Chapter 263: Tiger Among Sheep
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 same 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 dome, a hundred metres overhead, thick armoured glass keeping the artificial environment contained. Stars visible through it on clear nights. An architectural luxury and, as of right now, a structural liability.
Something was moving on the dome's exterior surface.
"Overhead! She's above us!"
His soldiers' heads came 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 metres 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 dome's surface now, holding something small.
She set a timer. Dropped it. Moved.
The grenade stuck where it landed — some adhesive property in its casing — and detonated twelve seconds later.
A small sun appeared at the top of the dome. Brief, intense, and sufficient.
Two square kilometres of armoured glass — half a metre thick, steel-wire reinforced throughout, each square metre weighing hundreds of kilograms — cracked, fractured, and came 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 battlement and the walkway. His soldiers hit the same position on instinct and training, using the merlons as cover.
The soldiers in the open garden had nothing.
The glass fell like a meteor strike in slow motion — piece after piece, each one tonnes of mass dropping from a hundred metres, landing with impacts that Kian felt through the stone beneath him. The sound was continuous and overlapping, each crash merging 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 same way it compressed everything else. Some pieces came 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 came 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 metres, peeling away from the dome intact. She had activated the adhesion system in her wraithbone armour and flattened herself against it, gecko-flat, as it fell.
A hundred metres. Accelerating.
Ten metres from impact she released, executed a rolling dismount that bled off every metre per second of velocity in a single fluid motion, and came up standing in the middle of the garden.
The power blade was already drawn.
The environment was dark — reactor dead, backup power dead, emergency lighting dead. The surviving household guards had their armour's shoulder-lights and weapon-lamps active, which meant they could see about five metres 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 somewhere else.
The household guards opened up with their heavy-barrel lasrifles — red beams cross-crossing the garden, heating the air, burning stone and metal and each other with indiscriminate volume. 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 engagement.
The survivors were firing constantly and hitting each other as often as her.
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