Stability returned quickly, arms outstretched, gyroscopes locked off and balance reasserted. The silence was endless.
“Steady descent,” Vre’Tong’ata reported, breaking the airy quiet with a hint of nervousness in his voice. This was only his second high-altitude drop.
“Drones?”
“Maintaining position.”
“Good. Unit three?”
“All signs are good.”
“Four?”
“Fine, Shas’el.”
“Coolant regulators are holding out, Kol’tae?”
“Clean and efficient, Shas’el.”
He nodded happily. “Stay alert. Engage packs at five hundred tor’leks. Not a second after. And easy on the deceleration — I don’t want any mid-air liquidations.”
The cloud layer dissolved around him, its ethereal paleness replaced by the sudden visual shock of the ground beneath, approaching at impossible speed.
The onset of evening rendered the sand rose red — a sea of embers stretching across every horizon. Lettica, directly below them now, was a jagged ulcer marring the desert, uneven surface casting its clawlike shadow in an ever-extending clutch as the sun lowered.
The four suits hurtled earthwards, like misfired bullets cruising along their curvaceous trajectory. Slaves at the whim of gravity. A blue light flickered twice at the corner of Lusha’s HUD, informing him that terminal velocity had been reached.
Pinpricks of light dappled and criss-crossed the black city, weaponsfire and explosions seeming somehow unreal under the influence of distance: bright festival lights against a dark background.
“Shas’el?” the comm chimed. This is the Or’es Tash’var!
Lusha rolled his eyes. “Make it quick,” he replied, “or I’m a ge’ta-flatbread.” The other team members chuckled quietly, reassured by their leader’s joviality.
The voice on the comm sounded perplexed. “S-shas’el?”
“Never mind. You’ve caught me at a bad time, Kor’ui, that’s all.”
“It’s just something O’Udas thought you’d want to know, Shas’el...”
“Understood. Squad — eight hundred tor’leks, brace for firing.”
“Shas’el, should I contact you later?”
“No, no...”
“It’s Shas’la Kais.”
What?
“You said you wanted to know if there was any news.”
Lusha’s stomach turned over.
Pragmatism. Detachment. Efficiency.
He frowned. Pragmatism be damned — he’d known Kais’s father. He’d watched the youth’s progress all rotaa. He owed the shas’la his concern. “And?”
“We think we’ve found a trace. On the surface.”
“You think?”
“It’s patchy, but we’re confident.”
“Be sure, Kor’ui. Is it him or not?”
“Uh...”
Is it him? Lusha struggled to control his eagerness, aware that his squad were listening.
“Probably” The Kor’ui replied hesitantly. “It’s as if his signal’s being blocked by so—”
“Shas’el!” Vre’Wyr’s voice cut in urgently. “You’re too low!”
Lusha glanced at his altimeter, heart racing. The kor’ui’s news had short-circuited his attention for too long: he’d dropped below the five hundred tor’lek limit.
Hissing in alarm, he brought the jetpack online quickly, overfeeding the anti-grav bursts to compensate for his tardiness and ignoring the chorus of protest chimes from the AI. The rest of the team grew more and more distant above him, decelerating at a far more sensible speed.
He overrode the jet dampeners with a rank command, ignoring the squeal of metallic protest as the burners kicked in and aided the anti-grav. The ground came up to meet him inexorably, altimeter blinking red in alarm.
“Shas’el?” the comm chimed. He was too busy sweating and fighting for control to discern whether it was one of the team or the kor’ui.
At an altitude of two hundred tor’leks, with the city’s buildings fully formed and ugly beneath him, he was fairly certain he was going to make it. The jetpack was moaning like an infant at the exertions placed upon it, anti-grav distorting the very air in a long column of shimmering diffracted light. He strengthened the field higher still and felt a glut of blood rush to his head. His organs sat heavily inside him, crushed indelicately by the force of the deceleration. He choked back on the nausea and brought himself under control.
“Shas’el — are you all right?” The rest of the team were now just fifty tor’leks above.
“Fine,” he grunted, trying to sound unruffled. A bright stream of ordnance rattled past him, tracers peppering the sky.
Great, he thought sourly. Just what I need.
He tried to fix on the firing position but it was lost in a riot of explosions and gunfire. Until he was down amongst the violence and madness it was difficult to appreciate its reality — being detached from it by distance made it seem almost laughable, a lightshow for his own amusement.
“Setting down in ten,” he hissed, hoping the battlesuit could take the strain. It was going to be a bumpy landing.
“Good fortune, Shas’el,” Vre’Kol’tae mumbled from somewhere above, voice thick with concern.
The ground came up like a battering ram, a clear street overshadowed by wrecked buildings. He pushed every remaining drop of power to the jetpack and flexed the absorption pads on the base of the suit’s lower limbs, angling his body shallowly to avoid a ruinous cartwheel splashdown. He’d seen it happen before.
The neural interface was supposedly unconnected to his pain centres. It should, in theory at least, be possible to lop off his mechanical limbs, fire bullets into his chassis, electrocute or burn or maim or behead the unit, without him feeling so much as a twinge of discomfort. In theory.
In practice, a veteran user of Crisis XV8 technology often developed ho’or-ata-t’chel: sympathetic ghost-pains. Phantom reactions to external damage.
He’d seen shas’uis so traumatised by losing their sensor-cluster “heads’ they’d spent kai’rotaas in a coma. He’d seen a shas’vre who, shot in his biological leg by a lucky armour-piercing round, couldn’t understand why he was unable to walk normally when he exited the suit, since its lowest limbs were perfectly intact. He’d seen shas’vres at the end of their careers, minds addled by a lifetime of war, by tau’cyrs of bounding effortlessly across cities on thrumming jetpacks, trying to fly...
The altimeter read 15t’l, 10t’l, 5t’l...
“T’au’va protect,” he said.
And then there was only sand and dust and a bone-jarring jolt that overrode the interface and left him gagging for breath, pushing red-hot splinters up his shins and knees. The suit wobbled forwards, base pads digging ugly gouges from the city street, recoil absorbers moaning in untaulike protest at their unkind treatment. He fought for calm, grimacing through the pain, and killed the jetpack. He’d seen novice suit-users drop neatly and forget to cut the power, launching vertically again like a bouncing ball straight into the rest of their squad. He’d seen just about everything there was to see, at one time or another. None of it was pretty.
“I’m down,” he commed with a mental shrug, fighting the instinctive desire to brush himself off. The sand was settling around him. He’d left quite a crater.
The other battlesuits executed textbook drops on either side, Vre’Wyr perching on a ruined building incline to survey the territory.
“Most impressive, Shas’el...” Tong’ata enthused with characteristic understatement. “I’ve never seen a drop so low.”
The battledrones arced out of the sky at bullet speed and came to a perfect halt without appearing to decelerate at all. Lusha felt, for a paranoid moment, like they were making fun of him.
“Heavy ordnance half a tor’kan north,” Vre’Wyr communicated from his vantage point. “Can’t identify the source from here, but it’s an enemy position.”
“Given that they were
shooting at us on the way down,” Lusha grumbled, “I’d say that was a fair assumption.”
“Shas’el?” Kol’tae sounded uncertain. “Who exactly are we fighting?”
He remembered Kais’s words on the comm. Was the youth still alive?
Mont’au. Mont’au!
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s move out.”
Ardias scowled into the shifting warsmog and consulted the rune icons on his auspex scanner. The third and fifth squads were creeping implacably into position, outflanking the artillery dugout they’d identified as a priority target.
“Head east,” he grunted. The Space Marine beside him nodded, twisting the control stick and sending the land speeder gliding, cautious of ambushes, along the smoke-shrouded streets. Ardias ignored the creeping view and kept his eyes on the scanner. The whispering urge to rage and kill was stronger than ever. He breathed deep and remembered the Codex.
Somewhere beyond the blasted remains of these few streets, perhaps three blocks from his current position, a wedge of Chaos Marines manning an anti-aircraft cannon and at least three mortar units were raining fire and death upon Lettica.
“Brother-captain,” Sergeant Larynz voxed. “I have an audio bearing upon the warp filth.”
“And?”
“They’re laughing.”
“Not for long,” Ardias replied, lip curling.
The basso report of cannonfire was a constant annoyance, reverberating from buildings and shaking the air, punctuated every now and again by the distinctive foom of mortar shells curving upwards. Whole districts away, sooty detonations fed a fire that raged obscenely, threatening to consume the entire southern district. Citizens fighting the blaze in simple workers’ clothing, desperate to protect their homes and families, were cut down by the gore-drenched Chaos things that prowled the streets, or else caught in a vicious crossfire and sent jerking to the sand, overalls punctured and bloody. Ardias had seen the footage, relayed by the scout squad he’d deployed southwards.
Most of the human troopers — guardsmen from the Dolumar barracks and storm-troopers deployed from orbit — had dug themselves into defensive positions and were engaged in a spirited attempt to contain the blossoming daemon army. It wasn’t working.
Portals yawned open seemingly at random, disgorging more and more Chaos Marines, more cackling daemon vermin, more rumbling perversions of Imperial vehicles and machines. Did they have objectives, he wondered? Did they have a single goal?
Just to kill.
The whole city was going straight to hell.
As if to prop up his wandering mind, he remembered long sermon tutorials in the schola lecturae of the barracks upon Macragge, tactical training and deployment conventions passed directly from Codex to student via a veteran-sergeant, soaked up by the young minds eager to prove their readiness for the mantle of superhumanity.
The flanking manoeuvre his squads were undertaking, miniaturised and given an unreal cheeriness by the bright lights of the scanner, was an exact replica of the standard deployment he’d been taught all those years ago. By the book. No mistakes. The Ultramarine way.
In exactly thirty-three seconds the Third tactical squad, lightly armed with bolters and grenades, would open fire from concealed positions upon the enemy dugout. They had little chance of hitting anything significant, of course, but as the gun crew scrabbled to return fire, the Fifth squad — devastators armed with a withering array of heavy weaponry — would crest the ridge directly behind them and blow the Chaos filth into several million tiny fragments of gore and bone. By the Codex. No mistakes.
Except...
Except he hadn’t been lying when he’d told the xeno there were no rules where Chaos was involved. You couldn’t anticipate disorder.
Ardias had served the Emperor for many, many years. He’d fought the eldar. Theirs was a discipline of intractable grace, stunningly swift, stunningly effective. Every unit had its role, its niche to fulfil, and would cling to it grimly. Their inflexibility — their inability to adapt — was their weakness.
He’d fought the tyranids. Theirs was a simple goal. There were no complexities buried beneath the lust to devour, no unpredictable tangents in behaviour behind the simple biological imperative to consume and propagate. They were adaptable, oh yes, but predictably so. There was no randomness in their behaviour and it could therefore be anticipated.
Even the orks, in their way, followed a set of rules. Theirs was a madness borne from utter dislocation with reason and rationality; they made up for their obvious intellectual shortcomings with a bloody-minded determination to surprise, to take the road less travelled. Their wanton disregard for convention, bizarrely, gave them a convention all of their own. Again, in their own unique way, they were predictable.
But Chaos...
Chaos wasn’t even madness. Chaos went beyond the wilful randomness of the orks into a realm of almost “rational irrationality”. It espoused a considered form of anarchy, an almost educated approach to uneducating. It was a thing of contradictions and adaptations, of ceaseless change and unrelenting unknowability. The greatest thing Ardias had learnt throughout his years of captaincy, that wasn’t inscribed in the scriptures of the Codex, was this: The only thing you can predict about Chaos is that you can’t predict it at all.
“Captain?” Larynz’s voice, distorted by the vox, sounded confused.
“Go ahead.”
“We’re at the dugout... They’ve gone, sir. There’s nobody here.”
Ardias realised with a start that the cannon had fallen silent. He’d been too intent on the auspex — and too immersed in his thoughts — to notice. He felt a cold shiver in his spine.
“Where are they?”
“There’s a trenchline buried nearby. The filth must have crawled out as we approached. Techmarine Achellus is preparing to scan the surroundings now.”
“Larynz...”
“What action, Brother-cap—”
“Larynz — you get out of there.”
“Wh—?”
Get out!
The explosion shook the world.
It was felt by Marria Sleva, cowering beneath the crude table in her two-room hab, hugging herself and crying. Jonas had gone out to help fight the fire, bless him, but... oh, God-Emperor — it seemed like hours ago and she was scared but, oh, but the baby was due any day and he’d told her — he’d told her — stay put, don’t move at all! I’ll be back, he said. And now there were explosions outside and the house was rocking and something was knocking on the door and laughing, and she was sure she could hear chainsaws-
It was felt by Solomon Gathandre, clutching at his las-gun and thanking his lucky stars. Posted with the second Dolumar regiment, he’d been in the perfect position to scramble for the deserted reservoir system on Lettica’s eastern fringe when the portals started opening. Armed with his gun, a hipflask of Old-Foiz and a stash of gantha-root rollups, he could wait out the lunacy in perfect contentment.
Away across the shadow relief buildings an almighty fireball clawed its way into the sky, shaking the ground. It looked like the whole of the south side had decided to go skyward.
“Hoooo-aaaaa...” he breathed, impressed.
Then the wreckage started to fall: vast slabs of blast-melted plascrete and metal tumbling along the slopes of the mine basin, and Solomon began to wonder whether he’d chosen the best hiding place after all.
Crunch.
It was felt by Shas’el T’au Lusha, swooping low across a shattered plaza in the city’s administrative quarter. He turned his — no, the battlesuit’s — fusion blaster on a gaggle of red armoured hulks, carving their way through a knot of screaming gue’la with vast axes that howled and smoked as they cleaved. Watching the glowing-eyed devils smoulder and shrivel beneath the stream of superheated air was, he admitted quietly, immensely gratifying.
One of the battledrones chattered an energy spike warning to his suit’s AI and he was treated to a peripheral view of the boiling smoke cloud twisti
ng and eating itself above the city to the south. He filed the incident away in his memory without comment — unimpressed — and instructed the team to continue with the search. The ethereal must be found.
It was felt by Brother Pereduz, heretic-Marine and veteran of the Iron Warriors, as he eased himself into a cellar-excavation deep underground. Three of his battle brothers, studded armour glimmering with a matt-gun-metal sheen, followed him along the tunnel. They’d been excellent bait, Pereduz judged, laughing uproariously in a fine imitation of demented bloodlust, a convincing characteristic of other, less academic Traitor Legions.
An Iron Warrior rarely laughed.
A relay-trigger, wired to a scan-beam sensor on the surface, blipped.
“Iron within,” he said, voice a monotone. “Iron without.” He pressed down on the remote detonator in his hand and basked in the sheets of cascading dust from the roof as the whole planet seemed to tremble.
It was felt by Sergeant Larynz, Veteran of the Ultramarines Third Company, holder of the Olivius Valoricum for bravery in the course of his duties, as he and the Third Tactical Squad glanced about the crevicelike dugout with a growing sense of impending doom. Techmarine Achellus swept his scanner across a strange device half-buried in the mud.
“Get out!” the vox screamed.
Everything went white.
It was felt by Shas’la T’au Kais, tor’kans distant, and he looked up from prising some strange weapon from the hands of a dead tau fireteam he’d discovered scattered across the street. Scavenging had become a vital part of his role: procuring an undamaged backpack, armfuls of auto-deploy mines, grenades, medipacks, rations...
A hundred-and-one carrion supplies stained with the blood of dead comrades.
Even through the soot and gore tangled and matted across his helmet-optics, the blinding explosion from the south made him wince to protect his eyes. He didn’t have much time to muse upon the maelstrom — something giggled from the shadows nearby and he turned his attention back to the strange gun with professional haste.
Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000) Page 27
