Deathwatch: Ignition

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

  ‘Adomar,’ said Ralon, his voice an anchor of calm. ‘Extract the asset from the xenos device, and take care you don’t kill him doing it. Kitra, find me an exit, and kill anything in front of you. Grytt, you and I will attend to this beast.’

  Grytt set his stance wide and low, and levelled his frag cannon at the greenskin warlord. ‘This time, xenos filth, you won’t go crawling away into the dark to hide.’

  The warboss stopped and roared as the warhost of ork warriors gathered behind it.

  The Space Marines braced. Kitra and Adomar leapt to their tasks, while Grytt and Ralon stood before the warboss.

  ‘Grytt, we strike together,’ said Ralon, his eyes locked on the hulking monstrosity. ‘I’ll circle to the right, draw its–’

  ‘Just kill it!’ bellowed Grytt, firing a burst from his frag cannon. ‘Die now, filth. Face the judgment of Dorn, and the Emperor!’

  The solid rounds clanged and ricocheted from the warboss’ armour, smacking into the walls and slaying the orks behind it. Those rounds that found flesh burst through in ragged wounds, enraging the alien chieftain further.

  In three massive strides, the warboss covered the distance to the Devastator and smashed him into the air with a single sweep of its claws.

  Grytt landed hard against the far wall and crashed to the floor. His retinal display blacked out and reset, clouded with static. He blinked blood from his eyes, searching for his spotter. The servo-skull was lost in the smoke, its feed to his display cut.

  The Imperial Fist pushed himself to his knees as Ralon leapt through the air to land on the ork’s shoulders. Each slash of the commander’s axe cleaved iron horns from the warboss’ crown as he blasted down at its face with his bolt pistol.

  The warboss bucked, twisting to shake the Executioner off. Ralon reared back and buried his axe in the alien’s forehead in a spray of dark blood. The xenos swung with the blow, catching the Space Marine off balance. Then it grabbed Ralon in its claws and, without apparent effort, tore him bodily in half.

  A cry of rage tore from Grytt’s throat as he stood on shaking legs. The warboss turned, throwing the Executioner’s remains aside, and stomped towards him. Grytt fired at the charging ork, targeting the breaches in its armour. With a howl of rage, the xenos reared back as an explosive round detonated, blowing one of its claws apart in a burst of flame and bloody shrapnel.

  Swinging the ragged stump like a club, the warboss smashed Grytt to the deck once again and seized him with its remaining claw. Raising the Imperial Fist to its frothing, roaring maw, it squeezed. Pistons and crude hydraulics in the claw’s talons crushed Grytt’s armour, and he felt the overlapping plates of ceramite grind and snap under the titanic strain.

  Unable to free his frag cannon from the ork’s monstrous grip, Grytt pulled his combat blade, slashing at the bundles of wires and hydraulic feeds weaving over the claw. The hoses snapped, spraying oil and brackish fluid like crazed serpents, but still the claw closed tighter.

  Grytt felt his vision narrow as the force overwhelmed him, when his retinal display blinked, reconnecting him with the feed from his servo-skull. Grytt saw the arch of stone the warboss lumbered beneath, dust and debris falling from it with each thunderous step.

  Grytt chambered a burst of high explosive rounds, and strained to aim his frag cannon’s barrel at the ork’s legs. He fired, snarling as the blast also sent shards of metal and stone through his own armoured greaves, but felt the ork’s claw relax a fraction as it howled in pain.

  He kicked away, freeing himself and landing with a crash on his back. He raised the cannon to the cracked stone of the archway over them.

  ‘To the abyss with you, filth!’ Grytt fired, obliterating the arch and burying both him and the ork warlord beneath an avalanche of ruined masonry.

  He wheezed, blinking away the procession of urgent runes spilling over his visor display. He squinted, looking through the intermittent feed of the servo-skull. A heap of broken stone covered him and the ork, wreathed in clinging ghosts of smoke and dust.

  Grunting with effort, he pushed forwards through the pile, dragging himself towards the flickering light. Razor-edged fragments gouged his plate and scraped the enamel from his armour. The fibre-bundle musculature of his left leg was shredded, and the armour hung as a dead weight.

  Grytt punched through, and dragged himself free from the rubble.

  The mound of rock shuddered, rolling away as the head of the warboss also pushed free, howling as it thrashed to right itself. It clamped its sparking claw around Grytt’s leg, dragging the Space Marine back towards it.

  Grytt rolled in its grip, levelling his frag cannon at the beast, and fired.

  But the weapon only clunked with an uneven cough.

  He wrenched furiously at the firing mechanism, fighting to clear the jam as the ork pulled him closer. With a bark, Grytt expelled a dented shell from the weapon’s breech, and fired again. The shell screamed from the cannon in a blast of fire and smoke, striking the warboss in the gape of its maw. The high explosive round ruptured the ork’s skull, detonating in a shower of blood and rancid meat.

  The Devastator lowered the smoking barrel of the cannon, dragging deep breaths through his helm as the rusted claw went slack.

  ‘So must the fate of all xenos be.’

  Kitra ducked beneath an ork swinging a club of jagged metal and cleaved upwards, splitting the creature from hip to neck with his lightning claws. He leapt onto a gantry, scanning the chamber for a viable exit.

  Adomar stood before the half-constructed tomb for the trapped Navigator. The air froze, and ice formed over the metal as the Silver Skull began to tear it apart with his mind. He stripped away plates of iron, taking care not to harm the youth within. Clearing the framework away from the boy’s unconscious form, Adomar slid the lengths of rebar spike from the Navigator’s arms, and caught him as he fell.

  ‘Brothers,’ said Adomar. ‘I have him. He yet lives.’

  ‘And I have located a pathway that should lead out of the hulk,’ said Kitra. ‘Awaiting team leader’s confirmation.’

  ‘Ralon has fallen,’ Grytt responded over the vox, firing a high explosive round to collapse the tunnel behind him. ‘We need to withdraw now. The Kisertet will begin its bombardment in minutes.’

  Kitra growled. ‘Have you no respect for the dead, Fist?’ He loomed before the Devastator as they met with Adomar at the centre of the chamber. ‘Another brother lost for your recklessness. Is there no end to–’

  The Reviler’s words were drowned by a choking cry as he was enveloped in scarlet lightning. Kitra thrashed as he rose into the air and hurtled into a control panel in a shower of sparks.

  The ork psyker emerged from the smoke of the burning chamber, uncouth rage ticking tremors across its face.

  Grytt bellowed wordlessly, firing a burst from his frag cannon.

  The ork did not move. The shells froze, tumbling slowly around the greenskin, before shooting off in different directions to frame the xenos in bursts of fire and shrapnel.

  ‘See to him!’ cried Adomar, passing the Navigator to Grytt and charging the ork, his sword burning with psychic flame.

  The two psykers clashed in a thunderclap of warring energies. Adomar parried a blow from the ork’s staff, rolling his wrists and slashing across the alien’s chest. Blood boiled from the wound, and the creature howled in anger, its scream a sonic blast that threw Adomar from his feet.

  The ork leapt towards the prone psyker, deflecting a shell fired from Grytt’s cannon with a thought and sending it spiralling back towards him. The round exploded at the Devastator’s feet, throwing him through the air to crash hard against the ground.

  Landing before Adomar, the xenos plucked a crooked dagger from its belt, the rusted blade writhing with poisonous energy. The greenskin slashed the dagger into Adomar’s chest, again and again. He made to drive the blade down into the Space Marine’s throat, but stopped as the temperature in the chamber plummeted.

  Standing s
ilently beside the xenos psyker was Sai of House Trigarta.

  The ork growled as it glared down upon him, enraged by his escape. Adomar rolled free, turning his back to the boy.

  Slowly, the lid of Sai’s third eye quivered free of its crust of dried blood and drew back, locking the alien’s gaze with the forbidden sight of his mutation.

  The greenskin’s eyes widened, their blazing red hue drowned in blackness so complete that light could not escape their surface. The flesh shivered and bulged. With a moist pop, they melted down its face, revealing undulating rifts into the warp within the sunken pits.

  Billions of tiny writhing claws tore into the dumbstruck beast, pulling it into the gashes in reality. Flesh ripped liked oiled sackcloth and bones gave way with a sickening crack as it was pulled into the impossibly small rifts. A howl of incomprehensible agony tore from the greenskin’s throat as the warp devoured it, the steaming coils of its entrails streaming up and into oblivion in shrieks of flash-frying blood.

  The ork’s screams died as its throat tore away, pulled into the abyss. The creature’s skull broke in half as it was sucked into the portals, leaving two glowing tears in reality floating in the chamber.

  Flickering with lightning, the rifts coalesced into a gateway to the Immaterium. Ribbons of nightmarish colour pressed against the thinning veil between the real and unreal, clawed things made from anguish and fury desperate to breach the material realm. Liquid madness began to stretch the portal wider, eager to feast.

  ‘Grytt,’ said Adomar weakly, reaching towards the Navigator. The Imperial Fist stood, ignoring the stabbing pains shooting through his body, and limped to the boy.

  Sai stared up at the undulating doorway, looking at things that only he could see shimmering before him. Mandalas of pulsing light collapsed and reformed again, flickering in and out of focus.

  ‘Come, my child…’ a million unholy voices sang to him. ‘There is so much for you to see…’

  Sai took a step forwards, blood flowing from his mundane eyes, and reached for the rift.

  Grytt seized hold of the boy, and clamped his hand over the Navigator’s eye. A billion cries lashed out from the rift as it seized and withered. Lightning the colour of shame and ecstasy burst from the rapidly diminishing ball of unreality, before coalescing into a sphere of black glass. The sphere hovered in the air for a moment, before dropping and shattering against the ground. The shards twitched with a clink before boiling away into a muffled thunderclap of sparking mist.

  Grytt staggered as Sai collapsed, barely managing to get an arm under him. Adomar pushed himself to his feet and, with Kitra supporting him, the Space Marines took flight.

  The kill team sprinted through the tunnels of the ork hulk as the chrono chimed down. Grytt stopped at junctions and intersections, blasting the hordes of pursuing greenskins and collapsing tunnel walls to bury the howling xenos beneath tons of rock. He fired the frag cannon one-handed, cradling Sai’s unconscious form in the other.

  The Space Marines charged through the hulk and into the crash site beyond, ash streaming from their armour as they ran.

  Adomar collapsed. At his side, Kitra hauled him to his knees again, though this time his hands came away slick with blood.

  ‘Brother,’ whispered Kitra.

  The Silver Skull removed his helm with a hiss of venting air pressure, the tattooed face beneath a scarlet mask of blood.

  ‘You cannot tarry. Go, now. Leave me.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Kitra, breathless, ‘are these acceptable losses?’

  Adomar laughed, a wet choke of blood between his teeth.

  ‘We are dead from the moment we ascend to the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes, Reviler. Even more so when we take the oaths of the Deathwatch. Death is our only destiny, and no loss is too high to eclipse the scale of duty.’

  The chrono in Grytt’s helm beeped. Four minutes remained. The ground began to shake with the tread of raging orks.

  ‘Go, damn you!’ Adomar hissed, driving his sword into the ground and leaning his weight against it. ‘See our mission done, and ensure that the blood drunk by the soil of this world was not shed for nothing.’

  ‘By Dorn, your sacrifice shall never be forgotten, brother.’ Grytt hammered a fist to his breastplate.

  ‘Die well, son of Varsavia,’ said Kitra as he turned away.

  Adomar laughed again.

  ‘I shall, brother. And not alone.’

  Grytt and Kitra set off to the extraction point at a run. Adomar set his helm in the dust beside him, and watched the street fill with howling greenskins. A growl built in his throat, and a crackling nimbus of light blinked into existence around him.

  His growl became a cry, as stones and rubble lifted from the ground, floating and chaining with lightning around the psyker. His eyes narrowed as the orks drew within a few paces, a sea of berserker fury.

  The midnight lacquer on the Space Marine’s armour boiled away, exposing the bare silver ceramite of the war-plate. Adomar roared, and a blinding light slashed out from his eyes, curling around him as the nimbus of lightning spasmed and swelled. The horde of fury raced towards the boiling wall of energy.

  The first ork brushed against the veil, and the avenue vanished in a searing flash. Lightning exploded in strobes of crackling death, the greenskins vaporising and bursting like sacks of jellied meat.

  Adomar of the Silver Skulls felt his body boil away, and plunged into the waiting darkness.

  Grytt felt the shockwave as it burst through the air, throwing him and Kitra forwards. The Imperial Fist turned, sheltering Sai’s body as he fell. He crashed into the wreckage of a ground carriage, his retinal display awash with static and frenzied warning icons. His helm crumpled, the left eyepiece torn away by the impact. He wrenched the helmet free and locked it to his belt.

  Hands gripped his shoulder and lifted him to his knees.

  ‘No time for rest, brother,’ said Kitra, extending his hand.

  Grytt gripped the Reviler by the wrist and stood, lifting Sai from the ground. He punched the release stud of his harness, shrugging the depleted ammunition hopper from his back and dropping it to the dust. Locking the frag cannon to his back, Grytt caught a bolt pistol tossed to him by Kitra, and the two warriors charged down the avenue to the extraction site as the remaining minutes burned away.

  Grytt ducked reflexively as an ebon Thunderhawk screamed low over their heads, its retros shrieking as it cut a tight blistering arc to slow at a city courtyard. The gunship hovered over the rubble as the Space Marines sprinted to it, pintle-mounted heavy bolters blasting away at the hordes of pursuing orks.

  The embarkation ramp of the gunship lowered as they approached. Kitra leapt up, turning to take hold of the Navigator as Grytt gripped the edge.

  A rocket spiralled towards the Thunderhawk, and the gunship swayed aside as the missile flashed over it. Grytt snarled as he clung to the ramp, hearing the chrono in his collar chime.

  ‘Get airborne now!’ shouted Grytt, hauling himself up as the Thunderhawk hurtled into the sky. He swung his legs onto the ramp, and Kitra dragged him up as the craft rocketed, rolling and blasting up into orbit.

  ‘Grab hold of something,’ the pilot called over the vox. ‘They’ve initiated the bombardment already!’

  Grytt and Kitra locked themselves into restraint thrones in the forward hold and secured the Navigator. The gunship wrenched to the side as the first streaking lines of the orbital strike lit up the sky, pushing its engines beyond their tolerances to put distance from the surface.

  Fulgurant streaks of light burned through the ash storms, lancing down like the defied fury of the Emperor Himself. The hulk caught fire as the orbital bombardment struck its surface, burning as lance strikes sliced into it. Mass drivers smashed down, blasting the xenos ship to atoms in thunderous detonations that filled the sky with flame. The orks within were boiled alive as bolts of plasma liquefied the craft, and devastating ordnance shattered the ruins of Pomarii. Explosions burst over the surface
as the ­Imperium of Man avenged the death of its subjects with fire and blood.

  Waves of fire and plasma swept the continent, burning the surface to glass. Anything living on the surface, human or greenskin, was obliterated in the searing conflagration. The ash storms amplified, swelling larger and surging across the planet as they drank in the ruin.

  Grytt glanced down at Sai, the young Navigator twitching in the throes of some unknown nightmare. It would not be his last, Grytt thought as he tightened the medical dressing obscuring the boy’s mutation.

  Then he looked from the viewport down at the devastation as they climbed through the upper reaches of Basatani’s atmosphere. The ork hulk was gone, the site of its impact nothing more than an irradiated crater of scorched rock. The city was shattered further as another bombardment began. Soon nothing would remain but glass and slag scattered over a scorched open graveyard. His gaze shifted to the Navigator, then his ever-watchful servo-skull, caked in ash and scorched from battle.

  Grytt knew at that moment that his decision to join the Deathwatch had been right. The bloodshed below had not freed him of his rage, but would he have succeeded without its fire? He felt clarity descend as the ship rose into orbit, a tempering of his choler that he had never felt before.

  It was not gone, but assuaged. If only briefly.

  The clarity crystallised within him, a sense of understanding. He was not one to lead, never the implacable glacier of calm that Captain Kyradon of the Eighth Company had been. He was the hammer of Dorn, a weapon for sowing destruction and purging the enemies of Man into oblivion.

  If his first mission with the Deathwatch were any impression, there would be many foes to be destroyed in the time to come.

  Deathwatch 8: The Silence

  Steve Lyons

  The xenos died without ever seeing its killer.