Thus reassured, he gathered the full enormity of his mental faculties— reasoning that such comprehensive security arrangements negated any need to spend time considering his safety — and focused on the console before him. The datum drones at his side blinked and chattered, ferociously eating away at the AI’s defences. The language decryption paradigm running in Natsan’s head decoded a string of characters and he stabbed at a sequence of controls, exposing yet another level of sophistication. Like some energistic equivalent of the gantry surrounding the powercore, the ship’s logic engine was a structured gem: a perfectly aligned arrangement of operative tiers and commands, symmetrical and cohesive. Had his sense of awe been complete, he suspected, he might actually be impressed by the technology’s complexity. As it was, the puritens surgery released a stream of disapproving endorphins into his mind, filling him with revulsion and making him all the more aware of the xenogens’ blatant disregard for the proper obeisance owed to the Machine God.
To his side, Adept Rolan controlled a group of servo-skulls as they swarmed around the thrumming engine pile at the centre of the tier stack. The technology contained within that single pillar of silent componentry was utterly foreign, an impure antithesis of the arcane knowledge of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Natsan’s brief glimpse through a viewing portal had raised more questions than it provided answers, revealing a luminous green liquid gas swirling with convection currents and speckled by drifting, glowing particles of matter. When the tau vessel was captured he would relish uncovering its secrets.
So rigid was the careful distribution of his concentration that he was completely oblivious to the heavy clang of the engine bay doors unlocking, drifting open with a rasp. His ears — sensory ganglia improved years earlier by cranial implants — competently recorded the unmistakable sounds of hellguns chattering angrily, but his consciousness was busy elsewhere and the harsh frequencies went unprocessed.
So immersed was he in his analysis of the AI systems, that only when the faint blue light of the energy shield collapsed upon itself and faded to nothing did he allocate a corner of his processing ability to analysing the new situation. He regarded his surroundings suspiciously, quickly noting the wrecked corpses of storm-troopers littering the chamber’s floor, and the console venting smoke on the next level down. He realised too late that the energy shield was not quite the impenetrable protection he’d surmised.
Before he could consider the new scenario in depth, a bipedal figure surged up the ramp onto the top tier and raised a weapon. Natsan grudgingly allowed his entire mind to drop the complex algorithms it had been studying and concentrated upon the new threat.
He drew his pistol.
Kais was up and sprinting before he had time to think.
There were two of them, he saw, and they were fast. They were armed and firing in a heartbeat, so alike in their movements they could have been twin linked machines or mirror reflections. They shifted in a rolling gaggle of insect jerks, metal pitted heads clicking like broken engines as they tracked him, eyes twinkling from the darkness beneath their black robes.
Kais thumbed a thirty-raik’an delay on a grenade and rolled it silently towards them, scurrying for cover. He pushed his armoured shoulder into the ground and rolled towards a dip in the mezzanine floor; radiant orbs of plasma impacting all around, splattering liquid metal across the dome of his helmet. The cover swallowed him up and he fought the temptation to lurk there, catching his breath.
Instead he sprinted onwards, sensing the fio’tak haemorrhaging behind him in an eruption of plasma and shrapnel. Scampering across the control tier, he caught a brief glimpse of black robes to his left and fired a ragged cluster of pulses towards them, earning a satisfying belch of smoke and sparks and forcing the gue’la back behind the sho’aun’or’es energy stack, near to where he’d secreted the grenade. Kais winced inside his helmet: a single breach of the core would not only cripple the ship’s movement but risked destroying the entire lower segments of the vessel.
As if testing his fears, the grenade detonated.
The first gue’la, the one with slightly less artificial features and two complete arms, was taken by surprise, somersaulting backwards on the crest of the Shockwave, legs detaching in a tracery of mechanical joints and ribbon sliced flesh. It screamed at the apex of its impromptu flight and Kais, never staying still for a moment, pumped two carbine rounds into its jerking torso before it had even slapped into the deck. It landed with a crack and flipped backwards off the tier. Every time it landed it bounced outwards, shedding chunks of biotech and flesh.
Kais watched it all the way, resisting the smile forming around his lips. The energy pillar, he noticed with relief, was undamaged.
The other gue’la, one arm ending in a scar tissue clump, lurched from the tangled wreckage in a crescendo of creaking parts and chittering components. Its shrapnel shredded face, welts of flesh hanging loose from the cable-studded bone beneath, stared ghoulishly. It was a lurching remnant of a being, neither crying out in agony or sneering in pain-dampening insanity at its injuries. But its eyes... its eyes were cold and dead — mechanical orbs of ice and metal. It raised the plasma pistol in a single angle-perfect movement, weapon fixating on Kais faster than he could ever hope to react. It pulled the trigger.
Kais wondered abstractly, in that miniscule moment before he died, whether he was looking at the gue’la vision of the tau’va.
For the tau, he thought, the One Path is a victory over individuality. It is gestalt over self, rationality over impulse, logic over spontaneity, focus over Mont’au...
But this thing, this creature with a scarred brain and a body more metallic than organic, this thing is rationality, it is logic, it is tau’va...
Is that what we’re trying to become, he asked himself? Painless, fearless, passionless... Monsters?
The plasma pistol made a sound.
Fzzk.
The gue’la tilted its head and squeezed the trigger again. A row of warning icons illuminated in fiery red along the bottom of Kais’s HUD, detecting a surge of energy nearby. He squinted at the gue’la pistol, heart racing. A single sliver of shrapnel had gouged itself into the firing mechanism at the base of the weapon’s barrel, smoking with a burgeoning hiss.
The gue’la vanished beneath a cloud of fire, flames billowing outwards and hurling Kais to the floor. Unvented promethium ignited in a rush, an inverted waterfall of thermal fury that gushed over him and boiled upwards to lash impotently against the chamber ceiling.
He stooped to his feet when the inferno finally abated, methodically checking for injuries. The gue’la priest stood as it had been before the explosion, skin peeling back, extended gun arm obliterated at the shoulder, a rarified sculpture with charred skin. Kais, shaking his head to clear the exhaustion, thought its blackening features seemed somehow interested, as though analysing its own immolation. Its expression of scrutiny remained until its silvery eyes melted and the flames burned through from the inside of its skull.
Kais stood and watched it until it flopped to the floor and was still. He watched until the cables and tubules running throughout its frame began to liquefy and puddle around it. He watched until the reinforcements arrived and Lusha voxed him with an almost paternal expression of congratulation.
He stood and watched the flickering, crumbling husk until it atomised and gusted away, and as he watched he wondered which was worse: to surrender to rage or to become a living machine?