Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 1
Contents
Cover
Warhammer 40,000
Carcharodons: Void Exile
Beyond the Veil of Stars
Transcript File 1
PART ONE
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
PART TWO
Transcript file 2
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
PART THREE
Transcript file 3
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Transcript file 4
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Oaths of Damnation’
Backlist
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
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 might of his inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, he is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so his may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
‘Honour is a dead thing.’
– Beyond the Veil of Stars
+ + Gene code approved + + +
+ + Salutations, Inquisitor >REDACTED< + + +
+ + Initialising astropathic relay auto-séance transcript chain 372F/71G. Part 1 of 4. Record downloading + + +
+ + Cleansing transcript file + + +
+ + Transcript file cleansed. Sender verified as Interrogator Anton Fell, agent of Inquisitor >REDACTED< of the Ordo Hereticus + + +
+ + Opening Transcript + + +
Greetings, inquisitor,
It has been too long since my last communiqué, and for that I crave your forgiveness.
Given the turbulence of our journey here and what I fear we may yet discover, I do not wish to overly tax my astropath, so I will attempt to keep my missives brief and regular. We broke from the warp in-system on Saint Klestus’ Day, one Terran week past. Initial scans by the Lightbringer’s augurs have found no vessels above Diamantus, at least no living ones. There is a great deal of orbital wreckage.
Captain Torrian, commander of the Lightbringer, hopes to drop stasis anchor within the next cycle. My sub-retinue is assembled and eager to make planetfall, though I cannot deny some personal trepidation. We have tried every conceivable means to make contact with the surface, but have received no reply across any bandwidth or frequency. Tech-Priest Garwell has even attempted to commune with the noosphere, but he can find no trace of its existence. The obvious explanation is that the vast amount of debris filling the atmosphere is blocking communications.
I pray this is the only cause. I can scarcely begin to imagine what other terrible events would have resulted in a forge world of over forty billion souls being reduced to complete silence.
Our work lies before us. Let us begin.
+ + Transcript file ends + + +
+ + Thought for the Day: Be strong in your ignorance + + +
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
The Mother-of-Them-All had devoured more fodder, and that meant there was glory to be won.
‘Move, scum,’ Hazek spat, and swung his electro-whip, the combined crack of sinew and voltage causing the laggards of his herd to yelp and scamper away, deeper into the bowels of the wreckage.
He followed them at a more measured pace. It was not his job to worm his way into the dark, between cold, buckled plasteel and over broken decking plates. Still, he did not refuse to accompany his herd, like those among his fellow forge-feeders who never left the comforts of the middle decks. If anything of value was discovered, he wished to be the first to know, and that meant going in amidst the salvage.
Hazek had killed two men for such an honour. When the rumours started to circulate, he had staked his claim against theirs. It had started, as it often did, with tremors, those hints of deep-space impacts, shivering through the Mother-of-Them-All, making her metal bulkheads groan and her flesh moan.
Hearsay had followed hard on the heels of the vibrations. The ghosts in the vox and the continual thrum of the lumens and generators had murmured things, and members of the herd and then other forge-feeders had started repeating them. Soon the middle decks were alive with accounts, rife with conflictions but agreeing on the most important point.
The Mother-of-Them-All had consumed, and a prize now lay in the depths of the great hulk, unclaimed, waiting to propel the brave and the strong to immortality.
As the herds had threatened to descend into a frenzy, the forge-feeders had contended. Three had demanded they be given the honour of recovering the salvage: Hazek, Ugal and Jarran. They had fought in one of the old ore pits, jeered and howled at by the Unblessed, those common labourers who toiled eternally in the middle decks.
Hazek could still feel the pain in his right thigh and left arm, caused by Jarran’s serrated scalping knife, and his skull ached from the repeated blows of Ugal’s smelter hammer. None of that mattered though. What mattered was that he had opened Jarran’s throats – both of them – with the clawed steel of his right hand, and burned out every nerve ending in Ugal’s body with his electro-whip. Unlike Jarran, Ugal hadn’t died, but he’d been left a twitching, senseless wreck, and had swiftly been snatched by the Unblessed, for what purpose Hazek neither knew nor cared.
Now Ugal’s and Jarran’s herds obeyed him, and he led them all, down into the depths.
The journey had taken over two day-cycles – as far as such things existed with any kind of regularity on board the Mother-of-Them-All – and had not been without incident. They had been ambushed by feral scavengers and by clatterfiends. At the Deepgate, Hazek had been forced to make sacrifices and speak words that had cut the inside of his throat, all in an effort to appease the mechanical angel who guarded the most reliable passage into the hulk’s lowest reaches.
It had been enough. They had progressed, until finally they had entered the Gullet, the series of cavernous spaces buried in the deepest depths of the Mother-of-Them-All. This was a deathly place, dark and frigid, far from the glorious, burning heat of the forges. Nothing lived down here, not for any length of time, not even the cakosparks or lawless, machine-less scavengers.
They picked their way through the old refuse – ships the Mother had devoured during the centuries of her slow progress. As the gargantuan vessel passed on her way through deep space, guided by the will of the Infernal Architect, she consumed debris adrift in her path. Stellar remains, wreckage, ancient parts of ancient vessels and way stations all now choked the Gullet. Most of it had been picked through a thousand times already, stripped bare of anything of value by the rapacious herds and their forge-feeder masters. Occasionally work crews of Unblessed would make the journey down from the middle decks too, and hack apart and remove even the broken frames of the ships, taking them as fodder for the furnaces. In this way, the Mother-of-Them-All continued to feed her children, that they might in turn do their master’s bidding.
It took the better part of another cycle to traverse the Gullet towards its upper end. There they finally reached the prize – fresh salvage. It had been snagged between the hulk’s vast jaws, jagged sheets of plasteel the size of small islands that were now, mercifully, sealed shut.
Obeying the gravity of the Mother-of-Them-All, the wreckage had crashed in amidst the older debris before starting to settle. It was still unstable as the herd boarded it ahead of Hazek, creaking and groaning dangerously.
The forge-feeder had been on worse, and besides, time was of the essence. Only a fool would linger in a place like this.
‘Hurry,’ he urged the herd, his voice ringing down the dark, broken corridors he found himself in after clambering through what appeared to have once been a docking bay. He triggered the stab-lumen on the shoulder of the work rig he wore, the small circle of harsh white light picking out a slanting passageway ahead.
He tried to discern exactly what the hulk had claimed as he moved through it, the awkward tilt
What mattered was that it was dead. The Mother-of-Them-All lived, thrived with the heat of her forges and crucibles and the pulsating of her flesh and the quickness of the millions of racing minds and beating hearts that inhabited her. That was not so with this vessel. It was hollow and frigid, an interstellar corpse, and the gloomy darkness of its bent corridors held nothing but the allure of possible relics.
‘Get to work,’ Hazek snapped, cracking his whip again for good measure. Much of the herd was now out of sight, dispersing through the broken ship, but those still in the corridor Hazek was moving down began to feverishly pry open wall pipes and decking plates with their crude tools, stripping out electrical cabling and lumens and dismantling lengths of metalwork. Such petty prizes still had value, for the forges were always hungry, but Hazek needed something more. Something to take back to the middle decks, to prove to the other forge-feeders that he bore the Infernal Architect’s favour.
Those who found worthy prizes amid the salvage would receive gifts. Hazek himself had been blessed lately with a new arm, an initially vestigial growth pushing out from between the ribs on the right side of his torso. It was now slowly but surely beginning to strengthen and find recognisable form. In order to show his thanks for such a gift, he had enlisted the aid of his fellow forge-feeders, who had held him down and sawed off his original right arm just below the elbow before grafting on an augmetic replacement, a clawed thing of wire sinews and oil-blood, its steel still hot from the smelter. That was a right and proper means of veneration. Flesh for metal, and metal for flesh, the way it had always been and the way it would always be.
He flexed his right hands now, both the soft, pale fingers of his new limb and the steel talons of the one that had replaced his old hand. There was power in both, but he wanted more. Was that not always the way?
He worked along the corridor and deeper into the salvage, descending a dark stairwell. The sounds of the herd’s labours were echoing through the old remains now, hammering and drilling and sawing and burning, stripping the wreck like carrion tearing flesh from the bones of a corpse. The noises of industry, a worthy orison to the Infernal Architect.
But where were the real corpses? That was the only thing that had surprised Hazek so far. Even if this ship had been adrift for decades, centuries even, the deep cold of space should have mummified and preserved any bodies on board. It seemed unlikely that a mass-conveyance freighter would have possessed salvation pods or the capacity to evacuate passengers, but there was only one other alternative to explain the lack of remains.
Someone, or something, had already scavenged them before he arrived.
The possibility was unthinkable. He began to hurry, reaching one of the freighter’s cavernous, empty cargo holds, where the vox sutured into the right side of his head clicked with an incoming transmission.
Hazek heard the voice of his lash-hand, Kyree, speaking loud and clear.
‘We’ve found something in one of the secondary berths. Midships. The wall stencilling says it’s deck thirteen.’
As lash-hand, Kyree was Hazek’s immediate subordinate, and potential successor. He had found her to be adept at disciplining and motivating the herd, and she was wise enough to continue to show him sufficient deference – her predecessor, Skaro, had met a swift end after failing to display similar wisdom.
‘What have you found?’ Hazek demanded, beginning to scan the hold’s exits for a means to ascend to the deck she was on.
‘I’m… not sure, my forge-feeder. Best you see it for yourself.’
Uncertainty was not like Kyree. Hazek found another stairwell out of the hold and began to climb once again, his heavy boots clanging on the plasteel rungs.
The shaft around him groaned, the deep, sombre tones of straining metal. The wreckage was still settling in the Gullet. There would doubtless be deck collapses, cave-ins, all manner of dangers. Just another reason to hurry.
Wheezing with the exertion, Hazek finally identified a wall stencil with his stab-lumen, marking the next hatch as deck thirteen. He clambered through it, into a corridor that seemed to lead to a number of secondary power-generation hubs. It made sense – he suspected they were close to the enginarium. That was always a place of rich pickings when it came to salvage, and he had no doubt Kyree had been heading there directly when whatever she had discovered had stopped her in her tracks.
‘Where on deck thirteen?’ Hazek demanded over the vox.
‘It’s marked “hub seven”. It looks like an old generator berth.’
He counted himself along. The other berths were already filled with the herd, busy sawing out old cogitators and power banks, scrapping among themselves as they fought over the honour of lugging the parts back up to the middle decks. Hazek ignored them, locating the correct hatchway and stepping inside.
The first thing he noticed was the water. His boots splashed into it, ankle-deep. That was another surprise. With the ship’s systems dead, all water on board should have frozen or evaporated a long time ago.
He quickly coiled his whip more tightly around the heavy gauntlet he wore over his left hand, wary lest the charged thong should trail.
His rig’s lumen picked out Kyree and a gaggle of the herd, her underlings all stooped, malnourished creatures wearing crude patchwork survival suits. As befitted her station, Kyree’s garb was better, mostly semi-insulated hides that meant she wasn’t left a pale, shivering wreck in the frigid depths of the Mother-of-Them-All. She wore an ugly, blocky resp-mask over her lower face – Hazek had never seen her without it, and wasn’t sure if it was a mere affectation, or whether some blessing or curse had left it physically fused to her skin. Her scalp was shaven and scarred with symbols of the Sacred Geometries he had ritually cut into her when she had been promoted to lash-hand, though her hair was beginning to grow in again in tufts around the puckered skin.
She carried a whip of her own, though it didn’t possess the electrical capacities of Hazek’s. Keeping it coiled, she gestured curtly with it, and the herd scrambled to make way for their forge-feeder, splashing across the tilting, waterlogged deck.
Hazek moved between them, looking past Kyree at what she had discovered. He immediately understood her hesitation. He had expected to find a reserve generator, nothing as valuable as the main engine block or the warp drives, but a secondary system designed to keep the lumens on in this part of the freighter’s midship. But what he was looking at was no generator.
There were two glassy containers set against the wall, ribbed with brass bands. They had been plugged into the cable cradles that would once have held a generator unit, though there was no sign that they were still receiving power. Even stranger, the front of both lay open, as if someone had removed their contents and, perhaps in doing so, had caused the localised flooding in the hub berth.
‘What are they?’ Kyree dared ask as Hazek came to a stop next to her, gazing at the mysterious containers.
‘Cryo-chambers,’ he said after pondering the sight for a moment longer.
‘These systems look advanced for a wreck like this,’ Kyree said quietly.
Hazek agreed. They represented the possibility of valuable salvage, but he had a new, even more pressing concern.
‘This berth is flooded,’ he said. ‘The water would have frozen or drained away if it had been here any length of time. That means it is fresh. It was melted by something. Probably by disengagement protocols.’ He kicked at the deck for emphasis, causing the water underfoot to splash.
‘But what would have been held in the water, or the ice?’ Kyree asked, still looking at the two upright tanks. ‘Not a person. They are too big.’
Hazek had been wondering the same thing, and was trying to come up with an answer that would not leave his lash-hand questioning his intellect, when he noticed the herd were making a noise. The usual snivelling, grunting and hissing of the pathetic menials had been replaced by a whining sound, like a dog displaying fear.
