The Beast Arises

The door opened, and Wienand’s bodyguard Kalthro strode in, a pistol raised. He halted when he saw Vangorich.

‘Far too little,’ Vangorich told him as he strode past, ‘far too late.’

Twenty-Three

Ardamantua

Daylight led the way over the broken ridge and down into the rubble-strewn valley where the lake spread out under a black sky. His armour, and the plate armour of the other three Imperial Fists, was spattered with ichor. No one had made any attempt to clean it off. They had left the field on the other side of the ridge strewn with dead xenos, piled high. It had plainly astonished Major Nyman and the Asmodai troopers, who had moved in towards the end and helped to slay the last few dozen with targeted fire.

Gravity, shifting and flexing like an invisible serpent through earth and air, shattered a distant row of hills with a noise like thunder. The clouds boiled past overhead, on fast-play. Flames of red, green and yellow danced around the ridges of broken rock and upturned, split earth.

‘Once we reach the lake, then what?’ asked Bastion Ledge.

‘From the lake, the nest,’ replied Daylight.

‘Then?’ Bastion Ledge asked.

‘Then we look for survivors,’ replied Daylight. ‘For signs.’

‘And if we find none?’

‘We look elsewhere.’

‘And if more of those things appear?’ Bastion Ledge asked.

‘Then we kill more of those things,’ said Daylight.

They skirted a series of murky pools and crooked ponds that were offshoots of the lake, their trudging figures reflected in the water, the running sky behind them. The wind blew. The noise bursts continued to break the air, howling barks that came from everywhere and nowhere.

The gravity blister popped without any warning except a slight shrug of physical matter. A random anomaly, it opened on the edge of one of the pools about fifty metres from their procession. The physicality of the world, the rocks, the air and the pool altered instantaneously. It went off like a bomb, hurling tonnes of stone and soil into the air sideways, like a blizzard. The ground broke open and water turned to steam. The main volume of the pool surged in the opposite direction in a spontaneous tidal wave three metres tall, and broke across the next ridge with enough force to shatter rock.

Flying rocks and debris, along with mud and water, ripped along the line of Daylight’s party. The Guardsmen were knocked off their feet. One died, his head crushed by a boulder. Only the frail, mind-addled tech-adept, bewildered and confused, remained upright.

Rocks and stones rained off the Imperial Fists, pelting their armour. In that instant, Daylight once again felt the uneasy fear. The Imperial Fists excelled at holding ground, but how did a warrior do that when the ground itself couldn’t be trusted?

The thought barely had time to form before another blister ripped the world open. It was smaller than the first, a gravitic aftershock, but it was right under them. Two of the Asmodai simply atomised, turning into clouds of blood and whizzing armour shreds, their forms lost in the explosive upchuck of rock and bludgeoning concussion.

Bastion Ledge died too.

As the smoke and steam cleared, and the last of the rock debris rained down and skittered around them, as the ground stopped shaking, Daylight saw his wall-brother. Half of Bastion Ledge, most of the left-hand side of his body, was missing. It was folded and compressed in on itself, flesh, bone and armour alike. He looked as though he had been snatched up by a giant and squeezed until he was crushed like a tin cup. Black blood drenched his buckled, ruined wargear.

Zarathustra knelt beside him to check for vitals, but they all knew it was in vain. Bastion was gone, killed by the world, killed by the ground, killed by the forces of nature they ought to have been able to trust.

For a second, Daylight felt hopelessness, but there was no time to consider such luxuries as emotions.

A third gravity blister blew out on the far side of the valley, and the boom rolled around the outcrops. It hardly mattered. There was a more immediate threat.

Major Nyman was shouting. He’d ripped his helmet off so he could be heard and he was yelling, gasping in the thin air.

Daylight turned.

Chromes were coming out of the stretch of lake behind them, scrambling towards the shore. They were all large, dark, mature and powerful. Flying rocks hurled by the third gravity detonation hammered across the lake, killing several of them and sending up spouts of water, as though heavy-calibre gunfire were peppering the surface. The Chromes churned on regardless, bounding up the stony shore to attack the Imperial party.