Dan Abnett - The Beast Arises

‘Come up,’ he called.

Cutthroat climbed after him, and then reached down to haul the dishevelled magos biologis up out of the tunnel. After them came Stab and Woundmaker. Slaughter had left the rest of Daylight Wall inside the nest under Frenzy’s command. The Chapter Master’s express orders had been to get Laurentis to the contact point. Well, four of them could do that. There was no sense pulling a whole company out. He’d voxed that decision to the Lanxium , but he hadn’t had a reply. Something was chopping vox and pict to hell. Atmospherics. It was like Karodan Monument all over again. They’d been deaf and blind there.

And they’d still won.

The magos biologis was looking around, blinking at the daylight. The rain ran off his face and plastered his robes to his body.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the sky.

‘We haven’t got time for sight-seeing,’ snapped Woundmaker. Woundmaker was a sergeant, a good man. In the last stretch of tunnel, they’d come upon one of the automated munition trains sent in to support them. It had been mangled beyond recognition by Chrome warrior-forms, and the servitors slain, but Woundmaker and Stab had managed to drive the enemy off and recover some reloads for their bolters. He was sorting and distributing them.

‘No, look,’ said Laurentis.

Slaughter took the four clips Woundmaker handed him and turned to look where the magos biologis was pointing. There was a light in the sky. It was a broad, diffuse light, weeping out of the ugly cloud cover, but there was a malicious little glowing coal at the heart of it, small and red, like the ember-fragment of a star.

‘That’s a ship death,’ said Cutthroat bluntly.

Slaughter heard Woundmaker curse. He’d been too ready to dismiss the magos biologis’ comment, but he could see that Cutthroat was right. They could all see he was right. They’d all seen a ship die from planetside. It was a heartbreaking thing.

‘When in Throne’s name did these vermin get orbital weapons?’ asked Woundmaker. ‘When did they get ship-to-ship capability?’

‘We still don’t know precisely how the Chromes distribute themselves across space,’ said Laurentis. ‘It is presumed they employ some form of pod or seed dispersal via fluctuations in the warp, but a full scale migration of the magnitude that would explain their population density here has never been witnessed or described. We don’t believe they have what we would consider to be ships or a fleet, no vessels at all, but—’

He fell silent. Four angular visors glared at him, rain beading off their beaked jaws.

‘I… I’m just saying,’ Laurentis managed. ‘I don’t know how the Chromes could have taken out one of our ships. Perhaps it is an unhappy coincidence, or an accident.’

‘There are no coincidences!’ Stab told him.

Cutthroat began to say something about accidents and defaming the ability of the fleet.

‘Well, something’s happened,’ said Slaughter, cutting them both off. ‘That’s a dead ship up there, and a big one too. The magos is right. If the Chromes couldn’t hit it, that leaves accident, or coincidence. And coincidence means—’

‘What?’ asked Laurentis.

‘Someone else,’ said Slaughter.

A noise burst filled the air. Outdoors, in the stinking open air, it was like the booming of a warhorn, the braying of some daemonic voice. The air seemed to shudder. All four Imperial Fists winced as it stripped through their helmet vox-systems and assaulted their ears. Laurentis felt it prickle his skin. The hairs on his arm rose, despite the rain. Static. Ozone. Around the distant, broken steeples at the blisternest heart, chain lightning flickered and crackled in a sickly yellow display. Two more noise bursts followed. Laurentis felt the actual structure of the blisternest beneath them resonate with the plangent sound.

‘The Chromes are capable of a great deal more than we realise,’ Laurentis told his guardians. ‘These noises… these bursts of noise… They are why your Chapter Master has charged you to protect me. I have a theory—’

‘Tell us,’ said Slaughter bluntly.

Laurentis nodded and shrugged.

‘I will, sir. I think it’s communication. I think the Chromes are trying to communicate with us. We understood them to be non-sapient animals, but we may have been very wrong about that. I wish to test the communication theory, and that is why I need to get to the drop-point to access specialist equipment.’

Slaughter nodded. He checked the auspex mounted across his left forearm.

‘Tracking the drop. It’ll be down at DZ 457 in the next twenty minutes. Let’s move.’

They started off, crossing the oddly ridged humps and rain-slick gullies of the blisternest’s upper surface. The Fists, with their strength, long stride and armoured feet, had no trouble negotiating the unpleasant material. Laurentis kept slipping and slithering. He was wet, and cold to the bone. Woundmaker kept picking him up by the scruff of his robes and setting him back on his feet as if he were some clumsy toddler.

‘The point of the communication,’ said Laurentis, out of breath and struggling to keep up. ‘I mean, the point I was making was that if the Chromes are capable of communication, if they are capable of language, then they may be capable of much else besides. They can clearly cross between worlds and star systems in ways we cannot divine. Maybe they can take out ships. Maybe they have potent weapons for void fights.’

‘Ships of their own, after all,’ said Slaughter.

‘Perhaps.’

‘If they are capable of communication,’ said Slaughter, pausing for a moment to look at the magos biologis. ‘If you prove your theory…’

‘Yes?’

‘What are they trying to say?’

Laurentis paused.

‘I first presumed, captain, that they might be trying to negotiate surrender. That was when they seemed to be at our mercy, when their nest seemed to be toppling under assault.’

‘And now?’

‘Now, I wonder if it might not be a warning. A cry of defiance. A challenge. Now I wonder if they might not be demanding our surrender.’

‘Because they are hurting us?’

Laurentis sighed.

‘They are, it seems, taking out our starships. They are harrying our ground assault. The successful outcome of this undertaking is not as clear-cut as we first imagined.’

They followed the rim of the nest down, along to the ugly, chordate ridges that pressed like giant finger-bones into the mud of the river’s edge. The noise bursts continued to bark across the smoke-wrapped distances, causing the rain to squall and billow. Laurentis tried to keep a basic log of observable details on his data-slate as he struggled to keep up with his transhuman bodyguards. Fountains of ash and light vomited into the air from regions on the far side of the central blisternest, and the concussive booms reached them a moment later.

‘Major munitions,’ said Slaughter.

‘Orbital strike?’ asked Cutthroat.

Woundmaker shook his head.

‘Looked like… subterranean.’

‘So… our enemy has further weapons we don’t know about?’ asked Stab.

‘That they destroy their own nest with?’ asked Cutthroat.

‘Don’t argue. Don’t debate,’ Slaughter snapped. ‘Get moving.’

Another blast rocked the ground and a huge plume sheeted into the dismal sky six or seven kilometres away. The Fists of Daylight Wall stoically and obediently ignored it and started moving onwards. Laurentis hurried with them.

‘It could be a new weapon,’ conjectured the magos biologis, a little out of breath. ‘They might, I suppose… They might destroy their own nest if there was nothing left to be gained from protecting it. It might be… uhm, intended to create confusion and disarray, to take as many of us with them as possible.’