Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  ‘Calm, let the antidote do its work. You’ll be needed to fight soon enough, servant of the Emperor.’

  The helmet of Sister Superior Iolanth hovered over him, her red armour brighter than the blood soaking into the plascrete dust. Behind her a white-armoured Sister Hospitaller was reloading her medicae gauntlet with fresh phials of antidote.

  ‘He’s fine, move on. Treat as many as you can.’

  ‘Yes, Sister Superior,’ said the hospitaller, and left the bunker. Incredibly, the rear part of the command post was intact and powered. The cleansing lock opened smoothly. The nozzles still jetted water when the Sister passed through to the outside. The smashed-in bunker front looked like it belonged in another place.

  Iolanth shoved a lasgun at him. It wasn’t his.

  ‘Get up, you’re needed. They’re launching an assault.’

  ‘They targeted me deliberately.’

  ‘It looks that way, but by the grace of the Emperor, you live. Come.’

  He followed her out of the command post. Her immaculate wargear was a beacon of rich crimson, leading him on into a world stripped of vibrancy; mixed clouds of brown gas, white dust, grey smoke.

  ‘This way,’ she said. Iolanth’s squad were blots of life, hurrying down the defence line in strict formation that no explosion, rubble or threat disrupted. Iolanth looked skywards. Her voxmitter clicked as she switched to a private comms channel.

  ‘They’re coming in now,’ she said to Devorus. ‘Look to the sky and ask for salvation. I have something to show you, something miraculous. Pray you witness it before you die.’

  The west wind blew stronger, caressing Devorus’ hood and chilling the rubber unpleasantly against his skin. Even through the breathing mask a stink reached him, a watery reek redolent of stagnant meres and pits clogged with the blackened flesh of trapped corpses.

  A buzzing monstrosity drifted through a gap in the brume, and then a second, as tall and bulky as a groundcar tilted onto its nose.

  They were machine abominations of flesh and metal, made with diabolical arts, repellent in every way. They called them engines, but the appurtenances of a machine – the glaring glass oculus, the armour and throaty engine block – could not disguise their origins in the warp. They were a hideous melding of the material and immaterial. Pulsing flesh sagged against greened brass hoops in the armoured shell, too loosely held in place, like the whole lot would slip free and slop out onto the ground. Each was a diseased crustacean of a thing.

  Iolanth held up her hand. Her squad halted instantly, and Devorus ran into the power pack sitting on her back. She didn’t move. He bounced off. ‘Wait,’ she said.

  The daemon engines flew by, ducted fans chopping thickly through the battle smog. They vanished.

  Devorus’ men opened fire. The thinning clouds of gas lit up with red. Light bursts stabbed into the side of the machines, bringing showers of yellow sparks from rusting armour. The thick column of a lascannon’s discharge stabbed into the side of one. Black smoke corkscrewed from the bloated flesh, and its palpitations quickened. The engine stopped in the air, the collection of pipes hanging from its rank underbelly snaking around beneath it. The slightest tilt of its triple engines had it lazily turn on the spot.

  From the brazen nozzles of its weapons, the droning engine vomited.

  The defences offered little protection. The slop found its way through the smallest crack, corroding and infecting those it touched in the same instant. Shouts clotted into gurgles. Boils swelled with supernatural speed on skin that was already melting. Devorus looked on helplessly, praying that none of the fluid would touch him. The noisome smell was an assault in itself.

  ‘Move!’ Iolanth snapped. She shoved him forward. The strength imparted to her by her battle armour sent him on his way.

  More screams greeted the toxin’s hiss as the second engine opened its valves. Iolanth’s Sisterhood paused and opened fire with their boltguns, driving the nearest of the great machines off in a storm of micro explosions.

  ‘This way!’ Iolanth shouted. She broke into a run. Extra power hummed into her limbs. Devorus struggled to keep pace. They ran as another barrage fell among the lines, dodging explosions with nothing but luck to preserve them.

  They barrelled into an empty gun emplacement. Iolanth came to a stop, her domed helm sweeping back and forth across the mess in search of something. ‘Where is she?’ she shouted.

  A poorly ranged shell slammed into the harbour and blew, sending up a spout of water a hundred feet tall. The boom of the explosion and rush of the short rain deafened Devorus. He flinched. His ears rang. The Sisters stood firm.

  When his hearing had recovered they were shouting excitedly.

  ‘–on! She’s alive!’

  ‘Up there!’ One of the women pointed to the top of a pile of rubble that had been a bunker last time Devorus had seen it.

  A girl in a white shift dress climbed the wreck, floating serenely rather than walking, it seemed, with the underwater slowness of a person bewitched.

  ‘What’s she doing? Get her back down here!’ said Devorus. ‘What by the Sainted Throne is that girl doing in the port?’

  ‘Wait!’ Iolanth shouted. The women watched, rapt.

  ‘Throne!’ Devorus swore at the Sisters’ inaction. By then he was already moving, racing out of the empty emplacement and up the heap of broken rockcrete. Iolanth’s footsteps clashed on the false stone close behind him.

  The girl stared unblinkingly, her eyes fixed on the sky as she clambered up chunks of bunker wall. Her feet dislodged the rhomboid shards of broken armourglass.

  Her bare feet.

  Devorus looked her up and down. She was young, maybe sixteen or seventeen standard years. So unlikely was the situation, he only truly saw then that the dress was all she wore. No stockings, no shoes or gloves, no helmet. Nothing to shield her from the enemy’s diseases. The dress wouldn’t have protected her from a cold spring day. She was out in the poison murk unharmed.

  He reached his hands out to her unsurely.

  She looked back at him, walking forward now without looking where her feet were placed. Serenity surrounded her.

  Devorus reached for her trailing shift. Iolanth caught his arm in a robot’s grip, halting it instantly.

  He looked into glaring eye lenses.

  ‘Wait, and see what happens,’ she said.

  ‘You’re condemning her to death!’ he shouted.

  Iolanth squeezed his arm. Her hands were small, even in her battleplate, but the force she exerted was crushing.

  ‘Stop,’ she commanded.

  ‘Alright! You’ve made your point,’ he said, trying to shake her off. He couldn’t.

  ‘I know your heart, Devorus. If I let you go you will try to save her. I cannot let you go.’

  He looked helplessly at the child.

  ‘Watch,’ said Iolanth. ‘Watch! She’s the one I told you about, the girl that cleansed the well.’

  ‘Was that true?’ asked Devorus. ‘Did it happen?’

  Iolanth did not answer his question but said, ‘Prepare to witness a miracle.’

  When she was upon the edge of the shattered bunker the girl caught the daemon engines’ attention. They shut off their plague torrents and turned around in stately contempt of the men firing at them, descending through snapping intersections of lasgun beams to hover over her, their ducted fans humming insect songs.

  Organic liquors dribbled from orifices. The daemon machines stank like a thousand years of rot.

  The girl stood fearless before them. Her shift was purest white, impossible in the dire state of the siege. Her skin was pure and clean.

  ‘Before decay stands purity,’ said Iolanth, her voice awed behind the roughness of the voxmitter.

  Astounding sights were commonplace in that age. Devorus had seen things he could not explain and did
not want to. This was something new.

  The daemons’ ruby lenses gleamed silent hatred at the girl. Venom gathered in the tips of the vast hypodermics protruding from their foreparts.

  The girl held up her hand.

  From the machines came the thump and whine of pumps building tempo. Vessels set behind their nozzles gurgled with pressure. They released their deadly torrent together.

  They were all caught in it: girl, Battle Sisters and the major.

  Devorus screamed as the wash of liquid hit him. He continued screaming as it ran over his face, and infiltrated the seal around his hood. He screamed as it filled his nostrils and seeped through his lips.

  He was screaming still as he tasted it. His brain froze.

  The liquid in his mouth was nothing but water; pure water, cleaner than any he had drunk for months. He blinked, and looked up in confusion to the engines.

  Filth left the nozzles. Water hit the people.

  Something shielded the girl. Before the slime hit her, it changed and a sphere of water splashed and sprayed from an invisible barrier. Devorus, naturally, assumed an energy field of the sort carried by fortunate priests and the highest officers – all dead now, he thought. The fields hadn’t helped them. But no, it could not be. She wore a white shift. She carried no kit nor any form of device.

  ‘How?’ he said, holding his hands into the sweet water deflected from the girl’s shield so he might see better.

  ‘The Emperor,’ said Iolanth rapturously.

  Wonders grew into greater wonders. Bright yellow light sprang from the girl’s eyes, spearing the machines in their single, unblinking glass oculi.

  ‘Begone,’ she said. The voice wasn’t hers. It sounded like… It sounded…

  Devorus could not recall what it sounded like, even immediately after hearing it. But it wasn’t the voice of a girl, and it scared him to the core.

  Grinding fan blades seized. The machines fell from the sky all of a sudden, first one, then the other, like hanging victims with their nooses cut. Smoking armour plates crashed off the rubble, empty, their fleshy contents gone. The poison fog blew back from the girl, and the sun blazed around her head until… No, Devorus saw he was mistaken again. The light came from no sun but the girl, shining around her head in a complex halo.

  She turned to look at him, only at him, and all the fear Devorus had felt in the last nine months was trivial to the terror he felt in that moment.

  ‘Keep faith, Devorus,’ she said. Light blazed from her mouth as it did from her eyes, so brightly he could not bear to look into it. Her voice possessed an ancient power that pushed inside him, rearranging the clockworks of his soul. ‘Through faith you shall be saved. Belief is the path to victory.’ Fog swirled, afraid. ‘Believe, and live.’ She looked skywards, through the dissipating gas towards the sickly heavens. ‘The primarch is coming.’ Thunder rumbled a single peal, silencing the thumping barks of the Death Guard mortars. A sudden wind blew outwards from her, tugging at the Sisters’ cloaks and whipping the girl’s hair around her face.

  The wind hurried the gas away from the line. The fog went with it. For the first time in days, Devorus could see beyond the broken curtain walls of Tyros into the city.

  The girl held her hand up to her face, tottered, and collapsed with a moan.

  ‘A miracle,’ said Iolanth. ‘A miracle,’ she said to Devorus. She finally let his arm go. It had gone completely numb, and sparkled with the pains of returning blood. He barely registered it as he scrambled up the mound to where the girl lay.

  The light extinguished, she was frail, young. He took her up in his arms. She weighed nothing, nothing at all. He shook her gently. Consciousness remained resolutely elusive.

  ‘I told you that you should have come with me this morning,’ said Iolanth. Her wargear glistened with droplets of pure water. Some of the Sisters were setting aside their bolters and uncorking tiny glass philtres, capturing the drops reverently as they ran from their armour plates. ‘The Emperor turns His face towards Parmenio at last. We shall be saved.’

  Her Sisters were moving up to Devorus. They took the girl from him.

  He looked down the line. There were figures at the edge of the mole, but they would not come out of the mist, and they retreated with it.

  ‘A miracle,’ said Iolanth reverently. She rested her hand on Devorus’ shoulder, and this time the touch was soft. ‘A saint.’

  Chapter Six

  Typhus challenged

  Focused light cut through the smog preceding Typhus’ advance into the kill zone. Hundreds of collimated beams sliced the air in rapid pulses. Too fast for the eye to see, only on extended bursts did they become visible as stuttering lines boring through the smoke.

  The Death Guard advanced into the teeth of it, droning their miserable hymns. They fired as they walked, their boltguns rusting but deadly functional, smashing apart bodies and robbing lives in time with their ponderous steps. Typhus regretted the waste of flesh. Bullet and blade were effective tools in the prosecution of the Long War, but his preference was for pestilence. Little despair was generated by explosion’s swift dismemberment, only a flicker of shock. Typhus did so enjoy their despair. His psychic ability was greater than it had ever been. Through witch’s eyes he watched the souls of the lost flee their bodies into the uncertainty of the warp regrettably quickly.

  Despair was exquisite. The utter loss of hope was Typhus’ favourite wine, only exceeded in piquancy by the emergence of those few mortals with the resilience to survive, see the truth, and turn to the worship of Grandfather Nurgle. But there was a battle to be won. He must indulge himself another time. Lingering death was prevented. He resented the loss of possible converts; he could taste the enemies’ wavering resolve in the face of his sclerotic majesty. Some at least would have turned. They all had to die.

  The last defence regiments of the Ultramarian Auxiliaries gathered in the secondary operations halls around the orbital starport’s command hub. There were a few Adeptus Astartes scattered among them. The Great Plague Wars stretched Ultramar’s defences to the limit, and there had not been many Space Marines loyal to the corpse god on the world of Odyssean anyway. They had all ascended to the station. In tedious fashion the Space Marines attacked and retreated, attempting to lure the Death Guard into traps and killing grounds as per Guilliman’s predictable combat doctrine. Typhus and his warriors marched right into them, trusting to their resilience to keep them safe. A few had fallen, but that was the Death Guard way; indomitable assault, stoic in the face of losses. A little blood spilled sharpened the satisfaction of killing the sons of the lapdog primarch.

  Typhus fought from the front. It was no good if Nurgle’s chief worshipper hung back. The mortals had to see the power granted him by his god, to witness how little regard their false deity had for them. They had to see his glory; only then might they relinquish hope and loyalty and throw themselves upon Nurgle’s mercies.

  Typhus handled his war scythe gently. The slow grace of his movements was magnified by the length of the shaft, becoming the unstoppable blur of the blade. It hissed through the air chased by blue sparks. Anything it met was obliterated with the almighty bang of disruptor fields. He kept the edge sharp, but mostly the manreaper did not so much cut as smash. With a deft flick he brought the blade round in a loop, cutting into a defence line of welded plates. It broke plasteel as easily as flesh. Makeshift defences fell in two. He kicked his way through the barricade. Another sweep. Three men exploded. Las-bolts slammed into the energy shield around his Cataphractii plate. His gaze locked with that of a terrified soldier, whose eyes were wide behind his breath-misted gas mask visor. Typhus saw the wavering of resolve in the man’s aura.

  ‘Lay down your arms!’ he said to the man. ‘Forget your merciless god. Join with us. An eternity of death and rebirth awaits! Father Nurgle is generous – he has many gifts for the faithful. There is a place for y
ou all in the fields of his garden, where blessed suffering may be endured without hurt or harm, and the joyful may live forever in holy filth!’

  The man responded with a lasgun shot to Typhus’ face. The beam snapped past the power field, scoring a black line across Typhus’ white helmet. Daemonic ichor wept from the wound. The armour had bonded to Typhus’ body long aeons ago, and he felt the blow as a hot needle of pain.

  With a grunt of annoyance, Typhus held up his hand and crushed the man’s head with psychic force.

  The mortals would not listen. It saddened him. They were so foolish; all they saw were monsters garlanded in rot. They did not apprehend the favour the Death Guard’s mutations were, nor see their maladies for blessings. Typhus tasted the mortals’ horror. If they could but see past these things they regarded as disfigurements, they would spy salvation and see Nurgle’s gifts as beautiful. It was their loss.

  He would take their souls by violence instead.

  As the last of the men fell in half around the blade of his manreaper a volley of boltgun shells exploded across his energy field. A couple made it through to the armour plate beneath, detonating on Typhus’ ceramite hide. He lumbered around, seeking his assailants.

  The approach to the command centre was guarded by a wide killing ground. A pair of projecting bastions flanked the outer gateway. Strongpoints had been laid to guard the approach. It had been done skilfully, probably by one of Dorn’s sons, thought Typhus. Of course, any who manned these bastions of sheet metal and fresh rockcrete blocks would die, but the defenders knew they would all perish. They were selling themselves as dearly as possible. The last of the Adeptus Astartes were advancing into the Death Guard, seeking to break up their advance and pin them in place so that they might be at least delayed. It was a hopeless last stand. Typhus’ army was the full first company of a Space Marine Legion, a force that outnumbered a Chapter of Space Marines many times over, and there had only been half that – five hundred – present at the spaceport to begin with.