A hail of las-bolts spattered the machine from the side, knocking it off kilter and exposing its vulnerable underbelly. Careening wildly through the air, the drone raked the ground with plasma, shredding two of the unconscious Konquistadores. Someone roared in fury and fresh las-fire ripped into the saucer’s belly. One of its carbines exploded, taking the other with it and spinning the machine out of control. Gushing smoke and burbling in distress it retreated, losing altitude as it limped towards the trees, but Iverson was already on his feet and charging. Leaping, he swung the shock maul down on the drone, smashing it towards the ground. It tried to rise and he struck again and again, elevated by a hatred untainted by doubt.
The machine exploded.
Iverson was thrown from his feet. Falling for what felt like forever he watched a ragged arm spiralling towards the sky, its hand still clenching a shock maul. It was awful and absurd, but suddenly he was laughing and someone else was laughing along with him. He glanced across the clearing and saw Cabeza. The cadaverous Konquistadore was on his knees, cackling through a mask of mud and blood. His lasrifle was levelled at the wrecked drone.
Cabeza didn’t know why he’d thrown in with the commissar at the end. He’d already turned his back on the Imperium to sign up with the enemy in the hope of a better deal. He wouldn’t be the first Guardsman to do it, nor the last, so why make a bad move now? What could Iverson offer him except more pain and maybe a quick death? Even for a commissar the man was crazy! Just look at him lying there with his arm torn off at the elbow and laughing like it was the best joke in the Imperium. Crazy! Except Cabeza was laughing right along with him so maybe he was crazy too. And maybe that was all there was to it.
‘For the bloody God-Emperor!’ Cabeza cackled through the last of his broken teeth. Then a drone soared down behind him and his chest erupted in a superheated geyser of flesh and blood. Looking down at the sizzling cavity in his chest he frowned, thinking a full-grown mirewyrm could swim right through there. It was a miracle his torso was still holding things together.
But then it wasn’t.
As Cabeza’s corpse collapsed inwards like a slaughterhouse of cards the second drone flashed past, homing in on Iverson. Biting down on the sudden agony of his ruined arm, he rolled to his knees. His laspistol was gone, lost somewhere in the fall. It wouldn’t have stopped the machine, but it would have given him a stand. Hadn’t Bierce taught him that a stand was all that mattered in the final accounting?
But hadn’t he stopped believing that long ago?
And if he’d stopped believing it, why was he still fighting? Maybe because Bierce was standing at the edge of the clearing, hands clasped behind his back in that parade ground rigor, watching and judging his pupil until the bitter end.
The drone swept past and began to circle him, chattering and chirping as two more descended to join its dance. The machines seemed to grow more alert and aware in numbers, almost as if they were parts of a collective mind coming together. Maybe it was just a delusion, but Iverson could have sworn there was real anger in that mind. He’d destroyed one of its components and it wanted revenge. And so the drones were playing with him, enjoying his hopeless, one-armed struggle against the coral, mocking his determination to die on his feet. He could almost taste their hatred. Wasn’t that why the Imperium shunned such technology? Didn’t the Ecclesiarchy preach that thinking machines loathed the living and would ultimately turn on their creators? Mankind had learned that hard truth to its cost long ago, but the blueskin race was still reckless with youth. Perhaps that would be its downfall. As the drones circled him Iverson took comfort in the thought.
The machine chatter rose to a higher pitch and he steeled himself for death, but abruptly the drones fell silent and drifted back a few paces. To Iverson’s eyes they looked reluctant and sullen, like angry dogs leashed by their masters. And as the dogs withdrew the masters emerged.
They crept from the trees in a low crouch, their stubby carbines sweeping from side to side as they advanced, hugging the coral with a bone-deep distrust of open ground. There were five, lightly armoured in mottled black breastplates and rubberised fatigues. Their long helmets arched over their shoulders, giving them a vaguely crustacean look, the strangeness heightened by the crystal sensors embedded in their otherwise blank faceplates. Iverson recognised them at once: pathfinders, the scouts of the tau race.
Despite their hunched postures the warriors were swift and graceful, fanning out to surround him with the perfect coordination of bonded hunters. Slipping on the coral yet again, Iverson abandoned dignity and faced them on his knees. He could see Bierce lurking at the periphery of his vision, demanding some final caustic rhetoric from his protégé, but Iverson had nothing to say. Glaring at the pathfinders, he noticed one of them was quite different to its companions – shorter and slighter of build, the set of its shoulders subtly wrong. The only one with hooves… Iverson’s eyes narrowed as the truth hit him: the odd-one-out was the genuine article.
Under that loathsome xenos armour all the others are human!
The lone alien stepped forward and dropped to its haunches, bringing its impassive crystal lenses level with his face. There was a crimson slash running along the spine of its helmet, identifying it as the leader, but Iverson was drawn to another mark – a deep crack running from its crown to the chin of its faceplate. The damage had been patched up, but the rippled scar of a chainsword was unmistakeable to a commissar.
‘Your face,’ he breathed. ‘Show me.’ The warrior tilted its head quizzically at the challenge. ‘Or are you afraid?’
‘Be watchful, shas’ui.’ It was one of the traitors, his voice surprisingly crisp through his sealed helmet. ‘This one is of the commissar caste. Even wounded this one will not yield.’
The studied formality of the traitor’s words disgusted Iverson, particularly the way he’d spoken that unclean xenos rank, ‘shas’ui’, with such reverence. These traitors weren’t just mercenaries or cowards looking for a way out – they were true believers.
The shas’ui considered Iverson for a moment, then it began to unclip its helmet, its four-fingered hands nimble as they uncoupled the power feed and flicked an array of seals. Throughout the ritual its cluster of crystal eyes remained fixed on him, unwavering until the helmet was swept away and he saw the face of his enemy.
Even for an alien it was ugly. It leathery blue-grey skin was tinged with yellow and pockmarked with insect bites. A rash of boils ran from its neck to cluster around a topknot of greasy black hair, but its most startling feature was the ruination left by the chainsword. A deep rift had been carved into the right side of its face, running from scalp to jaw, mirroring the crack in its helmet. It was an old wound, but still hideous. A bionic sensor glittered from the scabrous mess where its eye had been and the whole jaw had been replaced with a carved prosthetic. The remaining eye, black and lustreless, regarded the commissar inscrutably. For all its mutilated strangeness the creature was recognisably female. She was the first tau Iverson had seen up close and whatever he’d expected it wasn’t this filthy, disfigured veteran.
You’re even uglier than me. It was such an absurd, irrelevant thought that he almost laughed out loud.
‘Ko’miz’ar.’ The word sounded unfamiliar on the creature’s lips, but he sensed it had faced his kind before… and had the scar to show for it. ‘Ko’miz’ar…’ It was an accusation ripe with hatred.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
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FOOTNOTES
[1] Tau skin shades actually vary as much as human ones, though the majority appear somewhere in a range between pale grey and an even paler cerulean, a result of the role cobalt seems to play in their metabolism. Anyone interested in the physiological details can find more than they would ever wish to know in Magos Gandermak’s pioneering paper Some Preliminary Conclusions Concerning the Haematology of the Tau, Imperial Journal of Xenobiology, Vol. MMMCCXXIX, Number 8897, pp 346 - 892, Rasmussen’s Tentative Results of the Analysis of Tau Haemoglobin Free of Obvious Methodological Errors, Vol. MMMCCXXIX, Number 8899, pp 473 - 857, and the ensuing century and a half of increasingly acrimonious correspondence with the editor.
[2] Though their relative positions in the somewhat tangled skeins of military protocol precluded anything as firm as out and out friendship, their relationship was somewhat warmer than Cain’s words might imply; particularly by this point, in the last decade of the millennium, only five years from Cain’s official and frequently interrupted retirement. They socialised as frequently as possible given the pressing nature of their respective duties, and undoubtedly enjoyed one another’s company on such occasions.
[3] An Imperial Guard staging world, where many of the campaigns Cain was involved in over the course of his career were planned and the forces for them assembled.
[4] In fact most of the orbitals were still substantially intact, but the amount of debris around them made docking a starship problematic at best.
[5] Despite Cain’s clear cynicism, that is indeed how the tau themselves refer to their larger capital ships, which combine as much cargo space as a dedicated Imperial troop transport with the firepower of a battleship. An uncomfortable combination in planetary assaults, to say the least, although, as the Navy like to say, at least the defenders get to concentrate their fire against fewer targets.
[6] System Defence Fleet.
[7] Because, given Quadravidia’s value to the Imperium as a transport hub, cities on the ground were less important than the orbital docks above them. Which, in turn, meant that they were built beneath the footprints of structures in geostationary orbit which, by definition, were positioned above a point on the equator.
[8] From the aptly-named Settler’s Bane, a planet teeming with inimical life forms among which the tribes of feral orks rate no higher than a minor nuisance.
[9] An opinion shared by a number of later historians, although others assert with equal fervour that under the circumstances Braddick had little choice in the matter: any attempt to counter-attack at that point could just as easily have overstretched the defensive line, breaking it altogether.
[10] Though an Imperial Guard soldier, and therefore obliged by regulation to follow the orders of a superior, Jurgen remained convinced that his position as the personal aide to a commissar was a de facto secondment to the Commissariat itself, removing him entirely from the chain of command, apart from on those occasions when he could see some advantage to being lost within it. Needless to say this was a position Cain was perfectly happy with, and few Guard officers would have been inclined to dispute the point.
[11] A common misapprehension among Imperial citizens, who generally consider the relationship between the kroot, demiurg, and other races incorporated into the Tau Empire, and the tau themselves as something akin to that of the gretchin among orks: slaves or servants to do the dirty work their masters are unwilling to sully their hands with. In fact both the tau and their client races, which, let us not forget,
includes a disturbingly high number of renegade humans, seem to consider them as equals; albeit the tau are clearly a little more equal than any of the others.
[12] Probably a reference to the incident on Adumbria, where malicious accusations by another commissar led to a formal enquiry into Cain’s conduct which, ironically, only added lustre to his reputation.
[13] Not quite true, as the pilot sits in the heavily armoured torso; but given the anthropomorphic design of the tau battlesuit, it’s easy to forget this, and assume it’s up in the head, like the princeps of a miniature Titan.
[14] Literally ‘battlesuit unit fortuitous gale,’ no doubt one of the semi-formal honourific titles tau units acquire to commemorate notable successes on the battlefield.
[15] Completely impossible, of course, as Imperial Guard officers, however senior, don’t have the authority to execute a commissar; although I suppose Cain can be forgiven the impulse to indulge in some obvious wordplay.
[16] Primarily composed of Vostroyan and Harakoni regiments, supplemented by others raised from neighbouring worlds.
[17] A couple due to Cain’s direct, if reluctant, intervention, which no doubt went some way towards explaining the warmth with which the Lord General regarded him.
[18] There are, indeed, few if any instances on record of out and out treachery by the tau in their dealings with other races, although they’re not above a little self-serving confusion about the exact terms of whatever arrangement has been come to.
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