Chapter 254: The Aeldari Warrior
Kian had spent the better part of ten days parked in his command Chimera following the void battle like a serialised drama. Now it was over.
"So they actually wiped each other out completely? Humanity wins by default, collect your ration tins?"
He had the vox handset wedged between his shoulder and ear, working a whetstone along his combat knife.
Reynaud's voice crackled through. "More or less. But the observatory picked up something — one small shuttle made it out of the Aeldari wreck and is heading for the planet. Survivors."
Kian sat up straighter. A bonus episode.
"How many?"
"Single light shuttle. Took debris damage on the way out — flight path is erratic. They're estimating maybe a dozen Aeldari aboard. If they want to live, the planet is their only option."
Kian turned this over. "Aeldari are trouble. The serious ones benchmark against Astartes. What's the Hive leadership saying? What's the response plan?"
"What do you think? Send elite PDF regiments out to kill them. Doesn't matter how dangerous they are individually — enough lasrifles, Chimeras, and heavy weapons, you can put anything down."
They kept talking in a loose, unhurried way until Kian's vox cut across with an urgent regimental broadcast.
All units of the 109th — Hive Tenebris stabilisation operations are concluded. Immediate withdrawal from the Hive. Rally at grid reference—
Units be advised: watch the sky. In the coming days, alien survivors will be making planetfall. Kill every xenos contact on sight.
The 109th pulled out of the Hive and established positions in the surrounding countryside, weapons elevated, waiting.
Ten days later, Kian's battalion was dug in across open farmland — the observatory's projected landing zone for the Aeldari shuttle. Every few dozen kilometres along the line, another regiment. Thousands of guns pointed at the sky.
Egghead had found a rock to sit on. He was tracking an imaginary target across the clouds with his lasrifle, making quiet shooting noises.
Kian was looking for somewhere private to answer a call of nature when he noticed this.
"Egghead. The universe is incomprehensibly vast. You ever want to go see it?"
Egghead lowered his rifle and thought about it.
"Sarge, there's daemons and xenos and worse out there. Who'd want to see that? I'd rather stay home, have kids, find them something decent to do with their lives."
Kian made a sound somewhere between agreement and melancholy.
That answer, he thought, said everything about the Imperium's condition. An interstellar civilisation that had stopped being curious. Every resource, every thought, channelled into survival. An old man walking downhill — no ambition left, just momentum and habit.
"What are the Aeldari actually like?" Egghead asked. "Can we take them?"
"Tall, sharp-featured, move like they're performing for an audience. Muscle density that doesn't match their build — they're faster than they have any right to be, fast enough that tracking them visually is genuinely difficult.
But don't worry. One shuttle means maybe ten of them. This is flat farmland with clear sightlines. Speed doesn't outrun artillery. When that shuttle comes down, we roll in with every Chimera we've got and turn it into a crater."
Kian was fairly confident about this. Ten Aeldari, however capable, couldn't change the arithmetic.
Egghead started to ask something else.
Kian's head came up.
"Weapons up. Twelve o'clock. They're here."
Every soldier in the vicinity snapped their eyes to the sky simultaneously.
A speck. Growing.
The Aeldari shuttle had taken debris damage in the void — the breaches had expanded violently during atmospheric entry, friction tearing the wounds wider. It crossed the sky trailing a thick black smoke column, flight path unstable, descending fast.
Kian plotted the trajectory. Thirty kilometres south.
"Everyone mount up! South! Move!"
He was already running for the command Chimera. Engines started across the line, hatches slammed, and the column lurched south across the farmland at speed. Dozens of vehicles from Kian's battalion, and on the horizon on both flanks, hundreds more from other regiments converging on the same point. Nearly a thousand military vehicles converging.
Any Astartes who walked into that would have second thoughts.
The shuttle hit the ground hard — a controlled crash, the forward section ploughing into the topsoil and burying itself halfway before stopping. By the time Kian's column reached the impact site, it was already ringed three layers deep with PDF infantry and armour.
He dropped from the command Chimera and grabbed the nearest soldier.
"Situation. Are they dead?"
The soldier was practically vibrating with excitement.
"Five xenos came out through the rear hatch — autocannons got all of them! There's more inside the cockpit section, sappers are cutting through the door now—"
A detonation from inside the shuttle cut him off.
Then shouting from the front of the crowd. Triumphant, excited, and then rapidly escalating into something more urgent.
"Got one! We've got one—"
"Hold her down! Alive! Take her alive—"
"Throne, she's strong — get more people on her—"
"Irons! Someone get irons—"
Scattered lasfire. Screaming. Cheering.
Kian had been transported to the 41st Millennium without encountering a single xenos in the flesh. He was not about to miss this.
He drove into the crowd with his elbows, forcing through bodies, ignoring complaints. Several minutes of sustained effort later, he pushed through to the front.
The shuttle was riddled with autocannon impacts — 40mm armour-piercing rounds had punched clean through the hull in a dozen places. Debris was scattered across the surrounding soil. Several Aeldari bodies were visible, already quite thoroughly destroyed by the autocannon fire. The high muscle density Kian had heard about was apparent even in the remains — the anatomy was superficially human, but the tissue structure was something else.
Five Aeldari survivors were currently being sat on by significant numbers of PDF soldiers. Each of them was fighting it, and losing, but slowly. One — a young female, or at least presenting as one — was cursing the assembled PDF in her own language with what sounded like genuine creativity, while twelve soldiers worked to keep her pinned.
A PDF trooper settled the question by clubbing her repeatedly across the head with a rifle stock. A normal human would have been unconscious after the first blow. She bled, weakened, and eventually stopped struggling.
Kian was still taking in the scene when his eye landed on something.
A PDF soldier was holding up a severed Aeldari arm — male, going by the size — with one hand, and working at it with a knife with the other, apparently trying to separate it from the attached shoulder section for trophy purposes. Draped over that shoulder was a cloak. Purple. With a faint shimmer to it that had nothing to do with the light.
That's not a decorative cape.
Kian picked up a loose Aeldari arm from the ground first — out of professional curiosity. Held it at arm's length. Assessed the weight.
One arm. Drained of blood. Over ten kilograms.
An adult human male arm was four to five kilograms. This was more than double, in roughly the same volume.
The output that density produces. No wonder they move the way they do.
"This would be absolutely terrible grilled," he observed, and dropped it.
He walked up behind the PDF soldier working on the trophy arm and kicked him squarely into the crowd. While the man was still working out which way was up, Kian stripped the psyk-cloak free, tucked it under his arm, and let the crowd swallow him.
He examined it as he moved. The moment his fingers touched the fabric, he felt it — a faint but unmistakable psychic resonance, something dormant and waiting. Not decorative. Functional.
Excellent.
He was scanning the wreck for anything else worth acquiring when something at the edge of his perception made him stop.
A controlled pulse of psychic energy. Deliberate. Restrained. Close.
In a corner of the shuttle's interior, half-buried under debris and bodies and overlooked in the chaos, something in white armour moved.
The figure stood up slowly.
White war-helm, Aeldari pattern. Full powered warplate — sleek, curved, unmistakably alien. The helmet's triangular and cross-shaped markings activated as she oriented herself. She took in the wrecked shuttle, the bodies of her crewmates shredded by autocannon fire, and the massed PDF soldiers outside.
Her eyes showed one thing clearly: fury.
From behind her back she drew a curved power blade — elegant, purposeful, the Aeldari aesthetic of form and function fused together — and in her other hand, a shuriken pistol.
She raised the pistol toward the crowd outside and fired.
The sound was wrong. Not the crack of a lasrifle or the bark of a stubber. A sustained shriek, like blades being forced through air faster than air could move.
That was, in fact, exactly what it was. One hundred and fifty monomolecular discs per second, each one roughly four centimetres across, each one accelerated to lethal velocity by the pistol's anti-grav system. At that edge geometry, they didn't need to be aimed precisely. They just needed to intersect with human bodies.
One second.
Thirty PDF soldiers turned into a fine red mist before any of them understood what had happened.
The crowd around the shuttle registered that something had gone wrong. Heads turned. A second burst. A third. A fourth. Each one cutting through the packed infantry like a bandsaw through wet paper. The inferior PDF flak armour — rated for light small-arms, not monomolecular cutting weapons — provided no meaningful protection at this range.
Several hundred casualties in under a minute.
Then the survivors understood what they were looking at, and they raised their weapons.
The warrior vanished.
Not invisible — fast. She had already moved before the first gun came up. She crossed the distance to the crowd in a single charge and came apart inside them like a storm in a telephone box, the power blade cutting in controlled arcs that were individually precise and collectively catastrophic.
The soldiers nearest her could see a fast-moving shape that occasionally resolved into a figure before another arc of the blade parted someone from their structural integrity. They couldn't shoot without hitting each other. They could barely track her. They screamed.
She took out a Chimera next. She went up and over it with a single leap — the vehicle commander had been standing in the turret hatch trying to see what was happening and never saw her coming. The kick landed like a battlecannon shell. The commander's skull ceased to exist as a coherent object.
The turret swung to engage. Her blade swept horizontal — the autocannon barrel hit the ground three metres away. Then she stepped close and pressed the tip of the power blade against the turret ring and pushed.
The disruption field tore the armour plating apart. The autoloading mechanism inside detonated. The driver, the gunner, the hull weapon operator — all dead in the time it took to describe it.
Precise. Lethal. Unhurried.
This Aeldari Aspect Warrior had clearly studied human armoured vehicles. She knew exactly which points to hit.
The PDF broke.
Several thousand soldiers, veterans of a civil war, spreading across open farmland in every direction with the specific speed of people who had decided that self-preservation outweighed everything else. Chimeras and command vehicles tried to push forward to engage. She was already somewhere else.
She straightened up and surveyed the field — the bodies, the burning Chimera, the fleeing soldiers. Raised her blade for the next target.
Behind her, someone started clapping.
Slow. Deliberate. Appreciative.
Kian was standing five metres away, beside the five shackled Aeldari prisoners, who were still attempting to free themselves with the futile determination of people who hadn't quite given up. He was grinning.
His laspistol was in his right hand, hammer cocked, barrel resting against the skull of the nearest prisoner.
"Magnificent. Genuinely. You're incredible. I'm absolutely impressed."
The warrior turned.
He tilted his head toward the ruined Chimera.
"Any chance you could do that bit again? The part where you took apart the Chimera. I want to see how the entry point works."
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