‘Resume designated duties,’ Mires said, in the loud, slow manner required to instruct most servitors to do pretty much anything.
‘Input initiated,’ the vox-coder droned, while its head, having turned to the right as far as it could go, began a slow traverse in the opposite direction. I’ve never been particularly spooked by servitors, unlike some who find them deeply disturbing, but the measured, deliberate movement seemed watchful, somehow, as though the shambling assemblage of flesh and technotheology was assessing us.
‘What input?’ Mires demanded. He rounded on Kolyn. ‘Have you been retasking the bloody things behind my back again?’
‘Why would I do that?’ Kolyn snapped turning to look at the servitor with irritated bafflement. ‘Specify input.’
‘Input continuing,’ the machine-thing said, and Throne strike me down if I’m exaggerating, but I could swear I heard a glimmer of expression in that flat mechanical voice. An echo of contempt and spiteful amusement. Ignoring Mires, and heedless of whatever he might have to say about it, I squeezed the trigger of my laspistol.
I can’t say I’ve had to take potshots at servitors all that often in the course of my long and inglorious career, most of the things wanting to kill me having been composed of flesh and blood (or something not too dissimilar: unless you count the necrons, of course, or some of the bizzare denizens of the warp, which aren’t exactly living in any conventional sense), but I’d been faced with combat models programmed to make a mess of my uniform on more than one occasion. That experience came in handy now, guiding my aim to one of the more vulnerable points, where the neural modulator was plugged in to the base of its skull. (A system which would have been armoured on a combat model, of course, but which civilian ones left easily accessible for routine maintenance; although I doubted that those aboard the Fires of Faith would have benefited much from the arrangement.) The las-bolt hit it square on, with a satisfying shower of sparks, and a spatter of blood and lubricants.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Mires bellowed, while Jaren squealed like a startled gretchin and jumped back, gazing down in slack-jawed astonishment at the mess on his shirt.
Instead of falling, the servitor turned to face me, its eyes alight with malign intelligence, the ruined mechanism seeming to liquefy and meld with its necrotic flesh. Power cables tore free from the lectern it manned, wrapping themselves around its limbs, while cancerous growths sprouted around and between them, absorbing the crackling flails into its body. ‘Input complete,’ it announced smugly. ‘I’ve arrived.’
‘Look out!’ I shouted, but it was too late: the cables snaked towards the fleeing Jaren, who jerked for a moment as the current coursed through his body, before falling insensible to the deck. Unsure whether he was still living, or merely twitching by galvanic reflex, I put my next las-bolt through his head before returning my aim to the abomination taking form in front of me: it was too late to save his life, but I might still have been in time to preserve his soul.
Jurgen, of course, had needed no urging to open fire himself, and was directing burst after burst of las-bolts at the deformed monstrosity. Jaren’s body was being dragged towards it, still surrounded by a nimbus of crackling energy, as much witch-fire as electricity if I was any judge27; before my horrified gaze, it too began to flow, like melting wax, blood, flesh and bone going to redouble the size of the biomechanical horror in front of us.
‘Daemon on the bridge,’ I voxed, my voice cracking with panic. ‘We need backup. Lasguns won’t stop it!’
‘What can we do?’ Mires asked, all bluster gone, staring at the thing in slack-jawed horror.
‘Run,’ I said, preparing to do the same, and wondering if I’d need to use my chainsword to get through the little knot of panic-stricken crewmen blocking the door. ‘Unless you want to be next on the menu.’
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t, and joined the general exodus, while Jurgen and I kept peppering the abomination before us with ineffectual las-rounds to cover the civilians’ retreat. Which, as I’ve already admitted, was hardly my first choice of action; but I had a pretty good idea that the more the daemon fed, the stronger it would become, and saving Mires and his rabble from becoming warp spawn munchies would make an appreciable difference to my own chances of getting off the Fires of Faith with skin and soul intact. Besides, under the circumstances, the closer I could stick to Jurgen the better, and by great ill fortune we’d ended up furthest from the door.
‘Frak this,’ Jurgen said, with what seemed to me at the time to be commendable understatement, and unslung the melta. Hardly the most suitable thing to be using on the bridge of a starship, surrounded by arcane mechanisms of all kinds, but any collateral damage we might do would be a problem for later; whereas the daemon was most definitely a problem for now. I’d faced such things before, though not often, thank the Emperor28, so I knew we couldn’t kill it; but if we could inflict enough damage on the ghastly thing it would be drawn back into the warp. I closed my eyes by reflex as Jurgen pulled the trigger, and felt the backwash of heat as the glare of the discharge punched through the thin layer of skin to leave pinpricks of light dancing on my retina. Blinking them clear, I could see a few scorch marks on the metal components of the writhing abomination, but no sign of damage to its flesh, which was continuing to flow like congealing fat, twisting itself into ever more bizarre forms.
‘Chaplain’s on his way,’ Kasteen voxed, as the last of the panicking civilians cleared the room. ‘Can you keep it pinned until he gets there?’
‘We can try,’ I said, with an eye on the door, careful not to say anything which sounded like a promise. So far as I was concerned we could pin it down just as well from the corridor, or, better still, from one of the shuttle bays.
‘It’s still growing,’ Jurgen said, and with a thrill of horror I realised he was right. The metal floor was softening around the daemon, lapping against its bulging calves like the swell on a beach, the very fabric of the ship itself becoming fodder for the warp-spawned monstrosity. He fired the melta again, and this time I saw the flesh bubble and spit, like over-cooked stew, before scabbing over an instant later with a carapace of metal.
The daemon laughed, an ugly sound, all the more sinister for being filtered through the mechanical larynx which had once belonged to the mindless servitor now entombed at the heart of the living cancer swelling before my eyes.
‘Take out the cables!’ I shouted, seeing a new, more insidious threat. The waving mechanical tendrils which had snared and electrocuted Jaren were now snaking their way towards the control lecterns: even as I watched, the nearest began burrowing into the station Kolyn had manned. I had no idea what the monstrosity before us would do if it gained control of the ship, and had even less desire to find out.
Powering up my chainsword to its maximum speed, I sheared through the cable in a shower of sparks, feeling a jolt in my arm like a kick from a Space Marine as the current it carried discharged itself through the weapon. Fortunately the hilt was insulated for just such a contingency, and most of what sparked across the gap was taken care of by my glove. I can’t pretend it was an enjoyable sensation, but I had no doubt that I’d be feeling a good deal worse if the daemon managed to carry out whatever plan it had in mind.
‘The cables. Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen agreed, as imperturbable as ever, and set about reducing the ones he could see to slag with a series of well-placed melta blasts, while I gritted my teeth and sliced through another one, with results as uncomfortable as before.
Disconcertingly, the daemon continued to laugh the whole time, as though it was finding the whole thing a tremendous joke; a moment later I discovered why. The cable ends I’d severed were still moving, instead of having the common decency to lie still on the deck the way they should have done.
My first intimation of the unexpected danger was the sudden strike of the metallic serpents, which coiled themselves around me while my attention was on the swelling mound of flesh and metal that had spawned them. I fought for breath as the tentacles contracted, my ribs creaking, expecting to feel them crack at any moment, while I struggled fruitlessly to free the arm holding my chainsword. At least the daemon could no longer discharge electricity down the wires, apparently needing a physical connection for that, but as the grey mist hovered in front of my eyes, that was scant comfort. Dimly, I felt myself drawn towards the hideous entity, inchoate terror pounding at my temples, as it prepared to devour my very soul.
Then, abruptly, I felt the constricting bands of metal falling away, and discovered I could breathe again; a mixed blessing, as my gasps brought with them a strong and familiar odour.
‘It’s all right sir,’ Jurgen said, pulling the last coil away, and dropping it on the floor, where it lay reassuringly inert. ‘They come off easy enough.’ Which indeed they had, although I doubted whether anyone else could have managed it, devoid as they were of his peculiar talent29. Just to make sure, he reduced them to a puddle of slag with a quick melta blast, before turning to face the ghastly mound of flesh and metal again.
‘Fall back,’ I said, seeing our path to the door clear at last, and cracking off a couple of shots as I made for it. The daemon moved swiftly to cut us off then, as I’d hoped, flinched back at the last moment as it came within range of whatever it was about Jurgen so many denizens of the Cursed Realm found so disturbing. As it did so, he fired the melta again, and this time the damage he did remained, an ugly cauterised scar across its flesh, the softened metal licked by the beam glowing red in the dimly-lit bridge. For the first time it stopped laughing, and a roar of anger and revulsion echoed around the chamber.
‘Stick close to it,’ I said, seeing the tiny pockmarks left by my laspistol bolts remaining on the distended skin, instead of fading as they had done before. The same thing had happened when we’d fought the daemon on Adumbria, I recalled, with a faint flicker of hope; but then we’d had the massed firepower of an entire company concentrated on the abomination, with Jurgen somehow nullifying its ability to heal itself, and even then it had been a close run thing.
I hesitated, wondering whether we should make the best of the tiny advantage we had, and hope to the Throne we could find a way to exploit it, or simply make a run for it while we still had the chance. Before I could make up my mind, however, the clatter of boots in the corridor and a resonant voice chanting arcane gibberish in High Gothic did it for me; I could hardly let the troopers see the legendary Ciaphas Cain heading for the saviour pods, and expect them to watch my back in the future, so as the chaplain and whichever squad had been unlucky enough to be found by him on the way up burst into the bridge I turned back to face the looming pile of flesh and mechanica, flourishing my chainsword in an appropriately heroic manner. By great good fortune I happened to catch a lump of flesh protruding from between two chunks of metal, and severed it in a suitably dramatic spray of ichor.
‘Commissar! Get down!’ Chaplain Tope bellowed, in a voice accustomed to carrying to the far corners of a chapel without the benefit of a magnavox, and I complied at once, Jurgen following my lead as always. Several small objects arced over my head, bursting against the daemon, which shrieked in a most satisfying fashion; as I rose to my feet, I could see great swathes of it hissing and bubbling, the flesh liquefying, and the metal subliming into froth.
‘Acid?’ I asked, perplexed, wondering where he could have found so much of the stuff, and Tope laughed, in what sounded like honest amusement.
‘Holy water,’ he said. ‘Blessed it myself. Good, eh?’
Well, I could hardly argue with that; I’ve little enough time for Emperor-botherers in the normal course of events, but I can’t deny they have their uses at moments like this. Before I could thank him, the screaming daemon lashed out in our direction, ripping a couple of the lecterns from the floor, and battering a handful of the newly-arrived troopers against the wall with them.
‘Look out!’ I warned, ducking again in the nick of time as a flailing tendril of melting flesh hurtled in our direction. I caught it a good one with the chainsword on the way past, but the whirling blade simply tore a gash along the length of it; despite my best efforts it struck Tope full on, with enough force to dent a Chimera, and sent him skidding away across the deck.
‘It can’t do that to a man of the Emperor!’ Jurgen said, in tones of outraged piety, letting fly with the melta again, this time managing to punch a hole the size of his head deep into the daemon’s guts. I don’t know how much of the damage was due to his own ability, and how much to the chaplain’s spiritual assault on the thing30, but in any event it looked like the coup de grace; the towering abomination staggered, and crashed to the deck, assisted on its way by a volley of lasgun fire from the assembled troopers.
‘Flamers!’ Tope bellowed, scrambling to his feet with the aid of the nearest lectern, and adjusting the Guard-issue helmet he’d adorned with his rosarius to an incongruously jaunty angle31. Not for the first time, it seemed, his badge of office had protected him where lesser, or less pious, men would not have been so fortunate. ‘Finish it!’
Since I couldn’t argue with that, I stood aside, while a trio of troopers with incendiary weapons hosed the fallen giant down with blazing promethium, blistering the air in the suddenly smaller seeming chamber. The flames roared up, burning with an unhealthy bluish tinge, which reminded me once again of witchfire. The daemon’s bellows were growing weaker, and it thrashed about futilely, making even more of a mess of the bridge controls if that were possible.
‘It’s shrinking!’ I said, hardly daring to believe it, and shot a couple more pistol rounds into the spasming inferno, more for the sake of appearances than because I expected it to do any good.
‘Losing its grip on the material plane,’ Tope said, advancing, and beginning to recite the Rite of Exorcism. So far as I know he’d never had to perform one before, but he threw himself into it with rather more relish than I would have expected. Jurgen helped it along with a final melta blast, and the hideous thing suddenly vanished, with a sharp crack! of imploding air.
I looked around at the wreckage of the bridge, which had suddenly fallen silent, except for the groans of the wounded, and the faint crackle of the small fires scattered here and there, where spilled promethium from the flamers was slowly burning itself out. Hardly a control station seemed left intact.
‘I’d better perform a full cleansing ritual before we let the crew back in,’ Tope said after a moment, and I nodded, still trying to take in the extent of the devastation.
‘If you think there’s any point,’ I said. ‘They can hardly fly the ship from here now.’
A cold knot of fear began winding itself tightly around my stomach as I finished speaking, and the full import of my own words sank in. Barring a miracle, the Fires of Faith had just become a coffin for us all.
