It was only a matter of time before our names were bellowed out at the Last Roll Call. The odds against us got longer every day we kept breathing.

Such were the joys of being one of the Emperor’s soldiers in the bright new dawn of the 41st millennium. It was probably ever so.

We walked back down the hill to a camp seething with activity. Tens of thousands of grey-tunicked soldiers swarmed over the dry rock of Karsk IV. Hundreds of enginseer crews crawled over our Baneblades and Shadowswords and Leman Russ, scoping the armour plate, repairing the track mechanisms, testing the rotation of the turrets, elevating their guns, intoning battle hymns to placate the angry spirits of the great war machines. The roar of engines, the hum of servo-mechanisms and the chant of technical plainsong filled the air. The smell of drive exhaust rivalled the tang of the planetary atmosphere. The air vibrated from the engine-thunder of the enormous vehicles. Until you’ve witnessed it, you can never really appreciate exactly how much work and how much noise goes into getting an Imperial Guard Army ready to move.

Over everything loomed the monstrous bulk of the landing ships on which we had dropped from the eternal dark of space. They were larger than ork gargants and down their belly ramps rumbled Leman Russ after Leman Russ. Company after company of soldiers exited through the external hatches. The Imperial Guard had arrived in force at this tiny outpost in the desert of Karsk IV. It was all part of some great plan which, as usual, no one had bothered to explain to us. An adjutant might just have stuck the pin in the wrong part of the map again for all we knew.

There was that air of subdued excitement and suppressed fear that you always get at the start of campaigns. It was combined with the simple pleasure of having real planetary dirt beneath our feet and real gravity tugging at our bodies. When you’ve been cooped up on an Imperial troopship for months, you cannot wait to see a sky again even if it belongs to a foreign world where you may well die.

We passed along a row of Chimeras. Their crews lay around on their packs and blankets checking their lasguns and their filter masks. Ivan exchanged nods with the men he knew. There were far fewer familiar faces now than there had been when we set out from Belial all those years ago.

I thought about how different my surroundings were from that industrial world half a sector away. Belial was a cold place, much colder than this one and much more densely populated. There had been vast wastelands between the hive cities there too, of course. On Belial they had been slag heaps and ash deserts, the products of thousands of years of industrial production in the service of the Imperium.

Here, the wastelands were the result of shifting tectonic plates and the action of enormous volcanoes. This produced pyrite, the source of the planet’s wealth and the real reason why Battlegroup Sejanus of the Second Macharian Army was on-planet. This world would provide us with the shells that would feed our tanks, guns across the surface of hundreds of worlds as the crusade of Macharius got into gear. We needed to control this planet if the holy war was to proceed.

Apparently, Karsk IV’s rebel governor had different ideas. In the long years of schism that preceded the start of the 41st millennium his family had become a power unto itself. They controlled all the industrial worlds of this multi-planet system. The governor no longer saw himself as the Emperor’s representative. He believed himself to be absolute ruler of everything he surveyed. He claimed he was descended from the Emperor himself and blessed by the Angel of Fire who stood guard at the Emperor’s right hand.