TALLARN: WITNESS
John French



    The last Titan left on Tallarn bore the world's new master across the dust plains. It was a lonely god. Its brothers and sisters waited in the heavens, cocooned in the bellies of ships, healing and arming for the next battle. When this final task was done it would join them, but until then it strode on with the weariness of a wounded soldier. The wind rattled across its pitted grey skin, and pulled a caul of dust over its shoulders. Every few hundred metres it paused and shivered, damaged gears and clogged pistons clanking.
    Above its head, the sky was clear blue.
    Susada Syn, now the designated Governor-Militant of Tallarn, looked out from the Titan's eyes at the dry land.
    My land, he thought and coughed. The wound on the left side of his chest flared with pain. He blinked, but did not let the discomfort show on his face. At least, he hoped it did not show on his face.
    Beside him, the looming presence of Kalikgol remained unmoving, the White Scar's eyes fixed on the scene beyond the viewports of the Titan's bridge. General Gorn stood at his other shoulder, gaunt face utterly still above the buckled collar of his environment suit.
    Susada ran a hand around the neck seals of his own suit. The viral agents which had killed Tallarn still persisted in air and soil, and it would take hundreds - perhaps thousands? - of years before a human could breathe openly here again.
    He had not thought that his return home would be like this, but then how could he have? In all the decades of war across the stars, he had always thought he would never see the world of his birth again. On Vessos and Tagia Prime during the Great Crusade, and on Caldrin after the Warmaster turned, and on a dozen lesser fronts, he had been certain that death would pull him aside into cold oblivion. But he had lived, and now returned to find that Tallarn was no more.
    The deck swayed beneath his feet, and the god-machine halted. Susada glanced at the unmoving forms of the princeps and the twin moderati. The three were wired into their thrones. Black crystal visors covered their faces, apparently to cover their eyes from others. He had never seen the custom in other Titan Legions. He did not like it, but he did not know why.
    'What is it?' Susada asked after a few seconds. 'Why have we halted?'
    Spools of punched parchment unwound slowly from the command consoles.
    It was Kalikgol who spoke. 'Look.'
    The White Scar was staring out through the armourglass of the Titan's eye, his own pupils as dark pinpricks in grey irises. Susada followed the Space Marine's gaze, and saw.
    The cloud had cleared from a patch on the ground, peeled back by a tug of the wind. Shapes emerged from the yellow murk. For a second, he was reminded of the backs of sea creatures breaking the surface of an ocean. Then he recognised what he was looking at.
    Spirals of corrosion covered the closest tank's hull, snaking across the pitted metal. Its tracks lay beside and behind it, shed in the last moments before its destruction. A jagged-edged hole distorted the slope of the frontal armour. Its turret hatch was still sealed, but the barrel of the main gun was a splintered twig of blackened metal. He could see dust heaped within the gutted interior, opened up to the deadly elements.
    Another tank emerged from the retreating cloud, the lines of its bulk softened by acidic decay. Beside it another smaller machine, seemingly unmarked apart from the smooth hole passing cleanly through its turret from one side to the other - a clean bullet wound through a condemned man's skull. More wrecks appeared, crowded together, or isolated in drifts of their own debris. He recognised dozens of patterns in a single glance, though he saw many that he had never seen before. There were great slab-hulls of Storm Hammers resting beside the carcasses of legionary Predators and workhorse Executioners. Amidst the wreckage, the crumpled forms of battle automata spread in tangles of machine limbs. One of the larger walkers seemed almost intact, its fire-scoured carapace unmarked and its piston-clamp fists locked onto the broken hull of a Sicaran, seemingly frozen in the act of tearing the dead tank apart.
    The cloud continued to roll away, and the carpet of dead metal grew beneath the feet of the Titan.
    'The plains of Khedive,' muttered Kalikgol. Susada heard General Gorn take a slow breath, but he said nothing.
    Khedive, Susada thought. I must have stood almost on this very spot…
    There had been rain in the air that day - warm rain blown in from the south, so that the grasslands swayed and flowed like the tides of the sea. He had stood beside the other men of his regiment, their heads turned to the heavens, watching as the transports dropped through the sky towards them. It had been the last time that he had stood on the surface of Tallarn, the last time he had breathed its air. Now, he could never do either again.
    'What is this?' he asked at last, his voice dry in his throat. He looked at Gorn, but the general's scarred face had become a fixed mask, his eyes distant.
    'This?' said Kalikgol, turning his grey gaze on Susada for a long moment.
    Then the White Scar turned back to the plain of metal carcasses. It spread all the way to the horizon.
    'This is victory,' he said.