“These allies you speak of, Warmaster, who are they, and how will we make ourselves known to them?”
Again, the figure on the throne smiled in secret amusement and gestured towards his Chaos sorcerer. “You must be weary after such a long journey from whatever remote part of our domain you have travelled from. Rest and recover some of your strength. Afterwards, when you are ready, I have no doubt that our good and loyal Zaraphiston will tell you everything you need to know.”
It was some three weeks after the departure of the two envoys from the Warmaster’s court that a scout raider craft dropped out of the warp on the edge of a desolate and forgotten star system on the edge of the Cyclops Cluster. It made its way quickly in-system to take orbit around the system’s third innermost planet, a barren rock so insignificant that only the most dedicated of the Imperium’s cartographer-adepts could have located its details in the vast and still incomplete index of mapped star systems which lay within the Imperium’s sprawling and ever-changing borders.
A shuttle, black and sinister, dropped from the orbiting ship towards the planet’s surface, landing at the point of the precise co-ordinates given to them days ago and depositing three elite squads of Black Legion Chaos Marines on the dead and dusty plain. Two of the squads instantly fanned out to secure the perimeter of the landing zone while the other began a careful search of the area. It took less than a minute before a voxed shout alerted the squad commander that they had found what they came for.
It sat in the middle of a dust-filled crater. A squat, featureless obsidian canister roughly half a metre high and with no visible seams or means of opening. The planet was barren and airless. No wind or breeze existed to stir the dead dust of the place, and so it was with a feeling of unsettling disquiet that the squad commander noted that the desert surface of the sand remained undisturbed for hundreds of metres all around the canister. Whatever had placed the object there had left no evidence of its passing.
With an angry curse, he commanded a Marine to run forward and snatch up the canister before he and his squad retreated back toward their waiting shuttle, nervously training their weapons on a landscape which had not seen the tread of another living thing in millennia. Less than three minutes after touching down, the shuttle was in the air again, abandoning the world to whatever forgotten ghosts walked upon its dead surface.
Six days later, the canister lay on a black marble plinth within the private chambers of Abaddon. The Despoiler stood in contemplation of it, secretly marvelling at the chilling alien blankness of the thing. The scabbarded daemon blade hanging by his side stirred in disquiet, giving forth a faint psychic rustle of distrust, and Abaddon turned to see Zaraphiston entering the chamber.
“You sent for me, Warmaster?” he purred with his usual unctuous, too-quick-to-please tone. “I assume we have received an answer from our potential new allies?”
Abaddon gestured at the canister. “Open it.” The Chaos sorcerer bowed at the command and stood over the plinth, contemplating the object upon it for a few seconds. Then, with his scaled hands, he made passes over the canister, running his fingers above its featureless surface while whispering words of power. In the dim light of the room, a faint glowing nimbus of energy became apparent around the object. A few seconds later, a sequence of strange and elaborate rune-marks became fleetingly visible there too. Zaraphiston’s long, nimble fingers moved quickly, following the runes and lightly touching them in a complex sequence only he could follow.
With a quiet, rasping hiss, the top of the canister dilated open like the iris of an eye, although there was no visible mechanism involved in the process. An acrid vapour spilled out, tainting the air with a bitter-sweet chemical taste, and, beneath that, the faint smell of something rotting and organic.
“Well? What answer have they sent us?” asked Abaddon, as Zaraphiston reached into the canister and removed its contents.
The severed and perfectly preserved head of Hannibar of Barca dangled there, the circumstances of his death written there in the frozen expression of agony etched into his cryogenically preserved features. However the Khorne berserker had died, it had neither been quick nor easy, that much was plain to see.
Abaddon smiled at the sight of the gruesome missive-object. “Excellent. Then their answer is ‘yes’.”
THREE
Lileathon watched impassively as the last doomed human vessel continued valiantly, if futilely, to fight on. It had been stripped of its shields, its main drive had been crippled by a torpedo hit and it could neither move nor manoeuvre. Its hull was punctured in more than a dozen places and its internal atmosphere was bleeding out into space, and yet the human barbarians within refused to yield to the inevitable.
The slender dart shapes of her life-mate Kornous’s Eagle formation glided in for another and surely final bombing strike on the vessel, and, even as Lileathon watched the images projected on the delicate wraithbone membrane of the pict-skin, she saw the remaining working turret defences on the enemy vessel’s hull open fire at the oncoming bomber craft. She smiled in appreciation as she watched the Eagles dance through the hail of fire, leaving the confounded human gunners pointlessly chasing the ghostly after-images thrown out by their targets’ holofield generator defences.
“Your orders, craftmistress?” echoed Kornous’s mind-voice over the wraithbone device-amplified communication link. “Do you require any of the mon-keigh animals as captives?”
Even over the wraithbone-comm link, which often missed subtle inflections of meaning and cadence, the knowing humour in his mind-voice tone was clear.
“Mael dannan,” replied Lileathon, using the shared warrior-cant dialect of their now-vanquished craftworld. Dannan, the word for death, but used only in terms of the culling of animals and other lesser creatures.
Mael dannan. Total and merciless extermination.
The Eagle bombers bore mercilessly on, skipping effortlessly past a storm of las-beam fire, spinning a dizzying path through a wall of crude mon-keigh explosive projectile munitions. They bore relentlessly down on the target. In times past, Lileathon had taken on the aspect warrior path of Amon Harakht, of Eagle pilot. That part of her which would always be of that aspect could well remember the surge of exultant pleasure which must now be filling the minds of the bomber pilots as they heard the over-excited, screaming crescendo of their craft’s infinity circuits and saw the bulky shape of their doomed target looming ever larger through the crystal-glass canopies of their cockpits. She watched the last few moments on the pict-skin screen, marvelling at the skill and artistry of the bomber pilots. She had seen this final killing stroke performed a thousand times, had performed it herself a thousand times more, but still the pleasure never left her.
The Eagles bore on, until the pitted and battle-scarred hull of their target must have filled their entire universe, and then, at the last possible moment and with only scant metres to spare, they broke formation and peeled away, their navigator-companions simultaneously giving the mind-thought order to their crafts’ infinity circuit systems. A brood of missile-slivers launched away from each craft, piercing the target vessel’s hull in a space of time immeasurable by the crude animal-minds of the vessel’s occupants. Another infinitesimal moment later, and the missiles’ sonic charge warheads detonated deep within the target, unleashing a carefully orchestrated symphony of destruction. The human vessel did not so much explode as shatter, transformed in an instant into a rapidly expanding sphere of twisted metal and fragmented ruin.
The eldar vessel’s pack of killers raced ahead of the wreckage wave, the squadron’s infinity circuit comm-channels filled with a hot, excited mish-mash of victory shout-thoughts and bravado chatter.
“Swift victory, sure death,” thought-talked Lileathon in the proper rite of celebration, using her Eclipse-class cruiser’s superior infinity circuits to reach into the minds of the overexcited aspect warrior pilots and install a necessary sense of calm and authority. “Return home to receive your craft-world’s bless
ings.”
One by one, the pilots swiftly responded to the order, but she maintained her vigil at the pict-skin screen until she was certain that all the bomber craft were returning to their launch-bays. As a one-time aspect warrior pilot, she well knew the dangerous ferment which often seized the minds of those who chose the aspect warrior path.
We are slaves to our emotions, she thought. This weakness—this inability to control our animal-selves—almost destroyed us once. We must not succumb to this mon-keigh aspect within ourselves again. We must keep in check our baser nature if we are ever to survive.
A flickering glance across the other pict-skins confirmed that, elsewhere, the battle was likewise going in their favour. Four mon-keigh transports lay crippled and helpless, offering themselves up as easy victims to any of the other Eagle formations still at loose across the battle zone. Three more transports and one escort craft had been reduced to burned-out hulks, while what remained of the human convoy was making a desperate, limping run for the warp jump point on the fringes of the system, still impossibly far-distant, given their present speed and predicament.
Fast-attack eldar vessels, Hemlock and Nightshade destroyers, harried them all the way, and Lileathon saw the last surviving human escorts turn, outmanoeuvred and outgunned, to face their pursuers in a desperate and doubtlessly ill-fated attempt to buy time for the rest of the convoy to reach the safety of the warp jump point. The eldar ships accelerated at speed towards the enemy warships, their commanders no doubt revelling in the promise of such easy kills.
“They fight bravely, the humans,” offered Ailill, second-in-command of the Vual’en Sho, watching the denouement of the battle as it was projected real-time upon the augur chamber’s pict-skin screens. “We must give them that much, if nothing else.”
“We give them nothing,” replied Lileathon, making no attempt to disguise the contempt in her voice, shading the meaning of her words with the inflection reserved for an enemy considered beneath contempt.
“They are enemies. It is dangerous not to accord your enemies at least some measure of respect,” ventured Ailill.
“They are animals. They have no souls, and so they are incapable of possessing the virtues of bravery or nobility of spirit,” she replied.
“And yet they continue to fight when there is no hope of victory, as they do now. Even the lowliest animal knows when to flee or, if cornered, when to offer its throat in surrender to its conqueror.”
Lileathon was not to be distracted by her second-in-command’s philosophical musings. “They fight, because they know no other way, because their animal natures compel them to do so. If they have any courage, then it is merely the courage of a savage beast, that manner of mindless savagery which may drive an animal to gnaw at its own trap-imprisoned limbs.”
We have more important matters to attend to, she added in mind-speech. Let the issue be at an end.
“Wisdom commands,” genuflected Ailill, the unmistakeable body language of his stance and carefully subservient gesture making clear his unspoken opposition to his craftmistress’s opinion.
He disagrees, but our ways permit him to do so, thought Lileathon. That is why our ways are superior to the ways of the mon-keigh and their mindless subjugation to the will of their corpse-god. Lann Caihe. Water bringer. That is what his role means in our language. He is older and more cautious than I. His task is to bring water to quench the fires of my fury when they threaten to become too uncontrollable. He brings balance to my command, just as our race’s task is to bring balance to the universe. That is why all that we are and all that we have been cannot be allowed to be extinguished without a struggle.
Light flared on one of the pict-skin screens as another ship exploded, calling her attention back to the here and now. She saw one of the human vessels—so ugly, she thought to herself, so bulky and graceless, so unlike the graceful, slender-lined shapes of our ships—slowly breaking up as it was rent apart by a series of internal explosions, one entire side of its hull stripped away by the deadly, nimble touch of a pulsar lance. The eldar on the command bridge of the Vual’en Sho paused for a few seconds in their tasks to watch the last few moments of the human ship’s death-throes.
“One of their troop transports,” judged Ailill. “A bad loss for them, several thousand warriors less to battle the servants of the Abomination.”
“Or several thousand warriors less to attack and exterminate us,” countered Lileathon. “Count yourself fortunate, Ailill. You still have a craftworld home, while I saw mine destroyed by the mon-keigh savages, and heard the mind-screams of our world’s Dreaming Ones as their spirit stones were ripped out of the living wraithbone.”
Ailill said nothing. All across the command deck, the eyes of many other eldar were upon her, and even the gentle, calming mind-speak whisper of the wraithbone all around them seemed to falter and quiet. To those of her race, a craft-world was a sacred, living thing, the sanctuary which nurtured and protected them in the cold gulfs between the stars, and to speak of the death of one of these ancient and impossibly precious refuges was to bring fear and horror in the minds of every eldar listening.
“The mon-keigh and their corpse-god oppose the Great Abomination, as do we,” she continued, studying the patterns of the field of battle on the tactical pict-skin screen, “but they are also the Abomination’s greatest source of power. They are weak and stupid, and their god is old and failing. Their empire is doomed, but in its death-throes, it lashes out blindly at all around them, including us. They understand so little, and all which they do not understand, they condemn and seek to destroy. That is why we cannot depend on them to hold the line against the Abomination, and that is why we must prevent them from building their strength to strike at us.”
Ailill said nothing, but made the sixth variation of the ninth gesture of contrition. Sorrow expressed at the touching upon of another’s grief. Lileathon made the corresponding gesture of forgiveness. Her story was well known amongst the eldar of Ailill’s craftworld. Her own craftworld destroyed, she and the other survivors of the unwarranted attack on Bel-Shammon fled into the labyrinth of the webway, taking refuge amongst the craftworlds of their brethren eldar. A refugee even amongst a race of refugees, the fires of vengeance burned hot and fierce within the proud young warship captain, as the ships of this human transport convoy had just found out to their cost.
The humans’ war had spread out all across the Gothic sector, even into those regions which they had normally left well alone in centuries past. Regions marked as uncharted or uninhabited wilderness space on their crude star charts, but which every vessel’s captain knew all too well to be inhabited by races other than theirs. The humans had lost many ships over the millennia in attempts to probe into these regions and for many years now there had existed an unspoken concordat within the humans’ naval forces that such areas would be left well alone, and the races within them allowed to remain unchallenged.
Now, though, the urgent requirements of war brought the humans into these dark regions. They came in search of convoy routes which would allow them to evade the enemy’s prowling wolf pack fleets, or seeking new resource planets to provide the raw materials for the manufacture of their crude but often highly effective armaments. This system was part of one such region. In itself, it was insignificant and unremarkable, a dying dwarf star circled by four dead planets, but drifting far distant through the outer fringes of the system was the craftworld of An-Iolsus, birthplace of Ailill and the other eldar aboard the Vual’en Sho, and the adopted home of Lileathon herself. The system and the barren reaches of interstellar space around it were sacrosanct while the craftworld was even remotely nearby, and it would be over a century and a half yet before An-Iolsus’s slow, millennia-long course would carry it beyond the furthest borders of the system, and so the eldar of An-Iolsus had reacted with brutal and immediate force to the humans’ incursions into the region.
This was the third such convoy which Lileathon’s reaver fleet had ravaged, and
that aspect of her which she had surrendered to the warrior calling exulted in the carnage she and the vessels under her command had wreaked amongst the human trespassers. She had stood on this deck and watched in satisfaction as star-bright beams of pulsar lance energy effortlessly laid open the thickly-armoured hulls of the human vessels; as flights of eldar torpedoes, mind-fast and almost impossible to detect, ruthlessly and effectively hunted down and destroyed the slow and ponderous enemy ships; as squadrons of Darkstar fighters and Eagle bombers danced their deadly ballet around their targets, filling the darkness of space with the light of exploding enemy craft. She had seen all this, and yet it was not enough. Still, the humans came.
They do not yet understand that this region of space is forbidden to them, she thought, feeling the old, familiar fury of the warrior aspect well up within her, and so the more vessels they attempt to send into these reaches, the more we will enforce that understanding upon them.
With difficulty, she tamed such wild thoughts, knowing that the command deck of a flagship cruiser was no place to allow full vent to the most extreme emotions of her aspect warrior mind. She looked again at the scenes on the tactical pict-skins, speaking aloud orders to the crew members around her.
“Mainsail thirty degrees to sunward. Increase speed by two urs and set in a pursuit course following the main body of enemy vessels. Escort vessels Medhbh’s Shield and Lament of Elshor will accompany us. The remaining vessels will seek out and destroy the enemy stragglers which have already been abandoned in the enemy’s escape towards their precious jump point.”
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 4