Storm of Damocles

by Justin D Hill

  ‘What do you want to talk about?’ Leonas said. He swept his hands over the wounds on his body. ‘I am in some pain.’

  ‘Yes, but you are healing so quickly.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes. They thought that you would not survive,’ Roboute said.

  ‘I have to survive,’ Leonas said.

  Roboute frowned, put his stylus to his mouth and sucked it for a moment. ‘You keep saying that. Please explain.’

  There was a dull thud and the ship trembled for a moment.

  Leonas waited. There was another thud. Far off but distinctive.

  A siren sounded. Leonas sat up abruptly and the interrogator’s eyes widened in surprise.

  ‘My,’ he said. ‘You have healed quickly!’

  Leonas flexed his forearms and the bindings creaked as his muscles swelled and stretched them wide. He tugged at the holding straps. One hand burst free and then the other. Roboute’s face expressed a moment of boggle-eyed surprise as Leonas reached across and caught him by the throat. The neck was so thin it was easy to snap.

  ‘I told you,’ Leonas said, dropping the dead body to the floor. ‘I cannot die.’

  Chapter Six

  LOCATION: CANNIS GAS CLOUD,

  DAMOCLES GULF, 999.M41

  Without psykers, the tau could not make translations into the warp, but they had learnt to make short hops through the edge of the immaterial and real space, sticking to pre-ordained ‘stepping stones’. This particular transit point, deep in the Cannis gas cloud, was known to connect to the Sexton Sector. It was what the tau thought was a safe transit route, but its location had been known to the Deathwatch for some time.

  And now the Nemesis waited, systems low, barely ticking over, watching the empty space.

  Nergui stood before the Nemesis’ bridge viewport and watched the tau ships as an eagle watches the deer on the Chogorean plains, waiting his moment.

  The strike cruiser had been in a state of preparedness for over two weeks. Rumours of the loss of a kill team had filtered down among the human crew. All of them were keen to strike a blow against the enemy. All of them were hungry for violence.

  It was the waiting that strained nerves. Kill Team Faith were ready for immediate deployment. The bridge crew were tense. Nergui gave no sign or movement.

  An alarm sounded from the auspex scanners as a tau convoy slowed almost to a stop, their white hulls pale against the darkness of the void.

  The xenos ships readied their gravitic drives. If the Deathwatch were to attack, it had to be now, but the captain made no move.

  Only Shipmaster Ferral dared disturb the Space Marine. Her boots clipped out a regular beat as she strode towards the viewport. She had a sheath of reports in her hands.

  ‘Our guns are ready. Give the word, Captain Nergui, and we shall attack.’ There was a long pause. Her voice was tense. ‘If we do not, then we will lose the chance.’

  Still no answer.

  ‘Captain Nergui. Permission to engage the foe? My gun crews are ready. We could just take out a few of their transports and slip into warp space before their escorts have time to react. After the loss of Kill Team Primus…’

  ‘No,’ he said, and when she started to argue he spoke over her. ‘I do not doubt the bravery or skill of you or your crew, shipmaster. But we are hunting something far more important than this. We will not let vengeance get in our way.’ He gave the huddled transports before them a contemptuous nod.

  ‘May I know what?’

  ‘An emissary-class craft, bound for the Sexton Sector. Damaged in some way. Wounded.’ Domitian had seen it in the Emperor’s Tarot. ‘Wounded’ was the word he’d used.

  ‘Wounded’ seemed an odd word to use for a craft, but there were some mysteries about which it was better not to know.

  Ferral looked down and seemed to remember the thing she was carrying in her hand.

  ‘This arrived,’ she said. She held out a sealed message from the astropathic chambers. It was a standard bulletin from Agrellan. Clearance code vermillion.

  The language was terse and impersonal.

  Imperial Task Force Retribution had closed on Agrellan, under Lord Admiral Hawke’s command, and engaged the tau defences. The Will of Iron had been lost. The Herald of Terra had been forced to retire. The first Imperial Guard landings had taken place. The results were mixed. House Terryn had lost twelve Knights within the first day. The tau had a new battlesuit.

  Nergui’s hearts beat a little faster as he read on with a growing sense of hatred and anger.

  A new battlesuit, the thing that Kill Team Primus had found on Moon QX-937. Designated Stormsurges by the enemy. His eyes scanned through the pages, seeing the name, over and over.

  The Space Marine rolled the vellum scroll back up and held it tight in his fist. He gave no visible reaction, but he felt personally responsible. Worse than that, he felt sick at the thought of the damage the enemy had done with these new weapons. It had been his mission to find them and destroy them, and he was no closer to that than he had been six months earlier. When he had three entire kill teams.

  Ferral cleared her throat. The tau ships were still there, and it was hard for her to pass up the opportunity to strike a blow against the foe. She ran a hand through her short-cropped hair, shaking it back from her neck. ‘Do you think this emissary craft will come?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nergui said. ‘It has been seen in the Tarot.’

  As he spoke, the first of the tau ships seemed to pulse as it skimmed into the immaterium. In ten minutes they were all gone, and the space before them was empty once more, except for the light of distant stars.

  It was three days later that a lone tau ship tore into real space at the Cannis gas cloud, heading back towards the Eastern Fringe. It slowed rapidly, slewing off vapour contrails from its wide-spread wings.

  ‘Emissary craft,’ the Master of Auspex reported, and Ferral sent word to Nergui.

  The Space Marine was on the bridge in moments. Ferral handed him data reports but he did not look at them, striding straight to the viewport. The ship’s port drive was running on half power. Wounded. He knew in an instant. ‘That is it. Prepare for the attack.’

  His order was so sudden that Ferral thought she had misheard.

  Nergui turned on her. ‘Prepare your ship for the assault,’ he told her. ‘I am taking Kill Team Faith in.’

  The emissary craft went through standard protocol defensive manoeuvres as it prepared its gravitic drives for the next hop across space. The air caste captain was a veteran of many years, and had made a point of hailing each of the other captains they had met along this route. The last convoy had passed through this point only days before, reporting no signs of an enemy. Shields were raised. Scanners made perfunctory interrogations of the area, and drones were deployed before the ship made the next jump.

  The gravitic drive was powering up when the alarms sounded. A single ship, the scanners reported. Alarm signals flared as the attackers moved to assault positions. Scanners showed a spread of torpedoes burning towards them. The captain remained calm but tense. He deployed counter-drones, set all automated gun turrets to attack mode.

  One by one the torpedoes were hit with precise fire. The captain of the emissary craft slewed his ship around, scrambling to find an escape route. But the real attack had been launched half an hour before. A spread of three Caestus assault rams – too small to pick up amongst the space debris – powered towards the emissary craft. The first warning the bridge crew had was when one of them made visual contact. He stared and pointed through the bridge windows. It was hard to pick out anything so small until a drone exploded. Then they saw it: a blunt, brutal shape.

  The captain shouted for defences to be reconfigured against short-range targets. The air caste crew dashed to their controls, the fire warriors at the bridge door engaging their pulse weapons. Evasiv
e manoeuvres were ordered, and through the skill of the crew, the technologically advanced ship began to bank to the right as close-range drones moved to intercept the attackers.

  The Caestus batted the drones out of the way. Shots whizzed about the assault ram. They seared scorch marks into the thick slabs of reinforced ceramite plating, and had almost no effect. The Caestus kept coming, and as it filled the viewport the wing-mounted meltas flared. Then the bridge of the emissary craft was filled with molten steel and globes of reinforced glass. There was a moment of noise as the Caestus smashed through the wide viewport. At the same time, the atmosphere suddenly vented in a roar of air. The air caste crew were sucked out of the hissing gaps around the hull of the Caestus. Within seconds the entire bridge crew was dead or had been vomited out into the void, pain and horror forever frozen upon their faces as the twinned assault ramps slammed down, and a single black-armoured Terminator strode out, assault cannon spitting out trails of murderous steel.

  Nergui’s preferred style of battle combined speed and power in a devastating strike. He liked to drop from orbit like an eagle, jump pack lifting him from foe to foe, or ride his bike across the empty spaces. The slow and ponderous Terminator armour was not natural to him. He had not even left the assault ramp before he cursed its slowness. While it made him almost invulnerable to attack, it made him too slow. He crunched through the ruin of the emissary craft’s bridge, punched his chainfist through the sealed blast doors, kicked the bent panels to the side and forced his way through.

  As the vacuum of space sucked the air from the next corridor, it blasted towards him in a hail of debris. A startled fire warrior slammed full into his body. For a moment the warrior was held there by the force of the exiting air, mouth working soundlessly in the vacuum before it sucked him out and he spiralled into space.

  Nergui was already at the second door, carving through it and standing back to let the next section of the ship expel its contents. He must have found a mess hall of some kind, for large pots and plates and eating utensils went past in a sloppy blizzard of what he guessed was food. There were chunks in the mix: chunks that were tau and human. A hundred of them, he thought, as they started to catch and clog up the hole he had carved.

  His chainfist widened the hole and then the whole clot of food and bodies and furniture tore the rest of the door away, and it was all he could do to hold his footing.

  Nergui kicked through the next door, and a squad of fire warriors greeted him. These had had time to engage their void suits, and magnetic boots held them to the floor as they lowered their pulse carbines and doused him in a hail of searing fire. His Terminator suit was older than the tau race. He fired. The hail of shots cut through the tau bodies as a shredder went through straw on an agri world. As their bodies were ripped apart, he was already stepping through the gore and engaging the next foes.

  As Nergui advanced, the second Caestus assault ram hit the beleaguered emissary craft. Nergui felt the tau ship shudder at the impact.

  We have them now, he thought.

  Konrad Raimer’s Caestus assault ram hit the tau ship on the fifth deck, just below the secondary engines. The Black Templar was a grey and grizzled veteran with nearly a hundred years within the Deathwatch to his name. He loved the darkness inside a suit of Terminator armour, relished the power, the fury, the weaponry it gave him.

  He fired his heavy flamer as soon as the ramp doors slammed down. The corridor filled with fumes as the jet of promethium spilled out into the mess room. Off-duty tau warriors fell backwards before the incinerating flames. Behind Konrad three more Terminators strode out.

  Sardegna, a Scion of Sanguinius, lowered the muzzle of his storm bolter and fired. Cadvan blocked a burst of plasma with his storm shield and brought his thunder hammer over his head in a crushing blow that crumpled a close-action battlesuit into the floor. Olbath of the Aurora Chapter fired his storm bolter in the familiar staccato pattern of paired shots: head and heart, head and heart.

  The trailing shots punched fire warriors from their feet, exploded within them, showering their comrades with gore. Cadvan led the way, storm shield swatting away the few desultory shots, thunder hammer crackling with blue threads of power.

  Nergui kept moving into the tau ship, carving his way through bulkheads and into its heart. His role was to cause maximum destruction. He drew the defenders towards him, mowed them down with torrents of murderous fire.

  He had been inside the ship for just over sixty-four seconds when the third impact came. Nergui felt the ship tremble.

  Even within his Terminator armour Nergui flinched at the cold touch on his neck as Domitian’s mind found his own.

  In.+

  Librarian Domitian was the Angel of Death in his suit of black artificer armour: a thing of sombre craftsmanship, visor sockets glowing, his psychic hood crackling with static overflow as he reached out through the ship, his gamma-plus level psychic presence a many-tendrilled thing, touching each mind.

  His psychic power stunned everyone who felt it. It left the tau and their human allies slumped and drooling in mental shock. Frost rimed the corridor walls as Domitian searched for his brother.

  It took him seven seconds to find his target, and when he did he reached out to Nergui and Konrad.

  He is alive.+

  Leonas ripped the tubes from his veins, and staggered up. His head still hurt, and the wound in his side leaked blood and internal fluids, but he was alive, he told himself, and he could still fight.

  The tau guards had no idea what was coming for them. They ducked back behind the bulkheads and stared in horror at the naked torso of the Space Marine, hammering the plexiglass screen, leaving bloody smears against the pane. The roar of battle came closer, and ice began to craze the monitor screens before them. One of the fire warriors tried to open the door to shoot. As he fumbled with the lock the door burst from its hinges and the Space Marine ripped the carbine from him.

  Leonas fumbled with the mechanism for a moment, before giving up and smashing the guard in the face with the butt of the gun. By the time the others fought their way to him, Leonas stood in a room of the dead. He finally got the carbine to work as one by one the three Terminators pushed their way inside. He knew them by their Chapter markings. Konrad with heavy flamer, Sardegna with the heavy bolter, Cadvan with thunder hammer and storm shield, Olbath with his gilt-worked storm bolter.

  ‘What kept you?’ he said.

  Konrad wasn’t one for jokes. He spoke through his vox-grille.

  ‘Are there any others?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Leonas said. Then more seriously. ‘No. They’re all dead.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. They don’t have the same pressure. I can’t die, you see.’

  Time to go.+ Domitian’s mind spoke to them all simultaneously. Konrad made no reaction. +Let’s get out of here.+

  We have him.+

  The Librarian’s message came as Nergui slammed another magazine into his bolter.

  ‘How is he?’

  Angry we took so long.+

  What was left of the fire warriors made way for a pair of close-assault battlesuits. The corridor was suddenly full of photon grenades and a blizzard of red burst cannon rounds. Nergui swore through gritted teeth as his underslung storm bolter jammed.

  ‘Hazard battlesuit,’ he hissed, as a third battlesuit engaged its jump pack and powered up the corridor. ‘I’m retreating to my transport.’

  The assault cannon was low on ammo. He moved too slowly, and cursed as a hail of burst cannon rounds smacked into his gut. His system internals flared red as circuits failed. He slammed the jammed assault cannon against the wall. His left leg was dragging. He slammed it again, and this time it clicked into firing mode, and he opened up, wildly spraying the corridor. The battlesuits ducked back. Nergui had a moment’s warning as something landed behind him. He twisted t
oo late.

  There was a flash of light, and his helmet’s readings flared red. His armour’s leg had seized up completely and his assault cannon clicked empty. He punched his chainfist into the chest of the suit that had ambushed him. The ceramite teeth spun for a moment on the armour casing, before breaking through to the soft interior.

  Nergui kept pushing until the razor sharp teeth found flesh and his left visor lens was splattered with gore. His suit’s left leg was still shut down, so he half-dragged himself back along the corridor. He could see his Caestus only a hundred feet away, but at this rate it might just as well have been a league.

  Mission objectives had him dragging out the databanks, but that would be impossible now. ‘Can you help?’ he hissed.

  Domitian’s presence was immediate.

  I was just waiting for you to ask.+

  The Librarian’s mind was operating at distance. It swept through the corridor in a stunning blast. Nergui felt it.

  ‘Careful,’ he voxed.

  I wanted to make sure.+

  As Nergui’s vision cleared he saw hazard suits hanging motionless in the air, their pilots unconscious. Nergui limped through the ruins of the ship’s bridge, cutting the wall of databanks open and dragging them up the Caestus ramps. Tau were nothing if not efficient. The databanks came in large blocks that could easily be fitted and removed from their casing.

  It took a minute before he had salvaged all he could. He punched the ramp controls closed.

  ‘Disengage,’ he commanded the machine-spirit and the Caestus snarled and trembled as the engines roared to full power. There was a hiss and screech of glass and steel, and then they were out in the void.

  Nergui cursed as he dragged his malfunctioning leg up the boom and slumped down at the far end, exhausted. Next time just go in power armour, he thought, and then took in a deep breath and voxed the Nemesis.

  ‘On our way back. We’ve got Leonas.’

  Chapter Seven

  News had spread through the crew that they had recovered one of the members of Kill Team Orion. Nergui could feel the change in mood. Even the servitors who had gathered on the landing deck seemed to move with a sharpness and a speed that was unlike them. He hailed the tech officer.