Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  ‘Cog and teeth. Where did they come from?’ Urskein demanded over the vox. Communications were suddenly clear, like the foe had a sense of humour and wished to savour their dismay.

  ‘Provide engine identification,’ voxed Runstein, princeps of God’s Will. He was back a few hundred metres, too far to see himself.

  ‘They are towers, wheeled towers.’ Datascreed scrolled through his MIU link display that had him pause in disbelief. ‘They are made of… wood,’ reported Dunkel.

  ‘How can such things be a threat?’ asked Runstein. He did not scoff. Dunkel felt his unease over the manifold. The laws of the universe were upended. They fought things woven from bad dreams. Why could a wooden tower not be as deadly?

  ‘Be cautious,’ ordered Urskein. ‘Legio Oberon forward. Form up on God’s Wrath and God’s Will.’

  Titans of Atarus and Fortis adjusted to make way for the change, pinning the Titans of Mortis in place with concentrated volleys while Oberon walked out from the line. Orders pulsed back and forth between numerous layers of command, exploiting this moment of clear communication.

  Dunkel upped the magnification of God’s Wrath’s augurs. Yellow fog scudded across the battlefield, obscuring the towers anew, and allowed no further detail to be discerned.

  Concern sped the Titans into position. Retribution set itself behind God’s Wrath. Its weapons were in range, and they spoke with one voice, targeted upon the lead tower. God’s Will joined its fire. The ruby bands of laser destroyers, violent pink in the middle, lashed at the structure. The mists danced around the light, obscuring the target.

  ‘I see nothing. Maniple Five, report. Is the tower still standing?’ asked Urskein.

  Dunkel had his mind’s eye riveted to God’s Wrath’s external feeds. The tower reappeared in the forward picter view through a billow of mist, undamaged, fires guttering on its front. ‘No change to the tower. They are shielded.’

  ‘Then prepare to engage, close melee. Dunkel, you first. We shall topple them onto the masses with the force of our contempt. Maniple One, I request you divert and engage traitor Knight engines.’

  ‘As you wish, Urskein, but you owe me a good kill,’ voxed Opisa Elias, princeps seniores of Maniple One.

  ‘Keep them from the superheavy tanks. Baron Konor, do we have your support?’

  ‘It is an honour to march by your god-machines. We pledge to you our service.’

  ‘God’s Wrath, God’s Will, forward, maximum power. Retribution will follow. Princeps Elias, advance your maniple and anchor position at point four-nine-two, six-six-four, engage with full weapons fire at distance. Cover our advance.’

  In a shallow arrowhead, Retribution and its guardians marched forward. Nothing could stand before them. They were the Emperor’s vengeance manifest.

  A green discharge flashed at the top of the leading shape. A smoky light arced skywards, like phosphor bombs thrown from a monstrous catapult.

  Dunkel watched the missile resolve itself into a flaring comet. Anti-aircraft weapons opened fire all along the Imperial lines. Tracer shot flickered their belligerent dashes. Missiles slammed into the falling mass, but nothing stopped it. When it landed the earth convulsed, a retching shudder that shook the world. A hemisphere of green fire burst amid the Imperial lines. Pulsing energies filled the vox-net with otherworldly screams, and shortly thereafter came a physical push that lit foxfire along God’s Will’s arms. As the force passed through the god-machine, its spirit shivered like a dog in the presence of ghosts.

  ‘What by the Throne was that?’ voxed Urskein.

  No report came to them of the casualties the weapon inflicted. There was no one alive to communicate the damage. Then the data came pouring in, and did not stop. Thousands had died in an instant.

  ‘Increase speed!’ ordered Urskein. ‘Death Bolts Maniple Five advance with fire. We must destroy the towers! I am requesting immediate reinforcement from Legio command. All princeps, pass on targeting details to allied forces.’

  From behind God’s Wrath rivers of light flew straight as javelins. Super-heated fog danced madly around lines shocked clear by the las-beam’s passage. House Konor’s Knights swept aside enemy troops and armour, but without the support of heavier engines they would not advance far. Dunkel pushed God’s Wrath to up its pace.

  Now all seven towers flickered. Green balls of lightning hissed through the mist, discharge and passage near silent.

  ‘Void shields to maximum. Brace for impact,’ voxed Urskein. ‘Trajectory–’

  His last words. The green comets fell soft as rain, four targeted on Retribution, three upon God’s Will.

  The howling static of annihilated void shields blared over the voxnet. God’s Wrath was running before the noise ceased, aware before Dunkel was what the sound betokened.

  Engine death.

  Retribution’s reactor exploded first, giving out in a maelstrom of heat that punched a hollow into the ground a hundred metres deep. God’s Will died a microsecond after, falling down ablaze into the stinking mud. Its plasma core deactivated harmlessly, but the machine was dead, too broken to ever walk again.

  God’s Wrath weathered the electromagnetic storm of Retribution’s reactor failure, stumbling in its run but not falling. Burning liquid from God’s Will sloshed onto its leg and scorched at its warframe. It wailed for its dead brothers, and picked up speed, pushing deep into the quagmire the enemy had made of the plains of Hecatone.

  ‘The pleasure of this kill shall be mine, the pleasure of vengeance shall be mine!’ shouted Dunkel, but if they were his words or the engine’s escaping from his throat he could not tell.

  The lead tower ploughed on through the muck, giant wheels caked in filth. It ran over the beast creatures thronging its base without care, lubricating itself with their blood.

  The tower was not worthy of the name of engine. It was akin to the siege towers of backward peoples, nothing at all like the holy war constructs of the Machine-God. Iron plates streaked with orange armoured it foot to top, but the main material was of unfinished wood. Wedge-split planks layered the sides. Whole trunks were incorporated into its body. No sensible being would wish to see the forests that grew the timber, for the trees were convoluted and repulsive to look upon. The tower was covered over in their gnarled protrusions. Branches raked at their surroundings with the viciousness of claws. Slimy ropes held the tower together. Nails as large as men stuck bent from the lumber. Enormous leering faces adorned the three forward facings, their brass and bronze green, the nozzles of primitive guns protruding like tongues from their open mouths. Matter dribbled from every gap, coating the thing all over. Sheer-sided at the front, the tower sloped down at the back to a base housing a huge engine that belched noxious smoke. Pistons the size of God’s Wrath’s cannon bullied the larger middle wheels into motion to move the thing forward. It was wholly primitive, wholly impure.

  ‘Burn it!’ roared Dunkel.

  His order was superfluous. Already God’s Wrath had made that decision. A cone of superheated air shimmered before the meltacannon, striking the tower in the middle. Strange energies rallied to hold back the fury of the god-machine. They failed.

  Dunkel felt his crew and engine’s savage glee as metal ran and mouldering wood caught fire. He would have fired again, but Dunkel’s command of the engine’s bellicose spirit slipped further, and God’s Wrath took control. Surging forwards, injured leg still steaming with chemical burns, it built up to a lumbering run, drawing back its giant chain fist to strike.

  God’s Wrath slammed hard into the side of the tower. The siege engine was twice its height, but narrow based. It rocked upon its wheels, turning slightly from its path at the impact. With frenzied abandon, God’s Wrath punched into the rotting side of the tower, chain blade pulling out vast, dripping splinters of wood. God’s Wrath howled. Knights came stalking behind him, sensing a kill. Battlecannons fired triple shell bu
rsts into the wheels. Thermal cannons cut the middle axle in two.

  The tower stopped, locked wheels smoking. The upper reaches were ablaze.

  ‘If it can be wounded, it can be killed!’ howled Dunkel, and prepared to deliver the final blow.

  The tower had one final surprise.

  Broad fans of putrid liquid vomited from the carven mouths set upon the tower, shooting out in vast arcs from the pipes. Filth rained to the tower’s forward arc, showering onto God’s Wrath and the knights prowling about his feet.

  Void shields stuttered and sparked. The slop ran too slow to trip the displacement reaction of the aegis, but the liquid interacted with the field in some strange way, running down it in places like it was solid matter. In others, it washed past and slapped hard against the Titan’s plating. Ceramite composite fizzed, plasteel burned. Armour melted as readily as plastek before a plasma torch. Dunkel screeched with the machine’s pain. God’s Wrath blared an angry fanfare, half in agony, half in defiance.

  The tower gurgled. The pipes jutting from its scabrous back whistled out green-tinged steam, and the gargoyles vomited again.

  This time, the Reaver’s protective void shields did nothing, and the whole of the liquid burst over its torso. Hyperacid flooded down the front. The loin banner rotted to threads. Paint blistered and ran free, tinting the slop with stolen colour. Insulation was eaten from cabling. Hydraulic tubes perished and burst. The solution ate into the metal almost as fast as it did the softer parts, corroding the Reaver’s angled plates to a spongy, sagging mass.

  Death allowed the Reaver a final swing. The chain fist slammed into the face of the machine, chewing its way through, rupturing internal tanks. A wall of noxious fluid spilled over the tower, stripping it of its ugly garden of twigs and mould, its own structure melting as readily as that of the Reaver’s.

  The Titan came apart and slipped down the front of the tower, arms clasping it in belligerent embrace, as its legs disarticulated.

  God’s Wrath fell into the bubbling earth, sinking as it dissolved. Three Knights flopped around it, melting away. Their household blared a hymn of hate, machine born and machine voiced, and let fly into the holes in the wood carved by God’s Wrath’s final blow with battle­cannon and fusion lance. The ferment within burst aflame, then exploded with violence. The Knights hooted their revenge.

  The first tower had been stopped.

  Dunkel screamed as his machine died around him. Then, as the fluid ate through the carapace of the cockpit and spilled upon his human flesh, he screamed again. God’s Wrath howled for both of them as they died, its final shout halfway between thunder and a leonine growl, then acid ate through the final connections, and the Reaver fell silent forever.

  The remaining Blight Towers rolled relentlessly towards the Imperial Titans’ line. In their wake daemon legions strode. They arrived by no mortal means, but drew themselves together from the mist. Vapours thickened into daemon form, and there marched thousands where before there were none. At the fore came uncountable nurglings, though that did not stop the plaguebearers following them from trying. Swarms of giant daemon flies descended from foul skies. Lolloping packs of beasts giggled with excitement at all the fun. Great Unclean Ones towered over their servants – vast, bloated hillocks of flesh who wobbled their way towards the enemy. Every form of horrific disease and disfiguration was displayed proudly upon their bodies. Wounds gaped, spilling entrails upon the ground. Streams of maggots tumbled from holes in their skin. The stink of putrescence clung to every one. But set in pox-scarred faces were eyes full of intelligent malice. Decay and blight made Nurgle’s children strong. Sharp minds dwelled in their soft flesh. They set aside their japing for the day, and looked upon the foe with calculation.

  Drums boomed, horns wheezed. The insane music of nightmares infected living minds. In the mortal contingents of Mortarion’s army men dropped dead at the legions’ arrival. They fell covered in sores, vomiting pus, clawing open their stomachs to pull out their guts. Those so favoured were regarded with envy by their comrades for receiving Nurgle’s boons. The Death Guard saluted their daemon allies and looked to their own tasks.

  As the daemons manifested, the formation of the fly’s head grew enormous eyes and a long proboscis. By the Neverborn’s might, Mortarion intended to break his enemy.

  At the centre of daemonic host was the Plague Guard, Ku’gath’s cavalcade, among the strongest of all Nurgle’s legions. Seven of his greatest daemons ruled the Plague Guard, which was three times bigger than other legions, and seven times mightier.

  They marched through the sucking marsh, pipes squalling, counts droning. Repetitive songs both silly and sombre belched from rancid throats.

  Ku’gath’s palanquin proceeded at the fore of this squealing mass. Around him were his six lieutenants: Septicus, the Gangrel, Pestus Throon, the enormously obese Famine, Bubondubon and Squatumous.

  Beholding the legions would damn a man to madness, but though they had power beyond mortal knowledge, all was not well with the children of Nurgle. The warp’s grip slipped from Parmenio. The refreshing breezes blowing from the garden of their master dropped. There was barely enough of its influence to sustain them, and every exertion, every sorcery incanted, shortened the measure. The soul furnaces aboard the towers helped, feeding the daemons with stolen essences and funnelling the winds of change through their beings. But one tower had fallen already. Should the others be laid low, then so would the daemons.

  ‘Quickly! Quickly!’ shouted Septicus. ‘This war keeps the Plague­father from his business! Back to Iax Ku’gath must go, to craft the greatest plague ever conceived. Quickly! Quickly!’

  The other lieutenants plied the lash over the backs of the rest, laughing with every switch.

  Septicus’ witchsight perceived the candles of men’s souls wavering in the mist. They made a pretty display in their multitude, fit for any dreary fane, though their number shrank by the hundred, flashing brightly when they were taken into the warp. Fine as the sight was, flavoursome as they might be to savour, these lesser essences were not Septicus’ quarry. The soul he sought was brighter than those of mortal men, a bonfire almost as bright as the one in himself, for the being he hunted was as much of the warp as it was of the materium.

  Mortarion swooped low on moth’s wings and wheeled about Ku’gath’s tottering palanquin.

  ‘Find my brother, and bring him out,’ said Mortarion, his voice a phlegmy whisper. His wings beat soft vortices into the mist. ‘Do not kill him. Not here. Wound him, infect him, smash his armies. But let him live! The seeds must be planted in the soils of despair. Let them flower, and take him towards desolation before we finish him on Iax.’

  Ku’gath scowled. Septicus, who had abandoned pipes in favour of plague flail and plague sword, interrupted his cheerful humming to reply.

  ‘Lure him in, trap him, then away to Iax we shall go, there to complete the primarch’s plan and ruin all this tedious sterility!’

  The others snickered. Bubondubon laughed uproariously.

  Mortarion’s humour was not like theirs. He was more like Ku’gath in his solemnity. ‘Find him!’ he hissed. The Great Unclean Ones laughed at his graveness as he flew away.

  Tanks were lambent outlines like paper lanterns, illuminated by the souls within. Titans were huge, wicker men afire in pagan ritual, their own strange machine beings bright with half-realised life. The mass of infantry coming behind was an ocean of bobbing dots, luminous creatures in nighttime surf, secret, yet exposed.

  The soul light on Septicus’ side of the battlefield was of a different quality: red as old scabs, yellow as pustules about to burst. A simmering, fever-hot field of diseased light. Corrupted war engines flickered with the rage of the daemons enslaved within. Mortals who had pledged themselves to Grandfather were blisters, already fading. The giant Blight Towers shone a virulent green, lit by the souls burning on the furnaces inside. W
here the two lines met, the lights blended, motes of blue white and morbid red aswirl.

  ‘He is there!’ It was the Gangrel who wheezed, lifting a skinny arm to point. His black talon shook with palsy.

  Septicus looked. A huge shape, entirely material, lumbered behind three-score giant tanks. At its top, mounted like a beacon upon a distant shore, burned a soul so pure and powerful it hurt Septicus to perceive it.

  ‘Guilliman!’ Septicus called. ‘Guilliman is there! He comes, he comes to find his doom! Forward, my pretties, forward!’

  Corroded bells rang loudly. The daemon legions shambled forward. The Plague Guard led the way.

  Above, Mortarion shrilled a triumphant cry, and swooped low over the ground.

  ‘Come out, my brother!’ he bellowed. ‘Come to me!’

  Mortarion banked around the Plague Guard. From above the noisome phalanx, he shouted once again.

  ‘Roboute Guilliman! Come out! Come out!’

  His challenge was answered. The Leviathan stopped. Its forward ramp opened.

  Guilliman emerged, and Mortarion leapt into the sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A hero vanquished

  The Crucius Portis II shook with explosions as Squad Parris ran to the inner firing room and took up position overlooking the breached gate. From his station Justinian could see only a little way into the hole bored through the gates. The metal glowed still with its melting. There was a moment of quiet where his suit sang soft alarms. Several systems were damaged, and its hermetic sealing compromised. He could no longer trust it to protect him from the enemy’s diseases.

  He shut the tocsins off. There was nothing that could be done for the damage now. He sighted his bolt rifle into the bailey.

  A bowed line of Terminators awaited the enemy. A thousand guns were trained on the entrance.

  A moment of silence. Every warrior was still, gun pointed at the breach. Breath stilled in throats.