Chapter 152 - The Tau Failed (1)
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[We will not forget the Third Battle of the Agrellian Gulf, waged by the Human Empire.]
[The Primarch. In the past, our Empire understood little about these creations, regarding them as nothing more than special high-ranking commanders of the Human Empire.]
[But we were wrong.]
[We underestimated them.]
[We tasted the flavor of total, complete defeat.]
[Perhaps Farsight was right. In this dark and cruel universe, we are children who have only just stepped into an unknown wilderness. And facing those ancient existences that walk out from the depths of distant time...]
[We are utterly powerless.]
[— Archives of the Third Battle of the Agrellian Gulf, O'Shaserra]
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O'Shaserra, known to most by the name Shadowsun, was woken roughly.
A hand closed on her shoulder. No excess force. Just enough to drag her up from the fog of sleep.
She opened her eyes. Above her was not the woven fabric of a standard Tau field tent, but the cold-gleaming metal panels of a makeshift detention cell.
As one of the highest commanders of the Tau Empire, she was owed respect from allies and dread from enemies. But that had always rested on a foundation: the Tau fleet still holding orbit, her warriors still controlling the surface.
That foundation was gone.
She had been captured.
The one who captured her was a human commander named Garviel Loken.
She and her subordinates were held together in a temporary camp, hemmed in on all sides by Primaris Astartes in uniform white. Those giants stood in heavy power armor like silent iron towers, bolters gleaming with a cold metallic sheen under the daylight.
Shadowsun didn't know what the Human Empire had done to these warriors. They were taller than any Space Marines she had encountered. Faster. Stronger. Their firepower was ferocious.
But it was their tactics that had undone her. Flexible, unpredictable, savagely aggressive, and utterly without restraint.
Every response model she had built in her tactical simulations was torn apart by the most brutal and most intelligent methods imaginable.
Reinforcements were routed.
The garrison at the Agrellian Gulf was crushed.
And then she became a captive.
When they summoned her out, she found Commander Loken standing at the center of the camp.
He wore pure white Terminator armor. On his broad pauldron was engraved a single insignia: a wolf's head encircled by a moon. A symbol she had never seen on any Astartes Chapter.
"For what matter have you called me, Commander Loken?"
She spoke in fluent High Gothic. She had half-expected it to anger him. The arrogant Space Marines of the Human Empire never liked xenos making sounds with their language.
Loken only looked at her, calm.
"My superior wishes to see you, Commander Shadowsun."
"I thought you were the highest commander here." Shadowsun frowned. "Like those Astartes Chapter Masters."
The corner of Loken's mouth lifted slightly.
He didn't laugh. But something flickered through his eyes, unmistakable amusement.
"I am not the highest commander. My responsibility in this ground campaign was the capture and elimination of high-ranking commanders such as yourself."
He paused.
"And I am not a Chapter Master. I'm just an ordinary Space Marine Captain."
Just an ordinary Captain.
Shadowsun turned those words over in her mind. Her cognitive module seemed to have developed some kind of fault.
With a curiosity she couldn't suppress, and a low, persistent unease, she was escorted onto a Stormbird and carried up toward the flagship anchored in low orbit.
Loken did not manhandle her.
His manner was restrained. Almost a kind of silent courtesy. Shadowsun recognized it for what it was: diplomacy. The Human Empire had won, and they could afford to show the grace of victors.
She was brought into a command chamber.
And there, she finally laid eyes on the human commander-in-chief who, in a handful of days, had ground every arrangement she'd built, every tactic she'd devised, every conviction of victory she'd held into fine dust.
Horus Lupercal.
His stature was tall beyond anything Shadowsun's understanding of the word "human" could contain.
Not large. Overwhelming.
The proportions of his body were so perfect they bordered on sacred. There was a radiance in every movement, something like starlight caught in flesh, effortless and unself-conscious. Like a god wearing the shape of a man.
Shadowsun's mind went briefly, completely blank.
She had never seen anything like this.
She had seen Space Marines. Dreadnoughts. Ethereals. But the being before her did not belong to any category she could name.
"Sir. The prisoner has been brought."
Loken's voice broke the silence.
"Good work, Loken. Leave us." The one called Horus spoke. His voice was deep, carrying a quiet, unhurried authority. "I'd like to speak with this commander of the Tau Empire."
Loken inclined his head, turned, and left.
The hatch sealed behind him. The sound was very clear in the silence.
Shadowsun lifted her head and drew a slow breath.
She was the finest commander of the Tau Empire.
Defeated, imprisoned, none of that changed what she was. The pride of the Fire Caste did not leave with the fleet.
She straightened. With full formal etiquette, she offered her respects to the being who had crushed her.
"A masterful Kauyon, most honored commander of the Human Empire. I, Shadowsun, O'Shaserra, pay you the highest respect."
She added a clarification, so he would understand the weight of the word.
"Kauyon corresponds to your Empire's —"
"An opponent worthy of being taken seriously by the 'Patient Hunter' tactic. Am I correct?"
Her sentence died in her throat.
She went still.
Every syllable Horus had spoken landed precisely on the correct tones of the Tau language. Not with the blunt effort of a foreign accent, but with the easy fluency of an faint at the pulpit.
"You... know the language of our species?"
"Your species' language is quite easy to learn, actually." Horus's tone was unhurried.
"It took me less than 2 hours to master Tau. I picked up the auxiliary forces' languages along the way as well. The Kroot guttural sounds were slightly troublesome, but that was only a matter of a few extra minutes."
He smiled, just faintly.
"It made eavesdropping on your battlefield communications rather convenient."
2 hours.
The entire Tau language system.
The auxiliary forces' languages along the way.
Shadowsun felt something give way inside her.
Even the most gifted Tau scholars spent years learning to read and speak their own tongue, beginning in childhood. The being before her had done it in 2 hours, then carried those stolen transmissions onto the battlefield and used them to dismantle her from the inside out.
"...I am astonished."
Four words. It was the most precise statement she could form.
"I am a Primarch, after all." Horus did not conceal it. His tone held a plain, settled pride. "Understanding and mastering a new skill tends to be fast for us."
He paused, as if selecting the right words.
"Your Tau Empire performed reasonably well in this war. Across my command career of over 200 years, your forces rank somewhere in the middle-to-lower tier among all the xeno armies I have broken."
Shadowsun hadn't finished processing the words "middle-to-lower" when he added:
"Of course. That's the ranking against wars from 10,000 years ago."
Primarch.
10,000 years ago.
Shadowsun's thoughts stopped entirely.
She tried to weigh those words. 10,000 years. Longer than the entire history of the Tau Empire from its founding to this moment. And the being standing before her had commanded campaigns greater and more terrible than this one before her civilization had learned to reach for the stars.
She was silent for a long time.
Then she asked the only question she could put together.
"In your eyes... our resistance. Our performance in this war." She stopped. She looked almost afraid to finish it. "To you — were we simply children?"
Horus looked at her.
No mockery in those eyes. No pity. Only a calm so steady it was almost cruel.
"Honestly? Yes."
The corner of the Wolf Lord's mouth curved.
"I didn't take this war particularly seriously. Playing with children is also, in its way, a form of relaxation."
He smiled.
No malice in it. No contempt. Just a fact, stated plainly, the way you'd describe the weather.
A fact that landed on Shadowsun harder than any insult ever could.
She stood before him and understood, with a clarity she had never felt before, exactly what she was. Her Empire. The Greater Good. The art of war she had devoted her life to mastering. Before something this old, this vast, it was a mote of dust that had only just learned to drift on the wind.
➤ Next: The Tau Failed (End)
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