Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  ‘If I die, then you die. Can you not see that our fates are intertwined? The gods have made it so.’

  The Harvester climbed in altitude rapidly, angled against the land below at a nauseating slant and rapidly leaving it behind. They pierced the atmospheric clouds at mach speeds. Except for the gloss of sun reflecting from the craft’s nose, the world around blurred like wet paint: the brown earth, white sky and grey clouds streaking together into a tunnel of streaming colours.

  Barsabbas had utilised the most destructive human war machines, but the dark eldar technology left him in a state of jealous awe. The soldier within him could not deny that the vessel was a dangerous beast. It floated, spiralled and levelled out with a dexterity that was weightless. It could change directions without the hauling, air-dragging lunges of an Imperial fighter. Most impressive of all, grav-dampeners seemed to change the interior air pressure and speed. It felt as if they were not moving at all; there was no hint of velocity or momentum. Even standing in the fluted cockpit, unable to fit into any of the seats, Barsabbas did not budge as the Impaler soared.

  According to his helmet’s onboard display, the craft was travelling at supersonic speeds of Mach four-point-five, but Barsabbas estimated they were going hypersonic; his power armour simply did not register faster momentum.

  Gumede, terrified of the ordeal, was splayed out on the decking in the craft’s bottom. Face to the padded flooring, nails digging into the soft material, the chief’s eyes were closed. Barsabbas guessed he had never seen an atmospheric flier before, let alone been on board one. His cowardice, in Barsabbas’s mind, was distracting and the Chaos Space Marine ignored him.

  They crossed the northern badlands and overshot a narrow dust lake. From their vantage point, the pollution of Nurgle was revealed in its fullness. The intruders had poisoned, sickened and befouled everything.

  The further northwards they flew, the more jaundiced the sky became. It was thick with a mustard smog that left threads of heavy pigmented vapour in the clouds. Sometimes it rained and when it did, the downpour was brown like water from a disused and rusting tap. Even with the air-vents locked and the internal vacuum of the ship pressurised, Barsabbas could smell the faint odour of ageing, the sepulchral smell of organic matter falling apart prematurely, of rocks and plant life disintegrating to dust.

  The ship’s hololith projection of the topography showed almost zero plant or animal life. The mass graves of talon squall and caprid were illuminated as ghost images of bones breaking the monotony of the plains. Surface radiation was detected by the ship’s atmospheric reports, a steep increase the closer they flew to Ur.

  As the presence of the invaders grew stronger, Barsabbas felt increasingly disconnected with himself and his Chapter. He was on his own. The Traitor Marine let that thought seep in. He had hoped to find Sargaul, but with Sargaul gone, Barsabbas was entirely alone. He allowed the feeling to enrage him, to nurture the despondency into a vengeful rage. Gammadin had preached about harnessing emotions as opposed to wasting them. He nurtured his hate and soon he forgot all about the dust and ageing and emptiness of the plains. Thinking only in terms of kill count and ammunition ratio, Barsabbas prepared himself to enter Ur.

  The Cauldron Born had been full of life. Its flank had twinkled with the ship lights of activity, from the release of gases, from the over-venting of the engines, the hazard lights of ship dock, The daily test firing of batteries.

  But slowly, like an ailing man, the Cauldron Born was dying. Section by section, the ship’s lights became dark as the vessel trembled. As a living machine, the Cauldron Born was suffering. Its ventilation systems were blocked by mucus. The warp engines became weak and lethargic, consuming more and more power just to remain at anchor.

  Like the ship, entire galleries of slaves, the backbone of the space hulk, were falling to disease. Their habitation warrens were heady with the muffled heat of illness. Little by little, the lights switched off and the corridors dimmed as sections of the ship fell into disuse. The slaves who lived there were no longer. Nurgle had entered the vessel like a virus, spreading disease and wasting it away.

  Many slaves were reduced to eating scraps as the vast food stores rotted supernaturally fast. The ship’s hydroponic fungus farms, the mainstay of their diet, mutated, the edible mushrooms becoming pulsating, monstrous things. Stories were told of the vile, psychotropic poisons that affected victims who ate them.

  Perhaps the greatest change was the deliberate dismantling of the Blood Gorgons as a functional fighting force. From the dungeons, in slow piecemeal fashion, the Blood Gorgons were released to crew their ship. Unfamiliar with the workings of the ship, Opsarus’s Legion allowed the Blood Gorgons back into the fold, not as masters but as crew.

  The objective was to divide them, split them: segregate and neuter their ability to communicate, organise and unify. Companies were broken down into lonely squads, dispatched to crew distant peripheries of the ship.

  Some squads were relegated to maintain the warp engines, overseen by armed Plague Marines. Many were forced to perform the menial tasks of crewing surveillance systems or maintaining the ship’s bridge.

  When the Blood Gorgons were not utilising their combat-honed bodies for menial slavery, they attended indoctrination sessions. The high priests of Nurgle delivered fiery rhetoric about the divinity of decay. They forced the Blood Gorgons to kneel and pray for the poxes and plague of the Old Grandfather.

  Many outright refused, preferring to die than face the ignominy of slavery. The riots continued. There was an attempt by Squad Archeme to reach the weapon vaults via the air circulation ducts. Several minor resistances were attempted, but without organisational capacity, each was a needless casualty.

  The Blood Gorgons were no longer caged, but they were just as imprisoned. Their proud fighting companies fragmented – disarmed, controlled and infiltrated. Under this assault, there were those among the Chapter who openly admitted that the Blood Gorgons were no more.

  Chapter Twenty

  From orbital surveillance, Ur had never registered as anything more than a rock formation, a mere smudge upon a strata-map.

  But as they flew close, dropping in altitude, Barsabbas could see it in detail. From a distance, it had appeared a featureless bubble, merely a contrasting shape on the horizon. Up close it was a marvellous construct with an artistic symmetry that was not lost even on one so militantly linear.

  The city seemed entirely constructed of red clay. From the smooth panes of its siege curtains, it rose up and up for eight hundred metres, forming an imposing girdle of interlaced brick art. The wall was so tall it spread out to either side and up, its edges lost to a haze of dust. With such inferior materials, the city stood only by the design of sound engineering. It resembled a termite mound, the top clustered with finger spires and punctuated with mazes of galleries. Its raw size and flat, unyielding facelessness gave it a prominent, intoxicating stature.

  The monolithic walls were sealed within a void blister, a hemisphere of shields tessellating from generator pylons at ground level. Amber hexagons overlapped each other in a semi-sphere of paned scales. It was by far the thickest void shield Barsabbas had ever encountered, possibly sturdier than the shields of the Mechanicus Titans. Bronze, amber and tarnished brass, the tessellating pieces reflected the sunlight like tinfoil.

  Those shields, Barsabbas reckoned, had been the primary reason that the Blood Gorgons had never taken Ur. It was not that the Blood Gorgons could not break them – they had simply reasoned the costs to outweigh the gains. Ur, in some ways, protected the plainsmen of Bassiq against roving raiders from beyond the stars when the Blood Gorgons could not. Ur had protected Blood Gorgon interests, and in return the Blood Gorgons had chosen to let them live. Fight only when you have to, as Gammadin had always said.

  As the Harvester levelled out three hundred metres from Ur proper, a vox-signal was received by the ship’s tympanum, b
ringing Barsabbas out of his thoughts.

  ‘Mercenary, this is Green Father. State landing protocol, archon.’

  The voice that hailed them came through the Harvester’s aural fronds. Grating and intrusive, the voice thrummed through the metallic tuning forks set into the console with crystalline audio clarity.

  Sindul opened the vox-link on his console by touching the fibres connected to his ring fingers together. ‘This is the archon’s troupe. Mercenary awaits the Green Father’s welcome. Landing protocol sequenced,’ he announced loudly into the aural fronds.

  Without a second of delay, one of the shield pylons deactivated, winking a hexagonal gap in the city’s void blister. They flew in. The city rushed in to swallow them in a haze of sepia. The sudden change in atmospheric light was disorientating. Sunlight filtered through the void shields in honeyed orange. Everything seemed suspended in amber.

  The city itself rose in solid tiers. Enormous canvas awnings – perhaps half a kilometre in length – steepled each ziggurat with broad wings. Flat tiled roofs were set with perfect, geometric regularity up the stepped slope. Orthostats, pillars and open courts gave the architecture a palatial bearing.

  Barsabbas constructed a mental map of Ur from his briefing, remembering everything to scale and detail. Cross-referencing his coordinates with the dark eldar ship’s console display, Barsabbas remembered the ramparts contained narrow docking chutes heavily guarded by aerial defence silos. Measuring trajectory and angles of entry, he began making swift calculations in his head. ‘Zoom in there,’ he commanded, tapping the hololith display of the city’s rampart.

  Sindul’s fingers danced across his console, nimble and quick, and the image magnified. There amongst the brickwork was an aperture like an archer’s slit, a mere crack in the leviathan wall.

  ‘Take us in there,’ said Barsabbas.

  Sindul banked the Impaler into a lazy roll and dropped level with the rampart wall. Along the port side, they saw multiple box-battery missile systems swivel to track their descent. The accusatory finger of a turbo-laser tracked them, traversing on a railed track.

  ‘It’s time, then,’ Barsabbas intoned. He stowed his boltgun, mace and falchion in the storage bays and held out his wrists to Gumede. ‘Bind me,’ he ordered.

  The plainsman hesitantly looped one of the dark eldar’s barbed slave cuffs around Barsabbas’s forearms. His movements were clumsy and fearful, as if he did not want to touch the Godspawn. He cinched the noose tight around both of Barsabbas’s hands.

  Gumede peered outside the ship’s viewing ports as Ur rose above them. ‘I am not sure this will work,’ he said wearily, with the voice of a man resigned to death.

  Barsabbas shook his head. ‘It will work, as long as you both play your part.’

  The plan was simple. They would enter Ur and tell the truth, or at least a version of the truth. The dark eldar mercenaries had ambushed a lone Blood Gorgon survivor and captured him. Sindul, acting on behalf of the kabal, had come to negotiate a price for their Traitor Marine captive. Gumede, of course, was Sindul’s personal slave, a trophy from Hauts Bassiq.

  The plan was not without risks, but Barsabbas saw no other way of locating the gene-seeds or any other Blood Gorgon survivors. Ur was vast and to find a prisoner he would have to become one. Once imprisoned, Sindul would have no choice but to find and free him, lest he risk birthing a slave-scarab.

  Crossing over to the pilot’s seat with his hands bound, Barsabbas slapped the side of Sindul’s face. The dark eldar screamed in shock, the craft jinking as he flinched. A flesh scarab latched onto his milky skin and burrowed under the flesh, creating a bulge before disappearing into the muscle layers.

  ‘Why?’ Sindul hissed.

  ‘Do you need to ask?’

  ‘How can the plan work if I die? You need me to free you once you are captured,’ Sindul shot back.

  ‘That’s exactly why I’ve marked you. To ensure you do come back for me,’ Barsabbas replied.

  Sindul had nothing else to say. He simply touched his cheek where the flesh scarab had left a neat, red incision in his white skin.

  ‘You are a traitor, like all of your kind,’ Barsabbas said flatly. ‘You have five hours to come for me. So you best keep alert.’

  Those were the last words he said as the Impaler shot into the wall and into the city of Ur itself.

  Compared to the plains of Hauts Bassiq, the city of Ur seemed like a different world. Sealed within its void shields and walls, it existed as a self-contained ecosystem.

  Long ago prospectors, those who did not wish to wander the wastelands as nomads, had retreated to this place. They hoarded the last of the industrial engines with them and constructed the ziggurat – an ancestral symbol of human engineering. It was a construct of simple necessity, a sturdy monument of utility that has held a place within human history.

  They hid there. Away from the agonising climate, away from their wayward kin. Hiding, even, from the Imperium itself who had long since assigned the status of Hauts Bassiq as ‘inhospitable’ and tucked the notation away in forgotten archives.

  There, left to isolation, the ancestors of Ur devolved. Insular and inbred, her people became sickly and viciously paranoid. They diverged into their own puritan Imperial Cult, believing the preservation of their isolation the key to resisting corruption.

  They became obsessed with locking out the exterior. They raised mighty walls and developed stout shields. All their industry, their resources, all of their salvaged technology was devoted to isolation. To them, the world outside Ur was a hellish, primordial place.

  They emerged intermittently to trade with the distant nomads, and even then only for necessities which could not be synthetically produced in Ur’s industrial mills and foundries. Beyond that, Ur had remained sealed to the outside.

  Refineries in the lowest portions of the city-stack fed power and fuel into the city above, appropriately serving as its foundations. Pipe systems large enough to convey battle tanks coiled around the bottom stacks like a nest of metal pythons. The refineries cooled the city with cyclopean turbines, recycled water and powered the void shields. The columns of smoke stacks coughed exhaust into the atmosphere, steaming the void shields with their pollutant heat.

  Above this, the city itself rose in neat, geometric stacks. Brown, red and dust coloured brickwork rose up in tetric tessellation, as if the buildings were blocks that slotted into each other. No bolt, nail or adhesive could be found. Like the sealed city itself, the architecture was raw and unadorned, shocking in its gigantic scale – blunt and imposing and entirely interlocked.

  The Harvester landed in the open plaza of the apex palace. From within emerged the dark eldar slaver and his servant, a gold-skinned native. The shambling Traitor Marine was dragged out of the ship’s hold by means of anchor chains and barb cuffs. It took an entire platoon of Septic infantry to get him out, hauling taut on his collar, wrist and waist chains as he bayed and roared at the indignity.

  The interior of the palace was broad and high-ceilinged. Ivory tiles lined every surface, cool and sterile. Some were arranged in concentric spirals while others formed hypnotic helix patterns across the ceiling. It might have once been beautiful, but there was an air of darkness that spoke of its new occupiers. The tall windows were muffled by dark, heavy drapes to seal out the golden light. Septic soldiers patrolled the corridors or stood sentry in the galleries.

  The monstrous captive was led to the council chamber, where the barons of Ur had once held court.

  Much had changed since the coming of Nurgle. The tiled walls were scummed with gangrenous mould and mildew. Although the High Baron still sat upon his basalt throne, his face was haggard and his hair white. He was only thirty-two years old, but had aged forty years since the invasion. He was surrounded by his subjects – courtiers, advisors and scribes. They were all dead, their skin grey and their eyes white, but some s
till stood upright, locked in grovelling poses. Others still had been afflicted with the black wilt. Dirty nobles in filthy finery lurked in the corners like rodents, their wrists chained to the walls as they gnashed hungry teeth and wailed from dead lungs.

  As a reflection of the city itself, the court still stood as a dead shell of its former self, unchanged from the outside but decaying from within.

  Next to the High Baron stood a warrior-captain of Nurgle, a Plague Marine with a rhinocerine helmet and large, swollen hands that could not fit into armoured gloves. He leaned down to whisper into the ear of the High Baron, ‘You may speak.’

  And so the dark eldar slaver negotiated for the price of his captive. The High Baron responded, but each time at the behest of the Plague Marine. He was a mere puppet, his eyes wandering aimlessly as the Plague Marine prompted words into his mouth.

  They settled on a sum of two hundred slaves, of which at least one hundred would be strong, human males, to be paid immediately. In addition, two tonnes of high-grade adamantite from the newly reconstructed mines would be paid later, once the infrastructure was completed.

  The deal done, the High Baron bowed low and said, ‘May the Emperor protect,’ with a bored expression that spoke of thoughtless monotony.

  His words incurred a slap from the Plague Marine, his large, black palms knocking the High Baron to the ground.

  Without paying any attention, Sindul strode out of the chamber. The belay team of Septic soldiers following him strained against the chains of a raging Blood Gorgon.

  A procession descended into the hab quarters. The Septic had yoked Barsabbas to a stone chariot, chaining his limbs tightly against the basalt frame and pulling the ponderous platform on grinding stone wheels. The denizens of Ur mobbed the streets to catch a glimpse of him. For hours, the city’s address systems had announced the capture of an invader. Horn speakers from the ramparts promised the ‘bringing to heel of distant enemies’ – in turn, the survivors of Ur, those not too sick to show fealty to their new rulers, came to see him.