Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,47

going to need attention,’ Bael‐Shura said to Sica as he kicked his own severed arm away to make room.

Sica looked down at his leg and swore. There was a clean hole through his left thigh and the middle section of his femur was no longer there. His entire leg was twisted ninety degrees and attached only by threads of muscle and ceramite plating.

‘No time,’ Sica said, struggling to sit up.

The Plague Marines began firing. Muzzles flashed in the distance, and nearby rocks and scaffolding crumbled as if scored with an invisible drill. Sica fired two shots and opened the squad vox‐channel.

‘Sica to Besheba. Threat identified as Chaos Space Marines of Nurgle. We are outnumbered.’

It was the last transmission he would make. As shots barked and snapped around him, Sergeant Sica calmly ejected his spent magazine and clicked a fresh one into place. By his side, Bael‐Shura balanced a bolt pistol across the stump of his arm. They began to fire, determined to spend their ammunition while they still could.

EIGHT LEVELS UP, driven into the dead end of a rock grotto, the remnants of Squad Besheba fought. Barsabbas sprinted across a sloping shaft, racing upwards. He fired his bolter to the left as he ran, raking his field of vision. The enemy answered with their own fire, shooting so fiercely that the stalactites trembled from the ceiling. A shot glanced off Sargaul’s elbow.

Angry, Sargaul risked stopping for a moment and hurled a frag grenade.

The pair were running. What had begun as a coordinated sweep had degenerated into slaughter. The Plague Marines had ensnared them. They had exploited a Traitor Marine’s lust for violence by using auxiliary cultists as bait, luring the squad deep.

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Barsabbas could barely keep track of enemy positions. They were everywhere.

Gunshots exploded back and forth. They came and went, a rapid barrage of small‐arms fire, sudden and sharp, the whine of cyclical shots, then the singular shocking roar of rockets.

‘We have to go now,’ Barsabbas shouted to Sargaul. ‘We have to go.’

‘No, we stay,’ Sargaul replied.

‘They’re everywhere,’ Barsabbas argued. The violence was overcoming his deference to Sargaul’s seniority. ‘We can’t do anything here. We need to link up with another squad.’

The explosions and detonations threatened the integrity of the tunnel. Drip‐rocks above them rattled, shaking down a raft of dust and loose grit.

‘We have to go, brother,’ Barsabbas repeated. A missile launcher slid out from behind a support girder, almost directly in front of him. Barsabbas swung up his bolter and fired four times. A Plague Marine fell out from behind cover. The warhead fired and went wild, detonating overhead.

‘Sargaul!’

An overhanging shelf of sandstone weighing at least twenty tonnes cracked above Sargaul’s head. Oblivious, Sargaul traded shots with their pursuers. The stone above gave way. There was a whiplash snap as the sandstone split, before it dropped with a tectonic rumble. It missed crushing Sargaul by less than a metre. Unfazed, Sargaul spared the rock a curious glance before sprinting behind it for cover.

Fighting the urge to avoid being shot, Barsabbas waded back out into the open. He was low on ammunition. He locked onto a Plague Marine and shot at him, buckling him. In return, a bolter round exploded against his right chest plate. He felt the lancing pinpricks of shrapnel. The machine spirit of his armour recoiled in seething displeasure.

‘I’m getting hit. Absorbing shots and taking hits!’ Barsabbas voxed.

Boltguns barked, overlapping shots. Coarse screaming.The stampede of steel‐heavy boots.More shots.

‘Hold on, brother. Hold on,’ Sargaul replied.

Barsabbas saw Sargaul swim through the barrage towards him. His bond‐brother was missing a hand. Rounds drilled against his glossy hide. Sargaul ran.

Then the tunnel collapsed.

Creaking girders could no longer support the ancient mine shaft. The entire tunnel buckled, warped, as if the sandstone was momentarily liquefying. Steel girders snapped.

The ceiling imploded with a puff.

As the weight of a planet’s crust fell upon him, the last thing Barsabbas thought about was the shame he had brought to Squad Besheba.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

SABTAH WAS SLEEPING when they came for him.

They dispatched his black turbans quickly and without alarm. One slave‐guard was decapitated and hidden in a path of filamentous bacteria, just outside Sabtah’s chamber gates. His throat was cut and the blood absorbed into the gossamer hairs, leaving little trace of his murder.

The other sentry was less fortunate still. Standing guard outside Sabtah’s vestibule, he found himself unceremoniously rolled down a venting chute. The chopping fans coughed only slightly as his body was fed through them.

Although the iron‐bound gates were sealed by sequential trigger locks, the