by Guy Haley
Stormlord
Guy Haley
Lieutenant Jonas Vor Artem Lo Bannick of the 477th Paragon Foot surveyed his troops.
They were men of Paragon, all of them, arrayed in uniforms filthy with the mud of Gullen. They waited behind the high earthern bank shielding the siege-lines, the safety of their camp four kilometres behind them.
The men stared at the granular surface of the wall. Their time on the front had battered the fear out of them. So many were dead already that they had ceased to believe in their own survival, and their faces displayed grim acceptance of their fate.
Jonas had his back to the berm. Watching his men was preferable to staring at the bank that marked the end of the world.
Priests went down the line, muttering benedictions. No other spoke. The men of Paragon faced death silently, as death waited for them silently beyond that bank, in the sucking bog, in the trenches on the other side and in the kilometres of gun emplacements and bunkers; their fields of fire carefully planned, zigzag defence lines that reached out in the points of a deadly star to embrace any assault with ungentle arms of fire and bullet.
The rebels had massed on the Palatine Redoubt. The redoubt housed a defence laser, projecting out on a spur of fortifications away from the main walls so that it could fire clear of the palace void shields. With the defence laser operational, the fleet could not bombard the city. If the fleet could not bombard the city, the void shields would not stay down. If the void shields could not be brought down, then the rebels were safe.
And so the flesh-grinding fortifications of the defence laser must be breached by the infantry. The detachment of the Second Recovery Force had been attempting this task for a fortnight, without success, and with much blood.
The men kept their minds clear of all that, if they could. They kept their eyes away from the muzzle of the starship-killer projecting over the siege line berm and looked to their officers, as if these men of nobler birth could shield them from the las-beams of the rebels. The officers feared as much as their lower-born countrymen; their stoicism was an act, a keeping of face. Both men and officers knew it to be so. This shared, unacknowledged fear forged a comradeship between high- and low-born that none could have anticipated when they faced the maws of the dropships together and bade farewell to Paragon.
Together still, they faced the maws of death. Highborn men who would not have looked twice at those who followed them on Paragon glanced back repeatedly, checking the soldiers in their charge over and over, their concern open, and not just for their own fates.
Jonas had had many advantages in his life: his tall, athletic build was of far cleaner form than those of his men. Literally head and shoulders above the common soldiery, he was healthy in a way the lower orders of his world could never be. He owed it to his men to be the leader they needed him to be, and that meant concealing his own terror.
The front was still. The flag carried by Jonas’s ensign, Bosarain, stirred in the chilly wind. The vox channels were silent, somewhere out in the endless marshland, a native aerial lifeform cawed as if nothing were amiss. The war here operated with obscene decorousness. That the rebels would be shown little mercy when the palace fell had no bearing on the proceedings. Every day, the bombardment took place at the same time. Every day, the men of the Second Recovery Force would march from their camp and head toward the berm. Every day, they would go over the top, and they and their foes would grapple for metres of sodden ground. The two sides would part like exhausted lovers, head wearily back to their lines and prepare to do it all again the next morning.
The defence laser boomed. Its repetitive firing marked time for both sides. Every fifteen minutes the air cracked with man-made thunder as the great weapon discharged, a searing column of superheated air revealing the passage of its beam as it sought out the ships in orbit.
Jonas’s hand went to the grip of his laspistol. He flicked open the holster with his thumb. Crusted mud fell from his weapon. Gullen was a boggy world; it was impossible to keep anything clean.
The defence laser blast was the signal for the commencement of the day’s hostility, and the artillery of Jonas’s side replied. The rumble of scores of guns firing simultaneously made the lieutenant start in a way the defence laser had not.
‘Be steady, lieutenant. If you cannot inspire your men, look to your men for inspiration.’ A gloved hand, impossibly white in a warzone where dirt was ubiquitous, took Jonas by the shoulder. ‘War and fear make all men equal in the eyes of the Emperor. Brotherhood is the gift of the Emperor to the warriors who serve him.’
Commissar Suliban treated Jonas with a certain compassion, although Jonas knew the man would shoot him at the slightest sign of cowardice. Suliban’s fervour annoyed him, but it was impossible to be unmoved by his faith.
‘I wish they would get on with it,’ muttered Jonas. He glanced at the commissar. His uniform, from the shining peak of his cap to the gleaming toes of his boots, was immaculate. Jonas had no idea how he kept his kit so clean.
Commissar Suliban’s hand released him. ‘Impatient for the fray? Good, I applaud your valour, lieutenant. Your desire to close with the enemy is a credit. Fervor vincit omnia, fervor vincit omnia.’ He nodded his approval.
Jonas did not apprise the commissar that it was his weariness of fear, and not bravery, that prompted his eagerness to get it over and done with.
The company priest and his acolytes reached Jonas, the smell of bitter incense from their censer driving out the stink of unwashed bodies and damp. The priest began his litany, blessing Jonas with a touch of scented oil. Jonas mumbled the cant responses with half an eye on his platoon until the priest finished his benediction and moved on.
A wave of small movements made their way down the line, men shifting, turning their heads.
‘Looks like we’re getting ready,’ said Bosarain, standing up straight.
‘Look sharp,’ said Jonas to his command squad. Besides Bosarain there were Troopers Tabor and Micz, grizzled veterans from an earlier raising that had been blended with their own. Tabor carried the long-range vox and Micz was armed with a flamer. His final companion was Medic Lin Coass Lo Turneric, another Paragonian noble like himself and a genuine doctor besides. The Emperor alone knew how he’d got himself assigned to a unit of lowborn ground pounders like the 477th.
A brittle crackle sounded.
‘Vox net’s online, sir,’ said Micz. He and Tabor exchanged a glance. They had an understanding born from years of shared war. Jonas was jealous of it, he felt it undermined him.
‘Very good. The day’s orders will be with us soon. See to your weapons, men.’ His words sounded pompous in his own ears.
The orders would be the same as they were every day, and Jonas considered ordering his heavy weapons squad team to the top of the bank to save some time, but one did not anticipate orders, no matter how obvious; one only followed them.
A half second later, the voice of Colonel Vertor Lo Strabannick issued from the vox: five minutes, mass assault, the usual run at the guns and see what happens. Now Jonas ordered his heavy support into place.
He shifted his vox pickup from his lips, and brought his whistle to them. He filled his lungs with the dank air of Gullen and held it in for what seemed to be a very long time.
The artillery cut out.
Jonas blew hard.
Shrill whistles sounded up and down the line. Without hesitation, the men of Paragon shouted and ran for the top of the bank. Bindarian’s platoon, stationed to the left of his own, was over first. The chatter of automatic fire broke out, followed by screams.
An instant later, Jonas and his command squad were over the berm. They were down it fast onto the slop
e that led into the shell-pocked bog fronting the rebels’ rockcrete defence line. Muzzle flashes twinkled in the slit of a bunker two hundred metres away. He tried not to flinch as heavy bolts tore up the ground by his feet.
‘Squad five, kill that bunker!’ he shouted over his vox.
Plumes of smoke shrouded the view below as rockets launched by his support squad rushed toward the bunker. There was an explosion he could not see. When the rocket exhaust drifted off, the bunker burned. He breathed a little easier.
‘Platoon six!’ he shouted. ‘Forward for the glory of the Emperor, for Paragon!’
His men rushed after him down the slope. Weapons fire exploded all around him. Somewhere nearby, someone died loudly. The chunter of the Hydra batteries hidden behind the defence line scared off their air support.
At least it’s not raining for once, thought Jonas.
He and his men reached the bog.
It was slaughter, as it had been the day before, and the day before that.
Bindarian rapped on Jonas’s tent flap. If it made a sound, it was lost to the insistent drumming of the rain.
‘Bannick! Are you in there?’ It was the height of ill-manners for one Paragonian noble to call another solely by his clan name, but Jonas had noticed the convention slipping, and Bindarian was not from Paragon in any case. He was a refugee from a shattered regiment; where he was originally from, he wasn’t telling. Jonas was an outsider too, in his own way, and their shared status had brought the two men into an uneasy, if reliable, friendship.
Jonas sat up on his bed. ‘Yes, yes, Emperor forsake us. Just come in, you’re letting in the cold and the wet.’
Bindarian came through, water sheeting from his poncho. He looked at the floor, centimetres deep in mud.
‘I think it’s let itself in already, hey?’ He grinned widely. His accent was outlandish, a vibrant dialect with the characteristics of song, peppered with strange words. ‘You been sleeping, or are you always this grumpy?’
Jonas rubbed his head. ‘I was trying to sleep.’
Bindarian pulled out Jonas’s chair from his field desk and sat his impossibly lanky body down. Like Jonas, he was smeared in mud, some fresh, some old. ‘No time for sleeping, hey?’
‘When is there time to sleep?’
‘We’ve got a briefing, friend of mine, we’ve got to go real soon. You better shake that sleep out of you.’ Bindarian looked expectantly around the tent. ‘You got any of that syrupy stuff you Paragonians like to drink, hey?’
‘Gleece?’
‘Yeah, that it. I’m deadly parched.’
‘No,’ said Jonas levelly. ‘You drank the last of it.’
‘So I did.’ He smiled widely. ‘Best get your boots on quick, hey. Big news round the camp. They think we got a way into the Palatine. Finally.’
‘Really?’
Bindarian pulled an admonishing face. It seemed to Jonas that the off-worlder could take nothing seriously. ‘Is that sarcasm I’m hearing? Sometimes I think you don’t like being in the Guard at all, my friend. What would Commissar Suliban say?’
Jonas rubbed his eyes and gave his fellow lieutenant a doleful look. ‘My reasons for being here are simple. About five years ago, some cousin or other of mine that I’ve never met brought disgrace on the entire fiscal stem of Clan Bannick. My relatives are still paying the price, and will be for, oh, about three generations.’
Bindarian whistled through his teeth. ‘Look at you, you think you been dealt a bad hand? You think again. You think on your men, what kind of lives they got.’
‘Are they all revolutionaries on your world, Bindarian?’
Bindarian just grinned. He refused to be drawn on the smallest detail about his home.
Jonas yanked his boots on. His damp boots. Everything was damp. ‘If my thrice-blasted cousin wasn’t probably already dead, I could murder him. I’m not sure of what Colaron Artem Lo Bannick did, but I had an easy life planned, all dancing girls and gleece and a sinecure running the books for one of the foundries or somesuch. But after… Well, a career in the Imperial Guard looked mightily attractive compared to the alternatives I was offered.’
‘Friend, what did he do?’
‘I have no idea, no one will talk about it. It’s the Paragonian way. Put it like this, I’m a nobleman from a planet renowned for its tank companies. How badly do you think my cousin upset the Unified Clan Council for me to be assigned to an infantry regiment?’
‘Sounds nice, this clan council of yours.’
‘Pompous stuffed shirts. Big on ritual, short on brain.’
‘Ain’t that always the way?’ said Bindarian. ‘What happened to this cousin of yours a-then, hey?’
Jonas gave a grim smile. He stood and pulled his damp coat from the end of his damp bed and shrugged it on. He pulled his poncho on over the top of that. It was wet. He shivered. ‘Why, Lieutenant Bindarian, after he ruined his family, Colaron ran off to join the Guard.’
They hurried hunched through the rain. The rumble of the defence laser’s quarter-hourly updates troubled the sky, its monstrous voice shushed by the rain hissing into puddles.
The field camp was laid out in a grid, simple lumen-posts marking each intersection. Under the sharp smell of the rain and mud was the chemical stink of burning fossil fuels running the generators. It added to the stew of scents of five thousand men living together: sewer smells and rotten wounds.
Their feet plashed through slurry. Jonas’s feet had gone from damp to soaking.
He kept his head down, to stop the water from streaming into his eyes. He was dimly aware of other officers en route to the briefing tent, but none spoke, lost in their own private spheres of misery. Gullen retreated around him, the sounds of rain and his warm breath catching in his upturned collar; his body was a core of feeble warmth wrapped in soaking cloth. So disassociated did he become from his surroundings that he walked straight into the back of Lieutenant Lo Carrigen of the Fifteenth Platoon.
‘Watch where you’re going, Bannick,’ he growled. Carrigen was a squat, ugly individual, somebody’s useless fifth son, packed off to the military when the priesthood wouldn’t have him. A small crowd of other officers stood about him, blocking the road. They turned briefly from whatever they were staring at, but Jonas was not enough to hold their attention. Jonas couldn’t see, there were too many bodies in the way, and the rain cut visibility down to nothing.
‘You shouldn’t be standing in the middle of the street then, Carrigen. The marshalling yard’s right in front of you. Get going, man.’ If Carrigen didn’t have the manners to use the proper form of his name, then Jonas was damned if he would.
‘Right, so I should walk right through this then, should I? Think I’m one of the saints to be doing miracles, Bannick?’ Laughter came from the group. ‘Let’s show him, shall we?’ There was something triumphant in the man’s tone, but it struck Jonas suddenly that it wasn’t meant for him; in his bluff way Carrigen was sharing something rather than mocking him.
Carrigen and the others stepped aside, Carrigen waving his arm at the obstruction blocking their path.
Jonas got a view of a vast shape as long as the officers’ mess tent.
He was looking at the track unit of a superheavy battle tank. It filled most of the marshalling yard, obscuring the briefing tent on the other side.
Jonas took a step back to get a better view. It was huge, the track units taller than two men, so big he could only just make out the squat, raised command deck at the fore of the vehicle’s superstructure, the cowled, twin mounts of a Vulcan mega-bolter jutting out of it. Heavy flamers were housed in a side sponson over his head, the long barrel of a lascannon projecting over them. From where he stood he could not see the large, open-topped troop transport compartment he knew occupied much of the back of the tank.
‘When did this roll in?’
‘About a
n hour ago,’ said Carrigen. ‘They flew them in to the landing field under the cover of the rain. Rumbled in here like there was no mud at all.’
‘A Stormlord? This is the plan to get at the Palatine Redoubt? We drive there?’ said Jonas. Armoured assault had been tried before, and had not been successful. The burned-out hulls of Chimeras littered the bog before the defence line.
‘Three Stormlords. Not one, three,’ said Carrigen. ‘A whole superheavy tank company. Those rebellious scum have nothing that can bring one of these down, nothing at all.’
Jonas was not so sure, but he shared some of their awe. He remained with the others as they stared at the tank in the rain until the regimental peacekeepers came out and rounded them up. They were late for the briefing.
The air in the briefing tent was unpleasantly soupy with moisture and the warmth of damp bodies.
A holo flickered over the chart desk in the centre of the tent. The space was crowded, and the officers of the 477th constantly shifted to get a better look. Their twitchiness put Jonas on edge.
The colonel and his staff leaned on the edge of the chart desk, furious as they watched the holo.
A man with a reasonable face spoke reasonable-sounding words that were the blackest of treacheries.
‘We desire nothing but peace,’ he said, his eyes beseeching, his arms held out before him. ‘We are all brothers, all sons of man. Lay down your arms and join us, brothers. We have no need to fight. The Imperium crushes us all with its demands, bearing down with such weight the blood is squeezed from the very stones…’
The image broke up for a space, and a buzzing filled the tent. A tech-adept fiddled with the equipment and the picture stabilised.
‘…taken from your homes to fight on an alien world, our world, a world battered by war. We do not betray the Emperor, for He is the light of all mankind. The Emperor is the benefactor of all mankind. The Emperor is our lord and master as He is the lord and master of all mankind.
‘The High Lords are not a benefactor or the light. The High Lords of Terra are uncaring of the lives they spend, they set our tithes too high. We have the choice between starvation and insurrection. We take this road unwillingly…’