by William King
Drake nodded. His security people had already scanned them to make sure they had no sub-dermal explosives and were not assassins. Looking at them I would have said they were typical hive workers or what passed for such on this world. They were about medium-sized for humans, pale-skinned, blond, with pinkish-tinted eyes and a look that reminded me of albino rats.
‘Very good,’ said Drake. ‘Let us find out what they know.’
He strode up to the nearest, making no attempt to reassure them. A nimbus of light played around his head. When he reached out, a second halo of light jumped around the local’s head. The man’s face contorted, the tendons on his neck stood out, sweat appeared on his brow. He looked like a man losing a deadly struggle, which he probably was.
Drake’s breathing became shallow. When he spoke his voice held the tension of a man who was trying to concentrate on performing two difficult tasks at once. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘There was a plague. It struck down the local population after the moon-strike. This one thinks the world has come to an end. That these are the end-times.’
‘As far as these people are concerned he could be right,’ said Grimnar.
‘He thinks we are daemons,’ Drake said. ‘More specifically he thinks you are.’
It was easy to see how a heretic could have got that impression of the Space Wolves.
‘Was the plague released deliberately?’ Macharius asked.
Drake’s expression went blank for a moment. The local ground his teeth. ‘He does not know. It’s possible. The plague could be a weapon.’
‘Even if it is,’ Grimnar said, ‘it might not have been released deliberately. The hive took terrible damage when the moon-strike hit. If the plague was being stored in an incubator it might have got loose by accident.’
‘How did this one survive when so many died?’ Macharius asked.
‘There are always those who are immune to diseases,’ Drake said. ‘They have resistance. Even to the most virulent of plagues. This one may have it and there will be others. It should be possible to create a serum against the disease from his blood.’
Macharius spoke into the comm-net, ordering all precautions against contamination to be redoubled. We had all been exposed to the plague now.
‘How long did it take to strike people down?’ Macharius asked.
‘It all happened within hours of the impact.’
‘Right through the hive?’ Macharius said. ‘That does not sound like an accident.’
‘You’re right. I also suspect that the whole population might have been particularly susceptible to this plague.’
‘You mean it was intended to harm them.’
‘Yes. Tailored to their genetic runes, so it spread swiftly and fatally.’
There was silence. There was no need to ask why. It was a recruiting drive on Richter’s part, to bring about an army of the dead. I had no doubt that it would only be a matter of time before we met them. I thought of all the corpses on the fields outside. They had been activated by the gas shells fired upon us.
‘Gas,’ I said. ‘They will introduce it into the life support systems once the disease has had time to do its work.’
‘They’ve probably started already,’ Drake said. ‘That’s what that greenish stuff is.’
‘We need to find Richter and quickly,’ Macharius said, ‘otherwise we will be cutting our way through a whole city of the walking dead.’
Drake smiled. ‘I know where to find Richter.’
Macharius looked at him. ‘How?’
‘His palace is below us. Everyone in the city knows where the Chosen One lives. Even these maggots.’
‘The Chosen One?’ Macharius asked.
‘The warlord from the sky. He bears the Sacred Amulet of the Lord of Mortality,’ Drake said. His eyes were closed once more and he seemed to be plucking the words directly from the hiver’s mind. ‘He was the first living man in ten thousand years to enter the Vault of the Great One and live. He came out bearing the symbol of their daemon god’s power. That is why they follow him without question. That is why the plague priests believe he will lead them forth from this place to conquer the galaxy.’
Grimnar laughed. ‘I have heard such stories before on a hundred worlds. They have all ended the same way.’
The hiver must have understood the Space Wolf’s tone. His religious sensibility was outraged. He did something braver than I could. He spat on the ground at the Space Wolf’s feet and gabbled something angrily in his local tongue.
‘He says the Chosen One will kill you. He is invincible. He cannot be slain.’
Grimnar took no offence. ‘I have heard that one before too. I will tear his heart out and make him eat it.’
‘We move,’ Macharius said. ‘Now.’
Not even the Space Wolf disagreed with him.
Richter’s palace was located exactly at the centre of the hive, spread over multiple levels, with an enormous dome above it. The area around it looked as if it had once been a park or a garden of a very strange sort. There were fungal trees which looked as if they had once been landscaped. Clouds of spores swarmed the air and webs of slime clung to the great mushroom-like structures. Everything looked diseased and strange. There were bodies strewn everywhere, blotched with black mould. Some of the corpses hung on what looked like ropes of snot. Others had become so overgrown with fungus that they were being held upright by it. The mould appeared to have emerged from within their bodies and turned them into strange pillars. In some places a dozen or so of the overgrown corpses had been piled together and looked like a disturbing many-headed, many-limbed statue.
Here, as in so many other places around the hive, the moon-strike had done its work. The area around the palace was filled with rubble and the central structure had suffered as well. There had been emplacements and turrets in its sides. There still were but most of them were broken, their weapons twisted piles of scrap, the fortifications cracked and splintered. That did not mean they were useless. Right now I could see figures moving up there, for the first time since we had reached the city. It looked like there were living inhabitants.
I considered that for a moment. They were moving, but that did not mean they had to be alive. I turned the periscope of the Leman Russ to bear on them and saw that cowled and cloaked figures garbed in green and brown, their garments stitched with unholy runes, appeared to be performing rituals amid diseased-looking cultists in the garb of soldiers. Glowing nimbuses of light surrounded the priestly figures. The soldiers seemed involved in more mundane tasks, bringing weapons to bear on us.
Even before Macharius spoke orders into the comm-net, our tanks opened fire. Shots flashed between the palace and our army. And already the Space Wolves were in motion, racing through the fungal gardens, heading towards the building in which Richter and his allies lurked.
‘A ritual is being performed here,’ said Drake. ‘This is the centre of all the evil in this world.’
‘Then it must be cleansed,’ said Macharius. The first wave of tanks raced forward, moving towards the obscene forest. As they did so, spores erupted from the trees and began to clog their treads. As they ploughed into the trees, tendrils of mucus erupted and sprayed over them, coating hatches and exhaust pipes, to no visible or immediate effect.
The tanks pushed forward, slower than before. The guns in the side of the palace opened fire, concentrating on the lead vehicles and turning them into smoking wreckage. A leading Leman Russ exploded and the flames transformed its surroundings into blackened muck, which formed a swift-hardening tar, sucking at the tracks of the vehicles that followed.
It became clear that the plants were not there simply for decoration but formed as much of a defensive barrier as a minefield. A crewman bailed out of a brewed-up Leman Russ and dived for cover. One of the fungus-covered corpses came to life and grabbed him, hugging him close. Even as I watched, the mass of spores covering the animated corpse shifted to the Imperial Guardsman, flowing over his body, covering his eyes, entering his
mouth and his lungs, choking him. The luckless man collapsed onto the ground and sprawled there.
Macharius considered this for a moment and then gave orders. A wave of incendiaries descended on the fungal forest, setting it alight. More of the black sludge appeared where the mushroom trees went up. They caught fire, exploding and popping in the extreme heat.
While this was happening the heretics kept a stream of fire pouring down on us, and I noticed now that more and more bodies were starting to appear around us, shambling into place, moving to attack us. The walking dead had risen to do battle once more.
Reports came in from the back of our column. The soldiers there were under attack from an army of the walking dead. At the moment they did not seem to be any great threat to the tanks, but they were costing ammunition and distracting our forces.
A heartbeat later I heard the faint sound of distant explosions and screams and static buzz on the comm-net. It seemed like something had, after all, managed to destroy at least one of our tanks. A shiver passed through me. How could walking dead men manage to destroy an armoured vehicle? They were strong and their mindlessness made them fearless, but that was just not physically possible.
Macharius asked for reports from the vehicles nearby. His head tilted to one side. Clearly someone had seen something. He ordered the tanks of the rear-guard to keep firing, gave clear, clipped, concise instructions and then fell silent.
‘What is it?’ Drake asked.
Macharius looked at him. ‘Some of the corpses had bombs attached to them. And there were heretics concealed in the masses of walking dead, using them as cover to get close enough to use grenades and anti-tank weapons.’
As I listened a vision of what had happened became clear. Our boys had been overconfident, simply running the undead over, splattering them under the tracks of their vehicles. The enemy had used that to their advantage and closed. Now our troops were being forced to expend ammunition on them. Macharius did not need to explain the implications of that to anyone. We did not have unlimited ammo. The enemy had an almost unlimited supply of walking corpses.
I imagined what I would do if I were them. Now we were firing at the oncoming horde, the heretics could pull back and let our troops exhaust their ammunition on the fearless walking dead. If our soldiers looked like slacking, they could renew their attacks with anti-tank weapons and grenades until they forced us to start shooting again.
It was a tactic that favoured them. Sooner or later our troops would tire or run out of ammunition. The heretics had a whole hive city of walking dead to draw on. We would run out of bullets and shells before they ran out of bodies to throw at us.
Macharius swiftly gave orders dividing our force into six columns and sent a column to cover each entrance into the plaza. The powerful Leman Russ war machines formed a barricade across the main entrances that would be all but impossible for the walking dead to pass through while the tanks had ammunition. A dozen tanks could block the widest of the entrances and the remainder formed a ring around them, turrets facing outwards, to cover any lesser approaches and to keep firing at the palace.
It was not a perfect plan but it would keep us safe for as long as we could keep shooting. It left two columns to work with. One was to form a flying reserve to interdict any enemy force that broke through or appeared unexpectedly. The last column, led by Macharius himself, was to take the palace.
Watching the Lord High Commander at work I was reassured. He had risen to the challenge swiftly and well. We might not make it out of the citadel alive but it would not be for want of trying.
More reports came in over the comm-net, this time from the Space Wolves. They had blazed a path through the fungal forest, had secured one entrance and were spreading out through the palace, killing any enemy they encountered.
Drake was listening in and said, ‘They are hideously outnumbered in there. Even if one Space Wolf is worth a hundred heretics.’
‘In those circumstances more like a thousand, but you are correct,’ Macharius said. ‘They will need our aid, although they would not thank me for saying so.’
I had seen Grimnar in action before and it was easy to imagine him stalking silently through the palace ahead, picking off enemies and retreating into the shadows to strike again. Even so, given the number of enemies in there, all they could really do in the long run was buy us time by distracting them.
Also, it has to be said that Macharius was not a man to let anyone else, even the mighty Adeptus Astartes, do his fighting for him. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and saw there was something feverish about him. Here was a man who might be entering the last great battle of his life, facing his last test, seeing his last chance to grasp at glory. He had won every major battle except his last one here on Loki. He did not want to leave this life with an account unsettled. He did not want his last campaign to leave a mark on his unbroken string of victories. He had one last enemy to take down, Richter, and he wanted to be there at the kill. He knew he was dying and he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. That was what I thought, at least.
He gave the order for the final column to advance towards the palace. At his command we laid down a curtain of fire, not at the palace, not at its defenders, but at the obstacles in our way. The hail of fire smashed through the blazing fungus. The sticky tar beneath the treads slowed the tanks but did not stop them.
Then the enemy opened fire with incendiaries and I saw the purpose of that dark residue. It caught fire, blazing up with incredible heat. It was something that would have fried an infantryman on the spot, but a tank is massive and it takes some time to heat.
‘Push on!’ Macharius ordered. We drove forward into a curtain of flame.
I held my breath. I could see nothing except flames and oily smoke ahead of me. I was simply driving forward in the direction of the palace entrance as I remembered it and praying to the Emperor that we did not deviate too far from the line.
There was nothing out there that I could think of that would deflect us by sheer mass, but even a slight inclination caused by an obstruction could shift us a fraction of a degree out of line and the cumulative effect of those might cause a lot of drift. I was tempted to make adjustments to the controls, but that way, too, might lead to disaster. My own imagination could take us out of the correct line.
Something smashed down into the Russ from above. The guns on the palace walls were still firing at us. The Leman Russ shook under the impact but its armour held.
‘Keep moving, Lemuel,’ Macharius said. His voice was calm and confident. ‘We will soon be under the angle the guns can fire at.’
In his head, he was keeping the speed and range of our tank to the palace as well as all the other factors in the battle. He started giving out orders in response to reports coming in from the gates behind us. It sounded like the walking dead were attacking in force.
Ahead a burning man emerged from the flames. His flesh had been seared black but still he struggled to move. The dead were rising even in the former fungal forest but the flames incinerated them as that happened. It was a small mercy but I was grateful for it.
Suddenly we were clear of the fire. Ahead of us I could see a massive ornate staircase, flanked by two huge statues of diseased angels. Both were cowled. Both had great bat-wings rising from their backs. One of them had a skeletal face, the lower half of which was covered in a rebreather mask. The other apparently depicted a man in the throes of a plague. He was smiling malevolently, his mouth a death’s head rictus, his eyes narrowed in glee. The statues were so realistic they appeared to be alive.
I aimed the Leman Russ at the stairwell and drove up it, splintering the marble beneath the treads of the tank. The vehicle roared up and I glanced out ahead of us. Space Wolves held the hallway beyond us, crouched in cover behind pillars and obscene statuary. A hail of incoming fire splashed over us, until our own guns spoke in response.
A grinding sound behind us told me that other vehicles had arrived. I nudged the Leman R
uss forward as gently as I could into the hallway, and pulled up, hull down alongside a stagnant ornamental pool. We could take the tank no further.
The guns kept firing. Macharius reached up and flipped the seal above him, opening the hatchway and pulled himself out. I followed swiftly, determined to guard him with my life.
Twenty-Nine
I went up through the hatch, unslinging my shotgun, feeling the warmed metal of the hull vibrate beneath my feet. I risked a glance around and saw more and more Leman Russ emerge at the top of the stairs. There were so many of them now that the entranceway was all but blocked. Behind the tanks, towers of flame leapt and danced, and clouds of oily smoke spiralled upwards towards the roof of the hive.
I looked around and saw that the ornamental pool held scummy, stagnant, diseased-looking water. It was greenish and clogged with algae. Obscenely fat, whitish, slug-like bodies floated in it. Most of them bore the exploded-from-the-inside look that I associated with bolter shells.
There were corpses everywhere. Every single one of them either had its head torn off or its skull destroyed by bolter fire. The Space Wolves were taking no chances of having their foes return from death to trouble them again. I suspected it was less because the thought bothered them than because they did not want to waste the time.
The palace might have been beautiful once. There was a lot of marble and a lot of statuary but the place was contaminated. That was the only word I could think of to describe it. Things were blotched by mould and covered in curtains of mucus. A statue raised both hands to the sky, a bolter held between them. Yellowish slime dripped from under its arms. Paintings on the walls were covered in a fur of whitish mould. Small things scuttled everywhere. They might have been rats, they might have been beetles or they might have been some unholy hybrid of both.
Who could dwell amid all of this, I wondered? No one sane.
Macharius jumped from the side of the tank and landed on the edge of the pool. He kept his balance like a great cat. I dropped after him, and my boots slipped on the slimy lip at the water’s edge and I almost tumbled in. I flailed my arms to keep my balance, somehow pulled myself upright and let myself drop to the ground. The thought of touching the polluted liquid made me shudder. Ivan dropped down from the side of the tank directly to the ground, which struck me as entirely more sensible.
