9-1 BYRGENWERTH: Questions and Demands

"Yeah, but we won though, didn't we?"

"No, Pyotr, we did not win," Djura said. "The aeldari were after something, and they got their weird, spindly hands on it."

Pyotr laughed and jumped down from his gunner's nest. "Sure, camarada, but does that look like winning to you?"

Pyotr gestured with a wave of an arm at the dozens of figures sprawled about the district's Strada Primara, their strange armor cracked and leaking. The battle for the Strada had been a vicious knife fight, one of the worst Djura had been a part of; ungainly Mechanicus crawler-tanks firing their rockets danger close into aeldari shock troops, swarms of aeldari projectiles that shifted mid-flight to track their targets, the blessed Orphan itself bursting through a weakened wall to mince some unfortunate aeldari in ridiculous crested helms before disappearing again almost as fast. The aeldari had taken the worst of it, by far, but Djura couldn't shake the feeling that something had gone wrong.

"No," Djura answered. "I guess not." 

Djura watched as a fireteam of Choir militants stalked through the now-silent battlefield. Their autoguns, ugly folding things spot-welded in a basement somewhere, occasionally rang out single shots as they put down wounded aeldari. Djura didn't blame them. The aeldari were subtly wrong in ways that made them hard to look at. They moved too fluidly, their proportions slightly off, their skin too thin and their blood the wrong color. Looking at one too long without pulling a trigger made Djura's skin crawl.

A skitarius waved the squad down furiously and began what Djura assumed was the Mechanicus equivalent of chewing out the neophytes. Djura couldn't hear every word, but caught "valuable research material" and "fresh experimental subjects." Further down the Strada, Mechanicus servitors sawed aeldari out of their ruined armor and placed them in either cold-storage canisters or what looked like mobile hospital beds. Other servitors followed along behind, mechanically placing discarded xenos weapons and equipment into oversized containers bolted to their backs. One of the baffling Mechanicus bird-machines, transvectors, Djura remembered, passed overhead, stuffed to the brim with dead and dying aeldari.

Pyotr lit a lho stick, leaning against his ridgerunner and watching the servitors work. "Hey, Djura. What do you think the cogs do with them?"

Djura shrugged, lighting one of his own. "Who cares?"

+++

Willem was seated against the back wall of their field HQ, a cafe, perhaps, long abandoned, performing post-battle repairs. They didn't have much in the way of organic tissue left, and all it took to get them back in the fight was swapping out some parts too badly damaged to function. Mechadendrites snaked around Willem's outstretched arm, disassembling the augmetic, repairing what they could, removing and replacing what they couldn't. Willem used the intermittent sparks from the process as a mental focus, replaying the battle in his mind, searching for failures to rectify.

Willem had, thankfully, gotten a hand up and forced the aeldari's-

(/CLASSIFICATION: AUTARCH / ROLE: AELDARI WAR LEADER/ forced its way into Willem's noosphere display)

-thermal pistol up and away from center mass, but paid for it. The impossibly bright beam had critically damaged Willem's left arm and shoulder, melting armor plates and servo-motors together in a superheated sludge. The burst of energy and physical trauma had temporarily overwhelmed Willem's ability to process incoming data. Willem believed it was known as "losing consciousness" among baseline humans. Tactical analysis scrolled along the bottom of their vision, offering alternative attack angles and updating Willem's combat algorithms to account for this creature's fighting style.

There was, in physical reality, a subtle shift in the room's temperature and slight but noticeable displacement of air. Undetectable, Willem supposed, to the vast majority of purely organic life, but their environmental scans caught it easily. Something was inside the cafe with them. A mechadendrite snapped to attention over Willem's shoulder, tracking their visual focus. Instead of the folding manipulators that capped the rest of the artificial tentacles, this one ended in a short barreled rotary gun, a wildly complex marvel of human engineering Willem built by hand. It also, Willem thought idly, fires two thousand tungsten slugs per minute.

The presence in the cafe was directly above them, latched to the wall and perfectly still. Horrifically graceful, the genestealer patriarch seemed to unfold itself away from the wall, landing gently, one overly graceful limb at a time, almost completely silently, in front of Willem. It regarded the tech priest with its dead, black eyes, before crouching down to bring itself to eye level with them. Automated proximity warnings flashed across Willem's vision, followed by tactical recommendations and targeting solutions. Willem very consciously remained as still as they could manage.

The Orphan extended a single claw and placed it between them. Without breaking eye contact, the massive genestealer began to precisely etch a series of figures into the floor tile. A series of lines and circles, a flawless if somewhat archaic rendering of holy binharic.

01110010 01100101 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101000 01101001 01101100 01100100 01110010 01100101 01101110

R E L E A S E M Y C H I L D R E N