by Steve Parker
‘Such butchery,’ murmured Solarion, looking at the bodies by his feet. ‘At least he enjoyed himself in our absence.’
‘They were a welcome diversion, Ultramarine,’ rumbled a voice, basso profundo, ‘from the boredom of awaiting you.’
The hill of corpses against the chamber wall began to shudder and shift. Dead meat slid away. There was the noise of skulls smacking on stone, the slap of lifeless flesh. Chyron rose awkwardly from beneath the pile and turned his slot-visored glacis plate to face them.
‘A little hide-and-seek, Old One?’ said Zeed with a grin.
Chyron began dragging himself towards the middle of the chamber, and the rest of the kill-team could see just how badly damaged he was. His left leg was a mess, its armour shattered, the pistons and actuators beneath twisted and snagged. His foot made showers of bright yellow sparks as he dragged it along the ground. His right arm was in an even worse state, for almost nothing of the assault cannon remained. All over his chassis his tank-thick armour was gouged, scored, chipped and burned in too many places to count.
He pre-empted their next question.
‘Man-portable missile launchers,’ he growled. ‘The dung-eating cowards fired on me from the shadows, then swarmed on me like ants. And they died like ants – brainwashed men and xenos-bred abominations both.’
At this, the other Deathwatch operatives took a better look at the dead. There were literally hundreds of them, but finding bodies which had not been pulped beyond recognition by the Lamenter’s power fist or burned to cinders by his flamer was far from easy. For the most part, Chyron’s attackers were, in physical form at least, men like any others. The majority wore miners’ overalls and orange thermasuits. Others yet wore the dark uniform and body armour of Civitas enforcers. But there were others, too, and these last were not so much like men. They were taller, boasted larger frames, and those frames were twisted with xenos corruption. Some had extra limbs. Others had sharp triangular teeth peeking out from within their slack mouths. To a Space Marine’s eyes, even the relative darkness of the chamber could not hide the unnatural colouring of their skin. These were the tainted by-blows of the genestealer infection, and Chyron had left none here alive.
‘Quite a body count,’ said Voss.
‘Would that the diversion had lasted longer,’ returned Chyron. ‘Is there anything left to kill down here?’
‘Genestealers,’ said Voss. ‘Leaderless now, thanks to Scholar, but they’ll be coming. You may yet have more killing to do.’
‘That would be some compensation,’ said Chyron. ‘I tried to call in the Stormravens via the link when the chrono dropped to five minutes. I wondered why there was no response.’
‘Why did you hide under those corpses?’ asked Zeed.
Chyron snorted derisively. ‘Use your head, little raven. I was left with only my power fist. Would you have me stand here in the middle of the chamber where our enemies could fire missiles on me from a safe distance? I had hoped to ambush more of them as they walked among their dead. But it seemed there were no others to come. Or perhaps they did not want to die.’ After a pause he asked, ‘Is that the primary objective? That sickly woman? She looks all but dead herself.’
Rauth was still holding her, but it was Zeed who answered. ‘I doubt it’s the woman herself that Sigma wants.’ He looked with distaste at the shifting swollen skin of her belly. It suddenly occurred to him that Chyron, whose Chapter had been all but obliterated by the tyranid race, might recognise she was heavy with forbidden progeny and strike at the woman in a flash of vengeful rage. His power fist would kill both her and her unborn parasite in a single blow. He stepped in front of Rauth, blocking her from view as nonchalantly as possible.
Chyron watched the Raven Guard do this without comment, but he was no fool. He perceived the cause of Zeed’s concern, and searched himself for the fury his brother suspected might rise. It wasn’t there. In truth, the sight of the woman was so pathetic that it had not occurred to him to strike her and her unborn parasite down. Instead, he rumbled, ‘The Inquisition has strange needs. Whatever business they are about this time, they are welcome to it. Give me war, plain and simple, and to the warp with all their intrigues.’
At the mention of Inquisition business, Karras caught Zeed throwing him a meaningful look. He was about to question it when a tinny voice on the link stopped him.
‘Reaper One to Alpha. Reaper One to Alpha. Signal round sighted. Better late than never, Talon. We are en route to your location. ETA two minutes. Prep for extraction.’
‘Throne and sword!’ gasped Solarion. There was no mistaking his relief and joy.
‘Praise the Emperor,’ added Voss. He and Zeed gripped wrists in mutual congratulation.
‘Descended they, from the high heavens, upon wings of fire and steel,’ quoted Rauth quietly. ‘And lifted were our hearts, and we called them e’er after our salvation.’
Karras didn’t recognise that one. Half his mind was occupied by something else. A compulsion of sorts had come over him. He looked at Chyron and made a decision, though he would not understand why until later. Something inside him, a feeling not quite his own, told him that Chyron must not be the last member of the kill-team left in the chamber. Though he could find no logical basis to support that thought, as a psyker, he had learned to trust his instincts in moments like these.
‘Alpha to Reaper One. Talon Six will be extracted first. Instruct Reaper Two. Reaper Three will hang back. There are no retrievable support assets. Confirm.’
‘Negative, Alpha,’ said the flight-group leader. ‘We have orders to extract the package first.’
‘Reaper flight, Alpha reminds you that you are addressing one of the Emperor’s own Space Marines. You will do as I command or face the consequences. Talon Six will be extracted first. Acknowledge.’
There was a moment of tense silence before the pilot replied resignedly, ‘Understood, Alpha. Reaper Two moving into position now. Stand by for magna-grapple drop.’
Moments later, the battle-ravaged bulk of Chyron was winched out of sight, vanishing up the long, echoing vent-shaft. Even once he disappeared, Karras could still hear Chyron grumbling and growling about the indignity of being hauled up like a fish on a line.
Reaper Two moved off. Reaper One swung into position and dropped four lines, one of which ended in a body-sized recovery frame of black plasteel. Into this frame, the Space Marines strapped the limp form of White Phoenix. She was still breathing, but the movements of the parasite had increased. She did not have the luxury of time.
The kill-team watched her ascend after Karras gave Reaper One the all-clear to pull her up. Then Solarion, Rauth and Voss each mag-locked their weapons, placed a booted foot into the loop at the bottom of each of the three lines, voxed for the winches to start reeling them up, and began their own rapid climb to the gunship hovering overhead.
Zeed and Karras stood at the bottom, looking up.
‘Before we get back to the Saint Nevarre and that bastard inquisitor, there’s something I think you should know, Scholar,’ said the Raven Guard.
Karras looked at him, surprised by the tone. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Back in the xenos nest, after the horde broke away to hunt you and Watcher, something caught my eye. There was a cave deep at the back. I noticed it when I was clearing out the last of the genestealers. I took a quick look.’
‘And?’ asked Karras.
‘Talon Two, Three and Four are aboard,’ reported Reaper One. ‘What’s that? Alpha, please hold. We’re having some kind of trouble with the lines.’
Zeed continued. ‘There were several pods there, made of metal. No chitin. These were not tyranid things. They looked more like one-man boarding torpedoes – a diamonite drill for a nose and all the hallmarks of human construction. Big enough for genestealers, Scholar. In fact, when I looked inside, there were marks consistent with genestealers having broken out from within.’ The silence that followed his words was thick and heavy with unspoken im
plications.
A single line dropped down the shaft now. The slack hit the floor in front of them.
‘Some kind of trouble with the winches, Alpha,’ voxed Reaper One. ‘Damned strange. We’ve had to drop a manual line. You and Five will need to pull yourselves up.’
Karras ordered Zeed to go first. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
But Zeed wasn’t finished talking. He moved to the rope and grabbed it, but there he stopped and asked, ‘You see it, don’t you?’
I see it, thought Karras sourly. The Inquisition. The Ordo Xenos.
The genestealer infestation on Chiaro had been deliberate, engineered by men against men. But, in the name of Holy Terra, why?
‘They’ll burn this place out,’ continued Zeed, tugging the line to make sure it was secure. ‘The mines are almost dry now anyway. It must be why they chose this planet. They won’t wait long once we’re gone. They can’t afford the truth getting out. No one else is getting off this rock. Not after us.’
‘Exterminatus,’ murmured Karras to himself. The word carried a chill all of its own. A whole world purged of life. Extreme, but what other recourse was there, he supposed, when the civilian population was infected with genestealer taint? It could be rooted out no other way, and it was far too dangerous to risk the chance, even remote, that it might get off-world somehow.
He thought of the woman they had worked so hard to recover, and of the alien creature readying to tear its way out of her womb. Would he ever know why it had been so important to retrieve her? Would he ever know exactly how he and his team had served the Emperor’s Will? They had risked their lives, stood on the edge of the abyss and faced their end. Did they not deserve to know? And if Karras ever did discover why, would he feel it justified that a whole planet would pay the price for the games the Inquisition had played here?
That seemed unlikely.
‘Say no more on this, Ghost. For now, at least. I’ve a feeling Sigma monitors all we say and do. Nowhere on the Saint Nevarre is secure. For now, just keep your eyes and ears open. Even the best surgeon makes occasional mistakes. Sigma had best be careful lest he get cut by his own scalpel one day.’
‘Count on it, Scholar.’
The Raven Guard began his climb, his own muscles working in perfect concert with the tireless artificial fibre-bundles beneath his ceramite plate. Within moments, he was high above Karras, and now the kill-team leader gripped the rope and began his own climb. He was only slightly slower than the Raven Guard, but then nobody moved quite as fast as Siefer Zeed.
Karras had pulled himself some fifteen metres from the ground, and was just about to pass beyond the lower lip of the vent shaft when, suddenly, he stopped. He felt something sharp, bitter, pricking at his psychic awareness; a sense of something deeply wrong. It was only the briefest instant, but in that instant, he knew his sense of victory back at RP2 had been premature.
There was a rushing of air from below. Something powerful grasped his armoured ankle and, with terrifying physical force, hauled him from the rope.
Karras fell two metres and crashed into his attacker. The clip on his webbing cinched tight, arresting a further fall.
He whipped his head around to see the broodlord glaring up at him, spitting and twitching violently as it clung to the rope just below him. The fall into margonite-infused waters had not killed it, but immersion in that dangerous and corrosive solution had melted its flesh horribly and given it an unearthly white glow. Gleaming bone poked out between ragged gaps in the creature’s scorched flesh. The stumps where Karras had severed two of its wrists were horribly burned and withered. The other pair of arms, however, still with their sharp-clawed, five-fingered hands, were very much intact and still every bit as lethal.
Releasing its grip on the rope with one of these hands, the beast batted savagely at Karras, once, twice. He spun wildly. His weapons were knocked away and plummeted to clatter hard on the stone of the chamber floor below – all but his combat knife, sheathed on his right greave. Arquemann’s strap was severed by the beast’s second strike. Karras felt the force sword spin away from him and turned to see where it fell. The blade struck the floor point-first and lodged itself deep and hard in the stone. Karras’s hearts sank. He knew his talents would not be able to call the blade back to his hand. Not now.
‘Scholar,’ shouted Zeed from further up the rope.
The Raven Guard had reversed his climb. He was moving downwards again.
The broodlord lunged, attempting to pass Karras completely and grasp the rope above him, and Karras realised with a start that it did not simply want to kill them all. It was attempting to retrieve the body of the woman. It wanted the unborn thing inside her.
But, as the ruined creature leapt past him, Karras grabbed it and grappled with it, desperate to prevent its ascent. The accursed alien was still physically stronger by far, despite its dreadful wounds. It thrashed and struggled, and beat at Karras with the disfigured limbs that could not clutch the rope.
Karras saw no other option. Right here, right now, he had but a single chance to ensure the mission’s success. The cost would be great, but the Black River claimed all in the end – even those who had returned before from its furious astral waters.
With a roar of defiance, he drew his combat knife, stretched up and, gripping the broodlord tight with his other arm, cut the rope with a single hard slash.
Together, they tumbled backwards, plunging to cold, hard rock.
The monster screamed in rage. It was a scream that cut of abruptly when the ground leapt up to strike them both. The impact was brutal. Karras grunted, felt bones shatter. His knife skittered away. Even power armour couldn’t protect him completely from a fall like that.
Pain surged through him. Warning glyphs flashed red on his left retina. His right eye was blind. He didn’t know why. Several of his armour’s subsystems were non-functional. Main systems and motor controls were reporting progressive drops in efficiency. The suit’s joints were starting to lock up.
Heavy footfalls – clawed toes on blood-slicked stone – sounded near Karras’s head. He looked up with one eye.
The beast stood over him, trembling in rage and pain.
Just one more hideous terror in a galaxy filled with them, thought Karras. It is not your destiny to rule, monster. Only man can rise above his bestial instincts. Only man can ascend to a higher state of consciousness. For man alone, there is hope of salvation. That is why you and your kind will lose. Always. The future belongs to man.
The tyranid broodlord crouched over him and raised its clawed hands, ready to rip his armour open like foil and tear the organs from his flesh.
Karras had little life left in him, but he fought back with the only weapon that remained in reach.
He let the power of the immaterium flow through him.
White balefire rose from his body. It flared across his battered armour, and he bent all his will towards the destruction of the beast that was standing over him.
The air crackled with all that ethereal power. Karras heard voices taunting him, voices from the warp, the dark domain from which his power flowed. It was always a risk, always had been, but he was ready for that. He had been trained for it. He cast his inner gates wide and let more of the power flow through him. He turned his mind to the mantras with which the mighty Athio Cordatus had taught him to protect himself.
The broodlord staggered, buffeted by the rising psychic surge. Immediately, the monster turned to its own powerful gifts and battle was joined between the two one last time.
Dimly, Karras could hear voices calling to him on the link, but it was no good. There was nothing they could do for him now. They had the package. They had to get away while the broodlord was held here. Success had a price. Today, the price was his life, as he had always known it would one day be.
The ground beneath the two bitter enemies began to shudder. The stone floor started to crack and chip. Small loose rocks began rising up into the air, lifted on currents of
psychic fire. Dust and dirt began to rain down in great drifts from fresh cracks in the chamber’s domed ceiling and in the lip of the vent shaft.
Karras sensed a surge in the broodlord’s power, fuelled by raw animal rage. The resonance of the unborn xenos parasite was moving away from their location. Reaper One was withdrawing. The broodlord had lost. Operation Night Harvest, whatever its true purpose might be, had come to a close. Talon Squad had succeeded.
Now it was time to end this properly, and there was only one way left.
‘I die in battle,’ Karras spat at the creature. ‘And in so doing, earn my rebirth.’
He opened the gates of his mind as wide as he could, far further than he had even risked before. The flow of power was a crashing, raging tide now. The mocking voices from the warp grew louder, closer. The ground beneath him shook as if caught in the middle of a massive seismic cataclysm.
‘We die here together, xenos filth,’ roared Karras, ‘but of the two, only I will live again!’
Great, lethal chunks of rock began to tumble from the ceiling, smashing into the ground to shatter with all the force that weight and gravity could muster.
The beast fought back, its own power rising to meet the flow of Karras’s own, strength for strength.
Karras could channel no more. He gave himself over completely to the power that flowed through him, hoping it would be enough. He felt unseen things closing on him from a great distance, but their speed was immeasurably high. He prayed that he and the broodlord would die before his soul was forfeit.
The thick ceiling of the chamber gave a great heave above them and collapsed completely. Absolute finality tumbled towards the locked combatants, thousands of tonnes of sharp black rock spinning end-over-end. Karras loosed a final, raw-throated shout:
‘I fear not death, I who–’
He didn’t finish it.
20
Silence.
No more chittering voices to drive him mad. No more crashing surge of psychic power testing the limits of his strength and sanity. Nothing.
