it as a ghost image from his concussion. He took aim for a second shot – and paused.
The body continued to walk towards him, lurching with blind, drunken steps. This time Barsabbas removed its head with a clean shot and it dropped. Only then did he realise that they were surrounded by the dead.
Hundreds of dead. Their arms were outstretched and their faces waxy. Corpses swarmed over the drop‐pod, climbing the chassis and being pushed by thousands more from the rear. Barsabbas saw a naked male in an advanced state of decay, his skin hanging like loose latex garments from his glistening muscle. There was a woman with skin so infected it left fist‐sized holes in her belly. Another whose face was grey with mould barely resembled a man.
Recoiling in physical disgust, the Blood Gorgons opened fire with a whittling, sustained volley that fanned out in all directions. High‐velocity explosive rounds impacted against a dense wall of naked flesh. Barsabbas’s humidity readings reached almost ninety per cent as a mist of blood and fluid rose in a solid, blinding wall.
The fighting became frantic. Hands reached through the muzzle flashes towards him.
Something dragged on his ankle and gave way wetly as he crushed his heel into it. A rotting palm clawed at his vision lens.
Crouched low, Bael‐Shura released his flamer. An expert pyro gunner, he applied light pressure to the trigger spoon and played a tight, drilling cone of promethium into the wall of walking dead. Several were incinerated by the direct blast, but many simply caught fire and continued to fight. The flaming corpses flailed wildly, spreading the fire until it swirled in the air and churned a rippling backwash of heat into the drop‐pod.
Barsabbas grew agitated as black smoke began to clog his filtration vents. Bael‐Shura was a calloused warrior, but he was frustratingly obstinate. The flamer fulfilled a devastating anti‐infantry role within the squad, but right now its area of effect was causing 50
more tactical complications than necessary. The weapon spewed a promethium jet that incinerated most unarmoured targets upon contact, but it was precisely because of its super‐heated temperatures that it caused surrounding fabric and hair to catch fire. The tide of corpses became mobile tinder. Despite this, Bael‐Shura continued to fire, trying to play as narrow a flame as he could.
Barsabbas, however, preferred his mighty bolter. A standard Godwyn‐pattern with its high‐explosive bolt‐round was his lifeline. The bolter might have been heavy, bulky and had a recoil that could dislocate a human shoulder, but it flattened most targets with one shot.
When engaged in a protracted firefight, Barsabbas had learned it was better to shoot a target and see it fall than have the wounded target flee and spend the next few hours wondering if it was now doubling back to ambush him.
‘Besheba, switch to melee and fall behind me. We’re going to drive a wedge through them,’ Sica voxed into the squad link.
Barsabbas had been waiting for this command. Boarding actions had always been Barsabbas’s field of expertise. It was in the dense, mauling scrum of breach‐fighting that Barsabbas, young though he was, received the greatest respect. His dense, heavy frame was well suited to the wrestling, grinding melee. Ever since his bond with Sargaul and induction into Squad Besheba, Barsabbas had claimed the role of ‘fore‐hammer’: the lead point of a boarding advance.
‘Besheba, form on me,’ said Barsabbas, wrenching his mace from a waist hook. One and a half metres long, cold‐forged from a single rod of iron, the mace was capped by a knot of fused metal.
Sica nodded, pushing Barsabbas to the front. ‘Turtled advance.’
They drove forwards, Sica with a boarding pike, stoving ribs and skewering the dead with each thrust. Barsabbas kept his eyes on the sky and cleared the path with wide arcs of his swinging mace. As sophisticated as his suit’s auto‐sensors were, they had no answer for the blood that congealed over his lenses. Barsabbas tried wiping them with his gloved fingers but it simply smeared the blood, resigning him to seeing through a fog of pink.
Beside him, Sargaul slipped on the bodies spilled across the ground, crashing down on one knee. Barsabbas was immediately there, standing over Sargaul and tossing aside body after body. The dead buffeted him from all angles, glancing off his armour, dashing their teeth against his ceramite, climbing upon his back. Although he weighed close to three hundred and sixty kilos in armour, the sheer numbers rocked his heels. Unable to see clearly, Barsabbas felt