Angel of Fire

En masse we marched in triumph through a great arched gateway, flanked by two fire-winged angels fifty times as tall as a man, and passed into the depths of Hive Irongrad. Behind me stretched out long lines of grey-uniformed soldiers. Up ahead massive tanks roared like victorious beasts. In our hundreds of thousands we strode beneath banners that showed our regiment, our unit and our triumphs on a thousand different worlds. The High Command wanted no one to be in any doubt that the legions of the Emperor had returned to reclaim this world in His name.

I felt odd, marching along behind the tanks instead of driving the Indomitable. It had been a long time since I walked in parade file down the ramp-streets of a hive. Ahead of me a long line of machines receded into the distance. Overhead the lights of the level roof glittered like low-hanging stars.

Beside me were Hesse and Anton and Ivan and the others, their weapons slung over their shoulders, their boots polished and a swagger in their stride.

For the first time since we set foot on this benighted world I began to feel at home. The air had the recycled taste of a hive interior. It was different from that of Belial Masterforge but it had something of the same tang, of having been breathed a billion, billion times. There was the faint chemical undercurrent of the purification filters and the slightly rotten under-taste that I came to associate with Irongrad. It was warmer in this hive than it was in Belial Masterforge and the people were not so over-dressed. If the life-support systems broke down their problem was not going to be freezing and clearly they all knew this.

The hive was different in many other ways. The hab-towers were massive columns which supported the roofs that were the floors of the levels above. All of them were covered in titanic copper pipes through which ran gas and hot water and sewage and effluent. The sides of each tower vented flames as if they were engaged in some vast industrial process that was also a sacred rite. Each of the vents was moulded to resemble the Angel of Fire. It looked like a legion of rebel angels were poised for fire-winged flight across the city.

Between the hab-towers were expansive plazas and in every plaza was a fountain of fire. Emerging from their flames was a metal replica of the great statue of the Angel of Fire. Near every fountain was one of those sinister cages. Some were massive enough to hold hundreds of chained victims, some so small they seemed designed to hold children or dwarfs. Time and again as we made our way down into the belly of the hive I saw those ornate cages we had first seen in the desert with their x-frames and those devilish face-masks. No matter how crowded the streets were, there was always a clear space around them. It did not take a lot of imagination to work out why. Some of them were held on winches over the streets while below them flames vented from the pipes in the building sides.

Massive crowds watched us as we progressed downwards. The streets were full of folk looking down at us from every window and balcony. The people did not cheer but they did not seem hostile either. They were not sullen. They were curious. We were their world’s new masters. I suspected we could not have been much worse than their previous ones if we had been cannibal orks. The population had been so beaten down, so accustomed to the lash that they expected it from us and they did not even resent it.

The Irongradders seemed like typical hive dwellers: pasty-faced, undernourished, weary-looking from long, long hours of work. They could have been dropped here right from my old home-world. It made me feel oddly nostalgic and I could tell the others felt the same way.

Overhead glow-globes hovered. We passed flickering signs that exhorted us to worship the Angel and believe in his might. Our tech-priests had not got round to their ritual re-invocation yet. I found the images of the flame-winged angel and his burning-headed priesthood disturbing to say the least. I thought of the strange powers they had displayed and it seemed unlikely to me that there was anything holy about them. The Angel inspired awe and fear in me in about equal parts. The priests simply inspired fear and a desire to do murder if I got the chance. There must be many of them still out there and I very much doubted that they would give up the fight, whatever the planetary governor and the nobles of his court said.

Eventually, the long march ended, deep within the hive. We were confronted with our new home, billeted in factorum hab-units requisitioned by our Commissariat. The rooms within the massive buildings were huge and high-ceilinged and did not seem full even with a company of soldiers camped out in them. There were sinister fire-winged angels everywhere, astride the cornice of every building, worked in the frescoes of every ceiling. It was the sort of artwork, mass-produced and replicated in industrial scale, that only hive worlds can manage. In every alcove, on every desk, glaring down from every wall there were representations of the focus of the local religion. Someone had even used a small metal statue to prop open the door to the chamber in which we were to sleep.

‘Could be worse,’ Anton said as we entered and surveyed the huge hall with its hundreds of beds each with a locker beside it. I knew what he was thinking. It reminded him of the guild dormitories back on Belial. Hundreds of men swarmed around the place, lying on beds, stowing their gear, making a claim to some space. I recognised none of them. They were all like us, survivors of broken units, waiting to be reassigned or reformed into new companies. They might even be our new company for all I knew.

How many times had I done this, I wondered?

How many times had I dumped my gear in a new room or new tent or new barracks’ locker, looked around at Ivan and Anton and told them that if they touched my gear they were dead? How many times had I watched Anton grin his idiot grin and Ivan make that chirruping whistle that shows he thinks I am talking nonsense again? Too many times to count or remember, I suspect.

It’s part of a soldier’s life – to make camp constantly and move on again, to leave rooms and buildings and cities and worlds in their wake. To leave behind buried friends and lost loves as well. To be a soldier in the 41st millennium is to be a small atom of life, constantly in motion, never truly at rest anywhere until they burn your body or put you in the ground.

‘They say the locals call this place the City of the Angel,’ Anton said. He had tossed his pack on the floor and was busy scouring through it for his prop-nov. The rest of his gear joined a growing untidy pile on the floor. Tunic lay on shirt. His hip flask clinked when he tossed it beside his boots and badges.

‘I wonder why that is?’ I said sourly.

Ivan whistled a few descending notes. ‘Could that be because there is a huge bloody iron angel looming over the whole place and a statue of it on every street corner?’ He had stowed his gear under his bed and just sat there, taking a slug from his hip-flask. I wondered how much there was left in it. Not much at the rate he went through it and we would not be getting any more cooling fluid that would convert to rot-gut alcohol any time soon.

Anton held up a map and unfolded it, as if he might find his prop-nov within. I recognised it, soiled as it was. It was an old Imperial Survey map of Zone Three on Jurasik Prime. We had left a trail of dead heretics strewn across that place. Some of the stains on the map came from their blood. A sudden vivid image of green jungles and tropical islands came back to me. I remembered a pillbox built into cliffs and the Indomitable racing through waves all guns blazing.

‘I didn’t lend you my book, did I, Leo?’ Anton asked.

‘Why the hell would I want your bloody prop-nov?’ I said. ‘I’ve read it almost as many times as you.’

That strictly speaking was not true. Anton must have read that piece of Imperial propaganda a thousand times or more, almost as many times as he had read The Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer. He had been reading it at least once a week since we had started work in the factorum in Belial when we were twelve. I always remember him, hunched over it, tracing the line with his finger, his lips moving as he spelled out the words even though anyone else would have known them by heart.

‘Ivan?’ he asked.

‘You know I hate the bloody thing!’

‘All the more reason for you to take it and destroy it,’ said Anton.

‘Now you are putting ideas in my head.’

‘Don’t even think about it.’

‘You try the external pocket in your pack?’ I asked.

‘Of course I did. You think I am an idiot or something?’

‘You already know the answer to that.’ I reached down and lifted the pack up out of the growing pile of unwashed clothing and the gee-gaws Anton had acquired over the years of campaigning. I flicked open the seal on the right tab pocket where Anton always kept the book, reached in and pulled it out.

‘You just put it there,’ he said petulantly.

‘Yeah – I used my psyker powers to do that. Maybe I’ll use them to combust the book now.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ He stuck out a long bony hand. Behind him Ivan nodded his head. I tossed the book over Anton’s head to him.

‘Give me that, you bastard,’ Anton shouted, turning to try and grab it out of Ivan’s hand. Ivan tossed it to the New Boy.

‘You’ll hand that over right now, if you know what’s good for you, New Boy,’ Anton said. The New Boy looked abashed and hung his head down. He humbly held the book out and then when Anton reached for it, he tossed it to me.

Anton howled and dived at me. I just had time to toss the book away before he grappled me, his hand going for my throat. I noticed the others had gone oddly quiet and when I looked over Anton’s shoulder I could see why. The Understudy was standing there. He had caught the book as he entered the chamber without knocking.

Anton turned to see what I was looking at and his face went white. We saluted, ludicrous as that must have looked from our current position.

The Understudy said, ‘You are to report to the parade ground at nine hundred Imperial. You will be presented to Lord High Commander Macharius for decoration.’

He turned the book over in his hand as if inspecting some xenos relic then he put it down on the bed and said, ‘Carry on.’

Then he left. After that, no one was in the mood for brawling.

I stood before the assembled regiments in the great square outside our new barracks. They were illuminated by the dancing flames of the central fire fountain, drawn up in massed ranks before their vehicles, dressed in their best uniforms, all scrubbed and polished for the occasion. All it would have taken was one well-placed artillery shell and a whole regiment could have been wiped out, leaving their tanks for the enemy to take.

Our own regiment stood to the fore. The Seventh Belial had been first into Irongrad and had held the factorum zone in the teeth of a massive rebel counter-attack. We had been the spearhead of the crusade and had been tested and not broken. Of course, there were a damn sight fewer of us than there used to be but what did that matter to Command. We could always be replaced. There is no resource more common in the universe than the flesh of human soldiers.

All of us were waiting for Macharius. It seemed like the whole galaxy was back then. There was an air of anticipation about the ceremony that I had never experienced before. I stood to the left of the podium raised between the chassis of two Baneblades and I sensed it. It was as if every soldier awaited the arrival of a prophet, of someone who would transform their lives with his words. Only the Understudy did not seem touched by the atmosphere. Not even the revivalist feel of that great crowd could get through to the surface of whatever desolate world it was in which he walked.

A huge roar announced Macharius’s arrival. The gleaming oval of an aircar appeared in the sky overhead. It was the governor’s own vehicle, not military but a gorgeous gold and gem-encrusted aerial carbuncle. Under other circumstances, it would have seemed impossibly gaudy compared to the grim durasteel tanks lined up below it, but the idea that Macharius was within it transformed all that. The aircar seemed entirely appropriate for a conqueror of worlds. Just the sight of it brought cheers from the assembled troops.

The golden vehicle descended until it hovered over the platform. A door in its side opened and a long stairway extruded itself. Moments later Macharius strode regally down it, surrounded by his entourage. From my place beside the platform I got a clear view of him in profile. As ever, he looked like a mortal god. There was a radiance about him that had nothing to do with the personal body-shield he was wearing. He simply eclipsed all of those around him, even formidable men like Inquisitor Drake and squat, muscular General Sejanus. Tech-priests followed his every move with their monitoring devices. Technical cherubim hovered observantly over them. As ever the occasion was to be recorded and broadcast to the armies.

Macharius spread his arms wide in majestic greeting and then his imperial progress took him out of my sight. He spoke to the crowd briefly, his voice amplified by ancient technological artifice, his words relayed to our forces across the face of the planet and all the worlds of the system by the arcane science of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

I have seen the recordings of it since, the way he took the acclamation of the army as nothing more than his due and yet managed to make you feel as if it was deserved and not mere arrogance. There was something about Macharius then that made you think you were in the presence of something more than mortal. He had that quality that Space Marines have, of making you feel insignificant, but unlike them, there was no apartness. He was human, and he regarded you as human and being in his presence raised you up to the same exalted plane on which he lived.

Eventually the time came for us to be ushered into that imperial presence. He smiled as he saw us. You can see it in the recordings. He looks sincerely pleased and maybe he was. You can see all the surviving crew of the Indomitable as he pins the First-In medals on our chests. We all look much smaller than him and faintly embarrassed by the attention. All of us except the Understudy – he looks inhumanly distant.

Macharius praised us and pinned the decorations on our tunics. I remember standing close to him as he did so and thinking how tall he was and how young he looked. He radiated power and good health and a certain reserved good fellowship. When he looked at you, you felt the full power of his attention fall on you. When he spoke, he seemed genuinely interested in what you had to say, even if you only stuttered out your words as Anton did. He placed his hand on your shoulder in a comradely fashion and then moved on.

What I remember most about him is his sense of presence. Macharius was truly there. It was as if he was a solid thing and everything else around him was a shadow. Damn, I could spend the rest of my life trying to find the words to describe that but in the end all descriptions would be irrelevant. They could never give you the sense of the sheer primordial power of the man.

I know he talked to me and to this day I cannot remember what he said or what I said in return except in the vaguest of ways. I know he praised my bravery and I thanked him for it, and that he meant it and I meant it, which given how cynical I am, is a tribute to the man’s charisma.

At the end of the ceremony we were cheered by the assembled troops while Macharius watched and applauded himself. He got back into the governor’s air-chariot and flew away and I watched him go thinking that was the last time I would ever speak to him.

Of course, I was wrong.