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Deathwatch 3: The Flesh of the Angel

Ben Counter

The stench of the alien was everywhere. It was a heavy, meaty stink, like heaps of butchered animal carcasses left for too long somewhere dank and underground. There was an artificial, chemical note to it too, the smell of the laboratory and the operating room. And underlying it all was an alien sourness that could never come from anything human.

Zameon Gydrael crouched beside the gnarled wall of hardened mucus that bounded the tunnel leading into the Nidus Tertiam. The xenos-wrought structure wound deep into the foundations of Phoenicus Peak, where once a monastic human sect had inhabited the cells and shrines. He could feel the warmth coming off the walls – nutrient fluid pumped through them, channelled to the lowermost reaches of the nidus. He could hear the scrabbling of claws far below, the low groaning of the structure settling, and the hiss of its unspeakable veins and arteries.

But the noise was nothing to the stench.

His olfactory receptors had been enhanced by the surgeons of the Ordo Xenos to pick out the spore-trails of certain creatures, and to recognise a whole catalogue of alien scents. The drawback was that Gydrael could not turn them off.

‘Gydrael here,’ he said into the kill team’s vox-channel. ‘I’m in position at the head of Nidus Tertiam.’

‘In position,’ echoed Thorne of the Iron Hands.

‘I’m at Nidus Secundus,’ added Hasdrubal of the Storm Lords. ‘Ready to do this, brethren. I’d burn this whole mountain range just to get rid of the stink.’

‘There’s movement on the lower slopes,’ said the kill team’s leader, Sergeant Decurius of the Praetors of Ulixis. He was positioned on a mountaintop watching the main nidi of the breeding ground, where he could warn the rest of the team about reinforcements or despatch himself and the fifth member, Molgurr of the Mortifactors Chapter, to lend assistance if things went wrong. ‘Quiet further up. Clear to proceed.’

‘Acknowledged, brother,’ said Thorne.

‘About damned time,’ said Hasdrubal. ‘I have gone seven moons without taking a head. My knife is angry.’

‘Remember your mission,’ said Decurius. ‘Do not give battle unless you must. You will have alien blood to spare on your hands before the night is out, Hasdrubal. Trust me on that.’

‘I am advancing,’ voxed Gydrael. ‘Fury and blood, my brothers. Soon this world will be clean.’

The interior of the nidus was pitch dark, but Gydrael could see perfectly with his enhanced vision. The architecture of the monastery broke through the crusted mass of resinous matter that the xenos had used to build their nest. The mournful face of a female saint was almost buried in tendrils of alien secretion. Fragments of fallen chitin covered the floor.

Gydrael kneeled down and picked up a smooth, pale shard from the debris. It was a fragment of an eggshell, the curve suggesting it had been the size of a man’s torso before it had broken.

‘They’re hatching already,’ said Gydrael.

‘Then we must be swift,’ replied Decurius.

In the close confines, Gydrael holstered his plasma pistol and drew his broadsword.

At these ranges, the powered blade was a surer kill than a bolt of superheated plasma.

As he proceeded, the stench got worse, if that was possible. Below the upper level of monks’ cells, the side of a chapel had been torn down to form the opening of a tunnel winding into the depths. A revolting slurping, sucking sound came from further down.

While most of his mind was concerned with the mission-specific details around him – avenues of approach, ranges, hiding places for a lurking enemy – the rest of Gydrael’s perception was filing away the other information that came to him. It was a skill he had possessed even before he had become a Dark Angel, the ability to perceive and compartmentalise, and to recall afterwards everything he had seen. The Chapter had honed that skill well. It was one of the reasons that Gydrael had been selected for service with the Deathwatch.

The monks had lived lives of cruel denial. They served for decades before they earned the right to amputate their body parts in the name of the Emperor, denying themselves the very limbs with which they had been born, to understand better the sacrifice the Emperor had made of his physical body. The tale of the monks was told in the sculptures of limbless devotees and the harnesses and supports built into the stone pews that broke through the layers of hardened alien mucus. The small monastic community had existed on Kolagar for centuries before the sslyth had moved in, and in a few hellish nights the xenos had exterminated them and taken over their monastery.

Gydrael moved down through the tunnel and crouched by an opening into a huge chamber beyond. The bulbous shape of the cavity was like the interior of an enormous stomach. It had been carved into the rock of Phoenicus Peak, like a cyst that had rotted away the mountain stone, and the lower half of it was full of a foul grey-green biological soup.

The fluid was writhing. Gydrael’s vision focused on sinuous loops of muscle slithering in and out of one another, forming churning knots of scaly bodies. Clawed, muscular limbs reached from the mass, and here and there a head surfaced – noseless and snakelike, with a yawing, fanged mouth, eyes like flecks of red gemstone, and ridges of horned scales along the scalp and down the spine.

A yowling and roaring reached Gydrael’s ears. It was the noise of primal abandon.

The stench was heavy and musky here, an awful mix of decay and fecundity that overwhelmed the air filters built into his power armour and forced his body’s augmentations to leach out the toxins from the air.

On the shore of the pool, one of the muscular creatures disengaged from the mass and flopped onto the shore of congealed filth. It had a powerful, four-armed torso, and its lower half was a single long, thick tail. Its scaly body was covered in the sticky fluid and it gasped and contorted as it pulled itself free. Others followed. Some in the mire looked dead, their bodies having given out. The surviving xenos slithered into side tunnels, leaving trails of noxious slime.

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