Tallarn

by John French

  Amidst the silence of the Nerren gulf, the ships of Niobe the Castigator heard.

  Alone in the tower of his war-barque, Tempis Lor – General of Seventy Thousand Swords – heard.

  And in a hundred more quiet places, a thousand more, the loyal warriors of Emperor heard. And one by one, they rose to answer the siren call of war.

  Ironclad

  263 days after the death of Tallarn [unconfirmed estimate]

  ‘Victory is a child of many parents. Defeat is an orphan.’

  – ancient Terran aphorism, origin unknown

  ‘To know war we should ask the dead how they ended, not the living how they endured.’

  – General Zavier Gorn, recorded remarks

  ‘To think that we know everything is a condition of the human mind. The animal within us cannot tolerate the possibility that knowledge is a matter of selection, judgement a matter of focus, clarity a consequence of exclusion.

  There is not one truth.

  Reality does not break along clean lines.’

  – Precepts of the Vanus Temple, Officio Assassinorum

  Part One

  SEEKERS

  Night fell across the face of Tallarn, and the war machines followed the dying light. Dust rose in their wake as the drying ground powdered under their tracks. If any living thing could have stood on the surface of Tallarn and survived, they would have heard the approach of the machines long before they saw them. Spread out in long lines, or clustered together, they covered the dark ground in a carpet of armour. It was not an army. Such a name could not touch its nature.

  It was a host.

  They had come from dozens of the buried shelters across Tallarn, war machines bearing the scars of war like honours bestowed by great kings. Between them walked the automata of the Mechanicum, and above them the god machines of the Titan Legions strode. Signals crackled between them, swarming invisibly through the air.

  Far behind the advancing host, men and women waited in small rooms filled with the voices that scratched from speaker grilles. Few spoke, most simply waited and listened. There was nothing they could do now. All the weeks of planning, preparation and coordination were unfolding across the dead land above. Some twitched with nervousness. Others simply stared into space with the dead eyes of people who were trying not to feel anything. A few slept, slumped over their consoles, in spite of the power of the moment. No one woke them. Sleep would be banished soon enough.

  In the time since the first loyalist forces had reached Tallarn there had been two attempts to do what they now were trying to do again. This night would be the third attempt to break the Iron Warriors foothold on the surface of Tallarn, and bring the battle to an end.

  One

  Waking

  Arrival

  Sight

  ‘War Anvil, confirm unit status.’ The voice from the vox filled Kord’s ears.

  ‘Closing on waypoint,’ he replied, keeping his eyes on the auspex screen. ‘No enemy sighted.’

  ‘Attack pattern one, confirmed.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ Kord’s voice was low, steady. ‘We are at the kill edge.’

  ‘Good fortune, War Anvil.’

  He did not reply to the sign-off. The rattle of his machine filled the silence which followed.

  It was dark inside the hull. His breath had fogged the eyepieces of his enviro-suit. Six straight hours skinned inside the suit, breathing from tanks of air, unable to move more than a few inches; it was all so familiar that he had trouble thinking of how else war could be fought.

  His machine was an old Malcador assault tank, its class named for one of the Emperor’s closest courtiers. No doubt the man was a fine example of everything that was best about people who never had to see those who stood in the excrement beneath them. The tank was a brute though, with a name to match. She was called War Anvil, and was an ugly slab of tracks, armour and jutting gun barrels. A battle cannon stuck out from a turret high on her back, and a wide-mouthed demolisher cannon from a mount on her forward hull. Two lascannons nested in sponsons on the tank’s flanks. A crew of six worked inside its hull. The primary gunner and crew squeezed into a space just in front of the commander’s nest, so close that Kord could tap each of them on the shoulder without reaching. The machine’s drive and ammunition took up most of its bulk, with the sponson gunners isolated behind crawl hatches on either side of a cramped central compartment. Both the forward gunner and driver were wedged down behind the front armour plates with just room enough for them not to be killed by the demolisher’s recoil.

  It was a reliable, but ill-designed creature. The battle cannon had a limited forward traverse arc, and the sponsons could not cover the machine’s rear arc. Get behind it, and War Anvil’s armour counted for nothing. There had been a joke amongst the Jurnian officer corps that the Malcador hull was an ‘assault tank’ because no one could think of another use for a machine whose guns could only fire forwards. That did not matter to Kord. War Anvil had gotten him out of the fall of the Sapphire City, and made five kills in the process. Since then it had never failed, for all its age and flaws. If he had a home then War Anvil’s cramped and corroding insides was it.

  And now we are going back to what remains of the city we fled, he thought. He blinked away a bead of sweat running into his eye, and rechecked the unit markers on the screen. All of his machines were there, rolling forward in a line half a kilometre wide. Executioners, Vanquishers, and all the other mismatched assortment that was now his regiment: the leavings, the dregs, the survivors. In truth it was barely company strength, but he was still a Colonel Commander, and rank meant that certain formalities followed, even out here, on the dead edge of existence.

  ‘This is not going to work,’ Sacha’s voice lilted over the internal vox. He ignored it, just like he had ignored the goodwill sign-off from command. There was, quite frankly, no point in replying to either. He thumbed the unit vox, and winced as it shrieked in his ears.

  ‘All units, this is War Anvil. We are in the attack path, estimate time to outer defence units two minutes.’

  The acknowledgements came. Kord counted them off as he heard each call sign. Even if a machine was still moving, and showing an identification signal, that did not mean its crew were alive. Sometimes the seals went on a tank’s hatches, and the virus-laden air would eat through the crew’s air feeds without them noticing. Tanks had rolled on for kilometres with their crew dead inside them, their drivers’ dead hands still pressing the drive levers.

  ‘How much have we got out here?’ It was Sacha again. She was resting her head on the breech of the battle cannon. He did not look at her. The screen in front of him was more important than her need to talk her nerves out. ‘I mean,’ she carried on, ‘how many machines are in just this wave? Five hundred? A thousand? Throne, that’s just us tank riders. I heard the Titans are walking for this. That’s enough rolling iron to shake the ground all the way back to the stars.’ She laughed nervously. ‘They just expect the Iron Warriors not to have spotted it?’

  Kord was watching the distance to their waypoint count down across the auspex screen. He keyed the external vox.

  ‘All units–’

  ‘I mean, is this plan just based on us being dumb, or them being dumber?’

  ‘Light weapons and fire free. Anything in front of us is a target. Repeat, light weapons, fire free.’

  Sacha sat up and rolled her shoulders and neck, the heavy folds of her enviro-suit squeaking as they rubbed together.

  ‘And if they are not dumb–’

  ‘Sacha,’ he said, leaning in to press his eyes against the forward sight.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Load the gun, and then be quiet.’

  A second later he felt the thump as the cannon’s breech closed on a shell. Explosive, and incen
diary; he did not need to check that Sacha had remembered the mission briefing. Her inability to shut up had nothing to do with her memory, or how she handled the main cannon.

  ‘Fog’s not thinned.’ It was Saul. Kord could almost hear the forward gunner trying to force down his fear and fatigue. Kord squinted into the swirling green light of his own gunsight, and keyed the regimental vox.

  ‘Razor, this is War Anvil, what can you see?’

  ‘Nothing, looks clear,’ Origo’s voice came back straight away, clipped and sharp, ‘but they are there. I know.’

  Kord nodded. Origo’s scout squadron was half a kilometre in front of them, spread out and watching for the enemy.

  ‘Never a good start,’ muttered Sacha.

  ‘Passing waypoint one,’ called Mori from the driver’s nest. Kord took a slow breath, counted long seconds as he breathed it out again. Just in front of him Zade leaned into the battle cannon’s sight, and flicked the guard off the firing trigger.

  Kord keyed the regimental-wide vox.

  ‘Okay, let’s light this up. All units on my word.’ He was sighting into the murk which boiled across the forward sight. ‘The word is Vengeance.’ He pulled the trigger, and the dark, shrouded world became a sheet of light.

  The air of Isstvan V was fire. Hrend could not see the horizon. A firestorm rolled above and around Hrend. The shrill of his armour’s integrity and heat alarms had ceased several minutes before. He could feel coldness creeping across his flesh. He was breathing fumes and smoke but he could not smell them. He felt like shivering despite the flames all around. He knew what that meant. The air in his lungs, in his nose, in his throat, was burning him from the inside. The seals around his waist and knees had melted, and the fire was seeping in. He was cooking inside his armour. He was dying.

  ‘Iron within…’ he rasped, feeling blisters form on his lips and tongue.

  He kept wading forward, armour hissing and shrieking as it fought against damage. The ground sucked at his legs as he forced himself towards the cover of the wreck of a… He was not sure what it had been, a Rhino perhaps, but his helmet visor had dimmed to near blackness, and the wreck was a twisted shell. The vox scratched in his ear, but he knew better than to respond. It was just a ghost of distortion, the inferno laughing at him for his defiance. He was alone out here, in the swamp made by the burning blood of his brothers and their war machines.

  ‘Iron without…’

  He had failed. That much was clear. Surrounded, betrayed and outnumbered, the Raven Guard and Salamanders were doomed. But they still had teeth to bite back with. He should have anticipated how they would respond. He should have deployed differently. He should… He should have died when the first rocket salvoes hit. That was the reward he had earned by his weakness, and if he ended now it would only be because he had proved weak again.

  He reached the wreck. The edges of its shattered hull were glowing like metal pulled from a forge.

  ‘Iron…’ he heaved a burning breath. His vision blurred as the moisture cooked in his eyeballs. ‘Iron…’ He slid to the floor, and the fire closed over him… burning…

  ‘Master.’ The word sent a buzz of pain through him, and the dream of Isstvan melted into waking. For a second he felt as if he were drowning, as if warm, black water were all around him. Then his nerves reconnected him to the Dreadnought, and he was ironclad again. The remains of his body flickered with a memory of pain. For a second the weak core of his being wanted to scream.

  ‘Master,’ the voice came again.

  Waking was worse than dying.

  Silence surrounded him. When he had been alive, before he had been reborn as a Dreadnought, he had never noticed the soft clamour that life made: the beat of hearts and blood, the rise and fall of breath, the almost imperceptible noises of muscle and bone moving together. When he woke now it was to blank nothingness.

  Slowly he activated the Dreadnought’s senses. Sound came first. The wind whistled around him. Then he became aware of his limbs, of the pistons and servos waiting for his will, of the weapons which were part of him. Last he activated the sensor pod set into the sarcophagus like a helm in a suit of armour. He looked out through his machine’s eyes. Through his eyes.

  Fog swirled in the green murk before him. Rangefinders, infra-sensors and auspex arrays began to overlay his sight. He could see the enemy now. Distant pinpricks of heat growing brighter as they came closer.

  ‘Master, do you hear?’ The voice broke through the moan of the wind.

  ‘I hear,’ he said, feeling the machine take the words from the flayed nerves of his throat and cast them across the vox.

  ‘The enemy are advancing,’ said the voice. Jarvak, he thought, watching the input from his machine senses scroll across his view in columns of data. All of the war machines of his command were in position, scattered through the ruins around him. They had been waiting for twenty hours, three minutes, and forty-five seconds precisely. Jarvak had woken him at the correct time.

  Hrend watched the enemy advance. The pattern of their deployment was not ideal, and their formation lacked precision. They had also yet to detect Hrend or any of his force. Part of him wondered why they were attacking in this way. It was hopeless. The Sightless Warren would not fall. It was born of iron, and guarded by iron, and would never fail.

  ‘Stand ready,’ he said.

  ‘By your will,’ came the reply from Jarvak.

  Hrend saw the data-stream change as the status of the three Predators, and two Venators changed to active. Their systems were still half dormant, their heat and electronic signatures small enough that they should be invisible to auspexes. At least that was the intention. That left his two ironclad brothers.

  ‘Orun? Gortun?’ he spoke their names. No reply came for a second.

  ‘I wake, master.’ Orun’s voice was flat and metallic. It was the mirror of Hrend’s own voice.

  Gortun’s answer was a growl of static.

  Hrend watched and waited until the enemy units were on the edge of the kill zone created by his group’s guns.

  ‘Iron,’ he said, and then paused. A squall of dull blackness pulled at him, and somewhere he felt the cartilage of his charred throat try and form the next word. ‘Within.’

  ‘Iron without,’ came the reply from his brothers.

  The gunship launched as its parent strike ship skimmed close to Tallarn. In the craft’s cockpit Argonis watched as warning lights washed his view of Tallarn’s orbit.

  The planet looked like a ball of rancid yellow fat, shot through with smudges of smoke. Wreckage caged its orbits, glittering in long streams and banks of twisted metal. The fires of a void battle glittered above the planet’s northern polar region. It looked like a big fight to Argonis’s eyes. He corrected his course to ensure that they would come nowhere near the battle-sphere, locked onto his primary target, and pushed the engines to maximum thrust. Locked into the pilot rig, encased in power armour, he felt the hammer blow of full burn as a growing pressure.

  ‘Advise-warn you, current engine burn and trajectory will result in damage,’ Sota-Nul’s voice scratched in his ears. He did not reply. He had not asked her to link into the gunship, but it was inevitable that she would. For a human supposedly divested of emotion in favour of pure logic she was remarkably predictable. ‘Probability of engine output degradation currently at eighty-five point two-one,’ she added after a moment. ‘Estimated.’

  He did not reply. There was no point.

  His target was coming up fast. The outer picket ships of the Iron Blood’s first defence envelop were growing from distant dots to slabs of metal picked out in starlight. He threw the gunship into an irregular spiral, and watched two warning runes flick from amber to red in his helmet display.

  ‘Combat display active,’ he said, and space all around him became a network of blue, red and green arcs of potential targets. They disregarded
warships of course; he doubted if even the smallest of them would notice if he fired at them.

  ‘Auspexes and multiple targeting arrays have locked onto us.’

  ‘Transmit the identification signal,’ he said.

  ‘Compliance,’ droned the tech-witch. ‘Suggest we cut speed, alter course to a steady trajectory, and disable weapons.’

  ‘No,’ he said, without pause. ‘Transmit the signal, and then see if they still think the best course of action is to blow us out of the void.’

  The outer picket ships were now vast cliffs blocking out the sight of Tallarn and the light of its star. Beyond them the inner shell of ships waited, and within their sphere the vast, notched chisel outline of the Iron Blood.

  He yanked the gunship into a jagged skid and flicked into a spiral, as the tones of target locks grew in his ears.

  He waited, feeling the familiar tug of G-force at his flesh inside his armour. He had missed this, had missed the feeling of mingled control and danger singing in his senses. It made him feel alive again, and let him forget how close he had come to death at the hands of his lord. There was another reason to dance through the Iron Warriors gun sensors. Skimming in, weapons live, targeters active, daring them to fire and then cutting them dead: it was a message, a statement of intent. Do not confuse might with power, it said.

  Still, he would not like to have to do this in reality.

  ‘The Fourth Legion vessels have dropped their target lock,’ said Sota-Nul.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘They are hailing us.’

  ‘Give me the vox.’

  ‘Compliance.’

  Static popped in his ears, rose in pitch and then faded.

  ‘The warships and warriors of the Fourth Legion welcome you, honoured emissary.’ The voice paused. Argonis thought he recognised it, the sour tone, the sharp edges used to command but not to courtesy. Forrix, of course. Not the Lord of Iron, not yet, not until they were sure why Argonis was here.