‘There’ll be a few less by the time I’m finished tonight,’ said Anton. ‘I was just thinking about catching up on some kip. I’m not too happy about being interrupted.’
The chanting started drifting across no-man’s-land again. It had an agitated sound to it – the heretics were unsettled by the flares and star shells and the sounds of shooting. The drums took on a more regular, but still feverish, rhythm. A great strangled roar rose like a distant sea pummelling a stony shoreline. It was followed by shouts and the sound of more flares going off.
Warning horns sounded again. Our own troops started to pour out of the low bunker doors, the green uniforms of my Lion Guard crew mingled with the grey of the Grosslanders whose spines we had been sent to stiffen. Some of the likely lads were adjusting the straps of their rebreathers. Others had clearly just snatched up their weapons. One or two had bare feet. I could see the whitish mould on their toes, the places where the skin had cracked and leaked pus. They had probably been washing their feet when the alarm sounded. They were out of luck now. They’d better hope we didn’t run into any contact gas. Then they’d have more than losing their toes to worry about.
Chapter Two
More and more heads popped out of the bunkers and blockhouses. Men picked up guns and stood ready to defend their trenches. I ran along the front and shouted at the Grosslanders to get back in. As senior NCO, command had fallen to me since Lieutenant Jensen had taken a bullet through the brain. There were enemies coming across no-man’s-land who would be on us before those coming through the trenches. They needed to be shooting at them first.
I raised the periscope again. The black-clad assault troops had vanished into the cover of shell-holes and behind ridges, but a new wave of heretics was sometimes visible in the distance through the gaps in the mist haze and gas clouds. They were throwing themselves over the lip of their trenches and scuttling forward in a half-crouch that suggested they were somehow less than human. Perhaps it was the case. Rumour had it that some strange things were born in vats in those distant mountain citadels.
Lieutenant Prost of the 66th Grosslanders moved along the line. His gaze passed studiously over us. We were not part of his command. I was a mere NCO but I was also part of Macharius’s personal guard and, even with his fortunes at a low ebb, Macharius’s name meant something. He was still supreme commander of the crusade, and who knew what influence we might have. It was amazing how much that counted with certain officers in certain line regiments.
The Undertaker had dispatched us here to check on this section of line when communication went down and we had not been able to get back to our own section. Our cold-minded former lieutenant had not become any less strange as he had worked his way up to field command, but his grasp of basic tactics was as sound as ever. We were stuck here in our ambiguous position. We carried papers that told people who we were and they were marked with the seal of the Lord High Commander’s office. I had been in such situations before – I knew that if we asked for something we would most likely get it, just so long as we did not provoke the prickly pride of the officer class.
Prost barked orders emphasising what I had already said. I thought about that great human wave advancing across no-man’s-land. With proper artillery support it would be smashed even as it set out. Hell, with old Number Ten, the Baneblade that Ivan and Anton and I had started our careers on so long ago, we could have ended the attack there and then.
Screams sounded now as the bunkers opened up across no-man’s-land. Lasguns lit the night. Mortars churned the mud. Here and there explosions flared where someone blundered into a landmine or an unexploded shell.
I looked at the squad of men in tattered green uniforms around me. They were waiting for orders. I was not too troubled by the advance across no-man’s-land – the bunkers had been positioned so that their fields of fire raked the open approaches. They would slow or kill huge numbers of the enemy.
My main problem was the suspicion that this was a diversion, intended to focus attention away from the assault squads and attacks coming in along the trench lines themselves. Much as I disliked it, Anton’s earlier idea had suddenly started to sound good. We needed to undertake a quick reconnaissance along the front line just to make sure.
I raised my hand and indicated the others should follow me. I kept my head down while I did it. Despite Anton’s overconfidence I was not sure that there were no enemy snipers around, and people giving orders always make tempting targets.
We trudged down the line, passing the burned-out remains of another Leman Russ which had been hastily converted into an armoured strong point. A heavy bolter team were poking their heads and their weapon out of the place where its turret had once been. The weapon roared as they took their toll of the incoming heretics.
We passed more bunkers. Over each bunker entrance were bits of wood or scraps of card with joke signs inscribed on them, giving the bunker’s name. Some of them had lines scratched through the alien script of the heretics and words in Imperial Gothic written beneath. I know for a fact that during my time on the front some of those signs had been changed around a hundred times. Where once the crusade had leapt from star system to star system, now we were reduced to bickering over a few kilometres of sodden earthworks.
We came to a fork in the trenches. A crossroads sign announced that this was where the Great Trunk Road branched into the Street of a Thousand Taverns and the Night Bazaar. I gestured for Anton and Ivan to take a couple of the lads and move to point down Tavern Street. Heads down, they scuttled by me along the left-hand branch. The joking had gone out of them and they were all efficiency now. Anton held his sniper rifle at the ready. Ivan had a grenade in one hand and his lasgun in the other. I clutched my shotgun tight, made sure no one was in front of me and ran along the duckboards towards the so-called Night Bazaar.
When we’d first arrived all of these trenches were an incomprehensible maze where everything looked alike. Now they seemed as different as two adjoining neighbourhoods in Belial. I made out the midden piled up outside the facetiously named Officers’ Quarters bunker, and recognised the scratches on the doors of Hogey’s Grand Emporium where shrapnel had sliced the plasteel and peeled away the paint from the shattered remains of a Chimera. They were familiar landmarks now. We headed down Sewer Street, a trench that was basically just one big latrine, moving into the Great Bog, a circular area used as a combination of rubbish dump and public toilet.
The clouds parted and the skull moon glared down. The lesser moon was halfway across the sky. A star shell exploded, sending shadows flickering weirdly through the trenches and illuminating the bodies that sprawled around us. They were in the grey uniforms of the Grosslanders. I was all too aware that death had touched this place. Some of the corpses were already crawling with the fat-bodied bore-flies. They liked nothing more than to feast on the flesh of the fallen, before laying the jelly eggs containing their larvae.
I narrowed my eyes. A man lay with his throat cut from ear to ear, a splatter of red blood down his chest, covered in crawling insects. An officer sprawled face down, a lho-stick near to hand, a wisp of smoke still rising from the tip. A soldier with a faintly familiar face slumped over a packing crate on which lay a deck of cards and an open copy of the Imperial Infantryman’s Primer. The air inside my rebreather tasted stale. Something in my brain screamed that I ought to be able to smell the odour of death. I could hear the troops behind me shuffling their feet; all of them knew better than to get in front of me when I had the shotgun in my hands.