[Yes. Yes, me too.]
[A full-scale attack, then. All hands.]
[Agreed.]
++Do what you want. The Ultramarines require no assistance.++
++Stay out of our way.++
[And the tau?]
++Ignore them.++
[What about the Enduring Blade?]
++...++
[Ardias?]
++On my command, destroy it.++
Kais slipped into insanity. A dec passed.
The first thread of rationality returned to him with the beautiful, ugly thought.
This. This is surrender.
The burstcannon was far more graceful than the blocky meltagun. He vaguely recalled prising it, sticky with blood, from the grasp of a fragmented shas’ui in the concilium. Its lines were smooth and crafted, its balance perfect. He thumbed the trigger and didn’t let go.
This is freedom.
It was a living thing in his hands. A barrelled lance that foomed breathlessly, churning out a strobefire-barrage of pulse drops. Like rain, he thought. Like a water stream, filled with iridescent impurities.
This is letting go.
Something went down, screaming. Smoke and sparks clawed at the air, a whalespout of light and vapour. Blood, somewhere. It hit the deck and moaned and shifted, going still, and Kais walked past without looking. Maybe, he thought, it was an enemy. Maybe not.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
This is release.
The thunder barrage of gunfire; the flash lightning drumbeat of contact; electric-blue energy dispersing and dissipating across armour and flesh, gouging liquid metal, splitting muscle and sinew. Something small and chittering exploded with ichor splendour, a damp detonation of black and purple fluids that hung viscously in strands from the surfaces of his gloves and helmet.
A grenade cracked open a black-suited devil like a cockroach, spilling its rotten guts across the floor. It died with its ancient viscera clutched in its claw-gauntleted grasp, trying to reassemble its disordered innards.
Had he killed any tau, rampaging out of control?
Probably. Does it matter?
And the lights. Yellow-orange-yellow-orange. Pulse-pulse-pulse.
Portals heaved opened and closed, like heart valves, he thought. Organic machinery inside a stomach vessel, digestive enzymes with boiling red eyes and roaring axes hungrily breaking down the daily intake.
Dead tau, everywhere. Dead gue’la, everywhere.
Dead fire warriors and guardsmen and Space Marines. Dead officers and sergeants, dead ratings and crewmen and engineers and tech-priests.
Dead everything.
Scattered and blasted. Hanging from walls and ceiling. Bulkheads painted red. Decks awash in cyan. A here-and-there abattoir. Bits.
The madness lasted a solid dec, at least. His mind closed up: ephemeral thoughts passing through, peripheral considerations and concerns lost in a barrage of violence and blood. A whirligig storm of horror. The Mont’au thing slithered its way into his brain and took over.
Took over — or set him free? He wasn’t sure.
At the end of it, running through the circular platforms of the evacuation shaft, he began to remember details: little things first, but growing in size and relevance. A single dec. One point five human “hours’. So little time and yet so many memories crammed-together, slowly uncoiling.
There had been a voice in his head. There had been commands, perhaps. An impatient growl in his mind describing routes and pathways, opening doors and slamming them shut, warning him of the black hulk terrors lurking in wait for him. It was uncanny. The voice called him “xeno” and sounded angry. It spoke in the gue’la language.
He wondered why his madness should take such a precise form.
The voice had said that “they”—whoever they were — had struggled with the tau communication frequencies. It said he should consider himself lucky. The voice said that thanks to the Grace of the Emperor, they’d been able to latch on to his helmet code to reach him.
Kais didn’t understand, of course, but reasoned that one wasn’t, perhaps, supposed to understand hallucinations. The voice had said things were dire. The voice said if the enemy succeeded in firing the ship’s weapons into the tau fleet, then truce or not the war would begin again. The voice said someone had to cripple the lance arrays.
Kais’s memories were soup. They curled and coiled and writhed away from him, borne aloft on a bed of yammering, yowling voices; of whispering evil in his ear. Still, he remembered the guns... The voice talked him through it, thank the path. He concentrated on killing and dousing the world in blood whilst his madness — his patient, human-speaking madness — crackled in his helmet and told him how to plant bombs in file-edged ammunition stores and run, run, run.
He remembered the explosions. And now what?
This. This is release!
He thumbed the trigger again, pressure pad tacky with half-dry blood. There was almost no recoil and he delighted in the churning stream of teardrop plasma, biting and gnawing through the smoke and haze that seemed to have filled every last corner of this infectious, ruined ship.
Yes, maybe things were getting clearer. A dec had passed, or thereabouts, and now the mindfog was diminishing. He remembered the munitions chambers exploding, the voice in his head reluctantly congratulating him, the panicked screams...
He remembered a cold, grating voice pumped through every corridor like oxygen from a vent, hissing: “All hands, evacuate vessel. All hands, evacua—”
And the voice had said, “Get to the drop pods, xeno, if you can.”
And the voice had gone.
He remembered following the crowds. Humans and tau avoiding eye contact, fighting together but never speaking, descending through the ship together but never touching, never tapping one another on the back or helping one another when wounded. The gue’la ran and shouted and screamed and died. The tau hurried in silence, fanned out efficiently, exchanged commands, kept their cool — and died just the same.
And they all steered clear of him. It was like... it was like they weren’t sure who or what he was. He remembered that he’d tried, twice, to comm-link with the hurrying tau troops. Perhaps his helmet was more damaged than he thought, because not one deigned to answer.
The Mont’au thing was out of him now, draped like a shroud, like wings, like a bloody black mantle. He remembered rust-red Marines howling and bellowing, oozing from walls and floors with impossible spontaneity, hacking off heads and disappearing in a wet slurp of warp immateria. He remembered the hissing, whispering evil that saturated the air flexing and growing, biting at his madness, inviting him to join it.
A dec had passed, more or less. There was clarity returning now, by degrees. He wondered why. Was it, perhaps, desperation?
There were no drop pods. The evac-bay was a great circular abyss, platforms on all sides ringed by drop pod archways, level after level of evacuation galleries overflowing with panicking individuals struggling for freedom. Fights broke out, of course.
Briefly he toyed with turning back, returning to the snaking corridors and slime pocked cloisters of the ship. Giving in to it would be so easy, so perfect; clutching in his hand a weapon, unburdened by fears and agendas. No objectives. No commands. No rationality. No focus. Just total surrender, smashing and breaking and shattering. Pouring himself out of himself, destroying for the sake of destroying, raging impotently against the bitterness inside.
See, father? See!
But... It was too easy. Too pointless. So he went down a level, and down again, and each time the madness cleared a little more. Something was jostling it in his brain, pushing aside the need to kill. Something much older than the rage, something stronger even than the Mont’au hunger.