Sensing the confusion in her commander’s mind, Freyra, one of the Striking Scorpion warriors and kinsman to the farseer lord, stepped forward, making the third aspect of the fourth gesture of respect—respect due to a war leader from a notable lieutenant—as she did so.
“What the lord farseer says is true, Darodayos. The druchii are upon us. They must have come through another webway portal elsewhere on the planet’s surface, and closed in on us under the cover of the storm.” She pointed off into the storm-hidden distance behind her. “The ones I encountered came from the south. At first, we thought like you did, that the mon-keigh had betrayed us. Then I found the first druchii corpse lying amongst three of my brethren.”
She broke off, pointing grimly to the object still held by Kariadryl. “I took that off it and brought it to the lord farseer.”
Freyra and the other eldar relaxed somewhat, seeing the subtle but unmistakable signs of understanding and belief in the shifting stance of Darodayos’s body language. Nevertheless, the same tone of hostile suspicion remained in his spoken words.
“And the mon-keigh?” he asked.
“My people have been attacked too,” answered Horst in inelegantly-phrased but adequately spoken eldar, in one of the older trading dialects used amongst those eldar who travelled widely amongst the many different craftworlds and Exodite colonies. “Look upon them, Lord Darodayos. Can you not see the marks of battle upon many of them? We have not betrayed you, and your enemies are our enemies also.”
The eldar knight blinked once in a show of startled reaction. He had never before encountered a human who could speak, however inelegantly, the language of his people, nor had he even heard of such a thing. There were those amongst his kind who sneered that the language of the mon-keigh was little better than the crude grunting and snarling of orks and other lower classes of animals, and it was widely believed that the subtleties of the eldar language, with its many hidden meanings and additional mind-speech and body gesture inflections, was far beyond human comprehension.
A mon-keigh with the gift of speaking the eldar language, and possibly other hidden gifts as well? This mon-keigh, this “inquisitor”, as the humans seemed to term their sage-warlords, was either some kind of racial aberration or disturbing evidence that he and many of his brethren might have dangerously underestimated the humans and their abilities, Darodayos realised.
Now was not the time to debate such matters, though. In the distance, over the noise of the storm, his keen eldar senses were already picking out the sound of the thin, rising whine of approaching danger. The humans had not yet detected it, but already Darodayos and the several of the other eldar were exchanging warning gestures and urgent mind-speech alerts.
“Dakiilithyli!” shouted Darodayos aloud in warning to the others who may not yet have sensed the danger.
The eldar knight shouted something unintelligible and the surrounding eldar reached for their weapons in sudden response to their leader’s command. Ulanti was just reaching for his own bolstered laspistol when, suddenly and without warning, the new threat came out of the dust storm at them.
Dakiilithyli.
Jetbikes.
Stavka ran forward, roaring in anger, to protect Horst, just as something came speeding out of the dust screen. Ulanti glimpsed gleaming dark metal and barbed blade edges honed to a cruel perfection, and then there came a sound like something you would hear from a butcher’s shop or execution block, and a thin wetness sprayed across his face. The object was past before Ulanti had even quite registered what it really was, and Stavka fell to the ground in two sections, the top half of his body landing a metre away from the lower part, his mouth incredibly trying to form words as his twitching hand reached out pathetically towards the fallen pistol lying nearby.
A few moments later, mercifully, he died with a final shudder. The object which had killed him—some kind of small alien jet vehicle, Ulanti realised—flew on into the dust storm again, its rider brandishing a sword in triumph, the Inquisition man’s blood still wet on the vicious wing-blades jutting out from the sides of the vehicle.
“More of them are coming. Defend yourselves!” shouted Horst, as more of the alien engine noises came to them over the sound of the storm.
The words were barely out of the inquisitor’s mouth before the alien jetbike assault was upon them. Ulanti saw one eldar lose his head to a passing sword sweep from one of the jetbike riders, while one of the Macharius’s armsmen was swept off his feet by another of the attackers. One moment, the man was standing several metres away, trying to draw a bead on the fast-moving alien vehicles with his unwieldy shotcannon, and the next he was gone, carried screaming off into the storm, impaled on the prow blades of one of the vehicles which had struck him full on.
Ulanti fired off several las-rounds at the speeding targets, but at best only succeeded in managing a glancing hit or two off the black, chitin-like armour of one of them. Any attempt to make any improvements to his marksmanship was rudely interrupted by the screaming engine sound of another one of the vehicles coming straight at him.
He ducked just in time, avoiding the wing-scythes, and then had to keep on moving, rolling across the ground, as the vehicle’s angry rider swung out at him with a short-hafted polearm weapon. Ulanti rolled, the weapon blade slicing a line in the ground just beside his head, and then the vehicle was gone, speeding off into the cover of the storm, its rider no doubt intending to make a tight, sweeping turn and come back to finish off his elusive target.
Ulanti came out of the roll, sending a flurry of las-rounds into the storm in the same direction the vehicle was going. His aim was guided more by sound than sight, following the noise of the vehicle’s strange alien power source. The glowing las-shots were instantly swallowed up by the dust storm, and Ulanti was none the wiser if they had had any effect or not, when, through the howl of the storm, he thought he heard a more urgent note creep into the sound of the alien vehicle’s engine. Ulanti had no idea how these alien craft operated or what kind of power source they used, but the sound made by a damaged and stricken engine was unmistakable.
The over-stressed pitch of the thing’s power source grew in volume, becoming a loud, complaining whine, before abruptly fading away to almost nothing, then completely disappearing. Ulanti could have sworn he heard the sound of an impact over the noise of the storm and the surrounding gunfight, but could not be certain. Reasonably assured that the vehicle and its rider would not be returning for a second attack, he turned his attention back to the rest of the battle.
The second wave—or perhaps merely the first wave returning to attack again—of jetbike riders was coming in at them now. Two more of the eldar went down, cut apart by streams of projectile fire from the oncoming vehicles. The eldar on the jetbikes—for that was what they were, Ulanti realised, even if they were members of some rival faction within the same race—were mostly ignoring the men from the Macharius and were instead concentrating their fire on their erstwhile brethren.
Whatever the cause of this seeming hatred for the eldar led by the knight and the sage, the Imperium men were more than happy to take full advantage of the fact.
Maxim knelt and took aim with the heavy bolter, patiently tracking one of the speeding enemy vehicles and then pressing and holding down the trigger and sending out a long, stuttering stream of fire. Maxim was not exactly a marksman with the heavy bolter, but the point of a weapon like a heavy bolter, with its high firing rate and lethal stopping power, was that you didn’t have to be; with a weapon like this, all you had to do was fire off enough explosive-tipped rocket shell rounds, and you would eventually achieve the desired purpose.
The air around the jetbike and its rider was suddenly filled with screaming, glowing tracer rounds. The rider tried to swerve a path through them, and for a brief moment it looked like he might actually succeed. Then a round struck the vehicle’s nose, shattering its armour, while at the same time several ripped through the engine innards at its rear.
; The vehicle dipped towards the ground. The rider opened his mouth to scream or curse, but then several more heavy bolter shells struck home and blew him out of his saddle.
The burning, riderless vehicle crashed into the ground, exploding apart and transforming itself into a hail of razor-edged fragments lethal to humans and eldar alike.
Meanwhile, if the eldar were the targets of some special enmity from their darker-souled kin, then it was a hatred which they returned with equal fervour.
Eldar warriors knelt or stood, holding their ground, returning fire at the oncoming wave of jetbikes. The air was filled with deadly, whistling razor discs and crystal splinters from the differing alien weapons, and several eldar screamed and fell, struck down by enemy fire, while more than one jet-bike suddenly swerved away, the vehicle or its rider hit by fire from the eldar disc weapons.
One of the sage’s peacock-attired bodyguards—a fearsome-looking eldar female warrior in delicate bone-white armour and flaming red face-mask—ran forward to meet a jetbike which had peeled off towards where the eldar sage-lord stood. Pirouetting through a hail of fire from the vehicle and its rider, she leapt into the air, emitting a loud and inhuman, mask-amplified piercing shriek as she did so. Passing over the top of her target, she struck out with the crackling power sword in her hand, neatly decapitating the jetbike rider as he passed beneath her. She landed nimbly on her feet, but was unable to evade the first vehicle’s partner, which brutally rode her down, ripping her apart with a burst from its nose-mounted weapon.
Another of the eldar bodyguards—a warrior in glittering, flame-decorated heavy armour—gave a cry of anger and swung round the barrel of his heavy weapon, immolating both jetbike and rider in a blast of searing heat-energy.
Two of the other riders bore down on Darodayos, perhaps drawn in by the eldar aspect lord’s commanding presence and ancient and ornate armour. Darodayos unsaddled one of them with a single, lethal shot from his laspistol, and then stood his ground in challenge to the remaining one, lowering his pistol and brandishing his power sword in a show of unmistakable invitation to the other attacker.
It was a challenge which was enthusiastically taken up. The second rider discarded her own pistol and took up a scythe-like lance weapon, snarling in anticipation as she increased her vehicle’s acceleration and bore down on her intended victim.
Darodayos continued to stand his ground, unblinking, as he stared down the approaching bike and its rider, apparently heedless of the weapon in the rider’s hand, or the blades mounted in vicious, sweeping patterns along the length of the bike’s flanks.
Then the bike and its rider were upon him. Darodayos leapt, jumping clear of the lethal blades that passed centimetres beneath his body, swinging his sword out in mid-air to meet the blow from the rider’s lance-scythe, the buzzing energy sheath which surrounded the ancient blade shearing through both the haft of the dark eldar weapon and the hand which held it.
The hand and the broken weapon fell away, and the bike and its crippled, cursing rider passed by, apparently escaping. Darodayos knew otherwise. The laspistol, holstered against his leg, seemed to actually leap unbidden into the eldar’s hand, even though he had never even tried to reach for it, and then, still in mid-air, he shot the eldar rider three times through the back. She slumped forward dead across the vehicle’s controls, and the bike spun out of control, crashing into the rubble ten metres away.
Darodayos’s feet touched the ground again, just as the bike exploded. The entire duel had happened in the blink of an eye. Watching, almost mesmerised by the incident, and only able to mentally reconstruct the sequence of events after they had happened, Ulanti was stunned by the eldar warrior’s devastating show of speed and masterful precision.
Remembering his own recent and hard-won duel with an eldar who had appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary rank-and-file warrior, Ulanti was forced into an unhappy consideration of how he would have fared in combat against a warrior like this knight. It did not make for pleasant thinking. Ulanti saw the eldar look towards him for a second, almost as if it sensed something of his thoughts, but then abruptly the alien turned away again, raising his weapons and calling out urgent warnings to his kinsmen.
“Beware! More of the Accursed Ones. They have raider vehicles!”
The words were barely out of the neophyte exarch’s mouth before the first dark shape glided ominously out of the dusty murk. The eldar instantly directed their weapons fire at it, but the cannon weapon mounted on the armoured skimmer vehicle’s prow swivelled round and unleashed a blast of dark-hazed energy at them.
“Disintegrator!” The same horrified mind-speech thought flashed through the minds of all the eldar, just as two of Freyra’s Striking Scorpion brethren were struck by the weapon strike, and were instantly wreathed in a dark halo of crackling, black energy. When the dazzling black energy glow faded away, all that remained of the two aspect warriors was two fused, smoking masses of twisted bone and armour fragments.
Chiron of the Dark Reapers stepped forward, picking off the disintegrator lance and its gunner with an expert shot from his missile launcher, but the dark eldar skimmer continued to advance, its narrow deck crowded with more battle-eager dark eldar warriors while, behind it, the shapes of several more fast assault vehicles appeared out of the gloom, accompanied by scattered lines of infantry on foot.
The druchii—the Dark Ones—had arrived on this world in force, and Darodayos and his brethren, as well as their human allies, were clearly outnumbered.
“We must retreat,” warned one of Freyra’s remaining Scorpions, in mind-speech thought. “They are too many, and we are too few.”
“That cannot be done,” mind-spoke Kariadryl, the farseer’s voice commanding instant respect from all the other eldar. “The webway gate link to this place is weak and damaged by age and neglect. It is closed now, and will require too much time to re-open, time which the druchii will not allow us.”
“Then what are we to do?” asked one of the mid-ranking Guardian warriors.
“We flee,” commanded Darodayos, tingeing his mind-speech words with the power of his aspect rank, in a clear indication that, as the most senior warrior here, this was a military command decision, not to be questioned, even by Kariadryl. “You must protect the lord farseer, he is all that is important here. You will hide from the druchii, and you will await rescue from the Vual’en Sho and the other craft of ours who are here to watch over us.”
“And what of you, Lord Darodayos?”
The question came from Kariadryl, even though the aspect lord suspected that the wise old farseer already knew the answer.
“I will remain here, lord farseer,” the aspect warrior commander replied, “to face the druchii and allow you more time to escape. I pass the favour of Asuryan to your blood kinsman Freyra. To her now falls the duty of protecting you.”
There was a chorus of mind-speech voices from the other warriors, many of them beseeching the aspect lord to rethink his decision to stay and fight alone, some of them requesting permission to join him in his stand. He silenced them all with a single, irrevocable mind-speech command.
“And the humans?” asked Kariadryl. “What will become of them?”
“With your permission, lord farseer, we will go with you.” It was the voice of Horst, spoken in slightly awkward but still comprehensible mind-speech. Shock and consternation—quickly masked—flashed through the minds of the eldar. How much of their mind-speech conversation had the human been able to listen in on and understand, they asked themselves in fearful doubt?
Horst continued, making no show of noticing the alarm he had caused amongst the aliens. “As I said, your enemies are our enemies too, lord farseer. We wish no harm to come to you and your companions, and our ships are also in orbit above us. Perhaps they will come with your people to rescue us from our mutual enemies.”
“So shall it be,” Kariadryl commanded, ending any further complaints or doubts from any of the assembled eldar.
&nbs
p; With the issue settled, the eldar immediately began to follow their designated tasks for the chosen course of action. To the watching humans, it must have seemed as if the eldar were able to act together in eerie and silent synchronisation, for, in real time, the mind-speech conversation amongst them had only lasted a few moments.
“Lieutenant Ulanti,” ordered Horst, drawing the remnants of his own people around him and running over towards the contingent of navy men. “We’re pulling back. Get your people together, anyone that can walk and still hold a weapon is coming with us.”
Quickly, moving together, the two groups moved off away from the advancing dark eldar and into the safety of the cover of the dust storm. Behind them, Darodayos and the small group of aspect warriors who had elected to stay with him prepared to sell their lives dearly in combat against those who were once their kin.
They ran through the storm, Maxim staying close behind Ulanti, barely slowed down by the extra weight of the heavy bolter he carried. The eldar, naturally faster-moving and less encumbered by the clumsier equipment, weapons and armour of the humans, were ahead, forging a path through the storm, although several of them ran behind, forming a small vanguard to guard the two groups’ retreat.
Which left only the flanks to worry about, thought Maxim, holding the heavy weapon alertly and peering through his goggles into the depths of the storm around them, trying to detect any sign of danger.
It was not his eyes, but his ears, finely tuned for survival by the brutal necessities of existence on the hiveworld of Stranivar and its orbiting prison-moon Lubiyanka, which warned him of the first signs of approaching danger.
“Jetbikes!” he shouted, swinging the barrel of the heavy bolter round in the direction that the now familiar thin, whining sound was coming from. “They must fancy having another shot at us.”
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 23