The resonance of gunfire climbed up the shaft to them as Garro and the other Astartes rode the gravity disc down. Qruze shot him a look. 'This damn war's followed us here.'
'Aye,' replied the battle-captain. 'Our warning may have come too late.'
Hakur cursed under his breath. 'No signals from Sendek or Iago, not even a carrier wave. At this distance, there is no way I could not reach them. I could yell and they would hear it!'
The disc slowed as it approached the infirmary level. The stink of new death wafted up to the platform and every one of the Astartes tensed. 'Weapons/ ordered Garro, unsheathing his sword.
He led them off the elevator and through the corridors, crossing through the dank, blood-slick passage.
They entered the infirmary proper and Qruze made a spitting noise. 'Sendek is here/ he said, leaning over a dark shape in the gloom, 'what remains of him.'
Even through his helmet filters, the odour of decay assaulted Garro's nostrils as he came closer. The spongy slurry of meat resembled a body exposed to months of putrefaction. It was undeniably Tollen Sendek, even though the remains of the dead man's skull were a ruined, bloated mass. He recognised the honour pennants and oaths of moment affixed to the armour. These too were discoloured with age and mould, and fingers of orange rust looped around the joints of the limbs.
One of Hakur's men choked back a gasp of disgust. 'He looks like he's been dead for weeks… but I spoke to him only this morning.'
The Luna Wolf leaned closer to the body. 'Iacton, keep your distance-'
Garro's words came too late. Thick white pustules on Sendek's body trembled as they sensed the closeness of Qruze's blood-warmth and burst, throwing out streams of tiny iridescent beetles. The veteran rocked back and batted the things away, pulping great masses of them with his armoured palm. Agh! Filthy vermin!'
The captain nudged a severed limb with his boot. There were too many torn hanks of meat and bone strewn about the room to be the component parts of just one human body, and he knew with bleak certainty that Iago was as dead as poor Tollen.
From across the chamber, Hakur peered cautiously into the broken isolation pod. 'Empty…' He snagged something with his combat blade from inside the glass container and held it up for the others to see. 'In all the days of Terra, what is this?' It resembled a thin
scrap of torn muslin, slick with black liquids. As it turned in the air, Garro made out holes in the material that corresponded to eyes, nostrils and a mouth.
Qraze gave the rag a grim examination. 'It is human flesh, sergeant, sloughed off, as species of snakes and insects shed their skins.'
The flat bangs of bolter fire echoed down the corridors leading to the other compartments of the infirmary and Garro gestured sharply. 'Leave that. We move, now.'
Qruze's face was locked in a permanent scowl of harsh, cold anger. At every turn, just as he thought he had weathered each new sinister twist of fate, a fresh horror was heaped upon the others. Qruze imagined a vice turning about his spirit, gradually tightening, the pressure upon his mind and his will growing ever more intense. He felt as if he were on the verge of shutting down, as if the goodness and light inside him were in danger of guttering out. Each new sight repulsed and shocked the old soldier in ways he thought he could never be touched.
The Astartes passed quickly through a series of seal doors that lay off their hinges, ripped apart by something of great strength and violence. Past that, they came upon a curative ward with rows of medicae cradles and sickbeds, one of the Silent Sisterhood's hospices for those of their number injured in action, he decided. The ward resembled a slaughterhouse more than a place of healing. Like the isolation chamber, the room was thick with death-stink: blood and excrement, the fetor of disease and rich organic decomposition. In each bed, the patients were dead or near to it, each beneath the smothering hands of a different malady. Qruze saw a pallid,
skeletal witchseeker shaking and foaming at the mouth from some sort of palsy. Next to her was a bloated body wreathed in gaseous vapours. Then a victim killed by bone-rot, a weeping novice wracked by bubonic plague, and a naked girl bleeding from her eyes and ears.
It was not just living flesh that was polluted. Corrosion covered the steel frames of the medicae cradles, and glasses and plastics were cracked and broken. The decay touched everything. He looked away.
'They have been left to die,' said Hakur, 'infected and left to fester like discarded cuts of meat.'
'A test/ said Garro. 'The hand that did this was toying with them.'
"We ought to burn them,' said Qruze, 'put these poor fools out of their misery.'
'There's no time for that kind of mercy,' Garro retorted. 'Every moment we tarry, the cause of this horror walks free to spread more corruption.'
At the far end of the ward, they came across more dead, this time the bodies of Silent Sisters in the armoured garb of vigilators. Spent, broken bolt pistols lay near them, barrels clogged with gobs of acidic mucus. Thousands of tiny scratches covered the places where their skin was bare. They had died from puncture wounds in the chest, from what seemed like a cluster of five daggers stabbed into their torsos. Too narrow for a short sword,' Qraze noted.
Garro nodded and held up his hand, flexing the fingers in a gesture of explanation. 'Talons/ he explained.
Hakur and his men were already working the rusted wheel of a large airtight hatch that would give them access to the next section of the tier. The gummed metal shrieked as they forced it open.
'What kind of creature has claws like that?' Qruze asked aloud.
The hatch crashed open off its broken hinges with a roaring displacement of air, and there before them was the answer.
The adjoining chamber was an open space crisscrossed by gantries and walkways, suspended in a steel web far above the open platform of a hangar bay several tiers below. Situated halfway up the side of the Somnus Citadel, the hangar was one of many tertiary landing ports designed for the shuttles deployed aboard the Black Ships. This landing port served the infirmary, allowing injured Sisters to be taken directly to the medicae centre in the event of a critical emergency. Normally it would be busy with servitors performing maintenance tasks on the landing grids, the ships or the airlock doors, but now it was the site of a pitched battle.
Garro saw the gold and silver of a dozen Silent Sisters engaged in close combat with a whirling, screaming mass of claws and green-black armour. It was difficult to get a good eye on what was happening. A foggy mass of smoke wreathed all the combatants; but no, not smoke. The cloud hummed and writhed with a will of its own, and he saw one witchseeker pitched over the lip of a gantry and sent falling to her death as the swarming mass of flies blinded her. The form barely visible in the midst of the insects, tall and shimmering, continued to send out savage attacks into the lines of the Sisters.
Hakur raised his bolter, but Garro waved him back. 'Careful! There are oxygen lines and fuel conduits in the walls. A stray round could set off an inferno! Blades only until I order otherwise!'
The catwalks were narrow and they forced the Astartes into single file movement. Garro saw Qruze split off with one of Hakur's squad and make an approach along a different gantry. He nodded and ran forward. The metal decking clanged and shook beneath the heavy boots of the Death Guard. It was hardly built for the weight of men in ceramite and flexsteel.
The swarm's motion was that of a single living, thinking creature. As the Astartes came close, it cut off portions of itself and sent them screeching through the air, separate and distinct clumps of dense, poisonous forms clawing at the eyes and skin of the warriors. Bolter fire would not harm this enemy. The tiny bodies resisted their attack, and the men were reduced to snatching at the air, pulping the serrated insects into messes of cracked chitin.
Blue light gathered along his blade. Swinging Liber-tas over his head, Garro cut a swathe through the thickening edges of the swarm and reacted swiftly as a figure in gold cannoned into him, propelled backwards by a vicious blow. He caught the Sister in a vice-like grip and arrested her fall towards a broken guide rail. She hissed loudly and the captain realised too late that the woman's arm was scored with hundreds of slash wounds where razored insect wings had cut her flesh. Garro reeled her back in and found himself looking into the eyes of Amendera Kendel. She was flushed with effort from the fight.
To Garro's surprise, she made a quick string of word gestures in Astartes battle-sign. Nature of enemy unknown.
Aye,' agreed Garro. 'You know this tower better than we do, Sister. Block the escape routes and let my men deal with this mutant.' He had to raise his voice so it
would cany over the chattering squeals of the swarming bugs.
Kendel signed again, getting to her feet. Proceed with caution.
'That time has passed/ he replied and threw himself into the rippling mass of the swarm, the sword's power field crisping great clumps of black flies from the air around him.
The Sisters drew back and followed Garro's command. There had been a moment, just the smallest of instants, when Nathaniel Garro had heard Keeler's cry and feared that the women had turned against them. His own battle-brothers had already raised weapons against him, and it was sad and damning that his first reaction was to assume it had happened once more, this time with Kendel's witchseekers out to murder them. He felt a measure of relief to learn he was wrong. To be confronted by another betrayal added to those of Horus, Mortarion and Grulgor… Was fate so cruel to curse him again?
Yes.
In his heart, in his soul he knew who it was he would find at the heart of the swarm even before he laid eyes upon him. The clawed, reeking monster spread the too-long fingers of his distended left hand in a grotesque greeting as Nathaniel fell into the eye of the swarm storm. The hexagonal steel decking beneath him squealed and moaned, shifting.
'Captain.' The word was a mocking chorus of rattling echoes, humming into his ears from all around. 'Look, I am healed.' For all the gruesome malformations of his flesh and bone, the aspect of the man beneath the changed body was clear to Garro's eyes.
He teetered on the brink of despair for one long second, the revulsion at what stood before him threatening to knock the last pillars of reason from his mind. A flash of memory unfolded. Garro remembered the first time he had seen Solun Decius, on the muddy plateau of the black plains on Barbarus. The aspirant was covered in shallow cuts, streaks of blood and a patina of dirt. He was pale from exertion and ingested poisons, but there was no weakness of any kind lurking behind those wild eyes. The boy had the way of an untamed animal about him, brilliantly fierce and cunning. Garro had known in that moment that Decius was raw steel, ready to be tempered into a keen blade for the Emperor's service. Now all that potential was wasted, twisted and destroyed. He felt a terrible sense of failure settle upon him.
'Solun, why?' he shouted, furious at the youth's folly, his voice resonating inside his helmet. 'What have you done to yourself?'
'Solun Decius died aboard the EisensteinV thundered the rasping voice. 'His existence is at an end! I live now! I am the pestilent champion… I am the Lord of the Flies!'
Garro spat. Traitor! You followed Grulgor into his grotesque transformation. Look what you have become! A freak, a monster, a-'
A daemon? Is that what you were going to say, you hidebound old fool?' Callous laughter echoed around him. 'Is it sorcery that has renewed me? All that matters is that I have cheated death, like a true son of Mortarion!'
Why?' Garro screamed, the injustice hammering at him. 'In Terra's name, why did you give yourself to this abomination?'