Tallarn: Executioner

by John French

He had grown up around these streets, had run across the rooftops and climbed the fruit vines that crawled over the walls of the old buildings. He had never been poor but riches were far in the future. Life had not always been pleasant then, but it had been simpler.

  He missed that simplicity. He missed its clarity. He liked returning to the streets, the comforting feel of the worn stones beneath his feet, the mingled smell of cooking meat and flower tobacco softening the stench of stagnant drains. Most of all he enjoyed the difference in how people looked at him, or failed to look at him, when he was not surrounded by life wards, wound in suitably exotic fabrics and trailed by aides. He enjoyed not being Akil Sulan for a while.

  Tallarn is dying a slow death. The thought rose in his mind as he walked through the deepening shadows. Without the supplies and troops of the Great Crusade passing through the planet it would revert back to what it had been in the time of his grandfather: a backwater planet of little consequence. It might take a hundred years but it would happen. He would be dead himself by that time, but his daughters would not be. The twin girls were few years old, all smiles and careless laughter. They needed a future.

  A cry shook him from his thoughts. He slopped. The cry came again, clear and sharp. He could hear the sound of feet scrabbling on stone from around a corner a few paces ahead. Akil was moving before another thought passed through his mind. His blade was in his hand as he came around the corner. The leatherbound hilt of the knife felt familiar and warm in his grip. He remembered his grand-father smiling as he had given it to Akil. Curved and double-edged, every man and woman on Tallarn carried a knife like this.

  Akil turned the corner. The street beyond was narrow, the buildings to either side pressing close to pinch off the failing light. There were two of them, one a mound of flesh and muscle, the other thin and gangling. A third figure lay huddled on the ground. In the low light the men looked like blurred silhouettes, bodies and limbs. One of them lashed a kick into the figure on the ground. A cry cracked the air again.

  'Give us the coin, old man,' said the thinner of the two. Akil was three paces away. The big man turned. Akil had the impression of a wide face and saw the glitter of an eye as it fastened onto him. The big man opened his mouth to shout, his hand moving towards his own knife.

  'If you want to know a people's character, look at their weapons,’ his grandfather had said, 'and we of Tallarn are children of the knife.'

  The big man’s blade lashed out, its edge a twilight glitter. Akil ducked under the blow, and his own knife flicked across the man's thigh. The man yelled. Akil came up and sliced across his knife-arm above the elbow.

  The man's blade fell from his fingers, blood streaming black down his slack arm. He looked around for his friend but the thinner man was already running. Akil took a pace back and met his foe's eyes. The man hesitated. Akil brought his own knife up slowly so that it caught the light. Then the man nodded and limped away, trailing a line of dark drops on the stones of the street.

  Akil watched him go and then wiped and sheathed his blade. He looked to the figure on the ground. A worn face looked up at him as he bent down, old, with dust worked into the creases and framed by grey hair and beard.

  'Can you stand?' asked Akil. The old man grimaced, shifted and nodded.

  'Thank you, honoured worthy,' said the old man. Akil could hear the age and lack of teeth in the man's speech, but the words almost made him smile. 'Honoured worthy' was a form of address already antiquated before compliance. Akil noticed the grey folded cloth of the man's clothes, frayed and stained with sweat and dust. The man was a rustic from one of Tallarn's less developed settlements.

  'Did they take anything?' asked Akil as he helped him up.

  'No, honoured worthy.' The old man steadied himself on Akil, and took a shuddering breath. 'The stars smile on your kindness.'

  'Here.' Akil took a handful of trade markers from his pocket and held them out.

  'No, no.' The old man shook his head and pushed Akil's hand away. 'I cannot take twice from your kindness.' Akil held his hand out again, but the man shook his head and stepped away. 'You have given more than enough. Fortune's gifts rain on you.' The man began to shuffle away. Akil moved to help him but the old man shook his head again.

  Akil could sense the man's desire to be away from this silent street. He glanced around. The darkness was almost complete. He needed to be off the streets himself.

  'I know where I am going.' The man gave a toothless smile and nodded. 'It is not far.' Akil nodded back and was about to say something, but the man was already shuffling around the corner.

  For a second Akil did not move. Something in the exchange did not fit. He turned and took a step down the street, his hand unconsciously brushing his pocket.

  He went still. The pocket was empty, the data-slate gone. Cold dread spread through him. He checked his other pockets, and then the street.

  Nothing.

  He began to run in the direction the old man had gone, icy panic surging in his veins. He turned the corner. The wider street extended away into the gloom, silent and empty apart from scraps of rubbish dancing in the breeze.

  'You have given more than enough,' the old man had said. Akil took another step, half thinking of running through the streets looking for the old man. He stopped. He would not find the old thief. The twilit alleys of the Sapphire City could swallow someone in a few swift paces; there were a dozen different ways the man could have gone from here.

  He took a deep breath and tried to steady his thoughts and pulse. He would have to—

  A flash in the sky suddenly bleached the street white. Akil raised his hands to shield his eyes. For a second he could see the veins in his eyelids.

  He looked up. The stars were falling, breaking apart into sprays of sparks, tumbling across the night sky.

  Fireworks, he thought. An unplanned celebration. A meteor shower...

  Sirens began to scream. First one in the distance, then another, then another until the blaring chorus echoed all around. He could see doors and windows opening, people looking out. Somewhere deep inside him possibilities and fears combined. He thought of his daughters, sleeping in the manse on the other side of the city. People were filling the street now, pouring from doorways. Most froze as they emerged, their eyes locked upon the sky, their mouths moving, their words lost as the sirens wailed.

  Akil started to move, a few slow steps at first. Then he began to stride, shoving people out of his way. Then he was running. Above him the heavens wept tears of fire.

  The metal was cool against Brel's forehead. He kept his eyes closed, allowing the headache to bleed out of his skin into the rim of the turret hatch. Somewhere outside of the tank's hull he could hear raised voices. He ignored them. A lot of crews did not like spending more time in their vehicles than necessary, but Brel found the presence of his machine peaceful. Silence he had named her, long ago in the aftermath of a battle that he was not sure anyone on Tallarn actually remembered. Whether fired up, or engine cold as she was now, she was his place, his realm, where everything lined up as it should. When the headaches came, it was the only place he wanted to be.

  The voices were getting louder, angry words filtering in through the open hatch above him.

  Not now, he thought. Not while the headache was drumming through his skull. He let out a breath and tried to shut out the sound of the voices.

  'You gotta pay,' said a female voice, high-pitched, spite whining at the edges. He knew the voice. It was Jallinika, of course.

  'I can't,' said another voice, male, pleading, nasal. 'I just can't, look—' The man's voice cut off with a grunt.

  'There's more, lieutenant, sir,' said Jallinika. Brel could tell that she was enjoying what was going on. 'All the pain you want, just keep saying you can't pay.'

  Another voice spoke, male, growling like the sea grinding pebbles against a cliff, too low for Brel to pick out words. It didn't matter; he did not need to understand Calsuriz to recognise his voice. The big drive
r would be doing the muscle work, of course.

  A half-spluttered cry reached through the hatch. Broken teeth, most likely. Brel screwed his eyes more tightly shut. He just wanted them to shut up. The headache was a white ball in his forehead, pressing against the back of his eyes.

  'So what are you going to say now, lieutenant, sir?' drawled Jallinika, and Brel could hear her smiling.

  'I can... I—'

  There was a loud sharp cry, and something hit the outside of the machine's hull. For a second there was silence, then Calsuriz growled, and weeping mingled with wet, clotted breathing.

  Enough, thought Brel. The pain in his head was sun bright. He opened his eyes and blinked at the blue and pink smears dancing in front of his eyes. He reached up, put his hands either side of the circular hatch, and pulled himself out in a single clean movement. They looked up at him as he jumped down to the track guard and then to the floor. Hundreds of silent tanks extended away in every direction, their hulls wrapped in dust. Every hundred metres a lumen globe diluted the gloom with urine-yellow light.

  Brel looked down at the man curled on the floor. Blood had splattered the ground. The man's mouth and nose were leaking red between his fingers. Brel noted the braided rank cords dangling from the shoulders of his Chalcisorian 1002nd uniform.

  'That's enough,' said Brel. His mouth felt dry, and the sun was still burning on the inside of his head. Brel knew that he must look like he had just been scraped from a machine tread. He was bare to the waist, his thin frame hunched from half a life crouched inside a Vanquisher's turret. Dust and machine grease covered him, blurring the twists of long-healed wounds and smearing the edges of tattooed hawks and grinning skulls.

  He licked his lips, and looked up at Calsuriz. The big man dropped his eyes and rubbed his jaw. Jallinika began to say something, but Brel turned his head to look at her. She took a step back, hands low and open, placating. The crater scars across her thin face and arms looked like small studs of shadow on her pale skin. Brel looked back to the lieutenant whimpering on the floor, stepped forward and crouched down. He recognised the man now: Salamo, commander of Twelfth Squadron, Leopard Company.

  'It's Salamo, right?' said Brel.

  Salamo looked up. Blood covered the lower half of his face. His nose was a flattened mess and he was breathing between splinters of teeth. One of his augmetic eyes had shattered. He breathed hard, nodded.

  Brel gave him a smile, trying not to let the pain in his head sour the expression. 'The issue. Lieutenant Salamo, is that you seem to not understand the nature of a debt.' Brel paused, blinked as the pain shifted its centre in his skull. 'I did not take your debt marker, but unfortunately it is me that you owe. So before we go on I want to know what you owe and if you can pay.'

  Behind him Jallinika began to make a noise. Brel raised a hand. She went silent. He smiled again at Salamo. The man shifted, and sucked air through his broken teeth.

  'Sixty... five,' said Salamo, heaving a wet breath between the words.

  'Sixty-five?' said Brel. He was trying hard not to clamp his eyes shut against the pain in his head. It had not been this bad for a while, not since Ycanus. He looked around at Jallinika. 'You did this for sixty-five?'

  'He—' She began to speak again, but Brel raised a finger. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.

  'Can you pay?' he said to Salamo.

  'No,' gulped the man.

  Brel nodded, his eyes still closed. Sixty-five was not a huge debt, but most of those that came to him usually had a problem that meant that the normal scales of fortune did not apply.

  Brel and his crew had been on Tallarn for almost a decade now, left behind when the rest of their regiment moved on and left them still bleeding into bandages and muttering in fever dreams. For a decade he had waited for the war to call him back. He had watched as Tallarn's role as staging hub for the forces of the Great Crusade faded in importance. The millions that filled the shelter complexes had dwindled to a trickle. The ships that had lit the night sky with false stars had left and not returned. Still Brel and his crew had remained, forgotten warriors in a forgotten land. They found that there was a place for them on Tallarn.

  Amongst the billions of rounds of ammunition and mouldering stores, there were things that soldiers would pay for: stimms, pain suppressors, better food. Things to conjure dreams or gift forgetfulness. After a while they had enough money to supply almost anything that the soldiers could wish for. They had kept it quiet and efficient, and the war had never returned. Even when word came that the Imperium was apparently at war with itself, Brel did not worry - he and his crew would never go back, not now.

  He opened his eyes. Salamo was looking up at him, waiting. Brel gave a resigned smile and nodded.

  'Okay,' said Brel in a soft voice. 'Okay.' He reached out and hooked his arm gently under Salamo's, and helped him to his feet. The Chalcisorian lieutenant rubbed the back of a hand across his bloody mouth. He glanced up at Brel, the one intact augmetic eye glowing green.

  'I will get you the money,' lisped Salamo through a clot of spit and blood. 'And I won't say anything.'

  Brel smiled again, and the movement sent fresh lines of pain across his scalp.

  'Okay,' he said, and patted Salamo's shoulder. 'Okay.' Salamo tried to smile back but his mashed face could not manage it. He turned to walk away.

  Brel broke Salamo's neck in one quick movement, and lowered the body to the ground. He closed his eyes again when it was done and let himself slump against Silence's track guard. His ears were ringing. That was new.

  'Get rid of the body. Dump it in a lower cache chamber, and make it look like he fell off a ladder or something.'

  The ringing was a piercing shriek now. Jallinika and Calsuriz said nothing. Brel forced his eyes open and looked around. His driver and gunner were standing staring up at the gloom hiding the arched roof. Brel was about to say something when Jallinika turned and looked at him.

  'What is that?' she shouted.

  Brel blinked, then shook his head. The wailing shriek pulsed as he moved, not inside his head but all around him. Brel had seen a lot of war fronts, had heard ships scream as part of their hull was breached, and run for dugouts as the bombs fell. The sound was an alarm, but like none he had ever heard. It was no alert, no muster call; it seemed new, as though it was a scream cutting into reality from a forgotten nightmare. The pain in his head was so strong that his vision blurred.

  'I don't know,' he said, but the words were lost as the alarm shrieked louder.

  The first shot of the Battle of Tallarn was fired in space. It was fired from the edge of the planet's monitor range from the heavy cruiser Hammerfall. The nova shell hit the northern polar orbital defence station while its systems were still asleep. The station vanished. Harsh blue light lit the northern face of Tallarn, and for an instant it burned brighter than the sun. A fraction of a second later the shell's secondary payload activated. The graviton charge sucked in the expanding sphere of plasma and dragged the station's weapon platforms into its crushing embrace. Curtains of aurora light danced across the northern plains of Kadir as the graviton detonation warred with Tallarn’s magnetic fields. In the polar capital of Onnas people crowded the upper surfaces of the city dome to see the night sky dance.

  The orbital defence network began to wake. Auspex scans cut into space, looking for targets. They did not have to look hard. Hundreds of ships enclosed Tallarn in a shrinking sphere.

  The planet's defences began to fire. Torpedoes slid from launch tubes. Turbo-lasers fired, running their capacitors dry as they drew networks of light across the darkness. Some shots found their mark.

  Three torpedoes caught the macro-transporter Kraetos and burrowed through three deck layers before detonating. Turbo-lasers caught the Retribution of Thunder as its void shields hit a ring of orbital debris. The beams of energy sliced the ship's bridge from its bulk and left it drifting. But the resistance could not last

  Two more nova shells fired from t
he Iron Warriors fleet destroyed the equatorial and southern polar stations. Squadrons of destroyers slipped into high orbit and launched spreads of torpedoes. The warheads slid onto their own orbital arcs to hit the remaining weapon platforms. New constellations blinked into existence in the skies of Tallarn.

  There were few ships to defend the system. A squadron of defence monitors, their responses dulled by years of inactivity, tried to intercept some of the enemy ships. They died for their effort. Las-fire cut their hulls into chunks, and then macro-cannon salvos hammered the remains into scraps of metal and burning gas.

  One ship alone tried to run. The Light of Inwit was an Imperial Fists strike vessel. She paused for a second as her communications officer tried to raise Marshal Lycus on Tallarn's surface. The only reply was static. Her shipmaster did not hesitate. Word of the attack needed to reach others. The Light of Inwit turned its prow to the blackness of the system edge and burned its engines until they were white with heat.

  She nearly made it. Iron Warriors gunships accelerated in her wake, reaching after her with stitched lines of explosions. Clouds of debris and energy buffeted her void shields, but she kept running. More Iron Warriors ships slipped from behind Tallarn's outer moon. They had been waiting to see if any of the defenders would run, and they were ready. Ten destroyers launched a net of torpedoes. The Light of Inwit twisted, spiralling as it tried to weave a course through the web of warheads. A single torpedo clipped its upper hull and exploded. The vessel veered, its hull glowing with pinprick fires. The second torpedo hit it amidships and tore a chunk of hot metal from its flank. The Iron Warriors moved in with lazy confidence. Spinning without control, the Light of Inwit fired a single salvo as if shouting defiance. The Iron Warriors guns opened it from prow to stern.

  In the skies above Tallarn, heavy IV Legion ships settled into orbit. Grand cruisers, battle-barges, siege barques and weapon haulers plated the heavens in dull iron. Bombardment cannons slid from their bellies and rotated towards the surface. A few turned so that their prow torpedo tubes faced down towards the target zones, hanging like daggers.