But, of course, the governor was watching. Farrachus shivered, uneasy at being on display.
“You smell of fear,” the xeno trilled. He ignored it, secretly appalled at the obviousness of his anxiety.
The machina excrucia, so named by whatever ancient tech-priest had first called forth a machine spirit into its circular frame, had undergone his refinements with good grace. The physiology of the tau — a subject close to his heart — was somewhat different to that of the common human. He’d augmented the device’s conductors, subtly altering the positioning of its various synapse arrays, even narrowing the central locking spine. A tau’s skull, he had discovered during his studies, was rather more brittle than that of a human. Today, nothing must go wrong.
He saw with some satisfaction that the ethereal had ceased its empty glare in his direction, turning its dark eyes upwards again towards the device. The machine cast its globular shadow across the alien’s face, a toothless mouth positioning itself to swallow him whole.
“What will it do?” the alien asked, voice flat.
“It passes an energy stream across your pain centres,” he replied, guiding the hanging coronet as it descended. “At least, it’s supposed to. Our understanding of your biology is rather limited, more’s the pity, but I’m confident my alterations will yield fruit. Ideally, the excrucia simulates the sensation of physical pain without causing any real damage. I’m told that the more... tenacious subjects who’ve felt its bite have lingered for hours, with no respite and no medical attention. There’s no escape, Aun. Not even in death.” Farrachus smiled, stealing a sideways glance at Severus. He looked bored.
A skull-servitor corkscrewed its way through the chamber’s airspace, skeletal face sealed at the mouth and nostrils. Its eyelids hung open, lifeless, long-dead eyeballs replaced by polished silver beads. It looked like an insect, hovering on a trail of incense and disrupted air, compound eyes reflecting the world in an ugly convex distortion. Farrachus nodded at it.
“Commence recording,” he grunted. A red light high on the disembodied head’s brow blinked on. Farrachus glanced at the timecode artificially imposed over his vision. “Interrogation proceeding at 08.14 hrs, local time. Magos Farrachus attendi—”
The intercom clicked. “Priest? What are you doing?”
Farrachus scratched his eyebrow, uncertain. “Recording the interrogation, my lord. It is standard practice.”
“Don’t.”
“But, my lord... Don’t you want the, ah, the subject’s responses recorded?”
“Which responses?”
“To your questions, my lord. I-I assumed you wanted some information—”
“There are no questions, priest. Just hurt it. Make it... pliable.”
Farrachus mouthed wordlessly for a moment, searching for something to say. Pliable for what, he wondered? Severus’s shadowed glare burnt through him.
“Yes, my lord...” he blurted. He deactivated the recorder with a command and waved it away, sooty trails of scent smoke ebbing in its path. The excrucia halted its descent with a resounding click, settling lightly upon the upper dome of the alien’s skull like some barbaric headdress. Farrachus took a deep breath, resonance sensors on his face crackling in mechanical peristalsis, and stepped forwards.
Deus Mechanicus... he intoned, moving his hands in the prescribed gesture of awakening. The runes on the device glowed. Anima mechanica, exsuscitare... He flicked a control on the small console at the chair’s head and a sequence of clamps on the crown’s inner perimeter extended, copper conductors chattering in a volley of tiny sparks. With a final hiss the locking spine whirred to life, screwing forwards hungrily in a blur of rotating cogs and thrumming servos, needlepoint inching towards the alien’s skull.
The xeno’s eyes were dosed, thin lips moving in some breathless alien litany, the words a strained melody of focus and defiance. Farrachus smiled to himself, knowing that meditation alone wouldn’t be sufficient.
“I told you...” he hissed into the alien’s ear, interrupting its mantra. “There’s no escape.”
Behind him, the access portal blipped quietly.
“I said no interruptions!” Severus snarled, his voice lent an artificial menace by the intercom. Farrachus turned his head from the prisoner with interest, wondering which dim-witted guard was about to suffer the governor’s legendary temper. The door ground open noisily.
A figure pounced through before the magos could even think, a squat form of articulating armour plates surmounted by a crested helmet. It scanned the room in a blur, raising the long rifle at its side.
Farrachus’s thoughts moved sluggishly. The intruder was through the door and into the shadows of the room’s perimeter before he’d even fully identified it. T’au, the logic-engines subsumed into his biological mind told him. T’au warrior. Enemy.
He drew his pistol, movement sensors twitching with insect accuracy, hunting for the tau’s bodytrace. The human part of his mind, unashamedly terrified, struggled against the implacable coldness of his technological augmentations. Stimulants flooded his brain, making his senses race and his blood roar. They didn’t do any good.
A flicker of blue light at his side startled him and the tracking of his sensors, the unmistakable crack of bone broadcasting the locking spine’s grisly deployment. The excrucia flared to life with a horrific whine, greasy sparks coruscating around the punctured dome of the prisoner’s skull. Farrachus turned to watch, overcome with excitement at the culmination of his efforts. The ethereal’s composure shattered without trace, its thin-lipped mouth snapping open to emit a scream that dragged on and on and didn’t stop. Glorying in his work, the genetor all but forgot about the intruder.
The tau warrior stepped calmly from the shadows behind him and nestled the blocky barrel of its rifle against his skull. He felt the contact only abstractly, drug pulsing thoughts racing ahead to calculate reactions, hypotheses and projections.
When he died, the intricate metallic ganglia suffusing his brain gyrating outwards, Genetor Farrachus was busy formulating the predicted trajectory his slumping body would take as it tumbled to the ground.
His calculations were entirely correct.
Kais had found him.
Alone and in pain, restrained at the heart of a mesh of components and cables, lit by a single overhead illuminator at the chamber’s apex, Aun’el T’au Ko’vash writhed beneath the black contraption encircling his brow. He screamed unstoppably, twisted face surrounded by a shivering corona of energy, long fingers curled with rictus tension around the restraints encasing his arms. The controls at the chair’s head were meaningless to Kais, an array of angular runes and unfamiliar characters, pulsing and glowing hungrily. Not knowing what else to do, feeling panic surging in his mind in empathetic horror at the ethereal’s screams, he turned his rifle upon the console and took aim.
“That’s expensive equipment,” a dry voice hissed, sending Kais into an alert stance with a start. The voice laughed, a tinny electronic cackle emanating from a speaker nearby. Kais’s roving gaze landed on the huge sheet of glass on the other side of the chamber: a window into a gloomy viewing theatre. There was a human there, sneering face dipped low to glare up past its prominent brows, aquiline features arranged in a humourless grin.
“Hello, little bug...” it grinned.
Kais’s reaction was almost instantaneous: the rifle stuttered in his hands, long beads of pulsefire lancing towards the window. They impacted with a hollow crackle, tentacles of hazing glowlight writhing momentarily before fading to invisibility, leaving not so much as a scratch.
The human didn’t even flinch. It chuckled dryly, leaning to flick a switch out of Kais’s vision.
“Sergeant?” it said, not taking its eyes from Kais. “Meet me in the shuttle bay, please. And send one of your men to fetch the prisoner, if you would. We appear to have a problem with vermin.”
A disembodied voice, thick with artificial resonance and static, replied across the intercom: “As you wi
sh.”
“Goodbye, little one,” the human chuckled, waving flamboyantly through the glass and stabbing at another series of controls. With a lurch the viewing gallery ground its way upwards, vast elevator pistons exposed in its wake.
Kais returned his attention to the ethereal, shuddering and moaning in his seat. A long bead of blood worked its way past his rolling eyes, welling up from the wound on his forehead where a locking clamp held his skull in place. Kais ground his teeth, considering his best course of action.
The control console detonated colourfully beneath a single rifle shot. The locking spine retracted with a slurp, trailing a grisly strand of blood and eliciting another agonised moan from Ko’vash. The restraint pinions snapped open grudgingly, lights flaring then fading across the machine’s surface as if railing against a lingering death.
Then the madness began.
A side door, masked by the shadows of the chamber’s perimeter, slid open with a reptilian hiss. Something entered, footsteps heavy on the grille flooring. It advanced with tectonic slowness, an impossible geometric arrangement of thrumming segments and jointed armour plates. Its stocky build belied its enormity: almost as wide as it was tall, still both dimensions dwarfed Kais utterly.
The grey-green expanses of the creature’s shell broke up the sterile light in a collection of rune pitted segments, articulating with servo-fed power. Pennants and scraps of parchment, ridiculously fragile beside such magnificence, adorned its frescoed torso; a grinning skull, stylised between curving wings, set at its centre. Its arms, rolling fluidly with every step, cradled an enormous gun in jointed gauntlets, its angular stock patterned with runic inscriptions. To each side of its helmeted head, eyes blazing with amber light, wedgelike shoulder guards pistoned in time with its strides. On one an iconic depiction of a bird’s sharp profile, hooked beak narrowing to a vicious point, was picked out in white brushtrokes.
Kais felt bacterial before it. Insubstantial. He was an insect, throwing wide its brittle wings, preparing to be crushed underfoot. He was dust. Nothing.
For a moment, the certainty gripped him that the hulking thing must be a machine. It was too easy to imagine a lattice of engines within that brittle framework, compacted metallic viscera riddling the whole implausible structure like nerve endings, grinding fibres and drive chains ratcheting its awesome limbs.
But no: it was too precise, its steps full of the rolling fluidity of an organism. Somewhere inside that juggernaut shell, glaring out with all the arrogance and self assurance typical of their race, was a frail, pink little gue’la. The thought gave no comfort.
The creature tilted the barrel of its weapon, arched shoulder guard pivoting smoothly Before the hiss of alarm could even escape Kais’s mouth, the muzzle had vanished behind a curtain of fire; a long droplet of superheated air flickering dizzyingly. He lurched aside clumsily, springing through a cloud of airborne debris and rotating fragments of steel, plucked from the floor and walls wherever the rapidfire barrage followed him.
He hit the ground and rolled, unable to resist crying out at the succession of angry detonations all around, tiny shards of detritus gashing at his armour and slashing at his arms and legs. Each streaking ballistic contained a small explosive charge, ripping long ribbons of impact craters into every surface.
Kais returned fire as he moved, a shambling crawl-run of ducking, lurching movements that left his aim far wide of its mark. He dived awkwardly for cover, realising with horror even as he moved that in his panic he’d fallen directly behind the torture machine, the Aun still enmeshed and inert at its heart.
With unerring precision, as if in answer to Kais’s silent pleas, the storm of explosive shells was cut short moments before the ethereal became a target. His mind a tangle of fear and uncertainty, Kais realised with a start that his would-be executioner wanted to preserve the Aun just as much as he did. He wondered absurdly, at the back of his mind, what Ju and Y’hol would say if he told them he’d used an ethereal as a bodyshield.
Beyond caring, he leaned out of his fragile cover and pumped shot after shot at the armoured monster lurking at the edge of the light. It didn’t even bother to move.
The first pulse-orb caught it directly beneath the broad sweep of its right shoulder-guard, flaring angrily with white heat and cascading sparks. The figure jolted backwards slightly: a casual sway, as if in response to a light breeze. Each subsequent bolt repeated the ineffectual display, a fountain of dissipated energy blossoming at each impact but causing little real damage. The gue’la just stood there and took it all, leaning in its spot and absorbing everything that Kais threw at it.
Before he could even take stock, the gue’la’s weapon tilted and fired, blasting the tip of his rifle into fragments. Its induction charge imploded with a flash, spinning the weapon out of his hands and propelling him bodily from his cover. Arms ringing from the impact, blinking spots from his eyes, he looked up into the glowing orbs of the gue’la’s vision slits, watching him across the chamber. He stumbled to the floor, knees giving way.
No point, his mind told him. Not any more.
His opponent was invincible. An impregnable human fortress, impossible to besiege, futile to barrage. Who was he to stand against it?
A didactic memory, unconsciously suppressed during the action, bubbled sluggishly in his mind, identifying the armoured giant. It was a Space Marine, and the memory node contained more than enough information for him to know he was outclassed, outgunned and outdone.
Voices clamoured in his mind: gossamer wisps of text and oration, propaganda and meditation. “Focus,” they chimed. “Unity.” They filled his skull with a coiling serpent of racial assurance, a million and one certainties of the superiority of the tau’va.
They wouldn’t — couldn’t — help him anymore. Where was the great unity now? Where was the species struggle, supporting him as he supported it? Where was the great machine when he needed it? Where was the Greater Good to be found in dying here, broken and bewildered, on the floor of this filthy gue’la place?
His stomach knotted and with a groan, failing even in his ability to suppress his reactions, he waited to die. The marine stepped forwards, soot-blemished armour parting the clouds of weapon smoke. It was death, stalking through the cloudbanked atmosphere. Its eyes blazed.
Ave Imperator, it said, the distorted voice cold and artificial. The gun raised again. Kais couldn’t even bring himself to tense his muscles.
“Shas’la...” a voice said, shakily. “Sh... Shas...”
It was a ray of light stammering on the serenity of its own words. It was a dreamscent, whispering past his senses, a pheromone medley of spice and fruit. It was a song without a chorus, a breathless celebration of melody and rhythm, stained by a taint of discordant pain.
Kais twisted his head without thinking, unable to control his mind, finding his gaze filled by Aun’el T’au Ko’vash. The torture device had ascended into the shadows, leaving blotched burns and scratches across the ethereal’s pate. Weak and frail, shaking from the bone-pitted wound above his nasal orifice, the Aun raised his head defiantly and fixed Kais with a stare of pure peace. It filled his mind, overriding every sense in a rush of inexorable calmness. It waved away the smoke and the pain, it washed clean the blood in his brain and assuaged his racing thoughts. He was a puppet to it: an empty vessel given awareness of its own hollowness and somehow, against every expectation, glad of it.
If I am nothing as an individual, his mind said, then let me be content with my place in a higher order.
And he was.
In that instant, in that surreal moment of exposure to the ancient wisdom of the Aun, Shas’la T’au Kais was a functioning, satisfied piece of the machine.
“Never... alone...” the ethereal said weakly.
Kais picked up the dead gue’la’s plasma pistol. He hadn’t even noticed it at his feet. He was a glove, to be filled and worn, to be manipulated and moved as the Aun saw fit. It all happened so quickly, without seeming to happen
at all.
He shot the Space Marine twice. The first hazing orb of superheated plasma punched a deep crater in its torso plating, sending spiderlike fissures scuttling across the green surface. The figure toppled backwards, startled, weapon chattering spastically, spare hand clutching at the air.
The second plasma bolt hit the Marine’s scowling faceplate, shattering its eyelenses like glass, engulfing it in a cloud of igniting fragments and outwards-spreading gore — a thick soup of smoke and blood that followed the enormous hulk as it tumbled backwards, crashing chaotically to the ground. It shivered and whined as the last vestiges of the armour’s power reserves expended into the air.
It died by degrees, flailing extremities slowing in their mad flexes until everything was silent. Kais wondered if anything would ever seem real again.
He retrieved the pathetic remains of his rifle and turned to the Aun, still seated in pain and exhaustion. His slender fingers brushed lightly across the wound on his head, exploring its severity. Like all ethereals, his face was longer than most taus’, the gentle bisecting line of his scent orifice wider and more pronounced, lifted by the diamond-shaped ridge of bone at its centre. It was above this mysterious feature — the identifying mark of his caste — that the ugly wound marred his scalp. He winced momentarily, then his long features resolved into a glowing aspect of calmness and determination.
Here, Kais saw, was focus. Here was devotion to the tau’va on a scale he could barely imagine. Here was faith, and it was contagious. Despite the Aun’s fragility he carried an invisible aura, a mantle of contentment that hung around him, allaying every one of Kais’s fears, soothing his turbulent thoughts. He lowered his gaze, awash with devotion and respect.
“You have my thanks, Shas’la,” the ethereal purred, even his voice carrying a medicinal quality. In some quiet corner of his mind Kais felt manipulated, as if the mere presence of the Aun could blast away whatever shreds of individuality he might possess. But he couldn’t rage against the violation — he was powerless against it and, worse, he enjoyed it. Somehow, without even touching him, the Aun could reach inside his mind and show him how to belong.
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