Elemental Council, page 38
‘Would he?’ Sei snarled. ‘It doesn’t matter any more. What he would do for us, or what I would do for you. Nothing I do here will ever make a difference. I’m a pilot, and I work better alone. What does it matter if I go or if I stay?’
‘What are you so afraid of?’ Swordlight asked.
‘Of losing you!’ Sei shouted. ‘Or losing Ke! I can’t lose anyone else. I won’t survive it.’
Swordlight’s eyes crawled across Sei’s wounded expression. So that was it. He didn’t want to care. He couldn’t, lest he lose anything more. Pity ached through the hunter’s heart, seeing him like this. How frail he must be – how scarred – to be so afraid of losing one more person.
‘It was Yor’i,’ Swordlight said, her helmet filters translating her whisper in a liquid rush of static. ‘Yor’i killed Orr and tried to kill the seeker.’
The belligerent tension evaporated from Sei’s hands. ‘Daya,’ he said. ‘Turn off the audio feeds.’
Swordlight relayed what she knew. For eight minutes, Sei listened.
By the time she was done, the colour had left his cheeks. He leaned on the hull and slumped into a moulded passenger seat. ‘Do you have evidence to support any part of this accusation?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Ke said. ‘The briefing chamber had no surveillance feeds. Communications logs are not helpful, either. The Paramount Mover’s communications are encrypted and secure-locked. And far above our access rights, I’ll add.’
‘All we know is what I told you,’ Swordlight said.
Sei tapped a long finger on his leg. ‘Orr closed his eyes, relaxed his hands, and that means he was trying to tell us something. Yor’i’s gestures seem clumsy and still, and so he’s changed. Do you realise how feeble this all sounds? Orr could have been caught by surprise. Yor’i’s hands might ache. You said it best yourself – an ethereal cannot betray the Empire. What we are discussing… this is a metric impossibility in the universe.’
‘Not only impossible,’ Swordlight admitted through clenched teeth. ‘What I am saying is unthinkable. I required hours to figure out how to voice the concept. Still it is true, Sei. An ethereal has attacked an ethereal. An ethereal has betrayed us.’
Sei shook his hands. ‘So why torture yourself with these lies? Go, both of you. Report yourself to the commander’s edification corps before I do. Your words are clearly symptoms of… of irreparable social deviance. You’re both clearly due for re-education.’
Swordlight exhaled, trying to speak with the clarity that Orr would have. ‘Sei. Think. Think of the chain of events as we understand them. Our coalition conquered Cao Quo. The humans were in no position to resist us. As the integration began, an organised supremacist movement and rebellion took root. Aun’Kir’qath arrived to investigate, then disappeared. Aun’Yor’i gathered us to find her, and we did.’
‘Are you trying to make my point for me?’
Swordlight sealed her eyes, thinking. If only Orr was here. He could have given shape to the intuitions simmering in her gut. He could have made them make sense. ‘Why did Kir’qath isolate herself after her rescue?’ Swordlight asked, feeling her way through each word. ‘What did she fear?’
‘Clearly not Yor’i. He seemed to be the only person she could trust.’
‘After they met, yes,’ Swordlight said. ‘Even she would not question an ethereal. But she knew someone within the coalition could not be trusted.’
‘That suggests treachery,’ Ke said, picking up the thread of Swordlight’s words. ‘Someone deliberately betrayed the Empire. Not like the misguided supremacists.’
Swordlight signed emphatically. ‘Yor’i knew Kir’qath knew this, because she told him, just as she told Orr. But the Paramount Mover was the traitor. And he knew it was only a matter of time before she discovered him. Because he led the Syra astray.’
For three breaths, Ke’s unfocused eyes gazed beyond the hull. Sei simply gaped.
‘Even if an ethereal could be a supremacist,’ the kor’la said at last, ‘this explains none of Yor’i’s actions. The mighty prince was as shocked as we were when Artamax captured Kir’qath.’
Ke blinked, her suit creaking as she faced Swordlight. ‘He’s right. It doesn’t add up. And she, Artamax said. The Space Marine said she helped them.’
‘And regardless of who helped him,’ Sei said, ‘what would anyone have gained through treachery?’
‘Everything the Syra have done has helped the rebels,’ Ke said.
They gazed at Swordlight. The clamour from the hangar vaguely filtered into the Orca’s cabin.
Finally, she shook her hands. ‘I do not know. I do not know what Yor’i wanted, or if he is alone. All I know for certain is he tried to kill Kir’qath. And he did kill Orr.’
The last words sent a pulse of anger through Swordlight, until her hands were balled into fists. Orr was dead. Fire pumped through her veins, stirring like an old dragon in a warren of caves.
Sei’s eyes flickered between Ke and Swordlight. ‘What do you mean to do with any of this?’
‘Can we do anything?’ Ke asked. ‘Is it our place? Is this… normal for the aun?’
‘It is not normal,’ Swordlight said. ‘If it were, Yor’i would not have concealed his actions. So we do the only thing we can do. We voice the truth to Commander Nobledawn.’
Sei leaned back, joints creaking as they battled the world’s gravity. He raised his palms. ‘I won’t be part of this. I won’t tarnish my name with yours. I only just cleared it after losing my Barracuda on Thapes Quo.’
Swordlight’s fingers twitched. ‘You abandon us when we need you most.’
‘For the Greater Good,’ Sei said. ‘And if the T’au’va be true, I’ll never need to plant my hoof on this world’s soil again.’
Swordlight and Ke watched as the pilot rocked to his hooves and retrieved his flight case. He stroked a screen on the side, and the cockpit went dim as Daya-2 was transferred through a data buffer to his personal console. One long step after the other, Sei loped down the cabin, stopping at the stowed ramp gun, turning at the top of the embarkation ramp. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Then he left.
‘Maybe he’s right,’ Ke said, her voice a peep in the vague babble and clamour from the hangar outside. ‘Maybe we’re the traitors, to be so openly plotting against the Paramount Mover. Perhaps we should go to the edification corps. Maybe we do need re-education.’
Swordlight exhaled, saying nothing. So this was where their journey had led. To a diverging path, and each who walked its ways thought they alone knew what truly served the T’au’va. This, Swordlight imagined, was how the ancient fires of Mont’au had first kindled. With simple disagreements. With murdered brothers and sisters and shadows and lies. This discord was the silent trumpet of an empire’s fall. An empire divided would die.
‘Do you stand with me?’ Swordlight asked.
The engineer’s armoured hands curled in gestural ambiguity. ‘I’ve got nowhere else to stand.’
‘Would you believe me if I said I had been up against worse?’
‘Oh, not at all, Fireblade. Not at all.’
Swordlight chuckled. Something about Ke’s tone aggravated her. Something about the engineer’s new confidence and swagger – her sheer arrogance. But it was arrogance built on bedrock. The engineer had proven herself, time and again, and now she had come into her element. Swordlight trusted Ke with her life and reputation – a reputation six lifetimes in the making.
Ke must have trusted Swordlight, too, to stand so stalwartly with her against the word of the aun. They might as well have been staring down the heat death of the universe.
And still, Ke stood.
The surreal predicament of their apostasy dawned on Swordlight. Those who had embarked on this enterprise were insane. Either that, or they were correct – which was worse. Swordlight summoned her courage but found nothing to say. This was not an enemy she could have anticipated, and certainly not one she would have asked for. It was an enemy that, by all rights, should not have existed. When Swordlight had joined Yor’i’s council, she had craved a trial by fire. She had got a trial by fear.
Swordlight adjusted her carbine and made the ancient sign of unity, Fio’taun Stands. ‘Let us find Nobledawn,’ she said. ‘Let us tell her the truth.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Ghodh stalked through the base’s lonely, blasted corridors, stepping over the corpses of the fallen, pausing occasionally to taste the burnt meat of a human’s pulse-desecrated flesh, or close the eyes of the fallen t’au, so much as the lingering tension in their dead muscles would allow. It was not a gesture that held any value to Ghodh. Kroot universally devoured those they mourned. In doing so, they carried the memory and boons of the lost ones they had loved forever.
But Kroot did not consume t’au, and so the corpses of Ghodh’s allies did not whet his appetite. More than that, the t’au would not have understood the sacred display of reverence. They already thought Ghodh a traitor to the union. He had no wish to sully the honour of the kroot any further, nor acquire the genetic traits of the hoofed ones. To lose his appetite for meat, or begin meditating under trees and muttering sibilant mantras.
The strength of the t’au was not in their flesh. It was in their souls. Their spirit made them stronger. It made everything they touched stronger. Even those they had lost faith in.
Ghodh paused at the entrance to a maintenance access, absorbing the base’s silence. The sky fortress’ upper decks creaked in the wind, laid bare by the fires of war, forgotten in the amnesia of victory. The last t’au hunters had left this place after culling the human rebels and recovering those among their dead they could.
Commingling with the grim tang of war-blasted meat, a faint scent haunted Ghodh’s nares. The unmistakable bite of bitter medication, almost like scorched polymers.
A chill moved through Ghodh’s skin. The smell had been the same in the stasis terminal where the imprisoned Space Marine had been liberated in the lead-up to the attack. Not by a traitor, but by an imposter. Yor’i was not who he seemed.
Memories from Ghodh’s encounter with the two ethereals still swirled behind his eyes, within his nares. He had been stalking silently through the drone tunnels, following the scent of Kir’qath, his clawed feet splayed on the alloy panels, their textured pads gripping the slick surface. The spines of his skull had lain down to reduce his profile. Where the scent was strongest, he had smashed the panel of the drone tunnel away with his bladed rifle, then leapt to the deck below. He had landed like a felid, as if on wires, legs springing as they silently accepted his weight.
That was when he had seen her. When he had smelt her.
The human female.
The imposter wearing Yor’i’s flesh had stood over the seeker as she crawled away, serum from her bloodless gash slicking the deck beneath her. The imposter’s disguise fooled the eyes as surely as her voice fooled the ears. Even her scent had almost fooled Ghodh’s nares. If he had encountered her anywhere else, he might not have noticed the scent at all. The human pheromones were slight, so deeply buried beneath her false t’au pheromones and the sweet stink of combusted incense that no carnivore without scent-catching gifts could have detected them.
Just the same, the bitter medicated bite haunting the imposter’s aura remained just beyond Ghodh’s ken, infuriatingly out of the grasp of recognition. It was a combat narcotic, perhaps, or stress hormones from years of rigorous training. A chemical that facilitated her disguise, maybe – or a combination of all three. She was no pinnacle of genetic superiority, this one. Well-trained and well-equipped, true, but her flesh bore no gifts that could not be taken from any human miscreant.
No, the imposter was a wedge of the most average iron, forged by time and cruelty into ruthless steel. No more, and certainly no less.
As Ghodh had landed, this not-Yor’i had reacted immediately, raising her wrist as if to strike. Ghodh had moved first. With an underhanded swing, he had slashed his rifle up at her. The bladed stock of the weapon had cut the air, but had failed to land true. The imposter had danced around his blow, like a mannequin of sinewless rubber.
In that fateless breath, the membranes in Ghodh’s eyes had nictitated with shock. Ice had flushed into his belly, and his quills had splayed out in a threat display. She was no mere imposter, this one. She was something far, far worse.
Claws clinking on the deck, Ghodh emerged from a breach in the t’au sky fortress’ hull. Dozens of ruptures remained from the failed gue’la attack. Beyond, sickle mountains stabbed the skies like mossy hooks. The churning seas yawned beneath, little cutters slicing through the spume like needles.
Below, thunder echoed as a smooth t’au shuttle lander carved from the sky fortress’ cavernous hangar towards the grey horizon. As it left, so did the last hints of Sei’s flesh-weak, made-for-stars aroma.
The pilot had left the sky fortress. Ghodh’s allies grew few, if any remained at all. Orr’s timely interruption with Yor’i might have saved Ghodh’s life, but now the t’au believed Ghodh had killed the emissary-spy and the shaper-priestess Kir’qath. As the moment of the ever-hunt expanded, Ghodh’s place in it became sickeningly unclear.
Ghodh’s black eyes followed the shuttle into the veiled sky, a fell wind beating in over the sea. The distant sun skittered behind the curtain of cloud, painting the grey fog silver.
War was coming. It was all but here. Ghodh could feel it in his flesh, like the light rain beading on his oily skin, smearing the war paint and dried human ichor on his skin. He could smell it in his nares, riding the fell winds with the screams of distant battle. When the war came, he would fight for the t’au, whether or not they recognised him as friend. The union was unbreakable, and the clan-mothers and shapers had not lied.
Kroot and t’au were stronger together.
First, Ghodh would hunt the imposter wearing Yor’i’s flesh. He checked his hunting knife and the feed pan of his weapon, his throat clicking with a low growl. May the ancestors bless his blades. May the union watch over them all.
He turned back into the haunted halls of the dying sky fortress, padding silently along the traces of the imposter’s bitter spoor, his hunting blades clinking in his belt.
Soon.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Ke and Swordlight found Nobledawn in the ruined command gallery.
Ke stepped through a ruptured bulkhead onto the deck. The debris from the earlier battle had mostly been cleared. Uniformed earth caste technicians removed damaged alloy panels from the collapsed ceiling, welding infrastructural elements together beneath them. Hauler drones disappeared with nets full of scorched wreckage and expended repair consumables. Across the intelligence arena, a translucent tarpaulin of self-healing polymers crawled inch by inch across the rupture where the armaglass overlooking Cao Quo had once loomed. As the emergency cover expanded up drone tracks on the wall, a misty gale battered the thick sheath, the omen of a coming storm. The salty spray of the sea filled the blasted deck, tickling Ke’s nasal chasm.
Swordlight raised her carbine, pointing ahead. ‘There. The commander.’
Nobledawn stood at her console, gesturing to cadre commanders around her. Overuse had scorched the muzzle of the carbine hanging at her side black. Her eyes were red from battlesuit fatigue, and the stiffness in her neck gave Ke a sympathetic ache. The commander looked ready to collapse and sleep for four decs, or sever her scalp lock and hunt for nine days in mourning.
Ke scanned the area. The commander’s retinue stood guard around her and the looming shell of her inactive Crisis suit, pulse weaponry humming in their hands. If the commander didn’t want to hear what they had to say, she would have no problem removing them at all.
The sickly scent of burning incense wafted through Ke’s olfactory array, sending a shiver through her spine. Aun’Yor’i lurked in the intelligence arena below like an ancient shadow, threads of smoke unspooling from the stick in his hand. He paced along the translucent cover crawling up the window tracks, the brim of his broad hat eclipsing his gaze, painting his face in shadow.
He seemed anxious. Waiting for something.
He seemed like nothing an ethereal should be.
Ke shuddered. ‘Yor’i is here. I’m sealing the blast doors.’
Swordlight swivelled, helmet lenses whirring as they contracted. ‘For what?’
‘If the prince has betrayed us, he won’t take well to our conversation with the commander,’ Ke said. ‘We’ll need a captive audience.’
Swordlight approached Nobledawn alone, debris from the recent battle crunching under her hooves, her gloves damp with sweat from her palms. She came to a stop behind the shas’o, her weapon hanging from its sling around her bulky carapace, its muzzle aimed at the deck between her hooves. When the last cadre commander had departed, Swordlight spoke.
‘Commander.’
Nobledawn gestured for Swordlight to wait, glancing at one of the hunters of her retinue. ‘Oru’la,’ she said, her voice gravelly from overuse. ‘Send a runner to the lift station. Have them double our altitude.’
The hunter Oru’la bowed in compliance and departed, crossing his arm over his chest in a reverent salute to Swordlight. On Nobledawn’s console, holograms swirled. Swordlight blinked at a sigil, skimming the contextual fly-out hex that populated her helmet display.
The coalition’s forces were actively deployed across the world’s surface. No cadres remained in reserve whatsoever.
‘We are overextended,’ Swordlight breathed to herself.
Her helmet filters amplified her whisper, and Nobledawn turned. ‘Agreed. After everything that has happened, restraint will not serve us. I spoke with the Paramount Mover. We have been too good to the gue’la of this world. The time has come to put an end to the myth of rebellion against the enlightened Empire of T’au.’
