Warhammer 40k | - Deathwatch - Mark Of The Xenos.pdf

“Thrall,” Karn growled. “I’ve seen similar with the Genestealer cults.”

“Scrapcode won’t destroy it,” Vorek had told him before the mission. “But it will confuse the neural matrix long enough for the thralls to forget how to breathe.”

“The Mark of the Xenos is not a brand,” he told them, his voice like grinding slate. “It is a transformation. On Serekh Secundus, something is rewriting flesh into a weapon. You will identify it. You will contain it. You will not—under any edict—allow it to touch your bare skin.”

“Yes. It will.” Zephyr armed the vortex grenade and ran.

But silence, in the Jericho Reach, was never peaceful.

He voxed Zephyr. “Now, brother. Kill the signal.” Zephyr emerged from the shadows, not with a bomb, but with a data-spike —a modified auspex shrieking with a corrupted machine-spirit loaded with scrapcode. He drove it into the gravity-crystal’s base.

Zephyr was unscathed. But when he removed his glove, his right hand bore a single cerulean vein, pulsing faintly with the rhythm of a dead gravity signal.

It worked. The thralls dropped mid-stride, their cerulean veins flickering. Karn carved through the remaining dozens like scythes through wheat.

The kill team formed a killing zone. Xavian’s heavy bolter roared, tearing through the first wave in a spray of crystal shards and blue ichor. Karn leaped into the fray, twin claws shredding thralls into ribbons. Zephyr’s stalker bolter picked off those attempting to flank, each round a precision detonation.