Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  For hundreds of kilometres across the plains guns rumbled steady thunders. Titans trod monster heartbeats. Out to the left and the right of the Leviathan, Baneblades and Stormhammers in the heraldry of Ultramar forced a path through the cloying mud. An Astraeus superheavy tank grunted by, its grav field pounding the earth into a seeping pancake. But all their noise was stolen by the fog. Their colours were drained away, their forms eroded and consumed as they moved into position. They dissolved. The primarch and his entourage might have been lost on some desolate highland alone. Though they were close to the crawler, close enough to touch its open ramp and bathe in the clean blue light shining from inside, even that seemed far. Nurgle’s mists forced forbidding distance in between. War raged everywhere but where the primarch was. In front of Guilliman there was a moist void. No foes, no brother, only blankness, cold and soul-sapping damp.

  Unimpressed at Mortarion’s ploy, Guilliman made a dismissive noise, and spoke a quick order into his vox pickup.

  Several hundred Space Marine infantry in many colours emerged around the crawler and formed up, bolters ready, quiet, tense, eye lenses glowing like phantoms in yellows, greens, blues and reds.

  ‘My brother is a coward,’ Guilliman said. He then drew the Emperor’s sword, and held it aloft. Fire burst from the edges and guttered in the small winds of distant detonations. The mist moved against the breezes’ direction, shrinking from the fire.

  ‘Mortarion!’ Guilliman shouted, his godly voice amplified a thousandfold by his armour. ‘I am here. Come and face me!’

  Silence.

  ‘Mortarion! I am your brother, the last loyal son of the Emperor. If you have any shred of courage, you will face me!’

  Guilliman’s clarion voice was swallowed up without a trace.

  Guilliman lowered his sword. ‘Face me,’ he said. ‘He calls me out, but does not come.’

  ‘He will not, my lord. He wants to goad you,’ said Sicarius uneasily. His voice, so much lesser than the primarch’s, was strangled to a whisper.

  ‘Then consider me goaded,’ said Guilliman. ‘He wants to draw me out, I want to draw him out. We have the same aim in this war. It is inevitable we fight. I have a trap for him, he has the same for me. I want him here, now, so we can conclude this affair.’

  The earth shook. Colquan glanced to the hidden skies.

  ‘We do not have long to wait for the end,’ he said. ‘Galatan arrives. Its mass perturbs the world. We do not know who holds it, and soon it will open fire. This place is not safe. We should get you away from here.’

  ‘I agree with the tribune. You must have the upper hand,’ said Sicarius. ‘I urge you to withdraw. The Blight Towers–’

  ‘I will not withdraw until my brother faces me,’ Guilliman said firmly.

  ‘Where are the Neverborn?’ asked Colquan. ‘The Titans saw them. The psykers within the crawler say a horde of thousands should be here.’ He and his warriors waited around the primarch, vying subtly with the larger Victrix Guard to protect him.

  ‘They are here,’ said Guilliman. ‘This god of disease has a sense of theatre, that is all.’

  In answer to Guilliman’s statement, a bell tolled with a note of such misery all who heard it were touched by a sublime melancholy.

  ‘They come!’ said Sicarius.

  ‘I will slaughter them in such number, Mortarion will come at me in wrath,’ said Guilliman. ‘Stand ready!’

  A second toll rolled out, billowing the mist into dragon’s breath. Roils grew faces that gibbered to nothing on a growing, putrid wind.

  Colquan and his men presented the blades of their guardian spears. Sicarius murmured the names of his lost Second Company to himself in private litany as his men fanned out further. The taskforce of Space Marines split, squad by squad, maximising the efficacy of their firing positions.

  ‘I am Roboute Guilliman!’ shouted the primarch. ‘I will not stand for your presence upon this world!’ Stoked by his anger, the flames of the Emperor’s sword flared higher.

  A third toll, close now and loud. The fog twisted in agony. Misty figures danced in painful ecstasies, teased apart, reformed, howled and dissipated.

  The belligerent song of Titan warhorns lowed back. The ground quivered to their tread. Guilliman stood at the head of an army of metal gods.

  Music played, doleful and mischievous tunes at playful war. From the fog a carnival of decay appeared. A carpet of tittering, squat imps scurried out first, rolling over each other in their hurry to find fresh meat. A droning set up over the sound of pipe and bell. Lazy shapes flitted overhead. Huge horned beasts towered behind. Giant swarms of buzzing flies switched back and forth over the horde. Shortly after the sight, came the stench.

  Guilliman gripped his sword. ‘Open fire,’ he said.

  The tanks to the rear spoke as one.

  Announced by thunderous cannonade, the primarch charged.

  Iolanth’s Rhino moved towards the Leviathan. The crawler swam through the mist, disappearing and reappearing with uncanny inconstancy. Though its tracks were not engaged, its position was in flux. One moment it was four hundred metres, the next two hundred, the next a thousand, to the left and the right and then almost behind.

  ‘I cannot keep a fix on the command crawler,’ Verity said, her frustration plain. ‘It keeps moving!’ The Rhino jiggled as Verity tried to maintain the correct heading.

  The girl stirred, and looked up. Her hair was greasy and lank, and her skin had become pale. Sweat sheathed her face. Her lips were cracked and white, but from her eyes shone a glimmer of the golden light that made her seem purer than ever before.

  ‘We are nearly there,’ she said. She looked at Iolanth. ‘You must guide me to the son of the Emperor.’

  ‘I shall,’ said Iolanth. ‘But first you must guide us.’

  After this brief exchange the girl hung her head again. But now the Leviathan stayed where it was supposed to be. The Rhino finished the rest of its journey fast, coming so close it drove under the aegis of the crawler’s void shields.

  ‘Stop here,’ said the girl weakly. ‘We must walk. Please, Sister, help me. My strength is gone.’

  Her pleading face stirred Iolanth’s heart. She was so young, and the power in her was draining her soul away. But it had to be, when the loss of one soul was set against the loss of billions.

  Iolanth bent down to help the girl up, wincing at the pain the movement brought to her wounded side. She allowed her to drape one weak and boneless arm over her shoulder. ‘Are you ready?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘Then we shall go.’ Iolanth hauled her up. She weighed next to nothing.

  The rear ramp opened onto soft ground. Dankness blew in along with a cacophony of gunfire, moans and terrible shrieks.

  Iolanth’s Sisters ran out ahead. Iolanth followed, her bolter held one-handed, the other supporting the girl.

  Tank fire boomed all around them. The giant cannon at the front of the Leviathan pealed thunder and belched flame. The girl looked up at it fearfully.

  ‘Pay it no attention, we will get you there,’ said Iolanth.

  Six Sisters fanned out either side of her, bolters panning across the racing mist. The battle had moved on. The bubbling remains of Neverborn were strewed liberally in the mud, intermingled with the occasional corpses of the Adeptus Astartes whose bright livery broke the slick of residue with colourful islands.

  ‘Follow the thickest part of the corpse trail,’ said Iolanth. ‘It is there we shall find the primarch.’

  The mist deadened sound. The battle seemed distant, right until the moment they came upon it.

  A slobbering thing bounded out of the mist without warning, cannoning into one of Iolanth’s Sisters. The beast licked her effusively, picked her up in its mouth and tossed her into the air. Acid burned through her battleplate. By the time the beast lolloped over to play
some more, she was dead. All this happened before the rest of Iolanth’s group could react.

  The daemon beast nuzzled the corpse in whining disappointment. The first gunshot made it spin around with fresh excitement, sending its mop of tentacular hair flopping wildly. Here were some new friends, its moronic face said. It let out a happy yipping, then ran at them.

  It was an ugly thing, part mollusc, part canid, part man, a collection of body parts that should never have been made into one being, gone rapidly into death and decay. But it was alive, in its way, and enthusiastic. It bubbled and giggled and barked.

  Bolts slammed into its slimy hide. Chunks blew off it. Slime wept from the craters in its flesh. On it ran.

  ‘Bring it down!’ Iolanth shouted. ‘Now!’

  Verity tracked its movements, her boltgun steady in her grasp. She waited for the last moment. She waited so long, Iolanth thought the opportunity gone.

  Yelping playfully, the beast of Nurgle ran at them.

  Verity’s gun shot once. The creature skidded to a halt, frowned, and looked up at the hole drilled into its squamous forehead. Blood leaked out. It made a curious noise.

  The bolt exploded. The beast keeled over with a disappointed whimper and dissolved into the soil.

  ‘Their faith is not so strong as ours,’ said Iolanth with satisfaction. ‘See how quickly they decay. The lords of the warp have no sway here.’

  ‘Their power here is limited and they are growing weak,’ the girl said wearily. ‘But there is worse ahead.’

  Roboute Guilliman plunged into a crowd of malodorous beings. Plaguebearers was their common name, though they had many others. They pawed at him with slippery hands whose skin split over puffy flesh. They snapped black teeth and moaned his name. Swords of crystallised death, deep green and black, swung at him, and while they fought they counted on and on, a relentless murmur of meaningless numbers.

  Shells ploughed into the horde, blasting daemons to scraps, limbs wheeling high on pillars of fire, dissolving into black sludge as they flew. Titan weapons ploughed up flesh and earth, mixing them together, adding them to the fog as superheated vapours.

  ‘You are weak!’ Guilliman shouted into the face of a rotting horror. ‘Your souls have little purchase on my realm! You are not welcome! Begone back to the filth whence you came! Begone!’

  The Emperor’s sword blurred around him in fiery orange arcs. All the daemons that it touched shrieked piteously as their essences burned in the Emperor’s wrath. The sword was a potent tool of war against any foe, but there was no greater weapon against the Neverborn. Suffused with the power of the Emperor, it burned them to nothing, cleaving their unnatural souls to tatty streaks of psychic energy. Slowly, realisation dawned upon the tallymen of Nurgle that Guilliman was a threat to their immortal existence. They wavered, and fell back in terror, their count warbling. Guilliman pushed forward hard, exploiting their fear of him to drive deep into their ranks.

  ‘I bring you the end, the true death, the destruction of your wicked souls! In my right hand is the glory of the Master of Mankind. You have no place here!’

  The sword cleaved. The sword hacked. The sword roared fire. Its touch was death to any daemon, and they fell in staggering number before Guilliman. Tribune Colquan and his warriors kept close by Guilliman’s side. They fought apart from one another, each golden warrior surrounded by a mass of diseased bodies. Their guardian spears hummed through the air in blurs, lopping off limbs and splitting torsos. They were individual warriors following unique paths. Their techniques were their own, irreproducible by any but themselves.

  In an arc around the blue-clad primarch and his golden bodyguard fought the Sisters of Silence. Where they went the Neverborn shrieked and died, their essences unwoven by the null fields of the Sisters’ abyssal souls.

  Captain Sicarius and the Victrix Guard expressed another form of martial mastery. Where the Sisters and Custodians fought loosely grouped, the Space Marines were a single unit, each one a component in a machine of destruction. Their bolters banged in unison, blowing apart daemons by the score. Further out, other Space Marines, less exalted, pushed the wings of the wedge as Guilliman headed deeper into the horde, widening the gap. And behind them rolled the superheavy tanks of Ultramar, their guns smashing down the daemons at point-blank range, so that their heraldry was covered in curdled blood and the slime of disincorporating warp things.

  Silence became maelstrom, Guilliman at its eye.

  Giant flies burred overhead, their riders tossing putrescent heads into the infantry following the tanks. Guilliman kept his mortal warriors back from this push, but even Space Marines fell as the heads exploded in clouds of ravenous spores, even Space Marines found their bodies ravaged by disease. White Scars bikes roared past, a blizzard of white and snapping pennants. Leaping beasts licked affectionately at tanks, their acid saliva melting through armour and exposing the crew to the poisonous air. Warp energy targeted fighting vehicles. Nurglings poured into broken armour. Space Marines wrestled with daemons whose strength belied their feeble appearance.

  The daemonic horde pushed back against the Imperial advance. The lines ground to a halt, but not where Guilliman strode. He pressed on while his tanks were mired by the sheer weight of bodies and his Space Marines brought to a standstill. At his side were the Victrix Guard and the Talons of the Emperor.

  The fields of Hecatone were pandemonium. The brother-on-brother battles of the Heresy had once seemed the height of madness to Guilliman. That was before he had fought directly against the powers who had manipulated his brothers, poisoned their hearts and brought mankind close to apocalypse. To fight daemons was to fight nightmares. They were the fever-sick imaginings of the mad and perverted, the lonely and the afraid. Every whim, every dark desire, every wayward thought was a seed that grew in the churning of the warp. Legions of daemons trod the soils of Terra during the siege. For a long time, Guilliman questioned why his father had kept the secrets of the warp to Himself. He had fought daemons so many times that their impossibility became normalised. But it was only after his awakening and his exposure to the Cicatrix Maledictum that he truly understood what the Emperor had been trying to do, that these things were not his father’s true enemies, but rather their source was. Revealing the truth of daemonkind would have strengthened them enormously, for men would never have been able to put them from their thoughts.

  The Emperor had been trying to save mankind from the horror of its own mind.

  The universe hung on the brink of destruction. The balance tipped so far in the favour of evil that Guilliman could not see a way to alter the weights. Off the field of battle, fate’s caprice weighed on him heavily.

  At times like this, it did not matter. Guilliman let free all his pretensions to order and to progress. He unleashed his skills of destruction. Fighting for mortal man was what he had been made for, freeing the Emperor to wage a higher war.

  Roboute Guilliman was a living weapon.

  Explosions burst as orders fought their way through the daemon voices crowding the vox-waves. Artillery zeroed in. Strike craft roared by, dropping incendiary bombs with pinpoint accuracy.

  The daemons played their infernal music all the louder. Guilliman was cleaving his way through their mightier soldiers now, tall champions, rot-gutted warlords, giant things with maws of tentacles. He smote a many-eyed, elephantine beast down, and was through to a macabre marching band of flautists playing perforated shinbones, and bagpipers wheezing into living stomachs. Drums with screaming faces, bells that wept, all manner of madness flashed before his eyes before the fires of the sword consumed them and rendered them into ash.

  Guilliman cut down a wailing plaguebearer and found himself in an open space. Six gigantic beings shambled to encircle him. Diverse in type, they were fat and they were thin, they were miserable and they were jolly. But all were rotted. All stank. All bore gigantic weapons of rusted iron and greenin
g bronze.

  ‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t the Anathema’s most tedious son,’ said one, waddling forward to take position as their spokesman. He unhitched a flail of rusting chains and mossy stone skulls from his shoulder. ‘I’ve been looking for you. I am Septicus Seven, Seventh Lord of the Seventh Manse, as I’ll tell you freely. No mortal can name and keep me in his power, and certainly not you.’

  Colquan burst into the ring in a welter of green blood as Guilliman roared and swung back his flaming sword. Septicus Seven chortled and whirled his flail around his head.

  ‘Let’s have at it then, Roboute Guilliman,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this.’

  Daemonic iron met divine fire. The shockwave battered at the giants, forced the lesser beings back. Septicus held up the smoking remnants of his weapon. Colquan called his Custodes to his side. The Sisters emerged alongside them, then the Victrix Guard, reduced by half in number. The shouted orders of Guilliman’s warriors seemed unimportant in that ring of flesh. The confrontation between the primarch and Ku’gath’s lieutenant arrested the attention of all the universe.

  ‘That was interesting,’ Septicus said. He drew an immense sword from across his back. His dripping, sore-covered tongue licked poison from the blade’s edge. ‘Let’s try this one more time, eh?’

  From then on, battle was joined in earnest.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Emperor’s plan

  Ku’gath held back from the melee. He was content to hurl jars of cultured disease that he plucked from the racks on his palanquin into the foe. From his slimy fingers shot spears of warp energy, laying low warriors in flashes of sorcerous power. His mouth billowed stinking winds that caused ceramite to crumble and flesh to slough off.