Defenders of Mankind - David Annandale & Guy Haley Read online

  The worm moaned. The Dragons crucified it with bolter fire, pushing it back against the crumbled wall of the keep. They did not advance, though. They retreated instead, putting space between them and the monster, at last giving Brother Keryon, in the airborne Thunderhawk, the opportunity and the clear line of fire he needed.

  The worm was consumed by the justice of Hellstrike missiles. Its shrieks reached a height of pain pure enough to cut crystal, and then they cut off, and there was only the roar of flame. The worm fell. Toharan and his brothers moved to the edge of Lexica and peered down. Thousands of metres below, the worm had smashed itself open on the hill of bodies, its impact killing the few remaining climbers. Toharan noticed that there were no more of the tainted making their way into the valley.

  In the courtyard, while Apothecary Urlock revived Lettinger, Toharan asked Setheno, ‘What was that?’

  ‘It was the terminal stage of doubtworm,’ she answered, as if that explained everything. ‘Captain,’ she said to Vritras, ‘you have a very short time, if it is not already too late, to extract your Dragon Claws. The souls who formed the worm we just fought only numbered in the dozens. There is one coming into being on the other side of the pass, and it will be composed of billions.’

  Toharan was neck-and-neck with his captain as they raced for the landing Battle Pyre .

  ‘Brother-sergeant,’ Nithigg said as he and Volos crouched behind a boulder, ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘I didn’t say I had an idea.’

  ‘I know. I was just hoping to prompt some inspiration.’

  All trace of the mission had vanished. The worm was easily a thousand metres long, its maw twenty metres wide. And it was growing, the limitless, defeated hordes slowly walking to destruction and absorption by the beast. Ormarr had split up into pairs, darting from cover to cover, flaming the worm first from one side, then the other, shifting its attention from one team to the next, never letting it get a proper fix on its tormentors. But they were only playing for time, and Volos knew it. Every wound they inflicted on the worm was healed a hundred times over by the infinite prey. The Dragon Claws were trying to drain the ocean with spoons. And at the rate the worm was growing, it wouldn’t be long before it became impossible to evade its earth-shattering blows.

  ‘Ormarr,’ Vritras’s voice came over the comm-feed. ‘This is Battle Pyre . We are coming to extract you.’

  ‘Negative, brother-captain,’ Volos responded. ‘The skies are not safe at this time.’ The worm would swat the Thunderhawk like an insect.

  ‘Then make them safe, brother-sergeant. Inquisitor Lettinger has ordered Exterminatus, and we are not leaving this planet without the Dragon Claws. Arrival in five minutes.’

  Volos watched the worm pound the cliff side, bringing down an avalanche as it tried to crush Braxas and Vasuk. The monster and rocks missed. Just. But in the moment of the attack, Volos found his inspiration. ‘Brother,’ he grinned behind his helm, ‘this would not be a fitting death. We will need to seek a better one in another battle.’

  ‘You see how to end this one?’ Nithigg asked.

  Volos pointed at the worm. ‘It blinked.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When it slammed its head into the rock, it closed its eye.’

  Nithigg caught his train of thought. ‘If the eye needs protection, it is vulnerable.’

  ‘If it has an eye, it can be blinded. And where there is an eye, there is usually a brain not far away.’

  ‘How are we going to get at the eye?’ They had come equipped with short-range, area-effect weapons. They had nothing that could reach the eye, and the flamers were just about depleted. There was still some fuel left in the jump packs, but starting from the ground was impractical.

  Volos scanned the slopes behind them. About a hundred metres up and three hundred to the left, a ledge protruded like a tongue from the cliff face. ‘Battle Pyre ,’ he voxed, ‘this is Ormarr. Hold position on your side of the pass. Will advise when we are ready.’

  ‘Make it soon,’ Vritras responded.

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  Volos showed Nithigg the ledge. ‘I sense divine madness,’ Nithigg said. ‘I approve.’

  ‘I would give much for a melta bomb.’

  ‘I’m sure we all would. I do still have one krak, though.’

  Volos took the grenade. ‘I need its head low,’ he told Nithigg. ‘As soon as I’m up there, get it near my position. And do try not to let it wreck the mountain while I’m still on it.’

  ‘You are so very particular, brother-sergeant,’ Nithigg said, and moved out.

  Volos communicated with the rest of the squad, then sprinted for the mountainside. He didn’t use his jump pack to reach the ledge. He wanted to conserve fuel for when he really needed it, and there was plenty that could go wrong with his plan. He doubted the worm would cooperate with what he had in mind. There were enough handholds to make the climb not much worse than a steep scramble, and where there was nothing to grasp, he punched the rock face until there was. It took him less than ten minutes to reach the ledge, and the worm left him alone. Nithigg and the other Dragon Claws circled and harried it. They couldn’t kill it, but they swooped and stung like wasps around a grox. Their attacks had the grace and coordination of a dance. A team would burn the worm’s flank, drawing its attention, then retreat as it moved to attack, and the next team would hit just as the worm was ready to strike. They kept it off balance, and prolonged the stalemate. Even with all its eyes, the worm couldn’t keep up, its movements becoming more ponderous as it grew.

  But it was growing, all the time and always faster. The point would come, and come soon, when it wouldn’t even have to target the Dragons. It would simply move, and mountains would fall.

  Volos reached the ledge. ‘In position,’ he voxed to his squad. Then, ‘Battle Pyre , begin your approach. Remain at altitude for now. Whether we meet triumph or death, you’ll know.’

  Nithigg was at the foot of the cliff directly below the ledge. His flamer was done, but he had a bolt pistol as a secondary weapon and he fired with it. The rounds were barely pinpricks in the flanks of the monster now, but Volos saw those pinpricks count. Nithigg targeted the eye-mouths. High-pitched wails were drowned out by the ocean-deep roar of outrage from the maw. Braxas and Vasuk joined Nithigg, and concentrated their fire in the same spots, making the three of them a target as inviting to the worm as they were irritating. It heaved its bulk towards the mountainside and ducked its head to strike.

  Volos pulled the pin from the krak grenade, counted two, and leaped, riding the flame of his jump pack. His target was the upper portion of the worm’s eye. As he fell, he threw the grenade ahead of him. The worm saw him coming and its membrane snapped down over the eye. The grenade hit. The membrane was thick, tough muscle. It deflected much, and protected the eye from the pile-driving impacts of the worm’s lunges. But it was still flesh, and the krak grenade was designed to pierce armour. The explosion punched through the membrane, leaving the muscle hanging in ragged flaps. Volos was right behind, fists clenched. Propelled by the jump pack, he was a missile of flesh and rage. He snapped out his bone-blades and slammed into the eye.

  There was the treasured moment of agony as the blades emerged, treasured because the pain was an act of faith, and an act of pure war, his body transformed into the doom of the Emperor’s enemies. And on the heels of the agony came the ferocious pleasure of the deeper agony inflicted on the foe. The blades shot with the force of adamantium pistons into the orb. Ichor spewed over Volos. It was a green the shade of rotten limbs and cancerous souls, and it moved with a will of its own. It defied gravity and ran up his arms, coating and clutching at his armour. It bubbled as if it were an acid. But it did nothing. It covered his votive parchments, and then slid off, leaving them untouched. Ebony flames licked over him, and his retinal display told him that these flames were cold as the void of space. They were impotent against him. With his left arm holding fast to the corrupted jelly, he pulled his right ou
t and plunged the blade deeper. Then he held with the right and stabbed with the left. He began to dig himself deeper and deeper into the eye.

  The worm became frenzied. Its scream was as big as the world, and it writhed, an electrocuted serpent, desperate to dislodge him. Gravitic-forces pulled at Volos from every direction as the worm twisted and smashed itself against earth and mountain, but each blow only drove him in further. He punched and slashed, gouging into a morass of tissue that now held him tight despite itself. He shoved his head forward, using his horns to tear yet more of the filth apart. And as he tunnelled into the daemon eye, it spoke to him. There was no light inside the orb, but he could see all the same as visions fell upon him and voices shouted. Everything was the same refrain: there was no God-Emperor. The message was so absurd it was almost comical. There was something almost childish about the insistence, as if a big enough tantrum could make the ridiculous true. Volos began to laugh.

  Deeper, darker, the pressure building, the battering of the worm growing worse. He felt snaps, and knew they were his ribs. He didn’t care. His laughter was gigantic, wide and fierce as a battlefield. His enemy was in lethal torment. He was a Black Dragon, and he was the Emperor’s fire and bone.

  His blades sliced into something thick and knotted. He thought of tendons and nerve clusters, and he sawed with renewed savagery. The worm’s throes stiffened into a vibration that threatened to reduce his armour and skeleton to dust. The visions shrieked infantile heresy at him one more time, and dropped into silence. The movement stopped with a teeth-rattling boom . Volos paused, embraced by suffocating nothing, and then he twisted around and clawed his way back.

  He slid out of the eye as from a corrupted womb. The worm was a prone, motionless immensity. The rest of Squad Ormarr was waiting for him. Beyond them, in a space flattened by the worm’s agony, the Battle Pyre was coming down. ‘Brother,’ Nithigg said, ‘when are you going to limit yourself to battling foes your own size? These one-sided affairs hardly do you honour.’

  Volos laughed again despite the grinding in his ribcage. Then he saw that the worm’s jaw was still working. It was snapping at nothing at all, but as he watched, he realised that the motion wasn’t dying away. It was getting stronger.

  ‘Brother-sergeant,’ Braxas said.

  ‘I see it.’ He had a momentary impulse to plunge back into the monster and finish things.

  ‘Not the jaw.’ Braxas pointed.

  The millions upon millions of damned souls were still moving. Their strings hadn’t been cut when the worm fell. The entire circle of the horizon was in motion as the tainted population of Antagonis advanced to throw itself into the twitching monster.

  ‘No,’ Volos snarled, seeing his victory being taken away from him. His lips pulled back, and his fangs pushed out. For a moment, the world blinked out of existence, and there was nothing in the universe but his black rage. Then Nithigg had his arm, yanking him back to the here and now, and was pulling him towards the Thunderhawk. The worm’s body was moving again before he reached the loading ramp, and as the planet’s blasted humanity poured itself into the being, it grew so quickly it was almost touching the Battle Pyre as the ship took off.

  Toharan clapped his shoulder as he removed his helm, and Volos nodded an absent greeting. He moved to a viewing block. The worm’s expansion was obscene. It seemed to come closer as they pulled away, and it took several seconds before the Battle Pyre ’s acceleration reached the point where the Thunderhawk flew faster than the worm grew. Moment by moment, the creature’s movements became bigger and more violent, and with every sweep of its body, greater and greater numbers of walking fodder were consumed, and the growth exploded.

  Volos found cold solace in one fact. There was no purpose to the thrashing. The worm wasn’t searching for its tormentors. For all that its body was covered by countless thousands of eye-mouths, it was blind. He had hurt it at a level that it could not heal. But even that victory didn’t matter. There was nothing to save here now, and the worm didn’t need to see or even think to be the end of Antagonis. Its mere existence was now destruction itself.

  By the time the Battle Pyre reached Lexica Keep for the last time, the worm was a convulsing, coiling monstrosity that towered over the Temple chain. It rose, and it was as big as a god. It was a god. The setting sun bathed it red, marking it with the blood of the world it had killed. Volos sensed, for the first time in his life, the direct touch of the sublime, and he wanted to spit its obscene taste from his mouth. Then the worm fell, and it levelled mountains.

  It was visible even from orbit, and still it grew.

  CHAPTER 7

  PURGING

  It was Lettinger who ordered the Exterminatus, but only after being commanded to do so by Setheno. He had the formal authority. She had the will and the experience. And it was the Black Dragons who carried out the order. They had the cyclonic torpedoes.

  Dragons, canoness and inquisitor gathered on the command bridge of the Immolation Maw to watch the final curtain come down on Antagonis’s tragedy. The primary occulus showed the planet at zero magnification. The worm writhed across the entire northern landmass. To Volos, even at a size that changed tectonic behaviour, the worm seemed more than ever like a disease. Perhaps it was the way it moved, the smaller tremors looking like the trembling, mindless frenzy of bacteria. The worm was a warp-tainted infection. It needed to be burned out.

  The Exterminatus began with an assist from the Mortisian Dictator-class cruiser, Archon Voltinius . It was the least bit of justice that could be granted to the decimated companies. The bombardment began with mass drivers sent in a cluster near the worm’s head. Into that grouping, the Immolation Maw then fired the cyclonic torpedoes.

  In the past, Volos had heard human enthusiasts describe the work of the torpedoes as beautiful. Those men were idiots, he had always thought, mighty war boosters who had managed to avoid combat and its inconveniences themselves. But now, he could see a kind of beauty in the work of the torpedoes. It was the beauty of inexorable, unforgiving judgement, and of absolute power. These bombs killed by reshaping worlds.

  The artistry of annihilation began with a magnesium-white flare at the site of the strike. The burst was a sudden blossom, a flower from the heart of a sun. The torpedoes blasted through the planetary crust weakened by the Voltinius ’s bombs, and drove the mantle into the fury of the storm. Its kinetic energy turned supernova-worthy, the mantle discovered a heat beyond molten, beyond incandescence. Rock became gas. The surface of the planet twisted and flowed like clouds. Mountain ranges new and old became the arms of a hurricane. Antagonis was new again, returned to its infancy. Volos saw the worm consumed by a crust that veered wildly between solid and liquid, mountain and valley. When the terrible dance of the continental plates ended, so had everything else on Antagonis. There was no life. There was no hope. There was no point.

  Volos turned from the occulus to stare at a hololith of the planet projected above the strategium table. He asked Setheno, ‘Canoness, what were we fighting down there?’

  ‘An outbreak of doubtworm,’ she said. ‘Such events are rare, but when they occur, the result is preordained.’

  ‘And doubtworm is…?’

  ‘A parasitical form of daemonic possession.’

  ‘So the walking dead…’ Toharan began.

  ‘…were not dead,’ Setheno confirmed. ‘They were suffering the early onset of possession. The larval stage of the worm. Did you notice, sergeant, when you first arrived in Lecorb, any signs of distress or self-inflicted injury on the part of the infected?’

  Toharan nodded. ‘They didn’t seem interested in us at all until we were in the company of Lord Danton and the others.’

  ‘In the larval stage, the victims’ higher thought processes are dulled, but they are aware of what is happening to them. They sense their damnation, and are focused on it, not on those as yet untouched by the plague. But the people you rescued were fully possessed, and the others attacked them in a final, desperate a
ct of faith before they succumbed.’

  ‘An entire planet possessed in a week?’ Volos said. ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘It is possible because of human weakness. The parasite both feeds on doubt and spreads it. It is during the larval stage that it is most contagious, as that is when its effects are visible. Remember, this is no airborne virus. It is a thing of the warp, and leaps from mind to mind. For almost any human, to see a fellow fall prey to the worm is to feel vulnerable, and thus to be vulnerable. Then, during the pupal stage, the mind of the victim is active again, but only as the puppet to the daemon. During this phase, the worm will work to arrange its propagation to other worlds.’

  ‘Which is why Danton was so insistent on an evacuation,’ Lettinger put in.

  ‘Quite. The pupal period lasts until the disguise is either no longer needed or is discovered. The final stage,’ Setheno gestured at the hololith display of the shattered planet, ‘is final.’

  ‘Just so we can all follow,’ Lettinger said. ‘Those who appeared to have been untouched by the infection were in fact the most fully corrupted.’

  ‘I think I was clear the first time.’

  Volos didn’t believe for a moment that Lettinger hadn’t understood. He was making a point. There was satisfaction and triumph in his tone, and underneath, a current of grim duty. Volos thought he was pathetic.

  Lettinger didn’t respond to Setheno. He turned to Vritras instead. ‘Captain, I thank you for your rescue and your hospitality, but I will ask now for a transport back to my ship.’ When Vritras nodded, Lettinger added, ‘I’m sure I will be back again soon.’ Vritras stiffened in the command throne. Lettinger swept out of the strategium.

  ‘He will return with a writ from the Ordo Malleus,’ Setheno said.

  ‘And this pleases you?’ Vritras snapped.

  ‘Merely an observation.’