Blades of Damocles

by Phil Kelly

  Kroot. A cannibal thrall-race of the Tau Empire, according to the pre-war brief. Barbaric mercenaries with an insatiable hunger for warm flesh.

  Numitor was already moving, bulling forward towards a thicket of vegetation that shivered and waved. Sure enough, two of the long-quilled creatures could be seen within. The muzzles of their long rifles were pointed at Numitor’s head. He ducked fast, and a crackling bolt of energy burnt past his ear. The second struck home, slamming into the cables of his breastplate. The stink of burning permaplastic filled the sergeant’s nostrils, but he was too elated to care. This was a foe he understood, and knew how to kill. He would charge down a hundred of them and not break stride.

  Numitor hit the thicket of foliage like an industrial ram, a clawing sweep of his power fist tearing away a massive swathe of vegetation. A xenos mercenary seeking shelter in the thicket’s midst took Numitor’s outstretched fingers full in the ribcage. It went down in a spray of black fluids. Numitor was already on the second creature, batting its long-barrelled rifle aside with his bolt pistol before firing point blank. There was a boom and a backwash of heat as the bolt burst its cranium, sending wet fibrous matter and fizzing sparks in all directions. Bionics, thought Numitor as he span for another target. Not unusual for a mercenary caste, and irrelevant when an explosive bolt hit home.

  The clearing around Numitor seethed with violence. Every one of the Ultramarines was either engaged in a close-quarter firefight or was battling in frantic melee combat with a tall, beaked warrior. The kroot they had encountered on Vespertine had been rapacious carnivores, strung with trophy-cords and pouches containing the remains of those they had overcome in battle. These ones hooted and cackled as they fired blazing bullets of energy from their long rifles. Others whipped the bladed shafts of the guns around, using the spikes that jutted from stock and muzzle as combinations of axe and bayonet. Numitor laughed in contempt as a potent cocktail of chemostimulants invigorated his system. Such primitive weapons had little hope of felling a Space Marine.

  Sicarius went on the attack again, his tempest blade describing a perfect figure-of-eight as he drove his attack home into a knot of xenos gunmen. With him was Denturis, twin chainswords slashing arms from shoulders and heads from necks. The warrior grace that marked his sergeant’s attacks was absent, but the results were much the same.

  Veletan was standing bolt upright nearby with his chainsword at guard stance, firing his bolt pistol with impressive precision into the kroot trying to charge him down. Each shot sent a body tumbling back as if yanked away by an invisible hand before the bolt detonated, splattering each target’s central mass in a flash of light and spraying black liquids.

  There was a metallic clang to Numitor’s right as a spry kroot warrior smacked its gun-stave into Glavius’ battleplate. The blow, aimed for the throat, rebounded from the Ultramarine’s slim gorget. Glavius quickly slashed through the long rifle with a backhand sweep of his roaring chainsword, splinters of hardwood flying even as the tip of his blade caught the creature’s beak. The kroot was pulled suddenly forward, the chewing teeth ripping its skull into splinters. The scent of burning electrics filled the air, and a confusion of multicoloured sparks hissed from the alien’s ruined head.

  Nearby, thick smoke wisped from the corpses left in Duolor’s wake. The Iaxian punched a mercenary from its feet with the hilt of his recharging plasma pistol before mag-locking it to his belt and smoothly drawing a combat knife instead. Colnid, low on ammo, was fighting with chainsword and fist. He smashed a kroot’s throat with a sharp jabbing punch before taking its head with a sweep of his chainsword. Gore jetted from the gristly stump of its neck as it toppled away.

  Numitor was charging to aid his brothers when sleek quadrupedal forms darted through the jungle, shivering the greenery. The sergeant saw one of the things clearly for a moment, a long-beaked xenohound near the size of a horse. Another followed it, then a third, all moving uncannily fast. Numitor loosed a snap shot at the closest, but the creature had already slipped past.

  There was a prickling at the back of Numitor’s neck. Suddenly he was slammed from behind, pitching forward and curling his shoulder on instinct. He hit the ground at a good angle, rolling with the blow. Another heavy impact sent him sprawling. The creature that had bowled him over was a hideous fusion of raptor and hunting hound, lean and evil of aspect. Jagged jaws yawned towards him.

  Numitor clubbed the hound-creature’s heavy head with a sidelong swipe from his bolt pistol. The thing’s bite missed him by a hand’s breadth. That split second’s respite was all the sergeant needed. He reached up with his power glove and grabbed the thing around the midriff before making a fist. It was crushed into halves, bisected in an uncoiling heap of spooling wires and crackling orbs that squished between Numitor’s fingers. Dark fluids sluiced from its torn innards to foul the Space Marine’s armour.

  Another kroot hound leaped from his blind spot, but the battle instincts of the Adeptus Astartes were ingrained in every cell and synapse, and Numitor backhanded the creature so hard it burst. Unclean liquids spattered his armour once again. One side was completely black with the stuff, his Ultramarian heraldry hidden by a strange oily slick. It smelled not only of gore, but of lubricant, long-chain synthetics and microhydraulic oils. These kroot seemed to be muscle and bone, but inhabiting them were heretical machine intelligences, more like the drones they had encountered in the cradle chamber than living, sentient creatures.

  It made little difference. They would die, artificial or not.

  There was a bellow from the other side of the clearing, inhuman and loud. A snatch of shouted Talassarian battle cant followed, then another roar. Numitor sprang into a crouch, bolt pistol tracking movement nearby. He blasted a kroot mercenary off-balance just as the creature swung its rifle-blade at the back of Kaetoros’ skull. The xenos sprawled forward, then physically burst apart as the bolt in its torso exploded. Kaetoros’ flaking pauldron was spattered with vile fluids. The flamer specialist raised his weapon and a spear of ignited promethium stabbed out. It sent a nearby knot of kroot staggering away, aflame. Kaetoros dipped his shoulder into the roaring fire of his killshot, burning the unclean alien filth from his scorched armour before turning back towards Numitor.

  ‘Only half a flask left,’ said Kaetoros. ‘We’ll be kicking them to death at this rate.’

  Numitor hustled past a kroot corpse, its skull laid open by a chainsword slash to reveal the circuitry beneath. He had seen a similar sight on sacred Macragge; the aftermath of a training regime involving the blade-servitors of ancient practice cages. Like the servitors, these kroot creatures were not true warriors, but test subjects – puppet troops devised only for theoretical conflicts.

  Numitor’s mind raced. Did the tau have plans to make war upon their long-standing allies, the kroot? Did they seek to master every eventuality, every possible clash before it even started?

  Perhaps, said a nagging voice in Numitor’s mind, this nascent xenos empire was a true danger after all.

  The choking black smoke of Kaetoros’ flamer shot cleared for a moment, and Numitor was yanked back to the present. Ahead, Sicarius was fighting off three stave-armed mercenaries, two of whom were pressing home a berserk attack from opposing flanks. The third hooked a four-clawed hand around Sicarius’ wrist, pulling his tempest blade from his grip. The sergeant shot it in the face with his plasma pistol, the roaring column of energy taking its head and boring a hole in the tree trunk beyond. Without missing a beat he pressed the red-hot barrel into the throat of the second kroot warrior. There was a strangled squawk as the xenos creature fell backwards. The kroot on Sicarius’ flank came in hard. The sergeant ducked, driving an elbow into its solar plexus before stabbing up with the edge of his hand to crush its windpipe. The creature spasmed and clawed as it leaned in, its beak snapping in desperation at Sicarius’ temple.

  Numitor aimed, about to take an intervention shot. Sicarius suddenly swu
ng away, letting the creature topple forward before coming back in to grab it in a headlock. With a twist, he tore its quilled skull from its neck.

  Something flashed in the foliage to Numitor’s right, a series of dark silhouettes running along a thin gully. He snapped off a round, but the bolt found nothing. Its detonation sent up a spray of mud with a dull thump. There was a cackling caw from the right. Three of Antelion’s men levelled their bolters and sent a deafening volley of explosions into the foliage, ripping apart a wide area but not spilling so much as a drop of blood.

  Numitor saw another flash of movement in the canopy above. He raised his bolt pistol, but the weapon’s weight betrayed the fact he was running dangerously low on ammunition.

  ‘Killshots and bladework only!’ he shouted. ‘They’re deliberately draining our ammo!’

  There was another roar from up ahead, much closer this time. Charging out of the jungle came something muscular and hideous, a bellowing krootoid giant that bore down upon Sicarius with shocking speed. Its boulder-like head was capped with a blunt beak, jagged and grey with two vivid yellow stripes down its length. Porcine eyes glimmered with malice. Its shoulders were thick bulwarks of muscle; Numitor could feel as well as hear the thump-thump, thump-thump of its galloping lope across the jungle floor.

  As Numitor watched, two of Squad Antelion tracked the thing smoothly with the barrels of their bolters. The creature’s flanks were already bleeding from cratered bolt wounds when another shot hit home, all but tearing the krootoid’s right hind leg from its hip.

  The beast roared in pain and rage, the sound strangely metallic, but still its rampage would not be halted. Careening forward, it smashed Golotan aside into a tree. The Ultramarine dropped and rolled into a nest of briars without a sound. Still bellowing, the giant leaped over him, crashing through a curtain of long-dead vines, a monster on the rampage. The beast’s trunk-thick arms swung as it brought huge fists to bear.

  Two more kroot warriors vaulted from the trees to attack Sicarius. Recovering his tempest blade from the forest floor with a deft flick of his foot, the sergeant thrust the tip through the ribcage of one of his assailants. Two-handed, he brought the shuddering kroot-corpse around into the path of the oncoming monstrosity, simultaneously kicking the second xenos mercenary in the stomach so hard that Numitor heard its spine break.

  Sicarius dropped to one knee and leaned blade-first into the charge of the giant krootoid. The beast was fast enough to veer aside, its massive block of a fist slamming in towards the sergeant’s pauldron, but Sicarius was already moving. The creature’s roundhouse blow clipped him, rocking him back, but he rode the force of the impact. The point of his tempest blade came up to impale the charging monstrosity through the mouth, the creature’s own colossal weight driving the blade further into its brain until the tip burst bloodily from the back of its head.

  Numitor blinked in stunned admiration, then forced himself to focus. ‘Inbound!’ Antelion was shouting. ‘Warsuit, macro class!’

  There was a sudden bass crack, so loud it felt like Numitor’s skull had split down the middle. Then the world was light and noise. The sergeant’s every sense was consumed in a maelstrom of sensation. Blinking hard with his ears still ringing, Numitor cleared his vision to see a dozen tree trunks falling. The air was thick with splinters and evaporated mulch.

  A crater had appeared at the battle’s edge, high-sided and even. It was almost as wide as the clearing itself, and nothing was left within its geometrically perfect confines other than a few wisps of vaporised matter.

  Something loomed in the distance, partially hidden by the trees. Some kind of war engine glinted amongst the foliage, far larger than the machines they had fought in Gel’bryn City. This monstrosity did not hover above the ground, nor did it move adroitly to avoid retaliation.

  It was far too massive for that.

  ‘Get in close!’ shouted Antelion, his bolter shots chewing layers of ablative armour from the enormous machine. ‘Don’t let it draw a bead on you!’

  The Eighth Company were quick to obey. Power-armoured figures pounded through the jungle, some barrelling through cordons of kroot warriors with chainswords slashing whilst others fired from the hip as they sprinted towards the new threat. The warsuit launched a salvo of arm-length missiles that soared through the trees, winding like desert snakes as they sought a kill. Numitor hurdled a fallen tree trunk, diving out of the path of one missile only to cross two kroot hounds that burst from the undergrowth to leap at his heels. A second missile clipped his pauldron, jarring him hard and forcing him into a sudden dive. Deflected by the curvature of Numitor’s shoulder armour, the warhead detonated in the foliage behind, blasting one of the kroot hounds to stringy ruin and sending the other tumbling away.

  There was the telltale whoosh of more missiles inbound. Numitor tucked his shoulder into a combat roll, came up, and burst through a cluster of hanging lianas. Vaulting a swampy morass, he splashed down to skid unsteadily in the black mire, clapping his gauntlet around a thick sapling and using his momentum to pivot hard into a new direction. A heartbeat later a third sleek-bodied missile blasted the sapling to pieces, throwing him forward with concussive force. He pinballed from a pair of thornoaks to spin around hard. He looked up, and up again.

  Before Numitor was a silver-skinned tau walker that was closer to a titan in size than the warsuits he had seen on Vespertine. The giant machine was squat-bodied but enormous, a pair of tiny sensor heads cresting a torso the size of a command bunker. Its legs were splayed wide like those of a wrestler anticipating an opponent’s charge, piston-driven dewclaws giving more stability to compensate for a devastating recoil. Its barrel chest was flanked by two boxy missile arrays, jutting warheads arranged grid-like in each fascia. The weapons systems were so huge that even with arms spread wide, Numitor could not have spanned the distance of a single launcher’s frontage. Auxiliary guns were fused to the flanks and underside of each missile array, whilst still more bristled atop them.

  But it was the weapon on the warsuit’s shoulder that robbed Numitor of his battle-calm. Rectangular in cross-section, the primary cannon was a good ten metres in length, a massively up-scaled version of the pulse rifle used by the tau’s line infantry. The air shimmered around the gun’s generator cores. Leaves blackened in the canopy only a few metres above it as the cannon’s generator system shed its excess heat. Numitor felt his throat tighten. A weapon like that belonged on a spacecraft, not on the front line. A single direct hit could sign the death warrant for the entire strike force.

  The low thrum of the warsuit’s primary weapon system rose slowly to a crescendo, bringing a cold clarity to Numitor’s adrenalin-fuelled state. The gun was pivoting, the machine waddling backwards with ground-shaking footsteps in an attempt to get a clear shot. He had to move, and fast. With a flare of his stuttering jump pack, Numitor hurled himself between the trees.

  A blast of light and sound, sudden and terrible. The sergeant was sent sprawling through the air as if swatted by some wrathful god. He smashed bodily into a thornoak, tumbling down and turning groggily as he scrambled on hands and knees into the undergrowth. Another crater had suddenly appeared behind him, identical in size and aspect to the steaming hole that had been torn on the other side of the clearing.

  Now, whilst the main weapon was recharging. Now was the time to strike.

  Numitor coaxed the last burst of speed from his jump pack, feeling the lightness of its empty fuel cells as faltering turbines turned his charge into a headlong leap. A pair of missiles shot from the giant warsuit’s arm-arrays, contrails of heat distortion rippling behind them as they veered in. Numitor grinned like a death’s head as he twisted in mid-flight. The twin missiles came within a fraction of an inch on either side of him, crashing into the foliage behind to detonate with a spectacular boom.

  The giant machine was a preposterous asset to deploy in such dense terrain, its slow and clumsy progre
ss through the forest in stark contrast to the cybernetic kroot warriors that had slipped through without hindrance. All around the goliath were trees that had been shouldered aside, some lying diagonal with roots half-torn from the ground, others flattened completely. The destruction was a testament to the raw power the xenos scientists had at their disposal, and it did not bode well.

  Numitor ran along a thin culvert, Squad Antelion hustling forward in his wake. The tau warsuit was in sight up ahead, bringing its guns to bear once more. The sergeant launched up to spring from an outcrop of rock with his power fist raised. Bolts of plasma flashed past him from the warsuit’s auxiliary systems. Its torso loomed before him, a cliff of dull silver alloy. Numitor put everything he had into a wide haymaker, the power fist connecting with such force it blasted a crater in the thing’s chest and sent a spider’s web of cracks racing across its alloy shielding.

  The artillery machine did not so much as flinch.

  There was a high-pitched whine from the grotesquely large cannon upon the warsuit’s shoulder, and a flash of light so intense Numitor’s autosenses cut out altogether. When they recovered, the stink of burnt foliage and cooked flesh filled the air. The status runes of brothers Hereclor, Clavius, Daen, and Aurius had winked out, replaced by tiny skulls.