Men screamed, flesh gouged by translucent shrapnel. Some of them shrieked oddly. Some of them tore off their masks. Viscous slime stained their faces and dripped from their rebreathers. It looked like the fluid had found its way in through badly adjusted mouthpieces or impaired filters and the side effects looked anything but pleasant.
I looked around for Ivan, hoping that he was not numbered among the fallen. I caught no sight of him until I looked up at the opposite ramp and saw him there. His bolt pistol was in his hand and he was snapping off shots. He looked as strange and ungainly as the cultists without his bionic arm but its absence did not slow him.
I heard more screams below and looking down saw that some of the white bodies that had been in the tank were flopping towards our troops. They moved with a malevolent mindfulness that suggested that they had been aware of what was going on the whole time. They clutched at men’s ankles, and slowed them down. When men fell, they went for the throat with their blotched teeth.
Grimnar had cleared my section of the piping now. I could not fire into the melee below with the shotgun, so I advanced along the walkway behind the Space Wolf, took aim at the enemy across the gap and pulled the trigger. The shotgun kicked and cultists died. I took another step and fired again. In short order the ambush site was cleared.
Below us were more casualties, from enemy fire, from the splintered tanks, from the newborn monsters. It did not stop us though. We continued our advance through the hall.
The place seemed endless, lit with a daemonic emerald glow, filled with the bubbling sound from the life-vats and the gurgling of chemicals through the pipes. There were more ambushes and more killing but we were ready for them now, and fell into the rhythm of clearing them.
As we neared the exit from the hall, I heard screaming again behind me.
Chapter Thirty
It came from the soldier who had been stung by the diseased insects on the stairwell. He was clutching at his arm, and howling curses and imprecations. There was agony in his voice and madness in his eyes and I started to understand why as I moved closer to see if I could help him.
Small boils had erupted on his skin. They had spread out from the place where he had been stung. At first I thought it was a trick of the light, some weird distortion caused by the lenses of my rebreather mask, but as I squinted I could see I was wrong. The lumps in the man’s skin were shifting. One of them crawled beneath the flesh on the back of his hand. Another had reached his throat and was moving up towards his jaw. There were further ripples beneath the sleeves of his tunic.
The lump on his jaw moved across his cheek, heading towards his eye. There was something eerie about it, like watching some evil spell doing its work. I wondered if it was some new disease or the result of daemonic influence. Even as that thought ran through my mind, a blue, chitinous fly erupted from the soldier’s eye in a spurt of jelly and a clicking of mandibles. Dragonfly-like wings stretched wetly and the creature prepared to take to the air.
The infected man brought his fist crunching down on it even as more and more of the creatures erupted from his flesh. They had a wet, glistening, newborn look to them. I brought my boot down on one, even as the dying man rolled over to crush others. From down the line came more screams and I guessed that more of the infected soldiers were discovering what they carried.
The insects were slow and dazed, at least at first, and easy enough to kill, but some of them slipped away and I had an uneasy feeling that they might infiltrate my clothing or suddenly appear when I least expected it.
Men were swiftly assigned to stand guard over the wounded and the company moved on. I returned to Macharius’s side. Drake was speaking.
‘Confusion and demoralisation. That is their purpose. We must leave men to look after the wounded or we reduce morale yet further.’
Macharius gave a weary smile. ‘Those men knew what their lives became worth when they joined the Imperial Guard. They know what is going to happen to them. We cannot take them with us for they are time bombs waiting to go off. Any who have been infected must be left behind. We cannot risk another outbreak at a crucial time.’
Drake nodded. The sound of bullets began to be heard from behind and a commissar emerged from the line. ‘I have made sure we will suffer no liability from those men, Lord High Commander.’
Macharius nodded and with a curt gesture indicated that we should proceed.
From ahead came the roar of bolter fire. The howl of Space Wolves echoed through the great hall of the vats. In response came the eerie chanting of diseased fanatic voices and the thunder of autoguns.
Macharius indicated that we should advance. I took charge of a section and raced forward up a flight of stairs. I entered what looked like a demented combination of a temple and a sorcerous laboratory. Vast carved idols, resembling the huge daemon I had seen in my fever dreams, flanked a gigantic altar that crackled with magical energy. From an area behind the altar a strange glow emerged along with the sound of bestial chanting.
I glanced around, taking in an evil parody of an Imperial cathedral. There were nooks in which statues of what might have been plagued saints stood, and smaller altars were arranged along the walls. Galleries lined the higher walls. Perhaps once a congregation of Chaos worshippers had howled prayers to their evil gods there. Now they were packed with armed men, firing down at us.
Half a dozen Space Wolves did battle against an army of disease-infected, plague-worshipping mutants. Richter’s palace guards were almost as large as the Adeptus Astartes. They were armed with bolters and marked by the stigmata of a dozen diseases. Their eyes were pinkish, their flesh blotched. Running sores wept greenish pus but seemed to leave their owner’s fighting ability unimpaired.
A score of them opened fire on a running Space Wolf. A trail of shells chewed up the carved pews through which the Space Marine ran in search of cover. One of the shells took him in the shoulder, exploded and twisted him around. Another took him through the throat. Another impacted on his chest-plate, breaking it open and revealing flesh and bone beneath.
Still the Space Wolf kept moving. He raised his bolter and snapped off a shot at one of the heretics, removing his head, then he fired again and again, killing two more Nurgle worshippers. Sensing blood their comrades kept pouring on the firepower. More shots hit the exposed innards where the ceramite carapace had been torn away, ripping through flesh and doing terrible damage to the Space Wolf.
I noticed that his bones were not like normal human bones. They were larger and in places had fused together to form what appeared to be another layer of armour around vulnerable internal organs, but not even that was enough to save the luckless Space Marine.
He must have sensed that his death was upon him for he changed direction in an eye-blink and ran into the hail of fire. I did not think anything living could move through the storm of death around him but somehow he closed the distance with the cultists and was among them, bolter still spitting death. He reached out with one armoured hand and crushed the skull of the nearest heretic, broke the neck of another and then stumbled and fell backwards as the heretics hit him with a dozen shots. Even then he managed one last discharge of his own bolter before falling to the ground dead.
For a moment there was silence. The entire chamber was aware that some enormity had occurred. All around echoed the howling war cries of the Space Wolves as if they had, at that moment, sensed the death of their battle-brother and gave vent to their mourning.