Though he would never forget his Tauron heritage, Zaeus knew he was of the Machine-God now. Flesh or machine, he would serve the Throne and his brothers until duty ended in death. Even in that bleak thought he took comfort as he looked to the horizon.
A train of soldiers were marching. Their hearts still pumped, their limbs still moved, their lungs still drew air, but their minds were empty tombs only filled with what their masters put into them.
Zaeus saluted them as they faded into the storm.
It would rise higher and swallow the entire world in cyclonic death, a million souls consigned to the grave so a trillion more would live on. Then the Deathwatch would come to their worlds too, Zaeus had seen it happen countless times before, and the same thing would repeat.
Without an iota of remorse, he turned his back on the servitors and went to the gunship.
This world had only hours left to it, but there were thousands more in need of purgation. The task of the Deathwatch was endless, their victories unsung.
As he watched his brothers return to the ship, he wondered where they would be bound for next and what they would have to kill.
None of it really mattered. The mission could always be broken down to a single universal truth: suffer not the alien to live.
The Infinite Tableau
by Anthony Reynolds
One of them was about to die.
They stood at the epicentre of the battle, beneath a sky that was burning, and it seemed as though time stood still. The black-armoured paragon of humanity brought a golden-winged power sword around in a crackling two-handed killing strike. His pale face was twisted in hatred, and his eyes were tinged red with blood-rage. Despite the thickness of his enemy’s bull-like neck, the blow was perfectly timed, delivered with all his genhanced and armour-augmented strength.
His opponent was a hulking, green skinned monster that stood over two and half metres tall. It lived only for battle and knew – nay, cared for – nothing else. It roared as it swung its chugging chain-glaive around in a brutal arc, a blow that could carve the Space Marine clean in two.
Either blow would be mortal if it landed. Both would land within a single heartbeat.
One of them was about to die.
His rage was a vile, black thing dwelling deep within him. His force of will kept it coiled and bound for now, but it was growing stronger day by day, year by year. He knew that there would come a day when it would overcome him. All that would be left was the beast within.
Today would not be that day.
He repeated it to himself silently, like a mantra. Today is not that day. He forced himself to unclench his fists, and took a deep breath. The anger always came when he felt trapped, or when he felt that his fate was not his own to direct.
The gunship shuddered, but not from incoming fire. The native-born called the scouring winds that whipped across the ice floes the skree-tha – the witch-howling. He could understand why. Even enclosed within the ceramite-reinforced shell of the gunship, the roar of the straining engines was drowned out by the screaming, banshee wail outside.
The winds buffeted them hard, slamming the craft from side to side as they hurtled over the vast, empty expanse of ice. It lifted them sharply, threatening to rip the gunship’s wings off, before pulling them down, dragging the nose towards the ice floe below.
‘Cassiel,’ said a voice behind him. It was Tanaka. ‘Will you not sit?’
Cassiel did not reply. Nor did he make to return to his restraint harness. He could feel the White Scar’s reproachful gaze upon his back, but he ignored it. Had he remained seated, his anger would have blossomed.
He filled the doorway of the gunship’s cockpit, his already oversized frame made more massive still by his black power armour. One shoulder pad was dull silver and bore the Inquisition’s iconography. The other was blood red, and had the heraldry of his Chapter – the Blood Angels – sculpted in bas-relief upon its curved surface.
Cassiel peered over the shoulder of the ship’s pilot, his expression dark. He had taken up the position as soon as they had entered the moon’s atmosphere. He’d been unable to bear being restrained any longer.
‘We are nearing the distress beacon, sir,’ said the gunship pilot, his voice crackling through into Cassiel’s earpiece. Despite their close proximity, the howling gale made the vox necessary.
‘How long?’ said Cassiel.
‘Two minutes.’
Cassiel looked over his shoulder, back into the red-lit gloom of the gunship’s hold. Twelve black-clad storm troopers were seated back there, strapped in tightly. They were elite soldiers, trained from childhood to serve the Ordo Xenos. Their bodies had been enhanced, making them bigger, stronger and faster than regular humans. Nevertheless, they were dwarfed by Cassiel and the other two members of his kill-team.
‘Two minutes to touchdown,’ Cassiel said, his words being relayed into the ear of every soldier onboard. ‘Be ready.’
‘We should be able to see the ship any moment now,’ said the pilot. ‘There.’
Cassiel leaned forwards, brushing a strand of dark blond hair back from his eyes. The storm made it almost impossible to see anything at all beyond the ice-fogged cockpit. Everything was a swirling wall of white.
Then he saw what the human pilot’s augmented vision had picked out a moment earlier: a dark, bug-like shuttle crouched low on the ice. It was just a shadow at first, but solidified as the gunship drew in close. It was half buried in ice and snow. Another few hours, and it would be completely hidden.
Beside the ship, he could see a dark fissure in the ice, a massive crack that extended out into the storm.
‘We’re here,’ Cassiel said.
Cassiel was the first to step onto the ice, his black armour a stark contrast to his surroundings. How many worlds had he set foot upon now? How many foes had fallen beneath the long golden-winged blade, Aruthel, that he wore slung across his back? He had stopped counting long ago.
His face was as pale and cold as his surroundings. He might have resembled a classical statue, carved from pale marble, but for the trio of parallel scars that crossed his face, twisting his lips and puckering his skin; a memento of his encounter with a chameleonic xenos beast two years past.
The gale whipped at Cassiel’s shoulder-length hair and the tabard draped across his armour. Ice slashed at his cheeks, and he was forced to narrow his eyes against the biting gale. He breathed in deeply. The cold was as sharp as a knife in his lungs. Without a sealed enviro-suit, an unaugmented human would have been dead within a minute in these conditions. Cassiel was far from unaugmented, however, and he made a point of breathing the air of every planet he visited, even if only for a moment.
A pair of large, black-clad figures clomped out onto the ice behind him.
Tanaka, hefting his heavy bolter, and Var’myr of the Mortifactors, his boltgun held across his chest.
These were his adopted battle brothers, his kill-team.
He had fought alongside Tanaka for over a decade – they had both started their tenure with the Deathwatch at the same time. Var’myr was a newcomer, having joined the ranks of the Ordo Xenos fewer than six months ago. There had been others before him, but they were gone now: Svorgar of the Space Wolves had been decapitated by a clawed fiend on the nightworld of Jar’Mun’Gar; Ryzmor of the Carcharodons had been ripped limb from limb by the magicks of eldar witches in the ruins of Delthasur; Titus Constantine of the White Consuls had been released back to his Chapter with honour after the successful purging of Alanthus.
As much as Cassiel yearned to return to his Chapter, it was a privilege to fight alongside such esteemed warriors.
‘Var’myr, scan the area.’
A servo-skull hovered at the Mortifactor’s shoulder, its mechanical left eye blinking red. Once, that skull had belonged to one of his battle-brothers. They were a morbid Chapter, a fact re
inforced by the bones strung across Var’myr’s armour.
‘Go. Seek,’ the Mortifactor said, his voice deep and sombre. The servo-skull swung out into the storm, as ordered. The winds buffeted it – Cassiel heard Tanaka chuckle at the sight – but the device compensated swiftly, gyros buzzing. It commenced a wide sweep of the area, scanning and recording.
He glanced at the White Scar. Tanaka met his gaze, his dark obsidian eyes glinting with humour. His face was gnarled and weathered, the colour of tanned leather.
‘I like this place,’ Tanaka said, shouting to be heard above the gale and the dying whine of the gunship’s engines.
‘I see nothing redeemable about it,’ said Var’myr.
‘Bah!’ said Tanaka. ‘You know nothing! This cold is good. It lets you know you are still alive.’
‘I know I’m alive because I am alive,’ said Var’myr. ‘I don’t need the cold to tell me that.’
Var’myr assessed the skull’s findings, reading from the auspex built into his left forearm. The entire arm was bionic from the shoulder down.
‘The scan is clear,’ he said. He snapped the data-screen back into his vambrace, and the armoured plate clicked into place around it like a shell. ‘There is nothing living within a hundred kilometres, nor any heat signature or radiation. This is a dead world.’
‘Lieutenant, secure a perimeter,’ Cassiel ordered over the vox, and the storm troopers who had been standing by moved out onto the ice, flowing around the three Space Marines with their hellguns at the ready.
As they took up support positions, Cassiel and his brothers marched towards the silent shuttle squatting upon the ice. It was a bulbous, ugly ship resembling a fat-bodied insect. Its six articulated legs clung to the ice, and a pair of large eye-like portal-windows were positioned at the front of its ‘head’. Through them, Cassiel could see three vacant seats, where the pilot, co-pilot and navigator would normally be seated. There were no lights inside.
With crisp orders, Cassiel directed Var’myr and a pair of storm troopers to search the ship while Tanaka checked the ravine.
Cassiel pulled on his helm; the slicing storm was stinging his eyes. Once he had worn a helmet of shining gold, but since his indoctrination into the Deathwatch he had worn nothing but their traditional black. Among the Blood Angels, the only warriors who wore black were the holy Chaplain-wardens of the Chapter, and the damned warriors of the Death Company.
He walked around the exterior of the shuttle, scrutinising it for signs of battle damage. The nose and wingtips were blackened, but this looked like charring from orbital entry; it had not been brought down by weapons-fire. Var’myr stepped down from the explorator vessel just as he finished his circuit.
‘Nothing,’ said the Mortifactor, shaking his head. His servo-skull had returned to him, and was once more hovering at his shoulder.
Var’myr fell in beside Cassiel, and the pair trudged into the wind to join the vague figure of Tanaka, standing some way off and staring into the storm. The White Scar was almost completely hidden by swirling ice that seemed to confuse even the advanced sensory arrays of Cassiel’s battle plate.
‘Speak your mind,’ said Cassiel. Var’myr was taciturn at best, silent and sullen at worst, but in the brief time they had known each other, Cassiel felt he was beginning to learn how to read those silences.
‘We should never have been sent here,’ said Var’myr. ‘We ought to have joined the other strike teams in the final assault. We earned that, at least.’
‘Watch-Commander Haldaron felt that our presence was needed here,’ said Cassiel, keeping his voice neutral. ‘It is no smear on our honour.’
‘It is,’ said Var’myr. ‘The greenskin warlord’s head should have been ours to claim. By now, someone else will probably have it.’
In truth, Cassiel tended to agree, but that was not helpful.
‘I would hope so,’ he said, ‘else the brute still lives. Put it from your mind, brother. We are here now, and we have been given our duty.’
They joined the heavy bolter wielding White Scar, standing on the edge of the immense ice fissure. Steam was rising from the gaping rift, making it impossible to gauge its depth. It was narrow, little more than two metres across at any point, and extended further than the eye could see.
‘You think they went down there?’ asked Cassiel.
‘Where else?’ replied Tanaka.
‘Then that is where we shall go too.’
Var’myr sent his servo-skull down into the crack, red beams of light from its sensors scanning and documenting.
‘Seismic activity opened this crack twelve days ago,’ said Var’myr, tapping his data-slate. ‘The whole area is unstable. There are… seventeen active volcanic rifts within an eighty-kilometre radius of this location.’
‘How deep is it?’ said Cassiel.
‘Nine metres, here,’ said Var’myr, reading the output upon his forearm screen. ‘Deeper… much deeper further along.’
‘Is the ground solid at the bottom of the fissure, just here?’
‘It is.’
‘Good,’ said Cassiel.
‘It is unstable, however,’ said Var’myr. ‘Another tremor could seal this crack at any moment. You are not thinking of–’
Before the Mortifactor could finish, Cassiel stepped off the ice floe, dropping silently down into the gaping fissure.
The sound of wind down in the narrow defile was even more unearthly than it was up on the ice floe, though it was out of the worst of the gale. The sheer walls of ice were a brilliant, luminous blue – the first real colour that he had seen on this moon – and almost completely transparent in places where the ice was near flawless. Steam vented up from narrower cracks underfoot.
A flurry of ice and snow fell down around him, and Tanaka landed in a crouch a half-second later. He grinned at Cassiel as he rose to his feet. Var’myr landed a moment later, amid a small avalanche of ice.
‘You took your time, brother,’ said Cassiel.
The Mortifactor did not deign to answer. Up above, the storm troopers were readying their rappelling lines.
‘They went this way,’ said Tanaka, pointing. ‘But they did not come back.’
‘Did your ancestors tell you that?’ said Var’myr.
‘The tracks on the ground tell me that.’
Cassiel led the way. In places the ice canyon was so narrow that their shoulder plates scratched deep furrows in the ice. Their progress was not swift, but after a time they came to a low opening in one of the canyon walls. Hot steam spewed from the gap.
Var’myr’s servo-skull disappeared into the steam. It reappeared a moment later, its red eye blinking impatiently. Tanaka scowled at it, and it darted back into the steam like a rebuked hound. It reappeared a moment later, hanging just behind Tanaka’s shoulder, and Cassiel smirked. The White Scar caught sight of it, and swore in his own, guttural dialect.
‘Irritating thing,’ he said, swatting at it. ‘Away!’
It darted back, just out of reach. Cassiel wondered how much sentience remained within the skull – it seemed to delight in taunting the White Scar whenever possible. ‘Var’myr, control your creature,’ he said.
‘It’s just a machine,’ replied the Mortifactor mildly.
‘Here,’ Tanaka muttered, pointing out the tell-tale marks in the ice. ‘They widened the entrance with chainblades.’
‘Not enough, though,’ said Var’myr. Though the aperture was large enough for a regular human to get through, there was no chance that any of the three Deathwatch brothers could pass.
‘Move aside,’ Cassiel ordered. He would not sully Aruthel’s blade with such a mundane duty, nor did he need to. With a grunt he struck the ice with his gauntleted fist, dislodging a massive chunk. Within the space of a minute he had cleared an opening that he and his team could negotiate, followed a few moments later by th
e storm troopers.
Cassiel once again took up the lead, ice grinding against his armour. The steam made rivulets of condensation run down the lenses of his helm. Some way on, the passage opened up into an irregular cave formation, its floor at a steep angle. Ice-crystals formed by the volcanic updrafts filled the space. It was easy to see which path the explorators had taken – they merely had to follow the path of crushed crystals.
There was a surprising amount of light within the caves, even as they clambered, slid and crawled deeper beneath the ice floe. It was a diffuse, cold glow, which seemed to radiate from the very ice itself. A rumble of seismic activity shook the ground underfoot, ice fell from the slanted roof, and spider-web cracks appeared in the walls around them.
‘We do not want to be here any longer than necessary,’ said Cassiel, brushing melt-water from his shoulders.
Eighty metres below the ice floe, having traversed more than a kilometre from their starting point, the Space Marines came upon what the explorator team had been sent to find.
Cassiel dropped down into a large cavern, ice crunching underfoot. He was decidedly conscious of the millions of tonnes of glacier hanging above him, even more so as another ice-quake rumbled. It was groaning like a ship in the void. The walls seemed to close in, shifting and altering their position as the ice floe shuddered, and fresh cracks inched their way across the walls, clouding their previously transparent surfaces. Cassiel forced himself to breathe calmly, controlling his inner rage.
Tanaka and Var’myr joined him, dropping down into the cavern after him. It was as large as the embarkation deck of a battle-barge. The floors were uneven, rising and falling at acute angles, almost meeting the jagged ceiling in places and falling away into sheer deadfalls that sank hundreds of metres further down in others. Traversing the chamber was slow, and a clear line of sight from one side to the other was difficult, for pillars of crystal linked floor to roof and clusters of needle-like ice fanned out from wall and floor.
Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters Page 5