The Value of a Closed Fist

The city was built of laughter and screams and sometimes it was hard to tell which were which. It was haphazard, it was chaotic, its form rejected reason and sanity, its lines and curves were intagliated with cruelty and malice. The specter of death haunted its alleys and coiled about its towers, crept beneath floors and oozed between the walls, omnipresent, omni-malevolent, forever reaching for both slavers and slaves alike. It was a city of pleasure and pain, both tinged with desperation, the atmosphere of a party on the eve of Armageddon. It was a city of blades, and was itself balanced upon the point of one.

Kravzheyn wandered the tunnels beneath his home, trailing long fingers along walls mortared in the bones of his enemies, descending through generations of foes like geological layers, passing tapestries made of their flayed skins or plaques decorated with their heads (some kept artificially alive) or other notable body parts. He dangled his hand before the face of an ork half-immured in the wall, just out of its reach. He’d injected it with a petrifying virus—inch by inch, over the years it was slowly becoming an integral part of the wall it was partially encased within. Kravezheyn watched clinically as it struggled to bite and claw at him, but even this game gave him no pleasure that day.

He sighed, long and heavily, briefly considered just killing the thing, but no, that was precisely what the ork was hoping he’d do.

“I am in a fey humor,” he told the ork.

It bellowed and roared at him, straining stupidly against the steel and stone that held it immobile.

“I quite agree. The color has all but drained from the experience. The repetition, the banality of it all wears at me. Even torturing you feels rote.”

Its neck muscles strained, tendons standing out like building beams, its massive, tusked jaws snapped on nothing with a frustrated snarl.

“And well you might be surprised,” Kravzheyn nodded in sympathy. “Even I tire of these torments, necessary though they might be. Still, don’t worry. I’ll keep you around for a while yet. This melancholy may be a passing fancy. Perhaps the new toy will change my mind.”

The chamber at the end of the tunnel held the latest of his experiments. A grey-blue humanoid was pinned to the wall, its arms and legs entangled in mucous-wet and glistening tentacles, while a spider-thing hunched heavily upon its shoulders, probing the back of its cranium with scalpel-bladed appendages. From the spider-device’s mandibles emerged a milky, thin substance that it slowly, delicately and gently fed into the blue one’s head. With each probe the prisoner twitched, convulsed and moaned in a voice scarred well past screaming. He’d have to do something about that.

Kravzheyn drew up a seat and watched the machine’s ministrations through heavily-lidded eyes, his long chin resting upon one palm. The prisoner’s eyes opened and regarded him flatly, without interest or alarm. The two held gazes for a long moment.

“You people disappoint me,” Kravzheyn told it at last. “I had such hope you would provide some new entertainment.”

He thought he detected a trace of—what?—pity in those eyes.

Such amusing arrogance, such misplaced hubris! He was a scion of a civilization already ancient before this thing’s single-celled ancestors had slumped from the primordial soup of whatever fetid planet they called home. Look at its hoofed feet—clear evidence this species was a prey animal, meat for the hunters and predators of the galaxy.

“But so far you’ve all proven so very dull, so very drearily boring and dull,” Kravzheyn pressed on, irked but not unpleasantly so. Any feeling was better than monotony. “I hooked up six of your brothers and sisters to a machine which dispensed a steady drip of tissue-eating acid into each of their craniums. Acutely, deliciously painful, of course. As they slowly lost control over their organs, the effect was a bit like being buried alive in their own bodies. Ah, but, I gave them one option, one way out: At the push of a button, they could divert the acid from their own heads into one of their fellows’ instead, though they had to choose which one, of course. A wonderful recreation of the realities of existence, don’t you see, kill or be killed, the morality of the universe made miniature. Do you know what happened?”

He let the question hang. His prisoner made no response, indeed failed to even acknowledge the question. It simply regarded him with the same superior loathing. “Nothing. They all died, screaming until they forgot how to speak or breathe, all without ever once pushing a button. Dull. Dull, dull, boring and dull.”

Oh dear, now the thing was now looking grimly smug, as though the story had confirmed some long-held yet pessimistic belief.

“Try that with the mon-keigh and you barely have time to switch the device on before they’ve poisoned each other to death.” Kravzheyn chuckled and shook his head, like an indulgent parent amused at the folly of children.

The prisoner’s head drooped, no longer listening.

“How are we doing?” Kravzheyn rose and prodded it in the chest with a finger. “Not too comfortable, I hope? You know what this is doing? No? We have a weapon, a kind of lash called an agonizer, which does exactly what you think, only the damnable thing is you have to actually hold it in your hand and whip your enemies with it. Very tiresome. I’ve come up with a wonderful, labor-saving alternative: This device is inserting an agonizer filament into your body, sort of like a parasitic nervous system, perfectly mapping and reproducing your natural one, only the new one will be responsive to my commands. You’ll feel pain whenever and wherever I desire, without needing to lay a finger on you. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

The head lifted, glazed red eyes met his. “Once, in the time of the Mont’au, we were like you,” it croaked. “Vicious and cruel, short-sighted, selfish. When we were primitive and—aAAAaaAh—uncultured.”

Kravzheyn nearly killed it then, for its insolence. He was reaching for his demiklaive, but then took a breath, calmed himself. The prisoner still stared boldly back at him, daring him almost. “I could pluck your eyeballs out, you know, leave the nerve endings intact long enough for you to see your own mutilated face.”

“You could,” it agreed. “There is a parasite, a—aaAAghuaAA—a worm, on one of our worlds, that burrows into the eyes of children. You could do what that mindless worm does, yes.”

Kravzheyn chuckled and waggled a finger before the thing’s face. “Oho, call me a worm, eh? Don’t try to tempt me into killing you quickly, my noseless, flat-faced friend,” he chided. “I’ve been baited by prisoners far wittier than yourself. I can kill you whenever I like, however I like.”

“Any animal can kill,” the prisoner panted. “Any virus can kill. They do it by instinct—urrrgh—out of necessity.”

“Do not pretend you are any different.” The thing was getting to him, Kravzheyn realized, feeling himself growing genuinely angry. He was rather enjoying the sensation. Just when he had thought the world was growing grey, here was an emotion he had not felt in many long years. These primitives might provide some entertainment, after all.

“We are different,” it declared. “You have seen that, with your twisted game. We Tau are more than mere animals. We have risen above such brutish instinct. We have put aside the solipsistic nihilism that you wallow in. Under the guidance of the Ethereals, we work together to make the universe a better place, in unity, in harmony, as one. This is the Tau’va.”

“You are no better. Your Tau’va and its rules and laws are a delusion, a sham. A pretty lie you tell yourselves, a servile philosophy, a slave’s way of life. The universe is driven by one law, and one force alone, and that is death. Collaboration and cooperation breed weakness, not strength. The weak die, the strong and adaptable survive. They sustain themselves upon death. They feast upon the pain of the weak. Life survives through the instinct to preserve itself, whatever the cost. Self-interest is the only truth. That is why we are stronger than you, and that is why you are the prisoner, I am the captor.”

The prisoner shook its head. “Kill me then. Only spare me your juvenile justifications and excuses. You are a slave to your appetites and desires. Although I am bound, I will die freer than you have ever been.”

The spider-device chimed, withdrew its needle-pointed appendages from the prisoner’s head, and scuttled up the wall into darkness. Kravsheyn absently watched it go, thinking. Silence filled the room, nothing compounded upon nothing, and in that nothing Kravzheyn felt a tug within him, something reaching for him, seeking to tease out a thread of his being.

The ever-hungering one.

“Release,” he murmured, and the tendrils unwrapped from about the Tau’s limbs and let it fall heavily to the ground.

It curled into a ball and moaned. Time to test his new device.

“Fire,” Kravezheyn murmured, and the Tau began to scream and writhe and flail upon the ground, fingers scrabbling at vainly at its skin, hooves drumming a frantic beat in the dust. He watched it for a while, then said: “Stop.”

“Kill me,” the Tau croaked when it could speak again. “Kill me. You have to, you must, don’t you? Slave that you are.”

“No,” Kravzheyn shook his head, glacially slow, once, twice. “No, I’m not going to kill you. Not yet. I will do better than that. First, I am going to teach you. I will show you the error of your belief. I will return you to your people and show you the pain that underpins your coddled existence. You will see the real, raw struggle that seethes beneath the placid façade. And before I end your life, you will admit that I am right.”

#

It was a city of concentric circles of rounded buildings, their walls clad in warm sun-kissed stone of striated peach, cloudy pink and dusky rose. Every line and curve spoke of careful thought, a balance of function and form, practicality and beauty. Nothing felt arbitrary or rushed. Even time itself seemed to slow in the treacly amber sunlight. Neat, orderly streets swept fastidiously clean, paved with evenly-spaced circular flagstones, lined and shaded by trees of pale grey wood and their leafy crowns of gold and orange. Water sang from fountains and ran in a hundred laughing streams. Voices drifted on the wind between the houses, rising and falling in gentle rhythm, parting here and there for a gust of soft merriment.

For all its mirth it was a guarded city. It was girded in a low, steeply sloped wall, bristling at regular intervals with bunkers for rail guns and ion cannon, patrolled by clutches of golden-armored warriors and pierced by gates at each cardinal point. The gates, however, stood open, and a steady flow of vehicles and pedestrians passed in and out without even a cursory glance at the defenses.

To Fio’La Bor’kan Anais Jed’zal, it was as though she had awakened from a nightmare. There had been no transition, no awareness of movement, no memory of how she had arrived here, simply one moment she had been pinned upon the wall of a nightmare prison, poked and prodded like the specimen of some rare insect, the next moment she was here, by the road leading to the city, naked and sore but alive. She tottered to her feet, shivered and hugged herself although the morning was warm.

An antigrav cargo truck slowed, the driver staring and leaning out the window, then accelerated as the next vehicle came barreling down the road behind it. A group of pilgrims on the road, laden with packs and carrying walking sticks, slowed and stopped to look at her, curiosity migrating to concern as they saw her nakedness, and the bruises and scars upon her skin.

Jed’zal raised a hand, opened her mouth to call out to them when the pain hit. It was as though she had been dipped in acid. Every particle of her body suddenly screamed in agony. She collapsed. She thrashed and contorted and sought escape, but there was none. It burned inside her veins, behind her eyes, in her teeth, in her head. She clawed futilely at her skin, drawing blood, she retched, she vomited, and still the pain went on and on and on and on.

And then it was gone, leaving her drained and spent and gasping for air.

It had not been a dream, no, not a nightmare. The thing he had planted within her was there, beneath her skin. She flexed her traitor fingers, ran her hands along her arms, probing, trying to feel for some cable or cord or wire, a puppet searching for its strings. Nothing.

The pilgrims had drawn back, whispering to one another, eyeing her in silent suspicion. Who was this madwoman, they whispered, was she afflicted by some disease, perhaps, or else something more sinister, a poison or bio-weapon? They began to shuffle away, murmuring that someone should call the medics, or better yet, call the constabulary. Not to be callous, of course, just to be safe. One had to consider what was best for all.

Thanks to the cargo vehicle driver, the alarm had been raised. A cadre of armed warriors appeared, hastening towards her, hands on their weapons. The city gates began to swing shut.

Paradise was closed to her.

Jed’zal tried to stand on shaking, wobbling legs, but they would not bear the weight, and she fell back to her knees. She wept, cried and cried as she had never cried even in the darkest depths of her imprisonment, threw back her head and howled at the sky.

#

Her interrogators led her back to the room she had been given. It was not a cell, for there was no lock, no bars over the door or windows, and yet it was. Just as the others were not called interrogators, and yet they were. They said she was free to go but this was pure politeness, a necessary fiction to cover the fact she was a suspect, someone to be watched and guarded and carefully questioned.

And so each day she relived and relived the attack, her imprisonment, everything she had seen and suffered. She had told the planetary governor, Aun’O’Ko, her advisors and generals everything she could remember about her enslavement, her torture, the deaths of the others, the weapons and tactics of the pale ones, everything that might help the Empire fight back.

She thought her release and being allowed to come back here had meant the end of her torment. No. It had been just the beginning.

It was a small, functional room. A mat to sleep on. An eating area. Access to entertainment programming, carefully censored, containing nothing about the sept’s current events. A small, weak lumen for light. They hadn’t thought what the dark might mean to her now. She sat on the sleeping mat and stared at the wall. Dreading sleep.

She realized she was not alone. There was a figure, seated in the corner, keeping perfectly still. Its face was hidden in shadow, but she felt it watching her.

“I have answered your questions,” she said dully. “More than once. Some of them a dozen times. Is that not enough?”

“It is not for you to decide what is or is not enough, La’Anais.” The voice was robotic, filtered to hide its identity. She did not miss the deliberate use of her rank, however. A rebuke, a clear one.

Jed’zal bowed her head in apology. “I only meant these memories are … painful. Disturbing. You know everything. What more is to be gained? Can you not let me go?”

“Perhaps,” the voice allowed. “What would you do, La’Anais, if we allowed you to leave?”

“Auto-euthanasia,” she said automatically.

The other said nothing, merely waited.

“I have no desire to live with these images, these memories,” she felt driven to explain. “But more than that, I can be of no further use to my caste, the sept or the Empire. I would be a drain. Worse, I would be a target. I feel sure my captor will return to torment me again. Those around me will be in danger. It is better for all that I die, then he will have no reason to pursue us.”

“No,” the voice said simply.

“No?”

“You are forbidden to kill yourself. By the order of Aun’Ko.”

Jed’zal slumped, fell sideways onto the mat. She felt the last of her strength leaking through her skin, leaving her a hollow husk. Even a final release was denied her. “Why?”

“For the Tau’va.” A non-answer in the Tau language. A human would have said, ‘just because.’

“They are strong,” she said, softly, more to herself than the other. “Fast and cruel and so very, very strong.” Maybe her captor was right. It had been easy to spit defiance at him in the dungeon but now, her brash confidence and defiance seemed foolish things. He had been right, the Tau were weak, they hadn’t been able to stop him and his brethren before. They had come and killed and taken the rest away and there had been nothing anybody could do to stop them. These fragile walls would not stop him. The paltry few guards would barely even slow him. What use was harmony and cooperation when the lone predator could rip it all away from you?

“You have shown incredible bravery and resilience,” the other said, as though reading her mind. “The sept will have need of such qualities. But you are right, you cannot stay here. A place will be prepared for you. A guardian will be assigned.”

Ah, so not death then, she thought. Exile.

“They are killers, predators."

There was a long pause, and for the first time the figure moved, leaned forward slightly. “Do you think we Tau would be stronger, if back during the Mont’au the fire caste had annihilated the other three? No air, no water, no earth, only fire. Would we be powerful then? No. Cooperation and diversity are not weaknesses, Jed’zal. They are strengths. You will see that. In time.”

Jed’zal was not listening. Over and over, she kept repeating the word in her mind: Exile.

#

Jed’zal sat cross-legged on the beach, and watched the waves rise and recede, rise and recede, in endless repetitive cycle, a small cosmos of water molecules expanding and contracting, Big Bang to Big Bust, over and over. It was soothing, calming. Reassuring. Whatever happened to each individual wave, it would inevitably be called back to the ocean, there to gestate and be born anew, clean and fresh and foam-flecked.

The individual did not matter. The sea endured.

A sea-bird alighted on the sand just out of arm’s reach. It cocked its head at her, regarding her first with one black button eye, then the other, quorking to itself. Unsure if she were dead, perhaps, mustering its courage to peck at her. Other birds circled overhead, their cycles and rhythmic and endless as the waves, turn, dip, rise, turn, dip rise. Watching their flock-brother, no doubt, ready to land or fly away, depending on his fate. The flock endured.

It had been three tau’cyr since her release from Commorragh, though the memory was still fresh and clear and sharp. Three tau’cyr alone in a wooden, one-room seaside shack they’d given her, on this isolated stretch of sandy coast. Three times, in all that time, she had been suddenly struck down, pain exploding through every limb, such pain she felt sure her bones must surely burst straight through her skin, but then gone as suddenly as it began. A reminder, a threat and promise. She was no longer a prisoner, but she was far from free.

The third time had been last night.

Footfalls crunched in the sand behind her, and the sea bird, startled, hurriedly flapped away, crying in plaintive, shrilly panic as it went. Jed’zal watched it arc out over the waves, a slight smile upon her lips, until the other came alongside and squatted beside her.

“You’re up early.” The words might have been spoken by the sand, coarse and gritty, filled with the detritus of a thousand ages. “Another visitation?”

Jed’zal looked at her companion. Shas’Vre Bor’kan Shikau was as weathered and knotted as the driftwood walls of her hut, burnt near to indigo by the rays of a hundred different suns, gaunt and corded as though that heat had evaporated everything unnecessary—all fat, all softness, all gentleness had been wrung from him, leaving only a dry husk. Her guardian, they had said. He visited twice a day, brought food but little comfort. She had heard of hunters who would tether a prey beast in the middle of open ground to lure out a predator. That was her. She was the lure. He, the hunter.

“Yes,” she said simply. “The third time. I think he will return soon.”

“Good,” Shikau only grunted, squinting out to sea. Reading the future there, like an ancient soothsayer, in the patterns of bird flights and the shaping of the clouds.

“Good?” she repeated. “Good? These foes appear without warning, move like lightning, wield weapons that kill at the slightest touch, and are utterly ruthless and brutal. What, precisely, strikes you as good about this situation?”

The gnarled face regarded her. “Scared?”

“Of course I am! Terrified!” Her fist pounded frustrated craters into the useless sand. “Do you understand what happened to me? To everyone I’d known and loved? The horrors I witnessed, the ones I endured?”

Shikau thought about it, looked her up and down, and smiled. His teeth were all gone, replaced with dull silver false ones, and his smile gleamed in the sun. “You’ll be fine.”

Fine? A desiccated, iron-toothed mummy told her she would be fine. By his standards, maybe she would. It was hardly a comforting thought. She shivered in the wind.

#

Jed’zal’s dreams were haunted, black and tarry spider-web things that clung to her and trapped her and always she was on the wall, that horrible wall again, always and forever she was hanging again from that wall, and the ghostly face looked up at her and promised pain. The face itself changed. Sometimes it was the pale devil himself and sometimes it was Shikau, or else friends and family and lovers, and they all smiled when she cried out, and they all promised her pain. Many things changed in the dream. The promise of pain never did.

Tonight, in the dream she was not on the wall but in her bed. And the ghost stood outside her doorway and called out to her.

Jed’zal’s eyes snapped open. Her home. Her cot. Dark inside. No light through the windows. Food preparation area in one corner, cooking utensils slowly rusting in the sea-salt air. Rugs mountained and hilly over the sandy ground beneath. Silent and still. Something there though. Something had woken her. She had to look, had to check. Didn’t dare to. But had to. She turned her neck, moving no other muscle, and looked towards the doorway.

He was there.

A gaunt grey shadow against a deeper, blacker night.

“Knock, knock,” the ghost-figure said.

She sat up slowly, reluctantly, a marionette pulled on invisible strings. “Come in,” she said, pleased she could keep her voice calm and level. There was an invisible laser tripwire across the door, the only thing in the entire hut that couldn’t have been built a thousand years ago. “Make yourself at home.”

“Home? This is a prison cell without the decent honesty of bars. It’s rudimentary even by your species’ pathetic standards.” He started forward, then stilled into sudden immobility just before the threshold. He looked slowly up, across and down the frame of the door, then looked at her and shook his head with a chuckle. He waggled a finger at her: Naughty, naughty. He stepped back from the doorway and pulled something bulbous and spoked from a holster at his waist. He pointed it at the wall of her hut. It hummed for an instant, a tone that raced up the scale to banshee wail and then beyond her hearing, and spat a pellet of absolute darkness. The wall of her hut instantly disintegrated, vanished into a faint cloud of dust that came raining gently down upon her where she lay.

“Do you like it?” He stood amid the swirling haze of destruction and held the weapon up for her inspection. “Black matter blaster. Now come on, let’s not keep the others waiting.”

“Others?” She could guess who it might be: Shikau. Her supposed protector. She’d know he would prove as useful as the brittle wooden walls of her hut. Now came what she had long expected: Despair. Pain and suffering. Finally, death. “What others?”

“You’ll see, come, come.” He beckoned with the blaster. “I’m not here to debate you. Burn.”

Her nerves were acid, her veins were acid, her eyes and lips and tongue, her stomach, her sex organs, hot and cold and burning, burning, searing, burning, and then. Nothing. Only her, lying by the side of her cot, panting, gulping air.

“Come,” her tormentor said again, and she wanted to refuse but her traitor body rose and staggered out, through the hole in the wall, stumbling on the uneven sand outside, falling to her knees, rising again, falling. When she found her feet again, she wished she hadn’t. She cried out, lunged forward, and a hand cracked her across the side of the head and sent her sprawling again.

In the sand outside the hut there were three figures. Two were blade-sharp shadows much like her tormentor, pale faces gleaming like bone in the moonlight. The handles of cruel-bladed knives jutted from their belts. Between them, on her knees in the sand, face bloodied, robes tattered, crouched the planetary governor, Aun’O’Ko.

The surf roared and hissed in foamy frustration. Salt-scented wind blew Aun’Ko’s robes about her willowy frame. Jed’zal sat up, rubbing her bruised face, knowing that would be the least of the night’s torments.

“I see you recognize our other guest,” the Drukhari said with a mocking bow. “Governor, this is one of your menial labourers. Menial labourer, this is your planetary governor. Wonderful, now that we’re all friends. I can tell we are going to get on famously. And I? I am Kravzheyn, an Incubus, though that won’t mean anything to you primitives. It means I am a weapon. It means I hold your lives in my hands.”

“Let her go,” Jed’zal said. It was the expected thing, and she expected nothing would come of it, but she had to try. “She has no part in your madness.”

“Oh, but she does, a quite central part indeed. It took us a while to study her security, find a way we could spirit her away without raising a fuss, and give us a little time for this nice little chat.

“We have nothing to discuss.”

“We do, though. We do. Our topic is nothing less than the nature of all living things.”

“Killing her changes nothing,” Jed’zal said bitterly. “I said you are a slave to cruelty. You kill because you are driven to it, like a mindless virus. Killing her only proves my point.”

“Kill the dear governor? Oh my, no. Quite the reverse. I will give her one chance to save her sad little life.” Kravzheyn drew his blaster, clicked something in the handle and extracted a bar of pure darkness. He laid the weapon at Aun’Ko’s knees, then pointed at Jed’zal. “There is power for one shot, and one shot only. Use it to kill this pathetic creature, and I will release you. If you do not, you both die.”

The Drukhari on either side of Aun’Ko released her and stepped back. She did not move at first, only looked down at the weapon, back to Kravzheyn, at the gun again. Hesitating. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I think you’ll kill me anyway.”

Kravzheyn gave a what-do-I-care shrug. “I might, I might not. I’ll definitely kill you if you don’t though, so what do you have to lose? Come now, I am a patient man, but my patience is not infinite.”

“What does this prove?” Jed’zal demanded.

“That all things kill to survive.”

“Under duress.”

“Life is duress, my dear innocent little slug. Now hush and let the nice lady shoot you.”

Slowly, Aun’Ko leaned forward and lifted the blaster in a trembling hand. Her eyes met Jed’zal’s.

Jed’zal gave a small nod. Signaling acceptance, forgiveness. Permission.

Aun’Ko held her arm straight out, trembling, gun pointing like an arrow at Jed’zal’s head. Jed’zal took a deep breath and closed her eyes. There was a click. And. Nothing else. Jed’zal looked again, and saw the scene exactly as before, only Aun’Ko’s finger was wrapped about the trigger and she was staring dumbly at the gun and the Drukhari was sniggering, chortling, laughing to himself.

“You see?” he said between chuckles to Jed’zal. “You see? She would kill you without a thought.”

“Well, of course,” Jed’zal said. “I would gladly lay down my life for hers. She’s the Aun’O.”

“Don’t you understand, you mentally crippled imbecile?” Kravzheyn’s smile vanished. He rolled his eyes in disgust, fine fingers clawed into frustrated talons. “You’ve just replaced the individual with the hive, turned thinking beings into mindless drones. You’re no kinder or gentler than any other species, you’re only more ruthless about your own kind.”

Jed’zal shook her head in denial. “That was never my claim,” she pointed out. “The survival of the individual is your obsession, not ours. If the Tau is bondage, then it is one freely entered into. One that benefits all. Just do not tell me you are somehow liberated just because none of your fellow species care if you live or die, if you must live every moment in fear and suspicion.”

“It only benefits people like her!” Kravzheyn screeched and thrust an accusing finger in Aun’Ko’s face. “If I die at the hand of another, then at least I do not go meekly, like some beast to the slaughter!”

“No. Instead, like some diseased, maddened animal.”

“I am no animal!” Kravzheyn screamed in Jed’zal’s face, spittle flying.

“Kravzheyn, why waste time on –” one of the other Drukhari began.

“Silence!” Kravzheyn’s voice rose to a shriek and his hand fell to the handle of one of his blades.

The other Drukhari bared her teeth and tensed to draw her own klaive.

“I think that’s enough.”

It was a digitized, synthesized voice, but Jed’zal still recognized it. She’d heard it after her interrogation, spoken by the shadowy figure, cold and implacable, terrible with purpose and certainty. It came from the darkness, and the sound of it cracked across the sand and struck Kravzheyn like a blow, bringing his head snapping up. Before the last syllable had rung out, the Drukhari had a blade in each hand.

Five bulky shapes shimmered and emerged into the moonlight, taller than a Tau, rounded and bulbous, smooth-shelled, each with one long arm ending in the massive maw of a multi-barreled plasma burst cannon. There was no head, but baleful red light gleamed from between their shoulders. Stealth suits, equipped with holographic camouflage.

Kravzheyn’s lips peeled back in a snarl. He crouched, tensed. A panther on the hunt. “Fire and we kill your precious leader,” he warned, and waved a blade towards Aun’Ko. “Shut down and exit your battle suits or she dies.”

There was no immediate answer, but neither did any of the suits move. After a moment, the synthesized voice spoke again, from the gloom beyond the battle suits. “You think you’ve found our weakness,” it said. “You thought to demonstrate how loyalty leaves us vulnerable. Well, allow us to return the lesson: Whoever kills the Incubus may go free. The other dies.”

Kravzheyn opened his mouth to retort, but no sound came out. Slowly, he looked down. To the tip of the blade now jutting from his chest. It slid out with the wet sound of metal on meat and bone. Kravzheyn spent another moment looking in blinking disbelief at the hole it had left, then at the defiant face of the Drukhari who’d wielded the klaive and murdered her own leader.

Kravzheyn’s face frowned, a puzzled look, and his mouth continued to move as though trying to formulate the right question. He was still trying as his knees folded and he pitched face-forward into the sand.

The killer took a step away from her partner, then another. “You promised,” she said.

“I did,” the voice agreed. “I lied.”

The burst cannon of the five XV25 stealth suits opened fire. Incandescent, coruscating light strobed from the barrels and hammered into the two Drukhair, blew them off their feet and sent their burning, blazing bodies spinning across the sand, to land in two charred, smoking heaps.

In the silence that followed Jed’zal could clearly hear the footsteps in the sand. A figure approached, slim, small next to the battle suits. The owner of the voice. As it drew closer, Jed’zal could first make out the eyes, then the mouth, the craggy features, the weather-worn jawline.

“Vre’Shikau,” she said.

“La’Anais,” the wizened warrior returned her greeting. He waved to the battle suits. “Establish a perimeter. Get someone to look after the Aun’O, she is hurt.” He turned back to Jed’zal. “And you La’Anais – are you all right?”

She stared dumbly up at him. “What kind of question is that? I’ve just been dragged from my bed, sure I was about to die or, or, or … No. No, I am not all right. I will never be all right ever again.”

The veteran merely grunted and patted her on the shoulder. “Well, we all have our scars. You’re tough, you’ll live.”

The night was receding now as more and more vehicles arrived, armoured tanks and battle suits and medical vehicles, all blazing with lights. Aun’Ko was the center of a frenzied buzz of activity, gently lifted and carried into one of the waiting flyers by a swarm of attendants, a hive queen surrounded by her drones. Others were barking orders, cadres of warriors spreading out to find the intruders’ ship.

“You planned all this,” Jed’zal realized. “You were waiting for it.”

“’Course we were. We didn’t know he’d kidnap Aun’Ko, but we knew he’d be back, yes.”

“I was bait.”

“’Course you were. That thing they planted in your body, the torture device, it requires a signal and energy to activate. We stay far enough away that he didn’t spot us, but still detect when he used it. It let us know when he was here.”

“I could have died. Aun’Ko could have died.”

Shikau shrugged. “A calculated risk. Not very accurately calculated, I’ll grant, but we weren’t aiming for perfection. We got the bastards, is the point. Look, don’t be bitter about this La’Anais. Yes, you had to sacrifice. That’s what it means to be a member of society. We all make sacrifices, that we all may reap the rewards. It’s when you get too many lone wolves like our friend here, who want all the reward with none of the sacrifice, that it all falls apart.”

“How did you know he would come today?”

“Don’t be silly,” Shikau sniffed. “We’ve been waiting every night for the last three tau’cyr. Three. Without a decent night’s sleep, always on edge, never knowing if tonight will be the night. That’s what we gave up.” Shikau dug a hoof under Kravzheyn’s side and rolled the body over. The expression, of confusion, hurt and horror, made Jed’zal shudder. Shikau beckoned and a quartet of fire warriors came and dragged the body away.

“You know, there’s a reason the major starfaring species aren’t apex predators,” he mused as he watched. “Us, the gue’la, these pointy-eared bastards, we’re all social creatures only part-way up the food chain. That’s what this lot have forgotten. That’s why we’ll win. Ours is the only Empire built on cooperation rather than survival of the strongest. Time we showed them that extending an open hand doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the value of a closed fist.”

With a final pat on the shoulder Shikau strode away, melting into the maelstrom of activity. Jed’zal watched him go, a shriveled husk of a Tau, yet somehow indestructible. He’d disturbed the sand, churned up the dark black stain where the body had lain, and removed any trace it had ever been there.