The aircraft wobbled, veered, and crashed into the vanes of the distant communications array with force enough to tear the entire structure down into the battle below.
Numitor would have enjoyed that wrecking ball display, thought Sicarius, checking the chrono runes in his helm.
It was almost a shame he was taking so long to join in.
Sicarius took in the rest of the Eighth as they invaded the city, some by gunship, others by bulk lander. They were reinforced right and left by their warrior kin from the battle companies. Drop pods hurtled out of the skies, smashing through the alien hyperplastic of the tau hexodomes to release Space Marine squads into the smooth suburban landscapes beneath. Their assault had caught the tau unprepared. Small wonder; the brute force and speed of a Space Marine planetstrike was almost impossible to counter.
‘Numitor, attend me,’ voxed Sicarius, ‘I cannot see you, brother.’
‘Attend you? I think not,’ crackled the reply. ‘Besides, we took a detour. Look to the intersection nearest the reservoir.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Sicarius, signalling his squad to form up around him. ‘Got you. How fares the slaughter?’
‘It is everything I had hoped for.’
Sicarius gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Good hunting, then,’ he replied, ‘though I can see this being over far too quickly.’
‘There’s a whole planet of them, Cato. You will get your chance to shine.’
‘There’s a small empire, Jorus, not one paltry planet,’ replied Sicarius. ‘And likely not a single decent swordsman amongst them.’
‘We’ll have a challenge on our hands soon enough,’ said Numitor. ‘Take an altitude. Look at the interlinks of each district and tell me what you see.’
Sicarius signed off without a word. He triggered his jump pack, launching himself up to the landing platform jutting from a geometric hexodome and scanning the interstitial spars, brow furrowed.
Within each spar was a long, silver magnorail transmotive. The vehicles were moving with impressive speed. Sicarius could make out tau warriors inside the nearest. Hundreds stood in each transport, strapping on grenade harnesses and checking their long-barrelled guns. Couched atop each cylindrical section of the transmotive were the xenos warsuits the Eighth had encountered on Vespertine. The soulless creations combined the firepower of a Dreadnought with the agility of an Assault Marine.
Thousands of tau soldiers inbound, then. Sicarius counted the transmotive carriages and did a quick calculation. Tens of thousands, in fact.
Without exception, they were converging on the Eighth Company’s landing site.
Shas’o Dal’yth Ko’vash Kha’drel, better known as Commander Bravestorm, blink-clicked a hostiles filter on his battlesuit’s command suite. His sensors detected barely a hundred enemy warriors in this hex. They were so few in number, these proud Space Marine invaders. It was almost a shame the war would be over so soon.
Thus far, fewer than two gue’ron’sha cadre-equivalents – known to the Imperials as companies, according to his autotrans – had made planetfall. By the time the last interhex transmotives had reached each dropsite the Space Marine invasion would be contained, cauterised and eradicated. Bravestorm had ensured his countercrisis cadres were inbound as swiftly as possible. In the space of a single rotaa, the earth caste would have completed any necessary renovations, and Dal’yth society would return to normal. Did the humans truly expect to strike at the heart of the tau empire with so meagre a force, and somehow prevail?
The commander checked his cadre’s readiness symbols. All teams showed gold, whether buckled into the interior of the transmotives, or – as he and his other battlesuit teams were – ejector-locked into their roof cradles. His prototype XV8-02 shifted gently as the transmotive shot through a hex interstice to take a more direct course to the primary site of the invasion. The velocity barely changed, the transport’s progress silent apart for a low thrum of electromagnetic generators.
Bravestorm had originally assumed the Imperium’s blunt attack was a feint, a distraction to keep the fire caste occupied whilst the true strike fell elsewhere. He had apportioned his forces accordingly, distributing them evenly across the planet’s surface and coordinating with the other castes to ensure they could react quickly wherever the real blow fell. And yet no matter how many times he ran the air caste’s data through his analyticals, the answer was the same. Every orbital craft of the gue’la fleet had aligned with a major city, and fired its invasion force vertically downwards with only the most perfunctory of bombardments to pave the way. Bulk landers were following much the same trajectory in their wake. The attack had all the subtlety of a meteor shower.
‘They strike at Dal’yth’s heart,’ Bravestorm transmitted over the command-level cadre-net, ‘just as a savage kroot might jab his spear at a battlesuit’s chest, unaware that there, the armour is thickest of all.’
‘Their tactics are primitive, honoured Bravestorm,’ came the response from Commander Farsight. The famous warrior’s stoic features glowed on a sub-screen in Bravestorm’s command cocoon. ‘But some of their technologies are very advanced. Their interstellar transit speaks of far greater minds behind their warrior castes.’
‘I concur. I shall neutralise those invaders nearest my location and transmit my findings on the cadre-net for further analysis.’
‘Do so, with my thanks. I have every confidence in your resolve.’
Bravestorm eye-flicked a shorthand sign of respect. Today, he and his fellow commanders would impart a lesson, a lesson the defenders of Vespertine, caught out by the sheer alacrity of that first Imperial assault, had failed to teach. It was an immortal truth – one Bravestorm had learned shortly after birth and had been quietly reinforcing since he was old enough to speak.
It was the tau race’s destiny to rule the stars, and theirs alone.
‘Entering effective weapons range in sixty-two microdecs, commander,’ said Bravestorm. ‘All teams primed and ready.’
‘Excellent. I am making haste to join you,’ replied Farsight. ‘That which we presume to conquer, we must first understand.’
‘Master Puretide still speaks through his pupil.’
‘Of course. As he speaks through us all. For the Greater Good, Commander Bravestorm.’
‘For the Tau’va.’ Bravestorm made the sign of the impeccable kill and signed off.
The magnorail transmotive carved around another interstice at blurring speed. Atop its ejection cradle, Bravestorm fought to keep his sensor suite working smoothly. The panorama of war unfolding before them was so intense even his hyper-advanced battlesuit was struggling to keep up with the ballistics data flooding through it.
The air above the invasion site was filled with flak bursts, tracer fire, engine contrails and hurtling Imperial drop craft. The crystalline shards of broken hexodomes speared into the twilight. Each had been shattered by one of the pod-like landers the gue’ron’sha warships had hurled towards Gel’bryn City.
The headlong assault was proving an effective stratagem, brutal in its simplicity. Maximum force delivered at a concentrated point was a modus the fire caste made extensive use of themselves. The Imperials sought to break the shield wall, and once inside, capitalise. Though Bravestorm felt awkward and unclean at the thought, the directness of the Imperial mindset appealed to part of his soul. No negotiation here, no dance of veiled threat and false intelligence – just war, pitiless and direct.
Still, initial success or no, this alleged ‘Imperium of Man’ would pay for its temerity in crossing the Damocles Gulf. They had sent a vanguard of scarely a few thousand to conquer a major sept world; to Bravestorm’s mind, that did not reflect well on the military strength of this would-be rival empire. Though it had struck hard at first, the human armada would likely be broken within a matter of weeks.
The interhex transmotive passed a burning, shattered dome. Flickering ex
plosions lit the black smoke within.
‘Here,’ transmitted Bravestorm. ‘We begin here.’
The transport slowed hard, shuddering as a series of small explosions was stitched along its length. Blue-armoured figures emerged from the smoke-shrouded sidings, bulky sidearms raised.
‘All teams deploy as briefed,’ said Bravestorm to the fire warrior teams inside.
Atop the transmotive, dozens of ejection cradles hissed open. Each battlesuit was hurled skyward in an explosion of hydraulic vapour. Below, doorports slid open to allow strike teams of tau to disembark.
The air shimmered as jet packs engaged en masse. Forming up in a shallow wedge behind their commander, the battlesuits soared towards the gue’ron’sha troopers on the sidings, shoulder-mounted missile pods laying down suppressive fire to cover their advance.
The Imperials raised their guns, the blocky weapons booming as they sent miniature rockets roaring up. In Bravestorm’s control cocoon, incoming fire alerts bipped insistently. Again these simple-minded invaders had attacked the largest, most obvious threat – and in doing so, wasted their best chance for survival.
The commander’s gun drones moved to interpose, but Bravestorm eye-flicked them back. His XV8-02 could handle this. A heartbeat later his shield generator flared as three detonations boomed across its convex disc of energy. He deactivated the shield for the fourth shot, instead turning his shoulder unit into its path. The earth caste would thank him for the ballistics data.
The projectile detonated with a loud, punching impact, but did little more than strip a patch of synth paint from the prototype suit’s iridium alloy. Rapid beeps of alarm sounded as an anti-tank missile shot from the commander’s western flank. Bravestorm braced in his cocoon as the missile thumped into his suit’s waist joint, sending him reeling with the blast of kinetic force but ultimately doing no more than superficial damage.
Bravestorm smiled as he brought his battlesuit back upright. He liked a fair fight more than most.
But this would have to do.
‘Mass-reactive projectiles incoming, standard Imperial pattern,’ said Bravestorm over the cadre-net. ‘Dangerous, but within the tolerances of our combat armour. Fire warriors advance. Team Mal’caor, target the missile trooper at appended coordinates.’
Symbols of assent blinked on Bravestorm’s command suite. Below, the Imperial warriors darted left and right, firing as they moved inside the smoke of the burning hexodome. Bravestorm levelled his plasma rifles as one, his blacksun filter effortlessly piercing the pall. He swept his legs forward to trigger a firing stance and took the shots.
Two gue’ron’sha troops collapsed, heads burnt down to cauterised stumps. A barrage of plasma from the rest of his team sent three more Space Marines down hard.
One of the blue-armoured warriors hurled a grenade straight upward into the battlesuit team’s midst. It detonated a hand’s breadth from Bravestorm’s jump unit. The blast failed to so much as dent his suit’s armour, but it tore gun drone Oe-ven-3 from the sky. The helper’s death was a sad loss, thought Bravestorm, but acceptable, and soon to be avenged.
Nearby, a concentrated volley thudded into Shas’ui Vosdao’s battlesuit. A string of explosions tore it apart in a bloom of flame. Bravestorm cried out in denial as he steadied his flight, rolling shoulder-first in midair. He passed over the Space Marines, his plasma rifles spitting their fury. No straight kill shots this time, but a dual strike that took the legs and throwing arm from the grenade-hurler. Let him dwell on the nature of retribution as he dies in the dirt, thought the commander.
Bravestorm’s thrust/vector suite glowed gold as he came down into a piston-cushioned crouch, his team following to take the ground behind him. Weapon-limbs fired bursts of plasma and stabbing salvos of missiles wherever the telltale blue of the foe was glimpsed through the smoke. The engagement was fast becoming a one-sided firefight that not even the boldest intruder could hope to win.
The surviving Space Marines withdrew towards the heart of the ruined hexodome, firing a hail of bolts at Bravestorm as they went. Every one of them hit home. The majority did little more than knock the commander’s balance for a moment, but the last ricocheted upward from his knee, bypassing the shield generator’s disc and detonating inside his waist joint. The explosion tore a tiny fissure in the battlesuit’s side, sending a splinter of shrapnel into the control cocoon to sizzle into Bravestorm’s own thigh with a pungent smell of cooked meat.
The commander clenched his rear teeth for a moment as stimulant injectors pricked needles into the back of his neck. His suit’s self-heal mechanisms had already gone to work, contingency cells bursting to fill the wound at its waist with bluish caulk that swiftly set iron-hard. Stimulant injectors took effect, the pain washing away in a wave of cooling numbness as the commander laid down a sidelong volley of plasma. It was intended as suppressive fire, but it cored a nearby Space Marine’s torso nonetheless.
Ahead, the Space Marines had all but disappeared inside the ruins. Over half their squad lay dead, corpses strewn in the rubble. The whole exchange had been over before the first of the cadre’s fire warrior teams had made it into pulse carbine range.
Ten Space Marines, sent to conquer an entire hexodome. The arrogance of it beggared belief.
‘Today, my comrades,’ transmitted Bravestorm over the cadre-net, striding forward with his weapons systems levelled at the breach, ‘today, we shall play the role of teacher. All teams, pursue and destroy.’
A high-pitched whine from above became a roar, then a deafening boom. The ground shook hard, jolting Bravestorm even with his command cocoon’s dampeners set to combat mode. A bulky blue invasion pod had crashed into the smoking undergrowth of the magnorail siding behind them, large enough to hold a Broadside battlesuit with room to spare. Ramp-like hull sections fell flat against the earth, clouds of violet dust swirling around them. A barrage of flak burst outward, baffling Bravestorm’s sensor suite with a storm of light and noise. On reflex the commander shot upward in a graceful leap, repulsor jet pack carrying him above the blue-armoured craft. The rest of his team followed his example without needing to be told – all bar the hotheaded Shas’ui Fal’ras, who instead levelled his fusion blaster and plasma rifle at the craft’s interior.
The thing that stormed out of the invasion pod was truly monstrous. Twice the size of a battlesuit and wider than it was tall, it was a hideous caricature of the Hero’s Mantle. It looked like a walking tank rather than a piloted suit, and it had articulated claws in place of ranged weapon systems.
‘Some kind of heavy war drone,’ transmitted Bravestorm. ‘No living thing could survive that impact. Analyse at range, then take it down.’
Splayed feet clanged as the machine crunched down the hull plates of its insertion craft. Flak blasted from frontal launchers that bracketed a slab-like midsection. Fal’ras fell backwards, opening fire. His plasma bolts sizzled ineffectually across the machine’s monolithic hull. Bravestorm and the rest of his team added fire from above. The volley scorched the thing, melting small dents into its hide, but achieved little more.
Fal’ras waited for it to clear the transport and fired his fusion blaster, confident of a point-blank kill. Searing columns of superheated energy shot out, gouging a deep groove into the thing’s hull and cooking off its remaining frag launchers.
The machine did not fall.
Giant claws shot forward with piston quickness. There was a tearing shriek of metal, and Fal’ras’ battlesuit was caught, impaled upon the whirring grinder inside the thing’s right fist. The shas’ui came apart in hideous indignity, suit and pilot mingled horribly in sprays of sparking electricity and hot blood.
Lumbering forward, the Imperial machine made a clumsy grab for Bravestorm’s leg. The commander smoothly rose out of reach before dropping sharply behind it, kicking the machine whilst it was mid-step in an attempt to overbalance it. It was like striking a loaded
freight cube. He sent plasma bolts searing into the pistons at its hip, hoping to take its leg and send it sprawling. The white-hot energies spattered away without effect.
The thing was gathering speed, charging for the staggered lines of tau infantry that had formed up near the transmotive. The strike teams pock-marked its frontal armour with streams of plasma, and Bravestorm’s team added their fire. The combined fusillade turned the machine’s armour from cobalt blue to burned and blasted black, but it charged forwards nonetheless.
‘Controlled retreat!’ shouted Bravestorm over the cadre-net. ‘It’s iridium-plated!’
The fire warriors moved backwards in good order, some climbing back into the transmotive as others hurled photon grenades to buy them time. The devices detonated with blinding flashes, but they had as much effect as a pin-torch shone at a rampaging krootox.
A pug-nosed Imperial gunship roared overhead, its chugging anti-personnel cannons cutting down the fire warriors gathered close by the transmotive cylinder. The team’s cohesion broke, but their passage was hindered by the sprawling corpses of their comrades, and the resulting confusion cost them dear. The metal beast bore down on them, its footsteps shaking the earth.
Bravestorm punched his weapons yield to full, siphoning every iota of power from his shield generator to pour shots into the machine’s flank, but the thing barrelled through plasma fire and burst cannon volley alike. He had moments left before it reached the infantry. The thought of the slaughter that would ensue made the commander’s gorge rise.
Bravestorm boosted over the thing’s head, spinning mid-leap to land with a crunch right in its path.
‘Fight me then, monster!’ he shouted, his speakers blaring his challenge loud. He levelled a double shot at the hulking thing’s vision slit. The salvo did little more than scorch it. The war machine took the bait nonetheless, its entire torso swivelling at the waist as it swiped its demolition claw in a backhand arc. The disc of Bravestorm’s shield took most of the impact, but the blow connected hard nonetheless. His battlesuit flew backwards to crunch bodily into the transmotive’s transit cylinder, the impact caving in the reinforced metal of its side.
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