Spear of the Emperor (Warhammer 40,000) by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Author:Aaron Dembski-Bowden [Dembski-Bowden, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

We fought our way to the astropathic bastion; the conjoined district of the Hex given over to housing the psychic choir and generation of the Geller field to shield us through warp voyages. Casualties here had been immense after the Venatrix had detonated her psychic mine, and the first Spears to reach the temple-barracks had encountered seething horrors.

We waded through the aftermath, making for the inner chambers. Faelan hesitated at the cobalt corpses strewn among the dead and the damned, momentarily stunned by the sheer number of fallen brothers.

‘We’re here,’ he voxed over the master comm channel. The only reply he earned was static. Elsewhere on the deck, far from us, we could hear faint gunfire. This wasn’t the pitched battle we’d expected to charge into.

Tolmach stepped forward, ready to begin harvesting the dead. Faelan’s raised hand warded the druid back.

Tolmach, his black plate miserable with gore, objected with silence. He didn’t want to wait, you could see it in his posture. To delay extraction risked degeneration of the progenoids, lowering the chance of successful implantation in other candidates. The process of human decay begins in the first seconds after death – invisible to the eye but observable on the ­minute level through medicae lenses. Cells and particles no longer adhere without life to glue them together. The breakdown of a body is deeply underway long before signs of visible rot.

‘There,’ Amadeus said softly, drawing Tolmach’s eye across the chamber.

It was just a child. Just a boy, sat amongst the dead, streaked with blood, washed by it, sheeted with it. He saw us, though our appearance did nothing to stop him. He ate by the fistful, his small hands clutching gobbets of viscera from the slain.

The grotesque swelling of his head coupled with a waspish buzz in the air told us all we needed to know. Looking at him for more than a moment made my eye ache. The chamber around him shimmered with heat haze, though I registered no change in temperature.

The boy looked at each of us in turn. As his bloodshot eyes drifted over me, his voice caressed the edges of my thoughts, as if I were hearing a whisper beneath a spoken conversation.

Come to me.

It’s easy to describe the effect those words had on us, for we obeyed them, but words are inadequate to define why we were compelled to obey. A psychic compulsion implies… what? An order that can’t be disobeyed? A shove towards obedience, like a push from behind? Something that can’t be resisted?

It wasn’t like that at all.

Come to me, he whispered, and I felt nothing but revulsion. His sticky, silent tone. His greasy, swollen flesh. The cranial deformities of an oversized brain that had blossomed along twisted genetic paths, at the whims of mad gods.

Come to me.

But if I moved forward, I could come at him from the side while my master and the Spears engaged from other angles. If I moved closer, I might be able to take him with my blade while he was focused on Amadeus.

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