The Flight of the Eisenstein (27 page)

That is rumour and hearsay,' Qruze snapped, coming closer.

'Are you sure?' Decius pressed. They say the warp has turned black with tempests and the freakish things that lurk within them! And here we sit, on a ship held together by rust and hope, with intent to dive into that ocean of madness.'

Garro hesitated. There was truth in Decius's words. He
was
aware of the talk circulating about the fleet before the attack on the Choral City, that there had been isolated incidents of Navigators and astropaths going wild with panic when their minds stroked the immaterium. The sea of warp space was always a chaotic and dangerous realm through which to travel, but so the reports had hinted, it was rapidly becoming impassable.

We have already tested ourselves and this ship beyond all rational margins,' hissed Decius. 'If we touch the warp, it will be a step too far. We will not endure a blind voyage into the empyrean.'

The skin on the back of Garro's neck prickled. The innate danger sense that was second nature to an Astartes sounded in him and he turned towards the bridge's main hatch. Standing in the doorway, wreathed in thin grey smoke, the woman Keeler was watching him. The battle-captain blinked, for one moment afraid that reason had fled from him and she was some kind of ephemeral vision, but then he realized that Decius saw her too.

Keeler picked her way through the wreckage and came to stand directly in front of him. 'Nathaniel Garro, I came because I know you need help. Will you accept it?'

'You're just a remembrancer,' said Decius, but even his bluster was waning before her quiet, potent presence. 'What help can you offer?'

'You'd be surprised,' murmured Qruze.

'The survival of this ship is measured in moments,' she continued, 'and if we remain in this place we will surely die. We must all take a leap of faith, Nathaniel. If we trust in the will of the Emperor, we will find salvation.'

'What you ask of him is blind belief in phantoms,' Decius argued. 'You cannot know we will survive!'

'I can,' Keeler's reply was quiet, but filled with such complete certainty that the Astartes were given pause by it.

From the forward consoles, Vought called out. 'Captain, the ship's Geller Field will not stabilize. Perhaps we should abort the warp jump. If we enter the immaterium, it may fail completely and the ship will be unprotected.'

'You have only one choice, Nathaniel,' said Keeler softly.

There will be no abort, deck officer' Garro watched the shock unfold on Decius's face as he spoke. 'Take us in.'

Chaos

Visions

The Resurrected

The Eisenstein fell.

The warp gate opened, a ragged-edged wound cut through the matrix of space, and it drew the damaged frigate inside. Unreal energies collided and annihilated one another. With a brilliant flicker of radiation, the ship left reality behind.

It was impossible for a person possessed of an unaltered mind to comprehend the nature of warp space. The seething, churning ocean of raw non-matter was psychoactive. It was as much a product of the psyches of those that looked upon it, as it was a shifting, willful landscape of its own. On Ancient Earth there had once been a philosopher who warned that if a man were to look into an abyss, then he should know that the abyss would also look into the man. In no other place was this as true as it was in the immaterium. The warp was a mirror for the emotions of every living thing, a sea of turbulent thought echoes, the dark dregs of every hidden desire and broken id mixed together into a raw mass of disorder. If one could apply a single word to describe the nature of the warp, that word would be
chaos.

The Navigators and the astropaths knew the immaterium as well as any human could, but even they understood that their knowledge stood only in the shallows of this mad ocean. Description of the warp was not something they could easily relay to the limited minds of lesser beings. Some saw the realm as if it were made of taste and smell, some as a fractal back-cloth woven from mathematical theorems and lines of dense equations. Others conceived it as song, with turning symphonies to represent worlds, bold strings for thought patterns, great brass reveilles for suns, and woodwinds and timpani for the ships that crossed the aurascape. But its very existence defied comprehension. The warp was change. It was the absence of reason unleashed and teeming, sometimes mill-pond calm, sometimes towering in titanic, stormy rages. It was the Medusa, the mythic beast that could kill an unwary man who dared to look upon it unguarded.

Into this the wounded starship
Eisenstein
had been thrown, the shimmering and unsteady bubble of her protective Geller Field writhing as the insanity tried to claw inside.

The blast baffles slammed shut over the bridge viewports the instant the ship began its transition. Garro was grateful for it. The familiar lurching sensation in his chest that a warp jump forced upon him made the Death Guard grimace. There was something that disturbed him on the deepest, most primal level about the hellish light of warp space, and he was glad not to be bathed in it as the frigate translated.

'We're through,' gasped Vought. 'We're away!'

Qruze patted her on the shoulder as a rough-throated cheer sounded from the crewmen, all except the shipmaster, who gave Garro a grim-faced look. 'We shouldn't take our glories too soon, lads,' he said, addressing his men, but facing the Death Guard. 'As of now we have only traded one set of dangers for another'

The shaking, rolling gait of the
Eisenstein
showed no sign of easing. If anything, the smooth voyage through normal space was a distant memory, and the rattling swell it rode through had become the norm. 'How long will it take us to reach safety?' Garro asked.

Carya sighed heavily, the fatigue he had been holding at bay brimming over to flood him. 'It's the warp, sir,' he said, as if that would explain everything. *We could be in Terra's shade in a day or we might find ourselves clear across the galaxy a hundred years hence. There are no maps for these territories. We simply hold on and let our Navigator guide us as best he can.'

The ship rocked and a moaning shudder rippled the length of the bridge chamber. 'This is a tough old boat,' Carya added grimly. 'It won't go easily'

Garro caught sight of Decius, listening intently to his helmet vox. 'Lord,' he called, any signs of their earlier disagreement gone. 'Message from Hakur below decks. He says there are... there are intruders on board.'

Nathaniel's hand went for the hilt of his sword. 'How can that be? We detected no craft launched from Typhon's ship!'

'I don't know, sir, I'm only relaying what the sergeant says'

Garro toggled the vox link on his armour's collar and caught fragmentary barks of noise over the general channel. He heard the harsh snarls of bolter fire and screaming that clawed to inhuman heights. For an instant he thought of the Warsinger and her alien chorus.

'Alarm triggers sounding on the lower tiers,' reported Vought. 'It's Severnaya's adjutants again, at the navis sanctorum.'

'Hakur is there,' added Decius.

'Decius, with me. Sendek, you will remain here,' said Garro. 'Tell Hakur we're coming to him, and send to all the men to be on alert.'

'Aye, sir,' Sendek nodded his assent.

Garro turned to the older Luna Wolf. 'Captain Qruze, I would have you take my post here, if you will.'

Iacton saluted briskly. 'This is your ship, lad. I'll do as you order me. My experience may be of some use to these youths.'

Garro made to leave and found Keeler still there, standing before him. 'You will be tested,' she said, without preamble.

He pushed past her. 'Of that, I have never been in doubt.'

Andus Hakur had killed many times in his life. The countless adversaries that had fallen before his guns, his blades, his fists, they were a blur of swift and purposeful death. In service to the XIV Legion, the veteran had fought ork and eldar, jorgall and hykosi, he had fought beasts and he had fought men, but the enemies that he fought today were a kind that he had never seen the like of.

The first warning came when Severnaya's navis adjutant threw herself screaming from the door of the sanctum, weeping and shouting incoherently. The woman collapsed in a heap of thin limbs and knotted cloak. Her hands jerked and pointed to the corners of the corridor, as if she could see things up there that Hakur and the other Astartes were blind to. He stepped to her and felt his skin go cold, as if he had entered a refrigerated chamber. Then he saw it, just at the edges of his vision, the merest flicker of oddly coloured light, like fireflies shimmering in the dark. It came and went so fast for a moment he thought it might have been a trick of his brain, an after-effect of stress and battle fatigue.

He was still processing this when the first of the things emerged out of the smoky air and killed the Death Guard standing with his back to him. Hakur had the impression of a spinning disc, a wide purple blade trailing stinging cilia from its edges, and then the Astartes was being ripped open, blood and gore issuing out in runnels. Hakur fired reflexively, aware that his battle-brother was already beyond rescue, snapping off a three-round burst at the diaphanous shape. It died with a shriek, but the sound became a clarion call and suddenly new and different forms were emerging from the walls and floor. They brought a stench of such potency with them that Hakur's gorge rose and he tasted acid bile. The adjutant was already on her knees and puking violently.

'Blood's oath!' cursed one of the men in his squad. 'Rot and death!'

It was that, and a hundred times worse. The slices through which the creatures emerged allowed draughts of foetid plague-house stink to coil into the corridor. Patches of fungus and rusty discolouration fingered along crevices in the iron decking where the stench crawled forth, but this was only precursor to the diseased horrors of the invaders themselves.

They sickened Hakur to such a degree that he attacked instantly, so abhorrent were these things that the thought of their continued existence revolted him. The shape of the creatures was vaguely that of a man, but only in the grossest, most basic sense. Ropey limbs that shook with palsy flicked and clawed with black, decayed talons. Distended, malformed hooves scraped across the decking, leaving lines of acid slime and excrement. Each one was naked, and bloated around the torso and belly with gaseous buboes and grotesque sores that wept thick pus. Heads were shrunken balls of flaking skin over rictus-grinning skulls. All of them had trains of buzzing insects following behind them, tiny bottle-green flies that dived in and out of the invaders' open wounds.

Where bolter rounds struck them, gobbets of flesh were torn off and rolled away in bloody hanks of stinking meat. They took a lot of killing, the skittering, burbling things coming at the Death Guard in hooting profusion. Hakur watched them take a second brother, and two more, even as he poured shot after shot into them.

Then Garro hove into view at the opposite end of the corridor, Decius and a handful of reinforcements with him. Caught between two packs of Astartes, the advance of the creatures was staggered, and the battle-captain waded into the mass of them. Libertas shone as it rose and fell. Decius had liberated a flamer and torched the things with jets of promethium. Hakur used the distraction to recover the adjutant and pull her out of the line of battle.

She screamed and flailed at him, beating her hands on his chest plate. He could see now where her hands were bloody with self-inflicted scratch marks. 'Eyes and blood!' she wailed. 'But inside the pestilence!'

Garro stamped the last of the creatures to death and scraped the remains from his boot with a grimace. 'Silence her,' he snapped.

Decius's palm went to the breath grille of his helmet. 'In Terra's name, that rancid smell!'

Hakur handed off the woman to one of his men and made his report to the battle-captain. Garro listened intently. 'Word is coming in from all over the ship, the same thing: mutant freaks materializing and leaving decay in their wake.'

'It's the warp,' said Decius grimly. We all know the tales, of predators that prey on ships lost or weak.' He gestured at the walls. 'If the Geller Field fails, those things will overrun us.'

'I'll trust Master Carya's crew to keep that from happening,' Garro replied. 'In the meantime, we will destroy these unclean filth wherever we find them.'

'Unclean, unclean!' chorused the adjutant, ripping herself from the grip of Hakur's trooper. 'I have seen it! Inside the eyes!' She tore wildly at her face, ripping the skin and drawing blood. 'You see it too!

The woman threw herself at Garro with furious speed, and before he could deflect her, the adjutant impaled herself upon the hissing blade of his power sword.

Garro jerked back, but it was too late. The adjutant, a Navigator tertius in service to the senioris Severnaya, pressed into him and raked bloody fingers over his torso. 'You see!' she gasped. 'Soon the end comes! All will wither.'

The end comes.
Once more, the words of the jorgalli child fluttered through his thoughts like a dying raptor, falling and screaming. Garro's skin went hot with the flush of blood through his veins, his throat tightening in just the manner it had when he had taken the draught from the cups with Mortarion. He trembled, suddenly unable to speak. The woman's upturned face became paper, aged and crumbling. She slid away from him, off the tip of Libertas, turning into rags of meat and dead flesh, ash and then nothing.

'My lord?' Hakur's words were slow and thick, as if they were echoing through liquid. Garro turned to face his trusted sergeant and recoiled. Creeping decomposition was washing over Hakur and the other men, and none of them seemed to be aware of it. The resplendent marble-white of their armour bled away to become discoloured by a feeble, sickly green the shade of new death. The ceramite warped and became rippled, merging with their flesh until it strained and throbbed. Parasites and bloated organs pulsed within, and in some places wounds opened like new mouths, red-lipped with tongues of distended bowel and duct.