Shadowsword

by Guy Haley

  Fires blazed all around the Seventh’s position. The shattered shells of enemy Leman Russ battle tanks burned, pumping out masses of oil-black smoke. Teams of men lugged dead Geratomrans in yellow uniforms to the back of flatbed trucks and tossed them aboard. The trucks trundled along paths in the muck marked out with red flags. Men and adepts with minesweeping gear walked slowly about the battlefield followed by vigilant servo-skulls, hunting out explosives.

  ‘Stand clear!’ shouted a team. Bannick winced as the mine detonated. He walked up a low hill, its yellow grasses and pale lilac flowers untouched by war. Lux Imperator loomed over them, as if protecting the blooms.

  By the time he had mounted the ladder of Lux Imperator, more chains and cables had been attached to the stricken Hellhammer, and the recovery tanks were taking the strain again. He paused a moment to survey the battlefield. The enemy had chosen their spot well, using augur-detectable mines to direct Ostrakhan’s Rebirth into the deep ditch where it still languished. Cortein’s Honour stood side by side with Artemen Ultrus. The second Baneblade’s right-hand track lay flopped on the grass, three mangled road wheels and a shattered track skirt where the cannon had hit it. That had raised the Baneblades’ fury. The Leman Russ that had fired the immobilising shot was a black crater studded with metal shards, its platoon mates silent masses of metal, giant holes punched through their armour. An engine grumbled a few hundred yards away as another Atlas outfitted with a dozer blade pushed heaps of yellow-clad bodies into a mass grave, intermingling them with the earth.

  Bannick took a deep, thoughtful breath. Seven tanks had ambushed four super-heavies. Suicide, but effective. Three out of four of the Seventh’s tanks were out of action.

  He made the sign of the aquila on his forehead at the engine block shrine of the Shadowsword, climbed aboard and went down through its hatch.

  ‘Officer on deck!’ shouted Udolpho Lo Krast, the driver. Men stopped their work and saluted.

  The Shadowsword was in a sorry state. The lights were blown, illumination provided by red emergency lumens. Bannick held a handkerchief up to his mouth to stifle the smell of scorched flesh permeating the command deck. The body of First Gunner Vando Hastilleen had been removed, but patches of his burned skin still adhered to his station. Menial-grade tech-adepts infested its innards. There did not seem to be a housing panel left unopened. Miles of wires and tubing spilled from the tank onto the deck-plating. Enginseer Starstan, the machine’s permanently attached enginseer, fussed around his subordinates, anxious burbles emanating from his metal face.

  Meggen was on the lower deck, in the thick of it, a servo-skull bobbing close by his head, his arms buried up to the shoulder in the guts of the volcano cannon’s power feed. There was no space aboard. Every gangway had be traversed sideways. All was dominated by the cannon’s enormous capacitors.

  ‘How is it going?’ asked Bannick.

  ‘It’s an Emperor-forsaken, basdack-damned mess!’ said Meggen, heaving aside a hopeless tangle of power cabling. An hour after the battle, and acrid smoke was still curling from somewhere deep inside the Lux Imperator’s primary weapon’s array.

  Starstan poked his head down through the command floor ladder well. ‘Be respectful!’ he shouted in metallic Gothic.

  The skull rotated, the eye piece whining as it focused on Meggen. ‘Treat Lux Imperator with more respect. Its spirit is already disturbed, you risk angering it.’ Brasslock was outside helping with the recovery of Ostrakhan’s Rebirth, but he had enough processing capacity to spare to oversee the efforts aboard Lux Imperator simultaneously.

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Meggen, pushing heavy plastek piping that refused to stay put. He kissed his machina opus nonetheless. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘What is the problem? Why did the tank not fire?’

  ‘Beats me,’ said Meggen. ‘I’ve some experience with these energy weapons, but shells is where I’m at.’

  ‘You’re the most experienced gunner in the company after Hastilleen. After Hastilleen was,’ Bannick corrected himself. ‘You’ve done the acclimatisation training, and plenty of drills. You’re too modest.’

  Meggen rubbed furiously at his nose with his forearm to scratch an itch. His hands were covered in lubricant and white, sticky conductive media. ‘Still doesn’t mean I know how the damn thing works.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I’m pretty sure the Adeptus Mechanicus haven’t got a basdacking idea either.’

  ‘It just wouldn’t fire,’ said Commsman Vremont, stepping down the ladder. ‘Starstan primed the capacitors, but when Vando opened up the main conduit it wouldn’t fire, then it blew up right in his face.’

  A Shadowsword carried a crew complement of six, one of whom had been killed and two others wounded by the explosion. Vremont’s broken arm was bound up in a sling. Hurnigen had taken a lump of shrapnel to the thigh. Third Gunner Rastomar Kalligen had been knocked unconscious.

  ‘How are the others, sir?’ asked Vremont.

  ‘Rastomar’s just woken up,’ said Bannick. ‘Hurnigen’s been swearing fit to make the Emperor’s ears burn, but he’ll be all right.’

  Vremont nodded gratefully. ‘Too many crew out. We are seriously compromised,’ he said. ‘The power surge from the capacitors went everywhere but the cannon. My desk is fragged. Hurnigen’s chart table cracked.’ He gestured with his good arm at the command chair. A pool of Hurnigen’s blood shone on the floor. ‘Our main cogitator bank is offline – the logic engine luckily started up again. I don’t understand it.’

  Brasslock’s servo-skull flew up into Bannick’s eyeline.

  ‘It is the machine’s spirit,’ said the magos.

  ‘Yes,’ said Starstan. He too descended to the lower deck. It became intolerably crowded, and Bannick wanted to get out.

  Starstan’s hands, both incongruously flesh on a body that was mostly of metal, wrung. ‘Since the orks on Kalidar, it has not recovered from the humiliation heaped upon its sacred shell. It feels guilt for what it was made to do. There is trauma in its logic centres. It will take time to exorcise.’

  ‘The tank is traumatised?’ said Bannick incredulously.

  ‘Why are you surprised?’ said Brasslock. ‘You have seen the power of these machines’ spirits. You wear the machina opus beside your aquila. Do you have no faith?’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Bannick. ‘The miraculous is hard to believe, even when it is before your eyes.’

  ‘Guilt, fury, anger, shame, joy – these and all emotions the spirit of the machine feels, for their souls are born from the crackling energies of the motive force, just as yours.’

  ‘Can you not have a quiet word with it?’ said Meggen.

  ‘It is not so simple. The shame that Lux Imperator feels can only be truly purged in battle. It is a machine of war. Only by performing its function as intended can its spirit reach equilibrium again. That is why it is behaving erratically.’

  ‘Oh, so until it feels better it can go on refusing to open fire and killing its crew by spectacularly malfunctioning in combat?’ said Meggen.

  Bannick held up a hand to silence his gunner. ‘Enough, Meggen! Starstan, we need Lux Imperator to be fully functional. The Yellow Guard of Magor are no amateurs, and they defend the capital. What might be done, magos?’

  ‘We can perform the rituals as demanded, but there is only one sure remedy. The one I have stated,’ said Starstan. ‘Lux Imperator must regain its confidence through battle, or it will never function correctly again.’

  ‘I’ll let Hannick know. He won’t be happy but it could have been worse,’ said Bannick.

  Bannick’s vox-set peeped. ‘Sir, Epperaliant. I’ve a man here from the Sixteenth Company of the Four Hundred and Seventy-Seventh. Says he has a request order from Colonel Edel Lo Dostigern.’

  ‘Tell Hannick,’ said Bannick.

  ‘Hannick told me to tell you. They need a super-heavy. Ours is the only one oper
ational.’

  ‘I’ll be right back. Bannick out. Meggen, come with me,’ he said to his gunner. ‘We’re leaving.’

  ‘Duty calls,’ said Meggen to Brasslock’s skull.

  Starstan sang something out in binaric.

  ‘My esteemed frater wished to know if you might spare Tech-Aspirant Kolios for the placation of Lux Imperator’s spirit.’

  ‘No,’ said Bannick mounting the ladder out. ‘We’re going into combat. I need him where he is.’

  The day was pelting with rain by the time Cortein’s Honour rolled out to relieve the 477th.

  The tree-lined road they followed was not wide enough to accommodate the massive bulk of the tank, and so Bannick ordered it to slog through the fields alongside. Had there been space, the road would still have been hard going, being choked with men heading both ways. The Salamander detailed to come and fetch them followed the lead of Cortein’s Honour, driving off the road, over the ditch and into the crops. Bannick stood in the cupola, the tank’s great height enabling him to see far over the flat terrain and its many agricolae. Farming on Geratomro seemed to function at a lower technological level than the industry in the cities, relying on manpower and draught beasts to do the jobs performed by machines elsewhere. The fields were large, arranged as segments of a circle radiating from a round central farmyard housing the main buildings of the agricolum. For all its chilliness, Geratomro supported a wide variety of crops, including orchards, vegetables of various kinds and grains. The Baneblade crushed them all under its treads without showing preference to any, grinding food to feed hundreds into a cold soup that seeped into the mud. The touch of war was everywhere. Draught beasts lay piled in red puddles alongside their masters. More than one farm complex had been sacked, the walls over the windows and doors streaked with soot. The further they proceeded, the more scars marred the land, until they drove through fields whose crops had been burned to the ground, and buildings reduced to shells in crater-pocked fields.

  Progress was slow. The Baneblade was not the most agile of vehicles, its top speed of twenty miles an hour reduced to a grinding fifteen off-road. When the heavens opened, the mud was waiting and the driving worsened.

  Bannick stayed up top through the rainstorm. Some vagary of the local meteorology generated drops that were widely spaced but unusually large and that splashed mightily in soaking bursts on the tank. His hat and the upturned collar of his coat kept him dry enough for a while, and the warmth of the tank heated his legs. The crew would be glad of the sharp fresh air the rain brought.

  The situation on the road was getting worse. Many men were heading away from the front, walking wounded and field ambulances pushing against the flow onwards to Magor’s Seat. The Baneblade rumbled past an altercation at a crossroads, where a Chimera had thrown a track, blocking the way. Bannick watched men in rain ponchos shouting at each other, calling for recovery vehicles to clear the way. He imagined the exchange, their words lost to the thrumming of the Baneblade’s reactor and the drum of the rain.

  Five hours passed. The Salamander commander voxed in to inform Bannick that they were close to forward headquarters, and turned sharply towards a large agricolum hub.

  ‘Forty-five degrees left!’ Bannick ordered. The left track spun backwards at Shoam’s direction, and Cortein’s Honour swivelled towards their goal.

  They rolled over an outlying fence into a muddy pen. The Baneblade could not enter the mean complex of stone and corrugated plasteel buildings without demolishing it. Bannick called the Salamander over so that he could jump in and avoid the sucking mess under the tank’s tracks. Straw and dung were mixed equally into the mud.

  The agricolum probably had a name that meant something to someone, but to the invaders it was just a cross on a map, and they occupied it as though it had no more significance than that, rudely altering it to meet their transient needs. The farmer and his family were dead and propped up against the wall of their home, the word ‘traitors’ scrawled above them in their own blood.

  ‘What happened there?’ said Bannick.

  ‘They opened fire when we said we were going to commandeer the agricolum,’ said the Salamander’s commander. ‘We lost four men.’ He looked at Bannick accusingly. His eyes were hollow with exhaustion. ‘You don’t approve? Not all these basdacking natives are happy to see us. Those men that died were my friends.’

  Bannick turned away. There were seven corpses. Five were children.

  The scout tank stopped suddenly.

  ‘The captain’s this way,’ the sergeant said.

  They jumped down into a yard ripe with the smell of animal waste. A large, hemicylindrical, open-fronted barn housed the forward headquarters. Bannick followed the sergeant into a large area lit by portable lumen trees where vox-operators worked at makeshift desks covered in maps. A single, lobotomised tacticus cognosavant shouted pearls of military wisdom at weary soldiers. A malfunctioning chartdesk fizzled in the centre. The floor was thick with mud and smelt strongly of livestock.

  The sergeant saluted a bare-headed man bent over a map. ‘Captain, this is the tanker,’ he said, and walked away.

  The officer looked up from his desk, revealing a heavily scarred face missing a portion of the upper lip, exposing the teeth in a permanent sneer. ‘Captain Lubin Lo Santelligen, Four Hundred and Seventy-Seventh Paragon Foot, Sixteenth Company,’ he said.

  ‘Honoured Lieutenant Colaron Artem Lo Bannick, Cortein’s Honour, Baneblade, Seventh Paragonian Super-Heavy Tank Company.’ Bannick saluted.

  ‘Right, Jonas’ cousin. I thought I might get you.’

  ‘Is that a problem, sir?’

  ‘It would have been, had he not told me recently you aren’t half the basdack he was expecting. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Whoever you are, I need your help. If you were the dread Horus himself, I’d have to take it.’

  He beckoned Bannick to the table and tapped at a map printed on plastek draped over the desk. ‘There’s a cohort of Huratal’s Yellow Guard dug in here, on this ridge – hundreds of them, backed by artillery. There’s no air support available in the sector, fleet’s too far off tangent to offer direct bombardment, and my artillery company got hit two days back and is scattered in bits up the Matua road. Their heavy guns are taking pot-shots at the road and my troops filtering north to the rendezvous. You saw the wounded heading back?

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘All down to those yellow basdacks. We can’t bypass them, it’ll leave our flank exposed. Until they’re gone, the advance on this front is stalled. This road here,’ he tapped the paper near their location, ‘leads to the main Drava highway and gives access to the south-western districts of Magor’s Seat. Our job was to secure it and allow the rest of our regiment, supported by the Savlar Thirteenth, to push on to the capital here and here, meeting towards the centre.’

  Bannick nodded. The Seventh’s orders had been to reinforce the push to the south.

  ‘So now I’ve got men from five different regiments all trying to get past dug-in artillery where they’re sitting ducks. I’ve had them backing up the road and I’m running out of space and it won’t stop raining.’ He nodded to an aide who depressed a button on a blocky autoscribe assemblage. Five armatures dipped their quills into integrated ink pots, thrust forwards like daggers and began to scratch out a copy of the map onto rough paper.

  ‘I’ve my own men at these locations. We’ve tried to take the ridge three times, and been driven back every time. We tried an armoured assault twice. The first time, I lost all my APCs.’

  ‘A Baneblade should make short work of it, sir,’ said Bannick.

  ‘I was hoping for your whole company, or two super-heavies at least.’ Santelligen produced a battered pack of lho-sticks, a smoker’s choice Bannick had rarely seen. Santelligen offered him one. Bannick shook his head. ‘Good, these things are murderously expensive. Got a taste for them way back. Cheroots just a
ren’t the same once you’ve tasted lho.’

  ‘Lascannons, autocannons, they won’t tax Cortein’s Honour so much.’

  ‘Cocky, aren’t you? There’s something bigger up there than that. Something with real punch. We’ve not got eyes on it yet, but you want to steer clear of it.’ Santelligen’s aide lit the stick for him. The captain puffed at it until the tip glowed and a generous cloud of smoke wreathed his head. ‘We tried the second attack with half a platoon of Leman Russes to back us up. They’re all gone too.’

  ‘You need to be cautious,’ put in Santelligen’s aide. ‘If Cortein’s Honour is lost in this venture, you will have difficulties from the Departmento and the Adeptus Mechanicus.’

  ‘So you think I should let them range in on our boys and then bomb the life out of them, is that it, Mazdaran?’ said Santelligen.

  ‘No, sir. I am only thinking aloud. Perhaps we could wait for the rest of the honoured lieutenant’s company?’

  ‘Can we wait?’ Santelligen looked at Bannick for an answer.

  ‘It’ll be three days at least before the others are repaired, sir. Ostrakhan’s Rebirth was caught in a pit trap. Lux Imperator is suffering serious technical difficulties, and Artemen Ultrus lost its right track and suffered damage to its road wheels that can’t be remedied simply by swapping them out.’

  ‘If we wait–’ began Mazdaran.

  Santelligen looked sharply up. ‘Incoming!’ he shouted over the whistle of shells. All of them dived to ground, and lay in the filth with their hands clasped over their heads. A trio of closely spaced detonations banged outside. Bannick stood to see the agricolum’s main dwelling on fire, the dead family obliterated. A man screamed for help.

  ‘That’s that then,’ said Santelligen. ‘They’ve got our range. There’s no time. You’re attacking now.’

  The rain did not let up, becoming stronger as Cortein’s Honour ground its ponderous way to the ridge-line three miles distant from the 477th’s forward headquarters. Night was falling. The chaos on the road was absolute. Paragonian peacekeepers in rain ponchos were directing traffic off the rough road right where the Baneblade was headed. Headlight beams were filled with streaking raindrops like tracer fire. Bannick looked in dismay at the mess of men blocking his path. A massive, twenty-wheeled heavy hauler was half on the road, half off, its flatbed stacked high with supply crates.