Baneblade Read online

Asteroid belt ‘The Girdle’; Orbital Distance 9 AU. Population 928,331.

  Asteroid belt ‘Kalidar’s Noose’; Orbital Distance 8.7 AU, angle 76 degrees from plane of the ecliptic. Possible stellar collision remnant. Population 2,000,023.

  Req. world: Kalidar IV

  Orbital Distance 4.78 AU – 8.6 AU

  Temp. –37 to 87 degrees C

  0.7 G

  0.8 Terramass

  [Further details ref: Kalidar IV Physical properties 1227/33oIV]

  Planetary Grade: Industrial world

  DESIGNATED SYSTEM CAPITAL

  DESIGNATED SUBSECTOR CAPITAL

  Aestimare: Exactus secundus (nominal),

  optimare tertio prime

  Geography: Grade CLXXVI desert world [subclasses: minor hive, quinternary echelon death world

  (class IV)]

  Imperial Planetary Commander:

  Lozallio Cann [deceased]

  Status: War

  Thought for the day: The Emperor protects only the faithful.

  Chapter 1

  Kalidar IV, Kostoval Flats,

  3265397.M41

  Mars Triumphant sat upon a darkened plain, engines quiet, drawn up in readiness for the coming battle. For nearly two years it had lain in its cradle within the depths of a transport barge; tomorrow it would assail the orks of Kalidar.

  The tank rocked in time with the barrage; shells flung by artillery batteries ten kilometres behind the tank’s position, falling onto the ork army still kilometres ahead. Honoured Lieutenant Cortein felt rather than heard the distant thunder through the Baneblade’s armour as a steady metronome of destruction. Fine veils of Kalidar’s ever-present dust sifted down from the tank’s ceiling with every explosion.

  Three days on Kalidar, and already Mars Triumphant was being asked to fight.

  Cortein was unconcerned by the speed of their deployment, he understood this as his duty. If the tank had been asked, and could have replied, Cortein was sure it would hold similar sentiments. But the new regiments, raised on Cortein’s homeworld of Paragon, trained as they made their slow, dangerous way through the warp to Kalidar… He was not so sure he could say the same of them. Instinct told him that they needed more time, that this rush to smash the ork force besieging the mine complex of Urta was unwise.

  There was little he could do about that. Tomorrow, the 7th Paragonian Super-heavy Tank Company would form the lynchpin of one of two large arrow-headed tank formations, the remainder of them made up of Leman Russ squadrons and mechanised infantry, the two formations part of a large action involving men from three worlds. A hundred tanks, four regiments of infantry, a surprise for the orks besieging Urta at the heart of the lorelei-rich Kostoval Flats.

  That was the idea. Cortein was suspicious of ideas like this. Perhaps the thick armour of Mars Triumphant had made him cautious, inclined to sit things out, he thought, behind the fortress-like walls of the Baneblade. Maybe, but as they said at home, one does not weather a storm by casting oneself into the sea.

  Cortein stood before Mars Triumphant’s dimly lit wall of honour, near the reactor, the plant at the heart of the baneblade. Names on brass plaques filled the wall almost entirely, a proud list ending with his own. The green and red glows emitted by Mars Triumphant’s dim lights struck strange reflections from the metal, alternately revealing and obscuring the heroisms of the tank’s long past.

  The first plaque was worn smooth by time to leave but traces of archaic battle honours and the curve of what might have been an S or a G. Perhaps, thought Cortein, other commanders of Mars Triumphant had stood here like he did before every engagement, their fingers tracing out the names of those who had come before them. How many times had he stood there? He did not know, the battles and campaigns of thirty years blurring into one endless war, a lifetime of conflict. Such was the sacrifice the Emperor had demanded of him. It was a sacrifice Cortein bore gladly. He’d give his life over again, and again a score of times, having seen what he had seen. Humanity was besieged as surely as the orks out there in the desert besieged the lorelei mine complex. If it were not for the sacrifice of men like him…

  But there were men like him, many men, the passing of some remembered on this wall, and so the Imperium would stand. He had faith in the Emperor and in his servants.

  Still he felt fear at his own end, its edge dull and worn by experience and hard-won courage; present nevertheless.

  He heard a faint scuff behind him and glanced back. Crimson robes moved in the shadows, deeper shadows within the hood.

  ‘Enginseer Adept Brasslock,’ Cortein said. He returned his attention to the wall.

  ‘Honoured Lieutenant Cortein,’ said the other. He whispered as a priest does in a cathedral, his low voice hard to make out over the hiss of artificial lungs.

  ‘I saw your bodyguard outside and assumed you were within. But I did not hear you approach. In this machine you are as quiet as a monk in a cloister.’

  The enginseer gave forth the mechanical cough that passed for his laugh. ‘And that I am, in here, within Mars Triumphant. Any of the adepts of Mars are but supplicants before such a machine. You hold your vigil?’

  Cortein nodded distractedly. ‘As always. It calms me.’

  ‘After all these years, you need calming?’ Brasslock’s voice held the smile his face could no longer show. ‘You and I are old men, Cortein. Surely the battle fear has left you now?’

  ‘Never,’ said Cortein. ‘If it ever does, then I shall be dead. No man can ever conquer the fear of battle, and it is not wise to try. Standing here helps hold it at bay, turn it outwards, use it.’

  ‘To know the Machine-God and the Emperor watch over you, that is what calms you, and it should,’ said the other, certain in his pronouncement. ‘Many of your predecessors, the ones that I have known, have felt the same.’

  ‘No, it is not that.’ Cortein shook his head, checked himself, not wishing this one night to offend the seer, whose faith was somewhat stronger and deeper than his own. ‘Not entirely.’ He turned to the enginseer.

  Brasslock stood easily within the narrow confines of the main gangway leading from the gunnery deck. Cortein had no idea how old he was. Despite his stealth he suspected Brasslock was ancient, as the followers of the Omnissiah often were. His flesh hand, the left, was wizened as centuried leather, blotched with spots and scars. It was impossible to tell what colour the man’s skin had originally been. Brasslock rested this hand on the open bulkhead door, idly stroking plasteel as a mother might soothe her child. Metal glinted in the hood where his mouth should be. A thin, articulated tendril snuck out from under his robes from time to time, tasted the air and wicked back within. His right arm ended in a heavy metal stump, a broad socket ready to accept tools, for the moment empty. To a normal man’s eyes he was a grotesque, but Cortein had long ceased to find Enginseer Brasslock disturbing.

  ‘What then do you find here in the heart of Mars Triumphant?’ said the enginseer.

  ‘Watching the march of the names through time makes me… confident. Near a thousand years of battle, and this machine still fights. So many battles, tomorrow is merely one more. That is why it calms me.’

  ‘The spirit of Mars Triumphant is strong,’ agreed the enginseer. They both fell silent, the close silence of the tank disturbed by the distant bombardment and the hiss-whirr of Brasslock’s mechanical lungs, the two sounding in time, a pair of impacts for every breath.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Cortein eventually. ‘I wonder who he was.’ He nodded at the first plaque, the brass shiny where it had been rubbed away, the edges deepened to a lustre richer than gold. Verdigris scaled the base of the rivets. ‘Who was this first man to stand here? Did he come to look at his own name affixed to this wall as I do now and wonder at those who would follow?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Brasslock. ‘Men have forgotten as this metal has forgotten.’ He pointed wi
th a skeletal finger. ‘But the Machine-God does not forget. The flesh is weak, the Omnissiah is not. He knows all.’

  Cortein smiled tiredly. ‘Perhaps you can ask him for me some time, I would like to know.’

  Brasslock took Cortein’s blasphemy with good grace. ‘Alas it is not my place to do so, Honoured Lieutenant Cortein, but the data is kept by crystal, pen and chisel in Mars’s archives. You can be assured that the Omnissiah remembers all the men who serve Him, as He will remember you.’

  ‘That is not as comforting as you might think it sounds.’

  ‘I did not mean it for comfort, honoured lieutenant.’

  From deep within Mars Triumphant some subsystem or other grumbled, a pulsing thrum of interrupted energy flow, three beats in contretemps to the barrage outside.

  ‘Ah, see? She agrees.’

  ‘Mars Triumphant is inactive.’

  ‘They dream when they sleep, honoured lieutenant, as men do. Listen!’

  The artificial thunder had ceased. The ground shuddered hard, once, as if in pain. The charms Brasslock and generations of enginseers before him had affixed to the Wall of Honour jangled in reply, a final shower of dust pattered onto the pitted floor of the tank, then the world became still.

  ‘The barrage, it is done.’ The enginseer’s shadowy face looked up within his hood, rheumy eyes glinting. ‘I must rouse the spirit of Mars Triumphant; the other machines of the company must also be propitiated,’ said the enginseer. ‘I have much work to do to ensure optimum functionality of all systems for the morrow.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The enginseer inclined his head in a bow and departed, vanishing into the gloom to the aft of the tank.

  Cortein reached out to the plaques on the wall and reverently touched the oldest as was his habit, wearing it away atoms at a time, an erosion born of respect. He put on his cap, lifted the mask of his rebreather from the case hanging on his front, a necessary evil. He didn’t want to end his career coughing up his own lungs thanks to the dust. He buckled the foul thing about his face and went up onto the command deck, up again into the turret, and then out into the freezing desert dawn.

  Chapter 2

  Kalidar IV, Kostoval Flats

  3267397.M41

  Morning. Battle had begun. The Imperial advance, entirely mechanised, swept across the plains towards the ork siege lines. Around the Leman Russ and the Chimeras, the Baneblades and the Salamanders and the other armoured vehicles of the assault, a storm of shocking ferocity raged, masking their approach, but playing havoc with communications.

  ‘Sta… ation. Comm… s … itical. Storm is worsenin…’ Lieutenant Colaron Artem Lo Bannick’s ears rang with Kalidar’s electrostatic roar, the directions keeping the 3rd Company of the 42nd Paragon Tank Regiment’s echelon true garbled beyond comprehension. In conditions like this, even with the Leman Russ battle tanks so close to one another, short-range voxcasters barely worked, while the comm suite’s logic engine had become a lump of inert brass and plastics that did nothing but take up space. Kalidar appreciated no other voice than her own. ‘Sig… a… 317… Keep… ormation. Katail, you… squadron… andering to the left.’ The vox crackled, a stream of gibberish that might once have been an order rushing out.

  ‘Say again, command, say again!’ Bannick’s finger clicked off the speaking horn. Nothing but screeching came in reply. ‘Damn storm’s getting worse.’ Bannick hunched over the command suite of his Leman Russ Indomitable Fury and checked his squadron’s positioning against the overall plan. All bar the simplest instruments showed some kind of effect from the planet’s chaotic magnetosphere, but as far as he could tell they were still in formation. The glass bulbs positioned round the circumference of the Leman Russ’s vision block were sandblasted opaque by the planet’s accursed dust, revealing only an undifferentiated yellowish blur that could have been sky or ground. The tank’s augurs were not much better, screens rippling with actinic ghosts. Thankfully the periscope had been fitted with a cover, or they’d stay blind. He dared not open that yet; he’d learned from veterans of the campaign that supplies could be months in coming. To lose the periscope would be a disaster.

  Indomitable Fury bucked and gyred underneath him. Gunner Patinallo glanced up at Bannick from the seat below and to the right of his own, the massive breech block of the battle cannon like a threat between them.

  ‘Squadron Three! Keep your tanks in line!’ Bannick shouted into the speaking horn in an effort make himself heard over the roar of the engine. ‘I don’t want my name read out over the vox like that idiot Katail! Keep us in formation!’ Small augur screens showed him his crew: five men. His driver Kurlick, grim-faced and squinting as he wrestled the tank over the soft sand of Kalidar, as blind to what lay ahead as Bannick; Patinallo and the loader Brevant, viewed from an augur-eye at the front of the tank; Arlesen and Tovan, his sponson gunners, one so stoic as to appear petrified, the other mumbling prayers and repeatedly wiping sweat from his hands.

  He’d been angered when his squadron had not been given the duty of going in first at the head of their echelon; that honour had gone to Verlannick. His Leman Russ, Wilful Destruction, had been fitted with three heavy bolters in its sponsons and hull mount. These would be firing until they glowed red as the tank hit the enemy, the rest of his squadron on his flanks, covering his charge with their battle cannons. All the glory a man could wish for. He envied Verlannick that, even though the survival of the tank and crew was rated at less than fifteen per cent. It should have been him. The short odds of the point position were no less than he deserved.

  He shook himself. Envy was not a virtue worthy of the Paragonian clan nobility.

  Bannick blew out his cheeks, sweat trickling into his flesh eye, stinging it. His face itched with grime and salt. He wiped his face. The external screens cleared a little. The pictures remained grainy and jagged with interference patterns, but at least he could see.

  ‘A lull in the storm, Emperor be praised.’ Unconsciously he reached up his hand and pressed at the twin medallions under his shirt, the aquila and the cog, side by side, as worn by all the manufacturing aristocracy of Paragon.

  The left screen showed a vast expanse of desert, billows of dust from the tanks in front whirling across it. The view to the front and the right was less clear, plumes of the stuff kicked high by the preceding Leman Russ’s treads, one of the two in his squadron besides his own Indomitable Fury. The third was practically invisible, further out still, its shape lost in the storm. The whole company laboured on a dune as high as a mountain, all ten battle tanks struggling for purchase as they fishtailed their way up to the summit.

  The tanks were in a formation designated as Solon’s Axe, a Tactica Imperium-standard attack mode with trailing edges and a broad, flat front. The 3rd Company of the 42nd Paragonian Armoured Regiment’s job was to cover the left. Out on their right, hundreds of metres away, ran the 2nd Company, tasked with the protection of that flank. The fire arcs were seriously restricted by the formation but that was not important, they were forming a moving wall, a mobile fortress, protecting and supporting the machines in the middle of the two companies.

  In between the Leman Russ lumbered the 7th Paragonian Super-heavy Tank Company, four mechanical monsters of prodigious size and power. Their names leapt into Bannick’s mind: the Baneblade Artemen Ultrus, the Hellhammer Ostrakan’s Rebirth, the Shadowsword Lux Imperator, and the Baneblade Mars Triumphant. These were true fists of the Emperor.

  Somewhere behind the tank axe rode thirty squads of the 63rd Paragonian Mechanised and 14th Savlar Light Infantry, crammed into Chimera armoured carriers, waiting to leap out and exploit the gap the tanks were to create. They completed the Beta group.

  Formation Alpha was of similar composition and rode a few kilometres away, both formations converging on the weakest spot on the ork siege line. The orks had dug themselves in, fighting running battles under and over the ground f
or more than two months with the lorelei miners and the troops detailed to support them. This attack was intended to break that siege.

  The Leman Russ echelons at the sides of the axes would hit first, the super-heavy tanks – slower and more ponderous than the smaller battle tanks – would then advance and destroy the orks and their fortifications in between the Leman Russ echelons across a front perhaps a kilometre wide. Once the orks’ lines of trenches had been penetrated by the tank formations, other elements of the Imperial Guard were to move up and exploit the hole, while heavy bombardment pinned down the flanks of the greenskin horde, preventing reinforcements. Caught between the tanks and mechanised infantry in the rear, the miners and the troops stationed in the mine to their front and a rain of high-explosive fire to either side, the orks would be annihilated.

  Bannick desired to serve the Emperor in battle; if he were to die, so be it. But there were a thousand pointless ways to end one’s days here on Kalidar before you came within sight of the foe – swiftdust, radiation, temperature fluctuations and the ever-present danger of dustlung from the razor-sharp sand of the place. Right now the biggest threat was swiftdust – if a tank went into a patch of that it wasn’t going to come out again. This sector of the front had been declared free of swiftdust by Munitorum Ordinators but that meant nothing; Kalidar was treacherous, the dust moved quickly.

  ‘The Emperor protects the bold,’ he muttered. ‘Just don’t let me die in some damned sinkhole. That’s all I ask. If I am to die, let my death count.’

  He was jounced out of his thoughts as the engine pitch shifted and the tank heeled to the right and leaned back. His back pressed uncomfortably into the equipment round his chair as Indomitable Fury hung at a sixty-degree angle for an impossibly long second and he was forced to grasp at his station to steady himself. Through the scoured glass, the colour of the world outside became lighter as the tank reared up into the sky.

  ‘We’re going over!’ shouted Kurlick. ‘We’re going over!’