It seemed like a bitter reprimand now, trapped for weeks in the Argap highlands with no room to manoeuvre and endless hordes of foes surrounding them. Every day was another day of grinding siege, insane assaults, and casualties on both sides. The or’es’la died by the dozen for every fire warrior they dragged down, but each loss was keenly felt by the small band of defenders.
Now the Shas’ui was among the fallen, another casualty ticked off the shrinking roster of colony defenders. She had been caught in an or’es’la rocket attack while dragging an injured comrade clear, her limbs shattered and torso pierced by randomly flying metal. It all seemed so senseless.
‘Rest easy, Shas’ui,’ he said. ‘Another shuttle got through. You’re going to be evacuated.’
‘No!’ The Shas’ui lurched on her narrow cot, trying to rise ‘I will stay and fight!’
‘You will heal and fight another day,’ the Shas’o, O’Shovah as he was coming to think of himself, said coldly. ‘Your injuries would impede you in battle to the point of uselessness.’
The Shas’ui sank back, too weak to protest further, her eyes searching O’Shovah’s face. ‘Why don’t they evacuate all of us? Why are we still here?’
O’Shovah had no answer. The Aun’o was gone, the colony ruined and most of its population killed or fled. There was no reason to stay but the Shas’ar’tol insisted that they hold on. Reinforcements were trickling in, but they were barely enough to keep pace with the attrition incurred by the siege. No counter-offensive was possible, only endless positional warfare through the peaks and passes of the highlands.
‘I don’t know, Shas’ui,’ he confessed. ‘We must place our trust in the greater good.’
Shells screamed down in ragged salvos, pulverising rock and throwing up towering clouds of dust at the edge of the colony. They were concentrating on the dugouts around the skeletal remnants of the workshops. Their howling mingled with the first explosions, and soon the fire warriors could hear nothing but the crash of explosions and the whickering of shrapnel.
In recent weeks the or’es’la had fallen into a pattern of hoarding up their ammo and loosing it all off before an assault. In terms of inflicting casualties, it was actually less effective than their old method of firing short, unexpected bombardments whenever a crate of shells was brought up, but it was a lot more unnerving. It meant the or’es’la were coming again.
O’Shovah crouched in his crisis suit inside a shelter he’d helped the Fio to dig for him at the head of a feature they’d dubbed the slipway. It was an erosion-cut channel leading down from Arkunasha colony to a nearby valley in the highlands. Windblown sand and dust from the plateau poured continuously down the slipway like a slow motion avalanche confined by high rock walls on both sides. The or’es’la had fixated on the area as the widest point of approach and it was already littered with half-buried wrecks left by their previous attempts to storm it.
O’Shovah crouched in his hole, feeling the bedrock tremble as shells burst nearby. He found that he trembled with it. The bombardment seemed endless, maddening. Shells of all calibres poured down and were joined by the howl of rockets just as it seemed it could get no worse. Red flames spurted up on all sides and flashes filled the air. The world seemed engulfed by roaring giants on every side.
Suddenly, the or’es’la barrage dribbled away to nothing, a few paltry shells whistling down as the towering smoke clouds began to drift away in the wind. Then he heard the roar of many engines and the rumbling sound of tracks. O’Shovah emerged from his shelter, far enough to see down the slipway, as around him, surviving fire warriors looked cautiously out from their own redoubts and bunkers. Perhaps four teams remained, holding onto a precarious horseshoe of positions at the top of the slope, with barely one team in reserve. Ugly or’es’la battle-tanks were crawling to the base of the slipway, five steel giants with groups of smaller vehicles ranged to their left and right. Behind them, another wave of at least twenty vehicles was coming into view, labouring hard in the soft sand.
O’Shovah was speechless. The enemy had never before attacked in such strength. A wave of improvised seeker drone-missiles flew past, plummeting into the approaching behemoths. Two of the leading vehicles crumpled in flames and were soon joined by others as two Hammerhead tanks began firing from the heights. The air was split by harsh flames as the duel was played out, the or’es’la firing at the blue-white flashes of the Hammerhead’s railguns. The first enemy tank was hit and burst into flames. A second, immobilised with track damage, continued to fire until it was hit beneath a turret by a railgun round. The shot tore the turret from the vehicle in a spray of sparks. Flames shot into the air, enveloping the crew as they tried to escape.
A call came in. ‘Infantry climbing the slipway, O’Shovah!’
From among the tanks appeared or’es’la warriors in blood-red armour. They were running up the slipway and making better progress than the slithering wave of vehicles. At an order from O’Shovah, precision pulse rifle fire swept across them, temporarily clearing the slope of running shapes. The Hammerheads were now firing in salvos. A dozen burning enemy vehicles lay scattered in the sand as testimony to their handiwork. The leading vehicles had climbed as far as a chain of tethered charges hidden in the slipway. Three were disabled with shattered tracks and the rest swung away to one side in apparent confusion. The second wave of vehicles began to climb the slope. Three took direct hits from the Hammerheads and blew apart, but the rest kept churning upwards towards the workshops with single-minded determination.
O’Shovah emerged from his shelter and signalled his surviving bodyguard to follow as he moved behind the protective glacis to reach the dugouts at the workshops. They loped along behind roughly-piled foam-metal blocks, already half buried by the sliding sand. Shells fired by the or’es’la hammered into the area. Red and yellow tracers from their secondary armaments buzzed around the fire warrior positions. A quick glance at his lateral monitors showed O’Shovah more vehicles climbing up on his right as he approached, while his two bodyguards loomed reassuringly in his rear view. O’Shovah leapt over the top of the glacis. Tracers streaked past him as he broke cover. He zig-zagged the battlesuit with surprising dexterity for such a cumbersome device, spotted a large, half-collapsed crater just below him and took cover in it. A moment later, his bodyguards were also in position above and below him on the slope.
Ahead of them, an or’es’la assault group was breaching the top of the slipway, moments away from overrunning the position. O’Shovah locked on to a vehicle and its surrounding infantry, punching a plasma bolt into the former and allowing a salvo of smart missiles to pick off the latter. More plasma bolts and fusion blasts from his bodyguards ripped into the flanked or’es’la. Almost simultaneously, a burst of heavy calibre slugs stitched across the upper torso of O’Shovah’s armour, pitching him out of the crater and sprawling him full-length in the sand. His systems displays were alight with warning indicators as he struggled to stand. His bodyguards moved to protect him. One was blown almost in half by a stray shell, his crisis armour bursting open like rotten fruit.
The shattered remnants of the assault group were running towards them with a truly enormous or’es’la in the lead. Darkness was sliding across the battlefield behind the charging alien like the shadow of death. O’Shovah sighted manually on the bestial-looking warrior and punched a plasma bolt into its torso. To his dismay the creature’s armour shrugged off the strike and it continued to surge forward with its hugely tusked jaws roaring thunderously. O’Shovah tried to fire his rifle again but found it inoperative, he tried to operate his jetpack and found that inoperative too. The or’es’la continued to charge forward, only metres away now.
A blaze of energy engulfed the or’es’la from above, brilliant white beams dancing from one figure to the next, leaving burning torches in their wake. Gazing up, O’Shovah laughed as he saw wide delta shapes blotting out the suns. The familiar silhouettes of Manta missile destroyers hovered above like guardian angels, fin
ally enough of them to evacuate the whole colony.
The Aun refused his requests for an audience immediately after evacuation. It was just as well; he’d been furious when he first saw the tau war fleet in orbit. That anger had cooled and hardened in the intervening time. He had visited the Shas’ui and seen her adapting to her newly-grown prosthetics day by day. He had seen the other survivors of Arkunasha colony and mourned their dead with them. When the Aun finally sent for him he came calmly enough.
There was a triumvirate aboard the Vior’la Gal’leath M’shan comprising Aun’o T’au Vasoy Ty’asla and two other Aun, a male and a female, that O’Shovah did not recognise. They did not introduce themselves, nor speak at all when O’Shovah was conveyed to their veiled, opalescent sanctum. Instead Aun’o Vasoy smiled fondly at O’Shovah as he entered and bid his accompanying water caste associates to leave them. Only when they were alone did the female speak.
‘You have done well, Shas’o. You bring credit to your caste and your sept. We understand that you are distressed by the casualties incurred under your command.’
She paused as O’Shovah shook his head.
‘Casualties are a fact of war,’ he replied. ‘I am distressed by being starved of reinforcements that evidently exist and the unnecessary hardships thereby inflicted on my command.’
The unidentified male Aun spoke, ‘Surely it is not your place to question the strategies of the Shas’ar’tol?’
‘It is my place to question poor strategy whenever I see it, and this strategy did not originate from my honoured colleagues at the Shas’ar’tol.’ He paused to pull a flimsy sheaf of message transcripts from inside his tunic. ‘I checked.’
Aun’o Vasoy replied. ‘Your success in small unit engagements with the or’es’la has enabled the build up of large reserves. When the campaign to retake Arkunasha begins, it will be undertaken with overwhelming strength.’
‘In other words, you decided to throw away lives now for an easier victory later.’
‘As is our remit, for the greater good.’
There was an awkward moment of silence as O’Shovah failed to respond. Aun’o Vasoy seemed genuinely puzzled.
‘Shas’o, you act as if the war was lost, when your actions have virtually assured victory.’
O’Shovah dashed the transcript on the floor in sudden fury. ‘Because I was not told!’
The Aun drew back from his anger, their eyes becoming hooded. O’Shovah breathed deeply, mastering himself before speaking again.
‘You allowed me and my cadres to fight in the belief that no help was coming while you sat in orbit doing nothing. With sufficient forces, I could have ensured that the or’es’la never even reached the colony!’
‘Possibly,’ Aun’o Vasoy admitted. ‘Yet your situation spurred you to the highest efforts. As you said yourself, casualties are a fact of war. Yet you minimised your own and maximised those incurred by the enemy. Is that not victory?’
‘Of a sort,’ O’Shovah admitted bitterly. ‘And yet superior attrition seems to be the lowest form of success to my eyes.’
‘Come now, you must lay aside your grief for your lost warriors,’ Aun’o Vasoy said reasonably. ‘You have the gratitude of the tau empire and the approbation of your fellow caste members. I understand that they have even gifted you a new name in celebration of your success.’
The warrior’s face had become an immobile mask. He revealed nothing of his inner feelings when he responded finally.
‘Indeed, they have dubbed me O’Shovah – Commander Farsight – for my alleged ability to see into the future, and I have pledged to them that in future times the tau empire will remember my name.’
SIR DAGOBERT’S LAST BATTLE
Jonathan Green
I
The first to die had been Argulf’s youngest.
The child had been making daisy chains in the high pasture when the first of the greenskins emerged from the forest, gibbering and hooting with savage delight. The girl, barely four summers old, panicked and froze, howling for her mother as the cleaver-wielding greenskin cut her down.
Reynard had witnessed the child’s savage murder with his own eyes, his face slack with shock, his voice stolen from him in the same moment that the girl’s life was taken. But that abrupt act of unthinking brutality had only been the precursor to the slaughter that was to come.
The goblins poured from the forest in a tumbling tide of bone-knotted loincloths, flint-tipped spears, feathered headdresses and moss-coloured flesh. Despite their number, they were little more than a disorganised rabble. There were a few desultory arrows fired towards the village, but there was no cohesion to their attack.
Reynard had fought for his feudal overlords in the armies of Gisoreux as a young man, when a proliferation of orcs had bled into the lands of Ombreux from the Pale Sisters to the north-east and laid waste to the fiefdom for miles about. And he would fight again now, despite having given up the life of a man-at-arms years ago, to protect his home and his loved ones.
Snatching up his pitchfork from beside the back door of his cottage, he ran to meet the goblins’ insane charge. The stringy specimens he had encountered when still a young man had at least demonstrated some rudimentary discipline, even if it had been forced upon them by their larger cousins. But the shambling mob he was facing now had lost all semblance of order. Some squabbled with their own kin and they were not above trampling each other underfoot as they poured down the wind-swept escarpment from the forest’s edge. Their chaotic charge made it look more like they were fleeing from something rather than hurrying to attack the village huddled in the valley below.
But what they lacked in organisation, they more than made up for in numbers. Only now they were one down, a squirming mewling goblin skewered on the end of his improvised weapon. Bracing a booted foot against the creature’s chest, Reynard twisted sharply, the action accompanied by a grisly sucking sound. The squealing goblin fell silent and stopped struggling as the peasant pulled the pitchfork free of its filthy carcass.
The horde had fallen upon Layon just as locusts had fallen upon the wheat crop three years before. The village had only just recovered from that disaster and now there was a host of greenskins at their door. The rampaging horrors trampled the corn that had been less than a week from the sickle and scythe, slaughtering the livestock that had been intended to feed the villagers during the bitter months of winter.
Reynard blinked in the face of the smoke drifting across the village, seeking the source of the echoing hoof beats.
A shadow fell across the village as light bled from the sky.
‘Reynard!’
The scream snapped his attention back to the immediacy of the battle. It was his wife, Fleur. She stood at the threshold of their home, frying pan in hand, as a scrawny creature – no taller than a child of eight – bounded towards her, naked except for a strip of rabbit fur tied at its waist with grassy twine. It carried a rough axe in its bony fist, what looked like a large tooth set within it to create a serrated cutting edge.
As the greenskin lunged at his wife, Reynard sprang, thrusting the butt of his pitchfork forwards, using it as he would a quarterstaff. The hard wood connected with the base of the goblin’s skull, knocking the creature was sprawling to the ground. Reynard followed up with a second sharp blow to its skull, smiling grimly as he heard the sharp crack of bone fracturing.
Things were at their darkest now – the firmament the colour of pewter, the coming storm casting its pall across the face of the sun – as the greenskins rallied in the face of the villagers’ desperate defence. Men and women, as well as the young, the elderly and infirm, had all been forced into the fight, using anything that came to hand to help them save their homes from the tumbling tumult of shrieking greenskins, whether it was an axe from the woodpile or an iron poker from the hearth.
The goblins were everywhere now, or so it seemed, swarming along alleyways, over the churned mud of the village square and around the flower-bedecked roadsi
de shrine to the Lady.
A shrill whinny carried to Reynard’s ears over the tumult of battle – the shrieking of goblins, shouted oaths to the Lady and the clash of billhook on axe – as if it rode upon a wave of power that deadened all sound before it. He turned, and his heart lifted.
On the ridge of the escarpment beyond the village, dark silhouettes against the beaten metal sky, was another ragtag band. Swords held aloft, they only numbered ten in all. But at their midst, sat astride a barded warhorse, was the unmistakable form of a noble paladin, the crest atop the warrior’s helm clear for all to see, even in the failing light that came before the storm.
For this was not just any knight. Their saviour was a chosen champion of the Lady of the Lake, one upon whom the holiest of honours had been bestowed. A grail knight.
The silent ranks of the knight’s entourage watched as the massacre continued unabated. Just as Reynard was expecting the knight to issue his challenge, the men dropped to their knees, bowing their heads in prayer. The knight’s tabard rippled in the breeze that heralded the oncoming storm.
Reynard caught sight of a green blur from the corner of his eye and turned his attention from the silent men-at-arms back to the melee consuming Layon. He spun on his heel, sweeping the blunt end of his pitchfork before him, feeling the vibrations of the goblin’s bone-cleaver vibrating through his arms as the two weapons made contact.
Knowing that a chosen champion of the Lady had come to their aid filled him with renewed strength. It felt as if the very life-blood of Bretonnia was flowing through his veins.
Sliding the improvised weapon through his hands, grasping the shaft closer to the prongs, he swung the longer end round sharply. The goblin’s blade slipped from the smooth wood, the creature stumbling forwards on its spindly legs and into the path of the whirling tip. The end of the weapon caught the goblin in the throat, the force of the contact throwing it onto its back in the battle-churned mud of the village square.
Hammer and Bolter Year One Page 118
