by Ben Counter
Sarpedon had brought four hundred Soul Drinkers onto the unnamed world, well over half the Chapter's remaining strength. There was a very real chance that none of them would return, a chance every one of them understood. They would be vulnerable on the ocean - they were vulnerable now, not least because the dark power they were here to destroy could well know they had arrived. And even if everything went right they would still be attacking what was in all likelihood a well-defended and fortified position, facing doubtlessly fanatical and even daemonic resistance. And there was always the problem of whether they would even be able to get back to the orbiting Brokenback, regardless of their success on the ground.
None of it mattered. They were here because they owed the Emperor, the Architect of Fate, for showing them the truth, because He demanded they prove their worthiness to count themselves as His divine warriors. If they had to die, then they would die. The only fear that death held was that they would die without having accomplished their life's work of service to the Emperor - but to die here, for a Marine to give his life facing such a foe for such a reason, was to accomplish more than the longest-lived of the weak-willed Imperial servants could ever hope to achieve.
The low, throaty rumble drifted across from the harbour as the engines were tested. They sounded healthy enough - no doubt within a couple of hours the Soul Drinkers taskforce would be heading across the ocean towards the lair of Ve'Meth.
Sarpedon headed down the rocky ridge to supervise the Marines' embarkation onto the ships. Soon they would be gone from the island, leaving only a handful of serf-labourers guarding the Thunderhawks, and two hundred subhuman corpses.
Chapter Ten
IMAGINE A MAN. Now imagine him with no skin. Muscles wet to the open air, crowded onto slabs of pulpy pink tissue. Veins snaking, arteries squirming like snakes. Take his eyes and multiply them, like those of a spider, studding the upper half of his face, translucent blue-black. For a mouth, give him a pit lined with a dozen mandibles that could open like the tendrils of a grabflower.
Hammer a chunk of pitted metal, one edge honed sharp into the bony club of one hand for him to wield like a sword.
Armour him, but not in iron. No, in chunks of more muscle, grown into his own until his body was massive and huge-shouldered, spines jutting from the corded tendons. Mould it into a high collar of gristle and gauntlets of bone. Have him leave footprints of gore wherever he goes, and let clear grey liquid seep from his every surface.
Gelentius Vorp knew what he looked like. He rejoiced in it. Not least, his leathery seven-valved heart swelled to think of how even the mightiest chieftains of Methuselah 41 would have quailed at his very approach.
The peoples of the outer hills on Methuselah 41 had never been tamed. Though the men of the Imperial Guard fought them with guns and the Missionaria Galaxia battled with faith, the horsemen of the outer hills had never relented. They had made it their livelihood to raid the Imperial settlements and refinery outposts, as much to prove the manliness of their way of life as to steal weapons and livestock. They had struck like thunder and killed like lightning, and never stooped to pity the foes who fell before them.
It had been a good life. Gelentius Vorp had been proud of his people, who had raised him on the banks of the nitrogen rivers and sent him out strapped to a warrior's saddle before he had learned to walk. He had tasted a man's blood while he was still suckling mother's milk, and taken a man's head while he could still count his years on his fingers.
As he stood on the beach of broken black coral, he tried to remember - would he have loved that life on Methuselah 41 had he known what really lay beyond his homeworld's yellow-green sky? No. He would not. A thousand heads piled outside his groxhide tent would not have sated his lust to serve a power worthy of his subservience. When Ve'Meth had come to his world, he had learned so much and seen such wonders that he could never have gone back to the horse tribes of Methuselah 41.
Not mat he could - as with every world Ve'Mem had visited on his travels, he had left Methuselah 41 a blighted place, brimming with poisons and inimical to human life. A beautiful world, thought Vorp, but not one where he could leave his mark upon the universe as he desired. This new planet was better by far, hard and cold. It was one of the few worlds that could both be a home to Ve'Meth, and remain survivable enough to be a base for an army of his followers. Gelentius Vorp was the greatest of those followers, leading the plague hosts deep into the surrounding star clusters and preying on the foolhardy space traffic. One day, Vorp too would ascend to daemonhood, take a world for himself, forge an empire of malice and kill until the stars died around him.
Vorp's thoughts were broken by a messenger-thing, a dried-out tangle of tendons and skin that flapped lopsidedly towards him from along the beach. In the distance Vorp could see the slave-gangs hauling sharp chunks of coral to form barricades and hardpoints, and the cult-legions of Ve'Meth marching to the tune of discordant screeches from attack beasts that dogged their steps. Daemons, skin sallow and wet, malformed warp-flesh glowing faintly in the dusklight, clambered on the rippling peaks of coral and stone, befouling everything with their touch. Every living thing here was malformed, withered by disease or torn by mutation - everywhere limbs ended in dubs of bone and skin sloughed off by the handful, skeletons were racked by uncontrolled growth and mouths lolled with madness.
And beyond the beach, the ocean. Vorp's warp-attuned senses could hear the huge, mad creatures wallowing in the deeps, waiting for the call of their prince to bring them up to the surface. Shoals of malicious things swam around them, picking bites from their flesh, laughing at their agony. The planet was steeped in life, and that life was wielded like a weapon by Ve'Meth.
A wonderful world, to have taken so much to the touch of the Daemon Prince Ve'Meth.
'Gelentius Vorp, heed us,' hissed the messenger. 'Our lord would speak with you.'
Though he had been long in service - ten years, a hundred? - Vorp had rarely had the pleasure of an audience with the daemon prince himself. Lord Ve'Mem chose only those who pleased or displeased him the most - the first for reward, the second for a fate not even his own followers could divine.
'Do you know fear, Gelentius Vorp?' asked the messenger insolently.
'No, creature. I fear nothing. I serve my lord and have never failed in his eyes.'
The creature smiled - though it was hard to tell given its loose-skinned and rotting face - and flapped away.
Daemons. They had no respect for the mortal. No matter - eventually Vorp would himself wear the flesh of a daemon prince, and would toy with the lesser daemons as he wished. He knew Ve'Meth often hurt them for amusement, as he did the hapless hordes of slaves brought in from Vorp's raiding parties, and Vorp would do the same when his time came.
He headed back up the beach towards Ve'Meth's fortress, grown from the once-dead coral like a massive black stone pustule topped with a crater from which watery pus bubbled and flowed in steaming streams down its living sides. Vorp felt the shards of coral sand digging into the raw soles of his feet, and was proud that he could take the pain like it was nothing.
Onto the foothills of the fortress, through the orifice-gate and into the innards of Ve'Meth's palace, where the floors were paved with the half-living bodies of worn-out, plague-wracked slaves and the walls sweated bile. Up the tortuously twisted spiral staircases, upwards through the halls where shock troops, hardened cultists with sheets of metal nailed to their pustuled bodies, ran through the drills that had billhooks and morningstars slashing through imaginary foes. Through the viewing gallery where visions of the planet's polluted clouds scudded across the room, past the moaning huddles of disease-stricken slaves who had displeased their master, and into the audience chamber of the Daemon Prince Ve'Meth.
'Vorp. Good.' The voice that spoke was a woman's, sharp and clipped. Then, in a deep and slovenly masculine voice - 'Our world is less wearisome, for the hunting will soon be good.'
The chamber was an immense a
bscess beneath the pus-filled tip of the fortress-blister. And in the chamber stood eight hundred human bodies, male and female, all shapes and appearances, dressed in rags or finery or spacer's boiler suits. The only things they had in common were that they all bore the mark of some disease plain on their pasty skin, and they looked towards Gelentius Vorp as one.
'Something clean and unpestilent has come to our world, my champion.' said yet another of the bodies, for every sentence came from a different mouth. 'Unblessed! Cleanlisome! Four times a hundred of them, Vorp, and even now they ride the waves of our world in the hope they can face me and destroy me.'
Vorp smiled, if it could be called a smile. 'You cannot be destroyed, Lord Ve'Meth.'
All who were graced by the favour of Ve'Meth knew it to be true. The daemon prince had been blessed by the Plague God with a form most pleasing to those who revered pestilence and decay - he was a sentient disease, a colony of industrious microbes that infected the hosts of his choice and rotted their senses until they belonged completely to him. The eight hundred bodies of Ve'Meth, knitted together by the prince's infectious colony-mind, formed the blighted heart of the unnamed world, and the crusade of corruption that would one day soon sweep out from this planet and into the soft underbelly of the universe.
The eight hundred mouths of Ve'Meth scowled. 'Destruction, Vorp? Such a base, crude, unbotheratious thing! Do we fear destruction? How much of the flesh you wear now were you born with? None, I feel. You have been destroyed, Vorp. So have I, a million times over as I scaled the ladder of His pestilent Grandfathership's favour. No, I think of what they could do to the future. The potential I have created, Vorp, the bepustulated, filthificatious future! And they would make us nothing, rob us of our power, scrape our beautiful world clean of its vileness and make us just one more meaningless drop of nothing!'
'Destruction, Vorp? Destruction is nothing. We will survive. But nothingness - that is something to fear.'
A little under sixteen hundred eyes glared, Ve'Meth rarely admitted to any weakness, much less fear. But Gelentius Vorp, champion of the plague god, felt it too. They had come so far, from the scattered warbands following Grandfather Nurgle through the stars to the perfection of this world, shaped by Ve'Mefh's will, a seed that would grow into an empire of glorious fecundity and decay. They were so close now, but perhaps an enemy dedicated and deadly enough would have a chance of fatally upsetting their preparations.
'What do you wish of me, Lord Ve'Meth?'
Ve'Meth paused, and eight hundred faces seemed to consider this question. 'Ah, what to do? You are but a soldier, Gelentius Vorp, but one whom I have raised to be my right hand. If the enemy have lost their way, they will die no matter what they do, for my oceans are vomitorious and grave. But if they find their way here, they will surely attack with every last cleanlisome one of them. Therefore I give you, Gelentius Vorp, the task of marshalling an army on my shore, to fend off the uncorroded ones. You have the enlightened of my cults and the creatures born of my daemonhood, and the slaves if you can find a use for them.'
Gelentius Vorp felt the maggots in his entrails writhe with pride. To think that the Daemon Prince Ve'Meth himself had chosen him for such a task! He had captained daemon-fuelled plague-galleons into the cosmos to raid the space traffic foolish enough to stray too close, but he had longed to wield a true army in the field against a worthy enemy. Now he had got his wish - and on the doorstep of the fortress, under the very eyes of Ve'Meth himself!
'Lord Ve'Meth, it is a most plaguesome honour to-'
'Do not fail me, Gelentius Vorp, General of Chaos.' The voice this time was hard and commanding. To waste energy creating a punishment for you would not please me. Now leave, and prepare your defences.'
Eight hundred backs were turned to him. Ve'Meth was not in the habit of granting such audiences and when he did, they were short. Vorp turned and left the chamber, to feel the hundreds of eyes suddenly against his back.
'Vorp? Am I not stenchsome? Am I not the fulgurating glory of Grandfather Nurgle's joyous corruption?' said eight hundred voices.
'Yes, my prince. As always.'
One day, thought Vorp as he strode through the ichor-crusted halls of Ve'Meth's fortress, he would take on the mantle of daemon in the hordes of Ve'Meth's crusade, and this planet would bloom into a cancerous empire smearing corruption across the stars.
But first, the interlopers would die. Muscles tightened around the pitted iron of his bastard sword and the grim-worms squirmed down his spine with anticipation. Once he had been proud to lead a dozen warriors on horseback against the outposts of the Missionaria Galaxia - now he would have gibbering daemon-spawn beneath his lash, and ten thousand slave-filth crashed at his whim, all for the purpose of fending off those who would violate this world with their purity.
He found himself wishing the invaders would survive this far, so he could face them across the black coral beach and hurl them back screaming into the sea.
THE FOG ROLLED in like an enemy. Sarpedon was perched on the bow, talons dug into the iron-hard wood, the blade of the ship's prow cutting through the waves beneath him. The pulse of the engine throbbed through the hull as it powered the ship forwards at a speed even the exacting Tech-Marines had been pleased to reach.
The air was fouler the longer they travelled - it had got steadily worse over the last two days, and Sarpedon was sure it was because they were closing in on the source of the planet's sickness. Every Marine was still under orders to wear his helmet, and the serf-labourers were already developing lesions on exposed skin no matter how hard they tried to keep covered and stay below decks. The skies ended in an impenetrable ceiling of yellow-grey cloud even when there was no fog, and the waves were tipped with unhealthy foam. Fish with too many fins attached themselves to the sides of the hulls with vile round sucker-mouths, and titanic dark shapes slid into the depths in the distance.
The unnamed planet was against them. Every time one of the Soul Drinker lookouts spotted land, the damn fog swept in again. It was as if it knew they were here and blinded them as soon as there was anything worth seeing. It made it difficult in the extreme to navigate, not least because communications with the Brokenback had, as expected, been lost. Tyrendian, stationed on the second ship half-glimpsed through the fog, was responsible for navigation, and had filled a cabin below decks of the second ship with orbital scan printouts covered in scribbled routes and sightings. It had been hoped that Tyrendian and Sarpedon could navigate by psychic means, but the menacing darkness of the black flame burned so intensely that they feared it could poison their minds if they stared too far whh their minds' eyes.
Sarpedon had put Captain Karraidin in command of the second ship - Karraidin was a respected force commander who had shown total loyalty to Sarpedon ever since the fires of the chapter war. Chaplain Iktinos was at his side, crozius in hand, along with several tactical squads and the few serf-labourers the taskforce had taken with them. The first of the three ships had been christened the Hellblade, after the Hellblade Pass where the Chapter had made one of its most celebrated stands.
Sarpedon's own ship - the Ultima, after the operations around Ultima Macharia - included his command squad under Givrillian and rather more than a hundred Space Marines. The third ship, hanging just behind the other two, was commanded by Sergeant Graevus and contained the bulk of the assault squads under Tellos. Even Sarpedon had to consider the wisdom of putting Tellos in charge of anything - he had changed so much in body and mind that a more hidebound commander would consider him unstable. But his enthusiasm was such that the battle-brothers would feel something was missing if they launched an assault without Tellos, twin hand-blades flashing, at its head. Graevus's ship would be the first onto the shore when they reached Ve'Meth's archipelago, and Tellos would be the first into the face of the enemy.
Graevus had wanted to call his ship the Quixian, but Sarpedon had suggested otherwise. Instead, it was named the Lakonia. This name Sarpedon approved of - it
was good omen, to name the ship after the Soul Drinkers' first true victory.
Four hundred Marines, packed into three ships. Three arrows speeding towards the heart of corruption? Maybe. Three pens of animals, herded into killing pens? Definitely. They had never been more vulnerable. No matter that the augmented musculature and the nerve-fibre bundles of power armour made a Marine a strong swimmer - anyone who ended up in the water would have minutes to live, and that was assuming he could straggle out of his heavier armour sections before he sank like a stone. A ship that went down might take every fighting man with it.
Something huge and mindless lolled just beneath the water's surface. Its flesh was grey and rubbery and Sarpedon thought he could see a massive pale eye through the swelling waves. He glimpsed great flapping things through the fog and thought how deformed and unnatural they must be to breathe the air here. Every Marine's internal rebreather implant was already furring up. When they got back to the Brokenback the apothecaries would be on constant duty replacing the pre-lung filters.
If they got back at all.
But it didn't matter. None of it mattered, as long as they cut out the cancer that was Ve'Meth, or did themselves the honour of dying in the attempt.
Gunfire chattered. One of the flapping creatures spasmed and fell into the sea, the sound of its death drowned by the rumblings of the waves and the creaking of the ship's timbers. Sarpedon glanced back over the deck and saw Sergeant Dreo bolstering his boltgun, his squad gathered around him with guns still drawn, scanning for targets. The game was the same - any Marine who could bring down a target before the sergeant would be excused menial tasks for one day, spending it instead in contemplation and research in the archivum. This had happened twice since Dreo had been made sergeant, and that was twelve years ago.
