‘We’re going down,’ he said. ‘We’re going–’
They struck earth. The engine noise ceased abruptly, overwhelmed by the sound of buckling, splitting armour. Scipio thought he saw a chunk of wing ripped off, spiralling away down their flank before the ice and rock piled through the open hatch, suffocating everyone inside the hold.
Light became dark, sound became silence. The shuddering, jolting gunship finally grew still. Scipio’s head struck metal. The right side of his helm crumpled, crazing the retinal lens as he hit the interior wall or one of his brothers – he didn’t know which – and felt something warm trickle down the side of his face inside his helmet before blacking out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NOWHERE TO HIDE
Featureless ice sped past below, so fast it blurred into a smear of seemingly endless white. Storm squalls broke against the edge of the flyer like waves striking the bow of a ship, but nothing slowed it. It was moving at hyper-velocity now, running at supersonic and cutting through the belligerent wind with sickle-edged ease.
Pilot did not notice. No chill touched his body, though he was cocooned in a cockpit open to the elements and wore no flight suit or visored helmet. He experienced no exertion of any kind, no sense of inertia as his craft knifed through the air at such a phenomenal speed. Hail whipped against the flyer’s hull, against his exposed ‘skin’, but he paid it no heed. It was as inconsequential as the battle on the ice plain he had left behind several minutes ago. Emotion, even one as bright and blazing as hate, did not feature in his limited consciousness. For Pilot, sentience was reduced to the data stream and what it told him.
Multitudinous stacks of operational protocols streamed across his vision, enhanced cogitation assessing each before accessing prefigured routines and responses. A shift in wind speed, a sudden airburst, and Pilot activated the secondary protocol that told him to dip his wing and change the flyer’s angle of approach.
His twin craft, far too divorced from any bonds of brotherhood to be considered a wingman, performed a similar manoeuvre, reacting to the selfsame protocols. Both were acutely aware of each other’s presence, but not in the conventional sense. Pilot visualised the second flyer as a line of data, only acknowledged through the inclusion of the additional protocols it afforded within his vast but prescribed decision matrix.
Proximity markers entering the data stream provided further options for Pilot to sift through. He increased speed, deaf to the atonal shriek emanating from the flyer’s aggressive approach. A second concomitant data stream aligned onside the first, informing Pilot his twinned craft had mirrored the manoeuvre.
Up ahead, a large structure began to materialise through the ice fog. Pilot saw it in the data-feed first, a stream of code that unlocked a tertiary vault of responses. Then his cold machine eyes saw the city and he vectored towards the aspect which possessed the lowest threat ratio in order to increase the chances of mission success. This too was relayed and cogitated through the myriad datastacks.
Pilot felt no pity for the beings of flesh within the city’s walls; only cold logic raged through his android brain. He processed, adapted and realigned with the addition of new data. He did not feel in any way. He had no desire for carnage, but that was what Pilot brought with him on scythed wings; carnage and death.
Conditions in Infirmary Seven were overcrowded and far from sanitary. Buckets brimming with reams of used bandages and gauze lay clustered together in the corners, waiting to be cleaned or burned. Blood slicked the floor in places, waiting to be sluiced away. The warehouse-turned-medicae centre was capacious but the injured numbered in the hundreds, just at this location alone. Herded here in their droves, the men and women inside were like cattle. Beds were stacked close together, some rigged up as bunks for the more stable or terminal patients that could not be moved. Intravenous lines were hooked up to the extant machinery too cumbersome to move out for the barricades, or looped around bed rails. Some were even held by diligent servitors slaved to that single task.
The moment he stepped past the guard detail outside and entered the makeshift infirmary, Falka had to cover his nose and mouth. The place reeked of blood and contagion, the air thick with it and ringing with the screams of those undergoing emergency surgeries. Misery touched everything, clinging like a second skin. It was a product of despair, one that had affected all of Damnos since the invasion and was slowly eroding what little resolve its people had left.
Through the dingy light of overhead phosphor tubes that did little to lift the gloom of the place, Falka saw a small army of medics, orderlies and servitors rushing to keep the Damnosian wounded alive a little longer. Most wore masks to retard the worst of the stench, a few even utilised the mouth cups from Guard rebreathers.
Pressing through the mob of walking wounded, careful not to cause any further distress, Falka found what he took to be the nearest medic and gently gripped his shoulder.
Exasperated, the medic turned. He was a young man, too gaunt for his actual years, Falka suspected, and wore a smock stained dark with blood.
‘You one of the orderlies I requested?’ snapped the medic, without waiting for Falka to speak.
‘I– no, I–’ Falka began, wrong-footed.
‘Good,’ said the medic, seemingly hearing what he wanted to. ‘Name’s Rauter.’
‘Kolpeck, Falka,’ said Falka, events running a little too fast for him to keep up.
‘Follow me, please, Kolpeck.’ He turned on his heel, wading through the waves of meandering injured men and women, shouting orders here and there. To whom, Falka had no idea. It seemed chaotic in the shadowy infirmary. With bodies pressed so close together, it felt as if he were back in the One Hundred about to face the necron assault all over again.
Somewhat dumbstruck and appalled by it all, he followed, but struggled to keep up with the medic. Thronged with bodies, beds and what little medical equipment could be scavenged, it was a labyrinth without walls; one in which Falka could see his destination, but just had no idea how best to reach it. It was only by virtue of his size and intimidating stature that he was able to catch up with the medic at all. When he finally did, Rauter had found a rare scrap of open space where several avenues of beds connected.
‘There are a lot of burns, first through to fourth degree. Mostly from the weaponry those metal bastards were using, but from fires too,’ he explained, gesturing in several directions whilst reading off a data-slate Falka had only just realised Rauter was carrying. ‘Some amputations,’ the medic went on, ‘but we’ve got shock victims as well, burst ear drums, ocular scarring, breaks. You’re not skilled, so I don’t expect miracles. Make them comfortable if you can.’
Rauter turned from his data-slate to face him, wondering just how many of the able-bodied had been pressed into this service and what would happen when the injured outnumbered the fit and healthy. Perhaps they already did.
Now they had stopped and Falka was regaining his composure, he got his first proper look at the medic. A pepper-wash of stubble masked the lower half of Rauter’s jaw and neck and there were blood splashes he had not noticed or had time to clean off. His hair was short, not military, but still cropped. Falka guessed he was twenty-one standard, give or take. Too young to run a facility like this, but he saw no one else answering to the description.
‘Despite donations from our heavenward protectors,’ his tone was cynical and Falka had to resist the urge to strike him, but realised Rauter was just exhausted and had seen and lost too much, ‘we’re dangerously low on any form of sedative, so most of what you do will probably be holding down patients who are in agony but can’t be spared any pain relief. We’re also running out of coagulant gel, synth-skin, disinfectant and bandages. You care to name it, we probably haven’t got it or are almost out of it, so improvise.’
Rauter was about to hurry off when Falka put up a big hand to stop him.
‘I’m not here as an o
rderly,’ he said, stalling the young medic’s anger by going on to say, ‘I’m a soldier. I was told Jynn Evvers is in here somewhere and was asking for me.’
Rauter frowned, incredulous, as he opened up his arms wide to gesture at the squalid surroundings.
‘Look around. Can you see any organisation here? I have no idea where your friend is. If you’re not here to help please stay out of the way.’ Rauter was starting to walk away again and Falka’s urge to punch the medic came back with greater insistence, when he turned and said, ‘There’s a medical servitor with most of the patient data inloaded.’ Rauter jabbed a thumb in the vague direction behind Falka. ‘It’s voice activated, you only have to say her name. She might not have been logged, many haven’t, but it’s probably your best chance at finding her.’ He paused for a moment, his shoulders briefly sagging as he let Falka see the broken man he had become and was trying to keep at bay for as long as he was needed. ‘Is she your wife, daughter?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ he said, and felt hollow. ‘Just a friend.’
‘I am sorry… Kolpeck, was that your name?’ said Rauter. ‘I don’t mean to be insensitive, I don’t regard myself as such, but we are at the bleeding edge here. I’m not ashamed to admit that we’re ragged, but I haven’t slept for twenty hours and my patience is worn a little thin. Try the servitor, maybe it can help.’
Rauter nodded curtly before hurrying off to conduct his many duties, and was quickly lost in the crowd. In his wake, his words lingered. They were ragged, worn thin, and when ice is like that a break is not far off. All of Damnos was cracking. If the necrons did not kill them, then the heinous conditions they were being forced to endure probably would. Life had never been easy on the colony, ice mining never was, but this crisis was fast exceeding mortal forbearance.
Following the directions he had been given, chastening himself a second time for his lack of sympathy towards the medic, Falka eventually found the servitor.
It was a battered, half-organic model with a bare metal faceplate riveted across the nose and mouth where a vox-grille had been implanted, and all too human eyes. Given the nature of the enemy they were facing on Damnos, Falka found the spectacle of the servitor a little chilling. It was a walker, bipedal, with medical overalls and boots. It still had arms, but the organic limbs had been amputated and replaced with bionics. The servitor’s back was laden with various packs and canisters now mostly denuded of the medical supplies they had once carried.
Blank-eyed, the servitor paused in its preconfigured rounds and stopped in front of Falka.
‘I’m looking for Jynn Evvers. She here?’ he asked, a little unsettled by the corpse-like automaton.
Its dead-eyed stare persisted for a few seconds, giving the servitor time to search its records before blurting in machine-like cadence. ‘Name: Evvers, Jynn. Rank: Captain, Militia. Presence: Affirmative.’
There the report ended.
‘Where?’ asked Falka, frustrated. He had got used to the smell by now, but the constant moaning and wailing from the injured was wearing at his nerves.
After a few seconds of further searching, the servitor answered, ‘Insufficient data.’
Falka scowled. ‘What? She’s in here, right? Where is she? Evvers. Jynn,’ he repeated, and grabbed the servitor’s shoulders. The metal was cold and unyielding, and Falka suppressed an involuntary shiver at the touch.
‘Insufficient data,’ it answered again, in a carbon copy of its first response.
Irrational anger gripped Falka, prompting him to try and shake the truth he needed from the automaton. The patients around him were growing agitated too, thrashing and shouting. Some had risen from their beds and were remonstrating violently with the strung-out medicae staff. The break in the ice was coming, just as he knew it would…
Falka was wiping his eyes and shaking his head to clear the sudden bout of nausea threatening to empty his stomach when he heard someone puking nearby… then another.
‘Insufficient data, insufficient data, insufficien–’ blurted the servitor, trapped in a loop.
Something was happening. Falka felt it deep in his core, but could not pinpoint exactly what. Dizzy, he let go of the servitor and backed up a step before it suddenly convulsed and a line of blood streaked out of its eye from some internal haemorrhage.
‘What the hell…?’
Within a few metres of the servitor, a burn victim had kicked over his IV and collapsed on the floor. Another man, an orderly, fell to his knees and started scratching at his eyes. Farther away, he heard a woman shriek and someone else collided with a crash cart, spilling tools and equipment.
Through the crowd, which was slowly succumbing to some invisible malady, Falka noticed Rauter. The medic was slumped against the side of a bunk, his mouth slack and drooling. Then all the shouting, wailing and moaning stopped. Medical saws and machinery continued to burr and churn, but did so without human accompaniment.
Then came the keening.
It began as a low-level hum, just below the normal range of human hearing, but felt through the resonance of the hairs erect on the body or as a dull aching sensation in the gums, before growing in amplitude to an ear-wrenching shriek.
Falka did not realise what was happening until he had hit the ground, hands pressed instinctively over his ears. Somewhere close by he heard a gunshot, then the screaming began in earnest as the human voices returned. Patients were lurching up out of their beds, crawling their burn-ravaged bodies over the bloody infirmary floor. The medi-servitor Falka had been ineptly attempting to threaten was still upright but leaking a deluge of blood and oil from every one of its biological and non-biological orifices. The cyborganic was dead and no amount of augmentation would coax it back to functionality again. Never had he felt his own mortality so acutely. And as Falka looked up into the eyes of a hospitaller nurse who had fallen to her knees as he had done, he knew he was not alone. Terrified, she backed away and was lost to the darkness. Everywhere the same terror-etched faces, all experiencing the same revelation.
Death had come, and it was here amongst them.
Trembling, through tear-blurred vision, Falka saw someone he recognised emerging through the throng of slowly-maddening medics and patients. The whole infirmary was infected, the terrible shrieking an almost white-noise tinnitus that brought people to their knees or sent them into pangs of violent insanity. It was a man dressed in an Ark Guard uniform that Falka had seen. In one hand he held a simple igniter and a pack of smokes; in the other, a Damnosian ice axe already slick with blood. As he stepped into the dim light of a phosphor tube, the face of Corporal Tanner Greishof was revealed, only it was half-decayed and bloated with putrefaction.
‘Need a light?’ asked Greishof, the blackened tongue lolling around the cavity of his mouth slurring his voice.
Falka took out his sidearm, a simple heavy-gauge laslock, and pointed it towards the apparition. His rational mind knew what he was seeing could not be real, but his eyes were sending a different message to his brain, terrifying him.
‘Stay back!’ Falka warned.
Greishof frowned, flakes of skin peeling from his rotting face.
‘Do you want to jump instead? Down to the ice? It’s cold down there, you won’t feel a thing. Not a thing…’
The ground under Falka tilted like it was seesawing to the left and a profound sense of vertigo overtook him, enhancing his nausea. He vomited, but kept his eyes on Greishof, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Keep away…’
Other shapes moved in the darkness, within Falka’s peripheral vision. They were hunched and broad… skeletal.
Greishof advanced, paying the other spectres no mind, languidly swinging his ice axe.
‘Sure you don’t wanna smoke?’
‘Go to hell.’
Falka fired and missed, struggling to remain steady with the ground pitching a
nd yawing beneath him. A second shot flashed into the darkness beyond Greishof’s shoulder. A third struck his cheek and exploded the trooper’s jaw. Falka was about to unload a fourth when he caught sight of something behind Greishof.
No, not something, someone.
As his gaze alighted on a woman lying comatose on a nearby bunk, his heart beat a little faster, the flicker of hope rekindled in it.
‘Jynn…’
She lived. After everything, after he thought she had perished, Jynn lived.
‘Always knew you were a born survivor, girl,’ he murmured through tears of relief.
And like smoke shadows drifting away into the cold air, the spectres at the edge of Falka’s sight faded. But the crowd of half-mad Damnosians standing between them was very real. Crazed, capering figures barrelled through the darkness. Some were becoming increasingly violent, their fear turning them hostile. One slammed into Falka, but he managed to get his shoulder into the man’s abdomen and haul him over his head.
Knowing he would probably be crushed to death if he stayed on his knees, Falka staggered to his feet. He was tempted to keep out his pistol but holstered it instead, afraid of what he might do if he were so armed. At least Greishof had gone. He had never been there in the first place.
Just a ghost… Falka realised. They’re all just ghosts.
A woman wearing Guard fatigues rushed him out of the darkness. She was wailing incoherently, so Falka cuffed her across the left temple to put her down, knocking her unconscious.
‘Out of my way!’ he shouted, mustering what little resolve he had left, only the prospect of reaching Jynn compelling every laboured step. His concern for her was an anchor he could cling to and helped overcome his irrational fear. Even still, Falka’s heart was hammering like a rock-drill and he clutched at it, scarcely able to breathe. For a moment he genuinely believed his chest might burst and imagined a host of mechanical scarabs swarming out to consume him, flesh and bone.
Damnos - Nick Kyme Page 39