by John French
‘Get us moving, Cal,’ he said, and the big driver grunted an affirmative.
Beside him, Jallinika cursed. He looked around at her, his ears filling with a stream of expletives.
‘What?’ he shouted.
She stopped cursing. ‘Look,’ she said.
He did.
‘Oh.’
The front of the Spartan pistoned open in front of Akil’s eyes. He saw something move in the space within, something that glinted dully in the fire. For a second Akil wondered if the tank had simply come apart from the damage it had suffered, but the burning figures broke from the Spartan’s mouth at a run.
There were ten of them, ten nightmares cast in dull iron and brushed steel. Hammers, axes and claw blades wept lightning in their hands. Curved layers of armour hunched their shoulders, moving like iron-slab muscles as they ran. At first Akil just stared at them, his gaze locked upon the eyes shining in their black metal faces. He felt his mouth work soundlessly in his face, speaking a word he had heard once but now realised that he had never truly understood.
Terminators.
A bolt of energy streaked across the closing gap – Akil blinked a second too late, and the outline of an armoured figure burned across his retinas. He was screaming, screaming without being able to stop. Explosions rang against the hull. The lascannon fired again and again.
‘I killed one,’ gasped Udo. ‘I think I killed one.’
Akil forced his eyes open. The Terminators were forty metres away, firing as they came, the ground churning around their feet. Explosions and muzzle flare smeared his view. He yanked the control levers back. Metal screamed as the scout rocked in place, held for a second, and then jerked free. The controls juddered in his grip as power ran into the tracks and clawed them backwards.
The Terminators kept coming. He could see the polished iron skulls on their chests now, and the shell casings falling from their combi-bolters. Udo fired again but the shot burned wide.
Akil hit the brake on the left track. The scout twisted, skidding as the right track pulled it around. Akil rammed both levers forwards and Talon shot ahead. He could not see the Iron Warriors any more; the sight in front of him was a blur of cold rubble and ruins. They hit a wall and exploded through it. Udo was out of his seat, scrambling to the rear vision slits.
‘Where are they?’ shouted Akil.
‘I can’t see them.’
Akil half-twisted in his seat, instinctively looking behind. He snatched his gaze back around in time to see the remains of a fallen pillar just before they hit it.
Talon burst through the fractured plascrete, rode up and crashed down. Akil slammed forward. For a second, everything was ringing silence and the sound of his own breathing. Then he realised that they had stopped moving.
His hands went to the controls as his mouth opened. ‘Can you see th–’
The impact rang through the scout like a shattering gong. Roof plating buckled inwards. Akil could hear armour grinding on armour. Udo had curled into a ball behind his seat. Akil thought of the lightning clinging to the Terminators’ weapons.
‘Come on!’ shouted Tahirah. Lantern was still cold, its engine whining in protest at the speed Makis was demanding of it. Slime and mud sprayed from its tracks as it gouged a path towards the scout. Its gears screamed as it built up speed. They needed to be much, much closer for them to stand a chance of making a shot. Tahirah had ordered them on the fastest, most direct route to give it to them: straight across the sludge pan, straight towards the stranded scout and straight across the surviving Predator’s kill-zone.
Stupid, so damned stupid, Tahirah cursed inside her skull. ‘Lachlan, do you have a shot?’
‘Not a clear one.’
‘How long until you do?’
The rising growl of the engine and the rattle and ring of the Lantern filled the pause.
‘Five seconds, or maybe not at all.’
Tahirah looked at the auspex. On their left flank the Iron Warriors Predator had tagged them and was coming around in a wide arc, trailing its veil of heat and sensor baffling. In a few seconds it would be behind them. Kill shot, she thought.
‘Left gunner, fire at will.’ She waited, but heard no reply. ‘Do you hear that, whoever the hell you are? You see a target, you fire.’
‘Understood,’ came a trembling reply a second later.
‘Good,’ she snarled, and then switched the channel. ‘Silence, this is Lantern.’ Static boiled in her ears. ‘Brel, you hear me?’
The Iron Warriors Predator almost had a shot on them. If Brel did not take care of it, they would die. She laughed to herself. It was far too late for such thoughts. There was no choice now, none at all. ‘Lachlan, take the shot.’
The first Terminator reached Talon and pulled itself onto its roof. The Iron Warrior straightened with a clicking hiss of oiled joints and servos. No man could stand on the surface of Tallarn and hope to live, but this iron-clad creature was not a man – he was a Space Marine, and the armour that encased his flesh was made to walk through the fire of war and the cold of the void. The head of the Iron Warrior’s hammer glowed with a blue light in the thick air. The legionary looked down for a second, electric green eyes taking in the scout’s armour plating. He raised his hammer.
The plasma stream hit the Terminator from the side and pitched him from his feet. He twisted as he fell, his armour holding its shape for a second before melting. Chips of ceramite exploded with heat, burning the air as they fell. Inside the cage of his armour the Iron Warrior’s flesh became smoke and steam.
The plasma swept on through the air, peeling paint from Talon’s hull in black bubbles. The Iron Warriors nearest the scout vanished as their armour crumpled under the stream and became nothing more than expanding spheres of gas and heat. Some of them remained alive long enough to turn and try to lumber out of the plasma storm, their shapes slowly deforming as they went.
Light poured through the Talon’s vision slits, hot white and harsh blue. The roof plating began to glow red. Akil heard the scream and rush of plasma-fuelled explosions. Static boiled and spat in his ears as the light grew brighter, shifting hue from white to orange. His hands went back to the controls and fired the scout’s engines. It accelerated away over the rubble, the plasma fires burning in its wake.
Akil heard distant voices over the vox as he turned Talon south, away from the kill-zone.
‘Put us in the kill-zone, Cal,’ said Brel. There had been a pause, and Brel had not needed to see the driver’s face to know that it had creased with confusion. ‘Do it, Cal, put us right in the middle of it. As close to the live Predator as possible.’
As soon as Brel had seen Lantern move, he had realised what Tahirah was going to do, and what she was gambling on him doing. He had cursed, and for a second had thought of not giving the order. A long breath later he had shaken his head, half in anger and half in admiration.
‘Yes, boss,’ said Calsuriz, after a long pause.
Silence clattered into motion, its tracks rolling slowly, then faster and faster as it bumped onto the flat pan of the kill-zone. Brel glued his eyepieces to the periscope, flicking between infra-vision and the basic sight of the human eyeball. The fog here was thin enough that he could see the Iron Warriors tank cutting through the vapour like a shark through sand-clouded water.
‘There you are,’ he whispered. ‘Jal, make them notice us.’
The Vanquisher cannon spat fire, and a shower of mud and smoke hid the Predator for a second. When Brel saw it again it had changed course, turning hard with its dome turret traversing and its sponsons swivelling in their mounts. Damn, it was close – so close that its streaked metal hull almost filled his sight. He could see targeting lasers scatter red lines through the murk as they reached for him and the more distant Lantern. The Predator could do it; one machine could kill both Lantern and Silence, if it was not killed firs
t. Tahirah had known that, had known that by roaring across the sludge pan she was opening herself up as a target, and that the only way she would live was if Brel brought the Silence in to split the Predator’s attention. It was a move of total courage and utter stupidity.
The Predator’s turret was rotating around to Brel. Jallinika’s curses filled his ears again as she tried to get the main gun steady for a shot. The breech slammed open next to him, and the smoking case fell from its throat. Selq was already rising, ramming another shell into position. The Vanquisher’s firing block closed on the brass-cased shell with a ring like a struck anvil.
Brel kept his eyes on the Predator. Both machines were close, far too close. This was not an engagement; it was a nose-to-nose brawl with fists of high explosive and iron. In such a fight there could be only one winner.
The diffused red line of light from the Predator’s targeter became a dot in Brel’s sight, and he knew that behind the Predator’s gun a pair of legionary eyes was looking right back at him.
‘Okay,’ whispered Brel.
Silence fired an instant after the Predator, the boom of the shot and the ring of impact overlapping in a metal-throated roar. The Predator vanished before Brel’s eyes. A second later the shards of its hull rang on Silence’s outer skin like the striking of a thousand hammers. Jallinika whooped, slapping the breech block. Brel stayed silent, watching the fire and smoke rising from the blasted bones of the Predator, listening.
Clatter-clunk, clatter-clatter, clatter-clunk.
‘They hit us,’ he said.
They all heard it then: a grinding whir of half-sheared metal, like the drumming of broken iron fingers upon the hull.
‘Full halt,’ said Brel, but Calsuriz had already disengaged the power from the tracks. Silence lurched to a stop, and the metallic clatter-clunk sound ceased. For a second none of them said anything. They all knew what had just happened. Brel took a slow breath of sterilised air.
It was Selq that broke the silence.
‘The track isn’t broken,’ he said. Brel could hear the control in the loader’s soft lilt. ‘It would have spun out or jammed if it was a straight break.’
‘It’s half broke,’ added Calsuriz, his voice casual, as though he might be talking about the chance of winning a hand of cards. ‘You can hear it scrape the skirt, and it’s not just the track. Left drive wheel is shot as well, or I’m the new Regent of Terra.’
Jallinika barked a laugh, then went quiet.
Brel let out a slow breath. There was no point asking the question that was running through all their thoughts: Can we still move, or will we go a few metres and then be stranded?
‘Brel, you got it, you beautiful, beautiful bastard,’ Tahirah’s voice breathed over the vox, and he could hear the delight at still being alive in her words. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back.
‘You’re welcome,’ he said. So this is how it happens, he thought. After all this time I am going to suffocate on the surface of a dead planet because a stray shell clipped a track. He shook his head.
‘Brel?’ Tahirah’s voice crackled in his ear again, a sudden tension in her voice. ‘We should be moving, why have you stopped?’
He ignored the question, and flicked the vox to the internal channel only.
‘Cal, engage drive power slowly. Let’s see if we can move.’ Or if we are dead and just haven’t stopped breathing, he added to himself.
‘Brel?’ Tahirah’s voice grated in his ear again, and again he ignored it. He listened as the noise of the engine changed in pitch and the gears engaged with a clunk. His chest was aching, and he realised that he was holding his breath.
There was a rattling thud, and Silence lurched forwards. The engine noise dipped as Calsuriz notched the power down, and then there was the familiar rumble of movement. They were moving, slower than a man could walk, but moving nonetheless, and that meant they were alive.
Battle is joined on Tallarn
The first ship came alone. Tearing from the warp at the edge of the system, it sliced towards Tallarn. At first the Iron Warriors pickets presumed it was a trader or a bulk transporter unaware of the war raging at its destination. Three Iron Warriors destroyers moved to intercept it. They would board it, cripple it if they had to, and strip it of anything of value.
Only when they were within gun range did they realise they had miscalculated. The ship was no bulk carrier or lost trader. It was a warship.
The Lesson of Ages was a brawler of a vessel, made to take damage in exchange for the destruction of its enemies. An ugly block of fire-scored armour studded by weapon barrels; it had served the Emperor since the Great Crusade had first gone beyond the light of the Solar System. Every one of its previous commanders had died in action, and the ship had been on the threshold of destruction over a dozen times. But it had never faltered, and its dedication-oaths to the Emperor remained unbroken. In reply to the Iron Warriors hails, the shipmaster sent a single message looped through all frequencies.
‘Traitor-death, traitor-death, traitor-death,’ it chanted as it drove forwards.
The Iron Warriors destroyers fired, spreading torpedoes into the Lesson of Ages’s path. But she kept coming. Warheads slammed into her decks, burning through armour in gouts of plasma and drooling molten metal into the void. Still she kept coming. Further in-system, larger ships detached from Tallarn’s orbit and began the long burn to intercept this lone enemy. In the guts of the Iron Warriors vessels, ratings and servitors hauled fresh torpedoes into launch tubes. They fired again, the ordnance burning fast as it ate up the distance to the target. Fire blistered across the Lesson of Ages’s prow and back. Explosions shook her cracked skin. Still she kept coming.
The Iron Warriors destroyers began to turn out of the burning ship’s path. The Lesson of Ages fired. The destroyers’ shields vanished under the deluge of macro-shells an instant before their hulls melted and their reactors burst.
Its outer hull still burning, the Lesson of Ages roared towards Tallarn. Two hours later the second and third ships arrived – the Lament of Caliban and Beastslayer had followed the same distress call as the Lesson of Ages. The message had rippled through the warp from Tallarn, its meaning clear even through the fracturing of the storms.
‘The Iron Warriors are here. This is the anvil upon which we will break them.’
More would come. They came for hatred, they came for glory, but most of all they came to see the back of a traitor Legion broken.
Tallarn stood alone no longer.
Five
The land that will be
God-walk
Wounded
‘Do you see that?’
The words reached into the black water of Akil’s dream and pulled him to the surface. His eyelids flickered open. He had been asleep with his head resting against the vibrating hull of the scout. A sky of weeping fire filled the dreamscape through which a tattooed man walked, his multi-coloured skin crawling like a nest of snakes.
Akil had let Udo drive after he had nearly driven them into a ditch, and Udo had taken his place without a word of complaint. As soon as Akil was out of the driver’s seat the tiredness had come in a single silent wave, dragging him down into soft half-dreams. He thought he remembered trying to apologise, but he had just mumbled something incoherent and the dreams had kept coming. Now he was awake, his skin clammy against the inside of his suit, his senses trying to rebuild the world around him.
‘What?’ he said thickly, and then remembered that he needed to key his vox. ‘What did you say?’ he asked again.
He blinked. Talon was still, its engine silent. Udo was in the driver’s seat, leaning forward so that his eyepieces pressed against the smeared glass of the forward view slit.
‘What’s going on, why have we stopped?’
Udo did not turn away from the view.
‘We stopped an hour ago. The boss
wanted to re-plot our route. Something about enemy activity between us and the shelter. The other two are just next to us.’ He turned his head, looking at Akil with eyes that caught the moonlight streaming through the vision slit.
Something is wrong, thought Akil, something added or taken away from the way things should be. Something that he could not place...
Udo nodded and keyed the vox. ‘Sorry to wake you, but you have to see this.’
Akil realised what was different, then.
Moonlight.
Moonlight glinted off the scratches on the gun block and drive controls. Akil scrambled forward, reaching towards the silver light as though he could touch it, as though it were falling water. Udo moved out of the way, and Akil pushed his face against the glass and looked up. The murk was still there, hanging like a grubby veil, but he could see the moon and stars shining down on him with cold, beautiful light. He let out a long breath, closed his eyes and opened them again. He felt the smile spread across his face without being able to stop it.
‘The fog seems to be thinning in places,’ said Udo. ‘This is some plateau north-west of the shelter. We crossed into it twenty kilometres ago. Not seen a wreck or ruin since.’
Akil felt his smile stiffen, then drain away.
‘Fruit,’ he said to himself.
‘What?’
‘They grew fruit here. Kilometres and kilometres of trees and bushes. The Scented Flats, we called them, because when the blossom came the air used to be so thick with scented pollen that you could smell it all the way to the coast.’ Akil went quiet. He had brought his daughters here for the Blossom Festival just last year...
His eyes drifted down from the moon to the land laid out under its light. With the cloak of fog lifting, the sludge that had covered the ground was drying. Cracks snaked across the ground, and he saw a curl of dust rise on what must have been a gust of wind.
