So immersed was he in his analysis of the AI systems, that only when the faint blue light of the energy shield collapsed upon itself and faded to nothing did he allocate a corner of his processing ability to analysing the new situation. He regarded his surroundings suspiciously, quickly noting the wrecked corpses of storm-troopers littering the chamber’s floor, and the console venting smoke on the next level down. He realised too late that the energy shield was not quite the impenetrable protection he’d surmised.

Before he could consider the new scenario in depth, a bipedal figure surged up the ramp onto the top tier and raised a weapon. Natsan grudgingly allowed his entire mind to drop the complex algorithms it had been studying and concentrated upon the new threat.

He drew his pistol.

Kais was up and sprinting before he had time to think.

There were two of them, he saw, and they were fast. They were armed and firing in a heartbeat, so alike in their movements they could have been twin linked machines or mirror reflections. They shifted in a rolling gaggle of insect jerks, metal pitted heads clicking like broken engines as they tracked him, eyes twinkling from the darkness beneath their black robes.

Kais thumbed a thirty-raik’an delay on a grenade and rolled it silently towards them, scurrying for cover. He pushed his armoured shoulder into the ground and rolled towards a dip in the mezzanine floor; radiant orbs of plasma impacting all around, splattering liquid metal across the dome of his helmet. The cover swallowed him up and he fought the temptation to lurk there, catching his breath.

Instead he sprinted onwards, sensing the fio’tak haemorrhaging behind him in an eruption of plasma and shrapnel. Scampering across the control tier, he caught a brief glimpse of black robes to his left and fired a ragged cluster of pulses towards them, earning a satisfying belch of smoke and sparks and forcing the gue’la back behind the sho’aun’or’es energy stack, near to where he’d secreted the grenade. Kais winced inside his helmet: a single breach of the core would not only cripple the ship’s movement but risked destroying the entire lower segments of the vessel.

As if testing his fears, the grenade detonated.

The first gue’la, the one with slightly less artificial features and two complete arms, was taken by surprise, somersaulting backwards on the crest of the Shockwave, legs detaching in a tracery of mechanical joints and ribbon sliced flesh. It screamed at the apex of its impromptu flight and Kais, never staying still for a moment, pumped two carbine rounds into its jerking torso before it had even slapped into the deck. It landed with a crack and flipped backwards off the tier. Every time it landed it bounced outwards, shedding chunks of biotech and flesh.

Kais watched it all the way, resisting the smile forming around his lips. The energy pillar, he noticed with relief, was undamaged.

The other gue’la, one arm ending in a scar tissue clump, lurched from the tangled wreckage in a crescendo of creaking parts and chittering components. Its shrapnel shredded face, welts of flesh hanging loose from the cable-studded bone beneath, stared ghoulishly. It was a lurching remnant of a being, neither crying out in agony or sneering in pain-dampening insanity at its injuries. But its eyes... its eyes were cold and dead — mechanical orbs of ice and metal. It raised the plasma pistol in a single angle-perfect movement, weapon fixating on Kais faster than he could ever hope to react. It pulled the trigger.

Kais wondered abstractly, in that miniscule moment before he died, whether he was looking at the gue’la vision of the tau’va.

For the tau, he thought, the One Path is a victory over individuality. It is gestalt over self, rationality over impulse, logic over spontaneity, focus over Mont’au...

But this thing, this creature with a scarred brain and a body more metallic than organic, this thing is rationality, it is logic, it is tau’va...

Is that what we’re trying to become, he asked himself? Painless, fearless, passionless... Monsters?

The plasma pistol made a sound.

Fzzk.

The gue’la tilted its head and squeezed the trigger again. A row of warning icons illuminated in fiery red along the bottom of Kais’s HUD, detecting a surge of energy nearby. He squinted at the gue’la pistol, heart racing. A single sliver of shrapnel had gouged itself into the firing mechanism at the base of the weapon’s barrel, smoking with a burgeoning hiss.

The gue’la vanished beneath a cloud of fire, flames billowing outwards and hurling Kais to the floor. Unvented promethium ignited in a rush, an inverted waterfall of thermal fury that gushed over him and boiled upwards to lash impotently against the chamber ceiling.

He stooped to his feet when the inferno finally abated, methodically checking for injuries. The gue’la priest stood as it had been before the explosion, skin peeling back, extended gun arm obliterated at the shoulder, a rarified sculpture with charred skin. Kais, shaking his head to clear the exhaustion, thought its blackening features seemed somehow interested, as though analysing its own immolation. Its expression of scrutiny remained until its silvery eyes melted and the flames burned through from the inside of its skull.

Kais stood and watched it until it flopped to the floor and was still. He watched until the cables and tubules running throughout its frame began to liquefy and puddle around it. He watched until the reinforcements arrived and Lusha voxed him with an almost paternal expression of congratulation.

He stood and watched the flickering, crumbling husk until it atomised and gusted away, and as he watched he wondered which was worse: to surrender to rage or to become a living machine?

He didn’t know the answer.

Kor’o Natash T’yra took a final glance at the Tash’var’s status display, patted Kor’el Siet fondly on the shoulder to finalise the temporary delegation of command and hurried off the bridge into the boardroom. The Aun’chia’gor was already underway.

The origins of the ceremony were clearly prescribed in the datatexts of Kilto and it had remained almost unchanged in the two and a half thousand tau’cyrs since its inception. It was a product of the time of Mont’au, before the Auns came, when the tribes of T’au balanced on the very verge of self destruction.

As history had recorded, at the siege of Fio’taun, when the fate of an entire species hung precariously in the balance, where only a miracle could have prevented the emergence of an age of anarchy and turmoil, something impossible occurred.

There had been lights, glimpsed dimly around the distant mountaintops, for three rotaas. Stories spread amongst the armies of strange figures lurking in the mist of the hills, colourful attire and fluted limbs melting and capering through the haze. In the heat of battle few of the tribes gave any credence to the tales, stubbornly ignoring the phenomena that pulsed in the night sky, bending all their attention upon the hostilities that were tearing their world apart. On the final day the wind had carried strange resonances, swept aloft from the heights of the jagged peaks. They sounded, the Kilto histories recorded, like a choir of voices, raised in a song of impossible beauty.

And then the Auns had appeared. They came slowly, calmly — barefooted and unsullied by the hate and suspicion of their astonished brethren. They stepped between the campfires of the besieging army and appeared as if from nowhere within the impassable walls of the city.