Fall of Macharius

Chapter Three

I could hear the drums sounding along the trenches and more of that phlegmy chanting. Much more.

I was all out of grenades and the rest of the squad had very few. There would be no repeat of my ambush, not tonight; perhaps not any night, unless we could find a better place to make a stand.

As we made our way back along the trenches, I found I was limping. I looked down at my leg, which felt stiff. When I took out a bayonet and sliced at the cloth, I spotted odd black circles around the barbed wire punctures. I swabbed at them, hoping I was not already too late. I’d seen men lose legs from lesser things on Loki.

Ivan was frowning. He knew better than most what these things could lead to. I doubted there would be any bionics available for me out here. We had left access to such things a long way behind the front lines of the crusade. Fewer and fewer supplies were getting through.

‘What you think?’ Ivan asked.

‘We fall back to Brand’s Fort,’ I said. ‘It’s got the best chance of holding out against a big assault.’

‘It’s a death-trap if we’re caught in it.’

‘This whole salient is, unless we’re reinforced soon. At least there we’ll be dug-in with food and medical supplies and as much ammunition as we’re ever likely to get.’

Brand’s Fort was a massive bunker excavated from the inside of a small hill and covered in rockcrete. Over the past couple of years it had been reinforced and reinforced again, with more weapons blisters, more rockcrete and more barbed wire. Effluent sumps poured slimy liquid down the sides. Skeletons lay within clusters of wire. Some joker had built a small wall of human skulls around the base of one of the bunkers and then spelled out the words Come and die here in bones on the slope beneath them. Where did these people find the time?

A Banshee scream filled the air and there was the sudden thunder of an explosion. I threw myself flat and all the Lion Guard around me did the same. The distant heretic batteries had opened fire once again.

Anton spidered his way up alongside me – all long legs and elbows – and out of the side of his mouth said, ‘I wonder if this is all part of Richter’s Great Plan.’

I knew what he meant but I wasn’t going to be drawn into a reply. It was possible this was an artillery barrage meant to precede the rebel attack and that there had been some mistake on the enemy side that had resulted in its delayed launch. The Emperor knows I’ve seen enough such things happen on our side of the trench system. Or maybe this was the harbinger of another assault.

We lay there for long minutes, acutely aware that it would only take one of those shells to drop on our section of trench and we would all be gone. I felt the earth shake beneath me. The pain in my leg was getting worse and I felt a little light-headed. I told myself it was because we’d been on short rations for so long, but part of me knew that it was not hunger.

I raised my head and watched a cluster of explosions stalk up the side of Brand’s Fort, carving out new indentations in the rockcrete, destroying the wall of skulls and the message written in bones.

A crouched figure made its way up the trench towards us. He wore the grey uniform of a Grosslander with a yellow armband that marked him as a messenger. His hand was fumbling nervously in his belt for a pistol. I waved at him to let him know that even though we were not part of his regiment we were not enemies.

‘What’s new?’ I shouted in Imperial Gothic.

He moved up to our position and said, ‘Big heretic offensive incoming. I’m on my way to the Great Bog to let Lieutenant Snorrison know he should hold his ground.’

‘Snorrison is dead, along with his whole command,’ I said.

‘You sure?’

‘I was there not an hour ago. Assault squad hit his position and wiped it out. Not five minutes later a crowd of heretics came through. We bloodied their nose but we didn’t have enough to hold them.’

‘You should have,’ he said accusingly.

‘Is my name Snorrison?’ I asked. ‘Am I wearing a Grosslander uniform?’

His eyes widened behind the lenses of his rebreather mask and I think for the first time he noticed the lion emblem on my tunic. He probably couldn’t tell the colour – with all the grime it would have been hard.

‘No, sir,’ he said shakily. He looked into the distance embarrassed. ‘You sure the lieutenant is dead?’

‘Either that or he’s run away,’ I said. ‘There was nobody left alive in the Great Bog.’

‘Lieutenant Snorrison would not do that,’ said the youth. I realised now he was very young and very green. I could not quite bring myself to feel sorry for him. I was not sure I agreed with his assessment of the situation either. Lots of men ran away here and it was not because they were cowards. The strain of the trenches under constant bombardment ate away at their nerves and that was not taking into account some of the gases, which induced terror in the unprotected.

He shrugged and made to move past me. ‘Where you going?’

‘I need to see if I can find the lieutenant.’

This lad was devoted to his duty, that was for sure. I was not even offended that he would not take my word for it. He had been given orders to do a job and plenty of officers and no few commissars would find him to be in dereliction of them if he did not at least try to carry them out. Plus, he was keen. You could tell by the way he snapped a salute and then raced off along the trench. Silently I wished him luck – he was going to need it.

We kept moving towards the fort.

The fort was not quite so easy to enter as the bunkers back in the trenches. I had to shout down an intercom system that was basically just a collection of pipes. I gave my name, number and a password that was several days out of date and stood so that my face was visible in the view periscope.

This being the Imperial Guard, it took half an hour for someone finally to recognise me and let me in. When the airlock door was opened, the gatekeeper looked me up and down sardonically and sniffed. It was Sergeant Matlock. He was recently promoted, a martinet and a disciplinarian who came from Macharius’s home world and had been in the service of a family long allied with the Lord High Commander. I did not like him and he returned the favour.

‘Sorry to offend your delicate nostrils,’ I said. ‘I’ve been fighting.’

His aquiline nose wrinkled further. His nostrils dilated. He was struggling to find a pithy reply. I interrupted his train of thought. ‘I need to see the colonel.’

‘You were supposed to be back two days ago.’

‘The heretics decided that they required my company a bit longer.’ I was already limping past him down towards the local command centre. It was not quite a different world in the fort but it was close. The squalor of the trenches was nowhere visible. The floors and walls were scrubbed. Doubtless Matlock had to keep himself busy somehow. There were Guardsmen in sight but they looked like I remembered once looking myself – their uniforms were clean and untattered. They were shaved. Their eyes were not bloodshot. Their hands were not scabbed. Most of them looked at me guiltily, and felt bad about being down here in comparative safety while I was outside.

I can’t say it bothered me too much. I knew most of them would rotate out at some point and join the fun in the trenches. All of them except Matlock. Somehow he always managed to avoid the external duty roster. Someday I was going to have to ask him how he managed that – with a bayonet.

I made my way down the corridors into the command bunker. The Undertaker was there looking as cold and calm as the day he had returned to sanity in the wreckage of Old Number Ten. The juvenat treatments seemed to have worked well for him. The only visible differences were some deeper tan-lines around the crinkle of his eyes and the colonel’s insignia on his shoulder.

He looked over at me and I saluted. ‘Sergeant Lemuel,’ he said. His voice was as flat and emotionless as ever but I had served under him long enough to recognise the question in it.

‘Lieutenant Jensen is dead, sir. Killed by an enemy sniper. I am acting commander of the recon unit.’

He tilted his head to one side. ‘Report,’ he said.

I filled him in on the details of the encounter as quickly and calmly as I could. He nodded as if I were confirming something he already suspected, and barked instructions over his shoulder. A clerk moved some tokens on the paper map of the trench complex. This is what we had been reduced to. The holo-pits had all broken down and had not been repaired. The crystals needed had been requisitioned six months ago but had still not arrived.

I saw the clerk put a number of red counters on the map of the Great Bog and remove the small blue token that had represented Lieutenant Snorrison’s unit. There were not a lot of blue tokens in our section of the line and an awful lot of red ones. In the face of what looked like a giant heretic offensive our trenches were going to be very difficult to hold.

‘What happened to the leg, Lemuel?’ the Undertaker asked.

‘Barbed wire, sir. I scratched it.’

‘Have a medical orderly look at it, get some rest and then report back here in two hours. We’re going to need every man who can fight.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. It was clear I had been dismissed. I saluted and limped out of the command pit. Matlock watched me with hate-filled eyes and a sneer on his face.

‘You need to be careful with these things,’ said the medic, rubbing alcohol onto the cuts and tearing off a strip of gauze. We had run out of synthi-flesh a couple of months back.

‘My legs?’ I said, just to be annoying.

‘Punctures, cuts, abrasions of any sort. The disease spores out there are nasty and all manner of infections can get in. Some of them we can’t exorcise.’

‘Why is that, sir?’

He looked up at me. He was a middle-aged man in the uniform of the Grosslanders. No juvenat treatments for him. He knew who I was from the uniform so he was prepared to consider my question in a way that he might not have been if it had come from one of his own sergeants.

‘Don’t know, Lemuel. There’s just something about this place. The diseases here seem cursed. They are getting stronger and more virulent all the time. They’re cross-breeding like dogs.’

I could tell from the reference to cross-breeding that he had come from a particularly agricultural section of Grossland, which was a particularly agricultural world.

‘You said the diseases are getting stronger – how can you tell?’

‘They kill quicker, spread faster and are getting more virulent. The symptoms are getting more alarming too. It’s almost as if someone is using the disease spores as weapons.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘You hear stories. The ancients did it. Certain tech-magi are supposed to be able to do it.’

‘It’s a pretty dirty way of fighting a war.’

‘Most ways are,’ he said, ‘when you think about it.’

I thought about the gas shells and the death commandos hiding in latrine pits and I could not disagree with him. I thought of the hundreds of thousands of bodies spread across no-man’s-land, of all the men lost in mud pits and eaten by rats and killed by faulty rebreathers. I must have winced.

‘What?’ he said.

‘I was just thinking that the war here has been dirtier than any I have seen before, and some of the places I’ve been have been pretty unpleasant.’

‘You’re part of Macharius’s bodyguard, aren’t you?’

‘For more than twenty-five standard years now.’

‘You ever met him?’

‘The first time I met him he was decorating me for bravery. I was with the Seventh Belial at the time.’

‘What’s he like?’

I looked at him. He was a middle-aged man, well educated, well balanced and stable, and he still wanted to know about the legend. Even now, in this long season of delay and disappointment, it still glowed around the Lord High Commander like a halo around the head of a Saint.

‘That’s a hard question to answer,’ I said.

‘Do you think he really has been touched by the Emperor?’

Now we were on dangerous ground no matter how I replied. If I said yes, I was passing a religious judgement that was not mine to make. If I said no, I could be perceived as being disrespectful to Macharius if this man should turn out to be one of the fanatical kind who were becoming more and more attached to Macharius’s legend.

‘He is the greatest general of the age,’ I said.

‘You think he will beat Richter then?’

‘I think he can beat anybody,’ I said, ‘given time.’

‘We’ve had plenty of time here,’ said the orderly. Had I misjudged him? Was he one of those men who were critical of Macharius, who sought to undermine morale? It might be that he was just expressing his own opinion but that might prove a dangerous thing to do in these times, particularly since he was expressing it to a man he knew to be part of the Lord High Commander’s retinue.

‘We have however long it takes,’ I said, putting an edge into my voice so he would not misunderstand my real meaning.

‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I can’t help but feel that time is running out.’ Given the situation he was in – trapped in a fort running low on supplies with an enormous heretic attack coming in – his doubts were completely understandable, but I could not help thinking that in the past he would not have expressed them. In the past no one had doubted Macharius.

For the first time, I wondered if such thoughts were shared by other soldiers of the crusade. For the first time, I asked myself whether I had such doubts. I let the thought flicker across my mind for a few heartbeats and then I ushered it out. Now was not the time to start questioning my beliefs.

I looked at my leg. It had been swabbed. The dark circles around the wire punctures had faded a little, although one of them wept green pus. The orderly wrapped the gauze tightly again and said, ‘Keep it clean and try not to get it exposed again until it’s healed. Otherwise you might lose the leg, or worse.’

I got up and put some weight on it. It held, but I felt a twinge of pain and I knew I was not one hundred per cent. I doubted anyone on the front line was. I limped towards the door, knowing that I should report to the Undertaker soon.

‘If you do see Macharius, tell him the Grosslanders are still behind him,’ said the orderly. He sounded determined and clearly meant it as a declaration of loyalty. He did not sound as if he were afraid I would report the conversation. Myself, I wondered at the fact that he felt he needed to make such a declaration at all either on his own behalf or that of his regiment. Once it was simply taken as a given. Things had changed in the ranks of the crusade.

‘I will do that,’ I said, and laid a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. He was a decent man, trying to do his best under difficult circumstances and I respected that.

I reported to the Undertaker at the appointed time. He studied me for a moment with cold eyes and a manner that seemed as distant as the stars in the sky. There was no trace of humanity in the gaze he turned on me. For the thousandth time I wondered what he had seen in that strange trance in the wreckage of Number Ten amid the ruins of Karsk IV.

‘Fit, Lemuel?’ he asked.

‘Fit, sir.’ I was not one hundred per cent but I could fight, and every man was needed.

‘Good. We need to hold this line until reinforcements arrive. It’s going to be difficult.’

That was a considerable understatement. I looked at the gigantic stacks of red chips representing the heretics. I looked at our own thin blue line. The Undertaker followed my gaze.

‘The heretics are breaking through,’ the Undertaker said. ‘We have neither the manpower nor the munitions to hold them.’

That was a realistic assessment of the situation I thought, staring down at the complex map of trenches. What he said next surprised me. ‘So we are going to let them pass.’

‘Sir?’

‘We can hold them at choke points at Skeleton Ridge and Plague Hill. We have enough manpower to stop them there if we reinforce those points.’

‘But sir…’

Very few officers would have tolerated being interrupted by a sergeant, but the Undertaker’s strangeness and our long familiarity made the difference. ‘Please, let me finish, Lemuel.’

‘Sir.’

He glanced around at the rest of the officers in the bunker. They listened with the air of men who were going over a plan for the tenth time but wanted to make sure they understood completely. He pointed at the huge stacks of red chips. ‘The heretics will be funnelled into the Second Sector, by the resistance at Skeleton Ridge and Plague Hill. We will hold the bulk of our troops in reserve at those points. Once a sufficiently large section of heretics is within our trench system, we will close the front with swift counter-attacks from our strong points, leaving a large formation of heretics trapped within our lines. We will then move to eliminate them.’

It was a typical Macharian strategy, I thought, bold and relying on trickery and misdirection. It seemed like the Undertaker had been studying our master’s methods. Of course there were huge risks. We might not be able to close the gap once the heretics were flooding in; we might be ceding a huge forward base to them that they could pour men and materiel into. I thought about it for a moment. It was a desperate plan, but we did not really have much of a choice. It was as the Undertaker said – we did not have the forces to hold this whole section of the line.

‘The Lion Guard will spearhead the counter-assault, Lemuel. You will be held in reserve until then. Lieutenant Creasey will be commanding. Your men can resupply from the dumps on the hill.’

I thought about the huge horde of heretics waiting out there in the cold and rainy night. ‘Very good, sir,’ I said.

‘You may rejoin your unit,’ he said. He snapped off a salute.