The Lords of Silence Page 10

  He stomps up to what appears to be some kind of command centre and smashes the doors in. There are a few hundred baseline humans inside, some armed, all of them incontinent with fear. He gets to work. Las-beams flicker over his battleplate, lightly scorching the external patina. He reaches out for the first one, hauls him back and breaks his back. He goes after another, shattering an eye socket, and has to punch down again to stop the creature’s anguished writhing.

  His killing gauntlet, that mass of angry flesh and metal spines, becomes bloody. He’s been cramped up a long time on Solace and needs to flex his atrophying muscles. Soon he’s after a woman, one with an important-looking uniform. She’s scrabbling to get away from him, stinking of fear, but she’s also got a laspistol and is firing it at him in an impressively determined way.

  After a few dozen direct hits, that starts to annoy him. He powers towards her, suddenly speeding up, making use of his old Adeptus Astar­tes shock-velocity, which he can still call on if he needs to. He smacks her gun away and lifts her up by the throat.

  ‘Get out!’ she squeaks.

  Dragan hesitates, briefly amused. ‘Get… out?’

  ‘Get out!’

  It is ridiculous. She is white with terror, flailing at him as if he were vermin under her bedclothes, and yet it forces a smile across his scarred and weathered face. ‘Call for help,’ he growls.

  That’s all he really wants from this. To spread the word, to summon armies worth taking on.

  Instead she fires at him again – she’s still got the gun in her hand – and it stings him under his gorget. He barks a laugh and hurls her to one side, cracking her bloodily into a bulkhead.

  He wades into the rest of the herd then, lashing out lazily. The volume of screaming is beginning to make his ears tingle.

  ‘Putrifier,’ he voxes as he works, wondering if Slert’s already engaged. ‘Anything worth killing yet?’

  ‘There’s a garrison, Gallowsman,’ comes Slert’s eager voice.

  ‘Superb,’ says Dragan, advancing on the last of those still standing. ‘Leave some for me – I don’t think I’ll be kept here much longer.’

  But Slert has his hands full. The Lords of Silence are spread out across the jumble of outbuildings and corrugated habs, and he is among the first to locate the only genuine prospect of resistance. It is a hazed, muted prospect in the night’s driving wind, blurred by the gale of particles that race across this barren landscape.

  Slert knows what kind of world this is. He takes indecent pleasure in the knowledge that the Imperials consider it a fertile place, one from which sustenance can be taken. For him, schooled and steeped in the deepest concoctive formulations of the god, they might as well have paved it over with rockcrete and doused the rest in acid. It is a dead world. It is empty, barren and hideous. Nothing should linger here, nothing should be suffered to remain.

  For all that, there are opportunities. There will be silos somewhere, and vast expanses of just-about-growing matter. Perhaps there might be a few novel strings of molecules lurking amid all that conformity, something he can wrangle out and distil and spin around. That is, after all, his chief motivation, and the way in which he gives glory to the god. He is biologos, master of Petri dishes and cultures, the refiner of phages and exciting disturbances.

  It will have to wait, though. For the moment, the Imperials, credit to them, are putting up something of a fight.

  The garrison compound is walled, with defence towers at the corners and guns mounted atop the roof-level platforms within. There are two sets of gates, one on either side, and he approaches the first of them now. There are shooters on the ramparts, protected by a heavy parapet, though they are struggling to pick their targets in the flying stormwind.

  Others of his brotherhood are closing in on the compound now, striding out of the howling dark. He can see the outlines of one of Garstag’s juggernauts, even more cumbersome than the rest of the warband’s Unbroken, shrugging off a hail of direct impacts. There are dim green glows on the far side, indicating more of his brothers stalking into range.

  Slert has one capability none of the rest enjoy. His mortal eyes wasted away a long time ago, gnawed into pulp by parasites and left to dribble out of their sockets, but he has many more replacements across his whole body, bulbous nodules wedged under the skin that swivel and peer and blink. For Slert, the entire battlefield is a shifting tapestry of false-colour imagery, a ghostly, overlaid shimmer of infection. He does perceive the real, but only as if glimpsed through a dirty, blotchy glass. What he really spies is the infected, the signs of corruption and failure and closeted spawnings. Much of the time this means decay within inanimate objects – he can isolate metal rot and fungal spread and damp and rockcrete cancer – but that is not the purpose of his Gift. His true talent is for the living – for the hot, blood-pumping carriers of bacteria and viruses that cluster around him.

  That is what he sees now, straight through the translucent skein of the garrison wall units. Like corpuscles in a bloodstream, he sees troopers jog down tunnels or crouch behind strongpoints. He knows where they are by their life spoor, a signature in the living warp that only his glorious mutations perceive.

  And that gives him certain advantages. He knows where the weak links are, and how to exploit them. As the others close in, drawing fire dutifully, he limps up to the walls, extends his gauntlets and clamps them onto a thin joint between panels. The first touch brings the metal exploding out in rivers of corrosion – oxidisation spreading like wildfire, shooting up and out from his grip. Slert smiles and exerts more pressure. The entire section seems to age instantly, rotting from within, and soon it is collapsing in his grip, falling away, exposing a lumen-lit void beyond.

  The defenders see what he is doing and rush to drive him back, but by then it is already too late. Slert is clambering through the breach, a nightmare bursting out of the whirling dust. He draws his injector pistol, and every shot finds its target. Guardsmen collapse as soon as they are hit, doubling over and vomiting their own windpipes out.

  Slert shoves and barges his way deeper in, cutting down those who get too close with his serrated cleaver blade, dropping those who remain at range with his pistol. By now his Unbroken brothers have made their own incursions, blasting through the walls or tearing them apart with power fists. They are in their element now, gliding like vengeful cadavers through the wreckage, slaying in their deliberate, stolid manner.

  A Guardsman rushes him, screaming something about his Emperor protecting this and that. Slert sees him for what he is – mid-thirties, already cradling a few nondescript ailments within his undernourished body, including the liver cancer that would kill him in a few years anyway – and shoots him through the chest. The man goes down like a lead ingot, writhing, clutching at his neck with stiffening fingers. An injector needle gives a far more vivid experience than cancer, one that will fry his nerve ends and make his synapses sing, not that you’ll ever get thanks for gifts like that.

  Slert smashes his way through the teetering doors at the end of the corridor, breaking back out into the open – an inner courtyard – and sees the entire place thrown into disorder. Flames have started up, all of them ripe with the stink of unnatural chems, and the fires are now racing out of control. Unbroken warriors are rampaging through the defences in all directions, upending barricades and hacking down those still brave enough to man them. The soldiers are in full retreat now, haring back across towards the north wall, covered by las-fire from their comrades on the far parapets. They’re sprinting, those who still can.

  Slert hears a throaty cough, like a grox-herd entering heat, and turns to see a big crawler unit – five metres high on huge tyres and thickly shielded against the wind – gun its engines. It’s only metres away from him, and he reaches out to shoot at it. It swerves, squealing on rubber, and his shot grazes the nearside shielding. It’s being driven erratically, far too fast for its un
wieldy bulk, and it nearly topples over.

  Slert laughs out loud and shoots it again. This time he hits, and the crawler skids across the dust. Its armour just about holds, and who­ever’s driving it manages to spin it straight towards the opposite gates. These are closed still, but burning furiously and clearly weakened. The crawler roars towards them, bumps over a corpse, smashes clean into the barrier, bucks over the tumbling metal, and then gets out.

  ‘Well done,’ Slert murmurs, wondering if the drivers have any idea what he’s shot them with. A pity – they were resourceful.

  Then he turns back to the slaughter. All around him he sees bodies, transparent sacs of contagion, wobbling and bursting and racing away from him.

  ‘Now then, that’s a specimen,’ he says, picking the next target and lowering the injector.

  ‘Shit!’ says Battacharya.

  Machard drives.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

  Machard keeps his hands on the wheel, gripping tight.

  ‘What in the hell were…? What in the hell, Olav?’

  She’s shaking hard. She’s already been sick – that happened when they were first sighted from the walls – but she wants to be sick again. The shakes are getting worse.

  It is a bumpy ride. A crawler, as the name suggests, is designed to go sedately, rocking across the uneven plains of the Resource. Now Machard is driving it very fast, throwing both of them around in the cab.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit!’

  Machard has his foot locked to the accelerator piston. The world outside is a hurricane of blown chaff peppering the forward visor. The last of the light has fallen behind them; ahead there is nothing but the night-storm.

  Battacharya grabs her helm and wrenches it off. She’s hyperventilating and needs to calm herself. She can’t get the images out of her head, though. She doesn’t even have a word for what they were.

  Monsters. Terror-shapes. Goblins, bogeymen.

  The smell of them is still in the cab. It’s indescribable – a mix of rotting meat, medicae fluids and faeces, but that doesn’t convey the extent to which it makes you want to retch, to loose your bowels, to pluck your own eyeballs out and crush them between your own shivering fingers.

  She can’t look back. Surely they’re all dead by now anyway, the others. It was so terrifyingly quick, so completely one-sided. They couldn’t be hurt. She’d seen las-beam after las-beam strike home, and they hadn’t so much as stumbled. They’d just walked through it.

  Battacharya tries to stop her mind racing. Dantine might still be fighting. She’d seen him rally his troops and retreat back to the armoury, somehow keeping it together in the face of those… creatures.

  She couldn’t have stayed. There was nothing she could have done. The priority now was to get to the first node, to overload the weather stations. Once they went down, the entire biosphere would start to degrade, denying them Najan’s only asset – its immense productive capacity.

  It’s something to hang on to. The closest one is only a few kilo­metres away, far from the complex boundaries, and you can set a chain reaction off from any of them. It’s a last failsafe, designed just for this eventuality by ever-vigilant Mechanicus adepts.

  She rubs her eyes. She blinks hard.

  ‘Slow down, Olav,’ she says, trying to get a grip on where they are.

  His foot stays where it is. She can see his neck muscles under his helm, and they’re protruding alarmingly.

  ‘Olav, slow down. We’re out. Come on. Job to do.’

  Gradually, he relaxes a bit. He starts to steer properly. The crawler stops jumping everywhere, and the axles stop shrieking.

  ‘You have the coordinates?’ she asks, fumbling with her forearm implant to get the access codes.

  Machard is struggling to talk. ‘Yeah,’ he manages to get out at last.

  They’re still going too fast, but that’s the least of her worries. She’s in a cold sweat, and can’t find the numbers. ‘It’s coming up,’ she warns.

  The storm’s getting worse – a hail of particle-stuffed wind that slams up against them. It’s near pitch black ahead. They should see it soon – a needle-shaped pylon, forty metres high, blinking with markers.

  Something thumps on the cab’s roof, and she jumps.

  ‘What was that?’ she asks.

  ‘Can’t see it yet,’ Machard grunts.

  Battacharya peers into the flying murk. ‘It must be–’

  The rear glass pane shatters, and she screams. Something fist-sized tumbles into the cab and latches on to Machard. He tries to swat it off, and the crawler lurches.

  Battacharya reaches out, grabs it – it’s wet and scaly – and rips it from his jacket. The thing wriggles in her grip, twists, then turns on her. A wide grin splits its tiny body, yellow eyes light up, and it goes for her throat.

  She screams again, struggling to slap it off. It’s whip quick and horribly strong, like a bag of snakes, and its teeth snap at her face and spray her with spittle. Somehow she manages to elbow the window catch loose, and flings the thing at the pane. It splats hard against the glass, then tumbles out of the gap. She hears a long wail as it flies into the night.

  ‘What was–’ she starts, then sees Machard.

  He’s going limp, his hands slipping from the wheel. A bloody weal glistens at his neck. ‘I… can’t… see…’ he slurs.

  ‘Olav!’ she yells, grabbing the wheel before he loses control completely. The cab fills with flying chaff.

  Another thump on the roof. Then another. Battacharya sees something flop into the cab, wobble towards them. She recoils, and feels something wet below. She looks down, and there’s one squatting in the footwell, hissing at her.

  ‘Shit!’ she screams, stamping on it furiously.

  More of them tumble inside, squirming up the cab frame, swinging from tiny arms through the broken windows. She only catches glimpses of them in the confusion – marsh-green bodies, scabs and warts, spiked fingers and those horrific, far-too-wide mouths.

  Something slimy latches on to her jacket, and she screams again. She has a brief image of Machard, his face lost under a pulsing sac of flesh. Then there’s a puff of blood, splattering against the windscreen, and the crawler keels over.

  The world tilts off its axis. Her stomach lurches, and she’s briefly weightless, then the whole structure crashes onto its side. The crawler skids, engines whining at full tilt, two wheels churning up the earth as they keep spinning. She’s thrown around, yanked against her restraints, until the crawler hits something hard and jerks to a halt, nearly upended.

  The creatures are thrown off her by the impact, burst open as they hit the glass splinters. She’s dazed for a second, blood running down her forehead, but panicked adrenaline is still flooding through her. She unclips her restraint, fingers shaking, and shoves her way out of the splintered hole where the rear windshield used to be.

  She can’t see any more of the creatures, but doesn’t linger to check. Somehow the access codes are still blinking on her implant. Ahead of her, less than a hundred metres off, she sees the transmitter through the wind, a dark island of stability.

  She starts to run. Her leg spikes with pain, and something’s badly wrong with her ribs, but she’s got to get there. Barley fronds hiss around her as she limps towards the node’s wire fencing. The wind howls, and she thinks she can hear something like… giggling.

  ‘Oh, holy Throne…’ she murmurs, staggering faster, heart hammering. There’s only one thought in her mind now.

  Get to the node. Shut down the weather-net. Deny the enemy the Resource.

  She gets to the gate. She fumbles the lock, gets it open, pushes the frame back. The node rises up into the night, its on-off marker beacon almost obliterated by the chaff wind.

  She stumbles, light-headed now, gets to her feet again. The entrance to the command station
is just up ahead – a blast door set into an adamantium frame, capable of withstanding a direct hit from a howitzer.

  She slumps up against it, mercifully cut out of the wind. She’s shuddering badly now, feeling the blood loss, but manages to slot the intake needle into her arm. There’s a click, a whirr, and the blast door lock slides back. A bar of yellow light slides over the ground at her feet as the panels part. A surge of euphoria swelling up within her, she feels the warmth of the interior on her face and stumbles to get inside.

  It is absolutely impossible that they should be waiting for her. There is no way in, no gap, no chance of gnawing through that blast shielding. It is a secure chamber, designed to a standard Imperial template and utterly impregnable. For a moment her brain refuses to believe the evidence of her senses, and she keeps moving towards the gap.

  The Little Lords are happy to greet her, spilling off their perches inside the command station, thumping to the ground to waddle up to her with their arms spread. They swarm at her, racing up her legs like ship rats and sinking their teeth in deep. Her screams are brief this time, choked off by the mass of minuscule bodies overwhelming her. For a moment she struggles under the squirming mass, one arm extended, before they engulf her entirely, chewing and spitting and gnawing.

  It is all over very quickly. The frenzy passes. The Little Lords, soon sated, grow bored and start to wander off. One of them, its belly glistening and its teeth still dripping, waddles out of the open doorway. It looks at the smoking remains of the crawler, on its side in a furrow of driven earth. It looks at the crops swaying wildly in the driving wind. It looks at the night sky, still subject to full weather control.

  It does not understand the significance of any of this. It has done what it always does – followed its hungry instincts. It is absurdly happy. Almost all of the time, it is absurdly happy.

  Then it swivels around, pivoting on a miniature slop of obesity, to see its fellows start to gorge again.