Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al.

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘And they are hostile to the T’au Empire?’ Xanti asked uneasily.

  ‘They are hostile to all life save their own. Like locusts they exist only to consume and multiply, leaving nothing but dust and shadows in their wake. It is said the Imperium has suffered greatly from their depredations.’

  We were silent. Here was another ugly truth hidden in the name of the Greater Good. Over the last few months my certainties had eroded away, revealing deception, obsession and horror. What else had been kept from me?

  Down… further down… More dead Space Marines… First a golden beast’s

  head set against midnight blue, then another raptor, this one red against white.

  ‘You respect these warriors,’ I said, watching Jhi’kaara carefully.

  ‘I respect their strength, Asharil.’

  But I sensed her admiration ran deeper. Jhi’kaara was an outsider amongst her own kind, closer to Fi’draah’s wilderness than the wisdom of the Tau’va.

  She was drawn to these warriors for their brotherhood as much as their strength.

  By the time we reached the lowest tier we had found eight Space Marines.

  The last had succumbed at the periphery of his objective, his armour pierced in a dozen places by scything claws. Bizarrely he was still standing, his body wedged on its feet by the mass of corpses pressed against it. Even amongst his brothers he was a giant, but there were other differences. While the rest had painted their left arms silver, both his arms were silver – or more likely some stronger metal. Each was an angular augmetic, one terminating in a

  slab-like fist, the other in an intricate claw whose purpose was probably manipulation rather than combat. His personal heraldry was black, its symbol a stylised white gauntlet.

  ‘Iron Hand,’ Jhi’kaara declared. ‘Another old enemy.’

  ‘These would appear to be specimen containment units,’ Mutekh said, pointing out a pair of toppled glass cylinders that looked big enough to hold the largest abominations. Ropes of fungus were wrapped around them, squeezed so tight the reinforced glass had fractured.

  ‘The fools brought the Silent Hunger to Fi’draah,’ Jhi’kaara hissed. I was surprised by the fury in her voice. She sounded like her own world had been threatened.

  ‘So this place was some kind of prison?’ Xanti asked.

  ‘Not a prison,’ Mutekh said as he followed the web of pipes running from the cylinders to a corroded bank of consoles. ‘Remember the laboratories we passed through? No, this is a research facility. The Imperials were experimenting on these creatures. Perhaps they were seeking a means of communication…’

  ‘The Imperium does not seek communion with its enemies,’ Jhi’kaara said.

  ‘They were looking for a weapon.’

  ‘But why here?’ Xanti wondered. ‘Is it just a coincidence they came to Fi’draah?’

  ‘Many of the indigenous fungi are lethal,’ Mutekh speculated. ‘Perhaps they were attempting to synthesise a pathogen.’

  ‘Then they failed,’ Jhi’kaara said flatly.

  ‘We do not know that,’ Mutekh protested. ‘The techniques of the gue’la are riddled with superstition, but…’

  ‘The Yhe’mokushi strain was too strong,’ I said, surprised by my own conviction. ‘When the Imperials infected it… it devoured the fungus…’

  Intuition, I realised. I am neither entirely a creature of reason nor instinct, but something subtler than either.

  ‘It became the fungus,’ I finished. ‘And then the fungus devoured them.’

  My comrades stared at me, then their eyes wandered to the infested expanse around us. Jhi’kaara broke the silence: ‘Search the Space Marines,’ she ordered the janissaries. ‘Gather their grenades.’

  ‘What is your intent, fire warrior?’ Mutekh demanded.

  ‘We will complete our enemy’s mission.’ She indicated the monolithic

  puffball. ‘Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is the greater enemy.’

  ‘You will do no such thing!’ Mutekh was appalled. ‘We must ascertain what the Imperials discovered here.’ He looked to Xanti for support, but the young data tech avoided his gaze. ‘Autaku!’

  ‘I am sorry, fio’vre,’ his assistant muttered unhappily, ‘but whatever the Imperials found here… it did them no good.’

  ‘I will search this one,’ I said, heading for the nearest Space Marine.

  ‘I trust you know what a grenade looks like, waterkin?’ Jhi’kaara mocked gently. Then she was gone, heading for the upper tiers.

  ‘Cowards,’ Mutekh called after us. ‘You are all betraying the Greater Good.’

  No, we are serving the Greater Good, I thought fiercely. Even if some of us have come to doubt it.

  Biting down my disgust I dragged a corpse away from my chosen warrior,

  intent on reaching his utility belt. That was when I noticed the hum. It was faint, but its source was unmistakable: this Space Marine’s armour was still powered. Unsettled, I peered up at his archaic helmet. A flat visor covered the right side of his face, but the left was a tangle of bionics clustered around a jutting optical sensor. Up close he seemed more machine than man.

  Iron Hand, Jhi’kaara had called this one…

  ‘Fio’vre, wait!’ The voice was Xanti’s, its urgency irresistible. I glanced round and saw Mutekh standing beside the puffball, a laser scalpel in one hand and a sample container in the other.

  ‘Wait!’ I echoed, but the scalpel was already descending towards the mottled surface. ‘Don’t–’

  The puffball exploded like a bomb.

  And that’s precisely what it is, I realised, a spore bomb, dormant but not dead.

  There was no fire or fragmentation in the blast, but the concussion threw Mutekh across the tier, slamming him against the consoles with bone-breaking force. I saw his body rebound a heartbeat before everything was smothered in swirling grey smog. Clutching my mask tightly, I screwed my eyes shut and crouched, sheltering beneath the Iron Hand. The scattered janissaries cursed as the spore cloud rolled over them, then the curses turned to choked screams as their lungs drowned in filth. I heard them stumbling about as they fought to escape their torment. Someone opened fire blindly,

  his pulse-rounds sizzling as they ripped through the congealed air. Someone else screamed his last as a wild round struck him.

  That was a mercy. The only kind remaining to these men…

  I risked a glance as one of them fell to his knees alongside me. The toxic whiteout reduced him to a vague, flailing silhouette, but I could see his entire body heaving violently, as if in the grip of some bone-deep tremor.

  Not bone-deep. This quake ran much deeper than that.

  I heard his flesh seething as its muscles contorted into new shapes, stretching his skin taut in the struggle to contain the chaos beneath. Suddenly he screamed, spewing blood and spores as his back arched inwards at an impossible angle. The spine snapped – then snapped back into a sleek, predatory curve. Vicious spikes erupted along its length, racing to catch up with his rapidly elongating cranium. His arms shot out in a welter of shredded fingers, propelled by the bone scythes surging from his wrists. He tried to scream again and his tongue burst free, thickened and barbed, like a stinger-tipped snake.

  It looks like there is a wyrmtree growing inside him, I thought wildly. Any moment now, the newborn hybrid would turn and see me…

  ‘Fio’vre! Where are you?’ Xanti called as he came stumbling through the mist, his faithful drone hovering beside him. He saw me and raised a hand in relief. ‘Asharil! Did you see–’

  The hybrid leapt. Propelled by powerful, double-jointed legs it streaked through the air and was upon the autaku before he saw it coming. The bone scythes slashed down, impaling him through the shoulder blades and pinning him to the ground. His shriek was cut off as the beast’s tongue shot out like a spring-loaded blade and punched through his filtrator mask. His legs kicked about spastically as it wormed its way down his throat, stinging and seeding him with spores. The abando
ned data drone twittered in confusion and a scythe flailed out and sent it spinning my way. I covered my head as the saucer smashed into the Iron Hand and toppled beside me with a forlorn squawk.

  The smog had thinned out, the spores settling over the chamber like softly luminescent dust. By their pallid light I saw that none of the janissaries had escaped the change. Some were still going through the final trauma, but five were racing towards a solitary figure on the topmost tier. Jhi’kaara was kneeling, tracking the approaching hybrids with her pulse rifle. She fired, but

  her chosen mark darted aside with shocking speed. I imagined her cursing then, angry but not afraid. Never afraid… She fired again, then once more in quick succession, the first shot tricking her target into the path of the second.

  The round struck the hybrid mid-leap, throwing it to the ground in a writhing heap. Before it could right itself a third shot sheared through its skull. A kill, but it had cost her precious time.

  With a chittering yowl one of the creatures leapt onto Jhi’kaara’s tier, but she ignored it, intent upon a more distant mark. Before I could shout a warning, her gun drone swooped from the shadows and lanced her aggressor with its twin-linked guns, almost tearing it in two. Whirling round, the saucer sped towards another hybrid, spitting fire, but the beast danced about in ragged avian bursts, bounding between the floor and the walls as it charged.

  At the last moment it rolled low and sprung up beneath the saucer, latching on to its rim. The drone spun about, firing furiously as it tried to dislodge its attacker, but the beast was too strong. I imagined the machine’s primitive logic core assessing probabilities and weighing up options. It found its answer within seconds and self-destructed, incinerating the hybrid from the waist up.

  I had no more time to spare for Jhi’kaara’s battle. Done with its prey, Xanti’s attacker sat up on its haunches, sniffing the air while its victim writhed beneath it in the throes of change. I looked around, hoping for a fallen firearm… cursing myself for refusing to carry one… desperate for a clean death…

  ‘Power…’ The voice sounded like the wheeze of a dying machine. A machine that spoke Imperial Gothic… I looked up and saw the impossible: the Iron Hand had inclined its head towards me, its optic glowing a dull red, like a doomed sun. Beneath that merciless blaze water turned to fire and I became a creature of instinct. Grabbing Xanti’s battered drone I hauled, staggering under the weight as I raised it to the giant like an offering to some primal god. The burden was as much philosophical as physical, yet my path seemed clear.

  The galaxy was tainted and taint had to be cleansed…

  A metal tendril uncoiled from the warrior’s helmet, swaying about like a blind snake. Then it struck, its sharpened tip drilling through the drone’s casing with a whine of ruptured metal. A moment later the snake became a leech, burying itself inside the broken machine’s innards and sucking it dry of

  power. Power to re-ignite its master’s hatred.

  Honest hatred!

  I heard Xanti’s assailant rise behind me, but my world had narrowed to the awakening Iron Hand. I knew my sanity had gone, unravelled by O’Seishin’s lies and Fi’draah’s truths. All that remained was horror and the will to face it.

  For the Greater Good…

  The rest was a blur. The hybrid howled behind me and its kin answered from all sides. I spun round as it leapt, its virulent tongue extended towards me. The Space Marine’s fist met the beast in mid-air like a turbotram, punching clean through its ribcage. He cast the corpse aside as the others fell upon him in a chittering, screeching mob. There were four in all, fully transformed and almost mindless in their need to rend and tear and infect.

  The first came head-on and died in a heartbeat, its skull pulverised by a pneumatic punch to the face. His armour grinding like rusted cogs, the warrior swung at the waist and grabbed another by the throat, squeezing until bone and cartilage collapsed into paste. In the same instant he rammed his manipulator claw between the jaws of a third. Its head convulsed violently as the claw became a whirling rotary blade inside its mouth. He yanked the tool free in a storm of shattered bones as the final hybrid vaulted onto his back, scythes poised to hack down. Before it could strike, a bolt of energy punched through its skull, throwing it from its perch. I glanced up and saw Jhi’kaara kneeling a few tiers above us, her rifle levelled.

  Cleansed, I thought, every one of them.

  ‘Asaaar…haaal…’ The voice made my name sound like something dredged

  up from a polluted ocean. I turned as Xanti hauled himself up, using his malformed scythes like crutches. His movements were clumsy, crippled by the capricious mutation of his muscles, as if the fungus were baffled by t’au physiognomy. His face had stretched into a death mask, the lower jaw almost touching his belly, but his eyes were unchanged, staring at me with agonised recognition. Pleading…

  ‘Asaaar…’ Xanti’s barbed tongue surged towards me. The Space Marine shoved me aside, but the stinger lashed my shoulder as I fell. A terrible numbness seized my arm before I even hit the ground. Dimly I saw Jhi’kaara vault from the tier above. She raised her rifle to her shoulder and advanced on the abomination, firing as she came. She didn’t stop until it was a charred ruin. Then she turned her wrath on Mutekh’s broken, spore-saturated body.

  The cartographer never stirred beneath the barrage. Perhaps he was already dead, but I doubt Jhi’kaara cared. The last thing I saw before consciousness slipped away was the dimming red light in the Iron Hand’s optic.

  ‘Power…’ he whispered. And then we both faded to black.

  ‘You were fortunate,’ Jhi’kaara said when I awoke. The numbness in my arm had faded, leaving behind a dull ache. ‘Its sting did not carry the infection.’

  Then by unspoken consent we fed the Iron Hand, gathering the janissaries’

  weapons and power packs and offering them up to his ravenous

  mechadendrite. Our ritual was without sense for the enemy of our enemy was destroyed, leaving only the enemy, yet we never hesitated. We were both creatures of instinct now, bound by an imperative stronger than the Tau’va.

  ‘How long have you waited?’ I asked the giant when we were done. The Imperial Gothic came easily to my tongue. It always had.

  ‘How…? Long…?’ His voice was slurred and electronic, the syntax broken.

  ‘Very – long…’

  ‘How did you survive?’

  He turned his optic on me, weighing me up like an iron god. Abruptly the visor covering the right side of his face slid aside. In place of flesh and bone I saw a formless grey tangle riddled with electronics and corroded rivets.

  ‘The Flesh – betrays,’ he said, though he had no lips, ‘but the Machine – is faithful.’

  I saw his doom then. His body had succumbed to its wounds, but his depleted augmetics had endured, cradling his consciousness as life slipped away. Half-corpse, half-machine he had stood frozen in this chamber for untold decades, burning with impotent rage as his dead flesh was consumed.

  Denied sleep or the deeper oblivion of death, he had watched as corruption blossomed within and without. I saw him descending into madness, then clawing his way back in the hope of redemption… then falling again. How often had that cycle repeated? And where did it stand now?

  ‘Your mission is complete,’ I said carefully, indicating the tattered spore bomb. ‘We destroyed the taint.’

  ‘You did – Not. This was – Nothing – just another Tendril – of the Corruption. I watched it grow – then grow stale – over the long – Long –

  long…’ He faltered as his splintered mind strove for coherence. ‘The Root –

  survives…’

  He stepped towards the centre of the chamber, moving with surprising grace. We followed and saw the pit for the first time: a dark slash in the ground where the mega-fungus had bloomed. On closer inspection I saw it wasn’t a pit at all, but a steeply inclined tunnel, its walls resinous with fungus, like the aperture of a titanic blood vessel. Or a st
alk…

  The spore bomb grew from here, I realised, and the corruption is still down there, rooted deep in the ground.

  ‘The mission is – Incomplete.’

  Like the Iron Hand’s mission my story is incomplete, but that is of no consequence. My purpose is not to entertain you, but to warn you. Jhi’kaara will carry this log out of the Coil and ensure that it is heard and heeded. This undying tomb must be quarantined lest we fail to destroy its voracious legacy. We? Yes, I have chosen to accompany the Iron Hand on his final duty. I am no warrior, but I can carry grenades and we will bear many into the unclean bowels of this place. Jhi’kaara argued against it, of course, telling me it was her duty to make the final descent.

  ‘You should bear the word and I the fire,’ she said, but it could not be.

  You see, I cannot return. Jhi’kaara was wrong: Xanti’s sting did carry the contagion. Though his touch was fleeting I can feel the taint stirring in my blood like the promise of lies. I don’t know how long I have, but I will not hide in the darkness until the blight takes me. Besides, my corruption is more than blood-deep, for I have fallen from the Tau’va. I am no longer a creature of water or fire, nor indeed of sanity, but I can still serve. I shall descend into the pit alongside my enemy and purge the unclean… For the Greater Good.

  - END RECORDING -

  FARSIGHT: CRISIS OF FAITH

  by Phil Kelly

  Fresh from his victory on Arkunasha, the young Commander

  Farsight leads a crusade to reclaim colonies lost to mankind’s

  Imperium. But stiff resistance will test him to his limits, and beyond.

  Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com

  HOWL OF THE BANSHEE

  GAV THORPE

  A single candle guttered atop a slender pedestal at the centre of the chamber.

  Its light barely touched the five female eldar kneeling in a circle around it, catching them between the warm glow and the chill gloom beyond. They were each clad in tight armour the colour of bone, their red-tassled helms held in their laps, heads bowed in contemplation.