by John French
The Sickle Blade hit the edge of Tallarn’s atmosphere, and threw a cloak of fire across its wings. It trembled and sang as it plunged down through the air. Black ceramite shutters blinked closed over the gunship’s canopy, and suddenly the view of the rancid planet was gone from Argonis’s view. A projection of the world beyond filled his eyes instead, the complexity of reality stripped down to lines of light and sensor data. He was flying by hand, feeling the craft twist against bands of thickening air.
Behind the gunship, the Iron Warriors void-fighters peeled away to circle the re-entry point. The remaining six craft swung in closer to form a box, four Lightning Crows and two Fire Raptors. Argonis heard the terse words of each pilot flick across the vox. They were good, each movement and formation change crisp and precise, but Argonis could not shake the idea that the Iron Warriors flew with the same blunt efficiency as a resentful serf who wanted a duty done as quickly as possible. That was not fair, of course. The Iron Warriors were formidable in every sense. They just lacked something under their skin of iron.
‘You trust-believe the operative Jalen?’ Sota-Nul spoke across the vox. They had not spoken in the hour since the Sickle Blade had launched, but she spoke as though continuing a conversation that had continued without pause. Perhaps in the tech-witch’s mind she had simply cut back into the discussion of Jalen’s lack of information, as though resuming a recording from a mark.
‘Them, not he,’ said Argonis. ‘When you talk of the Twentieth Legion you should never think that you see them all. If you see ten then there are a hundred you do not see. If you see a hundred assume that there are a thousand. If you see one alone assume there are ten thousand.’
‘Is that your own wisdom?’
‘The Warmaster’s.’
‘He does not trust them…’ said Sota-Nul, and he thought he heard something rattling and serpentine in her voice. ‘Despite their alliance to his cause?’
‘His remarks,’ he said carefully, ‘were, I believe, intended as a compliment of their mode of war.’
Argonis watched as the altimeter counted down. They were within the lower bands of atmosphere. He blinked a rune, and the shutters flicked back from the canopy. A swirled soup of fog pressed against the armourglass. They were above a huge plateau that bore the name Khedive, diving directly downwards, accelerating into the grasp of the planet’s gravity. Just above the ground they would flick up from their descent, then slam into a ground-hugging curve. The XVI Legion called this manoeuvre Ahagress, ‘the dagger point’, in Cthonian. The Iron Warriors had simply referred to it as Assault Manoeuvre 23-b. The ground was coming up fast. He triggered the gunship’s ground-sweeping auspex. The shapes of war machines blinked in his sight, bright with heat and hard metal edges.
‘You have not answered,’ said Sota-Nul.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I neither trust nor believe the Alpha Legion, and what the Warmaster believes is not for me to know.’
‘But you are his emissary.’
‘Yes. I am.’
‘War machines active in insertion zone.’ The heavy voice of the Iron Warriors escort commander cut into the vox. ‘Threat status unclear.’
‘Leave them,’ snapped Argonis. ‘Even if they are hostile they won’t be able to touch us. Maintain pattern and course.’
‘Confirmed,’ said the Iron Warrior. Argonis watched as the altitude count drained down into smaller and smaller values.
‘Yet…’ Sota-Nul’s voice lingered on the word. There was something unsettling about it, something more flesh than machine, but still not human. ‘Yet even though you neither believe nor trust the operative Jalen, we still follow where he guides us.’
‘You do not need to trust a weapon to wield it.’
‘And that is what you do? You are sure?’
The altitude value at the edge of his sight pulsed amber then red. Beyond the canopy the fog parted for a brief instant, and a bare plain expanded beneath him. For an eye-blink he saw the scattered shapes of tanks. Then he triggered the anti-grav and the gunship snapped up. G-forces hit him like a blow. For a wonderful, terrible second it felt as though he were both floating and falling without control. Then he slammed power into the thrusters and Sickle Blade punched forward, and the thunder of its passing vanished behind it.
She waited in the dark and talked to herself.
It was cold. Her enhanced physiology let her discard the discomfort of the dropping temperature, but she still registered it. She had left the enviro-suit on. One of the suit’s very limited advantages was that it kept the chill out. She had cut all power in Vanquisher 681 before she had killed its crew. That part of the plan had been simple.
The machine’s controls were not complex. She had waited until the rest of the squadron had spread out, and then let one of her net-flies crawl out of her suit and bite into the tank’s vox and comms systems. From there it had been easy to slowly guide the squadron to where she needed it. Over the course of an hour she had teased Vanquisher 681 further and further away from its comrades without anyone realising. By the time she cut the power in the tank there was a very small probability that the rest of the squadron would find it. The crew had not panicked at first, and when they had it had played to her advantage. Then the waiting had begun.
She had begun the self-dialogue after four hours.
‘Question: What is the chance of error in the termination projection?’
‘Answer: High. The factors are unknown and all outcomes are approximations.’
It was a basic technique of the Vanus Temple, one of the first that initiates mastered. As much as mental skill and data were the foundations of the Vanus arts, doubt and questioning were trained into their psyches from childhood. The first stage of this training came from responding to the questions of a master, and then by mimicking that technique through assuming the viewpoint/intellectual framework of another person. Eventually the question/aggressive-doubt technique became part of their basic awareness. In time the back and forth of self-interrogation sank down into the architecture of their subconscious. Most Vanus rarely revisited the technique consciously, but Iaeo had taken to doing so during her deployment. At first she had thought of it as a form of mental cleaning, keeping her functions grounded. After a while she wondered if it had become a consequence of operating without direction, a compulsion.
In the quiet of the Vanquisher’s hull she flipped between questioner and answer, vocalising both. In her mind the questioner was always Master Senus, her mentor for her first decade in the Temple. His sour shrunken face grinned out each challenge from a pict-perfect memory.
‘Question: What is the basis of the current termination projection?’
‘Answer: That the presence of an emissary is seen as significant by the Alpha Legion. That the presence of the emissary represents a change in the problem field. Where there is change there is opportunity.
‘Question: State your current target.’
‘Answer: Apex Alpha Legion operatives within the Tallarn war locale.’
‘Question: Name and identify individual targets.’
‘Answer: Alpha Legion Apex Operative, cognomen Jalen.’
‘Question: Outline target’s current location, nature, capabilities, connections and resources.’
‘Answer: Demanded information unknown.’
She paused. In her mind the memory image of her mentor’s face grinned. It was not a pleasant expression.
‘Question: Outline base-level information related to target.’
‘Answer: Multi-level infiltration of loyalist forces on Tallarn by human, or human approximate operatives. Sub-level of bribed, coerced, or converted assets likely to exist within survivors of Iron Warriors viral attack, because of prior infiltration of Tallarn by the Alpha Legion.’
‘Question: Project the likely meaning of “emissary” in the context of the problem field.’
&nbs
p; ‘Answer: An actor sent by an external power as formal representation of that power. As the Alpha Legion is not dominant within the enemy forces, the emissary is not to them. The Iron Warriors are the dominant authority within the enemy forces at present. The emissary is, therefore, an individual sent to the Iron Warriors from another power base. This analysis has a 76 per cent accuracy value.’
‘Demand: Expand beyond primary analysis.’
‘Answer: Given a blank reading of power values within the enemy forces, an emissary implies at least a peer relationship of authority, and suggests a dominant relationship. The emissary is from a higher authority than the Iron Warriors. The emissary is from Horus Lupercal. This expanded analysis has a 38 per cent accuracy value.’
In her mind’s eye her mentor’s desiccated mouth spread into a dagger-slash smile.
‘Question: How does this offer a termination solution on the designated target?’
She paused again.
‘Answer: The presence of an emissary from Horus represents a change in power structures, an overall alteration in the problem field.’
The memory of her mentor just stared at her, eyes glittering in mocking triumph.
‘Answer clarification,’ she began, paused, felt her own hesitation, and shivered. To doubt brings truth, said another voice in her head, to be unclear is to fail before you begin. ‘Answer clarification: The emissary allows for an expansion of the problem space, and possible elimination of targets by manipulating ignorance and knowledge within the enemy forces.’
She stopped. She could hear her own heart beating through her blood in the silence of the Vanquisher’s interior. She saw the memory of her mentor lean forward, looking down at her, the light catching the implanted membrane over his eyes, turning them to blank silver.
‘Assertion,’ he whispered with her voice. ‘You are clutching at uncertainties.’
‘Response: There are possi–’ The words caught in her throat.
‘Assertion: You don’t see a clear outcome path. Assertion: You don’t know what you are doing. Assertion: You are going to make an error.’
She blinked. Suddenly aware of the cold inside the Vanquisher again.
‘You are going to make an error, Iaeo,’ she said quietly to herself.
She stayed still and quiet for a long while after that, eyes staring into space while she counted seconds.
At last the probability that the squadron were still searching for Vanquisher 681 shrank to nothing.
It was time.
She uncurled herself, and reached across the slumped body of the tank’s commander. The tank’s communication and vox systems came online. She triggered the signal she had prepared. It was a broad-spectrum distress broadcast. Dozens of these signals washed the comms network of Tallarn, the dying gasps of war machines who could not reach home. Both sides tracked down the sources of such signals near to their shelters. Functioning war machines were valuable in this war, even if the dead were pulled out of their hulls.
The signal began to ping out into dead air, and Iaeo listened and waited for the Iron Warriors to hear. She had positioned Vanquisher 681 close to the patrol screens which ran around the Sightless Warren’s southernmost entrances. Somewhere in the Iron Warriors base the signal would be heard, and recovery vehicles would come to pull the dead hull beneath the earth. Once she was inside the Sightless Warren she could begin the next stage.
She curled back into a ball, and watched the signal transmission light pulse. She considered beginning the self-dialogue again, but decided not to. The sound of a rising wind rattled down the outside of the hull. After a moment she thought it became a voice scratching at her from memory.
You are going to make an error, Iaeo, it said.
Tallarn was changing. Dawn broke across the planet in a ragged line. On the surface the light grew brighter, dissolving into the fog so that the air seemed soaked in a dirty brilliance. From orbit, if one looked down at the correct angle, the new day was a luminous cord pulled across the planet’s surface. Each day had begun like this since the virus bombing, and it seemed that it always would. Except that, here and there, the new light found holes in Tallarn’s shroud.
In places the fog had thinned, and the ground had begun to dry, black sludge caking to a dry layer under the sun. Shrinking pools of slime dotted this landscape. In places the hard crust covered deep sink holes of black liquid beneath. War machines had been lost to these hidden wells, their weight shattering the crust and plunging them into the void beneath. The turrets and barrels of some stuck up from the ground like dead hands reaching for air.
Dust began to replace the fog in these dry places. Winds shivered across the flats, picking up the powdered layer from the top of the ground and tumbling it up into the air. The human crews of tanks began to recognise the dust storms by the dry rattling sounds they made on the outside of their hulls. ‘The voice of the dead’ they called it.
Six days after the failed third attack on the Sightless Warren, the first squadron of war machines was lost to a storm on the plains of Khedive. Their wrecks were found by chance three weeks later. Lightning from a massive storm had crawled over their hulls, fried their systems and detonated their munitions. The wind had then stripped the corroded paint and soot from their hulls.
The fog swirled on the edge of the drying areas. It still covered much of Tallarn, but it too was changing. Churned by fire from battles, and the pillars of energy hurled from warships, it boiled with its own currents, spinning across the seas and slime-sheened mountains. Heavy with soot and the residue of great and terrible weapons, it spawned storms that dragged sheets of black rain through the dissolving rubble of cities.
The survivors of Tallarn felt the changes too.
The Hell Above was dying, they said. In place of the death mire of the old, a new land was emerging, fathered by war and mothered by poison. It was a hungry child too, filled with spite and hunger for their lives. As with so much of the battle, the survivors reached into the language of their past to name the changing surface of Tallarn. ‘Yathan’ they called it – the ‘land of lost pilgrims’.
SIX
Comrades
Black Oculus
Observer
‘Origo?’ Kord spoke the name carefully. His head was swimming, hovering somewhere on the boundary between exhaustion and hallucination. ‘Origo?’ he said again, checking as he did so that the vox was set to the scout machine’s frequency.
‘Yes, sir,’ came Origo’s voice, dry and wrung out. Kord licked his lips. His tongue was dry.
They had lost the quarry three days before. The Iron Warriors had simply vanished; one second the scouts were saying that they could see them, and the next the vox was filled with confusion. Finally a numb resignation settled into Kord like ice water. The auspex screens were showing merely static, as though the air itself had become nothing but a blizzard of distortion.
They had carried on for another twelve hours on the same heading after they had lost their quarry. No one spoke except to check headings and status. Kord remained quiet, even as the instinct to ask for fresh reports itched at him. They had settled into the silence for four hours, and at the end of it Kord had given the order to move out on the same bearing as before. No one had said anything other than the briefest of acknowledgements. That had been two weeks before, two weeks of pushing onwards sipping recycled water and nutri-paste from tubes inside the suit. They had not seen anything in that time, not a silhouette of a vehicle, not a scratch of code on the wind. At first he had been able to hear the tension in the voices of the others over the vox. Then that had faded to a dull monotone, which blended with the fog beyond. Even Sacha and the rest of his own crew had faded into soundlessness. He could not say he blamed them. He was not sure if he felt alive himself.
‘Was there something, colonel?’ asked Origo.
Kord breathed. He was not sure why he had beg
un this.
‘What should I do, Origo?’ the words came before he could help them. They hung in the pause that followed. I sound so weak, he thought. Weak, broken, cracked.
‘With all due respect, sir, that is not how the chain of command works.’
Kord almost laughed. He felt giddy.
‘We won’t find them again, will we, Origo? The ghost I was following is gone, isn’t it?’
‘If this is the old flats south of Kussank, then we could travel the two hundred kilometres we have already covered again before we saw its edge. They might be anywhere within that space, or somewhere else entirely.’ Origo did not add the implication of those facts. He did not need to.
Kord clicked the vox to reply, but said nothing. After several seconds of fizzing silence he released the transmission key. He closed his eyes, but kept the vox open. He began to notice the heat and noise of the machine, the warm clamminess of sweat on the seals of his suit, the stuttered clatter of the tracks turning, the way that Sacha twisted to get comfortable every few minutes. It was as though his mind and senses were reaching for something to take the place of the thought that kept rattling through him.
I was wrong.
Three hours after the last sighting he called a full halt. The regiment had scattered into a ring, guns and sensors facing outwards, power, heat and air turned down to a minimum. He had ordered all crews to sleep. He wondered, however, how many of them would sleep. He could not, he knew that without trying.
After several minutes he opened the vox to Origo again.
‘Is there supposed to be anything else out here?’
‘There was a settlement on the northern edge of the flats, a shelter too. We could perhaps make it in thirty-six hours if we went straight and fast.’
‘Are you saying that we should run for safety?’
‘Isn’t that why you’re asking?’
‘They are out here. We lost them but there are others.’ He paused, realising that the words had come without him thinking about them.