Baneblade

by Guy Haley

  One minute.

  Bannick swerved the Salamaner round the wrecks of ork buggies. There were only a few left functioning, buzzing round the larger tanks like gnats. The fighting was coming to an end. The orks were finished.

  Bannick checked his timepiece and pressed the drive levers for the vehicle’s twin engines forwards as far as he could.

  Ten… nine… eight… seven…

  He drove past one of the Leman Russ, making with all speed to the crater rim; the other was already creeping up and over.

  Six… five…

  Strenheim’s men had fallen back, leaving nought but green corpses to show they had been there.

  Four…

  He shot past Mars Triumphant, its hull going past in a blur. The spoil rim grew nearer and nearer.

  Three… two… one…

  A low, rumbling boom passed through the tank, a low-

  frequency shockwave that made the metal of the vehicle buzz.

  The ground bucked under the Salamander as the entire floor of the depression heaved up in a bulge, then dropped. The engines screamed as Bannick pushed the scout tank up and out of the sinking depression, sand pouring back past it into the deepened hole. He gained the rim, and pushed the tank up and out of the danger zone. The second Leman Russ followed a second later, toppling towards safety.

  Out over on the other side Bannick jammed the brakes on hard, and the vehicle struggled to a halt, engines stinking of burning oil.

  Bannick shoved his way out of the scout tank and ran up the pseudo-crater wall. He had to see what had happened to Mars Triumphant.

  Inside the depression, the facility had disappeared. In its stead lay a sucking hole. Ork carcasses and wrecked vehicles flowed towards it, tumbling down on rivers of sand.

  Mars Triumphant hung at the edge of the collapse, metres away from the spoil rim. Its tracks turned implacably, the ground disappearing beneath it, fighting to keep position.

  ‘No!’ shouted Bannick.

  The tank’s engine howled, gears grinding raucously within its track units. Slowly, slowly, the Baneblade made ground, edging forwards, and pulled itself onto the base of the spoil-rim wall. Bannick held his breath as it climbed out, one painful centimetre at a time.

  Then the mighty tank slipped, the ground under the right track unit gave way and it yawed alarming towards that side. The sand poured back faster than the tracks could turn, Mars Triumphant was pulled down, down into the rushing torrent of dust, buried up to its tracks, then its turret. Black smoke poured from its quad smokestacks as its mechanisms screamed.

  The rushing sand swallowed it whole.

  Bannick sank to his knees.

  The speed of the sand hissing into the altered landscape slowed. Aftershocks rumbled through the ground, the avalanche stilled.

  The Baneblade was gone. The cruelty of the God-Emperor hit him like a hammerblow. He’d dishonoured himself, tried to redeem his honour in the eyes of the lord of mankind, for Bannick believed fervently that He watched all the men that fought for Him. To be picked to serve aboard a super-heavy tank, the very one commanded by the hero of his clan, seemed a vindication of everything he had put himself through – the leaving of home, the disapproval of his father, the loss of his friend, but no, it was not enough, nothing could ever be enough for what he had done. This was all his fault, his doing. The Baneblade had been destroyed to punish him for breaking the codes of his clan, for the death of Tuparillio. He bowed his head in shame and prayed fervently for the souls of the men aboard the tank, and for the chance to expend his life as a useful servant of the Imperium. It was all he had, and all that he could give. He knew it for an inferior offering.

  Bannick remained that way for some time before he stood. Reluctantly, he quit the wall and walked down onto the desert floor. The sun was over the horizon now, the wind rising with it. In the distance a smudge of red hinted at another storm on its way.

  He was halfway back when mechanical thunder made him turn again.

  Mars Triumphant crested the wall of the mine depression, sand streaming from its flanks like water cascading from an ocean leviathan. It reared up high as it took the barrier, engines roaring, a beast bellowing its defiance to the universe, and came down hard. Once off the wall it levelled out, and growled to a stop in front of Bannick.

  Sand whispered onto the floor as it stood there, wide lights and augurs regarding him, engine revs breathing. Bannick stared back. He saw Mars Triumphant briefly as the tech-priests saw it, not just as a machine with a soul as most men would, a relic and reminder of the power and endurance of the Imperium, but as a living, breathing embodiment of the Emperor’s will. It was like looking at a ragged preacher, and catching a glimpse of the holy fire of sainthood beneath the surface. Through the mighty machine’s glass augurs and optics, the Emperor could see him stood there, right then, pathetic on the sand. The living god of mankind, clad in armour of plasteel and adamantium, gazed through the machinery before Bannick and judged him.

  He was found wanting.

  Bannick fell to his knees, overwhelmed.

  A clang from above broke the spell, followed by a shout. Bannick stood and stepped back to see Radden’s flame-haired head poke from the turret high above.

  ‘Bet you thought we were goners there eh, new boy? Well not us, not while we’re riding this! Not while we’ve got Mars Triumphant.’ He laughed as he pounded the tank’s armour, face bright with the glee of survival. He made the sign of the aquila, raised his medallions to his lips and pressed loud kisses upon them. ‘Praise be!’ He shouted. ‘Praise be to the tech-priests of Mars and all their screw-bothering mumblings! Ha!’

  Once news of their success had been conveyed to battlegroup HQ, Mars Triumphant and the other units had been ordered to stay put and wait for relief, so they waited and took stock of their casualties and vehicle damage. Shortly after the battle, a group of support staff from the 7th arrived in an Atlas tank, along with it Enginseers Brasslock and Starstan. Two hours or so later, Medicae and Munitorum teams arrived to resupply the group and take the wounded back to Hive Modulus

  The last of the casualties were shipped out close to the end of the long Kalidarian day, eighteen hours since the morning when Bannick had watched Mars Triumphant haul itself out of the crater, and it was a crater now, the result of a five-megatonne portable atomic seeded in the depths of the disused mine. How many of the Savlar had died fighting in the transit tunnels to place it there Bannick did not know, but having seen the orks at work in the open twice now, he was developing a respect for the so-called dregs, no matter what was said about them.

  The crews of the tanks, their support vehicles and the platoon under Lieutenant Strenkelios had formed a camp, lookouts placed in a kilometre-wide cordon. Reinforcements were due to arrive later that day, a recon company with light vehicles who’d scour the surrounding area for outlying groups of greenskins while the attack group made its way back to Hive Modulus.

  The weather held, the storm moving away from the horizon. Bannick was assigned to Enginseer Brasslock as he worked over the Baneblade, examining it in minute detail, Urtho his awesome shadow.

  ‘Do you hear it?’ the enginseer asked Bannick.

  ‘I hear the ticking of cooling metal, the creak of systems recently deactivated. I am sorry, but I hear nothing more.’ Bannick shuddered as he remembered how the tank had appeared after the battle. But now the presence within it had retreated, leaving only metal behind.

  Brasslock caught sight of this involuntary twitch, within his cowl ancient eyes creased with a smile and he nodded with approval. ‘On Paragon the cult of the Omnissiah is strong, yes?’

  ‘Among the clan aristocracy and others, we depend on the beneficence of the Machine-God, yes.’ Bannick pulled out his cog and eagle. ‘He is second only to the Emperor in our prayers.’

  Brasslock made a rasping noise Bannick supposed was a chu
ckle. ‘You are marked by the Machine-God.’ A metal tendril whipped out of the tech-priest’s robes and tapped Bannick’s chest. ‘And you respect Him. You have seen His glory now.’

  Bannick nodded hesitantly.

  ‘Then continue to listen, and you will hear.’

  Bannick cast his gaze up the side of the war machine, a metal wall that blocked out the merciless Kalidarian sun. ‘What will I hear?’

  ‘That Mars Triumphant is pleased with its choice. The machine-spirit of the Baneblade is satisfied with your actions, not least in your saving of the little one.’ His cowled head gestured towards the Salamander, currently being field-repaired by a team of Munitorum specialists under the direction of an enginseer. ‘All machines are sacred. They are brothers. Save one, and all are glad.’

  The rest of the crew went over their own systems, Tech-Adept Vorkosigen running general diagnostics on a data-slate independently of the enginseer’s efforts. As Bannick followed the ancient enginseer round, he was glad he was in the shadow of Mars Triumphant, and not with the Atraxian storm troopers, who laboured in the full glare of the sun moving stinking orkish corpses into a pile for burning; necessary, so he’d been told, to stop their bodies shedding spores. He found it hard to credit, but leave them unburnt and a year later this area would be crawling with yet more greenskins.

  Further reinforcements came in three hours before sunset, Honoured Captain Hannick among them, and he and Cortein were locked in close consultation for the remainder of the day. The honoured captain was surprisingly young, thought Bannick, much younger than Cortein.

  Later, as the fierce blue sun of Kalidar burned its way into the horizon, they drank. The others welcomed Bannick now, praising his deeds in the battle. Yet he could not share their joy. His dishonour set him aside in his mind, he was sure that the near loss of the Baneblade was a warning to him, a reminder that the Emperor knew of his shame, that Mars Triumphant knew, even if his comrades did not. He could not rid himself of the image of the men broken by the orks. Head swimming from the rough gleece the men handed round the sealed crew tent, he made his excuses and went outside, walking without purpose to the edge of the encampment, resenting with every rubber-tainted breath the respirator he was forced to wear.

  Bannick stood at the edge of the desert, his breath noisy in his ears. He became lost in thought, watching the day die.

  ‘It is, in its way, a beautiful place,’ said a voice close by him.

  ‘Honoured lieutenant,’ Bannick said, snapping to attention.

  ‘At ease, lieutenant, the time’s not right for that now. The day is done, we won. Now we rest.’

  Cortein came to stand by him. Like Bannick, he had his officer’s cap and coat on against the cold. They could have been two gentleman soldiers of their clan, taking the air at a Paragonian desert resort, were it not for the reek of spilt fuel and ork corpses burning on the pyre. ‘A harsh beauty. This is so hard a planet,’ he said. ‘So hot, so cold. No soft edges, not like home.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Cortein toed the sand with his boot. ‘You can never go back. It is a long time since I signed up; Paragon is not the world I left.’

  Bannick nodded. Cortein’s brother, whom he had met when he was very young, had died years ago, and he had been truly ancient, even by the aristocracy’s standards. ‘Your raising took place in my grandfather’s time.’

  ‘Time is bent out of shape by the warp,’ said Cortein. ‘Twenty-four jumps I’ve made, no more than twelve years total in the immaterium, yet over a century added outside, so thirty years of fighting becomes an age. Go home yourself, you’ll see it change. It will not be the same.’

  ‘I did not join to go home, sir.’

  Cortein made an affirmative noise. ‘Few ever go back. I was lucky in a sense, unlucky in another.’

  ‘I joined to leave, sir, to serve my Emperor as best I may.’

  Cortein nodded. ‘I was like you once, I too waived my clan exemption.’

  ‘I know, they still talk about it back home.’

  ‘Really now? Well, there’s a thing,’ said Cortein in a manner that suggested he’d had to sit through plenty of adulatory events on Paragon.

  ‘They have a statue to you in the Great Clan Hall.’

  Cortein snorted. ‘I saw it. Doesn’t mean much. I don’t fight for glory, not any more.’

  ‘What do you fight for?’

  Cortein frowned, and did not answer immediately. ‘I am no longer sure. I have seen worlds where men live and die in squalor, labouring on tasks they do not understand night and day for crumbs of food without succour of any kind. Our kind are beset on every side by all manner of evils – the orks are the least of the horrors this universe has to show, believe me. I spent a decade fighting eldar pirates, decadent scum who thrive on pain, worse than the orks. What they’ll do to men, women, children… the more blameless the better… those sights, they never leave you.’

  Bannick thought of the tortured men; he doubted he’d ever forget that. It would be some time before he’d be comfortable around the smell of roasting meat. He understood.

  ‘Even they are not the worst. There are things out there that will eat your soul, and then there are those on our own side.’ He gave a low, mirthless chuckle. ‘Some of them will dispose of you like a rag, tossing you aside when you have served your purpose. So… Brasslock has his Machine-God, the men their own reasons. But me? I fight because that is what I do, and I fight because we must. One of those eldar degenerates, we managed to catch and interrogate one once, he laughed at us all the while, right until he died under the chirurgeon’s blades, said we were a crude mirror of what had happened to his own kind, long ago, that mankind was a lower creature doomed to a worse fate. And I will not have that. Perhaps he was right, perhaps the doomsayers are right, that these are the times of ending. You see it sometimes, the way the senior officers will gamble with men’s lives, there is a certain…weariness to it all. But I will not. For the High Lords the score of victory is measured in planetary systems, not in the survival of individuals, and it is all too easy to fall into such a mindset oneself. Hannick, for example, he’s a good commander, but the machines are his charge, not the men. I took a dressing-down from him today for risking Mars Triumphant, not for the first time. He said half of those we rescued will die from dustlung anyway, and he’s probably right.’

  ‘If I may?’ asked Bannick hesitantly.

  ‘Go ahead, please speak freely.’

  ‘Then why do it, sir?’

  ‘Because half will not die, and they can fight again.’ Cortein drew in a deep breath. ‘To not fight is to hand victory to our enemies, yet to fight and abandon the spirit that makes us better than these evil creatures is worse than defeat. Men are men because they will risk themselves for one another, that is how we have spread across the stars. We look out for our own. If a single life can be saved, it should be. Every man with a gun in his hand is a bullet in the armoury of the Emperor. Every man counts!’ He became fervent. ‘We all must make the greatest sacrifice so that the Imperium may endure. Day by day billions die for the very survival of the human race, as I will surely die. To die for the Emperor is glory, for in each kilometre of ground bought by death lies hope for the survival of our kind. Death, boy, holds no fear for me, for the Emperor is at my side. But to throw away the lives of those who can also fight? To waste men and materiel simply because there is always more? That is a grave and odious sin, and I will not stand for it. It is by profligacy that we lose, for one day, if we cast away a tank here, a life there, on and on and on, then there will be no more. The mightiest edifice may be tumbled if it is carried away stone by stone. That, Colaron Artem Lo Bannick, is why I fight the way I do, and why sometimes I will take a calculated risk.’

  They stood in silence for a space, the aurorae like warring ghosts in the sky above. Cortein turned to face the younger officer. ‘Now, I am going for
a drink. You will come too. You did well today, you deserve to rest. On board Mars Triumphant, we think for ourselves, and we fight for each other. That is why we win. Welcome to the crew, Colaron Artem Lo Bannick.’

  Bannick followed his commander. He was glad he had not been asked his own reasons for fighting; he had no wish to describe his need for redemption.

  As Bannick came to the tent airlock, he caught the telltale rattle of a tarot deck. He looked towards Mars Triumphant, but saw nothing. Vorkosigen, he thought. Only he carries that damn deck around. Without stopping to wonder why the little man was always watching him, Bannick went inside to sleep.

  INTERSTITIAL

  Of Paragon, I will say it is most blessed of the Emperor’s domains within that subsector, and is holy to the Saint Honoria Dahl, a third-grade sister of Ephesus, cruelly martyred there some four thousand years past at the height of the Age of Apostasy, and whose Late Cheroptidian Revival Basilica will enchant those who enjoy architectural beauty with their worship.

  However one may regard it a fine point for the wayfarer to recoup and rest upon pilgrimage, I say to weaker souls be wary, lest resolve in the matter of one’s holy journey is sapped, for all things are possible on the sixth moon of the sixth world of that system. Better the drear stone prairies of Uzarn for those intent upon contemplation. Temptation stalks the halls of Paragon.’

  Frater Zonecus Tufar’s Famous Pilgrimage Guide,

  volume XXIII, ‘Coreward on the Road

  of the Ephesian Saints’

  Chapter 11