‘Morning, ladies! Have a nice stroll?’ Corporal Hesse’s booming voice called down from the dorsal turret. He was stripped to the waist and the cog-wheel tattoos were visible on his straining gut.
‘Piss off,’ Anton replied.
‘I think you meant to say piss off corporal, Private Antoniev,’ Hesse replied cheerfully. He muttered something to somebody below him in the fuselage of the tank. Whoever it was handed a power-spanner up to him and he began tightening nuts on the hatch-cover hinge. The effort made his chubby face red. Sweat dripped from his cheeks onto the metal as he spoke the proper invocations. Hesse could always find something that needed work on round the vehicle. It was his pride and joy. Anything not so technical it needed to be handled by an enginseer was his particular pleasure to tinker with.
‘Yeah, piss off corporal, Private Antoniev,’ Anton said.
Hesse chuckled, ‘Only you could tell yourself to piss off when trying to come up with a witty retort, Antoniev. Anyway, break time is over. Get your tools out and put them to some use. And I don’t mean take a piss…’
‘Ha bloody ha,’ said Anton.
‘You’ve used that one already today,’ said Ivan. ‘You’ll wear it out.’
‘Ha bloody ha.’ Anton’s scarecrow figure was already halfway up the metal ladder in the Baneblade’s side. He reached the dorsal turret and threw himself flat beside Hesse, inspecting the servos of the rotator mechanism. Soon they were cheerfully discussing the lack of pressure in the hydraulics. Say what you like about Anton, when it came to machines he knew his stuff. It had been the same back in the factorum on Belial. Of course, if any real work needed done they would need to summon the tech-priests. The priests of that mechanical brotherhood were as jealous of their prerogatives as the Mechanics of the Factorum Guild back on Belial.
I climbed up a metal cliff and dropped into the Baneblade’s innards. It smelled of oil and plasteel and recycled air. But at least it was cooler than outside. I fell into a tanker’s stoop and scuttled along the corridor heading for the cockpit. I was surprised to find a stranger there checking the controls. He had the well-scrubbed appearance of the new intake. He fidgeted nervously, fingers drumming on the control altar. He looked like he was contemplating a particularly difficult mathematical problem. There was an abstracted, scholarly air to him.
‘That’s my chair,’ I said. He looked up, startled.
‘Sorry,’ he said, rising up so fast he banged his head on the ceiling where it sloped above the driver’s chair. I winced with sympathy. I’ve been known to do the same thing myself. He was a tall kid, a little taller than me. His hair was curly and dirty-blond. His eyes were a pale, pale blue. He smiled nervously, showing surprisingly good teeth.
I slumped down into my bucket seat and inspected the controls. It did not look like he had made any invocations, but it’s always a good idea to check. One of our Russ went off a cliff once because a new boy had set the drives into reverse and the driver was too drunk on coolant fluid to check. Or so the story goes.
The boy stuck out a clean hand, with well-manicured nails. ‘Matosek,’ he said. ‘Adrian Adrianovitch Matosek.’
I looked at his hand till it withdrew. ‘Sit down, New Boy,’ I said. ‘And don’t touch anything until I say you can.’
I muttered the first driver’s prayer, pulled the periscope down into position and locked it. I twisted my driver’s cap sideways so the brim would not hit the eyepiece. Looking through it I got a clear view of the tortured sky above us, and another look at the lava sea on the horizon. I adjusted the view angle until I saw the slope around us and all the other tanks and artillery lined up there, getting ready to move.
I closed my eyes, asked the blessing of the machine-spirits and sent my hands dancing across the control altar in the ritual gestures of invocation and control. The spirit of the great war engine was still quiescent.
I watched the needles on the volt gauges rise and fall in response to my devotions. I touched the engine pedals with my feet and heard the big drives roar. I checked the lock toggles on the control sticks to make sure they were still in place then invoked the Baneblade’s tutelary spirit to watch over them.
‘I never touched anything,’ New Boy said. ‘I know the rituals.’
‘Don’t say anything till I finish either,’ I said. He fell into a silence, half-sullen and half-scared. I suppressed a smile. I knew what it was like to sit in that particular chair. Old Grigor had done exactly the same thing to me when I first saw the inside of a Baneblade. Well, he would learn by watching and doing, the same as I had to, the basic apprenticeship of the Imperial tank man.
I kept talking, ‘There’s been some shonky repairs done on Number Ten’s port-side armour towards the rear. You need to cover for that where you can. Set her down with the starboard towards the enemy where you can and the gunners will traverse the turrets to compensate. Be that way till we can get proper repairs done. The requisition chit is in – has been since Charybdis. Any decade now we will get the parts.’
He nodded again and kept his mouth shut. He was doing all right so far. ‘The number two drive has a tendency to over-rev at low speeds. You need to placate the spirit when it happens. It can be temperamental. Remember that.’
‘Sure.’
‘That’s that then. Let’s see if you can perform the basic rituals then.’
He shrugged. He looked at his control board. It was more or less a duplicate of mine. Hardly surprising really. Redundant controls systems are a feature of the Mark V Baneblade originated on Callan’s Forge. They say that it’s different on the Martian-sourced models but I would not know. I have never been inside one.
Nothing happened when he moved the switches. Nothing would unless the cut-outs on my controls kicked in which would most likely mean I was dead or so wounded I did not care. Or I toggled the switch and asked the machine to hand over control. I watched him. He was a good kid, careful. Everything went back into neutral when he had finished with it. Even though he was not directly communing with the spirit of the vessel he was taking no chances.
‘What happened to him?’
‘Who?’ I asked although I already knew who he meant. Vehicles like this you were usually sitting in some dead man’s chair.
‘The one who sat here before me.’
‘He died,’ I said. ‘It’s an occupational hazard.’
‘I see you two have met,’ said a voice behind us. It had the relaxed, born-to-command tone of the Upper Hives. I turned to look at the lieutenant. He was a big man with a bleak-looking face and a shadow of stubble on his massive jaw he could never quite get rid of. His uniform was covered in braid. His eagle epaulettes were enormously ornate. Campaign medals festooned his broad chest. I have always suspected our officers’ elaborate uniforms were designed as a deliberate contrast to the plain tunics of the common soldier in our regiment. It emphasises the class difference and our rulers on Belial have always liked to do that.
Behind the lieutenant was the Understudy, a moon orbiting the lieutenant’s planetary presence, hoping to reflect some of his authority. His uniform braiding was scarcely less elaborate than the lieutenant’s. The Understudy did not look much older than the New Boy. He was trying to appear relaxed the way the lieutenant did. Maybe in another twenty years he would have mastered the trick but somehow I doubted it. The lieutenant had been born the way he was. Or perhaps decanted from a glass jar, the way some of the Schismatics had been.