Fire and Ice - Peter Fehervari Read online

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  Fire and Ice - Peter Fehervari

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  War is not a binary condition. Despite superficial appearances to the contrary it does not begin or end with a single discrete event. There may be catalysts and culminations, but their antecedents and consequences – cultural, material and even metaphysical – extend through times past and future like ripples in a river that flows two ways. Accordingly, the war between the Imperium and the Tau Empire did not begin and end with the Damocles Gulf Crusade. That conflict was the first great blossoming of our enmity and it will not be the last, but we have now entered a subtler phase of the game. Fifty years have passed since the crusade. Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

  Here on the margins of the Damocles Gulf we are embroiled in a cold war, an intricate game of deceit, manipulation and coercion waged against a master player. It is a delicate struggle, but never make the mistake of thinking it any less inimical to the Imperium than the voracious depredations of the tyranids or the bleak pogrom waged by the necrons, for the tau are playing for the hearts and minds of mankind. If they triumph our species may survive, but its destiny will not.

  – Aion Escher, Grand Master of the

  Damocles Conclave, Ordo Xenos

  SMOKE

  Watch for the smoke of discord if you seek to light the flames of revolution.

  – The Calavera

  EIGHTY-ONE DAYS BEFORE UNITY, KLIEST

  Kreeger found his patron in the scorched hilltop temple he’d taken to haunting since they’d gone to ground on Kliest four months ago. It was a broken place on a broken world and it suited Haniel Mordaine’s mood exquisitely. Of late, the disgraced interrogator had immersed himself in sketching the crumbling statue of Sanguinius Ascendant that loomed over the pulpit like a petrified angel, its wings spread wide to encircle the lost celebrants. It was primitive work, roughly hewn from the local granite, yet its brooding gravity drew Mordaine back day after day. Crumpled parchment littered the ground in testament to his increasingly frenzied attempts to capture the Angel’s essence, and he would sometimes cajole or harangue the effigy as if it were actively opposing his efforts. Kreeger took it all in his stride. Mordaine was a noble and Kreeger had watched over enough of his kind to know they were all crazy. It was probably something in their blue blood.

  ‘The conclave has our scent again,’ he called, marching up the nave without reverence or reserve. ‘It’s time to move on, duke.’

  ‘Again?’ Mordaine turned reluctantly from his work. His eyes were like bloodshot sores in the shadow of a handsome face. ‘Are you certain?’

  It was an empty question because Kreeger was never less than certain of anything, but it was part of the ritual that had carried them from one failing world to another along the borders of the Damocles Gulf, always one step ahead of the Inquisition and ten more from hope. Perhaps half those worlds, Kliest among them, had been found wanting in their loyalty to the Imperium prior to the crusade, but all were paying the price in murderously increased tithes. Most would be stripped to the bone and abandoned within a scant few centuries.

  It sends a message, Grand Master Escher had decreed. If your neighbour falls, you fall. Nothing stimulates loyalty like judiciously applied fear.

  ‘We need to be off-world tonight,’ Kreeger said, brandishing a sheaf of greasy identity papers. ‘I’ve wangled us passage on a Gulf freighter. No questions asked.’

  ‘Another cargo hold?’ Mordaine guessed sourly.

  ‘Fish tank,’ Kreeger corrected. Seeing his employer’s expression he pressed on quickly. ‘Relax, we won’t be sharing, duke. They’ll be filling up at the other end.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t promise it’ll smell of incense and amasec, but…’

  ‘It will reek of a billion dead fish.’ Mordaine grimaced. ‘I despise fish, Kreeger.’

  ‘Lots of fish on Oblazt.’ The old soldier shrugged. ‘Fish, promethium and ice are about all they’ve got.’

  ‘Oblazt?’ The grimace became a frown. ‘The world with the floating hives?’

  ‘They call them anchor hives. Build ’em on platforms spiked deep into the ice so they don’t float. The Imperium’s been sucking promethium and fish out from under the ice since forever. There’s a whole ocean buried down there.’ As always, Kreeger had done his groundwork fastidiously. To his mind it was the trick to staying alive.

  ‘I’m not finished here.’ Mordaine gestured vaguely at the stone angel. ‘Anyway, perhaps it’s time to stop running.’ But there was no sincerity in his voice.

  ‘Oblazt is the subsector’s breadbasket and promethium wellspring in one,’ Kreeger pressed. ‘The kind of world the tau would make a play for.’

  Mordaine hesitated, raking a hand through his lank, grey-streaked hair. ‘Do you have something?’

  ‘I’ve got a contact.’ Kreeger shrugged again. ‘He calls himself the Calavera.’

  THIRTY DAYS BEFORE UNITY

  ABOVE THE DOME, VYSHODD ANCHOR HIVE, OBLAZT

  The roof of the world was a convex plain of dark rockcrete, blizzard-scoured and barren save for a scattering of blocky maintenance outposts and comms towers. A tracery of thermal capillary pipes shone dully beneath the surface, hissing and steaming as they dissolved the rapacious ice before it could take root. The resulting slurry flowed down the dome into the perimeter recycling trenches, then on into the hive’s reservoirs. Much of it would be superheated and pumped back into the canopy, a greatcoat against the cold. It was a crude but efficient system that maintained the ambient temperature of the city a few notches above freezing, but decades of neglect had taken their toll. Scattered mounds of hard-packed ice glazed the dome like glistening cancers where the hydrothermal network had failed, yet the outposts were dark and no servitors or icebreaker teams laboured across the surface to purge the blight. Such was the way of things on Oblazt in the wake of the Damocles Gulf Crusade.

  Two figures surveyed this entropy-in-motion from the shelter of an antenna-spiked relay tower. Both were swathed in heavy grey thermal robes, yet they were otherwise unalike. One would have towered over a tall man, yet his shorter companion was the stranger of the two, for there was a subtle aberration in the set of his shoulders and posture that suggested an altogether in­human heritage.

  ‘Their world ends, yet they do not see it,’ the alien observed. It spoke Gothic with the chilly precision of one who has mastered the language like a weapon. ‘This blindness is the lor’serra of your kind. The shadow truth of your nature.’

  ‘They are not my kind, traveller,’ replied the giant. ‘We parted company millennia before your kind possessed the wit to dream of touching the stars.’

  ‘Nevertheless you were forged from their bloodline, Iho’nen. Such bonds endure even after they are broken, like the ghost pains of a lost limb.’

  ‘You speak of your own wound,’ the giant called Iho’nen judged.

  ‘My wound is my purpose,’ said the traveller with glacial passion.

  ‘As is mine.’ But in Iho’nen’s voice there was no passion at all.

  For a time they were silent, brooding on private shadows.

  Finally the traveller spoke: ‘I walk the vash’yatol, Iho’nen. I cannot linger on this failing world. When do we begin?’

  ‘I have activated the Catalyst,’ the giant answered. ‘He is already here.’

  TWENTY-NINE DAYS BEFORE UNITY

  THE IRON JUNGLE

  The locals called the inner skin of Vyshodd’s dome the Iron Jungle. Climbing
through the gloomy industrial labyrinth bolted to the perimeter wall of Sector Nineteen, Haniel Mordaine felt it was an eminently fitting name. His path spiralled upwards, shadowing the dome in a tangle of catwalks and girders that heaved and groaned like an iron man bloated with corrosion. It was an arduous ascent, but he’d resisted the lure of the intermittent pneumatic lifts, preferring the certainty of a long, hard climb to the possibility of a short, infinitely harder fall.

  If this architectural heresy kills me I’ll never know the truth of things, he thought grimly. I’ll never know the truth of him. Angel’s Blood, is this Calavera even a man?

  For almost two months Mordaine had been lying low in a decrepit traders’ hostel waiting for word from their contact while Kreeger salved his anxieties with cheap Oblazti lodka and narcotic glitterfish oils.

  ‘The Calavera is in deep,’ his lieutenant had explained. ‘It’s the way he operates. How he sniffs out the rot.’

  ‘You make him sound like a dog, Kreeger,’ Mordaine had taunted.

  ‘A bloodhound,’ Kreeger had corrected, ‘the best the grand master had – and the only player in the conclave who buys your story. He’s all you’ve got, duke.’

  ‘And I’m grateful for his friendship, of course–’

  ‘Friendship?’ Kreeger had shaken his head. ‘No, duke, you’re useful to him. I’ve told you before, he thinks you’re the key to the real enemy.’

  ‘But I don’t know a damn thing!’

  A shrug. ‘Maybe you don’t need to.’

  And then Mordaine had tried the Question, as he’d done countless times before: ‘What is he, Kreeger?’

  And as always, Kreeger had offered the same hollow answer: ‘Never met him. Nobody ever did except the grand master. All the rest of us ever had was a name.’

  A name I never knew, Mordaine thought bitterly. I was your protégé, Escher – your damned interrogator – but you never trusted me with the identity of your finest operative. And if you concealed that then what else did you hide from me?

  ‘How did you find him?’ Mordaine had tried.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Kreeger had answered. ‘He found us.’

  ‘Yet the entire Damocles Conclave failed?’

  ‘Maybe because he’s been covering our trail.’

  Watching over me as I scurry from one dismal backwater world to another like a frightened rat! Tugging my strings…

  Mordaine snatched at a guardrail as his boot punched through a rust-riddled plate and sent fragments clattering into the abyss below. Frozen rigid, he waited until the shuddering walkway had steadied before gingerly sliding his foot free. Once again he cursed the Calavera for sending him on this lethal errand.

  Word had finally come two days ago.

  ‘He’s found them,’ Kreeger had relayed. ‘The tau are here.’

  ‘On Oblazt?’ Mordaine had slurred through a lodka-soaked daze.

  ‘In this hive,’ Kreeger had said. ‘Whatever’s coming, it starts here. It’s time to step up and take control, interrogator.’

  ‘Interrogator…’ Mordaine had been ashamed of the sudden, gut-wrenching terror that seized him. ‘I’ll be exposed… The conclave will come for me.’

  ‘And they’ll find a man who’s done his duty.’ Kreeger had actually grinned then, but it was all teeth and no eyes. ‘This is where you make things right.’

  ‘I need to meet the Calavera.’

  ‘What you need is muscle. An army. This is what he wants you to do…’

  And once again I’m dancing to the Calavera’s tune, Mordaine thought miserably as he resumed his ascent. And the worst, most damnable thing about it is he’s right! An army is precisely what I need.

  Two levels further up, his army found him. The sentries surged from the shadows overhead, leaping between the swaying gantries with the wild yet graceful assurance of natural acrobats. Watching them descend, Mordaine understood why they’d made the dome’s canopy their eyrie. Oblazt might not be their home world, but up in this vertiginous web they were its masters.

  Save for the quirks of fate, these warriors might have been enemies of the Imperium, Mordaine thought. Savagery runs dangerously deep in the blood of the Iwujii Sharks. After all, they’ve been bred for it.

  The military harvested its recruits young on Iwujii Secundus, Kreeger had explained, fast-tracking children into soldiers through a state-sanctioned programme of internecine wars that culled the weak and brutalised the strong. It was a barbarous tradition that predated the planet’s assimilation into the Imperium, but one the Departmento Munitorum had been rather taken with, for the practice offered a steady stream of hardened troops for the Imperial Guard.

  ‘The Iwujii Sharks aren’t what you’d call well-adjusted regiments,’ Kreeger had warned, ‘but they live, breathe and bleed the Im­perial Creed. You’ve just got to handle them right.’

  Offering neither threat nor submission, Mordaine studied the men who encircled him. They were all slight of build, with burnished copper skin and ebony hair that hung about their shoulders in elaborately braided dreadlocks. Their features were striking, with high cheekbones and sharply canted green eyes. Most didn’t look a year past twenty and all exuded an energy that seemed to rage against stillness. They wore tight-fitting fatigues of viridian striped with crimson slashes like open wounds and a haphazard array of leather armour. The majority sported vambraces and greaves, one a pair of shoulder pads wrought with splayed claws, another a breastplate carved into the likeness of a snarling tree. These warriors were evidently Iwujii first and Imperial Guard second. They weren’t the kind of troops Mordaine would have chosen, but they were the only regiment stationed on Oblazt.

  Regiment? One company, Mordaine calculated soberly. Just three hundred men to seize the reins of a hive and expose a xenos conspiracy…

  ‘My lieutenant sent word to your commanding officers,’ Mordaine declared, hesitating only a moment before committing himself: ‘I am Inquisitor Aion Escher, Grand Master of the Damocles Conclave. By authority of the Holy Orders of the Inquisition I am hereby sequestering all Imperial forces stationed on this planet to assist me in the prosecution of the Emperor’s justice.’

  Keeping his movements slow and steady, Mordaine drew a heavy seal from his coat and brandished it like a defensive ward. The grand master’s seal – the seal he’d stolen after watching his mentor die.

  I didn’t know, Escher, Mordaine swore. I didn’t know that girl was an assassin…

  He quashed the guilt, drawing strength from the awe in the troopers’ eyes as they recognised the stylised ‘I’ emblazoned on the seal. For a few brief weeks his every word would carry the sanction of the Imperium’s most feared authority.

  I can do this, Escher, Mordaine promised, though he didn’t know if it was an apology or a curse.

  TOWARDS UNITY

  ABOVE THE DOME

  Veiled by the emptiness at the roof of the world, the outsider called Iho’nen watched as the Catalyst moved his design towards its apogee. The remote outpost he’d claimed and upgraded with xenos tech was awash with a fluid cacophony of information – tapped vox-communications and vid-feeds… economic and social statistics rendered as filigree neon algorithms and charts… a constantly updating parade of psych profiles… Iho’nen drank it all in like a giant data-devouring spider, assimilating, correlating and assessing a thousand facts every minute.

  Days passed, yet he stood motionless, waiting as rigorously calculated probabilities crystallised into absolutes. Occasionally minor errors would manifest, prompting him to intervene through a reagent element, but this did not trouble him. It was the errors, or more precisely their correction, that kept him from becoming irrelevant.

  His fellow outsider, the xenos, did not watch with him, for he was travelling.

  THREE DAYS BEFORE UNITY

  HÖSOK PLAZA, VYSHODD ANCHOR HIVE

  The first steps ha
d gone smoothly enough, Mordaine reflected. Both the Iwujii Sharks and the hive’s ruling oligarchy had acceded to his authority, albeit sullenly in the case of the Koroleva nobles. With his force swelled by the hive’s Ironspine Hussars, he’d launched himself into the hunt with the fervour of a man racing death, which of course he was. If he didn’t uncover something tangible before the conclave caught up with him, he would be finished. His life was almost certainly forfeit regardless, but there was still honour to fight for, and, somewhat to his surprise, he’d accepted that might be enough.

  But everything hinged on finding the tau.

  The spoor of the xenos permeated Vyshodd like a spreading disease. He’d discovered fragments of strange machinery in the manufactories – sleek, geodesic blasphemies that shrugged off dirt and sang with unholy life. Then there’d been the rogue tech-priest who peddled enhanced trinkets guaranteed to run for a lifetime without power-ups or prayer. Most unsettling of all had been the abominable xenos sculptures adorning a Koroleva pleasure mansion. The brash minimalism of those abstracts had been an affront to decent Imperial aesthetics! Individually they were petty ­heresies, but together they pointed to a systemic infiltration that had been eroding Vyshodd for years, possibly decades. And then there was Unity.

  Unity – a simple, beautiful and perfectly ruinous lie.

  Rumour had it that a common fishery worker had formulated the creed in her rest periods, scrawling her ideas on scraps of packaging then spreading them by word of mouth. The doctrine espoused such deviant notions as the right to free speech and the wholesale redistribution of wealth, wrapping them up in a muddled entreaty to embrace some kind of galactic fraternity. It was puerile nonsense, yet it had spread among the ignorant and the oppressed like wildfire, as insidious as any Chaos cult. Mordaine didn’t doubt its true origins so he’d focused on rooting out the leaders, but all he’d found were followers – hundreds of them – who insisted that Unity had no leaders. How could it, when it was ‘the Many of One’!

  And throughout this dismal farrago there had been no word from the Calavera.