General Dhrost lost an engraved hip flask in 996.M41 and held it against every Ratling he subsequently encountered. Shield of Baal: Leviathan puts this in the unit description for his Ratlings, the Quickfingers. I keep wondering how long the general spent looking for it before settling on an entire branch of humanity as the culprit. The passage never names the thief.
Callum Davis’s new novella, Da Red Gobbo’s Reckoning, has a Ratling fixer called Ector Flynn dealing with Catachan commanders. According to Friday’s Warhammer Community announcement, his sniper squad has spent months being bullied by the Jungle Fighters before getting sent into a snowy wasteland to hunt the Gobbo. Flynn’s lads welcome the opportunity to prove themselves. Sunday’s preview puts the hardback among the coming week’s pre-orders, alongside the festive miniature.
Imperial permission to serve leaves plenty of room for a Ratling to be mistreated by the people issuing his orders. That’s the part of this announcement I want to follow. The snow, the Squigmobile, the promise of festive mayhem all sound entertaining, and I expect Davis to get considerable mileage out of them. I’ve got rather more invested in the squad being sent away from camp.
Ratlings on Dhrost’s rooftops
The Quickfingers entry in Shield of Baal: Leviathan, under Abhuman Auxilia, ‘The Quickfingers’, goes straight from Dhrost’s grudge to his decision to employ the snipers anyway. The account praises their marksmanship and the advantage they give him when covering city rooftops. Dhrost’s professionalism gets an explicit mention. The text says he puts his personal feelings aside when deploying them.
There’s a useful practical example elsewhere in the same book. In The Sporeflingers, Ratlings help defend Phodia on Asphodex by passing the positions of Tyranid leader-beasts to artillery on the city’s battlements. They shoot creatures surviving the bombardments and count kills against one another from their high positions. The account places them inside a combined defensive operation involving Cadian infantry, armour, aircraft, and artillery.
I like having that much detail. They’re watching the streets, identifying targets, communicating with the guns, and dealing with whatever comes through the explosions. There’s judgement involved in choosing which creature deserves an artillery strike. My mental picture of the Astra Militarum gets a bit tank-heavy, so the people quietly making the guns useful tend to disappear somewhere behind the Leman Russ turrets.
Dhrost’s personal grievance appears in the description of a functioning unit under his command. He’s a named officer with a particular irritation, and the writer has chosen to preserve it alongside the unit’s battlefield role. I’d be curious to know whether he ever complained about it within earshot of the Quickfingers. The entry dates the loss to 996.M41.
The fixer gets picked by the squad
The official Ratling Kill Team booklet describes fixers as leaders appointed by their squadmates. They’re good shots, with the cunning to deploy their team effectively. That’s a pleasingly specific detail to attach to Flynn’s job title. Within the little group, the people going on the mission have a hand in choosing who leads them.
The booklet also describes stashmasters distributing ammunition, supplies, and contraband. Vox-thieves intercept communications. Spotters help the others adjust their aim. Raiders use climbing gear to reach firing positions. The battlemutt carries supplies and ammunition as well as keeping watch. The background descriptions for these operatives occupy pages two and three of the booklet.
I keep getting distracted by the dog. Look at the amount of kit the poor little fellow has strapped on. He’s a sentry and a delivery service, which is already a fairly full working day, and he’s doing it amongst people with a professional interest in acquiring extra luggage. I hope somebody’s keeping his dinner separate from the squad’s supplies.
There are specialist reconnaissance jobs throughout the Guard; I went through some of that history when the Cadian Recon Squad appeared. With the Ratlings, I’m especially fond of the attention given to keeping the group functioning between shots. Somebody has to organise ammunition and find a way up to the roof. Somebody has to decide which route gets everybody back down. The Raider and Spotter descriptions both name the equipment used for those jobs.
And they’ve got Ogryn friends. The booklet says Ogryns sometimes serve alongside Ratlings, regard them as their little mates, and become extremely protective of them. Any such friendship in Flynn’s story remains for Davis to establish. I’d happily read about the daily complications of sharing a billet with that combination of appetites, particularly when the regiment’s supplies are running low.
During sixth edition I spent a whole evening making a ration crate for a Cadian weapons-team base. Balsa wood, thin strips for the reinforcing bands, a tiny paper label. I sealed it with PVA while the ink was still wet and turned the writing into a blue smear. Pete asked why my mortar crew had brought a fish tank. I painted over the label and kept the crate, because by then I’d used up the evening I was supposed to spend painting the actual crew.
The old Provisionally Prepared diorama scratches that same ridiculous itch for me. Its reveal points out the roast chicken, bottles, sausages, and little mug around a pair of snipers. One is watching through a ruined window while the other offers lunch. I can already imagine getting stuck painting the little mug on the broken wall.
A Ratling world tried leaving
White Dwarf #284’s The Pacification of Sigma-Agrius describes an agricultural world populated almost entirely by Ratlings. It supplies food to the Agripinaa sector. When the population declares independence from the Adeptus Terra, the Munitorum calculates that a single regiment will be enough to put the rebellion down. The 122nd Finreht Highlanders arrive expecting a manageable operation.
The Ratlings scatter. A week passes before a patrol comes under fire at a bridge over the Karline, and the Highlanders spend months struggling against guerrilla attacks. The senior commissar eventually orders the destruction of farms and villages to deprive the rebels of supplies. Colonel Serat’s regiment carries out the senior commissar’s orders.
The surviving rebel army gets surrounded in the Antranine Pocket and destroyed by bombardment. Afterwards the Highlanders receive stewardship of the planet and settle there as a ruling gentry over its abhuman workers. The account closes by reporting restored agricultural productivity and continuing surveillance of the Ratling population. The surviving workers remain under the settlers’ descendants’ watch.
I gave Sigma-Agrius a couple of sentences in the Imperial rebellions article. I was careless with that section, honestly. I joked about Ratling insurgents and moved on. Going through the original passage has left me stuck on the farms being burned and the surviving population continuing to work the land under the invaders’ descendants.
The account gives us little of the rebels’ own politics. We get the decision to secede, a description of the fighting, and the settlement imposed afterwards. White Dwarf also describes Ratlings being scorned as mutants on many worlds, which helps establish the conditions around them. I don’t know what demands Sigma-Agrius made before the troopships arrived; the article never supplies a manifesto or a named Ratling leader.
Flynn still wants the assignment
I might be leaning too hard on the miserable bits. A Red Gobbo Christmas novella is allowed to be a comedy about some hungry little criminals having an appalling holiday. I’d be disappointed if all the Ratlings did was suffer nobly. WarCom’s Regimental Gourmand piece has them circulating a culinary guide, planning access to officers’ stores, and complaining about T’au food. One section recommends ambushing Water caste envoys for the food they carry.
That guide has an enthusiastic Ratling narrator who treats shared T’au rations as a culinary disappointment and the Tyranids as competitors in the food trade. Its authors have opinions about several Imperial warzones, including suggestions for raiding officers’ quarters during the commotion of firing the Great Gun. The publication also carries a warning to keep commissars away.
Flynn’s assignment offers a smaller and more immediate problem than a planet-wide revolt. He’s a fixer with a squad, Catachan superiors, a cold stretch of country to cross, and a quarry who regularly turns up in books about reprisals. The announcement says the Ratlings want to prove their worth after the bullying. That’s as far as we’ve got. I haven’t read the novella, and I don’t know whether the Catachans ever have to answer for their treatment of the squad.
I’d like to see the Ratlings disagree about how to handle the mission. Flynn has to keep the squad together through a miserable journey with plenty of time to talk about the officers back at camp. How much authority does a fixer appointed by his mates have when those mates start arguing? That’s a fairly ordinary small-unit problem for Davis to get into, somewhere between the sniping and whatever the Gobbo has prepared.
Look, they’re little blokes with enormous rifles. They get hungry. They nick things. Fine. I’d still like to hear what they say about the colonel when he’s finally out of earshot. I’m curious how long they’ll keep talking about camp once the march gets tiring.
The Red Gobbo’s revolutionary history gives him a peculiar role in this setup. The Ratlings hunting him have just spent months being pushed around by bigger soldiers, and GW’s announcement hints that they’ll learn something about vengeance from him. The announcement doesn’t name the planet.
Images: Games Workshop / Warhammer Community.
