Thousands of years of priceless information was burning together with the menials and adepts trapped inside. Thaddeus saw one or two storm troopers and tech-guard who were suffering the same fate as him, struggling helplessly as they were thrown further and further into space. Ejected crystal debris glittered like shooting stars, streams of bright silver fragments spinning against the blackness. Bodies and body parts span amongst the debris, broken and helpless.
Thaddeus's mind raced through the situation. He tried to think objectively, like a good inquisitor should when first presented with a problem. His HE suit could survive hard vacuum but the air filters would fail soon without an atmosphere from which to draw oxygen and nitrogen. He had no means of propulsion and nowhere to go even if he could move.
The data-slate was in his pocket. That, at least, was something. With luck, he had completed his objective. Now he just had to survive.
There was nothing around him now but space. Pharos was a brightly-lit city-temple behind him, the remnants of the cylinder a darkening mass of twisted metal. The searing unblinking eye of the dying red star burned to one side, and to the other was just cold vacuum. Thaddeus had seen space only through viewscreen or portholes, or as the night sky from the safety of a planet's surface. He had never been surrounded by it. For the first time, he realised just how delicate the Imperium truly was - an infinitely thin layer of tenacious life clinging to the dead rock that made up a minuscule fraction of the galaxy. No wonder mankind had to fight. No wonder it saw extinction around every corner.
The Soul Drinkers were out there somewhere, between those stars. Thaddeus might even now have the information he needed to find them, but he was cruelly aware of just how close his death was. An inquisitor was not afraid of death, but he was afraid - and proud to be afraid - of dying with his service to the Emperor left incomplete. As Thaddeus drifted, that fear grew and grew, until it surrounded him as completely as the uncaring galaxy itself.
EIGHT
SEPTIAM TORUS WAS a garden world. Its two main continents were covered in temperate grasslands and deep, lush forests. The faint rings around the planet lit up the sky in shimmering rainbows, with sunsets of a million colours. Crystal-clear rivers wound their way through breathtaking countryside and plunged down spectacular waterfalls before joining a great shining ocean teeming with coral reefs. The planet's ecosystem had never evolved far beyond plant life, and so there were no animals to act as predators or scavengers save for the species introduced to pollinate the planet's small crop of soulfire flowers - flocks of birds with green and blue plumage that streaked across the skies like comets.
Soulfire stamens were the source of some of the most potent combat drugs the Imperium issued to its penal legions and more expendable Guard regiments, and so Septiam Torus was accorded special status. Its tithes were paid in the soulfire crop alone and the ruling family - descended from the first rogue trader to find the planet and annexe it in the name of the Emperor - was granted perpetual rights over the world.
Septiam Torus remained unsettled and unspoilt apart from its sole city, a sprawl of marble, like a vast colonnaded palace, with a barracks and brig for its private law enforcement regiment and endless tile-roofed streets housing the crop workers.
One day a ship's lifeboat was glimpsed in the upper atmosphere, its distress beacon bleating that it contained a sole occupant severely injured. The pod thudded home into the middle of a field, kicking up a plume of purple-black petals. The Septiam Torus Enforcement Division sent a paramedic team to recover the occupant and bring him for treatment to the city. They found a body badly charred but alive, and brought it back to the infirmary in the shadow of the senate house.
For three weeks the infirmary staff tried to coax life from the victim. Eventually they caused their patient - they couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman - to flicker an eyelid in recognition.
At that moment one of Septiam's senators was visiting the facility. It was the sort of duty expected of all senators, representing as they did a loose family group expected to outdo one another in service to their world. The senator disliked the infirmary but it was crucial to keeping the crop workers secure and happy on Septiam Torus, and she blandly absorbed the facts and figures the medical staff handed out as she followed them around the wards.
She rounded a corner and saw the charred form of the crash victim, suspended in a wire harness and wrapped in bandages that were yellow and stained even though they had been changed barely an hour earlier. Monitoring equipment blinked and chirped. The perfumed curtains that hung around the patient couldn't mask the faint odour of cooked meat.
'Ah, our visitor.' The senator smiled - ostensibly to show a friendly face to the unfortunate, but really because the seeping raw body was the first interesting thing she had seen all day. 'Our stranger. How long before you can tell us who you are? We are much concerned to find out about you and your ship.’
The patient has only just awoken, my lady,' said one of the orderlies. 'We hope for a return to consciousness very soon.’
The patient stirred and stared out at the senator with pained, rolling eyes.
Then, as the senator watched, the patient dissolved, bandages unravelling as skin sloughed off, looping entrails slithering and hissing to the polished floor, organs bubbling away into a foul brackish pool. The spine came apart and the skull plopped onto the floor, brains liquefying, eyes running down the cheeks, teeth bleached cubes in the stinking mess.
The senator was hurried out of the infirmary and the orderlies hosed the gory mess into the drains. But the senator had breathed in a good lungful of noisome gases from the dissolving patient, and in this way contracted a disease which she then transferred to the senate house at the next meeting.
Within two weeks, the senate and half the population was wiped out. The tens of thousands of dead were heaped into pits and the beautiful sky of Sep-tiam Torus turned dirty grey with fatty smoke from the pyres. The survivors tried to set up a sterile zone within the walls of Septiam City but charred skeletal fingers tore down the barriers and the dead walked again, the perfection of the garden world turned into a bloodstained nightmare of shambling corpses.
The few living dead that could speak spoke the name of Teturact.
GUARDSMAN SENSHINI COULD swear he heard the crunch of bone beneath the tracks of the Leman Russ Executioner as the tank lurched over a wooded ridge, churning up the cratered mud that stretched across the land where once fragrant fields of soulfire flowers and lush woodlands had thrived. Beyond the main cannon's targeting array Senshini could just pick out the jumble of shapes on the horizon, past the broken lumpy landscape of chewed-up forests and churned mud. Septiam City was dug in against the landscape, pockmarked slabs of marble and log-jams of toppled columns forming huge barricades and rows of tank traps ringing the city's outskirts.
Senshini knew enough about the short history of the conflict on Septiam Torus to guess this was the big push. The first attack on the planet had taken place just a few weeks after Septiam Torus had been confirmed as having been tainted by Teturact. A regiment of Elysians had dropped onto the world from Valkyries by grav-chute. They had died almost to the man, finding themselves surrounded by masses of walking corpses where they had expected a handful of rebel private troopers. The Elysian Drop Troop regiments were considered elite formations but no amount of training would make a lasgun shot kill something that was already dead, especially when some of those living dead were former comrades.