by Henry Zou
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 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 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 war. 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, 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 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.
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.
Chapter Eight
Sabtah was sleeping when they came for him.
They dispatched his black turbans quickly and without alarm. One slave-guard was decapitated and hidden in a path of filamentous bacteria, just outside Sabtah’s chamber gates. His throat was cut and the blood absorbed into the gossamer hairs, leaving little trace of his murder.
The other sentry was less fortunate still. Standing guard outside Sabtah’s vestibule, he found himself unceremoniously rolled down a venting chute. The chopping fans coughed only slightly as his body was fed through them.
Although the iron-bound gates were sealed by sequential trigger locks, the intruders knew the numeric codes and slid them open manually. Once inside, they severed the power cables that veined the ceilings above. Vox-channels, motion sensors and trip lasers were all disconnected. In one quick act, Sabtah’s proto-fortress became vulnerable and isolated. Even the phos-lights dimmed to black.
But Sabtah heard it all.
He sat upright in his circadian cradle – a high-backed throne of leather and iron. Spindles of wire sprouted from the cradle and interfaced with the black carapace beneath Sabtah’s naked torso. He pretended to be in a drug-induced comatose state. He was unarmoured, wearing nothing but a leather kilt. His chin rested against his chest and his eyes were closed. But in his mind, Sabtah was wide awake.
He kept his eyes closed even as he heard the soft click of his chamber door. In his mind’s eye, Sabtah drew a mental map of his vault. The vault was high-ceilinged and circular, a silo of vast but empty proportions. Ringing the walls were racks of disused boarding pikes – hundreds, perhaps thousands of spears, among them Adulasian harpoons, Cestun half-and-halfs and even Persepian marlin-pikes. Dusty and antiquated, the pikes huddled like clusters of old men, their shafts brittle and their tips toothless.
