‘Let’s wait a few months and see who survives and then we’ll decide who gets taught.’

It was a cruel thing to say but we nodded agreement. We would help these newcomers where we could and do our best to keep them alive because doing that would help keep us alive, but we would not get close to them until we saw who lived and who died.

That was always difficult to tell. The confident assured ones, the ones you would have sworn to the Emperor knew what they were doing were often the first to catch a las-bolt. The idiots, the incompetents, the sloppy ones sometimes surprised you and turned out to be good soldiers.

I mean who would have guessed looking at Anton back in the day that he was ever going to live through ten years of hellish violence. I suppose you could have said the same about me. Remembering what we had been like back then, Ivan was the only one I would put money on and look what had happened to him.

We walked all the way back to the Indomitable. Fondly I looked at the incept number Ten inscribed on its side beneath the Imperial Gothic lettering of its name. For a good deal of my career as an Imperial soldier this ancient tank had been my guardian and my weapon. It loomed over us like a mountain of ceramite and plasteel. The Baneblade cast a long cold shadow, even on the warm surface of Karsk IV. Its fierce presence welcomed us back to the only real home we had known in nearly a decade.

‘Morning, ladies! Have a nice stroll?’ Corporal Hesse’s booming voice called down from the dorsal turret. He was stripped to the waist and the cog-wheel tattoos were visible on his straining gut.

‘Piss off,’ Anton replied.

‘I think you meant to say piss off corporal, Private Antoniev,’ Hesse replied cheerfully. He muttered something to somebody below him in the fuselage of the tank. Whoever it was handed a power-spanner up to him and he began tightening nuts on the hatch-cover hinge. The effort made his chubby face red. Sweat dripped from his cheeks onto the metal as he spoke the proper invocations. Hesse could always find something that needed work on round the vehicle. It was his pride and joy. Anything not so technical it needed to be handled by an enginseer was his particular pleasure to tinker with.

‘Yeah, piss off corporal, Private Antoniev,’ Anton said.

Hesse chuckled, ‘Only you could tell yourself to piss off when trying to come up with a witty retort, Antoniev. Anyway, break time is over. Get your tools out and put them to some use. And I don’t mean take a piss…’

‘Ha bloody ha,’ said Anton.

‘You’ve used that one already today,’ said Ivan. ‘You’ll wear it out.’

‘Ha bloody ha.’ Anton’s scarecrow figure was already halfway up the metal ladder in the Baneblade’s side. He reached the dorsal turret and threw himself flat beside Hesse, inspecting the servos of the rotator mechanism. Soon they were cheerfully discussing the lack of pressure in the hydraulics. Say what you like about Anton, when it came to machines he knew his stuff. It had been the same back in the factorum on Belial. Of course, if any real work needed done they would need to summon the tech-priests.