Angel of Fire

The battle stalked away from us. The Titans, our reinforcements and the Death Spectres tore through the heretics like a sandstorm stripping an unprotected man to the bone. We watched them killing as they went. They took no prisoners. They did not have the time. That was left to the Imperial Guard regiments who followed up. It’s not glamorous but it beats getting your head shot off.

We were left alone on top of the tank, looking at the piles of broken bodies and heaps of destroyed armour around us. Anton produced a flask of coolant fluid and we shared swigs.

‘Bloody hell, Space Marines,’ Anton said. ‘We saw Space Marines. They saved us.’

From the tone of his voice it might just as well have been the Emperor himself descended from the Golden Throne to save our lives. I understood that. Very few men in all the worlds of the Imperium can say they have stood in a Space Marine’s shadow or even talked to one, however briefly.

You hear about them. You hear their praises sung. You never expect to meet one. Somehow all of the stories had not prepared us for the reality.

Ivan took another swig and gazed into the distance. He was thinking about the experience, I could tell, but like me he was still trying to digest it among all the other events of the day.

Anton cackled and said, ‘We saw Space Marines today. They saved us.’

‘I noticed,’ I said.

‘You think they noticed us?’ he asked. His eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed. The scar tightened on his forehead. I was surprised that he sounded so serious.

‘Well, they did not shoot us,’ I said.

‘I mean did they even see us as people? Will they remember us and think, yeah, we saved those Guardsmen on Karsk?’

I thought about the fierce, savage face of the Death Spectre. I remembered the controlled, killing fury in those cold, black eyes. I remembered the way he had grunted when I spoke to him. ‘The Emperor’s Angels’ I have heard the Space Marine Chapters called. There seemed very little angelic about them to me. I thought Death Spectres an entirely appropriate name. They certainly looked like manifest death to me, and they had proved themselves to be to all those they encountered on the field of battle. Among all those bodies down there, among all the thousands of casualties, I had not seen one encased in ceramite armour.

‘I doubt it.’

Ivan nodded and scratched his metal cheek. It made a nerve-jangling grinding sound. ‘Like mortal gods,’ he said. ‘Like something out of Scripture come to life.’

He sounded uneasy and that too was understandable. It is all very well hearing legends and heroic tales. It is another thing to find one of those legends standing in front of you, wielding a bolter and filled with righteous fury. The uncomfortable thought sidled into my mind: what if the Death Spectre had decided I was one of the Emperor’s enemies? He would have killed me on the spot and there was absolutely nothing I could have done to stop him. Space Marines have a way of making you feel your mortal insignificance. I was glad they were on our side but I was not sure I wanted to be that close to one ever again.

Anton, as ever, chose to give voice to his own reveries. ‘You know I don’t think they are like us at all.’

‘They are certainly not like you,’ Ivan said.

‘I mean it. I think they have no more in common with us than orks do.’

‘That’s not true. They were men once, if the tales are true.’

‘Once, Leo. Not any more. I looked into one’s eyes. It was not like looking into a man’s eyes at all. And I don’t think he looked back at me and saw someone who was the same species as him. They say they live forever, you know.’

‘They don’t. Just longer than us, if they are not shot.’

‘Yes, but they have a gene-seed in them that is passed on from one to another. That lives forever. Some of them must be carrying seeds that date back to when the Emperor walked among men.’

‘I don’t think I have ever seen you this thoughtful,’ I said. It was true too. Of all the strange and wonderful things I saw that day, a thoughtful Anton was not the least strange.

‘And… and those Titans, they were old too, old as the Imperium maybe. Some of them must have walked when the Emperor did and that Space Marine’s gene-seed was new. We live in a strange and terrible universe, Leo,’ he said.

‘It’s taken you all this time to work that out?’ I said.

He just stared at me bleakly, as if he was about to cry. There was a lost look about him, like a child separated from his parents in a hive-world crowd who does not know his way home. It was odd seeing those eyes looking out of that tall gangling body.

A strange gloom started to settle on us. I looked down at the armoured hull of the Indomitable. I knew at once we were all thinking the same thing.

I was the first to say it. ‘It’s dead.’

They understood what I meant. There was no sense of presence in the Indomitable. Whatever spirit had been in it was gone. Anton nodded. Ivan shook his head. They reflected the confusion of the moment.

There was the sound of gunfire and all the thunder of battle in the distance but it was as if we sat in our own small pool of quiet. We were all thinking about the Baneblade. Old Number Ten had carried us across half a dozen worlds. We had looked after it and it had looked after us. It had been in a very real sense the only home we had known in the past decade.

‘What are we going to do?’ Anton asked. They were both looking at me, in that hangdog way that they’d always done even back in the guild factorum on Belial.

‘We need to find an officer to report to,’ I said. None of us moved. A dying heretic started to scream for water. He lay in the shadow of a smashed Leman Russ across from us. Anton turned, raised his lasgun and put him out of his misery. We returned to contemplating our own problems.

‘There’s always the Understudy,’ I said. ‘He might still be alive. I suppose we should look.’

It was something we had been putting off and I hated to bring it up but someone had to. We had to go back into the shattered remains of the Baneblade and start looking for bodies. I doubted that anyone had survived but it was always possible and we would need to account for the casualties anyway at some point if we were the only survivors. The Imperial Guard always has a great curiosity about such things. We would need to reclaim the logs as well. As surviving crew it was our sacred duty.

Anton gulped. He acted tough and he was, most of the time, but there are some things nobody likes to do and this was one of them. It was also the first time any of us had been called on to do such a thing. The old tank had seemed indestructible. I don’t think it was quite real to any of us just yet.

And there was something else, a certain inertia. While we were sitting here we were out of things. Nothing was quite real. We were alone in a world of ruins and dust and corpses, committed to nothing except watching the universe pass us by. Once we started doing something we were back in the world of following orders, performing duties, a world in which we could be killed and in which, at very least, we would have to work. For all our depression, there was still an odd holiday mood in the air. It came from still being alive and having no supervision and, for the first time in years, having no real idea of what to do.

Ivan grunted as he started to get up. ‘I suppose we have to,’ he said.

You could always rely on Ivan to bring you down.

‘Come on you two,’ he said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

We clambered back down into the body of the Indomitable. We moved very cautiously, much more cautiously than when we had made our escape. There was something ominous about going back down there. It was as if we were rummaging about inside a huge corpse.

We were in the burned-out shell of something that had once been living but was now dead. I think all of us felt that way. They let me take the lead, quite wisely, because nobody really wants to stand in front of a man with a shotgun. Not if they have the slightest smidgen of a sense of self-preservation anyway.

I found that I was holding my breath again and walking on the balls of my feet. I was ready for anything – it was always possible that the Space Marines might have missed someone and that there might be enemies still left alive down here.

We entered the command cabin again. None of us could look at the lieutenant. I paused there and looked at my old seat. How many hours had I spent sitting there? How many leagues had I driven that ancient tank over? One thing was for sure, I would not be doing that again in a hurry. It seemed like a different place now and I felt like a different person from the driver who had sat there taking orders from the lieutenant.

‘Nothing,’ said Anton, shaking his head. ‘No one here except the dead.’ No one made any jokes. Even for us some things were not a subject for humour.

‘I suppose we’re going to have to go below,’ said Ivan. Even he did not sound very keen on the idea. None of us were.

‘I suppose we are,’ I said. There were dead bodies in the corridor leading towards the engine room. They were heretics. They had that strange look, as if their chests or their heads had exploded from within, that is so characteristic of the corpses of those who have been shot with a bolter. There is nothing, with the possible exception of grenades, that leaves quite such a mess and I say this as a man who is quite proficient with a shotgun.

Our boots made a strange sucking sound as we walked. It was impossible to tread through the narrow corridor without stepping in blood and entrails. Something bad had happened in the drive room. It must have taken the first hit and it had been a nasty one. The engine had exploded and taken out the engineers. Oily had been beheaded by a slice of metal half the size of the door that had been blown off in the explosion. The rest of his team had been so badly chopped up that we could not really work out which body parts belonged to which person.

‘It looks like we were lucky,’ said Anton. ‘I’m not sure anybody else made it out of here alive.’

Of course at that point we heard a groan from down the corridor. We pushed down to the head and banged on the door and the groaning stopped. ‘Who’s in there?’

‘Yeah, let us in, I need to use the head,’ said Anton.

‘Is that you, Leo?’ I heard the New Boy ask.

‘No! It’s Lord High Commander Macharius, come to offer you a promotion,’ I said. ‘What the hell do you think?’

The door swung open. Crammed into the tiny space of the toilet were the New Boy and the Understudy. They both looked pale and ill. They blinked at us like some nocturnal thing caught in the beam of a torch. The New Boy looked at us and then was violently sick. I stepped back just in time to avoid having vomit added to all the other gunk on my boots.

‘What happened?’ New Boy asked. ‘I heard shooting – some sort of gun I have not heard before – and then nothing.’

‘You missed the Space Marines,’ Anton said. ‘They saved us.’

‘Space Marines,’ said the New Boy.

‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘Those were bolters you heard.’ He sounded as satisfied as if he had been firing them himself.

‘That’s all very well but we need orders,’ I said. I looked pointedly at the Understudy. He just stared at me. I suppose having your superior’s brains blasted over your face will do that to you. That said, the New Boy had had the same experience and he seemed to be handling it. It seemed to me at the time the Understudy really had not been a product of the same school as the lieutenant. Just goes to show how wrong a man can be.

‘Are any of the others alive?’ the New Boy asked. It was a sensible question but Anton turned and spat on the floor.

‘That’s what we are trying to find out,’ he said. He looked in disgust at the Understudy. The man just stared at him blankly.

Ivan said, ‘Best get him out of here. I doubt the air down here is helping him recover.’

His words were almost kindly. There was that thing about Ivan. Just when you thought with a fair degree of certainty that he was a brute, he surprised you with his sensitivity. He had been the same as a boy back on Belial but his ruined face and metal-plated skull made me forget that sometimes.

I nodded. ‘We’ll all go,’ I said. ‘Just in case there are a few heretics left over.’

We stepped out into the fresh air, if that was the right word for it. It had some of the tang of the desert in it but it was also the air of a hive city, full of trace chemicals and the stink of heavy industry. Added to that was the taint of the dust of fallen buildings and the smell of explosive and burned flesh and burned-out machinery. Not even the filters of rebreathers could extract every trace of all of that.

I looked around. There were bodies everywhere, like in some of those religious paintings showing the Day of Judgement when the Emperor returns to pass sentence on the Guilty. Some of the bodies were still moving, with the faint pathetic shifts of posture that men slowly dying of thirst, air poison and terminal wounds make. Most of them were in the uniforms of heretics. I told myself I had no sympathy with them, that they had been trying to kill me only a few hours before, but, of course, it is never that simple.

There was one young boy lying there. There did not seem to be anything wrong with him except for the red stain spreading across the chest of his tunic. His face was very pale and he licked his lips when he saw me. He was frightened and he wanted to ask for something at the same time. I tried to ignore him and walk past.

‘Wait,’ he said. He was speaking Low Gothic. The local accent distorted the word but it was recognisable. Something made me turn to face him. ‘Drink. Please.’

I looked him in the eye. He was very young, even younger than the New Boy, younger than I had been when me, Ivan and Anton had run away to join the Guard. He held my gaze evenly. Who knew what he was really seeing? He had that visionary look that some of the dying get. I’ve seen it a thousand times. A man gets past a certain point and he just lets go. Indifference and a certain sympathy battled in my mind. I stuck out my hand. It surprised me to see there was a canteen in it.

‘Thank. You.’ He took a swig and lay back. He was dead before his head hit the ground. I wondered whether the act of drinking had killed him.

‘You going soft, Leo?’ Anton asked. He still looked thoughtful but the hint of his usual maniacal grin turned the corner of his lip up.

‘One day that might be me,’ I said. ‘Or you.’

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I am planning on living forever.’

‘The Guard might have something to say about that.’

‘I know. They have their stupid plan to get us killed at every chance they can, but we are too smart for them.’

‘Anton, you could not outsmart that rock.’

‘I am still smarter than the Imperial Guard.’

‘You may be on to something there.’

‘You know it.’ He bent over and closed the young boy’s eyes.

‘They are not so different,’ he said. Somehow I could tell he was still thinking about the Space Marine. I think what he had realised that day had really shocked him. All his life he had idolised Space Marines. There had been a day when he thought he could become one.

‘You still want to be a Space Marine?’ I asked. He stared off at the rising dust clouds in the distance for a long time before he turned and grinned at me.

‘Hell, yeah,’ he said. ‘Put in a good word for me with Lord High Commander Macharius.’

‘I will when I see him,’ I said. At the time, I thought it was a joke.