Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

A good question, and one he doesn’t bother to answer directly, so once again we turn to Thromp’s superficial but substantially accurate account of events.

From The Eldar: a History of Their Presence in the Ultima Segmentum, and Some Musings Upon Possible Means of Their Eradication, by Baltazar Thromp, 997 M41

Though the passage through the eldar blockade of so many vessels bringing comfort and hope to those marooned in the void was a stunning victory for the forces of righteousness in and of itself, an even greater one was soon to be made manifest. Working in the greatest of secrecy, General Porten and Admiral Herren had concocted a stratagem between them which, they hoped, would deal a significant blow to the eldar invaders.

Unbeknownst to any but the highest command levels of the defence forces, and the Adeptus Mechanicus acolytes who had aided them, Governor Fulcher’s relief flotilla left the surface of Ironfound accompanied by a handful of apparently unremarkable cargo vessels indistinguishable from the multitude among which they travelled. Piloted by servitors, their cargo holds contained nothing but fusion warheads, each one capable of levelling an entire hive.167 Prior to their departure, a series of apparently routine messages had been sent in a code which it was believed (correctly as it transpired) the eldar had already deciphered; these made it appear as though the ships in question were carrying items and resources which the xenos interlopers had taken a particular interest in during their previous piratical raids.

The ploy appeared at first to be an unqualified success, the bait being taken by a squadron of heavy fighters,168 which crippled the engines of the leading decoy with precision laser bursts, before moving in to take the drifting vessel under tow. As it approached the eldar flagship169 however, the warhead detonated prematurely.170 Though the enemy battleship wasn’t destroyed, it did suffer sufficient damage from the explosion to force it to withdraw, taking no further active part in the invasion.

Forewarned by this, the eldar abandoned their attempts to seize the other pieces of bait, no doubt unnerved by this turn of events and apprehensive as to what other cunning plans may have been devised against them171, and pulled most of their ships further back from the Imperial picket lines. Reverting to their secondary programming, the servitor pilots followed, attempting to ram the nearest eldar vessel and detonate their deadly cargoes, but none, alas, managed to do so, being easily picked off by the massed batteries of their targets far short of their goals.

Nevertheless, this may have been the decisive blow in the campaign; for though, as we shall see, the invaders were to make one further, desperate attempt to break the Imperial defensive line, the fight appeared to have gone out of them, their morale degraded almost as much as that of the gallant defenders had risen as a result. Because of this, it’s probably fair to say that, despite failing in its primary objective, the Porten-Herren stratagem was, in the end, an unqualified success.

Twenty-three

Close to, Skyside Seventeen seemed little different to most of the other void stations and orbitals I’d passed through in a lifetime of rattling around the galaxy, which is to say that any discernible form it might once have possessed had long since disappeared under a millennium or two’s worth of accretion. Docking arms, hangar bays and habitation zones stuck out haphazardly from a surface which most closely resembled a metal and armourcrys tuber (and in which, I strongly suspected, a few stray starships whose spacefaring days were done remained entombed, like insects in amber, becoming slowly digested as the city-sized installation had expanded). Vessels of all kinds scurried about the huge structure, ranging in size from warp-capable behemoths unwilling to risk making a run for it past the prowling eldar, right down to one-man utility pods and the void-suited hulljacks swarming all over it like flies across the surface of a large, rotten fruit. Nothing had exploded since the eldar had taken Herren’s bait, at least that I’d noticed, and everyone seemed to be going about their business as calmly and methodically as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances.