‘If we’re lucky.’ I said. The words came out more bitter than I intended but we all knew I was speaking true. If we were lucky we would be alive to watch others take the credit. Plenty would not be. Henrik’s death had left me thinking all three of us had lived longer than we had any reasonable right to expect. It was only a matter of time before our names were bellowed out at the Last Roll Call. The odds against us got longer every day we kept breathing.
Such were the joys of being one of the Emperor’s soldiers in the bright new dawn of the 41st millennium. It was probably ever so.
We walked back down the hill to a camp seething with activity. Tens of thousands of grey-tunicked soldiers swarmed over the dry rock of Karsk IV. Hundreds of enginseer crews crawled over our Baneblades and Shadowswords and Leman Russ, scoping the armour plate, repairing the track mechanisms, testing the rotation of the turrets, elevating their guns, intoning battle hymns to placate the angry spirits of the great war machines. The roar of engines, the hum of servo-mechanisms and the chant of technical plainsong filled the air. The smell of drive exhaust rivalled the tang of the planetary atmosphere. The air vibrated from the engine-thunder of the enormous vehicles. Until you’ve witnessed it, you can never really appreciate exactly how much work and how much noise goes into getting an Imperial Guard Army ready to move.
Over everything loomed the monstrous bulk of the landing ships on which we had dropped from the eternal dark of space. They were larger than ork gargants and down their belly ramps rumbled Leman Russ after Leman Russ. Company after company of soldiers exited through the external hatches. The Imperial Guard had arrived in force at this tiny outpost in the desert of Karsk IV. It was all part of some great plan which, as usual, no one had bothered to explain to us. An adjutant might just have stuck the pin in the wrong part of the map again for all we knew.
There was that air of subdued excitement and suppressed fear that you always get at the start of campaigns. It was combined with the simple pleasure of having real planetary dirt beneath our feet and real gravity tugging at our bodies. When you’ve been cooped up on an Imperial troopship for months, you cannot wait to see a sky again even if it belongs to a foreign world where you may well die.
We passed along a row of Chimeras. Their crews lay around on their packs and blankets checking their lasguns and their filter masks. Ivan exchanged nods with the men he knew. There were far fewer familiar faces now than there had been when we set out from Belial all those years ago.
I thought about how different my surroundings were from that industrial world half a sector away. Belial was a cold place, much colder than this one and much more densely populated. There had been vast wastelands between the hive cities there too, of course. On Belial they had been slag heaps and ash deserts, the products of thousands of years of industrial production in the service of the Imperium.
Here, the wastelands were the result of shifting tectonic plates and the action of enormous volcanoes. This produced pyrite, the source of the planet’s wealth and the real reason why Battlegroup Sejanus of the Second Macharian Army was on-planet. This world would provide us with the shells that would feed our tanks, guns across the surface of hundreds of worlds as the crusade of Macharius got into gear. We needed to control this planet if the holy war was to proceed.
Apparently, Karsk IV’s rebel governor had different ideas. In the long years of schism that preceded the start of the 41st millennium his family had become a power unto itself. They controlled all the industrial worlds of this multi-planet system. The governor no longer saw himself as the Emperor’s representative. He believed himself to be absolute ruler of everything he surveyed. He claimed he was descended from the Emperor himself and blessed by the Angel of Fire who stood guard at the Emperor’s right hand. It was up to us to convince him otherwise. He needed to learn that the Imperium had returned in all its glory. The bad old days were over. The stability of the Emperor’s rule was being extended into this sector once more.
We were the spearhead of an army of millions dispatched to reclaim thousands of worlds long lost to the light of the Emperor’s presence. Under the Lord High Commander Macharius we had crossed the infinite depths of space to bring the Emperor’s word to the lost and the forsaken.
We walked along a long line of Leman Russ stuck with their engines revving and going nowhere. Crewmen thrust their heads out of turrets and looked around. A few shouted to the troop carriers ahead of them asking what the hold-up was. If they had really wanted to know, they would have used the comm-net. The three of us were making better time on our own booted feet than the whole armoured column.
We soon saw the cause of the problem. One of the tanks was bogged down in a dust pool, holding up the whole line. A team of enginseers and their massive mechanical drones were laying a metal plate in front of the Russ, hoping that its tracks would get traction on it. Another team were attaching chains to the tow hook extruded by the tank in front so that it could help pull the trapped vehicle clear. We quickened our pace so we wouldn’t get roped into the work crew. Ahead of us was a huge flat plain covered in thousands of blister tents. In the cleared areas between the sleeping zones, companies marched and drilled and dug latrines. The Imperial Guard likes to keep its soldiers busy.
‘Look at them,’ Anton said, taking in a company of new recruits with one bold sweep of his thin right arm. ‘They should still be in schola.’
Their officer glared at Anton as he went by but said nothing, probably because in his heart of hearts he agreed. Maybe he noticed the campaign badges on our chests. We had more than he did.
There were a lot of new faces in the crowd, replacements right out of the training battalions for the casualties we had taken on Charybdis. They had the fresh-faced look that I knew only too well. I had worn it myself not all that long ago in the great scheme of things.
Ivan made the low whistling sound he sometimes used to signify amusement. The prosthetics made it hard for him to laugh. ‘Are you going to teach them?’
It was not just the youngsters’ faces that seemed clear and clean-scrubbed. Their uniforms had a newness to them that was dazzling. Their lasguns gleamed with the oil-gel coating they had when the Temple factorums shipped them. The newcomers were sharp-edged, bright and clear and not quite real yet. Some of them would not live to get that way. I already knew that. I had seen all of that before.
‘It would hardly be worth my while,’ Anton said. ‘Let’s wait a few months and see who survives and then we’ll decide who gets taught.’
It was a cruel thing to say but we nodded agreement. We would help these newcomers where we could and do our best to keep them alive because doing that would help keep us alive, but we would not get close to them until we saw who lived and who died.
That was always difficult to tell. The confident assured ones, the ones you would have sworn to the Emperor knew what they were doing were often the first to catch a las-bolt. The idiots, the incompetents, the sloppy ones sometimes surprised you and turned out to be good soldiers.
I mean who would have guessed looking at Anton back in the day that he was ever going to live through ten years of hellish violence. I suppose you could have said the same about me. Remembering what we had been like back then, Ivan was the only one I would put money on and look what had happened to him.
We walked all the way back to the Indomitable. Fondly I looked at the incept number Ten inscribed on its side beneath the Imperial Gothic lettering of its name. For a good deal of my career as an Imperial soldier this ancient tank had been my guardian and my weapon. It loomed over us like a mountain of ceramite and plasteel. The Baneblade cast a long cold shadow, even on the warm surface of Karsk IV. Its fierce presence welcomed us back to the only real home we had known in nearly a decade.