‘Follow their fire!’ Iverson yelled, then ducked back inside as a burst of fire leapt towards him.
‘They’re on board!’ someone in the crowd yelled. ‘They’re up here with us!’
‘I don’t see nothing!’ old Cully swore. He was kneeling with the stock of his bulky rail rifle wedged into the crook of his shoulder. ‘There ain’t nothing here!’ A bolt scorched away his left ear and he yelped, firing off a wild shot.
‘Form up in your firing teams!’ Lieutenant Grayburn was bawling from the stern. ‘We need to establish–’ Cully’s hypervelocity slug punched through his breastplate and exploded out of his back, almost decapitating the man behind. Grayburn staggered back, his lips working soundlessly, then toppled over the gunwales. Cully never even saw it happen. He had dropped his rifle and was on his knees, clawing at his ruined ear. Someone snatched up the weapon.
Cort Toomy sighted down the long barrel of the xenos rifle and felt the old instincts kick in. The sniper had never recovered from the head wound he’d suffered on their first day in the Mire… so long ago… It was a kick, he remembered, from a knight… on a boat. After that the world had gone dim, like somebody had turned out the lights in his head, so he’d just tagged along with the other guys and done what he was told, never talking or even thinking much. Everyone figured he’d be dead within a week, but here he was, almost at the end of the road, still breathing when so many others were scrab meat. And now he knew why. A lopsided smile lit up his slack features as he felt the thrum of the rifle in his hands. This gun felt right.
‘We got work to do, Eloise,’ he told the rifle, marvelling at the sound of his own voice. He couldn’t recall why he always called his guns Eloise, but he knew he always had, every one of them. Now he cradled her lovingly, careless of his own safety as he read the pattern of enemy fire, tracing the lethal threads back to their source, chasing a target…
Got you! The attacker was almost invisible, just a man-like shimmer on the starboard firing platform, but the flaring aperture of its gun was a beacon to the sniper. Toomy took the shot.
Iverson saw a burst of bright static through the crowd. A heartbeat later a headless body in bulky carapace armour toppled from one of the firing platforms, fizzling in and out of sight as its infiltration system went haywire.
Stealth suits, Iverson realised. Hadn’t Van Hal mentioned running into them earlier? Alongside their invisibility the tau infiltrators were equipped with jetpacks so the Triton’s open deck was an easy target for them. He scoured the deck for the others. According to reports their cloaking systems weren’t quite perfect.
Where are you?
And then he had them – a pair of humanoid shapes, one crouching on the stern engine housing, the other on the port firing platform. The light seemed to slip around them, leaving behind colourless, quicksilver shadows that flickered wildly in the green-tinged field of his augmetic eye. Irritated, Iverson blocked the bionic with a hand and squinted with his good eye – and the shadows were gone.
It’s the eye. Something about it lets me see them. Maybe there’s more to this relic than I thought. Once again he wondered how many others had carried the optic before him. The thing was old. But this was no time for idle speculation. Men were dying out there. Firing up his chainsaw, he leapt to the deck below.
The Triton was a wreck. It was stalled some two hundred metres from the shuttle pad, its prow burning ferociously. To Machen it sounded like bedlam had broken out on the deck above, but that wasn’t his battle. His heart pounded in fitful spurts as he raced across the platform housing the shuttle pad. His body was rotting inside his carapace, just as his mind was rotting inside his skull, one eaten by microscopic vermin, the other by a dead poet’s deliriums.
Weak meat inside an iron skin, kindred fates twinned too late...
The fever had him in its grip now and he was shivering and burning up all at once, but that didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered except the fury that promised his Thunderground.
Racing fate for the final hour, chasing hate before hate turns sour…
He was loping towards the armoured giant that had killed the gunboat. The Broadside battlesuit had stepped into their path from a silo up ahead and fired its twin rail guns before anyone could react. That one shot had demolished the Triton’s frontal armour as if it were the lightest flak plate. Squads of Fire Warriors had struck simultaneously, materialising from access tunnels and silos around the platform. There weren’t many – no more than twenty or thirty troops – but they were lethal at long range. The surviving greybacks were crouched under the gunboat’s treads, fighting back furiously, but the Fire Warriors’ accuracy was terrifying. Once again, the Zouaves would have to turn back the tide.
‘Engage them!’ the boy preacher had commanded and the knights had obeyed without question, splitting up to charge the scattered aliens. Machen had gone straight for the Broadside and it had swivelled to face him, tracking him with those massive tank-killing cannons. As he closed in he stared into the impassive sensor cluster that passed for its face, trying to read the pilot’s mind.
Burning rage before rage runs cold…
A pencil-thin ray of light touched Purcell when he was halfway to his foes. A moment later the Zouave was lit up with spectral blue light. As if following some unspoken edict, a dozen Fire Warriors focussed their attacks on the knight, pounding him with deadly accuracy. His archaic Stormsuit buckled under the barrage in seconds and he clattered to the ground. The marker light moved on from the melted wreckage, seeking another target.
Audie Joyce watched it happen from the other side of the square, where he was hacking apart a quartet of Fire Warriors. The tau were pathetically fragile in melee and there was no glory in killing them, but when he saw Purcell die he knew that was wrong. Cleansing the xenos – any xenos – was an Emperor-given gift!
Scowling, he followed the questing ray back to its source and spied a lightly armoured alien perched on a rooftop. The warrior’s helmet bulged with enhanced optics and sensors that identified him as some kind of spotter. He was directing the marker light across the battlefield with a telescopic device in his hands. Joyce levelled his heavy stubber… and saw the ray drift towards Machen.
When every colour is just another shade of damnation…
Machen dodged a heartbeat before the battlesuit’s rail guns fired. The killing bolts screamed past him, as if furious at his escape. He laughed triumphantly but heard only a brittle, dead man’s cackle. It was only when he tried to fire that he noticed his gun was missing, along with his left arm. One of the hypervelocity slugs had sheared off the limb at the shoulder and he hadn’t even noticed. He found he didn’t care. One arm would suffice for his vengeance.
And the final fires have fallen into ash…
He ducked low and death streaked over his head, leaving twin contrails in its wake. Then he was upon his foe. Shuddering with rage and fever, he thrust his drill into the battlesuit’s chest. His entire body vibrated as the screeching bit bored through layers of tough carapace. It was agony, but he embraced it gladly.
And all hope’s awash insensate fate…
The battlesuit’s rail guns flailed about as the pilot tried to bring them to bear on an enemy that was too close. It tottered backwards, but Machen followed mercilessly, digging ever deeper as his own body tore itself apart in sympathy. Abruptly the drill surged forward, breaking through the final strata of plates into blood and bone. Machen held it there for several seconds, liquidising the xenos within, longing for the rapture and finding nothing.
‘Are you my Thunderground?’ he wheezed at the dead xenos, knowing it was not. He staggered back, leaving the suit standing mute witness to his failure. ‘Templeton, if you know so much, then tell me…’ his voice broke into a spasm of blood-flecked coughs, ‘tell me what I need to do!’
Then heed the bell that tolls the end of always.
Dimly, Ma
chen wondered why his fever had turned the world bright blue. Then the marker light fluttered through his broken visor and came to rest between his eyes, almost like a benediction.
For always was never a promise.
‘Is this my–’
Joyce smiled wistfully as a score of pulse rounds hammered into Machen’s visor. The captain’s monstrous Thundersuit shuddered under the barrage, but did not fall.
‘And yea, the old and the faithless were found wanting,’ the boy preacher said, reciting truths the dead saint had shared with him. ‘And the Emperor withdrew from them His grace and raised up the righteous so that they might carve His word across the galaxy in blood and fire!’
Then the murder light flitted away from Machen’s iron tomb and Joyce opened fire, obliterating the spotter on the rooftop. Giving thanks to his god, he raced towards the nearest cluster of Fire Warriors. Doing the Emperor’s work was good!
Shas’vre Jhi’kaara watched the battle unfold from a manufactory rooftop. She knew her comrades were impatient, but she waited until the Sentinels had charged into the fray before giving the order: ‘Crisis team enable strike pattern Aoi’kais.’
Jhi’kaara launched herself into the air and rocketed towards the platform below, the blocky bulk of her battlesuit looking like some experimental flying machine. Her armoured companions, Kaorin and Asu’kai streaked after her on either flank, exhibiting a grace that humbled her own.
They despise my elevation to the Crisis team, Jhi’kaara thought.
The pair of veterans were the Diadem’s Crisis team. They had served together for years and were Ta’lissera bonded, which made them closer than siblings. Jhi’kaara herself had never taken the warrior’s oath of communion; the scars within and without had left her an outsider among her own kind, yet O’Seishin had elevated her over these bonded veterans. It was wrong, not least because the battlesuit didn’t feel right to her. While she was familiar with the technology, it had been many years since she’d worn a Crisis battlesuit into combat. She knew she was no match for her subordinates and they knew it too.
O’Seishin, your power games have made a mockery of our ways, she thought bitterly. The Water Caste has no reverence for the traditions.
The canker had set in decades ago, when the Ethereal assigned to Phaedra, Aun’o Hamaan had been lost, along with Shas’o Gheza, the commander of the Fire Warriors. As the most senior tau left on the planet, O’Seishin had assumed command and never relinquished it. For years Jhi’kaara had expected replacements from the Ethereal or Fire Castes to come, but nobody had and she’d finally accepted nobody would. Without a spiritual or martial figurehead the war had stagnated into something she no longer understood.
But here and now, I have a purity of purpose, Jhi’kaara decided. Today my life or death shall serve the Greater Good. Whatever that is…
That final dark thought disturbed her, but the time for thinking was done. Their fusion guns blazing, the battlesuits swooped on the Sentinels.
Van Hal was the only one who saw the attack coming, although ‘saw’ wasn’t really the word for it. It was more the ‘sense’ of a shadow falling across the skin of his Sentinel. There was no logic to it, but the cavalryman had long ago learned that logic had nothing to do with survival. He didn’t think, he just acted, swerving his machine aside so violently a lesser rider would have tripped. A barrage of powerful fusion blasts raked the air in his wake and chewed deep fissures into the metal floor. Arness’s Sentinel took the full brunt of a parallel salvo and its cockpit exploded violently. The headless walker stumbled on a few paces before crashing to the ground. Mister Silver got lucky – his assailant, seemingly less skilled than its comrades, missed him completely. Quint hadn’t been targeted at all. Doubtless the attackers had identified him as the poorest of the cavalrymen.
‘Battlesuits,’ Van Hal voxed, knowing it in his guts before the machines even touched the ground. Their splayed feet and piston-like legs absorbed the impact gracefully, but the one in the centre stumbled a little. You sir, don’t know your mount! Van Hal observed wryly.
‘I see fusion blasters and flamers!’ Mister Silver yelled. He was a young Norlander who’d been drafted into Silverstorm as a mascot, but his talents had shone through and the captain himself had financed his walker. The move had riled the die-hard patricians like Quint, but Van Hal was proud to share the field with Silver.
‘Pull back to the Triton!’ Quint yelled and raced for the stranded gunboat. It was a fatal error. While Van Hal and Silver careered about in evasive loops, dancing through the battlesuits’ sustained fire, Quint peeled away in a straight line. One of the suits spun and lanced his legs out from under him with derisory precision. His Sentinel toppled forward and the cockpit snapped off at the waist as it crashed to the ground. They heard Quint squealing in terror as his cabin skidded along like a runaway train. The squeals turned to screams as the wreckage caught fire.
Van Hal cut the lieutenant’s vox-feed and weighed up his enemies as he danced around them. The blocky battlesuits had landed in a neat delta formation with the poorest pilot in the centre, presumably in command. ‘Focus fire left,’ he ordered.
The Sentinels spun violently at the waist and fired synchronously. Both made magnificent shots despite their wild evasive dance. Van Hal’s lascannon took the Crisis battlesuit on the left square in the chest and Silver’s autocannon battered its legs from under it.
‘Split-kill: Battlesuit!’ Van Hal called.
And just like that Kaorin was gone, all her years of training reduced to nothing. Jhi’kaara felt no grief, only a cold regret that they had underestimated these foes. With those perfect killing shots the surviving riders had proved themselves to be masters of their machines.
Which I am not...
She noticed that Asu’kai was hunting his comrade’s killers furiously, his judgement clouded by the passion of her loss. His fire wasn’t even coming close to the cavorting Sentinels. Any moment now they would turn and kill again…
I will not die so easily and I will not die a fool!
Jhi’kaara drew deep of the bitterness in her heart, struggling to bond with her unfamiliar machine. She chose a foe and focussed, studying his erratic manoeuvres, willing herself to find a pattern. And suddenly she had it.
Van Hal knew he was dead the moment he committed to attack the berserk battlesuit. It was the wrong target. The other one, the one that had missed them from the air and stumbled when it landed, that one was going to kill him. He saw it in a subtle shift of the machine’s stance and weaponry and in the way its sensors locked onto him like they could see right into his soul. It had woken up to the game.
Stormchaser: 213 kills and counting.
There was no way out, so he completed his strike and blew apart the battlesuit on the right. A moment later the survivor hit him at precisely the right angle, just as he’d known it would. Van Hal didn’t even try to dodge.
Stormchaser: 214 kills and we’re all done.
Jhi’kaara growled with the joy of her kill, drinking in the burning Sentinel to feed her hate. Doubtless the Ethereals would not approve of such feelings, but the Ethereals had deserted them so what did it matter anymore? Perhaps the mystics were wrong about the Greater Good. If hate could bring such focus – such power – then perhaps it was the true path.
I will slay the gue’la and I will keep slaying them until they are nothing but dust and bitter memories!
She swung to track the remaining Sentinel. It was circling her warily, frightened by the loss of its brother. The rider was skilful – even more skilful than the one she had slain – but she could tell he didn’t believe it and his uncertainty would be his undoing.
‘Purge the blueskin plague!’ a voice bellowed behind her.
With an agonised whine something crunched into her back plate. She lurched round and flailed out with her fusion blaster, but her attacker deflected the swipe with
a spiky vambrace. He was wearing a baroque iron battlesuit that was the antithesis of her sleek, minimalist machine. The armour was spattered with blood and daubed with crude sigils that marked him out as a barbarian even by the standards of the gue’la.
‘Look upon their heresies and reap!’ the savage boomed through an amplifier as he pressed his attack, swinging the whirling buzz saws jutting from his wrists in wide, alternating arcs. Jhi’kaara blocked with the fusion blaster and felt the housing buckle. She could not bring her guns to bear. He was in too close…
If I am broken then I am stronger for it!
Snarling, she angled her flamer towards the ground and unleashed a deluge of fire. With a whoosh of tortured air the backwash surged up and engulfed them both. Warning indicators flashed across her vision, but she kept the stream flowing, confident her battlesuit would outlast her foe’s relic.
Your species are the plague! Your time is done!
Joyce’s armour was warming up like an oven, drenching him in sweat. He could hear the machine’s archaic cooling systems wheezing and clattering as they struggled to dissipate the heat from the tau’s flamer. Through the conflagration he saw the sensor module that served as his enemy’s head regarding him with glacial detachment. He knew that detachment was a lie: the xenos inside the suit hated him, just as he hated it. It was how things were meant to be.
There isn’t room for us both, not in all the Heavens and Hells of infinite space.
As his skin began to blister, Joyce swung at the battlesuit in a frenzy that drowned his pain. The xenos stood its ground, spewing fire and parrying clumsily with the fusion blaster clipped to its left arm. Finally the flames penetrated the gun’s cracked housing and it exploded with a violence that tore away the battlesuit’s arm and flung Joyce from the inferno.
‘Hang back and I’ll nail the bastard!’ Mister Silver called over the vox, lining up his Sentinel for a shot, but Joyce paid no heed. Howling a psalm of castigation he threw himself back into the fray, but the respite had given his foe the chance to level its flamer…
Fire Caste Page 32