Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

They returned to the gateway world of Port Sanctus, a mere two weeks' voyage from Terra.

Lin, wholly ignorant of the machinations of the great powers upon Terra, was still busy preparing to watch his very own proxy war unfold.

The Life Cult's fate played out exactly as Lin had predicted. Having committed their full strength to the field, they were soon surrounded and hunted down by the other underhive gangs. The gangs, who had long since stockpiled food and weapons, reacted to the Life Cult's sudden move at the first opportunity.

The savage expansion of the Nurgle faithful earlier had already shattered any trust the other gangs might have had in this bizarre religion. Even as these Nurgle worshippers explained again and again that they merely wished to strike at the Planetary Defence Force in vengeance against those lapdogs of the False Emperor, the gangs saw them only as a pack with ulterior motives.

Buoyed by their sense of righteous purpose, the Nurgle faithful had no intention of backing down after their explanations fell on deaf ears. The conflict between the two sides escalated sharply, and open war was ignited in an instant.

Though their opponents were cultists of unknown depth, these gangs had ruled the underhive for years, and they truly had a trick or two up their sleeves. While the combat prowess of their gangers couldn't measure up to the Astra Militarum, their far richer battle experience compared to the Nurgle faithful, and their intimate knowledge of the underhive, allowed them to rout the refugees the Nurgle worshippers had incited into a broken mob.

Still hoping to recruit yet more followers, the Nurgle cult was unwilling to display too much of the mutation upon their bodies. They could only deploy those faithful bearing minor mutations onto specific battlefields.

These Nurgle faithful, relying on their thick, tough hides, repelled countless ganger assaults. But the high-output lasguns the gangers had procured from the midhive now came into their own.

Weapons capable of punching through the power armour of Space Marines could naturally inflict fatal wounds upon the Nurgle faithful as well. Unwilling to watch its followers die, the Nurgle cult had no choice but to withdraw in disarray, and their engagement with the gangs ground into a stalemate.

The underhive gangs were satisfied that they had shown off their iron-blooded methods, and those residents who had originally meant to abandon the gangs to join the Life Cult grew hesitant. But just as the gangs were about to press their advantage in triumph, a strange plague swept through every gang's territory.

This wholly unremarkable virus was a secret weapon the Nurgle Bishop had spent several days custom-crafting.

Concocting a disease untainted by the foul energies of the Warp was, to the Bishop, as agonizing as forbidding a mangaka from drawing a certain something in his comics—but the results it achieved were remarkable indeed.

This virus, like a weakened strain of dysentery, was seeded into the drinking water. For the Nurgle faithful, drinking such water was nothing more than welcoming another companion into their bodies, but the gangers were the ones who suffered.

The virus spreading from the water supply left vast numbers of gangers wracked with diarrhoea and weakness, stripping them of their fighting strength. The once aggressive gangs were suddenly forced onto the strategic defensive.

So long as one had some kind of medical system, curing a disease without any Warp-based enhancement was no difficult matter.

But this was the underhive, where medical treatment was simply nonexistent.

All the infected had no recourse but prayer, yet no amount of praying would have any effect against this purely mundane sickness.

The incurable disease spread swiftly through the water and the excrement, and rumours flew thick and fast through the underhive for a time. The tale that the Life Cult was blessed by divine aid caused the once-faltering Life Cult to swell in strength once again.

The gangers, who had lost vast numbers of men and weapons in the successive routs, grew perilously vulnerable. Their morale collapsed to the point that entire formations of their men began defecting to the Life Cult.

The gang leaders flew into a rage over this, but they could do nothing to stop the Life Cult from taking in these "brothers" and turning their guns around to attack the gangs. This shook the already scattered morale of the gangers even further, and quite a few of the smaller gangs even showed signs of scattering like startled birds and beasts.

The gang leaders, who had originally each fought for themselves, all wanting to tear a chunk of flesh from the Life Cult, were forced to band together to discuss a countermeasure. They planned to head down to the lower hive, or even the midhive, to procure a batch of medicine—but this was the Warhammer universe, where medicine was a scarcity even rarer than weapons.

Just as the gang leaders were at their wits' end, a Tech-Priest arrived at their camp.

Facing the wary stares of the gangers, Lin spread his hands, displaying the weapons and medicine he had brought down from a Forge Ship: "Don't worry. What I bring is one hundred percent goodwill."

Their eyes instantly shifted to greed and wariness.

The greed was for the medicine and weapons; the wariness was for Lin's identity.

It was no strange thing for there to be a Tech-Priest in Port Sanctus. The factories here were not managed by the Adeptus Mechanicus, but a factory could hardly operate without members of the Mechanicus.

A Tech-Priest able to serve in a hive city factory might be nobody of note on the Forge Worlds, but on a hive world he was a senior administrator starting from the upper hive at the very least.

The gang leaders dared not treat him with neglect, and warmly ushered Lin inside.

"I've come to make a deal." Lin cut straight to the point, displaying before the gangers an arrogance befitting his station. "I know you lack munitions and medicine, and I happen to be able to provide these things."

"May I ask what it is you require...?" The gang leaders wisely refrained from asking how Lin had come to learn of their plight.

"The sacred furnace-fires of the Omnissiah must not be extinguished. Your act of cutting off the resource transports has harmed our interests. We cannot tolerate the inefficiency of black-market channels, so I require a share of your supply lines."

The demand, staggering in its appetite, instantly led the gang leaders to peg Lin as a senior priest looking to bypass the usual channels and trade directly with them. Their expressions grew even more deferential, though a bitterness crept unbidden into their features.

These grease-soaked bastards were each more skilled than the last at looting a house while it burned!

Considering the crisis bearing down upon them and Lin's identity, the gang leaders understood that this deal was not one they could refuse. After a round of haggling, all the gangs unanimously agreed to hand over a third of their share in exchange for Lin's long-term support in food, medicine, and weapons and munitions.

The resource extraction on Port Sanctus had itself been dwindling due to the war, and the gangs who controlled the production lines had already converted all their previously stockpiled resources into weapons. A third looked like a lot, but the gang leaders reckoned that as long as enough time passed, they would still come out ahead on this deal.

But would there really be enough time?

The specialized medicine Lin had crafted swiftly cured the afflicted gangers, while the extra food and water he provided eliminated any chance of re-infection. The weapons they had lost were replenished with arms hand-forged by the Evil Sun. Though these ork-produced weapons could hardly be praised for their safety, their sheer destructive power was second to none.

The gangs didn't care in the slightest whether their own men might be blown apart by their own weapons. The Nurgle faithful, who had thought victory was within reach, made the sorrowful discovery that their foes had sprung back to vigorous life once more, and they were driven into retreat step by step yet again.

No matter how slow-witted, the Bishop realized there had to be a lapdog of the False Emperor stirring the pot behind all this.

The Bishop, who had already intended to take revenge on the Imperial forces over his fall from favour in the eyes of the Grandfather, was now humiliated into fury. Faced with a situation where he would be beaten to death outright unless he revealed some real power, he could no longer spare a thought for anything else.

"Bring it forth—haul up our Walking Plague!" Flying into a rage, he tore away every mask of benevolence. "I want the False Emperor's lapdogs dead!"

At the Bishop's command, the faithful hauled a foul-stinking, sickly-green crucible out from the depths of the nest.

The Bishop had long ago ordered the refugees to gather up the corpses fallen on the battlefields. These bodies, collected under the pretext of giving them a proper burial, now piled into a small mountain before the Bishop, exuding a thick stench of rot.

The Nurgle faithful greedily breathed in this odour that filled them with delight. They were commanded to kneel in a row around this mountain of corpses, and under the Bishop's leadership, they prayed devoutly to their Great Father.

A dozen or so of the faithful, bearing the crucible, walked in prayer to the summit of the corpse-mountain. They poured the long-simmered pestilence downward, until every last body was steeped in that ghastly green fluid.

The ritual had reached its most crucial stage. The Bishop raised both hands high, chanting the incantation that could draw upon the foul power of the Warp, driving the ritual toward its climax.

"In the name of the Grandfather. Now, they shall be granted life once more!"

A corpse rose unsteadily from the ground, its cheeks sunken, its teeth gone, rotten veins bubbling beneath paper-thin skin. This condition could by no measure be called living, yet the plague of the Grandfather drove it to walk the earth once again.

More corpses rose, making no effort to hide their nature that craved flesh and blood, held in check and driven only by the ritual the assembled Nurgle faithful performed. Even the Bishop could not manipulate these things of corruption to any great degree, so he simply pointed out a rough direction and let this horde of Nurgle zombies go attack the gangers of their own accord.

"Go forth, dead who have returned to the world of the living! Attack those who do not believe in the Great Father, offer up their deaths to us, and their souls to the Grandfather!"

The foul power clinging to these Nurgle zombies was astonishingly scant, which left them without any particular mutation, and the plague upon their bodies lacked contagiousness. But the mere fact of walking corpses was enough to fill any normal person with dread. When these zombies appeared on the battlefield, every ganger's eyes went wide.

"Ritchie?" One ganger walked involuntarily toward a corpse. "I remember you were already dead. How are you...?"

The zombie would offer no answer to his confusion. It opened its mouth and bit down on the ganger's shoulder, and the ganger let out a howl of pain.

This bite was only the beginning. The Nurgle zombies, ravenous for flesh and blood, swarmed forward and tore this reckless ganger to pieces.

This scrap of flesh clearly could not satisfy their ever-insatiable hunger. The zombies, victims' blood still lingering at the corners of their mouths, turned around, their hollow eyes fixed dead upon the remaining gangers.

Gazing at this horde of zombies who only yesterday had been their friends, brothers, or enemies, the gangers' morale plummeted to freezing point in an instant.

"What in the world are these monsters...!"

They screamed, striking back with the weapons in their hands. But the resilient nature of Nurgle's creations had not been diminished the way their contagiousness had. Unless struck directly in the head, these seemingly frail plague zombies simply would not stop advancing.

But if they were all dead-eye marksmen, how could they possibly have been nothing more than an ordinary underhive gang?

The gangers, firing wildly in their terror and lacking any suppressive firepower, were utterly powerless to halt the approach of these rotting corpses. When the bloodthirsty zombies charged right up to them, one ganger finally could no longer bear the psychological strain. He cast aside the weapon in his hands, turned, and fled the battle line.

"I won't fight these monsters! I won't join them! I won't die here!"

This fleeing ganger spoke the heart of every man there. In an instant, the vast majority of the gangers turned and fled for their lives. The gang leaders who learned of this flew into a rage, yet they too were filled with dread of these bizarre zombies.

First disease, and now walking corpses? Just what other dark sorcery did this so-called Life Cult have?!

Even with no understanding whatsoever of the Warp and the Four Peddlers, the leaders could sense the abnormality of this "resurrection from the dead." Faced with a supernatural power they could not comprehend, they could only cast their pleading gazes toward Lin, who was present at the scene.

"My lord priest, we need some weapons capable of dealing with these walking dead. As for payment, what do you say...?"

"Don't worry. Those things aren't so hard to deal with."

In Lin's eyes, these gangers were already dead men. He did not provide any weapons as they wished, but neither did he let the underhive gang simply sit and wait for death. The gang leaders, having gunned down a dozen or so of the deserters, quickly rallied a band of armed men once more. They concentrated their weapons, and under Lin's "advice," formed a defensive line in an open stretch of ground. When the massive numbers of Nurgle zombies came pouring into this open area, the weapons massed there roared out in unison.

The flying lasbeams and the rain of shots spat out by the logging guns cut down the Nurgle zombies like scything wheat. The ever-victorious Nurgle zombies were finally set back a little here, but the Bishop manipulating them felt no panic.

This was the underhive—there were as many unclaimed corpses as anyone could ever want!

An endless stream of zombies continued to pour in, while the weapons on the defensive position seized up from firing round the clock for so long. The ever-softening firepower could no longer halt the plague zombies' advance.

The gang leaders holding the line grew ever more despairing. They turned to seek Lin's advice, only to discover, after searching all around, that Lin had already vanished without a trace.

"Where's the man?!"

Where's my great big priest gone?!

The gang leaders looked at one another, unable to believe that this grease-soaked bastard had simply abandoned them like this.

"We still hold the share of the supply lines that he wants!"

One of the leaders, however, saw the matter clearly: "Forget about any share. This is all the men we have left—what share could we even control anymore?"

"Then what do we do now?"

"Run! Pick different directions and split up. Every man to his own fate!"

Even with its limited effect, the Life Cult's trump card had shattered the underhive gangs. The leaders joining the ranks of the fleeing utterly proclaimed their defeat.

But before their complete defeat, these gangers had still inflicted more than enough casualties upon the Nurgle zombies. Just as the Life Bishop, brimming with self-satisfaction, had already begun to daydream on the back of this victory about how he would turn the entire hive city upside down once he had unified the underhive, the anguished screams of the Nurgle faithful cut his reverie short.

The Nurgle Bishop, snapping back to his senses, looked toward the source of the screams and found several Nurgle faithful, burning like torches, stumbling toward him.

These followers, purified by the flames, were already at their last breath: "Cult Master, it's the lapdogs of the False Emperor! They've come...!"

The flames burning upon their bodies were the very thing the Nurgle faithful feared. Only a few of the bold ones stepped forward, trying to help them put out the fire. But the promethium clinging to them and the swamp-fluid oozing out of their own bodies from decay were both the finest accelerants for the flames. Everyone could only watch helplessly as these "family members" collapsed amid the burning, reduced to unrecognizable charred corpses.

The same dread that had spread through the gangers upon seeing the Nurgle zombies now spread through the Nurgle faithful. Accompanied by the rumbling of an advancing tank, the Nurgle faithful looked up in terror to find that a Leman Russ had, at some unknown moment, already appeared here.

"Don't panic!" The Bishop shouted himself hoarse, trying to soothe his followers' fear. "It's just one tank—it can't block our path!"

But several flamer-equipped buggies burned the barely-recovered morale back into futility. Sweeping past the tank and racing swiftly into the field, they spewed out flames, working in concert with the siege tank that had set up its punisher shock-cannon to utterly seal off any hope of survival for the Nurgle faithful.

With the charge of the Hellhound war-vehicles as an opening act, the yellow-armoured Space Marines, wielding promethium flamers, appeared upon this battlefield.

"Let's begin."

Lin, who had vanished earlier, now stood at some unknown point within the Astartes battle line. He pointed both hands forward, issuing the order to commence the all-out assault of this extermination.

"Let the flames purify all!"

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