"This abomination cannot be allowed to continue," Em growled, softly. He wasn't sure what it was about the image of the soul shrine, ripped free from the heart of Lu'nasad, that effected him so deeply. He supposed, distantly, that it must be his kinship to the Eldar. While they were xenos and, hypothetically, his future enemy...they were also born in the same void he had spent his whole life in. They had the same deep affection to their ships. To their homes. The image of the tumbling shrine was all too easy to instead see as the manor home on the
Argent Scourge, tumbling towards a similar fate.
He lifted his chin, and spoke.
"Bring us up behind them. Fast and silent." He turned. "Ryia, you're the best pilot we have. I want you to spend the day it will take us to get there familierizing yourself with the controls. Phi, I would like you to do likewise. To do battle without some means of patching rigging is an excellent way to put ourselves into the soup."
"Wha-" Badb Ra started.
"You may, of course, accompany him," Em said, dryly, to the Ranger. "So that he might do better when all our lives are on the line."
The Eldar closed his mouth. Scowled. Then nodded. He and PHi hurried off the bridge, the tech-priest's atonal, alien voice jarring hideously against Badb Ra's musical, lilting tones as they ducked their heads close together to confer, whisper, and likely, argue bitterly.
Em noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that Tine was beaming at him.
"What?" he asked.
"Oh, nothing," she said, cheerfully. Then she leaned up and kissed him on the cheek.
***
Captain Skerrin Raj sat aboard the
Contempt of Righteousness and glared daggers at the sun ahead of him. The immense red orb crawled on hands and knees - crawled like time did aboard the bridge of his ship. He wanted to be in at the death, to be there when the great reaping of skulls and souls alike would bring decades...no...centuries of planning to fruit. But instead, his Master, his Lord, Karad Vall himself had left him here, with a mighty ship, to do what could be managed by a bloody rockhopper crewed by degenerate, inbred void-dogs. And...worst of all?
He had to work with...
her. His power armor grated against the throne he sat upon, the adamantine fingers scraping against adamantine armrests. One of his manservants - a cringing wretch that had begun to bore him almost the instant after he had been purchased, simpered forward.
"Some sweet meats, my l-"
Skerrin smashed the man's head open with backhanded blow. The slave sprawled, groaning, and clutched at the fracture on his skull, blood and bits of bone escaping around his fingers. He didn't die for some time, but listening to his whimpers and groans filled Skerrin with a great deal of pleasure as he sat back in the throne. The rest of the bridge crew worked a bit harder after that, even the lowly serviles who's only job was to pour the pints of groxblood into the groaning, wheezing predictor that was used for the macro-cannon targeting arrays.
"Sir," the voice that cut across the bridge was cold and feminine. His auspex officer, Errin, looked up at him from the auspex pit, her bald head shining and her blue painted symbol of Chaos Undivided stark against her pale features. "We're detecting something strange in the plasma wake."
"Strange, Errin?" Skerrin growled. "What is strange? We're dragging the heart of a craftworld through space with that bitch Huln and you bother me with strange? Give me some answers or shut up."
Errin, who was well used to the rivalry between Skerrin and Huln, sighed. "It's...unclear. There are some stars that are shifting position behind us."
"Stars? You trifle me with
stars?" Skerrin snarled, his hand flipping. "Send some void-rat out with Khorn-damned mop and clean the scopes, it's some muck or mire or heat shimmer or any number of irrelevencies that
you should be dealing with, not me. I am the captain of this ship, not one of your sub-officers. So, do your
godsdamned job or I will mount your void-suited body on the forespar!"
Errin clenched her jaw.
She sat back down at her console.
And she sent men out to check the scopes. Three minutes later, those men returned with the report that the scopes were clean. She filtered out heat-shimmer and she phased out energy emissions, working carefully with the scrying-tools, and muttering oaths cursing her captain's rock-stupid head several dozen times between each step of the laborious progress. After a half hour, she had finally filtered out every single possible answer for the star's shifting location behind her. There, she looked smugly at the result, and saw the elegant wings, the sails, the midnight black hull, the narrow snouts of long-bore lance guns, all aimed right at her scopes.
She opened her mouth.
The lance guns glowed.
"I've wasted my life," Errin said, with shocking introspection.
Then the entire five kilometer long, one kilometer wide angular sweep of the
Contempt for the Righteous exploded with the most devastatingly accurate macrocannon broadside seen in the Expanse for nearly sixty years. Plasma shells detonated as missiles detonated against the hull. Corridors crumpled. Crew were crushed under falling masonry, ripped from their bunks by screaming rents torn in the hull, consumed by flames. The shields rippled, collapsed, and refused to reform for a solid five minutes as plasma-shards ripped through the outer hull armor and softer inner plating alike. And yet? That was merely the beginning.
The lances had warmed up.
They flared.
A purple pair of beams slammed into the midsection of the ship, boring home. Then they faded...and slammed home again. Decks turned into enclosed infernos of blazing purple light. Hundreds, thousands, of souls were immolated in seconds. Air exploded from the walls. Then the beams slammed home a third and final time as the entire ship shuddered and the
Contempt for Righteousness started to heel hard to port, smoke and flames rippling along the entire flank of the ship. The captain was dead. The bridge crew were dead. The officers were too confused, too panicky, and too wounded, to turned to ashen heaps...to actually give orders. But as the minutes ticked by and bits of crew worked to slam down seal-locks and put out flames, the ship heeled and turned aside, without needing orders to do anything but flee...flee...
flee.
And in the night, barely visible, the
Anaris' Whisper whipped by, heeling on a dime and sweeping past the aft of the
Contempt - coming within no less than twenty six meters of her rudder, and seen by none by two men.
Those two men?
They had survived - survived by clinging on, survived because...minutes ago...they had been ordered to clean some telescopes.
And to think they had complained, at the time.
***
"CUT US LOOSE!"
The order was given the instant the first plasma shell had detonated on the shield of the
Contempt - bellowed by Captain Kuln Huln as she sprang from her slave-seat. The slaves, being well trained, didn't move as she stalked away from the interlocking human bodies, but their eyes were wide and terrified as they all watched their owner stalking away...or, maybe, they were more terrified by the sight of the distant
Contempt going up like a firework on Heretic Day.
The order was followed immediately - and the massive tow cables were slashed free with a snarling
crunch. The soul shrine began to float freely as more orders were shouted - from the bridge to the bilge decks - and they were all aligned on a single course. Men and women donned void suits and threw out the rigging in the middle of the ship, adjusting the flow of plasma to begin to fire the port thrusters. Plumes of superheated reaction mass shot from the side of the
Defiant Bigotry and her nose began to turn away from the red star ahead of her and towards the depths of space. Scopes were locked and the bridge worked furiously to try and track the midnight dark shape behind them.
"It's an eldar ship, sir!"
"No fucking shit it's an Eldar ship!" Huln snapped. "Give me a fucking auspex scan on her!"
"Uh, not a targeting-" one of her officers asked. Huln shot him in the chest and he collapsed to the ground, blood bubbling from his lips. The others got to work.
Soon, the Eldar ship was being bathed in emissions from their auspexes, and a few seconds later, Huln was kneeling down and looking over the console, grinning as she saw the diagrams of the ship. She pointed at it. "That's what we want..." she snarled, quietly. "Get men to the teleportarium...and have them
blow that to slag!"
***
The crack of purple light that announced the teleportarium's arrival faded and the men and women in heavy combat armor adjusted their swords and their weapons, looking around themselves in the pale gray chamber that they had arrived within. Their leader, a scarred woman with nails driven into her head to create a fearsome façade, grinned as she pointed at the crystalline emitters that filled the chamber. "There!" she said. "Those are the holo-"
Thump.
The sound was thunderingly loud and terrifying in a bone deep way. It was the sound of a single foot, thumping down onto the wraithbone of the chamber - but amplified and multiplied a hundred fold. A hundred Eldar figures stepped from niches around the boarding party, and they did so with an eerie, precise, unified movement that shook the Chaos Reavers to the core.
A hundred Eldar.
A hundred Wraithguard.
They, at the same time, lifted their long barreled wraithcannon.
"NO!" The leader of the Chaos Reavers screamed.
The wraithcannons spoke as one and, in a flurry of midnight black flares of terrible, killing light...the boarders were reduced to a smear of red paste along the floor, walls and ceiling of the holo-field projectors.
***
"How...did...you know that they would board there?" Farseer Callie asked, looking up from the projection of the internal security situation on the
Whisper. She and Serradon had been watching Em with growing expressions of shock as the past thirty minutes unfolded. Em glanced away from the vista-plates, ignoring the distant flicker of the
Bigotry opening up with her broadsides and her dorsal lances, hitting where the
Whisper had been approximately five minutes before with an accuracy that would have riddled their ship with holes. "Teleporters can't be predicted, save by psyker talents. Are you a psyker?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.
Em laughed, turning to face her full on. "No, my dear Farseer," he said, cheerfully. "I knew they would be there because that is precisely where I would send my men. In this kind of situation." He winked at her.
Farseer Callie didn't look particularly happy about that response.
"Ryia," Em said, quietly. "Can you bring us about and put us directly behind the second Hadies?"
Ryia, who had been adjusting the crystalline controls of the Eldar ship, gave him a little wry grin. "This ship fucking feels like it knows what I want before I ask it...I...it's like working with a dance partner. Em...I can put the pulse-lances into their fucking
window." She grinned. "And, look, we're traveling perpendicular along with the side of the sun - and the sails are actually tacking along with it." She pointed. "We're even faster now."
Em gave a nod, then squeezed her shoulder, gently. "Put us right down their throats."
The
Whisper shot forward - darting through the void, and as it came within a few thousand kilometers of the arcing
Bigotry as she continued to fire her broadsides. The prow guns started to open up along the nose and dorsal ridge of the
Whisper and Em watched as the shields of the distant heavy cruiser shimmered, crackled, then exploded apart, and left her open for the pulsed lances that were mounted on the belly and nose of the
Whisper. Em felt the pulses through his feet, the whole ship shuddering faintly as the lances fired again and again and again, ripping along the side of the Hades cruiser...until they whipped right past it. Em saw it, for a few moments, out the port window and saw that the entire side of the ship was burning and she was listing hard on a corkscrewing pattern, her rigging in tatters, her mainsail sputtering and flickering.
"And she's struck," Em said, confidently.
"Em! Em!" Tine said.
"I know, I see her," Em said. "Ryia, bring us to a new heading!"
Ryia nodded, her fingers moving along the console as the two Farseers watched through the vista-plate as the immense red orb of the sun started to swell, dizzily fast, before them. A tiny disk of blackness flipped end over end between them and the sun, and only the intelligent polarization of the vista-plate allowing them to see at all. Em still lifted his palm, shading his eyes as he tried to judge relative distances and speeds. Ryia herself was clenching her jaw, and the whole ship sung as the sails trembled and rattled - catching the photosphere's brilliance and transforming it into speed.
"Em, you better tell them to get ready," Ryia said. "Ten minutes."
Em tapped his microbead. "Phi, tell me you've rigged the grapnels out."
"
THERE ARE SOME DEVICES THAT SHALL SERVE," Phi said.
"Good," Em said.
The soul-shrine swelled before them, and Em could see the edges of her were flickering and rippling with blue-white light as the surviving void shields on the chunk of craftworld caught and reflected solar energies away...but at the distance it was getting to the sun, he could already tell that those shields would not last. In a half hour, maybe less, it would be within the photosphere and the wraithbone would char and burn away to cinders and the hope of tomorrow would be lost. The entire ship began to shudder and rock and the air started to heat up as Em realized one flaw in his plan...an unreasonably foolish one, one that had only occurred to him here and now.
Their ship didn't have
shields.
The Eldar, in their haughty arrogance, relied purely upon holo-fields. They were devastatingly effective in open combat...but you couldn't
fool a star!
"Bring us about as soon as you can, Ryia," Em said.
"THERE!" Ryia shouted.
She flung her fingers along the console - and Em stumbled against Tine, who stood perfectly still. Dr. Balthazar grunted as he fell against the wall from the corner where he was watching all of this - and the two Farseers stumbled as well. The sails screamed, literally screamed, through the hull of the ship as the prow of the
Whisper swung violently around to starboard, the sun whipping past them and the light shifting from a deadly red to the cool gray tones of the normal hull's light. The belly, Em felt, was now aimed directly at the soulstone.
Em put his finger to his micro-bead. "Phi! NOW!"
***
Enginseer Pi-0027-137 Alpha was an exceptionally good enginseer. He had been his whole life, even before he had taken to the Cloth and become a member of the Tech Priests. One of his earliest digitized memories was when he had gotten his father's ambultractor running again with nothing but gut intuition and the family psalm-manuals, and he kept it for times such as this, when the probability seemed inordinately long on success and he needed the comfort of precedent. In the cavernous, empty holds of the Eldar ship, he and Badb Ra had worked with the Wraithcrew to set up immense gravurn-capture catapults, all of them aimed at the void-shielded cargo entry door that dominated the belly of the ship. The blazing light of the sun shone through that shielded array, causing it to sparkle and crackle like a frothing sea-surf.
"Phi! NOW!"
Captain Vendigroth, as ever, had the timing down to a science.
Phi gave the order with a single thought - and the jerry-rigged gravurn-capture catapults began to whine loudly, their gemstone emitters glowing to life.
The whole of the Eldar ship shuddered as she was chained to the soul shrine, mass and all.
Then the decks shifted and the view through the belly hold swung wildly around as Phi saw that the sun was being put at their aft and the sails were spreading, trying to cancel the momentum that they had just added to their ship. He moved forward before the order was even given.
"We need more speed, Phi!"
"
THEN MORE SPEED YOU SHALL HAVE," Phi said verbally as he came to the console the annoying Badb Ra had shown him. His fingers and his mechadendrites both slammed down, pressing a hideous xenos rune here, flicking a malformed xenos switch there. It was all quite trivial, Phi predicted a nearly...sixty, sixty five percent chance of success. He preferred better odds, but he normally worked with Imperial enginarcana which he knew with such depth that it was closer to him than his own remaining biological organs.
The ship groaned as the sails spread further...
CRUNCH!
The whole ship shuddered again and Phi's ocular implants narrowed as he saw that the mainsail - a literal, not figurative, term here - was flashing ochre on the display.
"
CAPTAIN, I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT THE MAINSAIL HAS FRACTURED."
"How much momentum did we get?" Em asked.
It was worse than that - and Phi was fairly sure that Em knew it. The sail had cracked just at the moment they needed her the most - and now, they weren't just moving slowly...they
weren't bleeding off momentum at
all. They were being dragged into the star by the mass and momentum of the soul shrine, as surely as a man tied to an anchor.
They had a choice.
They could either cut the anchor...
Or they could drown.
Except...that wasn't true.
***
"We have to cut it lose," Em said, immediately.
"No, you can't!" Serradon snarled. "We lose that, Lu'nasad will never be reclaimed, ever!"
"We-"
"EM!" Tine screamed. "LOOK!"
The entire bridge crew went silent. The forward vista-plates showed the hull of the
Whisper - and at their angle, the hull looked as if she was on fire. Red light blazed along her midnight black plating, shining brightly enough to show where the wraithbone was beginning to melt and froth and bubble. But despite that, it was easy enough to see the solitary figure, moving with remarkable speed along the hull of the ship. He was illuminated by the crackling of his personal force field, which hissed and popped and shimmered. It looked as if Phi had cast aside his robes, exposing his many mechadendrites and his arms and the withered, dessicated flesh that was all that was left of his chest, his neck, one of his shoulders. He moved like a scuttling bug or deep sea cephaloid, with his many mechadendrites reaching forward to claps and drag him forward, keeping him rooted against the acceleration pressure of the ship.
And yet...there was one that did not help. One that was wrapped around a bubble of silver sheeting.
"Phi, what in warpsblood are you
doing?" Em asked, all decorum forgotten.
Phi did not respond. He swarmed up along the mainsail - and there, he tore the sheeting apart, revealing a constellation of wraithbone components. He began to work with furious speed, a beam-laser emerging from one mechadendrite, blazing bright even against the sunlight, melting into the wraithbone to reveal the inner working of the sail.
"His force field..." Tine whispered. "Hurry, Phi, hurry!"
The field was blazing bright now - Em had seen void shields both large and small and knew when one was about to fail.
He put his finger back to his micro-bead. "Phi-"
"
I HAVE DONE THE CALCULATIONS. ONCE." Phi said, his voice calm. Emotionless. "
I KNEW THE PROBABILITY OF MY SURVIVAL AND NEEDED NO CONFIRMATION."
He paused in his work. The distance was too great. The buzzing force shield was too bright.
But Em knew he was looking back, to the bridge spar.
"
IF YOU WERE ANY OTHER MAN, I WOULD EVALUATE MY KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS AS TOO GREAT A LOSS. BUT I KNOW, WITHOUT A DOUBT, THAT YOU C-CA...CAN SEE IT DONE, C...CA...CAPTAIN."
The ship shuddered.
The sails glowed.
And the backward movement, faintly perceptible to all aboard, reversed. Then it reversed faster. Faster. The
Whisper tore away from the sun - and Em stepped forward, unable to look at the consoles to see how fast they were going. He knew every meter reduced the energies bathing Phi - every meter gave them a chance.
"
PRAISE THE...OMNISIAH..." Static buzzed. "
IN...HIS N-N-NA...NAME."
The shield cracked.
Shattered.
Tine fell to her knees, sobbing, as on the prow of the
Anaris' Whisper, Enginseer Pi-0027-137 burned.
***
The Eldar stood, quietly, in the background. All save Callie, who stood beside Tine, holding her hand, gently, as Xoti and Biggs, moving with gentleness and care that seemed almost as alien as the ship they were on, set Phi's body upon the deck. Tine touched the augmetic shoulder of the Enginseer - feeling the running rivulets, frozen mid-droplet like a ice sculpture rescued from the heat of an oven at the last second. His opticals were closed and his mechadendrites had been, at the last second, driven into the softened hull of the
Whisper, keeping him in place as they had sailed away from the star's furious heat.
Tine drew in a ragged breath, then rubbed her palms against her face. Ryia's features were as grim as they had ever been. Em found himself feeling...almost lost. For almost a decade, Phi had
been there for him. Any technical problem, any issue of the theomachinery, and he...had had been there, present and able to work with his undying, endless, tireless diligence.
"He was a good cog," Xoti said, her voice breaking the somber silence of the cargo hold as she took off her void-suit helmet, holding it to her chest.
"That he was," Em said, quietly. "He saved us. All of us. Not just on this ship, not just in the fleet..." He pointed, outwards, towards the direction of the Scourge Fleet, which was even now sweeping down upon the fleeing Hades - capturing both of them without firing a shot, adding them to their growing roster - though, likely, they weren't going to be ready for combat any time soon. "But everyone on Purgatorio. Possibly everyone in the whole Sector." He turned to Callie, who started as the attention of the room came to her. "How hard will it be to clear the Enslavers out of the shrine?"
Callie blinked. "It...oh! It won't! I mean, at all!" She blushed. "They aren't there anymore - they left."
"They left?" Tine asked, her voice ragged and soft, haunted.
"W-Well, it was about to fall into a sun," Callie said, gulping. "But, I've accessed some of their records, at range, using the
Whisper's bone speaking capacity. I don't quite know what the...the
bastards did to Lu'nasad, but they clearly have some other way of controlling her than the Infinity Circuit. Some...chaos-built structure, to slot into the same place as the Soul Shrine. To get the Lu'nasad without needing to deal with the Enslavers." She shook her head. "B-But, there is...there is something!" She squared her shoulders. "The operation was preformed here - they caught Lu'nasad in this system, ripped her heart out here, replaced it here, and left here. And thus...the Soul-Shrine might have more datum on her."
"There's also the two Hades," Tine said. "We have the captain of one - one Kuln Huln. If anyone knows about the disposition of Vall's forces and where he's going, it'll be her."
---
What do Callie and Serradon find aboard the Soul Shrine
[ ] Precise warp destinations for Vall's fleet?
[ ] Revealing clues about his war-plans?
[ ] A weakness aboard his ship?
[ ] A cunning secret he knows about your fleet?
(Write Ins Not Allowed)
How do you interrogate Captain Huln
[ ] Put her in room with Em and let him explain to her precisely what happens if she doesn't talk.
[ ] Fuck it. Rip the secrets from her mind with every astro-telepath on your fleet at once.
[ ] Write In
