Baneblade

by Guy Haley

  ‘Sir! He works to the holy words of the Tactica.’

  ‘With all due respect, Commissar Van Bast, the Tactica is vast, no one can read it all, and then it is merely the beginning of the lessons we warriors of the Emperor must learn. The primary lessons on the greenskin menace within are… elementary. The Tactica fails to reveal early enough the full complexity of ork behaviour and clan division,’ said Spaduski. ‘Lack of true study of our blessed texts is an error I find among my fellow officers all too often.’ The embarrassed adjutant nodded enthusiastically and attempted to interject. Spaduski turned away, pointedly ignoring him.

  Bannick was careful to appear engaged yet distant. Spaduski’s criticism of the captain-general was dangerous, but this near-heretical assertion about the holy Tactica, from which most Imperial wisdom was derived, was almost too much. The commissar’s expression grew grim. Bannick wasn’t sure how the Commissariat worked within the Navy, but he’d never dare speak so openly in front of a political officer of any kind like that. Spaduski, however, was either too brave, too indifferent, too drunk or too stupid to care. Bannick doubted it was the last. ‘We’re all at risk down here,’ he went on. ‘No vox comms up or down. Iskhandria should be aboard my ship, Terra’s Lambent Glory, safely directing the troops, but the damned magnetosphere forces him down here into this… landship,’ he said dismissively. ‘Undermanned, and a target. Not that it’s much better up there. We lost four cruisers last month alone to ork strikes, a very bad score. They’re hiding out in the belts, attacking when we least expect it.’

  ‘Then be more vigilant,’ said the commissar.

  Spaduski leaned forwards. ‘Listen to me, we know this breed of greenskin. I’ve fought them before, out Valhalla way fifty years and more ago. They can take you by surprise, these Blood Axes, but even I’ve not seen this. There’s something strange going on here. We can’t see the ork, but as sure as the Emperor sits upon the Golden Throne, they can see us. That we keep fighting them on the ground as if they’ll happily throw themselves at our guns like other orks is extremely unhelpful. The astropaths on board talk of a presence in the warp, something… new.’

  ‘That may be so,’ said the commissar. ‘But the Emperor will bring us victory.’

  ‘Will He now?’ said the Navy man. ‘Or is it our own efforts, and our own discernment, good or bad as that may be, that will see us fall or succeed?’

  ‘Be careful of your tone, sir,’ said the commissar, his face hardening further. His palm slapped lightly upon the table.

  Spaduski held up his hands. ‘I merely warn against complacency. Faith is, as ever, the thickest of armours and I wear mine like a second skin. Were it not for the guiding light of our glorious lord, my ship would travel nowhere, and that is the least of all He does for us. Now, if you would excuse me, I am due to report in.’

  As Spaduski stood, a primaris psyker who had been talking a few feet away moved down the table and leaned into their conversation, grabbing onto Spaduski’s arm and preventing his exit. His eyes were piercing, sparkling with an energy far beyond that which is visible in the face of normal men. His costume was elaborate, implants plugged into his skull and trailing out from his hair. He exuded a palpable aura of might, yet his face was waxy and pale, his remarkable eyes sunk deep into shadowed flesh, an effect multiplied by the high psi-collar he wore. He is a strong man made sick by the witchlight within him, thought Bannick, and recalled his name as Maldon, but he smiled brightly as friendly men do. The commissar face’s stiffened at the approach of the powerful witch. For all that they were sanctioned, and bore the same gifts as the Emperor himself, albeit to far meaner proportions, psykers did not share His will or His purity. The Space Marine, too, watched him with undisguised suspicion.

  The psyker paid neither of them any heed. ‘Gentlemen! All this talk of travails! Shall we not change the matter to a lighter subject? Alas, the machines of the Adeptus Mechanicus may struggle with the conditions here on Kalidar, but I assure you that, with the Emperor’s aid, we of the Scholastica Psykana can fill the gap. I will gladly announce to you all at this very moment that forty-four of my colleagues, with full staff and a supplementary astropathic demi-choir, are en route to Kalidar as we speak. Is this not so?’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ agreed the astropath from his seat down the table, empty eye-sockets dark within the green of his robe.

  ‘There,’ said the psyker. ‘Where the might of the Martian Omnissiah is stymied, then the will and farsight of the Emperor will prevail. With additional minds to sing the praises of the Emperor, we will be able to cast a full psychic net around Kalidar and bring to an end the communications troubles that have so bedevilled us; to root out this strange aberration allied to the ork. Gentlemen!’ he shouted out, as conversation quieted down the length of the table. Bannick caught Cortein’s eye, sat twelve seats away. He shrugged, almost imperceptibly. ‘To victory!’ shouted the psyker.

  A mumbled cry of ‘hear hear’ replied. The hubbub resumed.

  The psyker did not sit.

  ‘…have so bedevilled us; to root out this strange aberration allied to the ork. Gentlemen!’ Maldon repeated, his arm jerking upwards. ‘To victory!’ Veins stood out on his head, cords on his neck. His face flushed red as if with great effort.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ hissed Spaduski. He removed the man’s hand from his arm and backed away.

  ‘…to …vict…’ the psyker shook as if palsied, his wine slopping over the sides of his goblet. His hand clenched, the glass shattered, piercing his flesh. Blood and wine spattered the tableware. His eyes rolled in his head, terrified.

  ‘Rrrr… Rrrr… To vic… to viccctorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeee.’ Maldon shook so hard his features blurred, his voice becoming a hideous burr. Sparks of green crackled from his fingers and breastplate, there was a bang, and the thick collar he wore exploded, showering the diners with broken crystal. The astropath cried out, muscles straining, unable to move; the other sanctioned psyker in the room screamed, blood streaming from his eyes and nose, and he collapsed into his food. Slowly, Maldon rose into the air, a storm of green sparks blazing around him as he was lifted above the table, forced upwards by a cascade of eldritch energy. Chairs scraped as men recoiled, pistols and swords were drawn, bringing leaps of warp-born power to earth through them. Cursing, their owners dropped them.

  Maldon hung in the centre of the room’s high arched ceiling, drifting in a circle. His face blazed with green energy, blackened jelly running down his cheeks where his eyes had been cooked in their sockets. There was a crack of breaking bone, and the psyker’s jaw sagged wide. Mandible jerking in a parody of normal speech, the storm-wracked man spoke.

  ‘Hur, hur, hur,’ he said in a voice not his own, a voice guttural and inhuman. ‘I see you, I see you all! There is no escape! This world belongs to the green! You are all dead! All of you!’ The psyker’s hand jerked up, fingers out in a claw, pointing at the occupants of the room. ‘And I am coming for you!’

  Malton began a hideous gurgle, his broken jaw flapping on his chest, tongue out long and twitching. Green fire shot from his throat as his body convulsed fit to snap his spine.

  His head exploded, showering the room with fragments of skull and brain. The green light cut off. Fountaining blood, the corpse of the primaris psyker crashed into the table, scattering the feast everywhere.

  Klaxons blared. A blast shook the command vehicle, sending the officers sprawling. A chandelier hit the floor, smoke poured into the room from a vent, then shut off. Green emergency lighting gave the room a ghostly air. The sounds of small explosions came and went. Shouting and feet ringing on metal floors went past the great room’s doors.

  ‘Attention, attention,’ a vox-borne voice called. ‘All hands to battle stations, all hands to battle stations, we are under attack. Repeat, we are under attack!’

  Bannick ran after Spaduski through the Leviathan, rebreather case clunking on
the back of his breastplate and bruising his hip. All officers in the mess had been ordered back to their posts, scattering to whatever route would take them there quickest. Many of them had made straight for the command deck of the massive vehicle, to direct their troops. Cortein had gone with them. The half-dozen or so other officers junior enough to be leading their troops in the field had scattered to various sally ports and access hatches. No one seemed to know where exactly the orks were on board. It was suggested that if they split up, at least some of them would get out. Spaduski was making for the comms suite, to see if he could get in touch with his ship. Bannick opted to follow him and find his own exit.

  With a clatter of feet, Spaduski and Bannick ran smack into a squad of Atraxian Guard Paramount, the high command’s elite unit. Weapons were whipped up on both sides, and slowly lowered.

  ‘Sirs,’ said the squad sergeant, his face hidden by his carapace mask.

  The crack of lasgun fire echoed distantly, roars and the clatter of orkish handguns replying.

  ‘The orks. Do you know where they are?’ muttered Spaduski.

  ‘There are a large group of them pouring in through door fourteen…’

  Spaduski raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Towards the rear, sir, maybe thirty or more. But reports have individuals roaming the entire ship. They’ve destroyed our comms array, and done something to the internal surveillance.’ The sergeant’s melodious Atraxian accent was at odds with his faceless armour.

  There was the sound of an explosion. The Leviathan rocked.

  ‘And now they’re blasting this place apart from the inside,’ growled the Navy man. ‘This could go badly. A boarding action is no good thing with these creatures.’

  A crackle of vox from the squad, the sergeant spoke into it. ‘We’re whittling them down, sir. Our comrades in the Guard Paramount are taking care of the main group. We’re on our way to the command deck just in case any get through there and try to assassinate high command.’ He paused for a moment, listening to vox chatter. ‘You,’ he said to six of his troops. ‘Continue on up to the command deck and reinforce the squad on the doors.’ He spoke into his vox rapidly, requesting permission to escort Bannick and Spaduski. ‘We’re to get these officers to their men,’ he said presently. Milite and Tesk, you come with me. Gentlemen, what are your orders?’

  ‘I’ve been ordered back to my vehicle,’ said Bannick.

  ‘I have to try and make contact with the fleet,’ said Spaduski. ‘Is the main vox array still down?’

  ‘Yes, commander,’ replied the Atraxian. ‘The orks targeted that first, all our communications capabilities are severely compromised.’

  ‘In that case I have to make it to the astropathic choir. I just hope they can send a message out with their leader in a coma.’

  The sergeant said, ‘The comms room is this way, on the way to the choir. We’ll visit both.’ He pointed to Bannick. ‘Milite will take you to the nearest sally. After that, you are on your own. The primary duty of the Guard Paramount is to protect command.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Good. Move out,’ said the Atraxian. Half his squad made their way cautiously up the corridor, towards the command deck.

  ‘I wish you well,’ said Spaduski.

  ‘And I you too,’ said Bannick, and he and his escort made off down the way. They jogged cautiously, pausing at every junction while the trooper checked the passages. Bannick stood behind him, sword hilt and laspistol held in palms that had suddenly gone sweaty. The distant sounds of fighting reached their ears every so often, but Bannick was amazed how quiet the giant vehicle was. Its carrier decks were empty, the troops it could carry billeted outside, all the action was going on elsewhere, he supposed, up on the elevated command deck at the top of the fore tower, in the six turrets down the flanks, round the breached accessway where the orks had broken in, anywhere but here.

  Milites slowed to a halt, listening to a message.

  ‘Sorry sir,’ he said shortly. ‘Road out to the second sally port is blocked. Three orks putting up a fight, they’ll lock it down, but they don’t know how long.’ He tapped onto his wrist-mounted augur, brought up plans, looked up. ‘We’ll go this way. It means backtracking a little,’ said Milite. ‘But there’s an external hatch nearby.’

  The trooper led Bannick to one of the wide ways that led down either side of the vehicle, which were repeated on every one of the command centre’s main four decks, giving access to the tank bays and troop compartments on the lower two, the various command sections on the upper. The far end of the corridor lit sporadically with the flash of weapons discharge, there was a defiant, alien bellow, shouting, then silence. The trooper held up a hand until the noise dissipated, then led Bannick across the corridor and into a side spur terminating at the inner hull of the command vehicle. A keypad sat alongside a window-sized doorway a metre off the floor bearing a large three.

  ‘Maintenance, I’m afraid, sir, it’ll be a squeeze.’

  ‘I’m a tanker, I’ve got into smaller spaces,’ said Bannick. He undid his sword while the trooper keyed in the code.

  ‘I’ve turned on the maintenance ladder, it should be out of the hull when you get there. It’ll deactivate automatically in a minute, and you’ll have to drop the last six metres or so in any case. The outer door will open at your biosign, but only once. After that, you are stuck, sir. Inside or out,’ he warned. ‘Auto defences activate twenty seconds after. You won’t have long to get out.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Bannick passed his weapon to the trooper and climbed into the service tunnel. The trooper pushed the sword into the tunnel after him and sealed him in, trapping him in the space between inner and outer hulls. Bannick muttered a quick prayer. He crawled off, banging his knuckles on the mesh floor where he gripped his sword. He’d have abandoned the weapon, but he was probably going to need it. The service ducts were silent, the vehicle’s innermost parts impervious to the sounds of the battle inside and the storm outside. Bannick crossed another tunnel that cut through his own at right angles, curving off into the darkness. Conduits and subsystems surrounded him, many bearing the seals and parchments left by free-roaming Adeptus Mechanicus repair vermin. He hoped he didn’t encounter any. Light was restricted to the twinkling of small system status indicators and widely spaced lumen cubes set into the floor.

  He made the outermost skin of the Leviathan in a few minutes. Once there he struggled his rebreather and goggles on and keyed the hatch’s single button. A broad sweep scan-laser swept up and down him, tasting his biology. A trill indicated the machine-spirit within was satisfied.

  The hatch cracked with a hiss, and the fury of Kalidar came shrieking in, hot wind and razor dust blasting Bannick. The hatch stopped wide with a clunk, opening out onto a scene of eerie blankness.

  The dust storm filled the night, the Imperial camp’s lights diffracted into fuzzy globes, muffling the outside in a uniform dimness within which darker shapes lurked; the great mesas that gave Macaree’s Tablelands its name. There were twenty-four gradings of dust storm on Kalidar – Bannick reckoned this to be somewhere round the fifteen mark. Blown up like this, the fine dust could cause dustlung after a few breaths. When it settled it ran like water, pooling in hollows in the ground, creating new deposits of deadly quickdust. Flows of heavier sand ran above the ground thirty metres below, completely obscuring it, whipped along the surface by the wind, the kind of fanged wind that cut.

  From within this maelstrom, he could make out the sounds of fighting.

  Holy Lord protect me, thought Bannick. He realised he was afraid, and that relieved him, for if he was numbed to the battle he was dead. He double-checked the seals on his respirator. He dropped his sword over the edge. It bounced once off the sloping fortress wall, and disappeared into the storm.

  He swung his legs out into the teeth of the storm, turned round and hung precariously from the hatchway by his h
ands. He was between two of the Leviathan’s side bastions, just below their turrets. These whined from side to side, unable to find a target. For a couple of moments his feet banged ineffectually into the heavily decorated side of the Leviathan, and he began to sweat. If the hatch shut, he’d lose his fingers and then… His fear intensified, empowering him. His foot found one of the hemispherical holes that made up the surface ladder and he breathed a sigh of relief. Quickly he descended, mindful of the time left to him before the hatch and ladder disengaged. He made it to where the ladder gave out, six metres off the ground. Turning, he pushed himself away from the side of the immense vehicle and fell through the air, coat fluttering behind him. He passed into the stream of heavier sand, and landed.

  ‘Thank the Emperor for low-G,’ he said. He stood and pulled out his laspistol. He found his sword quickly; already it was covering over with heavy grains of sand. He belted it back on and he pulled it free of the scabbard.

  Down here, right in the gullet of Kalidar’s latest tantrum, he could hardly see. Sand pattered off his goggles like stubber fire, his ears filled with the stuff. The night, normally frigid, was stifling, the storm’s thick air acting as a blanket, trapping the heat of the day.

  Vision limited by goggles and sand, hearing muffled, Bannick retreated into a world delineated by the circumscribed glow of the camp lamps. His breathing and heart competed with the roar of the wind. Any minute, he expected an ork to loom out of the night and snap his neck with its brutal hands; more than once he spun round, panic barely below the surface, sure he was about to be attacked.

  All he saw were shapes in the night, flashes in the gloom, muffled explosions and the crack of lasfire, amplified by superheated dust exploding in its beams.