Warriors and Warlords by Various authors

Author:Various authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-02T16:20:58+00:00

THE KILLING BLOW

BLACKTHUNDER MESA, NEAR DAL’RYU

T’AU SEPT WORLD DAL’YTH PRIME

The Manta Guardian’s Strike slid gracefully through the purple clouds of the Dal’yth sunset. The missile destroyer was large enough to carry an entire hunter cadre to war, and despite its great size, at cruising altitude its engines were little louder than those of a Sun Shark bomber.

Better yet, its electronic signature was masked by extensive dampener suites. Three times had Commanders Bravestorm and Sha’rell used the Strike to attack from a vertical vector, and three times they had landed the first blow without the Imperial tank companies having the slightest chance to parry.

It was what came after that posed the problem.

A wide view of the landscape beneath the Manta, relayed from its ventral cameras to the ten Crisis battlesuits within its modified hold, showed the infamous Blackthunder Mesa. So high its rugged clifftops had a weather system unto themselves, the ridge overlooked the Dal’ryu settlement and the hexagonal system of transmotive rails that linked it to the conurbations beyond.

It had once been a popular pastime amongst Dal’ryu’s youths to hike to the top of the mesa and watch the sun set over the domes. Now, its ridge was host only to spent shells and rotting corpses lousy with indigo maggots.

Since the Imperial invasion had begun, the mesa had been littered with the broken bodies of those t’au who had defended it. Many of the cadavers had since been ground beneath the tracks of the squat, badly camouflaged lumps of metal that the Imperials used as their main-line tanks.

Bravestorm felt his mouth twist in bitter disapproval as the Manta’s scanners penetrated the cloud cover to relay long-range scans to his command-and-control suite. The vehicles atop the ridge were not true fighting machines, but brutish demolitions engines, inelegant even in comparison to the earth caste’s building-levellers.

Each of the Imperial battle tanks was dark green and olive drab. It was a colouration appropriate enough for a verdant world, perhaps, but worse than useless against the mauves and purples of Dal’yth’s plains.

‘Is that supposed to be camouflage?’ said Tro’ari Shendu. The tactician’s tone was that of a rifleman being charged by a distant adversary wielding nothing more than a sharp stick.

‘Another sign of Imperial arrogance,’ said Bravestorm. ‘That is one of their many flaws. Laziness of the mind, and a habit of underestimating their enemy.’ He paused, deep in thought. ‘It will lead to their downfall.’

‘Some might say there is good reason for their pride,’ said Furuja. Bravestorm blipped across the crossed-forearms sign of censure and opened a single communion link. ‘Keep those thoughts to a closed link, if you must express them,’ he said. ‘The ethereal caste has a way of hearing such sentiments.’

He signed off before she could respond, but a small voice in Bravestorm’s mind admitted she had a point. There were literally hundreds of armoured targets down there on the ridge.

He cued up the Manta’s analysis, spooling through direct to his link. Eight hundred and eleven war vehicles in total

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