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Elemental Council – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

Don’t look away, Ke thought, her knees shaking. Look the hunter in his eyes.

The armoured fire warrior drew closer. The burly team leader, Relo – a shas’ui whose name meant ‘the Undercut’, a second-rank hunter in charge of five warriors of his caste – loomed over her. His hunched shoulders and shaved head eclipsed the sterile light from the lumen strips burning in the panel walls. His growling breath reminded Ke of an idling human chainsword, a deep buzz potent with ancient fury. Like all earth caste field engineers assigned to this system, Ke had meticulously studied the holographic archives of the Cao Quo coalition’s historical battle encounters with the rotting Imperium of Mankind during the War of the Day and Night. Every time she had tracked through the image captures, fear had ached in her gut, tingling in the back of her throat.

Here, new fear usurped the old. Even armed with chainswords and their own febrile faith, the human rabble of the Imperium could never match the stark hunter-killer standing before her.

‘Have you ever run for your life?’ Relo asked. ‘Ever run and known the difference between whether you live or die is how fast you go, and how far?’

‘No,’ Ke squeaked, her eyes unmoving.

The fire warrior jerked the earth caste engineer closer, gazing at something within her – something fragile and weak. Spittle gleamed on the medical-grade steel of his teeth. Replacements after some engagement in youth, to judge by the scar-knotted battlefield of his face. Blue wads of keloid gnarled his cerulean flesh, as war-torn as the wasted moonscape of Thapes Quo, the satellite the Empire now sought to prise from the Imperium’s rigor-mortis grip. The tang of his breath wafted through the olfactory relay of Ke’s combat-engineering suit, and her nasal chasm twitched.

‘You will die. With your field suit, or without it. The next dawn that rises over this rock will see our corpses and eight thousand more. And still, the Empire will stand.’

At that moment, Ke understood what her colleagues in the engineering enclave had always wanted her to know. With their teasing, their mockery. With their incessant gibes at her mentor’s disgrace, the stain that had left upon her.

Ke was a scared, small thing. If she wanted to belong, she would have to fight for it.

Don’t look away.

Her panic had started during the briefing.

The shadow of epiphany had tickled Ke’s brain as she pretended the boom of distant artillery didn’t scare her. Each impact shuddered through the bedrock, and moon dust finer than sand showered the t’au in the fortified dugout. Bullet-pocked panels of cannibalised fio’tak – a nanocrystalline ceramicised alloy – rattled on the walls, as if the entrenchments yearned to crush their captors. After prising the fortifications from the Imperium’s forces, the t’au had spent two days hastily reinforcing their position for today’s assault on Castellum Epiphania, humanity’s last sanctuary in the system.

Relo continued unperturbed. The holograms for his mission briefing glided before them, ennobling the dim bunker with the assuaging glow of holy enlightenment and high technology. ‘Once the Manta drop force gains a foothold in Castellum, our exploitation cadres advance.’ The team leader slashed his hand through the air, and the next stage of the operation played out before them like a ballet of ghosts. ‘It is essential our communications amplifier is up by then. Without this amplifier, the coalition’s advance will falter. We will not capture Castellum. We will lose our chance to take this moon as we took Cao Quo.’

Ke scanned the hologram, drinking the information into the folds of her brain. Gold blips represented t’au coalition units. Assault cadres from three Manta missile destroyers, forty exploitation cadres, six air caste sorties. The shimmering icons darted like minnows through a cloud of red sigils representing their benighted foes. Humanity would not surrender Thapes Quo without a fight. Not the mad gue’la zealots, whose guns had spirits, whose swords had teeth.

Ke shivered, glancing around. Relo and his five hunters showed no fear. She sucked in a lungful of dusty air, wondering if their fear differed from hers. In that briefest of breaths, she wished in her heart of blasphemies that she was fire caste, too. To hunt, and kill, and die in submission to the sacred T’au’va. To fear no enemy, nor shame.

Relo briefed their command hierarchy, then communications and signals protocols. The first-rank shas’la in his team listened attentively, pulse carbines strapped across their impact carapace, their backs straight despite the burden of their armour. Smooth helmets hung from their pouch-crowded belts, dented and dinged from a thousand near misses. Life expectancy on the gruelling front lines of Thapes Quo had averaged three hours since the coalition’s forces had arrived on the moon. How long could Ke last?

Relo stroked the projector again, and the hologram faded to ghost light. ‘That is all I have. Fio’ui Na’tar, respected supervisor of the engineering enclave. Tell us what we must know to help you erect this amplifier. Then we depart.’

The grubby earth caste supervisor’s thin lips curled into a smile – a human expression, an element of that species’ facio-gestural language that had deviously infiltrated t’au gestural. Though the Empire warred with the Imperium, many humans had prospered – some might say festered – across the Empire at large. In these minor ways, their customs and quirks had warped t’au culture.

‘I concede this honour to Fio’la Ke, my enclave’s apprentice engineer,’ Na’tar said. ‘She was eager for the opportunity to field-test her engineering suit today. She will brief the mission’s engineering component herself.’

Seven pairs of eyes lanced Ke where she stood. Ensconced within the ugly prototype suit she had assembled after the War of the Day and Night, she was sticky with sweat. The suit’s heat sink burned on her lower back, its strained cooling system sputtering, testing its power supply. The utterly functional ensemble would have resembled an uncloaked XV15 stealth suit, if not for its missing impact armour and exposed circuitry. Hardpoints on its wrists and shoulders contained field tools Ke could activate with a blink in her helmet display, or a whisper, or a well-timed prompt from her drone’s predictive intelligence. The drone itself – Rot’va, the Greater Annoyance – resided in a domed dish jutting from her back, its rim twice the span of her shoulders, a hard halo of polymers and metal. Lights in his chassis blinked, but Rot’va remained silent. The drone was as nervous as Ke.

Ke withered under the others’ gazes, and Na’tar’s crooked smile deepened. She cleared her throat, tapping the control screen on her bracer, eating the digits with her eyes, searching for words. Na’tar had not lied. She desired to prove her experimental suit’s utility in this operation. To prove her own utility. All of that seemed far beyond her grasp.

The words haunted Ke’s tongue, unspoken. Erect the cadrelink amplifier. The suit can do it. Say it, Ke.

Speak!

Relo tapped the built-in chronometer on his vambrace. ‘The Fireblade needs us, engineer.’

Another barrage of artillery rattled panels on the walls. Planting one hoof after the other, Ke backed from the dugout and bowed, moving into the covered trenches without, burning like the sun with shame. She lacked the courage even to excuse herself.

Relo had stormed out after Ke, fists clenched into clubs, his teeth bared in anger. But when the team leader found her – when his eyes had met hers, her suit frame clinking as her legs quivered – he had relaxed.

That was when he had spoken.

Relo released her and exhaled. ‘I have run. I have run like a coward, engineer, for that is how hunters run. First, from the ork hordes. Then from the tyranid swarms. And the T’au’va fill my soul, every caste-brother and sister whose blood has graced the edge of my bonding knife has run from humanity. Running is in our bones, fio’la. No shame in it. Only prudence. Then a better firing position and the Killing Blow.’

Ke shrank as another strike blasted the surface above, and a lumen strip flickered. ‘I can’t brief your team. I can’t conduct this operation.’

‘You can and will. The Fireblade needs us. You tremble like a youth. You are a first-rank engineer, sister of earth. A full fio’la.’

‘Was it so hard? Your first time?’

‘My first time, three hundred screaming human penal conscripts with foam in their mouths and red in their eyes plunged into my cadre’s wall of fire. Three hundred more followed them. They fell and they died, or they lived and they crawled. They squirmed through their own wire obstacles, mangling themselves for a chance to strangle us with their wretched, bleeding hands. Do not compare yourself to me. I am a brother of fire. You are a sister of earth. Be earth. As steady as the world.’

Ke’s eyes dropped as Relo gently splayed one hand behind the other. It was the eclipsed sun – an alignment of purposes. ‘I am so afraid,’ she whispered.

Relo clasped his rifle. ‘Of death?’

‘Of failure. Or success. Because no matter what comes after this, my brothers and sisters in the enclave will mock me. I will return, and they will ignore my feats or taunt my failures. Or I will die and they will forget who I ever was. What I do is not enough. I’m not enough. Not for my caste. Not for the Empire.’

The team leader canted his head, like an earth caste researcher observing the most peculiar of stellar phenomena. ‘I know of you. You are the last pupil of the Broken Hammer.’

Ke could not feel any smaller. ‘My teacher created the Twice Forged Steel school of engineering, to unite spirit and deed through technology,’ she said. ‘I’m the last of his students, the last who adheres to his engineering principles. His teachings are all but extinct.’ She whiffled in vain laughter, feeling as pathetic as she must have sounded. ‘It’s a dead dream. I cannot redeem its shame.’

The hunter pulsed with breathless mirth, his shield pauldron bouncing on his weak-side arm.

Ke’s head fell. ‘And now you mock me, too. I am no one.’

Relo regained his composure. ‘Ke. I cannot speak to your shame. You other castes bicker over your thousand schools of thought. We fire warriors have two ways. The Patient Hunter, the Killing Blow. Perhaps I am too simple to understand. Perhaps that is my strength. But you? You think too much.’

Ke said nothing. The muscled fire warrior leaned closer. Ke thought he meant to embrace her – to comfort her as the Broken Hammer had once comforted her, as roving drone nurses hummed the songs of ancient mothers to soothe squealing babes in a communal creche at night.

Instead he gripped the hard collar of her suit and heaved her to her hooves. Rot’va chirred as his drone shell rammed the wall.

‘I have served with many of your caste,’ Relo said. ‘Medical. Engineering. You are all the same before the hunt. You are t’au, sister. More than that, you are earth caste. If you doubt your place here, let me assure you. You do not belong on this moon, nor in this war. If you did, it would not be so difficult convincing you to do your job. You can do it, yes? I have never seen fewer than three engineers raise an amplifier in combat conditions.’

Ke brightened. She raised her arms, admiring her masterpiece. Her suit resembled a battlesuit, naked and unpainted, stripped of impact plating, the torso element little more than a hermetically sealed bodysuit with tool hardpoints and a frame musculature. The lower half was bulkier by far, with fibre-cable muscles joined in smooth plaits after hours of loving labour. Finlike heat sinks protruded from her hips, around the cylinder of her power core. Rot’va’s auxiliary cells purred smoothly from his dome-like shell on her back.

The suit was experimental. It was clearly experimental. But it was the work of Ke’s own hands, imbued with the artistry of her teacher and the loving wisdom he had ingrained in her, the imperfections he had smoothed from his pupil like a carpenter sanding flaws from prized timber in long, slow strokes.

Ke’s arms clanked at her sides. ‘The suit is designed for engineering in combat conditions. It has the strength of twelve t’au, a diagnostics and survey suite, and a void-grade welding attachment. It has armouring capacity, too. I could tune your rifle until it sings, or replace a Devilfish engine in standard time.’

‘I did not ask about these things.’

‘It can get the amplifier up. I’ve tested it in lab conditions. What takes a full engineering complement four hours, I can accomplish in two. But I need to field-test it.’

Relo grunted, satisfied. He pointed to the briefing dugout. ‘Can it brief a team of fire warriors?’

A smile curled Ke’s fingers. ‘Not without me. I will brief your hunters, shas’ui. Whatever good it does.’

‘You doubt we will understand you?’

‘I guarantee it.’

Relo chuckled, the sound like a chugging motor. ‘Confident. Good. Just be quick. The Fireblade needs us. Her Manta flight and drop contingent have already launched.’

Ke signed acknowledgement, a chill running from her spine to her hooves. She could do this. She could be like Relo.

She hiked after him towards the dugout, flinching as another artillery barrage rocked the covered trenches. The lumens flickered again. These impacts were closer.

The ceiling came apart in an avalanche of dirt and noise. Tortured earth poured down, burying Relo up to his thigh armour. Grit and fragmented metal pelted Ke’s suit. As the dust settled, a fog of smoke expanded from the breach. In the haze, shattered lumen strips swung on snapping wires, spitting with unchained energy.

Ke hacked for clean air, until her visor snapped closed and her helmet lighting switched on. She trudged forward, wrenching Relo from a drift of gravel. ‘A direct hit?’ she sputtered.

‘Direct hit.’ Relo found his hooves, brushing dirt from his lips. He glanced at the breach and froze.

A motion-sensor reticle in Ke’s display highlighted his hand, his trigger finger twitching.

Ahead, the sick light of Thapes Quo’s dun sky oozed from the ruptured fortifications. In the dust-filled breach, three enemy troopers loomed, their laspistols and saw-toothed blades silhouetted against the glare. Ke’s display reticles highlighted movement behind them. More troopers slid down a crater, steadying themselves against the blasted earth.

The humans’ feet, ensnared in synth-leather boots, thudded into the heap of smoking dirt in the covered trench. Pins chinkled on primitive fragmentation grenades stuffed into assault bandoliers festooning their pitted flak armour. The first soldier’s sword screamed to life, its crude motor belching promethium fumes. A track of cutting teeth skittered along its blade. The alien locked eyes with Relo, gargling in Low Gothic to his comrades.

Ke’s heart pounded. Relo’s rifle squealed as he shouldered it, taking aim. ‘Change of plans. We fight them here and now.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
This eBook edition published in 2024 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Christian Byrne.

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