The great vessel loomed over us, a tower of ceramite and plasteel, resting on great finned haunches. Most of the blast doors were already closed. Men in green tunics guarded the ramps. I brought the groundcar to a screeching halt and vaulted out, striding confidently towards the shuttle. Men brought lasguns to bear on me. I snapped a salute at the nearest officer.
‘Sergeant Lemuel,’ I said. ‘Reporting fit for duty.’
Anton and Ivan strode up behind me and repeated my performance. The officer shook his head and motioned for us to get up the ramps as quickly as we could.
‘We seal and blast in three minutes,’ he said. He glanced towards the conflict where the walls had been breached. ‘Possibly even sooner.’
The ramp flexed under my weight as I raced up it. At the top I turned and looked out. A massive heretic breakthrough had smashed the space port perimeter. At the edges, ships were already taking fire. Space-toughened ceramite was being blasted by Basilisk shells. Lightning danced down the flanks of one vessel where ancient power conduits leaked. Men lay charred and blackened on the concrete. Clouds of smoke and gas drifted across my field of vision. I stepped into the vessel. A starsailor shouted and pointed, guiding me towards the emergency acceleration couches. I strapped myself down knowing this was going to be a rough lift-off.
Chapter Twelve
I strapped myself into the launch-bed, thinking of all the previous times I had done this. Normally it was a simple precaution, but with all the shelling going on there was a very real threat of an emergency take-off. Even as that thought struck me, the whole ship shuddered. A bell-like tone filled the air, as if the ship had been struck with a great hammer.
‘That’s not good,’ said Anton. All around us crewmen were on their knees, murmuring technical invocations and launch prayers. A red light flashed. A warning bell sounded. There was another impact, this time followed by the sound of an explosion. It did not sound at all like the normal launch routine.
‘I think we got on just in time,’ said Ivan. His mechanical voice held no emotion. He at least always sounded calm.
‘I think we’re getting away just in time,’ said Anton and gulped. He glanced around furtively as if realising that what he had just said smacked of cowardice.
Normally I would have taken the opening and used it to attack. This time I kept my mouth shut. His words echoed my own thoughts too closely. The ship shuddered and for a moment I thought the end had come, but it was only the lifters cutting in. I could tell from the vibration that the shuttle was now airborne, climbing up and away from the planet’s surface. I lay there rigid, listening for the small sounds that would tell me that something had gone badly wrong.
‘If that last shell has breached the hull then all the air in the ship might be evacuated,’ Anton said. He sounded nervous.
‘Bulkheads will close and prevent that,’ said Ivan.
‘Only in the sections not breached. If there’s a hole in the hull we’ll all be sucked out into space even if the rest of the ship remains sealed.’
‘We can’t be sucked out,’ I said. ‘We’re strapped to these couches.’
‘Then we’ll suffocate and flash-freeze. Remember what happened back on the Tramontane when that wall blew out?’
How could I forget? We had found bodies frozen so cold that they were like ice blocks themselves. If you accidentally bumped into them bits broke off.
‘As far as I can tell it has not happened yet,’ said Ivan, ‘so why don’t you shut up and worry about it when it happens.’
‘Because I won’t be able to worry,’ said Anton. ‘I will be dead.’
‘Then where’s the problem?’
‘What was that noise?’ Anton asked, turning his head nervously. It was just the all clear, telling us the shuttle had left the planetary atmosphere. I unhooked the harness and stood up, made my way out of the emergency launch chamber and stared out of a small porthole. Beneath me I could see the vast shield of the planet obscuring the lower half of the sky. Green and red clouds drifted over rust deserts and sludge seas of ominous grey. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I could have sworn that I saw small flickers of light below me, as if vast explosions were going off, large enough to be seen from space.
Despite the silence, the shuttle was still accelerating. The great hemisphere shrank to become a ball beneath me. The outline of continents became visible. I felt unutterably weary. I looked at the chrono on the wall, still set to local time. An hour ago I had been among the sick and wounded in the great hospital. Now I was watching the planet recede beneath me. It all had the aspect of a dream.
I felt Anton and Ivan move up to flank me.
‘Well, we lost,’ said Ivan. His voice was utterly flat.
Anton sighed. He would have liked to deny it but he could not.
‘We’ll be back,’ I said. I did not sound very convincing, even to myself.
Macharius looked weary. It would not have been visible to many but it was to me. I had known him for a very long time, stood guard over him on a hundred worlds. It was evident to my eye as soon as I resumed my bodyguard duties.
There was something about him that suggested the old man he in fact was. It was not his body. The juvenat treatments still kept him slim, tall and athletic, muscular as a warrior god. His hair was still golden. His eyes were still clear. When he strode across the room there was still the same look of electric purpose to him that he had possessed when I had first seen him three decades ago on Karsk.
It was something about the set of the shoulders perhaps. They were not so firmly straight. There was the suggestion of a stoop as well, of a head often held downcast.
The grip he clapped on my shoulder was just as firm as it had ever been, and the way he guided me across the chamber was just as forceful as it ever was. There were more lines around his eyes, perhaps, and on the flesh of his hands. There were a few more scars, barely visible. Macharius always healed well. In this, he was fortunate.
‘You are recovered, Lemuel,’ he said. The tone of his voice was compelling but it seemed to have lost something, the certainty it had always had. It did not quite command belief the way it once did. Or perhaps it was just my own imagination and my own feelings of depression.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘It pleases me that you are fit for duty,’ he said. To his credit, he did sound pleased. It was not just something he was saying because it was expected. He was a man who had conquered sectors of the galaxy for the Imperium. He could say what he wanted to whomever he wanted.
I looked around the chamber. It was oddly familiar, filled with furnishings that I could remember seeing many times before, mementoes of scores of campaigns, the battle banners of a hundred defeated foes. There was a rune-embossed chainsword he had picked up on Silvermount and the helmet of the Amir of Peshtar, crowned with the Star of Pesh, birthright of a world’s rulers for a hundred generations. There was a desk carved from the tip of a Leviathan tusk on which sat a regicide set made from the resonant woods of Kal, whose colour responded to the mood of the player when he touched them.
Macharius looked at me again and said, ‘I wanted to thank you for saving my life back on Loki. I would decorate you again but you’ve enough braiding already.’
One more would always be nice, I thought, but I did not say anything. It was clear Macharius was not in the mood to be giving medals, even for saving his life. There was a grimness about him I had not seen before. He gestured that I should take a seat. I knew then what was coming.
Throughout his career Macharius had made a habit of talking with his common soldiers about the campaign. It was not really the trait of an Imperial general. It was the style of the planetary nobility amongst whom he had come of age, of men used to talking with trusted retainers.