I could see that he was looking up at the campaign badges on my tunic. They were all there – Teradon and Karsk IV and Lucifer and all those other places that we had followed the Lord High Commander through. I had a badge for all of them. I wish sometimes that I had back the blood and flesh I’d left on their surfaces. He reached out and grabbed my hand. He pressed it so tight that I thought perhaps he was gone but he looked up at me with feverish eyes and said, ‘Is it true?’

I don’t know why it was so important to him. Perhaps he just wanted to know that he was dying for something, that he was playing some part in the epic of Imperial history. Maybe at that moment in time he saw me as a link to that Great Crusade across the stars that Macharius had led. Maybe he was just in pain and wanted something to distract him through those last few seconds before everything went dark and he walked into the Light of the Emperor or whatever waits for us beyond death.

‘Yes, son, it’s true,’ I said. ‘I was with him on Karsk IV and I was with him on Demetrius and I was with him in a dozen different places.’

‘Was he what they said he was? Was he a saint? Was he the chosen of the Light?’

I laughed. It was either that or cry. He looked up at me with such pain in his eyes that I stopped.

‘Why did you laugh?’ There was an intense edge to his voice now and I could tell that he was close to passing.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He was not a saint. He was a man – a very great man and in some ways a very wicked one.’

His face twisted. I could tell that this was not what he wanted to hear. But what else was I going to say? It was the truth, and one of those things that Macharius always demanded was that we speak the truth to him and of him. Of course, like every other man, he often did not want to hear that truth when it was spoken but one of the things that made him what he was was the fact that he asked that it be done at all.

The boy looked disappointed and I cannot really blame him for that, because I was denying him his last wish, an affirmation of his belief in saints. Once they may have walked the world, once they may have stood by the side of the Emperor, perhaps out there in the darkness between the stars some of them still exist. The universe is vast and contains many strange things and I have not seen everything.

All I know is that Macharius was not a saint. He was perhaps the greatest general since the time of the Emperor. He was capable of great kindness and great wickedness but what man is not, given the opportunity? And opportunity was a thing that Macharius had a lot of.

I looked down at the boy, but his eyes were wide open and he was staring at the ceiling with that unblinking look that told me that he would not be closing them again himself. I reached out with my left hand and shut his eyes for him. I looked around at that chamber, full of the dead and dying, and I thought about Macharius, and about all of the others who had followed him and his great strange crusade to the edge of the known universe.

I thought about the Lord High Commander and I thought about Ivan and Anton and Anna. I thought about people I have not seen alive in three decades – I thought about Tiny and the lieutenant and the Undertaker. I thought about the fact that I had almost died today and that sometime soon I was certainly going to, and I decided that I needed to get it all down. I needed to leave what I knew so that someday it might be remembered: the truth about Macharius and Drake and their holy war to reclaim the galaxy, the truth about what they were like and how they died.

So here I am with this data-slate, making this recording. At least, it’s something to fill the time until the orks come again.

For me it all started on Karsk IV.