The warrior froze.
How did this human get so close to her kin without her noticing?
The Aeldari are an ancient species in decline — their biotechnology and psychic sciences represent the pinnacle of what any mortal race has achieved, and their lifespans border on true immortality. But a civilisational wound runs through all of it. Their birthrate had been collapsing for millennia. The entire species teetered on the edge of extinction, one generation at a ti.
Worse: their souls were spoken for. Slaanesh, the youngest and most ravenous of the Chaos Gods, had been born from Aeldari excess and claid their dead as a birthright. Every Aeldari who died without a spirit stone went screaming into that particular darkness.
The result was a species that treated every living mber of its kind as irreplaceable.
Kian's laspistol moved slowly from skull to skull along the row of shackled prisoners. His eyes never left the warrior.
He hadn't injected his combat stimms — but his latent psychic sensitivity had been hovering around baseline fifty for weeks now, and that alone was enough. The world ca in sharper. Reactions ca faster. Where a normal human saw a blur of motion, Kian saw movent — readable, trackable, sothing he could respond to.
She was forty tres away. If she committed to a charge, he could empty three rounds into the prisoners before she reached him. Possibly four.
The warrior was running the numbers too.
Her helt's wide-angle sensors were already registering what her eyes confird: the PDF that had scattered in every direction were flowing back. Reforming. In another few minutes, the cordon would be solid again.
Every second she spent deliberating was a second she didn't have.
Kian kept smiling.
"I know you understand Low Gothic. Here's what happens now: helt off, weapons down, both of them. Or I start shooting prisoners. I'll count to three.
One—"
The helt was not a fashion choice.
Aeldari Aspect Warriors wore their war-masks for reasons that went considerably deeper than protection. The mask housed a second personality — the Aspect's warrior-self, cold and efficient and utterly without hesitation, trained to make optimal decisions under fire without the interference of conscience or sentint.
Take the mask off, and the warrior underneath re-erged. The real person. The one who felt things.
In combat terms, this was a significant downgrade.
The war-mask had correctly identified that charging through forty tres of open ground while a human gunman held a pistol to five hostage skulls was not guaranteed to end well, even at Aspect Warrior speed. The hostages would not all survive. The warrior-self had run this calculation and returned an unsatisfactory result.
Her sensors swept the reforming PDF periter.
Thousands of infantry. Chiras moving to seal the gaps. Aircraft inbound — atmospheric fighters, which ant planetary command had already scrambled a response.
The warrior-self reached its conclusion: mission failed, extraction is the priority, the prisoners cannot be recovered today.
She looked at Kian. Then at the five shackled Aeldari on the ground.
Then she moved.
The gap in the PDF line was forty tres to the left — the thinnest section, still reforming. She hit it at full sprint, which ant she was effectively gone before the human soldiers had processed that she'd started running. The PDF opened up with everything they had. None of it connected. She cut through the closing cordon with three sweeps of the power blade — the soldiers it touched ca apart like porcelain — and then she was in the open farmland beyond, three bounds, four, and gone.
Kian lowered his pistol and watched her go.
Around him, the PDF slowly and sowhat sheepishly began to close in again. Overhead, the first atmospheric fighters scread past on pursuit vectors that were never going to succeed.
Several days later, in a conference chamber near the top of the Planetary Governor's Spire, the upper echelons of Hive Tenebris gathered to debate the question of what to do with five Aeldari prisoners.
Two male, three female.
Two of the five were warriors — one of each. Both had suffered significant impact trauma during the shuttle's crash landing, been knocked unconscious in the wreck, and been hauled out and secured before they woke up. Aspect Warrior-grade combatants, captured by the Astra Militarum because they'd been too concussed to fight back. Embarrassing for everyone involved, probably most of all for them.
Once in custody, the Enginseers had stripped their armour by force — cutting, prying, and generally disassembling it with the focused enthusiasm of the Adeptus chanicus encountering alien technology they were professionally obligated to analyse. When the two warriors regained consciousness, their warplate was gone, explosive collars had been fitted around their necks, and shock-shackles were locked around their wrists and ankles.
The other three were crew — a pilot, a logistics specialist, and soone whose function remained unclear. Non-combatants, relatively speaking.
All five were, by any standard human aesthetic tric, extraordinarily attractive. The Aeldari were built that way — the sa genetic engineering that produced their combat capability also produced proportions and features that humans found deeply compelling and sowhat unsettling.
This had created a problem.
Imperial doctrine on xenos was simple and unambiguous: destroy them. In practice, with five helpless prisoners who looked like this, the nobility of the upper Spire was discovering unexpected nuance in their convictions. Several lords who had been packing their belongings for ergency off-world evacuation three days ago were now flushed, animated, and openly negotiating prices with each other.
An impromptu auction had begun.
The Ministorum representative in the room — a Confessor who had arrived expecting to adjudicate a straightforward execution order — was experiencing sothing close to a religious crisis.
"IN THE GOD-EMPEROR'S HOLY NA—" he erupted, rising from his chair. "You are seriously considering lying with xenos?! You should all be sharing a pyre with these abominations! Every single one of you is one step from the heretic's fire!"
A senior lord drew himself up with the expression of a man who had prepared for this objection.
"Confessor, my devotion to the God-Emperor is beyond question. I rely wish to infuse these filthy xenos with my loyal genetic material in service of—"
The room dissolved into suggestions, counter-suggestions, and creative theological rationalizations for why "injecting loyal Imperial genetic material" into Aeldari captives might technically constitute a form of blessed crusade.
The Confessor looked as if he was seriously reconsidering his career.
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