Baneblade

by Guy Haley

  Only once did he pass by a firefight close enough to see. A squad of Guard had formed up in the heart of their platoon camp, loosing volleys of lasfire that crackled through the air, felling orks charging them. Others outflanked their small bastion, and melee ensued. Bannick debated joining them, but pressed on, thoughts on his orders, the Baneblade and his comrades.

  He came across an ork alone, crouched over something by the tracks of a Leman Russ. He crept up behind it. It was busy for a second, then away into the night without noticing him. He waited a few heartbeats and went to where the ork had been crouched. Explosives, it had been planting explosives. He checked the device quickly, six sticks of pliable explosive matter. As far as he could tell, two blinking green lights and a mechanical clock checking down the seconds on top formed the detonator. Gritting his teeth, he aimed his pistol and put a las-shot through the clock face. The bomb fizzed. He pulled the device free and tossed it as far as he could from the tank. The storm would bury it, they’d have to dig it out and destroy it, but better that than lose a tank.

  He recognised where he was then, the edge of the vehicle park, armoured fighting vehicles in precise ranks filling the canyon floor, their blocky shapes hazy in the night. Trails of ork footprints, already filling with sand, curved lazy S-shapes from tank to tank.

  Emperor knew how many bombs the orks had planted while the Guard’s attention was fixed on the Leviathan.

  Bannick pressed the stud at the side of his respirator. Vox static hissed in his ears angrily, Kalidar’s snake warning. ‘This is Lieutenant Colaron Artem Lo Bannick. Command, come in…’ He waited for a reply; nothing came. ‘Is anyone there? The attack on the Leviathan is a feint. They’re booby-trapping the tanks, repeat, orks are attaching explosives to our tanks.’

  No reply. Bannick swore. He searched up and down the bands for a working channel, nothing but the rush of interference and unintelligible chatter. He was about to try again when chatter of a different kind cut across his attention. Heavy bolter fire, coming from the centre of the massed ranks.

  The place where the super-heavies rested.

  He ran through the whirling dust, towards Mars Triumphant. Stooped silhouettes loomed up and then away, orks, guns out, firing. The bolter fire grew louder, the distinctive double report as the guns spat out the round and the accelerant activated, pushing the bolt past the speed of sound.

  Bannick threw himself forwards, a line of bolts streaking overhead. He rolled in time to see an ork bearing down on him from the storm. Huge and warty, green skin rendered brown by the dust, it leered evilly and raised a huge pistol. The young lieutenant prepared to die.

  The trigger pulled. A click. The ork looked at its gun and threw it aside. Kalidar spared neither side’s weapons, it seemed.

  It was all the time Bannick needed to aim a sideways swipe at its leg, cutting it deep into its calf beneath the back of the knee, splashing Bannick with dark blood. The ork roared, made to grab him, but Bannick was past it quickly, leaving it limping and shouting behind him in the storm.

  He was in the marshalling ground, the broad space at the middle of the camp’s vehicle park, a temporary square delineated by the tanks around it. Ahead, in its centre, sat the super-heavies. All three were part-active, heavy bolters blazing as turrets tracked this way and that. Bolter shells spanged off them as they caught each other in the crossfire, the crews trusting to their armour to stop the bolts dead. To the south, the smell of smoke as the tents of the company burned, a broad orange band in the whirling dust hinting at their location.

  None of the tanks moved. Their engines required time to energise at best, the exhortations of the company enginseers at worst. Nevertheless, bodies of orks formed a broken cordon of flesh about thirty metres out from them, the barrage of fire from all three super-heavy tanks keeping the xenos at bay. The tanks were sluggish, but far from sleeping.

  Bannick shook off a rising fugue brought on by the scent of burning flesh; the bodies of the men he could not rescue, brutalised into unrecognisable form, flashing into his mind. He forced himself to run. Luck was on his side: the orks had evidently been beaten back from the tanks, but he could hear them above the keen of the wind, regrouping, shadows moving in the storm. He had to be quick. He waited for the bolter turrets on Ostrakan’s Rebirth, closest to him now, to track away, then broke into a run.

  He just hoped he wouldn’t be mistaken for the enemy.

  He sprinted past the bulk of the Hellhammer, veering round its front. He hit the deck once again as a trio of rounds spat from the left sponson of Mars Triumphant, waited. No more came. They must have identified him as human – even in the storm the silhouettes of man and ork were easy to tell apart. He ran to the tank’s blunt nose, not wasting time scrambling round to the rear access ladder. Aided by the planet’s low gravity, he leapt the two and a half metres onto the sloping front, scrambled up over the demolisher cannon and onto the forward gunnery access hatch. He jammed his finger into the access lock, cursing as it failed to activate, scraping the choking dust from its internal iris. A clunk, and the lock disengaged. He yanked at the hatch, wormed inside, his respirator’s snout catching and banging painfully into his face as he dropped within.

  The hatch shut with difficulty, the crunch of sand powdering in its seals. The wind was shut away to a distant whisper.

  Bannick was stood hard by Ganlick’s seat. The low chair, jammed in tight by the forward demolisher turret, was vacant, screens off on the small station. Through the bulkhead’s cutaway he saw Outlanner in the driver’s chair as always, maskless, unconcerned that he might have got a lungful.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ said the driver. ‘How’re you?’ He leaned back. ‘You got sand all over Ganlick’s chair, he ain’t gonna be too happy ’bout that.’

  Bannick tore his mask off. ‘Can’t you get this damned thing moving? There are orks everywhere.’

  Outlanner shrugged. ‘No reactor power, no drive. Vorkosigen’s doing his best, but he ain’t got the full-on knowhow. Need a proper coghead for that.’

  ‘Who else is aboard?’ snapped Bannick. Outlanner was dreamy, full of gleece. Cortein let him get away with it; Bannick would have wondered why but he’d seen the man drive.

  ‘Me, Vorkosigen, Marsello and Ganlick, he’s up on the command deck, firing your guns at the greenies.’ The driver sighed. He’d be no help unless they got the engines on line.

  ‘Vorkosigen!’ bawled Bannick as he hurried up the gangway. ‘Vorkosigen!’

  The little engineer’s legs and blood-red robe could be seen protruding from out of the engine access. The eyes of the machine-spirit emblem to the side were extinguished, Vorksosigen’s prayers croaking out from below the block, in a poor mimicry of his Adeptus Mechanicus superiors. Bannick went up and stood over him.

  ‘Report, Vorkosigen.’

  Vorkosigen scooted out, his face oily, spanner in hand. The stare his big eyes gave Bannick was far from friendly. ‘Sir,’ he said coldly.

  ‘I said report, dammit! Why isn’t the plant online? Ganlick is in charge, am I correct? He ordered you to activate, no?’

  A pause. ‘The plants were powered down to a null state by the enginseers on all the super-heavies, sir,’ said Vorkosigen. He deliberately avoided looking Bannick in the eye, staring at the metal of the ceiling behind his shoulder. The tone he used was slow, patronising. ‘Usually when we stop Mars Triumphant goes into a standing ready state, but there is full maintenance scheduled for tomorrow and the multifuel reactor needs to be entirely cold before…’

  ‘Spare me the explanations, Vorkosigen, can you get it started?’

  ‘No. I can’t. I am trying, but I cannot do it without the enginseers. The reactor is rarely let into this state. Only my superiors know the proper rites for full reactivation, this is not a secret aspirants are party to.’

  ‘Why in the name of Terra would they leave us sitting dead?’

 
‘Standard procedure sir, we’re due a big engagement. I’m trying to patch in all the back-ups at once. That should buy us more time.’ With that, Vorkosigen slid back under the tank’s engine block.

  ‘Damn orks picked their moment,’ said Bannick. He went forwards again, showering dust from his coat. He hauled himself up the ladder onto the command deck. Marsello and Ganlick looked up sharply, the big gunner in the third gunner’s seat. Bannick’s seat.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’re running off batteries,’ said the second gunner, terse as always. ‘Sponsons only, I wouldn’t want to draw on the lascannon right now, and we don’t want to hit the other super-heavies with those. Heavy bolters are okay, lascannon shots.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyhow, we’d have four, maybe five shots, then we’d be without anything.’

  ‘Heavy bolters only then?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ganlick.

  ‘Vorkosigen told me that this is standard, seems insane to me. What did he mean?’

  Ganlick looked up again from the screen, a swarm of dots at its edge, motion markers blurred with static. The orks were massing. ‘The amount of power Mars Triumphant and her sisters use is enormous. They’ll run off anything…’

  ‘Like the Leman Russ and Chimeras?’ interrupted Bannick.

  ‘Yeah, but the plant is much bigger. The reactor has to be serviced every six months or so, but they do it every time they think we’ll be in a big engagement or long out in the field. More often, if the fuel or conditions are rough, like here…’

  ‘They’re coming back in!’ said Marsello.

  ‘Stand ready,’ said Bannick. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Ralt, Meggen and Epperaliant are off in camp at the rec tent. It’s their off shift. The honoured lieutenant?’

  ‘The last I saw of him, he was escorting the captain-general back to the command deck of the Leviathan. Captain Hannick too.’

  The sound of explosions rumbled through the hull.

  ‘They hit the Leviathan?’ asked Marsello, panic in his voice.

  ‘They hit the Leviathan, blew one of the basdack doors off and got right inside. And they’ve rigged the vehicle park with explosives, I guess that was them. Seems we’re a target as well,’ said Bannick. ‘Orks have hit the barrack tents, they’ve penned in our support while another group comes up here to cripple our armour. There’s not many of them out there, but they’ve got the whole camp in uproar, feinting and retreating, burning as they go.’

  ‘A diversion, from orks?’ said Marsello.

  ‘We’re dead in the sand,’ said Ganlick.

  The second and third gunners locked eyes.

  ‘You’re the ranking officer,’ said Ganlick, abruptly. Bannick was relieved and appalled simultaneously – relieved he wouldn’t have a turf war with the second gunner, appalled that he was responsible for the safety of Mars Triumphant.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I point guns and shoot ’em,’ said Ganlick. ‘I’m second gunner here, but the pips on your shoulder say you’re it and Cortein isn’t here to say otherwise. Where do you want me? I could go up top and man the stubber, you two keep us clear with the sponsons?’

  Bannick thought about it. He looked at the command suite. No use to him with the main guns and engines offline, and it felt wrong to usurp Cortein’s place. Better he stay here, where he belonged.

  ‘Okay. Keep your tracking down if you can,’ advised Ganlick. ‘It’s that which’ll squeeze the batteries dry. You’ll be lucky to hit anything anyway, best we can hope for now is to keep them back.’ They squeezed awkwardly past each other. Bannick sat as Ganlick pulled himself up the ladder. Marsello and Bannick slipped on their respirators. The hatch up top opened up and let Kalidar in.

  ‘They’re coming! Prepare delta fire pattern.’ The vox burst to life, the systems on the super-heavies powerful enough to break through the storm, at least at this short range. Honoured Lieutenant Marteken, the commander of Artemen Ultrus, the company’s other Baneblade. Bannick felt a rush of relief that he wasn’t the only ranking officer with the company and therefore responsible for the whole unit. He reported in rapidly. Marteken didn’t have time to respond before the orks were on them.

  The orks approached sidewise, using the parking pattern of the tanks against them. They came in fast, firing their clumsy rockets as they ran. Five of these small groups were pinned or scattered, but each one targeted let another further forwards, the super-heavy tanks’ arcs of fire compromised by their own bulk.

  They’re sophisticated for orks all right, thought Bannick, but they’re still aiming to get in close. He thought of the explosives attached to the sides of the Leman Russ.

  ‘They’re trying to get in with krak!’ he yelled into the vox. ‘Don’t let them into your dead fire zones!’

  Green dots swirled all over his tac display, many winked out as bolts found orks and blew them apart. More came in, close to fifty.

  A burst of thunder rumbled through Mars Triumphant: one, two, three, four explosions in quick succession. Screams filled the vox, the crew of Ostrakan’s Rebirth.

  The vox crackled. ‘Hull breach! Hull breach!’ Cholo, another man of Clan Radden, Hannick’s commsman. There was a babble of panic and crashing, more screams. A wave of strong static washed it out, then a click, Marteken cutting the feed, making the remaining crew of the two operational tanks stay focused.

  The guns of Ostrakan’s Rebirth fell silent. It took a moment for Bannick, intent on playing his own bolters across the advancing orks, to realise that Ganlick’s stubber had cut off too. If the orks had got to the tank, the open hatch would give them a way in…

  A clumsy thump of boots on metal made him turn. It saved his life.

  Crammed into the confines of the tank, like a monster from a fairytale stealing into a nursery, stood an ork. Bannick hadn’t had time to register the size and power of the creatures out there in the storm. They were shapes in the murk, the fights he had brief, sight of the creatures lost to the storm. Here, in the dim lights of the tanks, he could see how large orks truly were. It barely fitted in the confines of the command deck. It was perhaps as tall as Bannick, but only because it was so deeply stooped. Had it stood up straight it would have overtopped him by a head or more, and it was far more massive, four or five times his weight, its body a mass of slab-like muscle and ropey sinew. Hands as big as ammo boxes reached down to the floor, talons terminating fingers wide as two of Bannick’s own. Its head was huge, a hulking bucket of a skull as large as a man’s ribcage, dozerblade lower jaw jutting forwards, lined with swordblade fangs, ropes of drool streaming from between them. Bandoliers laden with shell cases and explosives criss-crossed its barrel chest, uniform camouflaged in the drab red oxides and greys of Kalidar. Its green skin was also disguised, scab, sore and scar all painted over with finger-smears of colour. Round its neck hung a chain of teeth, a crossed-axe pendant dangling from the centre. Its eyes were tiny, picked out a deep red by the lights in the cabin, retinas silvering as it leaned in towards Bannick.

  The ork went for him as he dove out of his chair, bringing its knife down hard and shearing the back of his station chair in half. Bannick fell to the floor, knocking the mask from his face. Immediately the stench of the ork assailed him, a strong animal stink, alien sweat and dung, rotting flesh and something like seaweed. Bannick scrambled up, reaching for his holster. He glanced to his sword, no room to pull it free, he prayed his laspistol would be enough. Marsello cried out, distracting the ork. Bannick sent a bolt of crimson light searing into the ork’s shoulder. The creature’s flesh smouldered, adding the flavour of hot wax and burnt meat to the reek in the room. It roared, more with annoyance than real pain, jaws hinging wide. It kept its eyes on the third loader, but pivoted backwards, bringing its long arm round towards Bannick. The beast’s massive shoulder moved slowly, but by the time the motion had reached its hand it was travelling fast
as a whip. Bannick dodged his head, narrowly saving him from a broken neck as the ork’s backhand connect with his chest like a cannon shot. Bannick was hurled backwards, foot catching on the edge of the down well; he stumbled backwards into the command suite, gun clattering to the floor

  Bannick shook the spots from his eyes in time to see the ork’s knife wrench free from Marsello’s chest, blood fountaining from the hole in his ribs, painting the command deck with his life.

  The ork stood, grinning at him. A deep, horrible noise Bannick took for a chuckle came up from its chest. It licked the knife edge with a long pink tongue, Marsello’s life-blood trickling onto its sabre-teeth, then gestured to the gun on the floor between them.

  The basdacked thing was challenging him.

  Bannick grabbed for his pistol as the ork clumsily swiped at him. He seized the dropped weapon, rolled sideways, over the lip of the stairwell as the ork lunged again. He landed hard on the deck, cutting his hand on a bunk door left askew. The ork came to the top of the steps, bulky body filling the aperture. Bannick brought up his gun, loosed off a shot, catching the ork in the arm as it wrestled itself through. It hissed and shook its head, began to descend. Bannick aimed for the head and missed. He scrabbled on his back towards the forward compartment of the tank.

  The ork came down, caution gone. It was playing with him. Bannick got up, kept low. The corridor was tight, no place for a fight, but the ork was at an even greater disadvantage, trapped by its huge bulk.

  Who was he trying to convince? He was a dead man.

  Suddenly, the ork grunted. It turned its head, rubbing at its brutish skull, thick blood trickling from a wound. Behind it, he could make out Vorkosigen, clutching a large spanner. The ork tried to turn to face him. It bellowed in anger as its knife caught on the wall. Too big to fit into a corridor made for beings half its size, it could not twist itself round to get at this new irritant.

  Bannick raised his gun for a final shot, trying to pinpoint a weak spot on the beast’s chest, some way into the vital organs, finding none. Faced with such a being, the laspistol felt as potent as a child’s water gun, a pathetic defence, all the training he’d had as a youth in blade and fist combat useless against it. His heart quailed at the thought of the thousands upon thousands of other greenskins on Kalidar, all wanting to rend him apart.