by Various
Devynius could hide. He could hunker down behind cover and hope the missiles didn’t tear him apart where he sheltered. He could run and hope that the Riptide didn’t just draw a bead on him as he fled, launching a missile to hit him square in the back. Devynius chose neither option.
He ran at the Riptide, pistol up and hammering fire out at the Riptide’s mechanical face. Bolt shells burst around its shoulders. Devynius vaulted a bank of torn metal, ignoring the bolts of pain rippling down his leg and through his chest.
The Riptide was, like many war engines of the tau, designed to kill from afar. No xenos species possessed superior firepower technology to the tau. That was how the tau fought – holding off the enemy, pinning them down and herding the disposable auxiliaries of their client races forward to deal with the bloody melee of battle.
It was in that melee that a Space Marine excelled. The ways of the Imperium did not change rapidly, but the Space Marines could learn to fight a new form of enemy rapidly enough if they had to. A Space Marine knew not to face the tau at their favourite range, where they could pick their shots and make the best use of their firepower. He faced them up close, where the tau tenets of war admonished them never to fight.
The first missile streaked at Devynius. Devynius dropped and turned, letting the missile streak over him, the scorching exhaust bubbling the paint of his armour. He rolled to his feet and the second missile, unleashed too quickly, veered from a target obscured in the smoke from the first. Twin explosions helped lift Devynius as he jumped at the Riptide.
Devynius slammed into the war machine at the height of its massive chest, grabbing the upper edge of one of the twin reactors. The armour plating was hot against his hand. The Riptide’s remaining arm reached up at him, a hand sliding out of its housing beneath the missile rack. Devynius drew his power sword and swung, a solid, glittering arc that cast a crescent of light through the Riptide’s wrist. The mechanical hand was sliced clean off and clattered into the wreckage below. Devynius found a foothold and powered himself up onto the Riptide’s shoulder, drawing back his blade and plunging it into the armour. The power field cracked armour plating and the tip slid through circuitry and machinery, hydraulic fluid spurting like thick oily blood.
The Riptide bucked to throw Devynius off, but he held tight. Sparks sprayed out of the wound. Explosive bolts fired as the Riptide activated its emergency escape mechanism and the torso split open down the middle.
The sealed atmosphere inside was vented as cold vapour. Inside was revealed the cockpit of the Riptide, the fire warrior pilot inside hooked up to his machine with dozens of wires, cradled in a cocoon-like pod to absorb the shocks the Riptide would suffer in battle.
The tau looked up at Devynius. Devynius thought he could detect some recognisable emotion in that alien face. Its lipless mouth was set in a grimace and the nose-slit flared wide. The three-fingered hands were forcing the controls round, trying to throw Devynius off. Devynius didn’t think it was afraid – it was desperate certainly, injured, angry. But not yet afraid.
Devynius reached down and grabbed the collar of the pilot’s jumpsuit. The pilot tried to draw a pistol from a holster next to the controls but Devynius yanked the alien out of the Riptide, holding it above the cockpit. The pilot’s feet kicked unsupported among the severed cables hanging from interfaces all over the jumpsuit.
‘What species is this, that butts heads with the Imperium of Man?’ growled Devynius. He didn’t know if the alien could understand him and he didn’t care. ‘Have you not witnessed our wrath? Have you not left your dead piled deep enough? Humanity does not kneel! Humanity is no slave-species for you to exploit, alien! If you have not learned that by now then we will teach it to you in death.’
The tau grimaced as it fought to breathe with Devynius’s gauntlet around its throat. ‘We do this for you,’ it slurred. ‘For your people. For their freedom. For the Greater Good.’
Devynius rammed the power sword up into the tau’s stomach. The power field blew out the back half of its chest, throwing shattered ribs and torn organs across the armoured carapace of the Riptide. The alien’s eyes rolled back and went dull, the light glinting in their black lenses extinguished. Devynius dropped the corpse at the feet of the Riptide and clambered down.
His squad were lost, shot down by the tau or killed in the collapse of the turbine hall. He did not know if the same could be said for the Crisis battlesuits, so he wasted no time in making his way across the turbine hall, through the sections of the fallen roof and out into the shanty town that clustered around the base of the building.
The firefight and the explosion in the turbine hall had scared the people away and the city surrounding the generatorium was empty. No doubt the people who lived here were well primed to evacuate the area at the first hint of an industrial accident. Devynius limped through the deserted streets, through the puddles of industrial run-off scum and through the greasy drizzle that had just begun to fall.
His vox was full of static. As he cleared the shadow of the cooling towers it resolved into the regular patterns of a starship’s beacon, and he switched to the orbital vox-channel.
‘Devynius to the Polar Defiance,’ he said. He repeated himself, struggling to make anything out through the static.
‘Stand by,’ came a weak fuzzy voice in reply. ‘We’re cleaning up the signal.’ The vox became a little clearer. ‘Captain Devynius, this is the bridge of the Polar Defiance, communications helm.’
‘Report mission failure,’ said Devynius. ‘The tau have this city, all of it. Throne forgive me, we have failed. Launch the orbital bombardment.’
Chapter Six
‘Suffer any ally, because every gun and sword is to be welcomed into your service. Trust no ally absolutely, for every gun and sword may be turned against you.’
– Codex Astartes
O’Myen had not expected Vre’Cyr to survive. The fire caste were useful, but sometimes their greatest utility lay in situations of danger. The water caste had to balance their immediate benefit against the possibility of using them again in the future, and Vre’Cyr was far more useful dying to deny the Ultramarines the generatorium than he was in fighting any future battles that might come along. It was testament to the stubbornness of the Space Marines that even protected by the armour and guns of a Riptide, Vre’Cyr had not been safe.
The fire caste themselves did not understand. Their own commanders tried to preserve their troops, basing decisions on the suboptimal desire to reduce casualties. The ethereals, infinitely wise though they were, were also compassionate to a fault. That was why the water caste had to be trusted sometimes, with the completion of goals whose means were less palatable to the other castes.
The ethereals would bemoan the deaths among all species. The fire caste would rage at the loss of their brethren. But the water caste would agree that O’Myen had done what was necessary for the Greater Good, and keep the lines of his reasoning to themselves.
O’Myen had left the city by that point, leading his entourage through the gue’la network of tunnels and safehouses to the cemeteries outside the city limits. There the gue’la had interred their dead, and icons of their strange Emperor-worshipping faith scattered the stony hills. The fire caste crouched among the tombstones, blending with the stony ground in their camouflage mantles. The water caste functionaries huddled around the ambassador as if they were freezing and his knowledge was warmth.
The first streak of fire in the sky did not bring O’Myen joy. The gue’la were odd creatures with their mercurial, tempestuous emotions, their capricious desires and constantly shifting focus. They would find a savage joy that someone they hated was suffering, that they had won a victory against a despised foe. They would whoop and dance, and intoxicate themselves as they so loved to do. O’Myen had seen this happen in his mind a thousand times before and had planned out a hundred lines of cause and effect that led to those first explosive
starship rounds breaching the upper atmosphere. Any joy had burned out long ago.
The first rounds hurtled through the middle and lower atmosphere, accelerated by Briseis’s own gravity, and speared into the Chrono-Wrights’ District. A bloom of orange fire rose over the skyline, throwing a cloud of debris into the air. A clock tower toppled, vanishing in a billow of dust. Secondary explosions peppered the rooftops as the volatile chemicals stored in the mechanics’ workshops caught fire.
The main body of the salvo descended in a slow burning rain. The people below, the loyal gue’la and ignorant civilians alike, were recovering from the shock of the first impact and perhaps looking up at the sky to see what disaster would come next. They saw many more disasters, forty or fifty, each one a massive-calibre shell fired from a broadside cannon on the Polar Defiance.
More explosions blossomed across the Chrono-Wrights’ District. Some shells fell wide and erupted among the lavish housing around the parliament, or strayed into the Industrial or Clerks’ Quarters. How many people died in those moments? The fire caste had calculated the outcome of such a bombardment, but the numbers they came up with had slipped O’Myen’s mind. It was unnecessary information, irrelevant, shunted aside to make room for something more important. The lives of the gue’la did not matter. The effect the bombardment would have on the survivors was the crucial knowledge, and O’Myen knew exactly what it would be.
The skyline of the Chrono-Wrights’ District was eroding, its cramped hab-blocks and towers collapsing. A spire near the parliament collapsed, taking with it a meaningless number of the city’s aristocracy. The cemetery’s tombs were lined red and orange with the glare of the fires ripping up from the city.
The sounds reached them, deep rumblings like an earthquake punctuated by the sudden gunshots of exploding chemical stashes.
‘Where is the beauty in this?’ asked O’Myen.
The functionary beside him turned to answer. ‘In the knowledge of the furtherance of the Greater Good,’ he replied.
O’Myen nodded in agreement, signifying the functionary was correct. These little moments of praise kept the smaller-minded on the right path.
‘And thus we reach the pinnacle of our craft,’ said O’Myen. ‘The blissful stage when all we need to do to see the Greater Good fulfilled, is wait.’
In the hours that passed the bombardment ceased, long after its purpose in wiping out the strongholds of the loyal gue’la was complete, and the fires spread to other parts of the city. Streams of evacuees left the city gates to form miserable makeshift camps in the flinty hills – none of them strayed near the cemetery, for it was a place of ill omen and such things held much weight in the imaginations of a society still not far removed from its tribal roots. The clever ones brought supplies with them to set up shelter and the others crowded around them to absorb better chances of survival. Survivors of the Peacemakers tried to police the evacuees, but they had no hope of keeping the peace here. Opportunists were already stealing and settling scores. Thus were the ways of the gue’la.
A group of humans approached the cemetery. They were tribal elders, among them the elder of the Thundercliff who had spoken to O’Myen many times in preparing this moment. Other leaders were among them, representatives of every ancient tribe of Briseis, guarded by the tribal enforcers who were the true lawkeepers of Port Memnor. They were the leaders of the Endless Sky, the Black Thorns, the Bone Renders and many more, those peoples who had wandered Briseis before they even learned of a long-dead Emperor and his crumbling Imperium.
‘Why have you chosen this place?’ demanded the Bone Render elder. He was a robust and bearded man, who seemed not to need the protection of the warriors at his side – they carried weapons carved from bone, and he wore the trinkets of tooth and ivory emblematic of his people.
‘We will not be watched here,’ said O’Myen. ‘And as you can see the city is not safe. I have called you together because in their infinite mercy and generosity, the tau wish to extend once more their offer to your people. You have heard the terms already, and they are once more laid before you. It is not much we ask, but in return, we offer you the greatest gift. A place within the Tau Empire, freedom for your people, a future of your own.’
‘It is more to ask than you realise,’ said the elder of the Black Thorns. He was a sickly-looking old man with skin that seemed paper thin. His attendants carried the implements of his tribe’s primitive alchemy – grinding bowls, bundles of rank herbs, jars of insects and leeches. ‘To turn back the centuries, to make whole what has so long been broken. Our people live in cities, they kneel before the eagle. Those who keep to the old ways are few. Many will die, alien.’
‘Your weak will die,’ said Ambassador O’Myen. ‘Is that not the way of Briseis? It was the principle on which your tribes were built. It is our principle, too. It is a part of the Greater Good to abandon to their fate those who do not deserve to thrive. And you forget, you will not be alone. The Tau Empire will protect you and watch over you, as it does all who pledge themselves to it.’
‘And we will become strong,’ said the Thundercliff elder. ‘We have been weak for too long. The Imperium has seen to that. One generation is all it will take. We will be hard as the stones and unyielding as the sky.’
‘And if you fear for the lives of your people,’ said O’Myen, ‘then simply observe.’ He cast a hand towards the city, the heart of which was spurting clouds of flame and black smoke as it burned. ‘The Imperium will have their city, and if it be a ghost town inhabited by none but corpses, they will care not. They would herd every Briseian into the fires. There is no turning back. Throw off their yoke or they will destroy you.’
‘I say yes to your offer,’ said the elder of the Storm of Shale tribe. ‘The Imperium have shown what manner of master they are. I would kneel to the alien a thousand times before I would once before an Imperial altar.’
Other elders gave their assent, a dozen voices raised at once.
‘But we once were free!’ shouted the elder of the Bone Renders. ‘We will but cast off one slavemaster for another! I will lead my tribe to destruction before I lead them to servitude again!’
The Thundercliff elder shuffled forwards to stand face to face with her Bone Render counterpart. The Bone Render was a big man, obviously powerful and physically dangerous, but the frail old woman before him seemed to make him shrink away as if she was the true threat. ‘War between the tribes,’ she said, ‘is a terrible thing. You are charged with keeping the memories of your tribe, so you know it as well as any of us. You speak of leading your people to destruction. Stand before the rest of us, and that is exactly what you will do. Pride keeps you from proclaiming your allegiance to the alien. That is to be expected, for the Bone Renders always were proud. Simply stand in silence, and your will shall be our will.’
The Bone Render tried to meet the old woman’s gaze, but his eyes turned to the ground instead. The moment passed, and he stayed silent.
‘Then it is agreed,’ said the Thundercliff elder. ‘None will stand against? None will make war in the name of pride?’ There was no answer from the other elders.
‘My gratitude, noble people of Briseis,’ said O’Myen. ‘From the sadness of this day shall come a great celebration, for you are now united with a hundred other species in the embrace of the Greater Good. But there are urgent matters that must be attended to. Have you brought the scouts we requested?’
The Thundercliff elder gestured to her entourage and a dozen men came forward. They wore the colours of several different tribes, hardy souls with pallid and pockmarked skin brought about by spending too much time underground. ‘They have mapped the tombs and tunnels as their fathers did,’ said the Thundercliff elder. ‘None know the underside of Port Memnor as they do. The scouts of the Thundercliff gave you access to the tombs as you requested, and now all tribes have given their expertise there is no corner of the under-city they do not know.
’
‘Then I ask that we move immediately,’ said O’Myen. ‘An earth caste work detail waits at the tomb entrance. The rest of you, my fire warriors have prepared a safe place for you so you might be spared the wrath of the Imperials, for more may soon fall on Port Memnor. They want to wipe you out, but the Greater Good values your allegiance and will protect you with our own tau blood.’
The fire warriors gathered the elders up and began marching them off the cemetery grounds, towards a ridge a short distance away where another team of tau troops kept watch. The Bone Render looked back at his burning city, just once, and followed the rest without another word.
The Space Marines met at the landing site, where the shuttles from the Polar Defiance had dropped them at the start of the mission. The full Jade Dragons squad was there, barely scratched by their assault on the chambers of Magos Skepteris.
Devynius, on the other hand, was alone.
The Jade Dragons squad was lined up along the ridge when Devynius arrived, standing watch. Sergeant Seanoa was among them, Skepteris’s blood still caking his armoured boot. Devynius limped down the slope as Seanoa’s eyepieces turned to follow him.
Devynius took off his helmet and dropped it at his feet. His power sword followed, and he stood unarmed.
Seanoa stepped out of line and walked to a few paces from Devynius. He unhooked the power couplings on his lightning claw and placed it on the ground. He removed the magazine from his bolter and laid the weapon beside the claw. He took his helmet off as Devynius had done – his face was bull-necked and flat-nosed, with the same swirling patterns on his armour inked across his cheeks and forehead.
Neither man spoke.
Seanoa dropped into a loose guard, hands held up, mobile and feinting. Devynius watched him, unmoving, gauging every detail of the Jade Dragons mobility and fighting style. Seanoa was all power and momentum, built for takedowns and grappling, neutralising an enemy’s movement and grinding him into defeat. Devynius had fought a thousand unarmed bouts against his brother Ultramarines on Macragge and he knew just about every style of combat a Space Marine might employ.