Carcharodons: Red Tithe Read online

  ‘We saw your re-entry,’ said the arbitrator. ‘We were dispatched from the sub-precinct to investigate. First Arbitrator Jaken thought it may be hostile contacts.’

  ‘What sub-precinct?’ Rannik managed, struggling to focus on the three men’s own ident tags. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Eight, sir,’ the arbitrator said, putting his arm under Rannik’s back to support her. ‘Klenn’s jurisdiction. We’re just two kilo­metres south west of the outer bastions.’

  ‘Is Klenn there?’ Rannik asked. ‘Have you heard anything from the Precinct Fortress or the warden primary?’

  ‘Negative, sir. The last we heard he was at the fortress attending a session review. Comms went down about two hours ago. We haven’t been able to raise anything. The shock squads were being deployed to an unsecure vessel in high orbit. Then everything went dark. I’m guessing that’s where you’ve come from, sir?’

  ‘It was a trap,’ Rannik said. ‘Not a prison riot. Something has taken over the ship.’

  ‘Something?’

  ‘We need to get to your sub-precinct, arbitrator. Help me.’

  Supported by one of the three, they made their way through the drenched jungle, following the blips on a handheld auspex. It was slow going. The rain turned the undergrowth into a quagmire and reduced dips and channels into fast-flowing, muddy streamlets. Soaking fronds and creeper vines clawed at them. The arbitrator on point unclamped a machete from his mag-plates and started hacking through the more obstructive sections of the green.

  Rannik still felt sick. Her skull was throbbing from the hit she’d received on the bridge. She tried not to think about any of it. Tried not to think about the tortured body of Captain Van Hoyt, wired up to his own vox-system. Tried not to think about how the midnight-clad giant had killed Macran with a single blow. Tried not to question why it had not only spared her life, but returned her to Zartak’s surface just south of a sub-precinct.

  Were they already here, on the surface?

  The sun was fully up by the time they stumbled into the kill zone clearing ringing Sub-Precinct Eight’s bastions. The central keep rose above them, a squat, thick blockhouse of black rockcrete. They passed the desiccated skulls staked out along the treeline – the remains of those convicts who’d attempted to escape, now serving as a warning to others desperate enough to want to switch the mines for the jungles.

  ‘Eight, this is recon team one,’ the arbitrator supporting Rannik said into his vox-torq. ‘We are entering the kill zone. Medicae to the south gate.’

  They began to slog through the rain-slashed mulch that surrounded the sub-precinct. They were halfway across when a boom echoed from the jungle behind them. The leg of the arbitrator supporting Rannik exploded just below the knee. They both went down, the arbitrator screaming.

  ‘Contact, contact,’ shouted a voice over the vox. ‘The treeline! Covering fire, now!’

  There was a rattle as the arbitrators manning the south bastion opened up with their autoguns, hard rounds zipping over Rannik’s head. She managed to get up onto her knees, glancing behind her. There was no sign of whatever had shot the arbitrator. The wounded man was writhing in the muck, clutching at his bloody stump. The sight of the injury sent a jolt of adrenaline through Rannik’s body.

  ‘Help me with him,’ she snarled at the other two. She snatched the man under one arm while his comrade took him beneath the other, and together they began to haul him towards the plasteel gate. The third arbitrator slammed a few long-ranged shotgun blasts into the treeline before joining them in the sprint for the gatehouse.

  Just a dozen yards away there was another boom. The skull of the arbitrator helping Rannik burst, splattering the sub-warden’s bare head with steaming grey gristle. She collapsed in the muck next to the headless corpse. The wounded arbitrator was still screaming, bleeding out fast from his severed limb.

  ‘Move it!’ Rannik heard a voice shouting. ‘Get them inside!’

  The sub-precinct’s gate had rolled open. Half a dozen arbitrators thumped out into the rain, weapons ready, joining the blind fusillade that was still hammering from the bastion top. Hands grasped at Rannik and the injured arbitrator, hauling them both into the bastion’s gatehouse. The final member of the recon team joined them. With a thud, the plasteel doors slammed shut.

  Rannik regained her feet and put out a hand to steady herself. She was panting. The arbitrator who’d led the team out from the gate had the yellow warning chevrons of an NCO stamped onto his black breastplate. He was speaking into his vox-torq.

  ‘Wall units, if you don’t have a visual, cease fire.’

  The shooting stopped. The wounded arbitrator had stopped screaming too. A medicae had jabbed a throwaway syringe packed with stimms into his thigh, and was now busy tying off the injury.

  Rannik cuffed blood and rainwater from her eyes. She was shaking. The arbitrator with the stripes looked at her.

  ‘Sub-Warden Rannik, I’m First Arbitrator Jaken, acting commander of Sub-Precinct Eight in the absence of Sub-Warden Klenn. With all due respect, sir, I would like to yield that responsibility to you.’

  ‘Accepted, First Arbitrator,’ Rannik said, speaking automatically. ‘You’ll have to brief me. How many men do you have garrisoned here?’

  We’re all going to die, her thoughts screamed.

  ‘Minus Forr here and Pollak out there in the mud, two squads of ten, sir. And five thousand inmates in the mines below. We’ve been on full alert since the vox-net went down.’

  ‘Are the inmates shackled?’

  ‘Every one of them, sir, and their magnicles are ready to blow at the first sign of trouble.’

  ‘Seal off the subways as well. Make sure nothing can get in or out via the underground.’

  ‘Understood, sir. What exactly is going on out there?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine, first arbitrator,’ Rannik lied. ‘But whatever it is, it’s bad news.’

  ‘How did you get off the ship?’ Jaken asked. Rannik forced herself to face the man down, trying not to let her fear and uncertainty show.

  ‘It’s classified. If you need to know, I’ll tell you.’

  Jaken didn’t look away, expression inscrutable behind his helm’s visor. Eventually he nodded.

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  Rannik turned her back on him and let out a long, unsteady breath.

  Shuttle engines screamed as a trio of gunships circled Sink Shaft One, the dawn sunlight glinting from their scarred, void-worn hulls. They hovered above the Precinct Fortress for a while like scavenger-bills, scenting the humid air thermals of the jungle for fresh meat.

  They found it in the fortress. One by one they dipped their wings and dropped off, alighting with an ungainly thud of stabilisers and landing prongs inside the precinct’s landing bays.

  Hatch ramps clanged down on the rockcrete and spiked combat boots clattered out onto the bays. The Black Hand had arrived.

  Fexrath and his Third Claw met them. The squads of cultist infantry were directed first to the void shield armoury block. There they swapped their old weaponry for freshly stamped Adeptus Arbites autoguns and shotguns, wasting no time in taking serrated combat knives to the Imperial insignia on the stocks.

  The Black Hand had started out as an experiment by Fexrath, one which Cull had approved. Harvest aspirants didn’t always perish during the trials, and with the warband forever low on resources Cull had been loathe to kill otherwise able recruits. Fexrath had volunteered to cultivate the most vicious survivors into infantry capable of undertaking tasks the warriors of the VIII Legion would not normally have dirtied themselves with. The Black Hand were the result, cultist foot soldiers dedicated to the sadistic narcissism that surrounded the warriors of the VIII.

  The weapons not scavenged from the Precinct Fortress by the cult soldiers were crated up and, still accompanied by the baleful presence of
Third Claw, shunted down into the Burrow. As the Black Hand spread out into the mines those convicts they came across who didn’t flee were gunned down. It was their misfortune – the Black Hand were only seeking to give out gifts.

  Once they’d penetrated far enough into the mines, the crates were unlocked, opened and abandoned. The Black Hand returned to the Precinct Fortress along with their masters.

  Only Shadraith stayed behind. The advice of Bar’ghul’s shadow minions had brought him to a sub-surface tunnel leading off from one of the stairwells. It had been one of the first places the flood of convicts had turned to when Eighth Claw had dissuaded them from the routes to the surface. It was littered with dead men, stripped of everything bar their overalls. In their frenzied desperation to escape, many had simply been crushed to death, and those who had passed by had looted them of whatever they’d scavenged.

  Finding a trail amidst the trampled bed of the loco tracks would have been impossible for even the most skilled mortal hunters. But Shadraith had immortals on his side. The shadows whispered to him, coiling and darting ahead like eager bloodhounds. They were forever flitting in the corner of the sorcerer’s eye, vanishing whenever he tried to focus on them. They were the nightmares that lived on in memory after sleep departed, and they had the scent, the warp-scent. In days past the voice of Bar’ghul itself would have guided him, but the trickster daemon was being infuriatingly distant now. It had been clear enough – only by tracking down and initiating the boy could Shadraith renew their millennia-old pact. With the daemon’s soul bound to a strong mortal’s flesh, nothing would stop them.

  Sub-mine 16. Shadraith passed into the hollowed-out tunnel, his dark, ethereal familiars muttering their encouragement. The bodies were fewer here. The convicts had filtered through the ever-expanding maze of the Burrow like scum through sluices, the packed masses of the upper levels disintegrating into smaller gangs, groupings and desperate, roving individuals. The shadows snatched a few of those unwary loners as Shadraith passed, rending and consuming them in a frenzy of insubstantial black talons and flapping wings.

  The Chaos sorcerer paid no heed to their antics. He was getting closer; he could sense it. The warpfires that topped his scythe, grown dormant since he’d massacred the Precinct Fortress’ astropaths, were flickering with life once again. The shadows chittered, excited by the return of their master’s favour.

  The Night Lord pressed on, into the bowels of the great mine workings. Inside a section marked as burrow shaft 28 he discovered what he’d hoped to find – bodies bearing the touch of the immaterium. There were two, hideously burned, their blackened remains shrivelled. To Shadraith’s witch-sight the corpses still smouldered with the many-coloured shades of warpfire. The third body was untouched, its skull split open.

  The boy’s friend, hissed the daemons that clustered around Shadraith. He nodded. The bodies were still fresh, their souls only recently fled. The boy could not have gone far.

  The sorcerer carried on down the shaft, forced to stoop. For now the boy was almost wholly unaware of his latent psychic abilities, blind to the power that made him shine like a beacon in the depths of the immaterium. His subconscious had clearly repressed his psychic strength as a means of self-preservation, reducing his gifts to so-called tricks or bouts of ‘luck.’ It was well that it had, or else the Black Ships would have already come for him.

  Shadraith could offer much more than the enslavement, torture and sacrifice demanded by the Imperium. Once he had the boy in his grasp he would unlock his abilities and make him realise his full potential, whether he wanted to or not. Then he would have an apprentice worthy of his skills, and Bar’ghul would have a power­ful host on the material plane.

  The daemon had been clear. All he had to do was get to the boy before the Pale Nomad.

  Skell clawed his way through the dirt, his sobs echoing down the packed rathole. There wasn’t room to stand. The main section of the seam had to be crawled through on hand and stomach before it widened out once more into the larger works of the neighbouring sub-precinct mines. That was where Skell had been trying to get to, hoping either to find some sort of order amidst the chaos, or just lose himself in the darkness. He would gladly have taken his prison cell and magnicles over the shadow-haunted underworld he was lost in.

  He’d taken an old lumen lantern from a bracket at the entrance to the rathole. Its flickering light was now his only companion, and he was certain the shadows were encroaching on its little sphere with each passing second. His shoulders scraped against the hole’s sides, and after a while he had to push the lantern through the cold, wet dirt in front of him, forced down by the suffocating space.

  He kept going, trying not to think about the claustrophobic walls or earth pressing in on him. He could still hear Dolar’s shout, when he had realised Skell was abandoning him. The dreadful noise echoed through his thoughts along with Argrim’s screams. The smuggler’s blood was a dry, brown crust on Skell’s fingers, and he had nothing to wash it off with.

  He remembered the wild panic of being pinned against the tunnel wall and beaten, and the horror of seeing what the other two were doing to Dolar. He’d gone blind for a second, and when his vision had returned it hadn’t been his own. Weird images had imposed themselves on his retinas, like the aftershock of a bright flash that left behind spindly, multi-limbed ghosts of radiant light. He’d heard cackling laughter echoing madly around the corridor of dirt. It had been like a dream, except when he’d awoken from it Argrim and his accomplices were dead. Only a lingering memory of exhilaration and unbridled aggression had remained imprinted on his mind.

  There was something coming for him. He had to get away, before it found him. The route he was taking, the one he’d once worked with Dolar, Nedzy and the rest of their labour gang, had been blocked off. At some point part of the rathole had collapsed. After twenty minutes of squirming desperately through muck and darkness Skell had come up against a solid wall of packed dirt and broken timbers. That was when he gave up.

  A part of him had known this day would come. He’d been having the dreams and waking visions since the snatch-squad had taken him on Fallowrain. He’d said nothing of the terrors except to Dolar, and even then only when he’d realised that he needed his brute strength if he was going to survive life in the penal colony. Now he’d lost even that.

  He was going to die. Or worse. Another bout of sobbing broke out and echoed away down the rathole.

  This time someone answered. A thought intruded into his mind. It was not a separate voice, not the sibilant death rattle that increasingly spoke to him in the darkest hours of the night. It was subtler, more of a suggestion, certainly alien but not wholly invasive.

  Keep going, it urged.

  ‘I can’t,’ Skell said, cuffing his nose. ‘It’s coming for me.’

  You still have time. If you stay the shadows will catch you. Double back, now.

  Skell tried to obey. He tried to force his tired limbs to work as he pressed through the cramped semi-dark, pushing with elbows and knees to force himself back down the rathole. It was slow going. He dragged himself without thinking, as though the suggestion in his mind had spread to the rest of his body, an otherworldly willpower that compelled him to action. It was at once a distressing and comforting sensation. The presence had none of the jagged bitterness that accompanied his visions of fanged shadows and leering skulls. It was not devoid of threat, but its malice was not directed at Skell. Whatever it was, it didn’t want the shadows to claim him. Right now that was all that mattered.

  Eventually he collapsed out of the hole and into the sub-mine shaft he’d entered from, his body burning with exertion, covered head to foot in cloying grey muck.

  Make haste, the thought said. You are stronger than you know.

  Fear drove Skell up, blanking out the pain in his limbs. He stumbled off down the corridor of earth, in the opposite direction from the route he’d taken. He
’d left the lantern at the rathole’s entrance, but he didn’t look back.

  Have faith, Skell, said the thought. Have faith, and keep running.

  Behind him, the lantern flickered once, and died.

  Shadraith stopped. He let out a thin, hissing breath from his helm’s vox-grille. Around him the shadows froze, as though caught in the middle of some illicit act.

  He is here, said Bar’ghul. The sorcerer shuddered at the sound of the daemon’s voice slipping around inside his skull.

  ‘You have not spoken in long enough,’ he replied, his tone barbed. The grip on his warp scythe tightened.

  I have not had good reason to, the daemon snarled back. The warp light wreathing Shadraith’s scythe flared, and the shadows cringed back in fear.

  ‘Do not so easily forget all I have done for you, daemon,’ Shadraith snapped. ‘You would do well to recall that you are not my master.’

  And neither are you mine, Night Lord. The boy is escaping. The Pale Nomad will do anything to retrieve him. You must take him and properly bind him, so that I might have a house of flesh to reside in.

  The sound of distant gunfire echoed down the tunnel to Shadraith. He turned his head towards the noise, his preysight stripping away the darkness.

  ‘The harvest is progressing,’ he said. ‘Cull has supplied the prisoners with weapons. If a trap is to be set then it must be done now. We need the Pale Nomad’s warp-blessed blood to complete your summoning.’

  Go, Bar’ghul urged him. My will is with you. He will not evade you for much longer.

  ‘About that at least we are agreed,’ Shadraith said, setting off once more. Around him the darkness sprang into scuttling, squirming motion, picking up the warp-scent again.

  This time there would be no escape.

  Sink Shaft One resounded with reports of gunfire. Las and hard rounds, the cracks and bangs echoed up and down statue-lined tunnels, transit ways and haulage shafts, and coalesced like a continually reverberating thunderclap in the central pit.