Legends of the Dark Millennium: Deathwatch by Ian St. Martin

Author:Ian St. Martin [Martin, Ian St.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The Black Library
Published: 2016-07-11T13:22:13+00:00

Sixteen

The charging xenos faltered as they were struck on two fronts. The slow, implacable march of the vanguard veterans, with Caltanix at their head, crushed the thrashing aliens against their shield wall as they were shredded by a firestorm of bolter fire from Kill Team Artemis.

After their fusillade, Artemis drew Exterminatus and led his brothers into the melee. The two kill teams of the Deathwatch butchered their way towards each other, leaving the stolen gallery a charnel house of broken alien flesh. As the last of the xenos fell, the Space Marines trudged knee deep through the dead to stand before one another.

‘Watch captain.’ Caltanix brought the hilt of his longsword to his forehead.

‘Hail, Caltanix,’ replied Artemis. Xenos blood fizzed and popped from the active blade of Exterminatus, cooking into twisting coils of foul-smelling smoke. He looked upon the vanguard veterans of Kill Team Caltanix. Their wargear bore the same level of damage as Artemis’ squad. The broad boarding shields they carried were gouged and cratered from small-arms fire. Patches of their power armour were splintered, the lacquer burned away by the touch of flame and bio-acid. The edges of their swords and hammers were scored and blunted by protracted use. Chainswords offered gap-toothed smiles, their tracked sawblades stripped of half their teeth.

An ivory-helmed Apothecary, bearing the heraldry of the Novamarines, settled to a crouch over a fallen brother. The warrior was surrounded by heaps of dead, half buried himself in the twitching corpses of xenos he had killed.

Caltanix and the Apothecary exchanged a short glance. The Novamarine shook his head slowly, and readied his reductor. The watch captain stared for a moment, before issuing orders to his brethren to see to their wargear. The veterans split, half of their number keeping watch while the others made quick repairs, replaced tracks of chainsword teeth, and offered prayers to their armour and weapons, before rotating.

Artemis saw the body beneath the Apothecary as the gene-seed was cut loose. It was the Blood Angel, Pecori. Imtehan stared at the body, bearing silent witness as the reductor and bone saws of the Novamarine’s narthecium gauntlet did their gruesome work. The Blood Angel’s progenoid glands, fleshy masses of pinkish tissue, were sealed within cryo-cylinders and stowed within a case on the Apothecary’s belt.

With a careful mix of alacrity and reverence, the Novamarine machined the warrior’s pauldron loose and pulled it free. The Apothecary locked the shoulder pad to a harness on his power pack. The crimson war-plate would see the skies of Baal once more, even if the warrior who had worn it would not. Kill Team Caltanix now stood on the strength of seven brothers.

‘You have lost kindred,’ said Artemis, bringing a fist to his chest.

‘Yes, our path carried us through the greenskin birthing chambers.’ Artemis could hear the solemn tone in the knight’s voice giving over to fury. ‘Two of our number fell between there and here. Brother Pecori had been wounded purging a tyranid brood infesting a barricaded causeway. His fall was not… unexpected, by me.

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