Chapter 255: Aeldari Prisoners
The warrior froze.
How did this human get so close to her kin without her noticing?
The Aeldari are an ancient species in decline — their biotechnology and psychic sciences represent the pinnacle of what any mortal race has achieved, and their lifespans border on true immortality. But a civilisational wound runs through all of it. Their birthrate had been collapsing for millennia. The entire species teetered on the edge of extinction, one generation at a time.
Worse: their souls were spoken for. Slaanesh, the youngest and most ravenous of the Chaos Gods, had been born from Aeldari excess and claimed their dead as a birthright. Every Aeldari who died without a spirit stone went screaming into that particular darkness.
The result was a species that treated every living member of its kind as irreplaceable.
Kian's laspistol moved slowly from skull to skull along the row of shackled prisoners. His eyes never left the warrior.
He hadn't injected his combat stimms — but his latent psychic sensitivity had been hovering around baseline fifty for weeks now, and that alone was enough. The world came in sharper. Reactions came faster. Where a normal human saw a blur of motion, Kian saw movement — readable, trackable, something he could respond to.
She was forty metres away. If she committed to a charge, he could empty three rounds into the prisoners before she reached him. Possibly four.
The warrior was running the numbers too.
Her helmet's wide-angle sensors were already registering what her eyes confirmed: the PDF that had scattered in every direction were flowing back. Reforming. In another few minutes, the cordon would be solid again.
Every second she spent deliberating was a second she didn't have.
Kian kept smiling.
"I know you understand Low Gothic. Here's what happens now: helmet off, weapons down, both of them. Or I start shooting prisoners. I'll count to three.
One—"
The helmet was not a fashion choice.
Aeldari Aspect Warriors wore their war-masks for reasons that went considerably deeper than protection. The mask housed a second personality — the Aspect's warrior-self, cold and efficient and utterly without hesitation, trained to make optimal decisions under fire without the interference of conscience or sentiment.
Take the mask off, and the warrior underneath re-emerged. The real person. The one who felt things.
In combat terms, this was a significant downgrade.
The war-mask had correctly identified that charging through forty metres of open ground while a human gunman held a pistol to five hostage skulls was not guaranteed to end well, even at Aspect Warrior speed. The hostages would not all survive. The warrior-self had run this calculation and returned an unsatisfactory result.
Her sensors swept the reforming PDF perimeter.
Thousands of infantry. Chimeras moving to seal the gaps. Aircraft inbound — atmospheric fighters, which meant planetary command had already scrambled a response.
The warrior-self reached its conclusion: mission failed, extraction is the priority, the prisoners cannot be recovered today.
She looked at Kian. Then at the five shackled Aeldari on the ground.
Then she moved.
The gap in the PDF line was forty metres to the left — the thinnest section, still reforming. She hit it at full sprint, which meant she was effectively gone before the human soldiers had processed that she'd started running. The PDF opened up with everything they had. None of it connected. She cut through the closing cordon with three sweeps of the power blade — the soldiers it touched came apart like porcelain — and then she was in the open farmland beyond, three bounds, four, and gone.
Kian lowered his pistol and watched her go.
Around him, the PDF slowly and somewhat sheepishly began to close in again. Overhead, the first atmospheric fighters screamed past on pursuit vectors that were never going to succeed.
Several days later, in a conference chamber near the top of the Planetary Governor's Spire, the upper echelons of Hive Tenebris gathered to debate the question of what to do with five Aeldari prisoners.
Two male, three female.
Two of the five were warriors — one of each. Both had suffered significant impact trauma during the shuttle's crash landing, been knocked unconscious in the wreck, and been hauled out and secured before they woke up. Aspect Warrior-grade combatants, captured by the Astra Militarum because they'd been too concussed to fight back. Embarrassing for everyone involved, probably most of all for them.
Once in custody, the Enginseers had stripped their armour by force — cutting, prying, and generally disassembling it with the focused enthusiasm of the Adeptus Mechanicus encountering alien technology they were professionally obligated to analyse. When the two warriors regained consciousness, their warplate was gone, explosive collars had been fitted around their necks, and shock-shackles were locked around their wrists and ankles.
The other three were crew — a pilot, a logistics specialist, and someone whose function remained unclear. Non-combatants, relatively speaking.
All five were, by any standard human aesthetic metric, extraordinarily attractive. The Aeldari were built that way — the same genetic engineering that produced their combat capability also produced proportions and features that humans found deeply compelling and somewhat unsettling.
This had created a problem.
Imperial doctrine on xenos was simple and unambiguous: destroy them. In practice, with five helpless prisoners who looked like this, the nobility of the upper Spire was discovering unexpected nuance in their convictions. Several lords who had been packing their belongings for emergency off-world evacuation three days ago were now flushed, animated, and openly negotiating prices with each other.
An impromptu auction had begun.
The Ministorum representative in the room — a Confessor who had arrived expecting to adjudicate a straightforward execution order — was experiencing something close to a religious crisis.
"IN THE GOD-EMPEROR'S HOLY NAME—" he erupted, rising from his chair. "You are seriously considering lying with xenos?! You should all be sharing a pyre with these abominations! Every single one of you is one step from the heretic's fire!"
A senior lord drew himself up with the expression of a man who had prepared for this objection.
"Confessor, my devotion to the God-Emperor is beyond question. I merely wish to infuse these filthy xenos with my loyal genetic material in service of—"
The room dissolved into suggestions, counter-suggestions, and creative theological rationalizations for why "injecting loyal Imperial genetic material" into Aeldari captives might technically constitute a form of blessed crusade.
The Confessor looked as if he was seriously reconsidering his career.
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