by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
As they smashed into a four-doored chamber, more flesh-constructs fell on them, wrapping serpent arms about them, serrated knives searching for weak spots.
There were hundreds of them, snapping and clawing. Within moments Cassius was pinned against the wall, and Skarr-Hedin was wounded and slowing rapidly. Pranus filled the room with bolter fire, but even as the attackers fell away more dropped in to replace them.
Sorrlock killed eight in mere seconds, reloaded and started to fire again, but as he reached the end of the corridor a tail caught him about his throat and dragged him back. Its skin shifted in texture as the muscles within it tightened. Sorrlock’s metal throat creaked with the strain, which would have snapped any other Space Marine’s neck. The tail kept wrapping about him, constricting about his chest and arm as a fanged mouth snapped at his face.
Normal augmetics would have buckled against such pressure, but Sorrlock’s were the work of an Iron Father. Even so, the finely calibrated ball sockets creaked and a hydraulic pipe on the bicep bulged and began to leak. Alarms flashed within Sorrlock’s retinal display even as he reached across with his bionic hand. From the fingers slid thin knife blades. He grasped the thing’s body and his hand snapped shut, shearing straight through muscle, bone and nerves.
The serpent creature whipped round. It was fast, even by Sorrlock’s standards. It wrapped around his wrist three times, and a flailing appendage drove a poisoned blade into his plackart, squirting hissing venoms into a gut of wires and pistons and nutri-cabling. It stabbed again, higher this time, seeking flesh, veins – the agony that would paralyse its foe, venoms that would down even a Space Marine within moments.
Sorrlock twisted, braced his feet and slammed his enemy against the wall, but his foe’s grip grew tighter. Chances of success began to decline rapidly. Consequential probabilities began to fall as well. Life expectancies of his fellow kill team members. Success of the mission. Probabilities of kill team extraction. All falling.
The machine within him snarled as it processed alternative solutions.
The probability of success was too small.
Too small. Too small.
Options were limited. The consequences were dire, perhaps critical. All probabilities were against them. Sorrlock’s logic circuits froze as the variables spiralled beyond his ability to compute.
IX
Sometimes, when Sorrlock slept or powered down, his human mind would remember life when his body was still merely flesh and blood. The tingle of skin. The imperfections of a human body. Sometimes, when he dreamt, the armourglass barrier within his mind dissolved and emotions filled him as they had once done.
Anger. Hurt. Pride.
Pain.
When he woke, the separation from sleep and emotion was always a shock.
The machine gave him so much more. It was precise and logical.
It was not weak.
Not even the Emperor could live without it.
It kept Ennox Sorrlock alive. It gave him power. It made him more than he had been.
Iron was strong. It did not fail.
Now you are strong. You are man and machine. You are more than an Iron Hand. You are iron limbs, iron spirit, iron will. You will not fail.
Do not fail yourself. Your Clan. Your Chapter. The Golden Throne.
You have been given a great honour, Sorrlock. You will not forget. You cannot forget.
The machine does not forget.
The machine is perfect.
I am a machine.
I am perfection.
But sometimes, when the data failed him, all that was left was Sorrlock’s fierce, human will to survive. That refused to die, even when the data was stacked against it.
He dragged the serpent to his head. Butted it. Trapped it. Bit it. His metal teeth tore through the flesh.
The blood of the creature tasted foul. He spat out chunks and bit again.
Mouthful by mouthful, he gnawed it down to the spine and cracked the bones between his teeth. The creature went slack. He spat again as he threw it to the floor, lifted his combi-weapon and pumped six shots through its body.
The predictive scroll of statistics began to slow, and then moved into a rapid reverse as he fired about the room, putting bolt rounds into the snarling faces that ringed him.
The room was a blur. These xenos moved faster than even he could see at times.
‘Sorrlock!’ Cassius hissed through gritted teeth. ‘Pranus is injured!’
‘I will try to aid him,’ Sorrlock said, but statistics from Pranus’ power armour showed that his systems were collapsing under a wash of toxins. The chances of the team’s survival were already low. He ran the cogitations in milliseconds. He had to aid Cassius first.
He put a bolt round through the back of the creature that embraced Cassius in its serpent coils, and two more into the five-armed thing that lunged at Skarr-Hedin. Both rounds hit. Skarr-Hedin threw the clawed hands off, and the creature’s sting-tipped tail made a few last efforts to stab through his armour before it fell dead. Sorrlock kept up a storm of fire, keeping Cassius and Skarr-Hedin free to fight.
‘I will cover you!’ Pranus choked as he reloaded his bolter. ‘Move, brothers!’
X
Sorrlock burst out onto the open roof. The warp portal flared in the air above him. It was oval, like an egg, bulging on all sides. As he slowed, three eldar jetbikes powered through the air towards the shimmering alien vista beyond it.
Sorrlock identified them as the same ones who had killed the human in the street. He threw himself back as they swept just over his head, razored blades thrumming in the air as they passed. The portal crackled blue and purple as they approached, strands reaching out to swallow them whole.
He let them go and spun about, looking for the mission target. He spotted an open-topped raider skimmer that was careering up the canyon from the south. It swung under gantries and archways, around rusting chains. His augmetic eyes zoomed in.
There on the deck stood their target: Archon Tehmaq.
Behind him was a face he had seen a thousand times in his nightmares.
The Black Spider.
About them were the archon’s retinue, all dressed in black armour, their faces hidden behind horned masks.
He pointed. ‘Ident positive. Target acquired.’
‘Skarr-Hedin, engage!’ Cassius shouted.
The Space Wolf was bleeding from a wound in his side, but he did not slow as he strode to the lip of the building, heavy bolter primed to fire. But Sorrlock did not have time to offer a warning before a hulking figure burst through the floor at Skarr-Hedin’s feet and threw him backwards. It was monstrously large – huge slabs of muscle, with a slavering head ending in a knot of tubes that hung about its head like hair. It had six arms. Each one ended with a terrible blade or drill or long, venom-dripping needle.
Skarr-Hedin swung about. It was difficult to hit something coming at him with such speed. He fired as he fell, rounds going wildly astray. Some hit. Others trailed up into the sky. The six arms wrapped him in a dreadful embrace, a fanged mouth gnashing at his throat. Behind the creature the raider’s guns opened fire, blazes hurtling up towards them.
Cassius ducked. His crozius was sizzling as he ran to help the Space Wolf. ‘We must slow them,’ he hissed. ‘Sorrlock!’
The thing tore at Skarr-Hedin in berserk fury. Its snout snapped at his throat. The arms stabbed and tore and crushed. Sorrlock calculated that he had six seconds to engage this threat before the archon came within range.
‘Affirmative,’ he voxed, aiming at the hulking flesh-construct’s head first, but his rounds failed to penetrate the armoured skull. Sorrlock’s sensors scanned the creature again, searching for vulnerabilities.
The movement slowed in his enhanced vision.
He took in every twitch of muscle beneath the skin, saw the pump of blood through its veins.
The pattern was clear. This thing possessed two hearts.
He targeted each one. As the metal c
oils in his brain spiralled away, assessing alternative weak spots in the internal bone mass, his human instincts saw only twin heart, fused ribcage.
It took a long moment for Sorrlock to believe what his data showed him. Despite all the changes, the thing felt familiar. It looked like a son of Medusa, the same dark planet that had raised him. The same clan, in fact...
The evidence was clear: this hulking thing had once been a Space Marine. A brother of the Iron Hands Chapter.
The realisation chilled him. Not only was this a Space Marine, he also recognised it. He knew its name. They had been scouts together, had been through gene-implantation and training together. And here they were now, on an abandoned planet, years of warp travel away from their home, each changed in their own way. And now the creature was tearing Skarr-Hedin apart.
The strength of the emotional response startled him.
‘Grimmack!’ he cried, as if he could call the spirit of his brother back to him. ‘Stop!’
But the thing did not stop. It snarled and savaged and punched a blade-fist through the front of Skarr-Hedin’s armour, kept driving the blade up towards his vital organs.
‘Grimmack!’ he shouted again.
Warning symbols flashed in his helm.
Sorrlock had run out of time.
XI
The eldar raider came on at seemingly impossible speed. Its bladed sail swung as the craft flew, strange runes in black on a purple background. Heads hung by their knotted hair from the craft’s railings, their slack mouths open in wild terror. The archon’s black-armoured retinue drew sickle blades from their belts, lifted their pistols to fire.
The archon himself was piloting. His mouth was open in a fey smile. His white face was flecked with blood, lit by the searing flashes of lance fire.
Skarr-Hedin battered at the thing that had once been Grimmack. The two of them raged at one another, berserk fury on both sides.
‘I have this one, brother,’ Skarr-Hedin hissed as he drove his combat knife into the second heart. He was gasping for breath. ‘Kill the archon!’
‘Archon approaching,’ Sorrlock voxed. He engaged his combi-melta, focusing his augmetic eyes on the foe. ‘I have him.’
As the raider swung up towards the warp portal, Sorrlock aimed and fired. The air shimmered with the sudden heat, and the shot hit the craft in the bows. It should have cut through and hit the archon as well, but the raider veered wildly, caught a hanging gantry, swung about like a ball on a chain and did almost a full rotation before slamming down in a ruin, fifty yards from the gate.
Sorrlock leapt towards it as eldar warriors were thrown onto the ground in crumpled heaps. He focused on one figure – the archon – who bounded unscathed from the wreckage, pirouetting through the air. Behind him, the Black Spider swung on its many limbs.
Cassius was shouting, but all Sorrlock saw was Archon Tehmaq moments from the safety of the portal. He lifted his bolter and his augmetic targeting systems worked so fast that time seemed to slow. The archon went from a blur to a slowly cartwheeling humanoid in sharp-edged black armour. The three members of his surviving retinue sprinted after him – to shield their master or to escape with him, Sorrlock could not tell.
And there, again, was the Black Spider.
Sorrlock’s data stream locked on the thought of what the haemonculus had done to Grimmack. What it had done to him. He wished that he could feel hatred for it. Wished he could fire on the Black Spider…
But he was a battle-brother of the Deathwatch, an Iron Hand, perfected through augmentation into a weapon of war. The hatred was there, but it was distant and faint.
He fired.
The two bolts moved with a beautiful slowness. The rocket cores were like flowers of fire with blue centres and shivering petals of yellow and red. The first bolt, a hellfire round, spun as it flew. Light glinted off the microscopic scratches like starlight on the hull of a turning spaceship, almost black against the darkness of wilderness space.
It struck the archon low in the gut, where the lobster panels of his black armour bucked and crumpled as the shock waves rippled. But it exploded without penetrating. It gave off a shower of shrapnel and droplets of bio-acid, shifting and reforming as they flew through the air. It scored spreading lines in the archon’s shining arcane armour, like the impact of an asteroid on the dust of a moon.
The second bolt hit the same spot, now acid-weakened by the first. It was a dragonfire round that smashed through the armour, into the archon’s gut, where it exploded with a sudden glare of green flame.
Tendrils of fire spread from the wound. They wrapped about the archon in a tortuous embrace. He stumbled and fell. The other xenos, the screeching Black Spider amongst them, were already leaping for the warp gate.
Then they were gone, and the gate shuddered out of existence like an air bladder bursting in reverse. An aching purple afterlight hung in the air, flickering and casting strange un-shadows across the rooftop as it faded.
The archon crawled towards the place where the portal had been. He clawed feebly for purchase on the rockcrete, his scorched belly flat against the floor, his face a rictus of astonishment and pain.
Sorrlock stood over him and put a third bolt shell into his head.
‘Mission complete,’ he reported.
They dragged the remains of Grimmack from Skarr-Hedin and the Space Wolf propped himself up. There was blood in his beard. The toxins were making his movements laboured and weak. When his voice came, it was rasping and pained. ‘I killed it for you, Iron Hand. We fought each other to the death. Your shame is cleansed.’
Cassius knelt, and pulled back the ruined power armour to inspect Skarr-Hedin’s wounds.
Even for a Space Marine, they were mortal.
Skarr-Hedin knew this and was not afraid. He laughed messily. ‘I shall go and feast with my brothers. I shall tell them that I died bravely!’
‘Hold, brother,’ Cassius said. ‘The gunship is on its way.’
Skarr-Hedin snarled against his pain. As they waited, the purple light in the air above them continued to boil away into nothingness, colours and patterns forming and dissolving.
Sorrlock could see faces in the patterns. They came forward, as if to peer at him, and then faded back. Cassius powered up his crozius, but Sorrlock shook his head. ‘They will not fight.’
‘Then why do they linger?’
‘They have come for their master’s body,’ Sorrlock said.
‘Not to take vengeance?’
‘No. The xenos are cowards.’ Sorrlock stopped inches from the fading mist. He reached out to touch it, but Cassius stayed his hand.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘You do not want to know what lies beyond there.’
Sorrlock lowered his hand. ‘I know already,’ he said. ‘Pain. A place of many screams. Many nightmares. A place without hope.’
XII
The Storm Eagle’s engines roared as it returned the survivors of Kill Team Torrent to their waiting ship. Skarr-Hedin’s body lay beneath a shroud. Pranus was being tended by two medicae adepts, the Novamarine having mercifully lost consciousness. Sorrlock sat bolt upright, his metal hands braced on his knees, and Cassius watched him. The Iron Hand still appeared to feel nothing. He had the same silence as the darkness of Deadhenge.
Sorrlock knew he was being watched – Cassius could see that from the dull glint of his augmetic eyes.
At last the Chaplain spoke. ‘You could have killed the Spider, brother.’
Sorrlock turned his augmetic eye and regarded him. ‘Affirmative.’
‘Then why didn’t you?’
‘He was not our designated target.’
‘But I would have caught the archon before he escaped.’
‘Yes. My calculations say you would.’
‘So, why? Look what he did to you. Your squad. Your brother, whom he captured. I brought you not only for your insight and your logic, but also to stoke the fire in your cold heart once more. You could have taken revenge.’
&nbs
p; The half-metal face made no response.
‘Part of me wanted to,’ Sorrlock’s monotone voice came at last.
There was a pause, a long pause, and when he spoke again it was almost as footnote.
‘But that part is weak.’
Deathwatch 6: First to Hunt
Chris Dows
Jetek Suberei opened his eyes and looked up to the blazing twin suns of Ballestae, their harsh white glow unfiltered by helmet or visor. Reaching down with his ungloved left hand, he touched the barren rocky surface of the planet and, like any good son of Chogoris, tried to read its secrets.
Sheer walls of granite towered hundreds of yards above him on either side. Their shape and form funnelled a vicious wind that whipped dust and tiny fragments of rock onto his exposed face, flicking the ends of his drooping moustache and long, braided topknot. Suns and breeze were scorching in their own way, but none of this registered on the kneeling Deathwatch warrior, too focussed on learning what the floor of the yawning chasm had to tell him about what lay ahead.
Unfortunately, the tale being told was of little use.
‘Difficult to say how much further we must travel, Vengla. You will have to take flight once again and be the eyes of Suberei. The xenos scum cannot be too far away.’
Rising to his feet, the White Scar strode over to his idling bike and snatched his helmet up from the broad seat. Thrusting it back on, he reached for his gauntlet and clicked it into place, but instead of mounting the battered vehicle, he extended his left arm and took the weight of the magnificent cyber-eagle as she glided from her perch on top of the bike’s rear wheel cowling. His impulse-link with the hunting bird might be at the most feral, basic level when they were not in direct communion, but during the long and isolated scouting missions that Suberei favoured, he spoke to her as though she understood every word.
Vengla took flight and climbed swiftly, using the swirling currents and rising heat of Ballestae’s unforgiving surface to twirl into the open sky. It filled Suberei’s heart with joy to see her soar. It brought back his memories of being a child on Mundus Planus, when he would go hunting with his tribe on the brutal Chogorian steppes. It mattered not that Vengla carried the augmentations of the White Scars Techmarines, that she was not a pure-breed – in fact, with her enhanced vision, power and reactions she had proved a great ally and, on occasion, a formidable weapon.
