The vision had been a warning, Garro realised, a glimpse of what he encountered here, and perhaps of what a failure might engender.

Around the legs of the abnormal Astartes were things that were once members of Eisenstein's crew, men caught halfway through the venomous ravages of the Life-Eater and suspended there, flesh in tatters and organs awash with ichor. They bayed and scrambled forward to attack Garro's warriors. Decius led the firing as the Death Guard let fly with bolters and flamers.

A ragged scarecrow of skin and bone flung itself to the deck and mewed, fly-blown pustules pocking a face eaten away by leprous cancers. It spoke, the stink of its breath reaching them in a reeking wash. 'Master.

He saw the robes, the skull sigil around its neck. 'Kaleb?' Garro recoiled in recognition, sickened by whatever appalling power had returned his housecarl into this loathsome semblance of life. Without hesitation, Garro turned Libertas in his hand and beheaded the creature. He fervently hoped that death a second time would be enough. Garro hoped fleet-ingly that his friend could forgive him.

'Watch yourselves/ he shouted, 'this is a feint!'

The tattered crewmen-things were only to draw their fire from the mutant Astartes behind them. The grotesques hammered across the promenade deck towards them, snorting bilious discharges of gas and firing back with mucus-clogged guns. A shambling form advanced on metal-shod hooves among the undead brethren. It was as big as a brother in Terminator armour, and as Garro laid eyes upon it, the thing seemed to be growing larger by the moment. Metal bent and broke as abnormal curves of discoloured bone issued out of popping boils. A distended belly of scarred, pustulent flesh protruded in an atrocious pregnant mockery, studded with triad clusters of tumescent buboes, and atop all this, girn-ing from ravaged ceramite pieces that still resembled Astartes armour, a striated neck ending in a bulbous skull. The bloodshot, rheumy eyes in the grotesque head turned and found Garro. It winked.

'Do you not find my new aspect pleasing, Nathaniel?' bubbled a disgusting voice. 'Do I offend your delicate senses?'

'Grulgor.' Garro hissed the name like a curse. 'What have you become?'

The Grulgor-creature lowed and twitched as a horn, glistening wet with fluids, emerged from the middle of his brow, echoing the shape of Typhon's horned

helmet. 'Better, you hidebound fool, better! The first captain was right. The powers are soon to bloom.' He shuddered again, and flesh peeled away across his back to release tarnished tubes of budding bone.

Garro spat on the decking to clear the stink clogging his throat. The air around Grulgor and his diseased horde was thick with contagion, worse than the acrid atmosphere of the xenos bottle-ship, worse than the toxins of a hundred death worlds. 'Whatever force saw fit to reanimate you, it will be in vain! I'll kill you as many times as I must!'

The bloated monster beckoned with a crooked hand. 'You are welcome to make the attempt, Terran.'

The battle-captain waded into the fight, bolter and sword as one in arcs of death, slicing through diseased meat and matter teeming with parasites, cutting towards the monster. In the play of battle, Garro's mind retreated to the familiar paths of war drills, of melee patterns ingrained in muscle and sinew from thousands of hours of combat. In this state, it should have been easy for him to shutter away the chilling horror these warp-spawned terrors represented, to simply fight and concentrate on that alone. The reverse was the reality, however.

Garro had seen the virus savage these men. He had heard their dying screams from the other side of the blast doors only hours earlier, and they stood before him, transformed into some living embodiment of disease, their freakish parody of life sustained by no manner that he could fathom. Was it sorcery? Could such a thing exist in the Emperor's secular cosmos? Garro's carefully constructed world of deeply held truths and hard-edged realities was crumbling with each passing hour, as if the universe had elected to pick apart what he thought to be true and show him

the lie of it. With a near-physical effort, the Death Guard forced the inner turmoil into silence, dragging his mind to the single struggle of the fighting.

Close by, Voyen took a glancing blow from a bolt shell that spattered thick fluid across his shoulder pauldron. The Apothecary reeled to dodge a peculiar morning star of knobbed bone. The weapon found purchase instead in the throat of a junior warrior who died clawing at the cancerous wound it left behind. Garro snarled and his bolter echoed him, a burst of fire slamming the killer back and off his feet. The battle-captain cursed as the mutant Astartes shivered, and then pulled itself slowly upward, leaking tainted blood and viscera. The bolter should have ended its life outright. He stormed in and took the traitor's head with his sword, finishing the job.

Still the shambling, filth-encrusted monstrosities came on, the press of their bodies dividing the lines of Garro's warriors, bunching around them as Grulgor moved to and fro, staying beyond close combat range. Perhaps he should not have been surprised to find these mutants hard to kill. Their advance mimicked the battle doctrine of the XIV Legion, the dogged and relentless progress that formed the core of the Death Guard's infantry dogma. They were matched closely, of that there was no doubt, but Garro's men were only Astartes, and as the Emperor was his witness, he had no true understanding of what his enemies were. Garro knew only that an abhorrence had taken root in him, and that these loathsome perversions of his brethren must be destroyed.

SEPARATED FROM THE other Death Guard, Decius found himself besieged by a gaggle of walking dead from the ship's company, the animated corpse-flesh

of the frigate's crewmen pawing at him and beating on his armour with clubs made from femurs and skulls. The flamer was spent and he was fighting hand-to-hand with the good weight of his chainsword as it rattled in his grip and the crackling force of his power fist.

The armoured gauntlet pummelled two conjoined deckhands into a seeping paste of rancid meat and bone fragments, and he took a torso apart with a downward sweep of his blade. The spinning ceramite teeth of the chainsword left a black rent in the mutant's body, and from the malodorous wound poured a waterfall of writhing maggots that pooled around Decius's boots. He turned around and cut necks with snapping reports like breaking wood.

The maggot-blown deckhand staggered backward, and as Decius looked on in fascinated horror the man-thing coiled the lips of the bloodless cut back together. Flies and shiny scarab-like insects swarmed over the wound and chewed at it, knitting the flesh with livid sutures beneath the repellent, hellish warp light from the window slits.

What powers propelled these foes, he wondered? Decius knew of no science that could make dead flesh animate once again, and yet here was evidence of just such an occurrence, hissing and clawing at him. The resurrected men seemed to bask in the glow from the immaterium beyond the thick armourglass windows of the promenade. It played over their bloated, pallid flesh in chaotic patterns. On some deep level, the Death Guard marvelled at the resilience and the horrific potency of these swarming plague carriers. They were living vessels for virulent disease, hosts for the simplest but most deadly of weapons.

Decius paid for his moment of inattention with a typhoon of pain that ripped down the length of his power fist. Too late, he sensed the blow coming from behind him and tried to turn from it. Grulgor's towering bulk moved fast, too fast for something so corpulent and foul. The freakish warrior's battle knife carved a dull arc through the air; like its owner, what had previously been a fine Astartes weapon was now a decayed version of its former self, the fractal-edged knife of bright lunar steel transformed into a blunted dagger of rusty metal.