I looked at Ivan. He looked away shame-faced. Anton pretended not to notice me either. Neither of them volunteered to go and join in the fighting, so I aimed us towards the Lion’s Pride and gunned the engine.
The great vessel loomed over us, a tower of ceramite and plasteel, resting on great finned haunches. Most of the blast doors were already closed. Men in green tunics guarded the ramps. I brought the groundcar to a screeching halt and vaulted out, striding confidently towards the shuttle. Men brought lasguns to bear on me. I snapped a salute at the nearest officer.
‘Sergeant Lemuel,’ I said. ‘Reporting fit for duty.’
Anton and Ivan strode up behind me and repeated my performance. The officer shook his head and motioned for us to get up the ramps as quickly as we could.
‘We seal and blast in three minutes,’ he said. He glanced towards the conflict where the walls had been breached. ‘Possibly even sooner.’
The ramp flexed under my weight as I raced up it. At the top I turned and looked out. A massive heretic breakthrough had smashed the space port perimeter. At the edges, ships were already taking fire. Space-toughened ceramite was being blasted by Basilisk shells. Lightning danced down the flanks of one vessel where ancient power conduits leaked. Men lay charred and blackened on the concrete. Clouds of smoke and gas drifted across my field of vision. I stepped into the vessel. A starsailor shouted and pointed, guiding me towards the emergency acceleration couches. I strapped myself down knowing this was going to be a rough lift-off.
Twelve
I strapped myself into the launch-bed, thinking of all the previous times I had done this. Normally it was a simple precaution, but with all the shelling going on there was a very real threat of an emergency take-off. Even as that thought struck me, the whole ship shuddered. A bell-like tone filled the air, as if the ship had been struck with a great hammer.
‘That’s not good,’ said Anton. All around us crewmen were on their knees, murmuring technical invocations and launch prayers. A red light flashed. A warning bell sounded. There was another impact, this time followed by the sound of an explosion. It did not sound at all like the normal launch routine.
‘I think we got on just in time,’ said Ivan. His mechanical voice held no emotion. He at least always sounded calm.
‘I think we’re getting away just in time,’ said Anton and gulped. He glanced around furtively as if realising that what he had just said smacked of cowardice.
Normally I would have taken the opening and used it to attack. This time I kept my mouth shut. His words echoed my own thoughts too closely. The ship shuddered and for a moment I thought the end had come, but it was only the lifters cutting in. I could tell from the vibration that the shuttle was now airborne, climbing up and away from the planet’s surface. I lay there rigid, listening for the small sounds that would tell me that something had gone badly wrong.
‘If that last shell has breached the hull then all the air in the ship might be evacuated,’ Anton said. He sounded nervous.
‘Bulkheads will close and prevent that,’ said Ivan.
‘Only in the sections not breached. If there’s a hole in the hull we’ll all be sucked out into space even if the rest of the ship remains sealed.’
‘We can’t be sucked out,’ I said. ‘We’re strapped to these couches.’
‘Then we’ll suffocate and flash-freeze. Remember what happened back on the Tramontane when that wall blew out?’
How could I forget? We had found bodies frozen so cold that they were like ice blocks themselves. If you accidentally bumped into them bits broke off.
‘As far as I can tell it has not happened yet,’ said Ivan, ‘so why don’t you shut up and worry about it when it happens.’
‘Because I won’t be able to worry,’ said Anton. ‘I will be dead.’
‘Then where’s the problem?’
‘What was that noise?’ Anton asked, turning his head nervously. It was just the all clear, telling us the shuttle had left the planetary atmosphere. I unhooked the harness and stood up, made my way out of the emergency launch chamber and stared out of a small porthole. Beneath me I could see the vast shield of the planet obscuring the lower half of the sky. Green and red clouds drifted over rust deserts and sludge seas of ominous grey. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I could have sworn that I saw small flickers of light below me, as if vast explosions were going off, large enough to be seen from space.
Despite the silence, the shuttle was still accelerating. The great hemisphere shrank to become a ball beneath me. The outline of continents became visible. I felt unutterably weary. I looked at the chrono on the wall, still set to local time. An hour ago I had been among the sick and wounded in the great hospital. Now I was watching the planet recede beneath me. It all had the aspect of a dream.
I felt Anton and Ivan move up to flank me.
‘Well, we lost,’ said Ivan. His voice was utterly flat.
Anton sighed. He would have liked to deny it but he could not.
‘We’ll be back,’ I said. I did not sound very convincing, even to myself.
Macharius looked weary. It would not have been visible to many but it was to me. I had known him for a very long time, stood guard over him on a hundred worlds. It was evident to my eye as soon as I resumed my bodyguard duties.
There was something about him that suggested the old man he in fact was. It was not his body. The juvenat treatments still kept him slim, tall and athletic, muscular as a warrior god. His hair was still golden. His eyes were still clear. When he strode across the room there was still the same look of electric purpose to him that he had possessed when I had first seen him three decades ago on Karsk.
It was something about the set of the shoulders perhaps. They were not so firmly straight. There was the suggestion of a stoop as well, of a head often held downcast.
The grip he clapped on my shoulder was just as firm as it had ever been, and the way he guided me across the chamber was just as forceful as it ever was. There were more lines around his eyes, perhaps, and on the flesh of his hands. There were a few more scars, barely visible. Macharius always healed well. In this, he was fortunate.
‘You are recovered, Lemuel,’ he said. The tone of his voice was compelling but it seemed to have lost something, the certainty it had always had. It did not quite command belief the way it once did. Or perhaps it was just my own imagination and my own feelings of depression.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
‘It pleases me that you are fit for duty,’ he said. To his credit, he did sound pleased. It was not just something he was saying because it was expected. He was a man who had conquered sectors of the galaxy for the Imperium. He could say what he wanted to whomever he wanted.
I looked around the chamber. It was oddly familiar, filled with furnishings that I could remember seeing many times before, mementoes of scores of campaigns, the battle banners of a hundred defeated foes. There was a rune-embossed chainsword he had picked up on Silvermount and the helmet of the Amir of Peshtar, crowned with the Star of Pesh, birthright of a world’s rulers for a hundred generations. There was a desk carved from the tip of a Leviathan tusk on which sat a regicide set made from the resonant woods of Kal, whose colour responded to the mood of the player when he touched them.
Macharius looked at me again and said, ‘I wanted to thank you for saving my life back on Loki. I would decorate you again but you’ve enough braiding already.’
One more would always be nice, I thought, but I did not say anything. It was clear Macharius was not in the mood to be giving medals, even for saving his life. There was a grimness about him I had not seen before. He gestured that I should take a seat. I knew then what was coming.
Throughout his career Macharius had made a habit of talking with his common soldiers about the campaign. It was not really the trait of an Imperial general. It was the style of the planetary nobility amongst whom he had come of age, of men used to talking with trusted retainers.
‘Tell me about
Loki,’ he said. His strange golden eyes focused on me. He assumed a posture of intent listening and I will say one thing for him, he did listen. He made you feel as if he had no other interest in the world at that moment but what you were saying.
Under the circumstances, in the face of such flattery, it would take a better man than I not to talk loosely. As I spoke he nodded and tilted his head to one side. It was clear that he was not judging, that I was expected to tell him what I felt honestly, man to man, two old comrades speaking the truth. Except, of course, that I was doing all the talking and he was doing all the listening.
I told him all about the trenches and the walking corpses and the strange things I had seen. He occasionally asked a question, requested more details, a clarification of some point I had made. It was always germane though, always showed that he had been following what I said very closely. I somehow found myself talking about my strange dreams, and the daemons I had seen, and for the first time I noticed a faint widening of his eyes. His fingers flexed and drummed against his thigh for a moment and then stopped as if he too had become aware of what he was doing and what he was revealing.
I told him about waking up in the hospital, about Anna and Zachariah. I repeated the things that were said as closely as I could remember them, even the things unflattering of him and critical. He just nodded and listened and I kept going until I had finished the full tale of our escape.
Only once it was done and he had risen from his chair did I realise the full appalling extent of all I had said. I had criticised the great man to his face, or I had repeated others’ criticisms of him, which to some officers would be the same thing. I had spoken aloud things that many would have construed as heretical to a man who was sworn to uphold and extend the Emperor’s law wherever he stood.
I held my breath, surprised, as I always was after such conversations, at exactly how big my mouth was and exactly how much trouble I was capable of getting myself into. And I had the cheek to call Anton stupid.
I watched Macharius, closely aware that even now he might be contemplating orders that would lead to my swift execution. He simply looked at me and said, ‘I appreciate your frankness, Lemuel, but you must say nothing of these things to anyone other than Inquisitor Drake and myself.’
He walked over to the regicide board and I could see that he had set up a position there, or perhaps he was playing against himself. Certainly there was no one else in the army who could have played against him and provided any sort of challenge, not even Inquisitor Drake. His hand hovered over a piece and just for a moment he looked something I had never seen him to be before. He looked indecisive and then he looked angry.
‘At every turn, I am thwarted, it seems,’ he said. I did not say anything. I did not know whether he was talking to himself or to me. I kept very still, and made my mind blank, pretending to be nothing more than a piece of furniture. ‘And it seems once again the Dark Powers are raised against me.’
He looked over at me. I don’t know whether he was trying to gauge my response or whether he expected me to say something. I kept very quiet. ‘There is something on Loki,’ he said. ‘Something old and dark and evil. Something that stands behind Richter’s shoulder and whispers to him.’
He put a world of loathing into the name Richter. I could understand that. He was talking about the man who had betrayed him after all, a former friend and pupil who had also beaten him in battle, and one thing Macharius was not used to was defeat. He strode over to the porthole and looked down. The world was still below us. In the distance I could see Imperial ships exchanging fire with the planetary defences. The flare as they unleashed their ordnance was visible against the blackness of space.
He looked down at the world below as he had looked down at the game board, with a savage intensity, as if he were confronting a foe with whom he was about to engage in bitter personal combat, against whom he was about to fight a duel to the death. I followed his gaze as it turned towards the moons, as if refusing to invest with any significance the world where he had been beaten.
‘I have his measure now,’ Macharius said. ‘I have its measure. I will return and I will be victorious.’
His voice had all of the power that had once held armies enthralled in its spell, but there was something missing, I thought, some inner note of conviction that would have given it the old magic and convinced me of his invincibility. To me, at that moment, it sounded as if Macharius was trying to convince himself.
‘Are you sure?’ Macharius asked Inquisitor Drake, when he brought his news. I kept my gaze fixed over his shoulder. I could see my face reflected a dozen times in the mirrored visors of the inquisitor’s storm trooper bodyguards. I saw Macharius too and I was sure that he was aware of me as I stood by his shoulder. It was a position of privilege, awarded only to the most trusted of house troopers.
The inquisitor looked long and hard at the general. He was not a man who was used to being questioned in such a way even by the most powerful man in the Imperium. His normally impeccable self-control was being tested. Knowing Macharius, this was possibly quite deliberate, but I was not so sure – circumstances were unusual. Eventually Drake nodded.
‘I am sure. It has been confirmed by multiple sources. Three of your highest-ranking commanders are already on Acheron. It is only a matter of time and the vagaries of interstellar travel before the others arrive there.’
For the first time ever I saw a look of utter fury on the face of Macharius’s distorted reflection. His fist clenched, crushing the metal goblet he held. Wine slopped over his fingers. A servant moved discreetly into place to mop it up. Macharius motioned him away with a flick of his hand, the sort of motion you would use to brush away a fly. He rose from his throne and moved down the dais until he stood directly in front of Drake. The two men were of the same height but somehow Macharius managed to make the other man look small.
‘Why would they do this? They must know they cannot get away with it.’
‘Must they?’ Drake’s voice was flat, calm and emotionless. He was not afraid of Macharius even though at that moment he appeared the focus of the Lord High Commander’s rage.
‘They are plotting behind my back. They have convened to replace me. They…’ He paused for a moment, as if he could not quite force the words out.
‘If you rush there you will find that it is a meeting convened by Cardinal Septimus. Word was sent informing you but somehow the messenger never reached you–’
‘Do they really think I am so stupid?’
‘There will be documentation, incontrovertible proof, that the message was sent, that through no fault of the cardinal you were unaware of the meeting. What are you going to do? Call him a liar? Execute a representative of the High Lords of Terra?’
‘I might.’
‘Now you are being foolish. That would merely give your enemies what they want. It would prove that you saw yourself as greater than the Emperor’s representatives, that you plan to set up your own realm here on the far marches of the Imperium, that all the things that have been whispered about you are true.’
‘I am not sure I like your tone, inquisitor.’
‘Like it or not I am merely doing what I have always done, telling you the truth, although it may not be pleasant to hear.’
Macharius paused at that and suddenly he smiled and looked more like the old Macharius. He knew that Drake was not his real enemy, that the men he was angry with were out of his reach and likely to remain so.
‘So it has finally come,’ Macharius said. ‘They have finally found the courage to move against me.’
Drake shrugged. ‘We both knew it was bound to happen. You’ve made too many enemies, ruffled too many feathers. Too many people want to share in the glory.’
‘Richter must be defeated. An example must be made to all future rebels.’
‘Is it more important that you defeat one insignificant foe on a flyspeck world or that you remain in charge of the crusade?’
Macharius s
tared at him. He looked as if he were about to say something. His fist clenched and he closed his eyes for a second as if breathing a prayer to the Emperor. Whether he was asking for patience or inspiration, I could not tell.
‘What do you intend to do about this challenge?’ Drake asked. His eyes met the Lord High Commander’s and did not blink.
Macharius remained silent for a moment. ‘What I have always done. Fight!’
And so we were ordered to Acheron and another fight that seemed impossible to win. This time with the representatives of the Imperium and those who had once been Macharius’s most loyal followers.
Thirteen
Ships filled the sky over Acheron Prime. It was hard to believe there were so many in existence, and it made me realise the full extent and power of the crusade. Here there was no sign of the long, grinding defeat we had known on Loki. Here, the full majesty of the Imperium was evident.
Acheron Prime itself was a vast half-empty city, built amid the ruins of some xenos civilisation on the far edge of the galaxy. Old dark towers loomed over shiny new human buildings. The mix gave the city the look of a regicide board, zones of dark and zones of light intermingled in its architecture.
If the leaders of those conspiring against Macharius were discommoded by his sudden appearance, they gave no sign of it. We were greeted on the edge of the space field by assembled regiments from two score worlds. They raised a thunderous cheer as the doors of the shuttle opened. Macharius raised his hands and waved at the assembled crowd. He turned to Drake.
‘There are at least twenty regiments of Guard down there who should be elsewhere.’ His tone was low and urgent. I think in his head he was making calculations. He had brought with him only his own personal guard and the remnants of the Grosslanders who had been evacuated from Loki.
At first I thought he was considering using these troops to return there and defeat Richter, but as we walked down the ramp in the chill air of the haunted world, it struck me that he might be considering something else. If it came to a battle we would be greatly outnumbered. I pushed those thoughts aside as I came down the steps. I felt the tug of a new world’s gravity, slightly stronger than the Imperial standard of the ship. It made my limbs feel heavier, and it increased my sensations of weariness.