Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  ‘This is no building,’ he reminded himself. ‘It is the playground of madness.’

  No sooner said, circumstances bore out his words. They turned towards the building’s core into a tunnel knee-deep in thick slime that flowed with slow, strong currents. While the party were in its flood, freakish sights greeted them at every turn. Walls of eyes, corridors like the branchings of diseased lungs, and everywhere deformed things skipping through the muck, never seen, only glimpsed.

  Felix pulled his boots from the slime. The paint was sloughing off, revealing dull ceramite beneath. Soon it would begin to pit.

  ‘Tetrarch.’ Kaspian, his voice tinged with disgust. He was looking into a large machine hall opening up off the corridor. The devices within were covered in pulsing fronds of something halfway between animal and vegetation. But it was the wall that held the sergeant’s gaze.

  Felix joined him. The threshold of the machine hall was higher than the corridor and he stepped up out of the river. The tetrarch was glad to be free of the slime.

  Kaspian played his gun-mounted stab light over the wall. Its beam caught upon rounded organic shapes. Arms, elbows, faces, all human, covered in a thick layer of mucus. At first Felix took it to be a work of art, a frieze depicting a hundred people nestled into one another. He reminded himself of where he was. If it was art, it was not of the conventional kind.

  A hundred human bodies were half-melted into the fabric of the wall. The uniform surface was an illusion generated by a coating of slime. Where the mucus covered less thickly, Kaspian’s stab light picked out badges, tools and differing colours of cloth.

  ‘The facility workers,’ said Kaspian. He ran the cone of light further up. ‘Mortal, servitor and adept.’

  Felix looked at it briefly. His attention was on the unfolding battle depicted on his display. They could not hear it down there, but reports blinked into his systems. Casualties were mounting.

  ‘An outrage,’ Felix said. ‘But we can be thankful they are dead. Move out.’

  After the hall, the sagging, slime-filled artery they walked turned by slow degree into something recognisable as a corridor. The cartolith in Felix’s datafile suddenly made more sense. The reactor core was not far. The deeper they went into the complex, the more pieces of wrecked technology were visible, and here and there stretches of the plasteel wall were clear of flesh plaques, though all of it was black with corrosion and accreted ooze. Brass plates bearing Nurgle’s tri-lobed symbol were embedded in this filth, leaking greenish oxide into the mess.

  After twenty minutes of walking, the river slid noiselessly through the floor into a dark void. They had reached their goal. The corridor opened out into the huge cylinder that had once housed the plasma reactor control systems. The reactor was encased in a ferrocrete sphere at the centre of this cylinder. Numerous engineering decks stacked over each other filled the space around the core.

  Felix tested the floor of grillwork sections dubiously. The plague lord’s attentions had turned the floor into a treacherous landscape, and where the river flowed it had melted away completely. On the far side the plasteel ended at a thick lip of ferrocrete projecting from the reactor core. That looked more or less solid, but the way across to it was rife with peril.

  Black veins ran down the walls in rootlike profusion. They covered over the observation galleries, as thick as ivy, obscuring them completely, but on the rotted deck plates they were sparser, a spreading network that endlessly split and rejoined itself before gathering up into ropes and piercing the ferrocrete of the core. They pulsed softly, alive. In the spaces between the veins were gaping holes opening onto falls a thousand feet deep.

  ‘Do you get a reading from the reactor?’ asked Felix.

  ‘No,’ said Kaspian.

  ‘Voi?’

  The Obsidian Knight planted her sword point down. She rested her right hand on the hilt, leaving her left free to speak. The energy of the warp is strongest there. She pointed at the reactor sphere. The ferrocrete shields us as it would have shielded the plasma reactor. Be careful when we approach. She signed as efficiently with one hand as with two.

  ‘Then our intelligence is correct. Proceed,’ said Felix.

  ‘Baskvo, guard the servitor. The rest of you, watch your step,’ warned Kaspian. ‘Over one at a time. Stick to the line of the beams.’

  They walked carefully, following the girders supporting the deck plates. These were visible through the grille of the floor, and were in barely better condition than the metal they supported. They creaked and shook as the Reivers jogged over them. When Asheera Voi ran over, they barely shifted, but when Felix set foot upon one, it moaned dangerously under the weight of his Gravis plate.

  ‘Steady, tetrarch,’ said Euphain. ‘Maybe you should hold back here. Our armour is lighter.’

  ‘I am aware of the risk,’ said Felix. He looked back at where the servitor waited in the corridor mouth. ‘The cyborg is about as heavy as I. If I cannot make it, neither will the device.’

  ‘You should wait,’ said Modrias.

  ‘No,’ said Felix, and strode out. He crossed at a steady pace. The floor bucked and swayed, but he made it across to the ferrocrete casing of the reactor heart without mishap.

  The ferrocrete was eaten into strange shapes. The surface of it crumbled to wet powder when stepped upon, but it was firmer footing than the plasteel grid.

  ‘Bring the servitor across,’ Felix said, and beckoned.

  Kaspian ordered the cyborg to proceed. The servitor’s simple brain understood the danger. Tracks jerking with minute course adjustments, it negotiated its way over the unstable deck.

  Felix looked down. A succession of similar floors were hidden in the foetid night below. If the servitor fell through, they would not be able to retrieve the device in time, if it was not smashed to pieces by the fall.

  The servitor was within three metres of the edge when the beam it was following broke. Deck plating that had seemed solid disintegrated into a blizzard of rust flakes. The cyborg pitched forward into a sudden hole, but did not fall. The front of its tracks were pointing into the yawning black, its chest jammed against the broken edge of the hole. Blood leaked where the jagged metal penetrated its torso.

  The servitor bleeped. The light in its augmetic eye stuttered. The tracks spun, first forwards, then backwards. It shook in place. The floor sagged in. Metal clanged off the floor below.

  ‘Quickly! Shut it off!’ commanded Felix. ‘Before its attempt to rise results in its fall!’

  The tracks spun into reverse. They pulled hard at the deck plates, shredding them with a metallic wrenching. The servitor hauled itself partially out of the hole before the deck around it collapsed further, and it fell through.

  ‘The device!’ shouted Felix.

  The servitor took a large swathe of broken deck plating with it. Two grapnels hissed out from the Reivers, thunking onto the smooth side of the device. The lines snapped taut. Euphain staggered past Felix. The tetrarch snapped out a hand to grab him, catching Euphain’s power pack around a stabilisation nozzle. Euphain skidded to a halt by the edge of the ferrocrete. The weight of the servitor pulled at him and Felix.

  ‘Hold!’ ordered Felix, his voice strained. He activated his maglocks. They pulled at the reactor casing, and should have anchored him to the ferric material, but the platform was rotten, and chunks of it were pulled up by his boots. Euphain lurched closer to the edge.

  Modrias had the other line. He was leaning back, straining at the grapnel gun with both hands. He was ploughing up a long furrow in the softened ferrocrete as he was dragged forwards, grunting with the effort.

  Kaspian let out a shout. ‘Disengaging carriage locks!’

  Suddenly the pull lessened by more than half. The Space Marines staggered backwards with the change in the weight. The servitor plummeted down into the pit, falling through deck after deck with a tremendous
crashing sound.

  Felix helped Euphain back to his feet. The two Reivers retracted their lines. Silent motors pulled up the device onto the platform.

  Voi and Kaspian went to the sphere to examine it for damage.

  The device is functional, my lord tetrarch, signed Voi.

  ‘I have movement coming in from the southern quadrant,’ said Kaspian.

  ‘They will have heard that. The time for stealth is done. We must be quick,’ said Felix. He deactivated silent running protocols and brought the full capabilities of his armour online.

  He broke vox silence. ‘This is Tetrarch Felix of Vespator.’ He felt strange saying the words. He had yet to go to the world of his new office. ‘Attention Strikeforce Purgator, we are in position. Units five, nine and twelve abandon current mission targets and gather on my position. The rest of you, fall back to the rendezvous points and await reinforcement.’

  The Reivers raised their weapons. Sighting mechanisms engaged, machine-spirits waking and whining with fresh power. Euphain and Modrias hoisted the sphere up between them. They jettisoned the lines, leaving the magnetic grapnels attached as handles. They lifted the device and toted their bolt carbines in their free hands.

  ‘This way,’ said Kaspian. ‘The walls of the reactor containment chamber are breached. We can get in. Daler, Baskvo, fall back and provide cover.’

  ‘We march for Macragge,’ whispered Daler. He and his brother vanished into the dark, the silent motors of their specialised power armour giving no indication where they were. If it weren’t for the unit signifiers flickering on Felix’s cartolith, he would have had no knowledge of their position.

  ‘If the wall is open, we can be sure no mortal engine powers the shield, or we would all be dead,’ said Felix. ‘Proceed cautiously.’

  Around the periphery of the reactor core, the control stations and mechanisms used to govern the heat of plasmic reactions were piles of damp detritus. Consoles were reduced to fragile frameworks of corrosion surrounded by shards of brittle plastek, broken glass and wet plates of rust. There was no sign of the thousands of mortals and servitors that ran the machinery. It had the look of an ancient ruin, though Parmenio had been attacked not long ago, and the facility had been as well maintained as any in Ultramar until it had been taken.

  They came to the hole in the reactor core. A giant crack ran between the floor and the one above where ferrocrete had crumbled away to nothing, reduced to soggy heaps of rusty waste.

  From inside, a ponderous pounding could be heard and a soft unlight issued that threw silver shadows and brought black highlights to the edges of objects.

  Kaspian moved to enter first. Felix called him back.

  ‘In this situation, having heavier armour than yours is an advantage,’ he said. ‘And I also have this.’

  A thought impulse activated his iron halo. With a crackle, a skin of blue energy snapped into life around him.

  Felix cycled up his boltstorm gauntlet to rapid fire. He held it out in front of himself, fist pointing forward at chest height.

  ‘Await my order. Protect the device at all costs.’

  He pushed inside a space no man should be able to enter. A plasma reactor imprisoned an artificial sun, its raging energies siphoned to power whatever was required. All the titanic needs of the city of Hecaton had been sated by this one crucial location. Once activated, a reactor core could burn forever, provided it was correctly fuelled and cared for.

  The star was dead. Felix emerged into the spherical chamber and was confronted with a dreadful sight.

  Growing into the empty reactor shell was an immense, five-chambered, black heart. An enormous parasitic cancer that had overtaken its host body, it filled two-thirds of the space. The heart’s extremities were close enough for Felix to touch, but the bulk of it was pushed up against the far side, creating a cavity walled with throbbing flesh on one side and decayed technology on the other. Where visible, the ignition spikes that had called forth the fusion reaction were furred with rust. Elsewhere they were buried under drooping folds of rancid skin. Ropes of pale white muscle tethered the pulsing organ. They shivered with every thunderous beat. A sickening, liquid churn filled the space. The drive of each systole sent ripples of force across the heart’s veinous surface. Slime dripped from it. Where it flowed most persistently it had eaten through the reaction spikes, adamantium containment flask and the ferrocrete wall behind. For all its appearance the heart was no physical organ. Felix could feel something in the back of his skull, a madness like a caged rat trying to gnaw its way out of imprisonment. A vile aftertaste tainted his mouth. The rest of the building’s bizarre changes could almost pass as something natural, but not this. Through the heart’s twitching aortas, the power of Chaos pumped. From here the taint ran.

  Boltgun fire sounded from the control cylinder.

  ‘We have attracted the attentions of Mortarion’s sons,’ voxed Kaspian. ‘They are here. Two squads, more on the way.’

  ‘Proceed within,’ said Felix. He broadcast his helm feed to the rest of his small strike force. ‘We must place the device near the heart, but I do not think I can get any closer to it.

  ‘I’ll bring it through,’ said Kaspian. ‘Modrias and Euphain, support your brothers.’

  ‘Negative,’ said Felix. ‘Wait a moment while I formulate a theoretical for the placement of the bomb. I shall–’

  Swift footsteps came from behind. Felix moved aside at the moment Asheera Voi flashed past and leapt. Her armour powered her across the gap. As she flew, she reversed the grip on her sword so the point was held facing down and forwards.

  The silica glass edge whispered through the heart, bringing forth a torrent of blood. Asheera pulled the sword down, opening up the side of the organ from top to bottom as she slid down its black flesh. It spasmed, and a horrible wailing set up from an indeterminate place. The cataract of foul-smelling vitae flooding from the wound filled the reactor chamber as if it were a bowl. She disappeared into it.

  Kaspian joined Felix, lugging the sphere.

  ‘Obsidian Knight!’ cried Felix.

  An area of blood boiled, steaming and shrieking as if it were independently alive. Voi emerged from this turbulence, sheathed her sword and ran on before the rising tide, springing up the dilapidated reaction spikes to regain the edge of the crack. Felix and Kaspian hauled her up, dripping filth.

  Throw the device into the wound, she signed.

  ‘Very well.’

  Felix and Kaspian had to combine their efforts to toss in the device. It was heavy and awkward, but working together they accomplished the task, heaving it out of the crack and over the six-metre gap. The ball spun around four times as it flew, slapping into the gushing rent Asheera had carved in the heart as it commenced its fifth revolution. The heart quivered from its hurt, the edges of the wound gaped, but it beat still, and swallowed the device without change.

  Kaspian consulted his auspex. ‘It’s active,’ he said. ‘We have five minutes.’ He put away the scanning device and drew a combat knife as long as a mortal’s sword.

  ‘We have to keep the enemy back, stop them from deactivating it,’ said Felix. He pushed back through the crack in the wall into the control centre. Boltgun fire flared a score of metres away, answered by return shots from one of the corridors. ‘Can we survive the bomb’s detonation?’

  Yes, signed Asheera Voi. Though it will not be pleasant.

  ‘Then we make our stand here,’ Felix said. He pulsed out a coded communication warning the others to prepare for the device’s emissions, along with instructions to their battleplate to count down from his mark.

  The Death Guard were arriving in some numbers, crowding the tunnel several ranks deep. From the safety of the shadows, the four Reivers fired upon them as they arrived, giving no clue from where they would next strike. Felix watched the signifier dots of the warriors shifting position betwe
en each burst, and was impressed with their ability to move around so unstable an area whilst keeping up such a high rate of fire. He had fought rarely with the Reivers before. He was a veteran of open war.

  ‘So far they are coming in only from the tunnel opposite the one we used,’ said Kaspian. ‘They are big, bloated. They do not want to risk treading on this trap of a floor. We can contain them, I am sure. Provided they do not come in to attack from two fronts.’

  Felix had been spotted by the foe. The tubercular cough of rusting weapons boomed from the far side of the room. Explosions from bolt rounds impacting Felix’s aegis field lit up his armour. The light from the discharge picked him out for the rest, and more bolts followed. Daler felled a traitor with a bolt-round through the head. The Death Guard’s relic of a helmet ruptured, and he crashed down onto the deck, making the whole structure shake, but it did not break.

  Seeing this, one of the others aimed his bolter at the deck, riddling it. He paused to assess the results. When the plates remained where they were, he stepped out with one cautious foot, the bolt rounds smacking off him ignored. He pushed, once, twice, then stared up at Felix with mad eyes. Chortling maniacally, the Death Guard strode onto the deck. A dozen more followed. Muttering, or singing discordant songs, or laughing like madmen, they spread out across the decking.

  They came across the open, ignoring what little cover there was between them and their foe. If easy to hit, they were incredibly difficult to kill. They absorbed a mass of shots which would have slain a Space Marine, but they did not falter. When one did succumb, his fellows stepped over his smoking corpse without care.

  Modrias was the first to die. A mortis chime in Felix’s helm rang simultaneously as his identification marker blinked out of the thumbnail cartolith. The burning darts of bolt fire coming from his position ceased at the same time.