‘Can’t come soon enough for me,’ said Anton.
‘Stow the chatter, lads,’ said the lieutenant, patching himself in to the lower level. ‘Keep your eyes peeled for heretics. They will be out there somewhere.’
‘Right you are, sir,’ said Ivan. He sounded almost cheerful but then he always did when there was a fight in the offing. There was a darkness in Ivan that responded to incipient violence. I’ve seen a lot of soldiers get that way. Combat is a drug for them.
We thundered across the wastelands, engines roaring, officers barking out calm commands. I felt part of a vast invincible war machine, certain of victory, assured of triumph. I tried to enjoy the feeling while I could.
I knew it wouldn’t last.
The night was quiet. We stood beside the tank and looked at the stars. They glittered cold and clear in the blackness of the firmament. All around us lay the rubble of a pueblo. There was no sign it had ever been a military outpost, no sign that it had been anything much. The buildings were in ruins. If it had not been for the fires that still burned in some, they might have been that way for tens of thousands of years.
One by one we clambered up the side of the Indomitable and looked out of the crater we had set ourselves hull-down in. As far as the eye could see were the silhouettes of armoured vehicles. Men swarmed over and around them, doing what we were doing, escaping from the cramped inner quarters, stretching their legs looking at the night sky. Somewhere in the distance someone was playing a harmonica. It was an old tune from Belial, My Girl Has Eyes of Blue.
To the south, the sky turned white then black then white again in eerie flickers. A sound like thunder raced across the desert in its wake. If I had not known there was a battle being fought below the horizon, I would have suspected it was the mother of all storms, racing towards us through the night.
I sat with my back to the main turret of the machine with my legs dangling over the side. Anton had draped himself over the barrel of a gun and hung there like a spider-lemur we had once paid to see in the zoo in Jansen Hive. Ivan took a swig of coolant fluid from his flask, wiped the mouth of it and passed it to me. I took a swig and handed it up to Anton.
‘It was awesome today, passing through the lava sea,’ he said eventually.
Ivan belched loudly then whistled.
‘You didn’t have to do the driving,’ I said.
‘I suppose you want us to thank you for getting us through alive,’ Anton said.
‘It’s my job,’ I said.
‘What you think they were like?’ Ivan asked.
‘Who?’ I said.
‘The folks who lived here.’
‘Like us I suppose. This is a human world.’
‘You think they woke up this morning expecting to be dead?’ Ivan asked. The booze was making him melancholy, as it usually did.
‘A world like this, yes, most likely.’ Anton replied. ‘It does not seem the most pleasant of places.’
‘Why would you build a place out here in the desert?’
‘Could be a relay station,’ I said. ‘Could be a rich man’s ranch. Could be an energy farm. Who knows? Who cares?’
The coolant fluid came back my way. I took another swig. It tasted like medicine but kicked like a drill sergeant. Lasgun fire flickered down below us. I reached for my combat shotgun but Ivan shook his head. ‘It’s just Oily and the boys tormenting one of those big scorpions.’
I squinted into the darkness. By the light of las-burst I recognised the mechanic’s squat form. He and a bunch of others from Number Six were flash-frying one of the beasts, probably wanted to know what it tasted like.
‘You know it’s strange,’ Ivan said, not in the least distracted from the job of depressing the rest of us. ‘There’s a whole army down there. This is probably the most people who have ever stood in this spot. Will most likely be until the end of time, till the stars burn out and the Emperor walks again.’
‘And your point is?’ I asked. Ivan shook his head and laughed bitterly. I heard the metal of the flask clink against the metal of his jaw.
‘We’ll never come back this way. We’ll never see this place again. We blasted it to bits in the name of the Emperor and tomorrow we will be gone and all that will be left will be wasteland.’
‘By the Emperor’s Throne, you are a miserable bastard, Ivan,’ Anton said. ‘I came out here happy to see the stars. Another five minutes of listening to you and I’ll be ready to eat a grenade.’
‘You’ll never get to be a Space Marine if you do that,’ Ivan said. His mood was contagious though. Even Anton seemed thoughtful now.
‘You think they’ll have big guns over there?’ he asked.
‘It’s a hive city – what do you think?’ I said.
‘Big enough to blow a hole in a Baneblade the way we blew this place up?’
‘Big enough,’ I said.
‘I can see what this miserable bastard is so depressed about then,’ said Anton.
‘It’s the way the world is,’ said Ivan. ‘Always somebody with a bigger gun. One day you’re doing the blowing up, next day you’re being exploded yourself.’
‘Not if we’re lucky,’ I said. ‘It’ll be some other poor bastard’s turn.’
I was fighting hard to keep up my spirits. The mood of total belief in victory that Macharius had given us had vanished into the night air. At least so it seemed for just a moment.
‘How can we lose?’ said Anton. ‘We’ve got Macharius with us.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Ivan. ‘He does not seem like a man in the habit of losing.’
And as quickly as it had come, the mood of pessimism vanished, seemingly dispelled by the magic of the general’s name. In the distance thunder rumbled. The ancient daemon gods of war beat their drums. Man-made lightning flickered. Somebody somewhere was dying.
Soon it would be time for us to join in.
A monstrous storm blew in from the north. The hot desert winds brought clouds of abrasive dust. It ground along the side of the Indomitable, stripping the paintwork in places. The filters kept most of it out, but the air had a strange taste and my mouth felt gritty. My eyes watered so much I was forced to pull down my visor. Everybody else in the cockpit did the same thing.
The winds were strong enough to send small pebbles pinging like bullets off our hull. The external comm-net crackled. Only occasional fragments of vox were audible. There was something about the weather on this planet potent enough to disrupt even our comm-grids. That was disturbing to say the least.
I kept the Baneblade rumbling forwards, knowing that the dust would work its way into the mechanisms of the treads and eventually break them down. It would be unfortunate if it happened. There was no way anyone could go outside and perform field repairs. If we dropped behind the main battlegroup there would be no help available either. We would be stuck out in the desert until the recycling systems overloaded and we died of hunger, thirst or bad air. It seemed unlikely that anyone would come looking for us while a war was being fought.
Even as these thoughts flitted through my mind, I concentrated on the way forwards. The New Boy was driving as my relief but I watched him like a hawk in case he made a mistake. I was ready to override the controls if any enemy appeared.
The lieutenant obviously felt the tension in the air. He spoke reassuringly into our local net, as if to make up for the lack of external chatter. ‘I’m glad I am inside on a day like today,’ he said. ‘Now is not the time for going for a little walk in the fresh air.’
There were some chuckles at that, and the truth of it was that he was right. There was something oddly reassuring and even perhaps a little enjoyable about being inside a monstrous armoured vehicle and immune to the ravages of the deadly storm outside.