Shadowbreaker Read online

  She continued to eye them. None of the kill-team interrupted as she continued. ‘I have fought beside Space Marines before. I know the truth behind the legends. I have read your files. I respect what you are and what you can do. I may not have your physical strength, your inhuman resilience, your centuries of war, but I have proven myself worthy to lead this operation. To lead you until its end. Read my records for yourselves if you doubt it.’

  She cast a half-glance at the hololith presiding over all of this. ‘Those parts of the records for which you have clearance, that is.’

  The briefing chamber was silent. Still, she held their gaze, never looking away.

  ‘The name,’ said Voss, breaking that silence. ‘Copley. Is that Elysian?’

  Always the peacemaker, thought Karras. Voss often found a way to cut through the tension and move things forward. His uses went far beyond raw strength and technical expertise.

  ‘She doesn’t have the look of one,’ muttered Zeed.

  Elysians were typically lighter skinned and slightly heavier in build than the woman that stood before them.

  ‘The name is Elysian, but only half of my genes are. My father was a sergeant in the Forty-first Elysian Drop Troops regiment, the Thunder Falcons. My mother was a refugee from Armageddon. I spent six years in the Guard. For the last two of those, I was head of a special interdiction force that ran assaults on t’au supply lines. After that, I was selected for the Departmento Munitorum’s Special Operations Detachment-F. We ran long-range reconnaissance patrols deep into t’au-held territory. I can read, write and understand sixteen T’au dialects and, with a modulator, can speak them too. After that–’

  ‘Enough,’ said Sigma. ‘The rest they can read in the files.’ He addressed Talon Squad. ‘Archangel has been heading an Ordo Xenos task force specialising in operations in t’au space for the last eleven years. For the duration of Shadowbreaker, Talon will be attached to that task force, designation Arcturus.’

  Solarion scowled and turned his head.

  Sigma’s hololith looked straight at him, its face utterly expressionless. ‘Let me reiterate. Talon will form part of Arcturus until mission end. Captain Copley’s orders will be followed as if they were my own.’

  Silence hung heavy in the air. The tension could have been cut with a chainsword.

  Then Archangel took a single step forward and stopped, feet apart, hands behind her back, every inch the officer in command.

  ‘Is that clear, Deathwatch?’ she barked.

  Battle-hardened men might have fallen in line immediately, such was the strength of her aura of command. But these were not mere men.

  Solarion twitched, barely able to hold himself from destroying the woman. Karras felt it, the rage, the lack of restraint from his subordinate. Pre-empting any action, and thus sparing anyone from dishonour, he stepped straight in front of Copley and looked down at her with sharp, clear, blood-red eyes.

  He towered over her, but as she looked up at him, again he saw no fear. Her irises were black as coal and just as hard, just as stony.

  ‘Armour lock,’ Karras said simply. He was looking at Copley, but he was talking to Sigma. ‘On Chiaro, you insulted us with it. You should have trusted in our oath to duty and honour. Tell me you do not intend to repeat that mistake.’

  ‘She will have the override codes for your amour,’ replied Sigma’s shimmering form. ‘You are still too… untested. I will not have you going off mission. Extreme personalities require extreme measures.’

  ‘Extreme personalities?’ said Voss.

  Sigma’s hololith looked at him and nodded. ‘The exceptional are always the most troublesome.’

  ‘It is an outrage!’ rumbled Chyron.

  Karras held Copley’s gaze. ‘I am willing to trust in your knowledge and experience of anti-t’au operations, woman. I am willing to work with you. But do not ever employ armour lock against one of my team. Be wise enough to know that we are bound by honour and oath. We are Space Marines. It is more than enough.’

  Copley held his gaze and nodded sincerely. ‘I believe in your honour. I believe in your oaths. All of you. If you swear to respect my authority for the duration of this mission, I will pledge not to use the lock.’

  Sigma watched, choosing to let it play out as the woman deemed fit. He had selected her to lead. He would let her do that now.

  Karras searched the woman’s eyes. Though her face was hard to read, her aura blazed with sincerity, with deep integrity and respect. Armour lock was not something she wanted. He could see in the flashes of colour that surrounded her soul that she disdained it. Sigma commanded, and his authority here was absolute, so she would accept the codes. But on the ground, Karras doubted she would ever use them.

  He found himself satisfied and turned his gaze to Sigma’s avatar. ‘Talon Squad will deploy as part of Arcturus and we will operate under the tactical command of Captain Copley.’

  He sensed Solarion readying to protest again and cut him off. ‘For the sake of our oaths to Chapter and Watch, we do this. Honour will be served. Do not insult it, and you will have our best.’

  Sigma’s avatar stared back a moment in thoughtful silence. ‘Talon Alpha,’ he said at last, ‘we will take you at your word. You were all selected for this highly sensitive operation precisely because of the esteem in which your talents are held. Find honour in that. Again, I tell you, the odds are slim that any of you will survive this operation. And yet, my coven assures me that our greatest hope – quite possibly our only hope of success – lies with you and Arcturus operating as one.’

  He turned his eyes on all of them in turn. ‘Go to Tychonis. Embed yourselves with the rebel forces in the north. Gather the necessary intelligence. Then strike hard, and get Epsilon out of there alive.’

  He dismissed them, telling them to prepare for transfer to the ship that would take them through the t’au defence network and down onto the planet’s surface.

  With the audience over, Archangel saluted the inquisitor’s hololith crisply, spun on a heel and marched out past the towering Space Marines with a single silent nod to Karras.

  The kill-team followed Karras out a moment later via the door through which they had entered, with no salute for the hololith on the throne.

  As they left the chamber, Sigma spoke one last time, his final words echoing behind them. ‘Do not disappoint me, Talon Squad. The price of failure this time may be greater than any of us can yet imagine.’

  Sixteen

  Arnaz was certain he’d left no threads that led back to him. After killing the cloaked t’au agent, he had removed the picts the traitor had handed over then dragged the body to a nearby refuse point. The t’au’s stealth field was still operational, despite the work he’d done with his knife. He re-engaged it. The corpse would remain invisible until either the power source died or some denizen of the city stumbled on it by chance. Diunar, too, had been eliminated, made to look like a suicide. As Arnaz’s knife undid him, the look in the man’s eyes was one of acceptance, almost gratitude. He had been coerced. A quick search of the hab had turned up evidence of a wife and child, but there were no signs they’d been present recently. The search also revealed the equipment Diunar had used to record the secret conclave of cell leaders.

  Arnaz made sure to wipe the cogitator’s data crystal memory after taking copies of all files for study back at one of his safe houses. He’d then left the hab, just before dawn, satisfied that those loose ends were tied up.

  That was a week ago – a week of heightened caution, of looking over his shoulder a little more than usual, just to be sure. But he knew his craft. He was better than good. The enemy hadn’t caught wind of him.

  To the t’au, he was just another part of the system, living as others did, a role to fulfil in society, a contribution to make, family to support.

  That last had been hard to accept, but it was a critical pa
rt of having solid cover here. Loners drew more attention, more suspicion, especially Tychonites – a people for whom marriage and the raising of children were seen as a duty equal to that of any professional calling.

  So he’d taken a wife of average looks and intelligence, someone who wouldn’t draw too much attention, and together they’d raised two unremarkable children, a boy and a girl.

  And somewhere in the process of faking emotion towards them, he found he had crossed over into actually caring about them. Not quite love, perhaps, but he found great comfort in the time he spent with them, and they were happy with the life he provided.

  They knew nothing of his true nature.

  Like most in the capital, they adored the Aun and served the Greater Good in every way they could. If the t’au caught on to him, they’d likely be tortured or used as leverage. He tried not to think about that and just made sure he never got complacent.

  In the end, though, he could only do so much. He had no idea that on the night of the rebel meeting, he had been marked.

  To Arnaz, as he left his family home to begin his working day, all looked normal. The streets were filled as always by men going to their t’au-designated occupations in t’au-designated robes and uniforms. He detected no shimmers in the air that might have given away a stealth field. Satisfied, he moved off in the rising heat of the morning. To everyone else, he was just Arnaz, a mid-level contract negotiator tasked with securing off-world resources for the ISF. In most cases, that meant making contracts with human smugglers who were willing to bring shipments into t’au territory from the Imperium. It was a position he had carefully manoeuvred himself into over long years, and it allowed him to keep one eye on the movement of weapons and another on the t’au and human military elements in the upper echelons of the city’s security force administration.

  Fostering trust was fundamental to any agent in deep cover. Arnaz was privy to highly sensitive information with increasing frequency. More and more, he found the line he walked thinning. There were things that, had he shared them with the Speaker of the Sands, would have given him away almost certainly. Despite the worth of such intel to the rebel cause, despite the rebel lives that would surely be lost, there were times he’d had to stay silent, accepting the burden of large numbers of deaths as a result. That had been hard on him, but he’d soon adapted. He’d learned to plasteel himself against such remorse.

  Eyes on the war, not the battle.

  He adjusted his belt and moved off down the street.

  The stealthed t’au drone that was tracking him kept pace, far enough away that its shimmer in the air was indiscernible, close enough to follow his movements with ease, all the while relaying its images back to its controller in the ranks of a fire caste counter-insurgency unit here in the capital. The disc-shaped device had enough autonomous intelligence to gauge exactly how and when to move so that it would never be seen. Arnaz didn’t stand a chance.

  An hour later, he stepped out of a grav-rail carriage onto a busy platform and made the rest of the journey to his workplace on foot. The drone locked onto him again.

  It lost him when he entered a twelve-storey t’au structure surrounded by watchtowers and electronic defences. This was where Arnaz worked. Today, several discussions were scheduled with mid- and high-level ISF officers. Major Rahin Rasaan would be present, commanding officer of the ISF and close adviser to Coldwave himself.

  Coldwave, of course, would not be in attendance. Reports had him back in the south at the Tower of the Forgotten and whatever work was keeping him there so much recently.

  Arnaz had met Coldwave twice in his time on Tychonis. The t’au supreme military commander was every bit as stern and expressionless as all fire caste tended to be, but there was definitely something different about him. He had a particular quality that was hard to define. Not charisma as men understood it, but there was definitely something. And he was weathered, scarred. This was a t’au that had fought in planetary wars. He had seen more death in his life than any other fire warrior on this planet. It lent him a quiet, powerful air. Arnaz, despite himself, had found the blue-skin formidable, even daunting. And yet he still hoped to spend more time around the warrior, for, apart from Aun’dzi himself, it was Coldwave who was the primary opponent of Imperial interests. It was Coldwave that would stop the rebels ever getting close enough to kill the Ethereal and begin the collapse of t’au rule.

  Instead, Arnaz found himself around an oval table with several fire and water caste members, the latter there to smooth communications between human and t’au members, for the fire caste tended to be so blunt that humans regularly took offence and things could so easily dissolve into argument and misunderstanding.

  As it was, the meeting proved significant. Arnaz learned that additional resources were to be shipped to the security forces at the Tower of the Forgotten. There was little explanation for it, but, through the careful wording used by the water caste and the specific avoidance of certain terms, Arnaz began to suspect that the woman in the picts and her Space Marine bodyguards had been moved to the facility.

  As prisoners? As something else? He had to find out. At the very least, he felt he had to communicate this update to the Speaker of the Sands. With this information, perhaps the Speaker would be able to scry more of the truth behind all this.

  The discussions were long and gruelling. Major Rasaan was as difficult to please as ever, questioning every aspect of the proposals put before him. Whatever was going on at the Tower had the ISF and fire caste more on edge than Arnaz had ever seen them.

  As the day came to an end, Arnaz resolved to return to the nearest of his safe houses and send a message north to the Drowned Lands before heading home.

  At the close of business, he made the standard formal farewells to both human and t’au and began to thread his way through the streets, careful to double back on himself a couple of times, keeping his eyes open for sign of any tails. He checked the skies several times, using narrow streets to funnel any airborne followers into view.

  Nothing.

  When he was sure he was in the clear, he headed for the safe house – a small basement in one of the city’s busiest habitation districts.

  Over the years, he had slowly and carefully managed to insulate the walls, floor and ceiling with shielding that would defy any kind of electronic surveillance. When the door clicked shut behind him and the locking bolts slid home, he breathed deep, allowing himself to relax. The air was stale. He reached out and hit the lights. Two lume-strips in the bare ceiling flickered to life. An air-cycler began to hum gently. In the middle of the room was a simple table and one chair. To the left, a basic bed. Some food and drink in a small fridgerator. That was it. To the untrained eye, the room was entirely void of anything else.

  Arnaz crossed to the north wall and stood facing it. Placing his right hand on the wall, he measured out three hand spans and pressed inwards. He felt the wall give just a millimetre. With his left hand about twenty centimetres lower, he measured out a single span and pressed there too. Again, he felt the wall give just a little. To his right, there was a click followed by the slow grind of stone on stone. A compartment, absolutely seamless until that moment, slid out from the wall. Within it was a black unit about the size of an assault weapon case.

  No icons, no runes, no logos. Not even a handle.

  Arnaz lifted the unit from the compartment and carried it to the table. He set it down and sat in the chair, then reached out his right hand and pressed it, palm flat, to the unit’s upper surface. Then he leaned forward and spoke.

  ‘Indigo seven-six-five-zero-nine. Authorisation ultima: designation Sand Spider.’

  A needle stabbed upwards into his palm. He knew it was coming, but he still winced at the sharp and sudden pain.

  For a moment, he felt rather than heard the ceramite case humming as it confirmed his genetic identity. He knew it was monitoring his heartb
eat at the same time. The Inquisition did not take chances. The blood of a dead operative and the codewords alone would not be enough to open the case. The agent had to be alive.

  After a second, the humming stopped and vacuum seals hissed. The case juddered as powerful mag-locks powered down. Arnaz withdrew his hand.

  The case opened smoothly.

  Inside was a fairly standard Imperial rune board, but there was nothing standard about that which facilitated the machine’s ability to transmit messages.

  There, in a glass dome embedded in the lower half of the case, was the living brain of a psychic human. This one had been put to fine use, extracted, wiped and conditioned to perform a single function only – to transmit encrypted astropathic messages to another distant psychic mind.

  Arnaz began typing on the rune board, glyphs appearing in green on the black screen set in the upper half of the case. Fluids began flowing through tubes into the psychic brain. The lights in the ceiling flickered. One went out. Arnaz prepared himself for that terrible sensation, that feeling of hair rising, of skin prickling, of chills in the spine.

  A vague, shadowy form materialised in the north-east corner of the room, hunched and human but too indistinct beyond that to tell more.

  ‘Speak quickly,’ said the shadow, with a voice that always made Arnaz think of words spoken underwater.

  More fluids flowed into the transmitting brain.

  Arnaz spoke of the day’s discussions and of all they indicated about events at the Tower of the Forgotten.

  The shadow drifted closer to him and he found himself growing more uneasy. His skin crawled.

  ‘This is good,’ said the shadow. ‘We have eyes and ears at the Tower. They will be contacted. Confirmation should come soon. We must be extra careful. The woman is… unreadable. Something, some field, prevents it. The same thing prevents me from seeing her bodyguards. You have done well. Is there anything else to report?’