‘Even the weather is on Macharius’s side,’ he said. ‘If this storm does not cover our approach nothing will.’
That was certainly an optimistic interpretation of events but who was I to disagree? It was possible he was right. The lieutenant knew more about these things than I did.
‘How long you think this will go on for, sir?’ the New Boy asked.
‘Our tac briefing says these storms can last for days. Sometimes the air outside can get so hot it’s like stepping into a furnace. The heat would kill you if the dust did not strip you to the bone first.’
A pebble ricocheted off the hull as if to emphasise his point. It sounded as if someone was firing a boltgun at us.
‘It’s why every part of this force is mechanised. There’s no other way of fighting on this planet until we’re close enough to the hives to find some cover. Now keep your eyes peeled. We’re getting close to the outer perimeter defences. There are bunkers full of big guns and lascannons. If this storm keeps up we’ll bypass them and cut them off from supply. If it dies down all of a sudden, we need to be ready to fight.’
As if some daemon of the storm had heard him, the sound of the wind began to die away. The grinding noise lessened. Chatter on the external comm-net became audible again.
The great billowing clouds of dust started to settle, except where the passing of the tanks set it swirling.
‘Oh shit,’ I heard someone say. A glance into the periscope told me why.
Ahead of us lay an enormous armoured bunker. It was the size of a small hill, reinforced with plascrete and sheets of durasteel. The maws of several very large guns pointed in our direction. A huge turret traversed towards us. I hit the override and took the controls from the New Boy. He tugged at the sticks for a few moments not realising what was happening. It was hard to blame him. The same thing had happened to me the first time I went into battle.
I glanced around at the terrain. Dunes undulated all around us, some of them large enough to provide us with some cover. I picked the most likely looking of them and sent us in that direction a fraction of a second before the lieutenant gave the order to take us hull-down.
Of course, the dune would not provide the slightest smidgeon of protection against the blast from one of those lascannons. That was not the point. The point was not even to hide us from view. It was to make us less visible than all the other tanks around us. If we were less of a target, the enemy would seek somebody else. I would not have wished death on anybody on our side, but our first task was to see that we stayed alive. Dead men win no battles and they certainly do not tell tales about them afterwards.
The lieutenant barked orders into the comm-net. I heard Ivan and Anton and the others respond. The whole Baneblade vibrated as all of our batteries went off at once, thundering at one of those distant guns.
Lines of las-fire stabbed out at us from the smaller emplacements in the bunker. It was stupid. Hitting a Baneblade with a light weapon was like menacing an elephant with a sulphur match. Those weapons would have cut infantrymen down like chaff but were useless against us.
Our fire blasted into one of the larger emplacements, sending shards of broken metal flying. That was one gun silenced. As I watched, smaller Chimera units surged forwards across the dunes. Heavy bolters blazed from the small-looking turrets on top of their hulls. Blasts from the pillbox tore a few of them apart but many more got close, then huge explosions from below sent them hurtling broken skywards.
‘Minefield,’ I heard the lieutenant mutter. ‘Lemuel, take us in, we are going to clear a path.’
There was no point arguing. The commander’s chair was behind mine. He could put a bullet through my brain if he even suspected mutiny, which in truth was not something I had in mind.
As I urged the Indomitable forwards I was thinking more of the possibility that the mines might be powerful enough to breach our hull and that we would be sitting targets for those batteries in the great fortress.
The lieutenant just kept talking into the comm-net. Ahead of us the Chimeras began to reverse, moving out of our paths like a swarm of crypt rats passing round a mastodon. I saw one or two broken bodies in the minefield, one or two men still moving. I did my best to ignore them and the thought that in a few minutes that could be me.
I nudged the Baneblade forwards. Something exploded beneath us. For a moment, I felt as if my heart was going to stop. I heard the New Boy groan and when I looked over his face was white. The hull vibrated like a great drum but held.
‘Keep us moving forwards, Lemuel. Those mines are not strong enough to stop us.’ I wished I was as sure of that as the lieutenant was. He calmly commanded the turrets to keep up a stream of fire into the gun emplacements even as one of those mighty lascannons started to rotate towards us. I knew that if we were directly in its sights then we were dead for sure. Such a powerful, fixed position gun had power enough to take out even a tank like the Indomitable. Another mine went off. For a moment, the Baneblade shuddered and threatened to stop. It felt as if even the massive weight of the ancient tank was not enough to keep it on the ground. For a heartbeat I feared that one of the drive-trains had given way and that we were immobilised. The old monster kept crawling forwards. Our guns raked the nearest positions. Brown-clad infantrymen rose up out of concrete foxholes and scurried away. What might have been a commissar rose to shoot them. A hail of fire from our anti-personnel weapons killed soldier and leader both. The lascannon kept traversing towards us. It would only be a matter of moments now before it had us in its sights.
‘Keep moving, Lemuel,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Just a few more metres.’
Suddenly I understood what he was doing. I fed the engines as much power as they would take and we surged forwards passing under the line of fire of the great lascannon. Its beam scorched the earth behind us but we were safe. The barrel of it could not be depressed any lower. We were under its arc of fire.
Along the path we had cleared through the minefield Chimeras raced forwards, guided by the mark of our tracks. The other Bane-blades were doing the same now. Within minutes the minefield was breached and our infantry swarmed over the sides of the pillbox, clearing bunkers and foxholes, breaking through the armoured security doors and swarming into the interior. We sat outside in the sun and provided them with covering fire.
‘That’s our first objective taken,’ said the lieutenant with some satisfaction.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the Understudy. ‘Everything is going according to plan.’
I wondered about that. I really did. Would it really have gone so well if the lieutenant had not been there, and seen the weakness in the minefields. And what if he had been wrong, what if the mines had been able to destroy the Baneblade. You can drive yourself mad thinking about such things. It’s best to stick to the things that actually happen and not what might have been. That’s a good rule when thinking about life in general, as about the wars you have fought in.
By noon the sun, at its highest point, gazed down on our triumph. Prisoners were rounded up and disarmed or shot. We had won a small victory but it was a victory and that is always a good way to open a campaign, as I am sure Macharius and the lieutenant at least understood.
We climbed down from the Baneblade to stretch our legs. We had been given a break and who knew how long it would be before we managed to get out of the tank’s claustrophobic interior.
The air smelled different. We lost the tang of incense and filtered air and cooped up sweaty bodies we had inside. I could smell the desert and explosives and burning and something else disturbing.