Deathwatch

by Steve Parker

  Shrike nodded in the direction of the approaching craft.

  ‘For a time, at least, the problem will be out of my hands. You see that ship? There is my solution, temporary though it may prove. The Deathwatch has come for him. In truth, it is a greater honour than I can offer him here. May it quell this talk of passing him over. I see that look, Saigan. I’ll not deny it is a convenient and easy path to take. But Zeed is worthy of joining the Watch. None can argue that. May he find guidance and wisdom among brothers from other Chapters since he will not listen to those of his own. And may he return to us recast, better suited to serve among us.’

  ‘If he returns at all,’ said Sergeant Saigan darkly. The ease of the captain’s solution did not sit well with him. Deathwatch service ought not to be used to rid one of an inconvenience. Moreover, Saigan himself had long dreamed of such an honour. Those who returned alive were often judged the best candidates for a captaincy whenever one arose.

  ‘Quite,’ said Shrike, and he turned from the balcony and went inside to descend the great stone stairs on his way to meet the black shuttle.

  9

  They found the man in question just as he was leaving the square, a large brown bottle in one hand, a bag of grox cuts in the other. Ordimas marked him well: a little shy of two metres tall, notably broad and deep-chested like so many of the Nightsiders. He was thickly bearded but with a shaved head. The crude tattoo on his neck identified him as either a member or former member of the local criminal organisation known as the Rockheads.

  Meaning he can fight, thought Ordimas, but I wasn’t planning on going toe-to-toe.

  As the brute made his way out of the square, Ordimas ordered Nedra home.

  ‘No,’ said the boy, standing firm. ‘I said I’d show you. Now, let’s go back together.’

  Ordimas frowned. ‘Lad, have I ever done ill by you?’

  Nedra looked at the ground and shook his head.

  ‘Do you take me at my word?’

  ‘You know I do,’ muttered the boy.

  ‘Then do as I ask. Have faith in me now. I have business that you can’t be part of. Not this time. So go home and wait for me. Eat. Sleep. Practise with the puppets. When I return – and I will return, though it may be a day or two – I’ll want to see that you can perform Harvald’s The Smiting of the Traitor at least as well as I. Is that understood? If you can, you’ll have your first official public appearance at our next showing.’

  Nedra’s eyes went wide. For a long time, he had waited to perform publicly. He wanted to make Ordimas proud. His fear for the little man’s safety still hung over him, but he nodded obediently and turned to go.

  At the last second, he turned back and, on a whim, reached out for Ordimas and drew him into a crushing hug.

  No further words passed between them, but Ordimas felt his heart breaking in that embrace, knowing that, after this last reconnaissance was done, he would have to leave the boy forever.

  I would have stayed, lad, he thought. Even in this dingy slum, living this pitiful false life. I’d have stayed until you were a bit older at least. But His Lordship won’t allow that. I live only while I’m useful; a man owned until death.

  I’ll see you right, though, son. Mark my words. This little freak, this smallest of scorpions, will see you right.

  Nedra released him and ran off towards home at a sprint. Ordimas didn’t have time to watch him go, or to dwell further on their inevitable parting. He moved off into the crowds, slipping between them like a fish between river reeds. Someone spat on his hunched-back and hissed, ‘Filthy twist!’, but he paid them no heed. The miner had slipped down a side-street, and Ordimas had to keep moving at speed to keep him within sight.

  Out of the market square, that proved a lot easier; the alleys were thick with shadow. Most people avoided them.

  The miner never noticed his diminutive pursuer. He roughly shouldered his way past anyone on his path, walking with the swagger of one who was known and feared here on his own patch. The Rockheads controlled most criminal business in Cholixe – drugs, women, weapons, smuggling, and much else besides. They were known for being ruthless and brutal; the very qualities which had allowed them to crush their competition. Even the Civitas enforcers here on Chiaro, few as there were, tolerated the gang’s activities rather than wage all-out war on them. An uneasy accord existed. With their local monopoly on illicit products and services, the Rockheads had their claws deep in the Garrahym labour force. They could tilt the miners into striking if they wanted to, even rioting. The administrators and law-enforcers knew the cost of denying labourers their few, limited pleasures. So, within tolerable limits, the Rockheads prospered.

  Arrogant oaf, thought Ordimas. Your tattoo won’t protect you from me.

  But it would pose something of a problem later.

  The miner had stopped at the door of a corner hab just up ahead and was delving into his pocket for his keys. He seemed to be having trouble finding them. Ordimas checked the street. No good. There were too many people around. Best not to act in haste. Patient observation was called for here.

  The miner began hammering a big fist on the door. ‘Mira!’ he barked over the pounding. ‘Open up! I forgot my gackin’ keys.’

  A moment later, the door opened. The miner shoved it wide, and charged inside, cursing the woman in his way, calling her every name he could think of.

  Ordimas slipped into a shadowed doorway on the right with a good view of the corner hab. The alcove was strewn with garbage and the smell from the gutters was foul, but it provided good cover. He dragged tattered papers and plastic bags over himself until he was completely cloaked from notice. And there he waited for his time to strike.

  He didn’t have to wait long. After forty minutes or so, voices were raised in the hab. Ordimas picked up the miner’s name. The woman, Mira, was screaming it.

  ‘Please, Mykal! Don’t!’

  The muffled sounds of a struggle followed. Suddenly, the hab door flew open, and a short, petite woman came racing out holding her cheek. Her clothes were torn, and she bled from one corner of her mouth. The miner, Mykal, came to the doorway and shouted after her, ‘Aye, run! You can come back when you remember your gackin’ place!’

  Mira didn’t hang around to shout back. She was already gone from the street when Ordimas rose from the cover of the shadows and the garbage. Mykal, he noticed, had slammed the door so hard behind him that the auto-lock hadn’t had time to click into place. The momentum of the metal door was so great when it struck the frame that it rebounded and swung half open again.

  Mykal had already retreated back inside the hab, too hasty or angry to notice, or perhaps too sure of himself to care.

  Ordimas bolted across the street and slid into the hab like a shadow, leaving the door open for now, knowing that the noise of closing it might alert his target.

  Once inside, he slid the short knife from its sheath at his lower back and crept forwards, feline-stealthy, down a gloomy, smoky hallway. The air smelt of mould and lho-stick residue. The wallpaper was curled and patchy with fungal growth. These people lived even worse than he and Nedra did.

  But not for long, Mykal, he thought as he stalked towards the kitchen at the far end of the hall. He could hear grunting and grumbling over the sound of fat sizzling in a hot pan. At the doorway, he paused long enough for a split-second scan of the place. There was Mykal, alone at the hob, back towards the door like an idiot.

  Ordimas gripped his knife tighter and stepped silently into the room.

  Time’s up, you son-of-a-bitch. May daemons gorge on your soul.

  Mykal made a short, gasping moan when the little knife punched into his lower back. It was the last breath that ever left his lungs. The neurotoxin on the blade raced through him in an instant, shutting down each of his organs, burning through his neurons, starving his brain of oxygen.

  Ordimas stepped deftly aside just in time as the big man toppled backwards stiff as a board, eyes wide open and already glassy.

&
nbsp; The little hunchback leaned over his mark, looking down into his face from only inches away. ‘You’ve had that coming a while, gacker,’ he murmured.

  There was little time to take real satisfaction in the deed. Morphosis would take an hour or so. He had to work fast. It was this moment, more than any other, that Ordimas dreaded. He knew the price he would pay later for using the drug. Taking it was bad enough, but the crash was another type of torture entirely.

  Quickly, he stripped both himself and the corpse, placing everything on the floor in two piles. Taking one of the drug-capsules from its pouch, he uncapped it, pressed the tiny needle into the flesh of his chest, and crushed the flexible plastic bubble that contained the purple liquid.

  The drug shot into him. He gritted his teeth, muffling a scream that desperately wanted to get out. The pain was as intense as ever, a fire that coursed along every last nerve in his body. He saw stars. His skin itched all over. He felt his heart hammering so fast he thought it would burst. But none of this was new to him. He knew it would subside.

  Within three minutes it had, and the drug, acting on Ordimas’s unique genetics, started to take its intended effect. Ordimas felt his joints loosen. He lay down on the floor next to the body of Mykal. His bones became less rigid. Normal breathing became difficult. He forced himself to relax and take shorter, shallower breaths, establishing a rhythm he knew would work best from past experience.

  The moment was at hand. Mustering all the strength his now flaccid muscles had left, he shifted his head over to the arm of the dead miner and took a tiny bite of his flesh. He didn’t need much; just some tissue, some blood, a little hair.

  He swallowed, no longer sickened by this, though in his early days of service to His Lordship, he had struggled with the notion, raging at himself because he dared not refuse. Not so now. One small bite was all he needed. That hardly made him a cannibal.

  The changes in his body took a new direction almost at once, guided not just by the intake of genetic material but by his eidetic imprint of how the man had looked when alive. He closed his eyes, holding that image of Mykal in vivid detail, knowing the process couldn’t be rushed. It was always better to lie back and let it happen.

  Fifty-eight minutes later, two near-identical bodies lay on the kitchen floor of that dirty corner hab; two men of thick muscle and bearded face. Of the original Ordimas Arujo, there was no sign left save the pile of humble clothes, the knife and the drug pouch. Two bodies, but only one stretched and rose to its feet:

  Ordimas as Mykal – puppeteer of another sort entirely.

  ‘What shall we do about that tattoo?’ wondered Ordimas aloud, testing the qualities of his newly configured vocal cords, attempting to mimic Mykal’s voice from the memory of the words the miner had hurled after his battered woman. Ordimas was trained for this, too, of course, and his mimicry was near perfect despite only hearing the mark speak clearly twice. Unique vocal habits and idiosyncrasies were something he would have to guess at, but Ordimas had observed enough of the Rockheads in bars and on street corners to know he had a feel for their patterns of speech.

  Still naked, he leaned close to the cold corpse to get a better look at the tattoo. Tattoos, scars, the holes of piercings; these were things his gift alone could not mimic. He had to think of a way–

  There was a crash of breaking glass to his left and the sound of a scream suddenly muffled by two hands.

  Ordimas whipped his head around to face the source.

  There in the kitchen doorway stood Mira, pale as a ghost, eyes wide like a panicked animal, her hands pressed tight over her mouth.

  Ashra’s arse! thought Ordimas. I should have locked the door after the kill.

  The woman probably had her own key, of course. Still, forcing her to unlock it would have bought him valuable extra seconds. In any case, it was too late for should-haves; here she was, frozen in fear, then suddenly frozen no more.

  She turned and bolted into the hall.

  Ordimas flew after her, fighting to coordinate his new limbs as he ran.

  10

  Bolter-fire stitched the earthworks behind which Second Company held fast.

  ‘Get those lascannons ready!’ barked Sergeant Voss. ‘Those tanks will move up any second. I want them taken out. And someone move those bloody fuel drums. If a stray bolt hits them, we’ll all be cooked meat!’

  Paradaxis, third planet of the Arcaydes system, had drawn the interest of the foul traitors known as the Word Bearers. No one knew why. They had struck suddenly, ships slipping from the warp so close to Imperial planetary defences that, within hours, the Naval Defence Monitors were overwhelmed and obliterated. Chaos drop-ships fell by the dozen, concentrating on the eastern regions of the Frajian continent, particularly around the bustling trade city Diasport.

  Imperial Guard regiments garrisoning the city had dug in to offer every bit of resistance they could muster. Via both astropathic and deep space relay communications, they had sent out a desperate call for aid.

  It was by chance alone that the Imperial Fists Second Company were in the subsector. They were two days out. Those two days almost ended the fight. The Guard regiments were little more than tattered remnants when the Fists arrived. Had it not been for the support of a redoubtable civilian militia determined to protect their homes and families, the city of Diasport would have fallen before the Adeptus Astartes could have made any difference.

  As it was, Maximmion Voss and the rest of his company, under the command of the renowned Second Captain Rudiel Straker, found themselves fighting against the clock. Whoever had designed the defences of Diasport ought to have been executed, at least in Voss’s eyes. The city’s guns were mostly on the coast, intended to prevent an attack by sea. The land to the west of the city had been given over to agriculture with little thought for effective fortification. So it was that Second Company fought from hastily constructed earthworks behind which they had dug and blasted out a complex trench network. Razor wire and tank traps added to the mix. It wasn’t much, not against the vile forces of Traitor Marines, but, given the identity of the Chapter defending the city, it was proving enough.

  Once ordered to hold ground, the Imperial Fists were unrivalled. They were the finest defensive fighters and counter-siege specialists in the modern Imperium. Voss intended to prove that.

  He ran along the primary trench, heading south, his powerful legs pounding the muddy duckboards. He was unusually short for a Space Marine. In the militia, there were standard humans – mundanes, some of the brothers called them – who cast as long a shadow as he did. Few cast a shadow as wide, however, for what Voss lacked in height, he more than compensated for in hard, grainy muscle. There was nothing he could do about his height, and not a few of the Chapter’s Apothecaries looked at him askance whenever he passed by. Perhaps it was a kind of unconscious compensation, but Voss had become prone to voluntary sessions of extreme physical training. His muscles swelled beyond their already significant gene-boosted mass. His armour had to be adjusted by the Chapter’s tech-servitors. Then it had to be adjusted again, and again. Finally, he had been told – no, commanded! – to grow no thicker. His strength and power had outstripped those around him, but concerns had arisen about his mobility in the field. So far, these had not been borne out. But nevertheless, with some reluctance, Voss had acceded to the demands of his superiors. He grew no bigger and, from that moment, trained only to maintain what he had.

  What he had remained formidable. As he ran to shore up a potential weakness in the southern defences, he carried not one but two portable Hellfire missile launchers, fully loaded, one in either armoured hand.

  Bolter and autocannon-rounds whipped and whined over his head. To his right, the earthworks shuddered. Dirt leapt into the air to shower down on his bright yellow helmet and pauldrons. A tank round – high explosive – had missed him by a few metres only. Voss kept running. Up ahead, he could see the battle-brothers of Squad Richter pouring bolter and plasma-fire onto the kill-zone from
the firing step. Suddenly, as one, they ducked. Another tank round whistled over them, smacking into the rear wall of the trench.

  The brothers of Squad Richter closest to the impact threw themselves to safety barely half a second before the rear wall blasted outwards. Voss was shoved sideways by the force of another blast a second later, but he was sure-footed and steady. He did not fall, nor did he drop his armaments.

  He reached Squad Richter a few seconds later. They were rising to their feet, shaking off clods of wet earth. Voss recognised a battle-brother called Varagrim, a heavy weapons specialist like himself. ‘Var!’ he shouted. ‘Look sharp!’

  He tossed one of the missile launchers and Varagrim caught it, knees bending momentarily with the weight of the weapon as it landed in his outstretched hands.

  ‘With me,’ ordered Voss as he leapt up onto the firing step and put the other missile launcher to his shoulder.

  Varagrim didn’t argue. Sergeant Richter had fallen to a heavy artillery barrage just two days prior. Sergeant Voss had assumed command of Squads Voss and Richter both.

  Voss poked his visor up above the lip of the trench and cursed. It wasn’t any kind of conventional armoured vehicle that had fired those shots into the trench. Before him, not three hundred metres away and scuttling forwards fast, was a multi-legged metal monstrosity. Hideous, daemonic faces cast in gold and bronze leered at the loyalists, mocking them, daring them to stand and fight. And die.

  ‘Defiler,’ spat Varagrim, joining him on the step.

  Aye, thought Voss. Curse the luck.

  Defilers were damned difficult to disable. Knock out the treads of a tank and it became a sitting target. Easy prey. But the thickly-armoured, spider-like limbs of the Defiler were harder to hit. More than that, should one of the legs be disabled, the others could compensate, keeping the Chaos abomination mobile. If one managed to stagger it, however, there was a short window of opportunity…