‘We meet again, Sergeant Lemuel,’ he said. His voice was a fierce growl but I thought I detected a glint of humour in his eyes. I pulled myself upright, using his massive armoured form as cover. I am not a small man but compared to him I felt like a child. He turned for a moment, snapped off a shot and said, ‘It has been a while since we fought alongside each other. It pleases me to do so again.’
‘Not as much as it pleases me to see you here,’ I said, and I meant it. The Space Wolves might only have doubled our number of troops on the ground but they were turning the battle. They had arrived at precisely the right moment to take advantage of the chaos. I noticed that squads of them had already captured the modified Hydra and were holding them against the oncoming tide of heretics. They were firing the weapons down into the battle in the valley below and I guessed they were not shooting at the Leman Russ.
I could hear the roar of approaching armour now. It mingled with the sounds of shooting, the cacophony of battle and the howl of Thunderhawk engines overhead. Glancing around I saw that Macharius and the others had abandoned their captured gun and were making for higher ground. I understood why at once. They did not want to be mistaken for an enemy when the Leman Russ arrived. The Space Wolves kept fighting and shooting, pulling their captured tanks back from the ridge and out of the line of fire. Clearly they were not going to abandon their prizes until absolutely the last second.
‘I must get to Macharius, sir,’ I said. ‘I am his bodyguard.’
‘That is well, for I must speak to him. Let us go together.’
And so once more I found myself racing across the battlefield in the company of a warrior who was already legendary.
A detachment of Space Wolves fell into place around us. I would have said they were Grimnar’s bodyguards but clearly he did not need any. He was quite capable of looking after himself. I have felt more threatened crossing the streets of a hive than I did running through that inferno of battle with the Space Wolves.
They wore armour so heavy a mortal man could not lift it and I wore only my normal uniform but still I struggled to keep up with them. They moved with long, easy loping strides that ate the ground beneath them. Nothing that got in their way lived. They laughed and growled as they shot and hacked.
I caught a hint of movement from the corner of my eye. I began to turn, raising my shotgun. By the time I had done so, a Space Wolf had lifted his bolter and removed the threat with a single shot. It happened again and again as we moved. I was never quick enough. There was never a threat I perceived before they did. They were superhumanly aware of all that went on around them, raking the battlefield with senses that mortals simply did not possess. At least that was the way it seemed to me.
As we raced over a hump in the hive side, Grimnar turned, bringing his bolter to bear. The other Wolves did the same. A moment later we saw a group of heretics moving cautiously into view. The Wolves could not have seen them, could not have heard them over the roar of the battle and yet they knew the enemy were there. I struggled to work out how. Had they smelt them? It did not seem likely, but what other explanation was there?
More to the point, they opened fire at once. They shot with control and precision. There was none of the confusion you would have got in such a situation with a normal group of even veteran human soldiers. Every Wolf picked a different target and shot him, and then did it again and again. There was no hesitation, no moment when they did not seem to know exactly what they were doing. And they reacted as one, like the pack of feral hunters that they were. They shared an understanding that went beyond the merely human and made them seem almost like one large organism. I had seen Macharius forge units of men into well-honed machines but the Space Wolves seemed to operate that way on instinct, but I know not how.
We came at last to the position that Macharius and the Lion Guard held. I saw Anton watching us, eyes wide as we approached. He was standing guard on the lip of a crater, covering the battlefield with his sniper rifle, occasionally taking a shot when a clear target presented itself. He made the sign of the aquila over his chest when he saw the Space Wolves arrive. There was something odd about the movement. It was jerky. His tunic seemed much darker as well. He waved at me cheerfully.
A moment later we were bounding down into the position, where Macharius waited with Drake and the remnants of his bodyguard. They stood amid a ring of wounded and dying soldiers. Clearly it had not just been the heretics who had taken casualties. Macharius finished saying something into the comm-net and then looked up and gave a smile of greeting to Grimnar.
‘As always you have chosen a good time to make an appearance, Logan Grimnar,’ he said.
‘I came looking for a battle, but this was only a skirmish,’ said the Space Wolf. His voice boomed out. His words should have sounded bombastic but there was a confidence and a humour in them that made me smile.
‘You will have your battle yet,’ said Macharius. ‘We are only knocking at the enemy’s door. He has yet to let us in.’
‘I am glad to hear that. We have come a long way for things to end so swiftly.’ He sounded as though he meant it, as if he would be disappointed that a fight in which he was outnumbered a mere twenty-five to one by heretics was a let-down. I wondered what it must be like to feel so certain of victory. It was certainly inspiring in an odd sort of way to be confronted with such confidence.
‘Well, if you have nothing better to do, you could perhaps secure the entrance for us,’ Macharius said.
With Grimnar to think was to act. ‘That we can do.’
No other words were spoken so he turned with his honour guard and raced away, heading back out onto the battlefield.
‘Lemuel,’ said Macharius. ‘I find it reassuring to see that your luck or the Emperor’s favour has not deserted you.’
‘The Space Wolves brought me back, sir,’ I said. ‘It was their doing, not mine.’
‘Yes, but they found you, Lemuel,’ Macharius said. ‘In all the chaos of battle, you ran into Logan Grimnar. And not for the first time.’
He turned to say something into the comm-net and his attention slid away from me. Even as he did so, he nodded his head to me. I was clearly dismissed. I looked around the vast shell-hole in which we were encamped. There was no sign of Ivan.
I walked over to the perimeter and took up a position beside Anton. ‘You seen Ivan?’ I asked. He leaned forward and studied the battlefield through his sniper-scope.
‘Last I saw of him he was with you, on the thing that looked like a Hydra,’ Anton said. His voice sounded odd. He squeezed the trigger. Somewhere below us a small figure fell. The barrel of the rifle tracked a little to the right. Anton sought another target.
I looked down and saw that his tunic was soaked in blood. I took a closer look at him and noticed he was pale and his face was twisted. ‘What in hell has happened to you?’ I said. ‘Sit down.’
‘No need,’ he said. ‘I am a goner.’ He removed his mask and I could see there was blood trickling from his nostrils and mouth.
‘So you are a medicae now?’
He laughed until it became a horrible choking sound. ‘Take a look for yourself, if you don’t believe me.’
I pushed him down and opened the tunic. A huge sliver of shrapnel had sunk deep into his belly. It must have been agonising but he did not give much sign of it. ‘Standard,’ he said. ‘I come all this way and I get taken out by my own side. It was those frakkers in the Russ down below. Overshot their target, shell exploded here. Can’t feel my legs now.’
‘Don’t talk,’ I said. ‘We’ll get you down to Drake, maybe he can do something.’