Blades of Damocles

by Phil Kelly

  ‘Time has been kind to you, Mont’ka-Shoh,’ said the old warrior. ‘Your bearing is that of the hero.’

  ‘If I have earned that accolade,’ said Farsight, ‘it is only because of the application of your wisdom. The fire caste would be a shadow of its current incarnation without you.’

  ‘I have trained so many, since I took residence here,’ sighed Master Puretide. ‘Thirteen tau’cyr I have spent on this mountain, with the young and the naive my only companions. I remember them all, every detail. Yet you are the first to come back to me.’

  Farsight felt something writhe in the pit of his stomach. Suddenly the contents of the satchel over his shoulder felt heavy and awkward.

  ‘I had forgotten how beautiful it was here.’

  ‘I doubt that, young warrior. You were never one to forget. I always knew your star would rise high, ever since I met you. A raw cadet, back then, but still outwitting your tutors daily at Battle Dome Mont’yr.’ The war-sage’s face cracked into a wrinkled smile. ‘One of them in particular did not take kindly to it.’

  ‘He still doesn’t,’ said Farsight. The thought of Tutor Sha’kan’thas made his blood sting in his veins, but he pushed the emotion down. That one did not belong here, not even in spirit.

  ‘My most recent students told me of your victory at Arkunasha,’ said Master Puretide. ‘A true son of Vior’la, setting the storm against the foe. An apt echo of your sept’s own trial by fire.’

  ‘Too many good warriors died to the orks there,’ said Farsight. ‘I cannot consider it a victory.’

  ‘Do not let the guilt consume you. The be’gel are not easily defeated. Their ways are strange.’

  ‘Master… it seems we have encountered an even stranger foe in the gue’la.’

  Puretide frowned, turning back to the crevasse and closing his eyes. ‘I have seen the fires in the sky. They seek to push a blade of doubt into the heart of the Tau Empire.’

  ‘I will not allow it,’ said Farsight.

  ‘So you come here. To seek my help.’

  Farsight swallowed. ‘Yes. For the Greater Good.’

  ‘My soul longs to fight, in truth,’ said Puretide. ‘And yet I laid down my guns long ago. I shall not wear the Hero’s Mantle again.’

  ‘I would not ask it of you,’ said Farsight. ‘But… the great ethereals, master. They wish to harness your wisdom in as many ways as possible. They have tasked the earth caste with this, as well as the fire.’

  ‘And yet you walk the monat’s path to reach me,’ said Puretide. ‘You have that within you, the power of one. Yet you must learn to fight with kauyon, monat and mont’ka, if you are to fulfil your destiny. To bait, to decoy, to guide foes as well as friends along the paths of fate. These are things Kauyon-Shas understands within her soul. But I fear you never will, not truly. Just as she will never truly understand the mont’ka.’

  ‘The victory of the mind is to consider the whole, not its constituent parts,’ quoted Farsight.

  ‘Just so,’ nodded Puretide. ‘Easy to repeat, not so easy to achieve. Take the gue’la invader’s mind into your own, my child. Study the stone-shape of his thoughts from the ripples that flow from their impact. You must form the da’thle’vral, the mirror that shows the weakness. Then, and only then, will you will prevail. To secure victory, the wise must adapt.’

  ‘There is little time for study, master,’ said Farsight. ‘This is not a war confined to a single world, like Arkunasha. The gue’la, their warships come from nowhere. They pour more of their filth upon Dal’yth with every new night. If they win here, they will not stop until the entire Tau Empire is shattered and our destiny cast into the void.’

  ‘And so you wish to win in haste,’ said Puretide, his expression sour. ‘Just as you always did.’

  ‘No, master,’ said Farsight. ‘I realise that patience is key. Yet the ethereals bade me take a different path.’

  Puretide said nothing, his expression unreadable. The thin, cold rain was turning to tiny flakes of snow, dancing and whirling as it came down around them.

  ‘Master, the gue’la are here, on this planet!’ protested Farsight. ‘The invaders’ beachhead is less than two rotaa from where we now sit together, talking as if I had never left!’ His face felt hot, despite the cold wind playing around them. ‘With a determined push, their strike troopers could take this mountain tonight,’ said Farsight, ‘and kill you where you sit! Does that not affect your philosophy? Do you not care for victory any more?’

  The venerable warrior just looked at Farsight as if the answer was obvious. The habit was just as infuriating as the first night he had spent on the mountain, but this time, the stakes were far, far higher.

  Just as Farsight’s simmering anger was about to boil over completely, the master spoke.

  ‘If I die, child, then it will be because my time has come.’

  ‘And what if Dal’yth dies with you? I cannot allow it.’

  Farsight swung the satchel from over his shoulder, releasing the strip that held it closed, and pulling out a disc-shaped cryocasket. He slid a finger around its circumference and it hissed open. As he gingerly took out the contents, a latticework device made of dangling wires and tiny circular pads, the device writhed slightly. It reminded Farsight uncomfortably of a Dal’ythan jellyfish.

  ‘This is a recording device,’ said Farsight. ‘You must wear it, master. It will capture your wisdom, the better to distribute it amongst the commanders of the Tau’va. We need your help, and we need it now.’

  ‘So they wish to take my mind,’ said Puretide. ‘I knew this day would come. But I did not expect it would be you that brought it to me.’

  Farsight made the gesture of the unworthy student. ‘In truth I do not know their full intent, master. I only relay it on behalf of the Shas’ar’tol.’

  The ancient sage looked sidelong at Farsight, his expression timeless.

  ‘Do not bring me falsehoods, Shoh.’

  The ugly sensation in the commander’s gut was getting stronger. He suddenly felt as if he wanted to choke out the contents of his stomachs, but clamped it down.

  ‘I only do as I am ordered,’ said Farsight. ‘As the ethereals have asked of me.’

  Puretide turned in his hover-throne to face his student, his face a stoic mask. ‘Do what you must, then,’ he said. ‘In the name of the Tau’va.’

  Taking the jellyfish device and spreading it out with his fingers as O’Vesa had shown him, Farsight draped it upon his mentor’s bald pate with the utmost care. It was a strange reversal, for the student to treat the master in such a fashion. In his mind’s eye, a memory flashed of the ceremonial ending of their training upon Mount Kan’ji. The master had finger-traced the crown of the new commander upon Farsight’s head in a mixture of blood and ash. Kauyon-Shas had been next, then Monat-Kais. It had been a day of joy, celebration and relief.

  The opposite to what Farsight now felt inside.

  Steeling himself, the commander began pressing the discs onto the neural sites as he had been instructed. All the while, the serpentine feeling of disquiet slithered in his gut.

  Puretide looked up at him, his eyes swimming with sadness and regret. In those dark pools were the reflections of a soul steeped in decades of contemplation.

  ‘Our race will walk dark paths, one day,’ he said. ‘Dark paths indeed.’

  Farsight did not reply, but inside his heart felt as if it were shrivelling. He touched the device’s activation node, and a tiny needle behind it extruded, poised over his master’s brain.

  At the last moment his mentor shot a hand up and grabbed him by the wrist, pulling him close.

  ‘Do not trust them all, my child,’ whispered Puretide. ‘Do not trust them all.’

  Then Farsight pushed the node all the way in with the faintest of clicks, and Puretide’s eyes rolled back into his head, as white as the snowflakes
drifting down from the troubled skies.

  Commander Sha’vastos leaned back into the ovoid med-slab, its cushioned recesses as welcoming as a soft bed. Proud to be part of this new phase of the tau’s military evolution, he smiled broadly at his fellow commanders and at the earth caste scientists bustling around them as they placed long needles under the skin of their subjects’ scalps.

  The door portal hissed open, and all those tau not strapped to a med-slab stood to attention, averting their eyes as the Ethereal Master himself stepped into the chamber. Every muscle in Sha’vastos’ body strained to stand bolt upright in salute, to make the sign of the Tau’va and progress through the full seven obeisances, but he was strapped down so securely he could do no more than twitch. He forced himself to adopt an expression of humble awe instead.

  Aun’Va swept further in, his ceremonial guards on either side as he exchanged soft words with the chief scientist, O’Vesa. Commander Sha’vastos felt weak with wonder. It was the very greatest of honours to have a member of the ethereal caste watch over him as his operation was performed, let alone to meet Aun’Va, Master of the Undying Light, in person. He could hardly believe his fortune.

  Soon he would scale the peaks of military perfection. It was a noble dream, to be spotless in the philosophies of war. He had always been in awe of the legendary Master Puretide, always looked to him as the epitome of what the fire caste could achieve. To be made one with all that wisdom, and to live as that which he had always most admired… and all before the greatest embodiment of the Tau’va who had ever lived. It was a dizzying thrill just to think about it.

  An earth caste scientist stepped into the commander’s line of vision, notation disc blinking in his palm.

  ‘Do you, Commander Shas’vastos, consent to this procedure in the name of the Tau’va?’

  There was really only one answer, and Sha’vastos was pleased to give it.

  ‘Of course.’

  Sha’vastos glanced at O’Vesa, hoping for reassurance. The squat luminary of the earth caste simply peered at him as if he was an interesting species of insect. Behind the earth caste scientist the commander could see a processor bank with a long, tall cylinder of blue liquid atop it. Inside that was the neural crown that had harnessed the sum total of Master Puretide’s wisdom. The wire-thing moved gently in its liquid suspension, motes of light trickling down its translucent appendages as it transmitted its data to the engram arrays below. It was strange, to think that the best of the fire caste’s long and proud warrior tradition could be represented in such a fashion. Strange and a little unsettling.

  Sha’vastos looked back to Aun’Va, and his doubts vanished completely.

  This was absolutely the right thing to do.

  ‘Do you have any questions before we begin the procedure?’ said the earth caste scientist, gently taking a sliver of biotech from the bottom of the engram array with a pair of repulsor field tweezers. Perhaps the size of a fingernail, the device had a nest of hairline wires bristling from its sides.

  ‘I only wish to register my profound delight in being allowed to participate in this new furtherance of the Greater Good,’ said Sha’vastos.

  ‘Very well,’ replied the scientist, pressing a panel upon the wall. He selected a laser scalpel from the small rack of instruments that hissed out. ‘Then let us begin.’

  ‘I echo Sha’vastos’ sentiment, of course,’ said Shas’o Myen, the female commander in the next alcove. ‘Is it possible, in theory, for the engram neurochip to be removed at a later date?’

  It was all Sha’vastos could do not to laugh. What a simple-minded fool she had proved herself to be, asking such a question in the presence of his Ethereal Majesty. The very idea of wanting to relinquish the strategic brilliance that Master Puretide’s engram would transfer to them… it was anathema to good sense.

  ‘Remove it?’ said O’Vesa, his grey slab of a face wrinkling in the middle. ‘Well, yes, of course we could remove it. The side effects would be significant, of course. Once the chip is embedded, the neurological structure of the brain is changed permanently. The host would likely be changed behaviourally, well below operational parameters in fact. But the chip itself would likely survive intact.’ He smiled broadly, showing flat teeth. ‘We build these things to last, you know.’

  ‘And will all of Master Puretide’s magnificence be transferred intact, O’Vesa?’ asked Aun’Va, his purring tones as soft as moonlight on silk.

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ said the master scientist awkwardly. ‘It is, after all, an experimental procedure. If I could have access to Master Puretide’s actual brain, perhaps remove it from its housing, then I could ensure–’

  ‘We shall continue with the current engram plan, for now,’ said Aun’Va. ‘Proceed. Let the Swords of Puretide be drawn, and the Tau’va rise magnificently from the flames upon Dal’yth.’

  Sha’vastos’ horror at the grotesque surgeries O’Vesa had been suggesting faded away, washed into cool tranquility by the liquid tones of the Ethereal Master. Aun’Va’s voice was more soothing than that of any water caste ambassador; Sha’vastos could listen to it from dawn until dusk and still drink in his every word.

  ‘Initiating,’ said the scientist in the commander’s peripheral vision. Sha’vastos first felt a series of sharp pricks in his skull as the med-slab’s anaesthetic needles sank deep, then nothing. His vision dimmed to grey, but his sense of smell remained. The scent of seared flesh and burning bone filled his olfactory fissure as the top of his head was cut away. Then his senses blurred together as one.

  Sha’vastos could actually see the smell of singed hair, taste the monochrome of shifting lights, and feel the spoken words caressing his opened cranium as the earth caste scientists talked through the procedure. A kaleidoscope of colours whirled across his mind, each a different melody in a symphony of pain. Then the biochip’s tiny wires stretched out into his brain, and his consciousness dwindled away completely, subsumed by that of a warrior he had always admired but never met. Unbidden, words rose to the surface, and bubbled out.

  ‘Do noth trusst them all, my child,’ slurred the commander through a mouthful of stringy drool. ‘Do noth trusst…’

  At the back of the med-bay, seen only by Sha’vastos’ milk-white and sightless orbs, Aun’Va’s eyes narrowed to thin and calculating slits.

  Chapter Thirteen

  FORTIFICATION/THE ARMOURED ISLAND

  On the outskirts of Via’mesh’la was the ‘instant fortress’ zone codified as Munitorum Zone Theta Tert. An elongated octagon in shape, its every corner bristled with autonomous weaponry. The area had been hastily cleared over the last two days. Already it was bustling with Imperial troops and armour.

  Under the supervision of a cabal of enginseers, the half-mile wide area had been blasted flat by demolitions charges and industrial-grade seismic drills. Around the rudimentary base’s edges were chunks of smooth tau architecture shattered into unrecognisable ruin. Amongst a thin haze of dust and smoke, Sentinel power lifters and piston-armed servitors still laboured to flatten the scatterings of tumbled buildings.

  On the corners of the octagon were rockcrete drop-bastions, reassuring icons of safety and solidity with the Imperial eagle emblazoned upon their sea-green flanks. Guardsmen kept vigil from their roofs, staring sullenly up at the domes and balconies of the curving tau buildings that constituted the periphery. Each bastion was topped with an Icarus quad-gun. As many of the giant autocannon arrays were trained upon the ivory roofs and the broken stretch of transmotive sweeprail to the west as were tracked up to the cloudy sky.

  Inside the bastions, platoons of Guardsmen rested, ate their rations or tended their wounds, adding an all-too-human stink to the soulless interiors of each prefabricated keep. Between each of these strongholds stretched aegis lines that formed the outer perimeter, battlement sections lowered into place by the same wide-bellied drop ships that had placed the bast
ions. There were gaps at the cardinal points of the barricades; two more bastions bracketed them like the towers of a gatehouse. Through these gate sites, columns of smoke-belching tanks ground into the complex and fanned out, guided to areas designated by monotask servitors that gestured repetitively with the lumen rods built into their skeletal limbs.

  Theta Tert formed the centre of a Munitorum beachhead. It was built to follow one of the fabled Standard Template Constructs, ancient blueprints devised to be of optimum utility no matter the war zone they were employed in, one of a dozen such zones established across Dal’yth’s surface since the main Imperial invasion had struck. Already half a regiment of Imperial Guard had mustered there. Transports as well as battle tanks were crunching through drifts of white gravel as they repositioned for refuelling and rearming at the bays next to the armoured promethium silos. A pair of Vendetta gunships sat idle in the north-east corner, lascannons jutting from their engine-tipped wings.

  The tang of cordite and electrical discharge filtered through the choking pall of dust, so thick it lingered on the tongue. In the last few minutes, the noise of brutal industry had abated to the point that the distant rumble of explosions was clearly audible in the distance. Hour by hour the tension of being in an active war zone increased. It was visible in the hunched shoulders of every Navy pilot and Astra Militarum trooper hustling to reach his designated muster point.

  Sergeant Numitor stepped from the side of the Baleghast Chimera Vorzht whilst it rolled into its designated position, his feet crunching into the thin layer of debris that covered the drop zone. After six hours clinging to the tank’s siderail with his feet braced a hand’s breadth from its grinding wheels, he was profoundly glad to be back on firm ground. The four remaining members of his squad followed his example, quickly forming up into standard Codex dispersal.