“Closer, yes. Come close now. I... I have things to tell you. You have to listen.”
Kais sidestepped closer, never letting the gun muzzle falter from its target. If the admiral was uncomfortable at staring down a muzzle he gave no indication of it, bloodshot eyes seeming exhausted and old.
“I’ve seen such things...” the man gurgled, scratching at one eyelid with an ungentle hand. “Things to... to... Things you can’t imagine.” he began to laugh, a damp and frail giggle that descended into a rasp of air. “Now look at us...” he hissed. “Emperor save us: our last hope riding on an alien... On a filthy little tau!” he threw back his head and laughed maniacally, great gouts of hilarity that quickly turned to sobs. He collapsed back onto the ground and heaved dry air, coughing and spluttering pathetically.
To Kais, he seemed as threatening as a one-tau’cyr youngling. Even with the rage gusting furiously through his blood the idea of shooting this defenceless thing was repugnant. He lowered his gun and slouched forwards, inquisitive.
The effect upon the human was electric. It jerked into a rigid crouch, face changing abruptly, stabbing out with the heel of its hand, fingers splayed.
“Stop!” it cried, voice suddenly losing its guttural unnaturalness. “Don’t come closer! It’s trying to... nn...” The man rolled onto his back, flexing furiously, spasming and dribbling and clawing at his own face. “Getoutgetoutgetout!”
Kais knew little of the ways of humans — his tutors had instructed him from an early age to think of them as a galaxy-wide pestilence, only dimly sentient and far from embracing the credo of the tau’va. But still, to his unpracticed eyes, it seemed like the admiral was struggling with some dark part of himself.
Kais could relate to that. He re-aimed the railgun and forced himself to stop shaking.
“Get out!” the man shrieked, punching himself in the eye. “Get back to the w... nn... J-just words, little tau. Feeling better now. Come closer. That’s it... No! Stay back!” Two voices, two faces, struggling and battering at one another viciously. Eventually the man slumped, exhausted, and lifted a tired face to stare at Kais.
“There...” he panted, “I-I think it’s under control...”
“What is?” Kais growled, needing little additional encouragement to squeeze his trigger.
Constantine bowed his head, breathing deep. They... they changed me. Opened me up to... oh, God-Emperor preserve me.
The man began to sob again. Kais took aim and began to tighten his finger, mouth a hard, tight line inside his helmet. Call it “mercy”, he thought.
“Wait!” the gue’la hissed, raising a shaky arm. “Not yet. I have to tell you! You need to know...”
“Tell me what, human? All I want is the ethereal. You’re in my way.”
“More important than that!”
“What, then?”
“How to stop the Darkness!”
The thing had no name, as such.
It was a minor being, by the standards of its kind, and it had never tasted the hard-edged paradise that was “reality”. It had lived out eternity as a coiling warp urge, a disembodied malevolence that hungered — yearned — for the seductive glory of materiality. The way had been opened.
A soul had been corrupted and twisted, burst into myriad shreds and left to gape open: an enticing entrance for any of the countless warp things that watched and waited. It was a light, a radiance of promise and power that the daemon minds had chattered and fought over, struggling to reach first.
Alone amongst billions, it had triumphed.
Inexperienced, still unfamiliar with the strange body it had entered, it found the host mind pushing back at it with annoying strength. It had plundered the thing’s memories for information: it called itself human, it had discovered, a shrivelled flesh morsel called “Constantine”. It had struggled against the warp mind’s incursion and now, of all the ignominy, had pushed it aside!
It was talking to some alien thing nearby, its words a meaningless prattle. Furious, the warp mind coiled itself into a ball and flexed, pushing all of its countless millennia of frustration and torment into that one daggerlike surge of consciousness.
The human’s mind broke like thin ice. The warp thing explored its new body quickly and decided, with a sneer, to make some changes.
“Y-you understand? The shrines! Remember!”
“I remember,” Kais grunted, impatient with the gue’la’s gibbering. Its voice grew weaker with every word, eyes rolling into its skull.
“It’s... it’s coming...” he gurgled, suddenly terrified.
“What is?” Kais glanced around the catacombs for any approaching enemy. None seemed forthcoming.
Constantine retched, then shifted.
His jaw distended obscenely, chin lurching forwards, mouth ratcheting open with a creak. His eyes sunk back into his head, pain-twisted orbs rolling and taking on an angry red lustre. Blood oozed copiously from his mouth, writhing upwards in mutiny against gravity, spreading out thin fingertips of fluid to consume the man’s entire head. His skull splintered with a dry crack.
His uniform ripped, moist fabric hanging briefly in the murky air. What bubbled and pulsed up from beneath the gaudy robes was far from human.
Kais backed away. The blood cocoon surrounding the man’s head cracked like an egg, reptile flesh revealed beneath, glowing with scaled luminescence. Black and blue tiger stripes undulated across red cheeks; themselves stretched into a beaklike maw, stippled with tiny teeth that bulged and hinged like insect legs.
The creature snapped its jaws together and dragged a long tongue into its eye to clean off the powdery residue of dried blood, gangly legs lifting it upright. It arched its back and leathery wings unfurled magnificently — a halo of tattered flesh and bone.
Kais didn’t need any further encouragement. He opened fire with a snarl.
The shell knocked the obscenity onto its back in a fountain of bone and gore, dust and smoke hanging around it as its flesh charred. It yowled in pain and lay still, taloned claws clutching rigidly at nothing. For a second Kais thought he’d destroyed it and the killing rage in his mind chuckled and whispered its congratulatory poison.
You can kill anything.
You are a god.
The corpse jerked upright, tilted its head, and screamed.
Kais staggered backwards, astonished, rocked by the force of the howl, clutching impotently at his ears and unable to block the audio-pickup from his helmet. The world wobbled on its axis, blurring in his mind, making his teeth rattle and his skull ache. Before he knew what was happening he was on his back, vaulted catacomb ceiling looming over. He shook his head to clear the haze and tried to move his arms, tried to rise up, tried to lift his gun but—
But the beast was on him, pinning him like a kroot hound, muscle chords straining beneath the dry sandpaper rasp of its skin. The railgun had blasted a hole straight through its midriff, a needle-eye that dangled shredded viscera upon Kais’s chest and emptied awful fluids across his armour. An aborted spinal chord dangled limply inside the wound, the beast’s legs uselessly dragging behind it.
His gun was gone, somewhere. Knocked aside in the rush.
A memory swelled abstractly from his mind. He remembered the first time he’d been given a lesson in hand-to-hand fighting, during the first tau’cyr of his training. The instructor had stared his young charges up and down and said, with no sense of irony at alclass="underline"
“The first rule of unarmed combat is: don’t be unarmed.”
Too late for that. He wrestled to move but the creature’s grip was too strong, bony dagger claws scraping into his arms, slicing at his flesh and leaving his armour shredded.