He was pretty badly beaten up. His back was riddled with shrapnel. His legs were wounded. His arm had been removed by the blast. I turned him over, worried by what I would see. Maybe his front was worse than his back. Maybe he was going to spill his guts all over the ground.
He didn’t, but his eyes were closed. I checked his heartbeat and was relieved to find there was still a pulse. At that moment his eyes flickered open.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ I asked.
He looked up at me and said, ‘Damned if I know.’
His jaw was twisted out of shape and his words mangled even more than usual.
‘I was running away from the anti-tank gun. There was an explosion and I felt a pain through my shoulder.’ He looked down at the metallic stump where his bionic arm had been.
‘Can you walk?’ I said. I tried to lift him to his feet. He stretched himself and rose shakily then walked over to where what was left of his arm lay. It did not look as if it were going to be repaired any time soon and we were a long way from getting any spare parts.
‘How did it go? We win?’ Ivan asked. ‘The last thing I remembered was seeing some lights in the sky. I thought it was the explosion.’
‘Space Wolves,’ I said. ‘Grimnar pulled our nads out of the fire again.’
‘That was good of him.’
‘I think he feels he owes Macharius for what happened on Demetrius.’
Ivan nodded and then took another experimental step or two. ‘It’s lucky he felt that way then. I was pretty sure we were all doomed. Where’s the idiot?’
I wanted to tell him but I could not. The words just seemed to get stuck in my throat. I tried to force them out again and still nothing came, only a strange gasping noise that I could not even make sound like words.
‘Damn,’ Ivan said, his words mangled. ‘Damn. Damn. Damn.’
We limped up the slope again towards where the rest of the Lion Guard were encamped. ‘How did it happen?’ Ivan asked eventually.
‘Shrapnel in the gut,’ I said. I paused for what felt like an hour and added, ‘Our own side.’
He looked away and shook his head. ‘Typical,’ was all he said.
I lay on the side of a vast daemon. It was as big as a hive but its flanks were green and slimy. Warts the size of turrets emerged from its side, burst blisters made huge gates in its skin. When I looked up I saw a great grinning face looking down at me. It was the same daemon I had seen when I lay in the hospital back on Niflgard. It smiled, revealing huge glistening yellow teeth, but there was no humour in its eyes. They were empty abysses cold as the darkness between the stars. There was a vacuum in them that threatened to suck my soul right out of my body.
I knew I had to look away or I was doomed, so I forced myself to look down. For a second I was looking at the daemon’s skin but that faded into translucence and I was looking at its internal organs, veins the size of streets, intestines big enough to hold a city. Corpses lay everywhere. They looked as if they had died all at once. Those street-veins were filled with them. They had that strange decomposed look I associated with the walking dead. I wondered what had happened to them.
It took me a moment to realise: life support failure, the nightmare of every hive dweller. The moonfall must have taken out the power and the circulation of air and all the cleansing systems must have failed. With the strange logic of dreams I was no longer looking at a daemon’s innards but a dead hive city and I always had been.
It was not entirely dead though, for within it, like maggots wriggling through a corpse, things still moved. Some were monstrous, partially human, but too big and too large, with white skin that somehow reminded me of slugs. There were other monsters born of men who had fed on the diseased corpses and been twisted by it.
They could not be real, I told myself. I must be dreaming. And it came to me that I had experienced such dreams before in other places like this and they had always contained within them seeds of truth. I felt breathing become difficult as one of those walking corpses turned his glowing eyes to look at me and stretched out one gauntleted hand. I knew without being told that if he completed that gesture he would become fully aware of me and I would die. I turned to flee…
I came to wakefulness around the gate of Richter’s citadel. I could see Drake nearby and Macharius and Grimnar. A halo of light played around the inquisitor’s head and I guessed he must have been working some strange sorcery of his, perhaps the backlash of it had touched my dreams and those of the other Guardsmen around me.
Drake’s whole posture spoke of weariness, as if he had been overstraining his gifts. He looked like a man who had just run for a day carrying a full pack. ‘Richter is down there,’ he said, ‘and so are other things. If we go down there, death is waiting for us all.’
‘It awaits every man around every corner,’ said Macharius.
‘That is well said,’ Grimnar agreed.
‘You are resolved then?’ said Drake.
‘Aye,’ said Macharius.
‘Very well then,’ the inquisitor said. ‘We should make ready to depart.’
‘I want to get my hands on the traitor and put an end to this once and for all,’ Macharius said. I picked myself up and looked around. Ivan lay nearby. He was awake and studying his surroundings. He had the veteran’s gift for being able to sleep anywhere and at a moment’s notice and wake in an instant. I walked over to him and drew my boot back.
‘Cold here,’ he said. He was looking in the direction of Anton’s burial mound. I had showed him where it was.
‘Then we’d best get you into the warm, little man,’ said Grimnar.
I heard men discussing the arrival of the Space Wolves and how victory was certain with the Emperor’s Angels beside us. There was a confidence in the air now, as if the presence of the Space Marines were a sign of the Emperor looking with renewed favour upon Macharius. Knowing the circumstances in which their aid had been granted I was a bit less confident but I said nothing. On a battlefield, morale is everything, and the presence of Grimnar and his band was good for our morale.
I heard the roar of Leman Russ engines and the grinding of great blocks of rockcrete being dragged away from the entrance of the hive. It seemed as if the gloom of this world had really infected me, for I did not share the soldiers’ confidence in our ultimate victory. I had the feeling that none of us were going to come out of this alive.
The Space Wolves had already scouted ahead before we even entered the hive. They moved in advance of us now as we roared into the depths.
I rode along within the Leman Russ Macharius had chosen to be his new command vehicle, and eyed the streets warily. Dead bodies were everywhere and I half expected them to come springing to life around us.
In some ways Richter’s citadel was like any other hive, smaller than most perhaps but otherwise the same. It was a complete city with its own life support systems, built level upon level, rising hundreds of metres into the air, sinking thousands of metres into the planet’s crust.
The effects of the moon-strike were evident, though. The city was cold and dead inside. Corpses filled the area massively: life support systems had failed and air purifiers had ceased to function. In whole sectors people had choked to death on poisonous fumes. Obviously someone somewhere had been working on bringing the systems back on stream but it had come too late for the people who had died here.
Drake sat with Macharius in the command cockpit. ‘There is an odd psychic pulse here,’ he said. ‘I don’t like this at all.’
‘You think this is another trap?’ Macharius asked.
‘I know it is.’
‘Good,’ Macharius said. ‘Then we are in agreement.’