Саймон Спуриэр - Fire Warrior

Dust, mud and blood caked his legs, a matted tangle of dry filth and moist gore. Twice he’d slipped on burnt, unrecognisable bodies, breath expended in great dry heaves as gossamer strands of sticky flesh and sinew clung to his boots. He scrabbled upright through the wafting smoke clouds, muscles aching, not caring whether he’d slipped in human or tau blood. He ran and ran and ran, stumbling and panting and gagging.

At some point — he couldn’t remember when — the anaerobic gasps burning his lungs had transformed into a hissed litany.

“...oh Throne... oh Throne... oh Throne... oh Throne...”

There was something following him. He hadn’t risked a headlong tumble by staring back over his shoulder, but his neck prickled with intuitive terror that he’d learnt to rely upon long ago. A coward without an innate sense of self-preservation was just a corpse.

Every now and again shapes appeared from the smoke haze hanging in the air. Friend or enemy, it didn’t matter which; they vanished just as abruptly, memories obliterated by each new corner to the trench-way. The location of the command post was inscribed on his mind with crystal clarity; as he ran he imagined a pulsing red lifeline threading through the forks and rises of the channel network, leading him forever onwards. A tiny, secret voice in his mind began to whisper: You’re going to make it!

He wouldn’t let himself believe it.

From somewhere nearby a storm of weapons fire chattered at the air, and his legs carried him along like a dead weight, bent at the waist with his arms over his head. He ran the gauntlet blind, tripping and shrieking, certain that each step would be his last. A blue-white orb of pulsefire smouldered across his shoulder, singeing the cloth of his regs and earning an anguished sob in response. In the last rational part of his brain he realised the wound barely even hurt, cauterised even as it was inflicted. That didn’t stop him from screaming.

And then the madness was left behind, the explosions and crackling gunfire reports faded in his wake, the world seemed to slow and his feet, unbidden, staggered to a halt. Obscured by dust, alternately bombed out or merely smeared with soot, the buildings that jostled around him like protective molluscs were nonetheless the most wonderful sight he’d ever seen. Stifling a relieved sob, he stepped into the city and left the trenches behind.

Which was when the xeno that had been following him, optic sensor burning with reflected light, shot his left kneecap into a thousand tiny, spinning fragments.

Shas’el T’au Lusha leaned over a hovering bank of viewscreens at the rear of the cockpit and scowled. The dropship Tap’ran had escaped major damage from the explosive convulsions of its sister vessel, though its juntas-side engine, now fluctuating annoyingly, had been marred by shards of debris. Lusha gritted his teeth at the lurching interruptions and fixed his eyes firmly on the grid’s screens.

In the course of his career he’d learnt to recognise the potential for greatness when he encountered it. In each aspect of the tau’va was the confirmation of equality: the lowliest earth caste fio’la, it espoused, was as vital to the continuing sanctity of the Greater Good as was the mighty Aun’o Kathl’an himself, high in the fluted towers of the walled city on T’au.

Lusha understood that. Respected it. But still, once in a while there came an... anomaly. Plain for all to see, an individual unable to fit in, without the means or the patience to find their niche in the correct — gradual — fashion. In La’Kais he could see skills beyond those of a mere shas’la: his stealth and speed, his innate craving for tactical knowledge — these things marked him out as plainly as did his impetuousness. Only the youth’s inability to accept his place in the present would prevent him from rising to greatness in his future.

Typically, even in the most meteoric of careers, there were incremental gaps of at least four tau’cyrs between each rank. One became a shas’la upon graduation from the battledome, then a shas’ui, then a shas’vre. An elite few became shas’els and, in only the most exceptional cases, shas’os. For Kais to achieve a status more in keeping with his abilities, he must exercise the one thing Lusha doubted he possessed: patience.

He peered at the sixteenth viewscreen and frowned. Kais’s helmet-feed was filled with the face of a gue’la soldier, writhing and screeching on the floor like some tyranid y’he’vre. He wondered vaguely what La’Kais was feeling, slowly raising his rifle to silence the pale creature. A readout beneath the monitor blinked red and began to rise in value: Kais’s pulse, growing faster. The youth was excited, Lusha realised, frowning uncomfortably.

The pulse rifle fired and the screen went red. Lusha looked away.

“Shas’el?” the kor’vre pilot trilled from the apex of the cockpit, interrupting his thoughts. “We’re over the extraction point now. Should I begin the descent?”

Lusha glanced at the other screens, a jumbled montage of different warriors’ views. The other survivors from the cadre were almost in position.

“Yes, Kor’vre. Let’s get them back.”

The dropship broke cover amid the cloudbanks and began its stately descent, marred only by the occasional sputtering of the damaged engine. Lusha tapped a control and the grid of screens switched to an external view.

Something flickered in the ruins below, a gue’la turret gun spitting streamers of tracer-lit bullets towards the city’s periphery. He wondered vaguely what it was shooting at.

“Shas’el?” The pilot said, concerned. “There’s something—”

The ship lurched violently, lifting Lusha off his feet and depositing him painfully on the floor. A squadron of drones hovered past, maintenance tools brandished.

“Report,” he demanded grimly, clambering to his feet.

“A tank,” the kor’vre stated flatly, voice admirably calm. “No major damage. I’m taking us back up, Shas’el. It won’t miss twice.”

Lusha nodded, fighting his irritation. Expressions of annoyance were wasteful and inefficient, more characteristic of the frail gue’la than the tau. He imagined the humans inside the tank cursing loudly at their near miss and hardened his resolve. Such creatures were not worthy of the tau’va, he suspected, regardless of the forgiveness and tolerance the Auns preached.

He switched the screens back to the fire warriors’ personal helmet-feeds, sadly aware of how many had faded to darkness. Kais’s HUD was a frenzy of movement too fast for Lusha to interpret.

“La’Kais?” he commed. “What’s your status?”

Kais’s voice sounded strained with effort. “Standby, Shas’el,” he grunted, angry weapons fire crackling in time with the lightning-pulses on the screen. “It’s under control.”

“La’Kais — what do you mean?”

The tumbling image began to resolve itself, oiled machinery catching the shifting smokelight. Kais’s gloved hands entered the viewframe, clenching down on a series of haphazard, rune-encrusted controls.

And then Lusha understood.

“By the path...” the pilot gasped, staring at the sensors. “He’s—”

“He’s hijacked the turret gun, Kor’vre...” Lusha said, forcing back a smile.

Kais held a gloved hand against the gun’s blocky controls, reasoning correctly that at least one of them must be a trigger. At the mercy of the weapon’s ramshackle vibrations, he held on for dear life and tried to aim as best as he could.

This part of the city had been all but flattened in the tau attack, targeted by one of the colossal Dorsal-class bombers that had pre-empted the ground strike, he guessed. The vessel’s unthinkable aerial ordnances had devastated whatever had stood here before, leaving nothing but fragmented rockcrete and rising smoke. He’d found the turret gun at the blastzone’s edge; fixed to a sturdy iron pintle it had weathered the storm with only a layer of soot to show for its fiery baptism. Its crew, what charred fragments remained, had not been so lucky.