Blades of Damocles

by Phil Kelly

  Splayed feet clanged as the machine crunched down the hull plates of its insertion craft. Flak blasted from frontal launchers that bracketed a slab-like midsection. Fal’ras fell backwards, opening fire. His plasma bolts sizzled ineffectually across the machine’s monolithic hull. Bravestorm and the rest of his team added fire from above. The volley scorched the thing, melting small dents into its hide, but achieved little more.

  Fal’ras waited for it to clear the transport and fired his fusion blaster, confident of a point-blank kill. Searing columns of superheated energy shot out, gouging a deep groove into the thing’s hull and cooking off its remaining frag launchers.

  The machine did not fall.

  Giant claws shot forward with piston quickness. There was a tearing shriek of metal, and Fal’ras’ battlesuit was caught, impaled upon the whirring grinder inside the thing’s right fist. The shas’ui came apart in hideous indignity, suit and pilot mingled horribly in sprays of sparking electricity and hot blood.

  Lumbering forward, the Imperial machine made a clumsy grab for Bravestorm’s leg. The commander smoothly rose out of reach before dropping sharply behind it, kicking the machine whilst it was mid-step in an attempt to overbalance it. It was like striking a loaded freight cube. He sent plasma bolts searing into the pistons at its hip, hoping to take its leg and send it sprawling. The white-hot energies spattered away without effect.

  The thing was gathering speed, charging for the staggered lines of tau infantry that had formed up near the transmotive. The strike teams pock-marked its frontal armour with streams of plasma, and Bravestorm’s team added their fire. The combined fusillade turned the machine’s armour from cobalt blue to burned and blasted black, but it charged forwards nonetheless.

  ‘Controlled retreat!’ shouted Bravestorm over the cadre-net. ‘It’s iridium-plated!’

  The fire warriors moved backwards in good order, some climbing back into the transmotive as others hurled photon grenades to buy them time. The devices detonated with blinding flashes, but they had as much effect as a pin-torch shone at a rampaging krootox.

  A pug-nosed Imperial gunship roared overhead, its chugging anti-personnel cannons cutting down the fire warriors gathered close by the transmotive cylinder. The team’s cohesion broke, but their passage was hindered by the sprawling corpses of their comrades, and the resulting confusion cost them dear. The metal beast bore down on them, its footsteps shaking the earth.

  Bravestorm punched his weapons yield to full, siphoning every iota of power from his shield generator to pour shots into the machine’s flank, but the thing barrelled through plasma fire and burst cannon volley alike. He had moments left before it reached the infantry. The thought of the slaughter that would ensue made the commander’s gorge rise.

  Bravestorm boosted over the thing’s head, spinning mid-leap to land with a crunch right in its path.

  ‘Fight me then, monster!’ he shouted, his speakers blaring his challenge loud. He levelled a double shot at the hulking thing’s vision slit. The salvo did little more than scorch it. The war machine took the bait nonetheless, its entire torso swivelling at the waist as it swiped its demolition claw in a backhand arc. The disc of Bravestorm’s shield took most of the impact, but the blow connected hard nonetheless. His battlesuit flew backwards to crunch bodily into the transmotive’s transit cylinder, the impact caving in the reinforced metal of its side.

  Muddled pain flared in Bravestorm’s head, his eyesight blurring even as his control cocoon’s systems glitched and shorted. His damage display suite pulsed red, alert chimes ringing insistently. The commander rerouted power, struggling to get the suit back online.

  He could feel the Imperial death-machine stomping towards him, deadly purpose in every earth-shaking step.

  The sensor suite fizzed back to life, and Bravestorm set his jaw as he levelled another volley. Still it did nothing. The monster had to be built specifically to resist plasma.

  The thing was lumbering on, fire warriors scrabbling away from it on all sides. He did not blame them. They had two choices – flee, or die where they stood. Though he felt revulsion to admit it, perhaps the scattering infantry had the right idea.

  Wan light glinted from the Imperial walker as it stormed in close, only fifteen feet away now. Its gauntlet fist flexed wide, the drills of its demolition claw whirring.

  Bravestorm crouched and triggered his jump jets, shoulder-barging the thing with all the thrust he could muster. He rebounded hard from its torso, triggering his repulsor jets to skid away through the sparse undergrowth of the magnorail siding.

  The machine tried to correct its charge, but its momentum was too great. It ploughed into the transmotive with such force it bowled an entire transit section over, twisting the rest of the conveyor along its length with a hideous shriek of alloys.

  Bravestorm made use of the reprieve to cast about himself, searching desperately for a weapon that could deal with such heavy armour. Above him, the aerial struggle for supremacy raged on, as many contrails of humanity’s pollutants discolouring the skies as there were clean white traces of the air caste. From the west, an Imperial gunship screamed in towards them for a strafing run, guns levelled.

  This time Bravestorm was ready.

  ‘Form a line on these coordinates!’ Symbols of request-clarification blipped on his command suite. ‘For the Tau’va! Do it now!’

  Bravestorm vaulted into the air, spinning to land atop the nearest transit cylinder’s ejection cradles. His team redeployed into a line leading away from the transmotive. Just as Bravestorm had suspected, the Imperial pilot could not resist the choice enfilade in front of him. The gunship thudded fat shells into Bravestorm’s Crisis team, knocking two of them down – but in doing so, it aligned itself with the unstoppable Imperial walker beyond.

  Bravestorm’s jump jets flared as he leapt from the roof of the transmotive to soar on a collision course with the gunship. The fist-like prow passed within arm’s reach. At that precise moment the commander opened fire at point-blank range into its cockpit. The plasma bolts burned the pilot to molten sludge just as the gunship’s wing slammed hard into Bravestorm’s side. Tremendous forces tore at him – it felt as if his limbs were being wrenched from his body, but incredibly the suit’s iridium held fast.

  The gunship fared much worse. With its wing buckled and its cockpit ablaze, its strafing run turned into a headlong dive. Flames coursed along its fuselage as the bull-nosed gunship hurtled down to earth. Just as the Imperial walker was freeing itself from the stricken transmotive, the ruined aircraft slammed right into it with catastrophic force.

  A mangled confusion of gunship, walker and transit cylinder slewed over the magnorail track before detonating spectacularly. The explosion lit the sky, Bravestorm’s displays auto-dimming a moment before a mushrooming cloud of smoke billowed from the carnage. The twisted bodies of the gunship’s Space Marine passengers mingled with the corpses of those fire warriors caught in the transit cylinder, tumbling down the siding in bloody confusion.

  Bravestorm landed clumsily, his balance taken by the impact of the gunship’s wing. He overlaid a hostiles filter as he righted himself, sending the data pulsing outward. Those of his battlesuit team still standing after the Imperial craft’s pass went to work. Their plasma rifles, all but useless against the heavy walker, blasted apart the dazed Space Marines that were struggling from the gunship’s wreckage.

  More fire warriors emerged from the transit cylinders to either side of the wreck, pulse carbine shots cutting down those gue’ron’sha emerging from the hexodome’s perimeter in support of their fallen kin. Here and there a wounded Imperial warrior returned fire, mass-reactive bolts punching tau infantry into the dirt, but in doing so they signed their own death warrants. Bravestorm eye-flicked target designators one after another, his weapon systems systematically destroying the remaining invaders whenever they revealed their locations. Every time his thr
eat sensor chimed, another Space Marine was cut down.

  ‘Commander,’ came the transmission from his trusted saz’nami aide Et’rel, ‘there are several invaders here that are well beyond threat parameters, but still technically alive.’

  ‘Leave them,’ said Bravestorm, his battlesuit picking through the rubble. ‘They fought with courage and pose no further danger to us. Secure a perimeter. I have data to accrue.’

  The burning wreckage of the transmotive had buckled in a great loop that dangled over the siding, and the ruined gunship had flipped over to expose the torn passenger bay beneath. In the middle of the carnage was the heavy walker, half-crumpled by the tremendous impact of the crashing aircraft.

  Bravestorm hovered closer, his sensor suite on high alert for any sign of threat. There was information to be harvested here, information the earth caste would value highly. Perhaps there were materials the Imperium made use of that surpassed even the hardiness of his battlesuit’s iridium alloy. Unlikely, but O’Vesa would never forgive him if he didn’t at least try to find out.

  Milky liquid drizzled from the crippled war machine’s chest unit, bubbling and popping in the electrical fires swathing its legs. Lubricant, thought Bravestorm. He zoomed in. The fluid was shot through with blood.

  Something was moving inside the torso unit. Something broken and sick.

  Bravestorm held his plasma rifle steady and extruded a hand from his battlesuit’s shield gauntlet. Gripping the blackened metal of the machine’s midsection, he carefully lifted the flaking hull plate up and outward, leaning forward to peer inside.

  The creature that stared back made his breath catch.

  A twisted and grotesque figure was trapped inside, all barrel chest and atrophied stumps. It stared up at him from sunken sockets, its undisguised hatred almost palpable. Wires and tubes penetrated its horrifically abused body in a hundred places. It wheezed, red-black fluids spilling from a broken jaw that worked and gummed as if it could click back into place through willpower alone.

  A glut of milky liquid poured from around its sutured waist as it jerked, spitting a gobbet of half-clotted blood onto Bravestorm’s ochre paintwork. Bravestorm’s sensor suite performed a threat analysis as the liquid burned through his synth layer. The clot was laced with a potent acid.

  The commander recoiled as the thing’s stink was filtered through his olfactory relay, and the battlesuit jerked upright in response. His autotrans flashed, spool-script rendering the creature’s slurred words in the tau lexicon.

  ‘– –DIE IN PAIN – – FOREIGN WORM THING – –’

  Standing upright, the commander placed a hoof-like foot upon the creature’s torso and triggered the punch-cylinder under its sole. A thin tube of titanium thumped into the thing’s ruined flesh before withdrawing with a neat click. The device was intended for geological analysis, installed by the earth caste to be used whenever the tau set foot on a new world, but Bravestorm knew from experience it could read biological information just as well.

  Keeping one eye on the plasma rifle’s designator, he used the other to scan the assessment screen in the rounded corner of his cocoon. The necrotic thing was human, or a close derivative. Extensive tissue damage, rejuvenation scars, and…

  The commander looked again in horror.

  Somehow, the vile thing was over six thousand years old.

  A macabre realisation crept through Bravestorm’s mind. This abomination had been trapped in its armoured war-coffin long before the tau’s ancestors had first emerged from their caves. What manner of enemy were they fighting upon Dal’yth?

  ‘– – KILL ME – – VEXING FOOL – –’ spooled the autotrans. ‘– – KILL ME – – OR I SHALL HUNT YOU UNTIL DEATH – –’

  Bravestorm triggered his plasma rifle, and the creature met its final oblivion.

  Chapter Two

  INTENSIFICATION/FIRE AND CARNAGE

  The Eighth Company was under fire, beyond punishing in its intensity. Battlesuits hunted the smoke, armed not with the rotary cannons the Ultramarines had encountered on the outlying tau worlds, but with cylindrical weapons that spat bolts of sizzling plasma. Whenever an Assault squad leaped high it was hit by converging streams of fire, and fresh casualties would hurtle back down to smash into the xenos synthcrete. Despite the early gains of the Imperial invasion’s initial attack, Operation Pluto was losing momentum fast.

  Sicarius felt impatience burning at his mind. The plexiglass of the domes offered little in the way of workable cover, and the tau warsuits seemed able to pierce the fog of war with ease. His superior, Captain Atheus, had not expected so sudden a counter-attack. None of them had, in truth. With every passing minute another magnorail transmotive disgorged a battalion of tau before heading back the way it had come to collect more reinforcements. Numitor was right. The planet’s defenders were converging upon them from every direction, and at speed.

  There was a crackling scream of engines, and Brother Dalaton hurtled from the sky to bounce, skid and slump against an abstract tau sculpture on Sicarius’ flank. Vaporised blood steamed from the gaping hole in the Space Marine’s gut. The stink of the wound was awful. Dalaton reached up towards his sergeant for a moment, shuddered, and fell back dead.

  They had to redeploy. Now.

  ‘Captain,’ voxed Sicarius. ‘We have to leave the landing site, by any means necessary. Apothecary Drekos, we have fallen battle-brothers in Plaza Sec Alpha.’

  ‘Agreed,’ voxed back Atheus. ‘Numitor, Antelion, disperse immediately. Concentration of assets has become our foe.’

  Sicarius was already running, waving his squad to keep low as they pounded along behind him. He saw Numitor break from the smoke across the plaza, making for the sleek white transit cylinder that had slid to a halt within the nearest interstitial spar. Sicarius broke into a full sprint, each stride spanning ten feet or more as he bounded alongside the accelerating transmotive. He drew his plasma pistol and fired, the sunburst of energy burning through the interstice wall to leave a gaping hole with glowing amber edges.

  Sicarius flung himself forward, triggered his pack, and boosted across the plaza less than an arm’s length from the ground. He hammered headlong through the wound in the tunnel’s side and into its cylindrical interior, rebounding from the mag-transport beyond to smash awkwardly into the rubble strewn across the spar’s floor. Instinctively, Sicarius grabbed hold of a jutting white bar and pulled upright. His legs had been a hand’s breadth from the electromagnetic rails that would have fried his power armour’s systems and left him trapped for any passing xenos to slay.

  Up ahead, Sicarius saw Numitor batter through a wall section with a strong swing of his power fist. Three of the sergeant’s squad put their shoulders into the breach, and the wall caved completely. Across the vox Sicarius heard Numitor laugh in satisfaction as rubble and dust cascaded down, scattering towards the magnorail transmotive inside.

  A low hum filled the interhex corridor, strange energies making the hair on Sicarius’ forearms prickle inside his battleplate. Though empty, the xenos transport had powered up and was beginning to move.

  ‘Get inside,’ voxed Sicarius, ‘all of you.’ He loosed another shot from his plasma pistol, its incandescent energies burning into the transmotive’s flank. The pistol’s machine-spirit was protesting against two maximum shots without a proper cooldown. It did its job nonetheless. The shot melted a wide aperture into the transit cylinder, and Sicarius barged his way through without breaking stride.

  Two of his squad made it through behind him, despite the transport’s smooth acceleration. The rest were nowhere to be seen. As Numitor and his battle-brothers wrenched their way inside the transit cylinder, Sicarius turned back with his face twisted in aggravation behind his helm.

  ‘Glavius! Veletan! Kaetoros!’ barked the sergeant. ‘What’s taking so long?’

  ‘Under heavy fire, sergeant,’ came the response.
‘Pinned down. Colnid and Denturis too.’

  ‘Then you’ve missed your chance,’ said Sicarius, his lips twisting. The transport was smoothly gliding away from the dropsite, leaving the majority of his squad in its wake. ‘Rendezvous later if you can.’ Sicarius shot a sidelong glance at Squad Numitor. The sergeant was looking right back at him, helm cocked in a silent question.

  Six of Squad Numitor, to his three.

  Not good enough.

  The transmotive was accelerating, pulling away from the war zone as it glided into the suburbs of the city.

  After a long silence, Numitor spoke.

  ‘The steersman’s unaware he’s carrying hostiles.’

  ‘If there is a steersman,’ replied Sicarius.

  ‘Hmm. Good point,’ said Numitor, pulling flinders of mangled metal from the scorched exterior of his power fist. ‘If this is guided by a false intelligence, so much the better. It’ll be blindly heading back for reinforcements, taking us right into a tau war nest.’

  Tau society was infested with weapons-grade drone intelligences; Sicarius and his squad had found that out the hard way on the other side of the Damocles Gulf. Their blasphemous creation of artificial life was widely seen as another compelling reason to eradicate the entire race.

  As if Sicarius needed any more of a motive.

  The sergeant smiled grimly, imagining the violence he would soon unleash. With luck, the transport would likely be taking them right to a tau military barracks, delivering them into the depths of a prime stronghold and giving them a chance to slaughter senior command personnel before they realised they were under attack.

  ‘The split will be worth it,’ said Sicarius, more to himself than anyone else.

  ‘They reacted fast, overall,’ said Numitor, motioning for his squadmates to take sentinel positions at the transit cylinder’s edges whilst they reloaded their bolt pistols. ‘Far faster than we had anticipated. Maybe they were forewarned. Psykers?’