Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  It was all the same to Seroff. He was going through the motions too. Each found in the other someone who understood and shared their bitterness, and who was capable of intelligent conversation. They had both fallen from great heights into the most profound abyss of humiliation, and they had discovered that there was no comfort, but much resentment, in knowing that things could not get worse.

  There was another sudden streak of light in the sky. The debris came straight down, striking the ground with purpose, only a few miles away to the south and east. The object was small, and the blast affected a much lesser area than the last impact. The tremors from the explosion barely shook the tower. But Seroff took notice.

  ‘That looked different,’ said Schenk.

  ‘Yes.’ Seroff stood and moved to the pitted, rockcrete parapet. ‘That hit like a torpedo,’ he said.

  ‘Are there any ships in the area?’

  ‘I have not been told of any.’ Seroff had given standing orders to the spaceport personnel to let him know of any traffic in the system that was not just more wreckage. Ships coming to Eremus were increasingly rare. Those who came were almost exclusively the freighters of low-end trading companies bringing meagre and substandard supplies, or troop ships arriving to take Seroff’s charges to a distant battlefield slaughterhouse.

  Schenk joined him at the parapet. They watched the glow fade from the initial blast. The object had hit in a region that was, by the standards of Eremus, still quite densely populated. The secondary fires spread outward from the impact site, looking like angry candlelight in the darkness. They multi­plied quickly.

  Seroff frowned. ‘Do you see a glow over that sector?’

  Schenk hesitated. ‘I can’t decide,’ she said. ‘Perhaps. The area seems brighter than it should be.’

  A faint orange nimbus, tinged with green, hovered over the city.

  Seroff put down his goblet. ‘Then we will have to have a closer look at this. I don’t know whether to feel interested or inconvenienced.’

  ‘I think both,’ said Schenk.

  But there was still duty. There was always duty. Neither of them had ever turned from it. Nor will we, Seroff thought, even though every act in the performance of duty was another blow to injured pride. There would never be any reward for the loyalty of their service.

  There were very few real streets now on Eremus. There were only their remnants, blocked every few hundred yards by the fallen shells of buildings. Seroff and Schenk wound their way through the wastelands, past jagged, rusted slabs of iron reaching fifty feet or more into the air. They took detours around hills of jumbled, indistinguishable refuse. Here and there, flames guttered, feeding on gas leaking from ruptured, mostly empty reservoirs. Rivulets of filthy, black, grease-thickened water ran down slopes and across fractured thoroughfares. The last maglev transports had ceased to run the year before Seroff had begun his exile. There was no way to get around the city except on foot.

  Navigating at ground-level on Eremus meant weaving through the canyons of a planet-wide scrapyard. Seroff’s tower was one of the few landmarks in the region, and it was easy to lose sight of it behind the cliffs of wreckage. A newcomer to Eremus would be lost within moments, but there were no newcomers on the planet. There had been none for a very long time. Seroff had lost his bearings the first time he had strayed from the memorised route that took him from his quarters to the barracks. Now he barely needed a torch at all to find his way to the impact site.

  Seroff wore the greatcoat of his rank, and Schenk had donned a dark cloak, her Inquisitorial rosette pinning it closed at her throat. Their clothes had seen better days, and soon were covered with dust and ash as Seroff and Schenk drew closer to the impact site. Seroff knew that he and the inquisitor had become shabby caricatures. But on this world, that still gave them god-like authority. They were escorted by twenty troopers of the Eremus Bayonets. They were the elite of Seroff’s current batch of recruits, in that they were at least competent. He had made them his detail until they were called off-planet.

  They heard the sounds of unrest and violence. Screams echoed from the refuse gorges. There were other sounds that Seroff could not identify. They reminded him of the snap and crackle of logs in a wood fire, but they also sounded wet.

  ‘What do you think?’ Seroff asked Schenk.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  In her voice was the same concern he felt. And also the same curiosity. Seroff couldn’t remember when he had last been curious about something.

  They squeezed through a narrow pass between two slumped mounds of iron. On the other side, they found chaos. The impact site was half a mile away, and the fires here were raging. In the time it had taken to march from Seroff’s tower, the conflagration had spread over the entire sector. A wall of flame blocked the way forward.

  ‘This is not the result of a simple debris strike,’ Seroff said. ‘These are deliberate fires.’ There must have been a cache of promethium somewhere nearby. Seroff smelled its harsh burn, and the fires had clearly been set with purpose. They billowed from doorways and windows, and blazed in an unbroken line on the rooftops. Pools of flammable effluent had been spread in the gaps between the patchwork habs and ignited.

  Seroff squinted against the glare of the fire. He thought he saw figures pushing others into the flames.

  ‘There is madness here,’ said Schenk. ‘I will need to interrogate one of the affected.’

  ‘There!’ Seroff shouted.

  A man ran from a doorway and through a momentary gap in the flames. He stumbled towards the group, clothes and hair smouldering, eyes wide with pain and fear. Violent coughs wracked his frame. When they stopped, his vision seemed to clear and he saw the uniforms of Seroff and Schenk. He halted a few feet from them, wavering in uncertainty.

  ‘Take him,’ said Schenk.

  Seroff nodded. Two soldiers moved forward. The man turned around as if he was actually contemplating running back into the fire. Then he stopped, his shoulders slumped, and he let himself be seized.

  Schenk had the citizen brought to a low, squat bunker of a building less than a mile east of Seroff’s tower. It was Schenk’s quarters, her laboratorium, and her Inquisitorial prison. She led the way through ferrocrete corridors that stank of old blood and stale fear. The floors and walls were discoloured with dark splashes. The place had always been a prison. Schenk had simply diversified the pain it inflicted.

  The troopers tossed the man into a bare cell. He curled up in a corner, trembling. His skin was patchy and red with burns and weeping blisters. His teeth chattered as if he were cold. His terrified, animal gaze was fixed on something outside the cell. He was barely aware of his captors.

  ‘Leave us,’ said Schenk.

  The soldiers obeyed. Seroff remained and slammed the iron door shut. Schenk crouched before the man while Seroff stood beside him, looming.

  ‘What is your name?’ said Schenk.

  The man’s lips moved silently. He was shaking his head in short, rapid jerks, his eyes fixed on a greater terror than the inquisitor.

  Schenk snapped her fingers in front of his face and squeezed his burned forearm. The man jolted in shock. He blinked, and looked directly at Schenk.

  ‘What is your name?’ she repeated.

  ‘Remmis,’ he rasped. ‘Arven Remmis.’

  ‘Good,’ said Schenk. ‘Citizen Remmis, why is your district on fire?’ She kept his left arm in her grip, and squeezed again to keep his fear focused on her.

  ‘Burn the dream,’ Remmis said. He shook his head more violently. The words came out in a rushing, desperate mutter. ‘We have to burn the dream.’ His eyes fastened onto Schenk, and he gripped her arm with his right hand. ‘Promise me I won’t dream. You won’t let me dream. Promise me, promise me.’ He sobbed. ‘They were all dreaming… my children… such dreams…’ He began to keen. ‘I can’t dream. Will you promise, will you promise, will
you promise?’

  The inquisitor shook his arm off and straightened, taking a step back. Remmis wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth, muttering about dreams and fire.

  ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ said Schenk.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Seroff said. ‘But it does confirm there was something in that object.’

  Schenk tried another tack. ‘What landed? Was something let loose?’

  ‘Dreams,’ Remmis whispered. ‘No, not dreams. Dreams of the end of dreams. Dreams of decay. Catching.’

  Seroff exchanged a worried look with Schenk. ‘Catching,’ he repeated.

  ‘A plague?’ Schenk murmured.

  ‘This is more your territory than mine,’ Seroff pointed out.

  Schenk nodded slowly, thinking. ‘I will need to see,’ she said. ‘When the fires die down, I’ll go back in.’ She grimaced. ‘He keeps talking about dreams. This does not sound like a plague.’

  ‘No!’ Remmis shouted. ‘NO!’ He looked back and forth between Seroff and Schenk, his eyes staring wide, looking as though they might jump from his skull. ‘Don’t let me,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t let me dream. Why won’t you stop the dream? You mustn’t let me dream.’ He scrabbled forward, reaching for the hem of Seroff’s coat. A second later, he shrank back. Eyes closed, he clawed at the walls, breaking his fingernails. ‘Stop the dream!’

  Remmis shrieked. He reached for his eyes. Bloody fingers hooked. As Seroff recoiled, Remmis’ cries turned into a single, unending scream. He sank his fingers into his eyes, and the eyes welcomed the fingers. Remmis’ eyelids liquified, and his eyeballs sucked at the fingers. His eyeballs became soft jelly, and then his eyelashes became tendrils, and sliced through skin and muscle, and then bone. With a splintering, sucking sound, his fingers came off his hand and disappeared into the hungry substance of his eyes. His arms fell back, the flesh around the stumps of his fingers turning black and flaking away. Rot gnawed its way along his hands and up his arms, spreading onto his torso.

  Remmis’ eyes ground his fingers to pulp, and then blossomed. Black, furry petals unfolded, their edges sharp as blades, their surface wet as tongues. A heady, cloying perfume filled the cell, and Seroff felt as if his nose were packed thick with buzzing flies. The unholy flowers kept unfolding, pulling themselves further and further out of Remmis’ skull. Soon they were a yard long, trembling and flapping against the ground. His screams finally choked off when his tongue swelled and coiled into a thick rope coated with slime and mould. The bones of his skull turned brittle and they collapsed in on themselves. It looked as though his head were deflating. The black petals kept growing until there was nothing at the junction of their stems but a trembling grey sludge. The petals slapped against the floor, the sound sharp, hard and slick, wet palms clapping. Then they, too, fell still and succumbed to the decay that had taken the rest of the body.

  After a few moments more, there was only ash. It drifted back and forth, caught in a nonexistent breeze. Seroff thought he heard something whisper.

  Seroff had his back against the door. His breath came in short, hitching gasps. Schenk had turned pale. She met his gaze, and they rushed out of the cell. ‘You’ll need to have this sealed,’ Seroff said as he slammed the door shut again. ‘What kind of plague is that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Schenk. ‘I’ve never encountered anything like that before.’ Given what she had encountered, her ignorance alarmed Seroff almost as much as what he had just seen.

  ‘Airborne?’ Seroff asked. ‘Are we infected?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel nothing. Do you?’

  ‘No. Not yet, at any rate.’

  ‘The symptoms seem to develop quickly. A few hours at most.’

  Grimly, they moved to another cell and sealed themselves in. They waited out the next few hours in silence, trapped in their expectation of monstrous change. Seroff braced himself with every breath to feel a fluttering in his lungs, a swelling of his tongue. Towards the end of the third hour, when no symptoms had developed, he began to relax.

  ‘The dust,’ Schenk said, half to herself. ‘Airborne, but larger particulates? I don’t know. I think we’re fortunate we didn’t breathe it in.’

  ‘If what we saw are the effects of the contagion,’ Seroff said, ‘we’re lucky the residents set their quarter on fire.’

  ‘A needed step, but we don’t know if that was enough. I’ll have to go in.’

  ‘And we don’t know how much further it might have spread,’ said Seroff.

  ‘Do you have the means to quarantine the zone?’

  ‘I hope so. Troop numbers aren’t the problem. But quarantining any sector is not going to be easy or certain.’ With no real roads, his perimeter would be a ragged zigzag around the mountains of wreckage, and the boundary might still be porous. To do this right, he would need, at the very least, the means to dig a clear ditch all around the infected area. That would require an army of excavators he did not have. In the immediate, he would have to make do with infantry, and hope that Schenk could do something effective against the plague. ‘Do you think there is any chance of an immunisation?’

  ‘No. Not quickly.’

  ‘Amputation, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Schenk. ‘Purge the infected and the region they are in.’

  A thought occurred to Seroff. ‘It is worth investigating further, though, yes? I could just order an immediate bombardment.’

  ‘That step will be necessary. But you are correct. There will be something of value to learn first.’

  ‘Valuable in more than one way.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Schenk.

  For the first time since Armageddon, Seroff felt the thrill of hope run through his old veins. ‘A new plague catalogued, analysed and contained,’ he said.

  ‘A threat to the galaxy halted,’ Schenk added.

  With the hope came Seroff’s first real smile in living memory. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it may be that what has fallen from the skies will make us rise again.’

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ said Schenk.

  ‘And He avenges.’

  Schenk’s rebreather was a bulky piece of equipment, a thing of brass that turned her head into an avian skull with a blunted beak. It was a relic of her early days in the Inquisition. She would never have been able to acquire a tool like this on Eremus. It filtered out almost every known toxin. The tinted goggles cycled through a wide range of light wavelengths, letting her see shifts in temperature and radiation that might point to sites of infection and vectors of contagion. They were controlled thanks to an interior mechadendrite that plugged into a socket in the base of her skull. This was the first time she had had cause to use it in the field on Eremus, though she wore it often during her experiments in the laboratorium.

  The rebreather felt heavy on her shoulders, and the weight of her greatcoat pulled at her too. The juvenat treatments available on Eremus were flawed, and she was old now. Everything was heavier, and she was slower. The same was true of Seroff. They were both bent figures now. They weren’t shuffling, at least, but they could no longer run as they once had. If she had to sprint, she didn’t think she would be able to.

  She doubted that would be necessary. The fires in the infected zone were dying down. Seroff had established a perimeter of sorts a mile away from the nearest fire. His perimeter was wider than it had to be, expanding the region that needed to be bombarded. Still, Schenk approved of the precaution. A few thousand more casualties lost to artillery shells was barely worth mentioning. What mattered was to contain the threat, identify it, and then eliminate it.

  Perhaps she could learn from it, too. The symptoms were profoundly disturbing, and understanding what caused them would, she thought, make them less fearsome. She was relieved that it was not the Plague of Unbelief that had come to Eremus. The nature of the impact still bothered her. It felt so purposeful. Had the Pla
gue of Unbelief appeared, it would have seemed like her past reaching out to claim her.

  Schenk advanced beyond the perimeter with a squad of troopers. They were using rebreathers. If the plague travelled on airborne particulates, those masks would not offer much protection. Schenk was not convinced it did, though. It seemed extremely lucky that she and Seroff had not inhaled anything at all in that cell.

  Schenk hadn’t advanced more than a hundred yards from the perimeter’s edge when she heard the cries. The screams were too close to be from the burned region. The heaps of metal wreckage scattered the echoes, and the screams were scattered too. They came from ahead and from the sides. They were rising moans and falling gurgles. They were grief and terror and agony, and they blended together in a tapestry that surprised Schenk by having a clear identity. The precise nature of the pain she heard was new to her, yet she knew it immediately for what it was. She was hearing the violent decay of a city.

  She signalled to her escort. ‘We may have to fight,’ she said. She could hear panic too, in the blend of shrieks. And there would be no question of letting anyone past. She might want a few specimens, though she was doubtful about the utility of trying to capture one. Remmis had died within less than a minute of the symptoms appearing. She would have to content herself with observing the effects, and trying to gauge the extent of the infection and the speed of its spread. She had hopes of collecting samples of contaminated matter for later study, but for now, knowing how to contain the plague was her priority.

  Schenk headed for the nearest screams. As she and the troopers rounded the gutted shell of a hab-block, the shrieks blasted through the empty window frames of the structure. The sound grew louder, and also harder to identify. Schenk frowned. Some of those voices did not sound human.

  Around the corner of the building, she found the source of the screams. There were twenty or thirty people here. Most were dragging themselves along the ground, gouging their flesh open on the sharp edges of refuse, trying to scrape away ponderous masses of tumours. The infected were moving away from the centre of the contagion, and they were changing as they went. There was no pattern to the metamorphoses. One man had lost his legs, and was leaving behind a thick trail of slime that boiled and bubbled, lashing back and forth like a thing alive. The body of the woman ahead of him was spreading and flattening out, her ribs pushing out of her flesh and turning into pale blind snakes. Schenk saw tentacles sprouting from necks, heads that had become nothing but gaping, snapping jaws, and flesh that sluiced away like melting candle wax. The only constant was transformation followed by immediate decay. The sticky, squirming stench of the plague forced its way through the rebreather filters and stung Schenk’s eyes. Her breath hitched in anxiety, but she did not fall to the plague.