Hive 37
The Guild Astropathica was of course empty. The overturned chairs and tables, cogitators ripped from their mounts on desks, and low-burning candles indicated a hasty retreat from the guild hall that was built into the spaceport terminal.
Timmett stepped carefully over the strewn contents of a desk that had been hastily emptied of its sensitive items before escape. At his feet was a pict of a man and his two sons. They were smiling, laughing over a game of regicide.
The alarm had gone off as soon as the power had shut off in the mid-level. Those that couldn't flee from the spaceport attempted to make their way to neighboring Hive 36 or 38 and were caught in the zombie onslaught. Practically the entire hive was against Timmett and the Ironsights at this point.
The Inquisitor stopped and looked at the bolt pistol in his hand. Even with all of the madness surrounding this situation, this guild hall was a sanctum. He slowly holstered his weapon under his left arm and stood straight up, looking around him at his destroyed surroundings.
"Inquisitor," a feminine voice called from the far side of the chamber. "I have been expecting you."
Timmett's attention snapped to when he heard the voice and his first instinct was to reach for the bolt pistol he had so foolishly just holstered. But just as his hand reached the grip of his weapon, he stopped. The adrenaline was pumping through his veins, but he forced himself to concentrate, to breathe.
"Who are you?" asked Timmett. His voice seemed hoarser than he imagined it would.
"I am the one who stayed behind to allow you to call for help," replied the voice. "My name is Kia, and I have a peculiar talent for seeing things."
Timmett lowered his hand but his muscles didn't relax.
"I need to send a message to Lord High Inquisitor Tothor on Gideron," Timmett told Kia.
"I knew you would need to send a message to someone important," Kia replied.
Finally Timmett caught movement at the far side of the chamber, and a small woman with curled gray hair and milky blue eyes stepped out from behind an overturned desk. Timmett might have thought her a ratling if she were fatter. She wore a young girl's robe that was bright purple, the sleeves just a little too long and the waist just a little too loose so that she appeared almost to be an infant wearing an adult's clothing. Her features were lined, but she had a youthfulness to her that bespoke her true age. She couldn't have been more than sixteen but she was already so damaged by the warp that she appeared almost sixty.
"Are you okay?" she asked. "You seem awfully tense."
"Should I be?" Timmett answered. "It is in my nature to be suspicious."
"I know," said Kia simply. She smiled, a cute innocent smile that said nothing of the horrors she had no doubt witnessed due to her abilities.
Timmett forced himself to relax a little, breathing in deeply and exhaling slowly through his nose. His shoulders stayed square and his jaw remained set. Kia giggled.
"I never expected a real inquisitor to actually be so…"
"What?" Timmett raised an eyebrow.
"Damn formal," Kia finished. "With all your connections to the warp and everything."
"I don't know what kind of inquisitors you've been reading about, Kia, but we tend to avoid direct connections to the warp whenever possible. We combat the horrors that try to invade humanity from the warp, not convene with them."
"Call it what you like," Kia said, shrugging. "At some point or another you will have a connection to those horrors to the point that it will kill you."
"I see," said Timmett. He decided it was time to change the subject. "You can send my message?"
"I absolutely can," Kia replied, her girlish smile widening so that the lines on her face made her look all the older. "Come right this way."
********
Karkiss looked over the terminal with disgust. Thousands of his minions seethed in through the doors but he gained no ground. He would have to end this personally, which was an act he loathed. He had so much to oversee as the conqueror of the planet Bizmoe, and this pathetic Inquisitor and his band of pesky PDF were no real match for the daemon-host and his army of the undead.
Annoyance bubbled up inside his congealed blood and chunky green pus boiled out of the sores that covered his body. Karkiss reached up and plucked out the rat that had made home in one of his empty eye sockets, crushing its head and neck with his bony fingers. Hot crimson blood gushed from between his digits and he threw the rat's body to the ground below him.
Loren Vince, who stood slightly behind her master, quickly reached down and picked up the rat's corpse. With a hungry growl, she began to feast on it.
Karkiss paid her no mind as he began to float towards the spaceport terminal.
Behind him Karkiss heard the crack of a long las and he spun around to see what the commotion was all about. Loren Vince lay sprawled on the ground, half of her head missing and the remaining contents spread in a long trail pointing towards the terminal. Another crack and a brilliant red bolt of energy screamed into the daemon-host's chest. It fizzled and left a smoking black hole in the daemon-host's robes but otherwise failed to harm the putrescent fiend.
In an instant Karkiss was on top of the sniper. He glared down at her with his empty soulless eye sockets and smiled an evil grin. He wanted her to know she was going to die, and die painfully.
The sniper, a young woman with bright purple eyes, met his glare fearlessly. She raised her long las again, and fired.
The shot fizzled off of Karkiss's head and popped a boil that had been waiting to ooze out for some time. Karkiss's eyebrows raised in amusement as the sniper woman fired again. The daemon-host grabbed the barrel of the long las and pulled the weapon out of the sniper's grip.
"It is not every day that a human can look upon the form of a daemon-host and not shit their pants instantly," Karkiss told the woman.
Disarmed, the woman took a step back and drew a very long serrated combat knife from a holster on her hip. Karkiss flicked his hand and the blade rusted and dissolved in her grip.
"Tell me," Karkiss said as he came very close to the woman. "Tell me just who the warp do you think you are?"
The woman punched Karkiss very hard, entirely dislocating his already slack jaw. Teeth and pus went flying.
"My name is Carla Welth," the woman said. "And today is your unlucky day."
Karkiss floated backwards a little with the recoil. He had never let anyone hit him before. He would never let anyone hit him again.
"Die, Carla Welth," Karkiss said.
As the daemon-host said the words, Carla doubled over and threw up. Her skin paled and her hair thinned and fell out. She coughed and threw up again, dry heaving as the rest of the bile in her stomach drained from her system. Her muscle mass withered and decayed, her skin pulled tight across her bones. She looked up at the daemon-host with her now cataract-covered eyes. In them burned not pain, but hatred. Karkiss knew that if she could speak she would be cursing him. But it didn't matter. Carla Welth was likely just one of the Inquisitor's agents, well-trained to handle the horrors of the warp. But at the end of the day, she was just human.
Karkiss turned and began his descent on the terminal.