Dolumar was a weapon world. Eating itself from the inside out, its overseers kept a constant stream of impure metallic nuggets spilling onto rickety, steaming conveyors; churning out the oiled, brittle killing tools of the Imperial Guard. Give it enough time and Lettica’s factories would cover its entire surface — another forge world to birth the war machines of the Imperium.
Little wonder the Departmento Munitorum had chosen to garrison the planet with such a high density of guardsmen. Four entire regiments were, even now, scrambling to respond to this unannounced alien threat.
Lieutenant Kevla sneered as he darted forwards, reassured by the war cries of the men hot on his heels. Yes, he told himself, these tau had made a grave mistake in targeting Dolumar.
Which was when twenty rounds of burstcannon fire shredded Lieutenant Kevla and his small squad in a cataclysm of detonating flesh and half-lived screams.
Briefly, Kais flew.
When it rose up to meet him, the ground seemed impossibly solid. The earth impacted against his hooves with an astonishing lurch, jarring through his legs. He stumbled, regaining his balance in a clumsy spray of dust and rock. More troopers piled out behind him, scattering towards the myriad trench openings nearby. Thick with haze and smoke, his first impressions of the planet were uniformly cluttered, crudely constructed trench walls snaking away towards the distant angles and towers of the gue’la city.
Even over the scream of the dropship’s engines, with miniature cyclones of dust fountaining all around him, Kais could hear the unmistakable rattle of burstcannon fire. The multi-barrelled weapon mounted on the nose of the dropship came to life with a hungry buzz, its bright strobefire dazzling him. By the time his disordered thoughts were settled enough to wonder at the weapon’s intended target, all that remained was a ragged cluster of shapes, crumbling and dissolving before his eyes.
It took Kais long, ugly raik’ans to realise that the red mist hanging in the air was gue’la blood. Somehow he’d expected them to have water pumping through their moist bodies, fuelling their plump, pink muscles and sloshing through their vacuous inner spaces. The vibrancy of their fluids was startling. The bodies slumped awkwardly as the burstcannon shut off, smoke gushing from its barrels, rotations slowing lazily.
And then the explosions started, and the smoke lifted, and hell opened up before him. The sky was a patchwork of pulsefire and tracer streams, arcing magnificently between unseen ordnance and unseen target. Perfect t’roi-petal detonations rippled open from horizon to horizon, sending out questing tentacles of shrapnel, churning the already frothing air in ranks of airborne metal and fire. A phalanx of Barracudas howled overhead, riding the storm of smoke and chaos; a tawny blur of pastel and black against the overcast pall. Enemy fighters gusted after them, weapons chattering.
Kais absorbed it all in stunned fascination, oblivious to the fire warriors sprinting past him. A voice in his head snapped him to attention sharply.
“All hands clear,” it barked. “Secure the area and advance into the trenches.”
Kais glanced around, surprised to find himself alone. His comrades’ armoured forms melted through the haze, pulling away from the hovering vessel towards the cover of the trenches. A second dropship, similarly poised, was settling nearby, no doubt preparing to disgorge its own cargo of troopers.
Kais focused on a pair of his comrades and stumbled after them, mind still reeling. Gunfire fought with the howl of the shuttle engines, jostling for his attention. The bright flash-flare of distant airstrikes patterned him with light and shadow, thick mushrooms of smoke pillaring upwards above the walls of the trench. On every side the mangled crudity of gue’la engineering affronted his eyes: haphazard bridges crisscrossing the channels with buckling scaffold struts, half-crumbled pillboxes overlooking each meandering twist in the sandbag corridors.
It was madness, and he gagged to find himself at its centre.
The two warriors sprinted ahead before he could catch them up, ducking beneath a wide platform that straddled the trench. Kais recognised the squat physique of the shas’la on point: a female named Keth’rit who had trained with him on T’au. The other he didn’t know.
The pair stepped around the nearest corner and flew apart, las-fire knocking ugly chunks from their armour.
Keth’rit’s head jolted backwards with a snap, a pale jet of cyan blood hanging limpid in the air before scrawling itself across the trench wall. The other trooper fragmented at the limbs and neck as his chest absorbed a volley, slumping in a fractured heap.
Kais’s momentum carried him on, too astonished by his comrades’ strangled death throes to even think. By the time something approaching reality assembled itself in his mind it was too late to stop, too late to regret the rashness of the assault, too late to recite the Sio’t mediation of the Shas’len’ra — the Cautious Warrior. His legs betrayed him, carrying him past Keth’rit’s jerking form and into the path of whatever had killed her. The scent of her blood was overpowering.
He dropped a knee to the floor, operating on instinct, panicked and automatic actions taken without a thought passing his mind. Grit and fabric exploded from the sandbag wall at his back, las-blasts at head height harmlessly shredding the air above him. He raised the rifle, isolating a shape from the swirling melange of visual madness, and squeezed the trigger. Something shrieked and crumpled to the ground, legs kicking and flailing dumbly.
Kais watched the gue’la for a long time, wishing it would realise it was dead.
Kor’vre Rann T’pell, ensconced within the comfortable confines of the second shuttle’s cockpit, nodded in satisfaction at the sensor displays. Glancing at the concave grid of viewscreens before her, she noted that her sister vessel had finished deploying its cargo of fire warriors and was beginning to lift clear. Nodding, she finalised her smooth descent with practiced ease and tapped at a control, remotely informing the deck officer that disembarkation could begin.
The controls before her could hardly be more intuitive: finely balanced level gauges, pitch and roll tracker spheres, directional touchpads on hovering drones, all within easy reach of her slender arms, themselves a physical trait common to all the spaceborn tau of the air caste. It was a design of perfect ergonomic arrangement, a symbiosis of pilot and vessel, and she never failed to spare a respectful thought for whatever earth caste fio’el had designed it.
“The doors are open, Kor’vre,” her kor’ui assistant trilled, concentrating hard on regulating the hover thrusters.
T’pell clucked her tongue in acknowledgement, daring to relax her tense muscles. Thus far the troop deployment had been a complete success.
As if overhearing her thoughts, the dropship’s Al chimed in with a sonorous announcement. “General alert,” it warned, voice lifeless and cold. “Enemy ordnance seeking lock. Gridzone 3-5-2.”
T’pell hissed and forced herself to remain calm, fixing her eyes upon the appropriate viewscreen. Sure enough, a lumbering vehicle on dust-choked tracks, venting clouds of smoke, lurched along the rim of a nearby trench and swivelled its turret inexorably in her direction. T’pell stabbed at the burstcannon auto-track control and held her breath.
The two weapons fired together.
For the briefest fraction of a raik’an, T’pell was convinced she could see the artillery shell ripping through the air towards her. Then the dropship shuddered, the viewscreens flickered to darkness, and everything turned to fire.
Kais was retracing his steps, intent upon regrouping with others from his cadre, when he spotted the tank. It squatted on the bank above the trench enormously, gunmetal flanks as chipped and stained as any of the gue’la technology he’d seen thus far. Glaring at it from below with a cynical eye, he doubted the vehicle’s efficacy as a threat to his comrades. He was quickly forced to reassess.