Not deep, he prayed, shaming himself with his own cowardice, not deep enough to kill.
He whimpered as the pain continued to blossom, warmth pattering serenely across his collar bone, soaking into his robes. The xeno replaced the knife centrally and pushed harder, tensing for another slow, surgical slice. This time, Constantine could tell, the cut would be deep.
“Admiral!” he groaned, begging the Emperor’s forgiveness, knees almost buckling. “I’m the admiral! In charge! Commander!”
“A kor’o?”
“What?”
“You command the vessel?”
Yes!
“And the fleet?”
Emperor’s undying mercy yes!
“Then listen. You... just listen.”
Constantine had the distinct impression that the alien was confused, thinking hard about what to do. He began to wonder at the possibilities of somehow exploiting the situation when full pressure was reapplied to the knife, making him gag.
“You contact the rest of your fleet. You tell them—”
“Warp take you! I’d rather die!”
“You tell them to fall back. You tell them to leave.”
“You’re pathetic!” Constantine fought to bring a cold laugh to his voice, breaking through the quaver of fear and hoping the creature was convinced. “They won’t listen. They’ll know I’ve been compromised.”
“We have your ship. We have you. It is best that they leave. There will be no more conflict.”
“The Emperor doesn’t compromise, xeno.”
The knife bit into this throat again, nicking at his skin. “Where is this Emperor now when you have need of him, human?”
Constantine suddenly felt a long, long way from home.
Cut him cut him cut him cut him—
It hissed and raged in Kais’s mind, a song of blood and anger and violence.
Make him bleed cut him cut him—
It was a killing lust born in frustration. Everything had seemed so simple before, killing and destroying anything that moved, cleansing the bridge of all life, capturing this quivering, whimpering kor’o. He’d felt like he could do anything, overcome any obstacle, crush any enemy.
But there were objectives here. Diplomatic outcomes.
The comm-link with the Or’es Tash’var was still down. He’d tried it twice, desperation mounting. So he’d tried to consider, just as before in the stygian gloom of the prison compound. He’d felt like he owed it to the tau’va to think — to force a conclusion to this conflict that didn’t rely on the squeeze of a trigger or the slash of a knife. To end it in blood, he felt, would surely be to allow the Mont’au devil its victory.
The personal glory of single-handedly forcing the gue’la fleet to withdraw, he had to admit, was alluring. Would it elevate him to hero status? Would it secure his promotion? Would it...
Don’t even think it.
...would it have made his father proud?
It was selfishness of the highest order, he saw with a guilty wince, imagining Ju shaking her head and patiently reading out another patronising meditation upon... upon the essence of humility, or the righteousness of unity, or something like that. Still, the image was hard to shake: cheering crowds, grateful ethereals...
But of course it wasn’t that simple, and his clumsy threats and attempts to control this tall, grey-haired human were going badly awry. He thought back to the por’vre from the expedition to Queh-quih and for the first time saw beyond the bumbling enthusiasm and almost comical attempts to placate the natives, appreciating instead the merchant’s grasp upon linguistics, his subtle words and hints, his mastery of interpersonal communication. Kais solemnly wished for a water caste diplomat now.
“Tell them to withdraw,” he shouted, pushing down on the blade.
“I’m-hekkgh-telling you... it won’t work!”
“Then you die.”
“Fine! Do it, abomination! I die in the knowledge that your race is doomed! They’ll be crushed underfoot! Kill me and have done with it — I won’t sully myself for you!”
Kais wanted to growl, enraged by the futility of his threats. The gue’la started to laugh madly — an hysterical cackle with more fatalism and terror in its tones than any great sense of amusement.
The rage shivered in Kais’s belly, widening its pin tooth grin and flooding his blood with fire. His arm muscle tensed. He closed his eyes and concentrated, fighting for control.
Focus focus focus focus—
Cut him cut him cut him cut him—
Calm. All you need is calm and balance and equilibrium and unity and—
Blood and death and bravery and reward and heroism and—
No expansion without equilibrium. No conquest without control—
Be a hero! Show the world! Show them you are your father’s son!
His grip tightened on the knife and he prepared to drag it sideways, seeing in his mind the ruby waterfall springing from the gash. The grey haired gue’la sensed what was coming, moaning low in his throat.
Time stopped. From somewhere nearby there came a flash of light and the hiss of a thousand serpents, wreathed in lightning. Kais paid it no attention.
There was a voice, shouting. It couldn’t drown the voice in his mind: Cut him cut him cut him!
The Mont’au devil bared its fangs triumphantly and shrieked. The blade bit.
A fist like a sky-blue meteor slammed into his helmet, lifting him off the ground. For the second time that rotaa the colour drizzled out of his eyes and he sagged to his knees, swallowed mercifully by thick, impenetrable sleep.
“Stop it!” the Ultramarine growled, more of his vast brethren bursting into existence with the crackling of teleportation energies behind him.
Constantine, shaking in horror, attempting to disentangle himself from the unconscious alien at his feet, fought for calmness.
“Stop what?” he quailed, quivering hands clamped to the wound on his neck.
The war. The fleet confrontation. The order to repel boarders. Everything!
V
13.30 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)
Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance) chattered to itself, complex energistic movements inside its shell shuttling packages of information from data stream to memory core. A sequence of algorithms interrogated all incoming data for security breaches or hidden frequencies and wordlessly deposited the filtered remains into a carrier package reserved for the por’hui media. These developments would be considered high priority, the little AI quickly established, and sought to edit them into some sort of intelligible sequence.
The guns had stopped. The fighters and Barracudas had pulled back, redocking to fuel and make repairs. The fleets had regrouped: two shoals of sullen, scarred predators, called off by their respective alpha males.
Damaged hulls gaped and vented into the starlit void, scattered wreckage tumbling thickly in the nothingness.
A withering selection of message bands and tight-beam commstreams threaded from ship to ship within each fleet; to 66.G’s multifarious senses they were rendered as vivid as glowing plasma cords or superheated cables — a network of pulsing channels that conspired to drown each pack of vessels beneath luminous gossamer threads.
The largest commstream of them all, visible to three of the drone’s filter optics as a conical blast of green light, hung suspended between the Or’es Tash’var and the Enduring Blade.