by Nick Kyme
He opened his eyes and saw the craggy, battle-scarred features of Darrion Rauth. The Exorcist was standing very close, helmet at his side, muttering something that sounded like a prayer.
His bolter was pressed to Karras’s head, and he was about to blow his brains out.
‘WHAT ARE YOU doing?’ Karras asked quietly.
Rauth looked surprised to hear his voice.
‘I’m saving your soul, Death Spectre. Be at peace. Your honour will be spared. The daemons of the warp will not have you.’ ‘That is good to know,’ said Karras. ‘Now lower your weapon. My soul is exactly where it should be, and there it stays until my service to the Emperor is done.’
For a moment, neither Rauth nor Karras moved. The Exorcist did not seem convinced.
‘Darrion Rauth,’ said Karras. ‘Are you so eager to spill my blood? Is this why you have shadowed my every movement for the last three years? Perhaps Solarion would thank you for killing me, but I don’t think Sigma would.’
‘That would depend,’ Rauth replied. Hesitantly, however, he lowered his gun. ‘You will submit to proper testing when we return to the Saint Nevarre. Sigma will insist on it, and so shall I.’
‘As is your right, brother, but be assured that you will find no taint. Of course it won’t matter either way unless we get off this ship alive. Quickly now, grab the monster’s head. I will open the cryo-case.’
Rauth did as ordered, though he kept a wary eye on the kill-team leader. Lifting Bludwrekk’s lifeless head, he offered it to Karras, saying, ‘The machinery that boosted Bludwrekk’s power should be analysed. If other ork psykers begin to employ such things…’
Karras took the ork’s head from him, placed it inside the black case, and pressed a four-digit code into the keypad on the side. The lid fused itself shut with a hiss. Karras rose, slung it over his right shoulder, sheathed Arquemann, located his helmet, and fixed it back on his head. Rauth donned his own helmet, too.
‘If Sigma wanted the machine,’ said Karras as he led his comrade off the command bridge, ‘he would have said so.’
Glancing at the mission chrono, he saw that barely seventeen minutes remained until the exfiltration deadline. He doubted it would be enough to escape the ship, but he wasn’t about to give up without trying. Not after all they had been through here. ‘Can you run?’ he asked Rauth.
‘TIME IS UP,’ said Solarion grimly. He stood in front of the open elevator cage. ‘They’re not going to make it. I’m coming down.’ ‘No,’ said Voss. ‘Give them another minute, Prophet.’
Voss and Zeed had finished slaughtering their attackers on the lower floor. It was just as well, too. Voss had used up the last of his promethium fuel in the fight. With great regret, he had slung the fuel pack off his back and relinquished the powerful weapon. He drew his support weapon, a bolt pistol, from a holster on his webbing.
It felt pathetically small and light in his hand.
‘Would you have us all die here, brother?’ asked the Ultramarine. ‘For no gain? Because that will be our lot if we don’t get moving right now.’
‘If only we had heard something on the link…’ said Zeed. ‘Omni, as much as I hate to say it, Prophet has a point.’
‘Believe me,’ said Solarion, ‘I wish it were otherwise. As of this moment, however, it seems only prudent that I assume operational command. Sigma, if you are listening—’
A familiar voice cut him off.
‘Wait until my boots have cooled before you step into them, Solarion!’
‘Scholar!’ exclaimed Zeed. ‘And is Watcher with you?’
‘How many times must I warn you, Raven Guard,’ said the Exorcist. ‘Don’t call me that.’
‘At least another hundred,’ replied Zeed.
‘Karras,’ said Voss, ‘where in Dorn’s name are you?’
‘Almost at the platform now,’ said Karras. ‘We’ve got company. Ork commandos closing the distance from the rear.’ ‘Keep your speed up,’ said Solarion. ‘The stairs are out. You’ll have to jump. The gap is about thirty metres.’
‘Understood,’ said Karras. ‘Coming out of the corridor now.’
Solarion could hear the thunder of heavy feet pounding the upper metal platform from which he had so recently leaped. He watched from beside the elevator, and saw two bulky black figures soar out into the air.
Karras landed first, coming down hard. The cryo-case came free of his shoulder and skidded across the metal floor towards the edge. Solarion saw it and moved automatically, stopping it with one booted foot before it slid over the side.
Rauth landed a second later, slamming onto the platform in a heap. He gave a grunt of pain, pushed himself up and limped past Solarion into the elevator cage.
‘Are you wounded, brother?’ asked the Ultramarine.
‘It is nothing,’ growled Rauth.
Karras and Solarion joined him in the cage. The kill-team leader pulled the lever, starting them on their downward journey. The cage started slowly at first, but soon gathered speed. Halfway down, the heavy counterweight again whooshed past them.
‘Ghost, Omni,’ said Karras over the link. ‘Start clearing the route towards the salvage bay. We’ll catch up with you as soon as we’re at the bottom.’
‘Loud and clear, Scholar,’ said Zeed. He and Voss disappeared off into the darkness of the corridor through which the kill-team had originally come.
Suddenly, Rauth pointed upwards. ‘Trouble,’ he said.
Karras and Solarion looked up.
Some of the ork commandos, those more resourceful than their kin, had used grapnels to cross the gap in the platforms. Now they were hacking at the elevator cables with their broad blades.
‘Solarion,’ said Karras.
He didn’t need to say anything else. The Ultramarine raised his bolter, sighted along the barrel, and began firing up at the orks. Shots sparked from the metal around the greenskins’ heads, but it was hard to fire accurately with the elevator shaking and shuddering throughout its descent.
Rauth stepped forward and ripped the lattice-work gate from its hinges. ‘We should jump the last twenty metres,’ he said. Solarion stopped firing. ‘Agreed.’
Karras looked down from the edge of the cage floor. ‘Forty metres,’ he said. ‘Thirty-five. Thirty. Twenty-five. Go!’
Together, the three Astartes leapt clear of the elevator and landed on the metal floor below. Again, Rauth gave a pained grunt, but he was up just as fast as the others.
Behind them, the elevator cage slammed into the floor with a mighty clang. Karras turned just in time to see the heavy counterweight smash down on top of it. The orks had cut the cables after all. Had the three Space Marines stayed in the cage until it reached the bottom, they would have been crushed to a fleshy pulp.
‘Ten minutes left,’ said Karras, adjusting the cryo-case on his shoulder. ‘In the Emperor’s name, run!’
KARRAS, RAUTH AND Solarion soon caught up with Voss and Zeed. There wasn’t time to move carefully now, but Karras dreaded getting caught up in another firefight. That would surely doom them. Perhaps the saints were smiling on him, though, because it seemed that most of the orks in the sections between the central shaft and the prow had responded to the earlier alarms and had already been slain by Zeed and Voss.
The corridors were comparatively empty, but the large mess room with its central squig pit was not.
The Space Marines charged straight in, this time on ground level, and opened fire with their bolters, cutting down the orks that were directly in their way. With his beloved blade, Karras hacked down all who stood before him, always maintaining his forward momentum, never stopping for a moment. In a matter of seconds, the kill-team crossed the mess hall and plunged into the shadowy corridor on the far side.
A great noise erupted behind them. Those orks that had not been killed or injured were taking up weapons and following close by. Their heavy, booted feet shook the grille-work floors of the corridor as they swarmed along it.
‘Omni,’ sai
d Karras, feet hammering the metal floor, ‘the moment we reach the bay, I want you to ready the shuttle. Do not stop to engage, is that clear?’
If Karras had been expecting some argument from the Imperial Fist, he was surprised. Voss acknowledged the order without dispute. The whole team had made it this far by the skin of their teeth, but he knew it would count for absolutely nothing if their shuttle didn’t get clear of the ork ship in time.
Up ahead, just over Solarion’s shoulder, Karras saw the light of the salvage bay. Then, in another few seconds, they were out of the corridor and charging through the mountains of scrap towards the large piece of starship wreckage in which they had stolen aboard.
There was a crew of gretchin around it, working feverishly with wrenches and hammers that looked far too big for their sinewy little bodies. Some even had blowtorches and were cutting through sections of the outer plate.
Damn them, cursed Karras. If they’ve damaged any of our critical systems…
Bolters spat, and the gretchin dropped in a red mist.
‘Omni, get those systems running,’ Karras ordered. ‘We’ll hold them off.’
Voss tossed Karras his bolt pistol as he ran past, then disappeared into the doorway in the side of the ruined prow.
Karras saw Rauth and Solarion open fire as the first of the pursuing orks charged in. At first, they came in twos and threes. Then they came in a great flood. Empty magazines fell to the scrap-covered floor, to be replaced by others that were quickly spent. Karras drew his own bolt pistol from its holster and joined the firefight, wielding one in each hand. Orks fell before him with gaping exit wounds in their heads.
‘I’m out!’ yelled Solarion, drawing his shortsword.
‘Dry,’ called Rauth seconds later and did the same.
Frenzied orks continued to pour in, firing their guns and waving their oversized blades, despite the steadily growing number of their dead that they had to trample over.
‘Blast it!’ cursed Karras. ‘Talk to me, Omni.’
‘Forty seconds,’ answered the Imperial Fist. ‘Coils at sixty per cent.’
Karras’s bolt pistols clicked empty within two rounds of each other. He holstered his own, fixed Voss’s to a loop on his webbing, drew Arquemann and called to the others, ‘Into the shuttle, now. We’ll have to take our chances.’
And hope they don’t cut through to our fuel lines, he thought sourly.
One member of the kill-team, however, didn’t seem to like those odds much.
‘They’re mine!’ Zeed roared, and he threw himself in among the orks, cutting and stabbing in a battle-fury, dropping the giant alien savages like flies. Karras felt a flash of anger, but he marvelled at the way the Raven Guard moved, as if every single flex of muscle and claw was part of a dance that sent xenos filth howling to their deaths.
Zeed’s armour was soon drenched in blood, and still he fought, swiping this way and that, always moving in perpetual slaughter, as if he were a tireless engine of death.
‘Plasma coils at eighty per cent,’ Voss announced. ‘What are we waiting on, Scholar?’
Solarion and Rauth had already broken from the orks they were fighting and had raced inside, but Karras hovered by the door. Zeed was still fighting.
‘Ghost,’ shouted Karras. ‘Fall back, damn you.’
Zeed didn’t seem to hear him, and the seconds kept ticking away. Any moment now, Karras knew, the ork ship’s reactor would explode. Voss had seen to that. Death would take all of them if they didn’t leave right now.
‘Raven Guard!’ Karras roared.
That did it.
Zeed plunged his lightning claws deep into the belly of one last ork, gutted him, then turned and raced towards Karras.
When they were through the door, Karras thumped the locking mechanism with the heel of his fist. ‘You’re worse than Omni,’ he growled at the Raven Guard. Then, over the comm-link, he said, ‘Blow the piston charges and get us out of here fast.’
He heard the sound of ork blades and hammers battering the hull as the orks tried to hack their way inside. The shuttle door would hold but, if Voss didn’t get them out of the salvage bay soon, they would go up with the rest of the ship.
‘Detonating charges now,’ said the Imperial Fist.
In the salvage bay, the packages he had fixed to the big pistons and cables on either side of the bay at the start of the mission exploded, shearing straight through the metal.
There was a great metallic screeching sound and the whole floor of the salvage bay began to shudder. Slowly, the ork ship’s gigantic mouth fell open, and the cold void of space rushed in, stealing away the breathable atmosphere. Everything inside the salvage bay, both animate and inanimate, was blown out of the gigantic mouth, as if snatched up by a mighty hurricane. Anything that hit the great triangular teeth on the way out went into a wild spin. Karras’s team was lucky. Their craft missed clipping the upper front teeth by less than a metre.
‘Shedding the shell,’ said Voss, ‘in three… two… one…’
He hit a button on the pilot’s console that fired a series of explosive bolts, and the wrecked prow facade fragmented and fell away, the pieces drifting off into space like metal blossoms on a breeze. The shuttle beneath was now revealed – a sleek, black wedge-shaped craft bearing the icons of both the Ordo Xenos and the Inquisition proper. All around it, metal debris and rapidly freezing ork bodies spun in zero gravity.
Inside the craft, Karras, Rauth, Solarion and Zeed fixed their weapons on storage racks, sat in their respective places, and locked themselves into impact frames.
‘Hold on to something,’ said Voss from the cockpit as he fired the ship’s plasma thrusters.
The shuttle leapt forward, accelerating violently just as the stern of the massive ork ship exploded. There was a blinding flash of yellow light that outshone even the local star. Then a series of secondary explosions erupted, blowing each section of the vast metal monstrosity apart, from aft to fore, in a great chain of utter destruction. Twenty thousand ork lives were snuffed out in a matter of seconds, reduced to their component atoms in the plasma-charged blasts.
Aboard the shuttle, Zeed removed his helmet and shook out his long black hair. With a broad grin, he said, ‘Damn, but I fought well today.’
Karras might have grinned at the Raven Guard’s exaggerated arrogance, but not this time. His mood was dark, despite their survival. Sigma had asked a lot this time. He looked down at the black surface of the cryo-case between his booted feet. Zeed followed his gaze. ‘We got what we came for, right, Scholar?’ he asked.
Karras nodded.
‘Going to let me see it?’
Zeed hated the ordo’s need-to-know policies, hated not knowing exactly why Talon squad was put on the line, time after time. Karras could identify with that. Maybe they all could. But curiosity brought its own dangers.
In one sense, it didn’t really matter why Sigma wanted Bludwrekk’s head, or anything else, so long as each of the Space Marines honoured the obligations of their Chapters and lived to return to them.
One day, it would all be over.
One day, Karras would set foot on Occludus again, and return to the Librarius as a veteran of the Deathwatch.
He felt Rauth’s eyes on him, watching as always, perhaps closer than ever now. There would be trouble later. Difficult questions. Tests. Karras didn’t lie to himself. He knew how close he had come to losing his soul. He had never allowed so much of the power to flow through him before, and the results made him anxious never to do so again.
How readily would Rauth pull the trigger next time?
Focusing his attention back on Zeed, he shook his head and muttered, ‘There’s nothing to see, Ghost, just an ugly green head with metal plugs in it.’ He tapped the case. ‘Besides, the moment I locked this thing, it fused itself shut. You could ask Sigma to let you see it, but we both know what he’ll say.’
The mention of his name seemed to invoke the inquisitor. His voice sounded on the comm-l
ink. ‘That could have gone better, Alpha. I confess I’m disappointed.’
‘Don’t be,’ Karras replied coldly. ‘We have what you wanted. How fine we cut it is beside the point.’
Sigma said nothing for a moment, then, ‘Fly the shuttle to the extraction coordinates and prepare for pick-up. Redthorne is on her way. And rest while you can. Something else has come up, and I want Talon on it.’
‘What is it this time?’ asked Karras.
‘You’ll know,’ said the inquisitor, ‘when you need to know. Sigma out.’
MAGOS ALTANDO, FORMER member of both biologis and technicus arms of the glorious Adeptus Mechanicus, stared through the wide plex window at his current project. Beyond the transparent barrier, a hundred captured orks lay strapped down to cold metal tables. Their skulls were trepanned, soft grey brains open to the air. Servo-arms dangling from the ceiling prodded each of them with short electrically-charged spikes, eliciting thunderous roars and howls of rage. The strange machine in the centre, wired directly to the greenskins’ brains, siphoned off the psychic energy their collective anger and aggression was generating.
Altando’s many eye-lenses watched his servitors scuttle among the tables, taking the measurements he had demanded.
I must comprehend the manner of its function, he told himself. Who could have projected that the orks were capable of fabricating such a thing?
Frustratingly, much of the data surrounding the recovery of the ork machine was classified above Altando’s clearance level. He knew that a Deathwatch kill-team, designation Scimitar, had uncovered it during a purge of mining tunnels on Delta IV Genova. The inquisitor had brought it to him, knowing Altando followed a school of thought which other tech-magi considered disconcertingly radical.
Of course, the machine would tell Altando very little without the last missing part of the puzzle.
A door slid open behind him, and he turned from his observations to greet a cloaked and hooded figure accompanied by a large, shambling servitor which carried a black case.
‘Progress?’ said the figure.
