++They can’t. The shields will h—++

[Picking up plasma fire.]

[Living god! Look at that payload!]

[Terra’s bones!]

++Th... upid... can’t ho... n... astards!++

[Throne...]

++They’ve knocked out my shield! Assist! Assist!++

[I’m engaged. Can’t get away—]

[Oh terra! They’ve g—]

[Shuttles homing on you, admiral.]

[...ammit, the generarium’s brea—]

[...]

[Brace-brace-brace!]

[The Reverus has gone...]

[Sweet Emperor... They’re so fast...]

++Th... This is...++

++All vessels... All vessels engage and destroy!++

++Forget the bloody ethereal!++

++In the Emperor’s name, make them bleed!++

They called it se’hen che lel. Riding the lightning.

Kais had undergone training, tau’cyrs earlier in the battledome. He remembered the first time. He’d been heartily sick afterwards and was somewhat gratified to find his friends equally as green as was he.

The real thing was worse. Strapped into a one-tau pod like an insect moulded into a bullet, the shuttle tube was little more than a vast railgun: linear energies dragging the pod along a frictionless tunnel with a succession of sonic booms. The view through the small window above his face stopped making any sense as the pod’s velocity increased exponentially and the rounded struts of the tunnel became a single tawny-coloured smear. A vibration grew from nothingness into a dreadful quake, threatening to splinter his armour and turn his body to powder. He gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to cry out. Then the roar ceased, the blur of the tunnel was wiped away in a daub of star speckled blackness and he was streaking across the void.

“They’d tried to stop him. First Ju,” then the others in her team, then Lusha over the comm. He’d earned his rest, they’d said. There were more than enough shas’las for the assault. He’d done his duty. He was a hero. Let it be.

Then they’d grown angry, despairing of his obstinate refusal to rest. He’d been shot in the head, by the One Path. Even by the pragmatic unsuperstitious standards of taukind he was pushing his luck. Hadn’t he done enough?

No.

No, he had not. The trial wasn’t over. He felt it in his bones.

He must face the Mont’au devil again and again and again until he killed it or it became him. Then, he supposed, if he hadn’t died first, the trial would be over. So they rearmed and resulted, filled their packs with as much wargear as they could carry, distributed miniature kor’vesa slave drones, strapped each other into hypervelocity capsules and were unceremoniously blasted at the beaked vulture-shape that was the Enduring Blade.

He’d refused to take a new helmet, though he couldn’t exactly explain why.

The dud bolter-shell might detonate at any moment, he supposed, failed gue’la artifices fizzling to life and blasting his head from his shoulders. And, just as easily, he might detonate at any moment, the devil on his back reaching into his heart and snapping the frail chord leading to the tau’va. Parallels and echoes.

It was sentimentality of the very worst kind, and Ju had looked at him like he was insane when he refused the pristine replacement she offered him. It didn’t matter. This was his Trial by Fire and he’d deal with it in his way.

Alone in the capsule the silence was thick, like being suffocated in velvet. Peering through the maddeningly tiny viewport, Kais was barely aware of moving at all, let alone hurtling at dizzying speed. He wondered vaguely how many other shas’las streaked ahead and behind him, each one immersed in his or her own silent world of introspection and fear.

El’Lusha’s voice startled him, echoing across a multi-band channel.

“Shas’las? We’ve overloaded their void shields but they won’t stay down for long. Shuttle trackers have a lock on their juntas-side launch bays, so that’s your insertion point. Your first priority after splashdown is to knock out the hangar weapons and disrupt their shield generators in the long-term. After that, strategic boarding strategies apply Cripple the engines, capture the bridge, disable the weapons.

“The Aun’el offers his fondest regards and wishes you well in your endeavours. T’au’va be with you, line warriors.”

Before the comm-channel closed, Kais heard the quiet whistle of the bandwidth narrowing. “And La’Kais? Remember the machine.”

With that the comm died and the silence unfolded its wings around him. A bright row of characters at his side dimmed gradually, representing his approach to the target in a chorus of quiet chimes and light levels.

“Thirty raik’ans,” the capsule’s AI trilled. Kais swallowed.

Abruptly his view through the port window changed: the blackness of space was replaced by a ghastly facade of buttresses and spines, vast crenellated towers and spindly steeples, looming towards him. Perspective was impossible to judge; just as it seemed inevitable that he’d smash across the intricate cliff face his senses realigned to accommodate its despicable vastness. Every moment of diminishing proximity was a moment where its enormity became more and more apparent.

The capsule shuddered, AI chiming in alarm and thrusters struggling to realign. Angry light bloomed in the viewportal, little more than a flicker that was gone in a moment. It happened again and he frowned, confused. Above, high on the architectural mountain, bright pinpricks of las-fire and shrapnel flak stabbed from the vessel’s vaulted, pitted hull, detonating spectacularly around the ghostly arrowheads of tau fighters that soared past, burst cannons dissecting great blocks of obsidian armour. Another petal of fire oozed past him, close, and he realised with a quickening heartbeat that the gue’la were firing at the hail of capsules as well as the fighters.

He’d imagined this, tau’cyrs ago, after the simulations. He’d imagined rumbling artillery, a constant drone of blossoming explosions and the shuddering chaos of running the firebelt gauntlet, watching helplessly as his comrades were plucked from the air like irritating insects, wondering whether he’d be one of the lucky ones.

He hadn’t imagined the silence, the stillness. At any moment he could fly apart in a suffocating ball of shrapnel and fiery laser heat — singeing and freezing and detonating all at once — and he’d never see it coming. Until then he was a rodent, sealed in a s’peiy-bottle and cast adrift at sea, never knowing if it would reach the shore or perish, always expecting but never anticipating the jaws of a t’pel shark around it.

Drift with the current. Be not concerned with that which you cannot control.

A snippet from the D’havre meditation. He’d never remembered the rest.

“Ten raik’ans.”

He took a final, heartstopping glimpse through the viewportal as the launch bay swallowed him, a gun-metal blur of tunnel lights and shadows. The capsule chimed, volume growing.

“Brace,” it chirped, the artificial voice sounding bored.

It shuddered heavily, passing through the field generator separating the atmosphere-rich interior of the hangars from the hard vacuum beyond. There was silence for a brief moment before the capsule hit the deck with a galaxy-splitting crump. It bounced and skidded.

There was noise and pain. There was tumbling and spinning and splintering. There was nonsensical, blurring insanity through the viewportal.

And finally, after an eternity of madness, there was stillness.

Librarian Delpheus’s prediction had been correct, it would seem.

Ardias armed his bolt pistol with a cold rasp and stamped into the briefing hall. A servitor’s mechanised drone piped again and again across the vessel’s internal vox.

“All hands to repel boarders. All hands to repel boarders. All hands to repel boarders. All hands to—”