Chương 56: Chapter Forty-Nine - Little Bastards

Alexis was happy for the mask; it hid the weirdly enticing scent of burning flesh as CS-3-2/11 burned the corpses behind them. They pushed into the long corridor, letting K84-321 take the lead. The hulking servitor stomped ahead, arms swaying slightly from side to side as he looked for foes, but for the moment, nothing was jumping out at them. Probably for the best. Alexis had two laspistols, both of them held in her mechadendrites. Next to her, Vena had a third.

Neither of them were sure if the weapons would be enough to handle anything serious, but it was better than nothing.

"So, ah, what's the goal here, exactly?" Alexis asked.

"You're the one that wanted to push in," Vena muttered.

"Yeah, but I expected... I don't know, enemies," Alexis said. So far, there was nothing. Just a relatively long passageway, with good lighting and clean walls and floors and the faint hum of ventilation systems. There weren't even any blood-soaked symbols painted onto any of the walls. Alexis unhooked her warp-auspex from her belt and flicked it on. All of the tools Vyper made had such satisfying little clicks and ticks whenever she interacted with them. It tickled her brain in just the right way.

Pointing it left and right, then up and down, was enough to give her a rough idea of where to go, only...

"Two signals," she said.

"A smaller one to the left, and..." She stepped back three long strides, almost bumping into KYS, then moved to the left and right the same way.

"Yeah, the one to the right is much closer. Smaller, too? How accurate would you say this kind of thing is, for judging the number of enemies?"

"That would depend on how much warp-like energy each one gives off. You may find a single larger entity will have as much contamination as dozens of smaller ones grouped together." Alexis supposed that made sense. It was a little like radiation, then?

"I think we should go to the smaller source first."

"I concur," Vena said.

"Assuming we're still treating this as though we're inspecting an enemy position and not excising an infection, then it makes sense to start at the smaller of the sources." Alexis couldn't help but smile. The taller woman was a little strange, and maybe a bit too serious, but she wasn't bad company. They veered right at the next intersection. The area had doors lining the corridor, a passage small enough that her larger friends were only just able to fit in.

The door they were heading for wasn't too deep in, a space that had a small plaque next to it.

"This is one of the director's clinics," Vena said as she reached up and touched the plaque.

"They're for VIP clients. Basically, they're the people that will be tended to directly by one of the department heads. Sometimes special projects, or short-to-medium term studies."

"Like the kinds of things a Magos Biologis might do?" Alexis asked.

"At least two department heads for the medicae on this ship are outright Magi Biologists," Vena said.

"Oh... if those are involved in a chaos cult, then that's heretek," Alexis said.

"Not so different from normal heresy, is it?" Alexis blinked.

"Well... no, I guess not? But it's different to us? You can be a bit of a heretic within the Mechanicus, and as long as you're ready to deal with the consequences of that, it doesn't matter? We won't judge. It's outsiders who might. But heretek is different."

"I see? Or rather, I don't, but I suppose that's just a cultural difference. Do tell me if I ever do something that offends your sensibilities. I'd rather not have you be slighted by miscommunication. I'll try to do likewise?" Alexis grinned back, then realized that her mask kind of made that impossible to tell, so she gave the sign of the cog and bowed a little while walking.

"So, are we going on?"

"I suppose so," Vena said. She reached up and knocked while tucking her laspistol away. Alexis did the same, and gestured for her servitors to stand down for the moment. It wasn't long before someone moved up to the door and opened it. Within was a wide room, painted in sterile whites, with a chemistry station to one side and a long space with several beds, most of them in their own little space separated by sheets. The beds were occupied, though Alexis couldn't see the condition of the patients from afar.

"Hello?" The person who had replied was a younger woman, with wide eyes over a surgical mask. A medicae?

"Hello, nurse," Vena said.

"Good to see you. I'm Ju-- I'm medicae Venin, this is my companion from the Mechanicus. May we come in?"

"Ah, yes? This is a secure area, however? Ah, Director Bennick will have to be informed," the nurse said. She stepped back with a squelch. Alexis looked down, but things seemed normal to her. The room looked more or less like what she expected a small clinic to look like. There were two doctors far to the left, working at some sort of chemistry station, and another nurse was deeper into the right, staring at them next to the far beds. The curtains were drawn over those.

"That's fine," Vena said.

"We're just here to check on... the condition of the Voidsmen sent up here. With all of the confusion in the last few days, we were worried that some files and identities were misplaced." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. Voidsmen? Alexis glanced at Vena, then looked around again and finally spotted it. Next to the entrance, in a wheeled bin, were voidsmen uniforms. A pile of them were heaped into the bin. There were some bloody stains on some.

"Oh! Of course, that makes sense. Give me a moment?" the nurse asked. Vena bowed slightly, then turned to aim her goggled eyes to Alexis.

"Anything?" she asked casually. The nurse moved off, squelching away to speak to the other nurse by the far end of the room. There were giggles from over there. Alexis pulled out her warp-auspex and raised it up, then flicked through the results. It was flickering a lot, as though the entire room was radiating whatever sort of energy the auspex was designed to pick up.

"Ah, too much to tell," Alexis said. She pointed it to the left and right, and the readings in those directions were a little stronger. There were more giggles to the right, and Alexis finally shook her head and twigged onto the fact that that... wasn't normal. Who giggled in a hospital? She looked over, but there were only the two nurses, talking to each other. She strained her eyes. Was the back of that nurse strange?

The nurse they'd spoken to turned, and Alexis finally noticed that the edge of her surgical mask hid a smattering of rough skin, covered in little welts and reddish blemishes. It could have been nothing, just poor skincare, but...

"We don't have all of their names on file," the nurse said.

"You don't?" Vena asked.

"No? Ah, is that such a problem? If so, you can talk to the director about it? He didn't tell us to keep track, really."

"I see," Vena replied.

"And what, exactly, are we doing to these soldiers?"

"Fixing them, of course!" the nurse said. More giggles, and the curtain behind the second nurse moved a little. Alexis glanced down. The lumens back there were weak, but she swore she saw a lot of shadowy little legs moving about behind the curtain. But that didn't make sense. The nurse walked closer, almost tripping over the flat, tile floor on the way back. Alexis moved one leg to the side, then started to tap her pointed foot against the ground, one inch apart. The ground was uneven.

She looked down, but it was all flat, all-white tile.

"Machine Spirit Vyper," she said.

"What is happening?"

"Hmm... it seems as though the area you are in is fixed to multiple places within the immaterium at once, all the while remaining within The Broken Scale. Interesting." Multiple... Vena started to argue with the nurse about protocols, and how this wasn't how things were meant to be, but Alexis was tuning it out. Instead, she reached to her side and slid her laspistol out.

"Vena," she said.

"I think the nurses are... not human," she said. Now that she said it, the fact was so much more obvious. The nurse before her was leaning, slightly, to one side. One leg was bent in a way that wasn't correct. Her white frock was deformed slightly at the side and rear.

"Oh?" the nurse asked.

"But we were human!"

"Were?" Vena asked.

"The director lost us, but it's okay! We came right back! Isn't that right?" The other nurse reached up and lowered her mask. Her mouth stretched way too far as she smiled.

"Yes!" she said simply.

"And we're bringing these poor soldiers back too! The miracle of medicae sciences!"

"Right... heretek," Alexis said. She raised her laspistol and fired at the nearest nurse. The nurse stumbled back, the upper third of her head missing, but one eye remained. Her mask fell off, revealing a lower face covered in pustules.

"Oh? Oh no, did we offend? We didn't mean to! Here, let's fill out the right forms together!" The nurse reached a hand into her gown and removed a bone saw that dripped with gray-green digestive matter. By the sucking sound it made, Alexis suspected that it had been stored within the nurse. Vena raised her own laspistol and fired a trio of shots into the woman, then quickly kicked her back. Just to be sure, Alexis fired into the body twice more.

Kill Confirmed: 1x Plaguebearer New Point Total: 124 In that same moment, as the nurse's head exploded away, the bodies in all of the beds started to convulse, skin ripping apart and the blankets covering them falling away to reveal bloated corpses that nonetheless had the will to move. The curtain at the far end of the room shifted upwards as a small figure spilled out from behind it, rolled on the ground, then came up onto its tiny stump legs.

It was no taller than Alexis' knee, and was grinning from three salivating mouths fixed in its bloated belly. The room twisted. The lumens flickered, and in a blink, the floor was covered in long, ropy lengths of something like an intestine spread out across the entire room. To the left, the two medicae working at the chemistry station were stumbling back.

Strangely, neither of them seemed inhuman, nor did most of the tools they were using seem odd, though Alexis noticed that her vision was extremely blurry as she scanned over several items in their part of the room. Both of them had paused in their work to stare.

"Well, this is an issue," Vena said.

"Retreat?"

"Yup!" Alexis agreed. Whatever all of this was, she didn't want anything to do with it.