Despite myself I felt something like pride swell within me. It was an awesome force and it was only a small part of the army the Imperium was bringing to bear on this part of the universe. I felt like I was watching a metal tide that could cover an entire planet and crush all resistance and I was a small part of it. I looked at all the others and I think they felt the same.
‘How far do you think they are going?’ the New Boy asked.
‘To the edge of the galaxy,’ I said. The words had the ring of prophesy.
‘I am starting to hate this place,’ Anton said, conversationally. He held his lasrifle casually, in the crook of his arm, but I could tell he was ready to use it at the slightest provocation. His helmet was tilted back. His rebreather was slung round his neck. He rubbed his scar with his long fingers as he looked out into the crowds. The people watched us as we swept the streets on patrol. They did not look hostile. They did not look friendly. They just looked. We kept moving, bringing up the rear of the foot patrol. We were just there to be seen.
‘Why is that?’ I asked. I was not really interested but sometimes Anton’s inane chatter could provide distraction. I already thought I knew what he was going to say.
In the interval since the bulk of the army departed, things became ominously quiet in Irongrad. There was something odd going on beneath the surface though. Whenever I scanned the faces of that huge crowd I felt as if they were waiting for something, a sign perhaps, from us or from the Angel who had ruled their world for so long. I could not help but feel that concealed within those oceans of flesh were people who meant us ill.
Everywhere we went the gaze of the Angel looked down on us. Perched on the side of every hab-tower those metal-bodied seraphim stood ready to take flight on wings of fire. On every ceiling, murals showed its androgynous form. Every day we walked the streets of the hab-zones, just to show the fact that we were there, to remind the natives that a new order had come. Our grey uniforms looked drab and alien among the bright, ruddy colours favoured by the locals. In every square the fountains of fire still burned. Our tech teams had started to take away the sacrificial cages. Many a day I stood watch over them as the great machines demolished them and reclaimed the metal. I studied the faces in the crowd around me. I looked down the vast avenue of hab-blocks stretching to the horizon wall of the hive. Anton surprised me.
‘It looks like home in some ways, but it’s not.’
‘It does not look like Belial,’ I said. ‘It looks nothing like Belial.’
‘It’s a hive,’ he said.
‘And that’s it,’ I said. I looked around and saw no similarity. Belial was grim and grey and all around had been the signs of the heaviest of heavy industry. Pollutant smog had filled the streets and snaked below the level bridges like rivers of mist. The air temperature had been lower and the humidity far greater.
Everything had carried the signs of the different guilds and factories. Here, there was an awful uniformity about everything. The Cult of the Angel of Fire had strangled everything else, like a weed choking the life out of normal plants in an overgrown garden. Everything bore its stamp. All of the people bore its symbol. Metal angels hung from chains around every neck. There were more of those bloody angels than there were of any other Imperial ikons, including our own.
‘I hate those cages,’ Anton said. ‘Whoever thought of putting people to death that way was a madman.’
‘If you are being put to death, what does it matter how you die?’ I asked.
‘If you were going to greet the Emperor which would you prefer – a bolter shell through the head, quick and clean, or being burned alive inside a brewed-up Leman Russ?’
‘Neither,’ I said. ‘I plan on living till I am eighty and collecting a pension.’
‘And I planned on becoming a Space Marine,’ Anton said. ‘Let’s see how those things work out for both of us…’
‘Hush, the pair of you,’ said Ivan. ‘Something’s up.’
We had just entered a large square. All around were stalls where vendors sold hot food and cold metal religious trash, amulets and ikons of the Angel. A small group of people stared at us resentfully. They had been handing out pamphlets whose covers, inevitably, featured pictures of the Angel of Fire standing over the corpses of grey-uniformed off-world invaders.
Most people watched us blandly but some of the pamphleteers looked at us with a ferocious hate. Once a few of them picked up stones and bits of trash and pelted us with them. The Understudy stood there and watched and then strode forwards. A sense of menace, of strangeness, of quietness radiated out from him. I saw some of the stone-chuckers pause in mid-throw.
‘Put those down and go home,’ the Understudy said. His odd rasping voice carried even over the hubbub of the hive. ‘Go home and you will live.’
Somebody pulled back his arm to throw. Suddenly there was a pistol in the Understudy’s hand. He pulled the trigger. The shot went right through the hand. The heretic screamed and fell. He writhed on the ground in agony.
‘Anybody else?’ the Understudy asked. They just looked at him. ‘All right then, go.’
The locals looked shame-faced and shuffled their feet but he just stood there, quiet, gun in hand, a single figure confronting scores of them, unafraid. I watched to see what would happen next. I had the shotgun in my hand in case things turned nasty.
Much to my surprise, the crowd backed away. The Understudy gestured for a couple of the lads to come forwards and take the wounded man away for interrogation then walked back to the ranks and watched as the demolition team continued its work.
‘Understudy we used to call him,’ Anton said. ‘More like a bloody Undertaker these days.’
‘You keep calling him that and the name will stick,’ I said.
‘We’ll see about that.’
The Understudy had his hand to his ear, listening to something on the comm-net in the ear bead. He looked around and gestured for us to follow him. It seemed like something was up. We piled into the Chimera and roared through the streets.
By the time we arrived, the battle was over and our side had taken heavy casualties. I looked around to see if there was any sign of the attackers. All I could see was at least a dozen of our boys lying dead on the ground. All that was left of them was scorched bodies. Their flesh was black and cracked in places. Most of their uniforms looked as if they had been set on fire. Their weapons lay close at hand, buckled and melted as if someone had thrown them into very intense flame.
Anton studied the survivors. There were half a dozen of them and they all looked pale-faced and frightened. I clutched my shotgun very close and surveyed the streets. The battle had taken place in a narrow alleyway close to a main thoroughfare. Some of the mountains of trash piled up against the walls still burned. Thick, oily stinking smoke rose above them. The corpses of roasted rats lay nearby. Cockroaches the size of dinner-plates had exploded in the heat.
I looked up and I could see the towering tenements rising hundreds of storeys above me. I wondered if our boys had come under attack from ambush and whether someone was still lurking on the balconies of the tenements waiting to take shots at us.
One thing I could not see was any sign of the people who had attacked. I looked around very carefully for bodies. There were probably two score civilians but none of them had any weapons.
I surmised that the survivors had gathered up the guns and taken them for themselves because I could not see any sign of flamethrowers or the sort of heavy weapons that would have resulted in this sort of loss. Some of these soldiers looked as if they’d been hit by a lascannon. There were a number of people heavily wounded – they had suffered very bad burns. The last time I had seen people who look like that, they had been dragged from the cockpits of burning tanks. Most of them had not lived very long afterwards.