Sergeant Hastis was half-swallowed by the mass, too, bones snapping as the mass extruded limbs to drag him face-first into it. The Marines of his squad already swallowed were still fighting back, the flesh splitting and ripping as bolters and combat knives slashed at it from inside.
Bolt shells pumped into the mass as Squad Luko and the remaining members of Squad Hastis fell back into the dining area. Sarpedon held his force staff tight and felt the force of his will flooding into its psychoactive nalwood, the wood hot and thrumming in his hands as it focused the psychic power flowing around his body.
The mass already filled half the room and there seemed no end to it. Bolt shells seemed to have no effect.
'Mine again.’ said Sergeant Luko. He spread his lightning claws and dived into the mass, the claws slashing deep scorched furrows in the flesh. Sarpe-don reared up on his hind legs and leapt across the room, following Luko into the mess of melded corpses. He clambered up the front of the roiling mass and tore deep gouges with his front legs, before plunging his force staff and letting all his psychic force rip through it and into the flesh. Skin and muscle boiled away leaving a huge scorched pit beneath Sarpedon, burned deep through layers of melded bodies, sending a shower of ash bursting from the wound.
Luko ripped the slabs of flesh apart and hauled Sergeant Hastis out of the gory mass - but the front of Hastis's head had been dissolved and a bloody skull's face stared blindly out, long service studs still embedded in the bone of the forehead. Luko threw Hastis's remains behind him and slashed away the tendrils of muscle trying to entwine his legs.
The mass surged forward again and filled the room. Bolter fire poured into it and didn't seem to slow it down - tainted blood was ankle-deep in the room and chunks of shredded flesh were spattered across the walls and ceiling.
Sarpedon could feel the disease inside it, like a ball of white noise somewhere deep in the heart of the corpses. It was dense and evil, something he saw with the psychic eye inside him and felt through the skin of his mutated legs where they touched the unholy flesh. Here the supernatural disease that infected Septiam City had taken the prisoners in the cells and, in that confined space, it had worked its corruption on them until they had gathered around the carrier into this ball of melded corpses.
The carrier - the first to be infected down here, now the host for the disease - lay in the very centre of the mass. Sarpedon felt this with his mind's eye, the seething knot of disease sending out a mindless psychic scream as it powered the exertions of two hundred bodies melted into one.
Sarpedon raised his force staff and cut downwards, opening a three-metre slash in the skin. With his front legs he pulled the wound wide open, drew his bolter with his free hand, and with his hind legs powered himself into the wound. Sarpedon heard Luko yell something as he dived in. But the room would soon fill with the mass and only Sarpedon stood a chance of stopping it in time.
He couldn't see, but he could feel. Corruption flowed through the veins around him. Walls of flesh pressed against him and he held his breath to keep from inhaling the foulness of the beast's innards. He tore his way through towards the carrier, pulling himself forward with his front legs and free hand. The wound closed behind him, so he was encased in a cocoon of muscle. Bones snapped as limbs turned inward and reformed to grasp at him. The heat was intense and the darkness complete.
But he could feel the carrier, the still-human shape hunched and foetal in front of him. He gouged and clawed his way closer to it until its seething corruption was bright against his mind. With two legs he speared the body and dragged it closer to him. With one hand he grabbed it by the back of the neck, and with the other he put the bolter against the forehead and fired.
The body spasmed and the flesh surrounding it shuddered in unison as the monstrous intelligence inside was shattered. The mass released its grip on Sarpedon and he pushed himself backwards. The flesh liquefied behind him until he burst back out through the skin again, sliding to the floor on a wave of gore.
He still had the body of the carrier in one hand. It was mostly intact, save for the gaping bolter wound in its forehead and the severed arteries extruded through its skin where it had been connected to the other bodies. The prisoner's electoo was still on the back of the neck, with the prisoner's name, number, and bar code.
Somehow, it didn't come as a surprise that the carrier had been Karlu Grien.
'Take the gene-seed of the fallen.’ said Sarpedon, dropping the deformed body to the ground.
One of Squad Hastis - Brother Dvoran, the youngest - removed his helmet and drew his combat knife. He kneeled down by the ruined body of Hastis and began to cut out the gene-seed organs, the twin glands in the throat and chest that controlled all a Space Marine's other augmentations.
Sergeant Hastis had been at the forefront of the assault of Ve'Meth's fortress, one of the Marines who had joined Sarpedon after the catastrophe of the Lakonia mission and Sarpedon's defeat of Chapter Master Gorgoleon. He had been as loyal as any Marine, one of the solid veterans Sarpedon relied on as much as they relied on him. Now he was dead, and so went another man who could not be replaced. They would have to cut off Hastis's head when the gene-seed was taken, to stop him from turning into a walking corpse like those that infested Septiam City.
Of course, Hastis's gene-seed couldn't then be implanted into a novice, as the Chapter traditions required. Not now. But it was still a powerful symbol, and it was symbols that held the Chapter together - so Dvoran cut the sacred organ from the sergeant's throat for transport back to the Chapter.
'It was always a long shot, commander,' said Luko, looking down at the body of Karlu Grien, the only man who could have told them the information they needed.
'Secure this area,' said Sarpedon, heading for the doors beyond the pulpit.
He tore the doors off their hinges and strode into the corridor beyond. This was where the prisoners had gathered as the madness first took them - deep gouges marked the walls where the prisoners had tried to claw their way out. Teeth and bone shards were embedded in the plasticrete and everything was stained brown-black. Bars on the cells were bent out of shape. Sarpedon could feel the madness imprinted on the walls. He could still hear the screams.
Cell 7-F was a pit of stained darkness, blood and filth crusted up the walls, the bars so corroded that they shattered as Sarpedon tore them aside. The pallet Karlu Grien had used as a bed was a slab of decay and Sarpedon's talons sunk into the caked filth on the floor as he entered the cell.
It was barely two metres square and into that space was packed so much malice and despair that Sarpedon could taste it, acrid and metallic in his mouth. Karlu Grien had probably been insane before he ever came here - Stratix Luminae had seen to that. When the plague came it sought out the most receptive carrier and found the mind of a mad heretic.
Sarpedon reached up and scraped away the hardened gore. Beneath were deep scratches in the walls, like in-the corridors outside - but more ordered, forming patterns against the plasticrete. Sarpedon scraped the wall clean, revealing a pattern of straight lines and arcs that covered the whole back wall.