‘There are more ahead,’ called Nalis.
‘Here also,’ said Hardran, voice echoing from the stalls away to the right.
‘There must be thousands,’ breathed Tosque, clumping forwards from behind, tracking the creaking stillness of the second level with his combi-plasma.
‘Tens of thousands,’ growled Columba.
Zerberyn spoke into his gorget pickup. ‘Reoch. I need you in here. Bring Brother Antille.’
An affirmative burred through his vox-channel. He killed the squad frequency and looked around again, easing his finger around the trigger of his pistol. Reticules wobbled across his visor, searching for something to target.
‘Detecting movement,’ said Columba, his vox dialled down to a low bass. He pointed up to the second floor.
‘More stalls, perhaps,’ said Zerberyn.
Columba shrugged.
‘Hardran, search the upper level. Tosque, secure the stairs and cover him. Nalis, run a circuit of the perimeter.’
The veteran-brothers nodded; in battleplate and deep shadow it was an ominous, inhuman gesture. Apothecary Reoch entered just as Nalis left. The glow of his binoptics intensified as they adapted to the gloom. Antille ducked through the splintered portico after him, vox antennae twanging against the lintel beam.
Mendel Reoch meanwhile continued to the stalls.
There was a piston shock, flesh punctured, a breathless gasp.
The Apothecary’s narthecium punched a sampler into the nearest captive’s jugular. The man moaned piteously, legs wobbling, but the press of filthy bodies held him steady.
Zerberyn hovered his helm light over the man’s gasping mouth, his curiosity piqued by something he had seen there. As well as having no hair, the man also had no teeth and, now he checked, no fingernails: nothing with which he could conceivably do harm to himself or another. A rare and unsettling cocktail of pity and disgust settled in his gut like one of Reoch’s analgesic slimes. His roving beam paused on the face of a woman who opened her mouth placidly as though conditioned to associate light with water or food. There was something branded onto her cheek. Zerberyn moved closer. She remained as she was, mouth wide and waiting, even as Zerberyn enclosed her head in his gauntlet and turned it gently to the side.
The brand was that of a snake.
The man under Mendel Reoch’s ministration gave one last grunt as the Apothecary’s narthecium retracted.
‘There are dangerously high levels of synthetic growth enhancers, testosterone, and other steroids in his blood. I would need to return him to Dantalion’s apothecarion for more thorough investigations.’
‘Take him and one other and begin what tests you are able. I think we have what we came for. Raise the gunship,’ Zerberyn added to Antille. ‘We need evacuation for these two test subjects.’
‘That deviates from the mission schematic, brother-captain.’
‘The fault is ours,’ said Zerberyn. ‘We failed to anticipate the possibility of survivors. As you were ordered, brother.’
‘Brother-captain!’
Straddling the top step and the next floor, Tosque swung his combi-plasma and helmet beam down onto whatever the veteran-brother had spotted amongst the stalls.
Zerberyn, Columba and Reoch instantly had pistols raised.
A human, unfettered and clothed, withered under the spotlight. Like his domesticated brethren, he was shorn and branded and denuded of teeth. Unlike them he had two off-white molars stapled into his brow. They reminded Zerberyn of rank pins, or the long-service studs that the veterans of other Chapters employed. The man licked his lips nervously, hugging a rusty pail to his chest as though to hide behind it. It slopped with a reddish-brown gelatin that Zerberyn initially hoped was waste but which, judging from the hanging mouths in the stalls to either side, he had the appalling suspicion was food.
The man bared his gums, squinting between Tosque and the others.
Then he screamed, shattering the night quiet like an intruder alarm.
It lasted half a second before mass-reactive rounds from four different weapons explosively ripped his body to pieces, vaporous parts of him filming the surrounding stalls.
The human cattle, mouths agape, began slowly to lick their lips.
Zerberyn held his breath as the echoes died. Chains and hoses clinked and swayed. Lips slurped. Tosque covered his angles warily. Columba calmly moved to cover another angle of approach through the maze of stalls. Zerberyn checked his visor display. Ident-runes shuffled across the display: there was Tarsus to his left, Galen and his team spreading out through the cattle sheds, Hardran in the plane above.
Nothing. He allowed his battle readiness to ease.
An enquiring grunt sounded from deeper in the complex. It was porcine, feral. Tension returned immediately to Zerberyn’s grip. The battle for Eidolica was fresh in his memory, the savage grunt-speak of the alien a repugnance he would remember until death relieved him of his duty.
‘Contacts!’ he roared, stepping away from the stall and aiming his bolt pistol into the swaying, clinking, snarling dark.
His beam hit something green. Metal winked from an axe-blade, tooth caps, the lead-hued base of tribal body art. He spared a passing split-second of a thought to the human cattle all around, packed in so close he could feel their body heat. He dismissed the minor variable. There was no longer any hope for them.
He fired.
The bolt-round exploded in the ork’s face, blasting the brute back and down against a partition wall. Reoch and Columba pushed forwards with him in lockstep, a perfect firing line, pistols blazing. From above, Tosque opened up with a strobing burst of fire, stitching a line of eviscerated ork green and human pink across a row of stalls. Without warning, the veteran-brother checked his fire, turned, and opened up on the second floor. Answering fire from stubbers and shooters bracketed the Space Marine’s armour and chewed into the steel wall behind him. He held firm, breaking up the incoming fire with controlled, even bursts of bolter fire.
A triumphant cry filled the unit vox, then cut off. Hardran’s rune blinked from gold to black in Zerberyn’s visor. Red threat icons, generated by his suit’s auspex, boiled around the edges of his display.
A firecrack bang hit the side of his helm with something hot and wet.
He staggered back until his genetic gifts could eliminate the aural shock and reassert his sense of balance. Reoch was down, a bullet in his temple. Zerberyn stepped over the downed Apothecary, solid slugs spanking off his battleplate.
Heavy stubber fire was thundering down on him from the second level. By weight of numbers and brute resilience, a mob of orks had taken the overhang that looked over the factory floor and forced Tosque onto the stairs. The veteran was firing point-blank now, descending backwards, ceding the stair step by step.
The orks were huge, bare-chested, arrogant in their simplicity. In a moment of clarity, Zerberyn saw them for what they were. They were the greenskins’ exemplars.
With a furious cry, Columba fired up his chainsword. The sergeant stepped up onto the air-cycler set against the stair-side wall and jumped across the walkspace, reaching the opposite side stall where he kicked, a servo-assisted release of superhuman force that drove his power-armoured bulk crashing through the metal balustrades and into the orks piling down the stairs. Blood sprayed across the wall, and for a moment it was impossible to distinguish the howls of the orks from that of Columba’s chainsword.
Reoch’s mouth-grille chewed out gravel sounds as he shook his head and rose with a slur of motorised joints, freeing a frag grenade from the clutch at his hip. He pulled the pin and lobbed the charge overarm onto the second level.