Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  Scowling miserably, the daemon Ku’gath pushed his way through the warp, stepping from one world to another in a beat of his rotten heart.

  Rain drizzled from green clouds, putting Ku’gath uncomfortably in mind of his rival Rotigus. Manifestation upon Parmenio had none of the joy of their ravaging of Tartella or the taking by plague of Iax. Septicus kept his horns hidden away under a cowl and his face sombre. His other lieutenants were equally morbid. The nurglings mewled and complained under Ku’gath’s bulk. He rocked his platform spitefully, giving them something real to moan about.

  The seven Great Unclean Ones of the Plague Guard legion approached Mortarion. The daemon primarch hunched on his throne, his wings folded against the driving rain. Parmenio was dark and miserable, but not in the right kind of way. Fresh winds probed at the edges of the stinking mists, threatening to tease them apart and blow away glorious foetor. Nearby, the weapons of mortals cut the atmosphere. This was not a propitious manifestation.

  Ku’gath looked at aurorae in the sky visible only to daemon eyes.

  ‘Nurgle’s power is slipping away,’ said Ku’gath. Iax had a shroud of warp current about it that he could draw strength from and force his existence upon the truculent cosmos. On Iax he felt vigorous. On Parmenio he could feel mealy mundanity under the flow of the warp, a grit under the sheets of a comfortable bed. He felt if he drew too hard on it to fuel his sorcery, it would give out. He would unravel, and the laws of the mortal realm would expel him. ‘The perfumed air of the garden wafts but fitfully over this place.’ He turned his mighty head to look beyond the platforms over the Death Guard camp beyond. ‘Your clock is in place. Does it not work?’ He shuddered. There was a wholesomeness emanating from somewhere uncomfortably close. Ku’gath had the sensation of being watched by unfriendly eyes. All the daemons felt it. They trudged out of the rift quietly. The nurglings had lost their mirth, becoming as miserable as the plaguebearers habitually were, whereas the plaguebearers themselves had become withdrawn, and whispered their counts. Beasts of Nurgle slumped by on acidic slime trails, whimpering, too cowed to play. The Plaguefather looked back at his stony-faced lieutenants – Septicus, Famine, the Gangrel, Pestus Throon, Squatumous and Bubondubon, who of them all was the only one to keep his good humour.

  ‘What have you tricked me into?’ Ku’gath demanded. He leaned forward, eliciting squeals of alarm from his palanquin bearers.

  ‘The plan has hit a further complication,’ said Mortarion. ‘The warp withdraws. The power that aided my brother through the othersea is at play here on the surface, working against our lord. I have hit a barrier at the western extremity of this continent, a city that will not fall. There is a protection over it.’

  ‘Which power stops you? Have you determined whether it is our ever-changing rival or… Him,’ said Ku’gath. Misgiving filled his miserable heart and spilled out between his rotting teeth. So potent was the feeling that Mortarion sank lower into his throne, like a cur fearful of his master’s whip.

  ‘Beyond the city the lands remain unblessed by Nurgle’s fecund gifts. All is slow stability, free of rot and rebirth.’

  ‘I asked which power, O lord of death,’ said Ku’gath. The muscles twitched around his loose eye, and he put up a fat hand to prevent its dropping out.

  ‘It matters not,’ said Mortarion. ‘The result is the same whoever challenges us. Our goals are unchanged. Parmenio is a stage for the second act of Guilliman’s fall. I have sent prayers to our Grandfather asking for his help. The portents are good. I am heeded.’

  ‘You need more aid?’ asked Ku’gath incredulously. ‘At your request I have brought the greater part of the daemonic host of Iax-that-will-be-Pestiliax.’ He shuddered. The flesh of his mountainous flanks quivered. ‘No more can be brought here. The legions of Nurgle are septets of infinity, seven times seven times seven and on, forevermore, but there is not warp current enough to support more at this place.’

  ‘We shall see,’ said Mortarion. ‘Nurgle will provide. The great battle for the soul of Ultramar is at hand. I will not rest until I have claimed this realm for Grandfather. He will support my aim. We will conquer this world and bring my brother to his doom on Pestiliax.’

  On the horizon, the false lightnings of void war flashed ever brighter. The final stabs of light hammered down from orbit to obliterate Hecaton. The fires of its destruction lit up the louring skies with cleansing orange. At the destruction of the city the warp gate shrivelled behind Ku’gath, narrowing the way between the worlds. The daemon legion wailed in consternation, and picked up its pace to get through before the path was shut.

  ‘Hurry!’ shouted Pestus Throon. ‘Hurry!’

  Ku’gath gasped. ‘And now the power lessens more. Our kind cannot tarry long here.’

  ‘My brother has identified and neutralised my warp clock more swiftly than I anticipated,’ said Mortarion. ‘But the portents are good. All is going to plan.’

  Ku’gath was unconvinced. ‘No more lies, Mortarion,’ he said, and turned his attentions to holding open the gate long enough for his legion to pass through.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Relief

  Another day closer to death. Devorus was in the forward observation post, right by the water. He had expected help after he had seen Hecaton burn. A week later none had come, and the enemy were closer to Tyros than ever.

  A shell detonated in the harbour. Water spouted high, splattering Devorus with seawater already turning foul. The enemy were close. The guns of the city wall were depressed to their lowest elevations. The enemy were coming within their minimum range, and so the guns pounded the harbour more than the foe. The air around Devorus’ position was mixed with seawater; moist and salty.

  ‘Fire!’ he shouted hoarsely. He had said the word so many times it had become meaningless. Lascannons shot, their beams persisting long enough to register as a burning, phantom flicker upon the retina. Molten metal ran from the dozer blades of the Death Guard siege tanks, mingling with the rubble they pushed into the water. Devorus’ hope that the enemy would abandon the mole and retreat from Tyros had gone unfulfilled. The arrival of the fleet spurred the enemy to a frenzy of activity. Work on the mole went into overdrive. Sickness sprang up in the streets of Tyros. Strange machine ailments compromised the city’s defences.

  Look to the mole, he thought. There is the threat. Concentrate. Thousands of the walking dead shambled alongside the tanks. They lacked the will to be useful as workers, so the Death Guard chained rocks about their necks and sent them forth. Driven on by their need to savage living flesh, the dead reached the end of the causeway and tumbled right into the water, the stones dragging them down to wet graves in the foundations of the siege works. Devorus ordered his men not to shoot them. It took too many hits to put them down, and they could not spare the ammunition. Arms flew away from bodies, and they did not slow. Shots punched through torsos, so all the guts fell out and clear air could be seen behind, but they came on. Even those whose legs were blasted away doggedly dragged themselves, hand over hand, towards the shore. There were more pressing targets to gun for. He would worry about the dead when they reached the island.

  ‘Target the heretics! Kill the traitors!’ he shouted, brandishing his laspistol over the broken docks.

  Conveyors rumbled behind the tanks, pouring gravel into the narrowing sea. The hulking figures of Traitor Space Marines walked beside them, whipping the hundreds of mortal slaves they brought to work for them, and lending a hand directly themselves, using their enhanced strength to toss boulders the weight of Devorus into the ocean.

  Devorus had not seen the Plague Marines so close for a while. There had been times, on other worlds, when he had faced them. Their appearance curdled his stomach nonetheless. His memories seemed too awful to be real; they had the enormity of lies. But the truth of the enemy was before him again. They were immense, hideous things warped beyond sanity’s capacity to understan
d. Devorus looked at them through his magnoculars, and felt his fragile grip on reality slipping away from him. With the machine’s aid he could see the Death Guards’ malformities in gruesome detail. The skin sloughing from flabby, exposed torsos, the fringes of luridly coloured tentacles poking out around armour plates, the limbs turned to whipping worms. Their stench was worse than the sight. They stank so much he could smell them over the frothing water, even through his rebreather. He thought if they came nearer, he might die simply by being in proximity to them. They smelled of disease, of the most hopeless hospitals in the worst of warzones, and the deepest, darkest plague pits.

  They should have been dead. Their wounds were severe and rotting, and their ailments obvious. Rather than weaken them and bring them to death, their afflictions made them strong. Their resilience was astounding. Their armour was close to scrap, but they shrugged off direct hits from lascannons and heavy bolters. Some of them waved cheerily when they were hit, or made juvenile noises. Their puerile behaviour only made them more terrifying.

  Devorus avoided looking at them through his magnoculars if he could help it. Not that he would need them for long to see the enemy in detail. They were close. The mole was only a hundred metres from the shore, and every minute saw it creep a little bit closer. By his estimation he had only an hour until they crossed the harbour and made it onto the island. Then the warped Space Marines would set foot upon Tyros’ land, and there would be plague walkers in horrific multitude. What would take him, he wondered, the living or the dead?

  Dark clouds bunched over the siege tanks. Cold wind, rank with damp and mould, blew from the shore.

  ‘Fire!’ he shouted again. Once more, the beams of lascannons slammed into the blades pushing rock, soil and bone into the churning ocean. Rotary cannons on the fronts of the tanks replied. Bullets whined, furious and insectile, past the defenders of the shore. Devorus’ engineers had strengthened the forward defences, making as good a redoubt as they could. A new wall constructed of shipping containers filled with rockcrete fronted the harbour, making a layered defence of three lines. Behind these barriers, the men were safer, but the volume of bullets was great, chance shots were common, and many died.

  ‘Fire!’ he ordered again. Heavy bolter rounds raked across pox walkers and Death Guard, hammering the former down, tearing chunks from the latter. The dead kept on coming, and the diseased Heretic Space Marines stood on open ground, inviting further tests of their fortitude with arms thrown wide. Worst of all, when the humans working alongside the traitors fell dead they were not long in getting back up, their faces fixed with the rictus of the pox walkers. They shambled forward, joining the mass.

  ‘Fire…’ Devorus said. His voice faltered. Over the mole a vortex of black smoke and sickly light formed. Mighty beings came to the front in the number of seven – Space Marine witches, draped in rotting man-skins and bearing staffs of gnarled green wood.

  They pointed their fetishes at the sea, and chanted words that ripped at the air in twisting streamers, polluting the very fabric of reality itself.

  Men shouted in alarm.

  ‘Witchery! Witchery! Sorcerers!’

  The sea boiled. White foam on grey water turned to black scum on stinking slime. The water jellied from liquid to solid. Squirming things pushed up through the thickening ocean, and a mat of pulsing veins formed, leaking ichor into the sea from dribbling nexuses. Flesh grew and spread between. Devorus recognised the shapes and form of Parmenio’s native marine flora and fauna in the growing mat, but hideously twisted and enlarged, before all semblance to natural things collapsed into the morass of flesh. This abomination wriggled its way across the ocean, grasping with elongating pseudopods at the pilings of the water front, and wrapping themselves fast around them with wet, suckering sounds. As the fringed vanguard of the flesh-way reached the shore, the back end solidified, going from disparate, filmy patches of matter to a solid causeway of pulsing, diseased life.

  A briny, rotten stink came from it, perceptible through his environmental gear. Vapours rose and stole ashore, switching this way and that with a life of their own. They appeared like shreds of ordinary ocean mist, but they were predatory, and aware.

  ‘Fire!’ shouted Devorus. He was close to panicking. He couldn’t show it, or his men would flee. ‘Shoot the bridge! Shoot the bridge!’

  At once, the heavy weapons emplaced along the shore fired, pummelling the surface of the living causeway. Their efforts were fruitless. Many shots rebounded from rubbery skin, deflected away from the unnatural organism by warpcraft. The surface throbbed and boomed, a linear drum, sending out sprays of water with each impact. Where hits did catch on the flesh and penetrate, black fluids bubbled forth, and poured as killing slicks into the sea.

  All around the causeway, things were dying. Sea life bobbed to the surface, crawling already with decay.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ a sergeant called. His frantic pointing directed Devorus’ attention to the far side. The tanks, thankfully, did not proceed; there was an apparent limit to the bridge’s carrying capacity. But the infantry were coming, proceeded by huge drifts of droning, evil-looking flies. The Death Guard were shrouded by them, their massive shapes hidden amid the swirling mass. With comical lopes they bounded across, using the give and bounce of the mat to propel them, proving their invulnerability to the firepower of the Astra Militarum. Heavy weapons fire and lasgun fusillade alike were swallowed up by the flies, whose shifting clumps made false figures while obscuring those that were real.

  The thumping of the enemy’s self-propelled mortars started up afresh. This time, no viral bombs were cast but simple explosives instead. Shells slammed hard into the makeshift defences, blasting out the sides of the containers with wrenching bangs. The mist was worse, creeping up to soldiers silently, and worming its way through the smallest of gaps. Those chosen by the vapour died horribly. They shook so hard their limbs broke. Vomited blood coloured the lenses of their masks red.

  Wounded men breathed their last in screaming agony. The lucky were annihilated instantly.

  Death reigned over the harbourside, and still the Death Guard were yet to open fire.

  ‘Sound the retreat,’ Devorus told his bugler, gripped by the certainty of defeat. ‘Now.’

  The bugler clicked his heels and bravely ventured out of the bunker door with his face uncovered; his instrument demanded it. The clear music of the horn cut through the racket of war. As Devorus’ officers and squad leaders caught the sound, it was joined by the far less melodious honking of air horns and the shrill of digital whistles passing on the command. Men shouted and began to fall back, all while shrieking shells rained down, and the diseased mist claimed more victims by touch alone.

  Devorus waited a moment. Unable to see much beyond the embrasure of the post, he judged the progress of the retreat by ear. When he guessed most of his men had begun to fall back, he turned to his new voxman. ‘Send a message, now. Bring down full bombardment on these coordinates.’

  ‘What coordinates?’ the soldier asked dumbly.

  ‘On our position! Tell the wall guns to shell this position!’

  The soldier stared back at him. Devorus swore, and snatched the vox-horn from his hand.

  ‘This is Major Devorus. Watch-code Ultima Phi. The enemy are breaking through. Prepare second line defences. Commence bombardment of my sector immediately.’

  A crackle told him he had been heard, though the words were lost. The buzzing of the flies reached beyond human hearing, infesting the vox waves.

  The Death Guard were nearly over the water. A mob of disease-twisted Parmenians went before them, absorbing many shots that would other­wise have found their mark in the bodies of the traitors.

  ‘We’re leaving. Now,’ he said. His command staff scrambled out. Devorus, as suited his temperament, left last.

  For the second time that week, Devorus found himself running away.

 
The daemon engines had been bad. This was far worse, a full-frontal assault by some of the deadliest warriors in the galaxy. He ran through the port, dodging explosions, all thoughts of command gone from his head. He did not think at all. Instinct took over. His body demanded survival and wrested control from his conscious mind. A crane took a direct hit and fell sideways, clanging down not far from him. He was dodging its fall before he even noticed it toppling. A unit of men was obliterated only twenty metres away, turned from running, shouting, thinking beings to smoking char in an eye blink.

  All the city was firing now, obliterating its own port with its heavy wall guns. Devorus glanced back as he fled. The bombardment punched towers of yellow fire into the swirling mass of insects. There were, finally, dead Heretic Space Marines lying upon the damp rockcrete wharfs. But they were few and far between, and even if every one were felled by a lucky shot, the walking dead were too numerous to slay. They walked onwards, slow as a spill of tar towards the breach in the wall.

  Behind him, bolters fired. The bang of release, the hissing of their rocket motors, the wet thumps as they exploded inside living flesh, made a roaring din. Terror had him. More than a fear of death. An invisible pall of fear was draped over the enemy, filling Devorus with cold, unthinking dread. He almost collapsed into a ball behind a stack of rusting barrels, there to await his end, but his body forced him on.

  The second defence line lay ahead, built atop the rubble of the broken wall and guarding the breach from attack. It was there Devorus had witnessed the child’s gift. From inside, the defences seemed respectable. From outside, looking at the mighty edifice of the broken wall behind, they appeared inadequate. Enemy artillery was pounding the breach. Where it hit unblemished sections, the walls held, but those shots that found their target knocked chunks away, bringing down boulders of rockcrete and widening the gap. In the port, already medium-range fire from the Death Guard was pounding at the prefabricated line sections closing the way into the city. They cruelly targeted the shore guard’s lines of escape, filling trenches with plasma and storms of whirling shrapnel, daring the fleeing men to take their chance between volleys. Devorus made for one of these deadly alleyways, hoping that he would be one of the few to make it through the buckled plasteel sally ports while the enemy were looking to slay some other unfortunate.