by William King
A cloud of gas billowed across the emplacement and, for a moment, I lost sight of what was going on. I could just hear the screams and roars of men fighting and dying all around me. I could still see the ghastly, spectral faces leering out of the fog. I wondered how those men out there could tell who they were fighting and realised that they could not. Right now it was perfectly possible that heretic was wrestling heretic, and Imperial Guard stabbing at Imperial Guard. It happens more often than you would imagine amid the chaos of battle, particularly under conditions such as those that prevailed on the surface of Loki.
I held my shotgun tight, felt the air vibrate as Anton shot something, heard a man scream and prayed it was not Ivan or one of our boys. A moment later the breeze whipped the fog aside as if it was a tattered diaphanous curtain and I saw the bodies piled high and the wall of heretics charging towards Anton and myself.
‘Kill the frakkers,’ I said.
Anton pulled the trigger and a heretic officer fell. I pointed the shotgun and fired. There was a shell left. It tore a gigantic hole in the heretical line. I pumped and pulled the trigger again and heard nothing but a clicking sound.
‘You picked a fine time to run out of ammo,’ Anton said accusingly. The wall of shrieking, gasping heretics rushed towards us.
It was another of those moments when I knew I was dead. I have lost count of how many times they have happened but they never get any easier to take.
It’s always the same. My mouth goes dry. My heart races. I feel that sudden sharp surge of fear that is inevitable when your body realises that it is soon going to cease functioning. In this case, the realisation was compounded by the fact that my body was already struggling with wounds and disease. The visions of dancing daemons swirling through my mind didn’t really help much either.
I braced myself for the stabbing of a dozen heretic bayonets. I wondered why they were not already charging at us, keen to take revenge for all the comrades we had sent to greet their daemon gods. I could hear the sounds of fighting, of lasguns pulsing, of chainswords splintering bone to white, bloodstained chips. I could hear someone shouting, ‘For the Emperor and Macharius!’
The heretics were charging at us, but their eyes were wide with panic. They did not seem intent on stabbing us so much as keen to get past us. A few of them raced by into Dead Man’s Trench, while others threw themselves up the parapet. Their officers screamed for them to stand their ground, or at least that is what I assume they were screaming, but none of the fleeing enemy seemed to be paying too much attention to those orders. They were too busy trying to put some distance between themselves and the green-tunicked Lion Guard coming at them from behind.
These troops were new and fresh and deadly looking. Their uniforms were clean and unpatched. Their weapons were being used with brisk efficiency. It was not them I noticed first though – it was the man leading them.
He looked like a great predator, tall and broad-shouldered, golden-haired and golden-skinned. His movements were poised and deadly. He swept through the melee, a human whirlwind of violence, cutting down a heretic with every stroke of the chainsword he wielded right-handed, while blasting away with the bolt pistol he was holding in his left. There was a poise and deadliness about the Lord High Commander Solar Macharius which he never lost even at the bitter end. He was a perfect killing machine, as completely deadly in his own way as a Space Marine of the Adeptus Astartes.
His coordination was uncanny, his movements eye-blurringly swift. Just when you thought you knew where he was going to step and whom he was going to strike, he surprised you.
The bullet aimed at him passed through the space where you thought he was going to be. His stroke turned out to be a feint, never hitting where it was expected, but burying itself in flesh nonetheless. A heretic raised his weapon to block the blade and took a bolt pistol shot through the eyes. Another ducked to avoid the killing shot and found himself impaled on the blade instead.
Macharius fought in close combat the way he led armies: swiftly, decisively, with feints within feints and a defence that consisted of the swiftest attacks. He was a living god of war, perfect in all he did when it came to battle. At least that was the impression he was still capable of giving when he chose to enter the fray in person. Seeing him, fighting beneath the fluttering Lion banner, you could not help but feel your heart rise and know that victory was certain.
He battled his way over to us, and I noticed that Ivan was by his side, fighting away, a clumsy half-human automaton compared to Macharius, but deadly in his own way. Macharius’s gaze swept over me and he nodded encouragingly and then he went by, killing as he went, leading the massive counter-attack he seemed to have organised out of nowhere.
I noticed then that Inquisitor Drake, his permanent shadow, was with him. Pale where Macharius was golden, thin where Macharius was athletic, Drake nonetheless had his own deadliness. His lean form possessed a surprising strength and an incredible resilience. If he was not quite so quick as Macharius, he seemed just as capable of countering all attacks, possibly because he was capable of reading the thoughts of the attackers.
A halo of light played around his head as he unleashed his psychic powers in terrifying bolts of energy. For a moment, his gaze rested on me as well and I shuddered, for his eyes seemed to be boring into my soul, and I felt he could see the contamination there, the doubts I had picked up, the daemons I was guilty of seeing.
Around Drake were the hand-picked storm troopers of his personal guard, their blank, mirrored visors reflecting the grimness of the battlefield on which they fought. Seen in the shimmering armourglass of those helmets, the landscape of Loki looked even more bleak and terrifying.
In a few more heartbeats, they, too, swept by and more and more troops of Macharius’s personal guard followed, looking stern and efficient and implacable.
I wondered then if this was another of Macharius’s famous feints, whether we had been the bait in yet another trap to draw in his enemies. At that point I was past caring. I slumped down against the earthwork wall of the trench, my back against a couple of stray sandbags, and I contemplated the staring eyes of the carpet of dead bodies Macharius had left in his wake. I wondered whether any of them would spring back into motion, and whether they would come to drag me down into death and I realised, at that moment, that I did not exactly care.
I did not feel at my best when I came to. I found I was looking up at the face of Macharius. He was standing talking with the Undertaker, saying something so quietly that even as close as I was I could not make it out. Over his shoulder the skull moon leered. The lesser moon raced across the sky, a small daemonling perched on it, giggling.
I tried to pull myself upright and I noticed that Anton and Ivan and a number of the other soldiers were there along with a few high-ranking officers. They were inspecting the dead and noting the fact that some of the corpses were dissolving into puddles of greenish slime, while others, in a new twist, seemed only to be lying there, their flesh green and corrupt-looking.
Around everything small pot-bellied daemons gambolled, sticking out their tongues, farting and belching, walking along behind the officers with taloned hands behind their backs, their movements and expressions mockeries of the men they were following.
I wondered where Drake was. Why wasn’t the inquisitor sorting these little frakkers out? It was his job, after all. Part of my mind, the tiny bit that still held a faint crumb of rationality, told me these were hallucinations, that I was feverish, that I was seeing things.
I pulled myself upright, gurgled for water, and noticed that one of the officers with Macharius did not look like the others. His skin had a greenish tinge. His eyes were mocking. There was something about him that reminded me of the daemons. He seemed to be just as inhuman as them and was fumbling in his belt, pulling his pistol free. I shouted a warning and pointed.
Macharius turned and so fast were his reflexes that he was already reacting to my pathetic attempt at a warning and the sight of th
e attacker he must have just caught from the corner of his eye. Even as the heretic drew a bead on him he was already in motion, pulling his bolt pistol free from its holster and swivelling at the hip to snap off a shot.
It was touch and go. The laspistol shot seared Macharius’s shoulder, melting one of the lion’s head epaulettes there. Macharius’s return took the heretic in the stomach and punched an enormous hole in it, the way bolter shells do when they explode. I pulled myself upright, and snatched up a laspistol from a corpse. I shot the heretic again, but he still kept moving, animated by some spirit of destruction, or so it seemed.
Others opened fire until glittering las-beams made a net around him and through his body and still he kept on coming. A sniper rifle sounded. The officer’s head exploded. I heard Anton give a grunt of satisfaction as the would-be assassin toppled and fell. Someone shouted for a medic and men swarmed towards Macharius.
That’s another life you owe me, I thought with satisfaction, somehow managing to forget in that moment all of the times Macharius had saved mine.
Eight
I was very weak. I was seeing daemons. And I was not the only one. All around me were thousands of beds, each containing a wounded man, or a sick man, or a man who was both. Adepts of the medicae moved from bed to bed, administering potions, stabbing men with huge hypodermics, lopping off infected limbs with massive medical chainsaws.
Every time I heard the whine of the blade, the splinter of bone, I shouted for them to keep away. I did not want to lose my leg. I did not want a mechanical limb, even if there were any to be had, which there had not been for a long time.
The air smelt of purification incense and gangrene, of suppurating flesh and infected blood. The sound of coughs and screams echoed through the halls.
A medicae adept stood at the foot of my bed. He looked at me with something like horror in his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was going to pronounce sentence on me, to announce that the leg was going to have to come off.
I was almost relieved when he shook his head and turned and looked over his shoulder and said that there was nothing to be done, that they did not have the serums, that even if they did, it was touch and go. He sounded ashamed and embarrassed.
I wanted to tell him not to feel too bad, that we were an army that was running out of ammunition and food and everything else. It was no surprise to me that we did not have the medicine – we had nothing else.
When I tried to speak all I could do was make an odd gurgling noise. It sounded as if someone had injected a gallon of phlegm into my lungs. Breathing was not easy. Speech was impossible. Two faces drifted into view: one belonged to Ivan and the other belonged to Anton. They both looked very sad. I closed my eyes and fell into strange dreams.
I woke to find a daemon sitting on my chest. That was the weight that was making it so difficult for me to breathe. It looked the same as all the others, fat and pot-bellied, with scales the green of snot and the brown of excrement. It had the same maliciously gleeful eyes and when it saw I was awake it began to use my stomach as a trampoline. Its bouncing caused the contents of my innards to explode from both ends of my body.
Anton rose from beside the bed and shouted for an orderly. The daemon by this point had me by the throat and was trying to strangle me. A huge gob of phlegm was stuck in my gullet. The pressure increased. Blackness swept over me.
When I opened my eyes again death was standing over me in the form of a beautiful woman. I knew her name. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform very similar to the one she had worn back in the days when we had first met. She was not a nurse, I knew. She was an assassin.
She was holding a vial of some odd blue substance and attaching a needle to it. I smiled at her, pleased in an odd way that I was getting to see her again before I died. I looked around and saw that Anton was slumped in a chair beside the bed. Ivan was nowhere to be seen. She raised a finger to her lips in the universal sign for silence, then she drove the needle into the vein in my arm and pushed the plunger home. A moment later something burning filled my veins and I screamed before a wave of fire burned all consciousness from me. My last thought was to wonder why she was killing me.
‘It’s a miracle,’ the medicae adept said. ‘The Emperor himself must have intervened on behalf of this man. I would have sworn there was no way he could survive without a dose of Universal Purge and we have not seen any of that on Loki for a year. There is not even enough for the Lord High Commander if he should come down with the plague.’
It took me a moment to realise he was talking about me. I certainly did not feel like the beneficiary of a miracle; I felt as weak as a starving rat. My arms refused to obey me when I tried to pull myself upright and it was all I could do to keep my eyes open. Even listening tired me out.
I somehow managed to move my head first to the right and then to the left and I realised that for the first time in days there were no daemons dancing around me. They were not sitting on my chest. They were not poking my eyes and my heart and my liver with their tiny claws. They were not wheezing into my ear and whispering unspeakable promises. They were simply not there. As that thought occurred to me, I thought I caught sight of one scuttling under a nearby bed. Maybe it was just a rodent.
‘So you’re saying he’s going to live then?’ said a relieved voice. It sounded as if it belonged to Anton who was going to burst into tears. I started to wonder if I was perhaps hallucinating again.
‘It’s not one hundred per cent certain,’ said the adept. ‘Last night I would have said this man was certain to die. This morning, he has at least a fighting chance. The fever will return. His wound may once again become inflamed, but at least he has a chance.’
‘I told you,’ Anton was saying. I was not sure who he was speaking to. ‘I told you he was too mean to die.’
I let myself drift back off to sleep. In the distance I could hear the chainsaws going, and the screams of men in pain and the gurgles of men dying. It seemed I was not going to be joining them just yet.
‘What are you trying to do, kill me?’ I asked.
Anton looked a little confused. If I had not known better I would have said he was hurt. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, the first thing I see when I wake up is your ugly mug. That’s enough to sap any man’s will to live.’
‘Ha-bloody-ha! And here I was thinking I would wheel you around the ward before I reported for duty today.’
‘I thought you would be fighting at the front,’ I said. Anton looked around over his shoulder, as if he were wondering who was listening.
‘The front is stable for the moment,’ he said. It did not sound like he believed it. To be perfectly honest, I did not believe it. ‘We’re guarding the space port.’
I looked at him. How stupid did he think I was? Actually maybe he did not think I was stupid. Maybe he was letting me know the true state of affairs without spelling it out in a way that might be construed as a treasonous attempt to undermine morale by any commissar. It was possible that Anton was not entirely stupid.
If the space port was being guarded by the elite troops of Macharius’s personal guard it was because there was a possibility that we would need to beat a hasty retreat through it. That was tantamount to admitting that we were beaten, that Richter was about to drive us off the surface of Loki, that for the first time in decades Macharius was drinking from the bitter cup of defeat. That was not something that anyone would want to speak aloud. It had a feeling of being the beginning of the end.
I looked at Anton again. For the first time in what seemed like weeks his face was not concealed by a rebreather mask. I could see that despite the juvenat the subtle signs of ageing were there. Around his eyes was a fine mesh of wrinkles. The flesh beneath his chin hung a little loose like the wattles of a hangman lizard. His hair looked washed out, not the straw blond of his long-gone youth on Belial. He was still springy and powerful but the long years and countless battles had taken their toll. They sap vitality and the will to live, in
other ways.
He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I am glad to see you’re still alive.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
He looked away, obviously uncomfortable. ‘I’d best be away. I have guard duty tonight.’
It seemed an odd thing to hear, so mundane after what we had been through, with the endless battles in the trenches, the dead rising, the strange hallucinogenic gases drifting over the battlefields. The phrase guard duty conjured up visions of easier nights on easier worlds when things had been going well. At least for me. He tossed me a mocking salute and shambled off into the night.
I tried to pull myself upright, but I was still weak, so I just lay there and thought about the things I had seen. Had the Emperor really intervened to save me? Had I really seen Anna? Or was she just another product of the fever that had fired up so many strange visions out of my diseased brain? I thought about the daemons I had seen and the odd dreams I had experienced. They had been wild hallucinations, surely, and yet at the same time they had been both consistent and convincing, as if somehow I had been peering into another world, one that existed just below the skin of our reality, at least on this cursed planet.
Such thoughts are easy to come by in a hospital bed, surrounded by shrieking wounded.
The hospital was packed with dying men. At first I wondered about the lack of care that had been given to me since, after all, I was one of Macharius’s chosen guards, but it came to me after a few days that I was getting the best care that was available. Medicae adepts checked me and shook their heads wonderingly and I realised that I had become something of a celebrity in the wards since my astonishing recovery. It turned out I was the only soldier to have done so from the fever I had suffered.
They checked the wound on my leg, which was no longer inflamed, although it was crusted over. They laid cool hands on my forehead and intoned invocations to the Emperor. They wafted incense over me that brought strange dreams and helped control the fevers that I still suffered.