Chapter 33: Are You Yvraine?!
Evan had been about to call out and stop the veterans. The lowest deck terrain was complex, the enemy knew their positions and the 112th did not know theirs, and staying put to wait for the main force was the soundest tactic available.
But watching Stroud and the others disappear into the darkness without a moment's hesitation, Evan set his jaw and followed.
He tightened his grip on the autopistol and went in after them. A glance behind him confirmed that Finn had also fallen in silently at his back, the long-las in hand.
The rest of the 112th soldiers remained in position at the training bay by the signals of the other officers. They had already reported the situation on the internal channel. Reinforcements would arrive in strength before long.
Using Stroud's instincts as a tracker, which had been refined by years of hunting in circumstances that would have killed most men twice over, the four of them kept tight to the heels of the two retreating Eldar, pushing deeper into the lowest deck of the transport.
The temperature dropped steadily around them. The background hum of the ventilation systems faded and faded until it had been replaced by a silence that felt like a physical weight.
They were within reach of locating the enemy's position, moving without sound, certain they had not been detected.
Then a series of extremely sharp hissing sounds came from somewhere in the dense tangle of overhead piping.
The sounds were small. They were extremely lethal.
Combat instinct refined to its edge across years of work that would fill a charnel house, combined with [Flesh Engine]'s enhancement, had them moving before the sound had fully registered. The evasion was pure reflex.
Several monomolecular flechettes drove into the metal deck plates where they had been standing. The cuts were as smooth as polished glass.
They had been found. And it was a reverse ambush.
"I knew it!" Stroud threw himself into a rolling dive behind a derelict servo-mechanism, shouting as he went. "Every time you come along we get spotted!"
"Shut your damned mouth, you idiot! Stop telling them exactly where we are!" Elias roared back, sliding low to let a shuriken pass over his head and returning fire blind with his pistol on the way down.
Stroud pulled up abruptly.
At the corridor bend ahead of them, slender figures had materialised from the dark without any warning and cut off their only line of retreat.
They had no choice but to change direction at a dead sprint, pushing into a large abandoned parts storage compartment off to one side.
But when they put their backs together and formed up in a circular defensive position, Eldar pirates poured from the surrounding shadows like water finding every gap simultaneously. From behind rusted debris, from the tops of stacked machinery, from the spaces between equipment components, they emerged as though the darkness itself were producing them.
Shuriken pistols out. Slender power blades in hand. Cold eyes watching the surrounded humans the way a hunter watches prey that has entered the trap and stopped running.
"Right." Stroud spat out a mouthful of blood and tightened his grip on the cloth-wrapped combat blade, every muscle in his body locked and ready for the worst hand-to-hand he had ever been in. "Looks like today's the day we get taken prisoner."
"Disgraceful." Finn's voice was flat.
He swung the long-las onto his back and drew the standard-issue bayonet from his hip with his prosthetic arm. Against Eldar precision weapons the heavy stub blade was close to useless, but there was no trace of retreat in his eyes.
Then the Eldar cordon parted.
Two figures stepped through the gap in it.
At the front was a female Eldar of exceptional height.
She was not wearing the rigid armour of Craftworld forces. Instead she wore form-fitting pirate mesh armour, its surface covered in precision spike decorations, the kind of armour designed as much as an aesthetic statement as protection. At her hips hung two long, elegant void blades. Her movement carried a quality of lethal beauty that was suffocating to witness. At her feet, pacing alongside her, was an alien creature the approximate size of a lynx, moving with an eerie, precise grace.
Behind her: the figure wrapped in a wide black robe.
The female leader swept a cold gaze across the surrounded humans, then turned her head to address the robed figure at her side.
"Are you certain it's them?"
The robed figure's voice reached them as though it were passing through several layers of fabric at once, carrying an unreal, rhythmic quality beneath the words.
"Yes. And no. But their threads of fate have been forcibly altered. The unknown presence is very close to them."
"What are they going on about?" Stroud muttered from the side, eyes fixed on the enemy, voice barely audible.
Elias drove an elbow hard into his ribs and said nothing.
The female Eldar leader's perfectly shaped brow drew together. She was clearly dissatisfied with the Shadowseer's ambiguous answer. But the alarm was still sounding through the lower deck, and Imperial naval security would reach this compartment soon enough. She had already been exposed. There was no more time.
"Cut their hamstrings. Bind them. Withdraw." She issued the order in Eldar in a tone without any warmth, and gave a casual wave toward the surrounding pirates.
But these veterans of the 112th who had crawled out of Formal Prime's meat grinder had no intention of making it easy.
"For the Emperor! Kill these long-ears!"
Stroud's roar broke the stillness. He did not fall back. He went directly forward, throwing himself at two of the closing Eldar pirates without any hesitation.
Anderson answered with a roar that had nothing human at the edges of it. He swung the thunder hammer in a devastating horizontal sweep that dragged a wall of displaced air behind it.
Evan and Finn raised autopistol and bayonet and went into the enemy that was pressing in around them.
The sealed compartment became a single continuous blood-soaked brawl. The 112th abandoned defence completely. They fought with pure mutual destruction tactics, the kind where both sides take casualties and neither side cares.
The ferocity and madness they brought to it forced the first wave of Eldar pirates back. It cost them severely to do it.
The female Eldar leader watched them, and something moved behind her eyes. Annoyance. And contempt.
She made a cold sound and drew both void blades from her hips with a slow, deliberate motion. In imperfect Low Gothic, her voice carried a precise disdain.
"A pack of lowly monkeys."
The words had not finished leaving her mouth before she was gone from where she had been standing.
Her speed exceeded what human eyes were built to resolve.
Elias had barely lifted his blade when a flash of light moved through his vision and both his wrists detonated with simultaneous pain. Both tendons cut, precisely, in the same instant. Blood sprayed from both wrists. The blade dropped.
Anderson swung the thunder hammer at the shape his eyes had last recorded. He hit nothing. She had already appeared in his visual dead angle. The void blades moved like a serpent striking, cutting through the muscles driving his knee from behind with surgical precision.
Anderson produced a low grunt and went down on one knee.
Stroud and Finn tried to close from both sides. Against swordsmanship of that quality, their combined effort was as effective as children swinging at someone who had decided to be unreachable.
In under ten seconds, with four arcs of light that were as elegant as they were final, every one of the veterans had been brought down. Critically wounded, incapacitated, no longer able to fight.
The female leader landed lightly in front of them. The void blades had not taken a single drop of blood onto their edges. She looked down at Evan from above with an unhurried expression, preparing to deliver the concluding cut.
At that moment, the heavy sealed door at the far end of the compartment produced a sound that briefly overrode everything else.
The door came apart under pure force, not so much opened as destroyed. Twisted metal fragments flew into the Eldar formation with the velocity of cannonballs.
"Get out of my way!"
With a single ferocious shout, Duvette arrived like something that had borrowed a human shape for the occasion, at the head of a mass of fully armed 112th soldiers and several senior officers who came running in hard behind him.
The instant he crossed the threshold, the invisible aura of [Star of Terra] dropped over the entire space.
Combined with [Flesh Engine].
Anderson and Stroud and the others on the deck felt it simultaneously: a savage force pumped through them from the chest outward, violent and immediate. Pain was simply cut. Muscles flooded with explosive force as though they had never been touched.
"The Commissar's here! Kill them!"
Anderson used his uninjured right arm to force himself back upright. Every one of the 112th veterans came alive again as though someone had thrown a switch, and they threw themselves back into the Eldar around them with a fury that had been building during the interval they had spent bleeding on the floor.
Duvette gripped the master-crafted power sword, its energy field snapping and crackling with blue light, and locked onto the female Eldar leader in the same instant his eyes moved across the room. He drove forward at a speed that had nothing gentle in it, closing the distance with long strides, the power sword tracing a hard blue arc as it rose.
In that precise fraction of a second, the robed figure standing behind the female leader moved.
She could not maintain her composure. She abandoned whatever the Shadowseer's discipline required of her in moments like this and jabbed a finger toward Duvette, her voice going raw in Eldar, carrying the extreme terror of someone watching fate collapse into something it had never been supposed to become.
"Amharoc! Be careful! He is the variable!"
In the noise of the brawl and the sounding alarm, Duvette's charging stride did not break.
He could not understand a single word of the Eldar language. But his mind caught something in that scream with the absolute precision of someone who has learned to extract information from noise. One syllable. A proper noun, requiring no translation at all, its phonetics identical in any language.
"Amharoc."
Duvette's transmigrator mind began an immediate search at full speed. Amharoc. Female Eldar pirate leader. Void twin-blades. The time period. The Harlequin Shadowseer marking her as significant. Could she be...
He was still running. The female Eldar before him had registered the Shadowseer's warning and turned, the flash of surprise visible even on her features, both void blades coming up to meet him.
At the last possible moment before the power sword and the void blades would have met, Duvette fixed his eyes on her alien gaze and shouted in Low Gothic:
"Are you Yvraine?!"
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