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Cover

Blades of Damocles – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Chapter One

INVASION/THE FALLING SPEAR

Jorus Numitor grinned fiercely as the Thunderhawk’s metal door pistoned open. The gunship’s interior filled with blazing violet light, and a gale force wind punched into him, but it only got his blood up all the more. Leaning forward, the sergeant ran into the hurricane and leaped, triggering his jump pack and boosting away with his assault squad close behind.

The Sword of Calth banked as it roared overhead, its wingtip passing inches from Numitor’s jump pack. He turned as he flew, now falling backwards, and counted his brothers off as they hurtled through the sky in his wake. All present and correct, nine runes flashing green in his peripherals.

‘Atheus will pounce on that one day, sergeant,’ voxed Aordus. ‘Supposed to debark from the tailgate into dead air on a drop like this.’

‘Captain Atheus can tuck himself in an evil-smelling drop pod,’ shouted Numitor, mirth bubbling through his words as he turned back into a leaning dive. ‘Orbital insertion’s a waste of a good view!’

Aordus laughed, and even over the crackling vox Numitor heard the frustration and boredom of their two-month transit sloughing away. He felt it too; the ice around his soul was melting, turned to liquid anticipation by the prospect of battle and the breathtaking vista below.

Dal’yth’s cloudbanks were truly magnificent. Violet and white, they stretched out like a realm of organic sky-castles, lit from within by strobing flashes of electricity. The Ultramarines straightened into close formation and plummeted headlong toward them.

This is what the Adeptus Astartes were made to do, thought Numitor. Not to meditate in silence, or to train endlessly in the dark bowels of a strike cruiser, but to bring death from above – sudden, loud, and in great measure. He took off his helm and mag-clamped it to his waist, revelling in the feeling of air blasting up into his face and tugging at the dense strip of hair that ran down his shaven scalp like a crest.

Nearby, Aordus shook his head at the flagrant breach of drop protocol.

Contrails scarred the skies ahead as the T-shaped aircraft of the tau duelled with box-nosed Thunderhawk and Stormraven gunships. Plummeting drop pods cut through their winding vapour trails, forming a lateral grid that cut the sky and gave shape to the squad’s otherwise abstract fall.

Here and there airbursts blossomed, fire-lit smoke spreading in the cold air wherever a missile or interceptor shot hit home. Even those distant signs of conflict made Numitor’s chest feel tight. Not long now, the sergeant told himself, as if comforting the beast rousing to wakefulness in his soul.

Not long.

Squad Numitor burst from the cloudbanks to witness the birth of a planetary war. Tessellating hex-zones each large enough to accommodate a hive city trammelled the indigo wilderness. Smoothly contoured buildings jutted from each junction point, lights glittering in their thousands wherever the ivory edifices reached up from the wider superstructures. The landscape of the tau sept world had been almost perverse in its order, but that was changing fast – the Imperium’s pre-invasion firestorm had torn ragged wounds across its surface. Megatonnes of ordnance were hurled from low orbit to break open the drop zones in the distance. Even those warheads detonated by tau flak were raining fire upon the cities below.

Numitor did not replace his helm. The chances of getting decapitated by sky-shrapnel were slim, and that was a gamble he was willing to take. It was worth it to drink in the spectacle of explosions blossoming below, to feel the blood-pounding rush of air hinting at the storm of violence to come. The tempestuous forces of the drop pulled at his skin, shook his bones and made his eyes and nose sting with sensation. He plunged through a high cloud and out again, needles of cold stinging his skin. It felt like a baptism.

The Ultramarines drop pod assault followed close behind the falling ordnance intended to clear a path for Operation Pluto. Livid fires billowed from shattered hexodomes and parallel plumes of dark smoke slanted into the skies from the black-rimmed craters that scarred the city’s alien symmetry. In his peripheral vision, Numitor could see dozens of gunships diving in near-vertical vectors, the throaty roars of their engines audible even over the thunder of freefall and the bass crump of ordnance.

The Imperial craft slammed through a thinly spread drone blockade to scatter enemy fighter craft like raptors slicing through a prey-flock. Coming out of their dives as they reached their drop coordinates, each gunship opened its doors and disgorged the Assault Marines inside. Numitor’s squad had been the first to make the drop, launching a good few seconds before Squad Sicarius, and even with the long freefall they would reach the planet first. He knew it was wrong to find joy in that, for it mattered little in truth. He smiled nonetheless.

‘Beachhead established in quadrant Zeta Tert, Gel’bryn City,’ said Aordus. ‘Good place to start.’

‘We’ll be fighting long before we get there,’ shouted Numitor. ‘Look sharp, brothers. Hunter-killers incoming. On my mark.’

A cluster of four wide, flat-bodied missiles blazed upwards from an intact hexodome.

‘Scatter!’ ordered Numitor. His men reacted a second before the seeker missiles reached their position. They triggered their jump packs simultaneously, blazing out in a ten-pointed star that saw the tau missiles sail harmlessly through the middle of their formation.

Three more of the xenotech warheads hurtled upwards. Numitor flipped and boosted straight down, swiping the fingertips of his power fist into the leading missile moments before it could strike Brother Duolor. It detonated with mind-numbing force as the other two shot past, missing their mark. The sergeant was flung outward, flailing and burning, but the flames found no purchase on his ceramite. He tucked into a somersault before righting his vector with a blast of his jump pack.

Trailing smoke, Numitor heaved in a great draught of air – not the stale, recycled air of a spaceship hold, but the cold, pure blast of freefall. He roared with the sheer catharsis of it. Elation flooded his body, despite the burning pain in the side of his face, despite the chemical tang of incendiaries in his multi-lung. His vox buzzed like a trapped insect, abruptly pulling him back to his senses.

‘Sergeant,’ said Aordus, ‘do we proceed to Zeta Tert?’

‘Hold course,’ called out Numitor, craning his head to look upward. ‘Zeta Tert, squad! Adjust vectors accordingly.’

High above, three remaining missiles looped around, doubling back in tight parabolas to close on the sergeant’s squad.

‘Ha!’ shouted Numitor triumphantly. ‘I thought as much. Ready pistols!’

The sergeant turned in mid-fall to face the night sky and the blunt-nosed missiles rocketing towards them. He unclamped his bolt pistol and snapped off three shots in close succession, his back to the ground even though his freefall was at terminal velocity. Numitor’s squad followed his lead. Mass-reactive bolts hurtled upwards, the last volley catching the incoming missiles a spear’s throw from their position. A canopy of fire bloomed above them, red and yellow against the darkening purple sky.

Nodding in satisfaction, Numitor turned back to his headlong descent.

From the hexodomes below tracer fire spat high, each stream stuttering phosphor-white. Black clouds of flak boomed as tau gunners intercepted the storm of Space Marine insertion craft hammering towards the xenos landscape. To their east flank, a cluster of hunter-missiles slammed into a plummeting drop pod. Numitor felt the blast wave of the explosion as it sent cherry-red metal scything in all directions.

Flailing Space Marines fell burning from the wreckage towards the planet’s surface.

They had fifteen seconds, if that.

‘Intercept that stricken squad!’ ordered Numitor, leaning into a diagonal vector and waving his squad to follow. He boosted hard, drawing his arms in close to streamline his body and angling his hands to fine-tune his path. His unit, close behind him, did likewise.

Nine seconds left.

A trio of falling Tactical Marines had righted themselves as best they could and were aiming their bolters downward, determined to take some kind of toll on the tau world before their deaths. The Tactical squad’s sergeant stretched out to catch one of his brothers by the arm as he pinwheeled past, yanking him in close. Numitor and his squad dived into their midst, each clamping an outstretched hand onto a falling battle-brother. There was no way Numitor and his squad could stop them entirely, pull them out of harm’s way, but they were still Assault Marines of the Eighth, the masters of the jump drop. This was their sky to rule.

‘Hard diagonal, due west!’ shouted Numitor.

With a burst of his jump pack engines at full yield, Numitor yanked the Tactical Marine’s descent into a sharp westward course. His squad did the same, their power armour preventing their arms from being ripped out of their sockets by the sudden weight. Slowly, agonisingly, their efforts bore fruit.

Three seconds.

‘Breakfall!’ shouted Numitor. ‘Ready!’

A bulbous white tower loomed suddenly upwards, its giant mushroom canopy studded with strange antennae. Numitor heaved hard, twisting his body so his jump pack bolstered the motion as he and his squad flung their battle-brothers sidelong towards the tau building’s upper slope.

The Tactical Marines struck it hard, but their armour took much of the impact. As they slid downward, they each drew their combat knives and drove them deep into the building’s curving roof, turning their skidding descent into a series of sharp halts.

By the time the Space Marines had mag-locked their boots onto the alloy of the building’s roof, Numitor had landed in their midst, and was already boosting back upwards. He caught a fifth falling battle-brother by the backpack and slowed his descent enough for him to hit the cream-coloured roof crumpled, but alive. The rest of Squad Numitor had touched down nearby, wispy circles of exhaust expanding around each of their landing sites. Pulse rounds shot from the balcony of a taller tau building to punch into their midst. The Tactical Marines turned their shoulders into the incoming fire, bolters aimed to launch a devastating counter-attack.

‘That was non-Codex drop procedure,’ said one of the rescued Space Marines.

The Tactical Marine sergeant snapped off a shot with his bolter, and a distant explosion mingled with xenos screams. ‘We’re alive, ingrate,’ he growled to his squadmate, ‘so make it count.’ He turned to Numitor between shots. ‘My thanks, brother. Antelion of the Fifth.’

‘I’m Numitor, Eighth Company. But if your friend reports the drop deviation, I’m Sergeant Cato Sicarius.’

Antelion laughed. ‘Now him I’ve heard of.’

Numitor nodded, but in truth his focus was already on the battle below.

‘Right, let’s get to it,’ he said, replacing his helm and slamming a fresh clip into his bolt pistol. ‘Brothers, make ready to join the fray. Cato is likely ankle-deep in blood already.’

Sergeant Cato Sicarius bellowed a wordless war cry, gunning his jump pack as he blasted shoulder-first towards a squadron of glider-like xenocraft. Energy streams spat from the tail-mounted quad turret of each tau fighter. They detonated explosively amongst his squad, one lucky shot sending Brother Endrion spiralling from the sky in a spray of blood.

Two more of the incandescent beams punched into Sicarius’ pauldron, vaporising chunks of ceramite and knocking him off kilter. He righted his charge within heartbeats, lips pulled back into a grimace of contempt, but it was too late. The aircraft had already hurtled past, the whine of their engines rising as they turned back for another strafing run.

A hot ache bled through Sicarius’ shoulder socket. ‘You’ve no idea who you are dealing with,’ he snarled under his breath. ‘You’re all going to die.’

‘Well said, sergeant,’ said Glavius, Sicarius’ de facto second in command. The sergeant clicked impatiently over the vox in response. The pain in his shoulder was dulling, but in his eyes it was still a symptom of failure.

On some level, Cato Sicarius knew and appreciated what was at stake upon Dal’yth. The war they were fighting here was no conventional crusade, but a battle for knowledge, hard won in the crucible of war. Two advanced civilisations were pitted against one another, and the sky was already filling with the fires of conflict.

‘Vespertine was a skirmish compared to this,’ said Glavius.

‘Good,’ said Sicarius. ‘A true test of our mettle, then.’ Here, each force was seeking not only to overcome the foe, but also to learn their strengths – and more importantly, weaknesses – in the process. ‘This is a race, Glavius,’ said Sicarius, ‘a race for understanding. Whoever wins it will secure victory not just here, but on a dozen worlds besides.’

With this site as the primary drop zone, there was every chance the battle for Gel’bryn City would determine the fate of the entire war. Taking the largest metropolis on the eastern seaboard would give them a commanding position, allowing them to dominate everything between the dropsite and the mountains to the north. As a sergeant, Sicarius was content to leave the wider campaign to the likes of Lord Calgar and Chief Librarian Tigurius, but here he was in his element. Drop invasions were his meat and drink.

He was made to conquer, and conquer he would.

The tau squadrons were coming back fast, veering around the tall antennae of a comms building for another pass. The two rearmost craft detached disc-like drones, machine intelligences much like those Sicarius had encountered on Vespertine. Their underslung ion guns thickened the firepower already searing the air.

Sicarius kept in the foremost pilot’s blind spot until the last moment, then launched up hard at top speed to catch its left wing and scrabble atop it. Gripping the front of the wing tight, he drew his Talassarian broadsword, thumbed the activation rune, and carved away the cockpit with a single broad sweep. Blood flew from the bisected head of the pilot inside. The fighter’s veering arc slowly turned into a dive.

‘Meagre creatures, these,’ said the sergeant, letting go of the wing and allowing himself to slide free. ‘Even weaker than the ground clades.’

‘Sergeant,’ came the vox from his squadmate Ionsian. ‘Inbound fighters.’

‘Mark them for me,’ said Sicarius, drawing his pistol as he fell. Energy weapon fire spat through the air towards him, but he twisted away from it.

‘Now, sergeant!’ said Ionsian, boosting past to draw the fire of the enemy pilot.

Sicarius’ target-runes flashed bright. He raised his plasma pistol and pulled the trigger, its grip painfully hot even through the ceramite banding of his gauntlet. His shot was true. It took a passing fighter under the nosecone, burning through its lightweight alien alloys to consume the tau inside.

The aircraft wobbled, veered, and crashed into the vanes of the distant communications array with force enough to tear the entire structure down into the battle below.

Numitor would have enjoyed that wrecking ball display, thought Sicarius, checking the chrono runes in his helm.

It was almost a shame he was taking so long to join in.

Sicarius took in the rest of the Eighth as they invaded the city, some by gunship, others by bulk lander. They were reinforced right and left by their warrior kin from the battle companies. Drop pods hurtled out of the skies, smashing through the alien hyperplastic of the tau hexodomes to release Space Marine squads into the smooth suburban landscapes beneath. Their assault had caught the tau unprepared. Small wonder; the brute force and speed of a Space Marine planetstrike was almost impossible to counter.

‘Numitor, attend me,’ voxed Sicarius, ‘I cannot see you, brother.’

‘Attend you? I think not,’ crackled the reply. ‘Besides, we took a detour. Look to the intersection nearest the reservoir.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Sicarius, signalling his squad to form up around him. ‘Got you. How fares the slaughter?’

‘It is everything I had hoped for.’

Sicarius gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Good hunting, then,’ he replied, ‘though I can see this being over far too quickly.’

‘There’s a whole planet of them, Cato. You will get your chance to shine.’

‘There’s a small empire, Jorus, not one paltry planet,’ replied Sicarius. ‘And likely not a single decent swordsman amongst them.’

‘We’ll have a challenge on our hands soon enough,’ said Numitor. ‘Take an altitude. Look at the interlinks of each district and tell me what you see.’

Sicarius signed off without a word. He triggered his jump pack, launching himself up to the landing platform jutting from a geometric hexodome and scanning the interstitial spars, brow furrowed.

Within each spar was a long, silver magnorail transmotive. The vehicles were moving with impressive speed. Sicarius could make out tau warriors inside the nearest. Hundreds stood in each transport, strapping on grenade harnesses and checking their long-barrelled guns. Couched atop each cylindrical section of the transmotive were the xenos warsuits the Eighth had encountered on Vespertine. The soulless creations combined the firepower of a Dreadnought with the agility of an Assault Marine.

Thousands of tau soldiers inbound, then. Sicarius counted the transmotive carriages and did a quick calculation. Tens of thousands, in fact.

Without exception, they were converging on the Eighth Company’s landing site.

Shas’o Dal’yth Ko’vash Kha’drel, better known as Commander Bravestorm, blink-clicked a hostiles filter on his battlesuit’s command suite. His sensors detected barely a hundred enemy warriors in this hex. They were so few in number, these proud Space Marine invaders. It was almost a shame the war would be over so soon.

Thus far, fewer than two gue’ron’sha cadre-equivalents – known to the Imperials as companies, according to his autotrans – had made planetfall. By the time the last interhex transmotives had reached each dropsite the Space Marine invasion would be contained, cauterised and eradicated. Bravestorm had ensured his countercrisis cadres were inbound as swiftly as possible. In the space of a single rotaa, the earth caste would have completed any necessary renovations, and Dal’yth society would return to normal. Did the humans truly expect to strike at the heart of the tau empire with so meagre a force, and somehow prevail?

The commander checked his cadre’s readiness symbols. All teams showed gold, whether buckled into the interior of the transmotives, or – as he and his other battlesuit teams were – ejector-locked into their roof cradles. His prototype XV8-02 shifted gently as the transmotive shot through a hex interstice to take a more direct course to the primary site of the invasion. The velocity barely changed, the transport’s progress silent apart for a low thrum of electromagnetic generators.

Bravestorm had originally assumed the Imperium’s blunt attack was a feint, a distraction to keep the fire caste occupied whilst the true strike fell elsewhere. He had apportioned his forces accordingly, distributing them evenly across the planet’s surface and coordinating with the other castes to ensure they could react quickly wherever the real blow fell. And yet no matter how many times he ran the air caste’s data through his analyticals, the answer was the same. Every orbital craft of the gue’la fleet had aligned with a major city, and fired its invasion force vertically downwards with only the most perfunctory of bombardments to pave the way. Bulk landers were following much the same trajectory in their wake. The attack had all the subtlety of a meteor shower.

‘They strike at Dal’yth’s heart,’ Bravestorm transmitted over the command-level cadre-net, ‘just as a savage kroot might jab his spear at a battlesuit’s chest, unaware that there, the armour is thickest of all.’

‘Their tactics are primitive, honoured Bravestorm,’ came the response from Commander Farsight. The famous warrior’s stoic features glowed on a sub-screen in Bravestorm’s command cocoon. ‘But some of their technologies are very advanced. Their interstellar transit speaks of far greater minds behind their warrior castes.’

‘I concur. I shall neutralise those invaders nearest my location and transmit my findings on the cadre-net for further analysis.’

‘Do so, with my thanks. I have every confidence in your resolve.’

Bravestorm eye-flicked a shorthand sign of respect. Today, he and his fellow commanders would impart a lesson, a lesson the defenders of Vespertine, caught out by the sheer alacrity of that first Imperial assault, had failed to teach. It was an immortal truth – one Bravestorm had learned shortly after birth and had been quietly reinforcing since he was old enough to speak.

It was the tau race’s destiny to rule the stars, and theirs alone.

‘Entering effective weapons range in sixty-two microdecs, commander,’ said Bravestorm. ‘All teams primed and ready.’

‘Excellent. I am making haste to join you,’ replied Farsight. ‘That which we presume to conquer, we must first understand.’

‘Master Puretide still speaks through his pupil.’

‘Of course. As he speaks through us all. For the Greater Good, Commander Bravestorm.’

‘For the Tau’va.’ Bravestorm made the sign of the impeccable kill and signed off.

The magnorail transmotive carved around another interstice at blurring speed. Atop its ejection cradle, Bravestorm fought to keep his sensor suite working smoothly. The panorama of war unfolding before them was so intense even his hyper-advanced battlesuit was struggling to keep up with the ballistics data flooding through it.

The air above the invasion site was filled with flak bursts, tracer fire, engine contrails and hurtling Imperial drop craft. The crystalline shards of broken hexodomes speared into the twilight. Each had been shattered by one of the pod-like landers the gue’ron’sha warships had hurled towards Gel’bryn City.

The headlong assault was proving an effective stratagem, brutal in its simplicity. Maximum force delivered at a concentrated point was a modus the fire caste made extensive use of themselves. The Imperials sought to break the shield wall, and once inside, capitalise. Though Bravestorm felt awkward and unclean at the thought, the directness of the Imperial mindset appealed to part of his soul. No negotiation here, no dance of veiled threat and false intelligence – just war, pitiless and direct.

Still, initial success or no, this alleged ‘Imperium of Man’ would pay for its temerity in crossing the Damocles Gulf. They had sent a vanguard of scarely a few thousand to conquer a major sept world; to Bravestorm’s mind, that did not reflect well on the military strength of this would-be rival empire. Though it had struck hard at first, the human armada would likely be broken within a matter of weeks.

The interhex transmotive passed a burning, shattered dome. Flickering explosions lit the black smoke within.

‘Here,’ transmitted Bravestorm. ‘We begin here.’

The transport slowed hard, shuddering as a series of small explosions was stitched along its length. Blue-armoured figures emerged from the smoke-shrouded sidings, bulky sidearms raised.

‘All teams deploy as briefed,’ said Bravestorm to the fire warrior teams inside.

Atop the transmotive, dozens of ejection cradles hissed open. Each battlesuit was hurled skyward in an explosion of hydraulic vapour. Below, doorports slid open to allow strike teams of tau to disembark.

The air shimmered as jet packs engaged en masse. Forming up in a shallow wedge behind their commander, the battlesuits soared towards the gue’ron’sha troopers on the sidings, shoulder-mounted missile pods laying down suppressive fire to cover their advance.

The Imperials raised their guns, the blocky weapons booming as they sent miniature rockets roaring up. In Bravestorm’s control cocoon, incoming fire alerts bipped insistently. Again these simple-minded invaders had attacked the largest, most obvious threat – and in doing so, wasted their best chance for survival.

The commander’s gun drones moved to interpose, but Bravestorm eye-flicked them back. His XV8-02 could handle this. A heartbeat later his shield generator flared as three detonations boomed across its convex disc of energy. He deactivated the shield for the fourth shot, instead turning his shoulder unit into its path. The earth caste would thank him for the ballistics data.

The projectile detonated with a loud, punching impact, but did little more than strip a patch of synth paint from the prototype suit’s iridium alloy. Rapid beeps of alarm sounded as an anti-tank missile shot from the commander’s western flank. Bravestorm braced in his cocoon as the missile thumped into his suit’s waist joint, sending him reeling with the blast of kinetic force but ultimately doing no more than superficial damage.

Bravestorm smiled as he brought his battlesuit back upright. He liked a fair fight more than most.

But this would have to do.

‘Mass-reactive projectiles incoming, standard Imperial pattern,’ said Bravestorm over the cadre-net. ‘Dangerous, but within the tolerances of our combat armour. Fire warriors advance. Team Mal’caor, target the missile trooper at appended coordinates.’

Symbols of assent blinked on Bravestorm’s command suite. Below, the Imperial warriors darted left and right, firing as they moved inside the smoke of the burning hexodome. Bravestorm levelled his plasma rifles as one, his blacksun filter effortlessly piercing the pall. He swept his legs forward to trigger a firing stance and took the shots.

Two gue’ron’sha troops collapsed, heads burnt down to cauterised stumps. A barrage of plasma from the rest of his team sent three more Space Marines down hard.

One of the blue-armoured warriors hurled a grenade straight upward into the battlesuit team’s midst. It detonated a hand’s breadth from Bravestorm’s jump unit. The blast failed to so much as dent his suit’s armour, but it tore gun drone Oe-ven-3 from the sky. The helper’s death was a sad loss, thought Bravestorm, but acceptable, and soon to be avenged.

Nearby, a concentrated volley thudded into Shas’ui Vosdao’s battlesuit. A string of explosions tore it apart in a bloom of flame. Bravestorm cried out in denial as he steadied his flight, rolling shoulder-first in midair. He passed over the Space Marines, his plasma rifles spitting their fury. No straight kill shots this time, but a dual strike that took the legs and throwing arm from the grenade-hurler. Let him dwell on the nature of retribution as he dies in the dirt, thought the commander.

Bravestorm’s thrust/vector suite glowed gold as he came down into a piston-cushioned crouch, his team following to take the ground behind him. Weapon-limbs fired bursts of plasma and stabbing salvos of missiles wherever the telltale blue of the foe was glimpsed through the smoke. The engagement was fast becoming a one-sided firefight that not even the boldest intruder could hope to win.

The surviving Space Marines withdrew towards the heart of the ruined hexodome, firing a hail of bolts at Bravestorm as they went. Every one of them hit home. The majority did little more than knock the commander’s balance for a moment, but the last ricocheted upward from his knee, bypassing the shield generator’s disc and detonating inside his waist joint. The explosion tore a tiny fissure in the battlesuit’s side, sending a splinter of shrapnel into the control cocoon to sizzle into Bravestorm’s own thigh with a pungent smell of cooked meat.

The commander clenched his rear teeth for a moment as stimulant injectors pricked needles into the back of his neck. His suit’s self-heal mechanisms had already gone to work, contingency cells bursting to fill the wound at its waist with bluish caulk that swiftly set iron-hard. Stimulant injectors took effect, the pain washing away in a wave of cooling numbness as the commander laid down a sidelong volley of plasma. It was intended as suppressive fire, but it cored a nearby Space Marine’s torso nonetheless.

Ahead, the Space Marines had all but disappeared inside the ruins. Over half their squad lay dead, corpses strewn in the rubble. The whole exchange had been over before the first of the cadre’s fire warrior teams had made it into pulse carbine range.

Ten Space Marines, sent to conquer an entire hexodome. The arrogance of it beggared belief.

‘Today, my comrades,’ transmitted Bravestorm over the cadre-net, striding forward with his weapons systems levelled at the breach, ‘today, we shall play the role of teacher. All teams, pursue and destroy.’

A high-pitched whine from above became a roar, then a deafening boom. The ground shook hard, jolting Bravestorm even with his command cocoon’s dampeners set to combat mode. A bulky blue invasion pod had crashed into the smoking undergrowth of the magnorail siding behind them, large enough to hold a Broadside battlesuit with room to spare. Ramp-like hull sections fell flat against the earth, clouds of violet dust swirling around them. A barrage of flak burst outward, baffling Bravestorm’s sensor suite with a storm of light and noise. On reflex the commander shot upward in a graceful leap, repulsor jet pack carrying him above the blue-armoured craft. The rest of his team followed his example without needing to be told – all bar the hotheaded Shas’ui Fal’ras, who instead levelled his fusion blaster and plasma rifle at the craft’s interior.

The thing that stormed out of the invasion pod was truly monstrous. Twice the size of a battlesuit and wider than it was tall, it was a hideous caricature of the Hero’s Mantle. It looked like a walking tank rather than a piloted suit, and it had articulated claws in place of ranged weapon systems.

‘Some kind of heavy war drone,’ transmitted Bravestorm. ‘No living thing could survive that impact. Analyse at range, then take it down.’

Splayed feet clanged as the machine crunched down the hull plates of its insertion craft. Flak blasted from frontal launchers that bracketed a slab-like midsection. Fal’ras fell backwards, opening fire. His plasma bolts sizzled ineffectually across the machine’s monolithic hull. Bravestorm and the rest of his team added fire from above. The volley scorched the thing, melting small dents into its hide, but achieved little more.

Fal’ras waited for it to clear the transport and fired his fusion blaster, confident of a point-blank kill. Searing columns of superheated energy shot out, gouging a deep groove into the thing’s hull and cooking off its remaining frag launchers.

The machine did not fall.

Giant claws shot forward with piston quickness. There was a tearing shriek of metal, and Fal’ras’ battlesuit was caught, impaled upon the whirring grinder inside the thing’s right fist. The shas’ui came apart in hideous indignity, suit and pilot mingled horribly in sprays of sparking electricity and hot blood.

Lumbering forward, the Imperial machine made a clumsy grab for Bravestorm’s leg. The commander smoothly rose out of reach before dropping sharply behind it, kicking the machine whilst it was mid-step in an attempt to overbalance it. It was like striking a loaded freight cube. He sent plasma bolts searing into the pistons at its hip, hoping to take its leg and send it sprawling. The white-hot energies spattered away without effect.

The thing was gathering speed, charging for the staggered lines of tau infantry that had formed up near the transmotive. The strike teams pock-marked its frontal armour with streams of plasma, and Bravestorm’s team added their fire. The combined fusillade turned the machine’s armour from cobalt blue to burned and blasted black, but it charged forwards nonetheless.

‘Controlled retreat!’ shouted Bravestorm over the cadre-net. ‘It’s iridium-plated!’

The fire warriors moved backwards in good order, some climbing back into the transmotive as others hurled photon grenades to buy them time. The devices detonated with blinding flashes, but they had as much effect as a pin-torch shone at a rampaging krootox.

A pug-nosed Imperial gunship roared overhead, its chugging anti-personnel cannons cutting down the fire warriors gathered close by the transmotive cylinder. The team’s cohesion broke, but their passage was hindered by the sprawling corpses of their comrades, and the resulting confusion cost them dear. The metal beast bore down on them, its footsteps shaking the earth.

Bravestorm punched his weapons yield to full, siphoning every iota of power from his shield generator to pour shots into the machine’s flank, but the thing barrelled through plasma fire and burst cannon volley alike. He had moments left before it reached the infantry. The thought of the slaughter that would ensue made the commander’s gorge rise.

Bravestorm boosted over the thing’s head, spinning mid-leap to land with a crunch right in its path.

‘Fight me then, monster!’ he shouted, his speakers blaring his challenge loud. He levelled a double shot at the hulking thing’s vision slit. The salvo did little more than scorch it. The war machine took the bait nonetheless, its entire torso swivelling at the waist as it swiped its demolition claw in a backhand arc. The disc of Bravestorm’s shield took most of the impact, but the blow connected hard nonetheless. His battlesuit flew backwards to crunch bodily into the transmotive’s transit cylinder, the impact caving in the reinforced metal of its side.

Muddled pain flared in Bravestorm’s head, his eyesight blurring even as his control cocoon’s systems glitched and shorted. His damage display suite pulsed red, alert chimes ringing insistently. The commander rerouted power, struggling to get the suit back online.

He could feel the Imperial death-machine stomping towards him, deadly purpose in every earth-shaking step.

The sensor suite fizzed back to life, and Bravestorm set his jaw as he levelled another volley. Still it did nothing. The monster had to be built specifically to resist plasma.

The thing was lumbering on, fire warriors scrabbling away from it on all sides. He did not blame them. They had two choices – flee, or die where they stood. Though he felt revulsion to admit it, perhaps the scattering infantry had the right idea.

Wan light glinted from the Imperial walker as it stormed in close, only fifteen feet away now. Its gauntlet fist flexed wide, the drills of its demolition claw whirring.

Bravestorm crouched and triggered his jump jets, shoulder-barging the thing with all the thrust he could muster. He rebounded hard from its torso, triggering his repulsor jets to skid away through the sparse undergrowth of the magnorail siding.

The machine tried to correct its charge, but its momentum was too great. It ploughed into the transmotive with such force it bowled an entire transit section over, twisting the rest of the conveyor along its length with a hideous shriek of alloys.

Bravestorm made use of the reprieve to cast about himself, searching desperately for a weapon that could deal with such heavy armour. Above him, the aerial struggle for supremacy raged on, as many contrails of humanity’s pollutants discolouring the skies as there were clean white traces of the air caste. From the west, an Imperial gunship screamed in towards them for a strafing run, guns levelled.

This time Bravestorm was ready.

‘Form a line on these coordinates!’ Symbols of request-clarification blipped on his command suite. ‘For the Tau’va! Do it now!’

Bravestorm vaulted into the air, spinning to land atop the nearest transit cylinder’s ejection cradles. His team redeployed into a line leading away from the transmotive. Just as Bravestorm had suspected, the Imperial pilot could not resist the choice enfilade in front of him. The gunship thudded fat shells into Bravestorm’s Crisis team, knocking two of them down – but in doing so, it aligned itself with the unstoppable Imperial walker beyond.

Bravestorm’s jump jets flared as he leapt from the roof of the transmotive to soar on a collision course with the gunship. The fist-like prow passed within arm’s reach. At that precise moment the commander opened fire at point-blank range into its cockpit. The plasma bolts burned the pilot to molten sludge just as the gunship’s wing slammed hard into Bravestorm’s side. Tremendous forces tore at him – it felt as if his limbs were being wrenched from his body, but incredibly the suit’s iridium held fast.

The gunship fared much worse. With its wing buckled and its cockpit ablaze, its strafing run turned into a headlong dive. Flames coursed along its fuselage as the bull-nosed gunship hurtled down to earth. Just as the Imperial walker was freeing itself from the stricken transmotive, the ruined aircraft slammed right into it with catastrophic force.

A mangled confusion of gunship, walker and transit cylinder slewed over the magnorail track before detonating spectacularly. The explosion lit the sky, Bravestorm’s displays auto-dimming a moment before a mushrooming cloud of smoke billowed from the carnage. The twisted bodies of the gunship’s Space Marine passengers mingled with the corpses of those fire warriors caught in the transit cylinder, tumbling down the siding in bloody confusion.

Bravestorm landed clumsily, his balance taken by the impact of the gunship’s wing. He overlaid a hostiles filter as he righted himself, sending the data pulsing outward. Those of his battlesuit team still standing after the Imperial craft’s pass went to work. Their plasma rifles, all but useless against the heavy walker, blasted apart the dazed Space Marines that were struggling from the gunship’s wreckage.

More fire warriors emerged from the transit cylinders to either side of the wreck, pulse carbine shots cutting down those gue’ron’sha emerging from the hexodome’s perimeter in support of their fallen kin. Here and there a wounded Imperial warrior returned fire, mass-reactive bolts punching tau infantry into the dirt, but in doing so they signed their own death warrants. Bravestorm eye-flicked target designators one after another, his weapon systems systematically destroying the remaining invaders whenever they revealed their locations. Every time his threat sensor chimed, another Space Marine was cut down.

‘Commander,’ came the transmission from his trusted saz’nami aide Et’rel, ‘there are several invaders here that are well beyond threat parameters, but still technically alive.’

‘Leave them,’ said Bravestorm, his battlesuit picking through the rubble. ‘They fought with courage and pose no further danger to us. Secure a perimeter. I have data to accrue.’

The burning wreckage of the transmotive had buckled in a great loop that dangled over the siding, and the ruined gunship had flipped over to expose the torn passenger bay beneath. In the middle of the carnage was the heavy walker, half-crumpled by the tremendous impact of the crashing aircraft.

Bravestorm hovered closer, his sensor suite on high alert for any sign of threat. There was information to be harvested here, information the earth caste would value highly. Perhaps there were materials the Imperium made use of that surpassed even the hardiness of his battlesuit’s iridium alloy. Unlikely, but O’Vesa would never forgive him if he didn’t at least try to find out.

Milky liquid drizzled from the crippled war machine’s chest unit, bubbling and popping in the electrical fires swathing its legs. Lubricant, thought Bravestorm. He zoomed in. The fluid was shot through with blood.

Something was moving inside the torso unit. Something broken and sick.

Bravestorm held his plasma rifle steady and extruded a hand from his battlesuit’s shield gauntlet. Gripping the blackened metal of the machine’s midsection, he carefully lifted the flaking hull plate up and outward, leaning forward to peer inside.

The creature that stared back made his breath catch.

A twisted and grotesque figure was trapped inside, all barrel chest and atrophied stumps. It stared up at him from sunken sockets, its undisguised hatred almost palpable. Wires and tubes penetrated its horrifically abused body in a hundred places. It wheezed, red-black fluids spilling from a broken jaw that worked and gummed as if it could click back into place through willpower alone.

A glut of milky liquid poured from around its sutured waist as it jerked, spitting a gobbet of half-clotted blood onto Bravestorm’s ochre paintwork. Bravestorm’s sensor suite performed a threat analysis as the liquid burned through his synth layer. The clot was laced with a potent acid.

The commander recoiled as the thing’s stink was filtered through his olfactory relay, and the battlesuit jerked upright in response. His autotrans flashed, spool-script rendering the creature’s slurred words in the tau lexicon.

‘– –DIE IN PAIN – – FOREIGN WORM THING – –’

Standing upright, the commander placed a hoof-like foot upon the creature’s torso and triggered the punch-cylinder under its sole. A thin tube of titanium thumped into the thing’s ruined flesh before withdrawing with a neat click. The device was intended for geological analysis, installed by the earth caste to be used whenever the tau set foot on a new world, but Bravestorm knew from experience it could read biological information just as well.

Keeping one eye on the plasma rifle’s designator, he used the other to scan the assessment screen in the rounded corner of his cocoon. The necrotic thing was human, or a close derivative. Extensive tissue damage, rejuvenation scars, and…

The commander looked again in horror.

Somehow, the vile thing was over six thousand years old.

A macabre realisation crept through Bravestorm’s mind. This abomination had been trapped in its armoured war-coffin long before the tau’s ancestors had first emerged from their caves. What manner of enemy were they fighting upon Dal’yth?

‘– – KILL ME – – VEXING FOOL – –’ spooled the autotrans. ‘– – KILL ME – – OR I SHALL HUNT YOU UNTIL DEATH – –’

Bravestorm triggered his plasma rifle, and the creature met its final oblivion.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Cover illustration by Pedro Nunez.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-465-7

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