'Clean cut/ noted the Astartes. Very fresh.'
Voyen's eyes narrowed. Where's the… the rest of her?'
Decius used his bolter to point towards different branches of the trees. 'Here, there and there. Over there as well, I think.' Wet rags of red and gold were visible on each.
'The Sisters came to the hatchery?' Hakur cast around, looking low. 'Why would witchseekers come here?'
Decius gave a dry chuckle. 'That, old man, would seem to be secondary to the question of what it was that killed her.'
From ahead of them where the trunks were thickest, there came a ripple of bolter fire. Garro spied the glitter of sporadic muzzle flashes even as a low rumble spread through the sandy dirt beneath his boots. Cracking sounds, sharp as snapping bone, reached him as trees in the middle distance shook and bent, the tops of them fluttering and falling as something large knocked them down.
'You're about to get your answer/ Rahl said, raising his bolter.
The Sisterhood came through the egg-trees, moving like dancers, harrying the jorgalli enhancile with their weapons. It was the largest of the xenos that Garro had encountered onboard the bottle-world, and of a design that had not been in Sendek's documentation. Outwardly it resembled the form of a jorgall in a basic sense, but it was perhaps ten times their mass. As high as the canopy of the trees, the thing appeared to be an agglomeration of scaled flesh and metals, a jorgall deformed by gigantism and then improved by technology to be larger still.
The battle-captain could make out fleshy matter inside a glass orb at the middle of the cyborg's mass,
perhaps, he reasoned, whatever remained of the jor-gall's original form. It had no arms. Instead there were writhing clusters of grey iron tentacles sprouting from each of its upper limb sockets. Some moved like striking serpents, snapping out at the Sisters, while others knotted around an unseen burden that the thing clasped desperately to its chest.
'Some sort of guardian?' offered Voyen.
'Some sort of target! retorted Decius and opened fire.
The Death Guard moved in to assist the Sisterhood, firing on the approach, adding their shots to the storm of bullets that haloed the cyborg. Garro had the fleeting impression that the machine-form was trying to escape, but then it turned around and threw any notion of fleeing aside. Perhaps it might have got away from the women, but with Garro's arrival it had no other choice but to stand and fight.
Metal feelers lashed out across the ground, keen-edged tips slicing furrows in the dirt. They flexed and moved, ripping up divots and roots. Hakur was caught off-guard as a tentacle lashed at him and threw the Astartes aside, rolling off the trunk of an egg-tree. Garro saw another rip the leg from one of the troopers and put him down in a welter of blood. The captain ducked away from the questing appendages as they hissed over his head.
A witchseeker, caught with her bolter breech open and magazine empty, met the tip of them through her breastbone. They stabbed through her torso and pinned her to a tree, then tore back out in a jet of spent vitae. Still trailing blood, the tentacles bent and whipped at the Emperor's warriors, clipping Rahl on the back swing and tearing the gold hood from another of Kendel's women. Without her helmet, a
severe Null Maiden with a red topknot and portcullis faceplate choked and stumbled, the rancid atmosphere of the jorgall vessel scouring her lungs. Voyen was already moving to assist her, and Garro's face soured. The cyborg was just too fast, too wild and uncontrolled in its motions. To kill it, they would need to take a more direct approach. He thumbed the selector switch on his bolter to fully automatic fire and charged the xenos hybrid.
The battle-captain unloaded an entire clip into the legs and thorax of the cyborg, gouts of oily fluid and flashing short-circuit arcs marking where each round hit home. The jorgall thing hooted and growled, turning to focus its attention on the figure in grey-white armour. Steel-sheathed whips shot out, extending and buzzing with effort, and Garro threw himself into a roll, dodging the places where they stabbed into the soil. The tips of the lashing feelers clattered over his ceramite armour, and Garro felt a sting of pain as they raked the place where the flyer's claws had cut him on the lakeside, reopening the wounds there. A chance flexion of the tentacle, a second of delay on his part, and suddenly the captain's bolter was spinning away from him through the air, the strap hanging ragged as the gun was snapped from his grip-
Garro turned into the force of the impact, rolled again and came up with Libertas in his hand. Stabbing lines of metal came at him and he batted them away with the sword blade, flares of sparks glaring orange-white in the sullen artificial daylight of the egg-tree groves. The others were pouring their fire on to the cyborg, but its attention was still split between Garro and the object it held tight, something swaddled in thin grey muslin. The battle-captain threw
himself at the jorgall mechanoid, chopping off the tips of tentacles and slashing at others. He spun as he felt iron limbs touch his legs and hacked at them, but he was close to its torso and the cyborg's appendages were thicker here, more muscular, more resilient. Powerful coils enveloped him and Garro felt the ground drop away. The machine-hybrid shook him violently, his sword-arm flailing against his side where he could not turn Libertas in his defence. His teeth rattled inside his skull and there was blood in his mouth.
He heard the splintering of flexsteel in the joints of his armour, smelled the acidic tang of spilled coolant as leaks jetted from his backpack. The Astartes hissed through his teeth as pain bit into him, compacting his implanted carapace and ribcage. It was a struggle to keep breath in his lungs, as the pressure grew greater with every moment. Garro was aware of motion as the cyborg drew him closer, up to the glassy capsule of its meat core. Hollow, predatory eyes stared at him, brimming with alien hate. The jorgall wanted to watch him die, to savour it.
The killing stress continued to increase as Garro's three lungs ran dry, his heart hammering wildly in his chest. Darkness was closing in on him. At the edges of the captain's consciousness, he glimpsed a shimmering ghost image, a figure that seemed to be his primarch, beckoning him towards oblivion.
In that moment, Garro tapped a final reserve of mad, desperate strength. By Terra's will, he told himself, in the name of my home world and the Imperium of Man, I will not perish!
New energy flooded through him, hot and raw. Garro reached deep into himself and found a well-spring of conviction, steeling himself against the
xenos's murderous embrace. The captain felt warmth spread into his agonised muscles as he pictured Terra's majesty in his mind's eye, and there with his hand cupped beneath it, holding it safe, the Emperor. In the Emperor's name, I will not fail! I dare not fail!
He unleashed a wordless, furious snarl of defiance and fought back against the alien coils, putting every last ounce of power he could muster into Libertas. The power sword's blade met jorgall steel and parted it, screeching through artificial nerves and mechanical cabling. The cyborg faltered and stumbled as Garro cut his way free, fragments of cracked ceramite shedding from his armour. The captain's burning lungs drank in ragged gulps of air. He pressed forward even as the machine-form tried to shove him away, bringing up the glowing tip of the blade.
Garro saw emotion flutter over the trembling mouthparts of the jorgall as Libertas touched the crown of its glass pod. Unlike the xenos, the captain did not linger for the sake of cruelty. Instead, he pressed his entire weight behind the sword and shattered the capsule, forcing the weapon into the fleshy torso of the alien until it burst from the cyborg's back in a rain of crimson.
The jorgall collapsed with a thunderous crash, tearing down a stand of trees as it fell. Half-finished things erupted from eggs, mewling and spitting, to be met by the guns of the Death Guard and the witchseekers.
Taking back his sword, Garro dropped to the ground as the cyborg's last nerve impulses fluttered through its limbs. Its burden, the shape in grey muslin, was released and rolled to his feet. The captain knelt and unwrapped it with the tip of his blade.
Inside there was an immature jorgall. What surprised him was not that the xenos hatchling was
completely free of any mechanical augmentation, but the freakish mutation of the tripedal being. It was conjoined, a malformation of two aliens that had somehow become merged during growth. Its skull was enormous, a bloated thing with four distinct chambers, quite unlike the ovoid heads typical of its species. Legs and arms twitched towards him, milky eyes swivelled and narrowed in Garro's direction.
Without warning, the air around him changed. The atmosphere became greasy and slick on his skin, suddenly scratchy with the sharp stench of ozone. He had felt such things before, on other battlefields, in other wars for the good of humanity. Garro's mind screamed a single word, and he understood exactly why the Sisters of Silence had come to this place.
'Psyker!' He drew up the sword in an arc, ready to take the creature's head from its shoulders.
Wait.
The word struck him like a cold flood, making his arm go rigid. The ozone stink enveloped him, clouding his thoughts and tightening on his mind just as the cyborg had coiled around his body. It reached into Garro, searching through him as easily as he might have leafed through a book.
Death Guard, it whispered, amusement in its words, 50 confident of your tightness, so afraid to see the crack in your spirit.
Garro tried to complete the killing blow, but he was locked tight, trapped in amber.
Soon the end comes. We see tomorrow. So shall you. All you worship will wither. All will-
The mutant's torso burst in a welter of blood and bone fragments as a single bolter round tore a hole through it as big as a fist. Suddenly the haze was gone and Garro blinked it away, as if waking from a deep
sleep. He turned and found Sister Amendera Kendel at his shoulder, smoke curling from the muzzle of her gun. Her dark eyes studied him from the vision slits of her helmet. The captain stood carefully and duplicated her gesture from the lakeside, touching his armoured fingertips to his heart and his brow.
He became aware of a sound reaching through the wooded ranks of the hatchery, a whistling, a keening that was quickly growing in volume. The sound was atonal and harsh on his ears. It was a lament, a cry from the unhatched.
'Look!' shouted Hakur. 'In the trees! Movement, everywhere!'
Every egg-orb that Garro could see was trembling as the jorgalli things inside thrashed and tore at their confinement, frantic in their need to escape. He flicked a look to Kendel, as the Sister directed her cohorts to gather the dead mutant into a chainmail sack. She glanced up at him and nodded. Perhaps Voyen had been correct, perhaps the cyborg had been some kind of guardian protecting the psyker child, and now it was dead, its siblings were enraged.
Spatters of yolk rained down from the trunks. Kendel flicked out harsh gestures to her Sisters and the women moved off, turning their flamers on the foliage. Garro saw the merit in her action and called into his vox-link. 'Deploy grenades and explosives. Follow the Sisterhood's example. Destroy the trees.'
The fibrous matter of the egg-trees was dry and made excellent tinder. In moments, the alien woodland was burning, the grey sacs popping and boiling. Many of the enhanciles made it to the ground, mad with fury, and they were put down with detached precision.
Garro watched the blue-tinged flames sear and dance as they spread, murdering the world-ship's
dormant and newborn. All across the bottle, the jorgall were perishing beneath the hand of the Death Guard, making a lie of the mutant child's final words. 'A lie,' said Garro aloud, watching the poisonous smoke turn above his head.
THREE
Aeria Gloris A Poisoned Chalice Put to the Question
In the ruins of their enemy, the Death Guard task force regrouped and surveyed the breadth of the destruction they had wrought. The wreckage of the jorgalli picket fleet was a cloud of crystallised breathing gasses, hull fragments and the dead. Some of the teardrop-shaped xenos vessels were still relatively intact. One by one, these were being scuttled with atomic charges, reduced to sun-hot balls of radioactive plasma. In less than a standard Terran day, there would be nothing recognisable left to show the face of an enemy that the Death Guard had obliterated so utterly.