Karni nodded. She was a tall, quiet woman. Lyrga took the bottom bunk. Karni took the top.

Minka had grown up in a world built and maintained by the drab-clothed Cadian labour corps. They’d taken their work as seri­ously as the rank and file of the shock troops took their military prowess. Of course they could fight as well, though that was not their primary training. They built barracks, fortifications, pontoons, trenches, dug-outs – anything that the army needed – to the highest specifications.

This new-build already had the look of a shabby old construction. The walls were unpainted flakboard. Raw nail heads ran in lines from floor to ceiling. There were straight graphite stylus marks, scrawled workings out in plain Gothic by semi-literate ­labour corps workers.

Minka gave the door a kick to make it close, then threw her pack down, puffed out her cheeks and looked about. She needed to sleep. She kept her boots on and lay down. The cot was a hard board with thin sheets and a colourless scratchy blanket with a faded Munitorum stamp.

‘Don’t wake me,’ she said to no one in particular, and lay back and put her arm over her face.

It seemed that no sooner had she fallen asleep than she was woken up by the distinctive note of a breakfast truck arriving outside – the squeak of the brakes, the back ramp swinging down.

Minka was up in an instant. She shook Lyrga’s bunk as she sat up.

‘Come on. Ration time! If you’re not quick, Baine will have eaten everything!’

Minka was almost first in line for food. The cooks had been up all night and they were in a foul mood. Nothing was ever right when you first arrived. The local Munitorum staff were always an unhelpful lot. It was an arm of the Imperium that seemed to attract the worst sort of incompetents, crooks and extortioners. Supplies were missing, mislabelled or stolen. It was a knot of corruption, and the canteen officers were on the front line of this internecine little war.

‘This is all you’re getting,’ the cook said as he stirred a thick lumpy green slop with his ladle.

Minka held out her bowl. The slop landed heavily. The next cook was handing out biscuits of hardtack. One each. No more. No less.

She took her breakfast to where The Saint was parked in line, and climbed up. The tank’s thick plating was cold from the night before and slick with beads of condensation. Its weight and ­armour were reassuring. She sat high on the turret so she could look out westwards.

Dawn was starting to bleach the western sky as the canteen staff lowered more vats of slab off the back of their cargo-6. Clouds piled up on the horizon. The camp was waking to the clink of cheap press-steel implements and the scent of hot food.