Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  Iolanth’s skill as a warrior was feted in her convent. She regarded herself as living proof that women were every bit as capable as men under arms. She was a champion in her order. Xenos, daemon and heretic had fallen to her sword.

  She had never fought someone like Asheera Voi before.

  The Obsidian Knight came for her with the long talon of her blade extended in a forward guard. Iolanth cast aside her bolter, drew and activated her power sword with one movement, turning the sweep of her weapon into an interception that smashed Voi’s weapon aside. Power fields crackled as the blades ran down one another. Voi was fast, disengaging and going for her opponent’s leg. Iolanth swung her sword around in a move that saw her opponent’s blade slide within centimetres of her thigh. Iolanth was quick, precise. Her moves were perfect, but Voi was better.

  ‘Stop!’ said Iolanth. ‘It does not have to be this way. Let me take the girl. I do the Emperor’s work.’

  Voi’s eyes blazed with hatred over her deep bevoir. You betray your vows, they seemed to say. You betray yourself. She struck again, turning and lifting and sending her sword buzzing towards Iolanth’s throat.

  Iolanth threw herself aside, her power armour’s strength helping her leap clear. She landed badly, her power pack clanging on the rockcrete. Voi was on her immediately, driving her long sword at the Battle Sister like a spear. Iolanth rolled aside along the wall, her own weapon clashing uselessly along the floor. She rolled again. Voi’s blade punched deep into the rockcrete, its disruption field carving a smoking crater. She renewed her attack so swiftly that Iolanth felt the beginnings of fear.

  Iolanth parried three times, overhead, left and right, a swing of the wrist downwards to block a blow to her torso. Voi was so very quick that she had no opportunity to return threat either by riposte or direct attack. The noises of fighting outside were getting louder, many more lasgun reports adding to the bang and propellant whoosh of bolt weaponry. Devorus’ regiment was moving in. She had to finish this quickly.

  The only end she could foresee was her own. Voi outmatched her.

  The Obsidian Knight battered mercilessly at Iolanth’s defence and forced her away from the girl. The sickening presence of Voi’s blank soul swamped Iolanth, numbing her nervous system. Her stomach rebelled. She was losing strength more quickly than she ever had before in a fight. Her mind was unfocused. Against the non-presence of Voi’s being, she could taste the flavour of her own thoughts, and they disgusted her. Her yearning for glory, her fetishisation of duty, her abandonment of individuality, her pride. Voi was a pitiless mirror. Iolanth felt dirty and small in comparison to the woman’s greater devotion to the Emperor.

  ‘Stop!’ she shouted again, taking a blow in a two-handed block that threw her back. ‘You know Him as I do. We are both His servants! I do His will, as do you!’

  Voi’s eyes bored into hers. Her sword rose. Iolanth barely caught the strike. It cut across her side, opening the armour on her flank. The edge drew a burning line through her skin.

  Already the sword was returning.

  ‘Stop!’ A voice. That voice. His voice. Iolanth moaned at its speaking. The word was a nail driven into her eardrums. She tasted blood in her mouth.

  ‘Stop now,’ the voice said again. ‘I command it.’

  She and Voi staggered; the words had a pressure that hurt. The girl rose up from her bed where she hovered, floating into the air. Golden light boiled from her skin. The hexagrammatic chains glowed red hot, then white, and then with a vaporous rush evaporated into scalding steam.

  The girl drifted upwards unharmed and turned upright, so that her dirty feet were hanging three feet from the floor. The light burned most brightly in her eyes. A divine light. The light of the Emperor.

  Voi paused. Iolanth treacherously took her chance, hating herself for the blow, but Voi saw it coming, and caught Iolanth’s sword upon the quillions of her weapon. They pressed into one another until they were face to face, armour clashing, noses almost touching as the golden light flared brighter.

  Voi shook her head. With a savage twist she wrenched Iolanth’s weapon from her hand. It bounced off the floor, its power field cut out, and it skittered into the corner.

  Voi moved in to finish her.

  ‘No,’ said the divine voice. Voi flew sideways, bent at the middle as if caught hard by the swipe of a giant’s lash. She crashed into the wall, and fell down.

  Iolanth looked up at the floating girl surrounded by the nimbus of energy. The girl stared back, mighty, imperious, all powerful.

  ‘Oh, my lord,’ Iolanth said. She fell to her knees, her head bowed and eyes shut tight, waiting for judgment. ‘Oh, my Emperor.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl, in her own voice. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The light fled. A soft thump of a body hitting the floor had Iolanth open her eyes. The girl was on the ground, breathing shallowly and staring at the ceiling. The skin round her eyes was blistered. The whites were red. Tears coursed down her cheeks. Outside, the bang and crack of fratricide continued.

  Wincing at the pain of her wound, Iolanth retrieved her weapons then scooped up the girl. She spared a glance for the unconscious Sister of Silence. Iolanth judged that her back was broken. She thought for the briefest instant of killing her, and knew for that consideration she damned herself.

  She left the Knight behind and gave a silent prayer she would be found and treated.

  Sheltering the girl’s limp body with her armour, Iolanth burst from the door. Lasgun fire smacked into her back, setting her cloak on fire as she fled to the stairwell. On the roof she boarded the Arvus lighter.

  The vox-link to the cabin crackled harshly, shaking Iolanth from her recollection.

  ‘Sister Superior, we will be landing in two minutes.’

  Iolanth readied herself. The road to perdition awaited.

  The Arvus flew towards a bank of shingle glowing orange in the rising sun. Water spray arced high behind the ship as it came in to land. Through the pilot’s canopy Iolanth had a glimpse of a tideline of dead creatures slain by the Plague God’s sickness. The ship banked over furze-cloaked sand dunes, then slowed, and set down near a Rhino covered with camo netting.

  ‘Disembark. Leave no trace of us on this craft,’ she told the two Sisters in the cockpit. ‘Then burn it.’

  She went back to the passenger bay. The girl had flopped back into her seat at the landing, but still stared off into nowhere with the same expression. Iolanth unbuckled her and lifted her up. The passenger ramp hissed down. There were three more Sisters of Battle waiting to help outside. Iolanth handed the girl off.

  ‘Where are the others?’ asked one of the Sisters.

  ‘Gone to the Emperor’s light, Sister Verity,’ Iolanth said.

  ‘And the girl, will she wake?’ Sister Verity followed Iolanth as she strode across the night grass towards the Rhino. Other Sisters were pulling back the camouflage. Lumens blinked on. The engine turned over. The side door opened, spilling red combat lighting into the dawn, and the girl was taken aboard.

  ‘The Emperor willing,’ Iolanth said.

  ‘Then it will happen,’ said Verity passionately.

  ‘I have faith it will,’ said Iolanth. ‘He came again to me. When I was retrieving her. He cast down one of the Sisters of Silence, a Knight no less, to allow the girl to be taken.’

  ‘Then we are blessed.’

  Iolanth paused in the circular hatch of the Rhino. The two Sisters who had piloted the Arvus lighter ran from it. It exploded behind them. Iolanth watched it burn.

  ‘We are either blessed, or we run pell-mell into the arms of damnation. Let us pray we are doing the right thing,’ she said, and clambered aboard.

  The Rhino drove through crowds of soldiers into a storm of iron. Downpours of shells cratered ground already cratered a hundred times. Beams of coherent light tore up the sky. Violence came their w
ay unheralded, always shocking. Bombs cast from distant guns murdered indiscriminately, culling those who expected to die in that moment along with those who thought death waited a few hours down the line.

  War is chaos. Information flows sporadically whatever technology an army may possess. Iolanth’s group passed through the rear lines of the army without incident, just another boxy troop transport struggling its way to the front line. If news of Iolanth’s crimes had left the walls of Tyros, they had not reached anyone who might have stopped her. Would any have cared to, she wondered. Long columns of troops strung themselves out across the shattered plains, scattering under bombardment, then drawing back together when the shells ceased. The soldiers at the rear were without the blessings of gene-seed or the strength of her faith to shield them. They were normal men and women with only the basest training, flimsy equipment, and a vague, half-believed hope that the Emperor might save them from a fate worse than death as protection.

  She and her warriors were a symbol of their distant god. The crimson Rhino, decked in symbols of devotion, brought cheers and tired waves from many of the soldiers as it drove by. Some fell to their knees and prayed. Priests pointed them out, shouting blessings and encouragement. Entire regiments made way, stepping into stinking ooze to yield the road to the Sisters.

  And they did not even know what travelled with her. Oh, Iolanth thought, if they could see her.

  The army was strung out between waystations, depots and medicae camps. Guilliman had drawn a grid of neatness over the wastes of Hecatone, sectioning Mortarion’s vandalism with comms lines, link roads, exactly spaced resupply points and all the rest, as if he could turn back the tide of chaos by overlaying it with order. The primarch’s hand was everywhere in the organised nature of retreat, reinforcement and resupply. A lesser commander would have been defeated by the terrain alone.

  Regiments passed each other in opposite directions either side of Iolanth’s tank, heads down. One column comprised battered units returning to base immersed in the horrors of what they had witnessed, their skin burned, limbs bloodied, their blinded comrades in long columns with hands rested upon the shoulders of the men in front. Reinforcements passed the opposite way, occupied with the fear of what they might see. Iolanth entertained the notion of throwing open the large firing hatch over the Rhino’s passenger compartment, and showing the girl to them all so that they might draw strength from the saint.

  If only everyone could be made safe, but she had known almost from birth that it was impossible to save everyone. They said the Emperor protects, but most of the laity misunderstood the saying. They assumed the Emperor would protect them personally, but the Emperor’s role was to safeguard the species. A single man meant nothing at all. Though every event of every miserable human life howled out this truth, people still hoped, still prayed to their embattled god that He watch over them against all evidence.

  It was sad, hopeless. The knowledge would crush the spirit of every human being, even her, were it not for miracles like the saint.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ she said into the rumbling, jerking progress of the Rhino. She looked at the girl.

  The saint sat mute, her eyes staring straight forwards.

  When they became stuck awhile in a shell hole she did nothing to help. Sister Verity gunned the engine and uttered words not fit to pass the lips of the Emperor’s warrior maidens. Only prayer from the Sisters caused the tracks to snag and haul them from the quagmire. After that, the ground became ever rougher. The lands of Hecatone had been well drained, with good soil suited to all manner of food crops. The marsh that had overwhelmed it was drying, but was still so sodden that the grains of dirt and sand that made up the earth had become a thick suspension, deadlier than free flowing water, for what it caught it would not let go, and where quicksand did not hold sway, the ground had been heaved up into soft hillocks by repeated shelling. The temporary roads laid over the top drew together, becoming fewer in number the closer they came to the front. More often they were blocked, bombed, or clogged with the wounded. In those cases Iolanth ordered her driver to follow the original roads between the region’s towns, but these too were jammed with vehicles and soldiers trying to find their way, and often they were forced to detour across treacherous ground. They prayed for clearer routes.

  Still the girl said nothing.

  They passed the army’s fighting rearguard, where command centres were set up, staffed, filled with frenzied activity then taken down again to be moved half a mile further on as the battle shifted. Batteries of long-range artillery occupied the brows of low hills, where the mud held its shape. The guns spoke without pause, their barrels glowing hot. Missiles screamed from racks while officers shouted pointlessly at servitors to bring reloads from haulers. The mist strobed with the firing of guns. Distant gunfire crackled from afar, sharp as dry leaves or ration packets trampled underfoot. They ground slowly past six Deathstrike launchers primed to fire, their missiles tilted. They looked benign, blunt, harmless. When the first crawled off its launch ramp, so deceptively slowly, it looked like it could not fly, but would belly-flop into the mud not far ahead. But it rose, and rose, disappearing to become a moving sun in the fog. The others followed like fledgling avians leaving their roost for the first time, rising uncertainly into the morning.

  Three minutes later white light sheeted the world, and the ground shook. The Rhino was passing an entire regiment of men and women waiting to be ordered into battle, all of them huddled into approved brace positions. The burst of atomics turned them into solid pieces of darkness. When the initial flash dispersed, whistles rang, and the soldiers sprang up and began jogging. Hot winds scoured the mud, dissipating the mist at first, but great volumes of steam rose from the drying earth, and it quickly thickened again. The troops vanished, swallowed by fresh effusions of vapour.

  They passed more regiments attending to the task of war. As they moved nearer to the front the roads quieted a while. They moved aside to allow a Space Marine Scout biker laden with message pouches to slew off down the muddy road. Then the rearguard was left behind, and they came to the start of the killing fields.

  The situation behind the leading front gave a false impression. Shifting battlelines broke off pieces of themselves and strewed small wars across the plains as the Imperial army pushed forwards. Between the rearguard and the principal combat zone was a collection of desperate struggles dying off like neglected fires. All manner of forces faced off against each other. A fierce firefight raged around a ruined agricola where light infantry and sentinel walkers fought renegade Space Marines. Elsewhere, squadrons of tanks duelled. Ahead, a pair of Titans, isolated from their battlegroups, traded salvoes of raging energy while Adeptus Mechanicus cyborg troops battled a horde of pestilent, goat-headed mutants around their feet. There were signs of trench networks and the like, laid down in the earlier battles when Parmenio fell, but neither side made much attempt to occupy them. Only nearer the front did these isolated skirmishes clump together into grand battles, where entire Chapters of Space Marines made war in the mud with their damned brothers, and Astra Militarum soldiers fought bayonet to claw with tides of shrieking abominations.

  These things too they passed. Iolanth expected trouble as they joined the raging interface of traitor and loyalist, but the Rhino passed them all without detection. They were simply not seen. Holes opened in the front to let them through. Iolanth gave a thankful prayer, for she knew this was the Emperor’s doing.

  The state of grace would not last. To achieve her goal, Iolanth had to go to the one man in the army who would certainly kill her for what she had done. She had to reach Roboute Guilliman. She felt it as an ache in her bones, her heart and her head. Her body was urging her to the primarch’s side; He was telling her where to go.

  They reached the place where god-machines made war in number. Their torsos and heads were lost in the murk. Their disembodied feet trailed streams of water and blood as they
lifted and planted themselves in the churned earth. Actinic flashes blazed high above. Rattling cracks and weird moans sounded from the heavens where the engines fought. Seeing these mighty avatars of her Emperor so near dazed Iolanth’s mind. There were so many of them, arrayed in long lines and phalanxes. War had progressed so far it had come full circle, back to the tribal wars of ancient man, the first wars, conducted by a handful of champions standing in a field, smiting each other at close range until one side gave way. Only their size had changed.

  ‘Sister Superior, I have located the Lord Guilliman’s Leviathan.’ Sister Verity’s voice broke the spell. Iolanth turned from the view slit.

  ‘Take us towards it, fast as you can,’ she said. The vehicle jerked around on one track as soon as the words were said, slipping slightly, then driving true. Iolanth looked at the girl. ‘The fate of the Imperium is in our hands.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Neverborn

  Roboute Guilliman disembarked first, against the wishes of his guards.

  ‘I will lead the way, as it must be,’ he insisted.

  Maldovar Colquan and his Adeptus Custodes begrudgingly obeyed, and followed the primarch in a shallow crescent. Flanking them were a dozen champions of the Sisters of Silence. The Victrix Guard came next, moving quietly down the ramp, their guns high and steady as they scanned the blank fog. They spread out on the polluted mud. Their colours were radiant spots for a moment, but then, like paint dissolving into water, their vividness faded into the murk. The fog was thick as wadding. It could be prodded and shaped. An intimidating malice camouflaged itself within the swirling droplets, watching the champions of humanity with greedy eyes.

  Guilliman surveyed the wall of fog. Moisture beaded on his armour. Droplets ran down the plates. The primarch was a knightly champion from a distant age at the castle gates of his enemy, the conclusion of his quest ahead, where death was as likely an outcome as success. Or so it should have been. What he saw was… Nothing.