[Excerpt | Blood Oath] Never underestimate the Imperial Guard
After previously defeating several Imperial Guard regiments in her career, Tau Commander Shadowsun went into the Tau 3rd Sphere Expansion with a rather low opinion of the Astra Militarum. However, as Tau forces pushed deeper into Imperial space, they start coming into contact with more elite Guard regiments like the Cadians and Catachans.
In the passages below, Shadowsun encounters the Catachan jungle fighters for the first time. At first she engages an armored convoy full of troop transports, dispatching it with ease as armored vehicles on a flat open terrain are easy targets for Tau Battlesuits and airpower.
However, her forces are later ambushed in the jungle by Colonel Iron Hand Straken and a large force of Catachans who remind her that the Imperial Guard are not to be taken lightly.
The yield capacitors of Shadowsun’s fusion blasters blipped gold. She dropped down from the flickering skies towards the column of boxy Imperial vehicles and triggered another full shot, twin beams of destructive energy spearing vertically downwards. She hit one of the lumpen things full on, an olive-hued tank that was little more than a mobile box filled with gue’la troopers. The transport exploded with a satisfying thump, and its passengers spilled out, grabbing for rebreathers or rolling out the fires that clung to their disgusting porcine flesh.
Yelling in defiance, the gunners in the cupolas of the other transports pivoted their pintle-mounted weapons towards the source of the killing shot. Shadowsun swung her hips back and her chest forward, her battlesuit smoothly boosting away from the chattering streams of slugs sent in her direction. Even a raw recruit could have avoided the ill-timed volley fired by the human soliders, and her Stealth cells made her all but invisible against the flickering clouds above.
Such poor warriors did not deserve to face the might of the XV104s. As if to prove her point, Drai’s team came alongside her, levelled their burst cannons, and tore apart the cupola gunners in a storm of blood and plasma. This really is too easy, thought Shadowsun.
There was little honour in shooting a fleeing foe, especially one as dull of wit as the Imperial Guard. Even their name was ridiculous.
[...several weeks later in the jungles of another planet...]
Shadowsun’s sensor suite flared the trajectory of another incoming barrage, but this time it came down behind her rearguard. Just as she was turning to survey the damage the treeline erupted into life. Hundreds of pale gue’la brutes roared out from the jungle in crude but effective camouflage, many of their number crying out praise to the Imperium’s dead god.
As the tau reeled in surprise, more and more of the gue’la emerged from the mists from either side of the road, their rifles spitting laser blasts into fire warriors and battlesuits alike. Some of them charged headlong at the fire warriors hunkered down at the side of the road, drawing knives the length of a tau’s arm and plunging them into the weak points of their armour. One in every ten of the gue’la emerging from the trees carried a cylindrical tank of the volatile liquid the Imperials loved to employ so much.
Cackling with alien glee, the gue’la troopers sent whooshing clouds of flame into the ranks of the tau firing back at them. Whole crowds of noble fire warriors were caught in the deadly clouds and transformed into burning, flailing puppets. One Imperial soldier caught a pulse rifle volley in the chest, its bolts slamming right through his torso and igniting the tanks on his back with a loud whooompf. The thick smoke of burning flesh mingled with the jungle mists, turning the ambush into a hellish confusion of half-glimpsed tableaus.
Shadowsun boosted up high, blasting columns of energy into the hollering gue’la troopers wherever a clear shot appeared.
‘Riptides, target the treelines! Heavy burst cannon only! Rearguard, move in to engage at close quarters! For the Greater Good, engage!’
[...]
Thick cylinders of plasma scythed down trees and gue’la warriors alike in a storm of indiscriminate violence. The blazing weapons systems panned back and forth across the treelines, reaping a madman’s toll on the gue’la platoons charging in. Here and there close-range las-fire picked at the Riptides to no more effect than light summer hail. Well-aimed krak grenades detonated against their joints, blackening paint but leaving the superstructure shining undamaged beneath.
The reactors that powered the battlesuits pulsed blue light into the mist as their rate of fire grew steadily higher. With a loud bang, something overloaded inside the Riptide closest to Shadowsun, a thin shriek coming from the battlesuit’s shuddering torso as it vented a geyser of steam. It was all the chance the gue’la needed.
They swarmed up the giant’s legs like arboreal simians, knives stabbing into the gaps between its armoured plates as their wiry fingers wedged into cracks. Shadowsun scythed past to cut two of them from the Riptide’s back with a precision blast of fusion fire. Oe-nu and Oe-hei hurtled after her, Oe-nu ramming bodily into a third and pitching him from the Riptide with a crack of broken bone.
Curving upright once more, Shadowsun glimpsed a scar-ravaged gue’la with a glowering bionic eye climb up high on the malfunctioning Riptide. He plunged a metallic arm deep into the battlesuit’s neck joint, rooting around before yanking half of a bloody tau head from the aperture he had torn in its metal hide.
Shadowsun’s stomach turned. She pivoted in midair in preparation to loose a blast right at the scarred gue’la, but the obscuring fog closed in around her once more, hiding him from sight.