by Phil Kelly
‘I cannot pilot a Hero’s Mantle like this,’ the commander mumbled. ‘Not that this cursed drone-machine is worthy of that title.’
‘Stop mewling and fight,’ said Ob’lotai, flashing rail rifle reticules on the targeting bay. ‘Remember these?’
‘How could I forget?’ said Farsight despite himself. He was fighting a clouding of the mind that threatened to consume him, making him want to kick open the plexus hatch and run out screaming to certain death. This machine was not his friend; it was not the mentor who had taught him the ways of the battlesuit in an early model Broadside. This was an artificial intelligence wearing the persona of a dead warrior, resurrected against his will.
‘It is me, Shoh,’ said Ob’lotai’s voice. ‘The best part of me, at least.’
‘A distorted echo, nothing more,’ spat Farsight.
A scene flashed up on the sensor suite, a relay view of a dome interior filled with starving tau children and mentors aged to little more than skeletons.
‘There’s no time for debate. You have to act, Shoh.’
Another screen flashed up, showing the ork warlord emerging from the rust. Three clanking walkers waddled at his side. A proximity alarm blared. The sound kindled an instinctual response in Farsight’s mind.
‘Back up and designate,’ said O’Shovah. ‘Cascading priority.’
The Broadside obeyed instantly. Without so much as a twitch of Farsight’s finger, the battlesuit swung its weapons around into a rifleman stance.
‘Fire.’
The battlesuit’s crosshairs flared white, and the whip-crack of electromagnetic discharge sent a hypervelocity shot smashing into the foremost ork walker. The thing’s innards blew outwards into the storm, its pilot reduced to red soup.
‘Three paces and re-engage,’ said Farsight.
The Broadside stomped resolutely through the raging storm, its sheer solid weight making it proof against the hurricane. It took a firing stance once more, and another rail rifle round split the air. The second of the three walkers toppled over, its torso gouting greasy flame.
Farsight narrowed his eyes as the third walker changed its course, waddling around and disappearing into the storm.
‘Kill it.’
Ob’lotai took the shot, and the lumpen thing pitched over into the rust.
And then their time ran out.
With a roar, Dok Toofjaw ran out from behind the wreckage of the second walker. His piston-driven armour gouted green steam as he charged in, far faster than Farsight had thought possible.
‘Kill shot on priority target!’ shouted Farsight, eye-flicking a weak spot he was sure would lead to a fatal injury. Ob’lotai was quick to respond. A rail rifle shot punched into the warlord’s gaping mouth and out through the back of its neck.
Incredibly, the beast came on.
‘Step back and repeat, secondary systems too,’ said Farsight, his calm tone belying the turmoil inside. This time, the shot from the twin-linked rail rifle turned the ork warlord’s shoulder into a mass of torn flesh. A moment later, two bolts of plasma fired from Ob’lotai’s shoulder-mounted rifles slammed home, sending one of the cyborg’s saw-limbs spinning into the storm.
‘That all ya got?’ roared Toofjaw, his manic laughter audible over the howl of the storm as he lumbered into a headlong charge.
‘Pull back,’ said Commander Farsight, and the Broadside retreated a few clumsy steps. ‘For the Greater Good, pull back, Ob’lotai!’
Not nearly fast enough.
Proximity alarms blared as the ork warlord slammed into them with the force of an oncoming mag-train. Ob’lotai had braced at the last moment, locking the legs of the battlesuit, presenting an immovable object to the greenskin’s irresistible force. Cyborg and Broadside staggered back from the crushing impact, but Toofjaw was the first to recover. His right killsaw came scything around, and this time it hit home, sawing through the square barrel of Ob’lotai’s twin-linked rail rifle in a shower of sparks. Then Toofjaw’s one-shot rocket launcher spat its payload. The missile ricocheted off the Broadside’s thick torso armour and detonated upon the battlesuit’s plasma rifles, blowing them clean off the suit in an explosion of white flame.
‘Ha!’ shouted the ork, barrelling forwards. ‘No guns now!’
‘All weapon systems neutralised,’ said Ob’lotai.
‘The rail rifle’s still a weapon,’ said Farsight. He eye-flicked a sweeping motion on the targeting bay, and in response Ob’lotai brought his great rifle’s barrel around like a kroot warrior swinging a bladestave. Club-like, it caught Toofjaw hard in the face, sending him sprawling over the crest of a rust dune and sliding away out of sight.
‘So it is,’ said Ob’lotai.
Farsight was already eye-flicking a new course onto the topographical map.
‘Get clear. Discard the rifle. I’ve something else in mind.’
‘According to my sensors, your customised XV8 is beyond repair, Shoh,’ said Ob’lotai.
‘Not all of it,’ Farsight replied.
Farsight’s stricken Crisis suit still lay sparking on the dune, its control cocoon half-filled with rust. Ob’lotai’s sensors threw up dozens of damage reports, but Farsight paid them little heed. He could hear Dok Toofjaw’s howls in the storm, angry and hungry for revenge.
Flashes of battle flared in the rust tempest. The eye of the storm should have been upon them long ago, but the hurricane’s hunger was not yet sated.
It took every ounce of Farsight’s concentration to instruct Ob’lotai in how to detach the Crisis suit’s shield generator and jetpack unit. With nothing but the Broadside’s oversized hands at his command, and the storm raging all around, the transfer operation would have been extremely difficult even for an earth caste scientist. Yet there was no facet of the front-line battlesuit, be it Crisis or Broadside, that Farsight didn’t know inside and out.
By the time his proximity sensor flashed up the icons of incoming orks, Commander Farsight’s salvaged shield generator was chiming in readiness, its programs synchronised with the Broadside’s master suite and El’Vesa’s symbol still winking over its spooling specifications.
Farsight activated the transfer with a single eye-stab. A heartbeat passed, then another.
As realisation dawned, a smile crept over Farsight’s face, the pain in his crippled hands forgotten.
Dok Toofjaw stamped out from the ochre haze, a look of pure hatred twisting his blood-streaked features.
‘These beasts do not give up easily,’ said Ob’lotai.
‘They do not,’ replied Farsight. ‘Yet your creator has given us hope. Thinner force shield, greater burst time.’
Alarms shrieked once more as the ork warlord lurched over the dunes, his limping run gathering speed. Farsight eye-flicked an evasive path, and the Broadside suit lumbered left, cumbersome on the uncertain footing of the dunes.
‘Too slow,’ said Farsight. ‘Brace!’
The ork cyborg launched himself at the Broadside once more, buzzsaws swiping out to chew through the battlesuit’s hip.
‘The shield,’ said Ob’lotai.
‘Agreed,’ said Farsight. ‘Copy my movements.’
He rocked down and to one side in his control cocoon, the Broadside doing the same. Eye-stabbing the shield program to maximum, Farsight brought up his bloody red fist in a looping uppercut.
The battlesuit stooped and brought its own fist upwards just as Toofjaw lunged in for the kill. The knife-thin edge of its new forcefield caught the ork under the chin. As the Broadside made a clumsy leap, an invisible blade of power sliced the ork warlord’s head from his shoulders in a spray of gore. Alien blood boiled across the bladed forcefield until every inch of its crackling edge drizzled red.
The ork’s armoured body slumped lifeless to the sand, its head whipped away by the storm.
‘Ha! Priority kill made,�
� transmitted Farsight to his cadres. ‘All units, muster on my signal. Tooth Jaw is dead. Repeat, the warlord Tooth Jaw is dead.’
Within moments, the remnants of Farsight’s hunter cadres had fought their way through the maelstrom to join their commander. Their armour, be it the plate of a footslogging fire warrior or the substance of a noble Crisis suit, had been badly scarred by close engagements, and in some places scoured back to bare metal.
‘Commander?’ queried Sha’vastos, his battlesuit fighting through the storm towards the location of the transmission. ‘You pilot Broadside armour. I do not understand.’
‘No time for that. Report.’
‘The eye of the storm eludes us still. With so many infantry, to attempt a vertical breach would be to waste hundreds of lives.’
Farsight adjusted his shield generator to maximum yield and radius. El’Vesa’s modifications were startlingly effective; the difference in power and versatility was incredible. Burning rust defined the invisible dome as Farsight pushed it to its limit, atomised flinders shimmering like a constellation of tiny supernovas.
‘All cadres, form up on me,’ said Farsight. ‘Crisis teams, shield generators to full. Protocols be damned – burn every asset if you need to. We are leaving.’
With their commander’s shield forging them a path through the hurricane, and his fellow battlesuit pilots shielding those less fortunate, the battered hunter cadres made their way through the storm. Step by step, they trudged tenaciously to the edge of the rust tempest, before finally emerging into the freedom of the open desert.
Exhausted though they were, decimated though they were, by the time the blue sky spread before them every single team was chanting Farsight’s name.
The orks they left behind had no such technology to protect them. Shorn of their leaders and with the storm around them angrier than ever, Arkunasha’s invaders were slowly cut to ribbons.
Epilogue
Bio-dome 31-8, Arkunasha
Mentor Y’eln felt long-forgotten muscles tense at the side of her eyes as the rust storm dissipated. The ork horde that had borne down upon them had been broken, and the sight of clear azure skies felt like a message of hope. Bio-dome 31-8 had been crippled by starvation, a third of its number lost since the ork invasion began. At the last minute, though, Commander Farsight had broken the greenskins’ grip.
There was no sign of the smoke-spewing ork aircraft that had once blighted the skies, and not a single greenskin prowled the dunes. Only scattered, bloodless corpses were left where once a besieging army had hollered and bawled.
The mentor shushed the excited babbling of her young charges and climbed the spiral stairs to the balcony, hoping that the perfection of the skies would bear telltale scars.
Sure enough, the triple lines of an air caste supply-drop carved the horizon.
Y’eln made the sign of the Tau’va, and cried tears of joy.
The Rust Wastes, Southern Hemisphere, Arkunasha
To the west, a fat-bellied ork slouched across the dunes. Behind him, a caravan of tusked squiggoths trod the sands, their sweaty stench thick enough to sear the eyes. Mounted atop each squiggoth’s howdah was a team of grots with makeshift telescopes, some of which they were managing to hold the right way round.
One of the grots squealed. Grabbing a red flag from a fellow runt, it waved the pennant frantically and pointed to the shadow of a dune.
Krobb waved a buzz-squig from his head and lumbered over to where the grot was pointing.
Sure enough, there it was.
The beast herder chortled to himself as he made his way into the shadows and picked up a malformed lump of flesh and metal from the rusty sands. Already thinking of where to string his new trophy, he brushed some rust from the disembodied head and turned it round for a proper look.
Dok Toofjaw stared right back, and snarled.
About the Author
Phil Kelly is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 Damocles novella Blood Oath and the Warhammer titles Sigmar’s Blood and Dreadfleet, as well as a number of short stories. He works as a background writer for Games Workshop, crafting the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in Nottingham.
An extract from 'The Arkunasha War' by Andy Chambers, taken from Shas’o.
Kreeger found his patron in the scorched hilltop temple he’d taken to haunting since they’d gone to ground on Kliest four months ago. It was a broken place on a broken world and it suited Haniel Mordaine’s mood exquisitely. Of late, the disgraced interrogator had immersed himself in sketching the crumbling statue of Sanguinius Ascendant that loomed over the pulpit like a petrified angel, its wings spread wide to encircle the lost celebrants. It was primitive work, roughly hewn from the local granite, yet its brooding gravity drew Mordaine back day after day. Crumpled parchment littered the ground in testament to his increasingly frenzied attempts to capture the Angel’s essence, and he would sometimes cajole or harangue the effigy as if it were actively opposing his efforts. Kreeger took it all in his stride. Mordaine was a noble and Kreeger had watched over enough of his kind to know they were all crazy. It was probably something in their blue blood.
‘The conclave has our scent again,’ he called, marching up the nave without reverence or reserve. ‘It’s time to move on, duke.’
‘Again?’ Mordaine turned reluctantly from his work. His eyes were like bloodshot sores in the shadow of a handsome face. ‘Are you certain?’
It was an empty question because Kreeger was never less than certain of anything, but it was part of the ritual that had carried them from one failing world to another along the borders of the Damocles Gulf, always one step ahead of the Inquisition and ten more from hope. Perhaps half those worlds, Kliest among them, had been found wanting in their loyalty to the Imperium prior to the crusade, but all were paying the price in murderously increased tithes. Most would be stripped to the bone and abandoned within a scant few centuries.
It sends a message, Grand Master Escher had decreed. If your neighbour falls, you fall. Nothing stimulates loyalty like judiciously applied fear.
‘We need to be off-world tonight,’ Kreeger said, brandishing a sheaf of greasy identity papers. ‘I’ve wangled us passage on a Gulf freighter. No questions asked.’
‘Another cargo hold?’ Mordaine guessed sourly.
‘Fish tank,’ Kreeger corrected. Seeing his employer’s expression he pressed on quickly. ‘Relax, we won’t be sharing, duke. They’ll be filling up at the other end.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t promise it’ll smell of incense and amasec, but…’
‘It will reek of a billion dead fish.’ Mordaine grimaced. ‘I despise fish, Kreeger.’
‘Lots of fish on Oblazt.’ The old soldier shrugged. ‘Fish, promethium and ice are about all they’ve got.’
‘Oblazt?’ The grimace became a frown. ‘The world with the floating hives?’
‘They call them anchor hives. Build ’em on platforms spiked deep into the ice so they don’t float. The Imperium’s been sucking promethium and fish out from under the ice since forever. There’s a whole ocean buried down there.’ As always, Kreeger had done his groundwork fastidiously. To his mind it was the trick to staying alive.
‘I’m not finished here.’ Mordaine gestured vaguely at the stone angel. ‘Anyway, perhaps it’s time to stop running.’ But there was no sincerity in his voice.
‘Oblazt is the subsector’s breadbasket and promethium wellspring in one,’ Kreeger pressed. ‘The kind of world the tau would make a play for.’
Mordaine hesitated, raking a hand through his lank, grey-streaked hair. ‘Do you have something?’
‘I’ve got a contact.’ Kreeger shrugged again. ‘He calls himself the Calavera.’
THIRTY DAYS BEFORE UNITY
ABOVE THE DOME, VYSHODD ANCHOR HIVE, OBLAZT
The roof of the world was a convex plain of dark rockcrete, blizzard-scoured and
barren save for a scattering of blocky maintenance outposts and comms towers. A tracery of thermal capillary pipes shone dully beneath the surface, hissing and steaming as they dissolved the rapacious ice before it could take root. The resulting slurry flowed down the dome into the perimeter recycling trenches, then on into the hive’s reservoirs. Much of it would be superheated and pumped back into the canopy, a greatcoat against the cold. It was a crude but efficient system that maintained the ambient temperature of the city a few notches above freezing, but decades of neglect had taken their toll. Scattered mounds of hard-packed ice glazed the dome like glistening cancers where the hydrothermal network had failed, yet the outposts were dark and no servitors or icebreaker teams laboured across the surface to purge the blight. Such was the way of things on Oblazt in the wake of the Damocles Gulf Crusade.
Two figures surveyed this entropy-in-motion from the shelter of an antenna-spiked relay tower. Both were swathed in heavy grey thermal robes, yet they were otherwise unalike. One would have towered over a tall man, yet his shorter companion was the stranger of the two, for there was a subtle aberration in the set of his shoulders and posture that suggested an altogether inhuman heritage.
‘Their world ends, yet they do not see it,’ the alien observed. It spoke Gothic with the chilly precision of one who has mastered the language like a weapon. ‘This blindness is the lor’serra of your kind. The shadow truth of your nature.’
‘They are not my kind, traveller,’ replied the giant. ‘We parted company millennia before your kind possessed the wit to dream of touching the stars.’
‘Nevertheless you were forged from their bloodline, Iho’nen. Such bonds endure even after they are broken, like the ghost pains of a lost limb.’
‘You speak of your own wound,’ the giant called Iho’nen judged.
‘My wound is my purpose,’ said the traveller with glacial passion.
‘As is mine.’ But in Iho’nen’s voice there was no passion at all.
