Once it was simply taken as a given. Things had changed in the ranks of the crusade.

‘I will do that,’ I said, and laid a hand on his shoulder to reassure him. He was a decent man, trying to do his best under difficult circumstances and I respected that.

I reported to the Undertaker at the appointed time. He studied me for a moment with cold eyes and a manner that seemed as distant as the stars in the sky. There was no trace of humanity in the gaze he turned on me. For the thousandth time I wondered what he had seen in that strange trance in the wreckage of Number Ten amid the ruins of Karsk IV.

‘Fit, Lemuel?’ he asked.

‘Fit, sir.’ I was not one hundred per cent but I could fight, and every man was needed.

‘Good. We need to hold this line until reinforcements arrive. It’s going to be difficult.’

That was a considerable understatement. I looked at the gigantic stacks of red chips representing the heretics. I looked at our own thin blue line. The Undertaker followed my gaze.

‘The heretics are breaking through,’ the Undertaker said. ‘We have neither the manpower nor the munitions to hold them.’

That was a realistic assessment of the situation I thought, staring down at the complex map of trenches. What he said next surprised me. ‘So we are going to let them pass.’

‘Sir?’

‘We can hold them at choke points at Skeleton Ridge and Plague Hill. We have enough manpower to stop them there if we reinforce those points.’

‘But sir…’

Very few officers would have tolerated being interrupted by a sergeant, but the Undertaker’s strangeness and our long familiarity made the difference. ‘Please, let me finish, Lemuel.’

‘Sir.’

He glanced around at the rest of the officers in the bunker. They listened with the air of men who were going over a plan for the tenth time but wanted to make sure they understood completely. He pointed at the huge stacks of red chips. ‘The heretics will be funnelled into the Second Sector, by the resistance at Skeleton Ridge and Plague Hill. We will hold the bulk of our troops in reserve at those points. Once a sufficiently large section of heretics is within our trench system, we will close the front with swift counter-attacks from our strong points, leaving a large formation of heretics trapped within our lines. We will then move to eliminate them.’

It was a typical Macharian strategy, I thought, bold and relying on trickery and misdirection. It seemed like the Undertaker had been studying our master’s methods. Of course there were huge risks. We might not be able to close the gap once the heretics were flooding in; we might be ceding a huge forward base to them that they could pour men and materiel into. I thought about it for a moment. It was a desperate plan, but we did not really have much of a choice. It was as the Undertaker said – we did not have the forces to hold this whole section of the line.

‘The Lion Guard will spearhead the counter-assault, Lemuel. You will be held in reserve until then. Lieutenant Creasey will be commanding.