Angel of Fire

From the top of Flamestrike Ridge I could see all the way into hell.

On the horizon, chemical flames erupted from newly born volcanoes. The molten rock of the lava lakes churned around islands of accumulated ash. Big, leather-winged predators drifted on thermals above the infernal pools. They might have been birds or bats or some mutant harpy out of ancient legend. It was too far to make out the full, ominous details.

Even at a distance of several Gothic leagues I could smell the brimstone on the wind. It made me cough and left a sulphurous taste on my tongue, adding its own special tang to the already acrid air of Karsk IV.

Off to the south, along the ridge-line, a battery of Basilisks pointed their pitted gun-metal snouts at the sky. Their crews had set them up according to the proper rituals and were traversing their weapons through ninety-degree arcs. I half expected them to start lobbing shells at the bubbling tar pits to test their accuracy.

‘I don’t think we’ll be going that way,’ said Anton, squinting in the direction of the flames. He leaned against a massive orange boulder at the same angle he had propped his lasgun. He had lost weight and looked taller and skinnier than ever. His grey uniform hung loose on his body. Huge sweat circles stained his plain dress tunic under the armpits. His rebreather dangled around his neck. His helmet was tipped back, showing the scar he had picked up on Charybdis. It had been sutured badly and the remnants of the scabbing puckered the flesh in small ridges so that it looked like a centipede crawling across his forehead just beneath the skin. Anton had acquired many interesting scars in his career as a soldier of the Emperor, some of them in his mind.

‘Really,’ I said.

I wiped the sweat from my brow as I watched an enormous geyser of lava spurt skywards. Huge gobbets of burning brimstone dropped back to splatter the ground. It was a sight at once awesome and extremely discouraging if you knew this was an obstacle between you and your objective. Soon we were going to have to find our way through that mass of flame and magma. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘The tanks will sink in the boiling rock and we will all drown.’

‘We’d burn to death before we drowned,’ said Ivan. His prosthetic jaw and the mass of plasteel covering half his ruined face distorted his voice into something not quite human. It was a legacy of an ork cannon shell on Jurasik. He raised the magnoculars he had taken from the dead Schismatic colonel and squinted in the direction of the flames. He still had the broad build of the boxer he had been during our time in the guild factorum on Belial. Amid the sweltering heat he was the only one of us not soaked in sweat. I envied him that. ‘The molten rock is called lava and we will be going that way. There are paths through it. You would know that if you paid any attention during His Lordship’s briefings.’

Anton grinned his idiot grin. He had the rotten yellow teeth so common among the hive workers of Belial. ‘Why would I do that when I got you to do it for me?’

‘Because I may not always be here to haul your skinny arse out of harm’s way.’ Ivan rubbed at the bare patch on his upper arm where his stripes had been. He had suffered one of the drunken demotions that were as regular as his promotions. It took a lot of alcohol to kill the pain and smite the recurring infections the reconstructive tech-surgery on his face had left him with.

I could tell from the expression in his cold blue eyes that death was on his mind. It had been on all of our minds since Henrik’s name came up in the lasgun lottery. I still looked around half-expecting to see old Henrik standing there, cracking jokes and offering up his hip flask. We had buried him in a mudhole on Charybdis six standard months ago.

Death was something you always thought about at the start of a campaign and this one was likely to be the biggest and most dangerous any of us would ever see, a full-scale Imperial Crusade, the first in a score of generations. Even Anton looked thoughtful. He pulled at his lower lip with a greasy finger. His frown made the centipede scar wriggle on his brow.

‘You’re very quiet, Leo,’ Ivan said, looking over at me. ‘Thinking too much again?’

‘I have to think for two when Anton is around,’ I said.

‘Ha bloody ha!’ Anton said.

‘For you that was a rejoinder of unusual wit,’ I said.

‘You swallow a lexicon?’ Anton asked. ‘You always have to use big words to prove you are not stupid. Or are you just trying to sound like the lieutenant and his toadies? You spend enough time around them up in the cockpit.’

‘I am not the man who joined the Imperial Guard because he thought he could get promoted to Space Marine,’ I said. Ivan snorted.

‘You thought so too,’ Anton said. He had stopped tugging his lip and was probing the insides of his ear with the same finger. ‘You just deny it now.’ His tone was that of the aggrieved child part of him was always going to be.

Maybe he was right. Maybe we had believed that back on Belial, when all we knew of soldiering was what we read in propaganda novels written at the behest of the planetary government.

Was it possible we had been so naive? Well, whatever naivety had been in us had been burned out by ten years of constant warfare on a dozen worlds.

‘I think I can see one of the paths the lieutenant was talking about,’ Ivan said. When he turned his head, I could see the flames reflected in the lenses of his field glasses and the metal of his cheek. It gave him a daemonic look, like a premonition of dark things to come. ‘I think we might be able to pass through and take the heretics in the flank.’

‘It would have made more sense to drop in on top of them,’ Anton said.

‘Yeah, nothing like dropping on top of the planetary defence batteries for keeping casualties low,’ I said. ‘It’s a good job General Sejanus is in charge and not you…’

‘Space Marines make drops like that,’ Anton said. He sounded wistful. ‘Just once I would like to do the same. Or at least bloody well get to see one.’

Ivan laughed. ‘We’re just the poor, bloody Guard. We get to do most of the fighting and watch others show up late and take the credit.’

‘If we’re lucky.’ I said. The words came out more bitter than I intended but we all knew I was speaking true. If we were lucky we would be alive to watch others take the credit. Plenty would not be. Henrik’s death had left me thinking all three of us had lived longer than we had any reasonable right to expect. It was only a matter of time before our names were bellowed out at the Last Roll Call. The odds against us got longer every day we kept breathing.

Such were the joys of being one of the Emperor’s soldiers in the bright new dawn of the 41st millennium. It was probably ever so.

We walked back down the hill to a camp seething with activity. Tens of thousands of grey-tunicked soldiers swarmed over the dry rock of Karsk IV. Hundreds of enginseer crews crawled over our Baneblades and Shadowswords and Leman Russ, scoping the armour plate, repairing the track mechanisms, testing the rotation of the turrets, elevating their guns, intoning battle hymns to placate the angry spirits of the great war machines. The roar of engines, the hum of servo-mechanisms and the chant of technical plainsong filled the air. The smell of drive exhaust rivalled the tang of the planetary atmosphere. The air vibrated from the engine-thunder of the enormous vehicles. Until you’ve witnessed it, you can never really appreciate exactly how much work and how much noise goes into getting an Imperial Guard Army ready to move.

Over everything loomed the monstrous bulk of the landing ships on which we had dropped from the eternal dark of space. They were larger than ork gargants and down their belly ramps rumbled Leman Russ after Leman Russ. Company after company of soldiers exited through the external hatches. The Imperial Guard had arrived in force at this tiny outpost in the desert of Karsk IV. It was all part of some great plan which, as usual, no one had bothered to explain to us. An adjutant might just have stuck the pin in the wrong part of the map again for all we knew.

There was that air of subdued excitement and suppressed fear that you always get at the start of campaigns. It was combined with the simple pleasure of having real planetary dirt beneath our feet and real gravity tugging at our bodies. When you’ve been cooped up on an Imperial troopship for months, you cannot wait to see a sky again even if it belongs to a foreign world where you may well die.

We passed along a row of Chimeras. Their crews lay around on their packs and blankets checking their lasguns and their filter masks. Ivan exchanged nods with the men he knew. There were far fewer familiar faces now than there had been when we set out from Belial all those years ago.

I thought about how different my surroundings were from that industrial world half a sector away. Belial was a cold place, much colder than this one and much more densely populated. There had been vast wastelands between the hive cities there too, of course. On Belial they had been slag heaps and ash deserts, the products of thousands of years of industrial production in the service of the Imperium.

Here, the wastelands were the result of shifting tectonic plates and the action of enormous volcanoes. This produced pyrite, the source of the planet’s wealth and the real reason why Battlegroup Sejanus of the Second Macharian Army was on-planet. This world would provide us with the shells that would feed our tanks, guns across the surface of hundreds of worlds as the crusade of Macharius got into gear. We needed to control this planet if the holy war was to proceed.

Apparently, Karsk IV’s rebel governor had different ideas. In the long years of schism that preceded the start of the 41st millennium his family had become a power unto itself. They controlled all the industrial worlds of this multi-planet system. The governor no longer saw himself as the Emperor’s representative. He believed himself to be absolute ruler of everything he surveyed. He claimed he was descended from the Emperor himself and blessed by the Angel of Fire who stood guard at the Emperor’s right hand. It was up to us to convince him otherwise. He needed to learn that the Imperium had returned in all its glory. The bad old days were over. The stability of the Emperor’s rule was being extended into this sector once more.

We were the spearhead of an army of millions dispatched to reclaim thousands of worlds long lost to the light of the Emperor’s presence. Under the Lord High Commander Macharius we had crossed the infinite depths of space to bring the Emperor’s word to the lost and the forsaken.

We walked along a long line of Leman Russ stuck with their engines revving and going nowhere. Crewmen thrust their heads out of turrets and looked around. A few shouted to the troop carriers ahead of them asking what the hold-up was. If they had really wanted to know, they would have used the comm-net. The three of us were making better time on our own booted feet than the whole armoured column.

We soon saw the cause of the problem. One of the tanks was bogged down in a dust pool, holding up the whole line. A team of enginseers and their massive mechanical drones were laying a metal plate in front of the Russ, hoping that its tracks would get traction on it. Another team were attaching chains to the tow hook extruded by the tank in front so that it could help pull the trapped vehicle clear. We quickened our pace so we wouldn’t get roped into the work crew. Ahead of us was a huge flat plain covered in thousands of blister tents. In the cleared areas between the sleeping zones, companies marched and drilled and dug latrines. The Imperial Guard likes to keep its soldiers busy.

‘Look at them,’ Anton said, taking in a company of new recruits with one bold sweep of his thin right arm. ‘They should still be in schola.’

Their officer glared at Anton as he went by but said nothing, probably because in his heart of hearts he agreed. Maybe he noticed the campaign badges on our chests. We had more than he did.

There were a lot of new faces in the crowd, replacements right out of the training battalions for the casualties we had taken on Charybdis. They had the fresh-faced look that I knew only too well. I had worn it myself not all that long ago in the great scheme of things.

Ivan made the low whistling sound he sometimes used to signify amusement. The prosthetics made it hard for him to laugh. ‘Are you going to teach them?’

It was not just the youngsters’ faces that seemed clear and clean-scrubbed. Their uniforms had a newness to them that was dazzling. Their lasguns gleamed with the oil-gel coating they had when the Temple factorums shipped them. The newcomers were sharp-edged, bright and clear and not quite real yet. Some of them would not live to get that way. I already knew that. I had seen all of that before.

‘It would hardly be worth my while,’ Anton said. ‘Let’s wait a few months and see who survives and then we’ll decide who gets taught.’

It was a cruel thing to say but we nodded agreement. We would help these newcomers where we could and do our best to keep them alive because doing that would help keep us alive, but we would not get close to them until we saw who lived and who died.

That was always difficult to tell. The confident assured ones, the ones you would have sworn to the Emperor knew what they were doing were often the first to catch a las-bolt. The idiots, the incompetents, the sloppy ones sometimes surprised you and turned out to be good soldiers.

I mean who would have guessed looking at Anton back in the day that he was ever going to live through ten years of hellish violence. I suppose you could have said the same about me. Remembering what we had been like back then, Ivan was the only one I would put money on and look what had happened to him.

We walked all the way back to the Indomitable. Fondly I looked at the incept number Ten inscribed on its side beneath the Imperial Gothic lettering of its name. For a good deal of my career as an Imperial soldier this ancient tank had been my guardian and my weapon. It loomed over us like a mountain of ceramite and plasteel. The Baneblade cast a long cold shadow, even on the warm surface of Karsk IV. Its fierce presence welcomed us back to the only real home we had known in nearly a decade.

‘Morning, ladies! Have a nice stroll?’ Corporal Hesse’s booming voice called down from the dorsal turret. He was stripped to the waist and the cog-wheel tattoos were visible on his straining gut.

‘Piss off,’ Anton replied.

‘I think you meant to say piss off corporal, Private Antoniev,’ Hesse replied cheerfully. He muttered something to somebody below him in the fuselage of the tank. Whoever it was handed a power-spanner up to him and he began tightening nuts on the hatch-cover hinge. The effort made his chubby face red. Sweat dripped from his cheeks onto the metal as he spoke the proper invocations. Hesse could always find something that needed work on round the vehicle. It was his pride and joy. Anything not so technical it needed to be handled by an enginseer was his particular pleasure to tinker with.

‘Yeah, piss off corporal, Private Antoniev,’ Anton said.

Hesse chuckled, ‘Only you could tell yourself to piss off when trying to come up with a witty retort, Antoniev. Anyway, break time is over. Get your tools out and put them to some use. And I don’t mean take a piss…’

‘Ha bloody ha,’ said Anton.

‘You’ve used that one already today,’ said Ivan. ‘You’ll wear it out.’

‘Ha bloody ha.’ Anton’s scarecrow figure was already halfway up the metal ladder in the Baneblade’s side. He reached the dorsal turret and threw himself flat beside Hesse, inspecting the servos of the rotator mechanism. Soon they were cheerfully discussing the lack of pressure in the hydraulics. Say what you like about Anton, when it came to machines he knew his stuff. It had been the same back in the factorum on Belial. Of course, if any real work needed done they would need to summon the tech-priests. The priests of that mechanical brotherhood were as jealous of their prerogatives as the Mechanics of the Factorum Guild back on Belial.

I climbed up a metal cliff and dropped into the Baneblade’s innards. It smelled of oil and plasteel and recycled air. But at least it was cooler than outside. I fell into a tanker’s stoop and scuttled along the corridor heading for the cockpit. I was surprised to find a stranger there checking the controls. He had the well-scrubbed appearance of the new intake. He fidgeted nervously, fingers drumming on the control altar. He looked like he was contemplating a particularly difficult mathematical problem. There was an abstracted, scholarly air to him.

‘That’s my chair,’ I said. He looked up, startled.

‘Sorry,’ he said, rising up so fast he banged his head on the ceiling where it sloped above the driver’s chair. I winced with sympathy. I’ve been known to do the same thing myself. He was a tall kid, a little taller than me. His hair was curly and dirty-blond. His eyes were a pale, pale blue. He smiled nervously, showing surprisingly good teeth.

I slumped down into my bucket seat and inspected the controls. It did not look like he had made any invocations, but it’s always a good idea to check. One of our Russ went off a cliff once because a new boy had set the drives into reverse and the driver was too drunk on coolant fluid to check. Or so the story goes.

The boy stuck out a clean hand, with well-manicured nails. ‘Matosek,’ he said. ‘Adrian Adrianovitch Matosek.’

I looked at his hand till it withdrew. ‘Sit down, New Boy,’ I said. ‘And don’t touch anything until I say you can.’

I muttered the first driver’s prayer, pulled the periscope down into position and locked it. I twisted my driver’s cap sideways so the brim would not hit the eyepiece. Looking through it I got a clear view of the tortured sky above us, and another look at the lava sea on the horizon. I adjusted the view angle until I saw the slope around us and all the other tanks and artillery lined up there, getting ready to move.

I closed my eyes, asked the blessing of the machine-spirits and sent my hands dancing across the control altar in the ritual gestures of invocation and control. The spirit of the great war engine was still quiescent.

I watched the needles on the volt gauges rise and fall in response to my devotions. I touched the engine pedals with my feet and heard the big drives roar. I checked the lock toggles on the control sticks to make sure they were still in place then invoked the Baneblade’s tutelary spirit to watch over them.

‘I never touched anything,’ New Boy said. ‘I know the rituals.’

‘Don’t say anything till I finish either,’ I said. He fell into a silence, half-sullen and half-scared. I suppressed a smile. I knew what it was like to sit in that particular chair. Old Grigor had done exactly the same thing to me when I first saw the inside of a Baneblade. Well, he would learn by watching and doing, the same as I had to, the basic apprenticeship of the Imperial tank man.

I kept talking, ‘There’s been some shonky repairs done on Number Ten’s port-side armour towards the rear. You need to cover for that where you can. Set her down with the starboard towards the enemy where you can and the gunners will traverse the turrets to compensate. Be that way till we can get proper repairs done. The requisition chit is in – has been since Charybdis. Any decade now we will get the parts.’

He nodded again and kept his mouth shut. He was doing all right so far. ‘The number two drive has a tendency to over-rev at low speeds. You need to placate the spirit when it happens. It can be temperamental. Remember that.’

‘Sure.’

‘That’s that then. Let’s see if you can perform the basic rituals then.’

He shrugged. He looked at his control board. It was more or less a duplicate of mine. Hardly surprising really. Redundant controls systems are a feature of the Mark V Baneblade originated on Callan’s Forge. They say that it’s different on the Martian-sourced models but I would not know. I have never been inside one.

Nothing happened when he moved the switches. Nothing would unless the cut-outs on my controls kicked in which would most likely mean I was dead or so wounded I did not care. Or I toggled the switch and asked the machine to hand over control. I watched him. He was a good kid, careful. Everything went back into neutral when he had finished with it. Even though he was not directly communing with the spirit of the vessel he was taking no chances.

‘What happened to him?’

‘Who?’ I asked although I already knew who he meant. Vehicles like this you were usually sitting in some dead man’s chair.

‘The one who sat here before me.’

‘He died,’ I said. ‘It’s an occupational hazard.’

‘I see you two have met,’ said a voice behind us. It had the relaxed, born-to-command tone of the Upper Hives. I turned to look at the lieutenant. He was a big man with a bleak-looking face and a shadow of stubble on his massive jaw he could never quite get rid of. His uniform was covered in braid. His eagle epaulettes were enormously ornate. Campaign medals festooned his broad chest. I have always suspected our officers’ elaborate uniforms were designed as a deliberate contrast to the plain tunics of the common soldier in our regiment. It emphasises the class difference and our rulers on Belial have always liked to do that.

Behind the lieutenant was the Understudy, a moon orbiting the lieutenant’s planetary presence, hoping to reflect some of his authority. His uniform braiding was scarcely less elaborate than the lieutenant’s. The Understudy did not look much older than the New Boy. He was trying to appear relaxed the way the lieutenant did. Maybe in another twenty years he would have mastered the trick but somehow I doubted it. The lieutenant had been born the way he was. Or perhaps decanted from a glass jar, the way some of the Schismatics had been.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. I did not quite get the words out of my mouth as fast as New Boy. He still had the discipline and the eagerness to please of the training camps on him.

‘Very good,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Private Lemuel, I expect you to look out for Private Matosek. Show him the ropes, make sure he doesn’t reverse us into a lava field, that sort of thing.’

‘He’s already started, sir,’ said New Boy, not realising that it was unnecessary. It was just the sort of thing the lieutenant felt called on to say for the good of morale, mostly his own.

‘I would have expected nothing less,’ said the lieutenant in his most inspirational manner. In spite of myself, I was pleased.

The lieutenant lounged back in his commander’s chair and invoked the controls. The command consoles emerged from the floor of the hull and locked into place around him as the spirit of the ancient tank responded to his prayers. The Understudy moved to a position two paces behind the throne and studied the screens as if his life depended on it. Maybe one day it would. The lieutenant studied the holo-images.

‘I don’t like the pressurisation on turret two,’ the lieutenant said in the quiet murmur the upper classes always use to let you know that you should not be listening but even if you are, it does not really matter any way.

‘You’re right, sir,’ said the Understudy. His private school had most likely provided him with a certificate in obsequiousness and daily lessons in toadying. ‘Shall I have words with the repair crews, sir?’

‘Hesse is already looking at it with Antoniev,’ the lieutenant said. From his expression, you would have thought the Understudy imagined the lieutenant had uncovered this by some supernatural means instead of having issued orders for it this morning. ‘If anything needs to be done I will petition it through the proper channels and with the proper offerings.’

‘Very good, sir,’ the Understudy said.

‘Still, all things considered, I think we’re set right to carry the Emperor’s word to the heretics.’ The lieutenant sounded sincere when he said that. It was a gift of his. ‘What do you think, Private Lemuel?’

‘I think they’ll be sorry they ever saw us, sir,’ I said with the right amount of stupid enthusiasm and bloodthirsty malice. It was what the lieutenant expected from us Lower Hivers and who was I to disappoint him?

‘We’ll know soon enough,’ he said, taking his pipe from his pocket, stuffing it with lho weed and lighting it. I knew something big was coming. He puffed away for a few moments, like a Baneblade’s exhausts on a frosty morning on Belial. He looked unspeakably cheerful, the way he always did when he was about to break very good or very bad news. ‘We’d better put on a good show tomorrow.’

‘Why is that, sir?’ I asked. The Understudy glared at me. He had wanted to ask that question himself even though he had most likely already known the answer.

‘Because we are under the eyes of the Lord High Commander Macharius himself.’

‘He’s here on Karsk IV, sir?’ I was as impressed as the lieutenant intended me to be. Macharius was the most successful general the Imperium had produced in a millennium, although you’ve got to remember this was before the campaigns that really made his name.

‘He soon will be,’ the lieutenant said. ‘His ship is in orbit.’

It seemed that Karsk IV was even more important than I had thought if Lord High Commander Macharius himself had come to supervise the opening of the campaign.

‘It’s possible there will be a surprise inspection tomorrow. Not a word of this to anybody,’ the lieutenant said, tapping the side of his nose. He might as well have winked. If he had not wanted me to spread the word among the crew he would never have said anything.