Shadowbreaker Read online

  ‘A large-scale plasma generator,’ she said. ‘Two or three levels above us. Probably the main power source for the whole base.’

  She’d blown up more than a few of them in her time.

  ‘Explains the interference on the auspex,’ said Triskel. ‘Damn thing is all but useless in here.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Ryce, ‘shouldn’t we rig it to blow? We could take down every system they’ve got. Plus it would be a hell of a diversion if we find ourselves pinned down.’

  Grigolicz snorted. ‘Taking down their systems like that could cut off access to our primary objective. Besides, they’ll have a backup for critical systems. Maybe even a backup for the backup. We’d just be kicking the nest.’

  Ryce was the youngest – fastest with a blade, deadly accurate with a lasgun, able to move as quietly as a leaf on a breeze when he had to – but he lacked the long experience of the others.

  ‘We’ll ignore the generator,’ said Copley, ‘and stick to the original plan. We get inside their security systems and take things from there. This is no demo job.’ She gestured up the tunnel with the muzzle of her lasgun. ‘Up ahead should be the old stairwell Ganeen used. From there, we make our way to the sub-tunnels that run under the storage block. Just pray to Terra and the Golden Throne that the blue-skins haven’t dumped a bunch of heavy crates over our only access point.’

  Copley’s luck or the Emperor’s blessing – whichever it was, it held. The t’au hadn’t covered the final hatch. There were no crates atop it. She and her men slipped into the vast, gloomy space of a storage depot on the east side of the facility, not far from the north wing where Alel a Tarag’s human inmates were kept.

  They heard movement as soon as they emerged. Copley signalled for everyone to stay low and hang back, then slid from cover to cover until she had a better vantage point.

  T’au voices, jabbering and clicking as they always did.

  She knew the dialect well. Two low-ranking earth caste members on a rest period making small talk about their most recent arranged matings.

  This depot was being used mostly for the storing of foodstuffs, judging by glyphs on the containers. A southern section was given over to banks of equipment for the recharging of power modules. Two modified TX4 Piranha skimmers were parked just inside the rolling plasteel shutter of the west wall. They were without armament, probably just used to taxi supplies over to whichever prison block needed them.

  Aside from the two earth caste workers closest to Copley, a mix of t’au workers and human auxiliaries moved to and fro, ticking things off on checklists or hefting crates.

  None had noticed the arrival of the five Imperial soldiers.

  Copley returned to her team and pointed up towards the ceiling. ‘That’s where we need to be. That upper walkway. There’s an observation room top and centre. It’ll be manned, and there will be some kind of control and communications systems there. Let’s not give them anything to report. Once we pass the observation room, we continue on the gangway going north. There’s an exit in the north wall, upper level. You see it? From that, we can access the enclosed bridge that will get us into the mid-levels of the central block. It doesn’t look like they modified the general structure of the place all that much. That’s good for us. The old stairwells should still be in place. We don’t want to use t’au vator shafts. Careful and quiet. Any one of you gives us away, I’ll shoot you myself.’

  They grinned at that. They’d heard it before.

  She motioned for them to follow and, one by one, with adaptive camouflage systems blending them into the background, they moved from cover, quietly making their way to the plasteel frame that supported the overhead walkways.

  Copley went up first, climbing swiftly and silently, her slender muscles bunching and rippling as she pulled herself from strut to strut. Within moments, she was at the top, crouching on the gangway.

  She wasn’t even breathing hard. It was good to be out in the field again, to feel alive like this, to put her skills to use. At times like these she knew she wouldn’t have traded this life for anything.

  Crouching low, trusting the others to keep pace, she moved along the walkway towards the door of the depot observation room. When she reached it, she crouched at the edge of the doorframe and slung her lasgun over her shoulder. She drew a wickedly curved, black-bladed knife, flipped it into a reverse grip and waited.

  Ryce joined her first, settling against the opposite side of the doorframe and throwing her a nod. Within seconds, the others had stacked up beside them.

  Copley used battle-sign, her fingers forming words and sentences in place of her mouth. In this silent language, she ordered Ryce up and over the roof of the control room and down onto the walkway on the other side.

  It was risky, sending one of her team up and over like that. A single noise at the wrong moment might give them all away. If even one of them were spotted at this early stage…

  But she trusted Ryce. Since his selection for Arcturus four years ago, she had shaped him, moulded him, to the point where he, like every other operator on her team, felt almost like an extension of herself, like a particular sword in the hands of a master swordsman, like a part of her own body.

  As Ryce pulled himself up and crept across the roof of the room, he moved with the cautious stealth of a panther approaching skittish prey. His every movement was careful and coordinated. In due course, he dropped silently down to the walkway on the other side and hunched himself against the doorframe. And there he waited.

  Copley nodded to the others. She reached up a hand and tested the door. As expected, it was unlocked. Slowly, carefully, she pulled it open and moved silently inside.

  A stocky t’au in a dark blue jumpsuit sat at a bank of monitors and controls, munching on the pungent black seeds that the earth caste seemed to love so much. Copley knew the smell. The seeds were toxic to the human liver, but the earth caste t’au couldn’t get enough of them, snacking on them almost constantly.

  That crunching and munching was her ally right now. As she crept quietly and carefully towards the t’au’s back, all he heard was the sound of his own grinding tooth-plates.

  Earth caste.

  Unmistakable, and not just for the smell their favourite food gave them. Their bodies were shorter compared to those of the other castes, but far denser, far thicker in bone and muscle. Approximately five feet in height, some weighed in at a hundred kilograms, and they were never fat. They were the lifters, the labourers, the inventors, the creators, the engineers.

  Copley raised her knife and readied herself for a clean, swift killing blow.

  Exhaling between her teeth, she put considerable strength behind her strike. The point of the knife bit her victim exactly where she wanted it to – between the third and fourth vertebrae, utterly separating the key nerves located there and immediately paralysing the target.

  The body shuddered. There was a soft sucking sound as the t’au desperately fought to breathe with lungs that were no longer responding. The blue heart slowed and died, and the inert form of Copley’s victim began to slide from its stool.

  Copley caught it, grunting at its weight, and lowered it quietly to the floor. She quickly checked the control console for any glyphs that would indicate security systems or door locking mechanisms.

  There was nothing to suggest emergency security systems, but she found a small bank of glyphs relating to door locks on the closed bridge between the storage depot and the central block – that part of the Tower from which its name had originally come.

  Briefly forcing her thoughts into the T’au language, Copley manipulated the controls, punching alien glyphs, unlocking every portal between here and the main block, before turning to her operators and signalling them to move through the room.

  Stealth systems still fully engaged, they passed her, joined up with Ryce on the other side and proceeded along the walkway.<
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  Copley came up last. Glancing down, she saw that their presence had not been noted. The t’au and their adopted human workers went about their business oblivious to the killing that had just taken place.

  She hoped that would last long enough for them to gain the main control centre. Compared to that, getting in this far had been a breeze.

  She knew it wouldn’t last.

  The first kill had been made. Many more lives would end this day.

  Twenty-four

  Karras stood in the shadowed mouth of a cave high in the cliff face, his helmet optics gently whirring, zooming in and out at his mental command as he scanned the outer perimeter of the t’au facility. It wouldn’t be long till sunset. He hoped Copley and her team were as far along in their task as they were supposed to be.

  The t’au were a diurnal race. Just like humans, they had fought back the night, first with fire, then with electricity. With the need for the fire caste to operate effectively in the dark, night-vision capabilities had followed, built into their helms and battle suits.

  And then they’d gone beyond that, fitting their drones with advanced multi-spectrum optics and energy sensors.

  Even now, as Karras studied the walls of the Tower at range, that advanced t’au scanning technology would be sweeping the surrounding area, most likely in the form of surveillance and security drone patrols.

  At least they didn’t have psykers. Not among their own kind. Sigma’s data indicated no Nicassar or other t’au-aligned psychic races were present on Tychonis.

  One less thing to concern him.

  He had sent his spirit out, murmuring the mantra of Sight Beyond Sight, searching, questing for signs of life, the glow of sentient souls.

  T’au didn’t register strongly in the immaterium. Comparing their aura to that of a human was like comparing a candle to a city on fire.

  Or a burning forest.

  Memories of his visions in the eldar machine threatened to rise up and distract him. He snarled and slammed shut the doorway to that room in his mind.

  Down on the canyon floor and up on the far side, on the plateau above, he sensed the simple spirit energy of desert creatures. He sensed other things, too – humans held within the Tower’s north block and beings of other races as well, though these were very few. What bothered him was that the psychic signatures of those souls were much dimmer than they should have been. There was a strange fogginess to his astral sight. It couldn’t be a t’au thing. They knew so little of the warp and the realm of the immaterial. As the Speaker had mentioned, the prison blocks had old pentagrammic warding, but this seemed to be something different. For a start, there was a different resonance to it, and it seemed particularly powerful at its centre, a single location somewhere beneath the main tower, the place where Epsilon was rumoured to be.

  Whatever it was, it kept his astral presence at bay, unable to proceed where he willed it to go. It was like trying to push two magnets together. He kept sliding off to the side.

  He soon stopped trying and withdrew his astral self into his physical body.

  The sun was beginning to set in the west, flooding the valley floor with warm liquid light just before it dipped below the horizon.

  He turned his gaze to the walkways high atop the perimeter walls of the Tower, visor optics zoomed at maximum magnification. In the day’s last light, he saw t’au sharpshooters in their distinctive carapace armour walking back and forth in groups of three. Occasionally, they would stop on one of the towers to gaze out into the canyon before turning and walking back the way they had come.

  No appreciable signs of tension. Good. It looked like Archangel hadn’t been detected.

  How far was she from her objective? She must be pretty close. He hadn’t been able to detect her signature through clairvoyance, so she was within the perimeter beyond which his gift could not take him.

  That meant minutes only until those defences went down, unless she and her team were killed or captured in the effort.

  ‘Everything is ready, Scholar,’ said a gruff voice from behind.

  Karras didn’t need to turn. ‘No change on the walls yet, Omni. No sign. They haven’t tripped any alarms, at least.’

  ‘I’m betting on Archangel and her team.’

  Karras nodded. ‘This kind of thing was her daily bread in SOD-F. She’s better suited to this kind of thing than I suspect you or I will ever be.’

  Voss drew up beside him and smiled. ‘I’m starting to forget what a good, stand-up fight feels like.’

  Aye, thought Karras. I doubt any of us thought Deathwatch service would be like this. But the Watch and the ordo operate as they must. It’s a special kind of war they wage.

  ‘What’s the mood back there?’ he asked.

  ‘Positive,’ said Voss. ‘Eager, even. Prophet is griping as usual, but I think he’s secretly happy about the role Archangel gave him.’

  ‘It’s where he can do the most good.’

  ‘If it keeps him out of the way of the rest of us, so much the better. Chyron is getting restless, though. The Elysians are giving him a wide berth.’

  ‘It won’t be long now.’

  ‘Can you truly not see into that place?’

  Karras turned and looked down at his short, stocky brother. ‘Whatever is stopping me is strong. The closer we get to it, the less access I’ll have to my gift.’

  Voss paused. He seemed to be considering whether or not to say something out loud.

  ‘What troubles you, Omni?’ asked Karras. ‘Speak freely.’

  ‘I was recalling Chiaro, Scholar. I remember looking back at you surrounded by genestealers while the rest of us ran for the exfil point. What I saw you do that day… You obliterated them. Until then, I had thought us more or less the same. But not after that. You’re something else entirely. I’ve wondered since why you need the rest of us at all.’

  Karras found himself both saddened and troubled by those words. He did not want to be different. Any barrier between him and the rest of the squad could only be a negative. Cohesion and trust were everything.

  ‘It was a desperate moment, brother. Had I any other choice… I cannot tell you the depth of the risk I take every time I have to depend on my gift to that degree. It is my very soul with which I might ultimately have to pay the cost one day. I’m sure the brothers of your own Librarius feel the same. Often do I wish I did not have access to this power at all. When I need it most is the very time it is most likely to destroy me.’

  Voss nodded slowly. ‘When I saw you rip those ’stealers apart in mid-air, I admit I envied you a little. I thought I could do so much more if I were gifted like you. But to hear you speak of the price you pay…’

  They stood in silence a moment, each with their thoughts.

  ‘Lend me your strength, Omni,’ said Karras. ‘With you and the others at my side, perhaps I will not need to risk my soul like that again.’

  ‘You don’t even have to ask it, Scholar. It’s yours. In Dorn’s name.’

  Fine words, and he meant them, but both Space Marines knew Karras would have to risk his soul again and again regardless.

  They were Deathwatch, assigned to Sigma. There would never be an easy op.

  ‘You should get back,’ said Karras. ‘The sign will come any moment. And when it does, I want Reaper flight in the air in seconds.’

  Voss turned and moved off into the shadows of the tunnel at the back of the cave, leaving Karras alone again, looking out over the last changing colours of the dying day.

  Soon, thought Karras. Soon, it’ll be time to go in, whether Archangel is successful or not. Live up to your reputation, woman. Open the way.

  Twenty-five

  Progress was slower than Copley would have liked. The halls and walkways were frequently swept by security drones. The unit’s ordo-issued camo-suits masked body heat, scent molecule
s, even the sounds of breathing and heartbeat, but none of that would have mattered without the patience and skill she and her men had honed over long years of special operations training and deployment.

  The t’au drones were all but silent until they got within about eight metres. From there, the pulsing hum of their anti-gravitic motors could be heard. Copley and her people held their collective breaths every time one of the damned things drifted past. Twice, they made cover just in the nick of time. Copley knew she was sweating, but the camo-suit masked that, too, locking the moisture away in a micro-weave layer. Half-seconds counted when avoiding the drones. Any flicker of unexpected movement caught by their lenses would bring investigation. And it wasn’t just drones. Sometimes, a fire warrior would accompany them, routinely patrolling the corridors with the drones floating along behind. But the patrolling soldiers looked bored and listless. This was no task for a born warrior. T’au soldiers longed to be on the front line, fighting to expand their race’s empire.

  Being stuck out here for years without conflict or intrusion had made them complacent by default. Try as a commander might – any commander – it made little difference; long periods lacking stimulation or surprise dulled the edge of even the best blades. Copley was more anxious about the drones than any flesh-and-blood foes.

  Being spotted meant being fired on, and that would mean losing what razor-thin advantage they still currently held. Trip one alarm, alert a single enemy, and the whole base would go on lockdown. Copley and her team would be cornered and exterminated like rats.

  Most would have cracked and slipped up, but tension was like high-octane promethium to special forces operators. Pressure brought out Copley’s best. The ordo didn’t hand out command to just anyone. With a series of last-second evasions and silent kills, she and her team finally reached the door to the central control chamber with situational advantage still intact.