Blades of Damocles

by Phil Kelly

  Tempting as it was to leave Sicarius behind, they could not split their forces again, not so soon after their tenuous regroup in the shattered tower. By leaving Glavius earthbound, Numitor’s fellow sergeant had forced their hand. They had no option but to fight – fight against an enemy far out of their reach, an adversary capable of killing them from low orbit if necessary without fear of retaliation.

  To his mounting horror, Numitor realised he had no idea how.

  The ominous purr of incoming xenocraft grew louder. Looking up at the skies, Numitor saw the flicker of wingtips between two smaller hexodomes. He tried to recall the wisdom of the Codex Astartes that dealt with anti-air doctrine, but with more aircraft closing in, nothing short of a battle demi-company would be enough to extricate them from their plight.

  ‘Veletan!’ he voxed. ‘What’s your theoretical?’

  ‘When shorn of ground-to-air capability, take cover whilst bringing allied assets to bear,’ recited Veletan. ‘If none are nearby, make haste to a rendezvous point.’

  ‘Allied assets,’ muttered Numitor. After the evacuation from Gel’bryn City, the nearest Ultramarine presence was at least an hour away. There was no way they could make it there alive with the tau bombers hounding them.

  Another trio of crackling plasma spheres fell from the skies. Several of Numitor’s squad leaped high on tongues of flame, taking shots with their bolt pistols at the apogee of their ascent, but they were way out of range. Aordus left it a moment too long to veer away from the return fire and was sent hurtling away by an explosion of plasma energy. He cracked awkwardly into a curved walkway, the front of his power armour melted away to expose the steaming black carapace beneath.

  ‘Get under the gantry,’ shouted Numitor, diving for cover as the bombers cut around a shallow hexodome for another attack run. The rest of his squad followed, catching on to the sergeant’s plan to dart from cover to cover until they reached the larger hexodome ahead. They were gambling that they would reach it in time, but it was the best chance they had.

  Not all of Sicarius’ squad were with him.

  ‘Brother Kaetoros!’

  Kaetoros, unmistakeable in his badly scorched armour, was pounding along the far side of the plaza. His flamer drizzled blue droplets of excess promethium, the flickering spots of heat that marked his progress lingering on Numitor’s auto-senses. They were presumably just as visible to the tau aircraft high above.

  ‘Trust me!’ voxed Kaetoros. ‘We won’t clear the plaza otherwise!’

  Numitor cursed as Sicarius’ flamer-wielding squadmate skidded to a halt almost half a mile away. Flakes of burnt paint eddied in his wake. Kaetoros raised the weapon to his chest and poured a long gout of burning promethium into the missing side portal of a fallen tau grav-tank; by Numitor’s reckoning it was a casualty of the opening invasion, laid low by a well-aimed missile. The flaming promethium splashed around inside the tank, burning electricals and plastics alike until a thick column of black smoke poured from the stricken vehicle’s side hatch. The interior of the tank caught fire and soon it was billowing clouds of choking pollutant into the air.

  Kaetoros boosted away a split second before a crackling sphere of plasma splashed down where he had been standing. Turning in mid-flight, he landed feet-first under the spar of a fallen balcony, sticking close to the wall. His scorched-black power armour blended with the shadows, making him appear more like a stealth-conscious Raven Guard than a proud Ultramarine.

  Overhead, the xenocraft squadron circled above the soot-belching tank, intent on finishing off the prey they had seen nearby. Plasma bombs rained down, chewing great chunks from the building next to the grav-tank and causing a landslide of rubble to crash into the street. Kaetoros had already slid away; if it were not for the rune on Numitor’s visor, he would have lost the flamer operative’s position altogether.

  The distraction had bought them time – not much, but perhaps enough.

  ‘With me,’ said Numitor to his brothers, breaking left and heading for an upright, lozenge-shaped structure. Atop it was the mushroom dome so common in tau architecture. His squad followed close behind, running as fast as they could across the plaza towards the cover.

  Out of nowhere came a pair of tau strike fighters, the quad-barrelled turrets under their tails spitting white fury. The first fighter’s strafing run cut across the leading squad, pitching Trondoris from his feet. The bladesman’s eviscerator clattered from his hands. The second aircraft’s plasma volley struck Numitor’s legs as he hurled himself forward into the shadow of the tau building, searing pain burning the backs of his knees. He put it out of his mind, his enhanced nervous system already quashing the agony with a rush of hyperdrenaline.

  Trondoris scrabbled to retrieve his outsized chainblade, but the quad turret underslung beneath the rearmost xenocraft swivelled around and spat bright ion fire, forcing him to yank his arms back or lose his hands entirely. Magros ran in close instead, scooping the eviscerator up in both hands and hurling it sidelong towards its owner even as he hurtled away once more.

  With Kaetoros’ distraction spent, the tau bombers were already heading back for a fresh pass. Their manoeuvrability was daunting, the closeness of their formation impressive even to an Ultramarine.

  The stragglers of squads Numitor and Sicarius got to shelter, darting under the eaves of a building with a raised transmotive rail around its perimeter just as the xenocraft reached them. A cluster of plasma spheres came raining down. One landed half a dozen feet from Numitor, the blast wave of its explosion hurling him sidelong across the plaza. The other two smashed into the maglev rail above them, burning straight through the graceful arcs of its supports.

  With an ominous squeal of protesting alloys, an entire section of the transit arc came crashing down. The Assault Marines leaped away at the last instant before the slew of rubble could bury them alive. Colnid, one of Sicarius’ squad, was a heartbeat too slow, and was sent sprawling as a boulder-sized lump of rock smacked into his shoulder. His jump pack malfunctioned, its stabbing fires sending him careening across the plaza and smashing him into a smooth, abstract sculpture.

  Above, Sicarius was leaping from balcony-spur to domed roof, his borrowed jump pack burning fuel in great gouts of flame as he sought to climb into range for a killing strike. Numitor shook his head in bewilderment. Already the sergeant was out of close vox range, leaving his squad to face the punitive attack runs of the tau without orders. The pilots were paying him little mind, and rightly so; even the highest building spire was still nowhere near their attack runs.

  Somewhere inside Numitor’s mind, he could hear his brother asking if he had any better ideas. In truth, he did not.

  Veering through the skies towards Sicarius’ position came a far larger tau aircraft, not elegant like the fighters and bombers that harried them, but lumpen and solid. It looked like its boxy hold could have held an entire demi-company. Thruster engines on each corner swivelled to landing positions. Numitor recognised the type from the battle at the reservoir – a xenos bulker, presumably filled with enough of their warrior caste to finish what the pilots above had started.

  With a wordless cry, Sergeant Sicarius leaped from his position behind the curving spar of a nearby building. The alien sun of Dal’yth glinted on his sword. Landing with a loud clang on the roof of the tau lander, he brought his blade curving down two-handed, slashing through the gimbal of the rear right engine to send the entire thruster tumbling away. The lander, struggling to avoid crashing into the city’s domes, adjusted its course upwards in a broad, smoking spiral.

  A spiral that would soon bring it close to the tau bomber squadron.

  Numitor shook his head, this time in awe. Sicarius, having bought the last surge of altitude he needed by the damaged craft’s evasive manoeuvre, blasted from the top of the transport with Glavius’ jump pack. His plasma pistol sent incandescent bursts of energy behind him to bullseye t
he lander’s other rear engine even as he surged higher. The lander, fatally wounded, dragged its heavy hindquarters through the sky. Its struggling glide accelerated into a downward dive as Sicarius shot upwards and away, expending fuel at a massive rate. His leap crested just as the tau bomber squadron veered around him in an attempt to evade.

  Sicarius pivoted, lashing out to carve the tip from one bomber’s wing even as it deployed its attendant drones. He boosted backwards as the disc-machines spat deadly ion energy from their rifles. Pistol aimed between his feet, Sicarius made his shot even as his sidelong flight took him towards the next bomber. A fist-sized ball of plasma caught the nearest drone full on, turning it into a hovering pillar of flame.

  Mag-clamping his pistol to his waist, Sicarius was already upon the next aircraft, reaching out to grab the elegant lateral bar that linked its wingtip to its tail. The jolt of the xenocraft’s passage would have torn a normal man’s arm from its socket, but Sicarius was of the Adeptus Astartes, built for power as well as speed. Cutting his pack turbines, Sicarius let his dead weight drag the bomber away from the last of its squadron. Its pilot struggled to compensate, jerking back against the downwards pull.

  A weapons drone hovered in close – too close. The sergeant lashed out with a foot and caught it under its broad rim, sending it spinning away with its rifle spitting curls of haywire energy.

  The tau pilot was on the verge of losing control, veering back towards his squadron-mate to compensate for the massive weight hanging from his wing. In doing so he unwittingly sealed his squadron’s fate. Sicarius put his shoulder to the lateral bar of the fighter’s fuselage and blasted his borrowed pack at full burn, turning his dead weight into a sudden sharp push. Then the sergeant let go, dropping feet-first to land in a clatter of ceramite on a nearby roof.

  The aircraft, already leaning hard, found itself peeling off at a steep angle with the sudden reversal of force upon its wing. Careening, it crashed into its squadmate and sent them both tumbling away into the city below. The flames from the double explosion lit the skies.

  A flash of shock and pain slammed across Numitor’s mind as three vicious impacts struck him side on, sending him sprawling. His eyes burned as he tried to make sense of what had happened, pushing himself upright and launching back on instinct as another strafing run scorched the plaza a matter of inches away. Static filled his vision. His armour’s machine-spirit had been driven into a recuperative coma, so he wrenched his dented helm free, trusting to his own senses despite the ringing blow that had shaken him.

  Numitor squinted up, the words of the Codex reverberating through his head. Rank hath its privileges, but with them come dangers too numerous to count.

  No wonder he was attracting so much fire. He wore a red helm where the rank and file wore blue.

  Sure enough, two of the tau strike fighters were bearing down on him. Their underslung tail guns spat as they stitched a deadly crossfire towards him. He triggered his jump pack. It was unresponsive, a dead weight on his back.

  A billowing white contrail shot up from a low domed roof to the right. Numitor caught sight of a flashing black missile at its tip. It slammed into the cockpit of the first strike fighter. A thunderous explosion saw the top half of the xenocraft torn away, a spray of blood amongst the mangled wreckage. The fighter craft flew apart under the force of its own torque, causing the second fighter to disengage, its attack run aborted as it shot overhead into the heart of the city.

  ‘Tactical squad, Fifth Company!’ shouted Trondoris across the plaza, pointing at the dome above.

  A red-helmed figure stood the edge of the sloping roof. Behind him, a heavy weapons specialist held his missile launcher vertical as the servo arm on his backpack slid another flakk missile inside. Seeing Numitor no longer wearing his helm, the sergeant took off his own and called down into the plaza.

  ‘Squad Antelion pays its debts!’

  Numitor laughed in disbelief. Squad Antelion, the same unit he and his men had saved from an ignominious death during the freefall of their initial planetstrike.

  ‘And quickly, it seems,’ hollered back Numitor. ‘Beware these ones, sergeant. They’ll pick you out as an officer if they see that red helm!’

  ‘The bombers just pass over us,’ Antelion shouted back. ‘There’s another squadron in this sector. Seen us two or three times now. They sent drones, but we dealt with them easily enough. They won’t bomb us, for some reason. It’s you they’re after!’

  Something about Antelion’s claim did not ring true with Numitor. An elite infantry squad, unsupported and exposed on a featureless dome; they were a prime target if ever there was one. The tau had shown no compunction about tearing down the architecture of their own city – no doubt the pilots were given clearance to bomb whatever target they deemed necessary. Little surprise, given the speed with which the builder caste were throwing up more strucures in the wake of the initial strikes.

  So why weren’t they bombing Squad Antelion, exposed as they were on the roof above?

  The words of the Codex filtered through Numitor’s mind once more, even without Veletan to remind him of them.

  When civilian casualties can be avoided, do so. When they cannot, act without hesitation.

  Perhaps the tau had a similar code. Perhaps theirs was less pragmatic, and they had been ordered to avoid civilian casualties no matter the cost.

  Suddenly it struck him. The shallow-domed buildings were hab-blocks, population areas that were likely still inhabited, and might lead to the honeycomb of tunnels and corridors housing the majority of the tau citizenry.

  ‘Trondoris, vox all squads!’ shouted Numitor, ‘we need to get into that dome under Antelion, and fast.’

  The battle-brothers of the Eighth Company shot across the plaza, a fresh squadron of xenocraft bombers coming in at speed behind them. Numitor gritted his teeth, expecting a deadly impact any moment. The ragged muster in the low dome’s shadow had cost them precious seconds.

  ‘Vertical vector,’ Veletan was muttering. ‘Thrust… assume velocity constant… maximum charge… parabolic crest… trajectory’s close enough…’

  ‘Veletan, shut up and concentrate,’ said Duolor.

  ‘I am concentrating,’ said Veletan. Turning suddenly, the warrior braced for a moment and leaped back the way they had come. A plasma sphere detonated ten feet beneath him just as the Assault Marine fired his jump pack to maximum, the bow wave of the explosion launching him high into the air. His pistol whined to full output, its power cells glowing bright blue. At the crest of his bolstered leap, Veletan punched the plasma pistol upward and took a single shot at the last of the tau bombers to hurtle overhead.

  His timing was impeccable. Just when the bomb generator underneath the craft clicked open to release its own ball of plasma, the searing energies of Veletan’s shot struck the pulse bomb itself, overloading it in a spectacular blaze of force. The malfunction consumed the entire rearwards section of the bomber with a thunderclap boom that reverberated across the city sector.

  Veletan fell back to the street, legs still trailing flame, as the front section of the craft hurtled downwards. It careened over the rest of Squad Numitor and struck the side of Antelion’s building with force enough to smash straight through the wall. Cracks shuddered out from the impact as the wreckage ploughed to a jumbled halt in the darkness beyond.

  Numitor could hardly believe the opportunity unfolding before them, but had no desire to see Veletan’s consummate display of skill wasted. He charged forwards, his men following. From the right came Sicarius, pounding across the plaza on foot. Having made it back down from his aerial attack, he was leading a gathering of battle-brothers – including Glavius, Kaetoros and the remainder of Squad Antelion – in a headlong run towards the shattered wall. The other squads of Eighth Company were close behind. Numitor sprinted for the opening that led into the civilian building, Sicarius and his men close on his
heels.

  Numitor pushed into the lee of the building and fought through the rubble and smoke to the safety of the interior.

  Perhaps there was hope for their plan after all, he thought. They would find the tau commanders they sought, and bring death to any who stood in their way.

  Chapter Five

  INSERTION/WHAT LIES BENEATH

  Por’el Aman’te looked at the ceiling with wide eyes as another explosion shook the walls of her underground home. A tracery of cracks had spread across it, daunting in their symbolism. Bombs were falling, high above.

  Gel’bryn City was taking great punishment. Aman’te had told Dal’yth’s people their planet would survive, and would tell them a thousand times over if necessary. But during a recent databrief she had seen the footage of the Imperial invasion of Vespertine, witnessing the horrific violence meted out by humanity’s shock troops. A tiny part of her was unworthy enough to think that her words of reassurance might just be outright lies.

  Not many of Dal’yth’s thriving water caste lived under the planet’s surface. Most of her kind preferred the hubbub of the city plazas, and took residences in the most populous of regions. But Aman’te was not like most of her kind.

  She cast a glance towards her liquid sculptures, arranged with great care upon the table. They were both her secret shame and her greatest joy, a constant symbol of the dichotomy at the centre of her soul. Ripples flowed across their surfaces, their shimmering light reflected upon the ceiling as the deep bass of explosions boomed above.

  It was unheard of for one of the water caste to pursue the art of sculpture. Acts of material creation were the exclusive province of the earth caste. Aman’te, driven by something inside her, had created them nonetheless. Something in her mind’s eye had called them into being, and she had been inspired to give them form, much like tau lifedonors were sometimes inspired to seek out the generation farms in the labyrinthine earth caste complexes beyond.