Deathwatch: Ignition

by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons

  ‘I ask an indulgence from my Chapter, Lord Asmodai,’ continued Gydrael. ‘When Averamus is brought to justice, if I still live, I shall be the one to execute him. For all that have died and will die by his hand, I would have vengeance on Averamus the Fallen. By my oaths to my Chapter and to the Deathwatch, and all the relics of the Rock, I would take his head. Sealed by the vox-print of Brother Zameon Gydrael, in the name of the Primarch and the Emperor Most High.’

  Gydrael deactivated the dataslate and continued to remove his armour, lining up the segments on the floor of the cell. He took a polishing cloth and compound from the tools racked on the wall and began to clean the blood of the sslyth off his armour.

  He murmured prayers to the armour’s machine-spirit, asking it to remain unbroken, as he settled in to a lengthy session of wargear rites.

  It would be a long time before the true dirt was wiped away.

  DEATHWATCH 4: REDBLADE

  Robbie MacNiven

  The chosen arena was Arco-Refinery Alpha 1-1’s primary firing range. Originally, the low, sloping tunnel had been designed to test Adeptus Mechanicus combat servitors, but with the arrival of the Space Marines on Theron it had been given over to them. If the servants of the Machine God had known what it was being used for now they would doubtless have objected, but a guard had been posted on the door to ensure they didn’t interfere.

  The chamber’s lumen strips flickered to life, a low hum filling the echoing space. Four warriors occupied the fire-scarred range just beyond the empty weapons stalls – two in the black plate of the Deathwatch, two bearing the blue-grey livery of the Space Wolves. One of the former, his quartered red and yellow pauldron marking him out as a Howling Griffon, took the boltgun handed to him by his brother.

  ‘You know the rules, Space Wolf,’ the bolter’s owner, Caius Vorens, said. ‘Combat knives only. First blood.’

  Drenn nodded. The young Wolf was almost shaking with battle-hunger, hand clenching and unclenching compulsively around the hilt of his blade, Fang. He could feel the anger of his pack leader, Svenbald, burning into him even as he squared up to Vorens. The Deathwatch kill-team leader was terse and stoic, his face unreadable behind his black faceplate. Drenn had left his own helmet off.

  They drew their blades and paced out to the centre of the range, boots ringing off the pockmarked rockcrete. Halfway down, Vorens stopped and faced Drenn. Svenbald and the Howling Griffon, Gallio, took post at the edge of the chamber.

  ‘Before the eyes of the Emperor,’ Gallio intoned. ‘Victory to the just.’

  Drenn kicked hard, slamming the ork back into the refinery’s edge. The alien managed to snatch one of the Space Wolf’s gauntlets just as the railings buckled and split. Snarling an oath to Russ and the Allfather, Drenn hacked into its straining limb with his knife, sawing its sharpened edge through slabs of green muscle, tendon and bone.

  The ork lost its grip, roaring furiously as it toppled over the platform’s side and down, down into the crushing embrace of Theron’s swirling gravity well. Drenn watched it go, bouncing off the flank of one of the refinery’s engine spheres. Its claws scrabbled for purchase, smearing the grav machine’s flank bloody before the beast vanished into the roiling clouds. The wind’s fury snatched its howl away.

  ‘Report,’ the voice of Svenbald, Drenn’s pack leader, crackled over the vox. He grimaced, turning away from the edge.

  ‘Southern plate secure. Six contacts, all purged.’

  ‘Regroup with the pack at the central hub,’ Svenbald said. ‘The fleet is reporting another wave approaching from the east.’

  Drenn bent to wipe the sticky xenos blood from his combat knife, and realised abruptly that the remainder of the alien’s meaty forearm was still clamped around his left gauntlet. Frustrated, he prised apart the ork’s claws and tossed the limb over the refinery’s side. For all their size and resilience, greenskins were hardly a worthy foe. There would be no sagas sung about today.

  Drenn sheathed the knife and keyed the activation rune on his jump pack.

  The clouds around Platform Epsilon 9-17 looked like diseased lungs, swollen a sickly yellow and shot through with ugly veins of red lightning. The airborne refinery lumbered through the sulphurous banks, the six huge gravitic engine spheres keeping the platform rig aloft.

  Thunder split the infected heavens as Drenn landed on the central plate of the refinery. The lightning snapped upwards, a crimson lash from the gas giant’s crushing depths. Normally, the Adeptus Mechanicus personnel crewing the platform would have welcomed such a sight, for Epsilon 9-17 was a mobile conductor, channelling a portion of the lightning it harvested to stay airborne. Its central hub bristled with plasteel arrays and blackened earthing spikes, while the bowels of its grav-engines crackled with the energy of the storm. But today the sound of thunder didn’t come from the lightning alone. It came from the orks.

  Drenn’s packmates were watching the second wave coming in. From such a distance the mass of xenos aircraft looked like a black thunderhead, spreading from the hangars of a hulking ork battle asteroid. The looted hunk of debris perched low in orbit, a burly mass of space-scarred rock, rusting battlements and leering skull glyphs.

  ‘Svenbald wants to see you,’ one of Drenn’s packmates, Karlson, said.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He went into the hub with the xenos hunter. He wants you to wait outside.’

  Drenn cast a glance at the three black-armoured warriors of the Deathwatch who stood observing the approaching war planes alongside the Space Wolves, then turned towards the refinery’s central hub.

  Epsilon’s generatorum house was like an Ecclesiarchy church, all crenelated spires and flying buttresses – except instead of the aquila above its arched doors it bore the Machina Opus symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and instead of pews and a high altar, the inside was crammed with throbbing arco-banks. The vaulted ceiling vibrated with their power, and red light crackled around the coils, throwing the interior into jagged illumination.

  The station’s crew of six tech adepts were standing before the hub’s primary generator, the air resounding with their binary cant. Magos Zarn was leading them, but turned as Drenn entered. His chief enginseer picked up where he left off.

  ‘My lords,’ the magos said. He was addressing the two figures who had walked in just before Drenn – Svenbald and the Deathwatch kill-team leader, Caius Vorens. Drenn hung back as they approached the magos. The Martian’s face was still mostly flesh, but utterly immobile, as though he wore a corpse mask. The tech-priest’s pale lips remained shut, his automated voice issuing from a brass vox-grille sutured into his throat. A canvas pump-lung, a requirement in the inimical upper atmosphere of Theron, pulsed grotesquely from its harness across his chest.

  ‘Magos Zarn,’ Vorens said, glancing briefly up at the cog-toothed symbol of the Omnissiah, suspended by great chains above the generatorum.

  ‘My data-streams report the xenos attack has been repelled,’ Zarn intoned. The mechadendrites coiling upwards from his robed back were swaying gently in time with the chanting of his adepts.

  ‘Repelled thanks in part to the firepower of your combat servitors,’ Vorens said, ‘and the oversight of the Imperial Navy. Has there been any word from the other refineries?’

  ‘Epsilon Five-One and Omega Fifteen-Zero have reported similar assaults. Beta Thirteen-Eleven hasn’t encountered any contacts, and we have received no communications, for good or ill, from Kappa Six-Eight. Of the refineries beyond my quadrant I know nothing, but my own estimates show that over eighty per cent of the platforms on Theron’s northern hemisphere are under attack.’

  ‘Naval fighter command is sparing what it can,’ Svenbald interjected, his stony voice a counterpoint to Zarn’s monotone speech. ‘We’ve been relying on their orbital presence to detect each incoming wave. There’s another one inbound as we speak.’

  ‘I trust your warriors will prove sufficient for the task at hand,’ Zarn said. Drenn felt the machine-man’s bionic ey
es focusing on him over Svenbald’s shoulder.

  The Wolf Guard sensed the change of attention and turned. His craggy, red-painted face, underlit by the energy surging through the arco-banks, became even grimmer. ‘I told you to wait outside, not follow me around like a stray pup.’

  ‘They’re coming again,’ Drenn said, ignoring the reprimand.

  ‘We know. Get out.’

  The greenskin invasion of Theron exuded savage, alien desperation. The strategos of the Departmento Munitorum had calculated that the xenos were attempting to capture the gas giant’s arco-refineries in a bid to refuel and rearm before pressing corewards. Kjarl Grimblood, perhaps reading good fortune in the flames of war, had dispatched eight packs from his Great Company to assist the Adeptus Mechanicus forces with Theron’s defence. Where the Deathwatch had come from, nobody knew.

  Drenn stared at the new swarm of ork aircraft in the distance as they rumbled towards Epsilon 9-17. Svenbald rounded on him, gripping his arm and speaking in hushed but aggressive tones.

  ‘Look at me. Grimblood ordered your transferal to my pack because you’re a wild young fool, even for a Blood Claw. My Flame Hunters thrive in the hottest fires, but we don’t seem to burn bright enough for your underdeveloped passions, do we?’

  ‘If you stopped gnawing at me, maybe I would respect you more,’ Drenn spat, finally looking his pack leader in the eye. Like many of the long-tooths in Kjarl Grimblood’s company, he daubed his burn-scarred features with his own blood before battle, the red streaks mimicking the fire that was the symbol of the Grimbloods. Svenbald was a Wolf Guard sky leader, but since Drenn’s recent promotion from Blood Claw to the war-hungry ranks of the Flame Hunters he had yet to see Svenbald do anything noteworthy.

  The old wolf was all boast and no teeth.

  ‘If you want to remain a part of this Great Company you can start by respecting the decisions of its Wolf Lord,’ Svenbald said. ‘A place in my pack is an honour, and it burns my pride having to count a whelp like you among my warriors.’

  ‘You want a tame pup who follows all your orders. You’d rather I gave up on personal combat, for a start. I won’t. No pistol or flamer can match my blades.’

  Immediately after arriving on Theron, Drenn had refused to carry his bolt pistol as a sidearm. The weapon had jammed when he’d needed it most, cut off in the middle of a mob of rampaging orks. Since then he’d relied only on his chainsword, Graam, and his hook-tipped combat knife, Fang.

  He’d also discarded his helmet, letting loose his shock of fiery red hair during combat. He had only worn his helm on the day that his bolter had failed, and only then because his power armour had been burning from crest to boot, set alight by the greenskin’s crude flamer weaponry. He’d carved his way clear of the mob, like the Fire Wolf of Fenrisian legend, a Flame Hunter worthy of his Wolf Lord. Svenbald had just watched.

  ‘You prefer the blood on your blades to the fire in your heart,’ Svenbald accused, accompanying each word with a jab at the Fire Wolf head embossed on Drenn’s breastplate. ‘You’re no Grimblood.’

  ‘You only say that because you know your kill statistics won’t match mine at the end of this campaign, long-tooth.’

  Svenbald snarled and turned away. ‘I don’t have time for your toothless biting, Drenn.’

  ‘My name is Redblade,’ said Drenn.

  ‘No it isn’t. Get back to the pack.’

  Erik, formerly the youngest of the Flame Hunters before Drenn’s hasty induction, stepped aside to make room for him at the edge of the refinery. The Wolves were taking up combat positions, flanked by the Deathwatch.

  ‘What did you say to him?’ Erik muttered. ‘It looks like you pissed in his mjod.’

  ‘He still won’t acknowledge me as Redblade,’ Drenn replied, deliberately catching Svenbald’s eye. The Wolf Guard held his gaze, but said nothing.

  ‘The greenskins are using a different trajectory,’ Vorens cut in over the vox. ‘Stand by for further orders.’

  He was right. The first wave had torn into the refinery head-on. Its defenders – hardwired combat servitors, the Deathwatch kill-team and Svenbald’s Flame Hunters – had picked them off as they approached, smearing the vile-looking clouds with dirty black contrails and spinning wreckage. Only six greenskins had made it to the platform, and Drenn had dealt with them.

  This time the orks’ crude machines were banking high, climbing above the platform.

  ‘Those look bigger,’ said Svenbald. ‘Bombers?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Vorens replied. ‘They want to take the station, not destroy it.’

  ‘If we kill enough of them, they’ll turn the asteroid’s guns on us,’ Svenbald said, pointing at the vast ork rock-ship still disgorging its airborne flotsam.

  ‘They need the power stored within the arco-refineries. Without the generatorums their most powerful weaponry is useless.’ Vorens’ voice remained slow and precise, but Drenn got the impression he thought Svenbald was an idiot. His opinion of the Deathwatch leader rose fractionally.

  Limping, fat flyers with stubby wings and dozens of juddering rotors had clambered over the refinery, out of bolter range. Drenn watched, fascinated, as their ramps and hatches were hauled back. Shapes began to barrel from the aircraft, leaping into the abyss with apparent fearlessness. For a moment he wondered whether the xenos were truly so blood-crazed and stupid that they thought they could avoid being dragged down into Theron’s gravity well. Then he spotted flares of light winking from the bulky packs strapped to their backs, and he realised he was in fact witnessing a haphazard aerial assault deployment.

  ‘Now we’re in for a fight,’ he growled. For once, Svenbald didn’t reprimand him.

  There was a thud of disengaging mag-locks as the Skyclaws drew their chainswords.

  ‘Kill-team,’ Vorens snapped. ‘Protect the central refinery. Hit them as they land.’

  ‘Flame Hunters,’ Svenbald roared, ‘for Russ and the Allfather, into them!’

  Drenn needed no further urging. He was already launching himself into the air, even as the first hard rounds from the orks’ crude firearms spanked off the platform around him. The gut-wrenching sense of dislocation matched the adrenaline pounding through his charged body, and he howled with glee as he speared upwards, his jump pack vents throbbing.

  He picked his first target. The greenskin’s mouth was open, but its bellowed challenge was whipped away by the wind. All Drenn could hear was the keening of his pack as he forced the turbo stud to its limit, pushing his leap as high as possible. He held his chainsword out two-handed, the kraken teeth roaring to life.

  Above the surface plates of Epsilon 9-17, Wolf and ork met. The impact almost tore Graam from Drenn’s grip, but it cleaved the beast from groin to skull. The rocket lashed to its back detonated, immolating the bisected halves. Drenn left the blast in his wake, drenched in alien gore.

  His jump pack hit its peak barely a second after the bloody collision, chiming a warning as the duel-vector thrust shorted out. That was when the second ork hit him.

  This one came boots-first. One steel toecap smashed into Drenn’s skull, and for a second even the Wolf’s superhuman senses failed. He felt a crack. Darkness reared up to smother him. The smell of blood – his blood – reached his nose and he snapped back with a snarl.

  He was falling. His pack was ringing out a warning, but he couldn’t reach the turbo stud because the greenskin that had struck him was now clamping both arms around his waist, locking its hands beneath his jump pack. Drenn got an impression of porcine red eyes glaring from behind grimy goggle lenses, great yellow tusks and breath like a butcher’s yard.

  Then the alien headbutted him.

  There was another crunch. Drenn’s vision swam. The world was turning over and under, yet still the ork clung on with savage, stinking intensity. It tried to hit him a second time, but he managed to twist his head back and away and the greenskin’s slavering jaw cracked off his gorget.

  One of Drenn’s hands scrabbled for a h
old on the nose of the ork’s rocket pack. With a fanged grimace he managed to force the battered nose of the rocket backwards, straining the straps binding it to the ork’s broad torso. He thrust Graam into the gap, and revved the weapon furiously. There was an audible snap of leather and the rocket fell away, launching off on a crazed, looping trajectory.

  The ork sensed its sudden weightlessness and tried to gouge Drenn’s face with its tusks, but the Wolf just grinned and hit the turbo stud with his free hand. The jump pack’s vector-thrust roared into life and the ork answered with a howl of agony as the downwash of the twin jets charred its forearms, still clenched around Drenn’s waist.

  The Space Wolf kicked away, turning and powering his fall into a sideways roll. With a crunch, the xenos brute impaled itself on one of the central hub’s earthing spikes.

  Drenn slammed into the hub’s deck plates an instant later. The pack hadn’t enough time to build a proper thrust, so the impact was hard and clumsy. He rolled, the servos in his power armour grating as they absorbed the fall. He felt a knee plate crack, but then he was back on his feet, Graam in hand, the weapon growling.

  Svenbald’s Flame Hunters had intercepted a dozen orks on the way up, and a dozen more on the way down, but just as many had made it to Epsilon’s plates. A few had come too fast, or their rocket packs had failed them, and their crumpled remains were smeared across the deck. Plenty more, however, had ploughed into the Deathwatch.

  The nearest ork had its back to Drenn, too busy pounding at the mangled, sparking form of a combat servitor to notice the Wolf’s arrival. Drenn smashed Graam through the alien’s thick skull, his own howl joining that of his chainsword. The battle frenzy was on him – the bloody fury the skjalds spoke of, the urge to kill so strong that it could fire up even the greyest long-tooth.

  It didn’t matter anymore that the greenskins weren’t worthy foes. It didn’t matter that Svenbald was an old fool who probably wanted him dead. It didn’t matter that even his packmates, themselves headstrong young Wolves, thought Drenn an impetuous firebrand. It didn’t matter that every day since leaving his tribe and his home on Fenris, he’d felt like a wolf without a pack, a lone hunter.