by Guy Haley
This was nothing like that. He did not need to ask. A pillar of brown smoke climbed from the roofless central building, braided with lightning, boiling with screaming faces. It whipped back and forth, but remained anchored at the bottom in the ruin, and at the top where it fed the storm. When he set eyes on that there was a certainty that came from outside, as sure as an angel stooping from heaven to whisper in his ear, that the place he saw was a medicae hospital, that it was the source of all evil upon Iax, and that it must be destroyed. This was not an intuition. No prayers for clarification were required. This was a divine command.
As if in response to his certainty, huge, fat-bellied fly-beasts rose up from the horizon and droned towards them in formations of three and seven. These were not truly insectoid, but a nightmarish combination of maggot, fly and pachyderm beast, some with huge trunks that slobbered steaming spittle, others with needle teeth in tiny jaws, and eyes that shone with the moist light of otherworldly fevers. Upon their backs daemons rode. The swamp belched black gas. Ripples disturbed the surface.
‘The enemy are coming,’ Odrameyer said. He gripped the rail on the train’s pulpit hard. Leather gloves creaked. ‘We must prepare for battle. Where should we make our stand, your holiness?’
‘We do not stand. We must advance,’ said Mathieu. He pointed to the institution. ‘Set course for the medicae building, full speed,’ he said, suddenly knowing exactly what it had been, and exactly what it had become.
‘But the creatures, your holiness, we may be better to take them here at the full range of our guns.’
Mathieu shook his head slowly, like someone lost in a dream. ‘Advance. Take up the sword of righteousness, colonel. Go to your men, lead your tanks and kill them all. The Emperor commands it.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
BATTLE JOINED
The landscape changed before the grav-tanks. Dead farmland gave way to low, bleak hills. The Space Marines skimmed onward, ever alert for signs of the enemy. When strange beasts winged their way through the sky, they hid in black copses, casting out shrouds of electromagnetic interference and clearing their minds of thoughts. These periods of blankness lasted as long as death. When Justinian came round from them he was reminded uncomfortably of his millennia in slumber, and recalled the burn of methalon cold.
The hills topped out in a series of stinking bogs: black sludge, spiky with half-dead shrubs. Wary, the task force halted at the edge, and stepped down for a few moments, guns ready, while Magos Fe set up his witch-finder. Turret and pintle weapons on the tanks panned restlessly over the land.
‘Do you have a positional?’ Edermo asked Magos Fe, for what must have been the thousandth time.
The little man gestured off to the south with his huge limbs.
‘Proceed on current approach vector. Psi-concentration remains in our southerly quadrant, no significant deviation from current course.’
‘None?’ asked Edermo.
‘Two point zero-five degrees. Not significant. I hazard we are close.’
‘I will believe so when we see the target,’ said Edermo. ‘This world is plagued by the effects of the warp.’
Justinian agreed. ‘The lack of movement of the target is suggestive of a trap.’
‘Or some other madness,’ said Edermo. ‘Brother-Sergeant Vasilon, do you have any readings?’
‘No broadcasts upon any vox range. Electromagnetic activity is beyond all known scales, and erratic. I could not signal another company of our Chapter if they were only a mile distant.’
‘Will you be able to get a teleport locus?’ Edermo asked.
‘Negative. Interference to auguries and psy-augury is exceptionally high. Non-accurate positional information is the likely result,’ responded Fe. ‘Teleport insertion will fail.’
‘I concur,’ said the Infiltrator sergeant. ‘We will not be able to call down reinforcements either via teleportation or by orbital landing. Nothing short of a miracle will enable that.’
Vasilon paused, consulted his wrist cogitator, and looked up, staring through some display of sines and interference peaks projected within his helm.
‘I calculate that we should be able to get enough of a data-burst up to call down an orbital strike, but we will have to call it down practically on top of us, and they will struggle to target anything accurately.’
‘So then,’ said Edermo. ‘We find the target. We call down the fury of the fleet.’
‘Orbital fire may prove inadequate,’ said Fe. ‘What we seek is known as an empyrical manifestation of rare power. Weaponry that functions according to the laws of the materium may be insufficient to destroy it. As previously stated, I calculate a near one hundred per cent certainty that we will require the Talons of the Emperor to complete this task.’
‘Then we move on,’ said Edermo. He cast his eyes over the bog. Lazy bubbles popped, releasing hisses of mephitic gas. ‘I do not like the look of this. It has a fell air.’
‘It will take too long to go around,’ said Justinian.
‘That is why we cross directly,’ said Edermo. ‘Move out. Keep your wits about you.’
The bogs widened as soon as the tanks began the traversal, until they were seemingly without end, the sludge blending with the mists at the limits of the Space Marines’ sight. Auspex pulses suggested the mud to be shallow, but this did nothing to blunt the Novamarines’ vigilance as they skimmed the surface. They were certain they were watched.
‘Movement,’ Achilleos reported. ‘Quadrant four. Position one-three, six-two.’
‘Got it,’ Maxentius-Drontio responded, moving to the back of the Impulsor and training his gun behind them. Orpino swung the iron hail stubber around. The Space Marines shifted to allow it a clearer firing line over the transport deck. Fe scuttled to the driver’s door access and crouched out of the way, looking like a child amid the Novamarines’ armoured legs.
Justinian had his helm provide an enhanced view, and scanned over the indicated quadrant. Lumps of sod turned over with eructations of marsh gas. His displays clicked, and discarded each movement, until they alighted upon a slithering in the bog, as something breached the surface and slipped away out of sight. The threat indicator in the top of his sightline flickered uncertainly through severities of rune.
‘Marked,’ said Justinian, data-casting the information to the whole group. ‘Lieutenant, something follows us.’
‘Contact acknowledged,’ Edermo said.
The Executioner’s heavy turret rotated back. On the other tanks, the Space Marines prepared themselves. Bolts racked into firing chambers. Brothers knelt so those standing behind them could fire over their heads. Their boots locked to the deck. At Edermo’s command, the vehicles increased speed. Grav-motors thumped. Fans of black mud sprayed behind them, splattering the Novamarines’ already dirty armour with sticky clods.
Ahead, the edge of the bog came into sight: hillsides clad in disintegrating grass and trees rotted to wet sawdust, rocky ridges stripped of cover standing naked, shocking as an exposed spine in a flensed back. The mist was shredding, giving way to a green light. A sail of fog brushed past over the ground, and Justinian saw for a moment a wavering pillar of lightning-filled smoke, climbing to a vortex in the clouds that was as raw as an open sore.
The mist closed over the sight, and he returned to scanning the rear, so he missed the movement that came in from the side, and the impact that flipped one of the Impulsors. He heard it well enough, a huge bang followed by the warble of damaged impellers. He turned back in time to see the upset vehicle ploughing a deep, wet trench in the bog, and its contragrav shove up a tall wave of mud that half swamped Squad Vasilon’s transport, forcing it to scud out of the way.
It was Squad Drucellus’ vehicle, the Assault Intercessors. Two of them were thrown free, slapping into the ooze. The others went under when their Impulsor rolled over and sank.
‘Enemy contact!’
Maxentius-Drontio roared. He opened fire, his bolts thwacking into the morass and exploding pathetically. Justinian restrained his own fire, searching for what had hit the tank.
An Assault Intercessor surfaced like a cork released at the bottom of a pond. Under him came an obscure thing, coming up as if from great depths, though the mud’s modest thickness could not possibly contain it. It was as big as the Repulsor – bigger, maybe – covered in flailing tentacles and breathing tubes that pumped filthy water. A mad thrash of limbs gripped the Space Marine, and lifted him high by the legs. The warrior could not get his chainsword to start, and so hit at the limbs holding him with a quiet blade, but his blows skidded ineffectually from the beast.
Justinian opened up, planting red craters in the creature’s flesh. It shrilled horribly from several mouths that opened all over its ball-shaped body. Eyes were studded randomly between them: red, yellow, and human blues and browns.
He saw human arms too, and human legs flopping from the sides, as if there were people stuck head first inside that were trying to run away.
‘Squad Parris, clear!’ Edermo ordered. Pasac flung their Impulsor into a steep turn, dipping the right-hand side into the mud like a sailing ship leaning from the wind.
The Executioner’s laser destroyer discharged, sending out a beam of light so bright the Space Marines’ lenses dimmed. A wall of steam erupted from the bog where it hit, and when Squad Parris’ Repulsor levelled off, the thrum of its impeller arrays cracked vitrified soil into shards.
The mutant roared, and flung the Space Marine in its tentacles at the Repulsor tank. He clashed off the side. The Repulsor fired again.
The beam hit the mutant square-on, evaporating a cylinder of flesh and cooking more for several feet around it. Pus slopped out, bright yellow, mingling with the mud. The Repulsor’s coaxial gatling cannon tore into it, bringing forth more squirts of vile fluids. Justinian had Pasac bring their own transport around. Vasilon was on the other side, both squads pouring bolt-rounds into the creature. Its mouths snapped closed, and it dived beneath the peat, leaving a slick of ichor atop.
Bubbles popped. The mud sagged inward.
‘Clear!’ said Justinian. No sign of the beast appeared on his sensorium. Vasilon went to the stricken Impulsor. As his Infiltrators were dragging the Assault Intercessors out of the bog, the beast returned.
It shot up into the air. What they thought had been the body was merely the tip of a long, muscular stalk, studded with gasping human faces. Ragged skin cloaked it, covered in boils and cancers. It remained above the surface long enough only to scream, then crashed back down, taking the wrecked Impulsor with it out of sight, the vehicle’s signum giving a depth reading of hundreds of feet before blinking out, in a place that should have been far into Iax’s bedrock.
They retrieved the survivors. Two had been lost, pulled down with the tank. The Space Marine hurled at the vehicle, Brother Mantello, was injured, though not badly. They watched the skies and ground carefully as they reached the edge of the bog.
‘We must have been heard,’ said Maxentius-Drontio, but there was no indication that they had been.
They crested the bony ridges, and a new landscape opened before them. Mile after mile of marshland, full of burgeoning growth, spread across the land. The strange fronds pushing up through the water thickened towards the east, further along the hills, where Justinian once again saw the smoke and the vortex – and, this time, broken roads leading to the ruins of a facility.
‘The medicae,’ he said.
‘Target located,’ said Magos Fe with undisguised satisfaction.
Just then, the rippling peals of heavy gunfire sounded. The Space Marines turned their sensoria towards the noise, and spied a column of tanks engaging a great host of daemons. At the centre rode an Ecclesiarchy war train.
‘This is unexpected,’ said Edermo from the turret of the Repulsor. ‘The militant-apostolic is here.’
‘Did the primarch plan it?’ asked Achilleos. ‘I thought our mission unique.’
‘The preacher has a history of defiance. He probably set out on his own,’ said Justinian. ‘That war party of his makes a mockery of our stealthy approach.’
‘No doubt he would call it divine providence that we come to him,’ said Maxentius-Drontio, taking in more of the daemons. ‘They are struggling. The question is, to what do we ascribe this meeting, and what do we do in the light of it?’
Edermo fell into silent thought long enough that Justinian was compelled to ask him what his orders were.
‘We move out towards the primary target,’ Edermo said. He fetched out his massive storm shield, and unsheathed his sword. ‘Vasilon, relay our coordinates to the tribune, if you can. Prepare to request orbital bombardment on our mark. We are close.’
They turned their grav-tanks to the south, and the fighting.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
PTOLEMY OPENS
Fabian awoke from delirious dreams weak and ready to pass out again. He sensed a presence, and lifted a head on a feeble neck to see a towering figure in black standing at the end of his bed. His vision swam, and at first he thought that death himself had come, but then Lucerne spoke.
‘Fabian, I was told you may wake today. I am glad to bear witness to it.’
‘Racej.’ Fabian let his head fall back onto the plastek-covered pillow. The touch of it, both slippery and tacky at once, was unpleasant on his skin, but his neck felt as strong as a thread of string, and he would not have been able to lift his head again if he had wanted to. There were pipes in his nose. In his arm he felt the pinch of buried needles.
‘The one and the same,’ said the Space Marine. He moved closer, and his features sharpened from imagined skull to concerned face. Excepting his bare head, he was fully armoured, his battleplate covered in dust and scratches, his helm clamped under one arm. ‘It is good to see you.’ He smiled. ‘Though you look terrible.’
Fabian groaned. ‘Why did I have to be assigned the one flippant Space Marine in all of Fleet Primus?’
‘It is only joy in my heart at the Emperor’s truth that makes me greet everything with a smile, my friend, for I know of mankind’s glory.’ Nevertheless, he frowned. ‘I was worried about you.’
‘It’s my fault. It’s not a good idea to get too close to a plague creature like that.’
‘Indeed not.’
‘I was stupid.’
‘I would say brave.’
‘That doesn’t make me feel any better.’
‘Well, pay heed to my truth. Your bravery will be needed again,’ said Lucerne. ‘We’ve been under attack for days. You have been unconscious for most of it. Daemons manifest out of the rain within the fortress. The heretic mortals have finally mounted their assault and have shown some tenacity. The remains of the Neverborn do not fade away when killed. Lord Tigurius says the warp is leaking into reality here, and that is interesting to learn, but the reality of it is grim, for when the daemons are slain their diseases remain.’
‘Is it that bad?’
Lucerne made an equivocal face. ‘It is that bad, but we’ve seen worse, you and I, and Macragge is no stranger to invasion. Marneus Calgar is one of the great heroes of the Imperium. We will prevail.’ He shifted his helm under his arm. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Bloody awful,’ said Fabian. His eyes could barely stay open. ‘Disgusting. Like I’ve been squashed and left to dry out on a stone, and then been embalmed in dung.’
‘A colourful turn of phrase.’
‘Words are my craft. I do not wish to disappoint,’ said Fabian. His throat was dry as sand. ‘But I am alive, thanks to you.’
‘I would give your praise to the Emperor,’ said Lucerne. ‘His role was greater than mine.’
‘Can you get me some water?’ said Fabian. The brief exchange had exhausted him. He was close to passing out, but he had such a powerful thirs
t he had to drink before unconsciousness claimed him again.
‘It shall be my honour.’ Lucerne clamped his helm to his thigh, poured a glass of water from a ewer, and presented it to Fabian. When the historitor tried and failed to take it, Sergeant Lucerne lifted his head ever so gently. Armoured fingers that could have crushed his skull like an egg cupped it with a mother’s tenderness. He held up the glass to Fabian’s lips with the other hand, and the historitor sipped at the water greedily.
‘Enough?’ Lucerne asked when Fabian turned his head away.
Fabian managed a weak nod. Lucerne lowered his head back to the pillow. He was unconscious before his weight had settled.
‘Sleep well, my friend,’ Fabian thought he heard Lucerne say.
Then the dreams returned.
Fabian woke again the day after, and felt well enough to get out of bed and set himself on the road to recovery. The medicae were good to him, feeding him cocktails of nutrients and vitamins, and he surprised himself by how quickly his strength returned. Within three days he was well enough to pass the day awake, within five to walk about. By the end of the week he was able to help the medicae staff with small tasks, insisting he be given something useful to do, for the facility was full of the wounded and the sick, the majority of them civilians, and the staff were overworked. So it was he found himself running messages up and down the wards. The facility was built into the face of the mountains of Hera, straddling the ancient wall that had once divided the Chapter monastery into two parts. The windows were shuttered against the war, but he could hear at all times the thunder of guns, the rumble of distant explosions, and the crackling screeches of void displacement as incoming ordnance hit the fortress’ aegis. What he did not hear, he felt, for the rock shook.
He heard nearer battles occasionally, the shocking banging of bolt weapons and inhuman voices counting, when daemons managed to penetrate the city’s psychic wards again and manifest inside the fortress. He thought the medicae may be at risk, but he was assured that as yet, the creatures had not managed to take material form within the buildings of the fortress, only outside. The static feel of arcane tech buried in the mountains tickled his gums, and when the feeling surged he knew the Neverborn were coming. Not inside, he told himself, not inside.