“You will tell us,” one said, its voice a metallic boom. Its face, occluded behind a dark green helm with glowing eyes, glowered down from high above.
“Where is the ethereal?” said another.
“You will tell us,” the first repeated, “or you will die.”
A segmented gauntlet backhanded him across his face, snapping his head around and dropping him to the floor. Pain blossomed along his cheekbone, and he dribbled blood onto the deck. It didn’t matter.
“Tell us,” one said. He didn’t know which. They all looked the same: hulking bodies destroying his sense of scale, their thrumming armour moving with speed and agility defying their enormity. A metal boot caught him in the ribs, flipping him onto his back. He felt the bones of his chest crackling as he landed.
“The ethereal,” one said. “Where is he?”
He forced his lips to part and hissed at the impossible shapes towering over him. “Sssafe...” he managed.
The colossus at the edge of the group stamped forwards, armour decorated with whorls and runes that seemed clipped and ugly to Tyra’s eyes. He wore no helmet, frail gue’la features protruding bizarrely from the slabs of ceramite that covered his shoulders. A long pinion of blue metal arched over his bald skull, tangles of cables infesting the ridge of his brow. His eyes seemed to glow.
“You will tell me, xenogen,” it said, mournful voice reaching into Tyra’s mind and sweeping a wave of nausea and dizziness across him. “You have no choice in this.”
“I think not,” Tyra croaked, voice heavy with a confidence he didn’t feel.
“Xenogen. I am Lexicanium Librarian Macex of his Imperial Majesty’s Raptors. Understand this: you are going to die. Today. By my hand. Tell me where your ethereal is hiding and I’ll make it quick, on my honour. I have no greater kindness to offer you, alien.”
Tyra almost laughed, coughing on the blood in his throat. “I... hh... I’m not afraid of you, gue’la.”
The human’s features creased, its expression almost sad. It extended one gauntleted hand, fingers spread, pressing down with surprising tenderness against his brow. “More the fool you,” it said, eyes crackling with a strange energy.
Daggers hit the inside of Tyra’s mind. A splintering medley of pain, indescribable agony that violated every part of his brain, surged through his head, making him cry out in astonishment. Tendrils of fire, like superheated proboscises, examined his thoughts in a series of clumsy incisions.
Like a bubble rising to the surface of a pool of sludge, he could feel the knowledge of the ethereal’s whereabouts distending and blooming upwards, thirsting for light, coiling inexorably towards the burning pseudopodia that invaded his brain. Sensing the nearness of his prize, the librarian’s psychic assault strengthened, charring the very skin of Tyra’s face where his hand made contact.
The kor’o was still screaming and flailing when the unhelmeted warrior’s pink features exploded in a gust of blood and brains. Tyra sagged gratefully to the floor, smoke coiling from his eyes and ears.
The other colossi reacted immediately, raising weapons to cover all points of the room, frantic gestures seeming ridiculous without the spoken commands to accompany them. Tyra wondered abstractly, hazy with pain and fear, what they were saying to each other in the insulated sanctity of their helmets. He hoped they were scared.
In an instant the room became a maelstrom of dizzying weaponsfire and detonating shells. Weak from his injuries, bewildered and stunned by the chaos of the combat around him, Kor’o Natash Tyra barely even noticed when one of the Marines carefully stamped on his skull and crushed his brain.
The first one was a gift. He fragmented its ugly, exposed head from his concealment in the space beside the elevator. He ducked back into the recess and waited for the resulting whirlwind of directionless, panicky return fire to abate.
Curled foetally in his concealment, Kais’s ears became his eyes. There was a heavy clang— the dead Space Marine’s body toppling to the deck. Its power output thrummed noisily before hissing away into silence. Kais seized upon the distraction to ease onto his feet, melting into the shadows cast by consoles nearer the centre of the bridge. He stole a single glance at the group, arranged on overwatch as one bent over the body of their dead comrade. He seemed to be pushing some sort of instrumentation into the ragged wound of the corpse’s neck, oozing blood and filth across the deck.
Heavy footsteps clanked nearby, the Marines spreading out to find their prey. Their silence was somehow horrifying, reacting to commands only they could hear, more like machines than organisms. Kais found himself again pondering upon the nature of the tau’va, and whether the cost of efficacy was a lifetime of mechanical hollowness. He eased himself into a crouch and flicked a button-sized signal-flare quietly across the room, not allowing himself the time to worry about what he was planning next. The flare clattered quietly behind the communications consoles and ignited with a fizz.
The firestorm rumbled to life again, gunfire shredding the consoles like a hungry zephyr, an invisible airborne claw raking spitefully at the fio’tak surfaces. Kais didn’t wait, pouncing from his concealment whilst the Marines were distracted and sprinting forwards, assessing as he moved.
Time slowed to a crawl.
There were two to his left, pumping long streamers of bolter fire into the tangled morass of metal where the consoles had once stood. A nebulous orb of plasma distorted across his vision from the right, adding to the wreckage around the flare, now venting purple smoke. Kais rolled as he moved, snatching a glance to his side where two other Marines hulked, plasma-weapons raised.
The final gue’la stood at the apex of the bridge, facing... directly towards him.
Watching him. Unfooled by the distraction. Raising its weapon.
“Death to the unclean!” it roared, voice thick with metallic transmission.
The bolter opened fire and Kais pounced away, tumbling clumsily sideways. Miniature explosions rattled all around him and he scrabbled forwards, racking the carbine’s underslung secondary parts as he went. He had time to squeeze the trigger just once before stumbling aside as the column of detonating shells raked past him.
The gue’la saw a spinning object flipping through the air and caught it instinctively, bringing its gauntleted fist up to its face in confused examination. The grenade blew the top half of its armoured body into fragments of gore and ceramite, transforming the bridge into a bone-pocked atrocity and leaving the Marine’s disembodied legs, like the remains of a vandalised statue, planted stalwartly amongst the carnage. The other humans swivelled towards him instantly, colossal silhouettes hazing through the violet mist like ghosts, eye slits blazing eerily.
He became an animal, sprinting for its life. He was a clonebeast being hunted, a ceremonial preything being stalked by the shas’uis during the festival of T’au’kon’seh. Weapons opened up on either side, invisible traceries whistling past his head, narrowing-in implacably. And all within moments that lasted forever, a single raik’an stretching on glacially for tau’cyrs.
He danced through the purple flaresmoke, lurching and rolling and feinting, wondering abstractly which of the four gue’la — arranged almost formally to either side — would be the first to find their mark. A plasma orb shrieked past within tor’ils, singeing the fabric of his regs at his elbow.