Palace Dungeons, Linat Primau, Pekun
The holding cells favoured by humanity were stinking, mildewed places of deprivation and horror, a far cry from the well-lit facilities of the t’au. Odd noises rose from the subterranean passageways below. Shadowsun heard shouts, mutterings, and the occasional scrape of metal on stone. No doubt there were still lost souls down here, the enemies of the dynasty that had once called this palace their home, slowly starving to death for crimes that had long since ceased to be relevant.
Shadowsun pulled up a wide-spectrum schematic of the sub-terranean warren.
‘Subject located,’ she transmitted across the cadrenet. ‘Hang back, please, all four of you.’
‘I will stay within maximum field distance, if I may, high commander,’ said the drone Oe-hei.
‘If you must. Just stay out of sight. This only works if he trusts me.’
She eye-flicked a sequence on the control suite, breathing hard onto the ident-scans before twisting the recessed release levers at once. A moment later the front of her battlesuit hissed as its hermetic seals opened, the plexus hatch smoothly yielding. As one the clutch points at her wrists, ankles, thighs and waist withdrew into the XV22’s fuselage, and she pulled free, sliding gingerly out and landing in a low crouch in the centre of the corridor.
Unclasping the compact pulse pistol stowed in the rear of the battlesuit, she checked the weapon over, activated it with a short exhalation upon its sensor-node, and affixed it to the stowage straps at the small of her back.
There was a rustle from the corridor’s end, and a faint rattle of quills in the gloom.
‘Due warning, friend of the T’au’va!’ she called out. With a last sign of patience to her drone colleagues, Shadowsun ventured down into the darkness. ‘I am approaching your cell purely to talk. Note that I am not of the Fourth Sphere, but the Fifth. I do not share the radical views of those you have dealt with before.’
There was a long moment of silence. Shadowsun felt rather than saw Oe-hei glide forward, and waved him back. She ventured forwards, her hand on the pulse pistol and her pulse racing in her throat. She leaned around the corner to get a better view, eyes acclimatising.
But for a pile of debris, the cell was empty.
A small bed, a wooden bench held with plasteel rods to the wall. On one side was a narrow window, a shaft of light streaming through from the moat outside to ripple on the cobbled floor. She thought the cell was strewn with straw, at first – human cultures often considered that enough of a nod to hygiene to accommodate a prisoner – until she realised it was scattered with twigs, branches and bits of reed. One corner of the cell had been mounded with so many of them that it formed a sort of triangular dwelling place, like a smaller version of the great bowers that dotted the high trees of Pech. He had to be in–
A burst of movement from the ceiling as long, gangly arms reached for her, wiry and thin. They were as grey as the cell’s stone, and textured much the same.
On instinct, Shadowsun leapt backwards, drawing her pistol, but the kroot was uncannily fast, like a spring long coiled. Bangles and leather cords strung with knucklebones rattled as the thing’s odd claw-hands grabbed her throat, the iron-hard talons on either side of its too-flexible palm closing around her neck. A beak came in close, snapping. She dodged, but it still ripped a strand of hair from her head.
She pushed her pulse pistol into its eye socket, the deactivated safety giving a shrill whine.
‘Opikh Tak?’
The kroot froze, then laughed, a clacking, choking sound that brought to mind predatory hunting calls rather than any real kind of mirth.
‘You say it broken, but yes,’ he said.
‘Kindly release my neck.’
The kroot shaper dropped down from his perch in the ceiling amongst trickles of old mortar, unfolding from the shadows to land with quills rattling and talons clacking. His muscular legs cracked as he stood to his full height, headquills fanning out to bristle like those of a pricklespine. Shadowsun suppressed a shudder. The smell of him was pungent, almost eye-watering. It was ammonia mixed with swamp slime, and it seemed to be getting thicker with every moment.
‘I have no words for you, lackey of fools.’
‘Just hear me out. I am from the same world as those who signed the Treaty of Pech with your ancestor Ankhor Prok. I give those at that historic moot their due reverence. Please, I seek only to talk in confidence.’
There was a long pause, stretching out as the alien watched her with cold, black eyes.
‘Truth-talk,’ said the shaper eventually. ‘Good to have something from you, given that you took me from my tribe. Your kind always take.’ His voice was scratchy, harsh, somewhere between the caw of a swordbeak corvid and the gravelly tones of a lho-stick addict. ‘I am hungry. I am disgraced. But I am not helpless. Not weak.’
‘As you have amply demonstrated,’ Shadowsun replied. ‘I have nothing but respect for your people’s culture.’
The kroot cocked his head, opening his mouth slightly to let a sharp, black tongue taste the air. ‘Liar.’
‘With the exception of your eating habits, then.’ She stood up a little taller, anger flaring in the white walls of her heart. ‘Those remain reprehensible. I cannot condone cannibalism, however much I need your aid.’
‘Ah, now I detect the spice of truth. We talk, then. I am a master shaper of the Wetland Oak. I know the flavours of your kind well, scalp-ringed warrior. I do not need to taste your flesh to tell if you lie to me.’
The shaper’s T’au was good, amongst the best she had ever heard from an ally species’ mouth, but in a way, that made him all the more unsettling.
‘I am not given to speaking falsehoods,’ she said, making the sign of the cleansing flame. ‘We fire caste speak plainly enough.’
‘Even words are weapons, to your caste. You are bred for war.’
‘We value the shield as much as the blade.’
‘And yet you carry a gun to a parley,’ said Tak.
Standing close to the bars, Shadowsun could see deep into the kroot’s eyes. There was not an ounce of uncertainty in him. Even unarmed, even in captivity, he had almost managed to kill her.
‘I need something from you.’
‘That is no surprise, taker-t’au.’
‘Two things, in fact. The first is your version of the truth. What happened to make you hate Commander Surestrike with such intensity?’
‘I give no version. It is simple fact. Not a version. Your people tried to kill mine, and that debt will be paid.’
‘You believe it is Surestrike that is to blame for the Du’lun Lakes? For Ky’san?’
‘It is he that called a race-kill on my kind. Not just one place, two. Not in the fire of war, but the cold night. An extermination.’
‘That can’t be right,’ said Shadowsun, her brows creasing. ‘The alliance between our species dates back hundreds of t’au’cyr.’
‘I saw it. Few kroot made it across the sea of skies. All our best master shapers were hunted and killed. Hunted by things that should not exist. I am the last one left. We fought hard, but they were not real, not solid. They did not have flesh-truth. They could not be eaten, or learned from.’
‘Some species of alien, then, as yet uncategorised?’
‘No!’ Tak’s long quills shivered, standing out like the crown of some primal midsummer king. ‘These were not flesh!’
‘Gaseous then,’ said Shadowsun. ‘Or… holograms, perhaps? Devised to distract you whilst hidden snipers took the real toll?’
The kroot coughed something out in its weird, avian language, hitting his beak with the flat of his hands as if on the brink of frenzy.
‘No!’ he shouted again, shaking the bars of the cell so hard that rock dust drizzled down from the ceiling. ‘These were not truth-creatures. They were lies-as-foes. Plague as flesh. But no host.’
‘Surely a disease must have something to infect.’
‘They were disease only.’
‘I see,’ said Shadowsun. ‘I mean… I do not understand, in truth, but I will listen, and learn as best I can.’
There was a blip on her temple-mounted data coronet, the voice of Calmstone tinny in her ear. ‘High commander, civilian ships have landed to the north-east. Close enough to be of concern.’
Shadowsun clicked her teeth and turned away, minimising the connection. ‘Whatever it is, I trust you to deal with it,’ she whispered, turning back to the kroot.
‘We hid,’ continued Tak. ‘We hid at first, with skin-change, colour and texture both. Long-trick of the Wetland Oak tribe, given to us by the swamp tentaclos. They still found us. They came in dreams, infected our best warriors. Not through spore or virus. Through dreams. Through give-up-hope. They came after the smell of fear. No hiding for us.’
‘And you fought back against these things?’
‘We tore the no-fleshers, shot them, trapped them, but did not bite them. Tasted foul in the air. They laughed as they died. Always came more. They let us win. They let us win one day to make us lose the next. They farm hope, to keep the feast prolonged. Lets little shoots grow from dark soil, then pull up to eat, the betrayal sweet-sour on their tongue. They ate our hope.’
Shadowsun said nothing. The kroot was shaking, now, at the memory. From what she knew of the race’s body language, he was feeling the adrenaline rush as if it were fresh.
‘Still we stayed faithful, those who survived. We went through the hole in space, and settled on the other side. Fought long against the humans here, the ones you call gue’la. We put them down at the order of your kin. The voyagers.’
‘The Fourth Sphere personnel?’
‘Yes. They wanted us to target the human shamans, wherever we found them. You know them. The robed ones. The third-eyes. And the ones with no eyes.’ He barked a chattering laugh like that of a great corvid, bitter and angry. ‘I know a little of their world, the world beyond sight and taste. It is not kind to the soul.’
‘You speak of those gue’la who refused the Greater Good,’ said Shadowsun. ‘The leaders of those would not embrace the T’au’va. That is why they had to die.’
‘No,’ said Tak. ‘The other way around! We were to kill those humans that had joined the T’au’va. They raised shrines to it, to a faceless god. They prayed to it. “T’au’va, hear us,” they say, over and over. “Great T’au’va, hear our prayer.” Always chanting. Always bright.’
‘Chanting. Like a religion.’
‘We had to kill them. The Four-Spheres said. To be safe, the Sure-Striker said. To ensure there was no corruption of the real truth of the T’au’va.’
‘That is… highly irregular. It must be a mistake.’
‘Ah, a mistake, you say. A mistake. Many accidents, in this war. Many mistakes. Many stray shots have flown far, many air strikes and collapsed bridges have made their mark on my people.’
Shadowsun felt sick with tension. The shaper’s tone was brittle, and violence lingered just beneath it.
‘Many buildings fell, broken whilst human and kroot were still inside. Unfortunate loss, they said. Then came the killing of the gue’vesa builder-tribes in Maar. Another mistake. Then the t’au turned their guns on us kroot. They killed my warriors. Only a few of us escaped to stop it happening again.’
‘No. We would never have done that.’
‘The t’au give themselves to madness. I have seen it.’
‘Not us. Not the Fifth Sphere personnel.’
‘Your kin. There was no mistake. They wanted us all dead.’
‘But why?’ said Shadowsun, genuinely mystified. ‘What started all this?’
‘They think all aliens corrupt their truth!’ shouted Tak, his quills rattling. ‘All those different to them! Bigot fools. They said to kill all the humans who walked the t’au path, to kill those who wore your symbols, but to leave the rest alone. Then they killed my people too. Hunted our leaders, before massacring the rest!’
‘There’s something we’re not getting here. You say they asked you to hunt the robed humans first, the shamans. Did they come after your own shaman caste too?’
‘We have no true shamans, not in the way of the humans. We have elders, with a little seeing-skill, a little shaping-skill. Some among us speak with the ancestors. But this is rare. It is not the same as in gue’la. Not so destructive, so uncontrolled. Instead respected. Instead, only used as last resort.’
Shadowsun looked out of the thin window at the Great Rift discolouring the sky, a shiver of unease in her bones. ‘Must be a grievous misunderstanding. Or perhaps some group hallucination.’
The kroot followed her gaze. After a long while, he spoke.
‘You think the sky-scar is part of this.’
‘I do.’
‘The shapers say the non-fleshed feed upon the darkness it brings.’
‘Ghosts, then,’ she said. ‘These non-fleshed you encountered. We have our own legends of such things, though few speak of them.’
There was an awful scream in the distance, then another. Cries for help, loud and strident. The kroot’s quills rose as his beak opened slightly, and she saw ropy muscles tense across his sparse frame.
‘Don’t do it.’ She fixed the shaper with a full stare, feeling the intensity of his gaze in return. It was an effort to hold it. ‘Don’t make any kind of mistake. I will gun you down if I have to. And if you die here, the rest of your people will pay the price.’
‘I smell that same evil on the wind. You leave me trapped, you won’t need to kill me yourself.’
More screams, shrill and disturbing. Shadowsun felt something break in her soul at the sound.
‘Stand back.’
To his credit, the kroot backed into the opposite corner. She set her pulse pistol to minimum yield and put its barrel against the door’s slab-like lock mechanism, pulling the trigger to pour plasma energy within until its insides trickled out in a stream of molten slurry.
‘I must investigate this disruption,’ she said. ‘But we are far from done.’
‘Oh, that is true,’ croaked the shaper, his eyes narrowing. ‘That is very true.’
Her XV22 suit was still standing at ease, its plexus hatch hinged down. As she approached it Shadowsun pivoted smoothly inside, placing her limbs into its control cradles. It was like the welcome embrace of a ta’lissera bond-mate. She eye-flicked the reignition protocols, feeling a wash of relief as the plexus hatch folded up to fit smoothly back into place and re-establish its hermetic seal. Safe, now, in her one-t’au fortress of technology and weaponised logic.
More than could be said for those outside.
Shadowsun punched up the latest intel on her command-and-control suite, eyes darting across the most recent field reports and information. The governor’s palace, a nexus for much of the traffic that passed through Linat Primau, had received several gue’la ships in the last few hours. Some of them she had seen herself as she had made planetfall. Nothing out of the ordinary, most were bulk haulers or transit frigates that had been operating near the core of the Atoll.
‘Oe-ken-yon, kindly tap into the local feed and relay the posited source of those screams.’
‘At once, high commander.’ He had the garrison’s drone surveillance rig patched through to her in the space of a heartbeat, and she speed-ran recent events across her feed. Several ships had docked even as she was engaged in parley with Opikh Tak. Even now there was a thin stream of air traffic moving out of the capital.
‘Anomalous craft,’ said the drone. ‘Look.’ He remote-zoomed on three huge, fat-bellied Imperial bulk landers, so scarred by endless deep-space voyages they appeared as mottled and encrusted as void whales. Their colourations and textures were much the same as those of the Death Guard fleet that had so unceremoniously barged into Nem’yar Atoll space, and when Shadowsun cross-referenced their symbols with the air caste’s debrief, they matched on several points. Their hulls were open, airlocks the size of audience halls vaguely visible beyond. Each of the landers was disgorging human passengers, and by the hundreds.
‘These aren’t gue’ron’sha,’ she said.
‘Could they be escapees?’ said Oe-ken-yon.
‘It’s possible,’ she replied. ‘But I doubt it.’
At first glance, she too had thought the crowds of humans departing the massive spacecraft were refugees from Barolyr. They were disorganised to an almost comical degree, but they were humans, after all, and clad in the dull motley of Imperial civilians. Yet they moved in a stumbling, distracted way towards the thin perimeter of t’au guards at the landing pad’s edge, seeming not to care where they roamed, spilling out and bouncing off one another in a random fashion. Something about it put Shadowsun’s mind on edge.
As she watched, some of the humans staggered to topple off the ramps of the landers, falling fifteen, twenty, forty feet to smack hard into the ferrocrete of the landing zone. Shadowsun swore she could hear the wet snap of bones breaking over the audio relay. From what she knew of human physiology, half of them should have been killed by the fall. But every one of those that spilled over the side of the ramps, whether through collision or just aimlessly walking over the edge, got back up again to stagger forward without protest.
Taking a bio-sign reading, she mapped it against a standard Imperial pattern in her control suite’s dossier on human biology. All the normal vital signs registered, if a little sluggish. They were not dead, not as such. But something was wrong with them.
Her eyes widened as it hit her. The reason why their heads lolled, their mouths open and gormless-slack, with thin strings of drool visible on their chins and cheeks.
These people were asleep.
Shadowsun moved the dronecam as she ventured outside and zoomed again, this time seeking out one of the sources of the screams. The sleepwalkers were taking fire from a thin line of gubernatorial space port guard, soldiers wearing the colours of the Pekun military and armed and armoured far better than standard gue’la troops. The newcomers were dancing as volleys of laser bolts hit them, torn this way and that as the shots hit centre mass, but they came on anyway, dazed and directionless, into the ranks of those gunners who stood their ground.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ said Oe-hei. ‘Why are they just ignoring incoming fire?’
‘I do not know. But they are only human, and clearly compromised at that. They should pose no real threat to us.’
Then, with sudden, lurching speed, one of the sleepwalkers grabbed an Imperial rifleman and pulled him apart like a hunk of slow-cooked meat.