Fire Warrior

“La’Kais — what do you mean?”

The tumbling image began to resolve itself, oiled machinery catching the shifting smokelight. Kais’s gloved hands entered the viewframe, clenching down on a series of haphazard, rune-encrusted controls.

And then Lusha understood.

“By the path...” the pilot gasped, staring at the sensors. “He’s—”

“He’s hijacked the turret gun, Kor’vre...” Lusha said, forcing back a smile.

Kais held a gloved hand against the gun’s blocky controls, reasoning correctly that at least one of them must be a trigger. At the mercy of the weapon’s ramshackle vibrations, he held on for dear life and tried to aim as best as he could.

This part of the city had been all but flattened in the tau attack, targeted by one of the colossal Dorsal-class bombers that had pre-empted the ground strike, he guessed. The vessel’s unthinkable aerial ordnances had devastated whatever had stood here before, leaving nothing but fragmented rockcrete and rising smoke. He’d found the turret gun at the blastzone’s edge; fixed to a sturdy iron pintle it had weathered the storm with only a layer of soot to show for its fiery baptism. Its crew, what charred fragments remained, had not been so lucky.

The tank had clambered over a nearby ridge, beetlelike, just as the comforting whine of the dropship’s engines met Kais’s ears. Standing beside the ungainly emplacement, staring in horror as the lumbering vehicle took careful aim at the descending shuttle, Kais was wrapping his fingers around the weapon’s controls before he’d even had time to think.

Haifa raik’or of noise and madness later, in which the dropship had come frighteningly close to destruction, the tank swivelled its ca

The gun quaked in his hands, spent ammunition cartridges spi

The vehicle heaved itself off the ground on a jet of flame, flipping over and shredding itself in a tangle of cabling and armour. A secondary explosion prised apart its midriff, hull fragments pirouetting through the air and smearing themselves across the ruined landscape. Slabs of wreckage gyrated and bounced, slicing the air. One of the crew screamed from somewhere at the heart of the madness. Briefly.

Kais watched the smoke lift for what seemed like a long time. When finally the ragged remnants of his cadre clambered from the trenches he was too exhausted to even greet them.

Barely half had made it back alive.

The shuttle came down and the cadre clambered aboard. Hell vanished behind a closing blast-door.

Sitting once again in his deployment seat, wondering about the perfect stillness of the vessel, Kais allowed his mind to rest. The other shas’las were silent. They too, he supposed, couldn’t think of anything to say. He wondered if they felt like him. Hollow, somehow. Diminished.

II

06.05 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)

The governor was on his way to see his new pet.

He descended the stairs two at a time, a feral grin smeared across his face. The troopers arranged about the room snapped nervously to attention. He could feel their eyes tracking his movements, faces full of fascinated intimidation. They feared him. They revered him. His most trusted men, charged with keeping the presence of his xeno plaything a secret, and they were terrified of him.

Lord Meyloch Severus entered the holding room in a sweep of gaudy robes, polished baubles and gold-piped lapels, eyes glowing balefully. His footsteps, clipped and precise, echoed around the chamber like a fist cracking its knuckles, broken up and dislocated by the arrays of uneven machinery and ungainly technology infesting the walls.

The genetor from the Magos Biologis scurried forwards, ratlike, to greet him. Severus studiously ignored him and stepped towards the holding cell. The thing inside regarded him unflinchingly, pale robes adorned with intricate alien designs, subtle swirls and interlocking grids of colour barely even visible in the halflight. Severus found himself astonished by the creature’s eyes, small and slanted, shadowed by the contours of its long skull and yet somehow full of acute, incisive intelligence. In the fanciful part of his mind he wondered whether such eyes as those couldn’t see into the very soul.

Not my soul, hissed another, darker part of his mind. He smiled.

The adept, unable to hold his tongue any longer, coughed pointedly.

“How’s our guest?” Severus growled, not bothering to look round.

“My lord, the xenog—”

“I am hungry,” the alien purred, its voice a soft melody of musical vowels.

Severus could barely contain the giggle building in his throat. “A talkative prisoner?” he gri

“He called you ‘my lord’,” the xeno said, tilting its head. Its single braided chord of hair, decorated with colourful bands of cloth and beading, hung delicately over its shoulder. It blinked. “I think perhaps you are in charge, here. I think perhaps a mistake has been made. I wonder if you aren’t aware that my people... my race... will not rest whilst I’m captive. I wonder if perhaps you’ve considered the ramifications of my imprisonment.”

Severus chuckled. “Well, I wonder,” he slurred, enjoying himself, “if perhaps you’re dropping spoor in terror at all the wonderful things I’m going to do to you.” He didn’t wait for a response, swivelling to glare at the adept. “Get him downstairs. I want to acquaint him with our new toy.”

“Of course, my lord.”

“And keep him quiet. His voice a

An angry tremor rumbled through the floor. The speaker above the door, through a crackling layer of distortion, burst into life.

“Governor? Governor Severus? Captain Praeter, sir.”

“Report.”

“It’s the xenogens, my lord! They’re here! They’re attacking the prison!”

Severus’s smile widened. He fixed the caged ethereal with a gaze, regarding its temperature fluctuations with interest.

“Well,” he smiled, “it’s about time.”

Lusha stared down through the dust and smoke-haze at the compound below. Anti-aircraft emplacements spat gobbets of soot towards the dropship, ugly ulcers of blackness speckling the sky.

Shas’ar’tol command were pleased, at least. The expenditure of life in attacking Lettica, they deemed, had been acceptable. Given the success with which the gue’la forces had been drawn away from the prison, Lusha suspected the supervising shas’o was delighted.

Lusha had been watching young Kais, recovering in his deployment chair, when the debriefing came through. Shas’o Sa’cea Udas, monitoring events from the orbiting warship Or’es Tash’var , appeared in ceremonial dress on the wallscreens of the dropship to congratulate the warriors on a job well done.

He told them about Aun’el T’au Ko’vash. He told them that the gue’la, unprovoked, had forcibly abducted the cherished ethereal. He told them how the abductors had been tracked by the finest air caste pilots to this backwater world. The loss of their comrades, he’d told them, was all part of the scheme, the plan, the mon’wern’a: the “deceptive assault”.