Shadowbreaker Read online

  A disembodied Karras watched as Reaper Three rose into the air of the hold on flaring nozzles and fired its drag-chute out the back of the freighter’s hatch.

  The chute caught the wind with a snap. The lines went taught. With a burst of gentle vertical thrust from its turbines, the Stormraven lifted into the air and was snatched out of the rear hatch. Its vector jets flared hard to stabilise it, then it dropped from view.

  Over the vox, a voice reported, ‘Reaper Three airborne. Chute detached. Moving north to search for a clearing.’

  ‘Acknowledged, Reaper Three,’ replied Captain Ventius. ‘Reaper Two, deploy on my mark.’

  Karras watched again as the second Stormraven fired its drag-chute out the back of the lander and whipped out just like the craft before it. With a burst of jet-flame, it swung north and followed.

  We’re up, thought Karras.

  His mind snapped back into his body, feeling the weight and strength of it all at once. He flexed his armoured fingers and rolled his neck.

  ‘When does this ride get to the good part?’ asked Zeed.

  ‘Reaper One deploying now,’ said the flight leader over the vox.

  There was the thunk of bolts firing and a cough like that of a mortar launcher as the last Stormraven’s drag-chute was fired out of the back of the lander and into the strong winds. It caught and flared hard. Just as it did, Ventius fired the vertical thrusters, pulled the assault craft’s nose up just a touch, lifting the Stormraven from the deck of the freighter, and fought to hold the sticks steady as the assault craft was ripped backwards out of the larger ship and into open air.

  With Chyron suspended from the rear of the Stormraven by magna-grapple, Reaper One was by far the heaviest of the birds. She cleared the rear hatch by less than a metre. Chyron’s massive feet scraped the ramp on the way out, sending up a wave of bright orange sparks.

  ‘Good luck, Reaper flight,’ voxed Burgess. ‘Emperor watch over you all. Whatever you have to do here, I pray for your success.’

  ‘Thank you, captain,’ replied Ventius. ‘May the Emperor protect you. I pray you make it out of t’au space alive.’

  In the hold of his Stormraven, Karras could feel the craft wrestling with wind currents, enforcing its will with the roar of its turbine engines. It was a battle the powerful turbofans won. He felt the craft stabilise, dip its nose, then swing north. The drag-chute was released. It whipped away on the wind. Within the quarter-hour, its advanced fibres would degrade, leaving no evidence.

  Another voice sounded on the vox. ‘I have a clearing, Reaper One.’ It was Flight Lieutenant Dargen, pilot of Reaper Three. ‘Big enough for all three Stormravens, but only just. Landing now.’

  ‘Good work, Reaper Three,’ Ventius replied. ‘Heading to your position now. Don’t wait for us. Get the camo-sheets up and the jamming modules online. If those t’au fighters are still heading in on this vector, we’ve got a few minutes at most. We do not want to get caught in the open.’

  ‘Copy that, sir,’ Dargen voxed back. ‘It will be done.’

  Reaper Three was already under its camo-sheet by the time Karras strode out the rear hatch of Reaper One and onto Tychonite soil, or rather grass, for the first time. He threw a glance at it as the men of Archangel’s unit rushed past him, hurrying to get a similar sheet up over Reaper Two. From Reaper Three’s camo-sheet, Karras saw cables snaking to a small black terminal on the ground by the treeline. One of Archangel’s people squatted in front of it, hitting a sequence of controls on the device’s runeboard.

  Photo-reactive cells kicked in, working to replicate the colours and textures of the terrain beneath the craft. Pictographic camouflage ripped over the sheet, a jumble of shapes and shades that eventually settled to perfectly mimic the surrounding vegetation. Then the soldier hit another sequence of runes and the sheet adjusted, crumpling here, smoothing there, compensating for the shape of the craft and the shadows it was casting.

  From the air, it must’ve looked almost as if the craft had simply vanished. Here again was a display of the power and resources of the Holy Inquisition. This level of camouflage technology was unknown to most other arms of the Imperium. The cost and resources involved, the rarity of such advanced technology…

  Truly, the Inquisition was an organisation apart. Even from the ground, it was difficult now to discern anything existed where Reaper Three had landed – just foliage sprouting from a small natural mound. Had Karras not seen the process take place right in front of him, only his enhanced senses or psychic gifts would have told him any better. A normal man might walk right past the covered assault craft and never know it even existed.

  The soldier at the console hit the standby rune. Another disconnected the cabling from beneath Reaper Three’s sheet and raced to Reaper Two. Once the terminal was connected again, the trooper went through the same steps.

  Reaper Two all but vanished a moment later.

  Karras turned to see his kill-team emerging from Reaper One, weapons in hand. Archangel’s people were already clambering up on the wings and dragging the last camo-sheet over the craft’s exterior. Magna-grapples still held Chyron beneath the rear of the craft. For the sake of time, he would be camouflaged under the sheet along with the Stormraven that carried him.

  ‘I hate drops like this,’ growled the massive Lamenter over the kill-team vox-channel.

  ‘Just be glad the grapples held,’ laughed Zeed as Chyron disappeared from sight, ‘or we’d have to leave you hanging in the forest canopy somewhere.’

  ‘Once those fighters pass, shall we see how far I can throw you, little raven?’

  ‘Space Marines. Into the trees,’ said Karras, pointing to the southern edge of the clearing, the nearest. ‘Now!’

  Talon Squad entered the thick shadows of the forest and turned to look out over the clearing. Karras joined them, standing between Rauth and Voss.

  ‘All photo-reactive camouflage activated,’ reported Archangel’s man. ‘Holding steady. Engaging jamming pods.’

  ‘Power down,’ Karras told his team. ‘Switch systems to full stealth. Minimal output. I don’t want our armour giving us away if they do some kind of deep auspex sweep.’

  Solarion thrust his chin at the Arcturus soldiers dragging material – weapons and ammo crates, other supplies – to the treeline. ‘If those grunts don’t get to cover, it won’t bloody matter.’

  Archangel’s people were working hard and fast, but Solarion was right. Seconds counted. They didn’t have long. Karras strained his ears. Reading the thought impulse via neural link, his helm reacted at once, boosting his hearing beyond its already superhuman ability. The sounds all around him immediately became sharper, more distinct, more individually defined. His brain filtered out the noises of the forest, the hum of his armour, his heartbeat, his breathing.

  Against the sharp calls of a hundred species of local fauna, he picked out the strange thrumming of alien engines, a powerful and agile combination of anti-gravity motors and plasma-based thrusters. From sensorium recordings he had experienced back at Damaroth, he recognised the sound signature of several Razorshark interceptors.

  He tensed.

  ‘Archangel,’ he voxed to the woman. ‘Your people have about eight seconds.’

  The sound of the alien jets was clear enough now to be heard by the unenhanced ears of the Arcturus soldiers.

  It grew louder.

  Archangel voxed a last curt command, and her people engaged the jammers, each set to interfere with t’au scanning methods but not with their communications. A sudden loss of comms would have tipped off the blue-skin pilots.

  Everyone had melted into the jungle now. The clearing was empty to the untrained eye. The task force troopers had worked fast and efficiently, but it was a close thing.

  Dark shadows suddenly screamed across the glade, filling the air with that mix of whining and humming. The craft were o
nly visible for a single second, but it was enough for Karras to see that he had been right.

  Razorsharks.

  Deadly effective in the hands of a competent air caste pilot, supremely so in the hands of their most talented. Had these well-armed interceptors arrived any earlier, the glade would have been host to a bloodbath.

  After their first pass, Archangel spoke, barely a whisper over the main task force channel. ‘Don’t move,’ she told the members of Arcturus. ‘Not a damned muscle. They’ll make three passes. The blue-skins always make three passes.’

  She wasn’t wrong. The t’au jets made exactly three passes over the clearing before the sound of their engines finally began to fade, heading eastward in the wake of The Pride of Kalvicca.

  She knew, thought Karras.

  The sensorium feeds back at Damaroth had shown him how t’au operated in the chaos of battle. He’d seen nothing like this. But Copley had known.

  This woman knows the t’au far better than we do, he admitted to himself. She has lived and breathed the Imperium’s war against them for most of her life. She has been on the front line her whole military career. No. She has served behind the lines.

  He wanted to know more, to experience her past in detail like the sensorium feeds at Damaroth had shown him those of battle-brothers long dead. A sharing of her memories might be immensely beneficial in the assault phase of this op. But she was Ordo Xenos. If there existed any feeds from her actions in the field, they would be classified. Sigma had certainly not mentioned them.

  Karras discounted the notion of an unsanctioned mind-dive as soon as it came into his head. Always dangerous, such a dive might undo her ability to lead. Worse still, dive just a little too deep and it might even kill her, not to mention the risks to his own mind were it to go wrong.

  Her leadership would do… so long as she lived.

  The Razorsharks were still just within audible range when an unexpected noise intruded, followed quickly by another – the scream of a rocket and the sudden explosive crump as it struck its target.

  Gunfire rang out in the east, muffled by the density of the jungle but still clear to the boosted hearing and helm audio-senses of the Space Marines.

  Having lost one of their number, the remaining two fighters had swung around and were strafing something or someone down below the forest canopy.

  ‘Karras.’

  It was Rauth. He didn’t need to say anything else.

  Karras centred his mind and tapped the flow of ethereal power that was always around him. Closing his eyes, he began murmuring, reciting the Litany of Sight Beyond Sight. He felt his consciousness separate from its living shell and rise up above the treetops. He turned his awareness east and willed his astral self in that direction.

  With his mind’s eye, he watched two rockets streak up out of the forest on white trails. One missed its mark and spiralled off to fall into the jungle without detonating. It had forced one of the alien craft to bank hard, however, putting it directly in the path of the other rocket. The Razorshark’s sleek hull blew out in a gush of flame and black smoke, debris spinning off it as it cartwheeled down into the trees, gouging a great gap in the canopy.

  The last of the t’au interceptors vectored high into the air at a sharp angle, cut back on the throttle, banked hard and began another strafing run. There was a bright stream of fire from its nose-mounted burst cannon. Rounds stitched the trees, hacking them to pieces, but before it completed its attack run, it peeled off and raced south. Either the air caste pilot had recognised that firing blind into the jungle was futile and was keeping him or her in missile range, or an order had come through to return and report.

  Karras willed his awareness back into his body and closed himself off from the flow of power from the warp.

  ‘Two of the Razorsharks were shot down with surface-to-air missiles. Man-portables. The last of them pulled away, heading south.’

  ‘The rebels,’ said Voss.

  Karras nodded. ‘The t’au probably don’t do flyovers here unless they have good reason. Too easy to be shot down from below, and too hard to see whoever does the shooting. The rebels have probably punished them for coming this far north before, but The Pride of Kalvicca breaking from her approved approach vector was too much for them to ignore.’

  ‘Better for us if the rebels hadn’t interfered,’ said Rauth.

  Karras silently agreed.

  ‘The xenos could clear this whole jungle,’ Zeed interjected. ‘So why don’t they?’

  Solarion snorted. ‘Don’t you ever connect to the archives like you’re told?’

  ‘That would ruin all the suprises,’ said Zeed with a grin.

  Voss laughed.

  ‘Resources,’ said Solarion. ‘This is a fringe world to the t’au. It’s not worth it to them. It’s also why their planetary defence grid was so permeable.’

  ‘More than that,’ said Karras, ‘the jungle is a buffer. The worst of the storms, the density of airborne and waterborne fungal spores, the planet’s larger predatory bioforms… Anything that helps stop these things reaching the agri zones and population centres stays where it is.’

  ‘All of which you would know, Raven Guard,’ said Solarion with a sneer, ‘if you just–’

  Karras cut him off, sharply raising a closed fist, signalling his team to be silent.

  ‘What is it, Scholar?’ said Voss.

  With the Razorsharks gone, Archangel was issuing orders to her people, getting them out of cover, directing them to remove the camo-sheets and get everything ready for the journey north into the Drowned Lands and the domain of the rebels.

  Karras sent his psychic presence questing through the trees, moving fast, the thick, vine-strangled trunks flashing by. When he found what he was looking for, he returned to his body and, without further word, strode out to stand in front of Copley.

  She turned from overseeing her people and looked up at him, squinting against the bright sun so high behind his head.

  ‘It looks like we’re in the clear for now, Scholar,’ she said. Absently, part of him noted that it was the first time she had used that name. ‘Get Talon loaded up. We’re moving out.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Karras. ‘We have visitors. Multiple contacts converging on this clearing.’

  Archangel’s hands went to the Ryza-pattern hot-shot lasgun slung over her shoulder. She shrugged out of its carry strap and then knocked the safety off.

  ‘Hostiles?’ she asked.

  Karras closed his eyes behind his visor. The auras he sensed had a familiar signature, an energy that surrounded them like clouds of steam. He knew it well. Throughout the Imperium, it was pervasive.

  Faith in the Imperial creed.

  It had to be the loyalist rebels. The Kashtu.

  ‘Armed,’ he said, ‘but not hostile. Not to us. Just over a hundred souls. They have been waiting a very long time for us to arrive, major.’

  ‘That can’t be,’ said Copley. ‘Even the ordo assets here haven’t been informed about our op for security reasons.’

  Karras shook his head. He could read the expectation and the excitement in the approaching people almost as strongly as he could sense their fanaticism. ‘Our coming was foretold. The one that leads them, this Speaker of the Sands mentioned in the mission files, saw it in the prime futures. These people have been awaiting us.’

  Figures began to emerge from the trees now. Strange figures. At first, they looked almost alien, even bestial, creatures of the jungle, born and formed to merge with it, to move through it without being seen. Their clothing was ragged, patterned to match the foliage, cut to mimic its natural shapes. No photo-reactive camouflage for these people. Theirs was simple, but effective enough. Each head was covered, each face masked to look like some beaked creature, long black bristles sprouting from the back. There was something of the kroot about them, Karras realised. T
hen he saw that the masks and cloaks were fashioned from the skulls and skins of members of that very race.

  They were armed with a wide variety of weapons, from long-barrelled lasrifles to weapons pilfered from dead xenos foes. But none of those weapons were raised.

  One moved forward from the ranks. He sat mounted on a tall bipedal creature, a half-bird, half-reptile thing with six black eyes and a horned beak. He dismounted, dropping gracefully to the ground. Stepping a few more metres forward of the others, he lifted a hand and removed his mask, revealing a scarred face with a thick black beard.

  True to their training, Archangel’s people had immediately trained their guns on the newcomers, but the major trusted Karras’ words. She barked out the command to lower weapons. Karras noted that the rebels had moved through the jungle so surely and quietly that even the superbly trained men and women of Arcturus had not sensed them until they broke cover. Had his senses not been that of the psyker, even he might not have known of their approach, taking the sounds they made as those of the forest. These were a people well adapted to their environment.

  ‘You should have had eyes on all sides,’ Karras told Copley.

  ‘I did,’ she bit back.

  At that moment, more of the masked figures emerged from the trees, carrying the inert forms of six of Archangel’s people.

  She growled and brought her weapon back up.

  Karras placed a heavy gauntlet on her shoulder.

  ‘They’re unconscious, not dead. They still breathe.’

  He removed his helm and stared straight into her eyes. ‘Listen well, major. In front of these people, you must be seen to defer to me. These people have been told that the Adeptus Astartes would come to them one day. They must believe I am in command if we are to leverage that properly. For now, I ask that you let me handle this.’

  Copley stared back hard into his blood-red eyes.

  ‘Trust me,’ he told her.

  After a moment, she nodded. ‘For now, Scholar.’

  Karras stepped past her and made his way towards the apparent leader.