Baneblade

by Guy Haley

  He shouted into the horn, internal vox. ‘Pantinallo, aim for the…’

  He never finished his order. A three-barrelled cannon on a bright yellow walker flashed fire. A second later Bannick’s universe became featureless white, shuddering with noise.

  He felt himself fall, then felt nothing.

  INTERSTITIAL

  ‘Orks are orks are orks, and we’re the best in the galaxy!

  But us, we’re the best yet, better than the best of the best. We’re Blood Axes, Gorkier than Gork, and Morkier than everyone. We are strong, and we are smart! We’re going to tear you all apart, snick snick! Better than a Goff, and sneakier than a Deathskull. We’re strong and deadly, but we are cunning too…’

  Translated message from Arch-Skarlord ‘General’ Gratzdakka

  Wur Mekdakka, prior to the Kalidar invasion.

  Chapter 3

  Warpspace

  9189267.M41 [nominal]

  The feeling in the ship was electric, full of foreboding. Their two-year voyage to Kalidar was nearly done, and the dreams were getting worse – Bannick had not slept properly for days. Lieutenant Kalligen’s hand descending on his shoulder was an unwelcome shock.

  ‘I thought I’d find you in here,’ said Kalligen, peering into the gloom of Chapel 42, the largest Ecclesiarchical chamber on the transport barge. A statue of the Emperor in armour, three times the height of a man, stared down upon the ranks of pews, flanked by smaller sculptures of saints of the Guard and the Navy. The chapel was getting fuller by the day the nearer the translation came, and now choirs of priests sang constantly, imploring the Emperor for safe passage through the warp.

  ‘Keep your voice down!’ muttered Bannick. The transport barge’s canon walked by the end of the row of seats, gaze almost as stern as that of the Emperor’s statue standing at the head of the chapel. ‘Can’t a man pray in peace?’

  ‘You do altogether too much praying.’ Kalligen sat down on the pew by which Bannick knelt. He at least had the decency to drop his voice and mark the sign of the aquila, Paragonian style, across his forehead. ‘I remember a time when you didn’t used to pray at all.’

  ‘Times change. Men change.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Kalligen nodded. Then: ‘Come on, I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘Leave me be.’

  ‘You’ll like it, I promise.’

  ‘I’m not done.’

  Kalligen’s face lost its perpetual grin for a moment. ‘Yes you are – praying won’t change anything, Colaron.’

  ‘I don’t see it that way.’

  Kalligen scratched his head. ‘What’s done is done. “Heroes of the Imperium! The time for words is done! Time to live by your actions!”’ Kalligen mimicked the thick accent of their commanding officer, Colonel Sholana, a non-Paragonian, like most of the higher-ups in the new regiment.

  ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ said Bannick.

  ‘I know that you were an idiot to sign up. You could have stayed at home and got rich and fat, not scurrying around in the depths of this tomb with Emperor knows what scrabbling around outside to get in at us.’ Kalligen shuddered. ‘Gives me the fear. Now, as far as I know you’re free right now.’ Kalligen stood and bowed to the Master of Mankind. ‘I have some orders to deliver to the vehicle deck. And you will want to see what’s waiting where I’m going, trust me, but it’s a bit of a walk.’

  ‘Time to commencement of realspace translation ritual, six thousand cycles,’ intoned a voice, booming across the transport barge in mechanical High Gothic, the syntax mangled in the Navy way, unfamiliar words peppered throughout. ‘All personnel prepare for translation. Naval personnel note, Captain Almazan commands free time reduction from thirty to ten minutes daily. Rapid translation preparation protocols alpha ten are now in place. Only the fool shirks his duty, for the Emperor knows all.’ A metallic hiss ended the announcement.

  ‘What is that, five days?’ muttered Kalligen, his face made choleric by the red lighting of the corridor.

  ‘You’re hopeless! Two days, four and a half hours, give or take a few minutes.’

  ‘Come on! Play fair Col, I’ve never heard the thousand-cycle system used outside the basdack bureaucracy. That and Zero Night, and we… Oh.’ He winced when he realised he might have put his foot in it. But Bannick did not react.

  ‘My clan, your adopted family, for the love of the saints, use it in our manufactoria,’ Bannick said, ‘it keeps the “basdack bureaucracy” happy. If you’d have spent more time learning the ways of your own family and less time drinking and chasing skirt you mightn’t find it so confusing.’

  Kalligen reached a bulkhead door, grasped the wheel in the centre and turned to his friend. ‘Why bother? I was always going into the army, me.’ He spun the doorlock with one hand. ‘I had a nice, cushy little job in the planetary militia lined up. No war on Paragon for a thousand years, should have been a breeze, just my blasted luck they called a regimental draft two weeks after I signed up. After you, “sir”.’ Kalligen executed a mock bow.

  ‘Stop it, Lazlo, we’ll be up on charges if we get seen. You’re a lieutenant too.’

  ‘Yep, well, you have the greater air of authority. All I do is mope about all the parties I’m missing, hardly the stuff of command, am I?’ He held up the flimsy clutched in his hand. ‘Now where by the High Lords of Terra’s collective backsides is berth 29/omicron/iii94a? They could have given me an auspex map. I can barely see this thing it’s so dark down here. None of the lights are working. Typical.’

  ‘They could have given you a pass for the tubeway too, but they didn’t. Why I agreed to come with you? I could have got some sleep.’

  ‘We both know why you didn’t do that,’ muttered Kalligen, scanning the map hopelessly. ‘The nightmares. It’s because we’re nearly out, it’s the worst time.’

  Bannick snatched at the map. ‘Give it here. Look, the vehicle decks are this way.’ He traced his finger round a tangle of corridors. ‘But we’ll have to avoid this next section.’ He pointed down the corridor to the next bulkhead. ‘It’s not in use.’

  Kalligen rolled his eyes. ‘You mean go back? I swear this ship has more holes in it than the Emperor himself.’

  Bannick gave his friend a level stare. ‘They’re going to shoot you one day, you know that?’

  The route to 29/omicron/iii94a proved long and convoluted. Several times they had to turn around, their way blocked by bulkhead doors welded shut, more sections of the millennia-old craft unused and uninhabitable. They walked kilometres of corridor in the skin of the hull, passing rarely into the vast open spaces at the heart of the barge. Once they walked a catwalk one hundred metres above the training field, a thousand metres square of bare metal deck where they’d spent much of the last two years training on mock battlefields. More corridors, on and on past dim rooms where bunks stretched off into the gloom. The thrum of the engines grew louder until conversation grew impossible between them, then receded. They passed through a gallery where hundreds of Naval personnel toiled at an incomprehensible machine of obscure purpose and immense size, its throaty roar accompanied by the crack of whips and the dirge of a warp-shanty.

  After three hours they found themselves walking through colonnaded cloisters running the length of the barge’s vehicle decks. Hundreds of Leman Russ, Chimera armoured personnel carriers, Salamander scout vehicles, self-propelled artillery, support vehicles and other, more unusual types rested in their transport cradles, stacked like models in a god’s toyshop, the racks disappearing into the gloom. Aside from a few servitors patrolling the place, they were alone. Munitorum and Adeptus Mechanicus personnel would have locked down the place as soon as the twelve-cycle translation warning had come. Having seen to their charges, they’d be preparing themselves now.

  A weird howling filled the air and the hairs on Bannick’s neck stood on end. The entire craft shuddered.

 
; ‘What the...?’

  Kalligen put his hand on Bannick’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. It’s always this way when they’re getting ready to translate,’ said Kalligen, low and conspiratorial. ‘That’s when it happens; coming in or going out of the immaterium, that’s when the Geller fields are most stressed.’ He laughed at his friends’ dismay. ‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t happen often. The stress sets up all kinds of weird harmonics in the hull, especially in an old tub like this.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Bannick swallowed nervously. A quartet of servitors clanked towards them. They had to move aside or be crushed. Once they had passed, the two lieutenants continued onwards.

  ‘I did pay some attention to my own clan’s business. My cousins told me.’

  ‘Just how many cousins do you have?’ Kalligen’s cousins were an endless source of information.

  ‘A couple of dozen. If there weren’t so many I’d never have been sent to live with you, would I? Four of them are merchantmen, you know that. Typical, I’m the one that really didn’t want to go into space, and yet here I am.’

  ‘Stop complaining, it’s not worthy of our kind. We’re here and… Are those the…?’ Bannick stopped, awestruck.

  ‘Well, would you look at that,’ said Kalligen with mock surprise. ‘See, I told you I had something worth showing you, eh?’

  In the racks before them squatted the titanic vehicles of the 7th Paragonian Super-heavy Tank Company. There were four of them, only four vehicles to make up an entire company! Bannick could not imagine what an entire regiment of them would be like, not that such things existed. Aside from the taskforce command Leviathan, the super-heavies were the only tanks of that size and power on the entire transport barge – they were rare.

  Bannick looked at the tanks with awe and respect, two versatile Baneblades, a short-range engagement Hellhammer, and a Shadowsword armed with an anti-Titan volcano cannon.

  ‘Are you glad you came now?’ said Kalligen. ‘Keeping me company for a while a fair trade?’

  ‘Imagine serving on them, Lazlo, imagine commanding one!’

  Kalligen shook his head. ‘Me, I’d rather serve on that.’ he pointed down the ranks of tank cradles. The lower half of one side of the Leviathan could just be made out in the distance, heavy with decoration, three great turrets atop bastions along its flank, a cathedral on tracks.

  ‘On the Leviathan? No Lazlo, they never see much action, too important. These, these super-heavy tanks, that’s what does all the fighting.’

  ‘My point exactly,’ said Kalligen. ‘Stop that will you? Two more minutes and you’ll be dribbling. I…’

  Kalligen was interrupted. A servitor with a socket in place of a left arm came to life in the shadows, causing them both to start, and marched stiffly across the deck. A faded penal tattoo adorned its bald head. Whoever had provided its organic component had been a giant in life. A harsh machine voice barked out of a speaker in its neck, the lips remaining immobile; half its face was given over to an implanted targeting array, its remaining human eye blank and fixed on the air above their heads. ‘State your business. This is a restricted area. No admission to the vehicle decks during transit period for non-authorised personnel.’

  ‘I… we have authorisation. I am delivering this datacapsule on behalf of General Ban Lo Verkerigen,’ said Kalligen.

  A spread of green light emanated from the cyborg’s facial implants, sweeping back and forth over the capsule in Kalligen’s hand.

  ‘Authorisation code accepted.’ It turned abruptly. ‘Follow me.’

  ‘You stay here. I have to go in there,’ said Kalligen, pointing at a door in the stanchions of the racks. ‘Deliver this to some enginseer or other. Are you listening to me?’

  ‘What? Yes, yes, sorry.’

  Kalligen followed Bannick’s eyeline to the massive hull of a Baneblade. ‘Oh you are smitten aren’t you? Makes you proud to serve the Emperor, eh?’

  Kalligen huffed when Bannick paid no attention to his sarcasm, and followed the servitor through a door, leaving Bannick alone. A clatter from one of the barge’s workshops sounded far in the distance, otherwise the vehicle deck was empty of noise beyond the omnipresent hum of the ship’s engines. Bannick had become so accustomed to their constant vibration over the long voyage that it had come to feel a part of him.

  He walked over to the Baneblade. His regiment had performed battle drills in their Leman Russ, preparing for the day when they might have to support such an engine in combat, but the super-heavies themselves were far too valuable to risk in training exercises. He couldn’t imagine what could possibly harm it; it was even more impressive than he had imagined.

  Clamps held the massive machine in place, tracks raised a few centimetres off the floor, hundreds of tonnes of plasteel floating in the air, enwrapped in thick cables. Parchments scrips were affixed to the hull in clusters by seals of deep-red wax, bearing prayers of safe transit in High Gothic and binaric, evidence of the creed of the tech-adepts who shepherded such beasts to war.

  He ducked down and leaned his head in close, looking down the line of the tank under the sponsons to the rear. It was bigger than most family habitation units. He reached out a hand. The hull was tacky, the jagged stripes of red and grey-blue camouflage that would hide it in the storms of Kalidar recently applied. Its name, Mars Triumphant, was engraved on a plasteel scroll at the fore of the vehicle’s track guards.

  He breathed out steadily. Here was a machine of heroes! He could only dream of commanding such a tank. Such an honour was reserved for those tank commanders who had proven themselves in battle time and again. A few alone were offered the opportunity to become honoured lieutenants, in command of a super-heavy. To captain a Baneblade, one of the Emperor’s hammers, nine men looking to him to lead them… He shook his head. He was not worthy, he never would be. He’d seen to that himself.

  Perhaps it was his imagination, but the tank seemed to rumble slightly, as if it growled in its sleep. He took his hand away.

  ‘Hey!’

  Bannick jumped to his feet.

  ‘What are you doing skulking about down there? Worshipping it now are you, like one of those tech-adepts? I’d have thought even you would have had enough of prayers today!’ Kalligen came over and cuffed his shoulder. ‘Let’s get out of here. You’ve had your treat. Whatever was in those orders can’t have been good. That enginseer did not look happy. I don’t want to hang around in case he decides to respond in kind. Last thing I want to do is rush about this hulk all day. Come on. I need a drink… No, I need to get drunk, and it’s a long walk back.’

  INTERSTITIAL

  ‘Kalidar is not a pleasant place to be. It’s a desert, not enough moisture to make a cup of caffeine in 400 cubic kilometres of atmosphere. The star’s a nightmare, pumps out solar flares of such magnitude the planet’s magnetosphere is constantly in turmoil. Vox communication’s nigh on impossible because of that. Commsats get fried in orbit, anything other than a shout won’t get through, short-range vox is unreliable, long-range unlikely, and heavy data transmission impossible without direct line of sight. The radiation from the sun would kill you all, in fact, if it weren’t for the dust in the air, and that brings me on to the next set of happy facts, gentlemen; the weather. The temperature can swing from iron-cracking cold to eighty degrees plus within a couple of hours. The wind’s constant and high, and wind shear is so dangerous you can forget air support.

  ‘Oh wait, wait my brave boys! It gets worse – that dust might keep the sun from filling your bones with cancer, but it gets everywhere, and is sharp as ground glass. Go out without your goggles and go blind. Go out without your rebreather and you can kiss goodbye to the galaxy, because you’ll be choking on pieces of your own lungs before the week’s out. They got a name for it, dustlung, and unless you fancy getting on personal terms with it, you’ll check and recheck your rebreathing unit every fourth hour, every
Emperor-blessed day until you’re sick of the sight of it. This is your main piece of equipment, not your lasgun, not your helmet, this! Look after it, or die. Simple as that.’

  Training-Senior Sergeant Vasco Vanhool,

  492nd Cadian Shock Troops, attached to the

  63rd Paragonian Mechanised Infantry.

  Chapter 4

  Kalidar IV, Kostoval Flats

  3267397.M41

  ‘Lock that fire down!’ shouted Cortein. He wiped sweat from his face, his eyes stinging with the smoke wafting up from below. ‘And shut those damn alarms off! Status report, Epperaliant!’

  Second Lieutenant Commsman Epperaliant ran his eyes over the tech feed on his desk, Tech-Adept Vorkosigen being below tackling the damage. ‘We’re still functional. Engine online and all weapons operational. Damage is minor.’

  ‘Good,’ said Cortein and switched frequency, directing his voice through the company’s closed datanet. ‘Honoured Lieutenant Marteken, concentrate all fire on that lead walker.’

  ‘Affirmative.’ It was Colken, the commsman on Artamen Ultrus speaking, voice stuttering and cracked by the vox problems. ‘We’ll follow your lead.’

  ‘Damn right,’ muttered Cortein to himself. ‘I’ve been doing this a lot longer than Marteken.’ Then, louder into the external vox. ‘Piping targeting data over.’

  Mars Triumphant’s main armament hurled a rocket-propelled shell at a super-heavy ork walker. The munition exploded in a ball of red-hot metal and billows of fire, shaking the war machine as it scythed an enormous chain weapon towards a pair of Leman Russ. A second shell impacted, fired by Artamen Ultrus, Mars Triumphant’s sister Baneblade in the company. The grind of shearing metal was audible even through the Baneblade’s hull as the walker’s arm fell off the machine.

  An explosion battered against Mars Triumphant’s armour. Alarms wailed louder, more smoke filtered up into the command deck from the gangway below. ‘I said get that alarm shut off and put that damn fire out! Marsello, Meggen, help him!’