by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
‘Despite what many believe, greenskins are capable of trickery and subterfuge. I wouldn’t discount the possibility that Drogg is hiding within the gas giant, ready to ambush us at a moment’s notice. We’ve seen it before.’
Cassius nodded, and gestured to Ectros. ‘You have served in the Deathwatch long enough now, Thaniel. Have you not learned that assumptions, especially where alien beings are concerned, can prove fatal? You must divest yourself of your preconceptions, and utilise the varied expertise of your team members. You will never become an effective watch captain until you do.’
Ectros’ jaw worked, but he remained silent.
‘I didn’t hear you,’ Cassius said.
‘I understand, Chaplain,’ he said tersely.
‘Don’t simply understand. Put it into practice – or else our time has been wasted.’ Cassius lowered his arm again. ‘Vael, contact the port. The rest of you, look to your wargear and prepare your hearts for battle. Insertion for this mission will be via drop pod.’
Ectros frowned. ‘Respectfully, Port Cepheus can accommodate a ship of this size. Should we not simply dock the Veritas on one of the fuelling piers?’
Cassius’ answer was a loaded one. ‘Is that what you would do, brother, if this were your kill team instead of mine?’
Ectros took a moment to consider, looking for what he had missed. ‘Granted, if there is an ork vessel lying in ambush, the Veritas becomes a stationary target if she docks. Conversely, if we use drop craft, not only is our deployment safe from possible interception, but the ship will remain free to act against any potential enemies. I see the wisdom of it.’
‘Then hope remains,’ Cassius said.
The others each saluted in their own ways and left the chamber while Donatus accessed the main vox-array. His brow furrowed. ‘There is no response on any of the long or mid-range channels. Even their distress call is being routed through a secondary system. It could be a mechanical failure.’
‘More likely, their communications have been purposefully sabotaged so that no one outside of their immediate vicinity will be able to hear them.’
‘I had reached the same conclusion, brother.’
Cassius opened a channel and called down to the lower decks. ‘Increase to best speed, and prepare for drop-deployment. Forward lance batteries at full ready.’
The Veritas had been designed to transport a single Space Marine unit, along with all the attendant serfs and vehicular support, rapidly across interstellar distances. Her engines were among the best in her class, and before long, the station loomed large beneath them. The vox-channels still registered nothing but empty static and background noise, and the endlessly repeating distress call that no one save the crew of the Veritas would ever be able to hear.
By the time Cassius and Donatus entered the cramped space within the drop pod, the other team members had stowed all of their weapons and locked themselves into restraining harnesses. Donatus took a moment to ensure that his prized Artifex pattern boltgun was safely racked before locking himself into place.
The deployment doors slowly closed. Cassius took his place in the sole remaining alcove and signalled to the bridge crew that all was ready. Deep reverberations came through the pod walls as cumbersome machinery was roused from sleep.
There was an anticipatory moment of stillness, and then they were away.
The pod rocketed from the ship with a velocity that would have pulverised most mortal men. The Space Marines were lifted upwards until their restraints creaked. Cassius muttered the Liturgy of Freefall, asking the Emperor’s blessing to be upon the machine-spirit of their transport. Otherwise, there was no sound but the dim roaring of thrusters beneath their feet, until Donatus spoke over the vox-channel they all shared.
‘Brother-Chaplain, I’ve been monitoring Port Cepheus’ short-range comms. Something is coming in.’
‘Let’s hear it.’
The kill team’s helmets were immediately filled with a woman’s strained voice. As she shouted, the background was filled with overlapping cries, the whine of turbine engines and staccato lasgun fire.
‘…don’t care, just secure the main door! Incoming Imperial vessel, I pray you can hear us. We are evacuating the station via Aquila lander. Repeat, we are evacuating the station.’
‘Port Cepheus,’ Cassius shouted back, ‘this is Chaplain Ortan Cassius of the Deathwatch, commanding the starship Veritas. A relief force is currently inbound to your location. Remain where you are.’
Someone was screaming. The woman’s voice called over the din to her would-be saviours. ‘Not a chance. We’re lifting off.’
Cassius cursed. Fear always drove mortals to act irrationally.
He called up the pod’s exterior feeds. His helmet’s visor display was suddenly filled with a scene from the landing scanners mounted at the base of the exterior doors. Port Cepheus seemed to be rushing up towards him through a halo of retro-rocket flame. As they had seen on the long-range augurs, three of the station’s docking spars were vacant. On the fourth sat a bulk freighter – its hull was ancient, pitted and dull, and thoroughly unremarkable.
Then he saw the lander, near the base of the central tower. Its wings were spread like those of an eagle, but the rest of it displayed none of its namesake’s gracefulness as it heaved up from the deck and began a wobbling climb.
‘Aquila lander,’ Cassius called, ‘you will not be permitted to dock with our ship until we have ascertained the nature of your distress call.’
‘There’s no ti–’
The link went dead.
Cassius watched the Aquila as it began a drunken roll to one side, before striking the deck with its wing tip. The fuselage came down hard on the docking pier, and the fuel tanks inside the hull ruptured. Still within Port Cepheus’ limited atmospheric envelope, the lander exploded, the short-lived fireball scattering smouldering hunks of armour plating noiselessly across the surface of the station.
The others did not respond, though many of them had also witnessed the crash. The pod signalled that it would impact in ten seconds.
‘Weapons ready!’ Cassius barked. He flicked off the external feed and drew his bolt pistol. ‘Consider our landing zone hostile!’
And then, with a mighty, thundering impact, they were down. The restraining harness retracted from Cassius’ shoulders, and the doors surrounding them all fell away with a flurry of locking bolt reports.
As he and the others exited the pod, it became immediately apparent that the port’s gravitic generators had been sent offline by the force of the lander’s destruction. The mag-lock plates in the soles of their armoured boots vibrated softly as they worked to keep each warrior securely bound to the space station’s deck.
Cassius found himself flanked by Omid and his heavy bolter on one side, and by Donatus on the other.
‘Auspex,’ the chaplain barked. ‘Scan for survivors.’
Koden moved up beside Omid, a portable scanner in his outstretched hand. He aimed the device towards the wreckage of the Aquila, pieces of which were already beginning to drift away into the void. ‘No survivors. Nothing within fifty yards in any direction.’
‘No life forms at all? What about from within the station?’
Koden shook his head.
Cassius surveyed the area. Port Cepheus’ central tower lay a short distance to his left, but its viewports were dark. Beyond the crashed lander loomed the corroded hull of the bulk cargo freighter. What few windows the ship had were as black and lifeless as the station’s. Huge, twisting pipes connected its cylindrical midsection to the pier’s deck plating. White lettering, faded to obscurity, stretched across its bow.
‘Brother Pranus,’ Cassius called.
One of the Space Marines near the back of the formation raised his head. His right shoulder guard was a field of blue emblazoned with a skull and a twelve-pointed star. ‘Brother-Chaplain?’
‘Go with Omid and two others. I want a sweep of that freighter.’
‘Understo
od, my lord.’ Pranus gestured to the Space Marines on either side of him. ‘I’ll take Brothers Siegfric and Thalassi.’
Cassius nodded in agreement. ‘Captain Ectros and I will lead the remainder of the team through the station on the chance that there are additional survivors. We will also retrieve the station logs and personnel files from the cogitator banks. Keep the vox-channel open at all times.’
‘We are no longer concerning ourselves with potential eavesdroppers?’ Ectros asked. The captain’s voice carried a trace of cynicism that Cassius did not fail to notice.
‘Mordakka is not here,’ he said quietly.
‘Can we be so certain?’
Cassius watched as Pranus, Omid, Thalassi and Siegfric made their way past the wreckage of the Aquila and towards the freighter.
‘If he were, he would have attacked us by now.’
‘Hostica ignotus. If not greenskins,’ Ectros asked, ‘then what?’
To that, Cassius had no answer.
The central spire’s nearest voidlock stood open. Within, a blinking blue light futilely warned of complete depressurisation. Cassius and Donatus entered first, followed by Ectros and the others.
Beyond the open airlock was a large, darkened chamber filled with storage lockers, and a wide, circular stairwell. A ceramic cup surrounded by frozen droplets of some dark brown liquid twirled end over end in the absence of gravity.
Cassius pointed to Koden, who once again held up his auspex.
‘Still registering no life forms,’ he said. ‘The station’s atmospheric envelope has failed. This is hard vacuum.’
‘Vael,’ the Chaplain said, ‘lead the way. The xenos must be purged!’
Donatus moved to the base of the stairwell, his boltgun at the ready. They began their climb in single file. On the second level, they passed a space that had once served as a communal dining area. Chairs and long metal tables drifted aimlessly, banging into one another. Above that, they encountered floor after floor of empty hab-compartments.
It was on the seventh level that they encountered the remains of two makeshift barricades. Supply crates and empty fuel drums now floated freely, but Cassius could see how they had been used to block the stairs. An empty lasgun lay on the floor, secured in place by a frozen pool of blood. Tattered shreds of beige cloth drifted lazily, their edges stained red.
A nearby wall caught Cassius’ eye. It looked as if something had exploded against it, leaving a dark stain. Tiny, jagged shards were embedded all around it. He pulled one of them out and held it between his fingers. It was deep indigo, shot through with veins of black.
‘Up here!’ Donatus called.
Cassius flicked the fragment away.
The command deck was located on the next and topmost floor. A set of thick blast doors, their external surfaces covered with deep scratches and grooves, greeted the Space Marines. Something – perhaps several somethings – had been trying desperately to get in here.
Cassius pushed past Ectros and the others to Donatus’ side, and together they hauled the doors open.
The chamber was circular in shape, with archways to both left and right. In the centre of the room squatted a bank of bulky cogitator machines. Two of their front panels had been removed so that a nest of wires and connectors spilled from the open space. The wall opposite the blast doors was dominated by a long crystalflex window.
Wordlessly, Cassius signalled for Ectros and Koden to each search one of the adjoining rooms while he crossed to the window. Through it, he could look out on all four of Port Cepheus’ docking piers. There was a second Aquila lander, he saw, sitting quietly on an elevated platform near the pitted freighter. The topmost viewports of the large ship were now brightly lit, and so he opened a vox-channel to the second team.
‘Pranus, report.’
‘Brother-Chaplain, we have completed a search of the lower decks and are currently on the vessel’s bridge. We’ve seen no indication of hostile xenos or the vessel’s crew.’
‘What is the status of the ship itself?’
‘Completely intact.’
‘Are you able to rouse its machine-spirit?’ Donatus asked. He had squatted down to examine the patchwork wiring more closely.
‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘Easily.’
‘What is the vessel’s name?’ Cassius demanded. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘The Pride of Ghosar. An ore freighter from the Ghosarian System. It arrived forty-seven hours before we did.’
‘Has it been resupplied?’
‘Yes, Chaplain. The ship is fully refuelled, and carries a full cargo load. A return course to the planet of Ghosar Quintus has already been plotted.’
Donatus pulled something free from within the tangled innards of the cogitator and stood up. In his hand he held a battered dataslate.
‘Station logs?’ Cassius asked.
Donatus nodded. ‘Useless. Scrambled and corrupted.’
Koden emerged from the nearest doorway and said, ‘Equipment storage. Thoroughly ransacked. There are compartments for fifteen environment suits. Half a dozen of them are missing.’
‘Ectros?’ Cassius called out.
The captain stepped back into the room. He held a rectangular device in his left hand. ‘I found nothing of note, save for this.’
‘A vox-corder?’
Ectros nodded and handed the box to Donatus. After a moment, he depressed a button on the side of the device, and the voice of the woman they had spoken with earlier filled their helmets.
‘I’ll… I’ll try to make this as brief as possible. If for some reason we are unsuccessful in our escape attempt, then at least there’ll be some kind of record. It’s been nearly two days since the creatures appeared, and in that time more than half of the station’s crew have either been killed or gone missing. I have no idea what happened to all the servitors. Maybe they just tore them apart so that they couldn’t repair any of our communications systems.
‘These things – we don’t know what to call them – are smart. We thought they were just animals at first, but they disabled the primary power grid somehow, and slaughtered our astropaths. They intentionally cut us off from any kind of outside help, isolating us so that they could finish us off at leisure. Chameron was able to reroute a distress call through the secondary systems, though. He wasn’t even sure that it would reach far enough for anyone to hear.
‘I want it noted that the crew of Port Cepheus defended this installation to the end. I mean, they’re mostly dock workers and menial mechanics, but they did the work of any Militarum guardsmen. They set up barricades on the floor below us, and when the… things… rushed them… well, they kept… they kept on…
‘Well, there’s only six of us now. Myself, Chameron, Chief Medicae Gryr, Alexus and the Inge brothers. The blast doors seem to have held the damned things off for now, but it’s only a matter of time before they find some other way to get in here. So, we’ve decided to just run for it while we can… try and get off the station and rendezvous with the approaching Adeptus Astartes frigate. We’ll take the lander – no way I’m going anywhere near that freighter. It’s no coincidence that the infestation started right after it arrived. I know it.
‘Anyway, I guess that’s all there is to say. May the Emperor have mercy on us. This is Overseer Lusi Arevik, Port Cepheus, Vadol Majoris System.’
The recording ended with a click. The Space Marines digested the information in silence for a moment.
‘Pranus,’ Cassius said, ‘were you privy to that?’
‘Yes, Chaplain. We heard it all.’
Cassius rifled through his memory. There were many species in the galaxy that propagated themselves by becoming stowaways. They would attach themselves to the outer hulls of starships or hide away within their cluttered holds. Almost all of them were animalistic vermin of one kind or another, and certainly couldn’t have precipitated a slaughter such as this. The only possible candidates he could call to mind were–
‘There’s something
else you should see, my lord – patching through to your display now.’
Brother Pranus’ rune-icon blinked up in Cassius’ helm, and his visual feed overlaid the visor. The Chaplain saw the dismal interior of the Pride of Ghosar, all bare metal bulkheads and worn decking. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Then Pranus turned to the rearmost wall of the bridge, and Cassius was filled with fresh hatred for all the unspeakable forms of xenos he had ever encountered.
Elegantly depicted in ageing fresco was a devotional mural of the Emperor of Mankind, defiled as though by some madman’s whim. His teeth were fangs, and his too-many hands tipped with elongated claws. Beneath this abomination, rendered in crudely sprayed lacquer, were the words ‘BLESSED BE THE TRYSST! ALL HAIL THE FOUR-ARMED EMPEROR!’
Blinking away the feed in disgust, Cassius returned his attention to the chamber in which he stood.
In that fractional instant, he caught the barest glimpse of something as it flew up the main stairwell and through the open blast doors – a blur of limbs and chitinous shell and teeth that hurled itself against Brother Koden’s shoulders. The Space Wolf gave a grunt and stumbled forwards with the unexpected impact.
Cassius raised his crozius arcanum, the gilded power maul that was the symbol of his office, above his head. He meant to remove the creature from Koden’s back with one fell blow, but he never got the chance. The crystalflex window beside him shattered soundlessly as three more creatures forced their way into the control room. Like the one attacking Koden, they were multi-limbed and covered with an indigo-coloured shell. Their heads were dominated by mouths filled with teeth the size of knives.
Possessed of a hellish speed, they were upon the team before they could react.
The xenos slashed at Cassius’ chest with their claws. One of them attempted to bite its way through the top of his helmet. With a cry of defiance, he swung the crozius. One of the monsters was struck across the face. Globules of dark blood sprayed out from between its teeth and spattered against the wall.
