Deathwatch

by Steve Parker

  Up ahead, Solarion angled right, following the gradual bend and downward slope of the path they trod. Even a Space Marine, his memory flawless, would have struggled with this maze of rough-hewn roads and abandoned machine-cut chambers. Some of the tunnels lacked the telltale signs of human creation. They had not been melted or blasted out, though they bore support stanchions and plasteel safety doors like all the man-made sections. The walls in some of these natural tunnels were almost mirror-smooth, seeming to curve to the contours of a massive tubular body. These, Karras guessed, were the work of rock-eaters – oversized vermians listed as extinct.

  Only their massive blade-like teeth and rings of body segment armour had ever been found, formed of a black material as hard as diamond, yet entirely organic according to Mechanicus Biologis reports. No other physical remains had been discovered in all the planet’s centuries of human occupation, and no live specimen had ever been recorded. A part of Karras hoped the giant worms were extinct. His team didn’t need any extra complications.

  Men had exploited the legacy of the rock-eaters. From their earliest days on Chiaro, they had incorporated the creatures’ tunnels as part of the mines, branching their own efforts out from them in search of priceless ores.

  Karras turned the bend ahead and caught sight of Solarion again.

  There was a crackle on the vox. Up ahead, the quality of the light changed. Around Solarion, it no longer shimmered on the ice-rimed tunnel walls.

  ‘I’ve entered the next chamber,’ said the Ultramarine. ‘No contacts.’

  ‘Move left, stop at ten metres and wait for orders,’ replied Karras. ‘We’ll do a proper sweep before I decide whether or not this is an appropriate site for an RP.’

  ‘Understood,’ Solarion grunted.

  Karras emerged into the chamber now, and, with the boosted, green-hued image his optical enhancements provided, saw it to be a vast polygonal hall, its walls cut from pure rock without need of artificial supports. Eight dark archways had been machine-cut into the walls, including the one through which the kill-team had come, leading off down inky tunnels in every compass direction. The ceiling above had been left rough and natural, covered in sharp stalactites that hung like black fangs waiting to bite down on them. Around the perimeter, however, there were several metal stairways reaching to smaller man-made tunnel mouths. Between some of these hung plasteel gantries and platforms. The immediate impression of the entire chamber was that people not only worked here, they had lived here.

  A natural cavern the first miners exploited, thought Karras. I don’t like all those exits. Too many angles to cover. On the other hand, there are some good bottlenecks at ground level and enough room to stay mobile during a firefight.

  In ordered rows on the cavern floor, there were several dozen prefab huts and cabins – some quite large, all with flat roofs – along with a number of raised platforms the purpose of which it was no longer possible to guess. Perhaps there had once been a small first-stage refinery operating here. Pipes and ducts criss-crossed large sections of the walls. Huge circular extractors hung silent and motionless in the gloom overhead. An old autocart, its basic cabin-and-flatbed design some eight metres long, lay to the far right in perfect condition, broad wheels frozen stiff to the chamber floor. Whatever purpose this place had once served, from now until the end of this particular mission, it would function as the first of the kill-team’s emergency rendezvous points. Karras was satisfied that, despite its shortcomings, it offered a good place to turn and engage pursuing enemy forces without getting locked down.

  The others filtered into the chamber now, breaking its long-lived, icy tranquillity. Following Karras’s commands, they arranged themselves in a broad line along the chamber’s western edge. Four gun-servitors rolled in after them, chugging and shuddering on their compact iron treads.

  Karras ordered a sweep. Within minutes, the chamber was proclaimed clear.

  Nothing. Not even recent tracks. It was as lifeless as the tunnels that had brought them. The squad gathered in the centre of the chamber and Karras addressed them.

  ‘I’m designating this RP1. It’s the closest large chamber with a direct access route to our exfil point. Omni, I want an ammo cache set up on one of the central roofs, one with easy access. A full third of what we have. By the time we return here, we’ll have plenty of company.’

  ‘I could rig the chamber for structural collapse, Scholar,’ said Voss, ‘but it will leave us light on charges.’

  Karras thought it over. He looked at the walls, the ceiling. Rigging it all to come down on a pursuing enemy force might make all the difference once things got out of hand, but it didn’t look like an ideal place to lay that kind of contingency measure.

  No pillars. All the weight is held by the walls. And just how thick are they?

  ‘No. Save them, Omni. There will be more viable options up ahead.’

  The inquisitor’s servo-skull moved off, drifting towards the thick adamantium plates of an emergency blast door approximately four metres across – a door that was firmly closed. There were many such doors in the more developed sections of the mines, intended to protect men and equipment from gas explosions or other deadly accidents.

  ‘Beyond this door is the way forwards,’ said Sigma.

  The little skull moved sideways and hovered by a control panel to the left. A tiny mechanical arm extended from its undercarriage and began prodding a runeboard.

  Nothing.

  Karras walked over to the same control panel and leaned in to study a small aperture in the wall.

  ‘There’s no power. Most of the circuits have been stripped out. We’ll have to open it manually,’ he told the others. ‘Two, Three and Five, help me with this.’

  There was a glass window behind which Karras could see a handle with yellow and black diagonal stripes. He punched the glass and pulled it. From the middle of each door, a long, thick bar swung out.

  ‘Zeed, Rauth, you take the far one. Solarion and I will take this one.’

  With two Space Marines to each door, and with their weapons mag-locked to their thigh plates, they began trying to haul the doors open, but even with superhuman musculature and all the additional strength conferred by their power armour, it was incredibly heavy going. After a minute of straining and swearing, the doors had shifted only half a metre apart.

  Voss had finished setting up the ammo cache. He stood watching them for a moment, grinning under his helm. ‘You are all pathetic,’ he joked. ‘My old serf could do better. Prophet, go pull with the others. I’ll work this side with Scholar.’

  ‘I’ve warned you about calling me that,’ said Solarion.

  ‘All right, brother, just get over there and start pulling, will you?’

  Voss joined Karras on the handle of the left door. He settled into position, gauntleted hands gripping the bar, ready to exert his significant strength. ‘Now you’ll see something.’

  Together with Karras, he heaved, throwing all his power into it, pulling hard with the broad, thick muscles of his unfeasibly wide back. The metal of the door groaned in protest, but it started moving. Within a matter of seconds, the gap had widened from half a metre to two-and-a-half, and most of that was on the left side. There was no need for further effort. They could proceed.

  ‘Don’t all thank me at once,’ said Voss as the team filtered through into the dark tunnel beyond.

  ‘I can see it now,’ said Zeed, ‘Maximmion Voss, Imperial Fist, Captain of the Third Company, Master of Doors. Think of the banner iconography. Glorious.’

  Even Solarion failed to stifle a snorted laugh.

  Rauth and Sigma, however, were silent. Karras noted it and it robbed him of his own grin.

  ‘Stay vigilant, Talon,’ he voxed. ‘This is enemy ground. Solarion, lead on.’

  4

  ‘Alpha. You had better come up here.’

  It was the voice of Solarion, tinged with static. Increasing amounts of soledite dust on the icy air were starting to tell on
vox-comms the deeper Talon Squad descended. Karras raised a gauntleted first, signalling those behind him to hold position, then he moved forwards down the tunnel to where he could see the Ultramarine’s broad silhouette. Drawing up alongside him, Karras didn’t need to ask why Talon’s point-man had stopped. The tunnel ended abruptly in a mass of fallen rock.

  ‘I saw this coming. This is recent, Karras.’

  ‘Deliberate?’

  ‘No tracks,’ said Solarion. ‘No explosive residue on the air. From this side, it looks natural, but I can’t be sure.’

  Karras was silent as he mulled that over. Was it conceivable that someone or something had known they were coming? Between this and the emergency blast door with the missing power core, it was starting to look like a definite possibility. Conventional stealth was one thing – though dropping a multi-tonne monstrosity like Chyron down a hundred-metre vent shaft was far from stealthy – but a psyker of strong ability with his mind turned to the right place at the right time could certainly have detected the arrival of unfamiliar spiritual signatures, even though Karras had suppressed the strength and brightness of his own. But why would another psyker be focused on the Inorin shaft unless… Could it be that the enemy had a true seer among them, one who could glimpse prime futures?

  Karras wished he could free his own talents then, if even for a moment only. He might have sent his astral self out at the speed of thought to scour the darkness ahead for such a foe. But, again, Sigma had been emphatic. Without the suppression, this time self-regulated, of Karras’s ethereal presence, the enemy leader would sense him in an instant and send his lethal children out en masse to rip them apart. A true seer, however, with genuine prescient ability, could have perceived months, even years ago, that the kill-team would be coming this way. If this cave-in was a response to such a vision then, for all the psychic damping, the pentagrammic wards tattooed on their flesh, the photo-reactive cells on their black armour and the low-light discipline they employed, Talon Squad might well have been compromised already.

  Without employing his power, there was no way to be sure.

  ‘Alpha to squad. It’s possible that we are being herded into ambuscade. Stay sharp, brothers. I’ll not have them get the drop on us.’

  ‘There’s a way around,’ said Solarion. ‘Check the automapper. See that junction three sections back? We can take the south-east tunnel. It’s small and cramped, and not as direct, but it will get us to the waypoint.’

  ‘We will lose an additional twenty minutes,’ said Karras, ‘and we’re already running out the chrono. But you’re right, brother. That’s our only option.’

  Karras turned to look at the servo-skull a few metres behind him. Did Sigma have nothing to say? Apparently not. Someone else did, however.

  ‘They underestimate us,’ said a hard, almost toneless voice over the link. ‘Whatever advantage they think they have, it will not be enough. We are Deathwatch and we encompass their doom. Lead us on, Alpha, ambush or no, and let us prove it to them.’

  It was the Exorcist, and he had just addressed Karras directly for the first time since the drop. That in itself was hardly surprising. Karras and the others had soon discovered during training at Damaroth that the Exorcist was a man of very few words, and half of those were obscure literary quotes only Karras ever seemed to recognise.

  Rauth’s words hung in the air between the five armoured warriors. The kill-team leader could almost feel a tremor of battle-hunger wash over him. He guessed the others felt it, too, but since his talent had to remain suppressed, it could only be a guess.

  ‘Watcher’s right,’ said Zeed. ‘Let them try their ambush. I welcome it.’

  On hearing the nickname, Rauth tensed. Watcher. It had been given to him because Rauth, for reasons unknown to anyone but himself, rarely took his eyes off the kill-team leader. Even back at Damaroth, this had been true. Since the moment of their meeting in the Refectorum that day, there had been a strange charge in the air between the two Space Marines. Karras had confronted the Exorcist, asking more than once if there was a problem, something he wished to discuss in private. But the Exorcist never answered. It was as if he was waiting for something, and not something positive, judging by his mien. But Karras could not begin to guess what it might be. With no recourse, he had pushed the matter aside, though he was ever aware that Rauth continued to watch him.

  Zeed meant no real offence. There was a spirit of camaraderie behind the giving and the usage of the nicknames, but Rauth and Solarion were both a lot less inclined than their fellows to accept theirs.

  Karras didn’t have time to arbitrate. ‘Solarion,’ he said, ‘lead us back to the junction. But let’s keep the pace up. Any more dead-ends will cost us time we can ill afford to spare.’

  The Ultramarine moved past Karras without a word.

  The rest of the squad fell in behind, with the servitors and Sigma’s floating skull in tow. They moved faster than before, conscious that doubling back was costing seconds they could ill afford. Despite their haste, they kept their senses razor-keen for any sign of hostile contact up ahead.

  So many ‘if’s, thought Karras. And these tunnels are riddled with blind-siding opportunities. If they have a prescient, we’re walking right into their game. Why in the name of the Emperor are we really down here, Sigma? I don’t believe this is about your loyalty to your people. Critical intel, maybe, but I suspect there’s more to it than that.

  What is it about this White Phoenix that you’re not telling us?

  5

  The Space Marines had to hunch over as they traversed the side tunnel that led away from the junction Solarion had mentioned as their only alternative. All but Voss, that is, so much shorter than the others. As they moved along the cramped passageway, pauldrons occasionally scraping on the cold black rock, Zeed half turned to the stocky Imperial Fist.

  ‘At long last, Omni, being so short proves advantageous.’

  Voss snorted. ‘Do me a favour, paper-face. Take your helmet off. We need more light in here, and you practically glow in the dark.’

  The Raven Guard laughed.

  ‘Kill it, you two,’ barked Karras from up ahead. ‘Talon Three, you should be seeing the next junction.’

  ‘Moving out into it now,’ voxed Solarion.

  Karras felt something – a tremor, slight at first, but building rapidly. A rain of dust broke the beam of his rail-mounted flashlight.

  ‘Move now,’ he snapped at his squad. ‘Get to that junction.’

  With the exception of Solarion, who was already far up ahead, the rest of the kill-team broke into a crouching run. The tremor got stronger and stronger. A rain of rock and dirt began drumming on helms and pauldrons.

  ‘Seismic?’ asked Zeed as he made haste.

  ‘Blood and blazes,’ cursed Karras as he ran. ‘If I didn’t have to suppress my power, I’d know what is happening here.’

  ‘And the enemy leader would perceive you at once,’ crackled the inquisitor’s voice, relayed through the comms module in the servo-skull’s small metal undercarriage. ‘The psy-suppression order stands until I say otherwise. The success of this mission depends on it.’

  Karras broke from the tunnel and saw Solarion, his back towards him, bolter raised to cover the three tunnel mouths on the other side of a small natural chamber.

  ‘It’s still getting stronger,’ gasped Voss as he barrelled out behind Karras. ‘What in Dorn’s name…’

  Rauth and Zeed followed, the servo-skull swooping out between them, still trailing its communications lifeline. Last of all came the gun servitors, rolling forwards swiftly on their tracks. Three of them made it out. The last was struck on the skull by a falling rock the size of a power fist. The man-machine’s head was smashed, the left hemisphere of its brain pulped to a grisly jelly. Milky nutrifluids pumped out over its neck and shoulders. Then more rocks fell. Just as the servitor’s treads were about to take it beyond the lip of the tunnel, it was buried in a rush of heavy black stone.

&
nbsp; ‘By the Spire, that was close,’ breathed Zeed, closest of the kill-team to the tunnel mouth that was now, suddenly, just another wall of rock.

  Karras checked the servo-skull’s communications hard-line and saw that it extended back into the fresh rubble. ‘Sigma, are you still with us?’

  ‘Still with you, Alpha,’ crackled the inquisitor’s voice. ‘The hard-line has not been severed. We have comms. Now start clearing this away. The servitor’s body must be recovered.’

  ‘That’s a negative,’ Karras replied. ‘We’ve just had our primary exfil path blocked and the mission-chrono is not on our side. We’re not digging out a non-operational servitor. Talon Squad–’

  ‘That servitor was carrying a hexagraphe,’ interrupted Sigma. ‘Do you know what that is? Because without it, this mission is already over, and the implications for you and your team, Death Spectre, are dire indeed.’

  Karras had seen a number of obscure references to hexagraphes in his reading back at Watch Fortress Damaroth. There were several vague mentions of their use, mostly in connection with defensive operations launched against the despised eldar. For a second, he was furious. If the device was so critical to the mission, they should have been issued two – a primary and a back-up – and the Space Marines themselves should have been tasked with carrying them.

  But Karras had no idea just how rare or dangerous they were. Did the Ordo Xenos even have two?

  He glanced over at the three remaining gun-servitors. They would be of no help here. Their upper limbs had been replaced with shoulder-grafted weaponry. It was down to Talon to get their hands dirty.

  ‘Right, brothers,’ said Karras. ‘Let’s dig the damned thing out.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ replied Solarion.

  Maximmion Voss ignored him, pushed past the others, grabbed the biggest rock as if it weighed nothing, and flung it off to his left where it smashed into a score of smaller pieces.

  Resignedly, Zeed and Rauth pitched in seconds later.

  Karras stared at Solarion for a moment longer, considering a direct command but certain it would lead to a confrontation he didn’t need right now. He left it and began removing debris with the others. A few seconds later, Solarion joined them with only a mumbled curse. Soon, the five Deathwatch Space Marines stood in a half-circle staring down at the mangled form of the permanently offlined gun-servitor.