Carcharodons: Red Tithe Page 6

  ‘Find the cogitator keys,’ Cull ordered him. ‘Quickly.’ He switched vox-channels with a blink-click, patching into the communications system of the Last Breath, high above.

  ‘Shenzar, are you prepared?’

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

  ‘Stand by.’

  First Kill were rifling through the gory remains of the shield hub’s operators, ripping apart blood-stained red robes and cracking open bionic plates. Narx managed to find the brass lever that switched off the alarms. After a few minutes, Drac turned up a memory swipe slate. Xeron found the second. Cull took them both and slid them into the central generator’s cogitator bank.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ he ordered. Golgoth scooped one severed limb up off the bloody floor, carrying it awkwardly in his heavy gauntlets. Cull pressed the palm to the scan screen and hit the override rune. The throbbing of the generator began to dip noticeably, fading like a dying heartbeat.

  ‘I can’t fully deactivate it without the correct codes, but I’ve put it into maintenance lockdown,’ Cull said. ‘That will reduce its strength enough for our purposes.’

  ‘Contacts on the auspex,’ Terron warned. ‘The rest of the garrison are inbound from the north wall.’

  ‘Much too little, and much too late,’ Cull said, and switched back to the Last Breath’s bridge vox-frequency.

  ‘Shenzar, now.’

  The lumens in the Centrum Dominus went out. It took three and a half seconds for the emergency strips running along the floor to activate. By then the killing had already started.

  There was a crack and a rush of displaced air. Five figures were suddenly standing in a circle in the room’s central cogitator pit. They had appeared like some dark conjurer’s trick, hulking warriors bedecked in thick plates of midnight-blue armour, the lightning crackling around their heavy gauntlets mimicking the splitting bolts painted across their breastplates and pauldrons. As the secondary lumens came online, they opened fire.

  Sholtz dropped down behind a rank of cogitators, hands clasped to his ears as the room filled with the colossal boom of combi-bolters. A part of him understood that the void shield had been compromised, and that they were experiencing a teleporter attack. Beyond that, everything was raw, mindless panic.

  The cogitators shuddered and sparked as they took a salvo of bolts. To his right he saw two augur operators go down, their torsos blown open. One of them was the boy who’d first fetched him from the situation room debriefing. Sholtz fumbled with his autopistol, managing to unlock it from his mag-belt.

  ‘Sir!’ wailed Augur Chief Tarl. Even as he made to dive into cover beside the warden, a bolt-round hit his right arm. The limb disappeared in a burst of blood and shattered bone, spinning him half round. His screaming lasted barely a second before another round struck his head, blowing away the left side of his face. He dropped.

  ‘Emperor’s wounds,’ stammered Sholtz, struggling with his pistol’s safety. The weapon was sticky with Tarl’s blood. He could hear Vox Chief Hestel screaming from the gantry, begging for mercy. There was a bang and the pleading stopped.

  Suddenly everything was quiet. The warden went still, his heart hammering. The pool of blood spreading from Tarl’s remains reached his knees. He didn’t move. Heavy footfalls thumped across the deck, accompanied by the whir and grate of power armour.

  ‘What are you?’ stammered a voice. The warden recognised it as Sub-Warden Klenn. There was a crunch, and Klenn started screaming. It lasted for a long time.

  The sounds of footsteps grew louder. A shadow fell across the warden primary. He looked up, shaking, blinking through the sweat and blood. His autopistol clattered to the floor.

  A giant stood over him, bedecked in spiked armour. Its helmet was crafted into a bestial snout with two short tusks, like those of a spineboar. Its eye-lenses glared a dark, bitter red. The winged skull embossed on its huge breastplate grinned madly.

  As it reached for him with one great, spiked gauntlet, the warden primary finally found the breath to scream.

  Something was coming. In all his years as attendant master of the choristorium on Zartak, Andreus Paul had never been so sure of something. His charges, four gamma-level astropaths, were more agitated than he’d ever seen them. They were spitting and grinding their toothless gums, pale, bare bodies writhing in the cords and cables that bound them into their psy-reactive transmission cradles. One would occasionally emit a brief, yelping shriek that echoed back from the chamber’s domed ceiling.

  The choristorium was the link between Zartak and the Imperium, the one thread that bound the distant system – teetering on the edge of galactic oblivion – to the rest of mankind. Andreus had been responsible for overseeing the transmission and receipt of astropathic messages at the station for over four decades. In that time he’d experienced three mine uprisings and their suppressions, and more security breaches and smaller riots than he cared count. But never had he witnessed his charges exhibiting such primal, nameless terror. Two were experiencing nosebleeds. One had almost ripped himself free from his neural nodes, and Andreus had been forced to clamp him in place. It was as though the sedated psykers were attempting to physically tear themselves from their life-sustaining cradles and flee the chamber.

  Andreus stood at his usual post, the readout lectern that monitored the vital signs and psyk levels of the astropaths. He activated another injection of suppressant stims into all four of them, cursing as R-88E tore away one of his subdermal mem-stabilisers.

  ‘Warp damn it,’ he snapped, and sent another situational jolt through the cogitator system to the Centrum Dominus. Something needed to be done, and fast. Much more stress and he’d be forced to request permission for a full sedation, and once that happened no messages would be reaching or leaving Zartak for at least twenty-four Terran-standard hours.

  The jolt pinged back on the cogitator screen, unsent. A frown creased the attendant master’s wrinkled brow. With a tap of the rune key he sent it again. Again it reappeared. Was the system glitching?

  A sound reached him, echoing along the corridors of the Precinct Fortress. A rapid, booming tattoo, like the beating of monstrously large bass drums.

  Many of those who held Andreus’ rank had never heard such a noise before, living their whole lives as they did shielded away in their choristoriums. But the attendant master had experienced suppressions before. He’d heard screaming, rabid penal scum beating at the very doors of the astropathic chamber. The attack had only stopped with the arrival of the arbitrator combat reserve. The sound of gunfire had heralded the beginning of the suppression. And that was what Andreus knew he was hearing right now. Gunfire, echoing up from the bowels of the Precinct Fortress.

  ‘What in the name of the God-Emperor–’ he began to say. He got no further. One of the astropaths, MEL-1E, started to scream. It took him a few seconds to realise that the sounds were actually words. She was repeating them over and over, her head snapping back and forth, as though her sightless eye sockets could see something in the shadows of the domed ceiling above her cradle.

  ‘Ave dominus nox! Ave dominus nox! Ave dominus nox!’

  The archaic High Gothic phrase sent a chill down the attendant master’s spine.

  Hail, lord of night.

  The astropath’s words degenerated back into pure, unadulterated screaming. The other three joined in, drowning out the reports of gunfire. Their vital signs were reaching critical. A warning screen began to flash red. The psyker activity levels were peaking too.

  And they weren’t coming from the astropaths.

  Andreus gasped as something shifted above him. He looked up to see the impossible. The shadows lurking about the ornate, gargoyle-studded brass dome of the choristorium were moving. They were physically invading the light cast by the lumen candelabra in the centre of the dome, bleeding and shifting down the walls in a manner that defied the possibil
ities of nature. The orbs began to go out, one by one.

  One of the cogitator screens in front of Andreus cracked and burst in a shower of sparks. An alarm started to ring, lost amidst the wailing of the astropaths. The shadows continued to move, weaving and coalescing together to form shapes. Talons. Maws. Leering, snapping beast skulls.

  With a howl torn from the warp itself, the darkness fell.

  His charges died first. The shadows took them, wrapping them up in razored death. Their screams became gagged and choked as the darkness flowed into their gaping mouths, rending them open from the inside, setting their cradles rocking as they were savaged and torn from their cabling.

  Andreus staggered back as dark, insubstantial talons reached for him, coiling like jagged smoke around his readout lectern. The astropaths had gone quiet, as had the distant gunfire. The only sounds now were his panicked breathing, and the slow drip of torn offal from the overflowing remains in the psy-cradles.

  ‘Emperor deliver me,’ Andreus stammered, trying to grasp on to the familiar canticle-words. ‘S-shine down your guiding light, burn away all impurities, s-save–’

  The shadows recoiled. Andreus missed a beat, staring. It was actually working. The God-Emperor himself was interceding on behalf of one of His faithful subjects. He took up the prayer once more, his voice firmer now.

  ‘From the darkness of the empyrean, deliver us. From heresy, deviancy, and mutation, deliver us. Against corruption and temptation, give us strength! All praise and glory unto you, O Master of Mankind!’

  The shadows contracted all the way to the centre of the choristorium, twisting as though in pain. Andreus glared at them triumphantly, and drew a breath for the final verse. None could stand before true faith.

  The shadows rushed together, as though sucked into a vacuum. The writhing darkness formed into a definable shape, like a figure slowly emerging from a thick swirl of dark fog. Andreus’ words turned bitter in his mouth as the last strands hardened into gleaming, dark battleplate.

  A being stood in the centre of the choristorium, woven from the murderous darkness. It was at least seven feet tall, bedecked in power armour and a great, horned helm. It held a long scythe in one spiked gauntlet, wreathed in an eerie blue luminescence. Worst of all was what covered the thing’s armour plates – flayed skins, many of them cracked with age, all sewn together and pinned in place with black iron spikes. Andreus could see shrivelled arms, legs and torsos, and gaping, wide-eyed face-flesh, hung like grotesque masks across the thing’s breastplate and pauldrons. The very air around the figure vibrated and crackled with dark energy. Andreus’ cogitator screens had all shorted out.

  The nightmare warrior advanced towards the attendant master, its stride implacable. Andreus stumbled back, tripping on the hem of his green robes.

  ‘Please,’ he stammered, desperately seeking something, anything, that would halt the flesh-draped monster. ‘Please, no.’

  With a contemptuous swipe, the flayed giant sent the lectern between them crashing across the chamber. Shorn power coils sparked and snapped. Andreus pulled himself up onto his knees, weeping and shaking.

  The giant bent over him, his shadow obscuring the last light of the remaining lumen orb. It reached out with its free hand, slowly caressing Andreus’ brow. The attendant master flinched as the thorns studding the nightmare’s gauntlet tugged at his flesh. It spoke.

  ‘You are alone now, old man. Are you afraid?’

  Andreus whimpered. A damp patch was spreading through his lower robes. The nightmare’s grip tightened fractionally.

  ‘You needn’t be. If you had managed to get a warning away before I butchered your blind slaves, I may have taken revenge on you. As it is, I don’t have the time to flay you. You’ll die quickly. You should thank me for that.’

  Andreus moaned. The nightmare clamped its hand over his head.

  ‘Thank me,’ it ordered.

  ‘Th-thank you,’ Andreus managed to stammer.

  ‘Ave dominus nox,’ intoned the nightmare. It crushed his skull.

  Two hours to warp jump. Company Master Sharr allowed the retinal scanner of the cryo-chamber to take its reading, remaining still and unblinking. There was a chime as it cleared him for entry. Disengaging locks clanged, followed by a click-click-click as the heavy blast doors – stamped with the Carcharodons oceanic predator crest – rolled backwards.

  The lighting beyond was even murkier than elsewhere on board the White Maw. It barely reached the vaulted stone ceiling of the cryo-chamber, and gleamed weakly from the brass ribs that encased the upright tanks lining the walls.

  As Sharr entered there was a whirring noise. A dozen hardwired combat servitors, spread across the wide room, turned to track him with their weapons. The Company Master ignored them, and after a moment they jerked back to their original stances like freakish marionettes, their threat-assessment scans complete. The robed attendants scurrying through the chamber’s shadows bowed. The room was silent bar the throb of the energy coils snaking across the deck underfoot.

  Around Sharr his brothers slumbered. There were forty in all, half of his company, secreted in the forecastle of the strike cruiser’s armour-plated prow. They slept in individual tanks, their bare, pale bodies hooked up to vitae monitors and nutrient feeds and suspended in clear preservation fluids. Their lower faces were muzzled with respirator masks. It was how most of the Chapter’s battle-brothers spent a great deal of their time in voidspace.

  Existing in the lifeless dark beyond the stars was no easy thing. The Carcharodon Astra had been roaming it for ten millennia, cut off from all contact with the wider Imperium. The normal avenues for recuperation and replenishment utilised by Space Marine Chapters were rarely open to them. The suspended hibernation afforded by the cryo-tanks provided the Chapter with a method of rest between combat operations and training cycles, and helped preserve their strength. Typically, it was the younger brethren and initiates who utilised the tanks the most, overcoming deep void sickness through the meditational activities of their newly implanted sus-an membrane. Older Carcharodons like Sharr tended to find it increasingly difficult to rest, even through the longer voyages. It was said Te Kahurangi hadn’t used his tank for many centuries. Sharr could believe it.

  The end of the chamber was dominated by five larger tanks. Unlike the other Carcharodons, their occupants were fully clad in their war-plate. Even inactive, they were an imposing sight – five Terminators of the Red Brethren, warriors of Lord Tyberos’ own First Company.

  The central tank contained the commander of the detachment. His name was Kahu. Like the other Terminators, his helmet was mag-locked to his belt, and his lower face muzzled by a respirator cowl. His pale features were a complex network of ritual exile scars, the markings of a truly bloodied warrior. A leather cord hung with the vicious incisors of half a dozen different predators was lashed round his gorget. Even dormant he exuded raw, savage threat.

  Sharr had served alongside Kahu before. He knew the warrior’s reputation was well founded. In battle his violence was implacable, ceasing only when the enemy had been utterly annihilated. He embodied the Chapter’s savage relentlessness. He was one of Lord Tyberos’ enforcers, assigned to the roaming Battle Companies to ensure they followed the overall directives of the Chapter and the Nomad Predation Fleet.

  There was no doubt in Sharr’s mind. Kahu was with the company not to supplement its fighting power or provide tactical advice. He was present to ensure the Red Tithe was carried out in full. He was the eyes and ears of Lord Tyberos, and his orders would be to allow nothing to interfere with the operation’s primary objective.

  Most of the Red Brethren, Kahu included, had been serving the Chapter longer than Sharr. The knowledge did not make his new appointment as Company Master and Reaper Prime any easier to bear. He watched Kahu slumbering for a while, wondering what bloody imaginings were soothing his torpid thoughts. Eventually, he sig
nalled to the serf attendants that waited on his orders.

  ‘Wake them,’ he said to them, glancing around the chamber at the rest of the demi-company. ‘All of them.’

  They started with the Red Brethren. Preset cogitator programs worked dashes of discord into the hibernating minds of the veteran Carcharodons, teasing their deep, drifting thoughts up towards surface consciousness. The temperature of the amniotic-like fluid in the tanks was raised. A pulse began to send increasingly violent tremors through each tank’s framework. Valves in the deck beneath slid open, draining the preservation fluids. The levels lowered slowly as Sharr watched, eventually reaching the upper back plating of the Terminators, and then their scarred scalps. As it was reduced down towards their skull-and-lightning engraved breastplates, Kahu’s eyes snapped open.

  They were equal parts black and pitiless. Sharr met them without flinching. His own gaze, he knew, was no different.

  Slowly, the Terminator brought his hand up and broke the seal on his respiration mask, pulling it away from his tattooed face. Its removal revealed a vicious, grinning maw, full of razor-sharp teeth. Sharr did not return the mirthless expression.

  The last of the liquid gargled down the drainage valve. A light set into scrimshawed skull tokens above the tanks winked green. There was a hiss as the thick crystalflex plates slid back into the recesses of their brass-ribbed flanks. The Red Brethren stepped out as one, and the deck shuddered.

  ‘Kia orrae, void brother,’ Kahu said in his serpentine, dead voice, pressing his skull close to Sharr’s in ritual greeting. Well met. Sharr returned the gesture, stomaching his discomfort at Kahu’s baleful presence.

  ‘Kia orrae,’ he replied. ‘It is time for our final preparations, brother. We are two hours away from system re-entry. Te Kahurangi believes the traitors may have already struck. They will need to be destroyed before the Tithing can begin.’ Kahu’s vicious grin didn’t falter.