The screens were going dark.
One by one, the feeds from the servo-skulls monitoring the USA troops across Skitterfall were dying. First, they would start to flicker, the quality would drop, and then there would be nothing but static on the screen for a few seconds before it shut down.
"It's coming from the palace," said Regina. "The servo-skulls closest to it were the first to fail, and it's spreading from there."
"You are right," said Ygdal. "Something has to be happening, but what ?"
Recognizing a rhetorical question when she heard one, Regina didn't answer. Five minutes later, not a single screen was still on; two minutes after that, the vox was completely dead. They couldn't even call the troopers right outside the command vehicle, whose last report before the comms had gone out had been of a sudden attack on the Forward Operation Base.
Cursing, Ygdal got off his seat and moved toward the embarkation ramp, pulling his power mace off his back and lighting it up.
"Stay inside," said the heretic colonel as he pressed the rune to open the ramp. "You don't have armor, and I won't have you get torn apart on my watch."
Much as it galled her to stay safe while others fought, Regina had to agree. Without the sealed power armor that every fighter of the USA was wearing, she couldn't risk going outside of the Lord of War's filtered air. She had a gas mask on her, of course, just in case the vehicle was breached, but that was a last-ditch measure.
Regina was left alone in the command center, with the rest of the Lord of War's crew busy firing its mighty guns into the horde besieging the FOB. After a few moments spent struggling with the Lord of War's controls, she managed to switch the screens to show the feeds from the war-machine's auspex. If she were to die here, she wanted to see her death coming rather than be taken by surprise when the hull around her was ripped apart by the claws of the monsters who'd taken this world from the Imperium.
She watched as the USA troopers held their ground against ever-greater numbers of the Infected. She watched as squads fell back from the city streets. Some made it back to the dubious safety of the defense lines, while others were overrun and torn to pieces in salvation's sight.
It was a hideous spectacle, monsters killing heretics. It was a beautiful sight, Mankind standing in defiance of the Outer Dark's horrors. Regina was transfixed by the sight, wanting to look away from the screens but unable to do so.
Then a new sound rang within the command chamber. She jumped, taken by surprise, and saw that, despite the vox still being down, one of the comms was beeping with an incoming call. She tentatively reached out and pressed the rune, acknowledging the link.
"Hello ?" She asked, forcing her voice to remain steady with an effort of will.
"This is Cain. Lord of War, do you hear me ?"
Briefly, Regina considered hanging up, but she promptly dropped that line of thought. There was too much at stake for her to risk it all by being petty.
"This is Colonel Kasteen," she replied. "I hear you, Cain."
"Good, I was worried this wouldn't work either." The relief he felt was audible in his voice, which only made Regina more tense. "Where is Ygdal ?"
"He went out to lead the defense of the FOB," she explained quickly. "The Infected are attacking in large numbers, and there are daemons among them now. How did you manage to reach us ? Every vox-link is dead."
"Ansible," he said as if she was supposed to know what that meant. "The borgs built one into my armor; I thought it was overkill, but clearly it wasn't. Can you get me in touch with the Fist ? There's another ansible pair between the Lord of War and the flagship, and I need to ask Krystabel and Harold about something."
"I …" Regina looked around. "I will see what I can do."
Most of the Lord of War's systems followed the standard Imperial templates with which she was familiar, but there were elements she'd never seen before, which she assumed were those 'ansibles' Cain was talking about. Fortunately, they were labelled clearly, with Low Gothic labels stamped under a series of communication runes. She saw that the one she'd already pressed said 'Liberator'. Next to it was another marked 'Flagship', and next to that one another simply labelled 'Slawkenberg'.
For one second, Regina simply stood there, her mouth open as she was struck by the implications of that one, innocuous name.
"Lord Cain," she heard her own voice asking, "why is there an ansible, which I assume is some kind of communication device, connected to Slawkenberg in this tank ?"
"Oh, that ?" replied the arch-heretic in a distracted tone. "The borgs added one when coming up with the design. A bit overboard, I know, but they thought it might be useful for the field commanders to be able to ask questions to the experts back home and get answers in real-time."
"How is that possible ?" Regina asked, aware of the slight hysteria that was slipping into her voice. She didn't know exactly how far Slawkenberg was from Adumbria, but she'd to imagine it was measured in light-years. And wait, had he just said 'in real-time' ?!
"I have no idea," Cain admitted, "but it works. It's based on a STC we found years ago. The bandwidth is a bit limited, but it's still a lot faster and more reliable than astropaths, and it can't be intercepted at all."
Colonel Kasteen swayed on her feet. Instant communication, regardless of the distance. This … this was even bigger than the Panacea, if true – and she couldn't think of a reason for Cain to lie. Even she, lowly officer though she may be in the grand scheme of things, could see that. The military applications alone could completely change how the Imperium responded to the many threats it faced.
Instead of needing to wait months, sometimes years for a reply, beleaguered worlds calling for aid could be told immediately when a relief force had been sent, which would happen a lot sooner without the time it took for an astropathic message to reach its destination, if it ever did. Then there were the logistic applications –
"Apologies, Colonel," Cain said, "but could you please hurry ?"
"Right," she snapped out of her awed fugue and pressed the rune marked 'Flagship'.
"This is Harold speaking," said the voice of the data-pusher she'd met at the war council immediately. "Where is Cain ?!"
"I am here, Harold," replied the Liberator. "We've lost the vox across the entire city, and Jurgen is telling me there's something going on in the palace. We're moving toward it to stop it; what can you tell me ?"
"Praise the Gods," murmured Harold with transparent relief. "Right, we are detecting a summoning of some kind taking place – a huge one. Whatever the Nurglites are calling, it's messing with the Materium, changing the laws of physics as it approaches."
"That's why the vox isn't working," guessed Cain, echoing Regina's own thoughts. "Any idea why the ansibles aren't affected ?"
"The ansibles work on completely different principles than the vox," promptly answered Harold. "You'd need to ask a borg for the details, but my best assumption is that those principles rely on a deeper level of reality, so to speak."
"So if the ansibles stop working, it will be a very bad sign," said Regina.
"… Yes." Harold sounded somewhat surprised she'd spoken up, but clearly realized this wasn't the time to argue about protocol. "Again, you'd need to ask an expert, but I'm fairly certain it would mean we've stopped being in the Materium completely."
"Is that possible ?" asked Cain.
"Given how much Warp energy is being pulled in at Skitterfall ? I am afraid so, lord."
"Wonderful. Well, I don't think we're quite ready to face Nurgle in his own realm yet, so we'll have to hurry and make sure that doesn't happen."
From anyone else, Regina would have taken that as a joke, an attempt by the speaker to calm his own nerves by making light of the situation. Yet hearing Cain speak them, somehow she couldn't stop herself from thinking he was being entirely serious.
Hektor woke up to a pleasant lack of stabbing, homicide-inducing pain in his skull. In the last hundred centuries (by the Imperium's reckoning : his own chronology had long since become muddled to the point of meaninglessness), the only sleep he'd known had been short bursts of unconsciousness, which had always ended with the Nails dragging him back to wakefulness long before he'd been able to get any real rest.
He was laying down on a hard surface, and could feel cold air on his skin. How long had it been since he had removed his armor ? Years ? Decades ? Like most of his memories since the Siege of Terra, it was all a jumbled mess. Truthfully, he hadn't even known whether it could even be removed anymore, or if it had fused with his flesh like was the case for so many other renegade Astartes.
There was a collar around his neck. The sudden realization filled him with all-too natural anger, and his hand closed around the offensive item –
"Please don't break that," said a calm, authoritative voice from the side of his bed. "I had to build it in a hurry, and it's really not as tough as I would like."
The man smelled of machine and medical supplies, and wore robes similar to those of the tech-priests, but he didn't have any visible metal on him, which only made Hektor more cautious. He'd met numerous members of the Dark Mechanicum in the Eye of Terror, and those who looked the most human were often the most dangerous under the surface.
"Greetings," he said. "I am Basileus-Zeta of the Bringers of Renewed Greatness."
"You seek to collar me, little man ?" grunted Hektor. Naked and weaponless he might be, but he was still a World Eater, Nails or not, and there were some indignities he wouldn't tolerate.
"That collar is the only thing keeping those grotesque cortical implants of yours from starting killing you again," revealed the magos, sounding only slightly perturbed by the threat implicit in Hektor's words. "I know it doesn't look good, but again, I had little time and this place isn't exactly furbished with the equipment I'd need for a more permanent solution."
"What exactly happened to me ?" he asked. "I remember laying on the ground, dying. Then someone injected me with something, and I passed out."
"You are currently in the forward medical outpost of the United Slawkenberg Army, part of our operation to purge the city of Skitterfall of the Nurglite infestation that has taken root here," replied Basileus-Zeta. "You'll be glad to know that we were able to put all your guts back inside and sew you back closed. The Panacea, that's what you were injected with, seems to have healed the damage from your injuries, though we don't have enough knowledge of Space Marine biology to know whether or not it worked correctly."
"What – what about the Nails ?" Hektor asked hesitantly.
"I assume you refer to the implants in your skull ?" The magos waited for Hektor's nod of confirmation, then continued : "they are still there, I'm afraid. The Panacea is neutralizing them, but it can't push them out completely – they are buried too deeply into your brain matter. It might be possible to remove them with surgery, as long as you're kept dosed with Panacea during the procedure, but that'd be risky, and not something we can do here in any case."
Hektor reached out with his left hand and gently touched the back of his skull, feeling the familiar, hated shape of the Butcher's Nails. Of course. It couldn't possibly be that easy. Still, even such a brief reprieve was already more than Hektor had ever dared hope for.
"We didn't know how long one dose of Panacea can keep the implants quiescent," Basileus-Zeta continued. "I built the collar to monitor how much of it is left in your system and inject you new doses when needed. Judging by the rate at which you needed new ones while unconscious, the collar should have enough for the next ten hours, as long as you don't get injured. And we have plenty more here, so don't worry about running out. Your collar will start beeping when it is on its last dose, so you'll need to come back here to get it refilled. I can show you how to reload it manually in the field if you want -"
"Why ?" Hektor cut him off. "Why are you doing this ? Why not just leave me to die and strip me of my weapons and armor ?"
The tech-priest blinked, as if he genuinely didn't understand what the Legionary was saying.
"You came to this world to battle the servants of Nurgle, didn't you ? That makes us allies in our crusade against the Entropic One. Leaving you to die would have been a waste, and letting these implants continue affecting you would have been the very height of foolishness. As for what we want from you in exchange, I expect the Liberator will want to talk with you about that himself -"
Suddenly, the side of the tent was ripped apart, and a large things with buzzing insect wings and several mouths with far too many teeth hurled itself inside the medical station. Hektor's instincts kicked in before conscious thought, and he grabbed the creature before it could reach Basileus-Zeta or any of his scampering aides.
He smashed it to the ground, before punching and kicking it until it burst and stopped moving. The sudden rush of action flowed his body with adrenalin and other hormones, but the lack of blissful relief from the Nails nearly threw him off-balance, and he stumbled for a second before turning back to Basileus-Zeta. His understanding of human emotions had eroded somewhat over the millennia, but he was fairly sure the tech-priest was feeling nauseous at the gory display.
"I need weapons," the World Eater said bluntly.
"I think that can be arranged," replied the tech-priest.
Five minutes later, Hektor was outside the medicae tent with a human-sized chain-glaive in each hand. The weapons' handles had been shortened with a plasma cutter to make them the size of combat blades. He was wearing his Panacea collar and a set of patient robes which had been hastily sewed to fit his transhuman frame, and nothing else. There had been ranged weapons in the infirmary, but none of them would've fit in his grip.
It wasn't a great way to go to war, but Hektor would have faced all the hordes of Nurgle naked and with one hand tied behind his back in exchange for relief from the Butcher's Nails.
The base, which had been built in the shadow of Skitterfall's walls, was under attack by a horde of Nurglite creatures. The mortals (the United Slawkenberg Army, Basileus-Zeta had called them) were fighting back with commendable skill. Hektor hadn't seen a mortal army so well equipped in a long time : only the most elite Regiments of the Solar Auxilia had been fully kitted with power armor like those were.
To his mild surprise, the troopers didn't seem affected by transhuman dread at his admittedly somewhat diminished presence. Instead of recoiling from him as he engaged the closest group of Nurglite monstrosities in melee, they shouted their own war-cries and joined in.
"Greetings, Ravager !" one of them, who wielded a power mace two-handed and whose armor bore the marks of a high rank, called out to Hektor. "Glad to see you already up and about. I am Colonel Ygdal. May I have your name ?"
"I am Hektor of the World Eaters," the Chaos Marine replied. "You serve the Blood God too, don't you ?"
"I serve the Liberator, and the people of Slawkenberg," corrected the mortal. "But I do follow the creed of the God of War, yes."
Hektor didn't know what to make of that, but fortunately there were more immediate problems to deal with. More Infected were hurling themselves over the barricades surrounding the outpost, accompanied by shambling Plaguebearers and other lesser daemons of Decay.
"Then let us make war together, Ygdal of Slawkenberg, for Khorne and the Liberator !"
"FOR KHORNE AND THE LIBERATOR !" roared back the soldiers around him, and Hektor couldn't suppress a smile that would've made lesser men run away in terror.
Truly, Nails or not, some things never changed.
They would be here soon.
Even as he sang the long and complex incantation, Adrien could feel the deaths of every slave the heretics were butchering on their way up the city and into his palace. Even the lesser children of the Grandfather, who slipped through the door his spell was slowly pulling open, couldn't slow them down for long.
The room containing the Blessed Spawn had been emptied of pews and worshippers to make room for the ritual circle he had directed his slaves to draw with blood and bile. Seven times seven times seven sacrifices had been offered, their souls ripped from their bodies and their flesh slowly melting to fill the basin at the center of the circle.
The remaining bodies had been pushed to the side, where the walls had promptly swallowed them whole, before spitting them back out transformed into new warrior-forms which Adrien had absent-mindedly commanded to get out and join the fight.
He couldn't spare the time to direct the defense of the palace : the ritual required his absolute focus, lest the great and wondrous energies he was commanding slip his grasp and destroy him utterly. All he could do was order every one of Nurgle's servants to come to his aid and put themselves between the ritual chamber and the intruders.
As the ritual reached its climax, the liquid biomass from the pool rose into the air, forming a vast, opaque sphere that glowed with greenish light. Adrien felt in his very soul the passage of some vast and terrible entity from the Empyrean to the Materium, and he gasped, falling to his knees, his gut bouncing against the floor.
The surface of the sphere hardened, then broke apart like an eggshell, revealing the towering figure of a Great Unclean One, who smiled down benevolently at Adrien.
He had done it, the prophet of Nurgle thought with delirious joy, even as he felt the last of his guards fall and the doors of the chamber burst apart under a single blow of Cain's black blade. He had called forth one of Grandfather's mightiest children, something only the greatest of Nurgle's chosen could do. Now, their victory was assured. They would crush the heretics, bring Adumbria into the Garden, and from there spread Nurgle's bounty across the stars, with Adrien as its herald, honored above all others –
Then the Great Unclean One landed on the ground, and crushed Adrien under his foot like an ant.
"Oops," said the monster in a voice that was like the slurping of entire rivers of filth as it looked down at the miserable stain that was all that remained of the sorcerer who had summoned it. "That was unlucky. Oh well," it shrugged. "Dear Adrien served his purpose well enough."
Such callousness, thought Jurgen. One more proof (as if one were needed) of the evil of Nurgle. For all that his cultists liked to talk about their patron's so-called 'love', they were never more than slaves, tools used to spread misery and despair across the galaxy in order to feed their foul god's power.
Before anyone, even the Liberator, could respond, the fiend turned its baleful gaze upon them all.
"I am Gurug'ath, Baron of the 6th Pestilential Circle," it said, and Jurgen felt blood run from his eyes as he heard it say its name, his mind filling with images of endless rot, decay and hideous fecundity. "Long have you defied the Grandfather, but this ceases now. Behold the truth of despair !"
Too fast for Jurgen to react, a psychic pulse erupted from the Greater Daemon, catching everyone in the room.
And Jurgen –
– he was back in the pit, with the chains around his body and mind, the reek of rotting corpses, the filth everywhere on his skin, and no light, no hope, nothing –
– was retching in his armor, muscles twitching, his gun slipping from nerveless fingers. The suit had detected his distress and triggered the automatic injection of Panacea into his bloodstream, but even the wondrous archeotech couldn't keep the psychic aura of despair at bay.
Around him, the rest of the troopers were also falling down, moaning in pain and terror, clawing at their armor with trembling hands. Not even that wench Mortalyss was unaffected, although Jurgen saw her still trying and failing to get to her feet. Through the haze that blurred his second sight, he could sense the brand on her chest blazing with power as Lady Emeli tried to force her to get up.
And yet, she couldn't do anything, and neither could Jurgen, as Gurug'ath slowly wobbled its way toward the Liberator Armor and pressed one disgusting hand against it in a vile caress that made the paint crumble and the wards engraved into the metal glow.
"Everything you have done means nothing in the end," the daemon gurgled. "All you've built, all you have achieved, will turn to dust and rot eventually. Your precious Panacea will be revealed as the impotent lie it truly is. Embrace this truth, Cain, and through it you will know Grandfather's forgiveness. It is time to stop hiding from the inevitable."
"… liar."
Liberation's Edge rose, and cut through layers of cancerous fat and rot-black bone. The left hand of the Great Unclean One fell to the ground with a revolting *plop*, and its owner recoiled, its grotesque features distended in an expression of shock.
"What ?!"
"LIAR !"
The Liberator's Armor moved like it was possessed, hacking at the Greater Daemon with bestial savagery. Wordless snarls of pure, undiluted rage emerged from its vox-speakers as Cain duelled the abomination. Jurgen watched in awe as Gurug'ath was forced to defend itself with its own blade, barely able to keep itself from being cut to pieces as it gave ground before Cain's berserk onslaught.
If the Liberator could fight through the daemon's spell, then by all the Gods, so could Jurgen. He pushed himself to his feet, grabbed his gun, aimed at Gurug'ath (using his psychic powers struck him as an incredibly stupid thing to do at the moment), and pulled the trigger. Thankfully, his armor compensated for the trembling flesh within, and the flurry of las-bolts hit more or less on target, burning chunks of putrid flesh off the daemon's ankle.
The wound was small compared to the bulk of the monstrosity, but it still threw it off-balance for just a second. To a swordsman like the Liberator, however, that second may as well have been an eternity, and he seized the opportunity by striking a diagonal blow that cut the Greater Daemon open from shoulder to waist. Rotten blood, entrails and other liquids with which Jurgen had become all too familiar during his captivity erupted from the wound in a foul geyser that bathed the front of the Liberator Armor, causing the metal to bubble and melt.
Again, the daemon stumbled backward, its three eyes wide open in shock as it pawed at its injury with its still-regenerating left hand. The aura of supernatural despair it had been projecting flickered and failed, and a roar of fury rose from the other troopers, mixed with the shame of how easily they'd been neutralized. They scrambled for their weapons and opened fire on Gurug'ath as well, their weapons set to full-burst. Individually, each las-bolt was little more than an insect's bite (though after some of the things they had killed on the way here, perhaps that comparison no longer applied), but there were a lot of them.
With a growl, Gurug'ath raised its remaining hand, brandishing its cleaver to strike at the Liberator Armor, which had gone worryingly still after being drenched in its daemonic guts. Terror that had nothing to do with the daemon's aura grasped Jurgen's heart, but before the Nurglite fiend could strike, its entire arm seemed to come apart into chunks that fell to the floor in a putrid rain.
The sound of Mortalyss' inhuman laughter echoed across the room as the Dark Eldar landed softly on the Liberator Armor's shoulder, her blades dripping with infernal gore. Right, she was there too.
"So be it," bellowed Gurug'ath. "I need no weapon to kill you all !"
Its third eye started to glow with eldritch light, and Jurgen felt Warp energy gather at that point as the Greater Daemon prepared to unleash some kind of fell sorcery.
Using his powers was still stupid, but Jurgen didn't have a choice. With a quick prayer, the Valhallan psyker threw the gates of his mind open, muffling a scream as the corruption saturating the Empyrean tried to flow into his soul. He would not give in, he would not succumb. He poured all of his rage into the counter-spell, all of his hate at the monster and what it represented, all of his determination not to fail the man who had saved him from a living hell all these years ago.
Jurgen screamed, and the energy Gurug'ath had been gathering burst into its face like a plasma grenade, Mortalyss leaping out of the way at the last moment. Darkness swayed at the edge of Jurgen's sight : the effort had taken a lot out of him. He raised his barriers back up again, knowing that pushing himself further would only put everyone else at risk now.
He couldn't see clearly, but Gurug'ath was still here. Was this it ? Did all their efforts amount to nothing in the end ?
Then the Liberator Armor hissed open, and Jurgen knew they were going to be okay.
Gurug'ath fell, the ground shaking under his tremendous weight. His hold of his incarnation was slipping from his grasp, the body poor Adrien had provided him pushed beyond its limits. If only he'd had more time to adjust to it, to draw upon the bountiful energies of rot and decay which saturated this city. Then things would've gone, much, much different, but Cain and his acolytes had rushed straight to this chamber without any hesitation instead of falling back to help defend their compatriots. Someone must have intervened, must have warned Cain despite the blocked communications.
Had it been that whore Emeli ? Or one of Gurug'ath's own enemies in the Great Game ? Whoever it had been, they would pay, Gurug'ath would make sure of it –
The damaged suit of armor cracked open, and the pilot stepped down, striding toward Gurug'ath like a hunter approaching prey which, while downed, could still be dangerous. The Great Unclean One glared at Cain, opening his infernal senses as much as he could. The mortal had made himself into a nuisance, and any knowledge Gurug'ath brought back with him to the Garden would lessen the shame of his defeat.
But, to the daemon's shock, while he could see Cain's soul-fire burning bright and strong (stronger than most mortals Gurug'ath had ever seen, though far from the strongest) he couldn't make out any details. His thoughts and emotions were obscured from the Greater Daemon's sight, blocked by a shadow that he couldn't identify.
For the first time in his existence, Gurug'ath felt something a mortal might have called fear. In the course of the Great Game, Gurug'ath had faced champions of the other Dark Gods enough times that there were Plaguebearers in the Garden whose sole duty was to keep track of them all. Yet never before had he encountered anything like this. This wasn't a ward or other mental barrier : Gurug'ath had seen plenty of those before, especially whilst battling the champions of despised Tzeentch.
This was something new, and to the children of Decay, there was little more terrifying than the new and unexpected.
"What are you ?" the Baron asked Cain as he stood before him. Even laying down as he was, Gurug'ath was so large that he was still eye-level with the man.
Cain didn't answer. The mortal warlord raised his chainsword above his head in a two-handed grip, then plunged it into Gurug'ath's third eye. Gurug'ath screeched in pain, before Cain pulled his reeving weapon up and down, adamantine teeth chewing Gurug'ath's skull in two.
"Tell Nurgle his time will come as well," hissed Cain, in a voice cold as the death of stars.
Before Gurug'ath could reply to that hubristic proclamation, his incarnation finally broke down completely, and his essence was dragged back into the Warp. As he fell away from the Materium, he felt the entire budding Warp Storm his puppet had cultivated over Adumbria fade, its energies pouring down into the metaphysical hole of his defeat.
The last thought to pass through the Greater Daemon's semblance of a mind was the knowledge of how completely he had failed his patron – then he felt the egg of the Blessed Spawn start hatching.
Slowly, as the veil of blind panic lifted from my senses, I became aware of myself and my surroundings once more. My memory of what had just happened was disjointed : last thing I knew, I had been in the Liberator Armor facing the Greater Daemon that stupid Nurglite cultist had summoned. It had been saying something, some nonsense about despair, and then …
Oh, Throne. I had snapped, hadn't I. As part of my training for the Commissariat, I had been taught that such things happened occasionally on the battlefield, as the human mind failed to process what was happening around it and reverted to its animal, fight-or-flight reflexes. As my instructors had put it, it was the job of a Commissar to make sure that when it happened, the soldier in question went for the 'fight' response, by providing his mind with something scarier than the enemy behind him.
Faced with one of the Warp's greatest horrors and the abject certainty that trying to run would only result in me being killed from behind, I had gone on the offensive instead, and somehow – somehow – managed to eke out a victory. Of course, I was under no illusion that, if not for the fact that my brief stint of madness had apparently disturbed the daemon's spell and allowed my companions to assist, things would have ended very differently.
The realization of how close I'd come to death nearly sent me back into a fugue, but I forced myself to remain, if not calm, then at least somewhat in control of myself. The troopers were watching, as were Jurgen and Malicia, and I couldn't afford to let either of those two realize what I was feeling.
"The vox is back on, Lord," reported Sergeant Karalet, one of the troopers. "We're getting reports that the storm overhead is dissipating, and the Infected are collapsing everywhere."
Of course. As Basileus-Zeta had explained, the Infected's biology didn't make any sense. Without the Warp to compensate, their shambling parody of life simply couldn't continue. It wouldn't do anything for the mundane diseases that were sure to infest the capital, but at the very least it should make our withdrawal to orbit a lot easier.
"Good," I replied, masking the relief I felt as exhaustion.
I was thinking about how long of a hot shower I would need before ever feeling clean again when I heard a noise, so unlikely in that den of foulness that it took me several seconds to recognize it as an infant's cry.
There was a baby laying on the altar, naked and squirming. Its skin was far too pale, its body temperature too low and getting lower according to my helmet's display. Its tiny hands ended in claws, and its eyes, which stared in my direction but didn't seem to actually see me, were slit like those of a felid. Around it were the shards of something which must have been shaped like an egg, and countless withered tendrils like those which had run on the walls, ceiling and floor of this blighted building.
"That doesn't look like a normal baby," said Jurgen cautiously from his position next to me. "A mutant, do you reckon, sir ? Some kind of super-soldier the Nurglites were working on ?"
"No, it isn't," said Malicia. "It isn't human at all. We should kill it right now, while it is still weak from whatever the slave of the Rotting One did to it."
"The frak ?" It was rare for Jurgen to swear, but he was clearly infuriated by Malicia's suggestion. "I knew your kind were ice-blooded, but this –"
"It has nothing to do with 'my kind', you fool !" she cut him off. She sounded genuinely disturbed, and I wondered what her xenos senses were picking up that mine weren't. "I … I don't know what that creature is exactly, but every instinct I possess is telling me it is dangerous !"
"We are all of us here dangerous," I said before the two of them could come to blows. "That in itself is no cause for condemnation, Malicia."
My gaze was still fixed on the squirming child as I thought on Malicia's words. This was obviously a trap, but I didn't know in which way. Was that child some last-ditch biological weapon, a carrier for Nurgle's plagues that would release death if we brought it with us ? Or would killing it as Malicia suggested be the trigger for precisely that, or even something worse ? The influence of the Warp on Adumbria was weakening, but I knew enough about such things to know that such large-scale undertakings left metaphysical scars on reality, and it wouldn't take much for the Immaterium to return here.
I did not know. But what I did know for certain was that I would be damned, quite literally, if I ever killed a baby on an altar, no matter which god it was dedicated to.
"I won't play your sick games, Nurgle," I declared defiantly for the benefit of my audience, before holding out my hand. "Jurgen, a dose of Panacea, please. I'm afraid mine were left in the other armor."
"Of course, sir," my faithful aide replied, and placed an injector into my hand.
Softly, I picked the child and held it in the crook of my arm. Then, as gently as I could, I placed it against the infant's neck I activated it. It (she, I realized now) cried out, and shook in my arms. For a terrible moment, I thought I had killed her after all, but then the greenish stains on her skin receded along with her obvious mutations, and I was left holding what looked like a perfectly ordinary and healthy baby girl, who was looking up at me with large, teary eyes.
Remembering how cold she was, I removed the cape hanging from my shoulders – an unnecessary addition I'd only agreed to because I'd had no intention of fighting outside the Liberator Armor if I could help it – and wrapped it around her as gently as I could. She gurgled happily, and closed her eyes, appearing to fall asleep.
"This is a bad idea," hissed Malicia. "I am supposed to protect you, and how can I do that if you –"
I cut her off with a gesture. She may very well be right, and in fact she was : had I known at the time what the infant I was holding really was, I wouldn't have been nearly as willing to carry her myself. But I had made my decision, for better or worse, and was in no mood to have her argue.
"We are leaving," I told the room of troopers. I looked up at the ceiling, realized that it was unlikely the building would last much longer without sorcery to prop it up, and continued : "And on the double."
As it turned out, I had been correct : as we made our way out of the palace, the sound of entire sections falling apart echoed through the corridors, and we'd only just emerged from the main entrance when the entire thing finally collapsed on itself. I was among the last to get out, still holding the girl, while Jurgen trotted alongside me, carrying the hilt of the deactivated Liberation's Edge under one arm and his rifle under the other (the Liberator Armor may be lost, but my aide had refused to leave the weapon behind, even though that would have been perfectly fine by me).
Outside, I was greeted by my first sight of a proper sky since we'd arrived at Skitterfall. As I gazed up at the perpetual twilight we had returned to the ruined city, noting the swift approach of a servo-skull in the corner of my eye, a noise from the child drew my attention downward. I saw her reach out to the heavens with one tiny hand, her eyes wide with delight – and now, I noted, the same purple hue as the sky.
And while I couldn't remember what color they'd been before, I was certain that hadn't been it.
Well.
That certainly meant something.
AN : Happy new year, everyone !
Gurug'ath : "Now, mortals, feel the crushing weight of all-consuming despair !"
Cain, who has been battling depression through alcohol and participating in the Handmaidens' 'activities' since the Uprising : "YOU KNOW NOTHING OF DESPAIR, PATHETIC WRETCH."
Warhammer fiction contains more scenes of mortals being terrified of daemons than I care to count, for good reason. As such, I find it is always delightful to see this reverted. Especially when the mortal doing the terrorizing isn't a living not!god like the Emperor, or even a Primarch - hell, not even a Space Marine.
Hopefully Hektor's POV clarified some things about what exactly the Panacea does to the Nails. It doesn't neutralize them entirely : without a steady flow of Panacea, Hektor's implants will start biting again. Which, yes, does mean that the Borgs are basically his drug dealers now, though I would argue the whole thing is more like someone needing medication to function than addiction (think insulin rather than heroin).
(Also, I tried to imagine what Hektor must feel when he even imagine the idea of the Nails starting to bite again after being freed of them for the first time in ages, and it was NOT a pleasant exercise.)
As has been pointed out several times on the SB thread, this unfortunately means it wouldn't work for Angron, since he is a Daemon Primarch and the Nails are, quite literally, part of him now, and the Panacea wouldn't work on daemons anyway, since they don't really have bodies for it to fix.
That being said, never say never, and you never know what might happen later on in Cain's career, once we get into the really over-the-top stuff I have planned. I could certainly come up with a way to free Angron from his perpetual torment in this story, so long as I found a way to make it funny. Which, in this fic, means a way to make Cain suffer for it.
One or two chapters are left of the Adumbria arc. As always, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts, suggestions, and even omakes and fanart.
Zahariel out.