TO STRIKE AS ONE
Duskenwald, Near Soul’s Well
Allhallow, Scorpid Cluster
The survivors sat huddled around a meagre campfire, passing around the remnants of a flagon of sour wine. Around them, beyond the mouth of the cavern in which they had sought shelter, the woods pressed in. They were composed of thick, ancient needle trees that were in some cases over five centuries old. Though widely spaced, their branches formed a canopy of entwined branches so thick they all but blotted out the harvest moon glowering down from above.
All three of the ragged figures around the fire were hunched over and heavy-lidded, every one of them a grotesque, mutated in some manner or other.
Fenas knew he was the worst. He reached up a gangling arm that was more tentacle than human limb and banged a flat hand against his ear, trying to somehow dislodge the tinnitus rising within it. Every day, a new trial. It was bad enough he was an eleven-foot freak with bulging, misshapen limbs. Going deaf was just adding insult to injury.
‘Pass me that wine, Harasen,’ he said. ‘On your left. Sooner I can drink myself to death, the better.’
‘I know where you are, boy,’ said the flabby, pale-skinned man to his right. ‘I’m blind, not stupid.’ He turned his ravaged, empty sockets on Fenas and bared his teeth, but held out the flagon nonetheless.
‘I should get the most of that swill,’ said the third of their sorry group. ‘It was I that liberated it.’ Jethren had escaped from the Absolvers’ fortress, way up north, whilst they had been preoccupied with the outbreak ravaging the inner corridors of their sacred stronghold.
‘You and your vassal chief there,’ said Fenas, nodding over at the decapitated head at Jethren’s feet. Horseflies were fussing around its orifices, seeking a convenient place to lay their eggs. Jethren shooed them away. ‘Old Fiorenz here was helpful enough, after a bit of persuasion,’ he grinned nastily, ‘and I needed his eyes, as it were. But he doesn’t get any of the good stuff. He’s given me nightmares enough without seeing wine dribble out of his tubes.’
‘At least you don’t have the memories of those skulls to get rid of,’ said Fenas. ‘I can’t sleep for seeing my one, staring at me. Worse than you, even, Harasen.’
The eyeless man just nodded. ‘Just be glad they chose someone else to latch onto,’ he said. He too was fiddling with his ear, sticking his little finger deep in there and wiggling it around. Fenas sympathised. It was hard to hear even the crackle and snap of the fire with the ringing noise growing steadily more intense.
‘I suppose… I suppose whatever ghosts lingered inside them gave us up as bad prospects,’ said Fenas. ‘No keep nor castle on Allhallow will let in the likes of us, not nowhere. Especially not after those rumours of aliens, and new lights in the sky not two days ago. I tell you, those weren’t Imperial.’
‘I’m all right with that,’ said Jethren, gesturing at the badly skinned crawhog they had roasting on a spit over their meagre fire. ‘Keep our heads down and let the demigods sort it out. I can live off the land well enough.’
‘Can you eat it without it falling out your belly?’ asked Harasen, gesturing vaguely in the direction of Jethren’s gaping stomach wound.
Fenas couldn’t help but look. The gash still hadn’t healed so much as solidified, and even over the course of their short acquaintance it had turned into something vaguely resembling a mouth. The sight turned Fenas’ own guts. Thick goop and clear liquid alike drooled out of the jagged, pink teeth that lined the vassal guard’s torn-open abdomen.
‘What are you babbling about now?’ asked Jethren. ‘Can’t hear a damn thing for some reason.’
Then, right in front of Fenas’ eyes, Jethren disappeared from the waist up in a cloud of pink mist.
‘What in the–’
Harasen leaped up, scrabbling at his blunt halberd. Then he too seemed to vanish, his entire right side disappearing to leave only a tapering wedge with one arm flailing uselessly. It toppled into the fire, the thick stink of burning human fat reaching up into Fenas’ nostrils.
‘Go on, then!’ shouted Fenas into the woods. ‘Get it over with!’
He saw something, then, out of the very corner of his eye. It was a technological monster of some sort, a shimmering blur in the moonlight near twenty feet tall. Its outline looked more like one of the legendary Dreadnoughts of Allhallow than one of the Space Marines he had been expecting. Disc-like distortions rippled in the air behind its broad shoulders.
Fenas felt his diaphragm convulse, and he heaved a great stream of psychic ooze, the projectile vomit splashing across the trees on the west side of the fire. His eyes watered, but he strained to see what had become of the monster nonetheless. He could not make it out. All that filled his head was that damnable ringing.
Then he felt something behind him. He turned around, ectoplasm dribbling from between his teeth, and snarled.
Fenas the Brave died on his feet.
Kais scanned the skies with one eye whilst the other zoomed in on the part of the clearing where the trees thinned. Independent focus was a trick he had learned lifetimes ago, and it had improved his kill ratio ever since.
Briefly he recalled a young Kauyon-Shas teaching the technique to him on the slopes of Mount Kan’ji, with Mont’ka-Shoh sitting cross-legged in the dappled sunlight nearby. It was strange to think they had gone on to become the legendary commanders Shadowsun and Farsight. Mont’ka-Shoh had chuckled at Kais’ discomfiture as their team-mate had dropped two leaves in front of him that spiralled in different directions, then demanded he follow both of them at once.
He banished the memory, fixating instead on the readouts spooling across the interior control suite of his XV95 Ghostkeel. It was a lethal machine indeed, and he had plans for it. But it was yet to fully prove its worth.
In the darkness of the trees, picked out by the spectrographic overlay of his target lock, was the mouth of a large cavern. It was hidden by a thick drape of moss and bracken that had grown over a curtain of roots from the largest trees overhead. To a common warrior, it would have seemed much like any other part of the forest, but Kais had noticed its hidden potential immediately.
There was water seeping from within it, making the ground boggy in places before spreading out into a dozen trickling rivulets that led further into the woods.
On the Ghostkeel’s screens the space behind the curtain of vines and roots registered cold blue and black, implying a great depth amongst the ambers and duns of its surroundings. Kais noticed something else as his eyes flicked left and right. He zoomed in on the stem of a fern a hundred feet away. It was broken, albeit only a little, with the fronds now facing away from the root curtain. One of the gue’la had emerged from inside; some two rotaa ago given the hardened state of the sap that had leaked from the broken stem.
It had to be the human with the strange stomach wound, thought Kais – one of his companions was too tall and ungainly to exit without causing much more damage to the flora, and the other, having no eyes, would likely have been even clumsier.
Kais triggered one of the sensor orbs in the Ghostkeel’s head to pan across to the relevant corpse. The guard wore the tattered remains of a heraldic uniform, its colours and iconography mapping as a variant of an archived gue’ron’sha cadre.
Another sensor orb slid, like the eye of some arachnid hunter, to the massive mountain citadel that reached up over the treeline to shimmer on the far horizon.
The gue’ron’sha stronghold.
The Ghostkeel stalked over to the curtain of roots, the two vaned discs of its X5 Stealth drones hovering close behind it. Calling up his echo location suite with a deft flick of his pupil, Kais sent a hypersonic pulse into the darkness.
A heartbeat after the echoes had returned, a glowing blue sonographic map of the tunnel network appeared on the Ghostkeel’s destination hexscreen. Every crack and fissure emanated from a wide arterial passageway leading into the depths of the mountain.
Narrowing his eyes, Kais pushed through into the darkness beyond.
Almost an entire nocturnal cycle had passed before Kais reached the first true line of resistance. They had been sentry guns, of a sort, hidden in darkened fissures and cracks with tiny laser optics on a hair-trigger alert. He had pursed his lips in impatience as his battlesuit located and automatically target-locked, knowing even that measure was unnecessary.
Kais had outwitted point defence drones on the first day of his training under Tutor Sha’kan’thas, when he was but four years old. Now, with the XV95 at his command, even the most advanced Imperial drone was an insult to his capabilities. He had walked past them without breaking stride, the full-spectrum countermeasures of the giant battlesuit baffling the sentry guns to such an extent they perceived nothing more than a sliver of glitching confusion. To all but the most advanced machines, the Ghostkeel was a phantasm in the wind.
The second trial had taken the form of a vast chasm, water spattering down from a thin tunnel above it. Had he left his battlesuit, he might have climbed upwards, following the trickle of water vertically until it led to another river. But Kais would not leave a weapon like the XV95 behind, not if there was another way. Firing up his jump jets, he bounded across that thirty-foot wide fissure with no more effort than a kroot hound leaping over a puddle.
On the other side, Kais had followed the channel that cascaded as a set of miniature waterfalls through the pitch-black tunnels until it became a rivulet, then a stream.
Now he found himself at an underground river. The source was a wide subterranean lake, with murky water dripping into it from the stalactites high above. On impulse, he opened his olfactory relay and breathed in the cool, damp air of the cave. He savoured it like a fine elixir. It had been so long since he had been able to truly appreciate a natural environment, it was all he could do not to open the Ghostkeel’s plexus hatch and drink it all in in person.
Amongst the stalactites was something that looked like a cyclopean well of ancient, chisel-dressed stone, but inverted, built into the ceiling by primitive human masons. Light spilled from within. Kais smiled coldly and initiated the Ghostkeel’s jet pack, proximity-locking his stealth drones to follow his exact trajectory. He manoeuvred the XV95 to ascend through the inverse well, taking care not to so much as scratch its chameleonic alloy as he went. Moments later he was rising to the top, the drones beneath him.
He rose into a wide octagonal chamber at the top of the giant well. Seven of the walls had alcoves, each holding a statue of some hooded gue’la saint. The eighth had a vast vault door. A cursory scan revealed that it was slab-locked, a retinal recognition scanner built into the eye of a bare skull the intended method of unlocking it.
Kais was quite used to the Imperium’s displays of disrespect to their ancestors, but had no wish to engage with human remains. He simply raised his fusion collider and melted away the vault door’s slab-locks – adamantium cores, dressed stone and all. Molten goop bubbled down the side of the door. Kais sent a tight beam electromagnetic pulse from his sensor-arm, and the entire edifice hinged slowly open to reveal the corridors beyond.
Kais was glad to see there was room enough for the Ghostkeel to traverse the passageways beyond. The Imperials were so fond of their own warsuit equivalents – the squat and slow machines they called Dreadnoughts – that the lower levels of their principal fortifications were built to house them. He sent an echo-pulse to see if there was anything to kill close by, and when it came back negative, pushed further in with his bafflers at maximum saturation.
After half an hour of prowling the corridors, the so-called ‘psyoccule’ skull artefact that Tutor Twiceblade had given him – and that was sharing the Ghostkeel’s cockpit – began to shudder of its own accord once more. Its lower jaw rattled unsettlingly in the wire apparatus that held it upright. After staring at it for a moment Kais turned the Ghostkeel this way and that, listening for the skull’s shivering to grow more intense, as it did when it was facing the direction of the nearest psychic presence. The psyoccule seemed more agitated than ever when he faced east.
So east he went. He bypassed dull-eyed, slack jawed servitors with their limbs entirely replaced by crude heavy weaponry, stalking past them without eliciting so much as a blink. When he entered a corridor network with a pair of gue’la chattel on patrol, the first thing they knew of his presence was a tight beam from his dual fusion blasters. The weapon systems gave no more than a faint hiss as they vaporised the humans’ disgusting, hairy bodies.
Now, as the skull shook with manic intensity, he could feel an imminent danger tingling behind his eyes.
The heart of the gue’ron’sha keep was not far away.
The iron-bound skull’s teeth clacked together with horrible animus. Suddenly, a nonsensically strong smell clung to it, somehow, filling the control cocoon of the XV95 with the scent of brine. Kais paid it no mind. Let Shadowsun obsess over spectres and phantasms, he thought. It was not his way. As the Ghostkeel padded forwards with the smooth gait of a stalking lion, the Monat commander focused instead on the stone archways and alcoves of the corridor ahead.
The prey was close.
There was the unmistakeable sound of heavily armoured feet marching into the atrium up ahead. Kais pinged another hypersonic pulse, his XV95’s echo-location software building the architecture ahead in impressive detail. He bounced a spread of high-density data harvesting pulses towards the figures in the middle, refining his picture of their disposition. The atrium was a choke point and a crossroads all at once, and according to his readings, a team of five gue’ron’sha had chosen it as their place to die.
Kais thought through the coming engagement’s problems one after another, the optimum solutions unfurling from the stasis of his memory without so much as a frown of concentration.
Subjects: five gue’ron’sha with mass reactive ballistics, all aware.
First data point: one obvious point of egress, covered.
Second data point: targets in heavy powered armour.
Third data point: mind-science evident according to foreign sensor reading.
One bio-reading implication: centremost not wearing helm.
Hypothesis: target with missing helm likely to be psychic threat.
Kais blinked, just once. A very close analogue was the kill pattern he had designated Mono-Imperial Scenario 2934/E during his cryostasis – it was one he considered challenging, but by no means lethal. He swung the Ghostkeel into the recess of a vaulting alcove and prepared his strike with a series of darting eye movements.
The skull chattered loud, as if beside itself with excitement at the prospect of the kill.
Solution one, thought Kais. He sent in a volley of blind-pulse flechettes that whipped around the corner. The gue’ron’sha cried out in alarm, opening fire.
The flechettes burst in a multi-spectral explosion of light and sound. Imperials could almost always be relied upon to have hair-trigger fingers, and this group was no exception. His control cocoon’s autotrans spooled their leader’s words.
‘– – BROTHERS – IT IS AMONGST US – –’
Solution two. The Monat swung round the corner of the alcove, data blossoming on his target lock as the white-armoured Space Marines reeled from the debilitating burst. The nearest two gue’ron’sha were all but obliterated in a silent storm of energy. The clattering of their disembodied limbs upon the flagstones was the only sound to mark his fusion collider’s wrath.
Solution three. One of the targets started to shake, white energy pouring from his eyes and mouth as it rose off the ground. It was shouting in its guttural tongue.
‘– – IT MUST DIE – –’
Hypothesis proven, thought Kais. He was already airborne, his boosters hissing as he leaped into the vaulted ceiling of the atrium. He pivoted mid-jump, stabbing the icon of his left-hand drone to decloak its stealth field and suddenly reveal itself amongst the Space Marines.
One of them cried out a warning, shooting from the hip; Kais swerved, and the high-calibre bolts ricocheted from the curve of his armour. The other raised his firearm and added his own volley. Two shots hit Kais in the hip, exploding to knock him back.
The Ghostkeel sent a ballistics report blossoming upon his damage control suite. Kais scanned it with one eye as he blink-triggered the fusion collider with the other, blasting the nearest Space Marine to red ruin just as the XV95 reached the apex of its leap. The other Space Marine twisted away with surprising speed, priming a grenade and hurling it at him.
Kais flicked his eyes to designate two targets at once. One of the twin fusion blasters mounted on the battlesuit’s shoulders took out the grenade in mid-air. The other turned the gue’ron’sha warrior to a burning stump and a dissipating red mist a fraction of a microdec later.
The psyker, unsteady on his feet as white effluvium poured from his eyes, nose and ears, screamed in two voices at once. The sound would have been unsettling to a normal t’au, Kais thought, but for him it was an invitation for the kill. He dropped down and stamped one of his suit’s hoof-like feet into the gue’ron’sha’s unprotected skull, crushing it like an egg.
The close quarters attack was an indulgence with all his weapons systems still registering in gold, and Kais knew it. But then he had been incarcerated for the most part of three hundred t’au’cyr. He could afford to relish his work a little. If he was honest with himself, every killing movement was as close to joy as Kais had ever felt.
The next likely site of organised resistance, according to Kais’ preliminary echo-location, was a long hall that appeared empty of targets. He scanned it nonetheless, and sent a drone ahead on optimum stealth recon.
His command suite built up a comprehensive picture. Ending in a broad set of stairs that curved upwards, the hall had walls of glass as much as rock, each gleaming barrier covering one of eight alcoves. These each had a faceted glass façade wrought with lead lining, the patterns and figures they depicted presumably intended as a primitive form of art. Above the alcoves were lance-like protrusions hung with long cloth banners, much like those that once fluttered from the fortresses of the Fio’taun. The zone had all the trappings of a feast hall; all that was missing was a long table made from some species of hard flora.
How these gue’ron’sha liked to venerate their inglorious past.
Kais was cautiously pushing his Ghostkeel inside when an energy readout spiked hard on his emission reader. The Monat’s brow creased. The pattern was an unknown form to him, and he did not like that at all.
Leaning back hard in his control cocoon, Kais boosted away just as a blaze of azure energy erupted in the centre of the grand hall. A pair of missiles shot through the air where he had been standing a heartbeat before, tearing a chunk from the doorway arch. Almost simultaneously a storm of mass-reactive bolts hurtled in, many less than two feet from his carapace hood.
Eight warriors materialised out of nowhere. The strange teleport technology of the Imperium, the envy of the earth caste, phased them into the hall in a crackling dome of lightning.
The psyoccule shivered its teeth, indicating another psychic presence. Kais had already taken stock of his situation by the time he had twisted his Ghostkeel back into the corridor, sliding it out of sight with an impressive grace for something of the XV95’s hulking size.
They were heavily armed, these ones, and far larger than the previous targets. Two had bulky missile arrays upon their shoulders, whilst two more had rotary cannons slung under their right arms. Kais saw them as lesser reflections of the mighty Broadside; they were not a lethal threat to a cutting edge XV95 at a distance. At close quarters, if they brought the crackling powered gauntlets on their left flanks to bear, that assessment would soon change.
Subjects: eight gue’ron’sha with explosive ballistics, four heavy, all aware.
First data point: one obvious point of egress, covered.
Second: targets in Broadside-equivalent armour, melee adapted.
Third: walls adorned with primitive weaponry.
Fourth: mind-science residue detected. No specialised equipment apparent.
Kais twitched his shio’he in thought. The situation mapped against Mono-Imperial Scenario 2991/D, or a close analogue thereof.
He stepped out of cover, triggering the battlesuit’s entire spectrum of holophoton countermeasures before letting fly with a volley of fusion energy.
In that moment the Imperials found themselves confounded a dozen times over. Kais knew what they would be experiencing on their own targeting screens. They would be plagued by images of overlapping, independently acting Ghostkeels moving in all directions, layered holograms of the gue’ron’sha from the previous chamber firing at them, stroboscopic orbs of light flashing at frequencies designed to disrupt biological perception, and insidious waves of static that caused their ammunition feeds to back-cycle.
Every aspect of the earth caste’s artifice in taking apart the enemy’s technology, replicating it and learning how to hijack it was brought to bear at once. For an entire second, the gue’ron’sha elites were stunned into inactivity.
It bought Kais all the time he needed.
Prioritising those amongst them with the heaviest weaponry, he hit the cannon-armed warriors first with his fusion collider, swiping his arm across the rest of the squad so the heat of its discharge cooked off the ammunition on the shoulders of their missile-armed brothers. The gue’ron’sha were ripped apart in a messy series of explosions as their own munitions detonated atop their armour. Typical of the Imperium, to use guns that could so easily kill their owners.
The four surviving members of the squad charged, voices raised in a wordless battle cry. Kais moved left, smashing through one of the compartmentalised windows to shrink his profile and let the first one past. He came back out at an angle to shoulder barge the second of the Imperials, knocking him out of the way and overrunning him as he turned back around to shoot.
He almost made it.
Kais felt the slamming impact of an energised fist under his cocoon as he passed. His own readouts fuzzed with static as the weapon’s disruption field spooked the Ghostkeel’s readouts for a moment. Kais hit the suit’s flechette launcher and countermeasures suite at once to buy him time. The resolution of his screen crystallised a moment later, revealing another recovered gue’ron’sha drawing a bead with his snub-nosed, double-barrelled gun.
Kais crouched, extrapolating a ballistics trajectory in the space of a millidec. He used the Ghostkeel’s armoured thigh to deflect the incoming bolts at just such an angle they did not detonate upon his carapace, but upon the glass wall beside it. There was a tinkling explosion of ancient glass as the window across the archway came apart.
Kais looped the sound waves of the shattering glass on his audioscopic suite and analysed their resonant frequency with one eye. He directed a blast from his fusion array at the gue’ron’sha brawler with the other even as the brutish creature came in with a wild punch.
Just as the warrior disappeared in a flash of superheated energy, Kais sent a sonic pulse from his countermeasures suite. It shattered every glass pane in the entire hall in a single crashing moment.
Two of the three surviving gue’ron’sha turned their heads as broken shards clattered across them. Seeing an opening, Kais stepped past with a half-turn, backhanding one of the Space Marines with his blunt electrowarfare limb to send him sprawling. He panned the fusion collider’s shimmering beam across the staggered warrior, and he was blasted to nothingness before he hit the flagstones. The other raised his gun, thundering a salvo at Kais’ head, but the Ghostkeel’s alloys were proof against it. A shot from one of Kais’ shoulder mounted fusion blasters was turned aside by some kind of energy field, but the other tore the Space Marine apart.
The last gue’ron’sha warrior stood before him, defiant to the last.
‘– – YOU WILL DIE HERE XENOS SCUM – –’ the autotrans relayed.
‘– – THERE WILL BE NO ESCAPE FOR YOU – –’
Kais summoned up the death scream he had recorded from the psy-tainted gue’ron’sha and broadcasted it at mind-splitting volume in response.
Snarling, the white-armoured warrior raised a long, powered blade and charged. He was amazingly fast, far more dextrous than Kais had expected.
Kais took a long step backwards, but it was not enough. The broadsword arced down, its disruption field hungry to rip right through the XV95’s torso and impale the pilot within.
At that moment one of the Ghostkeel’s drones shot forward. The blade cleaved right into it, cutting it in two with horrible ease. Kais shot the Imperial warrior point-blank, ribbons of gore and steam splashing across the hall’s flagstones as he died in a single blinding instant.
Frowning as his drone’s hex informational turned charcoal grey, Kais moved on to the end of the hall. He listened for the jittering teeth of the psyoccule to increase in their frequency, and was rewarded when he neared an archway-shaped panel on the wall. Zooming in, he found a hairline crack and two areas with flaking plaster that implied hinges.
Cycling his fusion collider to full, Kais took a shot at the door where a gue’la would think to put a lock. The door cracked in half along its middle.
A swift kick from the XV95 and it fell in completely, revealing a bound figure behind – far larger than a standard gue’ron’sha, and shackled from maw to toe. The psyoccule gnashed and clacked; likely this was the psyker it sought.
The figure’s eyes began to glow white. His suspicions confirmed, Kais took the shot, vaporising the figure in an instant.
Kais slid the olfactory relays of the battlesuit to maximum as he took in the aftermath of a long-calculated strategy put into lethal effect. The air stank of vaporised blood, burned alloy and ozone.
He inhaled the scent deeply, and moved on up the stairs to the uppermost levels of the fortress.
Master Castellan Moddren of the Angels of Absolution stood surrounded by his trusted veterans, his powered broadsword drawn and his storm shield canted against his thigh. A scowl marred his patrician features, lit by the candle-lumens of the Great Octagon. Above him was the Dome of Saint Ahtoa, the painted cherubs and seraphs smiling down as they brought water to Ferna of the Forest, and winding around him was the incense of his most pious servitor attendants. As the master castellan of Soul’s Well, he had a duty to defend it with his life and limb, leading the garrison troops to victory over whatever malignant forces were acting upon it.
With the fires of outrage burning at his heart, Moddren felt more like an angered animal than a leader of men. The urge to kill was upon him. His sanctum, his fortress, had been infected by a plague that had already claimed a dozen good men. And now – according to the Hidden Brotherhood – an alien champion was loose in their midst, running riot in some manner of stealther warsuit.
‘We will engage it in here,’ said Moddren, his tone cold and certain. ‘It is nothing more than an assassin, and I will not run from it.’ He put two fingers on the exterior nodes of his displacer field, checking the temperamental device was still active, and nodded to himself.
‘Aye, my lord.’ Moddren’s company champion, the stocky but dextrous bladesman known as Brother Jalamus, brought the hilt of his Terran greatsword to his helm before whipping it away in a diagonal slash. ‘I will cut its limbs from its body, and deliver it to you, so that you may have the pleasure of dealing with the pilot inside.’
Moddren nodded. ‘Please do.’ He motioned to his hand-picked team of veterans to take their places around the edges of the room. ‘Though I make no apologies if I spit it on my blade first. Epistolary Thorne, ensure the bait does not get under our feet, or exhibit any behaviour that will complicate our work. This will be no easy fight, and our locations are of vital importance.’
The master castellan checked the glowing triangles upon his helm relay; all was in position above as well as below. He cast a glance at the Devastator squad he had stationed in the Whispering Balcony, behind the ornate balustrade that lined the upper stratum of the mosaic-lined dome. He nodded, satisfied they were hidden well enough. Then, despite himself, he found his eyes drawn once again to the three astropaths in the centre of the massive octagonal hall.
The psykers were bound one per side to the grille-like facings of a tripartite truthfinder rack of ancient design. They had their eyes hidden with iron masks and their mouths clamped with the long-forsaken devices known as scold’s bridles.
The brutal instruments were still thick with dust after being brought out from reliquaries that had lain undisturbed for millennia. They were amongst those few relics of the past that the Angels of Absolution did not like to venerate. But the master castellan knew well from the events of the last few days that the psyker-plague could appear in moments, causing one afflicted by it to expel a vile liquid that spread it to all those it touched. Only a member of the Librarius could keep infected psykers under control, and he had summoned Thorne to his side for just that reason. But to Moddren it seemed a physical blockade against such effects was a wise additional precaution.
‘Master castellan,’ said Thorne, ‘I can feel its approach. It will be here in less than a minute at its current pace.’
Moddren touched the aquila tattooed upon his temple, and closed his eyes, just for a brief moment.
‘Then may the Lion bless our swords,’ he said softly.
Tutor Twiceblade monitored Kais’ progress from the safety of the Conquest’s relay throne. He was couched in an ergonomically optimal posture designed to promote wellbeing, yet his eyes were sore from staring, and his veins were thumping fit to burst.
The surviving X5 stealth drone that accompanied Kais’ infiltration, boosting the chameleonic properties of his Ghostkeel in the process, was still beaming up every aspect of his progress through the gue’ron’sha fortress. The Monat neared the mountain’s heart now, having bypassed nearly every hazard that stood in his way. Kais was a far more lethal weapon than any missile, macro-pulse cannon or high-calibre railgun, a leader in deed rather than word and arguably one of the three finest warriors in all the T’au Empire. In all likelihood, he would achieve his goals with utmost efficiency; Tutor Twiceblade had learned a lot just by watching him.
But he was also one of the three famous Students of Puretide, an icon of the T’au’va that was of consummate importance. His was a genius of such insight he could secure victory for expeditionary forces time and time again. He was irreplaceable, of paramount value to the Greater Good.
To lose him to an unauthorised sortie would be amongst the worst crimes against the T’au’va imaginable. The infamous punishment of the Malk’la ritual, levelled only at those commanders who committed a criminal waste of resources, would only be the beginning. But whatever censure was brought against him, it would be nothing next to the scouring soul-pain of a truly grotesque failure. The disgrace of getting Kais killed would eat him from the inside out until his final end.
It was too late. The deed was done. As he watched, Kais drove further into the gue’ron’sha citadel.
Tutor Twiceblade sat forwards in his seat, hands like claws digging into the quasi-foam of the throne’s armrests. The Monat was steadily approaching the centre of the gue’ron’sha fortress and the complex energy signatures that lay within.
Transfixed, the tutor did not notice the icon for one of the gue’ron’sha ships in low orbit slowly relocate on the display’s macro-informational, moving until it was directly above the giant fortification.
Kais sent a complex pulse of hypersonic sound along the corridor and into the massive chamber he could see just beyond. Octagonal, ringed by a balcony and with a tall dome at its peak, it had a simple rotational symmetry that was pleasing to the Monat’s eyes. Such structures were easy to process and even to weaponise, mapping well over his root calculations concerning engagements concluded within interior spaces. It could provide up to a 3.4 per cent efficiency enhancement to his kill-to-duration ratio, and hence met with his full approval.
Within the octagonal space were more gue’ron’sha warriors, some present at the heart of the chamber, others stationed in ambush around the gallery in its upper levels. They believed themselves hidden – it was an amazing feat of naivety, given that they were wearing brightly coloured, heavy-emission powered armour that made a constant low thrum.
At the heart of the chamber was a trio of figures wearing little more than robes and elaborate necklaces. The ironbound skull shivered vigorously next to him, the constant clackclackclackclack of its teeth an additional layer of information that Kais was glad to process. To hear a sound first hand was unusual, and made a refreshing change from the second-hand, pre-parsed data of the XV95.
He waited, as immobile as a mantis. It would not be long before the gue’ron’sha gave into their need for mindless, tribal chatter, providing their own distraction – and he could wait as long as necessary. Patience, as Shadowsun had taught him so long ago, was the brother of silence and stillness, together the most lethal weapons of all.
Sure enough, it was a matter of less than a dec when the most elaborately armoured of their number turned to talk to his subordinates. Kais knew enough about the gue’ron’sha mindset to know that as soon as the celebrated leader figure spoke, every warrior’s eyes would be on him out of respect.
The Monat called up his countermeasures and darted down the corridor for the kill.
Master Castellan Moddren turned to his brothers, and spoke. ‘When the xenos moves into–’
The room suddenly exploded into blinding light, a thousand contradictory images appearing on Moddren’s helm display. His artificer armour’s machine-spirit screamed in pain and confusion, but he was already moving, darting behind Brother Jalamus to cover Epistolary Thorne with his storm shield.
His instincts were proven correct. The shield suddenly crashed backwards in a burst of energy, the backwash of heat so intense Moddren could feel it through his armour. He was fighting blind, riding his momentum to skid into the lee of the nearest pillar even as he listened for the engines of the giant xenos machine.
There it was, under the multi-tone scream of his machine-spirit – a faint hum of engines, coming in to skirt the edge of the chamber.
Moddren’s vision cleared in time to see the astropaths disappear in a blaze of light and flame. All three of them simply disintegrated from the waist up, along with the top half of the truthfinder rack. Blood spurted from those arteries not cauterised by the blast, a cluster of tiny fountains that turned the psyker’s robes from green to crimson and black.
‘West flank!’ he shouted. ‘Kill it!’
The company champion, Brother Jalamus, charged past Epistolary Thorne and on towards the shimmer of energy at the wall. His movements seemed to blur as he passed the chanting Librarian. Jalamus leaped, evading a sudden blast of energy to plant his feet on the side of the chamber, then pushed off hard with his greatsword outstretched for a killing thrust.
He passed straight through the warsuit-sized shimmer of energy to collide hard with the mosaic beyond it, staggering away before regaining his feet.
A mirage. Grimacing, Moddren ripped off his helm. At least he could trust his eyes.
‘No!’ shouted Thorne.
Moddren ducked just as a column of energy shot over his head, the smell of his own burning scalp mingling with the dry, choking fug of burned stone. He ducked and rolled again, suddenly aware of the looming warsuit to his left, then came up with his shield before him. He did not so much deflect the second blast as rush into it, trusting to the storm shield’s ancient force field to protect him, then broke left and swung his broadsword in a rising diagonal sweep.
The warsuit raised its shin to intercept the blow even as it blasted Jalamus to atoms, but it did not evade. The sword bit deep, all but cutting the limb free in a spray of white sparks. The warsuit boosted high, nearly yanking the blade from Moddren’s hands, before kicking him so hard he skidded across the flagstones on his back. The master castellan felt a savage sense of relief when he realised his sword was still in his grip.
Epistolary Thorne was suddenly above him, conjuring a burst of blue fire that raced out like a vengeful ghost. It swathed the xenos suit’s multi-lensed head in blistering fire. The xenos thing recoiled, and Thorne moved in for the kill, but a heavy disc-like drone raced in to smack hard into the Librarian and send him sprawling.
There was a crack-whoosh from above as missiles arced down from the Devastator team on the Whispering Balcony. The disruptive electro-gheists the xenos was sending out had done their job all too well, for to Moddren’s horror, the krak missiles struck Thorne instead of the warsuit. The Librarian fell in a blackened, torn heap, blood seeping from his rent armour.
‘Helms off!’ shouted Moddren, his sensation of outrage mingling with a growing suspicion the situation was already long out of his control. ‘It’s confounding our machine-spirits!’
He jumped upright as the warsuit opened fire upon the Devastators in the gallery above. The killing beam from its strange tripartite weapon vaporised the balustrade and much of the pillar, taking with it two of the heavy weapon troopers behind.
Moddren charged, slashing his powered broadsword into the jet vents of the xenos warsuit. At the edge of the chamber, Veteran Sergeant Paethen raised his plasma gun and took his shot, only to fall back in an explosion of light a moment later. Crying out, Moddren swung his sword hard and carved a wedge from the thing’s arm before dodging away, moving to its blind spot, and striking for its torso.
The blade cut in, its tip digging deep, but it did not find the pilot inside. The xenos creature’s armour was a formidable defence, even against a powered weapon. But Moddren had not truly expected to make the kill with his sword.
The xenos thing had moved close, now, to the centre of the room.
Close. So very close.
Tutor Twiceblade felt himself shake with emotion. His mind was swamped, a tide of frantic hope crashing against cliffs of stone-cold fear. As he watched, Kais was taking apart the gue’ron’sha command echelon with consummate skill. It was like witnessing a master bladesman go through steps long rehearsed, each movement leading to a trap, an illusion, a killing strike that made his opponents seem clumsy and slow by comparison.
Twiceblade shook his head in amazement as the tempo of the dance sped up, the gue’ron’sha slain in ones, twos and threes like the inevitable culminations of a string of mathematical equations.
To the tutor’s mind, this was the supremacy of the T’au’va writ large.
A tiny chime came from the orbital distribution suite. He spared the hex-screen an irritable glance for a fraction of a heartbeat, idly noting that the gue’ron’sha ship now positioned directly over the mountain fortress – despite that ship facing directly away from the nearest t’au monitor vessel that was observing it – had turned red.
The lethal, warning red that denoted target lock.
Twiceblade’s eyes grew wide with horror.
Kais dodged out of the path of the shimmering blade of the gue’ron’sha leader, sliding left as another hacking sweep came in. A glancing blow, it carved a thick wedge of alloy from his arm, but did not compromise the systems beneath. A few moments before the swordsman had landed a heavy blow upon his jet pack, but by Kais’ calculation that was acceptable damage. In such close confines he could afford up to a thirty per cent loss of efficacy before lack of vertical mobility became a hindrance.
A gue’ron’sha to his right fired a blast from some manner of plasma weapon. The control cocoon grew painfully hot as the superheated energy penetrated the machine’s flank, burning all the way through to the interior.
Without diverting his attention from the gue’ron’sha leader, Kais hit the recessed panel by his feet that ejected the suit’s pulse pistol, took it up with his off hand, and pointed it through the steaming hole to shoot the plasma gunner in the head.
The Space Marine leader came in hard, his blade leaving crackling arcs as he hacked at the Ghostkeel’s plexus hatch. Kais ran a swift recalculation, blasting the gue’ron’sha with a dual beam from his shoulder weapons to force him to raise his shield. He kicked the crude protective slab hard, sending the warrior sprawling to buy him enough range for the kill. The gue’ron’sha wasted a valuable second replacing his helm. A foolish error of judgement, thought Kais, especially now that his EMP reservoir was nearly at full. First the pulse, then the kill, then he would make his escape.
‘– – NOW – –’ read the autotrans as it rendered the human’s command.
‘Kais!’ came the voice of Tutor Twiceblade, emerging painfully loud from the speaker-nodes of his control cocoon as alert signals flared on his command and control suite. ‘They have orbital–’
The Monat felt his concentration flicker and go blank, just for a moment. Just as he was rerouting all his power to the XV95’s emergency force shield, his focus was shattered by the one element he had not factored in his calculations.
Aid.
In that same moment, the beautifully painted dome above them came apart. A column of killing energy lanced down from low orbit, and Kais’ perfectly calculated rampage died in a storm of light.