Fire Caste Read online

  He froze up.

  Watching Joyce with steady brown eyes, the human officer raised a placatory hand and spoke. ‘Son, you don’t want to do this.’ There was a tired wisdom in the man’s voice that reminded Joyce of Uncle Sergeant Calhoun. ‘Whatever they’ve been telling you, it’s all lies,’ the officer continued. ‘You don’t have to throw your life away for–’

  Joyce squeezed the trigger hard and lit them both up like greasy candles. The traitor stopped talking and started screaming. The screaming didn’t last long but Joyce kept on burning until the flamer had run dry. He was sweating with something that had nothing to do with heat and everything to do with hate.

  ‘You’re both insane!’ Jaime Garrido wailed through broken teeth. The young pilot was kicking about on the cockpit floor, struggling against the cords that bound him. ‘Ortega, you know the regulations! We don’t fly over enemy territory!’

  Cutler and the co-pilot ignored him. Ortega’s attention was riveted to the controls as he made his descent. Moments later the ship dropped out of the Strangle Zone and the dense smog outside the window segued into the grey-green blur of the Mire rushing by below.

  ‘If there are any sky snipers up here we’re dead,’ Ortega breathed.

  ‘There won’t be,’ Cutler said. ‘If I’ve read them right, the tau won’t waste that kind of tech where it’s doing no good.’

  ‘And how, precisely, would shooting down an Imperial drop-ship do the tau no good?’ Ortega asked with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘You say nobody’s flown over this stretch in years, right?’

  ‘Indeed, the Dolorosa archipelago is a no-fly zone, by direct order of the Sky Marshall himself.’

  ‘You ever wonder why the man would give an order like that?’ Cutler asked with a frown, sensing yet another mystery. He put it aside, filing it away with all the other unanswered questions for the moment. ‘Anyway, the tau will have shifted the snipers somewhere useful.’

  ‘With respect, you are guessing, señor.’

  ‘Call it tactical gambling, friend.’

  Cutler’s personal vox-bead buzzed and Vendrake’s voice piped into his ear.

  ‘The Silverstorm Cavalry is locked and loaded, colonel.’ The Sentinel officer sounded strained.

  ‘We’ll be going in hot, captain. If any of your riders aren’t up to the job I want them to sit it out. That blonde gal of yours…’

  ‘We’re all good to go,’ Vendrake snapped and signed off.

  Cutler frowned, knowing there was going to be trouble from that quarter sooner or later. Probably sooner.

  ‘We’ll be over the Shell any minute now,’ Ortega said, sweating profusely. ‘That whelp Garrido is right, señor. This is utter madness.’

  ‘Maybe so, but that’s just the way I like it.’

  With a shudder Ortega noticed the colonel was grinning like a white wolf.

  The Shell was an apt name for the rebel base. It was a hollow, twisted city of temples dedicated to forgotten gods who had stopped listening eons ago. Presiding over a vast swathe of barren ground, the necropolis spiralled out in a coral web of melted ziggurats and globular rotundas. It was a gestalt leviathan, every structure bound to the whole by arterial, rubble-clogged colonnades and soaring, flanged walkways. Age clung to the dead city like a veneer of dust, mocking the alien vehicle gliding gracefully through its streets.

  The sleek hover tank was a creature of the future, arrogant with youth. The smooth contours of its glossy black carapace shrugged off the dirt and the rain, defying any blemish to its dignity. Its dorsal engine nacelles were massive, but they propelled the tank along in near silence, keeping it suspended just above the street. The prow curved gently towards the ground, splaying out into broad fins on either side, each one emblazoned with the mark of Commander Wintertide: a white circle containing a geometric black snowflake. Mounted alongside each mark was the distinctive disc of a dormant drone, but the tank’s main weapon was the fearsome rotary cannon protruding from beneath its nose. Commissar Cadet Rudyk would have identified the vehicle as a Devilfish, the primary troop transport of the tau race.

  The tank halted as a deep rumble rolled over the necropolis, approaching like distant thunder. The twin drones rose from their mounts and spun about, burbling uncertainly as they assessed the disturbance. Somewhere an alarm began to chime. Moments later the warning was echoed throughout the city. And then the alarms were drowned out by a thunderous roar as an Imperial drop-ship swept in low over the rooftops, shaking the coral structures. The ship was gone in seconds, storming towards the heart of the necropolis. Chattering furiously the drones zipped back to the tank and it accelerated away in pursuit.

  Squads of Concordance soldiers were racing through the streets, some on foot, others crammed into open-topped hover transports. There were no native guerrillas amongst them. These troops were all professional soldiers equipped with moulded flak-plate and stocky pulse carbines. They were gue’vesa janissaries, humans who had forsworn their old vows and pledged allegiance to the Tau Empire. They were something more than mercenaries, something less than respected allies.

  The Devilfish overtook the transports, negotiating the twists and turns of the streets with breathtaking precision. A couple of T-shaped skimmers flipped out of a side street and buzzed past like enraged hornets. The open-topped Piranhas were rapid response scouting vehicles, each carrying a pair of tau Fire Warriors. The helmets of their hunched riders blended into the contours of their vehicles, melding tau and machine into a single blur as they surged ahead.

  The Devilfish caught up with its speedier brethren as it swung into a wide plaza and braked to a frictionless halt. A circular hatch slid open and a slender tau warrior in rubberised grey fatigues and black plate slipped from the interior. Her head was enclosed in a battered helmet, the matt black scored with the twin honours of the crimson stripe and an old chainsword scar. As her gue’vesa neophytes fanned out behind her, the veteran watched the invading drop-ship from behind a veil of sensor lenses.

  A hail of ordnance raked the intruder from all sides as it dipped towards the plaza. Angry drones flittered around it, peppering its hull with small-arms fire while janissaries scorched it with heavy weapons from distant rooftop emplacements. The pilot fought to keep his vessel steady amidst the firestorm, hovering some fifty metres above the ground. There was a collective hiss and hatches swung open along the length of the ship, spewing out guide ropes. A moment later soldiers in bronze helmets rappelled towards the ground, firing lasrifles one-handed at the janissaries who rushed to meet them. Both the Piranhas raced into the fray, but the scarred veteran held her pathfinders back, unwilling to commit.

  With a pneumatic shriek the ship’s cargo hatch burst open and a wingless metal bird leapt towards the plaza. The jump pack fitted to its casing burned brightly, fighting to cushion the bird’s fall. Even so, the invader’s claws hit the ground with a crash that cracked open the brittle coral, but its reverse-jointed legs absorbed the impact. With barely a pause the machine hopped forwards, racing to intercept the Piranhas as a second walker made the jump. The tau skimmers spat fire and the bird replied with a storm of bullets from its rotary autocannon. One of the Piranhas was shredded but the other strafed away in a blur of speed.

  Sentinels. The veteran scowled behind her faceplate, recognising the invading machines. Her anger grew as the drop-ship hovered about with surprising agility, deploying men and machines across the plaza. One of the Sentinels landed badly and lost a leg in a tremendous snap of metal. Crippled, the bird hopped about frantically, then toppled over, pulverising a couple of invaders. The gue’vesa neophytes cheered, then cheered again as a pair of solid projectiles lanced into the drop-ship from across the plaza. The missiles struck with such force that the ship was sent spinning, pitching a waiting Sentinel into an explosive nosedive and sending several invaders tumbling from their ropes.

  Recognising the devas
tating power of a rail gun, the veteran squinted, triggering her optics to zoom in on the armoured giant lumbering into the fray. Like all tau battlesuits it was an elegant construct of interlocking plates and modular, geodesic blocks mounted on massive piston-like legs. Its boxy, lens-encrusted helmet looked small in proportion to its body, but the veteran knew the ‘head’ was just a sculpted housing for the suit’s sensor array. The tau pilot was safely encased within the heavily armoured chest cavity, linked to the machine by a neural interface that afforded an intimacy the crude gue’la technology could never match.

  Amongst the warrior caste of the Tau Empire it was considered a great honour to command a battlesuit. The veteran had earned the right long ago, but she had chosen to remain a pathfinder. She knew that many of her Fire Warrior comrades thought her disfigurement had made her insane, but they were wrong. The injury had defined her place in the Tau’va and made her whole. Had she not found her true name through her scars?

  Jhi’kaara – the broken mirror.

  The others found her choice unsettling, just as they found her fascination with knives repellent. Perhaps that was why she had been left to rot in this remote enclave.

  ‘What are your orders shas’ui?’ one of her neophytes asked, calling her by her caste and rank. It was the proper form of address from a gue’vesa janissary.

  Intent upon the battle, she did not answer. The battlesuit was tracking the drop-ship with the twin-linked rail guns mounted on its broad shoulders. The angular cannons jutted out like blunt tusks, projecting so far it seemed a miracle they didn’t imbalance the machine. Of course Jhi’kaara knew the real miracles were the anti-gravity stabilisers supporting the cannons, and like every miracle of her people they were not really miracles at all, but the fruits of vigorous technology. Unlike the stunted, superstitious gue’la, the tau exulted in innovation. Insane or not, she was certain that the future belonged to her race.

  But not this city. Not today.

  Even as the Broadside battlesuit fired again she knew it was too late and this battle was lost. Most of their force was deployed in the jungle, leaving only a token garrison within the city – no more than twenty Fire Warriors and two hundred gue’vesa janissaries. The Broadside was their only battlesuit, her Devilfish their only tank. It would have been enough if the silk-tongued Water Caste had been true to their word, but despite their assurances the invaders had attacked from the sky.

  The second Piranha burst into flames and Jhi’kaara felt the rage building inside her, but beneath the rage there was a fierce joy. Today everything has changed, she realised. The Imperials had violated the Invisible Accord so painstakingly arranged by the Water Caste. Once word of this treachery spread amongst the Fire Caste all the talk of ‘shadow treaties’ and ‘long games’ would end and the warriors would be free to fight this war unfettered. Once again Jhi’kaara saw her path on the Tau’va. She would be the one to carry the good news to her comrades.

  With a flick of the hand she ordered her neophytes back on board the Devilfish. As she followed, she glanced over shoulder and saw the lone battlesuit torn apart by a trio of Sentinels.

  ‘Your sacrifice will further the Greater Good,’ she promised. ‘I swear it.’

  Imperial Seabase Antigone, the Sargaatha Sea

  High Commissar Lomax has finally summoned me, but I still have no answers for her. I cannot explain, excuse or justify my actions with anything but results. Only Wintertide’s death will exonerate my desertion.

  And there you have it. I’ve finally accepted the word that is anathema to our kind. Desertion. Old Bierce glares at me as I make the confession at last, but you must understand that it wasn’t fear or faithlessness that drove me into the wilderness after the massacre at Indigo Gorge. I swear to you that it was duty.

  Unfortunately Bierce will never accept that. His suffering is on my hands and words will never sway him. He has been my judge for too long, watching and hating and waiting for my fall with the bitterness of the betrayed…

  What? No, of course I didn’t kill him! I loved the old man as a father, albeit a harsh and humourless father who never had a kind word to say. He raised me to terrorise and take the lives of lesser men, but I understood his calling – our calling – and I was always loyal. Yes, even when I betrayed him.

  It was complicated. You see I’d just completed my apprenticeship and earned the scarlet. I was impatient to escape the old man’s shadow and make my own name, but he insisted that I accompany him on one final campaign. It was an inglorious affair – yet another petty uprising, yet another wretched world too angry to know better. Fool that I was, I thought I’d seen it all before.

  Well, we crushed the rebels soon enough, but the pacification dragged on forever and I grew restless, eager for enemies worthy of the name. My arrogance blinded me to the assassin. Oh, I saw him all right – a ragged little bag of bones shambling towards Bierce – but all I saw was a filthy street urchin hunting for scraps, not a child soldier chasing martyrdom. I certainly didn’t see the needle gun concealed under his rags. None of us ever figured out how such vermin came by so rare and precious a weapon. Maybe one of the rebel leaders kitted him out in a last ditch bid for revenge or maybe he found it in the ruins of the aristo palace. Either way he was true to the whims of hate. He died in a hail of fire a heartbeat after he struck, but that was a heartbeat too late.

  My second betrayal came a week later. Bierce wouldn’t die you see. The neurotoxin in his bloodstream was cruel, twisting him into a mute, misshapen tangle of pain, but taking its time with the killing. The medicus warned me he might last for months. Emperor forgive me, I just couldn’t abide it.

  I remember retching at the stench when I walked into the old man’s room. He looked like a living corpse. As I drew my pistol he stared at me, silently urging me on. I pointed the gun right into his face… and froze. His eyes hardened with contempt, dismissing my struggle, already certain that I lacked the courage to pull the trigger. Because of that contempt I’ll never know if it was love or hate that stayed my hand. Perhaps I’ve never really known the difference and maybe that’s a mercy in a galaxy where there can only be war.

  And so I fled Bierce and that nameless world, but his shade came after me, following me across the stars. Over the decades I did my duty in one dead-end war after another, fiercely proclaiming the Emperor’s glory but feeling nothing inside. And eventually the spiral ended on Phaedra. After that there was nowhere left to run and the old man finally caught up with me.

  My first shadow has never talked. His contempt has no need of words. Well, I must trust that Wintertide’s death will satisfy him and lay all three of my ghosts to rest. Until then I dare not die.

  But now I must answer the High Commissar’s summons.

  Iverson’s Journal

  Night crept furtively through the jungle. As the sunlight slithered away an unseen orchestra struck up a symphony to greet the fungal dawn. Listening to the croaking, chirping cacophony, Ambrose Templeton thought the transformation both hideous and beautiful. He was in a strangely mellow mood. With nightfall, his fever had subsided to a rhythmic pounding deep inside his head…

  Like a seismic migraine seething in my psyche, teething through the tectonic plates of my skull…

  He cast the words aside and tried to focus on the task at hand, knowing the reprieve wouldn’t last long. What was it he had to do? Ah yes… the perimeter. He was going to do the rounds one last time.

  Keeping his head low, the captain crawled painfully along the inner rim of the caldera where his forces had dug in. The depression was almost two metres deep and totally devoid of vegetation, a paradoxical dead zone in the jungle. Templeton suspected the atrophy had something to do with the strange building coiled up like an alabaster snake at the heart of the crater. There was a brooding, expectant quality about the ruin that called to him, promising answers to questions he’d never thought to ask and wasn’t sure he
even understood…

  Beckoning with the secret wisdom of murder-tainted aeons, tempting saints and sinners alike to enter the eye of the needle-storm that unstitched time…

  ‘Care for some recaff, sir?’ Templeton jumped at the voice, blinking rapidly as he tried to make sense of the steaming mug in the speaker’s hand.

  ‘What?’ he managed vaguely.

  ‘There’s a dram of firewater in there too.’ The man’s uniform was caked in dried mud. ‘No disrespect to you captain, but you look like you could use it,’ the greyback continued. ‘We’ve only the one small keg between us, but I figured you’d earned it, seeing as you pulled us out of that swamp and all.’

  Unsure whether the fellow was being impudent or genuinely hospitable, Templeton mustered a wan smile and accepted the drink. He’d never been adept at bantering with the rank and file.

  ‘My thanks, trooper…’

  ‘Roach, sir.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Templeton muttered. ‘My thanks to you, Trooper Roach.’

  Sipping the drink, Templeton regarded the men hunkered down around Roach. They were a peculiar bunch of ruffians to be sure. One was a boy with the eyes of a zealot who cradled his flamer like a holy relic. Another just sat staring into space from a face that was one big bruise. A third was rubbing obsessively at the raw crater where his nose had been. Strangest of all was the native guide wearing a flat-topped Confederate cap. Seeing Templeton’s quizzical look, Roach nodded towards the savage.

  ‘Mister Fish here saved my skin, so I figured I’d sign him up to the squad for keeps,’ Roach said. ‘It’s not like there’s many of us left.’

  ‘Quite so,’ Templeton repeated, unsure what else to say.

  ‘Strange sort of nights they got round here, don’t you think, captain?’

  ‘Indeed. One would venture to speculate that the indigenous fungi are equipped with a metabolic…’ Seeing the blank look on the greyback’s face, Templeton trailed off. ‘Yes, a strange sort of night indeed,’ he finished lamely.