I looked over at Ivan and Anton. They were hunkered down near Macharius and Drake. The Lord High Commander looked utterly relaxed. I thought of all the ways we could be blasted from the sky. All it would take would be one shot from a Hydra Flak Tank – the enemy would not even have to know Macharius was on board. It just needed one man to fire an anti-aircraft weapon and we would go down. I prayed Macharius’s legendary luck would hold at least until we were on the ground once more when I could trust to our skills and weapons.
There are few situations more frightening than hurtling across the night sky in a flyer knowing that at any second a stray shot might kill you, that the slightest miscalculation on the part of the pilot might send you plunging to fiery doom ploughing through the side of a building. It’s the not having any control over my own fate that unsettles me.
Ahead of us now I could see fires burning on the peak of a black pyramid, and scores of raptor-like shadows swirling around the building as gunships strafed it. Some of those vehicles were descending and we moved to join them.
Dust swirled into the sky and flames danced away as the Valkyries displaced air. I jumped out of the door, shotgun held ready and scanned the rooftop. I could see no sign of resistance so far. In the distance I could hear klaxons howling and searchlights beginning to probe the sky. Down there was an army that was starting to wonder what was going on, who was attacking it and why?
I raced across the flat rooftop as the rest of the group tumbled out and moved to join me. Drake’s storm troopers were already crashing through doors. From below us came the sound of combat.
At that moment I felt an odd sadness descend on me. That which I had most dreaded had come to pass. Imperial soldiers were once more fighting against Imperial soldiers as they had done in the Schism. It seemed as if something had broken that could not be repaired, that even if Macharius were victorious he was in a sense defeated. The long balancing act that had kept him at the top of the crusade had finally failed. Forces had been unleashed tonight that would tear apart the unity he had worked so long and so hard to create. It would not be possible after tonight to even pretend that the army was united. If it had been Cardinal Septimus’s plan to undermine Macharius he had succeeded. What was worse was that Macharius had done his work for him.
We smashed through the palace. If Macharius’s grasp of the big picture had loosened, his ability on the smaller scale was intact. We stormed through the building with overwhelming force and savagery, taking prisoners by the dozen. What we did not find was General Crassus. He was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
Macharius stood in Crassus’s apartments and surveyed the scene of his latest conquest. He looked calm but he was quietly furious.
Drake looked at the hidden doorway behind the cabinet full of ancient statuettes and said, ‘Escape route.’
‘It goes somewhere,’ Macharius said.
‘My men are already investigating that.’
‘He’s gone somewhere.’
‘I am getting reports from the space field that a shuttle has taken off.’
‘Not his personal shuttle?’ asked Macharius.
Drake shook his head. ‘Order the field closed if you wish.’
‘Too late now,’ said Macharius, ‘and it would not make much difference anyway. A small craft could be launched from elsewhere on the surface of Acheron.’
‘We need to think about what we are going to say,’ Drake said. ‘We don’t have a prisoner to parade in front of the troops. We can still declare him a traitor.’
Macharius shook his head. ‘If he had been captured, you could have made him confess. As it stands we have nothing to show.’
‘We need to say something. The other generals will wonder what is happening.’
‘Let them wonder,’ Macharius said. ‘I will make my speech tomorrow. No one will try anything until after that and then we can settle things.’
The day of the great speech dawned. Macharius dressed in his most impressive uniform. A dirigible dropped him into the central square of Acheron city, onto a platform set between two massive Baneblades of the Seventh Belial, a deliberate echo of earlier speeches he had given when the crusade first began to drive out between the stars. If any of the tank’s crews wondered what had happened to the commander of their battlegroup, they gave no sign.
In the square tens of thousands of men had assembled. They were there to provide a backdrop for a speech that would be recorded by technical cherubim and broadcast to the entire crusade.
Macharius looked much as he had ever done, tall and impressive, a living avatar of war. His gaze was keen, his back was straight, his face like that of a hawk. He did not look nervous as an ordinary man might when about to speak to the assembled armies of the crusade. He had done this before. He was confident that he could do it again.
He stepped out onto the platform and raised his arms above his head. Where once this might have been greeted with a thunderous cheer, it was now met with a watchful silence. Rumours had been swirling around the camp, about the attack on Macharius, about Crassus’s flight. Men were wondering what was going on. The peace down there was a fragile thing.
If the quiet daunted Macharius he gave no sign. I took up my position on the edge of the platform watching the crowd as he spoke.
All eyes were on Macharius. Whatever else they felt about him, he still commanded the attention of the assembled regiments as no one else could. I studied faces through a magnifying lens, ostensibly looking for would-be assassins and troublemakers, in reality curious.
The regiments out there were the old guard of the crusade, those that had been with the generals longest, the core of the advancing armies of the Imperium. Every man out there was a veteran or serving alongside veterans. Of all men, they were the ones whose support Macharius should have been able to rely on. They belonged to forces that had fought for the crusade since the very beginning.
And perhaps that was the problem. The faces I looked upon belonged to men who were tired and old and far from home. Most of them did not have access to the juvenat that I had, most of them did not have access to the medical care I had received. They were scarred and wounded. Some of them had crude prosthetics. Some had eye-patches. They looked like hard, deadly men but they also looked like what they were, men who had spent long lives of fighting. They were not the fanatical youths who had set out all those decades ago to rebuild the Imperium and end the Great Schism.
In this I think Macharius misjudged them. He had lived with all the privileges of command. He still wanted more worlds to conquer. His thirst for glory was undiminished and his zeal for the reconquest of the worlds of Man still burned bright. Once it had made him perfectly in tune with all his warriors. Now it made him something else.
‘Comrades,’ he said. ‘We have come far together and we will go further yet.’
He spoke in that confident, confidential way he had. He was not the supreme commander issuing an order. He was a fellow soldier explaining what had to be done. It was a trick of speaking he had that had served him well for a very long time. Perhaps it would serve him again now. He waited, but there was no acclaim, no cheers, no sign that his huge audience was going to respond to the inspiration of his presence.
He made a small gesture of dismissal, shook his head slightly. He smiled. He was not going to let this cool reception put him off from saying what needed to be said. ‘We have come to the edge of the worlds that men knew in the time when the Emperor walked among us. We have travelled even beyond those. We have added new realms to the Imperium and we can be proud of that.’