Minka fell asleep, woke briefly to note that they were moving again, and then fell back asleep. She half-listened to the conversation of her squad.

‘Welcome to Malouri,’ she heard Baine say.

Dreno nodded. ‘Yeah. Another shitty war.’

At dusk they passed an isolated prayer chapel standing among high walls. Pseudo-flames guttered from grates set into the high stone buttresses. The gothic windows were lit from within with warm light. Over the roar of tanks and tracks Minka thought she could hear the sound of singing.

It woke an old memory within her. Each morning, as a child, hurrying towards Statue Square for morning drill as the night glare of the Eye of Terror slowly receded with the dawn. Veteran choirs had sung all night, dispelling the dread for the unholy rift that swirled above their heads.

The sound of their singing faded behind her. She paused and turned, pushing the hair from her face as she looked back, but the chapel was soon lost behind the military silhouettes of the Chimeras of Seventh Company.

The chapel in her memory had been dedicated to the Cadian Saint Gerstahl the Martyr. Squeezed into a gap between a dome-topped defence silo and a marshalling yard, the chapel had a small, narrow interior with high gothic windows that looked out onto the stacked habs. Along both walls were side chapels, each one hung with the mouldering banners of Kasr Myrak regiments, the oldest having rotted down to the bare skeleton of threads, the symbol of the Cadian Gate little more than an impression.

Each wall had been patchworked with brass plaques memorialising troopers who had died on far-off battlefields, too distant for their bones to ever be returned. She had stood there as a child and tried to pronounce the names of places. They spoke to her imagination of heroic deaths across the Imperium of Man.

There was one statue that she had loved more than any other. It was of cast bronze, depicting a colonel with a stern and tragic look in her one remaining eye. The statue was so old that the bronze had a deep, dark patina and only the aquila on her breastplate shone. Many hands had rubbed that mark for good luck; the two eagle heads, one blind, one sighted, and the raised ridges of the eagle’s wings gleamed.

The name of that warrior was Colonel…

Minka frowned.

She closed her eyes and summoned those details back, making the memories parade before her. There was a time, not long ago, when the name would have come to her in an instant. She strained for it, but the cherished object had been snatched up by the past, and however much she stretched and scrabbled for it, it was lost now, beyond all reach.

The sadness of Cadia did not come from the terrible months of battle as she had fought for her home city. The loss came from little separations like this.