Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000) Read online

  So, alone amongst the sentient transportees, he and Adept Tertius Rolan had survived the transition from the Enduring Blade to the alien vessel. Indignity upon indignity, it had fallen to them, lacking the combat servitors, to defend themselves against the xenogens — a tiresome business more suited to the plebeians of the Imperial guard, had they been present. Still, the task was quickly completed; those tau specimens already inhabiting the cavernous powercore were a craven breed of gangly air caste crew, easy pickings for his sanctified plasma pistol.

  Thankfully, the delay had been nominal. Within minutes the storm-troopers from the first assault craft had converged on his position, completing his carefully prepared security arrangements.

  The door into the tiered chamber had been sealed as comprehensively as was possible, preventing any tau troopers from entering. As far as Imperial intelligence was aware, the xenos possessed no teleport analogue technology, so there’d be no danger from that direction. Further, he had released two dozen of the armed servo-skulls into the ductways around the enginebay to patrol against any surreptitious entry from that quarter.

  The storm-troopers were deployed carefully across the lower levels of the power core, taking up position around the trunklike pillar at its centre which, he guessed, was the taus’ bizarre equivalent of a generarium reactor. The gantries and mezzanines which rose in platformed tiers around it had taken a while to climb in his hunt for a central console, his augmented frame not designed for such athletic exertion. The view from the summit was breathtaking.

  And finally, as if any living creature could penetrate so far, the upper levels of the construct, where he and Adept Rolan swiftly and silently worked to cripple the vessel’s engines and decrypt its datavised secrets, were bordered by a coruscating energy field. Natsan’s aggressive assault upon the vessel’s AI, a heretical intelligence that would be purged the instant it was no longer required, had yielded fruit quickly: he’d identified and implemented the shield device as a final, utterly impenetrable defence.

  Thus reassured, he gathered the full enormity of his mental faculties— reasoning that such comprehensive security arrangements negated any need to spend time considering his safety — and focused on the console before him. The datum drones at his side blinked and chattered, ferociously eating away at the AI’s defences. The language decryption paradigm running in Natsan’s head decoded a string of characters and he stabbed at a sequence of controls, exposing yet another level of sophistication. Like some energistic equivalent of the gantry surrounding the powercore, the ship’s logic engine was a structured gem: a perfectly aligned arrangement of operative tiers and commands, symmetrical and cohesive. Had his sense of awe been complete, he suspected, he might actually be impressed by the technology’s complexity. As it was, the puritens surgery released a stream of disapproving endorphins into his mind, filling him with revulsion and making him all the more aware of the xenogens’ blatant disregard for the proper obeisance owed to the Machine God.

  To his side, Adept Rolan controlled a group of servo-skulls as they swarmed around the thrumming engine pile at the centre of the tier stack. The technology contained within that single pillar of silent componentry was utterly foreign, an impure antithesis of the arcane knowledge of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Natsan’s brief glimpse through a viewing portal had raised more questions than it provided answers, revealing a luminous green liquid gas swirling with convection currents and speckled by drifting, glowing particles of matter. When the tau vessel was captured he would relish uncovering its secrets.

  So rigid was the careful distribution of his concentration that he was completely oblivious to the heavy clang of the engine bay doors unlocking, drifting open with a rasp. His ears — sensory ganglia improved years earlier by cranial implants — competently recorded the unmistakable sounds of hellguns chattering angrily, but his consciousness was busy elsewhere and the harsh frequencies went unprocessed.

  So immersed was he in his analysis of the AI systems, that only when the faint blue light of the energy shield collapsed upon itself and faded to nothing did he allocate a corner of his processing ability to analysing the new situation. He regarded his surroundings suspiciously, quickly noting the wrecked corpses of storm-troopers littering the chamber’s floor, and the console venting smoke on the next level down. He realised too late that the energy shield was not quite the impenetrable protection he’d surmised.

  Before he could consider the new scenario in depth, a bipedal figure surged up the ramp onto the top tier and raised a weapon. Natsan grudgingly allowed his entire mind to drop the complex algorithms it had been studying and concentrated upon the new threat.

  He drew his pistol.

  Kais was up and sprinting before he had time to think.

  There were two of them, he saw, and they were fast. They were armed and firing in a heartbeat, so alike in their movements they could have been twin linked machines or mirror reflections. They shifted in a rolling gaggle of insect jerks, metal pitted heads clicking like broken engines as they tracked him, eyes twinkling from the darkness beneath their black robes.

  Kais thumbed a thirty-raik’an delay on a grenade and rolled it silently towards them, scurrying for cover. He pushed his armoured shoulder into the ground and rolled towards a dip in the mezzanine floor; radiant orbs of plasma impacting all around, splattering liquid metal across the dome of his helmet. The cover swallowed him up and he fought the temptation to lurk there, catching his breath.

  Instead he sprinted onwards, sensing the fio’tak haemorrhaging behind him in an eruption of plasma and shrapnel. Scampering across the control tier, he caught a brief glimpse of black robes to his left and fired a ragged cluster of pulses towards them, earning a satisfying belch of smoke and sparks and forcing the gue’la back behind the sho’aun’or’es energy stack, near to where he’d secreted the grenade. Kais winced inside his helmet: a single breach of the core would not only cripple the ship’s movement but risked destroying the entire lower segments of the vessel.

  As if testing his fears, the grenade detonated.

  The first gue’la, the one with slightly less artificial features and two complete arms, was taken by surprise, somersaulting backwards on the crest of the Shockwave, legs detaching in a tracery of mechanical joints and ribbon sliced flesh. It screamed at the apex of its impromptu flight and Kais, never staying still for a moment, pumped two carbine rounds into its jerking torso before it had even slapped into the deck. It landed with a crack and flipped backwards off the tier. Every time it landed it bounced outwards, shedding chunks of biotech and flesh.

  Kais watched it all the way, resisting the smile forming around his lips. The energy pillar, he noticed with relief, was undamaged.

  The other gue’la, one arm ending in a scar tissue clump, lurched from the tangled wreckage in a crescendo of creaking parts and chittering components. Its shrapnel shredded face, welts of flesh hanging loose from the cable-studded bone beneath, stared ghoulishly. It was a lurching remnant of a being, neither crying out in agony or sneering in pain-dampening insanity at its injuries. But its eyes... its eyes were cold and dead — mechanical orbs of ice and metal. It raised the plasma pistol in a single angle-perfect movement, weapon fixating on Kais faster than he could ever hope to react. It pulled the trigger.

  Kais wondered abstractly, in that miniscule moment before he died, whether he was looking at the gue’la vision of the tau’va.

  For the tau, he thought, the One Path is a victory over individuality. It is gestalt over self, rationality over impulse, logic over spontaneity, focus over Mont’au...

  But this thing, this creature with a scarred brain and a body more metallic than organic, this thing is rationality, it is logic, it is tau’va...

  Is that what we’re trying to become, he asked himself? Painless, fearless, passionless... Monsters?

  The plasma pistol made a sound.

  Fzzk.

  The gue’la tilted its head and squeezed the trigger again. A row of warning
icons illuminated in fiery red along the bottom of Kais’s HUD, detecting a surge of energy nearby. He squinted at the gue’la pistol, heart racing. A single sliver of shrapnel had gouged itself into the firing mechanism at the base of the weapon’s barrel, smoking with a burgeoning hiss.

  The gue’la vanished beneath a cloud of fire, flames billowing outwards and hurling Kais to the floor. Unvented promethium ignited in a rush, an inverted waterfall of thermal fury that gushed over him and boiled upwards to lash impotently against the chamber ceiling.

  He stooped to his feet when the inferno finally abated, methodically checking for injuries. The gue’la priest stood as it had been before the explosion, skin peeling back, extended gun arm obliterated at the shoulder, a rarified sculpture with charred skin. Kais, shaking his head to clear the exhaustion, thought its blackening features seemed somehow interested, as though analysing its own immolation. Its expression of scrutiny remained until its silvery eyes melted and the flames burned through from the inside of its skull.

  Kais stood and watched it until it flopped to the floor and was still. He watched until the cables and tubules running throughout its frame began to liquefy and puddle around it. He watched until the reinforcements arrived and Lusha voxed him with an almost paternal expression of congratulation.

  He stood and watched the flickering, crumbling husk until it atomised and gusted away, and as he watched he wondered which was worse: to surrender to rage or to become a living machine?

  He didn’t know the answer.

  Kor’o Natash T’yra took a final glance at the Tash’var’s status display, patted Kor’el Siet fondly on the shoulder to finalise the temporary delegation of command and hurried off the bridge into the boardroom. The Aun’chia’gor was already underway.

  The origins of the ceremony were clearly prescribed in the datatexts of Kilto and it had remained almost unchanged in the two and a half thousand tau’cyrs since its inception. It was a product of the time of Mont’au, before the Auns came, when the tribes of T’au balanced on the very verge of self destruction.

  As history had recorded, at the siege of Fio’taun, when the fate of an entire species hung precariously in the balance, where only a miracle could have prevented the emergence of an age of anarchy and turmoil, something impossible occurred.

  There had been lights, glimpsed dimly around the distant mountaintops, for three rotaas. Stories spread amongst the armies of strange figures lurking in the mist of the hills, colourful attire and fluted limbs melting and capering through the haze. In the heat of battle few of the tribes gave any credence to the tales, stubbornly ignoring the phenomena that pulsed in the night sky, bending all their attention upon the hostilities that were tearing their world apart. On the final day the wind had carried strange resonances, swept aloft from the heights of the jagged peaks. They sounded, the Kilto histories recorded, like a choir of voices, raised in a song of impossible beauty.

  And then the Auns had appeared. They came slowly, calmly — barefooted and unsullied by the hate and suspicion of their astonished brethren. They stepped between the campfires of the besieging army and appeared as if from nowhere within the impassable walls of the city.

  And they talked. And as they talked, the tribes listened. They listened and they wondered, and they were filled with awe and reverence for these strange, graceful beings with their words of unity and progress.

  And the gates of Fio’taun opened, so the legend went, and the tribes met unarmed for the first time, and their leaders were seated at a mighty round table named Chia’Gor. And the Auns talked until the spokesmen of the tribes summoned the courage to participate. And slowly, so gradually that even the fiery plains tribes were gently coaxed into harmony, the tau’va was born.

  And so it had remained. The Aun’chia’gor had become a sensible paradigm for the meeting of the castes: wherever the five aspect pathways of the race were represented its simple procedures were rigidly observed. The table was a ring— a halo of artfully decorated materials, each appropriate to a single caste. The four “elemental” classes each occupied a quarter of the ring’s boundary, a single speaker surrounded by lesser aides and advisors.

  Tyra took his place at the centre of the air caste segment, a polished, voidlike swathe of dark tinted moriin-resin, filled with icy impurities and glimmering nebulae of coloured dyes, and nodded to each of the other top ranking delegates in turn.

  To his left, rigidly composed as if fresh from the parade-ground, Shas’o Udas drummed his fingers on the fire caste tabletop segment, a rough-hewn conglomerate of ruby and amber, and pursed his lips. Two shas’vres stood to attention on either side of him.

  To Tyra’s right sat the vessel’s earth caste representatives, squat and wide with flat, open faces and bulky, simple clothing. At their centre was Fio’el Boran, clutching a data wafer in his extraordinary artificial arm, traceries of silver and gold decorating its eight-fingered hand. His aides whispered to one another, lowly, uncomfortable in such formalised society. Their segment of the table was perhaps the most stunning of all: a single block of juntaa-stone, inscribed with an astonishing filigree of flowing patterns and mandalas.

  And directly opposite Tyra, seated comfortably and chatting affably with her equally at ease assistants, was Por’el T’au Yis’ten, the vessel’s foremost water caste diplomat. Her group wore simple but colourful robes that turned their corner of the room into a riot of shades and hues. Elegant jewellery adorned their necks and wrists and domed pol hats were arranged at jaunty angles atop their braided locks of hair. As if in direct contrast to their gaudy appearance, their section of the table was a simple block of silver dusted j’kaara, perfect mirrors on every surface. Tyra thought it most appropriate: the Por were renowned for their ability to adapt to any situation, reflecting and imitating those around them.

  The Aun’el, of course, was central.

  Alone in the barren space between the arc segments of the table, lit from above by a single light drone, Aun’el T’au Ko’vash devoured the attention of every individual and returned it in kind: a glowing beacon of certainty and assurance that calmed every nerve and soothed every impatience. He took small steps as he talked, turning from group to group, showing as much consideration to one caste as any other. His staff of office, a delicately ornamented honour blade set upon a tall cane of fio’tak, tapped out a rhythm as he moved, giving his words a metered, songlike rituality.

  “...would certainly seem their attempts to slow our progress have failed,” he was saying, “Path be praised. Nonetheless, let us not celebrate nor shield ourselves from the enormity of what the gue’la have undertaken this rotaa.” The Aun swivelled in his spot, ancient gaze settling upon the rigid fire caste quarter of the room. “Shas’o, if you would begin?”

  O’Udas nodded brusquely, rising to his feet and clearing his throat.

  “Honoured tau’fann,” he began, using the age-old address for members of alternate castes, and half-bowing. This episode has cost us dearly.

  “We estimate thirty per cent losses amongst the line troops. There’s a full cadre at least, maybe two, still tied up on the planet. The further we move from orbit, the harder it becomes to retrieve them.”

  The Aun nodded thoughtfully.

  “Still,” the general went on, rubbing his calloused knuckles. “We’ve brought the boarding crisis under control and the power core is secure. A near thing, by all accounts, but we’re stronger for it.

  “I’ve compiled a status paradigm with the assistance of the AI, taking into account the strength and deployment of our resources. With your permission, tau’fann, I should like to propose a retaliatory strike within the d—”

  Por’el Yis’ten scoffed loudly, rolling her eyes. Tyra, watching her exaggerated performance with interest, reminded himself of the flamboyant reputation of the water caste, traditionally a point of enmity with the characteristically austere fire caste.

  “El’Yis’ten?” the ethereal purred, turning to face her. “You wish to comment?
”

  She slouched upright and tossed her hair braids over her shoulder. Tyra had to admit that her beauty — legendary throughout the ship — was enough to drive any male to consider breaking caste. He quashed the thought with an embarrassed cough, wondering vaguely when his next summons from the Propagation Department would arrive. The Fio’os back on T’au, preoccupied with “optimum genetic compatibility”, orchestrated inter-caste couplings without prejudice or emotion, but still... Tyra found himself musing enviously upon which lucky por’el male would discover his name beside that of El’Yis’ten on the summons form. He snapped himself from the reverie with a guilty wince as she began to speak.

  “Retaliation seems a little... premature, tau’fann,” she trilled, smiling warmly. “I’d never attempt, of course, to counsel the honoured shas’o in his duty—”

  “Huh,” O’Udas grunted, a little too loud.

  “But the arithmetic seems comprehensive. The gue’la fleet is, how can I put this? Extensive. We are but a single — damaged — warship.”

  “Then how,” O’Udas interjected, “do you propose to dissuade them from chasing us all the way back to the spacedock at Rann? A pleasant chat over a cup of j’hal nectar?”

  “As it happens,” El’Yis’ten returned, “we have been attempting to contact the gue’la vessels. Is it not said that ‘no enemy is beyond the reason of the tau’va’?”

  The Aun’el dipped his head in her direction, clearly gratified by her knowledge of the sio’t. “There are some who might disagree,” he said with a nod, “but the gue’la are not fools. They are, perhaps, ignorant — even shortsighted — but we must strive to forgive them their faults. They are the product of their history, not of their choice. We must attempt not to hate them.”