Carcharodons: Red Tithe Read online

  It seems his warp-dreams are not wholly misplaced. A penal ship out of Fallowrain checked into a waystation in the spiral arm a week ahead of schedule. Gideos thinks that’s the one which the portents have been showing him. I’m going to need to run further checks before I go to Lord Rozenkranz and request clearance to leave this miserable place. The business here on Kelistan still hasn’t been tied up yet. The local Administratum quill-heads are dragging proceedings out, as is their way. Chasing some rogue penal ship to the edges of Imperial voidspace may be just the excuse I need to get away from this dead-end investigation.

  Signed,

  Interrogator Augim Nzogwu.

  + + Mem-bank entry log ends + + +

  + + Thought for the Day: Work earns salvation + + +

  Chapter II

  It was the night before the harvest. A time of breathless, desperate yearning. A time of preparation, and anticipation. A time the Prince of Thorns had come to savour.

  Amon Cull stared out of the primary viewing port of the Last Breath. The Prince of Thorns stared back at him – naked, jet hair lying lank about his shoulders, corpse-white flesh puckered with neural ports and scarred by ritual kill-tallies. Cull raised one hand and watched the prince mirror the movement in the crystalflex, all the while maintaining eye contact. The ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, exposing the tips of his steel teeth. The revenant in the void smiled back.

  He dropped his hand and looked beyond the nightmarish figure, black eyes refocusing on the dark orb that framed his reflection. Zartak. It was not an impressive sight: a small planetoid, a sphere of green, rugged rock on the fringes of a star system on the fringes of a galaxy. A place easily forgotten. A place well suited to Amon Cull’s needs.

  The harvest was overdue. They had dallied, first on Nemisar, then in the Talith System. It had been understandable, given how hungry the warband was for fresh victims. A slight shiver ran up Cull’s spine as he remembered the screams. He’d drawn them out just as his brothers had drawn out what was supposed to be a simple supply raid, lavishing their prisoners with every pain they could conceive of. They’d left a week behind schedule, and only then because the augurs had detected a powerful Naval squadron breaking in-system in a vain effort to intercept them.

  Nemisar and Talith had been pleasurable distractions, but distractions none the less. Zartak was where they needed to be. A place of lost and imprisoned souls, sharply concentrated into a dozen mining structures burrowed in amongst the inimical jungles that carpeted the humid orb. Aside from the arbitrators and prison overseers, every single person below was a convict labourer. They were all ripe for the harvest.

  The flesh at the nape of Cull’s neck itched. He indulged the sensation, imagining the serrated edge of a combat knife sliding home. At least a dozen eyes staring at his back wished to impale him right there and then, and that was only counting the genhanced ones. Cull delighted in such knowledge. Delighted in the fact that it was their fear of his skill with a blade that kept them at bay.

  A sound disturbed the awful quiet of the Last Breath’s bridge, a grating of time-worn alarm bells. Hunchbacked thralls scurried to deactivate them. Cull didn’t need to ask what they presaged. The ship’s augur arrays had detected the Imperial Truth, breaking in-system from its warp jump. Another eight hours would see the penal ship in high anchor above Zartak, joining Cull’s concealed fleet in the doomed mining colony’s orbit. Then, at last, the wait would be over.

  ‘Armour,’ the Prince of Thorns said. The voice was young, as cold, clean and cutting as a freshly scrubbed razor. The black-robed thralls of his personal retinue hurried to attend him, each labouring beneath the weight of a separate piece of battleplate. The design was ancient, Mark IV, daubed midnight blue and edged with bands of bronze. The scarred amalgamation of shaped plasteel, adamantium and ceramite had borne the brunt of the Long War for millennia, well before Cull had been conceived. Regardless of its venerable age, the prince had ordered customisations when he had taken possession of it from the warband’s previous master. Jagged spikes now bristled from its pauldrons, greaves and breastplate, and the leering winged skull motif of the VIII Legion was entwined with his own heraldry, the crest of House Cull – a black venomrose and its wicked, poisoned thorns.

  Layer by layer, the thralls clothed Cull for murder. The auto-sense links went in first, sliding with familiar little stabs of pain into the neural ports and flesh sockets that penetrated his black carapace. The servo plates and fibre bundles were next, the machine-muscles that would augment the prince’s already transhuman strength. After that, the armour itself, dark as a nightmare, old as the sins of the martyred gene-father Cull would never know. The thralls clamped each part to the electroid sealant strips without speaking, the bridge quiet except for the click and grate of cold metal.

  The pauldrons came last. It took two thralls to lift and lock each one in place, their calloused hands bloody from the spines that bristled across the dark steel. The servos in the power armour whirred and hummed as they came fully online. Cull smiled again.

  Sentath, his chief thrall and the only human dreg he’d deigned to name, stepped forwards. In his ageing hands he clasped a great war helm. Its visor had been moulded into the shape of a screaming skull, the bone-white a sharp contrast to the darkness of the rest of Cull’s armour. From its sides rose backswept red pinions, fashioned like the ragged wings of a bat. It was the very image of the VIII Legion’s heraldry. The top of the skull was covered in a ridge of bony horn nubs, echoing the spikes that bristled across the rest of Cull’s plate. The deactivated red lenses set into the skull’s sockets glittered a dark, dead shade of ruby.

  Cull took the helm from the struggling thrall with one hand, placing it over his head without ceremony. The neck lock hissed as it sealed with his gorget, and the vox-grille wheezed and rattled like a dying man.

  For a second he was in darkness. For a second he was cowering once more in the shadows of the palace that he had once called home, eyes screwed tight shut, whimpering as murderers clad in lightning stalked its halls. Then the helm’s preysight activated and the bridge returned, rendered now in bloody crimson. White icons overlaid his vision one by one, blinking into existence as his auto-senses came online – targeting reticules, vital signs, squad designates, ammunition counts, area schematics. He deleted each in turn with a blink-click. They were not needed, not yet. His gaze returned to his reflection in the crystalflex, to the Prince of Thorns, the Young Murderer, Champion of Fear. Night Lord, now midnight clad, ready to kill. Damn the so-called Long War veterans who claimed their young prince was not ready.

  ‘Shenzar,’ he said, voice transformed into a deep, deathly whisper that rattled from the death mask’s vox-grille. ‘Are the Claws prepared?’

  ‘Yes, my prince,’ the Terminator champion answered.

  With a thought, Cull activated his ancient armour’s power coils. Arco-lightning ignited, sparking and crackling across vicious spikes and snapping hungrily at his nightmare reflection. Cull nodded once, satisfied.

  ‘Then let us begin.’

  Meat parted beneath Shadraith’s blade. He watched it happen in silence, marvelling at the way in which the flaps of flesh came apart with gentle reluctance beneath the slight pressure of the scalpel. Marvelling too at the man’s screams: not unlike a broken grox sow, lowing and tired, weary with the pain that had been heaped upon its meaningless existence. Shadraith wondered sometimes whether, during his previous life, he’d been a butcher or slaughter yard labourer.

  Or maybe just a psychopath. There had been plenty of those on Nostramo.

  Shadraith removed the blade and straightened, momentarily sated. Between them, the last two hundred and eleven victims had gone some way to easing his communion with Bar’ghul. The ancient daemon had been ignoring Shadraith of late, its messages ever more distant and disconnected from reality. Now, though, the sorcerer could feel the warp creature’s a
ttention upon him again, drawn through the immaterium by the pain Shadraith was bleeding into the warp’s depths.

  ‘Another,’ he ordered, his voice a dead hiss that rattled from the vox of his horned helmet. Two stooped acolyte-things dragged the screaming man from the slab, struggling as he writhed. Two more heaved another prisoner up onto the rack. He was barely conscious, still under the effects of the phobos gas Shadraith had flooded the ship with before they’d boarded. This one wore the white uniform of a bridge vox-operator. Shadraith stripped it off with short, precise snips of his surgical scissors. He’d removed his gauntlets to make the work easier, his long, clawed fingers stained bright red.

  The Night Lord had commandeered the medicae bay of the Imperial Truth for his grisly work. It had been the natural choice – it already had all the tools he needed, from incision blades and bone saws to dissection tables and restraint clamps. He’d hung the flayed skins of two dozen of the ship’s bridge staff from the coolant pipes and venting ducts overhead, draping the whole bay in bare, bloody meat. He’d also had his acolytes clog the floor drains so that now, after several days of effort, the blood was lapping around the soles of his boots. The tiled walls, once a pristine, surgical white, had been painted crimson.

  Such activities were as much a hobby to Shadraith as they were an effort to communicate with his daemonic ally. It spoke to him of home, of distant, long lost Nostramo, and of better days with battle-brothers who had understood the true talents of the Night Lords. Causing pain and terror had once been goals in themselves. Now they were mere afterthoughts to the likes of Cull and the pack of inexperienced warriors Shadraith was forced to ally himself with. Almost none of them had even been alive during the great and glorious days of the VIII Legion’s liberation, when they had slipped the leash of the False Emperor and painted the stars red. The upstarts were an embarrassment to the Long War, and a testimony to how far the ideals of the Night Haunter had fallen.

  They were a means to an end, the Chaos sorcerer reminded himself as he scooped out an eyeball. Soon, with Bar’ghul’s blessings, he would have what he sought. Then he need humour the self-proclaimed Prince of Thorns no longer.

  He felt the presence of Vorfex, cold as a long-dead cadaver, slide into the bay. He didn’t look up from his work.

  ‘We have cleared the asteroid belt,’ the Raptor Claw leader said, his vox-voice cutting through the screaming of the sorcerer’s latest captive.

  ‘The shields?’ Shadraith asked, leaning a little closer to the struggling, breathless man.

  ‘Damaged, but still functional. They’ll be enough.’

  ‘And the vox-array?’

  ‘Intact. We have a full, uninterrupted connection with Zartak. No word from the prince or the rest of the fleet. They’re still shrouded on the dark side of the planet.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Shadraith said, finally looking up at his fellow Night Lord. Vorfex was one of the few members of the warband he considered to have anything approaching experience. If anything, Shadraith would have sponsored Vorfex to be its leader over Cull, if he had believed he could manipulate the older Night Lord the way he already did the so-called Prince of Thorns.

  ‘Continue transmitting everything the vox-thieves captured,’ Shadraith told him. ‘And prepare your Claw for the arrival of our new guests.’

  ‘As you wish, Flayed Father.’

  The harvest was about to begin.

  Rannik armoured herself in haste. Macran’s shock squads were the best arbitrators on Zartak, and possessed a personal armoury in the heart of the Precinct Fortress’ highest flak tower. The precinct itself was a blocky sprawl of enclosed rockcrete bastions, bulwarks and plasteel baffles, perched precariously on the crag edge of the so-called Burrow, Sink Shaft One, Zartak’s largest penal mine. The sub-precincts that overlooked the other smaller workings sunk into the planetoid’s adamantium-rich crust were far less impressive affairs – generally nothing more than a curtain wall and a squat rockcrete keep. The shock squad armoury alone displayed the disparity between the main fortress and the sub-precinct that Rannik had jurisdiction over.

  The carapace armour she unhooked from a reserve locker was far sturdier than her own. A collection of matt-black flakplates striped with yellow hazard chevrons and fitted over polyplastek fibre weave, each part clipped and fastened snugly on top of Rannik’s black bodyglove. She settled the open-jawed helmet in place, adjusted the vox-torq around her throat and snapped down the polarising visor lens. Last of all, she pulled on the suit’s armoured lock gloves.

  The weaponry lining the walls was just as comprehensive as the armour. Las and hard round vied with rows of grenade variants and half a dozen types of suppression mace. Rannik resisted the urge to select one of the big, scarred Synford-pattern lockshields from the upper racks. She locked her own autopistol and shock maul to the mag-strips of her armour’s belt and clamped a heavy Vox Legi-pattern combat shotgun and shell bandolier to the block on her backplate.

  She gave herself five seconds to take a breath and stare at her reflection in the changing bay mirror. Hazel eyes and a slender, pale young face stared back, capped by close-cropped black hair.

  This is what you wanted, she told herself. Stop hesitating.

  She took the grav lift to the tower’s shuttle bay, tightening and settling straps as she waited. With a flicker of annoyance, she realised that her heart was already racing. She’d spent years training and drilling for precisely this moment. Now that it was happening for real, it was supposed to be as simple as any other simulation exercise.

  But it suddenly didn’t seem simple at all.

  The wire doors of the lift juddered open, and she stepped out into bay fourteen. The screaming of jets and the backwash of idling engines hit her hard. Head down, she forced herself into it. Ahead of her, armoured figures were filing up into the open rear of a Mark IX Triwing Lighter, framed by the backdrop of landing lumens and the starry night sky that yawned beyond the bay’s open blast doors.

  ‘Wait!’ she shouted, but her words were snatched away by the engine noise. She broke into a jog, grimacing. She wasn’t going to let them leave her behind.

  The last figure up the Triwing’s ramp paused at the hatch and glanced back. The cockpit lights lit up her scarred features. Jhen Macran. She scowled as she caught sight of Rannik.

  ‘Well, come on then, warp damn you,’ she snapped, gesturing through the hatch. Rannik ducked inside.

  The last of Macran’s three teams had already filled the shuttle’s hold and strapped into the metal fold-down restraining benches. They looked up as she entered, jawlines grim beneath the edges of their helms, eyes inscrutable behind the black visors of their photosensitive lenses. Macran thrust Rannik forcibly down into the last harness by the hatch and banged the locking rune. The pitch of the shuttle’s engines rose to a painful shriek. Macran tapped her vox-torq.

  ‘What?’ Rannik tried to shout above the rising noise, then realised what she was telling her to do. She hastily activated the comms device.

  Macran sat down on the bench opposite and snapped the restraint over her shoulders. Her voice crackled in her ear. ‘You know Klenn only supported your request to be here because he’s praying some savlar on this damned penal ship splits your head open with a rusty crowbar?’

  ‘I assume that’s why you agreed to take me with you as well?’

  ‘If you get any of my men killed, then I promise you Klenn will get his wish. I’ll snap your damned neck myself and dump your body out an airlock. Do you understand?’

  ‘Perfectly, master-at-arms,’ Rannik said, and forced herself to smile.

  As the shuttle juddered with take-off turbulence, she realised she’d never been more afraid in her entire life.

  The boy cowers behind a statue of his supposed great grandfather and screws his eyes tight shut, while his parents die.

  They are not his real parents. His real parents are
thieves, or extortionists, or obscura addicts, or blasphemers, or murderers. They are any number of hateful savlar underhivers. He does not know them. He has never met them.

  His adoptive parents were the masters of Hive Apraxis. Lord and Lady of the Venomrose Thorns, the ancient House Cull, Firstborn of the lineage of Saint Yarwain. They are masters no longer. The new rulers of Apraxis are skinning his parents alive.

  ‘Where are you, boy?’

  The vox-shriek of their leader screams down the hallway, so sharp it seems to cut the child’s ears. The boy whimpers pitiably. The agony of his false parents has long since been reduced to moaning and sobs, echoing through the cold, bare, blood-slashed marble of their palace-turned-slaughterhouse. They have already screamed their throats raw.

  ‘You did this,’ whispers another voice, the little one in the boy’s head. He clamps his small hands over his ears, desperate to silence it. Desperate to stop the lightning-clad killers from hearing it. The words still come though, reaching him from inside his skull.

  ‘You killed them, Amon. You killed everybody. Don’t you–’

  Remember. The Prince of Thorns started. He realised he’d unclamped his runesword. The curving, Nostramo-marked steel glittered in the flickering light of the teleportation chamber. He blinked, and bared his steel fangs.

  He’d been remembering. That had been happening more often of late. The daemon, Bar’ghul, had been helping him recall the time before the hypno-inductions and murder inculcations. Before he’d found his purpose, and taken the mantle of power that was his by right. Before his ascension to the VIII Legion. It was trying to distract him. He thrust the thoughts angrily from his mind.

  He found the chamber often exacerbated such memories. The daemon-haunted vault in the underbelly of the Last Breath tended to act as a conduit for the darkest and most blessed moments of a man’s existence. He could tell from the short, sharp breathing and tense postures of First Kill that they too were having similar vision-recollections. Cull found it tended to put his retinue on edge just before an engagement. And an edge was exactly what he wanted from them. Unyielding, honed and cutting.