His name was Byzantane, Ulanti knew, the Arbites commander of the only shuttle to escape the destruction that had claimed the life of the Macharius’s captain. Badly damaged and leaking fuel and air, the shuttle had had to emergency dock with the closest friendly vessel as soon as it reached high orbit, the Macharius. Now, with the convoy underway and heading at maximum possible speed towards its jump point, there had been no opportunity for him to be returned to his own vessel.
“You truly believe that, marshal?”
“I believe it is my duty to serve the Emperor’s will, even though the meaning and purpose of that will may not always be apparent to me. I am merely mortal, but the Emperor is divine. Where I see defeat and ignominious retreat, I must believe that he sees the seeds of later victory. Where I have failed to serve him properly, I must believe that he already knows that other, more able, servants than I will later succeed where I have failed. Other than that,” he added with a grimacing half-smile, “and whenever possible, I leave the philosophising to the Ministorum’s worthy brethren and instead just try to do my duty bringing law to the lawless, heretic rabble that it pleases us to know as the Emperor’s loyal subjects.”
Byzantane looked out of the viewing bay at the dim and receding point of light that was Belatis. He sensed what was on the young naval officer’s mind.
“He struck me as a capable man, your captain. He was a loyal servant of the Emperor. His death will not go unavenged.”
“He was an officer in the Imperial Navy,” answered Ulanti. “If it was the Emperor’s will that he was to die, it should have been here where he belonged. On this bridge, in command of his vessel. That is what Captain Semper would have wanted. That is the only proper death for a ship’s captain.”
Byzantane nodded to himself, only able to agree with this naval man’s sentiments. When his time came to be called to the Emperor’s side, he did not wish it to come with him lying sick and dying in some Arbites precinct house infirmary, greedily fighting to hold on to the last pathetic dregs of life like all those wretched tech-priests who lived on for centuries, replacing their failing human organs with machine parts, trying to deny their own mortality and turning themselves into something less than human in imitation of their damnable Machine God. No, when he died, it would be as he lived, with a bolt pistol in one hand and a power maul in the other, fighting the enemies of the Imperium and maintaining the iron rule of the Emperor’s Law.
Looking through the viewing bay at the starfield beyond, Byzantane thought of the comm-net message he had received from Korte, aboard the Inviolable Retribution. Byzantane had always seen the strike cruiser’s name as a good omen, summing up as it did his own personal belief in his role as an Arbitrator. Inviolable retribution: the promise that, no matter the cost or risk, the guilty will always be pursued and punished. Again, Byzantane thought of the name that Korte had told him, the name of the secret traitor who had betrayed the Imperium and deliberately engineered the downfall of Belatis. His instinct about there being a Chaos agent in the governor-regent’s palace had been correct, but not even he had suspected just how highly-placed the traitor had been within the planet’s ruling hierarchy. They were dead now, killed along with so many others during the escape from the palace, and many might consider that just punishment of a kind.
Not Byzantane.
He could only think that the traitor had escaped true punishment. The traitor’s death during the destruction of the palace would have been swift and merciful, carrying with it none of the righteous retribution that the Emperor’s stern laws required. Looking back at the retreating speck of light that was Belatis, he realised that he and this naval officer shared something in common. Both of them had been cheated by the Planet Killer’s arrival. For one, it was a matter of honour, the desire to not to abandon hope when there was a still a chance—no matter how slight—that a comrade might still be alive. For the other, it was a matter of duty, a need to know that no traitor ever escaped unpunished. But, for both of them, the ignominious flight from Belatis represented the same thing. Unfinished business.
“Emperor’s mercy!” choked the lead armsman, recoiling back from the open mouth of the filth-choked hatchway in front of him. Koba Kyogen brusquely pushed the man aside, but even he staggered back in revulsion at the wave of foulness that welled up from the compartment beyond.
They were somewhere deep within the lower decks of the ship, moving through the maze of ancient, lightless passageways and compartments that no schematic or plan of the ship’s layout, no matter how old or detailed, would ever admit to. All vessels held areas like this, abandoned completely or inhabited only by the very lowest, least important crew dregs, and they were the perfect hiding place for deserters or even for the secret, illicit cabals—either criminal or heretical—that often flourished aboard even the most vigilant Imperial vessel.
Or for stowaways, thought Kyogen.
It had been suspected for some time that there was some kind of enemy stowaway aboard the Macharius, a survivor of the boarding action assault from the Battle of Helia IV. First there had been the outbreaks of disease amongst the crew of the lower decks, then several deaths and disappearances. The foolish and superstitious wretches that inhabited these lowest and most dismal areas of the ship spoke in terror of a daemon creature in their midst, but unnerving reports from Astropath Adeptus Rapavna and Navigator Solon Cassander, the two most senior Imperial psykers aboard ship, also spoke of the possibility of there being something hostile and malefic aboard the vessel. Augurs had been cast, alerts sounded, and at last squads of armsmen had descended in force into the bowels of the ship.
Kyogen paused before the hatchway, aware that the eyes of the crewmen were upon him and trying not to gag at the foul stench wafting through from the chill darkness beyond. The smell was indescribable, somehow seeping through the supposed protection of his rebreather mask. It carried with it the reek of corruption and decay, and something else. Something unknown and terrible. From behind Kyogen came the soft chanting of one of the ship’s Ministorum preachers as he offered up prayers of protection and swung a strongly perfumed incense burner to ward off the threat of disease that hung in the foul-smelling air. The commissar considered himself to be a pious man, but, in matters of protection, he looked more to the chainsword in his hand and the full dozen shot-cannon-wielding armsmen accompanying him than one prayer-chanting and incense-burning priest.
“Light! Give me light!” he called, climbing through the hatchway. Armsmen scrambled through after him, shining their weapon-mounted lux-beams to reveal the compartment beyond. They might fear whatever might be lurking in there, but Kyogen knew they feared him even more. Aboard the Macharius, Ship’s Commissar Kyogen was a figure of fear and respect. Mostly fear, Kyogen always thought to himself, satisfied that his role aboard ship was as it should be.
Inside the compartment, several of the armsmen, the preacher amongst them, stifled gasps of shock and revulsion. Kyogen had entered charnel places before—had seen the human devastation left by fire, vacuum and blast-shock in ships’ compartments destroyed during space combat—but he had never seen anything such as this, and prayed that he never would again.
There were bodies here, many bodies, although how many was now impossible to say, since all that remained of them was a thick, fleshy paste that had been smeared across the walls, ceiling and floor of the chamber. Jagged pieces of bone and other, less recognisable but no less human and organic components jutted out from the mess, and things moved amongst it all: crawling pieces of corruption that had hatched out of the pustule-like egg clusters that grew and ripened amongst the bloody filth. The big Imperial commissar saw the corruption was eating into the very stuff of the ship, opening up brittle, flaking wounds in plasma-forged alloys made to last for centuries. Metal bulkheads and pillars were shot through with streaks of decay. The whole compartment was a living canker growing within the body of the ship; left unchecked, it would spread to consume the whole of the Macharius.
&
nbsp; Kyogen turned, about to call up the flamer units from the rear of the armsmen squad, intending to scour clean the source of the Chaos infestation within his vessel, when the disease daemon came at them.
The lead armsman swung his shotcannon up, the beam of the lamp mounted on its barrel catching sight of something tattered and pestilent as it rushed at him from out of the darkness, detaching itself from where it had been nesting amongst the rotted filth of its victims. The light from the lux-lamp suddenly turned red, bathing everything it illuminated in shocking tones of scarlet, as the armsman’s blood splashed across its crystal face, his throat ripped open by one sweep of the Chaos creature’s bone-shard claws.
The interior of the compartment became a riot of sound and light as the creature descended on its would-be hunters. Lux-beams danced round in search of targets, and there was the strobe-flash of shotcannon muzzles firing as confused and terrified armsmen shot blindly into the darkness. Five armsmen died in as many seconds, at least one of them killed by unaimed panic fire from his own comrades. Kyogen saw the daemon close its clawed hand over the face of the Ministorum preacher, heard the Ecclesiarch servant’s falsetto shrieks of agony as sickly yellow fluid wept from the open mouth-wounds on the creature’s palms, the fluid burning through the preacher’s rebreather mask and into the flesh then bone off his face.
Kyogen tore a shotcannon from the grasp of a terrified arms-man, turning it on the creature and firing it on full auto-spread, mercifully blowing apart the screaming preacher. The creature staggered under the impact of the explosive shotcannon shells, its tattered flesh knitting and reforming almost as quickly as the shotcannon shells tore and ripped it apart. Kyogen looked down at the weapon’s ammo counter, seeing with a shock of fear that at his current rate of fire the shotcannon’s ammunition cylinder would be completely emptied in the next few seconds, and that the daemon creature showed no signs of dying before despite the heavy damage being inflicted on it.
“To me!” he called, rallying the surviving armsmen around him. “Send this warp-spawn back to the hell it crawled from!”
First one armsman, then another, and then a third joined their commanding officer, sending non-stop volleys of explosive-head shotcannon shells into the body of the daemon creature. The creature reeled back, now suffering damage at a rate faster than its body could regenerate. Under impact from the hail of gunfire, the creature’s flesh seemed to unravel itself, exposing the new horrors of its disease-warped innards to the eyes of its attackers.
Kyogen’s gun clicked empty. Seconds later, the weapons of the others followed suit. To their horror and disbelief, the daemon instantly started to recover once more. It screeched in anger, and in response, ribbons of flesh detached themselves from the organic mess smeared onto the surfaces all around it. They reached out towards the daemon, wrapping themselves round its gunfire-ravaged form, clothing it in horribly borrowed new flesh. In seconds, Kyogen knew, the creature would be fully regenerated and on the attack again.
“Flamers! Where are those flamers?” he barked. “If you’ve got one, show me that you haven’t forgotten how to use it!”
Two armsmen stumbled forward, clearly terrified of approaching the creature. Still, Kyogen’s fearsome reputation terrified them even more, just as it should, and they took up position at the commissar’s command, triggering their bulky flamer weapons and playing long jets of burning promethium chem-mix over the screaming creature.
Kyogen watched the creature thrash and burn. Unfastening his gleaming leather holster, he drew his bolt pistol, aiming it at the creature and slowly and deliberately pumping one bolter shell after another into its fire-melted form. Only when the pistol in his hand clicked empty, only when the volatile flamer fuel had completely consumed the creature and all that remained of it was a foul, greasy stink hanging thickly in the air of the chamber did he finally cease fire.
The compartment would have to be scoured free of the Chaos contamination that had taken root here, and after that the area would be ritually purified by the ship’s appointed Ministorum Confessor and then probably sealed off and quarantined for a period that might stretch into decades, but for now, Commissar Kyogen was satisfied that he had done his duty.
Re-holstering his side-arm, he activated his communicator; this deep below decks, the comm-link with the command deck more than three dozen decks overhead crackled and buzzed with interference from the ship’s power systems and dense hull structure.
“Kyogen to command deck. Mission accomplished. Acting captain Ulanti will have my full report before the end of this quarter day-cycle, but the contagion has been found and eradicated.”
Tens of millions of kilometres distant, Bulus Sirl finally broke off psychic contact with his plague-spawn, sensing the last of its spirit fade back into the warp just as the glowing phosphorus flames consumed the last of its corporeal form. The effort of maintaining the active psychic link with his disease-child was taxing in the extreme, especially over such vast physical distances, but Sirl found the experience to be joyously rewarding. Confined to the bridge of the Virulent by the nature of the plague-gifts and body-altering mutants that Grandfather Nurgle in his munificence had bestowed upon him, Sirl had almost forgotten the vicarious pleasures of close-quarters combat, and, after so long viewing battles on a ship’s surveyor screen, it had been a bloody-edged thrill to experience through the mind of the plague creature the sensation of killing at close-range with claws and teeth.
Besides, he half-smiled to himself, what proud parent couldn’t be excused for indulging itself in a few precious moments of enjoyment at the precocious deeds of one of its own children?
Although the plague-vessel’s captain had severed the link with the vanquished Chaos daemon, he did not yet allow his mystic warp-gaze to rejoin his resting body. Instead, he probed deeper into the innards of the enemy ship, searching through ducts and conduits, pipeways and maintenance shafts, instinctively homing in on the mind of the other creature now crawling through these cramped and secret byways.
His other plague-child. The glistening newly-birthed twin to the one now killed by the weak and foolish Imperial scum. On its own, the first creature had at first busied itself spreading its plague-gifts amongst the crew of the Imperial vessel, but its actions, while pure in motive, had been blind and instinctive, lacking direction and planning. Its presence aboard their vessel had been detected too early by the weakling humans, and so it had had to be sacrificed. It was an old and brutally expedient naval ruse, Sirl knew: sacrifice one vessel to the guns of the enemy, creating a diversion and allowing another vessel to pass undetected through their defences.
Making contact with the newborn, Sirl spoke to it in its mind, soothing and comforting it. It was weak and vulnerable, but there was one important task that he required of it.
He suddenly relinquished contact, his mind snapping back aboard the bridge of his vessel as, irritated, he became aware that there were matters that required his attention.
“Signal from the main fleet, lord,” reported his unctuous new second-in-command. “We are commanded to reduce speed and rejoin the second rank of escorts protecting the Warmaster’s vessel’s starboard flank.”
“Maintain present speed and heading,” ordered Sirl, fighting down a wave of dangerous irritation, knowing that he must keep his mind clear of strong emotion if he was to maintain the fragile link with the newborn aboard the Macharius.
“But, my lord, the Warmaster himself commands—”
The second-in-command’s bleating objections were silenced by Sirl’s angry hiss. Nesting at their master’s feet, playing amongst the festering filth that littered the floor of the plague-vessel’s command deck, the swarm of Nurgle spawn yelped in sudden excitement, perhaps sensing another unexpected treat that might soon come their way, gifted to them by their master’s anger.
“We obey the will of Grandfather Nurgle, not the Warmaster,” warned Sirl. “You would do well to remember that, if you are to remain in my service for very mu
ch longer. Continue on course. Our target and objective is the Macharius!”
This time, the second-in-command’s tone was measured and respectful, carefully free of any hint of criticism or reproach.
This one learns fast, mused Sirl. Perhaps, if he continues like this, he might even live out the rest of the year.
“The Macharius is amongst the rest of the enemy convoy, lord, heading directly away from us and the rest of the Warmaster’s fleet. Even at our current speed, it is unlikely that we will catch it before it reaches the edge of the system and escapes into the warp.”
Perhaps not, thought Sirl, revising his earlier estimate of his second-in-command’s life expectancy chances. Perhaps not even the duration of this current voyage. “Fool, attend to your charts and estimates. Meanwhile, I will prepare to do the Grandfather’s bidding and bring his vengeance upon those that have already defied him twice already now. The Macharius shall not escape us again. The Plague-Father and I will see to that.”
Sirl closed his eyes in concentration, focussing again on the faint psychic aura of the daemon-spawn creature aboard the enemy cruiser. It had a hard and dangerous journey ahead of it, crawling through the kilometres of pipes and conduits that twisted though the entire gargantuan bulk of the warship, but already Sirl could sense the signs of the creature’s eventual destination, and he guided it in that direction accordingly. Towards the source of the heavy, deep-set vibrations that shuddered along the length of the ship’s hull from its main drive engines. Towards the source of the growing blasts of heat that swept through the maze of conduits from the heart of the ship’s power systems.
[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour Page 25