“It turns out — and it took me three years of borrowing xenolinguitor servitors to unravel this — that the eldar established quickly that their hopes of annihilating Tarkh’ax and his forces were scant. They opted instead for a sly solution.
“The cartouche they left behind them explains it all, though deciphering its mysteries has cost me much of my life and my fortune. They opened up a sealed pocket of warp-space... part of a ‘webway’, the text says. We can’t even begin to fathom its workings but... I like to think of it as a cage, outside of space and time, cut off even from the warp. They closed off all the exits, detached it from their network of warp tunnels and sealed the gateways behind them.
“The mightiest of their warlocks, commanded by the Farseer Jur Telissa, constructed a ‘songweave’—like a psychic melody, holding it together, stitching the prison closed piece by piece. Out on the plains Tarkh’ax was moments from crushing their forces when the spell was finished and... Hh...A-and every last unit, every daemon and Marine, every warp thing and every warrior in that glorious army — disappeared. The pennants and icons fell. The black heraldry was left to rot, vehicles burning in the deserts. A grim day for the powers in the warp.
“The effort killed almost all the eldar warlocks. Small comfort.”
His lip curled, the unquenchable agonies of his master wracking through his body, filling him with despair.
“Imagine,” he hissed, the sensation too much to bear, “being sealed away for three thousand years, unable to move or think or feel. Cut off from the rage and the power of your gods. Separated by impossible energies from the howling, insane fury of your daemonlord. His cage was — is—the strongest of all.
“It took me three years to discern what those meddling, arrogant xenogen warlocks had done. It has taken me sixteen to work out how to undo it — but I’m close. Oh, terror’s-face, so close! All but one of the prisons are sundered. The army is released. Praise be the Ruinous Ones! Oh, stories can get away with not having a real beginning, gentlemen, but... there’s always an ending.
“Don’t look at me with those disgusted eyes, admiral. You don’t know. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Your... Your ‘order’, your structure... it’s transient. It crumbles. I understand. Given enough time, even the mightiest of endeavours comes to dust. Disorder out of order. You can’t fight nature. And everyone, in their secret souls, knows it. My masters merely seek to speed the process.
“It took me a decade. Hard years of rites and incantations, secretly studied and recited, chipping away at the songweave, crumbling the walls of the prison little by little. And then this... this ‘diplomatic disagreement’. My crowning glory — an orchestrated war. A thousand casualties, and more, all in the name of the daemon-lord!” The governor breathed hard, heart hammering excitedly in his chest. He forced himself to regain his composure and lit a bac-stick from his pocket, inhaling the scented fumes thoughtfully.
“There are rules, you see.” He blew a greasy smoke ring, enjoying the ethereal’s undivided attention on his every movement. “Oh, you stand and chant, you render the dispel icons and arrange the non-weave perfectly. You strike at the monoliths with deconsecrated swords and smear plagueshit across the altars... but you still need a gesture. Sorcery has a high cost, gentlemen. It’s paid in blood and souls and hate.
Thanks to your little conflict, thanks to all those tau killed by human hands — and vice versa — more than enough blood was spilled to fuel the final little act. The walls came tumbling down. I set the army free.
“Let me spell it out to you. I ordered your abduction because I expected reprisals, Aun, not because I value whatever worthless shreds of knowledge you have. I have to admit, mind you, the severity of the counterattack was impressive. Perhaps the tau aren’t entirely useless to the Dark Powers after all. And admiral... Admiral, admiral, admiral. Oh you poor, deluded thing. You really think you had any autonomy throughout this? You think you exercised free choice? I summoned you here, I involved you, stoked up the fire — I even crawled into a librarian’s mind, just to persuade that pompous fool Ardias to intervene. A delightful little peace conference was the only way I could get you both in the same room. All terribly sneaky, don’t you think?
“So the warhost was freed. The webway spat them out like rotten meat — wherever I commanded, of course — and now they’re up there on the surface, flexing their muscles. They’ve been waiting for three thousand years. It would be rude not to allow them some... ha... “venting” time.
“I couldn’t have done it without you. You both have my deepest gratitude. Still. No rest for the wicked, as they say. I have one little job left and then this whole sordid business is done with. One last seal to break. It has to be at sundown, gentlemen. Nineteen minutes past seven pm, by Dolumar’s clock. I checked. That’s three hours from now. Three hours until the last prison crumbles. Three hours until almighty Tarkh’ax — Tarkh’ax the Barbarous; Tarkh’ax the Iniquitor; Tarkh’ax the Defiler!—rises again to finish his holy work... Three hours until all of us — we who’ve done more than any others to bring about the daemonlord’s release — are rewarded for our faith.
“Don’t look so scared, admiral. You might even enjoy it.”
The servitor twitched briefly and turned its baleful gaze upon Captain Brunt. The bearded man, legs long since atrophied away to nothingness by years of seated command, mentally swivelled his chair cocoon towards the skeletal creature.
“Message, captain,” it clicked, cable bundles swaying as it moved.
“From?”
“Ardias. Space Marine. Very patchy.”
“Play it.”
Ghoulishly, the servitor’s dry lips moved in time with the relayed message, sharp voice suddenly dampened and bullied into Ardias’s gruff tones.
“...hear this, Fleet... an’t wait any longe... tramarines will evacuate in thirty secon... o more delays. No merc... eel no remorse at this, the vesse...onger part of the God-Emperor’s flee... tterly corrupted. It must be destroyed...”
The servitor’s mouth snapped shut with a dry crack and it turned back to its console. Brunt arched an eyebrow. On the viewscreen at the apex of the hot, dry bridge, the Enduring Blade hung enormously in the void. Its ruined generarium vented white hot promethium fuel in a ghostly trail as it lurched slowly, carcass prow splintered and battered, broadside weapons batteries reduced to gaping, toothless maws. More disturbing still, over the past hour an unnatural patina had begun to form across those obsidian faces of the hulk left undamaged; a green/red corrosion that matted every gloss, sullying every bright icon and gargoyle, wrapping threadlike pseudopodia of rust and mould and decay around it: strangling tendrils dragging its prey out of the light.
Brunt was put in mind of a tumour, breaking free of its initial lodging and spreading its cancerous cells throughout every network of fluids and flesh, grasping blindly, twisting and perverting and corrupting. Spatter clouds of sparks and minor detonations marred the crevices striating the broad hull, the corridor viscera within — black and fluid with whatever ruinous sorcery was morphing and infecting the ship — exposed like withered intestines.
He almost spat. The revulsion at seeing a vessel of the Enduring Blade’s ancient calibre — a beacon of purity and strength that had served the Emperor unstintingly for millennia — so corrupted and mired in evil, so defeated and violated, so utterly ruined... it was more than he was prepared to tolerate.
There were innocents still aboard. Hiding in their cabins, lurking in gloom-filled dormitories, shrieking and screaming as the last drop pods fell away without them and the Marines, their last vestige of hope, boarded their strikehawk and deserted them.
Brunt thought: Better off dead.
“Officer Jarreth. Prime the starboard arrays. Bring us into position. Contact the fleet. Tell them...
Tell them the Purgatus claims this lamentable duty as its own. Tell them to get clear.”
Kais slept. Dreamless and black. A sleep of exhaustion and confusion.
/>
Unable to resolve himself, unable to discern his thoughts into some precise mental colloid of reality and absurdity, his brain took the only option open to it.
It shut down. It closed itself off from everything. It threw up walls of weariness, pulled the plug on consciousness and aborted for the time that it took to reset. To start again.
Total. Mental. Expurgation.
His father had spoken of machines. The machine. A machine that, refusing to operate and unable to diagnose its errors, will nonetheless maintain every outward appearance of efficiency after simply closing down and being switched back on again. But the error would remain. Secret and impossible to reach. No matter how many times the machine required restarting, reformatting refreshing it would continue to falter until the problem was tackled at its root.
Outside of his mind a recorded servitor voice announced calmly that the drop pod had just punctured the mesosphere. Crude target seeking arrays, in the absence of any user input coordinates, identified a major population/energy reading within the troposphere, probably surface-based, and adjusted its descent to accommodate. A klaxon trilled once, almost perfunctory in its lacklustre volume, and the servitor voice reminded its occupants to batten down any cargo and ensure that all vehicular freight was adequately secured. Human passengers, it droned, were advised to check the straps of their deployment booths.
Kais rolled over in his sleep, flaccid muscles sprawled liquidly across the deck, and dreamed of cool, dark nothingness.
Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance) gusted horizontally — in relation to the planet’s terminator — to optimise its view of the gue’la vessel. The two fleets skulked on either side of the crippled hulk, weapons visibly lowered but not unlimbered. The drone drank it all in, recording and surveying, hungry for data.
Drop pods left the gue’la fleet like rain. Sunlight transformed them into pied fish shoals, iridescent flanks sweeping in broad waves of shimmering motion. The planetary exosphere took on a dappled ruby glow as pod after pod sluiced through its boundaries in a riot of superheated matter and coiling gases, the onset of evening marked brutally by the crescent swathe of darkness gobbling up continents below.
Orbsat 66.G could sense the abundance of weapons descending towards the surface. Munitions, artillery, vehicles: all deployed in a succession of different sized pods and shuttles, dipping their armoured bases and plummeting daggerlike, swallowed by perspective within moments.
The tau flotilla, positioned carefully opposite its black-hulled counterparts, efficiently disgorged a growing swarm of dropships. Soaring gulls to the humans’ graceless divehawks, they descended in progressive V-shaped waves, flanked by Barracuda fighters and drone-operated Harpedoes. Orbsat 66.G tracked a Dorsal-class heavy bomber as it rolled into the ionosphere in a gust of blue energy and was gone.
On either side of the tiny drone, waterfalls of death tumbled planetwards, and spinning with morbid ungainliness in the space in between, the mouldering cadaver of the Enduring Blade turned prow over stern and vented oxygen into the void. One of the gue’la vessels moved forwards, a ponderous monstrosity letting the last of its brood eggs tumble away to the spawning ground below. It was sleeker than the Enduring Blade, spire-encrusted plate surfaces more streamlined, arrowhead beak longer and more vicious. The drone’s vast memory banks hurried to identify the vessel, rapidly narrowing its list of candidates as each unique feature of the ebony black facade-hull was checked off against intelligence reports and sightings.
“The Purgatus,” the assessment reported, noting an elaborate array of cannon lances protruding from the vessel’s flanks and an ancient battle scar on the uppermost toroq spires — clearly repaired with more recent metallurgical techniques: telltale identifying marks, like pectoral wounds on an alpha t’pel shark. “Retribution class,” the report said. Impossibly ancient. Impossibly powerful.
Growing energy emissions from the swollen gun ports sent 66.G into a flurry of confirmations and warnings tightbeamed to the Or’es Tash’var. The response was dismissive: “Continue surveillance. No further action. Negligible threat detected.”
The Purgatus adopted a flanking position alongside the tumbling Enduring Blade, engines and stabilisers carefully fired in a succession of small bursts until the ships moved in the same slow pirouette together, a single unit bonded by invisible cords. The lance clusters developed a ruddy glow, faint deck lights surrounding their positions dimming even further as power was brutally redistributed. A corona began to form, a shifting zone of arcing electricity and vacuum-guzzled gases.
Orbsat 66.G sensed the energyspike in a sub-real spectrum moments before the weapons fired. In a flurry of glow-tipped torpedoes deployed from peripheral launch bays, the central cannon belched a solid stream of plasma-energy, secondary and tertiary weapons-fire clustered around its core like tributaries.
The first shot sliced open the Enduring Blade like a warm slab of poi’sell, melting its structure with colossal precision. Explosions and abortive mushroom-cloud gouts of superheated air marred the edges of the incision — dwarfed by the scale of the scene and rendered insignificant; little more than sparks at the tip of a hammer-struck anvil.
A wedge of decking yawned open from the dying vessel, exposing a labyrinth of cross-section corridors and machinery within. The dark aura that clung to the ship — totally escaping the drone’s abilities of analysis but somehow tangible nonetheless — was dragged out into the void to dissipate harmlessly.
The second strike, as the Enduring Blade rolled serenely end over tip, punctured the cavernous wreckage of the engine stacks and punched a mighty bolt hole the length of the carcass — a blazing lance that glowed through the portholes and gaps in the infrastructure and knocked a solid chunk of the wedge prow into razor-shrapnel; an exit wound full of fire and zero-gravity liquid metal, tumbling and accreting.
The ship rolled again, displaying the devastation of the first shot like a proud veteran dragging tight the skin around his flesh wounds to exaggerate his scars of honour. The third shot, accompanied by a precision-targeted swarm of torpedoes, stabbed deep into the wound and, the watching drone surmised, dissected a promethium fuel line.
For a single raik’an there was light: a nova flash bright enough to leave an ugly overexposed mishmash of pixels across 66.G’s conventional-spectrum recording and casting a freeze frame shadow, grotesque and crenellated, across the Purgatus’s hull.
Then, chain reactions dispersing along the length of the vessel in both directions, the Enduring Blade shrugged off its skin, scattered its rotten musculature like chaff, gurgled coils of white-hot fuel nervously, and finally — ghoulishly — vanished behind a domino effect detonation that pulverised every connection, shattered every joist and bulkhead, atomised every datalink and evaporated the aborted screams of anyone unfortunate enough to still be alive.
Orbsat 66.G watched — detached — as the lifesign counter dropped like a stone. The carcass broke up. Cable guts shimmied in the sun and fragmented. Melt-blasted debris formed gunmetal confetti, expanding spherically. And bodies. Bodies and bodies and bodies.
A motion detector set high on the drone’s casing diverted its attention briefly. It oscillated precisely and trained its primary optic on the gue’la fleet, brooding darkly against the planetary eventide, suffering the hail of fragments from their violated brother in some self-flagellating display of sorrow.
On every beaked monster, on every sombre battleship and snarl-prowed frigate, every colossal battlecruiser, a mast was jerkily raised above the bridgecastle. The fleet flew a black flag and the Imperial comm-channels were thick with the tinny report of funereal marches and martial fugues.
Things came back to him in a jumble.
Vision, somewhere. The wince-inducing flare of first light followed quickly by a moment’s confusion: perspective was all wrong — focusing on distant objects didn’t work.
Helmet-HUD, he reminded himself. Focus close.
The drop pod door lay open at an angle, the
rich evening sky of Dolumar revealed beyond. Kais wondered abstractly how long he’d been asleep, how long since landing, how long since—
The memories came back to him in a glut of impressions and sounds, making him gag. He’d lost control, he knew. He’d been pushed to the very back of his own consciousness and forced to watch, forced to obey.
That’s an excuse.
Nobody forced you.
You. Did. It. Yourself.
He stamped on that thought quickly and bullied his attention onto less esoteric matters, peering down at his gloves. He was unsurprised to find the familiar black-brown crust of dried blood speckling each digit, and again looked away before the reality could seep into his thoughts. He shifted his concentration to the blinking icons bordering his HUD. Half his helmet’s analysis functions were inoperative, and an experimental grope with his hand revealed a network of dents and scrapes and scratches. Again, he blinked and moved on, exercising the methodical analysis his training had instilled.
His leg ached. He’d lost the medipack that covered it, somewhere. A cursory glance at his pack reminded him of the blade-encrusted vehicle-monster and he shuddered, secretly grateful that he’d been under the effects of the madness. In a more rational state of mind, beyond the ravaging effects of exhaustion and the rage, he couldn’t have hoped to deal with such an enemy.
Was the Mont’au to thank, then, for his deliverance?
More rogue thoughts, there. Displacement was the key, he decided. Stay busy. Don’t think. He stood up, testing his body, and was astonished to find himself refreshed. He stretched languidly, arching his back and rubbing at his arms, enjoying the feline sensation for its mundane normalcy.
Something loud punctured his comfort from outside the pod. He blinked and ignored the ugly sound, concentrating on himself.
Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000) Page 25
