Fire Warrior Read online

  An altimeter chimed. The droplight turned green and the fire warriors in front of him began to tumble out into the haze.

  Kais’ leg muscles bunched, smoke and dust churning past them into the drop deck. He took a breath, swallowed hard, and jumped.

  Lieutenant Alik Kevla waved forwards the ragged remnants of his squad and advanced towards the next blind corner of the trench system. More of the alien vessels were bleeding out of the skies with every moment, filling the air with the awful shriek of their engines. Mind still burning with fury at the lucky airstrike that had wiped out half of his squad scant minutes before, he cursed every inhuman abomination that ever dared draw breath within the Emperor’s divine realms and gripped his lasgun to his chest.

  They’d come from nowhere, unprovoked and unannounced, but by the grace of the Throne they’d regret the day they came to this world!

  “Landing craft,” he snarled, peering cautiously around a corner at the pair of bulbous shuttles hovering nearby. They tilted downwards shallowly, as if sniffing at the dust, great plumes of haze lifting around their engines. Kevla turned to his squad with a growl. “Not one of them lives that walks on the Emperor’s soil. You understand? Not one!”

  They chorused their assent, sharing his anger. None of them held any great fondness for this world or its people, but they’d be damned before they saw a single godless xenogen sullying the sanctity of an Imperial world. Kevla nodded, satisfied at their resolve, and broke cover.

  Dolumar IV was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a well-developed world. The spaceport was little more than a cluster of limpet buildings and a field of rockcrete, the major city Lettica a haphazard arrangement of rock and steel and the population little more than a captive army of workers.

  All through the day and night the smelting factories churned away, disgorging their noxious emissions and shattering any hope of a moment’s silence. The agriculture projects had all died within a few years of the first colonists’ arrival; only the relentless machines, grinding away eternity in a fugue of molten metal and weld sparks, gave the planet any sense of purpose now.

  Dolumar was a weapon world. Eating itself from the inside out, its overseers kept a constant stream of impure metallic nuggets spilling onto rickety, steaming conveyors; churning out the oiled, brittle killing tools of the Imperial Guard. Give it enough time and Lettica’s factories would cover its entire surface—another forge world to birth the war machines of the Imperium.

  Little wonder the Departmento Munitorum had chosen to garrison the planet with such a high density of guardsmen. Four entire regiments were, even now, scrambling to respond to this unannounced alien threat.

  Lieutenant Kevla sneered as he darted forwards, reassured by the war cries of the men hot on his heels. Yes, he told himself, these tau had made a grave mistake in targeting Dolumar.

  Which was when twenty rounds of burstcannon fire shredded Lieutenant Kevla and his small squad in a cataclysm of detonating flesh and half-lived screams.

  Briefly, Kais flew.

  When it rose up to meet him, the ground seemed impossibly solid. The earth impacted against his hooves with an astonishing lurch, jarring through his legs. He stumbled, regaining his balance in a clumsy spray of dust and rock. More troopers piled out behind him, scattering towards the myriad trench openings nearby. Thick with haze and smoke, his first impressions of the planet were uniformly cluttered, crudely constructed trench walls snaking away towards the distant angles and towers of the gue’la city.

  Even over the scream of the dropship’s engines, with miniature cyclones of dust fountaining all around him, Kais could hear the unmistakable rattle of burstcannon fire. The multi-barrelled weapon mounted on the nose of the dropship came to life with a hungry buzz, its bright strobefire dazzling him. By the time his disordered thoughts were settled enough to wonder at the weapon’s intended target, all that remained was a ragged cluster of shapes, crumbling and dissolving before his eyes.

  It took Kais long, ugly raik’ans to realise that the red mist hanging in the air was gue’la blood. Somehow he’d expected them to have water pumping through their moist bodies, fuelling their plump, pink muscles and sloshing through their vacuous inner spaces. The vibrancy of their fluids was startling. The bodies slumped awkwardly as the burstcannon shut off, smoke gushing from its barrels, rotations slowing lazily.

  And then the explosions started, and the smoke lifted, and hell opened up before him. The sky was a patchwork of pulsefire and tracer streams, arcing magnificently between unseen ordnance and unseen target. Perfect t’roi-petal detonations rippled open from horizon to horizon, sending out questing tentacles of shrapnel, churning the already frothing air in ranks of airborne metal and fire. A phalanx of Barracudas howled overhead, riding the storm of smoke and chaos; a tawny blur of pastel and black against the overcast pall. Enemy fighters gusted after them, weapons chattering.

  Kais absorbed it all in stunned fascination, oblivious to the fire warriors sprinting past him. A voice in his head snapped him to attention sharply.

  “All hands clear,” it barked. “Secure the area and advance into the trenches.”

  Kais glanced around, surprised to find himself alone. His comrades’ armoured forms melted through the haze, pulling away from the hovering vessel towards the cover of the trenches. A second dropship, similarly poised, was settling nearby, no doubt preparing to disgorge its own cargo of troopers.

  Kais focused on a pair of his comrades and stumbled after them, mind still reeling. Gunfire fought with the howl of the shuttle engines, jostling for his attention. The bright flash-flare of distant airstrikes patterned him with light and shadow, thick mushrooms of smoke pillaring upwards above the walls of the trench. On every side the mangled crudity of gue’la engineering affronted his eyes: haphazard bridges crisscrossing the channels with buckling scaffold struts, half-crumbled pillboxes overlooking each meandering twist in the sandbag corridors.

  It was madness, and he gagged to find himself at its centre.

  The two warriors sprinted ahead before he could catch them up, ducking beneath a wide platform that straddled the trench. Kais recognised the squat physique of the shas’la on point: a female named Keth’rit who had trained with him on T’au. The other he didn’t know.

  The pair stepped around the nearest corner and flew apart, las-fire knocking ugly chunks from their armour.

  Keth’rit’s head jolted backwards with a snap, a pale jet of cyan blood hanging limpid in the air before scrawling itself across the trench wall. The other trooper fragmented at the limbs and neck as his chest absorbed a volley, slumping in a fractured heap.

  Kais’ momentum carried him on, too astonished by his comrades’ strangled death throes to even think. By the time something approaching reality assembled itself in his mind it was too late to stop, too late to regret the rashness of the assault, too late to recite the Sio’t mediation of the Shas’len’ra—the Cautious Warrior. His legs betrayed him, carrying him past Keth’rit’s jerking form and into the path of whatever had killed her. The scent of her blood was overpowering.

  He dropped a knee to the floor, operating on instinct, panicked and automatic actions taken without a thought passing his mind. Grit and fabric exploded from the sandbag wall at his back, las-blasts at head height harmlessly shredding the air above him. He raised the rifle, isolating a shape from the swirling mélange of visual madness, and squeezed the trigger. Something shrieked and crumpled to the ground, legs kicking and flailing dumbly.

  Kais watched the gue’la for a long time, wishing it would realise it was dead.

  Kor’vre Rann T’pell, ensconced within the comfortable confines of the second shuttle’s cockpit, nodded in satisfaction at the sensor displays. Glancing at the concave grid of viewscreens before her, she noted that her sister vessel had finished deploying its cargo of fire warriors and was beginning to lift clear. Nodding, she finalised her smooth descent with practiced ease and tapped at a control, remotely informing the deck office
r that disembarkation could begin.

  The controls before her could hardly be more intuitive: finely balanced level gauges, pitch and roll tracker spheres, directional touchpads on hovering drones, all within easy reach of her slender arms, themselves a physical trait common to all the spaceborn tau of the air caste. It was a design of perfect ergonomic arrangement, a symbiosis of pilot and vessel, and she never failed to spare a respectful thought for whatever earth caste fio’el had designed it.

  “The doors are open, Kor’vre,” her kor’ui assistant trilled, concentrating hard on regulating the hover thrusters.

  T’pell clucked her tongue in acknowledgement, daring to relax her tense muscles. Thus far the troop deployment had been a complete success.

  As if overhearing her thoughts, the dropship’s AI chimed in with a sonorous announcement. “General alert,” it warned, voice lifeless and cold. “Enemy ordnance seeking lock. Gridzone 3-5-2.”

  T’pell hissed and forced herself to remain calm, fixing her eyes upon the appropriate viewscreen. Sure enough, a lumbering vehicle on dust-choked tracks, venting clouds of smoke, lurched along the rim of a nearby trench and swivelled its turret inexorably in her direction. T’pell stabbed at the burstcannon auto-track control and held her breath.

  The two weapons fired together.

  For the briefest fraction of a raik’an, T’pell was convinced she could see the artillery shell ripping through the air towards her. Then the dropship shuddered, the viewscreens flickered to darkness, and everything turned to fire.

  * * *

  Kais was retracing his steps, intent upon regrouping with others from his cadre, when he spotted the tank. It squatted on the bank above the trench enormously, gunmetal flanks as chipped and stained as any of the gue’la technology he’d seen thus far. Glaring at it from below with a cynical eye, he doubted the vehicle’s efficacy as a threat to his comrades. He was quickly forced to reassess.

  The cannon fired, its roar shuddering through the air and lifting a layer of dust and sand from the trench floor.

  Like an angry creature spasming its muscles to shed the parasites infecting its skin, the ground clenched and shuddered. Something nearby detonated, and Kais lost his footing at the rush of shockwaves that followed. Scrabbling in the sand, he dragged his gaze painfully towards the end of the trench, where boiling gouts of smoke and dust lurched skywards. One of the dropships had been hit, toroq-side engine blown to shreds.

  The comm erupted in shouts and screams and the world went white.

  Burstcannon pulses punched craters in the trenchwalls around Kais, knocking lumps of molten metal from the gue’la tank above his head and sending him scrabbling for cover. The tank rolled onwards in spite of the firestorm, attempting to negotiate the bridge that spanned the trench.

  “…econd dropsh… oing dow—”

  “…ear the site! Get to c—”

  Trailing a plume of superheated fuel, continuing to spit a hail of pulsefire at the tank even as it foundered, the dropship hit the ground and dragged itself in an ugly arc. Dust churned upwards, obliterating the shrieks from the communicator and blocking Kais’ view. The last thing he saw was the other shuttle, the one he’d been deployed from, pulling away to the left as its dying sister-vessel gyrated in a fiery circle, heaving smoke and flame into the dust storm.

  Shredded by the burstcannon, the scaffold bridge collapsed.

  Spewing its mechanical innards, venting fire from the wounds all over its hull, the gue’la tank nosedived into the trench in a cascade of rock and oil, dragging with it the ruined skeleton of the bridge. The trench walls crumbled, smearing themselves across the devastation.

  Scrabbling clear of the tumbling wreckage, Kais thought of the gue’la trapped inside the vehicle, wounded and baking, wondering why the access hatch wouldn’t open, slowly suffocating in the dark. Guiltily, aware of the untaulike sentiment of it, he thought: Good.

  Rising up beyond the wreckage, thrusters faltering, the remaining dropship wobbled into the sky.

  “General address!” his comm announced, startling him. “This is El’Lusha. The drop site is no longer safe! All troopers regroup! I’m sending new coordinates now. Make your way to the pick-up site and await further instructions.”

  Kais felt panic gripping him, glancing around in the futile hopes of spotting other shas’las. “El’Lusha,” he transmitted, voice growing faster and louder as his terror betrayed him, “t-this is La’Kais. I don’t think I can regroup… The… the trench is blocked—I can’t see any of the others! I don’t know wh—”

  “La’Kais.” The voice was maddeningly calm, a leaden slab that arrested his panic before it consumed him. “La’Kais, you must focus.”

  He forced himself to breathe, grinding his teeth together until the horror subsided. He hung his head, ashamed of himself. “My apologies, Shas’el.”

  “Listen to me: the rest of the cadre is scattered on the other side of the dropsite. They’re regrouping, but they’re too far clear of your position…”

  “Shas’el? I-I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry, La’Kais. You’ll have to advance to the extraction point alone.”

  “T-there aren’t any others?” His voice was quiet, not ready to believe itself. Without even thinking, his hand clutched for the shape of the display wafer in his belt pouch.

  “None, Shas’la,” came Lusha’s grave reply. “They’re making their own way.”

  “I’m alone, then…” he murmured, more to himself than his commander.

  “No, Shas’la. Not alone. No tau ever is—you know that.”

  Kais breathed deep, unable to find any comfort in Lusha’s words.

  The disembodied voice continued with a sigh. “You should be receiving those co-ordinates now.” A row of characters blinked to life in the corner of his HUD. He stared at them morosely, aware of the distance involved.

  “You can do this, Kais.”

  He watched the ship clamber into the smoke, suspecting that with it went his hopes of survival.

  “Yes, Shas’el.”

  Nico Junz was scared. He didn’t mind admitting it. Being a coward was something he’d learned to live with long ago, refining it into a virtual art form. Now he relied upon his innate sense of terror to keep him alive.

  That was the principle, at any rate.

  He’d flourished amongst the grunts of the 19th Glamorgian regiment thanks wholly to his literacy. His weapon skills were negligible and any one of his comrades could, had they wanted to, pound him into the ground. But could any of them compose letters to their families, or read prayers to pass the time on guard duty? Could any of them make equipment manifestos or help the captain administer the armoury? Of course not. Being a coward was one thing, but being a useful coward was entirely another. Life, if not good, was at least easy.

  And then, arcing out of the morning sky like a hail of meteors, the tau had come.

  Suddenly nobody had the time to write letters, the captain was too busy shouting orders and killing things to worry about expenses, and the armoury, as of fifteen minutes ago, was a smoking crater. So yes, he was scared. Scared and, even worse, completely and utterly useless.

  The ceiling of the tight bunker, empty but for Nico, Captain Reicz and a communications servitor, vibrated in response to some explosion outside, dust misting downwards. Nico whimpered under his breath.

  “Quiet,” Reicz snorted, turning back to lean over the servitor’s shoulder. Nico, pressed against a wall in an attempt to remain clear of the captain’s fraying temper, regarded the ghoulish thing with a shudder. Once a living human, now its dead features were riddled with mechanical apparatus and twitching components, logic engines replacing its cauterised brain. Its necrotic flesh tightened in concentration as it listened to the comm-feed from the sensor array on the bunker’s roof.

  “T’au transmission intercepted…” it hissed, dead eyes long since rotted away and replaced by glowing optics. “Attempting to translate now…”

 
Its myriad fingers, branching horrendously from every part of its hands and wrists, began manipulating the gears and clattering logic devices on the console before it, every now and again pausing to tilt its head at some particularly hard-to-translate phrase. Reicz bent over it, watching the flickering display screen as the garbled message was deciphered. Nico felt himself creeping nearer, intrigued despite himself.

  “Bastards…” the captain breathed, dismayed by the message. “Sneaky alien bastards…”

  Nico had just spotted the words “deception” and “delay” from amongst the glowing text when something clattered loudly on the rockcrete above his head, then roared like a hundred thunderstorms. The whole bunker shook.

  Nico dived to the ground with a shriek, curling in a whimpering ball as the ceiling splintered and dust rained down from above. Reicz regarded the damage with rather more decorum, angrily glaring upwards. As if mewling for his attention, the console whined painfully, then shut down with a protracted hiss. The screen flickered and went black.

  “What happened?” Reicz demanded.

  The servitor twitched and chattered, eyebrows dipped in confusion. “Comm link severed…” it reported helplessly. “External channels dead.”

  “Sir?” Nico quailed, pulling himself upright with helpful eagerness. “What’s wr—”

  “They bombed us!” he roared furiously, hunting for someone to vent his anger at. He grabbed Nico’s lapels and bellowed into his face. “The bastards knocked out our comms, you idiot!”

  Nico cringed. “Helpful” was clearly not a wise career move. The captain dropped him and scratched his chin, furious.

  “I need a line to Command!”

  The servitor shook its head with a vacant rattle. Reicz’s lip curled.

  “You,” he snarled. Nico looked up and found a gloved finger aimed at his face. “M-me?”

  “Get to the command post. Tell them I know what the xenos are doing.”