The Beast Arises

Zerberyn moved his light on: blank faces luminesced under the beam, then returned to darkness and indignity as it passed. There must have been close to a hundred hemmed into the stall. There was no room for them to move, even to sit. The floor was perforated metal, for drainage, but the sheer volume of waste had clogged the pores and solid effluent heaped up in lumpen mounds over toes that were turning black with poor circulation and disease. The stink was infernal. Despite everything that he was, Zerberyn felt himself back away. Slavery and squalor he had encountered on many worlds. This was something other. Something worse.

‘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.