“Begin,” another barked, his cassock marking out his seniority, tracing a complex shape in the air. A group of servitors began opening valve wheels, atrophied muscles bunching at the command of their unthinking logic engine minds.
“The fixation target is acquired,” the first priest intoned. “All is ready.” The trio of chanting acolytes raised their voices higher, sonorous mantras ringing throughout the echoing cavern. The thrumming of the copper coils became almost unbearable, and Kilson clamped his hands over his ears in pain.
“Now,” the senior priest demanded, striking his censure against a plated duct in a flurry of incense. An inhuman howl consumed the chamber.
“For Corax and the Emperor!” the brother-sergeant roared through his helmet speakers, startling Kilson.
The incense danced, sparks drizzled from the air, the Marines clashed their weapons together with a roar and—
And a perfect orb of light flickered into existence, flared more brightly than Kilson’s eyes could stand, and vanished. The Space Marines were gone.
Something moved further ahead.
A piece of shadow detached from the smoothness of the duct, oscillating slowly into a new position. Kais tensed, raising the carbine. The tight confines of the crawl tube made the simplest movements a process of contortions and cramping muscles. The object shifted again. It flitted from shadow to shadow, hovering off the ground in the rounded cavity peaking the duct. It came to a halt and blinked a green light.
Kais relaxed.
“Kor’vesa?” he whispered. “Identify and report.”
The green light winked out.
Kais tried again. “Drone? What’s your status?”
The shape clicked: a slow reptile rattle, building in volume. Two bright points of light, like eyes, fixated on Kais and flicked off and on.
Then the thing was rushing forwards, breaking from the cover of the shadows with the hiss of displaced air. Light fell across it like a blade and Kais saw it fully, gasping: This was no efficient tau drone, perfectly engineered gravitic stabilisers allowing unrestricted and silent manoeuvrability.
It was a gue’la head.
Disembodied and cadaverous, frail skin necrotic and sallow, pitted with maggotlike extrusions of circuitry and cabling. Its ancient lips, long since desiccated by age, were peeled back in a papery sneer to reveal the gap-toothed gums below, a network of bloodless flesh and exposed bone. From its abortive neck a thrumming anti-gravitic drive held it aloft. The ghoulish machine’s jawbone ratcheted open with an audible crack, hanging monstrously in a silent shriek. A gun barrel, hidden in the leering maw, briefly reflected an overhead light.
Kais blasted the ugly device into spinning fragments before it could fire, scattering the tight confines of the duct with scorched components and lumps of bone. A series of teeth rattled cheerfully on the dome of his helmet. He shook his head and moved on, too exhausted to wonder where the monstrous attacker had come from.
The journey was proving tortuous. He’d been ready to rest following the incident in the engine bay. It had seemed fair. He felt like he’d spent tau’cyrs — his whole life, perhaps — fighting and killing and running; the exhaustion had finally overwhelmed him and he’d stood, swaying, as things returned to normal by degrees and his friends and comrades gathered around him. The ship was still full of gue’la, but they’d be hunted down. It had been as good as over, and the conflicting sides of his brain had gratefully segued into a single, relieved whole.
He should have guessed it wouldn’t last.
So: first a garbled message from a fraught-sounding El’Lusha, requesting his presence on the bridge. Not by the normal route, oh no, that was either blocked off or breached or infested, it didn’t matter which. Instead he found himself worming along tor’kans of intestinal ducting and vent systems.
Second, the unpleasant business of guerrilla tunnel combat. The various conduit intersections and turbine chambers had yielded plentiful surprises in the form of gue’la troopers (mostly casualties or cowards who’d crawled off to hide, he suspected). He’d lost the top segment of his shoulder torso guard when a gutshot trooper had taken a respectable stab at blowing his head off. Kais had returned the favour with rather more success.
Third, the internal workings of the Or’es Tash’var— normally a paragon of silent efficiency, out of sight and mind — were not operating in his favour. Much of this part of the ship had been damaged by assault imparts, forcing him to travel further into the complex innards of the vessel than seemed sensible. His attempts to hail the bridge to shut down the blade fans and circulatory turbines had met with a stony silence, forcing him to divert several times into human-occupied chambers to power down systems. Control panels that would, no doubt, appear self-explanatory to any of the kor’la crewmen were, to him, little more than meaningless jumbles of switches and dials. Thus far he’d prevailed by pressing everything at once.
And now, to cap it all, just as the intersection containing the command deck elevator was drawing near, he was getting attacked by scum-fire shyh’am-eating blood-of-t’au skulls, of all things. He swore out loud, just for the sake of it, not caring about the breach of etiquette. He was ready to drop, and he didn’t mind admitting it.
What kept him going was numbness. He’d reached a point beyond exhaustion. To stop now would cripple him, he suspected; the natural stimulants and pain were all that sustained him, pushing him on, delaying that moment when he could finally collapse and sleep and pretend to be normal again.
But there was something else. The remoteness of his physical fatigue was no protection against the turmoil in his mind, and for that he clung grimly to a single phrase:
“Nobody ever pretended it would be easy...”
El’Lusha had been right. To feel unfairly treated, to pity oneself somehow at the injustice of being responsible for such destruction: these were symbols of arrogance and Mont’au.
Kais had understood, as he crawled through the belly of the ship. Every fire warrior, he could see, must face their own Trial by Fire. For some it would be as simple as a physical test of their skills and abilities. For others — for him — such a test was redundant.
His proficiency for violence was inherent, no more open to adjudication than was the slant of his eyes or the size of his feet. For him, the true trial took place not at the tip of his gun barrel or in the bleeding piles of corpses he left behind him. For him, the trial took place in his mind.
So he kept going. He would accept the challenge and strive to succeed, to placate the devil inside him. He’d wage a tranquil, quiet war against the rage, using swords of focus and spears of calm, and in the name of the One Path he’d succeed.
He reloaded the carbine, chewing his lip.
Thinking it was a lot easier than achieving it.
They’d killed everyone.
El’Siet, his second in command for six tau’cyrs. Ruptured parts scattered across the deck, tendrils of brainsludge slithering down his control console.
El’Ver’sev’a, his personnel officer. They’d taken time with her, blowing off her limbs one at a time until she just lay there, emptying across the deck, too traumatised to even scream.
El’Gei’ven and El’Fay, the six kor’vres manning the comms and all the kor’uis and kor’las that hadn’t yet evacuated the bridge. Pulped. Shredded. Atomised and seared, knocked apart by hungry bolter shells or scorched into bubbling liquescence by all manner of vile, howling gue’la weapons.
Kofo Tyra forced open his swollen eyes and surveyed his domain, resisting the urge to vomit. There had been no fight, here. No honourable battle or measured struggle for supremacy. The attackers had stepped out of thin air without warning or challenge, opening fire with a savagery Tyra could never before have imagined. This was carnage, pure and simple. They’d turned his bridge into an abattoir, and expected... what? Cooperation?