Kian had the bolt carbine up before the shockwave had fully passed.
"Where? Where is she coming from?"
He already knew the answer in broad terms. You don't detonate a fusion reactor beneath a target and then walk away. The explosion was preparation. The attack was next.
The estate was dark. The power failure had taken every light source simultaneously, and the backup systems that should have activated were presumably part of the sa grid. Zeppelin's household troops — the ones without powered armour — were stumbling, disoriented, many of them dropping where they stood as the radiation dose worked through their unshielded bodies. The garden that had been packed with alert soldiers sixty seconds ago was now partly a casualty site.
Kian's own troops were still functional. Powered armour, all one hundred and fifty of them, positioned on and behind the exterior wall. The wall itself had partially screened them from the radiation burst.
He maxed out his infiltration armour's auspex, sweeping for biosigns.
The garden was full of them — too many, too close together. She was already in there, she'd blend against the mass of signatures. He couldn't isolate her.
His eyes went up.
The estate's garden occupied a pressurised enclosure — a vast atmospheric do, a hundred tres overhead, thick armoured glass keeping the artificial environnt contained. Stars visible through it on clear nights. An architectural luxury and, as of right now, a structural liability.
Sothing was moving on the do's exterior surface.
"Overhead! She's above us!"
His soldiers' heads ca up in unison.
The Aeldari warrior had not entered through any door. After detonating the reactor, she had sprinted back to the tower's exterior and climbed. One thousand tres of smooth plasteel wall, scaled using the power blade as a climbing anchor — driving it in, pulling up, driving it in again, all the way to the top.
She was standing on the do's surface now, holding sothing small.
She set a tir. Dropped it. Moved.
The grenade stuck where it landed — so adhesive property in its casing — and detonated twelve seconds later.
A small sun appeared at the top of the do. Brief, intense, and sufficient.
Two square kilotres of armoured glass — half a tre thick, steel-wire reinforced throughout, each square tre weighing hundreds of kilograms — cracked, fractured, and ca down.
Not as powder. As boulders.
"DOWN. EVERYONE DOWN."
Kian was already flat against the inside of the parapet, pressing himself into the angle between the battlent and the walkway. His soldiers hit the sa position on instinct and training, using the rlons as cover.
The soldiers in the open garden had nothing.
The glass fell like a teor strike in slow motion — piece after piece, each one tonnes of mass dropping from a hundred tres, landing with impacts that Kian felt through the stone beneath him. The sound was continuous and overlapping, each crash rging into the next.
Powered armour did not save the soldiers in the open. Several tonnes of reinforced glass moving at terminal velocity compressed powered armour the sa way it compressed everything else. So pieces ca down vertical — entering the ground like tombstones, leaving armoured soldiers embedded in the soil beneath them.
It lasted approximately thirty seconds.
When it stopped, Kian ca up.
"Report. Count off."
His soldiers counted. Twelve dead. One hundred and thirty-eight operational.
He had prepared himself for worse. He took the number and moved on.
In the garden below, the survivors of Zeppelin's household guard were screaming.
She had ridden one of the falling pieces down.
The grenade detonation had provided her a platform — a single large section, several hundred square tres, peeling away from the do intact. She had activated the adhesion system in her wraithbone armour and flattened herself against it, gecko-flat, as it fell.
A hundred tres. Accelerating.
Ten tres from impact she released, executed a rolling dismount that bled off every tre per second of velocity in a single fluid motion, and ca up standing in the middle of the garden.
The power blade was already drawn.
The environnt was dark — reactor dead, backup power dead, ergency lighting dead. The surviving household guards had their armour's shoulder-lights and weapon-lamps active, which ant they could see about five tres clearly and were conspicuous from thirty.
She moved through the pools of light between the dark spaces.
First pass: fifteen kills before the screaming started. Precise targeting — the blade entered at joint gaps, viewport seals, the thinner armour at the back of the knee and the inside of the elbow. Ceramite-reinforced plate cracked and separated. The flesh inside was less resilient.
When the shouting finally identified where she was, she was sowhere else.
The household guards opened up with their heavy-barrel lasrifles — red beams cross-crossing the garden, heating the air, burning stone and tal and each other with indiscriminate volu. She danced through it. The beams were tracking where she had been. She was already at the next target.
A guard split at the waist, upper body still attempting to crawl on reflex, processing not yet caught up with structural reality.
Another: blade entered at the neck seal, exited at the opposite shoulder. The ceramite parted around the disruption field like it wasn't there.
Thirty dead in the first engagent.
The survivors were firing constantly and hitting each other as often as her.
☆☆☆
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