Palace Mosaical, Linat Primau, Pekun
Shadowsun crunched hard into the mouldering earthen base of the trench-moat, her battlesuit’s hoof-like feet leaving deep imprints. She was under the bridge’s shadow an instant later with her drones close behind, running through the mounds of dried leaf litter across the width of the channel. The gue’ron’sha on the bridge had missed their chance. Slowed by rot and age, their forms obese, they were built for strength over dexterity. In their arrogance they had failed to close their trap, overweight hunt-hounds trying to corner a fox in the prime of its life.
Another rain of bodies, a stone’s throw to the west, as the out-of-control drop-ship poured out the last of its hapless passengers. They landed hard, yet some still rose to their feet, stumbling with eyes closed towards the nearest t’au. She circled them as a late priority target for the Manta, reasoning she still had time to get back out of the other side of the trench before they became a problem.
There was a crackling snap of energies behind her, her battlesuit blaring an alert. She turned to see the air curdling, shimmering, coalescing into something that looked for all the world like a giant disc of disease-ravaged skin. Giant sores suppurated and burst upon it; boils bulged and swelled transparent to pop open in gouts of foul liquid. They left holes in the air, windows into another vista behind them, lush and verdant whilst being thick with hideous rot and a misty miasma thicker than a Dal’ythan swamp. Through those apertures crawled some manner of alien, their forms so strange and foul Shadowsun found herself momentarily at a loss.
The creatures were both starveling-thin and fat-bellied at the same time, their bodies naked but for a few scraps of filthy rag. Their skin was like that of fallen apples left to rot, brown and sunken with rashes of livid white and yellow dappled across them. In their hands they bore rust-caked swords so twisted and weird they were hardly worthy of the name. On their bald pates they each had a single horn, lethally sharp in some cases and like broken branches in others, below which they had a cyclopean, cataracted eye.
The newcomers were crawling through the sore-holes as if pulling themselves from a clump of vile cocoons, half falling in showers of unclean fluids to the leafy ground before standing up, bow-legged and droning away in some guttural tongue. With one eye she glanced at her autotrans, but it spooled only gibberish.
Something in Shadowsun’s soul twisted in revulsion at the sight of them. Her battlesuit’s species archive silhouetted them for a moment, but it found nothing.
Alien allies of the invaders, they had to be. Her caste’s book of conduct, the Code of Fire, had strict guidelines when encountering a new species. Those that had not openly attacked were to be addressed first to see if a peace could be brokered before an inter-species war began. Sadly, it was often only a formality, and outright war broke out moments later. But it was by command of the ethereals that an alien should not be judged on appearance alone, and she had never knowingly disobeyed them.
This new race was foul indeed to look upon, but clearly sentient, given the fact they wielded blades. More than that, they were clearly proficient in the use of transdimensional portals, a technique that would be of immeasurable use to the T’au’va. Open fire on them and she might deny key assets to the glory of the Greater Good.
Her instincts, however, spoke of a very different scenario. Every iota of her hunter’s instinct cried out: destroy as many as you can, and retreat to higher ground.
Yet the code was the code, beaten into her through her formative years and beyond. To trust her instincts without conscious modulation would be to break something within as well as without.
‘I do not wish to fight,’ she called out in Low Gothic. They slipped and slithered upright, the sounds relayed over the audio link making her stomach twist. ‘But if you take one more step forward, you will all die.’
The closest of their number fixed her with the milky orb of its eye. It was taller than the rest with a protrusion of twisted bone jutting from its spine and tattered, sore-pocked skin blue-black with necrosis. Its forehead wrinkled for a moment, then its jaw dropped, far further than it should have. Out from its gullet came a stream of what Shadowsun at first thought to be smoke, but then realised was a horribly thick swarm of flies.
Shadowsun took an involuntary step backwards as the swarm hurtled forwards to engulf her, flitting right for her sensor units. She pulled up an emergency hex and launched a cloud of incendiary chaff to intercept them, flame blossoming across her view for a moment. Oe-hei, veering out from her left, took the rest on his shield. The insects fizzed and cracked to fall lifeless from the skies.
More of the hideous alien creatures pulled themselves through the suppurating, blood-dripping portal. One carried something in its hand that she thought at first was a rock, but then realised was a decapitated head so bloated with rot it was almost spherical.
‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Throw it. Let’s see how well that goes for you.’
The alien grinned, pulled back its hand and hurled it anyway. As soon as the ghastly projectile left its hand, there was a flash from her fusion blaster, and it was gone, atomised in the blink of an eye. The creature’s hand was gone, too, a smoking stump black to the elbow.
The creature laughed, a hollow, soul-wrenching sound.
Another swarm of flies came from the leader’s maw. She answered with a blast of fusion energy. A backwash of evaporating biomatter dispersed, catching her in its blast zone. Her suit’s seals were still sound and fully engaged, thank the T’au’va. So long as her suit remained intact, not even a single microbe could breach them.
The creatures were coming towards her now, loping and limping with their swords held high. It was not a charge, as such; they moved with no more urgency than if they came to hack apart a training mannequin. She redrew her targeting solutions, but they kept slipping free. For some reason the creatures were not registering properly on her command-and-control suite’s bio-scanner.
Her missile pod, ammunition fed from a hidden bandolier in the false arm of her battlesuit, was down to its last three warheads. Instead she slid her blasters’ output faders down to high diffusion and disabled the target lock. Ducking around the side of the stone pillar, she bathed all three of the oncoming creatures in a cone of superheated energy.
Fusion blasters were the most powerful standard-issue weapons the earth caste had ever mass-produced. Even at their widest dispersal setting she had seen them melt rock, and a wide dispersal could reduce a crowd of unarmoured enemies to bursts of evaporating fluid. Shadowsun’s were the most advanced of their kind, a triumph of the earth caste’s deadly art.
They did little more than burn the oncoming creatures red, as if they had stood too long in the sun.
One of them croaked like a frog, a horrible echo of the laughter of its masters above.
‘How?’ she breathed, putting one of the bridge’s stone pillars between them out of instinct. The creatures were so illogical, so other, that somehow, on some soul-deep level, something inside her had been cut away.
Her certainty, perhaps.
‘Force fields,’ said Oe-hei. ‘Gue’ron’sha technology.’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘That must be it.’
‘Here they come!’
She was about to move along the length of the moat, trusting to her suit’s camouflage, when she realised that doing so would bring her into the crosshairs of the gue’ron’sha on the bridge above.
‘Not worth the risk,’ she said, her mind still racing. If this was a trap, it was an improvised one. More likely it was a distraction from–
A blurt of alarm came from Oe-ken-yon as two of the creatures came for her around the other side of the stone pillar. She saw the shimmer of Oe-hei’s force field blossom outwards, but it was a moment too late; for such large creatures, the newcomers could move fast. Oe-ken-yon distracted one of them with a stark white discharge of energy, but the other brought its blade down hard.
The alien’s weapon was a mangled thing, as twisted as if it had been run over by an Imperial caterpillar tank. It dripped some manner of black liquid, rust mingled with verdigris and even patches of mould along its blade. Poor as it was, its core was sound, and it bit deep into her already-damaged weapon arm.
She kicked her assailant away and stumbled back into the shadow of the bridge, putting some distance between them and taking stock of the impact on the damage control suite. The red glow of a compromised asset seemed to be spreading. Soon the entire forearm was red, analysis screeds skidding fast as her software desperately sought a cause-effect correlation.
The creature’s hideous, half-rotten face leered large as it lunged forwards, pus dribbling from its sores and dry, cracked skin. It was inside the reach of her fusion blasters, but she let fly a cloud of flechettes from her suit’s shoulders instead, the tiny explosions spraying decayed flesh and black, sludgy fluid across her suit as they tore the thing to ribbons.
A cyclopean face came from the left, distending in a lacerated leer. Another two lurched from the right. A flare from Oe-hei’s shield batted the first away. She took the second with a slash of fusion energy. The third lunged for her throat.
There was a flash of metal and, in a welter of diseased blood, the first alien’s head was torn from its neck. A moment later a crescent blade burst from the third creature’s chest, the silver tip lifting it bodily upwards before dashing it down with a crunch of bone. The monstrous thing seemed to dissolve, spreading to nothing like squid ink diffusing in a rock pool.
Behind it stood Opikh Tak, quills bristling, a sickle-shaped gardening tool in each of his strangely clawed hands.
‘Come,’ he said, his beak clacking in sharp emphasis. ‘Be quick.’
The kroot turned and ran, and she ran with him. His skin was turning grey and mottled as he ran, its texture changing to become moss-patched and rough like the walls around them. She followed, trusting to her battlesuit’s digital camouflage. Her main viewscreen showed a pack of the hideous, fly-belching creatures sloping after her. Above them there was a blipping icon, a wide triangle coming in fast.
‘Get into cover,’ she called out to Tak as a progress signal chimed its completion on her viewscreen.
‘We must keep moving!’
‘No. I have a parting gift.’ She circle-designated the three of the bridge arch keystones nearest the palace, swerving as she ran to shoot her fusion blasters at the fourth. They made short work of the keystone, the huge wedge of masonry running like sludge.
The pillars supporting the bridge trembled.
A moment later, there was a whoosh of displaced air, the whip-crack of heavy railgun shots blasting into the pillars supporting the bridge. The air filled with rock dust as the back of each of the pillars was blasted out, the exit wounds of the railgun tearing massive, tumbling craters from the far side. A moment later the Projection of Force swept overhead in a graceful arc, bay doors open to let team after team of Crisis battlesuits drop down into the warzone. Despite the horror and confusion around her, Shadowsun bared her teeth in pleasure, the savage grin of a hunter whose trap is sprung.
With a groaning rumble, the entire bridge collapsed.
An avalanche of shattered masonry came down hard, burying the freakish disease-creatures under a hundred tons of cut stone. Shadowsun and Opikh Tak had to move fast to avoid the falling rubble, but the collapse pitched the gue’ron’sha above into a maelstrom of dust and rock. The noise was loud enough for Shadowsun’s audio dampeners to cut in. She blink-caught some footage for the water caste to optimise, or perhaps simply for her own gratification should she make it out of this situation alive.
Opikh Tak looked back at her, a milky yellow eye amidst the knobbled grey skin that by now looked almost identical to the rocky walls around them. The other side of the moat was within reach, now. She was not sure she could make the jump to the edge, even with her battlesuit lending her strength.
‘More rubble, wrecker-t’au,’ said the kroot. ‘Make it swift.’
She let her actions speak for her, circling the masonry nearest the far side of the bridge and letting fly a blast of fusion energy that sent the jutting remnants of the bridge toppling downward onto the piled rocks beneath. After the thunder and dust of its collapse, several much larger pieces of masonry lay piled on top of the first scattering.
‘That suffice?’
Shadowsun was already moving fast towards the makeshift ramp, bounding with the power of her battlesuit to land on one outcrop, then another. There was a crunch of masonry to her left. She panned a view-hex to see a dust-covered brute push himself upright, leaning heavily on one trunk-thick arm. He was massive, a Fio’taun stone statue coming to life. Three horns jutted from his eye-slit helm, more like the twisted branches of some spiky underwater coral than those of a plainsbeast.
Looping back with his arm carving through the air, the kroot shaper lashed out with his sickle, a blow so swift it would have decapitated an ork without slowing. It did nothing more than rebound from Three-horn’s armoured helm with a resounding clang.
‘These armoured things,’ said Tak, spitting in anger as he leapt to the next outcrop. ‘Unkillable.’
The gue’ron’sha picked up a hefty piece of rubble in his oversized fist and threw it with killing force. Tak twisted, attempting to bat it away, but it caught him a glancing blow to the flank. He went down even as the giant hauled his bulk upright. The brute let fly a volley of autocannon shells as Tak writhed, spasming like a snake. Rubble was kicked left and right by the force of the detonating bolts, blood puffing from Tak’s spall-wounds as his rock-grey skin was torn open in a dozen places. He made himself a hard target, but he would be caught and ripped to pieces any moment.
Shadowsun sent a pair of missiles shot from her pod, hitting not the giant but the rubble beneath his tread. In a flash of light, the stone was turned to scree. The brute’s foot skidded through it, overbalancing him so he thudded down onto his gut with his lightning-wreathed gauntlet scrabbling towards Tak’s leg. Giving a caw of triumph, the kroot hauled up a rock the size of a drone and brought it down with all his might on Three-horn’s head. The boulder broke rather than the helm.
Still, the blow had bought the shaper a moment of respite. He jumped from stone to stone, whipcord muscles seeing him reach the sheer wall of the trench’s far side to catch up with Shadowsun in a startling burst of speed.
In the skies above, the Projection of Force was already coming back around for another pass.
‘Weapons free,’ she sent to the ship, eye-circling the enemy amidst the ruin of the bridge. The gue’ron’sha were still hauling themselves out of the rubble with varying degrees of success. There was a flare of greenish light. Then the whip-crack of heavy railguns cut the air and smart missiles shot low to scour the trench with fire.
Shadowsun gained the edge of the moat, taking footage of the railgun strike for later analysis as she bounded up the rubble and ran hard towards the outer periphery of the maze over the moat’s lip. Opikh Tak was somehow alongside her, scarily fast, his gangly frame taut as his hunter’s garb flapped behind him.
What she saw then, on the remote-view relay from her drones, would stay with her until the day of her death.
There, inside an oily bubble of green light, was a hunchbacked and cowled gue’ron’sha crawling on all fours into a slick of mulch at the bottom of the moat. A whirling tornado of burning leaves lit the trench-like space around him, the entire zone a confusion of rock dust, leaf litter and tongues of flame still burning after the Manta strike.
Gue’ron’sha mind-science. The most dreaded aspect of all humanity’s nonsensical, counter-intuitive ways of making war.
The Death Guard psyker was the eye of the storm, his grotesque bodyguard lumbering in close to watch over him. At his side was the giant with the scythe, dragging himself into the swirling vortex’s epicentre even as Three-horn staggered, clutching his dented helm, to join them. In the middle distance, the Projection of Force was growing larger. Its pilots would not need Shadowsun to guide them. Markerlights were already flicking down from the palace’s crenellated walls to pick out the gue’ron’sha. The invaders were out of time.
Still howling unintelligible words, the cowled hunchback plunged his taloned hands deep into the mulch. Glowing green light poured from his eyes, his nose, his ears, appearing like the discharge of some especially vile disease. The ground around him erupted as he shuddered and screamed, hurling great handfuls of rotten slop skywards to mingle with the raging winds that spiralled like dust devils from one end of the trench to the other.
Shadowsun grimaced as the air around them turned the colour of dark mould, spiralling out and spreading with the speed of a cyclone. Like a sudden squall of rain, it coated the walls of the palace, turning bright mosaics to dull, swampy green. The conjuration spattered across the t’au on the battlements, the Devilfish squadron withdrawing the garrison survivors, and the gue’la troopers running on the perimeter road, sending them all stumbling in confusion and panic. Most of them were wiping their eyes and coughing up welters of black-green fluid.
The strange, wet phenomenon slicked the moat’s walls from grey and beige to sludgy brown. It coated the castle walls and those slumberers still staggering, groping and bumping their way along the top of them, but it did not stop there. Rising into the air like an expanding sphere of force, the wave of discolouration burst across the oncoming Manta to spatter its entire front section and occlude sensors and viewing panels alike. The craft veered sharply, peeling off from combat airspace; to do otherwise would be to fly blind.
A heartbeat later, Shadowsun’s XV22 was slathered with that same strange liquid growth. Her sensors darkened as the rampant spread of the substance outpaced the ultrasonic cleansing field that her battlesuit automatically engaged to clean it off.
She felt a queasy well of panic deep inside. Her visuals were turning greenish grey, her gun read-outs registering the grey-black of occluded barrels. In a matter of microdecs the invaders had found a way to rob her of her sight, her certainty, and her weaponry. There was every chance her life would be next.
An idea struck her. She stamped down on the ground in front of her, deploying her underheel punch-cylinders to take a small geological sample and paring off the top layer with a swipe of her left eye in order to force a swifter conclusion. The analysis was swift. Algae, or some manner of slime mould. Either way it was growing at an exponential rate, thickening to the point it was coating everything around them in dark green matter. Only the strange cylindrical shrine with the many-limbed statue seemed immune, an island of ochre and white in a sea of green on her failing distribution suite.
‘High commander,’ said Oe-ken-yon, his tone tense but calm, ‘my pan-spectrum optical readers are compromised. Some manner of slimy residue has–’
‘Sensors obscured!’ bleated Oe-hei. ‘Counter-scramblers ineffective! Reroutes inoperable! Airjet cleansers at eleven per cent efficacy! Shas’O Shaserra, I cannot protect you!’
She made out the white disc of the guardian drone just to her right and laid a hand on it even as her visuals dwindled to nothing. ‘Fear not, little one, we still have other senses.’ She felt the old fire inside, that burning desire to prove that those who underestimated her had made a fatal mistake. ‘And Oe-ken-yon, thank you for your patience. Just listen for the tone of my voice, amp up the aural sensors and key in my suit’s sonic pattern as a directional source if you haven’t already. Stay close to that and we can both still do our duty.’
‘I have called up relevant imagery from our visit thus far and am complementing it with echolocation,’ said Oe-ken-yon. ‘I believe I have enough of a picture to guide us the rest of the way.’
‘Heartfelt thanks,’ said Shadowsun as a grainy grey image appeared on her command-and-control suite. ‘That should suffice, if we are swift.’
She made for the edge of the maze by memory, setting a weapons solution that would see her fusion blasters make short work of the hedge wall before her and cut to the heart of the primitive labyrinth beyond. She blink-clicked the blasters’ fire icon as her screen darkened, the ambient light cut down as the maze wall loomed.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, but the battlesuit was glitchy, slow to respond. She could feel it becoming compromised, the haptics either failing to catch her movements or simply meeting some manner of soft resistance as she moved. The XV22 slowed, grinding now rather than moving smoothly, and emitted a series of high-pitched whines.
‘High commander,’ said Oe-ken-yon, ‘I fear we may be critically compromised.’
Behind her, she heard the booming of heavy, solid-shot weapons. A jagged chorus of small-arms gunfire was swallowed by a crackling, blurring static that was making her audio feed hard to parse. Clearly the projectile guns atop the gue’ron’sha ships were still operative, their primitive construction largely unaffected by the hideous biological weapon their masters had unleashed. Without the t’au keeping them pinned and with their noisome cargo released, the bulky craft had taken flight once more, the din of their crude mechanical guns blending into a rumble like thunder as they thickened their fire.
The XV22 was really struggling, now, alert signals propagating across its displays with worrying speed. She watched, a thick knot of concern in her throat, as the slide-scale icon on the right dropped towards the dreaded hue of charcoal. Linger any more, and her battlesuit would be reduced to a malfunctioning deathtrap.
‘Shimmersky, where are you, for the love of the T’au’va! I don’t care about your damned fail-safes, I need the Claimant airborne and on my position immediately!’
There was no reply.
‘Calmstone? Dawnchaser? Come in!’
The audio relay crackled, then spat out a thin trickle of words, too distorted to be intelligible. She thought she heard a strange gurgling laughter, then, as if the cadrelink was crossed with another broadcast from outside.
Outside, where the ghosts lurked, and hungered.