Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  To his right, at the opposite end of the empty chamber, was his MKII power amour. Erect on a dais, the suit watched the vault like an empty sentry. The only other object in the vault was a tiny necklace, a blackened, withered scrap of coarse hair and leather. It was suspended in a glass pillar, floating like a tribal fetish. Sabtah had worn it once when he had been a mere boy, thousands of years ago, in the darkest caves of his memory. Capturing the image behind his eyelids, Sabtah waited.

  He allowed the intruders to step closer. He counted two, judging by their movements. He heard the rasp of metal being unsheathed. It was a good draw, smooth and unhesitant. He restrained his battle instinct and kept his eyes closed.

  He heard the final whine of a blade as it cleared the scabbard, so soft it barely disturbed the cool, recycled air.

  That was when Sabtah burst into life.

  He leapt. His explosiveness was incredible, clearing four metres from a standstill. The spindle wires snapped painfully from his torso plugs but Sabtah didn’t feel them.

  He seized the knife arm in the dark, wrenching it into a figure-four lock and dislocating the elbow with a wet snap. He judged where the intruder’s throat would be in relation to the arm and punched with his fingers, jamming his gnarled digits into the larynx. He was rewarded by a wheeze of pain.

  Suddenly an arm seized Sabtah from behind, constricting around his throat. It snapped shut around his carotid arteries like a yoke. The arm was exceedingly strong and corded with smooth slabs of muscle. No normal man could possess such tendon strength; Sabtah knew he was fighting Astartes. It was something he had suspected when they first attacked, but now he was sure. Pivoting his hip, Sabtah tossed the assailant off his back with a smooth shoulder throw. The intruder crunched through his circadian cradle with a clash of sparks and broken circuitry.

  Under the fitful, hissing glow of his wrecked sleeping capsule Sabtah caught a brief glimpse of his assassins. They were both Blood Gorgons, and Sabtah knew them well.

  Both wore bodygloves of glossy umber; compression suits utilised for rigorous hand-to-hand combat, strength and conditioning drills. Both were young, their faces lacking the mutations of warp-wear. They were newly inducted warriors from Squad Mantica, a unit from the ruthless 5th Company.

  ‘Voldo, Korbaiden, desist!’ Sabtah ordered. His voice was sonorous, a blaring wall of sound.

  The young warriors faltered, stiffening for a second. But their training, their clinical drive to complete a mission, overtook any fear they held for Sabtah’s seniority. They were here to kill Sabtah and they would finish the job.

  As Voldo rose from the smoking wreck of the cradle, he lunged at Sabtah with a shard of broken panelling. Sabtah deflected the stab with the palm of his hand, a manoeuvre he had repeated millions of times in the drill halls. The younger warrior’s strike was slow in comparison, not yet honed through centuries upon centuries of combat. The trajectory was inefficient by ten degrees to the right and he did not roll his shoulder into the blow. Sabtah was faster and rammed his chin into Voldo’s eye. As Voldo reeled from the blow, Sabtah followed up with a rapid flurry of upper-body strikes. An elbow that crunched the orbital bone. A straight punch that dislocated the jaw. A knee that collapsed the sternum. Fists, knees, forearms and elbows, anvil impacts that thrashed Voldo back onto the floor.

  ‘Did Muhr send you?’ Sabtah asked forcefully, turning to face Korbaiden.

  The younger warrior backed away, his eyes darting left and right for a weapon. As old as Sabtah was, the hoary veteran’s body did not show any signs of mortal ageing. His torso was ridged and his legs were deeply striated, quadriceps bulging like hydraulics made flesh. He was short and compact for a Traitor Marine, but he carried the scarred, calloused pride of a weary predator. He could tell Korbaiden was frightened.

  ‘Did Muhr send you here? For me?’ Sabtah asked again.

  Korbaiden did not answer. He simply closed the distance, stepping to punch with his dislocated arm. Sabtah felt oddly proud of the young Blood Gorgon’s determination, but it did not deter him from sidestepping the punch and driving his knee into Korbaiden’s liver. Once. Twice. Sabtah wrapped his large, coarse hands behind Korbaiden’s head in a tight clinch and continued to knee him over and over again.

  He laid out both assassins on the floor. Voldo and Korbaiden were broken. They had suffered massive internal trauma that would have killed any normal human. Bones were split and organs had been ruptured. All of Korbaiden’s lungs had collapsed and part of Voldo’s face folded inwards.

  ‘Does your squad know of the shame you’ve brought them?’ Sabtah asked, softly this time.

  The assassins from Squad Mantica remained silent. Voldo tried to crawl towards a discarded knife, but his broken thigh would not hold him and he slid onto his stomach, eyes wide open as he breathed long, jagged breaths. Sabtah knew there was no sense in interrogating a Traitor Marine. They would not yield.

  Crossing over to a wall panel, Sabtah placed his palm on the scanner. The wall emitted an obliging chime and slid open. From the alcove, he retrieved his bolter and a fresh, heavy clip.

  As he loaded the weapon and crossed to the two injured Blood Gorgons, Sabtah sighed. He was profoundly sad. He had long feared that history came and went in cycles. The Blood Gorgons looked up at him, eyes wild and face muscles clenched in defiance.

  As his bolter banged twice, tremendously loud, it seemed his fears had been proven true.

  Barsabbas regained consciousness, but it made no difference. He could not move and he could not see. The only thing he could make out was a hairline crack on his otherwise blank, black helmet lens. There were no system reports, squad data-link or auspex monitors. Nothing.

  He tried to wriggle his fingers but they were wedged by stone. He tried to turn his neck but that too was viced under the avalanche.

  Unable to rely on his machine spirit, Barsabbas closed his eyes to mentally recompose himself. He felt no pain, which meant he was still operational. Except for some minor internal bruising, his major organs and skeleton remained intact. The concussion in his head was already fading, and it seemed his armour sensed his stirring consciousness. Slowly, the armour’s power plant roused from dormancy. Systems came online, one after another. His vision flashed, flickered and then became backlit by a luminous green as status updates scrolled across his helmet lens. The power plant would run on standby, slowly regenerating to full power, awaiting Barsabbas’s command.

  But Barsabbas simply opened his mouth and screamed in rage.

  They were defeated. It had never happened before. Barsabbas found it difficult to comprehend.

  The retreat on Govina against the tau had been just that: a retreat. It had been shameful, but it was nothing more than a blemish on what should have been an immeasurable history of warfare. But now Squad Besheba would gather no more history. Each warrior had been an invincible, terrifying warmonger. They were the horror stories that quelled unruly children. They were ruthless, clinically developed post-humans.

  And now they were all dead.

  This concept was something the Chirurgeons had not mentally processed him for. He felt dazed. He had fought Astartes before, both loyalist and renegade. He had repelled a boarding action against Imperial Fists; they had been linear and predictable, tactically sound but uncreative. The Salamanders had possessed heavy, static firepower, but had been susceptible to the Blood Gorgons’ guerrilla doctrine. They had even skirmished with the Black Legion – Abaddon’s own – over the spoils of a raid and escaped relatively unscathed.

  His power armour stirred impatiently, the power-plant surging static into his earpiece. Sargaul.

  Suddenly Barsabbas jolted. His bond. Where was his bond? Triggering the suit’s sensors, Barsabbas attempted to log on to the squad link and search for life signs. His systems were badly damaged. No read-outs or tact-visuals. No squad link. The vox was grainy with static and he had no status mo
nitors on his squad.

  Where was Sargaul?

  He did not feel the pain of separation experienced by the survivor of a broken bond. The death of a bond brought great mental and physical anguish, but he felt none. Sargaul was still alive, Barsabbas was sure of it.

  Again his power armour growled, its power plant surging. The machine spirit of his suit was rousing him to action. He was an operational Traitor Marine. He needed to proceed to Ur, for that was his primary objective. Mental conditioning took over, stabilising his rationality despite the neuro-toxicity of depression and hopelessness. Everything else had become secondary. But first he needed to free himself.

  Slowly, millimetre by millimetre, Barsabbas shifted his fingers. Calculating rest periods, it might take days to free himself, but he needed to proceed to Ur. Nothing would stop him while he still lived.

  Muscles tensing, suit hydraulics coiling, Barsabbas began the long, agonising process of clawing his way through the avalanche of rock.

  Mental conditioning was the cornerstone of an Astartes warrior. It was not their explosive strength, or the speed of their muscles. What made a Traitor Marine so terrifying a prospect was the conditioning of his mind.

  These were the thoughts that Barsabbas focussed on as he worked his way upwards from his burial. Beneath the suffocating weight of multi-tonne rock, Barsabbas thought of nothing else. He remembered the tale of Bond-Sergeant Ulphrete who fell comatose after a shell-shot to the temple. For ninety-two years, he lay in a coma, unable to be coaxed into wakefulness. Unknown to his brethren, Ulphrete had been awake the entire time. He had simply been unable to control his body. There he lay, trapped inside his own unresponsive form. For almost a century, he was left to his own madness as respirators nurtured his physical frame. The claustrophobia devoured him. What thoughts did one keep to close one’s eyes and simply think for one century?

  After almost a century, the bond-sergeant finally broke from his coma. To the disbelief of all, Ulphrete had clear memory of the conversations the Chirurgeons had held while they had thought him paralysed and brain dead. He had been awake and he had not gone mad. The mental conditioning of an Astartes had steeled his mind.

  For days, Barsabbas thought only of Ulphrete. Sensory deprivation for the first few days was bad. But then afterwards, he became accustomed to the kaleidoscopic scenes behind his eyelids and the utter lack of sound. He wriggled his way, easing out his fingers, creating room for his wrist, slowly pushing and shrugging his shoulders until finally he could move his entire right arm.

  He did not know how long it took him. Two days perhaps? Seven? Barsabbas had no way of telling. Painfully, bit by bit, he clawed his way up and out.

  Dragging his lower body free of the rockfall, Barsabbas stood up and stretched his limbs. The sensation of movement felt unnatural to him. Looking around, it took him some time to take in his surroundings. He stood atop the slope of an avalanche, the tunnel collapsed beneath crumbling sandstone. Above him, the upper tiers of the mines had fallen through, the rusting girders finally giving way. Patches of sunlight speared down from the remains of the mine shaft entry.

  In the back of his head, Ur still called. Barsabbas knew, if circumstances so required, he could stop thinking altogether and his body would take him to Ur – such was the mental conditioning of the Astartes.

  He retraced his steps, clawing his way up the shale slope. Enraged and despondent, the world became disjointed. He followed a trail left by the enemy, a spoor in the dirt. Something was leaking fluid, condensation from the damaged temperature control units of their power armour suit. It was unmistakable. Someone in damaged power armour had walked these same tracks.

  Barsabbas followed.

  His mind was a blank ocean of fury. Barsabbas’s entire world became a thin stream of fluid leakage that he followed. Occasionally, he sniffed the air. He tasted the decaying stink of the Plague Marines. Chasing them like a desperate hound, Barsabbas pushed himself. He crawled on his knees up sand dunes and sprinted where the ground was flat. He was maddened and did not know where he was. He no longer cared. It only mattered that he followed the scent and trail.

  When Barsabbas regained his senses he did not know how long he had been walking. The trail petered out, soaking into the sand. He found himself in a field of cenopods. The heat was fading from the day, and the burning light of the sequential twilights had begun, shading through white, red, orange and purple. If he looked to the dune crests behind him he could gauge the hours of remaining light. Already the dune faces were in shadow, the driftwood blue of canegrass contrasting with the sepia of the desert sands.

  But he no longer needed light to guide his way. He could see boot prints in the sand, the unmistakable prints of steel-shod boots like small craters made by giant feet. The wind had barely disturbed them yet, tracing fine whorls into the griddled prints, which meant they were fresh.

  Squad Shar-Kali did not receive. Squad Yuggoth did not receive. None of the squads responded. Only Squad Brigand made contact with a two-second signal. They were ambushed and dying.

  Finally, Barsabbas blanked his vox-bead and consigned himself to its soft static. His vox-systems were far too heavily damaged, and even the armour’s self-repair systems could only rewire the transmission to other non-damaged but already overloaded data fibres.

  As far as Barsabbas knew, he was on his own.

  Chapter Nine

  Hepshah was a capricious one who did not fear the mon-keigh. He did not even fear the hulking war machines those mon-keigh called the Space Marines. No. Hepshah was too fast, too clever to ever feel the delight of an adrenal dump when confronting the hairy, ponderous anthropoids of humanity.

  He certainly did not fear them now, as they ran from him. There was a shocking honesty to a human’s terror that Hepshah found strangely endearing. When a man was pushed to the absolute limits of desperation, when the horror of death became impending, a human acted in comical ways. Arched eyebrows, gaping mouth, facial muscles contorted, limbs stiffening as they ran. Hepshah did not laugh often, but their fear was irresistibly amusing.

  That was how he came to be hunting humans through the burning settlement, playing with them and extending his victims’ misery to the heights of uncontrollable panic. Hepshah even held aloft his aperture, a crystalline shard prized amongst the kabal. Upon exposure to light the stone would record sounds and images, so that he could relive this day’s festivities in luxury, much later.

  He held up his aperture shard, panning it to record a clear panorama of the settlement. There was not much of the settlement left. The road train was upturned and twisted, its silver belly ruptured and spilling bloodied furniture. Its sacred engine was wisping with fire. The tents and lean-tos that cuddled around its protective girth had been flattened into the dirt. The settlement had been camped at the edge of a saltpan and many of the occupants had tried to flee across its basin. Their bodies still lay there now.

  Hepshah made sure to catch images of the dead, focussing his warpstone to record close-up shots of their slack faces. Here and there, amongst the livestock pens, rubble and caravans, survivors still hid. Hepshah caught glimpses of his fellow dark eldar hunting in the ruins. They were dark flashes, quick movements that seemed to elude a clear image.

  Hepshah’s victim suddenly ran across a caprid pen. He was hunched over and sprinting. His skin was dark and his woollen shawl was bright red. Hepshah had never seen the man before, but he had decided there and then that he was curious to see the man die by his hand.

  Hepshah scuttled behind low rubble and ran parallel to the man. His indigo carapace was almost weightless and he easily outpaced the human with long, bouncing strides. As if sensing his danger, the human looked up. He was an older man, his skin prematurely aged by sun. He was crying, his thin shoulders bobbing in the supplicating way that seemed habitually human. Fire burned around him. The bodies of his kin poked out from beneath scattered furnish
ings and dismantled homes. Hepshah took a moment to savour the carnage.

  Suddenly, the man sprinted in the opposite direction. Sensing an end to his pursuit, Hepshah armed his splinter pistol with one hand and held up his aperture for a clear recording. He fired. The splinter barb impacted against a wooden pen-post, punching a nail-sized hole through the wood. The man was still running, weaving between the narrow gap of two punctured train carriages. Laughing, Hepshah pursued.

  He only ran five steps before something arrested his momentum hard. His thin neck whiplashed, his laughter choking in his throat, Hepshah’s back slammed to the ground. He found himself looking up at a brown, monstrous face, a bovine snarl, branching antlers. A helmet, Hepshah realised.

  The warrior towered over him, filling his aperture with images of dark armour, amour like bloodied earth pigment. ‘This is my home, little creature. These lands belong to the lineage of the Blood Gorgons.’

  Hepshah gave a shrill yelp of surprise. He never realised how tall and thickly built the mon-keigh could become. He had known Space Marines to be cumbersome flocks of tank-like infantry. Now he realised they were not.

  As Hepshah struggled to regain his breath, the Chaos Space Marine gripped him firmly by the face, pinning his head with a delicate grip. His other hand darted, whisper quick, tapping him on the temple with a long mace. No more than a light double tap.

  Hepshah stopped struggling. The dark eldar was no longer recognisable from the neck up. The encounter took just seconds and by the time Hepshah’s body was discovered, Barsabbas was already gone.

  Moribeth found Draaz hung from the rafters. She found Fhaisor and Amul-Teth reclining behind a bombed-out dust buggy. In the open, tossed amongst the debris, was a stove boiler that leaked blood. She did not open the coal hatch, but presumed it to contain the remains of Sabhira.