Hot exhaust fumes threw a sudden curtain of spent-fuel stink over them as a transport thundered upward, the spitting engines vibrating and complaining. She watched it struggling to gain height the cargo pods clustered beneath dangerously overloaded with refugees. Something inside broke with a cough of grey vapour, and the craft dipped sharply toward the ground. She grabbed her companion's cloak and pulled him into the lee of a blockhouse just seconds before the ship crashed. The concussion blew down the crowd like felling timbers, and for long moments her hearing was replaced by a low, hissing whistle.
He stood first, his mouth moving even though his voice was lost to her.
'This way. Keep going'.
She nodded. Acrid chemical smoke pooled around their ankles as they ran, the rough winds across the landing fields catching the hems of their cloaks and flapping them back like sails. They wore the simple robes of pilgrims, the clothing common to the endless migrations of penitents that came to Orilan to visit the tombs of the Faded Lords; but no pilgrims carried the combat webbing or weapons holsters that they wore underneath. Other ships passed over them, climbing on spears of white fire toward the high clouds. The horizon was full of fleeing silver darts, desperate to escape the horror engulfing the planet.
In the first few hours of the outbreak, the vox-casts had described the effect as a virus, warning people to stay in their homes and avoid large congregations; but it quickly became clear that the changes were not the creation of some malignant micro-organism, nor were they limited to humans.
Animals, insects, even plants began to shift and mutate. New forms arose on every corner, disgusting and loathsome things that sprouted horns or festoons of lapping tentacles. And then the inert and inorganic fell prey to the creeping aberration, as iron, stone and plastic warped beneath its touch. Some of the hysterical bulletins spoke about night-dark shadows wafting through the canyons of the city, leaving surreal and unnatural malformations in their wake. Sanity itself seemed to have fled Orilan, allowing things that were once coralled in nightmares to run wild in the cold light of reality.
She shook her head to clear it and blinked. Her companion stabbed a finger at a shifting cluster of people clinging to the edges of a boarding ramp.
'That one,' he said, 'yes?'
'Yes,' she replied. Atop the ramp was a planetary lighter, an orbital shuttle of a crude but quite speedy type. Similar ships were employed across the Imperium and she knew that if circumstances required, she would be able to pilot the craft herself. The lighter wore the logo of a freight haulage agency that carried cargo and passengers from platforms in the orbital rings, to the surface of the planet and back again. She estimated that with enough reaction mass and a good course, the ship might get them to Orilan's outermost moon. Where the ramp ended, a large servitor drone was blocking the open loading hatch, picking figures from the swarming throng with rough metal grippers. Valuables and items of all sorts, from coin bags to barrels of amasec and musical instruments, lay in a pile near its clawed feet. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty people between the two of them and the servitor. Her face set in a grim mask, the woman's hand dipped into the slit in the folds of her cloak, fingers toching the careworn butt of an old but steadfast stubber pistol. She scanned the people, looking for a target that would make the most disruption when she hit it.
'Wait.' His left hand touched her elbow, and she saw that his right was also swallowed by the mass of his robes. He had that look in his eyes, the misty; slightly vacant glitter that came on him when he was reading people. 'Be ready.' The words had barely left his lips when a commotion began in the heart of the crowd. A peculiar ululating scream flew from the mouth of a gangly dockworker in a coverall. The unfortunate threw himself about, crashing into other people, screeching as he collided with them.
Those around him struggled to get away, sending ripples of motion through the crowd. Figures at the ramp's edges were pushed off and into the sheer well of the exhaust pit below. Ripping sounds came from inside the man's clothing, and dark fans of blood discoloured his torso. From places on his chest and face, forests of needle-like spines erupted, tearing out of him. He jerked wildly, a puppet pulled by pain. The mob cried out in shock.
She watched the change take the dockworker with grotesque fascination. Since the morning, she had seen it occur more than a dozen times, but each riotous mutation was different from the last, horribly watchable in its repugnant display.
'Now!' said her companion, and her fascination snapped like a thread. He was springing forward, the ornate shape of a mastercrafted lasgun filling his fist. She fell into the confusion behind him, drawing her own weapon. It was less fancy than his, but just as elegant in its lethality. They reeled from him as he moved. He laid hands on them, brushed them with his fingers, and people recoiled as if they had been burned. Sweat beaded his brow despite the cold air, the effort of it straining him.
Amid the screams and howls, they forced their way through the crowd as ocean predators would knife through a shoal of fish. She felt her gut tighten as the ramp shuddered; the cargo hatch was beginning to descend, preparing to seal the shuttle.
'Two more. Two more,' grated the servitor, taking the coat hems of a merchant gentleman and his mistress, dragging them forward. 'Last ones. No more.'
Had it been necessary, her companion could have communicated his intent to her with a brief thought; but they had been together for so long, faced so many situations such as this one that neither of them needed to consider their next move. The two of them raised their guns and shot the gentleman and lady through the backs of their skulls, blowing brain matter and bone across the servitor's carapace. The machine-slave obeyed its programming automatically and dropped the dead bodies.
'Two more,' it said. 'Last ones.'
Some people understood what was transpiring and tried to push forward, but by then it was too late, and the woman and the man were ducking to get under the hatch, followed by the stooped servitor, it's manipulators full of swag. Fresh blood still dripped from it as the helot worked the locks. Fists tang on the hull, dull thuds resonating into the cargo bay.
The bay's interior was a web of netting and spars, to which dozens of Orilani had attached themselves, terrified that they would be torn out of their escape vessel before it made lift-off. She saw the servitor lock itself into an acceleration couch and grabbed at a loose curl of webbing.
Below their feet, the rocket motor spat out flame, burning alive the people they left behind as it rose into the air.
THE LIGHTER PRESENTED its blunt prow to the sky as it lifted away from the chaos of the starport, sweeping across the edge of the city. The engines laboured to hold the vessel on course, but by the Emperor's grace there was fuel enough in the tanks to burn the boosters hot. The ship clawed into the air, threading through thin streaks of cloud and the sooty plumes of burning buildings.
Something in the haze of corruption moved in a way that windborne smoke never would have. By turns and heartbeats, a black glitter of movement came falling towards the sweating, groaning ship. It was ephemeral and gauzy, a shimmer on spoiled waters, a glow from the wings of an insect swarm. It touched the vessel's fuselage and coated the hull like wet paint rolling in coils across the metal fuselage, down and about. Searching. Feeling. Seeking a way inside. As the vessel rose into Orilan's upper atmosphere, the inky shroud at last found a microscopic flaw in the hull. And with a controlled, fierce will, it poured itself in through the gap.
VONOROF FELT EMPTY and sick, as if the g-forces pushing him into the pilot's couch were leaching his very life essence away. As the blackness of space unfolded across the cockpit window, the pestilent sights he left behind still dogged him, replaying over and over in his mind's eye. The tree outside the chapel as it turned about its length to present a maw of teeth. The roadway that melted under his feet. His daughter wailing as her eyes fell from her head, her face sprouting tendrils and cilia. As hard as he tried, Vonorof could not shake the images away. He blinked.
He was still crying. He had been for quite some time now. The hatch behind him irised open and he gave a start. Panic rolled around made him and he steeled himself, at last daring to turn and race the figure that had entered. A pilgrim, his face haunted and drawn. About his neck pooled a rough-hewn hood, framing a bald head dominated by an electro-tattoo of the Imperial aquila. In one ear glittered a single purity stud of old pewter. Vonorof suddenly found his voice. 'You shouldn't be up here! This is a restricted area—'
'Not to me,' the man's voice was flat with fatigue, but it brooked no argument. He pushed into the cockpit and the pilot glimpsed another figure behind him in the gangway, another pilgrim hanging back. 'Change course,' said the bald man. Vonorof felt a peculiar tension around the thick brass sockets in the base of his neck, where the sinuous mechadendrites of the lighter's command chair connected directly to his brain. A subtle pressure, pushing on his will. He tasted a greasy sensation in the stale recycled air of the cabin. In all honesty, he had not given a lot of consideration to where he would go when he lifted the ship, he had half-expected not even to get this far. The vague, animal need to escape the insanity on the planet had been driving him with its directionless energy. 'Where to?' he asked, slipping into a position of inferiority before he was even aware of it. The man pointed; in the distance, starlight glittered off the hull of a vessel in high orbit. Direct machine code feeds from the lighter's cogitators told Vonorof that it was a Gladius-class frigate, a warship of a kind only employed by the Emperor's Space Marine legions, the Adeptus Astartes.
'Approach that craft.' A flood of panic seized the pilot. The frigate was the colour of old blood, a red scar in the sky, and even from this distance he could see the clouds of debris that remained of craft that had strayed too close to it.
'A blockade ship,' the words spilled from his lips in a rush, 'they'll destroy us, even if there are no infected on board!'
'There is no disease,' said the pilgrim, the weariness hollowing his voice. 'Do as I say.'
Vonorof glanced from the viewport and made eye contact with the man. Instantly any arguments died in his throat and the pilot found his head bobbing in a wooden nod. The pilgrims will overpowered him easily, and he turned the transport with quick motions, bringing it on a direct intercept course with the frigate. On some level, a small part of Vonorof's mind rebelled at the sudden compulsion that had come over him, but it was a weak and feeble voice that railed against the man's dominating presence.
HE WIPED A sheen of sweat from his head and licked dry lips. Retreating from the cockpit, he found his companion waiting in the anteroom, watching him with a level gaze. He saw accusation there, a telltale so subtle that only someone who knew her as well as he did could notice. He ignored the flicker of irritation that coiled inside him and sealed the hatch, leaving Vonorof to fulfil his orders.
'You are putting us at risk,' she told him. 'The Astartes will surely obliterate this shuttle.' The woman threw a nod in the direction of the frigate. 'You saw the hull livery. The Blood Angels. They're not known for their mercy.'
'Fortunate for me then that I do not seek it.'
She shook her head. 'We should attempt a stealthy approach to the outer lunar colony and then—'
He held up a hand to silence her. 'Marain, I know what I am doing. Trust me.'
Her eyes narrowed and an unspoken emotional charge passed between them. The issue of trust was a raw wound, a chasm yawning wide between them. After a long moment, he pushed past her, a new kind of weariness in his bones.
MARAIN WATCHED THE man pick his way through a mass of hastily stowed possessions, rooting in the depths of an equipment locker. 'You are so sure of yourself, Ramius.' She studied him with different eyes; curious that he could have that effect on her, not once or twice, but over and over. The first time Marain had laid eyes upon him, she had been afraid of Ramius, although her training forbade her to show even the slightest inkling of it. The man she had feared that day differed from the person she had learnt to respect; in turn, that man was different from the Ramius who had bedded her and shown her love of a sort, for a while; and again, that man was not the man she saw now, drinking from a water pack, pressing at his face as if the skin on it were a poorly-hung mask. 'Your soldier's eyes,' he said quietly, the ghost of a smile on his his. 'Watchful.'
'It's what I am,' she retorted. 'What I do.'
Ramius turned away. 'There's no war here.'
'You're wrong,' Marain told him. 'There's always war. If there were not, you would have no need for someone like me.'
He peered through a porthole. 'You are more than just a protector…'
The unspoken remainder of the statement made her lip curl. 'Once, perhaps, but not now. That road is dosed to us.' Ramius turned swiftly to face her. Was that hurt in his eyes, some flash of betrayal? Had he expected Marain to take his side in all of this? She held away any reaction, keeping her aspect utterly natural.
HE READ HER thoughts in her eyes; he could have laid them bare and known her mind inside out if he was prepared to expend the psychic effort, but Ramius was spent from tension and, although he hated to admit it, guilt. Marain's accusing face, her tawny skin framing a hard line of lips and dark eyes, arranged in judgement of him. In reproach of his mistakes, his folly.
She blamed him for it all, for the madness on Orilan. He could not dispute her. The truth of it was, his curiosity and arrogance would cost a world its life.
Marain came close to him, and he felt a surge of adrenaline as her lips spoke at his ear in a hushed murmur, too low to carry beyond the intimacy of the anteroom. 'You must atone, Ramius. Admit your errors and ask for forgiveness.' For all the quiet of the whisper, it was as loud a demand as a shout. He pulled away, unable to cover the sudden, naked fear on his face.
'I… I cannot.' Ramius husked.
Marain's disappointment coloured her words. 'You will die at the hands of the Blood Angels, along with everyone else on this scow. You have until then to consider your repentance.' She left him there to muse on her words, dropping back into the tunnel to the lighter's cargo decks.
THE SHIP HAD one compartment that could be considered to be ''luxury' accommodation, at least by the standards of comparison to the rest of the craft. The addition of some threadbare acceleration couches retrofitted from a fire-damaged starliner and a broken entertainment holosphere were all the lighter offered. The cabin was full of people, every seat taken, every inch of uttered carpeted floor filled with human traffic. The air was thick with body odour as the ventilators laboured to handle the miasma generated by the refugees. Under other circumstances, fights might have broken out as people jockeyed for more room; but not this time. The passengers who had bribed or cajoled their way on to Vonorof s shuttle were too afraid to do anything other than watch one another for signs of the change. A dead woman lay in one of the aisles, her skull crushed by the boots of her neighbours. Just prior to lift-off she had begun to writhe, and as one they had piled upon her and murdered her where she sat, terrified that the mutations would burst from her body and turn upon them. Fear drove them, none of them caring if her palsy was caused by something else. No one dared to cough or to speak. None of them wanted to be next. The compartment adjoined an engineering space. Running the length of the ship, it was filled with pipes for breathing gas and conduits labelled with arcane symbols that only Mechanicus adepts understood. Through this cluttered artery the darkness moved like liquid, flowing across every surface. When it passed the cabin wall it paused. It sensed life in there, very close. Very afraid. The black form drew the gossamer edges of itself together into a ball of diamond hardness, fashioning a blade-point. A flicker of motion forced it into the metal and a finger-thick hole popped open, directly behind the shoulders of a corpulent, sweaty man. Held in place by the press of flesh, he could only flap his hands and wail as the shape punched through his spine and bored through his torso. His dying act was to tear the shirt from his chest; and then the darkness erupted in streams from every pore of his
skin, turning him inside out.
People either side of the fat man warped like flowing candle wax, growing fans of teeth or eyes that popped open from boils.
Everyone reacted at once, screaming, scrambling, a mass of humans all trying to force themselves through a narrow hatch and away from the tide of changes. The blackness swooped, kissing them with corruption and shredding their bodies. It formed a rudimentary maw from thin streams of matter and contorted, pressing air out of its makeshift mouth. The squeal of noise distorted until it became a recognisable word. 'Ramius.'
MARAIN HEARD THE horrible voice and her blood ran cold. The name tolled like a bell, the ghostly moan resonating down the tunnel. Where the bare skin of her hands clasped the rungs of the access ladder, she felt the metal under her fingers grow warm and pliant turning fleshy. The air in the conduit became damp and breathy with the bouquet of rotting meat. The tunnel began to undulate and move, growing ribs and coils of cartilage. The sound of bone cracking spurred her into action and she let her weight carry her down to the cargo deck level. Wet trickles of stringy spittle followed, pooling at her feet in frothy puddles. She threw a quick glance up; the tunnel was turning into an open throat some giant mutant oesophagus. Marain's gun was in her hand as she sprinted forward, shoving blank-faced refugees out of her way.
RAMIUS DETECTED THE psychic spoor of the dark-thing moments before his physical senses registered the stink of rended flesh.
Inwardly he cursed; he had tired to the point that his weir honed warning senses had let him down. Tendrils like aerial roots crawled up the walls of the antechamber probing and tasting. In the places where they touched objects, the tentacle things split to reveal toothed lips, enveloping each new discovery like a snake eating a rodent. Ramius's gun shrieked, ozone sealing the air as laser bolts shrivelled the invading probes. The shots beat them back, but it was only a temporary respite. With cold honesty, he understood that his mistakes had come to gather him to their breast, understanding that his hopes of escape and denial were childish and unrealistic. From below, the mutation hooted its terrible rendition of his name once again.
Warhammer 40,000 - Anthology 13 Page 23
