Watchers in Death

by David Annandale

  ‘Auspex?’ said Thane.

  ‘Unhelpful,’ Abathar replied. ‘The biomass is too large and mobile, and we do not know the floor plans of this fortress. I cannot narrow the enemy’s location and movements to specific halls.’

  Warfist held up a hand. Helm lights switched off. Thane blinked through to thermal sight. Warfist was motionless.

  ‘Approaching,’ the Space Wolf voxed. He prowled forward, a silent giant, then turned left into another branching corridor and vanished.

  Thane waited. Sounds grew sharper. Booted feet were coming closer. The snarls were close, not echoes. Metal scraped against stone. Thane’s lenses picked up heat silhouettes. Then light reappeared. A large group of orks came down the corridor at a fast march. They shouted at each other as they dragged their blades along the engravings on the walls. The lead ork wielded a jagged cleaver in each hand. The beast was large enough to gouge both walls as it ran.

  ‘Take them,’ said Thane.

  Forcas struck first. The blow was silent. Its effect was not. The lead ork stumbled. It screamed. It dropped its weapons and clutched its head. It fell to its knees. The mob behind it milled in confusion. The agony of their leader held the greenskins’ attention. They did not shine their lights further down the corridor. They did not think to suspect an attack.

  The leader’s howls became a hissing rasp, pain exceeding the body’s ability to express it. Scalding blood erupted from its eyes and ears and mouth. Crimson steam filled the hall. The chieftain’s body fell forward at the same moment that Warfist hit the orks from behind. He jabbed out with his lightning claws, stabbing through the necks of two greenskins at once. Thane heard his satisfied grunt on the vox.

  Thane and Straton rushed on, Abathar and Forcas following more slowly. The orks heard the pounding of ceramite boots and finally looked up, much too late. Thane and Straton cut into the greenskins with chainswords. The snarl of the blades rattled the stones of the hall, yet it was of a kind with the howls of the orks and the roar of their weapons. The orks’ guns were still strapped to their belts. They had thought they were alone in the fortress. Thane wanted the delusion preserved for the rest of the force.

  ‘No firearms,’ he voxed to the squad.

  ‘Good,’ said Warfist.

  Thane ran his blade through the chest of one ork. He yanked it from the falling corpse with such violence that the edge of the blade plunged into the shoulder of the ork to his right, severing the arm, then grinding through the beast’s spine. Straton clashed with a greenskin almost as big as the dead leader. He angled his chainsword and cut through the head of the ork’s hammer, so the xenos weapon fell into two halves, and the Ultramarine’s blade continued downward, cleaving the monster’s skull.

  Abathar’s plasma cutter burned through eyes and throats, the hiss of its beam unheard in the tumult. Forcas boiled the blood of another ork. Warfist killed two more before the rest of the mob at last realised death had come for them in both directions. They lashed out, and they were strong in their rage.

  The Deathwatch was precise.

  Thane and Straton pressed in hard. There was no room in the narrow passage for the orks to find their footing and use their mass. They had no momentum behind their blows. An axe crashed against Thane’s helmet. His ears rang. He brought his chainsword up through the ork’s gut. The huge body shuddered. There was a second, weaker blow of the axe before it fell from dead fingers.

  Squad Gladius waded deeper into the greenskins. Thane’s senses were submerged in the thick, liquid stench of gouting blood and greenskin musk. Claws and blades and tusks and straining muscle tried to fell him. He cut the tide back. He and his brothers in black forced it down. Ultramarine doggedness meshed with Space Wolf savagery, with Blood Angel precision and Dark Angel relentlessness. The machine rendered the orks to bloody meat. Thane had seen the fusion of battle philosophies on the attack moon, in the desperation of that struggle. He saw it again now, the interlacing occurring automatically, triggered by the moment of conflict. As the last of the orks fell, he began to understand why the Council felt so threatened by the Deathwatch.

  This was a new force for war.

  Wienand watched the five Space Marines take apart a score of orks in a matter of seconds. She realised Veritus was looking at her. ‘What is it?’ she said as the squad moved on. Her boots splashed through a pool of blood.

  ‘That skirmish didn’t mean anything,’ said Veritus.

  ‘Your point?’

  ‘Any squad of Adeptus Astartes would have made short work of those orks.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, as if she accepted what Veritus was saying. Her interest in the Deathwatch threatened him, she thought. Good.

  Veritus was right. He was also obfuscating. The importance of what Wienand had watched lay not in the challenge this group of orks had presented, but in the manner the squad had eliminated them. The disparate operated in unison, forming a lethally efficient whole. That was what was important.

  The Deathwatch encountered two more ork patrols on the way to the dome. Warfist varied the route, switching corridors every few junctions, sometimes backtracking or travelling laterally for a brief period before returning to the original heading. The orks went down quickly each time, with no shots fired. The rest of the orks in the fortress never had the chance to learn what had come among them.

  This deep in the fortress, they were surrounded by the clamour of the orks rampaging through chambers and halls, smashing all they found. The infernal choir of xenos roars was a mixture of triumph, rage and frustration. The orks had come to destroy an enemy that had vanished from these halls centuries before.

  The Deathwatch entered the main hall again for the last hundred metres before the entrance to the dome.

  ‘We should wait,’ Forcas said. ‘There is a battle ahead that it will serve no purpose to engage.’

  ‘Ork witches?’ Thane asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Forcas. ‘Several.’

  ‘The auspex indicates a large horde,’ Abathar said.

  Warfist snorted. ‘I can hear it, Techmarine.’

  The squad withdrew into an alcove. The entrance to the dome glimmered with light from the space beyond. Wienand could make out the movement of hundreds of large bodies. The dome rang with bestial shouts. There were flashes of energy too, which made her skin crawl. The flares were powerful, the colours somehow inherently inhuman. At intervals, the clamour of the mob faded and individual ork voices rose to prominence. The horde was listening. Wienand listened too, to the sound of the greenskin witches. There was no sense to the language, but she could hear the power. She glanced at Forcas. Deep in the shadows of his psychic hood, his eyes glittered. His concentration was ferocious.

  These were the voices they must silence, Wienand thought. She felt the tension in the squad as the warriors held back from battle. They understood the necessity of restraint. And they resented that necessity.

  ‘How long must we wait here?’ Warfist growled.

  ‘Until they go,’ said Thane.

  The Space Wolf growled. ‘This is shameful.’

  ‘Shame,’ said Forcas, ‘would come in failing the mission by rushing into a pointless fight we could not win.’

  Warfist muttered something Wienand could not make out. Then he was silent again.

  It was several hours before the orks tired of the dome. They streamed out of multiple doors. Three armoured transport vehicles thundered past the squad’s alcove. Behind them came well over a hundred orks. After they passed, Wienand could hear the fading sounds of other parties heading out in other directions from inside the dome.

  Quiet fell at last beyond the doorway. Thane waited another few minutes, then nodded and led the way into the dome. In the distance, Wienand could still hear the orks ransacking Vultus. There was also the deep roar of ships taking off from the landing platforms. The greenskins were not yet done with the fo
rtress, but the departure was accelerating.

  She wondered if the orks had found a destination.

  The Space Marines played their helm lights over the hall beneath the dome. They fanned out across the vastness.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Straton asked.

  ‘Anything,’ said Thane.

  ‘The orks didn’t leave anything,’ Warfist observed.

  The floor was a mass of wreckage. Wienand assumed there had been statuary here, but there was nothing left of it now. She had to clamber over mounds of rubble to reach the centre of the hall.

  There had been something large there before, but now there was only a massive heap of ruined stone. There were angled chunks of marble and vague shapes suggestive of massiveness. A colossus of the Emperor, perhaps. A figure to tower beneath the dome, to inspire with majesty. Gone now, reduced to nothing, significance turned to dust.

  Veritus wandered between the mounds a little distance away. Wienand called to him. ‘If we find nothing, then what?’

  No answer.

  You thought the Sisters of Silence would be here, didn’t you? she thought. You don’t have an option beyond this.

  ‘There’s nothing up there,’ Straton said.

  Wienand craned her head back. The squad’s beams moved over the interior of the dome soaring far above. There was no fresco as there had been on Sacratus. There was nothing at all. Only darkness.

  ‘Did the orks destroy what was there?’ Thane asked.

  ‘It would appear not,’ Abathar said. ‘The stone itself is black. I perceive some smoke damage, but not much else.’ A few moments later he said, ‘There is evidence of scoring. The dome may have been scraped.’

  ‘By the orks?’ said Thane.

  ‘No. The scoring is beneath the smoke. It was done centuries ago.’

  ‘There’s no gallery,’ said Wienand. The walls of the hall rose uninterrupted to the base of the dome. ‘No way for the orks to get up there.’

  ‘And no reason for them to do so,’ Warfist said. He sounded disgusted. ‘This is futile.’

  Wienand was still looking up at the hemisphere of darkness when the beams went away, and so she saw the light that stayed behind.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. She stared, wondering if she was hallucinating. There was a silvery glow around the base of the dome. It was so faint, it vanished when Wienand looked directly at it. She focused her gaze instead on the crown. The silver grew stronger in her peripheral vision. She perceived brighter points and the hint of tracery. ‘There is something. A faint phosphorescence.’

  The Space Marines and Veritus moved towards her position. They turned off their lights. The hall fell into pitch darkness. Wienand could see the glow more clearly now. She could look at it directly, though she saw nothing more than the most fragile gossamer of grey. ‘Those are stars,’ she said. ‘It’s another chart.’

  ‘One that someone sought to obliterate,’ said Abathar.

  ‘Can you make a record of it?’ Thane asked.

  ‘Yes. It is too faint for pict inscription, but I am making a copy of the stars’ positions relative to each other.’

  ‘Will that be enough for the Navigator?’

  ‘We will hope it is.’

  ‘I see nothing in the centre,’ said Straton. ‘Is something missing? Is it possible all that remains is the edge of the chart?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ said Abathar. ‘The scoring cuts across the full height of the dome. The phosphorescence is limited to the lower third. There is…’ He trailed off.

  ‘What is it?’ said Thane.

  ‘I am uncertain. The pattern I have recorded is suggestive, but we will have to wait for confirmation aboard the Herald of Night.’

  ‘Suggestive of what?’ said Thane. ‘I trust your conclusions, Brother Abathar.’

  ‘If this is a chart, it points to nothing at all.’

  ‘You mean there is no direction?’ said Veritus. ‘Or that it is unreadable?’

  ‘Neither, inquisitor. I mean as I say – nothing. The crown of the dome is between systems. There truly is nothing there.’

  Eight

  The Western Reaches of the Segmentum Pacificus – the void

  The Herald of Night came to the nothingness and found hordes. Instead of dark, there was the flare of engines, the flash of launches and guns, the streak of missiles. The orks besieged a point where there should have been emptiness.

  There was a single planet in the starless night. It was a rocky mass, so cold its atmosphere was frozen, sullen snow. But the orks had brought heat to the world. Their bombardment melted nitrogen and methane. It pounded the surface to a molten orange, as if the greenskins sought to turn the world into a flowing, liquid hell.

  But the world resisted. It remained solid. And the target of the orks’ hatred struck back.

  ‘Lance fire from the surface,’ said Adnachiel. He pointed to a spike of icons on a pict screen, and looked around the tacticarium table at the Deathwatch and the inquisitors. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘By the Throne, I don’t think I can credit it even now. But I congratulate you. We have found our myths.’

  ‘At war,’ said Thane. ‘The orks have found them too. Before us.’

  ‘They wasted no time,’ said Straton.

  ‘No,’ said Adnachiel, ‘these are not the orks we saw over Vultus. The ships are different. The fleet is larger.’ He paused, his eye caught by a change on the pict screen to the left of the table. He grunted. ‘Cannon fire from the surface now too. And the orks have just lost an escort vessel. Impressive.’

  ‘But insufficient,’ Thane said.

  Adnachiel nodded. ‘There are heat signatures of landing craft. The greenskins are attacking on the surface as well.’ He frowned. ‘What I do not understand is, if they already knew the location of the Sisters of Silence, what interest did they have in Vultus?’

  ‘Fear,’ said Veritus. ‘Or something very like it. The orks sense the threat the Sisters of Silence represent. They seek to destroy all trace of them.’ He pointed to the centre of the tacticarium table. The hololithic display of the planet had an illuminated target. Its coordinates marked the focus of the orbital bombardment and the ork landings, and the origin of the surface fire. The Herald of Night was as yet too distant for the auspex array to form an image of the fortress itself. But the citadel was there, its existence confirmed by the conflict. ‘The orks cannot know that this is the one place in the galaxy where the Sisters of Silence may be found. They must attack every trace of them they find.’

  Warfist bared his teeth. ‘If this is true, so much the better. The thought of orks feeling threatened cheers me enormously.’

  ‘It proves the importance of our mission,’ Thane said. He examined the relative positions of the strike cruiser and the ork fleet. ‘What is your evaluation?’ he asked Adnachiel.

  ‘Worse than Vultus. This ork fleet is not much larger, but that one was already large enough. There are no planets to use as cover for our approach. The orks will see us coming, if they have not already detected our presence. If we fight…’ He stopped for a moment.

  ‘No one doubts your skill or the strength of your ship,’ said Thane.

  ‘I hope no one doubts my intelligence, either,’ Adnachiel replied. ‘The numbers and the forces are what they are. We can fight. We cannot win.’

  ‘We have not come all this way for a pointless sacrifice,’ said Warfist.

  Adnachiel gave the Space Wolf a curt nod. ‘Quite,’ he said.

  ‘Then our attack must be in two stages,’ said Thane. ‘We must neutralise the fleet before we engage with the orks planetside.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Wienand. ‘But what is the plan to do that?’

  Thane had no illusions about the situation. He could see many ways for it to end in disaster, and knew there were many more he had not imagined. Even so, his li
ps pressed into a taut smile. ‘I thought it was clear,’ he told Wienand. ‘We are going to destroy an ork fleet.’

  ‘The Herald of Night?’

  ‘No. The Deathwatch.’

  Five Space Marines in a single boarding torpedo came for the fleet. The launch of the torpedo, from the limit of its range, signalled the opening of a new front for the orks, though they did not know it. Abathar steered at an angle away from the Herald of Night, putting distance between the torpedo and its source. The Deathwatch streaked through the void, a lone missile directed at a fleet, beneath notice as the greenskins poured their wrath on the world below them.

  The target was the largest of the battleships at the centre of the ork formation. Thane watched the readout of the vessel grow on the torpedo’s navigation pict screen. The representation began as a single point. It became an outline, then an ever-more detailed schematic in red lines. Icons for possible attack points multiplied.

  ‘Have you chosen?’ Thane asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Abathar. His servo-arm pointed at the screen, to the junction of the immense engine block and the rest of the hull. The vessel narrowed slightly there. The battleship’s construction was a brutal monumentalism, a welding together of the massive. But still there was a junction. The shielding and the hull would be thinner. And the location was close to the goal.

  ‘Good,’ Thane approved. ‘And the ship’s position?’

  ‘Within an acceptable risk,’ Abathar said. ‘The defensive fire from the planet is pushing the greenskins back. They are substantially further from the surface than the enemy over Vultus.’

  ‘Far enough, then.’

  ‘Within an acceptable risk,’ Abathar said again.

  They had no choice, Thane thought. There was no other way of dealing with the ork fleet. What would be an unacceptable risk? he wondered.

  Nothing.

  The action was necessary. It was the only alternative to assured defeat.

  ‘Time?’ he asked.

  ‘One hundred seconds,’ Abathar told him.

  Thane voxed Adnachiel. ‘We are about to make our attack,’ he said.