Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  Keraz hefted his axe, chain edge shrieking, arrow wedge shadow falling across the cringing shapes. One was human, he saw without caring, old features open in terror, grey moustache quivering in a silent moan. The other was xeno, standing rigid and tense but betraying not a hint of fear.

  It didn’t matter. Terror wasn’t compulsory — only blood mattered.

  But the axe never came down — at its zenith the words of power gripped his body and Severus’s command overcame him. As meek as a lamb, but raging and boiling within, he dragged the two figures into the portal and vanished in a gust of energy and heat.

  Kais was too late.

  His mind still couldn’t be operating properly, surely. Surely he was too overwhelmed by this sudden escalation of events, this inexplicable horror. Surely that was why nothing was making any sense.

  Figures appearing from nowhere, fluttering creatures cackling and gibbering, everywhere was blood and fire and hate. He thought, am I going mad?

  Perhaps.

  Whispers like cobwebs, like dessicated corpse talk, like the papery rustling of a million inserts, filled his mind. Perhaps this was a gue’la trick? Some hitherto unknown technology and resource they’d concealed from tau intelligence until it was needed? Yes — yes, that must be it.

  A hidden army of berserk monstrosities, waiting to be unleashed; a cunning deceit they’d arranged to ensnare the Aun and crush the tau... He wondered briefly if El’Lusha and the others, still aboard the Or’es Tash’var, would concur. This was the remit of Auns and shas’os, not of flawed shas’las.

  But...

  But that wasn’t right... As he stumbled through twisted corridors, humans were screaming and dying, black monstrosities sweeping from glowing portals to murder the terrified paleskins, dragging them away to Aun-knows-where. And things, vermin with red-scale skin and spiny thorns, fluttered and swooped, scavenging amongst the bodies for flesh. They left trails of slime and pus as they crawled, chattering and giggling like infants.

  Reaching the concilium was a blur. Had he slept? Was he, perhaps, dreaming? Where was the scowling blue-armoured Space Marine? In all this bedlam Kais would have welcomed a familiar face, even one so threatening as Ardias’s.

  Towering devils. Black-on-red-on-rust armour. Eyes like volcanoes. Axes and guns and blades and claws. Spines and chains and leering skulls. Shadow Marines. Hate Marines. Pain Marines.

  The voice in his brain, hissing and whispering, fluctuated and diminished — a poison echo like a ringing in his ear. He wondered if everyone could hear it, or if this was some awful new symptom of his madness.

  The Enduring Blade had become distilled insanity, everywhere the clamour of screams and blood and gunfire. Even encased once again in the comforting envelope of his helmet, even cradling the blocky meltagun he’d found decs before, the fear bubbled up in him and refused to cave in to an assault of meditation and litany. He was running scared.

  Portals like great sucking lips opened on every side, smacking together wetly and disgorging their cackling cargo, ghost trails of warp and plasmic splatter following them.

  Oh, he was scared of death, that much was true. Scared of pain and oblivion. Scared of the laughing black-armoured devils with their glowing eyes — so like the Space Marines yet so different. Scared of insanity and madness and rage. Scared of failure.

  But more than that, scared of himself.

  In his darkest dreams, in his soul, this was how he imagined the Mont’au. As he ran for the boardroom, hooves clamouring on the deck, wounded leg forgotten in the rush, he saw the ember-eyed hulks twisting to face him, pausing in their bloody carnage, weapons raised, and each time there came a hesitation: a split-raik’an pause in which, he knew, the armoured creatures were staring at his battered form, his blood encrusted wargear, his crater-dented helmet, wondering—

  Which side is he on?

  But he was gone and sprinting before the hesitation was over, and the gunfire was just a distant chatter at his back.

  Ignore the screams.

  Ignore the whispering.

  Get to the ethereal. Save the ethereal. Focus. Concentrate.

  The door to the boardroom wouldn’t open. Stomping footsteps closed in behind him. Something cackled nearby. Moving without thinking, he opened fire with the meltagun, dragging its slipstream of boiling air across the immovable bulkhead beside the door. A ruddy glow appeared wherever it touched, oxidising treatments skittering across the metal in a ballet of blue fire circlets. It was too thick to succumb to the assault.

  A wide pipe above the sealed doorway clicked and clattered, bruised metal protesting at the conflicting expansion and contraction of its heating and cooling surfaces. Kais shrugged mentally and turned the gun on the conduit directly, its searing melta stream puckering and flaying the metal.

  The thing behind him came around the corner.

  The pipe ruptured and a flare of promethium flashed across his vision. The explosion hurled him off his feet, toppling him backwards. Everything tumbled downwards in his helmet display, a blur of metal and flame. His back found the deck with a breath-exploding thump, curling him over in a ball. A sheet of fire vomited overhead: a horizontal geyser of burning vapours sprouting from the ruptured pipe. The black-metal monster behind him shrieked as the fire lance struck it head-on, mashing it against the corridor wall like a swatted beetle.

  Kais didn’t look.

  Smoke and dust circulated all around, an opaque fog bisected neatly by the burning gas. He scrabbled beneath the flamespout on all fours, patting out the glowing speckles of singed fabric on his arms and legs. The door, absorbing the full force of the detonation, had ceased to exist.

  Kais’s triumph was short-lived; he leaped into the boardroom with a shout, gun brandished hungrily before him, to find blood. Nothing but blood. Limbs off, heads removed, bodies slumped. Goggle eyes and gaping mouths, like fish.

  El’Yis’ten stared at him reproachfully from a heap of flesh in one corner. Her body was on the other side of the room. Gue’la and tau, so scattered together that the bloodslick was a pale violet, a swirling galaxy of red and cyan running together. Here a tau arm lay, knuckles clenched, beside a de-limbed human corpse.

  There was a symbolism here, perhaps. A sense of unity, a sense of physical sameness. Given a talented enough por’hui journalist, this scene might mean something. “In death, we’re all the same”, perhaps.

  But it didn’t.

  All it meant to Kais was a furious scrabble to remove his helmet, a bulge-eyed moment of staring around, unshielded by the layer of artificiality his HUD provided, and then a bilious surge of nausea from his guts to his mouth. This time he couldn’t keep it down.

  His mind tumbled upside down, the whispering clogged his senses like mud and reality shifted like a compass.

  Ardias stared at the madness around him, acquainting himself with the extent of the situation. That things had gone catastrophically wrong was undeniable: the peace negotiations were ruined and the hidden evil, Delpheus’s “masked fiend”, was exposed. Still, despite it all, despite the horror and the death, despite the utter collapse of events, Ardias entered the fray with an air of professional relish. He had been born and moulded to fight, and in so doing he justified his existence. It was a strangely reassuring notion, and he could see no point in denying it.

  With a chattering bolt pistol in his hand, with a snarling chainsword cleaving the skulls of his enemies, it was difficult to appreciate the wider calamity — the physical realities were too close at hand to ignore. Ardias killed and shouted orders, commanding a meticulous purge, flanked by his indomitable, unwavering brethren.

  Governor Severus had invited Chaos onto the Enduring Blade.

  Chaos. The antithesis of order. The “Great Terror”. To investigate too far into the whys and wherefores of the Dark Power was to become clouded and tainted by it, so great was its potency. The mysterious agents of the Inquisition’s Ordo Malleus spent centuries struggling to bind and purge the madness, fully aw
are of the futility of conventional sciences and technologies. Instead the Taint, the very concept of Chaos, was embroiled behind a paradigm of religion and occultism, a stringent galactic code that stated clearly: the Emperor’s light is pure. All else leads to Chaos.

  It was bound to the warp. It was bound to the real and the unreal together, it was bound to those things invisible in the mundane colours and clamours of materiality: thoughts, feelings, spirits and souls and angels and devils.

  Chaos was a thing of division and conflict and contrast, a thing of anarchy and insanity. It would pull down the structures of humanity; of the universe; of time itself. It would shatter the galaxy for the reward of a pretty noise or murder a million billion men just to appreciate the hue of their fluids. It came from nowhere and went to nowhere.

  It was everything the Ultramarines were not. Ardias exploded a chittering daemon thing, fluttering at him with hooked teeth bared, and thanked the Emperor for this holy opportunity to cleanse the taint. There were mistakes to be rectified here.

  Ten millennia ago the Emperor’s glorious crusades to reunite humanity faltered and crumbled. The Space Marine legions, deified avatars of retribution and human endeavour, infallible in their purity and steadfastness, shining icons of strength and wholeness, had rotted from within. Like a worm ceaselessly and blindly hunting for a vulnerable entry point, Chaos had writhed its way into the very heart of the Imperium. Half the Space Marine legions were seduced and corrupted. Humanity held its breath. The Emperor all but died, sacrificing himself to save his race.

  The Dark Legions scattered.

  Ancient history, of course. Whispered lessons from the Librium at the Fortress of Hera. Arcane heresies guarded and studied by lexicaniums and codiciers and epistolaries. A blot on the data sheet, a stain on the purity of mankind. But the Legions were still out there, biding their time, murdering their way closer and closer to the heart of the Imperium. Who knew where they lurked, where they would strike next, where their shadow would fall?

  Ardias snarled and swiped at a horned helmet so hard it exploded, unable to restrain the unnatural hatred and fury that rose in his gut, guiltily aware of the deviation of his thoughts from the measured approach that the Codex counselled.

  The shadow had fallen across the Enduring Blade and he vowed silently to grapple against it until the last of his energy was spent; a loyal servant of the Emperor could do no more, and was expected to do no less. These ancient warriors, blackened with evil, who had once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ardias’s ancestors, these fallen angels; they must be punished.

  “Preserve your ammunition!” he voxed, firing off a short burst at one bellowing Chaos thing. A cackling daemon formed from a warp portal at his side and was efficiently cleaved in half by Sergeant Mallich’s chainsword. Ardias nodded gratefully and moved on.

  “Brother-captain? This is Sergeant Larynz.”

  “Report.”

  “I have the third tactical squad, two decks above your position. There are incursions at all points. These portals, brother — have you ever seen their like?”

  “Negative. Some dark sorcery lies at their heart, Larynz, you can be certain of that. Courage and honour!”

  “Courage and honour!”

  “Regroup on my signal, sergeant. I fear we must sacrifice this vessel.”

  “Sir? You can’t mea—?”

  “Regroup on me, Larynz. No questions.”

  “Of course, brother.”

  Ardias barged onwards along the corridor, swatting drooling daemonettes like flies. This far into the ship, the walls themselves seemed corrupted— structural damage and ancientness combining with some indefinable alteration to make everything seem organic and twisted. Not for the first time Ardias felt like he was walking in a peristaltic gut, wet walls shivering with hungry villi around him.

  “Captain!” the vox chattered, urgently. “I’ve located a communications chamber.” The rust-red shape of Tech-marine Achellus waved to him along a side artery, prominent mechanical appendages emulating the movement of his arms. The figure beckoned into one of the innumerable chambers that lined every corridor, where Ardias could see lights blinking and brass-bound gauges fluttering. In a vessel as ancient and labyrinthine as an Emperor-class battlecruiser, subsidiary control rooms and communication hubs lurked in myriad corners. Given enough time, a seeker could locate any resource aboard a ship of such magnitude.

  Ardias strode into the room, nodding at the cob-webbed controls.

  “Can you operate them, Achellus?” he asked, perplexed by the endless arrays of meaningless switches and dials.

  “By the grace of the Omnissiah,” the Tech-marine nodded, vaguely tracing the shape of the Holy Engine in the air, “I believe that I can.”

  “Squad?” Ardias voxed, watching Achellus’s cyborg fingers dancing across the console. “Assume overwatch positions outside this chamber. In the name of the primarch, hold your ground!”

  The bolters rattled and the daemons chattered and the hissing, whispering influence of Chaos filled the air with greasy nausea. Ardias bent over the controls, thinking hard, and ground his teeth against the cloying voices in his mind that made it so hard, almost impossible, to lower his bolter and lift a comm transmitter in its place.

  “Shas’o? There’s something happening on the battle-cruiser...”

  “Is the dropship returning?”

  “No... it’s...”

  “It’s what?”

  “The drones are picking up energy signatures. Weaponsfire, maybe.”

  “See if you can raise anyone.”

  “Their communications shields are still operative.”

  “We can’t reach any of them?”

  O’Udas rubbed his temples wearily, feeling exhausted. The return to the primary bridge of the Or’es Tash’var had been accompanied not only with the unpleasant task of removing the smoking bodies scattered thereon, but with the realisation that, lacking a kor’o and having failed to persuade the Aun to remain aboard, responsibility for the vessel and its crew was resting firmly with him.

  The kor’el with the unenviable task of filling O’Tyra’s shoes gave him a despairing look. “None, Shas’o. What action?”

  None of them had been prepared for this rotaa’s madness.

  “They’re taking too long...” he decided, glancing around at the anxious faces, tense bodies perched in ruined seats. “Power up the weapons. No more chances.”

  Drones scurried to comply, exhausted air caste personnel tapping at mangled controls, struggling to maintain their professional calm. Udas shared a glance with El’Lusha, rubbing his hands together uncomfortably. The tension throughout the command deck was palpable.

  “Shas’o?” a Kor’ui mumbled, frowning. “We’re getting a signal. Very faint but... it’s definitely directed at us.”

  “T’au?”

  “No. It’s gue’la.”

  He nodded, pursing his lips. “Let’s hear it. Branch it to the rest of the fleet too.”

  The kor’ui passed a long finger through a sense beam and abruptly a storm of white noise rippled across the bridge, high frequency squeals shifting in tone until a single voice — a gue’la voice — crackled through and resolved.

  “—s the Enduring Blade, hailing the tau flotilla. I request acknowledgment... It’s not working, Achellus. Try a different frequency.”

  The kor’ui gave Udas a plaintive look. “Shas’o?”

  He scratched his chin, tapping a hoof thoughtfully against the deck. A series of tiny drones with flashing “message” icons circulated around his head — kor’os and shas’os throughout the flotilla hurrying to give their advice. He waved them away.

  “Open a channel.”

  What little white noise that remained on the communication channel resolved with a tinny pop. The ugly gue’la voice halted in surprise.

  “Enduring Blade, this is the Or’es Tash’var. Identify yourself.”

  “Captain Ardias of the Ultramarines. You must listen to—”
/>
  “Where is Aun’el T’au Ko’vash?”

  “Never mind that, we—”

  “Where is he? We are poised to strike. Return him now.”

  “Stand down! You must listen! We face a mutual threat!”

  “Lies. Cut the channel. All vessels prepare to engage.” His blood burned.

  “Wait, Emperor damn you! The ethereal has been taken — most likely to the planet surface.”

  “By who?”

  “Chaos, warp take your eyes! Chaos!”

  O’Udas frowned. The gue’la’s voice was full of certainty and conviction, as if he was expected to recognise the name of this alleged enemy. The word was delivered with terrible resonance.

  “‘Chaos’?” he repeated, unfamiliar syllables sitting awkwardly on his tongue.

  The voice replied with heavy exasperation: “Oh, you don’t... I haven’t time to explain. The dark powers! The warp taint! Evil!”

  “This is ridiculous. I won’t listen to another w—”

  “They’ve taken him and the admiral. We can’t determine how they’re travelling but... listen to me, they are beyond our reach, for now. Attack this vessel and you will waste time and blood that would be better spent purging this threat! We’re under assault.”

  O’Udas shook his head, lips curling. “Gue’la lies. Delaying tactics.”

  The voice almost roared, a venomous litany of frustration and abuse that pushed O’Udas’s patience over the edge.

  “Cut the line,” he growled, directing a pointed look at the kor’ui manning the comms. The channel closed with a sedate peal.

  “Shas’o,” El’Lusha muttered from his alcove at the rear of the bridge. “What if he’s telling the truth?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But if there is a third party involved—”