Fire Warrior

“Good fortune, Shas’el,” Vre’Kol’tae mumbled from somewhere above, voice thick with concern.

The ground came up like a battering ram, a clear street overshadowed by wrecked buildings. He pushed every remaining drop of power to the jetpack and flexed the absorption pads on the base of the suit’s lower limbs, angling his body shallowly to avoid a ruinous cartwheel splashdown. He’d seen it happen before.

The neural interface was supposedly unco

In practice, a veteran user of Crisis XV8 technology often developed ho’or-ata-t’chel: sympathetic ghost-pains. Phantom reactions to external damage.

He’d seen shas’uis so traumatised by losing their sensor-cluster “heads’ they’d spent kai’rotaas in a coma. He’d seen a shas’vre who, shot in his biological leg by a lucky armour-piercing round, couldn’t understand why he was unable to walk normally when he exited the suit, since its lowest limbs were perfectly intact. He’d seen shas’vres at the end of their careers, minds addled by a lifetime of war, by tau’cyrs of bounding effortlessly across cities on thrumming jetpacks, trying to fly...

The altimeter read 15t’l, 10t’l, 5t’l...

“T’au’va protect,” he said.

And then there was only sand and dust and a bone-jarring jolt that overrode the interface and left him gagging for breath, pushing red-hot splinters up his shins and knees. The suit wobbled forwards, base pads digging ugly gouges from the city street, recoil absorbers moaning in untaulike protest at their unkind treatment. He fought for calm, grimacing through the pain, and killed the jetpack. He’d seen novice suit-users drop neatly and forget to cut the power, launching vertically again like a bouncing ball straight into the rest of their squad. He’d seen just about everything there was to see, at one time or another. None of it was pretty.

“I’m down,” he commed with a mental shrug, fighting the instinctive desire to brush himself off. The sand was settling around him. He’d left quite a crater.

The other battlesuits executed textbook drops on either side, Vre’Wyr perching on a ruined building incline to survey the territory.

“Most impressive, Shas’el...” Tong’ata enthused with characteristic understatement. “I’ve never seen a drop so low.”

The battledrones arced out of the sky at bullet speed and came to a perfect halt without appearing to decelerate at all. Lusha felt, for a paranoid moment, like they were making fun of him.

“Heavy ordnance half a tor’kan north,” Vre’Wyr communicated from his vantage point. “Can’t identify the source from here, but it’s an enemy position.”

“Given that they were shooting at us on the way down,” Lusha grumbled, “I’d say that was a fair assumption.”

“Shas’el?” Kol’tae sounded uncertain. “Who exactly are we fighting?”

He remembered Kais’s words on the comm. Was the youth still alive?

Mont’au. Mont’au!

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s move out.”

Ardias scowled into the shifting warsmog and consulted the rune icons on his auspex sca

“Head east,” he grunted. The Space Marine beside him nodded, twisting the control stick and sending the land speeder gliding, cautious of ambushes, along the smoke-shrouded streets. Ardias ignored the creeping view and kept his eyes on the sca

Somewhere beyond the blasted remains of these few streets, perhaps three blocks from his current position, a wedge of Chaos Marines ma

“Brother-captain,” Sergeant Larynz voxed. “I have an audio bearing upon the warp filth.”

“And?”

“They’re laughing.”

“Not for long,” Ardias replied, lip curling.

The basso report of ca

Most of the human troopers — guardsmen from the Dolumar barracks and storm-troopers deployed from orbit — had dug themselves into defensive positions and were engaged in a spirited attempt to contain the blossoming daemon army. It wasn’t working.

Portals yawned open seemingly at random, disgorging more and more Chaos Marines, more cackling daemon vermin, more rumbling perversions of Imperial vehicles and machines. Did they have objectives, he wondered? Did they have a single goal?

Just to kill.

The whole city was going straight to hell.

As if to prop up his wandering mind, he remembered long sermon tutorials in the schola lecturae of the barracks upon Macragge, tactical training and deployment conventions passed directly from Codex to student via a veteran-sergeant, soaked up by the young minds eager to prove their readiness for the mantle of superhumanity.

The flanking manoeuvre his squads were undertaking, miniaturised and given an unreal cheeriness by the bright lights of the sca

In exactly thirty-three seconds the Third tactical squad, lightly armed with bolters and grenades, would open fire from concealed positions upon the enemy dugout. They had little chance of hitting anything significant, of course, but as the gun crew scrabbled to return fire, the Fifth squad — devastators armed with a withering array of heavy weaponry — would crest the ridge directly behind them and blow the Chaos filth into several million tiny fragments of gore and bone. By the Codex. No mistakes.

Except...

Except he hadn’t been lying when he’d told the xeno there were no rules where Chaos was involved. You couldn’t anticipate disorder.

Ardias had served the Emperor for many, many years. He’d fought the eldar. Theirs was a discipline of intractable grace, stu

He’d fought the tyranids. Theirs was a simple goal. There were no complexities buried beneath the lust to devour, no unpredictable tangents in behaviour behind the simple biological imperative to consume and propagate. They were adaptable, oh yes, but predictably so. There was no randomness in their behaviour and it could therefore be anticipated.

Even the orks, in their way, followed a set of rules. Theirs was a madness borne from utter dislocation with reason and rationality; they made up for their obvious intellectual shortcomings with a bloody-minded determination to surprise, to take the road less travelled. Their wanton disregard for convention, bizarrely, gave them a convention all of their own. Again, in their own unique way, they were predictable.

But Chaos...

Chaos wasn’t even madness. Chaos went beyond the wilful randomness of the orks into a realm of almost “rational irrationality”. It espoused a considered form of anarchy, an almost educated approach to uneducating. It was a thing of contradictions and adaptations, of ceaseless change and unrelenting unknowability. The greatest thing Ardias had learnt throughout his years of captaincy, that wasn’t inscribed in the scriptures of the Codex, was this: The only thing you can predict about Chaos is that you can’t predict it at all.