Damocles

by Various

  Seanoa made a move for Devynius’s front leg, not a serious attempt to knock him down but a probing attack to see how Devynius moved. Devynius made the least movement necessary, not giving anything away. Seanoa circled, face focused, making quick half-movements with his hands, trying to draw a false start out of Devynius.

  Seanoa knew he would have to move in first, make the first attack. That was why Devynius made the first move instead, darting inside Seanoa’s guard with the speed and focus he had learned in decades of sparring and warfare. He drove a fist into Seanoa’s breastplate, knocking the Jade Dragon off-balance. He hooked Seanoa’s leg with his own, driving an elbow up into Seanoa’s jaw and tipping him onto his back.

  Seanoa sprawled onto his back in the loose shale. Devynius was on him, driving a fist down at his face. Seanoa caught Devynius’s arm in the crook of his elbow and forced Devynius down to the ground. Suddenly the positions were reversed, Seanoa on Devynius’s back, wrenching his arm behind him. Devynius felt his injuries, sealed up by the rapidly-clotting blood of a Space Marine, tearing open inside his armour. Hot blood pooled inside his breastplate. Pain rippled up through his chest, met by the cold flood of painkillers dispensed by his armour. They weren’t reducing the pain any more, just turning it from an isolated tearing to a dull pulse of agony that went right through him, as if he was immersed in it.

  Seanoa wrenched on Devynius’s shoulder. The joint was separating. After the encounter with the tau battlesuit force, it wouldn’t take much to put Devynius out of action entirely. Seanoa had a dozen ways of beating Devynius now, in a position in which he had a massive advantage. Choke Devynius out. Lock the head and make it clear he could break Devynius’s neck at will. Simply pound on Devynius’s skull until he fell unconscious.

  But there was one way for Devynius to regain the advantage.

  Devynius forced his body around under Seanoa’s weight, not fighting against the wrenching on his shoulder but using all his leverage to pivot in the same direction. He felt tendons snapping and gristle tearing, just before the flood of pain blanked everything else out. His shoulder dislocated and the joint of his armour was mobile enough to let the bone swivel freely in its socket.

  No longer pinned in place, Devynius spun on his stomach out from beneath Seanoa. Seanoa was still holding his arm but it gave him no purchase on Devynius with the shoulder joint giving no resistance.

  Devynius was on his feet, turning to face Seanoa. Devynius raised a foot and brought it down on the back of Seanoa’s head. His shoulder separated further, but the pain from the injury was just another note in the cacophony soaring through him. He had felt pain before. A Space Marine had to accept it, to welcome it even, to shunt it to a part of his mind where it could not interfere in the cold business of inflicting harm on the body of an enemy.

  Seanoa was face down on the ground. Devynius drove a second axe kick into the Jade Dragons head and Seanoa’s face slammed into the shale ground. When he lurched up, his face was cut by the flint shards. He tried to reel Devynius back in by the arm he still had hold of but Devynius dropped knee-first onto the back of Seanoa’s neck and pinned him in place.

  Devynius drew back the fist of his good arm and hammered it down into the side of Seanoa’s face. Pain was bursting through him like fireworks, their glow mingling into a smouldering fire, and it was good – he let it bleed right through him and turn into strength that drove his fist. Bone cracked. Shards of stone clattered against armour. Again and again the fist drove down and each time it hit a more yielding surface, finding fragments of bone instead of a solid skull, torn mush instead of muscle.

  Devynius held his fist still, hovering beside his face ready to hammer down again. The side of Seanoa’s face was a bloody mess.

  A brother did not kill a brother. Seanoa had destroyed the chances of Imperial success on Briseis with his rogue mission to kill Skepteris, but he was still a Space Marine. Devynius could have killed Seanoa there, and both men knew it. Seanoa’s squadmates, still watching silently, knew it. That was enough.

  Seanoa let go of Devynius’s arm. It hung limp and senseless by Devynius’s side. Devynius got to his feet and Seanoa lay under him, rolling onto his side and putting a hand to his half-ruined face. Already Seanoa’s eye had closed up and the remaining one looked up at Devynius with hatred he did nothing to disguise.

  Overhead the shuttle from the Polar Defiance was descending, its silhouette edged in the glare from its engines against the black sky. The Jade Dragons stayed where they were as the shuttle came down to land and the ramp opened up. Devynius walked up the ramp alone and the door closed again, leaving the Jade Dragons on the surface and the shuttle lifted off to return to orbit.

  Seanoa clambered slowly to his feet. None of his squadmates helped him – it would be a great shame for Seanoa to show further weakness by accepting the help of a battle-brother now.

  Seanoa picked up his helmet and weapons as the squad stood around him, waiting for their next orders. He jammed his helmet back on, hiding his wounded face.

  ‘As we are hunted,’ said Seanoa thickly, ‘so we hunt. The Black Leviathan is here. And there are still aliens to kill.’

  The earth caste work party followed their tribal guides through the tombs, deep down among the ancient fissures and uncovered graves with mouldering bones and shattered statues. These were paths known only to the tribesmen and their elders, mapped by scouts who had paid for the knowledge with their lives. It took many hours to reach the lowermost point, where the warrens through the rocky earth merged with the tectonic margin hidden beneath Port Memnor.

  The earth caste surveyors had surmised the existence of this fault from orbit when they first prepared for the war on Agrellan, but reaching it had needed the help of the tribes. The tribes had not been willing to give it. And so O’Myen had been despatched to do his work, and the web had first been spun.

  The earth caste workers were squat and powerful, with heavy hands and muscles made for labour. They hauled with them an explosive charge, sometimes on wheels, sometimes lowered by ropes, finally carried on their shoulders like a steel coffin. The guides who led them did not know for sure what it was, but they could guess.

  In the infernal heat and the dull glow of the magma-heated rocks, the earth caste detail unloaded the charge and set it with a timer of twelve hours. They wedged it into a fissure in the rocks, a place where the volcanic heat of Briseis’s core met the stony mantle. They made their final checks and the team leader announced their work was done.

  The guides were killed with the efficiency on which the earth caste prided itself. Each tau had a pistol concealed in his coveralls and put a single pulse round through the back of each guide’s head. The guides had guessed this, too, for if they were captured alive they might be forced to divulge the location of the bomb and put the whole operation in danger. They did not struggle or complain. They were doing their duty to their tribes, to the family who had raised them and loved them even when the cold hand of the Imperium had tried to crush out all that made the people of Briseis who they were. Better to die here with their work complete than live on another day as chattels of the Imperium.

  When the last corpse hit the ground, the tau began the return journey towards the surface. They made good pace, because in twelve hours there would be no surface to reach.

  ‘Would that I could see this a thousand times,’ said O’Myen. ‘A million times. So rarely we can observe the Greater Good advanced. It must be a thought, an emotion. But here we can see it, and there is nothing more beautiful.’

  The tau observer ship had remained hidden among its camouflage fields and the gravitational disturbances around Briseis. The Polar Defiance had missed it entirely. It was not a large craft, just enough to transport O’Myen’s water caste command and the late Vre’Cyr’s fire caste cadre. It was highly advanced, however, far beyond the technology the Imperium could create, and its bridge was a cold, humming t
estament to the sleek and efficient science of the tau. A section of the viewscreen was zoomed in on the city of Port Memnor, focusing on the huge starport that dominated one side of the city with its enormous rockcrete expanses and scattering of control towers.

  ‘The fire caste can destroy,’ said O’Myen, the water caste functionaries diligently recording his word. ‘The earth caste can build, and the air caste can take us among the stars. The ethereals can unite us in one glorious whole, a single mind and a single purpose. But only the water caste can bring about such beauty.’

  The tectonic charges laid by the earth caste had detonated some time before. The sequence of events, of one land mass moving against another, was as carefully planned as the chain of cause and effect that had seen the Space Marines defeated and the tribes of Briseis broken. Now the sequence reached the surface.

  Port Memnor lurched, and the first buildings fell. The burning scars left by the Imperial bombardment blossomed into flame again and the tallest structures toppled – the spires around the parliament, the parliament itself, the towers of the generatorium. A thousand disasters unfolded at once. Those who had not left the city already perished in their thousands. Half the city rose up like a sea monster from an ocean, like the Black Leviathan with which the Jade Dragons were so usefully obsessed. The other half sank as if under an enormous weight.

  The fissure opened. A great black slash ripped across the city and hundreds of buildings vanished, crumbling to dust and pitching into the depths. The fissure reached the spaceport and one of the landing pads was torn in half, control buildings falling, explosions erupting where underground fuel tanks were breached.

  It took almost an hour to unfold. The fault line under the city opened up and fully half of Port Memnor vanished, the rest devastated more thoroughly than a hundred Imperial bombardments could manage. The spaceport was completely destroyed, only burning islands of rockcrete remaining between a crazed pattern of crevasses. Ambassador O’Myen watched it all, not speaking or even blinking, as the Greater Good was done before his eyes.

  When it was done and only the stubbornly burning fires still moved, O’Myen turned to the gathering assembled at the back of the bridge. The elders of Briseis’s tribes had watched in silence, stunned by the enormity of destruction.

  ‘It is done,’ said O’Myen. ‘You are free members of the Tau Empire. Your people will no longer serve as pawns of the Imperium, serving them to maintain a foothold for their war on Agrellan. You finally have the liberty to seek out the Greater Good. The crew have prepared berths for you on board for the time being, but soon you will rejoin your people and lead them in the old ways again, as nomads and tribes of Briseis, honouring the ancient traditions you preserved for so long. Air caste crew began leading the elders off the bridge, towards the heart of the ship. One did not move, the Bone Render elder, and he stepped forward as the air caste tried to direct him away.

  ‘Speak the truth, alien,’ said the Bone Render. ‘Will any of us leave this ship?’

  Two fire caste warriors stepped in front of O’Myen, pulse carbines in hand. The Bone Render did not argue further, and joined his fellow elders as they were escorted off the bridge.

  O’Myen waved a hand and the viewscreen shifted to show the wide view of Briseis, and Agrellan hanging behind it. He was done with this world. A compliance detail would land there soon with water caste social engineers and fire caste enforcers to make something useful out of the displaced peoples of Briseis. That was beneath O’Myen’s concern. There were other worlds, other species, on whom to do his work and leave his legacy. Other worlds on which to pursue the Greater Good.

  Perhaps, he would even start to believe in it.

  Hunter’s Snare

  Josh Reynolds

  Chapter One

  The tau base was not hard to spot, even through the swirling, wind-borne snows, and hidden as it was amongst the harsh-edged crags and white-capped slopes of Rime Crag. It rose out of the snowy rock like a blister, and the peaks it nestled beneath, parasite-like. It was too smooth, too serene for the wilderness it sought to dominate.

  In that way, the tau bastion was much like those who had built it. They sought to inflict an unnatural and ill-fitting harmony upon the universe, a universe which was not theirs, not by right of blood or battle, and to force around a manufactured aleph that which had required no centre, or, rather, had many centres to choose from.

  They wished to tame the storm. That alone proved them mad at best and monstrous at worst. These thoughts were uppermost in Kor’sarro Khan’s mind as his bike hurtled through the driving snow towards the tau bastion, the icy flakes melting against the bare flesh of his scarred cheeks and stinging his golden-hued eyes. He could have worn his helmet, but the thought of even that little amount of constriction upon his senses was anathema to the huntsman, protective photolenses be damned. The air of Agrellan was so toxic that it seared even his altered lungs, but the pain only added spice to the experience. He’d conquered worse worlds than this, poisonous atmosphere and all.

  The captain of the Third Minghan of the White Scars and the ordu’s Master of the Hunt leaned into the snow, glorying in its bite as he urged his bike to greater speed. The enemy fortress loomed up, growing larger as he drew nearer. Lights flashed across the top of the outer wall. The enemy had spotted them at last.

  Instinctively, he leaned to the side, and his borrowed bike responded with a growl of its engines. Wheels skidded, and the pulse burst seared the air where he’d been a half-second later. More followed, and he guided his steed through the oscillating web of weapons fire with the grace of the berkut – one of the great, golden-feathered eagles which nested in the mountains of Chogoris. To Kor’sarro’s eyes, the bursts of energy moved slowly. He did not bother to speak a warning into the subcutaneous vox implant mounted beneath his jaw. Those who travelled in his wake could see as well as he, or he would not have chosen them.

  Each was a warrior without parallel, even among a Chapter which was reckoned full of such, and their trophy-racks were as heavy with skulls and scalps as his own. If the Emperor had decided that the lives of some of them must be claimed as the blood-price for a successful hunt, well, so it was, and would ever be.

  And this hunt would be successful. He had sworn such, during the Rites of Howling, and had come to the Damocles Gulf, and the hive-world of Agrellan, to see to the keeping of that oath. He would take the head of the alien known as Shadowsun and hang it from his lodge-pole or else he would die in the attempt. Her ugly xenos skull would be added to the White Road, to sit sentry with the rest of the Chapter’s enemies. A sudden urgency gripped him. Enthusiasm flushed caution from his veins. It was always the same, when a hunt drew to a close. The feeling of anticipation, the joy of the kill-to-be, roared through him, prodding him on, like spurs in the flesh of balky horse. There was no greater pleasure than this, the culmination of months of patience and focus, the release of the killing stroke across his prey’s neck.

  He had tracked Shadowsun across Agrellan, from one battlezone to the next, from bunker to trench to bastion, harrying her trail. If he could take her head, the tau would waver. Without her cunning, they would be easy meat. And she was cunning; that she had avoided and outpaced him this long was proof enough of that. He had nearly had her head at Blackshale Ridge. But he had her now. She was cornered, in a trap of her own making. And he would have her head before the sun rose.

  ‘Old man, rattle their paddock,’ he growled. Besides the bikes that rode at his heels, his hunting party included a quartet of heavier vehicles: two Rhinos, a Razorback and a Whirlwind, their engines adapted for greater speed so that they might keep up with Kor’sarro’s bike-mounted demi-company. Three of the four carried those hunt-brothers who were content to fight on foot, rather than from the back of an iron steed, and the fourth was there to ensure that they could do so with the blessings of the Emperor and the Great Khan.

  The comm-bead in h
is ear squawked as a familiar voice acknowledged the order, and a moment later fire lit the night from somewhere behind him. Old Shatterhand at his appointed task, and unspoken joy, the busting of bunkers and the shattering of bastions. Kor’sarro smiled as the face of his second-in-command flitted across the surface of his mind. Wrinkled, white-haired Cemakar, whom aspirants and khans of the ordu alike called Old Shatterhand, but never to his face, for even now, old as he was, he had a fist that could fell a Dreadnought and a snarl that could strip the ceremonial unguents from a suit of armour.

  Cemakar had refused, and quite pungently, to return with the rest of the company to reinforce Agrellan Prime in the wake of Shadowsun’s escape from Blackshale Ridge. Where his khan went, so did he, even if, in his opinion, said khan was a puling whelp of an aspirant, with fewer scars than was healthy and a decided lack of respect for the vaunted wisdom of elders such as the Stormseer Sudabeh and Cemakar himself. Despite this, Kor’sarro was gladdened to have the old man along on the hunt. Too many of those who had stepped forward at his call were like the berkut, bloodthirsty and glory-hungry. As he himself was, even after all this time as Master of the Hunt. Cemakar was a calming presence, and a bulwark against more of the same foolishness which had enabled Shadowsun to squirm out of his grip the last time they’d clashed.

  The wall ahead of him disintegrated into burning chunks, some of which spattered across the white-daubed ceramite plates of his power armour. Kor’sarro laughed as more fire split the snow and darkness, and the thunderous cries of the Emperor’s hunting eagles boomed across Rime Crag. Let the xenos cower in their burrow for as long as they might; the hunters had come to root them out. He tapped the firing stud for the twin-linked bolters mounted on the front of the bike as he rode through the welcoming flames, to herald his arrival.