The sky had been black for three days; the only light coming from a frequent pulse of lightning that flashed through the grimy, wet twilight. Humidity pooled on every surface and an acrid, flecking rain drifted down from the foul clouds.
Guardsman Kirkby wiped the stained moisture from his eyes as he squatted against the shattered wall of a collapsed habitation block. Guardsman MacArthur stooped under a twisted girder-steel as he clattered over the burned rubble and stopped on his knee next to Kirkby. Kirkby watched the sky and spoke without regarding his friend.
‘Sky’s getting worse Mac. Even the patches of blue have gone. What’s the word from Command?’
Their eyes met briefly. MacArthur grimaced, shook his head and spoke softly.
‘Captain Magellan’s gone; so have all the brass. There was a vox-operator left in the bunker, but he was just cycling through static. I couldn’t get any sense out of him’.
Both men jolted and winced at the distant crump of sporadic artillery. It was the first they’d heard for days.
‘Did you pick up any rations?’ Kirkby enquired hopefully. Again MacArthur shook his head. After a short silence he whispered, ‘it’s all done mate. It’s down to us now’.
Kirkby bit his lip and nodded, rocking on his haunches. He sniffed and took up an auspex from his hip webbing. The screen glowed crimson, filling the blasted cavity with a soft ruby ambience. Both men shifted position and peered out through cracks in the wall to the shattered city beyond.
‘You see the spire? Five hundred yards; off centre left? That’s the cathedral where the trigger is stored’. Kirkby cut the direction though the air with his flat palm, and MacArthur nodded approval.
‘Have you still got your code-key Mac?’
MacArthur nodded. ‘That’s a lot of ground to cover’, he whispered.
‘Aye, but I’ve not seen one of them for four hours’, Kirkby reassured. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine’.
They shot each other a hopeless smile.
‘How’s your ammo Mac?’
‘Uh…seven shots left. How’s yours?’
‘Not that many. Let’s make this quiet eh?’
Both guardsmen crept out of the ruined building, bobbing at a stoop and darting from rubble cover to blasted crater. A mesh of lightning lanced down, shattering a nearby rubble-spire, accompanied by a deafening crack through the rain-mist. Both men instinctively scrambled to cover, and as the thunder-crack faded a foul insect shriek cut across it overhead.
The huge creature, sleek black chitin, speckled with vibrant red, swooped onto a perch of shattered brick buttress thirty yards ahead. The foul beast croaked and chattered as it flexed its wings and tasted the air.
Both men watched, transfixed with terror as the creature, large as a bear, clawed and danced at its perch, jerking back and forth. Its vicious maw glinted in the rippling gloom, before it launched again, its great webbed wings thumping it skyward.
Kirkby was the first to move, crawling on his belly across the rubble towards his friend. He found MacArthur curled around his lasgun, eyes wide and shivering. Kirkby slipped under the dripping concrete overhang and shook his friend roughly.
‘Mac! Look at me. Listen, this Tyranid scum may have taken our home from us, but we’re trigger men from the Galtarn 122nd Planetary Defence Service. We’ve still got our final duty to do. By the Emperor, we might have lost our home to these monsters, but they’re not going to keep it!’
MacArthur heard the words and his terror-haze drifted away. He nodded and scrambled to his feet.
‘We can do this Mac. We have to do this’. Kirkby slapped his friend’s back and they both raised a quiet, mirthless chuckle.
‘Wait here’, Kirkby squeezed his friend’s shoulder reassuringly as he clambered up through the rubble to a higher vantage. He noted the best route down towards the cathedral, scanned the roiling sky and headed back into the gloom to join MacArthur.
‘Come on, it’s only another couple of hundred yards. There’s a nice route off to the left; lots of cover but not too difficult’, Kirkby reassured.
It took the pair an hour to reach the walls of the cathedral. They crouched into the cover of a cracked marble buttress, both laboured in their breathing.
‘Is it…me…’ MacArthur rasped, ‘…or is...the air…getting thin?’
‘Yeah…’ panted Kirkby, ‘…it’s you…’
The two men smiled, their teeth splitting through the grime of their faces.
Kirkby checked his auspex again, pulling up the cathedral floor plan. The crisis-trigger assembly was clearly marked in the crowning apse. He scanned his position and found it a few dozen meters to the north of their location. The main entrance was perhaps fifty meters to the south.
‘Right Mac…we’ll have to make our way…in through the main basilica. I can’t see any cracks in the wall here’.
Both men drank greedily the last trickles of water from their canteens before creeping south.
MacArthur took up a fire position, crushing himself against the crest of the ascendance steps before the blasted basilica doorway. Hugging the concave wall, Kirkby edged towards the opening. Cautiously he peeked into the dark beyond. The basilica was in disarray, but aside from the shattered windows and overturned pews seemed to have survived the worst of the destruction. A lavish black-wood rood screen partially obscured the quire beyond.
Kirkby signalled the way clear ahead and indicated the line of advance to MacArthur. Both men crept forwards at the ready; lasguns levelled to meet any threat. Inside the basilica a strong stench of damp wood and wet stone assailed them, and just at the edge of their senses the sweet horror of rotting flesh.
They crouched in the gloom at the rood screen and beyond, the quire led through to the crowning apse. All around them, the once proud statues stood in darkness, somehow the stone wilting in sorrow. The banners of past glories hung stoic in the transept, standing guard over the tombs of the glorious fallen. The golden vignettes of the quire hung tarnished in the fug.
The only sound within the cavern of faith was the clattering of the two men and the squeak of their combat boots on marble.
Kirkby signalled for MacArthur to adopt over-watch and swiftly advanced across the quire. Scanning the apse across his gun sight, he signalled that the building was clear. MacArthur advanced to join him and both men stood in the darkness, staring at the fresco disguising the crisis-trigger.
They stared for an age, neither man moving, nor speaking; their lasguns hanging limp.
Suddenly, their gaze was grabbed away away, back out into the quire. Stood there, stark, stained white against the grimy dark, a robed priest swayed uncertainly. His harrowed, filth-caked face, thick with beard, framed two bright wild eyes. His face broke into a visage of fear. He dropped the bucket he was carrying and darted off out of view.
The guardsmen looked at each other and burst into exhausted laughter. Shouldering their arms they fumbled in their breast pocket and retrieved their code keys.
‘Let’s do this’, stated MacArthur.
An urgent shuffling of sandaled feet screeched to a halt, dragging the men’s attentions back out to the quire. Six filth-crusted priests stood there, staring at them. Each carried a long knife.
‘You mustn’t’, stated the closest priest, his eyes wild with terror.
MacArthur bit the code-key between his teeth and raised his lasgun. Kirkby raised his hands in conciliation.
‘Now brothers, you know I have to. The time has come. We’re the trigger men for this sector’.
‘You can’t!’ The priest blurted again. ‘You just can’t! Help is on the way. The Emperor won’t forsake us. Our prayers continue around the clock!’
As he spoke, all six priests closed slowly in, flexing their fingers about the knife handles.
‘STAY WHERE YOU ARE!’ shouted Kirkby. The priests and MacArthur both jolted shocked at the sudden outburst.
‘The other trigger men obviously didn’t make it. The world is lost. It’s down to us now and were ARE going to do this. We HAVE to do this! The only way now is to kill the planet’.
The priests suddenly surged forward, knives flailing. MacArthur’s lasgun flared three times, dropping two priests before they were on the guardsmen. The priests hacked and stabbed as the guardsmen fumbled for their own bayonets, defending themselves with their rifle butts.
Suddenly, even the ruckus of the fighting the apse was drowned out be a cacophony hissing screams and a splintering of rood wood. The priests and guardsmen stopped mid-grapple and turned to the scene entering the quire.
Six large monsters, black chitin and flecked with red were advancing slowly past the splintered rood screen. Maws flexed and pulsated at the men. As one, the priests screamed and darted away, immediately pursued by four Tyranid beasts. The other two advanced slowly towards the apse, claws raking and tongues tasting the human blood on the damp air.
‘Now! Now! Now!’ screamed Kirkby, fumbling at the fresco, his code-key scraping across the cherubs in a desperate search for the key recess. MacArthur did the same and almost together both men found their mark. The keys slid in and they opened the door to Armageddon.
At the base of the fresco, a pict-tray slid out in a cascade of cloyed plaster. The screen glowed green in the gloom, a single image flickering across it.
MALFU__T_IO_ - MALFU__T_IO_ - MALFU__T_IO_ - MALFU__T_IO_
