There had been an ambush. One of our patrols had been set upon by hordes of the heretics. They had called in for help. We had been sent in response.
Ivan held the controls of the heavy bolter and studied the streets. If he was hungover you couldn’t tell. He was looking for targets. All we could see were people garbed in the light robes so common among the workers here. We were getting closer to the ambush site though. You could tell from the smell of burning flesh.
The fight had come to a climax in one of those plazas that centred around a burning cage. Our boys had made a good show of it. They had left hundreds of dead behind them as they went. Corpses still littered the ground despite the hordes of collectors who had gathered to strip the bodies and drag them away to the gigantic crematorium. Bounties were still paid for that. It was one of the local laws that Macharius had let stand.
A few of the dead might have been innocent bystanders. I doubted it. In my experience, factorum workers are rarely so heavily armed.
We were not the first on the spot. A company had already deployed in the square. I saw officers gesturing and shouting orders. I saw a ratling sniper perched on top of a winged angel statue and surveying the crowd of corpse collectors through the scope of his high-powered rifle.
The Chimera crunched bodies under its treads until a commissar gave the signal to halt. We stopped. The squad deployed. I clambered out of the turret and dropped into place beside Anton, my shotgun at the ready. Ivan stayed in the turret, hands still on the gun. I felt reassured to have him there. If trouble broke out, he knew how to handle such a weapon.
The commissar strode up to us. He was one of the icy-faced types. ‘Secure the perimeter, Lieutenant Ryker,’ he said. His voice was beautiful and mellow like that of an avuncular priest. It was surprising that such a man had such a voice.
‘Sir,’ said the Understudy. He began to rasp out the orders and we responded, moving to the edge of the plaza, taking cover behind burned-out cars, plascrete walls and podiums of statues. Anyone could see that it was too late, that the fighting was over, but no one was taking any chances. If an angry torch-bearing mob came back this way they would find themselves cut down in a hail of las-fire.
I found myself sheltering behind a plascrete bench with Corporal Hesse and the New Boy. Hesse did not look so jolly this morning. He was all business, just like the lasgun he held ready in his hand.
‘You see what they did back there?’ he asked, when he was sure that a horde of fanatics were not about to erupt from the side alleys and assault us at just this moment.
I had and I had been trying not to think about it. Around the fire fountain were half-burned bodies. More had been stuffed into a cage and set alight. I did not doubt for a moment they had been our boys and they had been alive at the time. It could not have been a nice way to go.
‘I don’t think I want to be taken alive by these heretics,’ said the New Boy. He was not being flippant.
‘Best way to do that is shoot them with a lasgun,’ said Hesse. ‘See how they like being burned.’
‘I saw some of those priests back at the factorum,’ said the New Boy. ‘Las-fire did not even slow them down. It just made them stronger, like they fed on it.’
Hesse smiled grimly. ‘Then don’t shoot the priests, shoot the people with them. Leave the local holy men to Lemuel here. See if they like shotgun cartridges as much as they like las-bolts.’
I was not at all sure that I appreciated Hesse volunteering me for priest-killing duty but what he said made a certain amount of sense.
‘Alternatively you could always try a grenade,’ I said.
‘I don’t care if you piss on the bastards to put out their burning heads, you see one of those psykers, you put him down, however you have to.’ The corporal sounded angry, which was understandable given the circumstances. I was not in the best of moods myself. We stared at the plaza as if we expected a horde of fire-worshipping heretics to manifest at any moment. They kept stubbornly away.
We waited and waited but the heretics did not return to do any more burning. Clearly odds of less than a hundred to one did not suit them. Eventually the officers and the commissar and the people who seemed to be consulting with them decided they had seen enough. We were ordered back to the vehicles and headed back to base.
The next day we stood on the walls and watched the army depart. Endless lines of massive battle-tanks roared off in advance of troop carriers. Valkyries swarmed in the air over them. Titans strode gigantically through the red murk of the dawn. The air vibrated with the passage of the army. Our words seemed to resonate inside our chests when we spoke.
‘We should be going with them,’ said Anton. ‘We should be in Number Ten.’
I wasn’t going to argue with him. If there was any justice in the galaxy we would have been out there in the Indomitable. The lieutenant would have been leading us and Oily and Henrik would have been with us. Instead we were with all the other troops of our hastily assembled company, standing guard on the walls of Irongrad, watching the army leave to go with Macharius to new conquests and victories. Somewhere in the distance were new hives, new heretic armies, new enemies. I told myself I should be glad that I was here, out of the way of danger, but I was not. I was disappointed.
‘It’ll be years before we get another Baneblade,’ said Ivan gloomily. ‘If ever we do.’
‘I’ve dreamed of being a tank driver,’ said the New Boy. ‘Now I am with the bloody footsloggers.’
‘Life’s not fair,’ I said. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
‘Like you have?’
‘Now you are just being disrespectful.’
‘They’ll get all the action,’ Anton said. His gaze followed the huge dust plumes kicked up by the army wistfully.
‘I am sure the locals will come up with something to keep us busy,’ I said. I was thinking about the increasing levels of violence on the streets and the rumours we had heard about the priesthood of the Angel of Fire becoming more active.
I shielded my eyes and kept staring out over the red-and-orange wastes. There were still some burned-out tanks out there from the days of our assault. The tech-adepts had not managed to salvage everything. It was pointless trying to count all the armoured vehicles down there but that did not stop me trying. I reached several dozen, a small fraction of the total, when Anton distracted me with one of his idiot questions. ‘Hey, Leo, what are the chances of us getting another Baneblade?’
‘About the same as you learning to think,’ I said.
‘I am serious,’ he said.
‘So am I,’ I said.
‘No, seriously, what do you think?’
‘I think we’ll all be dead of old age by the time we get reassigned. You know how the Munitorum works. If we’re lucky we won’t be reassigned to Valkyries.’
‘I quite fancy being a pilot,’ said Anton.
‘You have any training for it?’ I asked.
‘How difficult can it be?’
‘If it wasn’t too difficult for you, the Munitorum would never assign you to it,’ said Ivan.
‘Listen to the man, Anton,’ I said. ‘He understands military bureaucracy.’
‘I could learn,’ said Anton, never one to let the idiocy of a statement discourage him from making it. I watched Titans lope out now, the smaller Warhounds racing ahead as if to get to grips with the enemy all the sooner. The giant Reavers followed in their wake, cautious enough on the surface of a world that manufactured Shadowswords.