Scourge The Heretic

by Sandy Mitchell

  Whoever they were, they knew their business, deploying with a speed and efficiency his own shambolic platoon couldn’t have hoped to match, even in calm weather. Grateful for the camo cape that concealed him, he huddled lower, and flicked his lasgun’s safety catch off. Kyrlock did the same, and Drake held out a hand to forestall him.

  ‘Don’t shoot unless they spot us,’ he counselled, keeping his voice low despite the screaming engines of the strange, rounded spacecraft and the howl of the wind between the trees. For all he knew, the invaders might have some kind of sound detector among their motley collection of wargear. They certainly seemed to have pretty much everything else. All wore flak or carapace armour of some kind, but every set seemed to have been individualised to some extent, or made up of scavenged components that didn’t quite match. Their weapons were an odd collection too. Many carried lasguns like his own, or stubbers of some kind, but he could see a couple of flamers as well, and several of the troopers carried guns he couldn’t recognise at all, despite a lifetime spent in or around the military. ‘If they do, fire to suppress, and pull back into the woods.’

  Kyrlock nodded, flicking the fire selector of his las weapon to full auto. He wouldn’t have much chance of hitting a target anyway, but he could spray and pray like the best of them, and if they managed to slip away among the trees he was sure his familiarity with this type of terrain would enable him to evade any pursuit easily enough. Danuld too, if he managed to keep up. ‘Shouldn’t we report this?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been trying to,’ Drake said. The hissing in his vox was louder than ever, the chances of getting a signal through absolutely negligible, and he was certain by now that the jamming was deliberate. ‘Looks like we’re on our own.’

  ‘If we head back that way,’ Kyrlock suggested, waving an arm in the vague direction of the fortress, ‘we might be able to get through to Claren in time to warn them.’ The mercenary band was dispersing, melting into the trees in the direction he’d indicated, and he’d feel a lot happier staying behind them if he could. Danuld seemed scared of them, and he’d been a professional soldier before joining the Guard. If they stayed put, or sought refuge deeper in the forest, there was no telling what else they might run into. To his relief, Drake was nodding in agreement.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. If he added anything else, Kyrlock never heard him. The spacecraft’s engines rose in pitch, a shuddering whine that resonated through his bones. Then the gigantic vessel lifted in a cloud of steam as powerful fusion jets vaporised the snow surrounding it. The huge metal shape rose slowly above the trees.

  ‘Come on, then!’ Drake said, and began to run, following the diminishing howl of its engines and the wind scattered footmarks of its enigmatic passengers.

  The Citadel of the Forsaken, Sepheris Secundus

  087.993.M41

  The intruder noted the hour as the hidden timer reached zero, unsure of whether it had actually felt the faintest of tremors through the floor, or had been the victim of an atypical spasm of imagination. The explosion in the ducting behind the genetorium was small enough, as such things go, but its effects were catastrophic.

  Upper atmosphere, Sepheris Secundus

  088.993.M41

  The shuttle Inquisitor Finurbi had requisitioned had just crested the peak of its suborbital parabola, when he tensed in his seat, his face draining of colour.

  ‘Carolus?’ Elyra asked, concerned. She knew him well, better than any of the others, and could see the effort maintaining his composure was costing him. A pyrokene herself, she was unable to initiate direct mind to mind contact, but could recognise the signs of a sudden psychic shock impinging on the consciousness of a powerful telepath. ‘What’s wrong?’

  The moment she spoke she regretted the words. Her companions all shifted in their seats, uneasy, glancing sidelong at the inquisitor. In order to lead them effectively, he had to seem infallible, invulnerable, and she cursed herself for throwing even the slightest doubt on his fitness to command, not to mention drawing attention to the closer bond they shared, which she suspected Horst at least found threatening.

  I’m fine, Carolus mind touched, the words overlaid by reassurance and gratitude for her concern. Thank you for asking. Verbally, he addressed them all. ‘There’s a strong psychic disturbance at our destination. I have no idea, I’m afraid, what’s causing it.’

  Elyra watched her companions digest this information in their various ways. Horst looked worried, but then he always did on a suborbital hop, suffering the agonies of void sickness as they passed through the brief zone of zero gravity. Vex nodded, as though examining this new and unwelcome fact from every direction, before coughing raucously and thumping his chest plate again. Keira simply sat impassively, waiting to find a heretic to kill, only the faint, subconscious twitch of the hand hovering above the hilt of her sword betraying her impatience to begin bloodletting as quickly as possible.

  ‘Inquisitor.’ Their pilot’s voice broke in, diffident and apologetic, like any Secundan addressing someone of higher social status. ‘We’re in receipt of a message from our destination. They advise caution in our approach.’

  ‘Quite,’ Carolus said, his composure apparently fully restored, although Elyra could see how thin the façade really was. ‘I gather the weather conditions are quite severe.’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ the pilot said, apparently happier with a more familiar and less terrifying honorific, ‘but that’s not the reason. They say that they’re under attack.’

  Three

  The Citadel of the Forsaken, Sepheris Secundus

  088.993.M41

  ‘What the hell–’ Malakai began, before the rest of the sentence was drowned by the sudden blaring of alarms. The luminators in the main control chapel had merely flickered for a moment, nothing more, but that and a faint tremor through the rockcrete floor had been enough to warn him that something was awry. The tech-priests manning the lecterns around the chapel, over which twin statues of the Emperor and the Machine-God loomed, both finely wrought in polished glass, just had time to look at one another in consternation, exchanging twittering messages in their arcane secret tongue, before the lights failed altogether. A moment later they flickered back on, blood red, turning the peaceful sanctuary into the semblance of an abattoir.

  ‘Primary generators are off-line,’ a female acolyte of the Omnissiah reported, her droning vox-coder draining her words of the panic her posture was screaming into the room. ‘Secondaries compensating… Secondaries off-line too.’ As she spoke, the sanguineous emergency lighting failed, plunging the echoing room into stygian darkness.

  To Malakai’s relief the blaring alarms fell silent too, and he was able to hear himself think at last. ‘You two, with me,’ he ordered, plucking a hand luminator from his equipment pouches, and drawing his bolt pistol with the other hand. The pair of storm troopers on guard by the door of this most holy of sanctuaries fell in at his shoulder as he ran from the room, their hellguns already cradled, ready for use. Behind them, as they left, a few of the tech-priests kindled luminators built into their augmetics, turning the chapel into a nest of whirling fireflies as they began to pray for guidance, or debate the reason for this sudden and catastrophic displeasure of the Omnissiah.

  ‘Malakai to all stations,’ the guard commander voxed as they ran down darkened corridors, scared and startled faces flickering briefly through the cone of light he cast ahead. ‘Condition Extremis: repeat, Extremis.’

  Despite years of facing the worst horrors the warp and the galaxy could throw at him, he felt a cold trickle of sweat running down his spine at the words he’d never thought he’d use. The command channel was hissing with static, but a few voices were still able to respond, thank the Emperor. By now, the psi dampers would be down, and the thousands of psykers penned up in the containment blocks would suddenly have become aware that their unholy powers were returning. With any luck the shock would incapacitate most of them, if only for a moment or two, but any such respite would b
e short-lived at best. After that, all hell was going to break loose, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  Forest of Sorrows, Sepheris Secundus

  088.993.M41

  ‘Sergeant.’ The vox operator coughed apologetically. ‘A message, sir. From the fortress.’

  Claren stared at him in astonishment. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. The vast, looming structure beyond the camp hadn’t even so much as acknowledged their presence before now. ‘What do they want?’

  ‘Whoever’s in charge,’ the vox man said doubtfully. ‘I told them Lieutenant Kreel’s asleep, and they’ll have to call back in the morning, but they won’t go away.’

  ‘I’ll deal with it,’ Claren said. Browbeating some importunate upstart was a skill he’d learned well in his former life as an overseer in the mines. Rising to his feet, he took hold of the microphone. ‘This is Sergeant Claren,’ he began, ‘duty watch commander–’

  ‘Shut up and listen,’ the voice on the other end said, crisp with the expectation of instant obedience, and Claren’s determination to be obdurate wilted as abruptly as if he’d come face to face with an irritable baron. ‘Get your rabble on full alert now. Surround the bastion, and kill anyone who tries to leave. Understood?’ The voice was fading as it spoke, submerging in the rising sea of static that had already swallowed the voices of the outer sentry posts. Before Claren could muster a reply it had disappeared altogether.

  ‘What are we going to do, sir?’ the vox man asked, an expression of bovine incomprehension on his face. ‘The lieutenant said he wasn’t to be disturbed.’

  ‘We’ve had an order,’ Claren said, working out the ramifications and beginning to think like a soldier for the first and last time in his life. Whoever had given it clearly outranked his own immediate superior. ‘Sound the general alarm.’ Technically, that wouldn’t violate the lieutenant’s instructions either, as the noise would wake him without Claren’s direct intervention. Feeling remarkably pleased with himself, the sergeant reached for his lasgun.

  He’d almost closed his fingers around it when the Chimera erupted in a white-hot fireball, blasted apart by a plasma bolt of almost inconceivable power.

  ‘Throne preserve us!’ Kyrlock ejaculated, as he and Drake reached the treeline just in time to see the fiery demise of their detested superior. The strange, smooth hull of the alien drop-ship swept over the Guardsmen’s encampment like a living, vengeful embodiment of the shrieking elements, stabbing downwards and outwards with beams of incandescent energy that gouged smoking scars through the permafrost beneath the snow, blasting apart hab units and vehicles alike. Dorsal turrets strobed too, pouring a relentless stream of fire into the walls of the fortress, which began to crumble and burn under the inexorable onslaught. Emplaced weapons atop the towering edifice began to reply, but without any noticeable effect. Drake placed a restraining hand on his arm as he took another pace forward.

  ‘Rut this,’ the blond trooper said bluntly, dragging his friend back into the cover of the woods. ‘If we go out there, we’re dead.’

  It was hard to disagree. Those of their comrades who had lived through the initial strike were running around in the open, terrified beyond all rational thought, intent for the most part on nothing more than simple survival. Only a few even attempted to return fire, their las-bolts vanishing into the whirling white-out as if they’d never existed.

  The aerial leviathan turned lazily, and cut another swathe of devastation through what remained of the camp, casually picking off a lone Chimera that seemed to be attempting to flee, the lascannon in its turret continuing to spit futile defiance right up until the moment a hypervelocity projectile shattered its thick armour like porcelain beneath a careless boot.

  Most of the vessel’s staggering firepower continued to be directed against the fortress, however, carving a huge gash through walls, which, until that moment, both Guardsmen would have sworn on the aquila were completely impregnable. Before their astonished and horrified eyes, a section of rockcrete over a dozen metres across splintered and fell, crashing to the ground with an impact that shuddered through their boots even at this distance.

  ‘Look there,’ Drake said, pointing. The foot soldiers they’d been trailing were running forward to enter the breach, scrambling over the scattered rubble, gunning down any surviving Guardsmen foolish enough to attempt to engage them with the same casual disdain with which, as a Royal Scourge, he’d poured lasgun fire into the ranks of rebellious serfs armed only with mining tools.

  Belatedly remembering the amplivisor he carried, he raised it again, focusing the device on the invading mercenaries. Their vanguard was inside the stronghold by now, meeting serious resistance at last from the red uniformed soldiers garrisoned there. The advance was stalling, and he wondered for a moment how they could possibly hope to take the whole fortress with only a couple of dozen men.

  ‘Something’s not right,’ Kyrlock said, as the swooping vessel overhead swatted a battery of lascannon, which had been blazing away at it from the ramparts with very little noticeable effect beyond some superficial dents and scorch marks.

  He was right, Drake thought, an ozone prickle of apprehension running across his skin. A strange sensation of pressure was building all around them, as though the air was somehow becoming thicker, and the whirling snowflakes seemed to slow, hanging suspended in the coagulating wind.

  The Citadel of the Forsaken, Sepheris Secundus

  088.993.M41

  ‘Report,’ Malakai barked, reaching the thick metal doors leading down to the underground containment area at last. A full squad of storm troopers was formed up in front of the cyclopean entrance, their faces grim, and he assessed the assets available to him without conscious thought, bleakly aware that a hundred times their number might not be enough to avert the imminent apocalypse.

  A heavy weapons crew was crouching behind the gunnery shield of their tripod mounted autocannon, but most of the men were armed only with their standard issue hellguns, which they kept trained expectantly on the ominous portal. Thin tendrils of purple lightning played across the dully reflective surface, crackling faintly, imparting an itchy, greasy feel to the air. Malakai noticed that someone had had the sense to set up a portable arc light pointing directly at it. If the warp spawn inside somehow managed to get it open, with any luck they’d be dazzled just long enough for the waiting troopers to open fire.

  Not if, Malakai thought: when. There were over a thousand of the walking obscenities down there, and only a dozen troopers at his shoulder. Calmly, he commended his soul to the Emperor, and waited for the inevitable.

  ‘Sir.’ Jessun, the sergeant leading the squad, saluted, no doubt having come to the same conclusion. ‘The doors are still holding, but there’s a lot of energy building up behind them. We estimate they’ll be out in a matter of minutes.’

  ‘The gas?’ Malakai asked, already certain of the answer. In the event of a complete power failure, a dead man switch was supposed to release a lethal nerve toxin into the containment area, specifically to prevent this nightmare from happening. Jessun looked puzzled.

  ‘Should have been released when the dampers failed,’ he said. ‘Maybe one of the psykers was able to nullify it somehow.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Malakai was suddenly aware that the persistent hissing in his helmet vox had disappeared. ‘Command post, report.’

  ‘We’ve countered the jamming signal,’ the droning voice of a tech-priest informed him, ‘and sent word of our plight. The inquisitor is responding with all speed.’

  ‘Good.’ Malakai felt his spirits lifting for the first time since the incident began. Inquisitors were the unfailing right hand of the Emperor. For a moment, he began to think that perhaps things might be brought back under control, after all.

  Then, with shocking suddenness, the doors collapsed, and he was swept away by a tidal wave of lethal insanity.

  Forest of Sorrows, Sepheris Secundus

  088.993.M41

  ‘Emperor preserve and
guide our steps. From all things foul and warp spawned, shield us,’ Drake mumbled under his breath, repeating as much of the half-remembered catechism of protection as he could call to mind. Things had gone far beyond the merely wrong. The snowflakes were moving slowly through the clotted air, dancing and swirling apparently at random, no longer driven by the gale, which had been sweeping them along, forming patterns his mind refused to recognise, but which hurt the back of his eyes. The air felt hot and humid, and hard to breathe.

  Nevertheless, he kept the amplivisor raised, trying to follow the progress of the firefight in the devastated fortress. The mercenaries seemed to be falling back, the superior numbers of the red uniformed soldiers beginning to tell despite their tenacity. Then, without warning, everything changed. Abruptly, the defenders broke, turning to face some new threat from within the redoubt, and the mercenaries swept on, triumphant.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Kyrlock asked at his shoulder, and Drake lowered the lenses at last, a casual gesture, which was to save his life.

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ he admitted, just as something erupted into existence between them with a crack of displaced air and a nimbus of violet lightning. A young woman stood between them, barefoot in the snow, clad only in a thin grey robe. A tattoo almost identical to Kyrlock’s marked her cheek, indicating that she had once been the bonded serf of the same baron the former forester had cheated of his tithes, and she gazed at the two Guardsmen through emerald eyes, from which the last vestiges of sanity had long since fled.

  ‘You’re a bad man,’ she told Drake conversationally, the violet aura continuing to play around her, ‘but everyone can Change.’ She reached out a hand towards his face. ‘Change with me.’ She blinked, her eyelids closing from the sides instead of downwards, and a thin, forked tongue emerged from between her lips.