AN : new chapter once more ! This time, Nurgle's putrescent designs shall be unleashed in all their morbid splendor.
SPOILER WARNING - SORT OF, IT WOULD PROBABLY BE BETTER TO RETURN HERE AFTER YOU HAVE READ THE CHAPTER BUT I AM NOT SURE
In this chapter, I am trying my hand at something I have never written before : a Zombie Apocalypse. I did some research on the subject, both in the Warhammer 40000 universe and in other medias. Here, I am describing the process of the outbreak, with the plague spreading until there is only a small group of survivors left, and the chapter ends as they are about to make their last stand. I am not really confident in it, so please tell me what you think may have been done better in your reviews. Also, for the next chapter, I hesitate on whether to write a chapter about the last stand (with perhaps another event mixed in, like I usually do) or just say what happened from another point of view and leave it offscreen. If you have an opinion on the subject, likewise, please tell me. I know what will come after Talexorn's fate is complete, so it won't trouble me much to just abandon the idea of a lengthy description of the last stand.
SPOILER END
For the reviews of the last chapter, I would like to thank Spider, who warned me of a problem with the name of the new character. I really should have seen it !
For the other reviews, as always, I thank you for your support. It really helps to get the inspiration going.
This chapter was relatively easy and quick to write, and I have also greatly advanced on the next chapter of the Roboutian Heresy, the one on the Night Lords. You can expect it to go up soon, though I will take the time to polish this one. It has been expected for a long time, and I won't risk making it any less good that it can be by rushing it. (And yes, I know that I said I would finish the Parecxis campaign before returning to it. What can I say, inspiration is not predictable. I just wanted to note a few things for later, and it ended with already more than 12000 words and still several sections to finish).
On another note, the new version of the Apocalypse mod for Dawn of War has been released. It is awesome, with new units, voice acting, factions incorporated (I played several games of daemons of Nurgle for inspiration for this chapter). If you have the game, try it. It adds a whole dimension to the game.
If you have a question, a suggestion, or like the story, don't hesitate to PM me or leave a review.
And ... that's it for today. See you soon for the next Roboutian Heresy chapter !
I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.
++Three days after the rescue of the Lady of the Three Seas : infection++
Night had fallen on the hive-city of Talexorn, but the sounds of activity hadn't stopped. Even before the arrival of the Warp Storm, the noises of the city had never truly been silenced at any hour, for the hive was as much a giant factory as it was a city. Millions of souls had toiled day and night on assembly conveyors, fabricating the countless items necessary to both the life of the world's denizens and its exports to other systems. Now, with the planet isolated and traitor forces on the ground, these same chains had been reorganized to produce what the loyalists would need in the war, but the sounds of work hadn't really changed. It had been easy to reconvert the production from civilian products to military supplies – after all, the opposite had been done mere years before, when the Heresy had ended and Parecxis had been released from its duties to the war effort of the Imperium. Some discontent adepts murmured that it would save them time in the future to just assume the planet was always at war, instead of changing the production lines' organization each time something like that happened. Their masters quietly encouraged that line of reasoning, for it implied that the loyalists would succeed in defending their world from the traitors.
If one had been able to look at Talexorn now and before Arken had unleashed the power contained on Isleas, one of the only differences they would see were the ruins standing where there had once been proud towers, brought low by the earthquakes that had followed the world being engulfed into half-reality. Although the excavation of the area was underway, the unstable nature of the ground and the incarnate nightmares still hiding within the rubble made it a dangerous task, and one that had to be performed while wearing heavy rebreather masks and under the protection of Astartes squads. Another difference would be sky. Before the coming of the Storm, Talexorn had enjoyed the same night sky as any hive-city in the Imperium : black pollution clouds, occluding the stars. For all the delicate ecological balance instaured by the Ultramarines when they had freed the planet, nothing could suppress the consequences of large-scale industrialization.
Now, though, the citizens of Talexorn didn't look up at all, for to do so would endanger not only their sanity, but also their very souls. In some streets, great panels of opaque plasteel had been fixed between buildings and lumi-globes installed beneath them in order to block the skyline completely. But in the sections of the hive where this coverage wasn't finished, staring at the sky would expose the observer to the madness that reigned there. Even through the clouds, the unnatural light of the Storm was still visible, and thousands had lost their minds staring at the chaotic display. The lights showed the ever shifting tides of the Sea of Souls, and the only constant was the blighted orb that had once been the Palace of Glass, now lost to the servants of ruin. By now, only those who were already pledged to the Dark Gods dared to look at the sky, and even them tended to refrain from it, seeing as it would only bring the attention of Talexorn's transhuman protectors upon their heretical selves. As a result, the population of the hive kept its head down and tried very hard to ignore the manifestation of the power held by the Emperor's enemies that shone above them. Aside from the psychological consequences of such a way of life, it also made the job of the infiltrator hidden among them much easier.
The infiltrator knew that there were others in the city who ultimately served the same masters as it. It didn't care, however, for its mission didn't call for it to rely on them – and, though the infiltrator didn't know it, neither did any other plan of the Awakened One. These cultists had no contact with the network created by the Lord of Shadows when he had prepared the Arrival. They were a simple consequence of the Storm radiating its taint down the world, and when the time came they would share the fate of all within Talexorn's walls.
The spawn walked on the rooftops of the hive's towers, passing from one building to the next either by using the very same panels that were supposed to protect the city from the Warp's corruption or jumping from one to the next after taking several minutes to contract its unnatural muscles like springs. It wasn't especially attempting to be stealthy, and would have been discovered easily had the hive's population been in a normal condition. But right now, it could as well have been invisible as it moved across the hive with a speed that no one on the ground could match.
Among themselves, those of the Forsaken Sons who knew of the creature's existence called it a Plague Homunculus. Its existence had only been possible thanks to Pharod the Reborn's newfound knowledge of Nurgle's secrets, and its birth could only have happened in a place as deep in the Warp as the Gardener's lair on Parecxis Alpha's moon. Its unique properties made it perfectly suited for that kind of mission, and Pharod had been eager to allow his creation to prove its value in the eyes of his divine patron. Those who had seen Arken speak with the fallen Tech-priest over the hololithic transmission had been unnerved by the enthusiasm displayed by the Gardener, so unlike it had been to the sons of Mars' traditional calm. Allowing the creature to reach Talexorn had taken significant efforts, and Pharod had impressed on the Homunculus the importance of its mission. Now, with the blind devotion of an adoring child to its parent, the spawn of Nurgle aimed to fulfill it.
Reaching its destination, the Homunculus went on its belly and started to crawl, its movements unnaturaly fluid as it did so. Unlike most of the buildings in the hive, this one was actually guarded, and though most surveillance cameras had long been disabled by the Storm's static, one still functioning and placed on the rooftop would be enough to alert the guards of the Homunculus' presence. While there were only humans in the building, which it could easily kill, if it came to that its task here would be a failure. From the moment it reached the building until it left, stealth was of paramount importance.
The Homunculus found a vent and slipped within it, tearing free the grill that barred its entry with ease. The passage was too tight for its body, and so it unhinged its bones and reshaped the fluid beneath its tense skin. To a human observer, the sight would have been horrible : the humanoid shape turned into that of a snake, with empty patches of skin hanging around where its limbs had been and basic, dirty clothes surrounding the thing. After a few minutes of crawling down the vents, the bag of poison and bones reached the inside of the warehouse. Carefully removing the grill on the vent's other side, the Homunculus dropped within what it had identified as one of Talexorn's food stores.
Soon after the coming of the Warp Storm, Parecxis' authorities had began to seize all stocks of food on the planet, as well as hoard what few crops could still be made before the corruption of the Warp made it dramatically unwise to consume what could grow on the world. Recycling could only carry the population so far, and the government had quite rightly believed that only through rationing would it have a chance to avoid mass starvation before the Storm dissipated, if it ever did so. Food was distributed across the hive by dedicated workers under the protection of the militia, and so far riots related to the rationing had been avoided. Preachers in the street warned daily the masses of the risks of rebellion, especially when damnation was literally hanging over their heads.
The air was very cold around the Plague Homunculus – as was to be expected of a place dedicated to storing food for long periods of time. Icicles hung from the ceiling and those who worked here needed to wear protective suits lest they die of hypothermia. Quickly, it replaced its bones into human shape. While this transformation was something of a waste of time seeing as it would have to break down its skeleton again in order to leave, it was better to be able to pass for human in case it met one of the guards. The probabilities were slim, but the mind of the spawn had been crafted from a shard of Pharod's own, and for all the corruption of the former magos there was still a streak of cold logic left in him and thus in his creations.
After retaking a shape that a normal human could look at without immediately starting screaming, the Homunculus started to move amongst the rows of stored foodstuff. It ignored the slabs of meat and the other more pricey elements. During the last several days, it had observed the distribution of food across the hive, identifying the basic components from which the nutritive gruel was made. It knew what to look for in order to achieve maximum propagation. Avoiding the few humans who walked in the building, looking for the inevitable would-be thieves that rationing, no matter how justified it was, would always cause to appear, it finally reached a huge container within which was stored one of the hive's stock of condensed protein paste. The Homunculus climbed up the massive container, and punched through the lid, pushing its fist slowly through the metal. It looked down at the liquid, kept swirling by great paddles to avoid the formation of lumps. Then it spat into the tiny hole it had made, green, glowing poison dropping directly into the paste before being mixed with the rest of it.
As the liquid left its body, the Plague Homunculus felt its vitality fade a little, like it had done the four previous times he had infected something with Pharod's poison. It knew that fulfilling its mission would most certainly end it, but it didn't care. It had been brought into existence for that purpose, and it would show its gratitude to its maker by doing its duty without protest nor hesitation. It sought no reward for this, no blissful afterlife : the chance to prove its love for its parent was enough for the creature that had brought death into Talexorn.
++Seven days after the rescue of the Lady of the Three Seas : patient zero++
Pietro Lisnar didn't think of himself as a bad man. Yes, he was a thief. And yes, what he stole was technically property of the God-Emperor Himself, distributed amongst His subjects by those who were entrusted to do His will. But after what he had seen in the first days following the coming of the Storm, before order had been restored, he just wasn't able to think of a few stolen rations as a sin deserving damnation. Back then, madmen had rampaged in the streets, daemons had been brought forth from the Warp by the murder of children, and countless horrors had been committed by those who, willingly or not, had lost their souls to the Dark Gods. Even if Pietro was ready to admit to being a criminal, he knew that he was no servant of ruin. He simply needed the money, and his old boss wasn't capable of paying him, what with him being dead and all.
That had been a shame, really. The old shopkeeper had been a though and greedy bastard, but he hadn't deserved dying the way he had – torn to pieces by one of the psychos who had been cast across the entire planet from the prison-world by one of the thrice-accursed traitors, if rumor was to be believed. Left without a job and needing to pay rent, Pietro had reluctantly returned to his old set of skills, back before he had been able to find a stable position as the old man's aide. His only other skills consisted of moving heavy things around, and he didn't want to break his back helping in the Manufactorum or in clearing the rubble of the ruined districts. Thus, thievery. And since few things had value now that the traitors' army was on the ground and liable to attack the hive any day, he had begun to steal food. Other products were on demand on the black market, but he didn't trust his skills to try his hand at acquiring any of them. Food was honest, in the sense that it couldn't be misused, unlike weapons – another of the things many fearful citizens, and probably a few hidden cults, were stockpiling in preparation for whatever doom the traitors launched their way next. It was also untraceable, quickly vanished, and relatively simple to steal. For all the guards that accompanied the Administratum's mobile kitchens, they were more here to prevent riots over the precious supplies and less to actually guard the stuff in the more traditional sense. With most eyes locked on the crowd, it was not very difficult to go in and out of the trucks, especially with the adept's robe Pietro had managed to acquire on the black market weeks ago.
Standing on the street, waiting for his contact to arrive, Pietro looked around him, trying to prevent his nervosity to show. This was a fairly known place for illicit dealings, and just a few days ago the Arbites had made a raid here, arresting anyone they found with contraband on them. He had reached his current client through his usual channels, but that didn't mean he wasn't being set up. Those who ruled the hive liked to make examples of the food traffickers they caught. They didn't hang them in public or anything like that – the Sons of Calth considered such barbaric behavior not only ugly, but also dangerous for the soul of both the executioner and whoever watched and enjoyed the spectacle. Pietro didn't really understand it, but apparently strong emotions could allow daemons to appear, and public executions were generally not calm affairs. But even if his life wasn't in danger, indentured servitude in the Manufactorum for the next two decades was still something he wished to avoid.
Still, as long as it was the Arbites who found him, he could at least try to run, and was fairly confident in his ability to escape. What really worried him was that other rumor that had been running around since the beginning of the week. Word of a strange, silent silhouette who passed from shadow to shadow, going to places that no one could guess in order to do things no one could know. It was probably nothing, at worst another thief who was less careful than Pietro. But, like almost everyone in the hive, he had heard about what had happened aboard the Lady of the Three Seas. Details were unclear, but it was common knowledge that one of the infamous Night Lords had managed to hid on the ship before butchering hundreds of civilians. The authorities had tried to keep the whole affair under wraps, but the traumatized survivors had quickly spread their tale, and now everyone looked above his shoulder in fear that another of the Traitor Marines may have reached the hive without revealing himself. So far there had been no gruesome murders, but it could be that whatever that mysterious silhouette was, it was simply biding its time …
At last, Pietro's contact arrived. In the darkened street, several ration packs changed hands, quickly followed by a bag of coins. Pietro didn't check the money – he would do it once he was back into his tiny flat, and if he had been shortchanged, well there were a lot of other clients on the black market who would buy whatever he could take without being caught. It had happened before, but rarely. Pietro's appearance – a tall man with a scar running from his forehead to his lower jaw, given to him as a child by a thug's knife – was generally enough to keep the other party honest. As he walked down the streets, he took out the last pack he carried with him – the one he had got by waiting in line like everyone else. Despite everything, he still felt bad about personally eating anything he had stolen. It was stupid, but he considered the long period standing in the file something of a personal penance for his thief. Usually the gruel tasted of nothing identifiable, but it filled the belly and was supposed to give a grown man all the nutrients he needed to live and remain healthy. He thought that there was a strange aftertaste this time, but quickly dismissed it as a result of his imagination longing for some actual food.
On his way back to his hab, Pietro started to cough, feeling a coppery taste in his mouth as he did so. He hoped he hadn't caught anything.
++Twenty-two days after the rescue of the Lady of the Three Seas: spreading
At long last, the war had come to Talexorn. Not in the form of an army of Traitor Marines charging the city with chainswords held in their fists and hatred in their heart, nor as a tide of Neverborn bursting forth from the ether in a flow of madness and evil incarnate. Instead, it had come as a disease, a plague that spread amongst the population of the hive with alarming speed. Already thousands were lying down in the hive's hospitals, barely strong enough to breath on their own. On a population of almost two billions, these were but a drop in an ocean, but the Astartes wardens of the city had learned the hard way not to underestimate the potential of diseases as a fell weapon of war. Physicians and nurses were doing all they could to keep the infected alive in an increasingly desperate battle, while others sought to understand where the plague had come from and how to fight it.
To the knowledge of those who studied and fought the disease, no one had directly died of the plague yet, but work had significantly slowed in the factories as schedules were disrupted, and panic was slowly rising. Not only were the symptoms quite scary in their own right – coughing blood, quickly followed by the formation of boils on the infected's skin and then by deadly pallor and weakness as the body fought against the disease – but their progression was alarmingly quick, with healthy patients turning into half-dead wretches in less than a week. The fact that no cure seemed to have any effect made it all worse.
When the first cases had manifested themselves, the authorities had not thought much of it. Disease was a permanent feature of any high concentration of humanity, and the maritime hive-city most definitively qualified as such. It was only once the adepts of the Officio Medicae had failed to both identify and heal the plague and that more and more victims had appeared that concerns had begun to rise. Then the psykers in the hive – astropaths who had somehow survived the Storm so far and the Librarians of the Sons of Calth who regularly patrolled the hive to look for signs of daemonic incursion – had reported detecting the growing taint of the Warp within the city. It had not been difficult to see the link between these two events for the veteran Space Marines.
'This is an attack,' declared Captain Erasmos of Sons of Calth's Fourth Company to the assembled officials. 'Somehow the Forsaken Sons are responsible for this epidemic. There is no doubt about it. Now. What do we know ?'
The Captain was addressing a gathering of about twenty humans and posthumans inside what had once been the Arbites' headquarters in the hive and had become the center of the city's governance. Erasmos had been entrusted with command and defense of Talexorn by Chapter Master Chiron. He and the hundred battle-brothers of his Company were both the leaders of the hive's military forces and the last line of defense if – when – the hive came under attack, just like his colleague in the hive-city of the north. The center of the loyalist resistance was located in the hive-city deeper inside the continent, between Talexorn and the northern hive of Nalemos. There, in the gigantic spires of Asthenar , second greatest city of Parecxis Alpha, the Chapter Master and eight Companies of Sons of Calth prepared for the next stage of the war. When the Forsaken Sons attacked one of the hives – be it Nalemos or Talexorn – Menelas Chiron would lead the counter-attack at the head of the bulk of the Chapter and tens of thousands of human soldiers.
Or at least that was the plan. In practice, it seemed that the Traitors wouldn't give them a straight battle, instead using despicable means of weakening the loyalists such as the Warp-born disease that was the reason for this meeting.
'Our analysis has revealed traces of the virus in the food distributed to the population,' said a robed adept of the Mechanicus through the vox-speaker that had replaced his mouth. 'Not all of the sampled rations were contaminated, but enough that I ordered all of our reserves to be re-examined at once. My subordinates have already begun their work with the most vital stocks, as they are both most likely to have been targeted and the ones we need to keep the population fed. We have also detected the presence of the virus in several of the water distribution systems, and proceeded to their immediate purge. On this front also, the cleansing continues, but given the sheer size of the hive-city and our … ' the tech-priest actually hesitated there, something that worried all others present. It took much to unnerve the representative of the Mechanicus – the last time that had happened had been when news had reached him that some of his brethren had turned traitors in Santorius. ' … diminished personal available, it will take weeks before we have examined every single one of the three thousand seven hundred ninety-two separate reservoirs and recycling devices which supply the hive with drinkable water.'
'And all of it will mean nothing if whoever the traitors have got infiltrated poison them again,' muttered the representative of the various militias that had been merged with the Arbites. 'These were already guarded, but my men didn't see anything. Our investigation has also yielded little. We found the traces of the intruder's entrance. From the ways he has used, it is unlikely that we are dealing with a Traitor Marine – unless he can somehow crawl through air vents. Our main lead so far is that one of these wretched cults is behind it.'
'Many of my brothers have reported being told about a mysterious wanderer in our city's streets by those coming to them for spiritual counsel,' said Father Colin. The man's voice was soft, still sore from the exertion he had endured when confronting the daemon on the Lady of the Three Seas. Upon arriving to Talexorn, he had quickly became the unofficial head of the local Ecclesiarchy, the tale of his act spreading amongst the population. The old man hadn't sought such a position, but he had accepted it, and was doing his best to direct the efforts of the several hundreds of priests in the hive. 'Not only have many of them see it in the darkness, but even those who haven't dream of it, seeing it spilling poison and death across the city.'
Once, it would have been unthinkable for Erasmos to act upon the dreams of humans. But that had been before the Heresy – when the galaxy still made sense and the Imperial Truth still held firm in the universe. Now, he knew better than to reject such visions outright . Besides, his own Librarians had reported suffering similar dreams. Not for the first time, he was hit by the similarity between the hive-cities of the Imperium and a single living organism. The hive knew that it was under attack, the same way a man would know that he was sick. And, like a single man's immune system, it had ensured that those within its body that could deal with the infecting element were warned and sent into action.
'Argus,' he called to another of the Sons of Calth present. 'You and your squad have experience in fighting the spawn of the Warp used by our enemy. While the rest of us continue purging the infected stocks of food and water, you will track this creature. Try to capture it if possible – alive if you can, or bring its remains. I will trust your judgment on that matter, but our Apothecaries could learn much from it about this disease.'
'My lord,' asked the representative of the Officio Medicae, 'surely me and my colleagues are more qualified for …'
'No, adept. They aren't. Though your knowledge of human physiology may surpass that of my Apothecaries, it will mean nothing if they are themselves infected, and whatever is responsible for this contagion is bound to be far more dangerous than what you are equipped to deal with. So far, only us Astartes seem to be immune to this plague. We will be the ones to study it directly, while you and yours do all you can to help those who have been infected. Argus. Do you accept that duty ?'
'We will hunt down that infiltrator,' vowed Argus to all those present. 'And deliver upon him the Emperor's justice.'
++Thirty days after the rescue of the Lady of the Three Seas : first deaths
The hunt had lasted eight days. Eight days of wandering across the hive's most questionable districts, hiding their power armor under dirty rags. Eight days of interrogating terrified humans and following dubious leads. Eight days of listening to the reports from the hospitals, where the first victims of the plague had finally begun to slip away from the healers' fingers and into death's cold embrace before their bodies were burned to prevent further spread of the epidemic. Eight days of letting Lycaon spread his mind into the city's heart, looking out for the signs of the intruder in its midst.
It hadn't been a complete waste of time. Argus' squad had discovered four cults of the Ruinous Powers hiding in the underhive during their quest, and purged the fools with bolter and blade before calling for the Arbites to take care of the fallout. Their mere presence had also dismantled several networks of traffickers, who had chosen to abandon their ways rather than risk the wrath of the transhuman walking amongst them. But while the death of heretics and the suppression of crime were always worthwhile endeavors, it wasn't what they had sworn to accomplish. The source of the disease that was slowly spreading through the hive, the mysterious infiltrator, had eluded them. Lycaon's efforts had been obstructed by the fact that the essence of plague carried by the intruder was now thinner, and its psychic spore was emanating from those who were infected as well. They had crossed paths with teams of tech-priests tasked with cleansing contaminated water sources several times while following the Librarian's senses, to the growing frustration of all the squad.
Now, though, they finally had succeeded. As yet another night of fruitless searching was about to come to an end, Lycaon had caught the psychic scent of the plague in the middle of one of the habitation districts, and it was both potent and moving. It wasn't one of the infected, nor was it one of the contaminated locations. As soon as the Librarian had informed Argus, the sergeant had separated his squad in order to surround the infiltrator's estimated position. It was moving in the near-empty streets, at the same speed as a walking human. From a distance, it looked no different from any number of refugees who now lived in the city, though the cloak it wore over its shoulders was dirtier than what the exiled had been provided by the loyalists' quartermasters.
Showing discretion far beyond what one would think the armored transhuman capable of, the Astartes took position in ambush, waiting for their sergeant's signal. Once Argus had confirmation that all of his men were in position, he gestured to Lycaon to begin. With a pull of psychic energy, the Librarian ripped the cloak off their target's shoulders, giving away its exact position to the rest of his squad, who jumped out of their hiding places. Immediately, the few humans in the street started screaming in horror as they saw what was revealed.
The thing looked like a skeleton upon which human skin had been tensed and wearing a filthy and torn working uniform, exposing its chest – which looked as if there were no organs nor muscles in it. The Sons of Calth had seen corpses looking healthier than this. Seams were exposed where patches of skin had been knitted together on its skull, and the marks of disease were spread over the corrupted tissue. The creature looked at the Librarian, sensing the presence of the one who had revealed it, and Lycaon almost recoiled at what he saw. Beyond the skull-like appearance of the creature's head, its eyes were true visions of horror : two black orbs of rotting matter, with a unholy light shining at their core as the fell essence of the creature looked upon the world through them. It screamed at the Astartes with a sound not unlike a dying rattle, if one was strong enough to shatter windows.
The Sons of Calth weren't fazed by the aspect of their quarry. They had seen worse during the Heresy, and they charged the creature with bolters raised high, shouting at it to surrender or face the Emperor's wrath. They didn't need to bother with that.
'That is no cultist,' voxed Lycaon, giving voice to the thoughts of all of his squadmates. 'It isn't even human. I can't explain it, but … Don't try to capture it alive. Shoot to kill, brothers !'
Before the Astartes could follow the Librarian's advice, the infiltrator ran away from them, leaving the exposed street for the cover of one of the hab-towers. The Sons of Calth gave chase to the creature, but it was faster than its skeletal frame suggested, and kept ahead of the squad as it climbed up the stairs of the dozens of floors. The pursuit went on for several dozens of minutes, with shocked mortals throwing themselves away from the giants and their quarry. Argus felt sorely tempted to open fire on the thing, but held back. Inside this building, packed as it was with resting workers, there would still be collateral damage even if every shell hit the target , and the Space Marine knew all too well the damage even shrapnel from a bolt could to a human body.
They finally reached the rooftop of the building, a handful of meters behind the humanoid they were chasing. Despite having nowhere to run, it kept going forward in the direction of the opposite edge. Without needing to be ordered to, Argus' squad opened fire on the creature, their bolters barking in the air of dawn. Almost every bolt hit the target, dropping it flat on the floor, and those few that missed harmlessly detonated on the walls of another building on the street's other side.
Carefully, bolters still aimed at their quarry's remnants, the Space Marines approached what, according to all logic, should have been a corpse but somehow wasn't. The creature was riddled with gaping holes which leaked a greenish liquid that hissed at the contact of the rockrete, yet still it crawled toward the rooftop's edge. What was it hoping to achieve ? There was no escape from the Sons of Calth's squad. Over the edge, there was only a fall of several hundred meters into …
Argus' blood ran cold as sudden realization reached him. Had it been any other time, letting the creature suicide would have been of little consequence. But now, down there was a street packed with tens of thousands of workers going to rest or returning to their stations as the work-shifts changed. If the creature fell down, it would burst amongst all of them, spreading the poison in its body and infecting hundreds of them in a single moment. They still didn't know for certain how the disease spread from human to human, but a quick conservative estimate warned Argus that tens, possibly hundreds of thousands would be contaminated in mere hours if the creature was allowed to jump. And after that, the propagation would be exponentially quicker …
He ordered his men to cease fire, fearing that the impetus of their bolts would propel the cursed thing over the edge, and ran toward the infiltrator he had spent days hunting. Sensing his approach, the creature crawled faster, desperate to fulfill its suicidal mission. Argus moved with all the speed his transhuman physique and his power armor could grant him, his bolter dropped to the ground, hands held before him, reaching for a hold of the thing that wanted to murder the city he was sworn to protect.
He almost didn't make it. His hands tightened around the creature's ankles even as it fell, and he hauled it back on the rooftop before slamming it against its floor with all his strength. There was a repulsive crack as the rotten bones of the plague construct broke in dozens of pieces, yet still the thing moved. He let go of the creature's limbs, and it twitched on the damaged rockrete, laying on its back and glaring at Argus with its single remaining eye.
With a snarl, the sergeant brought his boot down onto its skull, reducing it to pulp with the crunching sound of bone being shattered between ceramite and rockrete. He sighed in relief, only to tense once more when he noticed that the creature was still moving ! Its skeletal limbs were scratching the rooftop's floor, still trying to propel the torn and burst remnants over the edge and into the teeming masses of humanity below. Somehow, removing the thing's head hadn't destroyed whatever vile consciousness animated it.
A part of his mind noted that there was no trace of grey matter in the mess he had made of the thing's head, only the same greenish liquid that had dripped from its wounds. The greater part of himself, however, was recoiling in disgust, and considering the best ways to dispose of the creature's remains once and for all. He knew that his orders had been to bring the creature, dead or alive, for examination, but this was no natural thing, which could be dissected, studied and understood. This was as much a spawn of the Warp as it was the product of mad genetic engineering – similar to some of the creations of the Dark Mechanicum that the Sons of Calth had fought when they were still Ultramarines. The only thing one could learn from such things was the way to damnation.
'Alek', he called to one of his warriors. 'Give me your plasma pistol.'
His brother tossed him the weapon, and Argus caught it in mid-air before aiming it straight at the mass of broken bones and tainted fluids writhing on the ground. He let the weapon going through its cycle of charging for a few seconds, feeling the handle vibrate in his hand as energy was gathered in the pistol's arcane mechanisms. In the Imperium, plasma weapons were at once unreliable and far too useful to abandon entirely. Keeping the energy contained was something of a gamble each time the weapon was used, for much of the knowledge that allowed them to be built had been lost during the Age of Strife, and any hope of recovering it had been crushed when Mars had burned in the fires of rebellion. Still, despite the risks of the gun exploding in his hand, Argus didn't hesitate. His squad didn't have any other weapons capable of destroying the infiltrator as completely – this was an urban mission, after all. No fusion grenades or flamethrowers had been allowed to the squad, let they reduce the hive they were supposed to protect to ash and rubble.
Once the pistol was charged, he pulled the trigger without another word and let purifying plasma burst from the weapon's muzzle and turn everything around the twitching living corpse into molten rock. There was the sound of liquefying rockrete and sizzling biomatter, and even though the creature had no mouth left at this point, Argus still heard it screaming as its form was consumed into oblivion by the heat of a newborn star. Somehow, he wasn't certain if what he heard was a scream of agony or scornful laughter.
++Forty-eight days after the rescue of the Lady of the Three Seas : quarantine++
Failure, Argus had found out, tasted like the smell of burnt corpses. Standing atop a barricade at one of the hive's quarantined districts, the sergeant of the Sons of Calth breathed in the smoke of the funeral pyres, punishing himself for his failure by enduring the acrid smell. For all that he and his squad had destroyed the source of the infection four weeks ago, they had been too late. The plague had continued to spread, unstopped by the efforts of both the Officio Medicae and the tech-priests who had cleansed the sources of infection. There were simply too many humans infected : the hospitals were full of the dying and the dead, and those who were contaminated but not yet showing the symptoms spread the disease even further before even knowing they were sick. Already, tens of thousands had died, and more fell by the hour. In secret so as to avoid panic, the Sons of Calth had begun to evacuate the more valuable personnel out of the hive, bio-screening each of them to ensure that the infection wasn't carried to other hives. But though the discreet exodus had remained under wraps so far, other signs were less easy to conceal from the public eye.
Entire sections of Talexorn, including the area where the refugees from Meridis had been relocated, had been locked down, those trapped within abandoned to their fate, and traffic with the rest of the continent was simply forbidden. While the majority of the population should still be clean of the virus, there was no way to screen the entirety of the billion humans with any reliability. The mere fact of making them stand in line would expose those who weren't infected to those who were. Unlike what had happened to Meridis, Talexorn was dying from a death that would take the entirety of its people with it. The Sons of Calth could save the Imperium's citizens from Traitor Marines' guns; they were ill-equipped to defend them from this plague. The Astartes knew it. Worse, so did the people, and they were starting to panic.
In the last week alone, four aircrafts had been shot down by the Sons of Calth's own guns. Those who had seek to flee the city with their private transports had died under their protectors' fire, in order to prevent them from causing further harm to the loyalist war effort. Talexorn's industry had stopped, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent great numbers of people to be gathered together, but with food still only supplied through the distribution trucks, that was a forlorn hope. It would slow the progression of the disease, but not by much. Though the priests in the streets still spoke of the plague as a test, a scourge sent by the Dark Gods that could only be endured through faith in the God-Emperor's will, Argus knew that the city was already considered lost by the high command. Though it hurt to think that they were effectively abandoning a billion people to their death, the sergeant understood the logic of that decision. He had seen the projections of the Apothecaries, given the current speed of the infection. They only had weeks remaining before the entire population was infected. Riots would break out long before that, and that was if the Chaos cults didn't make their move.
Argus' lips curled into a sneer as he thought of the degenerates. With the loosening of the loyalists' hold on Talexorn and the propagation of the plague, those who embraced the blasphemous teachings of the Dark Gods had grown both stronger and bolder. Pamphlets had been found denouncing the Emperor as a dead tyrant, and those who ruled in His name as impostors keeping Humanity from its true destiny as the favored species of the Pantheon. That much was nothing new – Argus had heard the same delusions a hundred times and more. What had the authorities worried was the claims of the cults that they held the key to surviving the plague. They didn't know if it was true, or just a lie to drag naive and desperate souls into the heretics' clutches, but it didn't matter in the end. Despair could do strange things to a mind, and the Son of Calth had no doubt that many of the cults' new recruits would never have thought of betraying the Emperor if not for the disease ravaging their bodies.
The Librarians were feeling the veil between reality and the unrestrained energies of the Warp thinning. Each night, the Storm above Talexorn seemed to grow more agitated as it fed upon the dying agonies of the hive's inhabitants. The nightmares of the sleepers no longer featured the infiltrator, but instead the rotting shape of the hive and all who lived within, the fragmented images of daemons belonging to the Plague God's choir, and a towering figure with three green, glowing eyes, looking down at the city's suffering. The hive was dying, and it dreamt of its own death. Its defenders had tried to stop the infection and failed; now, the cancer was spreading, turning more and more healthy cells into carriers of death. Without needing to fire a single bolter, the Forsaken Sons had already taken Talexorn from the loyalists.
Argus breathed in the smoke again, feeling his three lungs contract at they attempted to filter the unwholesome particles it contained. He had been warned by the Apothecaries that not only was this an entirely too morbid habit, it would also allow the remnants of the disease, carried by the smoke, to reach his lungs. It wouldn't be enough to infect him, of course – Astartes physiology could be exposed to far more trying conditions – but whether his metabolism would suppress the disease entirely or he would live with burning, aching lungs until the end of his life as his body fought against the plague, they had no idea. Argus didn't care. This was the less he could endure as punishment.
++Fifty-three days after the rescue of the Lady of the Three Seas : Plague-Born
When the true scope of the Forsaken Sons' plot revealed itself, Talexorn was already more than half-dead. Millions had perished from the plague, and their bodies were too numerous to be disposed of safely. Giant piles of corpses were massed into emptied buildings by trucks whose dedicated crew wore isolated suits initially designed for void-work or left to rot in the streets. Food was scarce since the distribution of rations had all but stopped, and the cults of plague openly ruled in entire districts. The Sons of Calth still launched purges on the most obvious such gatherings, but it was mostly in vain. For every cultist they killed, another dozen would appear amongst the desperate population they had failed to protect.
The last section of the hive still holding a semblance of order was in what had been the loyalists' headquarters in the hive. High barricades sealed off the zone completely, protecting a few thousands remaining uninfected citizens and soldiers. Grim-faced Astartes kept guard over the walls, mercilessly gunning down those who tried to pass them in order to prevent them from spreading the plague. Evacuation of the last defenders was made impossible by a sudden shift in the planet's air currents that had birthed a storm of titanic proportions between Talexorn and the other hives. With no way out of the infected hive-city, all they could do was wait out the tempest, and pray it was natural enough that it would eventually dissipate, while watching the throngs of mortals dying at their doors, braying for help until their dying breath. With depressing regularity, the Sons of Calth had to bring their flamers to bear and burn the piles of corpses at their walls to ash, lest they reach high enough that one may pass over the barricade.
And then, the three Librarians still present in the hive felt it. Not a ritual perpetrated by slaves to ruin finally reaching its conclusion, but a contraction of the Warp, as if some invisible tipping point had been passed. A surge of Chaotic energy ran across the hive, emanating from a hundred sources at once. The psychically gifted Astartes cried out in pain as they felt the souls of a hundred dying men and women being violently reshaped by the power of the Warp, twisted into something that wasn't human yet wasn't wholly daemonic either. Worst of all was the fact that these souls had welcomed this change, embracing the unholy power of the plague that had been slowly killing them. Even those without the sixth sense heard, as if coming from a great distance, the booming laughter of the Plaguefather as more joined his children. Still trembling from the psychic shock, the Librarians called for Captain Erasmos, warning him of a possible daemonic incursion. Although the surge of power had passed, its touch lingered in the other parts of the hive, gathering around the piles of the dead and permeating the mounts of corpses.
Across the hive, the survivors who dared to come out of their refuges in search of supplies, risking to be infected rather than die of hunger, froze at the scenes unfolding before them. Such had been the amount of death in the hive that none of them wasn't in sight of a corpse when the second effect of the Warp-pulse revealed itself. The corpses, rotting in the streets and bearing the marks of the plague's terminal state, started twitching. Slowly, with jerking motions, they rose to their feet, horrible moans leaving decomposed throats. Entire buildings collapsed as the dead within pushed around themselves, trying to get out of the piles under which they were buried. Even the corpses in the most advanced stages of decay rose, ignoring the basic physics that dictated that their limbs should fall off. Through a dozen vox-channels, the same desperate, horrified message echoed :
'The dead are walking !'
Immediately, a thousand battles erupted inside the city as packs of survivors defended themselves against the tide of reanimated corpses. At the doors of the quarantined zone, the Sons of Calth saw a horde charge their walls, led by those who had welcomed the disease within them and been remade for their devotion. These Plague-Born, as the Librarians had called them, were directing the legions of the mindless dead toward the Astartes' stronghold, singing the praises of the God of Life and Death as they did so. Heavy bolter fire shredded the horde to pieces, while snipers took down the Plague-Born with headshots, vaporizing their skulls with mass-reacting boltshells – the only way to take them down, as other wounds seemed simply to close or to remain open without causing any pain or discomfort. No matter their numbers, the Plague Zombies were no match for the Company of Erasmos, entrenched as they were behind high walls of prefabricated plasteel. After several hours of butchery, the tide of the dead turned back, leaving countless thousands in pieces across the various streets leading to the Sons of Calth's positions.
Erasmos stood on one of the barricades, listening to the groans of the millions remaining Zombies and the sporadic sounds of battle as the survivors fought for their lives. His hands were curled into fists, almost trembling with impotent rage and the bitterness of failure. Talexorn was lost. There was no way his men could reclaim it from the undead host that now walked its streets. Though the creatures were weak and mindless, their sheer number would crush the Astartes one by one if they left their current position. Oh, each of them would take down a hundred, perhaps a thousand of the Zombies before falling, but there were millions of them, and only a hundred Sons of Calth. There was only one possible course of action. As soon as the storms isolating Talexorn had dissipated, he would call for extraction of his men and as many of the survivors as he could, and then do what he had to do to deny victory to the servants of the Dark Gods.
++Seventy-seven days after the rescue of the Lady of the Three Seas : outbreak
Twenty-four days since the days the dead had risen, and they were still trapped in this hell of a city. The storms hadn't yet abated, keeping aerial extraction – the only reasonable way anyone was leaving – impossible. It was clear now that the tempest was no natural perturbation, though whether the cursed Forsaken Sons had deliberately engineered it somehow or if it was the result of the greater Storm above was still unknown.
Standing guard over the barricade that separated the tenuous safe zone from the ravening hordes of the living dead, former Arbites prevost Nero Cirsaz – now just one more grunt in the army forces on the loyalist side of the war for Parecxis Alpha – held his las-rifle tightly in his hands. He had been at his post for three hours, and he still had as much to wait until the next shift. Besides him, the twenty-meters broad barricade was manned by several dozens other men and women armed with lasguns and other weapons, as well as ten Sons of Calth. Unlike the frail mortals fighting alongside them, the Astartes had no need of being replaced so that they may rest. As far as Nero could say, they were sleeping while standing on guard, in between the waves of putrescent flesh hurling themselves at the barricade.
Despite the tension and the horror of facing the raised dead, the barricades had held so far with relative ease. Concentrated fire from the human soldiers, spikes and hand-crafted explosives placed on the undead' only path of attack thinned the horde before it reached the wall, while snipers took down the Plague-Born that led the mass of zombies to battle. On more than one occasion, Nero and his comrades had repelled the horde before it even reached the barricade itself. When they didn't, they would retreat and let the Space Marines tear apart the creatures reaching the barricade's top, taking care of the isolated stragglers that managed to slip past the Sons of Calth's unyielding defense.
After each attack was beaten back, the Sons of Calth would get down on the other side of the barricade to dispose of the torn and mangled bodies and reset the various traps and obstacles set in the hordes' way. It was somehow disrespectful for the Astartes to do such menial work, but the risk of some of the corpses still being animated was too great to risk human soldiers. Besides, no one knew when the next horde would attack, and only the Space Marines had a chance of making it to the barricade before being submerged if they were on the outside when the walking dead attacked.
In time, the horror of the situation had begun to dissipate. The human mind's capacity to adapt to anything once again proved its value, and the culling of the undead horde became just work to the mortal defenders. They woke from their rest, prepared, went to the barricades, shot the hordes, went to rest. Through habit and repetition, they were capable of dealing with the fact that millions had died, the city was lost, and they were trapped in its ruins with the undead spawn created by the disaster. In the first days, there had still been survivors beyond the Sons of Calth's stronghold, fighting for their lives and trying to reach the Astartes or leave the hive altogether. A few had even made it here, and after careful bio-screening by the Apothecaries, had been allowed to join the few hundred human survivors. Now, though, only the living dead and the traitors who had become their leaders remained in the corpse of Talexorn.
Movement at the other end of the avenue caught his attention, and his lifted his binoculars to his eyes. He gasped, the sound taken up by others around him who saw the same thing as he. A new horde was gathering, but that wasn't the reason for his terrified surprise. He could see beings that had once been Space Marines at the center of the growing horde, and though the image was blurred, he distinguished clouds of flies surrounding them, and saw that their armor was rotten and corroded, leaking pus and other pathogens. Ten of these wretched parodies of Astartes surrounded a smaller silhouette, giving it space with an impression of reverence that made Nero's blood run cold. What manner of being could command respect from such monstrosities ?
The creature reminded Nero of the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, but that was in the same way that the giants at its side reminded him of Space Marines. Rotted flesh and rusted augmetics were linked by cables crackling with eldritch energies and tubes dripping green, glowing liquid onto the ground. Seven mechadendrites of corroded metal and living, pulsing flesh emerged from its back, ending in an assortments of blades, injectors and other devices of which Nero had no wish to know the use. A cloak of vermin-infected leather hung from the heretek's shoulders, and Nero had no doubt at all that it had come from an … unwholesome source.
There were shouts of alarms and call for reinforcement at the barricade, but Nero kept his attention focused on the enemy. The horde advanced, and this time the traps and lesser barriers set in its path couldn't stop its advance. The corrupt Astartes opened fire on the defenders far before their minions reached them, forcing them to take cover under a volley of bolts that melted the flesh of those who were hit to sludge. Nero saw a Son of Calth being shot in the chest fall down the other side of the barricade, his body rapidly decomposing at it fell and bursting apart when it hit the ground. So far, the hordes had not used any ranged weapons, but the possibility had still be taken into account when the barricade had been built. Nero and the other defenders fell flat on their bellies and placed their weapons' muzzles through the small openings in the wall, firing blindly into the mass of flesh. Automated turrets opened fire as the Sons of Calth chose not to spare ammunition any longer, and volley after volley of heavy bolter shells impacted into the ranks of the walking dead. But more and more were coming, forming a shield in front of the Forsaken Sons and the corrupt tech-priest. Magazine after magazine was emptied into the tide, and each defender of the barricade achieved kill ratio of at least a hundred to one, but such losses were insignificant to the oncoming horde. Once more the tide reached the barricade, and the bodies of the living dead began to pile at its base, forming a ramp of rotten flesh for their kindred to escalate. None of the human defenders retreated this time – they knew all too well that there would be no running away from this foe.
A Plague-Born landed less than two meters away from Nero, and its gaze fixed on the soldier. Once, this had been a man, but now the thing before Nero was a monster. Its skin was falling off in patches, revealing muscles eaten through by parasites and worms, its hands had fingers shortened a phalanx, with the bone turned into a claw. Its face bore a large scar, but its eyes were what caused Nero the most horror. They glared at him not with the blind gaze of the walking dead, but with inhuman malice and hunger, and a depthless joy at being alive that was somehow more disturbing that the creature's stink of disease was overpowering, and nausea filled Nero, submerging him with the urge to puke and making his hands tremble, preventing him from shooting the creature. He tried to aim, but his weapon was snatched from his hands and broken in two pieces by the half-daemon, who started to laugh as the rifle's fragments started to rot in its hands. The sound was unlike anything the soldier had ever heard, like the splash of a rock tossed into stagnant waters.
Nero died a few seconds later, his throat torn apart by the scarred Plague-Born as he tried to force a prayer to the Emperor through his frothing lips. Less than a minute later, the barricade fell, the tide of undead passing above it like a sea of discomposed bodies finally reaching the top of an embankment. Thousands of the walking dead hurled themselves into Talexorn's last sanctuary, pushed forward by the will of their heretical overseers. That scene was being repeated all around the defended zone, as the Sons of Calth gave the order to abandon the barricades and retreat to the position where the last survivors of the coastal city would make their last stand against the horde.
Twelve minutes after the instant of his demise, Nero Cirsaz' corpse started to twitch, and he rose to his feet, wailing and moaning, before beginning to walk along the tide of putrefying flesh. His soul was gone, devoured by the Neverborn spirits that haunted Talexorn the moment it had left its body, but his infected flesh was Nurgle's to command, and it would serve the purposes of the Chaos God. As it started its march, it was passed over by Pharod the Reborn and his escort of Plague Marines, both equally eager to face the last Sons of Calth in the city.