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Tallarn: Ironclad - Extract

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ONE

Waking
Arrival
Sight

‘War Anvil, confirm unit status.’ The voice from the vox filled Kord’s ears.

‘Closing on waypoint,’ he replied, keeping his eyes on the auspex screen. ‘No enemy sighted.’

‘Attack pattern one, confirmed.’

‘Confirmed,’ Kord’s voice was low, steady. ‘We are at the kill edge.’

‘Good fortune, War Anvil.’

He did not reply to the sign-off. The rattle of his machine filled the silence which followed.

It was dark inside the hull. His breath had fogged the eyepieces of his enviro-suit. Six straight hours skinned inside the suit, breathing from tanks of air, unable to move more than a few inches; it was all so familiar that he had trouble thinking of how else war could be fought.

His machine was an old Malcador assault tank, its class named for one of the Emperor’s closest courtiers. No doubt the man was a fine example of everything that was best about people who never had to see those who stood in the excrement beneath them. The tank was a brute though, with a name to match. She was called War Anvil, and was an ugly slab of tracks, armour and jutting gun barrels. A battle cannon stuck out from a turret high on her back, and a wide-mouthed demolisher cannon from a mount on her forward hull. Two lascannons nested in sponsons on the tank’s flanks. A crew of six worked inside its hull. The primary gunner and crew squeezed into a space just in front of the commander’s nest, so close that Kord could tap each of them on the shoulder without reaching. The machine’s drive and ammunition took up most of its bulk, with the sponson gunners isolated behind crawl hatches on either side of a cramped central compartment. Both the forward gunner and driver were wedged down behind the front armour plates with just room enough for them not to be killed by the demolisher’s recoil.

It was a reliable, but ill-designed creature. The battle cannon had a limited forward traverse arc, and the sponsons could not cover the machine’s rear arc. Get behind it, and War Anvil’s armour counted for nothing. There had been a joke amongst the Jurnian officer corps that the Malcador hull was an ‘assault tank’ because no one could think of another use for a machine whose guns could only fire forwards. That did not matter to Kord. War Anvil had gotten him out of the fall of the Sapphire City, and made five kills in the process. Since then it had never failed, for all its age and flaws. If he had a home then War Anvil’s cramped and corroding insides was it.

And now we are going back to what remains of the city we fled, he thought. He blinked away a bead of sweat running into his eye, and rechecked the unit markers on the screen. All of his machines were there, rolling forward in a line half a kilometre wide. Executioners, Vanquishers, and all the other mismatched assortment that was now his regiment: the leavings, the dregs, the survivors. In truth it was barely company strength, but he was still a Colonel Commander, and rank meant that certain formalities followed, even out here, on the dead edge of existence.

‘This is not going to work,’ Sacha’s voice lilted over the internal vox. He ignored it, just like he had ignored the goodwill sign-off from command. There was, quite frankly, no point in replying to either. He thumbed the unit vox, and winced as it shrieked in his ears.

‘All units, this is War Anvil. We are in the attack path, estimate time to outer defence units two minutes.’

The acknowledgements came. Kord counted them off as he heard each call sign. Even if a machine was still moving, and showing an identification signal, that did not mean its crew were alive. Sometimes the seals went on a tank’s hatches, and the virus-laden air would eat through the crew’s air feeds without them noticing. Tanks had rolled on for kilometres with their crew dead inside them, their drivers’ dead hands still pressing the drive levers.

‘How much have we got out here?’ It was Sacha again. She was resting her head on the breech of the battle cannon. He did not look at her. The screen in front of him was more important than her need to talk her nerves out. ‘I mean,’ she carried on, ‘how many machines are in just this wave? Five hundred? A thousand? Throne, that’s just us tank riders. I heard the Titans are walking for this. That’s enough rolling iron to shake the ground all the way back to the stars.’ She laughed nervously. ‘They just expect the Iron Warriors not to have spotted it?’

Kord was watching the distance to their waypoint count down across the auspex screen. He keyed the external vox.

‘All units–’

‘I mean, is this plan just based on us being dumb, or them being dumber?’

‘Light weapons and fire free. Anything in front of us is a target. Repeat, light weapons, fire free.’

Sacha sat up and rolled her shoulders and neck, the heavy folds of her enviro-suit squeaking as they rubbed together.

‘And if they are not dumb–’

‘Sacha,’ he said, leaning in to press his eyes against the forward sight.

‘Yeah?’

‘Load the gun, and then be quiet.’

A second later he felt the thump as the cannon’s breech closed on a shell. Explosive, and incendiary; he did not need to check that Sacha had remembered the mission briefing. Her inability to shut up had nothing to do with her memory, or how she handled the main cannon.

‘Fog’s not thinned.’ It was Saul. Kord could almost hear the forward gunner trying to force down his fear and fatigue. Kord squinted into the swirling green light of his own gunsight, and keyed the regimental vox.

‘Razor, this is War Anvil, what can you see?’

‘Nothing, looks clear,’ Origo’s voice came back straight away, clipped and sharp, ‘but they are there. I know.’

Kord nodded. Origo’s scout squadron was half a kilometre in front of them, spread out and watching for the enemy.

‘Never a good start,’ muttered Sacha.

‘Passing waypoint one,’ called Mori from the driver’s nest. Kord took a slow breath, counted long seconds as he breathed it out again. Just in front of him Zade leaned into the battle cannon’s sight, and flicked the guard off the firing trigger.

Kord keyed the regimental-wide vox.

‘Okay, let’s light this up. All units on my word.’ He was sighting into the murk which boiled across the forward sight. ‘The word is Vengeance.’ He pulled the trigger, and the dark, shrouded world became a sheet of light.

The air of Isstvan V was fire. Hrend could not see the horizon. A firestorm rolled above and around Hrend. The shrill of his armour’s integrity and heat alarms had ceased several minutes before. He could feel coldness creeping across his flesh. He was breathing fumes and smoke but he could not smell them. He felt like shivering despite the flames all around. He knew what that meant. The air in his lungs, in his nose, in his throat, was burning him from the inside. The seals around his waist and knees had melted, and the fire was seeping in. He was cooking inside his armour. He was dying.

‘Iron within…’ he rasped, feeling blisters form on his lips and tongue.

He kept wading forward, armour hissing and shrieking as it fought against damage. The ground sucked at his legs as he forced himself towards the cover of the wreck of a… He was not sure what it had been, a Rhino perhaps, but his helmet visor had dimmed to near blackness, and the wreck was a twisted shell. The vox scratched in his ear, but he knew better than to respond. It was just a ghost of distortion, the inferno laughing at him for his defiance. He was alone out here, in the swamp made by the burning blood of his brothers and their war machines.

‘Iron without…’

He had failed. That much was clear. Surrounded, betrayed and outnumbered, the Raven Guard and Salamanders were doomed. But they still had teeth to bite back with. He should have anticipated how they would respond. He should have deployed differently. He should… He should have died when the first rocket salvoes hit. That was the reward he had earned by his weakness, and if he ended now it would only be because he had proved weak again.

He reached the wreck. The edges of its shattered hull were glowing like metal pulled from a forge.

‘Iron…’ he heaved a burning breath. His vision blurred as the moisture cooked in his eyeballs. ‘Iron…’ He slid to the floor, and the fire closed over him… burning…

‘Master.’ The word sent a buzz of pain through him, and the dream of Isstvan melted into waking. For a second he felt as if he were drowning, as if warm, black water were all around him. Then his nerves reconnected him to the Dreadnought, and he was ironclad again. The remains of his body flickered with a memory of pain. For a second the weak core of his being wanted to scream.

‘Master,’ the voice came again.

Waking was worse than dying.

Silence surrounded him. When he had been alive, before he had been reborn as a Dreadnought, he had never noticed the soft clamour that life made: the beat of hearts and blood, the rise and fall of breath, the almost imperceptible noises of muscle and bone moving together. When he woke now it was to blank nothingness.

Slowly he activated the Dreadnought’s senses. Sound came first. The wind whistled around him. Then he became aware of his limbs, of the pistons and servos waiting for his will, of the weapons which were part of him. Last he activated the sensor pod set into the sarcophagus like a helm in a suit of armour. He looked out through his machine’s eyes. Through his eyes.

Fog swirled in the green murk before him. Rangefinders, infra-sensors and auspex arrays began to overlay his sight. He could see the enemy now. Distant pinpricks of heat growing brighter as they came closer.

‘Master, do you hear?’ The voice broke through the moan of the wind.

‘I hear,’ he said, feeling the machine take the words from the flayed nerves of his throat and cast them across the vox.

‘The enemy are advancing,’ said the voice. Jarvak, he thought, watching the input from his machine senses scroll across his view in columns of data. All of the war machines of his command were in position, scattered through the ruins around him. They had been waiting for twenty hours, three minutes, and forty-five seconds precisely. Jarvak had woken him at the correct time.

Hrend watched the enemy advance. The pattern of their deployment was not ideal, and their formation lacked precision. They had also yet to detect Hrend or any of his force. Part of him wondered why they were attacking in this way. It was hopeless. The Sightless Warren would not fall. It was born of iron, and guarded by iron, and would never fail.

‘Stand ready,’ he said.

‘By your will,’ came the reply from Jarvak.

Hrend saw the data-stream change as the status of the three Predators, and two Venators changed to active. Their systems were still half dormant, their heat and electronic signatures small enough that they should be invisible to auspexes. At least that was the intention. That left his two ironclad brothers.

‘Orun? Gortun?’ he spoke their names. No reply came for a second.

‘I wake, master.’ Orun’s voice was flat and metallic. It was the mirror of Hrend’s own voice.

Gortun’s answer was a growl of static.

Hrend watched and waited until the enemy units were on the edge of the kill zone created by his group’s guns.

‘Iron,’ he said, and then paused. A squall of dull blackness pulled at him, and somewhere he felt the cartilage of his charred throat try and form the next word. ‘Within.’

‘Iron without,’ came the reply from his brothers.

The gunship launched as its parent strike ship skimmed close to Tallarn. In the craft’s cockpit Argonis watched as warning lights washed his view of Tallarn’s orbit.

The planet looked like a ball of rancid yellow fat, shot through with smudges of smoke. Wreckage caged its orbits, glittering in long streams and banks of twisted metal. The fires of a void battle glittered above the planet’s northern polar region. It looked like a big fight to Argonis’s eyes. He corrected his course to ensure that they would come nowhere near the battle-sphere, locked onto his primary target, and pushed the engines to maximum thrust. Locked into the pilot rig, encased in power armour, he felt the hammer blow of full burn as a growing pressure.

‘Advise-warn you, current engine burn and trajectory will result in damage,’ Sota-Nul’s voice scratched in his ears. He did not reply. He had not asked her to link into the gunship, but it was inevitable that she would. For a human supposedly divested of emotion in favour of pure logic she was remarkably predictable. ‘Probability of engine output degradation currently at eighty-five point two-one,’ she added after a moment. ‘Estimated.’

He did not reply. There was no point.

His target was coming up fast. The outer picket ships of the Iron Blood’s first defence envelop were growing from distant dots to slabs of metal picked out in starlight. He threw the gunship into an irregular spiral, and watched two warning runes flick from amber to red in his helmet display.

‘Combat display active,’ he said, and space all around him became a network of blue, red and green arcs of potential targets. They disregarded warships of course; he doubted if even the smallest of them would notice if he fired at them.

‘Auspexes and multiple targeting arrays have locked onto us.’

‘Transmit the identification signal,’ he said.

‘Compliance,’ droned the tech-witch. ‘Suggest we cut speed, alter course to a steady trajectory, and disable weapons.’

‘No,’ he said, without pause. ‘Transmit the signal, and then see if they still think the best course of action is to blow us out of the void.’

The outer picket ships were now vast cliffs blocking out the sight of Tallarn and the light of its star. Beyond them the inner shell of ships waited, and within their sphere the vast, notched chisel outline of the Iron Blood.

He yanked the gunship into a jagged skid and flicked into a spiral, as the tones of target locks grew in his ears.

He waited, feeling the familiar tug of G-force at his flesh inside his armour. He had missed this, had missed the feeling of mingled control and danger singing in his senses. It made him feel alive again, and let him forget how close he had come to death at the hands of his lord. There was another reason to dance through the Iron Warriors gun sensors. Skimming in, weapons live, targeters active, daring them to fire and then cutting them dead: it was a message, a statement of intent. Do not confuse might with power, it said.

Still, he would not like to have to do this in reality.

‘The Fourth Legion vessels have dropped their target lock,’ said Sota-Nul.

‘Good.’

‘They are hailing us.’

‘Give me the vox.’

‘Compliance.’

Static popped in his ears, rose in pitch and then faded.

‘The warships and warriors of the Fourth Legion welcome you, honoured emissary.’ The voice paused. Argonis thought he recognised it, the sour tone, the sharp edges used to command but not to courtesy. Forrix, of course. Not the Lord of Iron, not yet, not until they were sure why Argonis was here.

‘From whom do you come?’ asked Forrix’s voice carefully.

Behind the black faceplate of his helm, Argonis smiled without pleasure.

‘I come from the Warmaster,’ he replied.

Iaeo opened all her eyes, and began to hunt. The info-verse surrounded her. Images, pict-feeds and abstract data extended off into a holo-hazed distance. Ninety-eight out of her ninety-nine data-taps were still in place, the lost one an unfortunate consequence of the Iron Warriors strike against the signal cable node south of the ruins of the Crescent City. That was not optimal, but not as bad as it might have been.

She looked through her scattered swarm of net-flies, and her vision spilt into facets. She had loosed the tiny creatures into the shelter complex sixteen hours before, when she began to think that they might have found her. The chromed insects sat in key positions throughout the shelter. They watched without ceasing, parsing every face they saw and hearing every voice.

The shelter complex was vast. Like all the shelters buried across Tallarn, it had been intended to host the mustering of armies for conquering the star systems. Now those same shelters housed the survivors of a viral bombardment which had killed all life on the surface. In the rockcrete-lined tunnels a lucky few had survived, and then struck back at the destroyers of their world. It was a battle fought in hell for revenge.

The shelter Iaeo watched was one of the largest in loyalist hands, and it lay below the ruins of a city. She had been here since the fall of the Sapphire City, and the arrival of the first loyalist reinforcements to come to Tallarn. Before that she had been on Tallarn for a year, moving through the world above, ghosting through data looms, watching with her swarm eyes, drawing a web to snare her target. Her target had been a cell of Alpha Legion operatives, who were working through worlds on the margins of the greater war. The cell specialised in subverting, corrupting, sabotaging worlds of potential, but not current, strategic importance. They were not a target she had been given, but one she had identified and selected herself. That concept still made her uncomfortable.

Assassins of the Vanus Temple usually operated remotely, manipulating events through altering data to bring about the termination of a target. The noble killed by a jealous lover, after the discovery of rather explicit pict images; the cartel bosses eliminated by their business partners, when they discovered evidence of theft; the city wiped out by a plague because the shipment of vaccine, which would have saved it, never arrived – all these were the murder trade of the Vanus Temple, and, for most, the executioner did not have to see their target, or set foot on the killing ground. In fact most of Iaeo’s clade siblings did not take to the field. Direct methods were the preserve of the other Temples, but occasionally one of the Vanus Temple was designated as an Unbound Infocyte, and became an exception to the rule. It was not a condition set lightly.

An Unbound Infocyte both designated and executed their targets. Once they had eliminated one target they selected another, and so on, extrapolating from termination to termination, until their Unbound Condition was withdrawn. Death at the hand of a Vanus was normally ordained and delivered with the remoteness of an angel enacting the will of a deity. To be Unbound was to be both the eyes that saw and the hand that cut.

Iaeo had been placed under an Unbound Condition two years before, and had been killing ever since. Sometimes she thought of her current state as akin to the virus which had killed Tallarn: multiplying and changing, creating death without end. She understood why it was necessary in a war like this, but she did not like it. It lacked definition.

As the shelter filled her senses, she let it linger for a second at the edge of consciousness. No, there was nothing unusual, and she saw no change in the macro patterns of data. She focused on the shelter’s command room. It looked crowded. From her viewpoint she could see the strain on the faces, the lines of tension turned to gullies of shadow in the low light. No one was talking. She heard the rustle of fabric as someone shifted their weight. The comms officers, hunched over signal equipment, were glass-eyed with fatigue. She could almost taste the brittleness in the room. It would be five more minutes before reports from the attack on the Sightless Warren would come in, and another hour before the commanders could begin to gauge victory or defeat.

It would be defeat, though. Iaeo knew that already. The Iron Warriors knew the attack was coming. They had probably known before most of the loyalist forces now rumbling towards their attack positions. It still had to play out, but Iaeo did not doubt her projection.

She flicked between other viewpoints: the muster chambers, empty apart from a few machines too damaged to be on the surface, the billet chambers where a few slept under worn blankets, the lifts of the shelter’s main axis shaft. Nothing. Not even the beginning of a hint that she had been right. But the feeling was still there, just like before, itching at the edge of awareness. Somewhere in this complex there was at least one high-grade Alpha Legion operative, and they knew that Iaeo was there too.

She was of the Vanus, an assassin of information. She dealt with possibility, with projected outcomes and webs of data. Uncertainty vexed her, but absences worried her more. And that was what looked back at her from the data: a blankness where there should be something, as though someone had edited it out from reality. The Alpha Legion was here, and they did not even cast a shadow.

That was not optimal. Not at all. That meant they were close, that they had a read on her actions. There was even the possibility that…

She pulled the visor from her eyes, folded and stowed it, then slid down the air duct towards an access grate in the duct’s floor. The grate slid out of its housing and she dropped into the empty corridor below.

At least it had been empty two seconds before.

She saw the three figures as she dropped from the ceiling. All were utterly still, their shapes blurred outlines of grey, like graphite smeared on paper. Deductions spun through her mind in the stretched instant of the jump.

They must have been there for some time, long enough for their cloaked presences to dissolve into the data feed from her net-flies. Long enough that she had not seen them. That meant they had planned this. They had tracked her and predicted her actions.

Clever, she thought, as she heard the buzz of arming weapons.

She hit the floor.

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First published in Great Britain in 2015.
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