was usable and what was scrap. A grubby pair of hands prized me from the mud and threw me in the bed of a truck already filled with other weapons dropped by those fighting on both sides.

      After the indignity of being tossed into a pile in the back of the truck, I was sorted through the chain of arch enemy logistics. Eventually it was determined that the power cells of my power pack had long since lost the ability to hold a charge and a new power pack with a hotshot cell replaced it. Lastly I was handed to a new owner, a villain that called himself Staab, with tattoos of portraits depicting all manner of torture covering him from the top of his bald head to the bottom of his feet. Of course his masters couldn't care less about his name, he was just one dirty slave in an army of millions packed into cargo containers, stacked inside a ship of the traitor fleet. In our standing room only "quarters" the filthy slave had named me "Bloodbeam". After nearly a month they were delivered  to a traitor held spaceport of a planet under siege at the direction of their Black Legion overlords. The rabid horde spilled out into the adjacent hive city. Luckily enough for me, the main assault had been a success and the fighting was over before Staab was turned loose, so to my relief, I couldn't be used to gun down any loyal servants of the Emperor not that I was happy to see the corpses of slain sons and daughters of Cadia and Catachan.

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        After a week of hunting en masse they had sent most of their forces on to conquer other hives and garrisoned some to watch over the hive and Staab was among those chosen for this. Staab had developed an awful habit of pointing me at the enslaved citizens of the hive when he went out for his daily patrols. About a week in he saw movement in an alleyway and went to check it out wherein he found a young blonde woman dressed in a Cadian drab uniform, crouching behind a dumpster.  As he pointed me at her, my machine spirit raged in his hands and to my relief, before he could pull my trigger he collapsed under the weight of the Catachan Sergeant dropping down onto him, long serrated blade first. He pulled the thing from Staab's chest and picked me up, handing me over to the violet eyed girl.

          "Come on Whiteshield, now that you've got a weapon, I think we might be able to force our way into that motorpool we saw and steal a set of wheels. From there we could possibly get to the highway and make a break for open ground to rally up with guard forces outside the city before the lance strikes come down from orbit and wipe these heretics and this hive off the map." Lance strikes? So even though this hive city was lost there was still an imminent Imperial victory!

    The heavily muscled Sergeant led the way silently through the alleyways and ran across streets stealthily, avoiding the patrols of cultists and Black Legion Astartes commanding them. The rookie trooper holding me did her best to keep up and keep quiet and after most of the day skulking towards their objective they had reached it. Looking over the yard of militarum green freight trucks they took stock of their equipment, two combat knives, the veteran trooper's laspistol and his machete, three power cells for his pistol, five demolition charges in his satchel bag, three frag grenades and me with one overcharged hotshot power cell.

      "Okay Dostra here's our plan, that truck closest to the gate, that's our way out of here. You stay here on overwatch, as soon as the violence starts you run to that truck, kill anyone in your way, get in and drive like Horus himself is after you. If all goes well, I'll already be in that heavy stubber turret on top. While you're waiting I'm going to sneak in and set these charges to take out the other trucks once we're clear so they can't use them to chase us, and rig up a little distraction on the other end of the lot to draw them away from the gate. Any part of the plan you need me to go over again Whiteshield?"

     "Sergeant Nesk I'm...I'm just so scared...the traitor space marines...they're nothing like what the training prepared us for" tears dripped down onto me "I'm sorry! I'm so useless! I'm sorry you've had to do so much to keep me alive!" She began to sob and he reached out to her grabbing her by the shoulder and squeezing "You're doing better than I did my first time seeing war. I thought Catachan had grown me to be invincible. I needed extra large trousers just to fit my primarch sized balls," her tears slowed to a trickle as she looked up at him "but the first time I saw those shrieking aliens charging at us, I froze up and by the time my Sergeant snapped me out of it, my trousers were fugging soaked." She smiled and let out a little chuckle "Its okay to be afraid, the Emperor knows I am, but to have courage requires you recognize what you're afraid of and face it anyways. If you recognize something is dangerous and it doesn't scare you at least a little bit, you're probably stupid." She looked up at him and nodded "Thank you Sergeant...I'm good...let's do it" she said, confidence renewed.

      She got down into a crouch behind a dumpster in the alley across the street from the gate, watching, waiting as the Catachan veteran slipped in and disappeared. Approximately half an hour later the sound of a grenade detonating rang out, followed by two more explosions and then a much louder one as they had touched off a drum of prometheum at the fueling station on the opposite side of the lot and traitors began running towards the noise and flames. Dostra quietly ran for the truck, hooking around the gate wall towards the driver's compartment and fell flat on her rear after running smack into a hulking giant in menacing black warplate. As she looked up into the blood filled eyes of the Black Legion Terminator, he brought his weapon, a wicked one handed axe adorned with human skulls chained to the pommel, up over his head and activated the hateful red power field around its head.

    As certain death descended towards her Dostra pulled me across her and held me out to shield her. As it happened the right combination of events lined up. Dostra turned her head and screwed her eyes shut, not wanting to see her death. As she pulled me across her, his poweraxe sliced into my power pack, the power field contacting the hot shot cells and causing them to rupture in a bright vermillion ball of energy similar to the impact of a lascannon beam. His warplate was more than proof against the explosion and he would have been impervious had he been wearing his helmet but instead his face was incinerated and he howled in pain as he clawed at his eyes.

      Not wanting to be crushed underfoot Dostra dropped my slagged, broken receiver and scuttled back, getting to her feet and drawing her combat knife, unsure what she'd even be able to do against the thrashing superhuman in tank armor, even if he was blinded. Just when she'd made up her mind to go around the truck, climb over to get into the driver's compartment and drive off, leaving the blinded Terminator, the pommel of a combat knife bounced from the armored cowling housing his head followed by a taunt from Sergeant Nesk "Is that how the orphaned daughters of Horus fight?!" And as the Terminator turned, swinging his weapon blindly, a shot rang out accompanied by a red flash and the Terminator continued his spin as he toppled, a neat smoking hole drilled right through his charred forehead.

      Sergeant Nesk helped Dostra up into the driver's seat and the truck sped away, leaving me there, power port reduced to slag and my receiver broken. They detonated the charges killing the rest of the heretic forces in the depot and destroying the trucks so their allies would never be able to use them. In my last moments my machine spirit beamed with pride. I knew my Garamy would be proud to know his old lasrifle had been recovered from enemy hands and even been instrumental in killing a Black Legion Terminator Captain and saving the lives of another two of the Emperor's warriors.

Praise be to the Omnissiah.

The Emperor protects.