Fire Warrior

“Bastards...” the captain breathed, dismayed by the message. “Sneaky alien bastards...”

Nico had just spotted the words “deception” and “delay” from amongst the glowing text when something clattered loudly on the rockcrete above his head, then roared like a hundred thunderstorms. The whole bunker shook.

Nico dived to the ground with a shriek, curling in a whimpering ball as the ceiling splintered and dust rained down from above. Reicz regarded the damage with rather more decorum, angrily glaring upwards. As if mewling for his attention, the console whined painfully, then shut down with a protracted hiss. The screen flickered and went black.

“What happened?” Reicz demanded.

The servitor twitched and chattered, eyebrows dipped in confusion. “Comm link severed...” it reported helplessly. “External cha

“Sir?” Nico quailed, pulling himself upright with helpful eagerness. “What’s wr—”

“They bombed us!” he roared furiously, hunting for someone to vent his anger at. He grabbed Nico’s lapels and bellowed into his face. “The bastards knocked out our comms, you idiot!”

Nico cringed. “Helpful” was clearly not a wise career move. The captain dropped him and scratched his chin, furious.

“I need a line to Command!”

The servitor shook its head with a vacant rattle. Reicz’s lip curled.

“You,” he snarled. Nico looked up and found a gloved finger aimed at his face. “M-me?”

“Get to the command post. Tell them I know what the xenos are doing.”

“Wha—”

“Quiet. Listen. They’re drawing our fire. Lettica isn’t the target.”

“But, sir—”

“Shut up! It’s a diversion! It’s a warp-damned diversion, you hear me? The prison. You tell them! You tell Command from me — they’re going after the prison!”

Nico’s mind did a backflip. “Wh—”

Reicz glared. “Run!”

The whimpered complaint in Nico’s throat curled up and died. A laspistol muzzle had appeared magically in front of his eyes.

He came to a sudden, adrenalin-fuelled decision. If there was one thing a professional coward was certain to be good at, it was ru

Kais drew a long breath and crept further along the trench. The oblique curves of the recessed corridors fractured and distorted every sound, making distances impossible to judge. Every gunfire report or roiling artillery impact was a potential threat, and every corner represented an opportunity for deadly surprises.

Behind him, one of the dead gue’la gurgled. They did that, he’d quickly learned. They jerked and groaned and dribbled. Filthy.

His mind was unsettled: a storm of turbulence and dangerous excess. He’d seen and done so much in the few raik’ors since his separation from the cadre that he could barely think straight. He’d fought and sniped and shot. He’d punched holes through soft alien guts and cut short their blind, prejudiced little lives with no more effort than a trigger pull. He’d smelled their burning flesh, wiped their blood from his pale armour and listened, a

In a corner of his mind, he wondered why he wasn’t dead yet.

Along this small stretch of trenchway, dwarfed by the engagement raging all around him, Kais had learnt more about the Way of the Fire Warrior than twenty tau’cyrs in the battledome on T’au. It was enough to disquiet even the firmest, most stable mind.

But worse, worse even than extinguishing the lives of these brutal, impetuous creatures, was the suspicion creeping over him that he was just like them. He had discovered within himself a proclivity for killing, and it terrified him like nothing else.

The comm interrupted his thoughts. “Kais,” Lusha said, sounding strained. “Kais, I want you to pay attention.”

“Yes, Shas’el?”

“There’s a bunker ahead of you. You see it?”

Kais peered along the winding trench, disquieted by his commander’s ability to remotely view the feed from his helmet optics. All throughout his training he’d been uncomfortable with the sensation: having someone else inside his eyes, staring out at his world without his permission, judging his actions from a distance.

“I see it,” he said, glaring at the rockcrete pillbox. He’d assumed it was deserted as he approached, a thick ebb of smoke lifting from its upper surface in silent testament to a recent airstrike. The mangled remains of a communications array sagged piteously above it.

“Listen,” Lusha commed, “I’ve just had word from shas’ar’tol. They’re concerned that the gue’la in that bunker might have intercepted some... sensitive transmissions. Their equipment is more sophisticated than we thought.”

“I don’t understand, Shas’el.”

“You don’t need to understand, La’Kais. You just need to obey.”

The rebuke rang hollow in Kais’s mind. He understood the convention of Shas’la obedience and had even thought himself prepared to abide by it, but now he came to it he felt a powerful need for information. He craved knowledge of the situation, intensely uncomfortable with blind obedience.

Ju would have called it arrogance of the worst kind, he thought with a smile. In questioning orders he was betraying a distrust of his superiors and an unwillingness to allow others to make decisions for him. He quelled the subversive sentiments and bowed his head again, conscientiously attempting to conform.

“Of course, Shas’el. What are my orders?”

“Clear out the bunker, Shas’la. Leave nobody alive. El’Lusha out.”

Kais listened to the silence of the comm-cha

Don’t think about it, he told himself. Don’t ask why, don’t concern yourself. Just do it.

Not allowing himself time to agonise, he snatched a grenade from his utility belt, thumbed the trigger, and hurled it. Moments before it tumbled through the bunker’s doorway a ski

Kais blinked. The whole thing had lasted moments.

The grenade detonated with a roar, lifting the top layers of dust from the bunker and forcing out the walls: a concrete belly spasming with shrapnel flatulence. Smoke and flesh vented unevenly through the doorway.

He peered inside cautiously, strangely u

“That soldier...” came Lusha’s terse voice in his ear. An orange icon blinked in his helmet display, distance tracker rising swiftly. “You need to pursue him. He could be carrying a warning...”

“What warning?” Kais blurted, astonishing himself. He could feel the blood rushing to his face and bit at his tongue, furious with himself. He hadn’t intended to vocalise the query that had bubbled impetuously in his mind, least of all in such a disrespectful ma

Lusha surprised him again, sighing wearily. “Our deployment here was a distraction, Kais. Nothing more. We’re drawing their troops away from our true objective.”

“A... a distraction?” Kais felt sick. He saw again the two fire warriors dissolving before his eyes, picked apart by relentless las-fire. He saw the spi