by John French
‘Got another one in you?’ Varren shouted, nodding towards Ison’s psychic hood. The younger warrior was already gathering his preternatural power anew, but the glow was weaker than before and Varren suspected it would not save them a second time.
Eaten alive by flies. It was no way for a gladiator son to perish. He had not survived a bitter climb to maturity on Bodt, endured brutal warfare on Susa and Sha’Zik and the breaking of his own oaths just to die unremarked in a plasteel tunnel, surrounded by wailing humans. He would keep firing the guns, then. He decided this as the overload warning icons on their grips flashed crimson. Yes. Keep firing until the weapons in his hands exploded. Volkite flame would consume everything.
‘It’s… all one mind,’ Varren heard the psyker mutter. ‘A single swarm-consciousness…’
‘Then we’ll die killing it!’ he shouted, and opened fire again.
‘Not today, brother.’ The words came over the vox. ‘Look sharp!’
Across the corridor, where the metal wall became the outermost hull of the Walking City’s construction, a shimmering sword blade burst through the steel with a howling screech. Thick yellow sparks flew as the blade cut a molten-edged ‘V’, and then the weapon withdrew.
Ison was already herding the surviving civilians back towards the rent in the wall, as ceramite-clad fingers wrenched at the glowing cut and pulled the metal back from the outside, as if flaying the pelt from an animal.
A gust of icy cold air blasted in through the tear in the hull and Varren saw a figure silhouetted there – a legionary in grey with a smoking sword in one hand, and about his head, an armour cuirass detailed with a brass Imperial aquila. ‘Get them out!’ shouted Nathaniel Garro, wrenching a melta bomb from a hook on his belt.
A wild laugh burst from Varren’s mouth and he drew back, still firing, ignoring the burning pain through his gauntlets. The swarm wavered, as if the mass of insects sensed what was about to happen. He was the last through the rip in the hull and as he passed Garro, the other Knight-Errant pounded a fist on his shoulder pauldron.
‘Gallor is on the grav-platform,’ Garro shouted over the roar of the wind and the screaming buzz of the swarm, pointing his sword down-range. ‘Regroup! I will be right behind you!’
But Varren slowed his pace. He wanted to watch.
Garro flicked a switch on the melta device and slung it back through the tear in the Walking City’s flank. The dull green cylinder vanished into the midst of the carrion fly horde and detonated. Pale yellow fire thundered through the framework and the decking, and later Varren would swear that he heard the insects scream.
The Walking City lurched, several of its supporting legs stumbling into the slopes of a steep mountain, and across on the far side of the great moving platform, sheets of ice and dislodged snowpack sloughed off the rock and collided with it.
With the deck shuddering beneath them, Varren and Garro sprinted the last few metres to a floating service platform hovering alongside. Garro, serving as the Sigillite’s Agentia Primus among the Knights-Errant, was commander of this mission, and he would have been within his rights to chastise Ison and Varren for almost getting themselves killed – but that wasn’t his way. The former Death Guard battle-captain and the Hero of the Eisenstein was unlike the warriors Varren had served under in the XII Legion – never quick to his rage, never leading by fury when reason could serve as well. It had taken him a while to get used to it, but in truth there would always be a part of Macer Varren that expected death to meet him. When his primarch and his Legion had broken faith with the Imperium, Varren’s refusal to follow had started the pendulum swinging on a clock that counted down his days.
Climbing aboard the sputtering, overloaded grav-platform, he spied Helig Gallor – another Knight-Errant from Garro’s old Legion – at the controls and threw him a nod. Did Garro, Ison and Gallor think of their time as Varren did of his? His lips parted in a feral grin. I’ll probably be dead before I ever have the chance to ask them.
‘Go!’ called Garro, and the platform shot forward, up and around the Walking City’s eastern quarter.
Varren shoved a few whimpering civilians out of his way so he could get a better look at the metropolis. He estimated over a third of the city was on fire, although it was hard to be sure if the black smoke he saw was from conflagration or if it was more of the gargantuan insect swarm. The moving construct had lost one leg on the western side, and it appeared to be stumbling forward on an uncontrolled course. Ahead of it, the walls of a steep-sided valley were narrowing.
‘Are we retreating?’ Varren asked to the air. He glanced at the handful of civilians. ‘This is a pitiful number to count as rescued.’
‘We are regrouping,’ Garro countered, as Gallor brought the grav-platform up and over the Walking City’s spinal boulevard. ‘Look there.’ Again, he pointed with his power sword, and Varren spied the target at once. A towering column of shimmering darkness that did not move as smoke did.
As he watched, the legionary saw the swarm thicken and solidify. ‘It’s taking on a shape…’
‘Billions of those carrion flies, merging together,’ said Ison. ‘I have an inkling of the enemy’s intention.’ He glanced at Garro. ‘You won’t like it.’
Varren felt a jolt of cold understanding. ‘It’s going to infest the city’s machinery, just like it bred inside the flyblown.’
‘The World Eater has it,’ agreed Ison.
Gallor frowned. ‘Can they do that?’
‘We have seen them co-opt organic forms,’ Garro said gravely. ‘And corrupt the inorganic. I do not doubt these things have the power to do more.’ He turned to Gallor. ‘Helig! Find somewhere to set us down, then give the controls to one of the civilians.’
Varren kept his eyes on the swarm-form. ‘So how do we kill it, then?’ He gave his pistols an irritable shake. They were near-useless to him now, so he let them drop and drew his sword.
‘In the middle of that is the first victim of the carrion flies, the first human they infected,’ said Ison. ‘I sense the malignancy in the core, like a blighted beating heart. We kill that one–’
‘And that will be the end of it?’ Gallor did not sound convinced, and Varren shared his scepticism.
‘We will find out,’ said Garro, and then he showed a gallows-humour smirk. ‘After all, we are still writing the book on this kind of war.’
‘I don’t want to perish before we reach the last page,’ said Ison.
‘Ha!’ retorted Varren. ‘Speak for yourself!’
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First published in Great Britain in 2019.
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Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
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