From the accent I could tell he was one of ours, a Grosslander by the sound of it. I wondered what it was that made him plead so convincingly. Was he suffering the after-effects of some hallucinogenic? Was one of the giant rats that haunted the trench complex chewing on his leg? Or did he have his own personal reason for seeking a quick way out of Loki’s killing grounds?

‘One moment,’ Anton said. He lifted the silenced sniper rifle he had picked up on Dolmen, popped his head above the parapet and scanned the horizon for a moment. There was a soft coughing sound and the begging stopped. Anton dropped back into the trench and said, ‘Mission accomplished.’

‘You shot him,’ I said. ‘You shot one of our own men.’

‘I gave him what he was asking for. And to tell the truth he was getting on my nerves.’

‘You get on my nerves all the time,’ said Ivan. Even after all these years and an ever-improving series of prosthetic jaws, he still mangled his words. The plasteel teeth did not improve his pronunciation any. ‘Does that mean I can shoot you?’

‘The guy had lost half his guts. His entrails were covered in ghost mould. I tell you, if the same thing happens to me I hope you will shoot me. You’ll be doing me a favour.’

‘I’d be doing the rest of us a favour if I shot you now.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha,’ Anton said.

‘See anything else while you were up there?’ I asked. ‘You’re lucky one of the heretic snipers didn’t take your fool head off. They’re just waiting for an opportunity.’

‘I killed the last one two days ago when he shot Lieutenant Jensen. That will teach him not to do it again.’

‘Ever heard of reinforcements?’ I asked. ‘It’s not unknown for new snipers to be sent to the sector to replace the ones who were killed.’

Anton scratched at his head, running his fingernails across the ceramite of his helmet with a slick, scratchy sound – a pantomime of idiocy. ‘Reinforcements? Reinforcements? I heard that word once, a long time ago. Aren’t they the things the High Command keeps promising to send us, along with more ammo, and more food and new uniforms, and then keeps forgetting about? Or am I confusing them with supplies? It’s been almost two standard years in this forsaken place. I’m starting to forget the meaning of words.’

Dumb as he was, he had a point. We had been stuck here on Loki for close on two standard Imperial years now. It was the longest campaign of any during the crusade and there was still no end in sight. Things had got so bad that even elements of Macharius’s elite personal guard, like us, had been thrown piecemeal onto the front line to reinforce the green troops there. It was how we had gone from occupying a nice suite in a commandeered palace in Niflgard City to squatting in tattered, dirt-encrusted uniforms in these mud-filled trenches, watching assorted moulds grow on our feet and limbs. Most of the commissars had got themselves killed in the endless slogging grind of this war. Those who had not were doing the work of ten, walking the lines, executing the cowardly and those too wounded for medical treatment.

‘We’ll get reinforced soon. When have you ever known Macharius to fail?’ Ivan said. He sounded more like he was praying for it to be true than making a statement in which he believed. None of us had ever known a campaign in which Macharius had taken a personal interest bogged down for so long.