I took a quick glance around, looking for the last surviving eldar. It had realised what was going on now and was fleeing as fast as it could, moving swiftly through a glittering net of las-bolts, somehow managing to avoid the bulk of them while its armour shimmered and ran from the effects of the few that connected. Anton raised his sniper-rifle and sighted. His shot smashed into the eldar and it tumbled, still graceful, but hurt now. When it rose to its feet, some of its eerie grace had been leached away. Anton fired again and this time his shot hammered into its head. It fell flat. Some of us ran towards it.
‘Wait,’ said Macharius, his words coming out somewhere between a snarl and a shout. The men who had been moving forwards, led by Ivan, stopped and the Lord High Commander advanced. Once he was within reach the eldar struck, still almost too swift for the eye to follow. Macharius stepped to one side and decapitated it. I realised that the xenos, heavily wounded as it was, had been playing dead, hoping for some of us to come within reach so that it could take more victims with it. It would most likely have succeeded if Macharius had not been there.
I think they were overconfident those eldar, or we would have taken more casualties than we did. It seemed that not one of the Guardsmen wounded, no matter how lightly they were scratched, had survived. Macharius inspected the sword. A look of contempt flickered across his face.
‘Neurotoxins on the weapons,’ Macharius said. ‘Kill you painfully. Very painfully.’
I looked around and suddenly it was silent, one of those eerie moments you sometimes get on all battlefields, when just for an instant, by some strange coincidence, there are no weapons being fired, no screams echoing, no battle-cries pounding in your ears. The silence itself hisses and you are aware of your heart pounding and the taste of bile in your mouth, and you look around at your companions and you realise that they are all as pale-faced and wide-eyed as you, with that strange unblinking stare that the survivors always get when the thunder of battle has passed overhead and is gone.
It lasted only a few seconds and then everyone started to cheer, a release of tension that went on until we started to count the cost.
Chapter Seven
Reports kept coming in. I could tell just from what Macharius was saying that we had taken heavy casualties, but it looked as though the ship were clear of eldar. Their attack had failed. It had cost thousands of lives from among our own troops, and the Emperor alone knew how many tens of thousands from among the crew of the ship, but the eldar were gone, driven off.
Warning klaxons blared.
‘What now?’ Anton asked, still so high on the fury of battle that he forgot how close Macharius was.
‘We are about to make the jump,’ Macharius said. ‘The ship is being made ready.’
‘Sir, there are huge bloody holes in the hull where the eldar came through.’
‘The emergency bulkheads have been sealed and the screens are being ramped up to the maximum. It’s all we can do. It’s either make the jump or let the xenos blast us out of space.’ He smiled grimly. ‘I don’t think they will be inclined to spare us after the bloody nose we have just given them.’
It was too late to abort the warp jump even if he had given the order. The ship was already starting to shudder and vibrate, and I had the strange falling sensation I always got when we passed through into the warp.
I give the order to attack. Our ships swarm on the human craft, but it resists the fury of our assault. I order our ships to aim for any vulnerable point they can find, hoping to take out its drives. The human vessel smashes through the storm of fire and keeps accelerating. Its shields shimmer as it prepares to make its insane leap into the beyond. It occurs to me that we would, perhaps, be doing them a favour by destroying them, that instant death might prove to be a mercy compared to what may happen to them next.
I dismiss the thought. They may well survive – who knows what the probabilities are? No eldar has ever made a survey of them, but enough human ships move between the worlds to suggest that the odds are in favour of their madness, at least in the short term.
I wonder if there are any of my warriors still alive on board. My sensors say no, but there is always the possibility of error. I try to imagine what it would be like to be still aboard that ship as it crashed towards the forbidden. I wonder, do the humans really know what they are doing, entering a realm where the most evil beings in creation or below it lurk?
We begin another attack run. It may just be possible to cripple or destroy them before they make the jump. There is a certain pleasure to be gained from that.
We race closer again. The human weapons blast out at us but we are too swift for them, although evasive action slows our approach.
‘We will make it, Lord Ashterioth,’ Jalmek says.
‘Would you care to wager on that?’ I say. I am no longer convinced. Whoever is on board that ship has luck on his side, at least for today. Luck is always a fickle mistress, careless of whom she bestows her favours upon and when she withdraws them. Something tells me that today she smiles on my foe.
Jalmek looks at me. He has long ago learned the unwisdom of wagering against me. ‘I think not, sire.’
Nonetheless, he continues to give a stream of orders and course corrections designed to put us into attack position and, just for a moment, at the end of a long twisting and snaking run, I think he has done it.
‘Torpedo away,’ he says, and our vessel spits out the missile and sends it streaking towards our intended target.
At the moment of impact there is a blinding flash, so dazzling that the viewer turns shadowy as it filters the coruscating energies we are witnessing.
When I look again, the human ship is gone.
‘We destroyed it, sire,’ said Jalmek. I can tell he is wishing he had made that bet now. I study the space where the human ship was and I am not sure if he is right.
Once again the lights flickered. Once again there was a hideous sense of dizziness and nausea, as if I had suddenly fallen from a cliff into an infinite void. Near me some of the soldiers were being noisily sick. Men who had marched through the worst horrors the eldar had inflicted on us could not keep their food down now.
Everyone around me swayed; in the strobing warning lights their faces went from greenish and pale to red and bloody-looking and then back again. I leaned against a wall, supporting myself, trying to get a sense of what was happening. Fear filled my mind. We were making a jump with a ship that had been patched together after one failed flight and whose hull had been breached by the eldar. At any moment, I expected it to buckle, for all the daemons of the star-sailors’ ghost stories to start making themselves manifest. I stared at my companions as if any second they might be transformed into creatures of nightmare. Their features were oddly distorted.
Macharius stood there, glancing around him. ‘Take two minutes,’ he said. ‘Your bodies will adjust.’
After the battle was over Macharius went to inspect the wounded, for his presence among them was always a comfort. He found what I had been expecting, and I am sure what he had too, that there were far fewer of them than there ought to have been, and this was not good news.