Palace Mosaical, Linat Primau, Pekun
The distant screams were blending together into a cacophony. Cutting over the top of them was the eerie wail of a siren, a rising-falling sound so discordant and sorrowful it reminded Shadowsun of the old stories of widow-ghosts that cried on the mountainside for their lost lovers.
‘Oe-ken-yon. Please exit, rise fifty metres, and take an aerial disposition shot.’
‘Of course, high commander.’ The drone shot off at speed, and microdecs later the complex below suddenly resolved on her battlefield disposition suite, a three-dimensional riddle that her mind eagerly attacked.
To the north-east were the ornamental gardens, full of primitive stone fountains and badly maintained floral beds. Beyond them was the space port, built in a wide, irregular pentagon with a huge landing pad and accompanying buildings at each corner. A battle raged at its edges, a dark crowd of slumbering humans staggering in their direction. To the east was the maze, her Orca nestled at its heart; an impromptu fortress, when it came to the human crowds. She blipped a long-range communiqué to the craft’s gun drones, letting them know that they should be ready to detach and defend if necessary, and was rewarded with a gold symbol of assent in return.
To the south was the staff block, currently raising its shutters. Next was the royal barracks, taking up much of the south-west quadrant. Already a smattering of troops had emerged, well drilled in states of emergency but wrong-footed so they came in dribs and drabs to run around the inner perimeter of the Palace Mosaical. Finally, the Royal Stables and King’s Menagerie took up the rest of the complex to the north-west, their inclusion a studied exercise in anachronism.
The sleepwalkers were stumbling in their hundreds, slow but steady, so disorganised the palace’s antiquated defence system had not registered them as a threat at all. Some had already reached the inner perimeter of the palace. It was this vanguard that was the source of the screams.
‘They should already be under fire,’ muttered Shadowsun, opening a channel across the cadrenet. ‘Bring the human newcomers down at range. Fall back and cede ground where needed. Ensure they get no further.’ She blink-pushed the channel to her drones instead. ‘We must return to the Rightful Claimant immediately, and coordinate our defence from there.’
She slid her focus across the disposition graph, turning her head to better take in the three-dimensional space of the skies above. Sure enough, two craft were descending, lights blinking in the dim twilight. They veered from what she presumed to be a standard flight path to new headings, their jutting, jaw-like prows turning towards the stables to the north-west and the staff quarters to the south.
The two craft, at least, had been registered as threats by the palace’s automated systems. They were taking heavy fire from the quad-barrelled aegis guns atop the minarets cresting every tower. Shadowsun felt the muscles in her neck tighten at the sight, already knowing in her gut such basic weaponry would be ineffective.
Cycling up her weapons systems as she stood in the shadow of the palace, she readied her mind for battle. The initial encroachments of the bulk landers had been made to look like some basic resupply, but behind it was a decapitation strike. If she was still here when the real blow landed, the entire war effort would likely fall apart.
Keying her stealth battlesuit to a hunter’s stance on the inside of the external doorway, she brought hexes up on each of the incoming craft. Sure enough, though the aggressive barrage of firepower was mostly on target, it was only slabs of crusted, unidentifiable matter that fell from the sides of the vessels. The landers were almost black with rot, some horrible, scab-like growth splitting and falling away to reveal the gunmetal of the spacecraft beneath.
That vile organic coating was absorbing horrendous punishment, but it had done its job. The craft remained on target, crunching down onto the roofs of the stables and the staff quarters with clouds of green-grey smoke that reminded her of forest puffballs more than the usual carbon-based fumes so common to the Imperium.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed out into the gravel-strewn perimeter. The low-flying craft were still taking fire, but their own guns were stitching a constant stream of explosive shells into either exit of the barracks. The gue’vesa soldiers doing their best to exit in good order were blown to pieces by machine-gun fire, dozens consumed in a raging, violent firestorm that wrenched them apart and scattered their remains across the flagstones.
A tripartite strike, expertly capitalising on its overlapping fields of fire.
Use all the senses, came Puretide’s voice in the back of her head. Read the land. To trust only in the abstract is to fail.
‘Oe-ken-yon, Oe-hei, on my signal. Calmstone, be ready for point defence. Kor’vre Shimmersky, we shall be lifting off the moment we are all aboard.’ She blink-slid an open channel to the t’au guard outside as the drones blipped gold assent. ‘Shas’ui Laen’ta, we are moving to engage. Ensure you, Ou-dae 1-1 and the rest of your team reinforce if needed.’
‘As you wish, high commander,’ came Laen’ta’s reply. ‘We are ready. The gue’la appear to be stymied to the west, though my team is establishing a barricade perimeter.’
‘Excellent.’
‘I have already placed a request for reinforcements from Commander Surestrike.’
‘You have done what? I gave no such order!’
The crack of gunfire came over the cadrelink, along with the shouts of a hurried withdrawal.
‘Utmost contrition, but we are being engaged from the west… More bulk landers have come down…’
Laen’ta’s cadrelink went silent, folding away to a tiny icon.
Shadowsun grimaced and eased her way through the arched door of the palace’s dungeons, her XV22’s sound-bafflers dispersing the crunch of gravel to a low hiss as she and her drones came out into the light. Already the battlesuit’s photo-chameleonic cells had her form broken into a mosaic of desaturated colour, the perfect camouflage for the walls of the citadel behind her. Oe-ken-yon echoed her colouration instantaneously, their outer coatings long ago engineered to match her own.
The rattle and clack of autoguns echoed from the palace’s walls, tracer fire whipping across the sky as the point defences and invading ships traded heavy streams of firepower.
Soon, Shadowsun told herself. Soon, all the uncertainty and confusion will melt away.
‘Are we keeping to the lee of the building, high commander?’ said Oe-hei.
‘For now. These Death Guard are not so different from the Terran loyalists they profess to have left behind. They will overextend themselves, as certain as night follows day.’
Shadowsun eye-sketched containment manoeuvres onto her command-and-control suite, blipping them to the t’au garrison nearby whilst requesting an update on the status of their reinforcements. Calmstone and Dawn-chaser sent over their own status reports. Hidden by the high walls of the hedge, they were effectively blind but for the sensor arrays of the Orca itself, yet she would not risk her exfiltration route by requesting they reveal themselves. As any student of Kauyon knew, having a hidden asset was a vital advantage.
There was a scream to her right. She put her back to the wall, one of the palace’s curved flying buttresses between her and the barracks to the west.
‘Advance no further!’ The shas’vre of a breacher team was shouting warnings from behind a barricade of bulky, olive-green gue’la vehicles drawn up across the far gravel pathway. Human soldiers wearing arm-sleeves with the symbol of the T’au’va had taken position alongside the breachers, their long-barrelled rifles – primitive things – thudding slugs of metal into the advancing horde.
A surging tide of humans was staggering and loping towards them, bumping into one another, muttering half-words and moaning in the teeth of whatever nightmares held them. Whenever Laen’ta’s fire warriors sent one of them down with a burst of blazing pulse carbine fire, it staggered on for a few paces before toppling and being trampled by those behind. Beyond, there were crowds of the humans massing around the barracks – by a quick quadrant-count, between six and seven hundred. Shadowsun’s distribution suite showed another red blob of human bio-signs on the other side of the complex, moving around from the ornamental gardens to the maze.
Shadowsun leapt up, landing on a low and canted roof to perch between two statues of Imperial saints. The oncoming humans were advancing in a disorganised mass. She could see odd, mildewy discolourations across their skin, patchy and unsettling as a spread of toxic mould. Whenever a bullet or pulse rifle charge struck them in the centre mass to splatter gore across those behind, they broke into a lurching run, as if given sudden focus despite their horrible, gaping wounds.
One of the humans caught a fire warrior too slow to break from his rifleman’s crouch. He had only three fingers left on his maimed hand, but dug them into the warrior’s neck nonetheless, yanking out a stringy mass of arteries and scattering vertebrae. The marksman’s death scream was a gurgling cough. His teammates poured fire into the attacker, sending him sprawling. From the red ruin of his wounds a mould-like substance puffed out, dispersing spore-like on the wind. Shadowsun was suddenly very glad she was sealed inside her battlesuit, and very concerned about those who were not.
A gue’la plague, then. One that took a sleeping host and made a puppet of them.
The warriors at the barricade thickened their fire as she moved closer. The crowd were moving at a run, now, intent on reaching the line of vehicles. Some had been blasted bodily apart, and moved no more, but the rate of attrition was nowhere near high enough to stop them. In a matter of seconds, they were in range. She set her fusion blasters to dispersed field, slashing them downwards into those parts of the crowd that had strayed within her range to slice away limbs and atomise groaning, slack-jawed heads. Always there were more.
‘All garrison units, this is High Commander Shadowsun, approaching west quadrant. Please ignore usual protocol and concentrate fire on my mark. Devilfish squadron Hollowtooth, deploy teams in the designated safe zone and close on my position. Be ready to retract.’
As their shas’vre leaders blipped gold symbols in assent, she slid a ready icon over the Manta she had left thirty miles to the south, the symbol of the Fifth Sphere Expansion unfolding momentarily in response as it took to the air.
‘Much appreciated, high commander,’ said Laen’ta. ‘We cannot disengage without reinforcement.’
‘They are inbound. Just hold the line.’
Shadowsun leapt from the mosaic-studded roof, circling those slumberers closest to the barricade that were not already under heavy fire and eye-flicking the trigger rune. Three stubby cylinders shot from the missile pod mounted on the back of her fusion blaster, whipping out on their own trajectories to detonate in blinding, blistering synchronicity. Torn bodies slammed back into the crowd, limbs scattered far and wide amidst a splattering rain of flesh. She was not in the habit of wasting high-yield ammunition on such lowly targets, but another crowd of humans was closing fast.
‘Keep firing, Team Laen’ta. I must leave.’
The barricade troops’ fire thickened, a small unit of gue’la making a renewed attack now they had been bought a little time to fix their fire discipline. The perimeter track had become a shooting gallery, only the thickening mist of dusty spores that puffed off the corpses lending any kind of concealment.
There was something pitiful about the slumberers, the way their gormless mouths flapped and muttered, entirely oblivious as their bodies were hammered and blasted and torn to red ruin. Already the gravel underfoot was slicked red and pink, glistening white flecks of bone jutting amidst a scattering of cadavers. Yet there was no breaking them.
On her battlefield distribution display, three arrowhead shapes converged on her position. Incoming Devilfish skimmers, two on the left flank and one behind the crowd. Burst cannons mowed down the human infected, each skimmer’s attendant gun drones adding their pulse carbine fire to the fusillade. The slumberers spasmed and jerked, torn by spitting, relentless streams of white-hot plasma. The weapons were calibrated to make a mockery of Imperial flak armour. Against the slumberers, they proved devastating.
The fug of mildew and vaporised blood around the slumberers was thickening to a greyish-pink mist, obscuring the main body of the oncoming gue’la. Shadowsun’s XV22’s blacksun filter picked them out without issue, but such things were the privilege of the Hero’s Mantle. The fire warriors would not have such technology to rely on, and the human troopers would be rendered all but blind.
‘Hollowtooth squadron, move in, please,’ she said. ‘Eastern side of the barricade. All troops withdraw to the transports. Leave the gue’la vehicles. We relocate and begin again within a clean kill-zone.’
Symbols of assent cascaded on her screens as her killing field smoothly dismantled itself, each team making for one of the three Devilfishes that were settling down in the wider courtyard behind their lines. The last unit of fire warriors fired as it walked slowly backwards, gunning down those blood-spattered slumberers that were pressing their way through the heavy vehicles of the barricade. Even the gue’vesa withdrew in good order, sharing the berths of the Devilfish with their t’au allies. She saw several of them salute the faceless statue atop the nearby shrine as they went.
Shadowsun boosted backwards, eyes devouring the data flashing up on her screens. She caught sight of a drone-relay stream from the nearby space port. Heavy cargo craft were landing on the flat roofs of the stables and staff quarters, with another setting down in the middle distance. They were even now spilling more disorganised crowds of milling humans onto the rockcrete. One was settling on the roof of the nearby stables, the building’s shoddy construction groaning under its weight. She saw trickles of brick dust coming from several parts of the old, time-worn structure. Pinpointing the load-bearing lintels and cornerstones on her ballistics suite, she sent a trio of missiles looping out. A blast of rock and debris blossomed from the building’s upper storeys, and for a moment nothing happened. Then, with a series of loud cracks and a rumble of collapsing masonry, the entire structure’s facade fell into itself, sending the Imperial craft atop it tumbling down amidst countless tons of brick.
The cargo craft were distractions, just like their contents. She could feel it as solidly as the haptic relays on her fingertips. Clearly the mobs of humans had no value to those callous enough to use them as cannon fodder. So like the Imperium to expend lives for such momentary gain. No doubt the true threat would come from within the belly of one of the same drop-craft that had disgorged the vanguard, a pack of wolves hidden amongst a horde of dying, diseased sheep. The infected humans were a trap, of a sort, one with which the true foe hoped to embroil them whilst they moved in for the killing blow.
‘They think to ensnare us so easily,’ said Oe-ken-yon. ‘Do they realise our foremost assets are all capable of aerial engagement?’
‘They will soon learn of the fire caste’s true strength. The Kauyon is in place.’
Another of the human craft was coming in close, the quad-guns of the palace hammering it hard to send chunks of metal and caked debris flying from its hull. The solid-shot weapons were wounding the ship, but were not enough to fell it. Below her, the castle’s garrison was already mounting up into the three Devilfish transports she had summoned to collect them.
If the enemy had assumed the t’au would hole up within the majestic yet outdated defences of the palace they were sorely mistaken. That was not the t’au way. In any true war, territory changed hands time and time again, but lives could not be replaced.
Unlike in the gue’la society, where belligerence and stubbornness were counted as virtues, in the t’au philosophy a smooth, fluid withdrawal was seen as a sign of wisdom and good leadership. Soon only flight-capable assets would remain to ensure the enemy was pinned in place. Their weakness would be shown to be false, a mask for the strength beneath. Once the evacuation was complete, the fire caste would move its battlesuits in – and then, once their rain of fire had done its work, only the enemy’s corpses would remain. Then, when the danger had passed, the earth caste’s reclamations would begin.
A dark patch of shadow slipped across the courtyard. The stricken bulk lander, coming in low. Shadowsun was busy drawing a targeting solution when the first body hit the ferrocrete. Another followed, then three more, then a splattering, thudding rain of human bodies. The craft, low and fat with a vast cargo bay hold under stubby wings, was flying at an oblique angle with its side and rear doors wide open. A steady stream of the infected were rolling, toppling, falling out of the craft to plummet downwards on her position.
‘All teams, hold your breath, and move away at speed,’ she said, boosting back as the bodies thudded down around her. To her mounting disgust some of the fallen infected were getting back to their feet, broken bones grinding but driven by some primal impulse to attack nonetheless. ‘Form a perimeter thirty spans from the nearest of the afflicted humans and only open fire on those who show signs of movement. This is a biological weapon. It’s entirely likely that firing upon them will release the agent intended to poison us.’
‘Acknowledged.’
‘Commander!’ shouted Oe-ken-yon.
‘I have it,’ said Oe-hei, his force shield shimmering into place above Shadowsun even as her battlesuit blared a sudden proximity alarm. Something smashed into the shimmering dome from above to rebound hard onto the floor; on her dronelink hex the integrity of the shield suddenly diminished. Another impact, then a third. The rain of bodies was intensifying, the awful black silhouette of the drop-ship lingering above her position.
‘Orca fully engaged,’ transmitted Calmstone from the heart of the hedge maze. ‘Multiple gue’la targets.’
She boosted back hard, but the drop-ship followed her a moment later as if it had nowhere else to be. Another slumberer smashed down, then another.
‘Shield integrity suffering serious attrition,’ said Oe-hei. ‘I am optimised to deflect firepower rather than blunt impact from gross weight.’
‘Get into cover and save the rest of your charge for when we need it,’ said Shadowsun, veering into the shade of the building. A moment later the drone’s shield faded to let the mildew-thickened air flow back in. ‘I have firepower enough to–’
A sudden impact knocked Shadowsun’s battlesuit forward, another hitting her outstretched fusion blaster. She drew a bead on the lolling somnambulist that was suddenly in front of her, and brought the other gun around smoothly, blasting the lower half of the slumberer to a dissipating cloud of red mist. Its top half dropped to the floor, expression unchanged, still gabbling a stream of words as if it had simply sat down.
There was another sharp blow from behind, pitching Shadowsun forward. On instinct, she scanned her damage control suite. Something had ripped a great chunk of her turbines away. She redirected power to the thrust-vector suite, intending to fly out of trouble, only to have it blare an alert, its system charcoal grey. She turned hard, discharging a blinding arc of power as she tore the second of the creatures in two. The first pulled at her fusion blaster despite being cut bodily in half, muttering as if to itself as its fingers sank into the galvanised alloy as though it were no more than clay.
Malfunction icons flashed across her display as more of the sleepers thudded down, shaking themselves as if they had suddenly woken to stand up, then lash out wildly. She had three, five, six of them on her now. A blink-push to her flechette launcher as she brought her fusion blasters across her torso at full burn, and three of the creatures dropped in smoking halves to the ground, two more pitched backwards as a cloud of razored projectiles stabbed into them with lacerating force.
‘Oe-ken-yon, engage.’
The drone flashed white, a photosonic blast preceding the release of a cloud of microprojectiles that caught the nearest slumberer in the flank and caused a dozen fist-sized holes to blossom in his side. Oe-hei rammed the reeling human in the neck, and he went down hard.
Two more came in, gasping like desert-parched men thirsting for a fountain.
Shadowsun’s missile pod discharged a pair of sleek cylinders on delayed blast, picking two more of the slumberers from their feet and bearing them some five metres distant before splattering their remains across the gravel road.
The autotrans was queuing data now, trying to decipher the nonsensical, overlapping mutterings of the half-sentient humans desperate to claw her down. It was all meaningless to her, the half-formed language of nightmares. Another distraction in a flood of useless input that threatened to drown her.
With her jetpack torn open and malfunctioning, there was only one way out.
She leaned hard, slamming her shoulder into the torso of the nearest sleeper as she lashed out with her fusion blaster to carve a diagonal line across the three that were clawing at her back.
‘Oe-hei, planar shield defence!’
The guardian drone blipped, a sheet of force blazing out. Three of the infected humans were hurtled away as if backhanded by an invisible giant. At the same time Oe-ken-yon vented a cloud of plasma, burning a fourth assailant so badly that all that remained above the waist was charred black bone.
‘Get into the hedge maze,’ she said. ‘It’ll lend us some cover, maybe buy us some time to think.’
So far, all her usual tactics and strategies seemed next to useless against the infected humans; they were proving even more unpredictable than the hated orks. But with enough time to think, she could break any force that came against her, no matter how unusual. Of that she was certain.
Time is the deadliest weapon of all.
She turned her stumbling shoulder-barge into a leap, then a run as she gathered her balance, spinning around as a pack of the infected slumberers closed in on her from all sides. Her fusion blasters whipped left and right, carving like blades of light through the staggering sleepers to leave their bifurcated corpses flailing in the gravel. One of the slumberers gabbled nonsense up at her, bleeding his last in the dirt. Another spasmed and looked up at her with his mouth in a despairing crescent, eyes still closed.
A thudding boom reverberated across the perimeter road. Shadowsun was pitched from her feet, slamming down with red alert symbols flickering across the doppelganger hologram of her damage control suite.
‘Oe-hei?’ she shouted.
‘On emergency reroute and dealing with a human assailant!’ squeaked the drone. ‘Deepest contrition!’
‘Kor’vre Shimmersky, I may need your help here. Cycle weapons systems and be ready to take off.’
‘We are under close-quarters attack, high commander. The fail-safes… We cannot lift off.’
Another impact, sending her skidding through the gravel in an undignified tangle of limbs. She staggered to her feet and ran behind a flying buttress, an explosion sending rock dust and flinders of brick spraying in all directions around her. She cast an eye towards the doorway that had led her into the dungeons, but it was closed fast.
‘High commander,’ said Oe-ken-yon. ‘I am detecting unusually high levels of–’
‘Speed is the best defence,’ said Shadowsun, sprinting in puffs of gravel across the perimeter road towards the maze. ‘My jetpack is offline. We’ll have to cut our way through. Run interference as best you can.’
She brought her fusion blaster around on its widest spectrum as she burst from cover to make for the slender bridge leading to the outer ring. The fan of energy incinerated a pair of sleepers that were ripping a screaming gue’vesa apart with their bare hands. Leaping over them, she made for the edge of the bridge, already planning how best to carve her way through the maze to the Orca at its heart.
There was a flash of light, a dome of toxic green energy fading to reveal lumpen silhouettes in a yellowish miasma. A small group of grotesquely swollen warriors, stoutly built and with huge, distended guts, were suddenly lumbering towards her.
The Death Guard had finally shown their hand.
Shadowsun focused her ballistics suite as the invaders came within range. She made out a robed figure in the newcomers’ midst, hunchbacked and twisted as he leant on a staff like the limb of an ancient tree. A twisted, hideous thing that appeared to have a helm cast in the image of a blowfly loomed behind it. On one side was a three-horned giant in exaggerated armour that looked more like a set of cracked and seeping scabs than a functional assemblage of metal, and on the other was a huge, broad-shouldered warrior wielding a primitive but enormous scythe. The last of this foul quartet was laughing at her, pointing at her with one giant hand.
‘– – AH – – AND THERE SHE IS – – ’ spooled the autotrans, rendering the guttural Imperial Gothic of the gue’ron’sha into intelligible screeds of t’au. ‘– – THE QUEEN OF THE TECH-HIVE – – COME BROTHERS – – LET US TEACH HER WHO TRULY REIGNS HERE – –’
The gue’ron’sha moved with a slow, powerful certainty, spreading out into a wide diamond shape. Shadowsun cast a glance at her disposition suite, sketching the Projection of Force an intercept course. The bait was taken.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come in nice and close.’
They were the leaders of the enemy fleet, she would stake her life on it. Gue’ron’sha commanders were famous for wanting the choicest kills for themselves, respecting only displays of raw strength.
Sure enough, the scythe-wielder who had addressed her lumbered towards her with his weapon raised. The warrior was huge, his blade swinging in front of him like a pendulum as if in challenge. She sent a blinding double beam of fusion energy to greet him, but it sizzled to nothingness as it hit an invisible shield.
‘– – TRY HARDER – – LITTLE PREYLING – –’
Gritting her teeth, she feigned a withdrawal, backing off at a measured pace to keep the newcomers’ focus on her. Already her suit’s systems were reading them, delving into the T’au Empire’s records and cross-correlating the results from Kellik and Calendula.
‘You defile this place with your presence, warriors of the Death Guard.’ Her autotrans relayed it from her suit’s speakers in the water caste’s best Imperial Gothic. By their laughter, these bloated horrors understood her just fine.
She felt the acid of scorn rise within her in response. They thought their technology advanced? Their brutish weapons were solid-shot ballistics, powered gauntlets and blunt instruments. Oe-hei was more than capable of dealing with such primitive tools of war, and if not, her armour would be up to the task.
‘This world does not belong to you, nor your infected kin. Leave now, or feel the full force of our wrath.’
‘– – WHO ARE YOU TO WELCOME YOUR NEW KING IN SUCH A MANNER – –’ said their leader. He was stalking forward, toying with her as if he had all the time in the world. Hobbling up to join him at his side was a cowled and hunchbacked grotesque. His puffy face had something like a sinkhole in its middle.
‘I am called Shadowsun, high commander of the Fifth Sphere Expansion.’ She planted her feet and stood her ground, guns raised. ‘I am well versed in the inadequacies of your kind.’
‘– – YOU MAY CALL ME LORD GLURTOSK – –’ said the scythe-wielder. ‘– – OH – – SUCH GIFTS WE HAVE BROUGHT YOU – –’
‘– – THE EMBRACE OF ENTROPY IS A BLESSING – –’ said the cowled, bent elder. ‘– – LET US FREE YOU FROM YOUR CLEAN WHITE SHELL AND GIVE YOU A GLIMPSE OF WHAT WE BRING TO YOUR LITTLE EMPIRE – –’
Blinking through her suit’s weapon suites, Shadowsun brought up the symbol of a halo made of lightning – that of her suit’s emergency electroparalysis field. It was draining to her power source, but in theory it could be devastating against foes in powered armour, crippling them then and there. She triggered it, and a pulse of electromagnetic energy pulsed outward.
A shimmering force field flared around the Death Guard’s leader. It mingled with her energy pulse, a storm of tiny, writhing energy traces crackling around the newcomers before dissipating.
No effect.
Another volley from her fusion blasters, their intensity at maximum. Still that writhing, greasy-looking shield of force protected them from its burning wrath.
Her battlesuit blipped a proximity alarm. A knot of slumberers was closing on her from behind. Her blood felt sluggish and hot. The intruders had been playing for time, just as she had.
Oe-hei bravely interposed himself, ramming one of them in the throat as he sent a shimmering shield of energy to hold back the others. One of the fallen lurched upwards and grabbed him, dashing him to the ground. The slumberers came forward as one, babbling half-cogent phrases, muttering and tutting as their eyes flickered behind mildew-gummed lids.
She leapt sidelong on instinct, blasting flechettes at the nearest slumberer. So many hit home they sent him reeling backwards with a full inch of flesh torn from his torso. Kicking out at a second with a jarring impact, she sent a fusion blast into the guts of a third, cutting her in two at the waist. Too close to evade, Oe-ken-yon rammed another, only to be caught by a lurching sleeper that looked no older than fifteen t’au’cyr. The human gripped the drone tight and dashed him into the stone lintel at the edge of the bridge before stumbling away as if drunk.
She heard more laughter, then. One of the diseased gue’ron’sha was chanting rhythmically in a language even the autotrans could not parse, tendrils of black smoke pouring from his filth-encrusted fingernails. The others were simply watching her as she fought for her life.
‘– – SHE IS FASTER THAN SHE LOOKS – – THIS ONE – –’ said the one called Glurtosk.
‘– – HARD TO SEE HER – – CLAD IN MIRAGES AS SHE IS – –’ said his cowled attendant. ‘– – MAYBE SHE NEEDS A MANTLE OF FLESH TO DRAPE AROUND HER SHOULDERS – –’
‘Shimmersky, the Manta is en route but I’m out of time here, and the Devilfishes are already away. If you can find a way to focus fire on the hostiles on the bridge west of your–’
A pair of slumberers yanked at her weapon arm, then, pulling her off balance with uncanny strength. ‘Now!’ she cried. ‘Shimmersky, now!’ Her damage control suite flared red in three places, the battlesuit’s arm twisted so badly it would hardly respond to her haptic link.
‘High commander, something is choking the engines, I–’
Shadowsun felt something slam into her helmet and went down onto one knee, her broken jetpack flaring. She batted her assailants away with the barrels of her fusion blasters. Her second blow connected hard with the temple of one of the sleepers, sending him veering away, but another attacked her almost immediately, fists hammering hard enough to dent the hyperalloy of her suit and send alerts blaring across the plexus display. She discharged her missile pod at close range as the smell of burning filtered in through the olfactory link, blasting another two of the sleepwalkers to messy chunks and bowling her backwards in the blast.
It bought her a moment, but a microdec later another of the gue’la sleepers fell across her from behind, pinning her arm at an awkward angle. She jerked hard in her control harness, the haptic links sending her battlesuit flipping almost upright as she tried to shrug off her assailant. It clung on tight until Oe-ken-yon burst from a tangle of corpses and rock dust to ram it away from her. More of the nightmare-things were emerging to encircle them, and the gue’ron’sha warriors, unhurried, were stamping in close.
Surrounded, cut off and earthbound, she rolled over the edge of the bridge’s ornate stone railings and dropped like a stone.