Watchers in Death

by David Annandale

  ‘We can’t. If the orks break through–’

  ‘When, you mean,’ Vangorich corrected.

  ‘The defence of Terra is paramount,’ Lansung said.

  ‘Of course,’ Koorland said. What the Lord High Admiral said was true. It was also convenient. Lansung’s reluctance to commit the flagship Autocephalax Eternal to combat had moved far beyond the craven into a realm so contemptible it did not have a name.

  ‘The kill-teams must act quickly,’ Lansung said.

  ‘They will,’ Koorland said.

  Mesring had been staring into the middle distance, distracted by inner visions Koorland couldn’t guess at. Now the Ecclesiarch started in his seat. ‘We have not voted!’ he said. ‘Nothing has changed! What was monstrous before is just as monstrous now.’

  Silence from the other High Lords greeted Mesring’s outburst. He looked from one to another, pleading for support that had evaporated.

  Zeck sighed. ‘What assurances do we have this will not be your coup?’

  Vangorich laughed. ‘And would you believe those assurances if you had them? Would they mean anything coming from any of you?’

  Zeck said, ‘You find our circumstances amusing?’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Vangorich, suddenly cold. ‘Your responses to them, though, are quite another matter.’

  ‘Only one response interests me,’ Koorland. Even there he was stretching a point. He had little interest in anything the Council might say or do. He was here out of brute necessity and for no other reason. ‘You know what you have to do. Vote or be damned.’

  ‘You knew,’ Ekharth said, sullen with revelation. ‘You knew the orks would come back. You arranged this crisis. Now we have no choice but to embrace your rule as our salvation.’

  ‘Shut up, Tobias,’ said Tull. She sounded just as sullen, but where Ekharth was slipping into outright paranoia and speaking from genuine fear, in Tull’s voice Koorland heard suspicion shaped by frustrated ambition. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  ‘No!’ Mesring shouted. ‘We must not let this pass! It is blasphemous!’

  For the first time in the proceedings, Veritus spoke. ‘How?’ he asked.

  Mesring hesitated. ‘It is blasphemous,’ he said again. He looked away from the inquisitor. He shrank against the back of his seat, staring at the floor.

  Koorland frowned. Mesring’s objections bothered him more than Ekharth’s. The form they took made no sense. Koorland did not understand what was behind them, and that worried him.

  The High Lords voted.

  Mesring was the only one opposed. Even Ekharth, seeing himself isolated, joined with the others in voting with Vangorich. Veritus and Kubik abstained again. They seemed, Koorland thought, to have deliberately moved themselves to the sidelines. They were observers of an event whose end result could not be affected by their participation, and so they chose to guard their neutrality. They would bear watching. The power games of the High Lords never ceased, and it was the silent ones who were most formidable. They were the ones who, if they had not already seized an advantage, saw the potential of one within their grasp.

  The Council feared Koorland’s long-term plans. He wondered how the consequences of what he was about to set in motion would serve Kubik and Veritus. Like the Council, he had no choice.

  Koorland left the dais without a word.

  Three

  Terra – the Imperial Palace

  Robed, Abathar gazed at the armour he was about to don once more, and thought of the task ahead. He was standing on the precipice of meaning. He needed to understand the nature of his leap, and his armour was the key to that understanding. He knew this at a deep level, one without words – one at the same depths as that which resonated with the needs of the machine-spirits when he listened to their rages and pains.

  Outside the Techmarine’s armorium, footsteps rang up and down the corridors of the Imperial Palace barracks reserved for the Dark Angels. He heard the careful tread of Chapter-serfs. He heard the mechanical trudge of servitors. He heard the metallic cacophony of repairs, the murmur of prayers, and the whisper of oaths. Shadows, flickering in torchlight, moved over the armour and its folded servo-arms. The restless dark was deep, rich with imminent knowledge.

  The revelation was approaching.

  The sounds of the mobilisation seemed hollow and sparse. So many empty armoria and meditation cells. So many brothers lost. It would be easy to hear, in the diminishment, the echo of defeat. After a loss, a smaller muster, a weakened force.

  That would be a lie, he thought.

  It was true the combined Chapters on Terra could not attack the orks as they had before. It was true the new strategy Koorland had proposed was the product of necessity.

  ‘Not the full truths,’ the Techmarine muttered.

  ‘Lord?’ one of his armament serfs asked. They were standing by, waiting for him to permit them to return to their work of repair. His armour had escaped critical damage on Ullanor, but it had been badly scorched by vehicle-mounted flamers. It was blackened across most of its surface. The livery of the Dark Angels awaited restoration.

  ‘Wait,’ Abathar said.

  The full truth was that Koorland’s plan would be a small deployment even if the disaster of Ullanor had never occurred. The plan had come into being through necessity, but its shape surpassed necessity. It was a new thing. In the demands it placed on the members of the kill-teams, it was an extraordinary thing. Abathar thought about the Space Marines at whose side he would be fighting. An Ultramarine. A Blood Angel. A Space Wolf. The composition of the teams was astounding. It would never have been possible before Ullanor.

  Here again, was a product of necessity, and again the form of the act surpassed what was forced and entered into the realm of true daring and unprecedented innovation. Small squads of uniform composition would have been understandable. There were enough survivors of each Chapter to have mounted operations on that scale. But Koorland was urging them all to go further. The orders were to forge squad-level bonds with Space Marines who were strangers to him and to the ways of his brothers. At least one, he would have regarded with so much suspicion he would have refused to be in the same room as that warrior in other circumstances.

  The circumstances were beyond extraordinary. So was Koorland’s plan.

  ‘He is asking us to become something new,’ Abathar said.

  The squads were born of death, and their mission was death. They would be a lethal blade beaten to a point in the forge of tragedy.

  Abathar watched the shadows on his armour, darkness shifting over black. The shadows appeared to him to be the shadows of his lost brothers. The fallen of Ullanor called to Abathar and to all the Adeptus Astartes making ready to wage war in a new way. Look upon us, they said. Witness us, and strike in our name. See our death, and stand guard in our stead. See our death, and visit it upon our enemies.

  Born of shadow, Abathar thought, we become shadow. We are the eye of death.

  He knew what he must do.

  ‘Continue,’ he said to the serfs. ‘But the armour needs new colours.’

  The man and woman looked at each other, then at Abathar, confusion spreading over their features.

  ‘Restore the right pauldron,’ Abathar said. It must remain as it was, the icon of the Dark Angels pristine, the pride of brotherhood and Chapter still announced to the universe. ‘Paint the rest black.’

  ‘Lord?’ the woman said again.

  ‘You heard me.’

  It had been over a thousand years since the Chapter had worn black livery. This darkness would be different, Abathar thought. It was the black of mourning. The black of anger.

  The black of the death witnessed and delivered.

  Koorland found the Fabricator General in the laboratorium of the Cathedral of the Saviour Emperor. Kubik was examining Magneric’s data-feed again. When he
saw Koorland approaching, he gestured to the three tech-priests attending him. They bowed and withdrew through doors at the far end of the chamber, angular limbs pistoning under their robes as they left.

  Kubik turned off the feed as Koorland approached. ‘What do you wish, Lord Commander?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to talk to you about the ork teleportation technology. I want us to use it against the attack moon.’

  ‘That will not be possible,’ said Kubik.

  ‘Because it won’t work?’

  ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus is not the Departmento Munitorum, Lord Commander.’ The voice was flat, mechanical, inhuman. And still it was contemptuous.

  ‘Are we to rehearse our grievances once more?’ Koorland asked. ‘I had hoped we had put them in the past for the sake of the Imperium. You did not deny us the use of the gravity weapons on Caldera.’

  ‘That technology was deployed by the adepts of the Mechanicus in that conflict. I heard no mention of their presence in your proposal.’

  ‘Nor did I make one.’

  ‘Then we have no more to say.’

  ‘I’m surprised, Fabricator General. The teleportation of a body as large as the attack moon holds no interest for you, then?’

  Kubik’s stillness was the closest thing to uncertainty Koorland had ever detected in the High Lord.

  ‘You are not planning to use the technology as an augmentation of our current teleportation capabilities?’

  ‘No. Not primarily. We are going to teleport the moon out of this system.’

  Kubik hesitated. It frustrated Koorland that he could not tell if the Fabricator General was evaluating the feasibility of the plan or formulating a lie.

  ‘The possibility of success is minimal,’ Kubik said at last. But he seemed less resistant now. He was being captured by the challenge of the problem.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Our understanding of the technology is imperfect. Our adaptation is partial. The teleportation of Phobos was limited to repositioning it within its established orbit. The energy expenditure was of a magnitude very rare in a single action, requiring considerable resources on Mars. You wish to move a much larger body a much greater distance. We cannot transport the energy sources of Mars to the attack moon.’ There was a squeal of binary. ‘I amend my estimation. The operation is impossible.’

  ‘We used the orks’ energy sources against them on Caldera. We tapped into their grid to power the gravity weapon. We will do that again now.’

  Kubik straightened in interest and surprise. ‘Employ the attack moon’s power to generate its own teleportation?’

  ‘Precisely.’ Koorland was aware of Kubik’s optics examining him closely.

  ‘The proposal is intriguing,’ said Kubik. ‘It has the merit of providing a testing ground for our advances.’

  ‘It isn’t a proposal,’ Koorland said. ‘It’s an order.’

  Kubik regarded him in silence, except for the low hum of servo-motors and calibrating sensors.

  ‘This is what must be done,’ said Koorland. ‘We will neutralise the ork base once and for all. The Council has been too generous with regards to the desires of the Mechanicus. You had your chance to study it. Now here we are, with the orks on our doorstep once more, and the Navy falling before them. You have no more choice in obeying this order than I have in issuing it.’

  Kubik’s digits flexed and curled, flexed and curled. He said nothing.

  He was still silent when Koorland left. But he had not refused again.

  The initial muster for the kill-teams was held in the Monitus. Abathar had no difficulty in understanding the choice. The hall, with its statues of all the loyalist Legions, represented the ultimate unity of the Adeptus Astartes. He saw meaning in its position, so high above the Great Chamber. It was here, too, that Vulkan had shamed the High Lords. It was a fitting place for the beginning of the new venture, and of a very particular kind of unity. One, he had heard tell, that the High Lords feared.

  He arrived alone, following the orders of Grand Master Sachael.

  ‘You are Dark Angels,’ Sachael had told the survivors assigned to the kill-teams, ‘but for the length of this mission, you will also be something else. You will fight with warriors you might have regarded as strangers, in any other situation. You cannot do so now. You will join them as brothers. So you must arrive at the Monitus alone. In this manner, you are not departing a squad or a company. You are joining something else.’

  Abathar reached the top of the Stilicho Tower and entered the Monitus. He slowed as he approached his assigned position toward the centre of the balcony. He was not the first to arrive. A figure was standing at the rail, next to the Ultramarines statue, looking down at the roofs of the Imperial Palace. The right pauldron showed the icon of the Space Wolves.

  But the armour was black. Abathar stopped three paces away. The Space Wolf heard him and turned around. Abathar faced the weathered, bearded features of Asger Warfist. The Wolf Lord blinked in surprise.

  Neither Space Marine spoke. They acknowledged the importance of the moment with a solemn silence. Then Abathar said, ‘This is not chance.’

  Warfist nodded slowly. ‘It is fate.’

  When Abathar had entered the Monitus, there had been the low, echoing murmur of conversation. Now the sound was fading. Abathar saw Warfist’s eyes shift, looking past him to the rest of the hall. They widened. Abathar turned.

  There were more warriors in black armour. Abathar counted four others. Not many, but enough to be significant. Enough to prove the truth of Warfist’s words. Fate was at work here. Its hand was visible to every warrior in the Monitus.

  All conversation ceased. The only sound was the rap of boots against marble as the Space Marines in black moved to their positions. They were the focus of attention in the hall. Abathar felt the force of a dozen gazes fall on him. He was not troubled by the scrutiny, for he was as astonished as everyone else. He stared as hard as any of the others.

  A seventh warrior in black arrived, this one a Blood Angel. Then an eighth, an Ultramarine.

  Time in the Monitus paused. The hall filled with the power of significance.

  Warfist stepped forward. He moved to the centre of the hall. He spoke, the wind-cured rasp of his voice stretching across the Monitus.

  ‘Bear witness, brothers!’ he called. ‘Mark what is happening! This is a day the Imperium will remember.’ He was one Space Marine among many, yet in declaring the importance of what was happening, he became its nexus. All eyes turned to Warfist. All voices spoke to him.

  ‘An omen,’ said another Space Wolf on the other side of the hall.

  ‘It is more than that,’ Warfist said.

  ‘We have done this,’ said Abathar. ‘It is not visited upon us. We have taken this action. We have made this choice.’

  ‘And the choice has weight beyond the acts of a single brother,’ Warfist continued. ‘One choice, multiplied. This is a truth.’

  ‘So it is,’ said a Blood Angel nearby. Abathar recognised him as Forcas. He had seen the name on the list of members of his designated kill-team. Forcas’ armour was still red. ‘Can any of us doubt this truth? When it appears to us so clearly, and with such force?’

  ‘Was this truly a choice, then?’ Abathar wondered. ‘We were guided by the same circumstances, impulses and realities.’

  ‘Perhaps we have made our own omen, then,’ said War­fist. ‘If we have, its weight is all the greater.’

  Forcas was nodding. ‘I will do as you have done,’ he said.

  ‘As will I,’ the other Space Wolf shouted.

  The call was taken up. The Monitus rang with the oaths of a grim unity. The individual squads came together. The assembled Space Marines formed an arc before Warfist and the great statues.

  Abathar observed his fellow warriors with growing awe as the moments succeeded each other with
ever greater import. There was never doubt as to the ultimate unity of purpose of all the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes. Every battle-brother, no matter how estranged he might be from those in another Chapter, stood for the defence of the Emperor. On Ullanor, there had been the forging of many forces into one devoted to a single immediate goal. Here, though, was something else again. Here, the unity was not institutional. It was being forged at the level of the individual. There would be friction between members of the kill-teams. Abathar had no illusions about himself, or how he would feel fighting in the same squad as a Space Wolf.

  And yet…

  What is this thing we are becoming?

  Born of death. Forged in death. Living memoria of lost brothers, returning in anger.

  ‘What are we?’ Warfist roared. The question demanded an answer, but it was shouted with the certainty of the inevitability of that answer.

  ‘We are witness!’ said Forcas, and Abathar heard his thoughts present and past being spoken by others.

  Here, now, we are one, he thought. We are this new weapon.

  ‘We watch from death,’ said the Ultramarine in black.

  We are vigilance.

  We are vengeance.

  We are the judgement come for the xenos challenger.

  There was such clamour in his mind, in his soul and in the hall that Abathar could not tell if the words came from within or without. Perhaps they were both. Internal need had led to an external manifestation on his armour, and on that of other battle-brothers. They were the example. They were the clarity of black.

  Space Wolf, Dark Angel, Blood Angel and Ultramarine had spoken with a single voice.

  ‘We are the Deathwatch!’

  The words rang out above the others, given strength by their iron truth. It was a moment before Abathar realised the voice was his.

  ‘Deathwatch!’ Warfist repeated.

  ‘Deathwatch!’ said Forcas.

  Deathwatch. The word, the name, the truth was shouted by every warrior in the Monitus. It was the moment of creation. That which had been shattered on Ullanor had taken on a new shape, renewed of purpose.