by Henry Zou
It took Pelgan a moment to recognise the unfamiliar shape of an alien vessel. Lying tilted on its side, exposing its wounded stomach with one snapped wing saluting upwards, the craft looked severely vulnerable.
Pelgan chortled. Finally, he thought, something worthy of investigation. He beckoned for the Septic infantry to follow. ‘Hurry now,’ he said as he closed in on the stranded craft.
Pelgan entered the gaping spacecraft slowly and cautiously. Nurgle had a peculiar method of execution in all things, which was evident in Pelgan’s approach. The Plague Marines proceeded slowly, creeping through the xenos craft’s unlit interior. Entering through the rear cargo ramp, Pelgan sent his Septic infantry ahead to probe for traps.
Judging by the residual stink of excrement and musk, Pelgan guessed that the hold of the craft had once been used to transport prisoners of war, perhaps even slaves.
As Pelgan edged forwards, the interior was rendered by his thermal imaging into unsettling alien shapes. There was an organic feel to the ship, as if its composition had been grown naturally from bone. Sweeping arches, ridged framework and smooth floors. Pelgan saw no sign of the carving, chopping and bolting so unique to human and orkoid construction.
Boots clopping softly, Pelgan entered the cockpit.
‘I was counting how long it would take you.’
The voice came from the pilot cradle facing away from Pelgan. His finger hovered over the trigger of his boltgun.
Strapped into what appeared to be a command seat, Pelgan recognised the figure of a dark eldar. But not like any eldar that Pelgan had encountered in the field of war. This one was dishevelled – pale, weak, bloodied. He did not need to know much about xenos physiology to know that the eldar was in significant pain.
‘I can’t believe you were stupid enough to come in...’ the dark eldar wheezed.
Pelgan stepped back. ‘Your employment is no longer required, mercenary. Your payment is to be claimed on Hauts Bassiq. Why are you here? Answer me well, or I shall cut you up.’
The dark eldar’s head lolled weakly. His chest heaved up and down with each laborious breath. ‘You have less time than I...’
Pelgan’s honed battle instinct made him take another step back. ‘I will shoot now, mercenary. State your business.’
Suddenly, the ship’s power systems hummed back into life. Consoles blinked and overhead lights fluttered brightly. Garbled alien words were emitted from the cockpit.
The dark eldar fixed his gaze on Pelgan. His pupils were enlarged, indicating severe concussion or psychic brain trauma. ‘Better to die a traitor than die a slave. The Blood Gorgons, I’m sure, share that sentiment with me.’
The realisation startled Pelgan with a jolt. As far as he knew, eldar guarded their technology with a sacred reverence. Many of their machines were inhabited by the spirit stones of ancestors, eternally bound to the machine’s circuitry. No eldar would die and leave their ancestors in human hands. There must be a rational reason for the creature to come here and die.
The command console displays changed rapidly. There was a sequential pattern to the display. Numbers. Numbers counting down.
Pelgan turned his enormous bulk to run.
The console’s display blanked out. It blinked three times.
The ensuing explosion made the Cauldron Born cry in distress. The iron skeleton of its frame gurgled with a sonorous, keening protest. The blood vessels and throbbing capillaries that wound around the cables and pipes squirmed in agony.
On a gangway high up in a venting shaft, Barsabbas looked down. He knew, without any doubt, that the explosion was the Harvester’s self-destruction. Far below, he saw a tiny ball of flame puff up, brief and exhilarating, before burning down into a tiny, flickering speck.
Sindul had played his part, Barsabbas at least could give him respect for that. As strange as the dark eldar species were, they had principles. Sindul preferred death over the shame of returning home as a scarred, branded slave. There was never hesitation or doubt. Sindul knew he could never escape Barsabbas. In a strange sense, Barsabbas considered Sindul had simply given up hope and preferred suicide.
‘These fanatic templars of Nurgle will respond in full ponderous strength, as they always do,’ Gammadin said. ‘Our one advantage is terrain and knowledge of our own home. For once, I do not know if that will suffice. ’
Barsabbas counted thirteen shots left in his clip and an empty ammunition sling. Sliding out his knotwork mace, Barsabbas climbed the gantry after Gammadin, leaving the twinkling wreckage of the Harvester behind.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lance-Naik Dumog of the Third Septic Infantry considered himself a superstitious man, so it was little wonder that he felt ill at ease.
At the first trumpet, Dumog had woken from his sleep, groggy with phlegm, as he did every other day. But upon rising, he saw – curiously – his own uniform folded neatly at the foot of his cot and his helmet placed on top. Dumog shook his head, not remembering folding his uniform. Nor did he remember polishing his helmet. Routine and tidiness were not cultivated amongst Nurgle’s followers.
Stranger yet, Dumog remembered a time before his induction into Nurgle’s ranks. Of these distant, diminished memories of a previous life, the clearest image Dumog could recall was that of neatly folded clothes and a hat, placed at the foot of his grandfather’s deathbed.
Ever since then, Naik Dumog had associated death with that eerie pastiche of clothes pressed on a bed, with a hat placed ever so hauntingly atop.
The unsettling conclusion, which had been intruding upon his baffled and hesitant mind, was that he was going to die.
That deep sense of foreboding burdened his shoulders heavily, even as he attended systems operation on the Cauldron Born’s command bridge. Although his eyes were fixed upon the console monitors at his bay, his mind was elsewhere.
His paranoia seemed to be confirmed with a final, awful certainty, when alarm sirens began to bray. Slow at first, then loud and urgent – To arms! Children of Nurgle, to arms! Dumog had panicked then. None of the ship’s command consoles registered enemy activity either externally or on board the vessel. There had been signatures from a small foreign object piercing the vessel’s dermal bulkheads, but such was its fractional size that the bridge commanders had dismissed it as nothing more than standard space debris.
Perhaps, Dumog thought with the sinking regret of hindsight, the object had been more.
The alarms continued to sound as the command bridge erupted with frantic action. The sudden surge in activity quietened Dumog’s fretful nerves. The security protocols aboard the command bridge were matched by its fearsome troop disposition. Amongst the hundred-odd bridge crew and officers were three platoons of Septic heavy infantry. Overall command, however, rested with Captain Vyxant, a revered veteran who now snapped at his subordinates from a shrine-throne.
When Dumog looked up at the overhead surveillance slates, he espied panic in the decks. Septic heavy infantry were scrambling to respond, yet to what threat, they did not know. The command bridge had no answer. Neither surveillance pict nor auspex could locate any intrusion.
Through watching the hapless preparations on surveillance, the panic began to infect those crewing the bridge by osmosis. Alarms continued, yet the command bridge could give no commands. Crewmen hurried about, attempting to look occupied, but they had no direction.
Suddenly, Dumog heard a rash of gunfire beyond the command deck’s blast doors. Feeling the bile rise in his gorge, he scanned through the pict feeds, trying in vain to bring up a view of the confusion outside.
‘Gunfire, sir,’ announced a Septic officer, stating the obvious. Muffled shots crackled.
Captain Vyxant shouted through his vox-grille for silence. ‘Everything is reined in. Maintain control and keep your wits,’ he began, relaying information through his squad’s external comm-link. ‘There has been an exp
losion in the lower quarters, likely a result of faulty fuel mains. The fires have been contained by control teams.’
As Vyxant spoke, Dumog coughed in relief. Tapping on his porcelain console, he began to relay Captain Vyxant’s squad link through the ship’s vox-casters.
‘This ship is as old as the bottom of Terra’s muddy sea and no sturdier. The sooner we abandon this wreck–’
Captain Vyxant did not finish his assessment. The blast doors peeled outwards with a resonant clap of expanding air. A hard wind, frost-churned and biting, slammed into the command bridge, staggering those caught in its ferocity.
What followed sent Naik Dumog diving for cover. He hid, ducking his limbs awkwardly beneath a command console. He drew his limbs in tight and could think only of his uniform, folded at the foot of his bed.
A white-skinned daemon in power armour charged through the entrance. Or rather, it was no true daemon, but a scarred and warp-fused monstrosity, more daemon than Astartes. It bellowed with an anguished, vengeance-hungry howl. It had the bottled rage of a returned king. Indeed, Dumog knew without a doubt that before him rose an ancient, regal monster. He could brand it no other word but monster.
The command bridge erupted with the crackle of small arms. There was a ferocity to the counter-fire that spoke of a pressing urgency. It was indiscriminate. As if they were frightened of the warrior in their midst.
And rightly so. The Blood Gorgons patriarch sent out ripples of psychic shock through the atmosphere. Every console screen blew out along the eastern bank. With his spined pincer, he pierced Captain Vyxant’s chest and pinned him against the bulk of a cogitator.
Behind him, almost as an afterthought, came a Chaos Space Marine with bolter in hand. Like a retainer to his knight, the bond-brother guarded his lord’s back, firing stiff single shots.
Dumog could only hide his face and recite the Canticle of Seven Plagues. He had a laspistol at his hip, but he considered it worthless. There would be no point.
As the pandemonium continued, Dumog’s chest became taut with fright. He could only think that Father Nurgle had reached out to warn him, when he had woken up on such a portentous day. Nearer and nearer he could hear the grinding crunch of the Ascendant Champion. Gurgling and abrupt screams of death accompanied his approach. Dumog tried to reach for his laspistol but the resolve melted from his fingertips. He could do nothing but stay hidden.
There was another crunch. Somewhere close by, a Septic soldier fired a single shot before the crunch of bone could be heard. Dumog could almost hear the presence of his killer – a deep bass rasping of his expansive lungs. He could smell his nearness – the ozone stink of psyk-craft and oiled leather.
Suddenly, Dumog was travelling through the air, horizontally at first and then vertically, with a speed that whiplashed his neck.
He could feel the sores on his face open and weep, a natural response. His killer stared at him, face-to-face, pinching him up by his collar.
It spoke with a voice like slow-moving magma. ‘Did Muhr deactivate my Cauldron Born’s defence grid?’
Dumog nodded three times. He was unable to verbalise, for his tongue was too heavy to obey. So great was the Blood Gorgon’s presence that Dumog felt compelled to grovel before one so favoured by the gods. By the time the Arch-Champion released him, Dumog’s hands were trembling too much to even key the proper sequence into the command consoles.
‘Lord Opsarus has shut down the defence grids. We could not control the ship’s machine spirit. It turned on us,’ Dumog gasped.
‘I thought so. Faithful hound. This is a part of me, we are bonded, she and I. It almost boils my blood that you would so dismiss the strength of our bindings,’ his killer said. He was already lowering himself into the command throne. A net of neural cords slithered up to connect him to the ship.
As Gammadin left him cowering, Naik Dumog saw that he was the only survivor in the command bridge. The bodies of his comrades were discarded across the floor and cogitator bays. Wiping the pus from his weeping sores, the Septic Naik tried not to move, lest he incur his killer’s attention again.
‘What do we do with this one?’
Dumog started. He realised his killer’s retainer, the Space Marine, was indicating towards him. There was an impassive yet menacing air to his voice, as if Dumog did not really exist.
By now, his killer was nestled in his command throne. The neural cords that had attached to him in rubbery tendrils began to writhe, responding in a way that Captain Vyxant or even Opsarus could not replicate. The Cauldron Born was trembling, as though waking from slumber.
‘Leave him be,’ his killer commanded.
Dumog collapsed to his knees in supplication. ‘Praise be, great Lord Undivided!’
So preoccupied was Dumog in his displays of appeasement that he never saw the ceiling-mounted bolters perk up with mechanical vigour. He was still on his knees, prostrate, when the sentry guns fired upon him, killing him, as he had feared all along.
The alarms invoked Opsarus’s uncontrolled temper. Each whoop and bray was like a taunt to him, a personal taunt that burrowed its way deep into his ego and ate away at his ability to contain the anger.
Opsarus did not consider himself a furious being. He had an infectious laugh and a deep sense of glee. He often took pleasure in surprising his followers with small gifts – a curious pox, a rash to scratch or a boil to pop – and chuckling warmly.
But he had a serious side too, a cold anger that possessed him when he was enraged. A silent fury that rendered him dark and mute. He would move then almost at a prowl, entirely focussed on eliminating that dark spot against his mirth.
When the rapid series of alarms and reports flooded the hulk’s navigation helm, Opsarus settled quietly into that very same state.
Everywhere, the Blood Gorgons were rising – a broken beast that was gradually rousing, shaking its head against the fog of fear and confusion as it woke. It built momentum rapidly, a swift devolution and breakdown of order. First he heard Gammadin’s voice on the vox exhorting the meticulously divided Gorgon companies to retaliate. That alone had caused Opsarus some concern. The division of the Blood Gorgons had been tenuous, relying solely on isolation of communication between the squads and an absence of central leadership.
Soon after there were sporadic vox reports of Blood Gorgons squads retaliating against their Plague Marine custodians, of older, veteran Blood Gorgons squads rebelling from the slave galleys, lashing out against their captors with chains and tools. The fighting was quickly suppressed by gunfire.
The last report, issued from the diseased and venerable Sergeant Kulpus, was that the sentry force at the mid-decks had been lost and the Blood Gorgons had reclaimed an unsealed weapons vault. The regular patrols had been forced back by heavy Blood Gorgons fire. They were losing ground to the abrupt nature of the uprising.
Opsarus was not pleased. He had almost been driven into a spontaneous and uncharacteristic outburst of rage. Instead, he calmed himself with jags of breathing. His brass respirator tanks throbbed with exhalation from his chest vents.
‘Can you account for this? Is this your doing?’ he asked Muhr accusingly. The sorcerer, as always, stood by his side and behind him.
‘No, my lord,’ Muhr answered, startled. ‘Never.’
‘How did it come to this? This mess. I hate mess. Nurgle is decay, but there is an order to that. A process. A graduation. It is slow and inevitable but never a mess. This,’ Opsarus said, gesturing at the stilted surveillance images on the console banks. ‘This is a mess.’
‘Shall I summon the bearers?’ Muhr asked. He had already drawn his bolt pistol from his holster and was checking the clip.
‘No,’ Opsarus replied, waving him away. ‘I’ll do it myself.’
With careful deliberation, he unlocked his gauntlet. The hand within the shell was black and swollen. From the unintrusive shadows, a
servitor of melting flesh and rusting metal scuffled forwards and affixed an autocannon over Opsarus’s hand like a weaponised glove. Another servitor coupled the dense ammunition belt to the Terminator suit.
‘We go then. To fix this mess that you’ve created,’ Opsarus said. ‘As a matter of principle, Muhr, you should do this yourself. But Nurgle is generous.’
With that, the Crow and his witch made for the command deck, weapon servitors clattering in tow.
The war had begun. The five hundred and fifty Plague Marines and four companies of Septic were recalled to battle formations. They rushed back through the space hulk’s labyrinth, collecting in massed, company-strength formations. In congregation, they were a formidable force. Solid phalanxes of fortified armour and massed firepower – the slow, grinding combat doctrine of Nurgle. Boltguns and shoulder-mounted autocannons were brought to the fore.
They beat their pitted gauntlets against their chest plates. They shouted in unison, a mocking bark that was carried by a thousand voices. They thundered their feet against the metal decking, raising a clamour that sounded like the march of legions.
Opsarus the Crow, towering tall in his Terminator plate and shroud of skin-mail, advanced amongst his warriors. They cheered him as he passed. The sorcerer Muhr followed in his wake, his blackened face bearing his allegiance to Nurgle. They cheered him too, for he was now one of them.
Opsarus gave no orders, except to raise his fist. The companies of Nurgle, in reply, held aloft their standards and totems, clinking with skulls, effigy dolls and the fluttering flags of skinned tattoos. Beyond the grotesque savagery of their formations, there was also a tightly ranked discipline. With a final clash of kettle drums, the Plague Marines went forth to crush the Blood Gorgons’ rebellion.
The decks quaked. From the lighted halls to the dimmest marshes of the basement sewers, the ship trembled. The Cauldron Born’s fusion reactor scaled from standby to its highest output potential. Monstrous turbines spun with cyclonic force as the reactor core expanded with solar heat.