Greater Good

by Sandy Mitchell

  ‘How soon can we get there?’ I asked, practically salivating at the prospect of the hot meal and mug of recaff waiting for me at our destination. Even soylens viridiens seemed palatable right about now.

  Tyrie shrugged, and reached up to pat the neck of a horse, which was gazing into the middle distance with an air of patient boredom, which at least reassured me there weren’t any more ’nids in the immediate vicinity. ‘That depends,’ he said, glancing at me sideways through the lenses of his breather. ‘How fast can you ride?’

  By and large, my attitude to riding animals can best be described as distantly cordial. I’ve never had an active antipathy to the brutes, but I’ve always inclined to the view that if the Emperor intended us to get around in such a manner He’d never have given us the AFV[135]. The number of occasions on which I’ve been forced to rely on so archaic a form of transport have been few and far between, and it took me some time to get used to the curious rocking sensation of the horse beneath me, uncannily reminiscent of a small boat in a gentle swell. After the first hour or so I was beginning to feel some considerable discomfort in the posterior, but I was damned if I was going to admit the fact. I had no doubt my tight grip on the reins, and continual swaying as I tried to retain my balance, was affording the experienced horsemen around me enough amusement as it was. Fortunately the full-face masks they wore were enough to conceal their expressions, so we could all pretend to be dignified, but the contrast with their own relaxed postures was telling.

  To add to my discomfiture, Jurgen seemed hardly less at ease in the saddle than they were, guiding his own mount with faint nudges of the knees as easily as if he rode a horse every day. He moved up to flank me, taking me by surprise, since the breathers we were wearing not only restricted my field of vision, but robbed me of my usual olfactory warning of his approach. ‘Making good time,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ I responded. The truth was, the monotonous landscape was so dulling my senses that I had no idea how far we’d come, or how far we had still to go. We’d left the crash site shortly after sun-up, following a set of coordinates in Tyrie’s map slate which I hoped would soon bring the blocky mass of Regio Quinquaginta Unus into sight, but so far all I’d seen was the endless undulating sand, and the looming rockcrete ramparts of the distant hive. The pall of dust above the impact site where the bioship had met its end had dissipated overnight in the endless desert wind, but I could see nothing of its fate from this distance, and wasn’t about to suggest diverting to take a closer look; Throne alone knew what horrors awaited us there. Besides, the sooner we got to the Mechanicus shrine, the sooner I’d be able to find out what was going on. I’d already been out of contact for nearly twenty-four hours[136], and a day’s a long time in a war zone. Practically anything could have happened, none of it good, and I tried not to dwell on the worst-case scenarios.

  ‘These are a lot easier to ride than those sloth things,’ Jurgen remarked, and I nodded; hanging on to the saddles strapped to their stomachs for dear life while our panicked mounts clambered, dangling, from the boughs of one kilometre-high tree to another, was not one of my happier memories[137].

  ‘Definitely,’ I agreed, not really in the mood for conversation, but happy to seize on any distraction from the physical discomfort of my throbbing fundament. Before we could lose ourselves in happy reminiscences of bowel-clenching terror long past, however, Tyrie held up his pennant-tipped lance to halt the column.

  ‘Something’s out there,’ he said, raising a hand to shade his eyes; a possibly futile gesture, as the lenses of his breather had polarised, like mine and everyone else’s, converting them into small, round mirrors, in which I could see myself and the rest of our column reflected.

  ‘Amplivisor, sir?’ Jurgen offered, leaning at what seemed to me a reckless angle to proffer them. Trying not to look like a complete bluefoot[138], and praying to the Throne that I didn’t topple off the nag’s back in the process, I took them, a little unsteadily, and raised them to my eyes, only to find that the breather’s lenses kept them too distant to focus.

  Tyrie glanced back at me, in manifest disbelief, probably grateful that I couldn’t see his expression. ‘Magnification’s built in,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ I said, stuffing the amplivisor in a convenient pocket. After a few moments fumbling, I worked out how to manipulate the lenses of the breather, and the dune field in the middle distance suddenly expanded to fill my vision.

  ‘Better adjust it back when you’re done,’ Tyrie counselled, ‘or you’ll be falling over your own feet when you dismount.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, trying to make sense of what we were looking at. Something was definitely there, half-buried in the drifting sand, and what I could see of it was ridged and rounded, like plates of tyranid chitin. Not a creature, though, it was too still for that. ‘A dead spore?’

  ‘Looks like,’ Tyrie agreed. ‘It’s close to our route, so we can check it out as we pass.’

  ‘I’m more worried about what it delivered,’ I told him. ‘We’ve already seen a lictor, and ’stealers, as well as the gaunts.’

  ‘Whatever it is, we’ll kill it,’ Tyrie said. ‘Unless we already did.’ He gestured with his lance again. ‘Move out.’

  Tyrie’s confidence notwithstanding, I kept a sharp lookout as our mounts plodded onwards, paying particular attention to the downed mycetic spore in the distance every time we crested another dune and it came back into view. I had no doubt that its baleful cargo would have long since scattered in search of prey, perhaps even becoming part of the swarm which had attacked us the previous night, but that didn’t stop me from dialling the lenses to their greatest magnification and sweeping the area around it in search of movement. Something about that dark and silent bulk struck me as ominous, although I couldn’t have put my finger on what. Perhaps it was simply that the desolate emptiness all around us was making me feel uncomfortably exposed, which concentrated my attention on the only visible evidence of an enemy presence.

  ‘Any sign of movement?’ I asked, and Tyrie glanced at his portable auspex, before shaking his head.

  ‘Not a thing,’ he told me. Which might be good news, or it might not; tyranids weren’t that easy to detect at the best of times, and I doubted that Kildhar’s adjustments would have filtered their way down to individual pieces of field kit. So far as I knew, the handful of tech-priests capable of understanding and duplicating them were still working flat out on the sensoria suites of the warships in orbit[139]. If another lictor was lying in ambush beneath the sand, we’d have no more than a second or two’s warning before it struck.

  ‘Good,’ I said, grateful for the ease with which the breather hid my disquiet. By now we were close enough to make the thing out without the aid of the magnifiers, although that didn’t stop me from taking full advantage of the vision enhancement in any case. The spore was half-buried, inevitably, given the constant drift of the wind-driven sand, but that didn’t make it any the less repugnant. If anything, it simply reinforced the impression of some malignant cancer erupting from the body of the planet.

  ‘It’s definitely split,’ Jurgen said, studying the thing as carefully as I was. ‘But not all the way.’

  ‘Perhaps it was damaged on the way down,’ I said, noting the telltale signs of cauterisation on the fleshier parts, and calcification of its outer armour. For whatever reason it had tumbled on the way down[140], being more or less evenly toasted, instead of bearing the brunt of the atmospheric friction on the ablative sheets of chitin intended to protect its soft tissue and whatever ghastly creatures it contained.

  ‘We’d best check it out,’ Tyrie said, changing direction slightly to take us directly towards it. I could have overruled him, of course, citing the urgency of my errand, but, despite my misgivings, I was reluctant to. I had a reputation to maintain, however little I actually deserved it, and had no doubt that my ineptitude astride the horse had already afforded the death riders a fair amount of amusement at my expense.
It wouldn’t hurt to remind them that I was supposed to be a Hero of the Imperium, despite my subjectively scorching saddle, and any apparent reluctance to put myself in harm’s way would hardly help with that. Besides, the thing was bound to be dead by now.

  ‘Better had,’ I agreed, the ridemaster’s laconic conversational style proving surprisingly contagious[141], surreptitiously taking advantage of my widely-perceived ineptitude in the saddle to fall a little behind the others. Dormant or not, there was no point in being the first to get near the spore when I had a troop of riders to hide behind.

  As we got within a score or so metres of it, I began to appreciate the scale of the thing for the first time, all the previous examples I’d seen having been from a far safer distance. (Which was hardly surprising, as they’d been vomiting out swarms of malevolent creatures hell-bent on killing me, for the most part, and getting this close would have entailed hacking my way through them instead of following my natural inclination to move rapidly in the general direction of away.) Even on horseback, it still towered at least twice my height, an obscene outcrop of necrotising flesh, only the breather protecting me from the charnel stench of its decomposition.

  ‘Looks deserted,’ Jurgen said, unslinging the melta from his back anyway, a precaution I heartily approved of. I found myself straining my ears over the muffled plodding of my mount’s hooves in the sand, alert for any signs of ambush, but the horde of gaunts I expected to erupt from it failed to materialise. Perhaps Tyrie was right, and they were long gone, or they’d failed to survive the fiery descent from the upper atmosphere.

  Spurred by that thought, I adjusted the breather’s inbuilt optics to maximum magnification, and examined as much as I could see of the organism’s interior through the slits in its carapace intended to let the occupants disembark. Fortunately the sun was perfectly angled to allow a shaft of light within, so I was spared the frustration of attempting to come to grips with whatever image enhancers might also have been installed in the mask’s eyepieces. Sure enough, I could make out the slumped forms of several gaunts, the congealed remains of bodily fluids seeping from joints in their carapaces, baked and swollen tongues lolling from their distended jaws.

  ‘There are gaunts inside,’ I called[142], feeling it was time to make a show of actively participating in this fool’s errand. Another few minutes, and we could resume our progress towards a shower and a mug of recaff with a gratifying sense of duty done. ‘Definitely dead.’

  ‘Best sort,’ Jurgen added, sentiments with which I was in complete agreement.

  I began fumbling with the optic control, trying to restore normal vision, but the wretched thing seemed to be stuck, probably due to a few grains of sand embedded in something vital. I banged it with the heel of my hand, in the fashion I’d seen tech-priests use with recalcitrant devices, and muttered a few half-remembered phrases from the Litany of Percussive Maintenance which they generally employed on such occasions. The Omnissiah obviously felt I deserved a few marks for effort, because my vision abruptly snapped back to the way it should be. A moment before it did, though, the shaking, magnified image had swept across the surface of the spore, and I was certain I’d seen a quiver of movement somewhere among the half-melted cluster spines protruding from its back.

  ‘Incoming!’ I shouted, heedless of the possibility of making a fool of myself. If the thing hadn’t quite expired yet, and registered our presence, it would respond instinctively, and even damaged as they were, the spines would be enough to shred us. As I spoke I turned the horse’s head, and kicked it in the ribs, not far from where the thick tubes pumping nutrients and whatever else enabled it to survive out here into its bloodstream entered the skin. It broke into a trot, which nearly unseated me, Jurgen’s mount cantering a few paces to catch up before he slowed it enough to ride abreast.

  With a crackle like a brushfire incinerating a bush, the spines arced through the air, bursting among the riders and fragmenting into a thousand razor-edged fragments which lacerated man and mount alike. A couple of horses fell, shrieking behind their breathing masks, until the chemical regulators shot them full of analgesics, and they stopped caring about the speckling of open wounds through which their lifeblood was leaking out into the thirsty sand. Most of the men were scarcely better off, but, true to the traditions of the Death Korps, paid no attention to their injuries, going to ground instead, their weapons levelled. In any other terrain, and if the spore hadn’t been in such a bad way itself, able to launch no more than a tithe of its bristling armament, they’d probably have been wiped out to a man[143] on the instant. As it was, the drifted sand absorbed the larger part of the chitinous flechettes.

  ‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ Tyrie said, without any noticeable sarcasm that I could detect, his voice carrying easily in the quiet desert air. Belated as my warning had been, it had probably saved a few lives, as the riders had responded instantly to it by beginning to dismount. Had they not done so, they would have been above the majority of the sand ridges, unprotected from the cluster spine barrage. Hanging back had saved Jurgen and I from the worst of it, too, the pair of us, ironically, being the only two still mounted.

  ‘Mind your eyes, sir,’ Jurgen said, turning in the saddle to heave the bulk of his melta around. A second or so later the familiar eye-stabbing flash, muted by the polarised lenses of the breather, sparked, reducing the remaining spines to a charred ruin. My horse flinched, and I braced myself, expecting it to shy or rear in panic, but it calmed itself at once, by virtue of its training and the cocktail of chemicals sluicing through its system. ‘Don’t want it having another go.’

  ‘Indeed we don’t,’ I agreed, turning myself to take a look back at the scene of confusion around the spore. The distinctive sound of las-fire was crackling in the air by now, although for the life of me I couldn’t see what there was left for the Death Korps troopers to shoot at: the gaunts inside were all dead anyway, and lasguns would be completely ineffective against the vast slabs of chitin protecting them.

  Almost at once I had my answer, as the sand beneath my mount’s hooves churned, like wavelets in a choppy sea, making it stumble. This time it did rear, or tried to, throwing me from its back. I landed heavily and rolled clear, fearful of being trampled, but its front feet were being held by something sinuous and sinister, thrashing back and forth as the whinnying horse bucked frantically, trying to pull itself free. Then another tentacle burst from the sand, wrapping almost instantly around the desperate equine, the barbs along its length tearing jagged wounds in the horse’s flanks as it constricted. With a loud crack, the charger’s spine snapped, and its ribcage imploded. Still flailing in its death throes, my mount was dragged beneath the sand.

  ‘It’s trying to feed!’ I shouted, glancing frantically around for any more telltale movement in the grains beneath my feet. Whether it was attempting to garner enough biomass to grow more cluster spines, or simply lashing out with its tentacles because it had detected our presence[144] I had no idea, nor, at that moment, did I care.

  ‘Hang on, sir, I’m coming!’ Jurgen called back, trying to regain control of his understandably skittish mount. My skin crawling, anticipating the strike of another subterranean tentacle at any moment, I drew my chainsword, thumbing the speed control up to maximum. The full-throated roar of a flamer, and the crump of exploding grenades behind me provided a little welcome reassurance that the Death Korps were still in the fight, but given their fondness for glorious last stands I couldn’t count on their aid any time soon. ‘Behind you!’ my aide added, and I whipped round, to find one of the serpentine forms already lashing out at me.

  Cursing the restricted field of vision left by the breather, I brought my blade up to meet it, slicing through the sinuous limb in a single fluid movement. All that seemed to do was confirm the presence of more prey within reach, however, as another three or four metres of it immediately extruded from the sand, spraying ichor from its tip like promethium from a flamer as it came. Foul, sticky fluid slathered my much-abu
sed greatcoat, and caught me full in the face. Blessing the Emperor for the protection of the breather, I wiped the goggles as best I could with the fingers of my empty hand, restoring a measure of blurry vision and imparting an ineradicable stain to my glove just in time to see another couple of tentacles attempting to coil around me from opposite directions while the original struck from above. I lopped through the left-hand one, opening up enough space to evade the other two in a renewed welter of repulsive fluid, and turned to cut them all into a selection of chunks longer than my leg with a flurry of multiple blows.

  ‘Stay back!’ I called to Jurgen, who had his horse back under control now, and seemed on the point of charging down the slope they were perched on in an almost certainly doomed attempt to pluck me to safety. Not that I had any objection to being rescued, you understand, quite the reverse, but the fact that they hadn’t yet suffered the fate of my own mount could only mean they were beyond the reach of the spore’s tentacles. If my aide attempted to move any closer, though, he and the horse would become fuel for its bioweapon, and I’d lose the best chance I had of getting out of this alive. ‘Use the melta on any movement you see!’

  ‘Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen responded, with his usual brisk cheerfulness, and set to with a will, creating patches of steaming glass wherever the melta beam hit. Rather too many of them were close at hand for my liking, but after the first few shots I was pretty confident I could gauge the maximum reach of the ghastly thing, and was heartened to discover I was no more than a short sprint from safety.

  To think was to act, and I ran for the sandbank atop which Jurgen was perched as though Abaddon himself was after me, laying about with the chainsword at every foul appendage which dared to break the surface too close at hand for my aide to risk a shot. Within seconds, although it seemed far longer at the time, I was trying to scramble up the slope without letting go of the weapon, while Jurgen called encouragement from the crest. ‘Keep it up, sir!’ he urged. ‘You’re almost there!’ His words were punctuated by the flash and sizzle of the melta.