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Deathwatch 4: Redblade – Extract

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DEATHWATCH 4: REDBLADE

Robbie MacNiven

The chosen arena was Arco-Refinery Alpha 1-1’s primary firing range. Originally, the low, sloping tunnel had been designed to test Adeptus Mechanicus combat servitors, but with the arrival of the Space Marines on Theron it had been given over to them. If the servants of the Machine God had known what it was being used for now they would doubtless have objected, but a guard had been posted on the door to ensure they didn’t interfere.

The chamber’s lumen strips flickered to life, a low hum filling the echoing space. Four warriors occupied the fire-scarred range just beyond the empty weapons stalls – two in the black plate of the Deathwatch, two bearing the blue-grey livery of the Space Wolves. One of the former, his quartered red and yellow pauldron marking him out as a Howling Griffon, took the boltgun handed to him by his brother.

‘You know the rules, Space Wolf,’ the bolter’s owner, Caius Vorens, said. ‘Combat knives only. First blood.’

Drenn nodded. The young Wolf was almost shaking with battle-hunger, hand clenching and unclenching compulsively around the hilt of his blade, Fang. He could feel the anger of his pack leader, Svenbald, burning into him even as he squared up to Vorens. The Deathwatch kill-team leader was terse and stoic, his face unreadable behind his black faceplate. Drenn had left his own helmet off.

They drew their blades and paced out to the centre of the range, boots ringing off the pockmarked rockcrete. Halfway down, Vorens stopped and faced Drenn. Svenbald and the Howling Griffon, Gallio, took post at the edge of the chamber.

‘Before the eyes of the Emperor,’ Gallio intoned. ‘Victory to the just.’

Drenn kicked hard, slamming the ork back into the refinery’s edge. The alien managed to snatch one of the Space Wolf’s gauntlets just as the railings buckled and split. Snarling an oath to Russ and the Allfather, Drenn hacked into its straining limb with his knife, sawing its sharpened edge through slabs of green muscle, tendon and bone.

The ork lost its grip, roaring furiously as it toppled over the platform’s side and down, down into the crushing embrace of Theron’s swirling gravity well. Drenn watched it go, bouncing off the flank of one of the refinery’s engine spheres. Its claws scrabbled for purchase, smearing the grav machine’s flank bloody before the beast vanished into the roiling clouds. The wind’s fury snatched its howl away.

‘Report,’ the voice of Svenbald, Drenn’s pack leader, crackled over the vox. He grimaced, turning away from the edge.

‘Southern plate secure. Six contacts, all purged.’

‘Regroup with the pack at the central hub,’ Svenbald said. ‘The fleet is reporting another wave approaching from the east.’

Drenn bent to wipe the sticky xenos blood from his combat knife, and realised abruptly that the remainder of the alien’s meaty forearm was still clamped around his left gauntlet. Frustrated, he prised apart the ork’s claws and tossed the limb over the refinery’s side. For all their size and resilience, greenskins were hardly a worthy foe. There would be no sagas sung about today.

Drenn sheathed the knife and keyed the activation rune on his jump pack.

The clouds around Platform Epsilon 9-17 looked like diseased lungs, swollen a sickly yellow and shot through with ugly veins of red lightning. The airborne refinery lumbered through the sulphurous banks, the six huge gravitic engine spheres keeping the platform rig aloft.

Thunder split the infected heavens as Drenn landed on the central plate of the refinery. The lightning snapped upwards, a crimson lash from the gas giant’s crushing depths. Normally, the Adeptus Mechanicus personnel crewing the platform would have welcomed such a sight, for Epsilon 9-17 was a mobile conductor, channelling a portion of the lightning it harvested to stay airborne. Its central hub bristled with plasteel arrays and blackened earthing spikes, while the bowels of its grav-engines crackled with the energy of the storm. But today the sound of thunder didn’t come from the lightning alone. It came from the orks.

Drenn’s packmates were watching the second wave coming in. From such a distance the mass of xenos aircraft looked like a black thunderhead, spreading from the hangars of a hulking ork battle asteroid. The looted hunk of debris perched low in orbit, a burly mass of space-scarred rock, rusting battlements and leering skull glyphs.

‘Svenbald wants to see you,’ one of Drenn’s packmates, Karlson, said.

‘Where is he?’

‘He went into the hub with the xenos hunter. He wants you to wait outside.’

Drenn cast a glance at the three black-armoured warriors of the Deathwatch who stood observing the approaching war planes alongside the Space Wolves, then turned towards the refinery’s central hub.

Epsilon’s generatorum house was like an Ecclesiarchy church, all crenelated spires and flying buttresses – except instead of the aquila above its arched doors it bore the Machina Opus symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and instead of pews and a high altar, the inside was crammed with throbbing arco-banks. The vaulted ceiling vibrated with their power, and red light crackled around the coils, throwing the interior into jagged illumination.

The station’s crew of six tech adepts were standing before the hub’s primary generator, the air resounding with their binary cant. Magos Zarn was leading them, but turned as Drenn entered. His chief enginseer picked up where he left off.

‘My lords,’ the magos said. He was addressing the two figures who had walked in just before Drenn – Svenbald and the Deathwatch kill-team leader, Caius Vorens. Drenn hung back as they approached the magos. The Martian’s face was still mostly flesh, but utterly immobile, as though he wore a corpse mask. The tech-priest’s pale lips remained shut, his automated voice issuing from a brass vox-grille sutured into his throat. A canvas pump-lung, a requirement in the inimical upper atmosphere of Theron, pulsed grotesquely from its harness across his chest.

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