Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  ‘An additional effective sixty metres,’ said Justinian. He offered his bolt rifle up. The lieutenant took it, and looked it over. For a second the weapon appeared awkward in Edermo’s hands. A moment later he handled it like he had been using it for decades. He sighted down the combined block and barrel, which was substantially longer than that of the boltgun maglocked to his thigh.

  ‘It is heavy. I do not know if I would prefer it over my bolter. Is the stopping power greater?’

  ‘Not by much. Its greatest advantage over the boltgun is in its range, as you mentioned.’

  The lieutenant handed the weapon back.

  ‘Range is good, but this fight will be decided at close quarters.’ He turned back to the hololith. It flickered, and displayed a floating roster. ‘I have five hundred Astra Militarum here, and four squads of our Chapter.’ He paused.

  Justinian felt his cheeks colour. For an insane moment, he felt the lieutenant could sense his discomfort with his new brotherhood, and his words ‘our Chapter’ were a question, and not a statement.

  I am being paranoid, he thought.

  The lieutenant continued.

  ‘Two full Tactical, a Devastator, and a demi-squad of Assault. I want you to shadow Devastator Squad Amarillo. Keep the enemy off them. They have Astra Militarum support, but you are superior guardians. If the enemy get in close…’ He looked out of the window. From his vantage point he could see a good distance either way down both the radial and the circular corridors. They were long and plain with all buttressing plated over, designed to offer minimal shelter to boarding parties, but the nature of battle aboard spacecraft meant close-quarter engagements were inevitable. ‘If they get in close, do whatever you can to stop them from taking out my heavy weapons. These plague warriors are resilient. We will need the heavy bolters.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  Edermo did not mention how Justinian’s squad was supposed to work with the mortal soldiers. Justinian inferred a contempt for their abilities from that omission. If he was right, that was another difference in culture he would have to assimilate.

  ‘You are dismissed, sergeant,’ said Edermo. ‘I have a lot to do.’

  The lieutenant turned to speak with a human aide. Justinian bowed his head and left the command post.

  Outside, his Primaris brothers were busy checking their weapons. Talk between them was minimal.

  Maxentius-Drontio gave a crisp, one-handed aquila salute over his chest-plate. ‘Where to, brother?’ he asked.

  ‘We are to guard a fire support unit, tower tertio.’

  Maxentius-Drontio snorted. ‘Shooting things at a distance. I would prefer to get in close. I do not like to hang back.’

  Justinian felt the same. Marching about the corridors of Galatan could not match the exhilaration of dropping from the edge of space onto the battlefield as an Inceptor, his prior posting. Here he was to be employed by his new brothers on escort duty, war of a far less glorious order. Kept out of the way, untrusted.

  He could say none of this, even though Maxentius-Drontio knew they both felt the same.

  ‘We have our orders. We will fulfil them,’ said Justinian.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Maxentius-Drontio. He waved the others into action. ‘Squad, you heard the brother-sergeant. Move out.’

  The silhouette of the Terminus Est was known the galaxy over as a harbinger of terror, death and decay. Nurgle was bountiful to the flagship of his mortal herald. Ten millennia of his kind attentions had transformed it from a leviathan of plasteel into a decaying, prowling warpbeast of a thing, more dripping flesh than technology. The Terminus Est seethed with plague magic. It shimmered across the mortal realm in a haze of disease and frenzied fecundity. A part of Nurgle’s realm had been cut free and turned loose to roam the stars.

  In the Terminus Est’s company was an armada of craft from every part of history. Though vessels of the Heresy years predominated, human ships of all types and even xenos vessels flew together in putrid comradeship, prizes taken in war by Typhus’ dread First Company.

  Despite the ships’ diversity of origin, they had more in common rather than less, for all were part transmogrified by Nurgle’s power. Their crews were warped into hideous, disease ridden similarity. United in monstrousness, they were like nothing else in the galaxy but each other. There was comfort in their shared suffering.

  Millions of tonnes of ordnance came ahead of the fleet. Aged cannon shells preceded torpedoes whose metal skins were knotted with arthritic bone. The slime covering them was defiantly unfrozen in the killing voidchill. Green fire guttered in drive units, forever on the edge of burning out, but they flew true enough, coming in a broad spread at the port side of Galatan. Fired half a day before the torpedoes, the shells had been hundreds of thousands of kilometres ahead, but the steady acceleration of the missiles had them arriving not far behind.

  The ships followed their munitions at full burn, moving in a broad interception crescent to envelop the fort. In the prows of every ship, slavering, rotten-toothed maws concealed the emission vanes of ancient lance batteries. For the time being, these held their silence.

  In void war, timing was everything.

  The ships at the fore of the fleet were the least corrupted, still recognisable as built things. Strings of matter clogged gothic spires. Their hulls sprouted fleshy blisters from the metal, and their surfaces were unnaturally pitted with corrosive chemical reactions that should have ceased in the changeless void. But they were the least altered. Tormented ident-signifiers bleated out from them. If their appearance was insufficient proof, the cries of damned machine-spirits revealed the truth – recently captured Imperial ships ran ahead of Typhus’ deadly armada. Their datacasts sent the machines of Galatan into twitches of fear. When they neared and the moans of their warp-cursed crew were vox-cast on all frequencies, the effect on the human defenders was the same. A bow wake of dread preceded the plague fleet.

  The pieces were set. On one side, the corrupt and corrupting fleet of Typhus, the Herald of Nurgle. On the other, the mighty star fortress Galatan and its small escort. One side was bound by physics, the other was not. This was Typhus’ advantage. Swarms of daemonic flies surrounded his vessel, conjured from the non-stuff of the immaterium to serve as a living shield. His vessels lived in a way machines should not, and they were resilient because of it. Their ammunition was possessed of many strange and deadly properties.

  Galatan had a few advantages of its own. At the permission of the Mechanicus battle-conclaves who dwelt aboard, ancient weapons slid free of their housings and charged, drawing hard on Galatan’s quad reactors which, by the activation of pledge oaths dating back thousands of years, ran near full capacity.

  Before the torpedoes were eighteen thousand kilometres away, Galatan’s primary weapons were unleashed. The science of the guns was long lost. They were plasma cannons of incredible might. Thousands of tech-priests were detailed to forestall burnout with constant prayer. But though misunderstood, the guns functioned still. Bright energies left lines burning upon the dark of space as they slashed out at the plague fleet. Void shields collapsed in toppled series, and one craft burned to nothing from the first salvo alone.

  In silence this occurred. The plague ships glided nearer. Galatan coasted on, Parmenio growing slowly in the cosmic distance. To an outside observer, Galatan was an indomitable, sunlit mass, a single titanic creature, fighting off a predatory swarm of lesser things. The furious activity of its component cells was invisible; the prayers to the Emperor and Machine-God had no purchase in the void. From the strategium sealed deep in Galatan’s heart to the least of its thousands of gun batteries, humans, cyborgs and transhumans engaged in the labour of war. All of this frenzy was concealed by austere exteriors and the flare of potent weapons.

  Still the plague fleet sailed without returning fire, their spread of shells to the foremost, warped torpedoes following, the
n the captured ships running in close after.

  Again the antique weaponry of Galatan conjured incandescent starfire. Again void shields flared, giving off colours unlike any Imperial energy barrier, sickly greens and bile yellows. A large ship was hit and disabled. Its reactor stayed whole – if that was indeed what powered it still – but it fell out of line, brief fires burning in the exposed, fleshy caverns of its interior, caping the vessel in the black smoke of singed flesh.

  The astropaths within Galatan’s relay winced at its screams.

  The plague fleet came closer, ominous as a phantom flotilla from some backworld tale. Augurs and pict units caught clear images of what approached. It was a display of force, a promise of what was to come. Within his strategium, Chapter Master Dovaro was glad few of his mortal crewmen could see the horrors bearing down on the fortress.

  The third time the ancient weapons opened fire, the lesser guns and devices of the station were within range. The third discharge signalled their unleashing, and the void was suddenly filled with a tumult of light and fire so intense that the calm of a moment before seemed impossible.

  This time, the Imperial guns dared target the Terminus Est.

  This time, the plague fleet returned fire.

  Dancing streaks of green lightning leapt across the void, intermingled with the bright-line slash of lance fire. Unleashed energies outpaced the torpedoes and shells in the blink of an eye, slamming into Galatan with devastating force. Flickering storms blazed all over its port side for twenty kilometres and more. Void shields flared bright, their light dropping through the spectrum as their ability to displace energy into the warp was reduced, until they became but purplish coronas creeping around jutting bastions and docking piers.

  Galatan was blessed with dozens of shield banks. Deep within its armoured shell thousands of serfs laboured under the stern oversight of the tech-adepts. Choirs sang hosannas to the glory of the machine while labouring gangs ejected expended shield capacitors and replaced them with fresh ones brought on squealing rails from armoured storehouses. Each was the size of a small gunship, and required the muscle power of hundreds of men to switch. They heaved, rolling the devices from their transports and slamming them into cavernous sockets.

  Weapons fire flew freely between the fleet and the battlestation. The moaning wails of the damned infiltrated the fortress’ vox-net, until it overwhelmed communication, causing Dovaro to order it shut down, and all messaging to be moved to hardwires. It made no difference. An unholy meld of sorcery and science projected the screams. Simultaneously, the noosphere of Galatan was subjected to probing by sorcerous attack code. It came streaming in on pulse broadcasts of warp-infused EM-waves. Deep within the never-space of cogitator banks and serial-linked servitor minds, magi waged an informational war against daemonic attack. The machine-spirits of Galatan found themselves besieged before its human defenders had to raise their lasguns.

  Again, the lightning batteries and warp-lances of the plague fleet blazed. Again, their unclean magics raked at the void shields of one specific spot, stripping layers back until but one shielding matrix remained intact.

  The shells hit a microsecond later. Titanic detonations turned the void into a boiling sea of fire that roiled and went out, taking down the last shield with it.

  The torpedoes came next, burning the last of their fuel hard to increase their kinetic impact. They slammed into the hull of the fortress. With melta arrays and chomping ranks of daemon teeth, they chewed through layered ceramite and plasteel like maggots burrowing through the hides of livestock. They detonated deep within, bringing bursts of flaming atmosphere gouting into the void.

  Galatan was unconcerned by such a petty wound, and continued to fire, bringing down two, three, then five smaller vessels in the main fleet. All but one of the enslaved Imperial ships were annihilated. Like all the masters of the Novamarines before him, Dovaro was a master of void warfare. He could see what Typhus intended. The Herald of Nurgle had been responsible for the loss of three star fortresses already. His tactics were well known by now.

  ‘Concentrate fire upon that captured ship!’ Dovaro commanded. ‘Do not let it through!’

  Blazing fire all along its flanks, the final captured Imperial craft sliced through the gap in the shield arrays, and slammed hard into the weakened section of Galatan. The corroded prow rammed into the upper surface, smashing aside spires and gun towers, and ripped up the underlying hull skin like a divine plough turning a field of iron. Explosions blasted upwards from the impact. Clouds of gas roared outwards in white plumes, thousands of cubic metres of atmosphere vented in a moment. The diseased ship juddered, its underside trailing debris from the hit. Its rear rose up, its ram snagged in the star fortress, threatening to break its spine. The moans of tortured metal vibrated through the halls of Galatan. Dorsal manoeuvring engines fired. Jets of incongruous purity blasted from rusted slots and nozzles, and the ship came to a halt, hovering over the star fortress starboard side down, prow pressed in a dead kiss against the station’s fabric. At point-blank range the remaining guns of its starboard batteries opened fire, turning the scar in the space station into a glowing chasm.

  Behind it flew an armada of smaller craft. Ancient Dreadclaw assault pods and boarding torpedoes of every size raced around attack rams and Invader-class landing frigates. Anti-fighter fire made the void around Galatan a deadly weave of light, but there were so many ships. The Terminus Est came with them, fulfilling its ancient role of assault ship. Weapons fire of every conceivable sort burned against its void shields. They flickered sickening colours as they failed. The weapons’ blasts hit the hull, tearing up flesh-steel. Pus wept into the void. Fires burned along its noisome hull, but it could not be stopped.

  In the breach the captured Imperial ship was quickly reduced to a hulk. Pushed away by Galatan’s fire, it drifted, burning, into space, the crew aboard sacrificed. It had performed its role. A wound had opened Galatan’s thick hide to the void.

  The forked prow of the Terminus Est opened its hangars. Hundreds of gunships blasted out between gargantuan teeth.

  As numerous as flies in a swarm, the followers of Typhus, First Captain of the Death Guard, poured aboard Galatan.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Justinian’s War

  Noise. Chaos. Smoke. Justinian’s head rang. He was lying on his back, pinned by a fallen stanchion. Warning runes blinked in his retinal display. Chimes bleated, mingling with the sounds of disorder that filled the crossway fort.

  The pressure on his chest eased. A figure in scratched bone-and-blue armour threw aside the jagged metal, and reached a hand down.

  ‘Brother-sergeant!’ said the warrior.

  Justinian shook the fog from his mind. He grasped the offered hand and was hauled to his feet, his stabilisation jets firing to aid his recovery.

  ‘Brother Brucellus,’ said Justinian. Already he was checking over his armour systems and silencing its alarms. ‘My thanks.’ Sound from outside his armour was becoming faint. His sensorium alerted him to low oxygen levels. The floor was canted at a sharp angle. The room had been badly deformed by impact. The tower was bent and their strongpoint had crumpled. The firing slits were crushed shut, obscuring the view of the corridors outside. Large slabs of the ceiling had come down, killing many of the unmodified humans. Their broken bodies lay about, leaking vitae. Severed limbs collected in drifts in the deformed corners of the room. Broken cabling spat sparks. Pipes hissed a mixture of gasses. Alarms blared from the unseen outside, growing quieter with every second.

  ‘Atmosphere’s failing out there,’ Donasto said.

  Sergeant Amarillo looked up from the corpse of one of his warriors. His armour was battered, and the signum array atop his backpack had snapped, hanging from its mount on a twist of metal and a braid of wire.

  ‘A hit like that made a hole too big to plug. They will be sealing the station kilometres back from here. Thi
s whole section will vent itself into the void soon. We are probably trapped.’ Amarillo gave his warrior one last check. He lifted the end of the shattered heavy bolter the Novamarine had been carrying. The trooper’s modified backpack was cracked open. Boltshells glinted amid the mess of the ammo feed. He dropped the weapon. ‘All of you, log his position,’ he said to the surviving three men of his squad. ‘Whoever lives through this is to ensure the Apothecaries are aware of where he lies, so they may retrieve his gene-seed.’

  Dying Astra Militarum soldiers moaned around Justinian. He ignored them; there was nothing he could do for them. He brought up his tactical overlay, activating the status screeds for his warriors. The retinal display jumped a bit, settling down as his cogitator reconfigured itself. His men had been lucky. Most bore marks on their armour and some had to be dragged out of the wreckage, but the damage to their weapons and battleplate was minimal. Green dominated their systems statuses, touched with amber. Only Achilleos was harmed. He sat examining his crushed left arm as dispassionately as if it were a broken gun. His vambrace was breached in several places, spattered with blood and dribbling sealant foam. Justinian went to his side.

  Achilleos looked up. ‘It is not making a seal,’ he said. He peered at his injured limb critically. ‘The plate’s too badly compromised.’

  ‘Then fall back,’ Justinian told him. ‘Go to the apothecarion on deck theta 19.’

  ‘He will not make it,’ Amarillo called over. ‘There is no clear way through. He would be better remaining here.’

  ‘I am not staying here,’ said Achilleos. He got to his feet. ‘If this will not seal, I will cut off my arm at the elbow, let it seal there. The work of a minute.’ He half drew his combat knife.

  ‘Very well,’ said Justinian. ‘That will be an awkward cut. Pimento, aid him.’

  The rest of the Space Marines gathered around the two sergeants. Justinian’s squad intermingled with the Devastators they had been assigned to protect, the Primaris Marines standing tall over their older comrades.