‘Why would I do that when I got you to do it for me?’

‘Because I may not always be here to haul your skinny arse out of harm’s way.’ Ivan rubbed at the bare patch on his upper arm where his stripes had been. He had suffered one of the drunken demotions that were as regular as his promotions. It took a lot of alcohol to kill the pain and smite the recurring infections the reconstructive tech-surgery on his face had left him with.

I could tell from the expression in his cold blue eyes that death was on his mind. It had been on all of our minds since Henrik’s name came up in the lasgun lottery. I still looked around half-expecting to see old Henrik standing there, cracking jokes and offering up his hip flask. We had buried him in a mudhole on Charybdis six standard months ago.

Death was something you always thought about at the start of a campaign and this one was likely to be the biggest and most dangerous any of us would ever see, a full-scale Imperial Crusade, the first in a score of generations. Even Anton looked thoughtful. He pulled at his lower lip with a greasy finger. His frown made the centipede scar wriggle on his brow.

‘You’re very quiet, Leo,’ Ivan said, looking over at me. ‘Thinking too much again?’

‘I have to think for two when Anton is around,’ I said.

‘Ha bloody ha!’ Anton said.

‘For you that was a rejoinder of unusual wit,’ I said.

‘You swallow a lexicon?’ Anton asked. ‘You always have to use big words to prove you are not stupid. Or are you just trying to sound like the lieutenant and his toadies? You spend enough time around them up in the cockpit.’

‘I am not the man who joined the Imperial Guard because he thought he could get promoted to Space Marine,’ I said. Ivan snorted.

‘You thought so too,’ Anton said. He had stopped tugging his lip and was probing the insides of his ear with the same finger. ‘You just deny it now.’ His tone was that of the aggrieved child part of him was always going to be.

Maybe he was right. Maybe we had believed that back on Belial, when all we knew of soldiering was what we read in propaganda novels written at the behest of the planetary government.

Was it possible we had been so naive? Well, whatever naivety had been in us had been burned out by ten years of constant warfare on a dozen worlds.

‘I think I can see one of the paths the lieutenant was talking about,’ Ivan said. When he turned his head, I could see the flames reflected in the lenses of his field glasses and the metal of his cheek. It gave him a daemonic look, like a premonition of dark things to come. ‘I think we might be able to pass through and take the heretics in the flank.’

‘It would have made more sense to drop in on top of them,’ Anton said.

‘Yeah, nothing like dropping on top of the planetary defence batteries for keeping casualties low,’ I said. ‘It’s a good job General Sejanus is in charge and not you…’

‘Space Marines make drops like that,’ Anton said. He sounded wistful. ‘Just once I would like to do the same. Or at least bloody well get to see one.’

Ivan laughed. ‘We’re just the poor, bloody Guard. We get to do most of the fighting and watch others show up late and take the credit.’

‘If we’re lucky.’ I said. The words came out more bitter than I intended but we all knew I was speaking true. If we were lucky we would be alive to watch others take the credit. Plenty would not be. Henrik’s death had left me thinking all three of us had lived longer than we had any reasonable right to expect.