by Various
The drones chattered at him as they scouted, providing a detailed map of the surrounding region and the approaching armour column. Vre’valel’s eyes narrowed in concentration as he adapted his plan, his kauyon, to the situation at hand. He issued fresh orders.
He smiled his lipless smile, blue flesh crinkling at the motion.
‘Theorem, be advised you are falling behind. Increase speed and join the line.’ Yuriah Kelt, commanding officer aboard the Alpha-01A, was sick of saying that, sick of hearing Qerat’s worthless apologies. Annoyance, so strong it overwhelmed his emotional dampeners, surged through his systems.
Then the feed to the Theorem vanished. There was no explanation, no report, no hint. Kelt’s irritation grew. Then he noticed something that washed away his annoyance with apprehension.
Two other machines were missing. Kelt tried raising the Indomitable Iron and the Delta-88B on the vox. No responses.
Kelt apprised the tank regiment’s commander, Magos Philis Hurosse, of the situation. Hurosse, arrogance flushing through the noosphere, ordered the Alpha-01A to continue its course. The xenos could not possibly harm such a mighty machine, a Baneblade in the service of the Omnissiah. It was a massive thing, crafted in now defunct forges by Halfusian tech-priests long dead. The 01A rumbled down no particular street, no particular path. It had no need for roads. It made its own. They felt ashamed for punching through the blessed forges, for bringing harm to the planet’s function. They could only pray to the Omnissiah that He would forgive them this sin.
Something akin to pandemonium swept through the Lament, flooding its systems and crew. Tanks were dropping, blessed machines, holy in the eyes of the Omnissiah and His faithful, dead and destroyed without warning, without response.
Outrage and chaos. The tank commander, the battalion head, senior enginseers all were shouting in Lingua Technis and Gothic. They were not afraid for their own safety. Their lives were sacrosanct, protected by the Emperor and the Omnissiah. What brought them to outrage, what brought them to fear, was failure. The deaths of so many blessed machines smacked of failure, smacked of a task left unfinished.
The lights and smoke censers swung and swayed, casting crazed shadows through the hazy interior. Yuriah Kelt frantically searched for the Theorem and found no sign of the tank. The machine was dead. He felt this with the deep certainty of instinct and therefore reviled the feeling. He cycled through the Leman Russ displayed on the auspex.
Two more tanks, two more blessed machines, disappeared from the display before Kelt. The Machine Triumphant and the Delta-86F, mighty Leman Russ tanks, the pinnacle of Imperial and Mechanicus perfection, dead and gone.
Magos Hurosse thundered into the vox demanding something, anything, some small hint that he had control of this situation. He received no response.
Tense minutes passed, tense minutes in which another Leman Russ died. Kelt heard it die this time. Heard it die with his flesh ears. All aboard the Lament did. The lights flickered in sympathetic loss, the machine spirit manifesting the sympathetic pain. Feedback screeched through aural plugs. Static danced along the interior. Pain, electric hot, flooded the crew’s systems. The thing, whatever hunted them, whatever dared challenge the might of the Imperium and the Mechanicus, was close.
Kelt raged, as close to apoplexy as it was possible for a servant blessed by the Omnissiah with extensive augmetics to be. His binaric cants were clipped things, appended with the most urgent and forceful signifiers. Kelt could feel his rage bleeding into the manifold and it affected others within the Baneblade as well. Underlying the rage, underlying that heady emotion, was something deeper, more primal. Kelt realised with a start what it was, for he felt it too. He felt it seeping into the manifold from all in the Baneblade.
The feeling was dread.
Fear made the gue’la weak. Fear made them uncertain, made them commit mistakes. ‘Cull the herd’ demanded the doctrine of the ancient progenitors of the fire caste on T’au, his ancestors. Set the prey to running, to hunkering down. The Imperials reacted exactly as he expected. Tanks were beginning to clump together, beginning to form frightened clusters as they advanced.
This new machine, his new warsuit, was perfect for this purpose, perfect for this hunt.
The guns, his guns, whined as they spooled down.
He stepped over the burning wreckage of the dead gue’la tank. A massive carving, shaped like a human skull, half-machine, half-bone glared down at him, a mark of gue’la superstition.
He could hear his next target rumbling away, streets down, plumes of smoke spitting up from primitive engines.
Vre’valel smiled again. He smiled as he killed, smiled at a task accomplished well, at the advancement of the Greater Good.
Kelt whispered hushed orders into the vox. He urged the Leman Russ commanders to cluster together, to seek safety in numbers.
Even as he did so, he watched tank signifiers wink out, lost on the auspex. The Yllcos Device, STC 1186, Pride of Land, Halfusian Pattern YY245, Glory of Mars all died impotent. None sighted their killer. None fired back in anger. Forty-eight machines remained.
They caught the first sight of the predator hunting them three minutes later.
A junior tech-adept approached Kelt, mumbling honorifics in Lingua Technis, clutching a pict in sweaty palms. Kelt snatched it with an extended mechadendrite.
‘Is this confirmed?’ Kelt demanded, staring wide-eyed at the printout.
The tech-adept responded, affronted, before remembering whom it addressed. ‘The machine is certain. There was no interference.’
Kelt inloaded the data onto the noosphere.
With part of his brain, Kelt analysed the data, parsing it, applying blessed logic to the image. The rest of his brain was dedicated towards keeping the battalion moving to the front line.
Thunder rumbled outside. Thunder or something else dying.
Kelt flinched and what remained of his organic features grew pale. Unbidden, the object captured by the pict emerged into his consciousness.
It was tall, tall and vaguely humanoid. The smoke curled around it like a diaphanous robe, revealing and concealing in the same moment. The sight was horribly intimate. Flashes of light split up the smoke from various points on the humanoid shape. The thunder of guns, so many guns, so many weapons. The humanoid shape should have been reassuring, should have been comforting, but the figure was not squat. This was no Adeptus Astartes dreadnought, no blessed machine crafted by loving human hands.
What he could see of the thing was all clean lines, rounded intersections and malign otherness. The machine, the enemy, the predator that stalked them, had penetrated their lines, moving past the front, striking deep into the manufactorum districts. It was blunting their advance, keeping them from moving forward. What’s more, it was picking them off, killing them, denying them their duty.
The dread afflicting the manifold intensified as Magos Hurosse, safe in the main spire, made his own identifications and conclusions.
The tech-priests redoubled their prayers.
The prayers were reassuring. The twinned tongues of Lingua Technis and High Gothic curled serpentine around each other, drifting through the vox, drifting over the tank’s speakers. They provided a comforting counterpoint to the hammering bangs coming from outside.
They sounded like drums, like rage and anger.
Commander Eryn Berthick, hunched over his station, was half blind. Fire flared. Lightning stabbed. Faces howled in the outer pict viewers.
He could not see their companion, the Delta-66Z, through the thronging menials in Citizen’s Recreational Location 867-AF. His only hint that it was there was the constant vox burbling of Lingua Technis coming from his counterpart in the 66Z.
‘Desist and disperse,’ he announced. His voice was calm, despite his inner turmoil.
The menials ignored him.
‘Folly of Innovation,
Why have you stopped?’ whispered that machine-brained bastard, Kelt, in the clipped professional tones of an experienced enginseer. The man had abandoned too much of his humanity to the purity of the machine. While Berthick aspired to such heights, he could not help but loathe the man for his callousness, for his logic. Some day, Omnissiah willing, Berthick would be the same. For now, though, he retained some connection to his humanity.
‘Labour menials, honoured sire. We are swamped by labour menials,’ Berthick said, trying to sound contrite. They were everywhere, thronging the open spaces, mouths wide, voices loud, screaming for rights, screaming for the dissolution of their oppression.
Kelt’s response was a non-verbal scree of nonsense data, the Lingua Technis equivalent of a derisive snort.
‘You will advance,’ Kelt ordered.
Berthick canted his compliance. Their progress was slow at first.
‘Desist and disperse,’ the commander tried once more. Again he failed.
He nodded to one of his subordinates and the bass roar of side-mounted bolter sponsons commenced. The tank rocked as it ground over menials too slow to scatter out of the way.
He could hear the Delta-66Z doing the same.
Berthick, ridden with guilt at the wanton slaughter, began to relay recorded tech-prayers.
He was still praying, still broadcasting, still killing, when something thudded into the Folly of Innovation from the back.
The Leman Russ lurched forward, treads screeching as they failed to latch on to the rockcrete surface of the road. Crew flew from their seats, interface sockets spurting oil and blood as they were violently disconnected. Sparks flew as machine systems failed. The machine spirit growled from the engine, then coughed, wheezed and sputtered out.
The screen blinked at him in angry red letters.
Rear armour hit.
Eryn Berthick felt blood and oil dribble down his face, smelled the rich fluid in his nose, tasted it on the air with multiple inbuilt sensors.
‘Dead. We’re all dead,’ someone moaned, half wailing with despair and fear.
Berthick dragged himself forward, his mechanical legs broken and unresponsive. He was searching, hoping, praying, that some function yet remained within the Folly of Innovation. The power flickered.
He could hear a fierce whining sound from outside. Heavy footfalls thumped into the ground. Something came close, some cursed thing.
The commander’s hands stretched before a console. He wept as he failed to reach.
The screen before him flickered as outer pict-viewers cycled through default modes. They saw nothing and transmitted nothing.
Berthick screamed with effort as he felt his life fade out.
Finally, he reached the console.
He shook as he typed, as he ordered the machine to perform its holy purpose.
The pict-viewers outside ceased their trembling and began to function.
They were still transmitting a minute later when the xenos machine outside opened fire and terminated the Folly of Innovation.
Kelt watched as the enemy machine killed the Folly of Innovation, screens flickering as the machine spirit processed the images. It stood, staring down at the outer picters, its own inscrutable lenses clicking and whirring. It took one step forward, flames backlighting it. The tiny head cocked to the side as if puzzled. Muzzle flare distorted the image, but the looming xenos machine was the same deep red as the previous image. If there were differences in between this machine and the one in the pict before, Kelt did not notice them. Logic dictated that they must be the same. He searched for some inkling of humanity, some anthropomorphic quality that would make it familiar.
There was nothing. The machine was so different, so other, so xenos, that it nearly broke the Mechanicus adept’s mind.
But Kelt smiled. Something akin to joy spread through the manifold. They had spotted the machine, the picts clear as they could be amid the night and the fire. What was more important, however, is that they now knew where it was.
The bait was set. The kauyon, his hunt, his mission, neared completion. The gue’la had proved easy to predict.
They believed him to be in a gathering space, a square portion of the city devoid of buildings. He could hear their chatter over their crude communications networks. He paid no attention to the words. He listened only to their tone, to their panic.
They tried to hide it beneath crowing victory calls. They thought him cornered. They thought him easy to kill. They were wrong.
Vre’valel would teach them the error of their ways, the price of rejecting the Greater Good.
His treads were heavy, for this machine lacked the perfect subtlety of a stealth suit. He had no need for stealth now. He wanted the gue’la to know that he was near, to know that death claimed them. Each beat of their hearts would be a gasping thump declaring that the extent of their mistake was known.
There was no real passion behind this. Fear was merely another tool of the hunt. There was no hatred felt for the gue’la, only sadness, only a peculiar form of regret. To reject the Tau’va was madness, madness bred from wilful ignorance.
But it was not his role to question. His shas’o had spoken. The gue’la were dead. Their world belonged to the Tau Empire.
All that remained was to teach them this.
The Halfusian Pattern 436 was the first to enter Citizen’s Recreational Location 867-AF. It was the first to die. The xenos machine fired once. The accuracy was stunning. Bright plasma, painfully blue and white, lanced straight up the 436’s gun barrel and immolated the crew within.
Two other tanks entered from different side streets, guns already firing, machine prayers broadcast loud from external voxes. Third off the Line and Machined Glory joined them, their own guns speaking, their own voxes transmitting the same holy prayers.
The xenos machine stood unmoved, undaunted. Plasma streamed from mounted guns while drones rotated in complex configurations before it. Each shot from the Leman Russ impacted against a shimmering shield.
Each shot was answered by the warsuit.
It wheeled and turned, killing everything it faced.
Leman Russ tanks were reduced to burning scrap metal.
Kelt, minutes away in the Alpha-01A, listened, watched and trembled.
He screamed from his command throne, reverting to the flesh-voice of his youth, stress overwhelming his augmented brain. ‘Kill it!’
Kelt fed tanks into the square piecemeal, trying to overwhelm the xenos battlesuit, following the orders of the regimental command magos.
He was sending them like grox to the slaughter.
Options appeared on the manifold, suggested logic parameters, detailed plans for similar situations. Kelt watched as Hurosse dismissed them all one by one. The magos inloaded only rage, shunting all true logic.
The battalion converged on the square, engines rumbling, treads screeching, turrets thundering, machines dying.
‘How much longer until we kill the damn thing? How many more minutes until we hit the square?’ Kelt demanded, flesh-voice quivering.
‘Two minutes, honoured sire,’ came the reply from a robed enginseer.
Kelt nodded, his command throne gripped tight with metal hands.
Kelt dedicated part of his vocal functions to whisper benedictions to the Omnissiah, praying for more speed, praying for victory, praying for death.
With swift haptic commands, Yuriah Kelt sent more men and more machines to their deaths.
The test had begun. This was it, the climax of his kauyon.
This was what the hunters called the Rai’kor Kau’va, the Moment of Perfect Patience. The moment of exposure, of endurance. The hunt lived or died here.
More of the gue’la machines challenged him. More of the gue’la machines died. But with every second, their numbers grew. With every second he stood more chance to be hit,
to be slowed down.
Vre’valel’s smile became a grimace. His accompanying drones chattered at him, their intelligences excited.
What they reported did little to ease Vre’valel’s mind, to ease the tension of the moment.
He blinked to shield his eyes from another tank’s death, railgun discharge ringing.
Another.
The tank flew backwards, burning, splintering, dying. It erupted in a mushroom cloud of flame and dirty smoke.
Another.
The gue’la vehicle ceased all forward momentum. Smoke, dark and greasy pouring out of interior compartments.
Another.
The cannon rotated on his left arm, spitting death, plunking into the gue’la machine. The human tank blazed with fire as fuel tanks combusted.
Each dying, each exploding in a dozen different permutations.
Some died with screams, others with deafening sounds. Some merely froze, smoke emerging from ports in the hull. But what mattered was that each was dead. Each was silenced.
This was a challenge the gue’la could not ignore, not while he stood before him, the object of their wrath, of their emotion. Missiles thudded down into them, killing them. The gue’la did not note the direction they came from, only the destruction they wrought.
The capacity of the Riptide battlesuit for destruction was prodigious, its tactical applications perfect for this moment. The height, the sheer promise of such a machine was almost intoxicating. It was graceful in a way that could not be equalled. The majesty, the righteousness, of the Tau’va spoke through his will.
Vre’valel grimaced, but the smile lurked beneath, waiting to emerge.
The bait had been taken. The kauyon was ready.
The gue’la machines died, but the true prize, the true purpose of this hunt was almost within sight.
The faster Leman Russ tanks rushed forward, pushed in to face the warsuit, to bring it down. They were failing. They were dying.
Kelt was drooling now. The magos’s eyes twitched. The only sign of continued intellect was his presence on the manifold, the continued hissed cants directed to the crew.