‘Fine, I’ll give Solarion the new orders.’
‘No,’ said Sigma. ‘I’ll do it directly. You and Rauth must hurry to the command bridge. Expect to lose comms once you get closer to the target. I’m sure you’ve sensed the creature’s incredible power already. I want that thing eliminated, Alpha. Do not fail me.’
‘When have I ever?’ Karras retorted, but Sigma had already cut the link. Judging by Solarion’s body language as he ran, the inquisitor was already giving him his new orders.
At the next junction, Waypoint Barrius, the trio encountered another ork mob. But the speed at which Karras and his men were moving caught the orks by surprise. Karras didn’t even have time to charge his blade with psychic energy before he was in among them, hacking and thrusting. Arquemann was lethally sharp even without the power of the immaterium running through it, and orks fell in a great tide of blood. Silenced bolters coughed on either side of him, Solarion and Rauth giving fire support, and soon the junction was heaped with twitching green meat.
Karras turned to Rauth. ‘Give Solarion your frags and incendiaries,’ he said, pulling his own from his webbing. ‘But keep two breaching charges. We’ll need them.’
Solarion accepted the grenades, quickly fixing them to his belt, then he said, ‘Good hunting, brothers.’
Karras nodded. ‘We’ll rendezvous back at the elevator shaft. Whoever gets there first holds it until the others arrive. Keep the comm-link open. If it goes dead for more than ten minutes at our end, don’t waste any time. Rendezvous with Voss and Zeed and get to the salvage bay.’
Solarion banged a fist on his breastplate in salute and turned.
Karras nodded to Rauth. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, and together, they ran on towards the fore section of the ship while Solarion merged with the shadows in the other direction.
‘Die!’ spat Zeed as another massive greenskin slid to the floor, its body opened from gullet to groin. Then he was moving again. Instincts every bit as sharp as his lightning claws told him to sidestep just in time to avoid the stroke of a giant chainaxe that would have cleaved him in two. The ork wielding the axe roared in frustration as its whirring blade bit into the metal floor, sending up a shower of orange sparks. It made a grab for Zeed with its empty hand, but Zeed parried, slipped inside at the same instant, and thrust his right set of claws straight up under the creature’s jutting jaw. The tips of the long slender blades punched through the top of its skull, and it stood there quivering, literally dead on its feet.
Zeed stepped back, wrenching his claws from the creature’s throat, and watched its body drop beside the others.
He looked around hungrily, eager for another opponent to step forward, but there were none to be had. Voss and he stood surrounded by dead xenos. The Imperial Fist had already lowered his heavy flamer. He stood admiring his handiwork, a small hill of smoking black corpses. The two comrades had fought their way back to Waypoint Adrius. The air in the towering chamber was now thick with the stink of spilled blood and burnt flesh.
Zeed looked up at the landings overhead and said, ‘No sign of the others.’
Voss moved up beside him. ‘There’s much less static on the comm-link here. Scholar, this is Omni. If you can hear me, respond.’
At first there was no answer. Voss was about to try again when the Death Spectre Librarian finally acknowledged. ‘I hear you, Omni. This isn’t the best time.’
Karras sounded strained, as if fighting for his life.
‘We are finished with the reactor,’ Voss reported. ‘Back at Waypoint Adrius, now. Do you need assistance?’
As he asked this, Voss automatically checked the mission countdown.
Not good.
Twenty-seven minutes left.
‘Hold that position,’ Karras grunted. ‘We need to keep that area secure for our escape. Rauth and I are–’
His words were cut off in mid-sentence. For a brief instant, Voss and Zeed thought the kill-team leader had been hit, possibly even killed. But their fears were allayed when Karras heaved a sigh of relief and said, ‘Damn, those bastards were strong. Ghost, you would have enjoyed that. Listen, brothers, Rauth and I are outside the ship’s command bridge. Time is running out. If we don’t make it back to Waypoint Adrius within the next twelve minutes, I want the rest of you to pull out. Do not miss the pick-up. Is that understood?’
Voss scowled. The words pull out made him want to smash something. As far as his Chapter was concerned, they were curse words. But he knew Karras was right. There was little to be gained by dying here. ‘Emperor’s speed, Scholar,’ he said.
‘For Terra and the Throne,’ Karras replied then signed off.
Zeed was scraping his claws together restlessly, a bad habit that manifested itself when he had excess adrenaline and no further outlet for it. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I’m not standing around here while the others are fighting for their lives.’ He pointed to the metal landing high above him where Karras and the others had gotten off the elevator. ‘There has to be a way to call that piece of junk back down to this level. We can ride it up there and–’
He was interrupted by the clatter of heavy, iron-shod boots closing from multiple directions. The sounds echoed into the chamber from a dozen corridor mouths.
‘I think we’re about to be too busy for that, brother,’ said Voss darkly.
Rauth stepped over the body of the massive ork guard he had just slain, flicked the beast’s blood from the groove on his shortsword, and sheathed it at his side. There was a shallow crater in the ceramite of his right pauldron. Part of his Chapter icon was missing, cleaved off in the fight. The daemon-skull design now boasted only a single horn. The other pauldron, intricately detailed with the skull, bones and inquisitorial ‘I’ of the Deathwatch, was chipped and scraped, but had suffered no serious damage.
‘That’s the biggest I’ve slain hand-to-hand,’ the Exorcist muttered, mostly to himself.
The one Karras had just slain was no smaller, but the Death Spectre was focused on something else. He was standing with one hand pressed to a massive steel blast door covered in orkish glyphs. Tiny lambent arcs of unnatural energy flickered around him.
‘There’s a tremendous amount of psychic interference,’ he said, ‘but I sense at least thirty of them on this level. Our target is on the upper deck. And he knows we’re here.’
Rauth nodded, but said nothing. We? No. Karras was wrong in that. Rauth knew well enough that the target couldn’t have sensed him. Nothing psychic could. It was a side effect of the unspeakable horrors he had endured during his Chapter’s selection and training programmes—programmes that had taught him to hate all psykers and the terrible daemons their powers sometimes loosed into the galaxy.
The frequency with which Lyandro Karras tapped the power of the immaterium disgusted Rauth. Did the Librarian not realise the great peril in which he placed his soul? Or was he simply a fool, spilling over with an arrogance that invited the ultimate calamity. Daemons of the warp rejoiced in the folly of such men.
Of course, that was why Rauth had been sequestered to Deathwatch in the first place. The inquisitor had never said so explicitly, but it simply had to be the case. As enigmatic as Sigma was, he was clearly no fool. Who better than an Exorcist to watch over one such as Karras? Even the mighty Grey Knights, from whose seed Rauth’s Chapter had been born, could hardly have been more suited to the task.
‘Smoke,’ said Karras. ‘The moment we breach, I want smoke grenades in there. Don’t spare them for later. Use what we have. We go in with bolters blazing. Remove your suppressor. There’s no need for it now. Let them hear the bark of our guns. The minute the lower floor is cleared, we each take a side stair to the command deck. You go left. I’ll take the right. We’ll find the target at the top.’
‘Bodyguards?’ asked Rauth. Like Karras, he began unscrewing the sound suppressor from the barrel of his bolter.
&n
bsp; ‘I can’t tell. If there are, the psychic resonance is blotting them out. It’s… incredible.’
The two Astartes stored their suppressors in pouches on their webbing, then Rauth fixed a rectangular breaching charge to the seam between the double doors. The Exorcist was about to step back when Karras said, ‘No, brother. We’ll need two. These doors are stronger than you think.’
Rauth fixed another charge just below the first, then he and Karras moved to either side of the doorway and pressed their backs to the wall.
Simultaneously, they checked the magazines in their bolters. Rauth slid in a fresh clip. Karras tugged a smoke grenade from his webbing, and nodded.
‘Now!’
Rauth pressed the tiny detonator in his hand, and the whole corridor shook with a deafening blast to rival the boom of any artillery piece. The heavy doors blew straight into the room, causing immediate casualties among the orks closest to the explosion.
‘Smoke!’ ordered Karras as he threw his first grenade. Rauth discarded the detonator and did the same. Two, three, four small canisters bounced onto the ship’s bridge, spread just enough to avoid redundancy. Within two seconds, the whole deck was covered in a dense grey cloud. The ork crew went into an uproar, barely able to see their hands in front of their faces. But to the Astartes, all was perfectly clear. They entered the room with bolters firing, each shot a vicious bark, and the greenskins fell where they stood.
Not a single bolt was wasted. Every last one found its target, every shot a headshot, an instant kill. In the time it took to draw three breaths, the lower floor of the bridge was cleared of threats.
‘Move!’ said Karras, making for the stair that jutted from the right-hand wall.
The smoke had begun to billow upwards now, thinning as it did.
Rauth stormed the left-side stair.
Neither Space Marine, however, was entirely prepared for what he found at the top.
Solarion burst from the mouth of the corridor and sprinted along the metal landing in the direction of the elevator cage. He was breathing hard, and rivulets of red blood ran from grape-sized holes in the armour of his torso and left upper arm. If he could only stop, the wounds would quickly seal themselves, but there was no time for that. His normally dormant second heart was pumping in tandem with the first, flushing lactic acid from his muscles, helping him to keep going. Following barely a second behind him, a great mob of armoured orks with heavy pistols and blades surged out of the same corridor in hot pursuit. The platform trembled under their tremendous weight.
Solarion didn’t stop to look behind. Just ahead of him, the upper section of the landing ended. Beyond it was the rusted stairway that had almost claimed Rauth’s life. There was no time now to navigate those stairs.
He put on an extra burst of speed and leapt straight out over them.
It was an impressive jump. For a moment, he almost seemed to fly. Then he passed the apex of his jump and the ship’s artificial gravity started to pull him downwards. He landed on the lower section of the landing with a loud clang. Sharp spears of pain shot up the nerves in his legs, but he ignored them and turned, bolter held ready at his shoulder.
The orks were following his example, leaping from the upper platform, hoping to land right beside him and cut him to pieces. Their lack of agility, however, betrayed them. The first row crashed down onto the rickety stairs about two thirds of the way down. The old iron steps couldn’t take that kind of punishment. They crumbled and snapped, dropping the luckless orks into lethal freefall. The air filled with howls, but the others didn’t catch on until it was too late. They, too, leapt from the platform’s edge in their eagerness to make a kill. Step after step gave way with each heavy body that crashed down on it, and soon the stairway was reduced almost to nothing.
A broad chasm, some thirty metres across, now separated the metal platforms that had been joined by the stairs. The surviving orks saw that they couldn’t follow the Space Marine across. Instead, they paced the edge of the upper platform, bellowing at Solarion in outrage and frustration and taking wild potshots at him with their clunky pistols.
‘It’s raining greenskins,’ said a gruff voice on the link. ‘What in Dorn’s name is going on up there?’
With one eye still on the pacing orks, Solarion moved to the edge of the platform. As he reached the twisted railing, he looked out over the edge and down towards the steel floor two-hundred metres below. Gouts of bright promethium flame illuminated a conflict there. Voss and Zeed were standing back to back, about five metres apart, fighting off an ork assault from all sides. The floor around them was heaped with dead aliens.
‘This is Solarion,’ the Ultramarine told them. ‘Do you need aid, brothers?’
‘Prophet?’ said Zeed between lethal sweeps of his claws. ‘Where are Scholar and Watcher?’
‘You’ve had no word?’ asked Solarion.
‘They’ve been out of contact since they entered the command bridge. Sigma warned of that. But time is running out. Can you go to them?’
‘Impossible,’ replied Solarion. ‘The stairs are gone. I can’t get back up there now.’
‘Then pray for them,’ said Voss.
Solarion checked his mission chrono. He remembered Karras’s orders. Four more minutes. After that, he would have to assume they were dead. He would take the elevator down and, with the others, strike out for the salvage bay and their only hope of escape.
A shell from an ork pistol ricocheted from the platform and smacked against his breastplate. The shot wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate ceramite, not like the heavy-stubber shells he had taken at close range, but it got his attention. He was about to return fire, to start clearing the upper platform in anticipation of Karras and Rauth’s return, when a great boom shook the air and sent deep vibrations through the metal under his feet.
‘That’s not one of mine,’ said Voss.
‘It’s mine,’ said Solarion. ‘I rigged the fuel dump in their fighter bay. If we’re lucky, most of the greenskins will be drawn there, thinking that’s where the conflict is. It might buy our brothers a little time.’
The mission chrono now read eighteen minutes and forty seconds. He watched it drop. Thirty-nine seconds. Thirty-eight. Thirty-seven.
Come on, Karras, he thought. What in Terra’s name are you doing?
Karras barely had time to register the sheer size of Balthazog Bludwrekk’s twin bodyguards before their blistering assault began. They were easily the largest orks he had ever seen, even larger than the door guards he and Rauth had slain, and they wielded their massive two-handed warhammers as if they weighed nothing at all. Under normal circumstances, orks of this size and strength would have become mighty warbosses, but these two were nothing of the kind. They were slaves to a far greater power than mere muscle or aggression. They were mindless puppets held in servitude by a much deadlier force, and the puppeteer himself sat some ten metres behind them, perched on a bizarre mechanical throne in the centre of the ship’s command deck.
Bludwrekk!
Karras only needed an instant, a fraction of a second, to take in the details of the fiend’s appearance.
Even for an ork, the psychic warboss was hideous. Portions of his head were vastly swollen, with great vein-marbled bumps extending out in all directions from his crown. His brow was ringed with large, blood-stained metal plugs sunk deep into the bone of his skull. The beast’s leering, lopsided face was twisted, like something seen in a curved mirror, the features pathetically small on one side, grotesquely overlarge on the other, and saliva dripped from his slack jaw, great strands of it hanging from the spaces between his tusks.
He wore a patchwork robe of cured human skins stitched together with gut, and a trio of decaying heads hung between his knees, fixed to his belt by long, braided hair. Karras had the immediate impression that the heads had been taken from murdered women, perhaps the wives of some huma
n lord or tribal leader that the beast had slain during a raid. Orks had a known fondness for such grisly trophies.
The beast’s throne was just as strange; a mass of coils, cogs and moving pistons without any apparent purpose whatsoever. Thick bundles of wire linked it to an inexplicable clutter of vast, arcane machines that crackled and hummed with sickly green light. In the instant Karras took all this in, he felt his anger and hate break over him like a thunderstorm.
It was as if this creature, this blasted aberration, sat in sickening, blasphemous parody of the immortal Emperor Himself.
The two Space Marines opened fire at the same time, eager to drop the bodyguards and engage the real target quickly. Their bolters chattered, spitting their deadly hail, but somehow each round detonated harmlessly in the air.
‘He’s shielding them!’ Karras called out. ‘Draw your blade!’
He dropped the cryo-case from his shoulder, pulled Arquemann from its scabbard and let the power of the immaterium flow through him, focusing it into the ancient crystalline matrix that lay embedded in the blade.
‘To me, xenos scum!’ he roared at the hulking beast in front of him.
The bodyguard’s massive hammer whistled up into the air, then changed direction with a speed that seemed impossible. Karras barely managed to step aside. Sparks flew as the weapon clipped his left pauldron, sending a painful shock along his arm. The thick steel floor fared worse. The hammer left a hole in it the size of a human head.
On his right, Karras heard Rauth loose a great battle-cry as he clashed with his own opponent, barely ducking a lateral blow that would have taken his head clean off. The Exorcist’s short-sword looked awfully small compared to his enemy’s hammer.
Bludwrekk was laughing, revelling in the life and death struggle that was playing out before him, as if it were some kind of grand entertainment laid on just for him. The more he cackled, the more the green light seemed to shimmer and churn around him. Karras felt the resonance of that power disorienting him. The air was supercharged with it. He felt his own power surging up inside him, rising to meet it. Only so much could be channelled into his force sword. Already, the blade sang with deadly energy as it slashed through the air.
Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters Page 10