Carcharodons: Red Tithe Read online

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  SHAS’O

  A Tau Empire collection

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘The Reaping Time’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  They were dispatched into the Outer Darkness upon that first Day of Exile, there to ravage the foes of mankind until their final atonement. Their Forgotten One gave them remit unbound, to set about the traitor, the alien and the renegade without mercy, and to harrow them in their places of strength. So began their long hunt. They hunt still.

  – Chapter 17 Paragraph 98,

  the Mythos Angelica Mortis, c. M36

  + + File log Omicron, vermillion level access code input required + + +

  + + Access granted. Welcome, Interrogator Nzogwu + + +

  + + Initiating data scan + + +

  + + Data scan complete, transferring selected file 2873 + + +

  + + File transferred. Subject header “Gorgas Waypoint Station check-log” + + +

  + + Dated 4550875.M41 + + +

  + + Beginning vox transcript + + +

  ‘This is Captain Wilhelm Van Hoyt of the penal ship Imperial Truth, reporting en route to Zartak Primary Penitentiary via Fallowrain.

  We are code viridis. All systems are secure at this time. Empyrean navigation has progressed exceedingly well since passing the straights coreward of Starshoal. My Navigator reports we may reach Zartak up to a week in advance of our projected in-system arrival date. We are preparing for warp jump within the hour. I intend to take full advantage of these calmer currents while I can. Zartak is not a place I would wish to find myself stranded for any length of time.

  I commend my ship and my crew to the guiding light of the God-Emperor. This is Captain Wilhelm Van Hoyt, signing out.

  + + Vox transcript ends + + +

  + + File deletion initiated + + +

  + + Logging out + + +

  + + Thought for the Day: He is our light in the dark, our sword in the night + + +

  Chapter I

  The screaming marked an end to the day’s toil. The aching noise came from the gargoyle-mawed klaxons that lined each of the narrow walls, tunnels, sub-surface lines and assembly points of Zartak’s vast mine works. Mika Doren Skell dropped his half-pick into its tool crate, his scrawny limbs trembling with exhaustion. His fingers ached as he uncurled them. The blisters had burst again, and blood was welling up in little, oozing patches to discolour the thick layer of dust coating his hands.

  ‘Move, inmate,’ barked the arbitrator overseeing equipment reclamation. The armour-plated lawman gestured with the barrel of his heavy combat shotgun, motioning him back into line. Skell bowed his head and fell in behind Nedzy and the others, dropping his magnicled hands. The explosive-primed bonds chafed at his wrists, a constant, aching reminder of five months of captivity. Five months since the cowardly gang boss Roax had ratted him out. Five months since he had arrived in the subterranean hell of Zartak.

  ‘Argrim’s here,’ muttered Dolar as he dropped into line behind Skell. The presence of his big cell-mate at his back was reassuring. Without him, Skell would have died at least twice already, either in the burrow pits and excavation lanes or trudging back to the prison cells of Sink Shaft One.

  He had repaid his cell-mate many times over.

  A sudden pain pressed against Skell’s temples, as though the atmosphere in the low rock tunnel had suddenly changed. None of the other inmates showed any signs of discomfort. Skell’s bloody hands clenched into fists.

  ‘Argrim’s going to try someth
ing,’ he muttered to Dolar.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah. I can feel it.’

  Dolar said nothing, but Skell sensed him draw fractionally closer. The line ahead was beginning to divide as ragged prison groups were pulled from the column by shouting overseers and herded down the passages that would lead them back to their cell blocks and hanging cages. The pressure in Skell’s head increased. Argrim and his cronies would strike soon, once the mass of dirt-caked, dull-eyed labourers had been separated and divided. They’d tried it before, and Skell knew they’d try it again. They hated him. Not because he was from the sump-hive of Fallowrain, not because he was one of Roax’s old gang. Not even because he refused to bend before Argrim’s reputation and authority.

  They hated Skell because he was a witch.

  ‘That concludes the session review,’ said Warden Primary Sholtz. ‘Are there any questions? Sub-Warden Rannik?’

  The words dragged Rannik from the fug of boredom that had gripped her thoughts for the past two hours. The situation room was silent, the pict screen behind the warden’s lectern blinking, the lumen strips still dimmed. The transcription servitor in the corner clattered to a halt as its auto quill finished taking minutes. The other sub-wardens were all staring at her.

  ‘No questions, sir,’ Rannik said. ‘A thoroughly comprehensive review, as ever.’

  ‘Was it indeed?’ asked Sholtz from his perch behind the aquila-stamped lectern. The man’s stony glare was as hard as the blunt-force sarcasm he so loved to inflict on new officers. ‘What a relief to have met with your approval. I shall be sure to tell Judge Symons of your weighty opinion next time we share a holo-briefing.’

  The thirteen other Adeptus Arbites sub-wardens didn’t respond, but Rannik could sense their amusement. It made her bristle. She fought down her anger, channelling it into a deferential nod.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the grizzled warden continued, ‘you could elucidate further upon the last point I raised?’

  ‘The last point, sir?’ Rannik repeated.

  ‘Yes, sub-warden. The one discussed barely a minute ago.’

  Rannik said nothing. The silence in the situation room stretched to a painful, unnatural length. Finally, a bang at the hatch door broke it.

  ‘Not now,’ Sholtz snarled, his gaze not leaving Rannik. The banging sounded again. Scowling, the warden deactivated the lock with a flick of his sensor wand. The hatch slid open and a youth in the pale grey uniform of the Precinct Fortress’ Augur Division ducked inside.

  ‘What?’ the warden primary snapped. The boy threw a hurried salute.

  ‘Word from Augur Chief Tarl, sir. The sensor relays just chimed. The augur outposts on the system’s trailward edge have detected a lone vessel breaking into real space.’

  ‘Identity?’

  ‘We’re still running verification, sir, but initial scans of its keel tag and ident-codes show it’s probably our latest shipment.’

  ‘The Imperial Truth?’ Sholtz demanded. ‘That would make it over a week early.’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s what Chief Tarl said. We have tried to hail it but we aren’t receiving any response. Communications may just be choppy due to interference from the asteroid belt, but they’re definitely registering our messages.’

  ‘How far out is she?’

  ‘Just entering the belt, sir. Once she navigates it she’ll be three hours from high anchor.’

  ‘Gentlemen, we have a situation,’ Sholtz said to the assembled sub-wardens. ‘This session is formally adjourned. Come with me.’

  Sholtz left the situation room. The sub-wardens filed out from behind their benches and swept after him in a buzz of sudden, nervous excitement.

  ‘Bit of good fortune, this,’ Sub-Warden Klenn muttered as they entered the corridor, just loud enough for Rannik to hear. ‘The chief had her cold back there. She’s still making the same old mistakes.’

  Rannik forced herself not to respond. She could feel the scorn of the older arbitrators as they clattered along the Precinct Fortress’ darkened rockcrete tunnels, following in the warden primary’s footsteps. None of them thought she was fit to oversee her own sub-precinct, regardless of her exceptional progenium training and indoctrination statistics, or the fact that she’d finished top of her class at the Schola Excubitos on Terrax. In their eyes, in the five Terran months since Rannik had arrived, she’d done nothing to prove she was worthy of holding the same rank as them.

  She would prove them wrong.

  The warden primary burst into the precinct’s Centrum Dominus, buried deep within the fortress’ armoured depths. There was a scrape of chairs and a thud of combat boots as the two-tiered room came to attention, cogitators and scanner systems still humming.

  ‘Report,’ Sholtz snapped. Chief Tarl strode across from his station at the augur arrays, a yellow message chit in hand.

  ‘It’s definitely the Imperial Truth, sir,’ he said, giving the ident readout to the warden. ‘Almost seven days ahead of schedule, and breaking from the warp in completely the wrong place.’

  ‘Comms?’ Sholtz asked, looking up at the vox-banks ringing the Centrum’s gantries.

  ‘We caught a burst of transmission code less than sixty seconds ago, sir,’ said a ruddy-faced vox-lieutenant, earphones in hand. ‘Unintelligible. There’s been nothing since. The contact is just clearing the asteroid belt now, so the signal should become stronger. We’re keeping all channels open.’

  ‘Sub-Warden Rannik,’ Sholtz said, turning to the officers who’d followed him into the cogitator-ringed pit at the heart of the Centrum. ‘Operations manual seventeen, chapter one, paragraph one. What is the foremost rule when faced with the unknown or the uncertain?’

  ‘Prepare for the worst,’ Rannik said. ‘And trust in the God-Emperor, sir.’

  The warden nodded.

  ‘There, you see, even the bluntest blades have some cut if you sharpen them enough. We are arbitrators. We always assume the worst. Master-at-arms.’ He gestured at Macran, the head of Zartak’s Combat Division. The big woman, her shaved skull twisted with old flamer burns, came to attention with a clatter of flakplate.

  ‘Warden primary?’

  ‘Issue a priority broadcast throughout the fortress and to all sub-precincts across the planet. Code red, effective immediate. Stand to.’

  Blood was dripping onto the floor, slowly. Dolar hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Dolar,’ Skell said. The older convict started, looking down at him with wide, worried eyes.

  ‘Your nose,’ Skell said, holding out a rag ripped from the hem of his grubby penal fatigues. Dolar stared at it, uncomprehending. Skell wondered if he was concussed.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said after a moment, stuffing the rag back into his pocket. Dolar’s eyes became vacant again, and he leaned forwards over the edge of his shackle bunk. Blood continued to fall, drip by drip.

  Skell rolled back onto his own bunk and grimaced. Around them the sounds of the prison intruded, drifting up through the cell’s mesh flooring and around the bars of the hatch window – raised voices, the slamming of doors, the buzz of active alarm systems and pict monitors, thudding boots and the rattle of magnicles.

  Skell had only been here five months, and he already wished he was dead. At least then he wouldn’t have to dig and grub with his numb, bleeding hands any more. The requirements of the hundreds of mine works branching out from Sink Shaft One were without end. When prospectors had discovered that Zartak possessed a rich strata of raw adamantium-based minerals, the nearest consortium of hive worlds had acted quickly to forge a pact with the Adeptus Arbites, one that both relieved them of a good deal of their criminal underhive and enabled the tithing grade of the new mining colony to triple – much to the delight of the subsector’s Administratum officios. At some point the original miner colonists had vanished and been replaced by the lowest savlar – dregs, scum and the plain u
nlucky – of half a dozen miserable, industrialised Ethika subsector planets like Fallowrain or Nilrest. That was why Skell and tens of thousands of convicts like him were on Zartak. To drag raw material for the Imperium’s starships and armies from the hard, black earth.

  Dolar had finally noticed his nosebleed, and was ineffectually trying to stymie it with his grime-caked fingers. He was two years older than Skell – sixteen, Terran standard, or so he claimed – yet most of the time he acted no more coherently than a ten-year-old. Only his solid build and his willingness to resort to his fists had kept him alive so far. That, and his partnership with Skell.

  ‘Something’s coming,’ Skell said, looking at the darkness beyond the hatch window.

  ‘Argrim again?’ Dolar asked vacantly. Skell shook his head.

  ‘Something worse. It wasn’t him I felt earlier.’ The pressure from the mine tunnel was still there, like a dull, ever-present headache, pulsing incessantly in his temples. He’d never felt it so strongly before.

  ‘Is it the things you see in the dark?’ Dolar asked. ‘The things that keep giving you nightmares?’

  ‘They aren’t nightmares,’ Skell said, scowling. ‘They’re just... I don’t know what they are.’

  ‘Nothing good,’ Dolar mumbled.

  ‘Well they can’t be worse than this place,’ Skell replied. He was speaking lightly, but in truth he was afraid. The things he had started seeing in his dreams recently – claws and talons spun from shadows, the crackle of lightning and bitter red eyes – had not brought him any comfort. Worst of all had been the face. It was a skull, a death mask, leering from a void of black. Whenever he saw it, it drew closer, grinning with savage, unblinking intensity.

  ‘They’re coming for me,’ Skell said, still gazing at the barred entrance to the cell.

  ‘Not me?’ Dolar asked. Skell shot him a look.

  ‘All of us.’

  Dolar nodded. He always paid attention when Skell talked about the future. Theirs was a mutually beneficial partnership – the larger, older inmate protected the smaller physically, while the smaller guided the larger. Even for someone as slow as he was, Dolar had realised within weeks of their incarceration on Zartak that Skell had a special talent. It was the same talent that had made him such a lucky charm with the older gangmates back in the sump-sink of Fallowrain’s planetary capital, Vorhive. At least before Roax had ratted him out. It was the same talent that always earned him such regular beatings from superstitious inmates like Argrim, whenever the arbitrators were looking the other way. Skell had the Sight. Nosebleeds, headaches, nightmares. Few appreciated it.