Fall of Macharius

Chapter One

The gigantic face of the skull moon leered down through the clouds. The screams of the dying echoed out of no-man’s-land. Strangely coloured mist drifted over the lip of the trench and little lights, like the glow of lost fireflies, swirled inside as it passed overhead. There was something sinister about the movement, as if the tendril of poisonous gas was the limb of a monster furtively seeking out prey.

Shadows danced away from the entrance of the nearest bunker, where some of the troops were toasting lasgun powerpacks in a rubbish fire, hoping to coax a last bit of life into them before the next enemy attack. A partially disassembled flamer lay just inside the doorway. It had an abandoned look to it that did not surprise me. We had not had a sniff of promethium in more than two months and without that fiery element the weapon was worthless. The bunker itself was the shattered remnant of a Leman Russ battle tank, tipped on its side by a direct hit from enemy artillery and partially buried in mud. It had been stripped of any useful parts by the enginseers and its carcass left to decompose. Hundreds of such wrecks were incorporated into the trench lines. It made me nostalgic for the heady initial days of the war when we still believed in the armoured fist of the Imperial Guard, before everything got bogged down in the mud and rain and slurry of this hideous world.

I checked my spare rebreathers for the hundredth time. I had built up quite a collection – every man in Macharius’s Imperial Guard army had been issued with a secondary before we arrived on Loki and I had helped myself to a few more from corpses since then. I prayed to the Emperor that they would bring me more luck than they had to their original owners. There had been a lot of filter failures. There had been a lot of failures of every kind.

On Loki, you could never have too many protective masks. You never knew when one might fail, and if that happened you were dead. If the poison gases did not give you a heart attack by showing you your worst fears, the disease spores would clot in your lungs, and if the disease spores didn’t choke you to death on your own mucus then the airborne moulds would fill the inside of your lungs with grey fur. There were at least a dozen unpleasant ways to die on Loki that did not involve being shot, bayoneted or otherwise slain by heretics and there were plenty of fanatical bloodthirsty unbelievers to go around, too. The planet seemed to have entered into a conspiracy with the forces of darkness to slay the Emperor’s soldiers. I’ve been on many such since I joined the Guard.

Anton rose up out of the gloom, tall and gangly and weather-beaten. The rebreather covered the lower half of his face but from the way the old scar across his forehead writhed I could tell he was grinning at me. That he was still capable of such idle good humour after all these years of campaigning was testimony to his innate cheerfulness. Or his innate stupidity. It was sometimes hard to say. ‘You counting your treasures, are you?’

He was respectful enough when there were others around, but with no troops about we stopped being sergeant and corporal and were just men who had fought and bled for each other over the three decades since we had left Belial.

Anton had not even bothered to maintain his secondary rebreather. He was careless that way, or counting on me to bail him out most likely. He walked a little along the wooden duckboard. A thin layer of mud sucked at his boots. The sound seemed to disturb him, so he stopped walking for a moment and studied the muck thoughtfully.

‘Somebody has to make sure there’s enough to go round,’ I said. ‘You never know when another gas attack will come.’

‘I don’t know why they bother,’ Anton said. He looked out into no-man’s-land and shook his head at the folly of the generals. ‘We all have rebreathers, don’t we?’

Like me, Anton had grown up on Belial, an industrial hive. Wearing rebreathers was second nature to us, but it wasn’t to everybody. Many of the newcomers had come from agri worlds and feral worlds and the sort of beautiful friendly places where the air was always breathable. Hard to imagine but true.

‘We all have them and we sometimes wear them,’ I said. ‘And they sometimes work. The enemy is playing the odds. And anyway, you are missing the point. The gas is not there to kill us, it’s just to add to the general level of misery.’

‘I heard a medical adept say that you don’t need to breathe in some of the gases,’ said Ivan, rubbing at the metal-covered half of his face and then running the artificial fingers of his bionic hand over his prosthetic jaw. ‘They just need to touch your skin. That’s why we’re supposed to stay covered up all the time.’

‘Genius,’ said Anton. ‘Make sure we all get trench foot and lice and shuttle-bugs. I think Leo has it right. They are adding to the misery. I mean, this is the Imperial Guard – misery is what it’s all about.’

Somewhere out in the vast field of mud, barbed wire, shell-holes and disease-filled sewage ponds, a man was begging for someone to come and kill him. From the accent I could tell he was one of ours, a Grosslander by the sound of it. I wondered what it was that made him plead so convincingly. Was he suffering the after-effects of some hallucinogenic? Was one of the giant rats that haunted the trench complex chewing on his leg? Or did he have his own personal reason for seeking a quick way out of Loki’s killing grounds?

‘One moment,’ Anton said. He lifted the silenced sniper rifle he had picked up on Dolmen, popped his head above the parapet and scanned the horizon for a moment. There was a soft coughing sound and the begging stopped. Anton dropped back into the trench and said, ‘Mission accomplished.’

‘You shot him,’ I said. ‘You shot one of our own men.’

‘I gave him what he was asking for. And to tell the truth he was getting on my nerves.’

‘You get on my nerves all the time,’ said Ivan. Even after all these years and an ever-improving series of prosthetic jaws, he still mangled his words. The plasteel teeth did not improve his pronunciation any. ‘Does that mean I can shoot you?’

‘The guy had lost half his guts. His entrails were covered in ghost mould. I tell you, if the same thing happens to me I hope you will shoot me. You’ll be doing me a favour.’

‘I’d be doing the rest of us a favour if I shot you now.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha,’ Anton said.

‘See anything else while you were up there?’ I asked. ‘You’re lucky one of the heretic snipers didn’t take your fool head off. They’re just waiting for an opportunity.’

‘I killed the last one two days ago when he shot Lieutenant Jensen. That will teach him not to do it again.’

‘Ever heard of reinforcements?’ I asked. ‘It’s not unknown for new snipers to be sent to the sector to replace the ones who were killed.’

Anton scratched at his head, running his fingernails across the ceramite of his helmet with a slick, scratchy sound – a pantomime of idiocy. ‘Reinforcements? Reinforcements? I heard that word once, a long time ago. Aren’t they the things the High Command keeps promising to send us, along with more ammo, and more food and new uniforms, and then keeps forgetting about? Or am I confusing them with supplies? It’s been almost two standard years in this forsaken place. I’m starting to forget the meaning of words.’

Dumb as he was, he had a point. We had been stuck here on Loki for close on two standard Imperial years now. It was the longest campaign of any during the crusade and there was still no end in sight. Things had got so bad that even elements of Macharius’s elite personal guard, like us, had been thrown piecemeal onto the front line to reinforce the green troops there. It was how we had gone from occupying a nice suite in a commandeered palace in Niflgard City to squatting in tattered, dirt-encrusted uniforms in these mud-filled trenches, watching assorted moulds grow on our feet and limbs. Most of the commissars had got themselves killed in the endless slogging grind of this war. Those who had not were doing the work of ten, walking the lines, executing the cowardly and those too wounded for medical treatment.

‘We’ll get reinforced soon. When have you ever known Macharius to fail?’ Ivan said. He sounded more like he was praying for it to be true than making a statement in which he believed. None of us had ever known a campaign in which Macharius had taken a personal interest bogged down for so long. Maybe it was true what all the rookies were saying, that his fabled luck had deserted him. Or perhaps it was simpler than that. Perhaps, like the rest of us, in spite of all the juvenat treatments, he was simply getting old.

‘He’s never fought anyone like Richter before,’ Anton said. ‘Some say the traitor is as good as the Lord High Commander was in his glory days.’ He paused to let that particularly gloomy thought sink in. Anton did not like the fact that the enemy commander here on Loki had been one of our own, a favoured protégé of Macharius and his best pupil, until the day he had decided to start building his own little private empire here on the galaxy’s bleak far edge.

‘But you don’t agree with them, of course,’ I said. Saying a thing like that was dangerously close to treason. I had heard it muttered, though, even by soldiers of the Lion Guard, Macharius’s personal bodyguard. There was a sense of shock to the whole thing. Some of us had known Richter – we had fought alongside him and his regiment for almost a decade. And then one day, he had just turned, gone native, turned against us here on this hell world. What was most alarming was the thought that if it could happen to him, seemingly Macharius’s heir apparent, who else could it happen to?

‘Of course I don’t,’ said Anton. ‘What kind of idiot do you take me for?’

A lock of hair poked out from beneath his helmet. It was greying now. The stubble on my own chin was grey too. Juvenat holds back the years but it cannot stop them rolling by. It merely slows down the effects on your body and, some say, it has other side effects. Everything has its price and extended life has the highest price of all. I felt tired sometimes when I should not.

‘I don’t doubt we’ll see reinforcements,’ said Anton, suddenly serious. All of his life he had the greatest faith in Macharius and even if he sometimes complained he never liked to leave that faith in doubt for any length of time. ‘I just worry about the quality.’

He did not quite bellow it. He was trying in his way to be tactful, but with all of us he shared the veteran’s contempt for the newcomers. That too, like old age, is something that sneaks up on you. It did not matter how often I told myself that we had all been as green as these newcomers once, that the only way soldiers got to be veterans was starting as neophytes and living long enough to learn.

I could not suppress a certain irritation any more at the fresh young faces around me in the trenches and bunkers. I was glad none of them had decided to join us for a smoke in the rain. I could barely hide the contempt I felt for the way they did not have sense enough to throw themselves flat at the first hint of incoming shells and at the way they cowered in cover too long afterwards.

They did not move to the same beat as those of us who had been on the front line for so long. You were always having to wait for them to catch up, and then having to tell them at other times not to rush ahead and get themselves killed. I could see some of the Grosslanders looking at us now, heads poking out round the improvised door-holes of their bunkers, unlined faces staring out with scared and trusting eyes.

Or maybe it was just that they were young in a way I was not, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Maybe I was just jealous.

The smaller moon jumped over the horizon and raced across the sky like a drunken charioteer. Its orbit was much lower and faster than its huge brother, more like a comet or a meteor than a satellite. It was visible through the gaps in the clouds as it careened across the sky above us.

A trench rat emerged from its hole and glared at us with its horrible intelligent eyes. It chittered something to its hidden companions and retreated before anyone could draw a bead on it. It had seen no corpses to scavenge, no unguarded food, so why take the risk?

‘Sensible beast,’ said Ivan.

‘I hate those scuttling little frakkers,’ Anton said. ‘Caught a bunch chewing on Nardile’s corpse last night. They’d pulled out his guts and scooped out his eyes. One of them was nibbling on an eyeball like it was a grape.’ We all licked our lips at the thought of grapes, even Ivan who only has metal and plastic lips.

‘What did you do?’ I asked.

‘I armed an incendiary grenade and rolled it in among them. One of them tried to eat it too, greedy little swine. Then one of his mates tried to throw it back at me, I swear. He knew what it was for.’

‘Did it get you?’ I stifled a mock yawn.

‘Would I be sitting here telling you about it, if it had?’ Anton said.

‘I’m not sure I want to be sitting close to a genius who uses incendiaries in his own trenches and can almost be outsmarted by a rat.’

‘The key word is almost,’ said Anton. He sounded almost proud.

Behind him the chanting of the heretics had picked up again. I felt the hair on the back of my neck start to rise. For all I knew it might just be their evening prayers, but I doubted it. It was normally a sign that they were getting ready to attack. Or rather that their priests were whipping them up for an offensive. There was something about that mushy language that set my nerves on edge. It was as if the speakers’ mouths were filling with phlegm as they chanted – the mere sound of the words suggested illness and disease.

Anton was on his feet. He cupped his hands over his mouth and bellowed, ‘Could you keep the noise down? We’re trying to have a cosy little chat over here.’

By pure chance there was a momentary silence from the distant trenches. ‘Thank you,’ Anton bellowed.

The chanting started again.

‘I swear they do that just to annoy me,’ Anton said.

‘Yes,’ Ivan said. ‘This war is all about you. Always was. Always will be.’

‘I’m tempted to take a few of the new boys, head down the line to the Great Bog and make my displeasure known,’ Anton said. About a kilometre away, our trench system blended near imperceptibly into their trench system. If you followed the so-called Grand Trunk Road you’d get there, provided you negotiated the sprawl of barbed wire, trip-mines, booby traps, mud-holes, spore pits and rats’ nests that made movement in the abandoned trenches so treacherous. The Great Bog was a hideous swamp of latrines, cesspits and abandoned emplacements constantly fought over. Right now it represented our front line. Tomorrow it might well belong to the heretics.

‘You know the rules,’ I said. ‘We stay here until we are told to do something different. Or until the heretics come and ask us to leave. We don’t need to go embarking on any of your wild little adventures.’

‘You used to be a lot more fun before you became a sergeant, Leo,’ Anton said. ‘There was a time when you would have been leading the charge, not sitting there moaning about it.’

‘I think you are confusing me with someone else,’ I said. ‘Someone idiotic. Yourself perhaps.’ I could not think of any time when I would have been keen on one of Anton’s madcap charges, not even when we were young and had first joined the Guard all those decades ago.

‘If I am so stupid, how come I am still alive?’ he asked.

It was a good question, but it prompted an easy response. ‘Because Ivan and I are here to pull your nads out of the fire before you can toast them.’

‘I can think of plenty of times when I have saved the both of you.’ It was true, too, but the first rule of arguing with Anton is never to admit that he might have a point. You could go mad if you did that.

‘You can also remember seeing little green daemons dancing out in no-man’s-land,’ I said. During the last attack, there had been a fault in the filter in his rebreather. He was lucky I had dragged him into the bunker before it became something a lot worse than a mild case of seeing things.

‘They could have been there,’ Anton said. He sounded thoughtful now. ‘You hear a lot of strange stories here on Loki.’

‘We’ve been hearing a lot of strange stories since we got to the Halo Worlds,’ said Ivan. ‘It does not mean they are true. I mean ghosts of old armies from the Emperor’s time. The dead coming back to life. Space Marines dedicated to the powers of Chaos. Who could believe any of that?’

The chanting in the distance had become a phlegmy roar. Drums beat amidst it, erratically, like the heart of a fever victim in the throes of a muscular spasm. There was a suggestion of the catechism to it now, of a priest calling a question and a congregation shouting a response. Perhaps it was just my imagination. Now and then I seemed to be able to pick out an occasional word. Sound moved strangely through the trench system. Idly I wondered if any of Richter’s former regiment were over there, some of our old comrades. I had killed one a few months back, a sergeant I had once got drunk with back on Morgan’s World. He had been dressed in muddy brown robes, pale of face and tattooed with evil runes. I did not like to think about why a veteran of the crusade might have done that.

A light rain started to fall, a cold drizzle that soaked the threadbare fabric of our green tunics, ran down the rebreather goggles, hampering vision. I ran my forearm over the lenses to wipe them and they cleared for a few moments before becoming obscured again. I watched the puddles ripple where the raindrops hit them. The scummy water had a sinister chemical tint to it, the light refracted into rainbows the colours of which were not found anywhere in nature.

‘Ah, the rain,’ said Anton. ‘Just what I needed to make my joy complete.’ He pulled the standard-issue overcoat tight around his narrow shoulders, hunched forward with his collar up. He looked over at the bunker door without enthusiasm. It was a choice between returning to that narrow confined space with the rest of the troops or sitting outside in the rain. Neither was particularly appealing.

I picked up the periscope and raised it over the lip of the trench, adjusting the magnification. I could see kilometres and kilometres of earthworks, stretching all the way to the distant mountains. I twisted it and saw the same in every direction. An endless maze of trenches through which two armies slaughtered each other, all caught between gigantic ranges of mountains in which there were more fortified cities. One day, far in the future, the goal was to push all the way into those armoured citadels. Then we would be swapping fighting in trenches for fighting in tunnels. At that moment I would have welcomed it as a relief from the monotony.

The periscope went dark. I looked up. Idiot Anton was standing on the parapet again covering the lens with his gloved hand.

‘There’s a reason for using this thing,’ I said. I might just have sounded a little testy.

‘I told you I already killed the heretic snipers,’ Anton said.

‘Take your hand off the lens,’ I said. ‘I thought I saw something.’

I hadn’t really, but I wanted to annoy him. He shaded his eyes with his hand, looked off into the distance and said, ‘Hell, you’re right!’

I squinted into the eyepiece and adjusted the focus, trying to work out whether he was having me on or not. It was difficult to tell in the half-light of the moon with the mist and residue gas clouds floating above the shell-churned earth. Then I saw what looked like a tide of shadows, moving across the muddy fields of no-man’s-land, gliding from shell-hole to shell-hole, moving smoothly and quickly on a course that would take them to our lines just north-east of where we were. I coughed.

‘What is it?’ Ivan asked. He grabbed the periscope, wanting to take a look himself.

‘Death commando by the look of it. Looks like they’re going for another night raid.’

Ivan reached over and squeezed the bulb of the air-horn. It was a primitive thing but we had been reduced to such devices in the mud of Loki. Something about the planet radiation halo interfered with the comm-net, which worked only intermittently. The omnipresent mould and mud were tough on equipment as well. The horn’s great bellow echoed through the trench and bunkers and was answered by the sound of other air-horns as the alarm spread. Somebody somewhere let off a flare. It arced into the sky, a green firework leaving a phosphorescent trail behind it, until it exploded into a brilliant flash of actinic light. The shadows took on definition, became humanoid figures wrapped from crown to foot in dark black cloth, carrying black-barrelled weapons. I snatched up my shotgun and got ready to give the attackers a warm welcome.

‘No rest for the wicked,’ Ivan said.

‘You’d think they’d give some of those poor sinners over there the night off,’ Anton said.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Richter’s got millions of them and there’s more coming out of the vats all the time.’

‘There’ll be a few less by the time I’m finished tonight,’ said Anton. ‘I was just thinking about catching up on some kip. I’m not too happy about being interrupted.’

The chanting started drifting across no-man’s-land again. It had an agitated sound to it – the heretics were unsettled by the flares and star shells and the sounds of shooting. The drums took on a more regular, but still feverish, rhythm. A great strangled roar rose like a distant sea pummelling a stony shoreline. It was followed by shouts and the sound of more flares going off.

Warning horns sounded again. Our own troops started to pour out of the low bunker doors, the green uniforms of my Lion Guard crew mingled with the grey of the Grosslanders whose spines we had been sent to stiffen. Some of the likely lads were adjusting the straps of their rebreathers. Others had clearly just snatched up their weapons. One or two had bare feet. I could see the whitish mould on their toes, the places where the skin had cracked and leaked pus. They had probably been washing their feet when the alarm sounded. They were out of luck now. They’d better hope we didn’t run into any contact gas. Then they’d have more than losing their toes to worry about.