I looked around to see if any of the others were still alive. I found them clustered around a Space Marine watching him with slack-jawed awe. They looked as if they expected him to perform a miracle before their very eyes. Personally I would not have been surprised if he had. There was something vastly reassuring about the presence of these massive, black-armoured figures. I felt safe in their shadow. While they were there nothing could harm us. No threat was too terrible to be faced. They radiated power and confidence. You felt something of the distant majesty of the Emperor himself. These were his chosen.
Guardsmen reached out to touch their armour as they passed. It was a thing they would tell their comrades in decades to come. Others bent their knees as they would before a priest. I doubt the Death Spectres noticed.
Even as I watched I heard the massive figure say something into the comm-net. I moved closer and I heard something about a hulk moving in-system.
The Death Spectre gestured to his comrades and they returned to their vehicles and departed. There was something urgent in their manner as if they had been summoned to some new and important duty. Within minutes they were gone and the only sign they had ever been there were the corpses they had left spread across the square.
The Guardsmen watched them go in silence. The locals did too, such as had been spared. Dozens of them were on their knees babbling and praying for mercy or forgiveness. It seemed they had for once witnessed a force as capable of filling them with awe as the minions of the Angels of Fire.
The body collectors had already scuttled out of hiding and were loading the dead onto their trolleys.
Rumours abounded in the Angel’s Blessing that night. The city was on the verge of open rebellion. Macharius had been wounded at the new war front. Macharius had been killed. The Death Spectres had gone off-world to deal with an ork invasion fleet. Plague had erupted on Karsk V and would be coming our way soon. We sat in the dark and drank our rotgut and tried not to pay too much attention. We were looking for distraction.
That night the girls brought a friend. She was tall, dark, and strikingly pretty with dark hair cut very short. Her name was Anna. I studied her as she sat opposite me. She seemed quiet and self-possessed and calm. She had the competence that nurses always have but she was distant.
‘She’s as new around here as you are,’ Yanis said, as if making a joke.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
Anna smiled a little coldly, I thought. ‘She means I just transferred in to St Oberon’s. I was working two levels down in the old Flat Tunnel Hospice.’
‘Might as well have come from another planet,’ said Yanis. There was some tension between the two. ‘It’s a different world down there.’
‘It’s poorer, if that’s what you mean,’ said Anna. ‘But people still need healing.’
‘I never said they didn’t.’
‘It is different down there,’ Anna said. ‘Darker, more dismal. The nobles who come to St Oberon’s have no idea what it’s like.’ She let that hang in the air, with the implication it was not just the nobles.
‘It’s always the bloody same,’ said Anton. ‘The higher up the hive you go, the snottier people get.’ That got him some nasty looks from the other nurses. Not that Anton cared. He never paid too much attention to what other people thought.
Katrina looked at the table and said, ‘Do we need to talk about this? There are other more interesting things to talk about. I’ve never been out of the hive, let alone to a different planet, neither have you, Yanis or Anna. You boys have. What was it like?’
‘Dangerous,’ said Anton. ‘The bloody places always seemed full of people who wanted to shoot us for some reason.’
Ivan gave him a dark look. ‘It’s understandable. I feel that way every time I look at you.’
‘Ha bloody ha!’
Katrina’s attempt to change the subject and the booze worked though. We spoke of the campaigns we had fought in – Jurasik, Elijah, Lucifer and the others. We did not talk about anything we were doing at present but it would not have mattered very much – if they had been spies they could have learned a lot just from the stories we told of the old times and about the battles we had fought in. It did not seem very likely that they were spies although you can never tell. Little did I know…
‘Tell me about the Angel of Fire,’ the New Boy asked.
I frowned at the way he spoke. It seemed to me that he was more interested in the Angel of Fire than he ought to have been. He was a studious lad with a scholarly turn of mind and this was his first campaign and his first time off the leash on an alien world. He was curious about everything – I suppose if I had been in the same situation I would have been too. My friends were drunk and I knew what they were thinking anyway so I concentrated on the girls, wondering about their response.
It was interesting. Anna and Yanis wore the conventional pious look of the faithful. Lutzka looked blank and far more interested in her drink. Katrina looked angry and stared off into the distance, biting her lower lip and frowning. I wondered what she was thinking so I asked. She just shook her head and looked even more angry and then she got up and stalked away towards the ladies room. Anton looked at me annoyed as if I had done something wrong. ‘What was that all about?’ He asked of no one in particular. The other girls looked embarrassed and a little afraid.
‘Her brother was burned by the Sons of the Flame,’ Yanis said at last.
‘He was not the only one, judging by the number of cages I have seen recently,’ said Anton with his usual mastery of the diplomatic arts.
‘It’s not that common,’ Yanis said.
‘It looks as if they burned thousands,’ said Anton.
‘And what are thousands or even tens of thousands in all the millions that a hive contains.’
‘It matters to the thousands,’ I said.
‘It teaches the rest of us to respect the Angel,’ said Anna. ‘You need to be firm to keep a hive under control.’ I thought I heard an implied criticism there; that we were not being firm enough with the locals. Maybe she felt things were starting to spin out of control.
‘So what was Katrina’s brother being taught to respect?’ I asked.
‘Ask her,’ she said, not responding well to the aggression in my voice. Maybe I had had too much to drink. ‘It’s not my business to say. I am new here.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Lutzka. ‘They are burned for their own good.’
We all turned to look at her. She seemed to deflate a little then her jaw firmed and she said, ‘Well, it’s true.’
‘Would you care to explain that?’ I asked.
‘You’re not very nice,’ Anna said.
‘Because I want an explanation?’
‘Because you have a nasty manner.’
‘I would still like to know how you burn someone alive for their own good. Call me an apostate but I can’t see how that works.’
‘Their souls go to join the Angel,’ said Lutzka. There was a dreamy look in her eye, the sort you sometimes see on the faces of the really devout when they are at prayer. ‘The flames cleanse them of their sins and they join his choir purified and free of the bonds of flesh.’
‘I doubt there is much flesh left on them at this stage,’ I said.
‘Scoff if you like but it’s what it says in scripture.’