[38]

I am not certain if our terminology for the Eldar matches wider Imperial use. To us, 'warrior' means any Eldar armed and fighting like infantry. In this sector, they wear full-body medium armor. Their shard rifles fire incredibly fast, but armor and cover defeat them.

'Wrack' means something monstrous, even by the standards of the xeno, but still roughly shaped like an Eldar—like a grotesquely elongated man. Usually unarmored or lightly armored, but able to fight despite severe wounds. Weapons and capabilities vary.

Fragmentation would hurt them. Bolters would kill them. Stun grenades would affect the warriors. The Wracks, perhaps not at all.

Esmond piloted us ahead of them and put the Arvus low over the rooftops. There was suddenly a sound like flying through hail and then fragments of tox-shards were skittering around inside the compartment. I found the Eldar by their shard-fire. No muzzle flashes, but the streams of shards were visible like wisps of greenish smoke. I was next to Verity, lying flat on the deck, inching forward until I felt the tick of a shard glancing off of my helmet and knew they had to be in sight.

The Eldar were about one hundred meters behind us. They were subtle shimmers in the air, nothing more. In the diffuse light of helmet-augmented sky-glow, they had no shadows. Fast, erratic. They were running at about thirty kilometers per hour and still agile—dodging, zig-zag running, using cover, leaping when they came to the edge of a rooftop—

Verity and I both fired while one of them was mid-leap. One bolt shattered a section of rooftop. The other turned a midair shimmer into a red spray and blurred pieces of something that could almost have been a very tall man.

The shard-fire ceased.

Then they were vanishing over the side of the building. The Arvus slewed left to keep them behind us. I felt someone grab my ankles to keep me from sliding out. An alarm message was echoing from the city voxcasters in the district we were approaching: "LOCK. DOWN. LOCK. DOWN. ELDAR. RAID. ELDAR. RAID."

We saw them again for sparse seconds, descending the walls like a faint heat shimmer moving in reverse. Verity was still trying for aimed shots. She hadn't been there when we fought them on the outer moons, or when we stormed one of the nightmare hells they used for voidships. I flipped to automatic and held the trigger down until the gun was empty, a second and a half of shoulder-battering thunder. I missed every shot, but I hadn't expected to hit. Fourteen high explosive rounds turned the wall into a whirlwind of rockcrete fragments. The Eldar materialized into flickering visibility as the shrapnel swept across them.

They broke line of sight a moment later, scattering into alleys and through broken windows. There is something indescribably awful about the way that they go through apertures. There is something like a spider in it, though their arms and legs are shaped like ours.

The Arvus slewed left and right. It circled. The voxcaster continued its message, like a chant.

"I don't see them," voxed the pilot. "We lost them."

Trying to think like Eldar is doomed and leads to madness. But they could have scattered as soon as they killed Aria and Eloise. I thought they were running to something, not just running away. We were already near the edge of the fire-damaged zone.

I switched to Command Beta, waited for someone's report to finish, and said:

"Wessex, draw out the line of their retreat to the populated city. What is closest?"

There was a marketplace, closed for the day. An industrial bakery. And a hab-block with a little garden park behind it.

I thought: They would take the cruelest path.

I ordered Esmond to pilot us to the hab's address. I thought their ship would be on the roof. I was wrong, so people died.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

We reached the hab-block three minutes before our reinforcements could be in position. The community inside had locked it down tight. Blast shutters were closed, all lights turned on. People inside would be moving their children to safe-rooms. And a hab that cared for a shared garden usually cared for other shared responsibilities too. Somewhere behind those shutters there would be men running to a locker of state-permitted guns. Fathers and grandfathers who had been riflemen once, and still knew how to kill.

The Arvus blasted the roof with light and radar, but saw no invisible Eldar ship. It swept around, making us cling to webbing and the ceiling rails, and scanned the garden. Nothing. "Call it in," I told the pilot. "Put us on the roof."

I thought I was protecting them. May the Emperor forgive me. I swear by my soul, I thought I was protecting them.

The hab-block was four stories high, big enough for eight habs per level if they were small. We dropped two meters down to it and Hana and I held security for Verity and Tara as they set up grapnels and ropes at each of the four corners. We didn't need harnesses. Power-armor doesn't suffer rope-burn or grip fatigue.

We took positions back from the edge. The Arvus ascended to give us eyes from above. It paid off almost at once.

Esmond voxed: "Eldar incoming. From west, street level. Three. Correction, four. North, one incoming, rooftop. North, two more, street. Thermals, use thermals."

Verity, Tara, and I oriented to the threats, leaving Hana to position herself for rear security. I saw a xeno in my thermal vision as it vaulted into view—a few bright specks of shrapnel damage on a hazy silhouette like a too-tall man in bladed armor. It was impossibly fast, turning its gun on me and contorting its body to dodge before its feet touched the roof. But my gun was already aimed. The air thrummed with tox darts. I fired and its torso exploded.

I thought I saw a shimmer in the air below the north edge of the roof. Verity and Tara were taking fire from the west. Something grenade-sized arced up between them and bounced and rolled towards me. I grabbed it and threw it back. It exploded midair, blindingly bright. For a moment I couldn't see and was knocked backwards. My lenses cleared—my helmet had saved my eyes—but the thermal vision was dead, a rune of dysfunction showing on my display.

Verity and Tara were crawling back to the west, so I went north. Two of the Wracks were climbing the wall. Unarmored, monstrous, hideous, fast. Leaping, lunging upward, no handholds at all. I fired, missed twice, hit. The Wrack fell with its arm blasted off but it didn't die. The other Wrack dropped after it. I fired again, missed. Both dashed around to the west.

Other bolters were firing. The air was black with clouds of darts from the west.

There was a low thrumming, almost musical. A flicker of green light from the northwest corner. The building shivered, like it had been hit by an explosion.

Tara had stood up and was firing on automatic. Her weapon clicked empty. She dropped the magazine and snatched a new one as she dashed towards the northeast corner. "They breached. Street level. They're in, they're inside."

Part of me thought: It was exactly what I would have done in their place. Caught in a kill zone, with an enemy on the high ground.

Part of me wanted to scream and hide and flee and disappear and not think about what was about to happen, what might have already begun.

Part of me that didn't need to think to form words said, Help me to honor the martyr, tend the fallen, defend the innocent, and walk in the light.

"Arvus," I voxed. "Enemy visible outside?"

"Count three dead. No moving contacts."

"Inform Command. Stay on overwatch. Sisters, street level. Stack and enter. Go."

Tara was already descending. Verity swung out just meters behind her. I followed, letting the rope zip through my armored glove, trusting Tara and Verity to clear the landing. I cleared the landing for Hana. Tara put a stun grenade through the breach, and we chased it inside.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

There were two civilians in the room we entered and cleared. Alive, conscious, but they would die. They already couldn't scream.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

I will not describe what the Eldar did to them. Consult the helmet pictoria for this mission for specific visuals. Or do not, if you have seen enough of evil and need to see no more. They are attached at the end of the section.

They were an old man and an old woman. The man had no legs, just simple augmentics. There were picts of a large family beneath the family iconostasis. The top row would be for the already dead, the bottom for the living. There were steaming cups of tea abandoned on the kitchen table and long streaks of blood from the door to where they lay.

Hana started to vox it in the way she was trained to. "Two wounded, civilians, entry—"

Wessex cut her off. "Hold traffic. Mass trauma response already staging."

We pushed to the hallway door after an abbreviated clearance. It was open. I took care to cover the ceiling. The others knew, but it was their first time. People forget.

We stacked on the door. Verity started to work the angle. Tara had position two, supporting her. I was position three, where I could see and coordinate. Hana was rear security.

I heard Hana's gun, three quick shots. Something hit me in the back but I didn't feel pain. I turned as she fired a fourth into what was left of a downed Wrack. It was half covered in a bedsheet. I could just make out the gossamer-thin cutting whips that uncoiled from its one remaining hand.

Hana looked like she should be dead. There was a deep, narrow cut running from the top of her helmet to the bottom of her chest plate and another across her shoulder. She was still holding her sector.

"Injured?" I asked.

"Minor," she said. We pushed on into the corridor. Verity and Tara back to back, then me. The hallway was empty. There was an exterior door next to us and another past an open stairwell on the opposite end. No bloody footprints. No deadly shimmers that might be all-but-invisible monsters clinging to the ceiling. All the doors were shut. We pushed quickly towards the stairs, almost to the point of negligence, but it felt glacially slow. The lights began to flicker.

(Helmet picter footage becomes degraded here, but remains functional as a partial record of events. Audio records appear undamaged.)

I said, "Tara, number of enemy?"

"Believe five."

I could hear human gunfire. It sounded like it came from the stairwell. From outside, the sound of jets. Over them, the vox-caster, chanting—"LOCK. DOWN. ELDAR. RAID." I could hear human screams. They seemed to come from everywhere. Some fear. Some the awful, ripping shrieks of anguish and death.

The helmet picts show that we had been inside the structure for 28 seconds when we set up on the stairwell door. 49 seconds since the Eldar breach. It felt like eternity. I realized that I had forgotten to reload, so I had six or seven shots.

There was blood at the bottom of the stairs. The air above was thrashed by near-continuous lasgun fire and little pinging bits of shrapnel from the metal of the stairs. Something fell down the stairwell and landed with a thump. I had just enough time to register it as another Wrack—alive, dead, I don't know—before Verity shot its head off. Then there were two searing flashes and a pulsing concussion that shook the stairs and knocked us sprawling back.

The helmet protected my sight and hearing. My chest hurt, all my joints protested, but I wasn't broken. We struggled upright. The gunfire had ceased. The screaming had not.

I thought the flashes were plasma grenades. Whatever they were should have had more effect on any enemies in the stairwell than on us. I ordered us up the stairs.

The higher floors had doors between the stairs and the landings. The second floor door was locked. We bypassed it. The stairs up to the third were riddled with lasgun holes. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the third floor landing were covered in fragments of toxin shards. There was blood. Bodies—men with lascarbines. Nearby, a man was shrieking.

I don't know if anyone without ear protection could have heard, but as Verity worked the angle up to the third floor, I shouted, "Imperator! Imperator!" I didn't want her shot by a defender desperately trying to stay in the fight. But there weren't any.

There were five men and five guns. Two were dead. Two were spasming and frothing and clawing open their own flesh. One was still shrieking.

There were las impacts streaking the hall in one direction and tox-shard pockmarks in the other. I thought: The defenders were set up at the top of the stairs, shooting down. Eldar got behind them somehow. Another breach?

Then the hallway filled with shards. A few clicked off of my armor. I dropped flat. The living, shrieking man in front of me twitched, absorbing darts meant for me, and died. I traced the smoke-wisp trail back to a heat-haze shimmer on the ceiling. I shot at it, but it had moved, writhing across the ceiling and wall towards the far side apartment door. A shard hit me in the eye-lens, shattering the armor and internal displays. I could see it, blurry from proximity, amidst the sparking darkness of the destroyed optics. A tiny sliver of death nestled against a crack in the inner pane of the lens.

The Eldar was through its door. The hallway was empty. There were more screams.

"Reloading." I did.

Verity made a high, strangled gasp. "Hit, hit, I'm hit, leg, leg."

"Tourniquet!"

"Did, did, did!"

Her whole lower body was spasming. "Up, go," I said. "Hana, drag her. Tara, on me."

We pushed down the hallway towards the open doors. For a few seconds, my prayer collapsed to, Not Verity, not Verity, not Verity.

Tara and I spent two stun grenades at the doors. We took the doorframes back to back. I saw torture, atrocity, desecration. There had been children. It had only been seconds. Seconds for them to do those things.

There was an open window. I saw dim green light and a shadowy alien interior outside, where the north-facing alley should have been. There were xenos inside it, maybe four of them. There were humans inside, too. Children. Screaming. Blocking the window was a boy, about fourteen years old, hovering in midair, spasming, screaming, bleeding little dots of blood from tiny punctures.

Not hovering. Being held up by something I couldn't see. Being dragged back and out. In a moment he would be gone.

I tried to aim past him at the faint blur in the air that must be the xeno's head, but I knew what would happen if I pressed the trigger. I heard the Eldar fire its weapon. The shards skittered along the floor and a few hit the armor over my legs. I fired. The Eldar's head exploded. It took most of the boy's head with it.

The Eldar ship jerked up and away with a high, grating whine. I ran to the window, but it was already gone.

Elin's first transports arrived while we were still clearing the two rooms. Others took over the duties of clearing the hab-block of Eldar and traps. We stayed in that last room, trying to help the few who looked like they might still live. Verity was moving weakly, her leg twitching and jerking, making a little sobbing sound with every breath. Hana had fallen, and fallen again when she tried to get up.

A medic pulled me away from a girl—I think it was a girl—that I was trying to hold together.

Superior Isela was there, taking command.

Medics took us away.

❖ ❖ ❖

​

Verity lived.

In the Tactica, in the Rates of Galactic Attrition, it suggests that against Eldar, inflicting at least one fatality for every nine of yours is strategically favorable.

Not counting the four women in the car (they were something else; see [40]), we killed between sixteen and eighteen of theirs. We lost two Battle Sisters, thirteen civilians killed, three captured and presumed dead, and nineteen wounded but likely to survive.

There is a little shrine in the garden behind the hab-block, now. The sixteen names are there—first the names of five men, then an engraving of a lasgun, then the rest. The names, some of the skulls, and the fact: Slain Repelling Eldar, 231.738.M41. Below them are ninety-one more names, the ones who lived. There is no counting of the Eldar dead. I went there once without my armor. Months later—after this report ends. But it feels worth reporting, even though nothing happened. No one recognized me. I prayed, and I left.