The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Read online

  I will endure and abjure the xenos!

  Then the ship quaked as the Hammerhead tank struck again, this time punching through to the vessel’s innards. A chain reaction of detonations ripped through the galley and the observation deck pitched violently, rolling Exoss-UR01 to the level below amongst a heap of the dead.

  the magos commanded.

  Exoss-UR01 confirmed as he struggled to escape the mound of corpses. The damage to his spine had turned his titanium legs into dead weights and he couldn’t find any leverage–

  Someone grabbed his wrists and hauled, tearing him free in an explosion of agony that brought an involuntary gasp to his lips. His eyes misted with blood and smoke leaked from his nostrils as the pain inhibitor increased its current, doing irreversible damage to keep him conscious.

  his rescuer gibbered in broken code. The hulking vanguard was a dead man walking, his chest plate a mangled tangle of blood and iron. Only faith had kept the warrior on his feet, but this final effort finished him and he toppled over as Exoss-UR01 crawled past. The deck was ablaze and strewn with smouldering corpses.

  I am the last of Maniple Epsilon, Exoss-UR01 realised.

  The crossfire from the cliffs had moved on to target the second ship in the convoy, but Maniple Delta would prove a more formidable opponent. Exoss-UR01 felt no shame at the admission; it was simply a statistical fact that Delta’s tactical rating was 4.27 per cent superior to Epsilon’s. Nor did he resent the fact that Epsilon had been sacrificed to draw out the enemy.

  The least capable are the most expendable, he thought as he crawled towards the ragged crater in the ship’s prow. All the forward sensors had been destroyed so he would become the convoy’s eyes. Hoisting himself up, he saw the Hammerhead backing away, matching its speed to the galley’s lethargic drift. He sensed hesitation in the hover tank: its pilot knew it had killed its prey, but was uncertain how to put it down.

  ‘Skitarii machines are forged to endure,’ Exoss-UR01 croaked, unaware that he had lapsed into fleshspeak, ‘even in death.’

  Like the skitarii themselves…

  Something tugged his attention towards the prow gun emplacement. The Hammerhead’s opening attack had annihilated the gunner and dislodged the massive weapon from its mount, but the lascannon was still intact. Wheezing blood, the Alpha heaved himself over to the weapon, though with only one arm he’d be unable to adjust its firing arc more than a fraction. Reason told him it was hopeless, but faith said otherwise. As he put his eye to its cracked scope he felt the gun’s spirit brush against his own and understood.

  You are cognis… awake and thirsty for vengeance.

  The Hammerhead was almost in his sights. He nudged the weapon and it moved with a fluidity that should have been impossible, as if his touch were merely the spur to its will. Together they locked onto the tank’s cracked engine nacelle. Exoss-UR01 saw water hissing from the Hammerhead’s railgun as it prepared to fire again.

  He fired first.

  For Epsilon and the Omnissiah!

  The tank’s engine housing ruptured, tearing a jagged wedge out of its carapace and spinning it out of control. Gushing flames, it careened into the reef and its railgun tore a scar through the living coral. The weapon detonated in a nova of light that stripped away the vehicle’s canopy and incinerated its crew.

  Exoss-UR01 reported.

  There was a reverberating clang as something rammed into his ship’s stern – the second galley, shoving its dead brother further along the channel.

  Turning Maniple Epsilon’s tomb into a shield, Exoss-UR01 realised as his mind flickered out.

  The Alpha Primus pounded across the upper deck of her vessel, her blades slicing the air in tandem with her strides as her quicksilver mind computed parameters of velocity, thrust and inertial drag a thousand times a second, honing her charge with every step.

  Omnissiah guide my stride, she prayed.

  She leapt at the last possible moment, launching herself across the gulf towards the coral escarpment on the galley’s starboard side. Her twin blades lashed out to embed themselves in the lip of the cliff, and she hauled herself up and over like a silver mantis. She was moving again in seconds, racing along the narrow crest of the reef that paralleled her convoy, leaving her own vessel behind and drawing level with Maniple Beta.

  There were no enemies this far back. The tau had concentrated their ambush at the centre of the channel, where the invaders were at their least manoeuvrable, exactly as she had predicted. They were neither numerous nor well equipped so they would wield their forces like a scalpel, not a sword.

  The war for Phaedra was a sham on the part of the Tau Empire, Magos Caul had told her. The xenos committed few of their own warriors to its prosecution and those they did were deemed mediocre or troubled. There were no ethereals or talented commanders to lead them and only a handful of battlesuits, yet impoverished as those forces were, these survivors will be their inferiors in every way. That is why they were discarded after the war.

  It was a logical deduction, but the Primus was not convinced. Her master’s equations had omitted one crucial factor: desperation.

  The tau are survivors, she had demurred with frigid conviction. Hardship will harden them. She occasionally wondered what torments the xenos had visited upon her to grant her such insights. Was I their prisoner, or was I a traitor? The insidious thought filled her with rage. Was I a gue’vesa?

  Moments later she spotted the first squad of fire warriors. They were crouched low in a coral caldera, sniping at the ship in measured bursts. One wore a crimson-streaked helm that contrasted starkly with his white armour, marking him as a leader.

  Shas’ui… the Primus remembered. They call them shas’ui.

  The aliens didn’t register her presence until she was among them. She beheaded the first and second with symmetrical slashes of her power blades, then cleaved the arms from their shas’ui as he turned. He fell to his knees, flailing about with his bloody stumps as she stalked past. The remaining xenos attempted an orderly retreat, loosing snap shots as she followed, but their long rifles were unwieldy at close range and her conversion field devoured the few shots that found their mark. She lunged and impaled the nearest warrior, then sliced up through his chest and helmet, bisecting him as she tore her blade free. The next panicked and lost his footing on the slick coral. Flailing wildly, he crashed into the one behind and they both plummeted from the cliff.

  The purgation had taken seconds.

  the Alpha Primus offered, ignoring the impotent curses of the mutilated shas’ui bleeding out behind her. Then she was moving again, seeking the next group of xenos.

  Seeking retribution.

  ‘We are the last,’ Rho-IR02 said, turning his back on the empty expanse of water where the last of the skitarii speeders had disappeared. One by one, the other pilots had miscalculated and their boats had been swallowed by the whirlpools surrounding the island. ‘Squad Irridio alone endures.’

  Ptoltec-IR03 clicked.

  Alpha Phaestus-IR01 commanded.

  Rho-IR02 assessed the beach where Irridio had landed. It stretched towards the tau enclave in an unbroken swath of sand and seaweed. In the distance he saw a string of bulbous watchtowers threaded by a high, white wall. There were no sentries visible, but that didn’t preclude sensors.

  ‘There is no cover,’ he said.

  ‘The xenos will not expect an attack from this quarter,’ the Alpha replied. ‘They will trust the tides to ward this side of the island.’

  ‘This is dead land,’ Ixtchul-IR04 declared.

  Phaestus-IR01 queried.

  ‘Dead land… eats the soul,’ the squat ra
nger slurred, as if he didn’t understand the intuition himself. ‘Nothing grows here.’

  It’s an echo, Rho-IR02 realised. Most skitarii experienced such shadows of their past lives, but for the most part they made no sense and were best ignored. Ixtchul-IR04 had been forged from local Saathlaa stock and the planet still exerted a nebulous grip on him.

  the Alpha said.

  Since stealth wasn’t an option the squad advanced at a march, spreading out in a wide arc with their rifles raised. The sediment of bloated seaweed popped beneath their tread, disturbing swarms of scuttling skrabs that gnawed at their metal legs. The air was leaden, but flashes of lightning threaded the sky, teasing out rumbles of thunder.

  The xenos were careless to leave this beach unguarded, Rho-IR02 decided. Despite the whirlpools it seemed unforgivably lax… and unlike them. His memories of the long war were buried under deep strata of reprogramming, but he hadn’t forgotten how fiercely the tau could fight. No, this is not…

  There was a clang of metal on metal as he stepped down on something hard. He froze and looked down. His right foot rested upon the seaweed-smeared dome of something buried under the sand. A mine. The others had halted, waiting for the inevitable killing blast, but it didn’t come.

  ‘Remain still,’ Phaestus-IR01 commanded. His omnispex flashed to blue diagnostic mode as he scanned the ground. ‘The detonator may have failed.’

  The mine emitted a low hum and pressed up against Rho-IR02’s foot – almost as if it were trying to rise.

  ‘Alpha…’ the rigid warrior began, then stopped as he saw a clump of seaweed stirring over the squad leader’s shoulder.

  Not mines…

  Ptoltec-IR03 signalled as he opened fire.

  Rho-IR02 yelled a warning as a saucer burst from the ground in a cascade of sand and skrabs behind the Alpha. Like the Drone they’d encountered on the river it was small, roughly the size and shape of a tank gunner’s circular hatch, but the dual carbines jutting from its undercarriage marked it as a killer. The Alpha swung round as it fired and his back erupted in a rash of burning exit wounds as the machine carved twin trails of ruin through his chest.

  Rho-IR02 reported as he opened fire. His bullet drilled through the dying Alpha’s throat, ending him with merciful swiftness, and punched into the drone behind. The saucer’s electronic babbling rose to a high-pitched twitter as the invading servitor bullet subverted its power cells and twisted. Arcs of electricity raced across its shell as it span about on its own axis, whirling faster and faster until it tore itself apart.

  More drones were rising from the sand around the squad, their domes shrouded in seaweed and barnacled with coral. Their movements were sluggish as they tracked the intruders with erratic bursts of plasma, but their chatter was growing more confident by the second, as if they were taking bearings from one another to sharpen their focus. The rangers didn’t give them the chance to fully awaken. Working in data-linked communion, they designated and eliminated targets with glacial precision, always prioritising the most alert machines.

 

  A bolt of plasma seared past Ptoltec-IR03, setting his robe alight, but the ancient cyborg ignored it, holding fast to his assigned firing vector.

  How long have they been buried here? Rho-IR02 wondered as the last of the hovering machines exploded. He stamped down on the one trapped beneath him then stepped back, letting it surge up and into the squad’s crossfire. It exploded with a screech of tortured electronics.

  Ptoltec-IR03 confirmed, casting off his burning robe. The armour beneath was blackened, but the ranger’s noospheric aura was radiant with battle lust.

  Rho-IR02 turned to the tau base, expecting an alarm to sound, but there was nothing. He squinted, searching for movement, but he didn’t have the Alpha’s advanced optics. The Alpha… He glanced at the ruin that had been Phaestus-IR01, feeling nothing except concern that the squad’s efficiency had been compromised. Yet he lingered, uncertain why.

  Ptoltec-IR03 said.

  The elder cyborg knelt beside Phaestus-IR01’s corpse and unsheathed a serrated blade. With brutal efficiency he hacked their fallen leader’s ocular omispex free. The squad didn’t have the means to install the augmetic, but it would have been wasteful to discard such a precious artefact.

  Ptoltec-IR03 said, handing the bloody omispex to his new Alpha.

  Alpha Rho-IR01 answered.

  Four ships had survived the gauntlet of the reefs, though Delta’s had paid heavily to break the blockade. Riding low in the water and venting flames, it limped alongside its fellow vessels as they landed on the shores of the tau stronghold.

  The aliens had fortified this vulnerable stretch of the island well, assembling the walls of their base from solid geodesic blocks buttressed with soaring, saucer-like watchtowers. Fire warriors manned the towers, while scores of lightly armoured human auxiliaries lined the parapets. The walls converged upon a forward-slanted bastion that housed a spiral portal whose maw could accommodate a heavy battle tank.

  The fortifications were of incalculable value on a world where coral was the most durable material, but they were intended for an army of thousands and not the meagre hundreds that remained. The place dated back to the first years of the war, when the tau had staked a serious claim upon the planet, but those days were long past.

  A binaric fanfare howled from the Mechanicus ships as their landing ramps crashed down and disgorged the skitarii cohort. Platoons of armoured vanguard led the attack, advancing up the beach in rigid formations. The front ranks unleashed contaminated volleys of radium rounds, alternating their fire to maintain a steady fusillade against the defenders. Smaller squads of rangers followed behind, shielded by their comrades’ numbers and heavier armour as they sniped at the watchtowers.

  ‘By cog and code we spite the xenos,’ Alpha Viharok-TH01 chanted in lingua technis, his mind ablaze with euphoric war routines.

  Squad Thorium responded in pious code.

  ‘With iron and radium we smite the xenos.’

 

  The enemy gate coiled open like a metal heart valve and a squadron of sleek hover tanks glided from the fortress. They wove across the dunes in graceful, crisscrossing arcs, churning the sand into swirling dust devils beneath them. These Devilfish were lighter than the Hammerhead that had assailed the convoy earlier, but their burst cannons were devastating against infantry. They cut an arc of ruin through the invaders, scorching away iron and flesh with indiscriminate ease, but the vanguard were remorseless in their advance. As one warrior fell another stepped forward to take his place and soon the divine blight of their radium weapons began to take a toll on the xenos tanks. One of the Devilfish slipped out of its evasive dance to drift aimlessly over the dunes. Another’s movements grew sluggish and its fire dropped to sporadic, uncertain stutters.

  They have been anointed, Viharok-TH01 thought, recognising the signs. While the tanks were impervious to the vanguard’s standard rad carbines, every seventh warrior wielded an antique jezzail rifle that could pierce weakened armour. The structural damage they inflicted was negligible, but every shell was blessed with a killing aura that lingered. A single serendipitous bullet could excise an entire tank crew if it penetrated their cabin.

  The xenos will die in ignorance, the Alpha reflected, never knowing that the Omnissiah’s radiance has touched them.

  On the far side of the island the only sounds were the staccato splatter of rain and the low hum of Brok-IR04’s lascutter.

  Alpha Rho-IR01 reported.


  The other members of the infiltration team kept watch while Brok-IR04 worked at the tau barrier, slicing out a man-sized portal. The wall was a threadbare assemblage of interlocking hexagonal plates that had loosened in many places, leaving gaps in its surface. Peering through the cracks, the rangers had spotted insulated cables running from the palisade towards the compound beyond, but there was no current running through them. Either the generators were down or they’d been rerouted.

  The xenos were dying long before we arrived, Rho-IR01 guessed. If we hadn’t come they would have been gone within a year.

  Brok-IR04 prised out the wedge of metal he’d loosened and the squad slipped into the enemy compound.

  ‘Take a look,’ the Alpha ordered Ixtchul-IR03, indicating the nearest watchtower. He was the most agile amongst them, capable of a swiftness that belied his iron legs. He nodded and loped towards the watchtower.

  Ptoltec-IR02 said, scanning the deserted expanse of the inner walls.

  ‘This wasn’t meant for us,’ Rho-IR01 said, watching as the Saathlaa ascended the watchtower’s winding ramp. ‘This barrier was intended to keep Phaedra out.’

  But she was already inside, he sensed.

  Up in the tower Ixtchul-IR03 sliced the air in a negative gesture. The hand signal was another echo of the warrior’s past, but it communicated his message as clearly as code: he’d seen no enemies.

  Rho-IR01 sent.

  It was beginning to rain in earnest now, turning the coral sand to sludge. Behind the gathering storm clouds he spotted a hint of dancing colours. He’d noticed the aberration before, but only ever at night.

  What is that? He found he couldn’t avert his gaze from the nebulous chaos. There was something in there… something…