Viktor had been in worse scrapes, he told himself. ‘Right, Karni, I’m going to try to shove you up. Then I need you to hold yourself up. I’m starting to slip.’

She moaned, and he took this as assent and twisted the end of the cable about his hand. She slipped and fell back into him, the weight of them both yanking the wire tight. It had shifted beneath his flak armour, about his waist, and now the cable was starting to cut him. He could feel the blood pooling in his fingers. ‘Karni,’ he said. ‘I need you to hold yourself up. Orugi, reach back to pull Karni up.’

Orugi did so, hauling her up by her webbing.

‘We’re going to make it,’ Viktor assured them all as he slowly lowered himself down the three hundred feet of cable.

Seven

SEVEN

The eruptions lit the night as the Imperial troopers were carried back to the mainland. The air was warm and thick and sulphurous. A stink of ash hung about them all. The days of close quarter fighting had been easier than enduring the waves and the explosions. The terror of being aboard these craft had worn many of their nerves to shreds. They lay down and closed their eyes and prayed for dry land.

Colonel Baytov was there on the beach, ready to welcome his regiment ashore. The landing craft came back throughout the early morning, in dribs and drabs, like exhausted men.

Some were half empty. Others were overcrowded or crammed with wounded. They landed where they had embarked, in the wide pebble bay south of the camp.

Baytov strode down to catch ropes, pull men ashore. It looked and felt like a different place entirely. Maybe it was just because they were changed. They’d lost their bull-headed eagerness. They were now blooded, scarred and many of them were more than a little seasick.

‘Well done!’ Baytov told each and every trooper of his regiment, and he meant it.

In the blackened plains of the tank graveyard, Breve stepped down from the cargo-8 and looked about. Tanks painted in the distinctive colours of the 101st stretched away as far as he could see. The Cadian armour had been salvaged and carried off by the Adeptus Mechanicus reclamation squads. There were tanks, Chimeras, support vehicles, Sentinels, all parked neatly in rows with all the obsessive thoroughness of the Munitorum’s savants.

‘I wonder if they’re parked in platoon order?’ Breve said as they approached the row before them. The first tank had the markings of First Company, First Platoon, First Squad.

Breve and Wulfe looked about. ‘Throne,’ Wulfe said. ‘They are!’

Breve cut through the line, aiming for where he guessed Seventh Company’s tanks would be. Looking about, much of the armour here was junk. There wasn’t just shell-fire, but water damage as well, which had fried some of the wiring.