James Swallow - The Flight of the Eisenstein

He brought Libertas up to his chest and ran the blade at full discharge, the crackling aura dancing about his armour in coils of lightning. The winged mites puffed into dots of flame and perished, black ash smearing his wargear. Garro drew a glove across the lenses of his helmet in time to see the Lord of the Flies filling his vision. His enemy slammed into him, throwing the Astartes off the flank of a cargo pallet. Garro resisted and turned the fight back to the foe, blocking the wicked claw and sending a storm of punches into the damaged muscle and bone of the face. The flies hummed around him, trying to mend the smashed meat even as Garro broke more shards of carapace and gristle. He took a hard blow, a des­perate blow, and disengaged. The mutant Astartes stumbled back a step, over the lip of an inert landing scaffold.

Garro saw the opportunity that presented itself. Beyond the Lord of the Flies and his chattering, shrieking swarm, there was a wide iris hatch that opened directly out to space. He looked up at the fig­ures on the service gantry overhead and shouted into his vox pickup. 'Kendel!' He pointed forward. 'Open the hatch! Do it now!'

The Decius-thing couldn't hear his words, but the creature wasn't slow on the uptake. You think you can stop me? I carry the Lord of Decay's mark!'

Alert klaxons sounded and garish orange lumes blinked in wild strobing patterns over the steel and brass walls. Garro heard the clanking of metal gates parting on the other side of the hatch. The Lord of the Files bayed, his swarm carrying the humming, rattling voice through the air, over the chorus of sirens. 'I was right, Garro! I see the future! In ten thousand years, the galaxy will burn-'

The words vanished into a screaming tornado of sound as the iris slammed open.

With an explosive jolt the air and the loose con­tents of the hangar bay were torn away into the lunar night. Small objects, strips of printout and data-slates, tools and strings of dust raced away, and with them went the swarm. Garro's adversary flailed, reaching out to snag his claw on Nathaniel's boot. He fell and rolled as the vacuum dragged them both towards the roaring black mouth of the airlock. Garro felt the jagged digits score the ceramite of his greaves. He tried to strike with Libertas, but the decompression was stronger than either of them, the breath of a god carrying the two combatants away.

A cargo pod slammed into his back and the Astartes tumbled, rolled and came off his feet, buoyed by the tempest. Garro saw the walls of the landing bay flash past him and glimpsed the shimmer of his foe falling with him. Then they were in the freezing blackness, thrown from the face of the Somnus Citadel, tum­bling down towards the brilliant white sands of the moon amid a cloud of ice crystals. For a brief second, he saw the brass disc of the iris hatch cycling shut

behind him. He spun lazily, end over end, the waste­land racing up to meet them.

He never felt the impact. Time blinked and Garro was in a cauldron of pain, agony tight around every joint in his body. The only sounds were the gruff pulse of his breathing and the hisses of atmosphere inside his armour. Warning runes danced on his visor. There was a puncture somewhere in his wargear, a slow leak issuing air out into the dark. The regulators inside the armour's fusion power pack were flashing alerts. Garro ignored them all, and pushed himself up from the pit of moon dust where he had landed. Spears of hot pain ripped through his shoulder. The joint was dislocated. He tabbed a restorative pill from the auto-narthecia dispenser in his neck ring and gripped his wrist. With a hard yank, Garro snapped the limb back into place with a bark of agony.

He took stock of his surroundings, a small crater, thick with dust and dotted by small porous boulders, with steep walls. The brass tower of the citadel domi­nated the black sky beyond. A man-shaped imprint showed where he had landed, and close by there was Libertas lying flat on the dust. Garro moved quickly towards it in a loping motion, half running, half skip­ping. The gravity out on the lunar surface was much lower than that inside the citadel, where artificial field generators kept it to a Terran one-gee standard, and he had to be careful not to stumble. In full armour, he was suddenly unwieldy, and it took long seconds to adjust.

There was no sign of his opponent, and for a brief moment Garro wondered if the Decius-thing had landed somewhere else, perhaps outside the crater.

Something shattered under his boot as his foot touched the soil and interrupted his train of thought.

Small, glistening objects were scattered all around him, shining like tiny jewels. As he bent down to recover his sword, Garro realised what they were: the frozen corpses of thousands of insects, flies and bee­tles.

Nathaniel!

The forewarning brushed the edges of his thoughts, a faint breath of wind upon the ocean of his mind, but it was not enough.

The moon dust exploded upward in a storm of grey, Libertas tumbling away as the creature lurking beneath the powder burst out, talons reaching for his throat. Garro grappled witir the Lord of the Flies and went off his feet into a slow motion tumble. He grunted with effort as he punched his adversary hard in the sternum, and felt chitin give with the impact.

The Death Guard had known a thousand battles, and in every one the constant clatter of weapons had been the music that accompanied them; the hue and cry of fighting men locked in struggles for their lives. Now, out on the airless sun-blinding whiteness of Luna, there was no sound at all. The silence was bro­ken only by the rush of blood in his veins, the rhythm of his exhalations. There was an absence of scents too: the foetid stink of the creature that wreathed it inside the citadel was gone. In its place Garro could only smell the tang of his own blood and the acrid traces of burning plastics from his armour's damaged ser­vos.

They fought unarmed, hand-to-hand, every battle skill they could draw upon pushed to the fore. Using the low gravity to his advantage, Garro pushed off a rock outcropping and let his momentum flip him up and around. He turned a boot to meet his enemy's face and saw a compound eye burst into a cloud of

polluted blood. The droplets froze instantly into hard black jewels that scattered over the moon dust. Some questioning, analytical portion of the battle-captain's mind wondered how it was that this freak could even exist in the vacuum. It had no suit seals, as Garro's did, no airtight layer of atmosphere to sustain it. There were patches of dark frost on the limbs of the pestilent champion where the cold of space had iced over spilt fluids, but still it lived on, defiant by its very existence.

He took a blow that knocked the breath from him, ignoring the new alert runes that haloed his vision. Streams of white vapour – precious air – issued out from points of damage beneath the eagle cuirass. Eventually suffocation would come, even to an Astartes. 'You must die, abomination/ Garro said aloud, 'even if it be my last victory!'

The Lord of the Flies pressed upon him, and Garro's back slammed into the wall of the crater, into the inky shadows cast by the rock formation. The ruined insect face leered over him and the great claw tore the cuirass from him, tossing it away. He fought back, but the Decius-thing was faster. Burning pain lanced into him as the warped Astartes bored the serrated talons through layers of ceramite and flexsteel. The thing was going to rip his armour open and expose the meat inside to the killing vacuum.

'Is this my duty?' Garro asked. 'I am Death Guard… I am dead…' A sudden sorrow engulfed him, the weight of all his darkest, most morose moments returning as one. Perhaps it was fitting that he per­ished here, in this lifeless stone arena. His Legion was already destroyed. What was he now? No more than a relic, an embarrassment, his warning delivered and his purpose ended. The cold was filling him, leeching