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The Bleeding Stars – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Bleeding Stars

Robert Rath

The ziggurat had stood since gods walked free among the stars. Beamer arrays that could section starships in orbit mounted its towers, and the walls and gatehouses that girdled its base were a league thick. Not so much defences as they were tomb complexes in and of themselves.

For aeons uncounted they had kept vigil over the precious, destructive relic within, and for centuries they’d withstood continuous siege.

Yet tonight, there was a chance it might fall.

Emerald steam billowed from the ramparts atop the Volakhan Gate, venting from the overtaxed gauss blasters of the Oruscar Dynasty Immortals. ‘Move not!’ Revkkah ordered, striding among her phalanx. She was so lost in the intensity of the battlesphere that she spoke the order aloud along with the interstitial broadcast. ‘Gird your necrodermis! Harden your joints! They are coming again!’

Sixty million years she had stood on Volakhan Gate. Stood with these proud sentinels wearing the jade blue of the Oruscar, their tile banner never removed or thrown down, even as the rest of the dynasty slept in their crypts. Few had dared come against them, and those who had had been disdainfully repulsed. Even in the final cataclysms of the War in Heaven, when the God of Death itself had tried to breach the wall, they had turned it back.

Now, that god’s bastard offspring might succeed where it had failed.

‘Contingency Seven-Nine-Three!’ she shouted. ‘Release the scarab wave and pour on the fire!’

Her Immortals dropped their angle of fire, scything into the skorpekhs scaling the wall. Hundreds fell, their pieces tumbling into the mass. But those behind scrabbled higher, sinking their legs and blades into the wall face.

Beneath the beams, scarabs scuttled from hatches and dimensional irises, their backs lit by the passing gauss energy, to form a moving grid that covered every inch of the wall as it swept down and swamped the Destroyers.

‘Cease fire! Allow the scarabs to do the work. Acquire firing solutions on the plasmacytes. Atomise them, allow no reanimation.’

An Immortal let loose with a tesla cannon, the lightning catching one of the constructs and fusing it to inert metal. Its vapour sphere cracked and coughed green as it dropped into the troops below, crushing a skorpekh’s skull.

A fitting death for one with the Destroyer madness. To be taken apart, crushed, annihilated. That was what their illness compelled them to do, wasn’t it? To eradicate. And it had in turn been eradicated.

So many of these Kardenath Dynasty filth had the madness. For centuries they had laid siege to the ziggurat, attempting to use the treasure within to extinguish the organic life they looked upon with hatred and horror.

And in all that time, they had never got so close as they had tonight. Breaches had already occurred to the east and west, each partially or fully undone by a conclave of chronomancers, who’d frozen the local timeline even as the blocks of masonry flew into the air, and reversed the flow so the shattered walls reassembled themselves.

But they had burned so much energy in the attempt it could not be done again.

‘If they breach, it will not be here,’ Revkkah swore aloud to her soldiers. ‘The integrity of the galaxy depends on holding the Volakhan Gate, and we, its sentinels, will not dishonour ourselves by–’

Her peripheral threat matrix flared, and she snapped her top half around at the ball joint, swinging her gauss blaster’s emitter tubes towards the emerging threat directly behind her.

Dead gods, the wall.

They’d breached the wall.

Not horizontally, but vertically. Coming up through the floor onto the fighting platform, the bale glow of their hyperphase threshers searing the air as they carved up through the flagstones to sever the legs of her honoured band. The tainted surged upward from the semi-corporeal tunnel like a nest of serpents hatching, rising in all directions to punch their long talons through skulls and twist segmented tails around throats. They flickered with dimensional displacement as they did so, like a corrupted chrysoprase projection.

Ophydian Destroyers. Had Revkkah still possessed bile, she’d have vomited it.

‘Contain them! Seal that tunnel! Seal…’

She saw their intention the moment before it happened. Two of the levitating horrors were dragging a sarcophagus out of the quantum tunnel. Atop the blackstone surface, a colourless orb the size of her fist vibrated and distorted in the air between two field-emitter prongs.

An antimatter collider, with the ignition core already active.

‘Files Two and Three, bow!’ she ordered.

Her Immortals obeyed, bending forward at their hip joints in perfect synchronicity to clear a path and make a bridge.

Her feet landed heavy on the backs of her warriors, clanging with anvil force on ribcages, spines and heads. A shrieking Destroyer leapt at her. She atomised it with a blast and ran through the glowing cloud of ash cinders left in its wake.

She reached her final Immortal and leapt, firing another double-beam shot in mid-air that disassembled one of the Destroyers trying to lock the sarcophagus down, so its blast would be directed down into the wall. The Destroyers squealed static as if through broken vocal emitters, but in her cranked-back chronosense she knew they shouted one hateful, celebratory word.

‘Breach! Breach! Breeeeeeeeach!’

Not on my wall, she thought, and landed beside the weapon.

She jammed her underslung glaiveblade through a Destroyer’s carapace and wrenched the beast around, activating the twin beams so they bored through it and out its back, splashing across two other horrors.

A clawed hand reached for the sarcophagus’ activation rune, and Revkkah drew the triangular hyperphase axe from her back and struck it off at the wrist joint.

But the severed stump still plunged down on the rune.

The antimatter core rotated, prickled into spikes.

Revkkah slapped it with the side of her blade, the phase field shorting out with a bang but the antimatter binding to the necrodermis axe-head itself folding the weapon’s blade into a lightless void.

She threw the axe, end over end, to get it as far from the wall as possible.

Revkkah did not see the implosion; she was already buried under a mound of Destroyers.

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A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Lie Setiawan.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-522-7

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