THE LIVING WEAPON
The Liminal Conquest
Progress-Class Star Cruiser (Slipstream Enabled)
Flagship Of The Fourth Sphere Expansion
Tutor Twiceblade felt his pulse quicken at the prospect of disobedience, as he always did, but forced his unease back down. The hex-lift was coming to a smooth halt, the status display icon winking two levels from the bottom of its range.
‘Ident needed,’ said the hex-lift’s drone intelligence. ‘Please supply.’
Twiceblade pinched his finger and thumb over the sensor plate, rubbed them together, and blew softly. The plate turned from the slate grey of uncertainty to a healthy gold as fresh skin cells and breath droplets hit its bio-scanner.
‘Greetings of the T’au’va to you, Tutor Twiceblade,’ said the drone intelligence. ‘Shall we proceed?’
He hesitated for a moment, weighing his options for the hundredth time.
‘Yes. Please proceed, faithful helper.’
The hex-lift continued on its way, and a few moments later the status display icon slid to the lowest setting.
‘Munitions storage,’ said the drone as the lift doors slid open. ‘May you find that which you seek, tutor.’
‘My thanks,’ said Twiceblade absently, venturing out. He realised his hand was hovering close to his pulse pistol, and forced himself to walk as if he had no more on his mind than retiring to his communal quarters after a long day of training.
The Liminal Conquest’s munitions contingency deck was dark, cool and sterile. It was the domain of the earth caste, a subculture including many who would gladly forsake sunlight, news of current affairs and the company of the other castes if it made their operational parameters more predictable. All for the Greater Good, of course, for it was their technology that underpinned the expansion of the entire t’au race.
Only the highest-ranking fire caste had clearance to venture into their domain at will. Even then it was usually by invitation, to inspect some prototype weapon or survey some ballistics results as the earth caste proudly displayed their next triumph of destruction.
Tutor Twiceblade made his way around the side of observation decks, through the alleys of ammunition warehouses and along gantries overlooking work areas. All the while he took care to stick to the shadows. When an earth caste work team thumped its way towards him on their heavy feet, he was quick to find an alcove, stack or hover bier to hide behind. His natural hunter’s instincts made it easy enough to stay one step ahead of the myopic scientists that called this area their home.
The earth caste were excellent at focusing on matters which they were deliberately investigating, but they were famously poor at spotting anything outside their sphere of expertise. It was something Twiceblade had counted on many times as he went about his private work whilst the Conquest ploughed through space from one zone to the next.
Twiceblade ventured deeper into the bowels of the great ship, pacing along long corridors lined with lozenge lights. He fought to keep his demeanour casual, just in case he was observed or recorded by a micro-drone. No one challenged him. At one point, when the corridors narrowed, he had to shake off the memories of the passageways underneath Gel’bryn City, where he had waged his one-man crusade against the gue’ron’sha known as the Scar Lords. They were still as fresh as if he had experienced those events yesterday, despite the fact whole centuries of chronostasis had slid past.
It was not the first time Tutor Twiceblade had been down to the earth caste hangars since his recovery from his entrapment in the Imperial stasis field, but it was definitely the strangest. This time, the weapon he had come to inspect was very different. No t’au with rank less than ‘O’ even knew of its existence, and even then the aun had impressed upon them that the measure was only to be used in the direst of circumstances.
Tha’hasiro, it was called, on those rare occasions the fire caste whispered of it. A term that meant ‘Living Weapon.’ But it had another name, too.
Kais.
Making his way to Contingency Zone Eight, Tutor Twiceblade saw his destination; a tall cylinder that tapered towards the top in the manner of a primitive race’s bullet. He stepped closer with great care, his breath coming shallow and uneven, and looked into the elongated oval that formed its viewing window.
The figure inside was relatively slight of build, his skin dark blue and wrinkled over a sparse muscular frame. His features were pleasing enough, yet somehow nondescript to the point of blandness.
Not much for the holographers of the water caste to use there, thought Twiceblade – his features were hollow and gaunt, a stark contrast to the noble countenances of his fellow Students of Puretide. After the aun’s great experiment with Commander Farsight had failed, Shadowsun’s warrior visage had been spread far and wide across the empire’s informationals in his place. She had excelled in the role of exemplar of the T’au’va. But after his successful prosecution of the Fi’rios campaign, Kais had been allowed to return to his cryostasis cylinder rather than elevated to the status of a figurehead. With the water caste deleting all footage of his victories at the ethereal caste’s request, he had soon after faded back into myth.
Only those who had looked Kais in the eye knew the truth of his quiet power. This was a warrior who had seen the face of madness and survived, who had consumed the darkness in his soul and made of it a potent weapon. To Twiceblade’s mind, the commander in front of him was more lethal than any other t’au in existence. Even in dormancy, his tensed posture held the hair-trigger violence of a Fio’taun flintlock primed to fire.
Twiceblade had seen that violence erupt in person. It was a sight he would never forget.
The rest of the expedition believed Kais to be dormant, held in between life and death as a hero who could be revived and unleashed on a particularly intractable foe if there was no other option. But Tutor Twiceblade knew better.
The first time he came to gaze upon the stone-cold features of the Monat Supreme – that warrior he had once thought of as his idol – he had seen a muscular twitch under the eye. That miniscule movement had hit him like a battering ram to the chest. The only conclusion was that cryostasis was not fully operative – whether that was by accident or design, Twiceblade did not know.
‘Awaken, Monat-Kais. Please. It is Sha’ko’vash.’
The figure’s eyelids flicked open, his mismatched irises of purple and black dilating as his pupils adjusted to the light. Twiceblade felt his stomach lurch – no matter how many times the awakening ritual took place, it still felt like a claw of ice clenching in his innards.
‘Come closer,’ whispered the figure in the stasis tube. ‘I will not raise my voice to you, tutor.’
‘Of course,’ said Twiceblade, his heart thundering in his chest.
Long ago, hundreds of kai’rotaa ago, he had been Kais’ first official teacher. He had personally tutored Kais when the commander was a cadet of no more than four years old. He had shouted at the young warrior to reprimand him for slinking away, chastening him in front of his fellow students on his very first cycle of training. Kais’ eyes had hardened that day. Even now, there was something in the way the killer looked at him that said he had never forgiven him, never forgotten.
Tutor Twiceblade took a few tentative steps forward. He still felt his bones ache with the need to run whenever he stepped into the Monat’s presence. It never went away, that feeling.
Shortly after Commander Farsight had given him the name Sha’ko’vash – ‘fire’s worthy cause’ – and allowed him to make penance for his misdeeds as Sha’kan’thas, the tutor had launched a one-man attack on a Space Marine command echelon as atonement. Even that was not as daunting as approaching the Living Weapon. As a result of that strike Twiceblade had spent three hundred t’au’cyr locked in an experimental chronostasis field as a living monument to the Greater Good, apparently used as a motivational exhibit outside his own battle dome. He was a hero of the Fourth Sphere Expansion, lauded by his peers.
None of that mattered now.
All that was a lifetime away, an age, a soul’s journey made long in the past.
‘The gue’vesa curse is spreading,’ said the tutor quietly.
‘Of course,’ came the reply. Kais’ voice was emotionless, devoid of inflection or tone. His speech had no gestural component at all. To Twiceblade, it was as unsettling as if he was screeching from a mouth with no tongue or teeth to form the words.
‘It must be stopped.’
‘Then stop it.’
‘I cannot. My commander believes that circumspection is the correct path.’
‘Half measures are the refuge of fools.’
‘He has not your clarity of vision. Yet I cannot convince him alone.’
‘“Alone, a warrior cannot truly finish a battle. But he can start a war”.’
‘Master Puretide speaks through you, as ever.’
‘He still has relevance,’ said Kais. Inside the stasis pod he made neither inflection nor gesture, but Twiceblade could still hear the steel in Kais’ voice.
‘If the vector of the mind-curse could be isolated and destroyed, we could at least limit its spread,’ said the tutor, making the circular motion of the guardian’s perimeter. ‘Then the work of cutting away the infected tissue from the body could begin.’
‘Then release me. I am the sharpest of instruments.’
‘I believe it. But once the vector is slain, how can we prevent the same curse from rising again from those it has infected?’
‘The earth caste will answer that,’ whispered Kais. ‘Atmospheric poison. Chemical sterilisation. Planetary core disruption. All of these are viable.’
‘That cannot be borne. The gue’vesa share their worlds with too many t’au, and the losses would outweigh the gains. As a commander, you should appreciate that better than anyone.’
‘I am no commander.’
‘You used to be. You have to be. That is why Aun’Va, the Supreme Ethereal–’ at this Tutor Twiceblade stressed his words – ‘placed you as a critical part of the Fourth Sphere Expansion.’
‘I am a weapon,’ said Kais, something fierce in his voice. ‘I should be wielded as one.’
‘Would you not prefer to be the hand that wields the blade?’
‘No,’ said Kais, the word cutting as sharp as an executioner’s sword.
‘We must transcend the notion of Monat as a lone warrior,’ said Twiceblade. ‘We must make of that archetype a leader, an exemplar, a legend. I believe it was always Master Puretide’s intent that you bring its philosophy to its natural conclusion.’
Kais stared at him with an intensity that Twiceblade felt might bore through the glass.
The tutor swallowed, and continued nonetheless.
‘You must act as the leader of a lone force in the galaxy, acting in the name of the Greater Good, unseen and unheard. Yet you must do so with not one life, but hundreds of thousands. This the T’au’va demands of you.’
‘Do not tell me what I must and must not do, tutor. I have planned your death more times than I can count.’
‘Commander?’ said Twiceblade, his blood going cold. ‘I have only ever sought to aid you.’
‘I have been fully conscious for three hundred t’au’cyr,’ said Kais, his hissing tones fierce and clipped. ‘An error in the cryonic process. My body was asleep, inviolate. But not my mind, Tutor Sha’kan’thas.’
The tutor was stunned into silence. To be trapped, motionless and locked in a prison of immobile flesh and bone, for so long… it was a chilling prospect.
‘My mind was not allowed to age, to fall apart as all things do. I do not understand what manner of biostasis preserved it from entropy, yet left it active, able to parse what information I was fed and lay plans as to how best to use it. But I do know that the ordeal transformed me. At times I was permitted to roam, living waking dreams in which I commanded thousands of t’au teams and led them to victory. At others I fell, further and further, into the darkness.’
Twiceblade swallowed, his throat dry.
‘Do you know how many decs that amounts to? Three hundred t’au’cyr? In that time, I have planned the death of my enemies a thousand times over, in a thousand different ways. It was the only thing that kept me sane.’
Keeping his peace as to his true thoughts, Twiceblade looked down.
‘I built a war machine of causality, image by image, sliver by sliver,’ hissed Kais. ‘I have mentally rehearsed every permutation of every conflict against every known foe of the t’au race. Every strike, every manoeuvre, every possible angle or nuance I have analysed and memorised and perfected. In all those things, only one constant – I am alone. I am Monat.’
Kais stared, his eyes open a fraction too wide. ‘And in many of those visions, I have seen you die over and over again.’
Twiceblade felt cold sweat on his wrists. The creature before him was no longer t’au, that much was obvious. But perhaps some trace of the Greater Good was left inside him.
He took a deep breath, and spoke.
‘You know the mind-plague must be contained, quarantined and burned clean,’ he said. ‘The gue’vesa curse will spread if we do not limit it. This is why I stand before you, here, now. Surestrike’s hesitancy will doom us all. You are the only one who can stop this. Tell me what I must do. Teach me. Let me be your exemplar, your protégé.’
‘Unseal this device, and I will begin the work I was born to do.’
‘You know I cannot.’
Kais flew at the viewing lozenge, face distorted into an animal snarl as he hammered at it with his fists. He slammed them into the plexiglass so hard they spread smears of blood across the inside. Twiceblade staggered back, his hand flying to his pulse pistol.
Then, just as suddenly, Kais stopped.
‘I offer contrition,’ he said, his voice perfectly calm. ‘It is the stasis burn.’
‘I… I see,’ said the tutor. ‘I shall consult with my contacts in the earth caste as to how to alleviate it.’
Kais nodded, his face a mask of composure as he sombrely wiped away the blood on the inside of the viewing window. Twiceblade watched as the Monat cleansed every last spot of the blood, meticulous as a spider, without breaking his gaze for an instant.
The tutor re-engaged the cylinder’s systems, backed away a few steps, and bowed his head with his hands forming the closing book gesture of the supplicant-whose-questions-are-complete. He turned on his heel and walked at speed back the way he had come.
Jensa Deel stood impatiently in the long queue of tattered pilgrims and scruffy supplicants that led to the choral node. The rib-like arches of the solar station Qaru Non stretched up around her. It had taken nineteen hours without food or rest to get to the front, with nothing to occupy her but the ache in her bones, the gnawing in her belly, and the fear that she would have a relapse of the mind-plague – that horrible, migraine inducing psyker-spasm that had afflicted her ever since the day she had swum too deep under Ferro-Giant Omicron. She had kept the fear away with detailed thoughts of how she would rescue the last remnants of Saltire Vex, then later resettle it in her own fashion, turning it from a drowning world to a thriving, fighting, killing engine of war.
Her stomach rumbled every few minutes, that hungry animal inside her waking up and beginning to prowl around her guts. She had found a survival pack in the Arvus Lighter after all, and its vitae-paste had filled a gap, but it had not lasted nearly long enough.
‘Deel, Jensa,’ intoned the gaunt, wrinkle-headed adjudicator at the top of the judicial lectern. She looked up sharply. The ancient had a collar of autocandle lumens extending from his ruff, and a tattoo of a third eye on his forehead, its rays of black and white faded to translucency with age.
‘That is me,’ she said. ‘Present, I mean.’
‘Rigswoman Jensa Mahlia Deel. Present your proposed missive before the masters of the choir.’
She stepped forward, eyebrows raised, and fixed the adjudicator with her most commanding stare. It was a look that had intimidated drunken riggers into compliance, usually promising a swift slap of her wrench on the side of the head. But here, directed up at an impassive judiciary some eighteen feet above her, it lacked something in the way of threat.
‘I request the regular winter evacuation fleet be sent to Saltire Vex, for the cold cycle is growing close,’ she said. ‘This is a routine request and procedure.’
The wrinkled judiciary screwed up his face, making him look ancient beyond words. ‘Have I not seen this exact request from Saltire Vex before, young lady? Have I not already given it a negative verdict?’ He looked down at her as if she was no more than a clot of blood stuck to his shoe. ‘You realise the penalty for wasting the time of an Imperial adept?’
‘This time, you have little choice in the matter,’ said Deel, grabbing Farren’s scroll from her waist and holding it up. The adjudicator sighed theatrically, extended a multi-jointed limb from a hidden compartment in his lectern, and grabbed the scroll with a three-pronged claw.
The artificial appendage transferred it up to his wrinkled, bulge-knuckled hands. He tutted before checking its seal. Deel felt a warm glow inside as the pompous fool’s expression curdled through confusion, to disbelief, to barely concealed awe.
‘Emperor’s grace,’ he whispered. ‘Is this… is this a Primaris seal?’
A susurrus of whispers spread back through the queue behind Deel.
‘Yes,’ she said, trying to make her voice as strident as possible. ‘Read it, fellow servant of the Throne. I have no more time to waste.’
The adjudicator nodded, and unfurled the scroll. He drank in the information, his watery eyes seeming to bulge from his skull as he read and re-read its contents.
‘I see. And you would have our astropathic choir send for evacuation craft to escort the populace of Saltire Vex to safety. Is that correct, Rigswoman Deel?’
‘It is.’
‘Unfortunate. I have a listed prohibition against that exact course of action somewhere here.’ He sorted through the parchments on his desk, pulling one out to peer at it with eyes creased. ‘And though it is vague as to its origin, it bears the hallmark of the Adeptus Astartes. The seal is authentic, though unfortunately the author did not deign to state his rank, nor his Chapter.’
‘My scroll is not vague. As you can see, it comes from Primaris Lieutenant Xedro Farren of the Dark Angels, formerly of the Indomitus Crusade, and it must be obeyed.’
‘I must confess, if the rumours are true that the Primaris Marines are acquainted with Roboute Guilliman himself…’ At this the adjudicator linked his thumbs and crossed his hands in the winged sign of the aquila. ‘This sets a new precedent.’
‘That is good to hear,’ said Deel, a tiny flame of hope burning in her chest. She returned the sign, trying hard not to smile. ‘Will you honour it?’
‘This time,’ said the adjudicator, his goldfish-like expression betraying the fact he saw Deel in a whole new light. ‘I believe I will. Is there anything else, mamzel?’
‘Yes,’ said Deel. ‘Kindly send a missive to the mercenaries gathered upon the neighbouring world, Saltire Non Aqua. A thousand drums of refined promethium to the first alphic-category warship to enter low orbit and establish a defensive perimeter above Ferro-Giant Thetoid. All I need is a parley. I will take it from there.’
‘As you wish, mamzel,’ said the adjudicator, his quill scribbling hard upon his data-slate. ‘Mercenaries… fuel… thousand barrels of promethium… defensive perimeter.’
‘Tell them to make haste,’ said Deel. ‘War will find us before the evacuation vessels bear us to safety, I am sure of it.’
‘A war that requires an army of mercenaries.’
‘Yes.’
‘We have… contacts. A hireling alliance recently gained permission to bring one of their macro-class warships into Qaru nearspace. You will have your audience, Jensa Mahlia Deel.’
‘Good,’ said Deel, her eyes narrowing. ‘Saltire Vex will not be caught off guard again.’