Blood Gorgons

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT WAS NOT yet dawn but Barsabbas did not think today would be any different from the day before that. The squad crossed another empty creek, leaving gridded prints in loose, dusty clay. They had been moving at a ferocious pace for the past four days, even during the heat peak of midday. They had left the rust and sandhill country of the southern tip far behind and, according to the tact‐maps, had penetrated thirty‐odd kilometres into the central plains. Strangely, it grew more verdant there. Hauts Bassiq was a land without oceans, yet intermittent rainfall drained gullies and creeks into the central dune fields.

Rust‐resistant saltbushes flourished alongside weeping acacias in the red, infertile earth. The remnants of palaeodrainage channels became a refuge for relic plants with ancient lineages. Tall trees in dunefields were perhaps the most striking difference between the central and western territories and their eastern and southern cousins.

Following the dry channels, Squad Besheba swept north, ghosting in and out of vox range with their brother squads.

Barsabbas plodded along to the rhythmic hiss of his hydraulic knee suspensors. In such monotonous country, it was easy to fall into a catalepsean sleep, purposely inducing partial consciousness. But he remained alert, forcing himself to make periodic environment scans and disseminate the information through the vox‐link. His boltgun was strapped like a sash across his chest, his left hand coiled loosely around the trigger. In the past four days, Squad Besheba had learned to avoid the scavenging mobs of walking dead in order to conserve ammunition. Yet aside from wandering corpses and the stray caprid, there were no significant signs of life.

‘I can taste a pocket of high atmospheric disturbance. Bacterial organisms,’ Barsabbas announced as the line graph in the upper left corner of his vision spiked. A brisk wind had picked up, throwing dust into their faces. ‘What say you?’

Although no human disease could penetrate the immune system of a Space Marine, Sargaul vented his helmet. ‘I taste it too. Very acidic. Very strong,’ he confirmed, spitting saliva out through his helmet’s grille.

Cython did the same, but breathed in deeply and immediately coughed, his multi‐lung rejecting the airborne substance. ‘I can’t identify,’ he said, his words spurting out between violent hacking. ‘This is pure strain.’

The squad halted as Cython continued to hack and gurgle. The fact that the substance could force even a Space Marine’s multi‐lung to respond so harshly was testament to its lethality. His lung sphincters were constricting as the organ attempted to flood his system with cleansing mucus.

‘No more samples,’ Sergeant Sica ordered angrily. ‘Barsabbas, fade off your environment monitor. You’re putting the fear in all of us.’

Barsabbas swore fluently but obeyed. The power plant core of his armour was two thousand years old and its spirit was temperamental if not outright malevolent, but it would not lie to him. He had detected something else on his monitors besides the bacteria.

There had been a peripheral spike of detection, an organic pattern that was familiar to Barsabbas.

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‘Remember what Argol said,’ Sica continued. ‘Instinct will save your skin where scanners do not. Use your eyes and listen with your ears, and stop distracting yourself.’

With that, the squad peeled off, negotiating their way down the slope of a dry riverbed.

But Barsabbas lingered. Argol’s words resonated with him.

Suddenly alert, Barsabbas loosened his helmet seal and tested the air with his tongue. It was bitter at first, laced with a ferociously destructive organism that was corrosive to his hyper‐sensitive taste glands. But he tasted something else on his palate too, fleeting and subtle. There! Hidden behind the airborne toxins was a familiar taste, a coppery taint that was unmistakable. Fresh blood.

‘Blood.Fresh blood.’

‘Blood.Blood.’ The word echoed amongst the squad with breathless anticipation.

Sergeant Sica waved them to a halt at Barsabbas’s warning. Cython tasted again, wary this time. He spat. ‘Now that you say it, I can taste it too. You can barely pinpoint it with all the other tox on the wind current.’

‘Which direction?’ asked Bael‐Shura. His augmetic jaw was sutured to much of his upper trachea, destroying the neuroglottis that allowed others to track by taste alone.

‘Far from here, at least six kilometres to our north‐east,’ Barsabbas confirmed.

‘We go there,’ said Sica. ‘Sharp find, Brother Barsabbas.’

The wind gained momentum, forcing the tall acacias to kneel and uprooting the saltbushes in bales. There was something angry and sentient about the viral wind.

Barsabbas made sure both atmospheric venting and extraneous seals were entirely locked, a precaution usually reserved for vacuum or space exposure. The wind buffeted and rattled his armour like a cyclone grinding against a bunker.

They turned in defiance of the wind. It punished them with the full force of its gale.

Heads low, shoulders set against the rising dust storm, Sergeant Sica led them in pursuit of freshly spilled blood.

ABOARD THE CAULDRON Born, Sabtah roamed the old corridors. He rolled and unrolled his neck, loosening the muscles and working out the knots with pops and crackles, pacing the halls with a pensive focus. He did so often when things weighed heavily on his mind, such as now.

The shrine was a place where he came to think. These days it seemed like the younger Chaos Space Marines were too martial, too physical. They seldom tended to their war shrines. It was a quiet place and a place where Sabtah came to brood.

He sat before his shrine and retrieved his most precious prize.

The axe was of Fenrisian make, with a richly decorated brass haft‐cap secured the trumpet blade. It was one of Sabtah’s own trophies and one he kept at all times within his personal shrine.

Lifting the axe, Sabtah slashed the air with clumsy practice swings. It was not his weapon – it had once belonged to a Grey Hunter, one of Leman Russ’s cursed children.

Sabtah remembered the time when the Blood Gorgons had been declared Excommunicate Traitoris by the Inquisition within six decades of Founding. He had been a young neophyte then, not even blooded, yet those had been ignominious days. They had been driven from their home world by Space Wolves, a broken Chapter pursued into the warp by lupine hunters. They became thieves: foraging, hiding, always hunted. The brothers had stayed together only for survival, the Chapter divided by minor war‐captains and factions who 57

sealed off entire sections of the Cauldron Born as their own fiefdoms and baronies. There was no dignity to their name.

It was to be Gammadin who united the warring companies. It was he who waged an intra‐Chapter war that left much of the space hulk in devastation, even to this day. But in the aftermath of fratricide, the Blood Gorgons found cohesion. It had been Gammadin who devised the rituals of blood‐bonding to ensure that his Chapter would never again fight internally, pledging their very co‐existence to each other and the powers of Chaos. No Blood Gorgon would ever turn his blades on his brother again.

But Sabtah believed history came and went in cycles. What was due, would be due. The Blood Gorgons’ unity had been constructed and could thus be dismantled.

Yet Sabtah also believed he could change it and map the course of his Chapter; it was his duty as Gammadin’s blood bond. After all, Sabtah had been there from the beginning. He had been there the very day the Blood Gorgons rose up, seething and angry after decades of shame, to confront their Space Wolf pursuers.

Sabtah could still remember the fury and pent‐up anguish that the Blood Gorgons had released against those loyalist Space Marines. Sabtah had never experienced anything like it since. They had engaged the Space Wolves with Lamprey boarding craft simply to inflict damage, a malicious hit‐and‐run assault that left their pursuers with severe casualties.

Feared though the Wolves were in battle, they did not possess the refined boarding tactics of the Blood Gorgons. Although Sabtah had been a fresh‐blood then, he slew a Grey Hunter that day. He had even scalped his enemy’s long beard and plundered his axe.

He could not bear to see the Blood Gorgons live such shallow, inglorious existences again. They were a free Chapter, free to travel to the edge of the universe.

The Blood Gorgons knew nothing of restraint. Restraint, to Sabtah, was the bane of human existence. He knew that citizens of the Imperium worked their constant shift cycles until they withered and died, never deviating from doorstep to factorum. That was not existence. No, Blood Gorgons were like the sword‐bearing generals of Old Terra, conquering and plundering whatever they touched. There was substance to that. It was something Sabtah could be proud of.

Suddenly, Sabtah snapped out of his reverie. He felt a tweak in the base of his neck, and a chill ran across his skin. A flutter of nerves made his abdomen coil and uncoil.

Something was wrong.

Sabtah trusted his instincts without hesitation. The veteran pivoted on his ankle. He glimpsed movement as he spun mid‐turn. It was fleeting. A ghostly double image in the corner of his vision, disappearing behind the pillars that framed the temple entrance.

He was old, but his eyes did not lie to him.

Sabtah gave chase, exploding into a flat sprint. He did not know what he had seen. The Cauldron Born was old and large. He had seen odd things aboard the vessel before. There were rumours of strange, immaterial things that dwelt in the forgotten catacombs and drainage sumps in the lower levels of the ship. Others spoke of a dark terror that lurked in the collapsed passages beneath the rear boiler decks. Those with no knowledge of the arcane would accuse the ship of being ‘haunted’. Sabtah knew it was an inevitable influence of warp travel.

Twice more he caught sight of something large yet frustratingly elusive to his eyes. He pursued doggedly, his heavy legs pounding the ground. It led him further and further away from the serviced areas of the vessel. Sabtah chased hard, refusing to slow. He realised he 58

was being led into the forgotten areas. The corridors became unlit. The ground was uneven, broken by rust and calcification, but Sabtah was consumed by the chase. His hearts pulsated in his eardrums.

The thing, whatever it was that Sabtah saw, appeared once more, like a black sheet caught in the wind, and then vanished.

Sabtah found himself in a cavern. Leakage in the overhead pipes had created a curtain of stalactites, some pencil‐thin but others as stout as the trunks of trees. A carpet of mossy fungal growth glowed a cool, pale blue.

His lungs expanding with oxygen, Sabtah realised he was still gripping the Fenrisian axe. In his haste, he had left his bolter behind. Despite its brutish appearance, the axe was gyroscopically balanced – but Sabtah lacked the axe‐craft of a Fenrisian. Instead, he would have to rely on brute strength to force its leverage, and Sabtah had plenty of brute strength.

Clutching the awkward, top‐heavy tool in a double grip, he advanced.

The creature had baited him deep. Sabtah knew that, and part of him enjoyed the thrill of a sentient adversary. By his reckoning, he had grown slow and fat on board the ship. He was a specimen made for war.

Slowly, adrenaline drew his muscles tight, the sheaths of his musculature taut with that familiar feeling of pre‐combat. His knees and forearms quavered uncontrollably, every spindle of muscle building up with unspent energy.

He saw movement. This time it appeared and stopped, rising to its height less than thirty metres away: a human shape, clothed in shadow.

For no apparent reason, the Imperial scripture ‘ and they shall know no fear’ scrolled through his head. Sabtah snorted.

With that, he charged through the stalactite forest. His plate‐cased shoulders splintered the drip‐rock to powder upon impact. He ploughed through it unarrested, a storm of fragmented stone churned in his wake. Baring fangs through his wild beard, Sabtah howled with joyous aggression. His arms yearned to uncoil and channel all of his strength, all of his momentum and all of his rage through the edge of his axe and into the flesh of his foe.

‘Sabtah.Stop!’

Sabtah did not hear anything except the red wash of fury in his ears. He looped the axe in a hammer‐thrower’s arc, tearing down four or five stalactites in one sweep. The black shadow flickered like a disrupted pict‐feed.

‘Sabtah!’

Unresponsive, Sabtah drew the axe far back for another swing.

‘Muhr is going to kill you. Sabtah! You have to listen to me.’

The axe froze.

Finally, a hint of recognition creased Sabtah’s furrowed, animalistic brow. The feral snarl softened behind the beard. The killing rage ebbed. Sabtah lowered his axe cautiously, peering into the dark.

‘Nabonidus?’

A figure walked towards the glow‐lights of the ground fungus. It was indeed Nabonidus

– chosen of Muhr’s coven. The witch‐surgeon had shed his power armour and was clad in a hauberk of supple chainmail. His face was painted white and his eyes daubed with ash. The sorcerer clicked his fingers and the shadowy apparition standing before Sabtah dissipated.

Sabtah cursed. ‘I could have killed you, Nabonidus. What did you think you were doing?’

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Nabonidus pushed a finger to his lips. ‘Hush, Sabtah. Please lower your voice.’ He ducked his head and peered about the cavern. Finally satisfied that they were alone, Nabonidus whispered, ‘I lured you here for a reason.’

Sabtah raised his axe cautiously. Nabonidus was a sorcerer. There was an innate distrust between the coven and their warrior brethren. He watched the witch’s hands carefully.

‘I lured you here because that is the only way it would be safe. I can’t be seen talking to you, Sabtah. It’s not safe.’

‘Safe for who?’ Sabtah asked.

Nabonidus’s reply was tinged with a genuine terror. ‘For me,’ he admitted.

Still unconvinced, Sabtah remained silent. ‘I will give you one chance to explain yourself.’

‘Muhr is behind this. The Chapter rift. It is part of his power game. The troubles on Hauts Bassiq are his doing. It will cause a Chapter war from which Muhr is positioned to emerge the victor.’

Sabtah shrugged. ‘I suspected this. But he has nothing I cannot deal with.’

Nabonidus shook his head. ‘It is more than Muhr. There is another force at play here, more powerful than Muhr. There is some sort of pact between them.’

‘Who is that patron?’

Nabonidus took a step back. ‘I don’t know, Sabtah. All I know is that Muhr is a mere minion. This patron is destroying Hauts Bassiq, and in return for Muhr’s role, this patron is willing to aid Muhr in his ascension to power. That’s all I know.’

‘Why are you telling me this, witch?’

‘Because I am frightened, Sabtah. I am seven hundred years old and I am frightened, not for myself but for the Chapter. I do not want a Chapter war. It’s your duty now, Sabtah. You are his only obstacle.’

The blood wind led them north‐east, trembling across the lowlands. It led them to a ravine, a shallow cleft that revealed the headframe of an ancient mine. It was partially sealed by the wreckage of a collapsed hoist, like a steel spider web crushed into the entrance.

Such delving was not uncommon. The landscape was porous with such abandonment.

Some were large scale constructs, open shelf mines that sliced slabs of the continent away from its crust. Others were smaller shaft mines, long forgotten and extinguished by collapse.

This one – according to the squad’s pre‐deployment briefing – fell somewhere in-between the two extremes. A perfect circle, jagged with cog’s‐teeth markings, had been cut into the ravine’s coarse‐grained sandstone. Wide enough to accommodate seismic earth-tractors, the severed remains of a rail system led directly into the worm’s‐mouth entrance.

Much of the shaft entrance had become buried beneath thousands of years of sand, dust and clay, forming a natural ramp that descended into the flat, black depths. Lobed spinifex grass lined the natural stairway, covering the flaking fossils of frames and sheave wheels.

There was blood amongst the spinifex too.

Here and there amid the tufts of coarse grass could be seen bright dashes of red. From the pattern and volume, Barsabbas knew this was not the spotted trail of a wounded animal. Strong violence had occurred there.

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The squad skirted the ravine warily, appraising the area from a tactical perspective.

Below them lay an irregular basin of yellowing grasses and crumbling clay. The rough terrain provided plenty of hiding space for unseen predators, but little meaningful cover for a Chaos Space Marine. Across the basin floor, the mine entrance was an edifice of sagging, oxidised framework, a perfect circle cut into the side‐wall of the ravine. Even with his enhanced vision, Barsabbas could not see into the girdered depths.

Sica studied it for a while, not moving, not speaking, simply sitting and watching. After what seemed like an eternity he finally spoke. ‘There is no cover. We will cross the basin in pairs. First pair moves across with the others covering: once the first pair reaches the headframe, turn around and provide cover. Clear?’

‘Clear,’ Barsabbas repeated with his brethren.

THEY ONLY DISCOVERED the carnage once they reached the bottom of the ravine.

The giant spinifex grass was much thicker than Barsabbas realised, dragging at him with thorny burrs. The megaflora formed unusual growth patterns where the inner grass died off and new stems sprouted from the outside forming concentric circles of various sizes.

Barsabbas mowed through the giant spinifex, flattening it with great sweeps of his metal paws. Sargaul prowled at his side, bolter loose but ready. They crunched through the loose threads of ochre grass, stopping sporadically to study the blood that flecked the area.

Behind them, the rest of the squad kept an invisible watch.

Sargaul’s voice suddenly came over the squad vox‐link. ‘I found a dead one.’

By his tone, Sargaul was anxious. Moving over to him, Barsabbas parted the grass to see what Sargaul had discovered.

There was a plainsman. Dead. A warrior, judging by the way he wore his red shuka and the quiver resting on his exposed spine. Two parallel impact hits had segmented him and smeared him into the clay. Barsabbas stopped and marvelled at the freshly slain corpse. It always amazed him how soft and easily broken was the normal human body. Mankind was not meant for war – a pouch of soft, vulnerable tissue encased in pain‐receptive skin, all reinforced by a skeletal structure no more durable than pottery ceramic. Mankind was too mortal for war.

‘The walking dead don’t have the combat capacity for that,’ Sargaul concluded.

The pair swept the area, realising the full extent of the violence. There had been combat, a fight of some sort. A broken hatchet with its edge blunted by heavy impact.Broken arrows lying in the grass.Pieces of humans thrown far and wide by the tremendous force and violence.

They found another plainsman tossed some distance away, a jumble of filleted flesh and splintered bone barely held together by skin and sinew. Barsabbas knew there were more –

he saw enough hands and broken parts to know there were others, but they could no longer be found. Just pieces.

For a moment, Barsabbas was overwhelmed by the urge to spray his bolter wildly, directly into the mine shaft. But the frenzied urge was fleeting and the Chaos Space Marine’s discipline held. They reached the sloping wall on the other side and took a knee, covering the area as the next pair made their way across.

A brief, keening cry echoed up from the mine shaft, causing Barsabbas to turn quickly, his bolter heavy in his hands. Despite switching to thermal version, Barsabbas could see 61

nothing down the rocky throat. The angled shaft simply slipped away into lightless, visionless nothing. The scream came again.

‘Besheba, move on!’

The last pair, Sica and Bael‐Shura, had crossed the basin. It was time to confront.

‘Divide into bonds. Sargaul and Barsabbas to head east, Cython and Hadius to the west, we’ll spearhead north. Keep constant vox‐link at both high and medium frequencies.

Explore the facility and report. Stay fluid,’ ordered Sica.

With that the six Chaos Space Marines descended the shaft slope at a sprint, their footfalls rumbling like the infant tremors of an earthquake.

A SHADOW FELL across the wallowing blackness of the entrance shaft. Not a physical shadow, for nothing could be discerned in the pitch dark, but a shadowed presence.

It walked quietly, yet each step crushed calcite into mineral dust. It moved softly in the shadows, gliding and shifting, yet its girth eclipsed almost the entire passage. Its heart did not beat, but it was not dead.

It followed Squad Besheba for a time, stalking warily out of auspex range. As the Blood Gorgons split off to sweep the stope tunnels, it followed too.

CYTHON AND HADIUS followed a railed tunnel for several kilometres. The railway was old, with much of the wood disintegrated and the metal a crisp, flaking shell. Yet amongst the crumbling dust, Cython could see fresh footprints. Fresh humanoid prints, some barefooted but others in heavy‐soled shoes.

It would be eighty‐six minutes into their descent before Squad Besheba encountered the enemy on Hauts Bassiq.

The tunnel widened into a large, yet low‐ceilinged chamber. Huddles of men and women were digging at the walls with their bare hands, scraping the soft chalk with their nails and scooping the powder into mine carts. There were perhaps two hundred of them, working in unison, yet none of them registered any heat signals under thermal vision. They were already dead.

Standing guard over the work detail was a trio of men. These three were alive, their living signatures throbbing with vital signs in Cython’s HUD. Their heads and necks were hooded in loose bags of canvas. Their faces were hidden but for the pair of round vision goggles, wide like the eyes of a monstrous doll. Their bodies were armoured in cheap, mass‐moulded segments of rubberised sheathing the grey colour of arsenic – bulky, overlapping and lobster‐tailed. None of the men bore any military insignia or heraldry that Cython could recognise.

The three men gave monosyllabic commands to the labouring corpses – carry, retrieve, dig, lift. Already an entire section of the chalk wall had been cleared away to reveal a system of pipes like exposed muscle fibre. It was evident that the dead were re‐excavating the ancient mine networks of Hauts Bassiq.

Cython fired a single shot. In the distance, no more than eighty metres down the stope, one of the men spun right around and fell. Hadius felled the other two with such speed that they never uttered a cry. Bam‐Bam‐Bam. Three shots in a semi‐second and it was done.

Cython and Hadius pressed on, through the chamber of slave‐corpses. These, however, did not attack them. They did not even look up from their work. Without the three men to 62

give them commands, the slaves simply continued to work in their shambling, methodical fashion. The chalk was red with blood as the slaves scraped their fingers down into stumps.

THE MOMENT BEFORE a firefight is an oddly awkward affair. There is a fraction of a second when opposing forces meet and strain to recognise one another. A slight hesitation as the human mind reconciles the concept of shooting down a stranger before actually doing so.

But the Blood Gorgons harboured no such hesitation. Sica opened fire from behind the cover of a gas main.

The procession of hooded men advancing down the tunnel was caught by the ferocity of the sudden ambush. The hooded men fired back. Their shots were surprisingly rapid and precise, solid slugs hammering Sica’s chest plate and helmet with percussive shocks, pushing him back. These men were soldiers, or at least fighters of some discipline, Sica could tell. Bael‐Shura fell amongst them, an almost platoon‐sized element of these cumbersome‐looking soldiers. He washed them with his flamer and scattered the survivors with his spiked gauntlet. Although the men were large, imposing things, Bael‐Shura made them appear frail and undersized.

The tunnel was large and chaotic. Hundreds of walking corpses were digging, scooping sediments away from the porous shell of an ancient gas main. Hundreds more dragged a monolithic length of plastek piping down the passage, evidently to replace the older, semi-fossilised piece.

Despite the shooting, the walking dead did not seem to notice the Blood Gorgons in their midst. Some looked up almost lazily, like bored grazers, but none reacted. Some were caught in the backwash of Bael‐Shura’s flamer, but they did not stop work, even as they burned. Their fat boiled and their skin peeled but they continued to drag on the ropes of the replacement pipe. These were obedient workers.

Hooded figures charged down the stope towards Sica. They were shouting orders, shooting down any corpse who did not move out of their way. Sica made sure to recognise them, blinking his eyes to capture file‐picts of the enemy. It would provide valuable reconnaissance should the Blood Gorgons have to deploy in greater force. He zoomed in on their armaments, blunt‐muzzled autoguns with trailing belt‐fed ammunition; not of Imperial issue, but a distinctly human design nonetheless. They fought in loose platoon formations, but their arsenic‐grey armour was too thick for light infantry: a rubberised synthetic moulding that would be simple to manufacture but inferior in quality. It offered no protection against Sica’s bolter.

Bael‐Shura moved next to him, the tunnel wide enough to allow the Traitor Marines to fight shoulder to shoulder. They laughed as they worked, a dry wicked laughter that was frightening in its intensity. From behind the circular saws of an industrial rock cutter, a hooded man lobbed a rock at Sica. He heard a whistling sound and he turned the slab of his shoulder pad towards the missile. There was a flash of light. Even with his eyes closed, Sica’s vision strobed red and bright yellow. It had been a grenade. The explosion pushed Sica slightly and made him grunt with annoyance at his own carelessness. He shot the man off the industrial saw, quickly, as if ashamed.

What seemed like two or three full platoons of the hooded men flooded the tunnel.

Perhaps seventy or eighty men, by Sica’s estimation. He reported the situation over the squad vox‐link in‐between shots. It was confirmed without concern. The hulking, rubberised soldiers swarmed over them, firing their underslung autoguns, brass casings 63

flickering rapidly into the air. Sica’s armour registered some minor damage in the extremities, particularly the forearms and shoulder regions as bullets chipped the external ceramite and hypodermal mesh.

Laughing, Sica backhanded one of the hooded men with the ridged knuckles of his gauntlet, snapping his neck and throwing two hundred kilos of brutish soldier back into his comrades. Bael‐Shura expelled the last of his promethium and did not bother to reload; he crashed into the enemy with his weight, slashing with his studded fists. Bones broke and rubberised armour split like melon rind. There was no stopping them. Panic finally setting in, the hooded men turned and fled.

THE VOX‐LINKS WERE dead. Partitioned by solid bedrock, Barsabbas and Sargaul knew nothing of their brethren’s conflict. The pair skirted east at Sica’s command, following what seemed to be a recent delving. The rock was freshly cut, as if expansion of the ancient mines had began anew.

Barsabbas and Sargaul descended on a chain‐belt platform down hundreds of metres.

Despite the oxidised state of the iron elevator, the chain belt was of newly galvanised steel and still smelt sweetly of greasing oil. Something had been reconstructing the mine.

Perhaps the same things responsible for eviscerating the plainsmen braves above ground.

The elevator came to a clattering halt, fifteen metres above the shaft bottom. They hung there, suspended like a bird cage. Below them, the vault at the pit of the mine was not what they had expected.

There were hundreds of walking dead down there, packed like meat in a storage facility, a dense grid of scalps and jostling shoulders. The cooler temperatures ensured they did not rot or bloat from the surface heat. They did not move and they did not respond. The frigid air rendered them stiff and sluggish. Some moaned and rocked gently on frozen limbs.

‘An army of the dead,’ Sargaul whistled appreciatively.

‘A workforce,’ Barsabbas observed.

‘But they would make poor slaves. I would not eat food prepared by these creatures.’

‘No. I do not think they can do anything except menial labour. No dexterity or cognitive capacity,’ Barsabbas suggested.

As if on cue, several of the closest corpses looked up and began to babble nonsense.

Their vocal cords had stiffened and gases exhaled from their lungs in a strained, raspy cry.

‘But they will work,’ said Sargaul.

The walking dead needed no food, no water. They did not suffer under the intolerably harsh climate, and they did not sleep or rest. They would simply work until they rotted apart.

In a way, Barsabbas was awed by the simple logic. It was almost impossible for Hauts Bassiq to host a living workforce – this was the primary reason behind the Imperial exodus.

Bassiq lacked water or arable land. The climate could not sustain a proper agriculture.

Despite his post‐human fortitude, Barsabbas felt the sting of the heat and the fogginess of extreme dehydration – he could not imagine what the conditions were like for natural‐born men. In the end, the Adeptus Mechanicus left their great earthmovers and machines to rust and the rich mineral seams unclaimed. It had simply been unworkable.

A standard healthy human forced to toil in the mines or above‐ground refineries would not last long. Extreme surface temperatures combined with a lack of available water was a simple yet logistically impossible obstacle. Barsabbas calculated a normal human 64

constitution could withstand no more than an eighteen‐hour work shift before death –

unless heat stroke, dehydration or muscular contractions put them out of commission first.

‘A long time ago, when I was still young, Gammadin had once considered harvesting Bassiq for more than just genestock,’ Sargaul said, even as he studied the corpse ranks below them. ‘There are enough resources and repairable facilities to equip and power a naval armada, buried just beneath the sand.’

Barsabbas shook his head. ‘And Gammadin…’

‘And Gammadin was wise enough not to attempt anything so foolish. This world is borderline uninhabitable. Nothing living can really thrive here,’ Sargaul said, gesturing at the dead to emphasise his point.

Below them, the dead shuffled on the spot, moaning and occasionally expelling a bellow of bloat gas. There was something developing on a much grander scale, much more than a mere outbreak of pestilence. Of this, Barsabbas was sure.

THE HOODED MEN thought they had the intruders isolated. These were, after all, their mines and their domain. Slinking within the shadows, they had hunted Cython and Hadius quietly, waiting until they were trapped within the gantry‐maze of a bauxite cavern.

But when the fighting erupted in the old mines, the Blood Gorgons did not fall as expected. Instead, the intruders seemed to enjoy the game.

Cython and Hadius, whooping with glee, sprinted down a gantry frame, gunning as they went. They were an old pair, a veteran bond who genuinely enjoyed the business of execution. There was a flippant creativity to their murdercraft and it came as easily to them as walking or sleeping.

Hooded silhouettes rose from the numberless tiers of rock shelves and walkways. The Blood Gorgons blasted them back down, calling out targets to each other in perfect rhythm.

Suddenly Cython barked in laughter. In the upper tiers of the gantry he saw the reflective glint of a gun scope. He turned to warn Hadius, but his bond was already aware.

They fired and a grey‐clad body plummeted down, bouncing off gantry spurs twice.

‘This is bad. I’ll wager Sica and Bael are carving up a hellstorm and we’re missing out on all the kills,’ Hadius said, breathing through his vox‐grille.

‘They’re too afraid to engage!’ laughed Cython. He spotted movement to his left and fired on instinct. He worked on drill‐conditioned reflex, aiming and shooting before he thought to. Another hooded man died, the bolt‐round punching through the metal drum he was cowering behind.

Cython was still laughing when Hadius’s helmet exploded in a plume of blood and metal wreckage. It was a definitive kill, the only injury that could truly put down a Traitor Marine.

Hadius’s body continued to move on muscle memory. He fired twice in a random direction, reloaded his bolter clip in one fluid motion, sank to his knees and died.

Cython stopped running, suddenly mute with shock. He felt the death keenly, as if something had been severed from his physical self. He stood still for one whole second, a momentary lapse in his surgically‐enhanced combat discipline, as he looked at his blood bond. It was one whole second he could not afford.

Cython tried to move but he realised something hot was pulsing down his throat and soaking the front of his chest. He put a hand to his throat, trying to stem the flow of blood.

Even in the darkness, he could see the arterial sprays spit between his fingers. He aimed his bolter with his free hand but by then he was already falling, the entire left side of his torso, 65

abdomen and arm disintegrating in a blizzard of superheated ash. He hit the bottom after a forty‐metre drop and died wordlessly.

Forty metres above him, in the upper crane of the gantry, the stalkers melted away, leaving only the faintest trace of gun smoke in their wake.

A RAPID DATA pulse ran through the squad sensory links. Hadius was dead. His life monitors blanked out with a surge of white noise, then nothing.

A mere moment later, the squad link was disrupted again. Cython was dead. Two dead.

Sergeant Sica had always been in control. It was the only state that he had ever known.

Now, crouched in the dark, attempting to re‐establish a vox‐link, Sica no longer felt in control. The enemy were in the shadows all around him. Shots tested the air, hissing past him and promising more to come.

Slapping the side of his helmet, Sica swore at himself and at everything around him, cursing himself for his lapse in judgement.

Trembling with rage, Sica tore off his helmet. A heavy‐calibre round thrummed past his ear with meteoric speed.

‘We need to regroup with Sargaul and Barsabbas!’ roared Bael‐Shura. He was crouched before the bend in the mine shaft, his flamer wedged against the corner. More of the enemy spilled from the surrounding stope tunnels, clattering down staircases with thickly soled boots. Shura forced them backwards with an enormous belch from his flamer. ‘We need to regroup,’ Bael‐Shura repeated urgently.

Sica shook his head. It was too late. ‘I don’t have coordinates for them. My auspex is jammed with interference.’

Bael‐Shura stood up and sprinted over to Sica. He had not taken three steps before his right arm exploded at the elbow. Reeling from the blow, Bael‐Shura rocked back on his heels like a teetering fortress. His body was fighting the trauma, flooding him with endorphins as he fell to one knee.

‘Not now,’ Sica hissed.

A dark shape rose up behind Bael‐Shura, engulfing him in its shadow.

It stood head and shoulders taller than either of them, a monstrous specimen. A great distended gut, studded with barbs, eclipsed Sica’s vision. Its power armour was off‐white and marbled with fatty threads of lime green. There was a heady aura of disease and the odour of stagnancy. It clutched a leaf‐bladed dagger, slick with the blood of Bael‐Shura.

‘Plague Marine,’ spat Sica.

Sica remembered meeting their kind in the Gospar Subsector. Sica had ram‐boarded the cargo fleet of a Nurgle warlord, and the bastards were exceedingly difficult to kill. Their plunder had been tainted too – the gold tarnished, their manuscripts rotting and their slaves sickly.

‘Pest,’ the Plague Marine replied with a shrug of his massive torso.

They clashed then, colliding head to head, shoulder to shoulder. The rotting monster was inhumanly strong and he was larger than any other Chaos Space Marine Sica had ever faced. Tying up the back of the Plague Marine’s head with one hand, Sica began to deliver a series of hammer fists with his other. The reinforced, pyramidal studs on his gauntlet cracked his enemy’s cyclopean visor. In answer, the Plague Marine hacked with his heavy, chopping knife. The seax slid into the joint between Sica’s chest guard and abdominal plates. Roaring, both combatants broke from their clinch with a burst of blood and ceramite 66

fragments. There was a momentary lull in violence as Sica shouldered his bolter and the Plague Marine raised his bolt pistol.

Then they shot at each other repeatedly at point‐blank range.

Shots pounded into Sica, crazing his vision, punching through ceramite, jolting the ground out from beneath him. They exchanged shots on automatic, drilling each other from no more than five paces apart. Seismic vibrations rattled his teeth and dislocated his jaw.

Sparks flew and metal fused. Sica’s bolter was stronger, larger and its stopping power considerable, popping a trio of gaping holes in the Plague Marine’s stomach and tearing a line of ragged shots vertically up into its neck. Simultaneously, the enemy’s bolt pistol skipped fat explosive slugs across Sica’s groin, chewing the ceramite deeply before penetrating the weaker armour of Sica’s upper thigh.

Sica fell to his knee as his femur was shot clean through. The Plague Marine folded, stumbling backwards and recoiling away like a wounded animal.

Bael‐Shura, finally seeing a clear shot, enveloped the Plague Marine with a splash of fire.

Dying, the monstrous specimen crashed to the flowstone in a mountainous pyre. Even as it fell, another Plague Marine appeared at the end of the tunnel. Then two more appeared in the gantries above them. The Blood Gorgons were surrounded.

Bael‐Shura dragged Sica’s heavily bleeding form against the rock wall with his remaining arm and crouched next to him.

‘I think we’re going to die,’ Sica said quietly.

‘Your leg. It’s going to need attention,’ Bael‐Shura said to Sica as he kicked his own severed arm away to make room.

Sica looked down at his leg and swore. There was a clean hole through his left thigh and the middle section of his femur was no longer there. His entire leg was twisted ninety degrees and attached only by threads of muscle and ceramite plating.

‘No time,’ Sica said, struggling to sit up.

The Plague Marines began firing. Muzzles flashed in the distance, and nearby rocks and scaffolding crumbled as if scored with an invisible drill. Sica fired two shots and opened the squad vox‐channel.

‘Sica to Besheba. Threat identified as Chaos Space Marines of Nurgle. We are outnumbered.’

It was the last transmission he would make. As shots barked and snapped around him, Sergeant Sica calmly ejected his spent magazine and clicked a fresh one into place. By his side, Bael‐Shura balanced a bolt pistol across the stump of his arm. They began to fire, determined to spend their ammunition while they still could.

EIGHT LEVELS UP, driven into the dead end of a rock grotto, the remnants of Squad Besheba fought. Barsabbas sprinted across a sloping shaft, racing upwards. He fired his bolter to the left as he ran, raking his field of vision. The enemy answered with their own fire, shooting so fiercely that the stalactites trembled from the ceiling. A shot glanced off Sargaul’s elbow.

Angry, Sargaul risked stopping for a moment and hurled a frag grenade.

The pair were running. What had begun as a coordinated sweep had degenerated into slaughter. The Plague Marines had ensnared them. They had exploited a Traitor Marine’s lust for violence by using auxiliary cultists as bait, luring the squad deep.

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Barsabbas could barely keep track of enemy positions. They were everywhere.

Gunshots exploded back and forth. They came and went, a rapid barrage of small‐arms fire, sudden and sharp, the whine of cyclical shots, then the singular shocking roar of rockets.

‘We have to go now,’ Barsabbas shouted to Sargaul. ‘We have to go.’

‘No, we stay,’ Sargaul replied.

‘They’re everywhere,’ Barsabbas argued. The violence was overcoming his deference to Sargaul’s seniority. ‘We can’t do anything here. We need to link up with another squad.’

The explosions and detonations threatened the integrity of the tunnel. Drip‐rocks above them rattled, shaking down a raft of dust and loose grit.

‘We have to go, brother,’ Barsabbas repeated. A missile launcher slid out from behind a support girder, almost directly in front of him. Barsabbas swung up his bolter and fired four times. A Plague Marine fell out from behind cover. The warhead fired and went wild, detonating overhead.

‘Sargaul!’

An overhanging shelf of sandstone weighing at least twenty tonnes cracked above Sargaul’s head. Oblivious, Sargaul traded shots with their pursuers. The stone above gave way. There was a whiplash snap as the sandstone split, before it dropped with a tectonic rumble. It missed crushing Sargaul by less than a metre. Unfazed, Sargaul spared the rock a curious glance before sprinting behind it for cover.

Fighting the urge to avoid being shot, Barsabbas waded back out into the open. He was low on ammunition. He locked onto a Plague Marine and shot at him, buckling him. In return, a bolter round exploded against his right chest plate. He felt the lancing pinpricks of shrapnel. The machine spirit of his armour recoiled in seething displeasure.

‘I’m getting hit. Absorbing shots and taking hits!’ Barsabbas voxed.

Boltguns barked, overlapping shots. Coarse screaming.The stampede of steel‐heavy boots.More shots.

‘Hold on, brother. Hold on,’ Sargaul replied.

Barsabbas saw Sargaul swim through the barrage towards him. His bond‐brother was missing a hand. Rounds drilled against his glossy hide. Sargaul ran.

Then the tunnel collapsed.

Creaking girders could no longer support the ancient mine shaft. The entire tunnel buckled, warped, as if the sandstone was momentarily liquefying. Steel girders snapped.

The ceiling imploded with a puff.

As the weight of a planet’s crust fell upon him, the last thing Barsabbas thought about was the shame he had brought to Squad Besheba.

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