Gravity, shifting and flexing like an invisible serpent through earth and air, shattered a distant row of hills with a noise like thunder. The clouds boiled past overhead, on fast-play. Flames of red, green and yellow danced around the ridges of broken rock and upturned, split earth.
‘Once we reach the lake, then what?’ asked Bastion Ledge.
‘From the lake, the nest,’ replied Daylight.
‘Then?’ Bastion Ledge asked.
‘Then we look for survivors,’ replied Daylight. ‘For signs.’
‘And if we find none?’
‘We look elsewhere.’
‘And if more of those things appear?’ Bastion Ledge asked.
‘Then we kill more of those things,’ said Daylight.
They skirted a series of murky pools and crooked ponds that were offshoots of the lake, their trudging figures reflected in the water, the running sky behind them. The wind blew. The noise bursts continued to break the air, howling barks that came from everywhere and nowhere.
The gravity blister popped without any warning except a slight shrug of physical matter. A random anomaly, it opened on the edge of one of the pools about fifty metres from their procession. The physicality of the world, the rocks, the air and the pool altered instantaneously. It went off like a bomb, hurling tonnes of stone and soil into the air sideways, like a blizzard. The ground broke open and water turned to steam. The main volume of the pool surged in the opposite direction in a spontaneous tidal wave three metres tall, and broke across the next ridge with enough force to shatter rock.
Flying rocks and debris, along with mud and water, ripped along the line of Daylight’s party. The Guardsmen were knocked off their feet. One died, his head crushed by a boulder. Only the frail, mind-addled tech-adept, bewildered and confused, remained upright.
Rocks and stones rained off the Imperial Fists, pelting their armour. In that instant, Daylight once again felt the uneasy fear. The Imperial Fists excelled at holding ground, but how did a warrior do that when the ground itself couldn’t be trusted?
The thought barely had time to form before another blister ripped the world open. It was smaller than the first, a gravitic aftershock, but it was right under them. Two of the Asmodai simply atomised, turning into clouds of blood and whizzing armour shreds, their forms lost in the explosive upchuck of rock and bludgeoning concussion.
Bastion Ledge died too.
As the smoke and steam cleared, and the last of the rock debris rained down and skittered around them, as the ground stopped shaking, Daylight saw his wall-brother. Half of Bastion Ledge, most of the left-hand side of his body, was missing. It was folded and compressed in on itself, flesh, bone and armour alike. He looked as though he had been snatched up by a giant and squeezed until he was crushed like a tin cup. Black blood drenched his buckled, ruined wargear.
Zarathustra knelt beside him to check for vitals, but they all knew it was in vain. Bastion was gone, killed by the world, killed by the ground, killed by the forces of nature they ought to have been able to trust.
For a second, Daylight felt hopelessness, but there was no time to consider such luxuries as emotions.
A third gravity blister blew out on the far side of the valley, and the boom rolled around the outcrops. It hardly mattered. There was a more immediate threat.
Major Nyman was shouting. He’d ripped his helmet off so he could be heard and he was yelling, gasping in the thin air.
Daylight turned.
Chromes were coming out of the stretch of lake behind them, scrambling towards the shore. They were all large, dark, mature and powerful. Flying rocks hurled by the third gravity detonation hammered across the lake, killing several of them and sending up spouts of water, as though heavy-calibre gunfire were peppering the surface. The Chromes churned on regardless, bounding up the stony shore to attack the Imperial party.
Nyman and his men began to fire, though some of the Asmodai were still dazed from the triple hammerblow of the gravity blisters. Zarathustra sprang up and charged down the slope into the water, impaling first one and then a second dark Chrome with his war-spear. He felled a third with a savage back-thrust of the spear’s haft, and then threw himself full-length to tackle a Chrome in the shallows that was bearing down on Major Nyman. Nyman’s repeated shots were not slowing it down. Zarathustra knocked the creature sideways, and then tangled into a wrestling brawl with it, kicking up sprays of froth and water.
Tranquility used his boltgun as he moved down the shore, picking off two more of the Chromes that had come too close to the Asmodai line. His mass-reactive shells stopped them dead in a way that the poor Guardsmen’s las-rounds could not. It took sustained, saturating fire to stop a warrior-form with a lasrifle. Having bought enough time with his shots to get at the Chromes close-quarters, Tranquility holstered his bolter and unslung the power hammer from his backplate. He crushed one Chrome’s skull down into its shoulders and then struck another sideways, into the shallows. Its cranium split and ichor sprayed out. A third, attacking the Imperial Fist furiously, was knocked back with the butt of the haft, leaving it open for a downward smash of the head that ruptured it like a well-cooked piece of shellfish.
Ichor stained the frothing surface of the lake at the shallows.
Daylight met the attack with his gladius in his right hand and his combat knife in his left. He stabbed his sword through a sternum plate, and then slashed a mouth and throat open with his knife. As his second kill fell back, Daylight used the combat knife to block the striking claws of a third Chrome warrior-form, shoved the creature’s limbs up and aside, and ripped his sword through its exposed midriff with a sideways slash.
A fourth Chrome closed. Daylight outstepped its charge and hacked his sword edge into its spine as it passed him, dropping it on its face into the pool. A fifth beast ran onto his extended knife. A sixth died from a cross cut, a double slash of both weapons that ran from shoulders to hips.
A particularly large Chrome seized Daylight from behind, sawing into his armour with its claws, gnawing into his backplate with its mouthparts. It hoisted him off his feet, backwards, tilting.
Daylight inverted his grip on both blades, letting them fall out of his hands so he could catch them again reversed, and then stabbed past either side of his hips with the sword and the knife, impaling the torso that was braced against his. The Chrome burst at the wound points and sprayed ichor. It collapsed, pulling Daylight down with it into the water in a thrashing commotion.
Others rushed at him, trying to rip into the Imperial Fists wall-brother before he could regain his footing. Zarathustra and some of the Asmodai saw this and moved to support. The Guardsmen fired at the thrashing Chromes, and Zarathustra charged them, spear raised.
Gunfire raked the surface of the pool, cutting down dozens of the Chromes. It resembled the fury of spume and spouts that had been kicked up by the rock debris, but it was real gunfire.
Rotor cannons.
Tranquility turned.
Zarathustra reached Daylight and hauled him upright, stabbing at the Chromes that tried to mob and menace them.
Figures moved down the stony shore towards them, a squad of men. Two in the lead carried rotor cannons, firing bursts into the pool as they approached to drive back the xenoforms.
They were Imperial Fists.
Daylight crunched up the shoreline out of the water to meet them, Zarathustra at his heels.
The squad commander faced them, and removed his helm.
‘Severance, captain, Lotus Gate Wall,’ he said. ‘Where did you come from?’
Twenty-Four
‘We’ve been on the surface six weeks,’ said Severance. ‘At least, I presume it’s about that long. Gravity distortion is so prolific planetside, I feel we can’t trust any other laws. Several suit chronometers are showing significant time variances. This world is not aligned with the natural flow of the cosmos.’