Watchers in Death

by David Annandale

The bones of the attack base fell on Terra. Flaring molten red from their descent through the atmosphere, they hammered the continental expanse of the Imperial Palace. Where there was night, titanic explosions created day. Where there was day, millions of tonnes of ash and dust blanketed the sky and brought down a reign of night. Sectors the size of hive cities vaporised. Millions looked up in the final seconds of their lives, and saw the mountains of iron and stone come for them. Millions upon millions more knew nothing. They moved through their entombed lives, far from any view of the sky, ignorant until the blow, the fire, the cathedrals turned to ash, the towers’ crushing fall.

  Shockwaves annihilated ramparts. Winds of hundreds of kilometres an hour raged outward from the craters. Firestorms were a hundred kilometres wide. The dead at impact were fortunate in their ignorance or their momentary horror before oblivion. The victims of flame and wind and burial knew terror. Death came to them with great fear and pain.

  Victory was choking, burning, suffocating, dying.

  Victory was the most terrible destruction for a thousand years.

  The greater meteor swarm spared the precincts of the Inner Palace. Small fragments fell closer, pulverising roofs. They slashed the night with streaks of fire. One struck the Widdershins Tower a glancing blow, shattering the plex-glass windows of the Cerebrium.

  The big strikes fell beyond Mesring’s view of the horizon. The huge fragments vanished, and then he saw the awful sunrises of fireballs. The glow of devastation was the hammer blows of a wrathful god. Then the wind and the dust came for him, reaching into the Cerebrium with a furnace blast. He screamed, then. The hand of the Beast itself had come to claim him. He fell to the chamber floor, abandoned to a monstrous transcendence.

  He was not found for two days. Even then, he was still screaming.

  Five

  The Immitis System

  They reached the Immitis System, and it was burning.

  The Fists Exemplar translated out of the warp shortly after the Iron Warriors. The Palimodes was already in combat. A single ork ship was attacking the base in the system. It was a leviathan, much larger than the Iron Warriors strike cruiser, larger even than the Fists Exemplar battle-barges. It was a hulking shape, wider than the Dantalion and Guilliman combined. A black, snarling, metal beast of war, a thing of shields like tectonic plates and volcanic weaponry, it orbited the industrial moon of the system’s gas giant. The ork ship battered the surface with a barrage of torpedoes. Ranks of immense cannons jutted out beneath its hull, running the entire length of the ship. They fired shells the size of Thunderhawks.

  At this distance, the moon appeared in the Dantalion’s oculus as a metallic tangle. It was only a few hundred kilometres in diameter. Industrial works covered the entire surface. The gravity was too weak to sustain an atmosphere, and the belching of thousands of chimneys floated off into the void. The grey mass of twisting pipelines and manufactoria was lit now by blossoming fire.

  ‘Shipmaster Marcarian,’ Zerberyn said from the bridge pulpit, ‘set course for the starboard flank of the enemy.’ The Palimodes had engaged the port. ‘Weapons masters, target shields and weapons.’

  Marcarian looked up from the throne. ‘Not the engines?’

  ‘No. The vessel’s orbit is too close to the moon. Anything like a plasma detonation might destroy… our goal.’ His hesitation was brief, and he hoped it was not noticed. He had been uncertain how to refer to the moon. It was a world of slave manufactoria controlled by the Iron Warriors. He had just ordered the preservation of a Traitor possession.

  Of course you have, he thought. We need the resources to make repairs. I am honour-bound to aid Kalkator for the moment. And I do not intend to destroy a second world on this mission.

  The reasons were good. The reasons were true.

  They also sat uneasily in his heart.

  Marcarian communicated Zerberyn’s orders to the rest of the flotilla, and the Fists Exemplar vessels adjusted their course. The ork battleship had not reacted to their presence yet. They had the luxury of planning an attack.

  ‘Master of the Vox,’ Zerberyn said. ‘Hail the Palimodes. Command channel.’

  ‘So ordered.’

  ‘Your arrival is welcome, if tardy,’ Kalkator said a moment later.

  The Iron Warrior’s grim humour made Zerberyn’s neck muscles tense. It seemed to carry a presumption of brother­hood, one that Zerberyn was unable to reject as fully as he knew he should. He responded as if Kalkator had said nothing. ‘You cannot risk the destruction of the enemy.’

  ‘We cannot,’ Kalkator agreed. ‘Not in its current position.’ The effect of the warsmith’s voice was diminished by the distortions of the vox. Even so, it was harsh, the sound of spikes against a millstone.

  ‘You plan to board it?’

  ‘We do. We will be in position to attack the bridge shortly.’

  ‘If your ship survives long enough.’

  ‘Quite.’

  The orks were hitting the void shields of the Palimodes with punishing broadsides. The strike cruiser was surrounded by a desperate flaring of red. Like the Dantalion, the damage it had already sustained was considerable. It would not be able to take much more.

  ‘We will launch boarding torpedoes to aft starboard to coordinate with your attack,’ Zerberyn said. ‘We will work our way forward and silence their guns.’

  ‘Then we shall meet on the bridge,’ said Kalkator, and signed off.

  Zerberyn became aware of a presence to his right. ‘What is it, Brother Mandek?’ he said.

  ‘We are fighting alongside the Traitors again?’

  ‘Yes,’ Zerberyn said. He was unable to keep all the irritation from his voice. ‘Why are you asking? We travelled with them to Immitis. Or did you think we were following them in order to lay an ambush?’

  Mandek gazed at him levelly. Zerberyn had been given command of the mission by Thane, but Zerberyn and Mandek had held the same rank until a few days before that. Mandek appeared to want Zerberyn to remember this. ‘I needed to hear it said,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  Mandek frowned. Instead of answering directly, he said, ‘I’ve just come from the astropathic choir.’

  ‘Why?’ Zerberyn said again.

  ‘I wanted to know if there had been any message sent to the Chapter Master.’

  And again, Zerberyn said, ‘Why?’

  ‘You have not communicated with him since we began travelling this path with the Traitors, have you?’

  Was Mandek refusing to name the Iron Warriors, Zerberyn wondered, or was he simply choosing to state what they were until Zerberyn acknowledged that truth?

  This was not the time, he thought. There was a slippery tightness in his chest.

  ‘What is your point?’ Zerberyn said. He gestured at the oculus. ‘We are entering battle.’

  ‘There has been another message from Chapter Master Thane,’ said Mandek.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We are ordered to return to Terra with all haste.’

  ‘So we shall.’

  Mandek blinked.

  ‘Do think the flotilla can travel that distance through the warp and arrive intact?’

  ‘No,’ Mandek admitted.

  ‘Then we will make repairs first. Or are you suggesting we ignore the ork battleship before us?’

  The dark look Mandek gave the oculus suggested he wished the Iron Warriors and the orks the pleasure of each other’s company.

  ‘We cannot go far in our present condition,’ Zerberyn insisted.

  These are all true things, he thought. All of them.

  ‘Is there a message for the Chapter Master?’ Mandek asked.

  ‘Yes. That we have heard, and proceed as ordered.’

  ‘You will inform the astropathic choir of this message?’

  Zerberyn forced himself not to bristl
e. ‘No,’ he said. He met and held Mandek’s gaze. ‘You will.’

  Mandek nodded, satisfied. ‘So ordered.’

  They were both pretending now that the decision had been entirely Zerberyn’s.

  ‘Good. Let’s kill some orks first.’

  The boarding torpedoes from the Fists Exemplar flotilla drilled through dozens of metres of shield. They burrowed through the skin of the ork vessel like worms through earth.

  Outside the hull, the vessels of the Fists Exemplar and the Iron Warriors had the battleship surrounded. The strike cruisers Paragon, Implicit and Courageous were so heavily damaged they had to keep further back and within the shelter of Dantalion and Guilliman, but they too pounded the enemy with cannon fire. The orks had no need for void shields. The vessel’s plating was so thick, so dense, that shells burst against it with little effect. It retaliated, redirecting some of its firepower from the bombardment of the moon to target the ships.

  Zerberyn felt the blasts of the gargantuan cannons as his boarding torpedo ground its way forward. He was in the flesh of the enemy, and it shook with each concussion of its immense turrets. ‘Shipmaster,’ he voxed, ‘all torpedoes are breaching the target. What is your status?’

  ‘Our shields are at the limit,’ said Marcarian. ‘The hits are counting.’

  ‘Get some distance. I want something to return to when we are done here.’

  ‘So ordered.’

  The torpedoes burst through the outer hull. They came out in emptiness. Zerberyn and his squad were suddenly weightless as the torpedo dropped. It struck hard, and its front hatch blew open. Zerberyn lunged forward, bolter held out before him.

  The torpedoes had arrived in the lower third of a gallery that stretched for over a kilometre towards the bow of the vessel. Multiple levels of catwalks ran along the bulkheads. They led to the entrances to the turrets. The centre of the hull was a criss-crossing of metal platforms, bridges and ladders. In the vastness of the space, the web looked gossamer-thin. Orks swarmed over the structure like insects, running transport trains of shells to the guns, carrying materiel and tools as the web crumbled and shook with every blast of the guns.

  They had taken the orks by surprise. Enemy fire was sporadic. The greenskins raged, hurling blades. They overturned their transports, derailing them and sending them and their contents hurtling down on the invaders.

  ‘Destroy it!’ Zerberyn ordered. He dodged a rain of gears heavy enough to crush a mortal. ‘Tear this structure down!’ He threw krak grenades at the base of the nearest scaffolding. Up close, the strength of the construction was clear. The girders were all at least a quarter of a metre thick. It was the obscene power of the cannons and their recoil that subjected them to such inconceivable stress. Ahead and behind Zerberyn, his brothers used more krak grenades and melta bombs.

  The explosives went off within seconds of each other. A score of detonations turned the anchor points along a long section of the starboard base to liquid. The blasts melted through the bases of four supports rising from the bottom deck, and their collapse triggered a chain reaction. The tangle of metal web fell. Cables snapped and catwalks whipped away from bulkheads. Orks were crushed beneath thousands of tonnes of falling iron. The interior of the battleship echoed and rang with the avalanche of metal and the howls of the dying. The flow of ammunition for the entire section ended. The guns would soon fall silent.

  Zerberyn led the charge towards the bow. The Fists Exemplar alternated between firing into the gunnery compartments in the starboard bulkhead and triggering further collapses of the scaffold. They had left the boarding torpedoes hundreds of metres behind before the orks mounted a true counter-attack.

  They came from the upper cannon emplacements to starboard, and from all levels to port, pouring out of hatches and tunnels. The furious green tide flooded the gallery.

  ‘Keep advancing!’ Zerberyn ordered. ‘We’ll kill the guns, then finish off the crew.’

  Squad formation tightened. The Fists Exemplar became their name. They were a fist of ceramite, a fist over a hundred battle-brothers strong, a fist that punched through the enemy, leaving blood and flame in its wake. The density of bolter fire was ferocious. On the flanks, flamers washed jets of ignited promethium over the greenskins. Zerberyn inhaled the smell of burning xenos flesh even through his rebreather. The pungent stench crumbled beneath the purging burn of fuel.

  The orks shot and slashed at the formation. Their own crowd worked against them. They cut each other down with their own guns. They could not bring their mass to bear unless they isolated battle-brothers. The fist kept advancing, killing orks with every step. It was a long, slow, inexorable blow. The greenskins threw themselves against the formation and died.

  ‘They are doing our work for us!’ Mandek voxed.

  He sounded energised by the combat. Zerberyn glanced back. Mandek was close to his position, flamer reducing the enemy to ash. He fought with exuberance, and that was the battle-brother Zerberyn knew – the firebrand on the battlefield, not the worried soul he had seen on the bridge of the Dantalion.

  ‘Then we should make them work harder yet,’ Zerberyn said.

  The leading edge of the fist formation threw more krak grenades ahead. They melted flesh as well as iron, and the collapse of the scaffold web spread.

  Ten metres from the end of the gallery, after the last of the cannon enclaves, there was a large door in the starboard bulkhead. Zerberyn had just passed it when it blew open. Three monstrous orks stormed out. As big as Dreadnoughts, they were clad in armour that mirrored that of their vessel. They were huge, massively shielded. Two of them wielded what appeared to be power chainfists and claws large enough to peel open the hull of a Land Raider. They flanked the third, who had a flamer nozzle on either arm. It bellowed in eager rage and bathed the Fists Exemplar in fire.

  The assault was a flaming deluge that swept over the formation. The temperature inside Zerberyn’s armour rocketed and fire covered his helmet. He could see nothing except the burning red. He fired towards the position of the orks, shooting blind, as did all his brothers for many rows of the formation.

  ‘Rush them!’ Zerberyn ordered. The flamer would be useless to the ork at point-blank range.

  He ran to his right, still firing, still blinded by the unending stream of liquid flame. He could hear the roars of the giant orks over the din of battle, and that was enough of a guide. He pulled out his chainsword, revved its engine and thrust the whirring blade forward.

  He collided with a moving wall. The impact stopped both him and the wall. The wall growled. It hit him from the side with something massive. He flew back and to his right, landing in a heap of fallen iron, outside the wash of the flamer, and he could see again.

  The ork’s flamers launched the promethium with a pressure as high as the volume was enormous. It enveloped most of the Fists Exemplar’s formation. The fist had changed direction, had lost some of its coherence, and the flanking orks were smashing into it with their massive power limbs. The flamer ork turned off its weapon as the flaming mass it had created closed in to grapple with it. The greenskin attacked with piston-driven arms. It hands were strong enough on their own to rip a man in half.

  Zerberyn was at the edge of the formation. Smaller orks surrounded him. He kept his back to the wreckage and climbed a few steps, gaining elevation. He severed arms and heads with his chainsword, holding back the tide while he looked for the opportunity to take down the giants.

  He climbed another step. An ork leapt for him, arms outstretched to pull him back down into the greenskin cauldron. Zerberyn slammed the hilt of his chainsword onto the ork’s skull. He shoved its head down with such force that the beast impaled its throat on a spur of shattered girder. The ork twitched and writhed, helplessly pinned. Its blood poured down the jutting metal angles.

  The flames were dying down, and the Fists Exemplar could see again. Bolter shells blasted aw
ay chunks of ork armour, but the giants had not slowed at all. Dead battle-brothers, bodies crushed and dismembered, lay at their feet. The flamer ork lunged down and seized a Space Marine. It lifted him clear of the formation.

  It held Mandek. His left arm was pinned by the ork’s grip but his right was free, and he thrust his chainsword through the ork’s jaws. The beast uttered a choking shriek, tightening its grip convulsively. The sword cut through its throat. Mandek strained and hauled the blade to his right. The upper half of the ork’s head slid to the ground.

  The body twisted to Mandek’s left as it began to fall.

  Zerberyn had a clear shot at the fuel tanks on its back. He sent a full burst of shells into their centre. His brothers nearest the ork stepped back as the tanks exploded. The blast stunned the other two orks. The flash was dazzling, but Zerberyn’s auto-lenses flickered over his eyes, blocking the glare. Now he and his brothers had a few seconds of advantage where they could see and the greenskins could not.

  A huge gout of flame erupted over one of the giants. The inferno flowed through every chink in its armour. The ork became a screaming, towering torch, flailing its arms, as blind as its foe had been moments before. The Fists Exemplar surged forward again, pressing their advantage.

  The monster began to go down under the concerted assault.

  The body of the flamer ork was still standing, like a monstrous idol that refused to topple. And it still held Mandek in its death grip.

  Zerberyn leapt off the rubble. He smashed and cut his way through the stunned enemy, rejoining the formation. He skirted the edge of the fist, wielding his chainsword like a scythe, parting muscle and tendons. Orks fell before him, but he was wading in a muck of grasping limbs and blades. Too slow, too slow, he thought.

  The seconds fell away, sluggish and fatal.

  Mandek was cutting through the dead ork’s armoured limb. His chainblade sent out showers of sparks.

  Too slow, too slow.

  Behind Mandek, the third monster reached out with a claw. It hammered its power fist on the deck. Battle-brothers threw themselves out of its path. The blow was so powerful the deck rippled like water. Zerberyn stumbled as the surface beneath his boots dropped and jerked.