Fire Warrior Read online

  And then the wonder of a new world, to walk amongst the tall, savage kroot with their chittering, squalling language of clicks and squawks, to feel their pinprick eyes watching with something between suspicion and respect—these were experiences Kais and Ju would discuss and recollect for tau’cyrs thereafter.

  The expedition had lasted a five-rotaa and was, in the end, disastrous. The por’vre was growing impatient with the incessant humidity of the world; the air caste crew of the Por’creta Tai, ordered to remain on the surface out of deference for the kroots’ inexplicable dislike of vessels orbiting their planet, were suffering the effects of prolonged gravity exposure on their frail bodies. Ju was bemoaning the lack of por’hui broadcasts which might help her to meditate. Kais hadn’t eaten a decent ration in three rotaa after witnessing the kroot’s culinary preparations. And to top it all, the promised “jewellery” had turned out to be a selection of whittled bone fragments and colourful feathers.

  It was not going well.

  The final straw came on the sixth rotaa during a visit to the produce market. The por’vre spotted a stall in the distance selling trinkets and baubles and, in a fit of desperation, all but sprinted to inspect the wares. Kais and Ju were forced to hurry after their supposed protectee, stifling their irritation at his spontaneity.

  At which point the por’vre, in his haste, stamped on the paw of a kroothound basking in the sun and found himself the unwitting victim of one hungry vengeful predator. Cackling a birdlike shriek, the creature swatted the merchant’s legs aside with a single jagged claw and bounded onto his back.

  Pandemonium ensued.

  The por’vre screamed, the kroot tribesmen nearby leaped forwards, the hound opened its serrated beak to crush its flailing victim’s skull—

  —and Kais and Ju shot it, once each.

  Afterwards, of course, it had been made perfectly clear that killing the tribal shaper’s favourite warhound—notorious for its playful rough-and-tumble with strangers—was not a clever way of endearing oneself to the tribe. The Por’creta Tai left a dec later, in disgrace.

  And even though Kais and Ju had laughed at the absurd error afterwards, he’d never forget that moment when the weapon lurched in his hands, thrumming induction field ejecting a single tumbling particle at impossible velocity, opening up in a blue teardrop of plasma in midair. He’d never forget the impact on the creature’s flank, the initial flare of energy transfer, the scorched fragments of flesh and bone detonating outwards as the squealing beast shuddered aside. He’d never forget the stink of burned flesh.

  Except that he had.

  Four tau’cyrs of pretending to be a warrior and now… now where was he? Stalking his way through his own vessel, fighting a guerrilla battle throughout the once serene living spaces and recreation suites of the Or’es Tash’var, ignoring the stench of singed bodies, picking off humans as they sprinted hither and thither in disorder, killing and killing and killing. The kroothound was barely a memory anymore, the horror of its destruction eclipsed a hundredfold by the insanity of a single rotaa.

  The Trial by Fire, they called it. After four tau’cyrs of service a shas’la would face the judgement of an examining commander to determine their progression of rank, following a demonstration of ability. Most Trials were artificial affairs: a complex series of simulations, courses and non-lethal combat in the battledomes. They were regarded as festivals; holidays during which all castes would come together in the colossal auditoria to cheer and speculate upon which warriors would be deemed worthy of promotion. There was no sense of “success” or “failure”—to remain a shas’la was without dishonour, a celebration of discovering one’s niche and serving the tau’va in the best possible fashion.

  But there had always been incidents of the trials being eclipsed by external hostilities, and—ever pragmatic—the Shas’ar’tol saw no reason not to make use of the young shas’las. They could fight for the Greater Good whilst being judged; it was in many ways a purer test of their abilities.

  Sooner or later, once all this insanity was over, a critical shas’vre would sit and review the captured footage from each shas’la’s helmet-optics, poring over the sensory information, their reactions, their movements… their decisions.

  Kais frowned. Someone would judge him, too. How would they see his actions? Would they see the effectiveness, the successes, the victories? Or would they see the racing heart and the enjoyment? Would they look through his eyes upon his works and see the skill of a shas’ui, or the savagery of the Mont’au?

  Kais turned a corner and froze, the telltale light spillage of flickering gunfire dancing across a wall nearby. He twisted, keeping the carbine between him and the wide glass-fronted chamber at his side.

  A vision of hell opened up before his eyes. On the other side of the glass the regroup point was under attack. A knot of tau pathfinders—lightly armed scouts with little of the plate armour a line warrior sported—exchanged close fire with a black tide of gue’la troopers, their pale skin invisible beneath bulbous airmasks and flak jackets. Kais hurried to find the connecting door to the chamber, helplessly watching the combat as if on a por’hui screen.

  The shas’las were being cut down one by one, flipped from their meagre cover by the chattering gue’la weapons then pulverised, disintegrating in liquid disarray, screams cut short. The colliding shells created a shivering hailstorm of ricochets across the floor, some even punching at the great viewing gallery windows that opened up to the void beyond, sending tiny fissures scuttling across the surface.

  Kais spotted the chamber doorway from the promenade and sprinted forwards, racking his grenade launcher hungrily. This time he could enjoy the violence, safe in the knowledge that he was helping his comrades. This time there’d be no guilt.

  The door slid closed with a rasp, blocking his entry. Kais skidded to a halt before it, confused.

  “Shas’el?” he commed, bewildered, “Shas’el—you need to open this door!”

  “It’s on override, Kais. Standby…” Kais thought he heard Lusha hiss lightly, “Oh, by the path…”

  “Shas’el?”

  “The AI’s detected a breach.”

  “A… I don’t unders—”

  The cobweb of shatterlines scampering across the gallery windows blossomed, sudden rosettes of gossamer lurching into existence and, just as quickly, vanishing. The windows belched outwards into nothingness.

  One raik’or the room was a battleground: overturned arc benches and fragmented fio’sorral sculptures lying in disarray; the next, emptiness. There was the briefest impression of speed, a blur of rushing shapes and clutching limbs, then only the silent vastness of vacuum. A body tumbled serenely past the yawning windows, chest caved in, eyes bulging, trailing frozen blood-crystals like a necklace of diamonds.

  Kais gagged inside his helmet, backing away from the awful vision. The enormity of the destruction, the sudden, natural power of it—

  He envied it.

  “L-la’Kais…” Lusha sounded shaken. “There’s no time. You have to get to the engine bay.”

  “They. They’re all gone.”

  “La’Kais. Do you hear me?”

  “They’re gone. All of them.”

  “La’Kais!”

  He snapped back to reality with a jolt, tearing his eyes away from the scene. That split-second vision of rushing bodies, venting air… it wouldn’t leave his mind.

  “You can do this, Kais.”

  “I don’t know, Shas’el. These decks are crawling… It’s too much…”

  “The other cadres are engaged elsewhere, Shas’la. We’ll reroute as soon as we can.” A strange taint entered Lusha’s voice—fear, perhaps? Or guilt? “You can do this,” he repeated, sighing.

  Kais frowned, feeling the fear creeping into him again. Not the conventional horror of death or injury or pain, rather the fear of overreaching; the fear of uninhibited insanity, the fear of once again revelling in his own unwanted appetite for destruction. He hadn’t asked to
be a killer, hadn’t strived all his life to develop the rage and the spite that, unbidden, came naturally to him. He wanted to scream: It’s not fair!

  With every human they sent him against it became harder to pretend that he was doing it for them, doing it for their tau’va, doing it for their “Greater Good”, their pure racial goal that eluded him with infuriating intangibility. Every time he killed for them, it became harder to deny that really, secretly, he was doing it for himself.

  Kais searched for words, unable to contain the turmoil any longer.

  “Shas’el?”

  “Yes, Shas’la?”

  “Why me?”

  Lusha sounded concerned. “What do you mean?”

  “Why… Why do I have to be the one to…” His voice faltered. The words didn’t sound right; to express them could only expose the selfishness at their heart. “I’m damning myself!” he cried, a bubble of uncertainly and rage puncturing obscenely in his soul.

  Lusha took a long time to answer.

  “You’re the only one who can do this, La’Kais.”

  “But—”

  “Fire warrior! Nobody ever pretended it would be easy.”

  Kais hung his head. “Yes, Shas’el.” There was nothing else he could say.

  “Get to the power core, Shas’la. You’re our only hope.”

  Kais’ hand rested on the wafer in its pouch.

  No expansion without equilibrium.

  No conquest without control…

  Military words. Aggressive words. Expansion, conquest. Victory, violence. But always tempered by control, by balance.

  Maybe it deserved another try. He took a deep breath, focused his mind upon an ideal far greater than he could hope to appreciate, and scuttled away across the promenade.

  Captain Bortailis Seylind had enjoyed a long and eventful career.

  He received his military commission at the early age of nineteen and was thrust quickly into the terrifying world of combat service. He saw active duty on the Fell Core hiveworld when the rebellion began; he assisted in the mop-up operation after the Space Marines had dealt with the genestealer infestation; he was there when the first ’nid spores landed and he personally oversaw the clearance of Hive Tertius after the vent system was breached. He was in orbit, looking down, when the Exterminatus virus-bomb punctured the atmosphere of the doomed planet.

  At twenty-three he was transplanted from the 35th Octobian Regiment of the Imperial Guard to the StormTroop Assault-core, attached to the Battlefleet Ultima (Secundus) as an experimental specialist regiment of boarding infantry guards. The brutal complexities of ship warfare became his specialised field.

  Under Nobilite Captain Ferringus he took part in no fewer than thirteen major boarding actions in his first few years: a variety of rogue traders and suspected pirate craft proving a more-than-trying opportunity to hone the storm-troopers’ abilities. He received two citations for bravery, a medal for distinguished service and the cherished Crozius Ultima as a personal recognition of his courage under fire. By his twenty-eighth birthday the encroaching fragments of the Tyranid hive fleet Kraken were pushing before them all manner of scum: an ork flotilla, badly crippled by some recent encounter with the hive swarms, was to prove his first engagement with xeno troops. The assault craft scythed into the ineffectual hulls of the greenskin ships and Seylind received a further citation in the carefully executed cleansing of the flotilla that followed.

  By the time he was thirty-five, Seylind had been promoted to captain, decorated twice more for his cool-headedness and efficiency, had personally founded three more regiments of storm-troopers for assignment aboard other fleets in other Segmenta, had conducted successful boarding missions against the orks, the eldar and three ’stealer-infested space hulks; had received the gratitude of Governor Quotho following the elimination of a mercenary invasion force, and had been personally singled out to oversee the extension of the storm-trooper regiments to the Battlefleet Ultima Primus.

  He was received by Admiral Constantine of the Enduring Blade two weeks after his thirty-sixth birthday, earning a further service medal and a pleasant evening in the officers’ mess, courtesy of the navis nobilite. Life was good.

  Three weeks into the new commission, with much of the nascent regiment still comprised of green-around-the-gills conscripts, the opportunity to add the tau to his burgeoning list of defeated enemies was forced upon him. The boarding had been a difficult affair and resistance was well-organised and heavy, but he was confident. The insertion of tech-priests into the engine bay had been fraught with difficulties, but malfunctions aside, the teleporter had succeeded in delivering a pair of adepts. With his two most trusted secondaries, Seylind had occupied the surrounding decks, sealed the engine bay with a tri-lock (his third of which nestled securely in his utility holster) and could now continue with the pressing business of co-ordinating the infiltration of the vessel. Yes—he had reason to be confident. With foresight and planning, no obstacle was insurmountable.

  There’d be another medal in this one, he was certain. Perhaps even a promotion.

  He smiled, arming his hellgun happily.

  Someone shot him in the gut.

  As the colour went out of his world, he felt gloved alien hands rummaging in the utility holster at his hip.

  Adept Natsan, Reverus Illumina of Mars, magos of the Cult Deus-Mechanicus, second-level student of xenotech and mechanicus heretica, beneficiary of the Puritens lobotomy and recipient of no fewer than seventeen Spiritu-Mechanica surgical augmentations, was annoyed to notice he was bleeding heavily. He concentrated, internally arresting the flow of blood to his left upper limb, cauterising the wound with an acetylene lamp attached to his right elbow and watching as the neatly sliced flesh scarred over and cooked.

  Matter transmission had proved contrary to his expectations. He’d speculated upon a gravitic shift as the body adjusted between two localities in “overlapping” warp space, hypothesised upon the presence of emitted “waste” energy, sound and heat, and theorized upon the effects of matter occluded by existing dense material upon transmission.

  He had not expected a blinding discharge of light, a sharp tug in all directions at once, the bewildering sensation of falling, then a coalescing series of sensory feedbacks containing screams, fountaining blood and the unpalatable aroma of singed hair. It didn’t take him long to conclude, in fact, that something had gone wrong.

  The initial displace party had comprised five adepts of his order, several dozen armed servo skulls and a trio of combat servitors to provide a clearance security zone. The servo skulls, at least, had been delivered safely.

  The servitors had arrived all at once in the same spot: a fascinating arrangement of meat and metal, fused together and segueing from state to state apparently at random. It had mewed twice, coughed, then toppled sideways with a lurch and—in as much as it had ever been alive—died.

  Adepts Armill and Nyssen had, it would appear, been reconstituted beyond the limit of the locarus engine; pulped flesh and blood scattered in a perfect circle around the boundary of the safe zone. This hypothesis would seem to explain the damage to his own body: he estimated thirty-five per cent of his left limb had been breaching the safety perimeter upon materialisation, neatly amputating it below the elbow. Had he any pain centres remaining he suspected, the injury would be agonising.

  Adept Idow’s fate had been stranger still. Natsan had theorized that the locarus safe zone had overlapped part of the tau engine bay’s bulkhead, delivering Idow into the wall. His astonished features, flayed to a ruddy red liquescence and splattered by molten metal, leaned from the structural panel as if breaking the surface of a vertical pool.

  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.