James Swallow - The Flight of the Eisenstein

The Eisenstein had two long promenade corridors that ran the length of the frigate's port and starboard flanks, punctuated every few metres by thin observation slits that cast blades of light down across the polished steel decking. It was in this place, on the port side some ten or so strides from the ninety-seventh hull frame, that Death Guard met Death Guard in open conflict.

Garro saw the misshapen things from a distance and thought that the strange, plague-bearing

creatures they encountered at the navis sanctorum were before them once more, but he realised quickly that the size was wrong, that these diseased freaks were the match in height for the Astartes. When they hove into the light, what he saw sent him skidding to a halt, his free hand coming to his mouth in shock.

'In the Emperor's name,' choked Hakur, 'what hor­ror is this?'

Garro's blood turned to ice in his veins. The awful vision that seemed to transmit itself from the dying adjutant was suddenly here before him, written in reality over the mutated, swollen parodies of Death Guard warriors: the same corpse-pallor green of their battle armour, the same slack faces rippled with growths of broken tooth and horn, flesh stretched tight over bodies teeming with colonies of maggots. Voyen had joined Garro and the others at the entrance to the corridor and even the Apothecary, hardened to sights of disease and malady, retched at the sight of the twisted man-things.

The vision had been a warning, Garro realised, a glimpse of what he encountered here, and perhaps of what a failure might engender.

Around the legs of the abnormal Astartes were things that were once members of Eisenstein's crew, men caught halfway through the venomous ravages of the Life-Eater and suspended there, flesh in tatters and organs awash with ichor. They bayed and scram­bled forward to attack Garro's warriors. Decius led the firing as the Death Guard let fly with bolters and flamers.

A ragged scarecrow of skin and bone flung itself to the deck and mewed, fly-blown pustules pocking a face eaten away by leprous cancers. It spoke, the stink of its breath reaching them in a reeking wash. 'Master.

He saw the robes, the skull sigil around its neck. 'Kaleb?' Garro recoiled in recognition, sickened by whatever appalling power had returned his housecarl into this loathsome semblance of life. Without hesi­tation, Garro turned Libertas in his hand and beheaded the creature. He fervently hoped that death a second time would be enough. Garro hoped fleet-ingly that his friend could forgive him.

'Watch yourselves/ he shouted, 'this is a feint!'

The tattered crewmen-things were only to draw their fire from the mutant Astartes behind them. The grotesques hammered across the promenade deck towards them, snorting bilious discharges of gas and firing back with mucus-clogged guns. A shambling form advanced on metal-shod hooves among the undead brethren. It was as big as a brother in Termi­nator armour, and as Garro laid eyes upon it, the thing seemed to be growing larger by the moment. Metal bent and broke as abnormal curves of dis­coloured bone issued out of popping boils. A distended belly of scarred, pustulent flesh protruded in an atrocious pregnant mockery, studded with triad clusters of tumescent buboes, and atop all this, girn-ing from ravaged ceramite pieces that still resembled Astartes armour, a striated neck ending in a bulbous skull. The bloodshot, rheumy eyes in the grotesque head turned and found Garro. It winked.

'Do you not find my new aspect pleasing, Nathaniel?' bubbled a disgusting voice. 'Do I offend your delicate senses?'

'Grulgor.' Garro hissed the name like a curse. 'What have you become?'

The Grulgor-creature lowed and twitched as a horn, glistening wet with fluids, emerged from the middle of his brow, echoing the shape of Typhon's horned

helmet. 'Better, you hidebound fool, better! The first captain was right. The powers are soon to bloom.' He shuddered again, and flesh peeled away across his back to release tarnished tubes of budding bone.

Garro spat on the decking to clear the stink clog­ging his throat. The air around Grulgor and his diseased horde was thick with contagion, worse than the acrid atmosphere of the xenos bottle-ship, worse than the toxins of a hundred death worlds. 'Whatever force saw fit to reanimate you, it will be in vain! I'll kill you as many times as I must!'

The bloated monster beckoned with a crooked hand. 'You are welcome to make the attempt, Terran.'

The battle-captain waded into the fight, bolter and sword as one in arcs of death, slicing through dis­eased meat and matter teeming with parasites, cutting towards the monster. In the play of battle, Garro's mind retreated to the familiar paths of war drills, of melee patterns ingrained in muscle and sinew from thousands of hours of combat. In this state, it should have been easy for him to shutter away the chilling horror these warp-spawned terrors represented, to simply fight and concentrate on that alone. The reverse was the reality, however.

Garro had seen the virus savage these men. He had heard their dying screams from the other side of the blast doors only hours earlier, and they stood before him, transformed into some living embodiment of disease, their freakish parody of life sustained by no manner that he could fathom. Was it sorcery? Could such a thing exist in the Emperor's secular cosmos? Garro's carefully constructed world of deeply held truths and hard-edged realities was crumbling with each passing hour, as if the universe had elected to pick apart what he thought to be true and show him

the lie of it. With a near-physical effort, the Death Guard forced the inner turmoil into silence, dragging his mind to the single struggle of the fighting.

Close by, Voyen took a glancing blow from a bolt shell that spattered thick fluid across his shoulder pauldron. The Apothecary reeled to dodge a peculiar morning star of knobbed bone. The weapon found purchase instead in the throat of a junior warrior who died clawing at the cancerous wound it left behind. Garro snarled and his bolter echoed him, a burst of fire slamming the killer back and off his feet. The battle-captain cursed as the mutant Astartes shivered, and then pulled itself slowly upward, leaking tainted blood and viscera. The bolter should have ended its life outright. He stormed in and took the traitor's head with his sword, finishing the job.

Still the shambling, filth-encrusted monstrosities came on, the press of their bodies dividing the lines of Garro's warriors, bunching around them as Grul­gor moved to and fro, staying beyond close combat range. Perhaps he should not have been surprised to find these mutants hard to kill. Their advance mimic­ked the battle doctrine of the XIV Legion, the dogged and relentless progress that formed the core of the Death Guard's infantry dogma. They were matched closely, of that there was no doubt, but Garro's men were only Astartes, and as the Emperor was his wit­ness, he had no true understanding of what his enemies were. Garro knew only that an abhorrence had taken root in him, and that these loathsome per­versions of his brethren must be destroyed.

Separated from the other Death Guard, Decius found himself besieged by a gaggle of walking dead from the ship's company, the animated corpse-flesh

of the frigate's crewmen pawing at him and beating on his armour with clubs made from femurs and skulls. The flamer was spent and he was fighting hand-to-hand with the good weight of his chainsword as it rattled in his grip and the crackling force of his power fist.

The armoured gauntlet pummelled two conjoined deckhands into a seeping paste of rancid meat and bone fragments, and he took a torso apart with a downward sweep of his blade. The spinning ceramite teeth of the chainsword left a black rent in the mutant's body, and from the malodorous wound poured a waterfall of writhing maggots that pooled around Decius's boots. He turned around and cut necks with snapping reports like breaking wood.