‘Take us into the warp,’ Cutler shouted. ‘Or I’ll put you all down!’
‘We don’t have a navigator.’ The speaker was a tall, hairless woman in her autumn years. Unlike her comrades she seemed more angry than afraid. ‘Even if the Geller field holds we’ll never find our way back out of the warp.’
Perfect, Skjoldis whispered. He must never escape.
The quake threw Abel to the floor and sent his shot wide. The round punched through Iverson’s left shoulder, but he barely registered the wound.
Cutler’s done it! The thought filled him with fierce joy. He’s fired up the engines!
Iverson surged to his feet, flooded by a reserve of strength that seemed to come out of nowhere. Tottering unsteadily he caught sight of his enemy. The xenos was lying prone, but it hadn’t lost its hold on the gun. You’re no better than us, blueskin. Fighting the tremors, he staggered towards the tau. Seeing him, it snarled and opened fire, gripping the bucking gun two-handed. Iverson threw up his metal hand to shield his face. You’re just like us! He felt the bullets smacking into him like hammer blows as he advanced… and felt a dim pain in his legs… his gut… his chest… You’re just as lost and just as damned. Heard the bullets pinging off the metal fist… saw the sparks as it took the punishment… There’s no way out for any of us. Felt the scorching pain as a bullet slipped past and tore open his cheek.
‘It’s all a lie,’ he wheezed as he fell upon the alien.
Abel had time for one last shot, then Iverson caught the autopistol in his augmetic and squeezed, crushing metal and flesh into a jagged aggregate pulp.
‘Do you understand what I’m telling you?’ the female officer said levelly. ‘You’re condemning us all to hell.’ Despite her years, her eyes were a piercing blue.
Maybe that is where we belong, Skjoldis said.
‘Maybe that’s where we belong,’ Cutler said. He found he didn’t want to shoot the woman with the blue eyes. Whoever she was, she had more guts than all her comrades put together.
‘There is no Hell,’ O’Seishin muttered, sounding like he was trying to convince himself. ‘It is just a primitive delusion.’
‘Well, I guess we’re going to find out together, Si.’ Cutler levelled his gun at the woman he couldn’t bring himself to shoot. ‘Do it.’
‘Your race… is dying!’ Abel sneered as he wrestled hopelessly with Iverson. ‘We are… the future!’
Iverson mashed his rigid augmetic eye into the tau’s face and silenced its scorn. He struck again and again, ignoring the echoing agonies in his own skull as he hammered the bionic through flesh and bone.
We’re all dying and there is no future. Perhaps there never was.
At last his enemy was still and Iverson slumped back, fighting for breath. Abel’s final shot had pierced a lung and he could feel his chest filling up with liquid.
I’m drowning in my own blood. Perhaps I always was.
He stared at the alien’s ruined features. One of its eyes had been ruptured, but the other stared back at him with lifeless spite. As he gazed into that black abyss the world seemed to stretch away from him, tearing him out of reality like a flat paper cut-out and leaving him behind at the wrong end of an infinitely extending telescope. Through its impossibly distant lens he glimpsed a seething maelstrom of rainbow light.
We’ve entered the warp and the Geller fields have failed and now the warp is in here with us. Perhaps it always was.
Nausea turned him inside out and he retched blood. The liquid whirled about his head in dark streamers as he slipped away from his enemy and fell backwards… and felt like he was falling forever… falling down the telescope towards that eager, prismatic oblivion.
I’m going to end here and that’s for the best and there’s no perhaps about it.
‘You will not end here, Iverson.’ The voice sounded like it had slithered from the bed of a polluted ocean, but the clipped accent was unmistakeable.
‘Reve…’ He closed his eyes and saw her kneeling beside him. The right side of her face was encrusted with iridescent fungi while the left was a bloodless alabaster. Pale things crawled about in the ragged cavity of her neck.
‘Reve, you’re wrong,’ he whispered. ‘You’re too late. I’m already dead.’
She laughed, a low gurgle that scattered ephemeral parasites from her throat. ‘That is just the beginning of the road, Holt Iverson.’
Somewhere across an immeasurable morass of space and time he heard a bell tolling and thought of home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Fehervari slipped into the parallel surreality of television almost twenty years ago and never quite escaped. As a rogue editor, his life is an eternity of cuts and mixes to quench the dreams of thirsting producers while actually getting things on air. He has cut promos for many well known television shows, but winning a place in a Black Library anthology eclipsed it all. Since then his short stories have appeared in Heroes of the Space Marines and Xenos Hunters. Fire Caste is his first novel. He currently presides over a dormant Chaos Gate in London.
An extract from Shadowsun
a novella by Braden Campbell
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.
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 heartb
eat. 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 techno-logy. 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.
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Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
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