by John French
Jalen shook his head, sorrow creasing the tattoos around his eyes.
‘Akil–’
‘There is nothing left!’ roared Akil. He gulped a breath, and felt the tears on his face. ‘There is nothing left.’
‘You will not believe me, I can see that, but I tell you truly that we had no hand in what was done here. Others acted in a way that we had not anticipated. But you are still here, and so are we, and there is something that you can do to save Tallarn’s future, Akil.’ He paused and Akil looked up to see that the sorrow had faded from Jalen’s eyes. ‘There is something left.’
Akil shook his head, but coldness had spread through him at Jalen’s words.
‘What could you possibly–’
‘Your daughters, Akil. Both of them alive and well, and hoping that you are too.’
Akil said nothing. He could say nothing. Voices spiralled through his thoughts.
Let it be true. Please let it be true. No, it cannot be. Oh Terra, where are they...? Can they be alive? Is it a trick, a lie? How is this possible?
Jalen tilted his head, as though he were listening. Then he reached into a thigh pocket and pulled out a battered data-slate, and keyed it to wakefulness. The screen was cracked and smeared with fingerprints, but the images that moved across its surface held Akil still: two small faces framed by curls of black hair, dark eyes wide and wary. As Akil looked, one glanced at the other as if for reassurance.
Mina, he thought. It is all right, it will be all right. He felt his eyes sting and his throat lock.
‘You see,’ said Jalen softly. In the screen a tattoo-covered hand extended into the image, palm up as if asking for something. Akil watched as Emerita nodded to her sister, and Mina placed a small strip of woven fabric in the tattooed palm. The hand withdrew and the image cut out.
Akil looked up at Jalen. The tattooed man was holding out an open hand. The red, orange and blue threads were worn, and the edges frayed, but the colours were still as bright as the day he had last seen it flicking around at the end of Mina’s braid. He reached out and took the small piece of fabric, and stared at it for a long moment. When he looked up, he could feel the coldness spreading under his skin once more. It took him a second to speak.
‘What do you want from me?’
Jalen nodded without smiling, his face without expression.
‘In seventeen minutes, all units in this shelter will be called to deploy in the world above. They will join those already ringing the entrances. The Iron Warriors and their allies have come in force. They mean to break the armies that have come to your aid, then to break open this shelter and make it their own – their first fortress from which to fight the rest of this battle.’
‘The rest of the battle?’
‘Yes. The forces that now fill your shelter, and war in the skies above, are just the beginning. More will come, and more still to aid the Iron Warriors. More and more flesh and iron poured onto this world, until it is choked and both sides have nothing more to give and no more blood left to spill.’
Akil snorted and shook his head. ‘Is that what you want to happen, or what you fear?’
‘Very good, very good,’ said Jalen. A sudden smile sent the lizards squirming over his cheeks. ‘I should have remembered the reasons we came to you. You always were clever, Akil, but now you must listen.’
Jalen’s face was no longer smiling – his expression was hard, his eyes unblinking. Akil felt as though he could not look away from the face that suddenly seemed something very far from friendly.
‘In the battle to come, you will receive a signal with a single word. When you hear that word you must let the forces that are approaching you at that time pass. No harm will come to you, but they must pass.’
‘Pass... and reach the shelter?’ Akil paused, and Jalen inclined his head. ‘What will happen then?’
‘You will run, and live again, and so will your daughters.’
‘How could they find me in the middle of a battle?’
Jalen’s eyes seemed to sparkle. ‘They will find you.’
Akil let out a breath. He wanted to close his eyes, to fall back into the soft world of sleep and dreams, in which the path in front of him did not exist – a world where this choice was not his to make. The woven threads brushed his skin as he moved his hand.
A choice, said a voice from the cold core of his mind. There never was a choice.
‘What will the word in the signal be?’
‘Salvation.’
Jalen stood, handed Akil back his knife, and raised the palm of his left hand. The swirls and patterns of the tattoos caught the hazy glow of the light. Akil had a momentary impression of feathers and scales, and then a new pattern spread across Jalen’s palm in luminous green: two lines joined to form a triangle without a base. Reptilian heads and serpentine necks coiled around the symbol, their eyes and scales shimmering with cold light.
Akil hesitated, then raised his left hand and felt his own palm tingle as the electoo lit for only the second time in his life. Jalen closed his palm and gave a small bow. The tattooed patterns drained from his skin as he turned and stepped towards the door.
‘Do not worry, my friend,’ said Jalen, his hand on the door latch. ‘You are on the right side.’
Sound filled the cavern. It billowed into the air from ten thousand engines, and rattled with hatches locking shut. It grew like the waking growl of a vast beast made of metal and turning gears.
Tahirah ran through the growing swell of sound. She dodged loading servitors, and ran down the fume-filled corridors between tanks. She had been asleep when the deployment order had begun blaring from the vox-system. The contents of a bottle had been helping her not to dream; they had not done a good job. She had awoken thinking that it was happening again, that the bombs were falling and that the killing fog would fill the shelter. Then she had recognised the full alert signal and laughed to herself.
It was happening all over again, just in a different way.
A Malcador heavy tank began to grind backwards as she ran past it, almost catching her under its tracks. She swore at its metal back and kept moving. She was tired, so damned tired – tired enough to just stop and let whatever would happen be. But she ran anyway, pulling the seals on her enviro-suit shut, looking for the Lantern amongst the ranks of machines.
Every tank that could turn a track or wheel was scrambling to deploy. There were to be no exceptions, and if she was not there then Lantern would roll into the world above without her. She would not let that happen. No matter how tired she felt, no matter how much she thought that most of the machines here would end up as coffins for their crews, still she would not leave her machine and crew to go to war without her.
‘Tahirah!’
She twisted, looking for a familiar face. Udo stood half out of Lantern’s turret hatch, the hood and mask of his enviro-suit hanging down his chest like flayed skin. A grin spread across his unshaven face.
‘Why on Terra are you smiling?’
Udo looked puzzled for a moment, and the grin faltered. ‘Sorry, boss,’ he muttered. She had a feeling she knew why he was with Lantern rather than with Akil and Talon. She shook her head – her eyes felt gritty with incomplete sleep and going too far down the bottle to get there. ‘Just good to know you’re coming out with us,’ he said.
She ignored the remark, and clambered onto the top of her machine. Its camouflage scheme was long gone, stripped by decontamination and the air of the world above. A patina of dull colours and chips now covered Lantern’s hull like stains on a butcher’s apron. The main gun was cool and silent, the length of its outer cowling scorched black from the weapon’s own heat.
‘Out of the turret,’ she said to Udo, with a jerk of her head. He opened his mouth and took a breath to speak. She really did not want this, not now. Not ever, in fact.
‘You... you need
a new gunner.’
‘One of the sponson gunners will take the main gun.’
‘They haven’t got a clue, Tah.’
‘It’s Lieutenant Tahirah,’ she spat. ‘And before you point out more of the blindingly obvious – yes, I know that it will leave me with one sponson down, but you seem keen to leave Akil with no gunner at all, so get out of my machine and get to your own.’
‘He’s not here, Tah– lieutenant.’
‘What?’
Udo shrugged. ‘Akil. I haven’t seen him for hours.’
Tahirah just looked at him for a second. What the hell was she supposed to do now? A squadron of one? Great, just great. High above her a muster horn sounded into the cavern. The lights began to pulse, turning everything to a strobing yellow twilight. Hatches clattered shut across a field of tanks.
‘Lieutenant.’
She looked around. Akil was standing next to Lantern’s left flank. He was panting, sweat beading his forehead. His enviro-suit looked as if he had rushed to pull it on as he ran. That almost made her laugh. Udo’s shoulders slumped.
‘Both of you, get to your machine, and get ready to move.’
Udo did not argue.
She swung up onto Lantern’s turret and dropped inside. The rest of the crew were already there, compulsively checking equipment. She reached up to pull the hatch down, then paused. For a second she saw the cavern laid out before her: the blunt shapes of war machines waiting under the pulsing light and the blare of the horns. The machines nearest the doors started their engines, and the rumble of them rose in a chorus. Fumes belched from exhausts. For a long moment Tahirah just watched, waiting until the warning lights around the outer doors turned to green. Then she pulled the hatch shut and Lantern was her entire world once again.
The Iron Warriors burned the remains of the Sapphire City before their assault. Fire fell from the sky, salted from the ships in orbit high above. Flames rolled through the skeletons of buildings, gathering small cyclones of heat around themselves as they fed. Phosphex flowed down streets, eating through stone and iron with a crackling hunger. Hammer blows of ordnance reduced buildings to rubble even as they burned. The light of the flames turned the smoke and fog into sheets of blood-red and pus-yellow.
The ships stopped firing, and for a moment the corpse of the Sapphire City was allowed simply to burn. Then the long-range guns took up the beat, and the dead city shook again as the Iron Warriors advanced from the coastal plain.
Mountains rose to the north of the advancing host, their tops lost in the fog. On their southern flank, the sludge-clotted ocean sat like a black mirror. The Iron Warriors came in clusters and waves, a grinding tide of iron thirty kilometres wide and a hundred deep.
The siege engines were the first to enter the dead city. Block-hulled machines, with skirts of riveted ceramite, ground the rubble to powder under their tracks. Wide-mouthed guns jutted from their hulls and turrets, and armoured dozer blades shunted rubble aside as though it were freshly fallen snow. They crossed into the maze of rubble-choked roads and shattered buildings, auspex sifting the ruins for their enemy. Splinters of stone pattered on their hulls as the dust of the bombardment settled. The crews of these behemoths were not the Iron Warriors, though they bore the marks of service to Perturabo and his sons. They pressed forward for ten metres, a hundred metres, two hundred metres... and still nothing. Signals flickered between the advancing machines: had anyone seen anything? Why were there no wrecks? Perhaps the bombardment had already destroyed the enemy?
The 17th Company of the 81st Galibed Oathsworn had served beside the Iron Warriors for two decades. It had been their machines that had advanced into the fury of the Laccomil Gap on Tarnic IV, and Perturabo himself had ordered the company reborn after its death on Necibis. Now they advanced at the tip of the first wave – thirty Malcador, Demolisher and Thunderer siege tanks in coal-black. The Oathsworn had passed through five kilometres of silent cityscape when they became the first true casualties of the battle.
On a gully floor that had once been the city’s widest road, a line of green light flicked out from ruins to the side of the Oathsworn column. The luminous beam touched the hull of a Demolisher tank and burrowed into its heart. The tank vanished, its hull exploding outwards in a ragged cloud. The two machines to either side of it flipped over like tossed playing cards. The beam of green light disappeared, and then flicked out again. Another tank vanished.
Inside the advancing Oathsworn vehicles, auspex screens began to light with heat and energy blooms. The siege tanks began to fire, coughing fat shells into the ground in front of them. More fire came from amongst the ruins as the hidden tanks of the defenders came to life and fired.
Across the width of the city, from north to south, the defenders emerged from their prepared ambush sites. Hundreds of tanks died in moments, their hulls punctured or split by explosions. More defenders emerged from the maze of ruins to kill and kill again. To the south, in the water-choked ruins along the coast, walking machines of the Mechanicum pulled themselves from drowned tunnels. Twice the height of men but without flesh or faces, they stalked through the ruins, lightning reaching from their weapon arms to crawl across tank hulls and cook the crews inside.
For a moment, the invaders’ advance faltered. Then a second wave of attackers broke over the first.
The defenders who had survived the bombardment died then. They died in fire, their hulls holed through, their bodies blown into rags of skin and meat. They died in the gaps between heartbeats, their ears ringing with the bellow of shell impacts. They died thinking a thousand thoughts of home, and faces they would never see again.
Akil felt the shaking blows of falling shells as Talon crested the ramp’s edge. To either side of him, more machines poured out from the protection of the earth. Fragments of light and colour flashed through the view slits: columns of fire illuminating the fog, lighting up the black bones of buildings. Everything was shaking. His mouth was paper dry, the rubber smell of the suit thick in his throat.
‘Watch out!’ screamed Udo, and Akil just had time to yank Talon to one side before it rammed into the machine in front.
He cursed. Tanks were pouring from the shelter entrance so close together that it was like a herd of cattle jostling at a field gate. Shells exploded amongst them, flipping their hulls over and leaving wide craters in the ground. Akil pushed Talon forwards, keeping the shape of Lantern in his view. He could barely see where he was going, and the general vox was a wall of incoherent noise.
This is not a battle, he thought. It is a riot. He keyed the squadron frequency.
‘Where the hell are we going?’ he shouted into the vox.
‘Two kilometres out, then halt,’ came Tahirah’s voice. ‘We are forming a line to the south-east to meet the enemy before they can reach the central shelter entrances. The same is happening to shield the northern and southern entrances.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s all the commanders could agree between them, so that’s the plan. That’s what the hidden units on the surface bought us – time to get out and form a line across the city.’
Akil shook his head. ‘How many enemy are there?’
‘I don’t know. Ten thousand? Fifty?’
‘And we are just going out to meet them?’
‘What choice do we have? If they reach the entrances, they will burn through, and then we have no hope.’ Her voice cracked, and he could hear the exhaustion through the vox-distortion. ‘Winning is the only way we have to live.’
Akil said nothing, and after a moment keyed the vox off.
The Iron Warriors hit the defenders around the northern shelter entrance in a wedge of three hundred machines. At its tip, seven Fellblades punched into the still forming lines of defenders like a mailed fist into flak board. A few defenders had tried to stand before the super-heavy tanks, their guns firing at the huge machine
s. Accelerator cannons answered, punching shells through buildings and armour. Black clouds of smoke thumped into the air, flattening and splitting to show the red fire within.
The lesser Iron Warriors machines followed, killing the half-dead and the crippled. Vindicators and mortar carriers lobbed shells in front of the column’s advance, the overlapping explosions unfolding like scattered flowers.
The loyalist line buckled. Machines still exiting the northern shelter entrance met machines pulling back from the Iron Warriors advance. A tangle of machines formed for a kilometre around the entrance.
In the south of the city, the Titans advanced with the Iron Warriors forces: two battle groups clad in black iron and scorch-streaked orange, striding through the murk, their void shields shimmering with the rain patter of fire. Every few moments all the Titans would seem to pause, and then they would fire as one: lines of white-hot energy cracked the ground, and torrents of shells and missiles fell like rain at the edge of a storm cloud. Their advance had been resisted, but they had obliterated all who stood against them. As the dust of their latest salvo settled, the Titans bellowed their mechanical war cries across the burning ruins.
Then the first of the towering machines broke from the pack.
Sunderer loped down the shore line, its splayed toes sinking into the sludge and slime. It was a Warhound, the smallest of its breed, but no less a god of destruction for that. A hundred metres behind, its twin followed, head and weapons swaying with its accelerating strides. They had already taken their first kills: a maniple of Cyberneticae, and a squadron of dirty-hulled battle tanks. They had been easy prey, nothing of note to machines of their kind.
Within Sunderer’s head, the crew listened to the signals boil out of the city. Thousands of the reinforcement vehicles had gathered in the Sapphire City to defend a shelter hidden beneath the ruins. It did not matter; victory was simply a matter of time.
Without warning, a stuttering line of fire rose from amongst the ruins and struck Sunderer. The Warhound’s void shields burst and explosive shells hammered into its head. The Titan shook its skull like a dog trying to shake a swarm of fire-wasps from its fur and, half blinded, fired back. Plasma and bolt-shells spat from its weapons and churned the ruins around it to dust and glowing vapour.
