Baneblade

by Guy Haley

  He stilled his nerves. The ork was trapped, head turned awkwardly back and forth between the two humans, long arms alternately reaching for him, then struggling to get at Vorkosigen. The will to live flared bright in him. In circumstances like this, some men gave up and let death take them.

  Colaron Artem Lo Bannick was not among such men.

  His eyes lighted on the thick cables running the length of the corridor: The lascannon feeds. He had a chance, there was always a chance.

  Darting forwards, he flicked the quick release on part of the cable set, leaving the other end connected to the power supply. The cables swung down, a dull glow shining from their ends. He snatched up the bundle, careful to make sure his hand stayed on the thick insulation.

  ‘Xenos!’ he shouted. ‘Ork!’ The ork did not turn. It was still intent on thrashing its way around to deal with the small engineer who was repeatedly battering it on the skull, his face twisted in terror. Bannick shot it instead, aiming for the face, suddenly thankful for the endless lectures on combat anatomy he’d endured aboard the transport barge. The army might have played down the size and power of the greenskins, but they’d been right about their vulnerable spots.

  He had its attention.

  The ork clutched at its ear, howling in outrage, and turned to finished Bannick once and for all. Bannick was ready.

  ‘Prepare to receive the light of the Emperor,’ he said, steel in his voice, and thrust the live end of the cable into the creature’s mouth as far as he dared, snatching his hand back as the jaws snapped shut. Raw energy poured directly from the Baneblade’s batteries, energy sufficient to power a lascannon. The ork twitched as arcing sparks ran over it, mouth locked shut by electrically induced muscle spasm. Bannick shot again and again into the ork’s face, until it was a las-charred ruin.

  The ork leaned forwards in the corridor, too big to collapse, corpse smoking.

  Bannick breathed hard and leaned into the wall, laspistol clattering on the metal as he let his arm swing down. His breath was short and shaky, his bowels loose. He felt sick in the aftermath of adrenaline.

  The ork seemed bigger in death than it had in life. It certainly smelled a lot worse. Bannick suppressed a smile as he wondered how in the Emperor’s name they were going to get the thing out of there. He was struck by the ludicrous nature of his situation. That Vorkosigen was trapped, and would likely have to remain there until they’d chainsawed the stinking cadaver apart, just made it all the more absurd.

  Aftershock. Relief. All normal. He’d often wondered why the watchmen and bodyguards back home had had such black humour. As an angry youth, he’d thought such behaviour unbefitting a gentleman like himself. He understood now; it was a coping mechanism, ancient and tested on billions of battlefields. He’d survived again. He would live. It helped one’s sanity to find that funny.

  From outside came the muffled rumble of tank engines, Imperial. Looked like they’d finally been stirred to action.

  Vorkosigen glowered at him over the dead ork, face still blanched with battle-fear. Take some tankers out of a tank, crack them out of their thick armour, and they were as vulnerable as shelled sand-mites.

  ‘Don’t think this changes anything!’ said the tech-adept, and clutched the cracked screen of the tarot reader to him protectively.

  Bannick shook his head. He was getting the measure of Vorkosigen. The tech-adept did not like him, and that was getting to be a problem. He was about to ask him whether he ought to shoot him and solve his problem, when a clang sounded from behind him.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ said a voice. Bannick turned to see Ganlick hanging head down through the forward access, eye swollen shut, blood running off his respirator to drip on the floor.

  ‘Ganlick. You’re alive.’

  ‘Yeah. Basdack greenie pulled me out of the turret and chucked me over the side like I was a slowtail pup. Didn’t come down to finish me off. His mistake. Thank the Emperor I had my knife and pistol on me. I got his buddy. You?’

  ‘Marsello’s dead.’

  Ganlick shook his head, looked genuinely regretful. That was that, grieving put away to be endured later. The soldier’s way.

  Bannick inclined his head towards the dead alien. ‘Looks like we both lived to tell the tale.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the taciturn gunner. ‘Anyways, fighting’s moved off aways from us. Cortein’s here. Wants to see you.’

  Bannick stood up again, reholstered his pistol, nodded his assent. He grimaced as his vox earpiece squealed, static pushed back. The Leviathan’s powerful comms suite was back on line. Orders flowed like water, directing a counter-attack.

  ‘And Bannick,’ said Ganlick. ‘Don’t get sand on my seat again.’

  INTERSTITIAL

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  TF01101100<0110001}}IFChecksum14
  Magos Eurakote Steelmaster celebrates the naming of the

  Hellhammer Ostrakan’s Rebirth.

  Chapter 13

  Kalidar IV, Western Hemisphere Army Group Camp, Macaree’s Tablelands

  3329397.M41

  The camp was a flurry of activity as Bannick jumped off the skirts of Mars Triumphant and onto the sand. He adjusted his rebreather as he walked towards Cortein, who stood next to an angry Hannick.

  Tanks ground round and about. Squads of infantry ran past, heading over to the far side of the Leviathan where the last few orks were holding out.

  Ostrakan’s Rebirth billowed smoke, weapons pointed at useless angles, left track blown off, engine block plating twisted. Already Adeptus Mechanicus enginseer teams were about it, assessing the damage as its blackened, shaken crew were helped off, their dead comrades preceding them in body sacks, stern-faced proctors taking them for their final blessing.

  Cortein stood with Hannick, the pair of them staring at the wrecked Hellhammer. ‘I don’t believe what I am seeing,’ said Hannick. ‘What did they do to my tank?’ his voice was cold and level, mouth twisted into a near-snarl.

  ‘I hear the damage is not as bad as it appears, honoured captain,’ said Cortein. He nodded to Bannick as he came up alongside his clansman.

  Hannick gave Cortein a hard stare. ‘It is not so much the fact of what they did, but that they could do it at all. Where were our sentries? Colonel Gemael, he was in charge of setting camp. Best put the wolves in charge of the flock! Damned fool!’

  ‘The orks used the storm to slip into the camp.’ Cortein’s face betrayed nothing of what he thought.

  ‘That does not mean that we should not have been prepared. Blast it! Thrice blast it! Dogmatic fools leading us, green recruits, damnable weather! Basdack orks! We should have been laagered!’

  ‘That’s unusually strong for you, sir,’ said Cortein drily. ‘I did suggest we not follow the orders, leave the reactors online, and lay up the crew at hand with the vehicles.’

  ‘You’re enjoying this far too much, Cortein,’ said Hannick. They’d fought together for years. This was one occasion when Hannick wished he’d listened to his second. ‘Bah!’ he shouted. ‘Look what they did to my tank! How many times have you seen Ostrakhan’s Rebirth in such a state?’ Hannick gestured at the Hellhammer. Fire suppressant was being foamed onto its blast sites, smothering the remaining flames hiding in its cracked armour. ‘How many times? Never, never has my engine been so shamed!’ He walked forwards a few paces, hands behind his head. ‘This was supposed to be clear territory.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Cortein. Then to Bannick, ‘Do not worry about Hannick. He’s a fine battlefield commander but the finer points of logistics have never come easy to him and he can let his temper run. From time to time the dignity of command escapes him.’ He paused. ‘I am sorry to hear about Marsello. He would have made a fine tanker, given time. You did what you could, and you are still alive.’

  Bannick stood a little straighter, but sai
d nothing.

  ‘It is war,’ said Cortein, quietly, ‘comrades die all the time, so do friends. Don’t worry if you don’t feel it. When there’s a pause, a quiet time, that’s when it’ll hit you, the crew’ll be there for each other when it does.’ He gripped Bannick’s shoulder and stood back.

  ‘Sir,’ said Bannick.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Vorkosigen. He’s getting to be a problem.’

  Cortein started to speak, but Hannick was making his way back to them. ‘Later,’ he said.

  Hannick turned his back on his wounded tank and ran a hand over his face, stopping at his respirator. He found it loose, and that gave him something to concentrate on. He regained his calm as he tightened the straps and eventually noticed Bannick. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘You did a good job here, as well as can be expected. As probably the next honoured lieutenant in my command, judging by the rate at which we are losing men, you’re to accompany us to an emergency staff meeting. We’re all to go, we tankers, so we’ll just wait for Marteken and then we’ll find out what in the Emperor’s name we’re going to do to these green whoresons to pay them back for that.’ He pointed at his tank. ‘I do not take kindly to having my armour so mishandled.’

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ Radden and the other tankers came jogging from the direction of the barracks. Ralt had a minor wound to his right shoulder, and clutched at it. Epperaliant carried a las-carbine ready, and looked about him warily, peering into the night. The rest had their pistols out, all had their respirators and goggles on, but, roused directly from the rec tents, most did not have their coats, their bare arms reddened by the stinging sand. ‘The orks, the basdack greenskins, they attacked the barracks, thirty or so, like ghosts! In and out of the storm…’ Radden panted, out of breath in Kalidar’s oxygen-poor air. ‘We got them though, we got them all. Thanks be to the Throne that those Atraxian boys fight better than they play cards.’

  ‘Mars Triumphant?’ said Ralt carefully.

  ‘Fine,’ said Cortein. ‘Ostrakhan’s Rebirth was damaged, though. We’re going to need Brasslock and the Munitorum crews. Where is he?’

  ‘You don’t know?’ said Radden.

  Epperaliant glanced from Radden to Cortein. ‘There’s something you need to see.’

  The Adeptus Mechanicus quarters had been hit along with other key areas of the camp. It appeared the orks had known what to expect from the arcane weaponry of the tech-adepts, for the orkish dead there were larger and more heavily armed and armoured than the bodies Bannick saw elsewhere, and there were a lot of them. Stripes of fused sand marked the ground where the tech-priests had unleashed their ancient power. Warrior-servitors stood blank-faced, weapons ready, uncaring of their broken comrades.

  Urtho lay still, his muscular body shrunken in death, childlike in its appearance, curled protectively round the blackened rent in his belly. His heavy bolter had been wrenched from its mount and lay in pieces several feet away from his body. His left shoulder had been reduced to a tangle of wires and bent metal from which a nub of pink-white bone protruded. The interface plug cap had been torn from the end of his truncated humerus, revealing raw marrow to the air. Sheltered from the wind in the lee of an Adeptus Mechanicus shelter, sand had yet to crust over his remains.

  A circle of dead orks three-deep lay around the servitor, many bearing the telltale signs of bolter fire: large craters in their bodies, limbs blown off, heads missing. Those nearer-by had their eyes gouged and skulls crushed. The sand all about was sticky with blood.

  ‘Look like he gave a good account of himself,’ said Radden quietly.

  Other servitors stomped about, hauling the bodies back, mindlessly repairing the shelter, heedless of the storm.

  ‘Servitor 00897 “Urtho” slew fourteen of the enemy.’ Magos Rotar stood with them – Epperaliant, Cortein, Radden and Bannick, the rest having been detailed to see to the tank. ‘An above-average score for one of his build model. Unfortunately we believe his bolter malfunctioned. It is a Delta-Ceres pattern, a type known to be unreliable in sandy conditions. Still, his efficacy in close combat was admirable. We will salvage what we can and incorporate his abilities into our next design.’ He had no human voice, he spoke as a machine.

  ‘And Brasslock was taken?’

  The magos bowed from the waist and augmitted a series of binaric howls, each communications string interrupted as he listened for a reply. Probably carries an internal vox, thought Bannick. The magos’s head had been covered, or possibly replaced, it was impossible to tell, by a dark metal dome studded with ocular sensors. One arm bore a large claw, clasping a bloodied, cog-toothed axe, the other was hidden within its crimson sleeve. On his back he wore a heavy servo-harness, the four limbs and the tools at their tips twitching and swaying with a life of their own. This is what they mean when they say the flesh is weak, thought Bannick. There’s not much man left in those robes. The magos made him feel uneasy, and he’d been around tech-priests all his life, he bore their symbol about his neck next to his aquila. But this, this was too much.

  ‘His datapipe ceased to display forty three minutes ago; four minutes, twenty-two seconds after this servitor unit went offline. I answer affirmatively to your query, I believe he was taken.’

  ‘You do not seem concerned,’ said Bannick.

  ‘The flesh is weak. Emotional response is born from the flesh. He will live, or he will die. It matters not. His uploads were frequent, his knowledge will live on, that is the primary concern of all the adepts of Mars, the persistence of knowledge for the greater glory of the Omnissiah. Our lives are nothing but filaments in the shining racks of enlightenment. One component breaks, another can be found.’

  Bannick fought back an urge to grab the metal man and shake him. He had liked Brasslock. Despite his allegiances he had possessed a deep sense of humanity that this creature did not display. Magos Rotar was less of a man than Urtho had been.

  The magos caught his expression, and misinterpreted it. ‘Do not concern yourself, lieutenant. There are enough drone units to see to the proper activation of your war machine.’ He shrieked again, earsplitting audible databursts. Three servitors ceased work abruptly, turned on their heels as one and walked off into the storm. Dawn was breaking, natural light swamping the electric glow of the camp lights. Still the servitors vanished from view after walking only a few metres.

  ‘Come on,’ said Cortein. ‘There’s not much more we can accomplish here.’

  Bannick joined Cortein and Hannick for the army group briefing aboard the Magnificence, taking him for the first time into the command tower at the front of the massive vehicle. The tower extended two extra floors above the vehicle’s broad back, the majority of the lower one occupied by the Chamber of Strategies, the nerve centre of the Guard force on Kalidar. The chamber was open to the bridge of the Leviathan, sat fore and above on the second extra floor of the tower, wide windows affording a broad view of the land below, although these currently had their armoured shutters down against the storm, for Kalidar’s fury was potent enough to scour even armaglass blind. The bridge was the province of the Leviathan commander, his command crew and staff occupying its twenty-six stations, controlling weaponry, motivation and all other functions appertaining to the governance of the vehicle in motion and in battle. Spaduski had been correct in describing it as a ship of the land. Commander UvTerra stood up there now, issuing orders to his own officers, their activity frantic as they attempted to verify the security situation within and without the vast vehicle, and to begin repairs. The orks had let off two bombs inside, demolished one of the three main entryways, and shattered a track with carefully timed explosions as they retreated.

  Rails ran along the circular platform at the back, guarding the four-metre drop down to the floor of the long ellipse of The Chamber of Strategies. The chamber was as crowded with ostentatious decoration as it was with machinery and men. Here the assembled generals and senior staff of t
he Imperial Army Group directed hundreds of thousands of men in their war against the ork. Bridge and chamber together occupied one complex space, their division from each other effected by their differing heights. Curling stairs ran either side of the room, allowing access between the two, for direct communication between the commander in chief and Leviathan captain were vital. The stairs passed twin galleries of servitor-manned stations around the mid height of the room, where once-free men were plugged directly into the vehicle, their minds wiped, modified brains accommodating many of the complicated systems integration tasks the Leviathan’s logicators could not manage alone.

  Ranks of other stations, manned by uniformed staff officers, ran either side of the chamber floor, a massive chart desk occupying the middle. A prognosticator-logistician formed of vat-grown man and machine, spider-limbed and gangling, hung from a nest of cables in the roof, from where it could dart down to any point on either raised bridge or lowered chart room. This cyborg was, to all intents, the mind of Magnificence.

  Electronic comms and tac-suites took up much of the chamber’s capacity, where communications operatives waged their own war with Kalidar’s ceaseless scream, trying to keep lines of informational traffic open between the hive cities, the Leviathan, the fleet and the various subdivisions of the battle group.

  A short corridor at the end of the chamber led to an Astropathic relay, the fortress-vehicle being of sufficient size to host its own psychic communications link. Below the bridge, fire control for the command fortress’s macro cannon was situated, the cannon itself taking up most of the four decks at the front of the Leviathan below the tower.

  At the request of Sanctioned Psyker Logan, part of the screening surrounding the relay had been removed. Astropath Prime Mastraen himself was within the relay chamber, two other astropaths with him, singing out a screen of psychic interference that wove with the lorelei’s natural warp harmonics. They were hoping to drown out the thoughts of the assembled commanders, hiding their plans from whatever was watching. The atmosphere was oppressive with psychic might, the assembled officers experiencing nausea and odd, phantom sensations. They struggled to concentrate on Captain-General Iskhandrian, who stood on a railed pulpit backing onto the Astropathic relay, flanked by two Guards Paramount, their armoured faces a mass of lenses and carapace plating. Clustered around them were five Ministorum priests, quietly muttering prayers, while behind them modified youths waved censers of incense from mechanical limbs. A vat-cherub hovered above, weeping over the scroll of the recent dead.