Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  Severus stared at each chanting shape in turn, silently offering veneration to every priest’s patron god. To be considered worthy of inclusion within the dark rites that would free Tarkh’ax was an honour above and beyond his expectations.

  The representative of Old Grandfather Nurgle to his left, supplicating to its mouldering god of pestilence and decay, was a withered shape leaning heavily on a gnarled cane, dressed in tattered robes of bilious green and brown. Its voice was thick with moisture and clotted saliva and it paused frequently to cough, splattering a viscous red-black paste across the floor. Flies orbited the lugubrious figure in an orgy of decaying stinks.

  To its side, resplendent in a patchwork robe of rainbow hues and glimmering jewels, a priest of Slaanesh gestured grandly and hissed in a reed-thin voice. Worship of the hedonist god of pleasure and pain quickly aroused a sense of numbness in his followers, exposure to the vilest and most raucous of experiences deadening the senses to all but the most riotous of gratifications. Thus the Slaanesh priest dressed in a melange of clashing hues and bright-edge patterns, dragging knives across its exposed arms every few moments in an attempt to feel, groaning in ecstasy at every dimly experienced moment of discomfort.

  At the next point of the star was a bulky priest of the Blood God, Khorne. Draped in butcher’s robes of black leather and studded chains, waving a polished cleaver with every sorcerous gesticulation, the gravel-voiced figure created an impression of raging impatience, as if the very idea of spell-chanting was a tedious impediment to the far more rewarding pursuit of carnage and blood spilling. Given the semi-cleaved heads and limbs it had carefully arranged around itself, Severus guessed it was more than adept at both.

  And finally, to his immediate right, a sorcerer-devotee of Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, spread-eagled its limbs and glowed with power. Besides the mirrorglass mask concealing its facial features, not one part of the figure’s form was permanent. Its fingers writhed and melted together, forming claws and blades and osmotic leech-mouths; its arms boiled with under-skin turbulence, a shifting landscape of scales and hair and suckers and spines; its legs churned with polymorphic fluidity from state to state and its voice was a transient chorus of tones: soft becoming hard, rasp becoming trill. Everything about it characterised constant unending change. As befitted Tarkh’ax’s status as a child of Tzeentch, the sorcerer-priest occupied the central apex of the star, channelling energy zealously.

  Together, the four heretic-priests (surrounded to various degrees by acolytes and familiars and items of power) wove an energy web of fluctuating colours and sounds — a boiling lance of power to shatter apart the daemonlord’s imprisonment and unleash him at last upon reality.

  Severus glanced at his wrist piece and smiled.

  “...forty minutes...”

  The last two points upon the star, minor vertices to be sure, but more than enough for his purposes, were occupied by his prisoners. Secured with wrist-constricting chains to immovable stanchions, Fleet-Admiral Constantine and Aun’el T’au Ko’vash were the unwitting conduits of horrific energies. A pale violet corona surrounded each one, unnatural flames coruscating across their bodies. Constantine’s voice had given out a little over ten minutes ago, warp-be-praised; his screams and curses were growing tiresome. By now, Severus was pleased to note, his very flesh was beginning to shift, mutations bubbling through his body like clots of blood hulking painfully along veins and arteries, eyes rolled back into his head.

  Coming along nicely, he thought.

  The tau, by comparison, was an entirely disappointing subject. Around his skull the energies seemed to boil and flex, hunting impotently for some foothold of emotion or excess with which to work. Impervious to psychic persuasion, a living embodiment of focus and calm, the ethereal was proving to be a very difficult creature to corrupt. Severus rather suspected that, when he arrived, Tarkh’ax would deem the tau race unworthy of Chaos’s more insidious attentions and choose to obliterate them instead.

  He shrugged mentally. At least he’d tried. Glancing at the clock again with growing impatience, Severus took a breath and resumed the sonorous chant that would, as night fell across the pit’s entrance far, far above, release his new lord and master.

  The land speeder hacked and coughed its way through the industrial quarter of Lettica, its dented prow trailing a long beard of black-purple smoke, dipping every few moments to grate noisily against the street before lurching upright again.

  For Captain Ardias, accustomed to the clipped Codex-standard precision of Ultramarine behaviour, it was hardly a dignified mode of transport. Passing through hotly contested zones of violence — human and tau bodies mingling with those of Chaos warriors, gunfire and grenade blossoms marking every street corner — he grimly attributed the lack of pernicious fire aimed at him to the astonished amusement with which enemies and allies alike regarded him as he passed.

  Like them, he considered the continued functioning of the land speeder something of a minor miracle, and hissed thankful prayers to Guilliman, the Emperor and whatever unknown techmarine had originally built the chassis. Despite the dents, sparks, smoke-belching fissures and various red-blinking warning icons, received at the ungentle end of the enormous bomb blast, the hovering contrivance delivered him safely to the shadow of the district’s central hangar with no more damage than a thumping headache and a wounded sense of pride. He was in no mood for tolerating xeno-contact when he arrived.

  The blood-caked tau with the dented helmet, unexploded bolter shell still lurking within, watched him approach along the street with arms crossed, a healthy distance between his slouched position and the vast hangar.

  The rogue element, Delpheus had said, before he died. The warrior with the bomb in his head.

  This tau, this “Kais’, had singlehandedly wiped out the bridge of an Emperor-class battlecruiser. He’d crippled the Enduring Blade’s weapons systems, fought through the anarchy that consumed the ship to the drop pods and survived ever since. More than enough proof of his abilities. Still, it went against everything Ardias believed to consort, trust and rely upon the skills of an alien, even one endorsed by an Adeptus Astartes librarian, and drawing level with the cross-armed figure now confirmed every one of his fears.

  “Fool!” he roared, leaping to the sand and drawing his pistol. “I told you to sabotage the war machine, not await my arrival! We can’t hope to stop it in time; you’ve doomed un—”

  “Human,” the alien said calmly, holding up something small and silver. “Watch.”

  It pressed a button.

  Behind it the hangar went up like a box stuffed with firecrackers and for the briefest of moments Ardias could see the colossal shape of the titan shadowed against the flames, crisp hangar walls falling away like a layer of skin. It was a hunchback of smoke and shadow, an ogre of gargantuan proportions that basked— no, drowned — in its wreath of fire. All too soon it was lost to a series of detonations that plucked chunks from its torso and split apart its joints. Ugly gouts of plasma and promethium fuel vented outwards: fiery spouts from a dying whale, flexing and breaching its death throes in a blazing spectacle of incandescence.

  An upper limb sheared away from the torso with slow gravity, tumbling downwards in an avalanche of debris. The noise of its impact jerked Ardias from his astonishment, leaving him uncomfortably aware of his proximity to the collapsing machine and, more annoyingly of the tau warrior, who stood regarding his expression of awe with tilt-headed fascination.

  As he’d approached through the city he’d wondered vaguely what progress the alien might have made. He’d envisioned finding the creature’s body at the titan’s base, hurled dismissively from whichever inner tier at which its progress had faltered. He’d envisioned it cowering in a shadowy corner of the hangar, too horrified by the glory of Imperial engineering to even move. He’d imagined it failing and dying, or else succeeding with painstaking slowness. He had, to be blunt, not been confident.

  He’d never considered arriving to f
ind the job already done.

  “You had better come with me,” he growled, motioning towards the land speeder, “before the whole thing comes down on top of us.”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘well done’,” the alien grunted, clambering gingerly into the passenger seat.

  “Do what you want. We have work to do.”

  The vehicle moved off, sand mixing with soot and ash in a billowed cloudform wake. Behind it the titan wobbled uncertainly, knee joint buckling with enormous inevitability, the scene lent an eerie slowness by the scale of destruction. The building-machine toppled like a foundationless tower, tumbling apart in a riot of metal and stonedust, sparks and smoke swept along in its arc.

  The noise of its impact shuddered throughout the city for long, ugly seconds, colossal slabs of armour and masonry flattening the surrounding buildings and choking everything in a tsunami of opaque dust that guzzled the light ravenously. Ardias and Kais were gone before the echoes stopped.

  Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance) arranged itself carefully in relation to the other drones filling its airspace and, at the Or’es Tash’var’s command, trained every one of its sensors on the planetary surface.

  Extending in a wide grid of sense clusters, radar-scanners and high-altitude surveyors, every available drone at the tau flotilla’s command had been hastily deployed. Weapons droids mingled with engineering apparatus, blocky chaff drones interspersed sparsely with maintenance constructs, top-of-the-range spy-sat cameras and barely sentient control-applicators seeming awkward and disparate in close proximity comparison. And every last one — from the most technologically advanced to the simplest of unipurpose models, from those with sensory equipment able to pinpoint a single individual in twenty different spectrums through a hundred tor’kans of atmosphere and cloud cover, to the lowliest of sightless fuel-gauge drones with barely enough scan sensitivity to penetrate the exosphere — trained the colossal might of their combined awareness upon the planetary surface and, in a closely choreographed orbital dance, spiralled their attention outwards from the city.

  Every third mor’tek-raik’an 66.G flickered its attention across the precise bio readings and spectral signatures of Aun’el T’au Ko’vash, harvested from its memory banks and shared with the rest of the drone army. Thus did its sensor sweeps occur in three distinct segments: a reminder of its target; a momentary burst of information culled from its sensors and an alignment of the two, comparing and contrasting. The process was repeated over and over, thirty times in every raik’an, and only when the sensor reading and the memorised data matched could 66.G, or any of its comrades, be certain of having located the ethereal.

  A blip moved across its target area: a series of energy emissions and gue’la-signature fuel traces moving quickly eastwards. The drone narrow focused on the reading and performed a detailed analysis. From the available data and scant vehicular information stored within its record matrices, 66.G postulated that it had discovered a “land speeder”, a low-tech human skimmer vehicle, and transmitted its discovery to the parent node on the Or’es Tash’var. A minor sensory fluctuation in the reading caused it some perplexity; an apparent Line Warrior energy signature that oscillated between invisibility and a warning-red state of crisis. Orbsat 66.G checked off the identifier-code against Shas’ar’tol records and found it earmarked for immediate broadcast. Accordingly, the drone forwarded its bizarre findings to O’Udas’s staff and awaited a response.

  Below it the planet’s terminator rolled enormously onwards, a blur-edged sweep of sunless shadow grinding its way forwards as day segued into night.

  O’Udas’s personnel responded quickly with a request for possible destinations of the gue’la vehicle. The surveillance drone tilted fractionally to train its central optic upon the contrivance and then, locking its direction of travel into a cluster of auto-reactive gyroscopes, panned ahead in a broad extension of the journey.

  The foothills of a range of jagged mountains, like rotten teeth in the maw of a rogue kroothound, loomed ahead. Orbsat 66.G flicked through a sequence of filters routinely, not expecting to find anything.

  Something flared phosphor-bright across its artificial consciousness.

  “East, El’Lusha! We have a fix!”

  “What? Who is this?”

  “Sir, this is Ui’Gorty’l. We spoke earlier.”

  “The ‘faulty sensors’, yes?”

  “Uh...”

  “Right. What do you want? I’m up to my optic-cluster in the enemy here.”

  “My apologies, Shas’el. It’s just... you wanted to know about La’Kais.”

  “You’ve found him?”

  “We’ve picked up the phantom signal again. It could be him — we can’t be certain. But there’s something else—”

  “Where is he?”

  “Well, that’s just it... He’s heading east. We think he’s travelling in a gue’la transport.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I know, Shas’el, but... We postulated a destination and found something.”

  “Oh?”

  “There’s an energy spike bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. O’Udas believes we’ve found the enemy headquarters.”

  “And the ethereal?”

  “A faint reading, but it’s definitely him.”

  “East, you say?”

  “Correct. Go with the tau’va, Shas’el.”

  * * *

  There was a reckoning coming. Kais gritted his teeth and stared ahead to the jagged spinal-chord of the mountains on the horizon.

  Ardias said... Ardias said he knew where to find the enemy base. He said he was taking them there.

  He said he’d wipe away this man, “Severus’, and end the madness and that Kais, if he had to, could tag along.

  He said he’d kill him if he got in his way. Kais was inclined to believe him.

  The tight-skinned concentration of the Marine’s features, hawkish face scarred and frozen in a permanent frown of martial intensity, filled Kais with a strange sort of assurance. So little in his world now seemed reliable, but to even question this man’s metal-clad resolve was unthinkable. The human’s focus, despite being bent upon conflict and triumph rather than unity and equilibrium, was equal to any that he’d encountered in members of the tau race.

  Unity and Equilibrium and Progress and Growth...

  Important words. Tenets of faith.

  Ardias said... Ardias said faith would sustain him. Ardias said faith was the only shield Chaos couldn’t penetrate.

  Kais plucked the display wafer from his pocket — too exhausted and bloodied to care about exposing the tiny rectangle of words that he was so careful to conceal. The jagged characters were like old friends — or enemies, perhaps — each line and curving inflection as familiar as his own face.

  It began: My son. Somehow the familiarity of the phrase went against Kais’s ingrained impression of his father, as if to even accept such a base thing as having a flesh relative was below the idealistic grandeur Shi’ur had espoused in life.

  Then four lines of text:

  No expansion without equilibrium.

  No conquest without control.

  Pursue success in serenity

  And service to the tau’va.

  Military and focused and balanced and graceful, everything a Fire Warrior should be. Elegant but not excessive. Ambitious but moderated by knowledge of one’s limitations. It was efficient.

  Below it, nestled beneath the freeform meditation like a thorn hidden within a perfect petal, the display wafer said: With pride.

  Kais told himself: Don’t think about it. Not now.

  Don’t think about the eyes. The big, dark eyes. Overshadowed by straight-edged brows, framed by sweeping cheek bones and underscored, like a grammatical emphasis, by the rule-straight gash of his mouth.

  Don’t think about the disappointment. Don’t think about the silence of the battledome all those tau’cyrs ago as that diamond-tipped gaze, so full of disenchanted
melancholia, regarded you and skewered you and made you bleed inside.

  Don’t think about his words.

  His dedication to the tau’va is commendable, I daresay? He excels?

  Don’t think about the shas’vre, stammering for a dignified response when all he wanted to say was: “No. He struggles. He has no place here.”

  Don’t think about O’Shi’ur at all. Think of something else.

  Don’t think about never having had the chance to prove to him — to show him, for all time — that yes, I am your son! I am worthy of your blood!

  Don’t think about him dying, battlesuit shredded by tyranid talons, body exposed and bleeding — like a curled limpet prised apart by a resourceful carrion crow. Don’t think about him dying in the sure and certain knowledge that his son — his one hope of lasting legacy, his one gift to the machine that would last beyond the passing of his own self — was flawed.

  Don’t think about it!

  “What’s that?” The Space Marine’s voice was like granite, exploding apart his reverie. He realised he was clutching the wafer so tight one corner was cracking, twisting the words with fluid amorphousness. Twisting the last piece of purity in his world, just as everything before it had crumbled or corrupted or faltered.

  “Nothing,” he said, words strained. “Nothing you’d understand.”

  “Hm.”

  The silence, if one could call it that, resumed. Beyond sighing at the asthmatic spluttering of the vehicle’s engine and grunting at the occasional roar of friction as the nose dipped to grind against the desert shale, neither said a word. Ardias piloted the craft with unwavering absorption and Kais wondered vaguely, relieved to be distracted from the clamour of guilt and rage bubbling just below the surface of his mind, if the Marine, like him, was trawling through his memories for some way of explaining this rotaa’s insanity.