Fire Warrior

When he died, the intricate metallic ganglia suffusing his brain gyrating outwards, Genetor Farrachus was busy formulating the predicted trajectory his slumping body would take as it tumbled to the ground.

His calculations were entirely correct.

Kais had found him.

Alone and in pain, restrained at the heart of a mesh of components and cables, lit by a single overhead illuminator at the chamber’s apex, Aun’el T’au Ko’vash writhed beneath the black contraption encircling his brow. He screamed unstoppably, twisted face surrounded by a shivering corona of energy, long fingers curled with rictus tension around the restraints encasing his arms. The controls at the chair’s head were meaningless to Kais, an array of angular runes and unfamiliar characters, pulsing and glowing hungrily. Not knowing what else to do, feeling panic surging in his mind in empathetic horror at the ethereal’s screams, he turned his rifle upon the console and took aim.

“That’s expensive equipment,” a dry voice hissed, sending Kais into an alert stance with a start. The voice laughed, a ti

“Hello, little bug...” it gri

Kais’s reaction was almost instantaneous: the rifle stuttered in his hands, long beads of pulsefire lancing towards the window. They impacted with a hollow crackle, tentacles of hazing glowlight writhing momentarily before fading to invisibility, leaving not so much as a scratch.

The human didn’t even flinch. It chuckled dryly, leaning to flick a switch out of Kais’s vision.

“Sergeant?” it said, not taking its eyes from Kais. “Meet me in the shuttle bay, please. And send one of your men to fetch the prisoner, if you would. We appear to have a problem with vermin.”

A disembodied voice, thick with artificial resonance and static, replied across the intercom: “As you wish.”

“Goodbye, little one,” the human chuckled, waving flamboyantly through the glass and stabbing at another series of controls. With a lurch the viewing gallery ground its way upwards, vast elevator pistons exposed in its wake.

Kais returned his attention to the ethereal, shuddering and moaning in his seat. A long bead of blood worked its way past his rolling eyes, welling up from the wound on his forehead where a locking clamp held his skull in place. Kais ground his teeth, considering his best course of action.

The control console detonated colourfully beneath a single rifle shot. The locking spine retracted with a slurp, trailing a grisly strand of blood and eliciting another agonised moan from Ko’vash. The restraint pinions snapped open grudgingly, lights flaring then fading across the machine’s surface as if railing against a lingering death.

Then the madness began.

A side door, masked by the shadows of the chamber’s perimeter, slid open with a reptilian hiss. Something entered, footsteps heavy on the grille flooring. It advanced with tectonic slowness, an impossible geometric arrangement of thrumming segments and jointed armour plates. Its stocky build belied its enormity: almost as wide as it was tall, still both dimensions dwarfed Kais utterly.

The grey-green expanses of the creature’s shell broke up the sterile light in a collection of rune pitted segments, articulating with servo-fed power. Pe

Kais felt bacterial before it. Insubstantial. He was an insect, throwing wide its brittle wings, preparing to be crushed underfoot. He was dust. Nothing.

For a moment, the certainty gripped him that the hulking thing must be a machine. It was too easy to imagine a lattice of engines within that brittle framework, compacted metallic viscera riddling the whole implausible structure like nerve endings, grinding fibres and drive chains ratcheting its awesome limbs.

But no: it was too precise, its steps full of the rolling fluidity of an organism. Somewhere inside that juggernaut shell, glaring out with all the arrogance and self assurance typical of their race, was a frail, pink little gue’la. The thought gave no comfort.

The creature tilted the barrel of its weapon, arched shoulder guard pivoting smoothly Before the hiss of alarm could even escape Kais’s mouth, the muzzle had vanished behind a curtain of fire; a long droplet of superheated air flickering dizzyingly. He lurched aside clumsily, springing through a cloud of airborne debris and rotating fragments of steel, plucked from the floor and walls wherever the rapidfire barrage followed him.

He hit the ground and rolled, unable to resist crying out at the succession of angry detonations all around, tiny shards of detritus gashing at his armour and slashing at his arms and legs. Each streaking ballistic contained a small explosive charge, ripping long ribbons of impact craters into every surface.

Kais returned fire as he moved, a shambling crawl-run of ducking, lurching movements that left his aim far wide of its mark. He dived awkwardly for cover, realising with horror even as he moved that in his panic he’d fallen directly behind the torture machine, the Aun still enmeshed and inert at its heart.

With unerring precision, as if in answer to Kais’s silent pleas, the storm of explosive shells was cut short moments before the ethereal became a target. His mind a tangle of fear and uncertainty, Kais realised with a start that his would-be executioner wanted to preserve the Aun just as much as he did. He wondered absurdly, at the back of his mind, what Ju and Y’hol would say if he told them he’d used an ethereal as a bodyshield.

Beyond caring, he leaned out of his fragile cover and pumped shot after shot at the armoured monster lurking at the edge of the light. It didn’t even bother to move.

The first pulse-orb caught it directly beneath the broad sweep of its right shoulder-guard, flaring angrily with white heat and cascading sparks. The figure jolted backwards slightly: a casual sway, as if in response to a light breeze. Each subsequent bolt repeated the ineffectual display, a fountain of dissipated energy blossoming at each impact but causing little real damage. The gue’la just stood there and took it all, leaning in its spot and absorbing everything that Kais threw at it.

Before he could even take stock, the gue’la’s weapon tilted and fired, blasting the tip of his rifle into fragments. Its induction charge imploded with a flash, spi

No point, his mind told him. Not any more.

His opponent was invincible. An impregnable human fortress, impossible to besiege, futile to barrage. Who was he to stand against it?

A didactic memory, unconsciously suppressed during the action, bubbled sluggishly in his mind, identifying the armoured giant. It was a Space Marine, and the memory node contained more than enough information for him to know he was outclassed, outgu