by Various
She wished bitterly that her people were better swimmers, but between hoofed feet and a small lung capacity, the tau form was simply not well suited to an aquatic life. She was unsure how long she could hold her breath, but there was little else for it. Her survival depended on getting into her suit and unpacking her drone assistants.
She surveyed her uniform. It clung to her body in sopping, constricting, ochre layers. She would be best to doff it. She peeled open the front and shrugged out of it, not even bothering to scan the area or make sure that she was alone first. She tossed it on a nearby rock, and then wrapped the flex-screen back around her forearm. She made her way out to the middle of the frothing pool, ignoring how her blue skin began to turn purple with chill. When she came to the spot where she was convinced the pod lay, she gulped, and dove.
At first, she saw nothing but curtains of tiny white bubbles. Then, surrounded by dim boulders, she made out the survival pod. It had landed nose down and right side up, she noted. That was fortunate.
Already her chest was pounding, and she had to fight the urge to claw her way back to the surface. She kicked clumsily around to the rear underside of the pod. The hull was badly battered and blackened, and it took her a seeming eternity to find the manual access pad. As she punched in her five-digit access code, a dark notion raced across her brain. The pod has lost power, she thought. There’s no way to open this door.
With a dull thunk, a large, square cargo door fell away. In the space beyond, an unblemished white machine waited patiently. It was folded down into a compact cube: a crouching suit of armour with its arms wrapped tightly around its knees. She grabbed hold of it and pulled. With agonising slowness, it toppled forwards. When it landed on the riverbed, it kicked up plumes of silt.
Shadowsun’s whole being ached for a breath of air. She glanced upwards. The surface seemed light-years distant. Even if she started now, she knew she would never make it. Her only hope was to get into the battlesuit. Frantically, she keyed her flex-screen to interface with the battlesuit’s systems, telling it to power up and unfold itself. Lights came on behind the frosted surface of the helmet. The arms uncurled, and the legs straightened. By the time the chest piece began to hinge outwards, Shadowsun was on the verge of passing out. She squeezed herself up and under the helmet, jammed her arms and legs into place, and signalled the suit to seal itself up again.
The armour settled into place. With a steady hum, the environmental cyclers flushed the water out. Shadowsun took a long, wheezing intake of breath, and coughed.
Many times throughout her career, she had pictured the memorial they would erect of her on T’au following her death. It would be placed before the Mont’yr Battle Dome, of course, where it would stand among the other heroes of her people, immortalised in six-metre-high white marble. Along the base would read her accolades – Shadowsun, daughter of Kiru, hero of the K’resh Expansion War, scourge of the greenskin barbarians, bulwark against the hive fleets.
She chastised herself for not unpacking her equipment faster. Whatever coda might be added to her future epitaph, today it had very nearly been: drowned naked in a river while trying to get into her battlesuit.
‘Father would not approve,’ she muttered.
With a quick burst from the suit’s jet pack, she righted herself. Along the bottom of her helmet a series of interface icons glowed. She locked her eyes onto the symbol for ‘Drone Control’, and blinked twice. A tree of choices feathered up across the inside of the face plate. She selected ‘Shield Drones’, and then ‘Activation Protocols’, and set the program in motion. On either side of the survival pod, large, mushroom-shaped machines popped up from out of the hull. They were festooned with bright blue lights, and from their tops, they each sprouted two thick antennae. While they settled into place beside her, she found the control pathway for the third drone. It separated itself from the upper rear section of the escape pod. From its underside, it extruded a long, inverted fin. Special issue only to commanders of high rank such as herself, this was the machine that would let her locate and communicate with any other survivors of the crash.
She flicked her gaze from left to right, closing the drone menus. Icons for each of her new companions now glowed along the main list choices. She locked her gaze on the command-link symbol, and asked, ‘Where are we?’
The inside of her helmet lit up brightly as a tactical map was overlaid upon it; numbers scrolled across the left side of her vision. Cross hairs came to settle on the southern edge of a mountain range. She stared at it for several minutes before finally giving up. The map meant nothing to her without a larger reference frame. The last time she’d seen the planet had been from orbit.
She blinked away the map from her display, and selected ‘Communications’ from the root menu. On a hunch, she chose ‘Tightbeam, Encrypted, Tau: Orbital’, and waited.
Unlike the survival pod, the intelligence built into the command-link drone was pure fire caste. Its speech was short and clipped. It dealt only with essentials. ‘Negative. No tau ships in range.’
Good, she thought. Her last order had been obeyed. The nearest vessel would now be several light-minutes away. Unfortunately, that also meant she was on her own. She didn’t have the equipment to broadcast that far.
She chose ‘Widebeam, Encrypted, Tau: Groundside’, and cleared her throat.
‘O’Shaserra calling all ground forces,’ she said.
She was answered with silence.
‘Repeat, this is Commander Shadowsun calling any and all surviving ground forces. Acknowledge.’
Again, there was nothing save the sound of her breathing and the mild hum of the battlesuit’s oxygen scrubbers.
She instructed the command-link drone to scan for tau signals on a rotating band. When surrounded by hostile forces, and vastly outnumbered, it was standard procedure for tau soldiers to keep changing their transmission frequencies every few minutes.
She tried one last time. ‘Commander Shadowsun calling any and all surviving ground forces. Acknowledge.’
At first, there was nothing. Then, she received an answer.
‘Authorisation?’ The voice sounded young. Whoever he was, he was correct to be suspicious.
She smiled, and recited her identity code.
The youth sighed. ‘Confirmed. It’s an honour, commander. We… we thought you were lost.’
‘I’m very much alive,’ she said. ‘Identify yourself.’
‘Shas’la Fal’shia Sabu’ro,’ he replied.
Shadowsun was pleased. A fire caste communications expert. Exactly what was needed. ‘Shas’la,’ she asked, ‘are you alone?’
‘Negative, commander. There are many of us here.’
‘Who has seniority?’
‘Uh… Shas’vre Bork’an Yo’uta holds the highest rank.’
A veteran soldier by his name. Shadowsun’s hopes continued to rise. ‘I would speak with him, shas’la.’
While she waited for young Sabu’ro to fetch his superior, Shadowsun went looking for her guns. Normally, her battlesuit carried a burst cannon mounted underneath each arm, but in order for it to be stored as compactly as possible, these had to be removed and placed in a separate storage compartment. She found them near the crumpled nose of the escape pod. Their long barrels were horribly bent, and their main mechanisms were smashed piecemeal.
‘Damn the waste,’ she spat.
‘I’m sorry, commander?’ asked a gruff voice.
She returned her attention to the data flow streaming across the bottom of her display. ‘Shas’vre Yo’uta, I presume?’
‘I am honoured,’ the voice replied. ‘What is your condition, commander?’
‘Alive with minor injuries,’ Shadowsun sighed. ‘I have a complete complement of drones, and my battlesuit is fully intact. My weapons, regrettably, were destroyed during re-entry.’
She could feel Yo’u
ta’s scowl across the airwaves. ‘Eighty per cent equipment survival rate,’ he said. ‘Deplorable.’
Shadowsun smiled in agreement. Whoever this shas’vre was, he was a perfectionist like her. They were going to get along just fine. ‘We can chastise the engineers later,’ she said. ‘I need a positional fix, relative to you.’
Yo’uta queried his own kor’ves. ‘Your battlesuit indentification marker registers as being one hundred and sixty tor’kan due west of us. I’ll lead a recovery team to your position immediately.’
‘A team? How many survivors do you have?’
‘Forty-eight in total.’
Shadowsun caught her breath; it was more than she had dared hope for. ‘What is their condition?’
‘Zero casualties upon landing,’ Yo’uta said proudly. ‘We are, all of us, fit and duty ready. Our materiel, on the other hand, is greatly reduced.’
‘Explain.’
There was a slight pause before Yo’uta spoke again. ‘You should be made aware, commander, that we didn’t land in individual escape pods. We came down in a Manta.’
Shadowsun’s eyes widened at the thought. The Manta was a combat transport of substantial size and enormous firepower. Her flagship had carried an entire wing of them.
‘It was a hard landing though,’ Yo’uta went on. ‘We took extensive damage when the command ship broke apart. The re-entry angle was far from optimal, and the forests here are very dense.’
Shadowsun got the idea. Yo’uta was trying to tell her that not only was the Manta crippled, but that it had arrived on il’Wolaho in a very obvious manner.
‘The indigenous population cannot have possibly failed to track our descent, even with their primitive technology. Our sensors have already detected three fly-bys by high-altitude aircraft, and we expect that very soon our location will be swarming with ground forces. I have, of course, issued orders to hold our position.’
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘Have you received word from any other landing parties?’
‘Yours is the only one.’
Neither of them said anything for a moment. The pause was filled by thoughts of the many, many fine tau who had died this day without even having the opportunity to take one of the enemy with them.
‘Like I said,’ Shadowsun whispered, ‘damn the waste.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Shas’vre, cancel my retrieval. You haven’t the men to spare. Send me your coordinates instead, and I’ll make my way to you.’
‘Commander Shadowsun–’
‘I said I’ll come to you,’ she snapped. She might have been unarmed, but she was far from being helpless. She had a battlesuit with full stealth capabilities and redundant protective shielding. More than that, she was Shadowsun, student of Puretide, daughter of Kiru.
If Yo’usa felt chastised, his voice didn’t reveal it. ‘Understood,’ he said curtly. A fresh stream of information scrolled along Shadowsun’s peripheral view, transmitted to her through the command drone. An updated map appeared in front of her.
‘Data received. I’m leaving now. I will maintain communications silence until I approach your position.’
She closed the channel with a flick of her eyes, ignited her jet pack, and rocketed up through the water. She made almost no noise when she landed on the shore, despite the weight of the suit. Once the three drones had come up out of the water and settled soundlessly into place around her, she headed off through the twisted, alien trees at a brisk pace. She was happy to put the waterfall behind her, but more than that, she realised, she was looking forward to a fight against the humans that had robbed her of her ship and murdered so many of her followers.
The forest was indeed very thick, just as Yo’uta had said. The trunks of the trees were twisted and covered with large burls. Their branches intertwined so tightly above her that it was oftentimes difficult to see the sky. Eons of fallen leaves covered the forest floor. Bushes and briars occupied any and all available space.
On the off chance that the humans were actually capable of intercepting tau transmissions, Shadowsun kept her comm channel closed. The journey, however, was far from silent. The sounds of the forest poured through her audio pick-ups in a constant stream. The wind rustled the leaves above her. Birds of innumerable types were chirping and honking. Small, furry creatures with luminous eyes crunched their way through the underbrush. She grew anxious after a while; worried for the soldiers at the Manta site, and fearing that she wasn’t moving nearly fast enough. Several times she considered using her jet pack thrusters to more than double her pace, but each time her father’s voice rang in her mind with one of his axioms.
Do all things once and properly. Time is a cheap investiture to ensure victory.
Although she could go bounding through the dense terrain at breakneck speeds, she might seriously injure herself. Despite her armour and forcefields, it would be all too easy to twist a joint or even break a bone. Yes, her people needed her, but she would serve no good by arriving in their midst in anything less than perfect fighting form.
The Manta had come down in a series of stony hills and, after some time, the land began to rise. The ground became stonier and the vegetation thinned to the point where she could see large patches of the sky through the limbs of the trees. Her sensor suite chimed, and she stopped in mid-step. Five gue’la aircraft were approaching from the south, flying very low and in a V-shaped formation. With a flicking motion of her fingers, she sent the command drone aloft. It deftly navigated its way through the forest canopy until it finally poked through the tallest branches. She activated the ‘Remote Viewing’ option in her console, gaining an instant panoramic view of the land.
The craft were rectangular, propelled through the air more by the brute force of turbines than any understanding of aerodynamics. Beneath their stubby wings, they each carried two enormous cylinders, which she immediately took to be bombs. A quick check reassured her that her battlesuit’s adaptive camouflage was in perfect working order. She wished again that her burst cannons had survived the crash. Designed to shred light infantry, they would have done little at all against an aerial attack, but even so, she would have been able to go down fighting. She braced herself for an inevitable eruption and shockwave.
Nothing came.
She checked her sensors again. The craft had passed her by and were continuing to the north-west. She frowned with confusion; the Manta lay eastwards. If she wasn’t their target, and neither were her men, where were heading? She made a twisting motion with one hand. The command drone spun around until she could see the enemy aircraft receding into the distance and towards a wall of fire. The entire horizon had been replaced by an orange haze that flickered and danced. Above it, a sheet of grey smoke slowly roiled and churned forward. The sky was taking on an unnatural colour, like that of faded roses. There was no doubt in her mind it had been the falling pieces of her flagship that had started the blaze. The ion drive alone, she thought, would have been like a weapon of mass destruction as it struck the ground and ruptured.
Inside her helmet, she watched as the five aircraft flew straight towards the monstrous blaze. She magnified the view just as they began to dump a fine red cloud out behind them. Seconds later, they wheeled around, payloads expended, and headed southwards again.
The command drone sank back down to sit near her shoulder. The humans were using retardant chemicals to try and staunch the fire, but why? There was no settlement nearby that needed saving, just more forest. Since when did the soldiers of the Imperium care one iota about environmental preservation?
She was no unfeeling monster. The wanton destruction of the forest both disturbed and angered her. It was waste compiled on top of waste. She pushed the feelings aside by reminding herself that the humans had brought this on themselves. If they had simply surrendered their planet to tau authority instead of trying to resist, then everything would have been fine.
She pressed on.
The afternoon was waning by the time she drew near her destination. Shadowsun emerged into a wide strip of land where the forest had been snapped in half and knocked flat. It was like a road, rolled out before her to the horizon and paved with flattened logs. The Manta had carved this, she surmised. Easily, she imagined the flat, broad transport dropping lower and lower, at first shearing off the tops of the trees, and then eventually making itself a landing strip. Yo’uta hadn’t been exaggerating. Even a species as technologically backward as the humans would have little difficulty following a trail like this.
Shadowsun decided that she was close enough now to risk reopening her comm channels. No sooner had she done so, then she was assaulted by a myriad of voices. Some were barking orders. Others were screaming. The background was punctuated by the sounds of weapons fire.
‘Sabu’ro!’ she yelled as she broke into a run. ‘Sabu’ro, report!’
She wove out into the area of flattened trees where there was no longer anything to get in her way. She sprinted a few steps, kicked hard at the ground, and engaged the battlesuit’s thrusters. She soared into the air in a long, bounding motion and landed a great distance away.
‘Commander!’ the young fire warrior responded. ‘Commander, our position is under attack!’
‘I’m almost there,’ Shadowsun grunted as she leapt again. The ground blurred beneath her.
‘Negative!’ came the voice of Yo’uta. He was breathing heavily. ‘We are surrounded and taking significant losses, commander. Do not endanger yourself. ‘
Shadowsun landed hard atop a fallen trunk. Her hooves left deep imprints in the wood. She crouched, and leapt again. ‘What did I tell you, shas’vre?’ she yelled.
The gruff voice gave no reply.
Shadowsun was close enough now to hear the battle through her external audio pick-ups. There came the familiar hiss of pulse rifle fire – a three round chuffing that she had known from childhood, and the reassuring sizzle of plasma rifles being fired from Crisis battlesuits. These were nearly drowned out though by the sounds of gue’la weapons. Their inefficient laser guns ejected hot air from their assemblies with a staccato cracking, and the large-calibre cannons they were so fond of thumped savagely. She took some hope in what she didn’t hear. There was no rumble of ground tanks, no massive detonations from tracked artillery and no whine of hovering airships. This was an assault by large numbers of light infantry with little, if any, mechanised support. It would attack in waves, with no concern for casualties, until its enemy was eliminated. It was typically human and painfully predictable.