Baneblade

by Guy Haley

  ‘Third squadron, stay in line!’ Bannick shouted into the horn.

  The tank toppled forwards and hit the down slope. Bannick gripped his seat rails as his helmet rang off the vision-port casing before him. The tank’s engine howled as it picked up speed, hammering down the dune, slewing from side to side like a snake on the sand.

  ‘Stay together!’ Company Captain Malliant’s voice, fighting over the roar of static and engines. ‘Enemy in …ight. Time to impact is …’ His voice died away, Kalidar’s angry scream overwhelming him. ‘…wait for my…’

  This was it. Contact, his – their – first engagement. Two years in the warp, three days in the desert, right off the drop-ship. Finally, a chance to prove himself. ‘Squadron, prepare to slow to combat speed,’ ordered Bannick. His blood thundered loud enough to compete with the tank’s engine. ‘Patinallo.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Prepare to open fire with main armament,’ Bannick said, then added, ‘that’s if you can see anything in this mess.’ He debated with himself. ‘I’m opening the hatch. Masks on!’ He fastened his stinking rebreather over his mouth, a heavy, rubbery respiration mask wretched with the reek of his own breath and sweat. Hoses snaking behind the command chair in the turret attached it to the filter system, a bulky machine taking up more than its fair share of the tank’s already cramped interior. Bannick had the others sign off to make sure they had attached their masks before he grasped the lever above his head, twisted, and flung the hatch backwards.

  Outside was a maelstrom. Kalidar’s wind, never quiescent, keened ferociously through the fittings of Indomitable Fury. Dust stung his face round his breather and goggles. Although Indomitable Fury was practically new, built when the regiment was raised, already the sand had begun to strip the tank’s paint. He’d heard of more than one man stepping out to be blinded before putting his goggles on. Such men were shot. The commissars could not rule out the possibility that they had allowed themselves to be rendered unfit for duty.

  As Kurlick struggled to keep Indomitable Fury on an even course Bannick steadied himself on the tank’s turret rail. Out to his right he could make out the shape of Company Captain Malliant’s Vanquisher, protected on the inside of the echelon. Some distance to his left a thicker cloud of dust told him the position of the 4th and 5th Companies’ axe formation, more super-heavies at its heart – the Atraxian 18th – moving in parallel to them. He could see nothing of the tanks themselves, as massive as they were. He could barely make out the other two tanks in his own squadron, their blocky forms obscured by plumes of sand churned up by ten sets of tracks. His ears throbbed, the vox noise scrabbled at his concentration, the wind competing with that and the thundering engines of half a tank regiment.

  There was something else there too, a noise not of Kalidar. He sought after it, lost it, grew frustrated, and tore his headphones off. Sand instantly infiltrated his ears, but without the static-filled comms chatter, he could hear the noise more clearly, a rising-falling, as of surf beating the shore, though the last ocean of Kalidar had dried millennia ago.

  He squinted through the veils of sand whipping towards him. The chant grew louder. A dune obscured the view half a kilometre ahead. The formation was quickly up and over, Bannick bracing himself against the turret edge as Kurlick took the ridge at speed. More than one tank commander had been killed by internal injuries sustained while in transit over Kalidar’s unforgiving terrain.

  The wind shrieked, the chant was momentarily drowned, and then it was back on, low and guttural.

  Skirls of sand whispered up and over Fury’s bulk, veils of dust swept in and over him, and suddenly the visibility cleared enough for Bannick to see the blurry outline of Kalidar’s fierce blue sun. The shapes around him resolved themselves into tanks. He peered forwards. About three kilometres out over the saltpan of a long-dead sea was a dark wall, a jagged line hard against the desert: thousands upon thousands of orks, all chanting in one savage voice.

  ‘Throne!’ said Bannick. ‘They know we’re coming. They’ve come out from their trenches.’

  The shapes of crude war machines punctuated the orkish ranks, studding the horde with jagged islands of metal. There was little standardisation to them, each different in some way to its fellows. As the taskforce drew nearer to the orks the lurid colours of their armour, equipment and clothing grew brighter and brighter.

  They were loosely organised into great mobs of towering warriors, each clutching at unwieldy alien weapons. There seemed to be little hierarchy to them; heavy weapons were scattered amid their ranks, clanking walkers waving pincers and saws stomping backwards and forwards.

  A howl went up from the greenskins as they caught sight of the tanks. Instantly the maws of their war machines flashed fire, the pop and crackle of cannon reports sounding moments later.

  ‘Incoming!’ shouted Bannick, hoping that the vox pick-up in his mask had not malfunctioned again. Deafening whistles and screaming thrums filled the air, followed by explosions as shells impacted the dessicated seabed and heaved up columns of earth high in Kalidar’s low gravity. One landed in the centre of the formation, completely hiding Malliant’s command tank behind a fountain of dirt. A Leman Russ further ahead caught a glancing hit from a second shell. A track whipped free, the tank pivoting around its uninjured side and coming to a stop, flank to the enemy. Within moments the turret had rotated to face the orks and returned fire. The following vehicles snaked round it and carried on. Bannick recognised the Leman Russ as Kennerston’s, Senior Sergeant in the first squadron. Already he’d landed two shots in the orks’ ranks. Smoothly done, thought Bannick.

  Bannick ducked inside, slammed the hatch and replaced his headphones. Dust poured in after him. The tank’s off-white interior, near pristine days ago, was already chipped and filthy.

  ‘Sir, are you not to direct my fire?’ asked Patinallo, his voice barely audible in Bannick’s headphones.

  Bannick clawed his mask off, gasped as he took in the clearer air of the tank.

  ‘Too much incoming fire! Storm’s abated, so I’ll risk the periscope,’ he said into the horn. ‘Though there is not a chance you will miss.’

  ‘Enemy line impact in six minutes.’ Malliant’s voice, strong for a moment in the lull in the storm. ‘Your coming actions honour the dead. Prepare to scour this world free of the Emperor’s foe.’

  Patinallo looked to Bannick, his eyes expectant over the rim of his rebreather mask. The face of Brevant bobbed about below him. Bannick nodded at them. What he’d seen had barely shaken his battle-lust. This was what he had come for, this was what he had spent two years on a barge travelling over a segmentum to do, a chance at redemption. Excitement coursed through his veins, and Indomitable Fury surged beneath him. A sixty-tonne monster capable of spitting death over a kilometre, and two more like it, were his to command. He felt invincible, as safe behind the tank’s armour as if he were enfolded in the wings of the Emperor.

  He threw a lever, pulling back the metal eyelid covering the tank’s periscope. He put his face to the rubber seal over the eyepiece. The ork horde swam into view, magnified by the scope, a wall of savage green monsters with teeth like bayonets. They were working themselves into a frenzy, discharging their weapons into the air. Suddenly, a large part of the line bellied back and then forwards, a gathering of strength and hate. Ork leaders, taller by a head than their comrades and sporting trophy poles on their backs, ran among them, shouting and striking at the smaller greenskins. But they could not restrain them, the line broke. The orks were as indisciplined as he’d heard.

  Captain Malliant spoke. ‘The Empe… …ows the way. Readjust course, aim for the weakening of the line. Enemy in range. Open fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!’

  Muffled reports came through the hull of Indomitable Fury, the other Russ’s commanders jockeying to see who would be first to kill. Not Bannick. He would select his target with care. His first kill would be a
big one, he wanted to make certain of it. He scanned the ork line.

  ‘Gunner Patinallo,’ he shouted. ‘Load armour-piercing high-density shell.’

  ‘Sir! Armour-piercing high-density shell,’ said Patinallo. The Leman Russ was noisy, engine, storm and battle noise conspiring to drown out a commander’s orders. All conversation was conducted at a shout over the tank intercom. Repetition was essential. Brevant hauled out a green-tipped shell from the rack and slammed it home.

  ‘Track turret. Thirty-two degrees left.’

  ‘Turret thirty-two degrees left,’ repeated the gunner. Beyond him the loader had already produced a second shell, preparing to ram it into the breech as soon as the first had been fired. Servos whined as the turret turned.

  ‘Elevate five degrees.’ Bannick had his eye on a hulking wagon crammed with orks. Several of these had rumbled forwards in the wake of the infantry hammering across the sands towards the tanks, and were beginning to outpace them. The body of the gun within the tank’s turret shifted, halting with a clank.

  Patinallo consulted his ranging scope. ‘That big ork tank, lieutenant?’

  ‘The very one. Fire.’

  Patinallo sat back and his loader rotated aside as he depressed the firing lever. The tank shuddered as Indomitable Fury replied to the orkish guns. The noise inside was deafening. The barrel recoiled backwards a third of a metre, fiercely enough to kill anyone stood behind it. The breech door flicked open, ejecting the shell casing halfway and filling the compartment with acrid smoke. Brevant reached his thick gloves between the gunner’s and commander’s seats to haul the empty casing loose, hurling it back to the tank floor.

  Bannick remained glued to his periscope. Bright fire erupted along the length of the ork tank as the shell hit home, pride burning in his heart with it. Armour plates lifted as if punched from within by a giant. Ork body parts pinwheeled away. Black debris pattered down on the sand. When the last had rained down, the tank sat billowing a streamer of greasy black smoke into the wind.

  ‘Hit confirmed. Well done, Gunner Patinallo, our first kill of the day.’ Their first kill ever. He curbed an urge to shout like the savage xenos outside. ‘Armour-piercing round,’ he ordered.

  Patinallo echoed him. Brevant brought up the second shell, slid it in to the barrel and shut the breech while Patinallo and Bannick drew a bead on the selected target. Indomitable Fury once more gave its deadly shout. A clanking ork walker shattered into fragments, cutting down the infantry about it with red-hot shrapnel. Then the vox blared with static, and the scene was washed away once again by a renewed blizzard of sand. The ork line had vanished, those reckless few who had broken forwards mere shadows in the storm.

  ‘Damn!’ swore Bannick. ‘Hi-ex! We’ll fire blind into the main body! Thin their numbers!’ shouted Bannick. His crew dutifully echoed him.

  ‘Prepa… for …ct.’ Malliant’s voice began to break up. The end of his statement was lost to the bark of Fury’s main gun firing for a third time. When Bannick’s ears stopped ringing, there was nothing but interference on the external vox.

  ‘We’ve lost contact with the captain again! The storm’s picking up! Visibility’s back down to thirty metres,’ said Bannick. ‘Sponson gunners keep your eyes peeled for anti-tank. We’ll get no infantry support until the grunts debark. Stay on guard.’

  ‘Enemy line two hundred metres and closing!’ called out Kurlick.

  The four Leman Russ echelons of the twin Imperial spearheads smashed into the charging vanguard of the ork line within seconds of each other. The xenos ran screaming at the tanks, trying to grab on. Many were pulled over, sent head over heels into the dust, more falling under churning tracks. ‘Sponson gunners open fire!’ bellowed Bannick. Adrenaline coursed through him as the rapid crackle of multiple bolt ignitions joined the racket in the tank. The other vehicles in the formation followed suit, heavy bolters raking the desert. Orks exploded in fountains of gore. Still they came on.

  Kurlick shouted, ‘Wait, look! Out there, to the left! Contact! Enemy inbound!’

  Bannick swung the periscope round, twisting handles to transform a blur of motion into a picture he could understand; out to their flank a score of orks were emerging from the sandstorm, followed by more, and then more. They flung back trap doors and blankets, pulling themselves out of the desert. Many of them clutched crude rockets on poles and limpet mines the size of turret hatches.

  ‘By the Throne! Ambush! Anti-tank, anti-tank! Left sponson concentrate on the missile launchers. Now, do it now!’ shouted Bannick.

  Rockets corkscrewed through the air on black smoke trails. There was a ringing bang on the hull. Bannick winced, but there was no explosion. Others were not so lucky. Three found their mark on Ozorian Endures Fatefully, Bannick’s number two, directly in front of Indomitable Fury. It lifted off the sand as its magazine detonated, turning over and over in the air with unlikely grace. Bannick stared numbly as it began its downward trajectory, sure it would hit them, then Indomitable Fury spun to the side in a grind of protesting gears. The wrecked tank slammed into the ground metres from them. Bannick was thrown out of his seat, and thanked the Emperor for Kurlick’s skill as they skidded round the twisted wreck.

  Bannick regained his scope to see orks pouring towards them, more and more appearing out of the sandstorm and weaving their way into the formation. ‘Sergeant Gallient, concentrate fire to the left, protect the flank, don’t let them through!’

  ‘Mai… n form… main…’ Malliant said over the vox. Screams competed with frantic orders and roaring static as crews were cooked alive inside their armour.

  ‘They’re breaking the formation!’ shouted Bannick. This was not how orks were supposed to behave; they were supposed to be indisciplined, chaotic. This was a coordinated attack. What he’d taken for impatience was anything but. As circumscribed as his view of the field was, it was obvious to Bannick that this was not indiscipline.

  It was an ambush.

  Sponson guns tracked uselessly over the orks’ heads as they came in close and low. Rockets rained down from the sides of the formation. As they drew near the tanks the green xenos flung their limpet mines. They stuck with loud clangs to two more tanks ahead of Indomitable Fury. The bombs exploded; one tank came through a wreath of fire, guns blazing, the other did not; another Leman Russ gone.

  ‘There’s one on the hull! There’s one on the hull’ yelled Kurlick.

  The clank of heavy boots ran up the front of Indomitable Fury. Bannick reacted fast, threw open the hatch, hand pulling his rebreather over his mouth.

  He rose into the teeth of fury itself. His nose clogged and sand rasped in his throat and lungs before the mask snapped into place. An ork, taller than the tallest man Bannick had ever seen and as heavily muscled as Paragonian swamp cattle, towered above him. Its raised hands held high a metal pole so heavy that Bannick could never have lifted it. Atop the pole a fat, chequered rocket had been wired in place like a hammerhead.

  Bannick grabbed for the storm bolter atop the pintle mount. His hands found the cold metal grips, gritty with sand, and he swung it round. The world contracted to a point immediately in front of him – ork and gun, life and death. The storm and the battle were wiped from his perception, his sense of time slowed to a crawl. He pulled the trigger of the storm bolter, watching detachedly as the bolts came out of the weapon’s twin barrels, tiny jets igniting at the tail of each as they exited, to accelerate them away. One, two, three… all missed. The ork’s rocket came down, inevitable.

  The fourth bolt caught the ork in the leg. Mass-activated sensors detonated the miniature missile’s charge at a predetermined depth within its warty flesh, blowing the limb free in a spray of blood and meat. The ork went down face first, its rocket clattering harmlessly away. The creature bellowed as it tumbled off Fury’s hull, its shout cut short as it went under the treads.

  Bannick tracked his bolter round, sh
ooting down orks wherever he could.

  ‘Don’t let the greenskins through into the formation centre!’ he ordered.

  ‘Sir, something on the scope.’ Patinallo’s panicked voice was loud in his headphones. ‘By the Emperor, sir! Sir, you better come and see this. Sir!’

  Through veils of sand like grasping fingers Bannick saw them, ork super-heavy walkers fourteen metres tall, bristling with weapons, crushing orks too slow to move out of the way.

  Like all the orks’ machines, they were crude and ugly, fashioned as caricatures of fat ork warriors, bulging bellies made of jagged metal plates hammered together with little care and painted in colour schemes of glaring red and yellow, or in garish camo patterns. Crude, but deadly, and seven of them were coming straight at the left echelon. The formation headed blindly towards them.

  ‘Formation! Form… alt!’ came Malliant’s crackling voice. ‘Formation…’

  The captain’s voice cut out as the ork walkers opened up, heavy ordnance toted on stumpy arms sending shells slamming into the centre of the taskforce.

  ‘Malliant? Captain Malliant… Come in!’ shouted Bannick. Useless. ‘Lieutenant Verlannick?’ He called out to the second-in-command. No reply there either. That left him in command of the depleted company.

  The echelon began to break up as the tank squadrons spun tracks, frantically trying to avoid the walkers. Battle cannons barked flame and smoke as turrets rotated, tracking the threat. Shells shattered with fiery bangs against the thick ork armour, but the walkers did not slow.

  ‘All squadrons! Lieutenant Bannick! I am in command! Full reverse! Full reverse!’ shouted Bannick. ‘Form up on me! Single line! Bring fire to bear…’ he consulted his tac display, picking out the walker with what seemed the heaviest guns. ‘Point niner-five-zero!’

  Hearing his voice, the company began to exhibit some degree of order, forming a wall. They were down to six tanks. Bannick narrowed his eyes. The second company appeared to be doing the same, tanks inching backwards, loosing shots as they went.