Damocles

by Various

  ‘Stealth team until it suits you!’ she spat, her hot spike of anger simmering to cold disapproval in the space of a few heartbeats. ‘This is a sub-optimal time to show off, Shas’vre Drai. We are within warzone parameters.’

  ‘I offer contrition, my commander,’ said Drai, his body language deferential even in the swollen bulk of his battlesuit.

  Even the fire caste’s standard-issue stealth field generators were advanced enough to baffle the senses. Without state of the art optical sensors, Drai and his teammates would have been little more than heat shimmers against the cracked and lifeless landscape. That was little excuse for one with a multispectrum sensor suite, though. Shadowsun blamed her momentary lapse of concentration on the strange whisper-hiss that had distracted her. She still felt on edge even now.

  It was a well-known fact amongst the fire caste that Drai’s mastery of the silent approach more than made up for his habit of announcing his presence as loudly as possible, whether with a formal greeting or a salvo from the truncated burst cannon that formed his battlesuit’s right arm.

  ‘Have your assessments reached a satisfactory conclusion, my commander?’ asked Drai.

  ‘They have, Drai, and I thank you for your inquiry. No Imperial forces have been pinpointed as yet, though at least three capital-class transport ships have made planetfall to my knowledge. I have assigned forward bait elements.’

  ‘And the planet itself, my commander?’

  Shadowsun stepped back and to the side, revealing the c-link drone behind her. ‘Oe-ken?’

  The drone rose slightly. ‘Designation Imperial hive-world, human population approximate 16.7 billion, apex conurbation Agrellan Prime,’ said Oe-ken. His artificial voice was strangely lyrical, as if he were reciting an abstract poem. ‘Surface primarily plainsland, topographical map appended. Atmosphere highly toxic to all carbon-based clades, anomalous readings high…’

  ‘Excellent. I believe that will be sufficient for now, Oe-ken,’ interrupted Shadowsun. ‘We can assimilate the rest from your compile. We do not want the gue’la brutes alerted to our presence by you rattling out every last finding, after all.’

  ‘Rattling, commander?’ said Oe-ken, his elevation sinking.

  ‘An artefact of speech,’ said Shadowsun, waving the comment away. ‘I meant no aspersion.’

  The tau’s artificial intelligences were hard-wired to behave as much like their makers as possible in all social situations, and Oe-ken-yon was the most advanced of his kind. Regardless of size or duty, every drone strived to emulate its masters and fit in seamlessly with tau culture. It was a safety measure that covered most eventualities. When a purely objective viewpoint was necessary, personality protocols could be temporarily deactivated at a single blip.

  Such a course of action had proved problematic in the past – the disastrous Pech Incident was one example. In recent years, the earth caste had made it standard practice to build the tau empire’s artificial intelligences with a personality best suited their role. Even so, Shadowsun often wondered if a machine that could simulate emotion wasn’t just as likely to affect operational efficiency as one without it.

  ‘May I append an observation, Commander Shadowsun?’ said Oe-nu quietly as it hovered in close.

  The MV52, much like lesser shield drones, had twin projector aerials that reminded Shadowsun of the plain-hoppers she used to catch on Vior’la as a child.

  ‘By all means, Oe-nu.’

  ‘The background electromagnetic field upon Agrellan is having a detrimental effect on my battery source, commander. I cannot guarantee optimum performance throughout.’

  ‘Noted, little helper, but in truth you say that every time. It is rare that I deploy the fire caste into an idyllic environment.’

  ‘This time is different, Commander Shadowsun,’ the drone whined. It dipped the front of its rim in a gesture of dutiful obedience. ‘Rest assured that in the interests of longevity, Oe-hei and I will utilise the least possible amount of energy in order to ensure your protection. We shall not use one iota more than necessary.’

  ‘That is… indeed reassuring, Oe-nu. Thank you in advance.’

  ‘Merely doing our duty, Commander Shadowsun,’ the drone said obsequiously, dipping its disc-like body once more before withdrawing to slowly orbit its mistress.

  ‘May I ask what you make of these anomalous readings, my commander?’ said Shas’vre Drai, tapping his sensor antenna with the quad-barrelled end of his burst cannon.

  ‘Of course. I believe they are residuals, echoes of a sort after some cataclysmic event. That would certainly fit with the geological samples my punch-cylinders have taken thus far.’

  ‘A robust theory, my commander… up to a point,’ said Drai warily.

  ‘I realise it is the nature of the cataclysm that concerns you, Shas’vre Drai, but I would not divert attention to it at this point. We have more pressing data to obtain.’

  As Shadowsun finished her sentence, a sheet of red shapes flared across the topographical display above her command suite.

  ‘Excellent. The air caste have located the Imperial vessels. Approach on my mark.’

  As one, the Stealth suits and their drone escorts rose into the air, revolved eight degrees west, and hovered invisibly towards the Acacian Basin.

  The hive cities of Agrellan were truly mighty examples of their kind. Giant, slab-sided monstrosities, they reminded Shadowsun of insect mounds out on the Vior’lan plain. Each spire-dotted metropolis was teeming with human life, and somewhere within the basin were the occupants of the three Imperial vessels that had escaped the air caste’s lethal attentions. Finding their exact location would not be easy. At Oe-ken-yon’s estimation, the entire population of Shadowsun’s home sept could have fit within the endless levels of the nearest hive and still had its upper half to spare.

  According to the latest scans, the sides of each hive were dotted with gun nests, laser banks, gravity mine channels, ferrocrete plates, observation towers and docking plates. Sculptures of alien saints and living gargoyles loomed and crawled upon its facades, each a hideous reflection of the heroic monuments that stood outside each tau training academy. Shadowsun felt a forbidden twinge of excitement at the idea of smashing the human icons to dust.

  As the commander and her skimmer-borne cadres sped towards the mountain range that girdled the hives, she found herself recalling the day she had personally destroyed the statue of Shoh that stood outside his old battle dome. That had been a day long talked about. The traitor’s despicable sympathisers had branded her the Iconoclast, after that.

  She rather liked the term.

  The vast caldera that formed the walls of the basin loomed up ahead, the narrow pass at its southernmost point guarded by a kilometre-high gate-fortress. The giant bastion looked every bit as indomitable as the peaks around it, and infinitely more deadly.

  ‘A warrior who wears his strength openly is easily countered,’ she said to herself, imagining her master’s stony glare. She remembered learning that particular lesson well, after her boasts that neither Shoh nor Kais had a hope of finding her when she wished to remain unseen. Master Puretide had commanded her to prove it. All those weeks she had thought her bond-mates were looking for her, all those painful hours sat stewing in her tree-stump, hoping to be discovered. Master Puretide had never sent them out at all. She had eventually slunk back, starving and chastened, having missed out on almost a month of training. The Master had turned her greatest strength into punishing weakness with a single off-the-cuff command. It was an object lesson in humility – a quality the Imperium of Man had left behind long ago.

  She blipped the cadre-level datanet, denoting the looming fortress’s icon. ‘Needless to say,’ she transmitted, ‘we will not stray within range of that ridiculous thing.’

  Symbols of affirmation blinked over each team’s icons. She eye-flicked alternative lines of approach across
the mountains lining the basin, coloured pathways that zigzagged in from a dozen different points on the outside of the mountain range that girdled the basin. The air caste’s satellite scans, overlaid with the topography from the dronenets, had given her a hundred potential routes of approach, each shielded from hive artillery and remote gun nests. She would need no more than a handful of them to lure the Imperials into her trap.

  The cadres fanned out from a dust storm of their own creation, circumnavigating the giant caldera’s toxic peaks and joining the routes designated to them without slowing. Over and around the mountains they went, grav-skimmers, drones and battlesuits keeping in tight formation as they hovered up gullies, glaciers and crevasses.

  The skies flared white for a second, right on cue. The explosion left a concentric ring of light expanding high above the basin, as hypnotic to the hives’ sensor arrays as it was to mortal eyes.

  After securing victory in space scant hours before, the air caste’s commanders had been only too pleased to grant Shadowsun’s request for a grand distraction. The Supreme Admiral, Kor’O Li’men Ka, had transmitted back in person. The detonation of In Vigilus, an Imperial wreck burning in high orbit, would form a perfect coda to their symphony of supremacy.

  The death throes of the In Vigilus had bought Shadowsun a few seconds of electromagnetic backwash, a space of time in which the Imperial scanners were rendered blind and the Acacian Basin was lit in stark monochrome. In the blinking aftermath of those stolen seconds, every cadre hiding behind the lip of their respective mountains slid smoothly over the crest and boosted neatly into new hiding places.

  ‘Phase two is complete, commander,’ said Oe-ken, floating just behind Shadowsun.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Oe-ken, I have already observed that,’ she replied through a smile. ‘It’s phase three that will prove critical.’

  ‘I concur. It must be most satisfying to physically demonstrate the supremacy of the Greater Good in such a manner,’ the drone said wistfully.

  ‘It is pleasing to do so, but it is data I seek at this stage, not violence. Thankfully the air caste keep extensive records of the sigils and markings that the Imperium displays upon its battleships. According to my contacts, the first of the three vessels to have made planetfall upon Agrellan contains common gue’la soldiers and their support vehicles. The second, and this is the one I believe we must locate at all costs, contains the gue’ron’sha that the humans call Space Marines. I trust you are familiar with their reputation.’

  ‘I have assessed all available data. And the contents of the third vessel?’ prompted Oe-ken.

  ‘Unrecognised, and that has me intrigued. The ship has a cavernous cargo hold, though, and its symbol appears to be the riding-beast the humans call a “horse”. The water caste have appended the name ‘Terryn,’ along with a report that seems to have been made in haste.’

  ‘Cross-correlating… hard data not found. Commander,’ it said ruefully, ‘past the designation “Terryn” there’s very little on the fire caste databases about this warship.’

  ‘Interesting. Perhaps it contains beast-riding warriors, much as the kroot like to use. Keep searching, Oe-ken. I would rather not have any unwelcome surprises when the time comes to enact the takeover. Still, do not fear, little helper. We will force them to commit their strength, and the data will flow.’

  On Shadowsun’s command suite, the fire caste’s icons were sliding down the mountainsides into their designated zones. As the glare of the air caste’s high-orbit diversion gave way to dull moonlight, each cadre’s heavy elements began to move into position. Hammerhead and Skyray gunships prowled forward, each flanked by Devilfish transports, a wall of sleek ochre tanks waiting to show their true colours as killing machines.

  It was then that the hives awoke from their slumber.

  The skies were filled with such thunder it made a Vior’lan deathstorm look tame. Heavy munitions roared downward in a hail of shells that could tear a ferrocrete bunker apart as easily as it could a wooden box. The air above the Acacian Basin was darkened by the firepower roaring out of the hives, each Imperial metropolis hurling everything it could at the interlopers approaching their position.

  Yet despite all the fury, despite all the noise, not a single tau life signal faded to charcoal on Shadowsun’s command suite.

  The commander smiled thinly as she watched the Imperial hives vent their mindless, pointless wrath. Go on, she thought. Waste your ammunition. Waste as much as you like.

  The hive cities that dotted the Imperium grew almost organically over the centuries. New structures and statues were erected even as old ones sloughed away, complicating the already labyrinthine structures with every dubious new addition. Even comparatively young hives were so large, so moribund in their construction, that they were crippled by their own immense proportions. To Shadowsun, they were like fat old men that had undergone reconstructive surgery one too many times.

  During their approach to the Acacian Basin, Shadowsun had used the air caste’s orbital data to determine the location of each of the hive’s guns, and their possible fields of fire. She had correlated them against the data streams transmitted by each cadre’s pathfinder teams, projecting the elevation range of those guns and their estimated reach.

  Using Oe-ken’s formidable processing banks, she had then constructed a three-dimensional map of each hive’s blind spots. The charcoal grey of death denoted those areas covered by its guns, and healthy gold lit the zones that the hive’s bulk had occluded from its own sight. Her cadres’ symbols had glided into the golden slivers of safety overlaid on the master map she had transmitted. If her calculations were correct – and they invariably were – the warriors inside these zones were fundamentally safe.

  Convinced of their own idiot brawn, the hive’s gunners threw obscene amounts of ordnance towards the tau tanks lurking on their perimeters. They achieved nothing more than swathing the valley with shrouds of dust and foul-smelling smoke.

  It took the best part of an hour before the Imperials realised their mistake. It was time enough for Shadowsun to prepare detailed battle plans and approach vectors for every team under her command, and to arrange for the basin’s lines of reinforcement to be cut off.

  The cutting of the supply lines connecting each hive was a simple enough matter. The vast bulk of the Imperium’s armour took the form of tracked vehicles, so the air caste made neutralisation runs in the arid deserts between each hive, staying out of range of the Imperial guns to drop pulse bombs where the ferrocrete superhighways were weakest. Whenever the Imperium’s scrambled reinforcements left the ruined roads in favour of the parched wastes, they would throw up clouds of dust that would hang in Agrellan’s poisonous air. With such advance warning of their foes’ approach, the fire caste’s anti-gravity skimmers could roam the planet unimpeded.

  Once the last of the metallic mountains finally fell silent, Shadowsun slunk forward invisibly, the stealth elements of each of her cadres advancing on her cue. Barely a swirl of smoke marked their passage.

  They had reached the gold zones next to each hive before the echoes of the Imperial bombardment had stopped resounding from the mountainsides.

  Then the heavy elements of the tau cadres took their turn.

  The distinctive whip-crack of heavy railgun fire rang out across the basin, a quiet, precise sound after the tooth-rattling roar of the hive’s guns. The hypervelocity rounds they projected left tunnels of displaced air in their wake. Smoke and dust swirled around them like desert spirits startled from a lamp. The rounds thudded deep into the exterior slabs, at first achieving little more than to introduce a series of artificial fault lines. Yet each Hammerhead’s target had not been chosen at random.

  Pathfinder teams debarked from the Devilfish transports and painted each impact site with their markerlights. Moments later, massed squadrons of Skyray missile ships sent seekers soaring after the railgun volleys. The guide
d missiles detonated with pinpoint accuracy, each volley bringing hundreds of tonnes of ferrocrete tumbling down.

  To a casual observer, the hives had been grazed, nothing more. To those that could perceive the heat signatures of each hive’s walls, every exit, hangar and missile bay was at least partially buried by a small avalanche of rubble.

  The gold zones on Shadowsun’s command readout blinked, reconfigured and multiplied, a geometric landscape of possibilities that Oe-ken-yon updated for each encircling cadre to exploit.

  ‘Warriors of the fire caste, you may take these ugly monstrosities apart at your leisure,’ transmitted Shadowsun. ‘They cannot harm you now.’

  Chapter Three

  HIVE ACACIA SECUNDUS

  ACACIAN BASIN

  AGRELLAN, 742.999.M41

  A gun-studded slab of ferrocrete that could have crushed a Titan slid inexorably down the central spire of Hive Acacia Secundus. It crashed through the concentric circles of the hive’s waist and toppled sideways with majestic slowness, flattening a swathe of the underdistricts as it thundered to a halt. Rock dust billowed upwards as secondary landslides took yet more of the hive’s outer layer with them.

  Kor’sarro Khan grimaced. With the hives as densely populated as they were, that little disaster would have claimed tens of thousands, perhaps millions of human lives. If these xenos were allowed to continue their methodical destruction of the Acacian Basin, the death toll would soon reach the billions.

  ‘This has gone on long enough,’ the khan said to Sudabeh. ‘Let the others look to their own battles.’

  ‘Hives of this size can withstand a lot of punishment, my khan,’ replied Sudabeh. ‘Would it not be better to wait for Patriarch Tybalt’s Knights, or for Redstone’s Devils at the very least? With their help, we could cripple the foe’s chances of escape.’

  The khan just frowned, staring out as more tau missiles arced into the weak points of the hive’s architecture. Another set of spires crashed down, taking a wide strip of barnacle-habs to a dusty death.