Orderlies and nurses worked the wards, tending to the hundreds of people who filled the place. They nodded to him as he passed. In some faces he saw grudging respect, in others wordless tolerance. He knew that he could expect no less.

He made his way into a side compartment, a room that had once housed the fire control systems of the war machine's defensive weapons. Iron sprung beds were packed in tightly, each one home to a pathetic, broken shape that only superficially resembled a human being.

He nodded to the orderly fitting a drip over the nearest patient. A box bleeped erratically and trailing wires ran from the cracked display to the heartbreaking shape that lay in the bed.

'How is she?' Casuaban asked.

'How do you think?' was the answer. 'She's dying.'

Casuaban nodded and stood at the end of the bed, trying to remain dispassionate as he lifted the girl's notes and read how her condition had changed during the night.

Her name was Aniq and what was left of her stirred on the bed. He had been forced to amputate both her legs above the knee and her left arm was missing from the shoulder down. Aniq's entire body was a mass of gauze and synth-flesh, a desperate attempt to keep her from death, an attempt Casuaban knew was doomed to failure.

Aniq and her family had been caught in the middle of a firefight between the Sons of Salinas and a patrol of Achaman Falcatas that had spilled into the dwellings on the southern edge of Barbadus. Solid rounds and las-bolts had torn through the Chimera chassis that Aniq's family called home, the ricochets killing her parents and ripping into both her legs and her left arm. A volatile mixture of home-distilled fuel had exploded in the fight and had bathed her body in chemical fire.

The girl would die tonight. She should have died days ago, but she was strong and Casuaban knew it was his duty, his penance, to fight as hard to save her as she was fighting to live.

'Increase her pain medication,' Casuaban told the orderly.

'It won't matter,' said the orderly. 'The girl won't live.'

Suddenly angry, Casuaban snapped, 'She has a name. It is Aniq.'

'No, she's just another salve to your conscience, medicae,' snorted the orderly and walked away. Casuaban ignored the man and went to the drip regulator, adjusting the flow of Morphia himself. He might not be able to save her, but he could ease her suffering at least.

Casuaban had seen enough of war in his service with the Falcatas to last any man a dozen lifetimes. He had hoped that when his time with the regiment was at an end he would be able to retire somewhere warm where he could spend the last of his days trying to forget man's capacity for violence. He had never dared dream that the Falcatas would earn the right to claim a world of their own. After all, what regiment ever really got to muster out?

You heard stories about worlds settled by heroic regiments of Imperial Guard, but no one ever actually got to do it, did they?

But the Falcatas had it.

Designated an army of conquest by General Shermi Vigo, they had claimed Salinas as theirs, but instead of an end to war and the establishment of a Falcatan dynasty, the conquest of Salinas had become a poisoned chalice.

And Casuaban's vision of a peaceful retirement had vanished like mist.

He remembered the day his dreams had died.

It had been upon the Killing Ground, amid the ashen wasteland of Khaturian.

In the aftermath of the slaughter, he had walked the hellish warscape in a numbed daze, the streets and few remaining buildings filled with bodies that had cracked and twisted into foetal positions such was the infernal heat that had engulfed the city.

That had been the day his world had turned upside down, when his every belief had been shattered and his quest to atone had begun. He looked down at the small girl once more, trying to stem the tide of regret that he felt every time he saw her.

What had she done to earn the wrath of Leto Barbaden and the Achaman Falcatas?

Nothing. She'd done nothing. She had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, like most of the people in the House of Providence.

'You didn't deserve this,' he whispered.

The girl's eyes flickered open at the sound of his voice and her mouth moved soundlessly, her eyes pleading for Casuaban's understanding.

He crouched beside the bed and leaned in close to her, her voice little more than breath on his cheek.

'You were there,' she whispered, and he flinched as though struck.

Casuaban rose stiffly to his feet, his heart hammering in his chest. He backed away from the bed, the girl's wasted form now unutterably dreadful to him. He turned and all but fled the chamber, moving as though in a fugue state.

Serj Casuaban made his way through the wards, adjusting drug levels, making notes on charts and burying himself in a hundred other tasks to keep his mind from dwelling on what he had heard.

Darkness was beginning to fall and exhaustion had all but claimed him by the time Casuaban finished his rounds, the little light that pierced the windows fading to twilight grey before he had noticed. Naked glow strips hung from cables screwed into the corridor roofs and the sickly glow made him feel faintly nauseous.

He made his way back through the central section of the House of Providence and climbed the stairs to the control bridge, where lord generals and warmasters had once plotted destruction on a massive scale. The almost bare room was home to a compact desk, a couple of chairs, the low cot bed where he had spent many an uncomfortable night and a wall of locked drug cabinets.

Casuaban dropped the notes he had made on his rounds onto his desk and slumped into the hard, iron chair behind it. The words he had heard from Aniq's mouth and in his darkest nightmares echoed in his skull and he knew that there was one sure method to dull the ache and pain of them. He opened the drawer and lifted out a tapered bottle without a label and a pair of shot glasses, both of which he set on the desk and filled.

'There's no point in hiding,' he said. 'So, join me for a drink.'

A shadow detached itself from the wall and Pascal Blaise took the seat opposite Casuaban.

'Hello Serj,' said Pascal. 'How did you know I was here?'

'Unlike everything else in here, you don't smell of death,' answered Casuaban.

'Ironic, don't you think?'

'Perhaps,' said Casuaban, 'if I gave it any thought. What do you want?'

'You know what I want,' said Pascal, lifting the glass of raquir and taking a sip.

'I can't spare you any more medical supplies, we're running short as it is.'

'So ask Barbaden for more.'

'He'll say no.'

'Not to you he won't.'

'You love this, don't you?'

'What?'

'The fact that the medical supplies your men use come from Leto Barbaden.'

'There's a certain poetic justice to it,' admitted Pascal, 'but that's by the by. We took some casualties today.'

'I heard,' said Casuaban. 'You hit Verena Kain's Screaming Eagles.'

Pascal grinned. 'Aye, we did. She got away, but we hurt the bastards.'

'How many wounded do you have?' asked Casuaban.

'Too many: ten dead and another sixteen wounded. My men are hurting and we need fresh bandages, morphia and counterseptic.'

'I can't spare that much,' protested Casuaban. 'Bring your wounded here.'

'Don't be foolish,' warned Pascal. 'You think that Barbaden won't have Nisato and his goons watching this place for that?'

Casuaban laughed. 'You're here aren't you? You tell me who's being foolish.'

'I know how to make my way around without being seen,' said Pascal, 'and there's only one of me. I think they might notice sixteen wounded men being brought in.'

'I can't ask Barbaden for more,' said Casuaban, though he could hear the defeat in his voice. He knew he would give Pascal what he wanted, had known it the moment he had sensed the man's presence in his office.