Jenit Sulla screamed in defiance and righteous hatred as she smashed in the head of the grotesque, monstrous thing that had managed to reach the defensive line with the butt of her las-gun. It burst with a sickening crunch, and the stench of its brain fluids nearly made her gag inside her rebreather, despite the freezing temperature which permeated the entire coldside.
Like all of the enemy on Adumbria, it was a grotesque thing of flayed muscles and elongated bone, dripping with disgusting fluids and moving in ways that it shouldn't be able to. Knowing that, at some point, it had been a human being – before the fell contagion which had spread across this world had taken hold of its flesh – only made it more abhorrent.
Around her, her comrades – the women of the 296th Valhallan Infantry and the militia raised from the planet's surviving PDF, law enforcers, and anybody who could hold a las-rifle – continued to fire at the latest bunch of monstrosities which had made their way through the freezing, perpetual night of Adumbria's coldside laid dead on the ground.
As the Regiment's quartermaster, Sulla wasn't normally expected to get into the thick of the fray herself, but this Throne-damned situation didn't allow any Guardswoman of the 296th the luxury of staying away from the fighting to defend Glacier Peak.
When the 296th had arrived on Adumbria, it had been to help maintain public order on an important trade world after a handful of escalating incidents. But, a week after their arrival, the hand behind those incidents had revealed itself. They had lost the capital in less than a day, as swarms of Infected that had been kept hidden in the undercity rose in a series of coordinated attacks that decapitated every branch of Adumbria's government and turned the city's entire population into more Infected.
Glacier Peak's location, near the geographical center of Adumbria's coldside, made it ideally suited for a smaller force to hold on against a seemingly numberless host. The freezing climate, which reminded Sulla and her sisters of their homeworld, meant that over half of the Infected hordes had already frozen to death by the time they reached the settlement, and it was testament to the unholy strength of their monstrous forms that any survived the perilous trek at all. Not even the Valhallans would have survived such a trek : before the collapse of Imperial order on Adumbria, the only ways to reach Glacier Peak had been through train, or by hitching a ride on one of the vast crawlers which kept the scattered handful of settlements of the coldside linked together.
The vast tunnels of the mining complex had been converted into makeshift shelters for the waves of refugees pouring in from across the Shadow Belt (that thin band of land running from one pole of the rotationally locked planet to the other, where temperatures were more suitable for human inhabitation) as they fled from the Infected hordes.
Earlier during the conflict, a system had been put into place to use the large crawlers and other engines meant to carry the product of the coldside mines to the spaceport in order to bring these innocent folk to safety, which had been a nightmarish logistical challenge, but one that Sulla and her team had managed to overcome with the assistance of the local Administratum. Eventually, they had been forced to detonate the train lines which had run straight from Glacier Peak to the planetary capital Skitterfall after they had been overwhelmed with the Infected, an entire company of the 296th (including their previous Colonel) bravely laying down their lives in a rear guard action to buy enough time for the demolition teams.
Regardless, Glacier Peak had only been home to some thirty thousand souls before this, and was now packed with over two hundred thousand refugees at the last count. They had been forced to set up draconian food rationing in order to keep everyone from starving, and if not for the strength-sapping cold and the constant threat of the Infected there might already have been rioting among the desperate civilians. A handful of daring sorties had managed to secure more foodstuffs, but Sulla was bitterly aware that this was merely delaying the inevitable : if they didn't get help from off-world, then sooner or later they would all starve.
Of course, there was always the chance that the Infected would kill them all long before that became a problem, Sulla reflected grimly as she took aim and opened fire at another wave of the living blasphemies. For all the advantages of their defensive position, they still took casualties with every assault, and the Infection and the endless night took their own toll on the defenders. No matter what their commanding officers said to prevent panic, everyone in Glacier Peak knew they were all living on borrowed time, and sooner or later they would –
Great fireballs bloomed amidst the ranks of the Infected, obliterating dozens of them at a time. The snow-covered ground beneath Sulla's feet shook under the impact, but she managed to keep her balance. Raising her head to the forever black sky, she saw planes flying overhead, underlit by the radiance of their own ordinance. Or at least she guessed those were planes : in all her years in the Imperial Guard, she had never seen anything with that kind of silhouette.
Within moments, the entire hundreds-strong horde had been reduced to a few stragglers, which continued to advance toward the barricade, heedless of the carnage around them. Shaking herself, Sulla barked an order, and they were promptly finished off by focused fire.
Sulla knew that the few surviving aircrafts of the 296th had long since been grounded for lack of fuel, and the PDF's own engines had either suffered the same fate or been ingloriously lost before even taking off when their airfields had been overwhelmed by Infected swarms. And even if that hadn't been the case, and the Colonel had decided to deploy some previously unknown reserve, she would've heard about it on the vox.
Which meant there was only one explanation for this miracle, one which was further confirmed as reports began to come in of troop transports landing further afield and disgorging hundreds of soldiers in red armor.
Sulla could have wept. Help. By the God-Emperor's mercy, help had finally come.
Regina forced herself to remain stoic as the envoy approached her. He was clad in the uniform of a Valhallan Imperial Guard, with the thick fur coat which was assigned to every soldier raised from her homeworld.
"I am Acting Colonel Regina Kasteen of the Valhallan 296th," she said, doing her best not to show how utterly relieved she felt, nor the doubt from the fact that she held that rank only by virtue of being the most senior officer to have survived the disastrous retreat from Skitterfall. "To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking ?"
"I am Vaslo Kruld, Captain of the Valhallan 18th. Pleasure to meet you, Colonel."
Regina blinked. She recognized the Regiment, obviously – there probably wasn't a single Valhallan who wouldn't.
"I heard the Tundra Wolves had been lost, Captain," she said cautiously. "Destroyed to the last in battle against the heretics Inquisitor Karamazov waged his last crusade against."
"Lost, yes," confirmed Kruld. "Destroyed ? Well, almost, but not quite. Chenkov didn't manage to get us all killed before he got what was coming to him."
Realisation battled with disbelief within Regina. "You surrendered," she breathed out, the words sounding like the accusation they were. He blushed.
"We did, yeah. It was either that, die pointlessly in a suicide charge, or wait until we starved to death." He sighed. "Anyway, the boss thought you would like seeing someone from the homeworld – don't ask me how he knew you were here, because I've no idea – so he brought me along and asked me to make contact first. We are here to help you, Colonel, and from what I see you need all the help you can get."
"The boss. He's here, then ?" she asked.
"He is," confirmed Kruld. "And he wants to talk with you directly."
The Captain pulled out a small device from his pocket and held it in front of him, before pressing a rune to turn it on. Regina raised an eyebrow as she realized what it was : she'd never seen such a small hololithic projector before, and when it turned on, the life-sized image was far crisper and the sound clearer than she was used to.
Ciaphas Cain had come to Adumbria ready for war, and his attire showed it. He wore a suit of armor like that of the crimson troopers deployed around Glacier Peak (but with many more decorations), and a chainsword and bolt pistol hung from his belt. His face showed no sign of his corruption : had Regina not known who he was, she'd have found him the very image of an Imperial hero.
"Colonel Kasteen," said the heretic who'd successfully overthrown an Imperial Governor, and then gone on to defeat an Inquisitor and one of Valhalla's most infamous sons. "I am Ciaphas Cain."
"I know who you are," she replied. "The Militarum made sure we all knew you after what happened."
"Really ?" He raised an eyebrow. "I would've thought … Nevermind, that isn't important. What is important is the offer I wish to make to you, your troops, and the people under your protection."
Regina's hand tightened around the service weapon at her waist, hearing the unspoken threat hiding behind the words.
"And what 'offer' is that ?"
"Do not attempt to fight us," he replied bluntly. "There is little you could do anyway, and we have no hostile intentions toward you. Our only enemy here is the source of the plague which has beset this world. Regardless of our allegiances, we are all members of the human race, and share a common enemy here."
"If you accept this, not only will we not do you harm, we will also share with you our supplies, including our medical expertise. From what our auspex readings are telling regarding how many people are packed in your city, you can use all the help you can get. We have food, water, and medical supplies – enough to keep everyone alive, and even help rebuild civilization once the infection has been cleansed."
It sounded too good to be true, which immediately made Regina even more suspicious. She pointed out the most obvious issue :
"If we accept your offer, there will be no returning to the Imperium for us. Consorting with rebels is a capital offence."
He looked at her, with what she felt was genuine sadness and compassion in his gaze. "Oh, Colonel. I'm afraid it's already too late for that. Why do you think no reinforcements have been sent from the Imperium to relieve you ?"
Regina frowned, then scowled. "Because defenses across the entire Sector were thrown into chaos by Karamazov's failed attempt to bring your lot to justice, and High Command has more pressing concerns than this world ?"
"Well, partly because of that, yes," he admitted, "although I would argue we are not to blame for Karamazov's stupidity. But it's not just that there are other fronts needing resources. No one is coming here, ever. Adumbria has been declared Perditia due to the Warp-born plague that erupted here. You and your Regiment, along with everyone on this planet and aboard the ships in the system, have already been declared dead."
For a moment, Regina stood, stunned. She wanted to reject the heretic's words, denounce them as nothing but lies, but she couldn't. It had been months since the fall of Skitterfall, and she knew the astropaths had managed to get out one last call for help before the tower housing them had self-destructed to keep them from the Infected. Someone should have come by now, if only to burn the planet to ash with orbital bombardment or, Emperor forbid, the fires of Exterminatus.
"If you still had astropaths, you would have received the proclamation," he continued, not unkindly. "It was spread across the Sector to ensure everyone knew what to do in case any ship known to have been in the system arrived seeking asylum. It was us receiving it that made us decide to come here to your aid."
"Why ?" Regina managed to say. "Why did you come here ? What do you want ?"
"First and foremost, to assist our fellow human beings where it is in our power to do so." Regina made no attempt to keep what she thought of that from showing on her face, and Cain sighed. "But I understand that such altruistic motives are difficult to accept coming from me, so I will give you a more pragmatic reason. What do you know of the Warp, and the Powers that dwell within it ?"
"I have no desire to listen to your heresies –"
"Yes, yes, I know," he waved her off. "I promise I'm not going to try to convert you away from the God-Emperor. But you're an officer of the Imperial Guard. Surely you already know about the rivalry between the Chaos Gods ?"
He looked at her, and her lack of understanding must have shown on her face.
"Oh, brilliant. You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you ? To put it very, very briefly then : the forces of Chaos are far from united, and constantly struggle against each other for supremacy. On Slawkenberg, we have achieved a rare balance between three of the four Dark Gods. This, as you might imagine, hasn't especially endeared us with the fourth, which is the very same Power behind the corruption that has taken root on this world."
That … made sense. Regina might not know much about the Ruinous Powers (nor had she any desire to do so), but their disunity was legendary, and featured prominently in Imperial works of propaganda. Not even the Despoiler, that ancient monster that dwelled in the Eye of Terror beyond the Cadian Gate, could keep the hordes of Chaos united under his command for long.
"Ten years ago, I all but declared war on Nurgle," Cain spat the name, and Regina felt a shiver down her spine at the foul word. "Ever since then, we have been on the lookout for any response. When we heard what was happening here, we knew we had found it."
"So you are here to protect yourselves, knowing that if Adumbria falls to this plague, you will be next in its sights."
"Feel free to think of it that way, yes. But regardless of why we've come, we are the only help you are going to get."
"… You spoke of rivalry between the servants of the Ruinous Powers. Would that be why the Ravagers attacked the capital ?"
"I'm sorry ? The Ravagers ?"
"You don't know ? You aren't the first heretics to come to Adumbria. Around a month ago, a handful of starships arrived and crushed the SDF. We thought they were here to break the quarantine and spread the Infection, but their flagship was destroyed by some kind of unholy weapon at Skitterfall and the survivors made a suicide attack on the capital."
"I see," he mused. "Interesting. I didn't know about this, but you are probably correct : the Ravagers must have come to stop the source of the plague. They were just, shall we say, less diplomatic about it."
That was certainly one way to put it, thought Regina.
"I will let you consider your options," said Cain. "When you make your decision, tell Captain Kruld. Oh, and please don't kill him or try to take him prisoner. It wouldn't end well for anyone."
The hololithic projector turned off, leaving Regina face to face with Kruld. The renegade Captain looked at her hesitantly for a moment, before saying :
"I know it's a lot to take in, but Cain can be trusted. He promised to treat us well if we surrendered, and he did. And when the Orks attacked Slawkenberg ten years back, he gave us guns so we could defend ourselves, even though we could've used them on him and his folks. And they haven't forbidden us to pray to the God-Emperor either. There are still temples to Him on Slawkenberg : smaller than they used to be, sure, but a lot less gaudy too, and the priests in them sound a hell of a lot more sincere and trustworthy than Karamazov's sermons ever did."
"You want me to take his offer ?" Regina asked disbelievingly. "To betray my oaths to the Golden Throne and drag the women under my command along with me into damnation ?"
He shrugged, looking distinctly uncomfortable. "I wouldn't put it like that. The way I see it, you and your girls are frakked, through no fault of your own. And I don't doubt that you are ready to die fighting if that's what it comes to. But your lives aren't the only ones at stake here. Do you really think the Emperor wants you to die for nothing ? To condemn the civilians you've been protecting to a slow, miserable death ?"
"The Emperor expects us to fight His enemies no matter the cost," Regina replied by reflex.
"Who said anything about Cain being His enemy ? He's against the Imperium, sure, but I've never heard him say anything against the Emperor."
"The Emperor and the Imperium are one."
"And who decided that ?" Kruld sighed. "Anyway, I'm not a philosopher. Facts are, Cain is going to fight the monsters here regardless of what you decide. Us coming here was really more about him recognizing your efforts in holding up until now and wanting to help you for protecting the civilians. He's very particular about that, a lot more than frakking Chenkov ever was for sure."
Much as it galled Regina to admit, Kruld had a point. The few hundred women under her command had proven themselves capable warriors, but Cain had brought thousands of power-armored troopers along with mechanized and air support. It was one thing to hold Glacier Peak against hordes of uncoordinated monsters, and another to do so against a proper army with experience fighting the Imperial Guard.
"At the very least," continued the Captain, "I'm hoping you won't do anything stupid and throw your lives away trying to take down the USA. I've no doubt you're a better tactician than Chenkov, but that's not going to amount to much. Cain is frakking terrifying in a fight. He killed Chenkov and Karamazov by himself, the latter after boarding his ship while he was preparing to unleash Exterminatus. He fought an Ork Warboss in that fancy armor of his, then climbed out of the wrecked suit and dealt with an Eldar raid while he was at it."
Regina thought back on the tall, confident warlord she had met, and found that she could believe he had done all these things, however impossible they sounded.
"Beyond that, though, he really isn't a bad ruler. I don't know what you've heard about what happened on Slawkenberg, but I've talked with a lot of people who lived there, and it wasn't pretty. There's a reason almost nobody resisted his takeover, and he's genuinely made things better for everyone. I've been on a handful of planets in my time, and none of them were as … happy, I suppose is the best word for it."
Regina had never given any thought to what life might be like on worlds lost to the Imperium. If she had, though, she would probably have imagined some hellish realm with endless blood sacrifices and suffering, with monsters preying on a terrified population while a handful of powerful heretics lived in debauchery within their twisted citadels.
From Kruld's description, it seemed she'd been mistaken. Of course, he could be lying, but Regina thought she was quite good at reading people, and she didn't think he was. Biased, certainly, since the 296th following in the 12th's footsteps would confirm he and his comrades had done the right thing ten years ago, but not lying.
She thought of the millions who had already died on Adumbria, and of the thousands who yet remained, looking to her for safety on a world gone mad. She thought of their ever-dwindling supplies, of the sickness that was spreading among the refugees even beyond the Infection. She'd sworn an oath to protect them, no matter the cost to her.
Regina Kasteen made her decision.
It was with mixed feelings that I received the news that Colonel Kasteen had accepted my offer of a truce and cooperation against our common foe. On the one hand, I was relieved that I wouldn't have to order the USA to slaughter loyal Imperial soldiers who had performed admirably well in an impossible situation. On the other, I might just have started another Regiment of the Guard down the path of heresy, and that ran quite literally against everything I'd been taught to believe. I'd no doubt that, had her Regiment's assigned Commissar not perished alongside most of the command staff during the disastrous flight from the capital, things would've been much more complicated.
While it was perfectly understandable for the daughters of Valhalla to be furious at the world being callously abandoned by the Imperium, in truth it was more complicated than that. Adumbria stood at the crossroads of several Warp routes, and as such was far more important to the Sector's strategic interests than Slawkenberg ever had been. High Command wouldn't have given up on it so easily, and from the various divinations performed by the more intellectually-inclined madmen under my command, I knew the situation was dire.
In the decade since Karamazov's disastrous crusade, the Sector had taken blow after blow, leaving its military forces stretched perilously thin. The mining world of Desolation IV had been lost to a Tyranid splinter fleet, which had taken a lot of resources and the intervention of a couple of Astartes Chapters to eventually dispatch in a large-scale battle that had left the world of Keffia a desolate husk. And no sooner had that remnant of the Great Devourer been put to rest that the cold war with the Tau Empire had suddenly turned hot over some insignificant mudball at the border.
While all that meant I could rest easy in the knowledge the Imperium had bigger concerns than Slawkenberg's little rebellion, it also meant that worlds such as Adumbria were left perilously undefended from internal threats like the Infected.
At the very least, I might be able to get some kudos from the Emperor by cleaning up this mess and preventing His people from being wiped out on this world. That hope was, of course, somewhat diminished by the circumstances which had led to our presence in the system in the first place.
It turned out the Slaaneshi cult which Emeli had led had existed on Slawkenberg for longer than I'd suspected. Graduates of Saint Trynia Academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk had been secretly inducted into worshipping the Dark Prince for years before my arrival, and with how many wealthy individuals had come to enjoy the pleasures of the vacation world, several had managed to leave Slawkenberg behind and spread their heresy to other planets by seducing the right tourist.
The late Kyria Sejwek had been one such individual. From what I understood, she'd been the head of her very own small Slaaneshi cult among the local nobility, though she'd mostly contented herself with running a discreet, high-class brothel catering to the appetites of the rich and powerful.
She had died when the planetary capital had fallen to the Infected, but not before using her psychic abilities to send a message to her old friends on Slawkenberg. Given she'd no astropathic training (according to the records Krystabel had inherited from Emeli, her gifts had run toward creating illusions instead), I was fairly certain Emeli had intervened to make sure the message was received.
Between Madame Sejwek's dying message and the Imperial decree of quarantine being picked up by Slawkenberg's witches, I'd been forced to ask the Tzeentchian acolytes to use their divination rituals to figure out what was happening, and (more importantly) whether or not it threatened Slawkenberg itself.
As it turned out, it very much did. Like I had told Colonel Kasteen, letting the situation alone would result in Nurgle gaining a foothold in our corner of the galaxy. Given the reasons I had given the Plague God to be pissed off at Slawkenberg in general and me in particular, I had reluctantly accepted the fact that acting pre-emptively was the best move available to me, much as it ran contrary to my base instincts.
And now, here I was. With every building in Glacier Peak overcrowded with refugees, we had set up shop outside the settlement, in a prefabricated fort the borgs had hastily assembled. I hadn't expected Colonel Kasteen to insist on joining our war council in person, but she'd come back with Captain Kruld, after spending a good hour arguing with her subordinates and setting things up so that we could start sharing our supplies with Glacier Peak.
I had thought she'd be warier of placing herself in the middle of a bunch of heretics, but supposed she wanted to keep an eye on us to make sure we didn't have any nefarious intent for her soldiers and the civilians they protected – or perhaps she thought that, by handing herself as a potential hostage, she would prevent us from taking someone else. Whichever was true, it was an admirable course of action, and not one I would've ever willingly taken myself.
In addition to Kasteen and myself, Colonel Ygdal was also present, serving as the high commander of the USA forces (second only to my own authority, because of course he was). General Mahlone had initially wanted to come with the expedition himself, but had taken my attempt to get out of participating in this whole mess by insinuating that some members of the Council needed to stay behind in case the worst happened as an order for him to hold the fort in my absence while I went out gallantly saving the day and spread the ideals of Liberation.
Mahlone had looked so despondent that he couldn't come with us when he had wished me good fortune as we departed, I had almost strangled him.
Aside from Ygdal, Krystabel was also present at the meeting, along with Jafar's subordinate Iago and the borgs' own representative, Basileus-Zeta. Unlike most others of his order who had been members of the Mechanicus before the Uprising, he showed very little mechanical augmentation : from what I'd been told, he'd personally regrown most of the bits he'd replaced with metal equivalents and grafted them back on. He was Slawkenberg's pre-eminent Magos Biologis, and had worked on building the Panacea production facilities both on the planet and aboard the Grace of Emeli.
Jurgen was already serving recaf to everyone, which even Kasteen accepted. Not only did she look exhausted, the Imperials' own supplies of the stuff had doubtlessly been stretched thin by the siege. I took my own mug with a nod of thanks, grateful for the beverage's warmth as much as its invigorating taste. Malicia was also here, stalking the command center like a great hunting felid. Her armor covered her body completely, which protected her from the cold and also kept Kasteen from realizing I was consorting with foul xenos as well.
We were all sitting around an hololithic projector, attended by another borg and currently showing a slowly rotating image of Adumbria.
There were a lot of things in orbit, as one might expect from even a minor trading world, even if most of it was debris now. Prior to its last stand, Adumbria's SDF couldn't possibly have enforced the quarantine, not with hundreds of merchant ships constantly passing through the system. The moment the plague had become worrying, the merchants had immediately booked it, though I doubted they would be welcome at any Imperial port that had received the same astropathic message we had inadvertently received.
On our way to Adumbria Prime from the system's Mandeville Point, we had passed the hulks of merchantmen who hadn't been fast enough and ended up blasted to pieces by the SDF, or which simply hung in the void in ominous silence, their crew having been forced to abandon ship and seek refuge planetside at gunpoint once the situation had become untenable.
Naturally, I had already received several requests from the expedition's borg contingent to board the derelicts and convert them to the use of the newfangled Slawkenberg Navy. I had firmly rejected them : until the source of the plague was dealt with, we didn't have the resources to spare. Not that I didn't understand where the borgs were coming from : even after ten years of build-up, our flotilla was pitifully small. Its icons showed in orbit around the planet, straight above our heads.
To my unspoken relief that were was some limit to their ridiculous competence, not even the borgs could build the infrastructure required to construct entirely new starships in a mere decade. They had given it their best shot though, and the Emeli's Gift now sported a fully-functional dockyard adapted from some pre-Imperium human megastructure which had been fused to it at some point in its history.
Within that shipyard, the Fist of the Liberator, which served as Slawkenberg's flagship, had been refitted into a carrier vessel. In addition to the superweapon which had destroyed the Dark Eldar flagship (and which had been maintained and overhauled even though it had never been fired since at my express order), it hosted several squadrons of Slawkenberg's new fighters, the Cainwing (and Throne, how I wished the design committee had been able to agree on literally any other name).
To the best of my admittedly limited knowledge (the Navy had its own Commissars, and I had been trained for the Militarum from the start), the Aeronautica Imperialis relied on a handful of designs, which were cheap, reliable, easy to use, and churned out by the thousands in order to wipe out any enemy air support before the Guard went in to deal with the ground forces.
With Slawkenberg's limited industrial base, that option obviously hadn't been available, meaning that any clash between the Liberation Council's air forces and the Imperium's was certain to end in the former's inevitable defeat (well, as long as the Imperial commander wasn't another idiot of Chenkov's and Karamazov's calibre and somehow forgot to bring air support along with their Guardsmen).
But I hadn't wanted the rest of the Council to realize that, as they might decide to do something stupid in response, like trying to summon daemons and bind them within the frames of aircraft or Emperor knew what else. Instead, I had claimed that, by focusing on quality over quantity, the USA air force would be able to take on any number of inferior Imperial aircrafts, and commissioned the borgs to design the most elite, expensive, and complex fighter they could come up with.
The Cainwing was the result of over two years of vigorous debate, prototype building, simulations and more than one fistfight between the experts involved. It used a combination of jet engines and anti-gravity technology to fly in space as well as within a planet's atmosphere at speeds that the human brain simply wasn't designed to comprehend, and was equipped with a pair of high-intensity lascannons by default (though its armament could be changed depending on the mission).
I had nearly fainted when I had seen the price tag on the final product, but by then it was too late to turn back, and I had decided I might as well double down on the idea and ordered the mass-production of the thing in the vague hope that any resources spent on this wouldn't be spent on anything else which might make the USA more dangerous.
To my carefully concealed surprise, the test flights back on Slawkenberg had gone admirably well, with the first crop of pilots going through the extensive training process with admirable speed – despite the selection process the candidates had gone through being as painfully stringent as I could imagine, the importance I'd apparently put on the project had meant there'd been no shortage of volunteers.
Their first combat sortie had also been a success, insofar that they hadn't all fallen apart as soon as they had left the decks of the Fist and hadn't crashed into anything. But it wasn't as if the Infected swarms they had helped bomb into oblivion had been much of a threat to them. I expected the next stages of our campaign would be much more of a challenge for them.
Apart from the Fist of the Liberator, our expedition flotilla was comprised of a pair of captured troop transports, which were filled to the brim with USA troops and equipment, and the support ship Grace of Emeli. The Grace, which had been a merchant ship at some point, had been peeled off Emeli's Gift with great care and refitted to carry all the medical supplies and other sundries which our expedition to Adumbria was likely to need. This included a Panacea production facility, and the schematics and resources to build new ones (which, given the spread of the infection on Adumbria, was going to be very needed).
Since we didn't have Navigators, every ship housed a coven of of Tzeentchian adepts who were linked together by sorcery. When we'd first entered the Warp at Slawkenberg, I'd been terrified we were all going to die, but whether because of the magi's competence, Emeli's protection, or sheer blind luck, our journey to Adumbria had been incredibly smooth. Every ship had made it through more or less in one piece, despite it being the first time travelling through the Warp for almost every single crew member.
With our transport capacity so severely limited, I had made sure every soldier between me and the enemy was as tough as possible. Thus, almost our entire contingent was made up of USA troopers clad in the most advanced power armor the borgs were capable of crafting – and while it wasn't Astartes war-plate, I must admit that Tesilon-Kappa's hereteks had made something really impressive. Along with our new tanks and air support, I was reasonably confident we could handle whatever foulness Nurgle was getting up to here – though I would have much preferred it if I hadn't been the one expected to lead the charge.
"Alright," I began, drawing everyone's attention. "Let us begin this war council. Colonel Ygdal, you have the floor."
"Thank you, my lord. At the moment, based on our auspex scans and the intel we've received from our new allies," Ygdal nodded in Kasteen's direction, "swarms of Infected are moving across the planet in what appear to be patrol patterns. Any settlement unfortunate enough to be in their path are destroyed, and in the case where the inhabitants manage to repel the initial onslaught, more swarms will converge on the location until they are overwhelmed and wiped out."
"Which means," cut in Basileus-Zeta, "that there is a central intelligence directing the Infected."
"Yes," Ygdal nodded patiently. "We're still moving our assets from orbit, including the Panacea reserves for the local population's use -"
"Excuse me," Kasteen cut in, "but what's this 'Panacea' ?"
The Slawkenberg natives glanced at each other for several awkward seconds, before I valiantly charged into the breach :
"The Panacea is a healing substance based on a STC the Liberation Council recovered years ago, and which has completely eradicated disease from Slawkenberg. With it, any ailment and almost any injury can be healed." Then a sudden sense of dread came over me. "Wait, are you telling me you have never heard of it before ?"
"No, why ? Should I have ?"
I felt my mouth move, but no words came out. Fortunately, Krystabel came to my rescue :
"Lord Cain handed over the original STC to an Imperial Inquisitor years ago, after she tried and failed to kill him. We thought the technology would've been spread across the entire Sector by now."
"We hoped that would be the case," I hastily interjected. "I'm sure there is a reason why that isn't the case yet."
I could tell they weren't convinced, so I promptly changed the subject :
"What about the Infected, Magos ? I know you haven't had much time to research them, but do you have anything relevant to share with us ?"
"We do, yes," the borg began. "Unfortunately, the Panacea has proven unable to undo the transformation inflicted upon the victims of the plague. From our ongoing analysis, it appears that the contagion is only partially based within the Materium, and its Immaterial component is what causes the bodily transformation, as well as sustains the resulting creatures, which by all biological laws should simply not live."
"What happens when you inject them with Panacea anyway ?" I asked, morbidly curious.
"The Infected struggle for a varying period of time as the plague battles the injection, but in all test cases, the plague eventually wins out. Only when the subject is still in the early stage of the infection, such as the defenders of Glacier Peak which were bitten or otherwise exposed to the plague, can the Panacea deal enough damage to the Material component to win this confrontation."
"So all the Infected on this planet are as good as dead already ?" I asked, seeking confirmation of what I already knew.
"I'm afraid so, my lord." Well, at least he seemed genuinely sorry about that.
Damn it all. I had already known that, of course, but … after seeing the Panacea perform so many miracles, a small part of me had dared to hope. Though I supposed it would have make things awkward for the 296th and my own forces, who had already slain thousands of Infected.
I took a deep breath. I couldn't save everyone. Not even the Emperor could do that, and telling myself otherwise would only lead to madness.
"There is another point I think I should mention," said Basileus-Zeta. "While its Empyric component is clearly rooted in the Rotting One's influence, its Material elements show extensive signs of genetic engineering. Without going too deep into details," which certainly was one of the major differences between the borgs and the rest of the Mechanicus, "it appears to be capable of self-alteration on an incredible level, changing both itself and its host body in dramatic ways."
"We noticed," said Kasteen drily. "Almost no two of the Infected look exactly the same, though they're all just as ugly."
"Indeed. However, this implies that the base of the Infection was artificially created, yet there is no record of any facility on Adumbria with the capacity to produce such a biological weapon."
"You think this was brought from off-world ?" I guessed.
"It is possible," he agreed. "Another possibility is that such a facility does in fact exist, but was kept off the available records and concealed from our scans. Given the percentage of Adumbria's surface in which conditions hostile to most forms of life are prevalent, building an isolated laboratory would be practical."
Kasteen looked horrified at the idea, and I could understand why. The thought that all the horror that had befallen Adumbria might be the result of an Imperial research program gone wrong before being twisted to the purposes of a cult of Nurgle was the stuff of nightmares.
(It was also, as I'd learn later, both close and very far from what had actually happened.)
"We've no time to spend on such theories," I cut in vigorously. "Colonel Ygdal, what is your suggested course of action ?"
"We need to cut off the head of the beast," declared Colonel Ygdal. "Cleansing the planet of the Infected would take years, and while I don't doubt the skills of our troops I fear we would run out of ammo before we were done. As Magos Basileus-Zeta pointed out, the movements of the Infected indicate the existence of a guiding intelligence, and we know exactly where that intelligence is located."
"Skitterfall," I said gravelly, to show I was paying attention. Everyone nodded.
"Exactly," confirmed Ygdal. He gestured to the borg tending the projector, and the image zoomed in on the planetary capital, which stood where the Shadow Belt met the equator.
"Captain Horatio Bugler managed to cripple the entire Ravagers fleet except for their flagship," explained Kasteen with barely-concealed satisfaction. "Our auspex arrays detected it moving in position above Skitterfall, and then …" She shrugged. "Something happened, that's for sure, but we don't know what. It did a number on the flagship, though : pieces of it landed all over the region."
"Skitterfall didn't have any anti-orbital weaponry capable of taking out a battleship like that," said Ygdal, before turning toward Krystabel and Iago. "I'm guessing sorcery was involved ?"
"It seems the most likely answer, yes," said Harold. Like most of the higher-ranking Tzeentchian cultists on Slawkenberg, he looked deceptively ordinary if you ignored the sorcerous runes discreetly woven into his clerical robes : with thick reading glasses and a messy hairline, he was the kind of man you would expect to find working behind a desk in some out-of-the-way office, shuffling data-slates and being content with never having to actually talk with people in person.
But I knew better than most how deceiving looks could be, and Jafar's subordinates were experts of being underestimated. Harold had worked as the personal assistant to one of the most powerful men on Slawkenberg (who, unsurprisingly, had been a distant cousin of the Governor) before the Uprising, effectively running the man's affairs in his stead while the inbred fop indulged in whatever debauchery had most recently caught his fancy. The aristo hadn't suspected a thing about Harold's true feelings and shifting allegiances until the day of the Uprising, when the innocuous-looking bean counter had let a kill-team of insurgents into his estate and personally rammed an auto-quill into his throat.
"The Warp currents are particularly powerful in this system, owing to its position at the crossing of several Warp routes," continued the acolyte of the God of Change. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Kasteen looked about as uncomfortable with this talk as I, though I was doing a much better job of hiding it. "And they are converging on Skitterfall, drawn there by the spiritual weight of the horrors that have taken place there. When the Ravagers moved to attack it, that energy must have been used to launch an entropic curse of incredible potency at their remaining ships."
"Resulting in them falling apart in the void and raining down upon the planet in pieces," I finished, my guts knotting like Sanguinala garlands at the thought of such destructive power.
"Precisely," replied Harold.
"Could the enemy use this weapon against us in a ground assault ?" asked Ygdal, showing the practical turn of mind that had led to his high-ranking position.
Harold glanced at Krystabel, the two occult experts exchanging a silent conversation before turning back to the rest of us :
"I don't think so," said Harold. "There are restrictions to bringing such power into the Materium. My guess is that the sorcerous attack used the city's existing anti-orbital defences as a base, and those cannot be brought to bear on the surface, right ?"
"Not if Skitterfall followed standard construction schematics, yes," confirmed Basileus-Zeta.
"Then a massed assault on Skitterfall remains our best move," concluded Ygdal. "Colonel Kasteen, what can you tell us of the conditions in the capital ?"
"It's hell," she replied without hesitation. "The capital had over a million inhabitants before the plague hit, and most of them are still there. By the time we were forced to abandon it, the Infected looked even less human than the ones which attacked Glacier Peak."
Oh, brilliant, I thought, my imagination already starting to provide all manners of horrific imagery that I had no doubt would pale in comparison to the real thing.
"Then we can expect a difficult battle, but I am confident we shall be victorious nonetheless," I half-lied. "Where in the capital would the center of the Infection be located ?"
"The Governor's Palace," replied Krystabel. "There are other lesser sites of power, but that is where the bulk of the Warp energy is gathering. There is also the symbolism of it to consider : the Palace is the center of Imperial authority on this world, and defiling it will grant whatever pawn of the Rotting One is behind all this great favor with his foul god."
"There is no doubt that great challenges await," said Harold. "The amount of Warp energy that has accumulated within the capital is incredible. But with you leading the charge, Lord Liberator, then those responsible for this atrocity have no chance."
I chuckled self-effacingly. "Well, I suppose I do have some experience in storming gubernatorial palaces in order to expel vile filth from power. Though I would argue even the Giorbas were not quite as ugly as our current opposition."
That got a round of sycophantic laughter, during which I desperately searched for a way to get out of this and predictably failed. Technically, I supposed I could just tell them I wouldn't take part in the assault and they would have to follow my orders, but that would absolutely destroy my reputation, and no matter how afraid I was of the Nurglites, I was more afraid of my so-called subordinates.
Of course, I had no idea just what awaited me within the fallen city at the time. Had I known the depths of the horror which had taken over Skitterfall, I would have taken the first transport back to the Fist of the Liberator and ran all the way back to Slawkenberg without hesitation.
Adrien de Floures van Harbieter Ventrious, once a scion of House Ventrious and now undisputed master of Adumbria in the name of the God of Decay, frowned slightly as he shared the final sights of his faithful as they died in the dark and the cold. Many of the lesser blessed perished every not-day, even as more were inducted into the fold, but this had been different. The heretics had come to stop the Great Work, led by the Defiler his dreams had warned him about.
And that meant that he had work to do. With a long-suffering sigh, he pulled himself out of his chair, chuckling as he felt several fleshy growths linking him to it pop free as he did so.
He walked slowly out of his chambers, his body swollen by the Grandfather's blessings, but that didn't concern him. He had never needed to rush anywhere on foot before in his entire life, and that wasn't going to change now. Besides, it gave him time to enjoy the sights of the Governor's Palace.
Since he'd killed its previous occupant and claimed it for himself, the building had changed to reflect the allegiance of its new master. The walls were covered in living flesh, writhing with still-growing muscles and nerve clusters. The same was true of the floor and ceiling, giving the impression of walking through the intestines of some vast and fecund beast.
Through the open windows, he saw the perpetual twilight of Skitterfall, tinted through the Warp-infused clouds that covered the city. This, he knew, was what had first drawn the attention of the Grandfather on his world : the locked position of the planet, the constant light level which kept the only liveable region forever trapped between light and dark, day and night – life and death.
Faces, human and not, leered from all directions, weeping tears of pus and tainted blood. Sacs filled with amniotic fluid and incubating beasts grew in the old gardens, and the galleries of portraits of Adumbria's past Governors had become exhibitions of the many, many ways in which Nurgle's displeasure could manifest, as Adrien had taken great pleasure in punishing those of the planet's elite who'd wronged him in the past.
The servants he passed on his way prostrated themselves before him. Unlike the common plebeians, who were fit only to be used as vectors to spread the Grandfather's gifts, these servants had once been part of Adumbria's noble families. As such, they had been allowed to retain part of their intellectual faculties in order to better serve him – though Adrien had disposed of their inconvenient free will once he had grown tired of hearing them beg him for the release of death. Their bodies, though still altered in reflection of the Garden's glory, were still capable of using things like weapons, tools, and doorknobs.
Slowly, he made his way to the former throneroom, where Adumbria's Governors had held court for thousands of years. After personally strangling his predecessor there, Adrien had turned the place into Nurgle's pre-eminent temple on Adumbria. If he was the brain of the Great Work, then the temple and what laid within was its beating heart.
The entrance was guarded by a pair of towering creatures which, at his silent command, pushed the heavy doors open, revealing the temple.
Like every time he saw it, Adrien's breath caught in his throat – and not just because of the phlegm that filled it. Hundreds of host bodies filled the chamber, safe for a single passage leading further in. All of them were linked to each other and the living palace through thick fleshy tendrils, their moans a symphony of despair and suffering which was music to his ears and those of Nurgle.
And there, atop the altar which stood at the back of the room, was the Blessed Spawn, Nurgle's gift to Adrien and the source of the holy sacrament which had spread through Adumbria. Large tendrils ran down the walls and plunged into it, pulsating with various ichors that were injected into and extracted from the Blessed Spawn, before being circulated throughout the entire palace and beyond.
Though Adrien was the chosen apostle of Nurgle on this world, it was through the holy gifts that brewed within the Blessed Spawn that all of Adumbria was one. It served as a living cauldron, its unique biology turned to the service of the Grandfather, made to help his bountiful gifts pass from the Garden into drab reality.
As Adrien approached the altar, he saw that within its shell of hardened, translucent biological matter, the Blessed Spawn had changed form again. Gone were the many scarlet eyes and fanged maw : it now appeared to be an ordinary infant, in the last stages of its growth before it was birthed unto the world.
"Oh, child," Adrien chuckled as he patted the egg gently, before kneeling before the altar in preparation for the rites he needed to perform. "Still you resist, still you refuse the Grandfather's embrace."
It was understandable, of course. The Blessed Spawn was exactly that : a child, with no knowledge of the universe and its many wonders. Its biology was fighting the gifts of Nurgle even as they grew, multiplied and changed within it.
Adrien didn't know what exactly the Blessed Spawn was. For all the gifts he'd received from his patron, his understanding was still limited, though it grew with every passing moment. Still, he had received an answer of sorts, the last time he'd beseeched Nurgle for knowledge :
The Blessed Spawn, the Grandfather had whispered to him, was the last child of Legienstrasse.
AN : I know this chapter was heavy on exposition, but I promise we'll get back to (hopefully) hilarious shenanigans in the next one.
Adrien de Floures van Harbieter Ventrious is a canon character from The Traitor's Hand, although I changed which Dark God owns his miserable soul for what I hope are obvious reasons. I based his characterization, and the whole Nurgle Plague thing, on Resident Evil 4's Saddler and Plaga respectively - except, you know, worse because 1) Chaos and 2) inbred aristocrat.
Fun writing fact : it's always the details you least expect that end up taking the most time. For instance, in this chapter, I had to ask for help to name the USA's new aircraft (thanks sneakylurker for the Cainwing), and I spent entirely too long deciding what Adumbria's population would be like.
(If you are curious, I ended up using the off-handed mention that the planet might have received as much as a billion off-world visitors in the last two centuries and compared that to how many foreign tourists Paris gets per year to decide that Skitterfall had around a million and a half inhabitants, before extrapolating to the rest of the planet. Does that even remotely make sense from a demographic perspective ? Probably not, but I don't care.)
The Cainwing are based on the Mark VI Supremacy fighters of the Sith Empire from Star Wars : The Old Republic (you can look up the design online if you want), except they can be refitted with a variety of equipment depending on the mission they're about to be deployed on. Don't think too hard about whether this makes sense from a strategic/logistic/technological perspective, because I certainly didn't.
Finally, if you recognized Legienstrasse's name without needing to look it up, congratulations. For those of you who didn't, don't worry : I'm planning to explain it in-story, if only because Cain's reaction to the whole affair is going to be hilarious.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter and look forward to your thoughts on it.
Zahariel out.