Deathwatch (15 page)
Hour after endless hour the Space Marines drilled; over and over again in every conceivable form of close combat and small-unit special operations. The programme was organised into ten-hour cycles. First, the trainees would assemble in the main chapel for fifteen minutes of litany led by a senior Watch Chaplain called Qesos, a tall Space Marine of the Revilers Chapter with an unusually narrow frame and gaunt features. Despite his somewhat spare physique, his words smote the dank air of the nave like hammer on anvil, firing the blood of the assembled Space Marines for the rigours of the exercises to come.
After prayers, in which they petitioned the Emperor and the primarchs for increases in their already formidable skills, the Space Marines would assemble in the East Auditorium – a large skylighted hall hung with banners and pennants recalling the most glorious endeavours of those who had been trained here in days past. It was here, in this auditorium, facing the newest oath-takers on the tiered stone benches, that the Watch captains would announce the cycle’s squad allocations and outline the training ahead. After this, there would be stern reminders, if any were needed, of the codes and strictures under which all those accepted into the Watch were expected to operate. During these, there were no small amount of side glances cast between bitter rivals. Already, Brother Keanor of the Dark Angels had engaged in unsanctioned combat — too artful to be labelled brawling — with brothers from not one but three other Chapters. Likewise Brother Iddecai of the Minotaurs had been involved in his fair share of violent encounters, though in his particular case, it was clear to all that Iddecai had been the instigator each time.
The Watch Council punished these infractions through a combination of verbal denouncement – a stain on the honour of those involved – and something far, far worse. For as many cycles as was deemed necessary, the transgressor was incarcerated in a Penance Box – essentially a coffin, of height and width barely greater than his own. Locked in and fitted with a heavy psychostim helm, he was forced to endure sensorium feeds in which brothers from his own Chapter faced off against overwhelming enemy forces. These feeds had been recorded during real wars in days long past, and the penitent Space Marine sentenced to endure them now was helpless to do anything as he saw and felt those around him – his blood, his kin – cut to pieces by enemy fire or torn to red tatters by claw and fang. It was a terrible punishment, for it struck at the very heart of the those who received it.
Brotherhood: was there anything more important to a Space Marine? One fought for the Emperor, true. But one died for one’s brothers.
Even Iddecai, forced to experience the three hundred years-past slaughter of over sixty fellow Minotaurs at the hands of a vast eldar host, found the burning anguish too much to bear. It quickly dampened his hunger for picking fights with other Deathwatch trainees.
Karras had wondered if he, too, would be punished after the incident with the Ultramarine. But, due in great measure to the phrasing of Kulle’s report, it did not come to that. At the end of the exercise at kill-block Ophidion, Kulle had ordered him to the apothecarion so that his implant might be examined and, despite appearing to function as expected, be replaced.
Karras had accepted the new implant in cold silence tinged with a mixture of resentment and lingering shame.
With prayers and tencycle squad allocations over, the Space Marines would leave the East Auditorium, moving to pre-arranged assembly points in the groups to which they had been assigned. There, a Watch sergeant would brief them further and accompany them to the relevant training facility. Most of the Deathwatch training in those first hundred cycles centred around the kill-blocks. There were over thirty of them, each of varying size and complexity, each configurable to a given scenario. No Chapter in all Imperial space boasted such fine training facilities, but then no Chapter placed such singular emphasis on covert anti-xenos operations. Stormraven drops, special weapons and equipment training, fast-roping, stealth infiltration, asset recovery, assassination – all this and much more, the new arrivals studied and practised over and over until it came as natural to them as breathing. They learned fast, for even among Space Marines they were the chosen elite, and here were taught the skills that separated Deathwatch operatives from all others. This was a war fought not face to bloodied face on the battlefield, where superior force and top-down strategy won the day, but behind the lines, from the shadows, sudden and brief and scalpel-precise.
After physical training, usually lasting five to six hours per cycle, the trainees were given individual programmes of Librarius study. The Damaroth Archive had the distinction of being one of the top two repositories for xenos-related material in the entire segmentum, the other being located at the local Ordo Xenos headquarters on Talasa Prime. But this period of study contained far more than simple book-learning. The Deathwatch Librarius had at its disposal an incredible archive of sensorium recordings taken from human-xenos conflicts across the Imperium. Some of these dated back to the very earliest days of the Deathwatch, back to when the Imperium was still groggily pushing itself to its feet after the treachery of Horus and his faithless cohorts, and the enshrinement of the Emperor upon the Golden Throne.
The sensorium records – the very same resource used for punishment – provided a level of education that was unmatched. Seated in stone chairs with psychostim helms on their heads, Karras and the others would relive hellish battles through the senses of Space Marines long gone. As with the Penance Box, they could not influence these recordings. The battlefields they walked had gone quiet long ago. They were observers only, but the bloodshed that unfolded all around them was heart-stoppingly vivid – the sights, the smells, the sounds, everything.
They saw through the eyes of a stoic Black Templar as he and his brothers were finally gunned down by tau battlesuits on a desert salt pan beneath triple suns. Had they executed a fighting retreat they might just have survived. Pride made them stand their ground and the price was their lives. The lesson, though fatal to those who taught it, was not wasted.
In other recordings, they lived through the final moments of a tyranid assault on a missile defence base at a classified location somewhere in Ultramar. The forces of the Ultramarines Fourth Company held on as long as they could for air support that never came. Karras winced as a pair of huge, slavering jaws closed over the legs of the Space Marine through whose senses he was experiencing the dreadful rout. The Ultramarine had been bitten in half at the waist and swallowed in two twitching pieces. Throne alone knew how anyone had recovered his helmet and the data crystal it contained.
They witnessed, too, the lethally methodical advance of the deadly necrons. Those skeletal figures of black metal bone seemed to press forwards almost lazily. They never charged at speed – so utterly sure of victory, of the irresistible force they represented. Time and again, it seemed the Space Wolves that fought them were making progress, only for the thin black bodies on the ground to rise up and take arms again, corpses called endlessly back to life. Nothing would avail the Space Wolves. They fell back, dying as they gave ground.
All this and more, Karras and the others lived through, feeling the pain and loss of those whose experiences they distantly relived. These were some of the hardest sessions for Karras, for he could do nothing to help the brave Space Marines. He felt fresh pity for those brothers, such as Iddecai, forced to experience the loss of their Chapter brothers in a Penance Box. These were battles lost to time, and yet, through the sensorium feeds, they seemed as real and as tangible as the stone armrests beneath his straining, white-knuckled hands. Often after such a session, despite none of them originating with his own noble order, he would rise from the stone chair riddled with grief, blazing with anger, fists clenched, desperately seeking an enemy to kill in revenge for what he had seen. He was far from alone in this. These sessions were harrowing in the extreme. Though the Watch Council made sure to filter the experiences by Chapter, ensuring that only the perpetrators of misdemeanours witnessed the loss of their kin, still many cried out in raw anguish and struggled against the titanium bindings that kept them restrained. It mattered not that the dying wore different colours, different iconography, and spoke with accents unfamiliar. The effect was powerful all the same.
The Watch Librarians, Lochaine foremost among them, insisted it was necessary. No one was exempt; not by Chapter, not by rank. The sessions became hated, for they represented all that was worst about defeat: the loss of great heroes, the helplessness, the grief, anger and guilt.
Despite all this distress, Karras quickly came to see the value of these feeds. No one could deny the effects. Seeing how each xenos breed fought first-hand was absolutely invaluable. Karras vicariously looked straight into the alien eyes of several threat-species he had never even heard of. He learned how they moved, how they struck, the weapons they wielded. But it went beyond that. Something else happened that was, perhaps, more significant still.
Despite their differences, the Space Marines started to come together.
Like several others, Karras was, at one point, even compelled to approach Solarion. He did this after enduring the horrific feed from the Ultramarines Fourth Company.
‘Do not speak,’ he told Solarion, cornering him in the Refectorum. ‘I need no response. I wish only to tell you this: your brothers fought like gods of war. The sacrifice of those that fell is a testament to the glory of your Chapter. My brothers and I would have been proud to fight beside them.’
That was it. He turned and left immediately, still moved by what he had seen, not wishing to give the Ultramarine a chance to sour the sentiment.
Typically, after two or three hours of archival and sensorium study, the Space Marines would once again return to the main chapel to give thanks for all they had learned. Many who had stood in that same gloomy echoing space only eight hours earlier returned bearing fresh injuries of varying severity. The training was extreme because Deathwatch operations, by their very nature, were extreme. Yet no deaths occurred. There had not been a Space Marine death on Damaroth for over a century, for the Watch could ill afford to lose even a single battle-brother seconded to its ranks. This did not mean, however, that it could not push them to the very edge. Often, the Rothi would filter silently into the chapel after the post-training litanies were complete to clean congealed blood from the smooth marble flagstones.
After these litanies, the Space Marines would move to the Refectorum where, once per ten-hour cycle, they would consume a bowl of nutrient-dense gruel or, if they wished to eat alone, could acquire a meal-replacement block and return with it to their cells. These meal-replacements were affectionately known as bricks, and the name was well earned. They were the length and width of a typical Space Marine’s index finger, coloured like sandstone and grooved deeply so that they could be broken into three smaller chunks. They were textured like sandstone, too – rough, gritty and requiring significant pressure from the jaw muscles to break them down.
At first, Karras took his with iced water, eating back in the silence of his sparse quarters. After the first dozen cycles, however, he decided he was missing a unique opportunity and began to eat regularly in the Refectorum among his fellows. It did not serve anyone, he told himself, to hide away in solitude. A kill-team was a team. He would live and die by the honour and skill of the Space Marines who served beside him. With that in mind, he made efforts to get to know those around him, at the very least by sight. Mostly, he just observed them, for few seemed willing to approach. Librarians often found themselves segregated, even within their own Chapters, for the feelings their powers generated in their Chapter brothers were conflicting in nature.
Tolerate not the psyker, the witch, the shaman. Their power is the gateway to madness and corruption.
And yet, were Librarians not the supreme embodiment of anti-xenos war: soldiers whose physical talents were matched only by their psychic weaponry? Most alien species represented a threat on both counts. Only the psyker was capable of combating the latter aspect effectively.
Seated in the Refectorum cycle after cycle with the stone benches empty on either side of him, it was apparent to Karras that, in their discomfort at his presence, these elite battle-brothers were not so different from many others he had known, and he took to reading ancient texts from the Watch Librarius to distract himself from their prejudice as he ate.
But there were exceptions. During one such meal, with the Refectorum at only a third of its capacity, he met for the first time the most unusual and irreverent Space Marine he had ever encountered.
‘The one that bloodied Prophet’s lip,’ said the figure that suddenly appeared in front of him.
Karras looked up from his gruel and across the stone table. Before him stood a striking battle-brother in a black tunic belted with silver. In his hands, he held a clay bowl and spoon like those on the table in front of Karras.
‘Prophet?’ Karras asked, confused.
‘The Ultramarine you threw into a wall.’
‘Ignacio Solarion,’ said Karras. His brow creased. ‘Do you seek to shame me with such a reminder? Very well. I admit I was wrong to lose my composure. What is that to you?’
The stranger, ignoring the warning tone, asked if he might sit. Despite his misgivings, Karras gestured to the bench on the other side of the table. The other Space Marine dropped onto it, smiling to himself. His skin was as white as sun-bleached bone, exactly the shade of Karras’s own. The similarities stopped there, however. While Karras’s eyes were blood red, even where they should have been white, this battle-brother’s eyes were a solid, flawless black, like two spheres of pure polished obsidian. They were the same black as his long shimmering hair – hair that lay like a silk mantle on his shoulders. Karras was as bald as a knarloc egg. It was genetic. All Death Spectres went bald during the gene-seed implant process.