All of them except Matlock. Somehow he always managed to avoid the external duty roster. Someday I was going to have to ask him how he managed that – with a bayonet.

I made my way down the corridors into the command bunker. The Undertaker was there looking as cold and calm as the day he had returned to sanity in the wreckage of Old Number Ten. The juvenat treatments seemed to have worked well for him. The only visible differences were some deeper tan-lines around the crinkle of his eyes and the colonel’s insignia on his shoulder.

He looked over at me and I saluted. ‘Sergeant Lemuel,’ he said. His voice was as flat and emotionless as ever but I had served under him long enough to recognise the question in it.

‘Lieutenant Jensen is dead, sir. Killed by an enemy sniper. I am acting commander of the recon unit.’

He tilted his head to one side. ‘Report,’ he said.

I filled him in on the details of the encounter as quickly and calmly as I could. He nodded as if I were confirming something he already suspected, and barked instructions over his shoulder. A clerk moved some tokens on the paper map of the trench complex. This is what we had been reduced to. The holo-pits had all broken down and had not been repaired. The crystals needed had been requisitioned six months ago but had still not arrived.

I saw the clerk put a number of red counters on the map of the Great Bog and remove the small blue token that had represented Lieutenant Snorrison’s unit. There were not a lot of blue tokens in our section of the line and an awful lot of red ones. In the face of what looked like a giant heretic offensive our trenches were going to be very difficult to hold.

‘What happened to the leg, Lemuel?’ the Undertaker asked.

‘Barbed wire, sir. I scratched it.’

‘Have a medical orderly look at it, get some rest and then report back here in two hours. We’re going to need every man who can fight.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. It was clear I had been dismissed. I saluted and limped out of the command pit. Matlock watched me with hate-filled eyes and a sneer on his face.

‘You need to be careful with these things,’ said the medic, rubbing alcohol onto the cuts and tearing off a strip of gauze. We had run out of synthi-flesh a couple of months back.

‘My legs?’ I said, just to be annoying.

‘Punctures, cuts, abrasions of any sort. The disease spores out there are nasty and all manner of infections can get in. Some of them we can’t exorcise.’

‘Why is that, sir?’

He looked up at me. He was a middle-aged man in the uniform of the Grosslanders. No juvenat treatments for him. He knew who I was from the uniform so he was prepared to consider my question in a way that he might not have been if it had come from one of his own sergeants.

‘Don’t know, Lemuel. There’s just something about this place.