Chapter 277: Declaration of War on Every Screen in the Hive
In the gap layer between the Spire and Mid-Hive, buried among unmanned service corridors and maintenance conduits, most of the infrastructure ran on automation, built to service the upper city without requiring a human presence. It was exactly the kind of place where something that didn't want to be found could disappear.
The Aeldari warrior was here now, concealed among a dense cluster of data conduits. Her wraithbone armour had shifted from white to black, absorbing the colour of the pipes around her.
She drew her power glaive and cut through a thick communications trunk line, exposing the fibre-optic bundle beneath. A secondary conduit extended from the back of her helmet and enveloped the exposed fibres, interfacing with the data stream. Information from across the Hive began flowing into her helmet systems, which sorted and filtered it automatically while she worked.
She used the time to maintain her equipment.
Unlike Imperial gear, Aeldari weapons and armour ran on psychic energy rather than fuel cells or power packs. The Aeldari were a psionically attuned species, which meant their equipment had no practical energy limit. Where a human's power armour required a large generator pack on the back, her wraithbone suit had a completely flat dorsal profile.
The armour bore damage from the months of fighting: lasrifle scoring, heavy stubber impacts, each one a small crater or fracture line. She directed psychic energy across the affected areas and watched the wraithbone slowly close over the wounds like a healing wound.
Her power glaive had been with her through everything. Through human bodies, armoured vehicles, and half-metre blast doors. She could feel the weariness in the blade after that kind of sustained use.
The shuriken pistol was a different problem. It was a beautiful weapon, but after months in the field it had run dry. It was decorative now.
The Aeldari nuclear grenades were gone too, all of them thrown during the failed assassination attempt on the Governor. She'd used them to kill his chief steward before barely escaping with her life.
Out of ammunition. Out of explosives. That was her situation.
It was made worse by the fact that the entire Hive was crawling with bounty hunters. Even the maintenance corridors she was relying on were being swept. She couldn't stay in any single location for more than an hour before someone found her.
For a month she had been fighting without rest, dealing with bounty hunter sweeps every one to two hours. Her physical conditioning meant it registered as roughly equivalent to a normal human being pulling an all-nighter; uncomfortable, but manageable. The war-mask's war-self had been carrying her through the worst of it.
What was actually grinding her down was the information blackout. The Hive's communication channels had been locked down with physical cipher systems, codebooks distributed by hand between trusted parties. Without the codebook, the traffic was unbreakable. She was flying blind.
She had tried to turn this situation around. She'd reached an arrangement with several noble houses: they would get her inside the Governor's residence, and in exchange for the Governor's death they would release one of her captured companions. She'd fought her way through automated weapon systems that turned the interior into a killzone, managed to reach and kill the chief steward, and barely made it out. The nobles who had brokered the deal were subsequently executed by the Governor. She was alone again.
She removed the war mask.
The face beneath it was tired, soft, and hurting.
She set the mask beside her and crouched in the dark corner, arms around her knees, letting herself feel the quiet. Her eyes closed. Sleep pressed against her consciousness with enormous weight.
It had been so long. The fighting never stopped. The running never stopped. The killing never stopped.
Without the war-self to hold her up, she wasn't sure she would still be standing. She was hiding in the dark like a stray dog that had nowhere left to go.
A tear traced down her cheek.
Her earpiece chimed.
She was awake instantly, war mask back on.
Through her helmet's integrated display, a signal resolved: a public broadcast channel, wide-spectrum, receivable by every television set, radio receiver, and military communications array in the Hive simultaneously.
The image that came through showed a strongly built man with black hair and dark eyes, in a duty uniform, sitting in a chair and looking directly into the camera.
"This channel is broadcasting Hive-wide. Every public screen, every radio frequency, every military band."
Kian spoke to the lens.
He was not wrong. Every public broadcast in the Hive had been commandeered. Every screen, every speaker. Close to ten billion people were watching or listening.
He leaned forward slightly, his eyes hard and direct.
"I know you're watching. You, xenos. Hiding in whatever dark pipe you've crawled into, running whatever scheme through that scheming head of yours, thinking about your next move against our home. You've already done enough."
Cut.
The radiation zone from the fusion reactor detonation filled the screen. Hazmat-suited teams working through the contaminated area. Imperial citizens with radiation burns, skin sloughing away, being carried on stretchers. More bodies on the ground, entire families huddled together in corners, carbonised where they'd sheltered.
Cut.
A vast open square converted into a field hospital. Beds as far as the screen could show, each one occupied. Patients in various stages of radiation sickness. The mild cases: hair and scalp coming away together, eyes liquefying. The severe cases: no longer recognisably human, reduced to trembling, weeping masses of tissue.
Twenty million people. Twenty million suffering like this.
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