Please note this story is based on the "Extraction" mission from the Deathwatch RPG and as such borrows names, locations, and descriptions. I am practicing the short story format and this seemed a good inspiration to start from.
I once witnessed a lyzarswan fight so desperately for her life. The jaws of a crotalid had snapped shut on her leg, yet with frantic flapping of her wings she was able to break free, ripping her own fragile limb away from her body. The predator went hungry, but she would evermore be incomplete.
If this is it; if this is how we propose to extract humanity from this doom, then I fear for how much of our… humanity… we must sacrifice into the bargain.
- Inquisitor Zharn at the Conclave of Pho.
TANTALUS WAS DYING. A noxious maelstrom engulfed the planet, spreading like a cancer from its equator. An apocalyptic plague of billions of organisms, vast on a continental scale, the seething xenos swarm devoured everything in its path. Only the polar regions remained, retreating patches of icy pearl defiantly insisting on the planet’s natural hue.
Like a hammer hurled from the grey heavens by a furious god, the drop pod punched through the bloated clouds of Tantalus’s upper atmosphere. Hurtling down on wings of fire, its ceramite armour blistering, the blazing pod speared straight for the industrial facility designated Pyroclast-Gamma-9.
‘Impact minus twenty,’ the monotone servo-voice announced over the thunderous roar of the descent. Brother Markius clenched his teeth and gripped the arms of the grav-seat. G-forces clutched his body and threatened to tear it apart with invisible claws. Such traumas were lethal to any mortal human; but the riders aboard this plummeting comet were Adeptus Astartes. From across the cramped interior of the vessel, he heard Brother Rasmus growling with laughter.
Retro-jets ignited, the reverse thrust hammering into the five passengers like a dreadnought’s powerfist. Moments later the pod smashed into the bleak tundra, a geyser of polluted earth exploding skywards with its impact. Markius grunted. The retro-thrusters had fired precisely on time. They had survived the trial of fire.
The pod doors blasted open, smoking ceramite petals unleashing the deadly seeds cocooned within. Brother Markius clicked his harness and sprang forth onto Planet Tantalus. Chemical-thick mud squelched underfoot as Markius strode his first steps, his onyx-black power armour humming and auto senses tracking.
Markius scanned his quadrant. Jagged spars of granite and tumbledown crags disfigured the sub-arctic tundra, as bleak as the harsh skies glowering down from above. The icy air was thick with the stench of burning chemicals, and a whiff of human blood. Drifts of black smoke ghosted across the coarse landscape, but no hint of the enemy, yet.
‘Clear,’ came Brother Goran’s lupine voice in the vox-bead in his ear.
The black-armoured Astartes gathered at Borias’s corner of the smoking pod’s crater and gazed southwards. A roiling, purple-black cloud swallowed the horizon, shot through with cankerous veins of yellow. The hiss of billions of voracious nightmares drifted on the bitterly cold air. Markius narrowed his eyes. This is what a dying planet looked like, slowly devoured by an extragalactic multitude.
He checked his chronometer, mounted on his left vambrace. The left arm of his power armour, alone amongst the black-painted ceramite, was electroplated in chrome: The colours of the Deathwatch.
‘May I suggest our first avenue of inquiry to be this way?’ said Brother-Apothecary Sören, belatedly completing the group. The handsome, golden-haired warrior-physician gestured westwards and Markius spied a blackened scar gouged out of the earth. The marines loped towards the crash site, long strides consuming the distance. The Magos’s ship had plunged within the precincts of a promethium refining facility and brutal square-sided buildings and infrastructure jutted from the landscape, chained together by strings of failing lumen globes and nests of industrial pipes. Markius’s ceramite boots crunched onto metal grillwork panels, sunk for better footing in the chemical sludge that had been churned up by the passage of gigantic eight-wheeled engines. The Deathwatch marines soon reached their objective.
The broken body of a Kestrel-class interplanetary lighter lay shattered in the smoking trench it had scoured from the earth with its crash landing, its exhausts gushing and its armour plating torn apart like parchment. Despite the ruin of the spearhead-shaped craft, Markius concluded that the reactor had not ruptured, or he would instead be looking at nothing more than a glowing crater.
‘We take a look; beware vanguard organisms,’ Markius said, and the marines approached with weapons raised. Brother Goran was first to the rear of the armoured prow, the doors hanging open where explosive emergency bolts had been loosed. Goran grabbed one of the doors in his bionic powerfist and wrenched it from its mounting.
‘Someone walked away, then,’ he said, green eyes flashing as he scanned the inside of the wreck then the banks of scorched earth ramped up by the crash.
Amongst the catastrophe of the interior, the marines discovered the corpses of several crewmen, abandoned where they had died. Servitors, shredded and pulverized, populated the macabre wreck. There was no sign of the Magos.
‘What do you think of this, eh?’ said Brother Rasmus, peering at the vox array in the central control module. The bulky marine’s oblong face wrinkled as he frowned, right up to the grey stubble of his balding pate. The wrecked fuselage had twisted so that its wall had become its floor. Rasmus braced his hulking frame with his bionic leg propped against the former ceiling.
Markius raised his eyebrows at Sören. So did the others.
‘Not that I am trained as a techmarine, but I would suppose that this is the source of the Magos’s last emergency transmission,’ said the statuesque Apothecary, shrugging.
‘Well, he’s not here now,’ Goran snarled like a snow wolf, and the marines departed. Outside, Markius peered at the sprawling complex of Pyroclast-Gamma-9. Harsh ferrocrete bunkers stamped with Departmento Munitorum code runes and slogans admonishing the facility’s convict labourers were interspersed with looming iron-black engines and rusting pipework.
‘Throne. He could be anywhere,’ Markius said.
‘Over here!’ Brother Borias called from amongst a nest of sharp-edged shards of rock, and the other marines dashed over. There they witnessed another damaged servitor, but this was a combat android, and its bisected body still sparked and juddered. Two eviscerated navy crewmen, still clutching lasguns, lay in stale pools of their own blood.
‘This is what they look like, eh?’ said Rasmus, unusually quietly. Markius stepped up next to the big Astartes. The carcasses of two of the xenos life-forms leered at the marines – vanguard organisms, just one genus of this hideous alien race, designated hormagaunts in Markius’s engram patches.
‘Oho, pretty fraggers these tyranids, aren’t they?’ said Borias, but the wicked smile was absent from his aquiline face. Borias scratched at his bullet-smooth head, and Markius realised his own skin was crawling, too. He instinctively scanned their surroundings one more time, just in case there were any more of them lurking nearby. Tyranids, the Ordo Xenos had titled these extragalactic nightmares.
Soulless eyes, opaque and blank like those of a titanshark, peered from the grotesque skulls of the hormagaunts, and rows of needle teeth still glistened with arterial gore within grimacing maws. The hunched bodies, ribbed with exo-skeletons of chitinous armour, reminded Markius of ocean crustaceans grown to the size of men. One of the three pairs of claws of each specimen were elongated into razor-edged talons as long as sabres, which looked easily capable of bisecting a servitor, or ripping through navy flak armour jackets like a thermo-dagger through parchment.
‘Brother Markius, we have blood,’ said Sören, hunched over a spar of granite, runes illuminated on his vambrace-mounted medical equipment. Markius joined him and peered at the splashes of oily fluid.
‘I surmise that our Magos is injured, but not dead,’ said Sören, cupping his chiseled chin.
‘But we still don’t know where he damned well is,’ muttered Markius, checking his chronometer again. He scanned the bleak landscape once more. The twilight was fading into night, fast. Markius paused.
‘THAT WAS LASRIFLES,’ said Brother Goran, jade eyes glinting. Old bio-acid scars stood out against the fuzz of hair covering his scalp, ridged gouges carved through the black hair.
The Kill-team stalked towards the lip of a broad ravine that fell away into the earth – a deep scar of open-cast mining in the tundra. Sounds shivered in the air; inhuman roars and the distinctive crack of lasfire.
Markius frowned at big Rasmus, stomping along beside him with his bionic leg. The south-west had been Rasmus’s sector to check after drop-pod impact.
‘I keep telling you to see me about it,’ said Apothecary Sören.
‘Quiet,’ said Brother Goran, boltpistol drawn.
The marines took cover on the slope of a nearby escarpment and peered down into the ravine. There, sheltering around the overturned wreck of an eight-wheeled cargo-hauler, a ragged squad of Imperial guardsmen hunkered down into firing positions. More bodies of soldiers littered the ravine, and amongst them the mangled remains of bat-winged monsters bigger than men, with scythe-like claws that were drenched in blood. Markius recognised the creatures as scout-organisms, designated shrikes in his engram patch.
Markius instantly liked him. Beyond the guardsmen, on the far side of the ravine, movements rippled through the rocks as a swarm of tyranid monsters mustered for another attack.
The wave of chittering hormagaunts scuttled with preternatural speed across the floor of the ravine, rippling around and over boulders. Something big shifted in the shadows beyond them. The guardsmen responded with disciplined volleys of lasfire, directed by the commissar. Tyranid beasts died with nerve-jangling shrieks, smoking holes punched into their elongated heads. But those few that fell were ignored by their brethren, who surged and leapt over the fallen corpses. Markius could see the efforts of the guardsmen, while brave, would not be enough to halt the tide, and the larger thing still skulked out of sight. Neither side had yet noticed the marines.
‘Ahem, Brother Markius,’ said Sören.
Rasmus skidded down the steep side of the ravine, trailing a small avalanche of shale and dirt. Reaching the foot of the slope, he hefted his power-axe from its shoulder harness and activated the blade. The weighty wedge crackled into life, wreathed in a corona of electric energy. Rasmus charged, bellowing like an enraged ice bear, power-axe cleaving great circles above his head.
‘Brother Borias; covering fire!’ yelled Markius.
He leapt onto the plunging slope of the ravine side to begin his own sliding descent. Brother Sören followed, taking a route to Markius’s flank. And so too did Goran, thankfully putting aside his doubts in the adrenalin-fuelled rush of combat.
Brother Borias’s heavy bolter thundered its drumbeat, thump thump thump, and a fusillade of mass-reactive missiles screamed low over their heads, spearing down into the ravine. The heels of his ceramite boots gouging tracks from the side of the ravine, Markius swung round his bolter and thumbed the fire-selector control. Designating metal storm rounds, Markius opened fire while he slid. Brother Sören’s bolter also struck up the rhythm. Their blessed weapons disgorged righteous fury and the bolts exploded amongst the tyranid horde. The magics of the Omnissiah had primed the rounds to unleash their payload a split-second before impact, and the precious ammunition reaped a fearsome toll on the monsters. One-point-zero calibre missiles from Borias’s heavy bolter blasted into the crush of alien bodies too, and the combined onslaught seized the attention of the seething mass of xenos monsters.
Hardly believing their eyes, the guardsmen shouted encouragement to the unexpected interlopers. The three Deathwatch marines stumbled onto the bottom of the ravine at roughly the same time. Goran slunk away to the flank, towards Brother Rasmus. With grim efficiency, Markius and Sören marched towards the stunned xenos, pumping a withering hail of explosive firepower into their ranks. Six-limbed hormagaunts shattered into bloody piles of ichor and gore. Rasmus had already reached the nearest beast, too, smashing its head from its hunched shoulders with his axe. Still the thump thump thump of Borias’s heavy bolter bellowed its hymnal rhythm across the ravine.
A hiss rippled through the throng, rising into a crescendo, until with one voice the tyranids screamed their fury at the marines. The stampede altered its flight, and now the sea of gaping jaws and scything talons swarmed towards the Kill-team. Markius raised one eyebrow. The sudden appearance of genetically-engineered transhuman giants in onyx-black power armour unleashing the holy fire of bolter weapons had put to flight many xenos in his time. The suicidal bravery, even in base animals such as these, always surprised him.
Pausing to exchange magazines in his bolter, the thought struck Markius that they were going to have to kill every last one of these beasts.
Brother Goran leapt with sinewy grace to reinforce Brother Rasmus, fighting hand-to-hand with the nearest clutch of monsters. A hormagaunt sprang at him, powerful hind limbs propelling it with inhuman strength, but Goran’s powerfist energised and he smashed it through the abdomen of the creature, the crackling energy field pulverising internal organs and backbone all in one sweep.
Markius chanced a glance towards the guardsmen, and smiled as he saw the commissar waving them out from their defensive positions to counter-attack in support of the marines. He looked back to the swarm, observing their movements, noticing the change in their flocking patterns to react to the brutal attack in their flank by Rasmus and Goran.
‘Invictus,’ Sören acknowledged over the vox. The frenzied hormagaunts were only a few dozen paces away now. Markius and Sören unleashed controlled bursts to topple the foremost chargers.
‘That appears to be our node link,’ Sören’s voice betrayed just a little tension. The seething swarm was almost upon them, and Rasmus and Goran were lost to sight as they became surrounded by leaping nightmares to the flank.
He switched his fire-selector to hellfire rounds, newly designed by the tech priests serving the Ordo Xenos, raised his bolter to his shoulder and peered into the targeter.
‘Borias; keep them off us,’ he voxed.
The storm of heavy bolter fire screaming down into the ravine focused and intensified, blasting apart the leading edge of the wave of swarming xenos barely ten paces away.
Markius heard one of the human troopers – perhaps the commissar – shout something to Brother Sören, who was closest to them.
‘Concentrate fire; give us space,’ the Apothecary’s deep voice rang across the ravine.
‘You have a strategy, Lord?’ said the human.
‘We will disrupt the node link,’ said Sören.
Volleys of lasfire cut into the press of hormagaunts, the guardsmen receiving the order from their officer. Momentarily, Markius had time to scrutinise his target.
A monster as tall as a battle tank gaped at him through the advanced sights of his weapon, ridged chitin plates armouring its skull and broad shoulders. Osseous scythes longer than lascannon barrels curled from its muscular limbs, and it clutched what appeared to be a weapon in one of its sets of claws, though this contraption defied classification. The rifle looked more like a symbiotic organism, disgusting in its alien bizarreness. Another of the weapon-organisms, this time resembling a massive whip, writhed in the grip of another claw. Markius marked the leviathan with a laser dot.
His bolter juddered in his gauntleted grip, and again Brother Sören’s weapon echoed the divine rhythm of death. Self-propelled missiles smashed into the beast, at first ricocheting from its thick carapace. The marines pumped round after round, aware that the prototype ammunition was limited, and then the blazing streams found their way through the armour. One then another bolt rammed between ridges of chitin, before exploding inside the tyranid. Roaring like a mythical sea-dragon, the leader-beast crashed to the ground, gaping wounds blossoming in its exo-chitin as the mutagenic acid payloads of the missiles disintegrated the monster from the inside.
A hiss rippled through the hormagaunts, and their charge stuttered once more. Markius took the moment to return his fire-selector to metal storm rounds and braced with his bolter at his hip, ready to reach for his blade when they were overrun.
‘Node disrupted!’ voxed Borias, watching from the top of the ravine.
The hormagaunts appeared to be dazed, blinking and staggering. Markius spotted Rasmus and Goran, back to back in the centre of a circle of dismembered xenos corpses, purple alien blood staining their armour. They hesitated as the remaining beasts snarled and writhed but did not attack.
A renewed cheer rose from the guardsmen, and at a shout from the commissar, their lasguns ripped volleys of ruby fire into the bemused xenos before they could regain their wits again. The marines allowed the vengeful humans to finish off the hormagaunts, now bereft of their coordination and fanatical vigour, reverting to base animal instincts and fleeing as individuals. When the ravine was secure, the grey-coated soldiers gathered behind their commissar and he marched them before Brother Markius.
The Deathwatch marines gathered around Markius and faced the shabby unit of guardsmen, swaddled in winter fatigues. Markius narrowed his eyes at the commissar.
‘You have seen much for a young man,’ he said.
Markius was not sure how to answer, and the young officer read the silence that greeted his questions.
The guardsmen, most of whom Markius judged to be even younger than Sander, collapsed into exhausted piles. They whimpered, sending glances towards the south and the ever-approaching doom of the xenos swarm. Markius realised Sander had only kept them functioning this long with his oratories and promises of divine intervention.
‘Wait. There may be something I can do for you,’ Markius started.
Again, his arm was grabbed by Goran.
He marched Markius several paces away until they were out of earshot.
‘There should be enough space on the thunderhawk,’ said Markius.
‘What?’ Goran hissed, his sullen features twisting.
‘We take a vote on it,’ said Goran, and Markius felt his anger rising with his old rival once more.
‘I am Kill-team Leader!’ Markius hissed at Goran.
‘Brother Rasmus, what say you?’ said Goran.
‘Eh? I’m with Markius,’ said the big marine, hefting his power-axe over his shoulder.
‘As I thought,’ said Goran, still staring at Markius.
Markius was not sure he was satisfied with Borias’s answer, but with the matter decided he stomped back to face the guardsmen, and Sander.
It took several moments for the shattered soldiers to process the words uttered by Markius, but then hope ignited in their eyes once more and they clambered to their knees. They genuflected before the marines.
‘YOU ARE NOT native to Tantalus?’ said Markius.
Markius did not pursue that comment. He knew Imperial commissars were the product of Ecclesiarch scholams with harsh regimes that took in orphans and abandoned infants.
Nearby, the guardsmen of the search team poked about the rusting pipe-works that fed the huge refinery domes jutting from the rocky plateau. Grey bodies of convict-workers surrounded areas blackened by fires – some still smoking. Many bore the mark of attack by tyranid vanguard organisms – flesh flensed from bone by claws and fangs. But others showed evidence of gunshot wounds; murdered by other humans. Markius surmised the facility had fallen into chaos once the Imperial overseers had abandoned it, and then the xenos vanguard beasts had come. He noticed a medallion pinned at Falco Sander’s breast.
The commissar beamed with pride.
Sander reddened at the praise from an honoured space marine and lowered his eyes.
Markius felt more strongly than ever that he was justified in saving these men from the ravine. Mixed into this emotion, a pang of jealousy prickled in his gut. Never would his own actions be so honoured.
Sander cast his gaze southwards, where the shadow of the oncoming swarm loomed ever closer, bruising the horizon.
The vox-bead in Markius’s ear crackled.
Markius glanced to the east, where a conical comms tower crowned with a skeletal signal dish topped a craggy mount overlooking the sprawling industrial complex.
‘Invictus on that. Anything there?’ he voxed.
Markius exhaled then keyed his vox again.
Markius detected a dejected tone in Goran’s voice.
MARKIUS STOMPED BETWEEN crags to witness Sören and another of the guard search teams in a depression in the rough terrain. The area had been cleared and a broad trench laid with ferrocrete. High above, supported by sturdy black-iron struts set deep into this trench, an elevated mag-train rail ran east to west.
‘Up there,’ said Sören, when Markius reached him. He pointed up at the mag-train rail. It was inactive; the electric buzz of its operation absent. Though there were no carriages on the rail at the present, Markius guessed it was used to transport promethium and workers between Pyroclast’s extraction facilities.
A silhouette lurched atop the rail.
‘What the Throne is he doing?’ said Markius.
‘I thought you would say that,’ said Sören, securing his own weapon ready for the climb. They marched towards the nearest strut.
‘Invictus,’ came the acknowledgement signals from his battle brothers as Markius clutched the first iron beam and hefted himself upwards.
The climb was tedious but no great hardship for the strength-enhanced Adeptus Astartes. Clambering onto the inactive rail, Markius stood to the east of Magos Vyakai, while Sören emerged to the west. Markius peered at the tech priest through the rapidly descending gloom. His spindly form was cloaked in the distinctive rust-red robes of the Cult Mechanicus. One entire side of his cowled head and shoulders glistened with oily blood. Several mechadendrites flailed from a back-mounted unit like metal snakes, but one of these had been broken in half. It sparked with pulses of electrical discharge.
The Magos lurched in his direction, his movements a drunken swaying. Bionic optical lenses within the hood whirred and tried to focus. The cyber-augmented priest uttered something that Markius did not catch. Then he suddenly halted and jerked several precise corrections to his posture.
‘There is something wrong with him,’ Sören voxed quietly.
Markius took several paces towards the Magos.
The mechadendrites reared like snakes about to strike and Markius halted.
‘Magos Vyakai, do you know where you are? Do you remember sending your distress signal?’ Sören tried from his side. The tech priest whirled, staggering a step so that he nearly tumbled from the rail.
‘Careful, Scholar!’ Markius shouted, spotting an infernus pistol in one of the tech priest’s bionic claws.
‘Threat… Prime-zzz… Zzz-code not recognizzz…’ the Magos garbled electric noises then fell silent once more.
‘What is the delay?’ came Goran’s sullen tone on the vox.
The skeletal tech priest stood erect and still as a statue between them, ready to respond to any further steps the marines might make.
‘Erm, Actual: Revise estimate, thirty minutes,’ Borias voxed.
Markius harrumphed and reached for his bolter. The Magos jerked, one of the optical sensors at the end of a mechadendrite spotting the motion. The fat barrel of his infernus pistol snapped round to point at Markius’s chest. Markius froze mid-action, unwilling to test the devastating energy of the fusion weapon against his power armour.
‘Scholar, any ideas?’ he voxed carefully.
Markius thought about it. An idea came to him.
The Magos’s head snapped round.
There was a long pause and Markius held his breath.
To his delight, the Magos’s mechadendrites retracted and the infernus pistol lowered. The tech priest peered over the edge of the rail, still swaying. Markius and Sören approached from both directions.
‘How did you get up here anyway?’ said Markius, also peering down.
The Magos lurched and garbled electric hisses. Markius straightened.
Markius’s eyes widened as the tech priest stepped off the rail. Sören made a grab for him but was too late. Then, whirring motors kicked into life, lifting the tech priest’s tattered robes to reveal miniature vertical thrusters. Markius and Sören exchanged a look as the cyborg lazily floated downwards. Below, the circle of watching guardsmen and marines widened to give him space to land. Markius shrugged at Sören and then they began their climb down the struts once more.
Behind them, the hiss of the Magos’s transport jets coughed several times then cut. The Deathwatch marines turned around to witness Vyakai flop into the mud.
‘On it,’ Rasmus growled. The hulking marine leaned over and slung the limp cyborg over a shoulder.
The tirade was violently interrupted by Borias’s heavy bolter, firing from the crag that overlooked Pyroclast-Gamma-9. A hail of missiles screamed low over their heads. The guardsmen flung themselves to the ground, the marines halted and turned. A pair of winged beasts squawked and fell out of the air.
Markius was not listening. He glared southwards. Sören followed his stare and cursed.
Emerging from the landscape, a roiling sea of vanguard organisms, easily fifty times the number from the ravine, swarmed over rocks and pits, scrabbled around crags, leaping and screaming with their xenos voices. A score of the taller Tyranid leader-beasts stomped amongst them, roaring instructions.
The marines burst into a sprint, loping strides devouring the distance to the crag. Rasmus stomped on his bionic leg, the Magos slung over his shoulders. The sound of the closing predators hissed in their ears. Sören and Markius alternated turns stopping and shooting; short bursts of metal storm rounds. It was a pitiful effort at covering fire. Emptying an ammunition magazine and reaching for another, Markius paused.
The guardsmen were falling behind.
The commissar yelled at them, snapping off token blasts from his laspistol. They lurched and stumbled, their limbs and nerves failing them. A shrike swooped from the dusky skies on membranous wings, massive talons scooping up one of the stragglers. He was too tired even to scream. Eye-searing tracers stabbed through the darkness. Borias was doing his best, but a single heavy bolter offered little support.
Ahead the ground rose; they had reached the foot of the mount.
‘Scholar,’ called Markius, gesturing to the guardsmen. The apothecary nodded and they both turned to face the horde.
Goran and Rasmus stomped up the hillside while Markius and Sören faced the onrushing tide of fangs and claws. Guardsmen struggled past them, gasping as the black armoured marines reversed up the hillside, step-by-step. Markius emptied yet another magazine. He had one more of metal storms before he would need to switch to standard rounds. Sander took position between the marines, heaving guardsmen uphill as they passed him, between occasional shots from his laspistol.
Several of the guardsmen collapsed face down into the soil, conceding defeat to fatigue. Two paused to aid them but Sander screamed at them to climb faster.
‘T.L. Markius,’ Sören called across to Markius as the sea of vanguard organisms seethed towards them.
Markius’s vox-bead crackled, a signal breaking through the electrostatic interference of the tortured atmosphere.
The oblique silhouette of a thunderhawk gunship roared overhead, circling from north to west.
A grin twisted Markius’s face. He had never been so happy to hear Brother Lars’ voice.
‘Oho! We had fraggin’ noticed!’ Borias growled over the vox.
Its jets bellowing across the skies, the thunderhawk lined up its run towards the mount. At the last moment, a spray of missiles surged from under its wings, contrails of white smoke swirling in their wake. Markius braced.
With deafening roars, explosions bloomed amongst the seething carpet of hormagaunts like volcanoes erupting, hurling scores of broken bodies and tonnes of dirt cascading into the air. The gunship followed up with punishing volleys from nose-mounted autocannons, churning swathes of death through the Tyranids. Heat and noise and concussion waves from the explosions washed over Markius. He did not pause.
‘Move out!’ he shouted to Sander and what remained of his men, then turned and stomped up the hillside, the stench of barbequed alien flesh filling his nostrils.
Markius and Sören reached the top of the mount and joined the rest of the Kill-team just as the thunderhawk slowed its flight overhead. The gunship switched to vertical thrusters and they were buffeted by the downwash of hot wind. Sander and the guardsmen clambered to the summit as the thunderhawk touched down on its landing skis.
‘Thank you, Lord,’ was all Sander could gasp, falling to his knees.
‘THAT WAS CLOSE,’ William Zharn greeted Markius as he clambered into the passenger deck of the thunderhawk. The debonair inquisitor was as ever fitted in an excellently tailored charcoal suit. His dark mane of hair was streaked with elegant silver at his temples.
‘Too close,’ grunted Markius. The rest of the Kill-team, and ten remaining guardsmen including the commissar, followed him into the passenger deck. He spotted the robed form of Magos Gaius hovering behind the inquisitor, and then he paused.
Looming beyond the inquisitor and his tech priest, the black armoured stature of Deathwatch Commander Nero Atilius dominated the cramped interior of the gunship’s transporter hold.
‘Brother Markius,’ Atilius nodded once, the scars that disfigured his bald head highlighted by strip-luminators in the deck ceiling. Markius had never seen the commander outside of Watch Tower Duniash in four years of service.
‘Survivors, from the garrison,’ said Markius.
Atilius frowned, scrutinising the guardsmen through his glowing bionic eye.
Markius’s pulse quickened as the Deathwatch commander and Inquisitor Zharn shared a look.
‘We will deal with this later. Do you have the datacore?’ said Zharn.
‘Here!’ Rasmus growled from his corner of the passenger deck. He dumped the inert cyborg into a grav-seat and exhaled. Markius guessed that with all the augmetics of the Cult Mechanicus, the tech priest was a lot heavier than he looked.
Magos Xavier Gaius rattled past Markius and he wondered if he and Vyakai had been cloned from the same production line on Mars. Gaius reached Vyakai and a mechadendrite slithered from his back unit. A drill whirred at its end and Gaius shoved this into the inactive tech priest’s chest unit. Gaius barked something in electric code and a few warbles came from Vyakai’s vox-caster in response.
Apothecary Sören crouched next to Magos Gaius, observing the tech priest’s operation.
‘Will he make it?’ the warrior-physician displayed the same concern on his handsome face as he would for an injured battle brother in his care.
Sören turned and shared a glance with Markius. Markius shrugged.
A circular portal of bronze slowly unscrewed in the centre of Vyakai’s chest unit. With a click it finally sprung open, revealing a cavity inside. Zharn reached inside then coaxed out an opaque cube of black silicon the size of a marine’s fist. Zharn cradled it in two hands as if it were one of the fabled sea-dragon pearls of Pho. He nodded to Atilius.
The Deathwatch commander punched a wall-mounted vox-link.
The idling engines of the thunderhawk screamed, and Markius felt the lurch as they took off again.
‘What is on that thing, anyway?’ said Markius, peering at the datacore.
The lateral thrusters of the gunship kicked in and Markius braced as the thunderhawk accelerated. Commissar Sander approached the end of the passenger deck, perhaps sensing that the mission debriefings had been completed.
‘Lord of Ultramar, I am at your service,’ he said, recognising the Ultramarines’ heraldry upon Atilius’s shoulder plastron. Atilius ignored him. He looked at Markius.
‘My Lord Markius showed mercy upon our souls,’ said Sander.
Atilius did not shout, but his vocal chords had been ravaged by the same horrific xenos virus that had cratered and cracked his skin; the result of some long-ago mission. His voice grated like rocks crunching together. Markius believed the commander could cow a frenzied ambull with that tone. Sander closed his mouth and retreated.
‘You do not understand,’ Atilius said to Markius.
‘I told him so,’ Goran chimed in, slouched in a grav-seat nearby.
‘You, be quiet!’ said Markius.
‘This marine is insubordinate,’ Markius pointed an accusing finger at Goran.
Markius blinked, an uncomfortable ache spreading in his gut. From somewhere inside the thunderhawk, sponson-mounted heavy bolters rattled as the gunship gained altitude and outran shrikes. Atilius sighed and made a face at Inquisitor Zharn.
The golden-haired apothecary nodded and followed the inquisitor through a brass-plated pneumatic door.
Markius slumped into a grav-seat and huffed, not looking at Goran. Borias, thankfully, decided not to break the uncomfortable silence with one of his stupid jibes. Markius saw from the porthole that they were breaking from the slate-grey clouds, and the diseased atmosphere of a dying planet was soon after falling behind.
Sören returned with Zharn and walked right past Markius, his face unreadable.
Sören administered the injection into the offered necks of each guardsman, one by one, working his way down one side of the passenger deck and then up the other. He worked in silence, and Markius sensed a strange tranquility descend upon the scene as one starved and fatigued soldier pulled apart the thick fabrics of his greatcoat to reveal a scrawny pale jugular, then the next. The route Sören was taking meant Sander, who was sitting nearest to Markius and the Kill-team, would be last.
When Sören inserted the needle into the last-but-one, Markius thought he saw the apothecary mouth something: Something familiar.
When Falco Sander cocked his head and offered his neck, removing his commissar’s cap, Markius focused his enhanced hearing. Sören did sub-vocalise something. Nord En Ornisgard. Markius jolted. It was an old tribal benediction from their homeworld, uttered over the dying warrior whose soul is about to flee the body. Go north, into the hall of the god-eagles.
‘Scholar, what are you doing?’ Markius sprang to his feet.
Sören looked at him, his eyes sad.
‘He is delivering the Emperor’s Mercy,’ said William Zharn, sitting opposite Markius in a grav-seat. The soldiers’ heads lolled as if they were in deep sleep.
‘No-one was supposed to leave Tantalus,’ said Atilius, his face a stormcloud.
‘That man was a hero – decorated by the Ultramarines!’ Markius pointed at Sander. The commissar was still alive, his eyes drowsy. The rest of the guardsmen did not stir.
‘Brother Markius, listen to the inquisitor,’ grunted Atilius.
‘What the Throne is going on here?’ Markius rounded on Zharn.
The inquisitor raised his hands.
Marius shook his head, not understanding. Zharn continued.
At that point Zharn looked at Commander Atilius, who checked his chronometer.
Markius was about to ask how this could be achieved, but decided he did not want to know.
Zharn nodded, but he folded his hands and stared at them.
The whisper came from his left and Markius turned. Sander was still hanging on, rattling his final breaths. Markius crouched beside his seat. Sören had not moved, standing over the commissar, staring far away. Sander looked into Markius’s eyes.
‘I did my part; that is all,’ he croaked, and then was still.
Markius returned to his grav-seat and strapped himself in without a word.
‘Do not start with me,’ Markius growled.
‘And that is why you used the Black Shields,’ Markius directed this at Commander Atilius. He nodded back. He rarely spoke when it was not necessary.
‘Your mission is successfully completed, Brother Markius. Let that be the end of it,’ said Atilius.
Later, when they first spotted the exterminatus missiles passing into the atmosphere of Tantalus and the cyclonic infernos igniting, Markius still did not allow his scowl to relax. Still he was fuming inside. But one positive thought at last glimmered in his mind, like a ray of stray sunshine piercing Tantalus's bleak sky.
Falco Sander, and his men, had indeed been a catalyst. Markius had liked the young fool, even when he found out he placed such pride in meaningless heraldry – and not even his own. He would regret their fates. He had tried hard for them.
But an unexpected personal objective had also been completed.
Goran was no longer part of the Black Shields unit.
It was a successful extraction.
Last edited by kurisawa on Tue Aug 28, 2012 4:05 am, edited 3 times in total.
Great to see Markius and Co back and I think I am starting to become a bit of a fanboy with regards to your writing.
There are probably some things that could do with changing/tightening up, but in all honesty I got wrapped up in the story, dragged along unresistingly and simply got lost in the tale. Great description really sets the scene accurately with good dialogue to keep the interest and a twist at the end that I didn't see coming.
Excellent read, look forward to more as I am swiftly becoming a fan of your work.
Mauthos wrote: Great to see Markius and Co back and I think I am starting to become a bit of a fanboy with regards to your writing.
Hey Mauthos, thanks for looking in and your kind comments. This was fun to write and I think I'm starting to get the scope of 7-8k stories a bit (this comes in at a little over 8.5k).
Markius and KT Talon have become good friends, along with the inquisitor's team, so you can expect more from them soon!
Maybe soon, but doing extensive rewrites for this bolthole horror anthology as I unfortunately agree with the edits I have had sent back and my piece needs a lot of work and changes.
I still have not finished the last bit yet and there's a little concrit I'd like to share once I read through it again, but this is great stuff! A real rollicking adventure ride and I can honestly say you made my day with it! I was at work, bored, feeling destroyed, and you just pumped me up man! Your action sequences and clarity of style and thrill are wonderful to read. You most definitely should try things out as test runs ALL the time!
Thanks for looking in, Rawk. I look forward to your suggestions.