Deathwatch (33 page)

Voss stepped over the body at his feet, jammed his pistol into the genestealer’s mouth and blew out the back of its head. It flopped back, twitching, four arms splayed out.

He looked down at it and cursed. These foul creatures were an offence to the eye. Perhaps if they hadn’t borne so many features inherited from their host species… But the telltale signs of their parentage were plain for all to see: the thumbed hands, the configuration of facial features, the play of muscles beneath the skin of the neck – all this and more besides.

Corruption
, thought Voss.
They twist everything to their own pattern. What guides them? What purpose drives them across so much space just to absorb and multiply?

Mankind had no answer, but for now, at least, there were still men alive to ask. How much longer would that be so? The tyranids surely represented the greatest threat by far to the Imperium. They were implacable, remorseless, insatiable. There was no bargaining to be had. You killed them, or you were killed.

Zeed stepped past him, sheathing his long knife.

‘Not out of breath, I hope, brother.’

Voss grinned beneath his helm. ‘Show me to more of them and you’ll see.’

Solarion joined them, having surveyed his own kills and reloaded his empty bolter. ‘They’ll be coming soon enough. Let’s move a little deeper and do some more damage.’

Around them lay not only the first wave of genestealers who had been sent to defend this place, but the amniopods and birthing sacs from which the broodlord’s vicious progeny were meant to hatch. They wouldn’t be hatching now, however. Solarion, Zeed and Voss had torn through the place like a murderous wind before the first genestealer defenders had arrived. Half-formed creatures had spilled out in a wash of nutritional fluids as the Space Marines had wrenched open protective shells and cut through fleshy membranes. They had stamped on these unborn creatures, ending early the lives of beings that would have gone out to claim so many others.

There was no pity in their hearts. The xenos young were simply monsters waiting to grow into full lethality. Their destruction was the Emperor’s work.

Solarion took point without being asked, and they moved on, deeper into the heart of the alien nest, looking for the next birthing chamber in which to conduct their righteous slaughter.

They found one soon enough, large and humid, the air thick with noxious gases emitting an unwholesome, acrid stink. But the horde had been fully mobilised against them now, and there was no time to kill the tyranid young before the walls were swarming with full-grown genestealers.

Back at the junction after the assault of the first wave, Zeed had said he wanted more.

Now he got it.

Solarion’s breastplate screeched in protest as a talon raked it, tearing a great, jagged rent across its embossed honour-markings and Deathwatch iconography. Warning glyphs flickered to red life, his visor projecting them directly onto his left retina.

ARMOUR INTEGRITY COMPROMISED

The offending creature, hissing and spitting savagely as it readied itself for a killing lunge, suddenly choked out a wet cry and fell to the ground in two pieces separated at the waist. Behind it, the Raven Guard was already moving away, engaging another knot of xenos abominations, bolter blazing, firing one-handed as he gripped his combat knife in his other.

Solarion added his own gunfire, cutting down three large genestealers that were trying to flank Maximmion Voss from the right.

The chitin-covered cavern walls strobed with muzzle flashes. Genestealers were crawling all over them, climbing out from holes between faintly glowing cysts that were swollen close to bursting with embryonic alien forms. Quivering sacks of flesh lay pale pink and glistening wherever there was a corner or crevice. Wall-veins and ribbed umbilici, as white as the eyes of a blindfish, pumped nutrient-thick fluids to clusters of queer eggs that hung from between the stalactites above. Occasionally, a stray bolt would rupture them, and a rain of thick, smelly fluids would fall to the ground. It hardly mattered if it rained on the Space Marines. Their armour was already awash with gore.

The genestealers poured out towards them in numbers seemingly without end. The broodlord’s earlier probing attack had convinced it of the threat these armoured intruders represented to its nurseries, to the swelling of its forces and its eventual domination of the planet. It was time to remove that threat.

Even as Solarion revelled in the bloodbath, he recognised that he and his two irreverent Deathwatch brothers could not stand for long against numbers like these. They fought for the sake of Karras and Rauth, but he was less than willing to die for them.

Come on, Death Spectre. Retrieve the woman and get moving so we can pull out of here.

He knew he carried too few rounds to last much longer if the genestealer assault maintained its intensity. Voss was wielding his flamer again, gloriously effective against enemy ranks so dense, and the Imperial Fist was taking an impressive toll on the foe, but sooner or later, his weapon would run dry and there would be no more canisters of promethium to fuel it. Not until they returned to RP3.

If we ever get that chance.

‘More contacts,’ shouted the Raven Guard. ‘Front right, high.’

Solarion looked up. Another wave of hissing, six-limbed forms poured into the nursery chamber from a quivering, fleshy orifice in the ceiling, an obscene sight.

Zeed’s bolter barked out a greeting, and four of them fell with shots neatly placed in their brains and breasts. Solarion added three swift kills of his own to his tally. But not all of the genestealers could be killed at a safe distance. There were simply too many for that, and they moved so fast. Even Zeed, supreme at close quarters, would meet his death if the fighting went hand-to-hand. Against one or two at a time, he might just hold his own, but not against more than that.

How much longer, Karras?
thought Solarion bitterly.
In Guilliman’s name, how much longer?

If he, Zeed and Voss could only manage to break away from the fight in the next few moments, then maybe, if the Emperor was with them, they might just live to see the end of this damned fools’ errand.

He tried not to wonder if the prize was worth his life, nor to wonder how, if they didn’t make it back, Sigma would report their increasingly inevitable deaths to their respective Chapters.

‘In Terra’s holy name,’ groaned Karras. ‘I knew, but to see it with one’s own eyes…’

He and Rauth had entered a chamber of grotesque horrors, the sight of which, he knew, would stay with him forever, a reminder of reality’s darkest, cruellest face. It was the birthing chamber in which the primary objective awaited them. White Phoenix ought to be here, not just because the locatrix said so, but because this chamber was different from any other they had come across in a single, crucial way:

Women! Dozens of them. They have become a part of the nest, incorporated into it by their captors. Such a gruesome fate.

Karras wanted to turn away, sickened and infuriated.

More than half of the women were fixed to the strange organic walls of the chamber by a mix of dark chitin plates and thick strands of a sticky substance like some kind of tough mucus. The others were half enclosed in equally disgusting organic mounds dotted about the cavern floor. Pools of pungent yellow-brown liquid bubbled and steamed near them. Ropes of semi-translucent flesh fed or withdrew fluids from their bodies, snaking into their noses and mouths. Gratefully, Karras saw that the women’s lower bodies were fully encased, though their grossly distended bellies were exposed to the hot, humid air. He had no doubt there were similar organic catheters beneath the chitin, responsible for Throne-knew-what. Those bellies were so stretched by the xenos organisms growing within that the skin had become as translucent as the looping coils of strange umbilici. In some, the Death Spectre could see jostling clusters of embryonic aliens vying with each other for the most comfortable positions. The women playing host to these slithering forms wept and whimpered in an agony that pierced their mindless stupor.

Rauth was murmuring some litany that only those from the Basilica Malefix on Banish could possibly comprehend. His fists were clenched so tight that he had lost feeling in both hands.

‘And I saw the true face of darkness behind that veil, and it did blind me with its horror,’ quoted Karras numbly.

Rauth looked over at him. ‘Uxol Thay’s
Necrisod
.’

‘Volume three. His visions of the sixth hell.’

Rauth moved forwards, mag-locking his bolter and drawing his combat blade. ‘We should not let them suffer like this.’

Karras halted him with a hand on his right pauldron, palm pressed to the horned-skull icon there. ‘Agreed, and we
shall
end their misery, but we have a mission to complete, and our brothers are fighting for their lives so we can do just that. We will release them from their suffering after we extricate White Phoenix. Not before. The mission has ultimate priority here. We may be beset at any time.’

Rauth nodded once and brushed off Karras’s hand. He kept his blade ready in his own.

Karras checked his retinal display and found what he was looking for.

His battle-helm’s subsystems had locked on to the source of a repeating electronic life-signal. A small, red, triangular reticule appeared, marking the precise location of the opticom they had been moving towards all this time. Karras blink-clicked the reticule off and saw a wretched figure lying bound to a pulsing organic structure. It looked part-altar, part-incubator, and on it was White Phoenix, the primary objective.

‘That’s her,’ he said pointing, and strode over to her side.

Looking down at her, he saw deep scratches, crusted thick with blood, on her arms, face, neck and chest.

She fought them.

It hadn’t made any difference, but at least she had tried. He turned his eyes to her abdomen and saw that it was horribly distended. She was pregnant like the others, her belly stretched taut with early signs of the chitinous armour which the creature within was already forming. It would emerge ready to protect itself.

That emergence would be no quiet, slithering escape, either. It would rip and tear its way out, bursting forth in a tide of its dying host’s blood. Not one of these women would survive the birthing process. The creatures, when ready, would erupt through their flesh, then turn on their mothers and feed on them until nothing was left, not even the teeth, hair and bones.

Eat. Absorb. Incorporate. Spread.

So it went, the tyranid life cycle. It was a thing of absolute simplicity, but the halting of it, the stemming of that tide, was anything but simple. Countless brothers had already fallen in the attempt: Ultramarines at Macragge, Blood Angels and Angels Vermillion at Hollonan, Brother Chyron’s own Lamenters at Devlan and Malvolion, and so many more. Many yet would fall, and with no clear hope in sight.

Karras locked his bolter to his cuisse and, leaning forwards, tugged hard at the foul, sticky mass restraining White Phoenix. First, he worked to free her head and neck. With a cracking sound, a handful of chitinous matter came away trailing wet strands and tangles of what looked like human hair. It was the woman’s hair. As he pulled more of her bonds away, more hair came with it, falling out so easily. All her nutrients were being leeched away by the alien inside her. Karras paused, wondering if removing her from this abominable apparatus might kill her. She seemed so pale and thin. He had never seen her before, so he could not know that men of great power and influence had once coveted her. She had been an example of superb human genetics once. Now, she was little more than skin and bone. And yet, Sigma would have her returned. He had sent Talon Squad down into the depths of this dark, filth-ridden hellhole to get her back.

Again, he questioned the true motives behind this operation. Just what was her strategic importance to the Ordo Xenos? Well, it hardly mattered for now. Here she was, and it was his job to get her out, whatever Sigma’s motives might be.

As he pulled away more of the biomass from her body, he hoped his squad brothers were still alive. Talon was
his
kill-team. They were
his
operatives.
He
was responsible for their survival. But, as tempted as he was to send his astral self out to check on them, he would risk alerting the broodlord to his location. Not yet. It was too early. He just had to trust in their skill and hope they would rendezvous with he and Rauth as planned.

Suddenly, the woman’s eyelids fluttered open, surprising Karras and causing him to freeze. She turned her head slowly to regard him.

‘She’s conscious,’ he whispered to Rauth over the link.

The Exorcist, who had been covering the exits while Karras had been busy pulling her out, came closer and leaned in to snatch a brief look.

One of the woman’s eyes was completely bloodshot. The other was a gunmetal-grey orb with a glowing red lens for a pupil. ‘Space… Marines…,’ she murmured.

‘Yes,’ answered Karras. ‘Deathwatch.’ Against her barely audible voice, he was all too aware of the grating sharpness of his own, modulated as it was through his helmet’s vocaliser. Without knowing quite why he did it, he reached up and removed his helm.

His face was too harsh to be called handsome, criss-crossed as it was with scar tissue and old burns, as pale as snow and with blood-red eyes. But it was a more human face than she had seen in all too long. More than that, it was a Space Marine face, the face of a warrior, the face of her salvation. The woman smiled up at it weakly.

‘Kill us all,’ she said. ‘Don’t let us be… be used like this.’

‘I was not sent to kill you,’ said Karras. ‘I was sent to get you out.’

The woman shook her head. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘It was not me he sent you to recover.’

She knows it is Sigma who holds our leash.

He replaced his helmet and addressed Rauth, using the link so she would not hear. ‘She wishes death. Would that I could grant it.’

‘She is not likely to survive the extraction,’ Rauth returned. ‘Look at her. Death will come soon enough. Your hand need not hasten it.’

‘She believes it is the unborn beast Sigma wants, not her. But he was adamant we try to extract her alive.’

‘Then she is mistaken about his interests. Regardless, we should make haste.’

‘I will carry her,’ said Karras. ‘You take point.’

‘Very well. But first I shall set the others free.’

They looked again at the walls and grotesque mounds, and at the pitiful creatures trapped there.

‘Mankind must wipe out this tyranid cancer,’ snarled Karras. ‘Surely no other xenos race is as worthy of our hatred and rage.’

Rauth raised his knife.

‘No,’ said Karras. ‘There is not enough time to kill them that way. We will move to the exit and use our grenade launchers. Inferno rounds. We will burn everything to ash.’

So they did, and granted all the Emperor’s mercy.