The light from the Helldivers' lamps danced erratically, casting insane shadows on the rusted walls. The high-pitched whine of dying sensors mingled with a new sound: a metallic scraping, multiplied by dozens, then hundreds of sources, closing in from all directions.
"Sergeant Colin!" Shiva's voice, for the first time tinged with an electronic urgency, crackled in his helmet. "There's movement! A lot of movement! I'm losing contact with Bill and Shaun's beacons! What's happening? I can't—" The comms dissolved into a wave of static.
"Shiva? Respond!" Colin yelled.
Too late. The motion trackers integrated into their armor all blared at once, a strident chime of imminent death. On the mini-tacmaps in their visors, dozens of red dots converged on their position at an impossible speed.
"They're coming from everywhere!" a Helldiver screamed, his weapon aimed at a junction of corridors.
"Cut them to pieces!" roared Colin, his own blaster rifle chattering. "FIRE! FIRE!"
Hell unleashed itself.
The first shapes emerged from ventilation shafts, sealed doorways, and ceiling panels. They were no longer quite human. Their bodies were deformed, limbs twisted at unnatural angles. Their eyes glowed with a blood-red light, and their mouths were stretched into permanent snarls of hatred. They were armed with axes, rusted knives, and their own hands, now turned into claws. They rushed the Helldivers with supernatural speed and ferocity.
"Don't let them get close!" Colin ordered, gunning down two attackers with a precise burst. Their bodies exploded in showers of black blood and shattered bone, but others immediately took their place, climbing over the corpses of their kin without the slightest fear.
The narrow corridor became a funnel of death. The Helldivers, backs to the wall, formed a murderous half-circle. The strobe-like flashes of plasma fire and grenade explosions illuminated the scene in bursts, revealing successive waves of demented cultists. Their screams were not cries of fear, but hymns of praise to dark gods.
"Blood for the Blood God!" bellowed a woman with a shaved head, her torso covered in runes carved directly into her skin, before a shot vaporized her.
"Skulls for the Skull Throne!" shrieked a man whose arms had fused with metal tools, charging straight for the Helldivers' position.
The battle was a nightmare in slow motion. The zero-gravity turned the bodies of the dead and dying into a macabre, floating dance, bumping against armor and obscuring the view. The Helldivers fired, reloaded, fired again. Their weapons overheated, magazines emptied at an alarming rate.
"We can't hold here long, Sergeant!" a soldier yelled as a cultist leaped onto him, trying to drive a screwdriver into his helmet's neck joint. Colin clubbed the attacker dead with a rifle butt to the head.
"Fall back to the corvette!" Colin ordered. "Covering fire! Smoke grenades!"
Canisters were thrown, filling the corridor with thick fog. But the cultists seemed to see through it. Their red eyes pierced the smoke, and their howls did not diminish.
Suddenly, a massive presence blocked the far end of the corridor behind them. It was a man, larger than the others, clad in rags that might have once been a uniform. On his forehead and on the metal plates riveted to his body, the symbol of Khorne's eight-pointed star pulsed with a hellish light.
Garak. Formerly James Morton.
"You have come to us," he said, his voice a rumble that seemed to come from the earth itself. "You have offered your blood. We accept it."
He raised a hand, and in a flash of bloody light, a materialized war-axe, forged from bone and metal, appeared in his fist.
"For the Blood God!" he roared, charging.
The retreat to the corvette had just turned into a desperate struggle for survival, at the heart of a ship that had become the temple of a death god.