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.
167
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 explosion 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 ‘Canticles of Seven Plagues’. He had a laspistol at his hip, but he considered it worthless. There would be no point.
As the