Dark Imperium

by Guy Haley

  The dead of Espandor came to war.

  One of the recruits gasped, the humanity strangled out of his exhalation by his respirator. A sharp las-crack had Varens turning; a shocked, boyish face looked back at him. Rain steamed off the muzzle of the recruit’s lasgun.

  ‘Hold fire.’ Lieutenant Attinus’ voice crackled over the squad vox.

  Bolus rested his hand on the body of the gun. His damp glove hissed as it brushed the barrel. Heat radiated off the power pack. ‘Wait, son, you need to be precise. Shooting at this distance is a waste of charge. Rain and fog disperses the light. You don’t want to be swapping out your ammo while those things are clawing at your face. Every shot saved is another to fire when you need it. Save it until the command comes. Aim for the heads. Always the heads,’ he added, looking meaningfully up and down the line.

  Those of the young soldiers who had grasp of their wits nodded and leaned into their gunstocks. A couple stared tearfully out, gazes fixed. The Auxilia ordinarily had excellent training, but the needs of the war meant these recruits had been hurried through. They were conscripts, and they weren’t ready.

  The shapes of the dead solidified. They had been civilians, mostly. Their torn and dirty clothes were whole enough to give hints as to their origins in the overrun cities further east. There were a few Astra Militarum uniforms among them. If a position fell, it wasn’t always possible to behead and burn the bodies.

  ‘We’re fighting ourselves,’ a trooper said. Unease rippled down the line in a wave of nervous movement.

  Varens cursed the boy inwardly for speaking the truth. ‘Quiet there. Guns up. Take aim.’

  A soft tattoo of clicks and rattles undercut the drumming of the rain as his order was obeyed. Other sergeants and veterans gave their own commands, and the parapet grew a leafless hedge of las-barrels pointing into the blasted forest.

  There was no bombardment. Too many times the dead had clawed their way back up from the earth, taking the defenders by surprise, and shells for the big guns were running low. Espandor was remote, always had been, right at the edge of Ultramar. Supply had become increasingly difficult as the Plague Fleets stepped up their activities. Even back in the days of the Five Hundred Worlds it had been isolated, though when so many other worlds had been cut loose from Ultramar thousands of years ago, Espandor had remained within the fold.

  The dead staggered onwards, slack expressions on their faces. They did not speak or make any sound. Only the sucking of the mud at their feet and the drumming of the rain accompanied their march.

  Their flesh was rent, innards hanging from split stomachs, greening muscles exposed in ragged skin. There was no way an organism like that could function. All the men stationed on Espandor knew the dead for being born of warpcraft. The commissars ruthlessly dealt with any found speaking of such things, but they were facing unnatural monsters. Sorcery. It could not be denied.

  Varens let out a tense sigh. His breath was sour in his mask.

  From a way down the line, one of the last regimental priests bellowed prayers into the silent advance. The dead turned away from that quadrant as if ordered. Varens wished there were more holy men. Cardinals ruled Espandor in the name of the Adeptus Ministorum, though it was subordinate to Macragge, and so there were many men who claimed to be holy in its cities. But the priests of the world rarely came to the front. They were busy beseeching the Emperor to turn away the clouds of flies from the cities, they said, and tending to the many sick, and overseeing the disposal of the dead before they could reawaken. They had their hands full.

  Varens thought them cowards.

  He had been terrified at the sight of plague zombies in the beginning, but Varens’ fear lessened with each exposure. For all the horror of their being, the dead were clumsy. They were only dangerous in large numbers, and these assaults, though unpleasant, were easily dealt with.

  Once, a theatre of war like Espandor would have attracted the attentions of the Ultramarines themselves, but there were worse things attacking their empire, and they were needed elsewhere. There were supposedly Space Marines on Espandor somewhere. Varens’ couldn’t say if that were true. He had never seen them.

  The dead drew closer, lips smacking wordlessly together in a parody of living speech.

  ‘Fire!’ roared Lieutenant Attinus.

  Ruby las-lights stabbed out from the trench. The air cracked. Rain hissed loudly into steam, generating rank, warm clouds that settled on the line and thickened the fog.

  ‘Fire!’ ordered the lieutenant again.

  Multiple lasbeams riddled the corpse walkers. The dead began their dance, jigging as beams of coherent light blasted divots from their ruined bodies, but still they did not fall.

  ‘Aim for the heads!’ shouted Bolus at the recruits. He snapped off a shot at a lurching shape, pierced already with half a dozen black holes. Though the flesh was cauterised, the wounds leaked black fluid. Bolus cursed as his shot tore off the thing’s ear, and he adjusted his aim.

  Varens felled the one behind Bolus’ mark, trusting the acting sergeant to make his shot next count. He had a glimpse of a filthy officer’s uniform on the dead man, a priceless power sword scabbarded at his side.

  ‘Men! They are dead, but they will die anew. Hit them in the heads!’ shouted Varens.

  Bolus’ second shot was true, taking the approaching plague walker full in the face. Its head disintegrated and it fell down, chest rattling as it died its second death.

  The fog darkened directly in front of their line. Scattered silhouettes became a shadowy mass.

  ‘Damn it, there’s a knot of them coming this way.’ Bolus picked up the vox-horn from the vox-operator’s pack. ‘This is acting Sergeant Bolus, Fourth Squad, Second Platoon, requesting fire support on my quadrant immediately.’

  The veterans of the Espandor war reacted quickly. A heavy bolter dug into a projecting bunker almost fifty metres away swivelled and banged loudly. Compact, self-propelled munitions burned through the mist on streaks of flame numerous enough to light up the trench in yellow firelight. The bolts cut the dead to pieces, burying themselves in their flesh and exploding, scattering gobbets of rancid corpse meat over Varens’ unit.

  The men on the line let out a premature cheer. But the dead were not done with them.

  Several standing dead remained. A dozen more hauled their broken bodies across the mire with crippled limbs, ignorant of pain. Lasbeams snapped out at them, but too many of the recruits fired wildly, and things that should have died in the mud of the kill zone reached the trench line. There, they simply toppled forwards, landing with bone cracking force in the mud at the bottom of the trench, or fell onto hapless troopers. Those that didn’t land upon a target flopped about, stiff arms and legs twisting as they struggled to right themselves, teeth snapping at the limbs of the living. Most of the recruits remembered the drill and moved out of the way, but not all.

  ‘Quick! Don’t let them bite you! Kill them!’ ordered Varens. He drew his pistol and put a shot into the head of a foe struggling with a new recruit. ‘One bite and you’ll be like them. The heads, the heads! Aim for the heads!’

  A scream had him whirling around as another dead man fell directly onto a recruit. Teeth, unnaturally white in the ruin of its face, clashed at the soldier’s neck. The plague zombie bore the young soldier down off the step. The creature was naked but for a helmet still snugly strapped about its chin. Blurred regimental tattoos marked its upper arms. Varens’ first shot was deflected by the helmet, the second cored it through. The reanimated corpse died, head dripping molten plasteel and rotten brains. Varens was at the youth’s side before the corpse had collapsed, dragging him from the muck and shaking the shock out of him.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  The soldier stared mutely back. Varens quickly checked the seals around his mouth and eyes and shoved him back against the wall. The last few dead were being permanentl
y put down, and no more had reached the trench line. Out over the wasteland, others were falling, speared through the head by ruby light. The fresh soldiers seemed to have finally caught on.

  ‘Varens!’ Bolus called him over.

  ‘We didn’t lose anyone,’ said Varens.

  Bolus shook his head grimly. ‘It’s not over yet. This is something new. Listen!’

  Varens struggled to see anything through the swirl of rain and drifting steam. The fog had thickened through the fight and reduced visibility to a score of metres.

  A dirge came out from the murk.

  ‘All is ash, all is ash, all is ash.’

  The words were wet and thick, carried on breath from lungs full of fluid, up throats clogged with phlegm, uttered by swollen lips.

  ‘All is ash, all is ash, all is ash,’ they droned.

  The words were laden with loss and sorrow, and the inevitability of the end. They sent a chill down Varens’ spine. Hysterical giggles and guffaws of mirth interrupted the chant, as if the chanters performed some sacred duty they could not take entirely seriously. That made it worse. The new recruits wavered.

  Behind the last few staggering dead stalked huge shapes, bloated giants of fearsome silhouette. The grinding of ancient motors sounded out their every step. Though spikes and unholy adornments had changed their shapes from their intended form, there was no mistaking what they were.

  ‘Guilliman save us,’ said Bolus, his confidence shaken. ‘Heretic Astartes.’ Behind his visor, his eyes shone with fear. ‘Keep the lads in line,’ he whispered. ‘These aren’t going to fall as easily as the dead.’

  Varens’ stomach tightened. He nodded, teetering on the brink of utter panic, but his training took over, and he and Bolus went into action.

  ‘All is ash, all is ash, all is ash,’ chanted the enemy.

  ‘Stand firm!’ shouted Varens, retaking his position. He looked meaningfully at the soldiers to his right. They gripped their guns tighter. All down the line, other veterans shouted similar encouragements and threats, or cursed the new men for cowards – whatever it took to keep them from breaking. Screamed orders to halt came from close by, followed by the single bang of a bolt pistol. They all knew what that meant. The recruits stilled. The certainty of death for those who fled versus the probability of death for those who stood firm steadied them. Silence filled the trench as surely as water.

  ‘All is ash, all is ash, all is ash.’ The drone persisted.

  A quiet voice gibbered in the mist, its owner lost to view. ‘I don’t like it, I don’t like it, I don’t like it.’

  Bolus snatched the vox-horn up.

  ‘Lieutenant Attinus, please advise actions regarding new foe,’ said Bolus. ‘Lieutenant?’ He looked at Varens. ‘Not answering, damn him.’

  One of their own squad sank down to his knees to pray, his lasgun sliding from the saturated trench wall and landing in the slop at the bottom of the trench.

  Bolus was on him in an instant, dragging him up.

  ‘Get back on your feet!’ he screamed in the young man’s face. ‘If you want to die on your knees, I’ll shoot you myself and save the enemy the bother.’

  A second later, heavy weapons opened up. This time there was no holding back. Shells rained down from artillery to the rear. Disgusting mud heaved skywards, pattering wetly down over the trench lines. Man-portable heavy weapons added their fury to the storm descending on the traitors. Through the blizzard of earth, metal and fire, Varens saw a Plague Marine bisected by a lascannon blast. That one had the decency to die. The rest walked on as if the falling ordnance – the Medusa rockets, the heavy bolter shells and the rest of the Imperium’s martial rage – was of no more concern to them than the rain.

  The barrage crept near to the lip of the trench, pelting the defenders with debris. A last whistling descent, a final explosion, and the shelling ceased, leaving fyceline smoke to wisp into the greater body of the fog.

  The enemy was in range.

  ‘Give fire,’ ordered Attinus over the vox.

  ‘Fire!’ yelled Bolus, his voice raw-edged with panic.

  A hundred lasguns blazed, their bright red light illuminating the mud and the visored faces lining the trench. It was a vision of some primitive netherworld, raw and bloody with punishment. Varens counted no more than twenty or so of the enemy giants, but their boldness in assaulting the position was justified. He watched as one was riddled with shots that would have blown apart any other target. The Plague Marine didn’t even slow, but trudged onwards with his fellows as if nothing had happened, his armour smoking. All the while they chanted.

  ‘All is ash, all is ash.’

  The nearer the traitors came, the more awful details emerged. They were no longer fit to be called men. Adeptus Astartes once, they had sold themselves to fell powers for reasons no rational mind could comprehend. Diseases of every kind afflicted them. Their stomachs were distended, straining the capacity of their swollen wargear to contain. Where exposed, their skin was inflamed or outright necrotic. Their innards dangled freely from corroded gaps in their armour. Mucous, urine, faeces, blood – every humour of the body dripped from them, all of it stinking and tainted with the hues of illness. Parasites crawled over them, wriggling freely into and out of their never-healing wounds. Their droning spoke of great misery, but on helmetless faces smiles shone. There was a joke they all knew, and they were eager to share it with the rest of the universe.

  Though the wind blew away from the trenches, and though the Auxilia’s respirators were manufactured to strain out all atmospheric pollutants, the stink of the foe was overpowering, a charnel smell of rot that made Varens retch into his mask.

  ‘All is ash, all is ash.’

  Nonchalantly almost, the traitors levelled their weapons. Rusting bolt guns and plasma guns whose cracked containment chambers sent out hissing jets of superheated steam pointed at the line of exposed heads at the lip of the trench.

  ‘All is ash, all is ash.’

  As one, they opened fire. The guns banged as they ejected their munitions. A second louder bang sounded as the bolt-shells’ jets ignited and accelerated them well past the sound barrier. The final noise, the one that had the boltgun rightly feared as a weapon, was a flat banging as the rounds slammed into soil and flesh, and there detonated with deadly force.

  Varens’ visor spattered with gore as the head of the youthful soldier at his side was obliterated. He’d been with the unit two days. There had not been time to learn his name.

  ‘Keep firing! Keep firing!’ he shouted, over and over, until he was hoarse, but the blare and clatter of battle was so great he could not hear his own voice.

  Then the flies came, despite the rain and the gunfire, and everything collapsed into confusion. They buzzed in swarms so thick they turned the air solid. Varens lost sight of the man nearest him.

  For a long second, he saw nothing, then the swarm was away and over him, and Varens looked death in the face.

  The traitors had made their way to within metres of the trench. Directly opposite him, a giant in armour stained the violent turquoise of ocean-corroded iron turned his weapon upon Varens. He thought then he would surely die. Then the emplacements at either end of their section opened up, raking the traitors with fire. He watched in amazement as the Plague Marine’s obese frame absorbed four heavy bolt-rounds, the explosions of their detonations in his massive body sending squirts of ichor out of the holes in his armour. The traitor shook, but did not fall. He only succumbed to the impact of the fifth, and keeled over like a rotten tree into the quagmire.

  A new wave of flies battered against Varens’ helmet, hard as death-world hail, obscuring his vision with swirling curtains of pale, furry bodies. Then they were gone once more, and the traitors were at the trench.

  Three Heretic Astartes attacked Varens’ section, tossing wizened heads before them that exploded like gre
nades. A choking gas filled the trench, and several men fell to the poisons within as the smoke ate through their respirators.

  ‘All is ash, all is ash,’ the traitors sang.

  The Plague Marine nearest Varens stepped onto the edge of the earthwork. Dozens of lasbeams found him. His corroded armour turned the light aside, or else the beams were absorbed by his monstrously bloated body. Pulsing, rotting organs hung through gaps in the ancient ceramite. Oil dribbled from the armour’s ailing systems, and the reactor unit on his back hitched and coughed with the maladies of machines.

  The wooden and plasteel facing of the trench gave way under the traitor’s immense weight, and he rode the collapsing wall down, bringing a wave of sloppy mud and broken flesh with him.

  He rose over Varens. Half his helmet had corroded away, exposing rotten teeth and a single yellowed eye. The remains of the helm looked like it had melted somehow into the warrior’s flesh, becoming one with it, but incompletely so – the bottom still moved as a separate artefact, whereas at the top, rippled, green skin melded with the metal into a semi-living mass dotted with suppurating boils. A grey horn sprouted sideways from the warrior’s temple, the cracked mess at its root bleeding yellow plasma.

  Behind the giant, others of its kind fought with stolid efficiency, bludgeoning their way through the dozens of mortals who opposed them. There was shouting, and much weapons fire, and the crack of disruption fields as auxilia officers brought their power weapons to bear, but Varens saw only a little of it past the steaming, diseased bulk of the Plague Marine bearing down upon him.

  The visible portion of the Heretic Astartes’ face was bloated and pallid, the face of a man close to death, but a fevered mirth lit up his eye. Scabbed lips quivered with an avuncular chortle. He held up a clubbed hand whose little finger was a limp tentacle. A greening nail pointed directly at Varens.

  ‘You first!’ he said.

  The Plague Marine raised a bolter flaking with rust. Such a thing should not have functioned, but the servants of Chaos were not bound by natural law.