Of all the threats the Imperium of Man faces, Chaos is the one that cannot be exhausted or reasoned with or outlasted.
The Tyranids are voracious and endless, but they are biological: they consume, they grow, they can be starved and outmaneuvered. The Orks fight constantly and reproduce from their own spores, but they understand victory and defeat in a way that can be worked with. Even the Necrons, sleeping for millions of years in their tomb worlds, are operating within the logic of a physical universe.
Chaos is something else.
Khorne demands blood and skulls. He respects direct combat and understands losing. Tzeentch cannot stand to lose but has built ten thousand layers of justification for any outcome being part of the plan. Slaanesh is selective: the higher the power and position of a mortal, the greater the risk, but ordinary people living ordinary lives are not what draws Her attention.
Only Nurgle. Nurgle is indiscriminate. Whether the vector is plague or Daemon or the simple spreading of his gifts through a population, his harm to ordinary civilians has no floor. He does not distinguish between the powerful and the powerless. The toll he extracts from ordinary people is not a side effect. It is the point.
This was the enemy they were walking deeper into.
The town search took half an hour. The conclusion, when it came, was stark.
A minimum of one million people had disappeared from this single town. Some had become walking plague vessels, Nurgle's zombies, still moving but no longer anything that could be called alive. Others had been converted into something more specific, localized Daemons shaped by whatever aspect of Nurgle's blessing had touched them first. The plague cattle were one manifestation. The search turned up evidence of others.
This town was at the very edge of Uttar Pradesh, the border region closest to Madhya Pradesh. They had not yet moved into the interior.
If the border was already at this level, the interior was worse.
Doom raised his hands one final time and called hellfire across the entire town in a wide controlled sheet. The buildings caught quickly. Nolan watched the town begin to burn, said nothing, and turned away before the fire had reached the end of the first street.
The group moved in silence. There was nothing to say that the burning did not already say.
Through the communication channel, news arrived from David: contact had been made with S.P.E.A.R. at the temporary command post.
Nolan gave David immediate instructions. S.P.E.A.R. was to engage local governmental authorities at the highest available level and begin constructing a quarantine perimeter along the full border of Uttar Pradesh immediately. Speed mattered more than negotiation. All costs and resource expenditures were David's to authorize. The Intelligent Control Corps and the full complement of automatic servo robots from Twin Islands were to be transferred to the region as fast as the logistics permitted. The Latverian Wehrmacht Guards were to mobilize and move.
If the local authorities refused to cooperate, Nolan would deal with that situation himself when he had finished with the current one.
Several hours later, a ruined village had been searched and the team was resting in the briefest available sense of the word.
David called again. The local authorities were frightened and reluctant but not entirely obstructive: they understood something catastrophic was happening in Uttar Pradesh and were willing to cooperate, but they needed evidence they could use to convince higher-tier officials.
Nolan ordered Doom to transmit the full unedited video from their helmet eyepieces directly to David's channel.
David's voice, when he called back, carried what was either data-processing satisfaction or the Man of Iron's equivalent of dry amusement.
Several officials viewing the footage had needed immediate medical attention. Many more had agreed to cooperate without additional prompting. The S.P.E.A.R. director was personally en route to the command post and had committed to full organizational participation in the mission.
"Mortals," Nolan said, disconnecting the channel and shaking his helmet slightly. "They never believe it until they see it. Unfortunately Chaos Daemons do not wait for bureaucratic timelines."
He could also reasonably infer that whatever David described as people being "frightened" had probably involved the Lamenters standing somewhere visible and David making it clear that cooperation was the better of two available outcomes. The result was the same. When scorched earth tactics became necessary later, no one was going to be positioned to oppose them.
The sky was darkening.
Nolan looked at the position of the light, calculated the time remaining before full night, and made the decision.
"We continue into the interior. Doom, confirm Thunderhawk is on standby for immediate extraction if we get surrounded."
Doom sent the confirmation and made the call to the pilot.
They moved deeper.
Night brought the Nurgle walkers out.
They had been present in the daylight, but at lower density and less coordination. In the dark they moved differently, emerging from the collapsed structures and the irrigation channels and the spaces between abandoned vehicles in a continuous slow flood. The eyepiece optics compensated: what the naked eye would have seen as murky shapes resolving out of darkness, Nolan's display rendered in clear thermal contrast.
The walkers were not fast. They were numerous.
Nolan established the pattern immediately: kiting, keeping the group mobile and the perimeter of walkers from closing into a complete surround. The Ten Rings swept in wide passes, the Warscythe cleared anything that came too close, the Lamenters moved with the practiced economy of warriors who had done this in a hundred different contexts.
Then he noticed the pattern change.
The walkers were not pressing from all directions equally. The pressure was lateral, both flanks. Nothing was closing the rear. Something was directing them, not intelligently exactly, but with the functional intelligence of a plague that knows which way it wants its hosts to travel.
"Doom." He stopped. "Take altitude. Look ahead of us."
Doom was airborne within seconds.
His voice came back on the channel: "Twelve o'clock from my position, approximately seven kilometers. There is a large town. I can see fire and black smoke rising from the center. Something is active there, recently."
Something had set up in the next town. Recently. While they had been searching and burning the first one.
The walkers had been herding them toward it.
"Lamenters. Clear the path."
The five Astartes drew their power swords and chainswords and moved without acknowledgment, charging forward into the walker mass with the speed of a unit that has been waiting for the order to stop holding back. Natasha and Hawkeye came behind them, adapting to the pace with the focused concentration of people who had been fighting for several hours and had found the rhythm of it.
The walker density dropped. The entrance to the town ahead came into view.
The noise reached them first: engine sounds, multiple sources, high-revving in the dark, a mechanical shriek that had something organic underneath it that an engine should not have had.
Then the green fire.
The motorcycles that roared out of the town entrance were not motorcycles in any normal sense. The frames were metal and the wheels were there, but the surfaces between the mechanical parts were wrong: covered in rotten flesh that had been incorporated into the structure, the seams between metal and organic matter not clean but grown together over time. They moved on the wheels but also, faintly, on the flesh. The engines produced not only exhaust but something else that trailed behind them in wisps of putrid vapor.
They came out of the entrance in a line, then spread.
Nolan stood at the front of his group and looked at them.
"Daemon Engines," he said.
The word came out flat and certain. He had the Warscythe in his hand and the Ten Rings already moving.
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