"What a savage and primitive species." Dracon Utak's voice dropped into the ancient cadences of the Eldar tongue, the words shaped for an audience of one, his pale face carrying the expression of someone looking at something that had managed to offend their aesthetic sensibility. "Like black sun-rot, they stain my eyes simply by existing."
He raised the Agoniser.
The power whip cracked through the air toward Nolan as he cleared the top edge of the railing, the electro-corrosive energy along its length burning blue in the sea light.
Nolan's fingers moved. The Ten Rings pulled back from range, gathered around the vibranium armor in a tight spiral, and absorbed the whip's length across the formation: the strikes deflecting off ring after ring with sharp metallic reports. Two of the rings broke from the formation and planted themselves flat under his magnetic boots as he came fully over the railing and moved toward Utak.
Utak retreated with the fluid ease of someone who has spent considerable time learning to move backward at speed. His free hand found a spirit blade at his hip: a thin, cruel-looking weapon drawn from the Kabal armor's waist holster in a single practiced motion. The pale face showed nothing close to fear. It showed interest.
The deck erupted beneath him.
Three sets of ceramite fingers drove up through the plating from below and closed around Utak's ankles before he had processed what was happening. The grip was not negotiable. He was pulled down one sharp step, enough to unbalance him, enough to stop his retreat. His whip arm came around automatically.
The second Terminator came up through a wider section of deck directly behind him, ceramite and mass, and a single thick arm closed around Utak's throat from behind with the specificity of a hold that was designed to restrict oxygen without closing the airway completely. The Lamenter's other arm managed the whip hand.
Utak's expression of interest had become something else.
He threw the Agoniser. His hand changed the spirit blade's grip in the same motion, repositioning for a thrust at the Terminator behind him. A Ten Ring cut through the arc of the thrust and took the blade and two of his fingers with it.
Nolan walked across the top deck while Utak made the adjustments available to someone being held from three directions by Terminator-armored Space Marines. The Warscythe rested across his shoulder. The Ten Rings circled the vibranium armor in a steady orbit.
He stopped in front of the Dracon and looked at him through the helmet's eyepiece.
"The mission target is secured." He opened the vox channel. "Tyberos: feed the rest of them to the sea."
"You will pay for this," Utak said, through the increasingly constrained passage of air, his eyes bright with something past anger. "When you are in our hands, I promise you, what Slaanesh takes from souls will seem like restraint compared to what we will do with yours."
Nolan's fist connected once with the side of Utak's head. Precisely placed. The Dracon's eyes went out.
The Lamenter Terminator that had been holding Utak's throat released its grip immediately, shook its helmet once toward Nolan, and carried the unconscious Dracon toward the evacuation point at a steady run.
From the top deck, Nolan walked to the railing and looked down.
Tyberos was moving along the main deck below with the particular focus of a man who has been given an instruction he does not find objectionable. The Dark Eldar who remained, those who had not been put down in the initial assault, were going over the side of the ship one by one. Tyberos was handling the process personally. His armor was thoroughly covered in what the process involved.
Below the waterline, the sea was no longer clear.
Kahurangi stood at the rail of the lower deck. The pale Librarian's eyes were closed. His lips were moving slightly. In the water below, the shapes moving through the red-clouded sea were not the strange marine creatures that had been visible from the surface earlier. They were larger. They were faster. They were very much in the right place.
The sound the remaining Dark Eldar were making carried across the sea air and then did not.
The Gray Shark was waiting in low orbit when the Thunderhawks came up from the garden world and docked.
Nolan and the others came through the transport ramp in the order they had boarded: Tyberos first, Utak unconscious in one hand, heading directly for the interrogation section without discussion. The Lamenters filed in behind. The hunting team. Kahurangi, still somewhat distant in his expression in the way of Librarians who have been doing something intensive.
Ilaya came through with Jonah's hand in hers.
Jonah was looking in Tyberos's direction, specifically at the limp form of the Dracon being carried in the Chapter Master's grip. His brow had drawn together in the focused expression he sometimes produced when he was trying to organize a thought.
He raised one small finger and pointed at Utak.
"Door," he said, with unusual emphasis. Not the word as a habit. The word as a statement about something specific.
Every person near him was looking at him before he finished saying it. Ilaya's hand tightened around his.
"Pale Nomad." Nolan turned to Kahurangi. "Take Jonah to assess his psychic capability when you have the capacity. I want to know what he is detecting." He looked at the boy again for a moment. "Nothing about our operation has been discussed in front of him or his mother. Whatever he is reading, he is reading it independently."
Kahurangi's dark eyes rested on Jonah with the particular attention of a Librarian encountering a question he does not yet have a framework for. He nodded once.
Utak regained consciousness in a room.
The room was empty. The walls were metal, evenly surfaced, with no protrusions or joints or angles that differed from the surrounding geometry. The floor was the same. The ceiling was the same. The light was even and sourceless. There were no objects in the room.
The Carcharodons called this technique Silent Punishment.
It required no tools. It required no personnel in the room. It required no action once the subject had been placed inside and the door had been sealed.
What it required was time.
The Dark Eldar existed at the center of an unbroken relationship with sensation: the input of experience, the texture of the world received through every available channel, as constant and necessary as respiration. Remove the sensation, remove the variation, provide nothing that could be processed or reacted to, and the psychological architecture that a Dark Eldar built their existence upon had nothing to operate against.
By Tyberos's account, an ordinary Astartes could manage three to five days before significant deterioration. The Carcharodons, who had spent generations accustomed to the long silences of the void, could reach approximately a month.
What a Dark Eldar could manage depended on the individual. Specifically, on how comprehensive their psychological defenses were against the one thing they spent their entire existence trying to avoid.
The banging started less than ten minutes after the door had been sealed: a rhythmic impact against the metal, the sound of palms rather than fists, urgent and then urgent in a different way, and then accompanied by the particular quality of voice that existed between shouting and something that was not quite composed enough to be called shouting.
The Eldar language carried through the door with the tone of someone who had something very specific to say and was finding that the room did not respond to it.
Nolan stood in the corridor outside and listened for a while.
Then he shook his head slightly, turned, and drove the vibranium armor back down the passageway.
"Dark Eldar," he said, mostly to himself. "Enjoy the silence."