by John French
This is the beginning, thought Akil as the dust danced in the silver light. No matter what happens here, no matter who wins, my world will never return. It lives only in dreams now. This drying corpse is the future. I am looking at the land that will be.
Behind him Udo shifted, but said nothing. Akil was about to look away when he saw the first flash. He stared at the sky, blinking. For an instant he was sure he had seen...
Another flash, low on the hazed horizon, swallowed by the distant banks of fog. Then another, and another. As he looked up, fresh stars were blazing and blinking out, strobing and burning for the length of a heartbeat. The hazy sky danced with light and falling embers of fire. Akil began to speak, but the words came out as a gasp. Udo’s head came up.
‘Are you seeing this?’ Tahirah’s voice crackled in his ear.
‘Yes,’ came Brel’s voice without pause.
‘What–’ began Akil, but Brel cut through him.
‘Orbital engagement, a big one, and it looks like a drop as well. They are hammering the hell out of each other up there to reach the surface.’
Akil watched as a star formed and flickered from white to red.
‘But I thought we were alone,’ he said. ‘That it was just the Iron Warriors up there.’
‘Looks like that might have changed,’ said Brel dryly.
Akil felt something shift in his chest. It was a warm feeling, a feeling that the universe had opened an unexpected door in front of him, and that sunlight was shining through.
‘Doesn’t mean they are coming to help us,’ said Brel, as if he had heard the hope in Akil’s silence. ‘Have you heard anything from command, lieutenant?’
‘No comms since we came out,’ replied Tahirah, then she paused. ‘We have to get back to the shelter. All units warm up. We move in five minutes.’
They limped across the desiccating plain, a loose triangle of machines under the cold moonlight. They were moving at walking pace, dust rising in their wake. In front of them, looming nearer by slow paces, a bank of thick ochre fog waited like a wall separating the moonlit night from another realm.
Shut away from the moonlight, within the rattling dark of Lantern, Tahirah let her eyes close for a moment. They stung and ached from staring at the world through small strips of glass and targeting sights. Every now and again she would angle one of the sight blocks upwards to look at the night sky. The false stars, comets and fire lines of the space battle still fizzed across the black dome. Brel was right – whoever was up there, they were pounding the hell out of each other.
What did it mean? Reinforcements? Rescue? Withdrawal? She had heard the hope in Akil’s words when they had first seen the flashes in the sky, but as much as she wanted to believe that her first war was over, she had a feeling that Brel was closer to the mark: new stars in the sky might be ill omens as much as signs of hope.
‘We’ll be in the fog again in a few minutes,’ said Makis. ‘Did you say thirty kilometres to the shelter?’
‘Something like that.’ Tahirah shrugged even though Makis could not see her. ‘Difficult to be sure where we are. The maps are a little out of date.’
Makis did not reply. The low grumble of the machine surrounded Tahirah again, rocking her in its clattering embrace.
The fog swallowed them a few minutes later as Makis had promised. One minute it was a cliff of bulging vapour looming above them, and the next it was all around them, streaking past the glass of their periscopes, billowing like sediment stirred at the bottom of a river. Tahirah had to suppress a clench of fear in her guts. For a moment it felt as though they had plunged into deep, polluted water. She focused on the auspex to calm herself, watching the blue markers of Talon and Silence draw closer to either side of her machine. They would normally have spread out, relying on auspex and vox to stay connected, but with Silence hobbling on a half-broken track they stayed as close as they could.
They kept on moving for four hours. They passed along roads littered with the carcasses of vehicles, through the rusted metal ribs of buildings and past pools of congealing slime. The clatter of their tracks and the breath of their exhausts vanished in the pus-thick vapour. No one said anything, not inside the machines and not across the vox. The only noise was the sound of the engines turning the tracks and the hiss of the air pumping into breath masks.
‘Have to stop,’ said Brel, and the sound of his voice made Tahirah jump.
‘Problem?’ she said. The vox crackled for a second, and then Brel’s voice came back.
‘Track rattle has changed pitch,’ he said, his voice thick with exhaustion.
Terra, do we all sound like that? wondered Tahirah.
‘Might be the metal is weakening. Don’t want to push it.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, swallowing a wave of her own tiredness. Her mouth was gritty and an ache pulsed behind her eyes. ‘Fine. Sure.’ She blinked and shook her head, trying to bring everything back into focus. Much longer out here and we might not be able to make it back. She thumbed the squadron-wide vox. ‘All machines, halt fifteen minutes. Cool the engines down. Keep vox and auspex live.’
Akil and Brel acknowledged, but she only half heard them. She felt herself start to sag forwards, caught herself and jerked back into her seat. She had to stay awake somehow. She tried to figure out where they were for a moment, running calculations and comparing the grim sights they had passed against the luminous maps on her command console. It did not work. She found her eyes fluttering after the second distance calculation. At least with the engine off, Lantern was still and quiet.
She had to stay awake...
She had...
Tahirah’s eyes opened wide and her head snapped up so fast that it slammed into the hatch above. Sharp pain burned away the after-image of a dream. Her head was pulsing with pain that was not just from hitting it. She swallowed, trying to clear a taste of bile from her mouth.
Lantern trembled.
Tahirah went still. Had that been real? It had not felt like one of the tremors which ran through the machine when it was moving. No, it felt like the ground beneath them had shaken. Slowly she turned her head to look at Lachlan. The gunner was slumped sideways, asleep, the hood of his suit riding up so that the eyepieces were pressed against his forehead. Perhaps it had not been real; perhaps it was just an echo from her dream that had yet to fade. Her head felt like someone had hammered a nail into the centre of her forehead. Carefully she thumbed the internal vox.
‘Anyone else feel that?’ No reply came. She clicked transmit again.
The tremor came again. Lachlan shifted in his sleep but did not wake.
Tahirah had already flicked on her active sight, and had her eyes pressed against the viewfinder. The world outside was as it had been: a swirling bank of fog painted in the washed-out green-white of infra-sight. Clefts opened in the murk and then closed again, like corridors glimpsed beyond briefly opened doors.
Somewhere in the distance a spot of light and heat bloomed, spreading its illumination through the fog before shrinking to nothing. A second later she heard the rumble of a detonation. She switched to normal vision. A heartbeat later an orange glow formed, strobing with secondary detentions.
Tahirah bit her lip. The explosions were distant, but they were in the direction they would have to go to get to the shelter. Orbital strikes, perhaps? Long-range artillery or macro-rocket fire? But the metal of her machine was still; something else had shaken the ground. The tremor came again, and then again, as though in answer to her thoughts. Something in the slow rhythm of it made her think of being alone in a dark forest with the sound of unseen horrors circling at the edge of sight.
‘Lieutenant.’ Brel’s voice sounded tired and cold, but for some reason she had never been so pleased to hear any other. ‘Did you feel that?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There are explosions to the south-east.’
�
��Could be,’ he said. Was that a note of hope in his voice?
‘But the vibrations and the explosions are not synchronised.’
‘Maybe the shockwave takes longer to go through rock and earth.’
‘Maybe.’ She heard the lack of conviction in her own voice. ‘I think we should go cold. Full power down, sights off. No comms.’
‘What?’ said Brel, but she was already clicking another key on the vox.
‘Akil, do you hear me?’ She waited for a second then thumbed transmit again. ‘Akil.’
‘I hear you, lieutenant.’ His voice sounded as if he was struggling to wake up.
‘Good.’ She keyed the squadron-wide vox again. ‘All units, we are going cold and silent. Shut everything down apart from the air. I mean everything. Do not move, do not use anything that gives heat or uses power. Wake the vox up again in thirty, three–zero, minutes.’
She looked into her sight one last time, her hand going to the power stud.
The ground shook, and shook again.
‘Wait a second–’ Brel began, but never got to finish his protest.
The Titan strode out of the fog in front of Tahirah’s eyes as if stepping from behind a curtain. Curved plates of metres-thick armour covered its shoulders, and its back seemed bent under the weight of racked missiles. Pitted orange paint lacquered its metal skin. Its arms were long-barrelled weapons. The oily skins of void shields sparkled in the fog, and electric green light burned in its eyes. Beams of scanners swept in front of it, while pistons the width of tree trunks hissed as it took another step.
It was a god of war, an apex war machine. It was a Battle Titan, and the world shook beneath its tread.
‘Back!’ Tahirah felt the scream rip from her throat. Makis was shouting too, Lantern’s engine was roaring into full life, and the vox was crackling with the shouts of the rest of the crew. The Titan came on in unhurried strides. Fire leapt from its right arm overhead, chugging and coughing as the weapon barrels turned.
Talon screamed in protest as Akil engaged full power to its cold gears. It jumped back, tracks gouging into the ground.
‘I can’t see it!’ shouted Udo. The kid was hugging the lascannon sight, his hand on the firing lever. The ground around them erupted. The scout rose into the air and slammed back down. Yellow and red firelight flashed through the view slits, and the hull rang with the kiss of shrapnel. Akil whipped forward as Talon hit the ground. Pain detonated in his skull. A high-pitched buzz seemed to surround him, and warm liquid trickled down his forehead into his left eye. He reached for the control sticks, feeling their shape through his gloves even as his vision clogged and blurred. Talon was still moving, its tracks skidding and turning it as soon as it hit the ground. Akil rammed the right track forwards and the machine lurched around.
Outside the hull the Titan’s gun roared again, and the world quaked as though shaken by one of the old gods. He slammed Talon onwards, the gears screaming as they meshed at full speed.
They had seconds at best. He had heard stories of Titans, even seen a few remembrancer pict-captures of them in action. They carried enough firepower to turn a city to rubble and heat-cracked glass. Talon was still alive only because the god-machine had only extended a fraction of its power to kill them.
Through his blurred view he could see blue-white light strobing beyond the view slits, and hear the scream of plasma cutting through the fog. The Lantern’s plasma destroyer was firing up at the advancing machine. The beam of plasma hit the Titan’s first void shield and crumpled it in a wash of static. The Titan bellowed in reply, its war-horns howling above the sound of its footsteps. Its left weapon arm began to glow, lightning gathering in ribbed focusing coils. Steam began to vent along the weapon’s length.
The barrels of its right arm started to turn.
‘How long until we can fire again?’ shouted Tahirah. Lantern was jolting as it moved, slewing from side to side as Makis tried to make them as hard to hit as possible.
Heat fumed from the main gun. Sweat was running down the inside of Tahirah’s suit in rivulets, stinging her eyes as she tried to focus. They had taken one of the Titan’s shields down, maybe two, but they had not even touched the Titan itself.
‘Sponsons fire!’ Tahirah shouted, wishing she had learned the gunners’ damned names.
Both sponsons fired. White bolts of energy whipped out, burning the air, spilling across the Titan’s shields in rings of light. Another void shield trembled, fizzed and collapsed. The lascannons kept firing, punching into the next layer. She watched the Titan’s gatling weapon building ponderous speed as it turned, while the plasma weapon on its other arm was breathing heat and sparks into the fog as its power built.
‘Fire main gun!’
‘Not yet.’
‘Now, or we won’t get a chance.’
Lachlan cursed, and pushed the firing stud. The beam of plasma shrieked from the gun’s throat even as it overheated. Scalding gas vented from the breech block next to Lachlan, spilling over the shielding plates in terrifying, neon clouds. Lachlan screamed as the gas enveloped him, his enviro-suit melting to his skin, his lungs blistering in the heat. Alarms wailed.
Tahirah kept her eyes on the Titan as emergency coolant frosted the inside of the turret. The plasma stream hit the Titan’s shields and blew them out one after another. Exotic energy discharged in a peal of false thunder and a sheet of lightning.
Then the flash faded and the image of the Titan returned, standing still, stripped of its cloak of shields. For a second the god in iron stood naked under her gaze.
‘Sponsons fire,’ she said, but she knew it was too late. The Titan strode towards her, closing the distance with steps that cratered the ground. The angry light around the god-machine’s plasma destructor was a forged-steel red. She could almost hear the power in the weapon roaring to be free.
The Titan’s weapon fired at the exact moment the shell hit it from the side.
A jagged star of light formed where the left arm had been, and then shattered. The fog flashed white. The Titan staggered. Blast shields blinked shut over its eye ports. Fire spilled up its body from the remains of its arm, and debris rained to the ground. Its armour rippled with heat, shedding burnt flakes of paint. The god-machine’s great flat head dipped, and then shook like a fighter recovering from a heavy punch. Burning oil and sparks bled from cracks in its armour, and pain growled from half-melted war-horns. Then the head rose, and the Titan straightened with a shriek of heat-warped gears.
It opened fire. Shells tore from its remaining arm, churning the ground in front of it and filling the air with the thunder of its rage.
Lantern shook like a matchbox dancing in a hailstorm.
‘Go,’ said Brel in Tahirah’s ear. For a second she felt that it was a cool breath of calm cutting through the fury. ‘You hear me. Take your machines and run.’
Her entire world was vibration and noise.
‘You–’ she began, but the shouted words vanished into the roar of explosions.
‘Our track’s broken, Tahirah,’ said Brel, as if he were pointing out an obvious but easily overlooked fact of life. ‘Broken properly. That Titan will kill anything that remains here. There is no coming out of this. Not for us.’
Even wrapped in the oven heat of her tank, the words sent a shiver over Tahirah’s skin when she realised Brel had never used her proper name before.
‘Run,’ he said again, and the vox cut out.
For a second Tahirah said nothing. She felt her heart beat once and the shells shake the ground in answer.
‘Ready?’ said Brel. He did not look at the rest of his crew. Not at Jallinika, crammed close to him in the turret. Not at Selq, crouching in the space beneath his feet. Not at Calsuriz, who had pulled his bulk out of the driving seat and was crouched next to the frontal lascannon.
He did not need to look at them to know tha
t they would be where they needed to be. They had all heard what he had said to Tahirah; he had opened the transmission to the internal vox. None of them had said anything when he told the lie. The inside of Silence was ringing with the noise of explosions. The sound seemed to fade until it was the slow deep surge of the sea on the world he had left long ago, the only world he had called home.
‘No way we could have run with a broken track anyway,’ said Jallinika. Brel glanced at her, and then away. He nodded once.
So this is how it really does end, he thought. This is what I was trying to dodge and outrun all this time. I really am a fool.
‘Okay,’ he said, and nodded again. He did not need to look into the sight again to know where the enemy was. The grinding crash of its wounded steps rang through the hull.
A red light lit on his command console. A scanning array had touched them; the Titan had seen them.
‘Fire!’ he shouted.
Silence spoke for the last time, and the god it had wounded answered in kind.
Anarchy. No other word could sum up the first loyalist reinforcement of Tallarn. The ships that had swarmed to Tallarn’s aid brought remnants of Legion strike forces, Imperial Army grand cohorts, Titan battle groups and countless other divisions.
But they brought no single commander to marshal their efforts. In the void, hundreds of ships fought to reach the planet. Landing craft died and fell through Tallarn’s deadly air. On the surface, dozens of fractured commands contested against each other even as they fought the enemy. Who had authority over whom? What was the plan? What should they do? No single command had brought them to Tallarn, so there was no single answer.
In the end it was their numbers that saved the loyalists from disaster. Through chance they had approached Tallarn from every segment of the system sphere, and at broken intervals. Most of all, they arrived in huge numbers – lone ships, squadrons and ragged fleets, they came like carrion feeders to a corpse. With no unified plan of attack, they all did the simplest thing that they could: they fought to pour troops onto Tallarn’s surface.
