A new threat from a familiar enemy.

>>>/qst/

Shortly after the storm, a sickness spread with ferocious rapidity. However no taint of chaos could be detected, the symptoms included but we're not limited to. Nausea, profuse sweating, hardening of the skin and the development of dark red and black blisters, blindness, increase in hearing, increase in psychic perception, even among non psychers, and strange bone, tooth, and nail growth and hardening. All subjects were monitored temporarily before being righteously purged, at least that was the case with those that could be rounded up. In this climate however quarantine was extremely difficult as a full thirty-seven percent of the planets population was affected. Soon after the plague had reached its height the bioforms began appearing. They were a strange mixture of humanoid form and Tyranid. In some especially bizarre cases it seemed as if multiple infected could fuse together to make more dangerous and horrible forms.

Some simply developed sharp bone spurs that shot from their limbs, and the leather like armor that had become their skin. Another common mutation was the expulsion of carnivorous locult like bugs from the mouth and bone like tubes that grew from the bodies of the infected.

A dissected subject proved that a large portion of the infected's lungs had been repurposed to become a bladder like nest to suit this. In all my years of experience I have never seen an alien plague have this large of a mutating affect on the holy human form. The Astartes arrived before the hive ships did. The cries for help against a horrid new enemy, and my personal pleas, being a member of the holy Inquisition seemed to draw them there hastily. Though when they arrived I found they were far less cooperative with someone of my office than I think they should have been.

The chapter was extremely secretive and seemed unwilling to discuss any details about their homeworld and objectives. They wore armor that was mostly steel color save their shoulder pads and lower greaves, which showed blood red with gold trim, often decorated with numerals of their unit and an eye spouting lightning bolts. None would say the name of their chapter or themselves.