Tallarn

by John French

  ‘I…’ began Jalen.

  ‘And why did you free us? What are we, a weapon to be used now because something has gone wrong?’

  ‘You sent a signal…’

  ‘Black Oculus, tell me what you know of that.’

  ‘We…’ the man was fighting to keep calm. Argonis could feel Prophesius’s presence at his shoulder, hot and sharp against his skin. He could see the astropath’s iron mask reflected in Jalen’s eyes.

  ‘Prophesius,’ Argonis said carefully. ‘Take it from him.’

  The astropath extended a hand, green silk falling back from skeletal fingers tipped with the silver stylus spikes. Frost flashed up Argonis’s arm from where he held Jalen’s neck. He felt a stab of pain, in his mind. But he was ready for it, and it was weak.

  Prophesius’s fingers were extending slowly towards Jalen’s open eyes.

  ‘You have to stop them,’ hissed Jalen. ‘They almost have it. We cannot stop them, not now.’

  The tips of Prophesius’s fingers were a hair’s-width from the smooth surface above Jalen’s pupil.

  ‘What is this battle for? What are they here for? Why are you here?’

  ‘For a weapon, a weapon of primordial destruction.’ Jalen nodded carefully. ‘A weapon left here when there were still gods to war in the heavens. That is why my masters came here, and why Perturabo is here now.’

  ‘If you say you were doing this for the Warmaster, I will watch as your eyes are pulled out.’

  ‘We serve Alpharius, and Alpharius is loyal.’

  Argonis looked at the man for a long moment then nodded slowly.

  ‘So you were lying from the start,’ said Argonis.

  Argonis brought his boltgun up and fired: one round into each of the eyes, one into the heart.

  He paused, looking down at the scattered meat and red liquid which had been the man. After a second he turned away, wiped the blood from his face.

  ‘An unexpected tactical choice,’ hissed Sota-Nul.

  ‘If the liar has no tongue then he will tell no more lies.’

  ‘An aphorism I am not familiar with.’

  ‘It is from Cthonia.’

  Argonis stepped to the door. If Jalen had not lied about the immediate situation then they now had less than two minutes before the Iron Warriors began to respond to the breakout. He began to run; he needed to reach his armour, and then they needed to get out.

  ‘What is your intention?’ asked Sota-Nul.

  ‘We are going to follow Jalen’s plan. We are going to get to the Lord of Iron, and we are going to do the Warmaster’s will. We are going to call him to heel.’

  Iaeo watched Jalen die, and shifted a set of variables to fixed values. She felt her face twitch. She was smiling. A sign of pleasure, but she was not conscious of why. Strange, very strange… The operative’s death had been almost certain given Argonis’s personality structure and the information available to him. He had time to piece together a few basic strings of logic. The Alpha Legion was here, they were concerned with the discovery of secrets, and now they had freed him. He knew that they knew more than they had told him. The response from a warrior conditioned, trained and seasoned in the Sons of Horus was obvious.

  She replayed a recording of the execution. Fast and brutal, a killing straight from the gang warrens of Cthonia. The tri-shot obliteration technique was interesting. The descriptions she had read had not conveyed the speed, or mess. Yes, mess, that was the correct phrase. Brain, and blood, and bone, all sprayed across the walls, floor and ceiling. For his part, Jalen had also had little choice. The Alpha Legion had spent a long time trying to contain the Iron Warriors activities on Tallarn, and now he believed that they were about to achieve their true goal. The escalating battle on the plains of Khedive was significant, but to Jalen it was a side show; he believed that they were about to lose a prize they had worked for years to secure. So he had freed Argonis and told him part of the truth in the hope that Argonis would find a way to shut the Iron Warriors down.

  Desperation. Such a clean tool when applied. Now she just needed to make sure that…

  Something twitched at the edge of her awareness. Her first instinct was to override it. She had been deep in the data/problem/kill-space for a long time now, and had blocked out all but the most basic awareness of her body and environment.

  She flicked between net-fly views covering her hiding place. Nothing. There was nothing there.

  She went back to the flow of projections.

  Stinging cold enveloped her. Needles of pain stabbed into her skull. She felt her teeth clamp together, tasted blood as she bit her tongue. She tried to move, but her limbs were cold and cramped, and invisible fingers of ice were holding her still. A wall of displaced air slammed into her. The duct she was curled in came apart. She fell, limbs still locked in a ball, and hit a metal grate ten metres below her. Bones broke in her back, legs and arms. Her mind fought to divide what was going on into data, and failed. The pain was profound, stronger even than her modified body could cope with, too strong to ignore.

  A boot lashed into the base of her back, and she felt something rupture. Hands ripped the digi-needlers from her fingers. The joints popped and detonated fresh pain in her arms.

  Data: Enemy has knowledge of–

  Another kick, this time across her face, ripping the visor from her eyes. Her data projections and thought lines were falling apart, replaced by a vivid awareness that she was bleeding inside, that she could feel splinters of bone in her muscles.

  ‘Come now,’ said a smooth and reasonable voice. ‘This is just the way this meeting must be, mamzel. You are very capable, and that ability demands respect. See what you are experiencing now as our mark of respect.’ She heard steps moving towards her. The metal grating she was lying on shook slightly with each footfall. There was another sound nearby: the soft inhalation/exhalation cycle of one… no, two other people. Hands touched her face. She tried to snap her arms up, to grab, to strike. She could not. Her limbs simply would not move. The fingers felt warm, the tips smooth as they prised her eyelids open.

  Light flooded her eyes. She looked up. Huge turbines turned far above. Ducts criss-crossed the air in between. A ragged hole split the underside of a duct ten metres above where she lay. She recognised the effect of adhesive-tipped krak grenades. Beneath her a gantry of gridded metal spanned a rockcrete crevasse. Blackness hid the bottom of the drop. A face moved into view. It was not a smiling face, nor a cruel one, but it was the last face she had expected to see again.

  ‘I know you did not kill him, but I have a suspicion that I should thank you for the death of my brother,’ said Jalen.

  Only later would it be called a battle. The need of history to codify, divide and label would eventually mark the start of the Battle of Khedive as beginning two hours before dawn broke over the storm-lashed basin. It would say that its first shots were the torpedoes fired from loyalist Strike Force Indomitable. Seen in the cold light of retrospect that moment is as suitable a beginning as any other.

  It began, like so many offensives before it, in the heavens. The Inferno Tide had scoured the lower orbits of Tallarn of ships and defences, but in the high spheres the Iron Warriors still held sway. A circlet of weapon platforms and warships had been set above the Sightless Warren since its creation, guarding its approaches from the void, and watching over the approaches to its northern hemisphere. The Iron Warriors, never needing to set war to poetry, called this cluster Outer Defence 1.

  A spill of torpedoes converged on the clustered Iron Warriors ships and stations. Most had been shot days before by ships far from Tallarn’s orbits. Their rockets set on delayed triggers, and they had glided close to their targets on momentum alone. By the time their engines lit, it was too late for the Iron Warriors to destroy them. Building-sized munitions slid through void shields, struck armour, and detonated. Explosives, melta-core
s, graviton generators, plasma charges and quake warheads strung the sky with fresh stars. The Iron Warriors frigate Blood Tempered died as a string of five torpedoes caught it in a perfect line across its back. The debris and force of its death blew the shields off its sister ships in a flickered blink of white light.

  Strike Force Indomitable emerged, gliding along high orbits from behind the face of Tallarn. Twelve warships came in the first wave. They were not the heaviest ships the loyalists had in the system, but they were the fastest and most heavily armed. They had a single task: to kick open the door to the planet’s northern hemisphere. They began to fire as soon as the first torpedoes found their marks.

  Beams of las-fire laced the dark. Rushes of plasma formed comets as they boiled across the black gulf. Walls of shellfire spat from vast gun mouths. Kaleidoscope light boiled through the Iron Warriors ships. High orbital platforms split, burned, and began to tumble down the hungering gravity well into Tallarn’s embrace. As the first signals shouted from the dying and dead ships, the Iron Warriors ships in the rest of the system moved to respond. Squadrons scattered around the moons of Tallarn turned their prows towards the battle-sphere and burned their engines white.

  Strike Force Indomitable cut their fire and thrust forwards into the sphere of ruin they had created. They lost three ships in the first moments, split open by guns of the surviving Iron Warriors defences. The rest kept on, dumping macro-cannon fire into every target they could see. Half remained on the thinner edge of space and ripped into the remaining Iron Warrior defences. The second half settled deeper into low orbit, and began to roll fire down onto surface targets. Each captain on each ship knew that a counter-attack would come, that the might of the Iron Warriors would descend to close the sky above the Khedive. That fact was irrelevant, though. They had bought the time they needed.

  Twelve

  Vortex

  Treachery

  Second head of the Hydra

  ‘You cannot do this.’ Brigadier-Elite Sussabarka stood across the door to the muster chamber. A squadron of ten soldiers in crimson-and-grey carapace stood at her side. Kord noticed that they had not raised or pointed their cable-fed lasguns, but he could read the poised readiness in their stances. They were steady, professional, willing to stand with their commander as she stood in the path of a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. They were also intelligent enough not to point a weapon at the Iron Hands legionary.

  Menoetius stared at Sussabarka without moving. After a handful of seconds his stillness seemed to seep into the air. Even to Kord it felt like a threat. Sussabarka shifted but did not step back. Her face was a mask, her jaw and gaze set. Kord felt a twinge of admiration in the same instant that he dismissed her defiance as foolish; she would get herself killed if she held strong.

  At least that would get her out of the way.

  ‘Stand aside,’ said Menoetius, his voice low, like the purr of a vast engine turning over. Kord glanced up at Menoetius. The hum of the legionary’s armour was making his eyes ache. Sussabarka caught the gesture with a flick of her eyes, shook her head and began to reply.

  ‘I command–’

  ‘You do not command me.’ Menoetius voice was flat, devoid of emotion, carrying nothing but a blunt truth. ‘You are strong. You are loyal, and you perform what you see as your duty with the fullness of your spirit. But now you will stand aside.’

  One of the crimson-and-grey-clad troopers began to raise his weapon. Sussabarka’s hand slammed the trooper in the face, once, hard. He stumbled back, blood running bright from the flattened ruin of his nose. No one else moved. Menoetius had not even moved his eyes. Sussabarka nodded then moved from out of the doorway.

  Menoetius bowed his head, slowly.

  ‘My thanks,’ he said, and stepped through the doorway into the bright vastness of the muster chamber beyond. Kord flicked a glance at the brigadier. She was looking at him, her face still a mask, but he could feel the disgust in the sharpness of her eyes. He shrugged at her, and stepped after Menoetius.

  The muster chamber was larger than even those of the Sapphire or Crescent City Shelters. The ceiling was a distant blur beyond a smog layer turned to white by stab-lights. War machines covered the rockcrete floor, turning the path they walked on a labyrinth of acid- and dust-scoured metal and oiled tracks. People surged between the machines. He passed tank crews, their unsealed enviro-suits hanging around their waists like half-shed skins. Labour teams lugged shells, charge packs and thick ribbons of ammunition. Test-firing engines coughed into the air, and the smell of exhaust fumes scraped the back of his throat. He was walking through a full battle muster.

  He looked up and saw two gods of metal staring back at him. The twin Warhounds crouched in scaffold cages, the robes of attendant tech-priests standing out against the mottled grey and yellow of the Titans’ skins. The harsh white of welding beams and phosphor cutters strobed from their joints, and manes of sparks fell from their feral heads.

  Kord held the gaze of the pair for a second, before turning and hurrying after Menoetius. He suddenly did not like this, not at all; it just did not fit together.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he hissed. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Do you ask those questions because you think they require different answers, or because you don’t understand that in these circumstances they are the same thing?’ The Space Marine half turned his head, so that the edge of his eye caught Kord. He did not stop walking. ‘My counter-questions are rhetorical. You need not reply.’ He looked ahead again, in time to change direction, leading them down a gully created by twin lines of siege tanks. Kord began to feel sweat prickling his skin as he tried to keep pace. Menoetius waited a dozen strides before speaking again. ‘To answer your query, I am overriding the Brigadier-Elite’s authority, freeing you, and setting us both on a course to complete the mission you began.’

  Kord shook his head.

  ‘You disagree?’ said Menoetius. ‘I intend to finish what you began. You can come with us, or you can go back to your cell.’

  ‘This will not finish. There is no way for this to finish,’ said Kord. A sudden weight had fallen on his thoughts. He was free, but that freedom was meaningless. It was all meaningless. Right or wrong, he had no way back. The only thing that had pulled him forward, step by step and breath by breath, was gone, and no matter that the Space Marine seemed to share his sight, it did not matter.

  ‘Is your human conviction so weak?’

  ‘I was right. I am right. But that does not mean that we won’t die out there with nothing found.’

  ‘All true, if you don’t know where to look.’

  ‘No, that does not make sense. Nothing I said could have made you believe me. I did not say enough to persuade her, and I could not have persuaded you.’

  ‘You are correct. My heart was curious, and my mind followed. You did not persuade me.’ Menoetius turned a corner and halted so swiftly that Kord almost fell as he followed. ‘Your crews did.’

  Faces turned towards him. Some he knew; Kogetsu, Shornal, Zade and Saul nodded and gave ragged salutes. There was wariness in their eyes, hollowness too. He wondered how much they were here because they were loyal to him, or if, after everything, they had nothing else. Origo turned and straightened from where he bent over maps, which lay across the top of an ammunition crate. The lead scout bent his head and tapped his knuckle to his mouth, in a gesture that many of the Tallarn-born used in place of a formal salute. His eyes were as dark and calm as ever.

  Kord smiled back, and turned to look around the circle of faces. Menoetius was a pace behind his shoulder, and behind him in turn another Iron Hand warrior in scored black plate, face hidden by a slotted faceplate, head distorted by a bulge of optical lenses over the right eye. Both stood motionless, a pair of buzzing statues. After a pause Menoetius stepped forward. The brushed steel fingers of his hand unfolded, and tapped the surface of the map.

&nbs
p; ‘We will go here,’ he said. Kord’s eyes skated across the lines and colours showing geographical features which now bore only secondary relation to the reality of Tallarn’s surface. Hundreds of marks had been made on the page. In part it resembled the map that he had used himself to track sightings of enemy units and engagements, but that creation was a shadow of the data which covered the map’s smooth surface. The portion indicated by Menoetius was a dense tangle of markers. Bounded by mountains and crossed by the paths of rivers, which would now be dried or slime-choked channels. ‘Hacadia’ read the lettering which ran under Menoetius’s fingers.

  ‘How have you done this?’ he breathed, his eyes still roaming over the information inked across the flattened images of mountains, hills, and plateaus. ‘This would take communication and engagement data from across our forces… I could never access such data.’

  ‘But I could, and I have,’ said Menoetius. Kord looked up into his gaze. Menoetius nodded once. ‘I am the bearer. You are the eyes through which meaning is given.’

  He looked back down at the map. It was there, so clear that he thought that if he blinked the map parchment, ammo crates and floor would vanish and just leave the bones of the truth there, laid bare in front of him.

  ‘And what do you see?’ he asked without looking up.

  ‘A circle. An end,’ said Menoetius. ‘Do you not see it, colonel?’

  ‘No,’ breathed Kord. The coloured dots and lines were floating in his sight, the data next to them the shadows and planes of ragged curves that rippled out like the currents of water searching for a sink hole. He was right. He had always been right, and now he was seeing it: the image of a hidden reality that he had always known was there, just beyond his ability to see. ‘No. I don’t see a circle. I see a vortex.’

  Hrend’s fist came up. If anyone had been watching from outside the pack of machines they would have seen a simple gesture, casual, fluid, like a hand raised in greeting. The meltagun armed and fired in an eye-blink of screaming air and white light. The back of the Alpha Legion Sicaran flashed white. The spear of energy stabbed through armour plates. The tank’s turret twitched, like the head of a man feeling the kiss of the knife in his back. Its ammunition core exploded. The hull ripped in two. Hrend had already stopped firing, was already turning, fast as an uncoiling tiger. The blast wave roared over him. The heat soaked into him. His iron frame was his body. There was no split, no difference between him and the roaring hunger of the guns in his flesh.