by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
He ought to have confessed his sins to a chaplain, but he couldn’t.
He knew now why he had been chosen for this assignment to the Deathwatch, what had brought him to Lord Commander Dante’s attention. He had been sent to represent his Chapter here – rubbing shoulders with witch hunters and the elite of other Chapters – only because of his humble nature. He must have seemed the most reasonable, the most even-tempered of them all, one that surely the curse could never touch.
If Antor’s secret were discovered, he would face disgrace and worse. At the very least, the Deathwatch would expel him. Worse still, the purity of his gene-seed itself would be questioned. He would bring suspicion down upon every Blood Angel serving in the kill teams.
He had no choice.
He lowered his gleaming black helmet over his head, to hide the sweat on his face. He checked his reflection and tried to reclaim something of his pride. He had his duty, and he would perform it diligently. He would conquer his curse, as he had conquered it every day – almost every day – for the past four years.
The monster that dwelled inside him could never be slain, but Antor was determined to temper it.
Only, he couldn’t help but shift his gaze to the emblem on his shoulder: the blood drop with angel wings. He stepped out of his cabin and couldn’t help but remember stepping through that door once before to find his ship under attack.
The rage had saved his life that day. It had kept him on his feet, kept him fighting with a ferocity that had staggered his opponents, even after he ought to have died, as his brethren had. As every battle-brother, every watch captain, every inquisitor in Watch Fortress Erioch would have.
And that was one thing, the one thing above all, that he couldn’t forget.
It was the only thing he had left.
Antor Delassio may have been cursed – but once, that curse had saved them all.
Deathwatch 3: The Flesh of the Angel
Ben Counter
The stench of the alien was everywhere. It was a heavy, meaty stink, like heaps of butchered animal carcasses left for too long somewhere dank and underground. There was an artificial, chemical note to it too, the smell of the laboratory and the operating room. And underlying it all was an alien sourness that could never come from anything human.
Zameon Gydrael crouched beside the gnarled wall of hardened mucus that bounded the tunnel leading into the Nidus Tertiam. The xenos-wrought structure wound deep into the foundations of Phoenicus Peak, where once a monastic human sect had inhabited the cells and shrines. He could feel the warmth coming off the walls – nutrient fluid pumped through them, channelled to the lowermost reaches of the nidus. He could hear the scrabbling of claws far below, the low groaning of the structure settling, and the hiss of its unspeakable veins and arteries.
But the noise was nothing to the stench.
His olfactory receptors had been enhanced by the surgeons of the Ordo Xenos to pick out the spore-trails of certain creatures, and to recognise a whole catalogue of alien scents. The drawback was that Gydrael could not turn them off.
‘Gydrael here,’ he said into the kill team’s vox-channel. ‘I’m in position at the head of Nidus Tertiam.’
‘In position,’ echoed Thorne of the Iron Hands.
‘I’m at Nidus Secundus,’ added Hasdrubal of the Storm Lords. ‘Ready to do this, brethren. I’d burn this whole mountain range just to get rid of the stink.’
‘There’s movement on the lower slopes,’ said the kill team’s leader, Sergeant Decurius of the Praetors of Ulixis. He was positioned on a mountaintop watching the main nidi of the breeding ground, where he could warn the rest of the team about reinforcements or despatch himself and the fifth member, Molgurr of the Mortifactors Chapter, to lend assistance if things went wrong. ‘Quiet further up. Clear to proceed.’
‘Acknowledged, brother,’ said Thorne.
‘About damned time,’ said Hasdrubal. ‘I have gone seven moons without taking a head. My knife is angry.’
‘Remember your mission,’ said Decurius. ‘Do not give battle unless you must. You will have alien blood to spare on your hands before the night is out, Hasdrubal. Trust me on that.’
‘I am advancing,’ voxed Gydrael. ‘Fury and blood, my brothers. Soon this world will be clean.’
The interior of the nidus was pitch dark, but Gydrael could see perfectly with his enhanced vision. The architecture of the monastery broke through the crusted mass of resinous matter that the xenos had used to build their nest. The mournful face of a female saint was almost buried in tendrils of alien secretion. Fragments of fallen chitin covered the floor.
Gydrael kneeled down and picked up a smooth, pale shard from the debris. It was a fragment of an eggshell, the curve suggesting it had been the size of a man’s torso before it had broken.
‘They’re hatching already,’ said Gydrael.
‘Then we must be swift,’ replied Decurius.
In the close confines, Gydrael holstered his plasma pistol and drew his broadsword.
At these ranges, the powered blade was a surer kill than a bolt of superheated plasma.
As he proceeded, the stench got worse, if that was possible. Below the upper level of monks’ cells, the side of a chapel had been torn down to form the opening of a tunnel winding into the depths. A revolting slurping, sucking sound came from further down.
While most of his mind was concerned with the mission-specific details around him – avenues of approach, ranges, hiding places for a lurking enemy – the rest of Gydrael’s perception was filing away the other information that came to him. It was a skill he had possessed even before he had become a Dark Angel, the ability to perceive and compartmentalise, and to recall afterwards everything he had seen. The Chapter had honed that skill well. It was one of the reasons that Gydrael had been selected for service with the Deathwatch.
The monks had lived lives of cruel denial. They served for decades before they earned the right to amputate their body parts in the name of the Emperor, denying themselves the very limbs with which they had been born, to understand better the sacrifice the Emperor had made of his physical body. The tale of the monks was told in the sculptures of limbless devotees and the harnesses and supports built into the stone pews that broke through the layers of hardened alien mucus. The small monastic community had existed on Kolagar for centuries before the sslyth had moved in, and in a few hellish nights the xenos had exterminated them and taken over their monastery.
Gydrael moved down through the tunnel and crouched by an opening into a huge chamber beyond. The bulbous shape of the cavity was like the interior of an enormous stomach. It had been carved into the rock of Phoenicus Peak, like a cyst that had rotted away the mountain stone, and the lower half of it was full of a foul grey-green biological soup.
The fluid was writhing. Gydrael’s vision focused on sinuous loops of muscle slithering in and out of one another, forming churning knots of scaly bodies. Clawed, muscular limbs reached from the mass, and here and there a head surfaced – noseless and snakelike, with a yawing, fanged mouth, eyes like flecks of red gemstone, and ridges of horned scales along the scalp and down the spine.
A yowling and roaring reached Gydrael’s ears. It was the noise of primal abandon.
The stench was heavy and musky here, an awful mix of decay and fecundity that overwhelmed the air filters built into his power armour and forced his body’s augmentations to leach out the toxins from the air.
On the shore of the pool, one of the muscular creatures disengaged from the mass and flopped onto the shore of congealed filth. It had a powerful, four-armed torso, and its lower half was a single long, thick tail. Its scaly body was covered in the sticky fluid and it gasped and contorted as it pulled itself free. Others followed. Some in the mire looked dead, their bodies having given out. The surviving xenos slithered into side tunnels, leaving trails of noxious slime.
‘Confirm visual on the sslyth,’ voxed Gydrael. ‘This nidus has a breeding pool.’
‘No,’ said Gydrael. ‘They see nothing in their state.’
‘Skirt around it if you can. The hatcheries are likely below you.’
‘With pleasure.’
Hasdrubal chuckled. ‘Contain your lust, Dark Angel.’
Gydrael did not give Hasdrubal the satisfaction of an answer. The Storm Lords were of White Scars stock, earthy and brutal, very different to the Dark Angels. The White Scars’ primarch, Jaghatai Khan, had apparently lent his Legion’s geneseed a certain crudeness of thought which successor Chapters like the Storm Lords had evidently retained.
Gydrael put a hand to the canister mag-clamped to the waist of his armour. It contained enough infectious material to kill everything in the breeding pool a hundred times over. The virus bomb was gene-crafted to the phylum of sslyth that had surfaced on Kolagar, and it would have wiped them all out within three minutes.
If there had been enough of it to spare, Gydrael would have done just that. The sight of the sslyth locked in their fleshly mire turned his stomachs. But the Ordo Xenos had produced barely enough material to arm the three virus bombs the kill team carried into the nidi around Phoenicus Peak. They had to be used at the right place, in unison, to create the cascading reaction that would wipe out the entire phylum.
‘I am advancing,’ voxed Gydrael.
As revolting as the breeding pool was, Gydrael filed away its obscenity in his mind. Every contact with the sslyth, no matter how unwholesome, armed him with more knowledge of how to kill them. Of all the lessons Gydrael had learned in the Dark Angels’ training halls on the Rock, the first had been the most important.
Miss nothing.
The creature lurking in the makeshift shrine, its four brawny arms holding a pair of swords and a rusted autogun, was the first alert sslyth that Gydrael had seen since entering the nidus. It wore a harness of leather straps that clamped crude armour plates around its shoulders, chest and abdomen, and a necklace of fingers and dried-out eyeballs on a strip of leather was tied around its neck. With its muscular tail coiled underneath it, it reared up taller than Gydrael. He could see strips of purple-dyed cloth tied around its four biceps, embroidered with golden thread that seemed at odds with the creature’s savagery.
The ssylth stood before the altar of the shrine, which was little more than a heap of battle spoils – severed heads, captured lasguns, a silvery nest of ident-tags, a bowl of human hands – set in front of a carved wooden idol. The sensor-pits along the ssylth’s jaw line opened up as they registered the changes in air pressure and temperature that heralded Gydrael’s approach. It was impossible for anyone to sneak up on an alert sslyth – many men of the Astra Militarum on Kolagar had tried.
The sslyth whirled around and hissed, opening its mouth wide. Twin crescent-shaped fangs glinted with venom in its upper jaw.
By the time it raised its autogun, Gydrael had lunged across the shrine and was within sword range. The Dark Angel brought his broadsword around in a cut to the abdomen – the creature instinctively blocked with its gun and the blade’s power field lit the space up like a bolt of lightning. The sslyth spat and hissed as its weapon was reduced to a shower of metal shards.
The xenos howled, its tail propelling it towards Gydrael. It slammed into him with speed and strength, trying to close its jaws around his neck.
Gydrael didn’t fend off the closing jaws. The fangs were blunted against the ceramite of his helmet and shoulder guard. The sslyth was too close for him to swing his sword – he reversed his grip instead, and rammed the hilt up into the sslyth’s upper chest.
Gydrael had selected the broadsword from the vaults of the Rock when he had been chosen for the Deathwatch. He was his Chapter’s contribution to the ancient pacts which bound the Space Marines to this solemn duty, and he had needed a weapon to reflect that. He had always favoured the broadsword pattern, with its wide, brutal sweeps, its absence of ornamentation and flourish, and the massive, decisive damage that could be dealt with a clean blow. The weapon had a blade of infinitite alloy and a gilded hilt, with a cut red gemstone the size of a man’s fist set into the pommel. It was that gemstone that now cracked into the sslyth’s chest like the tip of a spear, shattering sternum and rib.
The sslyth was thrown against the pile of spoils in front of the altar. It let out a high, grating screech that seemed to shake the hardened secretions of the shrine walls. With his blade now free, Gydrael lashed out with a descending crescent blow that caught the creature in the armoured shoulder.
The broadsword sliced through, the power field giving it a keener edge that any mundane blade. It split armour, bone, muscle and organ, slicing all the way through to the sslyth’s abdomen. The alien was bisected clean in half, the two sections of its body flopping to the floor in a flood of sundered organs.
Gydrael heard the slithering of more aliens approaching. He shifted his grip on his sword, holding it one-handed while he drew his plasma pistol.
‘Brothers, I have encountered resistance,’ he voxed.
Three more sslyth rushed in through the side tunnels leading off from the shrine. Gydrael shot the first one through the face with his plasma pistol, the shot blasting the contents of its skull across the wall behind it. The second sslyth had a sword in each hand and a lithe, rope-muscled look to it, faster and leaner than the xenos Gydrael had butchered by the altar. It darted around the defensive arc of Gydrael’s sword, slicing out high with two blades and low with the others.
Gydrael had fought just about every form of enemy. Those he had not faced on the battlefield, he had engaged in simulated bouts with combat servitors, configuring their limbs to mimic any one of a hundred different species. Even so, the sslyth’s four swords threw him off for a moment as he weighed up each of his guards and parries and found them wanting.
Gydrael abandoned the subtlety of the swordsman. He trusted in his armour instead, letting three blows ring off the plating over his thigh, shoulder and chest. The fourth strike was at his head – Gydrael ducked under it, pivoted on his forward foot, and brought the broadsword around in a vertical rising strike.
Two of the sslyth’s hands thudded, severed, to the floor. The creature hissed, more in anger than in pain, as Gydrael focused on the third alien, which was lining up a shot at him with a boltgun.
The bolter it carried was larger than those sometimes issued to the officers of the Astra Militarum. It was sized for transhuman hands, but was of an older mark than anything in the Dark Angels’ armoury. The alien was strong enough to wield it, but it had none of the marksmanship of a Space Marine. The first shot flew wide and Gydrael lunged at the sslyth, ramming the point of the broadsword home.
These sslyth wore segments of armour salvaged from the Guardsmen of the Astra Militarum, sawn and hammered into shape and held in place by leather harnesses. They were no good against a powered blade. The armour split and the sword transfixed the creature through the stomach. Gydrael felt it sag as he withdrew the blade, knowing the alien’s spine was cut through and it would be paralysed before it hit the floor.
The surviving sslyth still had a sword in each of its remaining hands. It leapt up against one wall, bunching its tail in a powerful coil beneath it, to propel itself into Gydrael. He felt the hum of the plasma pistol in his hand – it could punch through the side of a tank, but it needed a second or two to recharge between each shot. It was ready to fire again.
Gydrael shot the sslyth through the throat. Its head flopped forwards, suddenly attached only by a string of charred scales.
The sslyth with the severed backbone was flopping around on the floor, trying to reach the boltgun beside it with jerking, spasming motions of its hands. Gydrael stabbed the broadsword down and pierced it through the back of the skull, slicing through its brain stem.
‘Cleared the resistance,’ he voxed. ‘The sslyth are aware of my presence.’
‘Don’t tell me Zameon has the first blood,’ said Hasdrubal. ‘You can have tha
t one, Dark Angel. I’ll bring out a heap of xenos heads you can only dream of.’
‘Focus, brethren,’ said Decurius. ‘If one nidus is alerted, the others will be soon. Hasdrubal, Thorne, stay alert.’
‘Always,’ replied Thorne.
Gydrael studied the altar for a moment before moving on. The carving above the heap of spoils was of an obscene figure composed of mismatched body parts and orifices. It had a heavy, fleshy realism in spite of the crudeness of the wooden sculpture. In the centre of the sculpture’s face was a sigil – a circle and two crescents. Gydrael had seen it before, carved into the flesh of maddened cultists or scrawled on the walls of defiled places of worship.
Gydrael picked the sslyth’s bolter off the floor. Though it was a Space Marine’s weapon it had a patina of filth and corrosion that no battle-brother would ever tolerate. It was a pattern that no forge world or Chapter armoury had produced for thousands of years, and its casing had once been decorated with golden scrollwork that was now peeling off.
‘I see evidence of worship,’ said Gydrael. ‘Devotion to a warp power. To the Lord of Unspeakable Pleasures.’
Hasdrubal snorted. ‘It is no surprise. The sslyth are predisposed to perversion.’
‘And they have had contact with the Emperor’s Children,’ said Gydrael.
‘Then their resurgence is no coincidence,’ said Decurius. ‘The Emperor’s Children hope to seed this world with them and undo all that the Astra Militarum achieved. That is why this phylum must be exterminated, brethren. That is why we are here.’
Throughout the Vensine Sector, a massive upwelling of separatism, inspired and coordinated by the traitors of the Emperor’s Children Legion, had gained a hold upon a dozen major Imperial worlds and almost a hundred lesser planets. The Inquisition suspected the Emperor’s Children had laid the groundwork for the uprising for generations, planting deviant weaknesses in the bloodlines of the Imperial aristocracy and seeding populations with folklore and prophecy that spoke of a bloody revolution.
