Chapter 256: Aeldari Prisoners, Part Two
The debate raged.
The male nobility wanted an Aeldari for personal company. The female nobility wanted an Aeldari for personal company. The Adeptus Mechanicus wanted one to disassemble. The Ecclesiarchy wanted to burn all of them.
Five prisoners, too many competing interests, not enough xenos to go around.
While the chamber descended into overlapping grievances, Kian sat in a corner eating a bag of puffed ration snacks that one of his retainers had brought him, and waited for a gap.
"I hate to interrupt," he said, when the volume briefly dipped, "but you're all acting like this is already wrapped up and we're at the celebration feast.
Has everyone forgotten there's an Aeldari Aspect Warrior still out there?"
The room quieted. Kian was present because he was a baron — and because he was the one who had actually stopped the warrior's rampage. General Zeppelin had used that leverage to get him a seat at the table.
The General turned toward him now.
"Battalion Commander Voss. You were on the ground when this happened. What's your read on the situation?"
Kian set the ration bag down.
"Honest read? Don't touch those five prisoners until we've dealt with the one who got away. She's still operational. She's fast enough that standard PDF units can't track her visually. She will be watching this building. And when she identifies an opportunity to recover her people, she'll take it — violently, precisely, and probably at a moment when nobody's ready for her."
A senior lord leaned back in his chair with the expression of a man who had not personally witnessed three hundred soldiers killed in under a minute.
"Surely one individual, however capable, cannot pose a meaningful threat to—"
"With respect, my lord, there were four thousand of us and several dozen Chimeras on that field. She killed over three hundred people, destroyed multiple vehicles, and left when she decided to leave. We didn't make her go — she chose to go. That distinction matters."
The chamber went quiet in a different way.
Everyone present knew the intelligence assessments. Aeldari Aspect Warriors — particularly the senior combat shrines — benchmarked against Space Marines in individual lethality. Having one operating freely inside your city, with a personal motivation to cause casualties, was not a small problem.
General Zeppelin broke the silence.
"Your recommendation?"
Kian thought for a moment.
"She's going to make an attempt on the prisoners eventually. We should control when and where that happens. A few options:
Use the prisoners as bait. Position them somewhere accessible, pack the surrounding area with several tens of tonnes of high explosives, and trigger them when she moves to extract. Or draw her out to open ground and redirect a fortress gun battery to the location — one salvo should be sufficient. Or run a false flag: leak intelligence that we want to negotiate, pack a room with fifty axemen, and when she walks in, everyone swings at once."
The assembled nobility exchanged glances. Most of them looked vaguely uncomfortable. The unfamiliar Confessor in the corner, however, was watching Kian with open appreciation.
"The Pious Crusader speaks sense," the man said, rising. "Against xenos, there is no such thing as going too far. Every method is sanctioned.
And I know exactly what I want.
Give me one prisoner. One. I will construct a stake in open ground, pack the surrounding area with melta charges, and wait. If that abomination comes to rescue her kin, I detonate everything and die a martyr. If she doesn't come, I burn the prisoner slowly with good kindling and deny her a soul.
Either outcome serves the Emperor."
He spread his hands.
"It is decided."
Now Kian was impressed.
That's the authentic Ecclesiarchy energy. Confessor Pious was a fine man, but he'd always been a bit too spiritually balanced for this kind of work. This stranger had the correct flavour of devout operational lunacy.
The nobility, having heard a sufficiently extreme position stated with sufficient conviction, found themselves unable to argue against it. The Confessor got his prisoner.
He moved fast.
A male Aeldari warrior — one of the two who'd been in armour, now stripped of everything — was transferred to his custody within the hour. The Confessor took his people outside the Hive, into the surrounding farmland, and began construction.
A pyre frame of solid steel was erected in the middle of a cleared field. The prisoner was transferred to it and secured. Secured meant triple-layered chains, and then the Confessor produced a hammer and iron spikes and began the process of nailing him physically to the frame.
He drove several hundred nails.
The prisoner's vocalizations during this process were, by any measure, impressive in both volume and duration.
Kian stood nearby and watched. He wanted to see if the Aeldari warrior in the treeline would take the bait.
The staking took two full hours. The Confessor appeared to find the pace appropriate. When the nailing was complete, he produced a scourge and worked through several additional preparations, including a lengthy inscription process involving a combat knife and what appeared to be both insults and purification liturgy carved directly into living tissue.
These people are genuinely built different, Kian thought, watching the prisoner continue to produce sound and movement well past the point a human would have gone quiet. The blood pooling around the base of the stake was substantial. The prisoner remained stubbornly alive.
Eventually the Confessor tired — age catching up with enthusiasm — and moved to the main event.
"Only flame can purify such corruption!"
His retinue of missionaries produced prepared bundles of kindling and promethium and arranged them at the base of the stake. The Confessor accepted a torch, raised it dramatically, and began the oration.
He kept going for over ten minutes.
He was not, Kian understood, merely performing for the crowd. He was waiting. Every one of the fifteen missionaries around him had a melta charge strapped to their chest. If the Aeldari warrior appeared, they would detonate simultaneously.
A melta charge — a meltabomb in proper Imperial designation — was not a subtle weapon. Its thermal and fusion output was sufficient to destroy main battle tanks, banish significant daemonic presences, and, in the words of Kian's own internal assessment, make even a Primarch have a very bad afternoon. Fifteen of them, concentrated in a small area, would leave nothing recognisably organic within the blast radius.
He waited.
The field remained still.
The forest at the edge of the farmland offered no movement.
The Confessor's voice gradually lost some of its passionate conviction as minutes passed without the arrival of a worthy opponent. Eventually he ran out of liturgy, confirmed that martyrdom was not forthcoming today, and threw the torch into the kindling with a sharp, irritated motion.
The fire caught. The prisoner struggled against the nails and the chains. The sound it made was not brief.
When it was over, the Confessor walked to Kian and shook his head with the sorrowful dignity of a man denied something he'd earned.
"A coward. She abandoned her own kin without a second thought. It seems the Emperor has other plans for my ascension to the Golden Throne."
Kian looked out across the farmland toward the treeline, where his psychic senses registered something — faint, disciplined, almost undetectable. A presence, held very still, projecting nothing it didn't have to.
She had been there the whole time. She had watched. She had not moved.
That's not cowardice, Kian thought. That's the warrior-self running the calculation and deciding five melta charges were a worse outcome than one lost prisoner.
He turned back to the Confessor with an expression of genuine warmth.
"Don't be discouraged. The Emperor saw everything you did here today. Every nail, every prayer, every minute of preparation. That kind of dedication?" He patted the man on the shoulder. "You'll be sitting at His right hand before the week is out. I'd start packing."
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