The Purgatus adopted a flanking position alongside the tumbling Enduring Blade, engines and stabilisers carefully fired in a succession of small bursts until the ships moved in the same slow pirouette together, a single unit bonded by invisible cords. The lance clusters developed a ruddy glow, faint deck lights surrounding their positions dimming even further as power was brutally redistributed. A corona began to form, a shifting zone of arcing electricity and vacuum-guzzled gases.
Orbsat 66.G sensed the energyspike in a sub-real spectrum moments before the weapons fired. In a flurry of glow-tipped torpedoes deployed from peripheral launch bays, the central cannon belched a solid stream of plasma-energy, secondary and tertiary weapons-fire clustered around its core like tributaries.
The first shot sliced open the Enduring Blade like a warm slab of poi’sell, melting its structure with colossal precision. Explosions and abortive mushroom-cloud gouts of superheated air marred the edges of the incision — dwarfed by the scale of the scene and rendered insignificant; little more than sparks at the tip of a hammer-struck anvil.
A wedge of decking yawned open from the dying vessel, exposing a labyrinth of cross-section corridors and machinery within. The dark aura that clung to the ship — totally escaping the drone’s abilities of analysis but somehow tangible nonetheless — was dragged out into the void to dissipate harmlessly.
The second strike, as the Enduring Blade rolled serenely end over tip, punctured the cavernous wreckage of the engine stacks and punched a mighty bolt hole the length of the carcass — a blazing lance that glowed through the portholes and gaps in the infrastructure and knocked a solid chunk of the wedge prow into razor-shrapnel; an exit wound full of fire and zero-gravity liquid metal, tumbling and accreting.
The ship rolled again, displaying the devastation of the first shot like a proud veteran dragging tight the skin around his flesh wounds to exaggerate his scars of honour. The third shot, accompanied by a precision-targeted swarm of torpedoes, stabbed deep into the wound and, the watching drone surmised, dissected a promethium fuel line.
For a single raik’an there was light: a nova flash bright enough to leave an ugly overexposed mishmash of pixels across 66.G’s conventional-spectrum recording and casting a freeze frame shadow, grotesque and crenellated, across the Purgatus’s hull.
Then, chain reactions dispersing along the length of the vessel in both directions, the Enduring Blade shrugged off its skin, scattered its rotten musculature like chaff, gurgled coils of white-hot fuel nervously, and finally — ghoulishly — vanished behind a domino effect detonation that pulverised every connection, shattered every joist and bulkhead, atomised every datalink and evaporated the aborted screams of anyone unfortunate enough to still be alive.
Orbsat 66.G watched — detached — as the lifesign counter dropped like a stone. The carcass broke up. Cable guts shimmied in the sun and fragmented. Melt-blasted debris formed gunmetal confetti, expanding spherically. And bodies. Bodies and bodies and bodies.
A motion detector set high on the drone’s casing diverted its attention briefly. It oscillated precisely and trained its primary optic on the gue’la fleet, brooding darkly against the planetary eventide, suffering the hail of fragments from their violated brother in some self-flagellating display of sorrow.
On every beaked monster, on every sombre battleship and snarl-prowed frigate, every colossal battlecruiser, a mast was jerkily raised above the bridgecastle. The fleet flew a black flag and the Imperial comm-channels were thick with the tinny report of funereal marches and martial fugues.
Things came back to him in a jumble.
Vision, somewhere. The wince-inducing flare of first light followed quickly by a moment’s confusion: perspective was all wrong — focusing on distant objects didn’t work.
Helmet-HUD, he reminded himself. Focus close.
The drop pod door lay open at an angle, the rich evening sky of Dolumar revealed beyond. Kais wondered abstractly how long he’d been asleep, how long since landing, how long since—
The memories came back to him in a glut of impressions and sounds, making him gag. He’d lost control, he knew. He’d been pushed to the very back of his own consciousness and forced to watch, forced to obey.
That’s an excuse.
Nobody forced you.
You. Did. It. Yourself.
He stamped on that thought quickly and bullied his attention onto less esoteric matters, peering down at his gloves. He was unsurprised to find the familiar black-brown crust of dried blood speckling each digit, and again looked away before the reality could seep into his thoughts. He shifted his concentration to the blinking icons bordering his HUD. Half his helmet’s analysis functions were inoperative, and an experimental grope with his hand revealed a network of dents and scrapes and scratches. Again, he blinked and moved on, exercising the methodical analysis his training had instilled.
His leg ached. He’d lost the medipack that covered it, somewhere. A cursory glance at his pack reminded him of the blade-encrusted vehicle-monster and he shuddered, secretly grateful that he’d been under the effects of the madness. In a more rational state of mind, beyond the ravaging effects of exhaustion and the rage, he couldn’t have hoped to deal with such an enemy.
Was the Mont’au to thank, then, for his deliverance?
More rogue thoughts, there. Displacement was the key, he decided. Stay busy. Don’t think. He stood up, testing his body, and was astonished to find himself refreshed. He stretched languidly, arching his back and rubbing at his arms, enjoying the feline sensation for its mundane normalcy.
Something loud punctured his comfort from outside the pod. He blinked and ignored the ugly sound, concentrating on himself.
Tapping at a small control on his wrist (mercifully undamaged), a small tube flicked into position alongside his mouth and he sipped gratefully on a high-energy soup of j’hal nectar, imagining it spreading through his body like a warm lattice of glowing tendrils. It felt that way.
“‘A well-maintained warrior’,” he said aloud, not feeling foolish, “‘is an effective warrior.’ Sio’t meditation twelve, lesson four.”
A series of explosions, somewhere nearby, rocked the drop pod lightly — like a faint wind. He scowled and put it out of his mind, not prepared to deal with that reality yet.
He picked up the burst cannon, examining its smooth lines. It was pitted and scratched in places, and as he drew a gloved finger along the barrel he was careful to avoid such imperfections, as if by refraining from any contact with the brutality of his memories he might successfully eclipse them. The dull report of distant explosions grew more frequent — stuttering gunfire and moaning aircraft engines entering the general background hum.
“‘A single blade of grass’,” he recited loudly, blocking the sounds of war, “‘will bend and falter in the lightest wind. But where grass grows in pasture, in field or savannah; each blade feels but a fraction of the wind’s full force. It prospers due to the common purpose of its fe—’”
“Xeno? Are you undamaged?”
Kais stopped, startled.
The voice had sounded like it came from behind him. He fought the irrational desire to spin on his spot, looking for the speaker. He already knew the pod was empty. He coughed and started again, even louder.
“‘A single blade of gr—’”