This second eldar carried an aura which drew every human eye upon him. He looked more frail and slow than the others, and, even though Ulanti had never seen an eldar before and had no means of judging such things in their terms, there was an unmistakable sense of venerable age about him.
And great wisdom, too, held in those almond eyes. The eldar scanned the ranks of the humans, that unsettling, inscrutable gaze quickly coming to rest on Inquisitor Horst.
The eldar took several more steps forward, until it stood before Horst. The two beings, human and eldar, regarded each other for a moment, the tall, slim eldar towering almost half a metre above Horst, then the alien gracefully inclined its head and executed what might have been a respectful bow.
“Welcome, human-called-Horst,” it said in perfectly-spoken but strangely enunciated High Gothic. “This one you would term ‘I’ is kin-called Kariadryl, second-born of the union of Ky-Danae and Darandera, and honoured to be the farseeing one of the craftworld An-Iolsus. You called into the void, brother, and I have answered, and now we have much to discuss.”
THIRTEEN
On the surface of Stabia, the parley had begun. Out in space, on the fringes of the Stabia system, the battle was also beginning.
The Sword-class frigate Volpone was patrolling the system’s perimeter and maintaining a close watch on the eldar vessel doing likewise. Or at least, thought the vessel’s angry and frustrated captain, Vanyan Karasev, that was what they were supposed to be doing.
Karasev was that rarity in Battlefleet Gothic, a ship’s captain who did not belong to the traditional and sprawling naval aristocracy class of Cypra Mundian nobility which had produced officers and captains for every battlefleet in the Segmentum Obscuras since time immemorial. Karasev had achieved his rank purely through his own drive and ability, and, secretly amongst the upper cadre of Battlefleet Command, great things were expected of him. The captaincy of a capital-class vessel would one day be his, although Karasev himself suspected that, had he been one of the Cypra Mundian elite, he would probably already be standing on the bridge of a Lunar or Gothic-class cruiser somewhere, directing the wrath of the Emperor directly upon the enemies of mankind.
Not that he took his current command or mission less seriously, but, at that moment, his fiery Stranivarite temper was up, as, for the fourth time in as many hours, his surveyor officers had once again allowed the eldar vessel ahead of them to slip out of the reach of his vessel’s scanners.
In truth, he knew it was not his crew’s fault. The eldar vessel had been arrogantly showing off, almost taunting them, as it executed a bewildering series of complex manoeuvres, shocking them with its sudden turns of speed and confounding the abilities of their surveyor systems by modulating the density and frequency of its energy signature, alternatively fading away completely from their augur screens and then appearing elsewhere from its last reported or estimated position in a sudden flare of energy signal.
And now it was gone again, disappearing from their surveyor screens after executing a rapid turn sunwards and vanishing without trace.
Like many ambitious men, Karasev was neither patient nor understanding, and the mood on the command deck of the Volpone was tense as his crew endeavoured to re-establish surveyor contact with the alien ship as their commander hovered ominously over them.
“Surveyor contact, two AUs to starboard, and closing!” declared a surveyor officer almost triumphantly.
“Clarify,” barked Karasev, already troubled by this latest development. A shared look with his second-in-command confirmed the same thought. At its last recorded position, the eldar ship was ahead of them and pulling away from them at speed. Now it had somehow slipped round their starboard flank and was closing on them instead, appearing from out of nowhere and at an alarmingly close distance.
“Definitely closing,” confirmed the ship’s chief surveyor officer, reading the data from his control lectern screen. “Energy signature is completely changed from the last time we acquired it. It’s—” The officer suddenly broke off, and looked at his captain in confusion. “According to these readings, it’s an Imperial ship. A Praetor-class frigate!”
Karasev and his second-in-command exchanged surprised looks. “Someone’s a long way from home,” noted the second-in-command, dryly. The Praetor-class vessel was in service amongst many of the local Imperium battlefleets of the Ultima Segmentum, but, as far as Karasev was aware, it had never been used within the Segmentum Obscuras, and certainly not by Battlefleet Gothic.
“More to the point, why weren’t we told there were other Imperium forces in the area?” said Karasev, trying to conceal the uncertainty he was feeling. Everything about this mission had been unorthodox so far, to say the least. Could it be possible that there was indeed another, more secret, Imperium force in the system, sent along to provide additional, security for Semper’s battle squadron?
“I want to see this thing on vidpict, and I want more information on it. Open hailing frequencies, and identify its transponder codes or energy signature. I want to know exactly what vessel it is.”
The bridge crew went to work carrying out their captain’s orders. The main augur screen crackled into life, displaying the hazy, reconstructed image being picked up by the ship’s augur systems. Seeing the image on the screen, Karasev allowed himself to relax a little as he recognised the unmistakable and reassuring hull shape of an Imperium warship. Still, the outline of the ship seemed to oddly waver and flicker. Karasev looked in silent question towards his Chief of Surveyors.
“Probably vidpict interference from the pulsar,” commented the officer. “This whole system’s just one damn big electromagnetic swamp.”
It was a reasonable enough explanation, Karasev knew—Emperor knew they had had enough trouble with the surveyor systems since the moment they had arrived in this blighted excuse of a star system—but something deeply worried him about the situation. Something was wrong here, he knew, but he just could not see what. The reports from his bridge crew did little to dispel his unease.
“Comm channels are garbled. Could be spill from the pulsar, but we’re getting nothing on the hailing frequencies, and we can’t pick up any transponder coding from the vessel.”
Vessel drawing closer. “Nothing in the registry to identify it.”
Karasev looked at the screen, seeing the ship continue its silent, steady approach. The feeling of unease worsened. He was just about to order a course change away from the ship, and for the Volpone’s gun batteries to be run out and readied to fire, when the image on the screen suddenly warped for a second.
At first he thought that it was just more vidpict interference, but then he told himself that, no, it had definitely been the image of the ship itself which had changed, while the starfield behind it remained in clear focus. For a moment—just the briefest of moments—the image of the frigate had flickered off, revealing the merest, snatched glimpse of… something else behind or beyond the facade of that image.
Another ship, Karasev told himself irrationally, unable to deny what he had just seen with his own eyes. It’s a projection concealing a completely different ship!
“Battle stations! All power to defence shields!”
The order was only half out of his mouth when he saw the second impossible thing happening on the augur screen before him. Torpedoes fired from a prow which had no torpedo tubes. Suddenly there were torpedoes streaking through space towards his vessel, travelling at a velocity no Imperium-made torpedo could match.
Karasev stared sickly at the data on his command lectern, seeing the torpedoes eat up the distance between them and his vessel, and knowing that he had made the greatest and final mistake of his career. A caustic Stranivarite oath which could never have come from any Cypra Mundian aristocrat escaped from his lips.
“Signal the Macharius,” he ordered, determined to at least give some useful purpose to his final moments. “Tell them we have been betrayed and are under attack from the eldar!”
Moments
later, the torpedoes struck home. The Volpone, its eight hundred crew and Captain Vanyan Karasev and his highly promising career disappeared together in an abrupt and fiery conclusion.
The Volpone’s killer cruised forward, slipping harmlessly past the expanding cloud of wreckage of the destroyed Imperial frigate, effortlessly shrugging off the false ship image projected by its mimic engines. The image of the Praetor-class frigate wavered and faded away. In its place was the sinister and predatory shape of a dark eldar cruiser, the strange black material of its smooth, featureless and shell-like hull seeming to draw in the light from the starfield around it.
On board the vessel’s bridge, the dark eldar commander savoured the thrill of the kill, while lamenting the necessity of having to completely destroy the human vessel without being allowed to take prisoners. Slaves, whether intended for use as sacrifices, torture fodder, cruel and terrible haemonculi experimentation or merely forced labour, were the currency of her kind, and a ship’s captain who returned from a raiding mission with their slave holds full of fresh, valuable new flesh could expect to receive the favour of their kabal lord.
This, however, was no mere raiding mission, and there were greater prizes at stake here than the opportunity to take a few hundred human slaves. The Kabal of the Poison Heart had lost much prestige and status in the recent Wych cult schism which had convulsed Commorragh society, and the kabal’s fortunes had waned as those of its enemies had risen. Shorn of many of its traditional allies, most of whom had been all too happy to abandon pacts made more out of fear than respect or loyalty and go over to the side of their enemies, the kabal had been left isolated and facing extinction. In the deadly, ever-shifting pattern of brutal intrigue, assassinations and constant internecine warfare that passed for politics in Commorragh, the Kabal of the Poison Heart would not be the first ancient clan to be wiped out without trace or subsumed completely into the ranks of a more powerful rival, and it would certainly not be the last.
Archon Satikus however, could not have maintained his position as kabal lord of the Poison Heart for these last few thousand years, ruthlessly despatching countless claimants and pretenders to the title, without possessing some measure of cunning and guile. This secret alliance with the creature known as Abaddon the Despoiler would, if it were to become known to the rest of their kind, be enough to ensure the Poison Heart’s swift and certain destruction by the combined might of all the kabals in Commorragh, but, as there were great risks in this venture, so too were there potentially great rewards.
To arrive back in Commorragh with holds full of thousands of human slaves; not mere sub-standard civilian chattel gathered in plunder raids on isolated settlements and colonies, but the finest specimens from the crews of the humans’ warships. Strong bodies and more resistant flesh, capable of withstanding greater and crueller abominations than their weaker brethren.
But there was better than that.
To arrive back in Commorragh with a prize greater than more mere mon-keigh slaves. To display before the other kabals hundreds or perhaps even thousands of those who were once their kin, but who long ago abandoned the inhabitants of Commorragh to their fate at the hands of the Great Devourer, and who denied them a place of safety amongst their own ranks. Yes, what tortures, what exquisite, long-lasting suffering wouldn’t any of her kind wish to see visited upon those most hated of their former brothers, the eldar of the craftworlds?
But, oh yes, there was even better than that.
To arrive back in Commorragh with a prize greater even than so many craftworld eldar. A prize great enough to make Lord Satikus risk all to capture it, even the complete destruction of his kabal. What Archon in what other kabal wouldn’t want to acquire such a prize for himself? What price might such a prize attain at exclusive auction amongst the highest kabal lords? How much of its former power and prestige would the Poison Heart recover when Lord Satikus paraded his rare, precious prize before his peers?
Yes, how much power and glory would be theirs, when they offered up the soul of a farseer to the One Who Thirsts?
The cruiser commander smiled at the thought, and turned her attention back to the business of the hunt.
The dark eldar cruiser sped on silently through the void, bearing down swiftly on its next chosen target.
Elsewhere in the Stabia system, the Volpone’s destruction would have registered as a sudden, tell-tale energy burst on the pictskin sensor screens of any nearby eldar craft. As it was, the craftmaster and crew of the nearest eldar vessel, the Aconite-class frigate Medhbh’s Shield, were too occupied with other, more pressing, matters to notice the incident.
Their attacker had appeared from literally empty space, it had seemed to Craftmaster Hora Kyrrl. It was almost as if it had unfolded from the blackness of space itself. Kyrrl was young as his race judged such matters, and, relatively unversed in the deeper, darker secrets of the history of the eldar, and at first he had not recognised the attackers for what they truly were. The ambush had been swift and sudden, and it was only after the enemy cruiser had launched torpedoes, only after the Medhbh’s Shield had been struck amidships by two of them and suffered a catastrophic energy drain which had left it floating powerless and defenceless in space, only after the enemy ship had come alongside and launched a boarding assault on their victim, that Kyrrl’s worst fears had been confirmed.
“The Dark Ones,” breathed one of his thought-talkers at the first, terrible sight of their attackers in the flesh. The thought-talker was old, and perhaps had previous, firsthand experience of such things, things which went unspoken amongst the eldar, but, for the younger eldar such as Kyrrl, it was as if part of their race’s darkest, most sinister legends had come to life. At first, he wondered—hoped even—that all this was just some particularly vivid kind of ashytii, a nightmare dream from his unconscious mind, born out of the eldar’s shared race memory of all their kind had endured and suffered since the terrible time of the Fall, but that notion was quickly dispelled as the thought-talker next to him fell screaming and gurgling to the ground, his torso shredded apart by a hit from one of the enemy’s weapons.
The dark eldar swarmed aboard, entering the ship from both sides of its hull and on most of its decks. Kyrrl’s thought-talkers were either dead or were unable to penetrate the psychic cloud of darkness which had enveloped the ship, shutting it off from contact with the other eldar vessels in the system. From the moment the first dark eldar warrior stepped through the breach in its hull, the survival of the Medhbh’s Shield could be measured in mere minutes.
Kyrrl’s helmet communicator was filled with the screams of his crew as they died under the Accursed Ones’ blades and weapons, and, far worse, his mind was filled with the babbling pleas and cries of those crew unlucky enough to fall alive into the hands of their shadow brethren.
Hails of shuriken pistol fire and the strange but deadly splinters of crystal material produced by the weapons of the enemy filled the passageway, striking the smooth, bone-like material of its walls and tearing long, jagged scars. The infinity circuit mind of the ship screamed in silent, psychic agony at the violations being done to it, at the tainting presence of the abominations now forcing their way aboard it. Kyrrl and the remains of his Guardian squad retreated up the passageway, heading towards the sacred wraithbone core which housed the ship’s precious infinity circuit mind. They left their dead and injured where they fell. The dark eldar pursued them relentlessly, firing as they came.
The Guardian in front of Kyrrl suddenly spun and fell, his arm sheared away at the shoulder by a hit from a splinter rifle. Kyrrl turned and fired, decapitating the Guardian’s attacker as a volley of razor-sharp shards of metal from Kyrrl’s shuriken pistol, propelled at enormous speed by the gravitic forces inside the pistol’s firing chamber, tore through the dark eldar warrior’s throat and embedded themselves in the chest of a second warrior following close behind.
The dark eldar fell back, and, for just a moment, Kyrrl allowed himself the tempting fantasy that per
haps they were retreating back to their vessel. The illusion was shattered in another hail of splinter weapon fire, striking down two more of the defenders, and pinning the others down as a trio of grotesque figures broke away from the ranks of the dark eldar and charged towards Kyrrl and the others.
“Asuryan preserve us,” gasped Melishya, a female steersman, staring in revulsion at the creatures dancing and capering up the passageway towards them. “What are those things?”
Kyrrl shared his crewman’s reaction of repulsed shock, but did not hesitate as he sent a first and then a second hail of shuriken fire into the body of one of the creatures. It staggered, almost falling as the razor-edged, tiny spinning discs of shining metal ripped bloody holes through its body. Seconds later, though, and as Kyrrl watched in complete disbelief, it was on the move again, dancing and capering up the passageway towards them as it raced to catch up with its companions.
Looking at the things, Kyrrl could only guess what kind of creatures they may once have been. Their bodies had been wracked and distorted out of shape by the most terrible tortures or surgical alterations. They were naked save for leather harnesses which held their torture-ravaged bodies into some semblance of normal form, and their flesh was pierced in dozens of places with barbed hooks and pins, holding open the mouths of unhealed wounds or surgical excavations and revealing gleaming bone and pulsing, blood-slicked organs within.
Repulsed, sickened and filled with an awful dread of the grotesque creatures, Kyrrl and those around him opened fire as one. The creatures screeched in vile, ecstatic pleasure as the shuriken fire tore into them, chopping through limbs and slicing clean through flesh and bone. Kyrrl saw one of the things, a shuriken shot carrying off a good third of its malformed head, continue on towards them, gibbering madly to itself. Another one, flayed by round after round of repeated shuriken hits, only succumbed after all its limbs had been shot away. Its limbless torso, pierced in a dozen places, flopped to the ground, where it wriggled in a spreading pool of its own fluids.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 18