It belches, picks its nose, then scampers back to join them.
Dantine can see they are breaking through. There is nothing in his arsenal powerful enough to even slow them, let alone halt them. At one point he thought they had actually downed one – a concentrated las-burst from twenty men, all aimed at the same target. The monster had stumbled, tottering over heavily as the combined hits took their toll. Dantine dared to believe, for a moment, that they had at last nailed one of the bastards.
But then it got back up. It hauled itself to its feet, armour-plate glowing from the kinetic energy discharged, its horrific eyes still shining, its claws reaching for the trigger on that bestial-looking firearm. It strode back into the las-storm and started killing again.
And that had crushed them. Dantine and his senior command group fell back to the central building, pulling in every survivor they could, barricaded it and prepared to die there. Even from within the walls he could tell that the wind was still blowing outside. Battacharya’s plan to reach the nodes in time had always been a forlorn hope. This world would fall, intact, to the enemy.
Now he waits for them grimly, knowing that his charge-pack is almost spent. They all crouch behind upended tables at the far end of the long corridor, fewer than thirty now, their weapons readied. They hear the crunch and slam of walls breaking and the agonised yowls of other soldiers being killed in that terrible, unhurried way.
He presses his finger over the trigger, mouthing prayers. He has seen action many times before. He has faced greenskins on far-off worlds, back when he aspired to achieve something with the Astra Militarum. He has faced heretic cultists in the depths of stinking hive towers, and thought at the time that no man could witness horror greater than that.
‘Holy Throne of Earth,’ he whispers softly, the first words of an old Ministorum hymn, a child’s catechism.
Startled, he realises the men around him are taking up the soft chant. They begin to sing, hardly audibly, their guns still held fast.
In faith we are preserved,
The first of the monsters comes around the corner, and the lasguns open up – flash after flash. This creature is as foul as the rest of them – a colossal beast in stinking, slithering armour, grotesquely huge and surrounded by clouds of insects. It carries a scythe that crackles with a pale energy.
Across the whole of space,
Dantine sings with the rest, though he can hardly squeeze the words out of his fear-choked throat. Every shot is hitting it, and none of it makes any difference. The thing walks towards them, taking its time. Some of the defenders begin to retch.
No shameful thought, no unclean deed,
He fires and fires and fires. The monster reaches the barricade of tables and gets to work, lifting them away and crushing those cowering on the far side. It pulls apart human bodies as if they were made of damp paper. A trooper, in desperation, draws a knife and launches himself at it. He is swatted off and crushed underfoot, the knife left trembling where he plunged it, hilt-deep into rotten armour-hide.
Obscures the glory of our race.
The thing gets closer to Dantine, and he sees that there are tiny numbers on its armour, picked out in black ink. They look handwritten, scrawled in some obsessive frenzy over every inch of exposed armour. It wheezes as it comes for him, and he sees flecks of blood and vomit on the fractured breastplate. It has an air of incredible age to it, a spectre of a lost epoch, unearthed at the dawn of time and given flesh to torment the living galaxy.
Dantine’s charge-pack gives out, and he switches grip, angling the bayonet. The monster has seen him, and he springs, going for the creature’s neck. He puts every last ounce of strength into the leap, holding the weapon two-handed above his head, shouting out as he hurtles towards the objective.
The monster catches him – catches him – in mid-leap. Claws snap across his chest, holding him rigid. His weapon spins away uselessly and Dantine finds himself staring straight into the creature’s face.
The mask is huge, well beyond anything human. He can see tubes snaking under the cracked rim, throbbing with dark liquids. He can see flies crawling all over it, and glossy sores on the tarnished ceramite. He can see a pair of lenses backlit with eerie green light, as thick as cream. He can see numbers written all over the ridges of barnacled armour, vanishing into impossibly small characters.
Dantine spits in its face. The spittle curdles as it hits, turning lumpy like old cheese.
He hears a rumble from within the carcass of the monster and realises it’s a deep, corrosive laugh. There’s nothing human about that laugh – the voice is too ruined, too overlaid with corruption and distortion and slow malice.
‘Kill me then,’ Dantine dares it, raging now, more angry at the blasphemy than afraid.
The monster looks at him for a while. All Dantine can see is its dark lenses, unblinking and unknowable.
Then it shakes its head.
‘Not you,’ it slurs.
It squeezes, gently, and Dantine can feel himself passing out.
‘No!’ he gasps, enraged, flailing against the grip, kicking out against the unyielding wall of stinking, mouldering armour.
But the fight is lost. As awareness fades, he realises the worst thing of all – that he’s not going to die here, that he will be denied even a noble end, and that, for him, this is all just beginning.
Chapter Eight
The sun comes up.
Garstag walks out to the far edge of the complex in order to observe it. It is a little rite for him, a small habit that he sees no reason to extinguish. After every successful action, he makes sure to see the sun come up on the worlds he has conquered. He has seen many suns rise – blazing blue-white orbs that sent shadows leaping across the rocks, mid-range yellow stars that must be reminiscent of Terra for those who remember it, and ones like this one – old and tired and amber, filling a sixteenth of the sky with a weary light.
The complex is still burning. Slert discovered promethium tanks and set them off. After that he drove a few survivors into the inferno, where they were caught between death at his hands and death in the flames. It was a poor game, that, one the Kardainn-master disapproved of. They deserved a chance to die on their feet.
He walks further out, getting away from the acrid smell of charred flesh and metal. The skies are dusty, still blown by an incessant boom of wind. In the distance he can see towers, studding the landscape at regular intervals. Between them is nothing, just a wasteland of rustling corn.
He keeps walking. He passes a huge vehicle, its innards twisted and its internal machinery ripped out. Hoppers, each one capable of storing hundreds of tonnes of material, have been pulled apart, and the dust and grain are mingling into a dry slurry underfoot.
He hears something out in the wastes and walks away from the abandoned vehicle. He sees Kledo kneeling out in the middle of one of the hyperfields and lumbers over to join him. The Surgeon doesn’t appear to notice him coming, or perhaps is merely too engrossed in his work.
Garstag sees what he has been up to. The severed bodies of Imperial servitors are lying in the dirt all around him, dozens of them. Some are clearly missing body parts. About fifty are waiting meekly for his attention, standing in the field with their eyes focusing well into the distance. They’re big creatures, bred for muscle, with absurdly small heads perched atop all that vat-grown bulk.
Kledo looks up. He has a needle in one hand, thread in another.
‘What?’ he snaps.
Garstag does not ask what he is doing. The brotherhood of Surgeons is notoriously secretive. If he had to guess, it would be that there is no clear purpose here, and that Kledo is simply bored. Perhaps he wishes to test the pain tolerances of these things, or merely see if they can be recombined in some novel way.
‘Not much of a theatre,’ Garstag says.
Kledo stops what he’s doing and looks around.
The windblown crops whisper back at him. ‘Where was their support?’ he asks.
Garstag nods. ‘It’s a big world. There’s a lot of fodder here.’
There should have been a response. Even if the planet itself did not maintain an adequate garrison, there should have been an alert network within the system, primed to respond. That was how the Imperium operated – it could not guard every single hunk of rock that it laid claim to, but it could act quickly when the alarm was raised. Garstag has seen this many times – a target would be hit, and within hours there would be landers darkening the skies.
It was what they had all hoped for – a cascade of steadily increasing resistance, something to get their claws into.
Kledo puts his bloody materials down and gets up. ‘It’s like they’ve given up,’ he says.
Garstag snorts. ‘You saw what it was like at the Gate. I don’t think they’ve given up. Maybe we have, though.’
Kledo looks intrigued. ‘What do you mean?’
Garstag almost doesn’t tell him. It is hard to know when the time is right. ‘Don’t tell me you would have chosen this target,’ he says carefully.
‘No one chose it. It’s where we ended up.’
‘Yes. Strange, that.’
Kledo suddenly looks angry. His moods are like a child’s – quick and complete, swinging from one extreme to the other. ‘There’s been plenty of talk. Don’t add me to it, or I’ll be stitching you to something foul.’
Garstag laughs. ‘We shouldn’t be anywhere near here. We should have followed the Despoiler out of Cadia.’ He sighs, feeling his muscles ache for more action. ‘You and I both know it, Surgeon. He’s lost his way.’
‘Who?’ asks Kledo, looking shrewd.
It is a big thing, to name the primarch. They do not openly criticise him, for they know that words, even whispered ones, have a way of carrying back to the Plague Planet. For some in the Legion, Mortarion is little less than a god, a slayer-sage elevated into the skirts of immortality. Even for those who think otherwise, he is still the most powerful of them all, a creature capable of turning the universe inside out in the cause of vengeance. Since his return to speech and activity, it has become perilous even to voice doubt, to utter a word of concern.
In any case, that is not who he meant.
‘Tell me, Surgeon,’ Garstag says. ‘Who gives a damn for Ultramar? I do not. I do not care whether it prospers or rots. How about you?’
Kledo thinks for a moment, then slowly nods. ‘We do not set the course.’
‘So what do you want from this? I never asked you.’
Kledo laughs. ‘A better world, more subjects for my predilections.’
‘Liar.’ Garstag stalks moodily away. ‘He’s led us for a long time. I find the obsessions wearying. It can’t go on, brother.’
‘Then do something.’
‘You recommend it?’
Kledo shrugs. ‘Don’t come here fishing for support. Do something, or hold your claws closed. That’s the way of things.’
‘I find it interesting to gauge views, that is all.’
Kledo snorts and gets back to his work. The needle flickers, snicker-snack, and surgical thread weaves. ‘I’ll say this for the siegemaster. He was there. Like I was. We both reached out, saw the walls, and for a moment they were falling. Falling. It was so, so close. And he’s never stopped fighting. I did, for a long time. It’s not easy to keep the hatred alive, sometimes. Especially in the Eye, where there are diversions.’
‘We’re not in the Eye, though, are we?’
‘Neither are we where we were supposed to be.’
‘And you know nothing about how that happened.’
‘Do you?’
They look at one another for a moment, a slight push of strength against strength. Eventually, Garstag looks away. ‘You’re making a mess of those things.’
‘I’m making them better. That’s our creed, brother. You should learn some religion.’
Garstag’s lips curl in something approaching disgust. Even now, even after he has seen and done so much, Kledo’s preferences can prove endlessly dismaying.
‘Think on it,’ he says, turning back towards the ruins of the complex. The smoke from the last of the fires gusts about them, blown at a low level into the fields.
But Kledo is no longer listening. He beckons to another servitor, waiting mutely in line.
‘Next,’ he says, brandishing the bloody needle.
Dantine takes a long time to wake up. He is half-aware of dreams in that time. He dreams of being taken up by men with no faces and carried somewhere far away. He sees stars swinging overhead, hundreds of them. At one point he thinks he wakes, and he feels the shake of an orbital lander, and then the nausea of a rapid ascent.
Then he is out again. He dreams of Battacharya, and somehow knows she is dead. He liked her, and believes she liked him. They might have achieved something together, had they not been stranded on such a nondescript world and haunted by mutually incomprehensible pasts. He wonders why she was posted there. He wonders why he was never brave enough to ask her.
Then he dreams that something is cutting him. He feels something being excised, dragged out of him. He hears voices – terrible voices – speaking through sputum in a language he does not understand.
Then he stops dreaming.
Much later, very much later, consciousness returns.
He blinks, and a shifting world comes back into something like focus.
He feels horribly ill, more than normal for a void transit. He is lying on his back, and he twists over to be sick. He sees the vomitus slap on to the floor, thick and greasy, and the smell appals him.
Then he lies on his back again, panting. He is clammy and cold, and he shuts his eyes. His chest hurts. He does not want to be alive. That thought prompts him to force himself awake properly. Perhaps there is something he can do about that – spite the enemy before the advent of whatever questioning or torment they have in mind.
He blinks again, hard, clearing rheum from his eyes. He tries to get a sense of where he is and what has happened.
He is inside a cell, metal-lined, metal-floored. It stinks. Some of that stink is from him – his uniform is soiled, and his various excreta reek. Foul matter is caked on every surface. The metal is heavily oxidised, stained and calcified. The floor is wet, and little bubbles pop to the surface of oily puddles.
He is on a long bench, also metal, also rusting away to nothing. The lone lumen is a chain-suspended sodium lamp, as dirty as everything else. There are furry things with many eyes crawling up the walls.
Dantine wipes his mouth and tries to sit up. His ribcage is the worst – he must have been hit hard there. His knife is gone, of course, as is anything else sharp. Aside from the smell, there is a taste in the air – a chemical taste, like something fermenting. He hears noises all around him, just as one always does on a starship. Noise resounds within a vessel in space from the total enclosure, running on top of the endemic growl of engines, air-cyclers, water-cyclers, shield generators and the rest – but this one is different to any starship he has been on before. He can detect horrible noises just below the grind of the machinery. Some are moans, some are repeating cries, some are unidentifiable. Dantine is not a cowardly man, but those noises make him shiver.
He looks up. The cell’s solitary door is opening. Weak as he feels, he clenches his fists and prepares to move.
Metal shrieks as the heavy door is shoved inward. Dantine leaps, seeing something huge and blurry in the gap and going for it.
He falls short, nearly passing out the instant he moves, and collapses into his own refuse. On his knees, he feels like weeping. He can barely lift a fist, let alone do his duty and attack his tormentor. He does not resist as huge hands reach for him, lift him up, place him back on the slab.
Then he is looking up into t
he same eyes as before, at the number-scrawled plates, at the bizarrely pocked and bloated armour.
‘Do not try that again,’ the monster says.
The voice is just as it was on Najan – like a throat submerged in oil, cracking and engine-harsh. The language is also strange and hard to follow, though patently some form of Gothic.
‘Why don’t you kill me?’ Dantine croaks.
The monster gives him a canister of water. He takes it and drinks greedily.
‘I am named Vorx, siegemaster of the Fourteenth Legion, called the Death Guard. You are on the ship Solace, in the care of the Lords of Silence. What is your name?’
Once a thing has a name, you can no longer call him ‘it’; he becomes a person, albeit of the most warped and esoteric kind. Even in the midst of his nausea and weakness, Dantine cannot escape a sliver of awe that creeps in. This warrior is old beyond imagination – that is evident just from the way he looks, moves and speaks. He even smells old – one of the melange of aromas this creature gives off is the kind of decay only the truly decrepit exude.
There had always been rumours, never spoken of except in the most intimate company, of Space Marines who had turned, who had given themselves over to the Ruinous Powers. Most sensible people discounted the notion – a Space Marine could not turn – but still the gossip never went away. Dantine remembered serving with a lieutenant who swore that he’d heard a definite account of this happening, with campaign names and dates. Two weeks later, that lieutenant was summoned to a meeting with the commissariat and never returned. For most, that was proof he must have been spouting heretical rubbish. For a few thoughtful souls though, it was enough to give them pause.
‘Captain Gaval Dantine, Najan Station resident defence force,’ he says.
‘I do not think you began your career on Najan,’ says Vorx. ‘You fought like a man who knows how to use a weapon. Is this right?’
He doesn’t want to reply. He wants to remain defiant, to list his name and position again, until they tire of it and either kill him or bring in instruments of torment.
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