Do something.
No point making for the bridge. What use could he be to the beings of myth who held that post?
There would be other clusters of warrior acolytes and the ship’s crew fighting. He didn’t know where. He could search…
He could search for someone more vital. He could seek the inquisitors.
Lungs rasping, legs stumping their pain, he kept running. He had no direction, but he had purpose. He clung to it.
He had evaded the orks, but not the sound of their presence. The walls of the ship shook with the beat of explosions and the roars of the invaders.
‘The enemy is in a hurry to die,’ Styer announced. It was a simple truth. The orks must have breached the Scouring Light in a dozen locations, and were converging on the bridge. They were throwing themselves into a choke point. The hall that ran from the bridge was a wide one, but it was also the only access. The Grey Knights stood with their backs to the sealed bridge door and filled the hall with corpses. The bodies piled up in low hills. And the greenskins kept coming.
‘They are tedious,’ Vohnum said. He waded forward into a crush of the enemy, laying waste with his halberd. A hail of storm bolter shells flanked him.
‘For a lowly enemy, they have already cost us dearly,’ Styer reminded him.
‘This force is an annoyance, not a threat.’ Frustration sated, Vohnum stepped back into formation.
The orks fired as soon as they reached the top of the staircase, a hundred metres away. Their bullets tore up the tapestries. They gouged the marble of the wall and deck. They did nothing to the Terminator armour worn by the squad.
Styer did not correct Vohnum. The ork groups that had made it this far presented no challenge. The Grey Knights could hold the bridge indefinitely. The fact that they might have to do so was a frustration in itself. They could stop the tide’s advance, but they could not stem its arrival. ‘Brother Warheit,’ he voxed the pilot. ‘Status?’
‘The Tyndaris has denied the approach of all boarding parties. And the orks are losing many ships.’
‘Your tone is less optimistic than your words.’
‘Still more are coming. This is a swarm, brother-justicar. The battle will be a long one. They are boarding the Scouring Light faster than they can be culled.’
‘Thank you, brother.’ He suppressed a curse. What were they accomplishing by remaining on station? He tried contacting Furia again, with no success. ‘Gared?’ he asked. ‘Anything?’
‘Inconclusive.’ Gared’s voice was thick with the strain of trying to pierce beyond the psychic interference of the orks’ war mass.
No way to tell if they had already completed their mission or not. The value of the prognostication was as slippery as ever. He was mounting what might be a pointless campaign, one that could easily result in the loss of two vessels.
His doubts crystallised. They formed the image of an avoidable defeat, a tragedy of errors leading to an ignominious loss at the hands of an unworthy enemy.
Styer said nothing. His brothers could very well be picturing the same nightmare. But this one he kept to himself. He would not spread the spectre of shame.
‘Conserve ammunition,’ he ordered. ‘We may be at this some time. All forward.’ As one, the Grey Knights ceased fire. Nemesis weapons at the fore, they advanced into the ork wave. They shattered the enemy. But as he brought the daemon hammer down, obliterating a greenskin’s head and torso, he noticed that the mob had thinned.
He looked ahead. A few orks were at the head of the staircase, shooting. They were not advancing.
A few more blows and the Grey Knights stood in a tableau of death. They ignored the orks at the end of the hall. Their fire was without effect. They weren’t worth expending ammunition to kill.
‘Where are they all?’ Gared asked.
The answer was a volcanic eruption. The orks had mined the entire deck from below. The explosions took out the floor. Styer was lifted off his feet. He rose in a chaos of flames and marble, iron and torn bodies. Then he fell, tumbling with an avalanche. Rubble rained down on him. He shrugged free of the wreckage, climbing out onto a ragged slope. The rest of the squad was emerging too. He wondered if the orks had really expected that tactic would harm them.
He had barely formed the thought when the heavy slugs slammed into him. The demolition had been a first move. The orks now struck with more and heavier weapons. Above, the more nimble foot soldiers were climbing along the ragged edges of the hole towards the bridge.
Gared said, ‘I need to get back up.’ There was urgency in his voice. And pain.
‘What…’ Styer began, but then he felt it too.
Beyond the background psychic pressure of the orks. Blasting through it. Suddenly here. A great flood.
A terrible presence.
Andoval stared at the disc. He shouldn’t continue without Orbiana present. The wards on this laboratorium were very basic. Their protection would be inadequate for the path he would follow. Orbiana’s abilities and her strength would be his security. He would wait for her return.
He would just look at the disc.
He was no closer to being able to read the runes. He felt as though he should be. Orbiana had said they were so close. Her conviction was a fire so fierce, it re-ignited his own. They were out of time. She had taken him into this secondary laboratorium, one that even he had not known about. Hidden here, the great work had a stay of execution. It would be brief. Inquisitor Furia and those dogmatic giants would look for him, and they would find him.
You stand on the threshold, Orbiana had said.
Was that true? Did he? He hadn’t known this to be the truth until she had spoken, but she was so certain, she had to be right. Her truth was his. So it had always been, in all the years of his service.
His data-slates sat on a lectern. On the work surfaces of the laboratorium were the instruments of his art. Stasis tubes of the samples of ork flesh they had been able to preserve. A coffin-sized isolation chamber containing far more dangerous samples. Rows of vials that were the means by which he was to perform a grand alchemical feat for the glory of the God-Emperor.
Orbiana was taking a long time, time they did not have. Perhaps she was fighting even now for a few more moments, and he was wasting them.
He mustn’t. The work was too important.
And now his body was moving back and forth between the lectern and the equipment. His soul was consumed by the disc.
He held it in his right hand. His eyes traced the concentric arms of the runes, spiralling out and spiralling in. They shouted something just beyond the horizon of meaning. His mind raced for that horizon. Desperation drew it closer. He would cross it. Orbiana knew that he would. Duty to the Imperium demanded that he would.
And so he would.
He felt the blossoming of inspiration.
The thread of possibility had already appeared to him while Orbiana was on Squire’s Rest. He hadn’t recognised it for what it was, then. It had been an idle thought, a suggestion of fancy, almost a dream. He hadn’t taken it seriously, yet he had also followed it, and he was surprised to find now just how far he had done so.
Spiralling in. Spiralling out.
The motionless disc spinning in two directions at once.
His ideas caught by the double whirl. Bending, curling, twisting into new shapes, spreading into new vistas of possibility.
The runes were as obscure as before, but that didn’t matter. They were not an answer. They were a suggestion, an invitation. He was answering a call. The source of the inspiration was on the other side of the horizon line, and it was up to him to construct the means of crossing the line.
And so he did. Revelation was upon him. Perhaps it was the eye of the God-Emperor. How else were his thoughts guided so surely? This was his epiphany: he had been wrong to focus on the ork physiology as the starting p
oint for the creation of his plague. He must begin with the plague. He must craft the great disease, and when his work was perfect, then it could be modified, then it could be turned into a shaped charge that would detonate in a single race.
He moved to the isolation chamber and reached for the control box with his left hand. His right still held the disc. One-handed, he operated the box as never before. Inside, at his command, mechanical arms extended to seize the canisters of poison. Needles of monomolecular width extruded. The building blocks were collected.
Spiralling in. Spiralling out.
Right hand vision, left hand creation. He felt the perfection of what was coming into being. It was a sublimity of disease. It braided contagion and virulence and pain and corruption and despair. A great spiral of elements. It had a name.
Could he suddenly read the runes? No. But he did know the name of the plague. It was bonewrack, and he knew precisely the horror of its symptoms. The greenskins would die in agony.
He moved faster. He was no longer teasing out an idea but working in the rush of fever. There had been barriers to the idea, but they had been weak, and there was a great pressure, created by millions of rampaging beings, and the wave was toppling the barrier, battering it to nothing, opening the way for the inspiration, for the sublime.
He ushered forth a great coming into being.
Its perfection was noticed. Its perfection was a call.
A summoning.
At the last, Andoval realised what had been done to him, and what he had done. He had very little time to repent, because the thing that answered this invitation took his body as raw material. The thing used his own flesh as the medium for its own coming into being. It zeroed in on the artistry of his plague. It used that focus to climb out of the empyrean into which it had been cast. It remade the body of the mind it had manipulated.
With a cry of exultant vengeance, it was born into the real.
At once, the real began to die.
CHAPTER NINE
THE VOICE OF THE PLAGUE
The door blew off its hinges. It sent Furia tumbling the short length of the passage. She banged off the walls and landed hard. Pain jabbed her back to full consciousness. Something monstrous was bellowing. Its voice was loud enough to shake the walls and deck. It was also liquid, seeming to come from deep under water, as if a polluted sea had found its tongue and was shouting curses. Syllables of anti-language bubbled and roiled. Meaning festered in a cauldron of rot.
Furia wanted to block her ears. The roar would soon be comprehensible. She had no desire to hear what would be said, especially when she could not fight the speaker. And now a ripple passed outward from the chamber. It raced over and past her, expanding to consume the entire ship. In its wake came decay. The air became slick. The cladding and the flagstones of the deck and walls turned cold and porous. They sweated a thick slime. They softened. It seemed to Furia that she was lying on sponge.
The being of filth spoke. Its words assembled themselves into Gothic. ‘Kin of Thawn, I have answered your call.’
The walls shook again. The words sank into Furia’s head. They were poison. They were dangerous because she sensed their corruption enveloped an even worse core of truth. Her body was broken, but her mind and her will were not. Her life had been shaped entirely to combat the daemonic. She blocked out the words, refusing to let them contaminate her thoughts. She quarantined the truth. She would examine it in a context that was not created by the daemon.
And now she had to move. She had to fight, and she could not do so lying here, waiting for the eye of the enemy to fall on her. She commanded her body to act.
So much of her was broken and missing. Most of that was flesh. If she hadn’t suffered her wounds on Angriff Primus, if she hadn’t been reconstructed, she would already be dead. But her bionic half had kept her alive. She still had one arm. She made it reach ahead of her. Her fingers sank into the dreadful softness of the deck. She gripped and pulled herself forward. It felt as if she were breaking her ribs again. Splintered knives stabbed at her guts. She denied herself the luxury of crying out. She reached again, and pulled again.
Metre by agonised metre, she dragged herself back into the web of corridors. To move away from the triumphant daemon was little enough as a struggle, but it was something.
And so she was not in a direct line of fire when the second, far worse ripple came. The one that destroyed that which had already rotted. The one that opened the way wide for the plague march.
The first ripple extended over the ship in seconds. Even the orks paused. The texture of the vessel changed. In the lower levels, Klas Brauner stumbled in the gloom. His feet left depressions in stone. He fell against a wall, and recoiled from its glistening touch.
In the Harrower, Warheit saw the ripple even as he continued to blast at the ork fighters and boarding torpedoes. The Scouring Light shivered. The movement was quick, organic, something impossible for a ship a thousand metres long. The appearance of the sloop altered. The change was a subtle one. The structure was unchanged. But the silhouette looked softer, as if it had started to melt, or the edges were eaten by insects. Its lights dimmed. Over the vox, he heard the shouts of his brothers, and he knew the worst had happened.
A few moments later, he saw that he was wrong. The worst came then, when the Scouring Light moved again.
And in the trench the orks had created outside the bridge, Gared sensed the great exultation even before the words found them. The thing that he had sensed probing the weak spots of the materium in Orbiana’s laboratorium, the consciousness that he had detected through the ork-created interference, had arrived. The rubble beneath his feet crumbled as the disease took it.
And then the voice: ‘Kin of Thawn, I have answered your call!’
‘Lies,’ Vohnum snarled.
No, Gared realised. He had been wrong to think he had managed to pierce the ork psychic storm and detect that thread of daemonic sentience. It had reached out to him. It had wanted to be seen.
‘We are known,’ Styer said. ‘How?’
Then the second attack came, and there was no time for answers or thought. The Scouring Light shook hard. There was a deep, reverberating series of booms. Metal tore and stone shattered. An invisible battering ram, big as a Land Raider, punched the length of the ship’s hull, through walls and bulkheads. Decks heaved like waves in a storm. They tore and collapsed. A massive tunnel formed from bow to bridge. When the blast hit the superstructure, it knocked Grey Knights and orks off their feet. The greenskins who had been climbing their way to the bridge fell like rotted fruit.
As Gared stood once more, he could see down the tunnel half the length of the ship before it fell into gloom. The explosion was followed by a miasma. The air turned a dirty brown streaked with coils of grey. The coils had coherence. They writhed and multiplied like bacilli. It was as if the new tunnel was really a throat, exhaling foul vapours.
Then, as he now knew it would, the army came. The hosts of disease boiled up from the lower reaches of the ship. They piled over each other in their eagerness to spread their gospel. They were beings whose flesh was mottled grey and green, oozing pus and slipping off their bones. Things that had a vague resemblance to humans clutched rusted, pitted blades. One-eyed, their heads weighed down by curving horns larger than their skulls, they shambled forward, chanting. Their song was monotonous, a single sound repeated endlessly. It sounded to Gared like a count that could not get past one.
Leaping over the lurching daemons were beasts with clawed forepaws and the bodies of massive slugs. They gambolled like canines, shattering wreckage with their weight. Their tongues lolled from gaping, fanged mouths, drooling viscous toxins.
And between the feet and paws of the larger daemons, climbing on their shoulders, swarming up the walls of the tunnel in their uncountable numbers were small creatures. They were tiny abominations that walked and crawled and
squirmed, plump boils given legs and arms, fat lesions that had learned how to laugh. Their gurgling coiled around the chants and the growls, and the sound itself was enough to make a mortal sicken and die.
For Gared, there was no mystery in the monsters surging forward. He knew the taxonomy of daemons. Plaguebearers. Beasts of Nurgle. Nurglings. There was strength in naming the enemy. It forced language and meaning onto beings that sought to destroy both. It was a means of combat before the first blow had been struck. And it was a shield against the cancerous irrationality of the Ruinous Powers.
But sometimes logic had a cancer of its own. Gared sensed that a virulent form lurked behind the words they had heard, the shout of the daemon, still unseen, who commanded the horde. It knew who the Grey Knights were. The worst damage its words could do would be if they were true.
If they had summoned it.
He had to reach the bridge.
As the daemons came into sight, they collided with the rear ranks of the orks. The two forces fell on each other. The battle was brutal, but its violence was mundane. The beasts leaped on the orks, coating them with slime, but the greenskins did not collapse with a sudden onset of plague. The daemons had to tear them apart with their claws. The orks fought back hard. The trench exploded with the violence of brute and obscenity. The conflict moved upwards under the pressure of the endless advance of the daemons.
At the front, the orks sought to capitalise on the effect of the collapse they had engineered. They had disrupted the Grey Knights’ squad formation. They attacked in a swarm, isolating the battle-brothers from each other, striking with chainblades and guns, killing many of their own, but landing many blows. They were striving to overcome the unbreachable wall of Terminator armour through the accumulation of the numbers and attacks.
It was a crude strategy. It might also, Gared thought, be effective.
Ten metres down the trench, moving to join the fight, barking orders and striking down any soldier slow to respond, was a giant ork in tank-like armour. The chieftain’s eyes burned with malevolent cunning. Gared had no doubt that this was the ork who had ordered the mining of the deck. He ignored the blows raining on him and stretched out his hand, striking at the monster with a blast of warp lightning. One bolt hit the ork’s armour, lighting it up with a crackling web. The warlord roared, withstanding the energies and exulting in the challenge. The rest of Gared’s attack went awry. To the left of the warlord was a trio of ork witches. They wore necklaces of skulls, and they brandished long iron staffs that were linked together by barbed chains. They reacted as one, taking Gared’s lightning as their own. They were energised by the collective war rage. With bellows that were the savage release beyond laughter, they hurled the power back at him.
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