Day 32

In the hive of Limos, countless Orks laid dead, their carcasses left to rot openly. The city was dead, but it was not quiet. The sounds of factories churning, battering away at metal, forges burning, layered the city in sound akin to the rumbling of thunder. So it was that none heard the buzzing, growing louder, coming closer. The air defenses of Limos, strong enough that no Ork craft could land within the city itself, were blind to what was approaching from within the roiling black clouds that choked the sky. They did not hear the buzzing, not as it swept around the spires, like water passing around a stone placed within a river, not as it hung there for a moment.

And so, they did not notice when the buzzing stopped.

Through the streets, drones of the Brood Mind moved about, some moving dead Orks into great piles, others transporting crates of material between foundries or to the defenses. They were preparing for the siege that they believed was to come. They did not realize it had already arrived and their defenses were already compromised.

A drone felt something small hit his head. Had such a thing ever existed on Monstrum, the drone might have thought it to be a raindrop. Yet, such weather did not occur on the ash-choked world. And this was no raindrop.

Bring his hand up to his head, the drone plucked up something small, fuzzy, and wriggling, bringing it before their eyes. A fly? Irrelevant.

The drone squished the little creature between his fingers, surprised by how viscous the yellow-green paste it became was. Then, the drone felt another fly drop on his head.

The drone, and countless others, looked up and saw it was raining.

It was raining flies.

Trillions of tiny, fuzzy bodies dropped from the sky, crashing to the ground, pelting the drones, the dead Orks, everything. The drones had no context for what was happening, but the Brood Mind had seen insects of a similar sort in past infiltrations, creatures of dark powers.

Even as the drones went about as quickly as they could, stamping whole clumps of the flies that crawled everywhere into paste, they watched as the creatures seemed to descend upon the dead, swarming the piles of corpses by the millions. Not unusual, for the creatures were known to be drawn to old meat, but what happened next was far stranger.

The flies seemed to burrow into the meat, not to eat or lay eggs, but to force their tiny bodies inside the flesh. They crawled through the open jaws of the orks or through their ears, disappearing. And then, the first ork twitched and rose.

This was not something the Brood Mind had encountered before.

The dead rose by the tens, then the hundreds, then the thousands and more and more continued to rise, within the walls of the hive city, well past their strongest defenses. The drones reacted nearly instantly, throwing themselves in waves at their undead foes, only to be ripped apart by the Orks, literally in some cases, as the Brood Mind tried to gain time.

Time had been its ally before, but no longer.

The Orks rushed through the city, unleashing guttural roars made all the more monstrous by the decay within their vocal cords. All the while, the flies descended upon the dead and soon the Brood Mind's own drones that had been killed were getting back up and joining the greenskin horde. Yet, in some places of the hive, Orks were few. In these cases, the flies made do.

They swarmed over the bodies of the drones by the hundreds of thousands, dozens being killed every time a drone tried to slap some away, but undeterred. The drones squeeze their mouths shut tight, but the flies tear through their lips with sharp mandibles, picking the flesh apart piece by piece, and tiny bodies possessed of greater strength than any fly should possess and a unified mind work together to force jaws apart, allowing the swarm inside. Some drones cover their mouths with their hands, but the swarm simply diverts its attention and crawls inside the ears or chew through the eyes or push up through the nose.

These drones soon drop to the floor and the flies that are left abandon them in search for a new victim, finding their next almost as soon as their previous is rising back to their feet, some not even possessing eyes but no longer needing them to see.

The flies rush ahead of the undead horde, filling the corridors of Limos with darkness as the swarm fills them to the brim, the horrendous buzzing now very much audible over the dying machines as more and more drones rush to defend against this new threat.

Filtration masks, endlessly mass produced and intended for even smaller foes, are donned, but this only provides a modicum of protection to one part of their body. Drones fall to the ground, crushing thousands of flies as they roll about in a vain attempt to rid themselves of their attackers that bite with mandibles that grow longer and sharper with each tiny piece of flesh consumed. However, it is only when the corridors of Limos are bathed in the breath of flamers that the swarm's advance falters, if only for a moment.

Hundreds of thousands of tiny bodies are burned to ash in an instant by each burst of fire, whole swarms being reduced to blackened dust piled up on the floor. But there are only so many flamers and Limos is a city filled with tunnels, with vents, with cracks and passages so well-suited for the tiny invaders. One-by-one, the flamer-equipped drones fall dead, gripped in their death throes for barely a moment before they too rise, weapons in hand.

In the main city, the Orks rush down, their bodies already starting to change. Some grow claws longer than the choppas they'd wielded in life, some have their arms lengthen and thin out into tentacles with sharpened spikes of bone that jut out. Others latch onto one another and pull their multiple bodies together, growths of flesh that sprout from them melding their myriad forms into one larger and greater, monsters as varied as they were horrific.

The Brood Mind took this all in stride, even as it did everything it could to stymy this new attacker, but it was clear that such efforts would not avail it. It sent out its most valued forms to try and lead a counterattack, only for them too to fall under the weight of the swarm or to the raw power of undead bodies that continued to shift and change more quickly than it could adapt.

A new strategy was adapted, one the Brood Mind had never used before, but seen many of its enemies use in face of the God Mind's approach: denial.

It could not stop this attack and every form and drone it lost was a new enemy it would have to fight in the future. That was, of course, assuming it could fight whatever… this thing was.

A group of a dozen drones and bioforms clumped together into a group, mere moments before the swarm would be upon them. Without hesitation, one equipped with a laspistol turned their weapon, not upon the approaching insects, but the promethium tank of another drone.

The ensuing fireball consumed the group and millions of flies with it, but such were their enemy's numbers that those losses were mere drops in the ocean. Still, the flies did not bother with the piles of ash that resulted.

More and more groups of the Brood Mind's bioforms and drones rushed towards one another. For each addition to a group, a hundred were too slow and fell to the swarm. More explosions rocked the hive city, more fireballs consuming more flies, but it wasn't enough, it was never going to be enough.

Genestealers could not feel afraid. It was a genetic impossibility for them.

And yet… The Brood Mind saw its future; it saw its death within the approaching swarm. Cut off from the God Mind by the storm, its knowledge, its existence, would be lost. It had existed as a part of a greater whole, even if a fragmented part, for countless eons.

Perhaps it was because of the Ghoul Stars and the strangeness of those systems that affected it. Perhaps it was an adaptation it had acquired unknowingly. Or, perhaps, it was a remnant of something the God Mind had thought had been removed long, long ago. Regardless of the reason, regardless of the why or how, the Brood Mind felt something that, interpreted by the brains of its drones, seemed very much like fear.

It felt the mind of the thing from the hive city of Malum, but it had changed. It had grown, far more quickly than the Brood Mind had expected it to be able to. And that mind knew the Brood felt it and pressed through that brief connection a strange feeling, a desire not meant for itself, but for the Brood Mind. A suggestion, a word of advice, something it should do, but it could not understand the meaning behind it, so alien was the concept.

Its drones understood the feeling and translated it in their minds into a single word.

Run.

Peri groaned as a spike of pain from her stomach nearly bowled her over. She leaned against the doorframe of her home, an expansive room by the standards of most hab blocks in Malum. Just enough space for a family of four to live… Or seven if they squeezed in together, as Peri's family had to.

By the grace of the God-Emperor, each family member's shifts was timed such that only around half of them were at home at any given time.

Nanel, her brother, and his daughter, Selene, were at home by the time she was there. As was Orin, their father, though that was always the case these days.

"Could you tear off the vines?" Nanel asked her, as he had every day for the last week. His back was against the wall, his booted feet nearly touching the other side of the room. Selene slept in the crook of one of his arms, resting her head against his chest. A few feet away, resting the other way so that his body could fully lay down, was Orin, only the rise and fall of his chest telling her the ancient, withered form of the man of nearly forty-five was still alive.

"They just…" Peri took a deep breath. The hunger had her limbs shaking slightly and her vision nearly blackened completely when she turned to look up. Her fingers were like claws with their vice grip on the door frame, the only thing keeping her upright. Slowly, her vision cleared and she the damned things had indeed reappeared, stuck to the ceiling as if by industrial sealant. "Coming back."

Reaching up, she dragged down the patch of vines, tearing them off. They came off easily, far more easily than they had the first time, though the ones that stretched across the ceiling of the corridor outside their hab unit remained stubbornly fixed in place. She left the vines on the floor. She wasn't sure if Nanel or someone else got rid of them when she slept, but they were always gone by the time her next shift came.

"They're persistent," Nanel nodded. Grime covered his face, as Peri knew it covered her own. "I hear some are eating them."

"God-Emperor have mercy upon them then, those vines smell fouler than the pox," Peri said, shaking her head. She pulled a small satchel from around her neck. "Dinner time."

Peri came to sit across from Nanel, resting her back against the wall as he did. She toed off her shoes, one by one, while handing Nanel the satchel. Unwilling to disturb his sleeping daughter, he expertly undid the rope clasp with one hand and withdrew the sole ration bar from within.

"Only one?" He asked. He didn't seem surprised, just disappointed.

"There's a war on. One hab unit, one ration bar," Peri repeated the words the distributor had told her and Nanel frowned, but said nothing. With bone-thin fingers, he carefully broke apart the bar into four pieces, though they weren't all the same size. The largest, he placed on Selene's lap, for when the small girl woke up. The second biggest he lightly tossed to land on Orin's chest. The third was Peri's, but she tossed it back to him and took the smallest for herself, devouring it before he could muster the strength to protest.

Nanel ate his portion under Peri's watchful gaze, washing it down with a small sip from the cannister of water that was passed back to Peri, who sipped from it as well. It wasn't filling in the slightest, only taking the edge off her hunger. Leaning back, her head thudded against the wall.

She closed her eyes and was asleep a moment later.

"Peri…" She turned her head away from the noise. "Peri, wake up."

Reluctantly, Peri opened bleary eyes, to see Nanel crouched next to her, staring at something at the entrance. Selene had moved from his arm to Orin's, the two sleeping peacefully, as Peri should have been.

"Wuzzit?" Her words were slurred as she glanced over, only for her eyes to snap open at the color of blood.

Except it wasn't blood that she saw, resting in her door frame. She didn't know what it was she saw.

Four… things rested there, in her door frame. They were spherical, almost perfectly so, and a bright red, brighter than blood in fact, and strangely shiny in this place matted with grime, dust, and ash. Peri barely noticed that the vines she had torn away earlier were already gone.

"What are they?" Peri asked in a whisper, suddenly quite awake and alert. Sometimes, things from the underhive crept upwards, but she had never seem something like this.

"I don't know," Nanel replied just as quietly. "I heard something drop from the ceiling, I thought it was a rat or… something else."

Slowly, cautiously, Peri shifted onto her feet in a similar crouch. She moved as quietly as she could towards the strange spheres, watching them with the attention of an overseer. She reached out towards the closest one with a single finger.

"Peri!" Nanel whispered harshly, but it was too late to realize what his sister intended. Peri's finger touched the sphere.

Nothing happened.

She picked up the sphere, eyeing it suspiciously. It was quite soft to the touch, almost feeling like flesh. She brought it closer to her face and sniffed. Her eyes widened.

"Peri!" Nanel said, no longer whispering, though his exclamation this time was more out of shock than rebuke as Peri sank her teeth into the sphere.

For a long time, Peri didn't hear anything, didn't see anything, didn't think anything. There was only the taste.

It was… Well, she had no idea what it was. She had no context with which to describe it. It was so different from the ration bars she'd eaten all her life. Where those were dry, this was wet. Where those were brittle, this was crisp, a strangely delightful crunch sound accompanying her bite. Where those were tasteless, this was…. This was…

Sweetness.

She paused at the word that seemed to enter her mind unbidden. She had never heard of it before, but… it oddly seemed to fit the taste. 'Sweetness'. Yes, that's what it was. The dryness of her mouth was gone. In a matter of moments, the entire sphere had disappeared and she had to fight her own body to keep herself from choking from how quickly she swallowed the strange food.

Quickly, she grabbed up the other three spheres, gathering them to her and handing one to Nanel, who had a flabbergasted look on his face.

"Eat it!" She insisted, even as she stepped over him towards Orin and Selene, almost shaking them awake.

"Wha-?" Selene was the first to wake, looking on the verge of tears as she was ripped from slumber. Orin simply rose quietly, shaking his head to clear it. She quickly pressed the two remaining spheres into their hands.

"Eat these," She said, an almost mad look in her eyes. Confused and possibly frightened, both complied, their eyes widening in shock just as hers had. Both devoured their spheres just as quickly as she had and it was a wonder neither choked.

"We can't eat these!" Nanel said, as though all three had gone insane. "The law is-!"

He was cut off as Peri grabbed the hand holding his sphere, pushing it towards his nose. The moment he smelled the thing, his mouth opened and teeth sank into it. Peri smiled as her brother lost any problems he had.

"What was that?" Selene asked, still seemingly confused, but a beaming smile on her face. "It was good!"

Orin grunted his agreement.

"I… don't know," Peri admitted, before Selene raised her hand and pointed.

"Look, look!" She said, laughing in delight. They all turned their heads to look outside, into the corridor. The ceiling, previously only covered in vines, was now nearly entirely filled with the red spheres.

Almost in a daze, Peri rose and stepped into the doorway of their hab unit, looking down both ends of the corridor. She could see others doing the same, all looking just as confused as her, some with the sticky juices of the spheres dribbling down their chins.

The entire corridor ceiling was a sea of ruby red. Thousands of the things. Tens of thousands.

"W-what does it mean?" Peri asked as Nanel squeezed past her. He reached up and plucked another of the things off the ceiling, taking a bite out of it.

"I have no idea," Nanel replied, his words slightly muffled by his meal. All around him, others were emerging, reaching up.

Peri had never known what the feeling of being 'full' was. Today would be the day she learned.