Kill Team Audax: Run
This is where stars die. This is where stars are born.
The supermassive isn’t as big as some others of its kind, perhaps 10,000 times the mass of Sol. Stars revolve around the event horizon at a rate scarcely perceptible to an observer with any rational perception of time. The redshift as their angle to the observer changes gives the black heart a red-orange halo. A “thin” lance of stars and dust fires in two directions, showing the axis of rotation. The knowledge of how something that eats light can give birth to so much light has long been lost.
The distance from which any of this may be viewed challenges any sane sense of scale. In the skies of worlds that orbit the stars outside the event horizon, the dust around the accretion disc has created a nightly river of light that has different names in different systems: the Emperor’s Belt, the Throne Road, or among the more pessimistic, Temptation’s Way.
Absolutely anything could hide among the stars of the great lance. Its radiation confounded vox traffic and confused navigators, making the Astronomican hard to see. The currents of the Warp were strange out at this end of the galactic Arm, faster and faster the nearer one was to the lance. A ship whose Masters were careless, or just unlucky, could overshoot its course and find itself among the stars of the lance, lost beyond finding, never to be heard from again.
The human denizens of this sector called it the Grave Spires. There was an excellent view of it from the rocky moon that orbited Desolus I. It shone ominously down on a Thunderhawk gently nosing its way into the blackness of a high-sided ravine. Lumes played over the spiny protrusions on the walls as the vessel dipped lower. A gangplank lowered as it swooped down within a few meters of the uneven floor of the crevasse. Five shapes dropped into the darkness, black ceramite barely delineated by the gleam of reflection, and the Thunderhawk curved up and away and was gone.
Without a sense of scale, the five Astartes looked very small here as they stood among the rocks. They were all dressed in the black armor and silver left pauldron of the Deathwatch, but they were by no means identical. One was markedly taller than the others, and one, the one with the black right pauldron, was a bit shorter and slighter.
“Well?” the gravel voice came from a marine with a black cross on a white field on his right pauldron. La’um’s HUD tagged him as Theta-2.
“Our objective is 600 kilometers bearing five degrees left as you face the Throne Road. We all arrive, or none of us does,” said another, whose right shoulder bore a red lightning bolt. His voice bore no sign of obvious damage, but something in the unhurried way he weighed each word felt older. He was marked Theta-1. “The terminator moves slowly, but do not be deceived. If you are caught out in the sun here, your armor will not save you. Kill Team Audax, run.”
La’um ran. In his own chapter he would have the copper stripe to his red helm that would mark him a veteran and a sergeant, but here and now he was only callsign Theta-3, and his helmet was black. Only his dull green right pauldron with the golden icon of the winged bull’s head marked him as a Harrower.
That did not bother him particularly. He was only the third man ever to be seconded to the Deathwatch in the entire history of the chapter, an honor superseding all minor inconveniences.
They had to scramble up the far side of the ravine, losing time as they climbed. Over his shoulder, La’um glimpsed a distant golden rim to the black horizon. Not even an Astartes could outrun the turning of a moon, he was certain. The objective was to stay ahead long enough to reach the destination. La’um understood his own top speed over distance to be something like 60 kilometers per hour. It would normally take him ten hours to run that far over uneven terrain.
As they burst onto level ground, he could already see the Blackshield start to pull ahead, but then his steps stuttered oddly and he fell back beside La’um. He had never turned his head. The gray-black plain sprawled in front of them all the way to the horizon.
For a couple of hours, they ran without incident. The watch-sergeant, Theta-1, did not have to keep pulling himself back to keep outpacing the others; his armored legs moved like clockwork, pace seemingly unvarying. But then, he’d done this run before. At around three hours by Terran reckoning, La’um’s vox clicked.
“If your strength should fail you, say so before you fall, cousin. I can carry you.”
His head jerked around in surprise. It was Theta-4 on a private channel. He had a green pauldron with a black dragon or lizard on it. His accent in Low Gothic was notably different even among a group from different worlds. He wasn’t small, about the same as Theta-2, but La’um had a hard time imagining him grabbing up an armored marine a foot taller than himself without difficulty. Still, his tone was not mocking. La’um thought he meant it.
“Acknowledged, 4,” he said.
When they had been running five hours, he could hear the others starting to struggle, harsh breathing audible even with all of them still helmed. The Blackshield Theta-5 had stopped jumping ahead and falling back. Now he was keeping pace with the others. He had shorter legs, but he also had less weight to carry and needed less air. It was 2 and 4 La’um was worried about. The watch-sergeant was obviously still having no trouble at all.
At about seven hours, Theta-2 stumbled for the first time. He caught it immediately and only lost a step, but the others had to check for that half-second, or he would not have been able to catch up.
La’um opened the team channel.
“Theta-4, trade places.” He wasn’t going to waste breath explaining why he was having an easier time of it. He was sweating, they all were, the recycling system in his armor humming faintly as it parsed poison from water in his sweat. The smell of Astartes sweat was chemical and bitter. But La’um was less out of breath than any of them.
They slid past each other, barely breaking stride. Now he was in the middle of their line, with the Blackshield Theta-5 over on 2’s left and the watch-sergeant on 4’s right. The next time Theta-2 stumbled, La’um and 5 each caught an arm and righted him, barely slowing.
At close to eight, Theta-4 stumbled, too. Again, La’um grabbed an arm to stop him from falling. He wasn’t sure if the watch-sergeant would actually help, but in fact he did, at exactly the same time as La’um. The sun was getting closer behind them now, steam rising from the cold rocks as the heat struck. La’um could hear it hissing. They were slower now because of the necessity of climbing over larger rocks. They dragged each other over boulders with a shaming amount of clumsiness for Angels of Death. Nothing on the horizon looked like any kind of objective to La’um, vision occasionally strobing in time with the beat of both hearts. He wondered if the watch-sergeant would in fact share their fate, or if he had some means of saving himself he had not mentioned. He didn’t seem worried.
By the time they topped a spiny rise and he saw the bunker a kilometer below, even La’um was starting to hurt, legs and back aching. His armor complained at the power usage incumbent on keeping him from hyperthermia. He ignored it as he bent to haul Theta-2 up over his shoulder before the man’s knees could finish buckling. He could hear his muffled swearing, but he wasn’t stupid enough to fight it.
Somewhat to his surprise, 4 was still going, staggering down the slope being half-dragged by the watch-sergeant. Theta-5 put on a burst of speed. La’um saw him skid to a halt at the bunker, checking the heavy door, then shouldering it open with an audible groan of effort. La’um ran into the cold shade with the sun at his heels, all of them ahead of him, and the watch-sergeant slammed the bunker door. A faint pop and hiss traveled over the structure all around them as the terminator passed over it outside. Faint lumes guttered to life. The room wasn’t large for five space marines, but it was untouched by the heat. A stairwell to one side led down into darkness, big enough for two of them to walk abreast. Cold air blew from the vents, enriching the air. It felt thicker to La’um now.
“Put me down, damn you,” growled Theta-2. La’um slid him off his shoulders, watching him land on his feet. He leaned into the wall, then tore off his helm to reveal features that were probably very pale when they weren’t beet-red. He had short, dark hair, and two skull-shaped iron studs were embedded in his brow.
The others, seeing no reprimand from Theta-1, dragged their helmets off as well. La’um had never seen them before today. He hesitated, but the watch-sergeant had removed his, revealing a sharp high-boned face with more normal-looking eyes than the others. The bun on the back of his head was half-down, strands of black hair sticking to his neck padding, but he stood straight and alert, watching all of them.
La’um doffed his helm slowly, shaking his head slightly to free his copper earrings. The helmet pulled free of the socket in the back of his neck and the HUD vanished from in front of his eyes. Now he was looking at the kill-team with his unaided vision. He adjusted to the dark relatively quickly. Theta-4 was black, not just dark-skinned like some of the humans at the watch fortress, but as black as a moonless night. Red cracks seamed the surface of his face and his bald head. His eyes were red, too, but the surfaces of them were naked like the others, and like the others they were oddly round in shape. Theta-5 was even paler than 2 beneath the red spot high on each cheekbone. He had a thin fuzz of very white hair, and his eyes were a very light purple, something La’um had never seen, either. He was very pretty in an oddly frail and mortal-looking way for an Astartes. A pair of straight scars, like equals signs, lay old and stretched across the hollow of each cheek.
They were looking up at La’um. He looked back, leaning his helm on one hip.
“I’ve never seen an Astartes that color,” Theta-4 said.
“I’ve never seen one like you, either,” La’um said. Theta-4 laughed. Wrinkles shifted around his eyes as they crinkled in genuine amusement.
“Mutants,” said 2. “All filthy mutants, by the - ”
La’um was glad he’d left his helm recording, because he didn’t actually see what the watch-sergeant did. He wasn’t looking away. It was just too fast, and then Theta-2 was lying on his back with a boot on his throat, wheezing. He grabbed at Theta-1’s greave, but could not twist away. He wasn’t making a good attempt, fingers weaker than normal.
“Are you a mutant, too?” he demanded.
“No. I am just faster than you,” said the watch-sergeant. “You say this because of my appearance?”
All of them had bolters and knives. Nobody had drawn one.
“No,” gritted 2. “There are such men in my Crusade. I said it because - ” He cut off, gasping, as 1 leaned on his throat.
“Mark me well, Theta-2. You are Deathwatch now, not Black Templar. You outrank no one. You are here to kill xenos. They,” an abrupt gesture indicated the others. “Are here to kill xenos. That is all that matters.”
“Watch-sergeant, a question,” La’um said. Theta-1 grunted as he stepped back, leaving 2 to kip back onto his feet. For a moment Theta-2 swayed, trying to be unobtrusive about grabbing the wall with one hand.
“Ask,” said Theta-1.
“Why did we run here? What is our objective?”
“Different chapters. Different traditions. All veterans,” said the watch-sergeant. “Perhaps one in ten Astartes seconded to the Deathwatch return alive. For those trained at Watch Fortress Desolus it’s four out of ten. We do not collect men and toss them out into the field like mice from a sack. We work them together until they are one unit.”
“All or none,” said Theta-4.
La’um nodded. He was younger than the others at seventy-five Terran, he was certain. He remembered what neophyte training had been like. With the benefit of hindsight it had been obvious that some of the purpose of that brutality was conditioning that the hypnomats couldn’t perform, or couldn’t perform well enough. He hadn’t been told that would happen here, but it made sense that it would.
“So you will run. You will fight. You will work until even you, mighty Angels of Death, can hardly stand. Then you’ll do it again. And I will be here with you, because I am your watch-sergeant. We emerge from the crucible as one body, or we do not emerge at all.”
He was barely out of breath now. La’um was mildly impressed.
“That was easier for you than me, little brother,” Theta-4 said to him. He had to look up to see the Harrower’s face. La’um’s lip twitched.
“My world’s air is thin, honored elder,” La’um said. “Everyone who lives there has adapted lungs.”
“Our strengths differ,” the watch-sergeant said. “This year you will learn what they are. You will learn your brothers and how they fight and what they bring.”
“And what about you?” Theta-2 asked, looking at the Blackshield. “Can you even speak?” La’um could tell he wanted to say “mutant,” biting off the word and swallowing it like a bitter pill.
“I can,” said Theta-5. His voice was lighter and his accent more rounded, as if he had been trained how to make the sounds with more precision. “When there is something needful to say.”
The watch-sergeant grunted. “Rehydrate. In one hour, we enter the tunnels.”
