Sendek slid away, knocking aside remnants of what had once been the torso of Brother Iago, and gasped. The shrieking, roaring storm of flies hammered around the room like a cyclone, the beating of their wings sharp in his ears. He groped for something to use as a weapon and found a large bone saw among a tray of discarded chirurgeon's tools. The Death Guard launched himself forward, turning the bright rod of surgical steel in his grip. He would make this intruder pay for killing his kinsmen.
He had only fleeting impressions of the black figure. He saw the strange wiry hairs festooning the surface of the oily armour, he felt himself gagging at the monsuous stench of death that enveloped it. A head with too many eyes and a chattering spider mouth came at him, but beneath the corrupted, fly-blown
flesh there was a shape that seemed familiar to him. A terrible moment of recognition struck Sendek like a bullet.
'Solun?' He hesitated, the arc of the bone saw halted in his shock.
'Not any more.' The mouth moved but the voice came from the flies, rippling their wings and scraping their carapaces to create a droning facsimile of human speech. The claw came out of the dimness and punctured the meat and bone of Sendek's head, splitting the Death Guard's skull. The pink-grey contents gushed out across his armour, and the swarm dived upon the richness to feed.
'Nathaniel!'
The woman's cry tore through Garro's body in a shuddering wave that set his nerves alight. He gasped and the steel mug in his hand fell away from nerveless fingers, a tongue of dark tea spilling across the floor of the exercise chamber. Voyen saw his reaction and reached out to steady him. 'Captain? Are you all right?'
'Did you hear that?' Garro said, tension running through him. He cast about. 'I heard her call out.'
Voyen blinked. 'Sir, there was no sound. You reacted as if you had been struck-'
Garro pushed him away. 'I heard her, as clear as you speak to me now! It was…' The import of it came all at once, the powerful, unfiltered jolt of fear projected into him. 'Keeler! Something is amiss, it was a… a warning…'
The chamber's hatch slid into the wall and Hakur was there, his expression one of deep concern. Immediately, Garro knew something was very wrong. 'Speak!' he snapped.
Hakur tapped the vox module built into the collar of his power armour. 'Lord, I fear Sendek may be in trouble. He started to send me an alert call, but his words were suddenly cut off.'
"Where is he?'
'He went to relieve Iago/ said Voyen, 'at the boy's side.'
Garro tapped him on the chest. Voyen, remain here and be ready for anything.' The battle-captain strode into the corridor. 'Sergeant, get the Luna Wolf and a couple of warriors to meet us at the drop-shaft.'
'Sir, what is going on?' asked Hakur. 'Have these women turned against us?'
Nathaniel closed his eyes and felt the echo of the cry still swimming through his spirit, a dark tide of emotion following with it. 'I don't know, old friend/ he replied, taking up his helmet and locking it in place. 'We'll know soon enough.'
The resonance of gunfire climbed up the shaft to them as Garro and the other Astartes rode the gravity disc down. Qruze shot him a look. 'This damn war's followed us here.'
'Aye,' replied the battle-captain. 'Our warning may have come too late.'
Hakur cursed under his breath. 'No signals from Sendek or Iago, not even a carrier wave. At this distance, there is no way I could not reach them. I could yell and they would hear it!'
The disc slowed as it approached the infirmary level. The stink of new death wafted up to the platform and every one of the Astartes tensed. 'Weapons/ ordered Garro, unsheathing his sword.
He led them off the elevator and through the corridors, crossing through the dank, blood-slick passage.
They entered the infirmary proper and Qruze made a spitting noise. 'Sendek is here/ he said, leaning over a dark shape in the gloom, 'what remains of him.'
Even through his helmet filters, the odour of decay assaulted Garro's nostrils as he came closer. The spongy slurry of meat resembled a body exposed to months of putrefaction. It was undeniably Tollen Sendek, even though the remains of the dead man's skull were a ruined, bloated mass. He recognised the honour pennants and oaths of moment affixed to the armour. These too were discoloured with age and mould, and fingers of orange rust looped around the joints of the limbs.
One of Hakur's men choked back a gasp of disgust. 'He looks like he's been dead for weeks… but I spoke to him only this morning.'
The Luna Wolf leaned closer to the body. 'Iacton, keep your distance-'
Garro's words came too late. Thick white pustules on Sendek's body trembled as they sensed the closeness of Qruze's blood-warmth and burst, throwing out streams of tiny iridescent beetles. The veteran rocked back and batted the things away, pulping great masses of them with his armoured palm. Agh! Filthy vermin!'
The captain nudged a severed limb with his boot. There were too many torn hanks of meat and bone strewn about the room to be the component parts of just one human body, and he knew with bleak certainty that Iago was as dead as poor Tollen.
From across the chamber, Hakur peered cautiously into the broken isolation pod. 'Empty…' He snagged something with his combat blade from inside the glass container and held it up for the others to see. 'In all the days of Terra, what is this?' It resembled a thin
scrap of torn muslin, slick with black liquids. As it turned in the air, Garro made out holes in the material that corresponded to eyes, nostrils and a mouth.
Qraze gave the rag a grim examination. 'It is human flesh, sergeant, sloughed off, as species of snakes and insects shed their skins.'
The flat bangs of bolter fire echoed down the corridors leading to the other compartments of the infirmary and Garro gestured sharply. 'Leave that. We move, now.'
Qruze's face was locked in a permanent scowl of harsh, cold anger. At every turn, just as he thought he had weathered each new sinister twist of fate, a fresh horror was heaped upon the others. Qruze imagined a vice turning about his spirit, gradually tightening, the pressure upon his mind and his will growing ever more intense. He felt as if he were on the verge of shutting down, as if the goodness and light inside him were in danger of guttering out. Each new sight repulsed and shocked the old soldier in ways he thought he could never be touched.
The Astartes passed quickly through a series of seal doors that lay off their hinges, ripped apart by something of great strength and violence. Past that, they came upon a curative ward with rows of medicae cradles and sickbeds, one of the Silent Sisterhood's hospices for those of their number injured in action, he decided. The ward resembled a slaughterhouse more than a place of healing. Like the isolation chamber, the room was thick with death-stink: blood and excrement, the fetor of disease and rich organic decomposition. In each bed, the patients were dead or near to it, each beneath the smothering hands of a different malady. Qruze saw a pallid,
skeletal witchseeker shaking and foaming at the mouth from some sort of palsy. Next to her was a bloated body wreathed in gaseous vapours. Then a victim killed by bone-rot, a weeping novice wracked by bubonic plague, and a naked girl bleeding from her eyes and ears.
It was not just living flesh that was polluted. Corrosion covered the steel frames of the medicae cradles, and glasses and plastics were cracked and broken. The decay touched everything. He looked away.
'They have been left to die,' said Hakur, 'infected and left to fester like discarded cuts of meat.'
'A test/ said Garro. 'The hand that did this was toying with them.'
"We ought to burn them,' said Qruze, 'put these poor fools out of their misery.'
'There's no time for that kind of mercy,' Garro retorted. 'Every moment we tarry, the cause of this horror walks free to spread more corruption.'