The shuttle did not have weapons or a holofield. It's only strength in comparison to the huge alien craft was its durability; wraithbone, as delicate as it might seem, was a preternaturally tough material. And the shuttle's shape, a narrow arrowhead, lent itself to a simple method of attack. The only issue was one of aiming.
Ramming into a spacefaring vessel with another is like shooting a bullet in flight with another bullet. The target is so small in comparison to the environment, and both vessels usually move so quickly, that actual contact relies on a trifecta of skill, training, and luck. Liriel had never piloted a spacecraft before, but she was a Seer. Divination was a useful tool for many things; altering what the lesser races might call "chance" was among them. One of the simplest exercises that Anathan had taught her was to toss a handful of dice such that they all landed on a specific side. It had seemed impossible at first, to predict which of a billion tiny changes in motion and angle would result in the outcome she wanted. There was a trick to it, of course, but the itinerant Seer insisted that discovery would teach her more than instruction. Such was Anathan's teaching style.
The alien vessel began to descend towards one of the waiting spires. It would slow down to make contact, fixing its position in possibility-space. Liriel made certain her puppets were secured in crash harnesses, then accelerated forward, guiding the craft not with her vision or the use of the instruments, but purely through her connection with the Warp. One of her hands lay on the control sphere, and she allowed chance impulse to twitch it to and fro. The vast majority of her mind dedicated itself to pruning the paths of probability, guiding her unseeing hand to her goal.
She snapped her eyes open the moment before impact. One moment hive ship was a speck against the backdrop of the planet; the next it occupied the majority of the viewscreen, and she had a horrific glimpse of tendrils and chitin plating and a vast, hideous maw; then the shuttle crashed into it.
It was exactly as violent as she had imagined. She had guided the shuttle to the best place possible, the gaping wound of a successful torpedo strike, scabbed over but still soft. They plunged into the hive ship like a dagger, the gravitic compensators shorting out under the strain of the massive g-forces of the deceleration. They died with an electric whine, whipping her against her own crash harness. She blacked out.
When she regained consciousness, the ship was mercifully intact. Only a few seconds had passed. Panel readouts reported a multitude of microfractures across it's skin. Wraithbone could repair itself, if slowly. The engines were, miraculously, still functional. They whined in frustration before she realized that her hand was still jamming the control sphere forward, the nose of the craft wedged into a bony bulkhead.
She could see no living creature from the cockpit, aside from the one she was embedded in. A good sign, but she could not afford to waste time. The IllMureead might be shocked at the assault, but they would not remain so. She unbuckled herself from the crash harness and clambered dizzily into the passenger cabin. Concussion? She slapped at a panel on the wall, releasing the other aeldar from their seats. With a silent command to follow, she stepped into the airlock and then into the dark womb of the hive ship proper.
The first surprise was the atmosphere. Breathable, barely, but denser than it had been on Mathara, and carrying with it a menacing pulse of biological noises from the veins and twitching muscles embedded into the walls. The atmosphere was warm and, her suit reported, extremely humid. She stepped forward, the only light in the cramped chamber coming from the airlock doors and her own suit. Her foot landed in a shallow pool of blood. Pools of it were congealing on the floor. Above her, a thick flow streamed from an artery wide enough to crawl through. The entry wound the shuttle had made was already healing.
There was a psychic beacon emanating from the core of the ship. The queen of this hive. Liriel could feel it through the walls, a buzzing drone that set her teeth on edge. The Warp was wrong here - it was always wrong, but it was wrong differently here, as though these creatures could bend it around their unified voices. Or perhaps her mind was still fragile, imagining what could not be.
Liriel's first impression was that the room was completely sealed. On closer inspection, she found the walls of the chamber were broken by puckered sphincters. At a touch, they reflexively relaxed open. They filed through quickly, and she alighted into the mind of each aeldar as they passed, reaffirming her control over them. They reacted not at all to the intrusion of her mind, and she quashed the stirring of horror at their blank faces. The sphincter closed, and she began the march to the queen.
The ship defied any attempt at quick traversal. The arterial hallways twisted in every direction, confounding her sense of navigation. Organ-chambers of unclear but likely nauseating purpose she passed through as quickly as possible. She glimpsed creatures half-born, rushed to life by the panicking IllMureead and floundering in the waters of their creation. She saw the ruins of gestation chambers, holding bays for untold numbers of the monsters, which had been hit by anti-ship fire and were now filled only with the corpses of their occupants. She saw the dark mind at the centre of this carnival of horrors activating, the ship rippling as its interior defenses truly activated.
Liriel could feel the pulses of control directing the beasts around her. As the group slipped through cramped passageways that shifted unsettlingly, she deepened her link to the Warp, relying on it to smother their psychic shadow and guide them into the blind spots between the hunters that stalked the paths around them.
She paused in one chamber, probing the future to find the best route forward. Pustules full to bursting grew all over the walls of the room. She led the way quickly, but kept the group close together. The bottom of the passage sloped downwards, steeper and steeper, until she was forced to crawl forward. And then it spasmed beneath her, and she was falling, sending a desperate command to her retinue to follow.
It was not a long fall, and she landed on her feet. Around her were dozens of small IllMureead, shaking off the remains of their shells. Serpentine beasts, barely the height of her thigh. They stared at her. Their eyes were dead and black and soulless. Beyond, she could see a tunnel out of this hatchery. The beasts opened mouths filled with row after row of razor sharp teeth.
Liriel felt a cold horror settle into her soul as she slew them, never stopping, every movement a defense and attack. It was easier with the aid of the other aeldar, but she could have cleared the room alone.
Because she had done so, over and over again.
The purpose of her torture at the hands of the daemon finally revealed to her, she recoiled from the choice before her. Play the part of the daemon's puppet, continue onwards, slay the queen, and condemn her people to be the daemon's sustenance; or die out of spite, condemn her people to death by alien hordes, and then have their souls consumed by the daemon.
Liriel understood now why it had been so easy to "slay" the thing in the centre of its power. The daemon had not died but simply fled through the Warp, probably into the World Stone itself. It was likely still there, gorging itself on aedari souls. Shame and indignation burned hot trails through her mind.
She could not allow herself to die. She could still save them. She had to believe that. If her foe still lived, she would rise to meet its challenge. Let it think her a mere weapon. If she was to be a sword, then she would be a hiltless one.
The hive was aware of their position now. She could feel the beasts converging. She shifted her focus from stealth to speed, dropping the veil she had held over her party. A hunting pack blocked the next passage; a quick flicker of power sent a flurry of telekinetic blades hurtling down the narrow corridor, carving the aliens into bloody chunks.
They entered a chamber consisting of multiple floors, with large gaps in in the levels between them. It was filled with strange tendons as thick as tree trunks that stretched from floor to ceiling and sometimes through those gaps. Tough, oblong nodes in the tendons emitted choking thick gasses, shrouding the room in an opaque pall. Liriel recalled the fire-filled chamber of the daemon's labyrinth. There, the smoke was not the threat.
Relexively, she ducked, and a beast darted through the air above her, long scythe-like talons embedding themselves in the aeldar behind. He died without a sound, burying his own sword down to the hilt into the creature's thorax. Liriel ran the party through, relying on the guidance of the Warp and the steps she had memorized by painful lesson to evade the attacks by the leapers. They climbed up and down the tendons, seeking an exit she knew must exist.
They lost three more to the aliens' attacks.
The exit was exactly where she thought it would be, but she paused before continuing through it. One by one, her retinue crossed through the narrow threshold, just ahead of dozens of scuttling claws. Smoke for the pall, but why the fire? Was it a hint?
Finally, she was the last aeldar remaining. She could see the dim forms of the IllMureead leapers vaulting from tendon to tendon to reach her. With a thought, she lit a pyroclastic spark deep in the room and then dove through the exit, sealing it behind her.
The explosion shook the craft, and she felt the entire thing buckle. The flinch took nearly a full minute to complete, muscles contracting in sequence as nerves carried the signal throughout the vessel. Thankfully, whatever that room was for, the seals were built to withstand a catastrophic explosion within. It was only afterwards, staring at the blackened centre of the sphincter, that Liriel realized how lucky she had been.
Close, now. She could almost see the queen of the hive, glowing in the center of a vast spiderweb of psychic connections. The jewel at the centre of the IllMureead trap. Before the rest of the ship could converge, before more horrors could be spawned, they needed to end this.
The portal to the next chamber opened into a clawing, chitinous hell. Beasts innumerable in number and infinite in description crowded the chamber, rushing the entryway as soon as they saw her.
There was no time to think. Liriel opened herself to the Warp, no possessing daemon or binding shields now to sabotage her efforts. And it was pure. And it was mighty. And it was hers. The world shuddered. The laws of the universe bent to the greater will of her mind.
She was Death itself.
The creatures fell like wheat to a thresher. Carved apart with telekinetic blades that filled the air like a rainstorm, or burned in black lightning that fell in sheets from her fingers, or crushed in mind by sheer overwhelming force. Their corpses choked the entrance to the tunnel, forcing their compatriots to hack through their bodies to get past.
Liriel simply blasted the bodies out of the way, a psychic shockwave that broke the bodies of those nearest the airlock.
Then the aeldar were among them, swords and spears cutting in deadly arcs. She took her place among them, dancer, conductor, and choreographer, her staff carving great bleeding furrows in the relentless press of bodies. The world was painted in stark lines, the room lit by the suit-lights of the aeldar and the glow of their weapons.
Strike, dodge, update the puppets; the actions blended into a continuous, seamless rhythm. An alien began screaming, a deadly build-up of bio-plasma collecting in its throat and emitting a hellish glow of its own. Her fate line veered sharply, ended abruptly in the potentiality that she let it hit her. She could not dodge in time; she was pinned between two of the largest forms, deflecting their rapid-fire blows as quickly as she could. She would win, but not fast enough. No matter.
A thought, and Khyan dived in front of the ball of bio-plasma, shielding her. He died quickly, the vile matter burning through his torso and clear to his heart in an instant. He did not scream.
One of the beasts, a sick monstrosity resembling nothing so much as a massive, malformed brain, barely held within the skin and chitinous armour around it, floated upwards. She sensed it's presence and effect in the Warp only moments before it unleashed its fury. It did not destroy bodies, but disrupted her puppets' fragile minds. Half a dozen aeldar lost their will, their connection to her severed. They were immediately torn to shreds.
The IllMureead had brought in their slower, elite melee infantry now. Bipedal, with four arms ending in small, razor-sharp claws. Their jaws distended savagely as they fell upon the aeldar, moving almost faster than she could perceive. Another four dead. Her force was below half strength, and the ones left were wearing their fatigue and accumulated wounds badly.
Liriel kept her distance. Every future where she allowed them to come to grips with her ended in her swift death, buried under lightning-swift claws. She could not dodge them for long in the close confines, and any delay would bring the horde behind her bearing down.
A losing fight. And the queen less than a hundred metres away, behind another sealed door.
There was never a choice. She gave the remaining survivors of her attack force a final order, and sprinted for the doorway to the queen. The puppets formed a wedge before her, throwing themselves at the alien horde to clear the path forward.
Sixty metres. A volley of diamond-hard shards ripped across the formation, taking down two more. She dodged through the cloud of projectiles, trusting fate to guide her path.
Forty metres. A massive biobeast, more a collection of moving armor plates than any natural animal, charged their side, trampling aeldar like a child crushing beetles. A swift leapt brought her halfway up it's side, and as it swung to shake her off she launched forward above a brood of its mates.
Twenty metres. A final defensive line, living mines that hovered close to the doorway. Liriel reached out her mind to crush them, and the brain beast behind her caught the thread of her connection to the Warp and ripped it, scattering her power. Gritting her teeth, she commanded two more aeldar puppets into the deadly blockade.
Their sacrifice cleared the route. She forced the sphincter open with her mind and completed her run through. One aeldar joined her - Tellyth, she noted - before she sealed it behind her, burning out the nerves that allowed the doorway to open again with a blast of black lightning.
It would take the aliens time to carve their way through the thick, bony walls of this room. But the queen, cocooned protectively in those walls, was not alone. Two more brain-beasts flanked her, and before them was another form, larger than any other she had fought so far, wielding an unholy array of swords, fleshy whips, and massive claws.
As before, there was no audible signal, no scream of challenge or rage. The attack came instantly, as a thousand angry wasps buzzing at Liriel's mind. She had only a fraction of a second to charge Tellyth at the massive leader of the IllMureead before she had to turn to her own defense. It was not the warpcraft of the aeldar, precise and exacting, but a strategy of overwhelming power. The brain-beasts battered her down, their strikes like numbing poison in her brain. Desperate, she discorporated, shattering her own mind into a thousand separate shards.
The attacks still came, but their strikes passed through her, unable to find purchase in the emptiness. She could not wield the Warp in this state, but that would not stop her. She had learned to fight with very little animating will. It took no effort to urge her limbs to motion and plunge her staff into the unshrouded brain of one of them. It screamed as it died, the first real vocalisation she had heard from the IllMureead, a sound both aural and psychic, pathetic and keening.
Tellyth died, skewered on a massive claw.
Coming back to herself, Liriel threw her full psychic might at the other beast before it could capitalize on her moment of weakness. She tore apart it's mind with main force, ignoring the wounds it inflicted on her in turn even as the larger leader-form sprang at her. It's weapons were a blur, slamming into her staff and tearing chips out of the iron-hard wood. She dodged out of the way of the writhing whip, constantly backing away from the aggressive assault. It was as if she was fighting four opponents at once.
She activated the staff and it's singularities caught at one of the beast's claws, carving a long, bloody furrow through them. It screamed at her, and then it's scream transformed, transitioning to higher registers. She had only an instant to react before the scream seemed to penetrate her very soul, shaking loose her ability to control her own body and mind.
Her movements became loose, uncoordinated. The creature did not slow down its assault to gloat, as some caricature of a villain in a children's story would. It struck her, the blow barely blocked by the staff in her hands, sending it flying. It's next attack knocked her against the wall, driving the air out of her lungs.
Liriel felt the darkness closing in. She stared at the queen, barely a dozen paces away. She was so close. Ten seconds, or two, in full control of her faculties, and the thing would be dead.
She was going to die.
If you're going to lose the game, burn the board down.
The leader approached to finish her off. Liriel groped for the Warp again, but this time she did not open a controlled breach in the veil. She ripped at it with her full force, felt the corrupting power flooding into realspace and dove into that maelstrom to draw out more. Mind reeling in fear and pain, she marshalled nothing but raw will and spite to ensure that however powerful and skilled the psykers of the IllMureead might be, they would not be able to fix this.
A breach formed above her, a dark lens that branded madness into the mind that looked too closely into its depths. Then something pushed through it. An arm, fully as thick as her own torso, reached through, then another, then another. Each held a bronze weapon that seemed to glow with inner fire. An axe embellished with images of hunting wolves, a sword engulfed in flames, a mace shrouded in dread, and a spiny whip that twitched of its own volition. The breach stretched, reality itself pained by its existence, and the thing on the other end forced the rest of its body through. It's blood-red skin rippled across mighty thews. From its four cloven feet to its massive, bat-like wings, framing a head crowned with two massive horns, the thing radiated a sense of imminent violence.
It glanced at her, and Liriel swear she saw recognition in its four coal-black eyes, before the IllMureead leader launched itself at the daemon.
Blow for blow, they swung at each other, strength, speed, and skill almost evenly matched. The walls were finally breached, and hordes of lesser creatures burst into the room from the adjoining chambers to be met by daemons dragging themselves out of the breach by the dozens. All ignored Liriel as irrelevant in the ongoing battle.
The daemon was the greater fighter. It laughed as it shattered the talon she had damaged. It allowed the flesh-whip to score its chest, black smoke rising from the wound, taking the opportunity to bind the leader-beast's head with it's own whip. Liriel could feel the backwash of the psychic assault the alien was unleashing on the unreal thing, to no avail.
"Finally!" the daemon roared, wrath and pleasure mixed equally in its voice. "This is how a war is waged! This is how a planet is taken! Not with plots and plagues, bloodless and cold!" It plunged the flaming sword deep in the alien's thorax. The sizzling drowned out the alien's hissing screech. "Let blood be spilled! Let skulls be taken! Let honour be won! Let glory sing its war-song!"
It flapped its wings, flying to the queen and dragging the leader-beast behind it. The warp-rift followed the daemon like a trained dog, the torrent of lesser daemons spewing from it never slowing. The queen had vacated her cocoon and was desperately trying to drag her bloated body away from the chaos. The daemon slammed his mace down, crushing one of her legs.
Liriel struggled to reorient herself and move away. She had to escape. She knew what would come next. Desperately, she shored up her mental defenses, trying to figure out a way through the maelstrom of heaving bodies. There was so much blood and viscera she could barely see.
The end came slowly for the queen, the daemon amusing itself by killing it piecemeal while the leader-beast thrashed in its restraints. The aliens could not plead or beg or scream for mercy. Perhaps the daemon simply wanted to inflict pain, even on creatures that would not care. Or perhaps it was just insane.
The daemon almost certainly couldn't hear what Liriel could, even sheltered underneath her mental defenses. The queen was emitting a psychic keening, a desperate call for help throughout the ship. Creatures poured through the doorways in their dozens, seeking to overwhelm the ranks of lesser daemons with sheer numbers alone. Liriel felt new life spawn in breeding chambers. Too slow, too slow - unless this too was a trick, a diversion while a new queen was birthed.
Eventually, however, the queen lost parts of her self to destroy, and the daemon held her broken body by the head, squeezing as one might a ripe johsa fruit. Her chitin cracked, splintered, and smashed, ooze exploding onto the daemon's body.
The psychic backlash was a tidal wave, slamming into every creature in that chamber and across the ship. Liriel saw even the greater daemon sent flying, then felt herself picked up by the sheer force of it. She was tumbling through the room, blood and bodies colliding with her from every direction. Her grasp on consciousness was fading, this assault too much for her mind to handle safely.
She struggled against the blackness, the dying screams of the hive mind ripping apart what little isolation she had left within her own mind, and failed.
