The maggots were a writhing flood. They cascaded into the chamber, a torrent of hunger the colour of diseased bone. Over the rustling of bodies was the wet, gurgling hiss of the monsters as they flowed over each other. They rushed for the legionaries, who opened fire. For a full second, Iron Hands and Raven Guard poured shells into the storm surge of devouring life. Maggots exploded in showers of blood, but the chamber continued to fill. The onrush of squirming horrors was unending. The legionaries were firing into a rising tide.
‘Up!’ Atticus commanded. The squads pounded up the ramp, sending bursts behind them, fighting to delay the flood by even a few moments. Bringing up the rear, the Raven Guard tossed frag grenades. The explosions were muffled. White, torn muscle flew up in a geyser. The blasts punched craters into the flesh. The gaps filled an instant later. One of Ptero’s brothers was swallowed by the rising tide.
As the squads neared the top of the ramp, they heard the same slithering, crawling roar from above. The maggots were pouring in there too. The legionaries ran straight into the suffocating mass. Firearms were useless. Galba barely had time to swap his bolter for his chainsword before he was engulfed. He fought blind. All light was extinguished by the ocean of flesh. The creatures rose up over and around him like quicksand. Coils wrapped around his legs and torso. Warning runes lit up as the pressure tested the limits of his armour’s strength. Teeth ground against ceramite. His blade tore through the maggots.
He could barely move his arms, but whatever touched the sword was shredded, and that was just enough to allow him to take one step forwards, then another. He was clutched by a fist, one whose fingers tightened, relaxed, and tightened again. Blood coated everything. His chainsword coughed as gore threatened to clog it. The bodies of the maggots on which he trod became slippery. Some burst beneath his weight, and the slick made his footing even more treacherous. If he fell, death would be swift.
There was nothing but the crushing grubs, nothing but the fist and the teeth. Galba butchered, sawed, shredded and moved upwards one gradual step after another. He had no sense of progress. He fought alone. It was impossible to link up with his nearest brothers. The only signs that they still existed were his retinal displays and the constant shouts over the vox.
And there was the presence of Atticus. The captain’s voice was there always. He commanded, he exhorted, he cursed the foe with creative venom, and his tone never varied from the calm of implacable, endless murder. At the head of the advance, he was the first to reach the next level. It fell to him to find the next ramp by feel alone, and call out the directions to the warriors who followed. Galba growled in frustration when that happened, extinguishing the faint hope that the level above was clear of maggots. He growled again, in anger, when he heard a series of sharp, splintering cracks and the identification rune of Brother Ennius pulsed red, then winked out. Three more runes went dark before the squads reached the top of the next ramp.
‘Push on, brothers,’ Atticus ordered. ‘There will be no defeat for us here. There can be no defeat, because we battle the flesh, and the flesh is weak. Behold the flesh at its most base. This is what we have risen above forever. The machine cannot be brought low by this vile excess. Let the monsters come. Let them fill this chasm to the top. They cannot stop us, because they are that which is past, and we are on the journey to the pure strength of the mechanical.’ There were no pauses in his speech. There were no grunts of effort. He spoke with a metronomic tempo. Each syllable was the punctuation of a blow. Every word was the death of another grub. Every sentence was a step closer to victory.
As he listened, even as he slipped on a twisting body and almost fell, Galba was seized by the conviction of the inevitability of victory. For how could such things of flesh possibly overwhelm the will, forged and tempered into a resilience beyond steel, of Atticus? The impossibility of such an event gave him the strength he needed to remain standing, to slice away once more at the crushing fingers of the fist, and to take another step.
Every metre the legionaries climbed was a battle. And every metre was the same. The fist would never let them go.
Until, suddenly, it did.
They reached a level that was not still buried, and that the rising tide of invertebrates had not reached. Galba ripped through another maggot that had wrapped itself around his torso, shoved the blade up through the jaws of another, and then he was out. He could see. He had the freedom of movement. He stayed long enough to help the rest of the rearguard, and then he was racing upwards with the remainder of the squads.
We are victors, he told himself. We are not survivors. We are victors.
Behind them came the maggots, the squirming froth of an overflowing cauldron. The Space Marines were faster. They put distance between themselves and the hungry flesh. As they ran, Galba heard Atticus vox to Darras, ordering him to send down more climb-cables. They reached the top level of the chambers, and re-emerged on the ledge. The cables were not strong enough to support the weight of more than two legionaries at a time, and now the wait began.
‘We shall depart last,’ Ptero said.
Atticus hesitated before answering, visibly galled by the prospect of owing any debt to the other Legion. But the Raven Guard had their jump packs. They could leave at the last second. Atticus gave a curt nod, conceding necessity. He ordered the rest of the legionaries up ahead of him. Galba stood at his side at the threshold to the chamber, also waiting to the last. He stared into the crimson. There was nothing to see yet, but he could hear the rising tide of the maggots. The sound of the obscene excess of life made him regret his own flesh. He envied his captain’s near-total purity. He felt a renewed love of the machine, its order and its logic. The flesh was weakness and disorder. It was a threat, as the maggots were, only through grotesque overabundance.
He had wondered if Atticus had sacrificed too much in his journey towards the absolutely machinic. He had wondered if too much of the human had been cut away. In this moment, his doubts fled. To become the machine was to become order. It was to take a stand against the perverse. The maggots were life as it too often was. Atticus was life as it could be: uncompromising, unbending, precise, free of ambiguity. Atticus was an embodied fragment of the Emperor’s dream. That dream was in danger. Galba did not know if its grand design could be saved, but portions of it could be. There it was, standing invincible in Atticus. His own duty lay before him, crystalline. He must walk the same path. He, too, must be order. He must be the dream.
There might be no other way to defeat the nightmares.
Now Camnus and the last of the Iron Hands were climbing. Another few minutes and it would be time to leave this cursed ground. The squirming hiss and rush of the maggots drew closer. The stone of the chamber began to vibrate.
‘You knew,’ Atticus said.
‘Captain?’
‘You warned us of the attack. Before there was any sign of it. You knew.’
‘I didn’t… That is…’
‘How did you know?’
The whispers. The grin. The voice that commanded. Reveal these things, and then what?
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. That was true, at least.
‘Then be sure,’ Atticus told him.
The maggots arrived. They boiled up the ramp, covering the floor in a heaving mass. Standing just before them, the four remaining Raven Guard sent more frag grenades into the creatures. The explosives landed in a line, creating a barrage. Ptero and his brothers followed the blasts with a stream of fire, stemming the flow for a few seconds.
But only a few. The maggots came on, piling one on top of each other, surging forwards in a gathering wave.
‘Captain Atticus,’ Ptero said. ‘It is time.’
Wordlessly, Atticus turned his head to Galba. The sergeant took a step back and looked up the façade. Camnus and the others were close to the top. He would be adding undue strain to the cable, but Ptero was right. They had stayed
as long as possible. He slammed his gauntlets to his chest in the sign of the aquila, and began to climb. He looked down and saw Atticus stride out onto the ledge. He stood beside one of the other cables.
‘You have my thanks, Raven Guard,’ the captain said. ‘Your duties here are at an end.’ He still did not take the cable. Galba paused and watched.
The black-armoured warriors of the XIX Legion shot out of the structure. The exhaust on their jump packs flared as they rose skyward. Only then did Atticus grasp the cable and begin to climb. His feet left the ground just as the wave crashed through the arch. He did not look down, refusing to grant his foe anything but the most sovereign contempt. He climbed hand over hand, and was soon level with Galba. The two legionaries moved up the lines.
Galba did look down. The momentum of the maggots’ rush was such that they plunged from the openings in an obscene cataract. But then the fall slowed bit by bit, and then the grubs began crawling up the façade. ‘They are not done with us,’ he said.
Atticus grunted. ‘Good. Because I am not done with them.’ Then, ‘Sergeant Darras, have flamers ready.’
‘Will we have enough promethium?’ Galba asked.
‘I will use my hands if necessary.’
Before they were halfway up, the strain on the lines eased as the other Iron Hands reached the top. No longer concerned with snapping the cables with sudden jerks and swings, Galba and Atticus climbed faster, gaining a few more seconds on the maggots that now covered the façade like a squirming veil. When they reached the lip of the chasm, Darras and two others were waiting with flamers.
Now Atticus did look down. He leaned over the edge, gauging the movements below. ‘Stand at the edge,’ he ordered. ‘Close together, and remain visible. Be prey. Give them a target. That will keep them concentrated.’
The Iron Hands joined him. He was right, Galba saw. Though they had no eyes, the maggots were somehow aware of their presence, and grouped closer together instead of spreading over the entire face of the structure. They became a rippling, pale wedge.
The twilight of Pythos was falling. The perpetual cloud cover permitted no sunset. There was only the slow death of the day, a layering of shrouds until all was black. During the final breath of light, when the torches that dotted the wall and the infant settlement were lit but did not yet have full night against which to stand out, the maggots reached the surface.
‘Welcome them,’ Atticus said.
The light of the flamers was searing. The stench of the burning creatures was corrosive. Galba did not mind. It was the smell of retribution, of purgation. It was evidence of the corrupted flesh being excised from a universe that demanded order. Darras and his men aimed their flamers at a steep angle, sending the wash of burning promethium over long swaths of the wedge. The maggots burned well, some of them swelling and popping as noxious gases ignited within their bodies. Writhing and hissing, they fell, and set fire to their kin as they dropped. The Iron Hands launched the lethal streams in quick bursts, setting one section of the advance alight, then another, moving the barrels back and forth along an arc, bringing death to the entire width of the undulating mass. The fires spread, moving quickly beyond the range of the flamers. The maggots came on, driven by mindless hunger. They rushed to their doom.
‘A gunship could launch a Hellfury strike into the gap,’ Camnus suggested.
‘We will be done soon enough,’ Atticus said.
In answer to his will, the flames broadened their reach, embracing the vermin. As night fell, the entire façade was a curtain of fire.
‘Purged,’ said Atticus, echoing Galba’s own thoughts. He turned his back on the dying enemy and stepped away from the edge. ‘So we have spectators,’ he muttered.
Galba turned around. A large crowd of the colonists had gathered. Their eyes glittered, reflecting the flames that licked out from the chasm.
‘Do you understand what you see?’ Atticus asked them, his voice a harsh, electronic slash in the night. ‘You are subjects of the Imperium. You are subject to the Emperor’s will. This is the fate of anything, animal, xenos or man, that would defy that will. Work well, fight hard. Earn our protection. Or you will earn our mercy.’
The last word became a hiss. Galba did not blink at the contempt. As he looked at the crowd of mortals, he saw a collection of the flesh. How different were they, in their weakness, from the immolated insects? Was Khi’dem right, in the end, to see them as any real use? Unless they were able to protect this settlement on their own, they were a drain on precious resources. And here they were, watching war from the sidelines. Was that eagerness he saw on their faces? Yes, it was.
‘Do you hear me?’ Atticus demanded. His voice was an electronic whip, his body a motionless silhouette, an angry god of war backlit by the flames of the hell he had called into being.
The people recoiled. But when they cried out that they heard, they did so with more excitement, and less fear, than Galba had expected. He felt the gulf between himself and the mortal variant of humanity widen. The flesh was becoming incomprehensible to him.
But then the face of Kanshell flashed before his mind’s eye. He saw the serf’s undying loyalty, and his mortal terror. His contempt withered. His pity bloomed, even for the sheep before him. He vacillated between hatred of the flesh and the need to protect it, and then realised that Atticus was now looking at him.
‘Are there more?’ the captain asked. His voice was quiet, for Galba’s ears only. His tone was cold.
‘More?’
‘Is there another attack imminent?’
‘Brother-captain, I don’t know.’
‘You knew down below.’
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘But not why.’
Atticus leaned in towards him. ‘Listen well, brother-sergeant. You will inform me of any such information you acquire, immediately.’
‘Of course, but I–’
‘Remember this, though. No matter what the state of the Imperium, this Legion remains faithful to the Emperor’s commands. I will brook no violation of the Edict of Nikaea. I will tolerate no sorcery in our midst. Do you understand?’
‘I am not a psyker, captain. I am–’
‘Do you hear me?’
‘I do, my lord.’ He heard the voice of the machine-warrior. He wondered what other voices he would hear again, and what they would cost him.
Thirteen
Taking stock
The fires of faith
The dance
‘That was an impressive speech,’ Khi’dem said.
Ptero nodded. ‘Perhaps a telling one, too.’
They stood beneath the palisade, watching the crowd disperse after Atticus’s harangue.
‘He has no love for mortals,’ Khi’dem admitted. ‘That is nothing new. Do you see this as evidence that his antipathy is becoming something more dangerous?’
‘No,’ Ptero said after a moment. ‘Not yet. Do you?’
‘I do not.’ Khi’dem told himself that he was not being foolish in his optimism. He knew what the consequences of ignoring danger signs could be. He also knew how little the remaining Salamanders and Raven Guard would be able to do should the worst occur. There were four of his battle-brothers remaining, one more than Ptero’s contingent. ‘He was explicit in demanding loyalty to the Emperor,’ he went on. ‘I heard contempt. I witnessed a leader who is quite willing to govern his charges through fear. But he is doing nothing criminal. I disagree with his means, but I cannot find fault with the goals.’ He gave Ptero a crooked smile. ‘Please tell me that I am speaking from reason and not from hope.’
Ptero’s laugh was dry and very brief. ‘How will you know that my reassurance has a basis that is any more sound?’
‘Then we are left where we have always been. We must have faith in our brother.’
‘Faith,’ Ptero muttered. ‘The Emperor has taught us to regard that word wit
h suspicion. Perhaps, if we had done so with greater rigour, the Imperium would not have come to this.’
‘He cast down faith in false gods,’ Khi’dem corrected gently. ‘Not faith in each other. Or in the dream of the Imperium. He has shown faith in His children.’
‘And this is how we have repaid it.’ There was no cynicism in Ptero’s words. Only an enormous grief.
‘We will yet prove worthy of it. We must.’
‘Agreed,’ Ptero said, and they watched the dying of the flames in silence for a minute.
Khi’dem cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry for the loss of your brother down there.’
‘Thank you. The life on this planet…’ Ptero shook his head. ‘Its absolute hostility should not surprise me any longer, but it does. It makes no sense at all. I still say it cannot be natural.’
‘If it was engineered, that gives further credence to Atticus’s belief that there is an enemy intelligence working against us.’
‘Of that, I have no doubt.’
Khi’dem chose his words carefully. ‘You have evidence, then, that most of us would be unable to perceive?’
Ptero smiled. ‘Yes, brother, I was once of my Legion’s Librarius. But I have not been acting in violation of Nikaea.’
‘I never thought you were.’
‘I have no wish to conceal what I am. It is, after all, no longer relevant under the Edict. But I did think it… politic… not to trumpet my nature before Atticus.’
‘Mutations do not sit well with his understanding of a proper, regimented universe,’ Khi’dem concurred. ‘I’m sure he sees them as a great failing.’
‘The flesh is unstable. Therefore it is weak.’
The Damnation of Pythos Page 19