The tau empire, p.45
The Tau Empire, page 45
Nodding in satisfaction, Numitor turned back to his headlong descent.
From the hexodomes below tracer fire spat high, each stream stuttering phosphor-white. Black clouds of flak boomed as tau gunners intercepted the storm of Space Marine insertion craft hammering towards the xenos landscape. To their east flank, a cluster of hunter-missiles slammed into a plummeting drop pod. Numitor felt the blast wave of the explosion as it sent cherry-red metal scything in all directions.
Flailing Space Marines fell burning from the wreckage towards the planet’s surface.
They had fifteen seconds, if that.
‘Intercept that stricken squad!’ ordered Numitor, leaning into a diagonal vector and waving his squad to follow. He boosted hard, drawing his arms in close to streamline his body and angling his hands to fine-tune his path. His unit, close behind him, did likewise.
Nine seconds left.
A trio of falling Tactical Marines had righted themselves as best they could and were aiming their bolters downward, determined to take some kind of toll on the tau world before their deaths. The Tactical squad’s sergeant stretched out to catch one of his brothers by the arm as he pinwheeled past, yanking him in close. Numitor and his squad dived into their midst, each clamping an outstretched hand onto a falling battle-brother. There was no way Numitor and his squad could stop them entirely, pull them out of harm’s way, but they were still Assault Marines of the Eighth, the masters of the jump drop. This was their sky to rule.
‘Hard diagonal, due west!’ shouted Numitor.
With a burst of his jump pack engines at full yield, Numitor yanked the Tactical Marine’s descent into a sharp westward course. His squad did the same, their power armour preventing their arms from being ripped out of their sockets by the sudden weight. Slowly, agonisingly, their efforts bore fruit.
Three seconds.
‘Breakfall!’ shouted Numitor. ‘Ready!’
A bulbous white tower loomed suddenly upwards, its giant mushroom canopy studded with strange antennae. Numitor heaved hard, twisting his body so his jump pack bolstered the motion as he and his squad flung their battle-brothers sidelong towards the tau building’s upper slope.
The Tactical Marines struck it hard, but their armour took much of the impact. As they slid downward, they each drew their combat knives and drove them deep into the building’s curving roof, turning their skidding descent into a series of sharp halts.
By the time the Space Marines had mag-locked their boots onto the alloy of the building’s roof, Numitor had landed in their midst, and was already boosting back upwards. He caught a fifth falling battle-brother by the backpack and slowed his descent enough for him to hit the cream-coloured roof crumpled, but alive. The rest of Squad Numitor had touched down nearby, wispy circles of exhaust expanding around each of their landing sites. Pulse rounds shot from the balcony of a taller tau building to punch into their midst. The Tactical Marines turned their shoulders into the incoming fire, bolters aimed to launch a devastating counter-attack.
‘That was non-Codex drop procedure,’ said one of the rescued Space Marines.
The Tactical Marine sergeant snapped off a shot with his bolter, and a distant explosion mingled with xenos screams. ‘We’re alive, ingrate,’ he growled to his squadmate, ‘so make it count.’ He turned to Numitor between shots. ‘My thanks, brother. Antelion of the Fifth.’
‘I’m Numitor, Eighth Company. But if your friend reports the drop deviation, I’m Sergeant Cato Sicarius.’
Antelion laughed. ‘Now him I’ve heard of.’
Numitor nodded, but in truth his focus was already on the battle below.
‘Right, let’s get to it,’ he said, replacing his helm and slamming a fresh clip into his bolt pistol. ‘Brothers, make ready to join the fray. Cato is likely ankle-deep in blood already.’
Sergeant Cato Sicarius bellowed a wordless war cry, gunning his jump pack as he blasted shoulder-first towards a squadron of glider-like xenocraft. Energy streams spat from the tail-mounted quad turret of each tau fighter. They detonated explosively amongst his squad, one lucky shot sending Brother Endrion spiralling from the sky in a spray of blood.
Two more of the incandescent beams punched into Sicarius’ pauldron, vaporising chunks of ceramite and knocking him off kilter. He righted his charge within heartbeats, lips pulled back into a grimace of contempt, but it was too late. The aircraft had already hurtled past, the whine of their engines rising as they turned back for another strafing run.
A hot ache bled through Sicarius’ shoulder socket. ‘You’ve no idea who you are dealing with,’ he snarled under his breath. ‘You’re all going to die.’
‘Well said, sergeant,’ said Glavius, Sicarius’ de facto second in command. The sergeant clicked impatiently over the vox in response. The pain in his shoulder was dulling, but in his eyes it was still a symptom of failure.
On some level, Cato Sicarius knew and appreciated what was at stake upon Dal’yth. The war they were fighting here was no conventional crusade, but a battle for knowledge, hard won in the crucible of war. Two advanced civilisations were pitted against one another, and the sky was already filling with the fires of conflict.
‘Vespertine was a skirmish compared to this,’ said Glavius.
‘Good,’ said Sicarius. ‘A true test of our mettle, then.’ Here, each force was seeking not only to overcome the foe, but also to learn their strengths – and more importantly, weaknesses – in the process. ‘This is a race, Glavius,’ said Sicarius, ‘a race for understanding. Whoever wins it will secure victory not just here, but on a dozen worlds besides.’
With this site as the primary drop zone, there was every chance the battle for Gel’bryn City would determine the fate of the entire war. Taking the largest metropolis on the eastern seaboard would give them a commanding position, allowing them to dominate everything between the dropsite and the mountains to the north. As a sergeant, Sicarius was content to leave the wider campaign to the likes of Lord Calgar and Chief Librarian Tigurius, but here he was in his element. Drop invasions were his meat and drink.
He was made to conquer, and conquer he would.
The tau squadrons were coming back fast, veering around the tall antennae of a comms building for another pass. The two rearmost craft detached disc-like drones, machine intelligences much like those Sicarius had encountered on Vespertine. Their underslung ion guns thickened the firepower already searing the air.
Sicarius kept in the foremost pilot’s blind spot until the last moment, then launched up hard at top speed to catch its left wing and scrabble atop it. Gripping the front of the wing tight, he drew his Talassarian broadsword, thumbed the activation rune, and carved away the cockpit with a single broad sweep. Blood flew from the bisected head of the pilot inside. The fighter’s veering arc slowly turned into a dive.
‘Meagre creatures, these,’ said the sergeant, letting go of the wing and allowing himself to slide free. ‘Even weaker than the ground clades.’
‘Sergeant,’ came the vox from his squadmate Ionsian. ‘Inbound fighters.’
‘Mark them for me,’ said Sicarius, drawing his pistol as he fell. Energy weapon fire spat through the air towards him, but he twisted away from it.
‘Now, sergeant!’ said Ionsian, boosting past to draw the fire of the enemy pilot.
Sicarius’ target-runes flashed bright. He raised his plasma pistol and pulled the trigger, its grip painfully hot even through the ceramite banding of his gauntlet. His shot was true. It took a passing fighter under the nosecone, burning through its lightweight alien alloys to consume the tau inside.
The aircraft wobbled, veered, and crashed into the vanes of the distant communications array with force enough to tear the entire structure down into the battle below.
Numitor would have enjoyed that wrecking ball display, thought Sicarius, checking the chrono runes in his helm.
It was almost a shame he was taking so long to join in.
Sicarius took in the rest of the Eighth as they invaded the city, some by gunship, others by bulk lander. They were reinforced right and left by their warrior kin from the battle companies. Drop pods hurtled out of the skies, smashing through the alien hyperplastic of the tau hexodomes to release Space Marine squads into the smooth suburban landscapes beneath. Their assault had caught the tau unprepared. Small wonder; the brute force and speed of a Space Marine planetstrike was almost impossible to counter.
‘Numitor, attend me,’ voxed Sicarius, ‘I cannot see you, brother.’
‘Attend you? I think not,’ crackled the reply. ‘Besides, we took a detour. Look to the intersection nearest the reservoir.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Sicarius, signalling his squad to form up around him. ‘Got you. How fares the slaughter?’
‘It is everything I had hoped for.’
Sicarius gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Good hunting, then,’ he replied, ‘though I can see this being over far too quickly.’
‘There’s a whole planet of them, Cato. You will get your chance to shine.’
‘There’s a small empire, Jorus, not one paltry planet,’ replied Sicarius. ‘And likely not a single decent swordsman amongst them.’
‘We’ll have a challenge on our hands soon enough,’ said Numitor. ‘Take an altitude. Look at the interlinks of each district and tell me what you see.’
Sicarius signed off without a word. He triggered his jump pack, launching himself up to the landing platform jutting from a geometric hexodome and scanning the interstitial spars, brow furrowed.
Within each spar was a long, silver magnorail transmotive. The vehicles were moving with impressive speed. Sicarius could make out tau warriors inside the nearest. Hundreds stood in each transport, strapping on grenade harnesses and checking their long-barrelled guns. Couched atop each cylindrical section of the transmotive were the xenos warsuits the Eighth had encountered on Vespertine. The soulless creations combined the firepower of a Dreadnought with the agility of an Assault Marine.
Thousands of tau soldiers inbound, then. Sicarius counted the transmotive carriages and did a quick calculation. Tens of thousands, in fact.
Without exception, they were converging on the Eighth Company’s landing site.
Shas’o Dal’yth Ko’vash Kha’drel, better known as Commander Bravestorm, blink-clicked a hostiles filter on his battlesuit’s command suite. His sensors detected barely a hundred enemy warriors in this hex. They were so few in number, these proud Space Marine invaders. It was almost a shame the war would be over so soon.
Thus far, fewer than two gue’ron’sha cadre-equivalents – known to the Imperials as companies, according to his autotrans – had made planetfall. By the time the last interhex transmotives had reached each dropsite the Space Marine invasion would be contained, cauterised and eradicated. Bravestorm had ensured his countercrisis cadres were inbound as swiftly as possible. In the space of a single rotaa, the earth caste would have completed any necessary renovations, and Dal’yth society would return to normal. Did the humans truly expect to strike at the heart of the tau empire with so meagre a force, and somehow prevail?
The commander checked his cadre’s readiness symbols. All teams showed gold, whether buckled into the interior of the transmotives, or – as he and his other battlesuit teams were – ejector-locked into their roof cradles. His prototype XV8-02 shifted gently as the transmotive shot through a hex interstice to take a more direct course to the primary site of the invasion. The velocity barely changed, the transport’s progress silent apart for a low thrum of electromagnetic generators.
Bravestorm had originally assumed the Imperium’s blunt attack was a feint, a distraction to keep the fire caste occupied whilst the true strike fell elsewhere. He had apportioned his forces accordingly, distributing them evenly across the planet’s surface and coordinating with the other castes to ensure they could react quickly wherever the real blow fell. And yet no matter how many times he ran the air caste’s data through his analyticals, the answer was the same. Every orbital craft of the gue’la fleet had aligned with a major city, and fired its invasion force vertically downwards with only the most perfunctory of bombardments to pave the way. Bulk landers were following much the same trajectory in their wake. The attack had all the subtlety of a meteor shower.
‘They strike at Dal’yth’s heart,’ Bravestorm transmitted over the command-level cadre-net, ‘just as a savage kroot might jab his spear at a battlesuit’s chest, unaware that there, the armour is thickest of all.’
‘Their tactics are primitive, honoured Bravestorm,’ came the response from Commander Farsight. The famous warrior’s stoic features glowed on a sub-screen in Bravestorm’s command cocoon. ‘But some of their technologies are very advanced. Their interstellar transit speaks of far greater minds behind their warrior castes.’
‘I concur. I shall neutralise those invaders nearest my location and transmit my findings on the cadre-net for further analysis.’
‘Do so, with my thanks. I have every confidence in your resolve.’
Bravestorm eye-flicked a shorthand sign of respect. Today, he and his fellow commanders would impart a lesson, a lesson the defenders of Vespertine, caught out by the sheer alacrity of that first Imperial assault, had failed to teach. It was an immortal truth – one Bravestorm had learned shortly after birth and had been quietly reinforcing since he was old enough to speak.
It was the tau race’s destiny to rule the stars, and theirs alone.
‘Entering effective weapons range in sixty-two microdecs, commander,’ said Bravestorm. ‘All teams primed and ready.’
‘Excellent. I am making haste to join you,’ replied Farsight. ‘That which we presume to conquer, we must first understand.’
‘Master Puretide still speaks through his pupil.’
‘Of course. As he speaks through us all. For the Greater Good, Commander Bravestorm.’
‘For the Tau’va.’ Bravestorm made the sign of the impeccable kill and signed off.
The magnorail transmotive carved around another interstice at blurring speed. Atop its ejection cradle, Bravestorm fought to keep his sensor suite working smoothly. The panorama of war unfolding before them was so intense even his hyper-advanced battlesuit was struggling to keep up with the ballistics data flooding through it.
The air above the invasion site was filled with flak bursts, tracer fire, engine contrails and hurtling Imperial drop craft. The crystalline shards of broken hexodomes speared into the twilight. Each had been shattered by one of the pod-like landers the gue’ron’sha warships had hurled towards Gel’bryn City.
The headlong assault was proving an effective stratagem, brutal in its simplicity. Maximum force delivered at a concentrated point was a modus the fire caste made extensive use of themselves. The Imperials sought to break the shield wall, and once inside, capitalise. Though Bravestorm felt awkward and unclean at the thought, the directness of the Imperial mindset appealed to part of his soul. No negotiation here, no dance of veiled threat and false intelligence – just war, pitiless and direct.
Still, initial success or no, this alleged ‘Imperium of Man’ would pay for its temerity in crossing the Damocles Gulf. They had sent a vanguard of scarely a few thousand to conquer a major sept world; to Bravestorm’s mind, that did not reflect well on the military strength of this would-be rival empire. Though it had struck hard at first, the human armada would likely be broken within a matter of weeks.
The interhex transmotive passed a burning, shattered dome. Flickering explosions lit the black smoke within.
‘Here,’ transmitted Bravestorm. ‘We begin here.’
The transport slowed hard, shuddering as a series of small explosions was stitched along its length. Blue-armoured figures emerged from the smoke-shrouded sidings, bulky sidearms raised.
‘All teams deploy as briefed,’ said Bravestorm to the fire warrior teams inside.
Atop the transmotive, dozens of ejection cradles hissed open. Each battlesuit was hurled skyward in an explosion of hydraulic vapour. Below, doorports slid open to allow strike teams of tau to disembark.
The air shimmered as jet packs engaged en masse. Forming up in a shallow wedge behind their commander, the battlesuits soared towards the gue’ron’sha troopers on the sidings, shoulder-mounted missile pods laying down suppressive fire to cover their advance.
The Imperials raised their guns, the blocky weapons booming as they sent miniature rockets roaring up. In Bravestorm’s control cocoon, incoming fire alerts bipped insistently. Again these simple-minded invaders had attacked the largest, most obvious threat – and in doing so, wasted their best chance for survival.
The commander’s gun drones moved to interpose, but Bravestorm eye-flicked them back. His XV8-02 could handle this. A heartbeat later his shield generator flared as three detonations boomed across its convex disc of energy. He deactivated the shield for the fourth shot, instead turning his shoulder unit into its path. The earth caste would thank him for the ballistics data.
The projectile detonated with a loud, punching impact, but did little more than strip a patch of synth paint from the prototype suit’s iridium alloy. Rapid beeps of alarm sounded as an anti-tank missile shot from the commander’s western flank. Bravestorm braced in his cocoon as the missile thumped into his suit’s waist joint, sending him reeling with the blast of kinetic force but ultimately doing no more than superficial damage.
Bravestorm smiled as he brought his battlesuit back upright. He liked a fair fight more than most.
But this would have to do.
‘Mass-reactive projectiles incoming, standard Imperial pattern,’ said Bravestorm over the cadre-net. ‘Dangerous, but within the tolerances of our combat armour. Fire warriors advance. Team Mal’caor, target the missile trooper at appended coordinates.’
