Baneblade

by Guy Haley

  ‘There,’ said the stranger. ‘I must go to my rest now, Enginseer Adept Brasslock, but I am sad to say you must remain. The Emperor has uses for you yet.’ The ghostly young officer began to fade away. ‘For me, tell my friend Bannick he is right to pray. He always was.’

  Brasslock gasped, and sank out of this world. Lux Imperator was still.

  ‘Vorkosigen!’ there was no reply. Cortein kicked at the tank’s controls. ‘Move damn you. Move!’ he roared. ‘I will not die without purpose!’

  The tank’s engines remained silent.

  A blast jolted him, and he looked around the machine he had lived and fought in for thirty years. It was close to the end now, a millennium of combat drawing to an end. Mars Triumphant was battered, plates buckled, cables and piping hanging loose, the raw air of Kalidar blowing in from where the heavy bolter turret had once sat.

  Cortein took a deep breath, shut his eyes, then opened them and spoke. ‘I am no tech-priest, Mars Triumphant,’ he said, ‘but I ask you to listen to me now. You and I have fought together for three decades. I have served you well, and you have served me in kind. Let us go now together in fire and vengeance, and bring destruction to the enemies of the Emperor.’

  He mouthed a prayer to the Emperor and Omnissiah, reached for the throttle and twisted it.

  Mars Triumphant juddered, the engines engaged. Tracks grinding against buckled skirts, it shuddered towards the crippled Titan.

  Cortein smiled. ‘Thank you.’ He locked the drive levers on full ahead and went aft, ducking stoved-in armour. He had to feel his way by touch, the lights were down, and the air clogged with smoke. Only a few alarms sounded, muted and dim, for the tank, like him, had accepted its fate.

  In the shell locker, Cortein wrapped his belt of frag grenades around a high explosive shell. He sat there in the gloom, shaken from side to side as the tank grumbled across the shattered plaza.

  He thought of his life. Of home. Of the men who had served with him, and who had died, all in the service of the Emperor.

  Now it was over. He had done his best. He prayed to the Emperor that it had been enough.

  There was a lurch as the tank’s front clanged against the Titan. Cortein depressed the firing button on one of the grenades.

  ‘Emperor save us all,’ he said.

  Orks ran at them. Bannick fired his borrowed lasgun and the Atraxian heavy bolter chattered. Mars Triumphant began to move.

  ‘The honoured lieutenant!’ said Epperaliant, snapping off a shot. ‘He’s still there.’

  They watched as the injured tank drove itself into the ork Titan. There was a pause, then a bang. Secondary explosions followed, and Mars Triumphant tore itself to pieces, its munitions store going up violently. The tank half lifted off the ground before it was lost to view in a boiling fireball that engulfed the Titan, the pair of giant vehicles detonating with an ear-splitting roar.

  Orks and men threw themselves flat as detritus rained down all over the square.

  When Bannick looked up again, the psychic shield was gone, shells falling unimpeded from the Imperial artillery right into the shaft of Hive Meradon.

  Almost immediately the air above the hive crackled violently as the atmosphere was superheated to roiling plasma by five simultaneous lance strikes right down the throat of the hive. A series of explosions rumbled from deep in the shaft. Sudden flames rushed into the sky and the ground under Bannick’s building bucked and shook, large chunks of rockcrete pelting down from the semi-ruined structure, crushing men within. As suddenly as it had begun, the lances snapped off, the air rushing in with a thunderous boom. The orks assaulting the building stopped and turned to see, the men within too surprised to shoot them until Bannick shouted orders and lesser bolts of light snapped out to reap their own harvest of death.

  The lances snapped on and off again, sometimes two or three of them at a time striking simultaneously, vaporising strongpoints. The remaining ork heavy walkers, the Titan’s lesser kin, trundled round to face a threat they could not assail, and were torn in two by the stabbing light.

  In between the beams, the air filled with shapes, teardrops of metal screaming down from the sky, retro-thrusters burning fiercely to slow their descent only a hundred metres above the ground. The pods hit hard, petal-doors blowing open with explosive force. Men, as tall as any ork, made inhumanly bulky by the black armour they wore, stepped out in groups from their drop-pods, laying intricate killing fields of fire with their boltguns. The orks assaulting Bannick’s position turned to face this new threat, or fled.

  ‘The Adeptus Astartes! The Black Templars!’ one of the Atraxians in the building said. His voice rising to a shout, ‘The Emperor be praised! The Emperor be praised! The Angels of Death are here!’

  The other men took up the shout. The noise of battle cannons from over the hive’s central pit became louder and louder as the main body of the Imperial Guard drove deep into Orktown. Their secret weapon gone, distracted by Cortein’s attack, assaulted from above, the orks crumbled.

  The war for Kalidar was over.

  Chapter 29

  Kalidar IV, Hive Meradon Surface Town

  3359397.M41

  Bannick and Hannick stood by a shattered wall on the fifth floor of the tallest surviving building in Meradon’s surface town, where a temporary command and medical centre had been established.

  He took in silently the information presented to him by Hannick.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you couldn’t be allowed to know,’ said the honoured captain. ‘Valle himself volunteered, he was the bait. Any mind of that magnitude was bound to attract the attention of the witch, and we had to make it look like we were trying to hide him. We needed the orks looking the wrong way and Mars Triumphant was a credible threat. We had to have them concentrating on you, so the Black Templars could redeploy and the fleet could position itself in order to destroy the ork device. With the witch bending all his efforts to finding where you were, he effectively made himself blind to our true intentions.’

  Bannick nodded.

  ‘We are all asked to make sacrifices, but they can be hard to take,’ said Hannick sympathetically.

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Bannick. ‘I serve.’

  Hannick carried on regardless, carried away by his own emotions: guilt, maybe, or grief. ‘We are engaged in a war of survival. The Imperium is beset on all sides. This is a small battle, and it needed to be finished quickly lest it rapidly escalate into something with far wider consequences. You did well. You played your part. You did your duty, as did your fellows. Mourn them, honour them with your service.

  Bannick looked across the ruined surface town. The central shaft of Hive Meradon was marked by a wide column of grey smoke. The shells of heavy walkers burned amid the wrecks of the hive’s low surface buildings. Recovery crews worked on abandoned armoured vehicles, a pair of ornate Ecclesiarchy charnel trains made their solemn way back and forth, bulldozing wreckage, recovering corpses, burning ork carcasses and delivering the Emperor’s final judgement to those xenos they found alive.

  ‘So the war for Kalidar is over?’ said Bannick.

  ‘Almost so. With the warboss dead, the orks will fall to fighting themselves. It is their way. If we manage it correctly, and do not provoke them into reuniting by allowing a new warlord to rise, we will be able to pick them off band by band. The Black Templars are now fighting their way into the hive to clear it. It is too valuable a source of lorelei to destroy, and it is there that the warlord’s lieutenants are concentrated, many of the bigger orks, the candidates to take over. It is dangerous, but the Black Templars more dangerous still. The orks lack leadership, and as Meradon is their main stronghold, that should very much be that.’ He peered over the drop to the street below, where victorious Guardsmen rested. They smoked and joked in the swaggering way of all men who have fought a hard battle and lived to tell the tale. ‘Nevertheless, there’s
a century or more’s work here for clearance teams, burning up spore infestations so the greenskins do not re-emerge as a secondary feral wave, but at least in that regard Kalidar is on our side.’

  Hannick sighed, arched his back and clasped his hands behind it. He looked over at Bannick.

  ‘The Munitorum believe that the mines here will be operational again within the month. Can you believe that?’

  Bannick said nothing. The wheel of war and oppression grinds on, he thought bitterly.

  ‘As for us, we are finished here,’ said Hannick. ‘The battlegroup is to be split in half, and we are to be redeployed. Rebellion on the plains of Geratomro or somesuch.’

  ‘Where?’ said Bannick.

  Hannick smiled. ‘The Imperium is vast, Lieutenant Bannick. For us, the men who are privileged enough to serve with such machines as Mars Triumphant, the war will never end. We go where we are sent, no matter if we have heard of it or not, and we fight until we fall.’

  ‘But, Mars Triumphant is destroyed. Surely I will be returned to the Paragonian 42nd?’ said Bannick. ‘My secondment is pointless now, there is nothing for me to serve upon and no one to serve with.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Hannick. ‘You are a member of the Paragonian 7th Super-heavy Tank Company, now and forever.’ He paused. ‘Until your own heroic end at least. A hard service, but what service! We are to meet with an Adeptus Mechanicus manufactory fleet on route to our new assignment. We are to be resupplied. A new Baneblade is probably being assembled up there as we speak. My command is to be returned to full strength.’ The young captain seemed happy with that. ‘Brasslock lives, as do Meggen and Epperaliant. There’s nearly half a crew there, including you. Continuity is the key.’

  He didn’t mention the others, thought Bannick. Poor young Marsello, or brave Ganlick, Vorkosigen, Radden, dying in agony in the ruins an hour before medicae teams got to us… So many good men dead. And he thought of the billions more that died day in, day out, all over the Imperium, fighting for the continued existence of the human race. What else could he do but serve?

  He kept these thoughts to himself, and instead said, ‘It is an honour to fight for the Emperor, a double one to serve upon such machines.’

  ‘I’m glad you agree.’

  The two men watched the destruction on the plain below for a space. A wide trail of dust churning in the air marked where three full companies of Atraxian Heavy Infantry in Chimeras made their way to the hive entrance to bolster the Marines within, unarmoured trucks bearing units of Savlar Chem-Dogs trailing in their wake. The wind carried the occasional sound of explosions or crackle of gunfire, the noise of tank engines reduced to insect whines. After the fury of the orbital strike, it was almost peaceful, and Kalidar for once was quiescent, sated by the violence wracking its surface.

  ‘I had a cousin once,’ said Bannick suddenly. ‘A man I loved as a little brother, a boy I read to, and played with, and protected.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Hannick, unsure as to where this was going. ‘And what happened to him?’

  Bannick looked his commanding officer in the eye. ‘I killed him. In a duel. He’d fallen in love with the woman I was required to marry, and did not take too kindly to my and my foster-brother’s lack of respect for her. He challenged me, perhaps hoping he would win and could marry her himself, perhaps because he knew he would lose and could die honourably. I don’t know why, but it was my hand that ended his life, no matter what his reasons. I slew him. I became a great shame to the clan, a kinslayer. For so long I thought I could never forgive myself the dishonour, but I realise now that I fixated upon that to save myself the truth. I killed a boy I should have saved, and shamed a woman I could have loved.’

  ‘You joined the Guard then, as atonement?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Yes I did.’

  ‘There are billions under arms in the Emperor’s armies, Lieutenant Bannick. All have stories, reasons why. Some will be far worse than yours.’

  ‘Do you think, sir, that the Emperor will forgive me, if I serve well?’ Sadness overwhelmed him, not for himself, not any more. Cortein had told him there would be a time to mourn, to think of Radden, and Marsello, and Lazlo, and Tuparillio, all of those who had died or who would die. He realised now that he had traded guilt for sorrow of an altogether greater kind. Tears moistened his face, tracking through the dust on his face. ‘I do not seek honour. Honour killed my cousin, a good young man. How many more of us will die for honour, or pride? Do you think all this is worthwhile? If we are to survive as a species, is all this worth it?’

  Hannick looked embarrassed and toed the floor with his boot, hands behind his back. ‘Those are questions for a priest, not for an officer, but I for one am glad you fight with me.’

  They fell silent.

  ‘I must away,’ said Hannick eventually. ‘I am to meet with our remaining tech-priests to discuss the salvage and redeployment of Lux Imperator.’

  ‘It is repairable?’

  ‘They believe so,’ said Hannick. ‘Mars Triumphant will be recovered also, eventually, but I believe it will be given the final rites of the Machine-God and dismantled. It is past saving. I am sorry for that too.’ He sighed. ‘Well. Ostrakhan’s Rebirth needs telemetry testing, I am told, to see how its repairs held out. I expect they will. She may be needed yet. She has never let me down yet, not once. Reports to write, records to file. If only war were just fighting, eh?’

  ‘Sir,’ agreed Bannick. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Hannick.

  ‘May I ask who I am to serve under? Am I to join the crew of Ostrakhan’s Rebirth?’

  Hannick shook his head. ‘You don’t understand, Honoured Lieutenant Bannick, you really don’t understand it at all.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Congratulations, Bannick.’

  With that, the honoured captain went to tend to his men and machines, a wheel within a wheel within an innumerable number of further wheels, whirring mindlessly on, each one serving the Emperor’s war machine.

  Bannick stayed, his first war done. High above the town, he watched Meradon burn, grief thick in his weary heart.

  Greeneye sat and watched the sands blow curling fingers over the shattered remnants of the human battlewagon and his own felled Titan, Mars Triumphant’s smashed hull intertwined inextricably with it, the surface of Hive Meradon smashed to pieces about them.

  He smiled at the destruction. The orks had lost, but it had been a good fight, and there would be many more.

  The sand, he thought, each grain was like an ork, each streamer of it like a warband. Each storm like a Waaagh! – and the desert was huge.

  There were billions of orks in the galaxy. Greeneye could feel them out there, a wall of fury and violence pressing on his mind, their mass shunting aside the other gods, blotting out the psychic howl of the devourer, dimming the light of the human Emperor’s beacon, the psychic presences of other species candles to the great bonfire of orkish might.

  Orks were meant to rule the galaxy, to burn it up and burn it up again, an eternity of warfare that made better and better orks that would one day bring the universe to its knees!

  Yes, there would be better fights.

  Greeneye was not like other orks. When he looked into the sand curling over the blackened metal, this is what he saw. He did not trouble himself over the next meal, or the next fight, or the impulsive need for cruel amusements at the cost of the weak.

  Greeneye had vision.

  He could hear the sound of men and their machines close by. They had retaken their city, killed and scattered Greeneye’s tribe and were returning it to the dull grey order of humanity. Soon they would come here and cut up the machines, take their parts away, but not yet.

  Greeneye stood. In his powerful mind he could already hear the stirrings of sporelings out in the sands, a new generation of orks to fight for him, and him alone, free now from
Gratzdakka, hacked down by the black-armoured warriors.

  Hidden from human sight by flickering warp fields generated by his insane mind, Greeneye strode off into the desert, copper staff gleaming in the sunlight. If they knew he lived, the humans would hunt him, they would stop at nothing to kill him, but he was Greeneye, the most powerful weirdboy ever! They would have to find him first, and when they did, he would kill them.

  He was free, and he would make the galaxy shake at the sound of his name.

  Epilogue

  Adeptus Mechanicus Forge Ship

  ‘Patternmaster’,

  Segmentum Pacificus Battlegroup 9876 redeployment fleet

  3480397.M41

  The manufactory ship pulsed and shook as a thousand thousand triphammers rang out the birth of war’s child, the bringer of ruin, the mightiest battle tank in the galaxy: Baneblade, fifteen metres long, as tall as three men, a moving fortress, hammer of the God-Emperor, bearer of firepower to equal a squadron of lesser tanks.

  A choir of tech-adepts and servitors sang the praise of the machine as the final blessings and unguents were applied to the components of the vehicle. Honoured Lieutenant Colaron Artem Lo Bannick watched as Enginseer Brasslock, body now more machine than man, worked with his red-robed fellows to conclude the naming ceremony of the mighty tank.

  Behind it hung rack upon rack of part-assembled war machines, awaiting final construction on the long shop floor of the forge ship, a space-borne manufactory cathedral, dedicated to the works of the Omnissiah.

  Bannick watched with mixed emotions as the Magos Activator ran through the final checks. There would be no field tests for this vehicle. The proving of its systems would come in battle, and it would fail or protect him according to the whim of the Omnissiah and Emperor.

  Bannick muttered his own prayers under his breath.

  The ceremony went on for hours, the choir singing loudly, the magi making their arcane pronouncements in ancient Gothic and binaric, their meaning lost to the Paragonian.