by John French
Tahirah stood. The quivering anger was back. She drew the laspistol slightly clumsily, but he noticed that the barrel did not shake as she levelled it at his face.
'That's sedition,' she said quietly.
'Go ahead,' he said. 'One more tank commander gone and the enemy didn't even need to fire a shot. Maybe they will give you a medal.'
He brought his cup slowly to his mouth, look a sip and looked back up into the barrel of her gun. After a second she let the pistol drop to her side. Brel nodded his thanks.
'I am going to do you a favour now, for free, because it is still early enough for you. Stop thinking of us as people. Me, my crew, that hawk-eyed civilian, or any of the rest that get hooked up to you. They are the machines they ride, and they do it well or they do it badly. That is all you care about, because that is all that matters to getting through this.'
Slowly and carefully, Tahirah put her cup down on the empty chair and took a step towards the door. Brel let out a long tired breath, but Tahirah spun faster than he could react and punched him hard across the jaw. Very hard.
He fell to the floor, his head buzzing. Lying there, he heard Tahirah pick up the half-empty bottle and walk away. He was tempted to laugh, but the door had already shut behind her.
Akil sat on the floor, alone and silent, his eyes staring at water dripping down the plascrete wall. For a second he wondered if the water had seeped in from outside the bunker, then he laughed at his own thought.
If it was from outside I would be dead already, he thought, and remembered the rotting pits opening in Rashne's face.
He shifted his legs up so that they were huddled against his chest. The overalls they had given him felt rough and stiff against his skin. His own clothes had been burned once he was past the first stage of decontamination. He was not sure why, but he could see the fear in the soldiers' eyes, and so he had stripped off another layer of his life and seen it dumped into a furnace without question.
Adrenaline had drained from him once he was inside the shelter. It had been like the tide receding after a storm to reveal the wreckage of its passing. People walked by, all in uniforms, all moving with apparent purpose. Some looked at him, but he was careful not to meet their gaze. He did not want to talk to anyone. He did not want to see himself in their eyes. He had walked down long grey corridors without knowing where he was going, until he just stopped. In the end he had just sat down with his back against the wall and waited for something to make sense. He was fairly sure that that had been several hours ago. He blinked and shook his head. He felt tired and empty.
There is nothing left to me that is not buried or hidden. My world lives on only in sealed graves now. He cupped his hands, staring at the lines of his palms. What am I doing? I am no warrior. I never was, and what is there to fight for now anyway? Clustered in the deep chambers, he had heard the other refugees talk of striking back, and striking back until the enemy poured blood into the dead soil of Tallarn.
Tallarn. Every time he thought or heard the word he felt the guilt rise from the pit of his thoughts. The dead skulls of buildings, and the look on Rashne's face in the instant before his eyes dissolved, blossomed once again in his mind's eye.
'Thinking too hard can kill you, you know,' said a voice from above him.
He looked up. A woman with a sharp face, cropped dark hair and baggy fatigues was looking down at him. She smiled, and Akil saw the tiredness in the gesture.
'Lieutenant,' he said, and started to get to his feet. She waved him back and dropped down next to him. He had not met her before joining the squadron, and had spoken all of ten words to her before they had gone up to the world above.
'Tahirah, please,' she said, and he smelled the alcohol on her breath. She reached into a thigh pouch and pulled out a bottle.
Clear liquid sloshed in the bottom. She opened it and took a swig, then offered the bottle to him. 'But Tah will do.'
He looked up at her, then at the bottle. Tahirah gave a small shrug. He took it from her.
The alcohol was surprisingly smooth in his mouth, but he coughed when it hit his throat. Tahirah laughed.
'Thanks,' said Akil, as numb warmth spread through him.
'Yeah, that stuff is pretty to the point.'
He spread the fingers of his left hand, his eyes tracing the folds and lines of the skin. He took another swig. This time he felt his throat numb at the alcohol's touch, and did not cough.
'I am sorry,' he said.
'For getting lost?' she asked. She held out a hand for the bottle and he handed it back. 'Yeah, that was pretty stupid, but you drive a machine well enough, and you seem like you don't make a habit of stupidity. So...' She trailed away, and he saw that her eyes were unfocused, as if she were looking at a memory. Then she shook her head and frowned. 'Not your fault really. We lost you as much as you got lost.' She took a gulp from the bottle. 'Did you see them?'
'Who? The enemy?'
Tahirah nodded.
'No, I just saw the... machines. But your gunner, Lachlan, he said he saw them.' He paused and glanced at Tahirah. 'He said they were Space Marines.'
'Iron Warriors,' she said with a nod. 'And a lot of them. That is what command are saying. The soup above is singing with their signals.'
Akil frowned. He had heard of the Legiones Astartes, of course. He had even seen one of their number at a distance once, when he was a boy. His father had been invited to a ceremony to mark the outset of some campaign - or the successful completion of one, Akil had never been sure. All the other great merchant princes had been there. The air had glittered with gold, and coiled with scent, and the Space Marine had stood beside the Governor-Militant like a dusk leopard amongst butterflies.
Iron Warriors. He had only dimly known the name before, and now it was the name of the slayers of his world.
'They can die, just like us,' said Akil, hearing the edge in his own voice.
Tahirah glanced at him, and raised an eyebrow. He took another swig from the bottle but did not speak. She shrugged.
'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 c
urse. 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.'
CHAPTER 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 riding 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.
'Tiring,' 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 now, 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 die 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 pan 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.