Chapter 31: Space Elves? On an Imperial Transport?!
In the officer quarters of the transport's lower decks, Duvette lay on a hard metal bunk in his full uniform, breathing slow and steady.
As a commissar who had clawed his way out of more blood and ruin than most men see in a lifetime, he had long since mastered the art of forcing himself to rest under any conditions, no matter how grim.
Then his eyes snapped open.
The cabin was unchanged. The darkness around him held no unusual sound, no movement, nothing out of place.
But every hair on Duvette's body was standing straight up. A bone-deep chill drove up his spine and hit his mind like a fist. The System's [Eye of Judgement] was sounding a lethal warning. Danger, extreme and immediate, was moving on the other side of his cabin wall.
Duvette made no sound.
He rose from the bunk in absolute silence, like a leopard gathering itself before the spring, eyes locked on his door. His right hand had already closed around the power sword hanging on the weapon rack with the ease of long habit.
At the edge of his retina, three vivid red points burned against the green grid of the tactical map, positioned directly outside his door and completely motionless.
Without a moment's hesitation, Duvette activated [Flesh Engine].
The skill's power surged through him. A savage force swept away whatever instinctive unease the unknown had produced. His muscles came alive with something far beyond standard human capacity.
His mind was already working through the possibilities. A mutiny from the lower decks? Impossible. It would never move this quietly all the way up to the senior officer quarters. Inquisition zealots? Chaos infiltrators who had somehow slipped aboard?
Whatever was standing outside that door, Duvette found himself quietly grateful for one thing: the privileges of his rank had kept him armed. Most of his weapons were exactly where he had left them.
He slowed his breathing, gripped the power sword, and moved to the edge of the metal door without making a sound.
Then his sharp hearing caught it: two faint hissing tones. The door lock had been overridden.
Duvette held his breath. Every muscle locked. At the instant the lock gave way and the door began to slide open, he drove his thumb down hard on the activation rune set into the sword's grip.
A deep, resonant hum filled the cabin.
A pale blue energy arc leaped across the blade as the disintegration field engaged.
He did not wait for the door to open fully. Both hands on the grip, he drove the powered sword straight through the plasteel panel with every ounce of force behind him.
The disintegration field tore through the plasteel at the molecular level. The screech of dissolving metal split the quiet like something being killed.
His hands told him clearly: after the blade punched through the door, it had found a target.
He checked the tactical map. All three red points still burned. Not one had gone out.
A sharp spike of surprise.
He had no time to act on it. The counterattack came like a sudden storm.
Duvette registered the motion in the same instant it began and threw himself backward, pulling the sword with him, compressing into the dead angle at the far corner of the narrow cabin.
The air came apart in a screaming rush around him. Something moving at a speed that barely registered to the naked eye reduced his bunk, his walls, and everything between them to shredded debris in a single pass. Projectiles buried themselves deep in the plasteel with the sound of hammers striking fast metal. The embedded slivers trembled faintly in the walls.
He focused on what had done it.
Monomolecular flechettes. Each one with an edge that could part almost any material known to the Imperium, driven in deep and still vibrating.
"Those are shuriken rounds."
Duvette's pupils snapped tight.
"What in the Throne are Eldar doing on an Imperial transport?!"
He allowed himself less than half a second on that question.
He understood immediately what it meant to sit in a corner and absorb punishment from an enemy whose entire advantage was speed and mobility. Staying put was a death sentence. He needed the initiative.
He hit the ruined door with his shoulder and drove himself through it.
The corridor opened in front of him.
Three figures. Slender, moving with a fluid and lethal grace that made every motion look entirely effortless. They were looking at the man who had just come crashing through his own door with something approaching genuine surprise. Duvette swept the scene in a single fast pass.
Three Eldar xenos, each carrying shuriken pistols and slender power blades. Spread across the corridor deck around them, in bloody heaps, lay an entire naval patrol detail. Whether any of them were still alive was not immediately clear.
The cabin doors to either side of him, in the direction the xenos had come from, had been forced open. Not a sound was coming from any of them.
One of the Eldar had a scorched black gash across its abdomen. His through-the-door thrust had connected. The creature had moved fast enough to avoid the kill, but not fast enough to avoid the blade entirely.
For just a moment, apparently unprepared for the target to come through his own door directly at them, all three hesitated.
Duvette was already moving through the gap.
With [Flesh Engine] running, his sprint speed was something no unaugmented human could have matched. He was on the wounded Eldar before it could bring its blade fully to bear.
The three xenos had misjudged their window by a fraction. The wounded one managed to get the power blade up into a parry and absorb the charge, but only barely.
Duvette had placed at the top of his Schola Progenium cohort in close-quarters combat. More than a decade of blood and fire since then had refined that into something difficult to put a single name to. He drove hard, attacks unrelenting, a controlled storm that gave the wounded Eldar no room to reset or breathe.
The corridor was barely wide enough for the kind of fighting happening in it. Both powered blades scraped and collided, throwing arcs of light across the bulkheads with each contact.
Even with [Flesh Engine] pushing his neural response and physical capability well beyond mortal limits, the wounded Eldar, bleeding through a scorched hole in its side, was holding pace with him. He acknowledged it as a fact without having to enjoy it. These creatures moved with a speed and precision that had no natural place in the same physics as ordinary humans.
The other two moved to end it. They raised their shuriken pistols and immediately lowered them again when they saw their companion locked too close for a clean shot. The refractor field at Duvette's chest threw the few rounds they tried anyway into deflected misses. They closed instead, power blades out.
Three to one.
He was losing ground. The thin blades were finding him. Blood was appearing in cuts along his arm and side, nothing that would cost him the fight immediately, but the arithmetic was going the wrong way.
Then the doors around him began opening.
Officers woken by the noise came out of their cabins. They saw Eldar, and their expressions went hard and flat in the same instant. Voices shouted to clear the corridor. Laspistols appeared from inside cabins and came on target.
One officer smashed the glass cover on the emergency auspex panel set into the corridor wall. The alarm that erupted through the midship decks was immediate and without any mercy. Red lumen lights strobed the whole corridor into pulsing crimson. The entire midship deck came alive at once.
Seeing the odds collapse with the alarm, all three Eldar turned to disengage.
Duvette did not give them the option.
He had been pushed far enough and he was not feeling charitable. He roared and drove at the wounded Eldar, absorbing warning cuts from the other two rather than pulling back, his own blade chasing the retreating xenos through the press.
Under the sustained pressure of his assault combined with the las-fire crossing from the assembled officers, the wounded Eldar's reactions finally hit a limit. A diagonal sweep found the opening and the power sword took its head cleanly from its shoulders.
The other two were gone into the corridor shadows before anyone could bring a weapon to bear on them.
Duvette leaned on the blade, breathing hard, and looked down at the headless xenos on the deck. The officers who had emerged from their cabins came quickly around him.
"Colonel-Commissar Duvette, are you injured?"
"Check every room on this corridor." His voice came out rough from the effort, but the authority in it was not diminished. "Every single one, right now. Has the captain been notified? There is no way they only sent three."
He pressed the rune on the grip and the disintegration field cut out with a low tone. He touched the cut on his arm. Flesh wound. Not worth the time.
"The captain has been notified, Commissar." The officer who answered had a mild, somewhat heavyset face and the expression of a man genuinely concerned about the answer to his next question. "Do you need the medical bay?"
"No." Duvette had already turned. He was walking toward the lift at the far end of the corridor. "If they have come aboard in force, they are going for the lower decks. My troops are down there. I am not leaving them on their own."