All I know is that Macharius was not a saint. He was perhaps the greatest general since the time of the Emperor. He was capable of great kindness and great wickedness but what man is not, given the opportunity? And opportunity was a thing that Macharius had a lot of.
I looked down at the boy, but his eyes were wide open and he was staring at the ceiling with that unblinking look that told me that he would not be closing them again himself. I reached out with my left hand and shut his eyes for him. I looked around at that chamber, full of the dead and dying, and I thought about Macharius, and about all of the others who had followed him and his great strange crusade to the edge of the known universe.
I thought about the Lord High Commander and I thought about Ivan and Anton and Anna. I thought about people I have not seen alive in three decades – I thought about Tiny and the lieutenant and the Undertaker. I thought about the fact that I had almost died today and that sometime soon I was certainly going to, and I decided that I needed to get it all down. I needed to leave what I knew so that someday it might be remembered: the truth about Macharius and Drake and their holy war to reclaim the galaxy, the truth about what they were like and how they died.
So here I am with this data-slate, making this recording. At least, it’s something to fill the time until the orks come again.
For me it all started on Karsk IV. This is how it was…
From the top of Flamestrike Ridge I could see all the way into hell.
On the horizon, chemical flames erupted from newly born volcanoes. The molten rock of the lava lakes churned around islands of accumulated ash. Big, leather-winged predators drifted on thermals above the infernal pools. They might have been birds or bats or some mutant harpy out of ancient legend. It was too far to make out the full, ominous details.
Even at a distance of several Gothic leagues I could smell the brimstone on the wind. It made me cough and left a sulphurous taste on my tongue, adding its own special tang to the already acrid air of Karsk IV.
Off to the south, along the ridge-line, a battery of Basilisks pointed their pitted gun-metal snouts at the sky. Their crews had set them up according to the proper rituals and were traversing their weapons through ninety-degree arcs. I half expected them to start lobbing shells at the bubbling tar pits to test their accuracy.
‘I don’t think we’ll be going that way,’ said Anton, squinting in the direction of the flames. He leaned against a massive orange boulder at the same angle he had propped his lasgun. He had lost weight and looked taller and skinnier than ever. His grey uniform hung loose on his body. Huge sweat circles stained his plain dress tunic under the armpits. His rebreather dangled around his neck. His helmet was tipped back, showing the scar he had picked up on Charybdis. It had been sutured badly and the remnants of the scabbing puckered the flesh in small ridges so that it looked like a centipede crawling across his forehead just beneath the skin. Anton had acquired many interesting scars in his career as a soldier of the Emperor, some of them in his mind.
‘Really,’ I said.
I wiped the sweat from my brow as I watched an enormous geyser of lava spurt skywards. Huge gobbets of burning brimstone dropped back to splatter the ground. It was a sight at once awesome and extremely discouraging if you knew this was an obstacle between you and your objective. Soon we were going to have to find our way through that mass of flame and magma. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘The tanks will sink in the boiling rock and we will all drown.’
‘We’d burn to death before we drowned,’ said Ivan. His prosthetic jaw and the mass of plasteel covering half his ruined face distorted his voice into something not quite human. It was a legacy of an ork cannon shell on Jurasik. He raised the magnoculars he had taken from the dead Schismatic colonel and squinted in the direction of the flames. He still had the broad build of the boxer he had been during our time in the guild factorum on Belial. Amid the sweltering heat he was the only one of us not soaked in sweat. I envied him that. ‘The molten rock is called lava and we will be going that way. There are paths through it. You would know that if you paid any attention during His Lordship’s briefings.’
Anton grinned his idiot grin. He had the rotten yellow teeth so common among the hive workers of Belial. ‘Why would I do that when I got you to do it for me?’
‘Because I may not always be here to haul your skinny arse out of harm’s way.’ Ivan rubbed at the bare patch on his upper arm where his stripes had been. He had suffered one of the drunken demotions that were as regular as his promotions. It took a lot of alcohol to kill the pain and smite the recurring infections the reconstructive tech-surgery on his face had left him with.
I could tell from the expression in his cold blue eyes that death was on his mind. It had been on all of our minds since Henrik’s name came up in the lasgun lottery. I still looked around half-expecting to see old Henrik standing there, cracking jokes and offering up his hip flask. We had buried him in a mudhole on Charybdis six standard months ago.
Death was something you always thought about at the start of a campaign and this one was likely to be the biggest and most dangerous any of us would ever see, a full-scale Imperial Crusade, the first in a score of generations. Even Anton looked thoughtful. He pulled at his lower lip with a greasy finger. His frown made the centipede scar wriggle on his brow.
‘You’re very quiet, Leo,’ Ivan said, looking over at me. ‘Thinking too much again?’
‘I have to think for two when Anton is around,’ I said.
‘Ha bloody ha!’ Anton said.
‘For you that was a rejoinder of unusual wit,’ I said.
‘You swallow a lexicon?’ Anton asked. ‘You always have to use big words to prove you are not stupid. Or are you just trying to sound like the lieutenant and his toadies? You spend enough time around them up in the cockpit.’
‘I am not the man who joined the Imperial Guard because he thought he could get promoted to Space Marine,’ I said. Ivan snorted.
‘You thought so too,’ Anton said. He had stopped tugging his lip and was probing the insides of his ear with the same finger. ‘You just deny it now.’ His tone was that of the aggrieved child part of him was always going to be.
Maybe he was right. Maybe we had believed that back on Belial, when all we knew of soldiering was what we read in propaganda novels written at the behest of the planetary government.
Was it possible we had been so naive? Well, whatever naivety had been in us had been burned out by ten years of constant warfare on a dozen worlds.
‘I think I can see one of the paths the lieutenant was talking about,’ Ivan said. When he turned his head, I could see the flames reflected in the lenses of his field glasses and the metal of his cheek. It gave him a daemonic look, like a premonition of dark things to come. ‘I think we might be able to pass through and take the heretics in the flank.’
‘It would have made more sense to drop in on top of them,’ Anton said.
‘Yeah, nothing like dropping on top of the planetary defence batteries for keeping casualties low,’ I said. ‘It’s a good job General Sejanus is in charge and not you…’
‘Space Marines make drops like that,’ Anton said. He sounded wistful. ‘Just once I would like to do the same. Or at least bloody well get to see one.’
Ivan laughed. ‘We’re just the poor, bloody Guard. We get to do most of the fighting and watch others show up late and take the credit.’