Free The Inquisition War by Ian Watson

facets squeezed.
    A skirmish in a hovertank plant...
    Arrows of light cross-hatched a grey cavern housing half-completed vehicles. Hybrids armed with lasguns were pressing hard against a picket line of planetary guardsmen. Those guards were a loyal, uninfiltrated unit and they were losing. What brutish caricatures of human beings the hybrids were, with their jutting, swollen, bone-ridged heads, their glaring eyes, their jagged bared teeth. In place of a human hand, several hybrids sported the terrible, strong claw of the purestrain genestealer. When those hybrids overran the guards they might simply tear the last survivors apart.
    Yet this wasn’t the whole picture, oh no, not by any means. Jaq shrank that grim facet and expanded another...
    Many hundreds of rebels swarmed across the roof of a rose-red plate-district, heading for a tree of administrative towers. Mingling with hybrids, indeed outnumbering them, were rebels who looked truly human. Some of these would be the firstborn spawn of hybrids, human in looks yet able to procreate a purestrain genestealer. Others would be subsequent offspring, genuine human beings who still heeded the hypnotic brood-bond.
    A series of explosions tore at the stem of the plate district where it was attached to the rest of the city. The entire plate sagged and snapped free. Briefly, the whole huge structure sailed on the air, then fell. Rebels slid and scrabbled for hand holds, claw holds, as the district plummeted towards the fringe of the jungle two kilometres below.
    On impact – a tree-flattening impact – dust arose. The dust was rebel bodies. Even the plasteel of the plate cracked open. A well-aimed plasma beam from above ignited fuel storage tanks. Within and without, flame engulfed the fallen plate-district. The dust burned; as did any populace who lived in that plate, supposing they had survived the plunge of their factory-homes.
    Many hundreds more rebels were dead now. Really the rebellion was entering its final, frantic, suicidal phase.
    ‘Some people believe the genestealers were designed – as a living weapon,’ Googol was informing Grimm. ‘A fine joke, dreamed up by some vicious alien!’
    ‘Huh.’
    ‘Well, why not? Do you think they evolved that way? Genestealers can’t breed on their own. How could they have come into existence in the first place without malicious midwives? They’re compelled to infest other races and multiply like a cancer within.’ In his travels throughout the galaxy, doubtless Googol would have heard many rumours, despite best official efforts to suppress scaremongering talk.
    ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Grimm, ‘a Chaos storm warped them from whatever they were before? Seems the purestrains can’t pilot a ship, can’t fire a gun, can’t fix a fuse. Otherwise, they’d be all over the place under their own steam. What a clumsy weapon! Huh!’
    ‘Yet what an excellent dark joke against life and family and love.’
    The stout abhuman muttered some oath in his own outlandish dialect.
    ‘Now, now, Grimbo,’ reproved the Navigator, ‘we all speak Imperial Gothic here—’ Another, darker oath in the same patois, ‘— like civilised beings.’
    ‘Well, kindly don’t call me Grimbo, then. Me name’s Grimm.’
    ‘Grimm in name though not grim in nature necessarily. You’re but a sprout of a squat.’
    ‘Huh. You’re hardly antique yourself, despite appearances.’
    Those wrinkles on the Navigator’s face; and his mournful tunic...
    Meh’Lindi’s hair was slicked down tight. When she sprayed her face, her visage became more of a blank than ever, a black mask with the merest hint of features. The syn-skin would protect her against poison gas or flame or the flash of explosions; it would boost her already-honed nervous system and her already-notable vigour.
    By the time she wound the scarlet sash around her waist once more, miniaturised digital weapons hooded her fingers like so many baroque thimbles. The needler, laser and flamer