Horusian Wars: Resurrection

by John French

  Ghast saluted without hesitation, and turned, her shouts of command battering against the screams of ship and crew.

  ‘Mistress Viola,’ called an ensign from deeper into the bridge. Viola glanced at the woman. She looked young, perhaps no more than twenty years, the pallor of her skin still not leached of vigour by life in the void. For a terrible instant Viola realised that she could not remember the ensign’s name.

  ‘Yes?’ she called.

  ‘Remaining sensors have just detected an ordnance lock,’ said the ensign. ‘The hostile frigate has just fired a torpedo payload at the asteroid.’

  Space beyond the viewports spun over as the Dionysia rolled again and shot back towards the direction of the warp rifts and the asteroid station beyond. Viola realised she was still swearing as the prow cut into the glowing curtains of warp-light.

  Eighteen

  A shape bubbled out of the air beside Severita. Boils erupted across wet flesh, splitting and gushing pus. A mouth of ripped meat opened to cry. Severita fired her bolt pistol into it. The shells punched into the mass of flesh and exploded. Meat and filth sprayed out, burning as it fell. The rest of the daemon’s form jerked forward, blood and smoking warp-stuff spilling from its shredded head. She stepped back and to the side, firing into the daemon’s mouth. The ritual movements, learned so long ago, unfolded through her as she swerved away from a jet of bile, pulled a bronze-plated magazine from her belt and slammed it into her bolt pistol. She pulled the trigger an instant after the firing mechanism slammed forwards.

  The bolt shell that roared out was silver and held a vial of thrice-blessed water at its core. It struck the daemon, detonated, and reduced its expanding flesh to burning slime. She spun as she sheathed her sword and drew her second bolt pistol.

  Covenant was a smudged shape beyond a curtain of light that blurred the chamber as the warp-wind blew. His two-handed sword was cutting, hacking through daemons as they clawed their way into being. His face was set, eyes flashing. A humanoid figure of wobbling flesh and rotting fat staggered towards him and swung a cleaver of rusted iron. Covenant stepped to the side of the blow, and sliced the creature from crown to groin.

  From the blasphemy of the Fallen, Our Emperor, deliver us.

  Severita heard the silent beat of her prayer rise as she cut to Covenant’s side. She spun and turned, and ducked and fired. It was not about speed, it was about focus. Voices screamed in her mind. Fear and madness ate into her thoughts. But the thread of prayer led her true, blinding her eyes to horror and stopping her ears to the cries that told her she should despair, that she could rise to glory, that she was a maggot in the flesh of mankind.

  From the begetting of daemons, Our Emperor, deliver us.

  A claw caught her shoulder from behind and ripped through her shoulder guard. She put her left hand under her right arm and fired a burst without looking. The claw jerked back just before it would have cut into her flesh. She heard a hiss like water boiling on hot metal.

  From the curse of the mutant, Our Emperor, deliver us.

  The air was burning and bubbling with multi-coloured flame. High hooting cries echoed up. The cries and explosions blended into a cacophony that sounded almost alive – that sounded like laughter. Thick fumes and serpent-coils of smoke hazed the air above. And, as Severita took a step closer to Covenant, she looked up. The vaulted metal of the chamber was no longer there. Cruel stars burned where it should have been, glinting with malevolence in a sea of darkness that pulled the eye on, and on, and on, without comfort or end.

  That thou wouldst bring them only death.

  The thread of prayer inside Severita’s soul quieted to a whisper. Her movement slowed. She was aware at once that it should not, but her limbs were obeying a call that was not her own. A daemon leapt out of empty air at her. Its body formed in an instant, and she had time only to lurch drunkenly to the side. It was a beauty of abomination, clean-limbed and smooth-skinned. Even the needle teeth in its smile sparkled with joy. Severita tried to hear the chord of her prayer, but it was faint, the pressure of the present like the surge of an ocean tide picking up a pebble. The claw that extended towards her face seemed lazy, a caress of razor edge chitin.

  That thou shouldst…

  The bolt-round punched through the daemon’s torso and out of its back. Lightning flashed as the silver and fire unmade the mock substance of its flesh and cooked the daemon’s blood to smoke.

  Covenant halted. The sensor pod spun over his shoulder as his gaze met Severita’s eyes.

  ‘Thou shouldst spare none,’ he said, and then turned, sword slicing up to split a horned head from chin to crown. Cold rage poured into Severita, slicing away the ghosts of sensations pulling her will apart.

  ‘That thou shouldst pardon none,’ she called. ‘We beseech thee, destroy them!’ And her pistols spoke as she shrieked her prayer into the faces of the daemons as they came in a tide of lies and claws.

  The world was burning as Cleander ran through it. Heaps of blazing books fell as shelves collapsed. Scraps of charring paper spun on the wind. The air he was gulping felt like it was burning too. He spun around another corner. The voices chased him, cackling in the noise of flame eating wood and words alike. They were the voices of his father, still spitting bile on his deathbed, of his great-grandmother, looking down at him with disappointment as he stumbled over his formal greeting. They were the voice of Covenant, stripping away the fortune he had made and the life he had lived. They were his own voice, rasping with old age and disease, telling him to stop, to listen to what the fire said, telling him that he did not need to serve anyone but himself and that he could have and do whatever he wanted for eternity.

  He kept running, hearing claws and howls follow him as the warp hissed promises to his soul.

  ‘Keep going, keep going,’ he gasped to himself. He had to be close. He had to be. He had only two grenades left. His needler was gone. That just left his sword, the sword that he had brought as much from habit as foresight.

  The fires clawed past him. A cabinet of glass jars to his right exploded as the flames swallowed it. Burning fluid showered out. Chunks of pale flesh from whatever the jars had held charred as they fell, then began to swell, fusing into a blackened and sizzling lump. Wings sprouted and caught in mid-air. Chitin spread across its back, abdomens ballooning. The sound of its wings was the rattle of air in a starved man’s throat. It flew at him, bloating as it blurred through the flames. He turned, hand falling to the hilt of the sword, the stupid sword that he should have left on the ship. The creature was already the size of a dog. Its wings battered into the burning shelves. He tugged the sword free and sliced at the thing. The tip caught a wing as it jinked aside.

  Bad cut, said a voice in his head, sloppy even under the circumstances. He almost laughed at the ridiculousness of that thought.

  A stinger was growing at the end of the thing’s bulging mass. It buzzed upwards, wings stretching. Multifaceted eyes gleamed like cut emeralds in the flame light. He shifted the grip on his sword. It was double-edged and the haft was a hand-and-a-half in length. A lion’s head roared in polished steel from the heavy pommel and an abrupt phrase in High Gothic ran the span of the cross guard on both faces. Never broken, never cowed, it read. He had always struggled with it as a motto. It was no power sword, or alien relic. It did not have a name. It was just a length of steel, forged by hammer and fire, and sharpened to an edge. But ever since his ancestor had first drawn it in the forgotten Age of Apostasy, it had been a killing blade.

  The creature buzzed towards him. The sound of its wings was deafening. Its stingers stabbed at him. He hacked at it, once, twice, three times. It recoiled, wings and body growing bigger. Its mouthparts clicked, fluid dribbling from rings of teeth. It dived. Cleander stepped back, spun the sword and cut up into its thorax. Pus, maggots and polluted blood gushed out as the skin parted. The fluid covered Cleander’s gauntlets. The vulcanis
ed rubber began to dissolve. He swore, moving backwards, shaking the heavy gloves free.

  ‘Useless things anyway,’ he gasped.

  The daemon-creature was thrashing, wings beating against the burning bookcases as its body vented fluid. It jerked forward. Cleander stamped his boot into a cluster of eyes. It gurgled and clicked. He gripped his sword with both hands and hacked down into the meat of its body, then again and again, twitching aside as its blood sprayed and sizzled. Its substance began to collapse into slime and mist. You could not kill a daemon, but if you turned its body into pulp then its toehold in reality would break, and it would dissolve back into the warp. To Cleander that distinction had always seemed overly technical; when you were facing one, you shot and hacked at it until it was gone or you were dead.

  After more blows than he wanted to count he stepped back, choking heavy breaths, gagging at the reek of rot and sulphur. He looked in the direction he had been going. Flashes of white and red lightning rose over the tops of the bookcases. That had to be it. He was almost there.

  Something landed on the burning shelves above and behind him. A clicking buzz rose against the cackle of the fire. Another of the insectoid creatures sat on the top of the stacks. Cooking fat hissed as the flames lapped over its body. It was larger than the one he had just chopped to slime. Seven wings flickered above it, folding and refolding as its mandibles and legs twitched and rubbed together.

  ‘Oh, come on…’ he said. The daemon hissed and pulled itself into the air. Cleander turned and ran. He could hear the click of insects in the back of his skull, and the crash of splintering wood as the creature slammed into shelves behind him.

  Two grenades: one frag, the other he was not really sure how to describe. He really should have brought more. This one would have to count. He pulled the grenade free from his waist and armed it in a single movement. It was heavy for its size. It was rare, and he did not really understand how it worked. In fact, he doubted that anyone else between here and the Throne of Terra had any idea. The civilisation that had made it was long dead and buried in the gas clouds of the Van Reilac Belt. The tomb he had opened had held three. One he had tried, just to see what it did, and the other he had given to Ianthe. This was the last, perhaps the last token that its makers had ever existed. He had carried it for almost two decades and never had to use it. Even in the near-disaster of the Panetha Varn infiltration he had not needed it. Now he was going to throw it away in a desperate bid to stay alive. Somehow he had always thought it would have a greater purpose than that.

  The creature buzzed low, legs dragging on the floor. The beat of its wings churned cinders into the air. He twisted the top of the grenade, once, then again. Frost spread instantly over his fingers. Cold bit into his hands. The winged daemon opened a multi-layered mouth. He threw the grenade. It spun through the air. Wisps of icy light unfolded from it as it tumbled. He gripped his sword, ready to strike.

  Stupid idea, really, Cleander, he thought.

  The grenade hit the creature on the head, bounced off. It fell to the floor as the creature swept over it, hissing and clicking.

  Done, thought Cleander. Done at last. He tensed to swing the sword. The grenade detonated. Shards of white light expanded from beneath the creature, passing through flesh and solidifying into a jagged crown of crystal. The daemon’s wings beat as it tried to pull its bulk out of the razor edges. Black blood and steaming gut fluid gushed out. Its flesh began to dissolve into oily foam. It shrieked, the sound booming and clattering, and Cleander felt his bones and blood shake. It made him want to clamp his hands over his ears, to weep.

  He stepped in and hacked the sword down into the thing’s head. Emerald eyes and chitin plates shattered. It gave one last cry, and slumped to stillness. Cleander let out a long breath.

  He turned, and forced his legs to run towards where the flash and roar of some other unfolding horror must mean that Covenant was close. As he pulled the last grenade from his belt, he reflected that it would be much simpler if he had never been born.

  The world beyond Koleg’s guns was a sea of flesh and luminous fog. The bookcases and cabinets of the Archive were ghost images on the edge of sight. Pain flared behind his eyes as thoughts hit dead ends in his skull. He fired a long burst. The macro-stubber gave a stuttering roar. Micro rounds sliced into flesh, and fur, and blubber. He felt the ammunition cylinder click empty, but he was already pulling the short stock grenade launcher up from where it hung on a strap at his back. He squeezed the launcher’s trigger, and the phosphor-grenade thumped into the floor just ahead of the closing horde. White-hot flame spread in a glowing cloud and reached up to the ceiling; shelves of books and scrolls ignited. Some of the daemons came through the blaze, bounding and cackling, spinning in the inferno like children playing in a spray of water.

  ‘Where is Covenant?’ shouted Josef from just behind his right shoulder. The preacher’s voice was heavy with effort. Koleg did not answer. In the last minutes the world had vanished behind curtains of etheric light and congealing flesh. He and Josef were shoulder to shoulder, an island in the rising sea of daemons, an island that existed as long as they could fight. That would not be long now. Koleg knew they were going to die. He knew it very clearly. That knowledge did not feature in his thoughts with any greater weight than the dwindling ammo count for his pistol, or the fact that they had survived the initial onslaught only because the daemons were still weak.

  He had fought daemons before, many times. That was the nature of his work for Covenant. He had seen them slaughter, and he had been permitted some knowledge of their nature. They were creatures of the warp. In the realm of psychic energy only their own paradoxical laws bound them. When they crossed into reality, their essence unravelled with every instant they remained, like a fish thrashing on the shore, or a human only able to remain beneath the surface of an ocean as long as the air in their lungs lasted. The daemons that were pouring into the chamber were weak because they had little to feed on. But the warp was roaring through the tatters of reality, and with every second that passed the daemons were getting stronger, bolder, larger.

  A dazzling blur of sensations filled Koleg’s eyes. Blues, pinks and yellows twirled kaleidoscopic patterns. Whispers cut through his ears, and pain ran down his nerves. He felt his gun drop, and heard the saw-blade sound of the rounds chewing into the floor. He bit down on his tongue and the flare of pain cleared his sight. He could hear Josef praying, the words strong with defiance but shaking with force of will.

  Daemons did not exist to be perceived; they existed to warp those who saw them, to twist emotions, to turn their minds against them. Except that he did not have the base material for them to work with. The chirurgeons and bio-alchemists had taken that from him when he had volunteered. That was an advantage, but it did not stop their presence pulling apart his perceptions. For the others the fight was wider, and deeper. All it would take was for their will to slip, and they would die just as surely as if they had misread the thrust of a claw. And the daemons only needed them to slip once.

  ‘Where is…’ began Josef.

  A strobing pulse of energy flickered from out of sight, and sliced through the press of half-formed daemon bodies. A break opened in the churning mass. Koleg saw the opening.

  ‘With me!’ he shouted, and ran for the gap. Josef came with him. Boots and machine limbs clanged on the deck. He fired as he moved, not aiming, scything with the stream of bullets. He could see the source of the beam now.

  Lord Inquisitor Vult stood amongst his four grey-armoured warriors. One of them was firing pulses of energy into the press of daemons to cut a path. The trooper’s silver visor snapped up towards Koleg as he ran into the space cut by the trooper. The pulse of fire from the warrior’s gun stuttered for an instant. It was enough. Rotting figures stepped from the dark, coiling into being with a gasp of fluid-filled lungs. One of Vult’s grey warriors fell, armour powdering to rust, flesh rotting as a sta
rvation-thin creature embraced him. The other figures juddered forwards.

  The three remaining warriors slid into a triangular formation around their master. The pistons on their shoulders locked, coolant vents on their backpacks opened. The barrels of their energy weapons glowed.

  ‘Hold them back,’ commanded Vult, and bowed his head.

  The trio of warriors fired. Ringed beams of energy lanced from their weapons and broadened into wide cones of blinding light. Daemon flesh shrivelled. Unholy blood cooked to ash. The warriors cut their fire sideways, moving with perfect unity. But the daemons were growing in strength as insanity poured across the barrier between worlds. One of the beams struck a creature with a long skull and the face of a flayed wolf. It staggered. Burned flesh ripped from it and curled to smoke. It shivered and walked forward into the blaze of the beam. Muscle rippled and remade itself even as it burned. Blood seeped from the daemon’s lolling jaws. It was two paces from the trio of warriors. It was larger than when Koleg had first seen it, taller, its bulk swelling, the heat of its presence a shimmer in the air around it. It held a wide-headed axe of pitted bronze. The edge of the axe was wet, its sharpness dripping with the blood it was yet to shed. Its jaws opened wide as it raised the weapon.

  ‘Down!’ shouted Vult. The three warriors ceased fire and dropped to their knees. A flat wave of fire exploded from the inquisitor lord. Its edge hit the daemons and sliced through. Bodies burst apart, immolating, thrashing as they tried to cling to reality. Vult glowed with heat. White light clung to the bulk of his Terminator armour. Beads of flame flickered in the recesses of the angel’s wings and daemon skulls. He was still for a second. A shiver ran through him, servos buzzing. He stepped forward. The thin circle of fire vanished. A wide circle of clear space had opened around and before him. Smoking liquid pooled on the floor clear to the nearest wall of shelves.

  ‘Move,’ he said, voice dry with fatigue. Shapes were spinning into being at the edge of the burning circle. The grey-armoured troopers rose, piston bracings releasing as they moved. Vult began to run towards the edge of the thrown circle. Heat-cracked tiles shattered under his stride. His trio of troopers moved with him. At the edge of the fire-carved space, the air was already rippling with boiling eyes and claws. Vult raised the gilded gun in his right hand and fired. Heavy shells thumped through the air and burst into showers of white sparks and bright, hard light. The warp-thickened shadows screamed as the silver light pushed them back.