Day 30, Continued
Catherine was falling. Wind rushed past her, quietly whistling in her ears. She looked down and saw clouds, not like those that covered Monstrum, dark and totally obscuring, but like ones that might be found on an Agri-world, colored all the shades of dawn, drifting lazily past. Orange, red, pink, purple, light cast by a sun that hung low in the sky. Below her, an ocean that shone and reflected the world above that never seemed to draw closer no matter how long she fell.
Despite the air striking her face, her eyes did not go bleary or feel any discomfort, nor did any other part of her. The air was warm and dry, more comfortable to her than Monstrum's humid corridors.
She recognized this place or, rather, knew a place like it. Charnos IV had been a Shrine World dedicated to Saint Erellia the Pure… and her home. It had been a beautiful world, not just because of the grand cathedrals unrivalled in the entire sector, but also its lush forests and thriving oceans that were abundant with all manner of exotic life, whether it was small fish the size of fingernails that could leap out of the waters and use their fins as wings to hover or leviathans as large as void attack craft that could swim with shocking speed through open waters and emerge to crawl across the land.
Then, the xenos came.
Catherine saw the lights of the clouds and sky darken, the ocean growing dim. She flipped her body around and looked up to see them.
They descended like a torrent of rain, as unstoppable as they were unending. Drop pods made of organic chitin screamed like meteors through the air, their flaming bodies rushing past her to strike at the world below. Skyfire cannons and countless other orbital defenses should have opened fire, should have protected them, even if only for a moment… but Charnos IV's weapons remained silent.
She was no longer falling through the skies, but on the streets of her home city, whose name she had forgotten. This night, however, she remembered all too well.
She was tiny, perhaps no older than five or six, carried in the arms of a man who might have been her father or simply someone who was unwilling to abandon a lost child to her fate. The man rushed down the streets, along the shadows and alleyways, avoiding the sounds of autogun fire and screaming. She sobbed into his shoulder and he hugged her tighter.
'It will be okay,' he had said. 'It will be okay.' He might have been trying to convince himself as much as her.
Through her tears, she saw only fragments, but even that was enough. They went down an alleyway, only for the man to suddenly halt, turn, and sprint away. Unfortunately, she was well-positioned to see just what they were running from.
A four-limbed monster, covered in chitinous plates and bristling with claws and fangs that left gouges in the rockrete as it ran towards them, each bound bringing it closer and closer, closer and closer.
She might have screamed, she probably had. However, the thing she remembered most were the beast's eyes. They were a glowing yellow, sickly, and utterly inhuman. Whatever emotions, whatever desires drove that creature, she had no chance of comprehending.
The creature leapt towards her, a claw outstretched, seeking to slice through her eyes, only for a rush of dark green to slam into the beast with a great roar, sending the monster flying through the air before it crashed to the ground. The man had barely taken another step before the monster was back up and facing this new threat.
The guardsman stood in proud defiance of the creature, brandishing a combat knife slick with purple blood. Further back in the alley, she saw dozens more of creatures just like the monster rushing forwards. The guardsman strode forward, swinging his knife with the strength of the God-Emperor, bellowing a wordless war cry as he fought off the monsters.
The man never stopped running. Her last glimpse of the valiant Guardsman was as a dozen or more monsters descended upon him from all sides. Then, the man rounded a corner and she saw nothing more.
She wasn't sure how long the man ran or how far, but his pace never faltered, though she remembered how slick with sweat the neck she had clung onto for dear life had felt. She remembered seeing more like the monsters and other things as well. She saw mutants and humans fighting just as rabidly as the creature that had tried to leap upon her. She also saw those who opposed them.
Guardsmen, Planetary Defense Forces, even ordinary citizens clad in nothing more than the clothes upon their backs that had picked up weapons from the fallen. They rallied around the man carrying her even as more of the monsters closed in. She watched as they bled and died under the talons of enemy, heard their screams as they were ripped apart.
At some point, the man carrying her fell. Perhaps he was overcome with exhaustion. Perhaps he'd been wounded. Perhaps his body had simply given out. She fell with him, but he managed to twist around just enough that she did not strike the ground, but he took the brunt of the collapse.
She tried shaking him, asking a question she couldn't remember the words of. He hadn't responded, his eyes simply staring up into a sky that had darkened, though not by night.
She remembered being wrapped up by a new pair of arms, being torn away from the man as she tried to shake him awake. She never saw the face of the person who took her, only remembering the green combat vest they'd worn.
She was rushed behind hastily thrown up lines of defenses, past camps filled more with the dead than the wounded, and along open streets rather than shadows and alleyways. She was brought to a large, open area. A spaceport, or something that had been turned into one out of need. A single shuttle waited, surrounded by a crowd of civilians that wept and screamed and shouted and demanded and threatened and begged, held back by guardsmen.
She was let through, possibly because of who brought her, passed off to another on the other side of the line keeping others from rushing the shuttle, already filled nearly to the brim. She was bundled away in a corner of the shuttle, filled with holy men, priests, who looked just as terrified as those outside.
The shuttle lifted off and she remembered finding a viewport, watching as swarms of monsters rushed across the spaceport, slaughtering the crowd and the guardsmen alike. She looked up and saw the dark sky of writhing horrors, the horrors they were rushing towards. She saw brief points of light erupt in that canopy of darkness, flickering into life one moment and dying the next, and thought the stars themselves were being devoured, one-by-one.
She saw a new sun be born before her eyes, a fireball that lit up the form of a monster of a size that it could have devoured her entire city whole. The beast fell to the world below, the cracking of its chitinous armor like peals of thunder.
They passed through the hole made in the beast by the short-lived sun and she saw its insides, filled with massive intestines and internal organs, but most disturbingly other monsters like those on the ground and even more varied and horrible in appearance, that scurried like a nest of angered insects across the corpse even as it fell.
They passed through the cloud and into the starlit void and Catherine saw the true scale of the terror they faced. The whole of Charnos IV was shrouded by hundreds of thousands monsters just as large as the one killed by the newborn sun if not bigger. They writhed and reacted like the waves of an ocean, moving together as one.
She saw other stars be born, but no matter how many monsters were consumed by the burning flames, endless numbers more remained. One broke off from the group and came closer, so close she could see the glint of its teeth, see that even the smallest of them was a greater size than the land-crawling leviathans of her world's oceans.
Its maw opened, revealing many more teeth and waterfalls of a green fluid spewing from the fleshy insides of its mouth. It was faster than their shuttle and moved nearer and nearer. She remembered the screams of the holy men, the begging for their own lives to be spared.
She remembered when the cruiser burned into view, its golden Imperial Eagle-shaped prow glinting in the starlight. The beak of the eagle was like a spear tip as it rushed headlong into the open mouth of the monster, piercing straight through the lining of its mouth and into where a normal creature's brain would have been. The great beast was shoved away by the force of the cruiser's blow, allowing the shuttle that carried her to escape… but the cruiser was lost and disappeared from view as the monster's great maw closed around it.
At some point, they reached a larger ship, a battleship she would later be told. One part of a great fleet that had been deployed to see off the threat of the creatures, the Tyranids. One part of a great fleet that had been sent to exterminatus Charnos IV once the Tyranids were invested there. One part of a great fleet that had evacuated only a fraction of the planet's population when the Tyranids arrived in system.
Catherine fell into the ocean.
Are you ready to talk now?
What… was that?
Memories. Some buried, others relived countless times.
Ellen shook her head. She floated in an ocean of endless black, her own form the only thing illuminated within it, though she couldn't say by what light. She wore simple plainclothes, like those that might have been owned by any peasant of a shrine world. Her body was not what it should have been. She knew she was powerfully built, a woman who had remained in her prime for longer than most humans lived naturally. Yet, here, she was a child, small, weak.
Innocent.
The realization that… whatever it was that spoke could read her thoughts was unnerving.
I choose what form you take here, as I control everything in this place. However, the forms I give are determined by the person in question. For Purilla, she came to me as your tool, a prisoner who did not realize what bonds held her. For Vidriov, he came as a man, a student of his order, one I hoped to teach.
And her?
You come at my invitation. The voice surrounded her, echoed through her, like the vibrations of a starship's engines. I find you and the Imperium you serve… Horrifying.
In a flash, her mind was bombarded with thoughts and images. She saw the common citizens of the Imperium slaving away in the factories of the hive cities. She saw mutants being beaten and abused and murdered. She saw the nobility the Imperium permitted hording wealth, gathering trinkets while their people suffered for their gain.
She had seen such things before and worse, but she had never gotten a look into the minds of those who were worked and abused. She heard them now. She heard the citizens and the horrific deadness of their minds, empty of thoughts and wishes and dreams and desires, as rote and mechanical as a servitor. There was no faith there, no love or respect for the Imperium, no sense of duty. Only mindless obedience.
She heard the cries and pains of the mutants, the disgust leveled at them by others and by themselves, heard their screams as they had their bodies broken. She watched in horror as she was forced to learn that it was not their mutations that drove them down the path of damnation, but the hate and scorn that fueled them, that made them into the very monsters the Imperium claimed them to be by birth.
She felt it. All of it. She was forced to feel everything the Imperium had wrought, everything she had proclaimed as being good and right.
Life is as much about suffering and pain as joy and happiness… But there is neither in these cities. Your Imperium has taught its people only to die, not to live. The only emotion left to them is hatred of those deemed unworthy of even that much.
Life… was duty. Catherine fell into the mantras she had been taught, trying to ignore the pain, the gnawing at her soul. An Inquisitor must be strong, must make the hard decisions. The people of the Imperium worked for the defense of all humanity.
Yes, that they do… And the Imperium squanders their devotion with pettiness, hate, and practices just as vile as those used by its enemies. How many worlds die for vendettas? How many devoted servants of your God-Emperor are killed for the sake of convenience? Humanity is dying, your Imperium is dying, as much because of its own actions as all the efforts of its enemies combined.
The universe was dark and cruel, it was only the God-Emperor's light that kept humanity afloat and it was the Inquisitors who embodied that light. She could not falter, could not let her fury dim. Through hardship, the people were made stronger to better serve the Emperor.
How hollow those words sounded to her now.
You aren't fighting me, Catherine Ellen, you're fighting the truth. You think your hate has kept you alive, your fury, your Emperor.
She was dragged through the black waters… No, she was carried through them. She felt her arms wrap around the neck of someone running, clinging tightly to them as she was delivered to safety.
You are wrong. The Imperium is not the reason humanity survives. Nor is your Emperor. Not the Inquisition, not the Space Marines, not the Ecclesiarchy, nor any organization. Humanity endures because of men and women like the ones who saved you from your home. The ones who saw a scared child… and helped her.
Ludicrous. She shook her head, releasing her grip upon the man, only to find herself sinking through the water once more. This time, however, she was no longer in the body of a child but an adult.
Kindness like what they had done was weakness. She should never have been brought aboard that shuttle. It was meant for priests, not children. She could have been infected, could have been a spy or an infiltrator.
You could have been, yes… But they helped you anyways. And not just those who carried you. Tell me, Inquisitor, why was a fleet conducting a rescue in a system that contained a Tyranid hive fleet? Do you think anyone on your planet would be worth risking so many ships, worth sacrificing a cruiser for, in the eyes of your Imperium?
The entity already knew the answer and so did she.
I thought not. The admiral of that fleet disobeyed orders to save as many as he could. Tell me, how does the Imperium reward those who not only successfully rescue tens of thousands of innocents, but also evade a Tyranid hive fleet?
She still remembered the admiral's screams as his flaying was broadcast across the entire fleet. Whoever had been in charge of deciding the execution for his treason that day must have been feeling… vindictive. It had been deserved, she told herself. He wasted resources.
Your Imperium is cruel. Sometimes, cruelty is needed… But all your kind accomplishes with the horrors you inflict is feeding the very things you so vehemently oppose.
She felt those horrors all around her, just out of sight in the darkness. The water shifted with their passing, shook with their laughing whispers. She thought she saw shapes, incomprehensible forms moving in the black, no more tangible than shades.
They're hungry and they know you all. They have fed well because of the Inquisition and its atrocities.
She was not… The Inquisition was not the problem! The impure, the unclean, were. Only through purification could the galaxy be made whole again!
You can lie to yourself all you wish, but you can never lie to me. You don't believe your own thoughts. You act, you pretend, you hide from your own potential. You think the questions that rise in your mind, the doubts you have, are weaknesses, are things that must not merely be crushed, but must never arise in the first place.
An Inquisitor held no doubt!
But you do. You are a poor Inquisitor, Catherine Ellen. And that is why there is still hope for you.
Purilla watched as Catherine's eyes opened and she rose into a seated position.
"Are you with us?" Purilla asked.
"Leave, heretic," Catherine whispered, sounding as disgusted with herself as with Purilla. Purilla tilted her head, more confused than upset. If anyone could have gotten through to someone as hardheaded as Ellen, it had to be Tide, right?
She is on the path, but the journey is a long one.
Should I leave?
Purilla asked, uncertain. Before, when Catherine had demanded she do so, Tide had stopped her since Catherine might have tried to harm herself is she thought she was alone. Now, however…
If you wish. You have done more for her than anyone could have expected from you. I will watch over her now.
Purilla nodded, more to Tide than to Catherine, and departed. She wasn't entirely sure what she should do now. For someone who had always been expected to follow commands, it was as liberating as it was daunting.
"Governor Selvik, to what do we owe the honor?"
Selvik's eyes narrowed. The man who appeared, displayed via holo, was not the governor of Malum, but a younger man. Judging by the uniform, he was some high-ranking officer of the hive's PDF, a colonel.
"Who is this?" He demanded. "Where is governor Coris?"
"I am afraid he is indisposed at the moment," The colonel answered. Selvik waited for more, but the colonel remained silent.
"Then go and get him," Selvik huffed finally. "I must speak to him about his refusal to send me the reinforcements I ordered."
The colonel cocked his head. "As I recall, governor, your orders were for ten regiments to be sent to aid in your eastern campaign."
"I am not discussing this with you!" Selvik was outraged. How dare he? "Bring me Coris. Now!" He'd have to talk to Coris about the sheer level of impropriety in his subordinates.
"As I said, sir, he is indisposed at the moment," The colonel said in reply. Selvik was starting to lose his temper.
"I don't care if he's in the middle of a rejuvenat treatment, go and get him!" Selvik demanded.
"He's-," The man started, but Sevik cut him off.
"NOW!"
The colonel sighed, sighed. At him! Forget mere impropriety, this colonel needed to be made an example of!
"Yes, sir," The colonel said, before disappearing. Selvik waited another two minutes, before the withered, holographic form of governor Coris appeared before him.
"Finally," Selvik said, his frustration ebbing slightly. "You need to have that colonel of yours executed. He's exceedingly rude."
"He is effective at his duties," Coris said, before bowing his head. "I apologize for my delay, I was indisposed."
Selvik arched an eyebrow. "Doing what exactly?"
"I am sure you can well imagine," Coris replied and Selvik suppressed a shudder. The old man was well over four hundred years old and, despite having access to some of the best rejuvenat treatments on the planet, it showed. Selvik would rather not imagine just what Coris may have been getting up to. "Now, the colonel tells me you are displeased with my contribution to your campaign?"
"More with the lack of contribution, governor," Selvik said icily. "I am told that no forces are departing from Malum to join us in the north?"
"That is correct."
"Then how exactly are you 'contributing' anything?" Selvik sighed. "I understand you may be pushed thin in the south, so perhaps I can reduce the regiments required from you, but the other hive governors are already displeased. I would have liked for you to at least speak with me before deciding to not send anything."
"I am sending ten regiments," Coris replied. "They simply won't be travelling north."
Selvik blinked. "What?" He couldn't mean-
"They will be heading east from Malum," Coris stated. "While your forces engage these mutant cultists in the north, mine shall strike from the south."
"Ten regiments cannot take a hive city," Selvik said, incredulous. "Your forces would be better served joining up with mine."
"If you wish, I will send you an additional ten regiments to join you in the north," Coris shrugged. Selvik's mouth fell open slightly.
"You… You're joking?" Selvik wasn't sure. Coris had always been a strange one, but then every hive governor was.
"Not at all."
"That would leave Malum practically defenseless," Selvik reminded him. Was the man's mind going?
Coris laughed. "Not at all! We have forty regiments raised, trained, and equipped at the moment."
"Forty?" That was impossible. There had been a mere twenty regiments in Malum less than a month ago. Conscription could allow for massive numbers of troops to be gathered, yes, but it would take time for them to be trained and equipped. Malum, as far as Selvik knew, had not even begun conscription. Coris had clearly lost his mind.
"Yes, I suppose that does make it sound as though we are being rather greedy," Coris said, completely missing why Selvik was shocked. "Very well, we'll send another five to you in the north and, why not, another five to the east from Malum. There, thirty regiments contributed to your campaign."
"Governor Coris, would you be so kind as to put the colonel from before back on?" Selvik requested. Coris, looking surprised, nodded.
"But of course!" Coris stepped away and there was a moment's pause as the colonel stepped forward. He must not have been very far.
"Colonel," Selvik bit down his frustration with the man. "May I ask if you are alone?"
The colonel looked at something out of view, then nodded. "Yes, sir. The governor just returned. I assume to-"
"I do not need to know. What is the matter with governor Coris?"
The colonel tilted his head. "Wrong, sir?"
"Why is he talking madness?!" Selvik nearly shrieked.
"He's not, sir. We have forty regiments presently ready for war within Malum, in addition to the eight deployed in the west." Selvik stared at the man. He had to be insane too. That had to be it.
"You cannot expect me to believe Malum has more than doubled its military forces in a month without instituting conscription."
"We have had a large number of volunteers recently, sir," The colonel shrugged, making Selvik's eye twitch at the slight. "I assume because of the attacks."
"And these are troops that have been fully trained and equipped?" Selvik asked skeptically. "In… what? Two weeks? Three?"
"They'll perform as required, sir," The colonel replied. "And, yes, fully equipped."
"If this is some kind of elaborate joke by governor Coris, know that I am not a man known for his sense of humor," Selvik growled. The colonel just grinned.
"The governor has decreed that fifteen regiments will come to your aid in the north," He said. "If you wish to inspect the veracity of our claims, they should arrive in two days."
"Two days!" Selvik laughed. It would be at least four before any of the other hives in the north were ready to send their troops, not to mention the day's travel it would take for them to arrive.
"Two days, sir," The colonel repeated with a smile.