Deathwatch

by Steve Parker

  The beast’s head was jolted backwards, but it didn’t stagger. It recovered quickly, lifting its limbs high for a killing blow, screeching with rage. But that screech would be the last sound its throat ever loosed. Zeed whipped his combat knife free from its sheath with his left hand, quick as lightning, and drove it straight through the genestealer’s exposed neck. Then he turned away, using all his bodyweight to rip the knife free. The serrated blade left almost nothing of the muscle and connective tissue. The genestealer collapsed, crashing to the rocky chamber floor with its neck gaping wide, head lolling at a gruesome angle.

  Others were still pouring from the black tunnel mouths. The Raven Guard resumed firing, adding the sound of his bolter to the deafening noise of the others. Ammo counters dropped with frightening speed. Bodies lay everywhere, but the assault didn’t seem to be slowing.

  ‘Stand firm!’ yelled Karras.

  A great sheet of fire roared out from Voss’s flamer. Seven distorted alien forms began an agonised dance in the middle of the blaze before they collapsed, their flesh melting off to leave only black and smoking bones.

  ‘Talon Four, cease fire,’ ordered Karras. ‘Conserve that ammo. This wave is almost at an end!’

  Voss slung his flamer in favour of the bolt pistol holstered on his left cuisse. He flicked off the safety just as the last line of genestealers erupted from the tunnels. The Space Marines’ guns rattled a deep tattoo. The frenzied aliens were mowed down even as they closed with their prey.

  Rauth killed the last of them, putting two bolts in the beast’s torso, dead-centre mass. As this last member of the alien assault tumbled dead to the chamber floor in front of him, the Exorcist hit the release catch on his bolter and dumped another empty mag.

  Zeed, almost giddy from the combat high, surveyed the charnel house scene before him.

  Bodies lay strewn everywhere. Footing was poor; the ground was slick with shining wet viscera. Brass bolt-casings surrounded the feet of the Space Marines, slowly being enclosed in a sea of cooling alien blood.

  ‘That’s it?’ he asked Karras.

  The team leader was reloading his bolter. ‘That was a probe, Ghost. The broodlord wanted to see what we can do. Now he knows. If anything, we’ve just proved that we deserve special attention. They’ll be coming for us in real numbers now.’

  Voss swapped his pistol out for his flamer again. He looked at the heaps of dead bodies all around them. ‘Real numbers?’

  ‘How many are we talking about, Alpha?’ Solarion asked. Tension had robbed his voice of its usual caustic tones.

  Karras faced his squad. ‘Too many for us to handle, and that’s not something I say lightly. Sigma told us this was not to be a purge. There’s good reason for that. We can’t afford to get locked down and have to fight it out. Look at your chronos, Talon. The readout is yellow, now. So we move fast, or we die here. I’m not planning on the latter.’

  Zeed rammed a fresh magazine into his bolter and cocked it. ‘Then let’s get a move on,’ he said, ‘because, that taste of combat has left me hungry for more.’

  It was here that Karras finally told them all that the kill-team must split up.

  Only Rauth did not voice objections, and Karras was hardly surprised. He had the feeling the Exorcist had known all along that this moment would come. Only Rauth was truly invisible to the broodlord’s psychic senses. Karras could suppress his gift again, and mute the signature his soul gave off so long as he did not exercise his powers, but he could not mask the others at the same time. To travel as a squad meant being tracked. That left only one course of action.

  ‘We will not be able to retrieve White Phoenix while under assault,’ Karras told them. ‘Solarion, Voss and Zeed, I need the three of you to head south towards the largest nurseries or hatcheries or whatever the warp they are. Cause as much damage as you can. Wreak havoc on them, a storm of slaughter so great they will have no choice but to send everything they have against you.’

  ‘That’s your plan?’ raged Solarion. ‘Use us as a diversion? Expendable, are we? No, Karras. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Listen,’ barked Karras. ‘There’s something you ought to know. Tell them, Rauth. Do it!’

  The Exorcist glared at Karras, but he would say nothing. Instead, he stepped away, bolter raised, and covered the exits in silence.

  Karras cursed in frustration. ‘Then I will tell them. Our Exorcist brother here gives off no spiritual signature. He has no presence in the immaterium. Do you understand me? The enemy cannot track him. They cannot even see him unless they have actual physical line-of-sight.’

  He let them process that a moment. ‘It means the broodlord does not know he is here.’

  ‘How is that possible?’ asked Voss. ‘I thought all living things had an ethereal signature. How can a Space Marine lack a soul?’

  Karras looked at Rauth, but the Exorcist presented only his back.

  Indeed, thought Karras. A Space Marine with no soul, and yet he lives and fights just as we do. It should not be possible. It goes against everything we know. And yet, here he is.

  There was no time to think on it more. Not here. ‘How does not matter,’ he told Voss. ‘I’m certain that Sigma knew of this… anomaly… and that he planned to have Rauth split off from the rest of the kill-team to recover the woman. I will be going with him as insurance. We cannot risk so much on only one of us.’

  ‘Can the broodlord not see you also?’ asked Voss.

  ‘He sees me clearest of all, brother, but only while my power is unshackled. I will suppress it again, now that Rauth and I will be separating from the rest of the squad.’

  ‘You’re still using us, Death Spectre,’ hissed Solarion.

  ‘Of course I am,’ snapped Karras. ‘You are members of my kill-team. We have a mission to accomplish, and this is our best chance of success. I am no more using you than Sigma is using all of us, but we are Deathwatch. This is what we do, and we are sworn to it by solemn oath. Let’s get the job done and get out of here. We will rendezvous at RP3 and fight our way back to the exfil point together. Is that clear? I expect all three of you to meet us back there. Do not disappoint me.’

  ‘I’m in,’ said Zeed. ‘I’ll take a straight fight over tip-toeing through tunnels with some woman on my back any day.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Voss. ‘We’ll give them a fight, all right.’

  They looked at Solarion, who looked back at them blankly for a moment.

  With an angry grunt, he finally agreed. ‘Very well, Alpha. I’ll do as ordered. But know this: if you plan to spend our lives as coin for your own escape, my shade will haunt you for the rest of your days.’

  Karras lifted both hands and disengaged the seals of his helm. He lifted it from his head, then he stepped directly in front of Solarion.

  ‘Look into my eyes, brother. Look, damn it! And listen to me now. Whatever you think of me, know that you are respected and valued, a crucial member of my kill-team. More than that, you are my battle-brothers, all of you. And I will not leave you behind. I will not!’

  His eyes blazed with intensity and emotion, and even Solarion had to admit to himself that he believed him.

  ‘Go south-east for half a kilometre. Move with speed. There is a cavern at the tunnel’s end. You already have the knowledge. Visualise it. From there, take the leftmost tunnel. It slopes down towards several of the enemy birthing chambers. There you will unleash your fury on them.’

  ‘How will we know when you have the woman? How will we know when to fall back to the rendezvous point?’

  ‘I cannot mask the woman’s soul, nor the signature of the creature in her belly. Once we have her, the broodlord will sense her moving away from the nest. In a fury, it will turn all the forces at its command to her recovery. You will know that we have her when the assault on your own position slackens. Pray for us then, because they will be coming for us. All of them. We will need your strength as soon as you can give it. Hurry to the RP. Without you, Rauth and I will have almost
no chance of survival.’

  His words sat heavy on the air. It was such a long shot, but all of them had known long odds before – had known them and survived them, if only by the skin of their teeth.

  When Karras finished replacing his helm, Voss moved forwards and gripped his wrist tight. ‘Emperor watch over you, Scholar.’

  ‘Fight hard, all of you,’ replied Karras. ‘Do yourselves proud, for the honour of Watch and Chapter both.’

  They parted, two moving off into the abyssal black tunnel to the north, three heading south-east as ordered.

  Karras felt a weight in his stomach as he and Rauth moved at a heavy trot.

  He could not shake the feeling that he had just sent three exemplary Space Marines off to their deaths.

  If so, both he and Rauth would not be far behind them.

  11

  As they ran, Karras glanced sidelong at the recalcitrant Exorcist.

  Of all his kill-team operatives, Darrion Rauth was the one about which he knew the least. Save a very few rare exceptions such as the Badab War, the exploits of Rauth’s Chapter were shrouded in unusual levels of secrecy. There seemed some link to the Inquisition’s Ordo Malleus, but it was vague and tenuous at best, at least as far as records went.

  What he did know was that Rauth had earned the nickname Zeed had given him.

  Watcher, he calls him, and with ample cause.

  Karras would have been a fool not to notice how often Rauth’s cold, withering gaze was on him. Worse still, his hand never strayed far from his weapon when in Karras’s presence. It was as if he expected violence to erupt at even the unlikeliest of times.

  Has he taken it upon himself to act as some kind of bodyguard? Has he been so instructed without my knowing? It can’t be that. His manner… It doesn’t fit. Then, what?

  Together, he and Rauth moved at speed along a slowly-curving downwards tunnel that branched north from the chamber in which they had parted from their fellows, then turned slowly north-east. It was pitch black here. They’d had to activate the rail-mounted lights on their bolters again.

  Karras had closed the inner gates on his power almost completely for now. What little he allowed through was spent on forcibly reducing the brightness of his soul and projecting that dimmer ethereal light well away from his true position. It took a certain amount of steady concentration, and while he maintained it, he could not psychically detect enemies that might be nearby, but what he did detect was the change in their surroundings. One only needed eyes for that.

  The walls were changing. Instead of bare, natural rock, they had become strangely ribbed, as if the two kill-team operatives were descending down the gullet of some vast creature as yet unnamed.

  Karras slowed to study them. Rauth ran on, then noticed Karras was no longer pacing him and stopped. Karras heard the slight shifting of ceramite plates as the Exorcist brought his bolter up.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘The walls,’ said Karras. He stepped over to the tunnel surface on his left and angled his bolter’s light onto it. ‘See for yourself.’

  Rauth moved cautiously over to his side and looked down.

  Karras reached out a hand and touched the surface. It was as he had suspected. The further they went, the more it became apparent: the walls were organic. They were in the nest for real now. Originally, the tunnel would have been a natural lava tube, or perhaps a path cut by a massive prehistoric rock-eater. But now the rock surface was covered with a shiny, waxy substance marbled with a network of fine lines that looked like veins. Rauth drew his knife from the sheath at his lower back and stabbed the point into the strange wall. The immediate surface was still somewhat soft, being composed of younger, newer growth, but the deeper the point of the blade went, the harder the material became. When Rauth withdrew his knife, the wound he had made began bleeding a thick, sticky substance – sap-like in consistency but with the colour and smell of super-oxygenated blood.

  ‘It bleeds,’ said the Exorcist.

  Karras nodded. ‘It’s alive and it’s growing on its own, spreading out from the centre of the tyranid nest. We are almost there. The locatrix is not far ahead.’

  They moved back to the centre of the tunnel, Rauth sheathing his blade. Side-by-side, they continued at a run down into the darkness. The air was stiflingly hot and humid now, but the filters, seals and regulatory systems of their power armour rendered such changes meaningless in terms of discomfort.

  When they had gone a few hundred metres further, and the growth on the walls became noticeably thicker, Karras remarked on the strange shapes their lights now described. The forms on the tunnel walls became more complex in structure. He saw cross-ribbed swellings and serrated spurs. There were thousands of craters clustered in groups, each containing a barnacle-like mouth from which tiny fronds, barely visible, waved. As the Space Marines passed these, they whipped inwards and disappeared completely, the beaks snapping shut with an audible clack.

  ‘We must talk, brother,’ said Karras, ‘about why the broodlord cannot detect you.’

  They kept running, and Rauth made no reply.

  ‘I noticed it the first time we met. You give off no resonance at all. I’ve never known anything like it.’

  It was not a question, and Rauth did not treat it as such.

  Karras’s tone became sharp.

  ‘As your Alpha,’ he said, ‘I have a right to know.’

  ‘You know everything you need to,’ growled Rauth in reply. ‘I have no psychic signature. I do not resonate. Accept it. Use the knowledge to your advantage, as you do now. Do not waste time and energy pressing me for the how and the why. I cannot and will not speak of it. My Chapter has its laws just as yours does.’

  Silence fell between them again.

  Eventually, Karras said, ‘Very well, brother, but the truth will out sooner or later. It always does.’

  ‘Then it will out for you, also. Think on that.’

  As they pressed on, Karras dimly sensed the broodlord stirring. He had not expected to, not with his talent closed off to him, but the abomination’s aura was throbbing powerfully with psychic thunder, strong enough to feel even with his gift suppressed. It was sending out a terrible impulse, compelling its hordes of chittering killers to move south-east in the direction of the other kill-team members.

  Their storm of carnage and destruction had begun.

  Karras clenched his teeth, adjusted his grip on his bolter, and increased his pace, acutely conscious that Zeed, Voss and Solarion were fighting to buy him time.

  ‘It has started,’ he told Rauth. ‘The tyranids move against the others. We must be swift.’

  Rauth matched his speed. ‘May the Emperor lend them His fury.’

  Whatever gulfs of misunderstanding and mistrust lay between Karras and Rauth, against the xenos threat, they were Deathwatch operatives united by oath. It would serve them both to remember that, Karras knew.

  He and Darrion Rauth would stand together, fight together, even die together.

  And the latter perhaps sooner than either of us might wish.

  12

  Voss stepped over the body at his feet, jammed his pistol into the genestealer’s mouth and blew out the back of its head. It flopped back, twitching, four arms splayed out.

  He looked down at it and cursed. These foul creatures were an offence to the eye. Perhaps if they hadn’t borne so many features inherited from their host species… But the telltale signs of their parentage were plain for all to see: the thumbed hands, the configuration of facial features, the play of muscles beneath the skin of the neck – all this and more besides.

  Corruption, thought Voss. They twist everything to their own pattern. What guides them? What purpose drives them across so much space just to absorb and multiply?

  Mankind had no answer, but for now, at least, there were still men alive to ask. How much longer would that be so? The tyranids surely represented the greatest threat by far to the Imperium. They were implacable, remorseless, insatiab
le. There was no bargaining to be had. You killed them, or you were killed.

  Zeed stepped past him, sheathing his long knife.

  ‘Not out of breath, I hope, brother.’

  Voss grinned beneath his helm. ‘Show me to more of them and you’ll see.’

  Solarion joined them, having surveyed his own kills and reloaded his empty bolter. ‘They’ll be coming soon enough. Let’s move a little deeper and do some more damage.’

  Around them lay not only the first wave of genestealers who had been sent to defend this place, but the amniopods and birthing sacs from which the broodlord’s vicious progeny were meant to hatch. They wouldn’t be hatching now, however. Solarion, Zeed and Voss had torn through the place like a murderous wind before the first genestealer defenders had arrived. Half-formed creatures had spilled out in a wash of nutritional fluids as the Space Marines had wrenched open protective shells and cut through fleshy membranes. They had stamped on these unborn creatures, ending early the lives of beings that would have gone out to claim so many others.

  There was no pity in their hearts. The xenos young were simply monsters waiting to grow into full lethality. Their destruction was the Emperor’s work.

  Solarion took point without being asked, and they moved on, deeper into the heart of the alien nest, looking for the next birthing chamber in which to conduct their righteous slaughter.

  They found one soon enough, large and humid, the air thick with noxious gases emitting an unwholesome, acrid stink. But the horde had been fully mobilised against them now, and there was no time to kill the tyranid young before the walls were swarming with full-grown genestealers.

  Back at the junction after the assault of the first wave, Zeed had said he wanted more.