Damocles

by Various

  ‘Riptide!’ shouted Devynius over the vox as he ran. Two missiles streaked towards him, screaming on trails of white exhaust. A few strides away was the statue of the Omnissiah and Devynius dived past the folds of its sculpted robe.

  One missile hurtled past the statue and exploded against the far wall. The second hit the statue, blowing it in half at the waist, sending chunks of torn bronze falling in scorching rain around Devynius. The upper half toppled, the head of the statue’s axe burying itself in the floor.

  Devynius broke from cover, snapping shots up at the Riptide. Its burst cannon followed him, tracking unerringly. It could punch through power armour as if it wasn’t there.

  Devynius dropped onto his back. He had one shot before the Riptide’s cannon speared right through him. He had trained for such a shot a thousand times in the firing ranges of Macragge, against drone-servitors in the proving grounds. Thaxos had been a better shot than he was, and Venarin was better than either. But Devynius was an Ultramarine, and there was no facet of the Codex Astartes he had neglected. Marksmanship included.

  The bolter kicked in Devynius’s hand. The Riptide’s eye lens shattered, spilling sparks like burning blood.

  It would not last. The tau battlesuits had redundant sensor systems that kept them lethal even when their primary sensors were destroyed, but it would buy seconds, and seconds were what Devynius needed.

  The other Ultramarines were fighting the Crisis suits. Each suit was the personal war machine of a tau fire caste veteran, armed with the exotic xenos weapons with which that warrior was most proficient – fusion rifles, missile pods, burst cannons. Brother Silen was down, clutching the wreckage of a ruined thigh, firing with one hand from his back. Merovos and Oderac brought one Crisis suit down with combined fire, Merovos’s plasma gun scorching a deep molten furrow across the battlesuit’s chest, the flesh of the alien inside bubbling and popping in the heat.

  Devynius could see the next few moments unravelling in his mind. The pages of the Codex Astartes seemed to turn before his eyes and every movement, every shot, was picked out in the hot glow of fate.

  And Devynius knew that Merovos would die. Merovos paused, gunfire streaking all around him, and took stock of the Riptide battlesuit stomping around the ruined statue to finish off Devynius. Merovos saw his commander stricken and the huge battlesuit turning its burst cannon towards him. Merovos raised his plasma gun, sighting down it, picking out the weak spots in the hulking machine as years of sleep-taught battle-lore had trained him.

  The plasma gun emitted a bolt of superheated plasma, the sound like tearing metal. The bolt sheared into the shoulder joint of the Riptide’s gun arm. Molten handfuls of armour fell away and the arm hung limp. The tip of the barrel scraped along the floor.

  The Riptide turned, its remaining sensors scanning the direction of the fire that had crippled its arm. The shoulder-mounted missile racks were full again and they tracked towards Merovos, who paused a half-second longer to spray another stream of plasma up into the Riptide’s chest.

  He was aiming for the reactors mounted on either side of the torso. What little intelligence existed on the Riptide suggested the blocky armoured areas housed the battlesuit’s power plant and that if breached, the machine might be destroyed. It was the only chance he had at bringing it down.

  The armour of the Riptide’s torso held. The sensors of the half-ruined head focused in on the Ultramarine and the missile racks let loose a trio of missiles that crossed the expanse of the cathedral in a heartbeat.

  Merovos was caught out in the open. He had no cover and had stood still to get the shot. The missiles hammered into him and Merovos vanished in a great plume of flame and wreckage.

  Devynius had seen it happen a second before the missiles had hit home. It was the way of the Ultramarines – to fight and die for one another, to hold honour above survival. Die if you must, Guilliman had written ten thousand years before, but die well.

  ‘Fall back!’ yelled Devynius into the vox, scrambling to his feet. ‘We will regroup, we will return! Fall back!’

  Runes projected onto Devynius’s retina called out the status of his squadmates. Three runes were dark – Silen, Merovos and Brother Timesus. Three Ultramarines dead to tau guns in the flaming chaos of the cathedral. This should have been their victory.

  Devynius sprayed fire almost at random at the Crisis battlesuits flitting between the defence lasers. He spotted some of the Ultramarines making their way towards him, holding together in a line as they fired, keeping the battlesuits on the move to thin the fire coming down at them.

  Behind him was a processional down which the servitors would approach the cathedral for the annual rituals to consecrate the defence lasers. It was one of the ways in that Devynius had earmarked to be fortified against attackers. Now it would have to serve as a way out. Past magi of Port Memnor glowered down at him through the hoods of their bronze robes, and incense-servitors droned around the rafters casting billows of sickly smoke.

  Brother Vesuvio got there first after Devynius, Timesus slung over his shoulder as Vesuvio fired one-handed at the tau closing in behind. Timesus’s armour was cratered and glowing down his left side, where one of the battlesuits’ fusion guns had hammered him with half a dozen shots. Timesus was almost certainly dead, and Vesuvio would not leave his squadmate behind.

  ‘Focus fire and keep moving!’ ordered Devynius. ‘Cage your fury, brothers! Discipline! By the Emperor’s will we shall return!’ The rest of Devynius’s squad reached the processional, Silen’s body dragged by a squadmate – there had not been enough left of Merovos to salvage.

  ‘How did they know?’ growled Vesuvio as the squad moved out of the cathedral and into the tangled mass of coolant ducts in the lower levels of the generatorium. ‘They never knew of our objective. Not even the procurator, not Maelenar, no one. How did the xenos know when and where we would strike?’

  As the squad reached the outskirts of the generatorium, where the workers’ habs and shanties clustered around the cooling towers, they came within earshot of the huge screens that broadcast to the people of Port Memnor. And it was then they got the answer.

  From time to time, the magi of Briseis would have cause to speak to the population, sometimes to warn of a coolant leak or industrial accident at the generatorium, sometimes to pronounce a new ordnance conscripting citizens into the workforce. It was used rarely, especially by the publicity-shy Magos Skepteris, but the picters and broadcast equipment needed were still stored in the magos’s quarters in the generatorium complex. It was this that Sergeant Seanoa used to speak to Port Memnor.

  On dozens of screens the cold black eyes of Seanoa’s faceplate looked out across the city. He held up one hand so the picter could see what he was carrying. It was the severed head of Magos Skepteris, seen out of its dark red hood for the first time on Briseis. A mass of ribboned flesh hung from below the neck, all that Seanoa’s lightning claw had left of her torso. The magos’s jaw hung open, revealing her steel teeth and the machinery in her throat. Cables and pipes hung among the gore.

  ‘Thus are the wages of heresy,’ said Seanoa. His voice echoed among the spires of spire-habs around the parliament building, between the chimneys of the generatorium and across the expanse of the spaceport’s landing pads. It reached into the workshops of the Chrono-Wrights’ District, the animal pens of the Slaughtermens’ Quarter, the millions of hab-cells and shanties. ‘The Enemy sought to convince us the tau were the threat on Briseis. But Fate told us otherwise. The Enemy sought to wage his war in the shadows, but Fate brought him to light. As we hunt, so we are hunted, but on this world we turned and fought back!’

  Seanoa cast the head of Magos Skepteris onto the floor of the magos’s chambers. The picter panned down to watch it land on the sea creature’s hide spread out on the floor. Seanoa’s armoured foot stamped down on the head, crushing the magos’s skull flat against the barnacled scales.<
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  ‘The Enemy cannot hide the signs of its passing, not from the Jade Dragons! The Black Leviathan passed by here and left its mark. It left it on the magos, the servant of the Enemy, and she was cut down. It left it on your city, and it shall be purged. You who worship the dark gods, you who lust for the power of the warp, know this! Now you are hunted!’

  Ambassador O’Myen watched with satisfaction as the picter turned back to the Space Marine’s face, its features hidden behind the faceplate. The screen turned black as the broadcast finished and O’Myen turned his attention back to the generatorium complex.

  O’Myen had wished to observe events at the generatorium directly and so had taken an escort of fire warriors and his detail of lower-ranked water caste to the top of a hab-block overlooking the complex. The signs of battle had been apparent from the buildings above the defence laser housing – fire and explosions from the entrance of Vre’Cyr’s fire caste cadre. Like punctuation marks in the history of Briseis, the explosions had marked the end of one age and the beginning of another.

  ‘Record, if you will,’ said O’Myen. The water caste emissary beside him, a loyal and hard-working tau who would never rise above his current rank, clacked away on a wrist-mounted data device. O’Myen’s words were worthy of preserving, for his was one of the finest minds in all the water caste.

  ‘Upon considering a problem,’ said O’Myen, ‘one should never seek out the solution as one might pick out a certain star in the sky. There is never a single answer and to hunt it is to chase one prey-beast while a thousand others like it are slumbering at your feet. Instead, we look upon the answers as the roots of a tree, dividing and rejoining, until the tip of every root is the result you desire and to get there you must merely follow the path of cause and effect.

  ‘Let us consider the solution to the problem presented on Briseis. The Imperial elites, the Space Marines as the gue’la know them, have the capacity to hold the defence laser complex indefinitely once they had taken and fortified the place. Thus, we place in motion events that will compromise their effort to do so. Observation, intelligence gathering and the resultant manipulation of the Jade Dragons created several potential outcomes, each of which would generate such a compromise. The first desirable outcome is the turning of the people of Briseis further against the possibility of Imperial occupation. That is the tip of one root, so to speak, and would be achieved by a public and graphic act of violence against one perceived as a friend of the tribes of Briseis. Another root leads to the outcome of the generatorium itself being unable to function properly without the input of an expert in its technology, of which the Imperium has mystifyingly few. Finally, the manipulation may lead to the fire caste response, intended to bring these Jade Dragons to battle, engaging a second Space Marine force in the process of fortifying the defence laser housing.’

  A second series of explosions rippled along the roof of the main generatorium building, the red-orange glare flickering against the massive shapes of the cooling towers. From this distance the glow of Crisis battlesuit exhausts was just visible, playing across the gargoyles and arch-tops of the Imperium’s grotesque architecture. Quite why the Imperium of Man insisted on creating such visions of oppression escaped O’Myen, for whom the clean, gleaming lines of tau cities was a vision so emblematic of peace and wisdom. Perhaps it would be a suitable study subject in the future, to provide an insight into the frustratingly wayward Imperial mind.

  ‘Thus we see that true social engineering is the instigation of behaviours and events of which the only possible outcomes are beneficial to the Greater Good,’ continued O’Myen. ‘To structure such a pattern, a cascading series of inevitably useful events, is the goal of every water caste intervention. In this we see in action previous lessons on the use of an opposing force’s qualities against him. The aggression and independence of the Jade Dragons, and the concept of human honour given such import by the Ultramarines, are themselves factors in the success of this intervention. This ambassador can think of no more useful tools in the work of the Greater Good than the Space Marines.’

  The emissary finished recording O’Myen’s words. They would form part of the great body of work he would leave behind, which later water caste ambassadors would use to further refine their ways of advancing the Greater Good and necessary expansion of the tau empire. Briseis would be a useful prize, Agrellan more so, but the true contribution to the Greater Good would come from the wisdom O’Myen had gathered in solving problems such as had been presented to him in Port Memnor.

  ‘Addendum,’ said O’Myen. ‘The fire caste win with blades and pulse rounds. The air caste win with fighter craft and bombs. The water caste win with words, and with them we shall deliver more than all our brother castes combined.’

  Perhaps the fire caste warriors standing guard on the rooftop would object to that, but they all knew better than to state it out loud. They could whine about it to their captain when they were done on Briseis, if their leader survived.

  That reminded O’Myen.

  ‘Vre’Cyr,’ said O’Myen into his communicator. ‘Report.’

  Brother Oderac crawled the last few metres across the floor of the turbine hall. Above him, what remained of the squad were swapping fire with the other Crisis battlesuits across the roof of the generatorium building. Around him rose the din of the turbines, masking the thudding footsteps of the battlesuit that had descended on its back-mounted jets to make sure he was dead. Oderac had fallen Throne knew how far when the roof section had collapsed and one leg had folded under him, broken and useless. He had already taken pulse rounds to the chest and shoulder, punching through his ceramite and into flesh and bone. He was dying.

  Looking down from the roof Devynius could see it all panning out in the same clinical slow motion as Merovos’s death. Oderac rolled onto one side, hot blood spraying over the blue of his armour as he unhooked a melta bomb from his waist. He sprawled across to the massive cylinder beside him – the turbine itself, powered by the steam superheated by the plasma reactors.

  The Crisis battlesuit stalked into view. A fusion blaster levelled at Oderac, and Oderac ripped the pin out of the meltabomb as he clamped it onto the turbine.

  Devynius scanned through the situation, the sleep-taught instincts of a combat leader taking control. His squad was down to half strength. He had taken a shot to one shin that had shattered the bone and though he could still walk, he limped through the fuzz of automatically dispensed painkillers and could feel the boot of his armour filling with blood. Vesuvio had fallen, Timesus still slung over his shoulder, drilled through the back by a volley of pulse shots a few paces from Devynius. The only way forward had been across the roof, towards the walkways and stairwells leading to the tangle of shanty tunnels where the Ultramarines could lose the bulky battlesuits, but until then there was scant cover among the gargoyles of the rooftop.

  In the same queasy slow motion, Oderac rolled onto his back. His helmet was gone, shredded by fusion fire, and Devynius could see Oderac mouthing some old curses of Macragge at the battlesuit looming over him.

  The melta bomb detonated. The turbine, Oderac, the battlesuit and the turbine hall vanished in a white eruption of steam, shards of shrapnel punching up through the roof. The shockwave hit Devynius and heat roared around him, everything swamped in the white wall of steam rushing up from the explosion.

  Somewhere in the storm and bedlam, the rest of the turbine hall roof collapsed. Devynius felt the world yawning open beneath his feet and he fell, every sense overwhelmed. Impacts hammered at him from every direction as if a thousand stone fists were pummelling him.

  He couldn’t even tell when he landed. The din ended and he was down, one side crushed into the splintered flagstones of the floor. The ruins of the turbine hall came into view as the steam dissipated. Oderac and the Crisis battlesuit were gone, shredded into nothing by the eruption of shrapnel.

  Devynius clambered to his feet,
as painfully and unsteadily as a crippled old man. His bolter was gone – he still had his bolt pistol and his power sword scabbarded.

  The icons on his retina were dark. His helmet was dented and one eyepiece was fractured, a black spider’s web cast over his field of vision. His leg was numb and wavering beneath him and the internal breastplate of bone was cracked. He could feel the splinters of bone floating free beneath the skin of his chest. An unaugmented human’s chest would have been crushed. Anyone but a Space Marine would have been dead a dozen times over.

  The turbine hall was full of wreckage. The destroyed turbine had burst open in a great torn spray of ripped metal. The structures criss-crossing the hall fallen. Chunks of smouldering wreckage were everywhere. The endless drone of the turbine hall was stuttering and uneven, the other turbines on the verge of tearing themselves apart.

  Movement caught Devynius’s eye, looming above the shattered turbine. Through the billows of steam emerged the head and shoulders of the Riptide battlesuit. Its gun arm was completely gone, torn off in the fall from the rooftop, its own jets not quick enough to engage. The desert colours were blistered and scraped away, revealing streams of bare metal underneath. Armour segments and loose components hung from the war machine, and the head in which its eyepieces were mounted was half-crushed and wrenched sideways.

  Devynius could make out the whining of the Riptide’s damaged servos over the turbines. The Riptide stalked through the wreckage towards Devynius, the single remaining lens narrowing to focus. It had seen him.

  Devynius drew his sword and pistol. The Riptide cycled two remaining missiles on its launcher.