Deathwatch (37 page)

Bolters chugged relentlessly, their barrels growing hot. Purging flames gushed forth in a torrent, twisting side-to-side like a great dancing snake as Voss strafed the murderous ranks of the foe. Under-barrel grenade launchers coughed, their rounds detonating with lethal efficacy, carving great craters of death in the horde. The genestealers were so numerous they were almost packed shoulder to ugly misshapen shoulder. The toll on them was devastating, but they didn’t care. They had numbers to spare and then some. There was no end to them. For every ten that were blasted or burned apart, twenty seemed to emerge onto the elevated gantries and walkways around the perimeter of the chamber.

The exit was cut off. It had been from the start. Karras had had no choice. He had ordered them to the rooftop where the cache was. With growing, heart-sickening despair, he watched the chrono tick down as if it was a death clock counting away the seconds until they were overwhelmed.

He couldn’t let the others feel this way. It was unworthy. If they had to die, let it be glorious and noble, drowning in the blood of their enemies right up to the end.

‘The Emperor is watching you!’ he roared at his squad. ‘Show him your worth. You are Deathwatch. Best of the best. Show him what that means. Earn honour for your Chapters. Remember your oaths!’

So they fought. They fought like gods of war. The genestealers seethed all around them, moving like an ocean, crashing against the old, frozen prefab structure on which they stood, then scrambling to the roof only to meet the wrath of Voss’s flamer. At this range, the weapon was savagely effective, spewing fiery death, cutting a burning swathe through literally hundreds of the foe. But it couldn’t last. Even with the additional ammo of the cache – already stripped bare – the moment would come when the last canister ran dry. Voss was ready. He would switch to his bolt pistol and knife. Standard operating protocol. But it meant Karras’s plan would never see fruition. He had been meant to help the kill-team leader hold the genestealers off while the others fell back. He couldn’t do that effectively with just his sidearm.

Over the link, he shouted to Karras. ‘Scholar! Last canister!’

There was no answer. At first, Voss felt his heart speed up. Had the Death Spectre fallen?

But Karras was gunning down genestealers with the others. Gunning them down and making the kind of decision only an Alpha could make.

‘All of you, down off the roof. Make for the tunnel. Move as a group, triangle formation, Rauth and the woman in the middle as before.’

‘No!’ said Zeed. ‘I’ll not leave this fight to you alone, Scholar. You plan to martyr yourself?’

‘You will do as commanded, Talon Squad!’

Balefire had begun to coruscate over his armour, the flickering tongues getting longer with each passing second, with each kill he racked up.
Arquemann
was glowing, pulsing, strapped to his back by its sling. The blade wanted free, free to slaughter enemies of the Chapter to which it belonged. Karras could feel it compelling him to mag-lock his bolter. But that was not why he was ordering the others away.

Two minutes remained on the mission chrono. It was already too late, he knew, but he wasn’t ready to believe it was over. If the others would only move clear, maybe, just maybe, he could do something to get them out of here.

‘You have to break for the tunnel now. Jump roof-to-roof until you are close. I will buy you the time you need to reach the exfil point, but you must do exactly as I say.’

‘Scholar–’

‘I’m giving you an order, Talon. Now move!’

There was no arguing with him. The tone of command in his voice was as hard as the rock all around them. But still they hesitated, and he saw that he would have to make a move himself.

‘Go!’ he shouted at them, then he ran to the edge of the roof and leapt to another, only not in the direction of the exfiltration point. He was trying to draw some of the genestealers in the other direction.

‘Don’t make me do this for nothing!’ he snarled at them.

‘Let’s move, Talon,’ barked Rauth. ‘I need cover. Let’s go!’

With a last glance at Karras, beset on all sides now by clambering, slavering terrors, the rest of the squad broke from the central roof and headed west to the exit, gunning down and burning all those genestealers unlucky enough to draw near.

Behind them, Karras emptied round after round into chitin-ribbed bodies and hideous, razor-mawed faces. He fired grenades into the densest knots. The kill-count was staggering, and it kept rising, but he was soon down to his last magazine.

Then the trigger clicked that fateful click every warrior dreads in the middle of a conflict – the last round was spent, the mag was empty. He unslung
Arquemann
from his back and gripped it two-handed, as it was meant to be held. Eldritch lightning began arcing between his body and the blade, bright white, bright enough to sear afterimages on the eyes.

The genestealers around him hesitated, sensing the lethal nature of the weapon, its touch utterly deadly. But there were so many pressing at their backs, they could not hold themselves clear. Like a great crashing tide, they surged towards him again.

Karras felt power racing through every fibre of his body. ‘You have underestimated me, alien filth!’ he bellowed. ‘And now you will learn to fear the power of the sons of Occludus!’

The cavern filled with great bolts of lightning. The air shook. Dying creatures screamed as their life force was ripped away from them, their bodies hewn to pieces.

At the far side of the chamber, the rest of Talon Squad had dropped from the roof of the block closest to the exit and had cut a path out through the foe.

Solarion ran in front, point-man as ever. Rauth was just two metres behind him, and behind Rauth came Zeed and Voss. As they bolted up the tunnel with all the speed they could manage, Voss chanced a single, brief glance backwards, looking for the kill-team leader.

He couldn’t quite see him. He couldn’t quite make sense of what he
did
see. It was so bright back there, his helm’s optics struggled to compensate. But he thought he saw hundreds of writhing forms suspended in the air while a figure clad in raging, blinding flame threw great spears of deadly energy out in all directions. Everything those spears of light touched burst into swirls of ash.

There was no time to witness anything more. The others were already pulling ahead.

Voss turned back to them and put on a burst of speed.

The exfiltration point was just up ahead.

But did it even matter any more?

After all, the chrono had stopped counting down minutes ago.

Now, all it read was
--:--:--
.

The exfiltration point looked like a scene from Gaudoleri’s famed triptych
Aftermath at Hades
. The circular expanse of the room was awash with blood, littered with the broken bodies of the dead. Four members of Talon Squad – Zeed, Voss, Solarion and Rauth – skidded into the echoing chamber and stopped, their lips forming grim lines behind their visors. They could not see their sixth member at all in this reeking mess. The chamber floor was tacky with cooling crimson. The nearest bodies looked like they had been ripped to pieces. Others nearer the far walls looked like they had been burned in flames or chewed apart by large rounds. Against one wall, more lay in a great mound.

But of Chyron himself, there was no sign.

Before anyone could comment, they heard footfalls from the tunnel behind them, and Karras entered at a tired, staggering run.
Arquemann
was once again slung on his back. When he stopped running, he collapsed to the ground on hands and armoured knees. There were deep gouges, tears and a spidery network of fracture lines all across his armour. His right vambrace had shattered completely. Only the metal frame and black layer of artificial muscle remained.

He was gasping in pain.

Zeed was closest to him. The Raven Guard dropped to his haunches at Karras’s side.

‘In the name of the primarch, Scholar, I don’t know how you did it, but I wish I could’ve stuck around to watch. Are you wounded?’

Karras, wordless at first, waved him off, then struggled to his feet. His entire body ached. It felt like there was fire in his bones and grinding glass in his brain. It was the second time only in a long life of war that he had been forced to exercise his power like that – not just in the purging of the foe with psychic fire, but also, once he had reached the chamber exit, to collapse the tunnel between here and RP1. It wasn’t much, but it would stop the genestealers from harassing them for a while…

… until they circled around and found another way in.

It was dangerous, this excessive use of a power that flowed from the warp of all places. In his head, he had heard the mutterings of inhuman voices, hungry and excited, watching him with gleeful anticipation for the moment he lost control. Those sounds were not something he ever wished to hear again.

‘Chyron?’ he asked the others.

‘No sign,’ said Solarion, ‘apart from this bloodbath. He must have pulled out at the last minute.’

Karras hoped the old warrior had indeed extracted on time. It made sense.

The rest of us… We all made it back alive. But for what, I wonder?

He had blinked off his chrono display. It was pointless now, just a row of dashes and colons that seemed to say
You Have Failed
more than anything else.

He crossed to the circular space beneath the Inorin vent shaft – the very shaft down which they had infiltrated just over ten hours ago – and looked upwards. At the top, he could make out a tiny circle of starlit space.
Ten hours.
He felt so drained. It was not so much a physical exhaustion – Space Marines could operate at extremes for days on end if need be – but the strain of first suppressing then almost constantly exercising his unique abilities, which had left him close to his mental limits. That last battle had pushed him beyond them. He needed nutriment and a long, unbroken rest.

And a book
, he thought.
An ancient, worthy tome in which to lose myself awhile.

‘I knew this would happen, Karras,’ Solarion griped, pulling off his helm. ‘If we hadn’t wasted so much time back–’

The kill-team leader’s patience was spent. ‘Kill it, Three!’ he barked harshly. ‘It was always going to be tight. Sigma was unrealistic in his assessment. The broodlord was always going to become a factor.’

Voss, largely ignoring the back-and-forth, had seen something of note among the bodies. He walked over to it and picked it up. ‘Now
that
explains a lot.’

He was holding the severed end of Sigma’s communications relay cable.

‘Burned straight through. It must have taken a las- or plasma-blast during Chyron’s little skirmish. I guess he was already engaging the enemy while we were crossing the lake.’

Solarion had been glaring daggers at Karras, but he, like the kill-team leader, didn’t have the necessary energy left to keep anger ablaze. ‘So what do we do now? For all we know, the
Saint Nevarre
is already heading out of the system.’

‘We have Sigma’s package,’ Karras grated, gesturing at the woman cradled in Rauth’s left arm. ‘And we’re only minutes late. I don’t think he’ll have given up on us quite yet. Reaper flight may still be in range. The signal round, if you please, brother.’

With some small hope rekindled, the Ultramarine drew a uniquely coloured bolt from his webbing. It was red with white banding. He detached the magazine from under his bolter, pulled the cocking lever back, slid the signal round into the breech and primed it. Then he lifted the bolter vertically, sighted upwards through the mounted scope, squeezed on the trigger and loosed the round.

A second later, the sound of the bolt detonating above the planet’s surface returned to them. There was a flash of bluish white light on the chamber floor, perfectly circular, shaped by the vent shaft under which Talon Squad stood.

‘So we wait,’ said Zeed, ‘and hope she’s as important to him as we think she is.’

‘There’s the city, Cholixe, eighty-three kilometres west of here,’ Voss replied. ‘If it comes down to it, we can make for there. They have a small space port and a subsector comms array.’

Karras looked at the woman again. ‘She won’t last another hour. Omni, if there’s no response to the signal round, do you think you could do something with that relay cable?’

‘I don’t have the tools to patch in from here, Scholar. I’d need to fix an I/O jack to the end of it before I could do anything else.’

‘So, we have to depend on the signal round,’ said Zeed.

‘If there’s no response from Reaper flight within twenty minutes,’ said Karras, ‘we will grant White Phoenix the Emperor’s Mercy, kill the parasite, and make for Cholixe.’

The others nodded silent agreement. All were thinking that the genestealer horde might find a way through to them by then. Zeed, unsatiated even now, actively hoped it.

‘Such butchery,’ murmured Solarion, looking at the bodies by his feet. ‘At least he enjoyed himself in our absence.’

‘They were a welcome diversion, Ultramarine,’ rumbled a voice, basso profundo, ‘from the boredom of awaiting you.’

The hill of corpses against the chamber wall began to shudder and shift. Dead meat slid away. There was the noise of skulls smacking on stone, the slap of lifeless flesh. Chyron rose awkwardly from beneath the pile and turned his slot-visored glacis plate to face them.

‘A little hide-and-seek, Old One?’ said Zeed with a grin.

Chyron began dragging himself towards the middle of the chamber, and the rest of the kill-team could see just how badly damaged he was. His left leg was a mess, its armour shattered, the pistons and actuators beneath twisted and snagged. His foot made showers of bright yellow sparks as he dragged it along the ground. His right arm was in an even worse state, for almost nothing of the assault cannon remained. All over his chassis his tank-thick armour was gouged, scored, chipped and burned in too many places to count.

He pre-empted their next question.

‘Man-portable missile launchers,’ he growled. ‘The dung-eating cowards fired on me from the shadows, then swarmed on me like ants. And they died like ants – brainwashed men and xenos-bred abominations both.’

At this, the other Deathwatch operatives took a better look at the dead. There were literally hundreds of them, but finding bodies which had not been pulped beyond recognition by the Lamenter’s power fist or burned to cinders by his flamer was far from easy. For the most part, Chyron’s attackers were, in physical form at least, men like any others. The majority wore miners’ overalls and orange thermasuits. Others yet wore the dark uniform and body armour of Civitas enforcers. But there were others, too, and these last were not so much like men. They were taller, boasted larger frames, and those frames were twisted with xenos corruption. Some had extra limbs. Others had sharp triangular teeth peeking out from within their slack mouths. To a Space Marine’s eyes, even the relative darkness of the chamber could not hide the unnatural colouring of their skin. These were the tainted by-blows of the genestealer infection, and Chyron had left none here alive.

‘Quite a body count,’ said Voss.

‘Would that the diversion had lasted longer,’ returned Chyron. ‘Is there anything left to kill down here?’

‘Genestealers,’ said Voss. ‘Leaderless now, thanks to Scholar, but they’ll be coming. You may yet have more killing to do.’

‘That would be some compensation,’ said Chyron. ‘I tried to call in the Stormravens via the link when the chrono dropped to five minutes. I wondered why there was no response.’

‘Why did you hide under those corpses?’ asked Zeed.

Chyron snorted derisively. ‘Use your head, little raven. I was left with only my power fist. Would you have me stand here in the middle of the chamber where our enemies could fire missiles on me from a safe distance? I had hoped to ambush more of them as they walked among their dead. But it seemed there were no others to come. Or perhaps they did not want to die.’ After a pause he asked, ‘Is that the primary objective? That sickly woman? She looks all but dead herself.’

Rauth was still holding her, but it was Zeed who answered. ‘I doubt it’s the woman herself that Sigma wants.’ He looked with distaste at the shifting swollen skin of her belly. It suddenly occurred to him that Chyron, whose Chapter had been all but obliterated by the tyranid race, might recognise she was heavy with forbidden progeny and strike at the woman in a flash of vengeful rage. His power fist would kill both her and her unborn parasite in a single blow. He stepped in front of Rauth, blocking her from view as nonchalantly as possible.

Chyron watched the Raven Guard do this without comment, but he was no fool. He perceived the cause of Zeed’s concern, and searched himself for the fury his brother suspected might rise. It wasn’t there. In truth, the sight of the woman was so pathetic that it had not occurred to him to strike her and her unborn parasite down. Instead, he rumbled, ‘The Inquisition has strange needs. Whatever business they are about this time, they are welcome to it. Give me war, plain and simple, and to the warp with all their intrigues.’

At the mention of Inquisition business, Karras caught Zeed throwing him a meaningful look. He was about to question it when a tinny voice on the link stopped him.

‘Reaper One to Alpha. Reaper One to Alpha. Signal round sighted. Better late than never, Talon. We are en route to your location. ETA two minutes. Prep for extraction.’

‘Throne and sword!’ gasped Solarion. There was no mistaking his relief and joy.

‘Praise the Emperor,’ added Voss. He and Zeed gripped wrists in mutual congratulation.

‘Descended they, from the high heavens, upon wings of fire and steel,’ quoted Rauth quietly. ‘And lifted were our hearts, and we called them e’er after our salvation.’

Karras didn’t recognise that one. Half his mind was occupied by something else. A compulsion of sorts had come over him. He looked at Chyron and made a decision, though he would not understand why until later. Something inside him, a feeling not quite his own, told him that Chyron must not be the last member of the kill-team left in the chamber. Though he could find no logical basis to support that thought, as a psyker, he had learned to trust his instincts in moments like these.

‘Alpha to Reaper One. Talon Six will be extracted first. Instruct Reaper Two. Reaper Three will hang back. There are no retrievable support assets. Confirm.’

‘Negative, Alpha,’ said the flight-group leader. ‘We have orders to extract the package first.’

‘Reaper flight, Alpha reminds you that you are addressing one of the Emperor’s own Space Marines. You will do as I command or face the consequences. Talon Six will be extracted first. Acknowledge.’

There was a moment of tense silence before the pilot replied resignedly, ‘Understood, Alpha. Reaper Two moving into position now. Stand by for magna-grapple drop.’

Moments later, the battle-ravaged bulk of Chyron was winched out of sight, vanishing up the long, echoing vent-shaft. Even once he disappeared, Karras could still hear Chyron grumbling and growling about the indignity of being hauled up like a fish on a line.

Reaper Two moved off. Reaper One swung into position and dropped four lines, one of which ended in a body-sized recovery frame of black plasteel. Into this frame, the Space Marines strapped the limp form of White Phoenix. She was still breathing, but the movements of the parasite had increased. She did not have the luxury of time.

The kill-team watched her ascend after Karras gave Reaper One the all-clear to pull her up. Then Solarion, Rauth and Voss each mag-locked their weapons, placed a booted foot into the loop at the bottom of each of the three lines, voxed for the winches to start reeling them up, and began their own rapid climb to the gunship hovering overhead.

Zeed and Karras stood at the bottom, looking up.

‘Before we get back to the
Saint Nevarre
and that bastard inquisitor, there’s something I think you should know, Scholar,’ said the Raven Guard.