“Delpheus,” Ardias hissed, uncomfortable. “You must control yourself.”
The Librarian’s oscillating eyeballs fixed on him, clarity returning with a jolt.
“It’s. The ship, yes. There’s something aboard...”
“We know that, brother. Throne-damned xenogens! We must purge th—”
“No! No — something more! S-something else...”
“What?”
Sergeant Mallich, a look of profound distaste creasing his features, lost his patience. “Captain? We should fall out, yes?”
“No!” Delpheus cried, finally dragging himself upright unaided. His eyes, ringed and sunken, prowled from face to face. He settled his gaze on Ardias and nodded, some semblance of reason returning to his features.
“Brother-captain... You must allow the Raptors their commission.”
“But—”
“There will be need for us afterwards. There are worse than tau aboard... I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it, don’t you hear me? I have seen it!”
“Seen what, by the Emperor? Talk sense!”
Delpheus leaned in close to Ardias’s face, feverish lips trembling. His voice was almost inaudible, psychic hood turning the air greasy.
“Old friend,” he hissed, “if you’ve ever trusted me... If ever you’ve believed my words, hear me now. A darkness approaches. There is... The Ultramarines, throne bless their thousand souls... They’ll be needed. Let the Raptors fight these tau, if they must. Win or lose — it doesn’t matter. We must be ready for the aftermath. We must steel ourselves for the masked fiend...”
Ardias stared deep into his old friend’s eyes and saw, as ever, the aching pain of the psychic curse, a lonely voice of sanity crying out from beyond a boundary of warp-spawned madness. But there was an inviolable core of certainty there as well. He took another glance at the sergeants. They weren’t remotely convinced.
“What would you have me do?” he asked his shivering comrade.
“Just... be ready... they come. They come...”
The librarian sunk to his knees, eyes rolling into his head. He collapsed to the deck with a groan and lay there unconscious, breathing heavily.
Sergeant Corlum broke the expectant silence. “Sir?”
Ardias didn’t take his eyes off the Librarian, gritting his teeth. “Cancel all previous orders.” he said. “Have the men standing by.”
“But sir! You can’t believ—”
“No arguments, brother. I want the men ready. Weapons loaded and armed. Distribute ammunition evenly. It seems we must wait for action.”
“Sir.”
“Fall out.”
The sergeants stamped out, shaking their heads and muttering. Ardias regretted their discontent, but could hardly blame them. He stared at the librarian, feverish breaths slowly normalising, and wondered what he’d meant.
They come... they come...
The other shas’las were in awe of him, he realised. Oh, they tried to conceal it, keeping pace with him, twittering professionally, taking turns to cover the rear or to take point. He’d decided to let them try and keep up, if they must. They were judging themselves along parameters for which he had no use.
Number of kills. Courage under fire. Objectives overcome. Real things; physical, violent things. For them these were the heart of their struggles and challenges, their Trials by Fire. He envied them the simplicity of their test.
Twice now since boarding this vaulted sepulchre-in-space he’d been forced to slam shut his eyes and drag the rage into a confined ball of focus, reciting his father’s meditation over and over and over.
The hangar had been a killing ground, a debris-strewn abattoir streaked through by crash landing capsules, mangled gue’la attack craft and artillery fire, digging gouges from the deck and dousing everything in burning fuel, air-skimming debris and blood. He’d lost control, briefly. He’d sprung from his burning shuttle with an adrenaline surge, spraying the panicky gue’la with carbine fire. He’d watched a boarding capsule plough into their pintle guns like a vengeful meteor, pulping their frail bodies and detonating in a whirlwind of overheating munitions. The other tau, converging on the masked plinth where he’d established his slaying point, had cried out in horror at the carnage. He’d smiled.
It happened again whilst disabling the guns on the deck below. It was as though a haze came down, like nothing was real and everything was distant. It felt like being numb: his inadequacies filled the world, a shadow gallery of frustrated instructors, mocking cadre mates and, above it all, his father’s disappointed eyes, seeing nothing but uselessness in his own son. In every moment of every heartbeat Kais knew... He’d never be so great, so respected, so focused as his father had expected him to be. He was flawed and it hurt.
And the only thing that could cut through the pain, that could remind him of being alive, that could convince him he was something other than a drone within a hive, was the screaming and the fire and the gurgling and the violence. It broke through the shell and it was addictive.
So he’d endured it, little by little, until he could see through the rage and think through the adrenaline. Every time it came upon him it became a little harder to claw his way back to the surface, back to rationality.
They’d disabled the weapons, they’d crippled the shield, they’d regrouped and congratulated one another like shas’saals after their first rotaa of training.
Kais had stood apart, new armour already tarnished with soot and blood, and thought: children.
Then the orders had come through, Lusha’s voice sounding broken and distorted by whatever dampening shields the gue’la ship employed, and Kais’s team was away, heading for the engine rooms in a gaggle of stringently by-the-book squad deployments. Kais rolled his eyes and kept quiet, guiltily waiting for the killing to begin again.
The Enduring Blade was unlike anything he could have prepared himself for. So radically alien to the gentle camber of all tau construction, this was a labyrinth of clipped corners, square-hewn buttresses and vast archways. Side arteries branched away unexpectedly, cloistered passages of conduit-striated shadows and undulating serpents of ducts and cables. A creeping tide of rust smeared itself across the gunmetal walls, water dribbling incontinently from fractured pipes and panels.
Narrow tunnels opened into breath-catching galleries, where backlit icons marking the walls illuminated capering dust motes high above, and chittering rodent vermin scurried in the gloom. In these vaulted chambers the faux-machismo of the team would stutter out and they’d slink silently as if cowed by the sheer enormity of the place. Kais appreciated the moments of quiet; as soon as the tunnel was rejoined the silence was inevitably shattered.
“Corner check, two by two.”
“Checking the blacksun-fil—. Hold... Zone clear. Moving on.”
“Scan track? Scan track?”
“High-level ye’qua’li radiation. Probable enemy presence.”
And so on. It was boring, thought Kais, and on both occasions where frightened knots of gue’la troopers had appeared, all the shas’las’ military bravado had served them not a jot. Within instants of the helmet scanners detecting movement the team split, a textbook left-right division. Those to the rear could provide cover in case of a fallback and the line warriors nearest the targets could lay down pinning fire. Thus covered, the secondary and tertiary pairs — carrying rifles — could take a more accurate bead on the enemy. Standard, routine: proven to work.
Kais had no patience for it. He shredded the first wave of gue’la with a grenade even as they rounded the corner ahead, then pumped carbine fire into the heads of the others as they staggered, shellshocked and gore-splattered, from the smoke. They went down in a tangle, pulped skulls shredding like overripe griy’na fruits, limbs twitching and clawing at the air.