Deathwatch (17 page)

She couldn’t afford to let that fear take root. She galvanised herself against it. She was an interrogator, class 3, of the Ordo Xenos of the Emperor’s own Holy Inquisition.

Stiffening, she said, ‘I will not succumb. Be sure of that.’

There was fresh grit in her voice, mixed with ice and fire. The little mutant blinked at her, his warning given, nothing left to say.

Varlan turned and began walking back down the tunnel. She spoke over her shoulder only once.

‘Farewell, Sixteen. You do not know me. You have not seen me.’

Ordimas bowed to her retreating back, then vanished.

She listened a moment to the offbeat rhythm of his footfalls. They receded quickly, soon drowned out by the background noise of the space port generators and the buzzing of the overhead lumes.

She strode briskly, eager to rejoin her retinue and find a place to take repast before a much-needed sleep… If she could even manage sleep given the knowledge she had now acquired. She would need the comfort of prayers and mantras at the very least. The security she felt in the company of the twins would help, too. It always did.

In something that barely passed for a whisper, she said, ‘Eagle to Shield.’

She listened. Nothing.

‘Eagle to Shield,’ she repeated.

Again, nothing.

‘Eagle to Sword,’ she tried. There was no answer.

There were two possibilities: either the tunnels and their machinery were interfering with the vox-net or her aides were incapacitated.

The latter possibility made her break into a run.

Even in heels, she was fast, running on the balls of her feet. The lamps in the ceiling rushed by her. Within moments, she reached the metal stair and flew up it, boots clanging on every second step. She reached the top and was about to throw open the door that led outside when, in her left ear, she heard a burst of static and a tinny voice repeating over and over, ‘Shield to Eagle. Shield to Eagle. Do you copy?’

Oroga.

‘Eagle copies,’ she replied. ‘Go ahead Shield.’

‘We have a serious problem, Eagle,’ voxed Oroga. ‘It’s an HID
[17]
. I think we may have been compromised.’

Karras and nineteen others were ordered to the Central Pankrateon fourteen tortuous cycles after he and Zeed had spoken in the Refectorum. The cycles between had been as brutal and exacting as anything he had so far experienced. One involved being subjected to the cold and pressure of crushing oceanic depths without any breathing apparatus, and having to complete various problems set by the Watch sergeants. There were no oceans on Damaroth, of course, but the tech-priests had managed to create immersion pods that achieved the precise effect. Karras’s body drew the oxygen he needed from the icy water that flooded his lungs. It was a new experience for him, being forced to breathe water, and not something he hoped ever to repeat.

Another cycle involved sprinting through kilometres of gas-filled tunnels wearing a hundred kilos of additional weight in the form of old-fashioned, unpowered plate armour. The thick, toxic clouds that billowed from nozzles in the walls attacked his eyes, skin and nasal membrane as he pounded towards the goal, but there was no stopping, no turning back or quitting. His breathing was as shallow as he could make it while still powering his muscles. Without the implanted organs of a Space Marine, he would have fallen down dead within the first twenty metres. As it was, it took him several further cycles to feel properly recovered.

There were other exercises, too, simulating combat in the zero-G void of space, fighting teams of servitor drones in extremes of heat and cold and various types of radiation. It wasn’t just a matter of combat in a range of extremes; all of these exercises included tasks to tax the mind as well as the body. The Deathwatch wanted to be sure its operatives could get the job done no matter what challenges they faced.

Compared to such withering tests, close-combat cycles in the Pankrateon sounded like a grand reprieve. Of course, they proved to be anything but. In the coming cycle, the group to which Karras was assigned would train knife, sword, double knife, double sword and empty-hand techniques under the critical eyes of Watch Sergeants Kulle and Coteaz. The latter was a veteran Deathwatch squad leader, originally of the Crimson Fists Chapter, who had famously slain an ork warboss that outweighed him six-to-one at close quarters using only a standard-issue combat blade. The scarred mess of his face, ruined almost beyond recognisable humanity, was ample testimony; Karras could believe the story all too easily looking at that battered visage.

The Pankrateon was a massive close-combat training facility roughly cross-shaped in layout. The main area was a dark central hall, its arched ceiling some thirty metres above a stone floor stained with thousands of years of shed blood. Brothers got cut here, and not infrequently. It was a rule that the flagstones of the Pankrateon did not get washed. Blood spilled was blood honoured, a mark of commitment to the ultimate goal of all this hard work. The Pankrateon exceeded even the kill-blocks in terms of serious injuries reported and formed a part of Deathwatch training every bit as critical.

The high ceiling was supported by cylindrical pillars set eight metres apart and running in two rows down the entire length of the main hall. These were no ordinary pillars. At their base, they boasted a profusion of multi-jointed mechanical arms, each ending in a metal appendage into which could be placed a wide variety of weapons: from swords and hammers to barbed whips and great crushing claws. Set on the surface of each pillar, winking from between the paired sets of arms, were target lights. These glowed red until struck, at which point they would turn momentarily blue. With this change, the arms linked to that light would stop attacking. The servo-skull embedded in stone above the top pair of arms would register the successful strike. Then the light would change back, the arms would reactivate, and the Space Marine would find himself under full assault once again.

Karras, his fatigues growing damp with a light sweat, ducked just as his pillar sent a slashing horizontal blow at his head. Air whooshed above him. He stepped in, careful to check the movement of the other three arms he faced, and stabbed upwards with his training knife.

The tip hit the target light’s hard, scratch-proof dome. It went blue and, for a second, the attacking arms froze. Karras stepped out, breathing hard, and rolled his shoulders, readying himself for the pillar-drone’s next tireless assault. The pillar’s embedded skull sounded a warning tone, the light flickered from blue back to red, and the arms began slicing the air once again, metal claws and sword-blades flashing.

Around Karras, his fellow Deathwatch trainees fought just as hard, grunting with effort as they pushed themselves to keep up with the fighting machines. This was training unlike anything Karras had known. Back at Logopol, the Death Spectres had trained with each other, learning from the mistakes and successes of their kin as much as from their own. But fighting fellow Space Marines was less than ideal given the special remit of the Watch. It was the combat habits and patterns of the main xenos threats which had to be learned and overcome. Karras’s pillar fought him according to a pattern taken from sensorium records of a mid-sized tyranid variant, large enough to be a serious threat, but not too large for hand-to-hand combat. Thus, four arms assailed him instead of two, and they were fast, striking like scorpion tails with lethal intent.

The Watch sergeants paced up and down the main hall, watching the unarmoured Space Marines fighting with all they had, barking at them to work harder, fight smarter.

‘Keep moving, damn you!’ shouted Coteaz through ragged lips. The torn flesh of his cheeks and mouth gave his voice a lisping quality. ‘Footwork. Footwork. A stationary Space Marine is a dead Space Marine.’

Karras put a burst of extra energy into his movement, slipped under another assault from the arms bearing knives, and scored another strike on the middle target light. The pillar’s skull beeped an alarm and froze. The light turned blue.

‘Sergeant,’ someone called out.

Karras looked towards the sound. Coteaz limped over to an extremely stocky Space Marine just two pillars away on the left. Then the pillar in front of Karras beeped, and the arms whistled out towards him again, abruptly recalling his attention. His training knife parried a blow that could have given him a very nasty chest wound. As he blocked and slipped another series of blistering swipes, he heard the stocky warrior speak.

‘I think I broke it.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Voss. No one has ever…’

‘Someone just did. Sorry, sergeant.’

‘Dorn’s blood! How did–?’

Karras scored another disabling hit on his foe and took the second’s respite to glance again in Voss’s direction.

The Imperial Fist. The one they’re calling Omni.

Voss was by far the shortest Space Marine Karras had ever laid eyes on, but his muscular bulk went a step beyond compensation. His arms, his shoulders, his chest; every muscle group on his squat frame rippled with thick, hard mass. Back on Occludus, it would not have been tolerated. Such muscularity often came at the price of agility and speed.

Then again, perhaps not. In that oh-so-momentary glance, Karras had seen Voss holding up a mechanical arm that he had somehow ripped right out of the training pillar. He lifted it as if offering it to Coteaz in embarrassed tribute. It was a feat that should only have been possible in power armour. Omni had used his bare hands.

Coteaz never got the chance to comment further. At that moment, Sergeant Kulle came storming out of one of the side halls and urged Coteaz to follow him.

‘You need to see this,’ he insisted.

Coteaz, noting the look in Kulle’s eyes, turned from Voss without another word and fell into step behind his fellow Watch sergeant, following him to the Pankrateon’s west chamber where one of the facility’s two sunken combat pits was located.

Two minutes later, Kulle reappeared and shouted for everyone else to follow him.

Karras withdrew from his combat-drone’s active range. The moment he stepped out of the machine’s engagement field, the scanners in the servo-skull blinked green, then off.

He fell into step behind the others as they followed Kulle through a short hall of black stone into a room with circular tiers sunk into the floor. There were five of these tiers, in the middle of which was a pit some twelve metres across and four metres deep. From the base of that pit came the sound of harsh impacts, of metal clashing, bursts of staccato sound interspersed with brief pauses. Looking at the other battle-brothers around him as he stepped to the rim, Karras noticed the hard looks on the faces of some, the knowing grins on the faces of others. Reaching the rim, he looked down and saw a whirling, darting blur of a figure being assaulted from three sides by heavy, multi-limbed close-combat servitors.

It was Siefer Zeed.
Ghost
. The alabaster skin and black-silk hair were unmistakable. Like all those present save the Watch sergeants and their Mechanicus support, Zeed wore black training fatigues. They contrasted sharply with his pale form. One of the training servitors sent a blistering diagonal axe-blow towards Zeed’s clavicle. The Raven Guard slipped it and struck the servitor’s chassis targets with three hard, open-handed blows. The servitor’s plasteel torso rang with the impacts.

One of the others servitors, this one armed with a sword and spiked shield, burst forwards while Zeed was withdrawing from the range of the other. For a moment, it looked like the servitor’s sword would bite down into Zeed’s upper back, but the Raven Guard had noticed the movement behind him. He stepped right as he spun to face his attacker, somehow still managing to keep himself just a hair beyond the range of the others, and threw out a hand to redirect the servitor’s downward force at the wrist. The sword bit into the pit’s sandy floor at the very moment Zeed moved inside, checking the spiked shield with his right hand and hammering a straight left into the glowing target that represented his enemy’s face.

The cybernetic drone staggered backwards, arms out for balance, only to receive a thunderous kick in its plated abdomen. It dropped hard to the sand, striking what passed for its head against the curving granite wall of the pit. There, it twitched a moment, its organic brain rocked, until subroutines kicked in and it began to right itself. In the meantime, Zeed had kicked the legs out from under the third, dropping it to its backside in front of him. It swiped at him from the ground, lashing out with the double short-swords it held, but it could not reach him. He ignored its futile attacks and focused on the axe-wielder, which had begun to close on him again.

Without turning or looking up, Zeed called out, ‘Next setting, damn it! They’re too slow!’

From a few metres to Karras’s right, someone growled and muttered, ‘Arrogant fool!’

Someone else grunted in agreement, but no one withdrew from the edge of the pit. Arrogant or not, Zeed was worthy of an audience. Karras saw that he had misjudged the strange battle-brother. That porcelain face was flawless not because he was untested or a gun-shy coward, but because no blade had ever been fast enough to touch it. The same was not true of Zeed’s body. One didn’t take combat to this level without paying the price. His white skin was laced like a roadmap of hundreds of scars, some broad and deep, a sign of tearing or gouging, some long and fine, where sharp blades had slashed his flesh.

On the other side of the pit’s rim, Watch Sergeant Kulle glanced at Coteaz, one eyebrow raised.

‘Not I,’ said Coteaz to his fellow. ‘I won’t be responsible for the first Pankrateon death in a century.’

‘He can handle it,’ said Kulle. ‘Look at him. See for yourself.’

Whatever look crossed Coteaz’s face then, Karras couldn’t read it. The grizzled old Space Marine’s visage was too much of a mess to discern any clear expression, but his words were anything but vague. ‘All I see is a showboater revelling in attention. The lesson here is of humility and of knowing one’s limitations, as you’ll see when this all turns ill.’

Karras felt Coteaz was wrong. Down in the pit, Zeed’s attention was focused like a las-beam on the deadly ballet in which he had the central role. Zeed never once looked up at the Space Marines ringing the pit, despite the supportive shouts of
Ghost!
from some of those present. The rest watched in either brooding or respectful silence. Zeed was putting his life on the line to test his capabilities and to try to move beyond them. His movements were so fast and precise they almost seemed choreographed. It was mesmerising.

No one would leave while he still fought. If Space Marines respected anything, it was proficiency in battle, and Karras doubted anyone here would honestly argue they were the equal of the Raven Guard in close quarters. Not now. How could they? Karras knew for certain that he himself was not. Had he been permitted to combine his own combat skills with the power of his gift, the story would be quite different, but that lessened Zeed’s achievement not one bit.

Ignoring Coteaz’s concerns, Watch Sergeant Kulle drew a slate-shaped device from a pocket on his webbing and tapped its face with his index finger. ‘Program Orpheus,’ he called down into the pit. ‘Mind yourself, Raven Guard!’

The Space Marines around the pit could see the change that took place immediately. Activation lights on the servitors’ chassis blinked in faster tempo. As aggressive as they had been earlier, they became more so now, leaping to attack in tight coordination with each other, their weapons whistling as they churned the air just inches from Zeed’s unprotected flesh.

Unprotected, but fast. Despite the intensity of the new assault, Zeed was somehow always just outside their reach, or just inside the arc of their blows. It was then, once he was inside, that he would strike like bolter-fire, rattling off a rapid series of strikes to his enemies’ glowing target lights. He was, in a word, incredible.