The golden vehicle descended until it hovered over the platform. A door in its side opened and a long stairway extruded itself. Moments later Macharius strode regally down it, surrounded by his entourage. From my place beside the platform I got a clear view of him in profile. As ever, he looked like a mortal god. There was a radiance about him that had nothing to do with the personal body-shield he was wearing. He simply eclipsed all of those around him, even formidable men like Inquisitor Drake and squat, muscular General Sejanus. Tech-priests followed his every move with their monitoring devices. Technical cherubim hovered observantly over them. As ever the occasion was to be recorded and broadcast to the armies.
Macharius spread his arms wide in majestic greeting and then his imperial progress took him out of my sight. He spoke to the crowd briefly, his voice amplified by ancient technological artifice, his words relayed to our forces across the face of the planet and all the worlds of the system by the arcane science of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
I have seen the recordings of it since, the way he took the acclamation of the army as nothing more than his due and yet managed to make you feel as if it was deserved and not mere arrogance. There was something about Macharius then that made you think you were in the presence of something more than mortal. He had that quality that Space Marines have, of making you feel insignificant, but unlike them, there was no apartness. He was human, and he regarded you as human and being in his presence raised you up to the same exalted plane on which he lived.
Eventually the time came for us to be ushered into that imperial presence. He smiled as he saw us. You can see it in the recordings. He looks sincerely pleased and maybe he was. You can see all the surviving crew of the Indomitable as he pins the First-In medals on our chests. We all look much smaller than him and faintly embarrassed by the attention. All of us except the Understudy – he looks inhumanly distant.
Macharius praised us and pinned the decorations on our tunics. I remember standing close to him as he did so and thinking how tall he was and how young he looked. He radiated power and good health and a certain reserved good fellowship. When he looked at you, you felt the full power of his attention fall on you. When he spoke, he seemed genuinely interested in what you had to say, even if you only stuttered out your words as Anton did. He placed his hand on your shoulder in a comradely fashion and then moved on.
What I remember most about him is his sense of presence. Macharius was truly there. It was as if he was a solid thing and everything else around him was a shadow. Damn, I could spend the rest of my life trying to find the words to describe that but in the end all descriptions would be irrelevant. They could never give you the sense of the sheer primordial power of the man.
I know he talked to me and to this day I cannot remember what he said or what I said in return except in the vaguest of ways. I know he praised my bravery and I thanked him for it, and that he meant it and I meant it, which given how cynical I am, is a tribute to the man’s charisma.
At the end of the ceremony we were cheered by the assembled troops while Macharius watched and applauded himself. He got back into the governor’s air-chariot and flew away and I watched him go thinking that was the last time I would ever speak to him.
Of course, I was wrong.
I crouched behind the wreck of an autocar while a bunch of maniacal gangers took pot-shots at us with their home-made pistols. A slug ricocheted off the hood of the vehicle and bounced through a shop window, shattering the glass.
‘Just like the old neighbourhood on a feast-day night,’ Anton said, rising and snapping off a shot with his lasgun. Somebody screamed. Anton dropped back into place and grinned.
‘Makes me nostalgic,’ Ivan said and whistled through his iron teeth. I could tell he was thinking of taking a few shots himself or maybe even charging. He had always been fond of a brawl in the old days.
I stuck my head up and gazed around the street. There were still plenty of armed youngsters there, high on blaze and full of fight. They lurked behind overturned autocars and inside burned-out ground transporters. The battle to take Irongrad might have been over but it’s always a war inside a hive. In this neighbourhood it had probably been war since the hab-blocks went up.
Many of the local gangers had taken the overthrow of the Sons of the Flame as a signal to indulge in an orgy of looting and rape and general score-settling. The Fire worshippers must have been feared indeed to have kept so tight a lid on the seething cauldron of violence that was Irongrad. We had been sent out into the street with the rest of our new company to restore some order.
Overhead iron angels looked down from the high spots that their wings of fire had carried them to. Ordinary citizens had dived for cover in doorways, behind trash cans, in the sumps that led down to the sewers. A ganger shouted abuse in his incomprehensible dialect and took another shot.
Once we had been decorated and the colonel had had his chance to strut in front of Macharius we were returned to duty. Our medals had not brought us any special privileges. We were assigned to a new scrub company made up of a motley assortment of soldiers – crews who had lost their vehicles, squads who were the only survivors of their companies, officers who had been wounded when the last big push came and had missed the chance to die in glorious battle when the heretics overran us. I could see some of the others huddled down in a doorway, getting ready to move up the street. One of them signalled that he wanted covering fire. I raised my hand in acknowledgement and got ready to give it to him.
‘What in the name of the Emperor...’ Anton said. I followed his gaze and saw what had him so upset. The Understudy was walking up the street. He had his pistol held in his hand but it was by his side and he was not aiming at anything. Bullets ricocheted all around him, kicking up small clouds of dust in the street. He walked through them as if they were raindrops dropping from the sky on Jurasik. It was as if he did not believe he could be hit and somehow his faith created a force field around him that prevented that from happening. His face was pale. His eyes were focused on the distance. A bullet knocked off his cap and he bent down to pick it up and adjusted it on his head as if the wind had blown it off. I swear another bullet passed through the air where his face had just been.
It did provoke some action though. He stood up, pointed his pistol and snapped off a shot. I heard a scream from the direction he was firing in. He just kept walking forwards, firing as he went, and was occasionally rewarded with another scream. I looked at Ivan. Ivan looked at me. We were equally bemused. Anton grinned and said, ‘What the hell!’ He stood up and fired his lasgun. The bolt passed over the Understudy’s shoulder and struck another ganger. Ivan and I sprang to our feet and raced forwards. The rest of the squad did the same. It seemed like the Understudy was getting all the attention anyway. They sent a hail of las-bolts pounding into the gangers and mowed a few down. Some of the others broke away and ran.
I had the shotgun in my hand but I couldn’t use it because the Understudy was in front of me. That did not stop Ivan from shooting. I think he was doing it more to keep the gangers pinned down than because he expected to hit anything. All three of us, the Understudy, Ivan and me, reached the gangers at the same time. I pushed my combat shotgun forwards and pulled the trigger and the spray from the pellet cartridge took out another three of them. The Understudy shot one and Ivan simply pointed his lasgun and said, ‘Surrender!’
The gangers dropped their guns. I don’t know what they found more frightening: the look on the Understudy’s face or the look of Ivan’s metal jaws. To tell the truth, there was little to choose between the two in terms of their frightfulness.