Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

They found the first bodies in the atrium where the highway entered the metropolis, at the edge of a multi-level annex that comprised a vendor arcade, an open-air dining court and a monorail station. The corpses were drifted ten deep in some places, almost all of them oriented in the same way: with the city proper to their backs and the highway before them.

  Meros saw heaps of dead Signusi citizens lying next to stalled rail cars or crushed against airlock doors that had not opened.

  ‘They were left where they fell,’ said Sarga, as they picked their way through the silent aftermath. ‘And they died running.’

  The bodies were all pallid with the cold, blinded eyes staring into nothing, blackened lips open in silent screams. Their flesh was strangely bloated and frozen solid, and thin rimes of hoarfrost covered them.

  In places where the dome had partly collapsed, snowdrifts had entered the arcology, but for the most part the lethal cold had been conjured out of the atmosphere. There were signs of structural damage here and there, but the majority of the buildings were intact. Holst-Prime Hive was a glacial tomb, and with each step the Blood Angels took, their ceramite boots crunched through the new layer of frost. Against the dirty white hue of the snow, the armour of the legionaries stood out in stark, garish contrast. Only the Word Bearers seemed to blend in, as dark as the long shadows cast by the hab-towers.

  As per orders, a Techmarine from the Ninth Company by the name of Kaide was documenting everything they saw. He controlled a servo-skull making slow circles over the heads of the warriors, buzzing quietly each time it took a pict-capture of the area. Kaide followed behind Sergeant Cassiel as he approached the Apothecary.

  ‘Meros. You have a theory about this?’ Cassiel gestured at the mounds of the dead.

  He sighed behind his breath mask. ‘For the sake of these poor fools, it seems it was quick. Death struck them all within seconds of one another.’ Meros paused over the body of a male in sequined robes, of the kind favoured by outworld mercantile clans. Judging by the cut of his clothes and his high quality augmetic implants, this man had been wealthy; not that the depths of his coffers had done him much good here.

  ‘No immediate signs of outward injury. My first guess is some kind of telepsychic offensive, perhaps a fast-acting gaseous or viral agent.’

  ‘A neuronic weapon?’ suggested Kaide. ‘A mind-shredder has similar effects.’

  ‘I’ve never known of one that could project over so wide an area,’ said Meros. ‘But that’s not to say it is impossible.’

  ‘So.’ Cassiel folded his arms over his chest. ‘They didn’t die like the ones on the ships, then?’

  Meros slowly drew his fractal-bladed combat knife from its sheath on his boot. ‘Let’s find out.’ He pointed at the greyed skin of the dead merchant’s swollen arm. ‘Sarga? If you would.’

  The other Blood Angel held the stiff limb firmly, and Meros struck with the knife in a single, smooth action. The meat of the frozen body came away with a peculiar squeaking sound. The cut was ragged, but clean through. Dispassionately, the Apothecary turned the sample over in his gloved hands, peering at the stump. He saw exploded veins and corrupted arteries, all destroyed by some unknown force, all flash-frozen by the brutal cold of Holst’s atmosphere. But no bone in there.

  Meros held the severed arm out to Cassiel. ‘The same,’ he said grimly. ‘The environment here preserved the corpses differently, but they died in the same fashion.’

  ‘There must be thousands of bodies in this area alone.’ Kaide’s head was bowed, but his vision was coming to him through the optical scopes of the mechanical drone circling high above. ‘And an entire hive-city beyond that.’

  ‘Other settlements, too,’ added Sarga. ‘This is the second most populous colony in the cluster.’

  ‘Are we to assume that all the people of Holst are lost?’ asked Kaide.

  ‘You have the eyes in the sky, brother,’ Cassiel was grim. ‘Do you see anything that tells you different?’ The Techmarine shook his head and the sergeant tapped his helm as he switched to the general vox. ‘Squad. Prepare to move on to the next search sector. All units, report your location.’

  Meros mentally tallied the names of the warriors as they voxed one after another. The count came a man short.

  ‘Xagan,’ Cassiel called his name, his voice harsh and level. ‘Status?’

  Kaide was already vectoring the monitor bird towards the legionary’s last known position. ‘There has been intermittent interference on the primary communications channel since we passed the city limits,’ he noted. ‘The density of the buildings may be affecting the vox.’ But it was unlikely, and they all knew it.

  Meros toggled a vision mode and an overlay appeared in the lens of his helmet, showing a string of icons indicating the armour status of each warrior in the squad: green for normal, amber for impaired, red for critical. Only the command officer and the unit medicae had access to the telemetry feed, and then only at close range.

  Xagan’s icon flashed from green to amber, and an instant later a salvo of shots echoed through the cold air.

  ‘Over there!’ Cassiel shot forwards like a rocket, mounting the stairs of a walkway three at a time. ‘All units, hold station and stand to alert!’ He didn’t wait for Meros to come after him, knowing that the Apothecary would be quick to follow.

  They sprinted over an ice-rimed lawn and a frozen ornamental fountain as another cascade of bolt-shots crashed in the near distance. Meros caught a noise like stone grinding on stone and the tinkle of breaking glass as they vaulted across a stalled groundcar and raced towards a fallen two-storey building.

  The icon bearing Xagan’s name blinked amber to red, and then went dim.

  The entrance was blocked. Cassiel led the way, making handholds in the rockcrete by punching his fingers into the wall. The sergeant rose up over the lintel of the collapsed roof and slid down. Both floors had flattened into one, forming a small atrium of broken stone. Meros halted at the roof level, panning with his bolt pistol, looking for any hostiles.

  Down below, an Umbra Ferrox-pattern bolter lay as if discarded on the ground, vapour still curling from its muzzle. There was no sign of Xagan, but the floor of the building was a ragged sink-hole, the edges of it broken into spars of twisted rebar and fractured rock. Cassiel carefully approached the edge and peered down. He pulled a biolume stick from a pouch on his belt and shook it into life, then tossed the object into the fissure. From his vantage, Meros watched the glowing stick fall away, dimming as it grew distant. There appeared to be no bottom to the crack in the ground, and the protruding spars of jagged metal extending out of the walls made it seem like he was staring into the gullet of some monstrous creature.

  Cassiel called the missing warrior’s name once more, but his resignation was clear in the set of his shoulders. If the sink-hole reached into the hive’s underlevels, which extended below almost as far as its towers rose above, there was no way that a legionary, even in full armour, could fall such a distance and survive. The sergeant gathered up the bolter, examining it. ‘This wasn’t an accident,’ he mused. ‘Xagan was firing at something. We both heard it. Two-thirds of this magazine has been discharged.’

  The words had barely left Cassiel’s lips when a bellow of rage and pain carried across the rooftops. Meros’s head snapped up, drawn by the sound, in time to see the glassy spire of a gallery tumbling into a cloud of displaced ice and rock dust. ‘To the south,’ he pointed.

  ‘Harox’s men are there,’ Cassiel called. ‘Don’t wait for me, get going!’

  Meros broke into a sprint across the line of the lintel and surged into a leap as he reached the edge. The powered muscle-fibres of his armour turned his jump into a powerful bound that took him across the short distance to the next low rooftop. Stone splintered under the impact of his landing, but he ignored it, running on, picking out the route that would get him to the fallen spire as quickly as possible.

  As he moved, he heard Cassiel’s voice over the vox. ‘All units, enemy con
tact, unknown vectors. Be ready!’

  The Apothecary made one last jump that dropped him in the middle of what had once been a parking bay for automated cabs. Garishly-painted capsule groundcars were partly buried under the rubble of the collapsed spire, and the air was still thick with a haze of dust. Meros peered through the thermal vision blocks of his helmet, sweeping about with his preysight. Immediately, he spotted a line of hot white light emanating from a dozen irregular shapes a few metres distant. Switching back to a normal optical mode, he ventured through the dissipating dust cloud, leading with his bolt pistol.

  The Word Bearers were not linked in to the train of status icons, but he had his gauntlet auspex and used it to scan for signs of life.

  The readings it returned were confused and nonsensical.

  Meros paused, getting his bearings. Somehow, the steel skeleton of the fallen spire had not broken in its collapse. Instead, it lay arched over him, the spines along its length splayed open like grasping metal fingers. Impossibly, whole panes of crystalflex were still in place, their edges bared and sharp. They hung above his head like a canopy of executioners’ axes. Dark, oily fluid stained many of them, and more of the liquid was pooling around his boots, steaming as it cooled, staining the layer of frost purple-black.

  He came across the first of the warm shapes lying on the ground and disgust clenched in his chest. The irregular forms were pieces of a legionary, cut in hard, fine lines across torso and limb, through joint and neck; ceramite, meat and bone all opened with slices of an immeasurably sharp blade. The slate-coloured armour of the dead Word Bearer was all that identified him, and with a start Meros realised that the purple fluid was the legionary’s blood. Despite the horror of the sight before him, the strange vitae filled his thoughts, his senses.

  It did not smell like any kind of blood Meros knew, and his Legion knew blood. He struggled to frame his thoughts.

  The Apothecary’s gaze lighted on the shattered half of the Word Bearer’s helmet, cut whole from his neck with his head still within, then broken open. What he could see of the face beneath was a ruin of scarification and dense tattooing, but the tone of the skin was all wrong. It was hate-red and twisted. Deformed.

  ‘Get away from him!’ Without warning, the Blood Angel was yanked around and pushed back by strong hands. Harox pushed past him, his other Word Bearer battle-brother immediately interposing himself between the Apothecary and the mutilated remains. ‘He is dead,’ Harox grated. ‘Your skills are of no use.’

  ‘I…’ Meros faltered, still trying to assimilate what had happened. He raised his medicae gauntlet, presenting the reductor. ‘Captain, if you wish I may be able to help you recover Brother–’ He paused; aside from Kreed and Harox, none of the other Word Bearers from the Dark Page had bothered to name themselves. ‘Your battle-brother’s gene-seed.’

  ‘I do not wish it,’ Harox’s words were colder than Holst’s snows. ‘Be gone, son of Baal. He is fallen and we must mark his loss. In private.’

  Meros gave a nod and turned away. He threaded back through the ruins to the central parkland of the atrium area, finding Kano and the others dug in, weapons loaded and ready.

  Cassiel saw the facts in his silence. ‘Dead?’

  ‘Dead. One of Harox’s trackers, carved like the carcass of a sand-ox.’

  ‘Did you see the enemy?’ asked Kano.

  ‘I saw nothing,’ Meros admitted. ‘Nothing I can explain.’

  EIGHT

  Helios

  The Living City

  Exterminatus

  The carousel of horrors turned ceaselessly out in the darkness of the void, and Godolfan stepped away from the viewport, shaking his head. He tried to rid himself of the images, the illusions his troubled mind had created. He tried and failed.

  ‘This…’ Godolfan was momentarily disoriented and he shrugged it off. ‘This is not correct.’ His gaze fell to Captain Reznor, but the Blood Angel was distracted, sniffing at the air like a hunting dog.

  ‘The scent.’ The captain came forwards, his head tilting up to study the plasteel hemisphere in the ceiling of the Helios’s bridge, the lowermost face of the Navigator’s habitat module.

  Godolfan looked up and saw something glistening around the circular rim of the pressure hatch: a trail of fluid was moving in a slow arc around the hatch’s edge towards its lowest point. The dark liquid pooled and surrendered to gravity, emitting a fat droplet to spatter on the deck plates. Instinctively, the shipmaster extended a hand to catch one of the drops. Thick, coppery fluid stained his palm.

  ‘Get back,’ ordered the captain, his plasma pistol rising in his fist. Another of Reznor’s warriors came to the hatch control and on his commander’s nod, he pressed the emergency release.

  A sluice of stale blood – more than could ever have been contained in a single body – vomited out of the habitat module and flowed over the floor. Godolfan stumbled back as specks of the cold, sticky liquid struck his cheek.

  From inside the unlit space of the habitat, a body in wet-slick robes tumbled out, legs and arms flailing at the air. Its fall was arrested just above the deck, the corpse of the Navigator suspended by trailing ropes of cable.

  From the smell of it, the remains were heavily decayed; but that was impossible. Godolfan had spoken with the Navigator less than five hours ago, after they had disengaged from the expeditionary fleet.

  ‘Wounds,’ said the other Blood Angel, pointing at the corpse. ‘Like claw slashes. Too large to have been self-inflicted.’

  ‘That pod is sealed,’ Godolfan insisted. ‘Nothing can get in or out!’

  There was a sharp cry of horror that the shipmaster recognised as Dequen, and he spun, watching her recoil from her console, her face drained of colour. She had blood on the fingers of her hands. The lieutenant bolted up from her chair, backing away.

  Godolfan’s first thought was that Dequen had been marked by the same back-splash that had ruined the tunic of his uniform; but then he realised that could not be so, she had been too far away. Around the lieutenant, other members of the bridge crew were following suit, fleeing from their panels in panic.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘Mind your stations, look sharp!’

  Reznor pointed with an armoured finger. ‘Blood,’ he said simply.

  Dequen’s console, like all the others on the Helios’s command deck, was an intricate and finely engineered piece of craftsmanship. It was brass and ivorite, with illuminated crystal buttons and multi-functional tabs, as elegant now as it had been when the cruiser first left the slips. It was also swimming in watery blood, rivulets of the crimson fluid streaming out of the innards of the console. Out of all the bridge consoles.

  The shipmaster cast around, not understanding what he saw, and found more trails of red issuing from the seams in the bulkheads and around the boles of rivets. The Helios was bleeding.

  Godolfan heard a strange, atonal screaming that hung in the air. It had no source, it was all around him. It was inside his head. He staggered to the viewport, his vision fogging, and fell against the armourglass wall, feeling the cold of the void outside even through the thick protective layers of the hull.

  Outside, the cautious smoke let its tendrils gather around the warship and draw it in towards the dark mass of the depthless veil.

  By the time the Word Bearers had returned to the atrium, it had been decided.

  ‘The nephilim must have left hunters in the city, waiting for any rescue force.’ Kano watched as Cassiel spoke to Harox. ‘Obviously, they’re cloaked in some way that renders them invisible to our auspexes.’

  ‘Obviously,’ echoed the captain. His voice ground like flint on flint.

  The sergeant gestured at the trampled grounds of the small parkland around them. ‘This area has good sightlines. We’ll hold here and draw them to us. Kaide has seeded the perimeter with tripwires and krak grenades.’

  The Techmarine nodded at the sound of his own name, without looking up from the data-slate in his ha
nd. Kaide’s servo-skull was still up above them, the drone circling in the eaves of the great roof-dome on an automatic patrol pattern, watching for thermal spikes, listening for the high-frequency pulses of xenos vocalisations.

  ‘Very well.’ Harox offered nothing else, and Kano frowned behind his visor. He had expected some display of emotion from the Word Bearer. The captain had just lost one of his men, and yet he behaved as if they were discussing a drill on the parade ground. The Blood Angel knew that his cousins in the XVII Legion were given to demonstrative fury and righteous rages, but he saw nothing of that in the taciturn Harox and his silent comrade. And considering that their search and rescue mission had barely even managed the first aspect of that description, the Word Bearers seemed unconcerned by Cassiel’s order to dig in and wait. When Kano tried to put a description to Harox’s behaviour, the only word that fit was ‘disinterested’.

  The warrior looked away. He longed to remove his helmet and take a breath of air that wasn’t from the close, recycled atmosphere of his sealed armour, but Cassiel had given the command for all legionaries to remain hooded. The fact was, Holst’s toxic air would have been painful to his lungs after more than a couple of breaths, but Kano couldn’t ignore the tension building inside him, the borderline claustrophobic pressure at the edge of his senses. I should have stayed on the flagship, he told himself. This place is nothing but a tomb.

  ‘We sit and wait, then?’ Sarga asked, pausing as he reloaded his bolter. ‘We lose a Stormbird and two warriors, and we sit and wait?’

  ‘The enemy are cunning,’ Cassiel replied, his tone silencing the other Blood Angel. ‘Picking off lone men, fading back into the ruins. This is their territory. We have to entice them to give up their cover and strike in the open.’

  ‘I’ve seen the nephilim up close,’ noted Leyteo. ‘They’re big. Hard to miss. You couldn’t hide one in all this.’

  ‘True. But they used human slaves on Melchior.’ Sarga pointed towards the dead. ‘Why not here as well?’

  ‘A conscript-soldier didn’t make Xagan vanish,’ Meros replied. ‘And slaves don’t cut open a legionary.’