Nico cringed. “Helpful” was clearly not a wise career move. The captain dropped him and scratched his chin, furious.
“I need a line to Command!”
The servitor shook its head with a vacant rattle. Reicz’s lip curled.
“You,” he snarled. Nico looked up and found a gloved finger aimed at his face. “M-me?”
“Get to the command post. Tell them I know what the xenos are doing.”
“Wha—”
“Quiet. Listen. They’re drawing our fire. Lettica isn’t the target.”
“But, sir—”
“Shut up! It’s a diversion! It’s a warp-damned diversion, you hear me? The prison. You tell them! You tell Command from me — they’re going after the prison!”
Nico’s mind did a backflip. “Wh—”
Reicz glared. “Run!”
The whimpered complaint in Nico’s throat curled up and died. A laspistol muzzle had appeared magically in front of his eyes.
He came to a sudden, adrenalin-fuelled decision. If there was one thing a professional coward was certain to be good at, it was running. He was out the door and sprinting before he knew it.
Kais drew a long breath and crept further along the trench. The oblique curves of the recessed corridors fractured and distorted every sound, making distances impossible to judge. Every gunfire report or roiling artillery impact was a potential threat, and every corner represented an opportunity for deadly surprises.
Behind him, one of the dead gue’la gurgled. They did that, he’d quickly learned. They jerked and groaned and dribbled. Filthy.
His mind was unsettled: a storm of turbulence and dangerous excess. He’d seen and done so much in the few raik’ors since his separation from the cadre that he could barely think straight. He’d fought and sniped and shot. He’d punched holes through soft alien guts and cut short their blind, prejudiced little lives with no more effort than a trigger pull. He’d smelled their burning flesh, wiped their blood from his pale armour and listened, annoyed, to their shrieks and pleas. They were inefficient, he had decided.
In a corner of his mind, he wondered why he wasn’t dead yet.
Along this small stretch of trenchway, dwarfed by the engagement raging all around him, Kais had learnt more about the Way of the Fire Warrior than twenty tau’cyrs in the battledome on T’au. It was enough to disquiet even the firmest, most stable mind.
But worse, worse even than extinguishing the lives of these brutal, impetuous creatures, was the suspicion creeping over him that he was just like them. He had discovered within himself a proclivity for killing, and it terrified him like nothing else.
The comm interrupted his thoughts. “Kais,” Lusha said, sounding strained. “Kais, I want you to pay attention.”
“Yes, Shas’el?”
“There’s a bunker ahead of you. You see it?”
Kais peered along the winding trench, disquieted by his commander’s ability to remotely view the feed from his helmet optics. All throughout his training he’d been uncomfortable with the sensation: having someone else inside his eyes, staring out at his world without his permission, judging his actions from a distance.
“I see it,” he said, glaring at the rockcrete pillbox. He’d assumed it was deserted as he approached, a thick ebb of smoke lifting from its upper surface in silent testament to a recent airstrike. The mangled remains of a communications array sagged piteously above it.
“Listen,” Lusha commed, “I’ve just had word from shas’ar’tol. They’re concerned that the gue’la in that bunker might have intercepted some… sensitive transmissions. Their equipment is more sophisticated than we thought.”
“I don’t understand, Shas’el.”
“You don’t need to understand, La’Kais. You just need to obey.”
The rebuke rang hollow in Kais’s mind. He understood the convention of Shas’la obedience and had even thought himself prepared to abide by it, but now he came to it he felt a powerful need for information. He craved knowledge of the situation, intensely uncomfortable with blind obedience.
Ju would have called it arrogance of the worst kind, he thought with a smile. In questioning orders he was betraying a distrust of his superiors and an unwillingness to allow others to make decisions for him. He quelled the subversive sentiments and bowed his head again, conscientiously attempting to conform.
“Of course, Shas’el. What are my orders?”
“Clear out the bunker, Shas’la. Leave nobody alive. El’Lusha out.”
Kais listened to the silence of the comm-channel and breathed deeply.
Don’t think about it, he told himself. Don’t ask why, don’t concern yourself. Just do it.
Not allowing himself time to agonise, he snatched a grenade from his utility belt, thumbed the trigger, and hurled it. Moments before it tumbled through the bunker’s doorway a skinny gue’la leapt out into the trench, eyes wide in terror. The grenade skittered past him into the dark interior, and in a strangled expulsion of breath the gue’la leapt away, not even aware of the fire warrior standing three tor’leks from him.
Kais blinked. The whole thing had lasted moments.
The grenade detonated with a roar, lifting the top layers of dust from the bunker and forcing out the walls: a concrete belly spasming with shrapnel flatulence. Smoke and flesh vented unevenly through the doorway.
He peered inside cautiously, strangely unnerved by the ease with which he’d commanded such devastation. Less than a dec ago he was awash with fear and confusion, bewildered by the strangeness and terror of it all. Now he was peering at the shredded remains of two bodies — two more bodies — with barely a jot of interest. They were just meat.
“That soldier…” came Lusha’s terse voice in his ear. An orange icon blinked in his helmet display, distance tracker rising swiftly. “You need to pursue him. He could be carrying a warning…”
“What warning?” Kais blurted, astonishing himself. He could feel the blood rushing to his face and bit at his tongue, furious with himself. He hadn’t intended to vocalise the query that had bubbled impetuously in his mind, least of all in such a disrespectful manner. His inability to contain rebellious thoughts had landed him in trouble before, and he prepared himself for the chastisement that would no doubt follow.
Lusha surprised him again, sighing wearily. “Our deployment here was a distraction, Kais. Nothing more. We’re drawing their troops away from our true objective.”
“A… a distraction?” Kais felt sick. He saw again the two fire warriors dissolving before his eyes, picked apart by relentless las-fire. He saw the spinning bulk of the shuttle, whirling out of control in a storm of dust and flame. He saw the death and insanity that had surrounded him since he set foot on this planet, a web of blood and smoke and horror. All part of an elaborate ruse. “Just a distraction…” he repeated, unwilling to believe it.
“Kais!” Lusha’s voice was strained with impatience. “Remember the machine. ‘One people, one unity, one person.’ You’re a cog! You’re a component in a greater scheme, and if you’re ordered to take part in a distraction, then by the One Path you’ll do it!”
Kais lowered his head, the shame boiling in his mind. “Yes, Shas’el.”
“Good.” The voice softened again, almost apologetic in its tone. “It’s never easy, Kais. I know that. Accept your place in the tau’va and you’ll find your peace.”
“I will try, Shas’el. Y-you have my apologies.”
“The gue’la soldier. He mustn’t be allowed to raise the alarm. We think there’s a command post nearby. It’s possible he’s heading for that.”
“I understand.”
“Good. Get after him.”
The world hazed. Nico tried to breathe. The trenches grew wider as he approached Lettica’s northern outskirts, rising imperceptibly towards the welcoming cover of its squat buildings. Not willing to spend any time enjoying the sight, he glimpsed the distant rooftops through a haze of adrenaline and pushed himself onwards.
At some point — he couldn’t remember when — the anaerobic gasps burning his lungs had transformed into a hissed litany.
“…oh Throne… oh Throne… oh Throne… oh Throne…”
There was something following him. He hadn’t risked a headlong tumble by staring back over his shoulder, but his neck prickled with intuitive terror that he’d learnt to rely upon long ago. A coward without an innate sense of self-preservation was just a corpse.
Every now and again shapes appeared from the smoke haze hanging in the air. Friend or enemy, it didn’t matter which; they vanished just as abruptly, memories obliterated by each new corner to the trench-way. The location of the command post was inscribed on his mind with crystal clarity; as he ran he imagined a pulsing red lifeline threading through the forks and rises of the channel network, leading him forever onwards. A tiny, secret voice in his mind began to whisper: You’re going to make it!
He wouldn’t let himself believe it.
From somewhere nearby a storm of weapons fire chattered at the air, and his legs carried him along like a dead weight, bent at the waist with his arms over his head. He ran the gauntlet blind, tripping and shrieking, certain that each step would be his last. A blue-white orb of pulsefire smouldered across his shoulder, singeing the cloth of his regs and earning an anguished sob in response. In the last rational part of his brain he realised the wound barely even hurt, cauterised even as it was inflicted. That didn’t stop him from screaming.
And then the madness was left behind, the explosions and crackling gunfire reports faded in his wake, the world seemed to slow and his feet, unbidden, staggered to a halt. Obscured by dust, alternately bombed out or merely smeared with soot, the buildings that jostled around him like protective molluscs were nonetheless the most wonderful sight he’d ever seen. Stifling a relieved sob, he stepped into the city and left the trenches behind.
Which was when the xeno that had been following him, optic sensor burning with reflected light, shot his left kneecap into a thousand tiny, spinning fragments.
Shas’el T’au Lusha leaned over a hovering bank of viewscreens at the rear of the cockpit and scowled. The dropship Tap’ran had escaped major damage from the explosive convulsions of its sister vessel, though its juntas-side engine, now fluctuating annoyingly, had been marred by shards of debris. Lusha gritted his teeth at the lurching interruptions and fixed his eyes firmly on the grid’s screens.
In the course of his career he’d learnt to recognise the potential for greatness when he encountered it. In each aspect of the tau’va was the confirmation of equality: the lowliest earth caste fio’la, it espoused, was as vital to the continuing sanctity of the Greater Good as was the mighty Aun’o Kathl’an himself, high in the fluted towers of the walled city on T’au.
Lusha understood that. Respected it. But still, once in a while there came an… anomaly. Plain for all to see, an individual unable to fit in, without the means or the patience to find their niche in the correct — gradual — fashion. In La’Kais he could see skills beyond those of a mere shas’la: his stealth and speed, his innate craving for tactical knowledge — these things marked him out as plainly as did his impetuousness. Only the youth’s inability to accept his place in the present would prevent him from rising to greatness in his future.
Typically, even in the most meteoric of careers, there were incremental gaps of at least four tau’cyrs between each rank. One became a shas’la upon graduation from the battledome, then a shas’ui, then a shas’vre. An elite few became shas’els and, in only the most exceptional cases, shas’os. For Kais to achieve a status more in keeping with his abilities, he must exercise the one thing Lusha doubted he possessed: patience.
He peered at the sixteenth viewscreen and frowned. Kais’s helmet-feed was filled with the face of a gue’la soldier, writhing and screeching on the floor like some tyranid y’he’vre. He wondered vaguely what La’Kais was feeling, slowly raising his rifle to silence the pale creature. A readout beneath the monitor blinked red and began to rise in value: Kais’s pulse, growing faster. The youth was excited, Lusha realised, frowning uncomfortably.
The pulse rifle fired and the screen went red. Lusha looked away.
“Shas’el?” the kor’vre pilot trilled from the apex of the cockpit, interrupting his thoughts. “We’re over the extraction point now. Should I begin the descent?”
Lusha glanced at the other screens, a jumbled montage of different warriors’ views. The other survivors from the cadre were almost in position.
“Yes, Kor’vre. Let’s get them back.”
The dropship broke cover amid the cloudbanks and began its stately descent, marred only by the occasional sputtering of the damaged engine. Lusha tapped a control and the grid of screens switched to an external view.
Something flickered in the ruins below, a gue’la turret gun spitting streamers of tracer-lit bullets towards the city’s periphery. He wondered vaguely what it was shooting at.
“Shas’el?” The pilot said, concerned. “There’s something—”
The ship lurched violently, lifting Lusha off his feet and depositing him painfully on the floor. A squadron of drones hovered past, maintenance tools brandished.
“Report,” he demanded grimly, clambering to his feet.
“A tank,” the kor’vre stated flatly, voice admirably calm. “No major damage. I’m taking us back up, Shas’el. It won’t miss twice.”
Lusha nodded, fighting his irritation. Expressions of annoyance were wasteful and inefficient, more characteristic of the frail gue’la than the tau. He imagined the humans inside the tank cursing loudly at their near miss and hardened his resolve. Such creatures were not worthy of the tau’va, he suspected, regardless of the forgiveness and tolerance the Auns preached.
He switched the screens back to the fire warriors’ personal helmet-feeds, sadly aware of how many had faded to darkness. Kais’s HUD was a frenzy of movement too fast for Lusha to interpret.
“La’Kais?” he commed. “What’s your status?”
Kais’s voice sounded strained with effort. “Standby, Shas’el,” he grunted, angry weapons fire crackling in time with the lightning-pulses on the screen. “It’s under control.”
“La’Kais — what do you mean?”
The tumbling image began to resolve itself, oiled machinery catching the shifting smokelight. Kais’s gloved hands entered the viewframe, clenching down on a series of haphazard, rune-encrusted controls.
And then Lusha understood.
“By the path…” the pilot gasped, staring at the sensors. “He’s—”
“He’s hijacked the turret gun, Kor’vre…” Lusha said, forcing back a smile.
Kais held a gloved hand against the gun’s blocky controls, reasoning correctly that at least one of them must be a trigger. At the mercy of the weapon’s ramshackle vibrations, he held on for dear life and tried to aim as best as he could.
This part of the city had been all but flattened in the tau attack, targeted by one of the colossal Dorsal-class bombers that had pre-empted the ground strike, he guessed. The vessel’s unthinkable aerial ordnances had devastated whatever had stood here before, leaving nothing but fragmented rockcrete and rising smoke. He’d found the turret gun at the blastzone’s edge; fixed to a sturdy iron pintle it had weathered the storm with only a layer of soot to show for its fiery baptism. Its crew, what charred fragments remained, had not been so lucky.
The tank had clambered over a nearby ridge, beetlelike, just as the comforting whine of the dropship’s engines met Kais’s ears. Standing beside the ungainly emplacement, staring in h
orror as the lumbering vehicle took careful aim at the descending shuttle, Kais was wrapping his fingers around the weapon’s controls before he’d even had time to think.
Haifa raik’or of noise and madness later, in which the dropship had come frighteningly close to destruction, the tank swivelled its cannon with glacial slowness in Kais’s direction. It advanced along the ruined street with juggernaut implacability, grinding rock and metal beneath its tracks.
The gun quaked in his hands, spent ammunition cartridges spinning past his head. Attempting to absorb the onslaught, a block of metal detached itself from the tank’s hull, sparks and shrapnel capering away. The vehicle lurched in its place, squealing tracks protesting at the impact. More craters blossomed: a process of metallic flaying in which gobbets of metallic flesh drizzled into the air. Buckling beneath the relentless barrage, fissures began to open in the devastated hull. With mere raik’ans to spare before the colossal cannon acquired its target, a fuel reserve ignited.
The vehicle heaved itself off the ground on a jet of flame, flipping over and shredding itself in a tangle of cabling and armour. A secondary explosion prised apart its midriff, hull fragments pirouetting through the air and smearing themselves across the ruined landscape. Slabs of wreckage gyrated and bounced, slicing the air. One of the crew screamed from somewhere at the heart of the madness. Briefly.
Kais watched the smoke lift for what seemed like a long time. When finally the ragged remnants of his cadre clambered from the trenches he was too exhausted to even greet them.
Barely half had made it back alive.
The shuttle came down and the cadre clambered aboard. Hell vanished behind a closing blast-door.
Sitting once again in his deployment seat, wondering about the perfect stillness of the vessel, Kais allowed his mind to rest. The other shas’las were silent. They too, he supposed, couldn’t think of anything to say. He wondered if they felt like him. Hollow, somehow. Diminished.
II
[Warhammer 40K] - Fire Warrior Page 4
