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Description

Greater Good:Chaos
Ever since our expansion from T'au, we have always feared Mont'au; the Terror. For the longest time, the Etheraels have lead us against that, but it was not until Farsight's Rebellion showed that even the once great Aun'Va could fall to Mont'au and lead the rest of us down that path.
Taus, as a species, are not affected by the powers of the Warp. This gives us some level of resistance to Warp-based powers affecting the mind, but it offers little, if any, protection against physically-manifested offensive psychic powers. The Fire caste was the first to discover that when they fought against Chaos cultists on Saqqara; now named Sa'Qar. The cult used their psychic powers to either tick invading forces or destroy their minds. Shockingly, they did not last long.
The problem fighting Chaos is not ferocity, demons, connection to the Warp, or Nightmarish abilities. It is that we have to keep our allied races far away, for their own, and our, protection.
This land was dying, and yet still clung to life.
Chaos forces, the Sanin Traitor Militia, had penetrated the Alpha Hive, breaking down its walls. Hundreds of millions of Guardsmen had given their lives to hold them back, to contain them to the outer zones at least, but the advance was relentless.
It was when the generators had blown, when production had grounded to a halt, that the evacuation order had been signed. The civilians had been lifted out first, those few who could still be reached and who hadn't been slaughtered or turned traitor. Now it was the turn of the Tau Empire on the ground.
Saningrad had been a proud world once. Its mines had been unprecedentedly bountiful, and its refineries and factories the most efficient in the sector. It standard of living, on the highest hives levels, had been good, and even the underhives had enjoyed a far lower than normal attrition rate. Saningrad's subjects had been loyal and happy, with a consequently high rate of population growth. They had been in the process of building their fifteenth hive, and Imperial Guard Command had advanced plans to raise another Guard regiment from their numbers within ten years.
It had taken half that time for Saningrad to be invaded, overrun, lost, and finally abandoned.
Gue'vesa'O Kain Osman stood in what had been a mine overseer's officer on Alpha Hive's eighty-third level. An explosion had ripped through the room recently, and two of its walls had been torn out. Its ceiling hung precariously over him, and every few hours the vibrations from a fresh blast below travelled far enough to make it tremble and threaten to give way.
He would have talk to Kauyon'Do about his positions later.
From this uncertain vantage point he could look out over what remained of the outer zones – at the ebb and flow of battle, at fire and smoke and metal, and the bottle-green lines of his army, marking extent of their progress throughout the hives.
The Tau have made leaps and bounds in close quarter combat, making use of their bonding knives and using power sword technology, but even with that they still needed to really to rely on human and Kroot intervention.
Kain never liked the Kroot. He always saw them as too barbaric of creatures to be used in normal combat, and they would eat POWs before negotiations could be made; leading further conflicts. But for enemies like Chaos they were the perfect combatants.
Another force he used was Stealth Teams. They could slip through the cracks in the Hive, and were invisible to chaos psykers. They could bring down their Space Marines, daemons, and Warband leaders completely undetected until it was too late.
Kain drew his armored greatcoat tighter around his body, tucked his gloved hands into its loose sleeves. He could have sworn that the temperature had dropped another two degrees in the past day. His joints started to ache; a storm was rolling soon and fast. He shivered for a second. Not from the cold, but for what he had to do to unsure victory.
Jhi'kaara had lost track of time.
She was so close to her goal, so close to getting back to her comrades, to Kain, the returning hero. It seemed like days since she had been separated from them, days since she had killed the warband leader, a corrupted Apostate Cardinal, and driven the chaotic forces into fighting each other. Now she was just a few meters away.
A few meters – but it may as well been a few thousand.
It was not in the young Tau's nature to lie still long. Anyway, the grumbling of approaching engines had alerted her to a new danger. The Chaos army was attempting to press forward, most of its foot soldiers passing her without seeing her, but behind them had come the heavy artillery, the tanks and the battle cannons, and she had to act fast to avoid being crushed beneath their wheels.
Kaara had scrambled to his feet, feeling the sting of cold air on her face, expecting to be shot down as soon as she was seen. Instead, surrounded by the enemy, she went unnoticed. She had realized that her uniform, that she stole off a dead Guardsman, was disheveled and torn, coated in grime and blood, and thus there was no real visible difference between her and any number of Traitor Guardsmen on the battlefield. Thinking quickly, she had ripped off the unit's badge to further her illusion, and considered taking a coat with the chaos insignia and rebreathe mask to better hid her face, but the thought of wearing such a thing made her stomach turn and skin crawl. She only pulled off the mask.
She couldn't just stand there, she had realized. She had to do something, make it look like she belonged here, that she was a corrupted human, giving herself time to think, to find an escape.
Casting around, she had seen a pair of cultists bickering over an upset cart. A purloined lascannon, too heavy for them to carry, had spilled from the rickety contraption, and the Kaara had rushed over to help lift it into place. In doing so, she had brushed against the cultist's arm and felt something shifting beneath his cloak. She had caught a glimpse of a slimy black tentacle, and had almost vomited on the spot.
Kaara ached – truly, physically ached – with the driving need to pull out her pistol, to blast these freaks to whatever afterlife they believed in, and she would have done it to… had it not been for the fact that Kain needed her.
She wished she knew how long it had been.
She slipped away from the cultists at the first opportunity, leaving her last grenade in the cannon's barrel. When the weapon fired, the grenade would burst and, Kaara hoped, would trigger a devastating melta explosion. She had made her way to the edge of the battlefield, trying to remain innocuous, finding cover where he could in a deserted, half-demolished building.
She had not counted on running into civilians. Four women and six children were huddled in a dark corner of one of those buildings, somehow overlooked by the culitists that had burnt out their homes and slaughtered their loved ones.
At first they had been an unwelcomed burden, because Kaara would certainly have become a target as soon as she had stepped out into the open with them, and if she revealed that she was a Tau they would've killed her. But, emboldened by the appearance of an Imperial Guardswoman, their savior, the women had told her a way out: a hatchway into the underhive.
And so, Kaara had ended up here, in a tunnel mouth, up to her ankles in filth of a billion departed slum dwellers. This place brought back memories of Oba'rai, where she took her team into the hive's depths and saw how vicious their Kroot ally were, and where she gained her name, and her scar, at the edge of a chainsword. At any instant she expected one of the bodies to reanimate, filled with hate-driven vitality, with some unknown human weapon and take her down.
The women waited some way behind her and tried to keep their children quiet. And the latter that would take them all back up to the surface, back to Kain and her comrades, was just a few meters away… a few, well-guarded, meters away.
It had been a shock to find cultists in the underhive. Fortunately, the women had known their way around, and, so far, they had been able to keep out of sight, though a number of diversions due to blocked tunnels had left Kaara fretting with impatience. Her greatest fear was still one of the bodies reanimating.
Four cultists. She could take them, she thought, especially as their guns were trained on the manhole above them. They were expecting trouble from above, not below. They weren't expecting her. She could take them.
And they would raise the alarm, and then more cultists would come running. Would she be able to ferry the women and the children up the ladder and hold their attackers off long enough to follow them?
A more patient hunter might have waited a while longer, might have looked for a better chance, or even another ladder. Not Kaara. She had lost enough time already.
Even though he knew that the fight ahead of her would be difficult, even though she knew that her chances of survival were slim, she drew her Pulse Pistol and she ran to meet it firing. And she did so not just because she felt she had no other choice, but with a grin on her face and a mad laugh erupted from her stomach.
A step gave way beneath Jhi'kaara's foot, and she leapt for the safety rail and pulled herself up. She had started a cascade effect, which demolished the rest of the staircase beneath her, but she had attained the balcony level of the refinery as planned.
She grinned at the memory of those comrades who had thought her mad for eschewing the standard Stealthsuit. The XV25, XV22, and even the XV15 Stealthsuits offered more protection against the cold and enemy fire, but the hostile environmental stealthsuit was much lighter, more flexible, easier to him under clothing, and Jhi'kaara's unencumbered agility, even with these uncomfortable human boots, had just saved her life.
She reached the tall, narrow window – the one towards which a Shas'ui had directed him from outside, below. She settled behind it and used the butt of her long pulse rifle, to knock away the glass. An icy gust of wind blew away the refinery's stuff gloom.
She rested the long, thin barrel of her weapon against the still, and waited.
The battle had only just spread to this part of the hive, and many of the buildings were still standing. She reminded herself to tell Kain this. Send in Kroot carnivore packs to clear out the cultists, and use the underhive to get around the Chaos forces. But, then again, there could be more civilians in hiding, and they would be easy prey for the Kroot. Maybe pathfinder teams would work better. It would take longer, but less civilian casualties.
She focused back into the task at hand, but the cultists were gone.
The cultists knew where she was. A frag grenade arced over the balcony rail and rolled to Kara's feet. She was already running, just ahead of the explosion, which blew out a section of the building's wall. The balcony was mangled, left partially unsupported, trembling and creaking – and, as Jhi'kaara reached on of the remaining set of steps, she found the four Chaos cultists ascending towards her, recognizable by their obscene tattoos.
She brought up her gun, but the cultists were too fast for her, and she had to throw herself onto her stomach to avoid las-fire. She wasn't accustomed to close combat, wasn't built for it. Sure she trained with Kain, but Jhi'kaara spent years in service honing her sneaking and sniping skills. Then, this, her worst nightmare: an enemy that could see her!
A section of mesh beneath her rattled and slid. Feverishly, she pried to the Ethereals it would loose and clamber down through a web of scaffolding. She dropped the six meters to the ground floor level, rolling to absorb the impact of her landing. The vile cultists were up on the teeter balcony, looking for her, and she decided to give them a taste of their own medicine. They saw the incoming grenade, and one of them tried to run, while the other three saw the futility of that course and jumped for it.
Jhi'kaara managed to get off a shot while they were in midair, killing two and wondering another one, who landed awkwardly with a snap of bone. Then the grenade went off and the balcony gave way, bringing two walls down with it. All Jhi'kaara had time to do was to drop to her knees and cover her head with her hands as she was engulfed by a tidal wave of screeching, rendering sound.
When it was all over, as the echoes died down, Jhi'kaara raised his head, and saw that one of the cultists had survived, and was training a Lasgun on her. She closed her eyes, heard the familiar cracking from such a primitive weapon as the cultist pulled the trigger.
The cultist only managed one shot before he died. An electrically charged slug was the last thing the cultist felt before he fell dead on the ground. Jhi'kaara slipped out of the rubble while her hologram disappeared. She motioned for the women and children to come up, but something got her attention
Not too far off though, some refinery doors crashed open, and Kaara pointed her pistol at it. There were five, lightly armored in mottled black breastplates and crimson rubberized fatigues. Their long helmets arched over their shoulders, giving them a vaguely crustacean look, the strangeness heightened by the crystal sensors embedded in their otherwise blank faceplates. Jhi'kaara recognized them easily: pathfinders, her scouts.
All, except for the Shas'ui, were human, and they lowered their weapons when Kaara took off her face mask.
"Shas'el," Shas'ui Kovash saluted. "We came to look for you."
"I know, I'm late," she said. "I've had some trouble with my comms,"
"We've been trying to contact you for the past half hour."
"No doubt Kain was getting worried," she thought. "I got a little sidetracked. There are women and children back there who desperately need medical attention. See to them."
"Yes, Shas'el," Kovash said.
Later, within the upper hive of the Alpha Hive, Jhi'kaara was watching over the system updates to her stealthsuits. The cold weather of Saningrad have been messing up the suits' internal constructs and data computers, so she wanted them fixed if she was going to go on another stealth mission.
She stood behind a one way window, watching as Mehmet and the earth caste engineers tinker with her suits. The room she was in was dark, quiet and peaceful, just the atmosphere she liked when she was thinking. Her body was wet from the sanitation chamber; even though Chaos could not corrupt Tau did not mean she wanted to smell like one. She a simple but colorful robe that could easily turn heads; it was a thank you present from a high ranking water caste diplomat after saving her merchants from Ork Freebooter raids.
She was lost in thought that she did not notice the door behind her opening up, not until Kain wrapped his arms around her waist.
"You lost a bit of weight, Kaara." Kain said as he rested his head on her shoulder.
"Nice try, but I've gained more than I care to admit."
He placed a hand on her cheek and pulled her closer. "Maybe you're wearing too many clothes."
"I'd show you, but this room is being monitored."
"Was being monitored, I changed the main feed. I also polarized the windows, so not even Mehmet can see in here."
"Thoroughly prepared as always," she chuckled as Kain rubbed the stubble of his facial hair on the side of her neck.
"Being a commander has its perks, and this is just one of them."

Description

Greater Good:Chaos
Ever since our expansion from T'au, we have always feared Mont'au; the Terror. For the longest time, the Etheraels have lead us against that, but it was not until Farsight's Rebellion showed that even the once great Aun'Va could fall to Mont'au and lead the rest of us down that path.
Taus, as a species, are not affected by the powers of the Warp. This gives us some level of resistance to Warp-based powers affecting the mind, but it offers little, if any, protection against physically-manifested offensive psychic powers. The Fire caste was the first to discover that when they fought against Chaos cultists on Saqqara; now named Sa'Qar. The cult used their psychic powers to either tick invading forces or destroy their minds. Shockingly, they did not last long.
The problem fighting Chaos is not ferocity, demons, connection to the Warp, or Nightmarish abilities. It is that we have to keep our allied races far away, for their own, and our, protection.
This land was dying, and yet still clung to life.
Chaos forces, the Sanin Traitor Militia, had penetrated the Alpha Hive, breaking down its walls. Hundreds of millions of Guardsmen had given their lives to hold them back, to contain them to the outer zones at least, but the advance was relentless.
It was when the generators had blown, when production had grounded to a halt, that the evacuation order had been signed. The civilians had been lifted out first, those few who could still be reached and who hadn't been slaughtered or turned traitor. Now it was the turn of the Tau Empire on the ground.
Saningrad had been a proud world once. Its mines had been unprecedentedly bountiful, and its refineries and factories the most efficient in the sector. It standard of living, on the highest hives levels, had been good, and even the underhives had enjoyed a far lower than normal attrition rate. Saningrad's subjects had been loyal and happy, with a consequently high rate of population growth. They had been in the process of building their fifteenth hive, and Imperial Guard Command had advanced plans to raise another Guard regiment from their numbers within ten years.
It had taken half that time for Saningrad to be invaded, overrun, lost, and finally abandoned.
Gue'vesa'O Kain Osman stood in what had been a mine overseer's officer on Alpha Hive's eighty-third level. An explosion had ripped through the room recently, and two of its walls had been torn out. Its ceiling hung precariously over him, and every few hours the vibrations from a fresh blast below travelled far enough to make it tremble and threaten to give way.
He would have talk to Kauyon'Do about his positions later.
From this uncertain vantage point he could look out over what remained of the outer zones – at the ebb and flow of battle, at fire and smoke and metal, and the bottle-green lines of his army, marking extent of their progress throughout the hives.
The Tau have made leaps and bounds in close quarter combat, making use of their bonding knives and using power sword technology, but even with that they still needed to really to rely on human and Kroot intervention.
Kain never liked the Kroot. He always saw them as too barbaric of creatures to be used in normal combat, and they would eat POWs before negotiations could be made; leading further conflicts. But for enemies like Chaos they were the perfect combatants.
Another force he used was Stealth Teams. They could slip through the cracks in the Hive, and were invisible to chaos psykers. They could bring down their Space Marines, daemons, and Warband leaders completely undetected until it was too late.
Kain drew his armored greatcoat tighter around his body, tucked his gloved hands into its loose sleeves. He could have sworn that the temperature had dropped another two degrees in the past day. His joints started to ache; a storm was rolling soon and fast. He shivered for a second. Not from the cold, but for what he had to do to unsure victory.
Jhi'kaara had lost track of time.
She was so close to her goal, so close to getting back to her comrades, to Kain, the returning hero. It seemed like days since she had been separated from them, days since she had killed the warband leader, a corrupted Apostate Cardinal, and driven the chaotic forces into fighting each other. Now she was just a few meters away.
A few meters – but it may as well been a few thousand.
It was not in the young Tau's nature to lie still long. Anyway, the grumbling of approaching engines had alerted her to a new danger. The Chaos army was attempting to press forward, most of its foot soldiers passing her without seeing her, but behind them had come the heavy artillery, the tanks and the battle cannons, and she had to act fast to avoid being crushed beneath their wheels.
Kaara had scrambled to his feet, feeling the sting of cold air on her face, expecting to be shot down as soon as she was seen. Instead, surrounded by the enemy, she went unnoticed. She had realized that her uniform, that she stole off a dead Guardsman, was disheveled and torn, coated in grime and blood, and thus there was no real visible difference between her and any number of Traitor Guardsmen on the battlefield. Thinking quickly, she had ripped off the unit's badge to further her illusion, and considered taking a coat with the chaos insignia and rebreathe mask to better hid her face, but the thought of wearing such a thing made her stomach turn and skin crawl. She only pulled off the mask.
She couldn't just stand there, she had realized. She had to do something, make it look like she belonged here, that she was a corrupted human, giving herself time to think, to find an escape.
Casting around, she had seen a pair of cultists bickering over an upset cart. A purloined lascannon, too heavy for them to carry, had spilled from the rickety contraption, and the Kaara had rushed over to help lift it into place. In doing so, she had brushed against the cultist's arm and felt something shifting beneath his cloak. She had caught a glimpse of a slimy black tentacle, and had almost vomited on the spot.
Kaara ached – truly, physically ached – with the driving need to pull out her pistol, to blast these freaks to whatever afterlife they believed in, and she would have done it to… had it not been for the fact that Kain needed her.
She wished she knew how long it had been.
She slipped away from the cultists at the first opportunity, leaving her last grenade in the cannon's barrel. When the weapon fired, the grenade would burst and, Kaara hoped, would trigger a devastating melta explosion. She had made her way to the edge of the battlefield, trying to remain innocuous, finding cover where he could in a deserted, half-demolished building.
She had not counted on running into civilians. Four women and six children were huddled in a dark corner of one of those buildings, somehow overlooked by the culitists that had burnt out their homes and slaughtered their loved ones.
At first they had been an unwelcomed burden, because Kaara would certainly have become a target as soon as she had stepped out into the open with them, and if she revealed that she was a Tau they would've killed her. But, emboldened by the appearance of an Imperial Guardswoman, their savior, the women had told her a way out: a hatchway into the underhive.
And so, Kaara had ended up here, in a tunnel mouth, up to her ankles in filth of a billion departed slum dwellers. This place brought back memories of Oba'rai, where she took her team into the hive's depths and saw how vicious their Kroot ally were, and where she gained her name, and her scar, at the edge of a chainsword. At any instant she expected one of the bodies to reanimate, filled with hate-driven vitality, with some unknown human weapon and take her down.
The women waited some way behind her and tried to keep their children quiet. And the latter that would take them all back up to the surface, back to Kain and her comrades, was just a few meters away… a few, well-guarded, meters away.
It had been a shock to find cultists in the underhive. Fortunately, the women had known their way around, and, so far, they had been able to keep out of sight, though a number of diversions due to blocked tunnels had left Kaara fretting with impatience. Her greatest fear was still one of the bodies reanimating.
Four cultists. She could take them, she thought, especially as their guns were trained on the manhole above them. They were expecting trouble from above, not below. They weren't expecting her. She could take them.
And they would raise the alarm, and then more cultists would come running. Would she be able to ferry the women and the children up the ladder and hold their attackers off long enough to follow them?
A more patient hunter might have waited a while longer, might have looked for a better chance, or even another ladder. Not Kaara. She had lost enough time already.
Even though he knew that the fight ahead of her would be difficult, even though she knew that her chances of survival were slim, she drew her Pulse Pistol and she ran to meet it firing. And she did so not just because she felt she had no other choice, but with a grin on her face and a mad laugh erupted from her stomach.
A step gave way beneath Jhi'kaara's foot, and she leapt for the safety rail and pulled herself up. She had started a cascade effect, which demolished the rest of the staircase beneath her, but she had attained the balcony level of the refinery as planned.
She grinned at the memory of those comrades who had thought her mad for eschewing the standard Stealthsuit. The XV25, XV22, and even the XV15 Stealthsuits offered more protection against the cold and enemy fire, but the hostile environmental stealthsuit was much lighter, more flexible, easier to him under clothing, and Jhi'kaara's unencumbered agility, even with these uncomfortable human boots, had just saved her life.
She reached the tall, narrow window – the one towards which a Shas'ui had directed him from outside, below. She settled behind it and used the butt of her long pulse rifle, to knock away the glass. An icy gust of wind blew away the refinery's stuff gloom.
She rested the long, thin barrel of her weapon against the still, and waited.
The battle had only just spread to this part of the hive, and many of the buildings were still standing. She reminded herself to tell Kain this. Send in Kroot carnivore packs to clear out the cultists, and use the underhive to get around the Chaos forces. But, then again, there could be more civilians in hiding, and they would be easy prey for the Kroot. Maybe pathfinder teams would work better. It would take longer, but less civilian casualties.
She focused back into the task at hand, but the cultists were gone.
The cultists knew where she was. A frag grenade arced over the balcony rail and rolled to Kara's feet. She was already running, just ahead of the explosion, which blew out a section of the building's wall. The balcony was mangled, left partially unsupported, trembling and creaking – and, as Jhi'kaara reached on of the remaining set of steps, she found the four Chaos cultists ascending towards her, recognizable by their obscene tattoos.
She brought up her gun, but the cultists were too fast for her, and she had to throw herself onto her stomach to avoid las-fire. She wasn't accustomed to close combat, wasn't built for it. Sure she trained with Kain, but Jhi'kaara spent years in service honing her sneaking and sniping skills. Then, this, her worst nightmare: an enemy that could see her!
A section of mesh beneath her rattled and slid. Feverishly, she pried to the Ethereals it would loose and clamber down through a web of scaffolding. She dropped the six meters to the ground floor level, rolling to absorb the impact of her landing. The vile cultists were up on the teeter balcony, looking for her, and she decided to give them a taste of their own medicine. They saw the incoming grenade, and one of them tried to run, while the other three saw the futility of that course and jumped for it.
Jhi'kaara managed to get off a shot while they were in midair, killing two and wondering another one, who landed awkwardly with a snap of bone. Then the grenade went off and the balcony gave way, bringing two walls down with it. All Jhi'kaara had time to do was to drop to her knees and cover her head with her hands as she was engulfed by a tidal wave of screeching, rendering sound.
When it was all over, as the echoes died down, Jhi'kaara raised his head, and saw that one of the cultists had survived, and was training a Lasgun on her. She closed her eyes, heard the familiar cracking from such a primitive weapon as the cultist pulled the trigger.
The cultist only managed one shot before he died. An electrically charged slug was the last thing the cultist felt before he fell dead on the ground. Jhi'kaara slipped out of the rubble while her hologram disappeared. She motioned for the women and children to come up, but something got her attention
Not too far off though, some refinery doors crashed open, and Kaara pointed her pistol at it. There were five, lightly armored in mottled black breastplates and crimson rubberized fatigues. Their long helmets arched over their shoulders, giving them a vaguely crustacean look, the strangeness heightened by the crystal sensors embedded in their otherwise blank faceplates. Jhi'kaara recognized them easily: pathfinders, her scouts.
All, except for the Shas'ui, were human, and they lowered their weapons when Kaara took off her face mask.
"Shas'el," Shas'ui Kovash saluted. "We came to look for you."
"I know, I'm late," she said. "I've had some trouble with my comms,"
"We've been trying to contact you for the past half hour."
"No doubt Kain was getting worried," she thought. "I got a little sidetracked. There are women and children back there who desperately need medical attention. See to them."
"Yes, Shas'el," Kovash said.
Later, within the upper hive of the Alpha Hive, Jhi'kaara was watching over the system updates to her stealthsuits. The cold weather of Saningrad have been messing up the suits' internal constructs and data computers, so she wanted them fixed if she was going to go on another stealth mission.
She stood behind a one way window, watching as Mehmet and the earth caste engineers tinker with her suits. The room she was in was dark, quiet and peaceful, just the atmosphere she liked when she was thinking. Her body was wet from the sanitation chamber; even though Chaos could not corrupt Tau did not mean she wanted to smell like one. She a simple but colorful robe that could easily turn heads; it was a thank you present from a high ranking water caste diplomat after saving her merchants from Ork Freebooter raids.
She was lost in thought that she did not notice the door behind her opening up, not until Kain wrapped his arms around her waist.
"You lost a bit of weight, Kaara." Kain said as he rested his head on her shoulder.
"Nice try, but I've gained more than I care to admit."
He placed a hand on her cheek and pulled her closer. "Maybe you're wearing too many clothes."
"I'd show you, but this room is being monitored."
"Was being monitored, I changed the main feed. I also polarized the windows, so not even Mehmet can see in here."
"Thoroughly prepared as always," she chuckled as Kain rubbed the stubble of his facial hair on the side of her neck.
"Being a commander has its perks, and this is just one of them."