Borusa put a studded boot into the eldar’s stomach, bringing its charge to a bone-crunching halt. He ducked the first, lightning-fast blade that came at him, but the weapon in the alien’s other hand cut through the meat of his forearm to the bone. Even before Borusa had registered the pain from the strange, cold metal of the alien blade, he had already dealt the creature a crushing blow with the stock of his heavy bolter, smashing the weapon down upon the creature’s skull.
The eldar crumpled to the ground. Roaring in anger, blood spurting from his wounded arm, Borusa planted a foot on the eldar’s chest, pinning it to the ground, and blew its head apart with a single heavy bolter round.
Getting up, Ulanti saw the source of his earlier, momentary confusion. The eldar’s armour and weapons were studded with long, scythe-like blade attachments. Even the long, crescent shape of its helmet was fashioned into a cruel-edged blade. The alien’s armour was mixed, muted shades of black and red. Everything about the alien and its appearance signified a dark and twisted malignity. It was also quite unlike any of the eldar Ulanti had seen so far here, sharing none of the bright peacock colours and delicately flamboyant design that he had seen in their weapons and armour, but he would be the first to admit that he was no damned Inquisition expert on xenos-related matters. However it might be different from the others the thing lying in the dust in front of him was unmistakably still an eldar.
They had come here to cautiously rendezvous and parley with the eldar, a race with a long and bloody history of attacks on Imperium forces, now they had come under attack from eldar. You didn’t have to be some damned Adeptus Mechanicus construct to work out what was happening here, Ulanti thought to himself.
It was left to Borusa, cursing and grinning savagely as he applied a hasty battlefield dressing to his wounded arm, to unsubtly set the situation in context.
“Alien or no alien,” he grinned, gesturing to the corpse at his feet, “the bastards still bleed good enough, sir. As long as I know they can bleed, then I know I ain’t going to have too much problem killing them.”
He took up the heavy bolter again, sending a long, chattering stream of bolter shells into the dust storm in the direction the eldar had come from, dissuading any others that might still be lurking out there from trying the same thing. Then, grabbing Ulanti, he ran off into the storm, probing out a path ahead of them with short, menacing bursts of bolter fire.
Stumbling through the confusion of the dust storm, with the muffled sounds of battle coming from all around them, they soon came across other corpses, mostly crewmen from the Macharius, but with the lifeless forms of Horst’s Inquisition retinue and also several eldar warriors mixed amongst them. Passing the corpse of one of the eldar, Ulanti could not help but notice that it was twitching and jerking in a way identical to the body of the armsman just moments ago, and that there were several identical smoking puncture wounds in its torso.
A victim of alien friendly fire, Ulanti wondered, cut down in the crossfire from one of his brother eldar? In the confusion of battle, in the urgency of the moment, there was no way of stopping to wonder what might have happened.
And there were other survivors too. Looming out of the murk, appearing so quickly that Ulanti almost sent a brace of las-shots into them, came Horst’s man Stavka, accompanied by several of his group. Following them came Commissar Kyogen with half a squad of naval armsmen. There were casualties amongst both groups of Imperial servants, one of Stavka’s men nursing the hastily-cauterised stump of an arm severed just below the elbow. There was the tell-tale glazed look of heavy doses of kalma in the man’s eyes, inuring him from the immediate pain and shock of his wound.
“They took us by surprise, coming at us from all sides,” said Stavka. There was blood smeared across the Inquisition man’s face—not his own, apparently, since he showed no sign of injury—and a look of fierce determination in his eyes. He gripped his weapon, an expensive and rare forge world-manufactured plasma pistol/bolt pistol combi-weapon, tightly. The plasma pistol element of the weapon emitted a faint whining noise as it recharged, and the barrel gave off an acrid-smelling vapour as its internal cooling element fought to combat the potentially disastrous effects of the weapon overheating. The gun had been fired recently and repeatedly.
“Are there any more of you?” asked Stavka, looking at the two naval men.
“Perhaps, but I can’t raise any of them on the comm. I sent a squad to check on the shuttles, but my chief petty officer here is the only one who made it back.”
Stavka swore in the Low Gothic dialect of his homeworld. “Alright, then we assume they’re all dead and what you see here is all we’ve got left. They’ve hit us hard and fast, but there’s still enough of us left to do them some damage. First thing we’ve got to do now is find the inquisitor and get him out of here.”
Ulanti nodded his assent. Stavka clapped him on the shoulder, grinned a humourless grin and then led them at a sprint towards the building where Horst had been meeting with the eldar leader. The sound of weapons fire was heaviest from that direction, although all that could be heard was the strange, mixed sounds of the aliens’ guns. Briefly, Ulanti wondered if, in the confusion of battle and the dust storm, the eldar had mistakenly opened fire on each other. If that were truly the case, he mused, then all the better for their own chances of survival, perhaps showing that the Emperor’s favour was with them.
One of Stavka’s retinue, a female with a powerful physique and primitive warrior tattoos carved into her disfigured face, gave a shout of alarm. She was equipped with augmetic eyes, which could apparently see further into the murk of the storm than normal human vision, and she had clearly spotted some imminent threat. Raising her bulky grenade launcher, she sent a brace of frag grenades flying out into the dust.
The action was answered seconds later by a series of explosions and the sound of alien screams as lethal hails of razor-edged shrapnel sprayed out amongst the eldar. The warrior woman grinned in triumph and raised the weapon to fire again, but was abruptly cut down by a volley of spinning razor disc projectiles which cut through flesh and bone seemingly just as easily as they cut through the dust-filled air of the storm. Struck by several of the missiles, the woman tumbled to the ground in pieces.
Stavka gave a yell of anger and charged off into the dust clouds. Ulanti followed suite, snapping off shots with his laspistol. From out of the dusty gloom, the distinctive shapes of the eldar began to emerge.
The attack from their rear had apparently caught them by surprise, but they were reacting with bewildering speed, turning from behind the low walls and tumbled ruins they had sought cover amongst to confront their human attackers. Ulanti saw an alien warrior in brightly-patterned armour turn the long, slender barrel of his unfamiliar-looking weapon towards them. The weapon spewed out a thin, arcing stream of fire, revealing itself to be some kind of alien flamer device. The weapon’s reach was longer and more deadly than its bulkier human equivalent; the alien’s aim even deadlier still.
The fireball consumed two of the men from the Macharius, and one of Stavka’s lieutenants, a dark-skinned mutant wearing the glowing snake crest skin-markings of one of the infamous bounty hunter clans of the feral world of Wagner’s Landing. Two of the victims, immolated almost completely by the potent chemical mix of the alien weapon, were ashes almost before they hit the ground. The third, one of the Macharius men, ran onwards blind and screaming as the fire ate hungrily away at him. One of the eldar disc projectiles, whether mercifully intended or not, struck him and brought his agony to an abrupt end.
The wave of fire rolled towards Ulanti, the heat of it igniting the dust in the air, as the alien continued to direct the weapon’s deadly reach towards more of his intended targets. Panicking, Ulanti snapped off several las-shots at the alien, seeing the eldar stagger slightly as at least one of them impacted against its armour. Before it could recover and readjust its aim, there was a distinctive screaming-roaring noise from somewhere close to Ulanti’s right, and the elda
r was struck square on by an angry ball of white-hot stellar energy, killing it instantly and igniting the fuel of its flamer weapon. The eldar and the area around it disappeared in a fiery roar, the flames from the explosion and its scattered debris casting an incandescent glow over the battlefield.
Panicked by the explosion, the other eldar pulled back to another line of ruins. Stavka crouched on the ground and fired his combi-weapon at them in an expert two-handed stance, picking off at least one more of them with short, carefully controlled bursts of bolter shells. Even amongst the loud bark of the bolter fire, the complaining whine of the plasma pistol element of the weapon could clearly be heard as it recharged once more, getting ready to unleash more catastrophe into the ranks of the aliens.
“We’ve got them on the run now,” shouted the ex-Arbites officer, the gruff authority in his voice evident even over the sound of gunfire and the ever-rising howl of the storm. “Don’t let them regroup or try to slip around us under cover of the storm!”
He was moving again, Ulanti and the others quickly following him. Ulanti had his laspistol in one hand and his master-crafted naval officer’s sabre in the other. The shapes of two eldar reared up at him. A solid blast of heavy bolter fire scattered one of them in pieces back into the gloom where it had come from; clear evidence that Borusa was still with him and watching his back. The other, too close for Ulanti’s hiveworld cutthroat guardian angel to risk a shot at, was upon the navy officer in an instant.
Ulanti and the eldar traded blows fast and furiously, the metal-working skills of the long dead craftsmen who had fabricated the sabre Ulanti wielded sorely tested by the impacts from the strange bone-like material of the alien’s own sword. Remorselessly, he found himself losing ground to his opponent, forced to take the defensive by the alien’s relentless and unorthodox fighting style. He looked into his opponent’s eyes, the eldar’s face at times only a hand’s breadth away from his own. In previous duels, he had been used to seeing various emotions in his enemy’s visage: hate, fear, desperation, determination. Even the faces of the most inhuman or warp-mutated servants of the Dark Powers showed some kind of emotion, even if it was often some kind of twisted glee at the thought of death, even their own. The face of the eldar betrayed nothing. Its graceful, alien features were set in an expression unreadable to Ulanti’s merely human experience. Its eyes, dark and wide, reflected back only Ulanti’s own face, and in it Ulanti saw the same expression he had seen in so many of his own opponents in the past: fear and desperation, and a growing realisation of death at the hands of a superior opponent.
He felt rather than saw Borusa’s closing presence nearby, but shouted out an angry command forbidding the big hive-worlder bodyguard to interfere. Parrying a sudden thrust of the eldar’s blade and barely managing to sidestep the alien’s lightning-quick follow-through attack, Ulanti stepped unexpectedly into the alien’s guard. Too close to use his own blade, and moving before the alien could dance out of reach again and bring its own blade to bear, he used a move which owed considerably more to the vicious tenets of combat during brutal, no-holds-barred boarding actions than it did to the stylised if lethal etiquette of the art of Necromundan duelling, bringing his knee hard up into his opponent’s groin.
Ulanti had no idea about any peculiarities of eldar physiology, or even what gender—if any—the alien might be, but the move seemed to have the desired effect. The alien grunted in pain and surprise, and staggered back for a moment. Swiftly, before the creature had a chance to recover, he swung his sabre at its exposed face, cleaving its skull.
For all the eldar’s inhuman grace and speed, it died just like any other opponent Ulanti had slain in the past, falling heavily to the ground with a surprised gurgle.
“Caught it a shot there right in the bilge decks, sir,” grinned Maxim, giving Ulanti a congratulatory clap on the shoulder. “Maybe we’ll make a decent bit of hivetrash out of you yet.”
He had to duck, grabbing Ulanti and dragging him down with him, as the air around them was again rent with the strange, frightening sound of the aliens’ weapons fire. There were several screams from nearby—Ulanti saw one of the Inquisition bodyguards, a middle-aged Imperial Guard veteran, sprawling in the dust, disembowelled by one of the deadly razor-edged disc projectiles—and then the answering bark of the Imperial guns.
The outlines of the alien warriors started to manifest themselves out of the murk of the storm. Ulanti checked the charge on his laspistol, as Maxim ratcheted back the loading lever on his heavy bolter, locking a full magazine of the lethally explosive rocket shells into place. He looked at Ulanti as he took aim at silhouette targets moving towards them.
Maxim grinned again, shooting a glance over at the officer. “Not to worry, sir. Like I said, we’ve seen the colour of their blood now, and, xenos bastards or not, we know that they bleed and die just like the rest of us.”
He was just about to fire, just about to, by his own expert estimation, shred apart the nearest two eldar, when the shout came to them from somewhere close and to their right.
“Hold your fire. Stop, in the name of the Holy Emperor!”
The voice was shocking in its immediacy, and there was something in the command which demanded complete and instant obedience. Almost involuntarily, and to his own very great surprise, Maxim found that his finger had frozen on the trigger, just short of sending out a long, lethal burst of bolter fire. He looked at Ulanti, seeing the doubt and confusion that must have been evident on his own scarred, brutal face reflected in Ulanti’s own expression.
They both became suddenly aware that all the other sounds of gunfire had ceased, human and alien. Whatever power that voice held had apparently held sway with the eldar too. Human and eldar faced each other uncertainly and in silence amidst the swirling screens of dust. The moment, probably only a few scant seconds in reality, seemed to stretch on forever in the minds of the participants, and then the spell was broken as Horst and the others appeared.
Ulanti and several of the others instinctively made to raise their weapons to fire at the sight of the armed eldar accompanying the inquisitor, especially when he saw that same tall, menacing eldar warrior lord amongst them. An unmistakably forbidding gesture from Horst, backed up by a command in that same compellingly dictatorial tone, brought a swift end to such intentions.
“I said cease fire. You’d do well to consider those words as immutable as if they were handed down to you from the Golden Throne itself.”
Ulanti’s weapon dropped down to his side, and he rose to his feet. The others did likewise, as did the eldar. The old eldar—some kind of seer or lord, Ulanti surmised—walked beside Horst, his presence commanding instant respect and obedience from the other eldar. He heard no words from the eldar lord, and saw little in the way of commanding gestures, but, somehow, the same command which had frozen the human combatants in place also communicated itself through the ranks of the aliens. The eldar also lowered their weapons and pulled back a short distance, standing warily and suspiciously eyeing their opponents while Horst, the eldar lord and the eldar’s peacock-attired bodyguards held the ground between the two hostile groups.
Suddenly, the eldar ranks opened, and the tall, menacing eldar warrior-lord strode forward, gesturing angrily at the seer. The seer’s bodyguards clustered nervously around their lord, uneasy at the presence of the armed humans, and the anger of the knight. Ulanti strained to hear over the smothering sound of the dust storm, catching only snatches of the aliens’ strange lilting, musical speech, shrewdly noticing that as much seemed to be communicated in silent gesture or body stance as it was in actual speech; noticing too the strange moments of silence and stillness in the conversation which would then resume without apparent interruption, almost as if the aliens had some secret means of communicating between themselves.
The knight’s voice became more strident, notes of unhappy discord evident in the aliens’ lyrical-sounding language. The bodyguards’ unease increased. Finally, at a gesture from the seer, on
e of the bodyguards threw something down on the ground before the knight. The effect was instantaneous: the knight stepped back almost in fear. His own group of warriors, catching sight of it, also drew back in revulsion from the object lying in the dust at the knight’s feet. The seer bent down and picked it up, holding it up for all to see. Ulanti saw it was an armoured helm, black, barbed and sinister, unmistakably similar to the one worn by the strange dark-armoured eldar warrior that Borusa had killed earlier in the battle.
The eldar saw what their lord was holding, and, even over the sound of the storm, Ulanti and the other humans witnessing all this heard the word—half whispered in fear, half shouted in revulsion—which rippled through the aliens’ ranks like a palpable wave of shock.
“Druchii,” they said amongst themselves, making the strange word sound like a curse.
“We have been betrayed, Darodayos, both we and the humans. The Dark Ones—the druchii—are here amongst us, spreading their deceit and setting us and the humans against each other.”
Darodayos stared at the hateful mask in Kariadryl’s hand. Like many of his race, especially those of the aspect warrior castes, he was suspicious and hostile to all human-kind, and all too ready to believe that they had been betrayed by the humans. It would not be the first time that the followers of the human corpse-god had turned on the eldar, and Darodayos doubted that it would be the last.
Nevertheless, the eldar warrior was unable to deny the evidence in the farseer’s hand. He had fought the Dark Ones before, and knew well enough the kind of trickery and deceit they were capable of, and seemed all but second nature to them. Still, with his own eyes, had he not just seen the humans turning their guns on his own people?
The two things, an innate and deep-seated suspicion of the humans and the equally deep-buried dread of his race’s own darker, one-time kinsfolk, fought for supremacy in the mind of the neophyte exarch.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 22