"CLANG——!!!"
A heavy, resonant impact — metal grinding and warping — as though something massive had clamped itself onto the hull by sheer force.
Immediately after, every light on the bridge went dark.
"Zzzzt — crack!"
Every instrument panel went black in an instant. The air circulation fans ground to a halt. The gravity generator cut out.
The entire ship plunged into darkness and weightlessness.
Andy felt his body begin to float, but he immediately seized the armrests of the command chair and anchored himself.
"Electromagnetic pulse attack."
Andy's cybernetic eyes switched to night-vision mode as he made his assessment, calm as ever.
"Contact-type, too. Conducted directly through the hull plating."
If it were the Imperial Navy, the Inquisition, or Orks, the opening move would have been a full broadside volley — intent on blowing you to fragments.
But if the first move was an EMP to paralyze your systems without punching through the hull, there was only one explanation.
They wanted prisoners.
They were after the cargo — and the crew.
"Restart the backup power! Now!"
Andy shouted into the darkness.
A few seconds later, the dim red glow of the emergency lights flickered on.
Six's voice came back online, though it carried noticeable electrical static — clearly she'd taken a hit from the pulse too.
"Radar restart complete — optical sensor calibrating —"
"Target confirmed."
The main screen lit up, revealing the attackers.
Several "meteorites" had latched onto the New Hope's flank armor. But now the outer rock camouflage had sheared away, exposing the savage metal structures within.
They were enormous mechanical grappling claws — spider-limbed and vicious — driven deep into the armor plating, continuously emitting jamming pulses.
Boarding hooks disguised as meteors.
Out in the void beyond, two ships of deeply unsettling design dropped their cloaking fields.
Their hulls were slender and blade-sharp, bristling with spines and serrated edges, painted in a nauseating palette of dark violet and black.
Dark Eldar. Corsair-class escort frigates.
These creatures were the most loathsome predators in the galaxy, and the most depraved sadists imaginable. They cared nothing for Chaos — yet were more monstrous than Chaos itself. They never attacked ships to destroy them. They attacked to harvest slaves.
Falling into their hands, death would be an act of mercy.
Because they would drag their captives back to Commorragh — that city of darkness — and subject them to centuries, even millennia, of living torment, using the prolonged suffering of others to stave off the slow dissolution of their own souls.
"It would appear our luck has been rather poor of late," Father Zol said, staring at the screen, his mechanical hands trembling. "Our attackers are Dark Eldar pirates. We're finished."
"If they capture us, I'd rather detonate my core right now."
"Shut up. We're not dead yet." Andy cut him off. "Six — can the engines move?"
"Main engine output down to 40%. Attitude control thrusters — most are locked out."
Six reported: "Both enemy ships are deploying traction beams, attempting to haul us in."
"What about the warp engine?"
"Barely functional, but —"
"No buts. Jump."
Andy issued the order.
Roger objected immediately: "But we haven't calculated coordinates! And we've still got those massive iron clamps hanging off the hull!"
"No time for that. Activate it now — go, go, go!"
Andy knew perfectly well that dogfighting the Dark Eldar in realspace was suicide.
Their ships were blindingly fast, equipped with dark matter weaponry and void mines. A transport like the New Hope couldn't outrun them in a million years.
The only way out was the Warp.
"Initiating forced charge — Gellar Field online —"
"Jump countdown: 3, 2, 1—"
"HUMMMMM!!!"
The New Hope let out a groan of agony.
The warp engine tore open the veil of reality by brute force.
An immense pull engulfed the ship instantly — dragging it, along with the mechanical grappling claws stubbornly clinging to the hull, through into a dimension of impossible, swirling chaos.
Inside the Warp.
Torrents of violet and blue energy hammered the New Hope's shields without mercy.
With no pre-plotted course — a forced jump with no navigation — the ship tumbled like a dead leaf in a hurricane.
"Warning! High-dimensional tracking signal detected!"
Six's voice grew urgent.
"They're following us!"
On the holographic display, two red dots clung tightly to the New Hope's rear quarter.
But strangely, the two dots had not entered the Warp proper. They existed in a kind of parallel state.
The Dark Eldar, though they made their home in Commorragh — a city threaded through the Webway tunnels inside the Warp — were profoundly terrified of the Warp itself.
Because Slaanesh — the She Who Thirsts, as they called her — was forever hungering for their souls.
The moment any of them so much as dipped a foot into the raw Warp, Slaanesh would catch the scent and come to devour them whole.
So the Dark Eldar never used Warp engines. They traveled the Webway — a network of safe tunnels crafted by the ancient Aeldari, existing in the narrow space between the Warp and realspace.
Right now, those two pirate ships hadn't actually entered the Warp. They were racing in parallel through a Webway tributary that ran alongside the New Hope's trajectory.
They couldn't cross over, but they held a solid lock on the New Hope's position.
The moment the New Hope dared to return to realspace, they would rip open a Webway gate and burst out to seize them.
It was like sprinting down a highway while armed hijackers drove parallel to you on an elevated overpass — just waiting for you to take an exit ramp.
"Shake them off!"
Andy gripped the armrests for dear life, absorbing the violent turbulence.
"Six — use your old trick! Surf!"
"Understood!"
Six once again demonstrated the terrifying computational power that made her a Warp-Sextant.
She had no hyper-dimensional sensing capability — she couldn't see the Webway. But she could calculate the flow patterns of Warp energy currents.
Ahead, a colossal Warp energy tide was forming — like a wall of purple water tens of thousands of kilometers high.
Any normal ship would have immediately charted a course around it. Hit that head-on and there was nothing left but debris.
But the New Hope did not decelerate.
She flew straight into it.
"Hold on!"
At the very instant of impact, Six violently adjusted the frequency of the Gellar Field and the attitude of the ship.
The New Hope was not smashed apart.
Instead, catching the tangential current of the massive wave at precisely the right angle, she was flung forward with tremendous force.
A razor-sharp hairpin turn at an angle that defied all reason.
The g-forces were so extreme the hull cracked and shrieked.
The Dark Eldar grappling claws that had been latched to the flanks finally could not withstand the centrifugal force.
"Snap! Snap! Snap!"
Three sharp reports.
The cables connecting the claws snapped — loudly, suggesting they'd torn away a significant chunk of armor plating along with them.
The parasitic nuisances were flung deep into the Warp, swallowed instantly by the energy storm.
The Dark Eldar ships in the Webway were physically incapable of executing a maneuver this flagrantly contemptuous of physics.
All they could do was watch helplessly as the New Hope vanished from their sensors in an instant, diving into a different, chaotic tributary of the Warp.
"Target lost."
Six's voice was exhausted, but carried a thin thread of satisfaction.
"We've lost them."
"Phew—"
Andy let out a long breath.
Before he could even finish exhaling, the red alarm lights blazed back to life.
"Warning! Main engine overheated — emergency shutdown!"
"Warning! Attitude control system offline!"
"Warning! Captured by unknown gravity well!"
That hairpin turn had been spectacular, but it had also consumed the very last reserves of the ship's endurance.
The reactor that had just been repaired was leaking again, coolant spraying everywhere.
The New Hope was adrift, pushed along by that last Warp energy tide, and she crashed back out through the veil of reality.
"BOOM!"
The ship returned to realspace.
But this was not the endless void of deep space.
It was the edge of a planet's atmosphere.
Crushing gravity seized the powerless steel giant instantly and began dragging it toward the surface.
"Emergency landing! Brace for emergency landing!"
Andy stared at the increasingly large ochre-colored planet filling the viewport and bellowed with profound exasperation.
What is this, seriously?
He'd just gotten the ship repaired. Barely two days of flight. And now it was going to crash again??
Did the New Hope have some kind of intimate relationship with the ground? Why did it always insist on burying itself in the dirt?!
"Calculating landing zone —"
Six rattled off data in rapid succession.
"Atmospheric composition: nitrogen, oxygen, significant industrial pollutants."
"Surface environment: desert, wasteland, severe contamination."
"Detecting numerous high-energy readings — those are —" Six paused briefly, as though cross-referencing her database. "— land battleships. Enormous land battleships."
Andy's stomach dropped.
Desert. Wasteland. Enormous land battleships.
And this coordinate.
He knew exactly where they were.
Zaist.
A world in the Heretic Stars that was extremely well-known — infamous, even.
The people here had been at war for ten thousand years. To survive the brutal conflict and the savage environment, they had built their cities onto massive tracked chassis, turning them into mobile fortresses kilometers, tens of kilometers, or even larger in scale — land battleships.
There was no peace on this planet. Only endless mobile warfare. The strong devoured the weak. Cannons and leviathans.
For the New Hope to make an emergency landing in a place like this was like falling straight into a wolf's den.
"Everyone! Impact positions!"
"Strap yourselves to your seats if you don't want to die!"
Andy bellowed the order.
The ship shook violently as the hull friction with the atmosphere painted the windows in burning red.
Gravitational acceleration crushed everyone into their seats — moving so much as a finger was an effort.
"ROAARRR—"
Trailing a long plume of black smoke, the New Hope fell like a colossal meteor, plummeting toward Zaist's crater-pocked, track-scarred wasteland.
The ground shook.
With a world-ending crash, the star-crossed starship carved a trench ten kilometers long across the surface, hurling a storm of dust into the sky.
At last, it came to rest.
The bridge was a scene of absolute devastation. Only the emergency lights still blinked stubbornly on.
Andy unclipped his safety harness and shook his slightly spinning head — he had no semicircular canals, but his vibration sensors had overloaded.
"All sections, report casualties!"
"Is everyone still alive?!"
A chorus of coughing and groaning came through the comms channel, but it seemed everyone had survived.
The T-9000 exoskeletons and the impact-resistance drills had saved their lives.
"My Lord Sage—" Gamma-9's feeble voice came through. "We — we appear to be surrounded."
Andy looked at the main screen.
Most of the external sensors had been destroyed in the crash, but one still functioned.
On screen, the great curtain of yellow dust slowly settled.
On the horizon, several enormous dark silhouettes were closing in. Beneath them, massive treads churned the earth. Above, forests of gun barrels and smokestacks bristled against the sky.
One of them had spotted this prey that had fallen from the heavens.
It was opening its maw wide, and coming to claim its share.