by Henry Zou
Gammadin’s reclamation of the ship’s defence grid could be felt everywhere.
Sentry guns, previously limp and toothless, resumed their methodical scanning. Positioned in high ceilings and bottleneck corridors, the twin-linked bolters and scatter lasers fired on anything that was not slave-marked or of the Blood Gorgons gene-code. Septic officers broadcast frantic reports that the walls themselves were attacking, spreading confusion throughout their ranks.
Gun servitors – chem-nourished reptiles of hulking shoulders, piston limbs and arms of reaper cannon – resumed their patrol of the ship’s main decks. Eyeless and drooling, the previously placated beasts relied purely on the ship’s defence grid to sight their targets and receive patrol orders. Now, packs of gun-servitors engaged Septic heavy infantry at close range. Their sole task was to seek, engage and eliminate.
Throughout the ship’s labyrinthine passages, void shields and lock shutters locked into position. The Nurgle forces, already disorientated by the ship’s layout, were confronted by road-blocks and impasse at nearly all the major routes.
By itself the Cauldron Born could not win the war. Already the sentry guns were low on ammunition; the linear patrol servitors were outmanoeuvred by animalistic cunning. Plague Marines breached the sealed corridors. Yet the ship itself was turning against its oppressors. It gave the Blood Gorgons the respite to regroup, re-establish lines of communication and rearm.
The ship’s reclaimed defence systems could not win them the war, but they gave the Blood Gorgons the small respite they needed to cobble together some semblance of an offensive.
Plague Marines were accustomed to fighting wars of attrition where they could use superior combined arms to overwhelm an opponent over a long, protracted campaign, grinding them down with disease, illness and misery. On marshes, mudfields and bloodied beaches, the Plague Marines could use their numbers.
But the cramped confines of ship-to-ship boarding were the domain of the Blood Gorgons. They were used to using their small numbers to maximise effectiveness in boarding raids.
At the Maze of Acts Martial, standing before its sacred gates, Bond-Brother Kasuga fought on his own. He had no guns, only the spears, swords and maces of the armoury, yet he fought with the gate’s wooden posts buttressing his flank and the lintel over his head. Denying the packed Plague Marine squads room to use their massed ranged weaponry, Kasuga broke his spears and blunted his swords across their armour. Wound after wound he sustained, yet there was no other recourse. He fought or he died: the instinct of self-preservation had long been expelled from his psyche.
Sergeant Hakkad moved his squad out of their billet in the first moments of confusion. They were unarmed, but well armoured, but that did not matter to him. Hakkad had killed men with less.
He ordered his squad to stay low, creeping through the quiet, disused corridors and guided only by the lambent glow of bacteria colonies. From the main tunnels and gangways, he could hear the distinct whoop of alarms and the high-pitched squeal of automatic scatter lasers. There came muffled, indistinct shouting and the rumble of movement.
Yet, above it all... Above all the noise and disruption, Hakkad heard the voice of Lord Gammadin. That voice urged him onwards. He was compelled by the familiar, rasping tones. The long, drawn-out vowels of a commander who was entirely in control.
‘Brothers, I am Gammadin returned.’
That was all he heard – Gammadin’s voice over the ship’s vox.
There had been a call to arms somewhere, but Hakkad had not really heard anything else. With those words, the rebellion that had simmered in his blood had been brought to the boil. He no longer cared if the other squads and broken companies would join him. It no longer mattered that his squad might be the only one to attempt a resistance. It did not matter because Gammadin had returned in the treasure vaults of the lower decks.
But the other squads did join him. Four members of Squad Hurrian had overpowered their keepers and found Hakkad and his men. Together, the ten Blood Gorgons had entered the unlocked vault and seized anything that could be used as weapons. Ancient relic swords, ceremonial sceptres plundered from ecclesiastical coffers, the gilded pistols of distant kings. These were no real weapons, but Hakkad was glad they had taken them.
Gammadin’s declaration was neither magic nor sorcery. In its most basic terms, Gammadin’s call gave them a conviction they had previously not possessed. Until then, there had been doubt amongst the Blood Gorgons – separated, betrayed and infiltrated by the enemy, they had lost their trust. Without that trust, they lost the ability to act cohesively. They had ceased to exist as a functional fighting force.
Plague Marines poured into the lower decks to maintain order. With no more than ten Blood Gorgons, Sergeant Hakkad engaged them. They fought at close quarters, a furious hurricane of muzzle flash and glinting steel. The Plague Marines overwhelmed them, but by then Hakkad did not care.
On the vox-link he could hear the reactivation of multiple squads – Squad Khrom, Squad Lagash, Venerable Nysus. One by one, the Blood Gorgons reunited.
Every slave dreams of liberation, but when liberation becomes an impossibility, the human spirit has remarkable ways of adapting. One finds comfort in small things – stability, shelter and a bed to sleep in.
The diseased legions had taken even that small comfort away from the slaves of the Cauldron Born. What little the slaves had managed to amass for themselves had wilted under the sickness and neglect visited upon them.
So it was no surprise that when the slaves heard Gammadin’s call to arms, they too rose up. There were thousands of slaves in the warrens, engines bays, loading docks and storage vaults. The belay teams, scullery serfs, custodials, black turbans. All of them. Thousands upon thousands, like soldier ants swarming from the darkest crevices.
They came out of the darkness, vengeful and exhilarated. They harboured no love for the Blood Gorgons, but it was the only life they knew. Men, women, families, children, even the elderly. Out they came, clattering tools, utensils and whatever blunt, heavy objects of revolt they could find.
They were cut down in their hundreds, yet still they forced one foot before the other. They threatened to overwhelm several key positions in the primary decks held by Septic guards. Black turbans wielding halberd and crossbow led the assault against automatic guns.
Although the slaves died in great numbers, they delayed and harassed the Nurgle counter-offensive. They blocked off tunnels, barricading corridors with pyres of wreckage and gas fires. Some barricaded the enemy with their own bodies. The ones who were not fighters, those who knew the futility of fighting, linked arms and sat, their voices raised in song. In doing so, they forced the Plague Marines to gun their way through a morass of living bodies. Each sold their life for the price of one bolt shell, but they died with a dignity that would otherwise have eluded them.
Bond-Sergeant Sharlon fumbled through the steaming carcass of a Plague Marine. He found a coil of access keys hooked around the Traitor’s war belt.
His squad, only five strong now, settled down in the entrance to the Maze of Acts Martial. They used the cover well, lying belly-down between the frond growths and honeycombed calcium deposits. Each had claimed themselves a bolter from the newly opened vaults on access-level 45. Their ammunition, however, was low and they picked cautious shots.
Across the access corridor, at the top of an iron stairwell, Plague Marine squads hammered them with automatic fire. Spitting bolt shot sparked off the walls and ate hungry mouthfuls of metal from the surfaces. The angle of fire was awkward and the shot inaccurate but the sheer volume of ammunition thrown down from the stairwell caused Bond-Sergeant Sharlon to bend double and sprint across the open, the access keys jingling softly against his wrist. Plumes of dusty shots traced his footsteps.
The enemy had sighted him now, calling out warnings from the upper gallery. From Sharlon’s right fist sagged a cluster of m
elta bombs. The enemy saw this too and began to shoot with urgency. A bolt shot exploded against the bond-sergeant’s ceramite neck guard, spreading fragments into his face-plate. Another struck his hip, punching him with hot lancing pain. Sharlon staggered up the stairs, taking one faltering step on his injured hip as another bolt tore through his thigh. The Plague Marines stood resolute at the top of the steps, refusing to give ground. They were no more than twelve metres away.
Sharlon took several more stubborn steps upwards. The clustered bombs swayed precariously around the storm of fire drilling through the bond-sergeant. Trembling, Sharlon rested a hand against the banisters. The upper right of his torso had become a porous mass of chewed ceramite and open bleeding. He climbed one more step, out of spite.
The primed melta bomb ignited. It detonated every grenade in the half-dozen cluster so brightly that Sharlon’s squad could see nothing as their visors automatically blacked out to protect their retinas from the flare.
It took exactly two seconds for the flare to settle and the squad’s light-sensitive lenses to recalibrate. By then, a perfect sphere had been cut into the partition bulkheads. Of the balustrade and upper gallery, there was no sign, nor any evidence that they had once existed. Almost an entire section of the bulkhead and upper mezzanine level had evaporated. The only evidence of the destruction was the smouldering red glow at the very edges of the blast.
If the Blood Gorgons did not have the Cauldron Born then nobody would, this was Sharlon’s parting message. The Cauldron Born existed only with them, and they could not live without the Cauldron Born. There was a symbiosis there.
The bond of the Blood Gorgons went beyond that of blood brother to blood brother, it bound them all as one single organism. A squad was nothing without its company, a company nothing without unity. Even the slaves co-existed in reciprocity with their Blood Gorgon masters. Every aspect of the Chapter existed as a unified whole. They would stand and fight together, or they would die alone.
A single Plague Marine stood on a dais, overlooking the sleeping dens of over two hundred slaves. The slaves, some so sickened that they could no longer stomach water, lay in lethargic heaps before him.
Yet when Gammadin’s declaration broadcast over the vox, the slaves began to stir. As one, they began to move.
The Plague Marine was disquieted. He checked the magazine on his bolter and braced it against his hip. He shouted for the slaves to remain supine, but some, he noticed, did not obey him. They stood up – pale and trembling, yet they defied him.
By the time Gammadin’s voice was heard a second time, the slaves surged. Their collective minds had been spurred. They rushed up to overwhelm the Plague Marine.
Determined though the slaves were, the Traitor Marine was a killer. With one shot, he killed. He had calibrated his methods of execution to the heights of efficiency. There was no warrior who could match him. But he could not withstand the combined savagery of two hundred desperate humans with nothing left to lose.
They drowned him with the weight of their bodies, tearing at his impervious armour. They crushed the Plague Marine, dying as they did so. For the slaves, it was a dignified end. To be slain in that final thrust of valour, to try but to fail nobly – it was a death they clambered to receive.
Tightly confined violence bubbled up from the lower levels and onto the command deck.
At the supply vaults, Sergeant Nightgaunt of Squad Hekuba succeeded in retaking the entire complex after finding it lightly defended. Heavy numbers of Plague Marines supported by Septic heavy infantry continued to press upon their position. The Blood Gorgons utilised the tight confines of the corridors to their advantage, repelling enemy attacks through their knowledge of the maze-like halls and their tunnel fighting expertise. Nightgaunt himself was killed approaching the third hour of combat, slain as he covered the approach against enemy advance. Yet the remaining five brothers of the squad secured the complex until fragments of the Ninth Company reinforced their position and established a line of supply, including ammunitions and weaponry, to those skirmishing in the lower decks.
Only thirty-six minutes into the uprising, two black turban slaves arrived in the Temple Halls, where the fighting was heaviest. The black turbans advised most senior Captain Zothique that slaves had reclaimed significant portions of the lower slave warrens and basements. They had driven out the Septic overseers through sheer numbers, forcing the enemy to reconsolidate their positions. Although it provided little strategic advantage, it renewed the Blood Gorgons’ fighting vigour.
Bond-Sergeant Severn, leading the remains of Sixth Company, brought the fight to the interior citadels. Assuming command in place of his slain Khoitan, Severn led an eighty-strong contingent of bonded brethren into a frontal assault against dug-in Plague Marines. With the aid of a veteran heavy weapons team in the overhead bulkheads, Severn was able to dislodge a company-sized element of Plague Marines from their personal quarters and scatter them into the narrow catacombs that housed the black turban barracks.
Nurgle battle tactics were little-changed despite the unfamiliar terrain – they relied on solid, frontal advances supported by heavy ordnance. They set up road blocks and static gun pits in an attempt to entice the Blood Gorgons into open warfare. But against a mobile Blood Gorgons force that refused to engage, they were frustrated in any attempts to counter-attack meaningfully. Perhaps by fault of their obstinate nature, the static Plague Marine formations endured ceaseless hit and run attacks that eventually drove them lower down the Cauldron Born’s extremities.
Two very powerful entities were approaching the command deck, beings of raw Chaos power. Gammadin could feel their psychic imprint and sense their approach through the ship’s neural link.
‘They are coming,’ he said. The Ascendant Champion’s eyelids flickered open as he severed neural links with the Cauldron Born.
‘Can you hear that?’ Gammadin asked.
There was a low keening in the air. Barsabbas strained to hear. Low on the wind, almost inaudible, he heard the acoustic echoes of an ancient metal fortress, a monolithic megastructure creaking as all the pressures of the universe pushed against its iron flanks.
‘The Cauldron Born is warning me of their approach,’ Gammadin said. He brushed the neural fibres from his temple and stood up from the command throne. His pincer arm began to click involuntarily in slight agitation.
Barsabbas took a deep, steadying breath, expanding his lungs with much-needed oxygen. His pupils dilated. There was a static burst of machine-scream through the vox-link as his armour’s spirit responded to the oncoming threat. Scrolling overlays of system reports, core temperature and power output streamed across his visor. The power armour wasn’t calmed until Barsabbas loaded his bolter with a salvaged clip and clicked the magazine into position. Only then did the machine spirit settle, minimising its report tabs and replacing the data streams with a single targeting reticule that bounced from periphery to periphery.
The entire wall on Barsabbas’s left was pushed in. All of it. A thirty-tonne section of plasteel bulkhead peeled inwards. Metal groaned in discordant protest as it was sheared from its structure. Warping and twisting, it finally folded diagonally, crushing the ancient cogitator banks beneath it.
Through the shorn wall came Muhr and the Nurgle Overlord, Opsarus.
For a brief moment, Barsabbas froze. He was occupied by the most curious feeling. Almost foreboding, dashed with a fleeting pall of hopelessness. Was this fear? Barsabbas could not be sure. Was this what it felt like, to be a pure human, at all times?
Opsarus crunched through the debris on legs like basalt columns. A behemoth, wading through the wreckage, deliberate and unsinkable. Behind him he dragged a wrecking ball of spherical metal, its solid weight keeping the chain taut.
He seemed to ignore Barsabbas entirely, not even dignifying the battle-brother’s presence with a glance. Instead, he crashed towards where Gammadin squared
up to meet him. Only then did Barsabbas realise that perhaps he did not feel fear of the enemy, merely fear that he would not be able to do his enemy enough harm.
Gammadin, the Arch-Champion of the Blood Gorgons, was physically smaller. Opsarus stood over him, his Tactical Dreadnought Armour almost eclipsing Gammadin from view. Even his cherubic deathmask, set in the centre of his hunchbacked chest, stood at a higher eye level than Gammadin’s defiantly raised head.
Muhr glided to circle Gammadin’s left. The witch was stalking him and cutting off his angles of manoeuvre. By his movements, Barsabbas could see that they were preparing to execute Gammadin at close quarters. There was no other way. Mere small-arms would be insufficient against constructs of warfare such as these. Such gods of war could not be felled by the cowardly shot of pistol or rifle.
Almost fifty metres away from Barsabbas, Gammadin adopted a low grappler’s crouch, his monstrous pincer raised high like the striking tail of a scorpion. Opsarus circled steadily closer, dragging a wrecking ball on a high-tensile chain with one hand.
Barsabbas knew he could not face Muhr or Opsarus in open combat. His bolter would not fell such flesh of the ancients. But if Barsabbas could not overcome them, he could prevent at least one of them from engaging Gammadin.
Firming his resolve, Barsabbas raised his bolter, took aim and waited.
Ever the aggressor, Lord Gammadin launched himself to meet the Nurgle warlord. There was a brief, glancing impact as Opsarus pivoted, their shoulders colliding. It sounded like a light tank had just collided with a super-heavy on full acceleration. The command bridge reverberated with the transfer of their kinetic force.
Muhr stood aside, his eyes rolling as he began to enter a sorcerous trance. Barsabbas had seen the coven work often enough to know their weakness. The brief seconds before a sorcerer could channel the warp were his most vulnerable. If Barsabbas still had a role to play, his time would be now.