I sense disappointment among the stupider of my followers who wish to continue to fight and feast. The wiser heads understand the reason for my decision. I sketch an ironic farewell to the human commander in the air. Enjoy your petty victory while you can. It will be short-lived.
I take the gauntlet with me. It will be an interesting souvenir of this encounter.
I saw the body of one man, partially flayed, skin stripped away from his flesh to reveal muscle and vein. He was still alive, paralysed by poison but in terrible agony as the venom slowly destroyed his nervous system in the most painful way. In the heat of combat, amid the fury of battle, what sort of sentient being takes time out to torture a victim, to peel them like an epicure consuming a drugged black grape?
There were too many examples of that sort of thing for me to imagine that the first was simply an accident. The eldar killed in an unclean fashion, caused pain for the pure pleasure of it, showed no more regard for life than a small boy tormenting a garbage scuttler. There were times when it seemed they would rather torture than fight. No – it did not seem that way, it was that way. For the eldar, pain was like a drug to which they were addicted. They craved it the way a dried-out boozehound craves his next drink.
In the midst of chopping their way through a company of men, they would suddenly pause, stand stock-still save for their helmeted heads, which would swivel from side to side, surveying everything as serenely as a man inspecting a garden.
At such moments, if you glanced around, it appeared that there might even be a pattern in the way the corpses had fallen, some strange symmetry in the lie of the severed limbs on the floor and blood spatters on the walls. It sounds bizarre, but that’s the way it seemed to me; that if I looked long enough I might discern some sort of structure underlying the flow of carnage. I strongly suspected that I would no longer be sane as humans measure sanity if I did.
I race through the corridors, listening to the chatter of small pockets of our troops who have been cut off. They are surprised to find the tables turned on them. They are having difficulty in understanding that they are no longer the hunters but the hunted. They pay for their lack of swift understanding with their lives.
I bound along the corridor, using ceiling and walls as easily as floor, scouting ahead of my own troops, keen to get off the ship and begin cleansing the universe of these human vermin.
Even as I do so, I sense the presence of humans ahead of me, moving to close the gap. I smile. The human commander misses nothing. He must be supervising the battle as closely as I. He realises that things have turned, although I wonder if he realises why.
Up ahead I suddenly see a massive wall of armed men. It looks like I underestimated my foe. The force we had been fighting had been merely there to slow us down, while he assembled a small army to cut us off. The humans are flooding into the area where our ship had penetrated theirs. We are going to have to battle our way through. I speed forwards into the fray.
I aim a shot at the approaching humans, killing one. I dive into their midst, cartwheeling, kicking, slashing and shooting. The human leader may have planned for victory but he could not have planned for me. I unleash the full fury of my attack, in a way I so seldom do. A smile twists my lips as I bound among my targets, slaying every one with a stroke. Now is no time for artistry. We are mere minutes away from this ship making its jump. If we are to get away we must do so soon.
The remnants of my bodyguard smash into the human lines behind me. I have left very little for them to do. They merely have to kill the few humans that somehow squirmed beyond my reach. They do this with pleasure. Some of them are laughing. I wonder whether it is mirth or simply relief that they think we will be able to escape this craft before it makes the leap into the forbidden realms.
We fit ourselves into place as the boarding craft pulls away. Through the portholes I can see bodies being blown out into space as the air rushes into the vacuum, flesh already chilling. Some of the humans are still alive although not for much longer. I glance around and notice that we have some human faces among us. It seems some of my warriors have taken captives after all.
I am not as displeased as I ought to be. I am curious about the human who led this army. I have a few questions for them before they die.
And then suddenly it reached a climax. We advanced on the enemy. A horde of howling Guardsmen emerged from the side corridors, killing as they came. The eldar were suddenly caught between the hammer and the anvil.
Macharius had deployed our troops in such a way as to cut most of the eldar off from the hull breach they had been retreating towards. The corridors were packed with armed men, bristling with a density of weapons that was too much even for the xenos. Fast as they were they could not dodge every las-beam, there were simply too many of them; as well to try to dodge drops of rain in a typhoon. I think that then, at last, the eldar realised what had happened. I am not sure that even then they believed it. They seemed baffled.
Not that it mattered.
When they saw they could not escape they turned on us with a redoubled fury. Something had driven them to a frenzy of suicidal ferocity. The surviving eldar punched backwards towards us with the fury of daemons who know they are going to be destroyed and are determined to take as many victims to hell with them as they can. They came at us in great leaping bounds, weapons blasting, killing or crippling a man with every shot. Even then, at the last extremity, some of them could not resist causing pain rather than killing.
They charged across a junction, got caught in crossfire from both sides as well as from behind and from our position. It was a density of fire that Macharius had arranged. There was no way they could move through that blizzard of las-bolts without being hit. Their armour blistered and peeled and ran. They kept moving anyway, slowed perhaps by pain, but still determined to rampage and kill.
One reached us, slashing out with its long circular blades. It was shot in a dozen places, its beautiful, chitinous armour cracked and blistered. Its movements were slower than they had been but still almost too swift to follow. Macharius killed it with a blow and met its companion chainsword to blade. The teeth of his weapon screeched on the eldar’s carapace and one of those long inhuman limbs flew in a different direction from the body it had been attached to. The fallen eldar still stabbed a Guardsman, the reflexive killing stroke of a dying sand-scorpion. The man went down. I stepped away. It kept trying to roll closer, all grace gone, just a furious daemonic engine of death.
Anton blasted it with his sniper rifle, sending a heavy calibre slug right through the visor of the helmet. Even then it did not stop flailing its limbs until heartbeats later. Even in death it tried to claim another victim.
More eldar slammed into us, close combat weapons slashing at our men. Again blood spurted, bone was revealed, part of a lung flopped out from a ribcage that had been somehow sheared in two. I aimed the shotgun and pulled the trigger but my target simply was not there. In the time it had taken me to aim and pull the trigger it had sprung out of my line of fire and my shell passed beneath. A moment later it was poised in front of me. All I saw of its strike was a blur. I knew in that moment my death was on me.
I flinched, but the blow never connected. Macharius’s blade intercepted it. The eldar sprang back too fast for me to react but not too fast for the general. He followed it with a spring just as swift, and the xenos desperately tried to defend itself from a predator even more lethal than itself.
A second eldar was cleaving its way through our ranks when suddenly a bolt of strange lightning struck it, melting its helmet. A second later, Macharius had stepped forwards, chainsword in hand. There was a raucous screeching as the xenos’s armour gave way under the force of the impact. I noticed that Drake was standing behind Macharius then; it had been his psionic bolt that had taken the eldar down.