Tales of the Amber Vipers Chapter 160
Automatons were everywhere, pouring through narrow streets with overwhelming numbers. They came in waves, pressing to break through the defence with relentless determination, uncaring of losses. They left ruin in their wake, radioactive taint staining buildings and great craters chewed out of manufactorums. That they were destroying their own home seemed irrelevant, in all likelihood it wasn't even part of their programming to consider collateral damage. So they fought without restraint, as zealously as a Gue'ron'sha but all the more eerie for their total silence.
Alohvar confronted a knot of them trying to push through a shunting yard, crossing mag-lev tracks where once freight trains would have been dispatched to distant parts of the planet. It had been a clever manoeuvre, trying to circumvent the Tau's front line and approach from the rear, but high-flying drones had detected their infiltration and Alohvar had moved to intervene.
He swept his Tri-cyclic ion blaster about and smashed a trio off their feet. Crackling bolts of incandescent might blew them apart, sending components flying high to shower down and ping off their comrades' helms. The rest weren't slowed by the losses, spreading out to ensnare the Tau Crisis Team in a crossfire. The yard was wide and laden with bulky train-trucks but the Tau were agile and kept repositioning, leaping over obstacles to rain down fire. Spiy'tus and Teq'ila soared overhead, blowing armours apart with plasma shots. They were forced to limit themselves to energy rounds, stockpiles of missiles were growing troublingly low and they had to conserve their ammunition for the most desperate of moments.
Alohvar left them to it as he blasted another pair of armours to slag, the overheating alarm in his ear a constant presence. The automatons fell before his feet but unseen a third stepped out from behind cover and let rip with a pair of radioactive red orbs. Alohvar had no time to dodge and watched as the blasts erupted on his flickering force field, the lone remaining shield drone sagging in the air from its constant defence of his life. Alohvar knew how it felt, he shared its exhaustion and wanted a rest so badly he could taste it. Yet there was no time to stop, the tide of silver ringed the Tau base and his Fire Warriors were the only thing holding them back.
Shaking off his empathy, the drone was only a machine after all, he lifted his ion blaster and smote the automaton with a single shot. The armour fell in pieces and he looked about to assess the situation. The shunting yard was filled with carnage and woe, but the Crisis Team had the upper hand, they had intercepted the flanking attack and contained it, crushing silver armours one by one. A good outcome surely, but only one of a thousand skirmishes this day and more were surely coming.
Alohvar realised his attention was wandering, his focus dimmed by exhaustion and forced his mind back to the present. He saw a trio of armours driving a tracked weapon-mount before them, with some unknown artefact attached that they were trying to bring to bear on Teq'ila. He instantly leapt into motion, jet pack sending him hurtling towards them. The first he met with a kick that shattered the armour into a cloud of flying bits, that pattered off the truck behind it. Another other turned and tried to bring fists wrapped in electric flames to bear but he grabbed the nearest with his Onager gauntlet and sent it flying into its comrade. The pair went down between two trucks, caught in a tangle of limbs and tried to right themselves but Alohvar had no patience for their antics and he kicked the truck, sending it jostling into the pair. Moving smoothly on ancient mag-lev rails the ten-tonne truck slammed into the automatons and crushed them, leaving a fused mess of ensnared parts behind.
Alohvar turned his attention to the weapon platform they had been escorting. Yet another new device, whose function he did not want to guess. The previous few hours had seen a plethora of vile technologies brought forth, each more hideous than the last. Weapons Alohvar would never have thought were possible, things he wished weren't possible, all brought froth to inflict misery upon the Tau. The machines seemed to have no consistency or order to their appearance, deploying whatever they had to hand and Alohvar had the strangest inkling they were showing off the range and potential of their arsenals. For what purpose he could not say.
Silence fell within the yard and Alohvar saw the Crisis team had finished off the remaining automatons, this fight was done. He turned to the weapon platform and kicked it over, then stepped on the barrel and snapped it in half. Sparks flew as bulging energy capacitors shattered and circuits were strewn everywhere. It was a small victory but it gave Alohvar satisfaction to know one more vile horror had been removed from the galaxy.
"Was that necessary?" Spiy'tus called as his suit walked over.
"In my opinion, yes," Alohvar replied.
Teq'ila approached, his armour so badly chipped the sept markings had vanished and he declared, "This fight is done."
"What a relief," Spiy'tus sighed, "I am bone weary. I don't know how I'm standing."
"You're not," Teq'ila pointed out, "You're curled up inside a Crisis suit."
"You know what I mean," Spiy'tus snapped, "This is as bad as the worst of the Nem'yar Atoll."
Alohvar shared their dismay and said, "Take a chance to catch your breath, it won't be long until…"
Suddenly the comms-waves filled with alarm as a distant voice cried, "Shas'Ui Uriem reporting, Pathfinders heavily engaged in district 43u!"
"Hold fast, support is incoming!" Alohvar ordered as he turned about.
"What was that, three whole Dec'taa peace?" Teq'ila muttered but Alohvar ignored him as he lit his jet pack and leapt into the sky. Gravity crushed his body down with a familiar surge as the XV8 cleared the yard and thumped onto a rooftop. Another bound took him to a low street and the next to the top of some orbital comm-tower. With each leap he saw the metropolis spread out below him and the conflict raging throughout. The Tau encampment was encircled now, pressed in on all sides by silver automatons. There had been no more chokepoints to form a solid defence, the city was porous and it would have been easy to bypass another roadblock. The Fire Caste were hard-pressed to keep them at bay and were they Imperials would surely have fallen back to concentrate their defence, yet such was not the Tau way, they responded with fluid manoeuvre and rapid redeployments, meeting strength with speed. Meanwhile sporadic bursts from the hovering Manta lent fire support to embattled Tau units.
Alohvar spied flashes of pulse carbine fire below, mixed with red bursts of light and fell into the fray feet first. He landed upon a silver armour, snapping its spine with the impact and crushing the machine under his weight. The other Crisis Suits landed a heartbeat later and their plasma rifles scythed down automatons, blowing melted holes through their mass. From behind a knot of overturned ground-cabs came supporting fire from the Pathfinders, Shas'Ui Uriem directing his squad to stand their ground. Behind them the lone Skyray shot off a missile, expertly aimed to crash down in the rear and blow several armours to pieces.
Alohvar knew they had arrived in the nick of time and laid into the fray, blowing automatons apart with furious barrages of Ion fire. His assault was brutal and direct, eschewing the cunning and skill of the Tau. His Tri-cyclic Ion blaster mowed down opponents while his Onager Gauntlet smote anything in his path. He waded through the fray, obliterating all within reach and kicking away anything that came too close. The superiority of the XV8 Crisis Suit once again proved its worth, besting all foes but the enemy were many and they closed in with unbreakable will.
"Help me!" Spiy'tus suddenly cried in alarm. Alohvar spun about and saw his comrades beleaguered by foes. Three armours were climbing over his frame, heaving themselves up to his cockpit, where surely they would rip him from his cocoon and end him. Alohvar's hearts filled with raw denial as he leapt over and grabbed one by the leg, throwing it away with a twist of the arm. Another was blown clear by a pinpoint shot of plasma fire from Teq'ila, a remarkable feat of marksmanship. Alohvar reached for the last one but before he could grab it the automaton hefted a dull-glass orb and smashed it open on the Crisis Suit. Alohvar reached it a second later and crushed it in his grip but too late, for silver worms wriggled over Spiy'tus, gnawing through nanocrystalline armour with ease.
"Get them off me!" Spiy'tus shouted as he jerked to and fro.
"Hold still!" Alohvar ordered as he turned around.
"They're getting through!" Spiy'tus screamed.
"Hold still!" Alohvar yelled with firm command.
He planted his feet firmly and ignited his jet pack. Thrust jerked him forward but he had calculated the strength of the burst and his feet held their ground. Licking flames shot from his back and washed over Spiy'tus, charring his front black yet failing to penetrate. However the fires seared the silver worms from his armour, leaving them to drop to the ground in withered motes.
"My thanks," Spiy'tus breathed in relief.
"Anytime," Alohvar replied as he disengaged his jet pack.
Yet suddenly Teq'ila shouted, "Watch out!"
Alohvar's sensor head jerked about and he saw an Automaton had closed with the Pathfinders. It bore a bulky harness about its form, which fed ammunition lines into a doughty projectile weapon carried in both hands. Alohvar's Ion blaster came up but too slowly as the foe planted its feet and opened fire. Flaming blue rounds struck the cover around the Pathfinders and shattered, spraying psychoactive fragments everywhere. Those struck by the hail went up like candles, covered head to toe in blue flames and then they vanished, erased completely from reality. Gemynd rounds, a technology mankind had done its very best to forget had ever existed, their flames burned beyond the dimensions of the material universe and extended into the Empyrean below. The flames incinerated not only the body but any connection to the warp; destroying what men would have called the soul. Multi-dimensional flames cauterised every echo and ripple the victim had ever made in the warp, erasing not only their lives but all memory of the person too.
Shas'Ui…. Shas'Ui… Shas… Alohvar was horrified to realise he could no longer recall the name of the Pathfinder leader. That there had been such an individual was obvious but the memory of who that person had been, their name and face and deeds, was lost forevermore. It was as if they had never lived and Alohvar knew he had been robbed of something vital and precious.
"Filth, mad filth!" he roared as he blew the Gemynd gunner away with a flurry of shots. He fired again and again, reducing the armour to slag, then blowing the slag to liquid as his denial drove him to mindless vengeance. He wanted more than to end these foes, he wanted to erase them, to erase this whole planet. The Gue'La had made horrors here that should never have been imagined. Their vile species was capable of depths of depravity beyond compare and the Tau had been fools to trust them. Alohvar realised then that he hated humans; he hated the whole filthy race and would be glad to see them driven into extinction. So he fired again and again into the dead enemy's remains, pouring out his abhorrence in a flurry of ion blasts.
His distraction was to cost them dear, for from the back of the line an automaton hefted a missile launcher and let fly a rocket that slammed into the Skyray. A black mote was released upon impact, spilling out of its wards and reaching out with claws of gravity. A singularity driver, a miniature black hole, touched the Skyray and pulled it into its embrace. Alohvar was nearly dragged from his feet as gravity flooded the street, heaving armours and debris into a tiny locus of mass. A hurricane of fragments was born, circling into an event horizon of pure blackness. The skyray was closest to the epicentre and the tank folded in on itself as it was dragged into that hungry maw, engines crumpling like parchment and armour neatly compacting into itself. The driver couldn't have lasted a heartbeat, compacted into a tiny space no living being could survive. For a Dec'taa the singularity pulsed, then it expired, leaving a tiny ball that was no bigger than Alohvar's fist where once had been a Skyray.
The sight made Alohvar's blood run cold and he realised this position was about to be overrun. The automatons were swelling in number and the Crisis suits alone could not hold. In moments their defeat would be at hand and the Tau base would fall. Filled with desperation he reached out and signalled, "Manta, lock onto these co-ordinates and deploy missile barrages!"
A distant Shas'Vre called, "But commander, you're in the blast zone."
"Do it, that's an order," Alohvar growled then barked to his comrades, "Go, go, go!"
They lit their jet packs and hurtled into the sky, chased by radioactive bolts. The silver armours were left behind as Alohvar was crushed in his cockpit, clawing for more speed. The Crisis team flew as fast as they could, soaring away but it was barely in time. A blur in his vision signalled a flurry of missiles arcing over from the lurking Manta at the heart of their base and then a moment later fireballs bloomed in the street they had evacuated. Alohvar was nearly blown from the sky as the blasts swept outwards, sending him tumbling to the ground in an uncontrolled roll. He slammed into Ferrocrete with an impact that would have shattered his bones, had he not been cushioned by the finest protection, and his suit rolled over as he came up to stare at his handiwork.
The road they had departed was a flaming inferno, filled with towering fires that blew dirty smoke into the sky. All was destruction and woe and nothing could have survived such carnage, not even machines. Alohvar picked himself up and growled, "That was too close."
Spiy'tus swayed to his feet and muttered, "You called down fire on us... again."
"It had to be done," Alohvar growled.
"You saved my life so I'm not complaining," Spiy'tus uttered, "But what do we do now?"
Alohvar cast his gaze over the metropolis and saw the defence was breaking, the Tau couldn't hold another push, the foe was about to breakthrough. Filled with the grim realisation that the battle was entering its final phase Alohvar ordered, "Pull everybody back to the base and make ready to fight to the bitter end. We have no choice now, save to make our last stand."