The Plagues of Orath

by Various

  The Scourge’s missiles were of no use in this situation. There was no way the Hunter could fire into the melee and not take out more friends than it did foes.

  For the first time in a while – since before the destruction of the first daemon engine – Arkelius felt a familiar itch. He longed to be out there, fighting alongside his brothers. He longed to feel the trembling of a chainsword in his palm as it bit into a stinking traitor’s armour. An irrational part of him felt unworthy, even, watching from inside his plasteel and ceramite bunker while others put their lives on the line for him.

  He threw open his top hatch again. He stood up on his seat and levelled his bolter across the Scourge’s roof. He squeezed the trigger whenever he had a clear shot at an enemy, which wasn’t nearly as often as he would have liked. At least he was doing something useful.

  In between shots, Arkelius prayed that the Emperor would lend strength to his battle-brothers’ arms and precision to their weapons. He prayed that for each brother cut down by a Plague Marine’s sword, his gene-seed at least might be rescued.

  The Death Guard were outnumbered, yes, but each one of them fought to the last breath in his festering body, refusing to surrender even a centimetre of ground.

  Once again, Arkelius wondered just what it was they were fighting for. What was it that made Fort Kerberos a prize worth the having, even as it lay in ruins?

  The battle seemed to rage forever, Arkelius’s enforced inactivity making every second seem to stretch into a lifetime. Then, the field in front of him began to clear at last, and Captain Numitor’s voice came over the vox-net again.

  The Imperial tanks started forward on Numitor’s order. The Scourge was still out a short way ahead of the pack, so, as Arkelius dropped back into his seat, he told his driver to give the other vehicles a second or two to draw level.

  It was just as well. Corbin had switched off the engine while they were stationary, giving it a chance to cool down. It took him three tries to restart it, and, when he did so, warning lights flashed across the instrument banks again and Arkelius smelt something burning.

  Corbin voxed him, anticipating his commander’s question, ‘I can hold it together, if we take it slow and steady.’

  For the first time he sounded stressed, and, as the Hunter ground into reluctant motion, Arkelius felt it pulling insistently to the left.

  They rolled past a Plague Marine, still on his feet and holding his own against four Ultramarines. Then, suddenly, another traitor emerged from the smoke in front of them. His face was hidden by a rash of vile mutations and grafted-on augmetics.

  He saw the Scourge bearing down on him, and braced himself as if to halt it with the strength of his own arms. Arkelius had Iunus train the hull-mounted storm bolter on the Plague Marine, and they blasted him with explosive rounds.

  Then the Plague Marine leapt, a jump pack on his back firing, and he landed with a thump, spread-eagled across the Scourge’s prow. He was holding a death’s-head grenade, and Arkelius realised that he was trying to jam it down the Skyspear missile launcher’s barrel.

  He was dragged from his perch by a pair of Ultramarines and shot at point-blank range in the head until he stopped twitching. Arkelius recognised one of the slayers – recognised the markings on his sealed armour, anyway – as Valerion, a former squad-mate.

  The Scourge rolled over something its weight couldn’t crush – a hillock, or, more likely, an armoured corpse – and, briefly, his vision slit pointed up at the overcast sky. He saw the jagged warp rift and quickly wrenched his eyes away from its purple glare. At least its close proximity told him that they were finally nearing their objective.

  Standing in their way, of course, was a line of enemy tanks.

  There were several Chaos Predators among them. Most of the tanks, however, were Vindicators: siege engines, fitted with Demolisher cannons and dozer-blades. Their Death Guard owners had modified them in other ways too: more bizarre and horrifying ways.

  Directly ahead of the Scourge, one tank had slimy tentacles sprouting from its hull and it was coughing up gouts of flame; another daemon-engine, it seemed. Most of the tanks were daubed with blazing Chaos runes, which made them painful to look at.

  They had played little part in the fighting thus far, and had waited in silence for their enemies to come to them. As the battlefield began to clear, however – as the risk of causing collateral damage diminished – they were bringing their guns to bear.

  Two Ultramarines were struck by Demolisher shells and vaporised.

  Arkelius held the Scourge of the Skies back, alongside its sister Hunter – the Vengeance of Daedalus – and the two Stalkers. He let the Imperial Predator Destructors edge ahead of them. Their autocannons blazed, as did the lascannons in their sponsons, to which the enemy artillery were quick to respond in kind.

  The enemy tanks were well within the Skyspear’s range now – and close enough for Iunus to get a target lock on any of them, despite the intervening smoke haze. So, Arkelius had his driver step on the brakes and lower the stabilisers.

  Iunus asked permission to fire a missile. As Arkelius gave it, he heard sobering news through his earpiece: a Predator, one of theirs, had already been destroyed, struck by one of those Demolishers. Its crew hadn’t had time to get out; they had perished in flames.

  ‘All right,’ he snarled, addressing his own crew, ‘this is it! Captain Galenus is dealing with the Death Guard at the fort. That just leaves these unholy machines for us. Blow our way through them, and it’s over. We’ll have done the Emperor proud.’

  As the leader of an infantry squad, he had often given similar speeches before. In the past, though, he had usually believed them.

  The Scourge’s first Skyspear missile hit the Vindicator in front of them. Arkelius was sure that it had cracked its armour plating, but the tank’s hull flowed like ooze, reforming into a new and even more hideous shape. Its turret spun around to face its attacker.

  A pair of searchlights on the Vindicator’s prow snapped on, glaring through the smoke of the explosion like malevolent eyes. To Arkelius, it seemed as if those eyes were looking right through the front of the Scourge and directly into his soul.

  Galenus learned of Chelaki’s fate over the vox-net.

  He hadn’t known the Doom Eagle, but he would certainly mourn his passing; later, when he had the time. For now, he was just grateful for the gain that his sacrifice had bought.

  He had lost three men from his own small force of ten, but the Apothecaries could probably save some of them, if they could reach them. On the other hand, the bodies of three of the seven Death Guard lay broken and half-buried in Fort Kerberos’s shifting rubble.

  Galenus closed with another of them. As he did so, the Plague Marine’s hollow eyes darkened and he jabbered insanely to himself. Suddenly, a cloud of filth erupted around him, filled with hundreds of thousands of tiny flies. Galenus’s auto-senses went wild, warning him of the threat of infection, and, reluctantly, he fell back.

  His battle-brothers nearby were having more luck. Brother Filion, with a sweep of his chainsword, opened up a fourth Plague Marine’s stomach, and, as the traitor sank to his knees coughing up black bile, Sergeant Thalorus sliced off his head.

  Terserus broke away from his own opponent and stamped into the cloud of pestilence, which clearly held no fear for him. Galenus and Thalorus took over from him, flanking the traitor that the Dreadnought had been fighting. As Filion moved to join them too, the captain voxed him.

  ‘No. Deal with the diggers.’

  Filion followed orders. He loped sure-footedly across the shifting wreckage, towards the spade-carrying zombies, which didn’t react to his approach at all. He announced his presence by sending a grenade ahead of him, pitching it into the heart of the largest zombie grouping.

  That got their attention. The explosion scattered the ungainly creatures and put a stop to their la
bours at long last. Some of them were hurled up to a hundred metres away, and more than a few were brutally dismembered. Hardly any of them, however, stayed down.

  The zombies climbed to their feet and came shambling towards Brother Filion.

  He pumped them full of bolter fire, putting some down but only staggering most. The first zombies reached him and he greeted them with a screaming chainsword, but the zombies were almost as resistant to injury as the Death Guard themselves.

  The zombies swarmed Filion, overwhelming him through sheer weight of numbers. They were scrabbling at his armour, seeking out its seams – or any fresh cracks – with grimy, splintered fingernails. They pinned his right arm to his side, impeding his use of his weapons. His chainsword blade was cutting into a zombie’s ribcage, but it didn’t seem to care.

  Galenus planted his boot in his latest opponent’s stomach and pushed hard. Taken by surprise, the Plague Marine sprawled backwards. Galenus had the opening he needed to rush to Brother Filion’s assistance. The Plague Marine recovered faster than he had hoped and began to follow him, but found the massive form of Terserus blocking his path.

  A rockcrete block shifted under Galenus’s foot, almost making him fall. His reaction time seemed a little off; his head felt light, but his stomach was heavy. He feared he might have been infected by the stinking cloud after all.

  Then, his eyes flickered upwards to the purple storm raging high above him. The warp rift. He was directly underneath it now. He fancied that he could feel the foul horrors of the immaterium, scratching at the furthest edges of his mind, looking for a way in. He swallowed hard and told himself not to think about it. He had to be able to concentrate on the task ahead of him. He had to stop that rift from opening any further.

  He had to hold the horrors at bay.

  Galenus reached Filion’s side. He had sheathed his gladius and wielded his chainsword two-handed so that each blow would have the strength of two servo-assisted arms behind it. The zombies were easy enough to hit – they hardly made an effort to defend themselves – but, as Galenus had already seen, near-impossible to kill.

  His best bet, clearly, was to carve them into small chunks.

  He drove his whirling blade through rotten grey flesh and brittle grey bones. He had saved Brother Filion’s life; at least, for now. His one-man cavalry charge had kept his battle-brother from going under. The zombies still had a significant advantage of numbers, but it was much harder to surround two Space Marines – when each of them was watching the other’s back – than one.

  Galenus risked a backwards glance, aware of the powerful enemy he had left behind him. He saw that Terserus was keeping the Plague Marine occupied, subjecting him to a sustained barrage of bolter fire. He had turned his back on his previous opponent, however – the one who had summoned the cloud, and who now aimed a meltagun at the Dreadnought’s back.

  A concentrated blast of superheated air caused Terserus’s armour to shed blue molten tears. He didn’t skip a beat in delivering his retaliation. The storm bolter that had taken the place of his right forearm swivelled vertically, a hundred and eighty degrees, to point behind him. It spat hot metal at the Plague Marine, punching new holes through his armour.

  Galenus had one ear tuned to the voice of a southbound Stormtalon pilot. He was on the edge of vox range, fading in and out, but the captain picked up the salient details of his report. The pilot had just laid eyes upon the Death Guard’s Thunderhawks.

  There were two of them, as the Quintillus’s scans had suggested. There was something else too. Another daemon engine – the same as the first two, dragon-like in appearance – had been clinging to one of the transporter’s hulls, which was why the scans had missed it. It had disengaged now and was coming at the Imperial Stormtalons, breathing fire.

  The pilot’s voice cut out altogether then, drowned in static.

  Galenus tried to contact the Quintillus, but received no reply. He spoke to Terserus over their private channel instead. The Dreadnought confirmed that, no, he couldn’t raise the battle-barge either; the fault wasn’t with the captain’s equipment.

  ‘The warp rift,’ Galenus muttered. ‘It’s directly between us now. It must be interfering with our vox signals.’ He wondered, for the first time, if Captain Fabian had been right. Should he have stayed in orbit? He didn’t like being out of touch with his forces like this.

  ‘You’d rather be up there,’ asked Terserus, as if the captain had voiced his thoughts, ‘not knowing what was happening down here?’

  This happened sometimes: a glimmer of his old self surfacing from the mist – the Sergeant Terserus of old, who knew Galenus better than anyone ever had – and, as usual, he was right. The captain had made his decision. He had to fight and win the battle he had chosen to fight.

  He swung his blade and cut both legs off a zombie at the knees. It fell, but dragged itself back towards him on its stomach and elbows. It tried to bite Galenus’s ankle; he kicked it in the head repeatedly until the last of its mouldering teeth fell out.

  There was more help on the way too. Another battle-brother had broken through the Plague Marines dwindling ranks.

  Galenus only wished he knew what was happening elsewhere on the planet.

  He wished he knew for sure why Death Guard gunships were headed towards Fort Garm. He wished he knew how the effort to slow them down was going. He wished he knew the condition of Fort Kerberos’s Great Seal, still buried somewhere beneath his feet – was it intact or wasn’t it?

  He just wished he could be certain that he wasn’t fighting for nothing.

  Below the wreckage of Fort Kerberos – a long way below– a figure stirred.

  His bones were broken. He was pinned to the ground by heavy debris. He had thought himself dead, and, perhaps, for a short time, he had been.

  The last thing he remembered, he had been locked in mortal combat with a single foe; no match for him, or so he had believed at the time.

  Naracoth had been arrogant and careless, and the memory of it shamed him.

  His enemy – Artorius, the Space Marine, although he had been battered and bloodied – had first taken his hand and then swept his feet out from under him.

  He had snatched up a weapon from the ground and plunged it into Naracoth’s skull with all his fading strength, penetrating his brain. He should have been dead.

  It seemed, however, that his god was not yet done with him.

  The roof of the shrine – the shrine in which he had fought, beneath the fort – had mostly collapsed. An obstinate pillar had held, sparing Naracoth the full force of the cave-in. His opponent had not been as blessed by his own paltry deity. A silver gauntlet protruded from beneath a hunk of rockcrete.

  Artorius’s head, throat and chest had been utterly crushed.

  Naracoth lifted his own bloated head with effort. The sodium torches that had lined the smooth walls had been extinguished. The shrine, however, was bathed in a bright, flickering purple light, the source of which he couldn’t see.

  His eyes searched for the artefact that had drawn him to this backwater world: the first of the two Great Seals. The shrine had been built around it: a gleaming, crystal rod plunged into a raised stone platform like a key pushed into a lock.

  It had been impervious to Naracoth’s strongest blows – but not to the sorcerous power of his unclean lord. The blood of one of the Great Seal’s keepers had broken the Seal. A shard of it, however, had remained stubbornly intact.

  Naracoth had been forced to seek out another sacrifice.

  His dry, scabby lips parted. A wheezing laugh bubbled up from his blackened, shrivelled lungs. He hadn’t failed in his mission, after all. He may have fallen to his enemy, but he had surely dealt him a mortal blow in the process; the shrine’s collapse had only finished the job. Artorius’s blood had spilled out of his dying body. Its stain must have spread to the remaining crystal shard; thus
the required sacrifice had been made.

  Of the first of the Great Seals of Orath, nothing remained; nothing but crystal fragments. The platform into which it had been plunged had shattered too, and it was from somewhere beneath this that the purple light now streamed.

  Naracoth reached up with his remaining hand. He gripped the shard of the Great Seal, still lodged within his brain. He closed his fingers tightly around it and yanked it free. The agony was incredible, almost making him black out again, and he screamed.

  The fragment was brittle now, and he crushed it in his fist.

  The purple light grew brighter, as if it was collecting around him, as if the shard had been keeping it at bay until this moment.

  And now, the light was tearing savagely through Naracoth’s body. A thousand phantom blades were slicing into his organs; his blood was on fire and he screamed again, longer and louder than before. He had faith, however, that he could endure any pain.

  Had he not earned Nurgle’s favour, after all?

  The Plague God had received his loyal servant’s gift, and had chosen to bestow the greatest of all possible rewards upon him. The purple light was tearing Naracoth apart, but at the same time he knew that it was putting him back together.

  He could feel the corrupting energy of the immaterium pouring into his veins. His every muscle was mutating, growing larger, more grotesque, more powerful by the second. The rubble pressing down on his legs didn’t bother him any longer. He knew he could lift it easily.

  The warp was flooding into Naracoth’s mind too. His last fragile strand of sanity finally snapped. He neither noticed nor would he have cared. He had spent his whole life working towards this moment and he had no intention of backing away from it now.

  He cast his old persona, his old life, aside with casual glee.