Deathwatch

by Steve Parker

  Voss moved to one of the gun-servitors and began pulling melta-charges from one of the munitions crates. Then he set about placing the charges where they would do the most damage.

  ‘The enemy is on the move,’ said Karras. ‘Solarion, Zeed, Rauth. I want another ammo cache here. See that crevice by the tunnel mouth behind you? Bolter mags and grenades, well hidden. Two canisters for the flamer. Half of all the spare ammo the servitors are still carrying. The other half we’ll need for a cache at RP3.’

  ‘You think we need another rendezvous point?’ asked Zeed.

  ‘I do. We’re going to burn through a lot of rounds when we hit the nest. We’ll need every last cache we can establish once we’re falling back.’

  Within moments, the tasks had been completed and the Space Marines, plus their three mindless drones, were ready to move deeper into the enemy’s lair.

  Before they did, Karras opened a secure private channel to the inquisitor.

  ‘Sigma, there’s something you need to know. When I read the resonance of the hexagraphe, I sensed the life-force of several human prisoners in the tyranid nurseries. All female. All…’ He swore and shook his head. ‘All swollen with xenos abominations. Do you copy, Sigma? Do you understand me? They’re carrying tyranid young. One of them is White Phoenix. There’s no doubt. I recognised the signature of the implant.’

  There was no answer. The servo-skull just floated there, trailing its long silver thread like a hovering spider.

  ‘Sigma?’ Karras pressed. ‘This changes things. Please advise.’

  Nothing.

  Karras swore again. On the mission channel, he addressed the others. ‘Listen up, brothers. We’ve just lost comms to the Saint Nevarre.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve lost Sigma. The link is dead. He’s offline.’

  Voss reached out a hand and tapped the servo-skull. It bobbed gently in mid-air.

  ‘Good bloody riddance,’ said Zeed. He snatched the skull out of the air, dropped it to the ground, raised a heavy boot, and crushed it violently.

  ‘What in Dorn’s name did you do that for?’ demanded Voss.

  ‘It made me feel better.’

  ‘I could have configured it for semi-autonomy and voice command,’ complained Voss. ‘We could have used it.’

  ‘To what end?’

  Voss had no immediate answer.

  ‘Enough,’ said Karras. ‘It doesn’t matter. The drone served its purpose. Now the relay is dead, we have no need of it.’

  He felt conflicted about losing Sigma. On one hand, it was freeing. He was in full command now, as he should have been from the start. The inquisitor had cast a shadow over the mission which had been a source of constant tension from the start. On the other hand, this was an Ordo Xenos operation. Sigma still had some important calls to make. White Phoenix carried an alien inside her. That had always been a possibility given the foe they faced, though Karras had truly expected to find the woman dead. Under any other circumstances, a Space Marine would not hesitate to end both those lives. But Sigma had been adamant about recovering his asset alive.

  Very well. I’m not about to second guess him. We will follow the last orders as they stand. We will try to keep her alive for extraction, despite her condition. We will drop her at his feet. Let the inquisitor deal with his own mess.

  He sensed the horde still heading towards them, getting nearer with every heartbeat. The longer he and his squad spent here, the more time he gave them to fill the tunnels. He pointed to an exit just to the right of a column of milky-coloured flowstone on the far side of the cavern. ‘That’s where our target lies, brothers. Talon Three, you’re on point. Move out.’

  Solarion led them out of the shimmering cavern and back into the relative gloom of the old lava-tubes with their patches of glowing blue bioforms.

  ‘One more thing,’ said Karras to the others as they moved. ‘Safeties off, and I’m rescinding the Stalker round order. They know we’re here. We’re on assault protocols now. Kill on sight, understand? From now on, we go in hard.’

  Karras heard safeties being clicked off up and down the line. Free at last to read the auras around him, he felt, too, the surge of battle-lust in his brothers, and acknowledged his own. But his was tempered by feelings of dread, for unlike the others, his gift – some would say his curse – told him just how many genestealers they faced.

  He knew they would not evade the broodlord itself for long.

  Down here in the dark, we are five against thousands, to say nothing of the power of their leader. Would that you were with me here, my khadit. Would that I had an entire company of my glorious brothers. I could use such strength and more.

  As dauntless and deadly as my squad-brothers are, I fear we are marching into the jaws of certain death.

  9

  It got steadily warmer as the kill-team pushed on. Warmer and more humid. The curving rock, constantly pressing in on them from four sides, became damp and slick. Veins of metal and crystalline compounds glowed dully, some of them seeming to pulse with a rhythm like a slow, steady heartbeat. Still the tunnels wound further and deeper into the depths.

  Karras charted their progress in his head, knowing by virtue of his gift exactly where they were in relation to the maze itself and the beasts that now hunted them. But he was also sharply aware of the data on his retinal display. Vox contact had dropped to a range of only thirty metres. He had heard nothing from Talon Six for hours. He had sensed the Dreadnought’s soul in the backwash of the hexagraphe, but it was lost to him now. He didn’t know what that meant. Was Chyron still with them? The distance was too great, and the margonite concentration in the walls was too high, to be able to tell with any certainty.

  As for the others, since leaving the cavern he’d designated RP2, they had been tense and, for the most part, silent. He could feel their doubts, almost see them with his mind’s eye. They rippled across the surface of their souls, like the ripples from a stone dropped in still water. Karras carried those same doubts too, but he couldn’t afford to show them. The rest of the kill-team must believe absolutely that he had full confidence in his own command. They had to believe he knew exactly what he was doing, and that meant he had to believe it himself. It was the crux of any authority. The leader had to know best. So he pressed them forwards, guiding them with as little hesitation as possible.

  And all the time, he felt the psychic focus of the enemy locked on to him like a laser-targeting beam. The mind of the xenos monstrosity probed at his, looking for weaknesses, chinks in his psychic armour, anything the beast could exploit to get inside his mind and read his intent, or drive him mad with alien thoughts.

  But Karras was First Codicier of the Death Spectres. He had fought dark wills before. The wards on his body and the mantras in his mind made him a hard shell to crack. Moreover, he was able to shield the others from similar attempts. He could not hide their presence. Their warrior spirits were strong. With that one glaring exception, their souls shone too brightly to properly mask. Karras might just manage to hide his own, or project it elsewhere, but Solarion, Voss and Zeed were, in ethereal terms, lit up like beacons.

  The same was true of the broodlord, of course. Such a nexus of raw power couldn’t hide, no matter how much margonite surrounded it. But there was something else. The broodlord wasn’t the only powerful presence further down in the tunnels. There seemed to be another locus of energy close to the tyranid leader. The nature of this being was harder to read, for its psychic signature had elements in common with the broodlord, and yet was significantly different, too. Almost human somehow. A corrupted astropath? Impossible to tell as yet.

  Up ahead, Solarion was emerging from the end of yet another tunnel and out into a broader space. Karras emerged second. The rest of the kill-team followed him out into a wide cave with a low ceiling lit in shifting patterns of dull orange and red. The heat inside it was intense.

  ‘Not good,’ said Voss, stopping on Karras’s left. ‘The footing will be t
reacherous here.’

  From cracks and craters in the cavern floor, puddles of glowing magma bubbled and churned. Narrow streams of molten rock ebbed from gaps in the walls. The black surface of those walls looked almost like the skin of some vast, burned creature, lambent blood leaking thickly through tears in its fire-crisped flanks. This was not a safe place.

  Most of the floor looked solid enough, but looks could kill. Much of what seemed stable might only be the cooled skin of an old bubble, mere millimetres thick. To step on it and break through it might be to plunge one’s leg into boiling magma. Even Space Marine power armour would succumb if submerged for a few seconds too long in a substance of such incredible heat.

  ‘Solarion,’ said Karras, ‘can you find us a route across?’

  The cavern had only one exit on the far side – a gaping tunnel mouth, the edges of which had a strange, melted-wax appearance, a result of how the cavern and tunnels had been formed.

  Solarion drew his long, serrated combat knife, went into a crouch and, without another word, started edging forwards, probing the ground before him with the point of the sixty-centimetre blade.

  Karras ushered Rauth, Zeed and Voss to follow the Ultramarine, slow and steady. Then he turned to the gun-servitors.

  ‘Command code: Bastion,’ he told them. ‘Cover both exits. Lethal force. All non-identicode-bearing targets viable. Confirm.’

  The servitors turned their blank faces towards him. Their vox-speakers crackled.

  ‘GS-18 confirms,’ said one. ‘Bastion protocol active.’

  ‘GS-11 confirms,’ said another. ‘Bastion protocol active.’

  ‘GS-5 confirms,’ said the last. ‘Bastion protocol active.’

  Karras glanced down at the ammunition reserves strapped to the back of the servitors’ chassis. Each carried grenades of various types and magazines loaded with bolter-rounds. One carried two extra promethium canisters to refuel Voss’s flamer. And then there were the remaining melta-charges.

  Without turning, Karras ordered the others to a halt.

  ‘Omni,’ he said. ‘Would you be able to rig these walls?’

  ‘Thinking of using the magma?’ Voss asked.

  ‘I’m thinking it would be a damned good deterrent to anything in pursuit.’

  Voss paused for a second to consider it.

  ‘It would mean using the last of our charges, Alpha, but I think you’re right. It would be easier to breach those walls and cause a magma flood than it would be to collapse the tunnel mouths, for example. And by Dorn, I’d love to see the results.’

  ‘Then I’m designating this chamber RP3,’ said Karras. ‘It’s close enough to the target to be a good first fall-back point and we can give them a proper bloody nose here. The gun-servitors are staying to secure it. Go ahead and rig it, Omni. Solarion, find him a stable path over to the walls. The rest of you stay put for now. We’ll do a final weapons check before we move on.’

  While Solarion and Voss moved left towards the cave wall, Zeed addressed Karras.

  ‘How long until we see some killing, Scholar?’

  ‘They’re almost on us, brother. There’s a four-way tunnel intersection about two hundred metres up ahead. I’m guessing we’ll have first contact there. Be ready.’

  ‘And yet you choose to leave the gun-servitors here,’ said Rauth.

  ‘I do,’ said Karras. ‘The servitors give off only the merest trace of any kind of psychic residue. In essence, they are almost as soulless as–’ He almost said as you, but he caught himself. Even so, Rauth must have guessed what was on his mind. ‘I’m counting on that to keep them from notice.’

  Did the topic of souls disturb Rauth? Was he even aware of his condition? Impossible to tell. Even without his helm, Rauth’s face was all but unreadable at the best of times. No emotion ever played out on it, at least none that Karras had seen.

  ‘We’ll need their fire-support on the way out,’ the kill-team leader continued. ‘By then, we’ll have the whole nest coming down on us. So I’m keeping them out of the fight until we need them most. Objections?’

  No one spoke.

  ‘Good,’ said Karras. ‘Because I’m Alpha here and the decisions are mine to make. Listen to me and do as I say, and we may yet get out of this alive.’

  Karras was presenting as cold and confident a face as possible. In truth, he knew their chances. The odds were almost laughable, but it was not in a Space Marine’s constitution to ever give up. They had established three solid fall-back positions, each with ammunition caches. Two were rigged with explosives to buy them extra time in their retreat. If they made it back to the exfil point with the foe on their heels… Well, maybe Chyron would get his fill of killing after all – if he yet lived.

  Be patient, Old One, and you may yet extract some revenge for your fallen brothers.

  Karras couldn’t know then that Talon Six was already waist deep in blood and fire.

  Minutes later, with RP3 rigged and ready, Talon Squad followed their point-man out of the blistering chamber and into yet another tunnel that was barely wider than an individual Adeptus Astartes. Unsurprisingly, this caused problems for Maximmion Voss. His broad bulk – from shoulder-to-shoulder a great deal wider than any of the others – forced him to move sideways along the passage.

  ‘Don’t get stuck, tree stump,’ jibed Siefer Zeed. ‘We need this tunnel clear for the journey back.’

  Voss snorted. ‘Go brush your hair or something.’

  Zeed laughed and made another riposte. So it went, back and forwards for a minute or so.

  Karras, focused as he was on the dark presence ahead and the kill-team’s descent towards it, nevertheless found himself grinning a little at the banter between the two Space Marines. Their rapport was something he envied. It wasn’t just a matter of their personalities, either. He recalled some of Damaroth’s hardest trials, the ones they had run as a kill-team, heavily poisoned, disoriented and beset by simulated foes. He had seen the way Zeed and Voss had moved together, each complementing the other’s strengths, compensating for his weaknesses, all without a word needing to be said between them. Cohesion. The Watch captains had stressed its importance. It was something the entire team should have shared. Perhaps in time…

  No, thought Karras. I’m not that naive.

  ‘Throne and sword, Alpha,’ snapped Solarion. ‘Will you shut them up?’

  Karras’s first instinct was to shout the Ultramarine down – these warriors were walking into death’s jaws. Let them laugh as they did so. But Solarion wasn’t entirely wrong. This was no time to lose focus in favour of levity. He needed all of them razor sharp, fingers on triggers, righteous death-dealing foremost in their minds.

  ‘Omni, Ghost,’ he said with some reluctance. ‘Ice the vox-chatter, now.’

  It was as much of a rebuke as he felt like issuing. For their part, Zeed and Voss conceded, guessing rightly that it was prudent not to press their Alpha too far, and the team moved on. They stepped out into a small, rocky chamber and took up positions covering each of the passage mouths that opened onto it, with the sole exception of the tunnel they had just exited.

  ‘Where are they, Scholar?’ demanded Zeed.

  ‘They’re closing fast,’ said Karras. ‘A lot of them. Back-to-back, all of you. Now!’

  The kill-team formed a tight fighting circle, bristling with bolter muzzles. Voss lit the igniter at the business end of his flamer.

  ‘How far, Karras?’ Solarion asked, voice tinged with tension, rough with the readiness to kill. ‘Range?’

  Faint scrabbling sounds began to reach their gene-boosted ears, vying for attention with the beating of their hearts and the rushing sound of the increased blood flow in their veins.

  Muscles twitched eagerly. Adrenaline levels and body temperatures increased. Their super-human physiologies were primed for combat, ready to fight like no normal man ever could.

  The scrabbling sounds got louder.

  ‘Twenty metres,’ said Karras. ‘Front and side
s.’

  Louder still; a frantic clatter of claws on rock.

  ‘Fifteen metres, Talon Squad!’ said Karras.

  Harsh chittering and screeching joined the clatter of the advance now. The sounds came out of the dark, like a vanguard of ghosts sent to cause terror ahead of the physical threat.

  ‘Ten metres,’ shouted Karras. ‘This is it! Fight well, brothers. For the honour of the Deathwatch and for the glory of your Chapters! Fear not death!’

  Shapes burst from the shadows at speed: tall and terrible, a great tangled mass of fang and claw, of chitin armour and long, spidery limbs. The first to emerge came straight for the Space Marines with eyes aglow and jaws dripping, compelled to commit savage and bloody slaughter by the alien mind whose impulses they served.

  ‘Engage!’ roared Karras.

  Muzzles flashed. Sheets of white flame gushed forth.

  Absolute violence swallowed everything.

  10

  Diamond-hard claws slashed the air just millimetres from Zeed’s visor. Had he not been faster, swaying backwards at the last instant, his head would have been taken clean off. The momentum of the savage swing carried the beast too far and it was open for a crucial half-second; a half-second in which, at point-blank range, Zeed unloaded a single bolt-round up through its lower jaw and out the back of its distorted purple head.

  Genestealers! Of all the foes to face in tight quarters…

  The body dropped hard, revealing others coming straight towards him.

  They had to leap the bodies of their dead, giving Zeed a scant few metres’ grace before they were on him. Decades of relentless training took over, coordinating his movements, impelling him to lethal action almost without conscious thought. He raised his bolter and put a single round in the forehead of each. Their heads snapped backwards, exploding as the bolts detonated within. But a third creature was coming in low on six limbs, skittering forwards like a scorpion intent on striking down its prey. Suddenly it leapt, long limbs splayed out, ready to attack with any of them.

  Zeed knew better than to step backwards, trying to avoid the killing claws. Instead, he lunged forwards with all the power of his legs, slipping inside the monster’s guard. As he did, he balled his left hand into a ceramite-plated fist and, with all the momentum available to his gene-boosted, power-armoured body, drove it hard into the monster’s face.