Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,110
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.
162
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 sonar 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 163
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,