by John French
‘They also say that there might be infiltrators in here with us, spies and traitors working for the other side, though I don’t see how.’ She gave a snort of laughter. ‘Paranoia is the only thing that is easy to find at the moment.’
Akil gave a short shake of his head, and then turned his gaze back to Tahirah.
‘Is it true what they say? That we are alone, that word never got out?’
‘Seems that way,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘But I don’t know. Perhaps command found a living astropath out there somewhere, or perhaps a ship in orbit made it out of the system. Perhaps the full might of the Imperium is coming to our aid.’
He gave a snort of laughter.
‘They never did before.’
Tahirah cocked her head, looking at him more closely.
‘You are from here, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded and looked at his hands. ‘Yes, this is my world.’
‘Family?’
He thought of his daughters. Had they been asleep when the bombs fell? Had they reached a shelter?
‘Yes. I mean, I think… I hope so.’
‘Seems like a lot of people made it to shelters.’ Tahirah looked at him steadily. ‘Your family might be here or in one that is connected to the communications network. I know some people in the command cadre. Your family’s name might be on a list of known survivors.’
For a second he just stared back at her, then he felt the prickle in his eyes, and blinked.
‘Thank you. Thank you, Tahirah,’ he said, and felt the smile spread over his face. She smiled back, but he caught a glitter in her eye and saw that the smile was in pity and not joy.
‘I came to find you, anyway,’ she said, after a moment.
‘What? Why?’
Tahirah stood, took a final gulp from the bottle, and looked down at him.
‘Because we are going back out. And you are coming with us.’
Ithak-ja. At first the military commanders and soldiers had thought it was a greeting. Then they had presumed it was a curse. Then they realised that it was neither.
The phrase ran from mouth to ear amongst the civilians in the shelters. Men and women would whisper the word to each other when they met. Parents would speak it to their children as though it were a cure for their fear. Old friends would clasp hands and speak it before parting. None of the soldiers asked the survivors what it meant, and those that did were met with dark looks and shaking heads, as if they had asked why one needed to breathe.
Then, just when the curiosity of the soldiers was running thin, the volunteers came forward. First a few, a ragged clutch of the bold. Then more – old and young, men and women, clustered together into the corridors outside the shelter’s command levels. When officers emerged, the ragged civilians would say that they had come to volunteer, that they would fill the ranks of those that died amongst the soldiers, that they would crew any war machine, and follow any order.
At first the scattered defence command refused, but with every raid against the Iron Warriors the loss of crews and machines increased. They could replace machines: unused materiel littered the forgotten corners of the shelters and staging bunkers. Most of the equipment was either old and damaged, or new and incomplete, but damage could be repaired and replacement components found. What could not be replaced were the bodies that steered the machines, manned the guns and pulled the triggers. So, at last, the terrible arithmetic of war gave the last citizens of Tallarn what they wished for – they would raid across the land they had lost and kill those who had taken it from them.
The old, the weak and the very young were sent away. Those that remained were shown how to control an armoured machine, how to load, how to zero and fire a weapon, and how to use a vox-unit. As training it was too quick and not enough; the soldiers knew it and so did the volunteers. Most also knew that the world above would teach them or kill them, but no one said as much. What would be the point of speaking that truth out loud?
Once their few hours of training had passed, the volunteers were spread amongst units that had suffered losses. A few, those with aptitude and skill, were given control of machines. Only then, once they knew that they would live or die together, did the soldiers ask their new brothers and sisters in war what ‘ithak-ja’ meant.
It was an old phrase, the Tallarn explained, spoken in a time which none could remember outside of stories. It had many meanings, but here and now it only had one meaning that mattered.
‘Vengeance,’ they said. ‘It means vengeance.’
Four
Kill-zone
We are all war machines
Death rattle
‘Three targets confirmed.’ Akil waited while the vox hissed in his ears.
‘Just three?’ the dry voice asked.
Brel, of course it was Brel. Akil had never heard the man say a word outside of the squadron vox: not in the hours spent going through decontamination, not in the shelter, not in all of the past weeks of war. Only out here, in the world of the dead, did they connect.
The cold bastard had a point though. Akil had seen seven Iron Warriors patrol groups, and all had been six strong. He put his eye to the sight again, zoomed out and panned from left to right and back. The fog was thinning, pulling back to show splintered buildings ringing the open flats like broken teeth around a rotten tongue. The enemy had bombarded this place more than once, flattening it with creeping barrages, trying to flush the raiders out. They had failed.
He switched his sight to infra-red and the fog, ground and ruins became a dull curtain of ambient heat. The fog was thin enough here that you could see a hundred metres without infra-sight, but there was no point. Heat vision was the daylight of this war.
The engine bloom of the three Iron Warriors machines stood out in bright green as they moved across the flats. Spots of yellow showed where components were running hot or a track was grinding out heat as it scraped past the hull. Cooling fumes trailed from their exhausts, and their engine blocks were blotches of near-white. He squinted and tweaked his zoom, trying to see if there were more machines running behind those that he could see.
No, there were just three: a huge slab-sided machine crawling between two of the smaller kind he had learned to call ‘Predators’. The bigger one looked more like a block of raw iron than a fighting vehicle. Clusters of lascannons hung from its flanks and its tracks looked thicker than his own machine’s armour.
‘Three enemy confirmed – two Predator, one of unknown class. Large, upward-sloped front, two quad las-clusters on the sides.’
‘Spartan,’ cut in Tahirah’s voice. ‘Land Raider-class hull.’
Akil nodded, even though there was almost no one to see. ‘All of them should be in the centre of the engagement zone in one-two-zero seconds.’
‘Understood,’ said Tahirah. ‘All units, fire and converge at Talon’s signal.’
The vox went silent, and Akil felt sweat tickle his brow. Without thinking, he raised his hand to rub the rubber of his suit above his eyes. For a second the image of Rashne raising his hand to wipe his bare face ghosted across his mind’s eye...
He blanked the memory out with a slow breath, and looked through the eyepiece above the steering levers. The infra-sight was new, like the lascannon fitted into the socket beside the drive controls, and the smeared grey-and-green disruption pattern on the outside hull. To Akil, the sight already had the familiar feel of something used again and again.
‘Sol’s light, look at that thing,’ said Udo. He crouched next to Akil, hugging the gunsight of the mounted lascannon. The internal vox somehow stretched the whining tone of Udo’s voice. ‘We could hit that Spartan square, and on the inside they would just think we were knocking to come in.’
‘It can be killed,’ said Akil, and knew it was a mistake as soon as he opened his mouth.
‘Yeah? How long have you been ridin
g machines, old man?’
Akil shrugged, looking at the exposed links rattling over the slab-machine’s hull. A good shot could sever the links and leave the machine like a beached leviathan. Long weeks on the surface, sucking air from pressure bottles, watching the enemy, hiding from them, running from them and killing them had changed the way that he saw the world.
I am not the man I was, he thought. He felt his left hand flex as if from remembered pain.
After a long moment of silence Udo snorted. Akil remained silent this time; he had learned that it was advisable not to respond to most of what Udo said. The gunner was not happy about being assigned to the scout machine, but Akil had a feeling that even left in paradise Udo would have found something to whine about.
‘They are entering the bracket,’ said Akil quietly.
‘Gun live,’ replied Udo.
Akil watched the lead Predator grind over a rise in the terrain, its main gun flexing to stay level. Behind it the Spartan ground forwards.
‘Target the front vehicle,’ said Akil.
‘I have it.’
‘Take the tracks this time.’
‘I know, I know. Would you shut up, old man? Just remember your part.’
Akil shifted his grip on the lever that would start the machine’s engine. He could hear Udo breathing over the vox. The Iron Warriors tanks grew larger in his view, the two Predators guarding the Spartan to its front and rear. He heard Udo take a single slow breath.
‘Firing,’ whispered Udo from beside Akil.
Akil’s free hand thumbed the external vox.
‘Vengeance!’ he shouted.
A whip-crack of thunder filled his ears. He closed his eyes as the bolt of energy flashed through the air from the lascannon, and the sight blanked to white. The las-blast struck the Predator low, burning through track skirting and melting a drive wheel. For an instant the Predator’s tracks kept moving, rattling through the broken cycle in a spray of molten metal. Then the tank slewed, its unbroken track pushing it in a skidding half-circle.
Inside the scout, Akil heard the thump and explosive crack of Silence’s shell hitting its target. The Predator vanished in an expanding cloud of black-streaked flame. Behind it the Spartan came on, scattering the flaming wreckage of its kin aside. The second Predator swerved to the flank, its turret traversing as it came.
Akil opened his eyes. Flame light was pouring through the scout’s vision slits, and the view through the infra-sight danced with heat. Udo was whooping, his hands slapping the top of the gunsight. Akil pulled the ignition lever and Talon’s engine started. He slammed it into reverse gear and the scout pushed back from the low rise.
Akil could no longer feel anything, really; some part of him was moving the scout’s controls, but all he was aware of was a high-pitched whine in his ears. This was the moment of survival or death. The Iron Warriors would know where they were now. They would have seen the beam of the lascannon shot like a finger pointing back to them. If the squadron had made an error in planning the ambush, or if they were too slow moving back, then they would die out here.
Talon accelerated backwards.
Thirty yards, then turn. The routine dominated Akil’s thoughts as he felt the machine judder and buck in his hands. Beside him Udo was still cursing the enemy and cheering with glee at the kill.
‘Talon, the Spartan is coming after you,’ came Brel’s voice, as flat and emotionless as a machine.
‘Shoot it,’ snarled Akil.
‘Waiting for a shot,’ said Brel.
The kill was a well-worn routine for Brel. They found a patrol, found an ambush site, then waited. The scout always picked the target, but it was Brel who laid the ambushes out. Tahirah had stopped questioning his suggestions and now just accepted them. Layout and angles were crucial. Once the scout hit the first target, Silence had to be in the right place to hit the target straight away and blow it to pieces.
Then came the messy part, the scrabbling to outrun the remaining enemy. They would hit targets of opportunity, but once they fired the first shots the objective was simply to survive. The scout was the most exposed in these moments, but that was just one of those facts that did not bother Brel. Tahirah and Lantern stayed back until the ambush was sprung; the Executioner’s energy and heat signatures were just too bright for it to be part of the first strike, and its weaponry too unreliable against anything larger than a medium-grade tank. Backup, insurance, a slayer of opportunity. Lantern might bear the title of Executioner, but Silence was the squadron’s true killer.
Hit once, hit hard, and run. It was a system that had kept them alive and killed eight Iron Warriors machines.
Brel watched as the Spartan closed in on the scout. Silence was almost a kilometre back from the kill site, and he was relying on infra-vision and auspex feeds to follow the battle. The Spartan was a glowing block, trailing streams of fire from the burning wreckage of the dead Predator. The surviving Predator was sweeping wide, its turret turning again to cover the Spartan’s rear. They were good, of course – no hesitation and no panic. They had gone straight from being ambushed, into cover and counter attack.
Brel felt his mouth twitch and almost shook his head at his own thought.
Of course they were good. They were the Legiones Astartes.
‘But out here, we are all war machines,’ he muttered to himself.
‘I have a clear shot to the Spartan’s drive wheel,’ said Jallinika. ‘We might not kill it but we can cripple it.’
Brel felt something itch at the back of his thoughts. Something was just not right about this ambush: a factor or possibility he had overlooked. He paused, listening to his own breathing, watching the colours shift and smudge on the auspex.
‘Boss?’ said Jallinika.
‘Take the shot,’ said Brel softly. In his head, the itch of uncertainty grew.
Tahirah waited. It had been twenty-six seconds since the engagement began. Before that they had been waiting for seventy-two minutes. She knew this; like counting, like breathing, like not moving in order to hide her shakes. This was all just part of how she did things now.
‘Do we go active, Tah?’ asked Makis.
‘Nope,’ she said without moving. It felt quiet in Lantern, even with the distant growl of ordnance and engines.
‘They must be ready to pull back by now.’
‘Light up early, we get seen, we die.’ She paused, clicked the vox off, and then thumbed it live again. ‘I think we would be slightly less useful dead than we are alive.’
‘All right,’ said Makis, his tone saying that it was anything but all right in his opinion. Vail and the left and right gunners said nothing. They probably agreed with Makis, but quite honestly she did not care. She had got them into and back from six missions and nine separate engagements. That meant that, in her considered opinion, she did not care what they thought.
I should learn the new gunners’ real names, she thought. Was the left one Forn, or was that Vantine? She mentally shrugged, it did not matter. Neither was that good a shot, and she was not convinced about the repair to the sponson anyway; whichever of them was in there would probably be pasted sooner rather than later. Simpler not to worry about their names.
Beside her, Lachlan shifted in his seat, his silence sullen and complete. He hardly spoke now, not on mission, not back in the shelter. It had bothered her for a while, but then she had her own problems. They all had enough of those.
‘You should have a look, Tah,’ he said. She heard the edge in his voice and her head snapped up to look at him.
‘Why?’
‘Because this is about to go to hell.’
The left side of Talon hit something hard, and the chassis skidded around. Akil hit the brakes and the scout slammed to a halt. His head whipped forward and the top of his face slammed into the infra-sight. He tasted wet iron in his mouth and throat a
s he gasped for breath.
Udo had stopped cheering. Akil blinked, his eyes watering and blood flecking the inside of his eyepieces.
‘No, no...’ he gasped, and grabbed at the controls. ‘Please...’
The power plant snarled and Talon rocked in place, stuck firm on whatever it had hit. A sudden cold void had opened inside him, spreading ice through his body and brain.
‘No, please, not now...’
They had all seen it over the last few weeks, and heard stories of it again and again. Worse than a clean hit from the enemy, worse even than a seal failure, was to be stranded in the hell above. Thrown tracks, burned-out power plants, mired hulls: all were a slow death for the crew inside the tank. Unable to get out to repair or free themselves, they had to wait in their armoured coffin for the air supply to hiss to nothing.
Beside him, Udo had his eyepiece pressed to the gunsight, gazing at the fire and smoke-polluted fog outside. Akil nudged the scout forwards, and then slammed it into reverse. Straining gears and tracks screeched over the rising growl of the power plant. They did not move.
‘It’s coming,’ shouted Udo.
Akil looked up at the glowing image in the infra-sight. The Spartan loomed, heat washing from its power plant. He pushed more power into the reverse gear and Talon lurched again. It was coming straight at them. Akil released the power, felt the scout slump a little, and then rammed it back again. Something gave, and Talon’s tracks scrabbled on the slime-covered rubble.
The Spartan’s lascannon clusters opened fire. Converging beams of lightning hit the rise of broken masonry just in front of Talon. The scout rang as chunks of white-hot plascrete struck its hull.
‘Brel!’ he shouted into the vox, but the word was lost in the sound of detonating metal.
The Vanquisher shell hit the Spartan’s rear armour. Smoke and flames exploded outwards, and the massive chassis bucked like an angry beast. Its rear slammed back down in a cloud of smoke, lascannon clusters twitching.
‘Got you,’ whispered Brel. The huge tank was still alive but it was going nowhere. He clicked the vox open. ‘Get moving, Talon.’ The Spartan’s weapons could come back online at any moment, and the remaining Predator was coming about hard and firing. Heavy rounds danced impact flashes across the ruins around the scout’s position. Brel glanced away from the view.