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Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Part I

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Part II

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Part III

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Deathwatch: Ignition’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

~DRAMATIS PERSONAE~

Deathwatch Chapter

ARTEMIS, Second of the Mortifactors Chapter, watch captain of Kill Team Artemis, Watch Company Tertius, Talasa Prime

SEKOR, Second of the Imperial Castellans Chapter, Kill Team Artemis, Watch Company Tertius, Talasa Prime

HARYK THUNDERFANG, Second of the Space Wolves Chapter, Kill Team Artemis, Watch Company Tertius, Talasa Prime

LAVESTUS, Second of the White Consuls Chapter, Kill Team Artemis, Watch Company Tertius, Talasa Prime

IMTEHAN, Second of the Flesh Tearers Chapter, Librarian, Kill Team Artemis, Watch Company Tertius, Talasa Prime

ROGERIO, Second of the Crimson Fists Chapter, Kill Team Artemis, Watch Company Tertius, Talasa Prime

HYPHANTES, Second of the Scythes of the Emperor Chapter, Kill Team Artemis, Watch Company Tertius, Talasa Prime

ASHARBANAPAL, Second of –REDACTED–, watch master and custodian of watch fortress Furor Shield, The Bladefall

CALTANIX, Second of the Black Templars Chapter, watch captain of Kill Team Caltanix, Watch Company Primus, The Bladefall

PECORI, Second of the Blood Angels Chapter, Kill Team Caltanix, Watch Company Primus, The Bladefall

NULSIS, Second of the Novamarines Chapter, Apothecary, Kill Team Caltanix, Watch Company Primus, The Bladefall

KRYCSES, Second of the Raven Guard Chapter, watch sergeant of Kill Team Krycses, Watch Company Quartus, The Bladefall

SANGO AEMNA, Indentured shipmaster of the Deathwatch strike frigate Fatal Redress

Battlefleet Kurbynola

CLOVIS NEARCHUS, High Admiral, Master of the Claw of Damyrov

JAROSLAV Leitz, Commodore, Claw of Damyrov

The Inquisition

KRYPTMAN, Lord Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos

‘Across the vastness of space, alien races plot the dethroning of the Emperor and the downfall of Humanity. This is the Imperium’s call to arms, and nothing shall stand in the way of our righteous crusade.’

– Unattributed

To be Unclean

That is the Mark of the Xenos

To be Impure

That is the Mark of the Xenos

To be Abhorred

That is the Mark of the Xenos

To be Reviled

That is the Mark of the Xenos

To be Hunted

That is the Mark of the Xenos

To be Purged

That is the Fate of the Xenos

To be Cleansed

That is the Fate of all Xenos

– Catechism of the Xeno,
extract from The Third Book of Indoctrinations

PROLOGUE

‘It cannot be done,’ whispered the flickering spectre. ‘It simply must not be done.’

Giants of harsh light ringed the darkened chamber, shivering intermittently from hololithic projectors. They encircled the chamber’s lone occupant, looming over him as they voiced their sanction.

‘The course you set to undertake cannot be allowed,’ said the projection of a High Lord. ‘Your mandate is to prevent the subjects of the God-Emperor from falling to such a fate.’

‘It is unthinkable,’ said another of the projections, an Inquisitorial rosette shining proudly on her uniform.

‘It is madness.’

‘It is genocide.’

‘We are supposed to protect them!’

The man at the centre of the chamber lifted a hand. The projections froze, halted in the heat of their denouncement. The man turned, watching as a lobotomised servitor shuffled forwards on legs of bronze clockwork. The servitor halted a respectful distance from the man, head low, its milky, unfocussed eyes on the floor.

‘They have arrived?’ asked the man, the pools of light from the projections failing to draw his face from the shadows.

‘Affirmation,’ choked the servitor through the iron vox grille replacing its teeth.

‘Bring them here.’

‘Compliance.’ The servitor gave a palsied bow, drooling from corpse-blue lips as it turned and limped from the chamber.

The man turned back, looking from face to face at the projections glaring upon him. He sighed. Each of them wields such formidable power, he thought. Yet none of them possesses the foresight to see what is coming. None have the conviction to do what is necessary.

The corridor leading to the chamber began to resound with the tread of heavy footfalls. The man snapped his fingers, and the glowering projections evaporated, their harsh light replaced by that of hovering glow globes. He turned back to the doorway as it slid open, framing the genhanced warriors standing beyond.

Watch Captain Artemis stepped into the chamber, encased in the sable power armour of the Deathwatch. His three companions entered behind him, wearing the same midnight-lacquered war-plate. All that distinguished the warriors were the right-hand pauldrons of their armour. Artemis wore the bone and black of the Mortifactors Chapter, while his comrades bore the heraldry of the White Consuls, Space Wolves and Imperial Castellans. The Space Marines carried massive weaponry, securely mag-locked to their armour. Stowing their weapons did nothing to diminish the aura of intimidation they exuded. They were war made manifest, the sharpest blade wielded by the Imperium of Man, and in the case of the Deathwatch, there were no deadlier hunters of xenos.

Artemis stopped a pace away from the man, shown in the light to be a slight figure of advanced age wearing simple black robes. Unmistakable, however, was the Inquisitorial rosette hanging from a chain about his neck, and the fire burning in his eyes. The eyes of a man who had condemned planets with a word.

‘Lord inquisitor,’ said Artemis, the vox grille of his helm rendering his voice into a harsh machine snarl. ‘The brotherhood of Talasa Prime has answered the call of the Ordo Xenos.’ He reached up, removing his helm with a hiss of balancing air pressure. A face of near-albino flesh and eyes of electric sapphire stared down impassively upon the inquisitor. ‘The Deathwatch stands before you in this place. Why?’

‘I have summoned you here for a grave purpose,’ said the inquisitor.

The Space Marine bearing the markings of the Space Wolves boomed with laughter, crossing his arms as he looked to Artemis. ‘Ah, this one summons us? A thin-blooded mortal who speaks as though we were his thralls.’

‘Be silent Haryk,’ said the Space Marine of the White Consuls. ‘We are all servants of the divine Emperor. The Holy Ordo Xenos of the Inquisition stands as Terra’s defence against the foul alien, as do we.’

The Space Wolf chuckled in reply.

Artemis raised a hand, and his brothers were silent. ‘It is true, you hold no authority over my brothers, inquisitor. But the crusade against the manifold xenos of the galaxy has bonded our purposes. It is in the continuance of that bond that we answer your call of our own accord.’

‘Of course, watch captain,’ said the inquisitor.

‘Now,’ said Artemis, ‘tell me of this grave purpose.’

The inquisitor smiled thinly and snapped his fingers. The glow globes extinguished, and a hololithic star chart leapt into the centre of the chamber. The image coalesced around Ultima Segmentum, in the galactic east, focusing further upon a shrouded and indistinct web of stars.

‘This is the Octarius sector. An expanse nearly as large as the dominion of Ultramar.’

‘That is greenskin territory,’ said Artemis. ‘Their so-called empire.’

‘Quite so,’ the inquisitor replied. He gestured with his hand, guiding their view away to the outer fringes of the segmentum. ‘Deep-void auguries have detected something skirting the galactic rim, pressing into Ultima.’ A crimson stripe stitched out from beyond the rim, blinking on the projection.

‘Cross-referenced with the data we have, there can be no doubt of what it is.’

The inquisitor turned to the Space Marines, his smouldering gaze locked to Artemis’ icy stare. ‘It is a tendril of the Great Devourer.’

Haryk and the White Consul exchanged glances. The inquisitor could hear the soft clicks of inter-suit vox communications between them.

‘The tyranids?’ Artemis held the inquisitor’s stare. ‘Behemoth has returned?’

‘No, this is another strain entirely. We have designated this tendril, and its hive fleet, as Leviathan.’

‘Why do you not marshal the battlefleets?’ asked Haryk. ‘Deploy the full forces at the Inquisition’s disposal against such a threat?’

‘Because you don’t have them, do you?’ said Artemis. The inquisitor said nothing as the watch captain stepped closer. ‘Cadia burns under another of the Archenemy’s black crusades. Every ship, every weapon, every mortal who can carry a weapon is being sent to repel them, bleeding the resources elsewhere white. You don’t have anything to stand against this Leviathan.’

‘And so,’ replied the inquisitor, ‘to survive we must adopt new tactics. The Leviathan will enter Ultima Segmentum. We cannot prevent that. But,’ he turned, pointing to the hololith of the advancing tyranids, ‘what if we could direct its course? Guide it away from Imperial systems, and towards those of a mutual adversary?’

Artemis noted the proximity of the tendril of Leviathan and the ork empire of Octarius. ‘You mean to force the tyranids into a war with the greenskins.’

‘Impossible,’ said the Imperial Castellan, his first words since entering the chamber.

‘Sekor.’ Artemis raised a fist, silencing the Castellan. The watch captain returned his attention to the inquisitor. ‘How?’

The image of Ultima Segmentum collapsed into shards of fractured light. In its place, a disjointed oblong of rock and twisted metal appeared, spinning slowly in the air. Artemis could see the corpses of Imperial vessels riddled throughout the object, backs broken, prows jutting from the rock surrounding them like drowning men desperate for breath. He also saw xenos vessels, some he recognised and some he could not identify, twisted among the amalgamated wreckage.

‘This space hulk translated into Ultima Segmentum eighty-six days ago,’ said the inquisitor. ‘It is travelling along the projected path of the Leviathan. I have seen the ways of the Great Devourer before. This xenos is insidious, infecting targeted systems and worlds with a vanguard in preparation for its arrival.’

‘Genestealers,’ said Haryk. ‘We have dealt with their like in the past.’

‘Precisely,’ replied the inquisitor. ‘You and your team have experience with the genestealer, watch captain. Which makes you eminently suitable for an undertaking such as this.’

The inquisitor’s servitor hobbled forth from the shadows, clutching a cylindrical device in its pallid hands.

‘This is an experimental weapon,’ said the inquisitor, taking the device. ‘Still a prototype. It emits a compact stasis field over a small area, rendering anything caught within immobile. When your team makes contact with the genestealer brood infesting the hulk, the device can be used to neutralise a number of them, allowing you to capture them alive.’

‘Alive?’ asked Haryk. He turned to his comrades. ‘Did he just say alive?’

‘To be seeded into the ork empire,’ the inquisitor continued. ‘Genestealers are the harbinger of their hive fleet, readying the path for the greater brood to descend. Seeding the captured genestealers will draw the Leviathan to Octarius. The orks have been massing in extraordinary numbers, and the conflict between both xenos could provide the Imperium decades to prepare. The enemy of my enemy–’

‘Is still a vile affront to the Emperor!’ the White Consul’s gladius was half drawn from its sheath in a moment.

Artemis placed a hand upon the White Consul’s arm. ‘Peace, Lavestus.’

‘This is heresy,’ Lavestus snarled. ‘It is our holy province to visit death upon all xenos. To do any less is betrayal.’

‘And yet it is the only chance we have to prevent the Leviathan from a full invasion of our realm.’ The inquisitor’s voice was steady, his conviction ironclad. ‘If we fail to divert them, both the ork and the Leviathan will spill into the Imperium at their full strength, with nothing to stand against them. Rynn’s World, Baal, even Ultramar will burn if we do not act.’

Rage emanated from Lavestus, a low growl scratching from his vox grille. Artemis’ eyes had never left him, his hand still clamped over the White Consul’s arm. With considerable effort, Lavestus sheathed his blade. ‘If this gambit fails, inquisitor, I will tear your limbs from you and cast you into the void.’

‘The fate of billions rests upon this moment, watch captain.’ The inquisitor met Artemis’ gaze once more, fire against ice. ‘What is your answer? Will you serve?’

The Mortifactor was silent for a few heartbeats. No emotion was betrayed on his pallid features. In a blink the glittering power sword at his hip was free of its sheath, the blade carving the air as it spun in Artemis’ grip.

The watch captain drove the blade down into the floor of the chamber, the name ‘Exterminatus’ etched in fine script down its length. Artemis’ eyes had never left the inquisitor. ‘The Deathwatch answers your call.’

Haryk snorted. ‘Eh, I was too pretty for this life anyway.’

Lavestus seethed, and Sekor remained silent.

Artemis sank to one knee, his comrades doing the same behind him. The watch captain raised his eyes to the frail man standing in the spectral glow of the hololith.

‘Lord Inquisitor Kryptman, of His Majesty’s Holy Ordo Xenos, hear now this oath of moment, bonding my blade and my blood in thy service.’

PART I

ONE

He listened to his world die.

From the throne at the centre of the command dais on the bridge of the Imperial Retribution-class battleship Claw of Damyrov, High Admiral Clovis Nearchus shook with tremors of impotent rage. The cries echoed through the vaulted heights of the enormous chamber, issuing from bronze horns, flittering cherub servitors and the carved mouths of gargoyles. The cries of a world being consumed. The cries of apocalypse.

They overlapped each other, each a panicked petition for aid, each rife with confusion that their protectors had abandoned them. Nearchus had ordered that the transmissions continue to play throughout the ship, as it remained at high anchor over the citadel world of Praesidium. The combined forces of the entire system had been gathered there. Its fleets ringed the planet, while its armies were immobilised on its surface, forced to watch as their worlds burned and their populations were massacred. Twenty worlds aflame, while their defenders did nothing.

Their impotence was mandated by the highest authority of the God-Emperor’s Inquisition. Questions were heretical. Dissent was met with oblivion. Nearchus’ own first officer had railed against their orders, unable to stand idle as the hive city that housed his wife and children was dragged into the maelstrom of two warring xenos races. For his inconstancy, he had been given the Emperor’s justice.

The agent of that justice stood just behind Nearchus as he rose from the command throne, gripping the brass railing of the dais. The high admiral felt the itch of active power armour, the heat radiating from a power pack. He smelled the lapping powder and sacred oils anointing the ceramite plate, and the coils of fyceline smoke that lingered in the ceiling buttresses from the mass-reactive boltgun round used to execute his first officer.

Armoured in black, the Space Marine stood as a silent sentinel, red eye-lenses glowing like balefires. A member of the vaunted Deathwatch, he carried the authority of the Inquisition, and upon his right shoulder stood the proud heraldry of the warrior kings of Macragge, noble cobalt against the sable.

There is no nobility in the genhanced warrior, Nearchus thought. There can be no nobility in this. In watching the slow genocide of billions, without ever knowing why.

Nearchus steeled himself, watching as a pair of servitors removed what was left of his first officer’s body from the bridge. They were clumsy things, leaving smears of crimson across the deck as they gathered up the chunks of flesh. The admiral turned to the silent Space Marine.

‘Can you not hear them?’ he asked, pointing to a circling cherub screaming in panic. ‘Can you not hear the voices of the Emperor’s servants, crying out for protection? Is that not your purpose?’

The Space Marine remained silent.

‘Our system burns. Billions are dying, our families, our homes. Your masters have forsaken them, and forced us to forsake them as well. Why?’ Nearchus demanded, rage lending his voice a growing boldness. ‘Are we to sit here and do nothing?’

‘No.’ The single word boomed from the Space Marine, who slowly turned the eye-lenses of his helm upon Nearchus.

‘What then? Tell me, what am I to do? Tell me!’

The Space Marine looked down at Nearchus for a long moment, before turning forwards again, resuming his vigil.

‘Duty.’

Artemis rolled into cover, crunching against the remains of the barricade as viridian lightning stitched over his head. Strings of jade energy slashed around him, liquefying walls and scorching the ground into furrows of dirty glass.

The watch captain blinked away a damage rune pulsing on his retinal display, and peered over the barricade.

Phalanxes of silver figures marched out of the smoke in perfect order. Hurricanes of las-fire and solid projectiles blasted into them, smashing much of the front ranks apart. Many of the fallen simply vanished, blinking out of existence, to be reawakened within the labyrinths of their ancient tomb ships. Others slithered back into one piece, their component parts flowing together as they stood. The gaps formed by those rendered ineffective were filled with silent, cold precision, and the advancing necron warriors levelled their glowing weaponry, firing without breaking stride.

The fortifications around the central bastion of Quaris were aflame after weeks of repelling the endless advance of the necrons. Heavy armour, elite regiments of the Astra Militarum and strategic orbital bombardments had done little to oppose their unstoppable march. Confined to a narrow valley barricade, with ammunition dwindling and casualties mounting, the Astra Militarum had petitioned for aid.

Artemis and his kill team had deployed from the Fatal Redress as soon as the rapid strike frigate had entered low orbit. Dropping directly into the enemy ranks, the Space Marines of the Deathwatch had fought a blistering counter, pushing the necrons back and buying the defenders time to consolidate.

Now the xenos had returned, and in far greater numbers.

Artemis slapped a magazine of kraken penetrator rounds into his bolter, looking sidelong at a comrade as he squared up beside him.

‘It is a blessing,’ said Rogerio, the myriad xenos skulls chained to his armour clattering as he reloaded his weapon, ‘to face a foe one can kill again and again.’ Hailing from the Crimson Fists, Rogerio had been a veteran of dozens of campaigns as a sternguard before joining the ranks of the Deathwatch. Though his voice was rendered a cold snarl by the bionics that replaced his throat, Artemis could hear the joy and zeal in the old warrior’s words.

‘I’d settle for them staying dead,’ Artemis replied, rising out of cover to snap off a volley of bolter fire. The anti-armour kraken rounds punched through the necron ranks, savaging their skeletal forms too severely for them to reform on the battlefield. He ducked back behind the barricade as the xenos responded with a withering fusillade of gauss cannon fire.

The necron weaponry stripped away the barricade on a molecular level, and Artemis dived back as he was exposed. Rogerio fired bursts from his storm bolter to cover him as the xenos overran the barricade.

‘Hyphantes, in the fight!’ barked Artemis.

A rumbling shriek of igniting promethium filled the air. The Scythe of the Emperor rocketed down on a pillar of fire, hurling a clutch of frag grenades ahead of him. He hit moments after the detonations, smashing into the tight ranks of the necrons. Capitalising on the moment of confusion, Hyphantes tore into the aliens with twin falxes, whirling the curved blades and slashing through living metal.

Artemis and Rogerio stalked forwards, emptying their bolters into the necrons closing on Hyphantes’ rear and flanks, before drawing their melee weapons. Rogerio’s spear spun as he lanced through a necron’s torso, and Artemis activated the power field of Exterminatus, wreathing the blade in crackling energy as he cleaved into a foe.

In the tight confines of the valley, the superior numbers of the xenos did not give the advantage it could in the open field. The crump of artillery sounded from the fortifications, raining shells down upon the rear phalanxes stymied at the front by the Deathwatch.

‘Now, Imtehan!’ grunted Artemis, countering a clubbing strike from a gauss cannon to his head by bifurcating the xenos from neck to groin.

Standing alone atop the high ridge framing one side of the valley, Imtehan snarled. Hooking his fingers into claws, the Space Marine tensed. His breath feathered out from between iron teeth as frost crept over his armour. The psychic hood sweeping behind his head crackled as his snarl became a roar. Loose rock and dust lifted around him, spinning, as he reached across towards the opposite ridge.

Tremors shook the ground beneath Artemis’ boots. He spared a glance up at the ridge, where Imtehan stood within the eye of a tempest. His roar split the air, lightning dancing over his limbs as he reached out. The dust on the opposite ridge began to tremble and leap upon the air. The tremors spiked in intensity as fissures erupted in the splitting rock.

‘Back!’ ordered Artemis, as Hyphantes and Rogerio closed to his sides. The xenos had ignored Imtehan, and the battle psyker was primed to show them the cost of such an error.

With the effort of hauling a star from the sky, Imtehan pulled.

The ridgeline shattered. Thousands of tons of rock floated for a heartbeat before hurtling down into the valley. The necron phalanxes, with no room to manoeuvre, were obliterated as the valley filled with mounds of rock twenty yards high. Dust fountained into the air, racing through the valley and over the ridgeline. Within moments, the rock settled and the guns went silent.

Imtehan dropped to a knee, snarling as he caught his breath. The sawtooth blade framing the ruby blood drop on his right shoulder became caked with dirt as the frost melted over the dust.

‘You are graceless, Flesh Tearer,’ said Hyphantes. ‘But one can find no fault in your results.’

Imtehan wiped blood from his nose with the back of his gauntlet, smearing it over the brutalised mahogany flesh of his face. ‘Remind me how graceful you would be, flayed by necron guns?’

‘Consolidate on my position, Imtehan,’ said Artemis. He opened a new vox-link with the bastion. ‘We have delayed them, colonel. But they are far from defeated.’

‘It will give us time to shift our wounded to the rear and consolidate whatever manpower we have left,’ the Astra Militarum commander replied over the scratchy vox-link. ‘We are in your debt, watch captain.’

Artemis killed the link as a priority transmission rune blinked on his display. He felt a slight vibration beneath his boots. Peering into the rock for any sign of movement, Artemis opened the channel.

‘Go ahead, Sekor.’

‘Contact from Fatal Redress,’ said the Imperial Castellan. Artemis could hear the roar of engines spooling up behind his voice. ‘We are being recalled to orbit, emergency condition.’

‘We are still conducting operations here, our mission is incomplete.’

‘It appears that it shall remain incomplete, then. The order is coming from a watch master.’

Artemis frowned. He blinked at the vox-link, sharing it across the kill team. ‘What is urgent enough to draw us from a combat zone?’

‘This is a watch master and the ordo calling us in,’ replied Sekor. ‘They are not exactly conversationalists.’

Artemis closed his eyes for a moment, pushing a breath through his teeth. ‘Very well, confirmed. We will stand by for immediate extraction.’

‘I am en route via Blackstar. Arrival imminent.’

Artemis severed the vox-link. He looked to Rogerio.

‘What of this mission, watch captain?’ asked the veteran.

‘This is no longer our mission.’ Artemis turned towards the bastion gateway.

‘We will just leave them to their fate, then?’ asked Hyphantes, betraying his unease.

Artemis sighed. Hyphantes was young for a Space Marine, freshly inducted into the battle companies of his own vanishing Chapter before being seconded to the Deathwatch. ‘We will follow our orders, brother. These soldiers swore oaths to defend the Imperium. They will do their duty, as shall we.’

The kill team gathered at the landing pad of the bastion. Imtehan joined them, his meteor hammer slung over one shoulder as they awaited Sekor.

The Corvus Blackstar was a sleek inverted arrow carving through the sky. Smaller than a Thunderhawk, the drop-ship was an experimental craft, in service only to the Deathwatch. Artemis still marvelled at how quiet the Blackstar was, as the drop-ship settled upon the rockcrete landing apron. Assault ramps lowered on each side of the Blackstar’s nose, and the kill team moved to board.

‘Watch captain!’ Artemis turned to see a wiry man in officer fatigues approach, a flock of aides and lieutenants trailing behind him. ‘Something is happening in the valley. Are you going airborne to conduct reconnaissance?’

Artemis stopped, pulling his helm free. He heard the distant sound, metal scraping against stone. He looked down at the colonel.

‘We are leaving this world. Our orders have directed us elsewhere.’

The colour drained from the officer’s face. ‘But, you cannot leave here. Our ammunition is depleted, our soldiers–’

‘Will serve the Emperor,’ said Artemis. ‘Your charge is not to question. You have your walls. Hold them. Do not take a step back. And should you fall, let it be in service. There is glory in that.’

The scraping grew louder as Artemis turned, joining his kill team as they boarded the Blackstar. Hyphantes spared a look back at the group of shocked mortals. Reaching to his shoulder, he tore a scroll of parchment held to his armour with crimson wax, and dropped it to the ground.

‘You discard your oath of moment?’ asked Imtehan as the Space Marines locked themselves into the crew bay. ‘You shame yourself, and us.’

‘We all discarded it,’ spat Hyphantes. ‘We have forsaken them.’

The scraping became a howling din as the Blackstar lifted from the landing pad. Looking out from an observation viewport, Artemis watched the mountains of broken rock shake, the cracks between them glowing with baleful green light.

As the drop-ship turned to blast into the atmosphere, Artemis saw the rock dissolve, washed away by a tide of silver scarabs. Thousands of the necron constructs flowed over the ramparts, consuming everything in their path as phalanxes of necron warriors marched behind their advance. He saw tiny islands in the ocean of silver, desperate last stands by the Imperial defenders, quickly subdued.

‘If you became an Adeptus Astartes believing you would forestall the death of innocents,’ said Artemis, turning to the Scythe of the Emperor, ‘then you have sworn your oaths in vain.’

TWO

The Fatal Redress dived through the warp, its crackling Geller field alight with burning daemons. The smaller entities swarmed around the modified Gladius-class frigate, ravenous for the souls of the crew within. Little more than fragments of rage and hunger, they ruined themselves against the bubble of realspace, while immense shapes circled from the depths like oceanic predators. The field held strong, keeping any of the neverborn from breaching.

Artemis had not told his kill team or the crew of the contents of the watch master’s message. He had relayed the navigational data to the shipmaster and Navigator, and proceeded to the duelling cages on the lower levels of the ship alone.

The cages were dark, the glow globes ringing the chamber extinguished. The only light to pierce the darkness was the flickering discharge of energy as Exterminatus made contact with the combat servitors. Bladed armatures and whirring chainblades spun through the air in showers of sparks, clattering to the polished rockcrete floor with dull clangs. Each blow illuminated Artemis for an instant as he turned and slashed, countered and riposted, his sword a blur of strobing flashes.

Sekor stepped into the chamber, his eyes adjusting to the lack of light. He made out Artemis’ outline, moving with effortless grace as he flowed around the combat servitors. Sekor’s augmentations and surgeries allowed him to see in the dark chamber quite easily. But Artemis was a child of the night.

‘A taste of home, watch captain?’ asked Sekor with a smirk.

The chamber went silent. Sekor watched the outline go still, steam rising from the watch captain’s skin.

‘Lights.’ The glow globes lit with Artemis’ command. A native son of the Mortifactors home world of Posul, Artemis had lived his entire mortal life in total darkness before being taken by his Chapter. He stepped out of a ring of severed limbs and bladed armatures, the dismembered combat servitors collapsing in various states of ruination around him.

‘Care for a real challenge?’ Sekor took a pair of short swords from a rack on the wall, spinning them to loosen his shoulders. ‘Or would you prefer continuing to play with your toys in the dark?’

Artemis smiled thinly. ‘A curious choice, brother. Twenty years and you have yet to land a blow on me.’

‘Yes, well we can’t all be like Haryk in the cages.’ Sekor chuckled. ‘Word is he is leading his pack to Cadia, following that child king of his.’

‘Trust Haryk to be at the centre of that storm.’ Artemis nodded.

Sekor tossed a short sword to Artemis. ‘For now you’ll have to content yourself with me.’

Artemis caught the weapon. Both Space Marines wore simple black body gloves, the torso and sleeves hanging from their hips to leave their upper bodies bare. Each was a patchwork of weathered flesh, threaded with ropes of scar tissue. Geometric patterns and lines flowed over Sekor’s skin, along with cogwork iconography from his brief apprenticeship on Mars. Artemis’ slab-like musculature was undecorated, bearing only the scars of battle.

Artemis turned to slip Exterminatus into its scabbard. Grinning, he spun, catching the overhand slash from Sekor and locking the blades.

‘Better,’ Artemis leaned forwards, slowly pushing Sekor back. ‘I almost couldn’t hear you that time.’

Sekor sidestepped, dragging their blades low and coming over the top with a return strike. Artemis weaved aside, and the two circled.

‘What of the watch master’s message?’ asked Sekor, tossing his gladius from hand to hand.

‘There was no message,’ replied Artemis. ‘Only the navigational data for our destination, and the mandate for this team to rendezvous there. Nothing more.’

The watch captain lunged, launching a flurry of lightning cuts and stabs. Sekor closed his guard, forced to his back foot as he waited for an opening to counter. They locked blades again. Artemis pistoned a fist into Sekor’s face, stepped behind him and threw him to the ground.

‘Was it your lack of attention that saw the Martian priesthood dismiss you from their forges?’

Sekor spat blood onto the rockcrete. He had never confided to Artemis the infraction that had seen him discharged from his training as a Techmarine, prompting his Chapter to send him to the Deathwatch. He rolled back over his shoulder into a crouch. He looked up, seeing Artemis holding both swords. The watch captain flipped one, offering the grip to Sekor.

‘Again.’

Sekor wiped the blood from his mouth, accepting the gladius. ‘So where is it we are going then?’ he asked as he stood.

‘Ultima Segmentum,’ replied Artemis. ‘To the watch fortress Furor Shield.’

‘The Bladefall are stationed there,’ Sekor frowned. ‘It seems out of character to petition for aid outside of their own chambers.’

‘Indeed,’ Artemis replied. He sprang forwards, meeting a lunge from Sekor with a sweeping deflection. He shoulder barged inside of the Imperial Castellan’s guard, gripping his sword arm and kicking out his legs from under him.

Artemis stood over Sekor, still gripping the warrior’s arm by the wrist, his boot pinning his shoulder to the floor.

Sekor winced. ‘What are we doing that is so important that we must abandon a mission?’ He looked up at Artemis, holding the Mortifactor’s frigid gaze. ‘Artemis, what do you know that you aren’t telling us?’

Artemis remained impassive, releasing his hold on Sekor’s wrist as he turned away. ‘You know as much as I, brother.’ He looked back as he strode from the chamber. ‘It will not be long before we arrive. I suggest you spend that time in practice.’

Imtehan knelt in silent repose in the centre of his chamber. Barely more than a cell, the Librarian’s austere quarters contained little. An arming rack for his weapons and armour, a simple pallet, and a small table laden with scrolls and tomes was the extent of the room’s contents. The flickering candlelight glittered on the frost coating the walls. The Flesh Tearer snarled, struggling to quiet the tremors in his mind.

Wrath radiated from Imtehan’s every action. It was the birthright of his Chapter. From the lowliest neophyte to Chapter Master Seth himself, all whose veins carried the blood of the primarch felt a rage that ran marrow-deep. It was their greatest weapon, a fury that had broken sieges and destroyed whole armies where others would have failed.

Yet there was a curse within such ire. Imtehan had watched battle-brothers, veterans of countless campaigns and crusades, succumb to the afflictions of their blood. As unceasing war starved the companies of able warriors, more and more brothers fell to the ranks of the condemned. Taken by the Rage or the Thirst, they donned the crimson saltires and the black armour of the Death Company until death in battle finally claimed them.

For Imtehan and the other psykers of the Flesh Tearers, it was a constant struggle to combat the afflictions within and the ravages of the warp’s foul entities from without.

The door to his chamber chimed once. Imtehan pushed a deep breath through his teeth, and stood.

‘Enter.’

The door slid open with a rumble. Artemis lowered the hood of his robes, and stepped into the chamber.

‘How are you faring, brother?’ the watch captain asked.

Imtehan turned to face Artemis. ‘I endure. Passage through the Sea of Souls can often be,’ the Flesh Tearer searched for the word, unused to Low Gothic, ‘demanding, for those with my affliction.’

‘Most would call your abilities a boon,’ said Artemis. ‘I would number among them. Your powers have tilted the balance of battle in our favour a dozen times over.’

‘Most,’ Imtehan nodded.

But not those born of Cretacia. The Dragon’s Cradle bred warriors who distrusted the arcane. Few of the witches born survived within their tribes long enough to gain the notice of the Chapter. Those that did rarely ascended to the ranks of the tearers of flesh.

Librarians were always the first ones chosen to join the ranks of the Deathwatch. Artemis knew that their exile suited Seth, who understood fully that few that were sent returned.

The Flesh Tearer looked at Artemis, smiling thinly. ‘I do not begrudge him his sentiment, Mortifactor. We deal in death. You know as well as I that it is not the mandate of the weapon to question its course. I am concerned only with meeting the enemy. Once we do, this weapon will bite, and drink deeply of their blood.’

‘You do your kindred credit,’ said Artemis. ‘I shall leave you to your meditations.’

‘Summon me, when you need me,’ replied Imtehan, kneeling once more as Artemis walked from the chamber.

Artemis walked through the corridors of the Fatal Redress. Servitors passed him at regular intervals, attending to the myriad menial tasks needed to keep the rapid strike vessel operational. The vessel’s crew was largely composed of servitors, having very little in the way of human crew members. Due to the secrecy with which the Deathwatch conducted its missions, and the unceasing pace of its operations, having as few mortals manning the decks as possible was an asset. It left less room for mistakes.

With the majority of the ship’s human complement stationed on the bridge, the bulk of the Fatal Redress remained without heat or light. The near-freezing conditions had no effect upon the servitors, or the Adeptus Astartes who called it home.

Artemis felt at ease within the blackness. He had fought across the galaxy, in all conditions and environments, but the darkness was always home to him. He remembered the endless night of Posul, and the dark passageways of the Mortifactors’ fortress-monastery, the Basilica Mortis. It had been more than a century since he had last walked its halls, the scents of ancient stone and bone dust filling the air. He put such reminiscence from his mind as he entered the armoury.

Rogerio stood at the workbenches towards the rear of the large chamber, Hyphantes aiding him in repairs to his bionic eye. The Scythe of the Emperor focussed, fitting the ticking lens assembly into the socket in Rogerio’s face.

The Crimson Fist blinked as the bionic locked into place. ‘Ah,’ he smiled as the lens glowed scarlet. ‘Thank you.’

Hyphantes pressed a fist to his chest, and turned to regard Artemis.

‘Brothers,’ the Mortifactor greeted.

‘Hail, Artemis,’ replied Rogerio with a nod.

‘Watch captain.’ Hyphantes bowed. ‘I must attend to my armour. By your leave?’

‘Proceed.’ Artemis turned aside, and Hyphantes strode from the chamber.

‘He still resents my decision,’ said Artemis. It was not a question.

‘He is young,’ replied Rogerio. ‘Much is expected of him. His kindred have placed a great burden on his shoulders – to return seasoned, with the knowledge and wisdom to rebuild his Chapter.’

‘One cannot lead until he learns to follow.’

‘He still holds the zeal of a child.’ The Crimson Fist pressed a finger to his temple, adjusting the seating of his bionics. ‘He still believes that all life can be saved, and has not yet accepted the truth of our galaxy. He never saw Sotha.’

‘Few Scythes draw breath that have.’

‘One in ten survived the Kraken’s fury. A disaster. I understand him. After Rynn’s World, my own kindred stood upon the precipice. We could have easily fallen, fading into annihilation as so many Chapters have. He will need his faith, as will his brothers, if they have any hope of survival.’

‘Sekor was similar when he first arrived,’ said Artemis. ‘Obstinate. Hyphantes will adjust. But this is no academy, Rogerio. We are elite, and you have seen the measure of our foes. No amount of faith alone will stop what we will face.’

‘Indeed. I relinquished the honour of the First Company to serve here. Combating the alien, setting fire to their worlds and striking at their very hearts – the Deathwatch is the highest honour one can achieve in my Chapter.’

‘He must learn in the crucible. He will learn, or his Chapter will have another brother to grieve.’

Rogerio rose, clapping Artemis on the shoulder. ‘I will watch over him, brother.’ He looked down. ‘Sekor should have a look at your arm.’

Artemis lifted his right arm, flexing iron fingers with a rasp of stuttering augmetics. The pistons threading the forearm caught, scraping against impact gouges left by necron blades.

‘Do you still feel it?’ asked Rogerio, pointing with his own whirring prosthetic.

Artemis frowned, looking over at the Crimson Fist. ‘I will have it attended to.’

The translation bell sounded in the armoury, and the chamber was bathed in amber light.

‘Gather the team and report to the bridge,’ said Artemis. ‘We have arrived.’

THREE

Realspace shivered. The light of distant stars blurred as the void before them distorted. Pinpricks of light the colour of bruised flesh winked into being, swelling and melting together to form a tear in reality. The Fatal Redress erupted from the tear, translating after sixty-one days in the immaterium. Fledgling daemons clung to the hull, trailing tears of warp light as they burned away with banshee screams.

Artemis stepped through the bulkhead into the controlled bedlam of the bridge. The deck reverberated with each step he took, bearing the weight of his power armour. Naval officers and serfs hurried from point to point, giving orders and confirming screeds of data from cogitators. Servitors twitched at their stations, connected by wires in the ceiling like marionettes.

At the centre of it all was Shipmaster Aemna, relaying orders to runners and her staff as she tapped at the runeboards of her command throne. Her eyes, silver bionics pulsing white, glittered like diamonds in the low light of the bridge.

‘Retract viewport shielding,’ said Aemna. ‘Let’s have a look.’

The segmented armour plating covering the forward observation ports, locked in place during warp travel, split, peeling back to provide the bridge with an unobstructed view of the void beyond. Empty space greeted them, with no planets or stars near their translation point.

Artemis came to a halt beside Aemna’s throne, inclining his head. ‘Shipmaster.’

‘Watch captain.’ Aemna flashed a smile as she pulled up a hololith of the local sphere of space. ‘Doesn’t appear to be anything out here.’

‘These are the coordinates I provided to you?’ asked the Space Marine.

‘Affirmative. We lit the engines a touch for a quick burn to reach here from our translation point, but this is it.’ Her shining eyes flicked up at Artemis. ‘I don’t suppose you left anything out?’

‘Shipmaster!’ a junior officer called, stopping at the command dais and making the sign of the aquila.

Aemna collapsed the hololith, regarding the officer. ‘Report.’

‘Long-range auspex came back with a flash return. It ghosted our scans but was gone by the next pulse.’

‘One of ours?’ she asked.

‘Inconclusive,’ he shook his head. ‘But it was there.’

‘Shields up,’ Aemna stood, smoothing a crease in her uniform. ‘I want all crews at their stations, the reactor primed and weapons online within twenty minutes.’

‘Aye, ma’am.’ The officer saluted again, and set to relaying the shipmaster’s orders to the rest of the bridge.

Aemna narrowed her eyes, peering into the void before looking back at Artemis. ‘Anything at all?’

Klaxons blared from the trumpets of angels carved into the walls.

‘Radiation spike,’ shouted a rating from a sensor station. ‘Closing in from the port side.’

‘Our phantom again?’ Aemna shouted back over the klaxons.

‘Negative, this is a different signature. It’s erratic but constant, and it’s big.’

‘To my station,’ Aemna ordered as she returned to her throne. ‘Battle stations. Gunnery, get those breeches loaded, I want broadsides and I want them now. And kill those damned bells!’

The klaxons ceased as the bridge became awash in red light. The crew, finely drilled veterans of the Imperial Navy, hurried to and fro in orchestrated disarray, conducted by the shipmaster.

Aemna read the lines of runes dancing down her viewscreen. ‘That…’ she blinked, reading the data again, ‘…that isn’t possible.’

‘What is it?’ asked Artemis.

‘The signature bearing in. It’s an ork ship,’ she shot a sidelong glance at Artemis. ‘What is a greenskin ship doing all the way out here?’

‘Incoming,’ squalled a servitor from the auspex stations, programmed to have its dull voice spike in volume when calling in approaching ordnance. ‘Incoming.’

Aemna cursed as the ship shook violently. Crew were hurled to the deck, and sparks vomited from a cluster of stations. Artemis was unmoved, his boots mag-locking to the deck plating.

‘Report!’ shouted the shipmaster.

‘Void shields holding,’ called out an officer. ‘Hull breaches sustained on decks C-Nine and E-Four, contained.’

‘Bring us about,’ Aemna snarled. ‘Run out our broadsides and get those lances primed!’

The Fatal Redress groaned as it manoeuvred at full engine burn, the pearlescent capsule of its void shielding still flickering. Yawning gunports ground open down its flanks, the deck thrumming as the Deathwatch strike frigate’s massive weapons batteries came online. Lance turrets tracked from the spinal battlements, turning towards the alien ship rapidly coming into view.

An ugly, ramshackle knob of scrap metal, the ork warship rocketed towards the Fatal Redress. Part junkyard, part asteroid, it bristled with oversized weapons arrays, which fired in all directions as it drew closer.

‘Where are my guns?’ Aemna demanded, tapping furiously at the runeboards of her control throne.

‘Broadsides ready in eight minutes,’ an officer from the gunnery pits shouted in reply. ‘Lances primed in four.’

Aemna cursed again. ‘They’ll be all over us in four.’ Her station chimed, new data appearing in urgent red script.

‘Shipmaster, we have another augur return. Contact inbound!’ a crewman called, hunched over an augur station.

‘Here’s our phantom,’ Aemna hissed.

‘It’s fired torpedoes!’ shouted the officer.

‘Evasive manoeuvres!’ ordered Aemna. The ship lurched in a chorus of strained iron as the Fatal Redress dived. The torpedoes, launched from an incredible distance, knifed through the void, passing the Deathwatch vessel and smashing into the flank of the ork warship.

Chains of explosions tore down the side of the xenos vessel, breaking the momentum of its assault vector. Armour plating shattered, and a cluster of engines was completely sheared away, leaving it listing and venting atmosphere. Seconds later, an enormous detonation engulfed the ship as another payload struck, reducing the greenskin craft to an expanding cloud of plasma and spinning debris.

‘That weapon,’ Aemna said, distracted as she flicked through the data on her viewscreen. ‘That was a bombardment cannon.’

‘Shipmaster! Priority communication inbound. We are being hailed.’

Aemna keyed a sequence into her console. A hololithic projector thrummed as an image sprang into life. A massive figure appeared in the air, armoured in midnight war-plate.

‘This is Watch Captain Caltanix of the Deathwatch,’ said the figure. ‘To our kindred of the Fatal Redress, we bid you welcome.’

FOUR

The Deathwatch battle-barge Victorious Son dwarfed the Fatal Redress. Spanning over five miles of void-black iron, the titanic warship was nearly five times the size of Artemis’ vessel. Spires and crenellations ran down her spine, bristling with weapons batteries, ending at its distinct hammerhead prow. Its bombardment cannons perched on dorsal turret mounts, potent weapons capable of levelling entire cities with a single shot from orbit.

A trio of support craft, each the size of the Fatal Redress themselves, peeled off from their escort positions around the Victorious Son, making a pass around Artemis’ ship. Instruments and tactical hololiths on the bridge crackled with interference as the escorts conducted deep auspex scans before, seemingly satisfied, they returned to their designated support formation.

‘Watch Captain Caltanix,’ said Artemis to the hololithic projection of the Deathwatch commander. ‘We have answered your call to rendezvous here. My crew and I would like to know why you have brought us here, and what an ork vessel is doing this close to Imperial space.’

‘Our astropathic choirs sent that message months ago,’ replied Caltanix, expressionless behind the snarling faceplate of his helm. ‘I was not certain if it had reached its destination, or whether you would be able to rally here. I am pleased to be mistaken.’

‘Watch captain–’

The Space Marine raised a hand of flickering light as he leaned to regard someone beyond the projection. ‘We are transmitting coordinates to your vessel. Follow us in to Furor Shield, brother, and you shall find the answers to your queries.’

Caltanix turned away as the hyololithic link cut, ending the transmission. Aemna shot a sidelong glance at Artemis. The Mortifactor kept his gaze locked to the viewports, as the Victorious Son began to turn.

‘Attend to your duties, shipmaster,’ said Artemis, ignoring her stare. ‘You have received the coordinates relayed from the Victorious Son?’

Aemna nodded, punching commands into her keypad. ‘We have them.’

‘Good. Match their approach vector and bring us in. I shall be below on the embarkation deck.’

‘Aye, watch captain,’ said Aemna, rising to issue orders to the crew as Artemis left the bridge.

When the alarm had sounded, Kill Team Artemis had armed themselves swiftly. With the watch captain on the bridge, they had deployed across the remainder of the vessel, in preparation to repel boarders from essential sections of the Fatal Redress.

Imtehan had proceeded to the gunnery decks, to ensure boarders could not silence the vessel’s guns by slaughtering the pressganged serfs and ratings responsible for hauling enormous shells into the breeches of broadside cannons. Sekor moved to the embarkation deck, ready to vent the hangar bays to the void to displace any xenos assault. Rogerio took up a defensive position in the engineering deck, safeguarding the warp drive and reactor, while Hyphantes posted himself at the sanctum of the vessel’s Navigator.

Once the alert lifted, and the ship’s bulkheads came out of lockdown, the kill team converged on Sekor’s position, meeting Artemis on the embarkation deck.

Artemis entered the main hangar first, seeing Sekor behind a hastily constructed barricade of heavy cargo pods. Setting a bulky multi-melta cannon down beside him, the Imperial Castellan began breaking down a tripod-mounted heavy bolter, stripping a belt of metal storm fragmentation shells from the weapon’s breech.

‘Greenskins?’ Sekor asked without looking up. ‘And only one ship?’

‘It was a small vessel,’ Artemis replied. ‘Likely a scout.’

‘How often do we see orks with the forethought to conduct reconnaissance?’ Sekor hauled the heavy bolter from its tripod, setting it on the deck with a thud.

‘Perhaps it was part of a convoy that drifted off course.’

Sekor locked eyes with Artemis. ‘You know where we are.’

Artemis did not avoid his gaze.

‘You remember when we were here last,’ Sekor pressed.

Artemis blinked, closing his bionic hand into a fist. He stepped towards Sekor, clapping a hand on his pauldron. ‘We will find answers, brother.’

The bulkhead of a heavy lift ground open, and Rogerio, Imtehan and Hyphantes joined Artemis and Sekor.

‘When I heard,’ said Rogerio, distractedly scraping an ork skull chained to his armour with his fingertips, ‘I was admittedly sceptical, watch captain. A single greenskin ship? Not possible. We cannot afford to tarry here. There are others, and we must bring them to battle.’

‘Peace, brother,’ said Artemis. ‘I suspect we may not have long to wait.’

The Fatal Redress fell into formation behind the Victorious Son, lighting its engines and following in the battle-barge’s wake. The vessels sailed through the void, the midnight iron of their hulls rendering them near invisible to the eye. Skirting the edges of the segmentum, they passed through the empty space between systems, swimming through the black towards their destination.

The watch fortress Furor Shield resembled a sprawling cityscape, as if it had been torn from the surface of a world and cast into the void. Spires and battlemented towers branched in all directions, bristling with launch bays, torpedo silos and weapon emplacements. Dry-dock cradles and scaffolds ringed the star fort, ready to accept returning Deathwatch warships seeking to refit and make repairs. Its surface winked with the light of vast forges, and domed environmental blisters bunched in clusters, providing kill teams with the ability to train in any climate, from lush rain forests to icy tundras.

No two watch fortresses were alike, varying in size, design and capability. Some formed artificial rings orbiting around worlds, others resembled planetoids or small moons. While most were inert, remaining at fixed points of vital strategic importance throughout the Imperium, several watch fortresses were mobile, even capable of travelling through the warp. Furor Shield was one such installation, with a full third of its mass devoted to its powerful plasma engines.

Sekor made preparations for their Corvus Blackstar to launch, readying the drop-ship to transport the kill team onto Furor Shield. Teams of serfs, Mechanicus adepts and servitors swarmed the craft, disconnecting fuel lines, checking vital systems and appeasing its machine-spirit with droning entreaties of binary cant.

Artemis led the kill team up the assault ramps of the Blackstar as Sekor buckled himself into the cockpit. The servitors permanently hard-wired into the stations to either side of him went about their tasks, oblivious to his presence. Sekor’s hands danced over the control panels of the drop-ship, and the craft began to thrum as its primary engines spooled up into readiness.

‘Watch captain,’ the voice of Shipmaster Aemna crackled over Artemis’ vox.

‘Shipmaster?’

‘We are entering close proximity to Furor Shield now, you are free to disengage.’

‘Acknowledged,’ Artemis nodded as he locked Exterminatus into an overhead magnetic harness alongside his bolter.

‘Once you clear the hangar, I suggest taking a look.’

‘I have seen watch fortresses many times, shipmaster. This fortress is of similar design to our own of Talasa Prime.’

‘Just take a look,’ said Aemna, before cutting the transmission.

Artemis sighed. He endured the necessary interaction with mortal humans, but found the constant awe with which they regarded nearly everything in the galaxy tedious. He cleared his head, focusing as the Blackstar shuddered. Its assault ramps folded into the fuselage on hissing hydraulics as the drop-ship lifted from the embarkation deck.

‘Stand by,’ announced Sekor over the vox of the crew bay. The drop-ship shook as it accelerated, darting from the hangar of the Fatal Redress and into the void. ‘And we are clear, inbound for Furor Shield. Watch captain?’

Artemis rolled his neck. ‘What is it, Sekor?’

‘You may want to have a look at this.’

Artemis quelled his irritation, pushing the restraint harness locking him in place up and away from him. Standing, he passed through the troop compartment towards the opening cockpit hatch. As Artemis entered, he froze.

Slowly, Artemis reached up, unbuckling the seals of his helm and pulling it free with a muted hiss of air pressure. He peered forwards, leaning over Sekor’s pilot throne, the shock writ upon his face mirrored by his comrade.

Dozens of warships hung around Furor Shield, the lights of their engines like fireflies in the night. Vessels of every class employed by the Space Marines of the Deathwatch were represented, from the most nimble hunter-destroyers and strike cruisers to the vast silhouette of a battle-barge.

Two, Artemis realised. There are two battle-barges here.

This gathering was unprecedented. The sheer number of vessels gathered was beyond anything Artemis had ever seen in a single place. The Deathwatch was continuously deployed on operations across the farthest flung regions of the Imperium. The gathering of all four of the kill teams comprising a watch company was exceptionally rare, a force tasked for only the most urgent of missions. Artemis himself had not been in contact with his kill teams in months, granting them autonomy to conduct operations from Talasa Prime.

The entire fleet of Furor Shield was present. Every kill team. Every company. Nearly two hundred Space Marines in all. It was a staggering force. The Deathwatch had pacified entire systems with less.

‘Throne. What could be happening,’ asked Sekor, ‘to require an entire watch fortress to assemble?’

Artemis took in the massive assembly as the Blackstar made its final approach to Furor Shield.

‘What indeed.’

FIVE

The primary embarkation deck of watch fortress Furor Shield thronged with activity. Hundreds of serfs, menials and thralls scurried about the massive hangar, while tech-priests and servitors attended to the multitudes of inbound craft landing each minute.

Drop-ships and rapid attack craft of every kind covered the hangar deck. Most units had adopted the newer Corvus Blackstar, as Artemis had. Some of the more stubborn commanders continued to make use of older craft, arriving in venerable Storm Eagle and Thunderhawk gunships, their hulls littered with litanies and sagas of battles dating back millennia.

Artemis led his kill team down the assault ramps of their Blackstar as crews of serfs attached fuel lines and performed rote maintenance. He had never seen so many Space Marines in one place, let alone from a unit as steeped in autonomous small-unit warfare as the Deathwatch. Hundreds of his brothers stepped down from their gunships, representing Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes from across the Imperium.

A warrior caught Artemis’ eye from halfway across the flight deck, bearing the same black and bone heraldry as he. A fellow Mortifactor. Artemis squinted, magnifying the view through his retinal display to make out the name adorning the Space Marine’s armour in blunt Posular script. Sobor.

The Mortifactor regarded him, brushing his armoured fingertips across his eyes in an ancient salute from the Mortifactors’ benighted world. Artemis mirrored the salute in reply, before Sobor turned away to follow his kill team.

‘Watch captain,’ a low, resonant voice boomed from behind Artemis. He turned, watching as the figure of Watch Captain Caltanix approached, flanked on each side by a Space Marine of the Storm Lords and Salamanders Chapters.

Artemis inclined his head, and the two clasped wrists in the traditional warrior fashion. ‘Caltanix.’

‘Well met.’ Caltanix was tall, even for a Space Marine, standing nearly a head taller than Artemis. The splayed cross of the Black Templars stood proud on his shoulder in pearl and polished jet. He possessed the same blunt, craggy features common among Space Marines, a countenance smashed to ruin by the trials of war time and again. A two-handed power sword, its blade as long as a mortal human is tall, was strapped to his back in an oiled leather scabbard, while a hunched pair of serfs carried his massive shield between them. They muttered from beneath their dark robes, chanting the litanies that covered the shield in hair-fine silver wire.

‘What is happening here?’ Artemis gestured to the bustling hangar.

‘A summons of great import,’ Caltanix nodded. ‘All of the Bladefall have rallied to the watch master’s call. As have you, praise be.’

The Black Templar turned. ‘Walk with me.’

Artemis glanced sidelong at Sekor before looking to Caltanix. ‘My kill team will accompany me.’

Caltanix gave a fractional bow, the servos of his brutish war-plate snarling. ‘As you say, watch captain.’

Artemis walked with Caltanix down the corridor, his kill team following behind.

‘What of the ork vessel that attacked us?’ asked Artemis. ‘There is no record of greenskins this far into the segmentum.’

‘Indeed,’ replied Caltanix. ‘We have been hunting and intercepting small armadas and raiding groups in this space for the better part of a decade. Recently, though, their numbers have dwindled. The one you encountered was among the last we have identified.’

‘The orks are massing for an invasion, then? This is why your companies have been recalled here?’

Caltanix halted before a large bronze gateway, intricately detailed with the symbol of the Deathwatch.

‘Inscribed upon this portal are the names and Chapters of every Space Marine to have fallen in service to the Bladefall over the centuries,’ said Caltanix. ‘Every warrior seconded to Furor Shield swears their oaths in the names of these heroes, those who have gone before and whose crusades are now ended.’

The gateway split down its centre, yawning open with a rumble of ancient cogwork.

‘Come,’ said Caltanix, ‘let us explain why you are here.’

The main strategium of Furor Shield was arranged like a vast amphitheatre. Tiered rows of stone led down to the centre of the chamber in a semicircle, with a single ramp leading down from the opposite wall. The Space Marines of the Bladefall filed into the strategium, assembling by watch company with their watch captains at the fore.

Caltanix led Artemis and his kill team to the bottom of the amphitheatre, gesturing to the first row of benches. Artemis and his team were seated, and Caltanix returned to his place before his company.

Sekor leaned towards Rogerio. ‘Brother, have you ever seen anything like this?’

The Crimson Fist shook his head. ‘No, never in these numbers. This situation must be dire for them to pull every battle-brother from the line.’

A flight of cherub servitors buzzed over the amphitheatre, settling above the central dais. The diminutive angels brought golden trumpets to their lips, sounding a blaring fanfare. Every Space Marine rose, standing and locking to attention as one.

A doorway in the rear of the amphitheatre opened, flooding the walkway before it with bright light. A procession of robed figures emerged in two columns, swinging bronze censers that trailed twisting clouds of incense. The thralls came to the end of the walkway, proceeding around the edge of the dais.

Next to pass through the doorway was a pair of hulking warriors encased in Terminator armour. They stomped forwards with heavy tread, one brandishing a massive rotary assault cannon, the other armed with lightning claws built into each gauntlet.

Behind the Terminators came the ruler of Furor Shield. Watch Master Asharbanapal strode towards his warriors with the easy grace of one destined for command. He wore exquisitely crafted power armour, adorned with laurels and parchment scrolls pronouncing the victories of the Bladefall. A cloak of crimson silk flowed behind him, its edges held aloft by cherub servitors. He bore no heraldry from the Chapter of his origin, having renounced all ties outside of the Deathwatch when he assumed the mantle of watch master.

In his hands, the watch master held a relic weapon, rare beyond imagining. Its haft was a perfectly balanced rod of adamantium encased in gold, its every surface etched with scrolling names of those who had carried it to war. It ended in an ornate boltgun, accented with pearl and rose gold. Beneath its barrel sat a platinum power blade, honed to a monomolecular edge, itself the length of an Adeptus Astartes power sword.

It was a weapon that had been created and carried by the elite bodyguard of the Emperor himself. A weapon that had held the ramparts upon the holy Throneworld of Terra against the fires of heresy ten thousand years before. Asharbanapal carried the guardian spear as he joined his brethren, a symbol of both his office and his peerless skill as a warrior.

A pace behind the watch master to either side followed the masters of the Reclusiam and Librarius of Furor Shield. Chief Librarian Sugedai, formerly of the White Scars, calmly descended towards the dais, a half smile visible beneath the shadow of his crystalline psychic hood. High Reclusiarch Albanactus, his armour still bearing the heraldry of the Black Templars, was unreadable, his features locked beneath the snarling flayed skull of his helm. Aggression and zealous fury radiated from him like a heat haze.

The watch master’s boots touched the dais, and every Space Marine assembled bent the knee. Heads bowed, their fists clashed against their breastplates in salute. Flanked by Sugedai and Albanactus, and the Terminator elite beside them, Asharbanapal raised his guardian spear in one gauntleted fist, bringing the end down against the stone floor with a clang like the tolling of a bell.

‘Rise, my brothers,’ said the watch master, his voice carrying effortlessly through the vast amphitheatre despite his soft, measured tone. The assembled Space Marines stood as one.

‘This is a day of days,’ said Asharbanapal. ‘The Bladefall have not united in full strength in all of the millennia since their founding. Our stewardship of the Emperor’s realms has called you to many places, and measured you against the foulest predations of the xenos.

‘Our duties are manifold, our enemies ruthless and insidious. The reclamation of each watch company here will not be without consequence. Threats will arise in our absence, and the blood of the Imperium will be shed. The burden of that choice rests upon my shoulders, my brothers. I did not arrive at it without consideration of its gravity, but the threat that has surfaced eclipses all others.’

The watch master turned, levelling the guardian spear. ‘Watch Captain Artemis, of Talasa Prime.’

Artemis went to one knee beneath Asharbanapal’s gaze. ‘Watch master.’

‘Rise, watch captain. You have been summoned here for a purpose.’

Artemis stood. ‘I have answered your call, and I obey.’

‘You have performed admirably in your service to Talasa Prime and the Deathwatch,’ said Asharbanapal. ‘You have faced the darkest of the xenos and prevailed against them.’

‘You honour me, watch master. I live but in service to the Emperor.’

The watch master flashed a smile for an instant. ‘You have even prevailed against the Great Devourer, an enemy that has blighted the Imperium and sown great destruction upon humanity. On one such undertaking, you succeeded in capturing a brood of genestealers alive, in service to Lord Inquisitor Kryptman of the Ordo Xenos. Is that not so?’

Artemis looked up. ‘It is as you say, watch master.’

Murmurs of disbelief rippled out across the assembled Space Marines. Muted outrage passed between warriors, suppressed by their sub-commanders. Two hundred faces turned to Artemis, a mixture of anger, shock and fascination colouring their features.

Asharbanapal raised his hands, silencing the clamouring Space Marines before turning back to Artemis.

‘A perilous task, watch captain. The purpose of the Deathwatch is the eradication of the xenos, wherever it appears. It is not to be understood, not to be cognised, but to be hated. Nothing but its utter annihilation can be accepted, yes?’

‘By the Emperor, it is so,’ replied Artemis.

‘Why did you capture the tyranid in service to the lord inquisitor?’ asked the watch master. ‘To what end, what purpose did you undertake this?’

‘A vanguard of a new hive fleet was emerging,’ said Artemis, ‘threatening to spill into Ultima Segmentum. Lord Inquisitor Kryptman sought to direct the tyranids away from Imperial space and into the ork empire of Octarius, to set them upon each other while a defence could be mounted.’

‘Indeed,’ said Asharbanapal. ‘In that, the lord inquisitor succeeded. The hive fleet appointed “Leviathan” descended upon the foul greenskins, turning its ravenous hunger upon their Overfiend and its hordes. All that remained was to wait. Wait for the xenos to rage against one another until only one survived, a broken shadow of its former strength.’

The watch master stepped to the centre of the dais, raising his guardian spear aloft. ‘We are here because the Inquisition has failed. The conflagration they kindled between our enemies has made them stronger, and their numbers more vast. The more biological matter it devours, the heartier and more numerous the tyranid becomes. And the foul ork, capable only of war, used the fire of battle to multiply far beyond the hordes it wielded before.’

A watch captain bearing the marks of the Iron Hands stood, his voice rendered harsh by extensive bionics. ‘Has the Inquisition done nothing to curtail their advance?’

Asharbanapal regarded the Iron Hand, and nodded to Albanactus. The high reclusiarch tapped a command into a data-slate, and a hololithic star chart leapt into view in the air over the central dais. A system blinked and expanded into focus, on the border of the ork empire of Octarius and the tendril of hive fleet Leviathan.

‘The Kurbynola System,’ began the watch master, gesturing to the hololith. ‘A vibrant star encircled by twenty worlds. Agriculture, mineral deposits, and substantial population centres on most of them.

‘When the ork conflict with the tyranids began to spill into the Imperium, the Inquisition sought to contain their advance. They deemed the Kurbynola System “non-essential”. All defensive resources were withdrawn from the system, confining them to the innermost citadel world of Praesidium. Defenceless, the Kurbynola System was enveloped by the xenos. Within months, both greenskins and tyranids had overrun the outer worlds. After two years, half of the system was razed, their populations butchered, their surfaces rendered uninhabitable.’

Artemis seethed, his bionic arm creaking as his fist tightened. The memories flooded back with his rage, burning in his mind.

–the twisted, claustrophobic passageways of the space hulk. The nightmarish forms of the genestealers, illuminated in the strobing flash of boltgun fire. The floor beneath them buckling and shearing away. Lavestus falling into a swarm of rending claws. Artemis leaping, grabbing hold of his brother as they sank into the howling darkness. His brothers pulling him back, finally hauling him away as he lost his grip. Sprawling as blood sprayed down his armour, his arm gone at the shoulder–

Artemis stood. ‘Watch master, where is the lord inquisitor? Kryptman must be brought to account for the billions of the Emperor’s servants he has led to the slaughter.’

‘The Inquisition shares your sentiment, watch captain. They declared him excommunicated, and their agents scour the Imperium as we speak to find him. Yet nothing he could do would alter our course. Our path is clear. Only we can deter a xenos menace of this magnitude.’

Asharbanapal spread his arms wide, exercising a rhetorical command that made it seem as if he were speaking directly to each Space Marine alone.

‘We are the bane of the xenos, my brothers. Now, in its multitudes, it is poised to threaten the entire segmentum. We stand against the invasion of the Leviathan hive fleet, and a greenskin incursion of a scale that has not been seen in nearly ten thousand years. It is for that threat, my kindred, that I have forsaken all other oaths. The Inquisition has failed, and it now falls to the Deathwatch to stand and drive this peril from our shores.’

‘My lord,’ Caltanix stood, striding down the amphitheatre to stand before the watch master. In a single smooth motion, he drew the longsword from his back and dropped to one knee. Head bowed, he held the sword in both hands. ‘Task me with such a crusade. I will burn every world the xenos infest, and marshal our fleet to purge them from the stars. I will lead our brothers and cleanse the Imperium of their taint!’

‘No.’

With a single word, the chamber was silent. Caltanix turned, watching as Artemis stepped forwards.

‘Watch master, the Deathwatch is a scalpel, not a cudgel,’ Artemis said. ‘If we are able to draw out the Overfiend of the greenskins and take his head, his hordes will turn upon themselves. Their unity will collapse as it has before.’

‘And what of the tyranids?’ asked the watch master.

‘The greenskins will be in disarray, no longer a united threat to the segmentum but they will still combat the tyranids as much as they will each other. The hive fleet will seek to press their advantage, and we can capitalise on such a diversion to locate the primary hive ships controlling the swarms. If our combined fleets can destroy the hive ships, the tyranids will lose their link to the Hive Mind, becoming feral. Precise, coordinated strikes can cut the heads from our enemies.’

Artemis locked eyes with the watch master. ‘My lord, it was the work of my hands, my deeds which brought about the start of this. With your blessing, I would have them bring about its end as well. I will hunt down the greenskin Overfiend and return with its head. With their fleets in conflict they will not notice a single vessel.’

Asharbanapal was silent for a moment, impassive as he looked at Artemis.

‘Very well, watch captain. You will take your ship and do as you have said.’

The watch master turned to Caltanix, who was still kneeling before him. ‘Caltanix, you and your kill team shall accompany him.’

For a pair of heartbeats Caltanix remained on his knees, his eyes cast to the floor. His facade betrayed nothing, as if carved from cold stone, yet Artemis could see the faintest tremble ripple over the blade the Templar held aloft.

‘Brother?’ asked Asharbanapal, a soft smile creasing his dusky features.

Caltanix stood, sheathing his longsword and bringing a fist to his chest. ‘It will be done, my lord.’

The Iron Hands watch captain stood once more. ‘You shall have a kill team of my company as well.’

Artemis bowed. ‘I will not fail.’

PART II

SIX

The space between stars caught fire, as hunger warred against wrath.

The Waaagh! of Overfiend Blaktoof, ruler of the ork empire of Octarius, filled the void, hundreds of brutal warships colliding with the enveloping swarm of hive fleet Leviathan. Rockets, mass-driven asteroids and unstable plasma bombs sprayed from each ramshackle vessel as the hive fleet vomited billions of winged horrors from vast bio-ships.

The ork vessels glowed with the fire from thousands of gun turrets bristling their hulls, filling the void around them with ordnance as the tyranids descended. Greenskins in primitive environment suits charged onto the hulls of their ships, slavering for combat. Flocks of ork fighters streamed from terror ships, twisting through space as they engaged the oncoming tyranid fliers.

The bio-ships quivered, organic cannons discharging gouts of acid that burned through ork armour and reduced their ships to boiling slag. Vast grasping tentacles wound about greenskin warships, breaking their backs and dragging them slowly into gaping, razor-toothed maws.

A cluster of ork ships, little more than asteroids with engine arrays bolted onto them, swept through the swarms of tyranid creatures. Firing their engines in starbursts of dirty light, they rammed a bio-ship, smashing into its flank and breaching thick layers of void-hardened chitin. Clouds of flash-freezing ichor burst from the living craft, and thousands of ork warriors clawed their way into the bio-ship with axes and saw-bladed claws. Broods of tyranid warrior organisms, dormant within the bio-ship, roused from their comatose state, tearing from birthing pods and flooding the interior of their vessel to oppose the orks. Tides of chitin smashed against greenskin flesh and scavenged metal, claw against blade.

The orks roared, jubilant at the slaughter even as they fell beneath the waves of gnashing tyranids. War was everything to the greenskins, the sublime goal sought in every act undertaken by an ork. Violence and aggression were their lifeblood, and they hurled themselves into the swarms of Leviathan, ecstatic to shed blood.

The tyranids cut down the orks in droves, the cold instinct of their gestalt intelligence leading the combat forms as other creatures dragged away the dead of both xenos races, their corpses to be consumed and converted to biomass to fuel the hive fleet.

Blood and ichor streamed through the battle, wreathing wreckage and the husks of dead bio-ships in frozen crusts of crimson and purplish black. The light of stars glittered on the frozen corpses of thousands and thousands of xenos, some still locked together as they drifted silently through the dark.

As their fleets mauled one another, the worlds turned below them. The once verdant planets of the Kurbynola System had been reduced to ashen husks, their populations massacred, all organic life devoured. The war between ork and tyranid had raged through the charnel house of Octarius, and now it had erupted into the Imperium of Man.

The Fatal Redress slid through the void, its engines dark and reactor cold as it pushed through the fringes of the Kurbynola System. The Deathwatch warship had shot forwards at maximum burn before deactivating its plasma engines, drifting on its momentum. All but the most essential systems onboard the frigate had been shut down to avoid detection, rendering the spear of dark iron indistinguishable from the void around it.

Shipmaster Aemna turned to Artemis. The bridge was dark, with only the most essential stations still receiving power. Servitors drooled, slack and inert at their consoles. Crew members paced from point to point in silence, breathing from bulky rebreather masks now that the life-support systems had been brought to barely survivable levels. The hand-held lamp packs they carried revealed portions of the bridge within cones of weak yellow light.

‘How close are we?’ asked Artemis, standing beside Aemna’s command throne.

‘If we managed to maintain our course before cutting our engines,’ replied the shipmaster, her voice muffled by her rebreather mask, ‘we should reach maximum augur range within the hour. That is, unless they have shifted across the system from our last available scans. It will be difficult to know for sure until we make visual contact. Right now we are running blind.’

The vox-bead in Artemis’ helm chimed. The rune for Rogerio blinked insistently on his retinal display.

‘Watch captain.’ The Crimson Fist’s voice crackled over the low-powered vox-link.

‘What is it, Rogerio?’ replied Artemis, irritated that vox silence had been broken.

‘It is the Flesh Tearer,’ said Rogerio. Artemis heard the tightness in the veteran’s voice. It was rare for him to exude such tension.

‘Understood, I am inbound.’ Artemis looked down at the shipmaster. ‘Notify me of any developments immediately. No alterations to our current course are to be made without my sanction. Do you understand?’

Aemna nodded. ‘Aye, watch captain.’

Artemis walked down the darkened corridors of the Fatal Redress from the ship’s bridge. He was fully armed, his thrumming Mark VIII power armour sealed and ready for combat at a moment’s notice. Alongside Rogerio, Hyphantes, Imtehan and Sekor, two full kill teams of the Bladefall prepared themselves within the ship’s armouries and barracks, adding another eighteen warriors to join Artemis in the hunt for the greenskin Overfiend.

A roar ripped through the metal bones of the Deathwatch vessel, a deafening howl of wrathful pain. Artemis broke into a run, his heavy boots clanging against the deck plating as he drew closer to the source of the cry.

It had begun as soon as they entered the system. In every place the hideous swarms of the tyranid touched, they radiated a dense synaptic field, projecting the vile presence of their Hive Mind. The field, known as the ‘Shadow in the Warp’, was anathema to psychic ability, drowning out all connection to the warp. All felt its insidious touch, racking the mortal crew with nightmares, disrupting the abilities of the ship’s Navigator and astropathic choir to perform their function, and bringing psykers to the very edge of madness.

Imtehan had sequestered himself within his living quarters as the Fatal Redress drew close to the Kurbynola System. As the warship slipped into proximity of the hive fleet, sounds of violence began to issue from the Flesh Tearer’s cell, along with furious bellowing from the tormented Librarian.

Artemis possessed an inkling of the affliction that tormented the sons of Sanguinius. He had fought alongside enough of them to appreciate the danger they posed should they succumb. He had witnessed Urbino, a warrior of the Blood Angels, lapse into a frenzy, slaying dozens of hideous genestealers before he himself was killed. Such fury was a powerful weapon, but indiscriminate in whom it harmed. Urbino would have attacked Artemis as easily as he had the xenos.

The line between maintaining control and descending into a mindless berserker was growing thin, and Artemis was wary of the pain driving Imtehan into the same state he had seen consume Urbino.

Another roar rattled the walls of the corridor as Artemis reached the Flesh Tearer’s chamber. Rogerio and Caltanix stood vigil at the bulkhead, their weapons at the ready.

‘His condition is worse,’ said Rogerio, his storm bolter braced across his chest.

‘Has he made any effort to leave his cell?’ asked Artemis.

Caltanix gestured to the bulkhead, indicating the fist-sized deformations in the thick iron plating. ‘No, though it may be a matter of time. His suffering grows the closer we draw to the xenos.’

‘Let me speak to him.’ The Space Marines turned as they heard the voice.

A warrior strode from the darkness of the corridor. The winged blood drop icon of the Blood Angels Chapter rested on a field of crimson on his pauldron.

‘I am Pecori, born of Baal and Angel of the Blood. Our brother stands upon a threshold, his grip tenuous. If you will sanction it, I would seek to hold him from such a fall.’

Artemis considered the Blood Angel. ‘Do what you can. We will need every brother we have for this mission. He must overcome this affliction.’

Pecori nodded. Rogerio and Caltanix braced at either side of the bulkhead as Artemis hauled the door open.

The interior of the cell was dark, the lumen strips smashed and torn from their housings. Detritus and fragments of metal and stone covered the floor, clicking beneath Pecori’s boots as the Blood Angel entered. As his eyesight adjusted, Artemis saw the cracked rockcrete of the walls, stained crimson from where the Flesh Tearer had beaten his fists bloody against them.

A deep, breathless snarl issued from the dark corner of the chamber. It reminded Artemis of a wounded beast, backed into a corner where it was the most dangerous and unpredictable. He could make out the silhouette of Imtehan, kneeling, with both hands grasping at his skull.

‘Shut this door behind me,’ Pecori whispered, stepping slowly towards Imtehan. Artemis glimpsed the Flesh Tearer, growling through clenched teeth, fists splitting cracks into the rockcrete floor as he crushed down, before sealing the hatch.

For several minutes, there was silence, punctuated briefly by the snarling roars of Imtehan’s anguished rage. Through the thick iron doorway to the cell, Artemis could hear a calm undercurrent weaving through the fury, slow and methodical but with the insistence of the tide. Artemis could not hear the words being spoken, but he could feel the tension as it ebbed away, before the silence asserted itself fully within the darkness of the Flesh Tearer’s chambers.

Pecori stepped out into the corridor, closing the hatch behind him.

‘What happened?’ asked Artemis of the Blood Angel. ‘What did you say to him?’

Pecori stared back at Artemis with piercing green eyes. Brushing a lock of platinum blond hair away from his porcelain visage, he raised the hood of the surplice he wore over his armour.

‘Only what needed to be said.’

Artemis had departed for the Fatal Redress’ observation dome after Pecori had calmed Imtehan. He did not know what had transpired between the two sons of Sanguinius, but knew well enough that some secrets were best kept from the light. The psyker was pained, but able to control his suffering. He would be able to fight when the time came.

The observation dome was a blister of armourglass protruding from the spine of the Fatal Redress. With its sheath of armoured ceramite retracted, it offered an unobstructed view of the void surrounding the Deathwatch warship, the light of distant stars glittering down upon Artemis as he took in the view.

‘In a system of this size,’ Artemis turned as he heard the voice behind him, ‘jump points along the rim would be teeming with ships. Cargo freighters, Imperial Navy system monitors, all manner of military and commercial craft moving corewards or jumping to adjacent systems.’

Sekor stopped at the edge of the blister, resting his gauntleted hands upon the brass railing encircling the chamber. ‘Now, there is nothing. It is silent.’

‘Quiet as a tomb,’ Artemis agreed.

‘Did you know?’ Sekor asked, looking up at the emptiness. ‘When we boarded that hulk for Kryptman. Did you know that this was what he intended?’

Artemis was silent for a moment. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘I knew the mission, where to go and what we were to do when we arrived, but nothing beyond that.’

‘If you had known, would you have done anything to stop it?’

‘That is not our province.’

‘Then what is?’ Sekor rounded on Artemis. ‘Our duty is to defend humanity from the predations of the xenos. Lavestus died–’

‘Lavestus died in service to the Imperium!’ Artemis snapped. His vox-bead chimed, but he blinked it away. ‘As must we all if called to do so. Ours is not to question why, Sekor. We do our duty, no matter what the cost may be.’

‘You yourself have thrown us into this madness because of what we have done!’ Sekor hissed, pointing to the void beyond the dome. ‘Is it to avenge the lives of those whose blood is on our hands? Or are you scrambling to salvage your wounded pride?’

‘You overstep your bounds, Castellan,’ Artemis growled. ‘You will still your insubordinate tongue, or I will–’

The watch captain’s words were cut off by a thudding impact striking the armourglass dome. Another collision followed, and another, and another. The two Space Marines looked up into the void.

Ork bodies smashed against the observation dome. Frozen and twisted in death, they tumbled over the blister as the Fatal Redress ploughed through them. Veils of icy blood droplets cascaded over the frigate like rubies, fields so vast they resembled nebulae. Larger debris and twisted metal drifted around them, and a shadow fell over Artemis and Sekor as the still form of a dead bio-ship reared into view.

Artemis focussed, finally heeding the insistent chime of his vox-bead. He opened the link.

‘Watch captain,’ cried Aemna, ‘ahead of us, we–’

‘I see it, shipmaster,’ replied Artemis calmly.

‘We are approaching the minimum distance to manoeuvre. We need to change course now!’

‘Bring secondary propulsion online, shipmaster.’ Artemis turned from Sekor and strode to the bulkhead. ‘And avoid notifying both xenos fleets of our arrival, if you please.’

SEVEN

Manoeuvring thrusters set in the prow of the Fatal Redress fired in jets of sharp flame, arresting the frigate’s momentum and pitching it into a sharp dive. The sleek craft barely scraped free of direct impact with the dead tyranid bio-ship, and several spires and auspex towers along its spinal battlements were sheared away.

Shipmaster Aemna gripped the armrests of her command throne as her vessel shuddered. The vibrations were more unnerving to the crew in the eerie silence that hung over the ship without the gentle rumble of the vessel’s reactor. She gritted her teeth, suppressing the anger welling up in her chest.

Aemna had served with the Deathwatch from childhood, climbing the ranks aboard ships of all kinds before taking the helm of the Fatal Redress. Conducting dangerous and secretive missions against some of humanity’s most terrifying enemies was nothing new to her, but sending her rapid strike frigate alone into a major void engagement between two xenos races was suicidal at best.

The ship ceased its tremors as it cleared the tyranid bio-ship. Aemna barked orders to her crew, firing a short burn from the ventral jets before killing the manoeuvring drives.

A junior officer rushed to her command throne from the vox station pits. ‘Ma’am, receiving reports from the upper decks. We have confirmation of multiple contacts cutting into the hull.’

Aemna hissed a quiet curse, opening her vox-link.

‘Watch captain, your presence is required on the upper decks. We have tyranids onboard.’

‘Prime all armour void seals,’ said Artemis as he chambered a round in his bolt pistol. He had deployed the three kill teams onboard the Fatal Redress across the upper decks, braced to repel the xenos they heard clattering and scratching against the ship’s hull. ‘Activate mag-locks. Close-combat weapons and hellfire rounds only. Pick your targets. Engagement will be at close range and we must minimise damage to the hull.’

Rogerio plodded forwards through the maintenance corridor, his boots clamping to the deck with each step. ‘Watch captain!’ he called, pointing to the ceiling of the corridor as the metal began to smoulder.

‘Be ready.’ Artemis waved Hyphantes ahead, stopping to pull Imtehan aside. ‘Are you prepared, brother?’

The Flesh Tearer nodded sharply, his shoulders rising and falling with each pained breath. ‘I will fight, watch captain. These xenos will die by my hand.’

Artemis clapped his pauldron, indicating a position across the corridor.

Smoke began to curl from the ceiling, the stink of burning metal and ozone thick even through the filters of the Space Marines’ helms. The reinforced steel began to liquefy, bubbling as slag drooled down to the floor. Microscopic breaches popped as the hull groaned.

‘Brace!’ Artemis shouted. The ceiling blew apart as it explosively decompressed. Hard vacuum tore at the Deathwatch warriors, who were held firm to the deck by their mag-locked boots. Heavy bulkheads on either side of the Space Marines slammed down to contain the breach. The silence of the open void muted all noise but the soft chimes of Artemis’ retinal display, and the steady sound of his breathing.

For several heartbeats nothing moved. The Space Marines tensed, flexing their grip on their weapons. Darting shadows flashed over the hull breach.

‘Contact!’ bellowed Hyphantes as a tide of tyranids erupted into the corridor. Hormagaunts, hideous creatures of violet and corpse-white carapace, leapt at the kill team, slashing with scything claws and snapping fanged jaws.

Bolter fire eviscerated the invading xenos. The mutagenic acid encased within the Deathwatch’s specialised hellfire rounds boiled the tyranids alive from the inside, reducing them to crumbling husks of scorched meat. More tyranids appeared, hooking their sickle claws into the compromised hull plating and tearing the breach wider.

A hormagaunt leapt onto Rogerio, thrashing as it fought to bury its claws in his chest. He could feel the thump of its powerful hind legs against the deck and hear the screech of its vicious claws through his power armour. The Crimson Fist drew a gladius from his hip, ripping it up and through the vile creature and hurling the bifurcated remains to clash against the walls of the corridor with a dull thud.

Slaved to the united gestalt intelligence of the Hive Mind, the tyranids converged on the hull breach, cutting through the floating corpses of their dead to reach the kill team inside.

Artemis raised his bolt pistol as he drew Exterminatus. A lattice of targeting runes crystalised over his right eye. He fired, the pouncing tyranids rupturing into frozen blooms of ichor and spinning chitin fragments. He whipped Exterminatus across another hormagaunt’s thorax, spinning away and on to the next as its innards burst from the gash in slowly tumbling coils.

Sekor and Imtehan fought back to back. As Sekor filled the corridor with withering fire from twin bolt pistols, the Flesh Tearer carved into the xenos assault with his meteor hammer, the saw-toothed spheres of dark iron blurring through chitin and obliterating xenos flesh. The morning star whirled its deadly orbit beside Imtehan as he readied for another wave of tyranids, its twin heads crackling with active power fields as they spun from the chain linking them. Beneath his helm, Imtehan’s clenched jaw creaked. Had his organic teeth not been replaced by pegs of dense iron long ago, they would have shattered under the strain of his repressed rage.

Hyphantes locked his bolter to his hip as his magazine depleted, drawing his twin falxes in a blur of energised metal. He howled a jubilant battle cry as he danced into the press of alien claws, relishing the death he dealt to his Chapter’s most hated enemy with every swing of his blades. Clouds of frozen ichor surrounded him like gems of tainted amethyst. He punched the tattered remains of a tyranid corpse drifting in front of him away, turning with leaden footfalls in search of new targets.

Silence descended once more, save for the elevated breathing sawing from each of the Space Marines behind their helms. Artemis took advantage of the reprieve to reload his bolt pistol, and opened a vox-link to the rest of the kill team.

‘Team, status report.’

‘Sekor, no damage.’

‘I am unhurt, watch captain,’ said Rogerio.

‘I endure,’ hissed Imtehan, clearly still fighting the battle within his mind.

‘Ready for more,’ growled Hyphantes, still hunched in a combat stance with his falxes spread wide.

Artemis killed the link and opened another. ‘Watch Captain Caltanix, what is your status?’

The vox crackled, flawed with static as the Black Templar replied.

‘We had brief contact via a minor hull breach, only a handful of the vile things from when we impacted their hive ship. We put them to the sword. The situation is contained.’

‘Understood. Our kill teams will perform overlapping sweeps of the upper decks to confirm the ship is secure before bringing up crews to close the hull breaches.’

‘Acknowledged,’ Caltanix replied. ‘Beginning our sweep now.’

Artemis closed the vox-link, sending a quick pulse to the bridge confirming their containment of the tyranid incursion to the shipmaster. After a moment, the bulkheads unlocked and slid open, and Artemis waved his kill team forwards to begin their inspection.

Hyphantes sheathed his falxes, picking a severed tyranid head from the air as it spun within a veil of its own ichor. He stared down at the monstrous visage of the creature, frozen in a vicious snarl. For all the black history of the Scythes of the Emperor, this had been his first action against the tyranids. The vile beasts that had devoured honoured Sotha, slaughtered his brothers before him and brought his Chapter to the precipice of extinction.

Slowly, Hyphantes tightened his grasp. The slick plates of carapace began to buckle under the crushing strain. His lips peeled back from bared teeth. The tyranid skull held his furious glare with black unfocussed eyes before fracturing in his grip, collapsing into an expanding cloud of freezing gristle.

‘Rest easy, lad.’ Rogerio laid a hand on Hyphantes’ shoulder. ‘This is only just beginning. There will be legions of these xenos filth to be slain soon.’

EIGHT

It had taken four hours for kill teams Artemis and Caltanix to meticulously purge the upper decks. The third Deathwatch unit aboard the Fatal Redress, Kill Team Krycses, had waited in reserve, prepared to converge on any surviving tyranids that had penetrated deeper into the ship. By the time crews of servitors arrived to seal the breaches and make repairs, the corridors were caked in blackened carbon where the Space Marines had scoured the passages with searing deluges from heavy flamers.

Artemis entered the strategium of the Fatal Redress, his armour still caked in thawing gore that slicked from the ceramite plates in greasy strings. With a dull thud, he set his bolter on the table dominating the chamber and removed his helm. Caltanix and Krycses stepped through the hatch and joined him.

Last to enter was Shipmaster Aemna. She strode into the chamber, and with a flickering stare from her augmetic eyes, a tactical hololith stuttered into being from a purring focusing lens.

‘This is the return from our last auspex pulse forty-eight minutes ago. We were able to make two other scans prior to that without detection. Either the xenos remain unaware of our presence, or we are not enough of a threat for them to care.’

Clouds of blinking runes designating ork and tyranid ships crackled in the hololith, entangled in swathes of red and yellow. A single blue icon representing the Fatal Redress stood alone, apart from the knot of embattled xenos.

‘We need to get closer,’ said Caltanix.

‘This is the closest we have reached without detection from either fleet,’ said Aemna. ‘A prospect that grows increasingly unlikely the nearer we draw to them.’

‘Shipmaster,’ said Artemis. ‘Have you been able to determine the relative sizes of the ork vessels in their armada?’

Aemna consulted her data-slate, tapping in a series of commands. The hololith refreshed, with each ork ship’s rune bearing a stream of data beside it. ‘There is little coordination or formation to be found in their arrangement. While standard Imperial doctrine calls for capital ships to sit at the centre of formations shielded by layers of support craft and escorts, the orks’ largest vessels are at the vanguard, pressed the furthest into the hive fleet.’

‘Where the fighting is the thickest,’ said Watch Sergeant Krycses, the Raven Guard pushing a stray lock of sable hair from his face as he leaned towards the hololith.

Artemis studied the tactical projection. He focussed on the blinking rune of the ork flagship, completely enveloped in tyranid icons.

‘Then that is where we must go,’ said Artemis with finality. ‘That is where we will find the Overfiend.’

Each brother of Kill Team Artemis readied themselves for battle in their own way, conducting rituals and traditions ingrained from service in the Chapters of their origins. While their former allegiances had been cast aside when they ascended to the ranks of the Deathwatch, they still retained the cultures and identities ingrained in them as neophytes.

Rogerio bathed his armour and weapons in twisting coils of incense from a burning censer. The veteran chanted guttural litanies of hate against the greenskin as he prepared to do battle with the most abhorred of all the Crimson Fists’ myriad foes. He drew the blade of his gladius across his left palm, pressing his bleeding hand against his armour and leaving a dark handprint on its chest.

Sekor meticulously dismantled each of his weapons down to their simplest components before reassembling them, repeating the ritual twice more for each tool of destruction he would carry on the mission. Imtehan fought in the training pits, centring his turbulent thoughts as he ripped apart a host of combat servitors.

Hyphantes sang. A low, sonorous dirge rang from the walls of his arming chamber as he prayed to crystal vials containing the remains of the warriors who had worn his armour before him. The vials held ash, scraps of fabric and splinters of bone. One contained a measure of blood, dried and crumbled away by time into wine-red dust. Their names adorned his right shoulder pad in flowing script, edged in silver around the golden crossed-scythes icon of his Chapter.

Alone within his own cell, Artemis flicked his gaze over the menagerie of flensed skulls hanging from the walls. Every xenos breed was represented, from the sleek elongated skull of an eldar witch to the brutal, sloped visage of an ork chieftain. He remembered tearing the massive warlord’s head from its spine, standing upon mounds of the dead and holding the trophy aloft as he roared in triumph.

Artemis pushed the memory aside and walked to a clay urn set beneath his armour. Opening the urn, he dipped his hands inside, drawing out handfuls of gritty black dust from within. He looked down upon the dark volcanic soil of Posul, ashen from an eternity starved of a star’s light. Artemis spread the dust over his flesh in an ancient ritual dating back to the earliest primitive tribes of his night-shrouded home world, who had caked themselves in earth to camouflage their bodies before the hunt.

Once he had finished, robed serfs stepped forwards. They anchored the heavy plates of ceramite armour to Artemis’ musculature, drilling the war-plate into place and connecting the interface ports set along his spine with a series of sharp clicks, as other serfs offered reverent prayers to its stirring machine-spirit. His power pack thrummed as it was machined into place, flooding his limbs with strength.

Artemis dismissed the serfs as they finished their appointed tasks. He sprinkled the ashen soil of Posul over the blade of Exterminatus, offering a silent prayer to the spirit of the relic blade. He honoured the bygone warriors of the Deathwatch who had borne it into battle before it had become his inheritance to wield. He clamped a grenade dispenser to his belt, mag-locking his bolter to his left leg and his bolt pistol to the small of his back.

Artemis sheathed Exterminatus, locked the scabbard to his hip and set his helm in the crook of his arm. The time for preparations had ended. The Mortifactor stood upon the brink, the war rushing up to meet him. He had only to leap.

The three kill teams assembled on the embarkation deck of the Fatal Redress, a cross-section of the finest warriors of the Imperium of Man.

Caltanix had chosen his own kill team of vanguard veterans to join him. They were consummate close-combat linebreakers, taken from the elite of their Chapters’ assault companies. The warriors were heavily drilled in boarding actions and planetary assault, and accounted for the absence of jump packs by doubling their caches of melta bombs. They perched on the deck, some carrying artificer thunder hammers in both hands, others bearing power mauls held loosely behind heavy boarding shields.

Drynn, the Iron Hands watch captain of the fourth watch company, had sent a kill team comprised primarily of asymmetrical warfare specialists. The eight warriors were encased in irregular power armour, heavily modified by each of the warriors to their own specifications as much as was possible without rousing the ire of the spirits dwelling within the ceramite plate. They excelled in assassination, clandestine operations and sabotage, at their best sowing destruction from deep behind enemy lines. Watch Sergeant Krycses lounged against a supply crate, tossing a combat blade in glittering arcs before catching it on his fingertip.

Artemis stepped onto the embarkation deck, giving a curt nod to his kill team as he placed himself between the three units.

‘My brothers,’ he began. ‘There is little I must say, and so I will exercise brevity. We all know what lies ahead of us. With victory, we end this now, and this system shall remain the only casualty of the Inquisition’s folly. We must cut the head from the beast. We must be swift, silent and ruthless. Bring glory to your watch fortresses, and honour to your Chapters. Draw your blades against the predations of the xenos, and purge them from the realms of the Emperor.’

Exterminatus blurred from Artemis’ sheath, the power field crackling as it burned Posul’s soil from its raised blade. ‘Victory!’ Artemis boomed, his voice reverberating across the vast chamber.

‘Victory!’ the kill teams roared in reply.

NINE

The Fatal Redress was nearly invisible in the void. With short blasts from its manoeuvring jets, it wound through the labyrinth of tumbling debris with glacial slowness.

Within the darkness of the warship’s bridge, Shipmaster Aemna waited in her command throne, fingers steepled before her mouth as she watched the ponderous dance of wreckage through the viewscreen. The tension among the crew was thick, a near physical thing. The shipmaster felt relief that the majority of the ship’s complement was comprised of mindless servitors, unaffected by the strain afflicting the mortal crew.

The void before them darkened as the shadow of a vast bio-ship passed over the Deathwatch vessel. Undulating tentacles larger than the Imperial frigate swept slowly ahead of the gargantuan creature, grasping in search of prey as it stalked closer to the centre of the space battle. It took several minutes for the shadow to lift as the bio-ship passed.

Aemna released a breath she did not realise she had been holding, running a hand through the stubble of her scalp. Bone-deep exhaustion permeated her and her crew, and the vulnerability of their situation grated on her. She was used to speed, to the rapid traversal of the void as she delivered her deadly cargo of demigod warriors. Without shields, without weapons and barely sipping enough power from the reactors to keep the ship from becoming a tomb, Aemna had never put her vessel in such a fragile, precarious state.

Aemna keyed in a command on her throne’s runepad. The Fatal Redress gave another short blast from its attitude thrusters, angling the prow towards the heart of the xenos confrontation. The incredible distances separating them rendered the battle as little more than a smudge on the viewscreen, briefly flickering with pinpricks of light as alien warships died.

The crew was silent, their tense, weary eyes fixed to the viewscreen as another blast slid them forwards. The frigate’s superstructure groaned softly as it advanced, its momentum carrying them inexorably closer to their target. Aemna ran the calculations through her mind. Barring a collision with the thousands of pieces of debris large enough to smash her vessel into fragments, which represented an uncomfortable amount of the prospective outcome, the Fatal Redress was set to ghost by the largest ork capital ship present, close enough to launch the pair of Corvus Blackstars carrying the kill teams to their destination.

If Aemna were able to achieve the insertion without being detected by either fleet, she would maintain her drift, slipping back into and hiding amongst the wreckage until the drop-ships returned. If not, she would light the engines and burn the reactors to slag fleeing to the deepest black. The watch captain would be on his own.

Some outside of the Deathwatch would consider the shipmaster callous, she was sure. Perhaps there was truth to that, but experience had scoured the sympathy that came with ignorance from her. Aemna had served on enough ships and carried enough kill teams to understand better than most the odds of survival for the Space Marines she transported from hot zone to hot zone. Were Artemis and his comrades to meet their destiny, it would not mark the first time she had watched the Emperor’s angels of death leap into the jaws of the eternal shadow war against the xenos, never to return.

When the demigod Space Marines were aboard the Fatal Redress, they were in command. When not, Aemna’s responsibility was the survival of the strike frigate and her crew. The Fatal Redress had sailed the stars and brought destruction to the xenos in service to the Deathwatch for over four thousand years. She would not have it brought to ruin on her watch.

The xenos battlefleets began to materialise, solidifying as the Fatal Redress drifted closer. The ugly masses of ork ships, an unholy union of scrap iron, asteroids and technology plundered from other races, charged into the hideous organic fleet of the tyranids with their consummate careless fury. Aemna could not recall ever seeing so many ships of either foul species, and seeing them locked against one another in one place chilled her blood. She could not begin to speculate on the mind of the lord inquisitor who had brought this catastrophe about, but knew that whether intended or not, she beheld the greatest threat to emerge against the Imperium after the invasions of the Archenemy assailing the bulwarks of Cadia.

She considered for a moment that the threat before her may be even greater.

The details of her briefing were thin by necessity, and Aemna had learned long ago not to press for information. She blinked, closing her eyelids over the smooth augmetics that had been installed after her masters had taken her eyes. She had been blinded upon ascending to serve in the battlefleets, her eyes removed so that she would never see the secret wars of the Deathwatch with her natural sight. It had been a simple, albeit unmistakably clear gesture. She saw only what the Deathwatch allowed her to see, and existed only as long as the alien hunters deemed her of use.

Still, Aemna’s thoughts drifted to the fleets anchored at the core of the system. The combined military of twenty worlds, forced to abandon their duties and bear witness to the destruction of the planets they were oath-sworn to protect. Many ships’ captains and crew had met summary execution at the hands of the Deathwatch enforcing the cordon, attempting to peel their ships away to respond to the wash of panicked entreaties for aid.

Aemna struggled to believe that more of the system’s defenders had not rebelled. The shipmaster had never known the world of her birth, but the prospect of being forced to watch, powerless, as it burned twisted acid through her veins.

The shipmaster dismissed the thought as an officer hurried to her side, offering a data-slate. Aemna scrolled through the screeds of data, her lips peeling back as she bared her teeth in a snarl.

The lead ork ship was moving. It had changed its vector to bring itself to bear against a trio of enormous hive ships that had just arrived. There was no way Aemna could get close enough to deploy the kill teams without burning her engines.

The shipmaster handed the data-slate back to the officer, and keyed the vox-link on her throne.

‘Watch captain, our plans have changed.’

TEN

Artemis stepped through the central aisle of the Corvus Blackstar’s crew bay, his booted steps rattling the deck as he passed the seated battle-brothers on both sides. The Deathwatch warriors of his own kill team locked themselves into their restraint thrones beside the eight warriors of Kill Team Krycses, mag-locking weapons beside them or in overhead compartments as they made final preparations for insertion. The watch captain heard whispered prayers and oaths in a dozen languages from the assembled Space Marines, honouring their weapons, beseeching their primarchs or entreating the Emperor Himself to look upon their deeds in the battle to come.

Artemis climbed up to the cockpit, where Sekor was priming the drop-ship’s systems to launch. The Imperial Castellan’s hands danced over the control panels, running final diagnostics and triple checking that all of the myriad systems of the gunship were operational.

‘You look tense, brother-captain,’ said Sekor without turning. Artemis did not respond. The Mortifactor glimpsed the other Blackstar through the armourglass canopy, where Caltanix’s kill team was mustering for deployment. After the shipmaster had detailed the change to their approach vector, the Deathwatch kill teams had scrambled to prepare their wargear and gunships for launch.

The two drop-ships would need to exit the Fatal Redress hangar while the frigate was at full engine burn, timing their departure precisely so that they could intercept the ork capital ship. It was a prospect whose statistical chances of success were objectively laughable.

It was far from ideal, but Artemis had led enough sorties to know that a flexible plan with viable contingencies was essential to prevail over the enemy. He had hoped to avoid adopting this contingency, but fortune, it seemed, had different ideas for him.

‘The shipmaster will line us up over the target as she makes her pass,’ said Artemis, leaning over Sekor’s shoulder. ‘You know our window to reach them. Straight across, high burn and get us inside in one piece. Preferably without letting every ork and tyranid onboard know we are there.’

‘I have plucked you from the air in freefall within a planet’s atmosphere, watch captain.’ Artemis could hear the easy smile in Sekor’s voice. ‘I will get us onto that ship, you have my word on that.’

Artemis clapped Sekor on the shoulder guard, and turned to exit the cockpit. ‘Just be ready when those doors open.’

Aemna gripped the railing of her command dais as she barked orders to her crew. The bridge was alive with motion again, as crewmembers rushed through the chamber performing the manifold tasks necessary to reawaken the Fatal Redress. Adepts of the Mechanicus encircled the reactor core of the strike frigate down in the engineering decks, conducting the arcane rituals and chants to rouse the vessel’s slumbering machine-spirit. Gangs of vat-grown slaves hauled on dense chains, loading gigantic shells into the breeches of the Deathwatch warship’s broadside cannons.

The Fatal Redress was ready, set for a blistering run into and through the warring xenos fleets. Once she was committed, the frigate would have little opportunity to manoeuvre or change its course, and would only have one chance to catch their foe unawares long enough to deploy the boarding parties.

Aemna took a deep breath as her junior officers sounded off, confirming their readiness. The alien battlefleets were close enough for her to see individual weapons impacts. She watched an ork cruiser ram a tyranid vessel amidships, splitting the squid-like bio-ship in two in an expanding cloud of dark ichor. Aemna watched the same ship become ensnared by the grasping tentacles of another hive ship, its reactor going critical in a sunburst of sickly green radiation as its back was broken.

The shipmaster shook her head, forcing herself to focus.

Just get them onboard, she thought. Just get them onboard.

‘I want shields raised and weapons ready to fire as soon as we light our engines,’ ordered Aemna, standing straight and smoothing a crease from her starched black uniform. ‘We will need to punch our way out of here, so get ready for a fight.’

She locked eyes with the deck officer overseeing the propulsion systems. The thin man held her gaze, coming to attention and offering a crisp salute.

‘Ready, ma’am.’

Aemna nodded, her shining eyes turning back to the viewscreen. She closed them for a moment. ‘Emperor guide our hand.’

Her eyes flashed open. ‘Engines to full power, now!’

‘Aye, ma’am!’ the officer replied, and the bridge erupted into feverish, practised activity. The reactor core of the Fatal Redress roared as it breathed once more, flooding the half-frozen decks of the warship with power. Sodium lamps bathed the corridors of the vessel in light, and the thin air was sucked into rescrubbers as they hissed back to life.

The deck of the Fatal Redress rumbled. The vessel’s engine arrays screamed with the fire of a chained star, launching the Deathwatch strike craft into the frenzy of the battle. The flickering globe of void shields solidified around the craft as it dived into the maelstrom of aliens.

Almost immediately, a shoal of smaller tyranid creatures peeled off from the underside of a nearby bio-ship, curling in towards the Fatal Redress.

‘Punch through them!’ shouted Aemna. ‘I want salvoes from all forward torpedo bays, lances ready for what is left.’

A volley of torpedoes burst from launchers in the Deathwatch vessel’s plough-like prow, shooting ahead on ribbons of plasma as their internal drives activated. The warheads smashed into the swarm of tyranid interceptors in a chain of detonations. Organic debris rained against the Fatal Redress as it knifed through the dissipating blasts, its void shields flaring in ripples of kaleidoscopic colour. Point-defence batteries bracketed the surviving tyranids in hellstorms of laser and artillery fire, taking only moments to hurl them into oblivion to join their hideous kindred.

Aemna cursed. At this pace they would be cut off and obliterated by any of the larger vessels between them and the ork capital ship before they could get anywhere near close enough to launch the drop-ships. They needed to go faster, much faster.

The shipmaster keyed in an emergency sequence on her command throne. Secondary coolant feeds flooded into the propulsion systems, fighting to quench the searing heat of the drives as Aemna pushed the engines beyond acceptable tolerances. The ship rumbled all around her as its point-defence batteries fired without pause at the hordes of converging tyranid and ork interceptors. Migraine-bright beams of lance fire slashed into the larger of the oncoming enemy vessels, leaving hulls cored through as thundering broadsides ruptured greenskin armour and void-hardened tyranid carapace in blasts of fire and twisting shrapnel.

The bridge heaved as the Fatal Redress was struck by a barrage of impacts. Sparks fountained from consoles as they caught fire. Crewmembers floundered on the deck, screaming, while others fought to put the flames out. Servitors, oblivious to the end, cooked and twitched as their remaining flesh ran from their bodies like wax.

‘Get those shields back up!’ Aemna staggered to her feet, blinking away the blood that covered her face from a gash on her brow. ‘Report!’

‘We have a fire on the gunnery decks. Teams are fighting to keep it from spreading to the magazines,’ shouted an officer as he sprayed a flaming console with extinguishing foam.

‘Hull breaches on decks D-Three, D-Four, E-Eight and G-Twelve,’ called out another. Aemna could not locate a face to match to the voice amidst the chaos. ‘Bulkheads are sealing but E-Eight and G-Twelve are open to the void.’

‘The engines are redlining! Shipmaster, they will go critical if we do not shut them down now!’

‘Not an option,’ spat Aemna. She pulled up a shaking hololith from a projector in her throne’s armrest. She double-checked their approach vector and that of the ships in their path, and then triple-checked it. ‘Two hundred and forty seconds and we make it.’

She glared at the gargantuan ork capital ship as it swelled to fill the entire viewscreen.

Just get them onboard.

‘Seal all bulkheads. Keep the point-defence batteries screaming but divert power from the broadsides and lances to shields. And open a secure vox-channel to the Navigator’s sanctum.’

‘Ma’am?’ asked a communications officer over the din of the ship shaking itself apart. ‘Say again. You need the Navigator?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Aemna bared her teeth in a defiant grin. ‘I intend to do something very foolish.’

ELEVEN

Sekor breathed calmly through the recycled air of his void-sealed power armour. His vision, stained crimson by his retinal display, was awash with technical data – ammunition and fuel readouts, engine temperature gauges and auspex returns, along with dozens of other runes and data screeds jockeying for his attention. He blinked anything not immediately relevant to transparency, shuffling it to his peripheral vision as he focussed on the sealed hangar bay doors before him.

Twenty seconds. That was the projected window Sekor had to deploy from the Fatal Redress and be directly over the ork capital ship. The Corvus Blackstar he sat in was a proud, nimble beast. It was faster and more manoeuvrable than the venerable Thunderhawk, yet it was less heavily armoured than the iconic gunship. Its weapons arrays were formidable despite its relatively slim profile, and Sekor had made use of the Blackstar to conduct surgical strafing runs of entrenched xenos strongpoints on more than one occasion.

‘Just get us across, brother,’ said Artemis over the vox. ‘Nothing extravagant.’

The Imperial Castellan looked to either side at the servitors hard-wired into co-pilot and navigator stations.

‘Ready to slay the foes of the Emperor, my stalwart companions?’

‘Compliance,’ they droned in unison.

Sekor smirked and turned his gaze to the hangar bay once more. He spared a glance to the second insertion team beside him. The Techmarine pilot of the Blackstar stood before the craft, offering final ministrations and entreaties to its machine-spirit. Sekor’s gaze lingered over the crimson ceramite of the Techmarine’s armour, the mantle given upon completing an apprenticeship within the towering forges of Mars, before turning away to focus on his own instruments.

Sekor hoped the Techmarine pilot was skilled. With the madness awaiting them, it would be impossible to maintain any contact or formation in their sprint to the ork ship. Once the doors opened, each of them would be on their own.

Klaxons began to wail. Serfs and tech-adepts scrambled, disconnecting fuel lines and making for the bulkheads. The rune in Sekor’s display for Shipmaster Aemna pulsed and issued an insistent chime. Sekor rapped his fist against the cockpit over his head, and slowly fed power to the engines. The drop-ship trembled as the thrusters spooled up, and a series of glyphs counted down in the corner of his eye.

3…

2…

…1

‘Here we go,’ Sekor whispered.

The hangar bay door flashed open on lightning-fast pneumatics. Sekor shoved the control sticks forwards, and the Corvus Blackstar rocketed out of the hangar and into absolute pandemonium.

The Fatal Redress was hit the instant Sekor cleared the hangar bay. A blinding flash surrounded the Corvus Blackstar for an instant before the Deathwatch frigate rolled away, its superstructure aflame and trailing smears of spectral blue plasma from its tortured engines.

‘I’ve lost visual on the Fatal Redress,’ Sekor barked. He hauled on the control sticks, pushing the engines to their limits as the drop-ship dived down to the revolting monument to xenos ingenuity that was the ork capital ship. The second Blackstar spiralled away to Sekor’s port side, immediately lost in the chaos.

‘There goes the Templar,’ Sekor exhaled sharply, as the ork flagship swelled to consume his view.

The ship was a mountain range of scrap metal, a bulky amalgamation of rusted plates daubed in the vile graffiti of the greenskin. Weapons covered every conceivable surface – macro-cannon batteries, torpedo silos, even ramshackle plasma cannons and lance turrets. Jutting from the ship’s blunt prow, shaped into the visage of one of their foul mongrel gods, was the unmistakable silhouette of a nova cannon, looted from the wreck of an Imperial battleship. The cannon jutted from the ‘mouth’ of the prow, framed by twisted blades of a starship hull in a crude facsimile of curved tusks.

A tyranid bio-ship had latched onto the ork battleship directly ahead of Sekor, adhering itself like an enormous limpet as it worked relentlessly to devour a warship twice its size. Tyranid combat organisms swarmed over the hull of the ork ship in their thousands, leaping into battle against the hordes of orks disgorging from within to oppose them. The hull shivered with thousands upon thousands of warring xenos, entire armies slaughtering each other, the dead spinning away into the void.

Sekor took in the sight in an instant, before a rust-red blur reared up into their path. Collision alarms wailed. Sekor yanked the control sticks to his chest, corkscrewing the Blackstar away from an onrushing ork cruiser just ahead of them as it rammed the tyranid bio-ship. Sickly bioluminescence wormed over the ailing tyranid vessel as it was torn from the ork capital ship, leaving shredded gouges of molten iron where it had adhered itself. It twisted, latching onto the ork cruiser embedded in its flank, and the two tumbled away, grappling for the advantage.

Sekor fought the controls of the Blackstar, arresting its lethal spiral and weaving through the maelstrom of weapons fire and xenos escort ships. Even a glancing hit from anything filling the void around them would leave them as nothing but a cloud of spinning fragments. He rolled the drop-ship over the spine of an ork destroyer as its hull evaporated in a spray of bio-acid. Sekor coaxed more power to the engines, curling the drop-ship back towards the ork capital ship as a rune blinked on his retinal display.

Aemna. The Fatal Redress. Sekor caught sight of the Deathwatch strike frigate long enough to realise what the shipmaster intended to do.

‘Oh,’ Sekor’s eyes went wide. ‘You stupid, stupid human.’

The space around the Fatal Redress began to undulate and shimmer. Instinctively, ork and tyranid ships in proximity to it peeled away in all directions, seeking to put as much distance as possible from the wounded frigate. Sekor watched the vessel’s Geller field shimmer into being, as the space in front of it began to tear like a velvet curtain.

Entering into the warp, even in the most calm and calculated conditions possible, was still a feat that was rife with peril. There were reasons Imperial law dictated that jumps occur only at designated points in planetary systems. Even the most flawless translation into the Sea of Souls was a horrifying cataclysm, as reality was torn open to admit the departing vessel into the beyond. Emergency warp translations were nearly always absolutely ruinous to the space around them.

An emergency warp translation conducted in the centre of a void battle was nothing short of apocalyptic.

The Fatal Redress dived into the roiling psychic syrup of the immaterium, and those ships too close to the vortex were pulled in as well, ork and tyranid alike. Vessels further away collided into one another under the pull of the translation point, rippling with internal detonations before shattering in clouds of twisted metal and hissing ichor.

‘What was that?’ Artemis demanded, the vox-link in Sekor’s helm stuttering and hazed with static.

‘The shipmaster just bought us an opening,’ Sekor replied, straining against the Blackstar’s controls. ‘If she didn’t just kill us doing it.’

Sekor pushed the engines to maximum, the drop-ship convulsing as it fought at the edge of the translation point’s pull. The vortex imploded, dissipating in a flash of tortured energy and flawed light. An ork ship caught halfway when the portal closed spun as the half in realspace broke free, its superstructure crumbling away like fossilised bone.

Sekor banked, pulling the ship onto a direct course towards the ork capital ship. Targeting runes meshed over his retinal display. He snarled as he depressed the firing runes on the control sticks. A withering salvo of energy bolts lanced into the ork ship’s hull from the Blackstar’s ventral lascannons, and a fusillade of stormstrike missiles leapt from beneath the drop-ship’s wings. The hull liquefied under the assault, the armour weakening and shearing away from the exposed decks beneath.

‘Brace! Brace!’ Sekor roared as he cut the engines and swung the Blackstar ninety degrees. Collision alarms screamed. The interior of the drop-ship was doused in crimson emergency lighting as the drop-ship smashed through the remaining weakened hull plating and ploughed through a scrap heap the size of a small mountain. Sekor fought to stay conscious as the g-force whipped the blood through his body, his vision blurring as a hurricane of scrap filled his view.

The Blackstar spun like a top, carving a gouge through the deck as it finally ground to a halt, partially buried in debris and refuse. The stanchions behind the drop-ship collapsed, burying half the chamber in compressed wreckage.

Sekor exhaled, and punched the buckle at his chest to release himself from the crash webbing of his control throne.

‘Adopt defensive protocol Iota-B-Nine,’ said Sekor to the servitors, placing them in control of the drop-ship’s weapon systems.

‘Compliance,’ they murmured in affirmation.

‘Well, brother-captain,’ Sekor said as he jumped down to the crew bay and the dazed kill teams within, ‘as you said, nothing extravagant.’

TWELVE

Artemis stormed down the assault ramp of the Corvus Blackstar and into the smoke-wreathed chamber of the ork battleship, bolter raised as Sekor and Rogerio held his flanks. Krycses’ team filed down the other assault ramp in practised silence, modified bolters covering all angles of their surroundings. Flickering targeting runes winked in and out across Artemis’ retinal display, his armour straining to pinpoint targets amidst the utter disarray of his surroundings.

Mountains of scrap metal reared over the Deathwatch kill teams. The air was a choking miasma of ash, scorched metal and industrial fumes. Rusted debris groaned and tumbled down in clamouring avalanches, reflecting the dirty light of chemical fires that danced against the blackened walls. Every breath was inundated with the dense fungal reek of the ork, and Artemis snarled as he tasted the xenos’ foul musk through his helmet filters.

The kill teams fanned across the chamber in silence, directed by curt battle-sign gestures from their commanders. Artemis halted his team quickly, priming his bolter as he heard approaching footsteps.

A mob of diminutive greenskins shuffled through the canyons of junk, attracted by the noise of their arrival. The hunched wretches, used for slave labour or exploited as meat shields in the Overfiend’s armies, cackled and shoved at one another, dull light glinting from their beady eyes and the broken tools they clutched.

Kill Team Artemis pressed to either side of the aliens’ path, hidden by smoke and mounds of scrap. As the gaggle passed, Rogerio and Sekor drew short blades, stalking behind their prey. It took only moments for the greenskins to die, left in expanding pools of their lifeblood as they choked through slit throats.

A rune flashed on Artemis’ visor display. Krycses had located a route out of the chamber. He blinked an affirmation to the Raven Guard, and watched their locator runes slip from the range of his auspex readout as the watch sergeant led his team through the ducts of a vent system at the opposite end of the chamber. Artemis brought up his vox, cycling through the frequencies selected by the kill teams as they planned their assault.

No contact from Caltanix. It was possible that the Black Templar’s kill team had boarded beyond range of the vox, or that the scale and material of the xenos craft was interfering with their communications. Perhaps more likely was that their drop-ship had been hit, and was now nothing more than splinters of wreckage in the void.

Artemis cleared his head. Such thinking was devoid of utility, nothing but a distraction in their current situation. No matter what had befallen them, Caltanix and his team were beyond Artemis’ aid. Krycses had taken his brothers along one path, and he would guide his own along another, as planned.

Seek and destroy. All had agreed that the best chance to locate and neutralise the Overfiend rested with each kill team moving through the ork vessel autonomously, staying in frequent vox contact to converge upon their target’s location when found.

‘Could the Fatal Redress have survived that warp jump?’ asked Hyphantes as the kill team picked their way through the fields of twisted metal.

‘Unlikely,’ replied Rogerio. ‘The superstructure was aflame as they translated. If the Geller field had been damaged they would be vulnerable to any number of predations waiting within the aether.’

‘The tyranid hive consciousness drowns out even the Astronomican’s light,’ hissed Imtehan, his voice strained through gritted teeth. ‘Their Navigator made the jump blind.’

‘Focus,’ Artemis snapped. ‘Their fate is irrelevant, and such speculation is done at expense to the moment. If death has taken them then so be it. They have done their duty, and it is now our mandate to do the same.’

‘And if they are dead?’ asked Sekor, cresting a dune of debris as he scouted ahead. ‘Any thought as to how we extract from this madness without them?’

Artemis was silent for a moment before replying. ‘There won’t be an extraction of any kind if we fail to accomplish our mission. We neutralise our target. Until that happens, no other considerations are relevant.’

Affirmation runes blinked across the watch captain’s visor display, the last coming from Sekor.

‘Stay alert, all of you. Sekor, have you identified an exit?’

‘Affirmative, brother-captain,’ Sekor replied. ‘Converge on my position.’

The remainder of the kill team closed and hunkered behind cover around the Imperial Castellan. Artemis crouched beside Sekor, following the path he indicated through the canyons of industrial refuse.

‘That is how the greenskins we despatched came in,’ said Sekor, motioning to a rusted bulkhead fifty yards ahead of their position. ‘Though I can guarantee we will be running into more of them going through there.’

‘Inevitable,’ Artemis replied, checking the ammo counter on his display. He turned to the rest of the kill team. ‘We move, fast and hard. Keep it tight and kill anything we hit up against, but don’t slow. If we get dragged into a pitched firefight, we are dead. If we get cut off and encircled, we are dead. Stay together, and keep moving.’

The kill team saluted with dull thuds of fists against breastplates. Artemis nodded.

‘On me, move out.’

The corridors of the ork ship were wreathed in clouds of toxic smog. The kill team stepped through thick drifts of rust, piled ankle deep like corroded snowfall. Passageways collapsed at random intervals, either from the inherent deterioration of greenskin technology or the constant tremors of the warship burning around them, forcing Artemis and his squad to double back through the labyrinth. The sweltering, humid air was thick with the guttural barks and roars of the greenskins, punctuated by the cold, bloodcurdling shrieks of tyranid combat organisms.

Artemis froze, a mailed fist raised to bring his kill team to a halt behind him as the deck gave a uniquely violent tremor. The Deathwatch warriors felt the iron of the wall come apart before they heard the scream of shearing metal. The wall ruptured like a jagged flower in bloom, sending shrapnel pinwheeling in all directions. Artemis raised a forearm, the fragments of twisted metal sparking from his armour as a blur of purple chitin appeared.

The tyranid warrior sank the scything claws protruding from its upper arms into the deck, arresting its slide in a fountain of sparks. It rose to its full height, head and shoulders taller than Artemis, turning its hideous visage upon the watch captain. The shining black orbs of its eyes glared unblinking from below a wedged crest of armoured chitin, riven by scars and slick with ichor and ork blood. It swung the bio-cannon it cradled in its lower arms towards Artemis, the tubular appendage glowing as it swelled with living plasma.

The tyranid wailed as a mob of charging orks burst from the tear it had made. The roaring greenskins leapt upon the warrior, carving into its armoured hide with axes and firing crude firearms at point-blank range. A scything claw bifurcated one of the orks from collar to hip, but the weight of numbers soon had it hauled to the ground in a storm of hacking blades. The walls were sprayed with dark ichor as they rang with the piggish battle cries of the orks.

Artemis opened fire on the knot of embattled xenos. Sekor fired his bolt pistols, and Rogerio lent his storm bolter’s fire to the barrage, a fusillade of mass-reactive death that reduced the grappling aliens to tatters of burst flesh and splintered bone. Gunsmoke twisted from the barrels of the kill team’s bolters like sanctified incense as they slammed fresh magazines home.

Hyphantes edged forwards, peering into the newly torn gap in the wall of the passageway. ‘Watch captain,’ he waved Artemis over.

The kill team gathered beside the Scythe of the Emperor, crouched behind the shorn metal of the breached wall. Artemis leaned out over Hyphantes, silent as he took in the scene before him.

The chamber was immense, a cavern of roughly hewn asteroid threaded with gantries, smoking generators and scrap-iron ducts. It was a factory, a hangar bay and an assembly area all at once, and it was absolutely teeming with warring xenos.

Swarms of tyranids flowed over mobs of braying orks. Larger warrior breeds of the Leviathan hive fleet reaped huge tallies with every slash of their bladed limbs as their hides crawled with whooping greenskin warboys. Ork tanks fired indiscriminately into the churning melee, their gunners oblivious to who or what they killed with the thunderous blasts of their battle cannons. Clattering greenskin walkers, little more than ramshackle cylinders of looted armour plating with shrieking rotary saws bolted to their hulls, threw themselves against the larger tyranids as packs of smaller ripper creatures inundated them with sheer numbers.

The cavern was so vast, its heights carved so high, that the morass of greasy smoke, aerosolised blood and industrial fumes rose and mingled together in the air, condensing to fall back as acid rain upon the heaving armies clashing below. Ochre fog clung to the ground as the rain burned away at the rust floating in reddish-black lakes of alien blood.

Artemis had seen entire battles that were of smaller scale than what was contained within the cavern’s jagged walls. Thousands of frenzied xenos of both races fought and died below the watching kill team – and this was just one of the countless battles raging between the two fleets.

‘Do we have a visual on our target?’ Artemis called out to his comrades. ‘Do we see the Overfiend?’

The Space Marines scanned the chaos of the battle below. While it was nearly impossible to distinguish between individual orks, slathered in blood and engine oil, they all had engaged enough greenskin warbands to know that the tyrants who commanded them were always of uniquely prodigious size. From the scattered intelligence they had on the Overfiend, only the Great Enemy, the ork war chieftain Ghazghkull, was larger, itself close to the size of a venerable Dreadnought.

There were dozens of orks that were powerful specimens of their vile breed in the clash below, but none approaching that bulk.

‘Negative,’ said Rogerio, the mechanical snarl of his augmetic throat still dripping with the acid of his marrow-deep hatred for the ork. ‘It is not there.’

‘Do we descend?’ asked Hyphantes, turning to Artemis. The eagerness in his voice was clear, his grip tight around the hilt of his combi-melta as he charged its under-slung meltagun.

‘Going down into that is suicide,’ said Sekor, shaking his head. ‘We do nothing to find our target by exposing ourselves to that many hostiles.’

‘We can skirt around,’ growled Imtehan. The Flesh Tearer pointed across the cavern to a series of massive pathways interspersed along the far wall. ‘Those passages lead deeper into the ship. That is where our prey lies.’

Artemis nodded in agreement. ‘We go in.’ He mag-locked his bolter and drew Exterminatus from its scabbard. He pointed the blade at the scaffolding ringing the cavern. ‘Circle around. Stick to the gantries above the fray, and stow your bolters. Any contacts we must engage will be neutralised silently.’

A deafening boom ripped through the cavern. An ork tank exploded in a fireball of spinning armour fragments, sending shrapnel knifing through everything within a thirty-yard radius. Hordes of orks and tyranids were eviscerated in the blast. Within moments, the two xenos races had filled the gap once more, trampling their dead as they leapt upon each other.

Artemis turned back to his kill team.

‘We do not want to attract their attention. Now move.’

The Deathwatch kill team vaulted over the breach, landing with a crunch of abused metal as they picked their way down into the madness of the cavern.

THIRTEEN

Gunfire stitched up the wall behind Artemis. Streamers of hot phosphorus whizzed by his position as the rounds struck the wall with percussive bangs, showering him with rock dust and bits of metal. He could not tell whether his presence had been discovered by an ork gunner, or if it was just one of the thousands of indiscriminate volleys of gunfire lancing through the cavern. It was impossible to say with any degree of certainty.

Kill Team Artemis had spent two hours negotiating the crumbling catwalks and gantries that encircled the cavern within the ork battleship. They sprinted between points of cover one by one, doing everything possible not to draw the ire of the two xenos races clashing in the bowl of the cavern. The Overfiend’s hordes and the swarms of hive fleet Leviathan churned against one another with seemingly inexhaustible numbers, the floor carpeted knee-deep with the dead and dying as their comrades trudged through them without care.

Artemis peered over the ledge of the scaffold he crouched behind. They had navigated over half of the circumference of the cavern towards the tunnel entrance to the network of passageways leading deeper into the greenskin warship, and with any fortune the location of the Overfiend itself. The doorway lay only a few hundred yards from their position.

The watch captain blinked rapidly, cycling through his vox-channels. He had lost contact with the other two kill teams that had boarded the warship with them three hours ago. The ork ship was immense, a dishevelled city of dense asteroid, void-hardened ice and jagged scrap iron. Such materials were likely the primary factor obstructing him from receiving clear auspex returns and vox communications as the Deathwatch navigated through its labyrinthine structure. Artemis had to get deeper into the core of the ship, towards where he knew the other Deathwatch kill teams would be converging in search of the ork warlord.

The steel mesh beneath Artemis trembled as Hyphantes charged towards him in a low sprint, sliding into a crouch beside him in a rasping whir of his armour’s servo joints. Hyphantes flexed his grip around his twin falx swords, giving Artemis a sharp nod as he took up a position behind him.

Artemis pulled a melta bomb from his belt, reaching under the gantry and clamping the explosive charge to the underside of the walkway. They had planted explosives at intervals along their path. Once they reached the passageways out of the cavern, the kill team would detonate the charges, detaching the scaffolds from the cavern wall and down onto the heads of the ork and tyranid hordes.

Adhering the melta bomb under the walkway with a hard clunk of magnetism, Artemis slid back from the edge and made ready to move to the next cover point. The clashing xenos made a ferocious din, easily covering the pounding tread of the Space Marine as he sprinted to where Rogerio knelt. The Crimson Fist waited for a moment before Artemis tapped his shoulder, and then shot forwards to the next point.

Cognisant of the tight-quarters combat he was sure to be steeped in during the boarding action, Rogerio had left his spear, a prized Chapter relic dating back to the founding of the Crimson Fists, behind on the Fatal Redress. He carried an exquisitely crafted power axe in both hands, its inactive generator snarling as the weapon’s leashed machine-spirit hungered for blood to shed.

Rogerio swore a silent oath to himself that, once this mission was concluded, he would scour the stars to find the Fatal Redress, wherever the warp’s foul currents had carried her. He would reclaim the cherished weapon his Chapter had entrusted him with. It had survived the tumult of his Chapter’s near extinction, and Rogerio vowed not to return to Rynn’s World without it in hand.

Rogerio came to a halt behind Sekor, the thrum of their active power armour sending thin shivers through the corrugated tin at the edge of the gantry. The cobalt of the Imperial Castellans glittered on Sekor’s shoulder pad in the flickering light, the Chapter icon of an armoured arm brandishing a sword in jet at its centre. Wisps of smog clung to Rogerio’s war-plate as he rapped his knuckles against the other Space Marine’s power pack. Sekor broke from cover and sprinted into the hot mist.

Imtehan skidded behind Artemis, ducking beneath an errant blast of bio plasma that fizzed and popped as it ate into the rock above them. Artemis began to move from cover when a shockwave nearly threw him from his feet.

A huge detonation rang out from behind him, sending tremors through the gantries with enough force to tear steel mesh, snap rebar and wrench support columns from their housings. Artemis cursed beneath his breath. A stray shell fired by one of the ork tanks had struck one of the melta charges the kill team had laid. The explosion tore an entire section of the scaffolding away, sending it spinning downwards into the battlefield in a cloud of shrapnel and blinding dust.

Imtehan spat a curse from his vox grille, a snarled bark of guttural Cretacian. A horde of orks had detached themselves from the edge of the battlefield, bearing towards the walls to inspect the source of the explosion. At the centre of the throng rumbled an ork tank, the massive greenskin riding atop it stabbing up at their position with a saw-bladed cleaver. The turret began to grind, panning the yawning mouth of its battle cannon towards the kill team.

Now it was Artemis’ turn to curse. ‘Throne,’ he hissed, looking to either side. ‘Displace!’

The battle cannon roared, rocking the tank back on its treads and wreathing the orks around it in blue fyceline as it lobbed a high-explosive shell into the scaffolds. The thin metal of the gantries burst into splinters as the shell hit, causing the catwalk beneath Artemis’ boots to lurch and groan in a chorus of protesting metal.

‘Move!’ Artemis pushed Imtehan forwards. The two Space Marines ran along the catwalk, with Hyphantes charging at their heels. Bullets ricocheted and sparked around them, fired by the crude weapons of the orks as they climbed the scaffolds towards them. Hyphantes took aim and fired his combi-melta as he ran, reducing a roaring greenskin’s head to a puff of pink mist.

A rocket spiralled, slamming into the catwalk ahead of the Space Marines in a burst of smoke and fire. Artemis cycled through the vision filters of his helm, selecting an enhanced mode that cut through the smoke.

The catwalk ahead of him was gone, sheared away by the ork rocket. A two-yard gap rushed up before him.

‘Jump!’ Artemis roared as he hurled himself across the gap, crashing down on the other side in a clang of strained metal. He stumbled for a moment before returning to his sprint. Imtehan struck the gantry behind him, a string of Cretacian invective issuing from his helm.

Hyphantes made the leap, clearing the gap and landing on the other side. A support beam beneath the catwalk snapped from the impact, wrenching the length of walkway down. Hyphantes’ feet slipped out from under him, landing hard and sliding down the falling walkway. He threw out an arm, seizing hold of the guard railing and arresting his fall at the end of the shorn catwalk.

Hyphantes looked down, his legs dangling above a growing sea of howling green faces. Small-arms fire slashed the air around him, a few lucky shots spanking from his armour and carving deep gouges in the ceramite. He felt a firm grip seize his wrist, and looked up.

‘Graceless,’ Imtehan hissed, grunting as he hauled Hyphantes back from the edge. The Flesh Tearer looked to Artemis as he rapped his chest with armoured fingers. ‘Half a cripple and still I am above the whelp.’

Hyphantes rolled his shoulders, rotating his left arm to clear a hitch from the servo joints. ‘My thanks to you, brother.’ The Scythe of the Emperor thudded a fist to his chest.

‘Another time,’ Artemis barked as a burst of gunfire slashed overhead. The Space Marines dashed forwards, meeting Rogerio and Sekor. The Crimson Fist and Imperial Castellan snapped off a blistering salvo of suppressing fire, curbing the tide of orks rising up the walls. They raised their bolters and joined in with the rest of the kill team as they ran the final yards towards the passageways.

The kill team reached a point directly above the tunnel entrance leading into the heart of the ship. Artemis activated the power field of Exterminatus, wreathing the blade in chains of killing light. He slashed down, carving a square into the grating of the walkway. The square fell away, clattering against the sloping rock wall as it pinwheeled to the ground.

Rogerio made the drop first, cratering the wall with his landing. The Crimson Fist veteran punched his right gauntlet out, raking down the slope to slow his fall as he slid. Imtehan went next, followed a moment later by Hyphantes.

‘Go!’ Artemis fired a burst from his bolter into the mobs of greenskins pounding down the catwalk. Sekor dropped down the gap, producing a thin cylinder from his belt and leaving a trail of dust as he slid down the slope.

The watch captain mag-locked his bolter as he backed to the drop. A howling ork bellowed a challenge, beating his chest with a rusted hatchet. Artemis stepped back, falling from the catwalk.

Sekor looked up, seeing that Artemis had cleared the scaffold. He raised the cylinder in his fist. Sekor triggered the activation rune on the detonator, and an intense flash swallowed the entire gantry. The Space Marine’s visor darkened to dull the blinding blast, and a smile touched his lips as he admired the destruction.

The chain of melta bomb detonations sheared the skeletal network of iron walkways from the wall of the cavern. The storm of jagged metal floated for a moment before tumbling down. The xenos turned, attempting to scatter from the onrushing mass of rebar as its shadow crept over them.

The gantry struck the ork and tyranid hordes in a mushroom cloud of dust and splintered rock. The expanding veil flew out in all directions, swallowing everything in sight. The swarms of rampaging aliens vanished within its suffocating embrace.

Artemis cycled through his vision filters, selecting an infrared overlay to pierce the dust and smoke. He slid to a stop as he reached the ground, joining the rest of his squad as they advanced towards the tunnel entrance. Artemis waved his comrades over to the looming gateway, turning to the noise of rumbling gears approaching from behind them.

A dark shape materialised from the dust, shaking with the clattering roar of hammering engines and grinding treads. The ork battle tank lumbered forwards, its mismatched armour given a ghostly pallor by the rock dust.

The tank’s battle cannon ground towards them, the ork commander perched atop its turret roaring as it pounded the roof of the tank. Artemis made ready to leap as a shadow flitted over the tank.

With a high-pitched shriek, a pack of winged tyranid harpies swooped down upon the ork war machine. The hideous flying beasts hooked their talons into the turret, tearing the cannon from its mounting. The ork commander was snatched up between two of the harpies, howling and lashing out with its cleaver before they tore him in half.

More shapes appeared from the dust – the thick, brutish aspects of the orks and the hunched, revolting silhouettes of the tyranids. Artemis spun on his heel, leading the kill team through the gateway and into the mouth of the tunnel.

Sekor threw his last melta bomb as they ran, the charge locking to the ceiling just above the tunnel entrance. Orks streamed in behind them, caked in bloody dust and howling in frustrated rage.

Sekor triggered the detonator. Nothing happened. The Imperial Castellan cursed, pounding the device against his gauntlet.

Artemis halted, spun and brought up his bolter. He took aim and fired. The melta charge exploded, enveloping the tunnel mouth in a blinding flash of superheated plasma. The ceiling collapsed, bringing tons of rock down upon the pursuing xenos and sealing the tunnel behind the Deathwatch kill team. The strangled cries of greenskins and the clicking scrape of dying tyranids sounded weakly from beneath the heap of stone for a moment, before all was silent.

Sekor crushed the detonator in his fist, hurling it to the ground as the kill team advanced into the darkness of the tunnel.

FOURTEEN

The kill team moved in silence through the tunnels of the ork ship. Veils of toxic mist filled the passage to knee height, clinging to the dark armour of the Space Marines. The width of the tunnel varied widely. At points it would constrict to less than an arm’s span on either side, before yawning wide enough to allow a Land Raider battle tank to pass through. As with so much of their architecture, the orks displayed no rhyme or reason here. The darkness was almost total, only briefly illuminated by the sparking of the decrepit machinery and faulty cabling threading through the walls. The blackness was no obstacle to the Deathwatch, even without the enhanced infrared vision of their helms.

Artemis smelled the orks before he saw them. The spicy fungal reek of them curled his lip in disgust as he pushed down the bile rising in his throat. He heard their heavy tread, no fewer than a dozen of the brutes lumbering through the poisonous smog towards them.

The tunnel had narrowed, and was barely wide enough to accommodate two of the Space Marines shoulder to shoulder. Rogerio heard the orks a moment after Artemis, his rune pulsing on the watch captain’s visor display.

‘I see them,’ said Artemis, his eyes flicking to his ammo counter. The countless running battles the kill team had fought against the orks and tyranids through the tunnels for the past hours had expended over a third of their ammunition. They would have to reserve their remaining supplies if they were to have any hope of completing their mission, not to mention blasting their way out of the xenos warship afterwards.

‘Blades,’ Artemis ordered, as he had ordered in the past three skirmishes. Rogerio gave a pleased grunt in reply, hefting his power axe as Artemis drew Exterminatus. ‘Hyphantes, Imtehan, kill anything that gets through us. Sekor, make sure nothing moves in behind.’

The kill team stowed bolters and drew their melee weapons as the porcine barks of the orks grew louder. Artemis and Rogerio halted, bracing into fighting stances as the xenos rounded a corner.

The two Space Marines triggered the power fields of their weapons as one. Exterminatus glowed, silver lightning coursing down its blade, while webs of crackling sapphire energy shivered down Rogerio’s axe. The orks stopped abruptly, grunting in alarm at the sudden light. They recovered quickly, brandishing cleavers and war mauls, and charged.

Rogerio roared, splitting an ork in half from skull to hips with a brutal overhead strike. He wrenched his axe from the dead alien’s guts, smashing aside a clubbing blow from an ork cleaver and taking the beast’s head from its shoulders.

‘Come to me, kine!’ Rogerio snarled as he waded into the ork ranks, his axe flashing with discharging energy with each killing strike. ‘Come join those who dared exist in the Emperor’s galaxy. Join them in oblivion!’

Exterminatus reaped a gruesome tally as it carved through the howling greenskins. Heads, limbs and weapons spun away into the dark in sprays of stinking blood, the xenos’ bodies torn into ribbons of putrid meat by the relic blade.

A massive ork bellowed a savage battle cry and slammed its war maul down at Artemis. The watch captain sidestepped, absorbing the blow on his pauldron. The maul’s head struck like a tolling bell, and Artemis felt the layers of ceramite armour fracture as his shoulder dislocated. He growled in anger and rammed his sword forwards, driving the blade up into the beast’s ribcage. The ork gave a strangled cry, its foetid breath flecking blood and bits of spoiled meat into Artemis’ faceplate as it tottered.

Artemis stumbled as the ork fell onto its back, dragging him to one knee as he finally pulled his sword from its ribcage. His head snapped up as he heard a deep clunk, and he looked up into the barrel of an ork hand cannon.

The greenskin bellowed an incoherent sound that might have been laughter. It aimed its crude weapon, and pulled the trigger.

For all that the tanks and weaponry of the xenos looked as if they had been made from rubbish soldered together by a madman in the dark, and although they appeared to teeter on the verge of self-destruction with every use, ork wargear was brutally effective in the vast majority of cases.

This was not one of those cases.

The ork’s firearm exploded in a flash of dirty light and scuds of greasy smoke. Artemis shielded his face with his bracer and came to his feet, his ears ringing as the air cleared. The ork was gone from the waist up. Its squat legs tilted and toppled to the ground at the centre of a circle of blasted rock.

A spinning globe of spiked iron slashed over Artemis’ head, crushing the skull of a charging ork. Imtehan stepped forwards and hauled his meteor hammer back on its clattering chain. The morning star wrenched free from the ruin of the greenskin’s face in a welter of stinking gore.

Artemis stood, slamming his shoulder against the wall to snap it back into place. He snarled, and gripped Exterminatus in both hands. An ork’s head flew from its shoulders as the watch captain charged back into the crushing melee. He passed Rogerio, who crouched over a thrashing ork he was choking the life from as he screamed his hatred down at the beast. The Crimson Fist beat the greenskin’s head against the ground until it broke apart, then took up his axe again.

Artemis froze. Instinct stilled his mind for a heartbeat, right before he felt the tremor beneath his boots. He dived back as the bedrock shattered in a cloud of splinters. A gaping maw filled with slavering, diamond-hard fangs emerged from the dust. A pair of huge, mantis-like talons hooked the lip of the breach, levering an undulating serpentine body into the tunnel. Two more sets of smaller talons unfolded, stringed with gelatinous resin, as the massive tyranid reared to the ceiling of the tunnel.

‘Contact!’ Artemis barked, rolling to his feet and drawing his bolt pistol with his free hand. ‘Ravener-breed!’

The ravener struck in a blink. Artemis lapsed into reflex and training, bringing up Exterminatus just in time to deflect a decapitating strike from the monster’s talon. Razor-edged chitin burned as it clashed with the power sword’s energised blade in a puff of ozone and acrid smoke. Artemis ducked as another talon strike blurred over his head, blasting chunks from the ravener’s exoskeleton with his bolt pistol.

The one ork remaining in the tunnel yelped as the ravener snatched it in its two sets of lower limbs. The greenskin bayed as the talons sank into its flesh. The ravener tore the ork into quarters, hurling the spurting chunks aside as it charged the kill team.

‘Witness the vengeance of Sotha!’ Hyphantes vaulted into the air, vaporising one of the ravener’s primary limbs with a blast from his combi-melta. He locked the weapon to his thigh and drew his twin falxes as he descended. He rammed the curved blades of the swords into the tyranid’s flank. A shrieking howl tore from the beast as he let his weight drag him to the ground, leaving a pair of haemorrhaging lacerations down the alien’s side. Ichor from the wounds sprayed his armour, blinding him for the moment it took the ravener to bring its tail around. The blow smashed Hyphantes against the wall of the tunnel.

Sekor advanced on the ravener, twin bolt pistols blazing. Chunks of the tyranid’s spined crest tore away in the mass-reactive firestorm. Sekor’s fire halted as his magazines emptied. The ravener surged forwards as he paused to reload. A scything talon slashed across Sekor’s chest, hurling him to the ground.

A pained battle cry filled the tunnel. Imtehan charged, his meteor hammer spinning in a deadly orbit above his head. He swung the morning star, crushing chitin and exoskeleton with each impact.

Rogerio stalked to the beast’s wounded side, pulling a frag grenade from his belt. He leapt forwards, pouncing on the ravener. He punched into the gaping wound of the tyranid’s severed forelimb, sinking his arm shoulder-deep. The ravener screeched, thrashing and sending the Crimson Fist flying.

There was a muted click within the ravener’s shoulder, before the inside of the tyranid lit up. The frag grenade detonated, and the creature exploded in a shower of black gore. A jagged section of its snake-like lower torso twitched, trembling for a moment before thudding to the ground in a wash of pulsing ichor.

Artemis hauled Sekor to his feet. The ravener’s talon had sheered through his breastplate, and dark blood oozed over the iron aquila emblazoned on his chest.

‘It is nothing,’ Sekor shook his head, waving Artemis away. ‘The wound is already closing.’

Artemis nodded. ‘Take a moment, brother.’ He turned, walking to where Imtehan and Rogerio were helping Hyphantes up. The Scythe of the Emperor wavered for a moment, steadying himself against the wall before straightening fully.

Artemis looked over his kill team. Each warrior had accumulated wounds during the boarding action, their armour scarred and pitted, the flat black lacquer scorched and abraded away in places down to the steel-grey of the ceramite. The Chapter icons on their pauldrons were marred by xenos blades and claws, and the symbol of the Deathwatch bore similar scars on the silver of their left arms.

His warriors had borne the brunt of the maelstrom, thought Artemis. He was astonished they had not taken casualties.

‘Patch your wounds,’ Artemis ordered, swapping a fresh magazine into his bolt pistol. ‘I want an ammunition inventory in two minutes.’

The Deathwatch kill team knelt in an outwards-facing circle, remaining vigilant for any sign of inbound threats as they performed rites of restoration upon their power armour and counted their remaining ammunition. Artemis did the same, drawing an oiled cloth over Exterminatus to clean the rime of alien blood from its blade. He reloaded his bolter, grimly noting that his remaining magazines had dwindled to half capacity. He breathed deeply. It would have to be enough.

‘Watch captain!’ Rogerio called out from the edge of their perimeter. Artemis rushed to the side of the Crimson Fist, panning over the darkness ahead with his bolter. He looked to the veteran, who crouched with a hand to the side of his helm.

‘I hear something.’

Artemis immediately flicked through the vox frequencies in his helm. ‘What do you hear?’

‘It…’ Rogerio strained to hear over the haze of boiling static. ‘It sounds like Watch Sergeant Krycses.’

Artemis found the frequency, listening to the faulty vox-channel as it fizzed and popped with interference. He could barely make out the voice of the Raven Guard. He walked forwards, the signal clearing fractionally the further he went. The rest of the kill team rearmed and followed him down the tunnel.

Artemis began to sprint, tearing loose rock from the ground as he charged forwards. ‘To me, brothers!’

The kill team broke into a thundering run behind Artemis. He heard the voice of the Raven Guard flickering between the static. The delivery of the communication was flawed, but the son of Corax’s message was clear:

They had located the Overfiend.

FIFTEEN

Watch Sergeant Krycses was a child of shadow.

Born on the airless rock of Deliverance, the boy who would become Krycses had been moulded by darkness from his first moment of life. Abandoned in the monolithic shadow of the Ravenspire, he had been brought within the darkness of its crypts. To this day he did not know the identities of those who had forsaken him, or whether the blood in his veins had been that of spire nobility or gutter transients. Nor could he bring himself to care. He had taken the first step on the path towards ascension. The blood in his veins would soon be that of demigods.

The boy ceased to be human, becoming an apprentice of the night-shrouded masters of the Raven Guard’s fortress-monastery. He survived the mutations and surgeries that hardened his bones and swelled his muscles. He endured where other supplicants were broken by the Chapter’s perilous trials. He faced the utter blackness of the shadows, and wilfully sank into their cold embrace.

Initiations and proving grounds ended, and service within the Scout Company of the Raven Guard began. He had become one with the shadows, the avenging blade of the primarch, striking down the enemies of the Imperium in silence. It consumed him – the cold calculation and discipline, the stealth. The feeling of watching the light flee from an enemy’s eyes, from a hand’s span as lifeblood flowed over his combat blade or from the telescopic sight of a sniper rifle miles away. It suited the child of the shadows better than his own flesh.

When the time had come for him to join the battle companies, the warrior who had become Krycses looked upon that mantle, and allowed it to pass from him. He would remain among the Scouts, the coldest talon of the Raven Guard, and his masters acquiesced to his wish.

So his service to the shadow war continued for the next eighty-six years. In that time, there was no enemy of mankind that had not met its end at the kiss of his rifle or the edge of his blades. When the shadow war called him into the ranks of the Deathwatch, those who made war against the most vile fastnesses of the hated alien, he had gone aboard their ebon warships without question. He had put aside the Scout carapace and accepted the strength of power armour then, keeping only the ragged cameleoline cloak he wore as a remnant of his former station.

Krycses almost always remained silent, and his voice scratched as he called out his message into the vox. Quyuk, a peerless tracker of the White Scars who could stalk prey across entire star systems without fail, thrashed at his feet, clutching his throat as bright arterial spray jetted from the wound he was fighting in vain to close. Artek of the Iron Lords hurled a smoke grenade ahead of their position, buying Krycses a handful of seconds as a fusillade of gunfire cut the distant son of the Gorgon down.

Krycses unclamped a thick cylinder of dark metal from the small of his back. His breath hissed calm and even from his helm as ordnance filled the air around him. The Raven Guard iterated his message once more, boosting the vox signal as far as the machine would allow, and set the communication to repeat every ten seconds as he tapped in a series of commands on the cylinder.

The device vibrated softly with the clicking of internal components as a deafening roar blasted through the thinning smoke. Krycses gritted his teeth as a bullet punched through his shoulder, fracturing the stripped-down power armour and shredding the ragged cameleoline cloak that hung about his shoulders.

The Raven Guard looked down upon the beacon as it pulsed insistently for activation. A thick shadow fell over Krycses, accompanied by the pounding of monstrous footsteps. He felt the caress of that familiar darkness, the projected lightlessness he had dwelt within to cut the life from his enemies, close over him to finally take its claim. The irony brought a thin smile to his lips.

Krycses’ fist slammed down on the beacon, before the shadows burned away in a storm of fire.

Artemis’ eyes locked to the auspex readout on his retinal display as the beacon fired. The signal carried clear, even through the dense walls of rock and scrap iron of the ork warship. The Deathwatch kill team pushed themselves to move faster. All around the Space Marines, the titanic xenos vessel rumbled and groaned. The blood-maddened cries of greenskins and the endless scratching of thousands upon thousands of tyranids filled the air around them.

Artemis pushed himself harder. He felt the sting of combat stimulants entering his bloodstream from the interface ports that connected him with his armour. The gene-forged warriors of the Adeptus Astartes were capable of staggering acts of sustained physical effort, able to fight on where mortal soldiers would fall to crippling wounds or exhaustion many times over. But they were not invincible. Their armour sustained damage, their bodies accumulated wounds and fatigue, and their weapons hungered for ammunition and grew blunted from protracted battle as surely as any others. They could tire, they could bleed, and they could die.

Artemis followed the beacon’s signal like a lifeline. It blinked again as his auspex refreshed, eight hundred yards distant. He began to see the weak glow of a light source ahead. Artemis primed his bolter, slowing his pace.

The light was coming from a string of corroded sodium lamps drilled into the ceiling of the tunnel. They led to a large bulkhead, roughly one and a half times Artemis’ height and of distinctly Imperial design. Like the space hulks they so often infested, the greenskins created most of their warships and other weapons of war from amalgamations of pilfered vessels captured during raids.

It sickened Artemis to see the technological perfection of the human race twisted in service to this mongrel scum. He could feel the rage radiating from Rogerio behind him. The veteran had survived the near extinction of his Chapter at the hands of the orks on Rynn’s World, and he exemplified the marrow-deep hatred those sons of Dorn felt towards the greenskins.

‘They befoul our warships to cobble together their abominations,’ Rogerio hissed. ‘Brother-captain, when the time comes, let it be me who takes the beast’s head.’

‘If the sightings of this Overfiend are to be believed,’ replied Artemis, ‘it will take all of our strength to bring it low.’

The watch captain turned to regard his kill team. He looked at each of his brothers, battered and tested by the crucible of this mission, but unbowed.

Unbroken.

‘We stand upon the threshold of the beast,’ said Artemis. ‘We must be swift, and strike together as one. Hate the xenos, and be ruthless and thorough in its annihilation. We shall cut the head from this horde of barbarian filth and set them upon each other. We will fulfil our oaths of moment, and see this foul tyrant destroyed for daring to exist in the Emperor’s galaxy. We strike together!’

Artemis slammed a fist to his chest.

‘Together!’ his brothers replied, mirroring the salute.

‘Suffer not the alien to live,’ Artemis snarled, turning and raising a boot to the bulkhead. He slammed down, tearing the rusted hatch from its hinges.

The kill team stormed into a gallery that had been ripped from an Imperial battleship. It was a long corridor, with a buttressed ceiling that soared high above the heads of the Deathwatch warriors. Great armourglass windows filled the walls on either side, giving an uninterrupted view of the chaos of the void conflict between the orks and the Leviathan hive fleet. Crude xenos graffiti covered much of the glass, and heaps of refuse and scrap were strewn across the floor, but the gallery’s eerie presence on the greenskin flagship still stopped Artemis in his tracks. It was like staring into the eyes of a dead brother, his body desecrated but unmistakable.

The corridor led to a massive steel gateway, the entrance to an audience chamber where envoys and adjutants would report to the master of the ship. The beacon pulsed, directly ahead. Artemis knew that the Overfiend was waiting behind those doors. All that stood between the Deathwatch kill team and its target was a throng of screaming xenos.

The gallery was the same abattoir the cavern had been. Heaving masses of orks and tyranids clashed, their foul blood fountaining onto the rusted deck. Greenskins bayed their savage war cries as they flung themselves at the scything claws of the tyranids, exhilarated as they revelled in the violence. The swarms of Leviathan came on, an unstoppable tide of monstrosities enslaved by an insatiable hunger.

‘Flesh Tearer,’ said Artemis, looking back over his shoulder. ‘Make us a path.’

‘At last.’ Imtehan stepped forwards, unlimbering a blackened flamer from his back. He had stowed the flamethrower in the tunnels, where the crushing close quarters and air thick with volatile chemicals made the weapon more of a liability than an asset. The air in the gallery was as clear as it could be on an ork ship.

The blue tongue of the flamer’s pilot light flickered beneath the dual barrels of the weapon. Imtehan braced in a wide stance and levelled the barrel at the churning melee. The embattled xenos turned to confront the new threat just as Imtehan depressed the firing stud.

Sheets of chemical fire screamed from the flamer, enveloping ranks of orks and tyranids in a storm of ignited promethium. Ochre green flesh and purple chitin ran like wax, sloughing into heaps of burning fat and ash. Imtehan walked forwards, dragging the flames back and forth over the xenos hordes. Alien howls pierced the flamer’s roar as dozens of the creatures burned alive.

The tyranids’ vile presence dug deeper into the meat of Imtehan’s mind. He gritted his teeth tighter, feeling as though his skull might split from the pressure swelling behind his eyes. He channelled the agony into a snarled litany of hatred as he atomised his foe with holy flame.

Artemis and the rest of the kill team followed in a wedge behind Imtehan, blasting into the xenos with a withering salvo of boltgun fire. Artemis fired flaring blasts from the combi-flamer, setting concentrated knots of greenskins ablaze before its reserve of promethium was depleted. The Flesh Tearer had reaped a fearsome tally with his flamer, and his Deathwatch brothers had pressed deep into the heart of the enemy in his wake – but it would not be enough.

The jet of flame stuttered as the canister of promethium feeding Imtehan’s flamer ran dry. Starved of fuel, the weapon ceased its lethal deluge. Imtehan dropped the spent canister with a hollow clang as he reached for another. The enraged xenos broke from their combat with each other and turned to charge at the Deathwatch Space Marines.

‘Stand ready!’ shouted Artemis, drawing his bolt pistol in one hand and Exterminatus in the other. ‘They will swarm to encircle us!’

Kill Team Artemis braced for the imminent onslaught. The watch captain seethed, to be so close to fulfilling his mission only to be cut down at the vile warlord’s door. He focussed, set on the grim knowledge that the xenos would pay dearly before he gave his dying breath.

The xenos charged in a thundering stampede of crude boots and scraping claws. They closed, ready to pounce, as a side entrance to the gallery exploded in a flash of superheated air.

A melta blast, Artemis realised.

Dark forms surged out from the shroud of smoke and dust. Lightning chained from within the pall as massive weapons smashed into the alien tide. The charge died as a wedge of armoured figures cut into its flank. Massive boarding shields crushed against the writhing forms of orks and tyranids. Thunder hammers and power mauls crushed chitin and pulped flesh.

At the centre of the storm of whirling death was a champion bearing a sword dark as midnight. The champion tore the aliens apart, cleaving bodies and taking heads with each sweep of his blade.

‘Well met, Brother Artemis,’ bellowed Caltanix, his words booming from his helmet grille. The Templar raised his longsword in salute before bringing it down to split an ork chieftain in two. ‘Let us finish this.’

SIXTEEN

The charging xenos faltered as they were struck on two fronts. The slow, implacable march of the vanguard veterans, with Caltanix at their head, crushed the thrashing aliens against their shield wall as they were shredded by a firestorm of bolter fire from Kill Team Artemis.

After their fusillade, Artemis drew Exterminatus and led his brothers into the melee. The two kill teams of the Deathwatch butchered their way towards each other, leaving the stolen gallery a charnel house of broken alien flesh. As the last of the xenos fell, the Space Marines trudged knee deep through the dead to stand before one another.

‘Watch captain.’ Caltanix brought the hilt of his longsword to his forehead.

‘Hail, Caltanix,’ replied Artemis. Xenos blood fizzed and popped from the active blade of Exterminatus, cooking into twisting coils of foul-smelling smoke. He looked upon the vanguard veterans of Kill Team Caltanix. Their wargear bore the same level of damage as Artemis’ squad. The broad boarding shields they carried were gouged and cratered from small-arms fire. Patches of their power armour were splintered, the lacquer burned away by the touch of flame and bio-acid. The edges of their swords and hammers were scored and blunted by protracted use. Chainswords offered gap-toothed smiles, their tracked sawblades stripped of half their teeth.

An ivory-helmed Apothecary, bearing the heraldry of the Novamarines, settled to a crouch over a fallen brother. The warrior was surrounded by heaps of dead, half buried himself in the twitching corpses of xenos he had killed.

Caltanix and the Apothecary exchanged a short glance. The Novamarine shook his head slowly, and readied his reductor. The watch captain stared for a moment, before issuing orders to his brethren to see to their wargear. The veterans split, half of their number keeping watch while the others made quick repairs, replaced tracks of chainsword teeth, and offered prayers to their armour and weapons, before rotating.

Artemis saw the body beneath the Apothecary as the gene-seed was cut loose. It was the Blood Angel, Pecori. Imtehan stared at the body, bearing silent witness as the reductor and bone saws of the Novamarine’s narthecium gauntlet did their gruesome work. The Blood Angel’s progenoid glands, fleshy masses of pinkish tissue, were sealed within cryo-cylinders and stowed within a case on the Apothecary’s belt.

With a careful mix of alacrity and reverence, the Novamarine machined the warrior’s pauldron loose and pulled it free. The Apothecary locked the shoulder pad to a harness on his power pack. The crimson war-plate would see the skies of Baal once more, even if the warrior who had worn it would not. Kill Team Caltanix now stood on the strength of seven brothers.

‘You have lost kindred,’ said Artemis, bringing a fist to his chest.

‘Yes, our path carried us through the greenskin birthing chambers.’ Artemis could hear the solemn tone in the knight’s voice giving over to fury. ‘Two of our number fell between there and here. Brother Pecori had been wounded purging a tyranid brood infesting a barricaded causeway. His fall was not… unexpected, by me.’

The Black Templar paused for a moment and rolled his shoulders.

‘Nulsis,’ said Caltanix. The Novamarine Apothecary rose.

‘Kindred.’ Nulsis uttered the single word, his voice low and resonant, before stepping away to attend to his chainaxe. Each warrior of Kill Team Caltanix stopped before Pecori’s body. They crouched, offering a silent word to their departed, before taking a portion of his armour as Nulsis had done. Deathwatch war-plate was a sacred relic, and priceless beyond measure. Just as the Blood Angel’s legacy would live on through his gene-seed, his brothers ensured that his armour would continue on in service to the Deathwatch as well. It was then that Artemis noticed the other sections of armour hanging from the harnesses of the vanguard veterans. None of their fallen’s wargear had been left behind, their machine-spirits not forsaken to rot away in ignominy aboard the ork warship.

Nulsis returned to Pecori, now stripped of his armour. He primed a syringe from his narthecium gauntlet, injecting it into the fallen Blood Angel’s neck. The modified strain of the mutagenic acid used in the Deathwatch’s hellfire boltgun rounds coursed through the Space Marine’s body, boiling it away into dust and ash.

The Novamarine gathered Pecori’s weapons, an artificer-crafted bolt pistol and power sword of gleaming silver. Nulsis stepped to Caltanix, raising the weapons to him with his head bowed. The knight accepted them, stowing the bolt pistol and sheathing the power sword at his hip.

Caltanix levelled his stare at Artemis. ‘These brothers’ crusades have ended, but ours has not. Come, we must not tarry now. This foulness must be purged.’

The knight stepped before the massive gateway at the end of the gallery. ‘Kindred, help me tear these doors down.’

The thick iron doors of the gateway flashed white-hot as the heat of the melta charges liquefied them to slag. The doors dulled to a deep red as the charges died, and began to bow from the booming pounding of hammer blows. The strikes reverberated through the darkened chamber like the tolling of bells, before the frame of the doorway gave way. The immense doors were sent crashing to the ground with a peal of thunder, revealing twelve giants standing at the threshold.

A thick pall of smoke filled the chamber. Artemis cycled through his vision filters, unable to pierce its toxic veil. Thin static crackled over his retinal display, meaning that a portion of the smoke was from a Deathwatch-issue blind grenade. The beacon pulsed on his auspex, just yards from where he stood. He heard a crashing stomp, and the device’s guiding light was extinguished.

Did the Overfiend want us to come here? thought Artemis. It would have constituted a surprising degree of cunning from a greenskin, though this tyrant was anything but typical for its mongrel race.

‘Stand!’ Caltanix shouted into the chamber. The knight levelled his longsword at the darkness. ‘Face the judgement of the Emperor of Mankind, praise be to Him! Show thyself, foul xenos, and die by His avenging hand!’

Silence greeted the Black Templar’s challenge. Artemis strained to hear the eager shuffling of metal-shod boots scraping against the bare rockcrete of the floor, the soft clattering of armour plates. He heard the deep, low breathing of multiple entities within the pall. That they did not charge immediately was another stunning feat of discipline for the greenskins.

The silence was broken by a rolling thud. An object bounced from the smoke, rolling slowly towards Caltanix. The knight stopped the object with a mailed boot. It was a Space Marine helm, with etchings of avian motifs and screeds of sharp Lycaen script.

The dead eyes of Watch Sergeant Krycses looked up at Caltanix from behind its tinted visor, as a deafening roar shook the walls. The vocal blast was a physical force, so strong it parted the smoke and cleared it from the room.

A dozen ork warriors of the larger, ruling breed stood before the Space Marines of the Deathwatch, clutching battleaxes and flexing the talons of pneumatic power claws. Scavenged tank plate and dense scrap iron was bent around their limbs to form crude armour, which was slathered in crimson war paint. Their faces were dyed the same arterial red, with their brutish tusks and fangs stained black.

Standing behind the fearsome greenskin berserkers, rising from a vast scrap-iron throne, was the single biggest ork that Artemis had ever seen.

It stood, the throne groaning with relief as it was freed of its oppressive weight. The ork reared to its full height, its hunched posture within its brutish armour still nearly half again the height of a Space Marine.

Chains and lengths of metal cabling dangled in dreadlocks from beneath its jaw, adorned with skulls that clattered like beads against the armour of its chest. More skulls – human, alien and some beyond any recognition – rattled from iron polearm axes that protruded from its shoulders, along with the desecrated helms of more than a dozen Space Marine Chapters. The beast wore a crown of crossed axes, their blades lacquered in scarlet, a match for the crude clan symbol daubed on the banner of rough sackcloth that rose from its back.

One enormous fist ended in scything talons, glowing red with heat from the crackling generators mounted on the crude armour the ork was encased in. The other clutched an immense double-headed axe, itself the size of a mature ork, stained red and covered in greenskin tribal graffiti.

The ork warlord bared its teeth, the cracked fangs and tusks curving from its jaw stained black in the same fashion as its retinue. The beast’s maw stretched wide as it issued another tectonic roar. Its praetorians joined in the war cry, shaking their fists and slamming their weapons against their chests.

Artemis’ heart sank as he beheld the greenskin warlord.

‘This is not the Overfiend,’ he said.

‘What?’ Caltanix hissed.

‘This is one of its vile sub-commanders.’ Artemis remembered the hypnotic instruction and eidetic recall briefings that had been conducted before their mission. He recognised the beast before him as the warlord of one of the larger clans of greenskins in service to the Overfiend. Roughly translated into Gothic, the ork was known as ‘Gorsnik Magash’, warboss of the clan designated the ‘Blood Axes’. The greenskin was formidable, responsible for spilling the blood of billions and for the pillaging of countless Imperial worlds, but it was not the target the Deathwatch sought to eliminate.

‘Overfiend or no,’ growled Caltanix, ‘this brute dies now.’

SEVENTEEN

The warriors of the Deathwatch stood in silence before Gorsnik Magash and his blood-maddened orks. Caltanix hefted his longsword, placing the ebon blade upon the rim of his boarding shield. The vanguard veterans who formed Kill Team Caltanix stood shoulder to shoulder with their watch captain, grips tight upon the hafts of thunder hammers, power mauls and chainswords as they built their shield wall.

Kill Team Artemis formed a second rank behind Caltanix’s line breakers. The barrels of their bolters held steady, aimed over the shoulders of the vanguard veterans. Targeting reticules danced over Artemis’ retinal display, settling over each of the orks’ heads and locking in brackets of sharp crimson light.

As one, the shield wall saluted in thunder those whom they were about to destroy. Seven weapons clashed against seven shields as they took their first step.

Thrun dun dun DUN!

Another step.

Thrun dun dun DUN!

Another.

Thrun dun dun DUN!

A savage war cry ripped from the throats of the orks as they charged. Kill Team Artemis opened fire, sending streams of mass-reactive death into the oncoming xenos. A bolt-round took one ork through the eye before detonating, the back of its head blowing out in a shower of blood and skull fragments. Another fell as its left knee disappeared in a puff of crimson mist. A burst hit it as it crashed to the ground, tearing its throat away in jets of gore. Bolts ricocheted from the orks’ armour, some finding the gaps between plates to score deep wounds that only served to enrage the greenskins further. The vanguard veterans interlocked their shields, weapons ready as the xenos closed to within a few yards.

Ten orks struck the shield wall with the force of a siege hammer. Kill Team Caltanix strained, held their ground, and pushed. Step after grinding step, the vanguard veterans drove forwards. Sword blades and hammers swung over the tops of their shields, while Artemis’ kill team fired precision shots at point-blank range into the orks’ howling faces.

Caltanix barked an order, and the shield wall froze. He barked again, and the centre of the wall allowed the orks to push them back. The line of Space Marines held, slowly bowing back as the orks pushed deeper into the chevron of shields.

‘Now, brother!’ Caltanix roared.

Kill Team Artemis swung out from both sides, snapping around the charging orks at their flanks. The xenos found themselves locked within a constricting ring of dark armour.

Artemis triggered the power field of Exterminatus and lanced it through the back of an ork’s skull. He tore the blade out sideways, leaving the alien’s head hanging by ligaments as it crashed to its knees. The orks thrashed within the tightening circle, crushed closer and closer together. Soon they could not raise their arms, and they howled in frustrated rage as blades found their throats and hammers pulped their skulls.

Rogerio cut the head from the last of the greenskins with his axe. He stooped, gathering the severed head up by its topknot of coarse black hair, and hurled it at the feet of Gorsnik Magash.

The ork warlord looked down at the head of its warrior, before returning the glare of its beady, bloodshot eyes to the Deathwatch Space Marines. A wet, choking rumble issued from the ork’s blackened maw. Artemis’ face twitched in revulsion at the xenos tyrant’s monstrous excuse for laughter.

Magash stomped the head flat in a wet crack of breaking skull, crushing it to a paste and smearing it across the deck. Its talons knifed through the air, their smouldering tips wreathed in heat haze. It took a booming step down from the elevated dais its throne sat upon. The Deathwatch kill teams scrambled to reform as the ork warlord raised its axe overhead and brought it smashing down to the ground.

The impact was seismic. Artemis was hurled from his feet, landing hard on his side with a squeal of grinding ceramite. He rolled to his feet, watching as Magash struck a vanguard veteran of the Dark Angels with the fist of its power claw. The warrior’s torso collapsed in a spray of blood, the blow killing him before he smashed against the far wall. A sweep of the ork’s axe killed two more, shearing through their shields and sawing through their bodies at the shoulders.

Rogerio roared, rolling beneath the axe’s blades and bringing his own to bear. He slashed into the torso of the warlord, drawing fountains of sparks from the looted tank plates as Sekor blasted at its head with his bolt pistols.

Magash twisted, turned and raked its power claw over the Crimson Fist veteran. The superheated talons tore Rogerio’s right side open. His power axe spun away, still in the grip of his severed right arm. The ork backhanded Rogerio, swatting him away and sending him hurtling into a wall. The sternguard struck with enough force to crack the rockcrete before falling in a heap.

‘Brother!’ Hyphantes cried. A howl of rage ripped from the grille of his helm as he leapt upon the back of the greenskin. The Scythe of the Emperor seized hold of the ork’s armour with one hand and stabbed down with a falx at Magash’s head with the other.

Artemis charged with the other Space Marines, weaving around the devastating attacks of the ork warboss as it rampaged through the chamber. He barely avoided a slash that cut the head from the vanguard veteran behind him.

Hyphantes screamed in anger as the claw crushed his legs. Magash tightened its grip, raising the Space Marine above its head and dashing him against the ground. The ork raised him to do it again as Artemis slashed the claw with Exterminatus, severing a bundle of hydraulic feeds. Oil and fuel sprayed from thrashing hoses, causing the claw to spasm and unlock. Hyphantes slid from between the talons and crashed to the floor.

Artemis ducked below a vicious backhand from the claw, slashing at the talons in a sheet of sparks. The ork moved fast, faster than anything that big should be capable of moving. Artemis readied to slash again on the return swing, and then was spinning through the air as Magash clubbed him aside with the haft of its axe.

Artemis hit the ground hard and rolled. He pushed himself to his knees. Flecks of scarlet dotted the interior of his visor. The spicy scent of his own blood filled his nose and its coppery tang coated his tongue. His vision wavered, blurring and focusing in and out. He saw Hyphantes dragging himself along the ground. Reaching for Artemis. His voice, weak and wet with blood, scratched across the vox-link.

‘Brother–’

The axe came down in a blur. Hyphantes writhed, his body locking in convulsions as the ork tyrant wrenched the blade free. The Space Marine was bisected from collar to hip. Hyphantes remained alive long enough to reach once more for Artemis, before his gauntlet dropped and he went still.

Hyphantes’ biometric readout flatlined on Artemis’ retinal display. The rune of twin scythes crossed beside it winked dark. Rogerio’s biosign flickered below it, the Crimson Fist barely clinging to life. Artemis saw Nulsis hurry to Rogerio’s side, fighting to stabilise him.

A needle of ice spiked up Artemis’ spine. He threw himself to the side as the greenskin’s axe smashed down again, embedding itself halfway into the rockcrete. Battle narcotics and pain suppressants itched through his blood as he brought his bolt pistol up. The percussive bangs of the bolter were numbed by his dazed senses as the weapon bucked in his fist. Mass-reactive rounds spanked off Magash’s armour in flashes of sparking metal. The ork tyrant ignored those that found its flesh, the craters erupting on its hide in welters of stinking blood beneath its notice.

Magash heaved, fighting to free its axe from the ground. A dense black chain struck the weapon, following the momentum of a spiked globe as it wrapped tightly around the axe’s haft.

Imtehan hauled back on the chain of his meteor hammer and braced his heavy flamer against his hip. He set his feet in a wide stance as he doused the ork in sheets of burning promethium. Magash bayed in savage fury as it thrashed in a cloud of chemical fire. The talons of its power claw lanced through the firestorm, shearing the heavy flamer in half.

The Flesh Tearer hurled the weapon away as it exploded. Heaps of refuse and combustible scrap caught fire, setting the chamber ablaze and filling it with choking black smoke. A weakened wall of the audience chamber collapsed, and the crackle of the flames was joined by the scraping and scratching of inhuman claws.

Tyranids smashed against the gap of the collapsed wall. They sank their long claws into the breach, straining to pull it wider to admit their chittering swarms.

Imtehan fell back as the chain of his meteor hammer snapped. He dodged as Magash charged at him, rolling to the wall where Rogerio lay. Grasping behind him, Imtehan grabbed hold of the Crimson Fist’s power axe, bringing the weapon to bear as the ork rounded on him.

It took a thunderous step and was nearly within striking distance when a volley of bolter fire stitched up its side. Artemis and Sekor fired upon the massive ork as the broken wall came down fully. Tyranids boiled into the chamber, leaping upon Magash.

‘Artemis,’ shouted Sekor. ‘We have to turn back!’

‘I will not flee from this place!’ Artemis snapped, dashing an empty magazine to the ground as he reloaded his weapon.

‘If we stay here, we die like the others!’ Sekor pressed.

‘Then we die!’ was Artemis’ cold reply.

‘This is not our mission! If we die here we will have failed. We fall back now, we live to fight another day. We live to find the Overfiend and end this!’

‘He is right.’

Artemis turned to see Caltanix stride from the flames. Fire had scorched the enamel from the knight’s armour, exposing the bare metal and ceramite.

‘Go, my brothers,’ said Caltanix. ‘Get clear and find the Overfiend. Nulsis!’

‘Brother!’ the Novamarine Apothecary shouted back.

‘You have the gene-seed of our fallen kindred?’

‘I have it.’

‘Then go with them.’ The knight levelled his sword at Magash. ‘Yours is another path, brother-captain,’ he said to Artemis, ‘and you must walk it as I must walk mine. I will see to it that this monster is banished from the Emperor’s light.’

‘We cannot–’ Artemis began.

‘Go now!’ Caltanix bellowed.

Artemis roared, emptying the remainder of his bolt pistol’s magazine at Magash as it brawled with the leaping tyranids. He lowered the weapon as it clicked empty, and allowed Sekor to turn him. Imtehan and Nulsis lifted Rogerio between them and carried him from the chamber. Standing upon the threshold of the audience chamber, Artemis spared an instant to glance back.

The watch captain saw an image that would not have been out of place stitched in tapestry or depicted in stained glass mosaic in the chapel of any fortress-monastery. The knight stood, sword in hand, alone against a massive inhuman monstrosity. He saw the manifestation of the Imperium of Man, a single light in the darkness, defiant against the encroaching doom that threatened to devour the human race.

Caltanix raised his longsword, its blade glittering with the raging inferno filling the chamber, and charged. A portion of the ceiling collapsed between them, blocking Artemis’ view of what occurred next. He offered a silent prayer, and turned with his brothers to run.

EIGHTEEN

Artemis and his kill team sprinted through the frenzy of the ork vessel. Nulsis had given Rogerio a series of chemical injections that triggered the sus-an membrane implanted over the veteran warrior’s brain. The Apothecary had induced a state of suspended animation to keep the trauma of the Crimson Fist’s wounds from killing him. The enhanced physiology of the Space Marine worked to staunch the worst of the haemorrhaging and knit the body back together, but the severe wounds covering his right side were still oozing dark blood that pattered to the deck.

The Deathwatch Space Marines carried their comrade between them, shifting between bearing his inert form and providing covering fire as they scrambled through the ship’s corridors towards the transponder signal of their drop-ship. They skirted around the biggest pockets of clashing xenos, as the tyranids still swarmed through the warship. The deck rumbled beneath the boots of the Space Marines as the greenskin vessel’s guns continued to fire at the hideous bio-ships of the Leviathan hive fleet encircling them.

Artemis snapped off a shot from his bolt pistol, watching as a hormagaunt’s skull ruptured. He continued to fire disciplined shots over his shoulder as they ran.

As they fled.

Acid burned through Artemis’ veins. Shame and rage hung from him like cloaks of lead, slowing his steps and flawing his reactions. He had led three kill teams, twenty-five Space Marines of the Deathwatch elite, into this catastrophe. Five remained alive if Rogerio did not succumb to his wounds.

Twenty Space Marines, champions of their respective Chapters.

Dead.

Hyphantes, the hope of a noble brotherhood standing on the precipice of extinction.

Gone.

They had not fallen in glorious battle, selling their lives dearly to complete the Deathwatch’s mission to destroy the ork Overfiend. Their deaths had been in vain. They had died for nothing.

Maudlin reflection and self-pity were anathema to a Space Marine. The relentless training, the endurance of the trials, and constant honing in the crucible of war had purged Artemis’ soul of such weakness. And in its place, the Chaplains of the Mortifactors, shamans of the endless night of Posul who forged men into demigods, had left one thing in its place.

Hatred.

Hatred that had burned cities and entire worlds to ash. Hatred that had toppled civilizations and rendered whole species extinct. Hatred that had brought the galaxy to heel, and had annihilated the enemies of mankind to keep the Imperium from vanishing into the darkness of oblivion.

Hatred, pure and true and hotter than the heart of a burning star flowed through Artemis. Pity was useless to him. It could not kill, nor could it lead armies against his foes. Pity could not keep him alive. Hatred was a pure, beautiful weapon. And Artemis would wield it.

He would not shrink from surrendering himself before his watch master to answer for his failure. He would stand and account for the lives of the brothers who had fallen under his watch. He would bare his throat to the executioner’s blade if it was his master’s wish.

But before that, his hatred would see the Overfiend dead.

Kill Team Artemis stormed into the chamber where the Corvus Blackstar drop-ship perched in wait. The wall separating the chamber from the void, breached by the Deathwatch during their landing, had completely sheared away. The splayed landing claws of the drop-ship had held firm. Its ebon hull was scored and pitted from debris that had been torn out into deep space during explosive decompression, but it was intact.

Tiny forms in bulky void suits scrambled over the Blackstar’s hull. They pried at the armour plating with crude tools, struggling to strip the drop-ship for salvage. Cruel, hook-nosed green faces squinted through leaded face bowls, waving frantically at each other as they fought over portions of the gunship.

The gretchin burst apart under a hail of bolter fire. Their diminutive bodies spun violently from the drop-ship, smashing against the walls of the chamber or twisting out into the void.

Kill Team Artemis stalked towards the Blackstar, their boots clanging from the deck as their magnetic seals locked and unlocked with their heavy tread. Sekor blink-clicked a series of runes on his visor display, transmitting a signal to the gunship’s restless machine-spirit. Clouds of spent bolt casings surrounded the craft, twinkling in the thin light along with the frozen corpses of dozens of orks and the lesser gretchin greenskins. The drop-ship had expended the ammunition reserves of its servitor-manned heavy bolters in defence of the vessel, the few xenos clinging to its hull when the Space Marines returned being the only survivors.

The twin assault ramps at the fore of the Blackstar unlocked, folding down to admit the Space Marines. Nulsis hauled Rogerio up one ramp and through the crew bay, pushing his weightless body towards the drop-ship’s austere apothecarion. The rest of the kill team filed up the other ramp, with Sekor climbing into the cockpit.

Sekor pulled the restraint harness down over himself and locked it in place, hands running over the control panels to bring the engines back online. An impact on the armourglass viewport jolted his attention.

The frozen remnants of a greenskin corpse, torn apart in the flayed manner indicative of mass-reactive weapons fire, thumped against the viewport before listing sedately away.

Sekor snorted. ‘I suppose I have you to thank for that.’

‘Compliance,’ murmured one of the servitors.

Sekor looked back over his shoulder at the other servitor. It remained silent.

‘Right,’ the Space Marine gripped the control sticks as the engines spooled up. The open space before the drop-ship was blocked out by the gargantuan form of a tyranid bio-ship as it rolled past.

‘From one fire to the next.’

NINETEEN

The engines of the Corvus Blackstar flared to life, and the drop-ship edged out into the void. A shell exploded a few yards off the right side, sending it corkscrewing to the left.

Sekor hauled on the controls, fighting to bring the Blackstar back under control. He fired the retro thrusters in the craft’s nose, breaking the momentum of their spin. Sekor cursed as the force of the correction cracked his head against the control throne. He banked the drop-ship around and down, pushing the engines to put distance from the knot of xenos capital ships mauling one another at the centre of the void conflict.

Artemis clambered up to the cockpit and leant against the control throne.

‘Have we cleared their capital ships?’

‘We have,’ Sekor pulled his helm free, letting it fall to the deck. ‘Though it is more dangerous for us out among their more agile escorts and fighter wings than it is in the shadows of the giants.’

Artemis looked down at his comrade. Sekor’s face was crusted with black blood from a network of gashes on his brow and nose. One eye was a solid crimson orb, the flesh around it black with trauma bruising.

‘What is our plan, brother-captain?’

The gunship rocked as ordnance exploded around it. Sekor looked up at Artemis.

‘This system is dead and we cannot rely on the Fatal Redress, even if the most likely scenario has not come to pass and it is not being torn to splinters by warp spawn as we speak,’ he said.

Artemis looked out through the viewport. A miasma of xenos ships stretched to fill the void as far as he could see, fighting and manoeuvring and lighting the darkness as they burned.

Artemis unlocked the collar seals of his helm before pulling it off. ‘Light our beacon,’ he said, running a gauntleted hand through his sweat-plastered hair. ‘Take us as far towards the rim as she will go, and we–’

The Blackstar lurched from a violent impact. Artemis mag-locked his boots to the deck, keeping himself from being thrown into the viewport as he gripped the back of Sekor’s control throne. Alarm klaxons blared as the cockpit was stained scarlet with emergency lighting.

‘Contacts bearing down on us!’ Sekor fought against the controls. Streams of tracer fire slashed over the drop-ship as Sekor evaded. ‘Fighter-class, must have tracked our engine flare.’

A trio of blocky, rust-coloured fighters swarmed in the Blackstar’s wake, streams of fire chattering from their wing-mounted autocannons. The Deathwatch drop-ship weaved through the ork attacks. Sekor swung the Blackstar back towards the larger ships, seeking to lose the fighters in the chaos.

The Deathwatch drop-ship rolled, diving and skimming under the chitinous hull of a bio-ship. One of the ork fighters hesitated and smashed into the tyranid vessel’s mottled purple shell. Another drifted too close to the fronds of its grasping tentacles and was snared. The greenskin ship’s engines flared in vain as it was slowly hauled into the bio-ship’s razor-toothed maw.

Sekor cut the Blackstar’s engines, rolling aside as the last ork fighter overshot them. The drop-ship’s drives flared back into life as Sekor kept pace with the greenskin. The fighter, a smear of green light on Sekor’s auspex readout, rolled and dived as it sought to outmanoeuvre them.

Targeting controls blared in the cockpit as the Blackstar’s armaments locked onto the xenos craft. Sekor fired the lascannons. Eye-aching chains of killing light slashed out from beneath the drop-ship’s nose. The ork pilot swayed aside, dodging the first volley, but was unable to avoid the next. Sekor’s fire struck the fighter in the spine, shearing it in two in a flash of light and expanding gases. Bits of glittering shrapnel clinked from the viewport as Sekor powered through its debris field.

The tyranid bio-ship behind the Blackstar shuddered down its bulbous, pod-like hull. Like a great beast shaking ticks from its hide, it began to shed shoals of lesser tyranid creatures, which peeled away from its skin in pursuit of the kill team. The nimble fliers spread leathery wings as they descended on the Deathwatch drop-ship.

With a silent shriek, the lead xenos unleashed a salvo of tentaclids from beneath their wings. The mindless living missiles darted through the void towards the Blackstar.

‘Crones!’ barked Sekor. ‘We have to shake that ordnance, or their electric pulse will stall our engines.’ He banked the drop-ship towards a bulky ork escort bristling with gun batteries.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Artemis as the viewport filled with blazing flak.

‘Something very stupid.’

Sekor spun the drop-ship into a tight spiral aimed dead centre at the ork warship. He rolled and banked as a firestorm of shells blasted at the Blackstar from the greenskin ship’s guns. Streams of fire that missed the Deathwatch craft blasted into the swarm of tyranid hive crones, shredding their bodies and scattering their formation. The volley of tentaclids drew closer.

The Blackstar bucked as an ork round struck home. Shrill klaxons blared within the cockpit, and Artemis heard the whoosh of fire from the crew bay.

‘We have a hull breach!’ shouted Sekor, fighting the controls with one hand as he clamped his helm back on. ‘Go, brother-captain. You see to those fires, I will keep us from becoming a smear on this greenskin bastard’s hull.’

Artemis locked his own helm into place and sealed his power armour as he descended from the cockpit to the crew bay.

Sparks fountained from the ceiling, raining down upon Imtehan as he sprayed at the flames spreading through the crew bay with a canister of extinguishing foam. Artemis pulled another canister from a compartment and went to the Flesh Tearer’s aid.

‘By the blood, what is that imbecile doing up there?’ Imtehan snarled as the ship rocked under the force of another impact.

‘Keeping us alive,’ replied Artemis, as he pushed into the rising flames.

Sparks spat from the control panels as Sekor sent the drop-ship diving towards the ork warship. Flashes of exploding flak filled the viewport, and the armourglass cracked as shrapnel struck the cockpit.

‘Proximity alert,’ droned the servitors behind Sekor. ‘Inbound collision in six seconds.’

Sekor gritted his teeth. He struggled to guide the Blackstar through the firestorm, avoiding the larger rockets and munitions as glancing hits slashed into the hull.

‘Inbound collision in four seconds.’

The tentaclids surged closer on the auspex screen as the distance between them and the Space Marines shrank. The ork vessel filled his viewport, so close he could see the individual gun barrels rattling as they hurled explosives at him.

‘Inbound collision in two seconds.’

‘I know! Throne, terminate proximity warnings,’ Sekor snapped.

‘Compliance.’

Sekor banked the drop-ship at the last moment. He skimmed along the flank of the ork vessel, lascannons carving a path through the batteries of guns that protruded from the hull like spines.

The tentaclids, guided by synaptic instinct, peeled away from Sekor towards the larger threat. The missiles exploded, showering the ork vessel in crackling chains of jade lightning. The lights studding the greenskin warship winked out in waves, rippling from the site of the impact back across the hull as it lost power and began to list.

Similarly drawn to the greater prey, half of the remaining hive crones dived upon the ork ship’s defenceless form, slashing with barbed spurs and dissolving swathes of hull plating with squirts of bio-acid from the fleshy cannons that protruded from their jaws. The other half continued their relentless pursuit of the Blackstar.

Sekor exhaled through gritted teeth. There was no way the drop-ship could keep absorbing such punishment. Even if they weren’t vaporised by any of a thousand different equally likely sources, they were burning through their fuel reserves, and any further sustained use of the lascannons would burn their capacitors out.

Sekor looked up as he heard a dull crackling, and watched as a hissing slick of bio-acid began to eat its way towards the cockpit’s canopy. Then his attention was snatched away once more as an arrow formation of new contacts strobed on his auspex screen, bearing straight for the Blackstar. The inbound craft would enter maximum weapons range in six seconds.

Sekor breathed, calm and slow, and closed his eyes.

The vox crackled. The voice on the other end, crazed with static, cut through the interference with its urgency.

‘Break to port!’

Sekor’s eyes snapped open. He wrenched the control sticks, banking the drop-ship to the left as a blur of silver shot past him. He looked back, watching as a squadron of Fury interceptors cut through the swarm of hive crones like a flung javelin. They fired withering volleys of lascannon fire, and launched missiles on twisting contrails to obliterate the tyranid fliers.

A spread of torpedoes stitched across the hulls of the nearby xenos ships at the same moment, sowing destruction and confusion as the sudden attack struck them by surprise.

Another salvo hit, and Sekor began to see tiny silver shapes materialise in the distance. These were not the ebon-hulled warships of the Deathwatch. This was an Imperial battlefleet.

The crenellated blades of Imperial battle cruisers, bristling with gun batteries and banks of lance turrets, powered forwards through the void. Escort craft, frigates, destroyers and corvettes of various designs and tonnages orbited their hulls in support formations, while squadrons of fighters struck ahead to engage the xenos warships.

At their fore, looming like an apex predator of ancient Terra, was a Retribution-class battleship. It dwarfed the other vessels of the battlefleet, its massive plasma drives keeping pace with the more nimble battle cruisers despite its immense tonnage. Vast weapons batteries primed as salvoes of torpedoes continued to fire from its plough-faced prow.

Sekor struggled to fathom where this battlefleet had appeared from. The entire Kurbynola System was a graveyard, and the cordon put in place by the Inquisition ensured that nothing could get in.

Or out.

Sekor realised there was only one place this battlefleet could have come from. He watched as layers of the ork and tyranid fleets came about to engage.

‘Follow us in!’ the voice of the Fury interceptor pilot scratched again over the vox. Sekor brought the drop-ship into their formation, bearing towards the immense blade of the Imperial battleship. If he was right, then things were set to become much more complicated.

A voice, stern, cold and deepened by advanced age boomed across the vox of the Blackstar. Artemis stood, turning to listen as he and Imtehan put the last of the fires out.

‘To the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes Deathwatch Chapter, this is High Admiral Nearchus, servant of the immortal God-Emperor of Man and master of the Battlefleet Kurbynola flagship Claw of Damyrov. I have come here for you.’

PART III

TWENTY

Battlefleet Kurbynola set in motion the procedures to begin a fighting withdrawal as soon as it had loosed its first torpedo salvo. Thousands and thousands of highly trained crew hurried about their tasks to bring the monumental warships around, from the most senior bridge officers and shipmasters to the lowest indentured ratings who toiled their lives away without ever seeing the light of the stars. Every cog in the vast machine necessary to control an Imperial vessel of war meshed and worked together as the battlefleet conducted its precisely choreographed dance in the heavens.

The escort ships placed themselves in a wedge at the vanguard, running interference against the leading xenos skirmishers and buying the larger vessels the time they needed to turn. The battle cruisers completed their partial rotation first, lending their broadsides and lance batteries to the barrage that scythed down swathes of the charging alien warships.

A tyranid bio-ship died, the bioluminescence that shivered down its hull extinguished as it absorbed the destruction inflicted by a full broadside volley. Ork blockade runners smashed into the armoured chevron of the Imperial vanguard. A destroyer was rammed amidships, breaking its back and overloading its warp core. The vessel erupted into an expanding cloud of wreckage, sending shorn fragments of hull plating spinning into the warships around it. A precision strike from the combined lance batteries of three Imperial ships destroyed the ork craft, slicing it into ragged segments of molten iron.

Sekor followed in the wake of the squadron of Fury interceptors that was escorting him to the Claw of Damyrov. The attack craft frequently peeled off in pairs to engage enemy fighters that came too close to the drop-ship, returning to their comrades when the threat had been eliminated or driven off.

Artemis stepped into the Blackstar’s apothecarion. The tiny room, little more than a table and a rack of tools and medical supplies, looked as much a war zone as the rest of the ship. While the watch captain and Imtehan had fought to contain the fires spreading through the drop-ship, the Novamarine Apothecary Nulsis had fought his own battle to keep Rogerio alive.

The small medicae chamber’s floor was sticky with blood and littered with discarded bindings, tourniquets and empty vials and ampoules. Nulsis stood, knuckles against the table as he studied his charge. He had removed his helm, revealing a noble visage that was endemic in the descendants of Guilliman and the battle-kings of Macragge, despite his many scars.

Rogerio was still. Much of his armour had been cut away and laid in heaps around the table. His torso was brutalised. The attack from Magash that had severed his right arm had torn away much of his right side. Raw flesh and muscle glistened alongside savaged bionics in the apothecarion’s sterile light, oozing blood and oil through the swathes of gauze and bio-foam that Nulsis had used to staunch the worst of the haemorrhaging.

‘Will he live?’ Artemis asked.

‘For now,’ Nulsis replied, still staring down at Rogerio. ‘I have kept him in an induced sus-an hibernation, which will gain him a little time.’

Nulsis turned to face Artemis, his face as cold and expressionless as his steel-grey eyes. ‘He needs a full apothecarion if he is going to survive. I’ve done all that I can with what I have here.’

‘Thank you, brother.’ Artemis hesitated.

‘What is it?’

‘I must ask another question of you.’

‘Speak it.’

‘The Sothan of our number who fell – Hyphantes. Did you recover his gene-seed?’

Nulsis blinked. A slight twitch ticked at his left eye. ‘No. It was beyond saving.’

‘Very well,’ Artemis nodded. ‘Thank you, brother.’

‘Watch captain,’ Nulsis called as Artemis turned to leave.

‘Yes?’

‘Of the nine who entered that ship with me, the seed of five lies lost within the dead. All of the gene-seed of the Raven Guard’s kill team remains there as well. We have all suffered loss on this endeavour.’

Artemis nodded, and turned away.

No further communications had been sent to the Deathwatch kill team from the battlefleet, nor were any of the Space Marines’ hails answered. Artemis climbed up to the cockpit from the crew bay of the Blackstar and stood behind Sekor’s pilot throne.

‘What brought them here?’ asked Sekor, scratching at a patch of newly closed scar tissue at his temple. ‘Could it have been the beacon? They would have had to be close for it to reach them, and for them to get here this quickly.’

Artemis watched the Imperial battleship swell to fill the entire cockpit viewport. He suppressed his armour from releasing a dose of combat narcotics into his bloodstream, the interface systems of his war-plate responding to his elevated heart rate and adrenaline.

Tension coiled around the watch captain. Artemis was well aware of the sequestration placed upon the defence forces of the Kurbynola System, ordered by the Inquisition and enforced by the Deathwatch. He speculated on the extent to which the system’s destruction had emotionally compromised the high admiral and the other mortals of the Imperial Navy and Astra Militarum relocated to the system’s citadel world of Praesidium. He could not relate to their situation, and had neither the desire nor the inclination to try. If the Mortifactor home world of Posul were destroyed, it would do nothing to sway him from fulfilling what duty would demand of him.

If the high admiral had defied his mandate, and sailed the battlefleet here of his own accord, then they were traitors in open rebellion, and Artemis was duty-bound to destroy them. Even if they had departed under orders, Kill Team Artemis was in a precarious position. Artemis did not deign to be at a disadvantage to or to be indebted to mortals.

‘Something sent them here,’ replied Artemis.

‘And Rogerio?’ asked Sekor. ‘Does he yet live?’

‘Aye,’ said Artemis. ‘He still draws breath. Though he will need the apothecarion of an Adeptus Astartes warship if he is to survive.’ The Mortifactor’s gaze returned to the Claw of Damyrov. ‘We will signal the fleet as soon as we are aboard.’

Artemis climbed down from the cockpit. He walked over to Imtehan, sitting in one of the unlocked restraint thrones. With the fires out and the hull breach sealed, the Space Marines had been able to remove their helms and make repairs to their armour. The Flesh Tearer was silent, his dark features impassive as he ran an oiled cloth over the silver blade of Rogerio’s power axe.

His eyes flicked up at Artemis as he approached.

‘Imperials,’ said Imtehan in his humourless growl. ‘That they are not where the Inquisition demanded brings ill tidings.’

‘We will learn the truth of it,’ replied Artemis.

Imtehan grunted, noncommittal. The axe gleamed in his steady grip. ‘So, how do you want to play this?’

Artemis wiped the sweat from his brow and rolled his shoulders. ‘We do not know what we are walking into.’ He laid a hand on Imtehan’s shoulder, meeting the Cretacian’s gaze with his eyes of electric blue.

‘Just be ready.’

The Imperial vanguard broke formation as the xenos response ebbed. Those alien ships remaining were isolated and destroyed or withdrew to return to their fleets. The escorts limped back to their positions supporting their respective capital ships. Many trailed fire and plasma or bore extensive damage to their hulls from the brief but intense fighting.

With the temporary diversion of the Imperial battlefleet gone, the ork and tyranid fleets returned fully to their titanic clash. They did not need to expend ships tracking the withdrawing humans. They were fully aware of the world that was their destination, and it would be only a matter of time before the might of their inhuman empires would darken its skies.

TWENTY-ONE

Commodore Jaroslav Leitz watched as the Space Marine drop-ship lowered onto the primary embarkation deck of the Claw of Damyrov. Leitz wiped at the sweat prickling his brow. He had seen one of the Deathwatch craft only once before, the one that had transported Brother Gnaeus to and from the battleship to enforce the mandate issued to Battlefleet Kurbynola by the Inquisition. He took a deep breath as the image of the ebon-clad giant appeared in his mind. It was the closest he had ever come to one of the Emperor’s mythical Space Marines. He had felt the ironclad focus of the demigod, and the unique terror of conversing with such a being, however briefly, as the warrior had enacted his mandate.

Like any other citizen of the Imperium, Leitz had grown up hearing legends of the Space Marines, the noble defenders of the Imperium who stood ever vigilant to protect the realms of the God-Emperor. He remembered the joy he had felt when he heard the news that an envoy from a Chapter of the venerable Adeptus Astartes would be arriving on the Claw of Damyrov.

Joy that had quickly turned to ashes as Brother Gnaeus of the Deathwatch proclaimed the mandate imposed by the Inquisition. The Space Marines had come not to protect their worlds, but to ensure that no one raised a hand to oppose their very annihilation. To ensure that High Admiral Nearchus, Leitz and every other son and daughter of Kurbynola watched as their home worlds burned. He could still smell the gunsmoke from when the Space Marine had executed Leitz’s predecessor. He believed that smell would remain with him for the rest of his days.

That act had brought the newly promoted, now-Commodore Leitz to the embarkation deck, flanked by an honour guard of senior armsmen, to await this detachment of Space Marines. He could feel the tension radiating from the armsmen, gripping their ceremonial chrome lasrifles with white knuckles. They were angry. Leitz was as well. They were all on edge. And just like Leitz, the powerlessness imposed upon them in the face of the Space Marines only soured that bitterness further.

Leitz cleared his throat, took a deep breath and stood up straighter as the dual assault ramps on either side of the sleek drop-ship’s nose lowered on hissing hydraulics.

Three giants clad in dark armour stepped down from the drop-ship assault ramp, the metal ringing with the weight of their heavy tread. The thrum of their war-plate tickled Leitz’s eardrums and set gooseflesh rippling over his skin. They looked as though they had clawed their way out from one of the stygian hellscapes of ancient Terran myth. Gouges and impact craters covered the plates of dark ceramite. Blood and other foul liquids slathered the mighty warriors from head to toe, dried to a thick crust that cracked and crumbled from snarling servo joints as they moved.

Baleful red eyes glowed like coals from their snarling masks. Each of the three was fully armed, carrying firearms with barrels the size of a man’s fist along with brutal swords and axes. The warrior leading the trio bore a sword as long as Leitz was tall sheathed at his hip.

The Space Marines did not look like the mythical heroes immortalised in statues and stained glass mosaics that had captivated Leitz as a child.

They looked like monsters.

‘Hail.’ Leitz stepped forwards, giving a short bow and making the sign of the aquila.

The lead Space Marine looked down upon Leitz, saying nothing.

‘On behalf of High Admiral Nearchus of Battlefleet Kurbynola, I–’

‘Where,’ the giant boomed, his voice inhumanly low and given a mechanical edge by his helm, ‘is the admiral?’

Leitz swallowed. ‘I am his adjutant, I have been tasked with escorting you and your brothers to him.’

The commodore heard muted clicks from the Space Marines, as they communicated with one another on a secure vox-channel, ignoring Leitz.

‘My brethren will not accompany me,’ replied the lead Space Marine. ‘Brother Sekor will stand vigil upon the bridge.’

One of the Space Marines, his pauldron displaying chipped cobalt, stepped away in silence, striding towards the lifts that led to the Claw of Damyrov’s bridge.

‘Brother Imtehan will attend to your astropathic choir. We have need of it.’

Leitz recognised the saw-toothed blade icon of the Flesh Tearers as another of the demigods departed. He had witnessed a small detachment of their Chapter depopulate an entire cruiser that had committed mutiny during his earliest years as a ship’s sub-lieutenant. Six of them had killed every man and woman onboard the seditious vessel, nearly eight thousand people, in two days. Leitz averted his eyes from the Space Marine as he stomped past.

‘There is another of our number who remains within our ship.’

Leitz looked back up at the lead Space Marine. The warrior’s smouldering gaze had never left him. The demigod gestured to the drop-ship. ‘You shall provide him with whatever resources he requires, and do so immediately. I will go with you to your master.’

‘Of course, my lord,’ Leitz replied.

The Space Marine turned, walking past the commodore and his honour guard. ‘I am not your lord.’

‘Then,’ said Leitz, fighting to banish the tremor from his voice, ‘how may I address you, so that I might announce you properly to High Admiral Nearchus?’

The giant came to a halt, looking back over his shoulder at the officer.

‘You will address me as Watch Captain Artemis, of the Deathwatch.’

Leitz bowed again, hurrying to keep pace with the Space Marine as he departed the embarkation deck. The honour guard left them as they came to the lift that would take them to the observation deck, where High Admiral Nearchus waited.

The commodore’s stress increased as he squeezed into the small lift. Such proximity to the Space Marine’s thrumming armour made him feel as though insects were crawling over his skin. He squeezed his fists tighter in an attempt to make them stop shaking.

It didn’t work.

Artemis was silent as the lift ascended through the decks of the Claw of Damyrov. He could smell a sour reek emanating from the mortal officer who shared the cramped confines of the pod with him. The same stench he encountered every time he came into contact with mortals. The musk was sharp, primal, and sickeningly biological. The smell of a cornered animal.

Fear.

It radiated from this mortal in great abundance. Artemis sincerely doubted the naval officer had ever drawn the laspistol holstered at his side. He had seen the mortal’s kind before. Had this battleship been disabled, and its crew ordered to take up arms and repel boarders, crewmembers such as the officer standing beside him would likely not have survived the slaughter.

Mercifully, the ascent to the observation deck was brief. The lift slid open, admitting Artemis and Commodore Leitz onto a broad circular hall at the tip of one of the Claw of Damyrov’s spinal crenellations. A ring of void-reinforced crystal ringed the circumference of the chamber, offering a full three hundred and sixty degree view of the void beyond the battleship’s hull. The observation deck was of a size that could easily hold hundreds, but there was only one inhabitant waiting. A tall, thin man, his posture hunched by age, stood with his back to the approaching duo, hands clasped behind him as he surveyed the celestial dance.

‘High admiral,’ began Leitz as they drew close to the figure. ‘I present–’

‘Thank you, Commodore Leitz,’ Admiral Nearchus said without turning. He raised a hand. ‘Leave us.’

Leitz swallowed, once again gave a short bow as he made the sign of the aquila, and departed from the observation deck.

The chamber was silent for some time, broken only by the pervasive, gum-aching hum of Artemis’ war-plate, before the high admiral spoke.

‘We are passing a planet soon.’ The man’s voice was low, the raw gravel of a man who had spent a lifetime shouting orders. It was stern, paternal, but not without warmth. ‘Can you see it?’

Artemis looked past Nearchus, seeing a dark sphere of ochre and grey materialise.

The high admiral gave a short chuckle. ‘What am I saying? Of course you can see it.’ He turned back, looking at Artemis with deep brown eyes.

‘Stand with me.’ Nearchus waved Artemis to him. ‘I will tell you of it.’

Artemis stepped forwards, stopping beside the high admiral before the crystal panel. Nearchus did not come to the Space Marine’s shoulder. Artemis looked back to the void, seeing the twinkling light given off by the Claw of Damyrov’s escort ships as the world drew into focus.

‘Iljaen.’ Nearchus’ voice was hushed, almost reverent as he whispered the world’s name. Artemis did not need the high admiral to tell him. He had memorised the name of every world in the Kurbynola System, as well as their histories, societies, and the order in which they circled the system’s star. Iljaen had been a forested world, a reflection of ancestral Terra in the bygone epochs of its ancient past. It had been verdant, a healthy agricultural contributor and cultural centre in the system, before the xenos had come.

‘I am told that it was,’ Artemis struggled with the banal conversation that mortals seemed so taken with, ‘pleasing in its aesthetic.’

‘It was my home,’ Nearchus smiled, lost in memory. ‘My family owned a farmstead in the hills, when I was young. Orchards, lands for grazing. We would go into the cities during the harvest solstice. The avenues were strewn with flowers. Hanging gardens covered the buildings, so thick and vibrant it was as if nature had taken the land back from us.’

The smile faded from his lips as the Claw of Damyrov slowly passed by Iljaen. The idyllic world of the high admiral’s birth was now a ruined husk. The planet had been utterly destroyed, and all life had been stripped from its surface, leaving it a cold and barren wasteland. Its two moons, themselves thriving settlements erected to mine their vast mineral deposits, had been shattered by the force of the alien cataclysm. The immense shards of the annihilated satellites, still caught within the gravity of Iljaen’s corpse, slowly spread over its orbit like a funeral shroud.

‘What are you doing here, admiral?’ Artemis finally asked.

‘We received a message through our astropathic choirs. With the tyranid hive fleet present, simply receiving it resulted in the loss of half of our astropaths, and even then we recovered only fragments. From what our choirs could decipher, I am told it was a plea from a traveller, on the verge of entering a great storm without eyes to see. A plea to find what they had left behind them in their wake.’

Artemis blinked. The Fatal Redress. Shipmaster Aemna must have ordered the telepathic sending before she entered the warp, casting out a call to recover his kill team when she knew she would not be able to herself.

‘You have defied the mandate of the Inquisition.’

‘For your salvation,’ answered Nearchus.

‘Irrelevant,’ growled Artemis. ‘The lives of the Emperor’s servants, our lives, mean nothing when weighed against the scale of duty.’

‘Watch captain, that is a lesson I have been taught already, is it not? When your brethren departed from our vessels to answer your watch master’s summons, they proclaimed to us that any who left the orbit of Praesidium would face summary execution for treason against the Imperium. But each one of us died the day you stripped us from our charge to protect these worlds. We died with our families the day we watched our homelands burn.’

‘Then why come for us?’

‘To impart a lesson of my own. We both are servants of the Imperium of Mankind. We have both sworn our lives in defence of humanity against the myriad foes that so threaten it. I forfeited my life to rescue you, watch captain, because in spite of whatever parallels we might share, I am nothing like you, and I never will be.’

Artemis took a breath, quelling the temper rising in his chest.

‘I… understand your desire for vindication against the xenos that have perpetrated this–’

‘Xenos?’ The high admiral turned to Artemis, eyes wide. His hands trembled into fists, and the skin of his face flushed crimson. ‘Xenos? You dare to lay this desolation at the foot of the alien? The ork and tyranid fleets entered the system only in the past weeks. This system had been murdered, the surfaces of its worlds made graveyards long before they arrived.’

Nearchus rounded on Artemis. ‘Our worlds did not die by their vile hands. Our cities were not sacked to sate the unholy bloodlust of the greenskins. Our people, our children, were not butchered and rendered down to feed the hunger of the malignant tyranid. No, watch captain, those things were denied to them. By you.’

Nearchus stabbed an accusing finger at Artemis’ chest. Exterminatus had cleared its sheath, its point against the high admiral’s throat before the mortal could blink an eye.

‘You forget yourself,’ snarled Artemis in a low growl. ‘You will account for your insult and your slander, or I will take your head.’

Nearchus pressed his throat to the blade hard enough for a thin trickle of blood to run down into the starched indigo of his dress uniform.

‘You were the Inquisition’s agent in this. You sought to starve the xenos of the resources this system would provide, to foist them upon each other. You came in your ships, and burned each world, one by one. You destroyed my home.’

Nearchus’ eyes watered and narrowed as he raged at Artemis.

‘You did this, Space Marine. To buy respite, to deny the enemy for a moment longer, you took the blood of billions of innocents upon your hands.’

The high admiral leaned as close as he could to Artemis’ emotionless helm.

‘You have created a wasteland, and called it peace.’

TWENTY-TWO

At the core of the Kurbynola System, a silver orb slowly turned in a careful celestial dance as it patiently circled its star. Thin rings encircled the sphere like glittering haloes. Upon closer inspection, one realised that these were not natural belts of dust and frozen rock. They were defence platforms, shipyards and weapons arrays. The planet below was not silver from natural occurrence, but rather from the vast citadels that covered its surface. If Iljaen had been a simulacrum of Terra’s ancestral past, then this world was fashioned to mirror humanity’s birthplace in its present state.

There were names given to places such as this. Fortress planet. Citadel world. This one bore the name Praesidium.

Deep-space auguries and auspex arrays on Praesidium’s rings tracked the ships of Battlefleet Kurbynola as they approached. Banks of macro cannons and long-range torpedo silos had locked onto and acquired firing solutions for each vessel long before they had entered visual range. The defenders of the citadel world relented as the transponder returns for the Imperial battlefleet were validated. The might of a hundred thousand guns lowered into sentinel vigilance once more.

The Claw of Damyrov slowed as it reached the rings of Praesidium, allowing its cruisers and squadrons of escort craft to overtake it as the most heavily damaged ships entered dry dock for repairs. Shoals of tugs and towing craft latched onto their hulls, hauling them into maintenance cradles spread out across the rings.

Artemis watched the fleet break up from the battleship’s bridge. The cavernous chamber spread out before the command dais he stood upon in tiers of blinking consoles and crowded control pits. Servitor stations lined the walls, slotted in as they tirelessly worked to keep the immense warship operational.

Sekor stood beside Artemis. Like the watch captain, he too felt the cocktail of fear and anger emanating from every member of the Claw of Damyrov’s crew. He had remained silent for some time when Artemis told him of High Admiral Nearchus’ revelation. He had found it as difficult to countenance as Artemis had. That opinion changed, however, as the warships of Battlefleet Kurbynola processed through the wasteland the system had become.

Apocalypse had swallowed the system’s worlds, spreading its ruinous touch over everything these mortals had sworn to protect. Calamity was rendered down into reams of scrolling data, whispered reports, and holographic projections gathered by the flagship’s sensors. It was not the ravaged devastation of the ork, nor the voracious consumption committed by the tyranid hive fleets. Artemis and Sekor both had served alongside the Inquisition, and they knew the after-effects of cyclonic torpedoes when they saw them. All life on each of the planets had been extinguished. Their surfaces had been set aflame, burned away to glass and barren rock. It could have only been the result of the rarest and most extreme of measures taken by the Imperium.

Exterminatus.

A weapon of last resort used when all other conventional measures had failed, exterminatus was invoked to kill a world in the case of overwhelming infestations by xenos or daemonic cults. To perform such total destruction of a world was a calamity. To invoke exterminatus across an entire system was beyond belief. Yet the proof of it surrounded Artemis as the Claw of Damyrov made its way to the system’s core.

Sekor had asked Artemis the same question he had been asking himself since Nearchus had told him.

‘Why did they not tell us?’

Artemis had no answer for him, but he intended to get one.

As if in concert with his thoughts, Artemis listened as a bell sounded from the auspex stations.

‘Translation alert!’ called out a crewman. ‘Multiple warp ruptures detected.’

Imtehan had voxed Artemis an hour before. He had been successful in sending a message via the Claw of Damyrov’s astropathic choir per Artemis’ orders, and had returned to the Blackstar drop-ship to aid Nulsis in attending to Rogerio.

Artemis watched as the full might of the Deathwatch fleet of the Bladefall emerged from writhing tears in the warp, corposant and unnatural lightning clinging to their ebon hulls as they returned from their sojourn in the Sea of Souls. The arrivals were dominated by the hammerhead behemoths of two battle-barges translating, one Artemis recognised immediately as the Victorious Son.

‘High admiral,’ called out a junior officer commanding a bank of vox stations. ‘We are being hailed.’

A low voice, honeyed yet edged with iron, broke across the bridge.

‘In the name of the Emperor of Mankind, the Deathwatch stands in judgement over this fleet. We carry the authority to grant the Emperor’s justice against those who have turned from His service. We demand to know why you have violated your mandate. Failure to surrender your command immediately will be met with your annihilation.’

Artemis recognised the voice of Watch Master Asharbanapal. High Admiral Nearchus stood from his command throne, drawing breath to respond, when a thundering clang rang out across the bridge, silencing him.

Artemis’ fist rose from the brass railing of the command dais, leaving an impression of his dark gauntlet in the metal.

‘Watch master, this is Watch Captain Artemis of Talasa Prime. I will give you your reason.’

Artemis stood alone within the strategium of the Victorious Son. Space Marine battle-barges were powerful, scarce vessels, highly prized by the Chapters that possessed them. The warships operated as the nerve centre of command and control for any engagements that included them, and the size of their strategiums was testament to that fact. Nearly a hundred generals, admirals and Space Marine commanders could fit within its stone walls, encircling a grand table of hewn onyx as they coordinated the prosecution of the Imperium’s wars.

Artemis pulled his helm free and closed his eyes, allowing the silence of the strategium to wash over him in welcome calm. He set his helmet down on the table, breathing in the coolness of the chamber rather than the stale, recycled air of his armour. He took a small comfort in the simple act, though it did nothing to resolve the anger that smouldered within his chest.

When Watch Master Asharbanapal entered the strategium, it was without the fanfare and pageantry that he had indulged in on the watch fortress before his assembled warriors. The watch master was alone and unarmed, though Artemis could hear the rumble of Terminator war-plate just beyond the chamber’s doors.

‘I would have you know that Brother Rogerio has been stabilised within our apothecarion,’ said Asharbanapal.

‘Will he live?’ asked Artemis.

‘As a result of Brother Apothecary Nulsis’ attention, he will. While the damage to his body is severe, there are methods that will ensure his service will not end this day. He is a testament to the resilience and fortitude of his Chapter.’

Artemis gritted his teeth, stifling his temper at the watch master’s calm banalities.

‘Why?’

The watch master arched an eyebrow. ‘What?’

‘This system, the exterminatus. The lies you told about who did this. Why did you do it?’

Asharbanapal flashed his disarming, charismatic smile, but there was steel in the gesture, like the bright colours of a venomous animal. ‘I will excuse the stridency in your tone, watch captain. But I will only do so once.’

‘Why, watch master?’ asked Artemis, stepping around the edge of the table towards Asharbanapal, calling up a map of the Kurbynola System. ‘Why did you not tell me the truth of what happened here?’

‘Because it was not necessary that you know,’ answered the watch master. ‘Doing so would not have altered the fate of this system or its citizens, nor would it have changed the parameters of the mission you failed to achieve.’

Artemis was silent as Asharbanapal continued. ‘Mortals do not experience time as we do, watch captain. The shorter lifespans they live compared to ours mean they often fail to grasp the significance of the long-term realities brought about by our actions in the now. They would see the destruction of a system by our hands as a genocide, whereas our duty is to carry out such a task in order to prevent the genocide of a thousand times their number. You know full well that the unenhanced, those not elevated to see the galaxy as we do, debase themselves to emotion, and do so instinctually. The Inquisition is no stranger to wielding deception as a weapon of great power, and nor is the Deathwatch. Laying the deaths of these worlds at the feet of the enemy rallies them to their banners, and coarsens them to endure the true storm that is coming.’

Asharbanapal paused and looked at the glowing hololith.

‘Evoking exterminatus upon an entire system was a radical step, that is true enough. But you of all should appreciate the threat we are now facing. The resources of these worlds had to be purged to deny the enemy the use of them against us. Whether their destruction was carried out by our hands or that of the xenos is irrelevant to the slain, but of vital importance to those who remained. The tyranid has already suffered by this deprivation, and were you successful in eliminating the Overfiend, their dual invasion could have been stifled long enough to marshal a comprehensive defence of the segmentum.’

‘And what of Praesidium?’ asked Artemis. ‘The armies and fleets that man its walls, knowing the truth of what happened here?’

Asharbanapal sighed, true solemnity betrayed on his face. ‘The Overfiend has always been the key to our efforts here. While we prayed your mission would be successful, we knew that we should have a contingency. I know the ork, watch captain. I have killed it in every condition imaginable. The assembly of legions of Astra Militarum, manning the barricades of a citadel world ringed with warships would be a temptation no greenskin tyrant could resist.’

Asharbanapal stepped in front of Artemis. ‘The Overfiend will come to Praesidium, make no mistake of that. And when it arrives at the head of its mongrel hordes, and we have no question of its presence on the surface, we will do to Praesidium what we have done to every other planet in this system.’

‘It will be the death of billions,’ whispered Artemis.

‘Yes,’ Asharbanapal held his gaze with unblinking eyes of honey-gold. ‘A grim duty done in order to save the lives of trillions. An undertaking I will carry out without hesitation.’

Artemis railed against the watch master’s deception, but could not fault his cruel logic. In the cold arithmetic of war, sacrifices are inevitable. Even the loss of an entire system, when weighed against the hundreds and thousands of systems at risk within the segmentum, was a cost that must be paid.

The image of Caltanix, standing alone before the brutish Gorsnik Magash filled Artemis’ mind. Rogerio, as the stalwart veteran was brought low by the ork warlord. He saw Nulsis’ stone-grey eyes, and heard him speak of the loss he had suffered. He saw Hyphantes as he died.

‘Failed,’ whispered Artemis.

Asharbanapal frowned, leaning closer. ‘What?’

‘My mission,’ replied Artemis. ‘You said that it failed.’

The watch master looked at Artemis, nonplussed.

‘When the Overfiend darkens the skies of Praesidium, and goes to its surface with its vile host, I will be there waiting. I will cut its head from its body and shatter the greenskin hordes. I will avenge the deaths of my brothers, and give these soldiers the vengeance they crave as well, whether you stand beside me or not.’

Asharbanapal did not reply. He watched as Artemis turned and gathered his helm from the table.

‘I have not failed,’ said the watch captain as he donned his helm.

‘My mission is not yet complete.’

TWENTY-THREE

‘Was this Inquisitor Kryptman’s plan all along?’ asked Imtehan. The Flesh Tearer had gathered together with Artemis and Sekor in one of the smaller chapels aboard the Victorious Son. Standing beneath an onyx statue depicting the Emperor in the warlike aspect of the warrior king and guardian of mankind, the three Space Marines spoke of what was to come next. Artemis had disclosed the details of his conversations with High Admiral Nearchus and the watch master to both of his brothers, as well as the plans set for the inevitable onslaught to come from the Overfiend and hive fleet Leviathan.

‘I do not know with certainty,’ replied Artemis. The warriors had removed their armour for repair by the battle-barge’s serfs and artificers, and now wore robes of heavy black sackcloth. ‘Such measures as this would align with a mind such as his.’

‘I laud his conviction,’ said Imtehan. ‘Speaking of such an act is one thing. Possessing the fortitude to see it through, however, is another matter entirely.’

‘He has not seen it through,’ said Sekor. ‘The Inquisition branded him with the Carta Extremis, stripped him of his authority and threw him into exile. Who can say where the old bastard is hiding, living the rest of his wretched life fleeing from the Officio Assassinorum.’

‘Where he is now is irrelevant,’ said Artemis. Sekor and Imtehan turned to regard the watch captain. ‘Whether this was his goal – its success, its failure – it is meaningless to us. All that matters is what is coming.’

‘And that is?’ asked Imtehan.

‘Vindication,’ answered Artemis. ‘The watch master is correct – the Overfiend will strike Praesidium, and it will do so soon. The actions of High Admiral Nearchus coming to our aid have likely only hastened its arrival. Legions of the Astra Militarum man the walls of the citadels below us, and Battlefleet Kurbynola stands ready in orbit. Much has been taken from these soldiers. Their homes, their families, the oaths they swore to protect these worlds. The time for them to enact their vengeance is coming. They will face the xenos here at Praesidium, and I will stand beside them when they do.’

Sekor and Imtehan looked at Artemis, their expressions belying their inner conflict. They must have known that this would be his course of action.

‘My duty has been left unfulfilled. I swore upon my blood, upon my honour that I would not rest until I had taken the Overfiend’s head. I will not forsake that oath now. I will await the greenskin on Praesidium, and when it is dead, Hyphantes and all those who have suffered here will be avenged. I will leave this system with that duty done, or I will die in the attempt.’

Artemis looked to each of his brothers in turn. ‘Will you stand with me?’

Imtehan’s face screwed up in a feral snarl before going still and impassive once more. ‘I will stand with you, Artemis. There must be a reckoning here, and now. Blood must be answered with blood.’

Sekor smirked. ‘Seeing as how it is a long fall from here to Praesidium, you two will most likely need a pilot.’

‘And an Apothecary.’

The Space Marines turned as a figure stepped into the chapel. Nulsis lowered the hood of his robes as he joined the members of Kill Team Artemis.

‘The blood of Caltanix and the vanguard cannot go unavenged. I will stand alongside you in this, watch captain, and do what I must to keep you alive long enough to take the greenskin tyrant’s head.’

‘What of Rogerio?’ asked Sekor.

Nulsis’ expression darkened. ‘As he is now, he will never wake again.’

Artemis nodded, eyes ablaze as he placed a hand on Nulsis’ shoulder. ‘Then he shall be avenged as well.’

The watch captain turned to face his brothers. ‘We may well be walking the road to our destiny. This is a foe more powerful than any we have faced before. We must not shrink from this duty, and if we are to fall to oblivion, then so be it.’

‘And what of the watch master?’ asked Imtehan. ‘He intends to enact exterminatus as soon as the Overfiend reveals itself.’

‘And how will we even get close to it?’ asked Sekor. ‘If the Overfiend itself makes landfall on Praesidium, the hive fleet will come with it, and it will be at the head of a legion of greenskins.’

‘True, brothers,’ replied Artemis. ‘Which means that, when our opening to strike arrives, we must be swift. And if our enemies are legion, then we must gather a legion of our own.’

The Corvus Blackstar rocketed down through the atmosphere of Praesidium in a blur of flame. The drop-ship had been fully repaired and rearmed once it had been transferred to the Victorious Son, its freshly lacquered hull reflecting no light from its sleek, matt surface.

Sekor scrolled through frequencies on the vox-net as they descended. He listened as a dozen different regiments passed orders in a dozen languages through the static and distortion. Armoured battalions, artillery, mechanised infantry and air superiority officers issued orders, rippling their intent out across their respective commands.

No Titan legions, thought Sekor. They would have helped us now.

Artemis entered the cockpit, taking his place again behind Sekor’s control throne. The last flames of atmospheric entry burned away from the drop-ship, allowing the Space Marines to take in the sight before them on the surface.

Praesidium was a volcanic desert world, its proximity to the Kurbynola System’s star rendering its climate inhospitable. Yet, by the technological mastery of the Adeptus Mechanicus, humanity had brought its harsh environment to heel, and erected vast fortifications across its surface. The raging volcanoes studding the planet were dammed and harnessed to power the crackling void shields that protected each of the bastions.

The silver forms of citadels stretched across the planet’s surface like star-shaped islands in an ocean of black igneous sand. Artemis leaned closer as the drop-ship approached the largest of the fortresses, watching as shivering tiles of black within its walls resolved into battalions of marching troops.

The drop-ship trembled as the silver inverted wedge of an Imperial Lightning fighter craft closed on either side.

‘Attention,’ the voice of one of the pilots came over the vox. ‘Proceed with us to the designated landing zone. Any deviation from your current course will be regarded as an act of hostility.’

Sekor snorted. ‘Acknowledged.’ He looked back at Artemis. ‘I would not expect the warmest of welcomes, brother-captain.’

‘No,’ replied Artemis. ‘I think not.’

Climbing back down into the crew bay, Artemis approached Imtehan and Nulsis. The Apothecary had busied himself with loading sickle-shaped bolter magazines, and Artemis listened to the snik snik snik as the Novamarine slotted the mass-reactive rounds into place. Imtehan had once again elected to attend to Rogerio’s power axe, carefully running over the weapon’s blade with an oiled cloth.

‘What makes you think they will stand with us?’ Imtehan asked.

‘I don’t,’ Artemis replied. ‘The desire for vengeance burns as hotly within them as it does within us. They will not have to stand with us to stand against the xenos, and that is all we will require of them.’

Artemis had disembarked alone from the Corvus Blackstar upon the main landing pad of Praesidium Primus, the foremost citadel of the fortress-world. He followed an escort of elite shock troopers through the fortification to its command spire, where he joined the assembly he had requested before departing from the Victorious Son.

The commanders of the combined forces of the Astra Militarum in the Kurbynola System stood around the central table of the strategium, their muted conversations silenced as the watch captain entered the room.

Artemis was surprised that the majority of the commanders had answered his summons. Representatives of the various armoured divisions, artillery and infantry divisions and fighter squadrons were gathered. The leaders of the Astra Militarum for the system eyed Artemis in silence, their expressions ranging from cold indifference to barely restrained ire. A crackling hololithic projection of High Admiral Nearchus was among their ranks, his pale blue form wavering with occasional interference.

‘I have requested this council so that the defence of this world might be coordinated,’ said Artemis as he stepped forwards to the table dominating the centre of the strategium.

‘Have you, Space Marine?’ growled one of the generals bitterly. ‘Or have you come to murder us, now that we are all together here in one place?’

A murmur of agreement rippled over the assembly.

‘Why not simply kill us as you have killed our worlds?’ sneered another commander.

‘Why have you come?’ demanded another.

Artemis looked around the room. Targeting reticules flickered over each mortal in the strategium. He had known of circumstances where Space Marines had executed mortals for lesser insults. The grim arithmetic coursed through his mind. Even without the use of his bolter, he could kill every man and woman present in the room within two minutes. He allowed himself a moment to savour the temptation, before banishing the thought. That could not be the way through this.

Artemis removed his helm with a hiss of air pressure, setting it down before him as he looked out at the assembled military leaders with eyes of blistering blue.

‘The Imperium of Mankind stands alone, a single light in the darkness. Monstrous foes in their legions descend upon it from all sides, desperate to extinguish the flame of humanity and cast the galaxy into darkness for eternity. This is such a foe who has come to your worlds, and who comes this day for your blood. Neither the cruelty of fate, nor the machinations of the Inquisition, nor any other agent can alter that reality. They seek your obliteration.’

‘To finish what you have started,’ spat a heavyset general bearing the laurels of an artillery battalion, his words greeted by a low murmur of bitter support.

‘You will not fight for me,’ continued Artemis. ‘Nor would I expect you to. Rather, you fight for the homes reduced to ash and ruin. You fight for the blood of the innocents lost. You fight for retribution. You fight for rage. The Emperor looks down upon you and knows your hearts. He has seen the atrocity you have borne, and will watch as you strike back against the enemy to claim the vengeance that is rightfully yours. It is there for each of you.

‘Stand upon the walls, look down with defiance upon the enemy in their multitudes, and make war as the avengers of the dead. The avengers of Iljaen, Colxis and Trunidia, of Lunfis and Rygrall and Balinth. Make war this day, as the avengers of Kurbynola.’

Silence filled the strategium. Artemis could sense the adrenaline of the assembled commanders rising. They craved retribution as much as he did, perhaps more. Fury battled within the heart of each man and woman against their mistrust of Artemis and the Deathwatch. Their bitterness and frustration had thinned, but still held their desire for revenge in check.

‘I will make war.’

The assembled leaders turned to the one who had spoken. High Admiral Nearchus stood straighter, his eyes hard even through the flickering light of his hololithic projection.

‘As I told you before, watch captain, I am already dead. I will not fight for the Inquisition, and I will not fight for you. I will fight for the souls of Kurbynola. I will fight, and walk into annihilation so that their spirits may find peace. The fleet will fight, Space Marine.’

‘As will my engines,’ rasped the patriarch of a clan of Imperial Knight combat walkers who was more augmetic than flesh. ‘House Merovic will walk, and we will make war.’

‘For Kurbynola, the Balinthian Rifles will make war.’

‘As will the armoured legions of Colxis.’

‘We will take to the air,’ said a colonel, his uniform bearing the marks of the 981st Air Superiority Corps. ‘The xenos will not hold the skies while we draw breath.’

One by one, the assembled commanders committed their warriors, not to Artemis, but to one another, to their honour, and to avenge their fallen. Crisp salutes were offered, and the sign of the aquila was made among the leaders.

A junior officer burst into the strategium.

‘Inbound contacts detected in low orbit!’

The wail of sirens filled the air over Praesidium Primus as the sky caught fire. Artemis and a group of senior commanders had stepped out onto the ramparts of the citadel to survey the skies. Teardrops of flame sparked and swelled as they rained down through the atmosphere, leaving fiery contrails in the wake of their entry.

‘Disperse orders giving permission to fire to our defensive guns,’ barked one of the generals to his adjutant. ‘Scramble Lightning squadrons for intercept sorties.’

‘No,’ said Artemis.

‘No?’ asked the general incredulously. ‘And why, watch captain, is that?’

‘Because those are not xenos.’

TWENTY-FOUR

Artemis stood on the running boards atop a Chimera as the troop transport raced to the landing pad. Streams of landers and drop-ships were touching down on Praesidium Primus, filling the sky with the roar of their engines. Every one of the landing craft was black, their hulls bearing the gothic skull iconography of the Deathwatch.

The Chimera rolled to a halt before a growing throng of Space Marines as they disembarked from Corvus Blackstars and heavy landers. Rhino heavy transports and Predator battle tanks rumbled from the open maws of landing craft, clearing the path for the massive Land Raider command tanks that followed in their wake.

Artemis leapt down from the Chimera. The ground beneath his boots quaked with the reverberations of the Deathwatch strike force readying for war.

‘Well met, watch captain,’ said Asharbanapal at the summit of the heavy lander’s loading ramp. He held his guardian spear with easy grace, and was flanked by the hulking forms of his Terminator guard.

Artemis came to a halt before the Deathwatch commander and saluted, his dark gauntlet banging against his chest. ‘Hail, watch master. I had not expected you to land a force on the surface.’

‘As you said, watch captain. You would be here whether I stood with you or not,’ Asharbanapal rested a gauntlet on Artemis’ pauldron. ‘And we will not stand by while the blood of Caltanix and my company goes unanswered, nor shall we leave our fellow brothers here to stand on their own against its hordes. I have elected that the Bladefall are to stand with you. And we shall not do so alone.’

The watch master gestured to the darkness in the depths of the cavernous lander. ‘Your brother has returned to you, watch captain.’

‘Rogerio?’ asked Artemis. ‘He has awoken? Can he speak?’

The deck of the lander boomed with a heavy, ponderous tread. Artemis felt the buzz of energy rippling from heavy power generators, and smelled the smoke and ozone that twisted into the air as the stomping footfalls drew closer.

‘Speak?’

A massive shape emerged from the lander. A broad, boxy sarcophagus, it stood in a wide stance upon splayed iron claws at the end of a pair of squat, heavily armoured legs. Its blackened hull was adorned with silver plates engraved with golden filigree, extolling a legacy of venerable deeds by legendary heroes. Oath parchments rippled in the wind, fastened to its chassis by discs of red wax. Bolted to its right side was a massive assault cannon, its spinning barrels whirring as they chewed the air in impatience. On its left was a grasping power fist, crackling with energy as its wrist-mounted meltagun hummed with killing power.

Artemis looked upon the hulking assault walker, his eyes transfixed upon the power fist. It was stained crimson.

‘I can do far more than speak, brother-captain,’ boomed Rogerio from the Dreadnought’s vox horn, looking down upon Artemis from a sensor node cluster fashioned to resemble a Space Marine’s helm.

Artemis’ fist thudded against his breastplate once more in a fervent clash of armour. ‘Welcome back, my brother. I am heartened to see you once again.’

‘And I you, Artemis,’ said Rogerio. ‘Now, let us away. Show me these xenos that we shall destroy.’

Artemis had been correct when he had spoken with his brothers. The brief skirmish fought by High Admiral Nearchus and Battlefleet Kurbynola against the clashing forces of the ork Overfiend and hive fleet Leviathan had only hastened the xenos’ inevitable advance to the gates of Praesidium.

As the commanders of the Astra Militarum deployed their forces across the many citadels of the fortress-world, the deep-space auguries stationed on the planet’s rings detected the coming storm.

Watch Master Asharbanapal had returned to orbit, coordinating the arrangement of the Deathwatch fleet with High Admiral Nearchus from the bridge of the Victorious Son. The Imperial warships took up positions, readying themselves for the entangled xenos hordes bearing down upon them.

The ploy to use Praesidium and the legions defending it to lure the aliens had worked. To hive fleet Leviathan, ravenous in its search for bio-mass to replenish its ranks lost in battle against the greenskin, Praesidium was irresistible. The fortress-world was similarly tantalising to the Overfiend’s hordes, who came charging towards the Imperial guns with a fanatical thirst for violence.

Against the immense scale of the twin fleets of the xenos, the Imperial ships knew they would not be able to prevent them from making planetfall even if they had wanted to. They would inflict as much damage as possible upon the ork and tyranid fleets before breaking from high anchor, splitting into sub-fleets and squadrons and conducting guerilla lightning attacks against the aliens. Against just one of the opposing fleets, the length of their defence would have been measured in days. Against both combined, the scenario was cut to hours.

High Admiral Nearchus marvelled at the scale of the xenos fleets approaching. He gazed at the grand oculus viewscreen that dominated the front of the Claw of Damyrov’s bridge. The fact that the xenos could advance upon them with any sense of coordination while simultaneously mauling one another was a truly chilling sight to behold. On they came, filling the oculus like a plague.

Nearchus had arrayed his ships in the best possible formation alongside the warships of the Deathwatch. Even with the formidable firepower at his command, it would be like holding out an outstretched hand to stop a tidal wave. The water would simply flow over and around it, and in time he would sink beneath its weight, and drown.

The high admiral closed his eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. Like all the other defenders of the Kurbynola System, he had been eager to rail against the Inquisition and the Space Marines of the Deathwatch for the ruin they had wreaked to forestall the coming xenos. He had shared their fiery conviction that no threat justified such genocide. Now, finally seeing the scale of their foe, Nearchus understood. He could never forgive what they had done, but now he understood.

‘My lord,’ Commodore Leitz stepped forwards, coming to a respectful halt one tier below Nearchus on the command dais. ‘Auspex confirms that the enemy will reach maximum weapons range in six minutes.’

Nearchus opened his eyes, nodding as he clasped his hands behind his back.

‘Run out our guns, commodore,’ said the high admiral to his adjutant. ‘Our foes have grown slothful quarrelling amongst each other. Let us show them the teeth of a true foe.’

The void lit with spheres of fire like a chain of infant suns. The combined firepower of the Imperial and Deathwatch fleets filled the space between them and their alien foes with a hurricane of ordnance. Shoals of torpedoes streaked unerringly towards the xenos swarm. The eye-aching brilliance of massed lance fire stitched through the hideous alien attackers, the lightning to the devastating thunder of heavy broadside volleys.

The foremost ranks of the ork and tyranid fleets simply ceased to exist. Bio-ships and ork cruisers vanished in the firestorm, shattered as their wreckage was ploughed through by those coming behind them. Squadrons of Fury interceptors strafed the larger warships before their formations were shattered by swarms of xenos fliers. Any semblance of order and cohesion evaporated as the warring fleets made contact, the precise choreography of traditional void warfare conducted at incredibly long distances erased as the battle devolved into a howling melee in the void.

A bio-ship disappeared in a blinding flash. Seconds later, one of the largest warships in the ork vanguard was similarly obliterated. The prow of the Victorious Son, along with the second battle-barge in the Deathwatch fleet, glowed as their titanic nova cannons readied to fire again.

The Imperial forces were reaping a ferocious tally against the xenos, but they were soon overwhelmed. An Imperial grand cruiser broke apart into an expanding cloud of plasma and spinning metal under the thunder of ork guns, while tyranid bio-ships filled their maws with the warships of Battlefleet Kurbynola, still firing their weapons even as they were consumed.

The bridge of the Claw of Damyrov was a riotous frenzy. Junior officers sprinted from station to station, shouting over the wail of proximity alarms as they struggled to keep the battlefleet’s flagship in the fight.

High Admiral Nearchus leaned heavily against the brass railing of the command dais, bleeding from a gash on his temple. He watched as the oculus viewscreen became completely obscured by the millions of tyranid bio-forms descending on his vessel like locusts. Biting back a curse, he shouted down to Commodore Leitz, who was diligently coordinating the chaos of the bridge like a trained orchestral conductor.

‘Send the order, splinter the fleet to their designated rendezvous points,’ ordered Nearchus, as the last light on the oculus was swallowed from sight.

‘We’ve done all we can for them on the surface. It’s in their hands now.’

TWENTY-FIVE

The sky lit with a false dawn as the last of Praesidium’s orbital defence rings was broken. Half visible in the wan light of the volcanic fortress-world, shards the size of cities twisted ponderously from view, or flared as they fell into the atmosphere.

Artemis had received communications from many of the smaller bastions reporting portions of the defence rings crashing into the fortifications. Lightning squadrons had managed to break up some of the fragments, but they could not reach them all. Praesidium Quintus was gone, obliterated in an instant as a fragment of the wreckage that survived re-entry had smashed into it like a mass driver.

The watch captain looked up as the last of the ring’s shards broke up in smears of flame. It would not be long now. The last bulwark between the xenos and the surface had been broken, and it was only a matter of time before the invading forces made landfall.

Artemis looked behind him at the blocks of marshalled troops and tanks filing into position behind the walls. They marched up from massive subterranean bunkers that were constructed to shelter refugees from planets across the system in times of emergency. The cavernous holds now stood empty as the Astra Militarum manned the ramparts.

The Deathwatch Space Marine looked back up as the sky began to turn black with vast shapes. They seemed shrouded in storm clouds, a spreading veil that soon blocked out the stifling heat of Praesidium’s sun.

Artemis drew Exterminatus smoothly from its scabbard on his hip, raising the blade towards the gathering darkness. Massive guns and flak batteries ground on turrets, angling their gaping barrels at the approaching xenos onslaught.

Artemis tightened his grip, triggering the activation rune of the power sword. The blade flashed with brilliant lightning as the guns of Praesidium Primus hurled their rage at the skies.

The war for Praesidium had begun.

There would be no calm before the storm. No slow procession of landing craft brimming with howling orks, disgorging their war parties away from the range of Praesidium Primus’ guns. No gradual massing of the greenskins’ confederated tribes until their numbers filled the horizon before they charged the walls. There would not be even the most chaotic and disorganised semblance of orkish strategy employed. The xenos streamed down onto the surface, dragging their war with them like a wildfire spreading to dry woodland.

The void shields of Praesidium Primus rippled with hundreds of impacts as the ork fleet rained down a bombardment from orbit. The shimmering field flared as it withstood the barrage of mass-driven projectiles, radiating in kaleidoscopic colour like an oil spill.

Ork landers filled the skies as they tumbled awkwardly down through the atmosphere. Many were quickly destroyed as the greenskin warships in orbit continued their bombardment of the surface, oblivious to the swathes of their own troops that they slaughtered. Those that survived the fury of their own guns, and those of the Imperial citadels, crashed into the black sand, vast prows slamming down like drawbridges as hosts of whooping orks spilled from their holds. Larger landing craft reached the surface as well, unleashing streams of tanks and the ponderous, hulking forms of scrap-titans.

As the orks filled the skies with their foulness, so too did a deluge of spores sweep down from the firmament. Fleshy spheres of myriad shapes and sizes hurtled down, sheathed in glistening ooze. Some exploded against the void shields of the citadel like artillery, showering the cracking barriers with bone fragments and gouts of bio-acid. A small number of the other pods were small enough that they bypassed the shields completely, passing straight through the energy fields to land behind the fortress walls. Their quivering shapes stretched and tore, eventually rupturing in a fountain of ichor as swarms of writhing tyranids burst out. The ground outside the bastions wriggled like a carpet of chitin as tiny ripper organisms dispersed over the surface.

The ork hordes and tyranid swarms lashed out, devoting as much energy to their continued annihilation of each other as they did to hurling themselves at the walls of the citadels. Streams of las-fire slashed down from the Imperial defenders, slaughtering anything that came near with needle-fine beams of scarlet energy. Artillery boomed, the earth shuddering beneath squadrons of Basilisk tanks which did not have to take aim to hit their targets. The skies were just as frenzied, as Lightning squadrons weaved through walls of flak in dogfights with ork fighters and swooping tyranid fliers.

Artemis took it all in from where he stood on the ramparts. Throughout a century of service to the Deathwatch, having made war in every type of environment against every type of xenos in the galaxy, he had never experienced such a cataclysm. The sky was gone. In its place was a writhing black shroud of inhuman monsters, enveloping the heavens and casting the world below into darkness. There were no single sounds any more, the thunder of exploding shells and roaring aliens meshing with the howls of pain and triumph and a million other sounds that formed the deafening chorus. The noise was incredible, as if Praesidium itself were screaming as its flesh played host to this upheaval.

Fast-reaction forces of elite Tempestus squads and Deathwatch kill teams quickly destroyed any tyranids that breached the void shields of the bastion. Lines of soldiers rotated from the battlements, the barrels of their lasguns glowing from unceasing fire. Each had killed dozens of the xenos that charged through the shimmering canopy of the void shields and threw themselves upon the walls, and some many more than that.

Though their faces were obscured behind rebreathers and darkly visored helms, Artemis could see their conviction plainly. There was fear, its icy claws wrapped about each of their hearts, but it did not slow their pace. Artemis saw reflected in the eyes of the mortal soldiers a grim acceptance that the moment had arrived for destiny to claim them. For months they had watched this storm draw nearer, stripping away everything they had sworn to protect. Now it had come for them, and they sought to meet their end not with a whimper, but with a roar of defiant rage.

Artemis had not expected the discipline he saw represented here by these mortals. He had imagined panic, riots, the air ringing with firing squads executing deserters. There was nowhere for them to desert to, and Artemis sensed they knew that as he looked out over a battlefield that would have made the stygian underworld of the darkest of mythologies pale by comparison. They were afraid, but they faced annihilation and held their ground. They knew theirs was a battle they would not have to fight for long, and accepted that reality with a cold grace that Artemis had not believed mortals could possess. Seeing their worlds burn had deadened them inside, stripping away the animal panic. Only the grim conviction to avenge remained in their eyes.

There was honour in that.

‘Admirable,’ Artemis said to himself as he watched the last men and women of Kurbynola greet their extinction.

Artemis’ visor dimmed as the distant shape of Praesidium Tertius died in fire, its overloaded void shields unable to stop the titanic meteor that smashed down into it like the fist of a pagan god. He waited for the mushroom cloud of smoke and ashen dust to thin, watching as a dark shape emerged.

It was nearly the size of the meteor that had borne it to the surface. It hauled its immense gut packed with devastating weapons forwards on squat, plodding legs. Stubby arms, themselves the size of Land Raiders, protruded from either side, little more than arsenals of battle cannons and missile launchers cobbled together and sheathed in scrap metal. A miasma of smoke and industrial fumes billowed from the haphazard smoke stacks, lingering above the scrap-titan like a diseased halo. At the summit of the hideous machine, carved in crude facsimile of some vile ork deity, static rumbled from vast war horns like building thunder.

The mammoth scrap-titan blared a deafening war cry, throwing anything within distance to the ground and putting the rest of the battlefield’s cacophony to shame with its bestial, blood-maddened fury. It was loud enough to send tanks tumbling and knock aircraft from the skies. It was hard enough that it reached Praesidium Primus, drawing skeins of tortured colour across its void shields. It was the roar of an apex predator proclaiming its presence and demanding submission from friend and foe alike. There was only one greenskin with the power to command such a war machine.

‘The moment has arrived,’ voxed Artemis to the Deathwatch strike force. ‘The beast has revealed itself. We go.’

TWENTY-SIX

The Deathwatch staging area was a scene of controlled chaos as they prepared to strike. Darkly armoured warriors donned bulky thruster packs and prayed over their weapons as they filed aboard a wedge of Corvus Blackstar drop-ships. Ahead of them, an entire battalion of battle tanks rumbled as their engines idled before the monolithic gates of Praesidium Primus. At the tip of the spear, mere strides away from the walls that held back the firestorm of clashing xenos, stood the Knights of House Merovic.

Penants and banners rippled from the battle cannons and chainswords that constituted the arms of the venerable combat walkers, displaying a legacy of gallantry over millennia of service to the Imperium. Kill markings and individual honours covered their jade carapaces. An entire warrior lineage shifted in place, eager to be unleashed against the enemy.

Artemis hauled his jump pack onto his back, securing the restraint harness with a chunky click. He whispered a benediction honouring its machine-spirit, and offered prayers to his bolt pistol and to Exterminatus as he locked them to his hips. Looking over towards the hulking form of Rogerio’s Dreadnought sarcophagus, Artemis watched as his brother strode with thundering tread towards an arcane platform ringed with hooded tech-magi and esoteric machinery. The Corvus Blackstars were incapable of bearing the weight of the walker, and without access to Thunderhawks or any other heavier conveyances, teleportation would be their sole recourse.

‘Are you ready, Brother Rogerio?’ asked the watch captain as he clamped a teleportation beacon to his armour. The cylindrical devices were issued throughout the assault force, so that the Dreadnought could be inserted by any Deathwatch elements that survived to reach the Overfiend.

‘They shall sing songs of the ruin I shall wreak amongst their mongrel kind,’ came the interred veteran’s reply.

‘Remember what we must do,’ warned Artemis. ‘We cannot allow vengeance to cloud our focus.’

‘The greenskin you refer to was nothing but a hound,’ boomed Rogerio. ‘My fury is reserved for the filth that holds its leash.’

Artemis gave the Dreadnought a sharp nod as he turned away.

‘Brother-captain,’ called Sekor, emerging from Kill Team Artemis’ Blackstar.

‘Our brothers are in readiness?’ asked Artemis.

‘Aye, Imtehan and Nulsis are already aboard.’

Artemis noted a brief flicker of hesitation in Sekor’s voice, a rarity in the Space Marine’s characteristically cocksure manner.

‘I wanted to provide you with this, before we departed.’

Sekor handed Artemis a brass cylinder the size of a melta charge. The watch captain accepted the device, his thoughts immediately carrying him back to the darkness of Kryptman’s briefing chamber, so many years ago.

‘A stasis bomb?’ Artemis frowned.

‘A design I have been tinkering with, based upon the one given to us by the Inquisition. It will work similarly, though its power supply is smaller, meaning that its detonation will be confined to a much smaller area, and its effect will not last for long.’

Artemis nodded, and clamped the stasis bomb to his thigh. He looked Sekor in the eye, holding the warrior’s green stare with his sharp blue gaze.

‘Just get us to the target,’ said Artemis. ‘Nothing extravagant.’

Sekor grinned, looking over the watch captain’s shoulder into the skies beyond the citadel. ‘Getting to the target alive will be more than extravagant enough, brother-captain.’

A thin smile tugged at Artemis’ lips for a moment as the Space Marines gripped wrist-to-wrist.

‘Die well, brother,’ said Artemis.

‘Many, many years from now,’ replied Sekor, as the Deathwatch Space Marines donned their helms and boarded the Blackstar.

As the gates of Praesidium Primus rumbled open, the Imperial speartip plunged into hell. The Knights of House Merovic plodded through masses of thrashing xenos, slaying dozens with each blast of their cannons and slash of their chainswords.

Columns of tanks streamed behind them, gumming their tracks with gore as they crushed the bed of corpses beneath them to a paste. They lashed out with the thunder of their guns, shells exploding in geysers of shrapnel and broken alien bodies as they fanned out across the flanks of the Knights.

The ork and tyranid hordes descended upon them immediately. Massed packs of tyranids of all kinds and whooping ork warbands converged upon the Imperial breakout, drawing them into a ferocious firefight. The skies, choked with xenos fliers, cleared for a moment as they swooped down on the Imperials.

Just as the Deathwatch had planned.

With a low whine of engines, a chevron of Corvus Blackstars lifted from their landing pads. The few remaining Lightning fighters formed up around the drop-ships, escorting them through the xenos tempest as they flew like a javelin aimed at the Overfiend.

Corporal Nazia of the 617th Balinthian Rifles stood just beneath the parapet as damnation screamed around her. The sky of Praesidium was gone. In its place was a swarming miasma that defied reason. Nazia had glimpsed it for a moment when it began, but could not look upon it any longer. She had not seen the wedge of Space Marine drop-ships pass overhead, nor where the dark shapes were going.

Her brothers and sisters stood in ranks beside her, awaiting their time to man the ramparts. The din was muted by Nazia’s helm and rebreather mask, and the sound of her frenetic breathing was overwhelming. Sweat misted her goggles and she blinked its sting from her eyes. The air shimmered with heat haze above her, as hundreds and hundreds of lasguns fired without pause down into the churning horror that surrounded the citadel. Nazia gripped her own weapon, and shot a quick glance to the soldier standing at her elbow.

‘Calm, corporal,’ said the man as he caught Nazia looking. His voice betrayed the gravel of age, and the experience that came with it. Sergeant’s chevrons adorned the arms of his uniform, and he cradled his own lasgun with the easy comfort earned through a life of soldiery.

Sergeant Maqabee had joined the Astra Militarum as a youth, when the founding tithe came to Colxis. He had warred across the Imperium, through many worlds and against many foes. While in service, patrolling the system and putting down minor insurrections, there had not been a single event or skirmish that he had not linked to a memory of his past service. No matter the situation, it always reminded him of something. He had been the anchor Nazia and her comrades had held fast to amidst the madness they found themselves in, the veteran offering the distraction the troops desperately sought with tales of his campaigns.

‘Doesn’t this remind you of anything, sergeant?’ asked Nazia.

Maqabee did not respond at once, his eyes calm and locked to the parapet. Whistles pierced the air, and the crack of massed las-fire ceased as flag bearers waved signals from watchtowers. The soldiers manning the walls turned, their exhaustion unmistakable as they descended.

Nazia glimpsed the face of a man as he dragged past. His eyes were hooded and glassy, like those of a corpse. Another soldier doubled over as they stumbled past, back arching as he released sick into the confines of his rebreather. Some simply collapsed a few paces behind the lines of waiting troops, their allies and weapons forgotten.

The soldier’s eyes blazed into Nazia’s mind. There had been terror in them once, but now, in the place of that terror, there was nothing. Numbness, without light or focus, as if the man had died upon those walls, yet his body remained animated. That scared Nazia more than anything.

Another whistle, and Nazia felt the press of soldiers around her push her forwards to the hellscape ahead. Maqabee smoothly charged his lasgun.

‘No, lass,’ he finally said, turning his dull brown eyes upon her as they prepared to climb to the ramparts.

‘I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

Sekor struggled with the Blackstar’s controls as he held the centre of the formation. The craft bucked and jinked as it absorbed dozens of impacts from the streams of xenos weapons fire filling the air. He glimpsed a Lightning sustain a direct hit from a tyranid spore mine, the fighter vanishing in a greasy cloud of jade bio-plasma.

A knot of ramshackle ork vehicles lumbered below the Deathwatch drop-ships, led by a massive ork who danced across the roof of the biggest of them, laughing maniacally and wreathed in electricity from the crown of sparking diodes bolted to its skull. The tanks shook erratically as the spindly cannons mounted to them crackled with growing chains of lightning. The cannons fired, and one of the Blackstars exploded as the ribbons of unstable energy blasted its prow apart. Sekor saw the small shapes of the Space Marines inside tumble out of the spiralling craft, most of them ablaze like the drop-ship as they hurtled lifelessly to the ground.

Sekor gritted his teeth as he passed through another cloud of flak. The Space Marine’s eyes went wide as he beheld the sight before him. The immense ork gargant walker was close, and by the Throne, he could see the Overfiend. He could see it from miles away.

Standing upon the crown of the gargant’s head, the ork king almost defied description. A godlike knot of ochre green flesh, nearly as wide as it was tall, with the armour of an entire battle tank drilled directly into its slab-like musculature. It staggered Sekor, making the murderous greenskin warlord Gorsnik Magash seem childlike by comparison.

The Overfiend looked up at the approaching drop-ships. Its massive jaw ground low, and the beast roared in feral challenge. Its voice blasted through the gargant’s war horns.

The wave of sound hit Sekor’s Blackstar like a physical force. The Space Marine fought to stabilise the drop-ship, pushing it into an abrupt dive to avoid a pair of Lightning escorts that were flung together by the force of the Overfiend’s tectonic howl.

Sekor hauled back on the controls as a pair of tyranid hive crones tore another of the Blackstars apart.

‘Enemy target in maximum weapons range,’ murmured the servitors from behind Sekor as his targeting cogitator chimed.

‘Fire everything!’ shouted Sekor.

‘Compliance,’ the lobotomised gunners replied with corpse-like calm. The Blackstar’s weapons unleashed fire at the gargant. Sekor opened fire with the drop-ship’s lascannons, lending the gunship’s fire to the barrage that blasted from the remaining Imperial craft as they descended upon the junk-titan.

From across the scrap-iron hide of the gargant, the turrets, cannons and weapons blisters hastily soldered to its hull ground and twisted as they tracked the inbound threat. It appeared as though the gargant had deployed a smokescreen, wreathing the plodding ork machine in fyceline as a fusillade of rockets and flak slashed towards the Blackstars.

‘Get that shell up!’ Tank commander Joyrll’s clipped orders resounded off the claustrophobic interior of the Leman Russ battle tank. He, along with the rest of his regiment, had followed out in the wake of the Space Marine air assault, an armoured spear of one hundred battle tanks of all shapes and sizes plunging into the sea of inhumanity assailing Praesidium. Their crews sang vengeful dirges as they charged, hatred and vindication propelling them into the enemy that had taken everything from them.

It had taken only minutes for their advance to stall. Tracks grew gummed with pulverized flesh in such revolting quantities that vehicles became trapped in the organic quagmire. Ammunition was depleted at staggering rates as commanders fired into an endless ocean of predatory xenos. Tanks were being split off from one another, flooded by howling orks and shrieking tyranids. When the vox had become flooded with the overlapping screams of crews as their hulls, and their bodies, were peeled apart, Joyrll had killed the link.

Smoke filled Joyrll’s wounded tank in a suffocating pall, flaring with sparks from where an ork rocket had blown through the left track and killed most of the crew. The only ones remaining alive within the tank were Joyrll and his gunner, the two feverishly working to reload the main cannon of the Leman Russ. Joyrll had not bothered to aim the cannon. He could not have missed if he wanted to, such was the insanity boiling around him. He had to blast a path clear to the nearest allied tank, and see if he could rally to regroup with the others.

He would not die here. He couldn’t.

‘Throne damn you,’ Joyrll hissed, squeezing himself from the firing station down to where the gunner was hauling a shell into the cannon’s breech. ‘What is wrong with–’

Joyrll stopped cold, mute as he saw his comrade’s slumped, twitching form.

A monstrous insectoid face looked up at him from the gunner’s ruptured body with milky, lifeless eyes. It grinned with needle-sharp fangs, caked with scarlet as strings of gore slithered down their length.

Joyrll did not even have time to scream as the thing leapt upon him, and sank its fangs deep.

Artemis heard the emergency klaxons blare inside the crew bay of the drop-ship. The chaos of exploding flak increased and Artemis mag-locked his boots to the deck as the craft shuddered violently.

‘Hold onto something!’ Sekor shouted over the vox. ‘We have multiple hostile missile locks!’

Imtehan calmly rose to stand in the central aisle of the crew bay. He sank to one knee, placing Rogerio’s power axe on the deck beside him.

‘Take a step from me, brothers,’ said the Flesh Tearer as he bowed his head. Nulsis and Artemis backed away from Imtehan, and the psyker began to scream.

He screamed so loudly that Artemis could barely hear the thunder of the guns outside the Blackstar. They sounded somehow baffled, muted. The Flesh Tearer pushed dents into the deck plating as his armoured fingers dug into it. Hoarfrost shimmered and cracked from his power armour as his bloodcurdling cry grew louder.

‘What is going on back there?’ exclaimed Sekor.

Artemis rushed to look out through a porthole in the Blackstar’s fuselage. The drop-ship was surrounded by a sphere of flame. Hundreds of impacts were detonating against the erratic barrier that enveloped the Deathwatch craft.

‘A kine shield,’ whispered Artemis. ‘Sekor, hurry! It is Imtehan. It is killing him! Get us to the target now.’

The Blackstar burst through the wall of ork flak, coming close to passing over the gargant.

‘This is as far as I can go,’ shouted Sekor. ‘You need to jump now!’

Nulsis stepped to the drop-ship’s rear assault ramp as it lowered. Smoke and wind clawed at his armour in a howling gale as he looked back at Artemis.

The watch captain knelt before Imtehan, drawing level with the Flesh Tearer. ‘Stand, brother!’

Imtehan’s scream faltered, straining further as he took hold of his power axe with trembling hands. Artemis could not conceive of the agony coursing through the Librarian as he drew power from the warp through the tyranid shadow. Imtehan looked as though he were drowning, his entire being thrown into the act as his body threatened to collapse beneath the monumental strain. He rose, taking one pained, stomping step after another towards the gaping opening, and leapt. Nulsis followed after him, and Artemis stopped for a moment to look down over the churning maelstrom before dropping down into it.

TWENTY-SEVEN

One by one, he felt them die. It was a grievous thing, to watch a comrade fall in battle. To see the men and women you had bonded with through hellish trials go limp within the storm of bullets and blades. But to experience it as a physical sensation, to feel the link they shared with you sever without warning – that was something else entirely.

Balas, Patriarch of the Knights of House Merovic, felt every one of his brothers and sisters die. He felt their armour shatter against the howling gale of exploding bombs and boiling acid. He felt the hot wind rake their skin as they were dragged down. He felt the tear and bite of hundreds of claws and crude blades as their sacred forms were carved open. He felt the cold void that took their place, when their hearts beat their last.

Balas was linked to his Knight through the archeotech of its throne mechanicum, as were the others of his lineage. Damage to their hallowed armour manifested through neural interface ports and spinal sockets as physical pain within the bodies of the pilots. They felt every blow, every glancing strike, every deep cut. When another Knight fell in battle, it rippled across the others of its order, wracking them with spasms of agonizing sorrow. Balas felt this over and over, as the xenos stole their light from the world.

A spasm of white-hot pain assailed Balas as he thrashed upon his cockpit throne. He was bleeding so profusely from a dozen points he could taste the metal in the air. His battle cannon was starved of ammunition, little more than a cudgel now as he smashed it into the hordes of gnashing aliens. His chainsword was so caked in inhuman gore that its teeth could no longer turn.

His family was gone. His noble house was reduced to ash and ghosts, their windswept voices joining the choir of those ancestral warriors who had taken Balas’ Knight into battle before him. Spitting the chips of a broken tooth from his mouth, Balas waded half-blind into the boiling mass of his foes. Xenos died, obliterated by his weapons and crushed beneath his clawed feet. Balas wheezed, blood spilling down his chin as he raged, determined to drag as many as he could down into the darkness with him. He could not see the Space Marines for whom his house had died, but it was not of consequence any longer.

Balas would be reunited with his kin, and he would not have long to wait.

They fell.

Like teardrops of oil, the Space Marines of Kill Team Artemis plummeted towards the Overfiend who waited atop the gargant.

The battlefield below filled Artemis’ vision. Legions of orks, all the more loathsome for their repulsive mimicry of mankind’s weapons and technology, continued their slaughter against the tyranids, who were so hideously inhuman that they showed no parallel to humanity at all.

In their midst, standing alone, was the Patriarch of House Merovic. His mount crippled and aflame, the Knight fought surrounded by the dead of his bloodline, an entire lineage lost and never to return. He swung his chainsword, now stripped of its teeth, and wielded his battle cannon like a blunted maul, before collapsing under a swarm of tyranids.

The surviving units of the Imperial armoured assault had ceased their forwards advance as their casualties mounted. Their commander attempted a breakout to stage a fighting withdrawal back to the walls of Praesidium Primus, but his tanks were quickly encircled and slaughtered to the last man by the rampaging xenos.

Artemis twisted in freefall, watching as Sekor took the Blackstar upwards in a steep climb, seeking to clear the range of the xenos guns. The wavering kine shield Imtehan had projected to protect the Blackstar collapsed with a peal of thunder. Artemis watched Sekor weave the drop-ship skilfully through the flak. The agile Blackstar rolled and dipped through the metal storm exploding around it as Sekor guided it with confident grace.

A chime from his visor display drew Artemis’ gaze to his altimeter. He did not see the rocket that corkscrewed into the Blackstar’s hull, just a flash of flame and smoke in his peripheral vision. His head snapped up, locking to the Blackstar as it lost altitude, trailing fire as it spun.

‘Sekor,’ voxed Artemis. He heard only crazed static in reply as the drop-ship hurtled groundwards. Sekor’s biometric feedback flickered inconsistently on his retinal display, before the Blackstar plunged into the smoke and vanished entirely from his view.

The lumbering armoured cliffside of the gargant rushed up beneath Artemis. A pair of vast doors peeled back across the towering scrap-titan’s sloping torso, revealing an immense cannon barrel within.

It made a sound like a god falling as it fired. The blast carved a shallow canyon across the surface of Praesidium as the fortress-world’s foremost citadel ceased to exist. Artemis was flung spinning from the force of the weapon firing. He twisted end over end, seeing alternating blurred images of the monstrous gargant and the flaming wreckage of Praesidium Primus.

The altimeter in Artemis’ retinal display pulsed urgently. He was falling too fast, and the blast was throwing him too far away from the gargant. Artemis triggered a blast from his jump pack to arrest his spin, bracing to stabilize his freefall as the inertia sought to crush him against his own armour. He fired another sustained burst, slowing his descent and throwing himself back towards the Overfiend’s mount.

The other two surviving Blackstars dropped their payloads of Deathwatch Space Marines over the ork junk walker. Artemis watched as one was pulped by flak, and another plucked from the air by a screeching tyranid flier, but the rest managed to land intact upon the gargant’s head and shoulders.

Fuel alerts jousted with the altimeter for Artemis’ attention as he fired the thruster pack again. He fell over the churning sea of brutality thrashing around the feet of the greenskin scrap god, as the shadow of another behemoth darkened the surface of Praesidium.

It struck with calamity. Swathed in dirty smoke and slick with the gore of the legions it had crushed with its arrival, the charred ovoid capsule that had sheltered it through the cold of the void and the fire of the planet’s atmosphere shivered as it sloughed away, exposing a creature seemingly dragged from the depths of humanity’s ancestral nightmares.

Spindly, arachnoid legs hauled a hunched insect-like body free of its birthing pod to tower above the battlefield. Enormous bio-cannons and hooked talons tore free of the glistening membranes of the vast creature’s womb. Rearing to its full height, it nearly eclipsed the Overfiend’s massive walker.

With a chilling screech, the tyranid bio-titan turned to the ork scrap machine. Instinctually, a baying pack of massive carnifex bio-forms swept about in its shadow as it made its way towards the Overfiend’s gargant with its knifing gait.

Artemis tumbled in the wake of the bio-titan’s crash. He fired the engines of his jump pack, fighting to land atop the gargant as it turned to face the titanic monstrosity bearing down on it. He reached out with grasping fingertips, scraping against its scrap-iron hide. Purchase eluded him. Sparks sprayed from either side as Artemis clawed against the gargant’s hull, seeking to arrest his fall down its sloping, distended gut.

Drawing Exterminatus in a reversed grip, Artemis drove the blade down into the scrap-titan’s rusted flesh, carving a channel with his momentum until he came to a grinding halt.

A small aperture in the gargant’s plough-faced jaw squealed as it was flung open above Artemis. A barking ork emerged, firing wildly at the Space Marine with a smoking junkyard firearm. The Deathwatch warrior dangled one-handed by the grip of Exterminatus as he drew his bolt pistol. The weapon bucked in his fist as it fired. The precisely aimed bolt lanced through one of the greenskin’s sunken eyes in a puff of dark blood. The round spun, liquefying the meat within the alien’s skull for an instant before detonating. Dirty light kicked out from the entry wound. The ork gave a shallow jump as its head disappeared, all that remained of it reduced to ragged ribbons of stinking meat falling over its shoulders. Artemis leapt upwards, clawing his way to the aperture, and hauled himself inside.

The sweltering interior of the gargant’s head bore the same repulsive, erratic madness as all ork technology, with one glaring exception. Everywhere Artemis looked, daubed crudely in ink across the walls or fashioned haphazardly into busts or statues, was the face of the Overfiend. Its dominating armoured underbite, the tusks and fangs stained black with oil and coal dust, its eyes burning with blazing torches or unstable sodium lamps.

Artemis took in all of this in a heartbeat, and fought down the bile rising in his throat. Exterminatus slashed left and right, butchering the greenskins and smaller gretchin wretches within the chamber as Artemis’ bolt pistol roared its anger to join the slaughter. This scrap-titan was no effigy to some pagan ork deity. It was the Overfiend itself. The greenskin tyrant had stridden into battle atop a hulking monument to its own ego.

The interior of the gargant rocked as the myriad weapons of the scrap-titan fired at the charging tyranid behemoth. A heavy slapping noise struck the head of the ork walker, and Artemis looked up as pinpricks of light shone down into the chamber amid the sound of hissing metal.

Bio-acid boiled the armour plating of a section of the gargant’s head. A whole section of its structure collapsed, throwing packs of orks from its head screaming to the circling carnifexes below. Artemis glimpsed a darkly armoured form among those who fell.

Wan, hellish light from Praesidium flooded in. Artemis sprinted towards the opening. He leapt, burning the rapidly dwindling promethium remaining in his jump pack to lift him to the lip of the gouge in the scrap-titan’s crown. He clawed hold of it, the dense armour made pliable like heated wax by the bio-acid. Artemis threw an elbow over the edge, and hauled himself up.

He looked at his target. The xenos chieftain who had brought this system to ruin. The Overfiend brawled in a frenzied melee of Deathwatch Space Marines and his hulking huscarls. Artemis stood, activating Exterminatus in a rush of lightning as he glared at the impossibly large beast, the very image of brutal xenos monstrosity.

And the Overfiend looked back.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The gargant was in flames. Concentrated blasts of bio-acid and living artillery from the tyranid bio-titan had torn sections of the lumbering ork walker into ruin as the two towering combatants fought above the churning chaos of Praesidium’s surface. The Overfiend, arch-xenos warlord of the ork empire of Octarius, roared with savage glee as it smashed through the ranks of the Deathwatch Space Marines that encircled it, bathing it in flame and bolter fire. Then a thundering crash of displaced air tore over the melee with a flash of blinding light.

The greenskin’s roars soured with rage as a salvo of assault cannon fire stitched up the tank armour bolted to its chest. The boxy shape of Rogerio’s Dreadnought walker stomped forwards through the mist of its teleportation, smashing into the Overfiend with a blistering punch from its cracking power fist.

‘Die, vile fiend!’ bellowed the machine voice of the fallen Crimson Fist. ‘Choke on your foul blood and know that you face the vengeance of the Emperor of Man!’

The greenskin colossus grappled with Rogerio, seizing hold of the Dreadnought’s hissing power fist in its claw. The Overfiend snarled at the venerable Space Marine as it tightened its adamantium grip. The crimson-lacquered weapon began to buckle under the crushing weight. The Overfiend smashed its other arm into Rogerio’s sarcophagus, punching into its armoured hull. It struck again, and again, the power of its clubbing fist building with momentum.

The gargant rocked as a thunderous explosion erupted at its base. One of the scrap-titan’s legs collapsed, and the warriors fighting over its hull were flung in every direction as it began to list to one side. The Overfiend broke away from Rogerio, tearing the Dreadnought’s power fist from its housing as it fought to balance itself.

With a roaring Cretacian battle cry, Imtehan leapt up behind the Overfiend, Rogerio’s power axe gripped in both hands. He drove the energized blade down into the Overfiend’s shoulder, in the gap between the creature’s massive armour plates. The Flesh Tearer let his weight drag him down to the ground, tearing into the xenos tyrant.

The Overfiend whirled around, lashing out with a clawed fist that Imtehan was barely able to roll beneath. Nulsis opened fire on the ork as it overbalanced, blasting it with searing strikes from his hissing combi-melta between bursts of kraken penetrator bolter rounds. The ork’s armour blazed white-hot, and knots of thick blood, dark as pitch, popped through the air as the armour-piercing rounds carved through the plate.

With a bellow of tectonic fury, the Overfiend leapt forwards. Moving faster than anything its size had any right to, it smashed into Nulsis with a clubbing strike. The Apothecary twisted, spinning away to crash in a heap on the gargant’s canted scrap plating. It killed another Space Marine, crushing the warrior in its clawed fists and flinging limbs in all directions as it tore the body apart.

The next moments passed as if the scene were trapped in slowly cooling glass. Artemis charged up the slope of the teetering gargant, legs pumping like pistons as he neared the howling Overfiend. A roar breached his bleeding lips as he launched himself in the air. A draconic final blast of promethium, every fume remaining that the feral machine-spirit releasing it could supply, flared from Artemis’ jump pack as he rocketed into the beast’s chest.

The ceramite of Artemis’ pauldron shattered with the impact. The Overfiend grunted in rage, looking down as the Space Marine punched a brass cylinder into a gouge in its armour. The device quivered as Artemis’ momentum pushed the two off the ground. The Space Marine bounced from the Overfiend, rolling off to the side and crashing heavily into the rusted gargant’s crown. Both began to slide down the tilt of the leaning scrap-titan, towards the precipice and the swarms of howling tyranids waiting below.

The Overfiend punched out a massive claw, digging a gouge into the metal and slowing its fall. With unfathomable rage burning from its beady, scarlet eyes, it began to haul itself up, claw over claw, frothing to butcher the one who had struck it.

Artemis punched down with Exterminatus to anchor himself as he blasted at the oncoming Overfiend with his bolt pistol. The mass-reactive rounds plinked harmlessly from its brutish armour.

Snarling, Artemis fired a shot through the Overfiend’s guard, striking one of the beast’s eyes in a welter of gore and pus. The Overfiend howled, lifting its claw to clutch at its ragged eye socket, as the stasis bomb detonated.

A blinding flash enveloped the Overfiend. Shivering worms of silver mist wrapped about its limbs and trunk. The beast froze, trapped within the stasis field, unable to do anything to prevent itself from sliding towards the edge of the gargant’s head.

The Overfiend of Octarius loosed a stifled, strangled cry, its force titanic enough to breach the stasis field entrapping it, as it hurtled off the edge of the scrap-titan.

The armour plating Artemis had anchored Exterminatus into sheared away. He skittered down the gargant’s crown in a shower of sparks, clawing for purchase as the greenskin war machine shuddered from its duel with the bio-titan. Artemis seized a handhold as his legs flew over the edge. He reached out, catching Exterminatus as it tumbled towards the precipice. He slowly released a breath.

Artemis barked in sudden pain as the gargant’s hull rippled. He looked down, reason warring with the impossibility of what his eyes were showing him. The Overfiend was alive, hanging from the gargant. It was fighting the suffocating shroud of the stasis bomb, and it was winning. The Overfiend reached up, clawing at Artemis. If it were to fall to its end here, it would take the Space Marine with it. Artemis’ armour cracked and shattered like eggshell as the greenskin king tore at it. He felt his leg dislocate as it was wrenched from the hip socket by the ork’s brutal strength. Artemis’ hold weakened, and he began to lose his grip as the metal bucked and shuddered with impacts.

‘Nay,’ the voice rolled like thunder as a shadow fell over Artemis. He looked up, seeing the gouged, sparking shell of Rogerio’s sarcophagus as the wounded Dreadnought levelled his assault cannon over the top of Artemis at the dangling Overfiend.

‘There is no escape for you, mongrel beast. Now die, drown in the madness you have wrought!’

The assault cannon was deafening as it fired just over Artemis’ head. Spent casings rained down onto him, plinking from his power armour. The Overfiend roared as its arm was ripped apart at the elbow, sending the ork tyrant hurtling into the thrashing masses below. It struggled to free itself, but was still ensnared by the stasis field when it struck the throng of screeching tyranids below. Even its preternatural strength and fury could not aid it, and the Overfiend of Octarius could do little but watch as the mindless swarms of hive fleet Leviathan tore it limb from limb.

The pack of carnifexes in the bio-titan’s shadow roared above the slaughter of the greenskin warlord. Artemis watched the frenzy below as the Overfiend was quickly reduced to ribbons of torn meat.

It was dead. The Overfiend was dead.

Artemis felt strong hands grab hold of him and haul him back over the edge. It was Imtehan and Nulsis, their armour split and pitted, but both of them alive. The Novamarine Apothecary supported Artemis with his weight.

‘That leg is attached by tendons alone,’ he growled, throwing Artemis’ arm across his shoulders. The remaining kill teams rallied, forming a condensing ring of black ceramite around the dazed greenskins who still lived atop the gargant.

The scene around Artemis collapsed further into total anarchy. Leaderless, the orks lost any remainder of their barbarian cohesion, and fell in a gory slaughter as the tyranids of hive fleet Leviathan pressed their advantage.

‘It is done!’ bellowed Rogerio in triumph, as a handful of the Deathwatch Space Marines produced blocky, flickering devices from their armour. Artemis recognised them immediately as teleportation beacons.

‘To me, my brothers, as we quit the field in victory!’

The Deathwatch gathered around Rogerio as frost began to coat his ruined shell.

‘It is done!’

Artemis felt rippling waves of sickness assail him, the wrenching dislocation and instantaneous sensation of freefall that came with teleportation, before a blinding flash stole the hellish visage of Praesidium from his sight.

TWENTY-NINE

Artemis watched as, true to his word, Watch Master Asharbanapal did to Praesidium what he had done to every other world of the Kurbynola System.

With the ork fleet scattered in the wake of the Overfiend’s death, and the majority of the tendril of the Leviathan hive fleet in pursuit of their routed prey, the remaining Deathwatch fleet settled into high orbit above the constellation of ruins that encircled Praesidium.

Artemis had hauled himself out of the packed apothecarion of the Victorious Son, limping to an observation screen to watch as the throat of the fortress-world was cut. He could make out the broken silhouette of the Claw of Damyrov as the dead battleship sank into the atmosphere of Praesidium, though there was not a soul aboard alive to feel its fire.

The deck beneath Artemis’ boots rumbled as the first salvo of cyclonic torpedoes was unleashed. The warheads sailed unerringly for the surface, where they would spark a globe-spanning firestorm, eradicating all life on the planet. In the end, Praesidium would be left a charred, lifeless husk of wind and broken glass, just like the others. It would join its celestial kindred, a silent procession of corpse worlds drifting coldly around the light of an uncaring star.

Upon their rapid return to the Victorious Son, Rogerio had been sedated and transported back to the ship’s vaults, where he would be attended to by the battle-barge’s Mechanicus adepts and Techmarines. Nulsis had carried Artemis to the apothecarion. Once he was convinced the watch captain was stable, he began seeing to the dozens of other grievously wounded Space Marines occupying slabs and lying upon the sterile tiled floor of the chamber.

Artemis did not know of Sekor’s fate. There had been scattered retrievals of pockets of Space Marines across the surface before the order for exterminatus had been given. Imtehan had departed from Artemis’ side on the watch captain’s orders, to scour the ranks of Deathwatch warriors onboard in search of their lost brother.

The first of the warheads exploded, a pinprick of cruel light blooming into an expanding wall of flame that swallowed continents. Its fellows struck soon after, their growing firestorms merging to envelop all of Praesidium in its holocaust.

Victory had never been so momentous, yet its taste so ashen upon Artemis’ tongue. The most powerful ork warlord short of the Archfiend Ghazghkull was dead, legions of his vile followers obliterated. The survivors had been thrown into disarray and infighting as a new Overfiend fought to be crowned. Artemis had no way of knowing, but if he had possessed a weakness for games of chance, he would have wagered that the foul brute Gorsnik Magash was likely to inherit that mantle.

The tendril of hive fleet Leviathan was blunted by the continuous war with the orks. The deprivation of bio-mass as a result of the purging of the Kurbynola System had cheated the monstrous xenos of the fuel necessary to continue their invasion of the segmentum. Even now, battle groups and strike forces from the watch fortress Furor Shield were assembling to prevent the weakened tyranids from spilling into the surrounding systems. They were not beaten, but the Imperium had won precious time with the blood of the billions it had lost. When the Leviathan reared its head once again, the Bladefall would be waiting.

Artemis knew in his heart that Asharbanapal had been right. In the face of this threat, any sacrifice made in defence of the Imperium had been necessary. To have done otherwise would have been to betray everything they had sworn to protect. To that extent then, Artemis thought, was Kryptman right as well? Had this been the lord inquisitor’s plan all along? And was he even alive to see its fruition?

Artemis did not know. As he watched the world of Praesidium reduced to cinders, he knew only one thing with certainty.

Another war would come. Whether with the inevitable resurgence of Leviathan, another greenskin invasion at the behest of an upstart warboss, the shadowy plots of the eldar, or the unknowable plagues of countless other xenos races that might prey upon the Imperium of Mankind, Artemis knew, in the quiet of that moment, what he had always known.

Another war was coming.

EPILOGUE

He fought alone in the darkness.

Flashes of brilliance blinked out in migraine smears, the only brief light to pierce the gloom given off by a sparking power field as the warrior’s blade severed limbs and split bodies. The last of the attackers came on in silence, oblivious to their fallen comrades as they menaced with chainblades and cudgels.

The warrior killed the first in a heartbeat, cleanly severing its head and sending it spinning from its shoulders. The second he killed on his return swing, bifurcating it from collar to groin in a spray of oily fluid.

The final attacker seized the warrior about the waist in a wrestler’s grip. The warrior twisted, throwing his opponent down heavily onto its back. The warrior smashed his fist into its face, his sword forgotten by his side as he punched again and again.

His foe’s skull protested the first blows. By the fifth, its resilience had gone. By the eighth, it shattered into ruin. One more strike from the warrior reduced the head to a limp bag of crushed gore and protruding skull fragments as his enemy went still.

The warrior panted atop the corpse for a moment, steam curling off his exposed skin in the frigid air. The only sound he could hear was his breathing, and the subtle drips as blood oozed from his knuckles onto the stone floor.

Light flooded the chamber. The warrior instinctively shut his eyes, cursing himself for not detecting the newcomer’s arrival.

‘Another taste of home?’ called out a voice.

Artemis opened his eyes as he stood, looking over as Sekor entered the duelling cages.

‘You should let me have a look at that,’ said Sekor, pointing to the watch captain’s arm.

Artemis looked down upon the whirring bionics of his arm. His eyes ran over the gouges, scars and acid burns covering the iron of the augmetic limb. He saw dark metal fingers, the damaged servos clicking and locking as he drew them together into a numb fist.

‘Later.’

Sekor nodded. ‘We returned Rogerio to hibernation this morning. He will slumber until we reach Talasa Prime, where the watch master will determine what to do.’

‘I spoke with him before, he said as much,’ replied Artemis. ‘He has borne the scars of this as well as any of us.’

‘Perhaps better than most,’ said Sekor.

Artemis met Sekor’s gaze with eyes of electric sapphire.

‘Is this what he wanted?’ asked Sekor, inspecting the racks of weapons on the walls but refraining from touching any of them. ‘Kryptman? Do you believe this is the end result he sought all those years ago?’ The Space Marine spat onto the bare floor of the training circle, watching the saliva eat into the rockcrete.

‘Perhaps,’ said Artemis, rubbing his closed eyes with his fingertips. ‘Though such rumination is pointless for those of our province. The foes have been beaten back from the gates once more, for a time. The Imperium survives for another day. We must return to Talasa Prime, rearm and seek out the Fatal Redress, if any of its crew still draw breath.’

Artemis could hear the smile in Sekor’s voice. ‘We have created a wasteland, and called it peace.’

Artemis’ eyes snapped open at the words. Only darkness confronted him. He stared down at the ruin of the combat servitor he crouched over in the inky black as he found himself alone in the duelling cages. The steam of his breath slowly feathered out before him in the cold. He looked over his shoulder, towards the entrance to the cages. The bulkhead was open, spilling cold light across the polished stone floor, but no one stood within its frame.

‘No, brother.’ The watch captain slowly rose, taking up Exterminatus as he walked from the chamber.

‘Never peace.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian St. Martin has written the short stories ‘City of Ruin’ and ‘In Wolves’ Clothing’ for Black Library. He lives and works in Washington DC, the US, caring for his cat and reading anything within reach.

An extract from
Deathwatch: Ignition.

Donatus slid into the cover of a ruined devotional cogitator bank, letting its bent and bullet-riddled frame shelter him for the moment it took to switch ammunition.

The rest of the Sternguard were weathering the storm of heavy-calibre fire stuttering around the chapel interior. Brother Adelmo was backed against a pillar and Felidus had dived into a side shrine as explosive fire tore up the floor slabs beneath him.

Donatus rejected the Hellfire round, too rare and precious, its core a reservoir of bio-reactive acid. The Metal Storm shell was also dismissed – against unarmoured flesh it could wreak carnage that a regular bolter shell could not, but in this situation it would be a poor choice. Donatus ejected his bolter’s load and replaced it with a single Kraken round from the clip at his belt. These were rare, too, and Donatus had only a single magazine of them in total. They were not to be fired off lightly.

‘Keep moving and flank it!’ commanded Sergeant Tatianus, the Sternguard squad leader. The sergeant bolted from cover and sprinted across the aisle between the chapel’s stone pews. Explosive fire followed him, filling the air with shards of hot stone. Felidus hefted his heavy bolter and rattled a volley of fire at the enemy, while Adelmo ran, head down, for the cover of the altar.

‘No effect!’ shouted Felidus over the vox. ‘The damn thing’s armoured like a tank!’

Donatus put his head above the wreck of the cogitator. The enemy was in the centre of the chapel, laughing bestially as it sprayed an endless torrent of fire at the Sternguard, mocking their attempts to bring it down.

Donatus had learned to hate the greenskins simply by virtue of being human, albeit a heavily modified one. The orks were the enemy of the very concept of humanity. They tore down the order mankind built around it to survive. They toppled the empires that men raised to bring sanity to a galaxy of madness. They were anarchy personified.

Donatus compressed his hatred into a thread that wrapped around his limbs and steadied his aim. His peered through the preysense sight of his custom bolter, leaning into the extended stock.

The enemy was a greenskin specialist. Some orks were leaders, others psykers, others pilots or vehicle gunners. The creature fighting the Sternguard was an ork engineer, one of the insane inventors that built their ramshackle war machines and unpredictably explosive weapons. It wore what Donatus guessed was its own creation – a massive suit of armour, driven by a smoke-belching power plant on its back, with dense plating that had turned aside every bolter shell the Sternguard had thrown at it.

The ork was armed with a pair of rapid-firing cannons, one mounted on each arm. Hissing hydraulics powering its limbs gave it the strength to heft the enormous weapons and keep up a withering wall of fire. Even as Donatus took in the sight, sizing up the greenskin’s armoured mass for avenues of attack, Brother Adelmo broke cover again and ran into a blind spot created by a heap of fallen masonry.

‘I’m making a detonation run!’ Adelmo voxed.

‘Go for the joints!’ replied Sergeant Tatianus. ‘They are the most vulnerable!’

Adelmo ran straight at the ork. He had a krak grenade in his hand, an explosive with a small radius but a high-powered charge designed to rip open armoured vehicles. Placed correctly, it would split the ork’s armour open and leave the xenos inside ripe for killing.

The creature saw Adelmo before he got close enough to plant the grenade. It swung one of its cannons and slammed the length of it into Adelmo’s chest. The Space Marine was hurled across the width of the chapel and crunched into the wall, dislodging chunks of broken stone as he tumbled to the floor.

The ork laughed again, the metallic sound issuing from the steel faceplate. Its metal mask was in the likeness of an ork, with red-lensed eyes and a huge grinning, jagged maw.

Donatus played his preysense sight across the ork. The sight picked out body heat and motion, lining the armoured ork in red and yellow, and the heat billowing from the power plant; the cannons glowed white-hot and the hydraulics were edged in cherry-red. The crosshairs etched onto Donatus’ lens hovered over the ork’s chest, where beneath the armour plating the alien’s heart had to beat.

Not even a Kraken round, with its shaped reactive charge to punch through ceramite and plasteel, would get through the armour there. Donatus needed another way.

The ork wheeled around to face Tatianus, who was still trying to outflank it. The sergeant rolled out of a volley of fire, but the shockwave of the chain of explosions threw the Sternguard sergeant off his feet and sent him sprawling behind the chapel’s altar.

The ork’s power plant was facing Donatus now. He had, he guessed, two ways through the ork engineer’s armour, and the power plant was one. It did not have the same armour plating as the ork’s body and there was a good chance a penetrating shot would create secondary detonations or cause the armour to fail.

He weighed up the chances in his head. At times like this, with a target in his sights, Donatus’ mind could hurtle through a series of probability equations that a scribe would need days to write down. He made his decision and pulled the trigger.

The Kraken shell speared through the brass-cased cylinder between the smoke-belching exhaust stacks. From the neat hole and larger exit scar shot a whistling plume of steam.

No explosion of fuel blew the armour apart. The ork didn’t slow down. It turned to face Donatus, suddenly aware of the fourth Sternguard in the chapel.

But there were two ways through the armour.

Donatus slid a second Kraken round into the breech of his bolter, and felt the click as it fitted into the firing chamber. His crosshair found the red lens over the ork’s right eye. A reflex action kicked in, and he fired.

The Kraken shell shattered the lens and bored right through the faceplate. It punched through the ork’s real eye and the bone of the socket. The armour covering the back of the skull held and the bullet rebounded inside its head, sending a shower of gore spraying from the ruptured lens.

The cannons fired a few more rounds as the ork’s hands clenched the firing levers reflexively. Then the guns hung limp at its sides and the whole contraption slumped, the head hanging low, the cannon barrels resting on the floor.

Tatianus picked himself up. Adelmo was on his feet, too, the deep blue of his Chapter livery caked in white dust from the pulverised stone of the chapel. His armour had been repainted upon his return from service with the Deathwatch, and it had made him look like a new recruit. Felidus had mocked him for it at first, but now Adelmo looked as battle-worn as the rest of them.

‘A good kill, brother,’ Tatianus commended Donatus, approaching the ork to check it really was dead. A trickle of gore from the punctured lens suggested there was little doubt of that.

‘Not so good,’ said Adelmo. Though he wore his helmet, crowned with gilded laurel leaves, Donatus could tell that he was smiling. ‘It took two rounds.’

For all of the people who believed in me, and especially for all the ones who did not.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Raymond Swanland.

Deathwatch © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Deathwatch, Legends of the Dark Millenium, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-232-5

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.