Baneblade

by Guy Haley

  Kaithalar didn’t look up from her charts as Bannick came into the room. A large fur was thrown over her slender shoulders, her face creased as always in a frown. She stroked at a goblet of gleece as she read and reread the sheets before her. ‘Come to apologise, have you?’

  A servant moved to take Bannick’s furs, but he shooed him away. He hunted around for a chair that was not piled high with sheets of vellum or production flimsies. He gave up, instead shifting the smallest pile he could find onto the floor before moving the chair as near to the fire as was polite and sitting down.

  ‘It’s not like that, Kaithalar…’ he began, and stumbled to a stop. He rubbed his face, not knowing what to say. The last week had been impossible. Tuparillio’s face haunted his dreams. He was drawn and pale, his eyes yellow from too much sleep and wine. He felt weak, but he had no appetite for food.

  Kaithalar looked up and stared at him hard. She’d always been a tough one, Bannick had seen that when they’d been at the collegium together, even before her father’s death had made her clan productiva and driven the girl from her once and for all. But today, Bannick thought, her eyes were a little softer, there was hurt in them too.

  ‘I’ve never thought highly of you, Colaron,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘You’re a rake more interested in bedding bond skirt and drinking your family’s wealth than making something of yourself. I pity you for it. I really do. All you male scions are like that, you’re expected to be, hanging off the say-so of your fathers until they hand on their office to you and die.’ She barked out a sharp, bitter laugh. ‘While we girls stay at home and behave like good daughters. Not me, though, not me, no brother.’ She cast her gaze around the room at the heaped papers. ‘I thought you might be a little different, but you are not. You are a drunken idiot like the rest of them, puffed up with honour. What was it, did Tuparillio look at one of your girlies funny? He was a boy, Colaron, a little boy. You should have slapped him and sent him on his way.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, look, can we not talk about this please? He was intent… he was…’ He couldn’t tell her. He didn’t want to involve her in his guilt. He gave up, exasperated with himself. ‘Listen to me. I have come here because I have something to say…’

  Her facade suddenly cracked. ‘Whatever you say, it’s no excuse! No excuse! I cannot have my betrothed becoming involved in common duelling. Barbarism! Have you any idea how embarrassing this is? What shame it is to have my betrothed whispered about as a kinslayer? It’s hard enough to run a clan department as a woman as it is, and now I have my future husband rampaging like a sho-beast. I will not stand for it! To think I thought you might be able to cope with this!’ she shouted, waving at the mess of documents. ‘To help me! How wrong I was.’ She punctuated her words by beating upon the table with a delicate fist. Her goblet had fallen, spilling gleece onto the papers. It dripped onto the carpet, unnoticed. ‘It is too much to hope for a love match, but in you I at least had hopes for a profitable partnership. Now, because of your behaviour you owe great indemnity, the alliance is in jeopardy and the finances of both clans will suffer. You’re lucky I don’t terminate the agreement. I need Clan Bannick’s backing to secure…’

  She is beautiful, thought Bannick, and he felt a tenderness for her that surprised him. Perhaps it would have been a good match. ‘Kaith,’ he interrupted gently. ‘You are right. I would be nothing but a liability to you.’

  ‘What do you mean, you “would be”?’

  ‘Kaith, I’m sorry, I… Look, I don’t know how to say this. I’m withdrawing from the marriage contract.’ Bannick hurried on before she could react, gabbling. ‘I have enlisted in the Guard, in the new double founding. I’ll be leaving as soon as the Long Winter is done. It’s not you, it’s this business with… with the duel.’ Say his name, he thought, tell her why he called you out… He couldn’t. ‘I can’t serve the Emperor here, I’ve proved that, you’re right. I will go and fight in His wars and, if He is willing, give service with my body and blood. I’m sorry.’

  Kaithalar’s mouth dropped wide, then snapped shut. Her features hardened.

  ‘I have to get away… I saw Tuparillio’s mother, my aunt, my mother, they know… I…’

  ‘Get out,’ she said.

  ‘Kaith…’

  ‘Get out!’ she shouted. She scooped up her goblet and hurled it at him. It sailed past his head, cracking the face of a plaster puttee on the wall behind him. The two bondsmen bodyguards re-entered the room and made towards him. Bannick left.

  The winter day outside seemed as bleak as his prospects.

  Chapter 9

  Kalidar IV, Hive Modulus

  3286397.M41

  Bannick was forced to wait for several hours before his liaison showed up; his belongings crammed into his kitbag, he sat outside the barracks of the 42nd Paragonian Armoured Regiment on a poorly made metal chair. He was nervous, whether of meeting the tank or its commander Cortein he wasn’t sure. Either one he did not wish to disappoint. As a boy he’d imagined fighting aboard a super-heavy tank, playing a game, imagining himself a hero like his uncle, who’d gone to war while Bannick was a boy. There was a statue in the clan hall, a bust of a man his tutor had told him commanded a super-heavy tank, an honoured man. Bannick had often daydreamed that he was that man.

  The man was Honoured Lieutenant Marken Cortein Lo Bannick, his rank in the style of Paragon, for as the Paragonians made machines they especially revered them. To serve aboard a Baneblade was a great honour for Bannick, to serve under a man who’d inspired him even greater, but it was an honour Bannick felt sure he did not deserve, and so he sat there with a mixture of dread and excitement churning in his stomach. He would have laughed at the perversity of fate were he not so on edge. War was supposed to have been an impossibility for him, no matter how much he had played and later duelled, and yet here he was. It was all thanks to Tuparillio. Thoughts ran round his head as he waited, taking his mind off the recent defeat at Kostoval and the disappearance of his foster-brother Kalligen.

  The barracks was situated in a food store five turns below the surface, not far from the Medicae facility where Bannick had been treated. The men had complained about how far away they were from their vehicles. It wasn’t a problem Bannick had to worry about now, nor did many of his colleagues. There were many empty beds in the enlisted men’s dormitory and officers’ rooms.

  Kalligen’s room was empty too. It had been hard to find anyone who knew what had happened to him, so many members of the regiment were dead or injured. He’d searched until he hit upon a crowd of men huddled around a casualty list pinned up on the wall of the mess. He fought his way through, eyes scanning the flimsies to find what he had feared. ‘Kalligen, Lazlo Gratimar Lo, 2098231, Lieutenant, MIA’ was all it had said. No matter how many times he reread it, it did not tell him anything more.

  Eventually he’d tracked down a junior support sergeant attached to Kalligen’s platoon. He told Bannick that only two of his friend’s four tanks had made it back into the depot, Kalligen’s own disappearing into the sandstorm. This last the sergeant had heard from a sponson gunner, sole survivor of Kalligen’s three tanks, and currently under the Medicae. Bannick pressed him for more information, but he had little to give.

  Missing in action on Kalidar was death postponed. Bannick became morose. Kalligen had been his closest friend for as long as he could remember, an interclan fostering. Clan Kalligen had taken Bannick’s older brother, his family had got Kalligen in return. Dark-eyed, cheeky, quick with his words, much to the annoyance of the Bannick tutors and, later, the masters at the collegium. Bannick thought his father would strike him for his impudence, but Kalligen had drawn something warm out in the old man, and he’d become much loved. Bannick remembered how all Kalligen’s bravado had gone in the first night when he’d cried for his own folk. Since then they’d been like brothers, and now he was gone.

  Bannick silently prayed. You
should have taken me in his stead. He was a better man than I, for all his blasphemy. He didn’t deserve to die. And Bannick thought further that the Emperor was cruel to torment him in this way, no matter his crimes. He waited for grief, but it did not come. He felt oddly numb, more weary than anything else. His callousness depressed him further, his emotions were being abraded by Kalidar.

  Death in war is to be expected, he told himself. I will mourn Kalligen when I have done my duty.

  Exhausted, Bannick drifted into semi-consciousness, aware of his surroundings, the scrape of cheap furniture, the murmur of men on clean-up duty, the scribble of a pen on the casualty listings on the nearby wall as some adjutant or another made an adjustment to the rollcall of the dead, and then he fell asleep.

  A boot kicked his, and he jerked awake.

  ‘Hi,’ said the man before him, small and wiry with a grin that screamed ‘insubordination’. He proffered a dirty hand. Bannick hesitated, shaking sleep from his mind, and took it. He shook it as firmly as he could. It was slick with grease. The man’s uniform was equally filthy. ‘I’m Radden, first gunner aboard Mars Triumphant. Sorry I’m so late, but we’ve been having no end of basdack troubles with the cannon targeting unit. We got pretty beat up back there at Osnakhem, not as bad as your boys, but still…’ He shrugged. ‘You want me to take that?’ Radden pointed to Bannick’s kitbag, and continued talking without drawing breath. ‘You’re Bannick right? Nice to meet you, damn shame about Vand, he was our third gunner before you, but always nice to meet a new face, it can get a bit anti-social being a tanker, but I guess you know that huh, lieutenant?’ Bannick got to his feet and stretched. ‘Come with me, come on, come on. I managed to requisition a groundcar, we can drive back in style.’ He winked in a way that suggested ‘requisition’ were a synonym for ‘steal’.

  He paused as he bent to lift Bannick’s bag. ‘Sorry, the honoured lieutenant says I’m always gabbling on, can’t stop talking ha ha! That’s my problem, but I can shoot straight, they all say that about me… What by the Throne have you got in this?’ Radden bent down and opened Bannick’s bag. He rummaged through it and began tossing objects onto the floor. ‘Sorry, but you won’t be needing this, or this, or this. Not much storage on board. Say, I better leave this, looks like it has sentimental value. But definitely not this!’ Bannick moved to protest, he even considered ordering him to stop, but wasn’t sure. In pure rank terms, he outranked Radden, but as first gunner, Radden technically had seniority over him on the tank crew until the honoured lieutenant said otherwise. ‘You got a spare rebreather?’ He zipped up the bag, leaving a pile of Bannick’s possessions to one side. ‘No? You’re going to need one, we often operate out for long periods. Last thing we need is for you to be jumping every time a bit of dust comes floating in. I’ll make sure we get you one. Right then! Ready? Let’s go, this way, this way!’ The little gunner stopped again, a puzzled frown crossing his brow beneath his red hair. ‘You know what, lieutenant, you don’t say much.’

  Radden drove the requisitioned groundcar like a maniac, weaving through the traffic with centimetres to spare as he climbed the uproad and took to the ways between the thick-walled buildings of Modulus’s surface town. On the flat, he drove even more badly, all the way to the factory where the 7th currently had its home. Long lines of infantry went by in a blur as Radden accelerated, chattering away as he drove. He turned off the overroute without signalling, causing a double-decked ore truck to blare angrily. He powered into a building emptied of ore and foundry vehicles to accommodate the 7th, and skidded to a halt in one of a series of partitioned ore stalls.

  ‘Sorry if I scared you!’ said Radden with a smirk, patently anything but apologetic. ‘Good job I’m not the driver eh?’ He pulled his respirator on. ‘You’ll need yours on too. The building’s not fully sealed. I’ve been told that on a day like this, it doesn’t really matter, but I’m not taking any chances, I don’t know about you.’

  Bannick followed suit, the memory of the lungwash still raw.

  They got out of the car, accompanied by a hiss of escaping atmosphere, and walked past lines of manufactory equipment onto the main floor. The machines that worked there in peacetime had been shunted carelessly to the other side of the half-kilometre wide room, the rockcrete in the middle scarred with scrape marks where they’d been dragged out. In their place was a hollow square about two hundred metres across. One side was walled off by prefabricated barracks buildings, boxes stacked one atop the other, each accessed through a flexible airlock. Store blocks, pallets of spare parts, a small Adeptus Mechanicus shrine, a portable Ministorum chapel on fat wheels and munitions stacks made up two more walls. The fourth side of the square was open, facing the doors to the warehouse.

  Bannick breathed a little quicker of the rebreather-fouled air as he caught sight of what stood before them: the remaining three super-heavy tanks of the 7th Paragonian Heavy Tank Company.

  ‘The Baneblade Artemen Ultrus, the Hellhammer Ostrakhan’s Rebirth, our captain’s ride – he likes blasting things up close – and of course, the Baneblade Mars Triumphant. Ours,’ said Radden, indicating each of the tanks in turn. ‘As you can see, we took a bit of a beating. Always comes through though, Mars Triumphant does, a millennium old and still going strong. Oldest tank in the company.’

  Radden glanced at the empty space on the floor, a box of white paint where Lux Imperator should have stood. ‘They got the Shadowsword though, basdack orks.’ The pair of them made the sign of the aquila, Paragon style, sharing for a moment comradeship in the memory of the dead vehicle.

  Each tank was more than thirteen metres long, over eight wide, the tallest of them towering three times the height of a tall man. The Leman Russ that Bannick had been trained to command seemed puny in comparison, for every tank here was the equal of a squadron of Leman Russ, or a full-strength platoon of infantry.

  And he was going to serve on one. By the Throne, he didn’t deserve this.

  ‘Hey, now that’s the right response,’ said Radden at Bannick’s wide-eyed silence. ‘Come on, your new posting awaits.’ Radden made off to Mars Triumphant, Bannick trailing in his wake, unable to take his eyes off the Baneblade.

  The two Baneblades were of the Martian pattern and differed from one another only in minor detail – both sported a fore-mounted demolisher cannon, a twin-linked heavy bolter turret beside it. Both had battle cannons as their main weapons in double-hatched turrets, rocket-assisted models with longer, vented barrels that were more powerful and further ranged than those mounted on Leman Russ. Both had a coaxial autocannon beside their main guns, more for ranging than for destruction. Both carried two pairs of twin auxiliary fuel tanks up and behind their track guards, either side of reactor plants that muttered and hummed even as the tanks slept. Both carried a sponson bank of remotely operated weapons on either side, although Mars Triumphant had lost one of hers in the fight, more twin-linked heavy bolters with a 90-degree arc of fire to the side and a turreted lascannon atop the sponson with 270 degrees of movement.

  It was on the turret the two tanks differed, Mars Triumphant carrying a pintle stubber on its left hatch that the other Baneblade, Artemen Ultrus, lacked. Mars Triumphant had a larger comms array to the turret’s rear, more stowage and a periscope mounting carved with two winged battle saints either side of the glass. Indeed, Artemen Ultrus was altogether plainer, lacking the decoration and scrollwork that Mars Triumphant had, and Bannick guessed it must be because of the Baneblade’s great age. This was a revered vehicle, a living relic, a testimony to the persistence and power of the Imperium of Man.

  ‘She is, beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Radden. ‘She’s looking a little out of sorts right now, but don’t you worry, we’ll fix her right up.’

  Many panels had been removed from the tanks, revealing the machinery beneath. Lines led from batteries of machines and fuel tanks. Powerloaders stalked noisily between pallets of shells, powercells, spares and rati
ons. Sparks arced from welding torches. Servitors trudged back and forth, or stood in place, precisely performing repetitive tasks. Tech-priests watched over all, interrupting their chants and prayers to deliver sharp rebukes to those less devout, or to communicate with the machine-spirits within the vehicles. Although the full company required forty crewmen to man the vehicles, the number of support staff they required to keep them supplied and functioning was almost quadruple that.

  The super-heavies dwarfed all; like chained monsters they rose up from amidst the activity all about them, quiescent, yet clearly the true power in the room. Swarmed over by tech-priests, their cyborg servitors and men of the Munitorum, they were patient, like beasts being cleaned of parasites by lesser creatures. Their aura of strength was almost overwhelming, as if at any time they chose they could rise up and swat away the bustle.

  An Atlas recovery tank was drawn up by the damaged flank of Mars Triumphant, the shell of a sponson hanging from it. Cables and wires like intestines spilled from a hole in the Baneblade’s side. New plates of armour and parts showed where the tank had been hit by the ork Titan’s strange weapons and repaired, free of paint, glistening like new scar tissue. The damage had appeared grave to Bannick’s eyes in the battle, but ministered to by the tech-priests it seemed a flesh wound, and the tank sat there unperturbed.

  Two tech-priests were busy at the side as the sponson came down, one plugged into a panel in the side of the Atlas by mechadendrite. The two screeched binaric in staccato audio bursts at each other as Radden and Bannick passed, their gesticulating speaking volumes as to their disagreement. ‘That one there,’ said Radden, pointing, ‘is Enginseer Adept Brasslock. You’ll be seeing a lot of him, and him.’ He pointed at a servitor stood to one side, and Bannick recognised it as the one he and Kalligen had seen on the barge. It was equipped for war, a heavy bolter plugged into its shoulder socket. ‘That’s Urtho, the two are rarely apart. See one, the other will be close by. Take my advice and never, ever lose your temper with Brasslock. Urtho does not take kindly to it. Some say he’s got a scrap of personality left in his scraped-out brain, but me, I just think its clever conditioning or something.’