Arrian swung the rifle up, studying it just long enough to figure out how it functioned. He tracked one of the lumbering brutes and pulled the trigger. Stung, the creature slapped at itself. As it turned, its flesh began to bubble and writhe. It gave a strangely shrill bellow as it was consumed by a rapid transformation. Arrian lowered the rifle.
‘Fascinating.’
‘Knowledge later, retreat now,’ Helion howled over the vox.
Arrian turned. Red-armoured drukhari swarmed his position. The barrel of Helion’s lascannon steamed as it slammed into a kabalite warrior’s helm, crumpling it and reducing the skull within to slurry. He wrenched the weapon free, spattering nearby mutants with gore, and fired, erasing a second drukhari from existence.
‘Fall back, or I’m leaving you behind!’
Arrian’s reply was lost in a fusillade of splinter-shots that sent both of them looking for cover. He scrambled behind a pillar and risked a quick glance, trusting in his armour’s sensors to pinpoint their attackers. Unfortunately, the sheer bedlam of his surroundings made it difficult. His targeting array saw too many potential threats. He activated his vox.
‘Helion, can you see them?’
‘No,’ the legionary growled. ‘They’re dug in. And now we’re cut off…’
‘You sound upset.’
Helion laughed as splinter fire chewed the pillar he hunched behind. ‘Why would I be upset? Our forces are in disarray and we are outnumbered. Two warriors against gods alone know how many xenos…’
‘There’s more than two of us, brother.’ Arrian tapped one of his skulls. ‘We fight as many, because our cause is just.’
‘I keep forgetting that you’re insane,’ Helion said jovially.
‘Quiet. I’m aiming.’ Arrian leaned around his pillar and sighted down the barrel of the xenos rifle. Targeting runes flickered from blue to red as they isolated a crimson-armoured kabalite warrior creeping forward, using the rubble as cover. Arrian fired, and was rewarded by the sight of the warrior pitching backwards, body convulsing. Apparently even a glancing hit was lethal. He patted the rifle. ‘Good gun.’
More red-armoured figures appeared. The drukhari were impatient – likely eager to begin looting. Or maybe they thought the gunships had been damaged.
‘Wait – I’m getting something on the vox – listen,’ Helion said.
Arrian cycled through the vox, one eye on the approaching drukhari. The message was brief – a blurt of warning, across an encrypted signal used by the 12th. Immediate withdrawal. No further information.
‘Did you hear?’
‘Yes.’ Arrian raised his borrowed weapon to his shoulder again, wondering how many more shots he had. ‘I’ll cover you. Fall back.’ But as he spoke, he saw the drukhari scrambling back to their own vessels. ‘Wait, they’re leaving as well.’ He stepped warily out of cover, watching as the drukhari retreated.
He felt the first rumbling then. As if the great scaffolds were groaning in fear. ‘Something is wrong,’ he murmured.
‘Worry about it later,’ Helion said. ‘You heard the order. Get to the gunship.’ He was already moving, his lascannon braced over his shoulder. Arrian made to follow, but paused. Something, some instinct, made him look in the direction of the cache-facility.
There was a light – not a true light, but a radiance of some sort. A flicker of unease pierced his chemically induced calm as another rumble shook the street.
He turned and hurried after Helion.
‘The webway gate – move,’ Fabius roared. He heard the whip-crack of a xenos weapon and felt something punch through his armour as if it were paper. The pain was immediate – and familiar. Hexrifle, he thought. He fired in reply, and took a moment’s satisfaction in the sight of a wrack toppling to the floor. He started towards the gate, as the virus began to gnaw at his system. ‘Smash through them if you value your lives!’
At his command, his followers hurled themselves forward with desperate urgency. Mutant met mutant in an orgy of blood. Fabius laid about himself with Torment, striking out at anyone or anything foolish enough to try and impede his progress. He spied Gorel and Marag doing the same. Gorel roared curses as he fired his bolt pistol into the massed ranks of chattel. Marag’s infernus pistols filled the air with the stink of burnt flesh as he burned himself a path through the brawl. They’d obviously realised what the timer meant, if not the specifics of the device in question.
The drukhari had many weapons. Old weapons, from before the shrinking of the universe, when the heavens roiled with war. Weapons powered by dark matter.
The air began to crumble, as a cold radiance swelled from the epicentre of the device. Fabius could feel the oxygen molecules split and tear even as he took a breath. Light stretched and bent, drawn back towards the device. A pressure, gentle at first, but growing stronger, tugged at his limbs. He sent a silent pulse to the chirurgeon, demanding more stimms, more combat drugs, to lend him strength and speed.
Hexachires’ wracks were retreating towards the gate, and he saw their plan at once. They would fall back and close the gate behind them, leaving everyone on the other side to perish. As the first cold flush of stimms hit his flagging system, he barrelled towards them. They fired at him in desperation, trying to bring him down.
Fabius was in among them before the echoes of the first shots had sounded. Torment swept around in a brutal arc, daemon-shard singing in rhapsodic delight. Wracks crumpled to the ground, broken and bloody, bodies twitching as raw pain tore through them. Mutant slaves leapt for him, howling. He smashed them down in a frenzy. Torment’s howls spiralled into audibility as Fabius careened towards the portal.
A lumbering grotesque flung itself into his path, grappling him with long arms. For a moment, his headlong charge was stalled. The grotesque was stronger than any Space Marine, and utterly without fear. Its blows fell like sledgehammers, rattling him inside his armour. He drove Torment into its belly and knees, trying to bring it down.
Metal claws scraped against his armour. One of the chirurgeon’s limbs was snapped off, eliciting a shrill whistle from the medicae harness. Enraged, Fabius drove the haft of his sceptre into the grotesque’s throat. The hulking creature jerked back, instinctively clutching at its crushed larynx. A second blow knocked it to its knees, and he shoved past it, not bothering to finish it off.
Stumbling now, he groped towards the portal’s dais. He could feel his limbs stiffening up as the Glass Plague spread itself through his system. Hexrifles meant near-instant death, normally. While there was no cure, there were any number of tinctures that could slow the virus and he’d made it a point to learn them all. Even so, he didn’t have long.
His vox crackled as he neared the shimmering aperture. More wracks emerged from the webway portal, armed with a variety of bladed implements. He swatted one aside and said, ‘Bellephus – can you hear me?’
‘I… o, Clone…’
‘I need you to sound a general retreat,’ Fabius shouted. ‘Everyone must get off-world immediately. Do you understand me? Immediate evacuation. Immediate–’
The vox-link died in a thrash of static. Fabius cursed and turned. The dark matter device was devouring vox signals along with everything else. The floor and walls closest to the device had lost all claim to solidity. The device had become the eye of a slow maelstrom, drawing all things towards itself. He could feel it now, in the grinding of his armour’s servos, and the warning runes flashing across his display.
Those combatants closest to the halo effect were the first to fall victim to it. As he watched, a dying mutant was dragged across the floor and into the chill nimbus of the device’s aura. The creature broke apart into globules of crimson matter that were soon reduced to nothing. More dead and dying followed, and then the living.
The fallen were reduced to a slurry of liquefied effluvia that swamped the legs of their fellows before being drawn into the slowly
expanding vortex. Everyone was struggling towards the portal now, with no thought save escape.
Several of the remaining wracks stood inside the portal, and were firing in all directions, even as they tried to shut it down. Fabius lunged and caught one by the throat. He tossed the struggling creature away, and it was dragged screaming into oblivion even as he fell upon its companions.
As Fabius parried a blow from a bladed gauntlet, he spied Gorel out of the corner of his eye. The Apothecary was stuck at the foot of the dais, his legs trapped by the seething remains of his victims. Gorel looked up and met his gaze, even as a maddened grotesque leapt for him. By the time Fabius had turned, both of them were gone.
The pull from the device had gone from insistent to irresistible. The chamber was beginning to collapse in on itself. Living beings were reduced to twisted strands of tissue, spiralling back into the blinding epicentre, as the walls and floor crumbled away, exposing the chamber’s endo-structure. His display flashed a warning and he twisted aside as a nutrient vat tore loose from the buckling wall and hurtled into the vortex. Support beams crashed down, and were wrenched into the flickering light.
Fabius reached out and dug his fingers into the frame of the webway portal. He was one of the last living things in the chamber. A few wracks still struggled at the edges of the dais, clinging to the broken floor with grim determination. A single grotesque plodded across the floor, blood streaming from its injuries. As Fabius hauled himself into the aperture, he saw the grotesque sink to one knee and hunch forward, digging its claws into the floor.
Its salvation lasted only a moment. The flesh of its back split, as its reinforced spine bowed outwards. The grotesque roared shrilly as it was ripped apart. Fabius slammed Torment’s ferrule down into the dais, anchoring himself. The chirurgeon’s limbs clattered as it struggled against the pull of oblivion. The chemical tanks attached to the harness cracked and shattered, the contents slipping away. Fabius dragged himself further into the aperture. The pull lessened, but only just.
It would only grow stronger. Unless the portal was closed, the effects might well spread into the webway. He turned and spied Marag, struggling up the steps, his robes flapping. Fabius reached out a hand, and Marag caught it in an iron grip. Fabius felt something give in his arm. Too late, he realised the plague had spread to his extremities. He tried to shout a warning, but his words were snatched away by the singularity.
His forearm twisted and split, crumbling into dull coloured shards. He felt nothing, save a sudden loss of balance. Marag was gone a moment later. Fabius stared into the event horizon, shocked by the suddenness of it all.
He turned and flung himself through the portal.
Part Two
THE BLACK PILGRIMAGE
992.M37
Chapter Twelve
Black Lassitude
Khorag forced open the sealed hatchway, ignoring the sparks that pattered across his head and shoulders. ‘Fabius,’ he called out. ‘You will speak with me.’
‘You could have simply used the vox,’ Fabius said from within. His voice sounded thready. Weak. Not like Fabius at all.
‘I tried. Three weeks ago. Even my patience has its limits.’ Khorag stumped into the laboratorium, ignoring the protesting squeals of the vatborn. The little creatures knew better than to try and stop him, though it was not a courtesy universally extended. Duco and the others who’d tried to breach Fabius’ sanctum had been driven back by the vatborn’s tricks and traps. The creatures were as vicious in their own way as the Gland-hounds. All of Fabius’ creations had been on edge since their return.
Other than Gorel and Marag, there had been no significant casualties on Peleus-Tertius. But the loss of resources had been incalculable – hundreds of warriors had died, caught in the planet’s death-throes. For a time, they’d thought Fabius himself had perished. His Gland-hounds had spirited him away and secreted him aboard the Vesalius, even as the ship hurtled away from the newborn singularity.
It was given that their return to Belial IV had not been as celebrated as they might have hoped. A defeat of this magnitude was almost always accompanied by evacuation, and some members of the Consortium had chosen to leave immediately, stripping the facilities of as much as they could carry.
Little wars had erupted over gene-samples and valuable equipment. Apothecary against Apothecary. The Smiling Count had mustered a small army of stimm-addicted mutants to raid the storage vaults of the eastern complexes, and run afoul of the servitor-thralls of Gemerax. Emicos Shard had engaged in a protracted firefight with Herkun Marr, an Apothecary from the Ninth Millennial, on the southern gantries. Marr had been killed – no great loss, but access to the southern bio-vaults had been compromised.
Marr wasn’t the only Apothecary to have perished since their return. And many had simply fled. Only a handful remained. Khorag had volunteered to find out what the Chief Apothecary was planning – and to see whether it included them.
‘I heard explosions,’ Fabius said, as Khorag entered.
‘A disagreement over transportation.’ One of the others had tried to steal a gunship full of samples. Someone had shot them down. Khorag wasn’t sure who’d been involved, nor did he particularly care.
Fabius gave him a grim smile. ‘So long as it was settled amicably.’ He sat atop an observation slab, surrounded by diagnostic equipment. The chirurgeon crouched behind him like a hungry spider, its scalpels and saws humming as it worked. He had been stripped to the waist, exposing the leathery, scarred flesh of his shrivelled frame. He looked like a victim of starvation, all lean muscle tight against the bone. ‘Is there something of importance you wished to discuss with me?’
‘Would I be here otherwise?’
‘I can only hope not, given that I left orders not to be disturbed.’ He winced as the chirurgeon extracted a lump of flesh that glittered like shards of glass. Khorag leaned forward interestedly.
‘Fascinating,’ he gurgled.
‘Don’t touch it,’ Fabius said. ‘The drukhari call it the Glass Plague, for obvious reasons.’ He signalled to a vatborn. ‘Sample jar. Hurry now!’
‘I have heard of that. It is reportedly fatal.’
‘It is, if one has not had the foresight to introduce a certain amount of neo-silicate protein into one’s cellular makeup.’ Fabius smiled thinly. ‘Even so, I must regularly abrade the afflicted areas, lest it spread.’
‘And your arm?’ Khorag indicated Fabius’ ravaged forearm. ‘You have not cloned a replacement, I see. Or procured a prosthetic.’
‘No need. It will repair itself in the next few days.’ Fabius gave the stump a twitch. ‘It is budding already, as you can see.’
‘I see more than that…’
The chirurgeon hummed as it sliced through the meat of Fabius’ shattered forearm, removing another section of glassed tissue. Carefully it peeled back the ragged flaps of flesh, the black carapace and the shroud of muscle fibre, revealing the pale, spiky structure beneath.
Khorag gestured. ‘That appears to be ceramite, Fabius.’
‘It is. Or rather, it is a variant of my own cultivation – a nanofibre hybrid. I have threaded it through the honeycomb matrix of the interior, lending strength and flexibility to my endo-structure even as the blight renders my bones to tumorous powder.’ Fabius reached for a handheld narthecium and carefully drilled out a sample of his splintered radius. ‘The nanofibres map my system, transmitting data directly to the data-nodes in my head, allowing me to identify and isolate problem areas more easily during my self-examinations.’
Khorag shook his head. ‘Very interesting. I see you have been keeping busy, at least.’ He looked around the laboratorium. At the remains of unfinished meals and abandoned experiments. Grandfather approved of sloth in his adherents. But Fabius had never been one for the seven virtues.
‘Why are you here, Khorag?’
‘They are leaving,’ Kho
rag said. ‘They have grown tired of waiting for you.’
‘Who remains?’
‘Duco. A few others. Not many. The rest departed not long after your return.’
‘And looted my laboratorium in the process.’
‘What did you expect?’ Khorag said, with a clotted laugh. ‘You taught them well.’
Fabius frowned. ‘Why did you come in here, really? Not simply to check on me, I think. Or to inform me that the remainder of your comrades are skulking away, while I am otherwise preoccupied.’
Khorag grunted and crossed his arms. ‘I thought you might wish to speak to them. Us.’ He laughed again. ‘Though I doubt they will listen.’
‘Speak to them? Why?’ Fabius hissed as the chirurgeon began to close up the incisions it had made. ‘Let them leave. I have grown tired of playing mentor.’
‘And then what? What will you do, with no allies? Will you sit and wait for the drukhari to find you, as they almost certainly will?’ Khorag leaned close, letting his miasma wash over Fabius. ‘Despair is a fine thing, Fabius, but I hate to see it wasted on one as unappreciative as yourself.’
Fabius scowled and leaned back. ‘What do you propose, Khorag? What would you have me do?’
‘Something. Anything.’ Khorag slammed his hands down on the observation slab. ‘I know you, Fabius. I know that you have schemes aplenty boiling away in that black brain of yours.’ He peered at Fabius. ‘But if you delay any longer, you risk losing everything you have built.’
Fabius chuckled. ‘I recall you saying something similar once before.’
‘Yes. And I was right. You should never have gone to Commorragh.’ Khorag turned away, shaking his head sadly. ‘It was the height of arrogance. But I often find myself wondering – was it worth it?’
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