It would work. With enough blood, with enough screams, the final seal would shatter and...
Yes. It would work, he was sure.
But the force had still taken him by surprise; he couldn’t be sure how many times the pressure had vented through him, releasing gobbets of crackling empyrean to scurry away in a melange of pseudomatter and amorphous outlines. It was getting beyond his ability to restrain, and the crew was growing suspicious. It didn’t matter. Not long now.
And the Ultramarine librarian — oh, what a gift! He’d become aware of the scrying, scratching mind-eyes of “Brother Delpheus” almost immediately, slamming closed his defences to prevent the inquisitive righteousness of the disembodied thoughts. The fool would be useful, when the time came. When victory and defeat were on the very brink of resolution, when the air was thick with crisis and triumph, he’d use that feeble little skull mercilessly.
He’d bring the ethereal to him. He’d gather up the most powerful pawns involved in this chaotic, maddening little game, and he’d use them. He’d spark a war and douse the system in blood. He’d shred the mind of human and tau alike to plant the seeds of his legacy and then, when all the finely carved pieces were in place, he’d break the seal and rise, rise, rise.
In the end, Kais was certain the team was pleased to be rid of him. The awe was turning to fear, he could see; a nervous timidity at his presence that the other shas’las were finding it harder and harder to conceal. They walked further away from him, they disliked him prowling the shadows behind them, they talked less and muttered more.
He heard the word “Mont’au” mumbled indiscreetly more than once.
Two had been lost to a gue’la ambush, rushing around a blind corner and erupting messily beneath streamers of gunfire, bodies jerking and shuddering as they toppled backwards. After he’d fragmented the humans, blithely rolling unarmed grenades along the corridor and gunning down the troopers as they quit their cover to flee, he’d been uncomfortably aware of the others glaring at him as he silently helped himself to the dead shas’las’ ammunition and supplies. It was standard procedure — cool and efficient — but nobody expected it to be easy. He suspected the others thought of his detachment, his numbness, as being somehow... unnatural.
Since discovering the mysterious abattoir chamber their military bravado had quickly waned. It was as if they’d seen the face of something real, something that convinced them of the ugliness and horror of their roles and left them in no doubt at alclass="underline" this wasn’t a game. This wasn’t a safe little simulation in the battledome or a harmless domestic service operation. This was war.
Kais wondered how his father felt on his first combat mission. Efficient, doubtlessly. Didn’t bat an eyelid.
Never lost his temper, never grew scared or furious. Ice cold, probably. Served the Greater Good with a clear conscience and a rigid application of the shas’ken’to principles of combat. Flawless.
Comms with the Or’es Tash’var were failing, garbled messages becoming little more than static. The path had grown divergent, hooded corridors branching away into blackness, multi-doored chambers leaving the group disorganised and disagreeable. Finally they’d come to a tight vent access that led downwards and away, wide enough for a single shas’la only. The others favoured continuing along the cloistered hallway, relying on their cohesion with each other to sustain and protect them.
Kais felt no cohesion.
The others grated upon him and, worse, the knowledge of his inability to fit in made his guilt more palpable. Operating as part of a unit was an expectation placed upon every tau. “Never alone,” the Auns said. His isolation was a constant reminder of his flaw, and he hated it.
He was in the vent and crawling before the others could even protest. Not that they would, of course. He imagined them breathing sighs of relief as his retreating back diminished into the gloom of the tunnel.
Half a dec later and comms were a distant memory. The bright icons of the others had dwindled in his HUD as their path carried them further away, and in no time at all he was left alone, once more scampering rodentlike through brittle metal veins, his wounded arm aching from supporting his weight. He cut through the pain mentally and forced himself onwards.
Then things went badly wrong. Lost in the belly of an enormous creature, more vast than one mind could ever appreciate, his only sense of location was provided by the occasional breaks in the vent walls: thick membranes giving way to grille-slits and steel gauze openings. Through such indistinct portals he peered out on a world of dank chambers, strobe-lit techbays, anodyne sleeping cells and sterile, chrome-plated laboratories. Gue’la slouched here and there, filthy ratings and crew that seemed more akin to the rats they co-habited with than the pink-faced troopers Kais had grown used to. He scuttled silently through their midst, suit power on minimum to limit noise and heat emissions.
It wasn’t enough when he came upon the Space Marines.
Briefly, he felt a moment of pleasure at seeing their blocky grey-green shapes through the light-striated grille, patrolling a corridor vertex with measured strides — surely their presence indicated that he was on the right path. No mere troopers, he reasoned, would be assigned to guard something important. He nodded to himself and moved on.
One of the Marines swivelled in its spot, helmeted head tilting inquisitively, staring up into the vent. Kais froze.
The two giants appeared to converse, the first pointing vaguely towards the vent then shrugging, movement exaggerated by its vast shoulder guards. Kais could only guess at their discussion.
He tried to move, painful tor’ils of silence and sweat. His heart sounded like a jackhammer in his chest, thumping in his ears and convincing him that the Marines could hear him.
Satisfied at the silence, they began to move away. Kais allowed himself to breathe out slowly, his mouth dry. Buoyed up by relief, his glacial progress carried him past the grille and slowly, cautiously, he began to relax.
The text wafer in his utility pocket slid gently though a las-singed fabric tear he hadn’t even noticed and tumbled to the floor of the duct. It sounded like a cannon erupting in his ear. It was a gong peal, shivering and groaning noisily. It was a planet splitting across its equator, furious resonances echoing and reverberating throughout eternity.
He grabbed for the wafer, fear pulping his senses, even as the first bolter-shells sliced tubules of light spillage into the duct and detonated angrily near his feet.
He bolted, stealthy progress discarded in favour of blind panic. His limbs raised a cannonade of thumps and clangs as he slithered and dragged himself along the duct, gashes and lumps of debris pulverising the metal walls and turning the conduit behind him into a whirlpool of fractured metal and conflicting detonations. Bolter fire roared behind him, filling the tunnels with ghostly echoes and the sharp scent of smoke.
He scrabbled onwards, turning a corner, lurching upwards into a vertical shaft, taking tunnel branches at random with a stream of mumbled curses and groans. There was no rage here, no surrender to the Mont’au impetuosity — only blind panic and helplessness. Again he knew how the clonebeasts felt during the tau’kon’seh, sprinting impotently for their lives. But this time there was no recourse to turn and fight, no clever scheme to even the odds. In this labyrinth of intestinal tubes he was a parasite, at the mercy of any scalpel-wielding surgeon that could detect his movement and cut him out.