Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,46

in the upper crane of the gantry, the stalkers melted away, leaving only the faintest trace of gun smoke in their wake.

A RAPID DATA pulse ran through the squad sensory links. Hadius was dead. His life monitors blanked out with a surge of white noise, then nothing.

A mere moment later, the squad link was disrupted again. Cython was dead. Two dead.

Sergeant Sica had always been in control. It was the only state that he had ever known.

Now, crouched in the dark, attempting to re‐establish a vox‐link, Sica no longer felt in control. The enemy were in the shadows all around him. Shots tested the air, hissing past him and promising more to come.

Slapping the side of his helmet, Sica swore at himself and at everything around him, cursing himself for his lapse in judgement.

Trembling with rage, Sica tore off his helmet. A heavy‐calibre round thrummed past his ear with meteoric speed.

‘We need to regroup with Sargaul and Barsabbas!’ roared Bael‐Shura. He was crouched before the bend in the mine shaft, his flamer wedged against the corner. More of the enemy spilled from the surrounding stope tunnels, clattering down staircases with thickly soled boots. Shura forced them backwards with an enormous belch from his flamer. ‘We need to regroup,’ Bael‐Shura repeated urgently.

Sica shook his head. It was too late. ‘I don’t have coordinates for them. My auspex is jammed with interference.’

Bael‐Shura stood up and sprinted over to Sica. He had not taken three steps before his right arm exploded at the elbow. Reeling from the blow, Bael‐Shura rocked back on his heels like a teetering fortress. His body was fighting the trauma, flooding him with endorphins as he fell to one knee.

‘Not now,’ Sica hissed.

A dark shape rose up behind Bael‐Shura, engulfing him in its shadow.

It stood head and shoulders taller than either of them, a monstrous specimen. A great distended gut, studded with barbs, eclipsed Sica’s vision. Its power armour was off‐white and marbled with fatty threads of lime green. There was a heady aura of disease and the odour of stagnancy. It clutched a leaf‐bladed dagger, slick with the blood of Bael‐Shura.

‘Plague Marine,’ spat Sica.

Sica remembered meeting their kind in the Gospar Subsector. Sica had ram‐boarded the cargo fleet of a Nurgle warlord, and the bastards were exceedingly difficult to kill. Their plunder had been tainted too – the gold tarnished, their manuscripts rotting and their slaves sickly.

‘Pest,’ the Plague Marine replied with a shrug of his massive torso.

They clashed then, colliding head to head, shoulder to shoulder. The rotting monster was inhumanly strong and he was larger than any other Chaos Space Marine Sica had ever faced. Tying up the back of the Plague Marine’s head with one hand, Sica began to deliver a series of hammer fists with his other. The reinforced, pyramidal studs on his gauntlet cracked his enemy’s cyclopean visor. In answer, the Plague Marine hacked with his heavy, chopping knife. The seax slid into the joint between Sica’s chest guard and abdominal plates. Roaring, both combatants broke from their clinch with a burst of blood and ceramite 66

fragments. There was a momentary lull in violence as Sica shouldered his bolter and the Plague Marine raised his bolt pistol.

Then they shot at each other repeatedly at point‐blank range.

Shots pounded into Sica, crazing his vision, punching through ceramite, jolting the ground out from beneath him. They exchanged shots on automatic, drilling each other from no more than five paces apart. Seismic vibrations rattled his teeth and dislocated his jaw.

Sparks flew and metal fused. Sica’s bolter was stronger, larger and its stopping power considerable, popping a trio of gaping holes in the Plague Marine’s stomach and tearing a line of ragged shots vertically up into its neck. Simultaneously, the enemy’s bolt pistol skipped fat explosive slugs across Sica’s groin, chewing the ceramite deeply before penetrating the weaker armour of Sica’s upper thigh.

Sica fell to his knee as his femur was shot clean through. The Plague Marine folded, stumbling backwards and recoiling away like a wounded animal.

Bael‐Shura, finally seeing a clear shot, enveloped the Plague Marine with a splash of fire.

Dying, the monstrous specimen crashed to the flowstone in a mountainous pyre. Even as it fell, another Plague Marine appeared at the end of the tunnel. Then two more appeared in the gantries above them. The Blood Gorgons were surrounded.

Bael‐Shura dragged Sica’s heavily bleeding form against the rock wall with his remaining arm and crouched next to him.

‘I think we’re going to die,’ Sica said quietly.

‘Your leg. It’s