Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

  Yet even as he had come to bear his hellish existence, he prayed for release. Not death, no, he had lived through too much to simply perish. He was filled with a new vitality and fervour that made him determined to cling to life for as long as he was able, to see this through one way or another.

  He prayed for deliverance and tears ran down his face as he felt himself becoming lost. Had the Emperor forsaken him? Did His light no longer shine upon Tanakreg? Had he been abandoned to his fate? For the first time since the occupation, Varnus felt true despair pull at him. He prayed vainly to the Emperor, but felt no comfort in his soul. No, he felt nothing but emptiness.

  The next moment he had forgotten why he had been crying and wiped away his tears in bafflement. Shrugging, he continued his work. The Gehemahnet needed tending.

  The slaughter had been immense and the valley was filled with the dead and dying. A cloying stink rose as the temperature soared, the hot-white sun overhead baking the earth. The wreck of the Titan was like the discarded shell of some giant colossus and scattered debris littered the ravine floor. The battle had been intense. The Word Bearers advanced into the confused Imperial lines after the Imperator’s fall, killing thousands of their foes as they tried to realign their battle line and draw support up past the massive frame of the Exemplis.

  The enemy had inflicted a terrible blow and had retreated once the Imperial reinforcements were brought forward. They had suffered relatively few casualties.

  A day had passed and the giant Ordinatus Magentus rumbled towards the valley. It was so massive that it was barely able to fit through the ravine and there was no possible way that it would be able pass the fallen Titan. It came to a halt some kilometres back, where the valley was wider.

  A dozen, giant, spiked stabiliser legs unfolded to either side of the titanic vehicle, steam hissing out into the hot air as their mechanics were engaged. They reached out to either side of the massive structure and drove down into the ground.

  The air tingled with power as giant energy cores were readied and the massive ribbed cone of the Ordinatus’s main gun was raised. A sound like a thousand jet engines began to whine, soon reaching a screaming intensity that reverberated through the earth. Elysians within a kilometre of the giant machine clutched hands to their ears as the giant creature made ready to unleash its power.

  The air around the ribbed cone-tip of the giant weapon began to shimmer and waver and then the Ordinatus fired.

  A deafening, sharp crack like the sound of a planet ripped in two resounded through the valley. Pre-warned, all the Elysians in the vicinity had engaged the sound mufflers within their helmets, but even so the blast of sound was deafening, making Havorn’s eardrums vibrate painfully. An ungodly silence followed as if all noise had been sucked out of the valley by the focused blast of sonic energy, and the air between the gun and the valley wall wavered and reverberated.

  The effect was astounding. Where the centre of the focused beam of sound struck the wall the rock was turned to dust, exploding outwards in a massive blast as it was shattered down to the molecular level. A wave seemed to spread from the epicentre and the rock rippled as if it were liquid, huge cracks appearing in its wake. Vibrating and shattered, the entire rock face broke apart and fell to the valley floor with a crash that rumbled along the entire mountain range. A huge cloud of salt dust rose up into the air.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The battle for Tanakreg had ground down into a brutal war of attrition. Within five days, the ravine had been levelled by the sheer power of the Ordinatus machine. Its sonic disruptor had reverberated through the mountains, shattering stone to powder and causing vast avalanches that could be felt halfway across the continent. Laron had only ever read about such a weapon and to see it in action was awe-inspiring.

  The steep cliff walls had been reduced to dust and the valleys were filled with crumbled salt rock, creating a vast expanse that the Imperial Guard and Mechanicus forces rolled across. The going was difficult, but with the steep ravine walls reduced to nothing, they were able to attack on a wide front. The enemy was unable to contain the sheer number of the Imperial troopers and they were relentlessly pushed back.

  The enemy had launched several vicious assaults to destroy the potent weapon, but Havorn had charged Laron with the protection of the Ordinatus and he had coordinated effective battles to stall the attacks. He had used his Valkyries effectively, rapidly redeploying units of his 72nd to launch counter-attacks into the flanks of the foe as they advanced, while the tech-guard of the Mechanicus had taken the brunt of the frontal attack. As he dropped more troopers into the flanks of the enemy, Havorn had directed heavier support forwards. Assailed on all sides, the enemy advance had been quashed time and again. He relished these battles. Now that the terrain had been levelled out, he had found the enemy much easier to deal with.

  He snorted, easier to deal with indeed. He had fought the traitor Astartes only once before and they were the toughest and deadliest foes that he had ever encountered in all his days of soldiering. Still, without having to advance up narrow defiles, the small number of the enemy meant that the vast Imperial war engine could grind on. Though their attacks on the traitors became more directed and hate fuelled, they were unable to close on the Ordinatus Magentus.

  Tens of thousands of Imperial troopers had been slaughtered and, wherever the enemy dug in for a concerted battle, they inflicted horrendous casualties. But it was not enough to halt the never-ending tide of Guardsmen, Skitarii warriors and vehicles. The foe was spread too thin and their flanks were surrounded and overrun. It was simply too wide a front for them to cover and there were too few of them to fight the type of war that suited the massed ranks of the Imperial Guard so well.

  Laron had capitalised on this and had ordered hundreds of Valkyries ahead of the main Imperial entourage. Already his storm troopers had assaulted and destroyed several of the enemy anti-aircraft guns emplaced on the foothills of the mountains and he knew that the time would soon come when the Imperials would be able to push forwards and take the fight onto the plains.

  Vast lines of siege tanks ground inexorably forward behind the infantry, pounding the enemy with ordnance outranging anything they had.

  Slowly the enemy had been driven back, pushed out of the mountains and onto the salt plains that spread out like a rippling blanket towards Shinar. If they could push the foe back to the peninsula on which Shinar sat then they would eventually grind them down and destroy them utterly. Though he saw that the old brigadier-general grieved for every soldier that they lost, he could also see that the Imperial commander was confident of their eventual victory.

  It was not the type of war that Laron liked, for it was more suited to the style, or lack of it, of other Imperial Guard regiments. His soldiers of the 72nd were drop-troopers, and in this war of attrition, the unique skills and talents of his units were not being utilised to their full capacity. As soon as the battle reached the plains though, it would be a different matter.

  The sheer number of casualties amongst the tech-guard had been staggering, but ever more of the mindless tech-soldiers marched from the vast factorum crawlers that ground over the earth in the wake of the army.

  Laron had seen the mechanised enhancements and weapons of fallen tech-guard servitors being recovered as the Imperials pushed ever forward and he knew that they were used to create more lobotomised, unfeeling soldiers. Brigadier-General Havorn had spoken of what became of the flesh of the fallen tech-guard and Laron had been horrified.

  It was like some archaic necromancy, he thought, to reuse the flesh and armaments of the dead to create new soldiers to throw thoughtlessly at the enemy. It was morbid and repugnant, and he tried as best he could to keep his men away from them. What was it that the magos called them? Skitarii? They were unnatural and they made his men uneasy. Hell, they made him uneasy. Soldiers that had no notion of fear or self-preservation, he was certain they would all march straight off a cliff to their doom at a word from the magos.
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  Soldiering was meant to be glorious; heroes were made on the battlefield and the victories of those heroes would be recorded for ever more back on Elysia, recounted in song at the great banquet feasts and balls of his home world. War was a noble act where one could gain honour and standing. There was no such honour or heroism amongst the Skitarii. They were little more than automata, playing pieces of their callous masters. What honour was there to be gained fighting alongside such as them?

  He had been fascinated and horrified in equal measures when he had first seen inside one of the mobile factorum crawlers. The motionless shapes of pale-fleshed humans were held in vast aisles of bubbling vat-tanks, kept in a dormant state. That single factorum must have held ten thousand inert bodies, or ‘flesh units’ as the magos called them. Darioq had coldly explained that while the Mechanicus was capable of creating its own vat-grown host bodies, it was time consuming and resource heavy, so most of these soldiers were from the other Imperial Guard units within the Crusade. They had suffered grave injuries, leaving them alive, but brain-dead. Others were criminals and deserters, and the punishment for their crimes was to be turned over to the Mechanicus.

  They were destined to become battle servitors, all semblances of their former selves erased with mind-wipes and the removal of their frontal lobes. Indeed, Darioq had stated, the entire right hemisphere of the brain was removed from all but a few, those used as shock-troops and specialists, where a certain degree of adaptability and autonomous decision making, albeit severely limited in nature, was required.

  Such concepts as creativity were clearly frowned upon within the Mechanicus and Laron had found this galling, for it was anathema to the way that the Elysians operated. Adaptability, being able to react to changing directives, objectives and situations, and the ability to operate effectively deep behind enemy lines with little or no direction from the upper echelons of command, were all favoured skills in the ranks of the Elysians. Those same traits were deplored as dangerous and heretical amongst the adepts of the Machine-God.

  ‘Deep in thought, acting colonel?’ asked a voice behind him and Laron turned to see the approach of the leather-clad figure of Kheler walking towards him.

  ‘Commissar,’ said Laron in acknowledgement. The commissar had been his shadow ever since Havorn had assigned him to watch over Laron and he had certainly not been lax in his duty. Wherever he turned, the man was there, watching and listening, waiting for him to slip up.

  ‘Survived another day without getting shot then, acting colonel?’

  ‘The day isn’t over yet, Kheler.’

  The commissar chuckled. It was insulting and belittling to have the man watching over him and the threat of his presence was obvious. His uniform demanded respect, yet he was a canny warrior and a highly capable officer.

  The swiftness and the severity of his judgement was shocking. The commissar had been smiling and talking with one of Laron’s men, but had executed that same man without a thought not an hour later when the trooper had turned to flee because his lasgun’s powercell had run dry. A laspistol blast in the man’s head had shown all the troopers that cowardice of any kind would not be tolerated.

  ‘You do not flee the enemy under any circumstances!’ he had roared. ‘The Emperor watches over you! If your power cell runs dry, you pick up the weapon of a fallen comrade. If that runs out of ammunition, you draw your pistol. If you have no pistol, you fight with your knife. If your knife breaks, you fight with your bare hands. And if your hands are cut off, still you do not flee, you attack the enemy with any weapon that you have. You bite their damned kneecaps off if that’s all you can do!’

  That had got a scattered laugh and Laron had marvelled at the commissar’s skill. The man had just killed one of their comrades and he had got them to laugh.

  ‘But you do not flee!’ Kheler had shouted severely, his eyes wide and threatening. ‘Or I promise you, as the Emperor is my witness, I will gun you down like traitorous dogs.’

  ‘Motivation,’ the commissar had explained to Laron. ‘That is what I provide to the regiment. The threat of a bullet in the back of the head is good motivation not to turn tail and run.’

  The man switched from jocular comrade to ruthless executioner in a second. Even knowing this, Laron found it hard to dislike the man.

  ‘Aren’t you hot in all that get up?’ asked Laron, motioning towards the commissar’s long, black, leather coat and hat. The temperature over the last days had soared and any sign of the storms of the week before were long passed.

  ‘Hot, acting colonel? Yes, I am damn hot, but do you think I would look such a commanding figure if I were stripped down to my undergarments? And besides, I look damn good in black. Dashing is a word that springs to mind.’

  Laron snorted and shook his head.

  ‘We are only flying to the front to see if the enemy truly are retreating into the plains, or if it is some ploy.’

  ‘Must keep up appearances, acting colonel,’ replied Kheler.

  ‘Hold on to your hat, commissar,’ said Laron as the dark shape of a Valkyrie approached overhead and the Elysian clicked his visor down over his eyes.

  The screaming reverse thruster jets of the Valkyrie blew salt dust up into the air as they rotated towards the ground. Laron smirked as the commissar shielded his eyes with one hand while the other was clamped down on his leather hat to keep it from blowing away in the hot blasts of air coming from the engines.

  The aircraft touched down onto the ground and its door slid open. With a nod to the men inside, Laron climbed aboard and turned to help the commissar. The man fell into his seat, blinking salt dust and grit from his eyes. Laron stood in the open doorway grabbing the overhead rail tightly as the Valkyrie left the ground and began a vertical ascent into the air, turning slightly.

  The Imperial battle force was spread out beneath him. Lines of tanks rolled towards the front and tens of thousands of men marched in snaking columns over the rough ground below. Free of the constriction of the ravine, the army moved forward quickly and in good order. It was surprisingly tiring to organise the dispositions and lines of advance, but no doubt that was why Havorn had ordered him to do it, to test how he progressed.

  It was certainly very different from being a captain. He had not thought it would be quite as difficult and exhausting as this. A lot of thankless organisational and logistical work required his attention, and he found that he was weary beyond words. He was far more tired than he had ever been when engaged on the front line, or even more than when he had been when engaged in deep missions on enemy territory. At those times he would snatch sleep when he could get it, an hour here, a few minutes there, but at least that sleep had been deep and restful, even if it was in the middle of a siege barrage. Now he felt as if he hadn’t slept for weeks and when he did sleep he was still filled with concerns and worries.

  There were a thousand and one jobs that needed his agreement, his sign-off and his input, and he had found it overwhelming. He was floundering and he couldn’t see how he could get on top of it all. It was difficult at first to know what truly needed his attention and what could be delegated to his captains. His respect for Havorn had grown immeasurably as he realised the responsibilities of command that must weigh upon him. But he never showed it. He was always the tough old campaigner and none doubted his judgement.

  His captains; it still sounded strange to him. He was no longer one of them. Now he was their colonel and the easy camaraderie he had once shared with them was long gone. He grinned at that. In truth, there had never been any easy camaraderie with most of the other captains. They had always seen him as an arrogant bastard, the “glory boy” captain of the storm troopers. And they were mostly right.

  It felt good to be in the air again and away from the pressures of his position, and he hated slogging along on foot. That was grunt’s work. He was a glory boy, damn it, and if they were going to say it anyway, he might as well live like one.

  ‘You think the enemy is truly retreati
ng, colonel?’ asked the commissar, though Laron knew that he already knew the answer. This was for the benefit of the men around them. He noted that in the presence of other members of the 72nd the commissar left out the acting part of his title. No doubt that was something else to do with motivation. He was a clever bastard.

  ‘It’s been hard and we have lost a lot of good men, but the enemy are falling back. I just want to see the traitors fleeing with my own eyes. The Emperor is with us! We will make them pay for the deaths of the men of the 72nd.’

  He saw a slight smile in the eyes of the commissar as he played along.

  ‘Motivation is vitally important,’ the commissar had said earlier, ‘whether it comes from the threat of a bullet, the impassioned speech of an officer, or propaganda from the mouth of a commissar, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that your soldiers fight and that they have fire in the bellies. For some that comes from faith, for others it is from outrage. It doesn’t matter. But you must never miss an opportunity to inspire your men. It’s not much, but a word here and there goes a long way with the common soldiers.’

  These conversations with the commissar had been playing on his mind and he had begun to wonder if that was another reason why Havorn had attached the commissar to his staff, to teach him the power of motivation in all its forms.

  ‘By the Emperor’s name, they will pay,’ said Laron once more.

  The view on the grainy, black and white pict screen had been astonishing as Marduk’s Thunderhawk made its approach into Shinar. It was almost unrecognisable from the original Imperial city. From this high in the air, nothing of it could at first be seen, bar the immense Gehemahnet tower that rose into the atmosphere. It was as if some astral deity had hurled a mighty spear into the planet, skewering it. It could be seen for thousands of kilometres all around when the air was clear.