Our boots made a strange sucking sound as we walked. It was impossible to tread through the narrow corridor without stepping in blood and entrails. Something bad had happened in the drive room. It must have taken the first hit and it had been a nasty one. The engine had exploded and taken out the engineers. Oily had been beheaded by a slice of metal half the size of the door that had been blown off in the explosion. The rest of his team had been so badly chopped up that we could not really work out which body parts belonged to which person.
‘It looks like we were lucky,’ said Anton. ‘I’m not sure anybody else made it out of here alive.’
Of course at that point we heard a groan from down the corridor. We pushed down to the head and banged on the door and the groaning stopped. ‘Who’s in there?’
‘Yeah, let us in, I need to use the head,’ said Anton.
‘Is that you, Leo?’ I heard the New Boy ask.
‘No! It’s Lord High Commander Macharius, come to offer you a promotion,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you think?’
The door swung open. Crammed into the tiny space of the toilet were the New Boy and the Understudy. They both looked pale and ill. They blinked at us like some nocturnal thing caught in the beam of a torch. The New Boy looked at us and then was violently sick. I stepped back just in time to avoid having vomit added to all the other gunk on my boots.
‘What happened?’ New Boy asked. ‘I heard shooting – some sort of gun I have not heard before – and then nothing.’
‘You missed the Space Marines,’ Anton said. ‘They saved us.’
‘Space Marines,’ said the New Boy.
‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘Those were bolters you heard.’ He sounded as satisfied as if he had been firing them himself.
‘That’s all very well but we need orders,’ I said. I looked pointedly at the Understudy. He just stared at me. I suppose having your superior’s brains blasted over your face will do that to you. That said, the New Boy had had the same experience and he seemed to be handling it. It seemed to me at the time the Understudy really had not been a product of the same school as the lieutenant. Just goes to show how wrong a man can be.
‘Are any of the others alive?’ the New Boy asked. It was a sensible question but Anton turned and spat on the floor.
‘That’s what we are trying to find out,’ he said. He looked in disgust at the Understudy. The man just stared at him blankly.
Ivan said, ‘Best get him out of here. I doubt the air down here is helping him recover.’
His words were almost kindly. There was that thing about Ivan. Just when you thought with a fair degree of certainty that he was a brute, he surprised you with his sensitivity. He had been the same as a boy back on Belial but his ruined face and metal-plated skull made me forget that sometimes.
I nodded. ‘We’ll all go,’ I said. ‘Just in case there are a few heretics left over.’
We stepped out into the fresh air, if that was the right word for it. It had some of the tang of the desert in it but it was also the air of a hive city, full of trace chemicals and the stink of heavy industry. Added to that was the taint of the dust of fallen buildings and the smell of explosive and burned flesh and burned-out machinery. Not even the filters of rebreathers could extract every trace of all of that.
I looked around. There were bodies everywhere, like in some of those religious paintings showing the Day of Judgement when the Emperor returns to pass sentence on the Guilty. Some of the bodies were still moving, with the faint pathetic shifts of posture that men slowly dying of thirst, air poison and terminal wounds make. Most of them were in the uniforms of heretics. I told myself I had no sympathy with them, that they had been trying to kill me only a few hours before, but, of course, it is never that simple.
There was one young boy lying there. There did not seem to be anything wrong with him except for the red stain spreading across the chest of his tunic. His face was very pale and he licked his lips when he saw me. He was frightened and he wanted to ask for something at the same time. I tried to ignore him and walk past.
‘Wait,’ he said. He was speaking Low Gothic. The local accent distorted the word but it was recognisable. Something made me turn to face him. ‘Drink. Please.’
I looked him in the eye. He was very young, even younger than the New Boy, younger than I had been when me, Ivan and Anton had run away to join the Guard. He held my gaze evenly. Who knew what he was really seeing? He had that visionary look that some of the dying get. I’ve seen it a thousand times. A man gets past a certain point and he just lets go. Indifference and a certain sympathy battled in my mind. I stuck out my hand. It surprised me to see there was a canteen in it.
‘Thank. You.’ He took a swig and lay back. He was dead before his head hit the ground. I wondered whether the act of drinking had killed him.
‘You going soft, Leo?’ Anton asked. He still looked thoughtful but the hint of his usual maniacal grin turned the corner of his lip up.
‘One day that might be me,’ I said. ‘Or you.’
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I am planning on living forever.’
‘The Guard might have something to say about that.’
‘I know. They have their stupid plan to get us killed at every chance they can, but we are too smart for them.’
‘Anton, you could not outsmart that rock.’
‘I am still smarter than the Imperial Guard.’
‘You may be on to something there.’
‘You know it.’ He bent over and closed the young boy’s eyes.
‘They are not so different,’ he said. Somehow I could tell he was still thinking about the Space Marine. I think what he had realised that day had really shocked him. All his life he had idolised Space Marines. There had been a day when he thought he could become one.
‘You still want to be a Space Marine?’ I asked. He stared off at the rising dust clouds in the distance for a long time before he turned and grinned at me.
‘Hell, yeah,’ he said. ‘Put in a good word for me with Lord High Commander Macharius.’
‘I will when I see him,’ I said. At the time, I thought it was a joke.
We squatted beside the burned-out shell of the Baneblade, listening to the Understudy mumble to himself and keeping our weapons close at hand just in case. It was quiet where we were but the thunder of battle muttered on in the distance. Sometimes the earth shook and I wondered what had happened. The New Boy rummaged about inside the tank for a while, then I heard his voice.
‘Hey, Leo?’ He peeked out from beneath the belly of the Bane-blade. He gestured for me to come follow him. I considered shouting at him but the fun was fast fading from that so I crawled underneath the corpse of the old monster and saw what he wanted me to see.
Corporal Hesse was there. At first I thought he was a goner but I saw his chest was rising and falling and it took me a moment to realise he was asleep. I moved closer and noticed the open maintenance hatch above him. He must have crawled through it and just waited out the fire-fight raging above and around him.
Asleep though he was, he had a lasgun near at hand so I gestured for New Boy to come away. You can have some truly terrible accidents when you wake an armed man suddenly.
‘What you find under there?’ Ivan asked as I crawled back out.
‘Corporal Hesse – the fat bastard is snoring away under the maintenance hatch.’
‘Good for him,’ Ivan said. He whistled as he did to show when he was pleased. Anton smiled as well. I think he was just happy that there would be another familiar face about. I was happy that my brief period as a figure of authority was over.