Carcharodons: Red Tithe Read online

  ‘We need to be ready,’ Skell said. ‘It’ll start soon.’ His body still ached from Argrim’s last attempted murder. The ambush had been sprung just as he’d predicted, when the work gang had been returning from Lower 6-16 at the end of that day-cycle’s labour shift. Argrim, the big, brutal ex-smuggler from Shantry, would have staved his skull in with a concealed pick haft if Dolar hadn’t put him down before he could get swinging. When the arbitrators had arrived, shock mauls buzzing, Dolar and Skell were still on their feet while their three attackers most definitely weren’t. All thanks to Skell’s foresight.

  The arbitrators had beaten them all the same.

  ‘When are they coming?’ Dolar asked, casting a lingering glance at the cell hatch.

  Skell didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. An ear-splitting wail made Dolar start, the magnicles binding him to his upper bunk clattering against its metal sides. The red emergency lumen over the aquila-stamped hatch bathed the small, dank space in angry light. There was a jarring thud as secondary blast doors throughout the honeycomb structure of Sink Shaft One’s prison complex thumped shut on auto-hinges. Dolar stared down at Skell.

  As the sound of heavy boots thumping past reached him over the screaming of the alarms, Skell swallowed and nodded. He shouted up to Dolar.

  ‘It’s started.’

  The Centrum Dominus was buzzing with activity, operators clattering at their rune banks as they sought to update the data streaming in from the augurs. In the tunnels outside, containment squads could be heard running past from the armouries. Sholtz was reviewing squad dispositions throughout the sub-precincts via the Centrum Dominus holochart, Rannik and the other officers still clustered around him. A shout from Vox Chief Hestel, seated on the upper communications gantry, disturbed the warden’s assessments.

  ‘Sir, we’re receiving a transmission from the Imperial Truth.’

  ‘She’s just cleared the asteroid belt,’ Tarl added from his station at the augur array.

  ‘Put it on vox,’ Sholtz ordered, gripping the brass railing running around the holochart. The room went suddenly quiet.

  There was a rush of static interference, rising and then dipping from an eerie squeal to a low grumble. Hestel bent over a frequency module, working a pair of sliders. A voice came and went, like a passing phantom. Eventually it snapped into focus.

  ‘...repeat, this is Captain Van Hoyt of the Imperial Truth to anyone who can hear me. We are code black.’

  ‘Captain,’ the warden primary called out. ‘We read you. This is Zartak Arbitrator Precinct Fortress Alpha, Warden Primary Sholtz speaking. What is your status, over?’

  ‘Thank the God-Emperor,’ the voice of Van Hoyt crackled back. ‘We have a situation here, warden primary. Multiple prisoner exfiltration attempts, a heavy security breach. I’ve been forced to seal off vital decks and open the airlocks. I am currently barricading the bridge alongside the remains of my security detail.’

  ‘Is First Arbitrator Nethim there?’ the warden prime demanded.

  ‘Negative. He’s currently holding out in the enginarium. We have locked our course to Zartak’s high orbit. Emperor willing we can keep the scum at bay long enough to reach you.’

  ‘Standby, captain,’ the warden primary said, signalling to Hestel to pause the connection. ‘Macran, are the sub-precincts mobilised?’

  ‘I estimate eighty-five per cent readiness, sir. But my shock troop squads can deploy immediately.’

  ‘Tarl, how long do we have?’

  ‘Going off the Imperial Truth’s current course,’ the augur chief said, bending over his screens, ‘and assuming Nethim manages to hold the enginarium, she’ll achieve high anchor in a little over two hours.’

  ‘Sir, should I forward a message to the choristorium?’ asked Hestel.

  ‘Negative, there’s no need to tax the astropaths just yet. The situation is still developing. Macran, take your teams into the void via the Divine Retribution. Intercept the Imperial Truth and contain the insurrection. I will continue to communicate with Van Hoyt while you are in transit and pass relevant intelligence on to you. After the suppression has been carried out and the situation is stable I will deploy detachments from the sub-precincts to support the clean-up operation. Use extreme prejudice.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ Macran replied.

  ‘Warden primary, I have a request,’ Rannik said from among the assembled sub-wardens. Sholtz scowled.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Let me go with the shock squads. I can provide liaison between you and Macran. Subordinate to her orders, of course.’ Rannik inclined her head towards the master-at-arms. She crossed her arms over her breastplate and glared back.

  ‘What makes you imagine she’d need you as an intermediary, Rannik?’ the warden primary demanded. ‘Macran is a veteran of twelve code black insurrections and a master suppressor. She is more than capable of heading up the operation and maintaining contact with the Centrum Dominus at the same time.’

  ‘If I may speak plainly, sir,’ Rannik said, taking a breath. ‘I want to be with the shock squads because I want to prove I’m capable. I understand my status as the youngest sub-warden in this room. Progenium training modules can only account for so much. I wish to show my devotion to the God-Emperor and the Lex Imperialis in the fires of an active suppression.’

  ‘You are impertinent, Rannik,’ the sub-warden growled. ‘The Adeptus Arbites does not operate on such vain whims. You will be assigned to tasks I deem you worthy of. Macran will have enough to think about on board that ship without your inexperience getting in her way.’

  ‘With respect, warden primary,’ Sub-Warden Klenn cut in. ‘Maybe it would be good to bloody her. This incident aboard the Imperial Truth should not be difficult to contain, and if we were to experience a security breach down here on the surface I’d rather know all my fellow arbitrators have first-hand combat experience. One compromised sub-precinct can have dire consequences for the safety of all of our facilities on Zartak.’

  ‘Let me prove myself,’ Rannik added. ‘The progenium thought I was ready, ready enough to assign me here.’

  ‘The bowels of an Imperial prison hulk are nothing like the simulation exercises,’ Macran snapped, the faint red glow of the holochart giving her grizzled features a bloody hue.

  ‘Which is precisely why she needs to experience it,’ Klenn said.

  ‘Sir,’ called Hestel from the vox-banks, transmission horn in hand. ‘Captain Van Hoyt is still on vox. I believe the prisoners are attempting to storm the bridge.’

  ‘We don’t have time for this foolishness,’ growled Sholtz. ‘Macran, I leave Sub-Warden Rannik’s assignment up to you. Just intercept that ship before it reaches high anchor.’

  Rannik looked at Macran. The flamer-scarred arbitrator glanced from the warden primary to Sub-Warden Klenn, then finally nodded at Rannik.

  ‘Draw shock kit from the armoury. Shuttle bay fourteen, ten minutes. If you’re not there we’re leaving without you.’

  The fore armoury of the White Maw, like every level above the slave decks, was almost completely silent. The only noise was the throbbing heartbeat of the warp drives, which shuddered up through the decking plates. The air was alive with the static charge of the active Geller field, the chlorine tang of ozone warring with the familiar scents of bolter oils and preservation unguents.

  Bail Sharr, Reaper Prime and Company Master, passed noiselessly down the length of the armoury hall, his bare feet making no sound on the cold metal deck. The few artisan serfs and repair savants still at work in the depths of the ship’s night cycle bowed as he passed, their gaze averted. Sharr ignored them, his void-black eyes focused instead on the objects the malnourished humans were attending. He passed row after row of empty battle suits, ranked either side down the armoury’s long walls, every one mounted on a steel pedestal-brace.

  Each set of power armour
was different, each an amalgamation of patterns and designs. Many of them were ancient. The most common parts were from Mark Vs, their surfaces studded with the gleaming brass orbs of the molecular bonding pins that held the worn plates of plasteel and ceramite together. Some bore the hook-nosed helmets of Mark VIs, others the ancient, circular ceramite banding of Mark IIs, or the vertical faceplate slits and horizontal mono-lens of the Mark III great helms. Only two features united the antique collection. All were painted with the same shade of deep grey, and all bore the same crest upon their right pauldrons – a white shark motif, jaw curling towards tail fin to form a razor-toothed crescent set upon a void of black.

  Despite the efforts of the repair savants, the majority of the suits were still visibly scarred, not only with the ancient, swirling honour patterns of exile markings, but with the blows of desperate, bloody and all-too recent battle. The artisans that laboured in the ship’s fore and aft armouries had been working for almost a month, Terran standard, to repair the damage done by the Great Devourer. Still Sharr saw the gleam of bare metal as he passed, noting where armour had been raked and scored by chitin talons and blades or pitted by bio acids and burrower beetles.

  The toll the War in the Deeps had taken upon the Chapter’s venerable equipment had been high. The toll on the flesh of its warriors had been even higher. Sharr himself walked with a slight limp, the pale grey skin of his right leg still not fully recovered from a gene­stealer’s claws. He had refused the offer of an augmetic – the wound was bearable and, Void Father knew, high-functioning bionics were in scarce enough supply as it was. He’d ordered Apothecary Tama to save the replacement for a void brother who needed it.

  The Reaper Prime reached the end of the hall. Before him, mounted upon the naked rivets and bare steel of the high wall, hung the faded remnants of the war banner of the Third Battle Company. His company now, Sharr reminded himself. Like the armour of the warriors that had fought to defend it, the heavy cloth bore fresh scars. Unlike the armour, the damage would remain unpatched, a ragged testimony to the fallen. Only the company’s crest – the intertwining shark-and-scythe symbol mirroring the fresh tattoo on Sharr’s left temple – would be woven anew in white. The new honour scroll pinned to the banner’s ragged bottom looked fresh and out-of-place. The ink describing the battle company’s actions during the War in the Deeps was barely dry.

  Sharr’s gaze lowered to the object that had drawn him to the armoury during the dead hours of fasting and cryo-meditation. It was another suit of power armour, its hard plates the opposite of the plain white robe clothing Sharr, standing rigid and inert on its pedestal like the other eighty-six suits lining the hall. This one, however, was different. Mostly Mark IV, its pauldron bandings were the colour of bronze, and the exile honour markings inscribed upon its dark grey surface were more intricate – they covered the suit’s gauntlets, vambraces and greaves in whorling, interlocking designs, mirroring the tattoos on Sharr’s own pale forearms and legs. The breastplate bore in its centre an embossed skull and twin lightning bolts, the crest of the ancient Terran Pacification War, the Chapter’s first battle honour.

  The helmet was also more elaborate. A heavy, modified Mark III great helm, the vox-uplink strip running along the top had been fashioned into a high, jagged ceramite crest, while the visor plate around the vox-grille was painted with the likeness of a yawning white maw. The Third Company’s shark-and-scythe sigil was inscribed over the helm’s left temple. Sharr felt his new tattoo, identical to the armour’s marking, throb. The helm’s inactive black lenses seemed to glare down at him in the armoury’s quiet, murky half-light.

  The looming suit had its gauntlets resting on the top of a great two-handed chainaxe, the adamantium haft locked to the bottom of the plinth. The flared head of the weapon was uncased, the metal-tipped shark teeth that edged the bare rotor gleaming wickedly. Sharr reached out and touched one jagged incisor. He half expected such a brazen violation to cause the inert figure to leap into motion. The weapon, like the armour, was what the Chapter referred to as tapu – for someone of lower rank to lay even a finger upon it was anathema. But Sharr was no longer of lower rank.

  The armour and the chainaxe – Reaper – had belonged to Company Master Akia for as long as Sharr could remember. He had been leading the Third Battle Company through the Outer Dark since Sharr’s days as a voidborn initiate. Like many senior figures within the Chapter, Akia had rarely been seen unarmoured, even among his closest brethren. Sharr himself hadn’t witnessed him fully without battleplate until the day Apothecary Tama had pulled his dead, white remains from its battered casing. Despite the on­going repairs, the scars and rents of the genestealer broodlord’s claws were still evident across the armour’s grey surfaces.

  For two and a half centuries the suit had been Akia. Now it belonged to Sharr. Even if tapu no longer applied to him, the thought of wearing it was an abomination. He withdrew his hand, gazing up into the eye-lenses. He felt the soul of the dead Company Master glaring back.

  ‘He would not have approved.’

  The voice startled Sharr. He turned to find Te Kahurangi approaching. Although the Chief Librarian was fully armoured, Sharr only now heard the thump of footfalls and the whir of sound-deadened servos. Had it been anyone else he would have worried at his own lack of vigilance. Te Kahurangi, however, had long ago established a habit of passing unnoticed.

  ‘He would not have approved of what, venerable Chief Librarian?’ Sharr asked as Te Kahurangi came to a halt beside him. The wizened psyker didn’t look at him, but gazed up at Akia’s old armour. Both Space Marines spoke in archaic High Gothic, the tongue used by their Chapter since its inception so many millennia before.

  ‘The former Company Master would not have approved of you standing and staring at his battleplate during the dead hours like some unbloodied initiate. If meditation or cryo-sleep do not suit you then there is work to be done.’ Sharr felt a stab of annoyance. He suppressed it.

  ‘I came to pay my respects.’

  ‘There has been time enough for that. As Akia would have said, what’s passed has passed. You are our Company Master now. You must assume your full responsibilities.’

  Sharr looked at Te Kahurangi – the Pale Nomad, Chief Librarian of the Chapter. His power armour was even more impressive than that of the Company Master’s. Its underlying surface was a deep blue, and every inch of it, from the boots to the cable-studded psychic hood, was inscribed with a dense knotwork of swirling exile marks. A heavy set of scrimshawed shark teeth hung about his gorget, and more old charms dangled from his vambraces. In his right gauntlet he grasped a force staff of carved bone, the head fashioned into a maw clamped around a sea-green shard of stone. The rock gleamed in the dim light.

  ‘The Tithing draws near,’ Te Kahurangi continued, turning to face Sharr. ‘The Tithing of a planet you once knew all too well. Are you ready, Reaper Prime?’

  ‘I am ready,’ Sharr replied forcefully, meeting the black void of Te Kahurangi’s gaze. The face that framed the unnatural eyes was a disturbing mismatch of colour. While much of it was as white as a corpse’s flesh, patches of skin around his eyes, jaw and neck were scabbed a rough, dark grey by denticles, lending his skin a scaly texture. Sharr had recently started to note the first outbreaks of the genetic anomaly on his own flesh, scabbing his elbows and shoulder joints. It was just one of the many afflictions suffered by the older members of the Chapter, and the condition would only degenerate as time passed. With the exception of the slumbering Greats in their white suits of Dreadnought armour, Te Kahurangi was by far the oldest member of the Chapter. Sharr had heard it said that he was only three generations removed from the Wandering Ancestors, the first to have gone into the void, alone, at the behest of the Forgotten One.

  ‘The company needs leadership now,’ said Te Kahurangi. ‘Your leadership, Sharr. This will be no ordinary Tithing.’

  ‘So you have said.’

 
‘The boy must be found,’ Te Kahurangi continued, voice a dry, dead whisper in the armoury’s echoing vaults. ‘The Murderers in the Night have his scent. If the one called Kiri Mate sinks his claws into him the suffering for all will be great. It is not enough to complete the Tithe. We must reach the boy before the heretics.’

  ‘We will find him,’ Sharr said. ‘And complete the Tithe, for the Chapter.’

  ‘It will be your first true test as Company Master.’

  ‘Then I welcome it, void brother.’

  Te Kahurangi glanced back down the length of the armoury. ‘Eighty-six functioning suits of battleplate recovered from the War in the Deeps. Seventy-nine void brothers to fill them. And you yourself plagued by doubt at this dark homecoming. Are we enough for the Tithe, given what awaits us?’

  ‘On our shoulders rests the future of the Chapter,’ Bail Sharr said, looking once again at Akia’s power armour. His armour. He laid his hand once more upon the chainaxe’s head. ‘We are Carcharodon Astra, Chief Librarian. From the Outer Dark we come, and when the Red Tithe is over we will leave behind only darkness. Nothing more.’

  + + Gene scan complete + + +

  + + Access granted + + +

  + + Beginning mem-bank entry log + + +

  + + Date check, 3555875.M41 + + +

  Day 46, Kelistan local.

  I have checked the subsector waystation logs at the request of Gideos. He is convinced something vital is occurring, and has been for days. His nightmares have kept half of Lord Rozenkranz’s retainers awake at night. I couldn’t stand it any more.