The Beast Arises

Right, looming rockcrete-walled slurry pits, surrounded by dirty metal outbuildings. A petrochem generator. A silage tank, round-walled and massive. One of the sheds was a machine store. It was open, an upswinging outer door half-covering a weather-beaten wheeled truck. The vehicle was a rusted contraption of belts, pulleys, and funnels, with an articulated pallet lifter at the front end painted to look like an orkish mouth. It had a canvas top and a blood-splattered rear fender. Its tyres were flat. Brothers Galen and Borhune took firing positions, Karva moving up to cover the units with his heavy flamer. Behind, nothing, according to the Thunderhawk’s deep augur scans — just over-exploited pastureland and dust.

Ahead, the objective.

His enhanced low-light vision described the structure in sharp detail. It was a massive, industrialised agricultural unit, with dust-tanned steel walls and barred windows. A large, rectangular glyph of a twisting serpent had been graffitied over the upper storey windows. It was an ork structure, but it was only as Zerberyn closed and metrics gathered in his helm display that he realised that every feature was about twenty-five per cent too large for human standard. The dirt drive leading up to the main door was churned with tyre tracks and strewn with bone meal, dung and what looked like scraps of clothing.

He loped forwards at an easy run. Brothers Hardran and Nalis followed up behind, flanking and covering the upper storeys and secondary entrances with their bolters. Tosque and Columba kept pace, the former maintaining his aim on the door with a bulky combi-plasma.

The unit frequency crackled in Zerberyn’s ear.

‘Galen. No contacts.’

‘Tarsus. Same here, brother-captain.’

‘Reoch,’ voxed the Apothecary, voice double-distorted and animal. ‘I am reading high soil concentrations of antibiotics and human growth hormones. I cannot say why, but I see no danger.’

‘Vigilance, brothers,’ Zerberyn replied, unslinging his thunder hammer.

His predecessor had favoured the purist elegance of the power sword, but long before the moment he had been granted his pick of the Chapter armoury Zerberyn had known what he would select. The weapon was dormant in his grip, quiet, and would remain so until the moment of impact. And when that moment came, whatever it was on the end of it, Zerberyn meant for it to die. Such was the thunder hammer’s pragmatic beauty.

Up close, the main door looked solid. Heavy plastek, proofed with an oily black sealant coating, hinged outwards and reinforced with armaplas crossbars. For an unmodified trooper, forcing access would have proven a complicated and time-consuming matter.

But not for him.

He dropped his pauldron plate and crashed his leading shoulder through without breaking stride. Shrugging off splinters, he straightened and scanned the room.

It was dark, cut off from the light of the stars and the ships massed in orbit, too dark even for the light-scavenging cells of his occulobe. His helm light beamed across riveted walls, ventilation grilles, moving onto a staircase against the left-side wall. The beam tracked it up to a mezzanine level, shadows of the square-sided balusters stretching out towards the rear wall and then angling sharply back across it as the beam moved on.

Hardran, Nalis and Borhune spread out, their own helmet beams dispersing through the cavernous space.

Zerberyn could hear murmuring, weeping, the strained sound of many, many bodies breathing. He sniffed. Even through his battleplate’s rebreather apparatus he was getting the smell of something rancid.

His helm display busied his vision with floating markers. The position, facing, and condition of his squad showed as glowing gold numerals. Box reticules closed over objects of interest — an atmosphere conditioner, a swaying chain connected to some kind of overhead wash unit — furnishing them with a full tactical overlay of range, angles and threat recognition. Reticules floated against the dark, open, uncertain, as his helm light swept over a chain link enclosure.

Eyes glittered dully in the beam.

‘What is it, brother?’

Tarsus. Zerberyn barely registered the vox-scratch in his ear. He grunted in disgust.

‘Animals.’

Fourteen

Prax

The man looked up into the glare of Zerberyn’s helmet beam with distant eyes. His pupils constricted to pinpricks and he recoiled from the light with a grunt, but did not otherwise appear to notice the giant in front of him. He was bruised, shorn, naked, but unusually fat. This was not the maltreatment Zerberyn would have expected from an alien conquerer. There was no brutality here. Injuries aside, which looked to be postural from remaining in one position for too long, rather than inflicted, the man looked as well-fed as any planetary governor.