Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  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 leaders 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 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 reknowned words ‘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?’

  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. 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 somewher
e 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.

  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 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 bare-footed 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 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 hammeri
ng 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.