Fire Warrior

They chorused their assent, sharing his anger. None of them held any great fondness for this world or its people, but they’d be damned before they saw a single godless xenogen sullying the sanctity of an Imperial world. Kevla nodded, satisfied at their resolve, and broke cover.

Dolumar IV was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a well-developed world. The spaceport was Hide more than a cluster of limpet buildings and a field of rockcrete, the major city Lettica a haphazard arrangement of rock and steel and the population little more than a captive army of workers.

All through the day and night the smelting factories churned away, disgorging their noxious emissions and shattering any hope of a moment’s silence. The agriculture projects had all died within a few years of the first colonists’ arrival; only the relentless machines, grinding away eternity in a fugue of molten metal and weld sparks, gave the planet any sense of purpose now.

Dolumar was a weapon world. Eating itself from the inside out, its overseers kept a constant stream of impure metallic nuggets spilling onto rickety, steaming conveyors; churning out the oiled, brittle killing tools of the Imperial Guard. Give it enough time and Lettica’s factories would cover its entire surface — another forge world to birth the war machines of the Imperium.

Little wonder the Departmento Munitorum had chosen to garrison the planet with such a high density of guardsmen. Four entire regiments were, even now, scrambling to respond to this una

Lieutenant Kevla sneered as he darted forwards, reassured by the war cries of the men hot on his heels. Yes, he told himself, these tau had made a grave mistake in targeting Dolumar.

Which was when twenty rounds of burstca

Briefly, Kais flew.

When it rose up to meet him, the ground seemed impossibly solid. The earth impacted against his hooves with an astonishing lurch, jarring through his legs. He stumbled, regaining his balance in a clumsy spray of dust and rock. More troopers piled out behind him, scattering towards the myriad trench openings nearby. Thick with haze and smoke, his first impressions of the planet were uniformly cluttered, crudely constructed trench walls snaking away towards the distant angles and towers of the gue’la city.

Even over the scream of the dropship’s engines, with miniature cyclones of dust fountaining all around him, Kais could hear the unmistakable rattle of burstca

It took Kais long, ugly raik’ans to realise that the red mist hanging in the air was gue’la blood. Somehow he’d expected them to have water pumping through their moist bodies, fuelling their plump, pink muscles and sloshing through their vacuous i

And then the explosions started, and the smoke lifted, and hell opened up before him. The sky was a patchwork of pulsefire and tracer streams, arcing magnificently between unseen ordnance and unseen target. Perfect t’roi-petal detonations rippled open from horizon to horizon, sending out questing tentacles of shrapnel, churning the already frothing air in ranks of airborne metal and fire. A phalanx of Barracudas howled overhead, riding the storm of smoke and chaos; a tawny blur of pastel and black against the overcast pall. Enemy fighters gusted after them, weapons chattering.

Kais absorbed it all in stu

“All hands clear,” it barked. “Secure the area and advance into the trenches.”

Kais glanced around, surprised to find himself alone. His comrades’ armoured forms melted through the haze, pulling away from the hovering vessel towards the cover of the trenches. A second dropship, similarly poised, was settling nearby, no doubt preparing to disgorge its own cargo of troopers.

Kais focused on a pair of his comrades and stumbled after them, mind still reeling. Gunfire fought with the howl of the shuttle engines, jostling for his attention. The bright flash-flare of distant airstrikes patterned him with light and shadow, thick mushrooms of smoke pillaring upwards above the walls of the trench. On every side the mangled crudity of gue’la engineering affronted his eyes: haphazard bridges crisscrossing the cha

It was madness, and he gagged to find himself at its centre.

The two warriors sprinted ahead before he could catch them up, ducking beneath a wide platform that straddled the trench. Kais recognised the squat physique of the shas’la on point: a female named Keth’rit who had trained with him on T’au. The other he didn’t know.

The pair stepped around the nearest corner and flew apart, las-fire knocking ugly chunks from their armour.

Keth’rit’s head jolted backwards with a snap, a pale jet of cyan blood hanging limpid in the air before scrawling itself across the trench wall. The other trooper fragmented at the limbs and neck as his chest absorbed a volley, slumping in a fractured heap.

Kais’s momentum carried him on, too astonished by his comrades’ strangled death throes to even think. By the time something approaching reality assembled itself in his mind it was too late to stop, too late to regret the rashness of the assault, too late to recite the Sio’t mediation of the Shas’len’ra — the Cautious Warrior. His legs betrayed him, carrying him past Keth’rit’s jerking form and into the path of whatever had killed her. The scent of her blood was overpowering.

He dropped a knee to the floor, operating on instinct, panicked and automatic actions taken without a thought passing his mind. Grit and fabric exploded from the sandbag wall at his back, las-blasts at head height harmlessly shredding the air above him. He raised the rifle, isolating a shape from the swirling melange of visual madness, and squeezed the trigger. Something shrieked and crumpled to the ground, legs kicking and flailing dumbly.

Kais watched the gue’la for a long time, wishing it would realise it was dead.

Kor’vre Ra

The controls before her could hardly be more intuitive: finely balanced level gauges, pitch and roll tracker spheres, directional touchpads on hovering drones, all within easy reach of her slender arms, themselves a physical trait common to all the spaceborn tau of the air caste. It was a design of perfect ergonomic arrangement, a symbiosis of pilot and vessel, and she never failed to spare a respectful thought for whatever earth caste fio’el had designed it.

“The doors are open, Kor’vre,” her kor’ui assistant trilled, concentrating hard on regulating the hover thrusters.