The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Read online

  It was difficult to read the expressions of a tau, most of which lay in the precise dilation of the mouth and nostril slits, but sickness was a universal trait and Phaestus-IR01 had no doubt that Por’ui Ybolyan was very sick. Tau didn’t sweat, but the rash of boils and weeping lesions mottling this one’s face looked like splinterskin to him. He’d lost enough brothers to Phaedra’s blights to recognise the signs – xenos, human or post-human, the flesh was always easy prey to her if left unsanctified.

  ‘If you will communicate your grievance I shall endeavour to mediate an accord,’ Por’ui Ybolyan offered. ‘However…’ The alien’s words exploded into violent coughing and a perceptible shiver ran through its emaciated frame.

  How is this creature still standing? Phaestus-IR01 wondered. It isn’t even one of their warrior caste. He expected the retching tau to topple from its perch, but the coughing fit passed and when it spoke again its voice was steady: ‘However, be advised that further incursion into tau territory will not be tolerated.’

  Rho-IR02 reported, slipping into code when precision was required.

  Phaestus-IR01 switched to his comrade’s viewpoint and caught a hint of movement on the riverbank. He crossed to Rho-IR02’s position and squinted with a lidless eye, triggering the magnification mode of his omnispex. Was there a humanoid figure crouched in the pixelated skein of the jungle? His rifle trained on the spot as if of its own accord, but he urged it to patience as he relayed the sighting to the ship’s nexus. Another alarm pulsed silently through the cohort.

  ‘They’re watching us,’ Rho-IR02 said.

  There was a fanfare of encoded salutes from the vanguard as the Alpha Primus stalked from the bridge, towering over the gathered skitarii like a Space Marine amongst mortal men. Her silver carapace was devoid of ornamentation save for a flanged cog embossed into her breastplate and a vermilion tabard hanging from her waist. Both her arms terminated in broad, double-edged blades that swept over the digital eradication beamers moulded into her vambraces. In place of hands, a pair of mechadendrites sprouted from her hips, rising to sway like restive snakes over her sleek, backswept pauldrons. Every segment of her carapace had been polished to a sheen that matched the mirror finish of her visor, rendering her a gleaming, indecipherable blank.

  With a hiss of servos the Primus bent her massive reverse-jointed legs and leapt to the prow rampart. Alpha Viharok-TH01 stepped aside as she took his place at the prow and faced the tau emissary. They regarded one another in silence, each taking the other’s measure without the need for words. Finally Por’ui Ybolyan released a long, rattling breath.

  ‘You will not negotiate.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Silence.

  ‘Then let there be an end to it,’ the alien said with unmistakable weariness.

  There was roar of thrusters from above and a volley of plasma fire surged from the sky to strike the Alpha Primus. She exploded with radiance as the conversion field woven into her armour twisted the heat into a halo of coruscating light. Viharok-TH01’s auto-reactive lenses dimmed before the corona could dazzle him, but the furious code-blurts of his squad told him that others had been less fortunate. Their blindness would pass in minutes, but minutes were an eternity in battle. As if to prove this bitter truth, a plasma bolt punched through the visor of the skitarius beside him and crumpled the warrior’s head into a molten slag of iron and bone. More fire streaked towards them from the riverbanks on either side and Viharok-TH01 realised his fallen comrade had been a collateral victim – the tau snipers were targeting the Alpha Primus.

  she declared in serene code as a barrage of plasma fire burst against her conversion field.
  Across the entire convoy skitarii warriors opened fire in perfect synchronicity, ranks of vanguard from the gunwales and smaller groups of rangers from the observation decks. Together they rained solid rounds and blistering arcs of electricity into the jungle, shredding vegetation and vermin in sweeping swaths of destruction as they chased down and obliterated the snipers. A bloated fungoid tower exploded into burning spore clouds that immolated a pair of lurking xenos. One of them staggered towards the river, but criss-crossing waves of electricity threw him back into the melting fungal pyre.

  the Alpha Primus chanted, amplifying her codecast into a white noise hymnal that sent a current of fidelity through the cohort. She had been fashioned by Magos Caul personally, prised from death’s grip and reassembled piece by broken piece into a perfect warrior. Many of the skitarii revered her as an avatar of the Machine-God, a belief the magos neither encouraged nor repressed.

  The vanguard responded with a chorus of hoarse voices and serrated static, singing their praises to the Machine-God as they cleansed the xenos stain.

  Something soared out of the sky and landed on the deck behind the Alpha Primus with a clang of metal. Viharok-TH01 swung round and saw a flickered silhouette outlined against the drizzle and flashes of gunfire. It was a looming, vaguely humanoid shape drawn in angular lines that rippled and tore as it moved. The invisibility that sheathed it was imperfect, oozing over its bulk in a patchy tide that revealed plates of dark, smoothly contoured armour. Bizarrely the stealth field had failed entirely around the blocky gun attached to the intruder’s right arm, making it appear suspended in empty air like a phantom weapon. Viharok-TH01 threw himself from the ramparts as the nozzle of the ghostly gun spun up and spat a whirling torrent of plasma.

  he transmitted as he dived.

  He rolled into a kneeling crouch behind the tau assassin and opened fire with his carbine. As the battlesuit turned towards him, Squad Thorium answered their Alpha’s summons and hammered the intruder with radium rounds from the ramparts above. The sighted and the blind struck with equal precision, their aim guided by the firing vector Viharok-TH01 had relayed. The battlesuit’s stealth field seethed erratically under the barrage and the Alpha saw its carapace buckling in the brief snapshots of visibility. He gritted his teeth around his rebreather in defiance as its burst cannon locked onto him.

  My service will terminate here, he thought, but this xenos filth will not long outlast me.

  ‘The Omnissiah condemns!’ he spat aloud, drawing upon a primal well of hatred stemming from his former life.

  A silver giant jumped from the ramparts, crashing down into a feral crouch beside the battlesuit. As she rose, the Alpha Primus sliced upwards with a humming, razor-edged blade. There was a screech of tortured metal and the tau’s ‘ghost’ cannon clattered to the ground – along with the now visible arm that still wielded it. The damaged battlesuit leapt away with surprising grace as its jetpack flared into life, but the Primus lunged after its stuttering silhouette and rammed her blade into its breastplate, pinning the assassin as its feet rose from the deck. Struggling to break free, it clawed at her visor with its surviving arm, but found no purchase on the polished metal. The Primus thrust deep and the tip of her blade punched through the assassin’s back, tearing open a wellspring of crackling electricity and steaming blood. A moment later the battlesuit was torn asunder as she fired her wrist-mounted eradication beamer within its chest cavity.

  the Alpha Primus transmitted. A ripple of electricity surged along her blade, oxidising the blood that stained it.

  Viharok-TH01 chittered as he climbed to his feet.

  the Primus said.

  Desultory volleys of gunfire could still be heard from the rear of the convoy, but there was no return fire. The attack was over. Por’ui Ybolyan had disappeared.

  ‘It was kauyon,’ the Alpha Primus reported later. ‘Stand
ard tau tactical methodology: draw out and ensnare your enemy.’ She paused, considering. ‘Sever its head.’

  She dominated the data-rich nexus of the bridge like a resplendent statue, standing rigid on the command dais as she communed with her master.

  ‘You are not the head of the cohort,’ Magos Caul replied from his aerie in the Iron Diadem. While every skitarius was linked to the magos through its noospheric aura, only the Alpha Primus was blessed with fluid two-way communion. The neural data tether lacing her skull connected them intimately.

  ‘The xenos underestimate our resolve,’ Caul said. ‘They underestimate me.’

  ‘Conjecture: they did not anticipate success,’ she said. ‘Postulate: desperation.’

  The magos never doubted the Primus’s insights into the tau. The blue-skinned xenos were among the most subtle of the Imperium’s enemies, yet they were transparent to her. She had studied his archives on the aliens obsessively, absorbing every facet of data, but he knew that wasn’t the crux of her understanding. She had more reason to loathe the tau than most, even if she only remembered it at a blood-deep, visceral level.

  She is my masterwork, Caul reflected with sober pride, an exemplar of order forged from anarchy… and ignominy.

  There had been no victory for either side in the long war for Phaedra, only a sudden and inexplicable cessation of supplies and communication; simply surviving had required considerable flexibility from those caught up in the meat grinder. During the final years Caul had been obliged to cooperate with the tau, but he had done it in the Omnissiah’s name, seizing the opportunity to study their technology. The depth of their heresy had appalled him, for their machines were diabolical contrivances imbued with thought, devoid of spirit. It was an affront to the Machine-God, yet it paled beside Phaedra’s biological stain.

  Compromise was a valid stratagem to secure my research, Caul reasoned. Nevertheless he would pay his penance when the last of his former associates were expunged. It was pleasing that their annihilation would fulfil a binary imperative, for the tau held the key to his escape from this doomed world.

  Dawn. A code pulsed through the cohort and the skitarii galleys surged forward at full thrust. The Alpha Primus became her ship’s figurehead, riding at the prow with her mirror-mask tilted into the spray and her blades hammered into the deck like monstrous pitons. Her bodyguards flanked her on either side, their legs splayed wide for balance as their silver-trimmed robes gusted in the wind. Both were female Alpha-level rangers who had been by her side since she was inducted into the skitarii. She remembered nothing before that time, not even her own face, though it must surely be a horror beyond endurance, for her helmet was a hermetically sealed puzzle box, its visor a rigid facade.

  I have been reborn as the wrath of the Machine-God incarnate, she thought. That is the only truth that matters.

  Abruptly the river yawned into a gaping estuary that disgorged the vessels into the open seas of Dolorosa Azure. Here the continent fragmented into scattered archipelagos that thinned out as the galleys reached deeper waters.

  the Alpha Primus codecast as the white walls of the tau enclave spilled from the horizon at precisely the coordinates the magos had predicted. Little escaped the web of men and machines that served as her master’s intelligence network. She knew he had seeded informers among the humans serving the tau, nurturing traitors amongst traitors. Doubtless that was how he had identified their prize.

  The Skysight… Even the Primus didn’t know what their objective really was or why it was so important to her master.

  As her ship hove closer, she noted the gargantuan, semi-sentient whirlpools surrounding the island and clicked her approval. The xenos had chosen well, for their base lay at the heart of a tidal minefield. The only safe approach was a narrow channel between parallel reefs that kept the whirlpools at bay.

  That is where the tau will strike, she decided.

  Suddenly the magos was with her, assessing the path ahead through her eyes, melding his intellect with her martial instincts to compute a strategy. A moment of hesitation, then previously concealed mission parameters were exloaded to her.

  they commanded in harmony.

  A skitarii speeder tore away from its mother ship, diverting sharply from the route the rest of the convoy was taking. Three more followed in its wake, each bearing a squad of rangers. The compact boats were absurdly vulnerable in the convulsing waters, but their spirits were as resolute as their pilots.

  Rho-IR02 was hunched over the controls of the lead speeder. Piloting routines had been installed in every ranger’s cortex, but the psych-simulators had deemed him the most capable mariner in Squad Irridio. It had been a question of latent instincts.

  We will need every scrap of the Omnissiah’s wisdom for this, he gauged as he sketched a path through the maze of whirlpools ahead, but this is a good plan.

  The bulk of the cohort would pass through the sheltering reefs and strike directly at the tau enclave, forcing the aliens into open battle. Meanwhile a small unit of infiltrators would circle round to the far side of the island to secure Objective Skysight.

  the Alpha Primus had briefed them.

  If the Primus is wrong we will die, Rho-IR02 thought. He was incapable of fear, but he was one of the few skitarii who could still conceive the idea of the Primus making an error. Then the first crosscurrents tugged at his speeder and his attention narrowed to more immediate matters.

  The convoy of war galleys was half way through the reefs when the attack came.

  A sleek hover tank burst from the concealing waters in the lead vessel’s path, its thrusters roaring as it rose above the waves. The Hammerhead’s slime-streaked carapace was battered and one of its engine nacelles was cracked, but it manoeuvred smoothly to bring its jutting railgun to bear on the intruders. Water shrieked into steam as it spat a shell wreathed in spirals of indigo light. The slug punched through the prow of the leading skitarii ship like an iron blade through flesh, virtually disintegrating the vanguard manning the forward turret. Simultaneously its flank cannons raked the galley’s deck with a barrage of plasma bolts that sent the defenders ducking for cover.

  Armoured figures rose from hiding atop the reefs on either side to rain more fire down on the invaders. The lenses set into their faceplates were arranged vertically, giving them a soulless, almost robotic, look, but their nimble movements belied it.

  A warrior in lighter armour guided one group, coordinating his comrades’ fire with a spectral beam that marked targets with pinpoint accuracy. The marker light itself was harmless, but the concentrated volleys of plasma that followed it were lethal. Keeping low, the tau spotter chose his victims with the judgement of a born hunter, singling out enemies that displayed notable authority or skill. The light fell upon the Alpha of Squad Kobaal as he directed his men at the starboard ramparts. A moment later a storm of plasma fire hammered into him, reducing him to a pair of smoking titanium legs.

  The treacherous light drifted on.

  Two rangers of Squad Uridion were marked and erased from the upper deck in quick succession. Recognising the danger, their squad brothers synchronised their targeting algorithms and hounded the spotter with a union of bullets and electricity, but the alien slipped between the deadly lattice with inhuman grace.

  the magos signalled, catching sight of something through the faltering optical sensors of a dead ranger.

  Uridion’s Alpha, Exoss-UR01 ducked instinctively, but his surviving troops looked to the sky with weapons raised. A neutron beam struck Gelon-UR03 square in the chest, detonating his torso into a red mist of superheated viscera. Voxhul-UR05 was snagged by th
e shoulders and hauled into the air by a swooping insect-like monstrosity. Struggling to bring his weapon to bear, he glimpsed row upon row of multi-faceted eyes crowning a maw of thorny mandibles. He hesitated, momentarily mistaking the alien’s chittering for code, then its talons let go and he was plunging towards the sea. Before Phaedra claimed him, Voxhul-UR05 saw his killer struck by an arc of avenging electricity from the ship. He chanted a mantra of praise as its smouldering carcass plummeted after him.

  Kneeling, Alpha Exoss-UR01 switched his aim to another of the bipedal insects. There were at least twenty of them circling the convoy, like thorny scavenger birds out of nightmares. They rose and dived in alternate waves, striking in concert with the fire warriors attacking from the cliffs.

  The Tau Empire is an unclean alloy of xenos filth and techno-heresy, Exoss-UR01 thought as he tried to lock on. His chosen target was flittering about to confuse his aim, but his targeting systems hunted it tenaciously. Twin diamond indicators were overlaid across his optics, spinning towards convergence as he tracked the creature. They blinked red as they melded into one, and then he fired. The lash of his arc rifle charred the flier’s wings and it dropped like a stone.

  Directly above…

  Exoss-UR01 tried to duck away, but the unwieldy permacapacitor strapped to his back threw his balance and he stumbled, taking the full weight of the xenos across his chest. He crashed onto his back and a spike of hard chitin lanced into his abdomen, tearing through his lower spine.

  the magos broadcast.

  Exoss-UR01 heaved at the carcass pinning him, the carbonized chitin cracking open to reveal pallid flesh. As he thrust it aside a pulse round slammed into his left shoulder, almost tearing his arm from its socket. The pain inhibitor wired into his brain clamped down on his nervous system and flooded his senses with digital arias of fortitude.