The vehicle heaved itself off the ground on a jet of flame, flipping over and shredding itself in a tangle of cabling and armour. A secondary explosion prised apart its midriff, hull fragments pirouetting through the air and smearing themselves across the ruined landscape. Slabs of wreckage gyrated and bounced, slicing the air. One of the crew screamed from somewhere at the heart of the madness. Briefly.
Kais watched the smoke lift for what seemed like a long time. When finally the ragged remnants of his cadre clambered from the trenches he was too exhausted to even greet them.
Barely half had made it back alive.
The shuttle came down and the cadre clambered aboard. Hell vanished behind a closing blast-door.
Sitting once again in his deployment seat, wondering about the perfect stillness of the vessel, Kais allowed his mind to rest. The other shas’las were silent. They too, he supposed, couldn’t think of anything to say. He wondered if they felt like him. Hollow, somehow. Diminished.
II
06.05 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)
The governor was on his way to see his new pet.
He descended the stairs two at a time, a feral grin smeared across his face. The troopers arranged about the room snapped nervously to attention. He could feel their eyes tracking his movements, faces full of fascinated intimidation. They feared him. They revered him. His most trusted men, charged with keeping the presence of his xeno plaything a secret, and they were terrified of him.
Lord Meyloch Severus entered the holding room in a sweep of gaudy robes, polished baubles and gold-piped lapels, eyes glowing balefully. His footsteps, clipped and precise, echoed around the chamber like a fist cracking its knuckles, broken up and dislocated by the arrays of uneven machinery and ungainly technology infesting the walls.
The genetor from the Magos Biologis scurried forwards, ratlike, to greet him. Severus studiously ignored him and stepped towards the holding cell. The thing inside regarded him unflinchingly, pale robes adorned with intricate alien designs, subtle swirls and interlocking grids of colour barely even visible in the halflight. Severus found himself astonished by the creature’s eyes, small and slanted, shadowed by the contours of its long skull and yet somehow full of acute, incisive intelligence. In the fanciful part of his mind he wondered whether such eyes as those couldn’t see into the very soul.
Not my soul, hissed another, darker part of his mind. He smiled.
The adept, unable to hold his tongue any longer, coughed pointedly.
“How’s our guest?” Severus growled, not bothering to look round.
“My lord, the xenog—”
“I am hungry,” the alien purred, its voice a soft melody of musical vowels.
Severus could barely contain the giggle building in his throat. “A talkative prisoner?” he grinned. “Well there’s a first.”
“He called you ‘my lord’,” the xeno said, tilting its head. Its single braided chord of hair, decorated with colourful bands of cloth and beading, hung delicately over its shoulder. It blinked. “I think perhaps you are in charge, here. I think perhaps a mistake has been made. I wonder if you aren’t aware that my people... my race... will not rest whilst I’m captive. I wonder if perhaps you’ve considered the ramifications of my imprisonment.”
Severus chuckled. “Well, I wonder,” he slurred, enjoying himself, “if perhaps you’re dropping spoor in terror at all the wonderful things I’m going to do to you.” He didn’t wait for a response, swivelling to glare at the adept. “Get him downstairs. I want to acquaint him with our new toy.”
“Of course, my lord.”
“And keep him quiet. His voice annoys me.”
An angry tremor rumbled through the floor. The speaker above the door, through a crackling layer of distortion, burst into life.
“Governor? Governor Severus? Captain Praeter, sir.”
“Report.”
“It’s the xenogens, my lord! They’re here! They’re attacking the prison!”
Severus’s smile widened. He fixed the caged ethereal with a gaze, regarding its temperature fluctuations with interest.
“Well,” he smiled, “it’s about time.”
Lusha stared down through the dust and smoke-haze at the compound below. Anti-aircraft emplacements spat gobbets of soot towards the dropship, ugly ulcers of blackness speckling the sky.
Shas’ar’tol command were pleased, at least. The expenditure of life in attacking Lettica, they deemed, had been acceptable. Given the success with which the gue’la forces had been drawn away from the prison, Lusha suspected the supervising shas’o was delighted.
Lusha had been watching young Kais, recovering in his deployment chair, when the debriefing came through. Shas’o Sa’cea Udas, monitoring events from the orbiting warship Or’es Tash’var , appeared in ceremonial dress on the wallscreens of the dropship to congratulate the warriors on a job well done.
He told them about Aun’el T’au Ko’vash. He told them that the gue’la, unprovoked, had forcibly abducted the cherished ethereal. He told them how the abductors had been tracked by the finest air caste pilots to this backwater world. The loss of their comrades, he’d told them, was all part of the scheme, the plan, the mon’wern’a: the “deceptive assault”.
Lusha couldn’t help but think of Kais’s words, from down on the planet. “Just a distraction?” he’d asked, voice thick with betrayal and bitterness. Sitting there in the dropship as the shas’o gave his inspirational speech, the youth had looked sick, expressionless features not masking the resentment in his eyes. In such subtle ways were the emotions of taukind expressed; not in the excesses and self-indulgences of the gue’la.
Lusha could well imagine the thoughts masked behind Kais’s empty expression, full of blood and fire and dead comrades. He wanted to tell the youth that they’d served the tau’va, each in their way, but O’Udas hadn’t finished talking and the meditations upon loss would have to wait.
“Now,” the general had nodded, “we must capitalise upon our success.”
So the dropship had plunged again into Dolumar’s rolling cloudbanks, hanging low over its rocky wastelands in a surgical insertion of manpower.
“A single unit,” O’Udas had insisted later, in private communication with Lusha. “Any more and we risk alerting the enemy — and then who knows what the barbarians would do? I daresay they’ll kill the Aun immediately if we attempt a direct assault.”
In the absence of any plan more likely to succeed Lusha had bowed to his superior’s decisions, as the tau’va demanded, but couldn’t bring himself to be happy with them.
So now he found himself crouched before the gaping deployment doors, watching again as the remnants of his cadre leapt away into the dust and smoke, dodging between gaping shell blasts and long-range death at the hands of gue’la snipers. Other dropships circulated nearby, themselves disgorging serried ranks of shas’las and shas’uis onto the swirling dust, figures picking their way through the haze in the shadow of the gue’la prison.
The very existence of an edifice designed solely for the incarceration of the socially incompatible was beyond Lusha’s understanding. On T’au those few who failed to conform were considered worthy of sympathy and help, not punishment. He dismissed again the illogic of their conventions and regarded the brooding construct dispassionately. It was an obscene blot; a cancerous assemblage of haphazard turrets and towers, tiered and arranged without efficiency or beauty. It was a shattered knuckle, thrust from the desert in a brutal pile of jutting weapons and walls. It lurked massively in the rocky depression beyond Lettica’s western boundary, and Lusha mused sourly that one might as well hurl snowballs into volcanoes as assault such a fortress with rifles and grenades.
The shas’o was repeating his tactic: get their attention, make a fuss, make them forget to look for less obvious threats. Mon’wern’a. So: a single unit to infiltrate and rescue, whilst the cadres drew attention and fire.
Lusha could have deployed a shas’ui
for the task, or even a shas’vre. He’d considered the possibility carefully; ultimately wondering whether experience would provide any real benefit in this circumstance. A veteran could be relied upon to do their duty with as much efficiency and haste as possible, dispassionate, effective and mechanical. Lusha’s experiences, learned the hard way in the heat of more battles than he cared to remember, told him that sometimes efficiency and duty would never be enough.
He remembered watching the pulse-rate indicator on the viewscreen, climbing steadily higher as the adrenaline flowed and the excitement burgeoned. He rubbed his jaw, wondering if he’d sent the right warrior. The young shas’la, fixing him with his father’s gaze, had been insistent...
The sentry gun fizzed and hung limp, pulsefire blowing open its turntable and shedding its metallic guts across the tunnel’s floor. Kais drifted past it, a wraith wearing every shadow like a cloak.
A high-altitude survey drone had provided the subterranean topography for his infiltration mission, now imposed iconically at the foot of his HUD. A complex melange of radiation echosensors and temperature gauges had located a natural sinkhole in the desert, terminating mere tor’leks from a service tunnel beneath the prison compound. After leaping from the dropship with his heart hammering at his insides, Kais had achieved access with an auto-deploy charge and an awkward struggle through the resulting fissure.
A guard, investigating the crippled sentry gun’s clattering protests, dropped to his knees with a neat hole through his forehead. Kais reloaded and crept onwards, thinking of his comrade Y’hol.
His closest friend. Uncomplicated and good humoured, he’d regarded Kais with a respect and familiarity he’d never expected to regain following his father’s visit to the battledome. And now he was dead. Lying in pieces somewhere, probably. Knocked apart by a grenade, or sliced into wafer fragments by a chattering lasgun. Gobbets of his flesh and bone riddling the flame-gutted trenchways.
Just a diversion.
Kais hadn’t even noticed his friend’s absence, to his eternal shame. Sitting there in the dropship, his mind a swirl of shocked recollections and impressions of the conflict, Ju had spelled it out to him miserably, her grief forcing uncharacteristic emotion into her broken voice. Just one among too many who never made it to the extraction point.
Kais stopped and breathed, concerned at the anger of his thoughts. The display wafer felt heavy in his pocket, and he fingered its rounded edges distractedly, repeating its calming litany to himself.
His father had given a speech once, recorded by por’hui journalists on the eve of his death at the hands of the y’he hivefleet, so the story went, ripped apart by some shrieking monster. The speech was broadcast on all por’hui channels to mark his loss — an inspirational gush of propaganda and affirmation. Kais had seen it so often it was inscribed upon his memory, as indelible as a didactic imprint:
“Remember the machine,” O’Shi’ur had said, staring at the camera drone directly, acidic gaze boring into the viewer’s brain. “It has interlocking parts, each operating with perfect efficiency, each as vital as every other. This machine works only because each component works. It succeeds only because each part of it is operating in order.
“Sometimes a segment may seem redundant... Sometimes the wheels appear more vital than the fuel reserve or... or the grinding cogs seem more necessary than the pistons. It’s an illusion. One won’t work without another.
“We’re all part of the machine. We live for it, we work for it, we fight for it. And, when the time comes, we die for it.” The old warrior had blinked his eyes then, and looked away from the camera. When he looked back, he seemed distant, sad somehow. Kais had always wondered about that.
“But in a way,” he went on, “we never die. Because... it doesn’t matter if a piece of the machine doesn’t operate any more. As long as the whole continues to function, the memories and achievements of each part remain with it forever.”
Prowling through the darkness, his dead father’s words haunting his mind, Kais wondered if Y’hol had died for the machine. When he drew his last breath, had he done so with a thought for the tau’va, lifting his spirit and sealing his contribution to the Greater Good forever? Or was he simply blown into moist fragments for the sake of a few moments of distraction?
Kais felt, somehow, that he owed it to Y’hol to ensure that the attack on the prison was a success, and to that end he’d volunteered for the principal role in the elaborate plan. The assault — a storm raging just beyond the caves — was just another deceit. Just another distraction to allow someone — him — to creep into the compound. This time it was his responsibility, only his, to ensure that every last fire warrior fighting and dying on the surface remained a part of his father’s magnificent, idealistic machine.
He wondered vaguely why El’Lusha had acquiesced to his request. To dispatch a shas’la on such an important mission was, he knew, an extraordinary risk. He scowled into the gloom, spotting an ascending flight of stairs leading into the fortress, and reminded himself that it didn’t matter why the commander had relented. All that mattered was that he had. Kais bit back on a feral smile and racked his pulse rifle hungrily, eager for targets.
He ought to relax, he knew. He ought to calm himself. Instead he killed another cringing gue’la in a storm of pulsefire, and every singed, smoking wound that he inflicted was dispensed in Y’hol’s name.
He ascended the stairs into the bowels of the fortress and the killing went on and on and on.
++Enduring Blade?++
[Received. Time reference 1632.17 (terracode), D. 5732341 .M41.]
[Carrier ident. recognised. Local link established.]
[Identify.]
++Colony 4356/E, Dolumar IV. This is Governor Meyloch Severus.++
[Hold.]
[Vocal analysis confirmation.]
[State secure-channel code.]
++I need to speak with the admiral.++
[State secure-channel code.]
++Who is this?++
[Servitor 56G/x (Rotho#2). State secure-channel code.]
++Oh, for throne’s sake...++
++Here. AGGE-2567-G.++
[Hold.]
[Secure-channel code verified.]
[State your business.]
++I need to speak with the admiral. Priority level alpha.++
[Requesting personnel.]
[Hold.]
[This is Ensign Kilson. The admiral’s busy — state your business.]
++It is essential that I speak with the admiral. Interrupt him, if need be.++
[I’m afrai—]
++Listen to me very carefully, ensign. You will tell the admiral that Governor Severus needs to speak with him urgentl—++
[But—]
++Quiet. If you do not, ensign, I will ensure that my acute displeasure, along with your name, is conveyed directly to the Officio Navis Nobilite. Is that clear?++
[...]
++Let me speak to the admiral. Now.++
[S-stand... stand-by.]
[...]
[...]
[...]
[Severus? What do you want?]
++Is that Admiral Constantine?++
[No. It’s Vandire himself, back from the dead. Of course it’s me.]
++So generous of you to bother.++
[Don’t waste my time, governor. I have a ship to run.]
++I need your help. My colony is under attack.++
[Emperor’s blood, man! You’ve got four warp-damned regiments down there! Plus the... special troops you requested last week.]
++They’re not enough. I’m facing an invasion.++
[Inva—? By who?]
++The tau. They’ve breached the treaty.++
[Terra’s Throne...]
++Indeed.++
/> ++Admiral, I hardly need acquaint you with the seriousness of this situation... If my factories aren’t operating this subsector can consider itself unarmed.++
++There’s an enemy vessel in orbit. I’d appreciate your assistance.++
[We’re on our way.]
++“We”?++
[You’re in luck, Severus.]
[The Enduring Blade just rendezvoused with the Fleet Ultima Primus. We’re a two-hour warp jump from the edge of your system.]
[The tau won’t know what hit them.]
Kais waited until the flow of fluids from the pulverised corpse resolved into a sluggish ebb of arterial paste, then rifled through the creature’s pockets. The gaudier these gue’la dressed, he reasoned, the more important they seemed to be.
He found a wafer of brittle plastic, identified by the sensors in his helmet as having a shaped magnetic field, in a utility holster on one of the body’s lower limbs. A keycard, the helmet’s computer speculated. Kais found himself wondering abstractly about the appearance of the human’s hooves, hidden away like infant-flesh inside its bulky boots. The mad desire to rip them off to find out made him nod in amusement, despite himself.
The dead body crackled, startling him. It took him a moment to ascertain that the tinny voice derived from the comms-bead fixed to the cadaver’s stained lapel, its distorted reportage so unlike the clear tones of his own communicator.
“C-captain Praeter?” a gue’la voice said, stammering with (Kais assumed) nerves. “Sir? This is Warden Tiernen — I’m on the artillery ring. The men up here are dead... I... I think they’ve been shot, sir. Something’s got inside. Something’s in here with us...”
Kais scowled as his didactic memories translated the crackling voice, irritated that his presence should be discovered already. His search for an access point to the underground holding cells was not going well.
Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000) Page 5
