by John French
A half-spluttered cry reached through the hatch. Broken teeth, most likely. Brel screwed his eyes more tightly shut. He just wanted them to shut up. The headache was a white ball in his forehead, pressing against the back of his eyes.
‘So what are you going to say now, lieutenant, sir?’ drawled Jallinika, and Brel could hear her smiling.
‘I can... I–’
There was a loud sharp cry, and something hit the outside of the machine’s hull. For a second there was silence, then Calsuriz growled, and weeping mingled with wet, clotted breathing.
Enough, thought Brel. The pain in his head was sun bright. He opened his eyes and blinked at the blue and pink smears dancing in front of his eyes. He reached up, put his hands either side of the circular hatch, and pulled himself out in a single clean movement. They looked up at him as he jumped down to the track guard and then to the floor. Hundreds of silent tanks extended away in every direction, their hulls wrapped in dust. Every hundred metres a lumen globe diluted the gloom with urine-yellow light.
Brel looked down at the man curled on the floor. Blood had splattered the ground. The man’s mouth and nose were leaking red between his fingers. Brel noted the braided rank cords dangling from the shoulders of his Chalcisorian 1002nd uniform.
‘That’s enough,’ said Brel. His mouth felt dry, and the sun was still burning on the inside of his head. Brel knew that he must look like he had just been scraped from a machine tread. He was bare to the waist, his thin frame hunched from half a life crouched inside a Vanquisher’s turret. Dust and machine grease covered him, blurring the twists of long-healed wounds and smearing the edges of tattooed hawks and grinning skulls.
He licked his lips, and looked up at Calsuriz. The big man dropped his eyes and rubbed his jaw. Jallinika began to say something, but Brel turned his head to look at her. She took a step back, hands low and open, placating. The crater scars across her thin face and arms looked like small studs of shadow on her pale skin. Brel looked back to the lieutenant whimpering on the floor, stepped forward and crouched down. He recognised the man now: Salamo, commander of Twelfth Squadron, Leopard Company.
‘It’s Salamo, right?’ said Brel.
Salamo looked up. Blood covered the lower half of his face. His nose was a flattened mess and he was breathing between splinters of teeth. One of his augmetic eyes had shattered. He breathed hard, nodded.
Brel gave him a smile, trying not to let the pain in his head sour the expression. ‘The issue, Lieutenant Salamo, is that you seem to not understand the nature of a debt.’ Brel paused, blinked as the pain shifted its centre in his skull. ‘I did not take your debt marker, but unfortunately it is me that you owe. So before we go on I want to know what you owe and if you can pay.’
Behind him Jallinika began to make a noise. Brel raised a hand. She went silent. He smiled again at Salamo. The man shifted, and sucked air through his broken teeth.
‘Sixty... five,’ said Salamo, heaving a wet breath between the words.
‘Sixty-five?’ said Brel. He was trying hard not to clamp his eyes shut against the pain in his head. It had not been this bad for a while, not since Ycanus. He looked around at Jallinika. ‘You did this for sixty-five?’
‘He–’ She began to speak again, but Brel raised a finger. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.
‘Can you pay?’ he said to Salamo.
‘No,’ gulped the man.
Brel nodded, his eyes still closed. Sixty-five was not a huge debt, but most of those that came to him usually had a problem that meant that the normal scales of fortune did not apply.
Brel and his crew had been on Tallarn for almost a decade now, left behind when the rest of their regiment had moved on and left them still bleeding into bandages and muttering in fever dreams. For a decade he had waited for the war to call him back. He had watched as Tallarn’s role as staging hub for the forces of the Great Crusade faded in importance. The millions that filled the shelter complexes had dwindled to a trickle. The ships that had lit the night sky with false stars had left and not returned. Still Brel and his crew had remained, forgotten warriors in a forgotten land. They found that there was a place for them on Tallarn.
Amongst the billions of rounds of ammunition and mouldering stores, there were things that soldiers would pay for: stimms, pain suppressors, better food. Things to conjure dreams or gift forgetfulness. After a while they had enough money to supply almost anything that the soldiers could wish for. They had kept it quiet and efficient, and the war had never returned. Even when word came that the Imperium was apparently at war with itself, Brel did not worry – he and his crew would never go back, not now.
He opened his eyes. Salamo was looking up at him, waiting. Brel gave a resigned smile and nodded.
‘Okay,’ said Brel in a soft voice. ‘Okay.’ He reached out and hooked his arm gently under Salamo’s, and helped him to his feet. The Chalcisorian lieutenant rubbed the back of a hand across his bloody mouth. He glanced up at Brel, the one intact augmetic eye glowing green.
‘I will get you the money,’ lisped Salamo through a clot of spit and blood. ‘And I won’t say anything.’
Brel smiled again, and the movement sent fresh lines of pain across his scalp.
‘Okay,’ he said, and patted Salamo’s shoulder. ‘Okay.’
Salamo tried to smile back but his mashed face could not manage it. He turned to walk away.
Brel broke Salamo’s neck in one quick movement, and lowered the body to the ground. He closed his eyes again when it was done and let himself slump against Silence’s track guard. His ears were ringing. That was new.
‘Get rid of the body. Dump it in a lower cache chamber, and make it look like he fell off a ladder or something.’
The ringing was a piercing shriek now. Jallinika and Calsuriz said nothing. Brel forced his eyes open and looked around. His driver and gunner were standing staring up at the gloom hiding the arched roof. Brel was about to say something when Jallinika turned and looked at him.
‘What is that?’ she shouted.
Brel blinked, then shook his head. The wailing shriek pulsed as he moved, not inside his head but all around him. Brel had seen a lot of war fronts, had heard ships scream as part of their hull was breached, and run for dugouts as the bombs fell. The sound was an alarm, but like none he had ever heard. It was no alert, no muster call; it seemed new, as though it was a scream cutting into reality from a forgotten nightmare. The pain in his head was so strong that his vision blurred.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, but the words were lost as the alarm shrieked louder.
The first shot of the Battle of Tallarn was fired in space. It was fired from the edge of the planet’s monitor range from the heavy cruiser Hammerfall. The nova shell hit the northern polar orbital defence station while its systems were still asleep. The station vanished. Harsh blue light lit the northern face of Tallarn, and for an instant it burned brighter than the sun. A fraction of a second later the shell’s secondary payload activated. The graviton charge sucked in the expanding sphere of plasma and dragged the station’s weapon platforms into its crushing embrace. Curtains of aurora light danced across the northern plains of Kadir as the graviton detonation warred with Tallarn’s magnetic fields. In the polar capital of Ormas people crowded the upper surfaces of the city dome to see the night sky dance.
The orbital defence network began to wake. Auspex scans cut into space, looking for targets. They did not have to look hard. Hundreds of ships enclosed Tallarn in a shrinking sphere.
The planet’s defences began to fire. Torpedoes slid from launch tubes. Turbo-lasers fired, running their capacitors dry as they drew networks of light across the darkness. Some shots found their mark.
Three torpedoes caught the macro-transporter Kraetos and burrowed through three deck layers before detonating. Turbo-lasers caught the Retribution of Thunder as its void
shields hit a ring of orbital debris. The beams of energy sliced the ship’s bridge from its bulk and left it drifting. But the resistance could not last.
Two more nova shells fired from the Iron Warriors fleet destroyed the equatorial and southern polar stations. Squadrons of destroyers slipped into high orbit and launched spreads of torpedoes. The warheads slid onto their own orbital arcs to hit the remaining weapon platforms. New constellations blinked into existence in the skies of Tallarn.
There were few ships to defend the system. A squadron of defence monitors, their responses dulled by years of inactivity, tried to intercept some of the enemy ships. They died for their effort. Las-fire cut their hulls into chunks, and then macro-cannon salvos hammered the remains into scraps of metal and burning gas.
One ship alone tried to run. The Light of Inwit was an Imperial Fists strike vessel. She paused for a second as her communications officer tried to raise Marshal Lycus on Tallarn’s surface. The only reply was static. Her shipmaster did not hesitate. Word of the attack needed to reach others. The Light of Inwit turned its prow to the blackness of the system edge and burned its engines until they were white with heat.
She nearly made it. Iron Warriors gunships accelerated in her wake, reaching after her with stitched lines of explosions. Clouds of debris and energy buffeted her void shields, but she kept running. More Iron Warriors ships slipped from behind Tallarn’s outer moon. They had been waiting to see if any of the defenders would run, and they were ready. Ten destroyers launched a net of torpedoes. The Light of Inwit twisted, spiralling as it tried to weave a course through the web of warheads. A single torpedo clipped its upper hull and exploded. The vessel veered, its hull glowing with pinprick fires. The second torpedo hit it amidships and tore a chunk of hot metal from its flank. The Iron Warriors moved in with lazy confidence. Spinning without control, the Light of Inwit fired a single salvo as if shouting defiance. The Iron Warriors guns opened it from prow to stern.
In the skies above Tallarn, heavy IV Legion ships settled into orbit. Grand cruisers, battle-barges, siege barques and weapon haulers plated the heavens in dull iron. Bombardment cannons slid from their bellies and rotated towards the surface. A few turned so that their prow torpedo tubes faced down towards the target zones, hanging like daggers.
On the ground, Tallarn’s defences began to shout defiance at the sky. Laser platforms and missile silos threw ship-cracking payloads towards the orbiting vessels. The Iron Warriors fired in return.
For those looking up from the night side of Tallarn the bombardment appeared as a shower of falling stars. In the clear skies of the south, the falling warheads winked like golden coins scattered in the sun. Hundreds of bombs and torpedoes fell. After their initial launch they needed no propulsion; Tallarn’s own gravity drew them to it. The warheads broke apart as they descended. They shed their ceramite armour first, sloughing it off like a cocoon to reveal polished metal beneath. The next layer simply fragmented seconds later, dumping the first dose of viral agents into the upper air currents. Beneath this, hundreds of winged bomblets nestled like insect young clinging to their mother. This layer released three hundred metres above the ground. The bomblets began to tumble like seeds, spraying atomised viral agents as they spun.
Finally, the core of each warhead hit the ground like a bullet, punching through rock and soil before exploding. Clouds of earth and debris burst into the air. Beneath the earth, the virus began to spread through the soil and into the water table.
The first casualties were those closest to the ground bursts. In the Crescent City, a warhead hit one of the main arterial routes through the outskirts. The road was dense with people and vehicles, scrambling to reach the entrances of the shelters beneath the city. As the explosive cloud settled people began to fall, blood running from their eyes. Within seconds the flesh of those within the initial blast had begun to fall from their bones in blood-slimed ribbons.
Those that were further away lived a little longer. The mist of viral agents in the air mixed with the wind as it blew across Tallarn. People began to fall. They fell trying to get to shelter. They fell in their homes as the killing air seeped through the cracks in the walls. They fell looking up at the sky. Outside the cities the virus scythed through the lush agri-belts and jungle regions. Forests became tatters of toxic slime hanging from the dead skeletons of trees. The slick bones of cattle floated in pools of black filth. Flocks of birds fell from the air in a rain of putrefying flesh and feathers.
Within five minutes of the first impacts the casualties in the major cities numbered almost a million. Within ten minutes they were over ten million. Within an hour the living population on the surface of Tallarn was negligible.
A few survived in isolated places far away from the impact sites. They would die in the following days. Within three days there was no measurable life on the surface.
The last person to die in the attack was a soldier attached to one of the northern tundra bases. His name was Rahim. Caught in an armoured vehicle far from the cities, he drove in search of other military personnel until his fuel ran out. His air supply failed two hours later.
Sealed in shelters far beneath the ground, the survivors of Tallarn waited. Many were soldiers, the remnants of regiments never shipped out to the Great Crusade. Beside them were a lucky few, civilians who had known of the shelters and reached them in time. Sipping recycled water, breathing processed air, they listened as silence settled across the surface of Tallarn like a shroud.
Two
The hell above
Machine kill
Vanquisher
‘You have to be kidding me,’ muttered Jallinika. Brel shot her a look, and she shrugged. They stood in the shelter’s primary dispersal area, just one of many clusters waiting to hear what would happen next. The officer standing on the turret top looked like he was about to be sick. His skin was pale and his eyes were wide and glassy, as though he had been staring at the world around him hoping that he was about to wake up. Brel remembered that look: it was the look of someone who had just found out what it felt like to be part of history.
‘The reconnaissance is going to be light – squadron strength.’ The officer, a Jurnian captain by his uniform, was pointedly not looking at the men and women clustered around the tracks of the tank he was standing on. He glanced down at a spool of parchment in his right hand, tried to smooth it out, failed and almost dropped it.
‘Terra,’ hissed Jallinika, and shook her head. Brel kept his eyes on the officer.
This was it: the calculation of fate, the roll of the dice. If there had been any gods left to pray to, Brel would have asked them to make sure that he remained forgotten. He had been ordered to report to this Jurnian captain – someone had actually found him and given him the order, and that could only mean bad things. Beside him, the Jurnian crews he had been lumped with shifted as they waited for the captain to find his voice. Brel glanced around the waiting circle, noticing the expressions on their faces. Some looked nervous, some numb. A few even looked excited.
Then his eyes found the others, the men and women in one-piece drab overalls without insignia or markings. They looked nothing like soldiers. They looked like refugees scraped together and stuffed into surplus uniforms. Brel gave a tired breath; he was suddenly certain how this was going to go.
‘Atmosphere on the surface is toxic so full seal protocols are to be enforced inside your machines.’ The officer paused, and licked his lips. Jallinika rolled her eyes and shook her head again, but he did not seem to notice. Brel was not surprised that the idiot was going through the full brief, top to bottom, like the drills, ignoring the fact that any idiot knew that any vehicle going out would have to be locked down and the crew skinned in enviro-suits. It, like the rest of the briefing, was irrelevant. Everyone was just waiting for the one thing that mattered: who was going out.
After all, thought Brel, they aren’t going to answer the real question
– why are we going out now?
It had been seven weeks since the bombs fell, and after the shock had come the panic, then the numbness of reality settling into place. There had been suicides, and the demand for narcotics of any and all description had gone through the roof. Then there were the survivors, thousands of civilians from the city above who had managed to reach the complex before it was sealed. Broken people wearing stained clothes from lives that no longer existed, they clustered in the unused chambers.
For a few days the complex had simmered on the edge of insanity. Officers had clung to protocol like drowning men to fragments of a broken ship. There had been some summary executions to enforce discipline, and things had settled into a dazed rhythm after that, and the weeks had passed.
Now, something had changed.
‘Each squadron will have a scout guide attached to them.’ The captain nodded to the men and women in the drab overalls. ‘They will be in light vehicles. They are all volunteers. They know the surface and will help you navigate.’
Brel was not surprised when Jallinika stifled a laugh. They were taking some of the civilian survivors out onto whatever was left of the surface of Tallarn. It was worse than pointless, it was idiotic.
‘The purpose of the mission is to establish if there are any enemy forces on the surface and to identify them,’ said the captain, reading from his notes. ‘We have no surviving forces on the surface, so you are going to be our eyes.’
We don’t even know who we are fighting, thought Brel. A whole world dies and we are wondering who held the knife.
‘The battle disposition is as follows,’ said the captain. Brel felt the coldness in his gut expand and squirm. ‘First Squadron, you are heading east along the coastal road.’
A female lieutenant with a sharp face and baggy fatigues raised a hand. ‘Number three machine is down in my squadron. Main armament won’t light.’
