by Nick Kyme
Somewhat dumbstruck and appalled by it all, he followed, but struggled to keep up with the medic. Thronged with bodies, beds and what little medical equipment could be scavenged, it was a labyrinth without walls; one in which Falka could see his destination, but just had no idea how best to reach it. It was only by virtue of his size and intimidating stature that he was able to catch up with the medic at all. When he finally did, Rauter had found a rare scrap of open space where several avenues of beds connected.
‘There are a lot of burns, first through to fourth degree. Mostly from the weaponry those metal bastards were using, but from fires too,’ he explained, gesturing in several directions whilst reading off a data-slate Falka had only just realised Rauter was carrying. ‘Some amputations,’ the medic went on, ‘but we’ve got shock victims as well, burst ear drums, ocular scarring, breaks. You’re not skilled, so I don’t expect miracles. Make them comfortable if you can.’
Rauter turned from his data-slate to face him, wondering just how many of the able-bodied had been pressed into this service and what would happen when the injured outnumbered the fit and healthy. Perhaps they already did.
Now they had stopped and Falka was regaining his composure, he got his first proper look at the medic. A pepper-wash of stubble masked the lower half of Rauter’s jaw and neck and there were blood splashes he had not noticed or had time to clean off. His hair was short, not military, but still cropped. Falka guessed he was twenty-one standard, give or take. Too young to run a facility like this, but he saw no one else answering to the description.
‘Despite donations from our heavenward protectors,’ his tone was cynical and Falka had to resist the urge to strike him, but realised Rauter was just exhausted and had seen and lost too much, ‘we’re dangerously low on any form of sedative, so most of what you do will probably be holding down patients who are in agony but can’t be spared any pain relief. We’re also running out of coagulant gel, synth-skin, disinfectant and bandages. You care to name it, we probably haven’t got it or are almost out of it, so improvise.’
Rauter was about to hurry off when Falka put up a big hand to stop him.
‘I’m not here as an orderly,’ he said, stalling the young medic’s anger by going on to say, ‘I’m a soldier. I was told Jynn Evvers is in here somewhere and was asking for me.’
Rauter frowned, incredulous, as he opened up his arms wide to gesture at the squalid surroundings.
‘Look around. Can you see any organisation here? I have no idea where your friend is. If you’re not here to help please stay out of the way.’ Rauter was starting to walk away again and Falka’s urge to punch the medic came back with greater insistence, when he turned and said, ‘There’s a medical servitor with most of the patient data inloaded.’ Rauter jabbed a thumb in the vague direction behind Falka. ‘It’s voice activated, you only have to say her name. She might not have been logged, many haven’t, but it’s probably your best chance at finding her.’ He paused for a moment, his shoulders briefly sagging as he let Falka see the broken man he had become and was trying to keep at bay for as long as he was needed. ‘Is she your wife, daughter?’
‘No, nothing like that,’ he said, and felt hollow. ‘Just a friend.’
‘I am sorry… Kolpeck, was that your name?’ said Rauter. ‘I don’t mean to be insensitive, I don’t regard myself as such, but we are at the bleeding edge here. I’m not ashamed to admit that we’re ragged, but I haven’t slept for twenty hours and my patience is worn a little thin. Try the servitor, maybe it can help.’
Rauter nodded curtly before hurrying off to conduct his many duties, and was quickly lost in the crowd. In his wake, his words lingered. They were ragged, worn thin, and when ice is like that a break is not far off. All of Damnos was cracking. If the necrons did not kill them, then the heinous conditions they were being forced to endure probably would. Life had never been easy on the colony, ice mining never was, but this crisis was fast exceeding mortal forbearance.
Following the directions he had been given, chastening himself a second time for his lack of sympathy towards the medic, Falka eventually found the servitor.
It was a battered, half-organic model with a bare metal faceplate riveted across the nose and mouth where a vox-grille had been implanted, and all too human eyes. Given the nature of the enemy they were facing on Damnos, Falka found the spectacle of the servitor a little chilling. It was a walker, bipedal, with medical overalls and boots. It still had arms, but the organic limbs had been amputated and replaced with bionics. The servitor’s back was laden with various packs and canisters now mostly denuded of the medical supplies they had once carried.
Blank-eyed, the servitor paused in its preconfigured rounds and stopped in front of Falka.
‘I’m looking for Jynn Evvers. She here?’ he asked, a little unsettled by the corpse-like automaton.
Its dead-eyed stare persisted for a few seconds, giving the servitor time to search its records before blurting in machine-like cadence. ‘Name: Evvers, Jynn. Rank: Captain, Militia. Presence: Affirmative.’
There the report ended.
‘Where?’ asked Falka, frustrated. He had got used to the smell by now, but the constant moaning and wailing from the injured was wearing at his nerves.
After a few seconds of further searching, the servitor answered, ‘Insufficient data.’
Falka scowled. ‘What? She’s in here, right? Where is she? Evvers. Jynn,’ he repeated, and grabbed the servitor’s shoulders. The metal was cold and unyielding, and Falka suppressed an involuntary shiver at the touch.
‘Insufficient data,’ it answered again, in a carbon copy of its first response.
Irrational anger gripped Falka, prompting him to try and shake the truth he needed from the automaton. The patients around him were growing agitated too, thrashing and shouting. Some had risen from their beds and were remonstrating violently with the strung-out medicae staff. The break in the ice was coming, just as he knew it would…
Falka was wiping his eyes and shaking his head to clear the sudden bout of nausea threatening to empty his stomach when he heard someone puking nearby… then another.
‘Insufficient data, insufficient data, insufficien–’ blurted the servitor, trapped in a loop.
Something was happening. Falka felt it deep in his core, but could not pinpoint exactly what. Dizzy, he let go of the servitor and backed up a step before it suddenly convulsed and a line of blood streaked out of its eye from some internal haemorrhage.
‘What the hell…?’
Within a few metres of the servitor, a burn victim had kicked over his IV and collapsed on the floor. Another man, an orderly, fell to his knees and started scratching at his eyes. Farther away, he heard a woman shriek and someone else collided with a crash cart, spilling tools and equipment.
Through the crowd, which was slowly succumbing to some invisible malady, Falka noticed Rauter. The medic was slumped against the side of a bunk, his mouth slack and drooling. Then all the shouting, wailing and moaning stopped. Medical saws and machinery continued to burr and churn, but did so without human accompaniment.
Then came the keening.
It began as a low-level hum, just below the normal range of human hearing, but felt through the resonance of the hairs erect on the body or as a dull aching sensation in the gums, before growing in amplitude to an ear-wrenching shriek.
Falka did not realise what was happening until he had hit the ground, hands pressed instinctively over his ears. Somewhere close by he heard a gunshot, then the screaming began in earnest as the human voices returned. Patients were lurching up out of their beds, crawling their burn-ravaged bodies over the bloody infirmary floor. The medi-servitor Falka had been ineptly attempting to threaten was still upright but leaking a deluge of blood and oil from every one of its biological and non-biological orifices. The cyborganic was dead and no amount of augmentation would coax it back to functionality again. Never had he felt his own mortality so acutely. And as Falka looked up into
the eyes of a hospitaller nurse who had fallen to her knees as he had done, he knew he was not alone. Terrified, she backed away and was lost to the darkness. Everywhere the same terror-etched faces, all experiencing the same revelation.
Death had come, and it was here amongst them.
Trembling, through tear-blurred vision, Falka saw someone he recognised emerging through the throng of slowly-maddening medics and patients. The whole infirmary was infected, the terrible shrieking an almost white-noise tinnitus that brought people to their knees or sent them into pangs of violent insanity. It was a man dressed in an Ark Guard uniform that Falka had seen. In one hand he held a simple igniter and a pack of smokes; in the other, a Damnosian ice axe already slick with blood. As he stepped into the dim light of a phosphor tube, the face of Corporal Tanner Greishof was revealed, only it was half-decayed and bloated with putrefaction.
‘Need a light?’ asked Greishof, the blackened tongue lolling around the cavity of his mouth slurring his voice.
Falka took out his sidearm, a simple heavy-gauge laslock, and pointed it towards the apparition. His rational mind knew what he was seeing could not be real, but his eyes were sending a different message to his brain, terrifying him.
‘Stay back!’ Falka warned.
Greishof frowned, flakes of skin peeling from his rotting face.
‘Do you want to jump instead? Down to the ice? It’s cold down there, you won’t feel a thing. Not a thing…’
The ground under Falka tilted like it was seesawing to the left and a profound sense of vertigo overtook him, enhancing his nausea. He vomited, but kept his eyes on Greishof, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Keep away…’
Other shapes moved in the darkness, within Falka’s peripheral vision. They were hunched and broad… skeletal.
Greishof advanced, paying the other spectres no mind, languidly swinging his ice axe.
‘Sure you don’t wanna smoke?’
‘Go to hell.’
Falka fired and missed, struggling to remain steady with the ground pitching and yawing beneath him. A second shot flashed into the darkness beyond Greishof’s shoulder. A third struck his cheek and exploded the trooper’s jaw. Falka was about to unload a fourth when he caught sight of something behind Greishof.
No, not something, someone.
As his gaze alighted on a woman lying comatose on a nearby bunk, his heart beat a little faster, the flicker of hope rekindled in it.
‘Jynn…’
She lived. After everything, after he thought she had perished, Jynn lived.
‘Always knew you were a born survivor, girl,’ he murmured through tears of relief.
And like smoke shadows drifting away into the cold air, the spectres at the edge of Falka’s sight faded. But the crowd of half-mad Damnosians standing between them was very real. Crazed, capering figures barrelled through the darkness. Some were becoming increasingly violent, their fear turning them hostile. One slammed into Falka, but he managed to get his shoulder into the man’s abdomen and haul him over his head.
Knowing he would probably be crushed to death if he stayed on his knees, Falka staggered to his feet. He was tempted to keep out his pistol but holstered it instead, afraid of what he might do if he were so armed. At least Greishof had gone. He had never been there in the first place.
Just a ghost… Falka realised. They’re all just ghosts.
A woman wearing Guard fatigues rushed him out of the darkness. She was wailing incoherently, so Falka cuffed her across the left temple to put her down, knocking her unconscious.
‘Out of my way!’ he shouted, mustering what little resolve he had left, only the prospect of reaching Jynn compelling every laboured step. His concern for her was an anchor he could cling to and helped overcome his irrational fear. Even still, Falka’s heart was hammering like a rock-drill and he clutched at it, scarcely able to breathe. For a moment he genuinely believed his chest might burst and imagined a host of mechanical scarabs swarming out to consume him, flesh and bone.
It’s just the fear talking. Ignore it. Grit your teeth.
Falka did; he gritted his teeth and clenched his hands into fists. He had reached the makeshift avenue of beds that led him to where Jynn was lying. Clutching one of the beds’ metal rails, barely noticing the catatonic figure seemingly paralysed upon it, he struggled on. It was like wading through an ice storm, only it was the phantoms in his mind and not the elements assailing him. Something lurked in the outer darkness of the infirmary, and it was slowly creeping towards him. Falka fought to maintain his tunnel vision, eyes locked on her and only her. She needed him, and he used that thought to galvanise him and reach Jynn’s bed. Even comatose, she had not been spared the horrors. Whether experiencing some nightmare brought on by the coma or feeling the shared dread that had affected everyone in the infirmary, Jynn was convulsing too.
Hands trembling, Falka managed to hold her down.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ he soothed, one giant hand keeping her still while he tenderly stroked her forehead with the other. No one came close. She and he were an island amidst the madness. His presence seemed to calm her but she was mewling in her coma sleep, reliving Throne-only-knew what dark moments embedded in her psyche.
Falka knew it was this deep-seeded fear that affected them, one so potent it could conjure the dead or render a grown man insensate. Without exception, the entire infirmary had capitulated before it. Perhaps all of Kellenport was lost to it? What if this were the end?
Falka rallied, forcing himself to focus on Jynn and getting her out of this alive.
‘Hold on,’ he whispered, clinging to his last shreds of sanity. ‘Hold on, for me,’ he repeated as the far wall of the infirmary was wrenched away in a storm of tearing metal and iridescent energy.
Men and women were thrown into the air by the blast. Some were shredded, cut in half by the wreckage of the destroyed wall. Falka saw others transfixed by jade-green lightning arcs, their bodies shuddering as they were rendered down to their scorched bones.
It happened so fast, experienced through fear-dulled senses, he barely reacted. But this was no apparition brought on by the terrible din droning throughout the infirmary; it was real.
Through the gaping hole where the infirmary wall had once stood, Falka saw out into the Damnos night and glimpsed two sickle-shaped objects arcing rapidly through the sky. It was the necrons; he felt it in his marrow. They had returned at last, just as he always knew they would.
The city was under attack.
Bodies had been cast everywhere. Some lay unmoving, either dead or too scared to move. Others, farther from the blast, had noticed the burly rig-hand and the woman he was protecting. Their faces looked feral in the half-light, barely human at all. Falka saw things glinting in their hands. They looked to him like blades: scalpels, knives and medical saws. He pulled out the laslock, brandishing it in the hope they would get the message and back away. To his right, another group had seen them and was advancing. They had just finished cutting into another coma victim, his blood still on their knives.
‘Cut it out,’ said one, drunk with madness.
‘Cut out the horrors,’ echoed another, and Falka was reminded of the scarab swarm, the one he had imagined nesting in his chest. They had seen them too, only they did not possess the strength of mind to realise they were not real.
The men and women converging on him and Jynn were lost. Waving a pistol at them would do no good.
‘Stay away,’ Falka warned one last time as the shadows behind them came alive again with the hulking skeletal figures. He squeezed Jynn’s hand, willing her to give him strength.
Falka fired, but the laslock went dead in his hand, its power cell drained. He calmly holstered the pistol, knowing the feral Damnosians would be on them in moments.
‘You can’t have her,’ he told them, scowling. ‘You’ll have to go through me first.’
‘Cut it out,’ said the leader of the mob, a simple c
lerk. He seemed not to hear Falka’s threat. ‘Cut it all out…’
From his position on the wall, Iulus swung around and tried to aim through his bolter’s scope. The skimmer was moving too fast, like a bullet, and banking as it sped over Kellenport, letting out a wailing dirge from its engines.
It was not alone, either. A second craft joined the first, both small enough to be fighters and armed with underslung weaponry. Iulus heard the wall guns answering the threat, and saw one lit up by a twin lightning arc spat from one fighter’s cannons. Both the emplacement and its crew were ripped apart and splattered over Kellenport’s cold stone with nothing in reply.
Down in the courtyard below, the Damnosian citizenry – runners, soldiers, militia, medics – were screaming in fear. Imagined terrors spilled from their lips as spectres of old friends or gratefully forgotten enemies came back to claim them for the afterlife. A battalion of Ark Guard sent to quell the sudden distemper had succumbed to it instead. To see them so unmanned would have disgusted Iulus once; now, he just pitied them and knew this enemy was merely beyond them. No human, as far as he could determine anyway, was immune. Only the Ultramarines seemed unaffected.
He raised his squad on the vox, following the arcing flight path of the fighters as they turned and wheeled. Hitting a flyer at that speed would be nigh-on impossible. They needed an advantage.
Iulus scowled. One had yet to present itself.
‘Immortals, gain the walls if you’re not already on them and try to bring these things down!’
Fortune might yet favour them. It was better than nothing, but not much better.
Staccato bolter fire echoed from the city battlements, muzzle flashes lighting the gloom and showing Iulus where his men had responded. But as the sergeant had predicted, the fighters were too fast and nimble. Hot tracer whipped through the air, but it was like chasing smoke on a gale.
Other squads joined the fusillade being levelled at the fighters and the sky ignited with explosions and spearing las-beams. The necrons ran the entire gauntlet without so much as a glancing hit. Atavian had marshalled his Devastators in the square but even the so-called ‘Titan Slayers’ struggled to get a bead on the rapidly moving craft.
