Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  ‘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 by all. 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.

  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.

  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 Fifth 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 wor
ds, 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?’

  ‘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.’

  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.

  ‘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 their 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 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.