He should have guessed it wouldn’t last.
So: first a garbled message from a fraught-sounding El’Lusha, requesting his presence on the bridge. Not by the normal route, oh no, that was either blocked off or breached or infested, it didn’t matter which. Instead he found himself worming along tor’kans of intestinal ducting and vent systems.
Second, the unpleasant business of guerrilla tunnel combat. The various conduit intersections and turbine chambers had yielded plentiful surprises in the form of gue’la troopers (mostly casualties or cowards who’d crawled off to hide, he suspected). He’d lost the top segment of his shoulder torso guard when a gutshot trooper had taken a respectable stab at blowing his head off. Kais had returned the favour with rather more success.
Third, the internal workings of the Or’es Tash’var— normally a paragon of silent efficiency, out of sight and mind — were not operating in his favour. Much of this part of the ship had been damaged by assault imparts, forcing him to travel further into the complex innards of the vessel than seemed sensible. His attempts to hail the bridge to shut down the blade fans and circulatory turbines had met with a stony silence, forcing him to divert several times into human-occupied chambers to power down systems. Control panels that would, no doubt, appear self-explanatory to any of the kor’la crewmen were, to him, little more than meaningless jumbles of switches and dials. Thus far he’d prevailed by pressing everything at once.
And now, to cap it all, just as the intersection containing the command deck elevator was drawing near, he was getting attacked by scum-fire shyh’am-eating blood-of-t’au skulls, of all things. He swore out loud, just for the sake of it, not caring about the breach of etiquette. He was ready to drop, and he didn’t mind admitting it.
What kept him going was numbness. He’d reached a point beyond exhaustion. To stop now would cripple him, he suspected; the natural stimulants and pain were all that sustained him, pushing him on, delaying that moment when he could finally collapse and sleep and pretend to be normal again.
But there was something else. The remoteness of his physical fatigue was no protection against the turmoil in his mind, and for that he clung grimly to a single phrase:
“Nobody ever pretended it would be easy...”
El’Lusha had been right. To feel unfairly treated, to pity oneself somehow at the injustice of being responsible for such destruction: these were symbols of arrogance and Mont’au.
Kais had understood, as he crawled through the belly of the ship. Every fire warrior, he could see, must face their own Trial by Fire. For some it would be as simple as a physical test of their skills and abilities. For others — for him — such a test was redundant.
His proficiency for violence was inherent, no more open to adjudication than was the slant of his eyes or the size of his feet. For him, the true trial took place not at the tip of his gun barrel or in the bleeding piles of corpses he left behind him. For him, the trial took place in his mind.
So he kept going. He would accept the challenge and strive to succeed, to placate the devil inside him. He’d wage a tranquil, quiet war against the rage, using swords of focus and spears of calm, and in the name of the One Path he’d succeed.
He reloaded the carbine, chewing his lip.
Thinking it was a lot easier than achieving it.
They’d killed everyone.
El’Siet, his second in command for six tau’cyrs. Ruptured parts scattered across the deck, tendrils of brainsludge slithering down his control console.
El’Ver’sev’a, his personnel officer. They’d taken time with her, blowing off her limbs one at a time until she just lay there, emptying across the deck, too traumatised to even scream.
El’Gei’ven and El’Fay, the six kor’vres manning the comms and all the kor’uis and kor’las that hadn’t yet evacuated the bridge. Pulped. Shredded. Atomised and seared, knocked apart by hungry bolter shells or scorched into bubbling liquescence by all manner of vile, howling gue’la weapons.
Kofo Tyra forced open his swollen eyes and surveyed his domain, resisting the urge to vomit. There had been no fight, here. No honourable battle or measured struggle for supremacy. The attackers had stepped out of thin air without warning or challenge, opening fire with a savagery Tyra could never before have imagined. This was carnage, pure and simple. They’d turned his bridge into an abattoir, and expected... what? Cooperation?
“You will tell us,” one said, its voice a metallic boom. Its face, occluded behind a dark green helm with glowing eyes, glowered down from high above.
“Where is the ethereal?” said another.
“You will tell us,” the first repeated, “or you will die.”
A segmented gauntlet backhanded him across his face, snapping his head around and dropping him to the floor. Pain blossomed along his cheekbone, and he dribbled blood onto the deck. It didn’t matter.
“Tell us,” one said. He didn’t know which. They all looked the same: hulking bodies destroying his sense of scale, their thrumming armour moving with speed and agility defying their enormity. A metal boot caught him in the ribs, flipping him onto his back. He felt the bones of his chest crackling as he landed.
“The ethereal,” one said. “Where is he?”
He forced his lips to part and hissed at the impossible shapes towering over him. “Sssafe...” he managed.
The colossus at the edge of the group stamped forwards, armour decorated with whorls and runes that seemed clipped and ugly to Tyra’s eyes. He wore no helmet, frail gue’la features protruding bizarrely from the slabs of ceramite that covered his shoulders. A long pinion of blue metal arched over his bald skull, tangles of cables infesting the ridge of his brow. His eyes seemed to glow.
“You will tell me, xenogen,” it said, mournful voice reaching into Tyra’s mind and sweeping a wave of nausea and dizziness across him. “You have no choice in this.”
“I think not,” Tyra croaked, voice heavy with a confidence he didn’t feel.
“Xenogen. I am Lexicanium Librarian Macex of his Imperial Majesty’s Raptors. Understand this: you are going to die. Today. By my hand. Tell me where your ethereal is hiding and I’ll make it quick, on my honour. I have no greater kindness to offer you, alien.”
Tyra almost laughed, coughing on the blood in his throat. “I... hh... I’m not afraid of you, gue’la.”
The human’s features creased, its expression almost sad. It extended one gauntleted hand, fingers spread, pressing down with surprising tenderness against his brow. “More the fool you,” it said, eyes crackling with a strange energy.
Daggers hit the inside of Tyra’s mind. A splintering medley of pain, indescribable agony that violated every part of his brain, surged through his head, making him cry out in astonishment. Tendrils of fire, like superheated proboscises, examined his thoughts in a series of clumsy incisions.
Like a bubble rising to the surface of a pool of sludge, he could feel the knowledge of the ethereal’s whereabouts distending and blooming upwards, thirsting for light, coiling inexorably towards the burning pseudopodia that invaded his brain. Sensing the nearness of his prize, the librarian’s psychic assault strengthened, charring the very skin of Tyra’s face where his hand made contact.
The kor’o was still screaming and flailing when the unhelmeted warrior’s pink features exploded in a gust of blood and brains. Tyra sagged gratefully to the floor, smoke coiling from his eyes and ears.
The other colossi reacted immediately, raising weapons to cover all points of the room, frantic gestures seeming ridiculous without the spoken commands to accompany them. Tyra wondered abstractly, hazy with pain and fear, what they were saying to each other in the insulated sanctity of their helmets. He hoped they were scared.
In an instant the room became a maelstrom of dizzying weaponsfire and detonating shells. Weak from his injuries, bewildered and stunned by the chaos of the combat around him, Kor’o Natash Tyra barely even noticed when one of the Marines carefully stamped on his skull and c
rushed his brain.
The first one was a gift. He fragmented its ugly, exposed head from his concealment in the space beside the elevator. He ducked back into the recess and waited for the resulting whirlwind of directionless, panicky return fire to abate.
Curled foetally in his concealment, Kais’s ears became his eyes. There was a heavy clang— the dead Space Marine’s body toppling to the deck. Its power output thrummed noisily before hissing away into silence. Kais seized upon the distraction to ease onto his feet, melting into the shadows cast by consoles nearer the centre of the bridge. He stole a single glance at the group, arranged on overwatch as one bent over the body of their dead comrade. He seemed to be pushing some sort of instrumentation into the ragged wound of the corpse’s neck, oozing blood and filth across the deck.
Heavy footsteps clanked nearby, the Marines spreading out to find their prey. Their silence was somehow horrifying, reacting to commands only they could hear, more like machines than organisms. Kais found himself again pondering upon the nature of the tau’va, and whether the cost of efficacy was a lifetime of mechanical hollowness. He eased himself into a crouch and flicked a button-sized signal-flare quietly across the room, not allowing himself the time to worry about what he was planning next. The flare clattered quietly behind the communications consoles and ignited with a fizz.
The firestorm rumbled to life again, gunfire shredding the consoles like a hungry zephyr, an invisible airborne claw raking spitefully at the fio’tak surfaces. Kais didn’t wait, pouncing from his concealment whilst the Marines were distracted and sprinting forwards, assessing as he moved.
Time slowed to a crawl.
There were two to his left, pumping long streamers of bolter fire into the tangled morass of metal where the consoles had once stood. A nebulous orb of plasma distorted across his vision from the right, adding to the wreckage around the flare, now venting purple smoke. Kais rolled as he moved, snatching a glance to his side where two other Marines hulked, plasma-weapons raised.
The final gue’la stood at the apex of the bridge, facing... directly towards him.
Watching him. Unfooled by the distraction. Raising its weapon.
“Death to the unclean!” it roared, voice thick with metallic transmission.
The bolter opened fire and Kais pounced away, tumbling clumsily sideways. Miniature explosions rattled all around him and he scrabbled forwards, racking the carbine’s underslung secondary parts as he went. He had time to squeeze the trigger just once before stumbling aside as the column of detonating shells raked past him.
The gue’la saw a spinning object flipping through the air and caught it instinctively, bringing its gauntleted fist up to its face in confused examination. The grenade blew the top half of its armoured body into fragments of gore and ceramite, transforming the bridge into a bone-pocked atrocity and leaving the Marine’s disembodied legs, like the remains of a vandalised statue, planted stalwartly amongst the carnage. The other humans swivelled towards him instantly, colossal silhouettes hazing through the violet mist like ghosts, eye slits blazing eerily.
He became an animal, sprinting for its life. He was a clonebeast being hunted, a ceremonial preything being stalked by the shas’uis during the festival of T’au’kon’seh. Weapons opened up on either side, invisible traceries whistling past his head, narrowing-in implacably. And all within moments that lasted forever, a single raik’an stretching on glacially for tau’cyrs.
He danced through the purple flaresmoke, lurching and rolling and feinting, wondering abstractly which of the four gue’la — arranged almost formally to either side — would be the first to find their mark. A plasma orb shrieked past within tor’ils, singeing the fabric of his regs at his elbow.
What does the clonebeast do? he asked himself.
It runs. Even when exhausted, foaming and coughing, breaths laboured and bloody. Always away, running from the jeth’ri spears of its pursuers.
And they always catch it, sooner or later...
So what does the clonebeast never do?
He adjusted his angle and, not slowing, sprinted directly at the two Marines on his right. A bolter shell, fired from behind, ripped through the outer layers of his thigh armour and shredded a clod of weave fabric, detonating angrily as it spun away. He kept going, finding time somehow within the adrenaline chaos and insanity of his mind to enjoy the bewildered posture of the Space Marines before him, bending away in astonishment as their easy kill bounded towards them. The bolter fire at his back didn’t stop.
He dived between the legs of the nearest colossus, rolling madly and leaping, cat-like, for the cover of a recess. The two Space Marines across the room, bolters chattering hungrily as they tracked after him, were too late to realise their mistake. The threads of impact fire chased him across the deck until he was shielded by the bodies of their comrades, purple haze wafting around their huge forms. Caught in the crossfire, bolter shells stabbed ugly holes through their armour before they could even protest, leaving ribbon trails of blood hanging in the air. The shells that had lodged inside them detonated one after another, sending the gue’la in an absurd jerking jig as they slumped to the floor, innards pulped, plasma weapons clattering to the deck.
Their comrades ceased fire, rushing forwards through the mist as they saw what they’d done. Kais wished he could hear their vox-exchange, relishing the anger and guilt they must be feeling. Their advance was a riot of clanging footsteps and racking weapons, smashing their way through the shredded remains of consoles and benches. One hulked away towards the side wall of the bridge, moving around to cut Kais off. The other edged forwards, bolter barrel sweeping from left to right hungrily, seeking out its prey.
Kais quit his cover in a flash, muscles bunching. He was past the Marine and sprinting before the colossus could even react. He imagined the figure behind him, gyrating around with that strange mechanical fluidity, weapon raised, to track his movements. This time he would be too close to miss.
Kais’s hand closed over the dropped plasma gun he’d been leaping for, slick with blood from its owner’s mangled body. He turned and fired in a single, leg jarring movement, crying out in desperation.
A bolter shell tore into his helmet.
The impact flipped him backwards like a piece of paper, scattering the pixellated view of his HUD. Before the dark clouds of unconsciousness swarmed into his eyes and mind he heard, far away, the satisfying impact of a plasma orb and the dying screams of a gue’la.
The shadows came down. Kais just had time to wonder, dully, how long there was between impact and detonation of a bolter shell before everything went black.
Her team was exhausted. They’d fought off three boarding parties back to back, wading through the bodies of their enemies to take ground and corner the gue’la invaders. They’d watched friends and comrades falling and dying pulverised by the chattering hellguns of the humans or sucked silently into the void behind sealing blast doors, screaming the last of their air away into nothingness.
They’d reinforced the engine bay where the last of the gue’la were converging executing every last one without compassion or mercy or hate. It was a cull, cold and pure and simple.
Then they’d rushed to the bridge, picking off the few wounded stragglers that remained among the crippled corridors of the Or’es Tash’var, until at long last, after what seemed like rotaas of running and fighting they’d found a working elevator to the command deck.
Shas’la T’au Ju, reciting the sio’t meditation of focused aggression beneath her breath, stumbled onto the bridge in a knot of other shas’las and faced a nightmarish vision.
Purple haze, thin enough to give everything an insipid, violet taint, hung listlessly in the air. Wrecked controls and shattered technology blinked and sparked spastically, splattered by the mingled blood of tau and gue’la alike. Kor’o Natash Tyra, unmistakable in his robesuit, lay in a heap in the centre of the bridge, smashed skull leaking fluids.
Then she saw the Marine. There were o
thers, dead and shattered, lying in enormous mounds at different points of the bridge, but this one was alive: an articulating monstrosity straight from the didactic courses that had given her nightmares as a youth. It stood in plain sight, leaning over the body of a fire warrior and raising its blocky weapon.
Ju didn’t think. She lifted her carbine and shot the gargantuan warrior over and over again, and didn’t stop when the rest of the team joined her. The figure seemed to glow briefly at the combined assault, then, with an aborted roar of pain and frustration, exploded. The mess on the bridge got worse.
The fallen shas’la, she found, was Kais. He’d been shot in the head.
When he awoke he laughed like a yearling shas’saal at the sight of her, and they were still hugging and smiling and examining the almost fatal dent in his helmet, a miraculously unexploded shell still buried in the fio’tak, when Shas’o U’das, concealed with the other dignitaries in some well-guarded part of the vessel, spoke across the ship’s communicator.
The fightback had begun.
IV
11.26 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)
The tau flotilla erupted from the final tentative warp hop in the midst of a blue-green corona, dissipating energies blossoming and fading into the void. Some forty vessels, none remotely as large as their gue’la counterparts but awe-inspiring in their sleek manoeuvrability and sheer weight of numbers, slipped into reality on the edges of the Dolumar system and surged towards the gue’la fleet, still in dogged pursuit of the Or’es Tash’var. Their rounded prows reflected the muggy light of the system’s star, casting luminous lines across the bulbous outer hulls of their fellows.
Lusha’s breath caught in his throat at the sight. The various “els and “os around him resisted the instinct to hiss in astonishment, wide eyes tracking the warships as they slunk past, disgorging swarms of fighters.
Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000) Page 14
