Tallarn: Executioner

by John French

  'What?' Tahirah's voice was a disbelieving crackle. 'You can see nothing, but there is something out there?'

  'Light your weapons. I don't care if you have rank over me. Light your weapons.'

  The pause lengthened into the squall of distortion.

  'Lantern, this is Deathlight, what are your orders?' The voice was Hector, commander of the squadron's number two machine. Hector was firm, but Brel could hear the tension in his question. The other crews would all be feeling what he fell - the heavy, caged sensation, and the acid taste of adrenaline. They would all be feeling it, but no one outside Silence would know what it meant.

  Beside him, Jallinika was murmuring something to herself. A prayer muttered to an outlawed god.

  'All call signs.' Tahirah paused. 'Light your weapons.'

  The glass trembled against the side of Akil’s head. The engine was still running, of course. They needed it to power the air system. He shifted his head slightly. Behind him the vox-unit was still breathing static into the cabin. It sounded reassuring, like rain pattering on the roof at night. Rashne was weeping, the sound of the boy's sobs cutting into and out of the internal vox. Akil listened but said nothing. They were lost. They were alone, and it was now just a matter of time until the engine ran out of fuel and the air stopped. He wondered if he would take off his suit and open the hatch before that point. At least that would be the end of everything, and an end he deserved. He thought of his daughters and whether they had survived.

  The glass trembled against his skull again. He raised his head and put his hand to the glass. A low bass vibration met his touch, its note out of sync with the rumble of the vehicle's engine, the sound of heavy tracks shaking the ground.

  'I hear something,' said Akil quietly. Rashne sobbed again.

  Akil keyed the internal vox and spoke more loudly. 'Rash, I hear something.' He looked around and saw that the boy had looked up at him, eyes wide behind misted glass. Akil nodded. 'Can't you hear it? They are out there, they are close.' He paused. 'Try the vox again.'

  Rashne turned and began to flick switches.

  'Any call sign, respond if you can hear this. This is scout unit four, First Squadron, Amaranth Company, Seven Hundred and First.'

  Akil shook his head, as if trying to shake the smile off. Relief and exhaustion flooded through him.

  We are not alone.

  He slumped forward, head resting on the armourglass he had been staring through for hours. His eyes flicked to the forward viewing slit. The fog had smothered them again, hiding the landscape behind yellow silt veils. He was about to turn to Rashne when he saw something move in the fog.

  'Rash,' he said carefully, trying to keep his voice steady. 'Are you getting anything coming through?'

  'No,' said Rashne. Akil could almost see the boy grinning and shrugging. 'But they are close, right?'

  Akil kept his eyes steady on the view beyond the smeared glass. He felt very cold.

  We are not alone. The thought rose in his mind, like a chilling echo of a misunderstood revelation.

  'That's weird,' said Rashne. Akil heard him flicking more switches. 'There is something coming over the vox. Listen.'

  Rashne raised the volume. After a second Akil heard what he meant: a low growl of noise rising and falling behind the wall of static. He listened more closely. The sound came and went, almost like the breaking of slow waves on a shore, or the beating of a heart.

  'Rash—' he began to say, but then he saw it again. It surfaced from the fog, like a sea creature breaking the surface to breathe before diving out of sight. He had an impression of hard angles and dull, unpolished steel. It had been close as well, within a hundred metres.

  He could hear the frame of the vehicle vibrating now.

  'Rash, shut the vox down,' he said, panic rising in his voice.

  'What?' said Rashne.

  'Shut it down'

  'Why?'

  Akil was not listening. He was thinking of when he had watched a sabre cat stalking prey in the equatorial forests, of the way it moved its head as it sniffed the air. He reached out slowly and flicked the engines off.

  'What are you doing?' called Rashne.

  'Shut the v—'

  They both heard it.

  'An engine,' breathed Rashne. 'It's them, they're here.' The boy was reaching for the vox.

  The tank broke from the fog in front of Akil's eyes. Its hull was a raked slab of dull metal topped with a domed turret. Slime scattered in its wake as it ground forwards. Threads of red light reached through the fog, scattering as they swept and converged. The turret rotated as he watched, fixing him with the blank gaze of its weapon barrel. He felt with numb certainty that his next breath would be the last.

  'I am sorry,' he whispered to himself.

  The world vanished behind a sheet of white light.

  'Kill!' shouted Lachlan. Tahirah winced as his voice roared from her headset. She felt sweat rolling down her skin. The temperature inside Lantern had spiked an instant after the weapon had fired. Inside her enviro-suit the hairs rose across her skin as the plasma destroyer began to recharge. The hull was shaking and bucking as it accelerated into the engagement. Engine noise vibrated through her head.

  Crammed into the turret next to Lachlan, it felt like she was riding a boat in a stormy sea. All of the crew wore sealed suits of rubber and treated fabric. Breathing air through a mask plugged into the tank's air supply, it felt as if she was drowning in the heat and the brain-numbing snarl of Lantern's engine. She could barely see anything that was not directly in front of her eyepieces, and moisture from her breath was already beading on the circles of glass. The only reason she could talk to the rest of the crew was because of the internal vox.

  Outside on the hull a sheet of burning vapour vented from the cone of the cannon. The slime clinging to its hull ignited. Flames crawled across Lantern, scorching the Amaranth stripes from its turret. Black liquid splattered up in its wake, as it dragged a cloak of guttering flame.

  For Tahirah everything had started to move very fast from the moment she had targeted the enemy vehicle and Lachlan had fired.

  She had trained in war machines for half a decade, been through live fire drills and logged over a hundred machine hours. But this was like nothing she had ever felt. Information and sensations washed over her. Dozens of thoughts, fears and possibilities formed and fled in a second. It was like trying to catch hold of a storm. It was the gap, she realised, the gap between training and reality, the gap she had always wanted to cross.

  Plumes of heal and gas blurred her view out of the periscope. Red icons painted the point where the enemy machine had been. It was not moving. Good enough.

  'Kill confirmed,' said Tahirah. The auspex was screeching. A shape had emerged from the green pixel fog. 'Enemy, left flank, sixty degrees, engage when you see them.'

  'I can't see them,' shouted Genji.

  'Traversing,' said Lachlan next to her, and the turret began to turn in its collar.

  'I can't see anything.'

  Genji, thought Tahirah. Terra, she wished the girl would stop shouting. Tahirah did not answer; she had no idea what was going on. The enemy had vanished off the auspex. Flashes of amber, green and red danced across the black screen. She tried to focus on the auspex screen, flicking glances out of the periscope blocks. She could not see a damned thing either.

  She turned her view to the green icons of Silence and Deathlight on the auspex screen. Together they formed a wedge with Lantern at the tip. The first kill had been straight ahead and even then they had only been able to see it because of the heat bloom. Now they could not pinpoint the rest of the enemy force. She knew that there was a very real chance of the squadron falling apart, of doing something fatally stupid and hitting each other as they tried to kill the enemy. She pushed the right-hand cup of her headphones over her ear and clicked to transmit.

  'All call signs, this is Lantern, engage only with visual confirmation.'

  Hector and Brel acknowledge
d the command, their voices almost lost in the rising jumble of sound around her.

  'Where the hell have they gone?' said Lachlan. His face was pressed against the rubber eyepieces of the Executioner's main weapon targeter.

  'I've got one,' came another shout. It was Udo, in the right sponson. She glanced at the auspex and saw the angular red return of metal and heat to their right. A target.

  Sharp eyed little rat, she thought.

  'Turn, right, right, right. Target, right flank, eighty degrees narrowing, visual confirm to engage.' The tone of the engine changed and the turret began to turn.

  'I've got it,' shouted Udo.

  'Confirm enemy,' said Tahirah, but the right sponson's firing light was already glowing amber on her control panel. She opened her mouth to shout.

  'Firing.'

  'Udo! Confirm, damn you.'

  The lightning-crack of the lascannon echoed through the compartment.

  'Hit,' whooped Udo.

  Tahirah pressed her eyes against one of the periscope viewers. She could barely see ten metres. Ochre clouds swirled in front of her eyes like silt in churned water. She switched to infra-sight and the world became a haze of grey. The heat of the las discharge was a fading line through the fog.

  'Lantern, this is Deathlight.' Hector's voice spat from her headset. 'I have las flare to my front. Almost hit us. What's going on?'

  'Udo!' shouted Tahirah.

  'It was them, I saw,' called Udo. She could almost see his face twist with denial, as if shooting the front off a friendly was just another understandable mistake.

  'Shut up,' she snarled. Icons were dancing across the auspex now, fading from red to amber, overlaying and contradicting. It was like trying to punch someone you could only hear in the middle of a rain storm. The enemy were there, they were right—

  Red blossomed across the auspex. The Lantern rocked. White light flashed from the eyepieces of her periscopes. Lachlan swore. She glanced at him. His hands were pressed against his eyes. Genji and Makis were shouting. The auspex cleared. She stared.

  Deathlight's green icon had vanished. A white smudge of heat rolled where it had been. Lantern kept driving forwards, its turret traversing so that it faced back towards Hector's last position. Tahirah's fingers slipped as she thumbed the comm-stud.

  'Deathlight, this is Lantern,' she began.

  'It's gone,' shouted Lachlan. She did not want to look at him. She could hear enough in his voice.

  'Deathlight, respond.'

  'It's gone.'

  Her skin suddenly felt very cold. Sounds seemed to be louder and further away.

  Genji's voice cut through her. 'Target. Firing.'

  'Wait,' said Tahirah, but the word was lost as the left sponson fired.

  Akil closed his eyes against the glare as the fog outside lit up. Rashne was screaming into the vox. The world was all vibration and sudden noise. For a second when the oncoming tank had vanished in a ball of fire he had thought it was them - that they had been hit, and that he was trapped in his last second of awareness.

  Then the light had turned red, and black smoke had stained the firelit fog.

  More sound and light, and teeth-aching tremors spun around him as he pressed his eyelids shut and Rashne screamed on and on.

  'Stop,' said Brel calmly. The rest of the crew said nothing, but he felt the engine disengage and the lone of the noise drop in the compartment. Jallinika was looking back at him, waiting for him to tell her if there was a target worth trying to see; they both knew that if she had her eye to gunsight without reason she would start firing at ghosts, or her own side.

  Old ways, and old tricks, thought Brel. And here we all are again. Home, like we never left.

  The fight had begun just how they always had, with a roar of death and then the hurtling descent into anarchy. He had felt Silence rock when Deathlight had gone up, and had heard Tahirah calling for a response. Tahirah's machine had no idea what was going on, but they were still moving and firing anyway, at an enemy of unknown strength and unknown nature. All they had were the blips on their screens and the images skidding across their sights. They might get another kill, but they were dangerous to stay close to.

  Brel watched the auspex display. The Lantern had one confirmed kill, and the enemy had fired back and killed the Deathlight in reply. That meant a minimum of one enemy machine still out there, as well as the lost scout machine. The enemy were good. They must have broken formation as soon as they were ready to engage, and they were using the fog and auspex interference to hide themselves.

  Or they were jamming our scanners and comms, he thought, reducing both to unreliable junk. Very good indeed.

  'Jal,' he said into the intra-crew vox. 'Strength of an elite hunter unit in these conditions?'

  'Three.' She shrugged. 'No more than four.'

  'Two?'

  She laughed. 'Only if you had no choice.'

  Brel nodded, and let out a long breath.

  'Yeah. I was worried you would agree.'

  He thought for a moment longer, and then gave one order.

  'Shut down the engine. Keep the load in the main gun. Keep comms, air, sights and auspex up, but close down the transponder.'

  There was the barest moment of hesitation. The transponder sent out a constant signal telling all other friendly units set to the same frequency where they were and that they were not something to fire at. Without it the Silence would appear as an unknown return on friendly auspex screens, and in a battle like this they would be a target to everyone.

  'Now,' said Brel, and a second later the Silence became an inert slab of cooling armour.

  * * *

  'Hrr,' called Genji. Tahirah shook her head, tried to focus, tried to grasp the passing threads of events.

  'Kill confirmed,' said Lachlan. 'I see fire.'

  Tahirah pressed her eyes to the periscope's eyepieces. Flames lit the fog, spreading through it in an angry red glow as if the air itself was burning. She blinked moisture from her eyes. The fog thinned and she saw the enemy machine. She had not seen the first target clearly - none of them had, not even Lachlan as he pulled the trigger. The wreck had a low hull with raked frontal armour, and two weapon booms jutting from its flanks. One of the booms was gone, severed to a blackened stump. Its turret was a carbuncular dome, bearing the ribbed barrel of a conversion beamer. A skull grinned from the front plate in black wrought iron. She knew the class and she knew the emblem from a thousand remembrancer captured images of the Imperial conquest.

  Predator class, she thought. Iron Warriors Legion. And it was not dead, not even close.

  'Oh, illumination,' she whispered.

  'What?' said Lachlan.

  The Predator was moving, thrusting towards them, its turret traversing to point back at her.

  'Kill not confirmed!' yelled Tahirah. 'Kill it, Lach! Kill it now!'

  'I see it,' called Lachlan as the turret traversed. He went still, his finger on the firing trigger. 'Oh, skies of Terra,' he breathed.

  'Fire!' Tahirah cried. The Predator was slowing, the muzzle of its turret gun settling on her like a dead stare.

  'I—'

  'Now!' she shouted.

  Lachlan squeezed the trigger, and the destroyer cannon screamed. The blast hit the Predator's turret collar and blew it off in a shower of half-melted armour. The destroyer kept firing, streaming plasma into the target, raking it with a sun's fury.

  Heat warning lights bloomed around Tahirah, and suddenly the inside of Lantern was soaked in red. She reached across and knocked Lachlan's hand from the gun’s trigger. Gas vented into the turret.

  Vail was swearing, scrambling for the coolant release lever at the rear of his pit beneath the main gun. He yanked it down and Tahirah heard the coolant lines ring with sudden pressure. The red lights turned amber a second later.

  She breathed out. Vail had released the auxiliary lines just in time. Another second and the gun would have vented searing hot vapour into the turret; now it would off-line wh
ile it cooled properly. Lachlan was looking at her, his eyes wide behind the circles of his suit's eyepieces.

  'Main weapon down,' she announced calmly, and thanked the suit for hiding the tears she could feel on her cheeks.

  'Boss...' Lachlan's voice was low.

  She turned away, taking in the auspex at a glance and speaking into the vox. She shook her head, focused on the auspex, on the red markers showing the two machine kills, and the eerie white where Deathlight had died. A yellow marker flickered on the edge of the screen highlighting an unidentified contact.

  'Target left - there is something else out there,' she said, and heard her words echo across the vox.

  'Boss, I saw them before I fired,' said Lachlan as if he had not heard her.

  She squinted at the static laden display. The yellow marker of the unidentified machine was dimming, ringed with fading heat.

  'As if it were a cooling wreck,' she muttered to herself. 'Or as if it cut its engine.'

  'I saw the enemy crew trying to get out of the wreck,' said Lachlan.

  'Target is live,' she called. 'Say again, target is live. Bastard is trying to hide.'

  'They were legionaries,' said Lachlan, and snorted as if he had said something ridiculous. 'The enemy out there are Space Marines.'

  Tahirah heard the words, and thought of the iron skull on the hull of the Predator. Space Marines, the thought rang in her head. Our enemies are Iron Warriors.

  'I have visual!' shouted Genji in the left sponson.

  Tahirah looked out of the periscope. The target was there, a low angular shape, half exposed by a billow in the fog. She opened her mouth to give the kill order.

  'Fir—'

  'Can you hear us?' the voice burst into her ears, filled with panic and static. Human. Tahirah felt her mind turn over, her mouth and body frozen. 'Please,' came the voice again. 'Please say you can hear us.'

  'Tah, I have the target,' called Genji.

  'Hold!' shouted Tahirah. She was suddenly aware of fresh sweat prickling over her skin inside the enviro-suit.