Blood Oath
Phil Kelly

 Chapter One


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 	‘Spit it out, then,’ said Kor’sarro.

 	‘My khan?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 	‘Correct again.’

 	‘Ha. Terrain?’

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

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

 	‘Anything else?’

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

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

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

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

 	‘Not these ones,’ the Stormseer replied.

 
 
 Chapter Two


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 	The master, come to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 	One in particular. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 	‘And the planet itself, my commander?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 	‘By all means, Oe-nu.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 	She rather liked the term.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 	It was then that the hives awoke from their slumber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 
 Chapter Three


 	HIVE ACACIA SECUNDUS
ACACIAN BASIN
AGRELLAN, 742.999.M41


 	A gun-studded slab of ferrocrete that could have crushed a Titan slid inexorably down the central spire of Hive Acacia Secundus. It crashed through the concentric circles of the hive’s waist and toppled sideways with majestic slowness, flattening a swathe of the underdistricts as it thundered to a halt. Rock dust billowed upwards as secondary landslides took yet more of the hive’s outer layer with them.

 	Kor’sarro Khan grimaced. With the hives as densely populated as they were, that little disaster would have claimed tens of thousands, perhaps millions of human lives. If these xenos were allowed to continue their methodical destruction of the Acacian Basin, the death toll would soon reach the billions. 

 	‘This has gone on long enough,’ the khan said to Sudabeh. ‘Let the others look to their own battles.’

 	‘Hives of this size can withstand a lot of punishment, my khan,’ replied Sudabeh. ‘Would it not be better to wait for Patriarch Tybalt’s Knights, or for Redstone’s Devils at the very least? With their help, we could cripple the foe’s chances of escape.’

 	The khan just frowned, staring out as more tau missiles arced into the weak points of the hive’s architecture. Another set of spires crashed down, taking a wide strip of barnacle-habs to a dusty death.

 	‘No,’ said the khan, turning on his heel. ‘Mobilise and deploy all air units,’ he voxed to his men. ‘I want both Thunderhawks with a full complement and in the air immediately. Two outriders at all times.’

 	A series of terse acknowledgements crackled in response from the Third Company’s sergeants and Techmarine pilots.

 	Sudabeh sighed heavily, picking up his totemic staff and making his way after his captain on his way to the Kisma’s launch deck.

 	‘It’ll be good for them,’ said the khan over his shoulder, loosening Moonfang in its scabbard.

 	The Kisma, the Imperial drop-ship that had seen the White Scars to their landing site, was a fat-bellied whale of a craft. It had been built to withstand direct barrage from warships a size category larger than itself. Just as well, for its sides were still buckled and burning from its terrifying journey planetside. 

 	The Kisma’s ablative armour robbed it of a great deal of potential speed, a fact that had gnawed at the patience of the White Scars within just as acid eats at metal. Yet after communing with the Emperor’s Tarot, the Stormseer Sudabeh had ordained the Kisma the safest vector of approach. Given that the Imperial fleet was being torn apart by a lethal assault from tau airspace, the khan had been ill-disposed to argue with him. 

 	The Kisma had done her job well enough, bearing them safely if inelegantly to the planet’s surface. It was no longer the time for caution. Now was the time for speed.

 	The Thunderhawks Khan Spear and Headseeker roared out from the underflank launch bays of the drop-ship like missiles from the wings of an immense fighter plane. Burning upwards on trails of refined promethium, they raced around the basin’s inner mountainsides, keeping to the smoking clouds as they banked parallel to Hive Acacia Primus. 

 	In theory both of the assault gunships had firepower enough to take on a scout-class Titan. In the case of Khan Spear, the fact was indisputable. The long-barrelled turbo-laser destructor mounted atop the Spear was powerful enough to punch through one side of a hive spire to the other. During the Tarotian Suppression, the khan had seen it obliterate half a kilometre of plasteel, ferrocrete, and adamantium in one searing, blinding blast. It was one of the khan’s most favourite weapons in all the galaxy. Though it greatly irritated the Spear’s dour Techmarine pilot, Debedian, Kor’sarro would often shout out targeting solutions during an aerial engagement, claiming the credit if the subsequent kill shot hit home.

 	Even shorn of its dorsal cannon the Thunderhawk could still embarrass a battle tank. Under its primary wings were sets of Hellstrike missiles whose individual payloads could collapse a hab-block. Lascannons graced its secondary wingtips, and twinned heavy bolter arrays swivelled on gimbals under the frontal stabiliser fins. White as snapped bone and marked by the lightning-split ingot of the White Scars, the Thunderhawk was the pride of the company’s armoured elite. Its opposite number, the Headseeker, was just as formidable a sight. These were no mere aircraft, but deadly and sacred relics released from their sanctums to wage the bloodiest of wars.

 	As the Thunderhawks set a breakneck pace, two pairs of Stormtalon gunships came alongside them. Each craft was a balled fist of stub-nosed guns and powerful engines. The Techmarine pilots at the helm of each escort craft levelled long-range auspex scans at the plains, binding their findings together in a lattice to better inform their charges of the tapestry of battle.

 	The Khan Spear’s engines flared as it pushed ahead of Headseeker, arrowing round the lee of the hive in a tight arc. Inside its passenger holds three squads of White Scars grinned as G-forces pulled hard at their flesh. The valley shook with raw sound as the Thunderhawks came hurtling into full view of the tau ground forces, the element of surprise made manifest. Up ahead the tau vehicles had formed a series of dense wedges, their deployment seemingly at random. The tip of each formation pointed towards the hive.

 	‘Why in the Emperor’s…’ said Kor’sarro. Suddenly it hit him. ‘Sudabeh! They are in the blind spots of their prey!’

 	‘I can believe it,’ voxed back Sudabeh. ‘I told you they were cunning.’

 	‘Ha. Not cunning enough,’ said the khan, leering as the Spear lanced towards the nearest of the tau wedges.

 	For a split second the Thunderhawk’s turbo-laser destructor stabbed out in a boiling, blinding column. The Spear hurtled past, leaving behind a smoking gulley where a quartet of tau hover-tanks had been moments before. Leaning over Debedian’s shoulder the khan chuckled darkly, already tapping the next targets on the Techmarine’s screen. 

 	From the smoky gloom up ahead, dull flickers of light turned to hammering cylinders of force as the next tank wedge’s railguns took pot shots at the approaching Space Marine craft.

 	‘Headseeker, attend us,’ voxed Kor’sarro, ‘stop skulking in our slipstream and make your presence felt.’

 	In answer the heart of the tau wedge up ahead was wrenched into the air by a blossoming black explosion, thick pieces of xenos tank spinning off in all directions. 

 	The Headseeker’s primary weapon was not a laser like its brother the Spear, but a heavily modified battle cannon. No ordinary breach gun, this was a piece of ordnance longer than a Leman Russ tank. When passing over dense urban environments, the weapon was difficult to use in anything other than a suppression role. Out in the open, the full force of its destructive power could be brought to bear.

 	Another shell hammered into the scattering tau tanks, and great plumes of toxic earth flew upward. Within them were more ochre hulls, entire squadrons sent spinning into the smoke. As the Headseeker launched its Hellstrike missiles with a chain of whooshing roars, the skimmers on the edge of the formation backed away. They were too slow. A triple detonation blasted into the gun-tanks at the tip of the wedge, two of them flipping over before their burning remains crunched to a halt.

 	‘Better shoot sharp, Debedian,’ said the khan, leaning in so close the Techmarine could smell the raw meat on his captain’s breath. ‘The Headseeker’s catching up.’

 	Then the world turned black. 

 	Hive Acacia Secundus had finally taken the shot it had been waiting for, and a shell the size of a maglift had detonated amongst the tau tanks scattering at the Thunderhawks’ attack. Mort-signals blaring, the Spear bucked and rolled as the macrocannon shell’s blast turned the air tornado fierce. Debedian’s helm chattered machine code as he fought not only to appease the ship’s machine-spirit but also to wrestle its steering array at the same time. A century of dutiful maintenance had bought the dour Techmarine some leeway with the Thunderhawk, and the gunship allowed itself to be brought back under control.

 	The Spear pulled back up alongside its brother the Headseeker, both soot-streaked gunships ploughing out of the black wall of smoke and angling towards the next wedge of tau armour. Though one of their Stormtalon escorts had been caught in the hive’s vengeful strike, the other three escort craft burst from the billowing clouds intact.

 	They were not alone.

 	Commander Shadowsun’s frown was lit by a wildfire of flashing red icons. The gue’ron’sha had revealed themselves, their giant gunships soaring through the air high above. They were most definitely making their presence felt.

 	‘Primary threat denoted,’ Shadowsun transmitted. ‘All units at hives one and two, continue apace. Hive three units relocate, staggered pattern southward, seventh wedge first. Watch your gold zones. Once the strike passes, resume serrated echelons. Hammerheads continue destruction duty, Skyrays cover the air. For the Greater Good.’

 	Symbols of assent flashed in instant affirmation, blinking everywhere around the crescent of tank wedges that surrounded the hive.

 	Shadowsun’s command suite blipped audio. ‘This is Team Vre’Esta reporting a pair of direct seeker hits on the primary target. Damage minimal. Requesting optimised targeting solution.’

 	‘Continue to occupy their attention, Vre’Esta,’ Shadowsun transmitted back. ‘The air caste will deliver the kill. Admiral Li’men Ka, proceed immediately.’

 	‘Affirmed, commander,’ transmitted the air caste admiral. ‘Razorsharks inbound. Air superiority will be secured in a matter of minutes.’

 	Two triangular sets of blue-grey darts appeared on Shadowsun’s sensor screen, falling in behind the gue’ron’sha gunship icons as they curved towards the next armoured wedge.

 	‘They have taken the bait, Drai,’ said Shadowsun to the ghostly shimmer next to her. ‘Stay alert.’

 	Shas’vre Drai had known his commander a long time. The moment before the kill was always the same.

 	Under her rapid commands and cold demeanour, a smile was waiting to pounce.

 	The khan was not pleased.

 	‘You let three enemy craft on your tail? Get rid of them!’ he shouted, hammering his fist onto the pilot throne right next to Debedian’s russet helmet.

 	The Spear banked right with surprising agility for such a massive craft, then left and up, roaring high before plunging down into the smoke. Though the Stormtalon gunships struggled to stay close to their charges, three blunt-nosed, T-shaped craft hung right behind each Thunderhawk as if mindlinked to their machine-spirits.

 	‘Shake them off or kill them, Techmarine,’ said Kor’sarro, ‘unless you want me to do it for you.’

 	Debedian merely inclined his head slightly before throwing his craft into more evasive manoeuvres. The T-shaped xenos craft stayed the course, the energy cannons underneath their long tails spitting blue-white pulses of ionic energy. Mort-signals flared on the control panel as the Thunderhawk’s engines took several direct hits.

 	Suddenly the two Stormtalon gunships were back, bursting out of the smoke banks beneath to interpose themselves between the Spear and its pursuers. Incredibly, both of the one-man escort craft flew after the Thunderhawk whilst facing backwards, the rotary engine pods on their flanks canted a full half-circle so their pilots could see the foe. 

 	The paired assault cannons underslung beneath each Stormtalon whirred, spitting bullets in a stream so solid it forced one of the xenos fighter craft to peel off. A moment later the first escort craft’s skyhammer launchers sent a volley of air-to-air missiles streaking out, smashing into the retreating pursuer and blasting it apart in an explosion of purple flame. 

 	The other two xenos craft came in close, missiles of their own rising up from hidden compartments on their wings and lancing out to follow the Thunderhawk’s powerful heat signature. One seeker whooshed under the Spear’s wing, but the other three detonated amongst the Thunderhawk’s engines. Smoke plumed and flames coughed as the Spear lost speed, the upper spires of the hive blurring past within arm’s reach of the wing.

 	The second of the two Stormtalons suddenly dropped into the smoke below, its engine pods twisting as its opposite number laid down suppressing fire. The two remaining xenos fighters closed in, quad turrets panning stuttering ion streams towards the flaming ruin of the Thunderhawk’s engines.

 	With a tight lateral swerve, the first Stormtalon hurled itself into the path of the deadly blue-white energies spitting from the closest xenos craft. The ion streams hit home, burning right through the armourglass of the gunship’s canopy and coring its pilot in his seat. 

 	As the gunship’s wreckage spiralled downwards, the second burst upward from the smoke banks right behind both of the T-shaped fighters. Assault cannons blazing, the Stormtalon’s typhoon launchers filled the sky with blossoming flak. Its wrath was all but indiscriminate, for though its pilot scored several inadvertent hits on the Thunderhawk, he knew the Spear could shrug off the threat of solid shot firepower without incident.

 	Not so the xenos craft pursuing it. The barrage tore gaping holes in the fuselage of both tau fighters, sending them veering out of control. First one fell, then the other, spiralling away to crash headlong into the hive city below. The victorious escort came alongside the Spear, voxing the all-clear as the gunship banked around for another killing pass. 

 	Shadowsun watched the last of the Razorsharks wink red and disappear on her sensor suite. Though one of the giant Imperial craft had been trapped in a crossfire of seeker missiles and forced to disengage, the other, despite taking severe damage to its engines, had been bought a reprieve by its ugly little escort. The gunship’s symbol pulsed white and active on her screen as it veered around the hive’s largest spire for another attack run.

 	She would make it suffer for its tenacity.

 	‘I must affect direct intervention. Oe-nu, electrofield lock onto my back, please. Maximum shield, or at least what you feel you can part with. Drai, please take care of Oe-ken and Oe-hei down here. I cannot let that vulgar craft up there take another chunk out of our armoured comrades.’

 	‘Affirmed, my commander,’ said Drai, his tone rueful at the thought of his commander fighting alone.

 	Shadowsun saluted briefly with her fusion blasters before rocketing up from her command position at the edge of the hive, battlesuit jets flaring white. Knowing well that her stealth cells struggled to cope at extreme velocities, she ordered the nearest Skyray gunships to mask her approach by firing seeker missiles parallel to her coordinates. From a distance her ascent looked much like a set of munitions arcing towards the human gunship as it came about for another attack run. 

 	Shadowsun broke off her headlong charge as the seekers detonated harmlessly upon the Imperial gunship’s underside, instead cutting in horizontal to match the giant gue’ron’sha vessel’s velocity. Once her suit had synched its speed with the gunships, she touched down with both feet on the broadest part of its primary wing and blink-pushed the electrofields that would lock her steady. Maniac winds wrenched at her armour as the hive’s spires blurred past at dizzying speed. As she had known it would be, her battlesuit was up to the task, and held her in place. 

 	It was a constant danger to the battlesuit pilot that within their control cocoon they felt danger only as a removed, academic emotion. One wrong step up here, Shadowsun reminded herself, and she could be twisted in half by the torque of the Thunderhawk’s aerial rampage.

 	‘Intercept phase complete,’ she blipped to Drai, aiming her deadly fusion blasters at the middle of the giant craft’s wing.

 	Twin beams of molten white light blazed out, scoring through the skin of the wing and leaving a finger-wide furrow across its length. Shadowsun blink-pushed a memogram in disbelief. She checked her gun readouts; they were still practically at full charge. Fusion blasters were designed to cut through bulkheads. They should have taken the wing clean off.

 	A side panel on the Thunderhawk’s prow clanged open, and a towering, armoured beast of a human burst out.

 	For a split second, Shadowsun was impressed. 

 	The giant in the ornate white armour had pulled himself up onto the frontal stabiliser fins with an athlete’s agility. He crouched, leapt, and smashed bodily into the secondary wings jutting from the gunship’s hull barely five paces from her. Even through her suit she felt the dull thud of his exosuit’s mag-clamps fastening his boots to the fuselage, locking him fast before the tumultuous forces that roared around them could tear him off. She raised her fusion blasters and fired, but the gue’ron’sha had already ducked behind the secondary wing.

 	The figure came out the other side hard, an archaic sword glimmering in his double grip. His mag-clamps thudded on the wing as he closed the distance. With the exaggerated slowness of a dream, she knee-folded to the left and aimed into the Space Marine’s midsection. The square barrel of her fusion blaster was tugged by a sudden surge of turbulence, and the deadly energies went wide.

 	Shadowsun had already muted the raging wind and the craft’s screaming engines, every sense bent towards her attacker. Her sensor suite’s autotrans picked up the figure’s battle cry as he barrelled forwards, blade raised.

 	‘- - - FOR THE GREAT KHAN - - - DIE XENOS WITCH - - -’ 

 	There was a brilliant flash as the Space Marine’s glowing sword arced down, only to strike the invisible shield of force that Oe-nu was projecting around Shadowsun. Taking her chance, the commander lifted her right boot and kicked out hard, blink-setting its plates to maximum repulsion. Her kick struck the Space Marine in the knee just as her electromagnetic push broke that leg’s mag-clamp grip. Reeling, the human turned his one-legged stagger into a pivot, raised his great blade in one hand, and brought it down in a powerful diagonal slash. The air crackled in a confusion of light as the gue’ron’sha’s powered sword fought Oe-nu’s shieldsphere.

 	A split second later a volley of mass-reactive shells spat from the heavy bolters beneath the Thunderhawk’s stabiliser fins. The bolts slammed into Shadowsun’s side and detonated with violent force, blasting her clear from the Thunderhawk’s wing and sending her spiralling down towards the hive below.

 	Alert signifiers blazed across Shadowsun’s coresystem as she plummeted towards the jagged spires, a dozen critical readings fighting for her attention on her damage control hub. Panic gripped her, panic and the unbidden sensation of whispery laughter.

 	Only with total focus can we avoid the falling blade.

 	Shadowsun exhaled slowly, eyes wide as she processed and enacted several subroutines at the speed of thought. To her left hive levels flashed past, scattered lights and sneering gargoyles blurred by her spiralling descent. She rerouted power from her weapons, from her command suite, even from Oe-nu’s shields. All of it, every iota, she poured it into her battlesuit’s damaged jetpack. 

 	It coughed once, twice, and then caught.

 	She felt relief spike through her, eclipsing the searing pain in her lower back as a fantail of flames billowed out from her armour. The heat was unbearable. She released as much sealant gel as she could as her vertical plummet levelled out and then turned into a wobbly ascent. As she climbed, she narrowly avoided the sainted colossi that bracketed the hive’s postern gate. 

 	Rerouting her power to normal hazard settings, Commander Shadowsun flickered and disappeared. As the battered Thunderhawk disappeared from sight behind the hive spires, the collared necks of the two largest postern statues blazed white in a wide garrotting loop. 

 	The solemn, sacred heads of the stone saints nodded as if falling asleep and toppled over, tumbling down into the underhive to claim yet more human lives.

 
 
 Chapter Four


 	HIVE AGRELLAN PRIME
ACACIAN BASIN
AGRELLAN, 743.999.M41


 	The White Scars had regrouped in the triumphal boulevard that led to Agrellan Prime’s monolithic Gate Victorius. Their battle-scarred Thunderhawks had set down amidst the sprawling Victorius skyshields and were already being attended to by their Techmarines, each glad of their narrow escape during the battle in the Acacian Basin.

 	Mechanicus-grade incense wafted around the stricken gunships as the repairs began in earnest. White-armoured tactical squads marched out from their bellies ten by ten, each group descending the ramps that led to the boulevard and curving off towards the Rhinos and Razorbacks waiting nearby. To a man they had their helmets mag-clamped to their waists, the warm column of pollution that whistled down the boulevard pulling at their topknots and ruffling the fur worn by their sergeants. It had no true soul to it, Agrellan’s air, a toxic hivewind that an unaugmented human could not breath without risking severe damage. But to the enhanced warriors of the White Scars it was still better than nothing. The baring of heads in a warzone was a lapse of protocol that the khan was apt to forgive, especially after being trapped for hours in the dimly-lit womb of a Thunderhawk.

 	Three groups of heavily-built, squat-bodied Space Marine bikes growled in readiness nearby, prime examples of the mechanical steeds so beloved by the sons of Chogoris. Several attack bikes were being tended nearby, their suspension blocks cleaned with psalms of purity and jets of compressed air. Their riders tested the throttles, as much for the love of the noise as for any real assessment of the engine.

 	Emerging from the gun district to the west were loose, skirmishing mobs of Catachans, rebreather masks covering their mouths and lasguns held loosely at their sides. Rugged tanks fanned out in their wake. 

 	To the khan, these were Imperial Guardsman only in the loosest sense. The planet Catachan was a violent mother, and she raised a different breed of man. No pomp and circumstance here, no ranks, no fanfares. Some said no discipline, either. Just hard-bitten, physically powerful men raised on a jungle world so deadly that even a White Scar would struggle to survive there for long.

 	The khan strode towards the bikes, sketching a loose salute towards Veteran Sergeant Djubali as he closed in. The sergeant saluted back, an easy grin spreading across his hairy face.

 	‘Straken’s taking his own good time getting into position,’ muttered the khan.

 	‘At least Terryn has deployed,’ Djubali replied. ‘Slow but sure, I suppose.’

 	The khan looked over to the war machines of House Terryn standing stock still at the end of the boulevard. To a casual glance they looked like the last six statues in a procession of armoured Imperial heroes that led from Gate Victorius to the slums of the hive’s core. 

 	‘Straken’s Catachans are worth the wait, I hear,’ said Djubali. ‘Redstone’s too. Even if they are, you know. Human.’

 	The steedmaster shook his thick mane of hair as if shivering, brushing it from his face with a practiced sweep of his hand. It didn’t make much difference. The man had a beard that crept up almost to his eyelids. 

 	‘I’m not certain the jungle fighters will be in position when the tau arrive, horseborn,’ said Kor’sarro. ‘Come to that, I’m not convinced Tybalt’s Knights will be, either.’

 	‘When the eagle carries the tortoise,’ said Djubali dolefully, ‘both go hungry.’

 	The khan nodded sagely. There was a shout from behind, and the clank of power-armoured feet on rockcrete. The khan frowned, turning in his tracks to see Sudabeh striding up to them. 

 	‘My khan,’ the Stormseer began, consternation scored upon his weather-beaten features. ‘Hive command’s astropathic choir has received a message-psalm intended for the Third Company. It is a psychic communion, from Chogoris.’

 	‘Speak on,’ said the khan, his brow furrowed.

 	‘We are needed elsewhere, captain,’ breathed Sudabeh. ‘The message-psalm says that a heretic fleet, red as blood, has translated from the warp above Chogoris. It isn’t alone. The battlefleet is…’ The Stormseer shook his head as if trying to dislodge a painful memory. ‘We must return to Quan Zhou at the first opportunity.’

 	The three men stood facing each other, their eyes sharing unspoken thoughts.

 	The khan was the first to speak. ‘We can’t,’ he said. 

 	‘Our Chapter is in danger,’ said Sudabeh, ‘I consulted the Tarot as soon as I received the astropathic psalm. It indicates the Heretic Ascendant over the Brotherhood of the Storm.’

 	‘Not good news, I’ll wager,’ said Kor’sarro, grimly.

 	‘No, my khan. It… it shows the Tor Mortalis as the sole majoris. Destruction incumbent.’

 	‘Emperor’s bones,’ grimaced Kor’sarro. ‘So we’ll make it quick here, and translate back into the warp as soon as possible. The tau are all over this planet like flies on a carcass, but we can’t leave Agrellan’s people to die – or worse, to be turned against the Imperium by snake-tongued xenos.’

 	‘Besides, we’ve barely given them a bloody nose,’ said Djubali. ‘I say we close them down with blades and bolts, fight them face to face.’

 	‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your counsel as objective, horseborn,’ said the Stormseer, lips curled. ‘I can smell your anticipation from here.’

 	‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Djubali, his eyes twinkling behind the curtain of his hair. ‘My khan? What does your instinct tell you?’

 	‘We stay,’ said Kor’sarro. ‘And we hit the tau so hard they never come back.’

 	Circled by Drai’s stealth team, Shadowsun and her drones touched down in the white forest that girdled the peak south of Agrellan Prime. With her suit’s self-healing resins already hardening, she had left the repair protocols to themselves and funnelled power back to her suit functions. In the process she had announced her arrival at the muster point and called the coalition’s heavy elements to blip their position. A constellation of symbols pulsed gold amongst the swathe of desiccated woodland that spread across her topographical display. At its heart was the symbol denoting the metropolis the humans called Agrellan Prime. Over five kilometres in height, the spear-tipped triangle was so tall its spires were lost to the clouds of pollution fanning out from the innumerable chimneys studding its thick bulk.

 	Shadowsun took stock of her situation, linking into Oe-ken-yon’s datacompile as her underclaw punch-cylinders took stratified samples of the ground beneath. Less than a second later new information spooled across her sensor suite. 

 	The soil was completely sterile. There were no life forms at all within the forest’s borders. 

 	She reached out to touch a jagged stump, and it crumbled under her fingers, leaving a fine white powder. Whatever had killed this planet prior to its resettlement had done a terrifyingly thorough job.

 	The glitches whispered in, louder in the forest than out on the scorched earth of the plain. Some of the sound waves looked a lot like words. Shadowsun’s right eye hovered over the autotrans field, its fat golden bar awaiting her blink.

 	She thought of Traitor Shoh looking down at her, his face a blur in the darkness, gently admonishing her for talking of ghosts in the night.

 	She knelt, muted all audio save emergency channels, and blink-pushed the autotrans.

 	The words hissed and crackled as if coming from a very great distance, but they were words, there was no doubt. They had meaning. The autotrans ran its conclusions underneath each sound wave, the fragments that it could isolate and decipher causing Shadowsun to frown in confusion.

 	‘- - - DEATH - - - ONLY DEATH - - - SHOULD NOT HAVE COME HERE - - - YOU WILL FAIL - - - YOU SHALL FALL - - - JOIN US - - - JOIN WITH THE DUST - - - KEEP YOU IN THE NOTHINGNESS - - -’

 	Shadowsun blipped off the audiostream, cancelled the autotrans and stood up straight. The urge to fight, to kill, rose in her chest.

 	‘All forward teams to begin bombardment immediately,’ she transmitted across the cadre.

 	A series of icons blipped gold in readiness, though a few still bore the dull silver of incompletion.

 	‘Commander, this is Tank Veteran Shas’ui Lir, we are six minutes from the nearest gold zone.’ Another voice was queued close behind. ‘Commander Shadowsun, Shas’ui Domor reporting, gold in eight minutes estimate.’ 

 	‘Begin bombardment as soon as you reach range, Shas’ui Lir,’ she transmitted, sketching a direct line of approach on the shared command grid. ‘Domor, stand by in silver zone with the rapid insertion forces and await further commands. The Imperials have as yet undefined assets of their own behind those walls.’

 	‘Affirmed, commander.’

 	The forest filled with the whip-cracks of Hammerhead gunships opening fire as the tau began their persecution of the towering metropolis. Broadside battlesuits raised their own railguns in a rifleman’s stance, each giant ochre warrior tall enough to fire over the open canopies of the Piranha skimmers that hovered nearby. 

 	As one the Broadsides locked, piston-sited, and fired. Streaking shafts of air connected them to the hive’s weakest points for a split second, the dull thwack of impact reaching Shadowsun a moment later. Seeker missiles zoomed out from the Skyrays behind her, flying parallel to the cylinder of displaced air left by each rail rifle shot. The missiles altered their trajectory at the last moment to hammer into fault lines, sending tumbling sheets of ornamental stone into the hivers scurrying below.

 	‘Repeat protocols,’ said Shadowsun. ‘Remain at full alert. I doubt it will take long for those gates to open.’

 	Less than a minute of punitive bombardment later, the blare of klaxons rang out into the gloom. Autolanterns bathed the superhighway with pools of light. The enormous wall of metal-ridged ferrocrete that guarded Agrellan Prime’s main entrance slid upwards, a portcullis clanking open to allow its castle’s defenders to sally forth. 

 	Shadowsun’s gunships were already making their attack run. Sleek but wide in the manner of undersea glider-beasts, her Tigersharks had wingspans to rival those of the gue’ron’sha’s indomitable gunships. Their chin-mounted ion cannons spat pulses of bluish energy that hurtled under the opening gate, blasting low into whatever was waiting to emerge on the other side. Upon impact a great sheet of white light flashed out with a deafening clap of displaced air. A heartbeat later a cloud of dust was thrown up, confusing the vid-feeds of the tau waiting in the desiccated forest.

 	‘Reveal yourself,’ muttered Shadowsun. Preoccupied and more than a little disturbed by the autotrans spool, she had inadvertently transmitted her exhalation across the cadrenet’s open frequency. Next to her, Shas’vre Drai blipped the symbol of mild confusion to his teammates.

 	Shadowsun projected her sensor suite’s vid-feed through a gap in the white trunks of the forest, seeking to make out the wreckage of whatever her Tigershark squadron’s ion cannons had engaged under the gate. The markerlights of her ranged support cadre’s pathfinder teams flickered across her vid-feed, their ruby red lines seeking purchase in the billowing dust.

 	Increasing magnification once more, Shadowsun thought she could make out hunchbacked warriors moving in the dust. She zoomed back out again, thinking for a moment she had originally pushed the magnification too far. 

 	In the lower quadrant of her sensor suite, the whisper-hiss changed shape, its wavelengths become less like words and more like laughter.

 	Then the gate slid up to reveal the metallic goliaths of House Terryn.

 	During the subtle conquest of the Damocles Gulf that had led to the war on Agrellan, the ambassadors of the water caste had found that there was one rock they could not erode. Many of the human worlds at the fringes of that impassable abyss had become bitter and disillusioned by the relentless grind of Imperial rule, and they were easily swayed by the promises of a better future. Even Agrellan had been infected by their insidious statecraft.

 	Yet the Knight world of Voltoris stood firm.

 	No matter how much the water caste bargained and explained and manoeuvred during their audience at Furion Peak, the seeds of their subtle conquests fell on barren ground. Patriarch Tybalt of House Terryn was too old, too mean and too suspicious to fall for the courting of xenos diplomats, and he told the tau ambassadors as much to their faces. Tybalt saw the offer of peaceful and mutually beneficial integration into the tau empire for what it was – a veiled choice between assimilation and destruction. 

 	The patriarch banished the ambassadors from his keep on pain of death, roaring an oath to destroy the tau should they ever threaten a sovereign world of the Imperium. 

 	And Tybalt, for all his many faults, was a man of his word.

 	The powerfully built walkers emerging from the hive gate were living monuments to the blunt power of mankind. Each was a colossus to rival the dreams of the most ambitious earth caste visionary, a stamping, killing relic that epitomised mankind’s unsubtle approach to war. Out from the dust surrounding Gate Victorius came six of the giant machines. They were resplendent in regal blue, a white horsehead icon glowing under the pooling light of the gate’s lanterns. 

 	So impressive were they, so mighty in aspect, that not even Shadowsun noticed the white-armoured bikes roaring through the dust clouds between their legs. 

 	Effigies of crude iron and grease-slicked pistons, the Knights’ riveted limbs were pillars of emblazoned alloy. They were constructed as bipeds, as if the dull machine-smiths of humanity had once witnessed the glory of a tau battlesuit and built flightless effigies in much the same fashion, but far, far larger. Their arms were massive weapon systems that swivelled beneath wide carapaces that were painted with heraldic designs. Yellow lenses glowed behind the eye-slits of featureless helms. As they came forward, long saw-toothed swords blurred through the air in slashing arcs. Each titanic blade looked more than capable of tearing a Hammerhead gunship to mangled scrap.

 	Shadowsun had no desire to see them put to use. 

 	‘All units operative at current range, neutralise them immediately,’ she transmitted. ‘Closest targets first, sequential reach.’

 	Even before the commander had finished her orders, the Hammerhead gunships at the edge of the desiccated forest punched railgun fire into the leading walkers. Shadowsun had expected the hypervelocity ammunition to smash right through the ancient relics, but the volleys merely flared white a few metres before they struck their targets, atomised by convex shields of force. 

 	As the red-dot markerlights of their diminutive pathfinder comrades picked out eye sockets and hip joints, the Broadside battlesuits of Shadowsun’s ranged support cadre added their own firepower. More railguns fired, and more solid shot ammunition was burnt to atoms before it could strike home. 

 	On the Knights came, closing the distance with every swinging stride.

 	The Tigersharks had banked around for another attack, looping perpendicular to the ground before firing a stream of ionic energy spheres into the Knights. The blue-white bursts fizzled into nothingness upon each walker’s shields, strobing pulses that lit the night but nothing more.

 	Then, with a blare of war-klaxons loud enough to wake the damned, the Knights of House Terryn broke into a run. 

 	Kor’sarro Khan’s lips drew back into a grinning snarl as Moondrakkan reached full throttle. The cursed xenos were so preoccupied by Tybalt’s stamping, blaring distractions that they had missed three whole squads of bikes roaring out into the gloom. They would live to regret their mistake. But not for long.

 	The khan gunned the engines as he took the lead of the triple arrowhead of bikes. He could hear the throaty roar of Djubali’s customised steed, Vendrujin, not far behind. Kor’sarro’s blood pounded in his ears, the thrill of the chase filling him with electric energy. These xenos thought themselves so clever, skulking in that poor excuse for a forest. Yet every time the cylinder-shot of their heavy munitions hurtled across the plains, it left a brief trail in the air that led back to its source. They may be able to hide from Agrellan Prime’s guns, thought Kor’sarro, but he would be damned before they could hide from the wrath of the White Scars.

 	Behind them, House Terryn’s Knights had doubled their pace. Through the vibrations of Moondrakkan’s wheels, the khan could feel the hard-packed wastes shiver with their loping tread. He chuckled to himself inside his helmet at the thought of the xenos reaction to the monstrous Imperial Knights. They would not have been expecting their appearance, let alone their headlong charge. The Knights were smaller than the Titans of the Mechanicus, but by the Great Khan, they were a damn sight faster. He wouldn’t mind trying the helm of one of those things himself, one day.

 	As the White Scars arrowed around the tau’s flank one of the Knights went down, its knee buckling. With a protesting creak it crashed headlong into the dust. It had been sniped by a xenos battlesuit, by the look of the fire-trace. To its pilot’s credit, even when sprawled in the dust the Knight hammered shell after shell into the desiccated forest, stabbing blind at its persecutors out of spite. Its brother Knights opened up in support, laying down a fusillade of large-bore shells in a barrage that any tank company would be proud of. 

 	Kor’sarro and his men hurtled around the thick waist of the desiccated forest, scanning for the foe and taking the measure of the battle as it unfolded. In their wake the foremost Knights levelled their thermal cannons. Each mighty gun’s barrels glowed cherry red, then amber, then unbearably bright white. As one the Knights unleashed six blinding spears of energy into the tau skimmer-tanks lurking in the forest. Everything the beams touched, everything even close by, was annihilated in a single searing moment. The tanks disappeared completely, simply erased from existence by the sheer power of the Knights’ weapons.

 	Despite their lethal salvo, the walkers themselves had not slowed their charge. They crashed into the forest with the force of industrial wrecking balls. Jagged tree stumps were smashed to powder wherever their thick legs swung, fine white dust coating their heraldic colours up to the waist. Ion shields flashed as they were struck by a hundred projectiles and pulse bursts at once. Before even one could be taken down, the Knights of House Terryn fell upon the skimmer-tanks that had been trapped by their own close deployment. Reaper chainswords growled and juddered as they carved left and right, the chewed-up remnants of xenos skimmers flung far and wide. The khan’s eyes crinkled in approval. Nothing could mangle a tank quite like a reaper.

 	With a great shout, the khan led his own charge into the forest. He stood up slightly in the saddle as he rode, jinking the bike around the desiccated stumps with twists of his hips as he scanned for xenos to kill. A pocket of shimmering dust appeared up ahead, a will-o’-the-wisp that would have been easy to miss. The khan squeezed Moondrakkan’s trigger bar and sent a volley of hand-engraved bolter shells streaking through the forest. He was rewarded by scarlet blossoms of blood and a chorus of thin shrieks that could only have come from alien throats.

 	Djubali raced past him, hammering up the sloping wreckage of an alien tank and launching off the other side. Mid-flight, the White Scar twisted his hips and brought his bike’s rear wheel round so the whole vehicle flew sidelong. He barked a war cry as the heavy vehicle slammed through a slender trunk and ploughed right into a knot of kneeling tau snipers with blunt, crushing force. Djubali rode out the skid, revved his engine amidst a confusion of powdered stone and broken alien limbs. A couple of bolt pistol shots boomed as the veteran executed those victims he had not killed on impact.

 	The khan blew out his cheeks, squeezing off another slew of bolt shells as he jinked left and right through the trees. Suddenly a trio of giant alien battlesuits loomed up ahead, and he drew the sword Moonfang crackling from its scabbard. Kor’sarro lopped the weapon-arm from the nearest battlesuit, sliding his bike low under the spitting plasma of the second before shoulder barging the last of them through a tree. 

 	The first battlesuit recovered quickly from the shock of its lost limb, boosting away from the khan on twin trails of fire. Missiles popped from its shoulder launcher and lanced out towards him. Instinct took over, and Kor’sarro leant over fully into the lee of his hurtling bike, just as the tribal riders of Chogoris used their steeds as shields against the arrows of their rivals. Letting the machine’s armoured bulk take the brunt of the explosion, he grabbed a krak grenade from his stowage rack and tore the pin out with blood-slicked teeth. Moondrakkan’s back wheel swung out wide as the khan flung the grenade high. Its detonation snapped a blinding burst right in front of the airborne battlesuit, ensuring his escape.

 	Up ahead his men were engaged with the enemy. Some fired searing bursts of plasma into the rifleman battlesuits that were hammering solid shot into the rampaging Knights. Their shots tore great holes that fizzed with electric malfunction. Others swung chainswords and power swords at the skulking tau infantrymen shimmering in the trees, arcs of blood splashing red across the white tree trunks. 

 	Up ahead and to the right, a hovering skimmer tank loosed salvo after salvo of missiles at a Knight struggling to dislodge a wrecked battlesuit from its whirring chainblade. Djubali cut right across the khan’s path, sliding his bike sidelong into a wheels-first skid that was all but horizontal. Rider and bike passed right beneath the tank’s anti-grav field in a cloud of stone dust, emerging unscathed before righting and speeding off again. Kor’sarro mentally counted down – three, two, one. Right on cue, the sergeant’s krak grenades detonated with a deafening crump, flipping the tank over onto its missile turret. 

 	The tight formations that the tau had adopted, coordinated to avoid the big guns of the hive, were proving to be their downfall. The White Scars and their allies in House Terryn sowed mayhem in every quarter. The air filled with the acrid stink of burning circuitry, the stench of molten plastics and the tang of alien blood. The khan gave a great shout of exultation as he took the head from a fleeing tau infantryman. His war cry was echoed by his Chogorian brethren as they killed their way through the forest acre by acre.

 	Through the vibrations of Moondrakkan’s handlebars, the khan could feel his response force closing in. The bass rumble of his Rhino and Razorback transports was underscored by the trundling thunder of the Catachan armoured division.

 	The battle was as good as won.

 	‘Targets sighted,’ transmitted Shadowsun. ‘Switch to multispectral and pick them out. Bait units, leave the walkers for now. Avoidance tactics only.’

 	Assent signals blipped across her command suite as her assault cadre closed in. The humans had struck hard, as was their custom. Predictable to the last, they were more concerned with the power of the deed than the thought behind it. Six bipedal war engines – five now, she corrected herself – and half a company of Space Marines. Fierce enough foes, but no match for multiple cadres of the fire caste’s finest.

 	Close behind her was the Crisis bodyguard team that Aun’va had assigned her. All five of them were proven heroes in their own right, chosen for those occasions when concentrated force was needed more than subtlety and stealth. This was one of those times. Engaging their blacksun filters to pick out their prey from the clouds of wood-powder, the airborne battlesuits sent streams of plasma hissing down into the gue’ron’sha bikers. They incinerated a Space Marine or cored a bike with every shot.

 	‘Air support, occupy those walkers. All bait units to immediately embark and rise, maximum elevation. They’ve revealed their strength, now we rob them of it. Crisis team, with me. We have monsters to hunt.’

 	Hidden by the clouds of white powder that the Imperial assault had thrown up from the desiccated forest, the surviving tau infantry mounted up into their Devilfish transports as fast as they could. The giants in their midst fought on, their stamping feet claiming the odd drone and crushing wrecked tanks into scrap. Shadowsun’s assault cadre closed in, announcing their presence with volleys of missiles and ion streams. 

 	The Imperial walkers turned to face the new threat, and the decimated bait cadre took its chance. By twos and threes the skimmer tanks began to hover upwards until they were out of reach even for Terryn’s Knights. Before a minute had passed, not a single tau remained earthbound. The Space Marine bikers and the vehicle-borne reinforcements roaring towards their position threw a smattering of fire into the air, and though the odd Piranha recon skimmer or light battlesuit fell smoking back to earth, it was not enough to prevent the cadres rallying and forming up above them once more.

 	By withdrawing into the skies, the tau had effectively turned the tables on their foes. Shadowsun’s battlesuits arced through the dust-choked air until they were directly above the giant walkers, sending tight beams of plasma and fusion blaster fire into their emblazoned carapaces. The hatch atop one of the giant walkers popped open under the buckling heat that washed across it. Shadowsun landed deftly atop the walker’s broad back, pushing the muzzle of her own blaster into the cockpit and consuming the pilot in a blast of blinding light and molten metal.

 	One by one, the four surviving Imperial war engines turned and stomped back towards the hive. The roar of bike engines dwindled in the forest, impossible to pinpoint in the white mist that fogged it from end to end.

 	‘No pursuit,’ transmitted Shadowsun. ‘All cadres, do not pursue. Stay in gold zones only. You may fire at will.’

 	The walkers made their way back to the Gate Victorius, sullen giants denied a promised feast. The tau levelled as much fire at them as they could, but the walkers’ convex force fields now protected their riveted backs. The great gate of Agrellan Prime slid upwards once more, allowing the walkers to stamp their way back inside.

 	In the shelter of the forest, Shadowsun checked her image banks and replayed a sample clip of the battle they had witnessed. The Imperial forces had taken a heavy toll on the bait cadre, but the way of the Patient Hunter required sacrifice, and the tau did not begrudge lives spent to ensure victory. 

 	By luring the human armies to reveal their most potent assets, the tau had taken the measure of their foe, and would be all the more lethal when next they crossed swords.

 	The great kill was so close Shadowsun could almost taste it.

 	The khan stormed into the vaulted hall, his ceramite boots clacking loud against ancient flagstones. The shafts of light that angled from the stained glass wall-slits played across gore-spattered battleplate as he strode forward. A clutch of decapitated tau heads bounced at his waist, bound through the eye sockets by a hemp rope that was already stiff with dried blood. At his side were Djubali and Sudabeh, their faces masks of white powder streaked with sweat.

 	The low hum of conversation in the vault ebbed away at the arrhythmic thud of their approach. It died altogether as the khan tossed a high-backed datathrone out of his path and loomed over the assembled delegates. He slammed his armoured knuckles onto the round oval table at the vault’s heart, and all but two of the dignitaries seated around it flinched backwards as if stung.

 	‘Where in the warp’s darkest hole were you?’ he growled at the assembly.

 	‘Huh. You Chogorians love a dramatic entrance, don’t you,’ drawled a tough-looking officer in the military vest and loose fatigues of a Catachan jungle fighter. The khan met his gaze, evaluating him in a single glance. A born warrior, and a veteran at that. One eye was hooded and unafraid, the other a bionic replacement that glowed dully in the gloom. Below the neck a knotted mass of muscle and tendon met extensive cybernetics that would have done a pit slave proud.

 	‘You test me, Catachan,’ said the khan, his teeth gritted hard. ‘Your regiment failed to make an entrance at all.’

 	‘You go racing off after glory and medals, there isn’t much chance us mere mortals are going to keep up,’ chuckled the officer, swinging his boots up onto the table and leaning back in the throne. He took a greasy lho-stick from behind a cauliflower ear and struck a match on the triumphal mosaic at the table’s edge. The stench of Catachan tobaccine filled the air.

 	Fuming at the human’s tone, the khan strode around the long table towards the officer. As he bore down on the Catachan, an old man in a fur-collared greatcoat pushed his datathrone backward into Kor’sarro’s path. He reached up to lay a gloved hand on the gold eagle of the khan’s breastplate.

 	‘Captain Khan of the White Scars Chapter,’ he said. ‘Remember that we are your allies.’ 

 	‘Remove your hand, Patriarch Tybalt, or Moonfang shall remove it for you,’ said the khan, his voice the rumble of an oncoming storm.

 	‘Be not so hasty,’ admonished the white-haired elder, his strangely goat-like face twisted into something he presumably believed was a smile. ‘The tau would like nothing more than for our armour to be riven from within. We are here to deny them their prize, not to serve it to them on a silver platter. Please sit.’

 	‘I will not “sit”,’ the khan spat, making the very idea sound like the gravest of sins. ‘But you at least fought well, Tybalt. As you committed your strength alongside ours, I will listen to you as an equal. Perhaps you can explain your insubordinate friend’s failure to deploy.’

 	The patriarch’s face turned sour as month-old cream. ‘Colonel Straken is no friend of mine,’ he said, casting a glance at his opposite number. 

 	The Catachan officer leered over at them both, tobacco-stained teeth yellow in the gloom. ‘You better find some patience, Space Marine,’ said the jungle fighter, pointing a metallic finger at the khan. ‘You can’t win this one by speed and brute force. They’re tau, the Damocles lot. Sure, they aren’t as fast as the eldar, but they are likely faster than you. Even on those lumpy battering rams you call bikes.’

 	The khan’s nostrils flared wide, his breastplate rising and falling as a hot coal of anger burnt in his chest. Tybalt met his gaze out of the corner of his eye, and gave Kor’sarro an almost imperceptible shake of his head. 

 	‘They’re beyond caring about ground taken, and there’s no way they’re dumb enough to try a frontal assault,’ continued Straken. ‘They aren’t idiot orks, or maniac zealots neither. They only care about the long game, this lot, and they’ll pull any trick they can to win it. Even then, they’ll happily die like fish if they think it’ll do their mates back home a favour.’

 	The khan turned the full force of his glare upon the Catachan, his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘You will address me with the proper respect, colonel,’ he said, his voice as cold as steel in the dark, ‘or you will not speak at all. I promise you that.’ 

 	The Catachan took a long drag on his lho-stick before stubbing it out on the priceless Pluvian marble of the vault’s table.

 	‘Yeah, yeah. Like I said, you aren’t even waging the same war as this lot. They’ll run rings around you if you keep fighting them on their terms, nipping at the bait like a starving rippyfish. I know a good ambush tactic when I see one.’

 	 The Catachan’s tone was blunt but genuine, and the khan found his anger cool.

 	‘Perhaps you are right,’ admitted the khan. ‘Patriarch Tybalt, where do you and your Knights stand on this matter? You fought against the tau on Voltoris, I believe?’

 	‘I fought them with words, not blades, I’m afraid,’ said the patriarch archly. ‘Today was the first time House Terryn has jousted with them on the field. These tau have formidable ranged capabilities, perhaps formidable enough to pierce our shields in a prolonged engagement. But they lack courage, and bladesmanship to boot.’

 	‘Yes,’ said the khan. ‘It’s the mind behind those weapons that is their deadliest weapon.’

 	‘Any idea who that might be, then?’ said Colonel Straken, the knotted scar tissue of his one remaining eyebrow raised high.

 	‘I have indeed,’ replied Kor’sarro. ‘My blade would have already taken her head if it weren’t for her xenos techno-heresy.’

 	‘Hmm,’ mused Tybalt. ‘A female, then.’

 	‘I believe so, by the way she moves,’ said the khan. ‘She wears a warsuit that can cast her invisible, though it is compromised by high speeds. She is adept in the use of melta-class guns, but has not might enough to fell our Thunderhawks. It was her that burnt your fellow noble in his command throne, Patriarch Tybalt.’

 	‘I saw only an ethereal shimmer before Gensen met the Emperor,’ said Tybalt, his eyes downcast. ‘But nonetheless I saw something atop his carapace. Was that her?’

 	‘She was there all right,’ said the khan, striding over to the stained glass window. ‘Her thermal signature was baffled, some xenos illusion hid her from sight, but it was her. I recognised the weapon discharge. If we are to win this war, she must die.’

 	‘Emperor help you with that, then,’ said Straken, flexing the fingers of his cybernetic arm. ‘She’ll be well out of it by now. Cautious lot, these grey-skins. I’ve got no air transport under my command, and we just found out the hard way that my Chimeras can’t reach her on the open plain. My lads’ll either have to lay a trap or chase ghosts for the rest of the war, and there’s enough of them crowding the vox-net as it is. A frontal assault just isn’t going to work a second time, even if Tybalt’s fancy walkers did give ’em a nasty surprise back there. Might as well try to run down the wind.’

 	‘You may be right,’ admitted the patriarch, stroking the tuft of white hair on his chin. ‘A foe borne on invisible wings, no matter how weak of limb he might be, finds it easy to stay out of blade’s reach.’

 	 ‘Set your traps, then,’ sneered the khan. ‘Wage your slow and costly war. I shall be waging mine on the open plain, as my primarch intended.’

 	The captain looked out through the stained glass wall-slit, peering at the wasteland below with his jaw set firm. The flat landscape reminded him of his home world, Chogoris. A beautiful planet of stark wilderness and endless skies, where his brothers were likely giving their lives in battle even now. Where old friends were bleeding out and dying with each passing minute. 

 	Yet the khan had a duty to perform before he could return. He would not abandon it, not this side of the grave.

 	‘I’m coming for you, you xenos witch,’ he said to the world outside. ‘Surround yourself with the greatest warriors at your command, or cower in the deepest and darkest hole you can find. It matters not. I shall take your head, for the Great Khan and for the Emperor.’

 	With her cadre hidden in the lee of a wasteland mesa, Shadowsun had taken a moment’s meditation in the midst of some shadowed boulders. Her drones keeping lookout, she played back the footage she had taken from the battle outside Agrellan Prime. At first she examined the giant walkers, paying particular attention to the perimeters of their force shields. Brutish things, powerful engines of destruction indeed but easily circumvented if necessary. Not so the speeding white bikers that had assailed them in the forest. They had a shocking turn of speed and the bravery to capitalise upon it. One mistake against this new breed of gue’ron’sha could be fatal.

 	‘- - - FATAL - - - FATAL - - - THEY SHALL BRING YOU PAIN - - -’

 	There it was again, the whisper-hiss, somehow overriding the mute she had assigned it. Her back went ramrod straight as she realised the whispers had somehow responded to her thoughts. Was that even possible?

 	‘DEATH - - - DEATH - - - THE GRAVE OPENS FOR YOU - - - SHASERRA - - - LIE WITH US IN THE DUST - - -’

 	‘Commander!’

 	Shadowsun’s jetpack engaged as she spun around in an aerial pirouette, all three drones whipping in close. Her fusion blasters gave a rising whine.

 	‘For the love of the Greater Good, Drai,’ she huffed, downpowering her guns. ‘Blip me first, or next time I’ll put a hole in you.’

 	‘I am greatly contrite, my commander,’ said Shas’vre Drai. A deactivation wave crackled across his battlesuit as his truelight appearance was slowly revealed.

 	‘I assume there is some report you needed to make in person,’ said Shadowsun, ‘or did you disturb my meditations purely to remind me that you have no sense of timing?’

 	‘There are… developments, my commander.’

 	‘Go on.’

 	‘During active reconnaissance, my optimised stealth group… we located the gue’ron’sha outside one of the principal dwelling-peaks. It appears they had searched the metropolis they designated as “Hive City”, hoping to neutralise the water caste operative within. Once they had emerged and revealed their presence by destroying the kroot salvage operation outside Agrellan Prime, we were able to get close enough to hear them talk of their plans.’

 	‘Excellent,’ said Shadowsun. ‘Transmit them immediately.’

 	Shas’vre Drai paused for a second before continuing. ‘Of course, my commander. In summary, they have determined you to be the primary threat. They intend to locate you and neutralise you via the means of decapitation.’

 	Nearby Oe-hei and Oe-nu buzzed in alarm, circling each other in agitation.

 	‘I see,’ said Shadowsun. ‘Yes, I imagine death by decapitation would affect my ability to prosecute the war.’

 	‘Be assured I will not allow this to occur, my commander. My life is your shield.’

 	‘That is kind, Shas’vre Drai. Yet it seems the most efficient way to force these gue’ron’sha into committing a fatal mistake would be to offer myself as bait.’

 	‘I… I cannot allow that, my commander,’ replied Drai. ‘I shall go in your stead.’

 	‘You and I shall do exactly what the tau empire requires of us, Shas’vre,’ said Shadowsun, her tone authoritarian. ‘Even if it means killing everything we can find, or the demise of every tau life on the planet.’

 	‘Of course, my commander,’ replied Drai, chastened. ‘For the Greater Good.’

 	Those tau with advanced sensor suites heard it first, a distant roar that shook fine black shale from the high ridge above. Two dots appeared on the horizon, closing fast.

 	‘Enact,’ transmitted Commander Shadowsun. In the shadow of the ridge behind her, a squadron of Sun Shark bombers took off into the air.

 	The white-hulled Thunderhawk gunships of the gue’ron’sha arrowed towards their position at breakneck pace, each trailed by smaller escort craft. Shadowsun had predicted their presence – indeed, made herself a visible target in order to invite it. For all the ridiculous superstition and ritual that bound the Imperium’s earth caste equivalent, they were clearly capable enough to effect complex repairs. The gunship with the ridiculously long barrel atop it should not have been flight capable at all.

 	Something churned in her chest, a desire to see the great engines brought low and smashed to pieces in the dust. She frowned, confusion bleeding into the cold certainty of her battle plan. Such emotion before an engagement was… untoward.

 	‘- - - KILL - - - KILL THEM ALL - - - BATHE IN THEIR BLOOD - - -’ spooled the autotrans.

 	She shuddered, aware of her skin brushing the inside of her battlesuit as the words rang around her head. She blink-pushed the translation ware off, but the strangely compelling whispers remained at the forefront of her thoughts. Perhaps it was because there was a part of her that wished to resolve things in as quick and as deadly a fashion as possible. Maybe that was how it felt before the initiation of a Mont’ka strategy. Perhaps… perhaps that was how the Traitor Shoh felt inside, all the time.

 	Shadowsun did understand – intellectually, at least – that the raw aggression and pitiless violence of the Mont’ka had its uses. But of the two macrostrategies, the Kauyon was unquestionably the most efficient way. She would prove it here, as the enemy gunships roared into the jaws of her trap. Just as she always did.

 	The enemy gunships were seconds away now, at most. Out from the blind edge of the giant ridge where they had exposed their position came two squadrons of Sun Shark bombers, their elegant tan hulls flying with the sun behind their tails. Paradox squadrons, their underslung bomb arrays fitted not with the plasma-based pulse bombs standard to their kind, but unstable stasis fields that could introduce a glitch into the timestream itself. Dangerous, thought Shadowsun, but extremely effective.

 	The Imperial gunships loosed a salvo of missiles towards the tau out in the open, the dull thump of detonations blasting Crisis battlesuits across the wastes in showers of black shale. Intent on their prey on the plain beneath the ridge, the gunships did not notice the Paradox squadrons converging on their position. Shadowsun watched intently as her bombers cut an intercept course, dropping localised stasis anomalies towards the enemy craft.

 	There was a flare of eye-watering unlight for a second, and the fabric of space-time bulged around the Imperial gunships. For a second the giant aircraft froze, the angry bellow of their engines stuttering in and out of existence. Then, as the bubble of time that had encapsulated them popped, all four of the aircraft roared over the top of the ridge, missing it by metres and ploughing nose-first into the hard, cracked earth.

 	Her blood pulsing with excitement, Shadowsun boosted upward to see the destruction her trap had wrought. A dozen battlesuits and a score of drones escorted her, hovering forward with all weapons systems primed. 

 	The Thunderhawks lay at the end of the two great furrows they had ploughed in the earth. Their fuselages jutted at awkward angles, wings torn from their frames and fires licking across their thick hulls.

 	‘Circle to the front, a hundred metres berth at all times,’ transmitted Shadowsun. ‘If anything somehow staggers out of there, I want it dead before it has taken two paces towards us.’

 	Golden signals of assent blipped across her command suite, the deadliest weaponry in the cadre’s arsenal primed and ready for the kill. 

 	As Shadowsun completed the half-circle that brought her to the front of the Thunderhawks, she heard a dull hiss. A white-edged circle glowed wide in the middle of the giant jaws jutting from the front of each gunship, reducing the mighty drawbridges to molten rain.

 	There was a throaty growl of bike engines followed by a whooping, ululating war cry. Bolters blazing, their blades and their voices raised, the steedmasters of Chogoris roared out from the darkness and plunged into the tau lines.

 	Bare-headed, bloodied and bruised, the White Scars hurtled out of the Spear’s melta-cut door. Kor’sarro Khan himself led the charge, with his champions Jebe Sabrehand and Djubali Steedborn gunning their steeds’ engines in his wake. Each of the three warriors had a glowing powerblade clutched in one fist and his bike’s handlebar triggers in the other. Staccato bursts of muzzle flare lit their swarthy features from below, each battle-brother snarling or shouting as he channelled the war-lust in his soul.

 	Behind the trio of leaders came paired squadrons of armoured bikes, two abreast and slewing out fast to open fire with their front-mounted bolters. As they clanked over the fallen jaws of the Thunderhawk, the side doors of the gunship clanged open. More white-armoured Space Marines piled out to add their bolter fire to the fusillade.

 	The khan could clearly see the xenos cowards that had shot them down. They were maybe two hundred metres away at most, a loose circle of large bipedal warsuits already pulsing plasma at their position. Most of their shots went wide or scorched shale, though a few sizzled into fairings and reinforced wheels. Kor’sarro’s feral smile grew wide. The tau were clearly ill-prepared for a mounted charge, whereas the White Scars were experts at the art of the sudden attack, turning each stolen second into a lethal advantage. 

 	The khan quickly scanned the undulating hillocks and ridges ahead, teeth grinding in anticipation of the beheading to come. Sure enough the xenos witch was there, bracketed by bodyguards and drones. Her snow-white armour was already shimmering to blend with the dark shale underfoot. Kor’sarro gunned the throttle and accelerated towards her, hungry to part her head from her neck.

 	The volley of firepower from the circle of ochre battlesuits was thickening as the White Scars closed in. Long-barrelled rifles sent thin lozenges of plasma sizzling in the khan’s direction, and the captain ducked down low. A second later his flaring nostrils picked out the stink of scorched hair over the ferroplastic tang of burning bike. His helmet display flicked up two, three, four mortis-runes from the squad behind. No time to look. No time to do anything but charge.

 	Those coming in fast behind them veered serpent-fast around the tumbling wrecks that had once been proud riders, plumes of shattered shale arcing up from the heavy rear wheels of their bikes. Ahead the tau battlesuits were rising up, the loose scree flattening in circles beneath them as their jetpacks boosted them higher. Their pulse weapons fired quadruple-burst volleys into the massed bikers, and though many blossomed ineffectually from thick ceramite plates, half a dozen kill shots hit home. 

 	And the White Scars were amongst the foe. 

 	The khan stood up in his saddle and brought Moonfang around in a high loop that severed the nearest warsuit’s leg and cut away half of its crotch in a spray of green sparks. Behind him, Jebe couched his power spear against his pauldron and used the momentum of his charge to spit another warsuit through the chest. As the company champion rode underneath the alien warsuit, he twisted his body like a lancer rolling with the impact of a hit, yanking his spear free in a spurt of blood. The xenos machine’s legs and weapon-arms dangled corpse-limp even as its jetpack kept it hovering three metres above the earth.

 	Djubali steered hard into a large flat stone and yanked hard on the handlebars to pull the nose of his bike high for a moment. At the apex of the jump his bolters blasted a double-shot into the jetpack of a warsuit turning to evade. Djubali’s front wheel slammed back down into the shale and he veered off after the khan whilst the stricken warsuit pirouetted wildly downwards into the shale. The red-helmeted Veteran Sergeant Koghai roared past, taking the fallen machine’s head from its neck with his powered tulwar blade as he went.

 	And then, as the loose circle of battlesuits boosted further upward in the skies, the riders of Chogoris found themselves with nothing left to charge.

 	‘Rally and re-engage!’ shouted Shadowsun, her voice tight with tension. ‘Vertical vectors wherever possible. Do not meet them on the horizontal plane!’

 	Golden signals of assent flicked on all but two of her subordinate registers. Shas’vre Tu’la Rin’s vital signs had turned the charcoal grey of death, and Shas’vre De’re La’s gunmetal was fading quickly to ash. Still, if the rest of them kept their altitude high, no more tau lives need be lost to the gue’ron’sha’s ugly but effective ambush.

 	The broken formation of her battlesuit cadre re-established its noose as it rose higher. Weapons systems spat fire into the heavy bikes that growled beneath them like a pride of angry hyperfelids. Those that roared out of the encirclement were met by streams of burst cannon fire from hidden stealth teams. The chameleonic shadows of Drai’s battlesuits shimmered low as they cut down the escaping foe with clinical precision.

 	Shadowsun picked out the enemy commander at the edge of the pack, the same scarred giant that she had fought on the gunship’s wing. The war-leader and his comrades had drawn blunt pistols and were firing explosive, rocket-propelled bolts towards them. The commander was shouting something up at her, pointing what looked like a long ceremonial sword in her direction. She spared a quick glimpse for the autotrans as it converted the gue’ron’sha’s words into tau.

 	‘- - - FACE ME YOU SKULKING HAG - - -’ his challenge read, ‘- - - COME BACK AND FIGHT - - - HONOURLESS COWARD - - -’

 	Eye-flicking a top-down vector of attack, Shadowsun boosted in close, bracketed by her shield drones and the two closest Crisis battlesuits. As they approached, a gue’ron’sha riding next to the bellowing war-leader stood in his saddle and flung a long, spear-like weapon right at her. Warning lights flickered red inside her helmet, bip-bip-bipping in rising alarm. She twisted her hips to steer her jetpack’s course left, curving around the spear’s path so her shield drones did not have to intercept it with their spheres of protective force. Oe-nu transmitted a tiny thanks-symbol, his reservoir band still a healthy copper hue.

 	The spear-thrower carved his bike around, and her sensor suite linked the rider’s projected route with the trajectory of his arcing weapon. Anticipating his course, she dropped suddenly and kicked him in the back of the head as he drove past, sending him careening into a shale-dune. The spear thudded down, impaling its owner’s shoulder and pinning him to the ground. The corners of her mouth twitched upward at the sight. She would enjoy replaying that moment once this was over.

 	The gue’ron’sha war-leader was coming around, looking right in her direction despite her stealth field. She levelled her fusion blasters and loosed parallel shots right at him. As the vaporising blasts hit his bike, the vehicle burst apart in an explosion of molten metal and steam. Somehow, though, the warrior had hurled himself free a matter of microseconds before the shot hit home. 

 	The warrior rolled in a loose shoulder-curl, clattering to a gunman’s kneel behind a smoking mass of human remains and firing a two-handed pistol shot right at Shadowsun’s head. Warnings bipped once more, but this time Oe-nu intercepted with a timely shield-flare. The mass-reactive bolt detonated prematurely, and the explosion washed like fiery liquid across the dome of the drone’s protective sphere. She blipped her own thanks-symbol, boosting back upward as her fusion blasters recharged with a high-pitched whine. 

 	A rough wedge of the bikers were trying to blaze a path out of the hail of firepower that was cutting them down. By their vectors, they were hoping to reunite with their comrades back at the fallen gunships. More than a third of their number had fallen now, and white-armoured bodies lay sprawled amongst the burning wreckage of their armoured bikes. All across the ridge the gue’ron’sha were fighting desperately to break out, but wherever they pushed their advance, a team of battlesuits was there to meet them.

 	‘Firestream squadrons intercept, Sun Sharks, reinforce,’ Shadowsun transmitted, her tone terse. ‘Flanking cadres deploy heavy armour. Ensure none escape.’

 	Barely a second later three squadrons of skimmers and a trio of Sun Shark bombers rose into view over the ridge. The shadows of their T-shaped hulls flitted across the shale, a shoal of fish cutting close to the bed of some soulless ocean. Anti-grav motors humming, they bore down on the white-armoured gue’ron’sha. Their burst cannons levelled quadruple plasma blasts into the bikers, taking five of them from the saddle in as many seconds. The fusion blasters of the squadron behind them killed the same number again. 

 	One of the surviving riders, a savage-looking brute whose head appeared to be little more than an unruly mass of hair, skidded his bike around and drove it hard up a jutting spire of rock. Rider and bike sailed through the air to land wheels-first on an oncoming Piranha. The dead weight of the flying bike bore the skimmer to the ground below with a crushing impact that saw the tau pilots broken and bleeding in the remains of their craft. 

 	Two of the hairy rider’s comrades were inspired to follow suit, launching their bikes from the same spire. One was immediately torn apart in mid-flight by a blast of fusion energy, but the other caught the edge of a passing Piranha’s wing with a cupped hand and yanked it so hard the skimmer was tipped wildly off course. The Piranha ploughed into the dark scree at the ridge’s edge before exploding in a burst of violet flame.

 	Just as Shadowsun was coming in for another pass, her meteorological readouts spiked hard. The anomalies seemed to centre in a spiralling vortex around one of the bikers at the heart of the gue’ron’sha pack, a totem-clad elder who had drawn to a halt with arms outstretched. Guttural syllables spilled from the shamanic figure’s lips, non-words that her autotrans could not understand. 

 	A second later a gale force wind thick with razor-edged shale flew out from the elder’s outstretched and blasted into the tau skimmers. The sudden hurricane caused most of the light craft to careen out of control. Some clashed wings and collided, whilst others were hurled away over the ridge as if a giant invisible hand had flung them away in disgust. Seeing the destruction ahead, the Sun Sharks peeled off, flinging their craft into evasive manoeuvres to avoid the chaos of the storm.

 	Shadowsun wanted to explain the phenomenon away as some advanced weapon system built into the shaman’s gauntlets, yet something in her chest told her otherwise. Here was the impossible mind-science of the gue’la, once thought a mere rumour from the edges of the Damocles Gulf. In truth it was clearly a very real threat, and all the more dangerous to the tau if they did not understand it.

 	A warrior capable of destroying two squadrons of skimmers at range could not be allowed to live. Ignoring the vulgar challenges spooling across her autotrans, Shadowsun altered her flight into a swoop towards the shaman, her shield drones buzzing in close. 

 	There was a low roar from the east, a rumble of thunderous engines that shook the dust from atop the smaller ridges. Anticipating her request, Oe-ken-yon’s telesensors blipped her long-range visuals. Five squadrons of Imperial gun-skimmers were coming in at breakneck speed, the gue’ron’sha equivalent of the Piranhas the shaman had crippled seconds before.

 	‘Flanking cadres engage and repel inbound gun-skimmers,’ said Shadowsun, ‘First and second Crisis teams, enact Rinyon encirclement. Priority kill on the indicated leader. Then engage at will.’

 	Her own cadre blipped golden assent, but as for the reserve cadres in the canyons below the ridge, only dull steel icons pulsed flat.

 	‘Flanking cadres! Where are you?’

 	‘Commander, we… we have encountered an unseen force of gue’ron’sha in the ravines,’ came the reply. ‘We are already… fully engaged. I offer… contrition for our absence.’ The voice was strained, its pauses indicative of a gunfight that raged even as they spoke. 

 	Shadowsun cancelled her order for reinforcements with a blink-push, her lips set firm. They would have to deal with this new foe themselves.

 	At the lip of the ridge, her Sun Shark squadrons had rallied for another attack run. They were coming back in low over the wrecked Imperial gunships and the gue’ron’sha sheltering in their lee. One by one the Sun Sharks dropped more of their temporal anomaly bombs, each detonating with a shimmering burst of white light. In truth Shadowsun did not understand how the earth caste had devised such weapons – despite the fact she had slept in stasis herself for many long years – but their efficacy was beyond question. Oe-ken-yon’s telesensors blipped footage of a low blitz that force-aged each gunship’s wreckage into rusting scrap and left the warriors nearby as slumped skeletons inside yellowed suits of armour.

 	Around her, six battlesuits shouldered their way through a smattering of pistol fire to converge on the leader of the gue’ron’sha force. Bolter fire thudded home, knocking two shas’ui off balance but failing to score a kill. The Crisis teams closed in, weapons raised. They formed a circle within a circle, converging upon the leader of the enemy riders.

 	The air was suddenly filled with a crossfire of heavy-gauge bolts. They hammered through the air to burst like flak on the armour of the hovering battlesuits, some of them long-range fire from the advancing skimmers, others from the still-operational turrets of the downed gunships at the ridge. Both of Shadowsun’s forward Crisis teams were caught in the teeth of the double fusillade, jerked like the marionettes of a mad puppeteer as they were buffeted by the explosions. Two battlesuits were blasted limb from limb as they desperately tried to escape the lethal storm of detonations around them.

 	‘All teams rise, maximum thrust!’ shouted Shadowsun, a molten pool of anger burning in her stomach, ‘Get up high so the Broadsides can add their fire! Then re-engage!’

 	Her battlesuit teams climbed into the sky, jetpacks heat-shimmering columns of air behind them. Shadowsun’s meteorological readouts spiked again, and the unnatural storm came in once more. This time it was more tornado than hurricane, a wall of angry wind and razored black stone. 

 	Shadowsun saw one of her shas’ui pilots caught by the wind, his battlesuit hurtled around by its uncanny forces and flung in a smoking tangle of limbs into a scree-covered ridge. Its ochre paint had been stripped away, leaving little more than a landscape of dented alloy and ruined circuitry.

 	The black tornado whipped around the rallying bikers below, interposing itself between her battlesuits and their prey and moving eastward at speed. Several of her teams made to pursue, but the Imperial skimmers moved parallel, sending streams of explosive bolts towards any who got too close.

 	 ‘Leave them,’ said Shadowsun. ‘Disengage. Their mind-science must be studied before it can be effectively countered.’

 	Golden assent signals blipped, though not nearly enough of them for her liking. Perhaps a quarter of her team-symbols had faded to the charcoal grey of death. 

 	Shadowsun surveyed the carnage left behind in the wake of the gue’ron’sha’s retreat. Sighing, she flicked through Oe-ken-yon’s footage of the battle in order to consolidate whatever knowledge she could at first glance. From above, the path of the gue’ron’sha’s mounted assault had formed two thick zigzagging columns that shot out from the frontal ramps of their downed gunships, then at the last moment fanned out in a wide delta formation to strike home. She was reminded of the lightning storms of Vior’la she had watched as a child – magnificent, deadly, and all but impossible to predict.

 	A learning experience, then, and a costly one. A harrowing number of tau bodies lay scattered about the ridge, some cast from their skimmer cockpits, others dangling from the smoking tombs of their mangled battlesuits. Her frown deepened as she realised there was something wrong, something even more unsettling than the sight of so many tau dead.

 	Though at least a dozen of the armoured bikes the Imperials used to such effect lay scattered and smoking in the shale, not a single gue’ron’sha body was amongst them.
Interlude 1-0


 	‘- - - SO MANY CORPSES - - -’ the autotrans scrolled, its whisper-waveform jerking peaks and troughs. Shadowsun eye-flicked it off, and the buzzing in her head subsided a little. Yet it was still there, reminding her of the death, the blood.

 	The symbol of the Supreme Ethereal blipped on her interior command screen for a second, and she transmitted a halt designation to her cadre.

 	‘Master Aun’Va, greatest respects,’ said Shadowsun, averting her eyes as the Ethereal Majesty appeared on her central screen. Even with her gaze cast down she could see his reflection on the inactive side of her battlesuit’s interior dome. A drawn, grey slab of a face with the wisdom of aeons etched into its angles. Aun’Va’s visage was framed by the Crown of Communities, the headdress that denoted the blessing of the entire tau empire. Shadowsun found her heart quicken in her chest at the thought that he was speaking to her, and her alone.

 	‘O’Shaserra,’ the projection intoned, his voice grave and resonant. ‘I hope your preparations are complete.’

 	‘They are, master,’ she replied. ‘Gue’la weaknesses are many, and easily exploited.’

 	‘Excellent. This world must fall, my child, and soon. The Greater Good demands it.’

 	‘Its demise is imminent, master.’

 	‘O’Shassera, did you just tell me the demise of the Greater Good is imminent?’ said Aun’Va, incredulity twisting his features.

 	‘No!’ protested Shadowsun, fear grabbing at her ribs with its cold claws. ‘No, of course not, master! The demise of Agrellan, I mean… I mean the Imperial forces upon Agrellan.’

 	‘I see. State clearly what you mean to say in future, child. There is no room for ambiguity in times of war.’

 	‘As you say, master.’

 	There was a long pause, stretching out until it seemed to fill the battlesuit dome’s interior with suffocating silence. At times like this, she was very glad it was forbidden to meet her master’s gaze. She would rather have pushed hot coals into her eyes than witness his displeasure.

 	Eventually Aun’Va spoke. ‘Am I to understand the gue’la military forces remain active?’

 	‘There have been… developments, master,’ she said, recovering herself. ‘Three lander ships escaped the air caste’s orbital cordon. A gue’ron’sha strike force, a gue’la regiment ship, and the Imperial force recently designated as House Terryn.’

 	‘Have they not been dealt with?’

 	‘We are whittling them down, master. Their reinforcements were unexpectedly… capable.’

 	She appended Oe-ken-yon’s clearest sensor capture of the colossal walkers the Imperium had deployed at Agrellan Prime.

 	‘Whittling them down,’ repeated Aun’Va. ‘I see. So in fact you have failed to destroy them in the time frame allocated. In doing so you have allowed these… monstrosities to regroup with their gue’ron’sha allies.’

 	Shadowsun said nothing, her eyes all but closed in shame.

 	‘Commander Puretide would be disappointed in your progress. The empire requires more than patience to realise its destiny.’ The Supreme Ethereal’s long grey lips turned down slightly, a pout of disapproval that Shadowsun realised she hated and feared more than anything else. Perhaps even more than the Traitor. 

 	The Supreme Ethereal paused, his hooded eyelids low and his large black pupils flicked back in brief meditation. His grey mask could well have been stone for all the life in it.

 	‘I shall be leading the final assault on Agrellan’s principal fortress,’ he said, returning to his former statesmanlike demeanour. ‘It is time the empire is reminded that none are exempt from strife in the name of the Greater Good. Not even those who watch over it. My ship is already inbound upon your position.’

 	‘But… Master, I…’ stammered Shadowsun, her mind whirling.

 	‘This shall occur. Within three ro’taa this world will be given a more fitting name – Mu’gulath Bay, the Gate of New Hope. The empire’s assimilation of this mineral-rich region will continue apace. You have command of an entire coalition in order to ensure it. The matter of the military details I leave to you.’

 	‘Of course, master. It shall be done.’

 	‘I am sure of it. The earth caste have assured me their fusion array upon Agrellan’s moon is essentially complete. The planetoid is only a matter of decs from its orbital zenith. The water caste are already in influential positions within those hives that will provide us gue’ve’sa for the next phase of expansion. The air caste have ensured total superiority of transfer for my fleet. It is only the fire caste that slow the empire’s progress.’

 	‘That… that is my fault, master,’ said Shadowsun, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘I shall work all the harder, forgoing sleep to ensure my caste’s success whilst remaining at optimum operational efficiency. I shall adopt,’ – she took a shallow breath before saying it – ‘I shall adopt the strategy of Mont’ka.’

 	‘What you will do, O’Shaserra, is accompany me in the creation of a breach in the primary hive’s walls,’ said Aun’Va, his orb-like eyes wide. ‘This breach will be secured by a contingency cadre inbound on your position, details appended. There shall the killing blow land. I intend for the footage of our glorious military victory to be broadcast across the entire empire.’

 	Shadowsun spared an eye-flick to scan Aun’Va’s transmitted append. ‘XV104s…’ she said, her eyes growing wide. ‘They are to be field-tested upon Agrellan, master? How many?’

 	‘A number sufficient to the task.’

 	‘Master Aun’Va, with these resources we shall create a legend here, that I promise you.’

 	‘Yes. I shall.’

 	A moment of silence passed. Aun’Va nodded slowly, staring hard at her as if he was reading her thoughts.

 	‘Master…’ said Shadowsun, her voice catching.

 	‘My child?’ the Supreme Ethereal replied. His tone was tired, as if he knew what was coming next, and had nothing but contempt for it. 

 	‘Has there been any word of Shoh?’

 	The Supreme Ethereal’s grey lips grew thin. 

 	‘Concentrate on the matter at hand, O’Shaserra,’ he said. ‘We shall speak of the Traitor soon enough.’

 	The flickering firelight caused the shadows of the fur-clad Chogorians to dance across the circle of bikes surrounding them. Their powerful machines faced outward in every direction, ready for the White Scars to mount up and disperse at a moment’s notice. 

 	The khan’s warriors listened in attentive silence as he prepared to issue instructions for the next stage of the hunt.

 	‘Our quarry is cunning, and not to be underestimated,’ he began. ‘The xenos witch has had the better of us once, but will not do so again. At sunrise, we will–’

 	Kor’sarro’s voice broke off as a faint silhouette began to take shape amid the darkness. As one, every White Scar aimed his bolter at the ebon figure’s head. The stranger did not flinch. 

 	‘In the name of the Great Khan, identify yourself!’ roared Jebe, Kor’sarro’s company champion, as he unsheathed his sword.

 	‘Stand down, brothers,’ ordered the khan, gesturing to his men to lower their weapons. ‘I know him.’

 	Kor’sarro Khan was aware of only one person in the entire galaxy that could infiltrate a Space Marine camp undetected. The khan’s warriors obeyed his command without question, though the scornful sneer he wore did little to ease the tension. 

 	Without a word, the newcomer reached up and unclasped his helm to reveal a narrow, pallid face beneath a veil of lank, black hair. It was Shadow Captain Shrike. 

 	‘We meet again, Raven Guard,’ the khan growled. ‘What brings your kind here? Have you come to spill xenos blood or skulk in the shadows and leave the fighting to real warriors?’

 	‘My “kind” have been engaging the enemy in covert operations for ten days,’ stated Shrike. ‘We engaged the tau relief forces in the canyons either side of your position at Blackshale Ridge. Did you not wonder how you managed to escape the ambush against such odds?’

 	The khan’s eyes narrowed at this, but Shrike continued before the White Scar could respond. ‘I bring orders from my master, Corvin Severax. This world is lost. The xenos forces arrayed against us are too great, and my scouts report that the tau are massing for a final assault.’

 	The realisation of what Shrike was about to say hit the khan like a sledgehammer. ‘You wish us to retreat? Craven!’

 	‘Severax has assumed full command of all Imperial forces in this sector and has called for the evacuation of all military assets and personnel on Agrellan – including you, brother. Given our history, he thought it prudent you heard this from me. He knew these orders would not be to your taste. The Wings of Deliverance awaits us in orbit, and two Magnus-class drop-ships are berthed in the hive’s triumphal boulevard for transfer. You are to accompany me back to Agrellan Prime for immediate extraction.’

 	 ‘Then he was wise to send you and no other, lest I gut them for their cowardice,’ growled khan. ‘But if these are indeed my orders, then I will do my duty, even though it stains my honour. White Scars, we ride! See you in Agrellan or hell, brother!’

 	‘Hell awaits us all at Agrellan Prime,’ Shrike muttered grimly. 

 	The curving corridors of the Undeniable Truth were still haunted by the sterile tang of its production dome. Through the spaceship’s white reaches shuffled the squat-bodied, muscular shapes of earth caste scientists. Each of them paused every thirty steps or so, raising a flat grey wand and taking complex readings from the oblong viewing ports that soared up to the roof high above. So far, every one of the nova reactors nestled within the corridors’ inhabitants had been emitting ideal data.

 	One of the earth caste scientists stepped up to the viewing port. Wiping the condensation from the plastiglass, he moved his face in close, looking up like a child who had been raised underground and brought out to see the night sky for the first time.

 	An armoured colossus stood there in the near-darkness, its sensor-lenses pulsing gently in harmony with the terrifying potential energy at its heart.

 	The XV104 Riptide – a hero’s mantle of magnificent and terrible beauty – was soon to be unleashed.

 
 
 Chapter Five


 	THE GREAT HIVES
ABSALOM CONTINENT
AGRELLAN, 747.999.M41


 	One by one, Agrellan’s great metropolises began to fall.

 	The first to face Shadowsun’s impeccably planned onslaughts were the three hives of the Acacian Basin. This time the White Scars, after being humbled at the battle of Blackshale Ridge and ordered to retreat to Agrellan Prime, were unable to prevent the tau offensive that hammered out from each hives’ blind spots. With the main gun nests and artillery domes of each Acacian hive buried under thousands of tonnes of ferrocrete, Shadowsun’s cadres picked apart each mountainous city like razor ants dismantling the carcass of a dying grox.

 	The Imperium was slow to learn from its mistakes, but it was not incapable. The war council of Agrellan Prime, forced to admit that the Acacian hives were as good as lost, resolved that those cities yet to be attacked would not be caught slumbering. They placed every hive on full alert, ensuring their artillery domes were manned around the clock and their vigilis-class servo-skulls were actively questing for signs of tau invaders.

 	Imperial Knights strode around the fractured borders of each vast city, ready and eager for battle at a moment’s notice. In the meantime they turned their cannons upon those outcrops and spires that occluded the hive’s fields of fire, methodically demolishing them with melta blasts or the relentless pounding of battle cannon shells. Despite the evacuations preceding each clearance, many citizens were lost in the landslides of rockcrete that were created by each barrage. Yet as each hive’s cataracts were removed one by one, its vision was sharpened once more, and the gold zones that Shadowsun had used to such effect in the Acacian Basin were eliminated. 

 	With the tau’s advantage of surprise spent in the initial phases of the war, Agrellan was ready and waiting for the next bout of bloodshed. A world given over to the production of war materiel was now armed and armoured to the hilt. 

 	Ultimately, it made little difference.

 	Imortis Hive, whose outer walls were so thick that conventional bombardments were useless against it, fell to its own defences. Though dormant gravity mines studded the folds in its walls, each intended to drag enemies into a pre-prepared kill zone, their locations had been determined long ago. Even before she had made planetfall Shadowsun’s orbital scans had uncovered their unusual energy signatures. At their commander’s behest, tau ranged support cadres edged towards the hive and sent their nimble gun drones to make a simultaneous approach. Small enough to evade the auspice arrays of the monolithic structure, the drones closed in, disc-like beads on a gossamer-thin garrotte closing around the hive’s throat. The drones triggered every one of the mines in a single diving assault, and the resultant gravitic dissonance was so strong that, although the gun drones were crushed flat, the hive’s walls were made momentarily vulnerable by their own density. 

 	The cadre’s subsequent railgun volleys spread hairline cracks that turned to finger-wide gaps, then gaping fissures until the impossibly strong gravity fields tore the walls down under their own weight. Under the cover of the colossal dust clouds thrown up by the ruinous collapse, hunter cadres by the dozen powered inside, debarking from their anti-grav Devilfish transports to cut down the hive’s defenders in a merciless urban war.

 	Gorvus Hive, the fiercest and most vigilant of all its kind, fell to the wiles of Shas’vre Drai. In the shadowy depths of the hive’s industrial layers, Drai’s chameleonic battlesuit teams were all but undetectable. Each stealth group fought its way through the territory of fierce underhive gangs and up to the sloping shoulders of the hive, emerging bloodied but undetected onto the artillery eyries overlooking the plains. The precision violence of their ambush cut down the crew of each artillery battery with ease, their fusion blasters reducing the Hydra flak tanks themselves to molten scrap. 

 	By robbing Gorvus Hive of its anti-aircraft capabilities, the stealth groups had ensured that their air caste allies could close in unmolested. Razorsharks shot down those few aircraft the hive could launch in its defence as Paradox squadrons circled the spires like vultures, dropping stasis bombs on the canopies and domes that protected its people from Agrellan’s toxic atmosphere. 

 	The deadly zephyrs of the planet’s wastes slowly filtered into the hive’s innards, and soon panic had broken out in every district. It was as potent a weapon of conquest as any bomb. Gorvite citizens fought tooth and nail for the rebreathers and puritan canisters that were worn by the richer members of the populace, just as Shadowsun had known they would, for humans were selfish and had little concept of a greater good. 

 	Before the hour was out, the hive’s gates had been flung wide by swarming refugees seeking the safety of neighbouring cities. The people that formed the hive’s lifeblood spilled out onto the toxic plains in screaming rivers and desperate, pooling crowds. So it was that whilst Imortis fell from without, Gorvus fell from within.

 	Rebellion took Barantius Hive, a fortress famous for the great macrocannons that girdled its thick waist. After inveigling their way inside the underhive, water caste ambassadors had traded cutting edge plasma weaponry to every gang leader they could find in exchange for little more than a handful of Imperial silver. When the Adeptus Arbites came for the tau that had been anonymously reported as lurking in the gangers’ midst, the trigger-happy hivers were more than ready to test out their new guns in defence of their new ‘friends’. 

 	Skirmishes turned into bloodbaths as the enforcers of the noble houses came down heavily upon those gangs that had dared resist them. With the temper of the oppressed masses already dangerously short, the tau ambassadors found it easy to fan the spark of revolt into a raging inferno. The entire underhive mobilised into an uprising that coursed through the hive city, consuming it layer by layer as the wordcraft of the tau ambassadors worked its subtle magic. Before the day was out even the highest spires were taken – not by tau warriors, but by human guerrillas only too glad to turn the tables on their long-time oppressors. In the end, Barantius fell without a single one of its macrocannons being fired. 

 	Predominus Hive was next. Huge shield discs jutted from every structure sturdy enough to hold them, a profusion of hemispheres reminiscent of the plate-fungus that clusters to the trunk of an ancient tree. Though they were individually weak, when all of these discs were at maximum output the hive was shrouded by a shimmering cloak of energy that could deflect artillery shells and lascannon beams alike. With every generator in the lower hive given over to these defences, the populace considered themselves invulnerable.

 	The hive’s citizens were to be disabused of this notion in the most horrific and final of ways. As Agrellan’s great cities were taken apart in a dozen locations, the planet’s moon appeared full and gloating directly above the spires of Predominus. From the armourglass balconies and vivariums of the hive’s upper levels, a tiny blue flicker could be seen in the planetoid’s deepest crater. The flicker grew larger, then larger still, until it hurt to look at the sky. 

 	Then, with a window-shattering thunderclap, a column of fusion energy the width of a mag-train stabbed down into the topmost spire of Predominus. It blasted the hive apart from within, a hundred thousand gun ports and archways venting sheets of blue-white energy in a single cataclysmic explosion. As Shadowsun had predicted, the fusion lance’s fell energies were contained within the same protective force fields that had been designed to protect the hive. Instead of being released they raged like a trapped firestorm, burning away every living thing inside and out until the hive was little more than crumbling ash.

 	The price of such destructive power was high, for the titanic release of energy from the earth caste mega-weapon upon Agrellan’s moon caused a fusion reactor meltdown of unprecedented scale. The backlash consumed half of Agrellan’s moon in blue fire, cracking the rest of the honeycombed orb into little more than space debris. Yet the deed was done. For the loss of less than fifty earth caste scientists, the tau coalition had obliterated over seven billion hivers.

 	Adronicus Hive fell next, then Stormspire, then Olnius, each taken down by a military masterstroke that turned the hive’s power against itself. Shadowsun’s worldwide Mont’ka strategy had halved the planet’s population and reduced its fortresses to rubble in the space of a single day.

 	Yet for all the deadly genius that Shadowsun had exhibited elsewhere on the planet, it was the conquest of Agrellan Prime that was to become legendary.

 	Kor’sarro Khan leant forward out of the cupola of the Rhino Steelsteed, toxic winds whipping across his face as the transport hurtled through the desiccated forest. The air was foul, and he could feel his multi-lung pumping at maximum capacity next to his spine. At least he could see his surroundings. Moondrakkan would take weeks to replace, and in the meantime there was no way he was going to hide from sight like a tau coward.

 	The khan’s transport was the arrowhead point of an armoured column that made all speed towards the evac site at Agrellan Prime. Each vehicle bore the white and red heraldry of the White Scars, the remains of its biker squads acting as outriders on either flank. Inside each Rhino and Razorback was a squad itching for battle, praying for the xenos to bar their path so they could take a measure of revenge before the evacuation craft bore them into the night sky.

 	Less than a hundred metres ahead of the Steelsteed, the contrails of Raven Guard jump packs flickered blue. The khan’s allies shot through the forest, their fast but stealthy approach in stark contrast to the White Scars juggernaut charge. Shrike had insisted the khan’s men take the forest road, sticking to the natural camouflage of the white trees for as long as possible before making a break for the walls of Agrellan Prime. After his losses at Blackshale Ridge, Kor’sarro had reluctantly acquiesced, part of him silently grateful that his loss of the steed Moondrakkan would be less evident if they rode through woodland instead of the open wastes.

 	‘Slippery tau hag,’ he muttered into the wind. The enemy commander had twice escaped him now, twice evaded Moonfang’s steel bite. If the witch hadn’t have been xenos, perhaps… perhaps the hatred he felt for her would be closer to respect.

 	A cloud of orange flame flickered up ahead, and the trunks of dead trees threw out stark shadows as shrill screams rose into the night. On either side of the forest road, baleful eyes flashed in the gloom. The khan caught flashes of heavy-set figures with their backs flattened against the desiccated trunks, white tree-dust smeared across their muscled frames.

 	Catachans. Kor’sarro knew fellow hunters when he saw them. But as for what they were waiting for…

 	An avian caw jolted Kor’sarro from his thoughts, and there came a clang of clawed feet on metal from behind him. He ducked on instinct just as a jagged blade attached to a hunting rifle swept overhead, ripping a clump of black hair from his topknot. 

 	Face set in a grimace of contempt, the khan punched upwards and grabbed the rifle’s shaft, yanking it forward to draw its owner into his line of sight. A gangly xenos stared down with beady black eyes, beak open and head-quills shaking in a primitive threat display. A kroot mercenary, savage in a fight but easily broken.

 	The creature’s head exploded, showering the cupola and its occupant with foul-smelling gore.

 	Kor’sarro shouldered up to lean out of the hatch once more and scan his surroundings. He could hear bolter fire, and see the flicker-flare of mass reactive shots detonating in the distance. To the right of the Steelsteed rode Djubali, grinning fiercely under his mask of whipping black hair. He had a smoking bolt pistol in his hand.

 	‘That kill was mine!’ bawled Kor’sarro, wiping xenos blood from his face.

 	‘My apologies, steedless one!’ laughed his battle-brother over the din of the armoured column’s engines. ‘At least you look a bit more like your old gory self now!’

 	The khan shrugged, picking up the remains of the xenos corpse’s arm and biting down into it so that blood ran down his chin. The muscle was stringy and foul, but he could feel his gut thanking him for the protein nonetheless. He smiled redly at Djubali and flung the rest of the arm at his head. 

 	‘There’s whole tribes of the things!’ shouted Djubali, expertly swaying his bike so the khan’s improvised projectile flailed past him. ‘Straken’s lot are hunting them!’

 	‘No time to join in!’ replied the khan. ‘Stick to the plan!’

 	A solid slug pinged hard from his pauldron, some tree-hidden kroot sniper’s best shot. Kor’sarro snorted in irritation, picking his helmet from the mag-clamp at his waist and pushing it down hard over his head. ‘Do not fall to this distraction,’ he voxed to his men. ‘We’ve a real battle to fight. Punch through the thick of it, then on to the hive walls.’

 	Djubali nodded his understanding and peeled off, the bolters on the front of his bike thumping out shells into the night.

 	The noise of battle up ahead was intensifying. Blossoms of flame illuminated long-limbed kroot and thickly muscled Catachans as they darted through the darkness. Catachan blood spurted in black arcs, hunting staves swung and chopped, alien flesh sizzled as lasguns stabbed pinpoint volleys through the darkness. The khan breathed in the heady scent of war, opening a vox-channel to his brethren whilst the White Scars column bullied its path through the sparse forest.

 	‘Engage only those in your path, brothers, do not slow,’ the khan said. ‘Deliver what wrath you can from atop your steeds.’

 	His men answered only with gunfire, those in the armoured column behind throwing open the top hatches of their Rhinos to send bolt shells blasting into the kroot snipers crouching in the trees. Xenos remains pattered out of the white boughs like the flesh of burst fruit. 

 	Up ahead, a squadron of squat-bodied Imperial Guard tanks bulldozed their way into a clearing. The khan chuckled evilly as he recognised the silhouettes of their giant promethium barrels.

 	Hellhounds.

 	The oily scent of ignited promethium billowed through the forest, and a roiling bow-wave of flame blasted a nearby copse of trees to burning splinters. The khan saw long-limbed figures blaze like tallow candles in a bonfire before falling away to ash.

 	Dozens of kroot fled from the Hellhounds, sprinting right towards the armoured column. They flitted and darted from tree to tree like shadows given life. Shouting a wordless war cry, the khan pivoted the cupola’s storm bolter and sent a volley of rocket-propelled shells thudding into scattering aliens and desiccated vegetation alike. Each deadly little cylinder detonated on impact to spray bone-white powder and xenos remains in a wide radius. The weapon bucked hard in the khan’s hands as it killed foe after foe, and the Rhino kicked like a mule as it crunched over those xenos too slow to scatter out of its path. Kor’sarro savoured the prickly feeling of hot adrenaline pumping through his system. Armoured warfare. There was nothing quite like it.

 	 The Raven Guard, as focused and driven as ever, had avoided the fighting entirely to boost out of the forest and onto the parched earth girdling the hive’s walls. The khan almost envied them their focus. He could no sooner pass through a forest of foes without taking a few kills than he could devour a Land Raider. Still, their advance had not slowed, and the edge of the desiccated woodland was in sight.

 	The White Scars column bullied its way out of the forest at breakneck speed, the crushed remains of kroot mercenaries gumming the tracks of many of its vehicles. A few kilometres distant the man-made mountain of Hive Agrellan loomed impossibly tall. Its spires disappeared up into the glowering clouds, though its perimeter wall loomed close, a promise of safety wrought in brutalist rockcrete. On its upper slopes ancient guns clanked and huffed, steam gouting from their gargoyle-mouthed vents as they ground into new firing positions. The khan could swear they were taking a bead on his armoured column.

 	Or perhaps, thought the khan, aiming at an unseen foe closing in upon it.

 	‘Beware the flanks, battle-brothers!’ shouted the khan, ‘Close all hatches! The alien is near!’

 	No sooner had the khan given his command than a shoal of xenos war machines hurtled down out of the low-hanging clouds towards them. Grav-skimmers, fighters, drones, battlesuits, every one of them bore down upon the White Scars with their guns spitting blue-white plasma. The Raven Guard jetting off ahead and the Catachans sprinting across the plains behind them were easy targets, but the xenos ignored them entirely. The khan could feel it in his bones. This was about revenge.

 	Several bikes tumbled away into the dust as the tau volleys hit home, and a Razorback flipped over as a volley of missiles struck its tracks. Rhinos were rocked on their suspension by seeker missiles that slammed into their hatches over and over again, hammering in hard as if trying to get at the Space Marines inside. The khan growled in frustration, longing to change tactic and engage them head on, but knowing the time for such tactics had passed.

 	‘Force Jekobah, Force Khenik, introduce yourselves,’ Kor’sarro growled into the vox. A moment later he heard the signature boom of turbo-boosted engines as eight Land Speeders and a Stormraven gunship roared out from the forest road to fill the skies with heavy bolter fire. Many of the shells hit home, and the blazing wreckage of tau drones and light aircraft fell out of the skies, long plumes of smoke trailing behind them as they corkscrewed towards the parched earth. 

 	A guttural chanting came from behind Kor’sarro. Sudabeh had shouldered his way out of the Steelsteed’s top hatch, his force staff raised high. The seer’s eyes filled red, the air around him crackling faintly as his conjuration reached its zenith. Far above, the clouds above the approaching tau strike force began to curl.

 	‘Ha!’ barked the khan. ‘Show them a real storm, old friend!’

 	The curling clouds turned into a spiral, then a vortex, its interior lit with ruddy streaks of lightning. Here and there an electrical bolt would crackle out with a loud snapping sound, discharging towards the tau warsuits that were sending missiles arcing down towards their position. Several of the bipedal weapons platforms took direct hits, and though they were left physically intact they fell away nonetheless, dropping like falling statues to the earth. 

 	The khan’s breath came quick. The vast city’s walls were less than three kilometres away. They could still make it. Even under heavy fire, they could make it.

 	He looked to the west, and saw dim shadows. He looked up, and his eyes widened.

 	Drifting down from the lightning-haunted skies came a new kind of death.

 	Four alien war machines emerged from the roiling clouds, so large and powerful that any one of them could have flipped the Steelsteed with one hand. The ever-present warsuits of the tau the khan had fought before. They were usually as tall as a Dreadnought and carried much the same firepower. Yet even those deadly things would barely have come up to the waists of the technological horrors that now came for them.

 	A single cyclopean eye glowed dull red in each boxy head, nestled small amongst the massive bulk of their segmented torsos and jetpack arrays. On the left arm of each massive warsuit discus shields shimmered, tiny flickers of Sudabeh’s red lightning dancing across the domes of force they projected. On their right arms were guns almost as large as the Khan Spear’s turbo-laser destructor.

 	The paired giants at the front of the formation raised their cannons, complex rotary weapons whose multiple barrels whirred into black and ochre blurs. The rising whine of the spinning barrels were soon joined by great bass pulses, the weapons booming voh-voh-voh-voh as arm-sized plasma bolts blitzed into the Raven Guard. Wherever the blinding white lozenges struck home, black-armoured Space Marines were bowled six metres into the dust, skidding to a halt in a tangle of smoking limbs and charred ceramite.

 	Behind them came two more of the monstrosities, boosting forward to take up kneeling stances in the dust. Bluish light poured from the vents in their double-barrelled cannons as their thrumming reactors powered up for the shot. A krak missile shot out from one of the Rhinos in the middle of the armoured column, its firer hoping to disrupt whatever barrage was to come. His aim was true, and the missile smacked right into the leftmost warsuit, detonating with a clap of percussive force. It did nothing more than discolour the colossus’ ochre hide.

 	Then the warsuits returned fire. 

 	With an enormous, blaring tzonng, two starbursts of ion energy flared out from the underslung cannons. Each boulder-sized sphere burned a trail through the air before smacking straight into the armoured column. 

 	One of the blinding balls punched into the side of a Rhino, annihilating a full half of its hull in an instant. Flailing Space Marines spilled out amongst the smouldering remains of their comrades a moment before the vehicle exploded with a ground-shaking boom. 

 	The other energy sphere burst upon the hull of a Razorback, incinerating its upper half and turning its lascannon turret into a pillar of crackling smoke. The stricken vehicle veered, tilted, and slowly toppled over, sending nearby bikers scattering away from its burning wreck.

 	‘Keep moving!’ shouted the khan, waving at his men to circumvent the ruined transports. ‘Full throttle! Full dispersal!’ 

 	Muting the vox for a second, Kor’sarro clucked his tongue in frustration and anger. With the Thunderhawks gone, they had nowhere near enough firepower to deal with this new threat, let alone the massed tau strike force on their right. Their only hope was speed and determination.

 	Luckily, those were qualities the White Scars had in great measure.

 	The Rhinos and Razorbacks broke into a loose pack and accelerated hard, their biker escorts swerving and kinking in a loose perimeter around them. The Land Speeders, still harrying the strike force descending on the right flank, wove interlocking patterns that made it all but impossible to settle cross hairs upon them. 

 	Then Agrellan Hive spoke, a single word of death that shook the earth.

 	One of the giant tau warsuits was blown to scrap in an instant, its internal reactor sending a mushroom cloud high into the air as the hive’s ordnance hit home. The other three suits rocked back in surprisingly human stances, their discus shields flaring as their force fields soaked up the worst of the baleful energies.

 	Turning back to the White Scars, the warsuits opened fire once more, as intent on the kill as any true hunter. The multi-barrelled rotary cannons of the foremost warsuits perforated the Steelsteed in half a dozen places, and the khan ducked low into the cupola as the vehicle shuddered like a frightened beast. Yet the stout machine kept going, carving a zigzag path into the shadow of the hive walls. 

 	The same could not be said for the men inside. Three of the runes corresponding to the khan’s command squad flickered red in his helmet display.

 	‘Apothecary Stebekh, tend to those hit by that last volley,’ snapped the khan, the medic in the Steelsteed’s hold voxing acknowledgement. 

 	‘Solarus Gate, harken all stations!’ shouted Kor’sarro, watching in envy as the surviving Raven Guard triggered their jump packs to bound effortlessly over the perimeter wall. ‘We require immediate entry! We’re under heavy fire out here. We request entry!’

 	The vox-net crackled, but there was no response. 

 	Behind him, another blaring tzonng was followed by the dull crump of a vehicle detonation. In the distance, two more explosions erupted from the transports at the rear of the column. Orange death-fires illuminated the cloud of smaller battlesuits hovering above them like a host of predatory angels.

 	‘By the Emperor’s holy throne, Solarus, give us an open port or I’ll cut my way inside and kill you myself!’

 	‘Quite impossible,’ came the gatemaster’s reply, his prim tone failing entirely to conceal the panic beneath.

 	Then, in a blaze of light, an opening appeared in the great Agrellan wall. 

 	But it was not the warriors of the Imperium who had made it. 

 	The yield capacitors of Shadowsun’s fusion blasters blipped gold. She dropped down from the flickering skies towards the column of boxy Imperial vehicles and triggered another full shot, twin beams of destructive energy spearing vertically downwards. She hit one of the lumpen things full on, an olive-hued tank that was little more than a mobile box filled with gue’la troopers. The transport exploded with a satisfying thump, and its passengers spilled out, grabbing for rebreathers or rolling out the fires that clung to their disgusting porcine flesh.

 	Yelling in defiance, the gunners in the cupolas of the other transports pivoted their pintle-mounted weapons towards the source of the killing shot. Shadowsun swung her hips back and her chest forward, her battlesuit smoothly boosting away from the chattering streams of slugs sent in her direction. Even a raw recruit could have avoided the ill-timed volley fired by the human soliders, and her stealth cells made her all but invisible against the flickering clouds above. Such poor warriors did not deserve to face the might of the XV104s. As if to prove her point, Drai’s team came alongside her, levelled their burst cannons, and tore apart the cupola gunners in a storm of blood and plasma.

 	This really is too easy, thought Shadowsun. There was little honour in shooting a fleeing foe, especially one as dull of wit as the Imperial Guard. Even their name was ridiculous. She was almost regretting ordering the Riptides to engage the gue’ron’sha instead of tackling them herself. Still, she reminded herself, Aun’Va had other duties in mind for her. 

 	It was time for the killing blow to fall.

 	‘Counterstrike cadres,’ she transmitted, her tones clipped and sure. ‘Neutralise as many of these transports as possible. Firststrike cadre, I want that wall breached immediately. Approach on appended vectors, Riptides at the fore. Full nova, then sentinel protocols. Oe-ken-yon, use the dronenet to get high-yield footage. Skystrike cadre – your Riptides have the honour of being the first inside. Prepare a path.’

 	The assent symbols of the Riptide wings flashed gold, their size and unfamiliarity filling Shadowsun with quiet pride. To have such warriors at her command, to be the first in the empire to wield them as her blade… it was an honour beyond measure.

 	She could feel the pull of Mont’ka tugging at her soul. With weapons such as these…

 	‘- - - YES - - - KILL - - - SEND THEM TO THEIR GRAVES - - -’ 

 	Shadowsun felt a hot prickle of unease cross her skin. She could have sworn she had turned the autotrans off when she was mustering the cadres in the cloud cover, to prevent… to prevent unnecessary distractions. Mont’ka required total focus. 

 	Ahead of her the Riptides she had claimed for her Firststrike cadre dropped out of the clouds above the hive’s wall. Their nova reactors thrummed to a crescendo as they hovered to a halt in front of the gate’s towers. Suddenly, blue-white spheres shot from their energy cannons, hitting home with such force they chewed a wide breach in the eagle-emblazoned gate. The walls around the opening were riven by a web of cracks, tumbling rubble carrying those Imperial Guardsmen that had been manning the gate’s battlements to a rocky demise.

 	The XV104s had blasted open the human fortress in a single devastating salvo. Behind the breach, the hive’s sprawling innards were laid bare. An iron-grated perimeter road met a cliff wall of pipes and platforms across which hundreds of ant-like citizens scurried, desperate to escape. Imperial Guard troops pushed their way through the teeming hivers to take up positions on landing pads and crenulated defence stations.

 	Shadowsun flew in close to the hive’s outer wall, blasting the face from a statue of an Imperial saint as she passed by. The paired Riptides that had ripped open the city’s wall bracketed her like armoured giants escorting an airborne goddess. Behind her, the three surviving Riptides that had mauled the gue’ron’sha tanks hovered towards the breach at speed, boosting over the postern gate on contrails of blue flame. They unleashed a hail of heavy burst cannon fire as they came back down in the perimeter streets, splayed metal feet landing with a rockcrete-shattering crunch. 

 	The other two Riptides stood guard, interposing themselves between the oncoming armoured column and the safety beyond the breach. Shas’vre Drai’s stealth teams were already inside, sowing confusion and distraction amongst the gue’la troopers rushing to reinforce the breach. This would be the battle that the tau empire demanded of her – loud, spectacular, and bloody in the extreme.

 	‘The way has been opened, master,’ she transmitted on a secure frequency. ‘My teams are securing it now.’

 	Aun’Va’s grey face flickered large. 

 	‘Not before time, O’Shaserra. I shall begin my descent.’

 	‘Acknowledged, master,’ sent Shadowsun, her heart beating hard. Soon she would fight alongside the Supreme Ethereal himself. 

 	If their plan succeeded, a scene of timeless glory would blossom on every screen and hologram across the empire.

 	And if it failed, she would die in utter disgrace.

 	The Riptides of Shadowsun’s Firststrike cadre blocked the breach completely, the towering XV104s standing shoulder to shoulder as they discharged accelerated ionic blasts into the scattered gue’ron’sha below. Too brave or stupid to seek cover, the enemy still came on, despite over two-thirds of their number lying dead or dying across the cratered battleground outside the hive.

 	Though she could not directly see the three Riptides of the Skystrike cadre, their symbols glowed gold on her command suite as they strode impervious along the perimeter walls. Those enemy warriors ensconced in the hive’s bulk were firing upon them with missiles, large-calibre bolts, even plasma fire of their own. Yet not one of the three battlesuits showed anything other than a healthy gold of full operative capacity.

 	Shadowsun watched a double string of heavy burst cannon fire pulse white across the battlements. Wherever the plasma bolts struck, the human soldiers manning the walls were reduced to a fine red mist. Those who had hidden from the Riptides’ cannonades were torn apart by the smart missiles fired by the launchers mounted atop their shoulders, contrails snaking through the crenulations to double back hard and detonate with killing force. 

 	These beautiful new machines were a vision made real for the fire caste. Shadowsun felt sad that Commander Puretide was not here to witness them.

 	With the enemy reeling, the rest of the commander’s Counterstrike cadre had approached the walls in their skimmer transports and were deploying in a tight guard formation. So far so good, thought Shadowsun. The next stage was already upon them.

 	 Soaring out from the flickering clouds over the plains was the pride of the air caste’s sub-orbital fleet, the Manta missile destroyer Burning Hope. Red lightning played across its splayed wings, but even the mind-science of the gue’ron’sha shaman had no hope of stopping such a massive craft. Shadowsun smiled thinly. Tau technology, in sufficient measure, could overcome any challenge.

 	The Burning Hope soared over the plains, coming in so low that the flattening force of its engines bowled over the human warriors darting amongst the wreckage beneath. As it bellied in close, the gunship’s rail cannons let loose a volley with a deafening whip-crack, shattering one of the hive’s artillery domes before it could fire and blasting the proud statuary above the secondary gate to powder. Burst cannons on the edge of the Hope’s graceful hull poured plasma into the ruined battlements around the breach, forcing the black-armoured gue’ron’sha taking position there to dive for cover.

 	Then, as the rear portal of the Burning Hope irised open and his escort cadre deployed in parade formation, the Supreme Ethereal Aun’Va entered the fray.

 	Aun’Va’s fire warrior escort marched determinedly towards the breach, their pulse rifles levelling volley after volley at those Imperial troops disrespectful enough to look upon their leader. In the centre of the formation came the spiritual leader of the tau empire, seated comfortably upon his disc-like gravity throne. An expression of grim serenity radiated from his stately features as he intoned words of inspiration and conquest to his men. How Shadowsun wished she were one of them, a rank and file trooper shorn of the burden of command and free to drink in the heady sensations of the Supreme Ethereal’s presence. Drink it all in as she killed in his name.

 	The Riptides standing sentinel on either side of the breach knelt in respect at Aun’Va’s approach, stabiliser pistons thunking out from their thighs as their ion accelerators hurled yet more glowing spheres at the oncoming gue’ron’sha. Oe-ken-yon hovered high amongst a swarm of fellow drones, his networked artificial intelligences recording every angle of Aun’Va’s glorious entrance into the city.

 	Then, with an ear-splitting screech of tortured metal, a giant chainsword blade burst out from the chest of the leftmost Riptide and juddered through its torso in a shower of sparks. 

 	A twisting burst of feedback roiled out, an artificial death cry that rang in every tau ear as the indomitable Riptide fell in crackling halves to the rubble-choked ground.

 	Shadowsun cried out and boosted in close, her cadre’s Crisis battlesuits behind her. Behind the dying Riptide stood a hunchbacked Titan clad in the matt black of the grave. Skulls were emblazoned on every flat plane of its riveted armour, and red eye-sensors glared out from the vision slit of its impassive metal helm. The apparition’s upper half twisted around with an oily scream, its tapering cannon-arm brought to bear upon the head of the second Riptide.

 	The battlesuit, its shield arm lowered to protect Aun’Va instead of itself, took a close range battle cannon shell right to the head. The blast sent it reeling backwards, violet sparks fizzing from its decapitated torso to crackle from the rubble of the breach.

 	The Riptide staggered upright, its systems whining hypersonically as it struggled to recalibrate. Shadowsun darted in close and levelled a double shot at the helm of the metal monster bearing down upon her battlesuited comrade. Her fusion blasts fizzled harmlessly across the thing’s ion shield. The iron beast ignored her and stomped across the breach, contemptuously kicking a spray of rubble at the fire warriors loosing ineffectual volleys at its flank. It raised the giant chainblade that formed its left arm and brought it slashing down at the stricken Riptide just as the battlesuit triggered its jetpack. The obsidian Knight’s chainblade caught the ascending Riptide’s leg, ripping it bodily out of its hip socket. The monster’s battle cannon clank-pumped shell after shell after the fleeing machine, a grating machine-sound coming from its mask that sounded uncannily like laughter.

 	‘A worthy adversary,’ transmitted Aun’Va over the open channel. ‘Commander Shadowsun, allow your blade to fall.’

 	‘Yes, master,’ she replied. ‘Skywing cadre, engage and neutralise that beast.’

 	Before she could finish her command a third Riptide shot horizontally across the breach on twin trails of fire, bodily smashing into the rear of the black-armoured walker and wrapping its arms around the thing’s waist. Twisting hard, the Riptide yanked the obsidian machine onto one foot, causing its massive shoulders to smash into the perimeter wall with such force that several black-armoured gue’ron’sha toppled from the battlements, guns blazing as they fell. The gue’la walker fought to right itself. Its chainblade slashed the air as a second Riptide ran past just out of reach, heavy burst cannon stitching plasma blasts across the monster’s ion shield.

 	The Imperial troops pouring into the breach had taken heart from the black-armoured Titan’s attack. The Space Marines amongst the rubble cut down fire warriors left and right with their bolt-spitting sidearms, several of their number even causing Aun’Va’s personal forceshield to flash bright. Shadowsun darted a horrified glance at the ancient’s image on the command screen, but she was greeted only by a serene mask.

 	‘None can shrink from sacrifice in the name of the Greater Good,’ Aun’Va boomed, his gaze directed at the c-link drone that hovered above. 

 	Around him, the fire warriors were being forced back by the renewed assault of the black-armoured gue’ron’sha and the supporting infantry that overlooked the battle from the platforms high above. More bolter fire hammered in, this time from outside the hive’s walls. Shadowsun felt her mouth go dry as she realised the Supreme Ethereal was in danger of being caught in a lethal crossfire.

 	The shield can often be more dangerous than the sword. 

 	‘Full defence upon the Supreme Ethereal’s escort!’ she shouted. ‘I want a shield over Aun’Va immediately! All Firststrike units, enact now!’

 	The tight-knit teams of her cadre hastened to obey, coming in low to the side of the breach where the Supreme Ethereal was hovering forward. They flew in dense formation, guns bristling outwards to shred anything that got close. 

 	Shadowsun jetted in close to her master, her tanks and battlesuits closing in tight as a turtle’s shell. She blipped a symbol of strength and stability to her cadre, but inside, she was dying. One stray shot is all it would take. One random, senseless bullet, and the flame that lit the heart of the tau empire would be extinguished forever.

 	Trailing smoke, the Steelsteed careened across the cratered earth, making haste for the section of the breach that was not choked with tau bodies. In the Rhino’s wake came the battered remnants of the armoured column, bouncing and slewing through the rockcrete that was scattered around the breach.

 	‘Ha! Looks like Severax’s little surprise has caught them unawares,’ laughed the khan. Sudabeh harrumphed in disapproval from the opened top hatch behind him. ‘Stop gloating and get us in there, Kor’sarro,’ he said.

 	‘Aye,’ replied the khan, nodding and opening the vox-channel to his men. ‘We have our chance, brothers,’ he said, ‘By the Emperor’s grace, let’s take it.’

 	The drivers of each Rhino and Razorback ground their tracked vehicles through the dense rock of the felled wall as fast as they dared. Incredibly, the heavy concentration of tau sheltering at the side of the breach let them past, firing only at the Raven Guard that were moving in to harass their position at close quarters. The remnants of the Catachan regiments followed close behind the khan’s company, their olive armoured Chimeras grinding rubble to dust as they covered the last few metres into the hive.

 	The khan grabbed the storm bolter and swung it around to point at the tau cadre’s defensive huddle, but he did not fire. There was no sense in kicking that particular hornet’s nest when salvation was within reach.

 	 ‘Solarus Gate!’ he voxed. ‘Drop a macrocannon shell onto that nest of xenos cockroaches and all is forgiven!’

 	Static crackled, but nothing more. High up in the artillery domes, the snap-crack of xenos plasma weaponry gave the khan the impression the only thing dropping from their positions would be human corpses.

 	A tremendous clang of metal on metal rang out, and the titanic black walker that Corvin Severax had set upon the tau staggered into view, locked in a wrestler’s clinch with one of the massive xenos warsuits. Both were fighting for a clear shot. Although the Knight was clumsy in comparison to the tau machine, it was far stronger. Levering a limb between itself and its assailant, the obsidian walker pushed the xenos warsuit into its line of fire with the flat of its whirring chainblade. The khan watched the black-iron walker blast its tau assailant backwards with a well-placed cannon shot. Stepping forwards into the space it had cleared, the Knight brought its whirring chainblade down in a coup de grace that chewed its victim apart from shoulder to hip.

 	As the obsidian Knight’s war-horns boomed in triumph, another massive xenos warsuit descended from on high, smashing feet first into the Knight’s back and pitching it forwards into the sparking remains of its kill. 

 	‘Make all speed to the grand promenade!’ shouted Kor’sarro across the vox. He levelled a stream of storm bolter fire at a knot of tau infantry darting through the rubble in the shadow of the wall, only to be greeted by the serial click of his empty ammo cache running dry. No sooner had he swore in frustration than a new clip was passed up from inside the transport’s hull. The khan reloaded, watching the alien forces fan out as they loosed pulse beams in all directions. Their defensive firepower, formerly a spattering shower aimed only at those who got too close, was intensifying into a blistering hail.

 	In the shadow of the perimeter wall, the obsidian Knight blasted itself upright with a close-ranged volley to its fallen victim’s guts. Riding the recoil, it staggered drunkenly backwards in a half-circle, righting itself before clank-thumping another battle cannon shell towards the xenos warsuit hovering above. Its airborne foe twisted, letting the shell bounce from its torso with a dull thump. Its return fire blazed a stitching path of plasma bolts across the black walker’s hull, overloading its ion shield and burning deep holes into its carapace.

 	The Steelsteed swerved hard, banking around the obsidian walker’s legs to veer into the streets beyond. The khan whooped as the crenulated perimeter gave way to a triumphal parade ground with no less than five of House Terryn’s Knights stomping down it. Behind him the rest of the White Scars transports fanned out into arrowhead formation, the remains of their biker escort accelerating hard towards the evac zone.

 	The khan turned all the way around in the Steelsteed’s cupola, thudding explosive bolts into the ochre-armoured alien tanks swerving in pursuit. A score of streamlined gunships hovered into view, their rectangular cannons cracking hypervelocity rounds into the walkers on the boulevard beyond. The khan heard the fizz of ion shield discharge over and over again, punctuated by the occasional clang of a solid impact.

 	Suddenly, there she was – a flash of white blurring high along the grey rockcrete at their flank. The xenos war leader, speeding on plumes of fire like a statue of some graven tech-daemon given life. She arced elegantly upwards, disc-like drones trailing in her wake, and loosed lengthwise fusion blasts into the Raven Guard manning the walls. Three of Severax’s men burst into crackling cinders.

 	The khan plucked a krak grenade from his belt and flung it as hard as he could towards the xenos commander’s back. Somehow she saw it coming, and she twisted in mid-air, connecting a perfect toe-punt before turning back to her prey. Kor’sarro was forced to duck as the krak grenade came in hard, detonating against the Rhino’s roof with a deafening bang and a stink of fyceline.

 	Despite himself, Kor’sarro raised his eyebrows and nodded in grudging appreciation.

 	Engines growling, the White Scar transports gunned down the promenade until they passed through the iron wall of Terryn’s walkers. Djubali passed right underneath the lead walker, the rest of the bikes behind him. At the other end of the boulevard, tau tanks and heavy battlesuits smashed railgun fire into the massive bulk of the Imperial Knights. The walkers returned fire, their battle cannons spitting shells at a rate that would make a Cadian tanker sick with envy.

 	‘Captain Khan, glad you could make it,’ voxed Patriarch Tybalt, his tone dry even as he loosed a blast of superheated air from his thermal cannon. ‘Kindly board the drop-ship, or I fear that Master Severin will let neither of us forget it.’

 	Kor’sarro grunted his assent, waving his men up the yawning ramps of the drop-ships that awaited them in the triumphal plaza. 

 	In the battle behind them, one of Terryn’s Knights fell slowly backwards with a creak of protesting metal. Its impact on the flagstones of the boulevard was so heavy that the khan could feel the Steelsteed jump as if it had taken a direct hit. Another of the looming walkers burst into a thick pillar of flame as its inner core gave out, the stress on its ion shields killing it from the inside out.

 	A thick worm of guilt writhed in Kor’sarro’s guts at the idea of leaving the planet to the mercy of the tau, but he had little choice. Agrellan Prime stood on the brink of collapse, and if the hive-voxes told true, every other defensive position had already fallen to the tau. 

 	Sudabeh seemed to sense his old friend’s thoughts, and laid a gauntlet upon his pauldron as they debarked from the smoking hull of the Steelsteed into the shadow of the drop-ship’s cargo bay.

 	‘To linger here would be to sacrifice more lives on the altar of wounded pride, my khan,’ said the Stormseer. ‘Nothing more.’

 	Kor’sarro spat in frustration as his vehicles mounted the ramps of the evac zone, the surviving Catachans close on their tracks. Even the Knights of House Terryn that had been blocking the promenade had turned their mighty war machines around, ion shields flaring at their rears as they stamped towards the hangar bays of the drop-ships. 

 	At the far end of the triumphal road, the giant tau warsuits that had blasted open Agrellan’s defences hovered high. Speaker arrays slid out from their torsos to blare a message in accented but precise Imperial Gothic. As the piston ramps of the drop-ships closed with a hiss, the rumble of their engines slowly drowned out the broadcasts of the alien invaders. 

 	Not quickly enough, for the khan’s liking. The tau’s message would ring in his ears for weeks to come.

 	‘People of Agrellan Prime!’ the speaker arrays called. ‘Your protectors have abandoned you! Watch as your Emperor’s finest warriors flee, leaving you to your fate. Yet that fate is kinder than you suspect! Throw down your arms, and the killing will cease immediately. We bring enlightenment, peace, and freedom from tyranny – yes, even freedom, blessed freedom from an Emperor that would bleed you white! We bring safety for you and your families, safety and boundless prosperity. Citizens, lay down your arms and listen, listen to the undeniable truth of the Greater Good…’

 
 
 Interlude 2-0


 	At the heart of the Raven Guard battle-barge Wings of Deliverance, the Sphere of Councils hung suspended by a thousand clanking chains. Built into the arched windows of the armoured sphere were baffles and dampeners that prevented the slightest whisper from getting out of its lead-lined walls. 

 	Inside the strange construction was a toroid loop of polished bone. The names of the Chapter’s heroes were inscribed upon it in tiny, spidery script. Ten figures stood around it, united in silence if not appearance. Each of their faces was cast in shadow by the candelabras dangling above. The atmosphere was thick with trails of verity-incense that wound around power-armoured Space Marine and uniformed human alike. The figures had been standing around the bone toroid inside the sphere for the best part of six hours.

 	‘This is futile!’ blurted Kor’sarro Khan, throwing his hands up for what seemed like the tenth time that day. ‘There is simply no time for the waiting game. We must strike back at these upstart tau, finish what we started on Agrellan. Sever the head and the body will die.’

 	His words were met only with a stony absence of reply. Up in the dome above, a perched corvid cawed its ill omens.

 	‘Perhaps…’ said Chapter Master Severax, his sonorous tones resonating around the chamber, ‘perhaps it is that same haste that has led us to this point, Captain Khan. A foe with the power of flight is not easily slain by an earthbound blade. We must strike unseen.’

 	‘But even should we find a location for this ambush,’ protested the khan, ‘what guarantee is there that she will take the bait? That xenos b… the tau war-leader is highly intelligent. I want her head silvered and spiked on the walls of Quan Zhou, more than any other warrior in the Imperium. I swore an oath to do so. But she will not fall so easily to a base ploy. We must strike hard and true, before she has a chance to prepare. I favour aggressive warp translation, then a killing strike.’

 	 ‘Even if it were successful, khan, that would doom us all,’ said Patriarch Tybalt, twisting his long goatee beard around a beringed finger. ‘We cannot engage the tau armada in fleet-to-fleet combat and hope to prevail. Our best hope is to use their overconfidence against them. A warrior with a newly-forged sword is always keen to test the blade.’

 	‘The old tortoise has a point,’ drawled Colonel Straken, drawing cold daggers from the patriarch opposite. ‘We’re on the edge of their empire, here. That means their nearest strongholds are a good sight closer than ours.’

 	‘So?’ put in Sudabeh, his dislike of the Catachan plain. 

 	‘So we hit them hard, they hit us back even harder. This time they do it for keeps. They got old Agrellan sewn up good and tight, took the whole planet down in the space of a day. You’re a fool if you think they didn’t let us evacuate, all the better for their propaganda vids. You can bet your straggly beard on that. But if we lure them further into the Imperium, goad them into a trap, well… they won’t be able to resist rolling out those shiny new suits for the pict-thieves. Spread them thin enough, cover the skies, and we can close them down.’

 	‘We’ve been over this,’ said Kayvaan Shrike, his fingers planted in the corners of his eyes. Wax dripped from one of the candelabras above him, but the shadow captain pivoted fast, and the trickle missed his power armour by a finger’s breadth. ‘All this strategy is of no use without a battlefield to enact it,’ he said, setting his feet once more as the gloom surrounded him like a funeral shroud.

 	Severax stared hard at Tybalt, though only Shrike caught the meaning of the glare.

 	‘Very well,’ said the patriarch, testily. ‘We shall use Voltoris herself as our castle, much as it pains me to suggest it. She is shielded from sight by the Damocles Gulf, though we can lead the foe there easily enough. With our fleet on the coreward side of the planet, we will give the impression that our portcullis is unbarred.’

 	The room lapsed into silence once more. Any world that stood in the path of the tau empire’s relentless expansion would bear heavy scars indeed.

 	‘But how will we know where the tau will strike, even if they do take the bait?’ said Kor’sarro, his tone full of polite respect.

 	‘Voltoris has but one city, Captain Khan,’ Tybalt sighed. ‘Furion Peak, seat of my throne, abode of my sons and grandsons and the pride of House Terryn. The rest of the land is either forest or desolate mountain range. Put simply, the planet has nothing else of consequence to conquer.’

 	There were murmurs from around the toroid. The khan shared a glance with Sudabeh before nodding his assent.

 	‘We set a snare at the peak, and wait for them to wander into it,’ said Kor’sarro. ‘I suppose that could work.’

 	‘Quite so,’ continued Tybalt. ‘Patience is the key. If we use Voltoris as bait, and we shall know the exact location of where they will aim their blade. The skies will tell us of the timing.’

 	Corvin Severax’s lips curled, the tiniest hint of gratitude tingeing his ashen features. Tybalt smiled back, though there was no mirth in it, and plenty of bitter steel.

 	‘Thank you for your offer, Patriarch Tybalt,’ said Severax. ‘On behalf of the Imperium, we recognise the sacrifice to come, and thank House Terryn for every life it gives.’

 	‘Thousands of my people will die, no doubt,’ said Tybalt, sighing heavily. ‘I suppose at least it’ll liven the place up a bit.’

 	Commander Shadowsun shut the iris door to her quarters behind her, glad of a moment’s respite. She splashed water on her face, rubbing her eyes hard before shuffling over to the concave egg of her bed. She was too tired to even take off her armoured bodyglove. She’d do it in a moment, she thought, lulled by the soft purr of the ship’s engines. Just a few minutes of rest first.

 	It had been so long.

 	Suddenly the side door that led into her war room hissed open. The Supreme Ethereal drifted through on a cushion of anti-grav, his robes of state billowing around him. Shadowsun shot out of her bed only to fall down once more into a skidding kneel, her head bowed as her mind scrambled to full alert.

 	‘O’Shaserra,’ boomed Aun’Va, the Supreme Ethereal every bit as real as the pooling hydration fluids that Shadowsun had spilled across the floor. ‘I find you ill-prepared for war.’

 	‘I offer contrition, master,’ she blurted, ‘I merely sought to meditate on a military phenomenon that disturbs me.’

 	‘Indeed. I have another matter for you to consider.’

 	‘Master?’ she said, eyes cast low.

 	‘The progress of our expansion throughout the Dovar System is on track once more, despite the setbacks you placed in its path. Our enaction of Mont’ka upon Agrellan was a resounding success. For this the empire thanks you. Scenes from the breaching of Agrellan Prime have been… optimised, and subsequently broadcast to every screen in the empire.’

 	‘I am honoured, master.’

 	‘Yet your work is far from done.’

 	‘I… I realise that to be the case, O Supreme One.’

 	‘You do not!’ said Aun’Va, his eyes wide. ‘You do not.’ 

 	He hovered over to Shadowsun’s meagre possessions and picked out a holosphere from amongst them, gazing idly at the images of himself that were projected from its faceted core. ‘I sense that my magnanimous decision to allow our foes to leave Agrellan gnaws at your warrior heart, my child. You wish to bring death to the barbarian war-leader you encountered there.’

 	‘You are as wise and perspicacious as ever, Supreme One.’

 	‘It is a matter to which I have given much thought.’ The Supreme Ethereal turned to Shadowsun, drifting over to where she knelt on the floor to loom above her. He spread his arms out at his sides, his robes of state floating around him. Though Shadowsun was still kneeling on the floor, she could feel his majesty filling the room. 

 	‘I am allowing you a single chance to hunt down and destroy those who you allowed to escape, O’Shaserra. You will be given the necessary materiel to ensure their destruction. I have seconded half the fleet to the cause. The other half shall continue the pacification of the Dovar System under my guidance.’

 	‘Master, I swear to you that it shall be done,’ enthused Shadowsun, though inside of her something broke. ‘My thanks can never be sufficient.’

 	‘Indeed they cannot. You will repay my faith by destroying the gue’ron’sha and their allies as soon as they make planetfall, ending them one and all. Oe-ken-yon will accompany you. Once this is done, you may return to the expeditionary fleet and attend me once more.’

 	‘Of course, master. I shall send out far-ranging surveillance drones with immediate effect. I long to leave, to enact Mont’ka upon our foes so that I may sooner return to your side.’

 	‘Then make your preparations immediately. I expect you to have mustered your cadres and launched your fleet before the dec is out.’

 	‘It shall be so, Supreme One,’ said Shadowsun, her head bowed so low she could smell the faint antiseptic whiff of her master’s hemmed robes.

 	‘Farewell, then, and may the Greater Good guide you,’ said Aun’Va, turning with stately grace to drift out of the iris portal that led to the main corridor and the Ethereal Guard that now waited outside. 

 	Shadowsun stayed kneeling in supplication until the iris door hissed closed. Once she was certain she was alone, she let her forehead slowly cover the last few centimetres to the cool, hard floor.

 	Spume glittered diamond-bright as Voltoris’s verdigris sea lapped softly onto the shoreline. Wavelets rich in photosynthetic algae swilled onto the wet sands, and as they receded once more, iridescent crabs darted sidelong to feed on the tiny shrimps. Barefooted children splashed and played near the waterline, laughing in joy as the crustaceans scuttled crazily between them. Far to the west, a kroktar hauled its tentacled bulk onto a shelf of flat stone, sunning itself in the infrared rays of the planet’s crimson sun. The children shrieked at the beast’s appearance, pointing and making finger-tentacles close to their faces.

 	The tallest of the children called out, his face stern as he pointed to his servo-skull’s chronometric. He motioned to the winding path that wound back through the thick forest. The smaller youngsters reluctantly gathered their little nets and headed into the verdant eaves, inspecting the prizes they would show their parents upon their return. The path wound up and up, avoiding the howler-dens and quagmires that dotted the forest that led to the Furion plateau. 

 	Several kilometres away, a massive fortress pushed its towers high from its perch atop the peak. Forbidding and terrible to most, but a safe haven to the children making their way towards it. 

 	The little group passed underneath the thick canopy and into the verdant gloom. They swung sticks they had recovered from the jungle path as they went, telling each other tall tales of terrible monsters and brave knights.

 	In the skies high above, a cluster of distant spaceships burnt their way across the firmament. Shooting stars to most, but death itself to the people of Furion Peak.

 
 
 Chapter Six


 	FURION DROPSITE
MOURNFALL JUNGLE
VOLTORIS


 	A dot appeared in front of the Voltorian sun, three smaller dots orbiting around it. This time, the commander and her drones shot from the heavens on contrails of fire, vengeful envoys from another world that bore only the message of death.

 	Shadowsun landed hard in the peaty earth of the Mournfall jungle. Mere seconds later her entire Firststrike cadre had mustered on her co-ordinates. Orca drop-ships lifted back up into low orbit, the fire warriors they disgorged forming up into disciplined phalanxes on the wide jungle road. Scores of Crisis suits hung in the air overhead, both of her Counterstrike cadres on sentinel duty as her ground forces deployed below.

 	Oe-ken-yon hovered in close, bobbing upward smugly. 

 	‘Dataharvest complete, commander! Designation Imperial feudal world, human population approximate 7 million, apex…’

 	‘Be silent, Drone Commandant Oe-ken-yon,’ snapped Shadowsun. ‘I know what this world is, and I know where the foe have mustered. The gue’la clearly consider us so localised a threat they can skulk upon backwater worlds without fear of reprisal. They will pay a high price for their ignorance. We shall deliver the killing blow and leave before the sun is set.’

 	‘May I append my datacompile, commander?’

 	‘If you must, but I have more important duties to attend to at this moment. Speed can be a weapon too, drone commandant.’

 	‘As you say, Commander Shadowsun,’ said the drone, its elevation sinking as it drifted away once more.

 	‘Shas’vre Drai, is your team ready for battle?’ said Shadowsun, spinning around hard to face the tree line.

 	‘Ah… yes, my commander,’ said Shas’vre Drai, emerging from the jungle in a shimmer of emerald light. ‘May I speak?’

 	‘You may. Make it quick.’

 	‘I see that you have deviated from your usual strategies in order to adopt Mont’ka, my commander.’

 	‘Continue with caution,’ she replied, her fusion blasters whining to full charge.

 	‘Ah… I also theorise that strategy could yield optimum results, though I have served alongside… alongside other commanders in my time. Timing is everything, as Commander Puretide taught us. The preparatory phase and the subsequent honing of this operation seems… perhaps… a little perfunctory?’ The stealth-suited veteran took two small steps back, his body language defensive.

 	‘We took extensive assessments of our prey upon Agrellan, Shas’vre Drai,’ said Shadowsun, her brow furrowed. ‘I have analysed them several times over. These are the very same warriors – if anything, they are fewer in number than predicted. All that remains is to enact the slaughter. Yet you quote Commander Puretide’s teachings, much as a teacher would to a novice. Do you intend to oppose me?’

 	‘No, my commander,’ said Drai, horrified at the very idea. ‘Your word is final!’

 	‘- - - HE LIES - - - HE SEEKS YOUR CROWN - - - SEND HIM TO HIS DEATH - - -’ 

 	Shadowsun snarled in irritation, but did not blink-push the autotrans away. No time to think about whatever inexplicable glitch had taken hold of her battlesuit on Agrellan. Not now.

 	Not when she was about to turn this green and peaceful world into a boiling cauldron of war.

 	The tau cadres swept along the mist-wreathed road, Shadowsun a shimmering white blur at their head. She was ready and willing to blast a breach in the fortress walls herself, if it came to it. Yet part of her would relish the sight of the Riptides in action once more. If they could blast open the perimeter wall of an Imperial hive city, they could certainly deal with the lumpen stone fortress that squatted on the plateau ahead. 

 	The tower-capped stronghold reminded Shadowsun of the tales her dome-tutors had told her as a child. Tales of the Mon’tau, the time of terror, the great darkness before the ethereals had brought the tau the light of a shared destiny. 

 	In the dim prehistory of their race, the castes had been at war, and Shadowsun’s hot-tempered predecessors had sought to tear down the castles of the builder tribes. Their primary settlement had been Fio’taun, a mountain plateau much like the one they were approaching along the misty jungle road. Atop it had been the mightiest of earthen citadels, a fortress long besieged by an alliance of fierce plains tribes and the winged tau of the peaks. Five long seasons her primitive ancestors had braved the cannons of the citadel atop the peak. Such wanton bloodshed. So many deaths, for so little reason. 

 	Strange how the cycles of time revolved.

 	Something flashed in the jungle mists, a string of illuminations like will-o’-the-wisps in the distance. The autotrans bar slid unbidden into her helmet’s viewscreen. 

 	‘- - - BEWARE LITTLE ICE MAIDEN - - -’ it spooled, ‘- - - YOUR DOOM IS CLOSE - - -’

 	Crawling suspicion covered Shadowsun’s skin, and she boosted one of the smaller audiobars that had sprung to life alongside the autotrans. There it was, the telltale whistle of solid ordnance.

 	‘All castes crouch and shield your south!’ she transmitted as widely as possible. ‘The gue’la attack!’

 	As one, the fire warriors in the jungle road dropped to one knee and raised the large oblong plates of their shoulder armour to face the hard-packed road leading back the way they had come. A heartbeat later, the peaty earth was torn upwards in an ear-blasting string of explosions that echoed from the jungle eaves. Dozens of Shadowsun’s rearguard were flung high into the air, their limbs ripped from their bodies. Here and there pulse rifles discharged random sprays of plasma as disembodied fingers clutched tight. 

 	Shadowsun’s sensor suite flared the trajectory of another incoming barrage, but this time it came down behind her rearguard. Just as she was turning to survey the damage the tree line erupted into life. Hundreds of pale gue’la brutes roared out from the jungle in crude but effective camouflage, many of their number crying out praise to the Imperium’s dead god. As the tau reeled in surprise, more and more of the gue’la emerged from the mists from either side of the road, their rifles spitting laser blasts into fire warriors and battlesuits alike. Some of them charged headlong at the fire warriors hunkered down at the side of the road, drawing knives the length of a tau’s arm and plunging them into the weak points of their armour. 

 	One in every ten of the gue’la emerging from the trees carried a cylindrical tank of the volatile liquid the Imperials loved to employ so much. Cackling with alien glee, the gue’la troopers sent whooshing clouds of flame into the ranks of the tau firing back at them. Whole crowds of noble fire warriors were caught in the deadly clouds and transformed into burning, flailing puppets. One Imperial soldier caught a pulse rifle volley in the chest, its bolts slamming right through his torso and igniting the tanks on his back with a loud whooompf. 

 	The thick smoke of burning flesh mingled with the jungle mists, turning the ambush into a hellish confusion of half-glimpsed tableaus. Shadowsun boosted up high, blasting columns of energy into the hollering gue’la troopers wherever a clear shot appeared.

 	‘Riptides, target the tree lines! Heavy burst cannon only! Rearguard, move in to engage at close quarters! For the Greater Good, engage!’

 	The XV104 battlesuits at the heart of the fire warrior phalanx stood inviolate in the chaos, each pivoting on their waist gimbals to level their arm cannons at a different section of the tree line. Nova reactors thrummed to full charge, the rotary whine of their multiple barrels in stark counterpoint. As one the Riptides opened fire, a bass voh-voh-voh-voh booming from their cannons. Thick cylinders of plasma scythed down trees and gue’la warriors alike in a storm of indiscriminate violence.

 	The blazing weapon systems panned back and forth across the tree lines, reaping a madman’s toll on the gue’la platoons charging in. Here and there close-range las-fire picked at the Riptides to no more effect than light summer hail. Well-aimed krak grenades detonated against their joints, blackening paint but leaving the superstructure shining undamaged beneath. 

 	The reactors that powered the battlesuits pulsed blue light into the mist as their rate of fire grew steadily higher. With a loud bang, something overloaded inside the Riptide closest to Shadowsun, a thin shriek coming from the battlesuit’s shuddering torso as it vented a geyser of steam.

 	It was all the chance the gue’la needed. They swarmed up the giant’s legs like arboreal simians, knives stabbing into the gaps between its armoured plates as their wiry fingers wedged into cracks. Shadowsun scythed past to cut two of them from the Riptide’s back with a precision blast of fusion fire. Oe-nu and Oe-hei hurtled after her, Oe-nu ramming bodily into a third and pitching him from the Riptide with a crack of broken bone. 

 	Curving upright once more, Shadowsun glimpsed a scar-ravaged gue’la with a glowering bionic eye climb up high on the malfunctioning Riptide. He plunged a metallic arm deep into the battlesuit’s neck joint, rooting around before yanking half of a bloody tau head from the aperture he had torn in its metal hide. Shadowsun’s stomach turned. She pivoted in mid-air in preparation to loose a blast right at the scarred gue’la, but the obscuring fog closed in around her once more, hiding him from sight. Her meteorological readouts showed that the strange mist was thicker than any natural phenomenon had any right to be. She eye-flicked through her secondary perception modes. Sonar sight was next to useless with the crump of artillery fire so close by, and strange red lightning haunted the electromagnetic spectrum.

 	More gue’la mind-science. 

 	‘Counterstrike cadres! Open a path, pressing north!’ she cried, her voice high above the confusion of battle. ‘Oe-ken-yon, maximum altitude! Locate the area where visibility is poorest and append details as soon as possible!’ 

 	In the mists below, black-armoured gue’ron’sha hammered out from the mists on columns of blue fire, slamming into the stealth battlesuits that stalked the perimeter of the battle. Everywhere the Space Marines struck they bowled over their targets, each battlesuit’s chameleon cells flickering a hundred colours at once as their owners slammed into the dirt. 

 	There was no way Shadowsun could get a clear shot, especially as the stealth battlesuits were already recalibrating to disguise them against the mud. Their Space Marine attackers had them up close, a terrifying thought even to a veteran like Shadowsun. Chaintoothed swords sawed through elbow and knee joints in spurts of dark blood, lightning-sheathed talons ripped right through armour to carve apart the pilots beneath. Death-symbols flickered charcoal grey in her command suite. Crying out, Shadowsun loosed a blast that cored gue’ron’sha and victim alike as she hunted desperately for the orchestrators of the ambush.

 	An isometric plane opened in her sensor suite as Oe-ken-yon blipped an aerial view of the battle. She read it with one eye as the other traced a sword-wielding gue’ron’sha in the mists ahead. Her right-hand blaster tore his torso in two in a cloud of vaporising blood. The thickest part of the mist clouding Oe-ken-yon’s isometric was at the road’s edge. Somewhere in that vicinity was the gue’ron’sha elder, thought Shadowsun, the summoner of mists and wielder of mind-science. If he was the architect of the trap that had closed around them, then he would be the next to die.

 	Twisting to kick an oncoming gue’la flame-trooper back into the mist, Shadowsun eye-flicked through her recorder console’s footage until she reached the battle at Blackshale Ridge. She isolated the elder with the raised staff, blink-pushing his silhouette into her ambient scan.

 	Less than a heartbeat later, her sensor suite blipped a lock.

 	Kor’sarro pounded through the mists towards the battle, Sudabeh chanting strange low syllables at his side. Though the khan was not accustomed to simply running into combat like a steedless stripling, their entire strategy hinged not upon the sudden thrust of the spear, but upon a noose drawn tight with stealth and sorcery. 

 	It felt strangely freeing. With no less a leader than the Chapter Master of the Raven Guard in command, he was better able to enjoy the primal thrill of the chase and the anticipation of the killing to come. Up ahead were Severax and Shrike, powering through the jungle shadows with controlled bursts of their shielded jump packs. Gloomy souls both, but by the Great Khan they knew how to spring an ambush.

 	The mists parted to reveal a knot of tau warriors. Those on the outside knelt to stab bolts of plasma into the Catachans rushing towards them from their flank. Making use of the distraction, Severax hit the xenos infantry like a Donorian fiend high on the scent of its own blood. His crackling talons slashed left and right to cut apart those tau he had not flattened with the sheer crushing weight of his charge. A second later Shadow Captain Shrike boosted up and over his master, plunging both lightning claws into the back of a battlesuit twice his size before ripping the thing into three pieces with a cruciform slash.

 	The khan laughed in exultation, activating Moonfang’s power field and bringing it round in a waist-high slash to carve a pair of tau in half at the waist. One of their kneeling comrades blasted a point-blank volley right at his chestplate, knocking him back a pace and filling his flaring nostrils with the scent of burning ceramite. The tau warrior scrabbled for a reload, his fingers shaking with fear. Kor’sarro cut him down with contemptuous ease.

 	Up ahead, the mist parted to reveal a trio of the massive warsuits they had encountered upon Agrellan. The closest of their number ceased stamping a Catachan into a mess of shattered bone and turned with a whirr of servomotors, its comrades following suit. Blue light poured from the barrels of their weapons as they levelled their cannons at the khan and his brothers. 

 	Kor’sarro roared in denial and sprinted forwards, planting his foot on the helmet of the kneeling tau warrior and launching diagonally upwards. He bounced hard from the giant’s cannon, forcing it wide just as the xenos pilot discharged it. The khan felt the violent backwash of the cannon’s blast catch him in mid-air, slamming him upwards into its midsection. On instinct he grabbed the ring of armour at its waist, dangling with one hand as he fought to bring Moonfang to bear with the other. With his hair on fire and half-blind from the close-range explosion, the khan hacked at the giant’s leg joints, spitting acid-laced blood onto its ochre hull.

 	As Kor’sarro sawed the point of Moonfang into the warsuit’s hip joint it stuck fast, lodged deep in the ball of the articulated socket. Growling in frustration, the khan planted one armoured foot on his blade and used it to boost upward, climbing hand over hand up the monster’s torso. Stepping backward, the warsuit brought its shield arm in tight, smashing the captain so hard his nose broke upon its chestplate. The White Scar hung on regardless, spitting teeth. Heat boiled out of the vent on the side of the thing’s torso, its backwash so intense that the white paint of his ceramite peeled away across a full half of his body. Barely a metre behind him the warsuit’s cannon arm blazed blue, no doubt powering up to slay yet more of his battle-brothers.

 	Inspiration struck, and the khan swung his lower body across the chestplate as he grabbed a krak grenade from his belt. Riding the momentum of his return, he pulled the grenade’s pin with his teeth and reached out to slam it hard into the vent on his right. The impossible energies boiling out of the vent cooked the flesh of his fingers inside his armoured gauntlet, but the grenade stuck tight. Kor’sarro let go and kicked away from the xenos machine hard, rolling with the impact once his backpack slammed into the jungle road below.

 	The looming warsuit brought its cannon’s muzzle to bear, the light of its barrel-slits blinding in its intensity. The khan dived sidelong into the corpse-strewn mud, grabbing a dead tau and raising its cadaver as a pathetically inadequate shield.

 	The tau machine’s torso thrummed, screeched, and exploded in a fountain of blue-white light.

 	‘Ha!’ shouted the khan, ‘Not so clever!’

 	The warsuit’s explosion had burnt away much of the mist around it, revealing Severax and Shrike as they ripped into the second of the towering machines. With their jetpacks to keep them airborne the Raven Guard were pitiless and predatory in their attack, a pair of black hyperfelids mauling a savannah mammut. Sparks flew as they stabbed their lightning claws in and out of the warsuit’s torso, seeking tau blood. Suddenly Severax cried in triumph and ripped open the machine’s breastplate door. The pilot crouched inside looked pitifully vulnerable as the hissing mist of decompression revealed him to the world. Shrike swung under the thing’s shield arm, punching a four-taloned claw deep into the pilot’s chest before kicking away to find more prey.

 	As the khan worked Moonfang free from the remains of his own warsuit kill, the third of their number stomped in, shrugging shouting Catachans from its massive shoulders. Its heavy burst cannon cut down a trio of Raven Guard, scattering their remains bodily into the mist. To the khan’s eyes the oncoming machine appeared to crackle, spidery red bolts playing over it from head to toe. 

 	The psychic lightning intensified as the entire warsuit glowed red, disappearing with a thunderclap boom to leave nothing behind but the stink of ozone. Kor’sarro turned to look for Sudabeh. Sure enough he was striding through the mist towards them, his eyes still glowing the colour of fresh blood.

 	‘Stormseer! You teleported it, brother!’ cried the khan in delight. ‘Where to?’

 	‘I have no idea,’ laughed Sudabeh.

 	The khan’s eyes creased as he raised his blade in a warrior’s salute.

 	Then Sudabeh burst apart in an explosion of superheated blood.

 	‘Mind-wielder neutralised,’ transmitted Shadowsun, launching backwards and away from the screaming war-leader that was firing his pistol at her from the jungle road. ‘All Crisis units, close on indicated position. I have located their leaders. Mont’ka is…’

 	Her words trailed off as the mist shrouding the forest stirred, thinned, and then dissipated completely.

 	Two columns of white gue’ron’sha vehicles were grinding along the shallow rivers on either side of the jungle road, their occupants deploying into the undergrowth and fanning out to cut off all routes of escape. A disaster in the making, but that alone, her cadres could have coped with. It was the sight on the road ahead that left her speechless. 

 	Up on the plateau, the gates of the stone fortress had opened. A thirty-strong army of Imperial walkers was striding out towards them, the black-iron devil at their head.

 	‘All cadres, back to the dropsite!’ shouted Shadowsun, her mind whirling as she desperately sought a tactic or strategy that would see them safe. Even as she spoke, she saw that yet another Imperial army was moving into position, a phalanx of green gue’la tanks that were driving up the jungle road right where she had intended to rally. Fear’s cold claw closed on her throat; fear of failure, and of causing the unnecessary death of so many tau. They were trapped, she thought, her mind drifting from the battle around her to a point of abstract thought. Trapped in the final act of a masterfully disguised Kauyon.

 	 A tide of self-loathing rose within Shadowsun as she realised she had fallen for the same strategy she had used upon her foes a hundred times and more. She forced herself to focus, blink-pushing mute the screams of her dying comrades so she could think straight.

 	‘Cancel that last command,’ she transmitted. ‘Manta wings, rapid insertion forces, reinforce and clear the indicated dropsite of enemy operatives. Concentrate fire on the outermost tanks, congest and deny mobility wherever possible. All battlesuits to stay airborne, but without ascending within view of inbound gue’la walkers.’

 	She eye-flicked details onto Oe-ken-yon’s latest isometric, turning her attention back to the metal goliaths pounding down the jungle road towards her. 

 	Suddenly a pair of blunt-nosed shells whistled past her, each larger than her torso. Three more thundered over the canopy scant metres from her position, detonating amidst a knot of Crisis battlesuits and forcing the survivors to hunker down low. Shadowsun too dropped like a stone, touching down in the blood-slick peat of the jungle eaves. A dome of ruby energy crackled around her as Oe-hei intercepted a lasgun shot aimed for the back of her head. She whipped round, her fusion blasters whining high as her targeting reticules sought a gue’la to kill. 

 	Her cross hairs glowed gold over a small human female clutching a tattered net like a blanket. Glittering crustaceans crawled at her feet as she mouthed something too quiet to hear.

 	‘- - - ARE YOU THE STAR PRINCESS - - -’ the autotrans spooled. 

 	‘I’ll have your head, you xenos hag!’ shouted Kor’sarro, barrelling off the forest road. His augmented sense of smell could pick out the dry clay tang of his foe’s fusion weapons even over the foul bouquet of battle. She would die at his hand yet.

 	A glimmer of distorted light and a patch of pale cloth caught the khan’s eye to the right. He stormed towards the undergrowth like an enraged bull, the trophy-skulls on his power pack catching at the looping vegetation of the boughs above. It made no difference. Nothing could have kept him from his quarry then. Her head would be his.

 	Sure enough, there she was – the xenos witch, blurred in outline but frozen in place in front of some foolish Terryn child that had chosen the wrong day to stray. Moonfang raised high, the khan launched himself headlong at his prey only to clang hard against an invisible wall and bounce back into the trunk of a twisted tree.

 	A shimmering outline blurred in front of his vision for a second. ‘Surprise,’ the shimmer said in accented Gothic, putting a multi-barrelled cannon to the khan’s head.

 	Shadowsun came to her senses in time to see the human war-leader dive to one side, tucking and rolling as Shas’vre Drai blasted the trunk behind him into splinters. Nimble despite his size, the gue’ron’sha warrior came up into a crouching run, outdistancing Drai’s volley as it carved through the foliage. The war-leader caught the small human female around the waist and hurled her into a thicket of bushy flora. Shadowsun took a double shot as soon as the diminutive human was clear, but the human warrior’s own force field glittered bright, absorbing the fusion blasts with an ultrasonic ring of protest.

 	Drai stomped forwards, his burst cannon blazing balls of plasma. The warrior turned his armoured shoulder to deflect the volley and shot blind with his bolt pistol once, then twice. The first of the bolts ricocheted from Drai’s armoured mantle. The second punched right through his lens array and detonated within his brain. 

 	As Shas’vre Drai slumped to the floor, the gue’ron’sha warrior launched himself right towards Shadowsun, silvered sword swinging hard. Appalled by the sudden death of her friend, she stumbled backwards with her firing impulses at maximum.

 	Both her fusion blasts went wide. 

 	Just as the massive warrior slashed a mighty backswing at Shadowsun’s neck the battle flashed monochrome, the jungle lit starkly for the space of a single searing moment. Oe-nu dropped out of the canopy and fell smoking to the earth. Driven by the weight of rage and grief, the swordblow would have taken Shadowsun’s head had Oe-nu not pumped every iota of its power into her personal forcefield.

 	Even so the human warlord’s sword landed a telling blow. Its cruel edge carved deep into Shadowsun’s breast, opening the muscle of her heart and smashing her backward into the mulch. 

 	The last thing she saw as her lifeblood pulsed onto the jungle floor were blazing angels silhouetted against the Voltorian sun. 

 
 
 Epilogue


 	‘Awaken her,’ said Aun’Va, his serene expression tainted with distaste.

 	The thick-set earth caste scientists bowed low, hurrying to impart the correct chemical balance to Shadowsun’s recuperation pod. A data strip at the side of the pod flashed copper, then gold. A string of numbers blipped across its front as it hissed open in a cloud of condensing air.

 	‘O’Shaserra,’ boomed the Supreme Ethereal, ‘The time for sleep is past.’

 	Commander Shadowsun slid one eyelid sideways, then the other, blearily struggling to focus on the figure in front of her.

 	‘Oh,’ she slurred, ‘It’s you.’

 	An awkward silence blossomed. The earth caste attendants turned quickly away.

 	‘Given your condition, I shall forgive that lapse of protocol,’ said Aun’va. ‘You may seek atonement for your slip at a future date.’

 	‘Whatever you say,’ croaked Shadowsun, her long-unused voice difficult to read even for an ethereal. ‘Please, tell me one thing before we proceed. What was the fate of the Voltoris expedition?’

 	‘Unmitigated disaster, my child,’ said Aun’Va gravely. ‘Eight hundred and twelve tau lives were lost to the gue’la’s guns before extraction was complete.’

 	‘And yet… and yet I still live?’

 	‘For now,’ said Aun’Va. ‘I understand your reinforcement cadre was able to wound your gue’ron’sha assailant to the point of neutralisation.’

 	There was another long silence. Shadowsun’s eyes were cast down, the Supreme Ethereal unable to see the depths of sorrow that pooled there.

 	‘The shame of your defeat is difficult to erase, O’Shaserra, if not impossible. Yet the empire shall prevail. The Dovar expedition proceeds as planned, and the earth caste assure me that you will be at maximum operational efficiency within a single kai’rotaa. It seems the Greater Good still has use for you.’

 	‘Then I shall serve it,’ said Shadowsun, a measure of conviction returning to her voice.

 	‘You shall, until death.’

 	Shadowsun set her jaw firm as if to receive a blow. ‘Will I be subjected to the Malk’la ritual for my failure?’

 	‘I have not yet decided. I shall seek the counsel of Aun’Shi. In the ways of war, he is more learned even than I.’

 	‘A wise choice.’

 	‘Of course it is, my child. Now, I sense a matter disturbs your soul, a matter that keeps you from realising your true potential. This conflict must first be resolved if you are to defeat your foes and retake your rightful place at the head of the Third Sphere expansion.’

 	‘What matter is it to which you refer?’

 	The Supreme Ethereal paused, cocking his grey head to one side by an almost imperceptible amount before answering.

 	‘Let us speak of the Traitor Shoh.’