‘The ship started to break up,’ offered Niobe. She looked towards Zhomas. ‘We went through the atmosphere.’
The crewman nodded, his eyes wet with sorrow, staring into nothing. ‘Oh aye.’
She went on. ‘We all… found each other after the crash. Came in here and locked the door. We had food and water.’
Meros saw where racks of supplies had been piled. Most of the containers were empty. ‘What were you going to do when you ran out?’
‘Die?’ Dortmund wondered aloud. ‘We couldn’t leave. Not after what we heard through the doors.’
‘Killings.’ Hengist’s head bobbed. ‘Killings the like of which never came afore.’ He raised his hands and pressed them to his head. ‘The sounds of that never fade.’
‘But the…’ Nakir hesitated. ‘The enemy that attacked the frigate. They left you alone.’
‘We’re not the only ones!’ Dortmund said it like it was a foolish suggestion. ‘I mean, we can’t be.’ His face fell. ‘The only ones on the ship?’
‘You are the first we have encountered since our fleet entered the Signus Cluster,’ Madidus replied, matter-of-fact. ‘Phorus, Holst, all dead. No signs of life on this world or any indications of it on the inner planets.’
A palpable sense of shock spread through the civilians, and Nakir went on. ‘Why would they allow you to live?’
The captain’s inference hung in the dead air. None of the survivors showed any mark of the xenos, no evidence of the masking the nephilim used on their helots, but still he was reluctant to evacuate them to the fleet without further information.
‘Because…’ A woman’s voice, thin and laced with pain, came from a figure lying along a low bench. ‘Because it amuses them to watch us die slowly in our despair.’
‘Lady Rozin, you must rest.’ Dortmund went to her side, frowning. ‘Don’t fear. We’re safe now.’
‘We are not,’ the woman insisted, rising painfully to a sitting position. Meros noted that she wore the status brooch of a colonial political aide on a blackened, blood-streaked jacket. ‘The Legions have not liberated us. They’ll never do that.’
‘No,’ Hengist shouted at her, ‘because you brought those monsters here, didn’t you? Invited them in, like, with tisane and garlands of flowers!’
‘Be quiet,’ Madidus snapped. ‘You had your chance to speak.’
‘What does he mean?’ said Meros.
Rozin looked up at him, and she had eyes that belonged to a broken spirit. He had seen it before, in warriors who had lived too long at the pinnacle of bloodshed and death. Whatever she had witnessed had aged her decades without taking a day from her flesh. ‘Bruja came to us.’ It cost her just to utter the name aloud. ‘He was brimming with lies. We thought he was the solution but he was the root.’
Niobe placed a hand on Meros’s vambrace. ‘He said he was going to save us. His voice rang through every watch-wire across the cluster. But he turned us on ourselves.’
‘Our weakness and our fear were all he needed. By the end of the first week we were building concentration camps for the ones who dared disagree.’ Tears fell from Rozin’s eyes, but she did not seem to notice them, her expression blank. ‘Within a month Bruja was ruler of the system in all but name. He told us if we appeased the forces that assailed us, we would live.’
‘What forces?’ said Meros.
Niobe met his gaze, confusion in her expression. ‘The daemons,’ she said, as if the answer were obvious.
The dull, leaden silence that followed was broken by a crackle across the vox-link. One of Nakir’s men in the other formation was reporting, several minutes before the scheduled check-in. The legionary’s voice was thick with static and peculiar resonance effects that sounded like distant whispers – but what was utterly distinct was the crash of bolter-fire in the background.
‘Withdrawing to landing zone,’ came the message. ‘staging point is under attack. We have intermittent enemy contact.’ Before Nakir could demand further explanation, a droning buzz filled the channel and the signal ceased abruptly.
‘They’ve come back,’ Hengist hissed, a gallows grin on his lips, almost as if he was pleased to be proven right. ‘Your legionaries drew them in anew!’
Meros looked up and met Cassiel’s gaze. The veteran’s expression was grim and determined.
‘Orders?’ said Madidus.
Nakir gathered up his helm and secured it in place, the vox-filter darkening his tones. ‘Take Meros, Cassiel and Gravato, bring the survivors. The rest of the squad will come with me, we’ll make a sprint to the staging point.’
‘Aye, lord.’ The sergeant saluted.
The captain hefted his weapon and barked out a new command. ‘To arms! Take the pace!’ In a blur of red armour, the legionaries thundered from the chamber, vanishing back the way they had come.
‘You heard him,’ said Cassiel, scanning the faces of the civilians. ‘On your feet. Carry the ones that cannot walk or they’ll be left behind.’
‘Blood Angel!’ Niobe’s hand pulled on Meros’s arm, panic filling her. ‘You don’t understand, we can’t go out there–’
‘Stay close. We will protect you.’
‘You believe that now,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘but you are wrong.’
At the staging point, the legionaries on guard had thought at first it was a gale of wind bringing new plumes of black smoke from the fires, pushing it across the ruined landscape towards them.
Then one of the warriors noted that the clouds were moving against the direction of the rest of the smoke. They heard the buzzing, the low drone building quickly to such noise that it was hard to make one’s voice heard below a shout.
The fat, ebon flies came in a swarm thick enough to eclipse what remained of the sunlight. Blood Angels who had gone unhooded went for their helms as the insects fell upon them like a tidal wave. Some were too slow and collapsed clawing at the exposed portions of their skin. The flies bored into bare flesh with acidic mandibles, eating their way into the unwary. The mass choked the breather grilles of their battle plate and the intake vents of the Stormbirds. Thick mats of hissing insect bodies filled thruster bells and choked the engines’ fire, grounding the ships.
Then there were faces in the fire smoke, the suggestion of lithe, graceful forms dancing around just out of clear sight. Pink, naked flesh and sinuous curves, laughing eyes that mocked the warriors in crimson. Savage claws that snapped and clattered together in raucous chorus. The air shimmered as if it had been cast like a glamour out of ancient myth.
By the time Captain Nakir reached the landing zone, the Blood Angels were in the teeth of the attack. He opened fire, placing his trust in bolt shell and blade’s edge.
Meros and the others could only move as swiftly as the slowest members of the ragged group of survivors, and their advance became a drawn-out struggle. Madidus took the lead, and they travelled in bursts. First through the winding, broken corridors of the Stark Dagger, then threading out through the dispersal field of wreckage and spoil. Now they were on open ground, with only the occasional low rise and the wreaths of heavy, choking smoke to give them cover.
Madidus raised his fist in the air and they went to the ground; some of the civilians had reacted too slowly the first time the sergeant had made the gesture, but Cassiel had shouted them into obedience and now no one dared to linger off the mark.
‘What is it?’ said Gravato over the vox, from the middle of the group. From his place at the tail end of the party, the Apothecary could see the Blood Angel pull his meltagun to his shoulder.
‘Overhead,’ said Madidus. ‘I hear… wings.’
Meros strained to listen and caught a fraction of the noise. The dull thump of air over beating, leathery sails; the strange skirling cry of something that was no common avian creature. He looked up, but all he saw were shadows moving above the smoke clouds, fast and flowing.
Part of him wanted very much to sight in and take a shot at those vague shapes, just for the certainty
of being able to see what forms lurked out in this wasteland. But a single bolt-shot would alert the enemy to their presence, and the lives of the people they had come to rescue could not be put at risk.
He looked down and saw Niobe watching him. Her plain face had kind eyes that implored him. She seemed so small and feeble, so incapable of strength. That she and the others had lived this long was miraculous to him.
The galaxy is a harsh and pitiless place, he thought. That is why the Emperor created us, to tame it for people like her. It was important to remember such things; in the long conflict of the Great Crusade it was sometimes easy to forget that the galaxy was not only a place of war.
Niobe’s eyes flicked to a point over Meros’s shoulder and he saw the colour drain from her cheeks. Her mouth dropped open in horror. Slowly and carefully he turned, silently drawing his bolt pistol.
It was three hundred metres from where they crouched, pausing to sniff at the air, licking at nothing with a forked, serpentine tongue. The dimensions of the creature and the svelte curves of its body suggested femininity, but only as an afterthought, only as a dressing for its true nature. Humanoid after a fashion, the thing was a very pale pink, almost corpse-white in places, and it balanced coyly on thin, muscular legs that ended in taloned feet. A face like mis-sculpted marble with feline eyes, no nose and a lipless sneer of a mouth turned this way and that. Meros saw striated elfin ears like those of the eldar, but the female bore no kinship to that species. He knew that instinctively; aliens Meros had encountered on many occasions, and although they were repulsive to him, no xenos he had seen carried this same sense of wrongness about it.
‘Contact right,’ he whispered into the vox, becoming an armoured statue. ‘Single target on foot. Could be a scout.’
‘Can you make a silent kill?’ Madidus replied.
‘Negative, too far. No reaction as yet.’
‘Don’t risk the humans. Let it go if you can.’
‘Aye.’
There was a pause and then Madidus spoke again. ‘Can you identify it?’
‘It’s not nephilim, sergeant. I don’t know what it is.’
‘Succubae,’ whispered Niobe. ‘Daemonette. Seducer. Those are the old names for them. They came in Bruja’s wake.’
The creature toyed with a blade in one pale hand, rolling it in idle circles. Its other arm ended in something resembling the pincer of a giant arthropod, toothed chelae tapping quietly against one another. The legionary could not be certain if the claw was some kind of weapon or if it was actually part of the female itself.
As that question formed in his mind, the black, pupil-less eyes turned and looked right at him.
There was no way it could have failed to see them. Even in a low crouch, the crimson and white of Meros’s battle plate stood out against the churned dirt of the plainsland.
But then it turned, with no hint of understanding on its face, and vanished into the smoke with a low, trilling call.
ELEVEN
Daemons
Signus Prime
The Scream
Madidus brought the survivors to the staging point, threading through the safe corridor. They were almost to the Stormbirds when Gravato reported that the count was short. Meros realised that Hengist and the man he had been carrying, a wounded farmer by the name of Quan, had fallen far behind. He went back for them.
Quan was in a heap a short distance from the perimeter and Hengist was angrily trying to pull him to his feet. When Meros was two paces from the injured man, the creature, the thing that Niobe had called a daemonette, attacked.
Hengist ran screaming as the succubae fell out of the air, dropping from the back of some winged mount-beast to run Quan through with its great claw. The farmer died quickly, but not easily; he gave no resistance to the thing. Instead, Quan lost himself in the creature’s opalescent gaze even as it gutted him alive.
The daemonette’s mount, a grotesque lizard-bird with four wings and a mouth full of cilia, wheeled and dived at the Blood Angel, instinctively blocking the line of fire to its rider as he drew his bolt pistol. Drawn off mark, he brought down the winged monster with a head-shot. Fountaining pink fluids, the mount crashed into the mud and lay there, foaming and twitching in the throes of death.
The succubae cried, a strangled, bloodcurdling sound, and came at him in fury. Meros tried to kill the beast with bolt-fire, but she – if considerations of gender could be applied to such a being – was fleet of foot, and on him before he could reload.
The flat of the succubae’s blade-claw hit him with such force that Meros’s helmed head stuck the bulky ridge of his backpack and he saw stars. The Blood Angel rolled and came up with his chainaxe, swinging in a blind arc that roared through the space where the creature had been standing.
She blurred away, dodging the clumsy reflex blow, making play at a cocky parry with the obsidian dagger in her other hand. The creature made a noise of almost sexual pleasure, pantomiming a demure expression that was odd and disturbing on the sharp planes of her face. Then she attacked him, shrieking.
Meros came in with the axe’s backswing and connected hard, the flat of the weapon slamming into the succubae’s breast, knocking her into a stumble. Agile as she was, the creature turned the fall into a roll and sprang into readiness once more. Meros turned, keeping her before him, waiting for the next attack.
He shut out all the distractions, the crashing thunder of gunfire, the buzzing swarm-screams, the deafening chaos of battle unfolding all around the grounded Stormbirds. His battle-brothers had engaged the enemy, and doubtless each of them was matched in his own small war just as the Apothecary was now. A single moment’s inattention could be fatal against such a foe.
From her low stance, the creature sprang at him, powerful taloned legs launching her at him with new speed. Meros turned his shoulder into the assault and leaned into the motion. They collided with bone-shaking force and he heard the crackle of ceramite as the outer layer of his armour was nicked. The claw-hand swept at him and he slammed it down with the butt of his pistol. Bony, chitinous material fragmented and the succubae spat angrily, a cascade of noises that seemed like words, but not from any language fit for a human tongue. He glimpsed a flash of bleeding meat inside the cracked claw; it was not, as he had wondered before, a sleeve-weapon, but actually a mutant outgrowth of the female’s slim, fleshy arm. The small, abhorrent truth of this detail sickened him. What kind of monstrous evolution would create such a twisted creature as this one?
The black dagger plunged to his chest and struck at a poor angle, scraping across the curve of his armoured torso, failing to penetrate. Meros made a split-second choice and released his bolt pistol, letting it drop into the scorched mud at his feet.
With one hand now freed, he grabbed at the claw’s wrist and forced it forwards in a sharp jerk of motion. The daemonette was caught off-guard and the curve of her great pincer slapped hard across her face, drawing streaks of oily purple blood.
Meros followed through, shoving the creature back before she could regain balance and break off. He turned the chainaxe’s head in his hand and brought it up, squeezing the trigger bar in the grip. The spinning blades bit into the bare skin of the creature’s midriff and tore through. With all his strength behind him, the Apothecary lifted the daemonette off the ground and into the air.
She screamed and ripped at him, knowing death was upon her, and the unearthly beauty of her strange aspect suddenly turned into a portrait of something hellish and filled with hate. The depthless opal eyes that had captured Quan’s will burned white, and the scream cut out with a dry gasp.
He flung the corpse to the ground and stooped to take up his discarded pistol.
Hengist, who had been cowering nearby for the duration of the fight, staggered to his feet, unable to look away from the carcass of the creature. He pointed at it. ‘I told them,’ he spat, as if he were accusing someone of a great crime. ‘I told them.’
‘Follow,’ Meros barked, reloading as he we
nt. ‘Tarry again and I leave you here.’
The cough and grunt of flamers met them as they passed beneath the wing of the nearest Stormbird. Nakir’s men were tracing ropes of flame over the fly-clogged exhausts, burning the foul insects off in droves and forcing the swarms to scatter. It was better to risk minor damage to the Legion’s own ships, Meros considered, than remain grounded on Scoltrum’s surface.
Dead succubae and lizard-birds lay all around, and with them a number of warriors in red armour. Meros cursed under his breath to see even a single Blood Angel dead at the hands of these grotesque harpies.
He looked away and saw Madidus at the stern hatch of a waiting drop-ship. Niobe’s face was also visible inside, peering out at him. The sergeant beckoned; they would not wait for a second wave to come after them. The beacon that had called to the Blood Angels had been found and silenced. There was no reason to remain on the agri-world any more.
Hengist was at his side. ‘Can we go now? I want to get away from here.’
The open terror in the man’s voice made Meros angry. ‘Get away from me,’ he said, moving to the nearest fallen legionary. ‘I have a duty to perform first.’
He activated the reductor probe on his medicae gauntlet, and with solemn care, Meros began to harvest the progenoid glands of the dead.
The mood in the lithocast chamber was in stark contrast to the temper of the conclave only a few days earlier. Captain Raldoron folded his arms across his chest and scanned the room, picking out the avatars of the commanders who were transmitting from their ships. Along with countless other minor malfunctions and small indignities, the hololithic network between the vessels of the Blood Angels fleet was suffering intermittent loss of data parity, and the synthetic avatars of many of the Three Hundred’s company captains were blurry and crazed with static. Techmarines and servitors from the Red Tear’s Mechanicum enginseer brigades had been unable to correct the problem, or blot out the damnable interference whisper that had gradually made itself known on every vox-channel and tactical relay.
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