Deathwing (10 page)

‘You sure?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘They’ve been following us all this time. They thought we might lead them to a hidden base. Now they’re getting impatient. Something seems to be affecting their minds. They want to kill.’

‘You hear that, sergeant?’ Nipper asked.

Krask nodded and muttered something to Borski. The commissar straightened up and brushed spores from the cuff of his uniform.

‘Break out what’s left of your stimm. We are going to kill some heretics.’

Nipper emptied the inhaler and felt a trickle of nervous energy pass through him. It was enough to make him alert. He saw Mak and Colquan looking at him. I wonder, he thought, do I look like that?

There was a jerky quality to the other guards’ movements and their eyes seemed dead beneath their bubble goggles. They cocked their heads like caricatures of people listening, assumed postures of exaggerated wariness. They looked so ridiculous that Nipper almost laughed, but he recognized that as a side-effect of the drug and fought to bring the mad hilarity under control.

‘It’s going to be dark soon,’ Krask said. ‘That’s when they’ll attack.’

‘This looks like as good a position as any to defend,’ Borski said crisply. ‘Krask, use your chainsword to cut down those fungus trees. They will give us some cover.’

A feeling almost of relief swept over the other Marauders. They seemed happy. It was as if they were tired of running, as if they had already given up on their lives and relished the chance of some action, Nipper thought. At least it would be a break from the monotony of the march, he found himself thinking crazily. Still he was full of fear.

‘C
OME ON
,’ C
OLQUAN
muttered.

They had been waiting twenty minutes and there was still no sign of the enemy. Their drug-induced energy was starting to fade. Lying behind their fungal barricades reminded them of how tired they were. Darkness swept over the dense forest like a wave.

‘Truk is feeling peckish,’ the ogryn said.

Borski glared at Sal. ‘Are you sure they are going to attack, psyker?’

‘Yes, commissar,’ she said. She had drawn her laspistol and was inspecting it carefully. ‘They are out there now. About two hundred metres and closing. They’re advancing warily. They wonder what we are up to.’

‘Keep your eyes peeled, soldiers,’ said Borski. Nipper sighted in the direction Sal had indicated. He ventured a quick glance at the sky, visible through a gap in the foliage. Was that rapidly-moving star the
Divine Retribution,
he wondered, or just the nearest planet, Ka’ana? He checked the time. Under an hour till the bombardment starts, he thought. How far had they come? He felt sure it wasn’t far enough.

It was strange. Earlier, filled with shame at his own weakness, he had wanted to die. Now when death seemed imminent he found that he desperately wanted to live. He was filled with disgust. Truly I am a spineless creature, he thought.

Was that movement he saw? He felt a thrill of fear pass through him. He stared at a patch of shadow suspiciously. No, he thought, just jumpy. Adrenalin was pumping through his system and weariness had begun to recede.

Was that shadow lengthening? It was, and in no natural way. Emperor guide my hand, he prayed, and squeezed the trigger of his lasrifle. There was a hum as the weapons generator kicked in. A perfectly straight beam of light crackled though the night and hit the shadow, illuminating the figure of a man. Nipper heard a scream. In the torchlight of the burning figure other rebels were revealed.

All of a sudden everyone was firing. Nipper saw the flash of las-fire out of the corner of his eye, partially dampened by his protective goggles. He heard the strange coughing sound of the grenade launcher as Truk fired it. A brilliant explosion shattered the night. Nipper saw rebel bodies tumble through the air away from the point of impact. He felt vibration ripple through the carpet moss.

Mist rose from the fungus tree trunk. For a second he wondered what was happening, then he realized that shuriken darts were hitting it.

Nipper took a wild guess at where they were coming from and fired a burst in that direction. He was rewarded with a shout of pain. He dropped flat just as a hail of shuriken hissed through the air where he had been. Pure terror surged through him. That had been too close.

Once more the ground trembled, once more he heard the sound of an explosion. He fought the urge to remain still, to huddle up in a ball and beg for mercy. He remained frozen in place. He could not move. Tears streamed down his face.

Suddenly a shadow passed over him. He cringed with fear, forced himself to look up. It was Borski. He looked calm and unafraid.

‘Get up, soldier,’ he said, ignoring the hail of darts which blurred by him. Nipper shook his head. Borski raised his pistol and snapped a shot off into the distance. Nipper heard a ricochet, saw Borski grimace with annoyance, like a man who had just missed a target on a practice range. He fired again and something close by groaned.

‘You can die like a cringing dog or like a soldier of the Imperium,’ Borski said. His calm voice carried clearly over the noise of battle. He fired again. The noise of his pistol seemed impossibly loud. ‘Be quick, your soul is in peril.’

Momentarily the noise of battle seemed to recede. Nipper looked up at the face of the commissar. Borski was strong and certain. His faith seemed to shield him as he stood amid the hail of enemy fire. Nipper knew his own hopelessness and lack of faith and felt diminished. He was filled with terror at the certainty of his own death. It turned his limbs to liquid.

He tried to make himself move. We all die in the end, he told himself. It is the manner of our dying that counts. Insight filled him. He knew as Borski knew that they were going to die here. That being the case, he had nothing to fear. His fate was already sealed. There was nothing he could do to alter it. His only choice was the way in which he met his end. Borski was setting him an example of how to do it. He smiled up at the commissar and rose to his feet.

Borski nodded, satisfied. ‘The correct decision,’ he said. ‘You are a true guardsman.’

Then his face was blown away by a hail of shuriken. Nipper looked at him and screamed.

A red haze fell over Nipper and he twisted, firing insanely into the oncoming rebels. He vaulted on to the top of the tree stump he had been cowering behind and set his lasrifle for full coverage. Howling with rage, he sprayed the enemy. He clicked the single-shot grenade launcher and fired again. An explosion racked the air. He continued to fire until his rifle powered down.

His terror had been transmuted to berserk fury. Filled with rage, he charged towards the enemy, miraculously avoiding being shot. The Emperor protects me, he thought crazily. He began laying about him with the butt of his rifle, crunching into the rebels with insane strength.

‘Follow me, Marauders,’ he yelled. ‘For the Emperor, for Borski, for our dead!’

Suddenly he was the centre of a swirling melee. He could hear the crack of small-arms fire and the gleeful shouts of Truk as he went hand-to-hand with the foe. Nipper picked up a chainsword from the hands of a dead rebel NCO and began to lay about him. Everywhere he struck a man died. The Emperor guides my hand and fills my heart with fury, he thought. The others emerged to join him in the fight.

Soon the enemy were routed, unable to face Nipper’s insane anger. As he watched them depart Nipper did not think they would return. He fell on his knees and wept.

‘H
ALT
!
IDENTIFY YOURSELVES
!’ said a harsh voice in Imperial Gothic.

‘A company of the Fifth Thranxian Regiment, the Devil’s Marauders,’ replied Krask.

‘Pretty small company,’ replied the sentry. Nipper agreed. Only Mak, Krask, Sal, Truk and himself were left of all the people who had set out. The ogryn carried the body of Commissar Borski under one arm.

‘Any more disrespect and I’ll have you shot,’ Krask said in his best imitation of Borski’s tone. ‘Where are we anyway?’

Nipper heard the sentry gulp. ‘Pretty far south, sir. Perimeter station Amber Twelve.’

‘We’re inside Zone Amber then?’

‘Yes, sir. Five kilometres.’

Nipper felt relief flood through him. He looked forward to getting some sleep in a relatively secure camp.

The sentry spoke again. ‘You just made it in time.’

‘I know,’ Krask said.

‘How could you, sir? We’ve only just got the order. We have to fall back to Zone Grey. The enemy have broken through perimeter Amber. The
Divine Retribution
is going to bombard this area from orbit in twenty-four hours.’

Nipper felt like screaming. Behind them a curtain of fire descended from the sky and the sector they had just left caught fire. From where Nipper stood it seemed as if the whole world was burning.

PESTILENCE

Dan Abnett

‘The Archenemy infects this universe. If we do not pause to fight that infection here, within our own selves, what purpose is there in taking our fight to the stars?’

— Apothecary Engane, from his Treatise on Imperial Medicine

I

I
T IS MY BELIEF
that memory is the finest faculty we as a species own. Through the function of memory, we are able to gather, hone and transmit all manner of knowledge for the benefit of mankind, and the endless glory of our God-Emperor, may the golden throne endure for ever more!

To forget a mistake is to be defeated a second time, so we are taught in the sermons of Thor. How may a great leader plan his campaign without memory of those battles won and lost before? How may his soldiers absorb his teaching and improve without that gift? How may the Ecclesiarchy disseminate its enervating message to the universal populace without that populace holding the teachings in memory? What are scholars, clerks, historians or chroniclers but agencies of memory?

And what is forgetfulness but the overthrow of memory, the ruination of precious knowledge, and an abhorrence?

I have, in the service of His Exalted Majesty the Emperor of Terra, waged war upon that abhorrence all my life. I strive to locate and recover things forgotten and return them to the custody of memory. I am a scrabbler in dark places, an illuminator of shadows, a turner of long un-turned pages, an asker of questions that have lapsed, forever hunting for answers that would otherwise have remained unvoiced. I am a recollector, prising lost secrets from the taciturn universe and returning them to the safe fold of memory, where they might again improve our lot amongst the out-flung stars.

My particular discipline is that of materia medica, for human medicine was my original calling. Our understanding of our own vital mechanisms is vast and admirable, but we can never know too much about our own biology and how to protect, repair and improve it. It is our burden as a species to exist in a galaxy riven by war, and where war goes, so flourish its hand-servants injury and disease. It may be said that as each war front advances, so medical knowledge advances too. And where armies fall back in defeat or are destroyed, so medical knowledge retreats or is forgotten. Such are the lapses I seek to redress.

Upon that very purpose, I came to Symbal Iota late in my forty-eighth year, looking for Ebhoe. To provide context, let me say that this would be the third year of the Genovingian campaign in the Obscura Segmentum, and about nine sidereal months after the first outbreak of Uhlren’s Pox amongst the Guard legions stationed on Genovingia itself. Also known, colloquially, as blood-froth, Uhlren’s Pox was named after the first victim it took, a colour-sergeant called Gustaf Uhlren, of the Fifteenth Mordian, if memory serves me. And I pride myself it does.

As a student of Imperial history, and materia medica too, you will have Uhlren’s Pox in your memory. A canker of body and vitality, virulently contagious, it corrupts from within, thickening circulatory fluids and wasting marrow, while embellishing the victim’s skin with foul cysts and buboes. The cycle between infection and death is at most four days. In the later stages, organs rupture, blood emulsifies and bubbles through the pores of the skin, and the victim becomes violently delusional. Some have even conjectured that by this phase, the soul itself has been corroded away. Death is inescapable in almost every case.

It appeared without warning on Genovingia, and within a month, the Medicae Regimentalis were recording twenty death notices a day. No drug or procedure could be found that began to even slow its effects. No origin for the infection could be located. Worst of all, despite increasingly vigorous programs of quarantine and cleansing, no method could be found to prevent wholesale contagion. No plague carriers, or means of transmission, were identifiable.

As an individual man weakens and sickens, so the Imperial Guard forces as a whole began to fail and falter as their best were taken by the pestilence. Within two months, Warmaster Rhyngold’s staff were doubting the continued viability of the entire campaign. By the third month, Uhlren’s Pox had also broken out (apparently miraculously and spontaneously, given its unknown process of dispersal) on Genovingia Minor, Lorches and Adamanaxer Delta. Four separate centres of infection, right along the leading edge of the Imperial advance through the sector. At that point, the contagion had spread to the civilian population of Genovingia itself, and the Administratum had issued a Proclamation of Pandemic. It was said the skies above the cities of that mighty world were black with carrion flies and the stench of biological pollution permeated every last acre of the planet.