The Withered Land: Dragons and Marauders

Dragons and Marauders, Part Seventeen

The searing heat from the barrels and expulsion vents from their pulse guns threatened to burn through their forearm guards. Ignoring the discomfort, they sprayed the entry foyer to the propulsion repair bay with a withering series of blasts. The dockyard security police squad of eight trauma armored officers scattered chaotically, practically falling over themselves in a mad dash to escape the line of fire and get cover.

The Ureeon Security Police Force were used to dealing with unruly, violent drunks and squabbling personal vendettas between motley individuals or very small crews from feuding ships. Most who docked at the facility respected the unwritten code that forbade rivalries and disagreements from turning into blood disputes. The police squad had never before needed to actually go to war against any particular foe. So they'd let their training and tactics become lax, the men ill-prepared both mentally and physically, and they had not updated and practiced their combat drills so they could be ready for an organized counterinsurgency. The mercenary Xar'queyeks had known this and had taken full advantage of the slack, lackadaisical state of Ureoon base security. They knew far in advance that the security team wouldn't have been prepared for a carefully-planned, full-on military assault.

Kedurom Meddo and Grasquan Bregsa had both once been Lancers in the Emperium's Light Infantry before they'd become infected with the Veindyllgoh bacteriophage and become tribal Xar'gueyek sell-swords. They were battlefield-experienced and knowledgeable warriors with deadly skills, despite the sometimes distracting neurological agitation that the bacteriophage caused. Veindyllgoh's Syndrome had been brought back from space during the height of the Great Revocation, when the Emperium's space legion were called back to Teshiwahur after the onset of catastrophic disasters that followed the unanticipated and ruinous incursion of The Wound into Teshiwahur's solar system. Veindyllgoh's had been quickly identified, controlled and managed by the Emperium's Homeworld Health Corp and so there were extremely few future incidents of its recurrence after the initial outbreak many orbital solar heliars ago, but, out in the Badland Wilds and among the more rural villages in the unincorporated territories, the disease still sometimes reared its ugly head, taking residence among those members of the population not inoculated against it. The main symptom of the bacteriophage, other than the eventual agonizing death it caused, was a euphoric mental state of battle-drunkenness... infected warriors were driven to participate in furious battles for the sheer adrenalin-induced joy of killing. Meddo and Bregsa, though both were on high doses of prescribed medication to mediate their battle-lust, were born infected and so were psychologically incapable of desiring to be rid of their bloodthirsty, murderous urges. They simply didn't know how, and had very little experience with, being any other way. Neither man had developed much in the way of a conscience to moderate their urges. And that made them damn good Blood-Haunters. Killing was what they lived for.

There were no less than seven dead bodies lying in pools of cooling blood on the floor below their position when, charging from the corridor behind and to the right of them, Pnoom-Ogg and Pnoom-Aig came upon them.

Kedurom Meddo heard the faintest scuffle of their boots on the metal gangway floor and rose into a half-crouch as he turned, his long-barreled pulse rifle swinging up and around to sight on the approaching target mass ---

Pnoom-Ogg's leg lashed out and kicked the gun's barrel aside just as a blast of ionized, elemental isotope radiation-enhanced light rocketed from out the weapon. The force of the kick traveled down the body of the weapon and transferred its energy to Meddo's body, throwing him into a dizzying, off-balance spin. Moving almost too swiftly to see, Pnoom-Ogg let his momentum carrying him crashing into Meddo's body as he followed up with an elbow strike that caught the mercenary in his face, right on the mandible. Meddo's head snapped back and he was thrown into the railing behind him, hitting it with his torso with force enough to crack three of his ribs and fracture a spinal vertebra.