Fire Warrior

II 06.05 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)

The governor was on his way to see his new pet.

He descended the stairs two at a time, a feral grin smeared across his face. The troopers arranged about the room snapped nervously to attention. He could feel their eyes tracking his movements, faces full of fascinated intimidation. They feared him. They revered him. His most trusted men, charged with keeping the presence of his xeno plaything a secret, and they were terrified of him.

Lord Meyloch Severus entered the holding room in a sweep of gaudy robes, polished baubles and gold-piped lapels, eyes glowing balefully. His footsteps, clipped and precise, echoed around the chamber like a fist cracking its knuckles, broken up and dislocated by the arrays of uneven machinery and ungainly technology infesting the walls.

The genetor from the Magos Biologis scurried forwards, ratlike, to greet him. Severus studiously ignored him and stepped towards the holding cell. The thing inside regarded him unflinchingly, pale robes adorned with intricate alien designs, subtle swirls and interlocking grids of colour barely even visible in the halflight. Severus found himself astonished by the creature’s eyes, small and slanted, shadowed by the contours of its long skull and yet somehow full of acute, incisive intelligence. In the fanciful part of his mind he wondered whether such eyes as those couldn’t see into the very soul.

Not my soul, hissed another, darker part of his mind. He smiled.

The adept, unable to hold his tongue any longer, coughed pointedly.

“How’s our guest?” Severus growled, not bothering to look round.

“My lord, the xenog—”

“I am hungry,” the alien purred, its voice a soft melody of musical vowels.

Severus could barely contain the giggle building in his throat. “A talkative prisoner?” he grinned. “Well there’s a first.”

“He called you ‘my lord’,” the xeno said, tilting its head. Its single braided chord of hair, decorated with colourful bands of cloth and beading, hung delicately over its shoulder. It blinked. “I think perhaps you are in charge, here. I think perhaps a mistake has been made. I wonder if you aren’t aware that my people... my race... will not rest whilst I’m captive. I wonder if perhaps you’ve considered the ramifications of my imprisonment.”

Severus chuckled. “Well, I wonder,” he slurred, enjoying himself, “if perhaps you’re dropping spoor in terror at all the wonderful things I’m going to do to you.” He didn’t wait for a response, swivelling to glare at the adept. “Get him downstairs. I want to acquaint him with our new toy.”

“Of course, my lord.”

“And keep him quiet. His voice annoys me.”

An angry tremor rumbled through the floor. The speaker above the door, through a crackling layer of distortion, burst into life.

“Governor? Governor Severus? Captain Praeter, sir.”

“Report.”

“It’s the xenogens, my lord! They’re here! They’re attacking the prison!”

Severus’s smile widened. He fixed the caged ethereal with a gaze, regarding its temperature fluctuations with interest.

“Well,” he smiled, “it’s about time.”

Lusha stared down through the dust and smoke-haze at the compound below. Anti-aircraft emplacements spat gobbets of soot towards the dropship, ugly ulcers of blackness speckling the sky.

Shas’ar’tol command were pleased, at least. The expenditure of life in attacking Lettica, they deemed, had been acceptable. Given the success with which the gue’la forces had been drawn away from the prison, Lusha suspected the supervising shas’o was delighted.

Lusha had been watching young Kais, recovering in his deployment chair, when the debriefing came through. Shas’o Sa’cea Udas, monitoring events from the orbiting warship Or’es Tash’var , appeared in ceremonial dress on the wallscreens of the dropship to congratulate the warriors on a job well done.

He told them about Aun’el T’au Ko’vash. He told them that the gue’la, unprovoked, had forcibly abducted the cherished ethereal. He told them how the abductors had been tracked by the finest air caste pilots to this backwater world. The loss of their comrades, he’d told them, was all part of the scheme, the plan, the mon’wern’a: the “deceptive assault”.

Lusha couldn’t help but think of Kais’s words, from down on the planet. “Just a distraction?” he’d asked, voice thick with betrayal and bitterness. Sitting there in the dropship as the shas’o gave his inspirational speech, the youth had looked sick, expressionless features not masking the resentment in his eyes. In such subtle ways were the emotions of taukind expressed; not in the excesses and self-indulgences of the gue’la.

Lusha could well imagine the thoughts masked behind Kais’s empty expression, full of blood and fire and dead comrades. He wanted to tell the youth that they’d served the tau’va, each in their way, but O’Udas hadn’t finished talking and the meditations upon loss would have to wait.

“Now,” the general had nodded, “we must capitalise upon our success.”

So the dropship had plunged again into Dolumar’s rolling cloudbanks, hanging low over its rocky wastelands in a surgical insertion of manpower.

“A single unit,” O’Udas had insisted later, in private communication with Lusha. “Any more and we risk alerting the enemy — and then who knows what the barbarians would do? I daresay they’ll kill the Aun immediately if we attempt a direct assault.”

In the absence of any plan more likely to succeed Lusha had bowed to his superior’s decisions, as the tau’va demanded, but couldn’t bring himself to be happy with them.

So now he found himself crouched before the gaping deployment doors, watching again as the remnants of his cadre leapt away into the dust and smoke, dodging between gaping shell blasts and long-range death at the hands of gue’la snipers. Other dropships circulated nearby, themselves disgorging serried ranks of shas’las and shas’uis onto the swirling dust, figures picking their way through the haze in the shadow of the gue’la prison.

The very existence of an edifice designed solely for the incarceration of the socially incompatible was beyond Lusha’s understanding. On T’au those few who failed to conform were considered worthy of sympathy and help, not punishment. He dismissed again the illogic of their conventions and regarded the brooding construct dispassionately. It was an obscene blot; a cancerous assemblage of haphazard turrets and towers, tiered and arranged without efficiency or beauty. It was a shattered knuckle, thrust from the desert in a brutal pile of jutting weapons and walls. It lurked massively in the rocky depression beyond Lettica’s western boundary, and Lusha mused sourly that one might as well hurl snowballs into volcanoes as assault such a fortress with rifles and grenades.

The shas’o was repeating his tactic: get their attention, make a fuss, make them forget to look for less obvious threats. Mon’wern’a. So: a single unit to infiltrate and rescue, whilst the cadres drew attention and fire.

Lusha could have deployed a shas’ui for the task, or even a shas’vre. He’d considered the possibility carefully; ultimately wondering whether experience would provide any real benefit in this circumstance. A veteran could be relied upon to do their duty with as much efficiency and haste as possible, dispassionate, effective and mechanical. Lusha’s experiences, learned the hard way in the heat of more battles than he cared to remember, told him that sometimes efficiency and duty would never be enough.

He remembered watching the pulse-rate indicator on the viewscreen, climbing steadily higher as the adrenaline flowed and the excitement burgeoned. He rubbed his jaw, wondering if he’d sent the right warrior. The young shas’la, fixing him with his father’s gaze, had been insistent...

The sentry gun fizzed and hung limp, pulsefire blowing open its turntable and shedding its metallic guts across the tunnel’s floor. Kais drifted past it, a wraith wearing every shadow like a cloak.

A high-altitude survey drone had provided the subterranean topography for his infiltration mission, now imposed iconically at the foot of his HUD. A complex melange of radiation echosensors and temperature gauges had located a natural sinkhole in the desert, terminating mere tor’leks from a service tunnel beneath the prison compound. After leaping from the dropship with his heart hammering at his insides, Kais had achieved access with an auto-deploy charge and an awkward struggle through the resulting fissure.

A guard, investigating the crippled sentry gun’s clattering protests, dropped to his knees with a neat hole through his forehead. Kais reloaded and crept onwards, thinking of his comrade Y’hol.

His closest friend. Uncomplicated and good humoured, he’d regarded Kais with a respect and familiarity he’d never expected to regain following his father’s visit to the battledome. And now he was dead. Lying in pieces somewhere, probably. Knocked apart by a grenade, or sliced into wafer fragments by a chattering lasgun. Gobbets of his flesh and bone riddling the flame-gutted trenchways.

Just a diversion.

Kais hadn’t even noticed his friend’s absence, to his eternal shame. Sitting there in the dropship, his mind a swirl of shocked recollections and impressions of the conflict, Ju had spelled it out to him miserably, her grief forcing uncharacteristic emotion into her broken voice. Just one among too many who never made it to the extraction point.

Kais stopped and breathed, concerned at the anger of his thoughts. The display wafer felt heavy in his pocket, and he fingered its rounded edges distractedly, repeating its calming litany to himself.

His father had given a speech once, recorded by por’hui journalists on the eve of his death at the hands of the y’he hivefleet, so the story went, ripped apart by some shrieking monster. The speech was broadcast on all por’hui channels to mark his loss — an inspirational gush of propaganda and affirmation. Kais had seen it so often it was inscribed upon his memory, as indelible as a didactic imprint:

“Remember the machine,” O’Shi’ur had said, staring at the camera drone directly, acidic gaze boring into the viewer’s brain. “It has interlocking parts, each operating with perfect efficiency, each as vital as every other. This machine works only because each component works. It succeeds only because each part of it is operating in order.

“Sometimes a segment may seem redundant... Sometimes the wheels appear more vital than the fuel reserve or... or the grinding cogs seem more necessary than the pistons. It’s an illusion. One won’t work without another.

“We’re all part of the machine. We live for it, we work for it, we fight for it. And, when the time comes, we die for it.” The old warrior had blinked his eyes then, and looked away from the camera. When he looked back, he seemed distant, sad somehow. Kais had always wondered about that.

“But in a way,” he went on, “we never die. Because... it doesn’t matter if a piece of the machine doesn’t operate any more. As long as the whole continues to function, the memories and achievements of each part remain with it forever.”

Prowling through the darkness, his dead father’s words haunting his mind, Kais wondered if Y’hol had died for the machine. When he drew his last breath, had he done so with a thought for the tau’va, lifting his spirit and sealing his contribution to the Greater Good forever? Or was he simply blown into moist fragments for the sake of a few moments of distraction?

Kais felt, somehow, that he owed it to Y’hol to ensure that the attack on the prison was a success, and to that end he’d volunteered for the principal role in the elaborate plan. The assault — a storm raging just beyond the caves — was just another deceit. Just another distraction to allow someone — him — to creep into the compound. This time it was his responsibility, only his, to ensure that every last fire warrior fighting and dying on the surface remained a part of his father’s magnificent, idealistic machine.

He wondered vaguely why El’Lusha had acquiesced to his request. To dispatch a shas’la on such an important mission was, he knew, an extraordinary risk. He scowled into the gloom, spotting an ascending flight of stairs leading into the fortress, and reminded himself that it didn’t matter why the commander had relented. All that mattered was that he had. Kais bit back on a feral smile and racked his pulse rifle hungrily, eager for targets.

He ought to relax, he knew. He ought to calm himself. Instead he killed another cringing gue’la in a storm of pulsefire, and every singed, smoking wound that he inflicted was dispensed in Y’hol’s name.

He ascended the stairs into the bowels of the fortress and the killing went on and on and on.

++Enduring Blade?++

[Received. Time reference 1632.17 (terracode), D. 5732341 .M41.]

[Carrier ident. recognised. Local link established.]

[Identify.]

++Colony 4356/E, Dolumar IV. This is Governor Meyloch Severus.++

[Hold.]

[Vocal analysis confirmation.]

[State secure-channel code.]

++I need to speak with the admiral.++

[State secure-channel code.]

++Who is this?++

[Servitor 56G/x (Rotho#2). State secure-channel code.]

++Oh, for throne’s sake...++

++Here. AGGE-2567-G.++

[Hold.]

[Secure-channel code verified.]

[State your business.]

++I need to speak with the admiral. Priority level alpha.++

[Requesting personnel.]

[Hold.]

[This is Ensign Kilson. The admiral’s busy — state your business.]

++It is essential that I speak with the admiral. Interrupt him, if need be.++

[I’m afrai—]

++Listen to me very carefully, ensign. You will tell the admiral that Governor Severus needs to speak with him urgentl—++

[But—]

++Quiet. If you do not, ensign, I will ensure that my acute displeasure, along with your name, is conveyed directly to the Officio Navis Nobilite. Is that clear?++

[...]

++Let me speak to the admiral. Now.++

[S-stand... stand-by.]

[...]

[...]

[...]

[Severus? What do you want?]

++Is that Admiral Constantine?++

[No. It’s Vandire himself, back from the dead. Of course it’s me.]

++So generous of you to bother.++

[Don’t waste my time, governor. I have a ship to run.]

++I need your help. My colony is under attack.++

[Emperor’s blood, man! You’ve got four warp-damned regiments down there! Plus the... special troops you requested last week.]

++They’re not enough. I’m facing an invasion.++

[Inva—? By who?]

++The tau. They’ve breached the treaty.++

[Terra’s Throne...]

++Indeed.++

++Admiral, I hardly need acquaint you with the seriousness of this situation... If my factories aren’t operating this subsector can consider itself unarmed.++

++There’s an enemy vessel in orbit. I’d appreciate your assistance.++

[We’re on our way.]

++“We”?++

[You’re in luck, Severus.]

[The Enduring Blade just rendezvoused with the Fleet Ultima Primus. We’re a two-hour warp jump from the edge of your system.]

[The tau won’t know what hit them.]

Kais waited until the flow of fluids from the pulverised corpse resolved into a sluggish ebb of arterial paste, then rifled through the creature’s pockets. The gaudier these gue’la dressed, he reasoned, the more important they seemed to be.

He found a wafer of brittle plastic, identified by the sensors in his helmet as having a shaped magnetic field, in a utility holster on one of the body’s lower limbs. A keycard, the helmet’s computer speculated. Kais found himself wondering abstractly about the appearance of the human’s hooves, hidden away like infant-flesh inside its bulky boots. The mad desire to rip them off to find out made him nod in amusement, despite himself.

The dead body crackled, startling him. It took him a moment to ascertain that the tinny voice derived from the comms-bead fixed to the cadaver’s stained lapel, its distorted reportage so unlike the clear tones of his own communicator.

“C-captain Praeter?” a gue’la voice said, stammering with (Kais assumed) nerves. “Sir? This is Warden Tiernen — I’m on the artillery ring. The men up here are dead... I... I think they’ve been shot, sir. Something’s got inside. Something’s in here with us...”

Kais scowled as his didactic memories translated the crackling voice, irritated that his presence should be discovered already. His search for an access point to the underground holding cells was not going well.

The gue’la fortress was a maze of shadows and angles, asymmetrical clusters of architecture distorting the expectations and unhinging the senses. It was a black brainstorm of metal struts, intestinal ducts, valve-like bulkheads scored by dribbling rivulets of oil and water and stained glass eyes, glaring down on every hallway in a kaleidoscope of insane colour and surreal iconography. To walk through it unguided was to be lost in an incoherent labyrinth, dissolving in the guts of some awful creature with blinking LEDs for nerve endings and cabling for its sinews. Only by carefully watching the positioning scanners of his HUD could he maintain any sense of direction, and focus his efforts around the sealed access yard at the compound’s heart.

Sneaking along a corridor, he shivered at the buttresses and load supports that branched from the walls like gnarled roots, chain-infested chandeliers of wrought iron and sputtering light drooping from the recesses above; like scraps of flesh clinging to a colossal ribcage that threaded with fossilised immobility throughout the prison’s structure.

A dull detonation somewhere outside ripped apart a stained-glass circle further along the hallway, sending a vivid hailstorm of colour chattering and tinkling across the floor. The jumbled noises of the battle outside seemed alien in this crypt-like space; an aural reminder of another world. Kais picked his way through the shadows and climbed a winding staircase, hugging the walls. The thick door at the summit lacked any obvious opening device, even one of the gue’la’s crude lever appendages he’d spotted elsewhere. His helmet sensors chimed, flickering graphics isolating a narrow groove in the doorway’s frame and matching it effortlessly with the keycard he’d taken from the officer’s body. He pushed the brittle shape into its slot and surged forwards, even as the door squealed open.

The two warden-guards lurking in the gloomy chamber beyond were too astonished to react effectively, bent over an array of switches, winking lights and clicking gauges. Unable to prevent himself, Kais grinned.

The first one fell backwards, legs flipping athletically as his pulverised chest arced away, smoke lifting from the wound. His head hit the console on the way down, an ugly krak that flipped the body over. It landed on its knees, forehead pressed to the floor.

“No!” the second one shouted, reacting mechanically, staggering backwards and groping for a weapon. Kais barely shifted position, carrying his body around in a perfect arc, as effortless as it was natural. He’d been born for this.

He squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The untaulike desire to shout or curse in frustration bubbled up inside him, and he bit down on it hard.

The las-shot hit him like a sledgehammer.

He’d expected a sharp, ripping pain. He’d expected it to feel like a needle, sliding through his flesh, separating sinews from bones, opening muscles like ripe fruit.

Instead it was an anvil crashing into his shoulder, spinning him around on his spot and sending angry, nebulous blobs of colour dancing before his eyes. He crashed to the floor, feet trailing before him.

It was only when the initial shock had faded, when he blinked through the film of eur’ii moisture covering his eyes, that the sense of sharpened agony began to blossom. An ugly laceration marred his upper arm, a blistering mess of cauterised flesh and singed fio’dr fabric. The pain clouded the world and stole his ability to think.

To Kais it seemed as natural as taking a breath: his mind phased out the world and replaced it with a grey dreamscape. There were words.

They said:

He breathed. He saw himself as part of the machine. Focus was the key.

The pain went away.

He jerked the knife from its holster on his hip, twisting to look up at the gue’la, its shaking hands taking aim for a second shot. He threw the knife and rolled. All one movement. Perfect. Precise.

The lasgun fired just as the knife hit the guard in the neck, a surgical incision parting flesh like water. No blood. Not yet. The las-bolt kicked a block of stone from the floor, scant tor’ils from Kais’s head. He hissed in shock.

The human stared right at Kais. Right into the optic of his helmet, knife hilt protruding absurdly, perpendicular to his horrified features. Then he dropped the gun and his head flopped forwards like an opening lid, fountaining liquid ruby.

Reality came to Kais piece by piece. He retrieved his knife and clamped a medipack onto his blistered arm. He reloaded the gun. All without thought; mechanical, going through the paces, operating to the parameters of a simple, shell-shocked program. A machine.

Through the thick windows of the control room he could peer down into the exercise yard at the compound’s centre, four heavyset access ramps preventing him — or anyone — from reaching the subterranean cells. He transferred his attention to the myriad controls spread out before him, utterly unable to decipher even a single runic inscription.

He sighed, balled his fist tightly, raised his arm, and applied the only form of engineering he understood. After several raik’ors of destructive attention, he appeared to have hit the correct control. Out in the yard, lifting like the yawning mouths of slumbering giants, the access ramps began to open.

“He’s gaining entry as we speak, Shas’o,” the transmitter reported, tiny speaker drone following the general around like a faithful ui’t cub. He paused at a schematic of the prison’s upper levels and nodded.

Shas’o Sa’cea Udas was pleased. Everything was going according to plan, thus far. The serene, rounded interior of the warship Ores Tash’var enclosed him in a womb of pleasant silence and contemplation: the perfect platform from which to conduct a war.

“Good.” he replied, the small drone rolling onto its back to expose a microphone array. “Excellent. Is he unharmed?”

“A minor wound, Shas’o. Nothing serious.”

“Indeed. Tell me, El’Lusha — what’s the name of this shas’vre? The por’hui have been requesting details for their next bulletin.”

There was a pause on the comm. Udas glanced at the drone, perplexed. When finally the red “receiving” light blinked, Lusha’s voice sounded reluctant, even embarrassed. “He’s not a shas’vre, O’Udas.”

The general blinked. The schematic on the wall refreshed itself, an AI assembled melange of radar, lasergrid and high altitude survey-drone telemetry melded together, now showing the access ramps in the prison courtyard hanging open.

“El’Lusha...” he said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “Who did you send?”

“I assure you, Shas’o, my choice is more than capable.”

“Who?”

“Shas’la T’au Kais.”

“A shas’la?”

“Yes, Shas’o. I made a decision based upon the requirements of the mission. I believe he’s the best for the job.”

Udas forced himself to calm, mumbling the D’havre meditation. There was no sense in anger.

“El’Lusha... Perhaps you might explain to me what possessed you to send a shas’la on a mission vital to the security of the Empire.”

The words seemed to come from far away.

“It was something O’Shi’ur said to me once, Shas’o. He... he told me that sometimes even broken components can be useful to the machine...”

“Broken components? Shas’el, explain yours—”

“Forgive me, Shas’o — I have to go. The fortress guns are being remanned.” There was a loud boom in the background. “We could use that strike when you’re ready, Shas’o. Lusha out.”

The comm went dead. Udas pursed his lips, fighting his irritation.

“Dismissed,” he grumbled to the drone, still circling his head. It drifted off.

He composed himself and turned around. Kor’o Natash Tyra, captain of the Or’es Tash’var, stood resplendent in his pale flightrobes at the centre of a swarm of drones, each one inscribed with a simple control icon. Every now and again, in response to a comm signal or fluttering display readout on the two sleek console drones at the head of the suspended swarm, O’T’yra would depress the touchpad on a drone’s casing transmitting whatever relevant orders might be required to some distant part of the ship’s crew. Other air caste personnel lined the outer walls of the command deck, operating sensors and secondary systems with as much fluidity and grace as their superior. The kor’o’s mastery of his vessel was an astonishing aerial ballet, and Udas had in the past decs regarded it with fascination. Now he had more pressing business.

“Kor’o?” he grunted, approaching.

“Shas’o,” the captain returned with a nod, tall frame towering over Udas’s squat form.

“Commence bombardment.”

Warden-Sergeant DiGril peered through the sniper slit on the prison’s upper level and shook his head. Something was wrong.

Beyond the walls the massed alien forces, lurking and weaving through the billowing sand, domed helmets hazing in and out of the airborne filth like deep-sea predators prowling the murk, were slowly but unmistakably creeping backwards. Not retreating, exactly; rather... backing off. Giving some space.

Emperor knew the prison needed it. Finally the reinforcement shuttles had started arriving from Lettica, picking their way through the churning smoke, harried by the xeno assault craft. Two had gone down, right in front of his eyes, the poor bastards inside strapped down and helpless in their seats as some warp-damned alien knocked a hole through their boat’s engine. Fire and death and the stink of burnt meat. Not the way he wanted to go.

Not that he particularly wanted to go any way, given the chance. Certainly not shot through the head like Warden-Captain Praeter, downstairs. Someone had found his body and announced it on the comm, right before all the cell-breach alarms started going off. It was one thing after another — just when the freaks outside stopped to take a break, it turned out there was one inside, creeping about like a orkspooring ghost.

DiGril hadn’t joined the swollen ranks of the Emperor’s Adeptus Detentio just to die at the hands of some godless xenogen, a resolution that he had firmly continued to support by secreting himself in the most remote section of the prison he could find. Discretion, he had always maintained, was the better part of valour.

If truth be told, Warden-Sergeant DiGril had (until this morning) thoroughly enjoyed his posting to this backwater world. The planetary governor’s renowned intolerance to criminality meant that those citizens foolish enough to break the law were more likely to find themselves executed than incarcerated; a state of affairs that had kept the vast compound all but deserted in recent years. DiGril had, on occasion, mentally questioned the sense in constructing such a formidable penal fortress if one never intended to use it, but having quickly settled into his undemanding role he knew better than to cause a fuss.

Not that the strangeness had terminated there, oh no. Last week, out of the blue, the governor had ordered Captain Praeter to execute what few prisoners they held, clear all the cells for new arrivals, and stockpile ammunition for the artillery defences. Stranger still, a series of datum drones — dead skulls filled with memorised information — had arrived in the captain’s office courtesy of the governor. Each one was a mine of subversive articles on xenogen species: images, essays, interrogation documents, biological treatises, voice record seminars on weaknesses and strengths, a million-and-one ugly facts about ugly beings that the captain had ordered him to recite to the other guards over and over again. It was as if Governor Severus was expecting xeno-trouble.

Well, he’d got his wish.

Quivering in the deserted shadows of the sniper ring, whimpering at every rumbling bombardment from without, Sergeant DiGril was praying that it wouldn’t occur to any of his men that, with the captain dead, he was supposedly in charge now.

“The alien’s in the courtyard,” someone barked on the comm. “I’m sealing the cell access ramps now.” There were men back in the control room, then. Good. DiGril nodded professionally, happy to have incidentally delegated responsibility. Finally, something was going right.

With depressing inevitability, the voice on the comm swore. “Oh, throne... The north ramp’s jammed. It won’t do — Ah, damn. It’s gone! General alert! The intruder’s breached the underground levels.”

DiGril rubbed his forehead. Typical.

His conscience gave him a jab. Rather than sitting here complaining, it said, how about getting out there and issuing some orders? Taking command, maybe? Doing some good?

“No chance,” he grumbled to himself. Not for all the many wives of the governor-sultan of Gammenon IX. Certainly not just for the chance to be a hero. Leave that sort of thing to the youngsters. Something caught his attention, gnawing on his senses. It took him a moment to identify what it was.

It was silence. Absolute, perfect calm. The sonic barrage of vehicles and pulsefire beyond the prison walls had sputtered and died. He pressed his face to the sniper slit and peered through the shifting smoke-clouds, confused.

The tau stood in quiet ranks, like ancient statues erected in the desert, ossified and unreal. Every last one of them was looking upwards.

Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance) adjusted its primary optic focus on the planetary horizon and opened a datastream. Its parent node aboard the Or’es Tash’var responded with a withering hail of security checks and analysis scans lasting a fraction of a heartbeat. An oscillating band of microwaves tightbeamed between the two processors, narrowing its focus appropriately. A secure frequency was isolated, verified and maintained. 66.G clucked an emotionless greeting. The Or’es Tash’var responded in kind.

Dolumar IV, a Kre’ui-class world with tolerable atmosphere and meteorological conditions, defined within 66.G’s memorysphere as “gue’la io’ra”, rolled beneath the surveillance drone’s field of vision enormously. The dark strip of shadow marking the planet’s terminator, where day oozed gradually into night, seeped across continents like a great, hungry parasite.

A cluster of signals arrived from the Or’es Tash’var. The drone responded immediately by adjusting its secondary optics, focusing them upon the distant speck of light representing its parent vessel. A bright blue glow was building beneath the warship’s forward segment.

66.G adjusted its horizontal position in relation to the planet. Damage analysis would require careful scrutiny. The warship broadcast a final set of emergency codes on all frequencies and fired.

66.G tracked the glittering droplet of energy as it fell away towards the planet, briefly developing a milky corona as it punctured the upper cloud level. By the time it reached the surface it was little more than a blue speck, leaving a ghostly ion trail behind it.

The little drone implemented its most powerful magnification filter and recorded the impact.

Many gue’la died.

Kais felt the impact underground.

He’d dropped past the massive access ramp mere moments before it sealed behind him, its rockcrete surface grinding into place with tectonic enormity. Standing beside it now he felt the earth tremble angrily, sending splinter marks writhing across walls and avalanches of dry earth and rust-weakened bolts rattling from the ceiling. The control panel beside the ramp hissed a fountain of sparks in protest, tiny viewscreens shattering.

“El’Lusha?” he transmitted, when finally the floor stopped shifting. “What was that?”

The reply, masked and indecipherable behind an ambient hiss of white noise, aborted with an unpleasant rasp. Kais frowned and regarded his surroundings, fingering his gun nervously. The corridor, poorly lit by bulkhead-mounted illuminators, stretched away towards a sharp corner like the gullet of a krootox, slick with condensed moisture.

The wound on his arm throbbed, a dull ache from beneath the medipack he’d clipped over it. He hoped he’d been quick enough in administering the covering — gue’la were notorious carriers of disease. Not for the first time, Kais curled his lip in distaste at the thought of being so deeply immersed in their unclean world. Every fibre in his body cried out for the serene cleanliness of T’au with its ancient, basking mountains and its functional cities of silver and ivory.

The first guards came in a rush: a confused glut of guttural shouting voices and dark uniforms, attracted by the alarms that had accompanied the ramp’s closure. Kais made himself comfortable to receive them, wedging himself into an alcove near the tunnel’s apex and clenching his hooves together. He scooped his body into a low crouch and raised the rifle, its crosshair artificially superimposed over his HUD.

They went down in a storm of grasping limbs, blocking the tunnel and tripping those behind them, orbs of pulsefire briefly illuminating the vaultway, hurling damp slabs of meat and bone across the walls and floor. Some of them, apparently able to operate beyond the remit of panic and adrenaline, sidestepped into a small antechamber, exchanging covering fire in a barrage of echoing insults and goads. A delaying tactic, Kais knew. They were waiting for backup.

He rolled a grenade into the shadows of the alcove, and when it exploded he sprinted forwards, not waiting for the smoke to clear, following the dismal moans of the injured. He silenced them quickly — a single shot through the head for each.

The last one, ragged scorch wounds dappling its legs and chest, pleaded with him, tear— and snot-clogged words an unintelligible drone of fear and helplessness. Its blistered fingers scrabbled against Kais’s legs, clutching and supplicating, sobbing pathetically. Kais recoiled from the contact, finger tightening against the trigger.

Unbidden, a memory sagged, sludgelike, into his mind:

It was a Sio’t meditation — committed to memory long tau’cyrs ago — supposedly composed by the great hero O’Mau’tel. Since its inscription, of course, the tau had encountered both the insane, green-skinned Be’gel and the ever-devouring The: two races, each in their own way utterly incapable of integration with the tau’va. The meditation had been quietly dropped from later editions of the Sio’t, but Kais had always remembered it. Perhaps in some dark, rogue part of his mind, the idea that his people’s social principles were not always correct had given him comfort.

“What do you want?” he said, staring down at the creature. “Why are y... What are you doing here? Why are you fighting us?” Lame questions. Halfhearted questions. He was no water caste por’la, after all. But the need to try — the need to do something the right way — was too strong to ignore.

The language itself felt just as bizarre now, grating against his throat, as it had done when the fio’ui medics grafted it into his mind at the third didactic treatment. He remembered spending decs afterwards with Ju and Y’hol, trying out the strange alien words appearing as if from nowhere inside their memories.

The sobbing human didn’t seem to hear his questions. It just clutched at his leg gibbering. “Please throne no don’t sweet emperor no don’t kill me oh living god not now, p-please don’t I’m begging you...”

“Quiet. Human. Be quiet.”

It would not be silent.

“Please oh I don’t want to, no, I... oh, I don’t want to die oh Terra please...”

It would not be silent and, worse, it was bleeding all over his legs. Sticky warm gue’la blood, dribbling and filthy against his hooves.

“Throne no please Emperor no no—”

He pumped a shot into its head and blotted out the horror and revulsion before it even hit him. He was getting good at that.

Something was clanging nearby, a rhythmic knocking that sent him dropping into an alert crouch, wary of every shadow, senses racing on overdrive. His slow scan of the room ended on a thick metal door, whorls of rust and moisture patterning it obscenely. A crude magnetic lock to one side winked its red eye conspiratorially at him. He lifted the rifle and obliterated the small device, quickly turning the gun on the door to face whatever horrors were revealed.

The metal disc rolled aside with a throaty roar. A dead man stepped out.

“Kais?” said Y’hol.

The apparition outside his cell could hardly be less friendly in appearance. Its polished shoulderguards and taupe armour were dulled by dust and filth, splattered with a drying galaxy of blood. Its fio’dr regs were stained and torn, an ugly singe mark marring its upper arm. Its weapon — a tangle of human blood and flesh decorating its tip — tilted up to glare at him.

But the unit code on its breast was clear, even beneath the filth. Shas’la T’au Kais. Y’hol stared at his best friend in astonishment, mind refusing to work.

They greeted each other in a tangle of relief, all horrors forgotten, clasping arms and pressing twice on the circle of armour over their hearts, a greeting reserved for familiars and friends. Kais kept repeating, over and over:

“We thought you were dead... We thought you were dead...”

Y’hol nodded, amused. Kais had always been too ready to expect the worst. “Of course not,” he smiled grimly. “Just a scratch.” He grunted and lifted his leg, a singed chunk of flesh missing just below the knee. Kais hissed, scrabbling in his utilities for a spare medipack.

“Relax,” Y’hol winced, easing the limb back to the floor. “It’s sealed over. A snae’ta gue’la cauterised it in the shuttle on the way here. Said prisoners aren’t allowed to die until they’ve answered some questions.”

“There are more survivors?”

“Yes...” Y’hol blinked, the insanity of the situation finally catching up with him. “Kais, what’s going on? Where is this place... a-and why are you even here?” The morass of jumbled questions subsided as a single, overbearing enquiry bubbled in his mind. “What’s happening, by the path?”

“They’ve captured an Aim,” Kais said, leading him out into the corridor. Y’hol didn’t recognise the voice — full of a sharp resonance he’d never heard before. It sounded focused, an attribute he’d never have associated with Kais until now.

“An Aun?” he breathed, horrified.

“That’s right,” his friend nodded, gelatinous gore clotting across his limbs. “I’m here to find him.”

“What’s happened to you?” Yhol whispered, suddenly afraid. Kais just stared at him, expressions hidden behind the glaring optic of his helmet.

“I found my niche,” he replied.

Together they worked their way back to the sealed access ramp, Vhol leaning on Kais with every painful, limped step.

“Can you open it?” Kais said, all business, nodding at the smoking panel beside the ramp.

Y’hol frowned. “B-but... The Aun—”

“That’s my path, Y’hol.”

“Your path?”

“Can you open it?”

Y’hol sighed, turning to the controls. This was all too much, too bewildering. Dealing with mundanity seemed the only way to cope. He squinted at the blasted circuitry, sparing a disparaging shake of his head for the crude gue’la technology, despite his bewilderment. “Yes,” he grunted, “Yes, I can open it. It’ll take me a whi—”

“Fine. I’ll send the rest of the prisoners here. You should be safe when you reach the surface. I think El’Lusha has everything under control.”

“But Kais...” The grime-covered warrior, shadows lurking in the scored depression of the helmet’s central optic, turned to look at him. Yhol suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Good luck,” he grunted, lamely.

Kais nodded once and ghosted away into the shadows. Y’hol wondered whether he’d ever see his friend again. Part of him wondered whether Kais — the Kais he knew — existed any more anyway.

Captain Ardias, veteran of the sacred Astartes Ultramarines Chapter, leader of the 3rd Company and Commander of the Arsenal, rarely enjoyed the opportunity to sleep.

In accordance with the stringent non-campaign daily agenda documented within the Codex Astartes, every Marine was accorded four hours of natural meditation-induced sleep every day. It was dreamless, supposedly, a time for bodily relaxation and total mental rest. Ardias hated it. It was four hours wasted; four hours that might be spent on the firing range, or in a training hangar, or conducting any one of the multifarious and complex ceremonies of worship that the monastic life of a Space Marine entailed.

Seated enormously on the cold floor, eyes fixed on the miniature shrine devoted jointly to the Emperor and to the Ultramarines’ Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, Ardias fidgeted distractedly and tried to get comfortable. Divested of his armour and its servomusculature he felt slow and ponderous, subject to niggling distractions like the coarseness of his robes and the drafts of his cell. He sighed and closed his eyes, trying to focus his mind.

It wasn’t even that sleep was necessary, especially. Deep in his skull the artificial catalepsean node could, when required, divert the ceaseless flow of his mental activity, allowing each cerebral lobe to rest whilst the other remained alert. In such a state a Marine could operate indefinitely, relentlessly serving the Emperor in a fashion unthinkable to normal, inferior humans. Only because it was so decreed in the Codex (and, he admitted, because of the vague danger of cranial trauma and psychosis), did Ardias accept his four wasted hours with good grace. He didn’t have to like it.

But today... today sleep wouldn’t come.

Perhaps, he considered, it was the unfamiliarity of his surroundings. For a man raised beneath the martial disciplines of Ultramar, thereafter growing accustomed to the simple but inspiring magnificence of the Fortress of Hera upon Macragge, this small naval cabin with its duct artery walls and rusted bulkhead hatches was an untidy, disordered distraction. The vessel’s distant generariums elicited a constant hum, refusing to seep away into the subconscious in a stave of tiny variations, forever reminding his ears of their presence.

But that was an excuse, he knew. He’d slept under far worse conditions in the past. He’d entered the fugue state on Galathas II whilst the population of the ice city trembled, waiting for the eldar to come... He’d slept in the shuddering hold of a strikehawk following the campaign to push back the orks on the moons of Feal’s World... He’d calmly slipped into meditation without concern or fear in the catacombs of Yielth, waiting for the tech-priests to fix the access elevator before the rainwater drowned his entire squad. He could sleep through a meteor strike, if the need took him.

No. The cabin wasn’t the problem. It was what lay beyond. Beyond the corridor striated innards of this ugly battlecruiser, its clamour-filled hollows so unlike the quiet solemnity of an Astartes battle barge; beyond its dark spaces and cable-infested walls, beyond its thick adamantium hull and the thrumming lenticular void shields.

Coiling and billowing, ethereal tentacles caressing the vessel as it churned by, the raw belly of the warp surrounded him on all sides. The empyrean, they called it. Crackling and seething, haunted by shifting, unreal things... It was the “beneath”. It was the “over there”. It was a gap into which entire vessels could be plunged, steered only by the arcane gifts of the frail psychic navigator entombed within the ship’s systems, guided by the radiance of the Astronomican — the Emperor’s dying legacy to the Imperium.

It was Chaos, raw and unfettered, and it made Ardias shiver. To be so close to such malevolence and yet to be completely at its mercy, helpless and insubstantial; it was a feeling distinctly alien to a Space Marine.

So no, today the sleep wouldn’t come. Today his meditations ebbed and shifted, drifting from subject to subject, refusing to allow his muscles to unwind, his tension to ooze away.

But there was more than that. Anxiety alone had never bothered him before, nor did it now. Today there was something else catching on his mind, turning his thoughts away from slumber.

Librarian Delpheus had received a vision. A vision of battle, so he said. A vision of chattering bolters, screaming enemies — the signature disordered order of combat. He’d reported it to Ardias scant hours earlier, moments before the riotous “vessel under way” alarms sounded and the warship slipped with a cold lurch into the warp. The librarian had been vague, clearly shaken by whatever mystical process he’d undergone. Ardias appreciated Delpheus’s work but could never bring himself to envy his old comrade. The psychic mutation was a poisoned chalice, more curse than gift. Still, whatever the details of the vision, the core of Delpheus’s prediction remained the same: action.

After a while, Ardias gave up trying to meditate and prowled his cabin restlessly, uncertain why he should be so eager for combat, but anxious for its arrival nonetheless. The Enduring Blade slid across the warp, ploughing a long furrow through the unseen somethings that gibbered all around it, gathering like mosquitoes around a faint light, raking their mist-like claws across its void shields in ceaseless hunger for the souls within.

There’d been ten other prisoners, in the end.

They’d staggered off into the compound, holding each other up, not sure whether to thank or flee their saviour. Kais had seen the look in their eyes; the way they stared him up and down. One of them — delirious from the pain of his wounds — had even said it. The one, ugly little word they were all thinking as their cell doors rumbled open and he stood there, gifting them with their freedom.

“Mont’au...” the warrior had hissed, feverish eyes staring in fear and uncertainty. The others had shushed him nervously, unwilling to tolerate such blatant sentiment, and limped away into the gloom — towards Y’hol and freedom.

Mont’au. The Terror.

It was a word from the time before the Auns came and preached the tau’va. Before the tribes became castes, before the wars ended and the blood stopped rushing and order came to T’au.

Mont’au was a state-of-being without progress, without unity or altruism, without direction or purpose or strength. There was a purity, he supposed, in its selfishness: a focus upon the “I” before the “we”. And they’d seen it in him.

As he descended the stairs, his HUD automatically adjusting to accommodate the waning light, Kais caught sight of his reflection in a polished illuminator fitting. Suddenly he could understand the captives’ anxieties.

He appeared, in that tiny fish-eyed representation, to be a lurching thing of soot and dust, dappled white and black in equal measure, crusted over by a drying layer of blood. He was a daemon in Fire Warrior armour. He was a ghost of the past, a Mont’au devil, bathing in the blood of his enemies and existing only to kill.

Only he wasn’t; he just looked the part. He took a breath and forced himself to believe it.

A doorway hung open, perpendicular to the stairway. He stepped through, scanning for movement. Above him the ceiling lifted away in a dizzying sweep of swan-neck buttresses of polished obsidian, catching and scattering the light from a phalanx of tall candles. Chiselled flagstones rose towards a marbled altar, itself crested by an enormous icon figure of carved alabaster.

The complex shape caught at his eye and he found himself staring in fascination, trying to decipher the stylised effigy. It seemed to comprise a withered shape, desiccated and frail. He realised with a frown that it was a gue’la figure, almost corpselike in its aspect. Its great papery head — ringed by serried light rays and lightning bolts, hung in limp necrosis, sallow features wrinkled and bloodless. Around and within the skeletal shape was a stylised machine encrusted with yellow and gold mosaic tiles, a rambling arrangement of clustered cables and bound tubing, puncturing and entombing the body, surrounding it in a metallic embrace.

The cadaver’s eyes peered down into the candlelit chapel with a great, hollow sadness, filling the chamber with mournful tension.

Was this their god? he wondered. Was this their Great Emperor, stubbornly hoarding the faith of his teeming flock and preventing their rightful acquiescence to the Greater Good? A rotting, pestilent corpse ruling over his rotting, pestilent empire. Kais fought to contain his revulsion, regarding the statue blankly. They deserved each other.

He raised his rifle and sighted on the pale figure, its very existence a bitter slur upon the efficiency and purity of the tau’va. To even waste an energy bead upon it was damning in its display of his intemperance, but he felt somehow that in obliterating the icon he would be achieving something palpable.

But he couldn’t do it.

The crosshair wandered across the smooth carved lines, full of destructive promise, but every time his finger tightened over the rifle’s trigger, every time he imagined the fragmented pieces of alabaster spinning nebulously away, every time he moved his gaze anywhere near the pitiful shape, those ancient, aching eyes pinned him to his spot.

Somehow, without even bearing a trace of similarity, the abrasive stare of the withered god reminded him of his father, seeing into and through him, exposing his ugliest thoughts. He couldn’t destroy it. He couldn’t even look away from it.

It was almost a relief when a gue’la soldier, hiding nearby, shattered the silence of the chapel in a hail of lasgun bolts and the stink of ionised air.

Kais rolled to the floor instinctively, scrabbling for the cover of a nearby pillar. A second opportunistic salvo from the lurking sniper snapped at his heels, kicking rocky craters in his impromptu shield. An idea formed.

Kais cried out, a scream of pain and fear that no true shas’la would ever articulate, and when the echoes from the sniperfire had died he moaned again, the anguished sob of a crippled, dying warrior.

The gue’la broke cover, chuckling in premature celebration, slouching over to inspect his trophy. The pulseshot pulverised his chest before he knew what was happening, blasting him backwards onto the flagstones with a strangled yelp. Kais silently picked his way back towards the corridor, keeping his back to the statue.

The hallway descended in a snaking series of chambers, each a little darker and more organically cluttered by the rambling, reticulated paraphernalia of gue’la technology than the last. As Kais entered the lowest level of the prison compound his thoughts were a tangle of violence, ancient devils and dark eyes glaring into his soul.

Genetor Farrachus wiped his sweating fingers on his robes and adjusted the valve wheel. A gurgle of steam belched past him, condensing on the cold components of his face.

High overhead the first ratchet joints of the chain clicked open and the device, wobbling and spinning, began to descend. Like a crown designed for a giant’s head, laced with intricate black circuitry and ornamented with all the arcane technology of the Adeptus Mechanicus, it creaked its way downwards: an ebony chandelier hung with wormlike wiring and festooned with flickering readouts. An angular strip of runes illuminated with a whine.

Seated at the exact centre of the chamber, thin arms and legs pinioned by steel brackets, the alien captive regarded the suspended diadem from directly below, features betraying none of its thoughts. Farrachus watched it closely, hoping for some small flicker of fear. None was forthcoming.

“It’s ready, my lord,” he mumbled, doing his best to conceal the nervousness in his voice. Beyond a thick lead glass partition across the chamber the governor waited, arms crossed impatiently. He leaned forwards and flicked at an intercom.

“Then get on with it.”

Farrachus nodded, looking back at the xenogen. Thus far its placidity had belied the accepted dogma, portraying aliens as vicious and aggressive, abominations that threatened humanity’s very survival. Still, he told himself, adjusting the plasma pistol in his belt, best not to take any chances.

The ethereal returned his gaze calmly. Where the restraints dug into its skin the creature’s grey colouration grew pale and wan, starved of blood. Farrachus fought the desire to touch it, to drag a fingertip across the dry texture of its flesh, just to experience the feel of it.

But, of course, the governor was watching. Farrachus shivered, uneasy at being on display.

“You smell of fear,” the xeno trilled. He ignored it, secretly appalled at the obviousness of his anxiety.

The machina excrucia, so named by whatever ancient tech-priest had first called forth a machine spirit into its circular frame, had undergone his refinements with good grace. The physiology of the tau — a subject close to his heart — was somewhat different to that of the common human. He’d augmented the device’s conductors, subtly altering the positioning of its various synapse arrays, even narrowing the central locking spine. A tau’s skull, he had discovered during his studies, was rather more brittle than that of a human. Today, nothing must go wrong.

He saw with some satisfaction that the ethereal had ceased its empty glare in his direction, turning its dark eyes upwards again towards the device. The machine cast its globular shadow across the alien’s face, a toothless mouth positioning itself to swallow him whole.

“What will it do?” the alien asked, voice flat.

“It passes an energy stream across your pain centres,” he replied, guiding the hanging coronet as it descended. “At least, it’s supposed to. Our understanding of your biology is rather limited, more’s the pity, but I’m confident my alterations will yield fruit. Ideally, the excrucia simulates the sensation of physical pain without causing any real damage. I’m told that the more... tenacious subjects who’ve felt its bite have lingered for hours, with no respite and no medical attention. There’s no escape, Aun. Not even in death.” Farrachus smiled, stealing a sideways glance at Severus. He looked bored.

A skull-servitor corkscrewed its way through the chamber’s airspace, skeletal face sealed at the mouth and nostrils. Its eyelids hung open, lifeless, long-dead eyeballs replaced by polished silver beads. It looked like an insect, hovering on a trail of incense and disrupted air, compound eyes reflecting the world in an ugly convex distortion. Farrachus nodded at it.

“Commence recording,” he grunted. A red light high on the disembodied head’s brow blinked on. Farrachus glanced at the timecode artificially imposed over his vision. “Interrogation proceeding at 08.14 hrs, local time. Magos Farrachus attendi—”

The intercom clicked. “Priest? What are you doing?”

Farrachus scratched his eyebrow, uncertain. “Recording the interrogation, my lord. It is standard practice.”

“Don’t.”

“But, my lord... Don’t you want the, ah, the subject’s responses recorded?”

“Which responses?”

“To your questions, my lord. I-I assumed you wanted some information—”

“There are no questions, priest. Just hurt it. Make it... pliable.”

Farrachus mouthed wordlessly for a moment, searching for something to say. Pliable for what, he wondered? Severus’s shadowed glare burnt through him.

“Yes, my lord...” he blurted. He deactivated the recorder with a command and waved it away, sooty trails of scent smoke ebbing in its path. The excrucia halted its descent with a resounding click, settling lightly upon the upper dome of the alien’s skull like some barbaric headdress. Farrachus took a deep breath, resonance sensors on his face crackling in mechanical peristalsis, and stepped forwards.

Deus Mechanicus... he intoned, moving his hands in the prescribed gesture of awakening. The runes on the device glowed. Anima mechanica, exsuscitare... He flicked a control on the small console at the chair’s head and a sequence of clamps on the crown’s inner perimeter extended, copper conductors chattering in a volley of tiny sparks. With a final hiss the locking spine whirred to life, screwing forwards hungrily in a blur of rotating cogs and thrumming servos, needlepoint inching towards the alien’s skull.

The xeno’s eyes were dosed, thin lips moving in some breathless alien litany, the words a strained melody of focus and defiance. Farrachus smiled to himself, knowing that meditation alone wouldn’t be sufficient.

“I told you...” he hissed into the alien’s ear, interrupting its mantra. “There’s no escape.”

Behind him, the access portal blipped quietly.

“I said no interruptions!” Severus snarled, his voice lent an artificial menace by the intercom. Farrachus turned his head from the prisoner with interest, wondering which dim-witted guard was about to suffer the governor’s legendary temper. The door ground open noisily.

A figure pounced through before the magos could even think, a squat form of articulating armour plates surmounted by a crested helmet. It scanned the room in a blur, raising the long rifle at its side.

Farrachus’s thoughts moved sluggishly. The intruder was through the door and into the shadows of the room’s perimeter before he’d even fully identified it. T’au, the logic-engines subsumed into his biological mind told him. T’au warrior. Enemy.

He drew his pistol, movement sensors twitching with insect accuracy, hunting for the tau’s bodytrace. The human part of his mind, unashamedly terrified, struggled against the implacable coldness of his technological augmentations. Stimulants flooded his brain, making his senses race and his blood roar. They didn’t do any good.

A flicker of blue light at his side startled him and the tracking of his sensors, the unmistakable crack of bone broadcasting the locking spine’s grisly deployment. The excrucia flared to life with a horrific whine, greasy sparks coruscating around the punctured dome of the prisoner’s skull. Farrachus turned to watch, overcome with excitement at the culmination of his efforts. The ethereal’s composure shattered without trace, its thin-lipped mouth snapping open to emit a scream that dragged on and on and didn’t stop. Glorying in his work, the genetor all but forgot about the intruder.

The tau warrior stepped calmly from the shadows behind him and nestled the blocky barrel of its rifle against his skull. He felt the contact only abstractly, drug pulsing thoughts racing ahead to calculate reactions, hypotheses and projections.

When he died, the intricate metallic ganglia suffusing his brain gyrating outwards, Genetor Farrachus was busy formulating the predicted trajectory his slumping body would take as it tumbled to the ground.

His calculations were entirely correct.

Kais had found him.

Alone and in pain, restrained at the heart of a mesh of components and cables, lit by a single overhead illuminator at the chamber’s apex, Aun’el T’au Ko’vash writhed beneath the black contraption encircling his brow. He screamed unstoppably, twisted face surrounded by a shivering corona of energy, long fingers curled with rictus tension around the restraints encasing his arms. The controls at the chair’s head were meaningless to Kais, an array of angular runes and unfamiliar characters, pulsing and glowing hungrily. Not knowing what else to do, feeling panic surging in his mind in empathetic horror at the ethereal’s screams, he turned his rifle upon the console and took aim.

“That’s expensive equipment,” a dry voice hissed, sending Kais into an alert stance with a start. The voice laughed, a tinny electronic cackle emanating from a speaker nearby. Kais’s roving gaze landed on the huge sheet of glass on the other side of the chamber: a window into a gloomy viewing theatre. There was a human there, sneering face dipped low to glare up past its prominent brows, aquiline features arranged in a humourless grin.

“Hello, little bug...” it grinned.

Kais’s reaction was almost instantaneous: the rifle stuttered in his hands, long beads of pulsefire lancing towards the window. They impacted with a hollow crackle, tentacles of hazing glowlight writhing momentarily before fading to invisibility, leaving not so much as a scratch.

The human didn’t even flinch. It chuckled dryly, leaning to flick a switch out of Kais’s vision.

“Sergeant?” it said, not taking its eyes from Kais. “Meet me in the shuttle bay, please. And send one of your men to fetch the prisoner, if you would. We appear to have a problem with vermin.”

A disembodied voice, thick with artificial resonance and static, replied across the intercom: “As you wish.”

“Goodbye, little one,” the human chuckled, waving flamboyantly through the glass and stabbing at another series of controls. With a lurch the viewing gallery ground its way upwards, vast elevator pistons exposed in its wake.

Kais returned his attention to the ethereal, shuddering and moaning in his seat. A long bead of blood worked its way past his rolling eyes, welling up from the wound on his forehead where a locking clamp held his skull in place. Kais ground his teeth, considering his best course of action.

The control console detonated colourfully beneath a single rifle shot. The locking spine retracted with a slurp, trailing a grisly strand of blood and eliciting another agonised moan from Ko’vash. The restraint pinions snapped open grudgingly, lights flaring then fading across the machine’s surface as if railing against a lingering death.

Then the madness began.

A side door, masked by the shadows of the chamber’s perimeter, slid open with a reptilian hiss. Something entered, footsteps heavy on the grille flooring. It advanced with tectonic slowness, an impossible geometric arrangement of thrumming segments and jointed armour plates. Its stocky build belied its enormity: almost as wide as it was tall, still both dimensions dwarfed Kais utterly.

The grey-green expanses of the creature’s shell broke up the sterile light in a collection of rune pitted segments, articulating with servo-fed power. Pennants and scraps of parchment, ridiculously fragile beside such magnificence, adorned its frescoed torso; a grinning skull, stylised between curving wings, set at its centre. Its arms, rolling fluidly with every step, cradled an enormous gun in jointed gauntlets, its angular stock patterned with runic inscriptions. To each side of its helmeted head, eyes blazing with amber light, wedgelike shoulder guards pistoned in time with its strides. On one an iconic depiction of a bird’s sharp profile, hooked beak narrowing to a vicious point, was picked out in white brushtrokes.

Kais felt bacterial before it. Insubstantial. He was an insect, throwing wide its brittle wings, preparing to be crushed underfoot. He was dust. Nothing.

For a moment, the certainty gripped him that the hulking thing must be a machine. It was too easy to imagine a lattice of engines within that brittle framework, compacted metallic viscera riddling the whole implausible structure like nerve endings, grinding fibres and drive chains ratcheting its awesome limbs.

But no: it was too precise, its steps full of the rolling fluidity of an organism. Somewhere inside that juggernaut shell, glaring out with all the arrogance and self assurance typical of their race, was a frail, pink little gue’la. The thought gave no comfort.

The creature tilted the barrel of its weapon, arched shoulder guard pivoting smoothly Before the hiss of alarm could even escape Kais’s mouth, the muzzle had vanished behind a curtain of fire; a long droplet of superheated air flickering dizzyingly. He lurched aside clumsily, springing through a cloud of airborne debris and rotating fragments of steel, plucked from the floor and walls wherever the rapidfire barrage followed him.

He hit the ground and rolled, unable to resist crying out at the succession of angry detonations all around, tiny shards of detritus gashing at his armour and slashing at his arms and legs. Each streaking ballistic contained a small explosive charge, ripping long ribbons of impact craters into every surface.

Kais returned fire as he moved, a shambling crawl-run of ducking, lurching movements that left his aim far wide of its mark. He dived awkwardly for cover, realising with horror even as he moved that in his panic he’d fallen directly behind the torture machine, the Aun still enmeshed and inert at its heart.

With unerring precision, as if in answer to Kais’s silent pleas, the storm of explosive shells was cut short moments before the ethereal became a target. His mind a tangle of fear and uncertainty, Kais realised with a start that his would-be executioner wanted to preserve the Aun just as much as he did. He wondered absurdly, at the back of his mind, what Ju and Y’hol would say if he told them he’d used an ethereal as a bodyshield.

Beyond caring, he leaned out of his fragile cover and pumped shot after shot at the armoured monster lurking at the edge of the light. It didn’t even bother to move.

The first pulse-orb caught it directly beneath the broad sweep of its right shoulder-guard, flaring angrily with white heat and cascading sparks. The figure jolted backwards slightly: a casual sway, as if in response to a light breeze. Each subsequent bolt repeated the ineffectual display, a fountain of dissipated energy blossoming at each impact but causing little real damage. The gue’la just stood there and took it all, leaning in its spot and absorbing everything that Kais threw at it.

Before he could even take stock, the gue’la’s weapon tilted and fired, blasting the tip of his rifle into fragments. Its induction charge imploded with a flash, spinning the weapon out of his hands and propelling him bodily from his cover. Arms ringing from the impact, blinking spots from his eyes, he looked up into the glowing orbs of the gue’la’s vision slits, watching him across the chamber. He stumbled to the floor, knees giving way.

No point, his mind told him. Not any more.

His opponent was invincible. An impregnable human fortress, impossible to besiege, futile to barrage. Who was he to stand against it?

A didactic memory, unconsciously suppressed during the action, bubbled sluggishly in his mind, identifying the armoured giant. It was a Space Marine, and the memory node contained more than enough information for him to know he was outclassed, outgunned and outdone.

Voices clamoured in his mind: gossamer wisps of text and oration, propaganda and meditation. “Focus,” they chimed. “Unity.” They filled his skull with a coiling serpent of racial assurance, a million and one certainties of the superiority of the tau’va.

They wouldn’t — couldn’t — help him anymore. Where was the great unity now? Where was the species struggle, supporting him as he supported it? Where was the great machine when he needed it? Where was the Greater Good to be found in dying here, broken and bewildered, on the floor of this filthy gue’la place?

His stomach knotted and with a groan, failing even in his ability to suppress his reactions, he waited to die. The marine stepped forwards, soot-blemished armour parting the clouds of weapon smoke. It was death, stalking through the cloudbanked atmosphere. Its eyes blazed.

Ave Imperator, it said, the distorted voice cold and artificial. The gun raised again. Kais couldn’t even bring himself to tense his muscles.

“Shas’la...” a voice said, shakily. “Sh... Shas...”

It was a ray of light stammering on the serenity of its own words. It was a dreamscent, whispering past his senses, a pheromone medley of spice and fruit. It was a song without a chorus, a breathless celebration of melody and rhythm, stained by a taint of discordant pain.

Kais twisted his head without thinking, unable to control his mind, finding his gaze filled by Aun’el T’au Ko’vash. The torture device had ascended into the shadows, leaving blotched burns and scratches across the ethereal’s pate. Weak and frail, shaking from the bone-pitted wound above his nasal orifice, the Aun raised his head defiantly and fixed Kais with a stare of pure peace. It filled his mind, overriding every sense in a rush of inexorable calmness. It waved away the smoke and the pain, it washed clean the blood in his brain and assuaged his racing thoughts. He was a puppet to it: an empty vessel given awareness of its own hollowness and somehow, against every expectation, glad of it.

If I am nothing as an individual, his mind said, then let me be content with my place in a higher order.

And he was.

In that instant, in that surreal moment of exposure to the ancient wisdom of the Aun, Shas’la T’au Kais was a functioning, satisfied piece of the machine.

“Never... alone...” the ethereal said weakly.

Kais picked up the dead gue’la’s plasma pistol. He hadn’t even noticed it at his feet. He was a glove, to be filled and worn, to be manipulated and moved as the Aun saw fit. It all happened so quickly, without seeming to happen at all.

He shot the Space Marine twice. The first hazing orb of superheated plasma punched a deep crater in its torso plating, sending spiderlike fissures scuttling across the green surface. The figure toppled backwards, startled, weapon chattering spastically, spare hand clutching at the air.

The second plasma bolt hit the Marine’s scowling faceplate, shattering its eyelenses like glass, engulfing it in a cloud of igniting fragments and outwards-spreading gore — a thick soup of smoke and blood that followed the enormous hulk as it tumbled backwards, crashing chaotically to the ground. It shivered and whined as the last vestiges of the armour’s power reserves expended into the air.

It died by degrees, flailing extremities slowing in their mad flexes until everything was silent. Kais wondered if anything would ever seem real again.

He retrieved the pathetic remains of his rifle and turned to the Aun, still seated in pain and exhaustion. His slender fingers brushed lightly across the wound on his head, exploring its severity. Like all ethereals, his face was longer than most taus’, the gentle bisecting line of his scent orifice wider and more pronounced, lifted by the diamond-shaped ridge of bone at its centre. It was above this mysterious feature — the identifying mark of his caste — that the ugly wound marred his scalp. He winced momentarily, then his long features resolved into a glowing aspect of calmness and determination.

Here, Kais saw, was focus. Here was devotion to the tau’va on a scale he could barely imagine. Here was faith, and it was contagious. Despite the Aun’s fragility he carried an invisible aura, a mantle of contentment that hung around him, allaying every one of Kais’s fears, soothing his turbulent thoughts. He lowered his gaze, awash with devotion and respect.

“You have my thanks, Shas’la,” the ethereal purred, even his voice carrying a medicinal quality. In some quiet corner of his mind Kais felt manipulated, as if the mere presence of the Aun could blast away whatever shreds of individuality he might possess. But he couldn’t rage against the violation — he was powerless against it and, worse, he enjoyed it. Somehow, without even touching him, the Aun could reach inside his mind and show him how to belong.

Kais spoke into his comm, fighting to tear his gaze away from the luminous being before him.

“Shas’el?” he rasped, voice dry.

“La’Kais!” came Lusha’s reply, full of relief. “We weren’t able to fix on you. We assumed... Shas’la: what’s your status?”

“The Aun is free, Shas’el. He’s wounded. We...”

“Hold on, Kais. We’re getting your signal again.”

A green bar of characters within his HUD — ominously absent for too long — chimed to life, confirming the sensor contact. It felt like a tiny slice of T’au — a portion of efficiency and logic lighting up this dark place of gue’la ugliness.

A thought occurred. “El’Lusha — did the prisoners get out?”

“They did. La’Y’hol led them to safety through the ruins, despite his injuries.” Lusha sounded amused. “The por’hui have got their hands on the footage already, I’m told.” Kais smiled to himself, imagining Y’hol’s proud, grinning features smeared across every bulletin screen back on T’au.

“Our troops are holding out above ground,” Lusha continued. “The surveyor drones have picked up a collapsed cavern near your position. We’ll airlift you out.”

The coordinates blinked to life in Kais’s vision, an impossible promise of freedom. He could barely allow himself to believe it was real.

Lusha’s voice suddenly didn’t seem so far away at all. “You’re coming home, Kais.”

The dropship left the battle behind, pulling away through the lazy columns of smoke towards the edge of the crater valley. Below, Lusha could see the last vestiges of gue’la resistance surrendering their posts and dashing for the cover of the underground levels exposed by the orbital strike. It didn’t matter. The pathfinder squads would pick them off one at a time, more through professional completism than any great need to cull the gue’la numbers. La’Kais had done it.

He could hardly believe it. The youth had been out of contact, hidden to the dropship’s sensors behind countless layers of rock and steel. But the truth was there, displayed before his eyes on the monitors. Aun’el T’au Ko’vash — looking weak and wounded but alive, slowly but surely picking his way through the caverns towards freedom.

Lusha mumbled a litany of affirmation and watched the extraction point grow ever nearer.

A broken component — that’s how he’d described Kais to the shas’o. Had he been right? It hardly seemed to matter now. His gamble had paid off: the inexplicably bizarre gue’la scheme — whatever it had been — had been foiled and punished. Let that be an end to it.

But it wouldn’t be. Oh, no. He’d seen the report, compiled and transmitted from the Or’es Tash’var half a dec earlier. High above the smoking, debris-strewn plains of Dolumar IV, prowling out of the warp like a shoal of rampaging t’pel sharks, the gue’la fleet had arrived.