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Deathwatch: The Long Vigil – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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MESSIAH COMPLEX

Steve Parker

Voss grabbed the big mutant by the shoulder and yanked him back hard. He hit the ground with a grunt. Rounds ripped the air where he’d been standing and stitched the walls of the habs across the avenue, biting chunks out of the brick and plaster. On the other side of the street, Striggo of the Carcharadons, black eyes bright with the sudden promise of bloodshed, knocked his bolter’s safety off and glanced over at Voss for a cue to engage.

‘Omni!’ he called out over the noise of the approaching orks.

Voss didn’t answer. He was busy barking at the mutant. ‘Keep your damned head down! You die before you lead us to the target, you get nothing.’

For a moment, the mutant – a large, tattooed thug by the name of Culcaven – blinked all six of the bug-like eyes that studded his flat, noseless face. He was stunned by the physical power of the Space Marine. He couldn’t remember the last time another person had knocked him over. He had always been proud of his strength, but in that moment he felt as powerless as an infant. Shaking it off, he shoved himself to his feet and scrambled into the cover of the hab wall behind Voss. He was breathing hard. Combat wasn’t new to him, but xenos were. He’d heard tales of orks, told to frighten even mutant children. He’d never imagined they would one day storm his people’s underground home. If Sapho the Witch had told Zenezeca, having seen the invasion in her visions, then Zenezeca – so-called saviour of the people of Jura, the City Under the City – had not deigned to share that foreknowledge.

‘This is just the first of them,’ Voss called over at Striggo. He tugged a grenade from his combat webbing. ‘Outriders.’

Striggo leaned briefly out of cover. Just a split second. The orks answered with a hail of fire that tore into the corner of the wall.

‘I count sixteen,’ he told Voss. Through that ugly, razor-lined mouth of his, with its triangular teeth and ragged, scarred lips, sixteen came out as part word, part hiss. No wonder Ghost had nicknamed him Lips. Not that the Carcharadon seemed to care.

‘They’ll be here in real numbers within minutes,’ said Voss, mostly to himself. To Culcaven, he added, ‘How far to Zenezeca’s compound?’

‘Still have to cross two districts.’

‘How many minutes at a run?’

‘For me? Forty if I go all out.’

Voss cursed. He’d be waist-deep in orks before he got within striking distance of the Mechanicus renegade. And Zenezeca’s forces, the mutant gangs for whom he’d risen to messiah status, wouldn’t just let two Space Marines get close. Intel said they were well armed and capable. The tech-priest had unified the mutant gangs down here and turned them into his personal army.

According to the briefing, he’d had over three hundred years to do it.

‘Prophet was right this time,’ Voss muttered. ‘Whole operation is another mess on a knife’s edge.’

Sigma should have sent them in with bikes or a speeder. Perhaps his psyker hadn’t foreseen the ork invasion any more than the locals had. An infested space hulk had broken from the warp and crashed into Cyrria’s only moon while the Saint Nevarre was still in transit. By the time the inquisitor’s ship had reached orbit above the capital, the planet below was a warzone.

Right now, Prophet was somewhere above ground, up in a Stormraven, designation Vampire, waiting for Voss to mark the target in case he and Striggo weren’t able to secure Zenezeca before the tech-priest made his run to the evacuation fields.

Voss pulled the pin on his grenade and leaned out from cover.

Let’s hope it works as well as it’s supposed to, he thought.

Mad-eyed greenskins were surging towards his position, their massive bodies clad in crude armour plate, stubbers barking, axes waving.

Voss tossed the grenade. There was a sharp crack. A reddish cloud filled the alley, wall to wall. There was a pause the length of one long breath, then the howls and screams started. Weapons clattered to the ground. Orks dropped to their knees. Green hands pressed hard on eyes being eaten away by a powerful bioacid adapted from tyranid samples.

The grenade type was nothing Voss had seen before, but working under the Ordo Xenos, he was getting used to that. Sigma had added it to the mission loadout without any explanation beyond what it was expected to do. According to the inquisitor, it attacked the sensitive tissues first – eyes, nasal membrane, gums – before it went to work on the lungs, eating them away quickly from the inside out.

The red mist dispersed, leaving a carpet of twitching green bodies. Voss allowed himself the briefest moment to appreciate the weapon’s effectiveness, then he grabbed Culcaven and shoved him out in front.

‘Move!’

Striggo took point, the mutant running between him and Voss. They’d have gone a lot faster without the mutant, but there were no maps of this place, and since this vast cavern had originally been carved out from exhausted rad mines, the background radiation made scans and even vox-comms an impossibility.

No maps. No contact with Vampire or Prophet.

We could have used seismic, thought Voss. Mapped it that way.

That was an oversight. Whose oversight, though, he didn’t take the time to consider. Around him as he ran, ugly, ramshackle tenements gave way to larger, better constructed hab-blocks interspersed with small processing facilities. Gas lamps and electric lumens still lit the empty streets. Light glowed in hab windows and spilled into the narrow alleys from doorways left open in the rush to flee.

According to the pre-drop briefing – which had been notably scant on details – Zenezeca had fled here after Al Rashaq vanished. Fled here or crashed here – that wasn’t known.

Al Rashaq, thought Voss, and he snarled as he thought of the mess they’d faced on Tychonis. According to Scholar on his mysterious return, in the seconds before he’d been marched off and isolated, Al Rashaq had been a Mechanicus black site – one they’d tried to hide from the greater Imperium. The Martian Priesthood had made it disappear when the Inquisition started getting close. That was three hundred years ago. It seemed like Sigma and the Ordo Xenos were closing in on it again. He and Striggo wouldn’t have been sent here otherwise.

Zenezeca, being a witness to the existence of the site, would have known he was being hunted by the Inquisition and the Adeptus Mechanicus both. No wonder he’d chosen to come down here where Imperial eyes never looked. According to Culcaven, for as long as any still living remembered, their mechanical messiah had been promising his mutant devotees a city of their own one day, a place in daylight where they could live without persecution. As his power base as the head of the underworld here on Cyrria had strengthened, along with his subsequent influence on the ruling class above ground, the mutants of Jura had gone from fearing him to adoring him. He was the healer, the fixer. He amputated vestigial limbs, grafted over secondary mouths and eyes, installed mechanical arms and legs, saved many from illness… He had even managed to make some of them passable enough that they could infiltrate the society above.

To the mutants – the secret, illegal offspring of those men and women who had been forced to work in the planet’s rad-mines since the Imperium had taken this world – Zenezeca was not just some renegade tech-priest. He was the only cure for pain and misery and despair they had ever known.

He was hope.

He was their messiah.

‘We need a vehicle,’ Voss told Culcaven as they ran. ‘If the orks reach Zenezeca’s sanctum before we do, he’ll run early.’

‘Look around you, m’lord Space Marine,’ gasped Culcaven between pounding footfalls. ‘Every single vehicle in Jura is being used to get our people to the rendezvous points for exodus.’

Culcaven had already told them as much as he knew. From the gathering points at the cavern-city’s easternmost edge, and from Zenezeca’s compound at the city’s centre, the mutants would surge aboveground and launch their assault on the Cyrrian Guard forces overseeing the evacuation fields. Zenezeca was planning on hijacking a warp-capable transport in order to get his people off-world and away. Just one would do it, but he’d have to slaughter a lot of troopers and Naval personnel to succeed.

On his own, Zenezeca could easily have bought his way off Cyrria. Strange that a tech-priest, usually so sentiment-free, would risk his own escape for these subhumans.

Striggo stopped at a junction up ahead, back to the wall, and dipped out to check for hostiles.

‘Clear. Which way, mutant?’

Culcaven barrelled past him, out into the middle of the junction, then turned right, calling over his shoulder, ‘This way! Through the market streets and into the manufacturing zone!’

There was a sharp screech of brakes. Culcaven dived, hitting the ground hard on his belly. A flatbed halftrack had come charging out of an alleyway on the left. The driver had swerved just in time to avoid Culcaven, missing him by inches.

The halftrack halted and sat idling noisily. Striggo looked over at Voss.

‘The Emperor provides.’

The Imperial Fist nodded. As one, they raised their bolters and stalked towards it.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Pedro Núñez.

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