The Beast Arises

The Chrome was massive. It was one of the darker-hued forms, one of the new ones that Laurentis had overheard a great deal of vox-traffic about once the Adeptus Astartes had entered the blisternest.

He’d been dying to see one.

How ironic.

It must have weighed about five hundred kilos. Its hard-shelled back was ridged, with a pronounced, sclerotic-looking hump. The shoulder portions and upper joints were bound with layers of muscle and sinew, like a great simian. The face… The face was not a face. It was a knot of ocular organs on the snout of the armoured head-crest, surmounting a powerful set of chattering mouthparts. The sound it made — clack-clack-clack — was like some funereal march, like a death-drum, like rot-beetles clicking away in wood.

The Chrome warrior-form had come out of a side aperture in the nest tunnel and attacked the leading carts in the magos biologis’ convoy. One cart was already mangled, and the curving tunnel walls were spattered with blood and lubricant fluid from three servitors that had been dismembered in the first strike.

‘Warrior-form’ was the word the Imperial Fists were using. It was a perfectly apt term, simple and technically appropriate. The creature was combat adapted. It was built for fighting. It was not, like the regular Chromes, a worker or drone obliged to defend the nest.

Gun servitors in Laurentis’ retinue had already opened fire, but their lasweapons were not sufficiently powerful to wound the armoured hulk. It came forwards, wrenching a second cart into the air, spilling its occupants, tipping it.

The confines of the tunnel were so tight. There was nowhere to run, to move to, no air to breathe. The light was poor and gunfire was causing intense visual disturbance. Everyone was shouting. Las-shots howled. Laurentis could hear the voice of the comm-servitor as it tried to reconnect his link with the Chapter Master.

He was caught up in it. It was exactly where he didn’t want to be, exactly where he’d spent his career trying not to be. He was caught in the untameable insanity of combat.

‘Save yourself, magos,’ the pilot servitor beside him said in a flat and oddly sad tone. Hardwired and bone-bonded into the cart’s driving position, the servitor itself could hardly escape. Even so, Laurentis wanted to snarl in outrage. Save himself? How? Where could he run to? Up the tunnel, away from the survey convoy? Into the nest, alone?

There was a sharp bang. The warrior-form had ploughed into one of the gun servitors, its claws ripping open the plated bio-organic torso like chisels. Power cables shredded and the servitor’s power plant exploded, showering sparks and sizzling fragments and releasing a stink of ozone.

Brain-dead, transfixed by the claws, the gun servitor went into a death-shock spasm, its autonomic systems reacting mindlessly, ungoverned by any programmed control protocols.

The double lasguns mounted onto each of its twitching wrists began to fire, the blue barrels pumping to and fro in their pneumatic sleeves as they spat out bolt after bolt of lethal, shaped light.

The first flurry ripped through three servitors and a biologis assistant standing on the stern of the nearest cart, killing them and making them tumble like skittles. Another wild burst blew out the port-side motivators of the same cart, and then killed two servitors on the ground beside it.

Laurentis flinched as another stray shot whined past, blowing out the head of his cart’s pilot servitor. The servitor didn’t even slump. The braced and bonded figure remained rigid in its driving socket, smoke streaming from the burned-out bowl of its skull.

Laurentis leapt over the side of the cart, and started to run up the narrow space between the cart and the tunnel wall. He could hear his comm-servitor, wired to its dedicated function, single-mindedly trying to reconnect his link with the Chapter Master in orbit.

Laurentis found his robes tangled in his feet. He was aware of a hot prickling in his lungs and chest, in his throat. Terror. Panic. He was going to die. He was going to die. Fleeing was the only possible option, but it was pointless. He was going to die.

Behind him, the warrior-form shook the dead gun servitor off its claws and sent the servitor’s corpse crashing away, bouncing off the tunnel roof and then the fairing of another cart.

Laurentis ran. He realised he wasn’t very good at it. The tunnel floor underneath his feet was spongy and thick with slime or mucus, and his boots weren’t in any way the right sort of footgear for these conditions. He banged his elbow on the vector cowling of the cart, and it really hurt. He could feel sweat streaming down his spine. He was hyperventilating. He was about to throw up.