Deathwatch: The Omnibus (Warhammer 40,000) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

Swordwind

Ian St. Martin

Screaming fire hurls me into eternal night. Silence swallows the flames as the boarding torpedo darts through the void, dark iron and ceramite against the infinite desert that is at once nothing, and everything.

Our shipmaster slips in with audacious grace to knife us into the xenos vessel of our target, trading broadsides with migraine-bright energy weapons. She loses most of her port side getting this close, and by the time she breaks off she trails fire and atmosphere from a thousand points. Servants of the Holy Ordos stream into the void as decks blow apart, tumbling away to suffocate alone in the dark.

It is inconsequential. Billions have died; a few thousand more are beneath notice. They are as expendable as I am, a fact I accept without rancour.

Our quarry has guided its foul kindred through the razing of thirteen Imperial worlds, leaving nothing but corpses in their wake. Our pursuit fleet engages them over the ashes of the thirteenth planet. We have never got this close, and will never get another chance. Four kill-teams are dispatched to take the target’s head.

Mine is among a shoal of torpedoes hurtling towards the alien warship. Most, loaded with arcane ordnance of the Inquisition’s design, detonate short of the craft, releasing shrouds of null-field particles designed to disrupt psychic ability.

In the pod’s ochre light, I regard the ebon giants within. We are indistinguishable in sable ceramite armour but for a shoulder pauldron of each warrior’s native brotherhood.

Ero repeats the operations order and his guiding intent. Wasted words. We have all had extensive briefings, hypnotic preparations, repeated drills through mock-ups of what we believe we will find inside. We have pored over data, learned their disposition, pulled apart their corpses to study their anatomy. We have killed them on world, moon and between the stars. We are as ready as we can be.

Apothecary Cornac sits beside our commander, his Death Spectres Chapter mark contrasting with the golden iconography of Ero’s Imperial Fists. He cycles through the tools of the reductor bolted to his arm. The whining drills set my teeth on edge, a reminder of the almost certainty that we will return with fewer operators than we began with, if any return at all.

The Wolf is singing. The lamentable bastard always sings during insertion, and I have long since resigned his howling to my awareness’s periphery.

I glance at Sobor, silent and focused as I am. It was providence that saw us, both Mortifactors, seconded together. To serve within the same kill-team rarer still. A veteran of countless crusades, he has anchored me through our silent wars.

The ident-runes for two of the kill-teams blink out. Dead before contact.

Ero’s vox clicks. ‘Orders changed,’ he says. ‘We are realigning as primary assault element, acquisition and destruction of Primary Target One. Emperor guide our hand.’

I open my eyes, the memory clinging behind them as my senses embrace the now. I stand in an umbilical of interlocked iron discs, freezing and thick with the scorched metal scent of the void.

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