Deathwatch

by Steve Parker

  ‘We’ve only two missiles,’ said Voss to Varagrim. ‘I want you to target the front right leg.’

  ‘Surely we should both fire on the hull, sergeant!’

  ‘Not while it still has full mobility. Trust me, brother. The next step that monster takes, I want you to cripple that leg.’

  Varagrim hesitated only a moment, then nodded.

  ‘As you say, brother-sergeant.’

  Behind the Defiler, a squad of Chaos Marines advanced, using the walking tank to shield themselves from the fury of the defenders. If the Defiler breached the earthworks, the Traitors would spill into the trenches and all advantage would be lost. Voss was confident of his company’s strength in hand-to-hand combat, but it was a numbers game here, and the Chaos filth outnumbered his brothers by a factor of three to one.

  What in Dorn’s holy name brought these bastards here?

  Perhaps he would never know. It was enough for now that they had to be stopped.

  ‘Fire!’ he barked to Varagrim.

  There was a shriek of igniting fuel and a bright flash of back-blast. The first missile screamed towards the Defiler on a trail of white smoke.

  It struck the leg squarely on the knee joint, staggering the unholy machine, biting off great chunks of thick armour and crippling the pistons beneath. The Defiler swayed and struggled to its articulated knees. That instant of immobility was the window Voss had been waiting for. He painted the Defiler’s hull dead-centre with his weapon’s targeting laser.

  ‘Get clear,’ he yelled, warning any behind him of the imminent back-blast.

  He pressed the firing stud and let fly.

  The launcher’s tube coughed out its deadly payload, kicking hard in Voss’s hands.

  With a piercing scream, the missile spiralled towards its mark. There was a short, sharp boom before blinding fire erupted outwards, followed immediately by a great billowing cloud of thick black smoke. As the wind pulled the smoke aside like a great curtain, Voss saw the ruined machine collapse in the mud. A secondary explosion rocked it from inside, the walker’s magazine detonating, blowing out the rest of its hull armour in a wave of deadly shrapnel that scythed into the Chaos Marines close by.

  ‘Now,’ Voss roared over the link. ‘Take them!’

  Along the trench, a blazing fusillade poured out towards the Traitor Marines, now wounded and exposed. Bolts punched deep into spiked armour, ruining the corrupt and twisted flesh within. Bright plasma fire arced into their ranks, burning and melting all it touched. It was slaughter. Righteous slaughter. The Imperial Fists revelled in it, feeling their blood rise.

  ‘Sergeant Voss,’ barked a stern voice on the vox-link. ‘Do you read me, sergeant?’

  ‘Captain?’ answered Voss.

  ‘You are relieved, sergeant. Fall back to Command HQ at once.’

  ‘The battle is not over, my lord. I have much to do here. My squad await–’

  ‘Your squad will be fused with Squad Richter for now. Brother Berren will assume command. I’m promoting him to sergeant as of this moment.’

  ‘A good choice, my lord, but I cannot leave the field while the enemy yet lays siege.’

  ‘You can and will, Maximmion. That is an order, and you shall not disobey. Your petition has been approved. A shuttle has arrived. You are to don the black of the Deathwatch, sergeant. The honour of the Chapter must be served.’

  Voss was stunned to silence, but only for a heartbeat. He had hoped, of course, but he had not dared to assume.

  ‘The honour of the Chapter will be served, captain.’

  ‘For the primarch, sergeant.’

  ‘For the primarch,’ said Voss. ‘For he and the Chapter both.’

  11

  One arm went around her waist and lifted her clear off the floor. The other snaked over her shoulder, a big hand clapping tight over her mouth before she could call out.

  Ordimas caught her as she was reaching for the handle on the inside of the front door. He wrestled her back to a doorway on the left of the hall that led into a dark main room. Two stained and rickety chairs sat before a smudge-screened pict-viewer. Lho-stick butts and empty bottles littered a table on the left.

  With his hand still on her mouth, Ordimas dropped Mira, the dead miner’s woman, down into one of the chairs and, staying behind her, pressed his face close to her ear.

  ‘I’m not here for you, girl,’ he said softly. ‘But I can’t let you report what you’ve seen. Not until my business is done. We both know that man was cruel to you, Mira. It is Mira, right? We both know you’ll be better off without him, Mira. So what I propose is this. I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer them. You’re going to help me. And then I’ll help you. I will have to tie you up when I leave, and gag you. But when my work is done, I’ll contact an associate of mine. She’ll come and free you. And if you do exactly as I say, and don’t interfere with my plans in any way, I’ll see to it you’re compensated. She’ll bring money, but only if you comply.’

  When he told her the exact amount he would be paying her, she went rigid. Ordimas remained silent to let the significance of the amount sink in. The woman gradually relaxed.

  ‘Good girl,’ he told her. ‘We both know what that money could do for you, so keep that in mind. Because you won’t like the alternative. I’m good to my friends, Mira, but I’m a daemon to my enemies. I never forgive, and I never forget. Take my word on that.’

  Mira nodded.

  Slowly, Ordimas removed his hand from her mouth. She didn’t scream.

  All the same, he made sure to stay behind her for now. Seeing him naked in front of her, an almost perfect likeness of her freshly slain partner, would most probably unhinge her. Ordimas didn’t need that. It was bad enough that he had to speak to her in Mykal’s voice. And it was the voice that he asked her about now.

  ‘Do I sound like him?’

  Mira made to turn and face him.

  ‘No,’ said Ordimas. ‘Face forwards. It’ll be easier for you that way, at least for now.’

  ‘H-he spoke a bit rougher than you,’ she said. ‘More rasping, sort of. Something he did by choice. He put it on to sound meaner.’

  Ordimas nodded and added more gravel to his tone.

  ‘Like this?’

  Mira gave a shudder. ‘Saints! What… what in the nine hells are you?’

  ‘Just a man,’ said Ordimas. ‘A man with a job to do. If that improves your lot, so much the better, yes?’

  Mira was silent. Seconds passed before she said, ‘He cursed a lot, Mykal did. Gacking this. Gacking that.’

  ‘Understood. Any physical habits? Anything other Rockheads would know him for?’

  Mira nodded, still facing the wall. ‘He cracked his knuckles a lot. He thought it intimidated people. He chewed that fungal stuff from the mines, too. Greywort. You’ll find some in his pockets if you check. He was always spittin’ it in the sink. Foul stuff.’

  Ordimas didn’t particularly want to mimic that habit – greywort was a mild psychotropic that induced euphoria in certain quantities – but he knew he could suppress the effect if he was careful with the dose. He wouldn’t take any unless offered. He needed to be sharp for this.

  ‘Right- or left-handed?’ he asked.

  ‘Right,’ said Mira.

  ‘Wait here,’ he told her.

  He went back into the kitchen and put on the dead man’s clothes, conscious of how different that felt to the habitual, almost automatic act of putting on his own. Then he stuffed his discarded clothes into a stinking, half-filled garbage bag, tied it shut, and jammed it in a corner beneath five or six others already filled almost to bursting. Then he put his belt, with its dagger and injectibles, around his waist and cinched it. His new waist was three notches bigger than his true waist. ‘Lucky the damned thing still fits,’ he mumbled to himself and went back through to the main room.

  ‘Okay, listen, Mira. I’m going to move in front of you now. I need you to keep it together, all right? I need to kn
ow everything you can tell me about his shifts, his friends, what he does in the mines, what business he’s into with the Rockheads. I need everything you can give me, Mira. It’s important. Just keep thinking about that money. I can’t pay you if I don’t pull this off.’

  ‘I… I understand. I’ll help you, but you better not be lying about that money.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Ordimas. ‘I’ll make sure you get what you’re due. Is there a quill and ink around here somewhere?’

  She told him he’d find them on an old desk in the corner of the next room. Ordimas, having bound her tightly to the chair, fetched them and went to the kitchen where the miner’s dead body lay cooling on the floor. With his knife, he cut the tattooed flesh from Mykal’s neck, took the flesh, quill and ink to the couple’s dingy bathroom, and copied the design onto his own skin. It took six minutes. Like any agent worth his salt, Ordimas had an eye for detail. The replica was near flawless.

  For the next two hours, Mira coached him. He dressed in Mykal’s overalls – a rough, orange one-piece thermasuit with I-8 printed on the back in big white letters. This was the man’s work-party allocation, and Ordimas’s primary concern was making sure the other men of I-8 sensed nothing out of the ordinary. By the end of his time with Mira, he had Mykal’s identity and mannerisms down so well that the woman suddenly began to weep. Ordimas thought she might be doubting her sanity. The scene she had returned to in the kitchen would have shaken anybody’s hold on reality. But it wasn’t that.

  ‘I won’t miss him,’ she sobbed, still tied to her chair. ‘I’m glad he’s dead, but I shouldn’t be. It seems wrong. Especially now that…’

  ‘Now that what?’

  ‘Now that I’m carrying his child. He could never manage it before. Children, I mean. Then suddenly he comes home from his shift one day and it’s the most important thing in the world. I never understood him.’

  So there were two living beings tied to the chair – Mira and her unborn child. That was a complication, but only if Ordimas allowed it to be.

  ‘It’s not wrong to be glad, Mira,’ he told her. ‘No child should grow up with a man like that as a father. There’re things you don’t know about him. But it doesn’t matter now. He’s gone.’

  There was a heavy knock at the front door and a gruff voice from outside, ‘Time to go, Myk. Get your arse out here, brother.’

  Mira started. ‘That’s Nordam. He and Mykal go to work together.’

  ‘A Rockhead?’ asked Ordimas.

  ‘No. Just a co-worker.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ordimas. ‘Last chance, Mira. If I blow this, we’re both gacked and you’ll never see that money. Is there anything you’ve forgotten?’

  Mira thought hard, brow creasing. Then she found something.

  ‘The Rockheads have a hand-sign.’

  ‘I know it,’ said Ordimas. He’d seen gang-members greet each other with it. He clenched his right fist and rapped it against the side of his skull. ‘Right?’

  Mira shook her head. ‘It used to be that,’ she told him. ‘For some of them, it still is, I think. But Mykal told me they changed it.’ She made a gesture with her hand – fingers splayed in twos with the thumb extended so that the hand looked like it had three digits instead of five.

  ‘Do this and put your hand over your heart,’ she told him.

  Ordimas tried it. She nodded. ‘That’s it.’

  He was suspicious. Had she changed her mind? Was this new hand-sign intended to give him away? No. Looking at her hard, using all his abilities to read people, he convinced himself that this woman was telling the truth. Mykal had abused her for Throne-knew-how-long. She wouldn’t miss him. The money she hoped to gain by aiding Ordimas would buy her a new life.

  More thumping sounded at the door, angry and impatient.

  ‘Time’s up,’ said Ordimas, and he withdrew behind Mira’s chair.

  She tensed. ‘You’ll remember the money?’ she said, voice desperate with thin hope. ‘You’ll remember your promise, right?’

  By way of answer, Ordimas moved close behind her. He looped a powerful arm round her neck, locked his grip on his opposite shoulder, and quickly, quietly choked her to death. She barely struggled. Ultimately, she had known deep down her death was at hand. Her last thought was one of self-contempt; how could she have even remotely believed in a happy ending? When had life ever granted her a boon?

  After checking for a pulse that was no longer there, Ordimas went to the front door and stepped out, greeting the broad-shouldered man on the step with a grunt. He closed the door behind himself and heard it lock, then the two men set off down the street.

  There was little conversation, which suited Ordimas fine.

  It was time to go to work.

  12

  Two hours ago, Karras had felt it. The pressure had eased. The voices died to a whisper, then to nothing at all. The rage and hate that had pricked the air inside the Adonai since it had entered the warp had finally ebbed away. The thrumming psychic resonance of the ship’s Geller fields no longer intruded on his enhanced awareness. He breathed easier. Warp transit was no smooth matter for a psyker, not even an experienced Codicier of the Librarius. For most of the journey, combat rituals and relentless training had helped to focus his mind. It was as Cordatus had said: Arquemann felt like a part of him now, an extension of his lethal will. He had never felt as deadly as he did wielding the rune-inscribed blade. Even so, as focused as he had been, he had nevertheless remained sharply aware of the attentions of the warp’s ravenous entities. They had been fixed on him for weeks as the ship sailed the tides of the immaterium.

  It was only the Adonai’s powerful Geller fields that kept those on board safe. With the exception of the ship’s Navigator and astropaths – themselves powerful psykers – the rest of the crew were far less sensitive than Karras to the chilling daemonic howls and screams of frustration, if they were even aware of the warp entities at all. Crewmen got restless, of course. They had sleepless, torment filled nights. There were more instances of argument, even flashes of physical violence. But the Geller fields had held.

  Now, in the austere, candlelit chamber that was his temporary quarters, Karras sat on the edge of his stone cot, glad that the worst part of the journey was over.

  A junior crewman, barely out of boyhood it seemed, had brought provisions to him here in his quarters about half an hour ago: fruit and watered wine. He had been shaking so much when Karras bade him enter that he’d almost spilled the contents of the tray. Karras grinned, remembering the speed of the boy’s terrified retreat. He lifted the clay goblet to his lips.

  The wine was cool and refreshing as it slid down his throat.

  They were like skittish birds sometimes, these little humans. Their fear over such simple things was beyond his comprehension. A miracle they had ever set forth into space at all!

  He ate some of the fruit – a platter of bright, fleshy segments, pre-skinned or peeled, from half a dozen worlds. Not exactly the right stuff to maintain a hard-training Space Marine, but it would be back to nutrient-dense amino-porridge and triglyceride gel soon enough.

  He was about to reach for another slice of black pear when, from the vox-speaker in the corner of his chamber, the voice of Captain Paninus Orlesi rang out, tinny and riddled with low static.

  ‘My lord passenger,’ said Orlesi. ‘Our destination is now in visual range. If you’ll meet me in the forward observation gallery, upper deck, I thought we might view it together. I think you’ll find the sight more than worthy of your time, my lord. I shall be there in ten minutes, if you’d care to meet me.’

  Twelve minutes later, Karras entered the viewing gallery. It was a broad, dimly lit space with deep, luxurious burgundy carpeting. In the centre of the carpet, a golden aquila, the two-headed eagle sigil of the Imperium of Man, had been woven into the fabric. Even at a cursory glance, Karras could see that it was beautiful and extremely expensive work. So too were the rich oil-paintings that lined the walls to left and r
ight, each highlighted in the warm oval illumination of its own wall-mounted lamp. A chandelier of pale green crystal dominated the ceiling, so low, and Karras so tall, that its polished centre almost brushed his head as he strode beneath it.

  Not realising he had company, the captain stood with hands clasped behind his back, gazing out through the wide armourglass window at the gallery’s far end. Karras continued towards him, announcing himself by clearing his throat.

  Orlesi turned to greet him, a smile on his florid features, teeth bright under a thick, well-oiled black moustache. He bowed. ‘My lord, I’m heartened that you decided to come. We’re on final approach. I’m sure you won’t think your time wasted.’

  ‘Naturally, I’m curious about our destination, captain. I would not have missed this opportunity.’

  Orlesi gestured towards the window, inviting Karras to enjoy the view.

  Whatever Karras had been expecting – some smaller variation of a Ramilies star fort, perhaps – it was not this.

  ‘Watch Fortress Damaroth,’ said Orlesi with theatrical emphasis.

  Damaroth. Centre of Deathwatch operations in the Centaurus Arm of the Ultima Segmentum.

  The actual coordinates of Damaroth were classified at the very highest level, known only to those pledged to a lifetime of service. The Space Marines seconded here only temporarily were never told exactly where here was. They were brought on Deathwatch ships and they departed on Deathwatch ships. They did not need to know.

  Shrouded in secrecy until now, Damaroth was at last revealed to Karras’s eyes. There it sat, hanging in space, rotating slowly in a wispy nebula of greenish blue. It was a striking sight.

  A ring! A vast artificial ring around a glowing moon.

  He was silent for long moments looking at that strange place. The ring structure was black on the nightward side, its shape a curving shadow against the backdrop of the gas cloud. Countless warning and docking lights blinked in waves of red and green respectively, still tiny at this distance. The sunward extent of the Watch fortress was lit in shades of silvery grey. The outer surface seemed smooth but for the telltale shadows of huge communications pylons and the kilometre-wide dishes of the advanced auspex arrays. Karras could see no edges where blocks joined other blocks. It was as if the ring was cast or carved from a single piece.