Watchers in Death

by David Annandale

  ‘Very well. We will delay engagement until your signal if possible. The Emperor protects.’

  ‘The Emperor protects.’

  Behind Thane, Forcas said, ‘We are establishing a precedent.’

  Thane turned around. Forcas was looking at the teleport homer on Abathar’s back.

  ‘The means we are using,’ Forcas went on. ‘The tools. The weapons.’

  ‘You think we should not employ them to defeat the orks?’

  ‘The devices are… impure,’ Forcas said. He used the word with the conviction of someone who was given to meditating on its meaning and implications. ‘Using them has a cost. We have seen that already.’

  ‘They aren’t made by xenos hands,’ Thane reminded him, though images of the cratered Imperial Palace flashed before his mind’s eye. ‘They are still productions of the Mechanicus.’

  ‘Their derivation is suspect.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Straton put in, ‘they are authorised.’

  ‘Even under the eyes of the Inquisition,’ said Warfist. He appeared to take sour enjoyment from the irony.

  Forcas gave a solemn nod, acknowledging the points. ‘Yet the fact remains the technology originates with the greenskins. The taint cannot be expunged through adaptation. We are conscious of its danger. We are using it in extremity. Would any of you wish this technology to have widespread adoption by Imperial forces? By all the Chapters? By the Astra Militarum?’

  The others were silent, their faces grim.

  ‘No,’ said Thane. Forcas was right. Already they’d had ample reason to distrust the ork-derived technology. Thane imagined the propagation of its use, and realised he was picturing a plague.

  ‘There must be a balance,’ Forcas said. ‘I acknowledge the necessity that forces our hands today. Yet we must limit the moral harm.’

  ‘Restrict the use of such weapons to the Deathwatch,’ said Straton.

  We. The Deathwatch. They were speaking as a unified force, Thane realised. And they were discussing situations that extended far beyond the current mission. He had agreed with Koorland that the Deathwatch was a temporary measure. In many ways, it had to be. He knew his involvement was limited. His responsibilities as Chapter Master made it so. Nor could he imagine any of the Space Marines before him adopting the black livery permanently. They, too, would return to their Chapters.

  And yet.

  We. The Deathwatch.

  There was something permanent here.

  ‘Fifty seconds,’ Abathar said, recalling Thane to the moment.

  The boarding torpedo had no viewing blocks. The pict-screens above the steering controls were Thane’s only window onto the battlefield. He watched the columns of icons and coordinates change as Abathar aimed the torpedo at its target. The bombardment was intensifying. There were more and more landing ships descending to the surface. Damage runes were also appearing with greater frequency. The defenders of the starless world were exacting a price from the invaders.

  All of the ork fire was directed at the planet. The Herald of Night had not been detected.

  ‘The Emperor does protect,’ Thane said. ‘He does indeed.’

  ‘Brace for impact,’ Abathar warned.

  Thane stood firm against the coming blow.

  The boarding torpedo hit the port side of the engine block’s junction. Violent rattling shook the torpedo hull as the drill head ground its way through the immense barrier. There were no void shields, only a monstrous excess of metal between the Deathwatch and their prey. The grinding went on for several minutes. Squad Gladius stood in a line before the hatch door, ready for the moment to storm out of the torpedo. Abathar’s head was cocked as if he were listening for nuances in the cries of iron agony.

  ‘We are nearly through,’ the Techmarine said.

  Thane lifted his bolter.

  The torpedo jerked forward, grinding air, then stopped. The hatch blew open. Squad Gladius charged out from below the drill head. The torpedo had broken through into a corridor running fore and aft. The battleship rang with the incessant beat of its bombardment. There was a group of orks to the right, frozen in surprise. Gladius cut them down with a sustained burst of bolter fire and the orks died before they could react.

  The corridor was wide and high, yet it felt crowded by the tangle of enormous conduits that made up its ceiling. The walls on either side were an assembly of mismatched and misshapen iron slabs, held together by an exuberance of rivets the size of Thane’s fist. Past the bodies of the orks, the passage continued a hundred metres into the engine block before it ended at a blast door.

  There were no other orks in sight. ‘These seconds are ours,’ Thane said. ‘Let us make good use of them.’

  The Deathwatch moved swiftly down the hall, Abathar in the lead. The Techmarine paused just short of the blast door.

  ‘A Dreadnought could pass through that,’ Straton said.

  ‘I choose not to,’ Abathar said. He was looking at the conduits above his head. ‘A struggle for the enginarium will not serve.’

  ‘Assuming it lies beyond that barrier,’ said Thane.

  ‘The presence of a blast door in this location of the hull suggests it does.’ Abathar took a step to his right. He pointed at the conduits. ‘So do these.’ He was under the largest. It was nearly three metres wide. Water dripped from cracks and clumsy welds. ‘This one,’ he said. His servo-arm reached upward. He used his plasma cutter to slice through the metal in a circle while the rest of the squad trained guns down the corridor. A few seconds later, a large iron disc clattered to the deck. A stream of brown water poured down. A hot wind, foul with a mix of xenos musk and burned fuel, blew from the gap.

  ‘Ventilation,’ he said, sounding both satisfied and offended. ‘Ventilation and cooling. The greenskins’ conception of the machine is obscene.’

  ‘Though powerful,’ Forcas said.

  ‘This is so.’ To Thane he said, ‘This will be my route.’

  ‘Very well. We will keep their attention focused elsewhere.’

  Abathar took hold of the edge of the hole with the servo-arm’s claw. He pulled himself up until he could grasp the edge with his gauntlets and disappeared into the conduit, heading in the direction of the engine block.

  ‘Now the guns,’ Thane said.

  There was the long, booming thunder of another volley. The corridor shook. Warfist laughed. ‘They will not be difficult to find.’

  Abathar moved through the long darkness of the conduit, facing into a burning gale. He tasted the air through his rebreather grille, laden with particles of soot and unrefined promethium. He was conscious of how offensive this machine grotesquerie was to the Omnissiah. He would make the destruction of this ship a worthy offering.

  The pipe stretched on and on. The wind grew stronger. He would find his goal at the source of the wind, he was sure of this. It was consistent with the paradox that was ork machines. They were a confounding mix of inconceivably advanced technology and constructs so crude that they should not have functioned at all. This conduit felt like it had been built by creatures who had heard of cooling and ventilation systems, but had no idea of how they actually worked. Yet on his back was a device that was an even more imperfect attempt to mimic technology far beyond the capabilities of the Imperium. The miraculous and the barbaric mixed with no reason, no order.

  It would be his privilege to erase it from existence.

  As the wind became stronger, so too did a sound that resembled the breathing of a gigantic beast. Close, Abathar thought. He was nearing the core of the ship’s enginarium.

  After another thirty metres, dim red light worked its way into the conduit. A bit further on, and the conduit became a nexus for dozens of pipes. There were now also many holes in the main conduit. Perhaps they were prepared for other shafts yet to be constructed. Perhaps they were intended to admit air from the chamb
er beyond. Whatever their purpose, they let in the pulsing, flickering red. Beyond the junction, fans spun. Abathar could see only a portion of one. Its blades must have been thirty metres long.

  Abathar crouched beside a circular grille in the floor of the conduit. Below him, in the red glow, incomprehensible machines clustered. They sparked, they smoked, they chittered at each other as if they were alive. Abathar waited. If there were orks about, they had little reason to approach this particular configuration of machinery. He cut the grille free, and dropped through.

  He landed in a nest of cables and shadows, a mire of technical perversity. It stretched for dozens of metres in every direction. The only illumination was the crimson, and Abathar turned around until he could see its origin. He was in a chamber large enough to contain the dome of Vultus several times over. In the far distance a massive shape loomed, as huge as myth. In its centre, a grille opened and closed, revealing and concealing the crimson heart of power, a miniature red sun, enslaved and turned into the motive power for the ship.

  Many levels of catwalks ran along the walls of the chamber. Precarious spans stretched through the air to connect to the heart of the enginarium and to other, lesser monoliths. Orks swarmed along the catwalks, welding gaps, replacing cables, tending to control consoles bristling with levers that would have needed two mortals to pull. Power flashed at faulty junctions, incinerating orks. Other greenskins were electrocuted by flailing cables. Their shrieks mixed with the braying laughter of their kin, who then moved to complete the lethal maintenance work or die in their turn. Hordes of the dwarfish greenskins hauled the bodies away or dragged bundles of equipment at the command of their hulking masters.

  Abathar had landed on the top of one of the secondary power sources. He was fifteen metres up from the floor of the enginarium, and six from the nearest catwalk. Heaps of tangled, metre-thick power cables sheltered him from sight. A few steps to his right, in the direction of the catwalk, was the base of an energy coil, ten metres high, which leaned out over the edge of the generator. The angry red power spiralled along its length.

  Yes, he could do what needed to be done here.

  Abathar removed the teleport homer from his back. He looked at the device differently than he had in the attack moon. Then he had been carrying untested technology, whose workings and morality were unclear. Now he saw the machine for what it truly was. It was a weapon, one whose use put more than its target at risk.

  He had said nothing during the debate on the boarding torpedo. He agreed with Forcas, though. There were weapons that should never be deployed except by the Deathwatch. They must be kept within the confines of that structure, belonging to none of the Chapters, usable only in very specific circumstances. He distrusted the device, yet he would use it now for the Imperium, and in its destruction remove its unclean being from the sight of the Omnissiah.

  Abathar moved towards the power coil. He was more exposed here, but the coil would have the energy concentration he required. The plan was not to teleport a moon this time. He did not have to tap into the full strength of the ship’s engines. Even so, an enormous level of energy would be unleashed. He stayed low and in the shadows, a machine among machines. There was a serpent’s nest of cables attached to the base of the coil. He scanned the radiation with the auspex until he found those that were drawing power from the coil rather than feeding it. His servo-arm claw yanked one after the other from the base.

  A warning klaxon sounded a harsh, animalistic braying across the enginarium. Up and down the walls and the deck below, lightning flashed from wounded machines. Overloads and short circuits took more orks by surprise. Greenskins shrieked and burned. Others roared with alarm and raced to regain control of the unravelling systems.

  Abathar’s actions were having an impact. He was on borrowed time now. The orks were seeking the source of the malfunctions. They would find him soon. He disconnected one more cable, then began the process of linking the tele­port homer to the power coil.

  He was finishing the first connection when a trio of orks ran down the catwalk towards his platform. They scrambled over the wall of cables and spotted Abathar where he crouched over the homer. They were just out of range of his plasma cutter. He trained his boltgun on them, and shot two into pieces before they could move. The sound of gunfire disappeared in the chaos of the klaxon and the booming beat of the engine. For a moment, Abathar thought he had gained another few seconds for his task.

  The third ork jumped from behind the falling bodies, onto a cable heap, then launched itself at Abathar. He fired, catching the greenskin in the shoulder, knocking its flight to the left. The ork went over the side of the generator. Spraying blood, it tumbled end over end. It dropped twenty metres and landed head-first, snapping its neck. But it howled a warning all the way down.

  Other orks heard. They saw the fall. They shouted, pointing, and the alarm spread. From across the enginarium, the orks abandoned their stations. The horde closed in on Abathar.

  The rest of Squad Gladius followed the seismic pounding of the cannons. There was no time for stealth, and no need for it. Thane wanted the orks to know they were under attack, and he wanted them looking at the wrong threat.

  The Deathwatch warriors tore through the halls and up the levels of the battleship at a run. Orks fell before them, leaves in a storm. Gladius struck with such speed that no warning could be issued. The orks were not prepared for battle on their own ship. Their weapons were sheathed. Their guard was down. They died by the score. The Deathwatch left a wake of shattered bodies and decks awash in xenos blood.

  The cannons were two levels up from the boarding torpedo. The chamber was cavernous. Colossal guns, their barrels six metres in diameter, moved back and forth in the upper space above the Space Marines’ heads, pistoning with each recoil. The blasts rang through Thane’s bones. The chamber vibrated, blurring before Thane’s eyes with the steady drumbeat of the bombardment. Beneath the monstrous cylinders, gunnery crews worked the controls. The stations were bulky, grotesque complexes, spitting steam and sparks. The air roiled, thick with the stench of struggling bodies, ozone and spent explosive.

  Thane, Straton and Warfist charged the nearest crew. Through a gap between Thane and Straton, Forcas unleashed a storm of crimson lightning. The warp energy hit the greenskins and their controls with explosive fury and both burned. Their station blew up, hurling shrapnel and fire across the chamber. Flames licked along cables and ignited pools of fuel. Black, choking smoke spread through the space, cutting visibility. The surviving crew turned on the rushing squad. Warfist reached them first. A greenskin managed a quick burst of its gun, the shells bouncing off the Space Wolf’s armour, before Warfist impaled it through the eyes with his lighting claws. Then he was speeding towards the next position.

  Thane strafed the remaining orks with bolter fire while Straton climbed the ruin of the controls, up articulated scaffolding. He affixed a melta bomb to the cannon, then dropped down. Thane and Forcas had already moved on, catching up with Warfist.

  The Deathwatch used speed against the orks. The surprise of the attack, the explosion of the station and the spreading fire had them off balance. Their retaliation was clumsy. They rushed, and missed.

  Speed. Precision. Purpose.

  Four Space Marines charged hundreds of orks, and the orks were on the defensive.

  Thane and Forcas provided covering fire for Warfist as he closed with the second position. He gutted the orks that blocked his path, and jumped onto the scaffolding. Straton added his bolter fire to the hail, holding down the crew until Warfist had placed his melta bomb.

  Then Warfist leapt away from the cannon and joined Straton and Forcas in giving Thane the cover he needed to sabotage the third cannon. Forcas lit up the chamber with more bolts of warp energy, spreading fires and ripping orks apart with eldritch lightning, but now he avoided destroying the controls. Bolter fire, too, no longer hit the stations.


  His bomb in place, Thane jumped down from the scaffolding. The rush had stopped. There were more cannons ahead, but the orks had rallied. The crews clustered around the next station, a barrier of rage, and their gunfire had the volume now to be effective.

  ‘Well enough?’ Warfist asked.

  ‘Well enough,’ said Thane.

  The Deathwatch retreated. The Space Marines laid down bursts of bolter fire behind them, but that was the lure. The true weapon was speed. The orks pursued, perceiving triumph as their enemy fled. The greenskins were fast, but the shells slamming into their bodies slowed their charge. The gun crews wore no armour, and the mass-reactive ammunition shredded their bodies. For the first several seconds of the chase, the orks died faster than they could charge. Then their numbers told, and they advanced on the wings of hate.

  As Thane had planned.

  The orks reclaimed the gunnery stations on the run. Crews resumed firing while the larger body continued the pursuit.

  This too, was as it should be.

  Thane brought up the rear, looking back, waiting for the moment. It came when the third cannon, having recoiled after its shot, moved outward once again. The second cannon was crewed once more, and about to roar back to life. ‘Now!’ Thane yelled. He pulled the trigger on his detonator. A moment later, so did Warfist.

  Incandescence lit the chamber. First one, then the other melta bomb detonated, burning through the barrels of the cannons. First one, then the other gun fired just as the integrity of the barrel was destroyed.

  First one, then another monstrous shell exploded inside the weapons.

  The cannons flew apart. Thunder so huge it had physical force slammed the orks down. Shrapnel like jagged storm shields flew through the chamber. Flame engulfed the space. And now Straton triggered his bomb too. The cataclysm smashed into the weakened first cannon, and the barrel fell. It smashed down behind the Deathwatch, a wall six metres high.

  Thane lost sight of the other Space Marines. He ran through fire, the world was fire, and the world disintegrated. The deck whiplashed. He flew through the fire, the world of fire. He landed on collapsing metal. He kept his feet and ran on.