Number of kills. Courage under fire. Objectives overcome. Real things; physical, violent things. For them these were the heart of their struggles and challenges, their Trials by Fire. He envied them the simplicity of their test.

Twice now since boarding this vaulted sepulchre-in-space he’d been forced to slam shut his eyes and drag the rage into a confined ball of focus, reciting his father’s meditation over and over and over.

The hangar had been a killing ground, a debris-strewn abattoir streaked through by crash landing capsules, mangled gue’la attack craft and artillery fire, digging gouges from the deck and dousing everything in burning fuel, air-skimming debris and blood. He’d lost control, briefly. He’d sprung from his burning shuttle with an adrenaline surge, spraying the panicky gue’la with carbine fire. He’d watched a boarding capsule plough into their pintle guns like a vengeful meteor, pulping their frail bodies and detonating in a whirlwind of overheating munitions. The other tau, converging on the masked plinth where he’d established his slaying point, had cried out in horror at the carnage. He’d smiled.

It happened again whilst disabling the guns on the deck below. It was as though a haze came down, like nothing was real and everything was distant. It felt like being numb: his inadequacies filled the world, a shadow gallery of frustrated instructors, mocking cadre mates and, above it all, his father’s disappointed eyes, seeing nothing but uselessness in his own son. In every moment of every heartbeat Kais knew... He’d never be so great, so respected, so focused as his father had expected him to be. He was flawed and it hurt.

And the only thing that could cut through the pain, that could remind him of being alive, that could convince him he was something other than a drone within a hive, was the screaming and the fire and the gurgling and the violence. It broke through the shell and it was addictive.

So he’d endured it, little by little, until he could see through the rage and think through the adrenaline. Every time it came upon him it became a little harder to claw his way back to the surface, back to rationality.

They’d disabled the weapons, they’d crippled the shield, they’d regrouped and congratulated one another like shas’saals after their first rotaa of training.

Kais had stood apart, new armour already tarnished with soot and blood, and thought: children.

Then the orders had come through, Lusha’s voice sounding broken and distorted by whatever dampening shields the gue’la ship employed, and Kais’s team was away, heading for the engine rooms in a gaggle of stringently by-the-book squad deployments. Kais rolled his eyes and kept quiet, guiltily waiting for the killing to begin again.

The Enduring Blade was unlike anything he could have prepared himself for. So radically alien to the gentle camber of all tau construction, this was a labyrinth of clipped corners, square-hewn buttresses and vast archways. Side arteries branched away unexpectedly, cloistered passages of conduit-striated shadows and undulating serpents of ducts and cables. A creeping tide of rust smeared itself across the gunmetal walls, water dribbling incontinently from fractured pipes and panels.

Narrow tunnels opened into breath-catching galleries, where backlit icons marking the walls illuminated capering dust motes high above, and chittering rodent vermin scurried in the gloom. In these vaulted chambers the faux-machismo of the team would stutter out and they’d slink silently as if cowed by the sheer enormity of the place. Kais appreciated the moments of quiet; as soon as the tunnel was rejoined the silence was inevitably shattered.

“Corner check, two by two.”

“Checking the blacksun-fil—. Hold... Zone clear. Moving on.”

“Scan track? Scan track?”

“High-level ye’qua’li radiation. Probable enemy presence.”

And so on. It was boring, thought Kais, and on both occasions where frightened knots of gue’la troopers had appeared, all the shas’las’ military bravado had served them not a jot. Within instants of the helmet scanners detecting movement the team split, a textbook left-right division. Those to the rear could provide cover in case of a fallback and the line warriors nearest the targets could lay down pinning fire. Thus covered, the secondary and tertiary pairs — carrying rifles — could take a more accurate bead on the enemy. Standard, routine: proven to work.

Kais had no patience for it. He shredded the first wave of gue’la with a grenade even as they rounded the corner ahead, then pumped carbine fire into the heads of the others as they staggered, shellshocked and gore-splattered, from the smoke. They went down in a tangle, pulped skulls shredding like overripe griy’na fruits, limbs twitching and clawing at the air.

The other shas’las never fired a single shot.

So, yes, they were in awe of him. They exchanged whispered conversations whilst glancing in his direction, tried to keep pace as he silently haunted the shadows and prattled uselessly to make themselves feel professional. It was pathetic.

Amongst the strangers of his team Kais recognised three of the warriors: fellow first-timers who’d trained and graduated with him in the battledome on T’au. They’d preened and performed flawlessly back then, impressing instructors and drill-shas’vres with their coolheadedness and their unblinking faith in the tau’va. Back then, he’d been in awe of them.

He caught one of them staring and grinned to himself.

Further along the corridor, its distant apex hidden behind the mask of deep gloom, someone screamed. Kais thought it probably gue’la but wasn’t sure; it was a shriek of terror and pain that transcended language and became a force, raising the cir’etz scales along his spine and neck with a shiver. The other shas’las froze, ducking into corners instinctively. The scream shut off as abruptly as it had begun.

One of the shas’las, voice quavering, said “What was—?”

“Quiet.” Kais waved the others out of their cover and cautiously moved along the corridor. The team exchanged glances and followed, fingers tight around gun triggers.

The walk seemed to last forever, the dim lighting achieving little other than hardening the resolution of the shadows. Everything was still and silent, like entering the gut of some long-dead behemoth. Dust rose spectrally from the floor with each step, tumbling in its slow dance before settling again. Each hoof-fall became a miniature gong blast that echoed briefly before being swallowed by the completeness of the silence.

The next scream was louder still, accompanied this time by a shuddering, clanging cacophony: something beating against metal. Kais felt his blood freeze and pushed himself against the wall, reassured by its solidity. One of the shas’las moaned quietly into the comm. The silence resumed, even thicker than before.

He activated his blacksun filters, nictitating lenses sliding across his helmet optics. Instantly the world was rendered lurid and kaleidoscopic, long corridor daubed in bright green hues. Rodents — bristling patches of bright yellow and white — lurked in the shallow gullies to either side of the deck grille. But there was something else: at the top of the hall where the path turned sharply to the left, a nebulous haze of yellows and oranges wafted ethereally across his vision. There was something warm up there.

“Wait here,” he murmured into the comm, not waiting for a reply. The others took up covering positions with characteristic good grace.

He inched into the green-lit gloom, his own breathing seeming unnaturally loud in the hot confines of his helmet. The glowing icons on his HUD representing the other shas’las faded slowly to the rear, leaving him utterly alone. Two tor’leks from the corner, eyes fixed rigidly upon that unbroken line of pitted wall, he stopped and held his breath, listening.