by Gav Thorpe
Under Aradryan’s direction, the distort cannon was steered across the bay and aimed towards the wall to the left. The weapon opened fire at the wall, its metal and rock-like substance engulfed by a whirling sphere of flickering energy. The small portal collapsed after a few moments, leaving a perfect circle burrowed through the thick bulkhead, leading into an access corridor not directly connected to the launch bay.
Aradryan drew his sword and pistol and waved for his team of forty warriors to move through the newly created opening, the d-cannon gliding under the control of its gunners. With a last glance to assure himself that the rearguard were set to defend the voidcutters and star-runners, Aradryan stepped through the bulkhead, calling for his raiders to head to the right.
On the last leg through the webway Aradryan had memorised the internal layout of the station – he had not asked how Yrithain had come by such information – and knew the allotted roles of the corsairs aboard his vessel and the others to the finest detail. Surprise and timing were key if they were to be successful; the larger ships would be making their run to orbit at a precise time and the battlestation’s main weapons had to be rendered ineffective by then or the whole raid would have to be abandoned. Knowing that Yrithain’s patience had already been tested by the Fae Taeruth’s arrival, and that the favour of Khiadysis would be fickle, Aradryan had no doubts regarding the price of failure.
Plotting a route through the station’s interior, Aradryan was struck by the inelegance and artificiality that formed the basis of the humans’ sense of space and architecture. There was nothing of nature in the design, no flow or grace to the simple grid layout; it was purely functional. The doorways and arches passed by the corsairs were broad and low, often marked with red and yellow stripes to denote hazards, indecipherable stencilled lettering on the walls beside them.
Using the d-cannon, Aradryan and his party were able to bypass the worst chokepoints and defensive bottlenecks, moving from one line of attack to another in a few heartbeats, so that the humans were easily outflanked and cut down. The masked soldiers would form a line ahead of the advancing eldar, ready to defend a junction or crossing. Aradryan would have a handful of his warriors engage the humans from the front for long enough for him to devise another route of advance. Sometimes the eldar would simply disengage from the defenders, having slipped into a secondary access tunnel, or dropped or climbed up a level. Most of the times, though, Aradryan led his corsairs on the attack, striking the defenders from the side or rear while their attention was drawn by those left behind.
The humans’ communications systems and command structure seemed woefully inadequate in the face of such a threat. Aradryan was surprised by the continued success of this tactic, as he slashed his sword across the throat of a human officer defending a stairwell that led to the innermost decks of the battlestation. Ducking beneath a pistol swung as a club, Aradryan kicked out at his attacker’s knee, sending the man sprawling to the floor. The gleaming edge of Aradryan’s blade bit into the side of the human’s head, stilling his resistance.
Firing a flurry of shurikens from his pistol into the throat of another foe, Aradryan stepped over the corpses of the fallen and glanced down the stairwell. There appeared to be no defenders on the level below, but he was not about to take any chances.
As the last of the humans died, a gurgling rasp emerging from his shuriken-ripped throat, Aradryan parted his company with gestures from his sword. The d-cannon crew understood his intent, and pointed their machine at the landing at the top of the stairs.
Aradryan’s skin crawled and his hair rose up with static energy as the distort cannon opened fire, punching a hole between reality and the warp. Part of the landing collapsed, sending a slide of broken masonry and twisted metal reinforcing rods plummeting down into the floor below. There were a few cries of shock and pain amongst the rumble of the tumbling landing.
Leaping down into the hole with his followers close behind, Aradryan landed on top of another human, who had been crawling across a tipped slab of flooring. Losing his footing, Aradryan rolled to one side, his pistol spitting discs that shredded the fallen man’s jerkin, droplets of blood spraying through the cloud of dust that surrounded Aradryan. In the gloom, Aradryan saw shapes moving – too slow and cumbersome to be his companions. He slashed at the disorientated soldiers with his sword, cutting down three enemies in quick succession.
As the dust cloud dispersed, the corsairs came leaping through the hole and Aradryan regained his bearings. The d-cannon floated down last, its gunners standing on the anti-grav platform. Aradryan double-checked their current position against his mental map, fixing the junction ahead in relation to the image in his mind. A left turn would bring them to where they needed to be.
Suited men came running around the corner ahead, no doubt responding to the noise of the collapsing stairwell. They were taken unawares as Aradryan and the rest of the corsairs opened fire, sending out a hail of shurikens and las-bolts. Sword held ready, Aradryan sprinted to the junction with Taelisieth at his shoulder. The passages to the left and right were clear for the moment, so Aradryan sent his lieutenant to the end of the corridor on the left, to secure the distant archway with a handful of corsairs. Turning his attention to the right, Aradryan sent another party to the far end of the passageway, where an armoured door had descended across the hall; he did not know whether the door could be raised again and it was best to assume the worst.
The walls and floor gently vibrated, set to a faint tremor by hidden power cabling. The passage and its surrounds were atop the power plant of the station: a crude plasma chamber that held an artificial star in check with magnetic fields and ceramic walls. The thrum that resonated around Aradryan was a lifeless, mechanical vibration, with none of the potency of an infinity circuit or world spirit. It was purely electrical energy, converted from the plasma reactor and sent along metal wires to distant gun posts and laser arrays. As basic as the system was, the electro-magnetic flux created by the plasma chamber was enough to distort the scanners of the eldar warships, making its exact location impossible to fix.
This was where Aradryan and his team came into the plan. Bringing forth a trio of beacons similar to those the rangers used at Hirith-Hreslain, the corsairs looked to Aradryan for guidance on their placement. He paced out the required distance along the corridor and, as he had expected, there was a door to his left, hung on hinges that creaked a little as he pushed open the rudimentary portal.
‘One in there,’ Aradryan told one of the beacon-holders, nodding towards the doorway. ‘Another at the sealed archway ahead. Bring the third.’
A little further from the junction was a small access panel. It came off to Aradryan’s prising fingers easily enough, revealing a circular cableway just about wide enough for an eldar to crawl into. Aradryan crouched and looked into the hole. There was a metal band holding a cluster of cables in place at roughly the right place, and he pointed out this feature to the corsair with the beacon. There was no need to be absolutely precise; Yrithain’s instructions had left some margin for error.
Ushering his companions back to the junction, Aradryan heard a commotion from the direction of Taelisieth and he saw fighting had broken out at the far end of the corridor. He sent reinforcements to his second-in-command as red las-blasts seared the walls around the eldar, two of the corsairs falling back from the passage junction with cries of pain. It seemed the humans were aware of the corsairs’ location and were about to launch a concerted assault. The enemy could not have any idea what the eldar planned – Aradryan had been astounded and amused by the suggestion – but the timing of the counter-attack was inconvenient.
Activating the beacons remotely, all Aradryan could do next was wait and hope that Maensith had been able to manoeuvre the Fae Taeruth into position. Like the group that had delved into the heart of the battle-station, the corsair’s leader had been put into the risky but pivotal lead position of the second wave. She would have to rely on skill and speed to outpace
the fully operational cannons of the orbital platform.
Once in position, and this was the ingenuity of Yrithain’s plan, Maensith would activate the cruiser’s webway portal, burrowing a tubular breach through realspace to create a temporary extension of the webway. Normally such a thing would have no impact on the material universe and would pass unnoticed through solid matter. With a small modification in the webway’s flux, and the target of the beacons, the web passage could be used to isolate the station’s plasma generator. If Aradryan had tried a conventional attack against the plasma reactor – assuming he and his companions had been able to fight their way through the massed layers of security blockades and hundreds of soldiers, and been able to penetrate the thick walls surrounding it with something like a distort cannon – any breach of the chamber would have resulted in a catastrophic feedback and meltdown event.
As if coming to a cue on a script, a shimmering wall bisected the tunnel behind Aradryan; streaming, half-seen energy cascaded at a slight diagonal to the angle of the walls. He knew from vast experience that he was looking at a webway manifestation, though the speed of its pulsing and partially temporal nature were new to him. Almost immediately, the webway tunnel appeared and raucous klaxons sounded along the passage, deafeningly loud.
Everything plunged into blackness, and all went still and silent.
Somewhere in the plane between realspace and the warp, a star blossomed into life and died in a heartbeat as the breached plasma chamber ran riot for an instant before being snuffed out by the impossible physics of the webway.
Aradryan stood absolutely still, knowing that in the moment that the plasma generator had been spirited into the alternate dimension, all of the major systems of the platform would have crashed. Along with the all-important weapons systems, environmental controls would be compromised too. Soon the air would be growing staler and the temperature was already slowly dropping, gradually being leeched out through the structure of the battlestation. Artificial gravity had ceased, hence Aradryan’s immobility for the moment, and all lights had been extinguished.
The battlestation, to all intents and purposes, was dead.
The sudden loss of power had interrupted the fighting between Taelisieth and the humans, neither side sure of what to do next. Aradryan blinked three times in rapid succession, activating the artificial lenses over his eyes. They were not as powerful as a proper visor, but there was enough reflected heat from the eldar and the cables within the walls to create a fuzzy image of Aradryan’s surrounds, while his fellow corsairs stood out like yellow silhouettes.
Kicking lightly off the floor, Aradryan did a slow cartwheel until his feet touched the ceiling. Rebounding towards the floor, he twisted again, splaying his arms to slow his descent. Touching down lightly, he stepped again, and in this way he made safe progress along the passageway towards Taelisieth.
The silence had not lasted more than few heartbeats before the shouted panic and the curt snarl of commands echoed along the corridor. Taelisieth reacted swiftly, leading his warriors against the humans in the darkness, making the most of their fear and confusion. Like ghosts, the bright images of the eldar pirates floated out of sight around the corner.
‘Onwards, the enemy will be converging,’ Aradryan told his warriors, pointing after Taelisieth. Turning to plant a foot on a wall, Aradryan pushed himself around the junction.
Ahead, the flash of laspistols and the whirr of shurikens punctuated the fight between eldar and human. Propelling himself down the corridor as fast as he could, Aradryan reached Taelisieth and the others as a sprawling melee broke out. Using his momentum, blade held out in front of him like a lance, Aradryan threw himself into the humans. The tip of his sword scored across the neck of a man struggling to gain his footing, the strap of his rifle tangling his arms. Blood jetted slowly from the wound, painting Aradryan’s arm red as his mass carried him past the dying soldier.
Twisting to avoid a swinging rifle aimed at his head, Aradryan found himself spinning out of control towards the floor. He punched down and turned, correcting his fall. Pulling up his knees, he was able to get his feet under himself and push up, leaping over the human who was pulling back his rifle for another swing. Aradryan lashed out with his sword, severing the man’s wrist. As the human fell back, pain wracking his features, Aradryan stretched out a leg, catching the wall with enough force to spin him towards the ceiling feet-first. Landing cat-like on the tiles above the two sides, Aradryan looked down on the unfolding fight.
The humans were utterly unable to deal with the change in conditions; they could not react quickly enough to prevent themselves colliding with walls, floor or ceiling, nor were they supple or dextrous enough to use their weapons whilst in mid-air. The eldar were like a flock of predatory birds, moving though their enemies with pistols and blades, shooting and cutting at leisure while their victims flailed helplessly in response. The cries of the wounded and dying humans formed a bass foundation to the light and lilting laughter of their superiors.
Aradryan spied a human trying to get away, using the lip of a ventilation cover for purchase as he pulled himself along the wall. With a turn and a kick, Aradryan somersaulted down to the floor just ahead of the fleeing soldier. The eldar drove his sword point between the shoulder blades of the human, the force of the blow sending Aradryan back to the ceiling once more. Using light fittings as hand- and footholds, Aradryan sped along the ceiling to the next junction. Checking to the left and right, he assured himself there were no further reinforcements coming for the moment.
Glancing back, he saw Taelisieth and his party binding a number of humans with gossamer-like fibres, made more difficult because their prisoner’s struggles caused human and eldar alike to spin through the air.
‘What are you doing?’ Aradryan demanded, somer-saulting back down the corridor to confront the lieutenant.
‘Maensith’s command,’ replied Taelisieth. There was a hint of humour in his voice. ‘Did you not hear?’
‘I did not,’ said Aradryan. ‘They will only slow us down. We have to get to the weapons lockers as quickly as possible.’
‘No need to worry about carrying all of that bulky stuff, when you can plunder something that moves under its own power,’ said Taelisieth. He placed a foot against the wall to brace himself as he hauled a bound human to his feet and pushed the man down the corridor. The human wiggled helplessly as he floated along the passageway. Taelisieth took a step after, but was stopped by Aradryan’s hand on his arm, causing the two of them to begin to slowly turn head over heels.
‘And what use are prisoners going to be when it comes to getting our share of the spoils? You heard Yrithain the same as I did. He has already arranged payment for the stores of the battlestation. What is Maensith’s game?’
‘You should ask her,’ said Taelisieth, his shrug causing him to turn away from Aradryan. ‘I thought you were the one she confided in. You are her favourite, after all.’
Aradryan said nothing, pushing himself away from his second. If Maensith had a plan, it was better to keep to it than cause further delay and disruption. The battlestation had no secondary systems of any import – why would it when normally the loss of its reactor would also be the cause of its destruction – but the corsairs were still outnumbered by several thousand humans. It was clear the way back to the ships would not be easy, even though the loss of light and gravity no doubt favoured the raiders.
‘So be it, we shall see what we can do,’ said Aradryan. He lifted a finger to the communicator stud in the lobe of his ear. ‘For those who have not yet been informed, we will be taking prisoners if possible. Do not risk your lives for them, but if you can take any enemies alive, then do so. There will be no attack on the upper storage levels; we head back as a group to the landing craft.’
As the party set off once more, half a dozen captured humans in tow, Aradryan considered Maensith’s instruction, and wondered why she had not chosen to share her orders, or her rationale, with him. There was onl
y one reason Aradryan could think of for Maensith to refuse Yrithain’s wishes, only one group of people that were interested in live prisoners: the Commorraghans.
The corsairs had a running battle back to their landing craft, and though they lost nearly a quarter of their number, Aradryan and his company managed to capture several scores of humans for whatever bargain Maensith had struck with the Commorraghans. In the zero gravity and darkness, such encounters were harsh, brief affairs of flashing laser and shuriken volleys, sweeping swords against bayonets, power mauls and knives. The eldar brought their dead with them, taking their spirit stones into safekeeping before forcing the captives to pull the lifeless remains.
Corridor by corridor, hallway by hallway, Aradryan guided his warriors back to the ships. The d-cannon had been destroyed, its anti-grav platform rendered inoperative after the loss of the station’s artificial gravity field; Aradryan would not leave such technology to be studied by the humans and so the workings of the cannon had been melted with a fusion charge.
Without the means to create their own shortcuts and doorways, the corsairs were harder pressed to outmanoeuvre the human soldiers, who had managed to recover some of the organisation and structure they had lost following the destruction of the power network. Even so, they were poorly equipped to deal with the conditions, and though the losses of the corsairs were growing in number, they did not encounter irresistible odds.
Approaching the docking area where the void-cutters and star-runners were located, Aradryan signalled the parties he had left defending the ships. As he expected, they had faced fierce counter-attacks and had been forced to withdraw to the craft, using the ship’s weapons to destroy the occasional forays from the human forces. They reported that no attack had been made since the plasma chamber’s destruction, but the ships’ sensors detected large bodies of troops guarding the approaches to the landing bay, waiting for the pirates to return to their vessels.
