Bastion Wars

by Henry Zou

  By Sindul’s reckoning, Barsabbas was free. His thoughts were confirmed when there was a distant thrum a hundred metres above. Looking up, Sindul saw puffs of gritty smoke drifting from the distant minarets.

  ‘We must stay and wait for the koag,’ Gumede declared, as if sensing Sindul’s intentions.

  Sindul cast him a sidelong glance, smiling softly.

  ‘We wait,’ Gumede repeated firmly. ‘You will not do to me again what you did last time.’

  The chief stepped back and pointed a lasrifle at Sindul.

  ‘This is awkward,’ Sindul began. He shot forwards and parried the lasrifle aside with the blade of his hand. His left hand shot out and seized Gumede’s throat.

  ‘You made it easier than last time,’ the dark eldar hissed through his teeth. He stepped inside and pushed Gumede against the ship’s fuselage. With two strokes, fast and deft, Sindul severed the chief’s vocal cords and collapsed his lungs.

  Turning swiftly from his act, Sindul looked for any witnesses but saw none. The hangar was empty but for his own long shadow.

  Satisfied that he was alone, Sindul began to pare off his own right cheek. He placed the blade against his own face and sliced deep. Startling, blinding pain almost blacked him out. The trauma would have sent a human into shock, but the dark eldar was a connoisseur of pain. The sensation, bright and heated, paralysed him temporarily. For a brief second the wound was too much even for Sindul, and he wobbled on his feet before he regained his senses. He forced down the pain and embraced its sensation until adrenaline numbed it.

  Stumbling, leaking a trail of blood, Sindul lurched towards his waiting vessel.

  The city was a vast place of unfamiliar angles and planes. A lesser man would have been disorientated and lost, yet Barsabbas moved with a sure-footed purpose. The broad plazas, walkways and mezzanines were mapped to hololithic precision in his mind. Retracing the route of his stone chariot, Barsabbas drew upon his short-term memory banks and the pict-captures from his iris.

  Bullets fragmented the stone around him as the enemy tracked his escape, but he was unfazed. Barsabbas ran point, snapping back shots when it suited him. He depleted the last of his ammunition, draining clip after clip. City wardens and Septic infantry soon discovered that lattice bricks did not stop bolt shells and fled at the accuracy of his fire. Automatic targetters jumped from victim to victim. Barsabbas fluttered the trigger, coaxing a constant burp of bolt-shot into the overhead ramparts and alcoves. The brickwork was chewed up, forcing the enemy deep into cover.

  Behind, Gammadin strode through the smoke. His head was lowered, the antlers of his forehead pointed forwards.

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ Barsabbas said, gesturing at a stone arch that framed a causeway.

  They turned a corner and the view opened before them, an open courtyard framed by inverted columns. Several bodies were strewn across the flagstones – among them was a figure swathed in a red shuka.

  Barsabbas recognised Gumede. His bolter flashed up immediately, looking for Sindul. Stepping past the plainsman’s body, Barsabbas afforded Gumede a brief glance. He felt a curious sensation, like a man who had lost a valuable tool, but he dismissed the thought immediately.

  Some metres away, the Harvester was already powering up as incandescent light speared from its rearward engine pods. Barsabbas tensed up at the sound. Something was wrong, or so his instincts told him. Running into the open, Barsabbas waved towards the Harvester’s cockpit.

  In response, the ship swivelled to face him, its engines flaring. Behind the glass viewing shields, Barsabbas could see Sindul’s face.

  The dark eldar actually smiled at him. He smiled through a face slick with blood.

  At first, Barsabbas only noticed the stone pillars around him toppling. Only a second later did he hear the Harvester’s nose-mounted cannons shriek into life.

  Barsabbas was already rolling backwards as flagstones around him liquefied, rolled and rippled under the impacts of a hyper-velocity cannon. He banged back three or four shots with his bolter, feeling impotent as he did so.

  As he dived for cover, Barsabbas could hear the increasing whine as the ship’s vector thrusters built up to full power. The Harvester levitated unsteadily as its landing struts folded into its hovering belly. The cannon continued to shred the surrounding area, felling walls and flattening nearby habs.

  Desist.+

  A sudden wrench of neural pain tingled up Barsabbas’s spine and into the back of his head. Screaming, Barsabbas fell into a crouch.

  Simultaneously, the Harvester seemed to lose balance. Its starboard wing listed and tipped, grazing the flagstones. It righted itself then lurched the other way, its portside wing scraping the tiles with a flash of fat orange sparks.

  Barsabbas turned around just in time to see Gammadin raise his hands and hurl another mind bolt.

  Desist+

  This time, Barsabbas tried to duck, but ducking did nothing to protect him. The psychic pain exploded again. The word ‘desist’ echoed in his brain. Barsabbas almost dropped his boltgun and lost control of his hands as the muscles spasmed. Although Gammadin’s will was focused on Sindul, such was the power of his psychic echoes that Barsabbas was compelled even by their residual fury.

  To his front, the Harvester tried to thrust up into the air. It rose hesitantly, stalled and then slammed back down. It came down so quickly that the landing struts snapped and there could be heard the bestial friction of forty tonnes of metal squealing against stone.

  Show yourself.+

  The cockpit hatch popped open with a vacuum hiss and Sindul crawled down the ledge. Blood ran down his face, into his chest and down most of his legs. His hands were clawing his head, his topknot frazzled and wild.

  Gammadin crossed the courtyard and bodily lifted the dark eldar into the air with one arm, holding him face to face. ‘Twice I have been betrayed by the dark eldar. Twice,’ Gammadin said with disgust while studying the specimen in his grasp.

  Sindul screamed. Gammadin tossed him onto the hard ground. A boot, wrought like a cloven hoof, was brought down onto Sindul’s femur, breaking his leg cleanly. Gammadin stomped again and broke the eldar’s other leg.

  ‘We still need him,’ Barsabbas gasped as he limped across the courtyard. He could already hear the familiar shouts of soldiers being mustered to find them, and the crump of approaching footsteps.

  ‘We still need him to fly his ship.’

  Gammadin nodded sagely. ‘Well, he can fly without the aid of his mischievous little legs.’

  At this, Sindul raised his head with a bloodied grin. When he smiled, the missing part of his right cheek twitched with exposed fat and sinew. Blood stained his teeth and drooled from his lips. ‘Well, we better go, then. The enemy are coming for you,’ he taunted defiantly.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Anko Muhr had not expected the influence of Grandfather Nurgle to pervade so quickly. The God of Decay was generous to those who gave worship. The Cauldron Born was ailing, its ventilation wheezing like great bellows. Even the Witchlord’s own brothers would one day succumb to the persistent corruption of Nurgle when their wills were sufficiently broken. Muhr, however, had welcomed the Lord of Decay openly.

  Had his hand always been so black? He was certain it had not.

  For as long as he could remember, Muhr’s ungloved hand had been that of a Blood Gorgon: pale white and deeply striated, with thick bones and the wiry muscle that bound them. It was not like that any more.

  Muhr’s hand, when he held it up to his face, was entirely black. The skin itself was so dark it was almost waxen, but not the smooth beautiful black of ebony, it was the black of rot. He had not even noticed the change in colour until his fingernails had slid off his fingertips. Now his hand pulsated, the veins engorged with tarrish blood and swelling the walls of his skin. The changes Muhr had undergone were mesmerising. The gifts o
f Father Nurgle, the beautification of decay, were endlessly fascinating...

  ‘My sorcerer. That has a measure of dignity to it, does it not? Sorcerer. Advisor. The second of the Crow.’

  Muhr turned to see Opsarus standing in his chambers without announcement. The Crow had a habit of doing so.

  ‘Nurgle favours you,’ Opsarus continued. ‘See the attention he invests in you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Muhr replied, hypnotised by his own hand.

  ‘Behold the floral magnificence of Nurgle. Budding flowers of flesh growth, the tessellating landscapes of mould spore. There is no beauty to the unadorned,’ Opsarus declared. ‘Nurgle is first and foremost an artist. Tzeentch, he is a mere mischief-maker, and young Slaanesh no more than a libertine. Let us not even begin with the linear, narrow-minded aggression of Khorne.’

  ‘Nurgle nurtures,’ Muhr said. ‘But I do not know how openly my bonded brethren will appreciate the artistic mutations of Nurgle.’

  Opsarus’s delighted tone changed suddenly. His voice lowered. ‘What do you mean?’

  Muhr shook his head quickly. ‘I did not mean anything by it,’ he stammered. ‘But the Blood Gorgon companies. They may not be impressed by the physical changes that Nurgle has planned for them.’

  Opsarus rose to his full height, his voice a slavering growl. ‘Of course they will. You would like it. Soon they will become like you. Like me. We are one. Nurgle will take the Blood Gorgons into the fold, whether they choose it or not.’

  Muhr nodded. He stared at his black hand. Nurgle was claiming him because he had allowed Nurgle into his soul. But sooner or later, whether the Blood Gorgons wished it or not, the deathly presence of the Plague Marines would change them. The spores would spread into recycled air, the viruses would consume the space hulk. The very presence of Nurgle himself would eventually change them all.

  Opsarus appeared to calm down, his breath slowing to a rasp. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We can be brothers in Nurgle together. You, I and all your brethren. There will be peace then.’

  ‘Of course, lord,’ Muhr agreed. ‘Of course.’

  The moons of Hauts Bassiq were not distant beasts. They lingered shyly on the fringes of the sky, sulking behind the fiery light of their solar cousins. Small, brown and fretful, the half-dozen moons fussed across the sky, attempting to find any space, any gap that was not dominated by the harsh glare of day just so they could be seen.

  It did not take long for the Harvester to locate the secondary moon of Hauspax once they left Bassiq’s toxic atmosphere behind. The moon was a slow-moving orbiter, a fat disc that crawled across the sky when viewed from below. What could not be seen from below, however, but became clearly visible on the Harvester’s sensor, was the leviathan bulk of the Cauldron Born hiding behind the moon’s unseen side. Its massive energy output and warp engines lit up its presence like a miniature star. Even lurking behind the dark side of the moon, its energy signature was so radiant that it could have been picked up almost a subsector away by any armada scan.

  It was a slow, steady affair to navigate the vessel by sensor scans alone. The ship’s glare shutters and void shields locked them in a cabin of low blue lighting. Cocooned by insulation, it shielded them from the boiling temperature and the retina-scalding brightness of the proximate suns.

  Despite their blind flight, Sindul proved to be a pilot of finesse. They circumvented the locust swarms of micrometeors that obstructed them. The xenos ship was light and comparatively fragile. Its void shields were not the thick-skinned energy-draining monsters favoured by human technology. It floated and spiralled away from oncoming high-velocity rock fragments rather than meeting them head-on, its shield shuddering briefly from hypersonic impacts with dust particles.

  As they crested the moon’s hemisphere, the Cauldron Born’s shadow eclipsed the sky. Here, even amongst the depthless expanse of space, the term ‘space hulk’ was entirely apt. Like the hand of a god it reared its fingers across the moon’s horizon. Four thousand metres away, the cityscapes of twinkling lance batteries, torpedo banks and gun turrets welcomed them with a taut, breathless tension.

  Although the broadsides were capable of dismantling continents, they were far too ponderous to harm the Harvester. Cloaked by refraction, the dark eldar ship pierced the Cauldron Born’s scans, registering as nothing more than tiny space debris.

  As they approached the tectonic flanks of the Cauldron Born, Sindul sped up. Launch tubes that clustered the vast underbelly closed rapidly. The raiding craft darted into a tube like a mosquito, swallowed up by the enormous metal hide of the floating fortress.

  It was too fast to fly by sight.

  The inner launch tube of the Cauldron Born’s flight passages became a blur, interrupted only by the strobe of overhead lights. Constructed to catapult raider craft from within the docking hangars, the tube’s guide markers were not clearly visible as the dark eldar vessel reduced speed to subsonic. Sindul navigated only by the sonic projection of his Impaler, guiding the craft with whisper-soft touches.

  By Barsabbas’s estimate, the Harvester was still going too fast. It was not meant to fly at such speeds. The wingtips barely cleared the tight confines of the entry valves. They banked hard, swerving as they flew deeper into the Cauldron Born’s sealed hangars. A human craft could never have matched the sharp brakes and switches in air pressure.

  Impressively, Sindul guided the craft in blind within the pitch-black chute. As Barsabbas watched, he realised that perhaps the folklore was true. Perhaps all eldarkind, to some extent, were possessed of psychic abilities. Even looking two or three seconds into the future would allow Sindul to pre-empt each turn, bend and elevation in their flight.

  A gas main flashed over the cockpit. The overhead ceiling skimmed so close that it felt like they had hit an oil slick.

  It seemed as if Sindul was fading. The dark eldar was shaking uncontrollably in his pilot’s sheath. As a Traitor Marine, Barsabbas had overlooked the physical and psychological ordeal he had forced upon his captive.

  Yet still Sindul laboured on.

  The Harvester finally slowed as it neared the Cauldron Born’s first atmospheric seal. It crashed then, as if entirely spent. It dropped, steadied and dropped again like an injured bird. Sindul only just managed to level out before the Harvester collided belly-down. It bounced once and skidded, wings sheared by a wall as the ship spun axially on its underside.

  Finally, with its rearward engines trailing flame, the ship came to a final, shuddering stop.

  Barsabbas pushed the side hatch open and manoeuvred his shoulders out from the frame. Gammadin strode out after him, his ceramite-fused body entirely unaffected by the landing. Without a word, the Ascendant Champion disappeared into the darkness of the launch tube’s hangar seal.

  Pausing briefly, Brother Barsabbas stole one last look into the Harvester’s interior. Under the flickering cabin glow, he could see Sindul’s body slumped in its cradle. As much as the creature had irked him, the dark eldar’s instinct to survive had impressed him. The utter lack of social conditioning, much like that of a Traitor Marine, meant the dark eldar could operate ruthlessly and without inhibition. That much at least was to be admired. Giving Sindul an almost imperceptible little nod, Barsabbas left, following Gammadin into the dark.

  Sindul breathed unsteadily.

  If he could see himself now, Sindul imagined he would not be the handsome creature he had once been. His pared-open face was smeared with a synthetic gel. Dried blood aproned the front of his chest and thighs. His hair framed wiry strands across his shoulders.

  He did not want to look down. He already knew his legs were a mess. The grating pain in his femurs had dulled now, one of the last feelings he would remember.

  Shaking uncontrollably, Sindul powered down the Harvester’s systems. Interior lights dimmed. Resting his head against the pilot’s cradle, he fought to stay awake.

  The Sept
ic infantry squad clattered down the lightless launch tube, unmasking the shadows with clumsy floodlight. Striding ahead of the human infantry came Brother Pelgan, a shambling, rusting behemoth of Nurgle. Despite the calls and clicks of animals that lurked in the subterranean depths, Pelgan was by far the most fearsome thing in the region.

  They made their way down into the abandoned extremities of the floating fortress. It was too dark to see what purpose these corridors once served, or where they led. In many parts the ceiling had collapsed or the mesh decking simply fell away like a cliff-face. Men stumbled often, sometimes a mere step away from some bottomless drop. It was difficult to imagine how large the Cauldron Born appeared from orbit, but within, Pelgan had learned to hate the enormity of its landscape. It was so easy to get lost.

  It was for that same reason Pelgan had bemoaned his ill-fortune when his squad sergeant forced him to investigate a foreign object that had breached the ship. It was likely no more than a small meteorite, attracted by the gravitational pull of the floating fortress. Nonetheless, the Septic subordinates could not be entrusted to such a task. With the recent riots in the dungeons, Opsarus had become even more wary, ever more alert.

  ‘Bring that floodlight over here,’ Pelgan snapped impatiently. The Septic hauled the heavy lamp over to where Pelgan indicated and began to pan the light back and forth.

  At first they saw nothing. The walls were caked with a patina of organic decay. Like an ossuary, the oxidised metal was honeycombed with fossilised plant life. Yet if Pelgan looked closely he could see gouges in the walls – high-impact damage to parts of the ceiling where flora and decay had been ripped away to reveal the raw metal of the ship’s infrastructure beneath.

  ‘Over there,’ Pelgan said, checking his auspex again.

  The floodlight captured something reflective in its beam. A long and fluted silhouette three times the length of a battle tank, yet organic in its sweeping profile. Its skin was the colour of a fresh bruise, mottled purple and black.