Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,96
as the Impaler soared.
According to his helmet’s onboard display, the craft was travelling at supersonic speeds of Mach four‐point‐five, but Barsabbas estimated they were going hypersonic; his power armour simply did not register faster momentum.
Gumede, terrified of the ordeal, was splayed out on the decking in the craft’s bottom.
Face to the padded flooring, nails digging into the soft polyfoam, the chief’s eyes were closed. Barsabbas guessed he had never seen an atmospheric flier before, let alone been on board one. His cowardice, in Barsabbas’s mind, was distracting and the Chaos Space Marine ignored him.
They crossed the northern badlands and overshot a narrow dust lake. From their vantage point, the pollution of Nurgle was revealed in its fullness. The intruders had poisoned, sickened and befouled everything.
The further northwards they flew, the more jaundiced the sky became. It was thick with a mustard smog that left threads of heavy pigmented vapour in the clouds. Sometimes it rained and when it did, the downpour was brown like water from a disused and rusting tap. Even with the air‐vents locked and the internal vacuum of the ship pressurised, Barsabbas could smell the faint odour of ageing, the sepulchral smell of organic matter falling apart prematurely, of rocks and plant life disintegrating to dust.
The ship’s hololith projection of the topography showed almost zero plant or animal life. The mass graves of talon squall and caprid were illuminated as ghost images of bones breaking the monotony of the plains. Surface radiation was detected by the ship’s atmospheric reports, a steep increase the closer they flew to Ur.
As the presence of the invaders grew stronger, Barsabbas felt increasingly disconnected with himself and his Chapter. He was on his own. The Traitor Marine let that thought seep in. He had hoped to find Sargaul, but with Sargaul gone, Barsabbas was entirely alone. He allowed the feeling to enrage him, to nurture the despondency into a vengeful rage.
Gammadin had preached about harnessing emotions as opposed to wasting them. He nurtured his hate and soon he forgot all about the dust and ageing and emptiness of the plains. Thinking only in terms of kill count and ammunition ratio, Barsabbas prepared himself to enter Ur.
THE CAULDRON BORN had been full of life. Its flank had twinkled with the ship lights of activity, from the release of gases, from the over‐venting of the engines, the hazard lights of ship dock, The daily test firing of batteries.
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But slowly, like an ailing man, the Cauldron Born was dying. Section by section, the ship’s lights became dark as the vessel trembled. As a living machine, the Cauldron Born was suffering. Its ventilation systems were blocked by mucus. The warp engines became weak and lethargic, consuming more and more power just to remain at anchor.
Like the ship, entire galleries of slaves, the backbone of the space hulk, were falling to disease. Their habitation warrens were heady with the muffled heat of illness. Little by little, the lights switched off and the corridors dimmed as sections of the ship fell into disuse. The slaves who lived there were no longer. Nurgle had entered the vessel like a virus, spreading disease and wasting it away.
Many slaves were reduced to eating scraps as the vast food stores rotted supernaturally fast. The ship’s hydroponic fungus farms, the mainstay of their diet, mutated, the edible mushrooms becoming pulsating, monstrous things. Stories were told of the vile, psychotropic poisons that affected victims who ate them.
Perhaps the greatest change was the deliberate dismantling of the Blood Gorgons as a functional fighting force. From the dungeons, in slow piecemeal fashion, the Blood Gorgons were released to crew their ship. Unfamiliar with the workings of the ship, Opsarus’s Legion allowed the Blood Gorgons back into the fold, not as masters but as crew.
The objective was to divide them, split them: segregate and neuter their ability to communicate, organise and unify. Companies were broken down into lonely squads, dispatched to crew distant peripheries of the ship.
Some squads were relegated to maintain the warp engines, overseen by armed Plague Marines. Many were forced to perform the menial tasks of crewing surveillance systems or maintaining the ship’s bridge.
When the Blood Gorgons were not utilising their combat‐honed bodies for menial slavery, they attended indoctrination sessions. The high priests of Nurgle delivered fiery rhetoric about the divinity of decay. They forced the Blood Gorgons to kneel and pray for the poxes and plague of the Old Grandfather.
Many outright refused, preferring to die than face the ignominy of slavery. The riots