Watchers in Death

by David Annandale

  The warring lightning faded between Forcas and the orks. The Blood Angel was still standing, but his armour was badly scorched. His face was a mass of burned meat. He staggered forward, still snarling. One of the engineers had fallen, smoke rising from its blackened corpse.

  Abathar pulled himself back inside the Titan’s head. He charged the engineers’ nest and swung his power axe at the straining shield. Warfist looped around and rammed his shoulder into the field at the same moment. Straton’s shells never let up. The two remaining greenskin engineers had just enough time to know what was coming and roar a brutish denial.

  They were dead moments later.

  The molten bedlam of the columns screamed. Its fire spread along the cables. They melted. They convulsed like maddened serpents. Electrical fury lanced through the space and the fused columns spun still faster as they shattered restraints. The whirl reached beyond them. It took the chamber. It seized the Titan. Thane felt a world roar into a vortex.

  The ork Titan was going mad.

  The entrance behind Thane, the one through which Squad Gladius had entered the control hall, had been destroyed by the maelstrom of the columns. There was another one in the far wall. ‘Seal the door!’ Thane shouted into the vox. There would be no chance for any ork to attempt to regain control of the Titan.

  Straton and Abathar ran through the monstrous clamour of the growing destruction. Abathar melted the door along its seams while Straton placed charges across the ceiling. Thane and Warfist turned to Forcas. The Blood Angel’s snarls were inaudible in the thunder of disintegrating metal. His movements were sluggish. They guided him towards the hatch.

  The door burst open, the crush of orks overwhelming the seals before Abathar could complete them. He turned plasma cutter and power axe against the horde. He was surrounded by a flood of blood and greenskin muscle.

  ‘Do it now!’ Thane heard him vox Straton.

  The Ultramarine set off the charges. The blasts brought down shrieking machinery and slabs of metal. They crushed flesh. Abathar disappeared under tonnes of burning wreckage with the horde.

  The deck tilted thirty degrees. It threw Forcas, Thane and Warfist against the outside wall. Straton grabbed a spur of rubble, kept his feet and hauled. Metal shifted. The centre of the rubble glowed white. It trembled, then began to collapse from the heat of the plasma cutter. Abathar reared out of the mass. His left arm hung limp, but he punched at his prison with servo-arm and axe.

  The deck rocked back, then to the sides. The rotation grew more violent. The spin gathered momentum. The columns had become a blinding mass of self-destruction, and still they spun and spun and spun. The flames were everywhere. There would be no salvation for the Titan. Soon there would none for the Deathwatch either.

  ‘Qaphsiel,’ Thane voxed. ‘We need extraction. Make for the crown of the Titan.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Warfist went through the hatch first. He hacked at the shielding with his power claws, carving a path up. Forcas sagged against Thane, but he had ceased snarling, and he reached out and grabbed the sides of the hatch. A cloud of fire swept over them. Blinded, Thane felt Forcas begin to pull, and he added his strength to the Blood Angel’s, guiding him into the air.

  ‘Straton,’ he voxed. ‘Abathar.’ He looked back, but he could no longer see them. The control chamber was darkness and flame and heaving movement.

  ‘We are here,’ Straton answered. ‘We are following.’

  Thane climbed outside. Fire erupted from the eyes of the Titan. Above him, Warfist was helping Forcas towards the crown. Thane waited until he saw Straton emerge from flame and smoke, then Abathar behind him. Then he climbed.

  The mind of the Titan was dying, and its body responded with ever greater violence. The massive cannons were still firing, but the Titan’s arms were caught in a pendulum motion, the swings growing longer and more wild. The monster’s gait was a drunken, turning sway. It was a mountain falling into a dance of death.

  Squad Gladius clung to the skull in storm. The Penitent Wrath skimmed the top of the Titan. Qaphsiel flew the gunship in tight circles as the Space Marines reached the peak. Warfist jumped through the side door as the Thunderhawk went by. He reached down for Forcas on the next pass. Thane held the psyker up. He was barely responsive.

  ‘Raise your arms, brother,’ Thane said. ‘Raise them in triumph.’

  Something in Forcas heard. He obeyed. Warfist grasped his forearms and hauled him aboard. Thane and Straton followed when Qaphsiel brought the gunship around again.

  One more pass now. One more brother. Thane and Straton crouched at the door to aid Abathar. The Techmarine flexed his knees and began his leap.

  Metal buckled. The crown of the Titan collapsed into the vortex. Shields turned to jagged teeth. Abathar fell into the gnashing metal.

  He stretched his servo-arm up as he plummeted. Thane seized the claw. The imploding skull dragged Abathar down and sought to pull Thane from the gunship. Straton clasped the arm and they both pulled.

  Thane felt the jaws crush something human. The disintegration of bone shook through Abathar’s frame and into Thane’s arms. ‘We have you, brother!’ he yelled in defiance of the dying beast.

  Then they did have him. They pulled him free. They dragged him aboard.

  His right leg was gone below the thigh.

  The Thunderhawk pulled away from the Titan. The monster was out of control now. It staggered through the mass of the ork army, crushing infantry beneath it. Its arms were a monstrous flailing, and the devastation of its guns spread across the battlefield, punching new craters in the ground as well as the mountainside. The ork invasion force turned on its own weapon. The caldera became a battlefield, a cauldron of explosives as the orks struggled against the awful power of their technology gone mad.

  The Penitent Wrath flew towards the fortress.

  Forcas was unconscious. Warfist and Straton wrestled him into a grav-harness. Abathar was awake. His blood slicked the deck, but his Larraman cells had already slowed the flow, coagulation building a scab over the stump. The femoral artery had pinched itself closed. Thane helped the Techmarine to a bench, then turned to Veritus. The inquisitor had been sitting silently in the troop hold. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  Veritus shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The enemy is distracted,’ said Warfist. ‘If they’re going to break out…’ He stopped. ‘What is that?’ he said.

  Thane joined him at the viewing block. The mountain just below the base of the fortress was moving. ‘A gate,’ he said. A seam of light appeared in the darkness. Walls of rock rumbled apart, revealing a vehicle bay beyond. Silver illumination bathed the cliff face. Three armoured vehicles advanced from the depths of the bay. ‘Rhinos,’ Thane said.

  ‘How do they expect to reach the ground?’ Warfist demanded. ‘That’s a sheer–’ He stopped.

  Thane’s eyes widened.

  ‘If those are Rhinos,’ Warfist said, ‘why are they flying?’

  Engine exhausts burned red on the flanks and undersides of the Rhinos. The vehicles streaked down the mountainside, then levelled off as they approached the ground. The squadron flew over the orks, storm bolters cutting a swath of fire through them. Thane witnessed impossible, awe-inspiring technology, and it was Imperial.

  Exulting, he said, ‘They are flying because they are transporting myths.’

  Epilogue

  Terra – the Imperial Palace

  Koorland listened to the silence. It was stronger than ever. It strode above the celebrations. Its weight gathered second by second, and he knew its cause.

  From the base of a staircase wide enough for thousands but forbidden to all but a few, he gazed at the towering door of the Sanctum Imperialis. He would never see what lay beyond. That was perhaps as it should be. The sublime was not for his eyes. He had not earned the right. The women who had entered
a short while ago had that right. The staircase was not forbidden to them, nor was this door. There were other entrances to the Sanctum, but they were for those who would never come out again. The warriors who had climbed this staircase would also descend it.

  ‘Did you speak to them?’ he asked Thane.

  ‘Very little. They were disinclined to speak to anyone except Inquisitor Wienand.’

  ‘I see.’ He pushed aside thoughts for now of the power play Wienand might be preparing.

  Inside the Sanctum, fifty women were passing before the Golden Throne, renewing their vows to the Emperor, and swearing themselves to eternal silence. Theirs was the quiet he was hearing. It was not a silence for which he could take credit or blame. It was not his burden, or his sacrifice, or his honour.

  He gave thanks for it, though. He did not expect this silence to banish the others. Their weights would remain with him. But it might bring about yet another. Through it, the Beast would at last cease to roar.

  About the Author

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novels Imperial Creed and The Pyres of Armageddon. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. He has also written several short stories set in the Age of Sigmar. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

  An extract from Deathwatch: Ignition.

  Donatus slid into the cover of a ruined devotional cogitator bank, letting its bent and bullet-riddled frame shelter him for the moment it took to switch ammunition.

  The rest of the Sternguard were weathering the storm of heavy-calibre fire stuttering around the chapel interior. Brother Adelmo was backed against a pillar and Felidus had dived into a side shrine as explosive fire tore up the floor slabs beneath him.

  Donatus rejected the Hellfire round, too rare and precious, its core a reservoir of bio-reactive acid. The Metal Storm shell was also dismissed – against unarmoured flesh it could wreak carnage that a regular bolter shell could not, but in this situation it would be a poor choice. Donatus ejected his bolter’s load and replaced it with a single Kraken round from the clip at his belt. These were rare, too, and Donatus had only a single magazine of them in total. They were not to be fired off lightly.

  ‘Keep moving and flank it!’ commanded Sergeant Tatianus, the Sternguard squad leader. The sergeant bolted from cover and sprinted across the aisle between the chapel’s stone pews. Explosive fire followed him, filling the air with shards of hot stone. Felidus hefted his heavy bolter and rattled a volley of fire at the enemy, while Adelmo ran, head down, for the cover of the altar.

  ‘No effect!’ shouted Felidus over the vox. ‘The damn thing’s armoured like a tank!’

  Donatus put his head above the wreck of the cogitator. The enemy was in the centre of the chapel, laughing bestially as it sprayed an endless torrent of fire at the Sternguard, mocking their attempts to bring it down.

  Donatus had learned to hate the greenskins simply by virtue of being human, albeit a heavily modified one. The orks were the enemy of the very concept of humanity. They tore down the order mankind built around it to survive. They toppled the empires that men raised to bring sanity to a galaxy of madness. They were anarchy personified.

  Donatus compressed his hatred into a thread that wrapped around his limbs and steadied his aim. His peered through the preysense sight of his custom bolter, leaning into the extended stock.

  The enemy was a greenskin specialist. Some orks were leaders, others psykers, others pilots or vehicle gunners. The creature fighting the Sternguard was an ork engineer, one of the insane inventors that built their ramshackle war machines and unpredictably explosive weapons. It wore what Donatus guessed was its own creation – a massive suit of armour, driven by a smoke-belching power plant on its back, with dense plating that had turned aside every bolter shell the Sternguard had thrown at it.

  The ork was armed with a pair of rapid-firing cannons, one mounted on each arm. Hissing hydraulics powering its limbs gave it the strength to heft the enormous weapons and keep up a withering wall of fire. Even as Donatus took in the sight, sizing up the greenskin’s armoured mass for avenues of attack, Brother Adelmo broke cover again and ran into a blind spot created by a heap of fallen masonry.

  ‘I’m making a detonation run!’ Adelmo voxed.

  ‘Go for the joints!’ replied Sergeant Tatianus. ‘They are the most vulnerable!’

  Adelmo ran straight at the ork. He had a krak grenade in his hand, an explosive with a small radius but a high-powered charge designed to rip open armoured vehicles. Placed correctly, it would split the ork’s armour open and leave the xenos inside ripe for killing.

  The creature saw Adelmo before he got close enough to plant the grenade. It swung one of its cannons and slammed the length of it into Adelmo’s chest. The Space Marine was hurled across the width of the chapel and crunched into the wall, dislodging chunks of broken stone as he tumbled to the floor.

  The ork laughed again, the metallic sound issuing from the steel faceplate. Its metal mask was in the likeness of an ork, with red-lensed eyes and a huge grinning, jagged maw.

  Donatus played his preysense sight across the ork. The sight picked out body heat and motion, lining the armoured ork in red and yellow, and the heat billowing from the power plant; the cannons glowed white-hot and the hydraulics were edged in cherry-red. The crosshairs etched onto Donatus’ lens hovered over the ork’s chest, where beneath the armour plating the alien’s heart had to beat.

  Not even a Kraken round, with its shaped reactive charge to punch through ceramite and plasteel, would get through the armour there. Donatus needed another way.

  The ork wheeled around to face Tatianus, who was still trying to outflank it. The sergeant rolled out of a volley of fire, but the shockwave of the chain of explosions threw the Sternguard sergeant off his feet and sent him sprawling behind the chapel’s altar.

  The ork’s power plant was facing Donatus now. He had, he guessed, two ways through the ork engineer’s armour, and the power plant was one. It did not have the same armour plating as the ork’s body and there was a good chance a penetrating shot would create secondary detonations or cause the armour to fail.

  He weighed up the chances in his head. At times like this, with a target in his sights, Donatus’ mind could hurtle through a series of probability equations that a scribe would need days to write down. He made his decision and pulled the trigger.

  The Kraken shell speared through the brass-cased cylinder between the smoke-belching exhaust stacks. From the neat hole and larger exit scar shot a whistling plume of steam.

  No explosion of fuel blew the armour apart. The ork didn’t slow down. It turned to face Donatus, suddenly aware of the fourth Sternguard in the chapel.

  But there were two ways through the armour.

  Donatus slid a second Kraken round into the breech of his bolter, and felt the click as it fitted into the firing chamber. His crosshair found the red lens over the ork’s right eye. A reflex action kicked in, and he fired.

  The Kraken shell shattered the lens and bored right through the faceplate. It punched through the ork’s real eye and the bone of the socket. The armour covering the back of the skull held and the bullet rebounded inside its head, sending a shower of gore spraying from the ruptured lens.

  The cannons fired a few more rounds as the ork’s hands clenched the firing levers reflexively. Then the guns hung limp at its sides and the whole contraption slumped, the head hanging low, the cannon barrels resting on the floor.

  Tatianus picked himself up. Adelmo was on his feet, too, the deep blue of hi
s Chapter livery caked in white dust from the pulverised stone of the chapel. His armour had been repainted upon his return from service with the Deathwatch, and it had made him look like a new recruit. Felidus had mocked him for it at first, but now Adelmo looked as battle-worn as the rest of them.

  ‘A good kill, brother,’ Tatianus commended Donatus, approaching the ork to check it really was dead. A trickle of gore from the punctured lens suggested there was little doubt of that.

  ‘Not so good,’ said Adelmo. Though he wore his helmet, crowned with gilded laurel leaves, Donatus could tell that he was smiling. ‘It took two rounds.’

  Chaplain Cassius took to the pulpit as if he were born to it, the ruddy sunlight edging his polished black armour with dull fire. Behind him rose the industrial mass of Skemarchus, the manufactoria city belching smoke and flame in vast columns that reached the steel-coloured sky.

  ‘Brethren,’ said Cassius. ‘On the eve of battle we turn our thoughts inwards, towards the strength we shall call upon tomorrow. A million orks hold Skemarchus. We are but eighty. And yet, we shall win.’

  The battle-brothers of the Third Company stood ranked up in the centre of the Ultramarines’ landing zone, surrounded by the command and sensorium buildings that had been dropped from orbit. Nearby were the Stormraven gunships and Rhinos that would take them into the storm that awaited them in Skemarchus. The eight squads stood hooked by Cassius’ words, the young Chaplain fixing each one with a look as he spoke. He did not wear the traditional skull-faced helm of his position, relying instead on his own face, not yet marked by battle, to relay the intensity behind his words. Most Ultramarines gave decades of service before they could be elevated to the ranks of the Reclusiam and wear the black armour of the Chaplain – Cassius was exceptionally young to serve in such a role.