|
‘I once saw Lord Solar Macharius!’ Sergeant Skrall spoke in a hushed whisper. ‘He was this far from me! I could have reached out and touched him!’
The handful of men left huddled in a deep crater of molten sand on the fourth moon of Kallastin, still warm from a week-old orbital strike, and watched the exhausted face of their sergeant glow for a moment with the memory of that moment.
‘We were on the ice world of Chiros. We’d just stormed the Tyrant’s megalith bastion. A storm blew up and the transports refused to land. I would have personally shot the lot of those fething pilots. Half a million men freezing to death. Wounded. Sick. The lots of us. We were cursing our fate when someone shouted that there was a light through the blizzard. A craft coming to land! There was a groan when we saw it was just a fething Arvus. A fething Arvus and us half a million men.
‘It’s engines were howling under the weight of ice on its wings. It came down like a lead weight. It almost crashed. I swear it! But at the last moment an eddy lifted it up, and the doors opened and he stepped out. The most beautiful sight on earth: glowing white armour, a halo hovering about his head. The blizzard barely ruffled his cape!’
There was a low groan from the fields of wounded who lay in No Man’s Land. The men barely heard it. They were focussed on the sergeant, now a grizzled veteran of more than forty years of campaigning, looking back on that moment with warmth.
‘He came down to us in an Arvus Lighter to show that the transports could land. He loved us and we loved him - he would never leave his soldiers behind! He came up to me out as our transport began to take off. It was a vast hanger full of frozen men and wounded. ‘How old are you?’ he said. I was too overcome to speak, but someone must have stammered something to him. ‘Sixteen?’ he said. ‘You look younger. Child! Warm yourself!’ My fingers were blue and I was close to death but he took the cloak from his shoulders and put it around me and a felt a great warmth through me then and I knew that I would live.
‘Look!’ The sergeant thrust his hand in through the buttons of his flak jacket and pulled out a worn rag from next to his skin – so dirty the colour was almost obscured, but there were patches of gold embroidery still clinging to the edges.
‘I’ve kept it all this time,’ he said.
The men shook their heads in wonder, but there was no more time for questions. The assigned hour for the attack was only a few moments off and Sergeant Skall drew his bolt pistol and shoving the rag back under his flak jacket. ‘Fix steel!’ he hissed. The men checked ammo cases, adjusted their helmet straps and made the sign of the Golden Throne. Above them a great shadow blotted out the stars and cast a shadow over the whole battlefield. It was a great spaceship, settling into low orbit, its lances fixing themselves on ground target coordinates.
‘It’s the Golden Throne!’ Sergeant Skall said and the men looked up with wonder to see Solar Macharius’ flagship blotting out the stars. ‘He is watching you!’ Skall said as he counted down the last moments before the attack.
Across the whole battlefield exhausted men felt the spirit of Macharius enter them. From trenches and craters ten thousand furious soldiers rose up with one purpose: victory and glory to the very edge of the galaxy.
Sergeant Skall put the whistle to his lips. The seconds ticked down. In front of them waited a hell of shell-holes and barbed wire,
‘Fix steel!’ he shouted, and the men of the XV Krieg Grenadiers rose, newly possessed, a single purpose driving them forward into the blinding hail of las-shots and heavy stubber fire.
‘For Death and Glory!’
|
