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Deathwatch 9: The Walker in Fire - Extract

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Deathwatch 9: The Walker in Fire

Peter Fehervari

The priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus claimed that teleportation was instantaneous, but nothing was certain in the warp, least of all time. Sometimes an instant swelled in a traveller’s perceptions, extending into a fugue state that could last subjective seconds, minutes or even hours. For most travellers the fugue was a maelstrom of bewildering fragments seeded from their souls, each piece gone before its meaning could be divined. For a few it offered flashes of insight that dissolved like gossamer threads at journey’s end.

For Garran Branatar, the passage brought only shame.

Once more he walked the temple-lined avenues of Gharuda, scorching white marble to black with the sacred fire of his bonded weapon. He had crafted the heavy flamer with his own hands and refined it over many years, perfecting it with the devotion of a true artisan. His kinship with the weapon ran deeper than blood, for it had been forged in the fires of his soul. It grieved him to belittle their bond with the unworthy foe they faced today.

Tainted by terror, Gharuda’s Imperial guardians had surrendered to the xenos raiders who preyed on their world, offering up their own people as slaves or sacrifices so they might escape the same fate. They were contemptible, yet Branatar took no pride in their cleansing. He knew every battle-brother in his squad shared his disdain, so they scoured the shrine city with sombre, subdued efficiency.

‘This is no work for the Sons of Vulkan,’ Athondar said, striding alongside him, ‘least of all for a Firedrake.’

Though his fellow warrior’s face was hidden beneath his helm, Branatar sensed the frown there. Despite his ferocity in battle there was a kindness about Athondar that was rare even among the Salamanders, a Chapter that had always enshrined the protection of Mankind at its heart. Some battle-brothers saw Athondar’s sensitivity as a weakness, but Branatar believed it elevated his comrade, bringing him closer to the ideal of their lost primarch.

‘We are burning out a viper’s nest of xenos collaborators, brother,’ Branatar said to his comrade. ‘In time the human worms who survive may become dragons who honour the Emperor.’

Then the game changed.

As the Salamanders turned onto the promenade leading to Gharuda’s basilica, the sky was riven by angry traceries of viridian light. Moments later a shoal of dark vessels slipped from the multiple rifts like predators of the deep sea, their forms sleek and spiny, as though woven from broken black bones bound with thorns. The xenos had returned to claim a final tithe…

The moment distended, then shattered into a thousand mirror images of memory as the teleportation fugue burned itself out.

‘Some souls are beyond redemption,’ Athondar said, a heartbeat before Branatar’s world dissolved into white light.

Tamas Athondar had first spoken those words five years ago, shortly before he died.

But death had not silenced him.

Sarastus was a world shrouded in perpetual night. The darkness wasn’t caused by some anomaly of cosmic geometry, for there was nothing eccentric about the planet’s form, mass or orbit. No, there was curse upon Sarastus, old and devoid of bite save for the blight of absolute darkness, but that had been enough to sour the world’s soul.

Carceri, the largest of the planet’s hive cities, was a hunched ziggurat of manufactories and tenement vaults, cold and silent, but not quite dead. Things that had once been human haunted its precincts, clinging to a half-life of hunger, hate and the dim memory of something more.

It was this last and cruellest misery that drew the ghouls to the roof of a nameless hab-block when they sensed a tremor in the immaterium, for they scented disorder as flies scented carrion flesh. For a time they scrabbled about the empty expanse, hunting for the nagging wrongness that had lured them there. Some raised their cataract-encrusted eyes to the broken sky, as if to invoke the blessing of a god even blinder than they. A thrill of blissful terror ran through the pack as the warp tremor grew stronger…

The radiance burst among them like a compressed supernova. Despite their blindness, the ghouls recoiled and fled from the light, chased by a swirl of tortured air as the portal swept a path clear to make way for something new.

Moments later, five shapes were silhouetted against the light. They stood rigid as iron statues while traceries of energy played about them, drawing flickering reflections from their helmet lenses. Though they were man-like in form they would have been giants among normal men. Their armour was painted black save for the shoulder pauldrons, whose emblems both united and divided them. While the left pad of every warrior bore a stylised ‘I’ cast in silver, the right ones differed in colour and design.

Abruptly, the portal winked out and darkness swept over the intruders.

‘Kill Team Sabatine, switch optics to full-spectrum night vision,’ a voice commanded inside Branatar’s helmet. The timbre was clipped and precise, identifying a speaker who was entirely grounded in the present.

For Watch Sergeant Cato Thandios, teleportation is always a silent instant, Branatar reflected. His soul is untroubled by shadows.

Sometimes Branatar envied the squad leader’s uncomplicated faith. Like all warriors of the White Consuls, Thandios revered the Emperor not only as the master of Mankind, but as the living god whose destiny was absolutely manifest. Few Space Marine Chapters subscribed so completely to the Imperial Creed, but Branatar imagined there was great clarity in such conviction.

Three voices acknowledged Thandios on the squad’s vox-channel. Two belonged to proven battle-brothers, but the third was an outsider, a Techmarine newly assigned to Sabatine for this mission. Branatar frowned at the newcomer’s inflectionless tone. None who entered the Omnissiah’s service were left untouched, but this warrior – Anzahl-M636, his name was – sounded more machine than man. Branatar had met skitarii with more personality. The Techmarine’s equipment also set him aside from his squad brothers, for while they were encased in hulking Terminator plate, Anzahl-M636 had opted for lighter power armour. He had modified the suit extensively, reworking the pauldrons and breastplate into angular, geodesic shapes that venerated the Machine God. His helmet was a smooth dome split by a vertical visor that glowed with cold light. It gave him the aspect of one of the Adeptus Mechanicus’ soulless automatons.

‘Salamander?’ Thandios pressed, stirring Branatar from his brooding.

‘Acknowledged, watch sergeant,’ Branatar said as he activated his optics with a thought sigil. A rockcrete expanse resolved across his lenses, rendered in an abstraction of grey-greens. The flat surface was blemished with boulder-sized debris and deep cracks that could swallow a man. It was a miracle that the rooftop was still intact.

Looking up, Branatar made out the broken shell of the district’s dome arcing high overhead. To his trained eye the damage looked like the work of decay rather than munitions, suggesting this city hadn’t died in an honest war. It was a disquieting thought, but according to the mission briefing, Sarastus had fallen centuries ago. Its doom was surely irrelevant to his present duty.

We are here for those who came long after, Branatar knew. The briefing had been vague, but that much was certain.

‘The teleport homer is unattended,’ Anzahl-M636 said. ‘Our bridgehead has been compromised.’ There wasn’t a trace of concern in the Techmarine’s voice.

Branatar turned his gaze upon a cylindrical device squatting a few paces from the squad. The indicator on its relay panel pulsed white in his night vision. It was the only source of light on the rooftop.

‘Formation Aegis,’ Thandios commanded. ‘Kill the beacon, One-Thousand.’ It was the Watch Sergeant’s custom to name each warrior by his Chapter of origin, which occasionally resulted in some odd designations, as had happened with Anzahl-M636, who’d been dubbed ‘One-Thousand’.

The Brotherhood of A Thousand, Branatar thought. It was a strange name for a Space Marine Chapter when all Chapters aspired to such a number. To his mind it was as drab as the black ‘M’ that served as the Techmarine’s Chapter badge. Functional…

‘It’s said their brotherhood always numbers precisely one thousand,’ Icharos Malvoisin sent on a secure channel, as if reading Branatar’s mind. ‘A dismal prospect is it not, brother?’

‘An absurd one,’ Branatar replied as he turned to cover his pre-assigned watch vector. The squad fanned out around him to scan the rooftop in every direction. ‘Next you’ll believe we Salamanders can breathe fire.’

‘Oh, I never doubted it, brother. What else would account for those angry red eyes of yours?’

‘Watching your damned back, simpleton.’

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