The Death of Antagonis

by David Annandale

  ‘All humans, Captain?’ Toharan asked. He was thinking of Dysfield and the remaining Mortisians. He wasn’t worried about Lettinger.

  ‘Unless she says otherwise.’

  When Volos heard the order, he didn’t feel surprise. Instead, he felt that he was being told something he had already known at a subconscious level. He turned from the dead to bring his flamer to bear on Robbes. He saw a woman fighting heroically for her life and those of her friends. His finger hesitated on the trigger. His peripheral vision caught the rest of the squad re-orienting their weapons, also on the horns of that terrible moment when orders seemed wrong.

  Robbes turned her head to look at him. Volos pulled the trigger.

  But he was too late. Everything was too late. The plague reached maturity, and the change began.

  CHAPTER 6

  DOUBTWORM

  Robbes opened her mouth wide in a snarling scream, and her head folded in on itself. The skull collapsed and flowed into her jaws. The bones in her legs turned to soup, and she dropped to the ground as Volos’s jet of flaming promethium passed over her. The jaws widened, unhinging like a snake’s, the teeth turning into rows of gleaming needles. The legs lengthened, thickened, coiled. The torso twisted, bones cracking and muscles flowing, transforming into an incarnation of liquid and strength, reptile and desire, teeth and chaos, and eternal change.

  The metamorphosis was as complex as it was instant. The shift from human to daemon took a fraction of a second. Volos lowered his flamer to send the abomination back to the warp. A leg turned into a tentacle covered in eyes. The eyes blinked and became mouths. The mouths snapped and became eyes. The tentacle whipped out and wrapped itself around the weapon, crushing it. Volos dropped the flamer and threw himself to the side as the promethium reservoir exploded. The eye-mouths of the tentacle screamed in a dozen registers as they were coated by flaming liquid. The limb curled in on itself against the pain, but the rest of the monster attacked as if unaware that it had been injured.

  The daemon’s body was stretching as it twisted, becoming a ropey, blinking tube of flesh. The other leg tentacle snatched at Volos, while the neck became a python, reaching for him with its gaping jaws. He slammed the tentacle down with his chainsword, pinned it and ground it beneath a boot, then lifted the blade high with both hands. He brought it down in a savage chopping motion against the daemon’s maw.

  Teeth met teeth. The sword’s howl was Volos’s rage as it ground deeper into the neck of the abomination. Ichor and blood splashed over him. The daemon unleashed an ululation that built into a choir of rage and pain before it turned into a racking, choking gurgle. The torso slumped forward. The burned tentacle snaked along the ground, not toward Volos, but to what had been the next strong point of the circle, where Nithigg was incinerating another daemon. That creature sent braided tendrils of muscle to meet the envoy from Volos’s foe. The flesh linked, fused and expanded, the wounded bodies at either end shrivelling as they poured what remained of their essence into the new, larger being.

  It had a less defined shape. All trace of the human was gone now, replaced by a giant, pulsating flesh sack. And still, covering its surface, the eyes that became mouths that became eyes that became mouths, watching and hungering, hating and screaming.

  Volos scanned the battlefield as he yanked his chainsword from the flopping corpse. The same pattern had played out along the entire defensive perimeter. His battle-brothers had cut down the daemons before them, but the defeated monsters were all melding with the new construct. And it was growing fast. All of the humans within the circle, dozens and dozens, had transformed. Some of the daemons melted down, flesh running like mercury and racing to the greater being. Others, still moving on things that passed for legs, leaped across the ground to throw themselves into the absorbing sac.

  Only it wasn’t really a sac any longer. In the seconds since it had formed, though its surface of eye-mouths were nothing but staring, gnashing change and the flesh between them bubbled and dripped, the larger whole had gathered force and shape. It was long. It was a tube.

  It was a worm.

  Volos grabbed one of the krak grenades from his belt dispenser. He hurled it at the worm. The grenade hit the centre of the monster and exploded in a fountain of gristle and blood. The other Dragon Claws followed his example. The worm howled with its thousand voices, and rolled into the army of beings that Volos had thought were dead.

  When the transformations had begun, the attacks had ceased. Antagonis’s tainted millions now were standing still and wailing. Their cry was inarticulate and mindless, but it wasn’t soulless. It was the most primitive, basic hymn of abject despair and regret, a song of a mission failed and of a doom inevitable. All the energy and ferocity evaporated from the creatures. Whatever need had animated them, it had fled at the moment of the daemonic transformations.

  The moment when disguises had been shed.

  For all the grief and terror resounding from millions upon millions of throats and stretching beyond the horizon, the tainted did not run as the worm rolled onto them. When it did, its flesh flowed over them and dissolved them. The daemonic body devoured them, taking in their mass and their essence, and grew. It screamed as the grenades blew out deliquescent chunks of its body, but it grew far faster than it was being injured. Its growth accelerated exponentially as its bulk covered a greater and greater area, swallowing up ever more bodies. And scattered over the foothills and forest were all the other pockets of resistance. Even now, from all those bastions of false hope, other worms were approaching, growing all the while, racing to fuse with the first.

  Setheno yanked open the surgery door. She saw Danton and his daughter. They turned to her. In that first second, Danton kept his aristocratically entreating smile and Bethshea was utterly the frightened little girl. Setheno didn’t hesitate. She raised her bolt pistol and fired. Danton was already changing when the mass-reactive rounds hit him, but he was still human enough to have a head and a face that disintegrated as the bolts smashed into his skull and exploded. The thing shrieked with the mouths that had sprouted on its neck and palms. It staggered, flailing madly. Arms became barbed whips that slashed across the room, but Setheno ducked under them and slid forward, emptying the clip into the daemon’s torso, knocking it down. She pressed the attack, knowing that she would never get the advantage back if she lost it for the slightest moment. She straddled what was still almost a chest, and slashed twice with her power sword, severing whip arms, and then stabbing straight down. It wasn’t a heart that she punctured, because hearts didn’t scream, but it was still something important. In the seconds that she had gained, she reloaded the bolt pistol and looked for Bethshea.

  The child thing was running away, racing down the corridor away from the surgery. Setheno cursed herself for having chosen not to shoot both daemonhosts at the same time. As she pulled the trigger, the Danton creature bucked, and a pillar of twisting muscle shot out of its chest. It slammed into her breastplate and knocked her across the room. She smashed into the far wall, cracking stonework. Even as she landed, she was firing again, her bolts blowing out more of the monster’s central mass, spreading it around the room. It tried to rise, but fell, thrashing. Setheno reloaded, fired again. The movements grew weak. She brought her sword to bear again.

  ‘You are alone here, wretch,’ she said as she butchered the thing. ‘You have no ally to absorb. You have no succour.’

  It sprouted a mouth on its shoulder and spoke to her. ‘You should be one of us.’ It sounded puzzled.

  ‘I have nothing for you to feed on,’ she said, and reduced it to dead, scattered meat.

  Then she ran from the room, hunting Bethshea.

  The refugees from Lecorb had been housed in the sleeping cells of Lexica Keep. Now they gathered together and fused. They made enough noise chanting and shrieking in ecstasy that Guardsmen came to investigate. The being took them. A worm ate at the heart of Lexica, and grew strong.

  Lettinger watched the Battle Pyre r
oar back to the keep. He frowned. All he had seen it do was engage in a brief bombardment. That wasn’t the counter-attack he’d been expecting. The attack craft descended to the elevated landing pad on the east side of the central courtyard. He hurried down the rampart stairs. He was halfway across the courtyard, and the Battle Pyre was just settling on the pad, when the keep’s main doors burst open and Setheno charged out, weapons in hand. He stopped to wait for her. She ran straight at him. The impact of her armoured form sent him sprawling, lungs flattened. She crouched over him and held her bolt pistol to his temple. He heard the racking of many chambers. He stared up into the screaming face of her helmet, and beyond her at the disembarked squads of Black Dragons, every bolter aimed his way. Perhaps his terror saved his life. Setheno hesitated. She grabbed his aquila pendant and brought it to his lips. ‘Kiss it,’ she ordered.

  He did.

  ‘How close have you come to any of the foe?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve only seen the ones in the valley,’ he gasped.

  Setheno paused a few more seconds, then stood and took a step away from him. ‘Get up,’ she said, lowering her pistol. The Dragons followed her lead.

  Lettinger got to his feet, and saw a small figure dart out of the doorway. ‘Bethshea?’ he asked, puzzled. When he spoke, Setheno whirled, gun out.

  Then the façade of Lexica Keep exploded.

  In the days that followed, the images of those few seconds would replay themselves before Toharan’s inner eye. They would remain vivid in his memory, etched in lightning, in a way that the rest of the battle would not. They would stay with him because of what they represented. They were proof of how desperately wrong he could be. They were a wound, and they were a lesson.

  He saw Bethshea running from the keep. He saw Setheno turn and raise her pistol to fire at the girl. He saw Lexica give shattering birth to a monstrous worm. It was fifty metres long, wider than Toharan was tall, and writhing with eye-mouths and roiling flesh. Stonework flew across the courtyard, battering Setheno’s power armour. She remained standing, and Lettinger ducked behind her, avoiding the worst of the falling wreckage. He wasn’t quite fast enough and an errant gargoyle head knocked him unconscious. The rain of blows was enough to throw Setheno’s aim off, and her volley of shots missed the zigzagging Bethshea.

  Then came the lesson. Toharan saw Bethshea turn and run towards the worm. Her speed was superhuman, and she was at least five metres from the monster when she leaped, arms outstretched as if to embrace the thing. As she flew, she transformed, elongating and distorting into a daemon of serpentine limbs and teeth, her shape changing from one fraction of a second to the next, each form flowing into the next until she hit the worm and was absorbed into its flank. Toharan remembered looking at Bethshea during the flight from Lecorb, and seeing in the girl the reason for an otherwise senseless mission. His battle-brothers and the Guard had been sacrificed, but she had been a small portion of the Imperium and its future that had been saved, and so the sacrifices had not been in vain. And indeed, he saw now, they had not been. But the deaths had been sacrifices to a monstrous cause. All of Toharan’s efforts in this war, and those of his fellow Dragons, had been worse than futile. The taken-for-granted certainties had been lies.

  The lesson would fester in time. But for now, all he felt was, first, a sharp drop in the pit of his stomach, and then nothing but the killing rage. Vritras yelled, ‘Fire and bone!’ Toharan roared it back at him, and he lived the battle-cry as he never had before. The Black Dragons charged down from the landing pad, bolters unleashing a mass-reactive hail. The worm flinched back from the blows. Each individual round was no more than a nuisance to it, but the cumulative effect of hundreds was punishing. It reared as its flesh was blasted away, and brought more of the keep crashing into the courtyard, crushing a handful of the few remaining Mortisian Guard. The leading end of the worm shaped itself into what passed for a head. It was nothing but a gigantic maw and a single, glistening black eye two metres across. It lunged forward, knocking aside Space Marines through sheer momentum and bulk.

  Toharan stood his ground until the last second, firing straight into the creature’s eye. A leathery membrane flicked down, covering the orb, deflecting and absorbing his shots. One got through, though. Green fluid and flickers of black flame burst from the wound. The worm squealed and jinked to the side to avoid him. As it passed, Toharan plunged his chainsword into the monster’s flank, and let the creature’s own motion tear open a massive wound. The blade-teeth chewed through eyes and shrieking mouths.

  Toharan snarled his satisfaction at he destroyed the embodiment of impurity. Then the worm’s tail curled and struck him, biting at his armour, teeth sinking into ceramite even as the blow pinned him against one of the landing pad’s support columns. The pillar cracked. The tail wrapped around Toharan and squeezed. He couldn’t move his arms, couldn’t strike with bolter or sword. His retinal display flashed warning runes as the pressure mounted. He saw the worm thrash as the Dragons continued to pour rounds into it, but it held its ground. It whipped and snapped. It landed a massive blow, and Toharan saw Brother Ythagor’s status rune switch from green to fatal red.

  The thudding rhythm of a heavy bolter began, and the worm shrieked. It released Toharan, leaving the surface of his armour pitted and scored from the bites of countless mouths and the touch of corrosive flesh. He leaped clear of the tail, reloaded his bolter and started firing again. Up on the rampart, he saw who had hurt the worm: First-Sergeant Aperos was manning a turret, the pounding fire cutting the worm to pieces. Shredded, enraged, it hurled itself at him, losing pieces of itself as it forced its way through the shredding fire. A juggernaut of corrupted flesh, it obliterated an entire section of the rampart, mangling the turret. Aperos’s rune blinked amber, but he emerged from the wreckage. His right arm swung loose and limp, but he drew his chainsword with his left hand and jumped onto the worm’s head. He plunged the sword deep into the flesh just above the eye. The growl of the sword competed with the shriek of the worm. It spasmed in agony and threw itself from side to side in an attempt to dislodge the Space Marine. Aperos held on, his blade staking his claim to the monster, sinking in and tearing deep just as Toharan’s had done, and with every movement, the wound became greater.

  The worm’s shrieks echoed off the mountains. With a massive convulsion, it slammed its head into the rampart again and again, reducing Lexica’s defences to ruins, ignoring all other attacks as it fought the terrible being whose fang was biting lethally into its essence. Finally, it drove itself deep into the foundations of the wall, a third of its length disappearing beneath the rubble.

  It stopped moving.

  Aperos’s rune blinked red.

  The Dragons kept up the attack, the need to ensure the worm was dead now less important than taking vengeance for a hero’s fall. And the worm wasn’t dead. After a few seconds, it reacted to the continuing fire and jerked free of the stonework. Its maw roared over the death of its enemy, but the ten thousand eye-mouths moaned in pain. It wavered in the air, a drunken serpent. Its movements were erratic, weak. It swung its head back and forth, seeking prey and salvation.

  To the front, it encountered nothing but the Black Dragons, now in a spearhead formation. Vritras was the tip, Toharan just behind and on his left. On his right, Chaplain Massorus cursed the worm back to the warp as he fired, and the monster seemed to twitch as if in fear. However it fed, Toharan realised, it could kill but not consume the Space Marines. Then the worm swung its head left. Dysfield and Setheno had organised the remaining Mortisians into a fire team under the landing pad platform. All the lasrifles and bolter rifles but Setheno’s suddenly fell silent as the worm looked at the men. It did not need to touch to feed or spread its taint. Its gaze, when met by a human, was enough. Dysfield and his troops stood still. They let their weapons drop from their hands. They began walking forward, until Setheno, with reptilian mercy, shot them all.

  The worm moaned. The Dragons crucified it with bolter fire, pu
shing it back against the crumbled wall of the keep. They did not advance, though. They retreated instead, putting space between them and the monster, at last giving Brother Keryon, in the airborne Thunderhawk, the opportunity and the clear line of fire he needed.

  The worm was consumed by the justice of Hellstrike missiles. Its shrieks reached a height of pain pure enough to cut crystal, and then they cut off, and there was only the roar of flame. The worm fell. Toharan and his brothers moved to the edge of Lexica and peered down. Thousands of metres below, the worm had smashed itself open on the hill of bodies, its impact killing the few remaining climbers. Toharan noticed that there were no more of the tainted making their way into the valley.

  In the courtyard, while Apothecary Urlock revived Lettinger, Toharan asked Setheno, ‘What was that?’

  ‘It was the terminal stage of doubtworm,’ she answered, as if that explained everything. ‘Captain,’ she said to Vritras, ‘you have a very short time, if it is not already too late, to extract your Dragon Claws. The souls who formed the worm we just fought only numbered in the dozens. There is one coming into being on the other side of the pass, and it will be composed of billions.’

  Toharan was neck-and-neck with his captain as they raced for the landing Battle Pyre.

  ‘Brother-sergeant,’ Nithigg said as he and Volos crouched behind a boulder, ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘I didn’t say I had an idea.’

  ‘I know. I was just hoping to prompt some inspiration.’