A crouched figure made its way up the trench towards us. He wore the grey uniform of a Grosslander with a yellow armband that marked him as a messenger. His hand was fumbling nervously in his belt for a pistol. I waved at him to let him know that even though we were not part of his regiment we were not enemies.
‘What’s new?’ I shouted in Imperial Gothic.
He moved up to our position and said, ‘Big heretic offensive incoming. I’m on my way to the Great Bog to let Lieutenant Snorrison know he should hold his ground.’
‘Snorrison is dead, along with his whole command,’ I said.
‘You sure?’
‘I was there not an hour ago. Assault squad hit his position and wiped it out. Not five minutes later a crowd of heretics came through. We bloodied their nose but we didn’t have enough to hold them.’
‘You should have,’ he said accusingly.
‘Is my name Snorrison?’ I asked. ‘Am I wearing a Grosslander uniform?’
His eyes widened behind the lenses of his rebreather mask and I think for the first time he noticed the lion emblem on my tunic. He probably couldn’t tell the colour – with all the grime it would have been hard.
‘No, sir,’ he said shakily. He looked into the distance embarrassed. ‘You sure the lieutenant is dead?’
‘Either that or he’s run away,’ I said. ‘There was nobody left alive in the Great Bog.’
‘Lieutenant Snorrison would not do that,’ said the youth. I realised now he was very young and very green. I could not quite bring myself to feel sorry for him. I was not sure I agreed with his assessment of the situation either. Lots of men ran away here and it was not because they were cowards. The strain of the trenches under constant bombardment ate away at their nerves and that was not taking into account some of the gases, which induced terror in the unprotected.
He shrugged and made to move past me. ‘Where you going?’
‘I need to see if I can find the lieutenant.’
This lad was devoted to his duty, that was for sure. I was not even offended that he would not take my word for it. He had been given orders to do a job and plenty of officers and no few commissars would find him to be in dereliction of them if he did not at least try to carry them out. Plus, he was keen. You could tell by the way he snapped a salute and then raced off along the trench. Silently I wished him luck – he was going to need it.
We kept moving towards the fort.
The fort was not quite so easy to enter as the bunkers back in the trenches. I had to shout down an intercom system that was basically just a collection of pipes. I gave my name, number and a password that was several days out of date and stood so that my face was visible in the view periscope.
This being the Imperial Guard, it took half an hour for someone finally to recognise me and let me in. When the airlock door was opened, the gatekeeper looked me up and down sardonically and sniffed. It was Sergeant Matlock. He was recently promoted, a martinet and a disciplinarian who came from Macharius’s home world and had been in the service of a family long allied with the Lord High Commander. I did not like him and he returned the favour.
‘Sorry to offend your delicate nostrils,’ I said. ‘I’ve been fighting.’
His aquiline nose wrinkled further. His nostrils dilated. He was struggling to find a pithy reply. I interrupted his train of thought. ‘I need to see the colonel.’
‘You were supposed to be back two days ago.’
‘The heretics decided that they required my company a bit longer.’ I was already limping past him down towards the local command centre. It was not quite a different world in the fort but it was close. The squalor of the trenches was nowhere visible. The floors and walls were scrubbed. Doubtless Matlock had to keep himself busy somehow. There were Guardsmen in sight but they looked like I remembered once looking myself – their uniforms were clean and untattered. They were shaved. Their eyes were not bloodshot. Their hands were not scabbed. Most of them looked at me guiltily, and felt bad about being down here in comparative safety while I was outside.
I can’t say it bothered me too much. I knew most of them would rotate out at some point and join the fun in the trenches. All of them except Matlock. Somehow he always managed to avoid the external duty roster. Someday I was going to have to ask him how he managed that – with a bayonet.
I made my way down the corridors into the command bunker. The Undertaker was there looking as cold and calm as the day he had returned to sanity in the wreckage of Old Number Ten. The juvenat treatments seemed to have worked well for him. The only visible differences were some deeper tan-lines around the crinkle of his eyes and the colonel’s insignia on his shoulder.
He looked over at me and I saluted. ‘Sergeant Lemuel,’ he said. His voice was as flat and emotionless as ever but I had served under him long enough to recognise the question in it.
‘Lieutenant Jensen is dead, sir. Killed by an enemy sniper. I am acting commander of the recon unit.’
He tilted his head to one side. ‘Report,’ he said.
I filled him in on the details of the encounter as quickly and calmly as I could. He nodded as if I were confirming something he already suspected, and barked instructions over his shoulder. A clerk moved some tokens on the paper map of the trench complex. This is what we had been reduced to. The holo-pits had all broken down and had not been repaired. The crystals needed had been requisitioned six months ago but had still not arrived.
I saw the clerk put a number of red counters on the map of the Great Bog and remove the small blue token that had represented Lieutenant Snorrison’s unit. There were not a lot of blue tokens in our section of the line and an awful lot of red ones. In the face of what looked like a giant heretic offensive our trenches were going to be very difficult to hold.
‘What happened to the leg, Lemuel?’ the Undertaker asked.
‘Barbed wire, sir. I scratched it.’
‘Have a medical orderly look at it, get some rest and then report back here in two hours. We’re going to need every man who can fight.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. It was clear I had been dismissed. I saluted and limped out of the command pit. Matlock watched me with hate-filled eyes and a sneer on his face.
‘You need to be careful with these things,’ said the medic, rubbing alcohol onto the cuts and tearing off a strip of gauze. We had run out of synthi-flesh a couple of months back.
‘My legs?’ I said, just to be annoying.
‘Punctures, cuts, abrasions of any sort. The disease spores out there are nasty and all manner of infections can get in. Some of them we can’t exorcise.’
‘Why is that, sir?’
He looked up at me. He was a middle-aged man in the uniform of the Grosslanders. No juvenat treatments for him. He knew who I was from the uniform so he was prepared to consider my question in a way that he might not have been if it had come from one of his own sergeants.
‘Don’t know, Lemuel. There’s just something about this place. The diseases here seem cursed. They are getting stronger and more virulent all the time. They’re cross-breeding like dogs.’
I could tell from the reference to cross-breeding that he had come from a particularly agricultural section of Grossland, which was a particularly agricultural world.
‘You said the diseases are getting stronger – how can you tell?’
‘They kill quicker, spread faster and are getting more virulent. The symptoms are getting more alarming too. It’s almost as if someone is using the disease spores as weapons.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘You hear stories. The ancients did it. Certain tech-magi are supposed to be able to do it.’