Sister Mixu took them off as quickly as she dared, through the darkness and danger of Hive Quintus.
FAR ABOVE THE polluted wastes, a ship from the dockyards of Stratix approached the thinly-stretched quarantine line around Eumenix. Orbital batteries fell silent at its approach, crews suddenly riddled with the most virulent plagues. Officio Medicae craft fled from it like shoals of fish before a shark as their survival instincts set alarms ringing. Plague and madness had come, concentrated into the force of one being.
For the plague-damned of Hive Quintus, their saviour was almost upon them.
FIVE
A SHADOW, LIGHT years across, was cast like a dark halo around the warzone. The Imperium had quarantined the tortured worlds under Teturact's rebellion, establishing a firebreak of locked-down star systems. Whole worlds were under house arrest, their fleets grounded, their populations prevented from leaving without permission from the war-zone's military command and the Officio Medicae. Cathedrals of the Imperial Faith offered up prayers for deliverance, begging the Emperor in his wisdom to let victory come to the Imperial war effort before the plague visited their worlds. Dark rumours circulated about Teturact, and the horror that would unfold if he ever broke through the Imperial fleets that were massing around his rebellious empire.
Governors reassured their people that the Navy and the Guard would soon blaze into the warzone and puncture the heart of Teturact's pestilent realm. They were also in the throes of preparing hermetically-sealed bunkers in case the plagues reached them.
The Imperium was, in many ways, constantly at war - but around the empire of Teturact, war was a stifling, sinister shroud draped over hundreds of worlds and billions of people. Fear swamped the minds of billions. They said that Eumenix had fallen, so who knew where would be struck next?
Interstellar traffic was quiet and the space lanes heavily monitored. Travel between systems had to be sanctioned by the Imperial authorities, with no exceptions. But there were always those who tried to make themselves exceptions - smugglers running supplies between quarantined worlds that they would sell for a huge mark-up, deserters escaping from the warzone, and the usual criminals and degenerates who fled from the Imperium during routine times. Most were picked up or destroyed, but some as ever got through.
And some were almost completely invisible. It was difficult enough to catch massive cargo ships slipping in and out of the warp in the quarantined systems. It was next to impossible to see them when they were fighter-sized craft - a fraction the size of the smallest Imperial warp-capable ship. But the shoal of craft that slipped through the darkness around the Stratix warzone were not Imperial.
They were alien fighters; their faintly sinister organic lines contained powerful vortex reactors that could push them into and out of the warp. It was dangerous, there was no doubt about it. No one really knew which xenos species had built the fighters, and the handful of captured Navigators who directed the squadron through the warp were, through necessity, not the best. But it was worth it. If they achieved what they set out to do, the risk was worth it.
Sarpedon looked out on the star-scattered darkness from the first fighter's cockpit. He wasn't even sure it was a fighter - when Techmarine Lygris had shown Sarpedon the fleet of bizarre craft on one of the Brokenback's many flight decks, the ships were empty of any ordnance or weapons save those that could be extruded from the ships' hulls. Instead, Lygris had fitted out the ships with grav-couches so each could carry a payload of Marines. It was an enormous risk, transporting almost the entire Chapter on ships that traversed the warp by means the Techmarines couldn't begin to understand. But it was the only way - the Brokenback couldn't have hoped to slip into the warzone.
Inside the fighter the cold, bulbous forms of the bridge were an odd silvery colour with a sheen of sinister purple. The Chapter serfs at the controls -some of the few survivors of the Chapter's break with the Imperium and the battle on the Brokenback - worked the fighter's instruments by moving their hands through pools of molten metal like strangely-hued quicksilver. The basic readouts had been translated from amorphous alien runes, but most of the information that ran across the irregularly shaped readouts was indecipherable. The ship was almost crushingly non-human - corridors twisted and the mysterious vortex generators were strange organic shapes like seed pods or the shells of sea creatures. The air was only breathable because of the filters and purifiers that pumped oxygen through vents that had once held gases toxic to humans. The inhabitants had evidently been taller but thinner than humans, as the ceilings were high and everything was narrow.
'What are our coordinates?' Sarpedon asked the Chapter serfs.
The serf at the navigation controls didn't look round as he replied. 'We're on top of the meeting point, Lord Sarpedon.'
'Give me the fleet vox.' Another serf dipped a hand into a shimmering pool of metal and Sarpedon was connected to the other nine fighter craft. 'All craft, be on the lookout for Dreo. We cannot wait here long.'
Somewhere in that band of stars across the sky was the corrupt heart of Teturact's empire. Somewhere far more distant was Terra, the equally corrupt heart of the Imperium. The galaxy out there was utterly immense, and beyond it was the warp, a whole dimension of horror that bled into real space every time mankind jumped between the stars. Against it all the Soul Drinkers stood, utterly alone, a little less than seven hundred warriors who were, even after all their alterations and training, still ultimately men. It was almost liberating for Sarpedon to look on the sheer vastness of the fight, and to know that he had made a conscious decision to go on fighting.
'Signals, commander.’ came a voice over the vox. It was Techmarine Lygris, who had managed to activate some of the strange sensor devices that jutted from the prow of his fighter. 'It's weak. They must be low on fuel.'
'Do you have a visual?'
A few moments passed, and then a film of liquid metal bled across the air and an image swam onto it. A shuttle limped painfully through space, one of its engines flaring as it died. Its hull was pitted with corrosion and streaked with burns from laser fire. It was a private craft designed for short hops between planets - not agonising hauls between systems. It must have taken months to get this far from Eumenix. There was no guarantee that any normal human could survive such conditions.
'Lygris, direct us in. I'll dock with them.'
'Understood. You realise any one of them could be infected.'
'If they're infected then the prisoner will be dead, and we might as well be. Besides, I need to debrief them myself Lygris directed the serfs on Sarpedon's fighter to fly towards the battered shutde. A section of the fighter's hull bulged outwards and burst like an ulcer; globules of liquid metal flowing into one another until they formed a smooth tunnel that latched onto the side of the shuttle like a hungry leech.
The metal formed a sharp, biting edge and began to bore through the hull of the shuttle.
A pressurised pocket formed in the hull of the fighter as the metallic bridge became airtight, and the wall formed an airlock. Sarpedon was there as soon as it had fully formed. 'Squad Hastis, Squad Karvik, meet me at the airlock. You too, Pallas.'