Yourself perhaps.’ I could not think of any time when I would have been keen on one of Anton’s madcap charges, not even when we were young and had first joined the Guard all those decades ago.

‘If I am so stupid, how come I am still alive?’ he asked.

It was a good question, but it prompted an easy response. ‘Because Ivan and I are here to pull your nads out of the fire before you can toast them.’

‘I can think of plenty of times when I have saved the both of you.’ It was true, too, but the first rule of arguing with Anton is never to admit that he might have a point. You could go mad if you did that.

‘You can also remember seeing little green daemons dancing out in no-man’s-land,’ I said. During the last attack, there had been a fault in the filter in his rebreather. He was lucky I had dragged him into the bunker before it became something a lot worse than a mild case of seeing things.

‘They could have been there,’ Anton said. He sounded thoughtful now. ‘You hear a lot of strange stories here on Loki.’

‘We’ve been hearing a lot of strange stories since we got to the Halo Worlds,’ said Ivan. ‘It does not mean they are true. I mean ghosts of old armies from the Emperor’s time. The dead coming back to life. Space Marines dedicated to the powers of Chaos. Who could believe any of that?’

The chanting in the distance had become a phlegmy roar. Drums beat amidst it, erratically, like the heart of a fever victim in the throes of a muscular spasm. There was a suggestion of the catechism to it now, of a priest calling a question and a congregation shouting a response. Perhaps it was just my imagination. Now and then I seemed to be able to pick out an occasional word. Sound moved strangely through the trench system. Idly I wondered if any of Richter’s former regiment were over there, some of our old comrades. I had killed one a few months back, a sergeant I had once got drunk with back on Morgan’s World. He had been dressed in muddy brown robes, pale of face and tattooed with evil runes. I did not like to think about why a veteran of the crusade might have done that.

A light rain started to fall, a cold drizzle that soaked the threadbare fabric of our green tunics, ran down the rebreather goggles, hampering vision. I ran my forearm over the lenses to wipe them and they cleared for a few moments before becoming obscured again. I watched the puddles ripple where the raindrops hit them. The scummy water had a sinister chemical tint to it, the light refracted into rainbows the colours of which were not found anywhere in nature.

‘Ah, the rain,’ said Anton. ‘Just what I needed to make my joy complete.’ He pulled the standard-issue overcoat tight around his narrow shoulders, hunched forward with his collar up. He looked over at the bunker door without enthusiasm. It was a choice between returning to that narrow confined space with the rest of the troops or sitting outside in the rain. Neither was particularly appealing.

I picked up the periscope and raised it over the lip of the trench, adjusting the magnification. I could see kilometres and kilometres of earthworks, stretching all the way to the distant mountains. I twisted it and saw the same in every direction.