Tallarn

by John French

  A new set of numbers became significant: the number of units each side had active on the surface. One side might have more war machines, or greater capacity to sustain, or recover from damage, but if the other side could outnumber and overwhelm them for a short time the reserves and stores would not matter. Governor Militant Dellasarius called it ‘the depth of cutting edge’, and by the time of the Third Assault on the Sightless Warren, it was the guiding principle of the loyalist strategy. The raiding tactics of old had become the past.

  ‘Just one vast push at the right time and the battle will be done,’ went the oft-repeated wisdom amongst the loyalists. Some commanders disagreed, some even took contradictory action, but their defiance meant little. It was a matter not of the small numbers, or of individuals. The groundswell of force, of strength and weakness, as measured in hundreds of thousands, in millions; that was what mattered, and individuals held no significance.

  Five

  Iron Warriors

  Dagger point

  Questions

  ‘All units, cut engines!’ Kord shouted the command as another sonic boom rang through War Anvil’s interior. Sacha was swearing, hands pressed over her ears. Kord was watching the auspex. It must have been a direct orbital drop, straight down from the edge of the void, fast, the kind of thing you only did if you were going straight into a war zone. He could see the aircraft now, small pips of light streaking across his screen as they banked east. Another sonic boom split the air above them, then another and another.

  ‘It’s a full flight!’ shouted Zade. Kord was adjusting the screen, throwing its viewpoint as wide as it would go. Blurred markers streaked the screen. They were out on the edge of the vast plateau which the Tallarn-born called the Khedive. The enemy formation they were tracking was forty kilometres in front of them, just at the edge of sensor range.

  Another thunder crack. Zade was not wrong, a full flight of warplanes had just dropped directly above their position. That might mean they were seconds away from being wreckage. The only thing holding him back from that conclusion was that they were still alive.

  ‘How did they find us?’ shouted Sacha.

  Kord ignored her. He took a quick breath, felt his pulse steady, and flicked over to the regiment-wide vox.

  ‘Squadron leads, this is War Anvil, what are you seeing?’

  ‘Six aircraft, so far. They are coming back around, banking towards the east,’ the voice was loud but level. Zekenilla, Kord knew without looking that she had shut down her squadron on a coin as soon as he gave the order.

  ‘They ours?’ Abbas from the First Squadron lead tank, his breath ragged. Shock? Possibly, more likely anger. That was normally the way with him.

  ‘No signals,’ said Origo. ‘They are spitting out a hell of a lot of auspex distortion. If they hadn’t come down on top of us we wouldn’t have known they were here. Probably not ours, but probably not looking for us either.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean that they might not take the chance to come back around and pick us off,’ snarled Abbas.

  ‘This far away from anything else, maybe they are just wondering what we are doing,’ said Zekenilla.

  ‘If we stay still maybe they will think we are already dead in the dust,’ added Origo.

  Kord took another breath.

  ‘Hold position,’ he said. ‘If we find we are still alive in a few minutes we can worry about other things.’

  He listened, straining to hear the aircraft over the vox hiss. Was that rumble them, or just the wind on the silent hull? The screen showed him a series of distorted marks that might mean that the aircraft were still banking, or had already cut a course to the east. The seconds stretched on.

  The roar of rockets and the crack of lascannons did not come.

  That does not mean they won’t, thought Kord. This is a battle of hunters and prey. Assume you have escaped and you make your death certain.

  ‘Sir.’ Origo’s voice cut into his thoughts. ‘I have a read on the quarry. They are still moving. Much longer sitting here and we lose them.’

  He switched the view on the auspex. The estimated position of the patrol they were tracking was drifting into blurred uncertainty.

  ‘Sir,’ Abbas said. Kord could almost hear the Tallarn-born lieutenant purse his lips as he chose his words. ‘Colonel, with all respect, what are we doing out here?’

  ‘Searching for answers,’ said Kord.

  ‘Sir,’ still Abbas, still holding his emotion on a lengthening leash, ‘it’s just a sweep patrol. Might not even be Legion machines.’

  ‘I saw a silhouette as the mist thinned five kilometres back,’ said Origo. ‘It looked like a Predator.’

  ‘Even if it is,’ pressed Abbas, ‘they are just looking for targets to take out. Targets like us. If we go much further the smaller machines aren’t going to have enough fuel to get back to the shelter.’

  ‘They aren’t on this planet to fight!’ snapped Kord, and regretted it as soon as he said it. Silence.

  ‘Sir?’ It was Zekenilla, her oh-so-steady voice touched with concern.

  Kord shook his head. All of his officers, and most of those that rode under his command, knew what he believed. They never asked him, and he never talked about it. It was an unspoken understanding that had never been tested. Except now they were on the edge of their fuel radius, watching a quarry, which only he believed was important, disappear into the distance.

  He shook his head, closed his eyes, and began to speak, suddenly unable to hide his weariness.

  ‘They thought they had won as soon as they let the first bomb fall. So why come down here after that? Why not just move on?’ He opened his eyes, wishing that he could take the suit off and rub them. ‘You have seen it as well. Legion patrols far from their bases, in areas that have no strategic value. They are not looking for targets. They are covering the ground, or keeping it clear for others that follow them. This is one of those patrols, way out, heading towards nothing important. If we want to know what they are here for, we follow them.’

  ‘That’s full of it!’ Abbas spat. An uneasy silence fell, like the pause between seeing the flash of a bomb and being hit by the blast wave. But when Abbas spoke again his voice was filled with exhaustion rather than anger. ‘There needs to be no reason for this war. We are here because we are. We lost at the Sapphire City because we were outgunned and out-fought. There is no other reason. No hidden truth that makes sense of it. It just is.’

  ‘I will let you have that, lieutenant,’ said Kord, and his voice was stone. ‘This one time.’

  ‘Command authorise this, sir?’ asked Abbas.

  Kord said nothing, there was no point. They all knew the answer.

  ‘Origo, you got anything to say to this?’ asked Kord.

  They all respected the scout. He had volunteered, one of the first. He had been there with the rest of them at the fall of the Sapphire City. Cold as a knife blade, that was what most of those who met him said.

  ‘There is always another side to things’ said Origo at last. ‘Always.’

  ‘Aircraft have passed, sir,’ said Zekenilla.

  Kord shook his head slowly, glanced at Zade and Sacha. They were looking away, leaning on the gun. They looked as though they were trying to catch a few moments of sleep. They were not of course. His crew would have heard the exchange, but he knew that they would not say anything. He had got each one of them out of the ruin of the Sapphire City, and they would follow him without a word. But Abbas had a point. This was the last moment they could turn back, and if they were going to step into what waited beyond they had to do it willingly. All of them.

  ‘All units, this is War Anvil. You know why we are out here. We are chasing ghosts that no one else believes in. Some of you might not believe in them either, but you know me. Whether you believe me or not, you all have a choice to make now – turn around and head back to the sh
elter, or follow me. We move in twenty seconds. War Anvil out.’

  He shut the vox off.

  ‘Mori, warm the engines up. Everyone else, you heard that, I’m afraid you don’t get the choice.’

  ‘Don’t really need one, sir,’ said Sacha.

  War Anvil woke to life. Kord waited, counting the seconds off in his head. When he reached twenty, he keyed the vox again.

  ‘All units, start up the engines. Let’s get moving.’

  Gradually, one after another the machines of the Tallarn 71st began to roll across the earth and into the mist. One machine, an Executioner, peeled away from the others as they fell into formation around War Anvil. The lone machine turned south. After a few minutes it was lost from the screens and sights of its comrades.

  ‘So,’ Kord heard Abbas’s voice over the vox, and could not help smile. ‘Igra decided this was not for him. Shame. Where are we going, colonel?’

  ‘Into the unknown,’ replied Kord.

  Hrend paused on the edge of the tunnel threshold. The wind wound yellow vapour over the land before him. He had not slept again since the primarch had come to him, and he would not sleep again until he returned.

  If you return, itched a thought at the back of his awareness.

  His Dreadnought brothers stood to either side of him. Blunt slabs covered Orun’s Mortis frame, the barrels of his doubled lascannons catching the passing streams of fog like fingers held in running water. On his other side, Gortun was turning his head unit slowly from side to side, spinning the drill claws of his fists up, and then letting them spin to stillness, over and over again. The tanks of the Cyllaros assault group were formed up behind them, tracks still on crusted earth. At their centre sat a Spartan carrier and a bloated mobile drill machine. Of all the machines in the group these two had to survive if the mission was to succeed. Everything and everyone else was expendable.

  ‘Master.’ Jarvak’s voice spoke the word to him. He did not reply. He knew what his lieutenant was going to ask. ‘What do we wait for?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The tunnel mouth they stood in opened in the side of a mountain range. A shallow slope slid down to meet low hills in front of him. Beyond that the land undulated away into the fog like the waves of a frozen sea. Above the tunnel mouth the bare rock of the mountain reached up to the hidden sky. The tunnel itself had been the entrance to an abandoned mine network. The Iron Warriors sappers and stone-wrights had connected it to their growing network of the Sightless Warren within a few days of the first shelter falling to them. Now it had provided Hrend and his force a door into a silent corner of the surface.

  What are we that we have made this? The thought pulled at Hrend.

  He adjusted his view, zooming in on where a line of pylons marched across the crest of a hill, and into the murk.

  ‘Do you think of the past, Jarvak?’

  ‘No, master.’ Jarvak’s voice cut into comms static. ‘I think of the task I must perform. I think of my duty.’

  ‘Duty?’

  ‘The duty we have to the primarch.’

  ‘What is that duty?’

  ‘To never fail. To never prove weak. To never break.’ Jarvak’s answer came without hesitation, but Hrend caught the note of puzzlement at the edge of the words.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Master?’

  ‘Answer.’

  ‘We are Iron Warriors.’

  We are Iron Warriors. That found an echo in his own thoughts. We are the Olympian-born, the Legion that did what others would not deign to do, the breakers and makers of war. We are the wronged, the slighted, the forgotten strength of an Imperium that turned its face from us even as we gave it the iron of our blood.

  ‘What does it mean to be an Iron Warrior?’

  ‘To be iron withi–’

  ‘Now. What does it mean now?’

  A pause, filled with the sound of the wind blowing the death shroud of a planet.

  ‘What it always meant,’ said Jarvak at last.

  Hrend said nothing, and then spoke across the vox to his entire group.

  ‘Forward.’ He stepped out of the tunnel mouth, and into the waiting desolation.

  The Sickle Blade hit the edge of Tallarn’s atmosphere, and threw a cloak of fire across its wings. It trembled and sang as it plunged down through the air. Black ceramite shutters blinked closed over the gunship’s canopy, and suddenly the view of the rancid planet was gone from Argonis’s view. A projection of the world beyond filled his eyes instead, the complexity of reality stripped down to lines of light and sensor data. He was flying by hand, feeling the craft twist against bands of thickening air.

  Behind the gunship, the Iron Warriors void-fighters peeled away to circle the re-entry point. The remaining six craft swung in closer to form a box, four Lightning Crows and two Fire Raptors. Argonis heard the terse words of each pilot flick across the vox. They were good, each movement and formation change crisp and precise, but Argonis could not shake the idea that the Iron Warriors flew with the same blunt efficiency as a resentful serf who wanted a duty done as quickly as possible. That was not fair, of course. The Iron Warriors were formidable in every sense. They just lacked something under their skin of iron.

  ‘You trust-believe the operative Jalen?’ Sota-Nul spoke across the vox. They had not spoken in the hour since the Sickle Blade had launched, but she spoke as though continuing a conversation that had continued without pause. Perhaps in the tech-witch’s mind she had simply cut back into the discussion of Jalen’s lack of information, as though resuming a recording from a mark.

  ‘Them, not he,’ said Argonis. ‘When you talk of the Twentieth Legion you should never think that you see them all. If you see ten then there are a hundred you do not see. If you see a hundred assume that there are a thousand. If you see one alone assume there are ten thousand.’

  ‘Is that your own wisdom?’

  ‘The Warmaster’s.’

  ‘He does not trust them…’ said Sota-Nul, and he thought he heard something rattling and serpentine in her voice. ‘Despite their alliance to his cause?’

  ‘His remarks,’ he said carefully, ‘were, I believe, intended as a compliment of their mode of war.’

  Argonis watched as the altimeter counted down. They were within the lower bands of atmosphere. He blinked a rune, and the shutters flicked back from the canopy. A swirled soup of fog pressed against the armourglass. They were above a huge plateau that bore the name Khedive, diving directly downwards, accelerating into the grasp of the planet’s gravity. Just above the ground they would flick up from their descent, then slam into a ground-hugging curve. The XVI Legion called this manoeuvre Ahagress, ‘the dagger point’, in Cthonian. The Iron Warriors had simply referred to it as Assault Manoeuvre 23-b. The ground was coming up fast. He triggered the gunship’s ground-sweeping auspex. The shapes of war machines blinked in his sight, bright with heat and hard metal edges.

  ‘You have not answered,’ said Sota-Nul.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I neither trust nor believe the Alpha Legion, and what the Warmaster believes is not for me to know.’

  ‘But you are his emissary.’

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  ‘War machines active in insertion zone.’ The heavy voice of the Iron Warriors escort commander cut into the vox. ‘Threat status unclear.’

  ‘Leave them,’ snapped Argonis. ‘Even if they are hostile they won’t be able to touch us. Maintain pattern and course.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ said the Iron Warrior. Argonis watched as the altitude count drained down into smaller and smaller values.

  ‘Yet…’ Sota-Nul’s voice lingered on the word. There was something unsettling about it, something more flesh than machine, but still not human. ‘Yet even though you neither believe nor trust the operative Jalen, we still follow where he guides us.’

  ‘You do
not need to trust a weapon to wield it.’

  ‘And that is what you do? You are sure?’

  The altitude value at the edge of his sight pulsed amber then red. Beyond the canopy the fog parted for a brief instant, and a bare plain expanded beneath him. For an eye-blink he saw the scattered shapes of tanks. Then he triggered the anti-grav and the gunship snapped up. G-forces hit him like a blow. For a wonderful, terrible second it felt as though he were both floating and falling without control. Then he slammed power into the thrusters and Sickle Blade punched forward, and the thunder of its passing vanished behind it.

  She waited in the dark and talked to herself.

  It was cold. Her enhanced physiology let her discard the discomfort of the dropping temperature, but she still registered it. She had left the enviro-suit on. One of the suit’s very limited advantages was that it kept the chill out. She had cut all power in Vanquisher 681 before she had killed its crew. That part of the plan had been simple.

  The machine’s controls were not complex. She had waited until the rest of the squadron had spread out, and then let one of her net-flies crawl out of her suit and bite into the tank’s vox and comms systems. From there it had been easy to slowly guide the squadron to where she needed it. Over the course of an hour she had teased Vanquisher 681 further and further away from its comrades without anyone realising. By the time she cut the power in the tank there was a very small probability that the rest of the squadron would find it. The crew had not panicked at first, and when they had it had played to her advantage. Then the waiting had begun.

  She had begun the self-dialogue after four hours.

  ‘Question: What is the chance of error in the termination projection?’

  ‘Answer: High. The factors are unknown and all outcomes are approximations.’

  It was a basic technique of the Vanus Temple, one of the first that initiates mastered. As much as mental skill and data were the foundations of the Vanus arts, doubt and questioning were trained into their psyches from childhood. The first stage of this training came from responding to the questions of a master, and then by mimicking that technique through assuming the viewpoint/intellectual framework of another person. Eventually the question/aggressive-doubt technique became part of their basic awareness. In time the back and forth of self-interrogation sank down into the architecture of their subconscious. Most Vanus rarely revisited the technique consciously, but Iaeo had taken to doing so during her deployment. At first she had thought of it as a form of mental cleaning, keeping her functions grounded. After a while she wondered if it had become a consequence of operating without direction, a compulsion.