by Joe Parrino
Warm air gusted through long disused vents and soon the maddening drip of water filled the ship’s compartment as frost melted and water flowed.
Warmth spread down the figure’s body. Tubes retracted from body sockets and pulled into the obsidian walls.
He flexed muscle groupings, drawing blood into anaesthetised meat and tissue. But he could not stand. The ship did not yet permit him to do so.
Augur and auspex chimed into mechanical life, defining the space around the ship. For hours, nothing broke the monotony of the deep void. Data danced across his eyes, moved across the empty spaces where windows waited, shuttered and cloistered. Mission exloads, target identities and allied force compositions stretched away, pulsing green and white.
The former were expected, almost comforting. Already plans and formulae pulsed through his mind. His training brought answers while the agility of his honed cognition filled gaps. But the latter was different, a variable he had never before encountered. He knew, in an academic manner, that it was almost unheard of for those such as he to deploy alongside others. Indeed, it was rarely necessary. None could stand his presence. His genes broke mortals.
The variable was disquieting. Outside the realm of his knowledge base, outside the realm of his comprehension, the fear of the unknown yawned wide, as cold and hungry as the void that surrounded his vessel. Iron training kept it quiet, kept the gulf of disquiet bridged and manageable. Still, it lingered, lurking at the back of his thoughts.
Windows opened, iron shutters receding, and the cold light of far distant stars twinkled into the cabin. The detritus of a space battle gently spun in the void. A planet beckoned beyond, thick with ash and storm clouds.
Warnings danced across the ship, the strident voices of angry machine-spirits manifesting as a droning wail. Proximity alerts and alarms buzzed into strident declamation. The figure silenced them all one by one. This was expected.
Heat shoved the small craft forward. It slowly rose in the cabin too. The figure within rocked his head from side to side, waiting for the satisfying crackling of relieved pressure. He followed with a swift cracking of the joints in his fingers. Micro twitches swept through the figure’s frame as adrenaline and apprehension built up. Anticipation flooded through his mind.
Lights stabbed out from the front of his vessel, spilling warm light into the void. Kilometres flashed by. The ship shook gently as minor space debris bounced off its frame.
The lights caught something, the reflexive shine of obsidian against the deep void. It grew, larger and larger, into the sleek predator outline of another vessel. Barely visible against its side was a small blue port. Already a pod was pulling away.
Brief engine light caught the machine-spirit’s attention and the figure followed it.
The figure within began his final preparations.
II
Viktor Zhau stood on the edge of space and looked down. Achyllus Prime turned gently beneath him. Storms raged across its surface.
For a moment, Zhau thought he could see faces forming from the clouds. He blinked and they were gone.
He stood alone, waiting near one of the high orbit drop pods that would carry him to the world’s benighted surface and his target. He preferred this. He knew himself, the only being he would and could ever trust beyond the God-Emperor’s benevolence. No other being was worthy of his faith, save the God-Emperor. The presence of the Callidus Assassin, their past history, was a complication Zhau did not desire. The loathsome creatures with their false faces made his skin crawl. That the two had history, history that she apparently remembered, did not ease matters.
Viktor Zhau preferred to work with what he knew: his pistol, rifle, skills and training. He had never needed anything else, never even considered that he might.
His calling was one that brooked no other beings.
The black drop pod’s door yawned open, ready to convey him to the surface. It was a small thing, designed for only one occupant. Bulky thrusters studded its outer surface, ready to realign the pod at the occupant’s touch. Windows and vid-picters watched him with empty glass stares.
He checked his exitus rounds, obsessively brushing imagined dust from their casings, repeating the prayers carved into the metal. He checked the inner workings of his rifle and pistol, not trusting the Callidus’s potential meddling.
All was in order. All was as it should be.
The unease that had been eating at him around the other Assassins was rapidly fading. His soul no longer felt at war, prepared for the knife to carve into his back.
Viktor Zhau stepped into the drop pod, donned his mask and knew peace.
The Vanus muttered something over the vox as the drop pod fell away. A prayer of safe-passage, a reminder, inane words, wasted words. Zhau ignored them.
The drop pod fell.
Achyllus Prime caught the pod in gravity’s embrace. Fire licked at the edge of the windows, the friction of atmospheric entry.
The Vindicare recited his calming prayers, his mantras.
‘Let my aim be true, Golden Lord. Let my target be courageous. Let them be obvious. Let your judgement flow through me and render itself known through the righteousness of my skill. Grant that your enemies will fall in the name of the Throne that saves us all. Let those who profane your majesty be scoured by the cleansing shadows.’
High altitude wind snagged at the pod, pulling him off course. Zhau’s fingers tapped commands into the pod’s systems. Rockets ignited, angling him back toward his landing site.
A face leered from the fore-window, misshapen and mocking. A devil’s face wrought from purple cloud vapour. Broken teeth gnawed at the glass.
Zhau resisted the urge to pull his pistol and erase the thing from his sight.
More daemon-things took interest in the pod.
Something heavy landed on top. Zhau could hear the scrape of talons against the hull, the bright shrieking of something that had no right to exist in the God-Emperor’s demesne.
‘As you faced the blasphemers in your time among us poor sinners, you taught us faith. Grant me your faith, your conviction, O Emperor. May you make of me an instrument of your holy will. Hollow this flesh and scour my soul of all sin. Let my hand enact your justice.’ Zhau was almost yelling the prayer. The words slipped from his lips in a rapturous chant.
Hands clawed at windows and view-ports, ripping at the outer edges. He could hear claws writing runes. Skeletal fingers tapped out blasphemous paeans to their heretical masters.
Zhau felt powerless. So he fell back into the prayers he had been taught. Fire scoured from the pod’s rockets, engulfing the drop pod in a halo of cleansing flame.
Still the daemons shrieked and gibbered, their maddening voices crying out in invitation.
‘Yea though the daemon may tempt me, though it might challenge my soul and my strength, I will triumph, for I enact your judgement. Through thy great gifts of life and duty will I serve thee, O Emperor!’
Certainty filled him. Righteousness granted him the strength of will to endure this drop. Faith soothed the raw edges of the Vindicare’s soul, erased the anxiety that bloomed within.
As it hurtled through Achyllus Prime’s tortured atmosphere, the drop pod corkscrewed.
Zhau blacked out.
He came to a second later, shutting his eyes against the rotating madness outside.
He tried to open his mouth, to offer a prayer to the God-Emperor, but the force was too much.
The altimeter ceased working, its screen broadcasting a meaningless scree of numbers and letters. He had no idea how far he was from the ground.
The boost rockets refused to answer his commands. The machine-spirit roared its wrath around him, speaking in the tongue of the wind.
The screens died, drowned in swirling white.
Hands beat against the outer hull. A woman’s voice cried for aid.
<
br /> Zhau could do nothing except merely endure.
The blinding white lifted and Zhau saw the ground. The light of Achyllus’s sun bathed the pod in its glow.
He had made it through the cloud layer. The inner consoles died and were resurrected. Alarms screamed into being. The rockets ignited in a burst of the machine-spirit’s rage.
An empty plain, mottled with stains of red, brown and green, stretched beneath him.
A vast weight punched Zhau backwards. Emergency systems enacted and the pod slowed down. It landed, punching a crater into the earth.
The door popped open as explosive hinges flashed into life.
Viktor Zhau rose from the drop pod, rifle held at the ready. He whispered one word into the vox, calm despite the blood that pounded through his vessels.
‘Deployed.’
III
Zhau’s first act out of the pod was to ascertain his location, to find how far off course the winds and the daemons had taken him. Few landmarks stood proud of the plain and only one mattered.
It was impossible to miss. The Astropathic Sanctum loomed kilometres in the distance. Even without the imposing edifice towering into the sky, the swirling bridge that connected it to orbit would have drawn his attention.
Bodies stretched all around him, bloating and rotting in the sun. The stench was horrific, barely filtered by his spy mask.
Zhau turned one over. Gas burped up from the corpse’s slack mouth, and flesh fell away in his hand, but the unit markings were still legible. The purple eyes that spoke of the genetic legacy of Cadia faced a turquoise sky. Cadian Astra Militarum.
Great wounds had been torn through the body and the others all around. The corpses stretched nearly as far as Zhau could see. Some were consistent with bolter trauma. Others were more esoteric.
By the decrepit state of the bodies, and the fluids seeping into the ground around them, Zhau judged the soldiers to have been slaughtered a few weeks prior.
It mattered little. These Cadians had failed in their Emperor-given duty. They had allowed horror to take root on this planet, to walk its surface unanswered.
His intelligence corroborated, Zhau ignored the bodies. They were irrelevant, their only use in proving the disgusting proclivities of the Archenemy.
The plain was a churned mess, carpeted with the Cadian dead. A fog drifted from them, shimmering almost green against the turquoise sky. Rotten eggs and decomposing flesh turned the air into a disgusting soup of noxious fumes.
Zhau picked his way through them, a black ghost moving through the fields of the dead. Strange sounds echoed: the groaning wheeze of corpse gas through tattered lips, the tearing of flesh and the cries of carrion creatures.
Every so often, Zhau caught the distant crump of an explosion as shifting bodies touched off failing ammunition.
Cultists, garbed in mismatched carapace and moth-eaten uniforms, patrolled through the dead. They were sloppy, inattentive. Their Dark Masters already controlled this world, so they believed themselves beyond reproach, or so they acted.
None noticed the Vindicare’s presence. When a knot of the chattering brutes passed too close, Zhau would prostrate himself flat into the mud. Sludge oozed beneath his chest. His cloak slipped over his head.
His breathing was controlled, almost non-existent. The lenses of his mask tracked nearby movement, but something interfered, preventing accurate tracking.
Zhau slithered deeper into the ooze, burrowing between the crevasse formed by two bodies.
Cultists passed nearly five metres away. They laughed in some mongrel tongue, all harsh syllables and rasping humour.
Zhau rose like a spectre of death after their passing. He shook his cloak, brushed as much of the foulness away as he could. The cameleoline garment weighed heavily upon him, but it broke his silhouette and merged his colours with the landscape.
A kilometre from the tower he began to follow the patrol routes of the traitors, shadowing their steps. They all emerged from a central location, all traced the same paths. A pattern emerged, evidence of a guiding intelligence.
More munitions cooked off in the distance, brief flashes that stirred the fog. The vibrations upset the corpses; wheezes cried out from slack jaws in a symphony of the failed dead.
An opening yawned in the sanctum’s base, clear of corpses. Blast doors sprawled metres away, ripped from their hinges. The ground before the opening was melted and fused.
‘I’ve found our entrance point,’ Zhau said. He panned his scope around.
There was a slight delay through the vox, a crackle of static that sounded almost like voices. Zhau mouthed a prayer to the Emperor in His guise as the Machine-God that communications would improve.
‘I know what you did,’ Adamta hissed. The man’s good humour was gone, as if it had never existed. This voice was cold, calculated and furious. ‘I followed the trail on Ymber, after we left. There is always data left behind.’
Zhau said nothing for a moment. ‘She got in the way.’
A cultist walked through his field of view, robed and cowled in green and black. Tumours and growths erupted from the woman’s flesh.
‘Got in the way of what?’ Adamta asked, smoke and static mangling his voice.
Through the lens of his exitus rifle’s scope, Zhau pierced the darkness. Immediately inside the entrance crackled several small fires. Cultists milled and lounged around them. Each was armed with a motley collection of weaponry, a scattering of lasguns, autorifles and close combat weaponry.
Nothing was immediately threatening.
‘My mission. I was entrusted by the authority of my Temple and the God-Emperor to eliminate the target. I do not tolerate outside variables,’ Zhau finally responded.
‘And another Assassin’s presence constitutes an outside variable?’ While Zhau was not a keen student of the nuances of human interaction, even he could tell that Adamta already knew the answer.
‘Quite,’ said Zhau. The link went dead.
Something moved beside him. Zhau’s attention snapped to his close surroundings. A close knot of dead soldiers met his gaze from the floor. Decomposition ravaged these corpses more than their fellows. Holes crawling with buzzing flies provided glimpses to spoiled internal organs. Glassy eyes watched the sky for a salvation denied to them.
The Emperor would never harbour failures such as these. A place at the Golden Throne’s side was purchased with success and victory.
Just as he turned to survey the sanctum once more, he caught movement. The chest of the nearest corpse rose. Impossibly, it seemed to be breathing.
Flies boiled out from a hole in a woman’s stomach. Buzzing angrily in the air, the insects formed a dense cloud. The mottled hands that had, in life, tried to keep the wound closed, fell away, squelching into the noxious muck. Wriggling maggots fled the corpse, spilling on to the ground. Her skin distended. A dribble of oily black blood leaked from the wound.
Five grubs punched free, splitting the skin and feeling the air. Zhau watched in fascinated distaste. An arm followed the grubs and the sight clicked in the Vindicare’s mind. Not grubs, but fingers.
More skin ripped and a ringed maw chewed free. Gimlet yellow eyes watched the Assassin. One closed in a slow wink. A fat, bloated creature crawled free, slipped from the body and fell into the muck. Its thick, wormlike limbs waggled in the air for a moment, trying to right its body.
Zhau’s pistol coughed and the creature burst like an oil-filled balloon.
The bodies around him shifted. More of the noxious daemon-things crawled free and blinked at the weak sunlight. Tongues licked out from between needle teeth, tasting the air.
The Vindicare froze. Slowly, the daemons turned to face him. Their tongues flickered out. Beetle maws rasped a buzzing drone.
With deceptive speed, the daemons swarmed. A chittering whine pierced his mind. Zhau danced bac
k, running across the unsteady carpet of the dead.
Tiny hands snagged at his ankles. Zhau nearly fell as bright lines of pain scratched across them.
Bone clasps caught his cloak, ripping him backwards. Zhau stumbled a step. Only his reflexes, so fast they bordered on transhuman, saved him. Nearly wrenched off balance, Zhau teetered across the rot-slick surface of corpses. He severed his cloak, lamented its loss and mouthed a prayer to the Emperor on High.
The tiny daemon-things crowed with victory, then realised their failure. They advanced on him like a rogue wave, all horrifying motion. Detail was lost in the mass, the chittering horrors melding together into one disgusting horde that owed its image more to liquid than the solid individuals that comprised it. A tide of bruised skin and decomposing flesh, broken horn and chitin, chased the Vindicare through the fields of the last stand of the Cadians on Achyllus Prime.
A weight landed on his shoulders. Zhau reached to pull it off, his imagination filling in the horrifying details of the daemon that had landed on him. He was still trying to grab it when jagged teeth stabbed into the meat of his shoulder. Creeping fever heat spread from the wound.
Yanking on the latched creature, a sack of loose skin and necrotised flesh, Zhau hurled it from his shoulder. Blood flashed, spurting from the bite wound. He fired his pistol, bursting the daemon in midair.
The distraction slowed him, and the daemons rushed closer. Their insect voices rose in victory. Tiny hands, full of sharp bones splitting from rotting flesh, snatched at him.
Fat flies shadowed over them. Thick streams of the black insects covered the sky, blocking out the fog and the weak sun.
The Vindicare stopped, turned and emptied his exitus pistol into the horrors. Bodies popped with grotesque finality, showering their shrieking comrades in pus and reeking fluid. His pistol chimed, starved of ammunition.
He was a weapon crafted to eradicate a single target. He had no true weapons to counteract this threat, this horde of daemons.
