HEADHUNTED

Steve Parker

SOMETHING VAST, DARK and brutish moved across the pin-pricked curtain of space, blotting out the diamond lights of the constellations behind it as if swallowing them whole. It was the size of a city block, and its bulbous eyes, like those of a great blind fish, glowed with a green and baleful light.

It was a terrible thing to behold, this leviathan - a harbinger of doom - and its passage had brought agony and destruction to countless victims in the centuries it had swum among the stars. It travelled, now, through the Charybdis Subsector on trails of angry red plasma, cutting across the inky darkness with a purpose.

That purpose was close at hand, and a change began to take place on its bestial features. New lights flickered to life on its muzzle, shining far brighter and sharper than its eyes, illuminating myriad shapes, large and small, that danced and spun in high orbit above the glowing orange sphere of Arronax II. With a slow, deliberate motion, the leviathan unhinged its massive lower jaw, and opened its mouth to feed.

At first, the glimmering pieces of debris it swallowed were mere fragments, nothing much larger than a man. But soon, heavier, bulkier pieces drifted into that gaping maw, passing between its bladelike teeth and down into its black throat.

For hours, the monster gorged itself on space-borne scrap, devouring everything it could fit into its mouth. The pickings were good. There had been heavy fighting here in ages past. Scoured worlds and lifeless wrecks were all that remained now, locked in a slow elliptical dance around the local star. But the wrecks, at least, had a future. Once salvaged, they would be forged anew, recast in forms that would bring death and suffering down upon countless others. For, of course, this beast, this hungry monster of the void, was no beast at all.

It was an ork ship. And the massive glyphs daubed sloppily on its hull marked it as a vessel of the Deathskull clan.

RE-PRESSURISATION BEGAN THE moment the ship’s vast metal jaws clanged shut. The process took around twenty minutes, pumps flooding the salvage bay with breathable, if foul-smelling, air. The orks crowding the corridor beyond the bay’s airlock doors roared their impatience and hammered their fists against the thick metal bulkheads. They shoved and jostled for position. Then, just when it seemed murderous violence was sure to erupt, sirens sounded and the heavy doors split apart. The orks surged forward, pushing and scrambling, racing towards the mountains of scrap, each utterly focused on claiming the choicest pieces for himself.

Fights broke out between the biggest and darkest skinned. They roared and wrestled with each other, and snapped at each other with tusk-filled jaws. They lashed out with the tools and weapons that bristled on their augmented limbs. They might have killed each other but for the massive suits of cybernetic armour they wore. These were no mere greenskin foot soldiers. They were orks of a unique genus, the engineers of their race, each born with an inherent understanding of machines. It was hard-coded into their marrow in the same way as violence and torture.

As was true of every caste, however, some among them were cleverer than others. While the mightiest bellowed and beat their metal-plated chests, one ork, marginally shorter and leaner than the rest, slid around them and into the shadows, intent on getting first pickings.

This ork was called Gorgrot in the rough speech of his race, and, despite the sheer density of salvage the ship had swallowed, it didn’t take him long to find something truly valuable. At the very back of the junk-filled bay, closes to the ship’s great metal teeth, he found the ruined, severed prow of a mid-sized human craft. As he studied it, he noticed weapon barrels protruding from the front end. His alien heart quickened. Functional or not, he could do great things with salvaged weapon systems. He would make himself more dangerous, an ork to be reckoned with.

After a furtive look over his shoulder to make sure none of the bigger orks had noticed him, he moved straight across to the wrecked prow, reached out a gnarled hand and touched the hull. Its armour-plating was in bad shape, pocked and cratered by plasma fire and torpedo impacts. To the rear, the metal was twisted and black where it had sheared away from the rest of the craft. It looked like an explosion had torn the ship apart. To Gorgrot, however, the nature of the ship’s destruction mattered not at all. What mattered was its potential. Already, visions of murderous creativity were flashing through his tiny mind in rapid succession, so many at once, in fact, that he forgot to breathe until his lungs sent him a painful reminder. These visions were a gift from Gork and Mork, the bloodthirsty greenskin gods, and he had received their like many times before. All greenskin engineers received them, and nothing, save the rending of an enemy’s flesh, felt so utterly right.

Even so, it was something small and insignificant that pulled him out of his rapture.

A light had begun to flash on the lower left side of the ruined prow, winking at him from beneath a tangle of beams and cables and dented armour plates, igniting his simple-minded curiosity, drawing him towards it. It was small and green, and it looked like it might be a button of some kind. Gorgrot began clearing debris from the area around it. Soon, he was grunting and growling with the effort, sweating despite the assistance of his armour’s strength-boosting hydraulics.

Within minutes, he had removed all obstructions between himself and the blinking light, and discovered that it was indeed a kind of button.

Gorgrot was extending his finger out to press it when something suddenly wrenched him backwards with irresistible force. He was hurled to the ground and landed hard on his back with a snarl. Immediately, he tried to scramble up again, but a huge metal boot stamped down on him, denting his belly-armour and pushing him deep into the carpet of sharp scrap.

Gorgrot looked up into the blazing red eyes of the biggest, heaviest ork in the salvage bay.

This was Zazog, personal engineer to the mighty Warboss Balthazog Bludwrekk, and few orks on the ship were foolish enough to challenge any of his salvage claims. It was the reason he always arrived in the salvage bay last of all; his tardiness was the supreme symbol of his dominance among the scavengers.

Zazog staked his claim now, turning from Gorgrot and stomping over to the wrecked prow. There, he hunkered down to examine the winking button. He knew well enough what it meant. There had to be a working power source onboard, something far more valuable than most scrap. He flicked out a blowtorch attachment from the middle knuckle of his mechanised left claw and burned a rough likeness of his personal glyph into the side of the wrecked prow. Then he rose and bellowed a challenge to those around him.

Scores of gretchin, puniest members of the orkoid race, skittered away in panic, disappearing into the protection of the shadows. The other orks stepped back, growling at Zazog, snarling in anger. But none dared challenge him.

Zazog glared at each in turn, forcing them, one by one, to drop their gazes or die by his hand. Then, satisfied at their deference, he turned and pressed a thick finger to the winking green button.

For a brief moment, nothing happened. Zazog growled and pressed it again. Still nothing. He was about to begin pounding it with his mighty fist when he heard a noise.

It was the sound of atmospheric seals unlocking.

The door shuddered, and began sliding up into the hull.

Zazog’s craggy, scar-covered face twisted into a hideous grin. Yes, there was a power source on board. The door’s motion proved it. He, like Gorgrot, began to experience flashes of divine inspiration, visions of weaponry so grand and deadly that his limited brain could hardly cope. No matter; the gods would work through him once he got started. His hands would automatically fashion what his brain could barely comprehend. It was always the way.

The sliding door retracted fully now, revealing an entrance just large enough for Zazog’s armoured bulk to squeeze through. He shifted forward with that very intention, but the moment never came.

From the shadows inside the doorway, there was a soft coughing sound.

Zazog’s skull disintegrated in a haze of blood and bone chips. His headless corpse crashed backwards onto the carpet of junk.

The other orks gaped in slack-jawed wonder. They looked down at Zazog’s body, trying to make sense of the dim warnings that rolled through their minds. Ignoring the obvious threat, the biggest orks quickly began roaring fresh claims and shoving the others aside, little realising that their own deaths were imminent.

But imminent they were.

A great black shadow appeared, bursting from the door Zazog had opened. It was humanoid, not quite as large as the orks surrounding it, but bulky nonetheless, though it moved with a speed and confidence no ork could ever have matched. Its long adamantium talons sparked and crackled with deadly energy as it slashed and stabbed in all directions, a whirlwind of lethal motion. Great fountains of thick red blood arced through the air as it killed again and again. Greenskins fell like sacks of meat.

More shadows emerged from the wreck now. Four of them. Like the first, all were dressed in heavy black ceramite armour. All bore an intricate skull and ”I” design on their massive left pauldrons. The icons on their right pauldrons, however, were each unique.

‘Clear the room,’ barked one over his comm-link as he gunned down a greenskin in front of him, spitting death from the barrel of his silenced bolter. ‘Quick and quiet. Kill the rest before they raise the alarm.’ Switching comm channels, he said, ‘Sigma, this is Talon Alpha. Phase one complete. Killteam is aboard. Securing entry point now.’

‘Understood, Alpha,’ replied the toneless voice at the other end of the link. ‘Proceed on mission. Extract within the hour, as instructed. Captain Redthorne has orders to pull out if you miss your pick-up, so keep your team on a tight leash. This is not a purge operation. Is that clear?’

‘I’m well aware of that, Sigma,’ the kill-team leader replied brusquely.

‘You had better be,’ replied the voice. ‘Sigma, out.’

*

IT TOOK TALON squad less than sixty seconds to clear the salvage bay. Brother Rauth of the Exorcists Chapter gunned down the last of the fleeing gretchin as it dashed for the exit. The creature stumbled as a single silenced bolt punched into its back. Half a second later, a flesh-muffled detonation ripped it apart.

It was the last of twenty-six bodies to fall among the litter of salvaged scrap.

‘Target down, Karras,’ reported Rauth. ‘Area clear.’

‘Confirmed,’ replied Karras. He turned to face a Space Marine with a heavy flamer. ‘Omni, you know what to do. The rest of you, cover the entrance.’

With the exception of Omni, the team immediately moved to positions covering the mouth of the corridor through which the orks had come. Omni, otherwise known as Maximmion Voss of the Imperial Fists, moved to the side walls, first the left, then the right, working quickly at a number of thick hydraulic pistons and power cables there.

‘That was messy, Karras,’ said Brother Solarion, ‘letting them see us as we came out. I told you we should have used smoke. If one had escaped and raised the alarm…’

Karras ignored the comment. It was just Solarion being Solarion.

‘Give it a rest, Prophet,’ said Brother Zeed, opting to use Solarion’s nickname. Zeed had coined it himself, and knew precisely how much it irritated the proud Ultramarine. ‘The room is clear. No runners. No alarms. Scholar knows what he’s doing.’

Scholar. That was what they called Karras, or at least Brothers Voss and Zeed did. Rauth and Solarion insisted on calling him by his second name. Sigma always called him Alpha. And his battle-brothers back on Occludus, homeworld of the Death Spectres Chapter, simply called him by his first name, Lyandro, or sometimes simply Codicier - his rank in the Librarius.

Karras didn’t much care what anyone called him so long as they all did their jobs. The honour of serving in the Deathwatch had been offered to him, and he had taken it, knowing the great glory it would bring both himself and his Chapter. But he wouldn’t be sorry when his obligation to the Emperor’s Holy Inquisition was over. Astartes life seemed far less complicated among one’s own Chapter-brothers.

When would he return to the fold? He didn’t know. There was no fixed term for Deathwatch service. The Inquisition made high demands of all it called upon. Karras might not see the darkly beautiful crypt-cities of his home world again for decades… if he lived that long.

‘Done, Scholar,’ reported Voss as he rejoined the rest of the team.

Karras nodded and pointed towards a shattered pict screen and rune-board that protruded from the wall, close to the bay’s only exit. ‘Think you can get anything from that?’ he asked.

‘Nothing from the screen,’ said Voss, ‘but I could try wiring the data-feed directly into my visor.’

‘Do it,’ said Karras, ‘but be quick.’ To the others, he said, ‘Proceed with phase two. Solarion, take point.’

The Ultramarine nodded curtly, rose from his position among the scrap and stalked forward into the shadowy corridor, bolter raised and ready. He moved with smooth, near-silent steps despite the massive weight of his armour. Torias Telion, famed Ultramarine Scout Master and Solarion’s former mentor, would have been proud of his prize student.

One by one, with the exception of Voss, the rest of the kill-team followed in his wake.

THE FILTHY, RUSTING corridors of the ork ship were lit, but the electric lamps the greenskins had strung up along pipes and ducts were old and in poor repair. Barely half of them seemed to be working at all. Even these buzzed and flickered in a constant battle to throw out their weak illumination. Still, the little light they did give was enough to bother the kill-team leader. The inquisitor, known to the members of Talon only by his call-sign, Sigma, had estimated the ork population of the ship at somewhere over twenty thousand. Against odds like these, Karras knew only too well that darkness and stealth were among his best weapons.

‘I want the lights taken out,’ he growled. ‘The longer we stay hidden, the better our chances of making it off this damned heap.’

‘We could shoot them out as we go,’ offered Solarion, ‘but I’d rather not waste my ammunition on something that doesn’t bleed.’

Just then, Karras heard Voss on the comm-link. ‘I’ve finished with the terminal, Scholar. I managed to pull some old cargo manifests from the ship’s memory core. Not much else, though. Apparently, this ship used to be a civilian heavy-transport, Magellan-class, built on Stygies. It was called The Pegasus.’

‘No schematics?’

‘Most of the memory core is heavily corrupted. It’s thousands of years old. We were lucky to get that much.’

‘Sigma, this is Alpha,’ said Karras. ‘The ork ship is built around an Imperial transport called The Pegasus. Requesting schematics, priority one.’

‘I heard,’ said Sigma. ‘You’ll have them as soon as I do.’

‘Voss, where are you now?’ Karras asked.

‘Close to your position,’ said the Imperial Fist.

‘Do you have any idea which cable provides power to the lights?’

‘Look up,’ said Voss. ‘See those cables running along the ceiling? The thick one, third from the left. I’d wager my knife on it.’

Karras didn’t have to issue the order. The moment Zeed heard Voss’s words, his right arm flashed upwards. There was a crackle of blue energy as the Raven Guard’s claws sliced through the cable, and the corridor went utterly dark.

To the Space Marines, however, everything remained clear as day. Their Mk VII helmets, like everything else in their arsenal, had been heavily modified by the Inquisition’s finest artificers. They boasted a composite low-light/thermal vision mode that was superior to anything else Karras had ever used. In the three years he had been leading Talon, it had tipped the balance in his favour more times than he cared to count. He hoped it would do so many more times in the years to come, but that would all depend on their survival here, and he knew all too well that the odds were against them from the start. It wasn’t just the numbers they were up against, or the tight deadline. There was something here the likes of which few Deathwatch kill-teams had ever faced before.

Karras could already feel its presence somewhere on the upper levels of the ship. ‘Keep moving,’ he told the others.

THREE MINUTES AFTER Zeed had killed the lights, Solarion hissed for them all to stop. ‘Karras,’ he rasped, ‘I have multiple xenos up ahead. Suggest you move up and take a look.’

Karras ordered the others to hold and went forward, careful not to bang or scrape his broad pauldrons against the clutter of twisting pipes that lined both walls. Crouching beside Solarion, he realised he needn’t have worried about a little noise. In front of him, over a hundred orks had crowded into a high-ceilinged, octagonal chamber. They were hooting and laughing and wresding with each other to get nearer the centre of the room.

Neither Karras nor Solarion could see beyond the wall of broad green backs, but there was clearly something in the middle that was holding their attention.

‘What are they doing?’ whispered Solarion.

Karras decided there was only one way to find out. He centred his awareness down in the pit of his stomach, and began reciting the Litany of the Sight Beyond Sight that his former master, Chief Librarian Athio Cordatus, had taught him during his earliest years in the Librarius. Beneath his helmet, hidden from Solarion’s view, Karras’s eyes, normally deep red in colour, began to glow with an ethereal white flame. On his forehead, a wound appeared. A single drop of blood rolled over his brow and down to the bridge of his narrow, angular nose. Slowly, as he opened his soul fractionally more to the dangerous power within him, the wound widened, revealing the physical manifestation of his psychic inner eye.

Karras felt his awareness lift out of his body now. He willed it deeper into the chamber, rising above the backs of the orks, looking down on them from above.

He saw a great pit sunk into the centre of the metal floor. It was filled with hideous ovoid creatures of every possible colour, their tiny red eyes set above oversized mouths crammed with razor-edged teeth.

‘It’s a mess hall,’ Karras told his team over the link. ‘There’s a squig pit in the centre.’

As his projected consciousness watched, the greenskins at the rim of the pit stabbed downwards with cruelly barbed poles, hooking their prey through soft flesh. Then they lifted the squigs, bleeding and screaming, into the air before reaching for them, tearing them from the hooks, and feasting on them.

‘They’re busy,’ said Karras, ‘but we’ll need to find another way through.’

‘Send me in, Scholar,’ said Voss from the rear. ‘I’ll turn them all into cooked meat before they even realise they’re under attack. Ghost can back me up.’

‘On your order, Scholar,’ said Zeed eagerly.

Ghost. That was Siefer Zeed. With his helmet off, it was easy to see how he’d come by the name. Like Karras, and like all brothers of their respective Chapters, Zeed was the victim of a failed melanochromic implant, a slight mutation in his ancient and otherwise worthy geneseed. The skin of both he and the kill-team leader was as white as porcelain. But, whereas Karras bore the blood-red eyes and chalk-white hair of the true albino, Zeed’s eyes were black as coals, and his hair no less dark.

‘Negative,’ said Karras. ‘We’ll find another way through.’

He pushed his astral-self further into the chamber, desperate to find a means that didn’t involve alerting the foe, but there seemed little choice. Only when he turned his awareness upwards did he see what he was looking for.

‘There’s a walkway near the ceiling,’ he reported. ‘It looks frail, rusting badly, but if we cross it one at a time, it should hold.’

A sharp, icy voice on the comm-link interrupted him. ‘Talon Alpha, get ready to receive those schematics. Transmitting now.’

Karras willed his consciousness back into his body, and his glowing third eye sealed itself, leaving only the barest trace of a scar. Using conventional sight, he consulted his helmet’s heads-up display and watched the last few percent of the schematics file being downloaded. When it was finished, he called it up with a thought, and the helmet projected it as a shimmering green image cast directly onto his left retina.

The others, he knew, were seeing the same thing.

‘According to these plans,’ he told them, ‘there’s an access ladder set into the wall near the second junction we passed. We’ll backtrack to it. The corridor above this one will give us access to the walkway.’

‘If it’s still there,’ said Solarion. ‘The orks may have removed it.’

‘And backtracking will cost us time,’ grumbled Voss. ‘Less time than a firefight would cost us,’ countered Rauth. His hard, gravelly tones were made even harder by the slight distortion on the comm-link. ‘There’s a time and place for that kind of killing, but it isn’t now.’

‘Watcher’s right,’ said Zeed reluctantly. It was rare for he and Rauth to agree.

‘I’ve told you before,’ warned Rauth. ‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Right or wrong,’ said Karras, ‘I’m not taking votes. I’ve made my call. Let’s move.’

KARRAS WAS THE last to cross the gantry above the ork feeding pit. The shadows up here were dense and, so far, the orks had noticed nothing, though there had been a few moments when it looked as if the aging iron were about to collapse, particularly beneath the tremendous weight of Voss with his heavy flamer, high explosives, and back-mounted promethium supply.

Such was the weight of the Imperial Fist and his kit that Karras had decided to send him over first. Voss had made it across, but it was nothing short of a miracle that the orks below hadn’t noticed the rain of red flakes showering down on them.

Lucky we didn’t bring old Chyron after all, thought Karras.

The sixth member of Talon wouldn’t have made it out of the salvage bay. The corridors on this ship were too narrow for such a mighty Space Marine. Instead, Sigma had ordered the redoubtable Dreadnought, formerly of the Lamenters Chapter but now permanently attached to Talon, to remain behind on Redthorne’s ship, the Saint Nevarre. That had caused a few tense moments. Chyron had a vile temper.

Karras made his way, centimetre by centimetre, along the creaking metal grille, his silenced bolter fixed securely to the magnetic couplings on his right thigh plate, his force sword sheathed on his left hip. Over one massive shoulder was slung the cryo-case that Sigma had insisted he carry. Karras cursed it, but there was no way he could leave it behind. It added twenty kilogrammes to his already significant weight, but the case was absolutely critical to the mission. He had no choice.

Up ahead, he could see Rauth watching him, as ever, from the end of the gangway. What was the Exorcist thinking? Karras had no clue. He had never been able to read the mysterious Astartes. Rauth seemed to have no warp signature whatsoever. He simply didn’t register at all. Even his armour, even his bolter for Throne’s sake, resonated more than he did. And it was an anomaly that Rauth was singularly unwilling to discuss.

There was no love lost between them, Karras knew, and, for his part, he regretted that. He had made gestures, occasional overtures, but for whatever reason, they had been rebuffed every time. The Exorcist was unreachable, distant, remote, and it seemed he planned to stay that way.

As Karras took his next step, the cryo-case suddenly swung forward on its strap, shifting his centre of gravity and threatening to unbalance him. He compensated swiftly, but the effort caused the gangway to creak and a piece of rusted metal snapped off, spinning away under him.

He froze, praying that the orks wouldn’t notice. But one did.

It was at the edge of the pit, poking a fat squig with its barbed pole, when the metal fragment struck its head. The ork immediately stopped what it was doing and scanned the shadows above it, squinting suspiciously up towards the unlit recesses of the high ceiling.

Karras stared back, willing it to turn away. Reading minds and controlling minds, however, were two very different things. The latter was a power beyond his gifts. Ultimately, it wasn’t Karras’s will that turned the ork from its scrutiny. It was the nature of the greenskin species.

The other orks around it, impatient to feed, began grabbing at the barbed pole. One managed to snatch it, and the gazing ork suddenly found himself robbed of his chance to feed. He launched himself into a violent frenzy, lashing out at the pole-thief and those nearby. That was when the orks behind him surged forward, and pushed him into the squig pit.

Karras saw the squigs swarm on the hapless ork, sinking their long teeth into its flesh and tearing away great, bloody mouthfuls. The food chain had been turned on its head. The orks around the pit laughed and capered and struck at their dying fellow with their poles.

Karras didn’t stop to watch. He moved on carefully, cursing the black case that was now pressed tight to his side with one arm. He rejoined his team in the mouth of a tunnel on the far side of the gantry, and they moved off, pressing deeper into the ship. Solarion moved up front with Zeed. Voss stayed in the middle. Rauth and Karras brought up the rear.

‘They need to do some damned maintenance around here,’ Karras told Rauth in a wry tone.

The Exorcist said nothing.

BY COMPARING SIGMA’s schematics of The Pegasus with the features he saw as he moved through it, it soon became clear to Karras that the orks had done very little to alter the interior of the ship beyond covering its walls in badly rendered glyphs, defecating wherever they pleased, leaving dead bodies to rot where they fell, and generally making the place unfit for habitation by anything save their own wretched kind. Masses of quivering fungi had sprouted from broken water pipes. Frayed electrical cables sparked and hissed at anyone who walked by. And there were so many bones strewn about that some sections almost looked like mass graves.

The Deathwatch members made a number of kills, or rather Solarion did, as they proceeded deeper into the ship’s belly. Most of these were gretchin sent out on some errand or other by their slavemasters. The Ultramarine silently executed them wherever he found them and stuffed the small corpses under pipes or in dark alcoves. Only twice did the kill-team encounter parties of ork warriors, and both times, the greenskins announced themselves well in advance with their loud grunting and jabbering. Karras could tell that Voss and Zeed were both itching to engage, but stealth was still paramount. Instead, he, Rauth and Solarion eliminated the foe, loading powerful hellfire rounds into their silenced bolters to ensure quick, quiet one-shot kills.

‘I’ve reached Waypoint Adrius,’ Solarion soon reported from up ahead. ‘No xenos contacts.’

‘Okay, move in and secure,’ Karras ordered. ‘Check your corners and exits.’

The kill-team hurried forward, emerging from the blackness of the corridor into a towering square shaft. It was hundreds of metres high, its metal walls stained with age and rust and all kinds of spillage. Thick pipes ran across the walls at all angles, many of them venting steam or dripping icy coolant. There were broken staircases and rusting gantries at regular intervals, each of which led to gaping doorways. And, in the middle of the left-side wall, an open elevator shaft ran almost to the top.

It was here that Talon would be forced to split up. From this chamber, they could access any level in the ship. Voss and Zeed would go down via a metal stairway, the others would go up.

‘Good luck using that,’ said Voss, nodding towards the elevator cage. It was clearly of ork construction, a mishmash of metal bits bolted together. It had a blood-stained steel floor, a folding, lattice-work gate and a large lever which could be pushed forward for up, or pulled backwards for down.

There was no sign of what had happened to the original elevator.

Karras scowled under his helmet as he looked at it and cross-referenced what he saw against his schematics.

‘We’ll have to take it as high as it will go,’ he told Rauth and Solarion. He pointed up towards the far ceiling. ‘That landing at the top; that is where we are going. From there we can access the corridor to the bridge. Ghost, Omni, you have your own objectives.’ He checked the mission chrono in the corner of his visor. ‘Forty-three minutes,’ he told them. ‘Avoid confrontation if you can. And stay in contact.’

‘Understood, Scholar,’ said Voss.

Karras frowned. He could sense the Imperial Fist’s hunger for battle. It had been there since the moment they’d set foot on this mechanical abomination. Like most Imperial Fists, once Voss was in a fight, he tended to stay there until the foe was dead. He could be stubborn to the point of idiocy, but there was no denying his versatility. Weapons, vehicles, demolitions… Voss could do it all.

‘Ghost,’ said Karras. ‘Make sure he gets back here on schedule.’

‘If I have to knock him out and drag him back myself,’ said Zeed.

‘You can try,’ Voss snorted, grinning under his helmet. He and the Raven Guard had enjoyed a good rapport since the moment they had met. Karras occasionally envied them that.

‘Go,’ he told them, and they moved off, disappearing down a stairwell on the right, their footsteps vibrating the grille under Karras’s feet.

‘Then there were three,’ said Solarion.

‘With the Emperor’s blessing,’ said Karras, ‘that’s all we’ll need.’ He strode over to the elevator, pulled the lattice-work gate aside, and got in. As the others joined him, he added, ‘If either of you know a Mechanicus prayer, now would be a good time. Rauth, take us up.’

The Exorcist pushed the control lever forward, and it gave a harsh, metallic screech. A winch high above them began turning. Slowly at first, then with increasing speed, the lower levels dropped away beneath them. Pipes and landings flashed by, then the counterweight whistled past. The floor of the cage creaked and groaned under their feet as it carried them higher and higher. Disconcerting sounds issued from the cable and the assembly at the top, but the ride was short, lasting barely a minute, for which Karras thanked the Emperor.

When they were almost at the top of the shaft, Rauth eased the control lever backwards and the elevator slowed, issuing the same high-pitched complaint with which it had started.

Karras heard Solarion cursing.

‘Problem, brother?’ he asked.

‘We’ll be lucky if the whole damned ship doesn’t know we’re here by now,’ spat the Ultramarine. ‘Accursed piece of ork junk.’

The elevator ground to a halt at the level of the topmost landing, and Solarion almost tore the lattice-work gate from its fixings as he wrenched it aside. Stepping out, he took point again automatically.

The rickety steel landing led off in two directions. To the left, it led to a trio of dimly lit corridor entrances. To the right, it led towards a steep metal staircase in a severe state of disrepair.

Karras consulted his schematics.

‘Now for the bad news,’ he said.

The others eyed the stair grimly.

‘It won’t hold us,’ said Rauth. ‘Not together.’

Some of the metal steps had rusted away completely leaving gaps of up to a metre. Others were bent and twisted, torn halfway free of their bolts as if something heavy had landed hard on them.

‘So we spread out,’ said Karras. ‘Stay close to the wall. Put as little pressure on each step as we can. We don’t have time to debate it.’

They moved off, Solarion in front, Karras in the middle, Rauth at the rear. Karras watched his point-man carefully, noting exactly where he placed each foot. The Ultramarine moved with a certainty and fluidity that few could match. Had he registered more of a warp signature than he did, Karras might even have suspected some kind of extra-sensory perception, but, in fact, it was simply the superior training of the Master Scout, Telion.

Halfway up the stair, however, Solarion suddenly held up his hand and hissed, ‘Hold!’

Rauth and Karras froze at once. The stairway creaked gently under them.

‘Xenos, direct front. Twenty metres. Three big ones.’

Neither Karras nor Rauth could see them. The steep angle of the stair prevented it.

‘Can you deal with them?’ asked Karras.

‘Not alone,’ said Solarion. ‘One is standing in a doorway. I don’t have clear line of fire on him. It could go either way. If he charges, fine. But he may raise the alarm as soon as I drop the others. Better the three of us take them out at once, if you think you can move up quietly.’

The challenge in Solarion’s words, not to mention his tone, could hardly be missed. Karras lifted a foot and placed it gently on the next step up. Slowly, he put his weight on it. There was a harsh grating sound.

‘I said quietly,’ hissed Solarion.

‘I heard you, damn it,’ Karras snapped back. Silently, he cursed the cryo-case strapped over his shoulder. Its extra weight and shifting centre of gravity was hampering him, as it had on the gantry above the squig pit, but what could he do?

‘Rauth,’ he said. ‘Move past me. Don’t touch this step. Place yourself on Solarion’s left. Try to get an angle on the ork in the doorway. Solarion, open fire on Rauth’s mark. You’ll have to handle the other two yourself.’

‘Confirmed,’ rumbled Rauth. Slowly, carefully, the Exorcist moved out from behind Karras and continued climbing as quietly as he could. Flakes of rust fell from the underside of the stair like red snow.

Rauth was just ahead of Karras, barely a metre out in front, when, as he put the weight down on his right foot, the step under it gave way with a sharp snap. Rauth plunged into open space, nothing below him but two hundred metres of freefall and a lethally hard landing.

Karras moved on instinct with a speed that bordered on supernatural. His gauntleted fist shot out, catching Rauth just in time, closing around the Exorcist’s left wrist with almost crushing force.

The orks turned their heads towards the sudden noise and stomped towards the top of the stairs, massive stubbers raised in front of them.

‘By Guilliman’s blood!’ raged Solarion.

He opened fire.

The first of the orks collapsed with its brainpan blown out.

Karras was struggling to haul Rauth back onto the stairway, but the metal under his own feet, forced to support the weight of both Astartes, began to scrape clear of its fixings.

‘Quickly, psyker,’ gasped Rauth, ‘or we’ll both die.’

‘Not a damned chance,’ Karras growled. With a monumental effort of strength, he heaved Rauth high enough that the Exorcist could grab the staircase and scramble back onto it.

As Rauth got to his feet, he breathed, ‘Thank you, Karras… but you may live to regret saving me.’

Karras was scowling furiously under his helmet. ‘You may not think of me as your brother, but, at the very least, you are a member of my team. However, the next time you call me psyker with such disdain, you will be the one to regret it. Is that understood?’

Rauth glared at him for a second, then nodded once. ‘Fair words.’

Karras moved past him, stepping over the broad gap then stopping at Solarion’s side. On the landing ahead, he saw two ork bodies leaking copious amounts of fluid from severe head wounds.

As he looked at them, wailing alarms began to sound throughout the ship.

Solarion turned to face him. ‘I told Sigma he should have put me in charge,’ he hissed. ‘Damn it, Karras.’

‘Save it,’ Karras barked. His eyes flicked to the countdown on his heads-up display. Thirty-three minutes left. ‘They know we’re here. The killing starts in earnest now, but we can’t let them hold us up. Both of you follow me. Let’s move!’

Without another word, the three Astartes pounded across the upper landing and into the mouth of the corridor down which the third ork had vanished, desperate to reach their primary objective before the whole damned horde descended on them.

‘So MUCH FOR keeping a low profile, eh, brother?’ said Zeed as he guarded Voss’s back.

A deafening, ululating wail had filled the air. Red lights began to rotate in their wall fixtures.

Voss grunted by way of response. He was concentrating hard on the task at hand. He crouched by the coolant valves of the ship’s massive plasma reactor, power source for the vessel’s gigantic main thrusters.

The noise in the reactor room was deafening even without the ork alarms, and none of the busy gretchin work crews had noticed the two Deathwatch members until it was too late. Zeed had hacked them limb from limb before they’d had a chance to scatter. Now that the alarm had been sounded, though, orks would be arming themselves and filling the corridors outside, each filthy alien desperate to claim a kill.

‘We’re done here,’ said Voss, rising from his crouch. He hefted his heavy flamer from the floor and turned. ‘The rest is up to Scholar and the others.’

Voss couldn’t check in with them. Not from here. Such close proximity to a reactor, particularly one with so much leakage, filled the kill-team’s primary comm-channels with nothing but static.

Zeed moved to the thick steel door of the reactor room, opened it a crack, and peered outside.

‘It’s getting busy out there,’ he reported. ‘Lots of mean-looking bastards, but they can hardly see with all the lights knocked out. What do you say, brother? Are you ready to paint the walls with the blood of the foe?’

Under his helmet, Voss grinned. He thumbed his heavy-flamer’s igniter switch and a hot blue flame burst to life just in front of the weapon’s promethium nozzle. ‘Always,’ he said, coming abreast of the Raven Guard.

Together, the two comrades charged into the corridor, howling the names of their primarchs as battle cries.

‘WE’RE PINNED,’ HISSED Rauth as ork stubber and pistol fire smacked into the metal wall beside him. Pipes shattered. Iron flakes showered the ground. Karras, Rauth and Solarion had pushed as far and as fast as they could once the alarms had been tripped. But now they found themselves penned-in at a junction, a confluence of three broad corridors, and mobs of howling, jabbering orks were pouring towards them from all sides.

With his knife, Solarion had already severed the cable that powered the lights, along with a score of others that did Throne-knew-what. A number of the orks, however, were equipped with goggles, not to mention weapons and armour far above typical greenskin standards. Karras had fought such fiends before. They were the greenskin equivalent of commando squads, far more cunning and deadly than the usual muscle-minded oafs. Their red night-vision lenses glowed like daemons’ eyes as they pressed closer and closer, keeping to cover as much as possible.

Karras and his Deathwatch Marines were outnumbered at least twenty to one, and that ratio would quickly change for the worse if they didn’t break through soon.

‘Orders, Karras,’ growled Solarion as his right pauldron absorbed a direct hit. The ork shell left an ugly scrape on the blue and white Chapter insignia there. ‘We’re taking too much fire. The cover here is pitiful.’

Karras thought fast. A smokescreen would be useless. If the ork goggles were operating on thermal signatures, they would see right through it. Incendiaries or frags would kill a good score of them and dissuade the others from closing, but that wouldn’t solve the problem of being pinned.

‘Novas,’ he told them. ‘On my signal, one down each corridor. Short throws. Remember to cover your visors. The moment they detonate, we make a push. I’m taking point. Clear?’

‘On your mark, Karras,’ said Solarion with a nod.

‘Give the word,’ said Rauth.

Karras tugged a nova grenade from the webbing around his armoured waist. The others did the same. He pulled the pin, swung his arm back and called out, ‘Now!’

Three small black cylinders flew through the darkness to clatter against the metal floor. Swept up in the excitement of the firefight, the orks didn’t notice them.

‘Eyes!’ shouted Karras and threw an arm up over his visor.

Three deafening bangs sounded in quick succession, louder even than the bark of the orks’ guns. Howls of agony immediately followed, filling the close, damp air of the corridors. Karras looked up to see the orks reeling around in the dark with their great, thick-fingered hands pressed to their faces. They were crashing into the walls, weapons forgotten, thrown to the floor in their agony and confusion.

Nova grenades were typically employed for room clearance, but they worked well in any dark, enclosed space. They were far from standard-issue Astartes hardware, but the Deathwatch were the elite, the best of the best, and they had access to the kind of resources that few others could boast. The intense, phosphor-bright flash that the grenades produced overloaded optical receptors, both mechanical and biological. The blindness was temporary in most cases, but Karras was betting that the orks’ goggles would magnify the glare.

Their retinas would be permanently burned out.

‘With me,’ he barked, and charged out from his corner. He moved in a blur, fixing his silenced bolter to the mag-locks on his thigh plate and drawing his faithful force sword, Arquemann, from its scabbard as he raced towards the foe.

Rauth and Solarion came behind, but not so close as to gamble with their lives. The bite of Arquemann was certain death whenever it glowed with otherworldly energy, and it had begun to glow now, throwing out a chill, unnatural light.

Karras threw himself in among the greenskin commandos, turning great powerful arcs with his blade, despatching more xenos filth with every limb-severing stroke. Steaming corpses soon littered the floor. The orks in the corridors behind continued to flail blindly, attacking each other now, in their sightless desperation.

‘The way is clear,’ Karras gasped. ‘We run.’ He sheathed Arquemann and led the way, feet pounding on the metal deck. The cryo-case swung wildly behind him as he moved, but he paid it no mind. Beneath his helmet, his third eye was closing again. The dangerous energies that gave him his powers were retreating at his command, suppressed by the mantras that kept him strong, kept him safe.

The inquisitor’s voice intruded on the comm-link. ‘Alpha, this is Sigma. Respond.’

‘I hear you, Sigma,’ said Karras as he ran.

‘Where are you now?’

‘Closing on Waypoint Barrius. We’re about one minute out.’

‘You’re falling behind, Alpha. Perhaps I should begin preparing death certificates to your respective Chapters.’

‘Damn you, inquisitor. We’ll make it. Now if that’s all you wanted…’

‘Solarion is to leave you at Barrius. I have another task for him.’

‘No,’ said Karras flatly. ‘We’re already facing heavy resistance here. I need him with me.’

‘I don’t make requests, Deathwatch. According to naval intelligence reports, there is a large fighter bay on the ship’s starboard side. Significant fuel dumps. Give Solarion your explosives. I want him to knock out that fighter bay while you and Rauth proceed to the bridge. If all goes well, the diversion may help clear your escape route. If not, you had better start praying for a miracle.’

‘Rauth will blow the fuel dumps,’ said Karras, opting to test a hunch.

‘No,’ said Sigma. ‘Solarion is better acquainted with operating alone.’

Karras wondered about Sigma’s insistence that Solarion go. Rauth hardly ever let Karras out of his sight. It had been that way ever since they’d met. Little wonder, then, that Zeed had settled on the nickname ”Watcher”. Was Sigma behind it all? Karras couldn’t be sure. The inquisitor had a point about Solarion’s solo skills, and he knew it.

‘Fine, I’ll give Solarion the new orders.’

‘No,’ said Sigma. ‘I’ll do it directly. You and Rauth must hurry to the command bridge. Expect to lose comms once you get closer to the target. I’m sure you’ve sensed the creature’s incredible power already. I want that thing eliminated, Alpha. Do not fail me.’

‘When have I ever?’ Karras retorted, but Sigma had already cut the link. Judging by Solarion’s body language as he ran, the inquisitor was already giving him his new orders.

At the next junction, Waypoint Barrius, the trio encountered another ork mob. But the speed at which Karras and his men were moving caught the orks by surprise. Karras didn’t even have time to charge his blade with psychic energy before he was in among them, hacking and thrusting. Arquemann was lethally sharp even without the power of the immaterium running through it, and orks fell in a great tide of blood. Silenced bolters coughed on either side of him, Solarion and Rauth giving fire support, and soon the junction was heaped with twitching green meat.

Karras turned to Rauth. ‘Give Solarion your frags and incendiaries,’ he said, pulling his own from his webbing. ‘But keep two breaching charges. We’ll need them.’

Solarion accepted the grenades, quickly fixing them to his belt, then he said, ‘Good hunting, brothers.’

Karras nodded. ‘We’ll rendezvous back at the elevator shaft. Whoever gets there first holds it until the others arrive. Keep the comm-link open. If it goes dead for more than ten minutes at our end, don’t waste any time. Rendezvous with Voss and Zeed and get to the salvage bay.’

Solarion banged a fist on his breastplate in salute and turned.

Karras nodded to Rauth. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, and together, they ran on towards the fore section of the ship while Solarion merged with the shadows in the other direction.

‘DIE!’ SPAT ZEED as another massive greenskin slid to the floor, its body opened from gullet to groin. Then he was moving again. Instincts every bit as sharp as his lightning claws told him to sidestep just in time to avoid the stroke of a giant chainaxe that would have cleaved him in two. The ork wielding the axe roared in frustration as its whirring blade bit into the metal floor, sending up a shower of orange sparks. It made a grab for Zeed with its empty hand, but Zeed parried, slipped inside at the same instant, and thrust his right set of claws straight up under the creature’s jutting jaw. The tips of the long slender blades punched through the top of its skull, and it stood there quivering, literally dead on its feet.

Zeed stepped back, wrenching his claws from the creature’s throat, and watched its body drop beside the others.

He looked around hungrily, eager for another opponent to step forward, but there were none to be had. Voss and he stood surrounded by dead xenos. The Imperial Fist had already lowered his heavy flamer. He stood admiring his handiwork, a small hill of smoking black corpses. The two comrades had fought their way back to Waypoint Adrius. The air in the towering chamber was now thick with the stink of spilled blood and burnt flesh.

Zeed looked up at the landings overhead and said, ‘No sign of the others.’

Voss moved up beside him. ‘There’s much less static on the comm-link here. Scholar, this is Omni. If you can hear me, respond.’

At first there was no answer. Voss was about to try again when the Death Spectre Librarian finally acknowledged. ‘I hear you, Omni. This isn’t the best time.’

Karras sounded strained, as if fighting for his life.

‘We are finished with the reactor,’ Voss reported. ‘Back at Waypoint Adrius, now. Do you need assistance?’

As he asked this, Voss automatically checked the mission countdown.

Not good.

Twenty-seven minutes left.

‘Hold that position,’ Karras grunted. ‘We need to keep that area secure for our escape. Rauth and I are-‘

His words were cut off in mid-sentence. For a brief instant, Voss and Zeed thought the kill-team leader had been hit, possibly even killed. But their fears were allayed when Karras heaved a sigh of relief and said, ‘Damn, those bastards were strong. Ghost, you would have enjoyed that. Listen, brothers, Rauth and I are outside the ship’s command bridge. Time is running out. If we don’t make it back to Waypoint Adrius within the next twelve minutes, I want the rest of you to pull out. Do not miss the pick-up. Is that understood?’

Voss scowled. The words pull out made him want to smash something. As far as his Chapter was concerned, they were curse words. But he knew Karras was right. There was little to be gained by dying here. ‘Emperor’s speed, Scholar,’ he said.

‘For Terra and the Throne,’ Karras replied then signed off.

Zeed was scraping his claws together restlessly, a bad habit that manifested itself when he had excess adrenaline and no further outlet for it. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I’m not standing around here while the others are fighting for their lives.’ He pointed to the metal landing high above him where Karras and the others had gotten off the elevator. ‘There has to be a way to call that piece of junk back down to this level. We can ride it up there and-‘

He was interrupted by the clatter of heavy, iron-shod boots closing from multiple directions. The sounds echoed into the chamber from a dozen corridor mouths.

‘I think we’re about to be too busy for that, brother,’ said Voss darkly.

RAUTH STEPPED OVER the body of the massive ork guard he had just slain, flicked the beast’s blood from the groove on his shortsword, and sheathed it at his side. There was a shallow crater in the ceramite of his right pauldron. Part of his Chapter icon was missing, cleaved off in the fight. The daemon-skull design now boasted only a single horn. The other pauldron, intricately detailed with the skull, bones and inquisitorial ”I” of the Deathwatch, was chipped and scraped, but had suffered no serious damage.

‘That’s the biggest I’ve slain in hand-to-hand,’ the Exorcist muttered, mostly to himself.

The one Karras had just slain was no smaller, but the Death Spectre was focused on something else. He was standing with one hand pressed to a massive steel blast door covered in orkish glyphs. Tiny lambent arcs of unnatural energy flickered around him.

‘There’s a tremendous amount of psychic interference,’ he said, ‘but I sense at least thirty of them on this level. Our target is on the upper deck. And he knows we’re here.’

Rauth nodded, but said nothing. We? No. Karras was wrong in that. Rauth knew well enough that the target couldn’t have sensed him. Nothing psychic could. It was a side effect of the unspeakable horrors he had endured during his Chapter’s selection and training programmes - programmes that had taught him to hate all psykers and the terrible daemons their powers sometimes loosed into the galaxy.

The frequency with which Lyandro Karras tapped the power of the immaterium disgusted Rauth. Did the Librarian not realise the great peril in which he placed his soul? Or was he simply a fool, spilling over with an arrogance that invited the ultimate calamity. Daemons of the warp rejoiced in the folly of such men.

Of course, that was why Rauth had been sequestered to Deathwatch in the first place. The inquisitor had never said so explicitly, but it simply had to be the case. As enigmatic as Sigma was, he was clearly no fool. Who better than an Exorcist to watch over one such as Karras? Even the mighty Grey Knights, from whose seed Rauth’s Chapter had been born, could hardly have been more suited to the task.

‘Smoke,’ said Karras. ‘The moment we breach, I want smoke grenades in there. Don’t spare them for later. Use what we have. We go in with bolters blazing. Remove your suppressor. There’s no need for it now. Let them hear the bark of our guns. The minute the lower floor is cleared, we each take a side stair to the command deck. You go left. I’ll take the right. We’ll find the target at the top.’

‘Bodyguards?’ asked Rauth. Like Karras, he began unscrewing the sound suppressor from the barrel of his bolter.

‘I can’t tell. If there are, the psychic resonance is blotting them out. It’s… incredible.’

The two Astartes stored their suppressors in pouches on their webbing, then Rauth fixed a rectangular breaching charge to the seam between the double doors. The Exorcist was about to step back when Karras said, ‘No, brother. We’ll need two. These doors are stronger than you think.’

Rauth fixed another charge just below the first, then he and Karras moved to either side of the doorway and pressed their backs to the wall.

Simultaneously, they checked the magazines in their bolters. Rauth slid in a fresh clip. Karras tugged a smoke grenade from his webbing, and nodded.

‘Now!’

Rauth pressed the tiny detonator in his hand, and the whole corridor shook with a deafening blast to rival the boom of any artillery piece. The heavy doors blew straight into the room causing immediate casualties among the orks closest to the explosion.

‘Smoke!’ ordered Karras as he threw his first grenade. Rauth discarded the detonator and did the same. Two, three, four small canisters bounced onto the ship’s bridge, spread just enough to avoid redundancy. Within two seconds, the whole deck was covered in a dense grey cloud. The ork crew went into an uproar, barely able to see their hands in front of their faces. But to the Astartes, all was perfectly clear. They entered the room with bolters firing, each shot a vicious bark, and the greenskins fell where they stood.

Not a single bolt was wasted. Every last one found its target, every shot a headshot, an instant kill. In the time it took to draw three breaths, the lower floor of the bridge was cleared of threats.

‘Move!’ said Karras, making for the stair that jutted from the right-hand wall.

The smoke had begun to billow upwards now, thinning as it did.

Rauth stormed the left-side stair.

Neither Space Marine, however, was entirely prepared for what he found at the top.

SOLARION BURST FROM the mouth of the corridor and sprinted along the metal landing in the direction of the elevator cage. He was breathing hard, and rivulets of red blood ran from grape-sized holes in the armour of his torso and left upper arm. If he could only stop, the wounds would quickly seal themselves, but there was no time for that. His normally dormant second heart was pumping in tandem with the first, flushing lactic acid from his muscles, helping him to keep going. Following barely a second behind him, a great mob of armoured orks with heavy pistols and blades surged out of the same corridor in hot pursuit. The platform trembled under their tremendous weight.

Solarion didn’t stop to look behind. Just ahead of him, the upper section of the landing ended. Beyond it was the rusted stairway that had almost claimed Rauth’s life. There was no time now to navigate those stairs.

He put on an extra burst of speed and leapt straight out over them.

It was an impressive jump. For a moment, he almost seemed to fly. Then he passed the apex of his jump and the ship’s artificial gravity started to pull him downwards. He landed on the lower section of the landing with a loud clang. Sharp spears of pain shot up the nerves in his legs, but he ignored them and turned, bolter held ready at his shoulder.

The orks were following his example, leaping from the upper platform, hoping to land right beside him and cut him to pieces. Their lack of agility, however, betrayed them. The first row crashed down onto the rickety stairs about two thirds of the way down. The old iron steps couldn’t take that kind of punishment. They crumbled and snapped, dropping the luckless orks into lethal freefall. The air filled with howls, but the others didn’t catch on until it was too late. They, too, leapt from the platform’s edge in their eagerness to make a kill. Step after step gave way with each heavy body that crashed down on it, and soon the stairway was reduced almost to nothing.

A broad chasm, some thirty metres across, now separated the metal platforms that had been joined by the stairs. The surviving orks saw that they couldn’t follow the Space Marine across. Instead, they paced the edge of the upper platform, bellowing at Solarion in outrage and frustration and taking wild potshots at him with their clunky pistols.

‘It’s raining greenskins,’ said a gruff voice on the link. ‘What in Dorn’s name is going on up there?’

With one eye still on the pacing orks, Solarion moved to the edge of the platform. As he reached the twisted railing, he looked out over the edge and down towards the steel floor two-hundred metres below. Gouts of bright promethium flame illuminated a conflict there. Voss and Zeed were standing back to back, about five metres apart, fighting off an ork assault from all sides. The floor around them was heaped with dead aliens.

‘This is Solarion,’ the Ultramarine told them. ‘Do you need aid, brothers?’

‘Prophet?’ said Zeed between lethal sweeps of his claws. ‘Where are Scholar and Watcher?’

‘You’ve had no word?’ asked Solarion.

‘They’ve been out of contact since they entered the command bridge. Sigma warned of that. But time is running out. Can you go to them?’

‘Impossible,’ replied Solarion. ‘The stairs are gone. I can’t get back up there now.’

‘Then pray for them,’ said Voss.

Solarion checked his mission chrono. He remembered Karras’s orders. Four more minutes. After that, he would have to assume they were dead. He would take the elevator down and, with the others, strike out for the salvage bay and their only hope of escape.

A shell from an ork pistol ricocheted from the platform and smacked against his breastplate. The shot wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate ceramite, not like the heavy-stubber shells he had taken at close range, but it got his attention. He was about to return fire, to start clearing the upper platform in anticipation of Karras and Rauth’s return, when a great boom shook the air and sent deep vibrations through the metal under his feet.

‘That’s not one of mine,’ said Voss.

‘It’s mine,’ said Solarion. ‘I rigged the fuel dump in their fighter bay. If we’re lucky, most of the greenskins will be drawn there, thinking that’s where the conflict is. It might buy our brothers a little time.’

The mission chrono now read eighteen minutes and forty seconds. He watched it drop. Thirty-nine seconds.

Thirty-eight.

Thirty-seven.

Come on, Karras, he thought. What in Terra’s name are you doing?

KARRAS BARELY HAD time to register the sheer size of Balthazog Bludwrekk’s twin bodyguards, before their blistering assault began. They were easily the largest orks he had ever seen, even larger than the door guards he and Rauth had slain, and they wielded their massive two-handed warhammers as if they weighed nothing at all. Under normal circumstances, orks of this size and strength would have become mighty warbosses, but these two were nothing of the kind. They were slaves to a far greater power than mere muscle or aggression. They were mindless puppets held in servitude by a much deadlier force, and the puppeteer himself sat some ten metres behind them, perched on a bizarre mechanical throne in the centre of the ship’s command deck. Bludwrekk!

Karras only needed an instant, a fraction of a second, to take in the details of the fiend’s appearance.

Even for an ork, the psychic warboss was hideous. Portions of his head were vastly swollen, with great vein-marbled bumps extending out in all directions from his crown. His brow was ringed with large, blood-stained metal plugs sunk deep into the bone of his skull. The beast’s leering, lopsided face was twisted, like something seen in a curved mirror, the features pathetically small on one side, grotesquely overlarge on the other, and saliva dripped from his slack jaw, great strands of it hanging from the spaces between his tusks.

He wore a patchwork robe of cured human skins stitched together with gut, and a trio of decaying heads hung between his knees, fixed to his belt by long, braided hair. Karras had the immediate impression that the heads had been taken from murdered women, perhaps the wives of some human lord or tribal leader that the beast had slain during a raid. Orks had a known fondness for such grisly trophies.

The beast’s throne was just as strange; a mass of coils, cogs and moving pistons without any apparent purpose whatsoever. Thick bundles of wire linked it to an inexplicable clutter of vast, arcane machines that crackled and hummed with sickly green light. In the instant Karras took all this in, he felt his anger and hate break over him like a thunderstorm.

It was as if this creature, this blasted aberration, sat in sickening, blasphemous parody of the immortal Emperor Himself.

The two Space Marines opened fire at the same time, eager to drop the bodyguards and engage the real target quickly. Their bolters chattered, spitting their deadly hail, but somehow each round detonated harmlessly in the air.

‘He’s shielding them!’ Karras called out. ‘Draw your blade!’

He dropped the cryo-case from his shoulder, pulled Arquemann from its scabbard and let the power of the immaterium flow through him, focusing it into the ancient crystalline matrix that lay embedded in the blade.

‘To me, xenos scum!’ he roared at the hulking beast in front of him.

The bodyguard’s massive hammer whistled up into the air, then changed direction with a speed that seemed impossible. Karras barely managed to step aside. Sparks flew as the weapon clipped his left pauldron, sending a painful shock along his arm. The thick steel floor fared worse. The hammer left a hole in it the size of a human head.

On his right, Karras heard Rauth loose a great battle cry as he clashed with his own opponent, barely ducking a lateral blow that would have taken his head clean off. The Exorcist’s shortsword looked awfully small compared to his enemy’s hammer.

Bludwrekk was laughing, revelling in the life and death struggle that was playing out before him, as if it were some kind of grand entertainment laid on just for him. The more he cackled, the more the green light seemed to shimmer and churn around him. Karras felt the resonance of that power disorienting him. The air was supercharged with it. He felt his own power surging up inside him, rising to meet it. Only so much could be channelled into his force sword. Already, the blade sang with deadly energy as it slashed through the air.

This surge is dangerous, he warned himself. I mustn’t let it get out of control.

Automatically, he began reciting the mantras Master Cordatus had taught him, but the effort of wrestling to maintain his equilibrium cost him an opening in which he could have killed his foe with a stroke. The ork bodyguard, on the other hand, did not miss its chance. It caught Karras squarely on the right pauldron with the head of its hammer, shattering the Deathwatch insignia there, and knocking him sideways, straight off his feet.

The impact hurled Karras directly into Rauth’s opponent, and the two tumbled to the metal floor. Karras’s helmet was torn from his head, and rolled away. In the sudden tangle of thrashing Space Marine and ork bodies, Rauth saw an opening. He stepped straight in, plunging his shortsword up under the beast’s sternum, shoving it deep, cleaving the ork’s heart in two. Without hesitation, he then turned to face the remaining bodyguard while Karras kicked himself clear of the dead behemoth and got to his feet.

The last bodyguard was fast, and Rauth did well to stay clear of the whistling hammerhead, but the stabbing and slashing strokes of his shortsword were having little effect. It was only when Karras joined him, and the ork was faced with attacks from two directions at once, that the tables truly turned. Balthazog Bludwrekk had stopped laughing now. He gave a deafening roar of anger as Rauth and Karras thrust from opposite angles and, between them, pierced the greenskin’s heart and lungs.

Blood bubbled from its wounds as it sank to the floor, dropping its mighty hammer with a crash.

Bludwrekk surged upwards from his throne. Arcs of green lightning lanced outwards from his fingers. Karras felt Waaagh! energy lick his armour, looking for chinks through which it might burn his flesh and corrode his soul. Together, blades raised, he and Rauth rounded on their foe.

The moment they stepped forward to engage, however, a great torrent of kinetic energy burst from the ork’s outstretched hands and launched Rauth into the air. Karras ducked and rolled sideways, narrowly avoiding death, but he heard Rauth land with a heavy crash on the lower floor of the bridge.

‘Rauth!’ he shouted over the link. ‘Answer!’

No answer was forthcoming. The comm-link was useless here. And perhaps Rauth was already dead.

Karras felt the ork’s magnified power pressing in on him from all sides, and now he saw its source. Behind Bludwrekk’s mechanical throne, beyond a filthy, blood-spattered window of thick glass, there were hundreds - no, thousands - of orks strapped to vertical slabs that looked like operating tables. The tops of their skulls had been removed, and cables and tubes ran from their exposed brains to the core of a vast power-siphoning system.

‘By the Golden Throne,’ gasped Karras. ‘No wonder Sigma wants your ugly head.’

How much time remained before the ship’s reactors detonated? Without his helmet, he couldn’t tell. Long enough to kill this monstrosity? Maybe. But, one on one, was he even a match for the thing?

Not without exploiting more of the dangerous power at his disposal. He had to trust in his master’s teachings. The mantras would keep him safe. They had to. He opened himself up to the warp a little more, channelling it, focusing it with his mind.

Bludwrekk stepped forward to meet him, and the two powers clashed with apocalyptic fury.

DARRION RAUTH WAS not dead. The searing impact of the ork warlord’s psychic blast would have killed a lesser man on contact, ripping his soul from his body and leaving it a lifeless hunk of meat. But Rauth was no lesser man. The secret rites of his Chapter, and the suffering he had endured to earn his place in it, had proofed him against such a fate. Also, though a number of his bones were broken, his superhuman physiology was already about the business of re-knitting them, making them whole and strong again. The internal bleeding would stop soon, too.

But there wasn’t time to heal completely. Not if he wanted to make a difference.

With a grunt of pain, he rolled, pushed himself to one knee, and looked for his shortsword. He couldn’t see it. His bolter, however, was still attached to his thigh plate. He tugged it free, slammed in a fresh magazine, cocked it, and struggled to his feet. He coughed wetly, tasting blood in his mouth. Looking up towards the place from which he had been thrown, he saw unnatural light blazing and strobing. There was a great deal of noise, too, almost like thunder, but not quite the same. It made the air tremble around him.

Karras must still be alive, he thought. He’s still fighting.

Pushing aside the agony in his limbs, he ran to the stairs on his right and, with an ancient litany of strength on his lips, charged up them to rejoin the battle.

KARRAS WAS FAILING. He could feel it. Balthazog Bludwrekk was drawing on an incredible reserve of power. The psychic Waaagh! energy he was tapping seemed boundless, pouring into the warlord from the brains of the tormented orks wired into his insane contraption.

Karras cursed as he struggled to turn aside another wave of roiling green fire. It buckled the deck plates all around him. Only those beneath his feet, those that fell inside the shimmering bubble he fought to maintain, remained undamaged.

His shield was holding, but only just, and the effort required to maintain it precluded him from launching attacks of his own. Worse yet, as the ork warlord pressed his advantage, Karras was forced to let the power of the warp flow through him more and more. A cacophony of voices had risen in his head, chittering and whispering in tongues he knew were blasphemous. This was the moment all Librarians feared, when the power they wielded threatened to consume them, when user became used, master became slave. The voices started to drown out his own. Much more of this and his soul would be lost for eternity, ripped from him and thrown into the maelstrom. Daemons would wrestle for command of his mortal flesh.

Was it right to slay this ork at the cost of his immortal soul? Should he not simply drop his shield and die so that something far worse than Bludwrekk would be denied entry into the material universe?

Karras could barely hear these questions in his head. So many other voices crowded them out.

Balthazog Bludwrekk seemed to sense the moment was his. He stepped nearer, still trailing thick cables from the metal plugs in his distorted skull.

Karras sank to one knee under the onslaught to both body and mind. His protective bubble was dissipating. Only seconds remained. One way or another, he realised, he was doomed.

Bludwrekk was almost on him now, still throwing green lightning from one hand, drawing a long, curved blade with the other. Glistening strands of drool shone in the fierce green light. His eyes were ablaze.

Karras sagged, barely able to hold himself upright, leaning heavily on the sword his mentor had given him.

I am Lyandro Karras, he tried to think. Librarian. Death Spectre. Space Marine. The Emperor will not let me fall.

But his inner voice was faint. Bludwrekk was barely two metres away. His psychic assault pierced Karras’s shield. The Codicer felt the skin on his arms blazing and crisping. His nerves began to scream.

In his mind, one voice began to dominate the others. Was this the voice of the daemon that would claim him? It was so loud and clear that it seemed to issue from the very air around him. ‘Get up, Karras!’ it snarled. ‘Fight!’

He realised it was speaking in High Gothic. He hadn’t expected that.

His vision was darkening, despite the green fire that blazed all around, but, distantly, he caught a flicker of movement to his right. A hulking black figure appeared as if from nowhere, weapon raised before it. There was something familiar about it, an icon on the left shoulder; a skull with a single gleaming red eye. Rauth!

The Exorcist’s bolter spat a torrent of shells, forcing Balthazog Bludwrekk to spin and defend himself, concentrating all his psychic power on stopping the stream of deadly bolts.

Karras acted without pause for conscious thought. He moved on reflex, conditioned by decades of harsh daily training rituals. With Bludwrekk’s merciless assault momentarily halted, he surged upwards, putting all his strength into a single horizontal swing of his force sword. The warp energy he had been trying to marshal crashed over him, flooding into the crystalline matrix of his blade as the razor-edged metal bit deep into the ork’s thick green neck.

The monster didn’t even have time to scream. Body and head fell in separate directions, the green light vanished, and the upper bridge was suddenly awash with steaming ork blood.

Karras fell to his knees, and screamed, dropping Arquemann at his side. His fight wasn’t over. Not yet.

Now, he turned his attention to the battle for his soul.

RAUTH SAW ALL too clearly that his moment had come, as he had known it must, sooner or later, but he couldn’t relish it. There was no joy to be had here. Psyker or not, Lyandro Karras was a Space Marine, a son of the Emperor just as he was himself, and he had saved Rauth’s life.

But you must do it for him, Rauth told himself. You must do it to save his soul.

Out of respect, Rauth took off his helmet so that he might bear witness to the Death Spectre’s final moments with his own naked eyes. Grimacing, he raised the barrel of his bolter to Karras’s temple and began reciting the words of the Mortis Morgatii Praetovo. It was an ancient rite from long before the Great Crusade, forgotten by all save the Exorcists and the Grey Knights. If it worked, it would send Karras’s spiritual essence beyond the reach of the warp’s ravenous fiends, but it could not save his life.

It was not a long rite, and Rauth recited it perfectly.

As he came to the end of it, he prepared to squeeze the trigger.

WAR RAGED INSIDE Lyandro Karras. Sickening entities filled with hate and hunger strove to overwhelm him. They were brutal and relentless, bombarding him with unholy visions that threatened to drown him in horror and disgust. He saw Imperial saints defiled and mutilated on altars of burning black rock. He saw the Golden Throne smashed and ruined, and the body of the Emperor trampled under the feet of vile capering beasts. He saw his Chapter house sundered, its walls covered in weeping sores as if the stones themselves had contracted a vile disease.

He cried out, railing against the visions, denying them. But still they came. He scrambled for something Cordatus had told him.

‘Cordatus.’

The thought of that name alone gave him the strength to keep up the fight, if only for a moment. To avoid becoming lost in the empyrean, the old warrior had said, one must anchor oneself to the physical.

Karras reached for the physical now, for something real, a bastion against the visions.

He found it in a strange place, in a sensation he couldn’t quite explain. Something hot and metallic was pressing hard against the skin of his temple.

The metal was scalding him, causing him physical pain. Other pains joined it, accumulating so that the song of agony his nerves were singing became louder and louder. He felt again the pain of his burned hands, even while his gene-boosted body worked fast to heal them. He clutched at the pain, letting the sensation pull his mind back to the moment, to the here and now. He grasped it like a rock in a storm-tossed sea.

The voices of the vile multitude began to weaken. He heard his own inner voice again, and immediately resumed his mantras. Soon enough, the energy of the immaterium slowed to a trickle, then ceased completely. He felt the physical manifestation of his third eye closing. He felt the skin knitting on his brow once again.

What was it, he wondered, this hot metal pressed to his head, this thing that had saved him?

He opened his eyes and saw the craggy, battle-scarred features of Darrion Rauth. The Exorcist was standing very close, helmet at his side, muttering something that sounded like a prayer.

His bolter was pressed to Karras’s head, and he was about to blow his brains out.

‘WHAT ARE YOU doing?’ Karras asked quietly.

Rauth looked surprised to hear his voice.

‘I’m saving your soul, Death Spectre. Be at peace. Your honour will be spared. The daemons of the warp will not have you.’

‘That is good to know,’ said Karras. ‘Now lower your weapon. My soul is exactly where it should be, and there it stays until my service to the Emperor is done.’

For a moment, neither Rauth nor Karras moved. The Exorcist did not seem convinced.

‘Darrion Rauth,’ said Karras. ‘Are you so eager to spill my blood? Is this why you have shadowed my every movement for the last three years? Perhaps Solarion would thank you for killing me, but I don’t think Sigma would.’

‘That would depend,’ Rauth replied. Hesitantly, however, he lowered his gun. ‘You will submit to proper testing when we return to the Saint Nevarre. Sigma will insist on it, and so shall I.’

‘As is your right, brother, but be assured that you will find no taint. Of course it won’t matter either way unless we get off this ship alive. Quickly now, grab the monster’s head. I will open the cryo-case.’

Rauth did as ordered, though he kept a wary eye on the kill-team leader. Lifting Bludwrekk’s lifeless head, he offered it to Karras, saying, ‘The machinery that boosted Bludwrekk’s power should be analysed. If other ork psykers begin to employ such things…’

Karras took the ork’s head from him, placed it inside the black case, and pressed a four-digit code into the keypad on the side. The lid fused itself shut with a hiss. Karras rose, slung it over his right shoulder, sheathed Arquemann, located his helmet, and fixed it back on his head. Rauth donned his own helmet, too.

‘If Sigma wanted the machine,’ said Karras as he led his comrade off the command bridge, ‘he would have said so.’

Glancing at the mission chrono, he saw that barely seventeen minutes remained until the exfiltration deadline. He doubted it would be enough to escape the ship, but he wasn’t about to give up without trying. Not after all they had been through here.

‘Can you run?’ he asked Rauth.

‘TIME IS UP,’ said Solarion grimly. He stood in front of the open elevator cage. ‘They’re not going to make it. I’m coming down.’

‘No,’ said Voss. ‘Give them another minute, Prophet.’

Voss and Zeed had finished slaughtering their attackers on the lower floor. It was just as well, too. Voss had used up the last of his promethium fuel in the fight. With great regret, he had slung the fuel pack off his back and relinquished the powerful weapon. He drew his support weapon, a bolt pistol, from a holster on his webbing.

It felt pathetically small and light in his hand.

‘Would you have us all die here, brother?’ asked the Ultramarine. ‘For no gain? Because that will be our lot if we don’t get moving right now.’

‘If only we had heard something on the link…’ said Zeed. ‘Omni, as much as I hate to say it, Prophet has a point.’

‘Believe me,’ said Solarion, ‘I wish it were otherwise. As of this moment, however, it seems only prudent that I assume operational command. Sigma, if you are listening-‘

A familiar voice cut him off.

‘Wait until my boots have cooled before you step into them, Solarion!’

‘Scholar!’ exclaimed Zeed. ‘And is Watcher with you?’

‘How many times must I warn you, Raven Guard,’ said the Exorcist. ‘Don’t call me that.’

‘At least another hundred,’ replied Zeed.

‘Karras,’ said Voss, ‘where in Dorn’s name are you?’

‘Almost at the platform now,’ said Karras. ‘We’ve got company. Ork commandos closing the distance from the rear.’

‘Keep your speed up,’ said Solarion. ‘The stairs are out. You’ll have to jump. The gap is about thirty metres.’

‘Understood,’ said Karras. ‘Coming out of the corridor now.’

Solarion could hear the thunder of heavy feet pounding the upper metal platform from which he had so recently leaped. He watched from beside the elevator, and saw two bulky black figures soar out into the air.

Karras landed first, coming down hard. The cryo-case came free of his shoulder and skidded across the metal floor towards the edge. Solarion saw it and moved automatically, stopping it with one booted foot before it slid over the side.

Rauth landed a second later, slamming onto the platform in a heap. He gave a grunt of pain, pushed himself up and limped past Solarion into the elevator cage.

‘Are you wounded, brother?’ asked the Ultramarine.

‘It is nothing,’ growled Rauth.

Karras and Solarion joined him in the cage. The kill-team leader pulled the lever, starting them on their downward journey.

The cage started slowly at first, but soon gathered speed. Halfway down, the heavy counterweight again whooshed past them.

‘Ghost, Omni,’ said Karras over the link. ‘Start clearing the route towards the salvage bay. We’ll catch up with you as soon as we’re at the bottom.’

‘Loud and clear, Scholar,’ said Zeed. He and Voss disappeared off into the darkness of the corridor through which the kill-team had originally come.

Suddenly, Rauth pointed upwards. ‘Trouble,’ he said.

Karras and Solarion looked up.

Some of the ork commandos, those more resourceful than their kin, had used grapnels to cross the gap in the platforms. Now they were hacking at the elevator cables with their broad blades.

‘Solarion,’ said Karras.

He didn’t need to say anything else. The Ultramarine raised his bolter, sighted along the barrel, and began firing up at the orks. Shots sparked from the metal around the greenskins’ heads, but it was hard to fire accurately with the elevator shaking and shuddering throughout its descent.

Rauth stepped forward and ripped the lattice-work gate from its hinges. ‘We should jump the last twenty metres,’ he said.

Solarion stopped firing. ‘Agreed.’

Karras looked down from the edge of the cage floor. ‘Forty metres,’ he said. ‘Thirty-five. Thirty. Twenty-five. Go!’

Together, the three Astartes leapt clear of the elevator and landed on the metal floor below. Again, Rauth gave a pained grunt, but he was up just as fast as the others.

Behind them, the elevator cage slammed into the floor with a mighty clang. Karras turned just in time to see the heavy counterweight smash down on top of it. The orks had cut the cables after all. Had the three Space Marines stayed in the cage until it reached the bottom, they would have been crushed to a fleshy pulp.

‘Ten minutes left,’ said Karras, adjusting the cryo-case on his shoulder. ‘In the Emperor’s name, run!’

KARRAS, RAUTH AND Solarion soon caught up with Voss and Zeed. There wasn’t time to move carefully now, but Karras dreaded getting caught up in another firefight. That would surely doom them. Perhaps the saints were smiling on him, though, because it seemed that most of the orks in the sections between the central shaft and the prow had responded to the earlier alarms and had already been slain by Zeed and Voss.

The corridors were comparatively empty, but the large mess room with its central squig pit was not.

The Space Marines charged straight in, this time on ground level, and opened fire with their bolters, cutting down the orks that were directly in their way. With his beloved blade, Karras hacked down all who stood before him, always maintaining his forward momentum, never stopping for a moment. In a matter of seconds, the kill-team crossed the mess hall and plunged into the shadowy corridor on the far side.

A great noise erupted behind them. Those orks that had not been killed or injured were taking up weapons and following close by. Their heavy, booted feet shook the grille-work floors of the corridor as they swarmed along it.

‘Omni,’ said Karras, feet hammering the metal floor, ‘the moment we reach the bay, I want you to ready the shuttle. Do not stop to engage, is that clear?’

If Karras had been expecting some argument from the Imperial Fist, he was surprised. Voss acknowledged the order without dispute. The whole team had made it this far by the skin of their teeth, but he knew it would count for absolutely nothing if their shuttle didn’t get clear of the ork ship in time.

Up ahead, just over Solarion’s shoulder, Karras saw the light of the salvage bay. Then, in another few seconds, they were out of the corridor and charging through the mountains of scrap towards the large piece of starship wreckage in which they had stolen aboard.

There was a crew of gretchin around it, working feverishly with wrenches and hammers that looked far too big for their sinewy little bodies. Some even had blowtorches and were cutting through sections of the outer plate.

Damn them, cursed Karras. If they’ve damaged any of our critical systems…

Bolters spat, and the gretchin dropped in a red mist.

‘Omni, get those systems running,’ Karras ordered. ‘We’ll hold them off.’

Voss tossed Karras his bolt pistol as he ran past, then disappeared into the doorway in the side of the ruined prow.

Karras saw Rauth and Solarion open fire as the first of the pursuing orks charged in. At first, they came in twos and threes. Then they came in a great flood. Empty magazines fell to the scrap-covered floor, to be replaced by others that were quickly spent.

Karras drew his own bolt pistol from its holster and joined the firefight, wielding one in each hand. Orks fell before him with gaping exit wounds in their heads.

‘I’m out!’ yelled Solarion, drawing his shortsword.

‘Dry,’ called Rauth seconds later and did the same.

Frenzied orks continued to pour in, firing their guns and waving their oversized blades, despite the steadily growing number of their dead that they had to trample over.

‘Blast it!’ cursed Karras. ‘Talk to me, Omni.’

‘Forty seconds,’ answered the Imperial Fist. ‘Coils at sixty per cent.’

Karras’s bolt pistols clicked empty within two rounds of each other. He holstered his own, fixed Voss’s to a loop on his webbing, drew Arquemann and called to the others, ‘Into the shuttle, now. We’ll have to take our chances.’

And hope they don’t cut through to our fuel lines, he thought sourly.

One member of the kill-team, however, didn’t seem to like those odds much.

‘They’re mine!’ Zeed roared, and he threw himself in among the orks, cutting and stabbing in a battle-fury, dropping the giant alien savages like flies. Karras felt a flash of anger, but he marvelled at the way the Raven Guard moved, as if every single flex of muscle and claw was part of a dance that sent xenos filth howling to their deaths.

Zeed’s armour was soon drenched in blood, and still he fought, swiping this way and that, always moving in perpetual slaughter, as if he were a tireless engine of death.

‘Plasma coils at eighty per cent,’ Voss announced. ‘What are we waiting on, Scholar?’

Solarion and Rauth had already broken from the orks they were fighting and had raced inside, but Karras hovered by the door.

Zeed was still fighting.

‘Ghost,’ shouted Karras. ‘Fall back, damn you.’

Zeed didn’t seem to hear him, and the seconds kept ticking away. Any moment now, Karras knew, the ork ship’s reactor would explode. Voss had seen to that. Death would take all of them if they didn’t leave right now.

‘Raven Guard!’ Karras roared.

That did it.

Zeed plunged his lightning claws deep into the belly of one last ork, gutted him, then turned and raced towards Karras.

When they were through the door, Karras thumped the locking mechanism with the heel of his fist. ‘You’re worse than Omni,’ he growled at the Raven Guard. Then, over the comm-link, he said, ‘Blow the piston charges and get us out of here fast.’

He heard the sound of ork blades and hammers battering the hull as the orks tried to hack their way inside. The shuttle door would hold but, if Voss didn’t get them out of the salvage bay soon, they would go up with the rest of the ship.

‘Detonating charges now,’ said the Imperial Fist.

In the salvage bay, the packages he had fixed to the big pistons and cables on either side of the bay at the start of the mission exploded, shearing straight through the metal.

There was a great metallic screeching sound and the whole floor of the salvage bay began to shudder. Slowly, the ork ship’s gigantic mouth fell open, and the cold void of space rushed in, stealing away the breathable atmosphere. Everything inside the salvage bay, both animate and inanimate, was blown out of the gigantic mouth, as if snatched up by a mighty hurricane. Anything that hit the great triangular teeth on the way out went into a wild spin. Karras’s team was lucky. Their craft missed clipping the upper front teeth by less than a metre.

‘Shedding the shell,’ said Voss, ‘in three… two… one…’

He hit a button on the pilot’s console that fired a series of explosive bolts, and the wrecked prow facade fragmented and fell away, the pieces drifting off into space like metal blossoms on a breeze. The shuttle beneath was now revealed - a sleek, black wedge-shaped craft bearing the icons of both the Ordo Xenos and the Inquisition proper. All around it, metal debris and rapidly freezing ork bodies spun in zero gravity.

Inside the craft, Karras, Rauth, Solarion and Zeed fixed their weapons on storage racks, sat in their respective places, and locked themselves into impact frames.

‘Hold on to something,’ said Voss from the cockpit as he fired the ship’s plasma thrusters.

The shuttle leapt forward, accelerating violently just as the stern of the massive ork ship exploded. There was a blinding flash of yellow light that outshone even the local star. Then a series of secondary explosions erupted, blowing each section of the vast metal monstrosity apart, from aft to fore, in a great chain of utter destruction. Twenty thousand ork lives were snuffed out in a matter of seconds, reduced to their component atoms in the plasma-charged blasts.

Aboard the shuttle, Zeed removed his helmet and shook out his long black hair. With a broad grin, he said, ‘Damn, but I fought well today.’

Karras might have grinned at the Raven Guard’s exagerrated arrogance, but not this time. His mood was dark, despite their survival. Sigma had asked a lot this time. He looked down at the black surface of the cryo-case between his booted feet.

Zeed followed his gaze. ‘We got what we came for, right, Scholar?’ he asked.

Karras nodded.

‘Going to let me see it?’

Zeed hated the ordo’s need-to-know policies, hated not knowing exactly why Talon squad was put on the line, time after time. Karras could identify with that. Maybe they all could. But curiosity brought its own dangers.

In one sense, it didn’t really matter why Sigma wanted Bludwrekk’s head, or anything else, so long as each of the Space Marines honoured the obligations of their Chapters and lived to return to them.

One day, it would all be over.

One day, Karras would set foot on Occludus again, and return to the Librarius as a veteran of the Deathwatch.

He felt Rauth’s eyes on him, watching as always, perhaps closer than ever now. There would be trouble later. Difficult questions. Tests. Karras didn’t lie to himself. He knew how close he had come to losing his soul. He had never allowed so much of the power to flow through him before, and the results made him anxious never to do so again.

How readily would Rauth pull the trigger next time?

Focusing his attention back on Zeed, he shook his head and muttered, ‘There’s nothing to see, Ghost, fust an ugly green head with metal plugs in it.’ He tapped the case. ‘Besides, the moment I locked this thing, it fused itself shut. You could ask Sigma to let you see it, but we both know what he’ll say.’

The mention of his name seemed to invoke the inquisitor. His voice sounded on the comm-link. ‘That could have gone better, Alpha. I confess I’m disappointed.’

‘Don’t be,’ Karras replied coldly. ‘We have what you wanted. How fine we cut it is beside the point.’

Sigma said nothing for a moment, then, ‘Fly the shuttle to the extraction coordinates and prepare for pick-up. Redthorne is on her way. And rest while you can. Something else has come up, and I want Talon on it.’

‘What is it this time?’ asked Karras.

‘You’ll know,’ said the inquisitor, ‘when you need to know. Sigma out.’

MAGOS ALTANDO, FORMER member of both biologis and technicus arms of the glorious Adeptus Mechanicus, stared through the wide plex window at his current project. Beyond the transparent barrier, a hundred captured orks lay strapped down to cold metal tables. Their skulls were trepanned, soft grey brains open to the air. Servo-arms dangling from the ceiling prodded each of them with short electrically-charged spikes, eliciting thunderous roars and howls of rage. The strange machine in the centre, wired directly to the greenskins’ brains, siphoned off the psychic energy their collective anger and aggression was generating.

Altando’s many eye-lenses watched his servitors scuttle among the tables, taking the measurements he had demanded.

I must comprehend the manner of its function, he told himself. Who could have projected that the orks were capable of fabricating such a thing?

Frustratingly, much of the data surrounding the recovery of the ork machine was classified above Altando’s clearance level. He knew that a Deathwatch kill-team, designation Scimitar, had uncovered it during a purge of mining tunnels on Delta IV Genova. The inquisitor had brought it to him, knowing Altando followed a school of thought which other tech-magi considered disconcertingly radical.

Of course, the machine would tell Altando very little without the last missing part of the puzzle.

A door slid open behind him, and he turned from his observations to greet a cloaked and hooded figure accompanied by a large, shambling servitor which carried a black case.

‘Progress?’ said the figure.

‘Limited,’ said Altando, ‘and so it will remain, inquisitor, without the resources we need. Ah, but it appears you have solved that problem. Correct?’

The inquisitor muttered something and the blank-eyed servitor trudged forward. It stopped just in front of Altando and wordlessly passed him the black metal case.

Altando accepted it without thanks, his own heavily augmented body having no trouble with the weight. ‘Let us go next door, inquisitor,’ he said, ‘to the primary laboratory.’

The hooded figure followed the magos into a chamber on the left, leaving the servitor where it stood, staring lifelessly into empty space.

The laboratory was large, but so packed with devices of every conceivable scientific purpose that there was little room to move. Servo-skulls hovered in the air overhead, awaiting commands, their metallic components gleaming in the lamplight. Altando placed the black case on a table in the middle of the room, and unfurled a long mechanical arm from his back. It was tipped with a las-cutter.

‘May I?’ asked the magos.

‘Proceed.’

The cutter sent bright red sparks out as it traced the circumference of the case. When it was done, the mechanical arm folded again behind the magos’s back, and another unfurled over the opposite shoulder. This was tipped with a powerful metal manipulator, like an angular crab’s claw but with three tapering digits instead of two. With it, the magos clutched the top of the case, lifted it, and set it aside. Then he dipped the manipulator into the box and lifted out the head of Balthazog Bludwrekk.

‘Yes,’ he grated through his vocaliser. ‘This will be perfect.’

‘It had better be,’ said the inquisitor. ‘These new orkoid machines represent a significant threat, and the Inquisition must have answers.’

The magos craned forward to examine the severed head. It was frozen solid, glittering with frost. The cut at its neck was incredibly clean, even at the highest magnification his eye-lenses would allow.

It must have been a fine weapon indeed that did this, Altando thought. No typical blade.

‘Look at the distortion of the skull,’ he said. ‘Look at the features. Fascinating. A mutation, perhaps? Or a side effect of the channelling process? Give me time, inquisitor, and the august Ordo Xenos will have the answers it seeks.’

‘Do not take too long, magos,’ said the inquisitor as he turned to leave. ‘And do not disappoint me. It took my best assets to acquire that abomination.’

The magos barely registered these words. Nor did he look up to watch the inquisitor and his servitor depart.

He was already far too engrossed in his study of the monstrous head.

Now, at long last, he could begin to unravel the secrets of the strange ork machine.