Secret War: The Annihilation Plague (Part1)

Chapter 1

,The roiling red smog-clouds engulfed the sky like a never-ending bubbling, boiling broth, so much so that it encircled down to every horizon. In stark contrast to the black beneath, black which spread in every direction, laid a city first made up of gothic towers of adamantium and plasteel, their silhouettes made jagged by the countless bouts of acid rain across the millennia and the millions and millions of gargoyles and statues of Aquilas and saints that studded them. Below were even more decrepit rockcrete, crumbling close-knit hab blocks, stacks and stacks of them and manufactorums that spewed the red smog in a stream which hadn't abated even slightly over the course of thousands of years.

A speck, one among billions named Attelus Kaltos walked in one of the many alleyways which wound throughout the hive. His hands in the pockets of his black flak jacket, a smoking Lho stick in the corner of his mouth. His footfalls echoed on the rockcrete ground in a way which seemed odd to his ears, but he couldn't identify why. It'd taken him a while to get used to his inhuman senses since his "enhancement" which now seemed a lifetime ago and he supposed it a by-product.

The itch on his nose made Attelus fight the urge to push the thick fringe of long brown hair from his sharp, almost feminine features despite the fact no one was around to see the horrific scar torn into his left cheek. No, he corrected, no one around I can see.

The thought made him narrow his eyes, stop and glance around himself; even his enhanced vision could only pierce the blanket of smog a few metres, even when he blink-clicked his photo-contact lenses to heat vision. The smog's burning stench writhed inside his nose like it had a life of its own. Attelus blinked away the welling tears blurring his vision for the millionth time, and after a few more seconds of searching and finding nothing, he began on again.

This world was one he'd never set foot on before, just one of countless hive worlds across the Imperium of Mankind. Just yet another small step on the road he'd begun, so much so he'd already forgotten its name. Not that wasn't without the realms of reality, as Attelus knew he didn't have the best memory for names. With his thumb and index finger, Attelus took the Lho stick from his lips and exhaled smoke but stopped as he realised why the sound of his feet seemed off; it echoed as if he walked on a varnished wooden floor inside a cavernous hall.

He didn't know what to make of this; his mind seemed to throb, and his thoughts became murky as if the smog had slipped inside his skull. Attelus didn't want to continue walking to confirm it.

Something caught the corner of Attelus' eye, and his attention snapped to the wall on his right. Words were spray-painted there, which he couldn't quite make out. Despite himself, Attelus started to approach it; the extreme familiarity of it ticked at the back of his mind, but he didn't know why.

It wasn't until he was only a few inches away he could read it, and the realisation sent a freezing shiver under his skin. It read in blue: 'Frig the arbites!' In a primitive, running scrawling. It was the exact same graffiti he passed every day when he walked to work at Taryst's tower back on Omnartus.

Attelus was sure that such a sentiment would be sprayed on walls the Imperium over, but this was the same he knew as he'd seen it twice a day, almost every day for six months.

But that wasn't possible. Omnartus was...Omnartus had been...

Attelus began to back away, then a movement caught the corner of his eye, and he turned. He was no longer in an alleyway, but the walls had spread apart so far that he seemed to stand on a wide-open plain in a valley made up of rockcrete.

The sound of thousands of echoing footsteps approaching his left made Attelus shudder in fright and turn.

Thousands of figures suddenly filled the new valley, swaying and marching his. Figures whose features flickered from inscrutable grey blurs into vaguely familiar faces, but the faces would never stay on the same figure twice.