Palace Mosaical, Linat Primau, Pekun
She darted left on instinct, desperate to see the emerald-green gap to the clearing at the maze’s centre. The repulsive attack-beast was horribly fast for its size, and the hideous warble of its voice was closing in behind her. One lashing tentacle around her ankle, one misstep, and she would be crushed, her skull shattered by its diseased bulk and its slimy pseudopods probing at her spilt brains.
Thank the T’au’va, before her was the sight she yearned for. The entrance to the centre of the maze, a rectangle of light green in the darkness.
‘Fire on my position!’
She dived headlong into the clearing as the Rightful Claimant’s underslung guns responded to her particular vocal signature and swung towards her. Unquestioning, it levelled a burst of plasma so fierce her vision turned white-blue.
The horrible creature behind her exploded in a mass of nameless slurry, the vile spatter swiftly evaporating to nothing at all.
Her eyes strained against the retinal glare. There was the gangling form of the master shaper Tak, dazed and lying on his side in the gravel. Blood was pouring from his flank. His skin had gone back to its original mottled green, the superheated gore from a plasma wound a dark red spatter against it.
She squinted, peering beyond the fallen shaper. Two infected humans converged on him, half stumbling, with their hands groping as if to find a lost treasure. Behind Tak was the Orca, the squat, rectilinear carrier craft struggling to get airborne with a crowd of sleepers clambering atop it and trying to drag it down.
The ship was leaning drunkenly, its engines turned to face the ground as it fought to counter the extra weight. Great gouges were left in its fuselage where the infected humans were digging their fingers into the metal.
Her aide, Calmstone, was leaning out of one door, shooting her pulse carbine one-handed at the nearest sleepers as even more of them climbed onto the ship’s fuselage. One of the infected humans went down, its head taken from its neck, then another, then a third. The focused expression on Calmstone’s face did not so much as twitch, even when one of the sleepers came at her from under the tank’s fuselage. It caught a bolt of plasma in the throat as a result.
Dawnchaser was on foot, blasting away at a hole torn in the other side of the hedge maze. Teeth gritted, eyes wide as her scalp lock swung around her shoulders, she was holding a knot of sleepers at bay through the sheer intensity of her barrage. She pulled a photon grenade from her belt and put her thumb over the priming node.
Shadowsun shielded her eyes. A split microdec later the disc-shaped device exploded amongst the sleepers in a multispectral burst of light and sound.
She had seen photon grenades blind and deafen a dozen types of enemy, crippling entire platoons of Imperial gue’la and sending even orks howling back in disarray. It made not a single bit of difference to the infected humans. Lost in a nightmarish reality of their own, they saw nothing of the real world, and staggered on.
But the sudden burst of light she could still use.
‘Shimmersky, fire on that emanation!’
Pop-down turrets extruded from the Claimant’s underside, long-barrelled burst cannons, point defence guns and a bulky missile pod whipping around as Dawnchaser fell back and leapt onto the transport craft’s rear ramp. A fraction of a microdec later the knot of sleepers were ripped bodily apart by pulse carbine fire.
Running towards Opikh Tak, Shadowsun kicked the legs out from one of the approaching slumberers and blasted the other backwards with her pulse pistol. The energy bolt cored the second sleeper’s torso front to back, filling the air with the stench of burning bone and cooking human meat.
The first of the two, having toppled into the gravel with a wailing cry of anguish, grabbed for her legs. She took its arm from its torso with one shot and put it out of its misery with another to the face. She took aim on the backs of the heads of the three sleepers still clambering on the Orca and, steady as if she were on a firing range, decapitated them one after another.
‘My thanks, high commander,’ called out Calmstone, shooting the last two sleepers from the rear of the Orca with tightly grouped bursts.
‘Are we clear for launch?’ she said as she approached the fallen kroot. The Orca beyond him, once a spotless white, was mottled green, black and blood red. Streaks of slime mould and algae occluded its sensors and viewports, just as they had her XV22.
‘Kor’vre Shimmersky thinks he can make it out on muscle memory alone,’ came the reply, ‘but with the engines compromised he is refusing to reach escape altitude.’
‘So we evac to the space port as high above ground level as we can manage. It’s an Orca, it can take a little punishment.’
‘If we leave now, perhaps,’ called back Calmstone. ‘If you leave the kroot. Come on!’
‘Who shot him? This is a pulse wound.’
‘A shas’ui guard from Pekun, by his markings,’ she called back, her usual staid demeanour beginning to crack. ‘He had a drone with him. Come, please! I’ll debrief you once we’re safe. Hurry!’
‘We have need of this one.’ Shadowsun hoisted the kroot up as best she could, the gangly giant’s limbs heavy as oaken boughs. Worse still, they were oily, and very hard to get a grip on. A cratered wound yawned in his flank, half-cauterised, half-torn. It stank of ammonia and rotten meat.
‘He could die if you carry him like that,’ said Calmstone. She leaned back into the Orca’s interior. ‘Kor’vre Shimmersky, please move south-south-west until I give the call to stop.’
The craft drifted towards her, Calmstone acting as its eyes. Shadowsun glanced around for a new attack, breath coming fast.
‘Oe-ken-yon,’ she said, ‘the contact salve.’
‘At once, high commander.’
The drone slid through the air, a hatch sliding open on its underside to extrude an aerosol no bigger than one of Shadowsun’s fingers. She took it from him, depressed its top to spray it onto the kroot’s wound. In moments the analgesic foam expanded, tough and resinous, but porous enough to let the damaged tissue breathe. She sprayed the remainder on her own wounds, shallow as they were. Another priceless innovation of the earth caste that had saved countless t’au lives.
If the kroot lived, it might save thousands of their auxiliaries to boot.
Tak’s eyes flickered open as he stirred to consciousness, the stimulants in the analgesic foam kick-starting his body once more. ‘I give you thanks,’ he said, pushing himself upright. ‘Not all your kind would see me live.’
The Orca drifted within reach. Shadowsun gave the kroot her arm as he hoisted himself up into the side hatch, folding himself inside as if climbing into the bole of a tree. Checking around her, she followed him into the ordered perfection of its crew compartment.
Dawnchaser emerged from between the inert Crisis suits that hung from the cargo bay’s central rail. A faraway look in her eyes, she ran her fingers along them as she did so, a subconscious longing in the gesture that Shadowsun knew well. But roles were roles, and Dawnchaser’s was not that of the XV8 pilot; neither was Calmstone’s, at that. They had given their life of study to the world of infantry tactics instead, for the Greater Good.
The cadre Fireblade nodded to her as she stepped forward, reloading her gun and replacing her spent grenades from a replenishment rail on the ship’s side. On the other side of the ship, Calmstone moved back to fill the door so she could better guide Shimmersky as the Orca lifted above the maze’s central enclosure.
In a matter of moments there was a booming cough in the distance, high-calibre shot thudding into its nose cone with a series of shuddering impacts. Shadowsun was off balance for a second. Calmstone ducked back in for a moment, calling out coordinates to Shimmersky as the pilot eased them over the top of the maze. More punching impacts, alerts blipping from the pilot suite in the nose of the craft. Shadowsun moved forwards to assess whatever read-outs it was still manifesting.
There was the familiar chime of markerlights linking to their console, and a moment later the Orca returned fire upon the target their fire warrior reinforcements had painted. It levelled a storm of energy that far surpassed the usual capability for a craft of this size, the light of the weapons discharge reflecting from a million sharp thorns atop the hedge to glimmer like a cloud of phosphorescent plankton. Shadowsun smiled as she heard an explosion in the middle distance, the impacts on the ship’s hull suddenly ceasing. What use was wearing the skin of a grazer-beast if the predator beneath it had no teeth?
‘Change of plan,’ she said. ‘Move to the maze’s entrance, please, just by the shattered bridge. I have unfinished business there. Shimmersky, when I tell you to, please bring the craft in as low as you can before directing the engines to the ground.’
‘Time is of the essence,’ said the air caste pilot. ‘I have incoming from the north-east, high altitude. If we stay low there’s no way the ventral guns can engage them.’
‘Just get me down there.’
A few moments later the Orca hovered smoothly over the entrance to the maze. Shadowsun could see her XV22 standing statue-still nearby. The slime upon its exterior had spread to become a thin coating of furry, mossy growth.
Beyond the roofs of the Palace Mosaical, teams of Crisis suits were fully engaged against not only huge, scab-bodied aircraft but also weird, buzzing shapes. They were like giant, swollen insects with no right to stay aloft, especially with pot-bellied riders atop them. She scanned the area for foes, be they slumberers, the aliens from under the bridge, or worse, gue’ron’sha.
The three-horned giant that Opikh Tak had tried to decapitate was stamping with stone-crushing force up the slope of rubble leading out of the moat. By the rivers of grey rock that trailed across the hillock of masonry, it was not for the first time.
‘Not built for speed, these ones.’ She tapped the communion bead at her collar. ‘Stalker suit, unseal and make ready for boarding,’ she said. Recognising her voice, the XV22 battlesuit shuddered, though with so much vile growth upon it, its hatch did not open.
‘Bring us in close, Shimmersky. Turn engines landward and let them clean the landing zone.’
‘Yes, high commander.’
With a blazing, shimmering roar of combusting energy, the backwash of the Orca’s engines engulfed the ground below, including the XV22 itself. They scoured it top to toe, the blast of engine discharge burning away the layer of slime that had settled upon it in a matter of seconds whilst doing little more than discolouring the hyperalloy beneath.
‘Twist right and drop!’ Shadowsun pushed past Calmstone, ready to leap to the ground as soon as the Orca was low enough to give her cover. ‘Suit, open for boarding!’
To her relief, this time the battlesuit obliged, clunking open with a hiss of green-grey steam.
‘High commander,’ said Oe-ken-yon. ‘I really must protest. There is a gue’ron’sha hostile close, and the suit is compromised.’
‘Shimmersky, get in low and turn the ramp towards the XV22. That’s a prototype down there, the only one of its kind. We already lost Oe-hei. I’m not leaving without my suit.’
Calmstone and Dawnchaser shared a glance, and the former stepped over to her.
‘We’ll come with you, high commander.’
‘You will not,’ said Shadowsun, jumping out of the Orca to crunch down onto the gravel a full ten feet below and immediately break into a run. ‘Cover me!’
The hulking, three-horned monster that was climbing over the lip of the moat opened fire as she darted for the cover of her battlesuit. The long-barrelled cannon under its arm spat flame. It pointed at its eyes with two fingers of its massively oversized fist, then extended them towards her: I see you.
Shadowsun slid under the roaring fusillade, gravel spraying even as Dawnchaser returned fire at the gue’ron’sha warrior. Her plasma bolts burned holes in its thick, grey-green armour, but the monstrosity did not so much as break stride, stomping towards her with its helm lowered like a monoceros ready to charge. A guttural laugh bubbled up over the din of battle.
She leapt, twisting, and landed inside her control cocoon in one smooth movement, arms and legs slipping into the half-open haptic collars with a motion she had practised a thousand times. Every sense screamed this was an unnecessary risk, that if the suit malfunctioned – turned from pristine white to a sooty, flaking black through its trial by plague and fire – then she would have thrown her life away for nothing, and likely the fate of the Fifth Sphere along with it.
Even a broken sword can kill.
The suit’s hatch hinged down, the helm and torso clicking into place even as a thunderous impact punched her backwards. Another shot, then another, her suit taking an involuntary step with each thumping blow. To her immense relief, its armour held fast, though the systems were glitched even more than they had been when she had left. The gue’ron’sha’s cannon was anti-tank calibre, and even her cutting-edge XV22 could not take much more.
‘Come on,’ said Shadowsun, stabbing at the manual override. ‘Come on, just reroute, or… Yes!’
The display on the command-and-control suite shimmered to life, multiple hexes suddenly showing the scenes before her. Though the airjet cleaners of her sensor hood had struggled with the sudden growth of biomatter, cleaning soot and ash from her optics was well within their power.
A sight to chill the blood greeted her. The horned monstrosity that had gained the edge of the moat was charging, raising a massive, energy-wreathed gauntlet the size of its own torso for a killer punch.
She took his legs from beneath him with her fusion blaster, then looped the gun around in a slashing figure of eight that cut the disgusting thing into four steaming pieces.
‘By the T’au’va,’ transmitted Calmstone across the cadrenet. ‘It’s good to have you back.’
‘We’re not safe yet,’ she said, striding forward and jumping so the battlesuit landed square on the wide-open rear ramp of the Claimant. She activated the magnetic clamps of the XV22’s feet and stamped up into the Orca before turning to survey the corpse-strewn mess of the palace grounds. ‘A long way from it. But the wind has turned.’
As the Orca moved off, Shadowsun saw another bulky creature gesturing up at her from the edge of the moat, its helm cast in the image of a fly. Only after zooming in did she see it twitch, a long tongue extending from between clacking mandibles to lick its compound eyes. That was no helm. Somehow, against all possible reason, the insectile, misshapen thing atop its neck was its head. It seemed to stare right back at her, chittering and pointing with a finger of black chitin.
Next to the bestial thing was the cowled, hunched elder with the mouth like a yawning black pit. It was calling out, stamping over to the fallen body of the hulk she had quartered with her fusion blasters. She watched in fascinated horror as it thrust the heel of its staff into the largest part of the fallen gue’ron’sha and threw back its head, guttural syllables spilling from its maw.
The psyker’s staff seemed to sprout, reminding her at first of a sapling growing strong from a bank of compost. It fast became a vast, fat-bodied tree that spread out and out again, putting down roots into the cadavers scattered around. Those roots thickened and bound together to form gigantic limbs and broad shoulders, a wide knot of boles forming the head. Branches and twigs swathed it, some exploded diagram of a venous system writ in rotten wood.
A great cloud of insects burst out of the cowled gue’ron’sha’s maw. He placed a palsied, albino hand on the throat of his fly-headed comrade, and they gushed from that creature’s mandibles as well. Whirring up in a vile black storm, the fat-bodied insects clothed the towering tree-form of veins and arteries, gathering so thick around them that they seemed to become a black and crawling skin. Even as she watched, it had become a bestial thing, towering over the hedge maze, looming over even the mosaical domes of the palace to the west.
The creature grew larger, heavier, more obese by the moment as the Orca slid away. Its gross limbs filled out, sausage skins being pumped overfull of rancid fat. The Rightful Claimant’s underslung guns spat fire, rivers of plasma and a quartet of missiles ploughing into the ugly mass of the thing’s chest. Blubbery flesh flew, but it was like taking potshots at a midden-heap.
A maw that was more a tear in reality than a true mouth yawned open, a stretching skin of tissue pulled apart like strings of melted plastic to expose teeth the size of grave markers. A guttural laugh erupted from the thing’s throat as it pulled itself free from the morass of dead bodies.
Then, to Shadowsun’s horror, it lumbered after them.