‘Could be worse,’ Anton said as we entered and surveyed the huge hall with its hundreds of beds each with a locker beside it. I knew what he was thinking. It reminded him of the guild dormitories back on Belial. Hundreds of men swarmed around the place, lying on beds, stowing their gear, making a claim to some space. I recognised none of them. They were all like us, survivors of broken units, waiting to be reassigned or reformed into new companies. They might even be our new company for all I knew.
How many times had I done this, I wondered?
How many times had I dumped my gear in a new room or new tent or new barracks’ locker, looked around at Ivan and Anton and told them that if they touched my gear they were dead? How many times had I watched Anton grin his idiot grin and Ivan make that chirruping whistle that shows he thinks I am talking nonsense again? Too many times to count or remember, I suspect.
It’s part of a soldier’s life – to make camp constantly and move on again, to leave rooms and buildings and cities and worlds in their wake. To leave behind buried friends and lost loves as well. To be a soldier in the 41st millennium is to be a small atom of life, constantly in motion, never truly at rest anywhere until they burn your body or put you in the ground.
‘They say the locals call this place the City of the Angel,’ Anton said. He had tossed his pack on the floor and was busy scouring through it for his prop-nov. The rest of his gear joined a growing untidy pile on the floor. Tunic lay on shirt. His hip flask clinked when he tossed it beside his boots and badges.
‘I wonder why that is?’ I said sourly.
Ivan whistled a few descending notes. ‘Could that be because there is a huge bloody iron angel looming over the whole place and a statue of it on every street corner?’ He had stowed his gear under his bed and just sat there, taking a slug from his hip-flask. I wondered how much there was left in it. Not much at the rate he went through it and we would not be getting any more cooling fluid that would convert to rot-gut alcohol any time soon.
Anton held up a map and unfolded it, as if he might find his prop-nov within. I recognised it, soiled as it was. It was an old Imperial Survey map of Zone Three on Jurasik Prime. We had left a trail of dead heretics strewn across that place. Some of the stains on the map came from their blood. A sudden vivid image of green jungles and tropical islands came back to me. I remembered a pillbox built into cliffs and the Indomitable racing through waves all guns blazing.
‘I didn’t lend you my book, did I, Leo?’ Anton asked.
‘Why the hell would I want your bloody prop-nov?’ I said. ‘I’ve read it almost as many times as you.’
That strictly speaking was not true. Anton must have read that piece of Imperial propaganda a thousand times or more, almost as many times as he had read The Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer. He had been reading it at least once a week since we had started work in the factorum in Belial when we were twelve. I always remember him, hunched over it, tracing the line with his finger, his lips moving as he spelled out the words even though anyone else would have known them by heart.
‘Ivan?’ he asked.
‘You know I hate the bloody thing!’
‘All the more reason for you to take it and destroy it,’ said Anton.
‘Now you are putting ideas in my head.’
‘Don’t even think about it.’
‘You try the external pocket in your pack?’ I asked.
‘Of course I did. You think I am an idiot or something?’
‘You already know the answer to that.’ I reached down and lifted the pack up out of the growing pile of unwashed clothing and the gee-gaws Anton had acquired over the years of campaigning. I flicked open the seal on the right tab pocket where Anton always kept the book, reached in and pulled it out.
‘You just put it there,’ he said petulantly.
‘Yeah – I used my psyker powers to do that. Maybe I’ll use them to combust the book now.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ He stuck out a long bony hand. Behind him Ivan nodded his head. I tossed the book over Anton’s head to him.
‘Give me that, you bastard,’ Anton shouted, turning to try and grab it out of Ivan’s hand. Ivan tossed it to the New Boy.
‘You’ll hand that over right now, if you know what’s good for you, New Boy,’ Anton said. The New Boy looked abashed and hung his head down. He humbly held the book out and then when Anton reached for it, he tossed it to me.
Anton howled and dived at me. I just had time to toss the book away before he grappled me, his hand going for my throat. I noticed the others had gone oddly quiet and when I looked over Anton’s shoulder I could see why. The Understudy was standing there. He had caught the book as he entered the chamber without knocking.
Anton turned to see what I was looking at and his face went white. We saluted, ludicrous as that must have looked from our current position.
The Understudy said, ‘You are to report to the parade ground at nine hundred Imperial. You will be presented to Lord High Commander Macharius for decoration.’
He turned the book over in his hand as if inspecting some xenos relic then he put it down on the bed and said, ‘Carry on.’
Then he left. After that, no one was in the mood for brawling.
I stood before the assembled regiments in the great square outside our new barracks. They were illuminated by the dancing flames of the central fire fountain, drawn up in massed ranks before their vehicles, dressed in their best uniforms, all scrubbed and polished for the occasion. All it would have taken was one well-placed artillery shell and a whole regiment could have been wiped out, leaving their tanks for the enemy to take.
Our own regiment stood to the fore. The Seventh Belial had been first into Irongrad and had held the factorum zone in the teeth of a massive rebel counter-attack. We had been the spearhead of the crusade and had been tested and not broken. Of course, there were a damn sight fewer of us than there used to be but what did that matter to Command. We could always be replaced. There is no resource more common in the universe than the flesh of human soldiers.
All of us were waiting for Macharius. It seemed like the whole galaxy was back then. There was an air of anticipation about the ceremony that I had never experienced before. I stood to the left of the podium raised between the chassis of two Baneblades and I sensed it. It was as if every soldier awaited the arrival of a prophet, of someone who would transform their lives with his words. Only the Understudy did not seem touched by the atmosphere. Not even the revivalist feel of that great crowd could get through to the surface of whatever desolate world it was in which he walked.
A huge roar announced Macharius’s arrival. The gleaming oval of an aircar appeared in the sky overhead. It was the governor’s own vehicle, not military but a gorgeous gold and gem-encrusted aerial carbuncle. Under other circumstances, it would have seemed impossibly gaudy compared to the grim durasteel tanks lined up below it, but the idea that Macharius was within it transformed all that. The aircar seemed entirely appropriate for a conqueror of worlds. Just the sight of it brought cheers from the assembled troops.