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《Desert Raiders（科幻战争）》
作者:[英]Lucien Soulban【完结】
Synopsis (英文书籍文案)
An Imperial listening station's psykers laps into death seizures when someone from the planet Khadar sends a mortis-cry. However, intelligence says there is no expedition, no life, no anything on the uninhabited desert planet. Yet there is no mistaking the enigmatic call for help. The 892nd Regiment is sent to investigate.
The 892nd is a new regiment. It is compiled from the Turenag and Banna Alliances. This creates a huge rift between soldiers due to the fact that the two alliances have been enemies for too many centuries to bother counting. Colonel Nisri Dakar (Turenag) and Lieutenant Colonel Turk Iban Salid (Banna) have a hard time keeping their men from killing each other. The two leaders can barely tolerate each other, much less control their people. However, Commissars Rezail and Tyrell keep them all under control or simply execute the ones causing problems.
Trouble multiplies when (later christened) Cavern Balilica is located. Cavern Balilica holds layers of rich, verdant jungle. It is filled with an eco-system unlike any other seen before; and both alliances want permission to colonize Khadar. Most, but not all, hatreds are put aside when a new threat arrives in the form of a Tyranid Horde.
PROLOGUE
“There was, there was not…
“All tales spoken from Tallarn fathers to their sons, and mothers to their daughters, begin in
this fashion. It is a way of saying that, by the Emperor’s will, this story may or may not be true.”
—The Accounts of the Tallarn by Remembrancer Tremault
There was, there was not…
The transmission fell like a carelessly discarded blade from the heavens, straight into his naked
brain. The astropath’s muscles seized into hard cords, and his teeth snapped down, cracking the
enamel. His skeletal hands gripped the cradle’s iron grasp-bars, cutting flesh with rust, and he
bucked against the leather straps holding him fast. There wasn’t enough time to mouth a litany of
protection or to will a psychic bulwark into place against the buckshot rain of thoughts. From the
heavens, tonight, fell death, and visions of history undone and ghosts unmade.
The warning chimes rang and the lume-tubes in the alcove washed the psyker in an infernal red
light. He saw none of it; heard none of it.
The psychic images slowed and then accelerated. They toppled and turned his mind inside out.
He didn’t understand the visions, but they crucified his senses: faces he did not know, voices he’d
never heard, yet each intimately familiar as a sort of déjà vu. In his mind, flesh unravelled and skin
was spooled like string; mothers grieved over the bloodstained sand and stabbed each other in their
lunatic grief; the foul miasma of discharged bowels, ozone and cordite filled the nostrils; a moon in
the sky with eyes for craters drowned the stars with its black tears; an eagle caught in tar, struggled
and dissolved.
The astropath screamed. He saw himself seeing himself seeing himself, ad infinitum, like two
mirrors facing each other with him trapped in the middle, and within the infinite reflections. He saw
himself dying between the razor-edged flashes of the transmission, strapped into the cradle, his
death echoed endlessly.
A grey-robed tech-acolyte with the Adeptus Astra Telepathica ran down the narrow corridor
with its exposed wiring and moisture weeping walls. He moved past the alcoves where astropaths
sat in restraint bubble-cradles, up to the alcove marked “Socket 9:12” with its flashing red alarms.
He checked the green-hued monitors that hung from the ceiling as the astropath struggled and
bucked. On screen, his vitals sent out jagged peaks and troughs of activity. The echo-plasm box
imprinted psychic visualisations that bled into one another and sent images into the vist-immateria
plate. The fusillade of visions, however, came fast and hard, fusing the already grainy images into a
horrid collage of blood and static.
The tech-acolyte quickly punched the button below the wall-vox. “This is Tech-Acolyte Resalon
on Providence Watch. Father Nuvosa, we—”
4
“I know,” the impatient, metallic voice replied. “It’s a mortis-cry, relayed through the Torquadas
Observium Array. A nasty one at that.”
“The cogitator banks cannot process most of the images,” Resalon said. “It’s interpreting them
as static. We’re losing the sanctity of the vision.”
“Then filter it through the other astropaths. Let them pick it clean of chaff.”
“The Emperor’s Will be done,” Resalon said.
He studied the astropath. The restraints cut into the psyker’s flesh, but they were necessary so
the astropath didn’t pull free the filaments plugged into his spine and helmet. Blood dribbled in fat
droplets from under the astropath’s black sens-dep helmet, however, and although Resalon could not
see through its poly-fibre surface, he imagined that the man’s nostrils and eyes were bleeding freely.
He briefly wondered if the sens-dep helmets weren’t just designed to tune the world out, but to
shield others from the horrors perceived by the psykers. Indeed, the other astropaths merely rested in
their cradles, unaware that one of them was dying in agony.
Resalon opened the echo-plasm’s control panel and drew out the red filament and tube bundle
pinched with yellow parchment. He plugged the leads into the adjoining sockets and suddenly, four
astropaths in their cradles seized and bucked against the mortis-cry.
3
“What do we have?” Tech-Father Nuvosa demanded. His winnowed frame rested at the centre of the
room, his body plugged into a circular dais. The lower half of his body had been surgically
amputated years ago, the metallic sacrum of his reinforced spine the platform’s socket that linked
thought to the surrounding techno-artefacts. Slow-moving plates orbited him, each of them pulling
streams of rune-code from the etherium.
Tech-Acolyte Resalon was pale, his eyes sunken. He wavered on his feet, but he handed the
flims-pic to Nuvosa. It was part image, part x-ray. “It’s the only thing the cogitators could translate,”
he said. “Three astropaths dead… one we had to put down after he—” Resalon sighed. “The vision’s
too corrupted by the psyker’s death.”
Nuvosa studied the flims-pic. It was grainy… a tattered, blood-caked standard half-buried in
sand among a sea of torn bodies. The shot caught the standard’s frayed edges in mid-flutter. Upon it,
the double-eagle crest of the Imperium.
“Where did the mortis-cry originate from?” Nuvosa asked.
“A desert world in the Barrases System… Khadar. It’s in the underbelly of the galactic plane of
the Ultima Segmentum. The transmission was an Imperium distress cry. The cogitators couldn’t
identify the astropath that sent it.”
Nuvosa’s eyelids fluttered briefly as he accessed the Administratum’s data-scrolls. The millionplus
planet names were transmitted to the cerebra-ocular implant keyed into his occipital lobe. The
names appeared only to Nuvosa, as scrolling ghostly runes. The search distilled it down to a
thousand, a hundred, a dozen worlds, and finally to one. After a moment, his eyes shot up and he
captured Resalon in his gaze.
“That’s not possible,” Nuvosa said. “Khadar’s a desert planet, yes, but there’s no Imperial
presence there. It’s not even settled. Khadar is uninhabited.”
5
CHAPTER ONE
“My tribe and I against outsiders, My brother and I against our tribe.”
—The Accounts of the Tallarn by Remembrancer Tremault
1
Day Zero.
The fleet of small ships drifted in the pitch of stars and held formation on approach to the
system’s outer planet — a frozen ball of nitrogen and methane. Ribbons and spittle-threads floated
around them, grey immaterium plasma ejected during the fleet’s explosive birth at retranslation from
Empyrean space.
Cruisers with gun-barrel bodies, frigates with flying ribbed buttresses, destroyers, transports and
squadrons of patrolling Fury interceptors all orbited the heart of the fleet — the Defiant-class cruiser
Oberron’s Flight with its carbon scorched prow and eagle figurehead.
2
Commissar Rezail stood at the ornate lancet window of his small cabin aboard Oberron’s Flight and
soaked up the hum of the ship through his black boots. He stared out at the fleet, but could barely
see the ships against the star scattered darkness. Only their blinking red and yellow beacons assured
him of their presence.
“Attention.” The vox-box crackled, and a voice echoed through the ship’s corridors. “This is the
officer of the watch. We’re entering the Barrases System. We’ll anchor in three hours. Prepare for
planet-fall.” The vox-box went silent.
Rezail straightened his peaked cap and the high collar of his brown coat. He turned and faced the
Tallarn Guardsman standing at attention, the one in the yellow tunic, leather boots and white cotton
kafiya, wrapped loosely around his neck. The Guardsman’s skin was a sun-baked brown, which
brought out the streaks of white in his peppered moustache. An ivory-handled dagger hung from his
black leather belt. He stood in sharp contrast to Rezail’s pale skin and stocky, almost soft, body.
“Sergeant Tyrell Habaas,” Rezail said. “As my aide, one of your chief duties will be to teach me
Tallarn battle-cant.”
“Yes, commissar,” Tyrell said, “but which one do you wish to learn? Tallarn has many tribes
and tribal alliances. There are four battle-cants and many—”
“High Cant… from your holy books.”
“That is a language of nobles. Not many soldiers—”
“They’ll learn. Which tribal alliance do you belong to?” Rezail asked.
“The Hawadi. We number eighty-seven tribes.”
“Your people are neutral?” Rezail asked, studying the densely clustered runes of the intelligence
dossier.
Tyrell wove his head a touch. “We are teachers and scholars.”
“Yes,” Rezail said, motioning with the data-slate in his hand. “It says here that your tribe serves
the Tallarn regiments as support staff. Why is that?”
6
“We are respected by the others for our great learning. We arbitrate disputes. We mediate. We
are trusted because we allow two sides to reach a truce without either losing face.”
“Face is very important to your people.”
“Of course. Without it we are dishonoured.”
“And you are neutral in this conflict, between the Turenag and Banna alliances?”
“Always.”
Rezail considered his steps carefully. This wasn’t going to be easy. The different battle-cants
were only a symptom of a larger problem facing the newly formed regiment. The Tallarn were a
“passionate people” according to one scroll in the Stratum Populace dossier prepared for him by the
Administratum, but in his experience, “passionate” was a bureaucratic cipher for “hothead”, and by
that definition, orks were exceedingly passionate and exuberant.
“In that case,” Rezail said, “I need you to teach me something… something called the promise
of salt.”
3
The observation deck of the light cruiser, Blood Epoch, offered an unparalleled view of the
surrounding stars. The striated green and white marble of a gas giant drifted by the port lancet
windows, the last planet before Khadar swung into view. Prince Turk Iban Salid, lost to private
thought, was barely aware of proceedings.
Commissar Rezail stood on a rusting iron dais, coroneted by the system’s distant blue sun in the
window behind him. As Rezail spoke, Tyrell stood by a window near the stage and spoke softly into
the micro-bead, translating Rezail’s speech for those officers unfamiliar with the nuances of Gothic.
“Five weeks ago,” Rezail said, “astropaths received a psyker distress cry… Imperial. It
originated from the uninhabited desert world of Khadar.”
Turk nodded automatically and cast a sidelong glance at the other high-ranking officer in the
room, the ebony-skinned Nisri Dakar. Nothing short of Turk’s knife at his throat would bring Turk
pleasure. Every centimetre of Nisri’s two metres disgusted him: his clean-shaven head demanded to
be split, his thin body broken, his wiry muscles snapped, and his dark skin deserved to glisten with
his blood instead of his sweat.
“It is our glorious duty to establish a small garrison on Khadar, to investigate the source of the
transmission.”
Nisri nodded, but Turk noticed that he also listened with a half-cocked smile. He was no doubt
pleased with his new posting.
“Prince Iban Salid, who do you serve?”
Turk started; he almost didn’t realise that Rezail was speaking directly to him in a broken
Tallarn that fumbled over the guttural consonants. Turk straightened, immediately aware that all
eyes were upon him. It electrified the room and set everyone on edge. He could see it in the darting
glances, and in the hands that looped their thumbs on their belts, closer to their blades.
“I war for the Emperor! All that is left of the 82nd Shaytani of the Dust wars for the Emperor,”
Turk said.
“Aya!” Turk’s officers cried out.
“May His light bless our meagre lives,” Turk concluded.
“And whose hand does the Emperor guide?” Rezail asked, again in broken Tallarn.
“Yours,” Turk responded, but Rezail stared at him for longer than was comfortable. He gritted
his teeth against the admission, but continued, “and our Iban Mushira — Colonel Nisri Dakar — our
new commander’s. May his bravery lead us to victory,” and may the Saints take his eyes, he
concluded silently.
7
Colonel Nisri Dakar watched as Turk responded to the commissar. He watched how the
commissar gestured to both men with his right hand.
He understands our customs, Nisri thought. He isn’t showing favour by using the left hand to
signify a lesser.
Nisri despised Turk, who seemed lazy and dull with his squat body, his heavy muscles and the
tan-brown touch of many suns. Turk kept his beard trimmed short, but there was cold calculating
mischief in his black eyes.
Although he delighted at Turk’s forced conceit, Nisri took care not to display it. He was the
regimental colonel; he had to lead by example.
“And you, Colonel Dakar,” Rezail asked, turning to Nisri. “Who do you serve?”
“I serve the Aba Aba Mushira, the Emperor, in all things. I am His sword and He is my hand.
All that is left of the 351st Derv’sh Blades of the Imperium submits to his will.”
“Aya!” cried the officers of Nisri’s regiment.
“And who do you greet as brothers in this room?” Rezail asked.
Dakar smiled; the commissar already possessed the small tokens of Tallarn formalities, enough
