Deathwatch 9: The Walker in Fire Read online

  Deathwatch 9: The Walker in Fire

  Peter Fehervari

  The priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus claimed that teleportation was instantaneous, but nothing was certain in the warp, least of all time. Sometimes an instant swelled in a traveller’s perceptions, extending into a fugue state that could last subjective seconds, minutes or even hours. For most travellers the fugue was a maelstrom of bewildering fragments seeded from their souls, each piece gone before its meaning could be divined. For a few it offered flashes of insight that dissolved like gossamer threads at journey’s end.

  For Garran Branatar, the passage brought only shame.

  Once more he walked the temple-lined avenues of Gharuda, scorching white marble to black with the sacred fire of his bonded weapon. He had crafted the heavy flamer with his own hands and refined it over many years, perfecting it with the devotion of a true artisan. His kinship with the weapon ran deeper than blood, for it had been forged in the fires of his soul. It grieved him to belittle their bond with the unworthy foe they faced today.

  Tainted by terror, Gharuda’s Imperial guardians had surrendered to the xenos raiders who preyed on their world, offering up their own ­people as slaves or sacrifices so they might escape the same fate. They were contemptible, yet Branatar took no pride in their cleansing. He knew every battle-brother in his squad shared his disdain, so they scoured the shrine city with sombre, subdued efficiency.

  ‘This is no work for the Sons of Vulkan,’ Athondar said, striding alongside him, ‘least of all for a Firedrake.’

  Though his fellow warrior’s face was hidden beneath his helm, Branatar sensed the frown there. Despite his ferocity in battle there was a kindness about Athondar that was rare even among the Salamanders, a Chapter that had always enshrined the protection of Mankind at its heart. Some battle-brothers saw Athondar’s sensitivity as a weakness, but Branatar believed it elevated his comrade, bringing him closer to the ideal of their lost primarch.

  ‘We are burning out a viper’s nest of xenos collaborators, brother,’ Branatar said to his comrade. ‘In time the human worms who survive may become dragons who honour the Emperor.’

  Then the game changed.

  As the Salamanders turned onto the promenade leading to Gharuda’s basilica, the sky was riven by angry traceries of viridian light. Moments later a shoal of dark vessels slipped from the multiple rifts like predators of the deep sea, their forms sleek and spiny, as though woven from broken black bones bound with thorns. The xenos had returned to claim a final tithe…

  The moment distended, then shattered into a thousand mirror images of memory as the teleportation fugue burned itself out.

  ‘Some souls are beyond redemption,’ Athondar said, a heartbeat before Branatar’s world dissolved into white light.

  Tamas Athondar had first spoken those words five years ago, shortly before he died.

  But death had not silenced him.

  Sarastus was a world shrouded in perpetual night. The darkness wasn’t caused by some anomaly of cosmic geometry, for there was nothing eccentric about the planet’s form, mass or orbit. No, there was curse upon Sarastus, old and devoid of bite save for the blight of absolute darkness, but that had been enough to sour the world’s soul.

  Carceri, the largest of the planet’s hive cities, was a hunched ziggurat of manufactories and tenement vaults, cold and silent, but not quite dead. Things that had once been human haunted its precincts, clinging to a half-life of hunger, hate and the dim memory of something more.

  It was this last and cruellest misery that drew the ghouls to the roof of a nameless hab-block when they sensed a tremor in the immaterium, for they scented disorder as flies scented carrion flesh. For a time they scrabbled about the empty expanse, hunting for the nagging wrongness that had lured them there. Some raised their cataract-encrusted eyes to the broken sky, as if to invoke the blessing of a god even blinder than they. A thrill of blissful terror ran through the pack as the warp tremor grew stronger…

  The radiance burst among them like a compressed supernova. Despite their blindness, the ghouls recoiled and fled from the light, chased by a swirl of tortured air as the portal swept a path clear to make way for something new.

  Moments later, five shapes were silhouetted against the light. They stood rigid as iron statues while traceries of energy played about them, drawing flickering reflections from their helmet lenses. Though they were man-like in form they would have been giants among normal men. Their armour was painted black save for the shoulder pauldrons, whose emblems both united and divided them. While the left pad of every warrior bore a stylised ‘I’ cast in silver, the right ones differed in colour and design.

  Abruptly, the portal winked out and darkness swept over the intruders.

  ‘Kill Team Sabatine, switch optics to full-spectrum night vision,’ a voice commanded inside Branatar’s helmet. The timbre was clipped and precise, identifying a speaker who was entirely grounded in the present.

  For Watch Sergeant Cato Thandios, teleportation is always a silent instant, Branatar reflected. His soul is untroubled by shadows.

  Sometimes Branatar envied the squad leader’s uncomplicated faith. Like all warriors of the White Consuls, Thandios revered the Emperor not only as the master of Mankind, but as the living god whose destiny was absolutely manifest. Few Space Marine Chapters subscribed so completely to the Imperial Creed, but Branatar imagined there was great clarity in such conviction.

  Three voices acknowledged Thandios on the squad’s vox-channel. Two belonged to proven battle-brothers, but the third was an outsider, a Techmarine newly assigned to Sabatine for this mission. Branatar frowned at the newcomer’s inflectionless tone. None who entered the Omnissiah’s service were left untouched, but this warrior – Anzahl-M636, his name was – sounded more machine than man. Branatar had met skitarii with more personality. The Tech­marine’s equipment also set him aside from his squad brothers, for while they were encased in hulking Terminator plate, Anzahl-M636 had opted for lighter power armour. He had modified the suit extensively, reworking the pauldrons and breastplate into angular, geodesic shapes that venerated the Machine God. His helmet was a smooth dome split by a vertical visor that glowed with cold light. It gave him the aspect of one of the Adeptus Mechanicus’ soulless automatons.

  ‘Salamander?’ Thandios pressed, stirring Branatar from his brooding.

  ‘Acknowledged, watch sergeant,’ Branatar said as he activated his optics with a thought sigil. A rockcrete expanse resolved across his lenses, rendered in an abstraction of grey-greens. The flat surface was blemished with boulder-sized debris and deep cracks that could swallow a man. It was a miracle that the rooftop was still intact.

  Looking up, Branatar made out the broken shell of the district’s dome arcing high overhead. To his trained eye the damage looked like the work of decay rather than munitions, suggesting this city hadn’t died in an honest war. It was a disquieting thought, but according to the mission briefing, Sarastus had fallen centuries ago. Its doom was surely irrelevant to his present duty.

  We are here for those who came long after, Branatar knew. The briefing had been vague, but that much was certain.

  ‘The teleport homer is unattended,’ Anzahl-M636 said. ‘Our bridgehead has been compromised.’ There wasn’t a trace of concern in the Techmarine’s voice.

  Branatar turned his gaze upon a cylindrical device squatting a few paces from the squad. The indicator on its relay panel pulsed white in his night vision. It was the only source of light on the rooftop.

  ‘Formation Aegis,’ Thandios commanded. ‘Kill the beacon, One-Thousand.’ It was the Watch Sergeant’s custom to name each warrior by his Chapter of origin, which occasionally resulted in some odd designations, as had happened with Anzahl-M636, who’d been dubbed ‘One-Thousand’.

  The Brotherhood of A Thousand, Branatar thought. It was a strange name for a Space Marine Chapter when all Chapters aspired to such a number. To his mind it was as drab as the black ‘M’ that served as the Techmarine’s Chapter badge. Functional…

  ‘It’s said their brotherhood always numbers precisely one thousand,’ Icharos Malvoisin sent on a secure channel, as if reading Branatar’s mind. ‘A dismal prospect is it not, brother?’

  ‘An absurd one,’ Branatar replied as he turned to cover his pre-assigned watch vector. The squad fanned out around him to scan the rooftop in every direction. ‘Next you’ll believe we Salamanders can breathe fire.’

  ‘Oh, I never doubted it, brother. What else would account for those angry red eyes of yours?’

  ‘Watching your damned back, simpleton.’

  Despite his rebuke, Branatar counted the Angel Resplendent as a friend. Cato Thandios and Sevastin, the Black Wing, were trusted allies, but outside the field of battle they were strangers to him. His camaraderie with Malvoisin had been unexpected, not least because the man’s humour had rankled him when they’d first met. In truth, Branatar had wondered how such a frivolous warrior had earned a place in the Deathwatch, but he’d found his answer on their first mission together: there was nothing frivolous about Icharos Malvoisin.

  ‘Status report, One-Thousand?’ Thandios asked.

  ‘The teleport homer has functioned at ninety-seven-point-three per cent efficiency,’ Anzahl-M636 replied. ‘Our spatial misalignment was within acceptable parameters.’

  The Tech
marine had extruded a serpentine mechadendrite from his gauntlet, connecting him to the device that their ship’s teleporter had used to triangulate their deployment. Without a homer, the squad might have materialised inside a solid wall or high above the planet’s surface. Neither prospect was conducive to survival, so homers were vital, but they had to be placed manually – so where was their contact on the ground?

  ‘Has it been tampered with?’ Thandios demanded, obviously sharing Branatar’s unease.

  ‘Improbable,’ Anzahl-M636 said, deactivating the homer. ‘The–’

  ‘Multiple contacts incoming,’ Sevastin cut across the Techmarine. If paranoia was a virtue in war then the Black Wing was a saint of battle, for he was always the first to see a threat, if indeed it was sight that gave him his edge.

  The creatures swarmed from the cracks in the roof like locusts, hauling themselves out with gangling arms and grasping, almost prehensile feet. They were naked and hairless, their pallid flesh stretched taut across skeletons that were no longer quite human, with misaligned joints and backswept skulls that frayed and tapered to thorny points. Their eyes were like shrivelled white mushrooms, sunken behind distended snouts that sniffed at the air as they skittered towards the squad, loping and leaping, sometimes on their feet, but just as often on all fours. Yet despite their bestial aspect, they charged in utter silence, save for the scrabbling of their talons across the ground.

  Somehow, that was the most inhuman thing of all.

  Mutants, Branatar thought with weary revulsion. He had seen such perversions of humanity before, though never as far gone as these degenerates. It will be a mercy to cleanse these vermin.

  ‘Hold fire,’ Thandios ordered, ‘melee weapons only. Keep it quick and quiet.’

  The warp turbulence that had heralded the squad’s arrival had lasted scant seconds. If fortune went their way the true enemy hadn’t registered it, but sustained gunfire would be pressing their luck.

  ‘Divided we endure,’ Sevastin hissed, as he did before every battle, even the least. Branatar assumed it was his Chapter’s credo, but if so it was a dark one. He’d fought alongside the Black Wing for years, yet he knew nothing about the reclusive warrior’s past.

  He is another who entered the Deathwatch seeking absolution, Branatar guessed. Absolution, or oblivion…

  He tilted his flamer up so it wouldn’t be sullied by unclean blood and raised his left hand. It was empty, yet the massive gauntlet was a weapon in its own right. There was a flare of light beside him as Malvoisin’s power sword surged into life. Like Branatar, he had customised his personal weapon, encasing the hilt in a chiaroscuro fretwork of silver and obsidian that sang when he swung the blade. The Angels Resplendent were artists without parallel among the Adeptus Astartes and Malvoisin was among their finest.

  ‘Veritas vos viribus!’ Thandios intoned in High Gothic as the mutants broke against the Deathwatch like a tide against an immovable rock. Claws and jaws scraped and snapped against hard ceramite, unable to penetrate or find purchase, while flailing fists battered themselves into bloody oblivion. The squad answered without mercy, culling the vermin in swathes.

  Branatar swung about with his fist, crushing skulls or punching through chests with equal ease. The ghouls were so fragile he barely felt them die. It was like extinguishing phantoms…

  ‘This is no work for a Firedrake,’ Athondar echoed his sentiment.

  Branatar cast the unwelcome memory aside and focussed on the battle at hand, though this slaughter hardly warranted the term. Given time he could put down every one of these degenerates on his own.

  Beside him, Malvoisin whirled his blade about in wide, rippling arcs that cleaved through two or three mutants with every pass. Tactically he was in his element here, but Branatar knew that he took no joy in such crude work.

  Icharos will sketch this scene over and over when we are done with this world, he predicted grimly. Whatever foe we face later, this is the one he will remember.

  Watch Sergeant Thandios was intoning a steady stream of canticles as he fought. Like his faith, the White Consul’s fighting style was resolute and controlled: he swung his power fist with piston-like regularity, marking every kill with a word of castigation.

  In contrast, the Black Wing tore into the mutants with a whirling abandon that strained against his bulky armour. His single lightning claw spiralled through the pack, slicing his foes into ragged fragments that spattered and sometimes stuck to his carapace. Thandios had frowned on Sevastin’s choice of a single claw because the Codex Astartes decreed that two was the optimal configuration, but the Black Wing’s choice hadn’t hindered his lethality.

  ‘This mutant strain appears stable,’ Anzahl-M636 observed, ‘but it exceeds prescribed Imperial limits for genetic drift. I will recommend a full purgation commission following mission termination.’

  Branatar glanced at the Techmarine. The newcomer stood rigid with his arms folded while the multi-jointed servo arm attached to his back whirred about with a life of its own, striking down mutants like a metal cobra. Its clawed head had extruded twin rows of rotary blades that shredded everything they touched.

  There was a snarl of disgust from Malvoisin. Branatar turned and saw a ghoul perched on his friend’s back, its matchstick legs wrapped around his helmet as it scratched at the lenses. The wretched creature must have vaulted from the shoulders of its kin to gain such a height. His vision impaired, the swordsman swung about trying to shake it off while keeping the others at bay. He was in no danger, but the sheer indignity of it appeared to enrage him. With a flourish he spun his sword round and lanced it up through the beast. Its carcass ignited and came apart around the energy-swathed blade, but another mutant leapt forwards and wrapped itself around his right leg. Malvoisin stamped furiously, crushing one of the beast’s trailing limbs and sending tremors through the rooftop.

  ‘Caution,’ Anzahl-M636 said flatly, ‘this structure is unsound.’

  The Techmarine was moving now, ploughing through the mob to put distance between him and the raging Angel Resplendent.

  ‘Icharos–’ Branatar began as Malvoisin kicked out and dislodged the ghoul from his leg. Before the Salamander could finish, the swordsman brought his blade down in a vertical swipe that cleaved the mutant in two and bit deep into the ground. With a roar of fury he hacked again and again, pulverising the creature into ragged red shards and sundering the ground beneath.

  ‘Angel!’ Thandios bellowed.

  A lattice of fissures zigzagged out from the riven rockcrete, widening as they extended. A moment later, the ground under the Angel Resplendent heaved apart and he found himself straddling a chasm. With a grace that belied his armoured bulk, Malvoisin spun to his right and brought both feet down on solid ground.

  ‘That was foolish,’ he said to Branatar. A shallower warrior would have said it with a grin, but there was only shame in Malvoisin’s voice.

  No, not shame, Branatar realised through his relief. Despair.

  ‘I–’

  Malvoisin’s words were snatched away as the ground disintegrated under him and he plummeted from sight, leaving behind a ragged hole. A tremor ran through the rooftop and another great slab tumbled through, widening the pit and sucking in a trio of wildly scrabbling ghouls.

  ‘Structural disintegration imminent,’ Anzahl-M636 evaluated.

  The slab under Branatar tilted towards the rift as he backed away. He saw that the Techmarine had reached the stairwell at the roof’s edge, but the rest of his comrades were caught in the collapse. Thandios was leaning forwards as he tried to navigate a path through the farrago, while Sevastin balanced precariously on a swaying slab.

  They won’t make it, Branatar gauged. And neither will I.

  ‘Kill Team Sabatine,’ the Techmarine instructed, ‘initiate armour salvation systems. Proceed to ground level, if you endure.’

  ‘He’s right!’ Branatar voxed. ‘It’s the only way, brothers!’

  As he was pitched towards the rift, he cradled his weapon and triggered his armour’s lockdown mode. The muscle fibre bundles lining the suit’s interior expanded, sheathing his body tightly as he plunged into the darkness alongside a pair of flailing, but still silent ghouls.