Blood Oath

Phil Kelly

Chapter One

QUAN ZHOU
FORTRESS-MONASTERY OF THE WHITE SCARS CHAPTER,
CHOGORIS, 713.999.M41

A thousand decapitated heads. One for every battle-brother in the Chapter.

By the time they had left Tarotian IV, the Third Company’s kill count had been closer to a million. He had killed over a hundred rebels himself. It was often the case. But like all White Scars, Kor’sarro knew the value of symbolism, and a round thousand was enough to make the point.

He wanted to be there to see them. An ending, of a sort, a cauterising of the wounds the Chapter had sustained on Tarotian IV.

Kor’sarro Khan stared out into the heat haze of Plain Zhou. From his vantage point within the highest eyrie in the fortress-monastery, it felt like he could see to the edges of the world. His topknot of greasy black hair flew erratically in the thermals, its thick strands mimicking the victory pennants waving high above.

Though the khan’s narrowed eyes flicked from scrub to bunker to a herd of stallions galloping in the distance, his hands had their attention elsewhere. Calloused fingers worked mechanically but precisely at the balcony’s edge, always in motion. The tip of the khan’s curved dagger scratched like an awl, carving the Khorchin word for ‘seeking’ onto the side of a dormant bolt shell.

Forty-nine more of the deadly little cylinders shone in the evening sun, ranged along the balcony neat as dominos. Those to the khan’s left were finished, and those to his right were bare. Three full crates hid in the shadow of the buttress arch, the tiny golden curls of swarf around their base rolled back and forth by a playful wind.

The thud-stride-thud of Sudabeh crossing the eyrie yurut’s rugs in full battleplate made the khan’s cheek twitch. He placed the last of the shells unfinished to one side.

‘Sunning yourself between hunts, my khan?’ said the newcomer.

‘Stormseer. Your… gifts.’ Kor’sarro looked at the sky for a second. ‘They are wasted here.’

‘Anyone with half a nostril could tell that you’ve been standing in the sun. If you ever run out of promethium, you could scrape your skin and use the run-off to feed Moondrakkan’s engine instead.’

‘Ha!’ shouted the khan, grinning and clenching his fist in triumph as if Sudabeh had helped him solve a difficult problem. He would not take the Stormseer’s bait today, he was in too good a mood for it.

Like all White Scars, Kor’sarro loved to feel the play of the elements first hand. For the last three hours he had been meditating in the boiling heat of Quan Zhou, clad in little more than loose white fatigues. His olive leather skin practically glowed, shining with oily sweat.

The khan raised a thick bare arm covered in zigzag scars, revealing a tuft of armpit hair that protruded from the sutured edge of his torsal glove. ‘Have a proper sniff then, naysmith.’

‘I respectfully decline your generous proposal,’ said Sudabeh, using the formal Chogorian dialect. Both men chuckled, two sets of white teeth sparkling in the sun. They had been Space Marines long enough to know that moments of humanity were to be treasured, no matter how simple. In fact the simpler they came, the better.

The khan pulled a cube of meat the size of his fist from one of the ammunition crates, picking off the largest bits of swarf before taking a massive bite. He turned to face his old friend, stale blood running down his long black moustache as he chewed loudly. Eyebrows knitted in mock concern, he motioned the Stormseer forward, his frown fading to a wet red grin.

Shaking his head in resignation, Sudabeh joined his captain on the balcony. He looked up at his distorted reflection in the silvered, eyeless skulls that were spitted on pikes along the balcony’s edge. Most of the trophies were human-sized, but the largest was the size a Land Speeder.

To the south, a large gunmetal lander was lowering its bulk towards the perimeter of Third Bronze Yurut. The squat ship’s backblast sent waves of plains-dust outward in concentric circles before its striped underskeleton finally touched down.

‘Cargo?’ asked Sudabeh, squinting through the dust.

‘Trophies,’ the khan replied around a mouthful of raw meat.

The bulk lander’s front jaw lowered with a distant hiss of hydraulics. One at first, then a dozen, then hundreds upon hundreds of human heads poured down the ramp towards the yurut wall. Though the first to emerge bounced and rolled as if freshly taken from the neck, those spilling over the rear part of the lander’s jaw slopped over in a state of advanced decomposition. Their smell was unpleasant on the wind, but the khan’s stomach growled in appreciation nonetheless.

‘Heretics,’ said the khan, savouring the word. ‘Tarotian IV.’

Sudabeh nodded thoughtfully. He watched the servitor work-teams retrieve the disembodied heads by the armful and dump them onto the vector carriages parked along the bronze yurut’s walls. Inside each carriage, wizened eyethieves rode the cupolas upwards towards the lances that jutted up from the wall’s crest. As they went, they took it in turns to stoke the carriage’s braziers and burn each trophy’s sockets clean with a length of red-hot iron.

Out past the dropsite, steed-beasts broke from distant herds. They galloped in to fall upon those heads left unattended, gnawing strips of meat from faces and scalps before the low blast of the lander’s horns drove them away. Part of Kor’sarro longed to be back in the saddle at the head of his tribe, hurling his spear into the flank of some doe-eyed zellion or marauding felid with a taste for human flesh.

‘Spit it out, then,’ said Kor’sarro.

‘My khan?’

‘You didn’t hide your scars under battleplate just to come out here and bait me, Stormseer. My temper’s not that tight.’

‘Of course,’ said Sudabeh, his tone suddenly formal. ‘The astropathic choir has a message for you, my khan. The Third Company is needed on Agrellan immediately. We are to eradicate a tau infestation, as loudly and as memorably as possible.’

‘Out of the question,’ replied Kor’sarro, but there was doubt under his tone. ‘You told me yourself, the Tarot indicates that Blackheart’s renegades draw closer with every passing hour. We are needed here, to defend our home world.’

‘Our elders have decided that our duty lies elsewhere, my khan,’ said Sudabeh. ‘Many other companies are ready to repel the Red Corsairs. Chogoris will endure without us, I can feel it. Quan Zhou will stand.’

A wordless pause stretched out, both men staring upward as if Huron Blackheart’s fleet would glimmer into being at any moment.

‘Tau,’ sighed the khan. ‘So we face their cursed weapon-magicks again.’

‘Indeed,’ said Sudabeh. ‘I believe they seek to use the planet Agrellan as a staging post in order to seize the mineral-rich tithe worlds on the cusp of the Damocles Gulf.’

‘Agrellan,’ the khan continued, fingering his long moustache. ‘Dovar System, yes?’

‘Correct again.’

‘Ha. Terrain?’

‘Unremarkable, for the most part. Technically a hive-world, but mostly scorched deserts and open plains.’

The khan’s grisly smile reappeared, bits of meat bleeding between his teeth.

‘Anything else?’

‘It’s haunted,’ said Sudabeh, matter-of-factly. ‘The place was subject to Exterminatus centuries ago. The Malleus alone know why.’

‘No doubt they do. The stain of Chaos is not easily erased.’

‘As you say. Reading between the lines of the data-slate, it seems the virus bombs left a highly toxic legacy. The planet still bears the marks of its former death, both physically and spiritually.’

‘Ghosts, then,’ said the khan, shrugging. ‘Common enough.’

‘Not these ones,’ the Stormseer replied.

Chapter Two

IRONDELVE PLAIN
SOUTH OF THE ACACIAN BASIN,
AGRELLAN, 742.999.M41

A shimmering black dot scarred the centre of the Agrellan sun. It grew by the tiniest of fractions, slowly expanding until it resolved into a smudged figure silhouetted against the blinding orb. Three smaller dots swirled around the figure like electrons orbiting a nucleus. Slowly, steadily, the outline swelled until it eclipsed the sun all but completely.

The figure’s lines hardened into those of a tau battlesuit, bulky yet somehow still strangely feminine. The accompanying dots became a trio of discus-like drones, thick antennae canted in a perfect compromise between aerodynamics and sensory acuity. Only thin jet streams in low orbit gave any hint of how this solar angel and her strange attendants had come to earth. The marks of her Orca’s passage were two faint scars amongst hundreds of others lining the azure sky.

Then, as soon as the figure and her retinue came within half a mile of the planet’s surface, they disappeared.

Commander Shadowsun touched down with such measured delicacy that the puff of dust from Agrellan’s scorched surface was barely noticeable.

Her appointment as the face of the Third Sphere expansion had been no accident. Tall for a tau and with a dancer’s perfect posture, on those occasions when she wished to be seen, she cut quite a majestic figure. When entering hostile territory, however, her highly sophisticated XV22 battlesuit rendered her practically invisible.

Technically speaking she could be seen by the naked eye, Shadowsun reminded herself, albeit as nothing more than a vague haze. Tiny cells honeycombed not only the surface of her battlesuit but also her underslung fusion blasters. One side of each sensor cell was a miniscule camera, and the other side a pinpoint hologram array that could replicate that camera’s footage with unprecedented accuracy.

Once she was back on her flagship after a military engagement, Shadowsun would transfer the footage from these cameras to a suite of holodrones and walk through a full-spectrum projection of her own performance, analysing, highlighting and consolidating her manoeuvres with the dedication and patience of a master.

The master, come to that.

‘Oe-ken-yon, please begin your initial dataharvest,’ said Shadowsun, turning to the largest of her three drones. ‘Take as much time as you require, my friend. As Commander Puretide taught us, when utilised correctly, the battlefield itself is a potent weapon.’

The drone blipped once in assent and moved away, sensor spectrums panning.

Data was vital in the business of waging war. Shadowsun was one of the three finest tau commanders of her generation, due in no small part to the fact she considered every angle and outcome before committing her forces. Diligence was one of a great many things she had learned on Mount Kanji under the wisdom of Master Puretide. She had absorbed every drop of knowledge she could from dawn to dusk. The perfect pupil, he had called her, albeit only after her training was complete. Those three small words were still the best gifts she had ever received.

For four long years Master Puretide had challenged her with gruelling trials. Trials so harsh she could never forget the lessons she learned from them, even had she wanted to. The lessons were hard won indeed. Her body still bore the scars – scars she sometimes traced when she was alone, dwelling on what she had learned.

Only two other tau in the entire galaxy could truly understand what she had gone through in the name of the Greater Good. Strange young Kais, the Monat Supreme, cadre-of-one and founder of Fi’rios Sept. Kais, and… and the traitor Shoh.

She shuddered, acutely aware of her skin brushing the inside of her suit. No time to think of him now.

‘Commander Shadowsun,’ blipped her c-link drone, its datatone prim and formal as it returned to her side. ‘My report is complete, and ready for your inspection.’

‘My thanks, Drone Commandant Oe-ken-yon,’ she transmitted back in kind, rapid-scanning the drone’s datacompile with one eye whilst her other remained fixed on her battlesuit’s sensor suite, just in case.

There was something strange about Agrellan’s data… a feeling of a glitch, rather than the anomaly itself. She dismissed the notion as illogical.

‘It appears that the environment itself is hostile, Oe-ken. Not unusual for an Imperial world, and well within the parameters of the earth caste to fix once we have taken this world for the empire. Please remain within shield radius of either Oe-nu or Oe-hei from now on.’

‘Affirmed. Any additionals, commander?’ transmitted Oe-ken-yon.

‘Not at this point, little one. Be content to wait.’

Back when she had simply been Shaserra, student of the fire caste academies, Commander Shadowsun had shown great talent in the arts of waging war. She consistently excelled in every simulation and battlescape her mentors could devise. After her training was complete, she had been accorded the signal honour of further study under Commander Puretide himself.

At the foot of her master’s hover-throne, she had learnt every nuance and tenet of the martial style that had lain closest to her natural skillset. Hers was the oldest and most well established of all the tau ways of war. It was known formally as Kauyon, and informally as the Patient Hunter.

Kilometres below the peak of Mount Kanji, Shadowsun had sat shrouded in snow at the side of a beast-trail for days. Her skin had been as cold as death, and her breathing as shallow as the tiny sighs of a hibernating mouse. She had remained so still that a large family of arctic spiders had used her as a frame for their tickling webs.

Inert as stone, at one with the mountain, when the one-eared snow lynx had finally wandered past her, she had simply lunged out and broken its neck.

Over the decades since her promotion to commander, Shadowsun had honed her natural patience and sense of timing to a lethal point. She had applied it like a scalpel to everything from the delicacies of diplomacy to the sudden destruction of alien battlefleets. And yet, despite her forces having overcome the tau empire’s foes for minimal loss on countless occasions, there remained a stubborn few who still questioned her ways.

One in particular.

The traitor Shoh had shunned Kauyon from the day they had begun their training together, concentrating solely on Mont’ka, the Killing Blow. Just recently Revered Aun’shi, the Ethereal Supreme and speaker of great truths, had told her in person that the Traitor believed the philosophy of Kauyon was only for the weak.

She shook her head in disgust and despair, her smooth brow creased. The idea of ignoring patience in favour of aggression was utterly alien to her. Surely, demonstrably as far as she was concerned, Kauyon was the path that led to the Greater Good. How else to use the foe’s own confidence against him, to do the maximum damage at minimum cost to the tau race? The Master himself had often said ‘To triumph with the least amount of risk must always be the goal.’ Unlike her headstrong peers, she had listened well.

Shadowsun amped her audio pickups high for a moment, and they relayed the telltale whine of a nearby VX1-0 dronenet gathering topographical data. Behind it was the high, triple purr of a Piranha squadron on patrol. High above the T-shaped skimmers, Manta missile destroyers hummed by in stately grace. Each of the giant supercraft was enacting one of Shadowsun’s overlapping heavy recon loops, scouring Agrellan’s surface for signs of the foe. Their airborne comrades would detect the blundering fools of the Imperium before long; the patterns on her suit’s distribution array described overlapping geometries that would have pleased even the most precise earth caste scientist.

There was something else there, though, something on the data-cusp. She blink-masked the audiosigns she recognised, cutting out all background elements until all she was left with was a subtle susurrus over a baseline of white noise.

The anomalous waveform was not regular, like that of a machine, but something with the erratic spike of the biological. In fact – she isolated it and amped it high – it sounded a lot like distant whispers.

‘Commander!’ boomed her audio bead, jolting her senses. ‘Stealth team report!’

She spun round, shield drones flying to her flanks. Her sensor suite’s blacksun filter revealed the ghostly heat signatures of a dozen XV25 Stealth suits. Whilst she had been lost in her reverie, Shas’vre Drai and his team had been standing behind her in full salute formation.

‘Stealth team until it suits you!’ she spat, her hot spike of anger simmering to cold disapproval in the space of a few heartbeats. ‘This is a sub-optimal time to show off, Shas’vre Drai. We are within warzone parameters.’

‘I offer contrition, my commander,’ said Drai, his body language deferential even in the swollen bulk of his battlesuit.

Even the fire caste’s standard-issue stealth field generators were advanced enough to baffle the senses. Without state of the art optical sensors, Drai and his teammates would have been little more than heat shimmers against the cracked and lifeless landscape. That was little excuse for one with a multispectrum sensor suite, though. Shadowsun blamed her momentary lapse of concentration on the strange whisper-hiss that had distracted her. She still felt on edge even now.

It was a well-known fact amongst the fire caste that Drai’s mastery of the silent approach more than made up for his habit of announcing his presence as loudly as possible, whether with a formal greeting or a salvo from the truncated burst cannon that formed his battlesuit’s right arm.

‘Have your assessments reached a satisfactory conclusion, my commander?’ asked Drai.

‘They have, Drai, and I thank you for your inquiry. No Imperial forces have been pinpointed as yet, though at least three capital-class transport ships have made planetfall to my knowledge. I have assigned forward bait elements.’

‘And the planet itself, my commander?’

Shadowsun stepped back and to the side, revealing the c-link drone behind her. ‘Oe-ken?’

The drone rose slightly. ‘Designation Imperial hive-world, human population approximate 16.7 billion, apex conurbation Agrellan Prime,’ said Oe-ken. His artificial voice was strangely lyrical, as if he were reciting an abstract poem. ‘Surface primarily plainsland, topographical map appended. Atmosphere highly toxic to all carbon-based clades, anomalous readings high…’

‘Excellent. I believe that will be sufficient for now, Oe-ken,’ interrupted Shadowsun. ‘We can assimilate the rest from your compile. We do not want the gue’la brutes alerted to our presence by you rattling out every last finding, after all.’

‘Rattling, commander?’ said Oe-ken, his elevation sinking.

‘An artefact of speech,’ said Shadowsun, waving the comment away. ‘I meant no aspersion.’

The tau’s artificial intelligences were hard-wired to behave as much like their makers as possible in all social situations, and Oe-ken-yon was the most advanced of his kind. Regardless of size or duty, every drone strived to emulate its masters and fit in seamlessly with tau culture. It was a safety measure that covered most eventualities. When a purely objective viewpoint was necessary, personality protocols could be temporarily deactivated at a single blip.

Such a course of action had proved problematic in the past – the disastrous Pech Incident was one example. In recent years, the earth caste had made it standard practice to build the tau empire’s artificial intelligences with a personality best suited their role. Even so, Shadowsun often wondered if a machine that could simulate emotion wasn’t just as likely to affect operational efficiency as one without it.

‘May I append an observation, Commander Shadowsun?’ said Oe-nu quietly as it hovered in close.

The MV52, much like lesser shield drones, had twin projector aerials that reminded Shadowsun of the plain-hoppers she used to catch on Vior’la as a child.

‘By all means, Oe-nu.’

‘The background electromagnetic field upon Agrellan is having a detrimental effect on my battery source, commander. I cannot guarantee optimum performance throughout.’

‘Noted, little helper, but in truth you say that every time. It is rare that I deploy the fire caste into an idyllic environment.’

‘This time is different, Commander Shadowsun,’ the drone whined. It dipped the front of its rim in a gesture of dutiful obedience. ‘Rest assured that in the interests of longevity, Oe-hei and I will utilise the least possible amount of energy in order to ensure your protection. We shall not use one iota more than necessary.’

‘That is… indeed reassuring, Oe-nu. Thank you in advance.’

‘Merely doing our duty, Commander Shadowsun,’ the drone said obsequiously, dipping its disc-like body once more before withdrawing to slowly orbit its mistress.

‘May I ask what you make of these anomalous readings, my commander?’ said Shas’vre Drai, tapping his sensor antenna with the quad-barrelled end of his burst cannon.

‘Of course. I believe they are residuals, echoes of a sort after some cataclysmic event. That would certainly fit with the geological samples my punch-cylinders have taken thus far.’

‘A robust theory, my commander… up to a point,’ said Drai warily.

‘I realise it is the nature of the cataclysm that concerns you, Shas’vre Drai, but I would not divert attention to it at this point. We have more pressing data to obtain.’

As Shadowsun finished her sentence, a sheet of red shapes flared across the topographical display above her command suite.

‘Excellent. The air caste have located the Imperial vessels. Approach on my mark.’

As one, the Stealth suits and their drone escorts rose into the air, revolved eight degrees west, and hovered invisibly towards the Acacian Basin.

The hive cities of Agrellan were truly mighty examples of their kind. Giant, slab-sided monstrosities, they reminded Shadowsun of insect mounds out on the Vior’lan plain. Each spire-dotted metropolis was teeming with human life, and somewhere within the basin were the occupants of the three Imperial vessels that had escaped the air caste’s lethal attentions. Finding their exact location would not be easy. At Oe-ken-yon’s estimation, the entire population of Shadowsun’s home sept could have fit within the endless levels of the nearest hive and still had its upper half to spare.

According to the latest scans, the sides of each hive were dotted with gun nests, laser banks, gravity mine channels, ferrocrete plates, observation towers and docking plates. Sculptures of alien saints and living gargoyles loomed and crawled upon its facades, each a hideous reflection of the heroic monuments that stood outside each tau training academy. Shadowsun felt a forbidden twinge of excitement at the idea of smashing the human icons to dust.

As the commander and her skimmer-borne cadres sped towards the mountain range that girdled the hives, she found herself recalling the day she had personally destroyed the statue of Shoh that stood outside his old battle dome. That had been a day long talked about. The traitor’s despicable sympathisers had branded her the Iconoclast, after that.

She rather liked the term.

The vast caldera that formed the walls of the basin loomed up ahead, the narrow pass at its southernmost point guarded by a kilometre-high gate-fortress. The giant bastion looked every bit as indomitable as the peaks around it, and infinitely more deadly.

‘A warrior who wears his strength openly is easily countered,’ she said to herself, imagining her master’s stony glare. She remembered learning that particular lesson well, after her boasts that neither Shoh nor Kais had a hope of finding her when she wished to remain unseen. Master Puretide had commanded her to prove it. All those weeks she had thought her bond-mates were looking for her, all those painful hours sat stewing in her tree-stump, hoping to be discovered. Master Puretide had never sent them out at all. She had eventually slunk back, starving and chastened, having missed out on almost a month of training. The Master had turned her greatest strength into punishing weakness with a single off-the-cuff command. It was an object lesson in humility – a quality the Imperium of Man had left behind long ago.

She blipped the cadre-level datanet, denoting the looming fortress’s icon. ‘Needless to say,’ she transmitted, ‘we will not stray within range of that ridiculous thing.’

Symbols of affirmation blinked over each team’s icons. She eye-flicked alternative lines of approach across the mountains lining the basin, coloured pathways that zigzagged in from a dozen different points on the outside of the mountain range that girdled the basin. The air caste’s satellite scans, overlaid with the topography from the dronenets, had given her a hundred potential routes of approach, each shielded from hive artillery and remote gun nests. She would need no more than a handful of them to lure the Imperials into her trap.

The cadres fanned out from a dust storm of their own creation, circumnavigating the giant caldera’s toxic peaks and joining the routes designated to them without slowing. Over and around the mountains they went, grav-skimmers, drones and battlesuits keeping in tight formation as they hovered up gullies, glaciers and crevasses.

The skies flared white for a second, right on cue. The explosion left a concentric ring of light expanding high above the basin, as hypnotic to the hives’ sensor arrays as it was to mortal eyes.

After securing victory in space scant hours before, the air caste’s commanders had been only too pleased to grant Shadowsun’s request for a grand distraction. The Supreme Admiral, Kor’O Li’men Ka, had transmitted back in person. The detonation of In Vigilus, an Imperial wreck burning in high orbit, would form a perfect coda to their symphony of supremacy.

The death throes of the In Vigilus had bought Shadowsun a few seconds of electromagnetic backwash, a space of time in which the Imperial scanners were rendered blind and the Acacian Basin was lit in stark monochrome. In the blinking aftermath of those stolen seconds, every cadre hiding behind the lip of their respective mountains slid smoothly over the crest and boosted neatly into new hiding places.

‘Phase two is complete, commander,’ said Oe-ken, floating just behind Shadowsun.

‘Yes, thank you, Oe-ken, I have already observed that,’ she replied through a smile. ‘It’s phase three that will prove critical.’

‘I concur. It must be most satisfying to physically demonstrate the supremacy of the Greater Good in such a manner,’ the drone said wistfully.

‘It is pleasing to do so, but it is data I seek at this stage, not violence. Thankfully the air caste keep extensive records of the sigils and markings that the Imperium displays upon its battleships. According to my contacts, the first of the three vessels to have made planetfall upon Agrellan contains common gue’la soldiers and their support vehicles. The second, and this is the one I believe we must locate at all costs, contains the gue’ron’sha that the humans call Space Marines. I trust you are familiar with their reputation.’

‘I have assessed all available data. And the contents of the third vessel?’ prompted Oe-ken.

‘Unrecognised, and that has me intrigued. The ship has a cavernous cargo hold, though, and its symbol appears to be the riding-beast the humans call a “horse”. The water caste have appended the name ‘Terryn,’ along with a report that seems to have been made in haste.’

‘Cross-correlating… hard data not found. Commander,’ it said ruefully, ‘past the designation “Terryn” there’s very little on the fire caste databases about this warship.’

‘Interesting. Perhaps it contains beast-riding warriors, much as the kroot like to use. Keep searching, Oe-ken. I would rather not have any unwelcome surprises when the time comes to enact the takeover. Still, do not fear, little helper. We will force them to commit their strength, and the data will flow.’

On Shadowsun’s command suite, the fire caste’s icons were sliding down the mountainsides into their designated zones. As the glare of the air caste’s high-orbit diversion gave way to dull moonlight, each cadre’s heavy elements began to move into position. Hammerhead and Skyray gunships prowled forward, each flanked by Devilfish transports, a wall of sleek ochre tanks waiting to show their true colours as killing machines.

It was then that the hives awoke from their slumber.

The skies were filled with such thunder it made a Vior’lan deathstorm look tame. Heavy munitions roared downward in a hail of shells that could tear a ferrocrete bunker apart as easily as it could a wooden box. The air above the Acacian Basin was darkened by the firepower roaring out of the hives, each Imperial metropolis hurling everything it could at the interlopers approaching their position.

Yet despite all the fury, despite all the noise, not a single tau life signal faded to charcoal on Shadowsun’s command suite.

The commander smiled thinly as she watched the Imperial hives vent their mindless, pointless wrath. Go on, she thought. Waste your ammunition. Waste as much as you like.

The hive cities that dotted the Imperium grew almost organically over the centuries. New structures and statues were erected even as old ones sloughed away, complicating the already labyrinthine structures with every dubious new addition. Even comparatively young hives were so large, so moribund in their construction, that they were crippled by their own immense proportions. To Shadowsun, they were like fat old men that had undergone reconstructive surgery one too many times.

During their approach to the Acacian Basin, Shadowsun had used the air caste’s orbital data to determine the location of each of the hive’s guns, and their possible fields of fire. She had correlated them against the data streams transmitted by each cadre’s pathfinder teams, projecting the elevation range of those guns and their estimated reach.

Using Oe-ken’s formidable processing banks, she had then constructed a three-dimensional map of each hive’s blind spots. The charcoal grey of death denoted those areas covered by its guns, and healthy gold lit the zones that the hive’s bulk had occluded from its own sight. Her cadres’ symbols had glided into the golden slivers of safety overlaid on the master map she had transmitted. If her calculations were correct – and they invariably were – the warriors inside these zones were fundamentally safe.

Convinced of their own idiot brawn, the hive’s gunners threw obscene amounts of ordnance towards the tau tanks lurking on their perimeters. They achieved nothing more than swathing the valley with shrouds of dust and foul-smelling smoke.

It took the best part of an hour before the Imperials realised their mistake. It was time enough for Shadowsun to prepare detailed battle plans and approach vectors for every team under her command, and to arrange for the basin’s lines of reinforcement to be cut off.

The cutting of the supply lines connecting each hive was a simple enough matter. The vast bulk of the Imperium’s armour took the form of tracked vehicles, so the air caste made neutralisation runs in the arid deserts between each hive, staying out of range of the Imperial guns to drop pulse bombs where the ferrocrete superhighways were weakest. Whenever the Imperium’s scrambled reinforcements left the ruined roads in favour of the parched wastes, they would throw up clouds of dust that would hang in Agrellan’s poisonous air. With such advance warning of their foes’ approach, the fire caste’s anti-gravity skimmers could roam the planet unimpeded.

Once the last of the metallic mountains finally fell silent, Shadowsun slunk forward invisibly, the stealth elements of each of her cadres advancing on her cue. Barely a swirl of smoke marked their passage.

They had reached the gold zones next to each hive before the echoes of the Imperial bombardment had stopped resounding from the mountainsides.

Then the heavy elements of the tau cadres took their turn.

The distinctive whip-crack of heavy railgun fire rang out across the basin, a quiet, precise sound after the tooth-rattling roar of the hive’s guns. The hypervelocity rounds they projected left tunnels of displaced air in their wake. Smoke and dust swirled around them like desert spirits startled from a lamp. The rounds thudded deep into the exterior slabs, at first achieving little more than to introduce a series of artificial fault lines. Yet each Hammerhead’s target had not been chosen at random.

Pathfinder teams debarked from the Devilfish transports and painted each impact site with their markerlights. Moments later, massed squadrons of Skyray missile ships sent seekers soaring after the railgun volleys. The guided missiles detonated with pinpoint accuracy, each volley bringing hundreds of tonnes of ferrocrete tumbling down.

To a casual observer, the hives had been grazed, nothing more. To those that could perceive the heat signatures of each hive’s walls, every exit, hangar and missile bay was at least partially buried by a small avalanche of rubble.

The gold zones on Shadowsun’s command readout blinked, reconfigured and multiplied, a geometric landscape of possibilities that Oe-ken-yon updated for each encircling cadre to exploit.

‘Warriors of the fire caste, you may take these ugly monstrosities apart at your leisure,’ transmitted Shadowsun. ‘They cannot harm you now.’

About the Authors

Phil Kelly has been a devotee of myths, monsters and magic for three decades, the last of which has been spent working as a games developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio. Over the years, Phil has pursued various exotic careers but since meeting his future wife at a Los Angeles beach party, he has settled down a bit. He now leads a nice normal life writing about fantastical armies, undead pirates and gribblies from outer space.

Guy Haley is the author of the Space Marine Battles novel The Death of Integrity, as well as Skarsnik and Baneblade. He worked for many years on magazines, including Games Workshop’s White Dwarf. Since 2009 he has been a wandering writer, working in both magazines and novels. He lives in Somerset with his wife and son.

Ben Counter is the author of the Soul Drinkers and Grey Knights series, along with two Horus Heresy novels, and is one of Black Library’s most popular Warhammer 40,000 authors. He has written RPG supplements and comic books. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

Josh Reynolds is the author of the novels Knight of the Blazing Sun, Time of Legends: Neferata and Gotrek and Felix: Road of Skulls. Josh used to be a roadie for the Hong Kong Cavaliers, but now writes full time. His work has appeared in various anthologies, including Age of Legend and several issues of the electronic magazine Hammer and Bolter.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Kai Lim of Imaginary Friends Studios.

Internal illustrations by Neil Hodgson, Nuala Kinrade and Sam Lamont.

© Games Workshop Limited 2014. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy logo, The Horus Heresy eye device, Space Marine Battles, the Space Marine Battles logo, Warhammer 40,000, the Warhammer 40,000 logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated brands, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer 40,000 universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2000-2014, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

978-1-78251-541-8

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