The Hydroponics Garden

Marius made his case again: De Mornay, first. The talent worth preserving, sheltering in a sacred space no abomination would enter. It was not an unreasonable argument. It found no purchase. Dauphine wanted the garden. So did the rest.

Before the debate had even settled, the vox betrayed them. Voices — many voices, chanting the Labourer's Lament — bled through the channel, and the voices were wrong. Some too shrill. Some issuing from mouths no longer whole.

Toil in service, workers dear Come ye now to service, Know the Emperor is near And always will protect us. Though ye toil for Golden Throne And sweat and bleed in labour, The Emperor holds tight his own And keeps us in his favour.

All of them but Dauphine knew the hymn. And as they listened, they saw it — scrawled in a shaking hand along the passage walls they were walking through, the same words repeated until the paint ran out or the hand gave up.

"It's irrelevant if the ship falls apart," Treave said, and that ended the matter. The squad turned toward the garden.

As they approached the Hydroponics Garden they could smell the noxious stench of decaying plant life. Fruit rotted on the trees with a sickeningly sweet smell, dripping pestilent pulp onto the bloody lawns. Bile clogged the streams and ponds. The gilded paths glistened in the warm glow of the artificial sun suspended over the treetops, as though the marble itself was oozing.

Dauphine felt it before she saw a single threat. Blasphemy, thick in the air like the rot itself. "This looks like no sanctified garden of Terra," she said, "but a blighted orchard of heresy." Her thumb found the activation stud on her chainsword.

Somnus felt something larger. The warp was not confined to one corner of this place — it pressed in from both sides of what only pretended to be a room. He said nothing of the scale of it, only kept watching. Then movement, low in the bushes — something smaller than a man, bigger than vermin. "Be careful, brothers," he said. "We're not alone here."

Dauphine looked to the others. "Which way? Clearly heresy here."

The tangled vegetation to the left unsettled Treave in a way he didn't examine too closely. He nodded right instead, toward the machines. "I believe if there was trouble, I would seek the machines." Where wrongness touched metal, he trusted himself to recognise it.

He was right to look there.

Treave and Somnus saw them first — menials among the pipework, driving lengths of cable into their own rotting wounds, grafting themselves to the machinery one insertion at a time. What had looked, at a distance, like devoted labourers tending Broder Able's gardens was something else entirely: seven of them, cutting into the cabling and into themselves in equal measure, melding with what they served.

Treave did not like it. He said so.

One of them noticed the agents watching. He straightened, pointed, and screamed through a squall of vox static:

"The Pox is here. All is one, machine and bilious flesh! Join us in bliss and rot!"

A tube erupted from the machine behind him and drove itself down his throat mid-cry. Nutrient fluid sprayed across a body already reshaping itself into something else. Then all seven turned as one.

Vox Shamblers.

Dauphine hit the activation stud a second time. "Clearly the work of the Ruinous Powers. For the Emperor!"

Marius put a shot toward the nearest one's skull. It went wide.

The Shamblers closed. One caught Treave with a blow that staggered him. Dauphine answered in kind — her chainsword opened one of them from crotch upward, a hard, climbing cut that left it reeling but not yet dead. Another struck at Marius; he weathered it without breaking stride.

Treave found the wounded one. He brought his maul down in a single line — skull to crotch — mangled flesh and ruptured bone and whatever passed for the thing's insides giving way all at once. It stopped moving.

Dauphine took a heavy blow of her own and held her ground through it, absorbing what would have dropped a lesser warrior.

Somnus closed the distance on his own target until there was no distance left — close enough that when he opened his palm and unleashed the Emperor's light, his own hand brushed the creature's face on the way in. Light punched out through the thing from the inside, hole after hole, until there was nothing left to hold together. It burned to ash where it stood.

Treave took a hit of his own, hard enough to be felt through the augmetics.

Another Shambler remained struck Marius before the matter could be settled.

The Hydroponics Garden did not care to wait for the outcome. Neither, for now, would the record.