by William King
I squinted into the darkness. By the light of las-burst I recognised the mechanic’s squat form. He and a bunch of others from Number Six were flash-frying one of the beasts, probably wanted to know what it tasted like.
‘You know it’s strange,’ Ivan said, not in the least distracted from the job of depressing the rest of us. ‘There’s a whole army down there. This is probably the most people who have ever stood in this spot. Will most likely be until the end of time, till the stars burn out and the Emperor walks again.’
‘And your point is?’ I asked. Ivan shook his head and laughed bitterly. I heard the metal of the flask clink against the metal of his jaw.
‘We’ll never come back this way. We’ll never see this place again. We blasted it to bits in the name of the Emperor and tomorrow we will be gone and all that will be left will be wasteland.’
‘By the Emperor’s Throne, you are a miserable bastard, Ivan,’ Anton said. ‘I came out here happy to see the stars. Another five minutes of listening to you and I’ll be ready to eat a grenade.’
‘You’ll never get to be a Space Marine if you do that,’ Ivan said. His mood was contagious though. Even Anton seemed thoughtful now.
‘You think they’ll have big guns over there?’ he asked.
‘It’s a hive city – what do you think?’ I said.
‘Big enough to blow a hole in a Baneblade the way we blew this place up?’
‘Big enough,’ I said.
‘I can see what this miserable bastard is so depressed about then,’ said Anton.
‘It’s the way the world is,’ said Ivan. ‘Always somebody with a bigger gun. One day you’re doing the blowing up, next day you’re being exploded yourself.’
‘Not if we’re lucky,’ I said. ‘It’ll be some other poor bastard’s turn.’
I was fighting hard to keep up my spirits. The mood of total belief in victory that Macharius had given us had vanished into the night air. At least so it seemed for just a moment.
‘How can we lose?’ said Anton. ‘We’ve got Macharius with us.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Ivan. ‘He does not seem like a man in the habit of losing.’
And as quickly as it had come, the mood of pessimism vanished, seemingly dispelled by the magic of the general’s name. In the distance thunder rumbled. The ancient daemon gods of war beat their drums. Man-made lightning flickered. Somebody somewhere was dying.
Soon it would be time for us to join in.
A monstrous storm blew in from the north. The hot desert winds brought clouds of abrasive dust. It ground along the side of the Indomitable, stripping the paintwork in places. The filters kept most of it out, but the air had a strange taste and my mouth felt gritty. My eyes watered so much I was forced to pull down my visor. Everybody else in the cockpit did the same thing.
The winds were strong enough to send small pebbles pinging like bullets off our hull. The external comm-net crackled. Only occasional fragments of vox were audible. There was something about the weather on this planet potent enough to disrupt even our comm-grids. That was disturbing to say the least.
I kept the Baneblade rumbling forwards, knowing that the dust would work its way into the mechanisms of the treads and eventually break them down. It would be unfortunate if it happened. There was no way anyone could go outside and perform field repairs. If we dropped behind the main battlegroup there would be no help available either. We would be stuck out in the desert until the recycling systems overloaded and we died of hunger, thirst or bad air. It seemed unlikely that anyone would come looking for us while a war was being fought.
Even as these thoughts flitted through my mind, I concentrated on the way forwards. The New Boy was driving as my relief but I watched him like a hawk in case he made a mistake. I was ready to override the controls if any enemy appeared.
The lieutenant obviously felt the tension in the air. He spoke reassuringly into our local net, as if to make up for the lack of external chatter. ‘I’m glad I am inside on a day like today,’ he said. ‘Now is not the time for going for a little walk in the fresh air.’
There were some chuckles at that, and the truth of it was that he was right. There was something oddly reassuring and even perhaps a little enjoyable about being inside a monstrous armoured vehicle and immune to the ravages of the deadly storm outside.
‘Even the weather is on Macharius’s side,’ he said. ‘If this storm does not cover our approach nothing will.’
That was certainly an optimistic interpretation of events but who was I to disagree? It was possible he was right. The lieutenant knew more about these things than I did.
‘How long you think this will go on for, sir?’ the New Boy asked.
‘Our tac briefing says these storms can last for days. Sometimes the air outside can get so hot it’s like stepping into a furnace. The heat would kill you if the dust did not strip you to the bone first.’
A pebble ricocheted off the hull as if to emphasise his point. It sounded as if someone was firing a boltgun at us.
‘It’s why every part of this force is mechanised. There’s no other way of fighting on this planet until we’re close enough to the hives to find some cover. Now keep your eyes peeled. We’re getting close to the outer perimeter defences. There are bunkers full of big guns and lascannons. If this storm keeps up we’ll bypass them and cut them off from supply. If it dies down all of a sudden, we need to be ready to fight.’
As if some daemon of the storm had heard him, the sound of the wind began to die away. The grinding noise lessened. Chatter on the external comm-net became audible again.
The great billowing clouds of dust started to settle, except where the passing of the tanks set it swirling.
‘Oh shit,’ I heard someone say. A glance into the periscope told me why.
Ahead of us lay an enormous armoured bunker. It was the size of a small hill, reinforced with plascrete and sheets of durasteel. The maws of several very large guns pointed in our direction. A huge turret traversed towards us. I hit the override and took the controls from the New Boy. He tugged at the sticks for a few moments not realising what was happening. It was hard to blame him. The same thing had happened to me the first time I went into battle.
I glanced around at the terrain. Dunes undulated all around us, some of them large enough to provide us with some cover. I picked the most likely looking of them and sent us in that direction a fraction of a second before the lieutenant gave the order to take us hull-down.
Of course, the dune would not provide the slightest smidgeon of protection against the blast from one of those lascannons. That was not the point. The point was not even to hide us from view. It was to make us less visible than all the other tanks around us. If we were less of a target, the enemy would seek somebody else. I would not have wished death on anybody on our side, but our first task was to see that we stayed alive. Dead men win no battles and they certainly do not tell tales about them afterwards.
The lieutenant barked orders into the comm-net. I heard Ivan and Anton and the others respond. The whole Baneblade vibrated as all of our batteries went off at once, thundering at one of those distant guns.
Lines of las-fire stabbed out at us from the smaller emplacements in the bunker. It was stupid. Hitting a Baneblade with a light weapon was like menacing an elephant with a sulphur match. Those weapons would have cut infantrymen down like chaff but were useless against us.
Our fire blasted into one of the larger emplacements, sending shards of broken metal flying. That was one gun silenced. As I watched, smaller Chimera units surged forwards across the dunes. Heavy bolters blazed from the small-looking turrets on top of their hulls. Blasts from the pillbox tore a few of them apart but many more got close, then huge explosions from below sent them hurtling broken skywards.
‘Minefield,’ I heard the lieutenant mutter. ‘Lemuel, take us in, w
e are going to clear a path.’
There was no point arguing. The commander’s chair was behind mine. He could put a bullet through my brain if he even suspected mutiny, which in truth was not something I had in mind.
As I urged the Indomitable forwards I was thinking more of the possibility that the mines might be powerful enough to breach our hull and that we would be sitting targets for those batteries in the great fortress.
The lieutenant just kept talking into the comm-net. Ahead of us the Chimeras began to reverse, moving out of our paths like a swarm of crypt rats passing round a mastodon. I saw one or two broken bodies in the minefield, one or two men still moving. I did my best to ignore them and the thought that in a few minutes that could be me.
I nudged the Baneblade forwards. Something exploded beneath us. For a moment, I felt as if my heart was going to stop. I heard the New Boy groan and when I looked over his face was white. The hull vibrated like a great drum but held.
‘Keep us moving forwards, Lemuel. Those mines are not strong enough to stop us.’ I wished I was as sure of that as the lieutenant was. He calmly commanded the turrets to keep up a stream of fire into the gun emplacements even as one of those mighty lascannons started to rotate towards us. I knew that if we were directly in its sights then we were dead for sure. Such a powerful, fixed position gun had power enough to take out even a tank like the Indomitable. Another mine went off. For a moment, the Baneblade shuddered and threatened to stop. It felt as if even the massive weight of the ancient tank was not enough to keep it on the ground. For a heartbeat I feared that one of the drive-trains had given way and that we were immobilised. The old monster kept crawling forwards. Our guns raked the nearest positions. Brown-clad infantrymen rose up out of concrete foxholes and scurried away. What might have been a commissar rose to shoot them. A hail of fire from our anti-personnel weapons killed soldier and leader both. The lascannon kept traversing towards us. It would only be a matter of moments now before it had us in its sights.
‘Keep moving, Lemuel,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Just a few more metres.’
Suddenly I understood what he was doing. I fed the engines as much power as they would take and we surged forwards passing under the line of fire of the great lascannon. Its beam scorched the earth behind us but we were safe. The barrel of it could not be depressed any lower. We were under its arc of fire.
Along the path we had cleared through the minefield Chimeras raced forwards, guided by the mark of our tracks. The other Bane-blades were doing the same now. Within minutes the minefield was breached and our infantry swarmed over the sides of the pillbox, clearing bunkers and foxholes, breaking through the armoured security doors and swarming into the interior. We sat outside in the sun and provided them with covering fire.
‘That’s our first objective taken,’ said the lieutenant with some satisfaction.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the Understudy. ‘Everything is going according to plan.’
I wondered about that. I really did. Would it really have gone so well if the lieutenant had not been there, and seen the weakness in the minefields. And what if he had been wrong, what if the mines had been able to destroy the Baneblade. You can drive yourself mad thinking about such things. It’s best to stick to the things that actually happen and not what might have been. That’s a good rule when thinking about life in general, as about the wars you have fought in.
By noon the sun, at its highest point, gazed down on our triumph. Prisoners were rounded up and disarmed or shot. We had won a small victory but it was a victory and that is always a good way to open a campaign, as I am sure Macharius and the lieutenant at least understood.
We climbed down from the Baneblade to stretch our legs. We had been given a break and who knew how long it would be before we managed to get out of the tank’s claustrophobic interior.
The air smelled different. We lost the tang of incense and filtered air and cooped up sweaty bodies we had inside. I could smell the desert and explosives and burning and something else disturbing.
Atop a nearby ridge I noticed something. It was a cage, made of metal, resting on a metal platform on a high spot above us. It was an odd shape – not square like most of cages I had seen but curved towards the top. Inside it were a number of X-shaped structures made from metal. I was too far away to make out what exactly these cages contained although I could see that they were blackened and scorched and covered in what appeared to be soot. Curious, I set off up the hill, shouldering my shotgun just in case. Anton and Ivan followed me.
I began to notice something else about the cages. Beneath them was some sort of residue. The bottoms seemed more scorched than the tops as if fires had been lit beneath them and heated the metal framework. As I got closer, I saw that this was exactly the case and I saw something else. There were fire-blackened human skeletons attached to the X-frames within the cages. They had been chained there.
‘What in the name of the Emperor?’ Ivan said and whistled. Anton just let out a high-pitched nervous giggle as if not quite able to come to terms with what he was seeing. I walked closer, thinking there must be some mistake.
There was no mistake. Somebody had chained up a number of men within the cages. They had set them alight. In places the flesh was scorched black, in other places pink meat and charred bone was visible where the flesh had sloughed away. Long metal tentacles descended from the top of the cage. They contacted the scorched skulls. At first I thought they were more chains designed to lift the victims’ heads at an unnatural angle but then I saw they were fire-proof tubes connected to metal rebreather filters over the victims’ mouths.
I stared, not quite able to get to grips with what I was seeing. It was mechanically-minded Anton who figured it out.
‘The tubes kept those poor bastards breathing,’ he said.
‘What?’ Ivan said.
‘The smoke from the flames might have suffocated them. The tubes fed air into their lungs, kept them breathing while the flames burned them alive.’
He paused for a moment and thought for a moment. ‘No. It was worse. They were not just burned alive. There are heating elements in the metal. The bars, the chains, those cross-bars would all be white hot. They would be branded as they burned.’
‘Why?’ I asked, for once not astonished by the fact I was asking Anton the reason for something.
‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Discipline maybe?’
‘You mean like a flogging?’
‘More like an execution.’
‘They are a cruel bunch on this world,’ said Ivan. We had lived under Imperial Guard discipline for a decade so you had to plumb impressive depths for Ivan to think you were cruel.
We walked around the cages, looking at them from all angles, trying to make sense of what was going on here. I’ve fought orks and they can be vicious but this was something else. It was calculated and strange and nasty beyond words. Someone had wanted whoever was imprisoned in these cages to suffer in the most profound way, to drag out every second of their blazing agony as their red-hot surroundings consumed their lives.
I stopped and stared at it for a long time.
‘What are you thinking, Leo?’ Anton asked.
‘I am thinking it would be a bad idea to be taken prisoner by whoever did this.’
‘You’ll get no arguments from me,’ said Ivan.
‘If I find the bastards who do this stuff, I’ll show them the sort of burning a lasgun can do,’ said Anton. He meant it to sound mean. It came out frightened.
I turned away from the cage and looked down at the aftermath of the battle. There were tens of thousands of Imperial Guardsmen down there, swarming over the position like ants, and I was suddenly very glad of that.
I could see the Indomitable and Corporal Hesse on top of it, waving up at us.
‘You reckon we ought to report this?’
I glanced around. From up here I co
uld see there were other cages and other groups of soldiers and officers clustered around them, gawping.
‘I don’t think we’ll need to,’ I said. ‘Other people have already noticed.’
The columns of our mechanised force roared southwards, moving as fast as they could. Valkyries and Vultures filled the sky overhead. All around us the landscape began to change. Great pipelines ran to the horizon. Signs of human occupation became more visible: empty irrigation canals and the huge crystalline geodesics of hydroponic farms. There were small pueblos and larger hab-zones.
Sometimes in the distance I caught sight of dust plumes as if refugees were fleeing before us. Sometimes, very far in the distance the clouds seemed to glow, although I had no idea why.
So far, we had not met any real opposition, which was worrying. Karsk was an industrial world – it should have had a mighty army defending it. We had overcome all resistance a little too easily.
I found it suspicious.
I could tell from the chat that I heard on the comm-net that the others were uneasy too. Ivan was making a few slurred jokes about how soft the heretics were. We were all wondering when the real war would begin.
Here and there about the landscape were more of the cages for burning folks alive. Some of them were large enough to hold hundreds. They seemed to become more common as we approached the city.
The ground beneath us was firmer now. We were out of the great ash deserts and on to what was either more solid rock or a foundation of plascrete set there for purposes of construction. The buildings started huddling together to form small towns. We swept by them, heading for our goal. It was swiftly becoming visible on the horizon.
A huge excrescence emerged out from the planet itself, a dense jumble of towers, each thrusting into a polluted sky. The clouds hung so low over the city that they obscured the top of the towers, as if the world was ashamed of Irongrad and sought to hide it beneath a blanket of fog. It took some time for me to realise that the clouds and fog were a product of the city itself, so strong was this initial impression. At the very tip of the hive where it vanished into the clouds, the sky was lighter and flickered as if something was aflame within the toxic fog.