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.
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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 melta 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 173
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