‘No,’ the Apothecary told him harshly. ‘Only the Emperor’s Finest are required here. Report to the Chief Apothecary. Perhaps he can find you a mop and bucket for the blood. Now get out of my sight.’
The serfs headed back towards the launch bays, leaving a weapon rack behind. The rack was laden with reserve magazines of bolt ammunition, simple gladius blades and the serrated length of the Apothecary’s chainsword. The mirrored finish of the weapon gleamed with clinical lethality. Reoch scooped the white dome of his half-helm from the rack and pulled it down over his bionics and scarred face-flesh. The half-helm gave a hydraulic sigh as it locked into place with the grille of its counterpart section.
Captain Thane had had Brother Aquino request of the signum-tower array any reports of intercepted communications between enemy contingents or ground-hordes and the attack moon. There was naught forthcoming. The captain found this unsettling. Falling to the surface of Eidolica in brute clutches, descent survivors amassed in murderous throngs — before, like blood coagulating in the veins and organs of a corpse, throngs became mobs and mobs became clan swarms. The barbarians seemed to be guided by a common brutality or unthinking brotherhood. Without the aid of conventional communications, beasts that ordinarily would prey on one another with claw, fang and mongrel weaponry found each other across the black sands of Eidolica. They were drawn down on the Adeptus Astartes’ position, guided by some predacious, gestalt impulse.
Thane considered that it might simply be lack of resistance that was driving the creatures on towards them with such speed. Fortunately, the Akbar promethium fields were all but deserted during the season of the Noxtide. Hardy caravans of nomadic workers and their families had migrated east to the Sheldrahc and Pharad fields, leaving automated jack-wells and photovoltaic harvesters under the seasonal supervision of crisp-skinned servitors in stone bubble-bunkers. Thane could only imagine what havoc the enemy were wreaking there or further east in the Great Basin and Tharkis Flats, where it was the time of the Yielding and Terra’s tithe was due.
That was Seventh Captain Dentor’s problem, although vox-chatter seemed to indicate that things were not going well. In the desert darkness, cursed with an exposed position, defending hundreds of thousands of nomad-civilians and supported by an ill-equipped promethium fields militia, Dentor and his company-brothers were at the heart of a swiftly-unfolding slaughter.
The auspectoria confirmed, however, that of the invader forces raining to the Eidolican sands from the attack moon, the vast majority had converged on the
That had been until the Rubicante Flux’s most recent encroachment. Although the eruption lasted mere hours, the rift event was colossal in magnitude — wrecking subsector shipping, disrupting communications and heralding the inception of numerous doomsday cults across the Imperial worlds of the region. The eruption’s most ambitious victim, though, was the