Plague Harvest

by Cavan Scott

  ‘I’m taking the Chaos lord,’ Blasius announced matter-of-factly across the vox, rushing towards Naracoth, chainsword held high. ‘For the Emperor!’

  Artorius was forced back around the corner of the barracks, but didn’t need to see the outcome of the attack. Blasius’s war cry immediately degenerated into a cry of pain as the Champion buried his War Scythe into the Doom Eagle’s shoulder. For a second the terrible shriek of metal against ceramite shrieked through Artorius’s helm before the vox-line abruptly cut off.

  The sergeant couldn’t respond to his battle-brother’s death, although he vowed he would personally carve Blasius’s name onto the obsidian Walls of the Fallen, back on Gathis II – if he survived the day himself.

  With teeth gritted, he threw himself around the wall and fired directly into the Plague Marine’s path.

  At the battlements, Jerius couldn’t prepare himself for the attack he knew was coming. All around him, lascannons fired, slaved to his own gun-turret, the air burning with the metallic ozone of every salvo.

  All the time he muttered prayers to the dozens of machine-spirits who were working in unison to protect Kerberos. He was the line that couldn’t be crossed and nothing could distract him from his task.

  With an inhuman bellow, a Rot Fly swooped down towards the Techmarine, spitting blazing skulls from its filthy proboscis. Jerius twisted the turret, a searing barrage of cobalt energy ripping through its putrid guts. The Plaguebearer on its back screamed in fury as steed and mount crashed down into the bulwark and tumbled away to the ground below.

  Something clattered across the floor at his feet. Jerius glanced down, his eyes widening as he realised what he was looking at. A pulsing, mummified head grinned up at him, the mouth and eyes sewn shut, luminescent maggots wriggling free from its shrunken nose and ears.

  ‘Blight grenade,’ the Techmarine cried out, before the concussive blast knocked him from the turret. Jerius smashed against the battlement, choking as noisome fumes overcame his helm’s ventilator, spores from the grenade already eating their way through his power armour.

  Another fireball blossomed at his feet, sending up a bloom of infected shrapnel and toxin-heavy smoke. Jerius reached for his bolter, but his cybernetic legs jolted, pushing him away from his weapon. Pain lanced through his body as his implants began to short out, his systems disrupted by the grenade’s corrosive forces.

  Through the miasma, he could make out a figure. The sorcerer known as Pestilan stood, plague-spear in hand, half a dozen blight grenades spiralling around his skeletal form, held in the air by unaccountable power.

  With a flick of the sorcerer’s hand, two of the death heads shot towards Jerius – but this time the Techmarine was ready. His plasma-cutter swept down, igniting both of the grenades in turn. At the same time, the Techmarine’s grabber arm jerked to the floor, knocking his bolter towards his waiting hand.

  He might not be able to walk, but he could still fight. Ignoring the cramp shooting up his arm, Jerius grabbed his bolt pistol and raised it towards his attacker.

  Six shots thudded into the sorcerer’s shoulder – but Pestilan didn’t fall. Instead he laughed – a noise like a knife on glass – as if the injuries had only tickled.

  ‘My turn,’ the Plague Marine hissed, balefire flaring in his multiple eyes. Dark energies crackled from his crooked fingers, slamming into the Techmarine’s chest.

  Sedeca broke from cover and charged straight at the plasma-gun wielding Plague Marine. As Artorius continued swapping bolts with his own attacker, the Doom Eagle swung his chainsword, its teeth carving into the three skulls emblazoned on the Death Guard’s pauldron.

  The blade stuck fast and deep in the brute’s shoulder, giving the pain-insensitive traitor the opportunity it needed. Even as Sedeca slammed his fist into the Death Guard’s breached helm, struggling to pull his sword free, the Plague Marine brought the barrel of his plasma-gun to the Doom Eagle’s head. The traitor fired, Sedeca’s helm disappearing in the burst of flame. The fire, fuelled by unhallowed magic, melted the Space Marine’s helm clean away, burning through flesh and bone in seconds.

  Sedeca’s body dropped and the Plague Marine turned, bringing his weapon to bear on Artorius, Sedeca’s chainsword still wedged deep in its shoulder. The sergeant twisted in time with the monster, aiming and pulling the trigger in a movement honed by centuries of combat. Across the courtyard, the bolts found their mark, the Plague Marine’s head dissolving into a cloud of bone and decaying brain matter – but still the fiend didn’t stop. It staggered forward three, maybe four steps before it finally realised it was dead and tumbled forward, landing in a loathsome heap beside Sedeca’s corpse.

  The sergeant switched targets again, focusing on the ponderous Plague Marine that was traipsing ever nearer to his own position. The bolts punched deep, shattering the already chipped power armour and detaching the arm, bolter and all, just below the elbow. The traitor didn’t even flinch, continuing to fire from its remaining gun.

  Artorius retreated around the corner, ready for another chance to attack, and came face-to-face with a hefty figure charging towards him.

  Naracoth’s War Scythe sliced through the air, but Artorius reacted as if he’d been prepared for the attack all along. He feinted back against the wall, firing into the Plague Champion’s chest at point-blank range even as the crackling blade smashed harmlessly into the floor in front of him. Ichor sprayed from the wound, splashing over Artorius, burning through his armour.

  Naracoth didn’t hesitate. Swinging up the Scythe, he smashed the foot of the staff into Artorius’s helm. The faceplate flattened the sergeant’s nose, blood bursting across his face like juice from squashed fruit.

  A second blow, to his stomach, sent him pitching forwards, the dark energies that flowed through the staff shooting directly into his guts. His bolter skittering across the floor, Artorius crashed to his knees, expecting his head to be cleaved from his shoulders at any moment.

  FOURTEEN

  Jerius could no longer make out detail, only shapes, like shadows in the mist – but the pathogens from the blight grenade hadn’t affected his hearing.

  He heard Pestilan’s cry of triumph, imagined the sorcerer charging forward, spear low like a lance. He had even calculated the exact moment the spearhead would pierce his chest.

  While he couldn’t match the Plague Marine’s depraved tolerance, Jerius had lived with pain every second of every day since the Thunderhawk crash. He had used his own chainsword to remove his trapped legs, cauterised the stumps with his plasma-cutter. The bionic limbs, which he had fitted himself, burned with every step. What was Pestilan’s attack but one more torment to add to the collection?

  As the spear burst from his back, the Techmarine brought down his servo-arm as he’d planned, the pincers closing tight. His implants immediately registered resistance and Jerius knew he had Pestilan’s neck in his grip.

  The sorcerer responded by twisting the spear, but the pain barely registered anymore. Jerius knew he was going into shock, his system shutting down, but even now the Techmarine didn’t despair. This was more than a Doom Eagle’s acceptance of the inevitable. Jerius wasn’t just a Space Marine, he was a disciple of the Machine-God. The flesh was weak, but the machine was strong. His cold metal pincers turned, forcing Pestilan’s head over. There was a satisfying crack as the sorcerer’s vertebrae finally shattered, and the pressure on the spear lessened as Pestilan fell away.

  Releasing the sorcerer’s body, the servo-arm found the spear and, closing around the shaft, ripped it free. This time Jerius did scream, the weapon inflicting more damage on the way out than it had caused going in. He sank back, exhausted, but he could still make out the sounds of the unclean hordes. They had started to scale the walls, avoiding the lascannons. Barely even able to draw breath, the Techmarine turned his plasma-cutter on the first Plague Zombie to scramble over the top of the battlements.

&n
bsp; His sergeant’s order played through his clouding mind.

  Do your duty. For Gathis II.

  The stink of burning flesh filled the already pungent air.

  For the Imperium.

  ‘Where is your relic of a god now?’ Naracoth jeered as he raised his scythe high for the killing blow.

  ‘Nearer than yours,’ Artorius screamed, twisting up and slamming his hand against the Plague Champion’s belt. The Chaos lord looked down, the skin around his empty sockets widening as he spied the krak grenade Artorius had magnalocked into place.

  The sergeant was already rolling out of the way when the charge went off, throwing Naracoth back into the barracks wall.

  Artorius didn’t wait to see if he had killed his foe. Retrieving his bolter, he sprung to his feet, straight into the path of the oncoming Plague Marine. Infected bolter-fire strafed his back as he barged headfirst into the traitor, his shoulders sinking into its entropic guts.

  ‘You may not feel pain,’ Artorius roared, the force of the impact causing the Chaos Marine to tumble back, ‘but you can still fall.’

  The brute crashed to the ground, firing bolts wildly in an arc. Thudding a knee into its chest, Artorius punched down into the Marine’s face, the chainfist’s blades cutting deep into cancerous flesh. With supreme effort, the Doom Eagle dragged the whirring teeth down, through the Plague Marine’s neck, slicing its chest cavity open.

  ‘Get up from this, turncoat,’ Artorius snarled as bloated flies burst from the wound. They whined around the sergeant’s face but he didn’t swat them away. Instead he dragged the chainfist free and took the Plague Marine’s head off with a final flourish.

  The corrupted warrior bucked beneath Artorius’s weight before finally falling silent, diseased blood oozing across the flagstones.

  Jerius thanked the Emperor for sparing him the sight of the aberrations that were pouring into the fort. The noise and the smell was bad enough – perhaps his blindness was a blessing after all.

  The Techmarine had managed to haul himself up, hanging desperately onto the turret. His bolter was back in his hand and he was spraying the side of the bulwark with indiscriminate gunfire, his plasma-cutter blazing above him. Hearing the unmistakable drone of a Plaguebearer, Jerius swung his servo-arm down. He grabbed the daemon and swung it like a writhing club, knocking its unholy brethren from the battlements. He would have smiled grimly if his features weren’t now permanently slack, paralysed by the diseases that were ripping his body apart.

  Heat surged up his spine and for one glorious moment the stench of the damned was overpowered by the biting tang of burning wire. He tried to shift, but his right leg was completely frozen. He was immobile, incapable of even dragging himself forward. The end was now inevitable, but he had been dead ever since he’d endured the aspirant trails deep within the Razorpeaks. Memories flooded back involuntarily. The sound of his fellow candidates screaming as they plummeted into the lava-flows below the Eyrie, the numbing pain of the flesh flaying from his bones as he struggled through passages lined with thorns as sharp as butcher knives. Every Doom Eagle was born in a frenzy of pain – the fact they died in agony was proof that the universe was nothing if not consistent.

  ‘We are Doom Eagles,’ the Techmarine slurred, ‘We are dead alr–’

  The chant was cut short by Pestilan’s plague knife slipping beneath Jerius’s helm and slicing through the Techmarine’s throat. Jerius gargled blood and gave up his spirit, slumping forward, his legs still frozen in place.

  Pestilan pulled the knife free as Jerius fell, baying in victory, his vile head sat forevermore at an unnatural angle from the rest of its body. The sorcerer threw his arms up high, praising Nurgle as the zombie hordes surged over the battlements, scrambling towards the keep.

  ‘Praise the Lord of Disease, Death and Destruction,’ the Plague Marine exalted, looking sideways into the heavens and seeing two Stormtalons descending from blackened skies. The lead gunship’s cannons blazed like angry fireflies and Pestilan’s psalm was left unfinished, his virulent body ripped apart in a blitz of las-fire.

  Artorius pushed himself up from the Plague Marine’s corpse as the Stormtalons roared above.

  ‘Kerna,’ he yelled, activating his vox, his eyes darting over the crowds of zombies clamouring towards him. ‘Clear the infestation. Do you copy?’

  He received nothing but static. The Stormtalons had overshot Kerberos and were already pitching around. They didn’t need any further orders; the pilots would know what to do.

  Casting his eyes around to catch a glance of Naracoth, Artorius sprinted towards the keep’s open doors. The Plague Champion was nowhere to be seen, but Artorius wasn’t naive enough to believe that it was dead.

  The air filled with the rattle of the Stormtalons’ guns as Kerna and Meleki performed another fly past, the ground itself bucking beneath the bombardment.

  Artorius was thrown from his feet. No, this was more than the Stormtalons’ attack. The tremors were too intense. It was as if something was forcing itself up from beneath the fort.

  From the rift that ran through the planet.

  From the warp itself.

  Yelling in defiance, Artorius leapt towards the doors as the courtyard buckled. Shattered stones erupted into the air and the sergeant was thrown forward. He could see gigantic, rust-covered talons bursting from beneath the slabs.

  With a crack, Artorius hit the heavy tower doors and slid dazed to the now uneven floor.

  ‘Say again, Meleki?’

  Kerna could barely make out what his fellow pilot was yelling across the vox, the Doom Eagle’s voice distorted by the waves of white noise which squealed through the speakers.

  He had a suspicion that his battle-brother was congratulating him on the amount of Plague Zombies and Plaguebearers he had mowed down during their last pass.

  ‘Stow the celebrations,’ Kerna muttered beneath his breath, throwing the Heart into a turn. The two Stormtalons peeled away from each other as they came around, warning bells lost in the rushing wind of the open cockpit. ‘We’re a long way from saving the day yet.’

  They were the last words Kerna would ever utter.

  In the Endurance, Meleki pulled hard on his stick.

  ‘Kerna, did the sergeant make it?’ he shouted, fighting against the sheer force of the gees the gunship was pulling. ‘Kerna?’

  There was no response.

  ‘Channel’s finally fried,’ Meleki told himself, the pressure of the turn bearing down at him. The Stormtalon levelled off as it came about. ‘No need for the vox. We can do this in our sleep, eh Kerna.’

  They had practised the manoeuvre time and time again, coming in at 90 degrees, Kerna slightly ahead. They’d cross, turn and repeat the tactic, firing directly into the ground forces with every pass.

  The damned didn’t stand a chance.

  Until now.

  The thing was flying up towards the Heart of Sorrow. Up from the ground, not dropping from the skies. Its scythe-like wings were flattened out, claws reaching up towards Kerna’s gunship. The fang-lined jaws were wide open, baleflamer jutting forward like a perverted metallic tongue.

  And then there was the noise. The beast’s profane howl was indescribable, like a nightmare being torn in two; an unearthly wail that threatened to shatter even the sanest of minds.

  There was nothing rational about the daemon engine that had pushed itself up from the very bowels of the planet itself.

  It was a Heldrake – a winged daemon engine forged at the heart of the warp. Once a gunship much like the Endurance, the Heldrake had been twisted beyond recognition. It no longer resembled any aircraft he had ever seen, taking the form of an apocalyptic dragon from ancient legend. Deep within the monstrous form, the withered body of the original steersman was cocooned in a nest of cable and bone, his flesh fused with the distorted metal, soul devoured long ago by t
he daemons that breathed infernal life into the war craft.

  The ultimate predator of the skies.

  And one that had Kerna in its sights.

  The Heart of Sorrow slewed to the right, trying to avoid collision, but it was hopeless. The Stormtalon was dwarfed by the mechanical atrocity that moved in for the kill.

  The Heldrake grabbed at the gunship like a craghawk snatching a sparrow, talons slicing easily through the aircraft’s armour plating.

  ‘Kerna!’

  The craft seemed to hang in the air for a second, locked in a deadly embrace, before the Heldrake dropped its fearsome head and disgorged its baleflamer into Kerna’s cockpit. The Heart of Sorrow exploded into a ball of blinding flame.

  Without even thinking, Meleki turned the Endurance’s nose into the fireball and opened fire, lascannons flashing ahead.

  With a bellow of victory, the Heldrake burst from the firestorm, flying straight towards the Stormtalon.

  FIFTEEN

  Artorius didn’t wait to see what had burst from the ground, or witness the fate of his Stormtalons. There was no callousness in the act. There was nothing a lone Space Marine on the ground could do to save them now, but he might still be able to protect the Key.

  Grunting with the effort, Artorius swung the heavy tower doors shut just as the first of the damned scrambled over the churned ground to reach the threshold. Their rotten fingernails scratched at the ancient wood as he slammed the heavy deadlocks home, the infected horde’s lamentations muffled by solid oak imported from the forests of Macragge.

  The devastation of the courtyard hadn’t reached the interior of the tower, the keep’s foundations standing firm. Artorius ripped his wrecked red helm from his head, expecting cool air against his bruised skin. Instead the atmosphere was humid, sweat immediately prickling against his neck.

  ‘Now, Vabion,’ he asked into the relative quiet of the entrance chamber, ‘where is this shrine of yours?’