Captain Breeard of the Mordant 77th relaxed a little as the thunder of the artillery shell died away and the shower of dust from the ceiling gave everyone the appearance of chronic dandruff. The hollolith flickered back into life and showed the deployment of forces throughout the capital city. No matter how it was interpreted there was no way they could win. After every engagement the Aquilla was slowly being ground further and further back on a tide of blood and gore as wave after wave of cultists surged forwards. And that was not the worst of it. Some darkly whispered of colossal figures of dread urging them on with the malice and hatred of their dark gods. It was whispered that the chaos marines were here.
A plea to the Omega Marines chapter had been made some time ago but so far the plea had gone un-headed and he was beginning to suspect that there was an Exterminatus Fleet in high orbit, hanging their waiting for him to fail.
Captain Breeard tried to remember the last time he had slept. Stay-awake drugs could only take you so far but eventually he knew he would need a good few hours' sleep. So far the drugs seemed to have taken him nearly two weeks. In that time he had lost the use of his legs as a piece of shrapnel imbedded itself into his lower spine and had lost right eyeball and ear when a suicide bomber tried to take an ammunition dump on the other side of the city. That thought cheered him up slightly. They were willing to die for their twisted faith, so they both had the same aim in mind.
But all levity aside he knew he was up shit creek with out a paddle. Especially given the fact that the last astropath on the planet had dropped dead nearly three weeks ago after sending an alpha grade distress message. He was unsure if the message had got through but given the lack of reinforcements he was almost certain it hadn't.
There was a respectful knocking on the armoured door of the command bunker. It went completely unheard in the din and racket of the regimental staff trying to turn the tide of war, or at least put of drowning in blood for a while.
The knocking came again. This time however it was loud enough to rattle the hinges and make some of the more nervous people by the door duck for cover.
The guard on the inside of slid the bolts back and let the door swing inwards.
Into the room strode a very strange creature. It was wearing what looked like a cross between light carapace armour and the body-glove that the Assassinatum made much use of, but was a dusty grey instead of black. In truth the figure was no taller than he was (or would have been had he not currently been in a wheelchair) but held its self completely straight and walked with a lightness that suggested it had no weight. The individual was without a helmet and the face identified it as being female, but what caught the attention of everyone in the room were the eyes. They were green. Not the green of human eyes but an almost luminous shade of green that is present in new leaves. The head was also cleanly shaven, but this was not an uncommon practice amongst many regiments.
'You called for aid?' Asked the strange woman. Her manner of speech was as strange and unsettling as her appearance, it was as if she had learnt it from a vox recording but had never acutely found occasion to use it.
'We were unsure the message had go through.'
'Yes. It reached our world. We have relayed it.' There was a long drawn out awkward pause. Eventually the Captain snapped first, the expressionless face was beginning to get on his last nerve.
'Are you going to tell me your name and rank?'
'Ekswontoo. Current spokeswoman for the Zephyr Cohort of the Ardentheen Refuge of the World Kree and representative of the other nineteen Cohorts now deploying on this planet.' The words were spoken in the same dead voice and still expression. It was as if those iridescent eyes were looking out of a mask.
'Are you the reinforcements the Sector Brass sent?' he recognised the name Kree from somewhere but for the life in him he could not bring it to mind. Those eyes did not help either. They were unblinking and seemed to be making his thought processes want to go off somewhere and hide. There was something not entirely human about them.
'No. We are the rainforests that sent ourselves. I am going to look at your map display.' The Spokeswoman moved soundlessly between two orderlies who were monitoring it and making notes. The moments were equally as wrong as the voice and the eyes. They were sudden and lightning fast, sudden but with an almost mechanical precision. They were more like the movements of an avian or an arachnid than human.
Ekswontoo stared unblinking as the images of the hololith blinked on and off from one scene to another faster than the eye could follow. Had anyone been paying adequate attention they would have noticed that she was not touching any of the buttons.
'We are going to eliminate elevated hierarchal members of the adversary. We believe that they are located in the cellars of this building.' She said pointing to a water purification plant. 'We will report their destruction to you with an eighty-five percent certainty within the next fifty hours. Goodbye.'
It was not until after she had left that they realized no one had asked her for identification. There really was something quite unsettling about her.
'Vill,' Called Captain Breeard to one of his data specialists by a large data-stack used for storing military information and running tactical simulations 'see what you can dig up on the planet Kree.' He did not relish the possibility of being stabbed in the back as well as the front.
Whytoofor was perched upon a windowsill of a bombed out Administratum building. He was on the top floor, to give him an astounding view of the ruined city, but far enough bellow the roof so as not to make a silhouette. It really was a ruined city. Whytoofor often wondered why Imperials so often sold their souls for the trivial gifts of the gestalt warp compound minds. They were as human as he once was and he had never even thought of doing anything like that. Chaos study had become a hobby of his, much to the delight of the rest of the cohort, who now valued his expertise.
There was a force of soldiers moving below him. They were small by distance but a quick adjustment to his biomechanical eyes brought them into sharp enough focus to make out the Mordant 77th emblem on their shoulders.
They obviously believed that they were being stealthy as they moved in the shadow of the empty buildings around them but if he strained he felt that he could just about make out the tromp of their heavy boots from three hundred foot above the street.
It did not bring a smile to Whytoofors face. Nothing did.
'Twenty-three soldiers of the Mordant 77th are moving on the walkway below me. They each bear a tattoo of a stylised sun above their right eye. Shall I kill them?' He broadcasted in Kree battle binary.
'Negative. The Mordant 77th are clear of taint beyond negligible levels. Consider wary allies.' Came the reply. He recognized the syntax of the message and reasoned that it must of come from Eksoweayt. She was currently covered in dark grey paint pretending to be a memorial statue nearly half a mile south. A disguise a base-human would have trouble pulling off. But her room temperature, perfectly still body could fool all but the most sophisticated observer. And even then they would have to be so close that they would not live long enough to do anything about their discovery.
He remained perched on his high place for a further two minutes.
'A force of twenty-six warp induced mutations seem to be stalking the Imperials. They are armed with local pattern las-rifles, Cadia pattern flack armour, and a varied assortment of small close combat weapons. Shall I kill them?'
There was the briefest of moments before the reply as the question was relayed and discussed with the rest of the Cohort. The loss of one of their number would be an immense blow to the Cohort as a whole. They had known each other since they had first become conscious; they had been grown in the same laboratory and had received their military grade hardware together. It would be terrible to loose a member of the Cohort with out very good reason. It would be like loosing a limb.
Yet it was only the briefest of moments.
'You may execute them at your leisure.' Was the eventual reply.
With an inhuman grace he hopped silently from one windowsill to the next in search of the ground.
Just before he reached the second floor window he jumped along the building, hit the wall with both feet and rolled to a halt on the floorboards of the second floor of an out building.
The broken windows of the far end of the building gave him a superior view down the street. He slung the perfectly balanced mag-gun out of its holster across his back and flipped the extended muzzle into place with a business-like click.
The mag-gun was both a work of art and a work of craft. The extended muzzle doubled its length to nearly one and a half metres. It was the same dusty black as his body armour with the same sleek, streamlined appearance. Regardless of how stationary it was it looked like it should be speeding away. It looked like you could get a friction burn off it just by touching it.
It propelled its ammunition by magnetically charging it, then charging its self in such a manner, and in a sequence along the barrel that it could propel a carefully shaped piece of metal to a lethal velocity. Its main advantage over the archaic auto-guns of the Imperium was that it could quite happily work in vacuum as well as in atmosphere and its main advantage over the las-rifle was that there was no refraction possibility in a certain types of dense atmosphere.
Whytoofor carefully managed to take out three of the trailing members of the warp tainted before they realized something was amiss and a forth before they managed to find adequate cover.
He ducked out of view of the window nearly four whole seconds before ferocrete around the window was peppered with the click and snap of las-gun fire, but by then he was smashing through a vacant side window, over an ally and through the window of the building next door. It was just bad luck that that was one of the few windows left with any glass in it.
The sound of the glass breaking was almost cheerful as it landed inside what appeared to be a sleeping room for a lowly administratum worker. Its threadbare carpet was coated in a layer of dust so thick that when Whytoofor executed a graceful landing roll on it no sound was made. Wasting no time he sprang up and dashed for the door and sped down the corridor in the direction of the stairs. They were of a spiral design and two turns below his feet someone was running up the stairs. The only direction of logic was upwards. They arrived at the turn he had just abandoned. He could hear the thud of their heavy boots. They were just about to proceed down the corridor.
With the grace of an acrobat he swung from the turn of the stairs above him and landed on soundlessly on the banister behind them. There was no sound as hid blade was drawn. He was not going to risk using the gun in this building. The walls were made of ferocrete and he had no intention of perforating his own vital organs through ricochet.
The knife was one, long, elegantly curved piece of artificially grown diamond about the length of his forearm. It had been custom grown for him and the handle fitted into his hand beautifully. He snuck up on the traitorous abomination so close he could hear its heart beating. Whytoofors own heart did not beat. In his chest were two screws that siphoned the blood around his arteries and veins in a much more efficient manner.
The knife was driven forwards so swiftly that it would have made a rattlesnake blink. It slid easily between two vertebrae, severing the spinal column just under the brain. The victim was dead quicker than he could blink.
Whytoofor caught the body as it fell and lowered it carefully to the ground so that the sound of it falling did not alert the next victim who was less than two meters away.
Some animal sense, or something darker, caused the soldier to turn around.
He did not have the same the same attitude towards ricochet as Whytoofor and raised his weapon.
Despite how quick he was he was not yet over the edge of the banister before the first bullet tore into his shoulder and shattered on his skeleton. The pain bloomed in his shoulder but found little purchase in his surgically re-wired brain.
He knew he was impaired now. Most of the bullet was wedged between his shoulder bones and he could not lift his left arm above the level of his head.
It was less than half an hour later. The last of the dangerously deviant humans was slumped on the opposite side of devastated street a neat dark round hole in his forehead.
In addition to the bullet wound in his shoulder he had acquired a knife to the gut, a bullet that had been fired at point blank range and had passed straight through his lung and out of his back and a great bruise down his right hand side as a grenade-launcher had tried to destroy the cover he was hiding behind. His armour had absorbed most of the damage but still his body was now damaged.
With a conscious effort he shut off the part of his lung that was bleeding.
'Objective achieved.' He transmitted.
'Acknowledged.' It was all that needed to be said.
Whytoofor got to his feet and made his way back to his former perch.
'Found something, sir.' The data specialist called out.
Captain Breeard wheeled his chair over to the flat screen and began to read. What little blood he had not shed in the last week drained out of his face. 'This is the one occasion I will be happy if you have made a mistake, Vill.'
'No, sir. I checked twice.' Captain Breeard looked down at her round, worried, freckled face. No, he thought, mistakes like that were just not in her nature. But just for once he wished this was not the case.