Damocles

by Various

  ‘May I append my datacompile, commander?’

  ‘If you must, but I have more important duties to attend to at this moment. Speed can be a weapon too, drone commandant.’

  ‘As you say, Commander Shadowsun,’ said the drone, its elevation sinking as it drifted away once more.

  ‘Shas’vre Drai, is your team ready for battle?’ said Shadowsun, spinning around hard to face the tree line.

  ‘Ah… yes, my commander,’ said Shas’vre Drai, emerging from the jungle in a shimmer of emerald light. ‘May I speak?’

  ‘You may. Make it quick.’

  ‘I see that you have deviated from your usual strategies in order to adopt Mont’ka, my commander.’

  ‘Continue with caution,’ she replied, her fusion blasters whining to full charge.

  ‘Ah… I also theorise that strategy could yield optimum results, though I have served alongside… alongside other commanders in my time. Timing is everything, as Commander Puretide taught us. The preparatory phase and the subsequent honing of this operation seems… perhaps… a little perfunctory?’ The stealth-suited veteran took two small steps back, his body language defensive.

  ‘We took extensive assessments of our prey upon Agrellan, Shas’vre Drai,’ said Shadowsun, her brow furrowed. ‘I have analysed them several times over. These are the very same warriors – if anything, they are fewer in number than predicted. All that remains is to enact the slaughter. Yet you quote Commander Puretide’s teachings, much as a teacher would to a novice. Do you intend to oppose me?’

  ‘No, my commander,’ said Drai, horrified at the very idea. ‘Your word is final!’

  ‘- - - HE LIES - - - HE SEEKS YOUR CROWN - - - SEND HIM TO HIS DEATH - - -’

  Shadowsun snarled in irritation, but did not blink-push the autotrans away. No time to think about whatever inexplicable glitch had taken hold of her battlesuit on Agrellan. Not now.

  Not when she was about to turn this green and peaceful world into a boiling cauldron of war.

  The tau cadres swept along the mist-wreathed road, Shadowsun a shimmering white blur at their head. She was ready and willing to blast a breach in the fortress walls herself, if it came to it. Yet part of her would relish the sight of the Riptides in action once more. If they could blast open the perimeter wall of an Imperial hive city, they could certainly deal with the lumpen stone fortress that squatted on the plateau ahead.

  The tower-capped stronghold reminded Shadowsun of the tales her dome-tutors had told her as a child. Tales of the Mon’tau, the time of terror, the great darkness before the ethereals had brought the tau the light of a shared destiny.

  In the dim prehistory of their race, the castes had been at war, and Shadowsun’s hot-tempered predecessors had sought to tear down the castles of the builder tribes. Their primary settlement had been Fio’taun, a mountain plateau much like the one they were approaching along the misty jungle road. Atop it had been the mightiest of earthen citadels, a fortress long besieged by an alliance of fierce plains tribes and the winged tau of the peaks. Five long seasons her primitive ancestors had braved the cannons of the citadel atop the peak. Such wanton bloodshed. So many deaths, for so little reason.

  Strange how the cycles of time revolved.

  Something flashed in the jungle mists, a string of illuminations like will-o’-the-wisps in the distance. The autotrans bar slid unbidden into her helmet’s viewscreen.

  ‘- - - BEWARE LITTLE ICE MAIDEN - - -’ it spooled, ‘- - - YOUR DOOM IS CLOSE - - -’

  Crawling suspicion covered Shadowsun’s skin, and she boosted one of the smaller audiobars that had sprung to life alongside the autotrans. There it was, the telltale whistle of solid ordnance.

  ‘All castes crouch and shield your south!’ she transmitted as widely as possible. ‘The gue’la attack!’

  As one, the fire warriors in the jungle road dropped to one knee and raised the large oblong plates of their shoulder armour to face the hard-packed road leading back the way they had come. A heartbeat later, the peaty earth was torn upwards in an ear-blasting string of explosions that echoed from the jungle eaves. Dozens of Shadowsun’s rearguard were flung high into the air, their limbs ripped from their bodies. Here and there pulse rifles discharged random sprays of plasma as disembodied fingers clutched tight.

  Shadowsun’s sensor suite flared the trajectory of another incoming barrage, but this time it came down behind her rearguard. Just as she was turning to survey the damage the tree line erupted into life. Hundreds of pale gue’la brutes roared out from the jungle in crude but effective camouflage, many of their number crying out praise to the Imperium’s dead god. As the tau reeled in surprise, more and more of the gue’la emerged from the mists from either side of the road, their rifles spitting laser blasts into fire warriors and battlesuits alike. Some of them charged headlong at the fire warriors hunkered down at the side of the road, drawing knives the length of a tau’s arm and plunging them into the weak points of their armour.

  One in every ten of the gue’la emerging from the trees carried a cylindrical tank of the volatile liquid the Imperials loved to employ so much. Cackling with alien glee, the gue’la troopers sent whooshing clouds of flame into the ranks of the tau firing back at them. Whole crowds of noble fire warriors were caught in the deadly clouds and transformed into burning, flailing puppets. One Imperial soldier caught a pulse rifle volley in the chest, its bolts slamming right through his torso and igniting the tanks on his back with a loud whooompf.

  The thick smoke of burning flesh mingled with the jungle mists, turning the ambush into a hellish confusion of half-glimpsed tableaus. Shadowsun boosted up high, blasting columns of energy into the hollering gue’la troopers wherever a clear shot appeared.

  ‘Riptides, target the tree lines! Heavy burst cannon only! Rearguard, move in to engage at close quarters! For the Greater Good, engage!’

  The XV104 battlesuits at the heart of the fire warrior phalanx stood inviolate in the chaos, each pivoting on their waist gimbals to level their arm cannons at a different section of the tree line. Nova reactors thrummed to full charge, the rotary whine of their multiple barrels in stark counterpoint. As one the Riptides opened fire, a bass voh-voh-voh-voh booming from their cannons. Thick cylinders of plasma scythed down trees and gue’la warriors alike in a storm of indiscriminate violence.

  The blazing weapon systems panned back and forth across the tree lines, reaping a madman’s toll on the gue’la platoons charging in. Here and there close-range las-fire picked at the Riptides to no more effect than light summer hail. Well-aimed krak grenades detonated against their joints, blackening paint but leaving the superstructure shining undamaged beneath.

  The reactors that powered the battlesuits pulsed blue light into the mist as their rate of fire grew steadily higher. With a loud bang, something overloaded inside the Riptide closest to Shadowsun, a thin shriek coming from the battlesuit’s shuddering torso as it vented a geyser of steam.

  It was all the chance the gue’la needed. They swarmed up the giant’s legs like arboreal simians, knives stabbing into the gaps between its armoured plates as their wiry fingers wedged into cracks. Shadowsun scythed past to cut two of them from the Riptide’s back with a precision blast of fusion fire. Oe-nu and Oe-hei hurtled after her, Oe-nu ramming bodily into a third and pitching him from the Riptide with a crack of broken bone.

  Curving upright once more, Shadowsun glimpsed a scar-ravaged gue’la with a glowering bionic eye climb up high on the malfunctioning Riptide. He plunged a metallic arm deep into the battlesuit’s neck joint, rooting around before yanking half of a bloody tau head from the aperture he had torn in its metal hide. Shadowsun’s stomach turned. She pivoted in mid-air in preparation to loose a blast right at the scarred gue’la, but the obscuring fog closed in around her once more, hiding him from sight. Her meteorological readouts showed that the strange mist was thicker than any natural phen
omenon had any right to be. She eye-flicked through her secondary perception modes. Sonar sight was next to useless with the crump of artillery fire so close by, and strange red lightning haunted the electromagnetic spectrum.

  More gue’la mind-science.

  ‘Counterstrike cadres! Open a path, pressing north!’ she cried, her voice high above the confusion of battle. ‘Oe-ken-yon, maximum altitude! Locate the area where visibility is poorest and append details as soon as possible!’

  In the mists below, black-armoured gue’ron’sha hammered out from the mists on columns of blue fire, slamming into the stealth battlesuits that stalked the perimeter of the battle. Everywhere the Space Marines struck they bowled over their targets, each battlesuit’s chameleon cells flickering a hundred colours at once as their owners slammed into the dirt.

  There was no way Shadowsun could get a clear shot, especially as the stealth battlesuits were already recalibrating to disguise them against the mud. Their Space Marine attackers had them up close, a terrifying thought even to a veteran like Shadowsun. Chaintoothed swords sawed through elbow and knee joints in spurts of dark blood, lightning-sheathed talons ripped right through armour to carve apart the pilots beneath. Death-symbols flickered charcoal grey in her command suite. Crying out, Shadowsun loosed a blast that cored gue’ron’sha and victim alike as she hunted desperately for the orchestrators of the ambush.

  An isometric plane opened in her sensor suite as Oe-ken-yon blipped an aerial view of the battle. She read it with one eye as the other traced a sword-wielding gue’ron’sha in the mists ahead. Her right-hand blaster tore his torso in two in a cloud of vaporising blood. The thickest part of the mist clouding Oe-ken-yon’s isometric was at the road’s edge. Somewhere in that vicinity was the gue’ron’sha elder, thought Shadowsun, the summoner of mists and wielder of mind-science. If he was the architect of the trap that had closed around them, then he would be the next to die.

  Twisting to kick an oncoming gue’la flame-trooper back into the mist, Shadowsun eye-flicked through her recorder console’s footage until she reached the battle at Blackshale Ridge. She isolated the elder with the raised staff, blink-pushing his silhouette into her ambient scan.

  Less than a heartbeat later, her sensor suite blipped a lock.

  Kor’sarro pounded through the mists towards the battle, Sudabeh chanting strange low syllables at his side. Though the khan was not accustomed to simply running into combat like a steedless stripling, their entire strategy hinged not upon the sudden thrust of the spear, but upon a noose drawn tight with stealth and sorcery.

  It felt strangely freeing. With no less a leader than the Chapter Master of the Raven Guard in command, he was better able to enjoy the primal thrill of the chase and the anticipation of the killing to come. Up ahead were Severax and Shrike, powering through the jungle shadows with controlled bursts of their shielded jump packs. Gloomy souls both, but by the Great Khan they knew how to spring an ambush.

  The mists parted to reveal a knot of tau warriors. Those on the outside knelt to stab bolts of plasma into the Catachans rushing towards them from their flank. Making use of the distraction, Severax hit the xenos infantry like a Donorian fiend high on the scent of its own blood. His crackling talons slashed left and right to cut apart those tau he had not flattened with the sheer crushing weight of his charge. A second later Shadow Captain Shrike boosted up and over his master, plunging both lightning claws into the back of a battlesuit twice his size before ripping the thing into three pieces with a cruciform slash.

  The khan laughed in exultation, activating Moonfang’s power field and bringing it round in a waist-high slash to carve a pair of tau in half at the waist. One of their kneeling comrades blasted a point-blank volley right at his chestplate, knocking him back a pace and filling his flaring nostrils with the scent of burning ceramite. The tau warrior scrabbled for a reload, his fingers shaking with fear. Kor’sarro cut him down with contemptuous ease.

  Up ahead, the mist parted to reveal a trio of the massive warsuits they had encountered upon Agrellan. The closest of their number ceased stamping a Catachan into a mess of shattered bone and turned with a whirr of servomotors, its comrades following suit. Blue light poured from the barrels of their weapons as they levelled their cannons at the khan and his brothers.

  Kor’sarro roared in denial and sprinted forwards, planting his foot on the helmet of the kneeling tau warrior and launching diagonally upwards. He bounced hard from the giant’s cannon, forcing it wide just as the xenos pilot discharged it. The khan felt the violent backwash of the cannon’s blast catch him in mid-air, slamming him upwards into its midsection. On instinct he grabbed the ring of armour at its waist, dangling with one hand as he fought to bring Moonfang to bear with the other. With his hair on fire and half-blind from the close-range explosion, the khan hacked at the giant’s leg joints, spitting acid-laced blood onto its ochre hull.

  As Kor’sarro sawed the point of Moonfang into the warsuit’s hip joint it stuck fast, lodged deep in the ball of the articulated socket. Growling in frustration, the khan planted one armoured foot on his blade and used it to boost upward, climbing hand over hand up the monster’s torso. Stepping backward, the warsuit brought its shield arm in tight, smashing the captain so hard his nose broke upon its chestplate. The White Scar hung on regardless, spitting teeth. Heat boiled out of the vent on the side of the thing’s torso, its backwash so intense that the white paint of his ceramite peeled away across a full half of his body. Barely a metre behind him the warsuit’s cannon arm blazed blue, no doubt powering up to slay yet more of his battle-brothers.

  Inspiration struck, and the khan swung his lower body across the chestplate as he grabbed a krak grenade from his belt. Riding the momentum of his return, he pulled the grenade’s pin with his teeth and reached out to slam it hard into the vent on his right. The impossible energies boiling out of the vent cooked the flesh of his fingers inside his armoured gauntlet, but the grenade stuck tight. Kor’sarro let go and kicked away from the xenos machine hard, rolling with the impact once his backpack slammed into the jungle road below.

  The looming warsuit brought its cannon’s muzzle to bear, the light of its barrel-slits blinding in its intensity. The khan dived sidelong into the corpse-strewn mud, grabbing a dead tau and raising its cadaver as a pathetically inadequate shield.

  The tau machine’s torso thrummed, screeched, and exploded in a fountain of blue-white light.

  ‘Ha!’ shouted the khan, ‘Not so clever!’

  The warsuit’s explosion had burnt away much of the mist around it, revealing Severax and Shrike as they ripped into the second of the towering machines. With their jetpacks to keep them airborne the Raven Guard were pitiless and predatory in their attack, a pair of black hyperfelids mauling a savannah mammut. Sparks flew as they stabbed their lightning claws in and out of the warsuit’s torso, seeking tau blood. Suddenly Severax cried in triumph and ripped open the machine’s breastplate door. The pilot crouched inside looked pitifully vulnerable as the hissing mist of decompression revealed him to the world. Shrike swung under the thing’s shield arm, punching a four-taloned claw deep into the pilot’s chest before kicking away to find more prey.

  As the khan worked Moonfang free from the remains of his own warsuit kill, the third of their number stomped in, shrugging shouting Catachans from its massive shoulders. Its heavy burst cannon cut down a trio of Raven Guard, scattering their remains bodily into the mist. To the khan’s eyes the oncoming machine appeared to crackle, spidery red bolts playing over it from head to toe.

  The psychic lightning intensified as the entire warsuit glowed red, disappearing with a thunderclap boom to leave nothing behind but the stink of ozone. Kor’sarro turned to look for Sudabeh. Sure enough he was striding through the mist towards them, his eyes still glowing the colour of fresh blood.

  ‘Stormseer! You teleported it, brother!’ cried the khan in delight. ‘Where to?’

>   ‘I have no idea,’ laughed Sudabeh.

  The khan’s eyes creased as he raised his blade in a warrior’s salute.

  Then Sudabeh burst apart in an explosion of superheated blood.

  ‘Mind-wielder neutralised,’ transmitted Shadowsun, launching backwards and away from the screaming war-leader that was firing his pistol at her from the jungle road. ‘All Crisis units, close on indicated position. I have located their leaders. Mont’ka is…’

  Her words trailed off as the mist shrouding the forest stirred, thinned, and then dissipated completely.

  Two columns of white gue’ron’sha vehicles were grinding along the shallow rivers on either side of the jungle road, their occupants deploying into the undergrowth and fanning out to cut off all routes of escape. A disaster in the making, but that alone, her cadres could have coped with. It was the sight on the road ahead that left her speechless.

  Up on the plateau, the gates of the stone fortress had opened. A thirty-strong army of Imperial walkers was striding out towards them, the black-iron devil at their head.

  ‘All cadres, back to the dropsite!’ shouted Shadowsun, her mind whirling as she desperately sought a tactic or strategy that would see them safe. Even as she spoke, she saw that yet another Imperial army was moving into position, a phalanx of green gue’la tanks that were driving up the jungle road right where she had intended to rally. Fear’s cold claw closed on her throat; fear of failure, and of causing the unnecessary death of so many tau. They were trapped, she thought, her mind drifting from the battle around her to a point of abstract thought. Trapped in the final act of a masterfully disguised Kauyon.

  A tide of self-loathing rose within Shadowsun as she realised she had fallen for the same strategy she had used upon her foes a hundred times and more. She forced herself to focus, blink-pushing mute the screams of her dying comrades so she could think straight.