There was an odd conviction in the way he said the word omens. He believed utterly in what he was saying and there was no trace of madness in those cold blue eyes of his. ‘They are omens. Something is happening here. Something terrible.’
I could not actually say I disagreed with him so I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to go. If he was going to spout heresy, I would need to report him to Drake or one of his minions. It was even possible he was one of the minions, put here to test the faith of those who were waiting to die. Don’t ask me why I thought that. I was sick and I was weary and I have seen and heard stranger things.
‘Our dreams are not the only omens,’ he said. Once again there was an ominous conviction in that light flat voice. I don’t know what it was that was so convincing, but there was something there, a certainty that made you believe, if not in what he said, then in the fact that the man uttering the words took them as the total truth. It spoke of a sort of faith, terrible in its simplicity. It was the sort of faith that many of us had once had in the success of the crusade. In this man, it seemed to have curdled into its opposite.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I was encouraging him because I was honestly curious.
‘You hear stories,’ he said. He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening, as if, even here surrounded by the dying, perhaps dying himself, he suspected that there were spies. He was quite possibly correct. ‘The crusade is crumbling. We came too far, too fast. We came to places where man was not meant to go. We are seeing things that man was not meant to see. We are too far from Holy Terra and the Emperor’s Light.’
Again there was that conviction there, the certainty of the fanatic who had no doubts. He might have been a commissar addressing a regiment before an important battle or a martyr preparing to meet his doom in fires stoked by heretics. There was no possibility that he was wrong.
‘I had been stationed a few places before we got to Loki – we stopped at all the transhipment points on our way out and I talked to a lot of folks. I like talking and I like listening and I heard some tales that would make your hair stand on end.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like ghost ships emerging from the warp and destroying our supply craft, enslaving their crews, taking the supplies meant for us and carrying them off to the daemon worlds where the heretics dwell.’
‘You always hear such stories,’ I said. ‘I have been hearing them since I first set foot on a starship over thirty years ago.’
‘I know,’ said Zachariah. ‘But tell me, is this the first time you have believed those stories to be true?’
Again there was no doubt in his voice, only certainty. I must believe what he did. The odd thing was that he was right. Oh, in the past, in moments of doubt and fear when travelling between the stars, I had thought of those old stories. Everybody does. But the Halo Worlds were the first place that I really actually thought it was true when I was not aboard ship.
He nodded, as if seeing something written on my face that confirmed what he was thinking. He kept going like a fighter pressing his advantage in a brawl. ‘The generals all think of rebellion, if they are not already openly rebelling like Richter. What else could that be but the taint of this evil place finding its way into their minds? Why else would they plot and scheme against the greatest hero mankind had known since the time of the Emperor?’
He was tugging at the first finger of his right hand now, counting off points as he made them.
‘Armies, entire Imperial armies, have fallen into heresy. Their generals set themselves up as gods among men, as satraps for old, evil powers. They are crushed and crushed again and still more emerge.’ That was another finger. ‘You have seen that here on Loki.’
‘Our armies are falling apart. Our men do not have ammunition. Our vehicles do not have fuel. Among the far stars, the glorified clerks of the Administratum plot against heroes.’ He had reached the penultimate digit.
‘We face more and more monsters, more and more strangeness, and that strangeness is not to be found just among our enemies but among ourselves.’ And he was done.
He sat down on his bed, appearing to have exhausted himself with his tirade. I noticed he was pale and that his eyes were faintly bloodshot. There were spots on his skin that reminded me of something and it came to me that he was very sick.
‘These are times of ill-omen,’ he said, his voice starting to fade, his certainty still there but his body unable to respond to his fanatic’s will. ‘All things will end badly.’
He nodded and slumped down, a wind-up toy that has run out of power. He pulled the sheet over himself and lay still. I turned my head a little so that I could see him, closed my eyes for a moment and I was asleep.
The next morning, when I woke, two Sisters Hospitaller were there. Zachariah’s body was covered with a white sheet. I felt much better and I sat up in bed. I placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder and she turned to face me, flinching as if she had felt the hand of a corpse on her body.
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What happened to Zachariah?’
‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘I thought that much would be obvious.’
‘I was just speaking to him last night,’ I said.
She looked at me. Her face was pale. Her eyes glittered. There were two spots of colour far up on her cheeks. ‘That’s impossible,’ she said. ‘He died two days ago. We’ve only just picked up the notification to remove the body.’
I stared at her, unsure if she was joking. It swiftly became obvious that she was not and I said no more.
I felt strong enough to take a walk around the wards. There was no one present to object. I was still limping and a little weak and I thought sometimes, out of the corners of my eyes, that I could see those small scuttling daemons.
There were many wounded men there, wrapped in bloody smocks. Some of them were legless. Some of them inspected the stumps where hands had once been with listless, uncomprehending eyes. Some were blind, with bandages wrapped around their eyes. Many lay on their beds, their breath wheezing from their chests, phlegm gurgling in their lungs. Their skins were pale. Their eyes were white. I was reminded constantly of the heretic armies as they advanced. If only there had been the sound of gunfire, many of the noises would have been similar.
As I walked I thought about what the sister had said, about the things I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye. It seemed obvious to me that I was not one hundred per cent recovered, that the fever still gripped me, at least some of the time.
I found myself in a great hallway with a soot-smudged stained-glass window. I looked out of it. Below me I could see dark clouds of industrial gas. From the gas lifted immense chimney towers, tall as starscrapers. In the sides of some I could see glowing windows. Roads ran round them, carrying groundcars ever higher. Aircars flew between them, bearing who knew what loads.
Below me the clouds parted and I caught sight of a vertiginous view, of massive pistons rising and falling on the roof of a structure bigger than a starship. Of more effluent billowing forth. Of a huge wheel, stuck in the side of a building, turning around and around for who knew what unguessable purpose. I stood there watching and thinking and trying to sort out my thoughts and feelings.
Had I imagined a whole conversation with Zachariah? Was it merely a fever dream conjured up from scraps of overheard conversation by my own imagination or had I really spoken to a dead man? Whether Zachariah had been dream or reality, he had given voice to many points that had troubled me about the state of the Imperium and the state of the crusade.