[center][h1][u]Remnants[/u][/h1][/center]


[b]Last days of the Unification Wars
Former Pan-Pacific territory, undisclosed site[/b]


[hr]


There was nothing remarkable about the building. Not from the outside. It was a broad, squat fortified thing of stark rockcrete, one among millions of bunkers that had sprung up across the face of Terra like a plague of sterile grey fungi as her inhabitants sought the protection of durable walls against the madness without. Nothing greatly differentiated this particular fastness from the innumerable others that the Exercitus Imperialis had taken by storm during the conquest of the Pan-Pacific Empire: not its flat roof resting upon blocky walls, not the narrow windows, better suited for gun barrels than human eyes, not even the wide entryway that now stood open, a black gaping pit like a sepulchral maw, after its doors had been blasted away, leaving dark scorch-marks around its frame. The only slightly unusual feature about this facility were the outer walls, an additional layer of defense crowned with barbed wire, and the utilitarian white symbols painted around their gates. The universal signs for “contamination” and “lethal danger” loomed large among the Pacifican script.


These days, most things on Terra were exactly what they seemed. There was little purpose in embellishments that might be marred the day after, and few could afford even the luxury of deception. Thus, a fortress was always no more nor less than a fortress, an army was an army, and what was dead was certain to have been reduced to that state with uncompromising ferocity. Something that concealed a hidden truth was an ill omen. It meant that either the wyrd was at work, or perhaps something yet worse.


For this reason and others, Sharpshooter Bartok did not like hidden truths. In the life of a man at arms, the unexpected and the unknown always meant danger, and danger was a step away from death. So it had been with this place. At a glance, it looked precisely like an empty, hollowed-out bunker, scoured of all resistance. Something to mark on the map and move on to the next straightforward, clearly defined objective. Nothing to worry about anymore.


But empty bunkers did not swallow half a company whole.


“Still nothing?” Bartok turned to the trooper crouching by the field voxcaptor set on the ground. They had struck a tentative camp in the front part of the courtyard, between the breached outer gates and the eerie abyss of the facility door. None of the company’s roughly hundred surviving men liked this arrangement. Even the sentinels by the outer wall were on edge, shuffling nervously at their posts in their dark green longcoats. They still had it better than the teams watching the door, who huddled miserably behind a makeshift barricade of rubble, surmounted by emplaced heavy stubbers and sentry guns in case something other than the missing platoons came out.


The vox-man, a swarthy fellow from somewhere near the Xeric borders named Marhej, shook his head. The receiver machine continued to crackle uselessly. It was both a torment and a relief. Neither of them truly hoped or even wished to hear anything else after that last message, but a new sound, whatever it might be, could at least displace the echoes still ringing in their minds after two hours.


Gunfire. Screams, screams that did not even sound human. Something crashing, tearing, breaking. A voice, unrecognisably distorted by pain and terror, shrieking into the vox. [i]“Bomb it! Bomb this place! Blow it all to fra-!”[/i]


That had been the last any of them had heard of the first platoon.


Bartok spat on the ground and looked away from the door. He should have known it would turn out badly. The assignment had already started with a hidden truth. Despite its appearance, the place they had been sent to capture was known to be no mere fortified holdout, though neither was it clear what exactly it was. Some sort of gene-lab, the commanders said. A valuable thing, to be taken as intact as possible. That had not seemed so bad at first. With the Pacifican genewarriors long since annihilated on the frontlines, it was unlikely any would be left to guard the facility. When they had crossed the gates, Bartok had been glad to not be in the units assigned to clear out the place. Sweeping up some lethargic guards and cowering geneweavers was going to be dull work. Now, beneath the dread and anguished uncertainty, he was even gladder.


At least it was certain no more of them would be going in again. Their side’s own genecrafted elite was arriving, the Master of the Lines’ own terrors to fight those of the devouring unknown. While their coming had been a relief, Bartok still did not quite like just how well those words applied to the first of the Astartes to arrive. He had heard awestruck tales from those who had fought on the frontlines alongside the striking Legions clad in bronze and black, in yellow or unvarnished grey. These newcomers, in their drab green battleplate, were nothing of the sort.


Even as far as they were now, in a far corner of the courtyard, it was clear they were an uneven lot. There was no uniformity to their postures or even sizes. Some were of the towering stature expected of a genewarrior, others much larger yet, broad and immense, heavy and lumbering of step. Several stood hunched, limbs perpetually bent and leaning forward like upright birds of prey. Most of them wore great cloaks of cheap industrial cloth, ragged and filthy, to conceal their forms, but now and then their movements revealed unwelcome glimpses of what lay beneath. Metal crudely melded to inflamed flesh. Engorged, cancerously swollen folds of muscle under cracking skin. Spurs and protrusions of what looked like exposed bone. Bartok suspected his comrades were just as uneasy about the presence of these uncanny giants as they were about the facility; he certainly was. This entire war was supposed to cleanse the world of monsters, not create more of them. He spat again and looked away.


Fortunately, they would not be left alone with their silent company much longer.


Indeed, they were joined by the troops of the Fifth, now fashionable late. They were clad in quite variant colours, the result of them all having adapted camouflages for different scenarios. However there likely wouldn’t be any need for such herein, and thus they hadn’t bothered to refresh their paintjobs. 


They were split into two groups. One was clearly the ‘heavy’ team for lack of a better term. They wore power armour with field modifications like extra plates of plasteel or ceramite welded on, in particular on the front while being armed with weapons suited for the most violent of combat within the laboratory. Additional flashlights would complement rotor cannons, grenade launchers, melta guns, flamers, shotguns and different shields. The second team were their opposite. Wearing skintight mesh armour, they carried long monoblades, and more sleek firearms with large muzzle devices. As a conscious effort, the Fifth tended to recruit shorter individuals where possible, a fact when compounded with their geneseed not making the Marines bearing it as tall as other Legions let these fellows be just about believable as mere mortal humans, if perhaps afflicted with acromegaly. These were meant to provide a softer touch, akin to more traditional mortal special forces.


Separate, would be the leadership. The Fifth had little in the way of leading from the front. Still, they were cognizant that they needed to take advantage of the fact they were Astartes. Thus the command squad would look as ordinary as Space Marines could, bearing a boltgun each. 


It would be them that approached the elements of the Nine, raising a hand in greeting. Once closer, it would be clear that three of the five in the command squad were Apothecaries. They looked upon the Ninth with a mixture of pity as if towards an injured orphan child, and curiosity as if looking at an already rare flower with a new and interesting mutation of colour. “Are you ready, comrades?” One would ask.


Their counterparts had already begun to turn and approach, some more ponderously than others where they were weighed down by their own overgrown bodies. From the front, their makeshift shrouds revealed more of the malformations beneath. Most wore sparse and haphazard pieces of armour, plates of outgrown bone or bloated proportions distorting them so severely as to make full suits impractical. The helmets of those who still wore them had their grilles removed, leaving what remained of their faces bare below the visors - unfleshed rictus snarls of withered mandibles, or wide mouths propped open by their own forests of long sharp teeth. Their armaments, however, were undiminished - the folds of the cloaks bristled with chainblades, flamer tubes, muzzles of bolter and volkite alike. The larger mutates even bore heavy culverins and autocannons in their oversized hands.


The group that came forward to meet the Fifth, however, was untouched by this grotesquerie. Fully covered in grey-green powered plate, they were as unremarkable as any Astartes squad besides for the number of mechanical replacement limbs, each body welded to at least one. Several among them likewise wore familiar tools, the narthecia and bone-saws of the apothecarion.


“Ready and eager,” the foremost of the Ninth, one of the bearers of medical tools, replied in a grave voice. Evidently he was the one that had been designated as the detachment’s leader in the preliminary data transmissions - one Tzosh Ghaal, curiously with no formal rank except an odd [i]primus medicae[/i]. “It will be well to fight along our twice fellows, in rebirth and calling both.”


A chuckle came from the one that had spoken to the Ninth, the Apothecary Arvo briefly pointing out his counterpart as the Fifth shared glances. “A good attitude, comrade.” Though obviously ugly things, perhaps the Ninth were more similar to the Undying Onslaught than the much more aesthetically pleasing Legions. Still, they wouldn’t deign to call them brother or cousin, finding the term objectionable despite any similarities. 


They wouldn’t wait any longer, and started heading towards the entrance as they kept speaking. “We trust you have reviewed the footage and records from the army units previously wiped out? We had hoped to at least in part trace them up until their failing points.” 


“For as much as we have,” Ghaal gestured to the gaping darkness of the doorway with his good hand. His brothers slowly began to rise from their places and file after him towards the building, damp cloaks raggedly hanging about them. Their movements were no less ungainly than the features that could be glimpsed among the drooping folds, each echoing their particular sorts of malformation. The larger ones trudged heavily, more similar to stiff-limbed automaton walkers than anything human. The others loped in a hunched, furtive way, bent low by crooked spines and unstraightening joints. Wretched as the sight may have been, there was something predatory in these shambling figures, an air of tense aggression ready to spring forth from their distorted limbs.


"The truth is that we have little to guide us," Ghaal was saying, "No plans of this place have been found. The Army only had a rough map of the first three floors and a record of their vox transmissions to give us."


He glanced towards the soldiers at the listening post, who were nervously avoiding to look at the Astartes for more than a few moments.


"We can at least triangulate the movements of the first groups and where contact stopped," the Primus Medicae continued, "But we will have to scout for ourselves. Are enough of your brothers skilled in the duty?"


Arvo tilted his head this way and that, as if within it were weights being balanced until finally reaching an equilibrium within which he could confidently speak to his counterpart. “Yes, we do. However, from what we have reviewed, at least the initial entry doesn’t merit scouting. Well, beyond scouting-by-fire.” As if to punctuate this, one of the Fifth’s warriors in his improvised heavy armour spun the barrels of his rotor cannon by hand.


“Once we progress past the point that the Army did, we hope there will be confines that our lighter warriors can scout within. But until then, we expect them to follow behind.”


The space beyond the ominous maw of the blasted doorway was indeed not only well-known, but almost unthreatening in its ruinous silence. A wide unadorned corridor, now thinly carpeted with dust and debris from the breach, ran directly from the entrance into the depths of the building, soon becoming lost to the sight of anyone not equipped with some form of night vision. Eerie as it appeared in the feeble patches of light that filtered down from the grey sky, it was also almost disappointingly banal. Nothing about the entryway set it apart from a hundred other fortified facilities that had been breached during the conquest of the Empire. Dimly glimpsed doors lined bare walls, showing fragments of unadorned, regularly-spaced rooms within. Despite the open entrance, the air stank of dust and metal.


Nothing remarkable, and yet a company was gone.


Drops of murky rain began to fall from the darkening sky. They passed through.


The first floor had evidently been the administrative part of the complex as well as its outermost watchstation. Those of the rooms that had not been emptied held little but worn metallic desks, simple data-nodes wiped empty or outright broken and the occasional hololith. What little physical documentation remained was reduced to formless shreds tossed into corners. There were no signs of life throughout.


Strangely enough, the bulk of the internal defensive emplacements were not concentrated by the entrance. While most had been removed by the first Army squads, even at full condition they would have paled before what was arrayed before the access to the lower floors. Heavy, double-layered metal vault doors stood open at the far end of the large arterial corridor, under the silent watch of deactivated sentry guns fixed to the floor and walls. A simple control station was in the closest room, its observation hololith rendered inoperable. The stairwell leading down was sparsely lit by electric bands, most of them dark and shattered. Rising from below was a faint reek of antiseptic and, perceptible only to Astartes senses, the iron tang of spilled blood. Silence reigned.


The Astartes of the Fifth looked between each other, and then at their hideous comrades. “Proceed.” One of the Undying Onslaught spoke, his word bearing a strange music to it, as if it could be interpreted as an order, or a polite request, or a suggestion by the Ninth. The warriors of the Fifth moved carefully, a constant hum of their rotor cannons and the soft spin of active but not in-use chainblades as a sort of theme to their movement. In a way that might be alien to the Ninth, the Undying Onslaught would speak very swiftly, using short-hands to relay every single piece of information they came upon; descriptions of doorways, messes on tables, the slightest details would be spoken of over their vox networks such that in real time an almost perfect recreation of the scene was being made just a few hundred meters away by fellow legionnaires in the event that this foray also failed in the same way that the mortals had. 


Despite the curious glances they occasionally threw at their counterparts and their flurry of action, the legionnaires of the Ninth had remained mostly silent until then. The less misshapen among them called out now and again, signaling a room or piece of furniture, but their words were clipped and almost reluctant in contrast to the Fifth’s brisk efficiency. Nevertheless, they did not lack in vigor, prowling ahead in the dim corridors more deftly than their malformed limbs would have suggested. Two among the bloated-bodied giants took point at the stairway while the medicae behind them nodded to their compatriots, and the metallic steps groaned under huge armoured feet.


The opening to the staircase below mirrored the one on the ground floor, similarly barricaded and reinforced with now inert turrets, with the sole difference that the defenses faced in the opposite direction. A small access zone, reminiscent of an airlock, led into another central corridor, though this one bifurcated some way past the middle of its parallel. The doors in its sides were fewer and markedly wider.


Here the Astartes saw the first signs of the exploration force that had preceded them. A dozen bodies in the dark green of the Exercitus regiment guarding the facility were laid by the reinforced door. Their comrades had evidently planned to carry them on the way out when they returned, but never been afforded that opportunity. The dead bore wounds from bladed weapons, a few with the cauterised edge of a power field, but mostly simple slashes and gouges. Further along the corridor were the remains of some of the culprits. Muscular bodies in dark bodysuits, the sort that the infamous Pan-Pacific commandos wore underneath their armour. These few fallen were not as large as the dreaded stealth warriors, however, and some had oddly bulging, asymmetrical muscular masses. Like their equipment, their augmentation seemed to have been incomplete.


Behind the doors on this floor were far simpler, yet denser sights than on the floor above. Each led to a large hall, necessarily low but very ample, filled with rows of metal tables. The size and shape of these surfaces, which would have been at home in an operational room, left little to the imagination, but even inference was unnecessary. A few of them still held bodies covered with rough cloth, mouldering after days of neglect. The smell of antiseptic hung in the air.


“They received a fresh batch recently,” one of the Ninth Legion’s medicae remarked, glancing at a printed schedule pinned to the wall in the first chamber.


Following their comrades, the Fifth examined the place. They came to similar conclusions, but knew a few things that they had to do. Warriors would walk up to corpses, taking pictures of the fallen to be identified, before a boot would carefully be brought down a few times on each dead man to be absolutely certain that the dead wouldn’t get up behind them and shoot them in the back. The Apothecaries got to examining the dead for anything else they could learn from the corpses, while yet others of their formation got to further work. They put large vox-casters in points about the scene, setting up to help extend the range of their connection such that they wouldn’t lose contact when going further inside. Others would go about a third task, carefully placing mines about the place. Adding themselves and their comrades to the IFFs of the proximity charges lest they end up running for their lives from the scene, while also relaying their exact locations back to their comrades on the outside. 


“A grim business!” Arvo remarked, crushing the last of the dead. Perhaps it was unnecessary, but even slim and seemingly nonexistent risks had to be removed. But, most interesting to the natural lust for knowledge of the Fifth was the information still herein. They would look over the collected information of the surgeon’s tables. What could possibly be so important, so scientifically fascinating that they had such thorough and layered protections for their findings? But, even that was not all. Some would begin placing charges about the place for its eventual demolition from within. While yet others would go to find points of egress, ways that they could be flanked, poring over every wall to make sure it wasn’t a path of ambush. 


“We may see worse yet,” nodded Ghaal as he motioned to his cohorts. Unlike their brethren, the Ninth had no supplementary materiel to bring to bear, but the wealth of their supplies was measured in living flesh. At their leader’s command, two of the less disfigured legionnaires remained standing by the stairway access, while four more took position to watch over the newly placed vox units. The remainder had joined the search for hidden passages and documentation, however even the united effort of the two legions yielded tantalizingly little. A number of the tables bore cryptic labels with what seemed to be chemical dosages not unfamiliar to the medically trained - steroid cocktails, hormone stimulants, stabilizing salves of the sort used after implantation surgeries. Along with the dead commandos, it was evidence enough that this had been one of Narthan Dume’s genehancement facilities, but nothing thus far explained the abnormally heavy defenses.


Yet it was certain that nothing had been removed from the complex before the Army had surrounded it. Whatever answers it held awaited in its depths.


The Apothecary laughed. “And inflict twice as much I am sure!” The Fifth would be cordial to the Ninth to their face, and would never make mention of the disfigurement. But in private the fact they were malformed creatures wouldn’t be said merely because there was total concurrence. However, that just made them all the more pleasantly impressed at even the slightest bit of wittiness as such from them. They expected them to be… well, inarticulate, if simply because even the most cosmopolitan and open minded of people wouldn’t be willing to look past those visages. Thus them being more developed than a toddler in speech was already grand.


A partition in the corridor covered the way to the next downward staircase, evidently intended to regulate the flow of bodies coming up from below, but too flimsy to withstand the augmented strength of space marines. More alarming was the darkness - the phosphor-tubes along the walls and ceiling had been blown out, and only a few stablights placed by the first expedition cast sparse patches of illumination on bare grey surfaces. While it was little obstacle to transhuman senses, the poor lighting was a sign that something was amiss below.


Very slowly, the Fifth would at least temporarily lead the way. Rotor-cannon barrels were spinning as fast as they could be now, ready to turn organic matter into goo with a stream of bullets. Rather than the proud march one might expect of Astartes, they seemed more like nervous humans taking half-steps. In some sense, that was because that was exactly what they (or at least, some of them) were, the veterans in their ranks far more eager to indulge in human self-preservation instincts than the bravado having youth of their Legion and others. All the while, one of them also walked with an exceptionally large auspec device, one sized more for artillery systems than infantry for indeed it was torn off of a captured self propelled gun. Still, the Fifth were absolutely confident it would come in useful, the one carrying the device on his back having his eyes flick side to side frantically on his heads-up-display; if anything was hidden away, they were sure this big dish would sense it. Then again, a place this dense with esoteric (often archaeotech) devices might manage to avoid it through strange means. “We should consume the minds of the dead below.” One of the Marines hissed, turning his whirring gun this way and that in anticipation of attack. 


“A sound thought,” Ghaal agreed in a low rasp with almost disconcerting facility, and motioned for the contingent of the Ninth to follow after their legion-brothers. With their lumbering, prowling gait and disproportionate weaponry, it seemed a wonder that none of them had yet tripped or crashed into their fellows, but the ravages of their bodies had not wholly withered the inhuman grace that was the Astartes’ gift. They made for an unsightly procession as they filed down the corridor, yet an orderly one nonetheless. It could not have escaped the most observant of the Fifth, however, that their medicae brethren had thus far acted as ambassadors as much as guides for the afflicted lot.


The descent to the second sublevel was made more laborious by the force’s alert pace, the doubled-up stairway an uncomfortable bottleneck halfway sunken in darkness, but other than the fading light nothing impeded the Astartes’ progress. The ominous signs, however, continued to mount. As they stepped down, a deathly reek rose to meet them. Previously muffled by the antiseptic smell that pervaded the floor above, the scent of a fresh slaughter now struck their enhanced senses with intimations of spilled blood and opened bowels. Fortunately, the sickly sweet notes of decay were still thin and weak, kept at bay by the sterile air of the facility. Most aggravating of this foetor was that it cast a pall over any other scents, too rich for even the neuroglottis to parse.


Such stench was a fitting harbinger for what the group’s enhanced eyes saw in the penumbra once they had reached the lower floor. In a great hallway, almost as wide as the entire first level, the Imperial Army’s expedition had met its end. A mire of blood and dismembered bodies covered the ground, scraps of uniforms and battered weapons strewn about it like stones in a morass. Accounting for the casualties they had encountered earlier, there ought to have been little less than a hundred bodies here, but such was the ruin that their number was difficult to discern. By grim fortune, a number still had almost intact heads, sufficient for the Astartes’ macabre plan.


The unit had clearly been wiped out in a brutal close-quarters engagement against a foe of rare violence even by the measure of Terra - a foe that, troublingly, was nowhere to be seen now. Even the vague sounds heard earlier had died down. Only the massive auspex carried by the Fifth’s legionnaire now caught signs of life at their height, numerous indicators of motion and heat signatures quietly drifting somewhere in the maze of side-passages they could see branching out from the landing. The improvised maps cut off at this point, however, making it impossible to pinpoint these unknown presences more precisely.


The Auspex bearer of course immediately alerted his comrades, motioning for them quietly in battle-sign to approach. Certainly the enemy would hear their presence, but it would be best to not risk alerting them to what they were saying. He pointed out the presence of the foe, whilst several of the Fifth went to very carefully isolating brains from the skulls that were their shells, a disconcerting carefulness and practiced touch to this affair as if separating long dead humans into components was second nature to them.


“There are too many to take in an assault without losses. We need to engage them, and make our return here in a fast retreat. Funnel them, rather than let them surround us in the winding hallways and passages.” It wasn’t confirmed, but the experiments were used by the Fifth’s Apothecary to not subtly imply that this foe was likely some sort of engineered monstrosity that was not a master of tactics and strategy. 


Silently, what passed for the Reviled officers signed their assent to the plan, then turned to their brothers with a sharply gestured series of instructions. A band of the mutated Astartes stepped forward to join the Fifth’s light vanguards closer ahead in the hall, towards where the shadows of the branching corridors gathered. These were not the less degenerate sort left to stand sentry earlier, or the trudging hulks with their heavy weapons, but those hunched with contorted spines, bony spurs emerging from their skin and armour. They moved surprisingly limber on their bent legs, with a long elastic gait that had something starkly ferocious to it. Their steps seemed to produce no more sound upon the metallic floor than they intended.


Meanwhile, others joined in the dissection of the mangled bodies. Unlike their more clinical counterparts, their movements were dry and jerky, less the manner of surgeons than that of tribal warriors accustomed to claiming trophies of skull and scalp. More unsettling still were those who approached to sample the gray matter. Their jaws, exposed under their half-helmets, were distended by long, recurve teeth, resembling those of some abyssal creature more than anything human. The ease with which they bit into cranial bone and scooped out the tissue underneath in a single motion almost seemed to suggest that, despite being an aberration of growth, they were formed for no other purpose than this.


What the investigators of both Legions saw, in the echoed memories of the omophagea, was stark in its premortem clarity. Past the confused remnants of the soldiers’ long-term recollections, their final moments were burned into their neurons, marred only by the emotional haze of disorientation and fear. The sublevel had met the unit with a screaming darkness that disgorged hideous shapes glimpsed in the flashing of stablights, instants which the acute minds of the Astartes wrung for every detail. Scores or hundreds of grotesque figures that had once been human, bent limbs and misshapen thoraces swollen with muscles and scabbed skin, hands deformed into something that resembled talons or organic blades, faces that were nothing but displaced eyes and teeth. There was a method to these grotesqueries the apothecaries could recognise, however, unlike the surreal mutations of the wyrd. It was as though the human features of these things had been pared down to only what was fit for violence, and then magnified outrageously.


“Well that was bloody useless.” one of the Apothecaries remarked. “But the flavour was better than that of many other mortals at least!” Arvo jested, remarking upon those in his ranks that laughed sycophantically. 


The senses were surely one such thing, for the probing advances of the vanguard teams into the mouth of the corridors, their steps calculated to emit a measured amount of noise, had stirred something. The ears of the Astartes caught a distant shuffling, low but distinct. On the auspex, the points of sound and heat multiplied, certain of the latter curiously feebler than should have been expected of vigorous bodies. Slowly, the subterranean dwellers were beginning to converge. There was little coordination to most of their groupings, driven by what was evidently an animalistic intelligence, but their visible quantity was steadily increasing.


There was not much they could do but prepare to take the foe head-on, albeit ready to retreat. Mortals were far less than Astartes. But the suffering and terror inflicted on these souls wasn’t something to be discarded as simple human weakness; these were professionals that had fallen not mere press-ganged thugs as some parts of the Imperial army were. 


As one final precaution, a gust of promethium flame was made to cover the ground. Astartes power armour and physiognomy could navigate it unharmed if they sprinted fast enough, but any man (or beast) would have his very bones turn to ash trying to cross it. Barrels of rotorcannons spun, eyes stared down reticles, and nerves tensed in preparation of horrible carnage.


They were not to be disappointed. The signatures on the auspex intensified, drew closer still, and soon they could feel the enemy approach. Charnel stench, the smell of infected wounds and exposed muscle, wound through the tang of burning fuel. Steps pattered down the dark passages, stealthy at first, but gaining in weight and numbers as the creeping approach of the enemy grew into a rushing charge, enough to overtake the crackle of chemical flame.


The first of the foe emerged into the hallway, and it became clear that the fate of the Army contingent had been sealed the moment it had penetrated the sublevel. A throng of lithe, muscular figures pushed out from the junction corridors. They were superficially human, yet distorted in a way born of the madness of Old Night. Their long, sinewy limbs had too many joints, legs curving backwards below the knee, arms stretching and bending at mesmerizingly grotesque angles. In places, their skin was split, unable to grow apace with the brutal modifications to the body, and torn wounds wept a thin, translucent pus. Some few carried combat blades and wore the remains of tattered bodysuits, but most were naked, their only weapons the long, bony talons that flexed in place of their fingers. Faces frozen in hateful grimaces of mangled jaws and too many teeth glared at the Astartes, and with a mad screech the foremost ranks sprang forward.


Despite their appearance, the wretched creatures moved with the speed and coordination of transhuman commandos. Groups of them clung to the walls, seeking to flank, while more rushed straight into the flames, heedless of pain. Where they fell, the next assailants leapt over their writhing bodies. Bolts and autocannon rounds swept them off their feet in broken heaps, but greater numbers continued to spill into the central space, which now felt claustrophobically tight. Monomolecular-edged claws reached for vulnerable spots in the legionnaires’ armour, slashing and scraping at joints and throats. Whatever the stigmata of benighted science on the grotesques’ bodies, their minds clearly knew no purpose but to kill.


Roars were bellowed by the Imperials, for even through the outright miasmic flood of firepower into the oncoming foemen many of the victims of intellectual hubris in the facility were able to make it into close combat. Chainblades whirred, their naturally aggressive noise almost as deafening in the confines as the heavy weapons. They didn’t pass now through meat and bone the way they usually did, these aberrations impressively resilient. The naturally curious minds of the V legion made their eyes almost glaze over with fascination even as they bore whatever weapons they could to beat back this assault. 


The gurgles of throats cleaved open by keratinous growths too alien to be called claws or nails among a great many other wounding sounds would foreshadow the adjustment of their HUDs to signal a comrade down.


Here at least, whatever the Fifth might have lacked in martial prowess that other legions might bear would be compensated in their extra-martial pursuits with the great number of Apothecaries they brought rushing forth to save the lives of the warriors who would otherwise be felled forever. 


So great was the chaos that even as they ministered to their wounded comrades of both Legions, the Apothecaries were forced to parry or even strike with their narthecia.


As the waves thinned, the gross fascination of Legio V was amplified by contrasting their wounded cousins with their foes. So far apart, and yet in some fashion so similar. Much as the nascent Imperium might deny this, this facility was in spirit not dissimilar to its own efforts.  To that end, the Apothecary contingent shared glances, that without speaking communed great interest in whatever was being done here, if for no reason that to learn enough of fleshcraft to be able to avoid the fate of their distant genetic kin. 


There was undoubtedly a similarity to be seen. Like the altered assailants, the Reviled fought in a way that adapted not so much to their environment as to their own bodies. They clove and hacked at the enemy with furious blows, yet the Apothecaries’ expert eyes could see how their motions were calculated to compensate for deformed limbs and frames. Warriors whose joints were stiffened by protruding bone growths favoured stabbing, lunging strikes, leaning into the angles of their bent spines to propel their weight forward, or flexed their wrists with a deftness that could only have been specially trained. Those made bulkier by their mutation used their mass to anchor themselves to the ground, withstanding the recoil of weapons that would have been fit for a towering mechanical shell.


Though the grotesque experimental soldiers were a lethal enough foe even to the measure of Astartes, their overwhelming numbers and instinctive tactics sealing the end of several warriors of either Legion, they were not inexhaustible. Had whatever project had spawned them reached completion, no doubt the conquest of the Pan-Pacific would have been far bloodier even than it was, but as the last of the living prototypes was cut down, the legionary contingent had borne a lesser cost to extinguish them than the human troops before them. Indeed, a number of losses would have been avoidable had the Reviled fought with less disregard for their own integrity. 


Even as the Apothecaries of the Fifth ministered to those that could yet be saved, they were met with surprised looks. Their charges had clearly not expected such care.


“You show us a rare mercy,” one of the Ninth’s medicae remarked, a rumble of dark mirth in his voice. Ghaal and his cohort had stood back during the struggle, fighting with precise shots from a distance, and as they moved forward now they seemed more interested in examining the dead than tending to the living. “When our execration grows so advanced, most of us seek a swift death in battle. Many of our brothers joined us here hoping just for that.”


“The Golden Rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you - remains a maxim we can adhere to freely in our crusade for mankind’s future.” A gentle kick was given to one of the dead opponents, as a demonstration that the application of this idea of reciprocity went in the realms of both violence and healing. “There might come a day when we need the same grace from your kindred.” Platitudes all insincere yet politically correct to the framework of the Imperium. It wasn’t that they didn’t care for this field between art and science, it was merely that they simply cared about extrapolating what they might learn to a much greater scale, and how it would impact their own personal growth. And, if the Ninth could be made a friend in the growing conquests, that would only be a boon.


Despite his words, the wounded bowed their heads in silent thanks for the succour, not trusting their throats to speak.


Arvo then took off his helmet, wiping a little bit of sweat from his brow. “Have you no faith that a day might come wherein the most afflicted of your ranks could be truly cured of this? Or perhaps at least come to cope with it.” much as he fancied himself cold and logical, the Apothecary found the mind of his comrade to be an unpleasant cocktail of fatalism and pessimism. Astartes were meant to know no fear, but he was certainly unnerved by this alien life of the Ninth. Even if war took his legs and arms and eyes, he thought that he would still cling on to dear life. 


“I believe our friend Ghaal tires of this, let us end this affair.” More grunted than spoken, the words came from one of the Undying Onslaught that was a [i]mere[/i] warrior, having just finished adorning his shield with bits picked from the dead monsters.


The elder medicae nodded, motioning for his unit to assemble. He turned his helmeted head, its lenses meeting Arvo’s eyes. Something told the Apothecary that the stare underneath was just as stonily solemn as the immobile visor.


“That day will indeed come.” His words seemed almost arrogant in their plain certainty. “It is why I am here.”


With the last of the augmented soldiers slain, the sublevel was left empty of life. Its seemingly labyrinthine corridors spread further than the floors above, but followed a simple enough plan, radiating from the centre towards several large, symmetrical chambers. With the lumen system disabled, the only light came from the occasional intact piece of machinery, faint and tinged in green or red. Operating tables and gestating tanks alike filled them, most of them damaged by their escaped creations. Blood and nutrient fluids stained the walls and floors, and shattered glass crunched underfoot. The screens of a few monitoring stations still flickered with fading sparks of life, within hope of recovery.


Quickly scanned by the rapid eye of the Astartes, their contents were revealed to be tantalising, but yet limited. The level’s databanks held the records of the procedures that had created the enhanced foes, detailed anatomical outlines and lengthy series of medical logs that could not fail to catch the Apothecaries’ eye, designs ingenious by the debased standards of Terra - but no more than that. Some form of compartmentalisation had been in effect. The installation’s central vault of knowledge, the records indicated, lay on the final sublevel, the last one that remained for the Imperial force to descend to. Warning markers pulsed that some form of containment breach had struck it as well. Still, the Fifth’s intellectuals eyed one another with unspoken language. This information was important, piecemeal as it was. They pored every line of data, pretending these were cursory inspections all the while they committed every character of information to memory.


The last stairway, located at the far point where the two centremost corridors reconverged, seemed itself to bear some macabre sign of danger. The metallic steps and railings were slick with a murky residue which smelled of blood, although only partially human. A dim red glow burned steadily below, and fetid warm air wafted through the well in uncannily regular streams.


Of the Fifth’s warriors, they were already gibbering, almost frothing like rabid dogs at the excitement of yet greater violence of a thus far unbeknownst taste. Nothing they had gone against was like these enemies. It was unprecedented stimulus, it was never before experienced change and an opportunity to unique and unparalleled veterancy. 


But, Arvo decided to broach the subject that would inevitably arise. “What is done here - horrible as it is - could be relevant to your Legion’s plight. As detestable as these would-be creations are, it would be a shame if the intellectual fruits were spoiled by mere association.” Nonetheless he steeled himself, whirring his narthecium in preparation for violence, as if this passing comment was just given as an accidental matter of fact rather than a prelude to a pointed suggestion.


Ghaal and his cohort stopped in their tracks, slowly turning to face their fellow Apothecary. The elder medicae regarded him for a moment, as if considering something beneath the cover of his helm, then slowly nodded, moving a step closer.


“Yes, you are right,” he rumbled evenly, “We of the Legions wield weapons of the dark age for a worthy end, and this would be no different. As a fellow medicae, you can see how much good this knowledge could do in better hands.” He added, with disarming bluntness, “Not just the biotechnica, but ours and yours as well.” The response was better than what the Fifth had hoped for. Before the syllables had even been uttered, one could see behind translucent helmet visors the shift of skin into devious grins. 


From below, dim emergency lights glowed bloodily. It was as though their light had solidified into the gory grime underfoot, for the tang of iron was thick in the suddenly warm and heavy air. Lenses and auspex screens fogged over, and more reddish condensation dripped from the underside of the staircase and the ceiling beyond. The access to the final sublevel was much narrower than either previous one, the landing immediately giving way to a low, metallic corridor, damp and greasy all over its rectangular length. Despite the heat, there was here a stirring in the air, a flow too irregular to be born of a mechanical ventilation unit, and yet strangely and unsettlingly constant. Sounds accompanied it, a wet rasp when it receded and all fell still, and a rough, wheezing whistle when it stirred again. None could miss the eerie resemblance to that most familiar of organic routines - a respiration cycle.


Yet something even more macabre was plain to see. Running along the slick walls were lengths of stretched, knotted matter, clinging to the metal like parasitic vines. But there was nothing vegetal in their slow pulsation, nor in their uneven, ruddy colour. A glance of superhuman eyes was all it took to confirm it - the strands were flesh and blood, somehow, impossibly human, distended in a way no body had ever known. They were boneless ropes of knotted muscle, nerves and arteries, glistening wetly in the red gloom. Ragged patches of skin grew over them, sparse and disjoined, as if the growth of the epidermis were struggling to keep pace with the unnatural extension of the red tangle beneath.


As the first Astartes approached the bottom of the stairs, the endings of the organic web closest to them began to twitch and vibrate, stirred by a wave of animation. 


Again as they progressed, the warriors of the Fifth made sure to cover their rear. Mines were placed, a few keypresses marking the Astartes as safe for the IFF system. They were purely fragmentation charges, a concern of the building being brought down preventing any kind of Krak or melta from being a practical option. Their comrades of the Reviled followed close, weapons held ready to cover the minelayers, or prowled warily in the vanguard.


They considered striking the tendrilous meat with a chainblade, but a hand was raised and the action was waved away. Who knew exactly how this aberration worked? Perhaps this would merely warn it of impending threats. Besides, many wanted to see what exactly this would lead to. Arvo in particular was excited, shoulders heaving with raggedy breath as if a hungry old bear in deep rasps.


As they advanced, the growths rapidly intensified, soon covering the walls and ceiling entirely in a lightly pulsating tapestry. Strings of muscle, strips of skin and blood vessels wove and interlaced in an outlandish mosaic that quietly thrummed with life. A few strands of flopping skin even drooped to the ground, though they were sparse enough to be easily avoided. Even the air was growing heavier, increasingly pregnant with a wispy, humid fog the further they travelled. It churned along with the breath-like breeze, its spectral folds soon making the corridor ahead indiscernible.


What the space marines did soon perceive, however, was that the corridor was becoming narrower. Despite the relatively brief distance they had travelled, the shift in dimensions was gradual enough that unaugmented eyes might have missed it. Even more subtle, however, was the fact revealed to closer scrutiny. The passage’s architecture was not tightening. It was the fleshy weave upon it, now a veritable wall of nerve and sinew, that crept inward at a painstakingly slow pace, constricting the space available to the Astartes little by little. The foremost were already almost brushing against the crawling funnel, the slow throb coursing through it audibly matching the hot wafts from the mist.


They had to stop, for this was almost certainly the last threshold before they reached the place where this would all conclude. The beginning of the end, yet also the end of a beginning of something between the two Legions. 


Several Legionnaires took off their helmets, trying to wipe down the lenses that had managed to get misty even as they weren’t made of a material that this ought be possible on. “We will have to go one at a time.” A Legionnaire Kalev croaked. Putting his helmet adorned in a crown of barbed wire back on his head, he hoisted his shield, volunteering to go first with a few beats of adamantium upon adamantium; the improvised chainmail mouth-guard of the open faced helmet was jingling with his heavy breath.


Knowing the danger he was going in, his comrades handed him a grenade each, lest his corpse need to be used as an improvised explosive on the other side. He had no occasion to prime them, however, before he reached the end of the corridor, which now resembled some nightmarish intestinal passage.


Beyond its opening, a ring of flesh that moved like a vast sphincter, a circular chamber spread as wide as half the entire previous level. The charnel growth covered it entirely, carpeting the ground with a weave or undulating skin, hanging in tumid clusters from the walls, dripping from overhead. It crawled over the thermal grilles that heated the room like a greenhouse, spread its membranes over the furious-red lumens, oozed from the ceiling in organic stalactites that throbbed with a now maddeningly familiar cadence.


Faintly visible among the roiling fog were several large, bulky shapes, like shadows cast in blood. Around the chamber’s circumference were what appeared to be a score of massive generator vats, all of them cracked open and overgrown with the hideous flesh-fabric, spilling from their innards. Dwarfing even them was what stood at the very center, a pillar or indeed a wall of writhing raw muscle. Huge vitreous globes swayed upon its surface, engorged mockeries of spinning eyes, and misaligned rows of overgrown teeth sawed into the restless tissue with every heaving breath.


As soon as Kalev stepped on the threshold, a thrumming groan seemed to run through the entire level, propagating from every damp pulsing surface and through the infested corridor. At once, every inch of organic matter was thrown into frenzied motion. Crude pseudopods formed from the walls, battering the Astartes in their stretched formation, and heavy masses of sloughing tissue dropped from the ceiling to crush them. More weight accrued with every blow. Foul-smelling digestive acids sprayed from suddenly emerging glands.


Chainblades whirred to life, and the flesh-walls spasmed madly.


It was far too dark to accommodate the full breadth of the scene, but as chaos erupted this hardly mattered, the flash of muzzles and the explosions of bolts made things far more apparent. But the cacophony did slowly get quieter as unnatural appendages one by one inflicted casualties. The meaty lianas needn't pierce armour or even skin. It more than sufficed to simply fling or strangulate or whip with such force that vertebrae snapped, skulls cracked and organs burst. Some would be recoverable losses, but these were attacks completely different and of a greater magnitude than the mere stub gun shots and shrapnel wounds that were the most common injury most Legionnaires faced thus far.


The noise of screaming and weapons and unnaturally fleshy sounds was overwhelming even to Astartes, especially with other sources of disorientation like the fog in their visors and the alien smells overwhelming even their transhuman nostrils. 


In any direction he looked, Kalev found new sensory experiences, so much to process with so little time. Left a comrade was snatched up and away by bloody vines, screaming as he would be never heard from again. To the right one was wrapped in so many that they simply pulled on different directions and pieces of disassembled Space Marine fell down. Then he looked down, stomping on a tendril about to wrap itself around his foot. 


But, there they were, the grenades. More than a dozen total, an assortment of frag, krak and incendiary charges. He thus took off his helmet, and stuffed them all in there. He didn't know if this would have any effect. But the focal point found in the form of the large pillar was a target they could focus on, and so he would. “Priority target!” He called out, pointing with his finger and marking it on the HUDs of his fellow Astartes. They couldn't gun it down in entirety. But perhaps they could make a large enough hole to jam his improvised bomb into.


The response was staggered. Those legionnaires who had already reached the chamber opened fire, aiming for the points where the living pillar’s layered muscle appeared thinnest. Most, however, were still struggling to clear the constrictingly narrow corridor, made even worse now that the creeping flesh on the walls surged to engulf and pin the embattled warriors. Those who became trapped in its viscous folds clogged the passage for their brothers behind. Chainswords were well-suited to shredding through the flailing appendages in sprays of strange-smelling blood, but the biomass seemed inexhaustible, as if flowing from the chamber in imperceptible tides.


And yet they pushed through, stumbling over the fallen and tearing through the lashing membranes. A flamer was brought to bear, unsuited to the dense crush within the corridor but witheringly effective against the crude pseudopods that emerged from the walls. More bolters and eventually an autocannon added their weight to the stream of fire, blasting chunks from the shuddering skinless bulk. Thick blood spurted in jets, tissue quickly contracting to stem it before being torn away by the next volley. The groans and vibrations radiating from it grew feverish, seeming to shake the entire complex.


It was not enough to cut through the quaking bulk, not by far, but a steady stream of precise fire had soon torn a ragged crater that reached into its spasming core. Kalev wasted no time. He had been fighting off meaty growths ever since he had made the order, and he knew for the luxury of firing at a non-immediate target at least a few comrades would perish. But it was now or never, and so as the gunfire lulled from reloading, obscured vision, or simple death of the bearer of said weapons he ran. He felt a vine go around one foot, then another, but he wouldn’t be stopped now. He rammed the helmet full of bombs into the gaping wound, but just as he primed one of the grenades and turned to run it was spat out in an almost peristaltic motion, as if this flesh had transmorphed into a throat.  He picked up the helmet again, and rammed it inside, his augmented hearing making every single tick of the arming system echo like a toll of bells. 


The strange foe tried to push out the intrusive object again, but his arm remained. He kept the explosives where they were meant to be, even as teeth like overgrown cillia and digestive acids made armour and then his flesh into goo. He closed his eyes, and then smiled. He didn’t hear the explosion, his ear drums burst instantly as about a quarter of him was vapourized. He was flung to the ceiling from where he bounced back down, but even in his fading consciousness he had the happy rictus of a man who had just seen a job well done. 


Soon, the sounds of violence wound down. The world wasn’t fighting back against them, and the Astartes could regroup, get to their senses, and tend to their wounded. 


Arvo was the first to speak on anything beyond analysis of the situations tactical and combat-medical. “Whatever horror one might see in this, that same one could not deny its efficacy. The minds herein were onto something, and the greatest shame is that they perhaps will never have the chance to truly share what they learned.” 


The surviving medicae of the Ninth cast glances about the twitching remnants, inclining their heads in a way that could have seemed appreciative. Ghaal limped over, his armour cracked and scored with corrosion, one leg stiffly dragging as he walked.


“No doubt, our enemies had a talent for their craft. They have failed to contain its fruits,” he stepped over to one of the shattered growth tanks and tore away the engorged mesh of blood vessels from what had been its monitor slate, “But we are not them.”


The damaged device displayed only fragmentary information - something to the effect that the rampant growth had evidently been designed as a reactive synthflesh culture, capable of autonomously adapting to seal any wound - but more alluring yet was what lay further. With the death of the amalgam, the heat of its diffuse body had begun to drain from the chamber, dispersing the vaporous fog little by little so that a doorway at its further end became visible. In the stillness left behind now that the vast breathing had ceased, a faint thrum of machinery became audible.


Ghaal’s head was one among those that snapped up to catch the remote sound. “Not everything might be lost to us. If the main cogitator can be recovered, neither their deaths nor ours will have been in vain.”


Arvo tilted his head, eyes impassive as his counterpart spoke. He was silent for a long time, perhaps almost signalling hesitation, but then he spoke. “Many might curse us for this. Emotional, weak minds. But that has been thankfully sifted out of us. Our task has just begun, the few of us willing to look a few steps forward know our task will outlast our lives, this war to last centuries even if not merely on Earth. And the generations that come after will sing us as heroes for not casting them into ignorance.” 


He stood up from the fallen Marine to whom he had delivered the Emperor’s mercy and extracted the gene-seed of, wiping some ichor off of himself. Perhaps his words were full of hubris and hypocrisy, but he spoke them nonetheless: “But though the right eyes ought feast upon this trove, the wrong ones ought not. What weaker minds might conjure with this….” He shrugged, and got to another fallen warrior. “It is merely luck that the right people came here.”


“Perhaps. We have travelled far in the hope to find something as this.” As if reassured, the elder Reviled shambled to the files of his own wounded, and the shrill of the narthecium’s bone-saws punctuated his words. “But we were lucky indeed to have you at our side.” He inclined his helmet. “Brother.”