Blades of Damocles

by Phil Kelly

  And then the sky strobed white.

  As soon as the Valkyrie pilot and his wingmen had left the protective aegis of the anti-aircraft gun batteries, four tau squadrons appeared from over the tallest buildings to fire everything they had at the ad hoc Imperial squadron. A lattice of white energy and whooshing missiles streaked out from the tau craft to blast into the Valkyrie and its Vendetta wingmen, tearing them to pieces in a chain explosion that cast stark shadows across the fortress zone. Fiery debris rained from the sky.

  Astra Militarum troopers were scrambling from the bastions to take firing positions behind the aegis lines, heavy weapon teams setting up atop every roof. Numitor was slide-checking the new clip in his bolt pistol when he noticed a swarm of tau drones detach from a damaged section of the burnt-out transmotive rail, drifting away into the streets. They were not the gun drones he was used to, but smaller grey-white models with complex manipulator arms around their circumferences. Spies, no doubt.

  His heart lurched. Manipulator arms, like those of a servitor.

  They were not spies, but builders.

  ‘Gunsights trained on the transmotive rail!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll have company any second!’

  A blaze of blue light came from the east. Numitor’s photolenses hazed for a moment, then sprang back into focus to reveal five massively-armoured Terminators shadowed in a dome of sickly orange energy. Four of the huge Ultramarines bore massive storm shields in one hand and long-hafted thunder hammers in the other, but their sergeant wielded a crackling broadsword of raw, angry plasma energy. Shielded by their bulk was a Space Marine with the mechanism of a psychic hood gripping his temples like a vice. His staff was raised aloft, a horrible amber light burning in his eyes as corpuscant played along its length.

  Epistolary Elixus, and he had brought brothers of the very highest calibre.

  ‘Do not yield!’ he called out, his stentorian tones electrifying. ‘Look to the rooftops!’

  Numitor heard the same voice in his head, this time cultured and smooth. +The tau are launching simultaneous ambushes upon every Imperial zone in every city,+ it said, the feeling of psychic communication eerie and unsettling. +This is the last site still standing. It must hold.+

  The severed wing of a Vendetta smashed and bounced between the buildings to the west, pinwheeling end over end before ploughing into the side of a bastion and crashing over the aegis defence line in a flurry of sparks. It crippled three Astra Militarum troopers before one of the Terminators strode to meet it and, with an overhand blow of his thunder hammer, smashed it into skidding scrap.

  Everywhere, on rooftops in every direction, the signature ochre and white of the tau warrior caste could be seen. Bulky warsuits stepped from the elevator columns of buildings to take their place alongside massing infantry. In the street, wedge-shaped formations of hover tanks glided into view.

  As Numitor had predicted, a transmotive zoomed over the sweeprail section the Imperial defenders had previously thought impassable, moving over the tumbled section on a freshly-rebuilt mag-rail before hissing to an abrupt halt. Warsuits shot from the ejection cradles on the transport’s roof to take position atop cylindrical hab towers. Teams of tau riflemen disembarked from the transmotive’s carriages to form gun lines upon nearby roofs, whilst others took position on the sweeprail itself.

  Without exception, the tau ambushers were taking elevated positions. They were forcing the vast majority of the Imperial troops to engage in a one-sided firefight, with no hope of rushing them. With the Munitorum base’s air cover gone, the tactic would likely see the defenders all cut down in a matter of minutes.

  Pulse fire lanced down into the streets, the Imperial Guard returning fire. Sicarius’ jump pack cycled active, but before he blasted skyward, he turned to Numitor.

  ‘Get in close, you think?’ he shouted.

  ‘If you can,’ said Numitor. ‘Epistolary Elixus, will you aid us? Can you reach the roofs?’

  ‘I can,’ said Elixus.

  ‘Hit them with everything they won’t expect. We only have one chance. Fail here, and we will be wiped from the face of the planet.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  REALISATION/HOUR OF THE WITCH

  Commander Sha’vastos looked with distaste upon the myriad readouts and command screens of his personalised XV85 Enforcer-model Crisis suit. Its arrangement was no longer to his liking.

  He eye-flicked a requisition for a standard model XV8 to be made available to him upon return to Shas’ar’tol high command. Everything was ready; the dual strike was set, a blend of kauyon trap and mont’ka blow that had the Imperials all but defeated purely by their relative positioning. So why did the latest generation of commanders feel the need to overcomplicate matters, clinging to so many auxiliary information feeds as if they would increase the harmony of the moment? Perhaps that was why the fire caste had been straying from the path to victory of late.

  ‘To embrace simplicity is to walk the road to perfection,’ he said in a voice not quite his own.

  ‘Commander?’ came the reply over the cadre-net from his saz’nami, Ula’tan. His icon shone the blue-grey steel of uncertainty. ‘Signal ambiguous. Should we let the killing blow fall?’

  ‘Strike,’ said Sha’vastos. ‘That is the distillation of purpose into a single perfect moment. Be the first to strike.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ said Ula’tan. ‘Commencing.’

  Commander Sha’vastos watched the elements of his strategy fall into place like the interlocking pieces of a meditation mosaic. Each team was playing its part until the whole was complete. The bait, provided by the noble Warghost Ob’lotai 3-0 in the form of a passing drone-plane, had drawn off the gue’la aircraft as surely as the hornet draws the gnawspider from its web. The sting had been soon to follow.

  Sha’vastos’ teams had made their way through the city’s underground network and then ascended through the spinal elevators of the district’s buildings to emerge upon their roofs. It was as he had always told them: to reach the heavens, a warrior must first learn to crawl. They had opened fire with pleasing synchrony, just as they had in a dozen different locations across the planet. He knew with all the conviction of the Tau’va that his fellow Swords of Puretide were also bringing their strategic brilliance to bear. This war would soon be over, and then the real conquest of the Imperium could start.

  Commander Sha’vastos idly considered joining the fight in person, for something within him was stirred by the sight of blood and the pungent smell of smoke. There was no real need, he reflected, pushing down the impulse with a deep, measured breath. Let the lower ranks of shas make their mark this day. A true master of the Code of Fire achieves victory without once drawing his blade. The air caste also had their part to play, of course, as was only proper in the name of the Tau’va. But he would remain on high, overseeing the slaughter.

  ‘To bind the beast, first blunt its claws,’ said the commander. With the code phrase given, twelve teams of missile-armed Crisis and Broadside suits sent him the gold symbol of affirmation. A heartbeat later, missiles streaked from the rooftops on every side of the Imperial drop zone to detonate upon the quad-barrelled gun emplacements the gue’la fondly imagined would protect them from aerial attack. The string of detonations was a thing of beauty, with every gunner killed or blinded, and all bar one of the weapons themselves reduced to mangled scrap. Sha’vastos retroactively blink-recorded it as training footage for later generations.

  ‘Admiral Teng,’ he said softly, eye-flicking the air caste frequency. ‘It is time. The way is clear.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ came the reedy voice of the air caste admiral. A few decs later, four Sun Shark bomber squadrons flew in a tight lattice formation over the war zone. The glowing spheres of their pulse bombs were released from the generator arrays on their undersides, dropping towards pre-programmed coordinates. They crackled down to detonate between the dual towers that
bracketed each of the compound’s exits. Plasma fire boiled in the craters of each bombardment, fierce enough to melt the metal of a fuel tank. The thuggish Imperial vehicles that were seeking to leave the zone slewed to a halt, blocking each exit with their lumpen mass.

  Commander Sha’vastos smiled at the air caste’s impeccable work. ‘The wise warrior turns the enemy’s fortress into his cage,’ he said. ‘My compliments, Admiral.’

  ‘I am not worthy of them, master,’ said Teng, his thin voice high and formal. ‘It is reward enough to watch Master Puretide’s genius at work.’

  The north-east quadrant of the battle, purposefully left empty of tau presence, had seen a surge of gue’la troopers clamber over their crude battlement to sprint down the street. Predictably, they were making for the ramp of rubble that led to the roof above. The commander almost felt disappointed, so eagerly did these fools dive into his kauyons. Without the gue’ron’sha to provide a challenge, there would be little honour in this victory.

  Sha’vastos blink-clicked an icon gold, and a squadron of Devilfish veered from concealment in the streets ahead. Their burst cannon and drone-mounted pulse carbines cut down the human soldiers as they braved the open terrain, spraying boiling gore and dismembered bodies across the streets.

  In weakness, hide strength.

  Seeing their comrades so dramatically cut down, the rest of the gue’la infantry hunkered down to escape the hail of energy bolts hissing into their ranks. Desultory fire crackled out, and one of their heavy weapons blasted a drone from the sky. An acceptable loss, thought Commander Sha’vastos. As he had predicted, the gue’la had huddled close to one another like frightened herdbeasts. He eye-flicked the icon of his railgun teams, and the Broadsides he had positioned on the eastern and southern towers opened fire.

  The armoured refuelling silos the Imperium had planted within their beachheads were capable of turning aside even large-calibre rounds from conventional armaments; this the fire caste knew from experience. The Broadsides’ hypervelocity rounds punched through them with the ease of a bonding knife stabbed through a paper lantern. Three fuel dumps detonated with a thunderous boom. Mushrooming clouds of smoke billowed sky high as burning fluids turned the huddling soldiers into pillars of flame.

  Sha’vastos allowed himself a sad smile at the irony. The crude fuel the humans prized so highly was so indicative of the gue’la mindset – powerful, volatile and easy to ignite into a self-destructive explosion.

  The elemental castes of the tau, measured, proficient and balanced by the blessed ethereals, did not make such simple mistakes. Here, Commander Sha’vastos had used the vertical axis as their shield against the barbaric gue’la, for they had proved too slow of wit to fight with true three-dimensional awareness. A swordsman without reach cannot strike. Even a child realised that. His gaze swept another mont’ka into place on his distribution suite.

  There was a horrible screaming, a sound unlike any Commander Sha’vastos had heard before. The giant pillars of flame that had erupted from the fuel silos twisted, turned upon themselves, and struck like angry serpents at the Crisis missile teams on the rooftops. The commander gaped in horror as heroic fire caste battlesuits melted away, molten metal mingling with bubbling flesh to spill over the edge of the rooftops in foul rivulets.

  One of the Hammerhead gun tanks closing the trap from the south blipped the deep red of alarm. The commander spared a glance with his left eye, gaping in disbelief at what he saw. A Hammerhead on Sha’vastos’ left peripheral screen lurched vertically, tumbling up through the air as if flung skyward by the hand of an invisible giant. It reached the apogee of its flight at the lip of the tower and crashed hard into the Broadside missile team stationed there, bowling two of the battlesuits over and skidding into the firing lane of the third with a tremendous crash.

  Sha’vastos searched his miraculous mind for a way to counter the threat, to identify and neutralise whatever invisible power had hurled the hovering gunship like a discarded toy.

  He found nothing.

  On the roof across from his vantage point, a flare of amber light burst into being next to his railgun Broadside team. It was not an explosion, as he had first thought. Its electronic signatures were not recognised by his suit’s analysis programs at all.

  The orange fires burned on as Commander Sha’vastos diverted an eye’s full attention to it. He zoomed in on impulse. There were shapes resolving there, bulky and broad-shouldered in the manner of the gue’ron’sha elite. They charged from the amber light, raising their shields. Sha’vastos blink-stabbed the icon of his Broadside team. As one they swung their railguns to face the new threat and smoothly opened fire. The commander breathed a mental sigh of relief. No human infantry could withstand a hypervelocity round impact, no matter what shield they bore.

  An explosion of cerulean electricity put the lie to his thoughts as the gue’ron’sha warriors charged straight through the volley into the midst of the Broadsides. Hammers rose and fell, disruptive energies flaring as they pulverised the hulking battlesuits one after another. One of the warriors swung a crackling sword of what read on Commander Sha’vastos’ analysis screen as plasma energy. Batting aside a wild swing from a railgun, the shock trooper brought his sword up in diagonal sweep, cutting right through the Broadside from hip to shoulder. As the battlesuit’s separate halves toppled away, the cauterised remains of its pilot slid free in a tangle of limbs.

  The commander cast about in mounting confusion. Suddenly he saw upon his targeting screen a silvered gue’la hellion, rising onto the roof on which he stood. He could not tell if the metallic figure was a male or female of the species, and it appeared to have no means of propulsion. Its stylised coat billowed in the thermals of the fires below. Let the earth caste solve that mystery, he thought, sliding his plasma rifle’s crosshairs over the being’s torso.

  The killshot hit its centre mass, as he knew it would. It yielded a few puffs of silver smoke, but nothing more.

  Sha’vastos’ bodyguard opened fire too, their burst cannons whirring as they poured firepower into the creature to no discernible effect. He blink-stabbed permission for his drones to intervene, and they added their pulse carbines to the volley. Consumed in the firestorm, the strange creature’s finery was shredded away to nothing, but its silver body remained whole. The drones dived in, and it swatted them away as if they were no more than insects.

  Then, against all logic, the metallic figure was upon them. Stretching out its hateful five-fingered hands, it grabbed the arm of Ula’tan’s battlesuit and pulled it free in a shower of sparks. Sha’vastos winced as it hurled the limb aside to crash through the missile volley of Saz’nami Du’erlka and thud into his plexus hatch. Ula’tan’s jet pack flared as he boosted away, and the commander quickly followed suit. The silvered thing reached out and caught Ula’tan’s leg at the last moment, swinging the entire battlesuit like some outrageous club towards Du’erlka. It struck the other saz’nami full on, bowling them both over the edge of the tower in a spray of sparks.

  Commander Sha’vastos was already airborne, putting as much distance between himself and the metal-skinned anomaly as possible. His mind burned hot as he cycled through endless tactics, strategies and aphorisms, but nothing seemed to apply. He cast around the screens of his command suite, seeing glimpses of gue’ron’sha brutes cutting down his warriors over and over. Black spots appeared in his vision as the stress built to unbearable levels.

  ‘Commander Sha’vastos,’ came a voice on the edge of panic. ‘Unknown enemy capabilities encountered. What are your orders?’

  Sha’vastos felt white-hot needles of pain shoot through his mind. An aggressive migraine thrust a fist of agony under his skull. His focus was gone, his thoughts scattered in a hundred directions at once. He clawed at the emergency protocol pad, and his battlesuit veered away into the night.

  ‘Commander?’ came the voice over the cadre-net. ‘Commander! What are yo
ur orders?’

  Neither Sha’vastos nor Puretide could reply.

  Numitor triggered his jump pack, focusing on the wider battle despite the pyrotechnics of the psykers at work. With Epistolary Elixus and his Terminators using arcane means to counter-attack the artillery warsuits, and Mannis’ columns of flame burning the jump-capable machines from the rooftops, the greatest remaining threat was posed by the transmotive. Tau infantry were disembarking by the score, and there was little in the way of firepower to hinder them. Most were firing salvos into the complex from the edge of the sweeprail bridge. Others had spilled from the far side of the translocator, jumping down to the roof of the cylindrical building beyond, finding yet another vantage point from which to pour firepower into the Munitorum base.

  The Codex Astartes had a lot to say on the matter of emergent threats. Even after the passage of almost ten millennia, those tenets still held true. The wording was ancient, laid down by the great primarch of the Ultramarines, but in Numitor’s eyes, they all boiled down to one, ageless concept.

  Hit them before they hit you.

  The sergeant soared high on twin plumes of flame towards the sweeprail with Magros, Duolor, Aordus and Golotan close behind him. Aiming to use the roof between the two points as a staging post, Numitor flew over the lip of the building where a team of three enemy warsuits had stood moments before. Since Vykola’s pyromancers had seized control of the promethium fires, all that remained of them was vile, bubbling sludge.

  A volley of plasma shots spat down, one burning into Numitor’s jump pack as he turned his head briefly to ensure his men were still close behind.

  ‘Damn it,’ he swore, cycling his pack’s jets. They were intact, thank the Emperor. Imperial technology was built to last.

  A moment later he was airborne once more. A smattering of pulse rifle shots blazed down. This time one struck Aordus, burning away the squad marking of his pauldron, whilst another hit Duolor’s chainsword and sent it spinning down into the street. The third hit Numitor on the top of the head, whipping it backward, but the ceramite of his helm held true.