Deathwatch (34 page)

Something happened, a sudden change that rippled across the enemy ranks. The genestealers froze in their attack and turned their heads to the north, as if hearing something the three blood-spattered Space Marines could not. Those nearest to passageways and tunnel mouths vanished into them, like great cockroaches scuttling for shadow, but the genestealers closest to the Deathwatch operatives resumed their attack, their targets too close to turn from, still intent on slaying the power-armoured intruders.

Even as he cored the torso of the closest with a triple burst of explosive bolts, Solarion called out over the link to the others. ‘That’s it. That must be it. They’ve got her!’

The others made no response, their minds lost in the joys of the killing.

Voss was closest. He had switched to his bolt pistol and knife. The flamer was down to half a canister. With the enemy ranks less dense, he didn’t want to waste it. Solarion stormed over to him and gripped the edge of his pauldron. He tried to turn him, but it was no easy task. As well to try and turn Chyron. ‘Time to fall back, brother. We must rendezvous with them at RP3. They will need our strength.’

Until the broodlord’s silent psychic call, the fighting hadn’t eased off for an instant. Checking his chrono, it was hard for the Ultramarine to believe just how briefly he and his fellows had been here. Adrenaline and battle-focus did strange things to one’s experience of time. The peak of the genestealer onslaught had lasted only minutes, but it felt a lot longer than that.

No further waves of tyranid organisms were emerging into the chamber now, and those that remained were thinning rapidly in number, cut down by Zeed, who continued to ignore the Ultramarine’s calls to pull out.

Lifeless bodies lay where they had fallen, piled together in slick, wet, steaming heaps. Perhaps a dozen live threats remained. A dozen genestealers, still more than enough to kill them all if they got within striking distance.

One dropped from the ceiling, landing with a clatter of chitin behind Voss and Solarion. Long arms flashed out towards the Imperial fist, but the sound of its landing had given the Ultramarine just enough time to turn. He emptied the last three bolts in his mag, blowing big holes in the creature’s torso and head, then dumped his empty clip and slid home another.

My second last.

Voss turned to see the creature dead on the cavern floor.

‘Thanks, Prophet.’

‘Thank me by getting your oversized backside out of here. And stop calling me Prophet.’

They turned to call on Zeed and found the cavern suddenly empty.

‘For Throne’s sake,’ raged Solarion. ‘Where in the blasted warp is that idiot?’

He tried the link again and again, voice rising to a shout.

‘Get back here Raven Guard. Get back here now, curse you!’

A black figure emerged from one of the far tunnels at a run.

‘Let’s move,’ said Zeed, voice unusually flat. He didn’t stop. He ran straight past them and out of the chamber. Voss and Solarion broke into a run behind him.

‘What happened, Ghost?’ asked Voss. ‘What did you see? Is something in pursuit?’

The Raven Guard was being uncharacteristically tight-lipped.

‘No,’ he told them. ‘We need to regroup with the others. I have to speak to Scholar.’

Solarion snorted doubtfully. Voss threw Zeed a curious look. But whatever was bothering Siefer Zeed, he would say no more about it, so they ran in wordless silence, hoping they wouldn’t be too late to help the others.

The woman in Karras’s arms was bleeding from all the places where they had tugged out tyranid umbilici. Every juddering step Karras took seemed to wrack her with fresh pain, but he couldn’t stop. Not now. Not with death breathing down his neck. So he ran, and Darrion Rauth ran with him.

Behind them, genestealers filled the tunnels, screeching and chittering as they raced after their prey.

‘Keep going,’ shouted Karras. ‘RP3 is not far now.’

Intermittently, Rauth would turn and fire a burst of deadly bolts back at their pursuers, but his ammunition supply was getting dangerously low. Since the horde had diverted towards them, he had downed scores of genestealers. But it never seemed to make a difference. There were always more emerging from the walls and ceiling, skittering out from every hole they passed. Karras couldn’t turn his own weapons on them, not with the frail woman in his arms. He wrestled with a near overwhelming desire to put her down, unsheathe
Arquemann
from his shoulder, and face the foe. Space Marines did not run.

Suffer not the alien to live.

It was the motto of the Deathwatch, but did the urge behind it belong to him, or to the spirit of the force sword? He could feel the blade’s lust for battle. It resonated, like the deep throbbing and pulsing of the air inside an enginarium.

Karras broke from the end of the tunnel and emerged into the junction where he had earlier split the kill-team into two groups. He kept running, Rauth just behind him, boots pounding on the cavern’s stone floor. Just as Karras and Rauth were crossing the centre of the tunnel intersection, three shapes careened out of a passage on the left, moving so fast that they almost collided with the kill-team leader. Karras swerved right, trying to shield the woman, and raised the bolt pistol in his right hand. Bolter muzzles whipped upwards to take aim, but recognition came at that very instant. It was Solarion, Voss and Zeed, their armour scored and gouged in a dozen places from the battle in the birthing chamber.

For a split second, the kill-team operatives halted and blinked at each other, stunned by the fact that they were all still alive. Then Karras yelled at them over the link.

‘Don’t stop now. Keep moving!’

United once more, Talon Squad bolted from the junction, thundering up the tunnel to RP3 just as the genestealers emerged behind them. As they ran, Rauth dropped back behind Voss, taking the rear. Still running, he plucked two grenades from his combat webbing, primed the first, and dropped it.

Seconds later, there was sharp sound, more like an almighty crack than a boom, and a sudden gust of superheated air. Bestial screams followed. In the tight confines of the tunnel, the explosive fragmentation caused impressive casualties. Many died. Many others were badly wounded. But the horde would not stop. They did not feel fear. They served a savage mind without the slightest notion of pity or sorrow.

Fresh, unwounded genestealers thrust aside the bodies of their dead or dying kin and resumed the pursuit. In less than a minute, they were as close as ever.

Rauth dropped his second frag grenade, then pulled his bolter from its mag-lock and put on a burst of extra speed. The designated rendezvous point was just up ahead, less than a hundred metres away. He heard the detonation of the grenade behind him, heard the high screeches that followed. The death toll from the second was as great as the first.

Just ahead of Karras, the light was changing. The rocky walls at the end of the tunnel were rimmed in red from the glow of the slow-flowing magma that ebbed from the pits and cracks in the cavern beyond.

Talon Squad exploded into the chamber.

And stopped.

Before them lay a scene of absolute carnage.

On every side, genestealer bodies lay shredded by the heavy bolter-fire of the three gun-servitors Karras had left behind. Other corpses were burned to black husks on the treacherous pot-holed floor. Pools of bubbling magma had already consumed parts of the dead, leaving an odd scattering of cracked and smoking heads and limbs, so blackened as to be almost beyond recognition.

The sight might have gratified the Deathwatch operatives but for two other elements. Firstly, the gun-servitors left to hold RP3 were strewn liberally around the cavern floor in countless dead pieces, their mechanical and biological components torn to tatters. Secondly, and of far more immediate concern, there were two figures waiting for the kill-team, standing dead-centre in the middle of the baking hot floor.

They were both beings of significant, almost overwhelming psychic power. But beyond that, in appearance at least, the similarities were few.

The smaller of the two was a tall man dressed in finely embroidered robes, with a long jewel-headed staff clutched in his right hand. He looked utterly incongruous in such a place, his face a mask of almost regal calm while all around him bubbles of glowing magma popped and hissed. On closer inspection, it was clear he was not really a man at all. The proportions of his features were off-kilter, somehow simply wrong, and despite his attempts to style himself some kind of high-priest, his eyes glimmered with an unwholesome alien light, to say nothing of their strange pupils. Psychic fire arced and crackled around him.

A magus
, thought Karras.
A hybrid psyker.

He was no weakling, despite his long, narrow frame. But the magus was, by far, the lesser of the two figures, for the other towered over him, at least three metres tall, and that while standing hunched over. It was a thing of nightmare: of heavy, ropey muscle that could pull limbs from torsos with sickening ease; of a super-dense armoured exoskeleton that standard bolts couldn’t hope to even chip; of four long arms – two with curving claws like scythes and two with taloned hands – that could rip and shred even the heaviest armour plating as if it were mere tinfoil. Its face was an ugly mass of skin and muscle, ridged with tiny thorns and webbed with thick, pulsing veins. Its teeth – all too many and all too wickedly sharp – sprouted from a lipless slash that was disgustingly wide. This was the broodlord, mighty and murderous, and its appearance hinted only at the least of its power.

Rauth, Zeed and Solarion brought up their bolters, but before they could fire, a wave of raw force struck them from their feet, hurling them backwards against the black chamber walls.

Voss stepped forwards with his flamer and was likewise batted aside as if his heavy body weighed no more than that of a fly. Only Karras stood unassaulted, and he knew it was only because of the groaning, bleeding woman in his arms.

No, not the woman. The damnable parasite in her belly. Whatever genotype it is, it’s important to them. That much is clear.

Karras knew better than to think a mere bolter-round would get anywhere near this creature or its hybrid aide. The air around them both shimmered with more than just the heat of the chamber.

They were shielded against attack but, with White Phoenix in his arms, so was Karras. It was a standoff. The broodlord simply stood there, glaring at Karras with eyes devoid of recognisable emotion, irises of pale purple with pupils round and black.

The magus smiled.

Against the walls, the other four members of the kill-team struggled groggily to rise to their feet. Their weapons had been knocked from their hands. They reached for them, but the moment they gripped them again, they were pushed back and pinned against the walls. Again, the force that did this was invisible, but it was incredibly powerful. They all felt the air being crushed from their lungs.

Behind Karras, the scrabbling sounds of the genestealer horde became louder and louder. The creatures reached the edge of the tunnel leading into the chamber and stopped. There they waited in silence, simply watching, awaiting some psychic command-impulse from their master.

The magus spoke.

‘So, the venerable Space Marines deign to grace us with a visit.’

His tone was mocking, the words spoken with a strange humming quality, product of vocal cords not quite human. ‘And they come as thieves and murderers, as killers of children. How did it feel to kill so many of our unborn back there in the hatcheries? Proud kills to add to your tallies? How mighty you are, indeed.’

Despite the pressure on his chest, Voss managed to growl, ‘We’ll add you to that tally, abomination!’

The magus barely glanced at him.

‘A threat beyond your means to make good, as you are surely well aware by now. You continue to draw breath for one reason, and one reason only. The Master could eviscerate all of you with but a single thought. Even you,’ he said to Karras. ‘But you may yet live through this if some bargain can be struck. We care not for your lives. Go free and never return. Only, give us the woman. The child she carries belongs to us.’

As the magus spoke, Karras could feel him exerting psychic force, trying to employ unnatural powers of persuasion. It was the very power with which, as cult priest, he had influenced and controlled so many Chiarites, but it was a power wasted on Space Marines. Their minds were too strong, trained to resist, and the pentagrammic wards on their bodies only added to that shield.

‘Xenos lies,’ grated Zeed, voice straining with the effort of trying to speak without adequate breath. ‘I would rather die than bargain with a damned alien.’

‘That is not your decision to make, underling,’ said the magus. ‘I speak to your leader. What say you, blood-gifted one? You have the power. Read my mind, see that I speak the truth. Give us the woman, and leave our tunnels. Simple terms. Non-negotiable. Your position is the weaker here. Surely you see that, yes?’

Karras wasn’t so sure. He drew his combat knife from the sheath at his lower back and, with his eyes on the broodlord rather than the magus, he pressed the point of the blade gently to the skin on the swollen belly of the inquisitor’s agent.