by Various
Shadowsun crested a ridge of dirt ploughed up by the Manta’s landing. As she had done on countless battlefields before, she catalogued the details of the scene in a heartbeat. The Manta was tilted slightly to one side with its nose in the air, a deep sea creature dragged up onto a wooded shore and left to die. Its hull looked crumpled and charred. The topmost of its two rear hatches was open, and a long boarding plank extended to the ground. Around the base of the transport, the warriors had erected a perimeter of four staggered barricades.
The ground in front of them was littered with dead humans. They were dressed in knee-length, dark-green coats with bright yellow armoured plates along the front and back. Their boots and gloves were made of light-brown leather. Their discarded rifles appeared to have wooden frames. Shadowsun could instantly tell that they had indeed tried to storm the Manta en masse only to be cut to pieces by the superiority of tau technology. Having sent the equivalent of eight fire warrior teams to a pointless doom, the remaining humans had evidently now decided to withdraw to the tree line where they too could have some protective cover. Volleys of laser fire continued to pour down onto her men, but they weren’t doing much damage.
The walking machines, on the other hand, were.
Six of them were holding place just outside the woods. Their main body was little more than an open-topped, reinforced cage large enough to hold a single gue’la pilot. They had two back-bent legs and pipes on their rear quarters that belched black smoke. They looked pathetic to Shadowsun, a child’s interpretation of a battlesuit. There was nothing laughable about their armaments though. Four of them had been mounted with projectile cannons; the other two had racks of missiles slung beneath them.
Shadowsun engaged her booster pack and arced high over the carnage. At the apex of her flight, she deactivated the suit’s camouflage systems and landed in a crouch behind the barricades. Heavy shells whistled over her head, exploding into shrapnel as they impacted the Manta hull. Several tau soldiers, huddled down as low as they could, whirled around to face her. She raised her hands and retracted her helmet. Upon seeing her face, they quickly lowered their weapons.
‘Apologies, commander,’ one of them blurted. His ochre combat armour was adorned with a mix of white officer’s insignia and black scorch marks. ‘The shas’vre informed us you were coming.’
She glanced quickly up and down the line. Many of her men lay in crumpled heaps. Another round of cannon shells burst in mid-air. ‘Where is Yo’uta?’ she shouted.
‘Out there.’ The officer indicated the corpse-strewn field between the barricades and the tree line. ‘He and the other Crisis suits were trying to outflank the enemy soldiers when those walkers suddenly appeared, a complete surprise.’
Shadowsun shot him a look of incredulity.
‘They didn’t appear on our scanners. I don’t know why. If we’d only had some pathfinders to act as forward scouts, then perhaps…’
Shadowsun glanced down toward her collar where her command interface icons still glowed. She sent a signal out to all of the nearby tau officers. A tiny panel on the forearm of the soldier in front of her glowed blue, but there were no other responses. She closed her eyes and took a breath.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Shas’ui Kou’to,’ he replied with a sharp nod of his head.
‘You’re in command until I return.’ The helmet of her battlesuit flipped down into place once more. The adaptive camouflage transformed her into little more than a blur. Then, with a burst from her thrusters, she leapt high into the air.
‘Covering fire!’ Kou’to’s voice bellowed to the tau over their shared combat frequency.
Shadowsun twisted in mid-flight, while behind her, the remaining tau popped up over the barricade and poured pulses of blue energy into the humans. Kou’to was taking no chances, she realised. Even though she was nearly invisible to gue’la eyes now, the shas’ui was making doubly certain that the enemy’s full attention would be directed away from her. She came down in the middle of a large crater where three tau Crisis suits lay in a jumbled heap. Their heavy armour was peppered with blast marks, but something else had dealt the fatal blows. Each suit had at least one hole in it large enough for her to put her fist through, with no exit on the opposite side. The humans were using heavy sabots that, should she somehow lose her defensive forcefields, would completely bypass her armour and detonate inside her piloting compartment. ‘Krak missiles’, they called them, because they were used to ‘crack’ hardened targets. Word play. Her jaw tightened. Any military that made jest of their equipment was disrespectful of their craft and worse than useless.
She quickly surveyed the weapon load-outs on the downed suits, forgoing missile pods and plasma rifles for something far more punishing. From two of the fallen, she removed a pair of fusion blasters. The flat, rectangular-shaped devices were typically reserved for destroying enemy armour. They fired a devastating beam of charged particles that incited chain reaction atomic explosions in whatever they hit. They were also considered a secondary weapon because of their extremely short range.
Perfect.
Within moments, she had attached the guns to the universal mountings on the underside of her suit’s forearms. She deftly scrambled out of the crater and sprinted toward the nearest human walkers. Three of them were clustered together, and as she approached they unleashed another barrage of cannon rounds and rockets at the tau position. The one with the missiles, the one that had likely killed her battlesuit officers, would be the first to be made an example of, she decided. The walkers remained unaware of her presence until she was so close that she could have reached out and slapped their sides. She depressed the activation studs on the blasters.
Twin streams of white light struck the underside of the machine, and a second later, the entire structure was engulfed in blinding energy. It seemed to collapse in on itself, sagging and melting as its molecular structure became superheated. One of the legs gave way, and the walker tumbled over onto its side. The cage covered its lone occupant in liquid metal, and even amidst the din of the battle, Shadowsun could hear the pilot’s final scream of agony.
The remaining walkers were taken aback. From their perspective, Shadowsun had appeared from out of nowhere. They tried to bring their cannons to bear, but she was already moving, dashing to the side. Heavy shells tore up the ground beneath her and bounced harmlessly off her shields. Then she was behind them. The walkers clumsily began to turn to face her, but she was already firing at them. She angled the blasters away from her body, and hit both of them at once. To her left, one of the cannons fell away like dripping wax. To her right, the pilot found himself blinded as part of his control panel vaporised before him.
Again she was in motion, leading them around and around. The blinded pilot shot at her in vain. His cannon shells splintered the trees. Shadowsun levelled both blasters at him. The bright beams cut the machine off at the knees, and it pitched over violently. She danced around the rear of the remaining walker, who spun desperately to keep her in check.
She was under fire now. Another group of walking machines had appeared to her right. They strode forwards across the corpses of their fellows. Shadowsun turned to glare at them, as their sabots and cannon rounds did nothing but burst harmlessly around her. From behind the barricades, Kou’to and his men stopped firing into the woods. In perfect unison, they swivelled and began shooting at the walkers closing in on their commander. Pulse blasts ricocheted off the rough armour-plating.
Shadowsun was indignant. She leapt up into the air and crunched down atop the weaponless walker. Beneath her hooves, the pilot stared up at her, slack jawed and stupefied. She didn’t even bother to look him in the eye as she fired both blasters into his lap. The shots punched clean through into the ground below, tearing the machine in half. Shadowsun was arcing through the air again, leaving only a pile of glowing slag in her wake.
As Sha
dowsun descended, she was peppered with shrapnel and struck full on by an armour-piercing missile. Again, her shields held firm. She came down near the crater with the fallen Crisis suits, and returned fire. She was farther down-range than she would have liked to have been, but she still succeeded in destroying one of them utterly.
The second group of walkers would not be so easily surprised. Human infantry were repositioning themselves just outside the tree line. They scuttled forwards, ducking low, quickly forming into ranks and files. The ones in front dove face first into the blood-soaked ground. Those behind went down to one knee. Far in back, she saw five others standing apart, providing moral support with the use of a large, green flag. There were a lot of them, Shadowsun admitted to herself, and they were lining her up in their sights. She returned her attention to the last two walkers. The infantry would be dealt with shortly.
For whatever reason, the machines couldn’t seem to hit their mark at all. Shadowsun repaid them for their incompetence by sprinting forwards, firing the blasters into both of them. One of them was gutted through the cockpit, but the one bearing the missile pod evaded her attack. As it spun, it fired into her. The blast was so close that as its missile detonated off her shields, the walker rocked backwards. Shadowsun rolled along the ground and sprang back up. She glanced quickly at her combat icons, certain that she had lost one of her drones. She had only two of the three symbols glowed contentedly.
Kou’to had ordered the fire warriors to begin thinning out the human infantry before they could drown Shadowsun in laser fire. Pulse blasts tore into the humans, but despite losing eight men, the gue’la remained steadfast and fired back. Their fusillade was like a wave of red light. It washed over the commander and her drones, obscuring them from sight. Kou’to and his men stood, horrified, certain that all was lost.
Shadowsun’s armour glowed as it tried to redirect what thermal energy it could. The interior of her visor became a collage of warnings and schematics informing her just where she was being hit and what systems were being damaged or destroyed. Her drone icons vanished. She closed her eyes and turned her face a fraction of a second before her face plate shattered inwards. Her face was slashed repeatedly. Heat leaked through the plating around her joints and torso. Her left knee buckled against her will. She could smell her skin burning.
Then, for the second time that day, she realised that she wasn’t dead. She opened her eyes. Her visor was a ragged, empty hole. Her suit collar flashed a dozen telltales and alarms. Smoke was filling the suit’s interior, and she could taste her own blood. But she was still alive.
A look of disbelief crossed the faces of the humans.
Rising slowly, Shadowsun peeled away her useless helmet and let it clatter into the mud alongside her tattered drones. Her vision was swimming, but peripherally she saw her fire warriors leaping over their protective barricade and rushing out to shield her. Without her having to utter a single word, they opened up with their pulse rifles. The human unit was ripped apart by flashes of light that cared nothing for their flimsy armour. Their heads flew back, and their limbs flailed. They fell in piles atop one another. For a moment, the handful who remained actually stood their ground, but then Shadowsun was bounding into their midst. She turned two of them into glowing embers with her fusion guns. She planted both her hooves into the chest of another as she landed. She could feel the reverberations in her ankles as the man’s ribcage snapped and caved in.
There were only two of them left now amidst the steaming corpses of their comrades. They tried to attack her using knives and bayonets, but the blades could find no purchase. She spun and struck one of them across the face with the flat edge of a fusion blaster. With the sound of breaking bones, a gush of bloody foam shot out of the human’s nose. He dropped heavily to the ground and died. The lone survivor tried once again to stab her, only to see his knife skitter over the surface of her battlesuit. Shadowsun whirled and drove a robotically augmented knee into his ribcage. His chest caved in and he fell among the dead, discarded and forgotten.
She turned her attention towards the tree line. Five humans were gathered there beneath a comically oversized standard. One of them was holding a sword with jagged mechanical teeth. The others had rifles. Their armour looked more substantial than that worn by the masses of dead infantry scattered about, and Shadowsun surmised that she was, at last, facing off against the gue’la commander and his bodyguard.
‘You are beaten,’ she shouted at them. Droplets of cyan-coloured blood flew from her mouth and spattered across her battlesuit collar. Behind her, thirty fire warriors waited calmly, their rifles at the ready.
The humans said nothing. They just glanced at one another. Their faces were unreadable.
Of course, Shadowsun realised. In preparing to go to war, she and the officers serving under her had schooled themselves in the language of the enemy. It was presumptuous to assume that the gue’la leaders had done anything likewise.
Four of the humans, including the one in charge of their flag, suddenly scrambled to lift their lasguns. The fifth was in the midst of yelling something when the tau pulled their triggers. Shadowsun watched impassively as the four bodyguards were shot down, their superior armour, in the end, proving insufficient. The final human, on the other hand, was spared by some kind of primitive body shield. It rippled as it managed to stop two of the three pulse blasts that struck him. Even so, he gripped his left arm and howled with agony as the third pulse slipped through. The mechanical sword fell away into the brush. Crimson spilled from between his fingers. He fell to his knees.
The fire warriors waited. Shadowsun slowly walked forward. She looked down at the wretched creature, and tried as best she could to wrap her bleeding lips around the thick words of his native tongue.
‘You are the commander?’ she asked.
His face, when he looked up, appeared to Shadowsun to be utterly lost. ‘Wha-what?’
Frustrated, she ground a hoof into the dirt. She spoke again in the human language, over-enunciating each word to ensure his understanding. ‘I asked, are you the commander?’
‘Hollett,’ he stammered. ‘Major, Diepr-3 Imperial Guard, serial number 58964-86542-4586.’
Shadowsun stepped back several paces. ‘You have squandered the lives of your warriors and been beaten in combat,’ she said to him. She glanced over her shoulder at Kou’to. ‘Get him up,’ she ordered.
With a nod, the shas’ui and two others slung their rifles over their shoulders, moved to the human lying in the dirt, and hoisted him onto his feet. He was several heads taller than they were when he stood. He was eye to eye with Shadowsun in her battlesuit.
‘Hollett,’ he repeated. ‘Major, Diepr-3 Imperial Guard, serial number 58964… no, wait...’ He swayed and continued to grip his wounded arm tightly.
Kou’to and his aides moved off to the side.
‘As an officer,’ Shadowsun continued, ‘you will doubtless wish to now die with honour. I will grant you such, which is more than you deserve, because I am tau.’
Shadowsun raised her fusion blasters. The human stared frantically. His jaw worked soundlessly and his eyes darted. At the last second, he recalled the word he was searching for.
‘Mu’mont!’ he screeched.
All the tau froze.
‘Is that right?’ he asked desperately. ‘Mu’mont? Mu’mont. No war, yes?’ He raised his free hand.
The barrels of Shadowsun’s fusion blasters dipped slightly. ‘Ya tau’sia?’
The human grinned with relief. ‘Yes,’ he blurted. ‘Yes. I can speak some of your language. A little. Little? Uh… shisa? Shisa tau’sia?’
‘How is it you can understand some of what we say?’ Shadowsun asked cautiously.
‘We’re right on your border. We monitor a lot of your civilian transmissions. I’ve picked up a bit, I guess. I was always good with things like that.’
Kou’to stared at
Shadowsun. Her face was like stone and in that moment, he was entirely unsure of whether or not she would accept this man’s surrender or simply shoot him in half regardless. Given how grievous the tau losses had been this day, he suspected the latter. As the only other soldier of rank, it fell to him to ensure that his commander did not let her passions get the better of her. He moved to stand between the two of them, and hit the human, hard, across the face with the butt of his pulse rifle.
‘You will not directly address the commander, gue’la!’ he yelled. ‘Do you understand?’
The human spat blood, and nodded. ‘Yes. I understand.’
‘Shas’ui,’ Shadowsun said lowly, ‘step aside.’
Kou’to pretended not to hear. ‘When you speak, gue’la, you will speak to me, and only me, or else you will die. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ the human replied. ‘Whatever you say, just, don’t kill me. Please.’
‘Shas’ui,’ Shadowsun said with increased volume. ‘I ordered you to step aside.’
Kou’to deftly pulled the heavy pistol from out of the holster on the man’s hip and tucked it into his own belt. It was nearly half the length of the shas’ui’s leg, with multiple cooling ports and an assembly along its top that glowed brightly. He spun to face Shadowsun, and bowed. ‘The prisoner has been disarmed, commander. My team will take him into custody,’ he said.