by John French
In the quiet of the Vanquisher’s hull she flipped between questioner and answer, vocalising both. In her mind the questioner was always Master Senus, her mentor for her first decade in the Temple. His sour shrunken face grinned out each challenge from a pict-perfect memory.
‘Question: What is the basis of the current termination projection?’
‘Answer: That the presence of an emissary is seen as significant by the Alpha Legion. That the presence of the emissary represents a change in the problem field. Where there is change there is opportunity.
‘Question: State your current target.’
‘Answer: Apex Alpha Legion operatives within the Tallarn war locale.’
‘Question: Name and identify individual targets.’
‘Answer: Alpha Legion Apex Operative, cognomen Jalen.’
‘Question: Outline target’s current location, nature, capabilities, connections and resources.’
‘Answer: Demanded information unknown.’
She paused. In her mind the memory image of her mentor’s face grinned. It was not a pleasant expression.
‘Question: Outline base-level information related to target.’
‘Answer: Multi-level infiltration of loyalist forces on Tallarn by human, or human approximate operatives. Sub-level of bribed, coerced, or converted assets likely to exist within survivors of Iron Warriors viral attack, because of prior infiltration of Tallarn by the Alpha Legion.’
‘Question: Project the likely meaning of “emissary” in the context of the problem field.’
‘Answer: An actor sent by an external power as formal representation of that power. As the Alpha Legion is not dominant within the enemy forces, the emissary is not to them. The Iron Warriors are the dominant authority within the enemy forces at present. The emissary is, therefore, an individual sent to the Iron Warriors from another power base. This analysis has a 76 per cent accuracy value.’
‘Demand: Expand beyond primary analysis.’
‘Answer: Given a blank reading of power values within the enemy forces, an emissary implies at least a peer relationship of authority, and suggests a dominant relationship. The emissary is from a higher authority than the Iron Warriors. The emissary is from Horus Lupercal. This expanded analysis has a 38 per cent accuracy value.’
In her mind’s eye her mentor’s desiccated mouth spread into a dagger-slash smile.
‘Question: How does this offer a termination solution on the designated target?’
She paused again.
‘Answer: The presence of an emissary from Horus represents a change in power structures, an overall alteration in the problem field.’
The memory of her mentor just stared at her, eyes glittering in mocking triumph.
‘Answer clarification,’ she began, paused, felt her own hesitation, and shivered. To doubt brings truth, said another voice in her head, to be unclear is to fail before you begin. ‘Answer clarification: The emissary allows for an expansion of the problem space, and possible elimination of targets by manipulating ignorance and knowledge within the enemy forces.’
She stopped. She could hear her own heart beating through her blood in the silence of the Vanquisher’s interior. She saw the memory of her mentor lean forward, looking down at her, the light catching the implanted membrane over his eyes, turning them to blank silver.
‘Assertion,’ he whispered with her voice. ‘You are clutching at uncertainties.’
‘Response: There are possi–’ The words caught in her throat.
‘Assertion: You don’t see a clear outcome path. Assertion: You don’t know what you are doing. Assertion: You are going to make an error.’
She blinked. Suddenly aware of the cold inside the Vanquisher again.
‘You are going to make an error, Iaeo,’ she said quietly to herself.
She stayed still and quiet for a long while after that, eyes staring into space while she counted seconds.
At last the probability that the squadron were still searching for Vanquisher 681 shrank to nothing.
It was time.
She uncurled herself, and reached across the slumped body of the tank’s commander. The tank’s communication and vox systems came online. She triggered the signal she had prepared. It was a broad-spectrum distress broadcast. Dozens of these signals washed the comms network of Tallarn, the dying gasps of war machines who could not reach home. Both sides tracked down the sources of such signals near to their shelters. Functioning war machines were valuable in this war, even if the dead were pulled out of their hulls.
The signal began to ping out into dead air, and Iaeo listened and waited for the Iron Warriors to hear. She had positioned Vanquisher 681 close to the patrol screens which ran around the Sightless Warren’s southernmost entrances. Somewhere in the Iron Warriors base the signal would be heard, and recovery vehicles would come to pull the dead hull beneath the earth. Once she was inside the Sightless Warren she could begin the next stage.
She curled back into a ball, and watched the signal transmission light pulse. She considered beginning the self-dialogue again, but decided not to. The sound of a rising wind rattled down the outside of the hull. After a moment she thought it became a voice scratching at her from memory.
You are going to make an error, Iaeo, it said.
Part Two
PILGRIMS
Tallarn was changing. Dawn broke across the planet in a ragged line. On the surface the light grew brighter, dissolving into the fog so that the air seemed soaked in a dirty brilliance. From orbit, if one looked down at the correct angle, the new day was a luminous cord pulled across the planet’s surface. Each day had begun like this since the virus bombing, and it seemed that it always would. Except that, here and there, the new light found holes in Tallarn’s shroud.
In places the fog had thinned, and the ground had begun to dry, black sludge caking to a dry layer under the sun. Shrinking pools of slime dotted this landscape. In places the hard crust covered deep sink holes of black liquid beneath. War machines had been lost to these hidden wells, their weight shattering the crust and plunging them into the void beneath. The turrets and barrels of some stuck up from the ground like dead hands reaching for air.
Dust began to replace the fog in these dry places. Winds shivered across the flats, picking up the powdered layer from the top of the ground and tumbling it up into the air. The human crews of tanks began to recognise the dust storms by the dry rattling sounds they made on the outside of their hulls. ‘The voice of the dead’ they called it.
Six days after the failed third attack on the Sightless Warren, the first squadron of war machines was lost to a storm on the plains of Khedive. Their wrecks were found by chance three weeks later. Lightning from a massive storm had crawled over their hulls, fried their systems and detonated their munitions. The wind had then stripped the corroded paint and soot from their hulls.
The fog swirled on the edge of the drying areas. It still covered much of Tallarn, but it too was changing. Churned by fire from battles, and the pillars of energy hurled from warships, it boiled with its own currents, spinning across the seas and slime-sheened mountains. Heavy with soot and the residue of great and terrible weapons, it spawned storms that dragged sheets of black rain through the dissolving rubble of cities.
The survivors of Tallarn felt the changes too.
The Hell Above was dying, they said. In place of the death mire of the old, a new land was emerging, fathered by war and mothered by poison. It was a hungry child too, filled with spite and hunger for their lives. As with so much of the battle, the survivors reached into the language of their past to name the changing surface of Tallarn. ‘Yathan’ they called it – the ‘land of lost pilgrims’.
Six
Comrades
Black Oculus
Observer
‘O
rigo?’ Kord spoke the name carefully. His head was swimming, hovering somewhere on the boundary between exhaustion and hallucination. ‘Origo?’ he said again, checking as he did so that the vox was set to the scout machine’s frequency.
‘Yes, sir,’ came Origo’s voice, dry and wrung out. Kord licked his lips. His tongue was dry.
They had lost the quarry three days before. The Iron Warriors had simply vanished; one second the scouts were saying that they could see them, and the next the vox was filled with confusion. Finally a numb resignation settled into Kord like ice water. The auspex screens were showing merely static, as though the air itself had become nothing but a blizzard of distortion.
They had carried on for another twelve hours on the same heading after they had lost their quarry. No one spoke except to check headings and status. Kord remained quiet, even as the instinct to ask for fresh reports itched at him. They had settled into the silence for four hours, and at the end of it Kord had given the order to move out on the same bearing as before. No one had said anything other than the briefest of acknowledgements. That had been two weeks before, two weeks of pushing onwards sipping recycled water and nutri-paste from tubes inside the suit. They had not seen anything in that time, not a silhouette of a vehicle, not a scratch of code on the wind. At first he had been able to hear the tension in the voices of the others over the vox. Then that had faded to a dull monotone, which blended with the fog beyond. Even Sacha and the rest of his own crew had faded into soundlessness. He could not say he blamed them. He was not sure if he felt alive himself.
‘Was there something, colonel?’ asked Origo.
Kord breathed. He was not sure why he had begun this.
‘What should I do, Origo?’ the words came before he could help them. They hung in the pause that followed. I sound so weak, he thought. Weak, broken, cracked.
‘With all due respect, sir, that is not how the chain of command works.’
Kord almost laughed. He felt giddy.
‘We won’t find them again, will we, Origo? The ghost I was following is gone, isn’t it?’
‘If this is the old flats south of Kussank, then we could travel the two hundred kilometres we have already covered again before we saw its edge. They might be anywhere within that space, or somewhere else entirely.’ Origo did not add the implication of those facts. He did not need to.
Kord clicked the vox to reply, but said nothing. After several seconds of fizzing silence he released the transmission key. He closed his eyes, but kept the vox open. He began to notice the heat and noise of the machine, the warm clamminess of sweat on the seals of his suit, the stuttered clatter of the tracks turning, the way that Sacha twisted to get comfortable every few minutes. It was as though his mind and senses were reaching for something to take the place of the thought that kept rattling through him.
I was wrong.
Three hours after the last sighting he called a full halt. The regiment had scattered into a ring, guns and sensors facing outwards, power, heat and air turned down to a minimum. He had ordered all crews to sleep. He wondered, however, how many of them would sleep. He could not, he knew that without trying.
After several minutes he opened the vox to Origo again.
‘Is there supposed to be anything else out here?’
‘There was a settlement on the northern edge of the flats, a shelter too. We could perhaps make it in thirty-six hours if we went straight and fast.’
‘Are you saying that we should run for safety?’
‘Isn’t that why you’re asking?’
‘They are out here. We lost them but there are others.’ He paused, realising that the words had come without him thinking about them.
‘You believe that, sir? I mean really?’
‘Yes…’ he began, and he heard the truth come wearily out of his mouth. ‘Because there has to be a reason doesn’t there? A reason for why this all happened, a reason why Horus is fighting the Emperor, a reason why the Iron Warriors came here, a reason why we are here, a reason for where we are going.’
‘Where are we going?’
He looked down at where the glass of the auspex screen blinked with runes.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sometimes… sometimes, knowing the answers does not help.’
‘No… perhaps… but we have to believe they exist.’
‘Who are you trying to convince, sir? Me, or yourself?’
‘Both.’
‘Well I–’
‘Colonel,’ Abbas’s voice cut through Origo’s. Kord felt the tiredness slide back behind a layer of adrenaline. ‘I am getting a signal. Very faint, but it’s there. Seventy-five degrees from north.’
Kord began to work the vox set. He could hear the signal now, a shift in the tone of the static. There was something there all right. It sounded like a voice.
‘All units, this is War Anvil. Engines and weapons live. Heading seventy-five degrees from north. Crescent formation. Slow and careful.’
They moved out, tracks clattering through slow revolutions. Muttered signals snapped between the machines.
‘I see something!’ Abbas’s voice came across after they had gone five kilometres.
‘Steady,’ said Kord.
‘Visual contact,’ called Abbas. ‘It’s a tank. Can’t identify class.’
They moved closer. Kord could almost feel the eyes of every member of the regiment scanning their sights and screens.
The faint sound in the static suddenly became a voice.
‘…please help, can anyone hear…’
‘I don’t like it,’ Zekenilla’s voice cut in. ‘Why did we not hear their call until now?’
‘Powered down perhaps, until they saw us,’ said Origo.
‘Keep on heading,’ said Kord.
‘…Please, oh golden gates of Terra,’ came the distorted voice. ‘Please, I can see you, please…’
And then Kord saw it. Sitting beneath a low rise was a Vanquisher, its turret rotated to the side, the tip of its long barrel touching the ground. Dust and corrosion had rubbed the red-and-black of its heraldic colours into a series of pocked patches.
‘Acassian Line Breakers,’ said Sacha. ‘Been out here for a while. Can’t see any damage.’
She was right. The machine looked intact, but it was slumped to one side, its right track submerged beneath the grey crust.
‘Please,’ said the voice again. ‘Please. I know you’re there. We don’t have much power left…’
‘Sir, what are we going to do?’ asked Sacha.
Kord was staring at the Vanquisher’s hull.
‘Sir?’
‘All units full stop. Origo move the scouts close. Get your eyeball pressed against its hull. All other units hold position. Stay sharp.’
Kord switch his vox to the frequency the pleading voice was speaking on.
‘Unknown unit, this is Colonel Kord of the Tallarn Seventy-First, please identify.’
‘Thank goodness,’ the voice sobbed back. Male, thought Kord. ‘Thank goodness…’ The words crumbled wetly, so that Kord could almost hear the tears.
‘Identify,’ he said again, turning his head to nod at Sacha. She returned the nod and pressed her eyes to her gunsight. The main gun was already loaded.
‘Gunner Tolson…’ the voice gasped, ‘Acassian Eight Hundred and Seventh.’
‘What is your situation?’
‘My situation… can’t you see?’
‘Listen to me, Tolson. What happened?’ asked Kord. A sob sucked over the vox, but then he heard the man take a series of breaths. When the voice came back it was steadier.
‘We ran into an enemy unit running to the east,’ said the voice. Kord felt the words shiver over his skin; he was aware that he was holding his breath. ‘We lost two. We ran. Then the track sunk, and we could not get out.’<
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‘Where is your commander, Tolson?’
‘We…’ the man’s words caught. ‘We started to run low on air…’
Kord blinked, suddenly aware of the air as it passed over his tongue.
‘You are alone?’
‘Yes, but I can drive it, the machine, I mean. I think it could move if it was shunted out.’
Kord nodded. The machine looked like it could be pushed out of the soft ground that had caught its track. He keyed the vox onto another channel.
‘Origo, tell me what you see.’
‘It’s jammed, but could come free.’
‘Anything else out there?’
Kord flicked his view to a straight magnified display down War Anvil’s gunsight. Just beyond the stranded tank and the three scattered scout machines, the fog swirled in uneven cliffs and curtains.
‘Not that I can see, sir,’ came Origo’s reply.
Kord nodded to himself.
‘Abbas,’ he said, ‘Get Grave Call and her dozer blade up here. Shunt the machine out.’
‘Sir,’ came the curt reply.
‘Tolson, we are going to shunt you out of there and get you moving. Then you are coming with us.’
He cut the man’s tears and thanks off as they started.
A second later Abbas’s squadron swept into sight. The dozer-equipped Executioner Grave Call was in the lead, its three siblings spread around and behind it in a V. Kord zoomed his view closer, tracking the machines. Getting the stranded tank free, that was one thing, but he was not thinking about that. All that he could think of was the enemy force that the surviving crew member had mentioned. If they could get the man calm enough to work the tank’s auspex he might be able to backtrack to the enemy’s last position. There could not be many Iron Warriors patrols out in this isolated reach of Tallarn, and that might mean that they had just stumbled on a lead.
