Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  Here the Blood Gorgons came to feast before deployment and, as was customary, receive their pre-mission assembly with the company commander. Although it marked the last stage of squad-level planning and tactics, it was also a sombre time to gather and feast among brothers.

  It was only a small deployment, with five squads. Many of the long tables, arrayed in one-hundred-man company lines, were empty, yet the food and wine were nonetheless bountiful. The kitchen crews had been diligent in their preparation of the Traitor Marines’ pre-war nutrition. Loaves of fibre-dense wholegrain breads steamed in baskets. Creamed soups from the vessel’s fungal colonies were wheeled out in cauldrons. Roast and furnaced meats of all kinds were hauled out in hand wagons.

  The five squads sat together at the long table, with Captain Hazareth at their head. Gathered were Squad Besheba, Squad Hastur, Squad Yuggoth, Squad Brigand and veteran fire-team Shar-Kali.

  Barsabbas found himself sitting opposite a brother of Squad Hastur. He gave him a curt nod but nothing more. It was known amongst the company that Squad Hastur were ‘Muhrites’, supporters of Muhr’s ascension. Their sergeant, Brother Kloden, was an ambitious aspirant who hungered for conquest, and that did not sit well with the company.

  The squads fell into silence as Captain Hazareth pushed back his granite bench with a scrape.

  ‘I could not be more confident in the destruction you will cause,’ Hazareth began.

  The squads stamped and clapped clamorously, spilling wine and bashing the basalt table with their fists. Barsabbas was so caught up in the excitement he crushed a brass dining plate in his hands and hurled it across the hall.

  Hazareth motioned for quiet. ‘Our wards on Hauts Bassiq have signalled for our aid. It is our duty to our slavestock worlds that we answer their calls, so it has always been.’

  He brought up a hololithic display from a vertical projector. ‘This is an aerial surveillance pict from the last time we harvested genestock. That was close to sixteen cycles ago, or almost eighty years standard. As you can see, the terrain is largely open, flat country. The Adeptus Mechanicus blasted the land prior to settlement. In doing so, the ensuing firestorm depleted the atmosphere causing temperatures to scale intolerable heights within years.’

  Barsabbas took a sip of his wine and realised it could be the last time in months that his hydration levels would be optimal. The furious loss of sweat and Hauts Bassiq’s scarcity of water had driven the Imperial colonies away and turned the planet into a ghost desert.

  Spilling a cartographer’s chart over the table and cutlery, Hazareth tapped the map with a blunt, armoured fingertip. ‘Of all our sixty-two recruitment worlds, Hauts Bassiq breeds one of the hardiest stock due to its borderline inhospitable climate. Minerally, it is one of the richest in resources–’

  Brother-Sergeant Kloden frowned and rapped the table in-between mouthfuls of beef tendon. ‘What use do we have of mineral resources? We have never been ones to hoard.’

  Sargaul interjected tersely. ‘Warp-iron. Kloden, do you know what warp-iron is?’ he asked coldly.

  Barsabbas nodded to himself knowingly. Although he was too young to have ever visited Hauts Bassiq, he had researched the catacombs for archived intelligence. Due to Hauts Bassiq’s proximity to the Occularis Terribus, its surface was marked with warpstone impacts that had compressed over the ages into a compound similar to uranium. This warp-iron was what kept the Cauldron Born’s fusion reactors running. Ever since the Chapter had claimed the ghost ship as its own, a piece of irradiated warp-iron almost three hundred metres in length had powered the reactor core.

  Before Kloden could respond, Captain Hazareth pointed at the map again. ‘Enemy threat disposition is unknown.’

  ‘Xenos, Khoitan?’ Sergeant Sica asked.

  Hazareth shook his head and drained his wine cup before answering. ‘Entirely unknown. The signal beacon from Hauts Bassiq relayed no other information.’

  ‘Try not to retreat if shot at again,’ Sergeant Kloden snorted.

  Sargaul stood up, clattering dishes and spilling a goblet. His naked blade was drawn.

  ‘Brother Sargaul! I will not have blades at my table,’ Captain Hazareth shouted, quick to quell the violence.

  Slaves frightened by the outburst scurried from the alcoves to refill wine goblets and placate the warriors with loaded plates of cold meat and spiced offal. The squads fell back to eating, shooting hard glares at each other across the table.

  Hazareth rotated the hololith and zoomed in close. ‘Your main objective is to reach the city of Ur. This is the last bastion of technology on Bassiq. The remaining Imperialists have sequestered themselves there, in a sealed city. They no longer maintain much contact with the nomads who we use as genestock. If any campaign were to be mounted, it would commence here. There are few other strategic targets amongst the major continents. The plainsmen dwell in semi-nomadic bands elsewhere.’

  ‘Why have our brother-ancestors not conquered Ur already? Why leave an Imperial bastion to blight the landscape?’ Barsabbas asked.

  ‘Because we pick and choose our fights carefully. There is nothing to be gained from overthrowing the Barons of Ur. They are an isolationist cult. Yet they protect the world from xenos raids and minor threats when we cannot. They do not even know of our existence or our sovereignty over their lands.’

  ‘Also,’ Kloden said, sneeringly, ‘we would risk too much. Our Chapter would have a difficult time overwhelming even that little dirthole,’ he said to Barsabbas. ‘They use a fusion reactor much like our own to power void shields thicker than your skull.’

  Captain Hazareth remained impassive, but Barsabbas could sense his Khoitan’s seething resentment for the Muhrites.

  ‘What you may not know,’ said Captain Hazareth, ‘is that Ur sits upon the largest deposit of warp-iron on the planet. There’s estimated to be enough warp-iron there to fuel the Cauldron Born’s fusion plant for no less than six hundred thousand years, standard.’

  Nothing in the archives had mentioned this. Barsabbas craned forwards. ‘Why have we not claimed this warp-iron as our own?’

  Hazareth shrugged dismissively. ‘Because, as Sergeant Kloden has said, we are not hoarders. We have all the warp-iron we need to feed the Cauldron Born’s reactor. We simply do not need more. We are free that way, and untied to the trouble of earthly possession.’

  Kloden exhaled derisively. ‘We are a poor man’s Chapter. Peasant ignorant.’

  Finally, Hazareth turned to Kloden. Only then did Barsabbas realise how imposing his Khoitan appeared. At well over two metres eighty, when Hazareth faced Kloden square on, he cast a shadow over Kloden’s face.

  ‘Sergeant Kloden. I will strip you of your rank and the skin from your sword hand if you cross me once more. I consider myself a tempered commander who judges his men not by the candidate of their allegiance, but by their merits as soldiers. If you befoul this mission with politics I swear I will eat your bones. You will go to Ur, you will report your findings, you will return here with all your men alive. Otherwise, Kloden, I sup on your marrow.’

  Kloden nodded quietly and slowly, afraid to meet Hazareth’s level gaze. He threw down a half-chewed haunch on his plate with a sullen clatter. His appetite, evidently, had gone.

  Despite Kloden’s chastisement, Barsabbas oddly felt no better. He too put down his eating knife. They were supposed to be Blood Gorgons, joined in feasting, shoulder to shoulder before their battle. It was not meant to be like this. Barsabbas was too young to remember the Chapter wars, but the thought of internecine conflict disturbed him in the most intrusive manner.

  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 a
nd 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.

  ‘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 hatch unfolded like a flower petal. 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 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 low-lying 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 demarcation of infection, where the black wilt 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.