V2 Chapter 30: The Hunt in the Shadows
At the edge of the Ashek system, behind a dead and silent planet nearest to the Mandeville Point.
In the absolute shadow where no starlight had ever reached, an alien fleet of strangely menacing design floated in total silence.
Unlike Imperial warships, those vast and brutalist moving cathedrals of the void, these vessels were slender and sharp as predatory fish lurking in deep water.
They had not raised any shields. Instead, relying on extremely advanced holographic refraction fields, they had blended their massive hulls perfectly into the surrounding darkness of space.
They were utterly without sound. Even their engine exhaust had been concealed entirely by some alien technology. No Imperial detection instrument could find their presence anywhere in this cold void.
On the command bridge of the largest raider vessel, a dim purple-red light outlined two slender figures engaged in a final conversation before the operation.
"You are absolutely certain that this target can change my destined death?" The alien standing at the front had a voice like cold silk, turning a rhombus-shaped bone crystal over in her hand, the crystal emitting a faint white light.
"As long as the... turning point of fate can be found, everything will change." The figure standing in the shadows behind her did not reveal herself fully, entirely covered by a black robe.
The alien commander tightened her grip on the bone crystal: an extremely rare miniature webway coordinate beacon.
"This beacon has enough energy for one final use. If the prophecy you have brought today turns out to be a fraud..." She paused. "Believe me, whatever your background, you will beg me for death."
The figure in the shadows let out a quiet laugh, then dissolved completely into the darkness. The alien commander turned, her cold gaze passing through the bridge's viewport, fixing on the distant Warp boundary that was about to be torn open.
At the same time, labouring through the violent transit lanes of the Warp, the vast Imperial expedition fleet made its way toward the Ashek system.
Inside a heavy transport under Marshal Blackwood's command, Duvette had used the privilege of his senior commissar rank and his standing as the Marshal's trusted officer to forcibly requisition a vast cargo hold in the ship's middle-lower decks, one originally used for storing heavy machinery, and convert it urgently into the 112th's dedicated grav-chute training ground.
The hold's interior rose dozens of metres. Engineering servitors had welded simple descent rigs and high-pressure airflow simulators to the metal structural beams at the top. Right now, the wide space echoed with alternating screams and the harsh sounds of mechanical operation.
"By the Throne, get me down! I would rather go hand-to-hand with ten Bloodletters!" Clayest was suspended in mid-air by a thick traction cable, having completely abandoned both his usual composure and any trace of aristocratic dignity. His fair hair was in complete disarray, and on his back he carried the heavy tactical pack and the newly issued grav-chute.
When the cable released, the anti-gravity field at the generator's base sent him spinning in mid-air like a headless insect, the intense weightlessness producing screams that the rest of the hold did not let him live down.
On the other side of the training floor, the powerfully built Anderson gripped his newly issued Mars-pattern thunder hammer with both hands, his face paper-white, and stepped off the high platform.
In mid-air, the miniature anti-gravity generators on the grav-chute's sides activated instantly, emitting a sharp, high-frequency hum.
The violent kinetic energy of the fall was cancelled by an invisible force field. The sudden deceleration and the rebellion of his organs produced a deep suppressed grunt from a man not normally given to making any sound at all.
Duvette stood at the edge of the high platform and watched the howling soldiers with an expressionless face.
These veterans were accustomed to advancing inside heavy armoured vehicles, accustomed to firing with both feet planted on solid ground or in trenches. Asking them to experience the weightlessness of an anti-gravity field and a vertical drop produced a physical and psychological resistance that was extreme and entirely instinctive.
But Duvette made no intervention.
Because he could clearly see the remarkable tactical quality hidden beneath those screams.
Thanks to the latent aura radiating from the Star of Terra on his chest, when these elite 112th warriors gathered in this enclosed training space, the passive effect of [United We Stand] had been completely activated.
Their physical strength, neural reflex speed, and dynamic visual processing were all climbing in ways that broke through mortal limits.
Clayest was the loudest by far in his complaints, but when he dropped toward the simulated cover at ground level and the grav-chute automatically cut its field, he completed the landing roll, the single-knee drop, and the weapon-raised targeting sequence almost by pure instinct, the entire sequence smooth without a single wasted motion.
And in the instant of landing, Anderson drove the heavy thunder hammer one-handed with a single motion, precisely shattering the practice target set up as the mock enemy. The explosive force produced a slight depression even in the auramite deck plating.
These warriors became proficient with the grav-chutes quickly. Once they pushed through the initial acrophobia, they began attempting complex tactical drop formations in mid-air using their fuel jets.
In under three Terran weeks, without years of systematic airborne training behind them, this unit had achieved grav-drop deployment efficiency and tactical precision fully comparable to the most elite Storm Trooper regiments in the Departmento Munitorum's service.
Duvette watched for a while in silence. He looked at these soldiers who had been forged to steel on the edge of death, and his confidence in the upcoming Ashek II drop operation grew.
He turned and walked back along the dim metal corridor toward his quarters. The ship was nearly ready to translate out of the Warp. According to the navigation officer's fleet-wide announcement, they were fourteen hours from Ashek II's high orbit.
A brief pre-battle window. Duvette needed to return to his room, check his weapons and equipment, and force himself to sleep.
He had to bring his physical condition and mental state to their absolute peak before dropping directly into a Chaos warlord's hive city stronghold.
Back in his quarters, Duvette removed the heavy black greatcoat and hung it on the bulkhead. He locked the two medals in their case, then lay down fully dressed on the hard metal bunk.
In the rhythmic sound of the engines, he closed his eyes quickly and entered the light, alert sleep that Astra Militarum officers learn to live by.
Several hours later.
In the void at the edge of the Ashek system, the physical laws of reality began to distort violently. The void at the Mandeville Point seemed to be torn apart by invisible hands. A Warp rift opened with a thunderous crack in the darkness, light flickering through it in colours that had no business existing.
The vast Imperial expedition fleet emerged from it like steel leviathans surfacing from an ocean, one by one in dense formation.
As the fleet translated back into realspace, an extremely powerful translation shock swept through every ship in the formation.
The auramite keels of every warship produced a teeth-gritting sound of distress.
In this initial phase of re-entry, the massive Warp energy discharge caused every ship's auspex arrays, augury systems, and long-range vox systems to fall into severe blindness and paralysis.
Detection screens showed nothing but fields of static snow and garbled data. Machine-spirits shrieked. Tech-Priests were frantically lighting incense, trying to calm these failing precision instruments.
As the Warp rift slowly closed behind the fleet, the main engines began to refire, spewing dazzling plasma trails, and the fleet pushed at sub-light speed toward the distant primary world of Ashek II.
The brief chaos produced by the translation shock had created a slight fracture in the originally tight fleet formation.
The massive transport carrying Duvette, being extremely heavily loaded, had slightly slower engine restart efficiency. It had fallen behind the escort ships ahead, temporarily occupying a position at the formation's edge.
However, as the fleet passed near that dead silent planet, during the blind recovery period for Imperial naval auspex arrays, not a single warship's instruments detected anything. In the absolute shadow on the planet's dark side, a small shuttle shaped like a sharp blade had quietly detached from the alien mothership.
The shuttle did not even activate conventional plasma engines. Relying entirely on the gravitational slingshot between stellar bodies, it glided silently toward the Imperial transport at speed that nothing should have been able to achieve by that method alone.
Its hull, coated in holographic stealth coating, perfectly absorbed all radiation and detection waves that space could throw at it.
At this range, unless someone had been standing on the transport's external armour plating with naked eyes, no high-precision scanner could have resolved it amid the screens full of snow.
The shuttle demonstrated extraordinary manoeuvrability in the void. At close range to the Imperial fleet, it executed a course change that completely defied the laws of inertia, then slid precisely against the belly of Duvette's transport from an absolute fire-blind angle.
Covered by the deafening roar of the transport's massive engines restarting, after confirming the exact position of the lower cargo hold, the alien shuttle began its work.
It did not use thermal cutting or laser weaponry. Either would have instantly triggered the Imperial ship's armour breach alarms and pressure loss alarms.
The shuttle's front extended an extremely precise device. A layer of alien energy stasis field radiating an eerie blue light enveloped a small section of armour on the transport's belly.
Then a silent resonance cutting frequency began propagating through the interior of the armour plating.
The Imperial hull separated silently under that resonance like butter softening, not a single warning triggered. The stasis field locked the interior air, temperature, and pressure perfectly, drawing no attention from any alarm system.
The shuttle slid through the gap it had cut, a precise and agile parasite, silently entering the lowest cavity of the transport.
As the shuttle settled in the darkness of the hold's floor, its hatch unfolded silently outward like petals opening.
A slender figure leaped nimbly from inside.
She made no sound. She dropped to one knee on the oil-and-dust-coated metal deck, drew the rhombus-shaped bone crystal from her belt, and positioned the device with extreme care at the exact centre of the floor, then pressed the activation rune.
A faint burst of light, and a miniature webway portal quietly formed in the compartment.
Then, large numbers of slender figures gripping shuriken pistols and blades emerged from it like ghosts walking out of nightmares, pouring in continuous silence from the portal, dispersing into the darkness of the transport's lower decks without a word.
The prey was still sleeping.
And the hunt in the shadows had begun.
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