Fire Warrior

Lusha couldn’t help but think of Kais’s words, from down on the planet. “Just a distraction?” he’d asked, voice thick with betrayal and bitterness. Sitting there in the dropship as the shas’o gave his inspirational speech, the youth had looked sick, expressionless features not masking the resentment in his eyes. In such subtle ways were the emotions of taukind expressed; not in the excesses and self-indulgences of the gue’la.

Lusha could well imagine the thoughts masked behind Kais’s empty expression, full of blood and fire and dead comrades. He wanted to tell the youth that they’d served the tau’va, each in their way, but O’Udas hadn’t finished talking and the meditations upon loss would have to wait.

“Now,” the general had nodded, “we must capitalise upon our success.”

So the dropship had plunged again into Dolumar’s rolling cloudbanks, hanging low over its rocky wastelands in a surgical insertion of manpower.

“A single unit,” O’Udas had insisted later, in private communication with Lusha. “Any more and we risk alerting the enemy — and then who knows what the barbarians would do? I daresay they’ll kill the Aun immediately if we attempt a direct assault.”

In the absence of any plan more likely to succeed Lusha had bowed to his superior’s decisions, as the tau’va demanded, but couldn’t bring himself to be happy with them.

So now he found himself crouched before the gaping deployment doors, watching again as the remnants of his cadre leapt away into the dust and smoke, dodging between gaping shell blasts and long-range death at the hands of gue’la snipers. Other dropships circulated nearby, themselves disgorging serried ranks of shas’las and shas’uis onto the swirling dust, figures picking their way through the haze in the shadow of the gue’la prison.

The very existence of an edifice designed solely for the incarceration of the socially incompatible was beyond Lusha’s understanding. On T’au those few who failed to conform were considered worthy of sympathy and help, not punishment. He dismissed again the illogic of their conventions and regarded the brooding construct dispassionately. It was an obscene blot; a cancerous assemblage of haphazard turrets and towers, tiered and arranged without efficiency or beauty. It was a shattered knuckle, thrust from the desert in a brutal pile of jutting weapons and walls. It lurked massively in the rocky depression beyond Lettica’s western boundary, and Lusha mused sourly that one might as well hurl snowballs into volcanoes as assault such a fortress with rifles and grenades.

The shas’o was repeating his tactic: get their attention, make a fuss, make them forget to look for less obvious threats. Mon’wern’a. So: a single unit to infiltrate and rescue, whilst the cadres drew attention and fire.

Lusha could have deployed a shas’ui for the task, or even a shas’vre. He’d considered the possibility carefully; ultimately wondering whether experience would provide any real benefit in this circumstance. A veteran could be relied upon to do their duty with as much efficiency and haste as possible, dispassionate, effective and mechanical. Lusha’s experiences, learned the hard way in the heat of more battles than he cared to remember, told him that sometimes efficiency and duty would never be enough.

He remembered watching the pulse-rate indicator on the viewscreen, climbing steadily higher as the adrenaline flowed and the excitement burgeoned. He rubbed his jaw, wondering if he’d sent the right warrior. The young shas’la, fixing him with his father’s gaze, had been insistent...

The sentry gun fizzed and hung limp, pulsefire blowing open its turntable and shedding its metallic guts across the tu

A high-altitude survey drone had provided the subterranean topography for his infiltration mission, now imposed iconically at the foot of his HUD. A complex melange of radiation echosensors and temperature gauges had located a natural sinkhole in the desert, terminating mere tor’leks from a service tu

A guard, investigating the crippled sentry gun’s clattering protests, dropped to his knees with a neat hole through his forehead. Kais reloaded and crept onwards, thinking of his comrade Y’hol.

His closest friend. Uncomplicated and good humoured, he’d regarded Kais with a respect and familiarity he’d never expected to regain following his father’s visit to the battledome. And now he was dead. Lying in pieces somewhere, probably. Knocked apart by a grenade, or sliced into wafer fragments by a chattering lasgun. Gobbets of his flesh and bone riddling the flame-gutted trenchways.

Just a diversion.

Kais hadn’t even noticed his friend’s absence, to his eternal shame. Sitting there in the dropship, his mind a swirl of shocked recollections and impressions of the conflict, Ju had spelled it out to him miserably, her grief forcing uncharacteristic emotion into her broken voice. Just one among too many who never made it to the extraction point.

Kais stopped and breathed, concerned at the anger of his thoughts. The display wafer felt heavy in his pocket, and he fingered its rounded edges distractedly, repeating its calming litany to himself.

His father had given a speech once, recorded by por’hui journalists on the eve of his death at the hands of the y’he hivefleet, so the story went, ripped apart by some shrieking monster. The speech was broadcast on all por’hui cha

“Remember the machine,” O’Shi’ur had said, staring at the camera drone directly, acidic gaze boring into the viewer’s brain. “It has interlocking parts, each operating with perfect efficiency, each as vital as every other. This machine works only because each component works. It succeeds only because each part of it is operating in order.

“Sometimes a segment may seem redundant... Sometimes the wheels appear more vital than the fuel reserve or... or the grinding cogs seem more necessary than the pistons. It’s an illusion. One won’t work without another.

“We’re all part of the machine. We live for it, we work for it, we fight for it. And, when the time comes, we die for it.” The old warrior had blinked his eyes then, and looked away from the camera. When he looked back, he seemed distant, sad somehow. Kais had always wondered about that.

“But in a way,” he went on, “we never die. Because... it doesn’t matter if a piece of the machine doesn’t operate any more. As long as the whole continues to function, the memories and achievements of each part remain with it forever.”

Prowling through the darkness, his dead father’s words haunting his mind, Kais wondered if Y’hol had died for the machine. When he drew his last breath, had he done so with a thought for the tau’va, lifting his spirit and sealing his contribution to the Greater Good forever? Or was he simply blown into moist fragments for the sake of a few moments of distraction?

Kais felt, somehow, that he owed it to Y’hol to ensure that the attack on the prison was a success, and to that end he’d volunteered for the principal role in the elaborate plan. The assault — a storm raging just beyond the caves — was just another deceit. Just another distraction to allow someone — him — to creep into the compound. This time it was his responsibility, only his, to ensure that every last fire warrior fighting and dying on the surface remained a part of his father’s magnificent, idealistic machine.