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  ‘Blocking, flowing, finding,’ grumbled Lhoro. ‘Better to strike, to force, to shatter.’

  ‘Not this time, shas’ui,’ said Vral, the subtle reiteration of the fire warrior’s rank reminding him of his place. ‘This time we use our wits alone. Before we leave, we shall bind these beasts in such a tangled fu’llasso that they will spend days if not weeks trying to extricate themselves. By then, the revered O’Shoh will have his sword at their throats.’

  ‘As you say, Magister Vral,’ said Lhoro, his head lowered in deference. ‘I offer contrition.’

  ‘None needed, my friend,’ said Vral, brushing away the sentiment with a circular gesture. ‘Let my words alone filter into their thick heads, the better to drown their minds in confusion.’

  ‘It is a tactic at which you excel, magister,’ said Shao, checking the pulse pistol at the small of her back. ‘Sometimes even on purpose.’

  The rest of the fire warriors followed Shao’s example, checking their grenades and concealed weapons with light pats and subtle taps. Lhoro transmitted a few murmured words to the pilots of the Devilfish and the two Piranha skimmers waiting beyond the crest of a nearby dune.

  Vral tapped open the neck of a phial of dark liquid, drinking it down and working it around his throat whilst making a variety of strange facial expressions and glottal noises.

  ‘Now all of you,’ said Vral, his voice deeper and more gravelly than before, ‘I wish you to be silent for the approach. May the Greater Good focus your minds – and your aim, should it come to it.’

  Each of the fire warriors blipped an assent symbol, the water caste magister mentally checking them off as they flicked up within his augmented eye’s readouts.

  Now or never, Vral thought.

  The tau approached the cavernous arch with a confident stride that belied his terror, taking in the gently clanking chains high above and the activity bristling in the gloom.

  The entire asteroid was infested. Ball-like organisms, little more than giant fanged heads with powerful legs on either side, snapped and slobbered as diminutive slave-creatures scuttled past. Fat white sparks shot from cutter torches on the rough gantries, masked welder-brutes hollering to one another as they clambered around a giant effigy with spiral drills for arms. To the west, a scrawny ork was tied to the top of a tall copper pole, its multicoloured clothing flapping in the breeze. A trio of waddling, cylindrical walkers stomped slowly past, each carrying bits of ork anatomy in their pincer-arms. Here and there, deep pits ringed with fungal growths gave off the miasma of rotting ordure. Vral had to fight not to cover his olfactory senses as he approached a trio of large ork elders.

  One of the greenskins was a hulking, heavy-set beast with an oily apron and a sparking silver skullcap. He had a noisome smoking-tube clenched between his yellowed teeth, and a strange harness bolted directly to his neck and shoulders that supported a bulky box with a long, ribbed antenna. Another ork – rotund and crag-faced, with a long catcher-pole under his armpit – lounged against the flank of a slumbering orkoid behemoth. Vral noticed tattooed hunter-paintings on the greenskin’s flesh, far cruder than those drawn by the fire caste’s ancient predecessors. Around the ork’s feet were slave-creatures that squealed and punched each other as they fought over scattered screws, nuts and bolts.

  The third of the brutes was by far the most fearsome. Taller and broader than the other two, his metallic maw held as many iron spikes as it did tusks. His slab-muscled body was bolted, riveted or plated with mismatched armour. Strange cybernetic protrusions ended in what looked to be surgical instruments, though they seemed more like weapons of war than the precision tools of a doctor. Most disturbing of all were the ork’s arms. They ended not only in grasping fingers, but also in disc-like rotary saws. To his mounting horror, Vral saw that each was wet with blood.

  ‘Oi, Droggok, ya lunk,’ said the leader-beast in a guttural growl. ‘You owe me three teef. They’re traders, like wot I said. They got guns, but they ain’t carrying ’em.’

  Vral breathed in deeply, privately pleased that he could understand the ork tongue in practice as well as in theory. He’d studied it from the archive as best he could for most of his adult life. There was a reason he had become the pre-eminent linguist upon Arkunasha.

  ‘Oi, you lot,’ said Vral, jabbing a finger towards the orks in the correct gestural vernacular. ‘We wanna talk about guns.’

  ‘That right, runty?’ said the skullcapped mechanic, probing a flaring nostril. He inspected the findings with an air of idle interest.

  ‘Yep,’ said Vral, pointing a thumb towards the gun-stacked bier nearby. ‘That little lot.’

  Under the influence of his relaxant tincture, the tau envoy’s voice assumed a passable imitation of the ork’s grunting dialect – by no means perfect, but close enough. Several nearby orks were downing tools and loping over to stare at the oddity in their midst.

  ‘Give us a look then,’ said the ork doctor-beast, brushing away a sting-tailed horror buzzing around his head. He motioned to the oily brute nearby. ‘Drogs, get yer finger out.’

  Taking his chance, Vral signalled his cargo drones to move the hover-bier closer. Shas’ui Lhoro stepped alongside it, hefting a large-bore burst cannon from the bier. He strained under its weight before laying it in the sand and stepping back to a safe distance.

  The ork named Droggok wiped his oily hands on his apron and approached the burst cannon, lifting the weapon effortlessly with one hand and inspecting it, his beetling brow creased.

  ‘Huh, looks shooty all right,’ he said, tossing the gun up and catching it by the trigger grip as if he’d used it all his life. ‘Dakka, dakka, dakka!’ he shouted, sparks flying from his cybernetic skull as he swung the barrel round to point at the fire warriors. The nearest of them flinched, and the orks collapsed in howls of laughter.

  How Vral hated these creatures.

  ‘Thing is, mate, it don’t fire anyfink out,’ said Droggok. ‘Not much use, is it? Us meks know about this sorta fing.’

  ‘That one’s switched off,’ said Vral. ‘Lhoro, show ’em one wiv the dakka switched on.’

  Vral made the prearranged signal to Shas’ui Lhoro, and the fire caste warrior took another burst cannon from the bier. He thumbed the activation sequence and turned it on the Devilfish transport hovering over the dome behind.

  Lhoro braced his legs in a wide firing stance and pulled the trigger. The burst cannon whirred smoothly before emitting an ear-splitting roar. A fusillade of plasma pellets blasted from its four tapering barrels, chewing away the front of the Devilfish and setting fire to the flammable coating Vral had tasked Shao with spraying onto its exterior. The burning tank tilted, veered, and crashed wing-first into a rust dune.

  Lhoro turned back, hoisting the burst cannon back onto the bier before rejoining his comrades.

  The orks bellowed and hooted, clapping their hands on their thighs and slapping each other heartily on the back. Only the surgeon-beast remained unmoved.

  ‘Look wot the little zogger done!’ said the rotund ork with the belly tattoos, his grotesque bulk shaking as he laughed in incredulity. ‘He smashed up his own ride! I’m gonna get me some of that dakka. Put it on my squiggoths,’ he said, patting the scaly haunch of the tusked monstrosity sleeping behind him.

  ‘It woz dead shooty, Krobb, true enough,’ said the mek named Droggok, nodding, his lantern jaw stuck out in pugnacious thought. A small crowd of ork warriors were picking up the long-barrelled tau guns now, sniffing them and staging mock firefights with one another.

  ‘Lads could always use more dakka,’ added the mechanic, his lips pursed in brutish appreciation. ‘Even if the fight’s gone outta you lot. Hidin’ away in yer bubble hut fings. Whaddya fink, Toofjaw? Reckon these could knock down a few walls?’

  ‘It smells funny as a dead squig, that’s what I fink,’ growled the cyborg monster. He stood up to his full height and t
ook a couple of steps towards Vral, pistons hissing. ‘So wot do you lot want in return for them guns, then? Cos I reckon somehow it ain’t more dakka.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Vral. ‘We got plenty o’ that already. Especially now our mates have showed up.’

  The ork leaders exchanged a look. Lips peeled back to reveal shining white tusks.

  ‘Mates, eh?’

  ‘Yep. We want you ta stay out of the middle part of the desert,’ continued Vral. ‘The hot bit between the two rings.’ He triggered a hologram from his elaborator disc. A moment later an image of Arkunasha sprang to life, its equatorial belt shaded a deeper red. ‘This bit. You can have the rest of the planet. Plus you get a new one of these gun stashes every day.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said the Toofjaw creature, his eyes narrowing. ‘We can have the lot, I reckon, and there’s nothin’ you gun-runts can do about it. Nor these mates o’ yours, come ta that.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Droggok, an evil smile crawling up the sparking ruin of his face. ‘The lads could do wiv a good fight. We could just take them guns from ya right now. Maybe use ’em on yer fancy mates, whaddyafink?’

  ‘You wouldn’t get no more that way,’ said Vral. ‘And they’re all switched off. Like that one ya got there, Droggok. Soon as you get out of the hot red bit I showed ya, they’ll all switch on. You’ll have more dakka than ever.’

  The orks just stared, the intensity of their gaze all but overwhelming. Vral felt a prickly heat cross his skin. A long droplet of drool fell from Droggok’s rubbery lips, hitting the mek’s steel toecap with a ping. Vral could feel the tension in his throat. The eyes of every nearby ork were boring into him.

  Too late to go back now.

  ‘Plus, as a little sweetener,’ said Vral, ‘we’ll fix up your ships. Make ’em ready to leave so you can invade a proper planet. Then it’s shootin’ time.’

  The ork leaders shared a look of incredulity for a moment.

  ‘Nah,’ said Toofjaw, his buzzsaws whirring to life. ‘It’s shootin’ time now, ya mouthy git. Kill ’em, boyz!’

  The ork encampment roared in savage joy, the nearest brutes raising their new guns and stuffing meaty fingers through trigger guards. They pointed the weapons at the tau and pulled the triggers, only to find all of the guns inactive. Low growls quickly grew to hoarse shouts of rage.

  Vral turned and ran. Voice tight with fear, he called in backup from the two Piranha recon skimmers he had sequestered in a nearby dune trench. He sprinted past his fire warriors as they hurled photon grenades into the oncoming mob of orks. Phosphor-bright flashes strobed, and the air was rent by ear-splitting bangs.

  Vral risked a glance backwards as he ran towards the Devilfish. Lhoro’s team had drawn their pulse pistols and were pacing backwards, picking off the orks that staggered through the haze of their grenades. The Devilfish, its fires extinguished by the drones rising from its wing tips, extended a burst cannon from a ventral panel and spat a stuttering stream of plasma into the milling greenskins. Piranha skimmers screamed past, their pulse weaponry scything down those orks nearest the tau delegation.

  For a few heartbeats, the well-honed target priority of the fire caste gunners held the disoriented beasts at bay. Heads were taken from necks in puffs of crimson gore. Then a massive glut of the things barrelled out of the gloom. The orks held aloft the weapons they had taken from the gun bier, wielding them like clubs. Howling in manic glee, they fell upon Lhoro’s team, battering them to the ground and caving in skulls with the elegant tau war-tech. Arcs of tau blood spurted into the air as the orks bludgeoned the fallen warriors to death.

  Vral sprinted towards the Devilfish, his eyes fixed on the circular hatch that promised salvation.

  He heard a sudden clank, a scream of protesting metal, and watched as a massive length of chain fell from the overhanging rock above the skimmer. The magister leapt back in horror, scrambling away as the enormous chain thundered down in an avalanche of rusted metal, burying the Devilfish completely in a mound of heavy iron links. Rough barks and hoots came from high above, the shadow of a crude crane rippling across the sand.

  Vral cast about frantically for some means of escape. Back under the lip of the asteroid base, he could see fire caste warriors dying – beaten to a pulp, their bodies caught up and slammed back down again, or being messily eviscerated by jagged claws. One of the Piranhas had been downed, a plume of oily smoke belching from a gaping hole in its flank. Shao lay dead nearby, her once-lively face a bloody mask. An ork warrior roared in triumph over her corpse, her comms helmet jammed awkwardly on its greasy green pate.

  Frozen in terror, Vral spotted the doctor-beast the mechanic had called Toofjaw storming from the shadow of the asteroid base. Shas’ui Lhoro motioned frantically for Vral to run, then turned and took aim with his pulse pistol. His shot took a chunk from Toofjaw’s neck, but the beast just growled and kept on coming.

  The ork swung one of his disc-saws out in a wide loop, carving Lhoro in two from hip to shoulder. The sheer force of the blow sent the two halves of the fire warrior’s corpse flailing into the sunlight.

  A Piranha arced over the sands from the lip of the ridge, slowing expertly on approach as it veered close to Vral. Its gunner leaned down and grabbed the diplomat’s robes in the small of his back, hoisting him bodily upwards with a great heave.

  The envoy scrabbled upwards into the cockpit, all dignity and poise forsaken. The light skimmer wobbled alarmingly, veering about on an escape vector. Its pilot activated the craft’s drones, sending them off to buy them a few more microdecs. A trio of bulky, ugly warbikes emerged from the shadow of the giant ship and roared after them in pursuit.

  A clattering series of bangs came from behind as the ork asteroid’s guns clanked to life. Large-calibre bullets stitched the desert in a parallel path only a few metres away from the fleeing tau. Two, then three deadly lines stuttered across the sands towards the overburdened Piranha’s silhouette.

  Vral made his peace with the Tau’va, and screwed his eyes shut.

  The fourth asteroid gun caught them in its crosshairs, and the light skimmer came apart, ploughing into a rust dune before exploding in a confusion of wreckage and bloody limbs.

  The morning sun blazed down as the smoke of the ruined Piranha drifted on the desert breeze. Vral’s torn corpse trickled blood down a ruined wing tip. His would-be saviours, the Piranha crew, lay blackened and burned nearby. In the distance, more ork outriders set off from the crashed asteroid base, following the drones that the skimmer pilot had launched before the crash.

  High above, a pair of scruffy black vultures circled in the sky. Their harsh caws were met by the rising rumble of an ork horde mustering for war.

  4-0

  Bio-dome Complex 1-1, Sector 2-1-1, North Hex, Arkunasha

  The Manta missile destroyer Por’es Kauyon bellied down outside the bio-domes, its splayed wings like those of a ray settling on the seabed. Its cavernous hold opened and extruded a wide ramp. Ground teams, then battlesuits, then vehicles came into view until an entire hunter cadre had emerged.

  The cadre deployed with such practised efficiency that O’Shoh nodded approvingly despite himself. Behind them, other Manta missile destroyers descended with a grace that belied their size.

  The containment zone established by the Arkunashan army stretched for miles on either side. Despite having broken into the transit tunnels in several places, the orks had been unable to penetrate either the vault doors that led inside the tau settlements or the metres-thick transplastic of the bio-domes themselves. With the ork hordes held in a stalemate and a localised drone net watching the skies, the major bio-domes were islands of relative safety.

  Nonetheless, the carnage the greenskins had wreaked was extensive. Shattered conurbations dotted the skyline, the rubble of broken homes strewn across the sands.

  With a sick feeling in his heart, O’Shoh saw the parallel trails l
eft by the heels of corpses dragged towards the bio-dome entrances for their burial rites. Sha’vastos had clearly done his best to cover up the damage, but to O’Shoh it was plain that hundreds, if not thousands, of tau had died in this complex’s defence.

  While his fire warriors disembarked from the Mantas, O’Shoh studied the ruined transit tunnels leading into the vast, hexagon-plated bio-domes. Their shattered spars threw sharp shadows upon the dunes as the Arkunashan sun slid slowly across the sky. The wind howled through holes blasted in the tunnels, its voice as mournful as a broken soul.

  Here and there, O’Shoh saw malnourished work teams digging through rubble. Fire caste warriors and stocky earth caste engineers were labouring together to search the clusters of wreckage the orks had cast down. Red-grey clouds darkened the horizon.

  O’Shoh heard the heavy footsteps of his old mentor, Ob’lotai.

  ‘A storm is coming, Shoh,’ said the shas’vre, sombrely. ‘It would be wise to proceed inside.’

  ‘I offer thanks, Ob’lotai,’ said O’Shoh, turning with a scowl that put the lie to his words, ‘though I no longer live or die by your counsel. And in front of others, I’d rather you used my title. It is a matter of respect.’

  Ob’lotai inclined his bald head for a moment, and O’Shoh felt a flicker of shame at his sour reply. Four long tau’cyr in Ob’lotai’s Broadside team had established a deep connection with the old warrior, and they were long past formal dialect.

  ‘ “A true warlord strives to master the environment as well as the foe”, ’ quoted Ob’lotai.

  ‘A strong wind cannot dissuade me, old friend, that I promise you,’ said O’Shoh. ‘Look around you. These people need help, not prudence.’

  He swept his arm out, once more taking in the dust-caked work teams shifting plasrock in the shadowy ruins of the transit tunnels. Many were emaciated to the point of starvation; others panted in the heat like exhausted kroot hounds. Yet still they carried on ferrying chunks of ruined architecture along the work chain. Some of them left bloody handprints on the white stone.