It was not just living flesh that was polluted. Corrosion covered the steel frames of the medicae cradles, and glasses and plastics were cracked and broken. The decay touched everything. He looked away.
‘They have been left to die,’ said Hakur, ‘infected and left to fester like discarded cuts of meat.’
‘A test,’ said Garro. ‘The hand that did this was toying with them.’
‘We ought to burn them,’ said Qruze, ‘put these poor fools out of their misery.’
‘There’s no time for that kind of mercy,’ Garro retorted. ‘Every moment we tarry, the cause of this horror walks free to spread more corruption.’
At the far end of the ward, they came across more dead, this time the bodies of Silent Sisters in the armoured garb of vigilators. Spent, broken bolt pistols lay near them, barrels clogged with gobs of acidic mucus. Thousands of tiny scratches covered the places where their skin was bare. They had died from puncture wounds in the chest, from what seemed like a cluster of five daggers stabbed into their torsos. ‘Too narrow for a short sword,’ Qruze noted.
Garro nodded and held up his hand, flexing the fingers in a gesture of explanation. ‘Talons,’ he explained.
Hakur and his men were already working the rusted wheel of a large airtight hatch that would give them access to the next section of the tier. The gummed metal shrieked as they forced it open.
‘What kind of creature has claws like that?’ Qruze asked aloud.
The hatch crashed open off its broken hinges with a roaring displacement of air, and there before them was the answer.
THE ADJOINING CHAMBER was an open space crisscrossed by gantries and walkways, suspended in a steel web far above the open platform of a hangar bay several tiers below. Situated halfway up the side of the Somnus Citadel, the hangar was one of many tertiary landing ports designed for the shuttles deployed aboard the Black Ships. This landing port served the infirmary, allowing injured Sisters to be taken directly to the medicae centre in the event of a critical emergency. Normally it would be busy with servitors performing maintenance tasks on the landing grids, the ships or the airlock doors, but now it was the site of a pitched battle.
Garro saw the gold and silver of a dozen Silent Sisters engaged in close combat with a whirling, screaming mass of claws and green-black armour. It was difficult to get a good eye on what was happening. A foggy mass of smoke wreathed all the combatants; but no, not smoke. The cloud hummed and writhed with a will of its own, and he saw one witchseeker pitched over the lip of a gantry and sent falling to her death as the swarming mass of flies blinded her. The form barely visible in the midst of the insects, tall and shimmering, continued to send out savage attacks into the lines of the Sisters.
Hakur raised his bolter, but Garro waved him back. ‘Careful! There are oxygen lines and fuel conduits in the walls. A stray round could set off an inferno! Blades only until I order otherwise!’
The catwalks were narrow and they forced the Astartes into single file movement. Garro saw Qruze split off with one of Hakur’s squad and make an approach along a different gantry. He nodded and ran forward. The metal decking clanged and shook beneath the heavy boots of the Death Guard. It was hardly built for the weight of men in ceramite and flexsteel.
The swarm’s motion was that of a single living, thinking creature. As the Astartes came close, it cut off portions of itself and sent them screeching through the air, separate and distinct clumps of dense, poisonous forms clawing at the eyes and skin of the warriors. Bolter fire would not harm this enemy. The tiny bodies resisted their attack, and the men were reduced to snatching at the air, pulping the serrated insects into messes of cracked chitin.
Blue light gathered along his blade. Swinging Libertas over his head, Garro cut a swathe through the thickening edges of the swarm and reacted swiftly as a figure in gold cannoned into him, propelled backwards by a vicious blow. He caught the Sister in a vice-like grip and arrested her fall towards a broken guide rail. She hissed loudly and the captain realised too late that the woman’s arm was scored with hundreds of slash wounds where razored insect wings had cut her flesh. Garro reeled her back in and found himself looking into the eyes of Amendera Kendel. She was flushed with effort from the fight.
To Garro’s surprise, she made a quick string of word gestures in Astartes battle-sign. Nature of enemy unknown.
‘Aye,’ agreed Garro. ‘You know this tower better than we do, Sister. Block the escape routes and let my men deal with this mutant.’ He had to raise his voice so it would carry over the chattering squeals of the swarming bugs.
Kendel signed again, getting to her feet. Proceed with caution.
‘That time has passed,’ he replied and threw himself into the rippling mass of the swarm, the sword’s power field crisping great clumps of black flies from the air around him.
THE SISTERS DREW back and followed Garro’s command. There had been a moment, just the smallest of instants, when Nathaniel Garro had heard Keeler’s cry and feared that the women had turned against them. His own battle-brothers had already raised weapons against him, and it was sad and damning that his first reaction was to assume it had happened once more, this time with Kendel’s witchseekers out to murder them. He felt a measure of relief to learn he was wrong. To be confronted by another betrayal added to those of Horus, Mortarion and Grulgor… Was fate so cruel to curse him again?
Yes.
In his heart, in his soul he knew who it was he would find at the heart of the swarm even before he laid eyes upon him. The clawed, reeking monster spread the too-long fingers of his distended left hand in a grotesque greeting as Nathaniel fell into the eye of the swarm storm. The hexagonal steel decking beneath him squealed and moaned, shifting.
‘Captain.’ The word was a mocking chorus of rattling echoes, humming into his ears from all around. ‘Look, I am healed.’ For all the gruesome malformations of his flesh and bone, the aspect of the man beneath the changed body was clear to Garro’s eyes.
He teetered on the brink of despair for one long second, the revulsion at what stood before him threatening to knock the last pillars of reason from his mind. A flash of memory unfolded. Garro remembered the first time he had seen Solun Decius, on the muddy plateau of the black plains on Barbarus. The aspirant was covered in shallow cuts, streaks of blood and a patina of dirt. He was pale from exertion and ingested poisons, but there was no weakness of any kind lurking behind those wild eyes. The boy had the way of an untamed animal about him, brilliantly fierce and cunning. Garro had known in that moment that Decius was raw steel, ready to be tempered into a keen blade for the Emperor’s service. Now all that potential was wasted, twisted and destroyed. He felt a terrible sense of failure settle upon him.
‘Solun, why?’ he shouted, furious at the youth’s folly, his voice resonating inside his helmet. ‘What have you done to yourself?’
‘Solun Decius died aboard the Eisenstein!’ thundered the rasping voice. ‘His existence is at an end! I live now! I am the pestilent champion… I am the Lord of the Flies!’
Garro spat. ‘Traitor! You followed Grulgor into his grotesque transformation. Look what you have become! A freak, a monster, a—’
‘A daemon? Is that what you were going to say, you hidebound old fool?’ Callous laughter echoed around him. ‘Is it sorcery that has renewed me? All that matters is that I have cheated death, like a true son of Mortarion!’
‘Why?’ Garro screamed, the injustice hammering at him. ‘In Terra’s name, why did you give yourself to this abomination?’
‘Because it is the future!’ The voice buzzed and chattered. ‘Look at me, captain. I am what the Death Guard is to become, what Grulgor and his men are already! Undying, living avatars of decay, waiting to reap the darkness!’
Garro’s senses were heavy with the stench of corruption. ‘I should have let you perish.’ He coughed, faltering for a moment.
‘But you did not!’ came the scream. ‘Poor Decius, trapped at the edge of mortality, wracked with
such pain it would grind down a mountain. You could have released him, Garro! But you let him live in agony, tortured him with every passing moment, and for what? Because of your ludicrous belief that he would be saved by your master…’ The creature took heavy steps towards him, the claw reaching out. ‘He begged you! Begged you to end him, but you did not listen! He prayed to your precious gaudy Emperor for deliverance, and again he was ignored! Forsaken! Forsaken!’ A slashing blow clipped Garro and he dodged away, falling through a haze of flies. The breathing slits on his armour locked shut, holding out the scrabbling, biting mandibles of the insects.
Garro had the brass icon and its chain wound around the fingers of his gauntlet. ‘No,’ he insisted, ‘you should have survived. If you had held on, if you could give your spirit in the God-Emperor’s service—’
‘God!’ The swarm bellowed the word back at him. ‘I know god! The power that remade Decius, that is god! The intellect that answered him when he lay praying for the bliss of decease, that is god! Not your hollow golden idol!’
‘Blasphemy!’ Garro snarled. ‘You are a blasphemy, and I will not suffer you to live. Your heresy, that of Grulgor, Mortarion, Horus himself, will be crushed!’
The battle-captain launched a brutal flurry of counterstrokes, chopping at the discoloured armour.
Each blow was parried. ‘Fool. The Death Guard are already dead. It is ordained.’
Garro’s answer was a vicious downward slash that cut a wide gouge through the rigid plates of chitinous shell. The thing that had been Solun Decius staggered with the pain of the blow and jets of thin yellow mucus streamed from the cut. Instantly, flies from the hurricane swarm around them hurtled inward and buried themselves in the wound. In seconds, the pulpy mass of writhing insect bodies was bloating and distending, staunching the injury, the flies feasting on themselves to seal it closed.
‘You cannot kill decay,’ hissed the voice. ‘Corruption comes to all things. Men die, the stars burn cold—’
‘Be silent,’ commanded Garro. One of Solun’s character flaws was that he had never known when to shut up.
Libertas gleamed as it arced through the air, this time cutting horned chunks of the insect armour off the monstrous foe. The distended claw, huge and heavy, swung around and slammed into the Death Guard’s chest, denting the eagle cuirass and cracking the ceramite.
The knife-sharp fingers scraped across his arm, trying and failing to gain purchase. Garro brought the sword around and attacked again, forcing his enemy to push back along a gantry. Neither of them had room to manoeuvre, but corralling his enemy would only make the fight more difficult.
Blade and claw met over and over, the crystalline blue steel sparking off the chitinous talons. The speed and power behind the blows was stunning. Even at his very best, Decius had never been this deadly. It was taking every iota of Garro’s skill to stay toe-to-toe with his former pupil, and where he felt the edges of tension and fatigue in his muscles, his adversary clearly did not. I must end this, and swiftly, before more people die.
He recalled the fight with Grulgor on the promenade deck, but there it had been the warp sustaining the diseased foes. Here, there was only the rage and anger of Solun Decius, convinced that his kinsmen had abandoned him. Garro knew one thing for certain: only he was the match for this Lord of the Flies. None of his battle-brothers had been able to beat Decius before, and in this mutated form, he would certainly kill them.
The gantry they fought upon complained and listed as Garro jumped to avoid a low, sweeping strike. The sound brought a cold smile to the battle-captain’s face, and he threw out a powerful downward blow that his enemy evaded with ease.
‘Too slow, teacher!’ the grating snarl pulled at him.
‘Too quick, apprentice,’ he retorted. The strike was a feint, never intended to hit his opponent. Instead, the sparking blade sliced though the guard rail and hex-grid of the catwalk, severing cables and leaving red glowing edges where the sword cut molecules in two. The gantry moaned, twisted beneath their weight; and then it snapped, bending along its length to throw the two combatants into the air. Garro and the mutant fell, still clawing and slashing at one another, until they impacted on the wide open deck of the hangar level. The swarm buzzed angrily and came coiling down after them, as if it were furious at being left behind.
Garro got to his feet, ignoring the pain of the fall, and drew his augmetic limb forward just as the Decius-thing struck out with a sadistic side-kick. Garro took the blow full force on the mechanical leg, the steel bones creaking, flares of hard pain clutching at his abdomen. He backhanded the mutant with the heavy pommel on his sword, smashing the hilt into a face of arthropod eyes and black mandibles. As the swarm came on them, Garro spun the blade and slashed at pallid, fly-blown skin. The cut opened the corpse flesh and spilt powdery blood. The insects reacted, howling and smothering Garro from head to foot in a thick, shifting mass.
He brought Libertas up to his chest and ran the blade at full discharge, the crackling aura dancing about his armour in coils of lightning. The winged mites puffed into dots of flame and perished, black ash smearing his wargear. Garro drew a glove across the lenses of his helmet in time to see the Lord of the Flies filling his vision. His enemy slammed into him, throwing the Astartes off the flank of a cargo pallet. Garro resisted and turned the fight back to the foe, blocking the wicked claw and sending a storm of punches into the damaged muscle and bone of the face. The flies hummed around him, trying to mend the smashed meat even as Garro broke more shards of carapace and gristle. He took a hard blow, a desperate blow, and disengaged. The mutant Astartes stumbled back a step, over the lip of an inert landing scaffold.
Garro saw the opportunity that presented itself. Beyond the Lord of the Flies and his chattering, shrieking swarm, there was a wide iris hatch that opened directly out to space. He looked up at the figures on the service gantry overhead and shouted into his vox pickup. ‘Kendel!’ He pointed forward. ‘Open the hatch! Do it now!’
The Decius-thing couldn’t hear his words, but the creature wasn’t slow on the uptake. ‘You think you can stop me? I carry the Lord of Decay’s mark!’
Alert klaxons sounded and garish orange lumes blinked in wild strobing patterns over the steel and brass walls. Garro heard the clanking of metal gates parting on the other side of the hatch. The Lord of the Files bayed, his swarm carrying the humming, rattling voice through the air, over the chorus of sirens. ‘I was right, Garro! I see the future! In ten thousand years, the galaxy will burn—’
The words vanished into a screaming tornado of sound as the iris slammed open.
With an explosive jolt the air and the loose contents of the hangar bay were torn away into the lunar night. Small objects, strips of printout and data-slates, tools and strings of dust raced away, and with them went the swarm. Garro’s adversary flailed, reaching out to snag his claw on Nathaniel’s boot. He fell and rolled as the vacuum dragged them both towards the roaring black mouth of the airlock. Garro felt the jagged digits score the ceramite of his greaves. He tried to strike with Libertas, but the decompression was stronger than either of them, the breath of a god carrying the two combatants away.
A cargo pod slammed into his back and the Astartes tumbled, rolled and came off his feet, buoyed by the tempest. Garro saw the walls of the landing bay flash past him and glimpsed the shimmer of his foe falling with him. Then they were in the freezing blackness, thrown from the face of the Somnus Citadel, tumbling down towards the brilliant white sands of the moon amid a cloud of ice crystals. For a brief second, he saw the brass disc of the iris hatch cycling shut behind him. He spun lazily, end over end, the wasteland racing up to meet them.
HE NEVER FELT the impact. Time blinked and Garro was in a cauldron of pain, agony tight around every joint in his body. The only sounds were the gruff pulse of his breathing and the hisses of atmosphere inside his armour. Warning runes danced on his visor. There was a puncture somewhere in his wargear, a slow leak issuing air out into the dark. T
he regulators inside the armour’s fusion power pack were flashing alerts. Garro ignored them all, and pushed himself up from the pit of moon dust where he had landed. Spears of hot pain ripped through his shoulder. The joint was dislocated. He tabbed a restorative pill from the auto-narthecia dispenser in his neck ring and gripped his wrist. With a hard yank, Garro snapped the limb back into place with a bark of agony.
He took stock of his surroundings, a small crater, thick with dust and dotted by small porous boulders, with steep walls. The brass tower of the citadel dominated the black sky beyond. A man-shaped imprint showed where he had landed, and close by there was Libertas lying flat on the dust. Garro moved quickly towards it in a loping motion, half running, half skipping. The gravity out on the lunar surface was much lower than that inside the citadel, where artificial field generators kept it to a Terran one-gee standard, and he had to be careful not to stumble. In full armour, he was suddenly unwieldy, and it took long seconds to adjust.
There was no sign of his opponent, and for a brief moment Garro wondered if the Decius-thing had landed somewhere else, perhaps outside the crater.
Something shattered under his boot as his foot touched the soil and interrupted his train of thought.
Small, glistening objects were scattered all around him, shining like tiny jewels. As he bent down to recover his sword, Garro realised what they were: the frozen corpses of thousands of insects, flies and beetles.
Nathaniel!
The forewarning brushed the edges of his thoughts, a faint breath of wind upon the ocean of his mind, but it was not enough.
The moon dust exploded upward in a storm of grey, Libertas tumbling away as the creature lurking beneath the powder burst out, talons reaching for his throat. Garro grappled with the Lord of the Flies and went off his feet into a slow motion tumble. He grunted with effort as he punched his adversary hard in the sternum, and felt chitin give with the impact.
The Flight of the Eisenstein Page 32
