Watchers in Death

by David Annandale

  Thane looked. Abathar was right. The flickering light also suggested flames close to the ground. All the other flashes Thane could see came from no lower than the cables, midway up the flanks of the generators.

  ‘A generator in distress,’ Abathar said. He moved his hand to a switch. Just above it, sparks flew with a surprisingly steady rhythm. ‘That,’ the Dark Angel said, ‘is what passes for a remote alarm with these brutes.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘As sure as I must be.’ He flipped the switch.

  The sparks ceased. Exposed wiring glowed red, then went dark.

  ‘Sword, this is Gladius,’ Thane voxed. ‘We believe we have cut the power to your generator. Please confirm.’

  ‘Confirmed,’ Koorland said after a moment. ‘Splicing in.’

  Thane turned to Abathar. ‘And the gate?’ he asked.

  The Techmarine had already moved to the other end of the control banks. ‘The machines grow brighter towards the right,’ he said. ‘There is a higher intensity of power gathering there. We must seek the greatest current.’

  Thane looked off to the right, following the pattern of light. The flares converged at a blinding point that pulsed in and out of existence. ‘I see it,’ he said.

  ‘As do I.’

  ‘But it is not damaged.’

  ‘There appears to be a rough concordance between the position of the generators and their controls here. A crude organisation, perfect for these brutes.’

  These brutes who perform wonders we cannot hope to emulate, Thane thought. Even so, Abathar’s logic was sound. The orks combined brutishness and ingenuity in a manner that defied comprehension. It was necessary simply to accept the fusion and attempt to counter its effects.

  Abathar wrapped his gauntlet around a lever the size of a bolter. He nodded at Thane.

  ‘Crozius,’ Thane voxed, ‘we are attempting to cut the power to the gate.’

  ‘We are ready,’ said Iairos.

  Abathar pulled the lever. It moved with a foul metallic grinding, as if the end of the shaft went all the way to the core of the attack moon. An ear-shattering klaxon sounded. Scores of crackling warning flares shot up from the consoles around the lever.

  ‘You have angered the ork machines,’ said Thane.

  ‘Good.’

  In the distance, the searing point dimmed to an ember, then went out.

  ‘The gate is closed!’ Iairos shouted, triumphant. ‘The gate is closed!’

  Thane grinned. He imagined he could hear a howl coming from the throat of every ork on the moon as their device ceased to respond to their commands. He checked the clip on his bolter. ‘Now we wait on the others,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure you can convince the orks to have patience,’ said Abathar. He unshouldered the teleport homer and extended its mechadendrites. His servo-arm’s plasma cutter sliced open a portion of the control surface, exposing a madness that Thane could barely qualify as technological. Abathar began linking the homer to the madness.

  ‘On what basis can we expect that to work?’ Thane asked.

  ‘On faith,’ Abathar answered. ‘The Mechanicus has made this a human device, but the taint of the xenos remains. On this day, that taint is necessary. It will permit the union of the homer to the greenskin network.’

  ‘Then you have my faith and my hope,’ Thane said. ‘The Emperor protects.’

  ‘The Emperor protects.’

  Thane clapped Abathar on the pauldron and made for the door.

  Outside the control centre, a green wave surged towards the ramp.

  Iairos fired his bolter in a wide, repeating arc. Greenskin chests and skulls burst apart. Bodies fell on bodies. A mound of corpses grew. He timed his kills carefully. Theoretical: each foe killed at the right moment becomes a new obstacle to the others. Already he had created a protective wall of flesh taller than a man, blocking the left-hand and forward approaches to Squad Crozius’ position.

  Behind him, Gadreel had cut into the housing of the giant cable. Where it began its branching into the smaller lines, he was connecting the mechadendrites of the modified teleport homer. The device would draw upon multiple branches of power.

  ‘How long?’ Iairos called out.

  ‘Nearly there.’

  On the right, Vehuel and Eligos added to the wall of bodies. Skyclaw stood atop the mound, the centre of a shrieking storm. Winds flattened the orks as they struggled to close with the kill-team. Lightning struck them down when they dared to attack the Rune Priest. His axe blade shone a brilliant, frigid blue. Ice flew on the wind, sharp as steel, lacerating flesh, slashing faces. Orks staggered on the top of the mound, blinded by ice shards. They screamed, holding their eyes. Blood poured from between their fingers. Iairos did not waste shells putting those brutes down. When they came within Skyclaw’s reach, he decapitated them with a single, wrathful stroke of his runic axe.

  ‘A grand battle!’ Skyclaw shouted. ‘Son of Guilliman, you have led us to a rare feast!’

  ‘We will avenge the dead of Ullanor yet,’ said Eligos.

  ‘By the will of the Emperor,’ Iairos said. Yet he felt the pressure of passing time. The gate was dark, and the orks’ attention was divided by the simultaneous attacks on three fronts. The squads were benefiting, Iairos thought, from the uncertainty over which target was the most important, the most vulnerable. The orks were fighting blindly, for the moment without the direction that had made them so lethal on Ullanor. But the confusion would pass, and they were still mustering ever greater numbers of reinforcements. Greenskins poured out of every tunnel entrance. They converged on Crozius at a run. They died on the near approach.

  For now.

  Iairos calculated his team was at the edge of what it could hold off. And once Gadreel’s task was complete, they would be facing a much greater flood of the enemy.

  ‘Done,’ said Gadreel. ‘Let us bear witness now to the will of the Omnissiah.’

  ‘Thane,’ Iairos voxed. ‘Let the current flow.’

  The orks were concentrating their fire now. With Sword no longer moving, the attacks were becoming more and more focused and savage. Desperate too, Koorland wanted to believe. He wanted the orks to know doom was rushing for them. He wanted them to know fear. He wanted them to know fate had turned its back on them at last.

  Simmias had cut through a slab of the generator’s shielding. While he spliced the teleport homer into the inner workings of the machine, Koorland, Vepar and Haas held the ground attacks off. Icegrip had climbed up to the cable network. The lines were thick enough to walk on, and he raced over the network, taking down the ork gunners. Xenos blood rained on the cavern floor. Bodies hailed down upon their kin. Hanniel’s warp lighting lashed out again and again, burning more of the greenskins above.

  And still the enemy fire became more and more focused. Solid rounds pounded against Koorland’s armour. Some of the rounds were large enough, the hits direct enough, to punch through the ceramite. He blinked off the damage warnings. There was no shelter, and nowhere to go until the task was done.

  Haas’ armour was shattered over her chest and shoulders, though she still had her helmet. She kept moving, dodging from one end of the squad’s position to the other. Her shouts had become a raspy snarl. Her breath was pained. Her shots counted, though. She fought with the purpose of a warrior certain of her death, and as certain that she would take the enemy down with her.

  ‘Now!’ Simmias shouted.

  ‘Now!’ Koorland repeated into the vox. ‘Thane! It must be now!’

  ‘Turn the power back on!’ Thane voxed to Abathar. The roar of the attacking orks was too great for him to make himself heard otherwise. He did not look back. Standing above Forcas, Straton and Warfist, he sprayed bolter shells down the ramp into the rising tide. The four Space Marines killed the greenskins by the score, but the tide still grew. The orks charged o
ver heaps of bodies. There were thousands of them massing at the base of the ramp, the press of the mob pushing them on. Their horde was so dense, it pushed even the dead forward.

  There would be no retreat through the tunnels.

  Squad Gladius slowed the orks. Each second was a victory, Thane thought. Each second might be the victory.

  The orks did not engage in massed fire, wary of destroying the centre they had come to save. If they had, Gladius would have already lost.

  There was a huge flash behind Thane. For a moment, the ramp and its combatants were lit in negative colours.

  ‘Power restored,’ Abathar reported. ‘The devices are charging.’

  The gate burst into life. A foul, captive star blazed in the grip of the horn. It vanished, and an emerald explosion on the platform released a mob of heavily armoured orks and a tank into the cavern. The tank had a massive, spiked siege blade. It thundered off the platform in a cloud of black promethium smoke. Its hulking silhouette bristled with guns. Iairos saw it barrel across the cavern floor and knew the mission’s strategy had become desperate.

  ‘If they start using heavy armour…’ said Vehuel.

  ‘They may be willing to sacrifice what we have seized,’ Iairos finished.

  The tank’s blade struck the wall of bodies. The rampart was taller than a Space Marine now. It toppled forward, a carrion wave. Skyclaw turned towards the vehicle. The storm gathered around him. It surrounded him with a gleaming, whistling shroud of razor ice. He shot his arms forward and the storm screamed with all its concentrated strength into the tank. Ice slashed through every gap in the armour, tore the plating, and shredded the crew. The tank swerved, out of control, but its turrets still barked. A shell slammed into Skyclaw. It hurled him from the remains of the corpse wall. He hit the cavern floor with such force he cracked stone. The storm died.

  The Space Wolf’s icon blinked an ominous amber in Iairos’ helm display.

  The tank was still moving. Iairos ran forward, his bolter on full auto-bursts. He held the gun in one hand, and with the other he unclipped a frag grenade. He jumped up the fallen wall, hurling the grenade through a rent in the armour. The cab of the vehicle exploded. Torn bodies flew out of it. The tank rode over the wall and then stopped, a new obstacle.

  The gate flashed again. More orks appeared. And more tanks.

  A snarl erupted from a vox-caster. It was a sound that began as something vaguely human, rising until it became a monstrous shriek of hunger. It was nothing but need, a drive that was beyond human, beyond animal. At first Iairos thought he was hearing the wolf howl of Skyclaw. But the Space Wolf had not moved.

  The sound came from Eligos.

  The Blood Angel had left his position to the right of Gadreel. He tore over the ground towards the nearest group of orks. They were racing to finish off Skyclaw, who had risen to his knees. Eligos pounded past the Space Wolf, chainsword drawn, and plunged into the orks, blade roaring. He did not fight as he had before. Gone was the elegant exactitude of his violence. He was worse than a butcher. His blows were savage, careless, lethal. The roaring from the vox-caster cut off as he shed his helmet. His face was contorted. It was a rictus, his teeth bared as if they would devour hunger itself.

  Eligos was not rescuing Skyclaw. But his whirlwind of violence blunted the orks’ attack long enough for Skyclaw to regain his feet, lift his bolt pistol and shoot back. Iairos and Gadreel rushed to his position. Vehuel moved in more slowly, maintaining a wide field of fire, cutting back at the advance of the horde for another second, and another second.

  Iairos stood at Skyclaw’s side, blasting at the enemy. Gadreel ran to Eligos. The Techmarine called to his brother, shouting his name over and over. Eligos did not respond. He tore the orks apart. The tide closed in on all of them, a constriction of foul smell, brutal muscle, drooling fangs and misshapen blades. A vibrating chainaxe cut into Iairos’ flank. He spun into the hit, firing as he turned. The stream of mass-reactive shells pulped the features of his attacker and the orks on either side.

  Gadreel blinded one ork after another with his plasma cutter. He called and called his brother’s name in vain. Iairos did not understand the nature of the frenzy that had taken Eligos, but at this stage he almost welcomed it. The Blood Angel fought with such reckless fury he was forcing another small pause on the ork advance.

  Iairos stood back to back with Skyclaw, a wall of huge, green brutishness before him. The Rune Priest’s breathing on the vox was ragged. The readout of his life signs was still flashing amber.

  The teleportation device was still charging. A hum filled the cavern. It was gargantuan. It was in the walls, the floor, the air. The entire moon vibrated. A terrible song was coming into being. Soon it would have a voice.

  ‘A few moments more,’ Gadreel voxed. ‘A few–’

  Light.

  Light of breaking. Of dissolution. Of shattering, of edges, of fragmentation.

  The end of here and the end of there. Death of space. Death of time.

  Death.

  Light of breaking.

  Light of breaking.

  All bro

  ken.

  Koorland gasped. Blood filled his mouth and his lungs. He was standing in the centre of the teleportation platform of the Herald of Night. Haas was on her hands and knees, shaking with enough force to fracture bone. All the squads were present. The other Space Marines seemed as unsteady on their feet.

  He had never experienced a teleportation like this. He had been ripped into nothing, then reassembled, and every particle of his being remembered the pain of destruction and rebirth. Between the two lay an infinitesimal portion of a second that was as wide as aeons.

  The hum was still growing. He could feel it even this far from the moon, through the hull of the strike cruiser.

  He commanded his body to move. It obeyed with reluctance. With limbs of crumbling rockcrete, he walked from the teleportation platform. By the time he and his brothers reached the bridge, he could run again.

  In the oculus, the moon was still there. The homers had functioned as Kubik had promised. They had locked on to the sensors in the armour and transported the tiny mass of the Deathwatch kill-teams before they had gathered the full power needed to send the ork base out of the sector.

  ‘Why has it not gone?’ Haas whispered. Her teeth chattered. She did not yet have control over her body.

  ‘It will. We are victorious.’ Koorland said this even as he watched the explosions of the void war. Nothing was finished.

  But the teleporters worked. They were working. They had triumphed.

  Staring at the moon, Simmias said, ‘That is… unexpected…’

  The mountains, canyons and plains of the ork base were suffused with a shifting, retina-slashing glow. And they were moving. The mountains rocked back and forth. Peaks collapsed in on themselves. The canyons of iron pulled wide, the crust of the moon tearing like flesh. The plains heaved as if inconceivable leviathans were struggling to the surface.

  ‘What is happening?’ said Koorland.

  Simmias shook his head. ‘The theoreticals of the technology do not account for this. The disassembly of the material body is instantaneous.’

  ‘It didn’t feel like it,’ said Haas.

  ‘This geomorphic distortion is abnormal.’

  ‘Shipmaster,’ Adnachiel said, ‘pull us back.’

  Simmias said, ‘There is no distance we can reach. Our fates have already been decided.’

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ said Vepar.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Koorland repeated. He barely heard his own voice. He watched the vast agony take the moon. He saw dissolution approach.

  We have done this to you, he thought. We have ended you. We are victorious.

  There had been few triumphs in this war. If this was his last one, he would enjoy it.

  The end came
first as a brilliance that consumed the spectrum. Koorland’s lens shutters slammed down, but not fast enough. He saw the absolute light still.

  The shutters opened again, and let him see the moon’s end. Half the sphere had vanished. What remained looked like a skull cut cleanly along a diagonal line. That form held just long enough for Koorland to understand what he was seeing. Then it erupted.

  A swarm of asteroids hurtled through the void. The ­shattered surface tore through the warring ships.

  He had begun coming to the Cerebrium again. Mesring did not let any of the other High Lords know. They did not come because of what they feared to see. They hid from the light of the ork moon under the cracked dome of the Great Chamber.

  Mesring came to see the very thing that kept them away. The top of the Widdershins Tower pierced the clouds more often than any other point of the Inner Palace. Mesring was confident of being alone here, and of being able to contemplate the moon.

  He saw the flash. Suddenly, there was an impossible shape in the heavens. Then it flew apart.

  Mesring gaped. He stared. His mind was blank except for an inchoate horror.

  The great light faded. Where the moon had been was a sudden blackness, the return of the void.

  Smaller flashes and glints surrounded the absence where the moon had been. Some of the glints grew stronger. They became more consistent. Their number grew.

  He understood nothing. He was bearing witness to a transcendent death, and his thought could not encompass it. He stood at the casement, his body numb, all his awareness focused on a point hundreds of thousands of kilometres away.

  The points came closer. The glints became shards of white light. Still he did not understand.

  He stayed where he was, fear and horror and helpless anger combining in an alchemy of madness.

  He was standing there, blank, lost, when the fragments of the moon entered Terra’s atmosphere and the night caught fire.