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The Rust Wastes, Southern Hemisphere, Arkunasha

Commander Farsight was struck by a dozen bullets at once. The solid slugs punched into the armoured plates of his Crisis battlesuit, each hitting hard enough for him to feel within its control cocoon. More impacts dented the ochre plates of the XV8’s exterior. He swung his shield generator to block the gunfire, the shallow dome it projected rippling at each impact. Above his command suite’s damage display, a holographic doppelganger of his suit pulsed red.

The orks in the storm outside were shooting at anything that moved, roaring in their bestial tongue as they emptied their guns into the tempest. Their fusillade had raw kinetic power, but little chance of penetrating a battlesuit’s nanocrystalline alloy. Farsight’s elite Crisis teams could theoretically ride out an ork volley with no more than superficial damage. Even a basic XV8 pilot could hold out long enough to kill his attackers.

The cadre’s fire warrior infantry could not.

Tau bodies littered the rust dunes, chewed to dismal ruin by the killer storm and the relentless hail of ork firepower.

‘Beasts,’ spat Farsight, recalibrating his plasma rifle for close-range engagement. With the howling gale turning the air red with oxide particles, long-distance marksmanship was out of the question.

There was a momentary lull in the din of battle. Sensing an opportunity, the commander broke left into the storm. He kept his shield raised and his cowled head-unit turned away as his sensors extrapolated the paths of the largest calibre bullets to strike him. Ghostly lines flickered across his targeting bay, each a ballistic trajectory.

The analysis was complete in a microdec, confirming the firing solution Farsight had already put in place. His index finger twitched three times, and the long cylinder of his plasma rifle seared with staccato bursts. Each bolt of plasma silenced a heavy gun hidden in the storm.

Farsight’s humourless smile soon fell away. Such kills would have been routine in an open battlescape. In the training simulations he had undertaken as a cadet, he had taken entire waves of orks apart with systematic efficiency. But the reality of Arkunasha was worse than Tutor Sha’kan’thas had ever imagined.

The immense tornados haunting the rust planet’s wilderness whipped great swathes of its ferrous deserts into the air, flinging tiny metal fragments at a terrifying pace. An unarmoured tau warrior would be chewed to ruin before he could escape the storm. Even inside his battlesuit, Farsight could practically feel the airborne rust gnawing at him, its violent energies rendering his suit’s blacksun filter next to useless. As well as disrupting any kind of electronic surveillance, the tempest made it impossible to maintain battlefield cohesion. For the orks, a race that thrived on anarchy, the storm was an inconvenience. For the tau, it was a nightmare.

The commander scanned left on instinct. Sure enough, a knot of hulking orks was barrelling out of the murk. They were almost as broad as they were tall, clad in soiled cloth and beaten metal plate. In their calloused fists they clutched crude bludgeons, whirring mechanical axes and boxy pistols. Their bucket jaws hung low, exposing blunt yellow tusks. The orks charged, roaring like hungry predators hunting fresh prey.

They found something else entirely.

The commander took a long step backwards before firing, coring the nearest beast with a plasma bolt. The second ork was close behind; a blinding arc of light seared from the fusion blaster on Farsight’s right arm, and the creature collapsed in a puff of scattering ash.

The third greenskin charged with a roar, bringing its chain-toothed axe down in an overhead sweep. Farsight’s rifleman stance became a low crouch, and he blinked his shield generator to maximum just as the ork’s blow was about to connect. The generator’s flaring energy field hurled the ork backwards, the commander swiftly taking its head with a plasma shot to the jaw. The storm snatched the thing’s decapitated body into the vortex like so many others.

Farsight recalibrated his sensors, adjusting his blacksun filter to mask out the storm’s latest assault. Bloodstained corpses lay everywhere, tau and ork alike. Some were slumped on the dunes, whilst others hurtled through the air upon violent winds.

To his right, Farsight saw a lone gun drone struggle against the storm before being whipped into the hurricane. Behind it, a team of Crisis suits stalked over the crest of a dune, jetpack vents glowing blue.

‘Keep your altitude low!’ shouted Farsight. A gold symbol of acknowledgement flickered on his command suite. The wind changed abruptly, and another battlesuit team emerged from the red haze, Commander Sha’vastos at their head. The old warrior picked off a cluster of nearby orks with precise bursts of plasma, his team matching him as best they could. The orks broke, scattering from sight.

‘We cannot win this war, Commander Farsight,’ transmitted Sha’vastos over a closed frequency. ‘We cannot battle two foes at once. We fight the storm and the ork infestation, yet we have mastered neither.’

‘Keep scanning, Sha’vastos. Recalibrate every dec if necessary. Tooth Jaw is in here somewhere.’

In his heart, Farsight knew Sha’vastos was right. The ferrous sands gummed engine vents, clogged ball-and-socket joints and baffled electromagnetic sensors. Exactly the kind of scenario his tutors had said to avoid.

‘All teams compensate for the storm as best you can,’ transmitted Farsight into the cadre-level net. With any luck, it would reach at least some of his teams. Some sent the gold of acknowledgement, a loose constellation of icons blipping across his distribution array. Others remained the silver that denoted an unconfirmed status. A worrying number had turned the charcoal grey of death.

The commander felt his throat tighten. They were losing.

He pushed on through the storm, his sensors reaching out for signs of his quarry. A white-yellow heat signal flickered, and he bore down upon it at top speed. A many-armed smudge began to resolve in the rust clouds ahead. Its silhouette slowly coalesced into one of the barrel-bodied contraptions the orks used as walkers.

The commander’s face twisted, disgusted by the mockery of the Hero’s Mantle confronting him. The waddling scrapheap was a single-pilot war machine, but there the similarity with a tau battlesuit ended.

Such ugliness. Such inefficiency. Yet the thing was clearly dangerous; its hydraulic shears were crusted with tau blood.

The commander’s plasma rifle burned a fist-sized hole through the thing’s metal plates. The ork walker stomped on regardless and returned fire, the solid slugs ricocheting from the invisible disc of Farsight’s shield generator. The monstrosity’s joints wheezed steam and drizzled oil as it came about in clumsy, limping increments. Around the machine came a mob of hollering orks, their porcine eyes glinting in the storm’s strange twilight.

Farsight didn’t need his sensor programs to find the lumpen thing’s weak spot. He broke left, drawing the walker’s ork followers towards him, and then suddenly burst right. Pounding a wide circle to the clanking walker’s rear, he slashed his fusion blaster’s beam into its midsection. The shot cut through the boiler door strapped over its power plant, and the walker exploded. A ring of knife-sharp shrapnel burst outwards. Farsight rolled with the impact, but the orks who had been advancing alongside the walker were shredded.

A secure frequency stuttered open.

‘The storm’s eye is moving counter-intuitively, commander,’ transmitted Sha’vastos. ‘Our cadres cannot sustain much more of this.’

‘I realise that, Sha’vastos,’ replied Farsight, firing into a knot of orks as he came alongside one of his XV8 shas’ui veterans, ‘yet unless we make it to the eye, escape is impossible. We must press on.’

His sensor suite flared a red warning. Anomalous readings spiked as an energy build-up bloomed from his right, crackling like a thunderhead about to strike. In a flash of green light, the XV8 shas’ui simply disappeared from the waist down.

Farsight staggered back in shock as the pilot, his legs shorn completely, slithered from the control cocoon. The remains of his battlesuit fell sparking onto the rust dunes.

Righting himself, the commander leaned into the storm and pushed towards the source of the hideous attack. His sensors detected more of the powerful energy emissions typical of the orks’ mechanic caste. He could just make out a loose group of the creatures up ahead. All were clad in thick piston-driven armour, but one had a strange contraption strapped to its back. Its readings shone with aggressive brilliance on Farsight’s sensor unit.

‘Ork elders located,’ he transmitted. ‘All teams close on my position.’

Finding a firing solution, he loosed a burning bolt of plasma. It dissipated at the last moment, dispersing across a crackling dome of force.

‘Sha’vastos,’ said Farsight, his tone grave, ‘they have portable shield technology. Appending footage.’

‘Send it to El’Vesa. It’s his field.’

‘No time,’ Farsight lied.

Taking a gunman’s crouch behind the lip of a dune, the commander joined his fusion blaster’s beam to the trajectory of his plasma rifle and poured everything he had at the ork mechanic caste. The primitive power field overloaded in a shower of sparks, sending greenskin elders stumbling backwards.

The flame-painted battlesuit of the young Commander Brightsword burst from the tempest to leap over Farsight’s position. Twin fusion beams cut a great ‘X’ into the rust dunes, reducing all bar one of the ork mechanics to steaming ruin.

‘Die, worthless ones,’ Brightsword said through his XV8’s vocalisers. ‘This planet is ours!’

The symbol of Stealth Team Tar’osa appeared on Farsight’s distribution array, the telltale ripple of their passage gliding through the storm nearby. They were heading to intercept a scrawny ork in brightly coloured attire with a highly unusual heat signature. Farsight punched the creature’s image up close. For some reason, the writhing ork was being held in the grip of two much larger specimens. Some trick of the storm’s light made it look as if the beast’s eyes were aflame.

Farsight watched the ork spasm, the bio-sign readings on his sensor suite going haywire. The commander felt his blood thunder within his veins as a sickly light poured from the alien’s eyes and mouth. Blinding whips of green-white energy lashed from the greenskin’s cranium. Several grounded on Stealth Team Tar’osa, rendering the shimmering battlesuits visible for a flickering moment just as they levelled their burst cannons.

Then the crackling energies simply erased the tau from existence.

Crying out, Farsight triggered his battlesuit jets and boosted low through the storm to their position. A threat alarm blipped insistently; he had left his fellow Crisis pilots out of formation in his wake. He ignored it. Such unnatural horrors could not be allowed to survive.

A shot from his plasma rifle cut one of the creature’s ork bodyguards down, its muscular flank burned away. The other ork stepped in, axe raised. A contemptuous shot from Farsight’s fusion blaster vaporised it.

Before the commander could make another kill, the gangling ork wretch convulsed, its snaggletooth maw yawning wide. Heaving forwards, it vomited a kaleidoscopic geyser of energy that struck Farsight’s customised Crisis battlesuit full in the chest.

Fierce spears of light jabbed at Farsight’s eyes as his entire control console went haywire. He could see nothing but crazed static, his targeting systems glitching and unresponsive. Even his motive units had stopped working.

Unable to fight the storm, Farsight’s Crisis suit toppled onto its side. His audio picked up the ork’s febrile yammering outside. The commander twitched his fingers inside his control gauntlets, each gesture calling for a kill.

Nothing happened.

The commander blink-jabbed fail-safe icons, but even they were offline. He could see a yellowish fluid bubbling through his hatch seals, its suffocating stench filling the cocoon. His throat was scorched with every gasping breath. He yanked hard at the mechanical release lever, but it was stuck fast.

His battlesuit had become a tomb.

Farsight took a desperate glance through the plexus vision slit. The control cocoon was filling with smoke, the stench of burning electrics and ork bile chokingly intense. Eyes watering, the commander disengaged his buckle clasps and kicked hard at the manual release panel. The seals depressurised with a hiss. Still the torso unit did not open.

The smell of boiling vomit clawed at Farsight’s throat, eyes and skin. Lungs burning, he braced against the cocoon’s backrest and placed both feet on the hatch. He kicked out hard and sharp, but it shifted less than a finger’s breadth.

Farsight channelled his pent-up anger and frustration; the fires of desperation roared within his soul.

With a great cry, he pushed as hard as he could.

The hatch groaned for a single microdec, then sprang open. Farsight fell into the howling storm. He landed on his hands and knees on a dune of sharp-edged rust, as vulnerable as a newborn.

Razored flinders chewed at his face and hands as he stumbled away from the sparking wreck of his battlesuit. A sudden gale hurled him from his feet, and the commander scrambled backwards over the lip of a dune. The rust sliced his nimble pilot’s fingers to the bone, terrifying pain wracking his hands as the tops of his digits were carved away. He felt terror creep over his mind as he realised his hands were all but useless. He could not pilot a battlesuit now, even were he safe inside one.

Farsight shielded his face to draw in a foul-tasting lungful of hot air, getting a mouthful of rusty sand for his efforts. He fell, coughing hard as splintered metal stabbed him in a thousand places at once. Mind blazing, he tried to focus, to somehow grasp a strand of hope that could lead to his escape.

An insistent buzzing grew louder over the howling gale, accompanied by the thin screech of metal. The silhouettes of three ork walkers emerged from the tempest. Rotary saws at the end of each of their limbs buzzed loudly.

A giant of an ork stomped amongst them, its sutured body as much metal as flesh. It was easily the ugliest thing Farsight had ever seen. Beneath a crown of crackling antennae, a scarred head peered through the storm, its leer obscured by a jutting metal jaw and the buzzsaws that revved in place of its hands.

The pig-like eyes of Dok Toofjaw glinted red, lit by the fires of malice.

Then the buzzsaws came down to end the Arkunashan war once and for all.

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First published in Great Britain in 2015.
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