Deathwatch

by Steve Parker

  Well, now he had, and somehow they had shut down his ship.

  He folded his arms and stared out over his command bridge. The eyes of every crewman in that great long room had turned his way. He blew out a deep, frustrated breath, drew in another, and called out, ‘Stand down all of you. It’s not like we have any choice. Permission granted to rest at your stations until further notice. Mister Korren and Mister Hayter, stations six and ten. I’ll want to know the moment something changes.’

  Two grudging yessirs came back at him. The captain had never liked Korren and Hayter much, and he was not above demonstrating it.

  He dropped back into his chair and rested his chin on a clenched fist. Brindle still stood beside him. The captain waved him off, gesturing for him to go and rest at his station. The first officer moved away. Before he had gone five metres, however, Captain Sythero called out to him again.

  ‘Inquisitors are just men, Gideon,’ he said. ‘Just men and women like you or I.’

  Brindle turned, but his eyes did not meet his captain’s. They rested on that macabre icon still glowing from the nearest screen.

  ‘I don’t think so, sir,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’re like us at all. But if we’re lucky, we’ll never find out the truth of it.’

  Those words hung in the red gloom long after Brindle had returned to his chair. Captain Sythero turned them over and over in his head. Commanding a system defence ship, even all the way out here on the fringe, had always given him a sense of power, of importance. Four hundred trained men and women under his command. Forward weapons batteries that could level a city in minutes or cut through a battleship three times the Ventria’s size. How easily this Inquisition had come along and stripped him of that, ripped it away from him like a gossamer veil.

  How had they shut him down? A Centaurus level override, the voice had said. Did that mean override codes had been pre-written into the ship’s systems? The Ventria was a vessel of His Holy Majesty’s Imperial Navy; it didn’t seem possible. But if the overrides had been broadcast from an external source, a ship somewhere in-system, why hadn’t the long-range auspex arrays picked it up? They had full-scan capabilities right out to the system’s edge and beyond.

  If the override codes had been broadcast from another ship, the implications of them falling into enemy hands were, frankly, terrifying.

  I can’t abide this. Naval Command needs to be told. This undermines every capability we have. To hell with the warnings. As soon as the override lifts…

  Four hours and twenty-seven minutes later, it did lift. The Ventria’s primary systems came back online. Colours other than red flooded the bridge as if erasing a murder scene, restoring life, noise and activity. Cogitator screens and vocaliser units started churning out status reports and statistical data. The control pits buzzed in a frenzy.

  Sythero thrust forwards in his chair and called out, ‘Brindle, open me a two-way with the Ultrix. I want to speak to Captain Mendel at once. And make sure it’s bloody secure.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Brindle, punching the relevant runes.

  A pale-skinned old man in a crisp Naval uniform soon appeared on the main display above Sythero’s chair. He was clean shaven, with craggy features, and his white hair was oiled back smartly. A dark scar, legacy of a past wound, traced a path from his forehead down to his left ear. This was Mendel, captain of the Ventria’s sister vessel, and Sythero read on his face that the old man had known this call was coming. Typically a forceful and vigorous man despite his years, Mendel looked unusually weary now. There was no formal greeting. The old man simply held up a hand and said, ‘Please, captain. If you’re about to ask what I think–’

  Sythero cut him off. ‘Tell me the Ultrix hasn’t just spent the last four hours in some kind of blasted lockdown!’

  Mendel sighed and nodded. ‘We just got all our primaries back online, same as you.’

  ‘And that’s all you’ve got to say about it? For Throne’s sake, Mendel. What’s going on here? Someone out there has override codes that leave two Naval warships completely defenceless, and you don’t seem ready to do a damned thing about it. We could have been cut to pieces already. What’s gotten into you, man?’

  Mendel looked off to the side, gave an order to someone on his own bridge, and returned his attention to the link. ‘You saw the insignia, same as I did, captain, and we only saw that because they wanted us to know we were not under attack. It was a courtesy. I’m not about to start asking questions to which I honestly don’t want the answers. And trust me, you don’t either. Do us both a favour and forget anything happened.’

  ‘Like red hell I will! I’m going straight to Sector Command with this. The implications–’

  ‘The implications don’t bear thinking about, son,’ interrupted Mendel. ‘I’ll assume you like breathing as much as I do, so I’ll say this and then I’m done. I hope you’ll credit me with at least a little age-based wisdom. Drop this thing completely, captain. Don’t mention it in any reports. Don’t record it in your log. If anyone ever asks, it was a glitch in the monitoring scripts. Nothing more. That’s your story, and you stick to it.’

  Sythero knew his expression betrayed his distaste, but it was clear, too, that he was alone in wanting to take the matter further. As is so often true, the resolve of a man standing alone is that much easier to shake. He cursed under his breath, wanting to do something, but not quite adamant enough to act against such strong counsel. Mendel and Brindle were neither of them fools, after all.

  ‘If it happens again?’ he asked the older captain, his tone signalling his acceptance of defeat.

  ‘We stay nice and quiet, and wait it out,’ replied Mendel. ‘I’ve worked system defence for a dozen other worlds, captain, and I’ve only ever… Look, I doubt it’ll happen again, but if it does…’ He shrugged.

  Sythero nodded, hardly satisfied but subdued at last. ‘Very well, captain. In that case, I’ll not keep you any longer.’

  Mendel gave a sympathetic half-smile and signed off.

  Sythero remained staring silently at the comms monitor long after it had gone blank. In the days that followed, the numerous duties of a Naval captain helped to push the matter further and further towards the back of his mind. But he never quite forgot it. From time to time, his mind would throw up the image of the skull-and-I symbol that had appeared on all his screens, and he would wonder at it, at the power it represented and the questions no one else seemed willing to ask.

  Of the men he had ordered to the ship’s viewports, only one reported anything unusual. Two hours and thirty-three minutes into the primary systems lock-out, Ormond Greeves, a low-ranking weapons tech assigned to one of the aft plasma-batteries, reported a brief flicker of fire skirting the edge of the dark hemisphere of the planet below. It looked, he said, as if something – perhaps a small craft, perhaps just debris – had entered the atmosphere of Chiaro at speed. Greeves had good eyes – he was a religious man, too, whose words were seldom, if ever, false. But his report was never entered in the ship’s records.

  Of what really happened that day in the orbit of the mine-world Chiaro, only those responsible could properly tell. But they were of the Holy Inquisition and, with but a single exception, they were answerable to no one.

  2

  ‘Blackseed has been planted,’ said one hooded figure to another in a clear, toneless voice.

  They sat across from each other at a table of polished wood, rich and dark, the grain unnaturally symmetrical. No Imperial iconography here. It was a simple room, lit by simple oil lamps with simple iron fixings. There were no glasses or dishes on the table, no tapestries or portraits on the walls. No need for such. This place, after all, and everything in it, was mere psychic projection. The figures, too, were projections only, in truth seated many light years away from each other, brought together by the life-sapping toil of the psychic choirs under their command. Nothing here was real save the words they shared and the wills behind them. Here in this mutual mindscape, no ot
her could intrude without detection. No other could hear their words, for they were spoken in secrecy. And that was well.

  ‘Fruition?’ asked the other.

  ‘Four years for a ten per cent conversion, given the reported gestation times. Nineteen years absolute if the magos’s projections prove accurate. Monitors are in place, naturally, but if there are timeline problems…’

  ‘You’ll have the new assets you need. The Watch Commander may grudge it, but he will not refuse. The new accord bears your personal seal as arranged. The Deathwatch knows what it gains. You have other assets in place, of course.’

  ‘Some of my best, and I’m positioning others now.’

  ‘Nothing to which you are too attached, I hope.’

  ‘You taught me better than that.’

  A nod, acknowledging the compliment. ‘You do me credit as ever. May it always be so. If Project Blackseed bears fruit, your most fervent hope may be that much closer to reality.’

  ‘Or it may not. In either case, your continued support–’

  ‘Mutually beneficial, my old friend, as I’ve assured you before.’

  ‘Even so, I would affirm my commitment once more if you would hear it.’

  A raised hand. ‘Your loyalty is not in doubt. We both know the sacrifices that must be made. Let the opposition believe you work against me. Small wounds I gladly bear for the greater prize. You have done well in laying false tracks. They follow where we send them. They shall not discover their error until it is too late. By then we will have taken them apart from the inside, and our benefactor will rise to power unopposed.’

  ‘You mentioned new players.’

  ‘Middle-rankers. Nothing that need concern you yet. They play the long game, as we do, hoping to establish their own candidate. Others who share our outlook are already on hand to check them. Focus on your own immediate objectives. If there is anything you would ask before we part minds…’

  ‘Is she well?’

  Always the same question, worded exactly the same way. His one true weakness.

  His sister.

  ‘She sleeps peacefully as always, my friend. Envy her that. And may the Imperium to which you restore her be a better place for both of you.’

  ‘Blackseed will bear fruit.’

  ‘But only if White Phoenix is at the centre. Any other and we gain nothing. The psykers were adamant. Along that path alone lies the weapon we need.’

  ‘White Phoenix will be ordered to the relevant location when the time is right. Everything else will depend on successful extraction. I am sure the Deathwatch will not disappoint.’

  ‘Let us hope not. The visions were less clear on that count. In any case, I shall await your report. We’ll not speak again until this is over. Vigilance, my friend. In nomine Imperator.’

  ‘Vigilance. And may His Glorious Light guide us all.’

  3

  Around him, death. Familiar. Comfortable. Not the screaming, churning, blood-drenched death of thousands falling in battle. This was quiet death. This was the pensive, sombre death of the graveyard in winter. This was death carved artfully in stone. Death in repose.

  A crow cawed in the chill air, noisily protesting the intrusion of the tall figure in grey fatigues who approached uninvited.

  Lyandro Karras grinned at the bird and nodded in salutation, but as he drew nearer, the bird cawed once more, a last harsh reproach, and left its perch on the tallest of the headstones. Pinions clapping, it beat a path through the frigid air.

  Karras watched the crow’s grudging departure until it vanished beyond a steep hill to his right. Falling snow danced for a moment in the wake of its passage.

  We are both icons of death, my noisy friend, he thought, psychically tracking the bird’s life-force as it moved farther and farther off, something he did out of long habit.

  I precipitate it. My arrival signals the coming end. You come after to gorge on the spoils. And neither of us is welcome in gentle company. How misunderstood we are!

  The words were not his own but quotes from a 31st millennium play by Hertzen. Sunset on Deneb, it was called. Karras had never seen it performed, but he had read it once during warp transit to a combat zone in the Janos subsector. That had been over a century ago. Thinking back, he allowed himself a moment of silent amusement as he remembered the improbable series of events that had befallen the play’s hero, Benizzi Caldori. Stumbling from conflict to conflict, the poor fool, unable even to tie his own boot-laces, had ended up a Lord Militant charged with winning a sector-wide campaign against the abhorrent orks.

  Karras made a mental note to recall the play in its entirety sometime. There were several lessons in the second and third acts worth reviewing.

  Turning his thoughts away from petulant crows and ancient plays, he continued his journey, snow crunching beneath his boots with every broad stride. He walked without destination, as he had done for the past three days, untroubled by sub-zero temperatures that would have killed a normal man, glad simply to have been called back here after so long fighting out in the dark reaches.

  Occludus.

  The grave world.

  Chapter-planet of the Death Spectres Space Marines.

  Home.

  As he walked, Karras let his fingers run over the snow-covered tops of the headstones he passed. History could not recall the people who had made them, nor those who lay beneath, though they were certainly human. The writing on the stones was in a sharp, angular script that had lost all its meaning far back in the mists of time. Despite the Chapter’s efforts, no record could be found that told of the first colonies here. No archive explained how or why the entire planet had been dedicated to the interring of the dead.

  And this world’s greatest secret…

  That was a thing the Chapter kept well buried, for there were still things in the universe that mankind was far from ready to know.

  Thinking of this and of the long-dead multitude beneath his feet caused Karras to recall his own deaths.

  The first he had experienced at the age of four S.I.[3], and it had lasted only twenty-three minutes and seven seconds. The poison they gave him stopped his heart and lungs – he’d had only one heart back then, and his lungs had as yet been unaltered. He remembered struggling frantically, unable to scream, his young muscles almost tearing as he wrestled with the restraints. Then the struggle left him and so did his worldly senses. His awareness awoke to the realms beyond reality. He had seen the nexus, the Black River of which others had spoken, its surface an inexplicable cylinder enclosing his mind, funnelling him towards the Beyond. He had felt its powerful currents pulling at him, dragging him towards an irreversible transition he was not yet ready to make.

  In the lore of the Chapter, as it was written in ancient times, only those who died in battle could be reborn to serve again. The Afterworld waited to embrace him, to swallow him, to deny him that eventual rebirth, and he fought as his betters had instructed, using mantras, wielding his mental strength where the physical had no meaning. Other presences, hungry and malign, closed in on him as he resisted, but they could not breach the flowing walls of the tunnel. They belonged to other dimensions and lacked the power to tear their way into his. Nevertheless, he heard them screaming in rage and frustration. He felt it, too. Their combined anger manifested itself as a hurricane-like force, fearfully strong. He reeled as it buffeted his awareness. Still the Black River pulled at him, but he held on.

  How long had he fought in those strange dimensions? Time flowed differently there. Hours? Days? Longer? Bright as his young life-force was, his reserves reached their end at last. He was sapped. He could fight the flow no longer. There would be no return to the world of flesh. Not ever. He had failed himself and the Chapter both, and the price was an eternity without honour or glory.

  No! I cannot die. I must not die. Not like this, without weapon in hand.

  Thoughts of disappointing his khadit[4] were too much. That, too, was worse than death, a shame he refused to carry into the ever-
after. Renewed strength infused his essence then, born of loyalty and natural tenacity both. He fought harder, a last desperate push, turning his rage upon the flowing nexus as if it were a sentient foe.

  In the culmination of holy rites symbolic of the Great Resurrection itself, his immortal soul wrestled its way back to the physical plane. He gasped, flexed cold, stiff fingers, opened his eyes, and drank deep lungfuls of incense-heavy air. Lyandro Karras lived again, no longer an aspirant but a neophyte that day, embraced by the warrior cult that had taken him from his birth-parents and changed his fate to one of consequence.

  The Black River terrified me back then.

  As he crunched through the snow between avenues of ancient graves, he remembered his second death.

  He had been eight S.I. – almost twenty-two Terran years – and he had lain dead for one hour, eleven minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Dispassionate eyes had watched him as he lay on an altar of black marble inlaid with fine golden script. Those around him, robed and hooded in dark grey, murmured ancient litanies in low, hypnotic monotone. Again, Karras had fought against the currents of the Black River as it surged all around him. Experience gave him more fortitude this time around, but his strengthened life-force and growing psychic power also attracted more attention from the dreadful denizens on the other side of the walls. He felt them clawing frantically at the fabric of reality, scrabbling to get at him. They had come so much closer that second time, driven into a famished frenzy by the new vigour they sensed in him. But, as before, he won out. Bolstered by mantras taught since the earliest days of the Chapter, and the Deep Training passed to him by his khadit, he bested death and its raging currents once more.

  When life at last returned to his cooling corpse, Karras rose once again. And once again, he ascended in rank, a neophyte no longer, a full battle-brother of the Chapter at last. The litanies ended. Silent smiles replaced thin-lipped concern. He stood now among equals, ready at last to visit death on mankind’s enemies in the Emperor’s holy name.