Dark Imperium

by Guy Haley

  Felix went close to the front. He would gladly fight at the head of his army, but Codex doctrine ruled placing one’s officers at the very forefront of an advance as sub-optimal, likely to lead to the rapid elimination of the command cadre. He joined Flavian. The Aggressor squad made an unbreachable shield in front of them.

  Empty space yawned on the other side of the bridge’s low parapets. Sunlight filtered through corrosion and the broken light sculptures, revealing the extent of the spire’s accelerated decay.

  The variety of Chaos was manifold. Even within the limited purview of each of the fell entities that called themselves gods, there was staggering variety. Where the skypark had been a riot of life decaying in the aftermath of abundant growth, the spire interior was bare of any living thing; instead, its corruption was evidenced in patterns of oxidisation spreading over the walls. Violent oranges, deep greens and vibrant marine turquoises – metal, it seemed, could die as colourfully as flesh.

  ‘Brother-captain, we have contacts moving on our position.’

  At the moment Hellicus voxed Felix, he saw the signifiers himself.

  ‘Light aircraft, coming up from below. Forward party, increase speed. The rest of you, cover our advance,’ ordered Felix.

  The Aggressors broke into a jog that shook the bridge. The Intercessor squads lowered their bolt rifles from fully-aimed positions and cradled them at their hips, switching from single shot to short-burst mode. The greater ammunition expenditure was worthwhile, for it maintained fire efficiency when moving at speed when shots could not be perfectly aimed.

  As precise as any Mechanicus machine, the forward party made the other side, turned, and took up position around the guard walls of the spire ramps.

  Engines screeched in the spire shaft, jarring with the hideous wind music – jet turbines, grinding hard for want of lubricant. Felix risked a look below. Seven heavy three-engined drones were rising rapidly up the shaft.

  ‘Ware!’ called out Codicier Maxim. ‘These are daemon engines! I can taste their souls.’

  ‘Destroy them,’ said Felix.

  Bolts and plasma crossed the shaft, skewering the lead drone from multiple directions. Its armour cracked moistly, like chitin rather than plasteel. An engine blew out, and it whirled down to destruction.

  ‘More coming in from above!’ voxed Sergeant Brutian of the second Hellblaster squad.

  The dead spire’s acoustic design made it a sounding chamber where every noise was amplified massively. Bolts exploded like heavy mortar rounds. Air superheated by plasma streams exploded with the force of tropical storms.

  The lower drones were in a poor firing position. At their angle of attack, the Primaris Space Marines were well sheltered by the ramp and walkway walls. Gouts of sticky, yellow plague liquids splashed against the building’s fabric, eating into the metal and causing fleshy boils to sprout and blood to flow around the impact sites in violation of all natural law.

  For the descending daemon engines, however, the converse was true. The sprays of infected matter they pumped from their cannons came over the top of the walls, washing over the Space Marines. The paint bubbled on their armour, and warriors fell with pained cries as the vile material ate through their softseals and into the flesh beneath.

  The two Librarians worked together, nullifying hexes and banishing the trapped daemons back into the warp. Three of the drones fell this way, and another two to the concentrated fire of the Primaris Space Marines, before the strike force’s attention was diverted elsewhere.

  ‘Captain, I have multiple contacts coming from below on the ramps,’ shouted Hellicus against the crack and boom of battle. ‘Some kind of infantry. There are thousands of them.’

  Felix retasked his suit’s auto-senses to take a sounding even as he fired his gauntlet bolter, riddling a bloat-drone hovering up before him with explosive rounds. His attack knocked it back through the air. Cratered metal-flesh weeping thin liquids, it dropped out of sight.

  Felix’s auto-senses indicated his scan was done. He rotated his cartograph. The walkways were so crowded with enemy contacts that they were a solid red.

  ‘More coming from behind,’ voxed Flavian.

  Felix looked through the arch leading into the next spire. Movement registered first upon his auto-senses, then upon his vision.

  The noble dead of Ardium were marching to war.

  They shambled forwards, clad in ruined finery. They were propelled by limbs that should not, could not possibly work. Their faces were twisted into rictus grins, but in their eyes was hopeless despair.

  ‘Plague walkers,’ he spat.

  ‘Worse,’ said Maxim. ‘By the Emperor’s light, their souls are trapped within their carcasses. The pain…’

  ‘We shall put them out of their misery.’ Felix had to shout to make himself heard. ‘Aggressors, turn about. Immolation protocols. Burn them back. All squads, consolidate on our position. We shall fight our way through.’

  A drone exploded with a boom behind him, showering metal gummed with sticky meat across the walkways. Something inside gave out an inhuman scream as it died – half of pain, half of release.

  The Aggressors waded into the dead. The plague zombies’ feeble hands and makeshift weapons were no use against the inviolable Gravis plate. They bit at the Space Marines’ limbs, shattering their rotten teeth on ceramite. The Aggressors responded with a boiling wash of chemical fire. The dead still fought as they burned.

  Four drones remained. Gerrundium speared one with crackling lightning, searing the daemon from its shell. Another took hits from both Hellblaster squads, and was consumed in an actinic ball of energy.

  Intercessors gained the bridge. The dead coming from below were slow, but there were so many that Felix’s small group could not prevail against them.

  ‘Firing lines! Triple rows,’ he said. ‘We must clear a way through to the Palace Spire!’

  Three squads, all missing a member or two now, lined up. The first threw themselves prone, the second knelt behind them, the third stood.

  ‘Aggressors, back!’ Felix ordered. ‘Intercessors, prepare to fire. Set weapons to full automatic fire. Release these wretches from their torment, and carve our way out of here.’

  The Aggressors stepped aside with ponderous elegance. The barrier removed, the burning dead surged forwards, white teeth shining in blackening flesh.

  ‘Fire!’ bellowed Felix.

  Twelve bolt rifles opened up, sending out a wall of mass-reactive shells that gouged a deep and immediate passage into the crowd. Felix joined his men and fired with them.

  The dead fell into a thick carpet of twitching limbs, many still on fire.

  ‘Hellblasters, fire!’ Felix ordered.

  Aside from the squad forming the rearguard, all of the Space Marines were on the same level now, firing into the crowd of dead. Walking corpses exploded, or flash-burst into steam when hit by plasma.

  ‘Advance!’ bellowed Felix.

  His boltstorm gauntlet roaring, he led his men against the damned. His boots crushed corpses flat, threatening to mire him in traps of broken ribs. He brought his power sword into play, using it like a machete to hack down the foe. He needed none of his considerable skill to kill them. Hundreds fell to Felix and his men. No matter how many they slew, the dead came on in seemingly endless tide.

  Metre by metre, they forced a way through. Felix raised his sword to strike at a skull-faced warrior, and halted his blow just in time.

  The skull was the helm of a Primaris Reiver.

  ‘Cease fire!’ he commanded.

  The last line of the dead fell down, their souls released. Sparking power blades were yanked back out of chests.

  ‘Sergeant Lyceus, well met,’ said Felix. ‘Do you have vox? Ours is not functioning beyond our immediate proximity.’

  The Reivers’ leader reloaded his bolt pistol. ‘The
enemy are jamming our communications across the battlezone. Lieutenant Astium ordered us to seek you out. We heard your gunfire. We fought our way from the Palace Spire.’

  The Reiver squad was armed with oversized combat knives glimmering with disruption fields, and heavy bolt pistols. Their helms were death’s heads, and their left pauldrons enlarged to provide better protection in melee. Their armour was eerily silent, adapted for stealth work. Reivers were an infiltration and close-combat specialisation.

  ‘Do you have the location of Lieutenant Tobias also?’

  ‘This way, brother-captain,’ said Sergeant Lyceus. ‘They are together, and under attack close to the mission target. The device is within the chapel off the feasting hall.’

  ‘The enemy despise the notion of the Emperor as god,’ said Maxim. ‘There is power to be courted by defiling His holy places.’

  ‘The Emperor is not divine, so says our creed,’ said Felix, who had heard the sentiment expressed forcefully from the lips of Guilliman himself.

  ‘It does not matter whether he is or not – it is the act that brings the power, not the truth of it. The plague zombies cannot be “true”. They are an impossibility. Yet they exist,’ said Maxim. ‘That is the power of Chaos.’

  ‘Speaking of which, there are thousands more dead coming behind us,’ said Felix. ‘We must hurry, identify the target, assess its threat level and destroy it.’

  The Palace Spire was wider than the first. Whereas the Sighing Spire had been a declaration of art, a rich man’s showpiece, the second spire contained the palace proper. Within the walls was a maze of staircases and landings. Elevator shafts plummeted down tens of thousands of storeys to the depths of the hive, their cars nowhere to be seen. Within this outer layer of rooms and passageways, the main body of the palace was a series of giant halls, designed expressly with the display of power in mind. The Ultramarines ruled Ardium directly, and so there was no planetary commander, but the office of the governor was sacrosanct, and there were as many depictions of various historic holders of the title and their heraldic badges as there were of the Ultramarines.

  Statues of Ultramarines native to Ardium lined long hallways. Justinian was of that world, Felix recalled, but the creation of the Primaris Space Marines had been a secret. No monument had been raised to him. Soaring vaulted roofs glittered with mosaics of precious metals, depicting the deeds of ancient heroes. In the silence of the deserted palace, the glittering of the eyes of the figures in the mosaics gave them a sinister false life. Even so, decay was less prevalent in the Palace Spire than in the Sighing Spire, as if the statues and the devotional images in the palace resisted its progress.

  Only echoes held court there, and the hooting wind. There were blood stains as well, old and black, and combat damage to the spire itself, but there were no corpses. All the dead walked in the service of Nurgle.

  The rumble of battle broke through the funereal wind, and Felix’s dwindling force picked up its pace. He had lost seven Space Marines. A dozen more were wounded. His Apothecary’s grim silence told him that the gene-seed of the dead had been too polluted to salvage.

  ‘This way,’ said Sergeant Lyceus.

  He led the strike force through a series of service corridors, plain and unadorned ways never seen by the lords who inhabited the palace. Lyceus led them upwards. The sound of rocket fire rushed down the stair, and they emerged onto a wide mezzanine overlooking the palace’s vast feasting hall. A group of Death Guard heavy weapons troopers were firing with impunity down into the combat raging on the main floor. Lyceus held up a finger to his grinning skull mouth. He and his men stole forwards, attacking the Heretic Astartes from behind. Two died, gutted by power blades before they could react. Felix had his men shoot down the most troublesome, a purple-faced champion with a clubbed claw for a fist.

  The enemy dealt with, Felix’s force took their place.

  In the audience chamber, battle raged. Felix assessed the situation quickly. Lieutenant Astium’s forces were heavily depleted; Tobias’ squads looked to have arrived later. The Death Guard fought ferociously, their peculiar specialists choking the air with poison fog and plague spores. Thankfully, the Primaris Space Marines’ Mark X armour kept this cargo of disease at bay, but the swirling mists made a mockery of their targeting systems.

  ‘A good position,’ said Felix.

  ‘Purposefully chosen,’ said Lyceum. ‘I will rejoin the others. We are more use down there than we are up here.’

  Felix nodded, and bid him good fortune, then ordered his warriors to creep forwards, ready to fire down at the enemy.

  At his command, they unleashed a torrent of death upon the foe, slaughtering many where they stood. Several took dozens of hits before they fell, but fall they did. Forced to divide their own fire between the two groups in the feasting hall and the newcomers upon the balcony, the Death Guard were hard pressed.

  ‘Brothers! Victory is with us,’ called Felix, amplifying his vox signal to break through the enemy’s jamming.

  Astium and Tobias hailed him with grim joy. The Death Guard were caught in a crossfire, and the tide began to turn.

  But the forces of Nurgle were not bested yet.

  A bell tolled, perturbing the poison gases.

  Unbelievably, the clanging bell shook the Primaris Space Marines. Bolt rifles wavered and dipped. Warriors looked to their brothers questioningly. Felix recoiled as if struck. The bell’s note was a poison all its own.

  There were promises there among the tolling. Embrace my misery, its resonance sang, sinking into the meat of Felix’s brain, and enjoy an end to all future miseries.

  Through the melee below, a grossly obese plague lord advanced, a bronze bell hanging from a crook of black horn suspended over his powerpack. The bell swung slowly, and its clapper struck the metal. Another doleful peal rolled out over the battle, invigorating the Death Guard. The effect on the Space Marines was debilitating.

  His shots going wide from a hand suddenly weak, Felix reeled back from the mezzanine’s edge. Black thoughts filled his head, taking him away from the battle. He was tormented with visions of his own death, his mighty Primaris body undone by disease and age, reduced to a trembling ague-smitten shadow. The world fell away, and he found himself wracked with sickness in a grey place. His armour was corroded and non-functional, a dead weight on his swiftly weakening frame, and his weapons were breaking in his hands, scorching his nostril with the harsh chemical reactions of oxidising fyceline and failing energy cells.

  There was a flicker of heat in the reactor upon his back, but it too was fading. He tried to stand, but he could not.

  He was dying, dying from old age and neglect, and there would be no heroes to resurrect him as they had Guilliman. The baleful howl of the warp awaited.

  The bell tolled again.

  There is release from this suffering, the bell sang. There is joy in pain. Pledge yourself to Father Nurgle and never fear mortality again. Become eternal, become a vector of life. Join the neverending dance and be merry.

  A light penetrated the dismal world that Felix inhabited. He lifted his head from the ground on his age-weakened neck and saw the glowing figure of Codicier Maxim striding through the grey, his blue armour as pure as sapphire, the green shoulder pad of his Aurora Chapter insignia as bright as virgin forest leaves.

  ‘Stand firm! Pay no heed! It is but a poison of the warp!’ bellowed Maxim. His voice strained as he spoke. The crystal rods and tracks of his aegis hood glowed with fierce counter-wychfire.

  The bell tolled again. Maxim’s image flickered. He approached Felix.

  ‘Captain! You must finish the herald, or we shall fail.’

  Felix raised a shaking hand, the last fragments of rusty armour falling from his fingers. Maxim grasped him arm, and suddenly he was armoured, young and full of the power of the Emperor. The grey world crumbled as if made of dust. He was in the feasting h
all again.

  ‘Go, now!’ said Maxim. ‘I shall shield you.’

  The bell rang. Felix took the psychic impact with a grunt.

  While the Primaris Space Marines were reeling from the bell’s dolorous effects, the Death Guard renewed their attack, regrouping while reinforcements made their way in from some of its many entrances. He had to act now.

  Holding aloft his power sword, he leapt over the edge of the balustrade, landing in the middle of his foes. He recovered well and barged past a Traitor Space Marine, desperate to slay the bell-toller before Maxim’s power gave out. Warriors came at him but he smote them down, crushing the chest of one with a blow from his gauntlet, eviscerating a second with a reverse cut of his power sword.

  Heart, heart, head – the mantra for combat against other Adeptus Astartes, doubly important when fighting the resilient Death Guard.

  Despite their toughness, Felix cut them down economically, guarding his movements against excessive flourishes that may expose him. A brief burst from his boltstorm gauntlet mashed the head of a bloated giant whose armour joints sported fringes of tentacles. The traitor fell to his knees, his additional limbs spasming and falling limp.

  The bellringer was a metre away. Felix was taller than the traitor, but with far less mass; the bellringer was a swollen horror, bloated with unnatural disease and fell power. His cracked armour strained to contain his bulk. Diseased horns sprouted from his back, the bell hanger but one of them, and they were part of his body. A filthy tabard hung from his armour, yellowed by smoke pouring from a censer at his waist.

  Felix leapt onto the corpse of the tentacled Space Marine, using the backpack as a springboard to launch himself at his foe. The bellringer loosed a shot from his plasma pistol, and a globular sun howled past the captain’s ear. Felix let fly with his boltstorm gauntlet, the shots ringing the bell, then brought his power sword up and back for a mighty downwards cut. The blade’s powered edge sank deep into the traitor’s thick armour, bringing forth a wash of black blood and a ringing grunt, more bell chime than voice.

  The traitor staggered, his motion setting the great bell on his back into another swing. Soundwaves pummelled Felix, piercing the psychic protection of Maxim. His auditory dampers burst. The scent of fried electronics filled his mask, and his ears bled.