by Various
His massive antlers brushed against the lowest limbs of the conifers as he made his way. Tufts of his thick black fur got caught in the brambles. He walked slowly because he was old and his knees ached on cool mornings like this one. He also walked fearlessly because, despite his advanced age, he was well aware that his massive strength and size would deter all but the most resolute pack of predators. He was the lord and master of this world, he knew, and a king ought not to rush himself.
To the east, the mountains were backlit with a pale lavender hue that steadily grew brighter and brighter. Then, quite suddenly, the sun rose over the snow-dusted peaks, and the world displayed its true colours. The face of the rocky cliffs wasn’t purple after all, but a deep crimson slashed through with burgundy. The forest threw off its inky cloak and became a patchwork of yellow and green, pristine and undisturbed. A sunbeam fell on his back, and the ursaloth shrugged contentedly.
At last, he came to the water’s edge, where the thick trees gave way to a space of stony ground. The river was flowing quickly, boosted by the melt running down from the mountain tops. It splashed and gurgled so loudly in fact, that his arrival went unnoticed by a flock of geese that had perched atop of his favourite fishing boulder. He gave a low growl to announce his presence, and the birds, skittish creatures at the best of times, took to the skies with a cacophonic flapping of their wings. Satisfied, the old ursaloth cautiously made his way up the boulder, then sat down and extended the talons on one of his massive front paws. He let it hover over the surface of the water and waited for the moment to strike. A school of fish were wriggling closer and closer.
The ursaloth licked his snout in anticipation and was about to strike, when a blinding beam of light stabbed upwards through the southern skies. He barely managed to raise his head to register it before it vanished. He blinked feverishly, but try as he might, he couldn’t clear the purple after-images from his eyes. He nuzzled his face against the water-slick coolness of his boulder, but that too provided no relief.
Then came a blast of wind, hotter than anything he had ever known. The limbs of the pine trees bowed severely. Several of their tops snapped and fell to the ground. This confused the ursaloth all the more; it was springtime and the summer storms were months away. When the blistering wind had passed and the trees had righted themselves, an unnatural quiet descended on the forest. The ursaloth, blinking away tears from his burning eyes, sniffed the still air. Beyond the stink of his singed fur, the world had a sour tang to it. Everything was seared and dry, as if the sudden wind had sucked all the moisture from the grass and trees.
He cocked his head and strained. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be, but he could make out a series of muffled booms. Now, there was a sharp whistling sound. It was high-pitched and soft; so soft as to be almost undetectable, but it was growing steadily louder. Then, he heard another one. And another. And another. What was happening here?
He splashed out into the middle of the river, his breakfast totally forgotten. Perhaps, he thought, the geese were coming back to steal his fishing rock from him. True, the geese never made sounds like this, but what other explanation was there? He craned his ancient neck and looked upwards, towards the sounds. What he saw made no sense at all.
Giant chunks of fire were raining from the sky. Their nuclei were wreathed in swirling yellows and oranges; long, red contrails stretched out in their wake, and behind that, trailed kilometres of black smoke. They made a screaming noise as they fell. Within moments, it was deafening. The ursaloth roared his displeasure. His was supposed to be an unchanging realm.
The ground shook as the first of the intrusive meteors impacted somewhere to the north-west. A terrible explosion rolled across the forest: a gut-wrenching, deep bass boom that stifled the king in mid-growl. The other pieces now finished their long fall, pummelling the world with their terrible mass and velocity. The old ursaloth stood midstream, paralysed, as again and again the stones beneath him rumbled and shook. When at last the worst of the earthquakes had subsided, he looked to the heavens again. The rain of gigantic fireballs seemed to be over with. Only smaller embers continued to fall, slashing blackened lines across the sky as he himself might shred the bark off a tree.
The bright morning sun was becoming obscured by a thickening haze of dust and ash and smoke. Birds of every shape and size were fleeing southwards. On either bank, long-legged deer rushed past. Small, furry rodents leapt from branch to branch in a mad dash towards safety. The ursaloth twitched his massive, runny nose. There was a bad smell on the wind, one that he had known many times. One did not live in the forest as long as he had and not encounter at least one wildfire. The other animals were correct to flee; the only thing to do in such a situation was to head towards the cool dampness of the lowlands. It was dangerous; the swamps were home to creatures that did not like to be disturbed. Yet, it was better than being burned alive. So, with watering eyes and an empty belly, he splashed south along the river bank. Behind him, the parched woods were quickly consumed by licking orange tongues and growing swaths of flame.
Some time later, he came to a place dimly remembered from his youth. Here, the land dropped away sharply and the river spilled over the rock ledge in a prismatic waterfall. The noonday sun was being smothered by a grey veil. What he could see of the horizon glowed dull red. It was, all of it, most unnatural.
He froze. Something alien was sitting in the river, very near the drop off. It was very large, about half as big as he, with a smooth surface and rounded edges. It had a shell of some kind that was brilliant white in the few places where it was not blackened and charred. It was half submerged, and around it, the water bubbled and steamed. The air was ripe with the stink of burned, otherworldly materials. He was about to take an investigative step towards it when suddenly, a portion of its shell popped off and it extended a stubby antenna. There was a light on the tip, bright blue in colour, which began to pulse rapidly. It started chirping shrilly like a baby bird.
It was more than he could stand. His entire world had been disrupted, and for no reason that he could comprehend. He roared at the mysterious thing to announce that he, not it, was the lord and master of these woods. Then he leapt from the bank and tackled it with his full bulk. The riverbed shifted under the blow, and they toppled forwards. Water rushed all around them. The ursaloth refused to let go however, and drove his talons through his enemy’s outer shell again and again. He was still doing so as they were both carried over the lip of the falls to tumble through empty space. Only when they crashed into the boulder laden pool below did he release his grip.
For a moment, the old beast was lost. There was no sense of direction, no up or down. Just frothing bubbles and roaring waters and a searing pain along his entire underside. At last his head broke the surface, and he slowly swam to shore. His paws and belly were badly burned from touching the intruder, and in the melee, it had managed to impale its blinking antenna into him like a very long wasp stinger. Still, it had been worth it. His dominion reasserted, he gave a final, triumphant roar before limping away into the underbrush.
Behind him, the object – burned, dented, and now perforated with holes – sank to the deep bottom of the pool, and began to fill with water.
Slowly, she realised that she wasn’t dead. Her people held no belief in an afterlife; one lived, and if one had lived well, one left behind a legacy. The dead were dead. They became nothing. They felt nothing. Yet, she could feel a liquid trickling down her face. Her entire body ached, and it hurt to breathe. Moreover, there was a sound like a dozen taps pouring into a bucket. She could hear and feel and, therefore, she must still be alive.
Pod, she thought groggily. Someone must have gotten her into her survival pod. She had no idea to whom she owed her thanks. Her last memory before awakening just now had been that of the command bridge exploding around her. Several air caste crew members had scrambled to get her to safety, and then the entire midsection of the ship had
seemed to give way.
Instinctually, she reached up to wipe her forehead. Her fingers came away wet. With great effort, she opened her eyes. She expected to find them sticky with blood, and in a way she was correct. There was blood, but the cyan-coloured fluid was thin and runny. Diluted. Watery.
Water!
She snapped into full awareness and looked around. Being inside the pod was like being strapped tightly to a cushioned table and smothered by redundant layers of soft, white padding and sky blue, shock-absorbing gel liner. Everything about it had been designed to let her fall from the most unimaginable heights and survive. It could withstand infernal heat as well as intense cold, and its recycling system could provide her with weeks of breathable air. What it was not supposed to do, however, was fill inexorably with water, which it most certainly was.
‘Kor’ves?’ she cried out.
The computer intelligence built into the capsule had been gifted with the voice of a water caste member. Even in the face of utter disaster, it would remain calm and controlled and eternally reassuring, a true testament to the Greater Good.
‘Yes, Commander Shadowsun,’ came the reply. ‘What assistance may I offer?’
‘Report!’
‘Your atmospheric re-entry has been most successful. Regrettably, the capsule’s hull has suffered several breaches following its initial landing.’
She licked her fingers. The water was cold, but fresh. At least she wasn’t lying at the bottom of an ocean. ‘Where am I?’
‘On the daylight side of the planet designated il’Wolaho. Your exact geographic position cannot be confirmed.’
‘Why not?’
‘I have lost all contact with the remainder of the fleet, and there are no friendly satellites in orbit. Moreover, the survival pod’s uplink antenna has been forcibly removed post impact.’
‘Release the door,’ she said.
The pod made a trio of chiming sounds. ‘Unable to complete the requested function.’
She was taken aback. A kor’ves refusing a direct command? Impossible.
‘Release the door,’ she repeated. ‘That’s an order.’
For a few seconds nothing happened. She had the distinct impression that the computer was struggling with itself, assessing several directives against one another. Finally, it spoke again. ‘Unable to complete the requested function. The environment outside is potentially dangerous, given the nature of the local wildlife and the injuries you have sustained. It would be irresponsible to release you in such circumstances.’
She knew the computer was simply doing its duty. It was charged with keeping her safe and calm, and, perhaps most importantly, in one place until a rescue team could arrive. That was admirable in a way, but for all she knew, she was a sole survivor. She couldn’t afford to lie here calmly and wait. It was impossible to tell exactly how the pod had come to rest, but already her feet, legs, and back were soaking wet. She looked down her body. At this rate, the capsule would be completely filled in mere minutes. She flexed her shoulders, but the crash restraints held firm.
‘Please refrain from struggling, commander. It needlessly accelerates your heart rate and consumes the available oxygen that much faster.’
‘I’m going to drown!’ she yelled. ‘Open the damned door! Override code: Shadowsun, two-five-three-six-eight!’
‘Voice print confirmed. Command code verified.’ The pod made more chirping noises, but nothing else happened. ‘Request iiiiin progessssss,’ it slurred.
She had worked with kor’ves often enough throughout her career to know the garbled speech was a bad sign. ‘Thought-lock’, the earth caste technicians called it. The pod was convinced that she would die if it let her leave, yet equally certain that she would die if it forced her to remain. Unable to choose between two dead-end solutions, it was becoming paralysed into inactivity.
Everything below her chest was now submerged and cold. Her limbs were tingling. With numbing fingers she groped around the sides of the padded table. The seconds dragged by. Finally, she found what she was seeking. The water was below her chin.
‘Request iiiiin progessssss,’ the pod repeated.
She could barely feel the release handle, but she grasped it as tightly as she could. There was time for one final lungful of air and then the water crested her head. She yanked upwards with all her might. There was a muffled boom as the explosive bolts mounted on the exterior of the capsule detonated. The entire front section fell away suddenly, and the pod vomited out thick foam and gelsheets. The harness popped off her shoulders and legs, and from around her waist. She kicked out hard and swam towards the shimmering daylight above. She had no idea how deep she had sunk, but her lungs were burning by the time she broke the surface. The smell of wood smoke and a deafening roar of water assaulted her at once. Her head darted around, taking note of the dark green trees, the rushing waterfall and, finally, the rocky shore. Gasping and sputtering, she made her way to a sloping rock covered with moss. She dug in hard with her fingers and hauled herself up out of the water. Her hooves scrabbled on the slick rock, but eventually she managed to wrestle her way atop it and collapse onto her back.
The sun was a hazy smudge behind an obscuring grey sky. As she lay there, she eventually noticed that small objects were falling from horizon to horizon. They left fiery, smoky trails behind them.
That’s my ship, she thought detachedly. She cast her mind back, tracing over the events that had led her to this moment.
Hers had been the lead vessel. As Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force, it was both her right and her duty to lead the way and, as it turned out, to take the first fusillade of fire. The air caste cartographers had named the planet il’Wolaho – the place of bright colours. From space it was a stunning patchwork of green, yellow, red, and blue; banks of white cloud traced shifting patterns across its face. She was not one to indulge in sentimentality, but even she had been forced to admit that it was lovely. Too lovely, she had decided, for it to remain in the possession of the human gue’la; only a tau could fully appreciate the aesthetics of this world.
Intelligence had informed her that il’Wolaho, or as the unimaginative locals called it, Diepr-3, was sparsely populated to the point of being nearly uninhabited. There were fewer than five settlements of notable size. It was also barely developed; there was little evidence of road works, canals, mag-lev lines, or the like. That had been surprising at first, since it was well known that the people of the Imperium craved social interaction to an unhealthy degree. What else could explain the way in which they would lump themselves together in a single living structure filled with hundreds of millions of their fellows, while at the same time leaving the remaining surface of a planet to go to rot and waste? ‘Hive cities’, they called them: filthy places run amok with violence and disease. What was even more surprising was the fact that il’Wolaho had an intact, thriving biosphere, because humans traditionally cared nothing for environmental protection. In fact, they were habitual polluters of the worst kind, tainting and toxifying everywhere they trod.
She now realised that in her zeal to take this jewel of a world away from a barbaric people, she had neglected the gue’la penchant for war. Even a modestly populated Imperial planet would naturally possess defences against a space-borne attack. She was fully prepared to deal with surface-to-air missile batteries, or perhaps waves of aerospace interceptors. However, the magnitude of the laser that struck her command ship as it began to settle into orbit had been wholly unexpected. It shot up from the surface of il’Wolaho like concentrated starfire. Within seconds, the vessel’s protective shields collapsed. The front third of the hull vaporised away into space. Stress fractures ran the length of what remained. The lights on the bridge flickered. Reports came flooding in from all sections. Everything forward of bulkhead eight was destroyed. Main power was going off-line. Weapons were useless. The gravity drive was non-responsive.
Others in her place might have stood there stunned. Not her. Even as the tumbling remnants of her ship began to slip helplessly into il’Wolaho’s atmosphere, she ordered the rest of the fleet to back away to a safe distance and to remain at station keeping. ‘You must attempt no rescue, repeat, no rescue,’ she told them. Whatever defence system the Imperials had in place, it would make short work of any vessel that strayed too close. For the Greater Good, they must not endanger their multitude in a futile attempt to save whatever few might survive an impending, hellish re-entry.
No sooner had she given out her final orders than three willowy air caste hurried over to her. She had to get to the survival pod, they had pleaded. Time was short. She sounded the general order to abandon ship, took one last glimpse of the planet spiralling up to meet them, and turned to go. Then, the entire room detonated.
Shadowsun sat up suddenly and looked down into the pool below the waterfall. A wave of pain shot through her ribs, but she paid it no heed. ‘Battlesuit,’ she whispered.
On her left forearm she wore a personal flex-screen. The paper-thin crystal data display curled around her sleeve like a wide bracelet. It had become cracked in the crash, and its surface was dark. When she pressed her finger to its surface however, it glowed back to life.
‘Interface with survival pod kor’ves,’ she instructed it. A second later, it blinked happily that it was now in contact with the drowned escape pod.
‘Kor’ves,’ she said loudly, ‘open the main compartment and unpack the drones.’
‘Request iiiiiin progresssssssss,’ came the response.
Shadowsun cursed and waded ankle deep into the river. She tried to peer into the depths of the pool, but the waterfall churned the surface such that she couldn’t see anything. She frowned. Her suit would be stowed in the rear underside of the pod, but with the computer still frozen, she would have to open the cargo door manually.