by Guy Haley
The suddenness of Ku’gath’s movement took the whole plague mill by surprise. His bulk brushed against wood, breaking it and sending part of the walkway crashing down. The Plaguefather glared down at Septicus so hard his loose eye fell out and hung upon his cheek.
‘If you start playing those miserable pipes where I can hear them, Septicus Seven of the Seventh Manse, I’ll rip out your filthy guts and eat them in front of you.’
Septicus performed a squelchy bow. ‘My lord,’ he said. With admirable decorum he let the mouthpiece drop and departed, shouting for the remainder of Ku’gath’s six bodyguards to join him.
Nurglings squealed with laughter. The plaguebearers went into a frenzy trying to count each breath of mirth.
‘And you can all shut up as well!’ rumbled Ku’gath. He swung his massive head around, his glare silencing all it touched upon. His minions fell into fearful quiet. Even the plaguebearers took to counting in their heads.
Ku’gath gave out a profoundly grateful sigh, allowing his irritation to condense into droplets of phlegm and rain into the stew. He approved. A little skin-crawling annoyance never hurt a good disease. He licked his eye to lubricate it and pushed it back into its socket.
Stirring took his mind off his woes. He enjoyed a short moment of this peace, before Septicus’ pipes set up their squawking beyond the plague mill’s walls. The nurglings burst out laughing again, and plaguebearers, startled from their fear, recommenced their count. Hammers banged as the walkway was repaired.
Ku’gath shook his weary head and hunkered down over the cauldron, wishing in his rotten black heart that they would all just go away.
Chapter Five
Tyros besieged
Major Devorus of the Ninety-Ninth Calth brought the magnoculars away from his face and leaned against the sandbags of the forward observation post, as if the extra few centimetres would give him a clearer view into the mist cloaking the shore of Hecatone. Dark waters slapped against rockcrete pilings near his position. The wharf edge was a hard line of pale grey against the sea. Not far away enough, the enemy came, piling up their rocks.
The wind was fresh and coming up from Keleton on the far side of the River Sea. Devorus risked the air with the hood of his suit pulled back and mask dangling from its straps. Every movement squirted his warm stink up out of his suit as he moved. The smell coming off his own body was almost as bad as that hanging over the blighted marshes to the east, and being trapped beneath the mask with it was far, far worse, so he took his chances. Besides, he could see better without scratched plastek between him and the world.
Grime-ringed eyes blinked in a face hollowed out by lack of sleep. He squinted, trying to see what he could without the magnoculars’ aid. There was a trade-off, greater magnification with the device against a wider field of vision without.
Both views told him the same thing: Tyros was doomed.
The port city was a proud place. Its people were independent minded, islanders raised eight hundred metres from the shore. Near enough to spit on the mainland, if the wind was right. ‘Part of Hecatone, but forever apart.’ The Tyreans pronounced the old saying often, especially when outsiders were within earshot.
Never had the sentiment been more correct. Tyros was free of disease and unnatural influence. The wide plains of Hecatone between the city and the mountains, invisible in the yellow mists, were infested by both. Hecaton, the mountain city and Tyros’ not so good-natured rival, was a pit of filth.
The Death Guard had taken what they wanted in Hecatone and despoiled the rest. But although they had overrun Tyros’ mainland port facilities days after the invasion, months had gone by and they had yet to take Tyros itself. While Tyros stood, the enemy could not cross the River Sea at the city’s back. The River Sea was a wet nothing, fifty kilometres across at its widest. But on the Keletonian side, sanity prevailed so long as Tyros held.
Thanks to Tyrean effort, half of Parmenio remained unsullied. While Tyros stands, Devorus reminded himself. He glanced back at the damage wrought by the war’s opening bombardment upon his birthplace. City walls soared high behind the main defence line. They had suffered a major breach before the orbital defences of Keleton had driven back the plague fleet. A huge gap, big enough for a parade to sing its way through, gaped behind his command bunker a hundred metres away.
Typical of Keleton, thought Devorus. Never there when you need them right away, but they come good in the end.
Late to start their retaliatory fire, the defence laser batteries on the far side of the River Sea had not rested since the attack. Nothing flew close to the city in the atmosphere or in orbit. Nothing could. Tyros was defiant.
The sons of Mortarion were working to rectify that situation. At the shore’s edge they had begun the construction of a creeping mole. Day by day, their shovel-fronted vehicles pushed thousands of tonnes of rock into the water, inching out slowly across the channel. The distance had reduced by three-quarters already, and the giant tracked mantlets the Death Guard used to protect their engineers were moving closer. They were currently two hundred metres away, and that really was close enough to spit on.
When the Death Guard got across the water, that would be that. The breach was an open road with a feeble doorstop of defence lines and bunkers in the way.
Decorative, thought Devorus, to show we’re making the effort.
He wasn’t stupid. The enemy would have an easy time of getting into the city.
As the Death Guard extended their reach to the Imperial lines, so the Ultramarians had sought to do the same, digging up the flat wharves at the wall’s base to build out their trenches and redoubts to the water’s edge. At the beginning, Imperial guns had the range on the Death Guard, but not any longer. That was another thing that had changed. He had to be more vigilant. He was well within the range of a boltgun.
Devorus glanced at his chronograph. He wore it over the rubberised environmental suit that he had ceased to think of as clothing and come to regard as somewhere between a second skin and a prison.
‘Should be about now,’ said Devorus. He held up his magnoculars one-handed.
Sure enough, the work had stopped. The end of the mole was deserted. The mantlets loomed ominously out of the fog.
‘Same time, every damn day, like the Heretic Astartes want us to know.’
He leaned back from the wall of sandbags and shouted as loudly as he could at his command squad, although they were only paces away.
‘They’re starting up again! Everybody into cover! Now! Chem and bio hazard protocols in force!’
Vox-Operator Bacculus pumped the dynamo handle bolted to the master vox-unit. The enemy’s method of war wreaked as much havoc on their equipment as it did upon their bodies, and they’d run through a year’s worth of replacement parts for the vox-system in four weeks. They weren’t beaten yet, but they had been forced to be creative with repairs. Devorus watched Bacculus relaying the order down the line, and muttered quiet thanks to Enginseer 4-9 Solum for his ingenuity in repairing their kit.
From the contravallation on the far side of the harbour channel, dozens of tank-mounted mortars coughed out deadly loads. Thick smoke wafted from the armaments, breaking up the mist. Sound chased vision, dull thumps arriving seconds late, soft as flour sacks hitting a mill floor. By then the shells had already reached the apex of their climb.
As the rising fall of the raid sirens started its second round, the shells were howling out of the sky.
The rigours of survival had beaten many lessons into Devorus’ officers, observation being at the top of the list. Most of them would have been watching the Death Guard lines like hawks, and they were already shouting at their men to take cover and get their environmental gear into place before the voxed orders reached them.
Thirty metres over the line of bunkers and trenches, the shells burst open, filling the yellowed sky with expanding clouds of brown gas
. Like powder paint ejected from paper bags smacked open by clapping hands, the smoke rolled out in bulbous roils. Gravity dragged them in streaky lines towards the ground.
‘Bacculus, get out!’ he said. ‘The rest of you, out! Out! Gas, gas, gas!’ He waved his arms at his men, shooing them from the observation post.
His command squad grabbed up folders of orders, maps and other important documents by the armful and moved out quickly and calmly. Devorus felt a flush of pride. He was last to go, staying to watch the brown trails of tumbling powder reach long, deathly fingers for the trenches. They caught upon a striation of the atmosphere, were pulled sideways and stirred into a deadly fume by the wind. Not hard enough, he noted, to blow the gas away. The gas was heavy stuff, unnaturally dense. He pulled his suit in tight, as automatically as a man tying his laces. Catch fabric sealed his gloves shut. Zips and buttons closed up the front. He glanced at the puttees laced against his legs. The seals were either good or they weren’t. There was no good fussing over them now.
He waited for the last possible moment before drawing up the hood, setting the respirator over his mouth and nose and fastening the press studs shut on the rubberised straps, confining himself in a sauna of old sweat, bad breath and fear.
By the time he was moving out of the forward post, the chemsmoke drifted freely through the trenches, thick enough in places to obscure the walls of Tyros. He jogged on up the spur trench towards the main line in front of the breach. The squeaking of crank handles winding armaplas panes up to seal firing slits cut eerily through the gas. Sometimes the Death Guard lobbed a few explosive shells over to catch men hurrying for cover, but for the time being they were content to let their gas do the work. It could be viral, it could be purely chemical. Sometimes it was both. The plague warriors liked to keep the defenders guessing. He’d ask 4-9 Solum for a report afterwards. The results would join the rest in his log, adding to the columns of minute notations recording the many deaths the enemy flung at them.
He reached the end of the spur and joined the main trenchline. Somewhere in front, the wall stood, an invisible yet palpable presence in the fog. The gas was thickening. Cries came out of the murk. He turned to find the source, his breath loud in his mask. His foot snagged on a soft obstruction. He nearly fell.
A body. He stopped to check for life. Pointlessly, he knew, but Devorus was a man with a kind heart, and he did not want to let the war diminish him.
Hands clumsy in his gloves, he rolled the soldier over. The mask came free. Acid in the gas had perished the straps. Poison had done the rest. Dead white eyes stared out from a blistered face.
Devorus didn’t recognise the man; his face was too badly disfigured. He snagged the soldier’s ident tags and stuffed them in a large external pocket. Once decontaminated, he’d pass them to the regimental Adeptus Munitorum attaches in the city. The soldier’s name would be put in a book somewhere and promptly forgotten, but that was procedure.
‘Pity,’ said Devorus.
The safety catch on his laspistol caught on his leather holster. He really needed to get that fixed.
He put a single las-pulse through the soldier’s eye, cooking his brain to jelly. Steam curled up from his ruined eye socket. They’d not had an outbreak of the walking pox for a few weeks but it had to be done.
Procedure.
The catch snagged on his holster as he replaced his gun.
He followed the short-lived whooshes of venting units purging bunkers of gas. Cleaner air perturbed the smoke in excitable bursts. Soon after he was at the dull plasteel door of his command post near the wall breach. He ducked through into the tepid gush of the decontamination shower, then out the far airlock door, reborn a dripping rubber man into the snug interior.
He pulled his mask off and swapped his own breath for the combined fug of five others. Antiseptics, sweat and chemical counter agents scented with an incongruous dash of floral soap pricked tears from his eyes, yet he breathed the stale recycled air with the relief of a drowning man breaching the surface.
‘Where did you get to?’ said Bacculus.
All the command squad were there, huddled on ammo boxes, leaning on their lasguns like sitting beggars hugging their crutches.
‘Sir,’ said Devorus. He busied himself checking and rechecking his seals.
‘Screw you, sir,’ said Bacculus. ‘What happened?’ He was on edge, worried for his commander.
‘I stayed to watch,’ said Devorus.
‘You take too many risks,’ said Bacculus. ‘Sir,’ he added. ‘I mean, we quite like you. I don’t want you to die mostly for that, but mostly because you’re the last ranking officer in this detachment, and if you go, then we get Commissar Trenk in charge.’
‘I’m touched by your concern,’ said Devorus.
‘I can imagine what Trenk would say about bodies staying out “to watch”,’ Bacculus said archly. He too was going over his seals. Pat pat, tug tug, stretch stretch; Astra Militarum procedure was somewhat enthusiastically inculcated into the Imperium’s soldiers, but the most brutal drill sergeant could not teach as fast as the myriad ways to die the Death Guard had for them. No seals, no life. A simple equation every soldier knew the answer to. Pat pat, tug tug, stretch stretch.
‘I imagine that he’d probably shoot the man,’ said Devorus. ‘Because he shoots people readily, including for not calling their superiors “sir”, Bacculus, so you best hope nothing happens to me.’ Devorus patted his seals again. He recognised it as borderline obsessive. He was lucky his mind had begun only to fray and not break like so many others had.
‘That’s what I am trying to do,’ said Bacculus.
‘Alright, alright,’ said Devorus irritably. ‘I’m fine.’
Bacculus scraped mud off the vox-set. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.
The others said nothing. They watched the exchange with haunted eyes.
Devorus sat on an upended ammo crate. The power packs it had conveyed to the front line were long used up. They should have lasted through a decade of recharging cycles, but entropy danced to the Death Guard’s tune on Parmenio, and the packs were worked out in months. He leaned the back of his head against the plascrete wall. Gas bombardment rumbled on outside, the erratic heartbeat of a dying giant.
He was so tired. Sleep had become a luxury to be jealously guarded. Every moment of rest, every moment, he’d shoot a man for stealing. Every moment should be…
Devorus’ head jerked back upright. He blinked grittily. His men were staring at the floor, a still life of misery. They were already dead, remembered only as a painting on a museum wall.
He blinked again. And again. His eyes wouldn’t stay open. Periods of dark outlasted light. He didn’t mean to fall asleep. A jumble of memories crowded his imagination, desperate for attention before they followed the waking world into black.
A shattering roar punched him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, hurling him sideways into the wall. He rolled over, coughing pulverised rockcrete. Microparticles hazed the air in a floury blizzard that obscured all.
A murderous hail of explosive ordnance pounded down, shells expertly dropped onto the line of bunkers and redoubts. The bastards had herded them into cover.
A burning stench chased down the thought. There was a breach in the wall. A snake of brown smoke eased itself inside. Venom preceded the smoke invisibly; a rough catch in Devorus’ nostrils, a heat gathering in his pharynx, readying itself to spring upwards and burn out his brain.
‘Gas! Gas! Gas!’ His eyes streamed. Chemical heat tickled his lungs. His panic was swallowed by a greater pandemonium of screams and explosions. His dust-white hand skated through debris on the floor, feeling for his mask, finding slicks of blood beneath the grit instead. His throat was closing. Men were screaming, on and on, until splutters silenced them, and death drew out their breath.
Bacculus had been obliterated. An arm and a l
eg garnished a spread of guts next to his vox-set, which was absurdly intact. Etpin lay on the floor, his hood pushed into a hole in the back of his head like a conjurer’s handkerchief partway thrust into a fist. Jacov clawed at his face, his fingers raking through a mess of snot and blood clots coughing out of his mouth. Devorus’ other two men had been sitting exactly where the shell had hit. A bunker penetrator, the explosion directed forwards in a thin cone to shatter defences. Explosive force, targeting and delivery had been expertly calibrated. By rights, the explosion’s shockwave should have destroyed the occupants. The Death Guard had made sure it did not deliberately. They had a disdain for quick deaths.
Devorus gulped for air. His throat was closing. The gas was a pure chemical weapon. No disease load. Suffocation was his lot. It could have been worse.
Coloured spots swarmed his vision, busy as bacteria in a sample dish. This was it. Death had come. Twenty-nine years of life, over.
Bombs shivered the earth. Devorus coughed. Hot glass raked his throat. No air came.
A metal hand grabbed his hair, another jabbed into his armpit, levering his nerveless arm away from his side, and dragged him roughly up. A mask was placed over his face. Hard fingers yanked the straps closed and probed the seals. Another hand yanked back the collar of his uniform. A cold nozzle pressed into his neck and fizzed a stinging kiss into his skin.
Suddenly, Devorus could breathe again. He half-leapt up, drawing in great lungfuls of filtered air.
The hard metal hand pressed him back against the wall. A female voice spoke, melodious despite the harshening of her voxmitter.