Shas'o

by Various

  For a moment, I thought it must be Ezra Mihalik, cornered at last, and my pulse raced. As I ran closer though, I saw that it wasn’t. He was just another officer, dressed similarly to the one I had blown apart a moment ago. He had a crimson head wrap and heavily tattooed arms. He held a sword in one hand that crackled and glowed, and in the other he had a pistol. His face was a portrait of defiance: his eyes narrowed and his teeth barred. He was a cornered animal. The last three hounds were circling around him, growling and snapping as they looked for an opening. It never occurred to me to put a stop to such cruelty. The kroot were delighted to see this sport, and I left them to it. I had prey of my own to find.

  There was no movement in the glass dome. That left the flat roofed building as Mihalik’s only possible remaining location. The solitary door did not appear so thick or armoured that I couldn’t break it down, but I knew better. It would be trapped somehow, or would have a half dozen heavily armed men waiting just behind it. I followed the example of the kroot and simply avoided it altogether. I squatted down, then kicked out hard. The stealth suit’s augmented legs and thrust assist boosters sent me rocketing upwards. As I descended, I pulled my legs in tight, and fired my burst cannon at the building’s roof. When I landed, I again kicked out, crashing through the roof and landing in a crouch.

  I sprayed the room. The pulse blasts sparked and snapped as they impacted on tables and chairs, blew through computer screens, shattered glass and overturned wooden supply crates. The ammo counter on my heads up display rolled backwards at a furious pace. Finally, I stopped. There was no one here. I was surrounded by all manner of destroyed electrical and scientific equipment, but a quick sensor check revealed it to be devoid of life. I briefly considered the possibility that the entire building was a trap of some kind; that it was about to explode and release the sporepod blooms across Cytheria. Then the audio pickups built into the suit registered something below me.

  I saw now that there was a stairwell in one corner of the room. I moved to it and peered cautiously over the railing. Metal steps vanished down into a basement level. I amplified the background noise and heard the distinct sound of running feet. Of course, I thought as I descended after them, attack and run. That’s what you do, Ezra. No glorious last stands. No honourable self slaughter. Just run and live to fight another day. But not this time.

  At the bottom of the stairs was a long hallway roughly hewn into the bedrock. Multiple doorways branched off to the left and right. I followed the sounds, passing unoccupied rooms filled with beds, and a sizable eating area where food still steamed on plates. There was an open doorway at the end of the passage. I moved towards it and was met with a volley of laser fire. Most of it was safely absorbed with the additional armour plating I had specifically installed into the battlesuit, but as I barrelled into the next room, I felt a white hot stab of pain in my left shoulder. Alarms lit up inside my face plate, informing me that my suit had been breached. Not a second later, there was a soothing, hissing sound as painkillers were automatically injected into my bloodstream, and topical medicines were applied to the wound.

  I had charged into a generator room. Four huge, blocky fusion reactors provided cover for Mihalik’s small cadre of veteran bodyguards. There was a heavy-looking blast door set into the back wall. There was a control panel beside it, at which Mihalik was frantically working. I raised my burst cannon, but before I could shoot, his men had rushed me. Three of them tackled me around the waist, hoping to knock me down. I leaned in to their charge and braced my legs against the doorway so as to remain upright. The fourth man activated a long melee weapon with jagged, metal teeth that blurred into motion. He drove it down across my helmet. My face was stung from a hundred shallow cuts as my faceplate shattered, but again, the suit’s medical systems made even this pain a distant and irrelevant thing.

  I cleared the chainsword out of the way with my burst cannon, then punched its wielder in the face with all the strength I could muster. His nose exploded with a spray of blood and a snapping of cartilage, and he stumbled back. To his fellows, I delivered a flurry of elbow strikes and low kicks until they too had been distanced from me. Before they could recover themselves, I shot them dead.

  Mihalik froze in place. He had a pistol holstered on his hip, and a ridiculously oversized mechanical glove on one hand. The heavy door was open now. Beyond it, I could make out a vertical tunnel and a ladder. A warm breeze blew into the room.

  His eyes flashed. ‘Well,’ he said slowly. ‘I guess you don’t plan to let me escape. Are you here to respectfully demand my surrender, then?’

  I levelled my weapon at him.

  ‘Oh,’ he nodded. ‘Okay then.’

  Mihalik dashed forwards with a speed of which I would not have thought him capable. He held one arm rigid across his body like a shield, while his other, the one bearing the robotic fist, wound up to deliver a crushing blow. Had the thing not been so heavy and cumbersome, he might well have killed me. However, its awkwardness worked to my benefit. I grasped his shirt and used his own momentum to throw him to the floor. He landed with a heavy thud, and tried to swing his armoured fist into my thigh. I stomped down, pinning it, and with a burst from my cannon, blew off his forearm. The mechanical hand skittered across the room.

  The stump below his elbow fountained blood. He began gasping for breath, but I was taking no chances. With two powerful kicks, I broke both of his legs. Then, still holding him by his shirt, I began to drag him along the corridor and back up the stairs.

  ‘Wha… what are you… what are you doing?’ he sputtered.

  ‘I promised myself that I would leave you to the beasts.’ I said flatly.

  Outside, it was still raining. The kroot were making a meal out of the dead Ka’Tashuns, tearing off pieces of them and shoving the meat, raw and dripping, into their beaks. When I emerged from the building, they rose to their feet.

  I threw Mihalik down into the mud. Awl approached. He clacked his beak the way another creature might salivate before an especially delicious meal. The other kroot began to gather around. The rebel leader’s eyes grew wide as he realised how it was about to end.

  ‘Shas’o Rra,’ he panted. ‘I guess… I was wrong to… to call you that.’

  ‘No,’ I responded. ‘As it happens, you weren’t.’

  I did not turn away as they ate him. Nor did I try to mentally block out his agonising screams. I simply stood there. I felt neither remorse, nor disgust, nor pity. I didn’t even feel a sense of satisfaction or poetic justice. I felt nothing. I was totally and absolutely cold inside. I embraced it then, the name the gue’la gave me. Mihalik had called me the shadow of a commander. He meant it as an insult, but I no longer saw it that way. I would be Shas’o Alo’rra – Commander Cold Shadow – and wherever the enemies of the Tau are hiding, I would be there… intangible… unfeeling.

  There were other, smaller groups of Ka’tashun yet to be dealt with. So in the days that followed, I ordered that the remaining kroot, who had been in orbit until then, land on the surface of Cytheria. I unleashed them into the wilderness and gave them free reign to seek out and eliminate whatever resistance they found. For a time, it worked wonderfully. Their savagery was more than a match for the rebels, and their bellies grew fat with the flesh of the enemy. Cytheria became largely pacified. Recently however, I have received a number of disturbing reports. The kroot increasingly refuse to obey the orders of their tau superiors and have taken to wearing red scarves around their foreheads. They speak in the gue’la language when they think no one is listening. Perhaps worst of all, in my subsequent conversations with Shaper Awl, he has begun calling calling me Shas’o Rra.

  ‘A tau chooses neither its caste nor its true name. We are blood born to the first and borne by blood to the second, named for what we have done and might yet do. And like ourselves, our true names are not carved in stone.’

  – The Tau’va

  The warrior c
rouches in darkness, eyes locked on the softly glowing lenses of the helmet in its hands. Remembering. Seeking a name.

  When I completed my training and stepped onto the Path of Fire I was summoned before the academy commander alongside my fellow shas’saal cadets for the Naming. Who better to decipher a warrior’s true name than the master who has honed that living weapon? While others were honoured for their endurance, or agility, or precision with arms, I was named for my skill in reading the hearts of my comrades: J’kaara, ‘the mirror’.

  ‘You have been their shining core,’ he said. ‘You recognise and draw on their strength, reflecting it back threefold.’

  He predicted a path of leadership, confirming what I already knew, that I was first amongst equals. Yes, there was pride, but it was hard earned, for though there is no prejudice against females under the Tau’va, few of us burn brightly on the Fire Path. I dreamt I would eclipse Shadowsun herself.

  She frowns at the memory – the arrogance of impossible youth past and the price that will never pass. Sighing, she strokes her helmet with calloused fingers. It has been with her since her first, all too sweet, taste of war.

  A new-forged shas’la, I embarked on my first campaign alight with a conviction that did not flicker in the cold winds of war. Our enemy was the bhe’ghaal, a race of green-skinned beasts that infested vast tracts of the galaxy and made frequent raids into tau territory. They were a brutal, ugly species that lived for war, yet made a mockery of the craft, fighting in mobs that swept about the battlefield intoxicated by their own fury. We spun circles of death around them, luring them into one trap after another, decimating them from a distance with firepower they couldn’t hope to match, then falling back before they overran us with sheer numbers.

  It was a flawless execution of kauyon that confirmed the tau mastery of war… and my own mastery of hearts, for though I did not lead by rank, my comrades followed me regardless, inspired by my example and my words. Indeed, words flowed so freely for me that our shas’ui joked that I must be a waterborn changeling!

  I was beyond fear or doubt, certain of my place in the perfect geometry of the Tau’va – untouchable. And when the shas’ui fell, none were surprised that I was chosen to take his place. A veteran in my youth, I believed myself a hero. I was too young to understand that easy victories have no heroes.

  She shivers as her fingers find the scar. Abhorrent. Reverent. She traces the shallow fault line from the helmet’s crown to the chin. It is a mere ghost of the rift that was once there, but its truth is undiminished.

  Fh’anc… Dhobos… Po’gaja… More paltry worlds and petty wars fought against inept or feeble foes, more easy victories to burnish my pride.

  Oba’rai…

  A small planet on the fringes of the Second Expansion, Oba’rai was uncannily beautiful, its arid plains reminiscent of revered T’au itself. It was a natural home to the people, worthy of risk.

  ‘There are gue’la here,’ our cadre shas’o told us. ‘Their Imperium lays claim to this world, but their shadow has grown pale in this region, sapped by distant conflicts. If we strike swift and hard the Imperium will turn a blind eye.’

  Gue’la – ‘hu-maans’… They were an ancient race steeped in belligerent superstition, yet they were neither fools nor savages. I thrilled at the prospect of facing a worthy enemy at last. Perhaps I would earn the rank of shas’vre here.

  The disfigured helmet gazes back at her. Challenging. Accusing. It has been crudely repaired by her own hands, functional but ugly. An artisan of the earth caste could have restored it to perfection, but perfection would have been a lie.

  The gue’la colonists fought fiercely, but their technology and tactics were primitive beside our own. Only their vaunted Imperial Guard gave us pause – a single regiment who had been promised the planet as a home if they could hold it. The shas’o offered them the opportunity to surrender, but his terms were harsh and they spat in his face. The outcome troubled me because they were honourable foes, but when I mentioned these doubts to my shas’vre, he laughed.

  ‘Do you believe the shas’o wanted them to surrender? This war calls for the Killing Blow, not the Open Hand – a clean sweep, not complications.’

  She nods at her scarred shadow, acknowledging the moment when perfection withered and doubt blossomed – the moment when her true name became a lie.

  The Guardsmen made their last stand in Oba’rai’s primary city, fortifying the walls and rallying a militia of thousands, but it was an empty gesture. Our stealth teams infiltrated the bastion and destroyed their artillery with surgical precision, leaving the defenders helpless against our long-range missiles and railguns. We razed the city without losing a single warrior, yet never once during that nightmare bombardment did the Imperials attempt to surrender. My comrades derided them for fools, but I was silent.

  As I expected, the shas’o decreed we would take no prisoners. Scouring the ruins would be dangerous close-quarters work, so he unleashed the kroot, our alien auxiliaries, upon the broken city. They were bloodthirsty avian predators, little better than beasts, but loyal and perfectly suited to the task. And yet… The thought of those savages running riot amongst fallen warriors reviled me. If the rumours were true, the kroot had a taste for the flesh of their enemies…

  She is no longer a shining mirror, but she is still strong and she still serves the Greater Good, not because it is perfect, but because everything else is less so. Now the strength she reflects is dark and fractured, so perhaps imperfection will be her key.

  Even now I cannot explain the compulsion, but I disobeyed the shas’o’s edict and led my squad into the ruins, lying to them and playing on their trust, seeking something I couldn’t name. A swirling miasma of black smoke transformed the city into a shadow labyrinth haunted by charred corpses and twitching things that had no business being alive. Wordlessly we killed them as we passed. It was a mercy, yet I sensed my squad tightening with reflexive revulsion and felt their unspoken question: why? They were my closest comrades, the ones I hoped to swear the ta’lissera with, yet I had carried them into this filth, rubbing their faces in a carnage we tau prefer to keep at arm’s length.

  Why?

  As we pressed deeper, the moans of the dying echoed around us, sometimes broken by the gleeful hoots of the ravening kroot. In the city square we came upon a pack of the beasts huddled around a mound of corpses and I learnt that the rumours about our allies were true. One of them saw us and chittered, rocking back and forth on its talons, trailing red ruin from its serrated beak. Then it cocked its head and beckoned, sly and mocking, inviting us to join the feast. Two of my comrades retched inside their helmets as we backed away, stumbling in our eagerness to distance ourselves from these vile allies.

  Lost in smoke and revulsion, I tripped over a corpse in a smouldering greatcoat and froze. The dead man’s eyes were wide open in a face scorched to the bone – looking right at me. Absurdly, his high-peaked cap was still intact, its melted rim fused to his skull.

  Why? I might have asked it aloud, though of what I have no idea.

  The gue’la surged up with impossible, hate-driven vitality, something bright and furiously alive buzzing in his hands, sweeping towards me. I staggered back, throwing up my rifle to block the blow and it was torn asunder in a storm of tortured metal that shook my entire body. I heard my comrades’ wild shouts and the burst of their carbines as the whirling chainblade kissed my helmet…

  The warrior reaches up and touches the other scar, the one that can never be repaired because it cuts deeper than flesh or bone, proclaiming a darkness that was perhaps always there. Her comrades killed the ko’miz’ar a heartbeat before he killed her, but still a heartbeat too late. Afterwards, they were comrades no more and there have been none since. The flaw has made her an outcast amongst her own kind, denying her the bond of the ta’lissera, but it has also forged her into something more. Crouching in the darkness as the
darkness crouches inside her, she finally names her truth: Jhi’kaara, ‘the broken mirror’.

  On this spot, in the year of our Lord and Saviour 970.M30, THE IMMORTAL EMPEROR OF MANKIND and his Great Crusade touched down upon the surface of Diepr-3.

  And when He beheld the verdant beauty of this world, He wept; and His tears fell into the waters of these lakes and made them Holy.

  Blessed be those who partake of this water, for they shall gain strength and insight if they so need it.

  And blessed be those to whom the Emperor hath entrusted this world.

  May they never forget their most sacred of duties.

  The ursaloth yawned and stretched his front paws as he emerged from his cave. He had awoken earlier than normal this morning. The sun had not yet come up over the eastern mountains and the valley was still cloaked in cool mists and murky shadows of blue. He sat down heavily on the damp ground and scratched himself. Part of him still yearned for sleep; spring was only a few weeks old and by all rights he ought to still be hibernating. Then his stomach growled with hunger and all other considerations were forgotten. He righted himself and plodded heavily down the hillside along a well-worn path that led to a nearby river.