‘Valuable in more than one way.’
‘Precisely,’ said Schenk.
For the first time since Armageddon, Seroff felt the thrill of hope run through his old veins. ‘A new plague catalogued, analysed and contained,’ he said.
‘A threat to the galaxy halted,’ Schenk added.
With the hope came Seroff’s first real smile in living memory. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it may be that what has fallen from the skies will make us rise again.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ said Schenk.
‘And He avenges.’
Schenk’s rebreather was a bulky piece of equipment, a thing of brass that turned her head into an avian skull with a blunted beak. It was a relic of her early days in the Inquisition. She would never have been able to acquire a tool like this on Eremus. It filtered out almost every known toxin. The tinted goggles cycled through a wide range of light wavelengths, letting her see shifts in temperature and radiation that might point to sites of infection and vectors of contagion. They were controlled thanks to an interior mechadendrite that plugged into a socket in the base of her skull. This was the first time she had had cause to use it in the field on Eremus, though she wore it often during her experiments in the laboratorium.
The rebreather felt heavy on her shoulders, and the weight of her greatcoat pulled at her too. The juvenat treatments available on Eremus were flawed, and she was old now. Everything was heavier, and she was slower. The same was true of Seroff. They were both bent figures now. They weren’t shuffling, at least, but they could no longer run as they once had. If she had to sprint, she didn’t think she would be able to.
She doubted that would be necessary. The fires in the infected zone were dying down. Seroff had established a perimeter of sorts a mile away from the nearest fire. His perimeter was wider than it had to be, expanding the region that needed to be bombarded. Still, Schenk approved of the precaution. A few thousand more casualties lost to artillery shells was barely worth mentioning. What mattered was to contain the threat, identify it, and then eliminate it.
Perhaps she could learn from it, too. The symptoms were profoundly disturbing, and understanding what caused them would, she thought, make them less fearsome. She was relieved that it was not the Plague of Unbelief that had come to Eremus. The nature of the impact still bothered her. It felt so purposeful. Had the Plague of Unbelief appeared, it would have seemed like her past reaching out to claim her.
Schenk advanced beyond the perimeter with a squad of troopers. They were using rebreathers. If the plague travelled on airborne particulates, those masks would not offer much protection. Schenk was not convinced it did, though. It seemed extremely lucky that she and Seroff had not inhaled anything at all in that cell.
Schenk hadn’t advanced more than a hundred yards from the perimeter’s edge when she heard the cries. The screams were too close to be from the burned region. The heaps of metal wreckage scattered the echoes, and the screams were scattered too. They came from ahead and from the sides. They were rising moans and falling gurgles. They were grief and terror and agony, and they blended together in a tapestry that surprised Schenk by having a clear identity. The precise nature of the pain she heard was new to her, yet she knew it immediately for what it was. She was hearing the violent decay of a city.
She signalled to her escort. ‘We may have to fight,’ she said. She could hear panic too, in the blend of shrieks. And there would be no question of letting anyone past. She might want a few specimens, though she was doubtful about the utility of trying to capture one. Remmis had died within less than a minute of the symptoms appearing. She would have to content herself with observing the effects, and trying to gauge the extent of the infection and the speed of its spread. She had hopes of collecting samples of contaminated matter for later study, but for now, knowing how to contain the plague was her priority.
Schenk headed for the nearest screams. As she and the troopers rounded the gutted shell of a hab-block, the shrieks blasted through the empty window frames of the structure. The sound grew louder, and also harder to identify. Schenk frowned. Some of those voices did not sound human.
Around the corner of the building, she found the source of the screams. There were twenty or thirty people here. Most were dragging themselves along the ground, gouging their flesh open on the sharp edges of refuse, trying to scrape away ponderous masses of tumours. The infected were moving away from the centre of the contagion, and they were changing as they went. There was no pattern to the metamorphoses. One man had lost his legs, and was leaving behind a thick trail of slime that boiled and bubbled, lashing back and forth like a thing alive. The body of the woman ahead of him was spreading and flattening out, her ribs pushing out of her flesh and turning into pale blind snakes. Schenk saw tentacles sprouting from necks, heads that had become nothing but gaping, snapping jaws, and flesh that sluiced away like melting candle wax. The only constant was transformation followed by immediate decay. The sticky, squirming stench of the plague forced its way through the rebreather filters and stung Schenk’s eyes. Her breath hitched in anxiety, but she did not fall to the plague.
Some of the infected were still running, fleeing their more corrupted kin. They sped towards Schenk and the troopers, but did not see them. Their eyes, the ones that were still truly eyes and not sprouting vines or snapping insects, were blank with horror. Perhaps they saw the world around them enough to keep moving, but visions of a greater horror assailed them.
The troopers opened fire before Schenk could give the signal. She did not object. Las cut into the bodies of the fleeing people. They dropped, their wounds smouldering, and their bodies erupted into sudden, explosive change. The dust of their final disintegration whipped up into the air. It spread in every direction, and Schenk saw that it was not carried by any wind, but driven by some other, unnatural impulse. Where it landed, the plague spread. The dust was how the contagion spread. She and Seroff had escaped its taint, but now she saw the unmistakeable evidence of its power.
It was more than the infected that made her start to back away. It was more than the dust arcing up from the bodies in plumes. It was the other way the plague spread. It was the other kind of infection she saw taking hold.
Schenk believed in the possibility of returning the Emperor to life, in having him walk again among his children. She had never abandoned her faith as a Revivificator, even though the Inquisition in its totality, her faction included, had abandoned her. She had continued her work on Eremus, still looking for the way to bring life to the dead. She never stopped believing such a miracle was possible, but she had ceased to believe she might be the one to discover the secret. She had vented her frustration, her anger and her bitterness on her subjects, dispassionately observing atrocious suffering and death on her medicae tables. That sour, petty vengeance on the galaxy that had betrayed her was all that she had left.
And now she saw the miracle. Now she saw life spring out of dead matter. Only it was the wrong sort of miracle. This was not revival, for the matter that cried out in the pain of birth had never been alive before. It was stone and rockcrete and iron and glass that stirred and screamed. The flat surfaces of building façades, of the broken road and of sheets of debris wrinkled like flesh. With grinds and cracks, rigid materials bent, tore and parted, revealing the glistening of teeth and the staring horror of eyes. What had been inanimate came to life, and it screamed and writhed to feel itself diseased and dying. Wherever the dust of bodies fell, new life stirred, and the pangs rippled outward along the full length of the girders or the stone blocks, infecting whatever they touched. The disease was rushing over the industrial landscape of Eremus like a consuming tide.
Schenk turned her gaze from the abomination transpiring close to her. She looked back towards the impact site, and saw the rise of more and greater ash plumes. Entire hills were moving, sliding down as they decayed, and struggling to lurch forward as if they might escape their doom. There was movement everywhere she looked, and it was spreading quickly. Somehow, a critical mass had been reached, and the plague was reaching out to grasp all of Eremus. The futility of her mission and of Seroff’s efforts at quarantine hit her so hard she staggered.
She and the troopers were still backing up, still holding on to a form of order. The soldiers had killed almost all the mutating civilians. The bodies no longer crawled. They were not the threat. The dust they were turning into was the danger, the dust rising and spreading and grasping at the world.
‘Run,’ Schenk said. There was no mission to accomplish here. Her revived ambition turned to ash in her chest. ‘Back to the perimeter,’ she said. That would be no protection, but that wasn’t her concern. She could barely think past that point. She found that she could run. Terror gave her energy, and she could ignore the pain in her limbs. She had to outrun the spread of the plague.
Outrun it to where?
She suppressed the thought. If she despaired now, she would die before she had a chance to think of a way to make good a true escape.
‘The dust is contagious,’ she warned the troopers. ‘Do not let it touch you.’
The troopers heard her, and they ran. They had held true to their training until now, but when she broke and fled, they revealed the limits of how far Seroff had been able to shape them. Schenk had been their one shield against panic. She was the Inquisition, the authority who had the ability to end the crisis. If the Inquisition was helpless, there was no hope. They dropped their weapons and ran, quickly outpacing her. They glanced back in fear at the rotting transformations spreading over the land, and ran faster.
More and more dust rose up. As the larger buildings and mountains of refuse caught the infection, their decompositions hurled tons of dust into the air, like ash from a volcanic eruption. For the moment the dust was relatively contained, climbing up directly above the bodies and mounds that produced it, but spreading only a short distance outward. As unstoppable as the contagion was, its spread was advancing in incremental stages, as if it were gathering strength for a shattering blow.
The sense of volition lurking behind that hesitation chilled Schenk’s blood even further. The expanse of her ignorance before this plague was staggering. After a lifetime of study, she understood nothing. She was helpless before this foulness. She was no better than the lowest, most ignorant serf. She was just another tiny figure fleeing in panic, as if running would somehow be enough to save her life.
The troopers pulled further ahead of Schenk, though the way the path twisted through the industrial dereliction slowed them down. They were still in her sight when the plague caught them. One fell, then another, and then the rest in quick succession, the contagion jumping faster between them as more became infected. Schenk slowed down, her lungs rasping like rusted metal in her chest, her breaths thunderous echoes inside the rebreather helm. The twisting bodies blocked her path.
She stopped, exhausted and puzzled. She glanced back and up at the dust cloud. Its leading edge was still a short distance to the rear. As far as she could tell, no dust had fallen here yet. And if it had, why wasn’t she infected too? Perhaps her rebreather was keeping the dust away from her, but that would not matter if it turned into a dying, snarling monster around her skull. She could see no reason for the soldiers to be convulsing before her, their bodies opening up, their organs snapping at each other with stingers and claws, their bones whiplashing into contortions of ecstatic pain.
She was missing something. Even her diagnosis of her helplessness was lacking. She was failing to grasp even the most basic elements of the plague’s contagion.
Think later. Run now. Even if she was wrong about how humans contracted the plague, she had seen the dust infect stone and metal. If she was caught in dustfall, she would die in gibbering rockcrete jaws. She hesitated a moment longer. The route blocked by the dying troopers ran between two long hab-blocks. It would take her half an hour to try to detour around either building and find her way back onto a route towards the perimeter.
Go now, before they turn into dust.
The mad hope of an immunity danced through her mind and she ran. There was no choice. Irrationally, she held her breath as she passed between liquefying humans. Her skin prickled in the anticipation of being clutched by disease. Then she was past the dying soldiers and running between the stained, leaning walls of the hab-blocks. She ran for the other end of the passage between the buildings as if it were a meaningful goal.
As if Seroff’s quarantine line represented actual refuge.
And yet, even though terror snapped at her heels and squeezed her heart, she still felt immune. At her innermost core, where the bitter stone of her being had been shaped and polished by year upon year of frustrations and disappointments, she could not really believe she would succumb to the plague. Such an end was not permissible. The Emperor and fate would not allow it.
So she struggled onward, clad in the armour of soured pride. Behind her, the clouds of monstrous transformation gathered and thickened.
‘What have you done, inquisitor?’ Seroff muttered. One plume of dust after another climbed into the sky. From this position, on the perimeter of the quarantine, it was impossible to see their origins, other than being in the infected zone. This section of the perimeter was somewhat elevated, though, and Seroff caught glimpses of large movements. He thought he saw a hill of detritus drop out of sight with a plunging motion, then more dust shot upwards. All of this had begun within minutes of Schenk entering the contaminated sector.
