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Warhammer 40,000

Shadowsun: The Last of Kiru's Line

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It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

On this spot,
in the year of our Lord and Saviour 970.M30,

THE IMMORTAL EMPEROR OF MANKIND

and his Great Crusade touched down upon the surface of Diepr-3.

And when He beheld the verdant beauty of this world, He wept; and His tears fell into the waters of these lakes and made them Holy.

Blessed be those who partake of this water,
for they shall gain strength and insight if
they so need it.

And blessed be those to whom the Emperor
hath entrusted this world.

May they never forget their most sacred of duties.

The ursaloth yawned and stretched his front paws as he emerged from his cave. He had awoken earlier than normal this morning. The sun had not yet come up over the eastern mountains and the valley was still cloaked in cool mists and murky shadows of blue. He sat down heavily on the damp ground and scratched himself. Part of him still yearned for sleep; spring was only a few weeks old and by all rights he ought to still be hibernating. Then his stomach growled with hunger and all other considerations were forgotten. He righted himself and plodded heavily down the hillside along a well-worn path that led to a nearby river.

His massive antlers brushed against the lowest limbs of the conifers as he made his way. Tufts of his thick black fur got caught in the brambles. He walked slowly because he was old and his knees ached on cool mornings like this one. He also walked fearlessly because, despite his advanced age, he was well aware that his massive strength and size would deter all but the most resolute pack of predators. He was the lord and master of this world, he knew, and a king ought not to rush himself.

To the east, the mountains were backlit with a pale lavender hue that steadily grew brighter and brighter. Then, quite suddenly, the sun rose over the snow-dusted peaks, and the world displayed its true colours. The face of the rocky cliffs wasn’t purple after all, but a deep crimson slashed through with burgundy. The forest threw off its inky cloak and became a patchwork of yellow and green, pristine and undisturbed. A sunbeam fell on his back, and the ursaloth shrugged contentedly.

At last, he came to the water’s edge, where the thick trees gave way to a space of stony ground. The river was flowing quickly, boosted by the melt running down from the mountain tops. It splashed and gurgled so loudly in fact, that his arrival went unnoticed by a flock of geese that had perched atop of his favourite fishing boulder. He gave a low growl to announce his presence, and the birds, skittish creatures at the best of times, took to the skies with a cacophonic flapping of their wings. Satisfied, the old ursaloth cautiously made his way up the boulder, then sat down and extended the talons on one of his massive front paws. He let it hover over the surface of the water and waited for the moment to strike. A school of fish were wriggling closer and closer.

The ursaloth licked his snout in anticipation and was about to strike, when a blinding beam of light stabbed upwards through the southern skies. He barely managed to raise his head to register it before it vanished. He blinked feverishly, but try as he might, he couldn’t clear the purple after-images from his eyes. He nuzzled his face against the water-slick coolness of his boulder, but that too provided no relief.

Then came a blast of wind, hotter than anything he had ever known. The limbs of the pine trees bowed severely. Several of their tops snapped and fell to the ground. This confused the ursaloth all the more; it was springtime and the summer storms were months away. When the blistering wind had passed and the trees had righted themselves, an unnatural quiet descended on the forest. The ursaloth, blinking away tears from his burning eyes, sniffed the still air. Beyond the stink of his singed fur, the world had a sour tang to it. Everything was seared and dry, as if the sudden wind had sucked all the moisture from the grass and trees.

He cocked his head and strained. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be, but he could make out a series of muffled booms. Now, there was a sharp whistling sound. It was high-pitched and soft; so soft as to be almost undetectable, but it was growing steadily louder. Then, he heard another one. And another. And another. What was happening here?

He splashed out into the middle of the river, his breakfast totally forgotten. Perhaps, he thought, the geese were coming back to steal his fishing rock from him. True, the geese never made sounds like this, but what other explanation was there? He craned his ancient neck and looked upwards, towards the sounds. What he saw made no sense at all.

Giant chunks of fire were raining from the sky. Their nuclei were wreathed in swirling yellows and oranges; long, red contrails stretched out in their wake, and behind that, trailed kilometres of black smoke. They made a screaming noise as they fell. Within moments, it was deafening. The ursaloth roared his displeasure. His was supposed to be an unchanging realm.

The ground shook as the first of the intrusive meteors impacted somewhere to the north-west. A terrible explosion rolled across the forest: a gut-wrenching, deep bass boom that stifled the king in mid-growl. The other pieces now finished their long fall, pummelling the world with their terrible mass and velocity. The old ursaloth stood midstream, paralysed, as again and again the stones beneath him rumbled and shook. When at last the worst of the earthquakes had subsided, he looked to the heavens again. The rain of gigantic fireballs seemed to be over with. Only smaller embers continued to fall, slashing blackened lines across the sky as he himself might shred the bark off a tree.

The bright morning sun was becoming obscured by a thickening haze of dust and ash and smoke. Birds of every shape and size were fleeing southwards. On either bank, long-legged deer rushed past. Small, furry rodents leapt from branch to branch in a mad dash towards safety. The ursaloth twitched his massive, runny nose. There was a bad smell on the wind, one that he had known many times. One did not live in the forest as long as he had and not encounter at least one wildfire. The other animals were correct to flee; the only thing to do in such a situation was to head towards the cool dampness of the lowlands. It was dangerous; the swamps were home to creatures that did not like to be disturbed. Yet, it was better than being burned alive. So, with watering eyes and an empty belly, he splashed south along the river bank. Behind him, the parched woods were quickly consumed by licking orange tongues and growing swaths of flame.

Some time later, he came to a place dimly remembered from his youth. Here, the land dropped away sharply and the river spilled over the rock ledge in a prismatic waterfall. The noonday sun was being smothered by a grey veil. What he could see of the horizon glowed dull red. It was, all of it, most unnatural.

He froze. Something alien was sitting in the river, very near the drop off. It was very large, about half as big as he, with a smooth surface and rounded edges. It had a shell of some kind that was brilliant white in the few places where it was not blackened and charred. It was half submerged, and around it, the water bubbled and steamed. The air was ripe with the stink of burned, otherworldly materials. He was about to take an investigative step towards it when suddenly, a portion of its shell popped off and it extended a stubby antenna. There was a light on the tip, bright blue in colour, which began to pulse rapidly. It started chirping shrilly like a baby bird.

It was more than he could stand. His entire world had been disrupted, and for no reason that he could comprehend. He roared at the mysterious thing to announce that he, not it, was the lord and master of these woods. Then he leapt from the bank and tackled it with his full bulk. The riverbed shifted under the blow, and they toppled forwards. Water rushed all around them. The ursaloth refused to let go however, and drove his talons through his enemy’s outer shell again and again. He was still doing so as they were both carried over the lip of the falls to tumble through empty space. Only when they crashed into the boulder laden pool below did he release his grip.

For a moment, the old beast was lost. There was no sense of direction, no up or down. Just frothing bubbles and roaring waters and a searing pain along his entire underside. At last his head broke the surface, and he slowly swam to shore. His paws and belly were badly burned from touching the intruder, and in the melee, it had managed to impale its blinking antenna into him like a very long wasp stinger. Still, it had been worth it. His dominion reasserted, he gave a final, triumphant roar before limping away into the underbrush.

Behind him, the object – burned, dented, and now perforated with holes – sank to the deep bottom of the pool, and began to fill with water.

Slowly, she realised that she wasn’t dead. Her people held no belief in an afterlife; one lived, and if one had lived well, one left behind a legacy. The dead were dead. They became nothing. They felt nothing. Yet, she could feel a liquid trickling down her face. Her entire body ached, and it hurt to breathe. Moreover, there was a sound like a dozen taps pouring into a bucket. She could hear and feel and, therefore, she must still be alive.

Pod, she thought groggily. Someone must have gotten her into her survival pod. She had no idea to whom she owed her thanks. Her last memory before awakening just now had been that of the command bridge exploding around her. Several air caste crew members had scrambled to get her to safety, and then the entire midsection of the ship had seemed to give way.

Instinctually, she reached up to wipe her forehead. Her fingers came away wet. With great effort, she opened her eyes. She expected to find them sticky with blood, and in a way she was correct. There was blood, but the cyan-coloured fluid was thin and runny. Diluted. Watery.

Water!

She snapped into full awareness and looked around. Being inside the pod was like being strapped tightly to a cushioned table and smothered by redundant layers of soft, white padding and sky blue, shock-absorbing gel liner. Everything about it had been designed to let her fall from the most unimaginable heights and survive. It could withstand infernal heat as well as intense cold, and its recycling system could provide her with weeks of breathable air. What it was not supposed to do, however, was fill inexorably with water, which it most certainly was.

‘Kor’ves?’ she cried out.

The computer intelligence built into the capsule had been gifted with the voice of a water caste member. Even in the face of utter disaster, it would remain calm and controlled and eternally reassuring, a true testament to the Greater Good.

‘Yes, Commander Shadowsun,’ came the reply. ‘What assistance may I offer?’

‘Report!’

‘Your atmospheric re-entry has been most successful. Regrettably, the capsule’s hull has suffered several breaches following its initial landing.’

She licked her fingers. The water was cold, but fresh. At least she wasn’t lying at the bottom of an ocean. ‘Where am I?’

‘On the daylight side of the planet designated il’Wolaho. Your exact geographic position cannot be confirmed.’

‘Why not?’

‘I have lost all contact with the remainder of the fleet, and there are no friendly satellites in orbit. Moreover, the survival pod’s uplink antenna has been forcibly removed post impact.’

‘Release the door,’ she said.

The pod made a trio of chiming sounds. ‘Unable to complete the requested function.’

She was taken aback. A kor’ves refusing a direct command? Impossible.

‘Release the door,’ she repeated. ‘That’s an order.’

For a few seconds nothing happened. She had the distinct impression that the computer was struggling with itself, assessing several directives against one another. Finally, it spoke again. ‘Unable to complete the requested function. The environment outside is potentially dangerous, given the nature of the local wildlife and the injuries you have sustained. It would be irresponsible to release you in such circumstances.’

She knew the computer was simply doing its duty. It was charged with keeping her safe and calm, and, perhaps most importantly, in one place until a rescue team could arrive. That was admirable in a way, but for all she knew, she was a sole survivor. She couldn’t afford to lie here calmly and wait. It was impossible to tell exactly how the pod had come to rest, but already her feet, legs, and back were soaking wet. She looked down her body. At this rate, the capsule would be completely filled in mere minutes. She flexed her shoulders, but the crash restraints held firm.

‘Please refrain from struggling, commander. It needlessly accelerates your heart rate and consumes the available oxygen that much faster.’

‘I’m going to drown!’ she yelled. ‘Open the damned door! Override code: Shadowsun, two-five-three-six-eight!’

‘Voice print confirmed. Command code verified.’ The pod made more chirping noises, but nothing else happened. ‘Request iiiiin progessssss,’ it slurred.

She had worked with kor’ves often enough throughout her career to know the garbled speech was a bad sign. ‘Thought-lock’, the earth caste technicians called it. The pod was convinced that she would die if it let her leave, yet equally certain that she would die if it forced her to remain. Unable to choose between two dead-end solutions, it was becoming paralysed into inactivity.

Everything below her chest was now submerged and cold. Her limbs were tingling. With numbing fingers she groped around the sides of the padded table. The seconds dragged by. Finally, she found what she was seeking. The water was below her chin.

‘Request iiiiin progessssss,’ the pod repeated.

She could barely feel the release handle, but she grasped it as tightly as she could. There was time for one final lungful of air and then the water crested her head. She yanked upwards with all her might. There was a muffled boom as the explosive bolts mounted on the exterior of the capsule detonated. The entire front section fell away suddenly, and the pod vomited out thick foam and gelsheets. The harness popped off her shoulders and legs, and from around her waist. She kicked out hard and swam towards the shimmering daylight above. She had no idea how deep she had sunk, but her lungs were burning by the time she broke the surface. The smell of wood smoke and a deafening roar of water assaulted her at once. Her head darted around, taking note of the dark green trees, the rushing waterfall and, finally, the rocky shore. Gasping and sputtering, she made her way to a sloping rock covered with moss. She dug in hard with her fingers and hauled herself up out of the water. Her hooves scrabbled on the slick rock, but eventually she managed to wrestle her way atop it and collapse onto her back.

The sun was a hazy smudge behind an obscuring grey sky. As she lay there, she eventually noticed that small objects were falling from horizon to horizon. They left fiery, smoky trails behind them.

That’s my ship, she thought detachedly. She cast her mind back, tracing over the events that had led her to this moment.

Hers had been the lead vessel. As Commander-in-Chief of the Expeditionary Force, it was both her right and her duty to lead the way and, as it turned out, to take the first fusillade of fire. The air caste cartographers had named the planet il’Wolaho – the place of bright colours. From space it was a stunning patchwork of green, yellow, red, and blue; banks of white cloud traced shifting patterns across its face. She was not one to indulge in sentimentality, but even she had been forced to admit that it was lovely. Too lovely, she had decided, for it to remain in the possession of the human gue’la; only a tau could fully appreciate the aesthetics of this world.

Intelligence had informed her that il’Wolaho, or as the unimaginative locals called it, Diepr-3, was sparsely populated to the point of being nearly uninhabited. There were fewer than five settlements of notable size. It was also barely developed; there was little evidence of road works, canals, mag-lev lines, or the like. That had been surprising at first, since it was well known that the people of the Imperium craved social interaction to an unhealthy degree. What else could explain the way in which they would lump themselves together in a single living structure filled with hundreds of millions of their fellows, while at the same time leaving the remaining surface of a planet to go to rot and waste? ‘Hive cities’, they called them: filthy places run amok with violence and disease. What was even more surprising was the fact that il’Wolaho had an intact, thriving biosphere, because humans traditionally cared nothing for environmental protection. In fact, they were habitual polluters of the worst kind, tainting and toxifying everywhere they trod.

She now realised that in her zeal to take this jewel of a world away from a barbaric people, she had neglected the gue’la penchant for war. Even a modestly populated Imperial planet would naturally possess defences against a space-borne attack. She was fully prepared to deal with surface-to-air missile batteries, or perhaps waves of aerospace interceptors. However, the magnitude of the laser that struck her command ship as it began to settle into orbit had been wholly unexpected. It shot up from the surface of il’Wolaho like concentrated starfire. Within seconds, the vessel’s protective shields collapsed. The front third of the hull vaporised away into space. Stress fractures ran the length of what remained. The lights on the bridge flickered. Reports came flooding in from all sections. Everything forward of bulkhead eight was destroyed. Main power was going off-line. Weapons were useless. The gravity drive was non-responsive.

Others in her place might have stood there stunned. Not her. Even as the tumbling remnants of her ship began to slip helplessly into il’Wolaho’s atmosphere, she ordered the rest of the fleet to back away to a safe distance and to remain at station keeping. ‘You must attempt no rescue, repeat, no rescue,’ she told them. Whatever defence system the Imperials had in place, it would make short work of any vessel that strayed too close. For the Greater Good, they must not endanger their multitude in a futile attempt to save whatever few might survive an impending, hellish re-entry.

No sooner had she given out her final orders than three willowy air caste hurried over to her. She had to get to the survival pod, they had pleaded. Time was short. She sounded the general order to abandon ship, took one last glimpse of the planet spiralling up to meet them, and turned to go. Then, the entire room detonated.

Shadowsun sat up suddenly and looked down into the pool below the waterfall. A wave of pain shot through her ribs, but she paid it no heed. ‘Battlesuit,’ she whispered.

On her left forearm she wore a personal flex-screen. The paper-thin crystal data display curled around her sleeve like a wide bracelet. It had become cracked in the crash, and its surface was dark. When she pressed her finger to its surface however, it glowed back to life.

‘Interface with survival pod kor’ves,’ she instructed it. A second later, it blinked happily that it was now in contact with the drowned escape pod.

‘Kor’ves,’ she said loudly, ‘open the main compartment and unpack the drones.’

‘Request iiiiiin progresssssssss,’ came the response.

Shadowsun cursed and waded ankle deep into the river. She tried to peer into the depths of the pool, but the waterfall churned the surface such that she couldn’t see anything. She frowned. Her suit would be stowed in the rear underside of the pod, but with the computer still frozen, she would have to open the cargo door manually.

She wished bitterly that her people were better swimmers, but between hoofed feet and a small lung capacity, the tau form was simply not well suited to an aquatic life. She was unsure how long she could hold her breath, but there was little else for it. Her survival depended on getting into her suit and unpacking her drone assistants.

She surveyed her uniform. It clung to her body in sopping, constricting, ochre layers. She would be best to doff it. She peeled open the front and shrugged out of it, not even bothering to scan the area or make sure that she was alone first. She tossed it on a nearby rock, and then wrapped the flex-screen back around her forearm. She made her way out to the middle of the frothing pool, ignoring how her blue skin began to turn purple with chill. When she came to the spot where she was convinced the pod lay, she gulped, and dove.

At first, she saw nothing but curtains of tiny white bubbles. Then, surrounded by dim boulders, she made out the survival pod. It had landed nose down and right side up, she noted. That was fortunate.

Already her chest was pounding, and she had to fight the urge to claw her way back to the surface. She kicked clumsily around to the rear underside of the pod. The hull was badly battered and blackened, and it took her a seeming eternity to find the manual access pad. As she punched in her five-digit access code, a dark notion raced across her brain. The pod has lost power, she thought. There’s no way to open this door.

With a dull thunk, a large, square cargo door fell away. In the space beyond, an unblemished white machine waited patiently. It was folded down into a compact cube: a crouching suit of armour with its arms wrapped tightly around its knees. She grabbed hold of it and pulled. With agonising slowness, it toppled forwards. When it landed on the riverbed, it kicked up plumes of silt.

Shadowsun’s whole being ached for a breath of air. She glanced upwards. The surface seemed light-years distant. Even if she started now, she knew she would never make it. Her only hope was to get into the battlesuit. Frantically, she keyed her flex-screen to interface with the battlesuit’s systems, telling it to power up and unfold itself. Lights came on behind the frosted surface of the helmet. The arms uncurled, and the legs straightened. By the time the chest piece began to hinge outwards, Shadowsun was on the verge of passing out. She squeezed herself up and under the helmet, jammed her arms and legs into place, and signalled the suit to seal itself up again.

The armour settled into place. With a steady hum, the environmental cyclers flushed the water out. Shadowsun took a long, wheezing intake of breath, and coughed.

Many times throughout her career, she had pictured the memorial they would erect of her on T’au following her death. It would be placed before the Mont’yr Battle Dome, of course, where it would stand among the other heroes of her people, immortalised in six-metre-high white marble. Along the base would read her accolades – Shadowsun, daughter of Kiru, hero of the K’resh Expansion War, scourge of the greenskin barbarians, bulwark against the hive fleets.

She chastised herself for not unpacking her equipment faster. Whatever coda might be added to her future epitaph, today it had very nearly been: drowned naked in a river while trying to get into her battlesuit.

‘Father would not approve,’ she muttered.

With a quick burst from the suit’s jet pack, she righted herself. Along the bottom of her helmet a series of interface icons glowed. She locked her eyes onto the symbol for ‘Drone Control’, and blinked twice. A tree of choices feathered up across the inside of the face plate. She selected ‘Shield Drones’, and then ‘Activation Protocols’, and set the program in motion. On either side of the survival pod, large, mushroom-shaped machines popped up from out of the hull. They were festooned with bright blue lights, and from their tops, they each sprouted two thick antennae. While they settled into place beside her, she found the control pathway for the third drone. It separated itself from the upper rear section of the escape pod. From its underside, it extruded a long, inverted fin. Special issue only to commanders of high rank such as herself, this was the machine that would let her locate and communicate with any other survivors of the crash.

She flicked her gaze from left to right, closing the drone menus. Icons for each of her new companions now glowed along the main list choices. She locked her gaze on the command-link symbol, and asked, ‘Where are we?’

The inside of her helmet lit up brightly as a tactical map was overlaid upon it; numbers scrolled across the left side of her vision. Cross hairs came to settle on the southern edge of a mountain range. She stared at it for several minutes before finally giving up. The map meant nothing to her without a larger reference frame. The last time she’d seen the planet had been from orbit.

She blinked away the map from her display, and selected ‘Communications’ from the root menu. On a hunch, she chose ‘Tightbeam, Encrypted, Tau: Orbital’, and waited.

Unlike the survival pod, the intelligence built into the command-link drone was pure fire caste. Its speech was short and clipped. It dealt only with essentials. ‘Negative. No tau ships in range.’

Good, she thought. Her last order had been obeyed. The nearest vessel would now be several light-minutes away. Unfortunately, that also meant she was on her own. She didn’t have the equipment to broadcast that far.

She chose ‘Widebeam, Encrypted, Tau: Groundside’, and cleared her throat.

‘O’Shaserra calling all ground forces,’ she said.

She was answered with silence.

‘Repeat, this is Commander Shadowsun calling any and all surviving ground forces. Acknowledge.’

Again, there was nothing save the sound of her breathing and the mild hum of the battlesuit’s oxygen scrubbers.

She instructed the command-link drone to scan for tau signals on a rotating band. When surrounded by hostile forces, and vastly outnumbered, it was standard procedure for tau soldiers to keep changing their transmission frequencies every few minutes.

She tried one last time. ‘Commander Shadowsun calling any and all surviving ground forces. Acknowledge.’

At first, there was nothing. Then, she received an answer.

‘Authorisation?’ The voice sounded young. Whoever he was, he was correct to be suspicious.

She smiled, and recited her identity code.

The youth sighed. ‘Confirmed. It’s an honour, commander. We… we thought you were lost.’

‘I’m very much alive,’ she said. ‘Identify yourself.’

‘Shas’la Fal’shia Sabu’ro,’ he replied.

Shadowsun was pleased. A fire caste communications expert. Exactly what was needed. ‘Shas’la,’ she asked, ‘are you alone?’

‘Negative, commander. There are many of us here.’

‘Who has seniority?’

‘Uh… Shas’vre Bork’an Yo’uta holds the highest rank.’

A veteran soldier by his name. Shadowsun’s hopes continued to rise. ‘I would speak with him, Shas’la.’

While she waited for young Sabu’ro to fetch his superior, Shadowsun went looking for her guns. Normally, her battlesuit carried a burst cannon mounted underneath each arm, but in order for it to be stored as compactly as possible, these had to be removed and placed in a separate storage compartment. She found them near the crumpled nose of the escape pod. Their long barrels were horribly bent, and their main mechanisms were smashed piecemeal.

‘Damn the waste,’ she spat.

‘I’m sorry, commander?’ asked a gruff voice.

She returned her attention to the data flow streaming across the bottom of her display. ‘Shas’vre Yo’uta, I presume?’

‘I am honoured,’ the voice replied. ‘What is your condition, commander?’

‘Alive with minor injuries,’ Shadowsun sighed. ‘I have a complete complement of drones, and my battlesuit is fully intact. My weapons, regrettably, were destroyed during re-entry.’

She could feel Yo’uta’s scowl across the airwaves. ‘Eighty per cent equipment survival rate,’ he said. ‘Deplorable.’

Shadowsun smiled in agreement. Whoever this Shas’vre was, he was a perfectionist like her. They were going to get along just fine. ‘We can chastise the engineers later,’ she said. ‘I need a positional fix, relative to you.’

Yo’uta queried his own kor’ves. ‘Your battlesuit I.D. marker registers as being one hundred and sixty tor’kan due west of us. I’ll lead a recovery team to your position immediately.’

‘A team? How many survivors do you have?’

‘Forty-eight in total.’

Shadowsun caught her breath; it was more than she had dared hope for. ‘What is their condition?’

‘Zero casualties upon landing,’ Yo’uta said proudly. ‘We are, all of us, fit and ready duty. Our materiel, on the other hand, is greatly reduced.’

‘Explain.’

There was a slight pause before Yo’uta spoke again. ‘You should be made aware, commander, that we didn’t land in individual escape pods. We came down in a Manta.’

Shadowsun’s eyes widened at the thought. The Manta was a combat transport of substantial size and enormous firepower. Her flagship had carried an entire wing of them.

‘It was a hard landing though,’ Yo’uta went on. ‘We took extensive damage when the command ship broke apart. The re-entry angle was far from optimal, and the forests here are very dense.’

Shadowsun got the idea. Yo’uta was trying to tell her that not only was the Manta crippled, but that it had arrived on il’Wolaho in a very obvious manner.

‘The indigenous population cannot have possibly failed to track our descent, even with their primitive technology. Our sensors have already detected three fly-bys by high-altitude aircraft, and we expect that very soon our location will be swarming with ground forces. I have, of course, issued orders to hold our position.’

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘Have you received word from any other landing parties?’

‘Yours is the only one.’

Neither of them said anything for a moment. The pause was filled by thoughts of the many, many fine tau who had died this day without even having the opportunity to take one of the enemy with them.

‘Like I said,’ Shadowsun whispered, ‘damn the waste.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Shas’vre, cancel my retrieval. You haven’t the men to spare. Send me your coordinates instead, and I’ll make my way to you.’

‘Commander Shadowsun–’

‘I said I’ll come to you,’ she snapped. She might have been unarmed, but she was far from being helpless. She had a battlesuit with full stealth capabilities and redundant protective shielding. More than that, she was Shadowsun, student of Puretide, daughter of Kiru.

If Yo’usa felt chastised, his voice didn’t reveal it. ‘Understood,’ he said curtly. A fresh stream of information scrolled along Shadowsun’s peripheral view, transmitted to her through the command drone. An updated map appeared in front of her.

‘Data received. I’m leaving now. I will maintain communications silence until I approach your position.’

She closed the channel with a flick of her eyes, ignited her jet pack, and rocketed up through the water. She made almost no noise when she landed on the shore, despite the weight of the suit. Once the three drones had come up out of the water and settled soundlessly into place around her, she headed off through the twisted, alien trees at a brisk pace. She was happy to put the waterfall behind her, but more than that, she realised, she was looking forward to a fight against the humans that had robbed her of her ship and murdered so many of her followers.

The forest was indeed very thick, just as Yo’uta had said. The trunks of the trees were twisted and covered with large burls. Their branches intertwined so tightly above her that it was oftentimes difficult to see the sky. Eons of fallen leaves covered the forest floor. Bushes and briars occupied any and all available space.

On the off chance that the humans were actually capable of intercepting tau transmissions, Shadowsun kept her comm channel closed. The journey, however, was far from silent. The sounds of the forest poured through her audio pick-ups in a constant stream. The wind rustled the leaves above her. Birds of innumerable types were chirping and honking. Small, furry creatures with luminous eyes crunched their way through the underbrush. She grew anxious after a while; worried for the soldiers at the Manta site, and fearing that she wasn’t moving nearly fast enough. Several times she considered using her jet pack thrusters to more than double her pace, but each time her father’s voice rang in her mind with one of his axioms.

Do all things once and properly. Time is a cheap investiture to ensure victory.

Although she could go bounding through the dense terrain at breakneck speeds, she might seriously injure herself. Despite her armour and forcefields, it would be all too easy to twist a joint or even break a bone. Yes, her people needed her, but she would serve no good by arriving in their midst in anything less than perfect fighting form.

The Manta had come down in a series of stony hills and, after some time, the land began to rise. The ground became stonier and the vegetation thinned to the point where she could see large patches of the sky through the limbs of the trees. Her sensor suite chimed, and she stopped in mid-step. Five gue’la aircraft were approaching from the south, flying very low and in a V-shaped formation. With a flicking motion of her fingers, she sent the command drone aloft. It deftly navigated its way through the forest canopy until it finally poked through the tallest branches. She activated the ‘Remote Viewing’ option in her console, gaining an instant panoramic view of the land.

The craft were rectangular, propelled through the air more by the brute force of turbines than any understanding of aerodynamics. Beneath their stubby wings, they each carried two enormous cylinders, which she immediately took to be bombs. A quick check reassured her that her battlesuit’s adaptive camouflage was in perfect working order. She wished again that her burst cannons had survived the crash. Designed to shred light infantry, they would have done little at all against an aerial attack, but even so, she would have been able to go down fighting. She braced herself for an inevitable eruption and shockwave.

Nothing came.

She checked her sensors again. The craft had passed her by and were continuing to the north-west. She frowned with confusion; the Manta lay eastwards. If she wasn’t their target, and neither were her men, where were heading? She made a twisting motion with one hand. The command drone spun around until she could see the enemy aircraft receding into the distance and towards a wall of fire. The entire horizon had been replaced by an orange haze that flickered and danced. Above it, a sheet of grey smoke slowly roiled and churned forward. The sky was taking on an unnatural colour, like that of faded roses. There was no doubt in her mind it had been the falling pieces of her flagship that had started the blaze. The ion drive alone, she thought, would have been like a weapon of mass destruction as it struck the ground and ruptured.

Inside her helmet, she watched as the five aircraft flew straight towards the monstrous blaze. She magnified the view just as they began to dump a fine red cloud out behind them. Seconds later, they wheeled around, payloads expended, and headed southwards again.

The command drone sank back down to sit near her shoulder. The humans were using retardant chemicals to try and staunch the fire, but why? There was no settlement nearby that needed saving, just more forest. Since when did the soldiers of the Imperium care one iota about environmental preservation?

She was no unfeeling monster. The wanton destruction of the forest both disturbed and angered her. It was waste compiled on top of waste. She pushed the feelings aside by reminding herself that the humans had brought this on themselves. If they had simply surrendered their planet to tau authority instead of trying to resist, then everything would have been fine.

She pressed on.

The afternoon was waning by the time she drew near her destination. Shadowsun emerged into a wide strip of land where the forest had been snapped in half and knocked flat. It was like a road, rolled out before her to the horizon and paved with flattened logs. The Manta had carved this, she surmised. Easily, she imagined the flat, broad transport dropping lower and lower, at first shearing off the tops of the trees, and then eventually making itself a landing strip. Yo’uta hadn’t been exaggerating. Even a species as technologically backward as the humans would have little difficulty following a trail like this.

Shadowsun decided that she was close enough now to risk reopening her comm channels. No sooner had she done so, then she was assaulted by a myriad of voices. Some were barking orders. Others were screaming. The background was punctuated by the sounds of weapons fire.

‘Sabu’ro!’ she yelled as she broke into a run. ‘Sabu’ro, report!’

She wove out into the area of flattened trees where there was no longer anything to get in her way. She sprinted a few steps, kicked hard at the ground, and engaged the battlesuit’s thrusters. She soared into the air in a long, bounding motion and landed a great distance away.

‘Commander!’ the young fire warrior responded. ‘Commander, our position is under attack!’

‘I’m almost there,’ Shadowsun grunted as she leapt again. The ground blurred beneath her.

‘Negative!’ came the voice of Yo’uta. He was breathing heavily. ‘We are surrounded and taking significant losses, commander. Do not endanger yourself. ‘

Shadowsun landed hard atop a fallen trunk. Her hooves left deep imprints in the wood. She crouched, and leapt again. ‘What did I tell you, Shas’vre?’ she yelled.

The gruff voice gave no reply.

Shadowsun was close enough now to hear the battle through her external audio pick-ups. There came the familiar hiss of pulse rifle fire – a three round chuffing that she had known from childhood, and the reassuring sizzle of plasma rifles being fired from Crisis battlesuits. These were nearly drowned out though by the sounds of gue’la weapons. Their inefficient laser guns ejected hot air from their assemblies with a staccato cracking, and the large-calibre cannons they were so fond of thumped savagely. She took some hope in what she didn’t hear. There was no rumble of ground tanks, no massive detonations from tracked artillery and no whine of hovering airships. This was an assault by large numbers of light infantry with little, if any, mechanised support. It would attack in waves, with no concern for casualties, until its enemy was eliminated. It was typically human and painfully predictable.

Shadowsun crested a ridge of dirt ploughed up by the Manta’s landing. As she had done on countless battlefields before, she catalogued the details of the scene in a heartbeat. The Manta was tilted slightly to one side with its nose in the air, a deep sea creature dragged up onto a wooded shore and left to die. Its hull looked crumpled and charred. The topmost of its two rear hatches was open, and a long boarding plank extended to the ground. Around the base of the transport, the warriors had erected a perimeter of four staggered barricades.

The ground in front of them was littered with dead humans. They were dressed in knee-length, dark-green coats with bright yellow armoured plates along the front and back. Their boots and gloves were made of light-brown leather. Their discarded rifles appeared to have wooden frames. Shadowsun could instantly tell that they had indeed tried to storm the Manta en masse only to be cut to pieces by the superiority of tau technology. Having sent the equivalent of eight fire warrior teams to a pointless doom, the remaining humans had evidently now decided to withdraw to the tree line where they too could have some protective cover. Volleys of laser fire continued to pour down onto her men, but they weren’t doing much damage.

The walking machines, on the other hand, were.

Six of them were holding place just outside the woods. Their main body was little more than an open-topped, reinforced cage large enough to hold a single gue’la pilot. They had two back-bent legs and pipes on their rear quarters that belched black smoke. They looked pathetic to Shadowsun, a child’s interpretation of a battlesuit. There was nothing laughable about their armaments though. Four of them had been mounted with projectile cannons; the other two had racks of missiles slung beneath them.

Shadowsun engaged her booster pack and arced high over the carnage. At the apex of her flight, she deactivated the suit’s camouflage systems and landed in a crouch behind the barricades. Heavy shells whistled over her head, exploding into shrapnel as they impacted the Manta hull. Several tau soldiers, huddled down as low as they could, whirled around to face her. She raised her hands and retracted her helmet. Upon seeing her face, they quickly lowered their weapons.

‘Apologies, commander,’ one of them blurted. His ochre combat armour was adorned with a mix of white officer’s insignia and black scorch marks. ‘Shas’vre informed us you were coming.’

She glanced quickly up and down the line. Many of her men lay in crumpled heaps. Another round of cannon shells burst in mid-air. ‘Where is Yo’uta?’ she shouted.

‘Out there.’ The officer indicated the corpse-strewn field between the barricades and the tree line. ‘He and the other Crisis suits were trying to outflank the enemy soldiers when those walkers suddenly appeared; a complete surprise.

Shadowsun shot him a look of incredulity.

‘They didn’t appear on our scanners. I don’t know why. If we’d only had some pathfinders to act as forward scouts, then perhaps…’

Shadowsun glanced down toward her collar where her command interface icons still glowed. She sent a signal out to all of the nearby tau officers. A tiny panel on the forearm of the soldier in front of her glowed blue, but there were no other responses. She closed her eyes and took a breath.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Shas’ui Kou’to,’ he replied with a sharp nod of his head.

‘You’re in command until I return.’ The helmet of her battlesuit flipped down into place once more. The adaptive camouflage transformed her into little more than a blur. Then, with a burst from her thrusters, she leapt high into the air.

‘Covering fire!’ Kou’to’s voice bellowed to the tau over their shared combat frequency.

Shadowsun twisted in mid-flight, while behind her, the remaining tau popped up over the barricade and poured pulses of blue energy into the humans. Kou’to was taking no chances, she realised. Even though she was nearly invisible to gue’la eyes now, the Shas’ui was making doubly certain that the enemy’s full attention would be directed away from her. She came down in the middle of a large crater where three tau Crisis suits lay in a jumbled heap. Their heavy armour was peppered with blast marks, but something else had dealt the fatal blows. Each suit had at least one hole in it large enough for her to put her fist through, with no exit on the opposite side. The humans were using heavy sabots that, should she somehow lose her defensive forcefields, would completely bypass her armour and detonate inside her piloting compartment. ‘Krak missiles’, they called them, because they were used to ‘crack’ hardened targets. Word play. Her jaw tightened. Any military that made jest of their equipment was disrespectful of their craft and worse than useless.

She quickly surveyed the weapon load-outs on the downed suits, forgoing missile pods and plasma rifles for something far more punishing. From two of the fallen, she removed a pair of fusion blasters. The flat, rectangular-shaped devices were typically reserved for destroying enemy armour. They fired a devastating beam of charged particles that incited chain reaction atomic explosions in whatever they hit. They were also considered a secondary weapon because of their extremely short range.

Perfect.

Within moments, she had attached the guns to the universal mountings on the underside of her suit’s forearms. She deftly scrambled out of the crater and sprinted toward the nearest human walkers. Three of them were clustered together, and as she approached they unleashed another barrage of cannon rounds and rockets at the tau position. The one with the missiles, the one that had likely killed her battlesuit officers, would be the first to be made an example of, she decided. The walkers remained unaware of her presence until she was so close that she could have reached out and slapped their sides. She depressed the activation studs on the blasters.

Twin streams of white light struck the underside of the machine, and a second later, the entire structure was engulfed in blinding energy. It seemed to collapse in on itself, sagging and melting as its molecular structure became superheated. One of the legs gave way, and the walker tumbled over onto its side. The cage covered its lone occupant in liquid metal, and even amidst the din of the battle, Shadowsun could hear the pilot’s final scream of agony.

The remaining walkers were taken aback. From their perspective, Shadowsun had appeared from out of nowhere. They tried to bring their cannons to bear, but she was already moving, dashing to the side. Heavy shells tore up the ground beneath her and bounced harmlessly off her shields. Then she was behind them. The walkers clumsily began to turn to face her, but she was already firing at them. She angled the blasters away from her body, and hit both of them at once. To her left, one of the cannons fell away like dripping wax. To her right, the pilot found himself blinded as part of his control panel vaporised before him.

Again she was in motion, leading them around and around. The blinded pilot shot at her in vain. His cannon shells splintered the trees. Shadowsun levelled both blasters at him. The bright beams cut the machine off at the knees, and it pitched over violently. She danced around the rear of the remaining walker, who spun desperately to keep her in check.

She was under fire now. Another group of walking machines had appeared to her right. They strode forwards across the corpses of their fellows. Shadowsun turned to glare at them, as their sabots and cannon rounds did nothing but burst harmlessly around her. From behind the barricades, Kou’to and his men stopped firing into the woods. In perfect unison, they swivelled and began shooting at the walkers closing in on their commander. Pulse blasts ricocheted off the rough armour-plating.

Shadowsun was indignant. She leapt up into the air and crunched down atop the weaponless walker. Beneath her hooves, the pilot stared up at her, slack jawed and stupefied. She didn’t even bother to look him in the eye as she fired both blasters into his lap. The shots punched clean through into the ground below, tearing the machine in half. Shadowsun was arcing through the air again, leaving only a pile of glowing slag in her wake.

As Shadowsun descended, she was peppered with shrapnel and struck full on by an armour-piercing missile. Again, her shields held firm. She came down near the crater with the fallen Crisis suits, and returned fire. She was farther down-range than she would have liked to have been, but she still succeeded in destroying one of them utterly.

The second group of walkers would not be so easily surprised. Human infantry were repositioning themselves just outside the tree line. They scuttled forwards, ducking low, quickly forming into ranks and files. The ones in front dove face first into the blood-soaked ground. Those behind went down to one knee. Far in back, she saw five others standing apart, providing moral support with the use of a large, green flag. There were a lot of them, Shadowsun admitted to herself, and they were lining her up in their sights. She returned her attention to the last two walkers. The infantry would be dealt with shortly.

For whatever reason, the machines couldn’t seem to hit their mark at all. Shadowsun repaid them for their incompetence by sprinting forwards, firing the blasters into both of them. One of them was gutted through the cockpit, but the one bearing the missile pod evaded her attack. As it spun, it fired into her. The blast was so close that as its missile detonated off her shields, the walker rocked backwards. Shadowsun rolled along the ground and sprang back up. She glanced quickly at her combat icons, certain that she had lost one of her drones. She had only two of the three symbols glowed contentedly.

Kou’to had ordered the fire warriors to begin thinning out the human infantry before they could drown Shadowsun in laser fire. Pulse blasts tore into the humans, but despite losing eight men, the gue’la remained steadfast and fired back. Their fusillade was like a wave of red light. It washed over the commander and her drones, obscuring them from sight. Kou’to and his men stood, horrified, certain that all was lost.

Shadowsun’s armour glowed as it tried to redirect what thermal energy it could. The interior of her visor became a collage of warnings and schematics informing her just where she was being hit and what systems were being damaged or destroyed. Her drone icons vanished. She closed her eyes and turned her face a fraction of a second before her face plate shattered inwards. Her face was slashed repeatedly. Heat leaked through the plating around her joints and torso. Her left knee buckled against her will. She could smell her skin burning.

Then, for the second time that day, she realised that she wasn’t dead. She opened her eyes. Her visor was a ragged, empty hole. Her suit collar flashed a dozen telltales and alarms. Smoke was filling the suit’s interior, and she could taste her own blood. But she was still alive.

A look of disbelief crossed the faces of the humans.

Rising slowly, Shadowsun peeled away her useless helmet and let it clatter into the mud alongside her tattered drones. Her vision was swimming, but peripherally she saw her fire warriors leaping over their protective barricade and rushing out to shield her. Without her having to utter a single word, they opened up with their pulse rifles. The human unit was ripped apart by flashes of light that cared nothing for their flimsy armour. Their heads flew back, and their limbs flailed. They fell in piles atop one another. For a moment, the handful who remained actually stood their ground, but then Shadowsun was bounding into their midst. She turned two of them into glowing embers with her fusion guns. She planted both her hooves into the chest of another as she landed. She could feel the reverberations in her ankles as the man’s ribcage snapped and caved in.

There were only two of them left now amidst the steaming corpses of their comrades. They tried to attack her using knives and bayonets, but the blades could find no purchase. She spun and struck one of them across the face with the flat edge of a fusion blaster. With the sound of breaking bones, a gush of bloody foam shot out of the human’s nose. He dropped heavily to the ground and died. The lone survivor tried once again to stab her, only to see his knife skitter over the surface of her battlesuit. Shadowsun whirled and drove a robotically augmented knee into his ribcage. His chest caved in and he fell among the dead, discarded and forgotten.

She turned her attention towards the tree line. Five humans were gathered there beneath a comically oversized standard. One of them was holding a sword with jagged mechanical teeth. The others had rifles. Their armour looked more substantial than that worn by the masses of dead infantry scattered about, and Shadowsun surmised that she was, at last, facing off against the gue’la commander and his bodyguard.

‘You are beaten,’ she shouted at them. Droplets of cyan-coloured blood flew from her mouth and spattered across her battlesuit collar. Behind her, thirty fire warriors waited calmly, their rifles at the ready.

The humans said nothing. They just glanced at one another. Their faces were unreadable.

Of course, Shadowsun realised. In preparing to go to war, she and the officers serving under her had schooled themselves in the language of the enemy. It was presumptuous to assume that the gue’la leaders had done anything likewise.

Four of the humans, including the one in charge of their flag, suddenly scrambled to lift their lasguns. The fifth was in the midst of yelling something when the tau pulled their triggers. Shadowsun watched impassively as the four bodyguards were shot down, their superior armour, in the end, proving insufficient. The final human, on the other hand, was spared by some kind of primitive body shield. It rippled as it managed to stop two of the three pulse blasts that struck him. Even so, he gripped his left arm and howled with agony as the third pulse slipped through. The mechanical sword fell away into the brush. Crimson spilled from between his fingers. He fell to his knees.

The fire warriors waited. Shadowsun slowly walked forward. She looked down at the wretched creature, and tried as best she could to wrap her bleeding lips around the thick words of his native tongue.

‘You are the commander?’ she asked.

His face, when he looked up, appeared to Shadowsun to be utterly lost. ‘Wha-what?’

Frustrated, she ground a hoof into the dirt. She spoke again in the human language, over-enunciating each word to ensure his understanding. ‘I asked, are you the commander?’

‘Hollett,’ he stammered. ‘Major, Diepr-3 Imperial Guard, serial number 58964-86542-4586.’

Shadowsun stepped back several paces. ‘You have squandered the lives of your warriors and been beaten in combat,’ she said to him. She glanced over her shoulder at Kou’to. ‘Get him up,’ she ordered.

With a nod, the Shas’ui and two others slung their rifles over their shoulders, moved to the human lying in the dirt, and hoisted him onto his feet. He was several heads taller than they were when he stood. He was eye to eye with Shadowsun in her battlesuit.

‘Hollett,’ he repeated. ‘Major, Diepr-3 Imperial Guard, serial number 58964… no, wait...’ He swayed and continued to grip his wounded arm tightly.

Kou’to and his aides moved off to the side.

‘As an officer,’ Shadowsun continued, ‘you will doubtless wish to now die with honour. I will grant you such, which is more than you deserve, because I am tau.’

Shadowsun raised her fusion blasters. The human stared frantically. His jaw worked soundlessly and his eyes darted. At the last second, he recalled the word he was searching for.

‘Mu’mont!’ he screeched.

All the tau froze.

‘Is that right?’ he asked desperately. ‘Mu’mont? Mu’mont. No war, yes?’ He raised his free hand.

The barrels of Shadowsun’s fusion blasters dipped slightly. ‘Ya tau’sia?’

The human grinned with relief. ‘Yes,’ he blurted. ‘Yes. I can speak some of your language. A little. Little? Uh… shisa? Shisa tau’sia?’

‘How is it you can understand some of what we say?’ Shadowsun asked cautiously.

‘We’re right on your border. We monitor a lot of your civilian transmissions. I’ve picked up a bit, I guess. I was always good with things like that.’

Kou’to stared at Shadowsun. Her face was like stone and in that moment, he was entirely unsure of whether or not she would accept this man’s surrender or simply shoot him in half regardless. Given how grievous the tau losses had been this day, he suspected the latter. As the only other soldier of rank, it fell to him to ensure that his commander did not let her passions get the better of her. He moved to stand between the two of them, and hit the human, hard, across the face with the butt of his pulse rifle.

‘You will not directly address the commander, gue’la!’ he yelled. ‘Do you understand?’

The human spat blood, and nodded. ‘Yes. I understand.’

‘Shas’ui,’ Shadowsun said lowly, ‘step aside.’

Kou’to pretended not to hear. ‘When you speak, gue’la, you will speak to me, and only me, or else you will die. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ the human replied. ‘Whatever you say, just, don’t kill me. Please.’

‘Shas’ui,’ Shadowsun said with increased volume. ‘I ordered you to step aside.’

Kou’to deftly pulled the heavy pistol from out of the holster on the man’s hip and tucked it into his own belt. It was nearly half the length of the Shas’ui’s leg, with multiple cooling ports and an assembly along its top that glowed brightly. He spun to face Shadowsun, and bowed. ‘The prisoner has been disarmed, commander. My team will take him into custody,’ he said.

Shadowsun continued to hold the fusion blasters out in front of her. No one moved. Even the vast forest around them seemed to pause. Then Kou’to signalled the two closest fire warriors to take the human away, dismissing everyone else with a nod. As they returned to the Manta, he shouldered his weapon and waited.

Slowly, the fusion blasters dropped. A long moment passed between the two of them. At last, Shadowsun looked down at herself and said strangely, ‘I’ve been wounded.’

Kou’to gestured towards the downed transport ship. ‘The commander will be attended to, of course. Lead on.’

Shadowsun turned and plodded towards the Manta. Kou’to followed at a respectful distance, but he never took his eyes off of her.

She exited her battlesuit at the base of the boarding ramp. Kou’to had a team of eleven fire warriors stand in a protective circle around her as she did so. With his head lowered so far that his chin touched his chest, Kou’to brought her a fresh set of clothing. She dressed quickly, snapped the flex-screen back around her left arm, and said, ‘It’s a bit large.’

Kou’to scarcely moved. ‘Forgiveness, commander, but it was taken from the body of one of the fallen. He was of wider proportion than you. This uniform represents our best efforts.’

Shadowsun cinched the waist as tightly as she could and started rolling up the sleeves. Even so, it hung on her like a shapeless mustard-coloured bag. ‘His contribution is received and appreciated. You may dismiss your men.’

Kou’to’s head snapped up. ‘La’rua, karae’na!’ he barked. The circle protecting the commander’s decency dispersed at once to continue policing the bodies of friend and foe alike. He produced a small brown satchel from his belt and passed it to Shadowsun. ‘Medical supplies, commander.’

She took it with a nod of thanks and removed a small vial marked ‘tissue rebuilder’ from the pouch. Twisting off the top, she pressed the tiny cylinder against the side of her neck.

‘Where is the gue’la?’ Shadowsun asked.

‘He is restrained and under guard,’ Kou’to replied.

She touched one of the many cuts to her face. The blood there was already congealing and the wound closing. ‘Shas’la Sabu’ro. Take me to him.’

Together they ascended the ramp. The Manta, despite its enormous size, had very little room to move around in. Its wings were entirely occupied with engines and integrated weapons. The central fuselage was divided into three parts: a command and control area designed to accommodate two air caste pilots, a rectangular storage bay in the transport’s belly that held large war machines like tanks and Crisis battlesuits, and an upper transport deck, which Shadowsun and Kou’to went to. The space was dominated by slotted couches along each wall and a median with additional seating on each side.

Shadowsun halted when she saw it. Kou’to answered her question about its intended occupant before she could even ask it.

‘The Aun was not aboard when we were forced to leave the command ship,’ he said flatly.

Of all the disappointments she had suffered this day, the absence of an Ethereal was the greatest. ‘No,’ she muttered, ‘none of the Aun would have had enough time to make their way to the flight hangars.’ She touched one of the many places on her brow that were sticky with congealing blood.

A diminutive tau strode past the captive human and down the aisle towards them. His ochre body armour was adorned with deep red markings. He cradled his helmet beneath one arm. In his other hand he held a rolled up flex-screen. He bowed deeply when he stood before his superiors. His eyes avoided Shadowsun, and he spoke to Kou’to.

‘Shas’la Fal’shia Sabu’ro puts himself at your service,’ he said rapidly.

Shadowsun appraised him. Sabu’ro was young, perhaps no more than ten or eleven. He must have scored very high on the aptitude tests to have been selected to serve aboard her flagship. ‘It is agreeable to see you, Shas’la,’ she said. ‘What is the status of our communications?’

Sabu’ro glanced at Kou’to before answering. The veteran’s nod told him that it was all right to address Shadowsun directly.

‘Commander,’ he said proudly, ‘we are fully capable. Local tightbeam and interplanetary tachyon arrays are both at one hundred per cent.’

‘Are you able to contact the rest of the fleet?’

‘It has already been done. All ships are holding at station-keeping eight light-minutes beyond il’Wolaho’s moon, as per your previous instructions. Command of the armada has passed to Kor’el Kenhi’ta, who relayed the news of what transpired today to T’au via graviton data packet.’ He smiled. ‘After you last spoke to me, I made all vessels aware of your survival.’

‘Was that news also relayed to T’au?’

Young Sabu’ro seemed confused by the question. ‘Why would it not be?’

Shadowsun nodded, imagining what the reaction must have been back on the home world. First, news that a powerful warship had been destroyed with all hands lost. Then, later on, a second bulletin informing everyone that she and a handful of others were alive, but for the moment, non-recoverable. Shock, followed by sadness, followed by joy, followed by concern. The halls of the Aun’t’au’retha, the supreme council of Ethereals who presided over the Empire, must have been uncharacteristically lively this day. Once again, she blamed herself.

‘How many warriors are left?’ she asked Kou’to.

‘The survivors have been grouped into three fireteams, commander. There are also ten kor’ves gun drones remaining, two of which I have ordered to be refitted into shield drones for your use.’

‘The tanks?’ she asked, thinking of the two Hammerhead-class war machines that one would usually find secured in the bowls of a Manta.

‘Rendered inoperable during the landing.’

‘And the Manta itself is no longer flight-worthy?’

‘That is correct, commander.’

Shadowsun frowned deeply. With only herself, a handful of robots, and less than thirty infantry, their position here was untenable. The humans knew where they were, and would be sending another attack wave shortly; one which they were certain to be unable to resist.

‘We must leave,’ she concluded aloud. ‘Yet if we signal the fleet to evacuate us, the gue’la energy cannon will inflict even more casualties upon our people.’

‘That much is certain,’ Kou’to agreed.

‘Then it falls to us to destroy their defences. Have your men bring in our prisoner.’

As Kou’to signalled to the soldiers outside, the flex-screen in Sabu’ro’s fist made a loud beeping. The young man unrolled the computer display. He made it rigid with a snap of his wrist, studied it for a moment, and then announced, ‘Commander, there’s an incoming data packet addressed to you.’ He passed the flex-screen to Shadowsun. ‘A pre-recorded message of some kind, relayed through the fleet position.’

Il’Walaho was nearly one hundred and fifty light-years away from the heart of the Empire. Real-time communication over such distances was impossible, even for a race as technologically advanced as the tau. Shadowsun took note of the time stamp as the bundle of words and decompiled themselves; whatever the nature of this message, it had been sent while her fleet was in translation from T’au.

‘It says here that this was made and received some time ago. Why am I only seeing it now?’

Sabu’ro shook his head as the recording began.

‘O’Shaserra,’ it said slowly and clearly, ‘This is Aun’va speaking. As leader of the Aun’t’au’retha, may I say that it brings great relief to all to hear that you have survived the destruction of your command vessel.’

Shadowsun couldn’t help but smile as the ancient Ethereal’s face swam into focus. His cheeks and lips were deeply lined. The skin above his eyes drooped. The braid of hair that sprouted from his chin was shot through with grey, and was so long that it dropped out of frame. She often thought that, had her father lived to a similar age, that he might have been much the same. Aun’va – along with her mentor Puretide – had guided her in every aspect of her preparation with a stern but gentle hand. She revered him, both as a superior and a mentor.

‘There was much distress when first we heard the news,’ the recording continued. ‘Much distress. These are trying days for the Empire, dear child. We face danger on many fronts, and for a time, we were afraid that we had lost all three of Kiru’s daughters.’

Shadowsun’s smile collapsed. There was a sudden sickness in her core. She tilted her head, certain that she had misheard that last sentence.

Aun’va’s face was grim. His long mouth was severely downturned. ‘Yes. I regret to inform you, O’Shaserra, that word has reached us from two other theatres of operation; your sisters have given the ultimate sacrifice for the Greater Good, and have been killed in the line of duty.’

She felt numb.

‘Shas’el Ty’res had been selected to provide security for some very important earth caste research, far beyond the borders of the Empire. For security reasons, which we are sure you will understand, we cannot disclose the exact location. Despite our best attempts at peaceful delegation, a massive conflict erupted involving several other races. The operation had to be cancelled. We are told that she gave her life so that others could escape to safety.

‘Shas’el Oru’mi was slain by Var Sin’da pirates on the planet Tash’Var. All reports state that she was working to prevent them from capturing the Ethereals residing there, and that she alone is credited with more than fifty-two confirmed enemy kills. Her position was overrun. She was wounded and evacuated to the medical complex in Mikaz City. She received the best of care, but the poisons used by those damnable creatures are quite virulent, and she died three days later.

‘We have personally seen to it that both of their remains were returned to T’au. A special funeral ceremony has already been held, but now that we have news of your survival, its final vows have been suspended.’

Shadowsun’s face was slack. She had incurred two and a half years of time-debt travelling out to the fringes of tau space. While in transit, not only had her sisters died, but she had missed their funeral as well. She gave a short, hysterical laugh, then slowly handed the flex-screen back to Sabu’ro. He accepted it delicately, as if its edges had suddenly become lethally sharp, and tried to avoid looking at it as the recording played on.

‘Your father was a man of greatness: a magnificent warrior and a shining example of the Greater Good. That is why he was granted leave to raise a family himself, and why you have that right as well. All the Empire was saddened by his death. Yet, we took solace in the knowledge that his legacy lived on through his daughters. Again, all the Empire grieves, and now we have only you, O’Shaserra, in which to find our consolation. You are the last of Kiru’s line.’

Shadowsun half sat, half fell onto one of the couches. Her hands felt cold. Her head began to pound. She found that she was suddenly unable to remember what her sisters had looked like.

‘Obviously, we must discuss the question of what happens next. Therefore, it is imperative that you return to your battlefleet,’ Aun’va concluded. ‘The occupation efforts can be left to others for the time being.’ The Ethereal sighed and, perhaps unsure of what else to say, ended the recording.

Kou’to was torn. His instinct was to offer Shadowsun some kind of condolence, yet doing so would be a massive breach of protocol. Unable to decide what to do, he simply stood stoically by and watched her stare off into space.

Shadowsun’s head made an almost imperceptible shake, refuting a statement whispered in her ears alone. She gave a broken, breathy sigh, and looked at her hands.

At the far end of the room, two fire warriors appeared with Hollett between them. His head was bowed and his wrists were tied together by a thick, plastek restraint.

Kou’to glanced over his shoulder, and cleared his throat. Shadowsun looked up. When she saw Hollett, her face hardened.

‘You, gue’la!’

Hollett lifted his head at the sound of his own language. He looked first to Shadowsun, and then at Kou’to. ‘Tell her my name is Hollett,’ he said. ‘Cordel Hollett.’

‘You are a gue’la barbarian,’ Shadowsun scowled as he marched towards him, ‘and a coward. It matters not what your name is. You lost all right to it when you chose surrender over death.’

Hollett’s eyes lowered. ‘I’m no traitor,’ he muttered.

She stood with her hands on her hips. Now that she was no longer in her battlesuit exoskeleton, Hollett towered over them all. His posture, though, was stooped and deflated. The tau woman might have knocked him over with the slightest of ease, it seemed.

‘I have been told to leave this place and to rejoin my battlefleet,’ she said. ‘This order comes from the highest possible authority, and cannot be denied.’

‘I see.’

‘If, however, I instruct a vessel to come and collect me, your defence laser will destroy it before it even enters the atmosphere.’

Hollett said nothing, sensing that he and Shadowsun were heading towards a disastrous impasse.

‘I therefore ask you, as one commander to another, will you grant permission for a rescue vessel to take myself and my surviving soldiers back out into space? Will you deactivate the cannon long enough to allow for this?’

‘Commander, no!’ Kou’to snapped. Shadowsun silenced him with a raised finger.

Hollett licked his lips. He didn’t know the little blue alien woman personally, but he knew her type. Oh yes indeed. She was a fighter, through and through. She was cold and hard, gifted and prideful. He could not imagine what it must be like for her now, having to ask her enemy for permission to retreat.

‘I can’t,’ he sighed.

Shadowsun was on her feet in a flash. Her face was tight. Her fists were clenched. Her fury was a tangible thing radiating around her.

Hollett found himself actually backing up a step. He raised his bound hands in front of him. ‘I wish I could,’ he cried. ‘Believe me. Letting you leave would solve a lot of my problems today. But it’s not up to me.’

‘You are the commander,’ Shadowsun grated. ‘If you order the cannon to be deactivated, it will be so.’

‘No,’ Hollett said. ‘I’m not the commander. I mean, I am a commander, but I’m not the highest ranking officer on Diepr-3. I can’t order something like that.’

Shadowsun appraised him coolly. ‘You are the N’el Shas’O?’

‘The what?’

‘The second-most important.’

‘Oh. Uh… yes.’

‘Then I must bring my request to your superior.’

Hollett’s face grew hard, and something in the tone of his voice took Shadowsun aback. ‘No, you won’t,’ he assured her.

‘Our equipment is fully capable of broadcasting…’

‘I’m not talking about your radio!’ He took a deep breath before continuing. ‘I’ve served under Colonel Falkens for more than fifteen years. If you try to negotiate with him, he’ll kill you. If you send your ships within range of his guns, he’ll destroy them. If you try to hide from him out here in the wilderness, he’ll track you. Falkens doesn’t understand things like charity or compassion. He doesn’t believe in compromise, and he sees everything weaker than him as something to be degraded and abused.’

‘Can you be so certain?’ Shadowsun asked quietly.

Hollet’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He’s like you.’

Shadowsun seemed to consider that for a moment. ‘Then I will have to destroy it. You will provide Shas’ui Kou’to with a list of its weak points and vulnerabilities.’

‘You’re going to attack the defence laser?’ Hollett gave a snort and shrugged weakly. ‘That’d be suicide. You haven’t enough troops. Not from what I’ve seen. The heavy bolters alone will cut you to pieces by before you even get into range.’

‘Heavy bolters,’ Shadowsun chewed the alien words slowly, recalling the large-calibre automatic machine guns the phrase described. Regrettably, the human was correct. An attack using nothing but light infantry would be doomed to failure. She would need more firepower.

Turning to face Sabu’ro, she began speaking once more in her native tongue. ‘Shas’la, contact Kor’el Kenhi’ta.’

‘At once, commander.’ The young soldier’s fingers flew across the surface of the flex-screen. Hollett looked around uneasily.

Seconds later, Sabu’ro bowed slightly at the waist and handed the flex-screen to Shadowsun. The display was filled with the image of an air caste tau in his early thirties. His uniform robe flared at the shoulders, and above him floated a large, clam-shaped device. The crown of his head nestled inside the machine, connected by glowing fibop cables and neural relays. His eyes, large and luminous, darted about, preoccupied. The Kor’el was deep in tacflow, Shadowsun knew. Information from every vessel in the armada was pouring into his brain, sifted and prioritised by banks of computers, and displayed on his hard-wired ocular implants.

‘Commander Shadowsun,’ he wheezed. Like all members of the air caste, his voice was thin and breathy. ‘I am… at your service.’

‘Kor’el, there are new orders from T’au. From the Aun’t’au’retha as a whole and Aun’va specifically. I am to evacuate this planet and rejoin the fleet. All other considerations are rescinded.’

Kenhi’ta’s head dipped oddly to one side, giving him a quizzical look. Shadowsun knew that he was, in fact, plotting course directions, scanning weapon readiness reports, and worst of all, calculating potential losses.

‘We must comply, of course,’ he said at last. ‘However, the presence of the gue’la defence weapon will make such an operation… very costly.’

‘Agreed,’ Shadowsun said curtly. ‘Therefore, we will attempt to lower the cost. You are hereby ordered to move the fleet into position above il’Wolaho, and begin bombardment of the energy cannon and surrounding area.’

She could feel Kou’to staring at her. He obviously disagreed with this course of action, but of course, was too bound by his place in the chain of command to comment on it. She turned her hands over slightly in the air and tried to reassure him. ‘We will lose several ships to be certain,’ she said lowly, ‘but in return, we will crush the gue’la resistance entirely. It’s an acceptable trade.’

Kou’to swallowed bitterly, and nodded.

‘What’s happening?’ Hollett asked him.

‘Not now,’ Kou’to growled.

On the flex-screen, Kenhi’ta appeared to look at the ceiling. He wiggled the fingers of his right hand, manipulating data only he was privy to. ‘Blanket saturation of the area… redundant shock wave radii… secondary effects of thermal wash... elevated nucleotide counts. The collateral damage to the planet will be… considerable.’

Unlike the tau soldiers, who spoke in rapid, crackling bursts, the space captain’s sentences were ponderous and drawn out. There was more than enough time for Hollett to identify a word or two. He spoke to Kou’to again. ‘Damage? What damage? What the hell are you planning?’

Shadowsun turned ferociously. ‘Since you give me no other choice, Hollett-la, I am ordering my people to vaporise your defence cannon from orbit.’

Hollett went very pale. ‘But, you’ll destroy half the continent. You’ll kill everyone living there.’

‘You should be thankful then for your imminent promotion.’ She returned her attention to the flex-screen.

‘No!’ Hollett screamed. He lurched forwards, bound hands raised to strike at Shadowsun. Kou’to’s men caught him around the waist before he touched her, and threw him against the bulkhead.

Shadowsun appraised him coldly.

‘I have…’ Hollett choked. He blinked several times, shook his head, and started again. ‘There must be another way.’

To the flex-screen, Shadowsun said, ‘Stand by, Kor’el.’ She turned to Hollet. ‘Provide me with another option then.’ Fleetingly, she wished that she had a member of the water caste present. Negotiations and diplomatic discussions were their speciality.

Hollett searched the floor for a moment. ‘I wasn’t lying before,’ he mumbled. ‘It would be suicide to attack the defence laser with what you’ve got here, and I can’t order them to stand down.’ He laughed sadly. ‘In fact, I can’t order anyone to do anything anymore. I’m as good as dead to them now. But if it wasn’t able to hit anything, if it couldn’t actually lock on to any of your ships as they came to get you, would that be good enough?’

Hollett took their silence as an invitation to continue.

‘The defence laser receives its targeting data from our primary communications array. It’s a separate installation, built some distance from the main colony. Fairly remote, actually. I guess because it’s staffed by a lot of psykers and astropaths. Anyway, I could take you there. Get you inside. I have retinal access to the building. You can call for retrieval, and everyone just walks away.’

‘We still intend to annex this world,’ Shadowsun snapped. ‘No amount of… co-operation… will prevent that.’

Hollett raised his chin. ‘I only care about protecting my home.’

Shadowsun looked down the length of the empty room. Outside, beyond the open hatch, the forest was filled with lengthening shadows.

Home. Images of vacant rooms and echoing hallways flitted through her mind as she suddenly wondered what would become of the ancestral estate on T’au. The thought of having to go back there and inventory her sisters’ things, alone, made her weak in the knees; but there was no one left to help her.

‘Agreed,’ she said to Hollett.

She turned to Kou’to and began speaking in her own language again. ‘Prepare the fireteams to move out as quickly as possible. We will follow the human to his people’s communications centre, secure it, and evacuate from there.’

‘Has the commander considered the possibility that this is some kind of trap?’

Together they looked at Hollett as the two tau guards jostled him down the boarding plank. ‘I think not, Shas’la,’ she replied. ‘He’s not so great an actor.’

Kou’to bowed and left.

‘Sabu’ro,’ she said sternly, ‘you understand that we cannot allow our technology to fall into the enemy’s hands. The Manta will have to be destroyed. ‘

The youth looked sad. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I will ensure that the fail-safes are properly set. But, commander, once they go off, we will lose our only uplink to the fleet.’ He indicated the flex-screen still clutched in Shadowsun’s hand.

‘We will have to make do until we gain control of the human equipment. Now, prepare the detonators. There’s not much time.’

When Sabu’ro had hurried away, she lifted the display. Kenhi’ta continued to stare blankly and wiggle his fingers, waiting patiently for her to resume their conversation. ‘Kor’el, did you hear all of that?’

‘I did.’

‘Very shortly, we will fall into a communications blackout. If all goes well, you will hear from me again. However, if you do not, your orders are to take the armada and leave this system. Bypass it entirely. Do not attempt to retrieve me.’

‘Understood.’

She licked her lips before continuing. They were rough and tasted of drying blood. ‘Also, please send the following reply via graviton packet.

‘To Aun’va and all esteemed members of the Aun’t’au’retha: Previous message received and understood. Evacuation considered impossible so long as gue’la primary defence weapon remains on-line. Am leaving now to render said weapon ineffectual. Have left further instructions with Kor’el Kenhi’ta.’

She paused. You are the last of Kiru’s line, Aun’va had said.

‘Personal addendum: If I am eventually rescued from this place, you should be made aware that I am considering following my father’s example and taking the Taal Saal’Y.’

Kenhi’ta’s face suddenly became entirely focused on Shadowsun. ‘Commander,’ he said in a shocked whisper, ‘are you certain?’

‘Considering,’ she restated firmly. ‘Only considering. End recording and transmit to home system.’

‘Success in your endeavours, commander,’ Kenhi’ta breathed. He winked out of existence as Shadowsun returned the flex-screen to supple mode and rolled it up in her hands. She walked out to the top of the boarding plank. The light was strange now. To the west, the sun was setting in amber hues, but a similar, more sinister glow spanned the entire northern skyline. The fires must be truly gigantic by now, she thought. Below, her soldiers were hurrying back and forth, gathering what they needed for the journey. She saw Hollett, still under guard, sitting forlornly atop an empty supply crate. His eyes were closed, and his lips were moving. Was he praying, she wondered.

Again, she thought of the humans’ unfathomable religious beliefs, of their deific protector, of their surety in a life after death. It was ridiculous, all of it. The dead were dead, she reminded herself. Only legacies survived the end of life. That was the way of things.

The density of the forest forced them to march in a long column, Shadowsun led the way. Two drones, recovered from the downed Manta, hovered over each of her shoulders. The remaining eight had been networked together and sent ahead to act as scouts. Every once in a while, they could be heard snapping their way through branches and disturbing the local wildlife. Sabu’ro walked next to Shadowsun. He had linked his flex-screen to the drones’ optics and relayed their movements to her as often as he could find an excuse to. Behind the commander, Kou’to and ten other soldiers marched in double file. They pushed Hollett ahead of them, his hands still bound. The remaining fire warriors, divided evenly into two teams, took up the flanks.

When they were some distance away, Shadowsun called them to a halt. The sun had set, but the sky, when glimpsed through the branches, was a dim, crimson sheet. The fire warriors crouched down amidst the underbrush while the drones circled the perimeter, ever vigilant. Sabu’ro unrolled his flex-screen, snapped it rigid, and waited for the order. With a nod from Shadowsun, the young Shas’la keyed in the detonation sequence, followed a moment later by two confirmation codes.

From the north came a soft thump and a thunderous rumble as the Manta’s fusion engines were set to overload. They were too far away to see the explosion or the expanding sphere of gas and plasma that were now all that remained of the landing site. Still, Sabu’ro’s shoulders slumped slightly in despair. Shadowsun said nothing, although she sympathised. Destroying the Manta and everything in it was the tactically sound thing to do, but still, she hated to consider the loss of materiel. It seemed like such a waste.

She turned to Kou’to. ‘We’ll be continuing through the night,’ she told him, ‘so tell the men to eat now. They’ll need their strength.’

Kou’to bowed slightly. ‘Yes, commander. May I get you something as well?’

Shadowsun was staring off into the dark spaces between the trees. ‘I’m not hungry.’

Kou’to did not push the issue. He passed along the instruction to the other tau, who quietly produced silver pouches from their kits. They shook them and then tore off the top. Steam escaped into the night air and they began to heartily eat the long green noodles within. He himself removed the cap from his water flask. The container was nearly empty when he shook it, and he knew that those of the men were not much better. He tipped his head back and drank it all. It was better, he knew, to stay fully hydrated rather than weaken himself by trying to ration it.

Hollett was sitting with his back against a knotted tree trunk, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes. Kou’to walked silently over to him, and held one of the silver pouches aloft. The human looked up at him.

‘Water,’ Kou’to said. ‘We’re going to need some soon. Is there a drinkable source en route?’

‘There are streams and pools all around here.’ Hollett gestured to the woods.

‘Sabu’ro tells me that our personal filters are insufficient to strain out all of the soil contaminants and bacteria.’

‘Oh, yes. It’ll make you very sick.’ He smiled slightly.

‘Is there a cleaner source somewhere? Answer me, and you’ll get something to eat.’

‘What are we having?’

‘Nim ko’nai.’

‘I have no idea what that is.’ Hollett thrust his chin toward Shadowsun. ‘What’s gotten into her?’ he asked.

Kou’to bristled at the audacity of the question. The personal goings-on of any tau, especially those of the commander, were of no business to a human prisoner.

‘I don’t understand, Hollett. Do you want me to strike you?’

‘Do you want to go thirsty?’ Their eyes locked. Somewhere nearby, a troupe of nocturnal tree dwellers began crooning in harmony.

Kou’to weighed the need to keep his warriors at peak performance against Shadowsun’s right to privacy. In the end, he realised that the Greater Good compelled him to answer Hollett’s initial question. It still felt like a betrayal however, no matter how logically he justified it.

‘Her sisters died’ he said tersely.

‘Oh. Up in orbit?’

‘No, they were serving elsewhere in the Empire.’

‘Serving? So, they were soldiers too? ‘

Kou’to frowned. ‘How could they choose to be otherwise?’ he asked incredulously. Then it occurred to him that Hollett, as a mere gue’la, would have no idea to what he was referring. ‘The commander and her sisters were the daughters of Kiru,’ he clarified, ‘a very powerful and well respected warrior whose lineage has shed its blood for the Greater Good since the days of the First Expansion. After he died, the three sisters took up his legacy, as was their duty.’

Hollett nodded. ‘The things we do for family,’ he muttered.

‘Water source,’ Kou’to growled.

‘What? Oh, yes. If we continue to the south-west,’ Hollett pointed off into the dark forest, ‘we should come to the Brevo river. It’s much more suitable. By daybreak, I should say. Maybe a little after.’

Kou’to tossed the silver pouch into the human’s lap. Then he turned and strode back toward Shadowsun. The commander had moved off and was standing underneath a low bough. She had detached the fusion blasters from beneath the arms of her battlesuit and leaned them up against a tree trunk. As Kou’to approached, he saw her remove a small vial from a compartment on her hip, twist off the top, and press the tiny cylinder against the side of her neck. Kou’to slowed his pace until she was finished injecting herself. He had no wish to interrupt and possibly embarrass her. She suddenly glanced over her shoulder and caught his eye. Kou’to looked sharply away.

She sniffed in the gloom. ‘Tissue rebuilder,’ she said. ‘My head is still hurting. From when my helmet imploded.’

‘Of course,’ Kou’to replied stiffly.

‘Was there something you needed?’ She returned the empty tube to its compartment.

‘The prisoner has agreed to lead us to a source of safely drinkable water.’

‘En route to our target?’

‘Yes, commander. There should be little deviation from our primary course.’

‘Good,’ she sighed. She looked up into the branches for a moment. ‘I… I appreciate you taking it upon yourself to associate with him,’ Shadowsun said at last. ‘The dishonour must weigh heavily on you, but for the time being, we need the human’s co-operation.’

Kou’to bowed. ‘I serve the Greater Good in all things,’ he said. ‘My personal feelings are of no consequence.’

‘Do you have any siblings, Shas’ui?’ The suddenness and intimacy of the question took both of them by surprise.

‘Two brothers and a sister,’ Kou’to replied.

‘And a family of your own?’ Again, Shadowsun couldn’t believe that she was asking such personal questions. Where was her professional detachment?

‘Y’ana and I were partnered six years ago. She has bestowed me with four children.’

‘Well,’ Shadowsun murmured, struggling to regain control of her thoughts, ‘when we finally leave this planet, I will be certain to contact them and tell them of the good works you have performed here.’

Kou’to took that as an invitation to leave, spinning on his heel and returning to his men. As he passed near Hollett however, he froze. There was a sound on the wind, a distant whooshing that grew steadily louder.

‘Aircraft!’ Sabu’ro hissed.

With a flick of his hand, Kou’to ordered everyone to combat readiness. The fire warriors dropped their water flasks and food packs and hoisted their long pulse rifles to their chests. Glancing over, he saw that Shadowsun had reactivated her stealth field, all but vanishing into the shadows. For several moments, the sound increased somewhere in the skies above them. It reached a crescendo, and then receded into the distance.

‘Valkyries,’ Hollett whispered.

‘Searching for us?’ Kou’to replied.

‘Could be. Could be fighting the fires, but I doubt it.’

Shadowsun stepped out of the gloom next to them. ‘Get the men up, Kou’to,’ she said. ‘We’re moving on.’ She pointed angrily at Hollett. ‘Don’t let him leave your sight.’

They walked for hours, stopping only a few times to rest and even then, for scant minutes. All throughout the night, the red sky hung menacingly over them. No one spoke. A wind was at their backs, carrying with it an increasing miasma of ash and smoke. Shadowsun preoccupied herself by constantly checking and rechecking her command icons, whether they changed or not. The medicine had diminished, but didn’t entirely abate, the throbbing in her skull. The faster they neutralised the defence laser and got back to civilisation, the better.

Dawn approached, and the sky beyond the forest canopy lightened from red to orange. Shadowsun and Hollett were the first to emerge from the trees, followed by Kou’to and Sabu’ro. The four of them stood on the edge of a grassy knoll. In the near distance, a large lake reflected the fiery sky, its waters calm. A wide, paved road stretched off towards the south, eventually vanishing into the thick forest again.

‘Well now,’ Kou’to sighed, ‘this is a place worth fighting to preserve.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Sabu’ro nodded.

‘All except for that,’ Shadowsun said, pointing.

Lording over this scene, perched high atop a heavy, square pedestal, was a colossal statue. It depicted a human wearing an unwieldy yet intricately decorated suit of armour; birds of prey had been incorporated into his massive shoulder plates, the left hand was sheathed in talons, and carved faces stared from out of his knee guards. The figure depicted was helmetless, his head bowed. His right hand covered the face. Metre-high words were carved into the base, explaining how he was weeping with joy instead of sorrow, and that his tears, having fallen into the lake, had somehow imbued the water with supernatural properties.

It was the most ungainly thing the tau had ever seen.

‘Sweet God-Emperor,’ Hollett began muttering under his breath. ‘Forgive Your servant his sins, and remember I am just a man.’

‘What?’ Kou’to’s helmet cocked to one side.

Hollett kept this rapt gaze on the gigantic statue. ‘The Litany of Forgiveness,’ he replied.

‘Who is that supposed to be?’ Sabu’ro asked.

‘That is my saviour, the Immortal Emperor of Mankind,’ Hollett said. ‘He stood there once. Actually stood there. His footprints are preserved beneath the memorial. He came down from the heavens, and surveyed the land, and He pronounced it good.’

The three tau were silent for a moment, so confused by the reverence in Hollett’s voice that they didn’t know quite how to respond. Finally, Shadowsun tossed her long hair and snorted.

‘Your saviour had no sense of style.’

Fire burned behind the Guardsman’s eyes, but Shadowsun ignored him. ‘Is the area clear?’ she asked Sabu’ro. The young Shas’la nodded after consulting his equipment, and she began to stride across the grass.

Kou’to spoke into his tightbeam. ‘Team one, secure the perimeter. The rest of us will go down to the lake and fill our flasks.’

‘What are you doing?’ Hollett suddenly yelled.

‘We’re getting water,’ Kou’to answered.

‘No! This isn’t what I meant.’ Hollett started to panic as more of the fire warriors emerged from the forest. ‘There’s a river. About an hour’s walk from here. You can drink that.’

Shadowsun stopped and whirled around. ‘Shas’ui, silence the prisoner.’

‘Hollett-la,’ Kou’to snapped, ‘be quiet!’

‘You can’t! It’s sacrilege,’ Hollett cried. ‘Damned xenos!’

Shadowsun spun towards Hollett. Her intention was clear to Kou’to who swept the Guardsman’s legs out from under him, and began to pummel him with the butt of his pulse rifle. The human grunted and rolled over onto his side, curling his legs up to his chest. Kou’to stopped and, panting, called back, ‘The prisoner has been silenced.’

Shadowsun surveyed the two of them, and then continued towards the lake once again. Kou’to peeled off his helmet and watched her go.

‘That’s twice now. What, is it your job to hit me so she doesn’t have to?’ Hollett moaned.

‘The commander would have killed you if I hadn’t beaten you first. I can’t let her dishonour herself so.’

‘Very kind of you.’

Kou’to looked down at him. ‘Don’t mistake duty for pity,’ he snapped. ‘We do our best not to commit wanton murder, even in the fires of war. But if you don’t mind your place, our options will be limited. Do you understand?’

Hollett struggled to his feet. His arms hugged his chest and he stooped severely. ‘It’s holy water,’ he managed to say.

‘Your beliefs are ridiculous to us,’ Kou’to said, ‘but perhaps you can take consolation in the fact that you at least tried to stop us.’

Hollett grunted, and together they slowly followed behind Shadowsun.

When she came to the water’s edge, the commander stopped. The fusion blasters left her hands full, and she would have to disarm herself in order drink. She ejected the guns, which fell soundlessly into the grass, and then knelt down by the crystal lake. She dipped a gloved hand into the water and raised it to her parched lips. The water was sweet and cold, and it bathed her throat like nectar. Greedily, she drew more and more, stirring up the surface with expanding ripples. After four handfuls, she took note of her reflection. Her forehead and chin looked distorted and her eyes seemed to swim.

I look like Oru’mi, she mused, and her chest heaved without her consent.

The youngest of Kiru’s daughters was beautiful. Everyone said so. She had hair as black as the void and a soft and round face dominated by expressive, watery, red eyes. Their father often said that of the three of them, it was Oru’mi who most resembled their mother. Ty’res remained neutral after hearing such a slight, and voiced no opinion on the matter. Shadowsun, the steel-tempered eldest, scoffed at such mawkishness. Oru’mi could be their father’s favourite all she wanted, it didn’t change the fact that she was always on the verge of tears.

In fact, the last time she had seen her, she had been crying. Their father had died only days previous, and the three of them were now charged with going through the family estate, selecting which of Kiru’s possessions were to be kept and which were to be sent to the military museums. Oru’mi had argued fervently with Shadowsun over each and every item. She had wanted to keep them, no matter how miniscule.

‘You can’t get rid of that,’ she would whine. ‘That’s part of father’s legacy.’

‘No,’ Shadowsun replied coldly, ‘it’s just a thing. We’re his legacy. We don’t need cast-offs to remember him. Someday you’ll understand that.’

‘But… but…’ Oru’mi blathered. Seeing the eldest sister’s impassible face, she called for help. ‘Ty’res!’

Ty’res stayed true to her non-confrontational middle-child nature. ‘Work it out for yourselves!’ she yelled.

In the end, Shadowsun had claimed that as Kiru’s first-born, she had an inherent veto over the others. They purged nearly everything. A great and suffocating pall descended over the ancestral home. Shadowsun, Ty’res, and Oru’mi made a concerted effort not to encounter each other as one by one the rooms were shut up, and their furniture, murals, and tapestries were sealed in stasis fields. A week later, the house contained almost no evidence that their father had ever lived there at all. The three sisters stood outside the front gate, giving terse goodbyes to one another before heading off to their individual combat assignments. Oru’mi’s feelings got the better of her, and she broke down in tears. Ty’res put an arm around her. With a pleading look, she invited Shadowsun to do the same, but instead of joining them, Shadowsun had simply turned and walked away, thinking that her coldness made her strong.

It was difficult for Shadowsun to picture Oru’mi as a military leader, but in the years since, she had obviously become so. Tash’Var was a frontier planet, she knew, far from the home world. Its citizenry were hardy and resourceful, and perhaps amidst such people and out from underneath the protective wing of her family, the girl had blossomed. Aun’va had said that she had been defending members of the Ethereal caste from enslaving alien pirates. That was noble and heroic by any measure. But the poisons used by the Var Sin’da caused agony beyond description. Shadowsun wondered grimly if Oru’mi had cried like a version of her younger self as she lay in a hospital bed, dying by degrees.

Her chest lurched again. Shadowsun squeezed her eyes tightly shut. You didn’t get as far as you have by being weak. You will not break down, she told herself. They’re dead, but you are not. Now get to work.

She forced herself back to her feet, then opened her eyes and looked around. Kou’to and Hollett were approaching. The smoky wind had picked up again. Fire warriors collected water or stood guard alertly. The drone squad circled high overhead. Smoke continued to choke the sky, and a young boy stood beneath a drooping tree with leaves the colour of silver.

She gave a start. He was a tau male, perhaps four or five years of age, broad across the shoulders and narrow-waisted. He wore dark brown, loose fitting trousers and an ochre jacket with short sleeves. His forehead was high and noble, his eyes were bright and intelligent. He had a fine, narrow chin, and a short braid of hair that hung to just below his left ear. He smiled at Shadowsun, beckoned to her with a wide swing of one arm, and then turned and ran into the woods.

‘Did you see that?’ Shadowsun asked weakly before realising that no one was standing close enough to hear her. ‘Kou’to!’ she hollered.

The Shas’ui sprinted over to her. ‘Commander, what’s wrong?’

‘I saw a boy,’ she said and pointed towards the silver-leafed tree. ‘Standing just over there by the edge of the woods.’

‘A boy? You mean a human scout?’

‘No, he was tau. He was wearing a shas’saal’s uniform.’ She took a few steps forward. A notion, the only one that might have explained the child’s sudden appearance, flashed across her mind: he was obviously another survivor from the crash. She whirled around angrily. ‘Why wasn’t I informed that a fire warrior cadet unit had been assigned to my flagship?’

‘Commander,’ Kou’to was utterly confused, ‘I know of no such thing.’ He brought his forearm close to his helmet and spoke into his tightbeam. ‘Sabu’ro, query. Were there…’ He paused at the sheer ridiculousness of the question. ‘Were there any children aboard the commander’s vessel?’

The answer was immediate. ‘Negative. Absolutely none.’

Kou’to shifted his rifle strap uncomfortably. ‘Commander, the current situation is very stressful, and you haven’t slept since–’

‘I saw him!’ she snapped, and began running towards the tree line. Behind her, Kou’to searched the sky in a sudden panic and called out after her. The heads of several other fire warriors also jerked around to see what the sudden commotion was. Shadowsun left them all behind with a short burst from her suit thrusters. There was no trace of the child beneath the drooping tree, not even a set of hoof-prints in the soil. She looked around, suddenly desperate to prove that she hadn’t been hallucinating.

‘It’s all right,’ she called out. ‘You don’t have to hide. We’re not going to hurt you.’

Shadowsun glanced over her shoulder. ‘He was right here,’ she yelled. Kou’to was sprinting toward her. Sabu’ro trailed behind struggling as he carried her bulky fusion blasters.

It was only then, as Kou’to screamed her name over the tightbeam, that she became aware of the whining sound of turbines. Out of habit, she looked to her icon display, but the command drone no longer existed and her head-up display had vanished along with her helmet. She turned and looked back towards the lake just in time to see a wing of aircraft – the flying crates that Hollett had called ‘Valkyries’ – crest the trees above her. There were three of them, and they immediately began to shoot down the drone squad. The little machines stood no chance against the superior range and volume of fire. They exploded into clouds of twisted metal and rained down into the clearing. Pulse rifle beams leapt up into the air as the perimeter guards opened up, but the machines were out of range. They banked high now, preparing for another pass.

Sabu’ro passed the fusion blasters to Shadowsun, who scrambled to reattach them to the arms of her battlesuit. Kou’to had his rifle in his hands and was barking orders over his communicator. ‘All units, return fire.’

The Valkyries were swooping over the lake again, firing lasers and heavy bolter rounds into everything they saw. Several of Kou’to’s men were cut down mercilessly. Once more, the other fire warriors did their best to shoot the enemy flyers, but their pulse blasts continued to fall short.

Shadowsun hefted her remounted fusion blasters and grimaced. ‘We haven’t the range,’ she said to herself. Opening her tightbeam channel she called out, ‘Into cover, everyone! Whatever you can.’

‘Hollett!’ Sabu’ro gasped, pointing back down the slope.

The major’s two ever-present bodyguards were shoving him towards the base of the massive statue. He stumbled and nearly fell. Each one took a shoulder and threw Hollett forwards. He hit the rough stonework just below the last words of the inscription, and whirled around. The Valkyries were beginning a third pass. The two guards, still out in the open, were hit by a flurry of bolter shells that tore them limb from limb.

‘We can’t lose him,’ Shadowsun gasped, and before either Sabu’ro or Kou’to could object, she was rocketing across the grass in a bounding leap. Her adaptive camouflage tried its best to hide her, but as the gunships circled around once more, they spotted her. Lasers and heavy shells tore up the ground around her and made her shielding reverberate. Her shield drones whirled around her, putting themselves in harm’s way in order to preserve her life. First one, and then the other, exploded into metallic ribbons, their passing marked only by an extinguished icon on her interface collar. With her last few steps, she spread her arms wide and covered Hollett with the battlesuit’s bulk. Lasers pounded into her back, but the armour held firm. Sweat fell from her brow. Breathless, she met Hollett’s wide-eyed face. She snapped around to survey the skies.

The Valkyries were screeching upwards. Their wings wobbled and it seemed to Shadowsun that their pilots were on the verge of losing control. This manoeuvre was obviously sudden and unexpected for them, and in a flash, she understood why.

She glanced at her communications icon, and opened an unencrypted wideband channel. She raised her fusion blasters threateningly and as clearly as she could, shouted in the gue’la language, ‘Break off now, or I’ll destroy it!’

‘What are you doing?’ Hollett cried from behind her.

The aircraft soared up into the ashen sky, collected themselves, and began to orbit in a wide circle above the lake. Their torrent of fire ceased. Tense seconds passed until at last a voice came through the tau communicators. It might have easily belonged to a trained baritone, deep and soft and almost pleasing, but Shadowsun could feel the chilling malevolence lying just beneath the surface of it.

‘Move away from the statue,’ it said. ‘Now.’

‘To whom am I speaking?’ She replied.

The smooth voice ignored her question. ‘Move away from the statue,’ it repeated, ‘or I’ll open fire.’

She smirked. ‘And risk destroying the Emperor’s footprints,’ she chided. ‘I think not.’ Her tone became serious once more. ‘Answer my question.’

‘My name is Emmett Falkens, leader of the Dieprian Mountain Men. And you are?’

‘O’Shaserra.’

The voice on the radio repeated her name slowly, lasciviously playing over every syllable. It trilled the r’s in such a way as to make her physically ill. ‘Commander Sun Shadow, I believe. Or do my translational skills fail me?’

‘Shadowsun,’ she corrected. Her throat was suddenly very dry, and she feared that she no longer sounded threatening or authoritative.

‘I see,’ Falkens said smoothly. ‘This world does not belong to you, Shadowsun. You are trespassing. I take a dim view of that. Moreover, you killed many of my soldiers yesterday; fine boys who were simply defending their home from unwelcome intruders.’

‘And you murdered hundreds of auxiliaries when you destroyed my ship.’

‘Non-combatants,’ Falkens sniggered. ‘That’s rich.’

She swallowed hard. ‘You will clear the skies immediately and allow us to be on our way, or I will turn this abomination of a statue into molten slag.’

Falkens’ disrespectful laughter vanished. He considered the situation in silence. ‘I don’t entirely believe you,’ he said at last.

With a quick swipe, she burned a glowing slash across the inscription. The word ‘insight’ liquefied and ran to the ground in orange rivulets. She heard a commotion in the background, the Valkyrie pilots and a collection of other human passengers gasping and swearing.

‘My next shot destroys it all,’ she barked. Her voice was strong. She felt bolstered by the reaction of Falkens’s men.

The background expletives ceased. Falkens took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Finally he said, ‘All right, you win a temporary reprieve. We will meet again, Shadowsun. You may count on it.’

With that, the Valkyries banked and roared away to the south. Shadowsun watched them recede into the distance. Behind her, Hollett rose to his feet.

‘Mountain Men?’ she asked.

‘A double-edged regimental nickname.’

A gust of wind brought fresh smells of smoke and ash. The fire-storm was creeping closer.

‘You spoke true, Hollett-la. Your Shas’O is formidable. He waited until we were out in the open and then attacked with a reach superior to ours. He understands mont’ka.’

‘What?’

She surveyed the lake shore. The bodies of nearly a dozen fire warriors lay scattered about. ‘The killing blow,’ she translated. ‘From here, which way is it to the communications relay?’

Hollett came out from behind her to stand by her side. He gestured towards the road. ‘Just follow that. It curves to the west for a bit, but swings back southward at the Long Drop.’

Shadowsun grunted. ‘Kou’to,’ she said switching back to an encrypted tightbeam, ‘We’re moving on. Record the names of the fallen, and then join me. We’ll be leaving on a course due south.’

‘Understood, commander.’

‘No, I told you,’ Hollett said with a shake of his head, ‘the road detours to the west first.’

‘We’ll not be following the road.’ Shadowsun locked eyes with Hollett. ‘Travel along a single, predictable path, hedged on both sides by dense cover? You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Hollett-la? To lead us into another ambush?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It’s simply coincidence that we are attacked the moment we stepped into clear view, then? You had nothing to do with it, I suppose?’

‘I’ve been helping you this whole time!’

‘Which only proves how disloyal and untrustworthy you are! No, I will not listen to any of your advice anymore, thank you. If you suggest a thing, I will circumvent it and do the opposite. We will travel directly southward, through the cover of the trees.’

‘That would be a mistake.’ Hollett’s voice was deadly serious.

‘So says my enemy prisoner.’

Fire warriors began emerging from the tree line. Sabu’ro knelt by one of the fallen, and began typing information on his flex-screen while Kou’to looked on.

Hollett’s head bobbed in frustration more than agreement. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Fine. We go straight south. Why not? Obviously you have nothing better to live for.’

With that, he walked toward the water and sat down among a cluster of reeds. He snapped one off mid-stalk, and began to pluck brown, fluffy seeds from the top. He cupped them in his palm before blowing them out across the surface of the lake. He did not see the look of introspection that came over Shadowsun’s face.

South of the sacred lake, the land sloped downward. The forest lost none of its density however, despite the rockier ground. The roots of the trees, unable to plunge into deep soil, spread outwards in a thick, interwoven tangle. Shadowsun and Sabu’ro took the lead. Kou’to walked a few paces behind them with Hollett at his side. To their left and right, the remaining fire warriors picked their way through the gnarl of undergrowth. The going was tough and slow. The tau fought constantly to avoid slipping or falling, their hooves scrabbling to find purchase on the incline. Exhaustion was setting in for everyone.

‘If only we still had the drones,’ Sabu’ro lamented. ‘We would have a better idea of what lies ahead.’

‘There’s no point in pining over lost things,’ Kou’to chided. ‘We will simply overcome, and make do.’

‘Of course, Shas’ui.’ The young warrior patted the metal cylinder on his belt containing his rolled up flex-screen. ‘It’s just that without them, I feel that I am not contributing my full share toward the mission’s success.’

‘Do not doubt yourself,’ Kou’to said paternally, then added sharply, ‘and do not go begging for compliments.’ His eyes flicked to Shadowsun and back to Sabu’ro. The youth looked away sheepishly.

Shadowsun had been silent for a long time, lost in thought. She was aware of the others speaking around her, but their words were distant and half-heard. As she trudged slowly between the snaking roots, Hollett’s jibe turned around and around in her mind, seeking purchase until, at last, she found she was engaging in conversation with herself.

Do I have anything more to live for, she wondered?

Let’s examine the record, another part of her replied.

Memories played out for her like a holovid. She recalled her initial military schooling. Her selection for special command training following an unprecedented inspection visit by Aun’va. Battling greenskin barbarians in the jungles and deserts of the planet K’resh. Engaging the spore ships of the ever-devouring Y’he in deep space. Arriving in orbit of il’Wolaho.

Wait, she told herself. That’s just a list of military achievements.

She sifted through them again and again, trying to find an alternate theme with increasing desperation. But there was no escaping it. Her career and her life were one and the same. And why shouldn’t they be? She was a member of the fire caste. An exemplary member. A marriage partner, children, a home of her own; all these trappings and trivialities of everyday life she had sacrificed in order to become a paragon. In her, Kiru’s legacy and that of all his progenitors had been elevated to glorious new heights. Her actions served the Greater Good for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of tau. Wasn’t that enough?

Obviously you have nothing better to live for.

She had spent nearly twenty years, a full half of her life, at war. One day, her memorial would grace the Walk of Honour outside the Mont’yr Battle Dome, and future generations would speak her name with reverent whispers. But the awe would come from the children of strangers, for Kiru’s line would be at an end. She couldn’t let that happen. She had a familial duty. But what then of her career, of the Empire that depended on her so? What of her duty to it?

This burden was never supposed to fall to me.

No?

No! I had my own plan. I worked harder than anyone and I achieved it. I upheld father’s legacy. It was left to Oru’mi and Ty’res to carry on his line.

But they’re dead now.

And left me to do everything.

It is your duty.

Duty here, duty there, she thought. We have no lives. Just obligations. We’re never allowed to simply do what we want.

Then the question is obvious. What do you want, Shadowsun?

I don’t know, she snapped.

The answer that came back was so gentle in its tone that she stopped in her tracks, certain that it hadn’t come from her. But it had. Yes you do, it said.

‘Commander, what’s wrong?’ Kou’to asked. He and the others had likewise ceased walking.

‘Are you picking up something?’ Sabu’ro pointed anxiously at her battlesuit collar.

She looked at the two of them. ‘You should be made aware,’ she said slowly, ‘that I have sent a reply to T’au informing them that, following our rescue from this planet, I am considering the Taal Saal’Y.’

Their faces went slack, except for Hollett who looked on, confused at their words.

Kou’to nodded and lowered his head mournfully. Sabu’ro however, swiftly removed his helmet and stared Shadowsun in the eye.

‘You can’t!’ he exclaimed.

Kou’to barked at the insolence. ‘Shas’la, mind your place!’

Shadowsun waved a fusion blaster to quiet him. The young warrior’s face was despondent, she could see, and perhaps rightly so. After all, he had just been told that one of his heroes was thinking about quitting her job.

‘Considering, I said,’ she told him. ‘But strongly considering.’

Sabu’ro looked as if he were on the verge of tears. He blinked rapidly, and then put his helmet back on. He squared his shoulders manfully and said, ‘I understand. Thank you for telling us.’ Then he added, ‘If I may say so, commander, you will make an excellent mother.’

Shadowsun’s face broke into a weary smile, and she began moving forwards again. Sabu’ro followed by her side, step for step, but Hollett paused.

‘Taal Saal’Y’, he asked Kou’to. ‘What’s that?’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ the Shas’ui said curtly.

Hollett stared at him, waiting for a more satisfactory answer. Kou’to sighed at his obstinacy, and continued.

‘How would you say it?’ he rolled a hand in the air, searching for the right translation. ‘“To preserve one child”. It’s a policy we have wherein the last surviving member of a family may be excused from dangerous service in order to carry on the line.’

‘And she’s going to take it?’

‘She hasn’t made up her mind.’

Hollett gazed down the hill. A tiny laugh escaped his lips.

‘Is something funny?’ Kou’to growled threateningly.

Hollett shook his head. ‘Oh no,’ he said earnestly. ‘No. Someone like her, that’s not funny at all. That must be one hell of a tough choice.’ He began walking again.

Eventually, the land levelled out once again. The ground became progressively more wet, and the composition of the forest began to change. Instead of the towering, twisting trees and delicate flowers, there instead grew short, ugly trees with foliage like spider silk and bark the colour of rusting metal. Water began to pool in their tracks. By late afternoon, they were in sucking mud halfway to their knees. A fine, white mist began to settle all around them.

‘Did your Emperor weep when he saw the beauty of this swamp?’ Kou’to asked Hollett.

The Guardsman paid the slight no heed. He looked around, eyes wide. His skin was clammy and beaded with sweat. ‘Just make sure you all walk slowly and gently. No sudden moves. And tell her that as well.’ Hollett gestured towards Shadowsun. ‘Her armour’s way too heavy to be stomping around in here.’

‘Why?’

Hollett coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his bound hands. ‘You can’t smell that, can you, with your helmet on?’

Kou’to shook his head no, but Shadowsun called back over her shoulder. ‘I can. Smoke. Ash. It’s been getting stronger all day. I would guess that the highlands we’ve passed through are all burning fiercely.’

Hollett surveyed the air. ‘Yeah, we’re pretty much surrounded by it now.’

She stopped and leaned heavily against a blotchy orange trunk. ‘Perhaps Colonel Falkens should focus more on fighting fires and less on fighting me.’ She took a long drink from her water container and then sighed. She felt fatigued down to her very bones.

‘Never happen,’ Hollett said.

Kou’to sat wearily on a fallen log and massaged the knee plates of his armour. His rule to Hollett about never addressing the commander directly was apparently forgotten beneath a burden of weariness. ‘Why say you so?’ he asked.

‘Because he’s got something to prove, I suppose.’ The Guardsman shrugged. ‘He’s a Mountain Man.’ He struggled to clear his throat and surveyed his captors. He could see that many of them were nearing the breaking point. This march was pushing them to the limits of their endurance. It was for him as well.

‘Ah, yes,’ Shadowsun recalled. ‘Your sept’s unflattering identification.’

Hollett’s lip curled. ‘Double-edged nickname, I said.’

Shadowsun was suddenly intrigued. It was the first time she’d seen any hint of backbone in her prisoner. ‘Explain it then.’

The wisps of smoke were beginning to irritate Hollett’s eyes. He rubbed them, smearing mud across his face. ‘The Emperor gave it to us,’ he began. ‘It’s an old name, dating back to the lost times before the Great Crusade. The original Mountain Men lived in pristine wildernesses, far from any cities. They were very tough and self-sufficient. They were able to recognise what creatures to eat and which to leave alone. They could manoeuvre through the thickest forests and knew how to use the land to their advantage. But the more civilised people of the day, the ones who lived in cities and such, didn’t see them in the same light. To them, the Mountain Men were wild, unkempt, uneducated.

‘We’re a lot the same. To the rest of the Imperial Guard, we’re something of a laughing stock. I mean, our regiment is relegated to this one planet. It’s a beautiful planet, mind you; it’s a genuine treasure of the galaxy. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re committed to an eternity of guard duty. We aren’t sent to fight in major conflicts, and no major conflict ever found its way to us.’

‘Until now,’ Shadowsun said softly.

Hollett looked at her. ‘Yesterday was the first time anyone could recall the defence laser being fired. Ever. The soldiers on this planet have been dreaming all their lives for someone like you to come along. They can’t wait to fight you. They can’t wait to kill you, all of you, in the most brutal ways possible. Because, finally, they get to show the Imperium what they’re made of. And if the cost for doing so is the worst wildfire in recorded history, then so be it.’

‘What about you?’

Hollett’s eyes narrowed as he considered his answer. Something in the distance seemed to catch his attention and his head snapped away. ‘I know what’s important,’ he said cryptically.

One of the fire warriors on the perimeter threw his fist up into the air, a signal that something was amiss. Pulse rifles clicked to readiness. Shadowsun pointed from Kou’to to Hollett, and the Shas’ui nodded once. The air carried a mixture of snapping, crashing, honking, and screeching. And the sounds were coming closer. Shadowsun took a few steps forward, and was nearly run down.

The herd was hundreds strong and seemed to come out of nowhere. It rushed forwards, pouring over the tau like a living, liquid thing. Shadowsun lost sight of everything else as she became surrounded by a flood of brown flesh. The beasts whipped past her in a blur, but she could make out their general shape. They ran on four, comically elongated legs. Their bodies were long and thin, and covered by tan fur and white spots. Some of them had heads crowned by a ring of twisting horns, while others had a pair of tails that lashed back and forth. Their eyes were huge and wild. They frothed at the mouth. The sopping ground was being ferociously churned up with their passing, and their trampling was like thunder.

Shadowsun was grazed several times by their passing, each blow dizzily spinning her around. Then, one of the creatures ran blindly into her at full speed. Her battlesuit possessed one final shield projector, and there was a blue flash as it reacted to the sudden impact. The creature spun away. Shadowsun landed face-down in the mire. An arm’s length from her, another of the creatures became hopelessly mired. As it brayed and struggled to get back up, its fellows paid it no heed whatsoever and trampled it into bits of red meat and broken bone. Then, as suddenly as they had come upon her, they were gone, crashing their way through the swamp with terrified abandon.

The mud felt cool against her face, and Shadowsun had to fight the urge to simply fall asleep where she lay. Her arms and back were bruised where the stampeding creatures had slammed the plates of the battlesuit into her flesh. Somewhere in the distance she could hear the moans and shouts of the others. She was dimly aware of someone kneeling down next to her.

Through fluttering eyes, she saw the tau boy crouched beside her, still dressed in his cadet uniform. When he saw her face, covered with its mask of brown slime, he giggled. Shadowsun attempted to lift herself, but her arms were like rubber. ‘Who are you?’ she muttered weakly, and then collapsed again.

‘Commander, it’s me,’ a voice said gently. ‘Sabu’ro.’

She opened her eyes to find no trace of the boy. Rather, the young shas’la was kneeling beside her, helmet off, his brow furrowed with concern. When he struggled to help her up, she wobbled slightly.

‘Commander, are you all right?’

She surveyed the scene to make certain that no one else had been seriously hurt. Fire warriors were helping each other up from out of the mud. She wanted to tell him no, that in fact she felt as if she were falling apart. But it was a commander’s duty to elevate and maintain the morale of those under her, and so for the Greater Good, she lied.

‘Never better,’ she told him.

‘Oh no, no, no, no no,’ Hollett was muttering. ‘Stupid, damned bovids.’

‘What were they running from?’ Sabu’ro asked, trying to ignore the panicking human.

She cleared her burning throat. ‘The fires, I would think. Perhaps there’s enough moisture in this place for it to be a natural refuge...’

Her voice trailed off as the ground began to shake. In the mud puddles around their legs, the water began to ripple. Something was smashing its way through the trees in pursuit of the fleeing herd. Something huge.

Kou’to trudged out into the middle of the bog. ‘Ires shas’ka momyu!’ he shouted. Raising a fist, he signalled the fire warriors to ready weapons and arrange themselves into ranks around him. ‘Sabu’ro,’ he snapped, ‘guard our prisoner.’

The young Shas’la slogged back towards Hollett, pulse rifle in hand. The Guardsman was glancing at the ground, his face stricken with panic. The surface of the bog seemed to be boiling now. He looked to Kou’to and screamed, ‘Get out of there, you idiots!’

‘Sabu’ro!’ Kou’to barked. ‘Quiet him!’

Sabu’ro’s fingers squirmed uncomfortably against his rifle. ‘Please, Hollett-la,’ he hissed.

Hollett ignored him. ‘Then give me back my gun!’ he shouted.

Kou’to was bowled over by the audacity of the request. ‘Shas’la, I ordered you to quiet the prisoner!’

Whatever was coming was nearly upon them.

‘At least give me the chance to defend myself!’

Shadowsun glanced over to Sabu’ro, and noted his reluctance. With augmented strides she stomped over to the tree against which Hollett had pressed his back. Sabu’ro stepped aside as best he could. The commander wound back to deliver a brutal bludgeoning, but she never got the chance. The trees behind her splintered amidst a thunderous crash, and a creature, one of the largest any of them had ever seen, strode into their midst.

It was larger than a tank and stood on four, broad legs. Vast, solid antlers sprouted from its head. Its long fur was a mass of dark brown, broken only by a peculiar V-shaped patch of light tan across its neck. Something was impaled in its flesh: a long metallic rod that trailed wires. Its blue eyes were tiny in comparison to the rest of its features, but they stared brightly from underneath a colossal brow. It lifted a titanic paw up from the mire, and swiped the air with five curved talons. When it bellowed, the creature’s face seemed to open wide enough to swallow a person whole, and the sound rattled the branches.

‘Ursaloth,’ Hollett whispered.

The beast lowered its face, and the antlers became a shield wall as it charged forward. Kou’to’s men fired their rifles as it came on, but to no effect. The ursaloth seemed to deflect or absorb their every blast. It plowed into the fire warriors like a runaway monorail, and reared its head. Half of the tau went flying, smacking into nearby trees and falling limply in the mud. Shadowsun whirled around and leveled her fusion blasters, but Kou’to and the remaining warriors were trying their best to hold the beast in place. They beat at its legs in a flurry of pathetic blows, and blocked her line of sight. She couldn’t fire without the risk of killing one of her own, and il’Wolaho had already claimed enough of her people’s lives.

‘Get clear!’ she hollered.

Something stirred beneath her hooves. Hollett’s yells were lost in the din as the swamp erupted from below. The swarm of things that emerged from the mire were vaguely serpentine, and twice the size of her battlesuit. Their heads were their most prominent feature, with spherical eyes perched high atop their skulls and a mouth that occupied the rest. A pair of bony flippers protruded from behind their jaws, tipped with wickedly curved claws. Their mouths gaped. Their teeth were tiny needles, ineffectual for biting or chewing. They were covered with soft, rubbery, greenish-grey skin. They began pouncing and crawling over the fire warrior teams, over the ursaloth, over Sabu’ro and Shadowsun.

‘What are they?’ Sabu’ro cried.

‘Fen skulks,’ Hollett replied. ‘Oh, Throne…’

Shadowsun ignored him and fell into combat mode immediately, firing her blasters. A pair of skulks burst disgustingly as if their bodies were nothing more than taut bags filled with water and blubber. Their guts sprayed in all directions, painting her suit in grey ichor.

There was no time for anyone to notice Hollett. As he scrambled up the tree beside him, the razor-edged bark tore his overcoat in many places and slashed his arms and legs. With a grunt, he hoisted himself up into a notch between limbs and looked at his hands. Blood was pouring down his sleeves from the cuts he had suffered across his palms. Suddenly, he had an idea. While the tau fought their multitude of assailants, he began to saw his restraints back and forth across the branch between his thighs. A moment later, the bands popped, and he was free. He reached down to his belt, and depressed a button on one of the innocuous metal boxes attached there. There was a crackle all around him as his refractor field leapt into place. He had free hands, and protective shielding. Now all he needed was a weapon. Elevated above the carnage he scanned the scene.

Far to his left, the second team of warriors quickly tried to bring their guns to bear on the new threat. But their barrels were long and awkward, and the fen skulks’ reflexes were faster by far. They snapped off a flurry of pulse blasts. Their targets twisted and writhed out of harm’s way. Energy bolts wildly tore through the razor trees and vaporised the spider silk fronds above. Kou’to and his diminishing number of men could not even be seen for the writhing mass that covered them. Above them, the ursaloth gave a mighty swipe of its talons, cleaving several skulks in half.

Below Hollett’s dangling feet, Sabu’ro raised his rifle to his helmet and fired a single, well aimed energy bolt into a nearby cluster of the creatures. The shot tore clean through one of the monstrosities and the thing fell, spasming and spewing. Shadowsun launched herself forwards to meet them, the thrusters of her suit sending up a plume of mud. She landed and brought the flat edge of the fusion blasters down on the nearest thing’s head. Its gelatinous skull caved in, coating her arms with fatty blobs of flesh and ruptured eyeballs. The remaining five surged ahead. Enormous mouths snapped. Claws scrabbled over the surface of her suit. She raised her arms to shield her face and locked her knees to prevent being bowled over. Unable to deliver any kick attacks, she felt as if she were fighting in a pool of glue, partially restrained and capable of moving only in slow motion. A claw missed her eye by the slimmest of margins, tearing a ragged slash down her cheek. She shoved the weight of the suit against the swarm and tried to hold on. When a pair of jaws swallowed her right forearm, she fired the fusion blaster down the attacker’s throat.

Hollett took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He had tried to warn her. Diepr-3 was no death world, but it still possessed its share of dangers. The boggy lowlands in particular were a haven for several carnivorous life forms, with the fen skulks being some of the worst. The snake-like amphibians would lie beneath the muck for days at a time in a state resembling hibernation. They leeched some basic nutrients through their skin, enough to keep them alive, but not enough to truly satisfy. Whenever they detected large vibrations in the mud, they would come awake and attack the source. A small platoon of men on foot could travel through the swamps with only a slight risk of waking the monsters beneath, but the thudding of a sentinel walker or other heavy machines would send them into a feeding frenzy. In this case, it had been the bovids – stupid, flighty things – that had roused the skulks. The ursaloth had only made things worse, stomping around with its terrible bulk. For that matter, he wondered detachedly, what was the Highland King doing this far south, and so far out of his element?

As if responding to Hollett’s thoughts, the ursaloth roared and shook itself like a wet dog. Fen skulks flew off in all directions. Then, bellowing its dominion, it charged forward, head lowered, antlers plowing a massive furrow through the bog. Kou’to’s remaining warriors were buried beneath a tidal wave of loam and stomped flat by paws broader than their shoulders. The Shas’ui himself was pushed along helplessly, his rifle lost and his hands desperately grasping for something to hold on to. At last, the ursaloth crashed into a particularly wide razor tree. Slime and water cascaded. The trunk snapped in half with a sound like thunder. Hollett caught a glimpse of Kou’to’s broken body as it sailed through the air and crashed into the underbrush. He swung his leg over the side of his perch, cut himself once more on the bark, and dropped to the ground.

Shadowsun continued to struggle against the fen skulks. Dimly, she realised that young Sabu’ro had joined her in the fray, sweeping the air with the butt of his rifle in an attempt to keep the monsters away from his commander. She clapped the fusion blasters together, crushing a fin between them, and then drove her knee into a mound of gelatinous flesh. The last of their attackers darted forward. Its tail wrapped around Shadowsun’s body. Its gaping face lurched to the side. Sabu’ro suddenly gave a sharp cry. His right arm had vanished at the elbow, swallowed by the frothing skulk. He held the spurting stump aloft and stammered incoherently. The front of his armour was stained dark blue.

Shadowsun risked dispatching the thing with a shot from one of the fusion blasters. The monster seemed to catch fire beneath the skin and erupted in a shower of goo. The heat melted a section of her suit’s frontal armour. She whirled around to catch Sabu’ro as he stumbled.

‘Vesa!’ she cried. ‘Vesa!’

She glanced up to see the ursaloth surrounded by a fresh mass of fen skulks, stomping and roaring. The bodies of her fire warriors lay scattered about the bog, broken and torn piecemeal. Not one of them moved or responded to her calls for help. Rather, it was the gue’la that grabbed Sabu’ro around the waist and hoisted him over his shoulder.

‘We need to go. Now!’ he yelled. He jerked his head towards the rampaging giant. ‘While he keeps them busy!’

‘The others…’ Shadowsun began weakly.

Hollett was already pushing through the swamp with wide strides. ‘They’re all dead. Even Kou’to. I checked.’

Shadowsun followed Hollett through a growth of dusty yellow-coloured shrubs and past a thick copse of razor trees. The Guardsman seemed to know exactly where he was going, and he made great strides through the mud. Sabu’ro’s blood left a spreading swath of aquamarine down the back of Hollett’s greatcoat. He groaned weakly as he was jostled about. Shadowsun tried to offer encouragement.

‘Remain strong,’ she told him, ‘you still have much to contribute to the mission.’

After some minutes, they began to climb up and out of the swamp. The mud was replaced by drier ground, scattered with rocks. A creek rushed along nearby. The water was thick with ash and dust. The ursaloth’s rampaging could still be heard on a wind that reeked of carbon. Hollett dropped to his knees in the midst of the stream, and put Sabu’ro down against the bank. He plunged his hands into the filthy water, and splashed his face. His breathing was laboured. Sweat ran freely down his face and left dark stains under his arms.

‘Little guy’s heavy,’ he muttered.

Shadowsun had stopped a few steps away. Her face was contorted. ‘The air,’ she said, ‘it’s getting very bad.’

‘Because we’re close to fires,’ he panted. He stood and began to remove the yellow sash he wore around his waist.

Shadowsun opened her palms and made a shrugging motion. The fusion blasters dropped into the grey water. She knelt down next to Sabu’ro and removed his helmet. The young tau’s face was pale. His eyes rolled about. ‘I need something to staunch the wound,’ she said.

Hollett thrust the golden cloth at her. ‘Here.’

She grabbed it without comment and clamped it with both hands over the stump below Sabu’ro’s shoulder. ‘Hollett-la, on my hip there is a small compartment. Get the cylinder inside, remove the cap, and hand it to me.’

As the Guardsman began to do so, Sabu’ro shook violently, looked up at his commander and said, ‘I’m so sorry… so sorry.’

Shadowsun shook her head. ‘There are no personal setbacks,’ she quoted, ‘only steps forward for the Greater Good.’

Sabu’ro managed to smile weakly. ‘Aun’va’s words.’

Hollett passed the tiny silver tube to Shadowsun, who pressed it into the side of Sabu’ro’s neck. She did not notice as Hollett then took several steps backward, opened his coat, and slowly pulled a cumbersome object from the small of his back.

‘I’ve given you a tissue rebuilder,’ Shadowsun told Sabu’ro. ‘It will help to seal the wound, and rejuvenate your blood supply.’

‘The commander should… leave me behind. I will… only… slow you down.’

‘Too many lives have been cut short already. Yours will not be one of them. Besides, I will need your expertise at the gue’la communications array to contact the fleet. We have to keep going.’

Sabu’ro closed his eyes. Shadowsun cupped some water in her hand and tenderly drizzled it over the young tau’s face.

‘Will he live?’ Hollett asked quietly.

‘I believe he will,’ she said as she examined the makeshift compress. Sabu’ro’s blood had turned the sash a bright green.

‘Good. Then get up slowly, and turn around.’

Shadowsun scowled and whipped her head around in fury. ‘I do not take orders from–’

Her eyes widened. Hollett was standing astride her discarded fusion blasters, leveling a massive pistol at her. It glowed from within and wispy tendrils of steam escaped from exhaust ports near the muzzle.

‘This fires plasma,’ he said flatly.

Shadowsun swallowed in a dry throat. She knew the term. One shot from Hollett’s sidearm would likely puncture her battlesuit, and annihilate her within it. She lay Sabu’ro’s head down on the bank, and slowly rose to face the major.

‘Where did you get that?’ she asked dumbly.

‘Took it from Kou’to,’ Hollett replied. He did not blink. His hands were rock steady.

She was stunned to realise that she had absolutely no idea what to do. Never had she so quickly and easily lost control of a situation. All her life, it was she who was the one in control. ‘What now then?’

Hollett raised his chin. ‘“You have squandered the lives of your men, and been defeated.” Isn’t that what you said to me?’

All the strength seemed to drain out of her. ‘Yes.’

‘“And as an officer, you will doubtless wish to now die with honour.” Something to that effect.’

‘Yes.’ She was thankful for the rigidity of her battlesuit. Its reinforced joints would ensure that she was standing when she died.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The creek gurgled around their ankles. The air was hot and heavy.

‘I’m not going to kill you,’ Hollett announced. ‘Emperor knows I’d love to. Emperor knows that I should. But I can’t.’

Shadowsun didn’t move. ‘I am to be your prisoner then?’

‘Tempting, but also no. Doing either of those things will have only one effect that I can see, and that is, to back your people up there,’ he gestured to the sooty sky above, ‘into a corner. If you’re captured, they will try to rescue you. If you are killed, they will feel compelled to avenge you. In either case, they will bring that armada into low orbit and dump on us with everything they have. Oh, sure, they’ll take a few losses. Maybe a lot. But in the end, they will destroy the defence laser and the colony around it with… I don’t know… whatever doomsday weapons you people employ. The seas will boil, the forests will be incinerated, and everything I care about will just be dust on the wind.

‘So, I’m going to take the only option left to me. I will get you to the comms array. I will take the planetary targeters off-line, and I will let your friends in space come down here and collect you. But for this, there is a price.’

Shadowsun sneered. Here it was revealed at last: the self-serving greed that was the cornerstone of every gue’la life. ‘You are hoping for some kind of clemency, Hollett-la? You think that by co-operating with us, you will gain favour when we annex this planet into the Empire?’

Hollett shrugged. ‘I won’t be around,’ he said. ‘You’re going to relocate me off-world.’

She was physically taken aback. ‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter where, so long as it’s sparsely populated and far away from here.’

‘I don’t care what you say, you are a traitor to your kind, Hollett-la. A spineless, snivelling coward.’

‘I should just leave then? You and your one-armed sidekick can wander the burning countryside and hope that you find what it is you’re looking for? Maybe while you’re at it, you’ll stumble across another Imperial officer willing to get you inside.’

Shadowsun’s eyes narrowed.

‘That’s what I thought.’ He lowered the pistol to his waist. ‘Make no mistake. You’re no better than I am in this mess. We’re both equally guilty of collusion with the enemy. So, do we have a deal?’

Shadowsun was reluctantly impressed. She had taken Hollett for a simple turncoat, a man too weak to accept death before dishonour. But she had sorely underestimated him, she saw that now. There was something driving his actions, something far more than simple self-preservation.

‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked earnestly.

‘Do we have a deal?’ he repeated.

Her mouth worked as if she tasted something sour. ‘Dao,’ she replied at last. ‘H’ai mesme ‘hee vash.’

Hollett waited.

‘Yes,’ she hissed in translation. ‘We are joined in a purpose.’

He stepped back so that he was no longer directly over the top of her weapons. ‘A bit long-winded, but good enough for me.’

Shadowsun cautiously walked forwards and reattached the fusion blasters to her battlesuit. They hummed softly as the power couplings clicked into place. She and Hollett regarded one another for a moment, each half expecting the other to squeeze a trigger or depress an activation stud.

‘We’d better get him up,’ Hollett said, indicating the place where Sabu’ro lay. He splashed his way down the creek, picked up the helmet, and then hoisted the young tau up on to his hooves. Sabu’ro stood wobbling midstream. Hollett pressed the helmet into his hand.

‘Nuni,’ he slurred.

‘You’re welcome,’ Hollett grunted. With a glance to Shadowsun, he began sloshing down the creek once more. ‘It’ll be better if we stick to the water now,’ he called.

Shadowsun extended an arm for Sabu’ro to lean on, and together, the two of them moved after Hollett. To the west, the sun set on a burning world.

The air grew worse as they travelled. The creek was joined by others until they were traversing down a narrow river. On either side of them the forest was a tangled wall of silhouettes shot through with flecks of orange. After an hour of staggering along, they passed their first flaming tree. Hollett double-checked his refractor field and surveyed Shadowsun. ‘How insulated is that suit?’

‘Less so without a helmet,’ she conceded, ‘but the shield generator is still intact. It will do.’

‘And Sabu’ro?’

‘His armour is fully environmental.’

‘Good, because we’re about to walk right through it.’ He dug into one of the deep pockets of his greatcoat and produced a large handkerchief. He dunked it into the water, and began to tie it around the lower half of his face.

‘I see now why you warned me against travelling directly south,’ Shadowsun said. ‘Surely though, you must agree that taking the road way would have been just as perilous.’

‘It’s all on fire now, so it doesn’t much matter. They were going to die no matter which way you chose. This is a lose-lose situation.’

‘Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Isn’t that a proverbial saying among you gue’la?’

‘Pretty much.’

She shook her head in disgust. ‘What a negative species you are. Everything is bleak and dismal. You have no sense of optimism or hope.’

‘So you say.’

‘Oh? Something gives you a reason to go on, does it?’

Hollett said nothing, refusing to take the bait. He resumed moving.

Shadowsun followed while trying a different tactic. ‘With lives so grim, I can see why il’Wolaho would be considered a treasure.’

‘Eel-walla-what?’ Hollett frowned.

‘Il’Wolaho. Our name for this planet. It means “the place of bright colours”.’

‘This planet already has a name.’

‘It will be changed shortly. When we pacify it, make it a proper, civilised world and remove any unwanted or disruptive elements. First thing I will tell the engineers to do is to drain that swamp and exterminate those snake creatures.’

Hollett smiled behind his impromptu mask. ‘The fen skulks? Yeah, have fun with that.’

‘Or that other monstrosity, the one that killed my warriors.’

‘The ursaloth?’

‘Whatever you call it.’

‘They aren’t monsters,’ Hollett said.

‘They are from what I’ve seen.’

‘No, no,’ Hollett waved his pistol in the air. ‘That one’s just been driven out of his natural habitat by the wildfires. He’s scared and confused and lashing out blindly. You know, you should feel lucky to have even seen one, especially one that old.’

‘Perhaps a zoo then. We could capture and transfer them to the Central Menagerie on T’au for all the people to come and wonder at.’ She surveyed him coldly.

‘Do whatever you want. Like I said before, I won’t be here.’

Before long, there were burning trees on both sides of the river. The flames grew thicker until it was nearly as bright as noon. All that could be heard was a crackling rushing sound as the air was heated and sucked upwards. Orange light filled every empty space. It played across the surface of the water and stained the sky above. The temperature was oppressive. It wormed its way through armour and energy shields alike. They stumbled often and it seemed that their progress was slow. Time and direction seemed to have vanished. There were only fires and heat and the river which they blindly followed.

When they at last came to a strip of rocky, open ground where there was no forest and nothing to burn, the three of them collapsed. They could hear the roar of a waterfall, and for a dizzying moment, Shadowsun was convinced that she had simply come full circle, that her survival pod was lying nearby, still thought-locked and filled with water.

‘We’re near the Drop’, Hollett finally managed to say. He peeled off his handkerchief revealing a red and blistered face. ‘There should be a cliff not too far off, and a bridge.’

Shadowsun left Sabu’ro and managed to claw her way atop a nearby boulder. Behind them, the wall of fire cast more than enough light to see by. They were very close to the edge of a wide chasm, just as Hollett had said. To the west, a single bridge reached across the gap. The far side was quiet and dark.

‘Nothing’s burning,’ she panted. ‘On the far side of this canyon, there’s nothing burning.’

Hollett sat up shakily. ‘The Drop will act like a natural fire break,’ he said. ‘You see that tall hill beyond the bridge?’

‘Only just.’

‘The comm relay is at the top of it.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ She dropped down with a heavy splash.

The three of them followed the lip of the canyon westward until the bridge was nearly in front of them. A large stone archway anchored it on this side, with a similar structure on the opposite end. From the tops of the arches, huge curving cables ran down to the deck. A low guardrail ran along each side. Shadowsun surmised that the structure was wide enough to accommodate only a single vehicle at time, or perhaps four people walking abreast.

There was no sign of anything or anyone else, and so they began to cross. A cool wind blew up from the canyon below. Hollett and Shadowsun both breathed it in deeply. The bridge swayed slightly beneath them. Hollett saw the look of panic that instinctually came over Shadowsun’s face, and laughed.

‘It’s supposed to do that. If it was built completely rigid, then the wind would cause it to crack.’

‘How long has it stood here?’ Sabu’ro asked.

‘It was built during the first settling. The support structure is made of whiskered adamantium though, so I wouldn’t worry. It would take a melta weapon to do any damage to it.’

‘Still, this must be terrifying to drive over,’ Shadowsun remarked.

‘That’s why anyone who has to come out here does it by Valkyrie. There’s a landing pad on the far side of the relay station. Your people can use it when they send a shuttle to come get you.’

They approached the midway point where the four enormous support cables came to their lowest point. Sabu’ro wandered over to touch one. He tried unsuccessfully to peer over the top. ‘How far down is it from here?’

Hollett laughed again. ‘Far,’ he said.

Shadowsun froze. The sensor suite in her battlesuit had sprung to life with a half a dozen indicators. Without a head-up display, she couldn’t identify them easily, and so she peered into the orange-hued night.

‘What?’ Hollett asked. ‘What is it?’

Another sound was steadily rising on the wind, a high-pitched whine that all three of them recognised from their first night in the forest. Aircraft were approaching fast and from somewhere high above them. Hollett searched the skies in a panic.

‘I can’t see them!’ Sabu’ro wailed.

‘They must be high up,’ said Hollett.

‘Moving fast,’ Shadowsun confirmed. ‘They’re nearly on top of us.’

The three of them broke into a run, desperately dashing toward the far side of the causeway. The turbine engines screamed somewhere above them, and then faded slightly. A multitude of new sounds came rushing towards them, like hands being run quickly over a silky fabric. Ten gue’la soldiers dropped out of the sky in a perfect formation, blocking their path. They wore heavy combat armour. Their helmets had bright-green lenses for eyes. A stubby machine poked up over each of their shoulders, connected to a power supply worn on their backs. Their rifles were short and heavy looking.

‘Don’t move, xenos!’ one of them barked.

Hollett stopped short and whirled around, only to find that twice as many men had come down behind them. ‘You!’ they hollered. ‘Hands up where we can see them!’

A wash of bright lights stabbed onto the scene from above. A Valkyrie was slowly twirling its way down to the deck. It landed behind the team in front of Shadowsun. The stubby wings of the machine grazed the suspension cables to either side of it. Shadowsun squinted in the harsh light as a lone silhouette emerged from a door in the vehicle’s side.

‘I told you that we’d meet again,’ called a voice from beyond the glare.

‘Falkens,’ Shadowsun sneered.

The colonel sauntered forwards as a man might walk through a garden. His hands were clasped behind his back. He wore a uniform much the same as Hollett’s, with a sabre of some kind that banged against his hip as he moved. In the backlight, Shadowsun could barely make out a hawkish nose, a pointed chin and high cheekbones. To either side of him trailed yet more troopers. By her count, there were now at least forty of them, all heavily armed and armoured.

‘Colonel Falkens,’ he corrected in his smooth, almost seductive voice. He shifted to one side slightly. ‘Hollett?’

‘Hello, sir.’ Hollett’s voice was very low.

‘So that was you we saw down by the Lake of Tears. Some of the boys here said so, but I told them they must be mistaken. There’s no way that Cordell Hollett would allow himself to be captured. He’s much cannier than that.’

There was a ripple of laughter among the soldiers. Falkens stepped close enough that Shadowsun could see his entire face. His eyes were bright, and there was a smile on his lips, but the expression was cold and merciless, a predator toying with a cornered prey. ‘Damn, but you’re predictable, Cordell. Aside from the main colony, this is the only place worth heading for on the entire continent. Did you really think that I wouldn’t anticipate such a move?’

‘Actually,’ Hollett said, ‘there was a small part of me that hoped you might be out trying to stop the fires. You know, like we’re supposed to?’

Falkens dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand. He turned to Shadowsun and studied her features. ‘How about you? Would you care to surrender? Throw yourself on my mercy, perhaps?’

‘I would not. Nor do I actually believe that you would spare me if I asked.’

Falkens leaned back on his heels. ‘Yes. You’re right about that. Still, it might be entertaining.’ Again the soldiers laughed. A few called out insults. Falkens drank it in merrily. ‘No? Are you certain? All right then.’ He spun and started to rejoin his men. ‘Bit of an anticlimactic ending to things, but so be it. Squad one, squad four, ready weapons!’

Twenty rifles jerked into position. Hollett and Sabu’ro were dumbfounded. Shadowsun was not.

‘So that’s it? You’re just going to have your men shoot me down?’ she called to Falkens.

‘I believe I’ve already established that,’ came the smug reply. ‘First rank, second rank, aim!’

She spread her arms wide in invitation. ‘Why don’t we finish this properly then, one commander to another?’

Falkens gave a dismissive snort. ‘I wouldn’t dirty my blade.’

‘I guess it’s true then what they say about the Mountain Men. You’re not warriors. You’re just uniformed gardeners.’

The crowd went silent for a moment. Then one of the soldiers near Falkens shouted, ‘Go get her, colonel!’ and the others responded in kind with shouts and chants. Falkens stepped forwards once again. He drew his sword from the scabbard with an exaggerated flourish. Tiny blue sparks, like miniature lightning bolts, ran up and down the blade.

‘At ease, boys,’ he yelled. ‘Enjoy the show.’

Shadowsun took several steps back. Outside of her battlesuit, Falkens would have a definite advantage over her. Humans were, she hated to admit, possessed of faster reflexes than tau. The augmented movements of the suit however, made her faster and stronger than any normal gue-la. Even so, when Falkens lunged at her, it was with a swiftness that nearly caught her off guard. She pivoted to the side. The blade thrust past her chest, slicing only air. Falkens recovered, and Shadowsun followed by plowing a hoof into his lower abdomen.

The colonel flew backwards and hit the deck of the bridge with a loud thump. The bystanders gasped and cursed. Falkens kicked himself upright. His eyes flicked to the dent in his chest plate, and then he glared at Shadowsun. Behind him, the troopers shouted encouragement. He approached more cautiously this time. The two combatants began to circle one another.

‘That’s one, little girl,’ he scowled. ‘There will not be another.’

‘You talk too much.’

‘Do I?’ Falkens’s blade slashed the air twice more. Each time Shadowsun managed to evade it.

‘You understand mont’ka,’ she retorted, ‘but your arrogance makes you sloppy.’

As if to prove her wrong, Falkens thrust his sword towards her left hip. Shadowsun once more moved to dodge, only to discover too late that the colonel had been throwing a feint. With a twist of his wrist, the crackling sword flipped over and cut high and to the right instead. Her integral forcefield was also fooled, it seemed. The armour near the top of her arm parted effortlessly. Blood spattered across her shoulder, and began to rain down her arm.

Falkens leapt back gracefully into a guard position, his body turned to one side and his sword before him protectively. Shadowsun charged. The colonel dropped low, rolled out of the way, and slashed at one of her legs.

Shadowsun whirled around. She caught a glimpse of Sabu’ro and Hollett standing nearby, their faces etched with fear. Two indicators were blinking wildly on her battlesuit collar. She glanced down and realised to her horror that her left leg was deeply cut. The interior padding of the suit expanded to put pressure on the wounds, but too little avail. Blood was gushing freely from a long rent in her leg plates.

Falkens’s men were cheering loudly now, their passions roused by this unexpected entertainment. The colonel’s face was a mask of concentration, with no hint of levity. Shadowsun went back on the offensive, closing the distance between them in a heartbeat. They were nearly chest to chest as she began pummelling him with the flat edges of her fusion blasters. His personal shield flared brightly again and again as it absorbed the blows. She drove a knee into his gut, and when he doubled over, she tried to flip him over her shoulder.

Falkens somehow twisted out of her grip and rolled away to the side. He came up low, but disoriented. He reached out with his free hand and steadied himself against one of the bridge’s massive suspension cables.

Shadowsun’s leg was buckling beneath her as she turned to face him. She couldn’t feel the fingers of her right hand anymore either. The cuts were very deep, she suspected. Perhaps all the way to the bone. Her battlesuit evened the gap between them, but she had to concede that Colonel Falkens was simply a more skilled melee fighter than she. Without thinking, she aimed both fusion blasters at him and fired.

Falkens’s eyes went wide. The back of his coat burst into flames as he barely managed to dive out of the way. The trunk-like cable against which he had been crouched melted clean through. There was a titanic crack as it snapped free of the bridge and flew up into the night sky. Shadowsun rotated to find her target, but as she did, the entire bridge rocked violently, as if some giant, invisible hand were suddenly shaking it. The world pitched to the right, and her leg seemed to liquefy. She fell to one knee, and looked up just in time to see Falkens. He was backlit by the harsh floodlights of the Valkyrie. A nimbus of white surrounded his head and shoulders. He wound back, and drove his sword downwards.

The blow was so precise, and the blade so wickedly sharp, that for a moment there was no pain. Falken’s planted a boot on her chest and jerked his sword free. Shadowsun tried to stand, but all the air seemed to have been sucked from her lungs. She collapsed to the pavement and lay there gasping, while on her collar an amber warning light flashed.

The watching soldiers went into hysterics. Falkens raised his gore-stained weapon in the air triumphantly, and smiled. He turned in a circle, basking in their praise. His coat-tails were still on fire.

Shadowsun managed to draw a breath, only to cough. Blue blood shot out from her mouth and nose. Falkens strode over the top of her, his sword lowered towards her neck. He swept his arm back to deliver a decapitating blow, and that was when she heard Hollett cry out.

The major dove, tackling Falkens around the waist and driving both of them to the deck. Electric sparks flew from the places where their two shields touched, and Hollett began beating the colonel about the head and face. Falkens tried to raise his sword. Hollett grabbed his wrist. With barred teeth they grunted at each other savagely.

Falkens planted a heel in Hollett’s stomach and kicked out. The major sailed up into the air and hit the pavement hard. He scrabbled away on his hands and knees, and quickly got to his feet. Falkens rose and wiped his bloody nose on the back of a gloved hand. ‘You traitorous heretic!’ he screamed. ‘Collaborator!’

Hollett held up his hands. ‘You can’t kill her, Emmett!’ he cried. ‘You don’t understand…’

Falkens didn’t reply. He simply charged and cut the air with his sword. Hollett scampered back, but the bridge was now sagging diagonally, and he tripped. Falkens kicked him in the side. Hollett, his fists clenched together, swept the colonel’s legs out from under him and pounced. Falkens rolled and sprang to his feet, panting heavily.

‘Look who found his spine,’ he spat.

‘I never lost it.’

They charged one another. Hollett grabbed Falkens’s wrist again, and twisted, trying desperately to keep the crackling blade away. Falkens, grimacing like a wild man, slammed his forehead into Hollett’s nose. The cartilage snapped with a sound like a gunshot, and Hollett’s face became awash with blood. He staggered back, stunned. Falkens lunged and drove his sword through the centre of the major’s chest, paying heed to neither armour nor shield.

Hollett made a gasping noise and went to his knees first. Falkens withdrew the sword and stepped back. The major slumped over on his side. An arm’s reach from him, Shadowsun continued to fight for every breath.

Falkens did not bask in triumph this time. He did not parade before his men, nor do anything to enhance the theatricality of the moment. He simply stood there, bent painfully at the waist, as breathless as his vanquished foes.

‘Don’t…’ Hollett struggled to say. ‘Emmett… you’ll kill us all…’

‘No,’ he said as he righted himself and placed his free hand over a wound near his hip, ‘not all. Just you. You, and your two friends.’ He hobbled closer, his sword nearly scraping the surface of the bridge.

‘Hollett-la,’ Shadowsun managed to say. ‘Grab hold.’

Rolling over, Shadowsun aimed both of her weapons at the second suspension cable. The beams were blinding as they vaporised their target. Tiny residual explosions ripped up along the length of the support structure. The bridge shook.

Falkens jerked his head around, trying to piece together what had just been set in motion. His jaw went slack. ‘Get off the deck!’ he screamed in a voice that was far from controlled. He turned and began to sprint back towards the Valkyrie. ‘Oh, God-Emperor! Get clear, all of–’

Then, with an ominous grinding noise, the entire bridge began to fall. The end closest to the wildfires heaved and pitched sharply downward. The remaining support cables, anchored on the side of the communications array, groaned and stretched. Wide, jagged cracks raced up towards the Valkyrie. In several places, the rockcrete surface exploded outwards as metal support struts and huge, iron-red girders erupted through it. Within seconds, everyone was sliding.

With a burst from her suit thrusters, Shadowsun slowed her descent enough so that she could catch a jutting beam and not be impaled upon it. She hugged it with both arms. Between her hoofs she could see Falkens’s men, the ones who had blocked off the way they came. They flailed helplessly, scrambled to find something to save them, and fell headlong into the black depths of the gorge.

The bridge lurched and fell again. It was nearly vertical now, a roadway built by a madman, with one end attached to the top of a cliff and the other hanging freely in space. She craned her head upwards. From her perspective, it was raining bodies. Hollett had managed to latch onto a guardrail, wrapping a forearm around one of the bars, and jamming his foot between two others. His other hand was clenched in Sabu’ro’s. The Shas’la dangled perilously.

With agonising slowness, the Valkyrie toppled and began to slide. It plowed over at least twenty of Falkens’s elite troopers before becoming caught in a tangle of wires and beams. Some troopers bounced along the blacktop, screaming. Others impacted against the tumbling wreckage with sickening wet sounds, and then plummeted silently into the Drop.

The Valkyrie engines roared to life. The transport lurched again and twisted slightly. Like a bird caught in a net, it rose up only to have the cabling of the bridge drag it down again. Through the cockpit glass, Shadowsun saw Falkens at the controls, manically trying to extricate it from the collapsing structure.

She refused to let him get away. Not too far above her she noted a place where part of the guardrail had bent inward. Three of Falkens’s men had lodged there in a twisted heap. She let go of the beam from which she was hanging and rocketed upward with a long burst from her battlesuit thrusters. She landed amidst the bodies on the little shelf, fell on her hands and knees, and spit a wide, blue stream of blood from her mouth. Then she wearily pointed both her fusion blasters directly at Falkens.

The colonel pulled back on the Valkyrie’s controls with such ferocity that the cords in his neck stood out. The awkward machine whined in protest, but began to finally move up and out over the gorge. Bits of stonework and cabling were caught up in its landing gear and wrapped around its wings and tail.

As it passed over her, Shadowsun fired.

The beams struck the transport’s belly. The armour-plating simply ceased to exist as its molecules flew apart. White-hot lines of heat radiated out from the impact point. The very air inside the cockpit and passenger compartments became superheated and caught fire. The Valkyrie spun like a child’s discarded toy. Shadowsun was certain that she caught a glimpse of a hand pressed against the pilot’s canopy before everything exploded in a mass of shrapnel. Huge pieces of machinery fell into the Drop, trailing auburn flames behind them. When they at last hit bottom, the sound was distant and muffled.

How long she lay there on the makeshift alcove she didn’t know. It was a labour just to breathe, and the night breeze felt cool and refreshing against her skin. Finally, she heard Hollett calling out to her from somewhere nearby. She lifted her head.

‘Oh, good. You’re not dead,’ Hollett said dryly. He and Sabu’ro were climbing up the guardrail with agonising slowness.

‘No,’ she murmured. ‘Not yet.’

‘Can you make it up to the top, commander?’ Sabu’ro asked.

Shadowsun nodded weakly, and drained the blood from her mouth again.

The sun was rising when the three of them at last crested the cliff top. Across the Long Drop, the fires continued to rage. They lay there, completely spent, and watched the forest burn. Finally, Hollett stood and began limping up the winding path that led to the communications array.

‘Let’s go call your friends,’ he said.

The landing field was in chaos. All along the rockcrete the ochre shuttlecraft of the tau had landed and disgorged their passengers. Fire warriors swarmed everywhere. Earth caste scientists unloaded equipment and stacked supply crates. Water caste merchants took inventory of their wares. A few pilots from the air caste examined their vessels or made minor repairs. From every flagpole hung long, mustard banners proclaiming that the inhabitants of il’Wolaho – formerly Diepr-3 – were now under the jurisdiction of the Tau Empire.

Shadowsun displayed a banner as well: a waist-length purple cape hung over her left side. It was the official symbol for a tau in mourning. Sabu’ro walked proudly beside her. He wore a new suit of combat armour decorated with the insignia of a Shas’ui. His helmet rested in the crook of his left arm. They passed into the shadow of the defence laser. The massive building reached up into a heaven streaked with grey clouds of smoke.

Shadowsun pointed through the crowd ahead of them. Through the throng she could see Hollett standing beside a large pile of suitcases and trunks. He wore knee-high boots, a simple pair of grey trousers and a brown leather jacket over the top of an off-white shirt. His plasma pistol rested in the holster on his hip. A large, white bandage etched with silver circuitry stretched across the bridge of his nose.

The two tau came to a halt. Sabu’ro gave a shallow bow of greeting. ‘Greetings, Hollett-la’, he said merrily. ‘How are you feeling?’

Hollett touched his nose and said, ‘You know this thing is just about healed? Those medics of yours sure know a thing or two.’ He looked at Shadowsun. ‘How’s your leg?’

Shadowsun merely thrust out a small digital readout. ‘Your transfer data,’ she said. ‘Show this to the pilots, and they will ensure that you get where you are going.’

Hollett accepted the pad, and tucked it inside a breast pocket. ‘And where is that, exactly?’

‘Colony Twenty-three,’ Sabu’ro answered. ‘I chose it myself. The port is sparsely populated, but multicultural. I thought that you might encounter other humans there from time to time.’

‘Nuni,’ he said.

‘You might not be so thankful when you get there,’ Shadowsun sneered. ‘It’s the epitome of desolation.’

Hollett looked over at his stack of belongings. ‘I’m sure we’ll make do,’ he said, and gestured with his fingers. A girl of perhaps five or six years cautiously leaned out from where she had been hiding and looked up at the blue-skinned aliens. She was long-limbed and thin and pretty. Her light-brown hair was cut to just above her shoulders. Her hazel eyes were wide with mistrust. She clutched a well-worn, four-legged, stuffed animal toy to her chest. She darted out from behind her cover, and latched herself to Hollett’s side.

‘Daddy, who’s that?’ she whispered loudly. Hollett hoisted her up in his arms and held her tightly. He bounced her lightly, told her to never mind, and kissed her cheek.

Shadowsun’s expression fell. ‘Your daughter?’ she croaked.

‘Janaya, yes.’

‘Where was she all this time?’ Sabu’ro inquired.

Hollett licked his lips and cast a glance towards Shadowsun before he jerked his head towards the dormant defence laser. All around its heavy base were nestled the hab-blocks of the citizenry and the barracks of the former Guardsmen.

‘We had a communal dormitory over there.’

Sabu’ro gasped with realisation. ‘If we had... if the fleet had fired on this place from orbit…’

From behind the four of them came a long, undulating wail, like a lamenting foghorn. They turned to see a small army of earth caste tau struggling to manoeuvre a massive cage up the boarding ramp of a cargo shuttle. Inside the enclosure, the ursaloth bemoaned his fate.

‘The king has been dethroned,’ Hollett muttered grimly.

‘What’s going to happen to him?’ Janaya asked.

‘I’m not sure sweetie. I think he’s getting a new home. Like us.’

The flex-screen wrapped around Sabu’ro’s left forearm emitted three sharp chirps. He read the display, and whispered, ‘Commander, it’s Kor’el Kenhi’ta’s vessel. They have received a data packet from T’au, addressed to you.’

‘My shuttle is close by,’ she replied. ‘Have them transfer the message there.’

She took one last look at Hollett as he cradled his daughter.

‘Was it for this?’ she asked, but the former Guardsman’s only response was to hold the girl tighter. Shadowsun marched away through the crowd without another word. Sabu’ro started to follow, saw how Janaya buried her face into Hollett’s shoulder, and felt compelled to say something.

‘The ursaloth will be well cared for, I’m sure. The Menagerie is home to some of the most skilled xenologists in the Empire.’

Shadowsun was already standing just inside the open hatch of her shuttle. Sabu’ro joined her in the darkened interior, and activated a large viewscreen on the curving bulkhead.

‘We’re ready down here,’ he said.

The wrinkled, wizened face of Aun’va appeared. He was seated behind a grandiose, white desk. A towering hat was perched upon his head.

‘O’Shaserra, I hope that this message finds you not only alive and well, but victorious in your endeavours. The Aun’t’au’retha received your previous transmission, and have discussed it at length. The council acknowledges that you are well within your rights to take the Taal Saal’Y. Indeed, your retirement from active service in order to focus on a family is likely the wisest course of action. The Empire as a whole would suffer a great loss if Kiru’s line were to come an end. Therefore, if you wish to return home, you will be welcomed with all honour.

‘But I speak now, not on behalf of the Aun’t’au’retha, but for myself. Shadowsun, when I first met you, when you were just at the beginning of your caste training, I knew then that you would be one of the rare ones, one of those legendary few who push our entire race forwards with their actions. I did what I could to help. I used my influence to ensure that you received the most dangerous and difficult assignments, because the sharpest blade is tempered in the hottest forge.

‘Your father knew all of this, incidentally. Not only that, but he approved. He could never tell you himself, but he was very proud of you. He once said “in that girl, I see all of my best qualities and more”. That’s why he gave you your name. You eclipsed him while also being the light of his life.

‘I will understand if you choose to come home. But I also encourage you to rule your fears, and not be ruled by them. But you and I know that there is also a Greater Good. It often demands sacrifice and loss, but in the end, it is the wiser, better path.

‘Regardless of your decision, the Aun’t’au’retha and I eagerly await word from you.’

The image faded out. Neither Shadowsun nor Sabu’ro moved.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she muttered.

Sabu’ro’s face was etched with anticipation and worry. He swallowed and managed to voice the question burning within him. ‘Back to T’au, commander?’

She walked to the boarding hatch and surveyed the throng swirling about on the landing field. A cool breeze filled the shuttle with memories of smoke and fire. She saw Hollett seated on one of his trunks, cradling Janaya in his lap as she played with her stuffed toy. She saw that the ursaloth’s cage was nearly stowed away. She saw the tau boy standing at the base of the boarding ramp. He was dressed as before, in his crisp cadet’s uniform. His black hair-braid framed his face. Once, lying in the bog, she had asked who he was, but there was no need now. She knew who he was.

He was her boy.

You would have been E Rra’E – ‘Shadowsun’s son’. Others would have smiled whenever they heard your name. How ideal, they would say. Perfect alliteration. Balanced spelling. Even a clever homophone. You would have had all of my best qualities and more, a perfect inheritor of Kiru’s line. You would have eclipsed me, and I would have been so proud of you.

The boy regarded her forlornly and motioned for her to step down from out of the shuttle and join him. She thumbed the control panel next to her. The hatch swung shut, sealing away the noisy scene.

‘Why would we go home when there is so much still left to do?’ she said, answering Sabu’ro.

Behind her, the young shas’ui broke into a smile. ‘I’ll set course to rendezvous with Kenhi’ta’s vessel at once,’ he said, and headed to the cockpit with proud strides.

In the silence and isolation that rushed in, she placed a hand against the smooth metal door. Her head sagged and her body was wracked by three hard sobs. Tears splashed onto the tips of her hooves.

‘I’m so sorry, child,’ she whispered. ‘I just can’t.’

Then she drew a ragged breath, sniffled, and straightened her uniform. Oh, Oru’mi, she thought, wouldn’t you laugh to see your big sister right now. She spun on her heel and followed after Sabu’ro. There was work to be done for the last of Kiru’s line, she told herself. Important work. A Greater Good.

Moments later, the shuttle rocketed skywards. Shadowsun caught her reflection in the viewport as she watched the landing field recede. Her eyes were dry. After all, the boy on the planet below hadn’t really existed. And now, she realised, he never would.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Braden Campbell is a classical actor and playwright, currently living in Milton, Ontario. His theatrical work has seen him perform across not only across Canada, but in England and New York City. For the past five years he has also worked as a freelance writer, particularly in the field of role playing games. Braden has enjoyed Warhammer 40,000 for nearly a decade, and remains fiercely dedicated to his dark eldar.

To Annachie, who sacrificed her summer vacation for the Greater Good.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Adam Tooby.

© Games Workshop Limited 2013. All rights reserved.

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

ISBN: 978-0-85787-967-7

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.