Let The Galaxy Burn

by Marc

  ‘And cause a mass panic, sir?’ smiled Grauss sadly.

  Tiegl sighed. ‘No, no…’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘I thought you were on sick-rest? Medic’s orders?’

  ‘Making me crazy, sir. Give me something to do, and it might take my mind off the… the things in my head.’

  The colonel nodded. ‘Good man. Well, we need drivers. Can you handle a truck-rig?’

  ‘Pretty much.’ said Grauss.

  Tiegl consulted his dataslate and pointed to a dirt-caked eight wheeler parked over by the side sheds. ‘Unit 177. She’s yours.’

  ‘What’s the program?’

  ‘I want the main evacuation section out of here by 15.00. No excuses. Anything we haven’t loaded by then is staying, and that includes these bloody farmers. Uplift point is the Nacine Plains, nineteen hours north of here. According to transmitted reports, we’re expecting nearly sixty bulk transports to be waiting there to take us to the orbiting fleet units. There are eight other evac convoys like ours heading in from other collectives, so it’ll pay to be on time. We want to get our place, and if things turn nasty, we don’t want them leaving without us.’

  ‘What if it does come to a fight, sir?’

  ‘Then we’ll show these alien freaks what Mordian fighting spirit is. There are seventy thousand men from our regiment deployed planetside, not to mention thirty thousand from the Phyrus regiments. General Caen has informed me that armour units are a few hours from landing, and there’s even talk of help from the Chapters.’

  ‘That’s reassuring.’ said Grauss. ‘It may have been a little isolated outbreak we found down at the pump station, but it pays to be prepared.’

  ‘More then prepared now.’ said Tiegl, a little darkly. ‘The alert’s moved up a notch. Didn’t anybody tell you?’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Off-world astropathic communications went down five hours ago. The Shadow has fallen across us. They’re coming, Grauss, they’re definitely coming.’

  LIKE BEACHED LEVIATHANS with screaming, wide mouths, the vast battle-barges squatted on the dry, stony flats of the Nacine Plain, disgorging rivers of armour amid clouds of churned, pale dust. Even from the high observation mast of the command ship, three hundred metres above ground, General Caen could hear the clank and grumble of the Paladian tanks and fighting vehicles. He swept his magnoculars around and then nodded in satisfaction. Colonel Grizmund was deploying his armour as fast as ordered, faster perhaps. A good, clean dispersal. The sky was a clear blue, and they had visibility to ten kilometres. They wouldn’t be caught napping.

  Caen let the magnoculars dangle against the crisp, pressed front of his immaculate Mordian uniform. Beside him on the ship’s watch-platform, two servitors and three Mordian adjutants manned the supervision consoles and vox-caster sets. A steady stream of radio traffic crackled in the background.

  Hanff, one of the adjutants, approached him across the metal grille and handed the general a data-slate.

  ‘Reports in from all the evacuation points, sir. Most of the collectives are underway to us in convoy. Tiegl at Collective farm-plex 132/5 informs you they will be underway by 15.00.’

  ‘Why so slow?’

  ‘That’s where the outbreak occurred, sir. I think the colonel is being especially careful.’

  Caen nodded. He knew Tiegl and trusted him well. The man would get the job done.

  ‘And this?’ he asked, pointing to the slate. ‘Collective 344/9?’

  ‘They haven’t embarked either, General. Men from the Phyrus regiment are there. I… don’t know what the hold up is.’

  ‘Vox them. Find out. Tell them I’ll skin them alive if they don’t move soon.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The air trembled with subsonic, basso power. A shadow passed over them. Another ten thousand ton bulk transport swung down in to land on the plain, braking jets squirting blue flames.

  ‘The Ariadne,’ said Hanff. ‘Right on time.’

  Boots clanged up the mast ladder and Colonel Grizmund pulled himself up onto the platform. He was a tall, thick-set man wearing the crimson battledress of the Paladian armour brigade proudly. He saluted Caen.

  ‘Reporting in person.’ he said. ‘We’re ready to move out. Where do you want us?’

  Caen shook the colonel’s hand and showed him the chart table.

  ‘We’re playing watchdog right now, Grizmund. Some of my men down in the delta stirred up genestealers two weeks ago, and blew the whistle. From the reports, it looks like the locals found some kind of tyranid scout-drone or incursion probe and woke it up. Emperor alone knows how long its been sending its beacon, but since the Shadow fell this morning, we can be sure it’s been heard. I’d like you to move south. The evac convoy from the delta collective may need support if trouble starts there, and they’re lagging.’

  ‘We’ll embark at once, and meet them en route.’

  ‘Good, good…’ Caen turned to look at Hanff. ‘Any joy with those damned Phryus idiots yet?’

  THEY’D BEEN in Farm Collective 344/9 only six hours and Trooper Nink was already banging on that something bad was coming.

  The Phyrus troopers were packing crates into the pack of heavy transports behind the main maize silo and the suns, a matched pair, were coming up hard and bright. Sergeant Syra Gallo tossed another crate up into Nink’s hands and told him to shut the hell up.

  ‘Of course there’s something bad coming, you moron! That’s why we’re here! That’s why we were diverted nine days ago with express orders to head for Malvolion! That’s why we’re busting our humps getting a bunch of dirt-scratchers onto transports and away to the uplift! Something bad! Something really bad!’

  Nink looked down at him as if the sergeant had just broken awful news about his wife.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Gallo turned around to regard the other men of the Phyrus Fourth Regiment who had all paused in their work. ‘None of you!’

  ‘For the Emperor’s sake, you moon-eyed bastards, we’re Imperial Guard! We only go to places like this because something bad is coming! I mean, the Warmaster doesn’t say “Oh, Malvolion, nothing bad’s gonna happen there. Let’s deploy thirty thousand of our brave Phyrus boys immediately!” does he? Eh? No he freaking doesn’t! We’re here because we are the Imperial freaking Guard and people give thanks and kiss our spotty butts in gratitude because we are there when that Something Bad arrives! Now get these crates stowed and tell yourselves this…’

  Gallo dropped his voice and grinned at his men. ‘We’re the freaking Phyrus Fourth. We’re stone-killers to a man. It had better be something really freaking bad because when it gets here, it’s gonna find us, and we are gonna kill it so many times it’s gonna wish it had never been born!’

  There were cheers. Even Nink cheered. The Malvolion colonists trudging past to the waiting trucks further down the evacuation convoy line were silent and looked far too scared for Gallo’s liking.

  Silently, he just wished he knew what was coming, what they were up against, and why they were here.

  ‘Repeated signals from Nacine Plain Command.’ Vox-officer Binal called to Gallo.

  ‘Yeah, yeah…’

  ‘It’s the general himself, sergeant. He wants to know why we’re not moving yet.’

  Gallo dropped a crate in contempt and turned to look at Binal. ‘We’re not moving because Major Hunnal hasn’t given the order yet. Tell him that.’

  ‘I did, sergeant. He wants to know why not.’

  Wiping his sore, dusty palms, Gallo stalked away across the sunlit compound. ‘Tell him I’ll ask the major himself.’

  Gallo entered the main hall of the collective, a dirty, zinc-panelled prefab that creaked in the heat. Air-scrubbers chattered fitfully. Gallo had seen the major and two other officers disappear inside an hour before to discuss the final evacuation conditions with the collective’s selectmen.

  ‘Major? Major Hunnal?’

  Gallo checked a few rooms.
The place was empty. Unnerved, he called in a squad to help him search. Five men, all in heavy Phyrus battledress, clattered in through the entryway to join him. One brought Gallo his las-gun. ‘Spread out.’ he told them.

  Gallo and a trooper called Matlyg had the pleasure of finding Hunnal, the other two officers, and the six farm selectmen. What was left of them anyway. Reduced to blood and bone-meal, they coated the floor and walls of cargo bay behind the hall.

  Matlyg threw up and fell over in the mess of bloody remains. Gallo tried to stammer into his vox-link.

  Something tall and still that he had taken to be a roof support quivered and moved. Fast… so freaking fast! A scything talon the size of a grown man lashed out of fhe shadows and ripped the vomiting Matlyg into ribbons of flesh and a spume of airborne blood.

  Gallo found his legs, retreating, screaming, firing. Purple plates knotted with whitish bone, iridescent green tendrils lapping between its jagged, filthy teeth, the mantis killer disengaged itself from the ultraviolet spectrum and shimmered into being, towering over him.

  ‘Spook! Spook!’ Gallo wailed.

  His shots punching into the dark, bony plates of the thing’s belly and chewed off some splinters of chitin. Then he was in through the doors and running.

  The vox-channels were alive with panic. Gallo ran into two of his searchers and pulled them down into cover, backs against the prefab wall.

  He was trying to tell them what he had seen when two metres of talon sliced in through the wall and one of the troopers. Blood boiled out of the trooper’s sagging mouth as the talon withdrew and let him slide free. Gallo threw himself away as another bio-blade slammed through the wall and decapitated the other trooper, splitting his skull lengthways.

  It can see us. Even through the walls, it can see our heat!

  Gallo ran.

  He reached the outside.

  The evacuation convoy was where he had left it, still not underway. Now it would never get underway. Ever. Several trucks were overturned, and two were on fire. Phyras troops ran in all directions, firing into the smoke. Farmers and their families stampeded in panic all around. Bodies littered the ground. None were remotely intact.

  Stumbling forward, Gallo found Nink. From the belly down, Nink was nothing but tatters of bloody cloth, ropes of torn entrails and fragments of semi-articulated raw bone. But somehow, horribly, he was still alive. He clawed at Gallo, begging the sergeant to take him with him. Nink clutched at Gallo’s leggings.

  Gallo shot Nink through the forehead. A mercy, he considered.

  He dropped into cover as a clutch of farmers tumbled by in extreme distress. Something darted after them, taller than a man, its armoured body swept forward over racing, bird-like limbs. The genestealer’s primary limbs, hugely taloned, the uppermost of its four torso limbs, raked at the screaming settlers, disembowelling one. Its drooling tongue flapped between snapping teeth.

  Like the mantis killer, it moved so fast…

  It corralled the settlers, and two more abominations just like it chased in out of the fuel-oil smoke, stubby tails erect and wagging like excited dogs. Together, their limbs thrashed and ploughed, ripping the frantic people into offal.

  Gallo realised two things with ghastly clarity. He would never forget the screams of the slaughtered farmers and their folk for as long as he lived. And that wasn’t going to be very long.

  He saw a mantis killer through the smoke, busy rending a track apart. He ran, reaching one of the laden tracks at the edge of the compound. Binal lay dead by the rear wheels. Gallo knew it was Binal because the corpse still wore the vox-caster set, even if it didn’t have a head any more.

  He tore the vox-unit from the body and clambered into the track’s cab.

  It took him a moment to find the emergency channel.

  ‘344/9! 344/9!’ he rasped. ‘Incursion! Tyranid incursion! Repeat—’

  There was no time to repeat. The genestealers were at the cab windows, on the bonnet, smashing the glass and reaching in.

  THOUGH UNINTELLIGIBLE AND more a sound of pain than real words, Gallo’s last transmission was heard six hundred kilometres away at Nacine Plain.

  The channel went dead. Caen looked away, avoiding Hanff’s face as he tried to compose himself. That sound. That scream…

  He was about to signal Grizmund’s armour brigade, which had left the plain just forty minutes before to turn on a bearing for 132/5, but the sky went abruptly black.

  Wind-borne spores began to winnow down around them, burning flesh and thickening the air.

  Caen ran to get below as the first of the atmospheric toxins began killing Mordian troops and navy personnel. Ship landing lights came on automatically as the natural light died, illuminating streams of pelting spores like a black blizzard.

  Against the blackness high above, colossal shapes descended. Harridan brood-organisms, the tyranid main dispersal form. Caen had read about them. But to see them, to see their size, smell their downwashed stink… it ruined his mind.

  Swarms of winged bat-forms swirled out of them like drifts of fallen leaves billowing on the wind. The gargoyles filled the air, shrieking, targeting individual men, membranous wings beating. They executed steep, perilous dives, raking the ground beneath them with the flesh borers they clutched to their leathery torsos. Plasma fire rained down, shrivelling and igniting men as they ran for cover.

  Caen pulled out his power-sword, and slashed at a gargoyle that swooped towards him. He split it into two, and was drenched in its stinking ichor.

  He fell.

  Rising, the ground shaking, he saw how the corrosive spore-mines were collapsing the superstructure of most of the landing ships. Bulk transports were sagging and melting as they lost integrity. Parts of some exploded outwards.

  Things no bigger than a man scuttled forward through the burning darkness and confusion. Termagants and the larger, bounding hormagaunts. There were thousands of them, Caen realised. So many, so many…

  He sliced at the alien filth that closed on him. He cut the snout off one termagaunt, the forelimb off another. He was distracted by a liquid scream as Hanff, running for cover nearby, was destroyed by mycetic spores, both necrotic and corrosive. A fat, bubbly slick punctuated by corroding bone mass was all that remained of him after thirty seconds.

  The fleshborer hit Caen in the chest. He writhed and wailed as it quivered and dug and turned the contents of his body cavity into mush.

  THE EVAC CONVOY was two hours out from 132/5 when they saw the change in weather patterns a hundred kilometres ahead. A dark stain, like a wash of thunderheads, was braising the distance, widening with every passing moment.

  From the cab of unit 177, Grauss saw the blue skies fill with dark-bellied clouds. His guts tightened. Around the black stain in the distance, the weather was being tormented in an ever-expanding radius. Frothing clouds whirled cydonically like blast ripples from the ominous darkness. Drizzles of rain, thick with dingy fluid and what seemed like seed-pods, pelted down. The two kilometre-long convoy switched on their headlights almost as one, and wipers began to beat.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ asked Trooper Femlyn, riding shotgun next to Grauss, an autogun across his lap.

  ‘Turn west! Turn west!’ Colonel Tiegl’s voice rattled over the inter-vehicle comm. The convoy, ungainly and slow to respond, shunted and churned as it tried to make the new heading.

  The air was sweet and hot, Grauss realised. It smelled like the pumping station hot-house.

  Two trucks overturned on the trackway, slumping into revets as they tried to turn. Another three broke axles and were stranded. Tiegl left them and their screaming occupants behind.

  ‘Nacine Plain has gone!’ he yelled into his vox-horn. ‘Our only hope is the main hive at Malvo Height! Turn west!’

  Grauss looked at his chart-plate. Malvo Height was a thousand kilometres away to the west. They’d never reach it. Never.

  He put his foot down anyway.

  GRIZMUND’S ARMOUR WAS running hard fr
om the filth storm that expanded ever outwards from the Nacine Plain. All hope of reaching the evac convoy from 132/5 was gone. All hope was gone, period.

  He turned his vehicles to meet the onrush. It was a slow business, because the torrential rain had turned the dry, stony fields to mud and tangles of vegetation were growing up out of it even as he watched. In the space of fifteen minutes a dry, arid upland had turned into a mossy, fern-filled swamp. Another hour, and it would be a thick, impenetrable jungle of creepers and moulds, spilling outwards and consuming the dry land.

  Grizmund didn’t have an hour, and would never see that floral conquest. His tank guns roared up into the dense packs of flying things that swooped from the staining sky. Burning, membranous creatures dropped to the ground or were annihilated in the air.

  Then his tanks started to die. Advancing tides of biovore engines spat spore mines into them, blowing armour units apart or melting them with acid and poison. Overwhelming floods of hormagaunts and termagants skittered forward out of the deluge, completely burying some vehicles under their writhing numbers. The air pulsed with the psychic throb of the tyranid warriors, tall and hideous, as they advanced amidst the smaller monsters. Zoanthropes, glistening like great floating brains, their atrophied limbs clutched to themselves, hovered over the swarms and flashed out lances of energy that blew tanks asunder.

  Grizmund saw the twisting, lashing shapes of raveners approaching, and shouted down from his turret for the gun layer and aimer to increase fire.

  Then the carnifex was on them. Shrieking, it lacerated two nearby tanks and flicked them aside. The last thing Grizmund saw was mouth of the venom cannon it raised towards his vehicle.

  THE EVAC CONVOY from collective 132/5 was running west, hard, turbines roaring. They’d laboriously crossed a network of interfarm trackways and finally made it onto a metalled highway running east-west, the main overland arterial route used by the produce road-trains every harvest season to ship grain to the world hive at Malvo Heights. They were kicking dust in a trail four kilometres long from the dry white roadway, passing irrigation canals and wide, flooded field-basins lined with rows of growing frames. Then the rain caught up with them again, washing out the dust, glistening the roadway, until they were kicking up spray instead.