Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,97
continued. There was an attempt by Squad Archeme to reach the weapon vaults via the air circulation ducts. Several minor resistances were attempted, but without organisational capacity, each was a needless casualty.
The Blood Gorgons were no longer caged, but they were just as imprisoned. Their proud fighting companies fragmented – disarmed, controlled and infiltrated. Under this assault, there were those among the Chapter who openly admitted that the Blood Gorgons were no more.
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CHAPTER TWENTY
FROM ORBITAL SURVEILLANCE, Ur had never registered as anything more than a rock formation, a mere smudge upon a strata‐map.
But as they flew close, dropping in altitude, Barsabbas could see it in detail. From a distance, it had appeared a featureless bubble, merely a contrasting shape on the horizon.
Up close it was a marvellous construct with an artistic symmetry that was not lost even on one so militantly linear.
The city seemed entirely constructed of red clay. From the smooth panes of its siege curtains, it rose up and up for eight hundred metres, forming an imposing girdle of interlaced brick art. The wall was so tall it spread out to either side and up, its edges lost to a haze of dust. With such inferior materials, the city stood only by the design of sound engineering. It resembled a termite mound, the top clustered with finger spires and punctuated with mazes of galleries. Its raw size and flat, unyielding facelessness gave it a prominent, intoxicating stature.
The monolithic walls were sealed within a void blister, a hemisphere of shields tessellating from generator pylons at ground level. Amber hexagons overlapped each other in a semi‐sphere of paned scales. It was by far the thickest void shield Barsabbas had ever encountered, possibly sturdier than the shield blisters of the Mechanicus Titans. Bronze, amber and tarnished brass, the tessellating pieces reflected the sunlight like tinfoil.
Those shields, Barsabbas reckoned, had been the primary reason that the Blood Gorgons had never taken Ur. It was not that the Blood Gorgons could not break them – they had simply reasoned the costs to outweigh the gains. Ur, in some ways, protected the plainsmen of Bassiq against roving raiders from beyond the stars when the Blood Gorgons could not. Ur had protected Blood Gorgon interests, and in return the Blood Gorgons had chosen to let them live. Fight only when you have to, as Gammadin had always said.
As the Harvester levelled out three hundred metres from Ur proper, a vox‐signal was received by the ship’s tympanum, bringing Barsabbas out of his thoughts.
‘Mercenary, this is Green Father. State landing protocol, archon.’
The voice that hailed them came through the Harvester’s aural fronds. Grating and intrusive, the voice thrummed through the metallic tuning forks set into the console with crystalline audio clarity.
Sindul opened the vox‐link on his console by touching the fibres connected to his ring fingers together. ‘This is the archon’s troupe. Mercenary awaits the Green Father’s welcome. Landing protocol sequenced,’ he announced loudly into the aural fronds.
Without a second of delay, one of the shield pylons deactivated, winking a hexagonal gap in the city’s void blister. They flew in. The city rushed in to swallow them in a haze of sepia. The sudden change in atmospheric light was disorientating. Sunlight filtered through the void shields in honeyed orange. Everything seemed suspended in amber.
The city itself rose in solid tiers. Enormous canvas awnings – perhaps half a kilometre in length – steepled each ziggurat with broad wings. Flat tiled roofs were set with perfect, geometric regularity up the stepped slope. Orthostats, pillars and open courts gave the architecture a palatial bearing.
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Barsabbas constructed a mental map of Ur from his briefing, remembering everything to scale and detail. Cross‐referencing his coordinates with the dark eldar ship’s console display, Barsabbas remembered the ramparts contained narrow docking chutes heavily guarded by aerial defence silos. Measuring trajectory and angles of entry, he began making swift calculations in his head. ‘Zoom in there,’ he commanded, tapping the hololith display of the city’s rampart.
Sindul’s fingers danced across his console, nimble and quick, and the image magnified.
There amongst the brickwork was an aperture like an archer’s slit, a mere crack in the leviathan wall.
‘Take us in there,’ said Barsabbas.
Sindul banked the Impaler into a lazy roll and dropped level with the rampart wall.
Along the port side, they saw multiple box‐battery missile systems swivel to track their descent. The accusatory finger of a turbo‐laser tracked them, traversing on a railed track.
‘It’s time, then,’ Barsabbas intoned. He stowed his boltgun, mace and falchion in the storage bays