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Baneblade - Extract

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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 home world 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 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 with 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.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2013
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Adam Tooby.

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