Blood Gorgons

CHAPTER SIX

ON THE DAY the Red Gods descended to Hauts Bassiq, the weather was angry.

A high‐pitched wind on the lower part of the south continent built up its strength. By the time it jettisoned itself across the North Territories it was a bellowing dust storm. Grit tore the bark off trees and gales uprooted even the hardy dwarf bushes from the sands. The sky darkened so hungrily that it became black at the height of noon and stayed that way for some hours.

In the central interior plains, a plains herdsman fleeing towards shelter saw several lights in the sky. They winked like stars, but they plummeted, moving too fast across the black sky to be distant astral bodies. He saw them break away from each other, like flowers caught in an updraught, and scatter across the horizon. Peering out from beneath the shuka he had drawn around his face as the sand whipped his lashes, he wondered if they were the cause of such portentous weather.

GUIDE LIGHTS WINKING, fluttering blindly in the sky, the drop‐pods became trapped in an updraught. Confined within the coffin slabs of bulk plating, Squad Besheba could only watch the topographic monitors overhead as they veered off course. Violent wind patterns shaped like an eye spiralled outwards and pushed the tiny dots of the Blood Gorgons’ drop-pods further and further away from Ur.

‘Forward venting disabled. Guiding fins are losing drift. Prepare for freefall!’ Sergeant Sica shouted above the drop‐pod’s death rattle.

Their Dreadclaw was plummeting, freefalling as the thrusters grunted with intermittent effort to slow their descent. Arrest sirens.The crash of high‐altitude wind.The stink of loose petroleum. The drop‐pod became a self‐enclosed world of blind confusion.

Barsabbas was pinned against his restraints by g‐force as the entire cabin vibrated against the atmospheric friction. In the restraint harness beside him, Sargaul was utterly impassive behind his helmet and entirely motionless. Barsabbas tried to emulate some of the veteran’s composure, but the combat stimms he had ingested were agitating him. He was grinding his teeth as the stimms elevated his heart rate. The crushed enamel tasted like wet sand in his mouth.

Barsabbas almost did not feel the crash. The drop‐pod collided with the planet’s surface at high speed and continued to bounce with a loose, jarring expulsion of force. The impact would have shattered any normal human’s skeletal structure. Rolling, tumbling, flipping head over heels, Barsabbas gripped his restraint harness as the drop‐pod swept him along.

His neck whipped violently against the arrestor cage and his shoulder popped briefly out of joint before clicking back into the socket. Blood, hot and sour, filled his mouth as his teeth sliced clean through his tongue.

‘Up! Up! Up!’ Sica shouted.

There was no time for quiet. The alarms were still so loud they beat in his eardrums.

Barsabbas shook his head to clear the concussive aftershock. His ears were ringing as the dust settled around him.

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‘Contact!Multiple massive movement.’ Someone shouted the warning into the squad’s vox‐link but the urgency blurred the words into no more than a sharp smear. He was already up and uncaged from his restraint harness. The drop‐pod’s surveillance systems were baying with alarm. External motion sensors were detecting encroaching movement.

‘Bolters up,’ Bael‐Shura commanded. The squad uncaged their restraints and readied themselves, slamming bolter clips into their guns. A banging came from the outside, a rapid persistent hammering as if a horde were trying to breach the drop‐pod’s shell.

Barsabbas checked he had a full load in his sickle‐pattern bolter clip. His helmet HUD

powered up, its ocular targeting syncing with his bolter sights. Slabs of system reports scrolled by his peripheral vision: climate, energy readouts, atmospheric toxicity, all of which Barsabbas ignored as the alarms brayed and amber cabin lights flashed. He signalled to Bael‐Shura that he was ready.

Sica stood by with a hand over the release button. The hammering outside grew louder, almost wild.

‘Deploy!’ Sica roared, punching the release button.

The drop‐pod’s side hatches unfolded like flower petals. There was an exhalation of pressurised air. The outside rushed in towards them as if a flood gate had burst open.

Barsabbas crouched and shot on instinct. His first shot punched through a human chest.

The body had no chance to fall as others pushed in from behind. It remained upright –

jammed by the press of people. The freshly killed male seemed to writhe. Barsabbas thought he saw its arms raise, but he dismissed it as a ghost image from his concussion. He took aim for a second shot – and paused.

The body continued to walk towards him, lurching with blind, drunken steps. This time Barsabbas removed its head with a clean shot and it dropped. Only then did he realise that they were surrounded by the dead.

Hundreds of dead. Their arms were outstretched and their faces waxy. Corpses swarmed over the drop‐pod, climbing the chassis and being pushed by thousands more from the rear. Barsabbas saw a naked male in an advanced state of decay, his skin hanging like loose latex garments from his glistening muscle. There was a woman with skin so infected it left fist‐sized holes in her belly. Another whose face was grey with mould barely resembled a man.

Recoiling in physical disgust, the Blood Gorgons opened fire with a whittling, sustained volley that fanned out in all directions. High‐velocity explosive rounds impacted against a dense wall of naked flesh. Barsabbas’s humidity readings reached almost ninety per cent as a mist of blood and fluid rose in a solid, blinding wall.

The fighting became frantic. Hands reached through the muzzle flashes towards him.

Something dragged on his ankle and gave way wetly as he crushed his heel into it. A rotting palm clawed at his vision lens.

Crouched low, Bael‐Shura released his flamer. An expert pyro gunner, he applied light pressure to the trigger spoon and played a tight, drilling cone of promethium into the wall of walking dead. Several were incinerated by the direct blast, but many simply caught fire and continued to fight. The flaming corpses flailed wildly, spreading the fire until it swirled in the air and churned a rippling backwash of heat into the drop‐pod.

Barsabbas grew agitated as black smoke began to clog his filtration vents. Bael‐Shura was a calloused warrior, but he was frustratingly obstinate. The flamer fulfilled a devastating anti‐infantry role within the squad, but right now its area of effect was causing 50

more tactical complications than necessary. The weapon spewed a promethium jet that incinerated most unarmoured targets upon contact, but it was precisely because of its super‐heated temperatures that it caused surrounding fabric and hair to catch fire. The tide of corpses became mobile tinder. Despite this, Bael‐Shura continued to fire, trying to play as narrow a flame as he could.

Barsabbas, however, preferred his mighty bolter. A standard Godwyn‐pattern with its high‐explosive bolt‐round was his lifeline. The bolter might have been heavy, bulky and had a recoil that could dislocate a human shoulder, but it flattened most targets with one shot.

When engaged in a protracted firefight, Barsabbas had learned it was better to shoot a target and see it fall than have the wounded target flee and spend the next few hours wondering if it was now doubling back to ambush him.

‘Besheba, switch to melee and fall behind me. We’re going to drive a wedge through them,’ Sica voxed into the squad link.

Barsabbas had been waiting for this command. Boarding actions had always been Barsabbas’s field of expertise. It was in the dense, mauling scrum of breach‐fighting that Barsabbas, young though he was, received the greatest respect. His dense, heavy frame was well suited to the wrestling, grinding melee. Ever since his bond with Sargaul and induction into Squad Besheba, Barsabbas had claimed the role of ‘fore‐hammer’: the lead point of a boarding advance.

‘Besheba, form on me,’ said Barsabbas, wrenching his mace from a waist hook. One and a half metres long, cold‐forged from a single rod of iron, the mace was capped by a knot of fused metal.

Sica nodded, pushing Barsabbas to the front. ‘Turtled advance.’

They drove forwards, Sica with a boarding pike, stoving ribs and skewering the dead with each thrust. Barsabbas kept his eyes on the sky and cleared the path with wide arcs of his swinging mace. As sophisticated as his suit’s auto‐sensors were, they had no answer for the blood that congealed over his lenses. Barsabbas tried wiping them with his gloved fingers but it simply smeared the blood, resigning him to seeing through a fog of pink.

Beside him, Sargaul slipped on the bodies spilled across the ground, crashing down on one knee. Barsabbas was immediately there, standing over Sargaul and tossing aside body after body. The dead buffeted him from all angles, glancing off his armour, dashing their teeth against his ceramite, climbing upon his back. Although he weighed close to three hundred and sixty kilos in armour, the sheer numbers rocked his heels. Unable to see clearly, Barsabbas felt engulfed by an avalanche of body parts.

‘Stay tight and follow me,’ Sica repeated. His low, steady voice on the vox‐link pierced the jostling, teetering confusion.

Looking over the swarm of undead, Barsabbas watched solitary figures crest the sand dunes on a far horizon. They were more walking dead, attracted by the brilliant contrails of their descending drop‐pod. Some sprinted, other walked stiffly, others still seemed to follow in confused huddles. Beyond them, the red ferric peaks surrounded them like lowlying mountains, impervious to the furious fight below.

THE STRATOSPHERIC WIND had blown them wide off course. The landing zone of Squad Besheba had been locked for the infected north, just twelve kilometres away from the sealed city of Ur. Instead, they had been inserted deep into the south, beyond the 51

demarcation of infection, where the black wilt, according to reports, had not yet developed into a contagious threat.

It was not a portentous beginning to their deployment.

Barsabbas set himself upon a rock, fanning out the great trunks of his legs. He unlocked his helmet and a trickle of sweat sheeted down from the neck seal. Running his thick metal fingers through his damp locks, he sighed wearily as Sica reported.

‘All squads were blown off target by the storm. All of them except Squad Shar‐Kali experienced a mass assault by the dead.’

‘Maybe these walking corpses were attracted by the falling lights,’ Bael‐Shura offered.

Under the orange light of sunset, Barsabbas could see tiny scratches over the surface of his power armour. The undead had literally clawed their fingers to bloody stumps in an effort to break him open. Barsabbas imagined he looked much the same.

‘Or maybe our arrival was anticipated and they were sent to find us,’ Cython said in a rare moment of insight. The usually loud, boorish Cython and his bond Hadius were placated for once by the post‐adrenal slump. Despite their superhuman metabolism and delayed onset of lactic acid build‐up in their muscles, the exhaustion of hand‐to‐hand fighting could be felt in their bones. Every fibre in Barsabbas’s body, particularly his forearms, was sour with strain. Squad Besheba had managed to travel six kilometres from the crash site, pursued by the undead relentlessly. Scattered, broken bodies were left in their wake. Barsabbas counted one hundred and ninety‐six kills by hand, bested perhaps only by Sergeant Sica. They had finally been forced to climb the canyon in order to shake off their pursuers.

‘We will press on to Ur when the temperature permits. It is far, but that is our objective and no orders were issued to deviate.’

As Sica spoke, Barsabbas was already analysing their situation. According to tact‐maps they were rock‐marooned almost eleven hundred kilometres from their intended dropsite.

The local geography was predominantly arid with a high density of ferrous metals in the dirt. To their immediate south lay a bee‐hived range of sedimentary formations, the sandstone and clay appearing ominously scarlet. Barsabbas chose to interpret the red as a good omen, a sign of angry retribution.

Sargaul was crouched a little further away, his bolter wedged vigilantly against a rock ledge. By the set of his jawline, Sargaul’s conscious mind was shut off, stripped bare of thought. For now, his body was reduced to cardiac, respiratory and autonomic functions and he knew nothing except the scope of his weapon and the trigger finger of his right hand.

Barsabbas settled on a rock next to his bond. Sargaul turned his head slowly to regard him, before nestling his face back behind the weapon. Together they sat in silence, watching the suns leapfrog each other as they slunk beneath the horizon. For a while, nothing was said as they seeped in the sticky, chest‐heaving glow of post‐combat.

Finally Barsabbas turned to Sargaul. ‘What were they?’

‘They were the dead.’

‘But I’ve never seen corpses do that before. It is… is it common?’ Barsabbas asked. He often tried not to ask Sargaul too many questions. Barsabbas was conscious of the fact that he was the youngest and his combat experience had been limited to raids and squad‐level deployments. Questions were weak, grasping things and he often avoided them.

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Sargaul shook his head. ‘Once, I saw dead men possessed by the puppet strings of an alpha‐psyker. They were much the same.’

Barsabbas thought about this. Sargaul had seen many things throughout his service, but something about the corpses had put the veteran on edge. He could feel that his bond was agitated, of that he was sure. ‘You are disturbed by this?’

Sargaul did not try to hide it. He nodded, almost to himself. ‘I have never seen the dead rise of their own accord, have you? I try not think about why the dead would become so angry as to rise from their sleep and walk the earth. What could have wronged them? What influence makes these old ancestors restless? The walking dead are a by‐product, an effect of influence. The answers escapes me and I am disturbed.’

‘Do you think the enemy will fear us?’

‘No, Barsabbas, I don’t think they do,’ Sargaul replied without taking his eyes off the scope.

‘That’s a shame,’ said Barsabbas matter‐of‐factly. ‘We look terrifying.’

At first, Barsabbas had taken pleasure in the carnage of the fight. After so many months of slithering through the cramped training tunnels of the ship, it felt good to finally be uncaged and administer so much destruction. But now he felt hollow. The walking dead were not living beings who feared him, nor breathing creatures who felt the despair at the sight of a charging Traitor Marine. They were ‘the dead’, a thoughtless horde no more sentient than a tide or the weather. It was a pointless fight. But there would be something else here. As Sargaul had said, the dead did not rise of their own accord. Something was causing this. Perhaps if Squad Besheba could find that cause, then they could put the fear into them.

MUHR HAD NOT seen the artificial light of the ship in days, only the darkness of his tower and the glow of his scrying lens. Despite the rituals of deployment and warp transit of the Cauldron Born, Muhr remained cloistered, refusing any contact beyond his own sanctuary.

His hair, unwashed and long, hung like a greasy mantle from his armoured shoulders.

He was sweating fat beads that ran down his neck. His head was throbbing. Yet still he hung on, wringing the last efforts of psychic strength from his mind.

The mirror was set in a heavy frame, a free‐standing structure of sculpted white meerschaum. But the frame was not important, for the mirror itself had had many frames throughout its long existence. It had once belonged to a prophet of the eldar race, or so the story went, and had since changed hands. In the hands of the eldar, it was said to have been an oracle, a scryer and a means of entering the webway, but Muhr dismissed these tales as fanciful. He had never been able to use it for anything more than astro‐telepathy, and even then, the image was often poor.

As he waved his hand in an arc, the mirror surface became cloudy and changed. Muhr peered deeply.

He saw a settlement in Hauts Bassiq. A colony of wagons and carts tucked beneath the shade of a red, dusty hill. The image was murky, appearing fractured in some places and layered with ghost images. Muhr tapped the mirror and an image of the huts blossomed across the lens. He saw the corpse of an old man, withered and dry, crouched by the wood frame of a caravan. Periodically, the corpse gnawed on a femur before discarding it, as if it couldn’t remember what it was doing, before picking it up and repeating the process.

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Muhr tapped again. Now he saw a mass exodus of people. Plodding with stiff gaits, they moved in a single direction as if they were a great herd in migration. Flies settled on their slack lips and eyelids and they did not react. These were the walking dead, victims of the black wilt who spread the disease southwards.

Sudden footsteps intruded upon him. Distracted, Muhr shed the psychic link and turned from the mirror.

‘My lord.’

It was Nabonidus, one of his coven. Nabonidus, the Chirurgeon and sorcerer attached to 5th Company.

‘My lord,’ Nabonidus repeated. ‘I report that the scouting element has been deployed.

They made landfall thirty‐one hours ago, but you were not present at the ceremony.’

Muhr smiled. ‘I have been reviewing a joint operation.’

Nabonidus paused. He was a direct man, blunt and obtuse, and often did not understand Muhr. Like the smooth, faceless iron mask that Nabonidus wore, he was very straightforward. Although Muhr relied upon him as an enormously powerful psyker who had a natural affinity for daemonology, and a deft Chirugeon, there were some jobs that Muhr did not entrust him with, for Nabonidus lacked cunning. Muhr perceived him as no more than an effective automaton. Had his latent psychic abilities not been discovered during his neophyte induction, Nabonidus could have become a squad sergeant or even company captain. As a sorcerer of the coven, he would always be limited by his lack of guile.

‘Come, Nabonidus. See for yourself.’

Muhr tapped the scrying glass. The same image reappeared as before. Nabonidus looked, his iron mask expressionless.

‘That is Hauts Bassiq,’ Nabonidus announced flatly.

‘That is our joint operation. It is partly the fruits of my labour,’ Muhr admitted proudly, his eyes glazed with psy‐trance.

Nabonidus tilted his head curiously. ‘You are the source of the troubles on Bassiq?’ His tone was monotonous, devoid of accusation. Nabonidus was linear and so was his question.

‘I am not the source, no,’ said Muhr. He thought for a while, relishing the act. ‘I am more of a facilitator, if you will.’

‘You could be seen as a betrayer,’ said Nabonidus. Somehow the words were not at all accusatory. If anyone else had uttered such words, Muhr would have slain him outright. But not deadpan Nabonidus.

‘Nothing could be further from the truth. I am doing this for the glory of our Chapter,’

said Muhr as he stepped away from the mirror. ‘Do you see the work I have done there?’

‘Perhaps,’ Nabonidus replied, choosing his words carefully. Muhr was testing him now and the coven witch sensed it. If he displayed the slightest sign of dissidence, then he would be done.

Rising up, Muhr closed in on Nabonidus. ‘My patron is creating a slave force capable of exploiting the warp‐iron on Hauts Bassiq. My patron requires this warp‐iron to fuel his expanding fleets of conquest, and only I have the wisdom to facilitate this for him.’

The witch sounded delirious, his hands describing grand arcs in the air. Nabonidus tried to step back but his coven master pressed forwards until he was almost standing face to face.

‘Do you understand what I do? Why I did this?’

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‘I do, Muhr,’ Nabonidus said cautiously. ‘But we are sending our brethren into a trap.

Hazareth’s company should be told–’

At this Muhr started, grasping Nabonidus’s face in his palms and pulling him until they were eye to eye. ‘Nobody needs to be told. No one but those that I choose,’ he hissed.

Suddenly casting Nabonidus aside, Muhr swung about and manipulated the mirror again. He saw a fleeting glimpse of Ur – a microcosm of civilisation in the wild plains. A dark cloud hung over the city, suffocating its stacked chimneys and settling like fog on its ramparts.

‘See this power? The power of my patron? We can share this power. If we give him Bassiq, we can share it. We do not have to be pirates, scavengers, any more. We will all be noble warlords.’

‘Blood Gorgons do not have a patron,’ Nabonidus ventured.

‘We have a pact, Nabonidus. If the Blood Gorgons relinquish Hauts Bassiq to my patron, my patron will strengthen our Chapter. I am a pragmatist, Nabonidus. I know what needs to be done to raise us above our anonymity.’

‘I understand,’ Nabonidus said, his voice trembling.

Muhr slapped his palm against the scrying mirror. As the images of Hauts Bassiq faded, all that remained on the glass was the ghostly imprint of his hand. ‘We need this. I’m not doing this for myself. I do this for the Chapter,’ Muhr said with finality. ‘Hauts Bassiq is a worthy sacrifice for the prize that awaits us.’

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