She closed her eyes when she heard the rattle of the fuel pipes disengaging from the lighter. The engine whine rose in volume, the sub-sonic vibrations making her teeth ache. She started to sweat and began to feel sick. The stuffy air was unbearable.

Dreno pulled out his pack of well-thumbed cards. ‘Who’s up for it?’ No one took him up.

Minka sat with her back to the metal struts. Out of boredom she took her combat knife from the sheath she kept strapped to her thigh. It was kasrkin issue and had once belonged to a soldier named Rath Sturm who’d kept her alive in Kasr Myrak. The pressed emblem read ‘94th’ with a crossed rifle and knife beneath it. Sturm was the kind of man held together with scars and skull-plate and titanium pins. By sheer force of will he had kept them fighting, street by street, ruin by ruin, room by room, long after they should have been mopped up by the Black Legion kill squads.

Among his many honours he was also an Armageddon veteran. ‘Any warrior who’s fought greenskins and survived is hard to scare,’ he’d liked to say.

He still came to her in her dreams. When she was cut off behind Statue Square, or picking through the ruins of her former scholam. Then she would hear the inhuman keening of the enemy forces, her heart beginning to race and her body sweating.

She struggled to wake in those moments, as if the enemies would not let her surface from sleep. But then Colonel Rath Sturm would appear, leaping over a broken wall, or kicking a door down and shooting her foes.

She held that image in her head now, and it calmed her as their lander began to fall towards the planet.

Minka had seen enough landing craft get hit on their descent. She’d seen them fall like fireworks from the sky, the hailstorm of blackened bodies landing a few minutes later. It was an image that always tormented her at moments like these. She hated planetary landings. She clenched her jaw and thought of Rath Sturm.

But this time she could smell Baine’s closeness. The nausea kept rising.

Minka pushed herself up at last. ‘Dreno! Deal me a hand.’

She had lost a month’s wages by the time the klaxons sounded for imminent landing.

Baine had been watching her the entire time. ‘Got a problem?’ she snapped at last.

‘I wouldn’t have played that,’ Baine said.

‘No?’

‘No,’ he said.

She gave him her coldest smile. ‘And why should I take any notice of a man I beat in the sparring pits?’

‘You got lucky.’

‘I didn’t get lucky, I carry it around with me.’

Baine clapped his hands and laughed out loud. ‘Good. That’s the kind of sergeant we need.’