by Various
‘I am greatly contrite, my commander,’ said Shas’vre Drai. A deactivation wave crackled across his battlesuit as his truelight appearance was slowly revealed.
‘I assume there is some report you needed to make in person,’ said Shadowsun, ‘or did you disturb my meditations purely to remind me that you have no sense of timing?’
‘There are… developments, my commander.’
‘Go on.’
‘During active reconnaissance, my optimised stealth group… we located the gue’ron’sha outside one of the principal dwelling-peaks. It appears they had searched the metropolis they designated as “Hive City”, hoping to neutralise the water caste operative within. Once they had emerged and revealed their presence by destroying the kroot salvage operation outside Agrellan Prime, we were able to get close enough to hear them talk of their plans.’
‘Excellent,’ said Shadowsun. ‘Transmit them immediately.’
Shas’vre Drai paused for a second before continuing. ‘Of course, my commander. In summary, they have determined you to be the primary threat. They intend to locate you and neutralise you via the means of decapitation.’
Nearby Oe-hei and Oe-nu buzzed in alarm, circling each other in agitation.
‘I see,’ said Shadowsun. ‘Yes, I imagine death by decapitation would affect my ability to prosecute the war.’
‘Be assured I will not allow this to occur, my commander. My life is your shield.’
‘That is kind, Shas’vre Drai. Yet it seems the most efficient way to force these gue’ron’sha into committing a fatal mistake would be to offer myself as bait.’
‘I… I cannot allow that, my commander,’ replied Drai. ‘I shall go in your stead.’
‘You and I shall do exactly what the tau empire requires of us, Shas’vre,’ said Shadowsun, her tone authoritarian. ‘Even if it means killing everything we can find, or the demise of every tau life on the planet.’
‘Of course, my commander,’ replied Drai, chastened. ‘For the Greater Good.’
Those tau with advanced sensor suites heard it first, a distant roar that shook fine black shale from the high ridge above. Two dots appeared on the horizon, closing fast.
‘Enact,’ transmitted Commander Shadowsun. In the shadow of the ridge behind her, a squadron of Sun Shark bombers took off into the air.
The white-hulled Thunderhawk gunships of the gue’ron’sha arrowed towards their position at breakneck pace, each trailed by smaller escort craft. Shadowsun had predicted their presence – indeed, made herself a visible target in order to invite it. For all the ridiculous superstition and ritual that bound the Imperium’s earth caste equivalent, they were clearly capable enough to effect complex repairs. The gunship with the ridiculously long barrel atop it should not have been flight capable at all.
Something churned in her chest, a desire to see the great engines brought low and smashed to pieces in the dust. She frowned, confusion bleeding into the cold certainty of her battle plan. Such emotion before an engagement was… untoward.
‘- - - KILL - - - KILL THEM ALL - - - BATHE IN THEIR BLOOD - - -’ spooled the autotrans.
She shuddered, aware of her skin brushing the inside of her battlesuit as the words rang around her head. She blink-pushed the translation ware off, but the strangely compelling whispers remained at the forefront of her thoughts. Perhaps it was because there was a part of her that wished to resolve things in as quick and as deadly a fashion as possible. Maybe that was how it felt before the initiation of a Mont’ka strategy. Perhaps… perhaps that was how the Traitor Shoh felt inside, all the time.
Shadowsun did understand – intellectually, at least – that the raw aggression and pitiless violence of the Mont’ka had its uses. But of the two macrostrategies, the Kauyon was unquestionably the most efficient way. She would prove it here, as the enemy gunships roared into the jaws of her trap. Just as she always did.
The enemy gunships were seconds away now, at most. Out from the blind edge of the giant ridge where they had exposed their position came two squadrons of Sun Shark bombers, their elegant tan hulls flying with the sun behind their tails. Paradox squadrons, their underslung bomb arrays fitted not with the plasma-based pulse bombs standard to their kind, but unstable stasis fields that could introduce a glitch into the timestream itself. Dangerous, thought Shadowsun, but extremely effective.
The Imperial gunships loosed a salvo of missiles towards the tau out in the open, the dull thump of detonations blasting Crisis battlesuits across the wastes in showers of black shale. Intent on their prey on the plain beneath the ridge, the gunships did not notice the Paradox squadrons converging on their position. Shadowsun watched intently as her bombers cut an intercept course, dropping localised stasis anomalies towards the enemy craft.
There was a flare of eye-watering unlight for a second, and the fabric of space-time bulged around the Imperial gunships. For a second the giant aircraft froze, the angry bellow of their engines stuttering in and out of existence. Then, as the bubble of time that had encapsulated them popped, all four of the aircraft roared over the top of the ridge, missing it by metres and ploughing nose-first into the hard, cracked earth.
Her blood pulsing with excitement, Shadowsun boosted upward to see the destruction her trap had wrought. A dozen battlesuits and a score of drones escorted her, hovering forward with all weapons systems primed.
The Thunderhawks lay at the end of the two great furrows they had ploughed in the earth. Their fuselages jutted at awkward angles, wings torn from their frames and fires licking across their thick hulls.
‘Circle to the front, a hundred metres berth at all times,’ transmitted Shadowsun. ‘If anything somehow staggers out of there, I want it dead before it has taken two paces towards us.’
Golden signals of assent blipped across her command suite, the deadliest weaponry in the cadre’s arsenal primed and ready for the kill.
As Shadowsun completed the half-circle that brought her to the front of the Thunderhawks, she heard a dull hiss. A white-edged circle glowed wide in the middle of the giant jaws jutting from the front of each gunship, reducing the mighty drawbridges to molten rain.
There was a throaty growl of bike engines followed by a whooping, ululating war cry. Bolters blazing, their blades and their voices raised, the steedmasters of Chogoris roared out from the darkness and plunged into the tau lines.
Bare-headed, bloodied and bruised, the White Scars hurtled out of the Spear’s melta-cut door. Kor’sarro Khan himself led the charge, with his champions Jebe Sabrehand and Djubali Steedborn gunning their steeds’ engines in his wake. Each of the three warriors had a glowing powerblade clutched in one fist and his bike’s handlebar triggers in the other. Staccato bursts of muzzle flare lit their swarthy features from below, each battle-brother snarling or shouting as he channelled the war-lust in his soul.
Behind the trio of leaders came paired squadrons of armoured bikes, two abreast and slewing out fast to open fire with their front-mounted bolters. As they clanked over the fallen jaws of the Thunderhawk, the side doors of the gunship clanged open. More white-armoured Space Marines piled out to add their bolter fire to the fusillade.
The khan could clearly see the xenos cowards that had shot them down. They were maybe two hundred metres away at most, a loose circle of large bipedal warsuits already pulsing plasma at their position. Most of their shots went wide or scorched shale, though a few sizzled into fairings and reinforced wheels. Kor’sarro’s feral smile grew wide. The tau were clearly ill-prepared for a mounted charge, whereas the White Scars were experts at the art of the sudden attack, turning each stolen second into a lethal advantage.
The khan quickly scanned the undulating hillocks and ridges ahead, teeth grinding in anticipation of the beheading to come. Sure enough the xenos witch was there, bracketed by bodyguards and drones. Her snow-white armour was already shimmering to blend with the dark shale u
nderfoot. Kor’sarro gunned the throttle and accelerated towards her, hungry to part her head from her neck.
The volley of firepower from the circle of ochre battlesuits was thickening as the White Scars closed in. Long-barrelled rifles sent thin lozenges of plasma sizzling in the khan’s direction, and the captain ducked down low. A second later his flaring nostrils picked out the stink of scorched hair over the ferroplastic tang of burning bike. His helmet display flicked up two, three, four mortis-runes from the squad behind. No time to look. No time to do anything but charge.
Those coming in fast behind them veered serpent-fast around the tumbling wrecks that had once been proud riders, plumes of shattered shale arcing up from the heavy rear wheels of their bikes. Ahead the tau battlesuits were rising up, the loose scree flattening in circles beneath them as their jetpacks boosted them higher. Their pulse weapons fired quadruple-burst volleys into the massed bikers, and though many blossomed ineffectually from thick ceramite plates, half a dozen kill shots hit home.
And the White Scars were amongst the foe.
The khan stood up in his saddle and brought Moonfang around in a high loop that severed the nearest warsuit’s leg and cut away half of its crotch in a spray of green sparks. Behind him, Jebe couched his power spear against his pauldron and used the momentum of his charge to spit another warsuit through the chest. As the company champion rode underneath the alien warsuit, he twisted his body like a lancer rolling with the impact of a hit, yanking his spear free in a spurt of blood. The xenos machine’s legs and weapon-arms dangled corpse-limp even as its jetpack kept it hovering three metres above the earth.
Djubali steered hard into a large flat stone and yanked hard on the handlebars to pull the nose of his bike high for a moment. At the apex of the jump his bolters blasted a double-shot into the jetpack of a warsuit turning to evade. Djubali’s front wheel slammed back down into the shale and he veered off after the khan whilst the stricken warsuit pirouetted wildly downwards into the shale. The red-helmeted Veteran Sergeant Koghai roared past, taking the fallen machine’s head from its neck with his powered tulwar blade as he went.
And then, as the loose circle of battlesuits boosted further upward in the skies, the riders of Chogoris found themselves with nothing left to charge.
‘Rally and re-engage!’ shouted Shadowsun, her voice tight with tension. ‘Vertical vectors wherever possible. Do not meet them on the horizontal plane!’
Golden signals of assent flicked on all but two of her subordinate registers. Shas’vre Tu’la Rin’s vital signs had turned the charcoal grey of death, and Shas’vre De’re La’s gunmetal was fading quickly to ash. Still, if the rest of them kept their altitude high, no more tau lives need be lost to the gue’ron’sha’s ugly but effective ambush.
The broken formation of her battlesuit cadre re-established its noose as it rose higher. Weapons systems spat fire into the heavy bikes that growled beneath them like a pride of angry hyperfelids. Those that roared out of the encirclement were met by streams of burst cannon fire from hidden stealth teams. The chameleonic shadows of Drai’s battlesuits shimmered low as they cut down the escaping foe with clinical precision.
Shadowsun picked out the enemy commander at the edge of the pack, the same scarred giant that she had fought on the gunship’s wing. The war-leader and his comrades had drawn blunt pistols and were firing explosive, rocket-propelled bolts towards them. The commander was shouting something up at her, pointing what looked like a long ceremonial sword in her direction. She spared a quick glimpse for the autotrans as it converted the gue’ron’sha’s words into tau.
‘- - - FACE ME YOU SKULKING HAG - - -’ his challenge read, ‘- - - COME BACK AND FIGHT - - - HONOURLESS COWARD - - -’
Eye-flicking a top-down vector of attack, Shadowsun boosted in close, bracketed by her shield drones and the two closest Crisis battlesuits. As they approached, a gue’ron’sha riding next to the bellowing war-leader stood in his saddle and flung a long, spear-like weapon right at her. Warning lights flickered red inside her helmet, bip-bip-bipping in rising alarm. She twisted her hips to steer her jetpack’s course left, curving around the spear’s path so her shield drones did not have to intercept it with their spheres of protective force. Oe-nu transmitted a tiny thanks-symbol, his reservoir band still a healthy copper hue.
The spear-thrower carved his bike around, and her sensor suite linked the rider’s projected route with the trajectory of his arcing weapon. Anticipating his course, she dropped suddenly and kicked him in the back of the head as he drove past, sending him careening into a shale-dune. The spear thudded down, impaling its owner’s shoulder and pinning him to the ground. The corners of her mouth twitched upward at the sight. She would enjoy replaying that moment once this was over.
The gue’ron’sha war-leader was coming around, looking right in her direction despite her stealth field. She levelled her fusion blasters and loosed parallel shots right at him. As the vaporising blasts hit his bike, the vehicle burst apart in an explosion of molten metal and steam. Somehow, though, the warrior had hurled himself free a matter of microseconds before the shot hit home.
The warrior rolled in a loose shoulder-curl, clattering to a gunman’s kneel behind a smoking mass of human remains and firing a two-handed pistol shot right at Shadowsun’s head. Warnings bipped once more, but this time Oe-nu intercepted with a timely shield-flare. The mass-reactive bolt detonated prematurely, and the explosion washed like fiery liquid across the dome of the drone’s protective sphere. She blipped her own thanks-symbol, boosting back upward as her fusion blasters recharged with a high-pitched whine.
A rough wedge of the bikers were trying to blaze a path out of the hail of firepower that was cutting them down. By their vectors, they were hoping to reunite with their comrades back at the fallen gunships. More than a third of their number had fallen now, and white-armoured bodies lay sprawled amongst the burning wreckage of their armoured bikes. All across the ridge the gue’ron’sha were fighting desperately to break out, but wherever they pushed their advance, a team of battlesuits was there to meet them.
‘Firestream squadrons intercept, Sun Sharks, reinforce,’ Shadowsun transmitted, her tone terse. ‘Flanking cadres deploy heavy armour. Ensure none escape.’
Barely a second later three squadrons of skimmers and a trio of Sun Shark bombers rose into view over the ridge. The shadows of their T-shaped hulls flitted across the shale, a shoal of fish cutting close to the bed of some soulless ocean. Anti-grav motors humming, they bore down on the white-armoured gue’ron’sha. Their burst cannons levelled quadruple plasma blasts into the bikers, taking five of them from the saddle in as many seconds. The fusion blasters of the squadron behind them killed the same number again.
One of the surviving riders, a savage-looking brute whose head appeared to be little more than an unruly mass of hair, skidded his bike around and drove it hard up a jutting spire of rock. Rider and bike sailed through the air to land wheels-first on an oncoming Piranha. The dead weight of the flying bike bore the skimmer to the ground below with a crushing impact that saw the tau pilots broken and bleeding in the remains of their craft.
Two of the hairy rider’s comrades were inspired to follow suit, launching their bikes from the same spire. One was immediately torn apart in mid-flight by a blast of fusion energy, but the other caught the edge of a passing Piranha’s wing with a cupped hand and yanked it so hard the skimmer was tipped wildly off course. The Piranha ploughed into the dark scree at the ridge’s edge before exploding in a burst of violet flame.
Just as Shadowsun was coming in for another pass, her meteorological readouts spiked hard. The anomalies seemed to centre in a spiralling vortex around one of the bikers at the heart of the gue’ron’sha pack, a totem-clad elder who had drawn to a halt with arms outstretched. Guttural syllables spilled from the shamanic figure’s lips, non-words that her autotrans could not understand.
A second later a
gale force wind thick with razor-edged shale flew out from the elder’s outstretched and blasted into the tau skimmers. The sudden hurricane caused most of the light craft to careen out of control. Some clashed wings and collided, whilst others were hurled away over the ridge as if a giant invisible hand had flung them away in disgust. Seeing the destruction ahead, the Sun Sharks peeled off, flinging their craft into evasive manoeuvres to avoid the chaos of the storm.
Shadowsun wanted to explain the phenomenon away as some advanced weapon system built into the shaman’s gauntlets, yet something in her chest told her otherwise. Here was the impossible mind-science of the gue’la, once thought a mere rumour from the edges of the Damocles Gulf. In truth it was clearly a very real threat, and all the more dangerous to the tau if they did not understand it.
A warrior capable of destroying two squadrons of skimmers at range could not be allowed to live. Ignoring the vulgar challenges spooling across her autotrans, Shadowsun altered her flight into a swoop towards the shaman, her shield drones buzzing in close.
There was a low roar from the east, a rumble of thunderous engines that shook the dust from atop the smaller ridges. Anticipating her request, Oe-ken-yon’s telesensors blipped her long-range visuals. Five squadrons of Imperial gun-skimmers were coming in at breakneck speed, the gue’ron’sha equivalent of the Piranhas the shaman had crippled seconds before.
‘Flanking cadres engage and repel inbound gun-skimmers,’ said Shadowsun, ‘First and second Crisis teams, enact Rinyon encirclement. Priority kill on the indicated leader. Then engage at will.’
Her own cadre blipped golden assent, but as for the reserve cadres in the canyons below the ridge, only dull steel icons pulsed flat.
‘Flanking cadres! Where are you?’
‘Commander, we… we have encountered an unseen force of gue’ron’sha in the ravines,’ came the reply. ‘We are already… fully engaged. I offer… contrition for our absence.’ The voice was strained, its pauses indicative of a gunfight that raged even as they spoke.