Tallarn: Executioner

by John French

  'Traitor-death, traitor-death, traitor-death,' it chanted as it drove forwards.

  The Iron Warriors destroyers fired, spreading torpedoes into the Lesson of Ages's path. But she kept coming. Warheads slammed into her decks, burning through armour in gouts of plasma and drooling molten metal into the void. Still she kept coming. Further in-system, larger ships detached from Tallarn's orbit and began the long burn to intercept this lone enemy. In the guts of the Iron Warriors vessels, ratings and servitors hauled fresh torpedoes into launch tubes. They fired again, the ordnance burning fast as it ate up the distance to the target. Fire blistered across the Lesson of Ages's prow and back. Explosions shook her cracked skin. Still she kept coming.

  The Iron Warriors destroyers began to turn out of the burning ship's path. The Lesson of Ages fired. The destroyers' shields vanished under the deluge of macro-shells an instant before their hulls melted and their reactors burst.

  Its outer hull still burning, the Lesson of Ages roared towards Tallarn. Two hours later the second and third ships arrived - the Lament of Caliban and Beastslayer had followed the same distress call as the Lesson of Ages. The message had rippled through the warp from Tallarn, its meaning clear even through the fracturing of the storms.

  'The Iron Warriors are here. This is the anvil upon which we will break them.'

  More would come. They came for hatred, they came for glory, but most of all they came to see the back of a traitor Legion broken.

  Tallarn stood alone no longer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The land that will be

  God-walk

  Wounded

  'Do you see that?'

  The words reached into the black water of Akil's dream and pulled him to the surface. His eyelids flickered open. He had been asleep with his head resting against the vibrating hull of the scout. A sky of weeping fire filled the dreamscape through which a tattooed man walked, his multi-coloured skin crawling like a nest of snakes.

  Akil had let Udo drive after he had nearly driven them into a ditch, and Udo had taken his place without a word of complaint. As soon as Akil was out of the driver's seat the tiredness had come in a single silent wave, dragging him down into soft half-dreams. He thought he remembered trying to apologise, but he had just mumbled something incoherent and the dreams had kept coming. Now he was awake, his skin clammy against the inside of his suit, his senses trying to rebuild the world around him.

  'What?' he said thickly, and then remembered that he needed to key his vox. 'What did you say?' he asked again.

  He blinked. Talon was still, its engine silent. Udo was in the driver’s seat, leaning forward so that his eyepieces pressed against the smeared glass of the forward view slit.

  'What's going on, why have we stopped?'

  Udo did not turn away from the view.

  'We stopped an hour ago. The boss wanted to re-plot our route. Something about enemy activity between us and the shelter. The other two are just next to us.' He turned his head, looking at Akil with eyes that caught the moonlight streaming through the vision slit.

  Something is wrong, thought Akil, something added or taken away from the way things should be. Something that he could not place...

  Udo nodded and keyed the vox. 'Sorry to wake you, but you have to see this.'

  Akil realised what was different, then.

  Moonlight.

  Moonlight glinted off the scratches on the gun block and drive controls. Akil scrambled forward, reaching towards the silver light as though he could touch it, as though it were falling water. Udo moved out of the way, and Akil pushed his face against the glass and looked up. The murk was still there, hanging like a grubby veil, but he could see the moon and stars shining down on him with cold, beautiful light. He let out a long breath, closed his eyes and opened them again. He felt the smile spread across his face without being able to stop it.

  'The fog seems to be thinning in places,' said Udo. 'This is some plateau north-west of the shelter. We crossed into it twenty kilometres ago. Not seen a wreck or ruin since.'

  Akil felt his smile stiffen, then drain away.

  'Fruit,' he said to himself.

  'What?'

  'They grew fruit here. Kilometres and kilometres of trees and bushes. The Scented Flats, we called them, because when the blossom came the air used to be so thick with scented pollen that you could smell it all the way to the coast.' Akil went quiet. He had brought his daughters here for the Blossom Festival just last year...

  His eyes drifted down from the moon to the land laid out under its light. With the cloak of fog lifting, the sludge that had covered the ground was drying. Cracks snaked across the ground, and he saw a curl of dust rise on what must have been a gust of wind.

  This is the beginning, thought Akil as the dust danced in the silver light. No matter what happens here, no matter who wins, my world will never return. It lives only in dreams now. This drying corpse is the future.

  I am looking at the land that will be.

  Behind him Udo shifted, but said nothing. Akil was about to look away when he saw the first flash. He stared at the sky, blinking. For an instant he was sure he had seen...

  Another flash, low on the hazed horizon, swallowed by the distant banks of fog. Then another, and another. As he looked up, fresh stars were blazing and blinking out, strobing and burning for the length of a heartbeat. The hazy sky danced with light and falling embers of fire. Akil began to speak, but the words came out as a gasp, Udo's head came up.

  'Are you seeing this?' Tahirah's voice crackled in his ear.

  ‘Yes,' came Brel's voice without pause.

  'What—' began Akil, but Brel cut through him.

  'Orbital engagement, a big one, and it looks like a drop as well. They are hammering the hell out of each other up there to reach the surface.'

  Akil watched as a star formed and flickered from white to red.

  'But I thought we were alone,' he said. 'That it was just the Iron Warriors up there.'

  ‘Looks like that might have changed,' said Brel dryly.

  Akil felt something shift in his chest. It was a warm feeling, a feeling that the universe had opened an unexpected door in front of him, and that sunlight was shining through.

  'Doesn't mean they are coming to help us,' said Brel, as if he had heard the hope in Akil's silence. 'Have you heard anything from command, lieutenant?'

  'No comms since we came out,' replied Tahirah, then she paused. 'We have to get back to the shelter. All units warm up. We move in five minutes.'

  They limped across the desiccating plain, a loose triangle of machines under the cold moonlight. They were moving at walking pace, dust rising in their wake. In front of them, looming nearer by slow paces, a bank of thick ochre fog waited like a wall separating the moonlit night from another realm.

  Shut away from the moonlight, within the rattling dark of Lantern, Tahirah let her eyes close for a moment. They stung and ached from staring at the world through small strips of glass and targeting sights. Every now and again she would angle one of the sight blocks upwards to look at the night sky. The false stars, comets and fire lines of the space battle still fizzed across the black dome. Brel was right - whoever was up there, they were pounding the hell out of each other.

  What did it mean? Reinforcements? Rescue? Withdrawal? She had heard the hope in Akil's words when they had first seen the flashes in the sky, but as much as she wanted to believe that her first war was over, she had a feeling that Brel was closer to the mark: new stars in the sky might be ill omens as much as signs of hope.

  'We'll be in the fog again in a few minutes,' said Makis. 'Did you say thirty kilometres to the shelter?'

  'Something like that.' Tahirah shrugged even though Makis could not see her. 'Difficult to be sure where we are. The maps are a little out of date.'

  Makis did not reply. The low grumble of the machine surrounded Tahirah again, rocking her in its clattering embrace.

  The fog swallowed them a few minutes l
ater as Makis had promised. One minute it was a cliff of bulging vapour looming above them, and the next it was all around them, streaking past the glass of their periscopes, billowing like sediment stirred at the bottom of a river. Tahirah had to suppress a clench of fear in her guts. For a moment it felt as though they had plunged into deep, polluted water. She focused on the auspex to calm herself, watching the blue markers of Talon and Silence draw closer to either side of her machine. They would normally have spread out, relying on auspex and vox to stay connected, but with Silence hobbling on a half-broken track they stayed as close as they could.

  They kept on moving for four hours. They passed along roads littered with the carcasses of vehicles, through the rusted metal ribs of buildings and past pools of congealing slime. The clatter of their tracks and the breath of their exhausts vanished in the pus-thick vapour. No one said anything, not inside the machines and not across the vox. The only noise was the sound of the engines turning the tracks and the hiss of the air pumping into breath masks.

  'Have to stop,' said Brel, and the sound of his voice made Tahirah jump.

  'Problem?' she said. The vox crackled for a second, and then Brel's voice came back.

  'Track rattle has changed pitch,' he said, his voice thick with exhaustion.

  Terra, do we all sound like that? wondered Tahirah.

  'Might be the metal is weakening. Don't want to push it.'

  'Yeah,' she said, swallowing a wave of her own tiredness. Her mouth was gritty and an ache pulsed behind her eyes. 'Fine. Sure.' She blinked and shook her head, trying to bring everything back into focus. Much longer out here and we might not be able to make it back. She thumbed the squadron-wide vox. 'All machines, halt fifteen minutes. Cool the engines down. Keep vox and auspex live.'

  Akil and Brel acknowledged, but she only half heard them. She felt herself start to sag forwards, caught herself and jerked back into her seat. She had to stay awake somehow. She tried to figure out where they were for a moment, running calculations and comparing the grim sights they had passed against the luminous maps on her command console. It did not work. She found her eyes fluttering after the second distance calculation. At least with the engine off, Lantern was still and quiet.

  She had to stay awake...

  She had...

  Tahirah's eyes opened wide and her head snapped up so fast that it slammed into the hatch above. Sharp pain burned away the afterimage of a dream. Her head was pulsing with pain that was not just from hitting it. She swallowed, trying to clear a taste of bile from her mouth.

  Lantern trembled.

  Tahirah went still. Had that been real? It had not felt like one of the tremors which ran through the machine when it was moving. No, it felt like the ground beneath them had shaken. Slowly she turned her head to look at Lachlan. The gunner was slumped sideways, asleep, the hood of his suit riding up so that the eyepieces were pressed against his forehead. Perhaps it had not been real; perhaps it was just an echo from her dream that had yet to fade. Her head felt like someone had hammered a nail into the centre of her forehead. Carefully she thumbed the internal vox.

  ‘Anyone else feel that?' No reply came. She clicked transmit again.

  The tremor came again. Lachlan shifted in his sleep but did not wake.

  Tahirah had already flicked on her active sight, and had her eyes pressed against the viewfinder. The world outside was as it had been: a swirling bank of fog painted in the washed-out green-white of infra-sight. Clefts opened in the murk and then closed again, like corridors glimpsed beyond briefly opened doors.

  Somewhere in the distance a spot of light and heat bloomed, spreading its illumination through the fog before shrinking to nothing. A second later she heard the rumble of a detonation. She switched to normal vision. A heartbeat later an orange glow formed, strobing with secondary detentions.

  Tahirah bit her lip. The explosions were distant, but they were in the direction they would have to go to get to the shelter. Orbital strikes, perhaps? Long-range artillery or macro-rocket fire? But the metal of her machine was still; something else had shaken the ground. The tremor came again, and then again, as though in answer to her thoughts. Something in the slow rhythm of it made her think of being alone in a dark forest with the sound of unseen horrors circling at the edge of sight.

  'Lieutenant.' Brel's voice sounded tired and cold, but for some reason she had never been so pleased to hear any other. 'Did you feel that?'

  'Yes,' she said. 'There are explosions to the south-east.'

  ‘Could be,' he said. Was that a note of hope in his voice?

  ‘But the vibrations and the explosions are not synchronized.'

  'Maybe the shockwave takes longer to go through rock and earth.’

  'Maybe.' She heard the lack of conviction in her own voice. 'I think we should go cold. Full power down, sights off. No comms.'

  'What?' said Brel, but she was already clicking another key on the vox.

  'Akil, do you hear me?' She waited for a second then thumbed transmit again. 'Akil.'

  'I hear you, lieutenant.' His voice sounded as if he was struggling to wake up.

  'Good.' She keyed the squadron-wide vox again. 'All units, we are going cold and silent. Shut everything down apart from the air. I mean everything. Do not move, do not use anything that gives heat or uses power. Wake the vox up again in thirty, three-zero, minutes.'

  She looked into her sight one last time, her hand going to the power stud.

  The ground shook, and shook again.

  'Wait a second—' Brel began, but never got to finish his protest.

  The Titan strode out of the fog in front of Tahirah's eyes as if stepping from behind a curtain. Curved plates of metres-thick armour covered its shoulders, and its back seemed bent under the weight of racked missiles. Pitted orange paint lacquered its metal skin. Its arms were long-barrelled weapons. The oily skins of void shields sparkled in the fog, and electric green light burned in its eyes. Beams of scanners swept in front of it, while pistons the width of tree trunks hissed as it took another step.

  It was a god of war, an apex war machine. It was a Battle Titan, and the world shook beneath its tread.

  'Back!' Tahirah felt the scream rip from her throat. Makis was shouting too, Lantern's engine was roaring into full life, and the vox was crackling with the shouts of the rest of the crew. The Titan came on in unhurried strides, fire leapt from its right arm overhead, chugging and coughing as the weapon barrels turned.

  * * *

  Talon screamed in protest as Akil engaged full power to its cold gears. It jumped back, tracks gouging into the ground.

  'I can't see it!' shouted Udo. The kid was hugging the lascannon sight, his hand on the firing lever. The ground around them erupted. The scout rose into the air and slammed back down. Yellow and red firelight flashed through the view slits, and the hull rang with the kiss of shrapnel. Akil whipped forward as Talon hit the ground. Pain detonated in his skull. A high-pitched buzz seemed to surround him, and warm liquid trickled down his forehead into his left eye. He reached for the control sticks, feeling their shape through his gloves even as his vision clogged and blurred. Talon was still moving, its tracks skidding and turning it as soon as it hit the ground. Akil rammed the right track forwards and the machine lurched around.

  Outside the hull the Titan's gun roared again, and the world quaked as though shaken by one of the old gods. He slammed Talon onwards, the gears screaming as they meshed at full speed.

  They had seconds at best. He had heard stories of Titans, even seen a few remembrancer pict-captures of them in action. They carried enough firepower to turn a city to rubble and heat-cracked glass. Talon was still alive only because the god-machine had only extended a fraction of its power to kill them.

  Through his blurred view he could see blue-white light strobing beyond the view slits, and hear the scream of plasma cutting through the fog. The Lantern's plasma destroyer was firing up at the advancing machine. The beam of plasma hit the Titan's fir
st void shield and crumpled it in a wash of static. The Titan bellowed in reply, its war-horns howling above the sound of its footsteps. Its left weapon arm began to glow, lightning gathering in ribbed focusing coils. Steam began to vent along the weapon's length.

  The barrels of its right arm started to turn.

  'How long until we can fire again?' shouted Tahirah. Lantern was jolting as it moved, slewing from side to side as Makis tried to make them as hard to hit as possible.

  Heat fumed from the main gun. Sweat was running down the inside of Tahirah's suit in rivulets, stinging her eyes as she tried to focus. They had taken one of the Titan's shields down, maybe two, but they had not even touched the Titan itself.

  'Sponsons fire!' Tahirah shouted, wishing she had learned the gunners' damned names.

  Both sponsons fired. White bolts of energy whipped out, burning the air, spilling across the Titan's shields in rings of light. Another void shield trembled, fizzed and collapsed. The lascannons kept firing, punching into the next layer. She watched the Titan's gatling weapon building ponderous speed as it turned, while the plasma weapon on its other arm was breathing heat and sparks into the fog as its power built.

  'Fire main gun!'

  'Not yet.'

  'Now, or we won't get a chance.'

  Lachlan cursed, and pushed the firing stud. The beam of plasma shrieked from the gun's throat even as it overheated. Scalding gas vented from the breech block next to Lachlan, spilling over the shielding plates in terrifying, neon clouds. Lachlan screamed as the gas enveloped him, his enviro-suit melting to his skin, his lungs blistering in the heat. Alarms wailed.

  Tahirah kept her eyes on the Titan, as emergency coolant frosted the inside of the turret. The plasma stream hit the Titan's shields and blew them out one after another. Exotic energy discharged in a peal of false thunder and a sheet of lightning.