The Plagues of Orath

by Various

  The Quintillus wrenched itself free of Orath’s pull and soared again. Had Galenus had the time, he might have breathed a small sigh of relief. But they weren’t out of danger yet. ‘The plague ship,’ barked the shipmaster. ‘Where is it?’

  Crewmembers were scrambling around the bridge in a frenzy, running diagnostic checks, taking readings. ‘It broke off its pursuit of us, sir,’ one of them reported. ‘It went after the transporters.’ He punched up the information on the tactical display.

  ‘Bring us around,’ the shipmaster ordered. ‘I want eyes – and guns – on that junk pile.’ Once again, the deck plates tilted as the Quintillus banked ponderously to the right.

  A moment later, Orath heaved back into sight in the forward viewport – along with the rotting plague ship, which was now between them and the yellow-green planet.

  The plague ship had a straggler in its sights. Its cannons blazed, and the luckless Thunderhawk – along with its pilot and the Predator Destructors it had been carrying – were consumed in a blossom of flame.

  Galenus held himself still, clenching his jaw. He had to remind himself that this wasn’t his battle to fight. The shipmaster knew what he was doing.

  On his snarled command, his gunners assailed the plague ship with everything they had: assault cannons, torpedoes, they even brought their lances online and pounded the enemy’s shields with focused energy beams. The plague ship reeled under the sustained assault and the last of its would-be prey, the Imperial swarm, slipped out of its grasp.

  The Quintillus kept up the punishing bombardment regardless.

  Galenus watched with grim satisfaction as a muck-encrusted engine pod exploded. The stricken plague ship came around, and, for a moment, the captain thought it was actually going to try to ram them. It veered away, however, and plunged into the warp rift instead.

  It was probably returning to the Eye of Terror, he thought. Doubtless, it had a base there, perhaps on the Plague Planet itself.

  He only prayed that the ship was as damaged as it had appeared to be. Otherwise, there was a chance of it returning – loaded up with reinforcements.

  Chelaki remembered.

  Blazing drop pods plummeting from the sky; the air filled with hideous, bloated flying insects, large enough to be ridden as mounts; Fort Kerberos in ruins.

  He remembered the creature – or some manner of infernal machine? – that had come screeching out of nowhere, with burning breath and rending claws. It had shrugged off his cannon fire and torn the cockpit of his Stormtalon apart.

  Tangled up in twisted metal, he hadn’t had a chance to bail out.

  There had only been two Doom Eagles squads stationed on Orath. It had seemed like more than enough to guard a pair of minor listening posts.

  A jagged shard of the Stormtalon’s hull had pierced Chelaki’s side.

  The force of the crash must have driven it straight through his armour. It had lodged itself deep between his ribs. It seemed to have the whole weight of the hull pressing down on it. He didn’t have the strength to pull it out.

  The only thing he could do was pull himself off the shard. To gain the leverage he needed, he had to shift his position and let the shard tear further through his flesh. His armour increased the flow of stimulants to his brain to dull the pain.

  At last, with a spray of arterial blood, Chelaki stumbled uncertainly from the gunship’s wreckage. He wasn’t able to get his legs underneath him in time and he landed flat on his face and stomach. He levered himself up to his knees.

  He had come down in a grain field. But the sorghum-variant crops around him were diseased and blackened – and smouldering, as a cluster of small fires struggled to take hold in their midst. The crops, he realised, were the source of that rotten stench in the air.

  The readouts in his helmet were warning him of a hundred different airborne diseases and viruses, both known and unknown. His armour had been fractured and fatally compromised. No longer was it airtight. The wound in Chelaki’s side had scabbed over – his Larraman’s organ had done its job, as always – but it felt as if it was burning.

  He heard a scraping, snuffling sound, and turned. Two creatures were clambering over the wreckage behind him. They were only a few feet tall: squat, misshapen horrors that looked as if they had been moulded from filth and excrement. The folds of their stomachs undulated as they moved, and their oozing cold sores left slime trails in their wakes.

  Chelaki guessed that they had been searching the crash site for carrion. One of them had been poised to spring at his neck and shoulders.

  He planted his hand in the ashy ground beside him, rolled away from the muck-creatures and to his feet. In the process, he drew his chainsword and thumbed its activation rune. Its engine roared, its whirling blade shrieked, and the creatures baulked as their intended victim proved himself less helpless than he had seemed.

  Chelaki took a step towards them and swung his blade. It sliced through the nearest of his attackers, but coughed and sputtered indignantly as great globs of the creature’s feculence adhered to its teeth.

  The second muck-creature must have known it couldn’t outrun a Space Marine. It flew at Chelaki instead. A spiked tongue lashed out from inside a ring of teeth and flecked his armour with rancid green and black spittle.

  It hit him in the stomach, extruding filthy, rope-like tendrils to bind itself to him. It was squirming its way towards Chelaki’s wound, as if attracted by the newly formed scab. He tried to block its questing, slobbering tongue, but it simply oozed its way around his gauntlet. He felt it clawing, tearing at his exposed flesh.

  Disgusted, he thrust the edge of his blade into the creature’s formless mass and tried to scrape it off him, striking furious sparks off his own armour in the process.

  He must have hit a vital organ inside the creature – presumably there was something in there somewhere – because it shrieked and suddenly released its grip on him.

  It smacked into the ground at Chelaki’s feet, and he stamped on it with all his strength and armoured weight. The creature popped like a festering boil, and he was spattered up to his chest with its pus.

  A third muck-creature was watching him from amid the wreckage. He had almost missed it, but his motion sensors had detected its presence.

  It must have been hanging back, waiting for an opening to strike, or perhaps just a chance to share in its fellows’ spoils. It had witnessed the fate of those fellows and was trying to slink away. Chelaki knew that, if it did, it would reveal his presence here to its Death Guard masters. He snatched his boltgun out of its holster and squeezed the trigger, but the weapon didn’t fire. Its chamber was cracked; an explosive round was jammed inside it.

  He cast the bolter aside – he would retrieve it later if he could; for now, he couldn’t take the risk of it detonating in his hand – and he started to run. He rounded the downed gunship just in time to see the muck-creature slithering through the mangled frame of the cockpit canopy on the other side.

  It tried to scamper away from him but Chelaki caught up to it easily and despatched it with a single sweep of his blade. In the wake of his exertion, however, he was left with a pounding heart and heaving lungs. He could feel sweat prickling his brow.

  He took a moment – the first chance he had – to get his bearings.

  He saw the crack in the sky, the warp rift, pulsing hatefully. If anything, it looked even wider than it had before. He knew that Fort Kerberos – what remained of it – lay directly beneath that crack, hidden from him for the present by an intervening rise. The air above the site was clogged with dust and smoke – but, with his augmented eyes, Chelaki could make out darker shapes flitting through the miasma. He remembered the huge flies and their hideous riders, and he fell back to the wreck of the Stormtalon and squatted in its shadow.

  He had a chance – one final chance – to strike a blow against the Emperor’s enemies. H
e knew he mustn’t waste it. He had to find a way across this field, somehow, without the rift’s violet light glinting off his silver armour and betraying him.

  Chelaki couldn’t wait for nightfall. He feared he didn’t have that long. What he needed, he concluded, was a distraction – and no sooner had he formed that thought, than the Emperor saw fit to oblige him again.

  His gaze was drawn upwards, once more, by the howling of engines. Two Thunderhawks streaked above his head, and Chelaki grinned as he took in their bright blue livery and the white Chapter symbols on their bows.

  They were flying low, circling the occupied site of the destroyed fort. As Chelaki watched, more blue ships swooped from the heavens to join them. In the distance, to the north-west, blue drop pods were plummeting from the clouds like hailstones.

  Salvation was here.

  Why hadn’t they landed yet?

  Arkelius ground his teeth, impatiently. A drop pod would have delivered him to the front lines by now. His blade could have had its first taste of traitor blood.

  He was monitoring vox-chatter with one ear. He had heard about the destruction of one of the other Thunderhawks. It must have been carrying a pair of tanks too. Two tank crews – six battle-brothers – gone before they had even set wheels on the ground. Not only was that a dreadful loss to the Chapter, but it also was no way for a warrior to die.

  Through his vision slit, Arkelius could only see the rear of the tank in front of him. He wondered how high up they still were.

  His right ear was attuned to the Scourge’s internal frequency. His crewmates – Corbin and Iunus – were comparing what they knew about the Death Guard, mostly tales of past Imperial victories over them. If they felt any tension at all, they didn’t show it – or perhaps, thought Arkelius, this was their way of dealing with it.

  He couldn’t see the expressions of either of his brothers to judge. He had ordered ‘helmets on’ as soon as their Thunderhawk had launched.

  Galenus had emphasised this point in his briefing. They were facing disciples of Nurgle, the oldest and foulest of the Ruinous Powers. They were worshippers of pestilence and decay, and their deadliest weapons were neither their blades nor their guns.

  ‘I’ve seen whole companies ravaged by the diseases they spread,’ the captain had said grimly. ‘I do not wish to see that happening again.’

  That was why he had requisitioned all the heavy artillery possible, including some fresh from the assembly yards on Ryza. That was why he had placed as many men as he could inside those tanks. That was why he had broken up Arkelius’s squad and thrust him into a new, unfamiliar role.

  Inside the Scourge of the Skies, Arkelius was as well-protected as he could be. The tank was fitted with oxygen filters; most of the air inside it was recycled, anyway. His power armour – for as long as it remained intact with the helmet in place – provided him with a strong additional layer of defence.

  Arkelius understood this and was duly grateful for it. All the same, he preferred to fight without the helmet. He was told he had an intimidating countenance, with his shaved head, flattened nose and the duelling scar that ran the length of his right cheek. He liked to let his enemies see it. He liked to lock glares with them, let them see he had no fear of them.

  He liked to feel their warm blood on his face.

  ‘What do you think, sergeant?’ asked Iunus.

  Arkelius had no idea what his gunner was talking about. He had been tuning out his crewmates’ voices, lost in his own thoughts.

  Corbin filled him in, ‘Orath. It’s an agri planet, a breadbasket world, with no real strategic value. We wondered what the Death Guard could possibly want with it.’

  Arkelius’s only answer was a noncommittal grunt.

  ‘We also wondered,’ said Iunus, ‘since the crops down there and the farmers too are dead anyway, and contaminated–’

  ‘–then why send us in at all?’ Corbin concluded. ‘What does the Imperium have to gain from a ground assault at this point? Why not just fire off a salvo of rockets from orbit, or blast the whole world to ashes? Stop the rot from spreading further?’

  ‘Unless,’ said Iunus, ‘perhaps there’s something about Orath, about this “breadbasket world”, that we don’t know?’

  ‘The captain doesn’t have to explain his decisions to you,’ Arkelius growled.

  ‘No, sergeant,’ agreed Corbin. ‘Of course he doesn’t.’

  He fell silent then – Iunus too – and Arkelius was left to his own thoughts again.

  The fact was that he couldn’t have told them anything if he had wanted to. He had put the same questions to Galenus himself earlier – and received the same curt answer. Whatever Orath’s secret was – because Arkelius, like Corbin and Iunus, was certain it must have one – it was considered too sensitive for his ears.

  A new voice crackled over the Scourge’s frequency: their Thunderhawk pilot. He advised the Hunter’s tank commander and crew that – at last – he was putting them down. Arkelius acknowledged him gratefully, and told Corbin to restart the engine. For the second time, he realised that his driver had pre-empted his order.

  Runes blazed into life on the control banks around Arkelius, bathing him in a muted glow. He held onto his seat as the Thunderhawk decelerated sharply. A moment later, the Scourge of the Skies’s chassis let out a groan of relief as the clamping arms released it.

  It fell the last few metres to Orath’s surface, and landed with a violent jolt.

  Raising his head, Arkelius peered through one of the vision slits above him. He saw more Thunderhawks, swooping down around his tank like giant metal birds. They laid their equally giant metal eggs, then shot away into the overcast sky.

  He couldn’t see much else, so he turned to his tactical displays for information. They had put down in a field, thirty kilometres to the north-west of their objective: Fort Kerberos, one of Orath’s former listening posts, now the Death Guard’s base of operations.

  Arkelius instructed Corbin to release the brakes and step on the accelerator pedal. The Hunter’s tracks spun for almost a second before finding traction in the ashy ground.

  Then, the Scourge of the Skies surged forwards. It smashed its way through blackened, wilting sorghum sheaves that grew almost as high as Arkelius’s main vision slit and crushed them into pulp beneath its armoured-metal weight.

  A new voice came over the vox-net: Captain Numitor of the Eighth Reserve Company. He instructed the Ultramarines artillery to form up into an arc, with their most powerful units – like the Hunters, the Scourge and the Stalkers – towards the rear.

  Eyes on his displays, Arkelius voxed directions to Corbin. The driver brought the Scourge around and manoeuvred it into position, on the right-hand flank of the most impressive array of artillery that Arkelius had ever seen: at least twenty tanks, by his count. They were flanked by a Predator Destructor ahead of them and a Stalker behind.

  In the field in front of the tanks, two hundred Space Marines were forming up too. They were loading up their bolters, performing litanies of accuracy and hatred over each shell. Arkelius felt a fleeting pang of jealousy, wishing he was out there with them.

  Behind him, Iunus was preparing the Scourge’s weaponry.

  The next voice they heard was Galenus’s, voxing from the orbiting Quintillus. He reminded his brothers of their mission: to retake the captured fort, despite the fact that – according to the battle-barge’s scans – the Death Guard had reduced it to a ruin. Arkelius could guess what his two crewmates would make of that.

  The captain then gave way to the company Chaplain, who bestowed the blessings of the Emperor upon the assembled force. Then, at last, Captain Numitor gave the order that Arkelius had been waiting for, and which he immediately relayed to his eager driver.

  ‘Artillery – advance!’

  Galenus strode brusquely into the Quintillus’s strategium.

>   His senior staff were waiting for him around its U-shaped table, as was Captain Mikael Fabian of the Third Company, flanked by his own entourage. Numitor of the Eighth was already down on Orath, of course, but he too was represented by several aides.

  Terserus stood quietly in one corner, but dominated the room all the same. Galenus liked to have him present at these meetings – after all, he was the Fifth Company’s most venerable and experienced member. He valued his wisdom.

  Terserus had led Galenus’s first squad as a fully-fledged battle-brother. Galenus had often said that everything he knew, Sergeant Terserus had taught him. Three-quarters of a century ago, he had tried to overrun an enemy tank. In the process, he had been struck point-blank in the chest by its autocannon and blasted to shreds.

  He had refused to die – he had always been stubborn, even by Space Marine standards – though his body had been beyond saving. His remains – some would say his very soul – had been interred in Dreadnought armour, so that he could continue to serve.

  Galenus took his place at the top of the table – at the apex of the U’s curve – but didn’t sit down. He rested his fists on the table instead.

  He studied the hovering tactical hololith that almost filled the space between the table’s arms. It showed him nothing that he hadn’t already known. His army had set down to the north-west of Fort Kerberos and begun their march towards it.

  ‘This is what we know,’ said Galenus. ‘Two ancient eldar artefacts were found beneath the surface of Orath. We call them – Librarian Appius Vabion called them – the Great Seals. He believed that the Seals secure a warp rift of unknown magnitude. Their purpose is to hold that rift at bay. What we don’t know…’

  He straightened up and pursed his thin lips. ‘What we don’t know, frankly, could fill tomes. Even Vabion, who devoted his life to the study of the Great Seals – even he confessed to me, in his final report before he died, that he had hardly begun to unpick their secrets.