‘They could have crushed you at any time,’ said Karras.
Agga nodded. ‘You’ve already guessed why they did not. Aun’dzi and Commander Coldwave are no fools.’
‘Steel sharpens steel,’ said Copley.
Agga shrugged. ‘We are not much, but better than nothing in the eyes of the fire caste. How bored and indolent they would become without us. How listless and weak.’
‘Here in the north,’ said Karras, ‘you command the Kashtu. What of the Ishtu in the far south?’
‘I am Speaker to them also.’ She glanced sideways at her sleeping son. ‘Another proxy, though that one is unrelated by blood and has a mind of his own when I am not speaking through him.’
‘With that radius of control, could you not have signalled the Imperium for help?’ asked Karras. ‘Astropathic relays at the edge of Imperial space could have brought your call for aid to other planets.’
‘With amplification, I could have. An astropathic tower. There were once two on Tychonis – one in this very city. Both fell to ruin during the assaults of the Tall Ones in the pre-t’au years, deliberately targeted to ensure our world was isolated from support. The knowledge of their repair and operation was lost with those that died in them.’
Copley leaned forward, elbows on her knees. ‘You know that we did not come to help your people, Agga.’
Any trace of good humour fell from Agga’s face. Karras felt her warmth and light melt away. Her aura shifted, brighter colours giving way to muted ones.
‘Tychonis is a fringe world,’ she told Copley. ‘Even in the days before the Dragon’s Eye erupted and cut us off, it was barely worth notice to the rest of the Imperium. You came for the woman, Epsilon, whose prime futures are shrouded in fate as black as the feathers she wears. You came for her, for her knowledge, and a great many of my beloved people will die before you get it. If you get it.’
Her words hung in the air, heavy and dark.
‘The business of the Ordo Xenos is the business of mankind’s survival as a species,’ said Copley. ‘Our success or failure here has implications for all worlds. We do not ask anything lightly.’
Agga held Copley’s gaze a long moment, then shrugged her narrow, bony shoulders. ‘We are loyal to the God-Emperor, to the Imperium and the creed. And we are proud. We believe in strength and honour. We believe in the teachings of the saints. We live by these. And we honour, of course, the Adeptus Astartes. They are the God-Emperor’s divine will made flesh. And yet, none of this – not one of these things – is the reason I will send my people to face death in service to your mission.’
‘But you will allow it,’ said Copley.
Agga nodded. Karras saw the warmer colours reemerge in her aura.
‘Then why, Agga?’ he asked.
The old woman smiled up at him, eyes shining like black gems, then leaned forward and picked up a date from the plate before her.
Twenty-one
Copley was done.
Two days it had taken her to go through every bit of rebel intel. The Speaker had helped her make sense of it all, filling in any blanks where she could. For a withered old woman, Agga was mono-blade sharp. Her good humour made heavy work seem light. The time flew. Despite herself, Copley had started to like her.
It was easy to respect Agga for what she’d managed here, keeping these people together, committed to what was, more or less, a truly hopeless fight.
Not that liking her helped anyone.
As Copley took pains to remind herself, Shadowbreaker was all that mattered here.
During the two days she’d been immersed in data, the operators of Task Force Arcturus had been assessing the rebel fighters, their materiel, their organisation.
Then they had set about training them.
The rebels had been eager and quick to learn. They were already solid at close range. A few intense sessions with the Elysians quickly improved their mid- and long-range abilities too, to the extent that time and resources allowed.
Arcturus was well practised at bringing up the skills of locals in short order.
Talon Squad, though, had kept their distance. The Space Marines were rarely seen among the rebels. Whenever they did make an appearance, the Kashtu fell to one knee, heads bowed, or simply froze up and stared. Better that the armoured giants remained aloof.
Now, though, with all the knowledge she needed, the moment had come for Copley to assemble her key people.
Karras arrived in the makeshift Strategium to find the other members of the kill-team, with the exception of Chyron, already assembled around a bright, pulsing hololithic table. It was military grade, a well-preserved remnant from the days when this world still had a standing Planetary Defence Force. The massive Lamenter, too large to enter, was attending remotely via pict feed from Voss’ helm.
Copley’s sergeants were in attendance – her second-in-command, Vyggs, plus Morant and Grigolicz. So, too, were ranking war-band leaders, including Kainis and Touric.
The major looked up as Karras strode in and nodded a greeting. The Speaker, too – or rather, the false Speaker – bowed his head in welcome. Karras looked for the man’s mother, his puppeteer, but she was present only through her proxy. Of all those in the room, only Copley and Karras knew that the man in the headdress and robes at the table’s controls was not the real leader of the tribes.
With deft fingers, that man now punched a series of runes in the holo-table’s control surface. Intersecting prisms of light cast glowing shapes in the air that quickly rezzed themselves into a highly detailed model of Tychonis and its moons.
Fingers flickered over yet more runes, and the projection zoomed in on a broad swathe of the planet’s surface – a rectangular section of the equatorial region a thousand kilometres across. This projection rotated until it lay horizontal like a traditional map. The peaks, ridges and valleys were still rendered in exquisite three-dimensional detail.
‘There are Militarum commanders who would kill to acquire one as fine as this,’ said Sergeant Vyggs.
‘How recent are the scans?’ asked Rauth. ‘Is this old geographical data?’
‘Among the haddayin are a scant few who specialise in the stealing of t’au data,’ said Kainis. ‘Before he ceased to function, Enginseer Zagorian, the last of the tech-adepts on Tychonis, wrote a machine prayer capable of converting stolen data for our use with this table. This scan is a year old, but the haddayin tell us little, if anything, has changed.’
Zeed gestured at the currently magnified section. ‘What exactly are we looking at?’
‘Speaker?’ said Copley.
Agga’s son bowed politely and gestured at the hololith. ‘This is a geoscan of the Hakkar. It’s a region to the south of the Western Capital. As you can see, the area is riddled with deep canyons. We call this canyon complex Urq Gar – the Scarring of Urq – and it was once a site of holy pilgrimage. Here it was that Saint Isara found the lost temple. The t’au have another name for it.’
‘What’s our interest in the region?’ asked Voss.
The hololith spun and expanded, zooming in, distant features becoming clear. It was a dry, desolate place, formed by ancient tectonic trauma, the scars of which were the gorges and deep crevasses that marred the land. The hololithic view continued to magnify, then to descend, a dive that took it to the floor of the widest of the canyons. Those around the tables watched as countless cave mouths and strange sandstorm-carved rock formations whipped past. The view opened out on a large oval valley, and Karras saw at once why this area was of note.
In the centre of the valley sat a high-walled complex, fortified to withstand assault.
‘Looks like a containment facility,’ said Sergeant Morant.
‘A prison,’ said Rauth from Karras’ left. ‘But not alien. That’s Imperial architecture.’
‘Right,’ agreed Voss. ‘The basic structure is Im
perial. It looks like the t’au made a few additions.’ He pointed to several installations atop the towers and walls – t’au defensive emplacements, characteristically rounded and smooth. The rock walls on which they sat were angular and rough, made of tan-coloured stone.
‘It was once the planet’s largest and most secure penitentiary,’ said the false Speaker, ‘built far from the cities so that the families of the guilty would not be able to visit them. It was called Alel a Tarag – the Tower of the Forgotten. Or simply Alel. The Tower. The Civitas Enforcers and Judges of the Adeptus Arbites sent many people there over the centuries. It was not a place from which one returned.’
‘And now?’ asked Karras.
‘Now,’ said the tribal figurehead, gaze hardening, ‘it is loyal Kashtu and Ishtu who are imprisoned within. There are others, too, what the t’au call the rauk’na – those of their kind that resist the Greater Good. The blue-skins have been using it since their usurpation. For long years, we tried to get our haddayin inside. Eventually, we managed.’
‘You have an asset placed within the facility?’ asked Karras.
‘A doctor of medicine,’ said Copley.
‘The t’au overseer at the Tower was concerned about the spread of disease among human inmates,’ Agga said through her son. ‘Since his appointment to the Tower medicae staff seven years ago, our man has managed to provide a good amount of intel.’
‘Such as?’ said Rauth.
The false Speaker glanced across at him, then back to the structure rendered in hololithic light. ‘We have part of the layout, mostly the central block and north containment wing. We know that over three hundred human prisoners are currently kept there. Some are Kashtu like us, but just as many are Ishtu from the south. All show signs of torture. No matter how civilised and reasonable the words of the t’au ethereal appear, the reality of his regime lies just below the surface. The truth of the Greater Good is like a thin layer of paint over rusting metal. It takes but a fingernail to scratch it and reveal the foul nature of the xenos.’
‘What else do we know?’ asked Solarion.
It was Copley who answered. ‘The latest update from the doctor arrived six days ago. In it, he relates that Commander Coldwave returned from the capital with several fully loaded transports. Within the transports were dozens of t’au criminals and dissidents, all chained at neck and wrists. No humans. A dozen of them were not taken directly to the south block as they would normally be.’
‘Then where?’ asked Rauth.
‘It seems they were taken below ground. Somewhere under the central operations block.’
‘Before the coming of your Epsilon, the rauk’na were only ever brought here in twos or threes,’ said the false Speaker. ‘Most were kept in city prisons.’
A ripple of intensity ran through the Space Marines around the table.
‘She’s there,’ said Solarion. ‘Could you have seen that, Scholar?’
‘I told you already, the woman is protected from psychic tracking. Do you really think one of Sigma’s peers would be so easy to find?’
The Ultramarine snorted.
‘The Tower has always been hard to penetrate with astral sight,’ said Agga’s proxy. ‘It once counted psykers among its inmates. There were wards in place. But, since shortly after Epsilon was sighted at Kurdiza, it has been even more difficult to survey.’
Over the vox, Chyron rumbled, ‘Is there anything else to support this?’
‘The doctor believes he heard t’au guards discussing her bodyguards,’ said Copley. ‘Specifically, their smell.’
‘Their smell?’ echoed Zeed.
Copley grinned. ‘With respect, the scent of an Adeptus Astartes is very… distinctive.’
‘She’s telling you to take a bath, paper-face,’ laughed Voss.
Zeed almost got a retort off, but Karras cut in. ‘The t’au have a highly sensitive olfactory sense, like a guard dog’s.’ He looked at Copley. ‘That could be a problem for us going in.’
Copley shook her head. ‘Not if you wear your helms. Ordo stealth enhancements to your armour suppress scent traces. Epsilon’s bodyguards will have had their helms off as they moved among the t’au.’
‘In any case,’ said Rauth, ‘it’s clear that we have to hit Alel a Tarag. And fast, before things change.’
‘I’ve been here far too long already without a foe to kill,’ said Zeed.
‘Do we know what she’s doing there exactly?’ asked Karras.
‘She’s clearly no prisoner,’ said Copley. ‘At least, not in the sense of others there.’
‘We know she is involved in some kind of activity in the subterranean levels of the central block,’ said the Speaker. ‘The doctor has seen her twice only. Both times, she was entering restricted vators that lead to lower levels. Both times, she was in the company of armed fire warriors and her two Space Marines.’
‘She had a full kill-team,’ said Solarion. ‘Where are the others?’
Copley shook her head. ‘We have to consider that she may not want to be extracted. She may resist.’
They all processed that silently for a moment.
‘What she wants is irrelevant,’ said Karras at last. ‘We have orders. The Ordo Xenos is calling her back in.’
‘Getting in and out of there doesn’t look like a very easy proposition,’ said Voss. ‘Look here. And here. This whole facility is as much a military base now as it ever was a prison. These towers on the encircling blast walls all have anti-air defences. These structures here are almost definitely fire caste barracks. That’s an armoury, there. Given the size, I’d expect problematic hardware inside.’
Zeed leaned forward and gestured to another area. ‘These are training grounds. See? This is a firing range. These are combat training areas. It looks like this rooftop here is built to handle small-to-medium-sized aircraft. Nothing bigger than a light transport, but it will be an issue if they have reinforcements within fast-response range.’
‘Significant entrenched assets,’ said Solarion, ‘a difficult and very limited approach by air, potential enemy reinforcement during the op and far too many unknowns… This is damned little to work with. Gaining and maintaining situational control will be a tall order from the start.’
‘MSRs?’ asked Rauth.
The Speaker looked at him quizzically.
‘Main supply routes,’ explained Copley. Turning back to Rauth, she said, ‘A single road running north-west and another running south-east. Both depend on several bridges to cross the canyon network on the way in to the Tower.’
‘Some good news, at least,’ grunted Solarion. ‘Blow the bridges and we can at least isolate the facility from ground-based support.’
Copley nodded to Kainis and said, ‘A chance for the Kashtu fighters to aid in the attack.’
Kainis and the other war-band leaders, each sporting a thick black beard and facial tattoos, all looked at their prophet-leader simultaneously.
The false Speaker smiled at them. ‘A chance for our warriors to earn great honour and strike against the blue-skins openly. How could we refuse?’
White smiles cracked those typically dour faces, teeth shining against the black of their beards.
‘We will hit them hard,’ insisted one called Garum, ‘and soak the sands blue.’
Karras shook his head. ‘Under cover of stealth, you will rig their bridges and blow them. After that, if you must engage their infantry for your own satisfaction, you may do as you wish. Not before. Is that clear?’
The rebel leaders were not used to being addressed so, but this was a Space Marine. They bowed and, in obedient tones, replied, ‘As you will it, resh’vah.’
The false Speaker spoke next. ‘Alel a Tarag has never been attacked. The t’au charged with defending the bridges and patrolling the local area will have become complacent. I know my people can cut off those r
outes. Reinforcements by air, however, I cannot comment on.’
‘We’ll handle that if it comes up,’ said Karras.
‘If Epsilon were on the move,’ said Solarion, ‘it would be a damned sight easier to hit a convoy.’
‘I concur,’ said Voss.
Copley shook her head. ‘We can’t sit and wait for that. Our orders were clear. Locate and extract her as soon as possible. As far as we know, they still have no idea we’re here. We need to go hard while that’s still true. Situation superiority.’
‘Getting in there unseen will be the first test,’ said Karras. ‘Just how do you plan to achieve it, major? Darkness means little to t’au battlesuits. Camouflaged or not, there’s only one viable approach to the valley – right along the canyon. The turret defences studding the walls will be AI controlled. They don’t feel fatigue. They never sleep. Even stealthed, our Stormravens will be detected with plenty of time for them to fire on us. If there’s no backdoor, no way to strip those defences before an air approach…’
No one disagreed. Special forces doctrine depended on maintaining situational advantage for as long as possible. The smaller force had to keep things stacked in their favour, by any means available. There had to be something… something that would assure them at least a chance.
Having heard Karras out, the false Speaker nodded to one of the bodyguards at his side. The man moved off at once, leaving the Strategium via a door in the rear wall.
Zeed threw a quizzical look at Karras, but before Karras could offer any response, the door slid open again and the bodyguard returned, followed by a shrunken, half-lame old man with a carved wooden crutch.
Those assembled watched with varying levels of patience as the old man shuffled towards the hololithic table. When he stopped, leaning on his crutch to support himself, he was breathing hard. Still, he managed to bow his head and, with all the reverence he could muster, say, ‘My lords. It is truly the greatest honour…’
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