Storm of Damocles

by Justin D Hill

  ‘No. But they died there nonetheless. Domitian felt it.’

  ‘What killed them?’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me it was the atmosphere.’

  ‘No. It was not the sulphur. It was the tau.’

  Shipmaster Ferral did not have a sense of humour, though her habit of speaking bluntly was sometimes mistaken for jest – to the distinct disadvantage of her crew. ‘Looks like your prey fought back.’

  Nergui nodded. ‘Yes, it does that.’

  ‘In the wild it is the hunter who kills the prey. Not the other way round.’

  ‘This is not the wilds of some planet, shipmaster. This is the way of the galaxy. Kill or be killed. The hunted adapts, or it dies. And this enemy has adapted.’

  She stiffened. ‘I have commanded auspex sweeps of the whole system, but found nothing.’

  Nergui turned for a moment as Ganbold was loaded onto one of the armoury carriages and carried with due reverence into the armoury lift. He waited until the lift doors had closed, and then he turned back to her. ‘I do not think they are still here. The xenos have made great efforts to hide their presence. Whatever was there a month ago is now gone.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Nergui remembered the size of those battlesuits, and his jaw hardened. ‘That is what we need to find out.’

  She sighed. ‘So we have accounted for Kill Team Primus. But what of Kill Team Orion? Do we keep searching for them?’

  Nergui paused for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We do not. What I saw there – I must take news back. Our commander must hear. Now, please excuse me.’

  Nergui’s cell was a plain chamber with a bed, an armoury and a vast round viewport that looked out across the upper portside weapon batteries. He kept reliving the moment when Ellial had seen the Riptide and the new battlesuit side by side. Their enemy had evolved in a way that repelled him. The urge to kill was strong. They were not just xenos, they were a deadly bacteria that multiplied and learned and changed.

  Humanity would not be safe if even one of their foul race was left alive.

  He closed his eyes, meditated upon the images that he had seen from Ellial’s mind, going over each one moment by moment, gleaning every scrap of information.

  He did not sleep for three days, and it was not until he felt the warp drive being engaged that his eyes snapped open. He had given his orders for the return to Picket’s Watch, but now – after long and deep thought – something nagged at him.

  Nergui jumped up suddenly and strode out into the central corridor. To the left the walls were warm and throbbed with the heat of the ship’s core reactor. To the right the Adeptus Astartes’ cells opened out to the port side of the Nemesis, at the base of the bridge spires. It would have taken Nergui an hour to climb the long stairs up to the bridge, and sometimes he did this, timing himself and trying to beat his best. It helped to keep the mind active on long voyages.

  This time he took the lift, and just in time. Shipmaster Ferral was preparing for the jump into warp space as he entered. He felt the human crew stiffen at his presence. They stared into their instruments and avoided looking in his direction. It was an effect he was almost entirely oblivious to.

  Shipmaster Ferral was sitting in her throne, issuing a series of commands, when an alarm sounded.

  ‘What is that?’ she said.

  ‘Long-range anomalous readings,’ the Master of Auspex reported.

  ‘Let me see.’ It was Nergui who spoke. The Master of Auspex was an augmented human, and he visibly wilted as Nergui turned his full attention upon him. He held out a sheath of reports in a shaking hand.

  Nergui inspected the readings. ‘Anomalous readings from so far beyond the Mandeville point?’

  The Master of Auspex nodded.

  Nergui nodded. ‘We must investigate.’

  Shipmaster Loni Ferral had been hovering on the edge of the conversation and she stepped in now, her voice tense. ‘Captain Nergui. Your orders were to move to the Mandeville point with all speed. It will take us two days, at least, to investigate those readings. May I suggest…’

  Nergui did not bother listening to the suggestion. He turned his back on the shipmaster and waited for the suggestion to end, before saying, with due honorifics, ‘Shipmaster Ferral. My orders have changed. I want to find out if that is their ship, and if any of my brothers are still alive.’

  The readings were correct. They found a burned hulk, two and a half days past the Mandeville point, within the dark, cold heart of a nebula made up of her own frozen clouds of oxygen and water and hydrogen – still venting thin trails of gas from the gaping holes in her flanks.

  Kill Team Primus had set out on their mission aboard the six hundred-year-old strike cruiser Troilus – a hardy vessel, retrofitted with extra slabs of ablative armour along her sides, a suite of generators, and three vast dorsal lance batteries, unusual for a ship of this class, which gave her a formidable punch against any foe.

  Domitian appeared on the bridge just as Nergui was about to call him. His eyes had lost their glassy tiredness, and he approached the round viewport with steady steps.

  ‘I have done as you asked,’ the Librarian said.

  Nergui did not hold out much hope. ‘And did you feel any… presence, brother?’

  Domitian shook his head. ‘I have felt out for life. But there is none.’

  Nergui nodded. Sometimes there were pockets of life aboard a destroyed ship, airlocks that had remained secure, human crews sheltering in the depths of the engines or about the warmth of the reactor cores. Or one of the Adeptus Astartes, whose enhanced physiques and armour allowed them to survive in places no ordinary human could. ‘And did you sense anything else?’

  Domitian shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  Nergui looked at the wreck. He had flown on the Troilus many times. She had a fine crew. It hurt him to see the gaping holes along the hull, thick slabs of armour melted and peeled away. Her fuselage was bent and broken. She had been blasted down to the structural spine, long after she would have stopped posing any threat. But most chilling of all were the three great dorsal turrets, with their massive lance arrays. All three of them remained in the cruising position, pointing straight forwards. ‘They did not even have a chance to fire back. They were ambushed.’

  ‘They knew what they were doing,’ Domitian said. He put a hand to Nergui’s arm, and spoke earnestly. ‘And you were right to send them here. Remember what you saw. They found something.’

  Nergui remembered the images he had seen. An armed camp, hidden in the depths of empty space, a hundred newly developed battlesuits raining fire down upon a single kill team. ‘Yes, they found something. But what?’

  ‘Captain,’ the shipmaster’s voice came again.

  Nergui turned.

  Ferral cleared her throat. ‘I have logged the location of the Troilus. When we return to Picket’s Watch I suggest we send a reclamation craft to bring her home, but for now we have information of importance that must be brought back with all speed. Do I have your permission to make the translation now?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We can leave.’

  Chapter Four

  Nowhere in the Imperial archives did it tell who Picket of the Picket’s Watch was, but archeo-scribes recorded that the foundation of the fortress dated to the days of the Great Crusade, when it was a sentinel on the vast emptiness of the Damocles Gulf.

  The earliest extant archival record was by Archeo-scribe Nay-lor, attached to Explorator Fleet Beaconfire, whose footnotes recorded that Picket’s Watch had been an outpost of the Imperial Fists Legion – although there was evidence of an earlier watch fortress, of human design, probably dating back to the Age of Strife.

  What the Imperial Fists legionaries had been guarding against no record survived to tell, but they built Westkeep: a massive bastion of stone and ceramite, with void shield generators, hidden gun batterie
s and murderous enfilading fields of fire.

  It was possible, the author of the history mused, that Picket’s Watch had been built to mark the edge of habitable space. Or it could be that whatever threat those ancient Legiones Astartes had perceived had faded, or been wiped out. Now the Damocles Gulf was a quiet region of space, Nay-lor stated: safe, predictable, thoroughly colonised. One of the more stable regions of the Imperium of Mankind.

  Nay-lor’s treatise had been written in 789.M35, when the Explorator Fleet Beaconfire passed through on its way across the gulf. That statement about this being a safe region of space had been true then. The expedition had successfully crossed the Damocles Gulf and found worlds that had never been visited before by emissaries of the Adeptus Mechanicus. On their journey they had found one world, named T’au. Predominantly arid – possible uses: grox cultivation on semi-arid savannah regions, the official reports had read. Currently inhabited by indigenous xenos race. Have just mastered fire. Suggest extermination landing. Clearance expected one to six months.

  That report had been logged, recorded and filed safely away when it reached Terra, and T’au scheduled for clearance before it was made suitable for human colonisation. A sudden warp storm had cut the region off for over six thousand years, and when the first rogue traders pushed back into this area of space, they found that the tau race had evolved from a virtual stone age to a culture of high sophistication and technological heresy, spanning three hundred light years.

  For thousands of years Picket’s Watch had been sustained by a skeleton crew of servitors, but with the threat now expanding across the Damocles Gulf, it found itself on a new front line. It was taken over by the Deathwatch. They reinforced the outer wards, with massive batteries and emplacements, buttressed towers and bastions set around the impregnable fortress of Westkeep. And so it became a frontier outpost, home to the Second Chamber of the Warriors of Talassa Prime – Guardians of the Eastern Fringe.

  But despite the vast bombardment cannons and automated lance batteries, its chief defence was secrecy. And it was to this hidden outpost that Nergui’s ship, Nemesis, returned, bearing the news of the loss of Kill Team Primus and the strike cruiser Troilus.

  Their Navigator steered them through the swirling warp to this lone rock, lost in the black void of true space, and while the Nemesis manoeuvred slowly into her assigned dock, a black Thunderhawk bearing the insignia of the Deathwatch brought Cadvan, Domitian and Nergui down to the starport.

  Automated gun platforms tracked their descent. They disembarked and made their way towards the dark, solid bulk of Westkeep.

  ‘Shall I come with you?’ Domitian voxed.

  Nergui shook his head. ‘It is not necessary. I must tell the commander first.’

  ‘So be it,’ Domitian said.

  Nergui watched as the slight figure of the Librarian and giant Cadvan crossed the flagstones of the inner courtyard and disappeared into the shadows of Carnot’s Bastion, then he turned to the vast, heavy block of Westkeep.

  Slaved heavy bolters tracked Nergui’s progress as he started up the broad rockcrete steps. As he strode up, a bell rang out from the top of Westkeep, a single note marking the loss of his brothers. It seemed the tidings of the fate of Kill Team Primus had arrived before him. Ferral must have sent a message ahead. She should not have done that. It was not right for a human, even a shipmaster, to get involved in the affairs of the Deathwatch.

  The augmented door wards had their black hoods pulled low over their faces. They stood back, shotguns braced to chests, and bowed as Nergui’s shadow passed across the threshold. The servitors’ slack-jawed faces had sad and melancholic looks, as if even they understood the loss that the Second Chamber had suffered.

  A dark-cowled adept bowed. ‘The commander is in the Old Feast Hall. We heard of your losses, captain,’ he ventured. ‘We are sorry…’

  ‘Yes. We’re all sorry,’ Nergui snapped.

  Nergui descended four levels down into the hidden fastness of Picket’s Watch, past Carnot’s Library, where two automated savants wheeled up towards their respective lecterns, low lights illuminating ancient leather-bound tomes as their metal fingers carefully turned each page.

  The sparring chamber was strangely quiet, although he could hear the distant thud from the firing range. It sounded like Olbath. He had a distinctive one-two style of firing. Head and heart, he called it.

  Nergui took the third corridor on the right, descending the broad and gently worn steps that led to the Old Feast Hall. Only authorised personnel were permitted to enter the lower levels, where the past centuries lay like fine dust on the floor, and the lower he went the more conscious he was that he was stepping into history – where the Imperial Fists once held vigil over the borders of the galaxy.

  At the antechamber entrance, the lintels were carved with twin axes and above the lintel a clenched fist icon held three lightning bolts in its grip.

  The Old Feast Hall was the only place in Westkeep where the Imperial Fists iconography had not been replaced with that of the Deathwatch. Why this was so, Nergui did not know. But there was a boldness and confidence in those Legion emblems that seemed to say, We are humanity’s guardians. We do not fear the emptiness of space.

  Theirs had not been a secretive mission, he was sure. Here on the edges of known space those ancient warriors had gloried in humanity’s achievement. But their watch had ended, their Legion had been broken up, and the Chapter born in its stead was unable to maintain the resources necessary to man hundreds of watchposts.

  Nergui passed under the arch of dressed stone into the Old Feast Hall. After so long in corridors and low chambers, he stepped into the vaulted room and felt the ceilings lift above his head to a cathedral space. He had seen it once lit as it must have been when the Imperial Fists filled the benches.

  The arched ceiling was gilded with icons of Rogal Dorn, the Great Crusade and the Emperor Ascendant that must have taken decades to finish. The sight of these ancient images had taken his breath away for a moment. They had been so hopeful, coming as they did from before the days of the Great Heresy.

  There had once been benches for the entire company of Imperial Fists. Now the Deathwatch could barely maintain more than three kill teams here. And despite the years of fighting, the dangers had only increased. The feast benches had been long since cleared away, and now the room was empty except for the tombs of ancient warriors that lined the walls, and a lone figure, standing in the corner, at the black marble shrine of St Hallows.

  And it was here, in the ancient shadows, that Commander Jotunn liked to keep his watch.

  ‘White Scar…’ Jotunn the Space Wolf’s voice was so deep and resonant it made the stones of the ancient fortress tremble. Nergui paused mid-step. Watch-Commander Jotunn – the Lone Wolf – only addressed brothers by their Chapter names when he was angry, and now, as his great hunched form turned, Nergui could see that the Space Wolf’s long fangs were bared in a snarl. ‘Where are my warriors, White Scar?’

  Nergui stopped two sword lengths away. ‘Kill Team Primus was destroyed. Domitian found Ellial’s presence on a moon in the Sexton Sector.’

  Jotunn faced the White Scar. His finely artificed black power armour was almost as old as the fortress itself. His face was drawn with age and the puckered red marks of old scars, while his white beard hung in long plaits that reached down to his knees.

  ‘I gave you my best kill team, White Scar,’ the Lone Wolf growled.

  Nergui was defiant. ‘Yes, commander. You did. And I sent them out to do their duty, which is to fight the xenos.’

  There was a low rumble of anger. The Lone Wolf came almost to the edge of the shadows.

  ‘Do you see this empty hall? I cannot spare warriors!’

  Nergui did not need to look. He knew what the darkness obscured. The walls were covered with an assortment of shoulder pads, xenos skulls, bolt pistols, lovingly polished h
ellfire bolter rounds, eldar swords, grotesque and screaming masks, chequerboard faces with wickedly curved features, a loaxtl’s withered front claw, the flensed jaw bone of a carnifex prime. Each totem was carefully inscribed in High Gothic script with the name of a fallen member of the Deathwatch.

  Jotunn picked out a green spirit stone with the name Mortifax chiselled into the surface, but where the names usually ended with a Chapter symbol, there was an empty shield, without emblem or marking.

  ‘Do you know who Mortifax was, White Scar?’

  Nergui shook his head.

  ‘His real name was Kaspar Dabanville. He was of the Sons of Medusa Chapter. He rose to great fame among his brothers. For a hundred and six years he was a great warrior within the Deathwatch. He hated the eldar, and pursued them mercilessly from world to world, burning and razing their ancient shrines and scattered communities. He led an entire chamber – seven kill teams – on a raid into the webway on the world of Brand’s Gate. It was a trap that the xenos had laid for him. They killed each of his warriors, one by one, until only he was left, surrounded, wounded and alone.

  ‘And do you know what they did to him?’

  Nergui shook his head.

  ‘They let him return to Brand’s Gate. Alive. Shamed. It was there that he took the black. He held himself to higher standards than anyone else. He became a Black Shield and painted over all trace of his former Chapter, and went back to being a simple warrior. He even changed his name to Mortifax to symbolise his contrition.’

  ‘Why do you tell me this, commander?’

  ‘I tell you this because there is no mercy in this galaxy,’ Jotunn said. ‘There is no room for the weak or the stupid. The hunters became the hunted. It is the way of the galaxy. Only the strongest and fiercest and most cunning will survive. You have to think like the xenos we hunt. You have to understand them, to know what they are thinking, even though their thoughts are abhorrent. You have to understand their logic, even though their thoughts are illogical. You have to hate them! But you must never underestimate their evil and their cunning. You have failed to outthink, out-reason, outguess your foes. Not doing so, Captain Nergui, is the worst kind of failure.’