‘I won’t,’ said Haluk, the mere suggestion of it irking him. ‘But why are you here? I was not told to expect you.’
The man paused. ‘We were not meant to meet, it’s true. But I wanted to leave something else for you up there. It took me a moment.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘A chance at life, kharkeen. I anchored a rope to the tower wall.’
Haluk scowled.
‘Do not be offended,’ said the haddayin. ‘I know you are ready to give your life. But if you move quickly… Would the cause not be better served by your survival? Martyrs are a one-shot weapon. I’ve always thought it wasteful. If there’s a chance–’
‘The Speaker has seen my ascension to glory in the scrying sands.’
‘The Speaker,’ said the man gravely. He shrugged. ‘Then so it will be, I suppose. Fate is fate.’
One did not doubt the Speaker, least of all in the presence of a kharkeen. The infiltrator gave a shallow bow and resumed his descent. Haluk angled his body that the other might pass him on the narrow stair. As the man drew parallel, he offered his final words. ‘Saint Sathra watch and keep you, kharkeen. Saint Isara speed your soul on its journey. I’ll hold your deed in memory and see the tale passed on.’
He vanished round the curve of the staircase and was gone, but his words stayed with Haluk all the way to the top of the minaret.
So it will be.
It has been foretold. My fate is set.
Today, I die.
He had thought himself ready, his acceptance complete, certain of the promise of elevation in the eternal life after this one.
But now, chill slivers of doubt began to press at the edges of his faith. Fear and the animal need to survive gnawed at him.
What about choice? What about free will? He did not doubt the Speaker or his visions, but… What if he turned around right now? What would happen to the cause? Just how much did the dreams of his people rest on his actions this day?
Surely the future was not so binary a thing. Surely success in the years that followed did not rest on a single act of sacrifice today.
Emerging from the stairwell at the top, he found himself high above the city, sheltered from the beating sun – and from any eyes overhead – by the eaves of the tower’s sharply tilted roof. The sky was so wide and blue it seemed that the whole of existence lay beneath it. On the eastern side of the parapet, by the inner edge of the waist-high sandstone crenellations, he found the man-portable missile launcher he had known would be waiting for him. The weapon looked old, covered in scuffs and scratches.
A one-shot weapon only, as was he.
It was foretold.
Damn the haddayin for igniting these doubts now.
What if surviving to fight might make a bigger difference?
No. The Speaker would have seen that in the scrying sands. He was the God-Emperor’s instrument on Tychonis. It was by his visions and his leadership that the yoke of alien occupation would be thrown off. Haluk’s death today would be a flagstone on the path to the redemption of his people and his world. His place in history was assured.
One shot.
The weapon’s laser-targeting system meant Haluk wouldn’t need more than that. His training had been comprehensive. Strict. Gruelling.
He was fully prepared.
The missile was pre-loaded and the targeting systems were on standby, but as Haluk bent to lift the launcher, he felt a powerful urge to check something.
Walking around to the other side of the tower, he spotted the coil of thick rope the sergeant had left for him. He reached down and tugged on it. It was anchored solidly to a plasteel piton.
He growled at himself, again conflicted.
I should be past this. Why am I still torn? If I run, I risk being taken alive.
Capture was not an option. What might the blue-skins draw out from him? What terrible methods did the pogs use?
Committed to death in duty, kharkeen did not train in anti-interrogation methods.
Haluk cursed himself for his momentary weakness and whirled away from the rope. He marched determinedly back to his firing position. Mere moments remained. Peeking over the lip of the wall, he surveyed the scene forty metres below.
The highway was thronged with people now, all jostling for position. Hab windows on every floor in every building were crammed, mostly boys and men who had shoved, elbowed and shouted their way past sisters, wives and mothers to get a better view.
The infiltrator had said the drones had completed their pass on the towers. Sure enough, they hovered over the lower rooftops now, guns and lenses tracking left and right looking for potential threats.
Haluk muttered a hateful curse as he watched.
The air began to fill with the eerie humming of alien engines. T’au gunships swung into view from ramps and intersections along the highway, hovering a metre off the ground, sliding like insects on the surface of a pond into prearranged positions. Their guns swung to cover the dense assembly of a curious and colourful crowd.
You see? thought Haluk. Safety and prosperity to all those who bow to the T’au’va. But little trust.
Members of the security forces made a long line on either side of the road, facing the masses, weapons in hand. Haluk was disgusted to see so many humans among them, proudly holding weapons across their chests, so ready to kill any of their own people who threatened their t’au masters.
As he looked down at the spectacle-hungry masses and the might of the security forces restraining them, he felt himself being pulled headlong towards a nexus, a point in time on which great future events rested.
More ground vehicles started to emerge from the heat and dust at the far end of the road now, engines adding their strange voices to the rest, creating a curious low vibration in Haluk’s chest.
First came a vanguard of sleek skimmers, their cockpits open to the air. Then came two heavy craft bristling with gun barrels and missile racks. They had about them the visual aspect of an ocean predator, their hulls of metal and advanced ceramics curving and sweeping like organic forms.
Then, at last it appeared before him – the craft he had spent so long studying in vids and picts, visualising in his mind, the overwhelming, overriding focus of the days and weeks leading up to this one.
It was the personal vehicle of the blue-skin wretch responsible for more Kashtu and Ishtu deaths on Tychonis than any other living being.
Commander Coldwave.
Haluk’s whole body tensed.
In that single moment, this thing which had dominated his thoughts for so long was made suddenly, imposingly solid and real.
Flanked by the support craft of an honour guard, it prowled along the highway, a heavily armoured troop transport with the honour markings of the warrior-leader to whom it belonged.
As it glided closer to Haluk’s position, he hefted the missile launcher and settled it on his right shoulder. The weight of it pressed down on him. He adjusted until he was about as comfortable and steady as he could make himself.
The crowd below grew quiet, hesitant, watching in awe and respect. No cheering and clapping. The t’au found such raucous displays distasteful.
The fire caste supreme commander had been in the south for months. He had always shunned the spotlight and his movements were seldom made public knowledge. But the Speaker had known. Long before this morning’s public announcement over the Tychonite infocast system, the Speaker had known that Coldwave would pass this way at this hour on this day.
And a single kharkeen might thus strike a great blow against the enemy.
The moment had come.
Coldwave’s Devilfish armoured transport slid into firing range.
Five
With his heart pounding and a prayer on his lips, Haluk sighted through the lens of the missile launcher’s scope and tracked right.
The crosshairs rolled over the polished fuselage of the Devilfish.
He thumbed the safety off and pressed the activation rune for the laser target designator. A bare moment after the invisible laser painted the side of the transport, the t’au military presence and their human cohorts jolted into action like they’d been stung. The energy in the whole area changed completely. Helmed faces whipped around towards Haluk’s position. Drones lifted from their holding pattern. Fireblade squad leaders started calling out to their cadres, gesturing sharply. Several squads broke from the road and started charging through the crowd, converging on the minaret from several places at once.
So Coldwave’s Devilfish had a lock-on sensor.
No matter. Haluk had his target dead centre.
He kept his right eye pressed to the weapon’s scope. In the peripheral vision of his left, he noted three gun drones cutting straight towards him through the air. Blood roared in his ears. His brain was screaming at him to flee. Instead, he gritted his teeth, pushed the weapon’s charge lever to Active, pressed forward on the firing lever with his thumb and squeezed the trigger.
The weapon roared, deafening him. He was almost blown from his feet. He shut his eyes involuntarily, blinded by the sudden ignition of rocket fuel. When he opened them half a second later, he saw a streak of white smoke arcing down towards the transport.
He had time to marvel at the gentle, graceful curve of the trail before he was blinded again by the flare of the explosion. The noise was like a thunderclap, short and sharp. It reverberated in the stone beneath his feet. The tower shivered.
Righteous zeal filled Haluk’s wildly beating heart. He had done it. He had struck a blow against the usurpers in the name of the God-Emperor and all that was right.
The t’au fire caste leader was dead!
Be proud, Mother. Terra’s Holy Light surely shines upon me now.
But Haluk was wrong in that. Perhaps the Emperor’s attention was elsewhere that day.
Luck, certainly, was not with him. As he let the launcher drop at his feet, he watched the smoke clear, pulled away like a veil caught on a breeze.
The sight it revealed made him cry out in denial.
Down in the streets, people were shoving and scrambling to get away from the main thoroughfare, desperate to get back to the cover of the alleys and away from more explosions. Shutters slammed over the windows that faced onto the highway. The security forces were forming a cordon around what should have been the twisted, burning wreckage of the transport.
Should have been…
The transport was untouched, not even blackened by the blast.
But how? The missile had exploded. Haluk had done everything he had been trained to do. Burning debris should have been raining down from the sky. Those inside should have been so much charred meat.
Haluk felt like his heart had dropped out of his chest, but there was no time to stand and try to process it all. The drones were almost on him. The knowledge that he had failed to kill the t’au military leader changed everything. This was not the glory he had been promised.
He was no longer content to die here. Not now. The promise of eternal reward had been snatched from him, his most fervent hopes undone.
Giving himself over completely to the survival instinct he had been wrestling with, he raced around the walkway to the other side of the tower, grabbed a double armful of the coils of the infiltrator’s rope and heaved its length out over the crenellations. The rope plunged downwards, uncoiling as it fell. It stopped just a few metres short of the ground.
The hum of the drones was pressing on his ears. They swung around the sides of the tower – two from the left, one from the right – just as Haluk took firm hold of the rope and pitched himself over the edge.
He swung out in a controlled spin and landed his feet against the wall. From there, he began a frantic descent.
The drones swept in closer, descending in parallel with him, taking up position four metres off to his sides and rear.
A burst of flat t’au speech, mechanical and lifeless, emanated from all three at once.
Haluk ignored it, his mind given over completely to the descent.
The voice switched to Uhrzi, the most common variant of Tychonite Low Gothic, the official human language of occupied Tychonis.
‘Cease all movement immediately.’
Desperate now, hardly thinking at all, Haluk switched from arm-over-arm. He hooked the rope into the crook of his elbow and began to drop at speed, the fabric of his robes protecting him from burning abrasion.
He dropped fast, but the drones dropped with him, guns levelled.
‘Cease movement. This is your final warning.’
Only ten metres to the ground. Nine. Eight. Seven.
When the guns fired on him, it was the sound more than the explosive pain of the pulse rounds smacking into his flesh that snapped his focus away from the rope. So distinctive, that strange, angry buzz.
His strength left him completely. He lost his grip, plunging the rest of the distance to the ground below, hitting it with a loud, wet crack. The back of his skull shattered. A pool of hot, thick blood began to spread out around his head. Lights swarmed and danced behind his eyelids.
He opened them and looked up at the sky, cloudless and blue. In his peripheral vision, he saw the drones settle around him in a cordoning pattern. They turned their guns outwards.
He was no longer any threat.
Everything was growing dark. He heard the sound of many pairs of booted feet running towards him. There was shouting in both Uhrzi and T’au.
Haluk was fading fast. He couldn’t turn his head to see, but he sensed he was being surrounded. Figures moved at the edges of his vision. Suddenly, the flat, noseless face of a t’au fire warrior leaned over him, close and low, scowling, snarling, barking a string of questions in that arrogant, contemptible way common to all pog soldiers.
Haluk tested his right arm gingerly. It moved, albeit painfully slowly. With great effort, he forced his hand into the folds of his robe. The officer leaning over him snapped ferociously, this time in Uhrzi.
‘Don’t move, gue’la. You are dying.’
Haluk felt his hand close over the tiny device he sought. Through bloodied lips, he grinned. Perhaps a little glory after all.
‘Pro Terra Imperator,’ he wheezed, blood bubbling from his mouth.
He pressed the small red button on the detonator and ignited the explosives under his robes, ending his part in the liberation of his world.
Eight t’au security personnel died in the capital that day, all kills of the Ishtu death-commando Haluk uz-Kalan. Four human security officers also died immediately in the blast. The three drones that had gunned the rebel down were blown to hot fragments. A further sixteen members of the t’au and human security forces were injured.
The greater effects of the attack were felt only after, and for much longer, just as the Speaker of the Sands had always intended.
Coldwave had never been a viable target – not for so simple a plan as this.
The real target that day was unity – the cross-species trust between the people of Tychonis and their blue-skinned overlords.
In the climate of surging doubt and tension that sprang from the attack, and in the months of increased security measures that followed Haluk uz-Kalan’s death, not just in the bustling districts of Chu’sut Ka but in all the integrated towns and cities, thousands of men and women were forcefully detained for questioning. Those with something to hide were subjected to measures few would have expected of the t’au. People vanished. Some were released – not because they were thought innocent, but because observing them might lead t’au intelligence operatives to higher-value suspects.
Among the people of the souks and recaff houses and narco-dens, words of criticism and outrage became more common.
Perhaps the
Greater Good was not all it purported to be, men whispered to each other. Perhaps, despite all the promises, some were more equal than others in the glorious t’au regime.
That was what the Speaker of the Sands had sought to gain.
That was what Haluk uz-Kalan’s life bought for the loyalist cause.
Six
The room never changed. And why would it? Those who met within cared not at all about its decor or lack thereof. After all, it did not actually exist. It was a no-room, a psychic construct only, a simple tool, nothing more. It allowed the two minds now occupying it to discuss matters of great import without the distraction and discomfort of total astral disembodiment. Those minds were projected and maintained in that ethereal space by the life-sapping, flesh-withering efforts of their individual psychic choirs, each a collection of lobotomised psychic minds all slaved to their respective master astropaths.
This was what it took to bridge the vast distance between the Saint Nevarre and The Lance of Sion, two ships currently almost half a segmentum apart.
The table in the centre of the no-room was of the same unnaturally symmetrical grain as before. The flames in the wall sconces still guttered and danced in strange synchronicity, each a copied instance of a single fixture. The chairs were plain, their surfaces neither warm nor cold, neither hard nor soft. There was only enough detail, enough realism, to appease the human mind so that it might disregard the surroundings as utterly mundane.
No, the room had not changed since the last time these two met in secret conclave.
But much else had.
‘The master astropath confirms we are secure on our side,’ said one.
‘Likewise at this end, my lord. Cleared to proceed,’ replied the other.
The simplicity of this astral environment had another benefit – it was easy to spot glitches. Had any asymmetry crept into the psychic fabric of the room, any hint of unexpected detail, the implications would have been significant and the course of action immediate. The meeting would be ended at once. Anything at all – a single flame out of sync with the others, or some tiny variance in the table’s grain – would mean outside interference.
Shadowbreaker - Steve Parker Page 4