Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,39

sash across his chest, his left hand coiled loosely around the trigger. In the past four days, Squad Besheba had learned to avoid the scavenging mobs of walking dead in order to conserve ammunition. Yet aside from wandering corpses and the stray caprid, there were no significant signs of life.

‘I can taste a pocket of high atmospheric disturbance. Bacterial organisms,’ Barsabbas announced as the line graph in the upper left corner of his vision spiked. A brisk wind had picked up, throwing dust into their faces. ‘What say you?’

Although no human disease could penetrate the immune system of a Space Marine, Sargaul vented his helmet. ‘I taste it too. Very acidic. Very strong,’ he confirmed, spitting saliva out through his helmet’s grille.

Cython did the same, but breathed in deeply and immediately coughed, his multi‐lung rejecting the airborne substance. ‘I can’t identify,’ he said, his words spurting out between violent hacking. ‘This is pure strain.’

The squad halted as Cython continued to hack and gurgle. The fact that the substance could force even a Space Marine’s multi‐lung to respond so harshly was testament to its lethality. His lung sphincters were constricting as the organ attempted to flood his system with cleansing mucus.

‘No more samples,’ Sergeant Sica ordered angrily. ‘Barsabbas, fade off your environment monitor. You’re putting the fear in all of us.’

Barsabbas swore fluently but obeyed. The power plant core of his armour was two thousand years old and its spirit was temperamental if not outright malevolent, but it would not lie to him. He had detected something else on his monitors besides the bacteria.

There had been a peripheral spike of detection, an organic pattern that was familiar to Barsabbas.

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‘Remember what Argol said,’ Sica continued. ‘Instinct will save your skin where scanners do not. Use your eyes and listen with your ears, and stop distracting yourself.’

With that, the squad peeled off, negotiating their way down the slope of a dry riverbed.

But Barsabbas lingered. Argol’s words resonated with him.

Suddenly alert, Barsabbas loosened his helmet seal and tested the air with his tongue. It was bitter at first, laced with a ferociously destructive organism that was corrosive to his hyper‐sensitive taste glands. But he tasted something else on his palate too, fleeting and subtle. There! Hidden behind the airborne toxins was a familiar taste, a coppery taint that was unmistakable. Fresh blood.

‘Blood.Fresh blood.’

‘Blood.Blood.’ The word echoed amongst the squad with breathless anticipation.

Sergeant Sica waved them to a halt at Barsabbas’s warning. Cython tasted again, wary this time. He spat. ‘Now that you say it, I can taste it too. You can barely pinpoint it with all the other tox on the wind current.’

‘Which direction?’ asked Bael‐Shura. His augmetic jaw was sutured to much of his upper trachea, destroying the neuroglottis that allowed others to track by taste alone.

‘Far from here, at least six kilometres to our north‐east,’ Barsabbas confirmed.

‘We go there,’ said Sica. ‘Sharp find, Brother Barsabbas.’

The wind gained momentum, forcing the tall acacias to kneel and uprooting the saltbushes in bales. There was something angry and sentient about the viral wind.

Barsabbas made sure both atmospheric venting and extraneous seals were entirely locked, a precaution usually reserved for vacuum or space exposure. The wind buffeted and rattled his armour like a cyclone grinding against a bunker.

They turned in defiance of the wind. It punished them with the full force of its gale.

Heads low, shoulders set against the rising dust storm, Sergeant Sica led them in pursuit of freshly spilled blood.

ABOARD THE CAULDRON Born, Sabtah roamed the old corridors. He rolled and unrolled his neck, loosening the muscles and working out the knots with pops and crackles, pacing the halls with a pensive focus. He did so often when things weighed heavily on his mind, such as now.

The shrine was a place where he came to think. These days it seemed like the younger Chaos Space Marines were too martial, too physical. They seldom tended to their war shrines. It was a quiet place and a place where Sabtah came to brood.

He sat before his shrine and retrieved his most precious prize.

The axe was of Fenrisian make, with a richly decorated brass haft‐cap secured the trumpet blade. It was one of Sabtah’s own trophies and one he kept at all times within his personal shrine.

Lifting the axe, Sabtah slashed the air with clumsy practice swings. It was not his weapon – it had once belonged to a Grey Hunter, one of Leman Russ’s cursed children.

Sabtah remembered the time when the Blood Gorgons had been declared