Chapter 32: We Are the Hunters
In the officer quarters of the transport's lower decks, Evan had returned to his room. The high-intensity grav-chute simulation training had finally ended and his muscles were aching from the sustained fight against weightlessness.
He stripped off the heavy, stifling training suit and dropped it on the edge of the metal bunk. The dark military undershirt beneath was completely soaked through, plastered tight against his skin.
He crossed to the small water outlet in the corner of the narrow room, turned the rusted metal valve, and collected a shallow basin of recycled water. It came out ice cold, carrying the sharp chemical smell of machine oil and purification agents particular to the transport's lower levels.
Evan didn't care. He soaked the rough thick cloth and scrubbed hard at the sweat and grime on his face and neck.
He planned to clean up quickly and then force himself to sleep for a few hours. The ship would be translating out of the Warp before long. Not much time after that before they would be positioned above Ashek II and waiting for the next particular hell to open below them.
Lena was still with Doctor Wayne, working through the medical knowledge the physician was passing on to her. That suited Evan well. He had no desire to have his sister coming with them into the middle of whatever Ashek II was going to produce.
As the Commissar's adjutant, Evan had grown gradually accustomed to surviving in the noise and constant death of the battlefield. But more often than not he found that what wore a man down most was not the fighting itself. It was the long transit between battles. The Warp transit in particular, that dead and oppressive sealed steel space, without enemies shouting or guns firing, with nothing but the monotonous throb of the engines. Fear had the easiest time growing in those gaps. Only the exhaustion of high-intensity physical training could push it down by force, burying it under muscles tired enough to leave no room for anything else.
He had just drawn a long breath, finished scrubbing, and was turning toward the bunk when everything changed.
A scalp-prickling chill erupted from the pit of his chest without any warning whatsoever, flooding through him before he could place it. It felt exactly as though something hidden in darkness had locked its eyes on him and refused to look away.
Above his head, the dim lumen light in the room produced two short sharp electrical snaps, then went dark.
Enemy.
Evan's pupils contracted in the blackness. Astra Militarum tactical instinct took over his body before conscious thought could.
He understood immediately what it meant. He threw himself sideways to the small metal desk in the corner of the room, yanked the drawer open, and pulled out the standard autopistol that Commissar Duvette had personally given him, the one he had kept carefully hidden there. He racked the slide and the round chambered with a crisp metallic snap that cut through the dead silence like something alive.
His mind was running at full speed. He had no idea how enemies had gotten aboard, how anything could have penetrated the layered defences of an Imperial expedition transport. But there was no time for that problem. Staying alive was the only law that mattered right now.
He gripped the autopistol and moved out of the room by memory alone.
The corridor outside was the same oppressive dark silence. Every main lighting circuit had been cut completely. Only at very great distance, weak red fault indicators flickered against the blackness.
Then a rough hand reached out of a blind spot and patted his left shoulder without a sound.
Evan's already maxed-out nerves detonated. Every muscle in his body locked. He did not turn. He dropped into a low crouch in one motion, swinging the autopistol backward, finger already pressing the trigger.
He did not fire. The hand used a practiced restraining grip, pressing his gun arm down in mid-air before the shot could break. A second hand, carrying the dense, sharp smell of old sweat, clamped over his mouth from behind.
"Don't fire. It's me."
A voice so low it barely registered above silence, hoarse and almost inaudible.
Bald Stroud.
The tension across Evan's body let go by a fraction. Stroud slowly released his mouth.
"There are enemies. Xenos." Nothing in his voice resembled panic. "I've already quietly woken everyone. You're the last. Keep your footsteps silent. Follow me."
Stroud made a brief tactical hand signal in the darkness and moved. Evan fell in behind him. They pressed themselves against the cold bulkheads and moved fast toward the large cargo bay, the space they had been using for grav-chute training only a few hours before.
The bay was not far from the bunk areas. A short distance beyond it, through two isolation doors, was the main passage leading down to the lowest deck regions of the transport.
The vast training space had fallen into the same deep darkness. The main lighting was entirely gone. Only a handful of independent battery emergency lamps were still running, casting pale illumination over small portions of stacked metal panels and suspended rigs.
The silence around them was unnatural in a way that pressed against the ears. The only sound was the heavy, constant hum of the ventilation systems, which swallowed every fine detail of movement in the space.
Evan moved with the pistol up, eyes sweeping. He could sense it rather than see it: other 112th veterans were positioned in the darkness somewhere behind those containers and behind that cover. But he could not locate a single one. Could not hear a single extra breath.
The 112th's veterans, once they had shifted into this particular state that they knew so well from years of asymmetric ambush work, had simply ceased to be separate from the environment around them.
Stroud brought Evan to the edge of the training area and they climbed up to a metal observation platform a little more than two metres off the deck.
Stroud pressed low and spoke in a voice that barely existed.
"Eldar." He kept it to the essential facts. "When I got up in the night I caught them cutting power on the lower decks. They killed a few naval patrol guards. But look at their movement pattern. They're not here to massacre. They are moving in a straight line toward a specific objective. Whatever they came to this ship for, it's something they consider extremely important."
He extended one hand and pointed toward the dark passage mouth in the far wall, the route leading to the lowest deck regions. Then he made a gesture: eyes on that, cover it from up here.
He indicated for Evan to stay at elevation and hold the passage mouth with the autopistol. Then, gripping a combat knife whose blade he had wrapped tightly in torn cloth to kill any reflected light, he slid off the platform and disappeared into the shadows below like water finding a drain.
Evan went prone against the cold metal railing. Both hands locked around the autopistol. Barrel trained on the passage.
In the absolute dark and silence of waiting, fear began its work.
It came slowly, like cold water rising through his veins. The most basic human response to a predator it cannot see. His heartbeat climbed. Cold sweat pushed through his palms. But Evan clenched his jaw, adjusted his breathing rate, and used the willpower that hundreds of gun lines under fire had built into him to push the fear back down below where it could reach him.
In a silence so complete that a pin dropping on the deck would have sounded like a gunshot, time stretched out until it lost any meaningful shape.
Then Evan's pupils contracted by a fraction.
Military instinct, stretched to its limit, caught something wrong at the distant passage mouth. On the wall beside it, a flickering red emergency lamp threw its small arc of light. In that precise instant, an unnatural shadow had briefly blocked it. Less than half a second.
They were here.
Without any hesitation, Evan fired from elevation.
Three shots. The autopistol's sharp bark tore the dead silence apart. Muzzle flash threw orange light across the deck.
But the ambush did not produce the effect he had expected.
In that brief flash: three Eldar stepped from the shadows, each one slender and fitted precisely in close armour. Their reaction speed broke whatever physical laws were supposed to apply here. In the instant the gun fired, each of them twisted their bodies at angles that simply should not have existed. The rounds struck nothing but the deck, punching out sparks.
All three locked onto Evan on the platform in the same moment. They did not raise their weapons immediately. They broke into movement, fluid and impossibly fast, dodging Evan's follow-up shots as they closed the distance toward the platform from three directions.
One of them raised a weapon on the run.
Evan felt it before he understood it: a wrong sensation in his right arm. His gun hand flinched. The autopistol nearly left his grip. A shuriken flechette had buried itself deep in the muscle of his forearm.
The fight erupted.
From the dark cover in the surrounding bay, the sounds broke simultaneously, the thud of bodies colliding and blades clashing, the sounds of the 112th veterans hidden throughout the space engaging whatever other Eldar had infiltrated alongside the three closing on the platform.
The three were less than ten metres away from the platform now. Blades gleaming with cold light in the darkness. Evan could read the expression beneath their helmets clearly enough. Cold. Contemptuous. This was something they expected to be over before it started.
At that crisis moment, a familiar and savage force surged through Evan without warning, like a furnace igniting. Muscle fibres felt as though they had been flooded with high-energy fuel. Pain was blocked instantly. His dynamic vision and neural reflexes broke through whatever mortal limits had been holding them a moment before.
He had felt this too many times not to know it immediately.
The Commissar was awake.
In the same second that force arrived, the ambush turned.
Two figures burst from the dead angles in the shadows on both sides of the Eldar's line of approach, erupting from positions no one had registered them occupying. With [Flesh Engine] pushing them, their speed and force were not inferior to the Eldar's own. They hit two of the xenos like hammers, taking them off their feet and bringing them down hard on the cold deck.
What followed had nothing to do with swordplay.
The two 112th veterans locked down the Eldar's arms with the full force of their bodies and the ferocity the aura had given them, and drove their combat blades into the xenos' throats without any pause. Pinned to the deck.
The third Eldar registered its companions going down in the same instant it happened. It tried to twist its body and turn back to assist them.
It cost it one tenth of a second.
From deep in the container stacks, from the furthest dark layering of shadow in the bay, a deep red laser beam cut through the air. The smell of ionized atmosphere reached Evan before the light fully registered. The beam hit the Eldar's head with complete precision.
No sound. The entire skull was vaporized by the heat in an instant. The headless body stumbled forward two steps on inertia and went down.
Evan stared from the platform. His mind had not caught up with what he had just watched.
He had barely begun to process it when a figure came up over the platform edge. Elias Hawthorne, the Cadian officer attached to the 112th's command element, extended a bloody hand and hauled Evan to his feet.
"Apologies, Adjutant." He showed the grin of a man who knows the apology is a bit late and cannot quite suppress his own amusement at having gotten away with it. "Their senses were too sharp. No matter how well we concealed ourselves, they were going to pick us up eventually. We needed a slightly nervous decoy to hold their attention. Don't tell the Commissar. He will kill us."
Below on the deck, Stroud rose from where he had been working. As a precaution, he drove his combat blade into each of the two Eldar bodies several times more before he was satisfied. Then he straightened up, wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand, and looked up at the platform.
Evan followed the direction of the laser shot. In the deepest shadow of the stacked container columns, Finn was standing slowly, slinging his weapon onto his back. A long-las, barrel extended past his shoulder, the kind of weapon built for exactly what it had just done.
"You smuggled a long-las onto the ship?!" Evan's eyes went wide. Under strict fleet weapons controls, a soldier hiding a pistol was already pushing the boundary of what could be concealed. Getting a weapon of that size aboard undetected should have been effectively impossible.
"Ask the madman." Stroud spread his hands below, the expression of a man who intends to have nothing to do with the consequences. "Honestly, when I saw him pull the barrel out from under the mattress of his bunk just now, I was shocked too."
"The Emperor permitted it." Finn's voice came through the vox.
"Right, right, the Emperor permitted it." Stroud gave several solemn nods, then turned to Evan and tapped a finger against his own temple with the expression of a man indicating a fundamental structural problem.
"I saw that." Finn's voice came back through the vox.
Then heavy footsteps, weighted and deliberate, moved through the dark toward them.
"Dealt with."
Anderson walked out of the darkness. His right hand gripped the newly issued Mars-pattern thunder hammer. He had not activated the weapon's disintegration field at any point during the fighting, apparently having decided the noise was not worth it. He had used nothing but his own physical strength, and it had been entirely sufficient. In his left hand, held the way someone might carry two items of no particular significance, he was gripping two Eldar corpses by whatever portion of their armour gave him purchase, their bodies twisted and crushed into shapes they had not previously been capable of achieving.
His undershirt had several deep cuts across it. He was still bleeding from them. He had clearly been in extremely close quarters with something that had tried very hard to kill him.
"Are you alright?" Evan looked at the wounds.
"Minor. Didn't reach bone." Anderson tossed the two crushed bodies onto the deck near Stroud's feet without ceremony.
"Watch yourself, you damned maniac, you nearly hit me!" Stroud muttered under his breath and kicked the bodies aside.
Evan was about to ask how they had arranged all of this, how the plan had been set without anyone saying a word to him, when Stroud's expression went sharp without warning. His hand came up and clamped over Evan's mouth for the second time that night. He made the gesture for absolute silence with the other hand, sharp and immediate.
Something else was moving.
Every person in the bay stopped. Without a sound, they melted back into the surrounding shadows on pure reflex. Anderson withdrew silently behind a massive metal structural pillar and tightened his grip on the hammer.
Dead silence fell again.
Then from the stairwell in the direction Anderson had come from, the access point leading up toward the officer decks above, two figures came scrambling through into the bay.
Two Eldar.
But these were not the precise and elegant assassins they had just finished fighting. The armour on both of them was marked with disintegration field cut lines, the kind of damage that could only come from a powered blade used at very close range against a target that had been trying to get away. They were moving at a dead sprint toward the passage leading to the deepest regions of the lowest decks.
In the darkness surrounding the bay, the assembled 112th veterans exchanged looks they could barely see.
Stroud licked his lips slowly. In his eyes, barely visible in the dim emergency lamp glow, there was a gleam that anyone who had spent time in the field would recognise immediately.
"I think," he said, barely above a whisper, turning his head to take in the others, "we should follow them and see exactly where these bastards came from."
He paused.
"What do you say?"
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