They were just as huge and much more menacing. Perhaps for the first time in my life I truly realised exactly how terrifying a main battle tank can be as it passes. You feel completely insignificant compared to that vast monstrosity and you just know that with the slightest sweep of its smallest weapon it could extinguish your life like an officer treading on the stub of a lho stick.
Even as I watched, a small anti-personnel turret on the side of the Shadowsword began to rotate. I shouted a warning to Ivan and Anton and pulled my head back inside the gaping hole in the Indomitable’s side. Bolter shells bounced off the iron walls outside. Some of them passed through the gaping hole in the hull. Something ricocheted around the interior of the command chamber and I dived for cover instinctively.
When I heard voices outside speaking the guttural accent of Irongrad I knew the enemy soldiers had started clambering up the hull of our Baneblade. The anti-personnel fire had stopped. More time had passed without me realising it. I think I was in shock.
I could hear the enemy coming closer and closer. I turned and saw that New Boy was standing beside the Understudy, trying to get him to say something, but nothing was happening. I turned and shouted at them, ‘Get into cover! Now! Get out of here!’
He looked at me as if he did not quite understand what I was saying. I brought my combat shotgun around and he flinched as anyone will when a weapon is pointed at them by someone of whose intentions he is not sure. ‘Go!’
At that moment, a soldier in brownish-red uniform clambered through the hole in the metal wall. He saw me at once and began to swing his lasgun towards me. I turned and fired. The shotgun spoke in a voice of thunder. The kick of the weapon almost dislocated my shoulder.
The heretic screamed and fell backwards, tumbling to the ground far below, carried back out through the hull-breach by the force of the shotgun blast. His blood stained the floor. More heads poked through the gap. I pumped the shotgun and fired again then I dived behind what was left of the command throne, almost slipping on the lieutenant’s slimy remains.
The knees of my trousers were sticky. My hands were red too. I did not really have time to consider the implications of this. The New Boy had taken the Understudy and disappeared through the internal hatch.
Smoke billowed along the corridor and through it and for the first time I wondered if I had done the right thing ordering him to run. In the depths of the Baneblade fires were raging and smoke can be as deadly as poison gas under the wrong circumstances. I told myself that he had his rebreather and that he knew how to use it but I was not entirely certain that under the circumstances he would remember to do so.
Even as that thought occurred to me, I realised that I had not adjusted my own mask. I pulled the rebreather into position and immediately it flattened out the stink of torn-apart bodies and burned control systems.
I adjusted my goggles and squinted at the door again, half-wishing and half-dreading that the heretics would appear again. A kind of madness descended upon me, filling me with bloodlust. It’s not that I lost all fear – it was more that I knew that death would put an end to the terror clawing at my gut and so I feared it less.
I waited and I waited and no one came.
I heard footsteps clattering in the corridor behind me and I turned, half-expecting to see the New Boy again but it was Ivan and Anton. They were dragging the loader along with them. He was pale and had lost a lot of blood and it seemed obvious that he had been hit by a bolter shell. With both hands he was holding his stomach and I could see the pink squirming thing that was one of his intestines trying to escape from between his fingers. Even as I watched, he coughed and what seemed like a river of blood gushed from his mouth. He slumped to the floor, clearly dead.
Ivan and Anton held their lasguns at the ready. They looked just as prepared to shoot me as I was prepared to shoot them at the moment.
‘It’s Leo,’ Ivan said, ‘don’t shoot!’
‘That would be nice,’ I said idiotically. ‘If you don’t shoot me, I won’t shoot you.’
‘Excellent plan,’ said Ivan.
‘I do my best,’ I said.
‘Is that the...’ asked Anton. I nodded.
‘It’s the lieutenant.’
‘He deserved better,’ said Ivan.
‘We all do,’ I said. ‘But I doubt we’ll get it.’
‘I thought I saw some of the heretics climbing the side of the tank,’ Ivan said.
‘You did,’ I said. I patted the barrel of my shotgun. ‘My friend here discouraged them from entering uninvited.’
‘It’s good to have a friend like that,’ said Ivan.
‘Cover me,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a look around.’
I took a couple of steps and threw myself flat where there was less blood and then I wriggled forwards on my belly towards the hole in the hull wall. When I got there I looked out and surveyed the battlefield. The man I had shot lay on the ground below me. Another had been run over by a tank. You could tell by the tread marks on his belly. What was left of our Baneblade was a metal island rising out of a sea of heretics.
We were on our own, I realised, surrounded by our enemies. I did not see any way we were going to get out of this.
All around us I could see the heretics. There were hundreds of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers surging past. Most of them paid not the slightest attention to the broken-down Baneblade in their midst. They were too busy concentrating on the factorum zones ahead. They had their eyes on the objective they had been sent to retake.
I felt utterly insignificant. It did not seem as if I was even worth killing.
I noticed in the ranks of the enemy there were many priests with halos of flame. They seemed to take the same position in the heretic’s army as commissars held in our own. I saw them exhorting the soldiers and threatening them and when one of them looked up at me I got back out of sight certain that the worst thing I could do would be to attract the attention of such a fanatic.
Anton and Ivan threw themselves down next to me and peeked out over the edge of the breach in the hull.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Anton. ‘It’s like there’s an army down there.’
He grinned a cheesy grin and unclipped a grenade and dropped it over the side of the tank. It fell amid the heretics and exploded, killing a dozen of them. The unbelievers looked around, unable to understand what had happened. Perhaps they thought they were under artillery fire. Perhaps they thought that some distant tank was shooting at them. I could cheerfully have just lain there and let the heretics pass by but the two madmen I was with were not prepared to do that.
Ivan grunted and threw a grenade of his own. He tossed it further and it landed beside a Leman Russ. The explosion ricocheted off the side of the tank, leaving it unscathed, but killing more heretics. Ivan laughed and Anton giggled and I cursed the pair of them for being idiots.
They did not care. I think they had already decided that they were dead and they were just going to take as many of the heretics with them as they could. It had all become a big childish game to them. I did not know whether to laugh or cry.
At that moment, all I really wanted to do was keep living for another few heartbeats. I looked up at the sky. For once there was a hole in the clouds above us and I could see a patch of pure reddish-blue. The sun was shining through it and briefly I saw the contrail of some aircraft passing at high altitude. It was an incongruously peaceful sight in the midst of that vast assault.
Anton threw another grenade. Then Ivan did the same. They kept doing it and they kept laughing and there was something contagious about their mad mirth in the middle of all that death so I joined in.