Deathwatch (35 page)

The broodlord shrieked in rage, the sound so piercing it hurt Karras’s ears. The magus stepped forwards, eyes wide, and stretched out a hand in placation. ‘No,’ he said nervously. ‘Don’t. I promise you will all die here if you dare harm–’

‘If you knew anything about Space Marines,’ Karras snarled, ‘you would know that we do not fear death. We court it. It is our constant companion. We would be proud to die here, slaughtering as many of your disgusting kin as we can before we fall. And trust me, those numbers would be great. So, no. You are mistaken. Ours is not the weaker position here.’

‘Yet you stay your hand,’ said the magus. ‘You do not strike. Despite your words, you are not so ready to meet your end, I think.’

Karras didn’t doubt the magus was lying, trying to play him for a fool. He made a gambit of his own. ‘We have other enemies than you,’ he told the hybrid. ‘Greater enemies against whom some of us have sworn blood-oaths of vengeance. I would see us have that vengeance. And to have it, we must leave here alive, mission accomplished or otherwise. So, very well, you may yet have your beloved parasite, but only if you meet my terms.’

The magus frowned, unsure, but he inclined his swollen, distended head for Karras to proceed. ‘Which are?’

‘Your master will release my brothers and allow them leave. Once I am satisfied that they are at a safe distance, I shall hand the woman over to you. Do you understand? I will give her to you and then
I
will leave. But so help me, if you attempt to interfere with our departure, we will unleash death on you such as you can scarcely imagine. You have the power, too. Read my mind if you dare and see what will come of betrayal.’

The magus closed his eyes and raised a long-fingered hand to one of the broodlord’s massive chitin-covered forearms. He did not read Karras’s mind, fearful, perhaps, of some psychic trick. Instead, he was silently conferring with his overlord.

Karras took that opportunity to communicate with the others in Space Marine battle-sign.

All: retreat to exfil point at speed,
he ordered.

Do not wait.

He hoped they would trust him and follow his command. He did not intend to martyr himself here. He had already marked the locations of the explosive charges he had ordered Maximmion Voss to place on these very walls. Voss had the detonator, and Karras doubted he could contrive some way for the Imperial Fist to pass it off to him, but it didn’t matter. He had other means at his disposal.

Sigma had ordered Talon Squad not to engage the broodlord. But the accursed thing was right here within striking distance, and it was too good a chance to pass up. The footfalls of such a creature heralded the doom of entire worlds.

The monster had to die.

The magus removed his hand from the broodlord’s arm and took a step forwards. ‘We find your terms acceptable, Space Marine. These others will be allowed to leave. They must go now, before the Master changes his mind.’

Karras, his knife still pressed to the woman’s belly, half turned to his kill-team.

‘Get out of here, now. All of you. Go.’

They moved around to the other side of the cavern, Karras moving with them as far as he was able. At the mouth of the exit tunnel, Voss hesitated. ‘You can’t mean to do this, Scholar.’

‘Get back to the exfil point,’ Karras commanded. ‘Fire the signal-round and call in Reaper flight. That’s an order.’

‘You’re abandoning the mission, Karras,’ warned Solarion. ‘You’ll be executed for this.’

‘I said go.’

There was much swearing and cursing as they left him there. Voss almost had to be dragged away by the others, but soon they were gone from view. Karras listened to the sound of their boots on the tunnel floor as they ran.

Once the sound had faded, he nodded to the magus.

The hybrid stepped forwards.

‘You must see, Space Marine,’ he gloated, ‘that the destiny of this galaxy – nay, the entire universe – lies with our race, not yours. And yet you humans resist us, struggling futilely against the inevitable day when all you represent will be incorporated. Within our great united race, there is no competition, no treachery or betrayal. There is no selfishness. We are the embodiment of equanimity. All are rendered equal, for we are, in truth, simply cells in a single vast life form. Your species will become part of that, its genes blended with ours to live on forever.’

Not while a single Space Marine still draws breath,
swore Karras.

He let the magus rant. He used that moment to send out a psychic tendril seeking his kill-team. They were moving fast, almost hitting the halfway point to RP2. He edged closer to the mouth of the exit tunnel and stopped. His escape route was only two metres behind him now.

He checked his mission chrono and felt his heart speed up. The readout had turned orange.

01:32:01.

01:32:00.

01:31:59.

Time was uncomfortably scarce.

‘Enough words,’ he told the magus. ‘Take her. But move slowly. Any tricks and I’ll cut your damned parasite in two.’

The magus carefully laid his ornate staff on the cavern floor, raised both hands in submission, and walked slowly forwards to receive the woman. The broodlord was still, silent, watching Karras with unblinking eyes.

‘No deceits, Space Marine,’ warned the magus coldly as he neared. ‘They would only doom you.’

When he was two metres from Karras, he stopped and turned his hands flat to receive the swollen, sickly body of White Phoenix. ‘The birth will occur soon,’ he said. ‘We must get her back to the nest quickly.’ The monster in the woman’s belly shifted and thrashed against the walls of its fleshy prison. Karras felt a definite psychic emanation from the parasite. The magus felt it, too. His face lit up as if he were in some kind of rapture.

It was the moment Karras needed. With the magus distracted, he stepped in, whipped up his right leg, and booted the foul hybrid directly in the sternum. There was an almighty crunch of shattering bone and the robed figure flew backwards, hitting the ground hard. His right arm splashed in a pool of molten rock and he screamed, a high and terrible sound. Behind him, the broodlord screamed too and took a lumbering step forwards. The genestealers waiting at the mouth of the opposite tunnel burst into the chamber like floodwaters, flowing around their leader, heading straight for Karras with lethal claws outstretched.

Karras stepped backwards towards his exit, still holding the woman tight in his arms, and mustered power from within. He reached out with astral energies to Voss’s explosives, found them on the walls, and ignited their fuses with a single thought. This done, he instantly threw up a powerful bubble of protective energy.

The explosives blasted inwards, rocky debris scything through the air, cutting down several of the genestealers at the sides of the charging mass. Glowing magma erupted from breaches in the black walls and flooded into the room.

The broodlord hissed with rage and threw up a protective screen of its own, against which the magma crashed and surged but could not penetrate.

The magus, on the other hand was too slow to shield himself, still reeling from the pain of his smashed ribs and his blackened, withered arm. He screamed as the molten rock rolled over him, and thrashed wildly in unspeakable pain as it closed over his head and destroyed all trace of him.

Karras saw all this happen in the space of a heartbeat, but he didn’t wait around any longer than that. His shield could not be maintained for more than a matter of seconds, not against such constant heat and force. As he was turning to make his escape, he glimpsed the broodlord turn the other way and make its own retreat, the river of magma between them too thick to ford.

So you survive, beast
, thought Karras sourly.
But I can still finish my mission if I hurry.

He raced away from the flooded chamber and pounded up the tunnel towards RP2 with the sagging woman in his arms. He could sense masses of genestealers moving through parallel tunnels to the north and south of his position, racing to try and overtake him. He couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t let them flank him. He ran with everything he had. They would be wary of harming the woman while the parasite was still inside her, but would it hold them back? Karras doubted his bluff would work a second time, and the magus was gone. He didn’t think the broodlord and his purestrain genestealers would be inclined towards verbal negotiations.

He knew he would be seeing the alien overlord again before this mission was over.

Then something bulky suddenly emerged from the tunnel wall in front of him and brought Karras to a sharp, jarring halt.

‘Did you kill it?’ asked a gravel-rough voice.

Karras recognised it at once, relief mixing with anger in equal measure.

‘I told you to get to the exfil point!’ he snapped.

‘Did you
kill
it, Karras?’ Darrion Rauth asked again.

Karras shook his head. ‘It lives, though the magus is dead.’

He should have guessed the Exorcist might be waiting. Like Karras himself, the magus and the broodlord wouldn’t have sensed Rauth hiding there in the tunnel, standing by to offer support.

‘Give her to me,’ said Rauth. ‘Quickly. If the monster shows its face again, you’ll need to fight it. You’re the only one who can.’

Karras passed the woman gently into the Exorcist’s plated arms. ‘Be careful. She clings to life by a thread.’

Up ahead, he sensed the others. Then he sensed something else. Waves of genestealers were converging on them from multiple tunnels. Genestealers and something bigger, something different they hadn’t yet seen. The broodlord was still to the east, behind them, forced to circle around. But it was hunting them.

Karras and Rauth ran as fast as they could, but even without their precious burden, they wouldn’t have been in time. Their three Deathwatch brothers were about to be engaged by significant enemy strength. If Karras and Rauth wanted to regroup with them at all, they would have to find another way around.

The kill-team was once again split in two, with a horde of xenos foes separating them and less than ninety minutes on the mission chrono.

Operation Night Harvest
was not going well.

‘Run, you clods!’ shouted the Ultramarine.

Zeed and Voss had been laying down a lethal covering fire, burning through ammunition far faster than either would have liked, but now they broke from the fight and turned. In the tunnel up ahead, they could see the Ultramarine facing them. He dropped to a knee with his bolter raised. Zeed heard rounds whipping past his shoulder to embed themselves in the bodies of the genestealers close behind. He didn’t turn to look. With the genestealers so numerous and so fast on their feet, a staggered retreat was the only option, but with the chrono ticking, it was far slower then he’d have liked.

Only twenty metres separated the Raven Guard from the Ultramarine when the tunnel wall to the right suddenly exploded. Solarion vanished in a cloud of black dust and stone chips. Behind Zeed, there was a roar and a rush of white light. Voss had turned to punish their pursuers with righteous, cleansing flame. In the tunnel confines, the lethal blast of blazing promethium was inescapable. Scores of the hideous wretches collapsed in withering heat, leaving little but charred husks and ash. Others – those at the farthest extent of the weapon’s effective range – screamed and thrashed in agony like wild marionettes, their muscle tissue bubbling and burning as the fire licked at them.

But something was moving in the cloud of dust up ahead. Something big.

Zeed heard a chilling double scream unlike anything he’d heard before. Then he saw it, the frontal section of something large and wormlike, plated in broad rings of glittering black shell. It cast its head about, searching for the Ultramarine, strange multi-part jaws working the air, hoping to bite down on its target.

Zeed still couldn’t see Solarion. His view was blocked by the bulk of the monster. But he heard him growl something over the vox-link. In all the noise, it was difficult to make out – a curse of some sort, maybe.

‘Omni! Contact front!’ Zeed shouted to his friend. ‘Something big!’

Voss’s flames had bought them a little breathing space. Together, the Raven Guard and the Imperial Fist ran forwards up the tunnel, Zeed firing off rounds at the monstrous armoured worm. That armour, however, was too thick for any bolter-round to penetrate, and if Zeed thought his attack would draw the monster’s attention away from Solarion, well, in that regard he was wrong.

‘Prophet,’ he shouted over the link. ‘Respond.’

From the other side of the beast’s massive cylindrical bulk, Zeed and Voss could hear three-round bursts of bolter-fire.

‘Prophet!’ Zeed said again.

‘Damn it, Raven Guard,’ came the voice at last. ‘I’m a little busy here. And don’t call me that!’

There was further cursing, then, ‘It’s no good. I can’t even chip the thing. I knew we should have been issued Kraken rounds.’

At least the Ultramarine was to the west of the creature. He could still fall back to RP2, which lay just half a kilometre further up the tunnel. But the vast, wormlike enemy was blocking any hope of Talon Four and Five joining him. Clearly their weapons were inadequate against all that armour plate.

Zeed and Voss were within just a few metres of the creature’s bulk now. Zeed slowed, knowing there was nothing in his arsenal to defeat such a beast. Perhaps if they had brought a lascannon, a meltagun, a plasma cannon, or his own beloved master-crafted lightning claws…

But, right now, those peerless claws were somewhere beyond the planet’s ionosphere, in orbit aboard the
Saint Nevarre.
Next time, he would insist on choosing his own damned mission loadout, and to hell with Sigma.

Voss, however, had his own ideas. The Imperial Fist surged past Zeed, ran straight up to the side of the worm and thrust his gauntlets deep between two of the monster’s exo-skeletal segments. With a booming roar, he threw all his tremendous augmented strength into pushing the sections of black plate apart. Zeed saw glistening purple flesh appear in the gap, soft, wet and sticky.

Vulnerable.

He leapt to Voss’s side, thrust his bolter’s muzzle against the exposed skin, and emptied half an entire clip deep into the body of the beast.

There was a repeat of the strange double-voiced scream, and the creature whipped its head around, throwing Zeed and Voss back against the wall to their right. But, as it turned to bring its glistening jaws to bear on them, the bolts detonated deep inside its flesh. The rounds, clustered together, caused a massive rupture, blowing out a great section of its body, covering the Space Marines and the tunnel walls in a disgusting shower of gore and chitinous fragments.

The creature slumped dead, rocking slightly from side to side on its rings, pungent smoke rising from the messy crater in its corpse.

Zeed and Voss pushed themselves up and looked at the results of their handiwork.

‘Not subtle,’ said Zeed, ‘but nice.’

‘It will do,’ Voss agreed. ‘I guess the tyranids found rock-eater genes somewhere after all. They must have incorporated them into one of their new bioforms.’

‘You think too much, tree stump,’ said Zeed, kicking the lifeless mass of the thing with the toe of his boot.

The creature suddenly jolted, and they both levelled their weapons at it with a start, though Zeed’s was now already empty. But the thing hadn’t returned to life. It was just Solarion, pushing his way past the limply clacking mouthparts to rejoin them.

If Zeed and Voss had expected any thanks, they were mistaken.

‘Once you’re finished feeling proud of yourselves, perhaps we can get a bloody move on. RP2 is just up ahead.’

He vanished back around the monster’s corpse and they could hear him break into a run on the other side, his boots hammering on the rocky tunnel floor.

They looked at each other a moment.

‘Sooner or later,’ said Zeed, ‘I’m going to crack him one in the face.’

‘I’ll hold him for you,’ Voss replied with a grin beneath his helm.

Zeed snorted his disdain for the idea.

‘Hardly necessary.’