Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 12
‘Speak the rites of purification,’ he grunted. ‘Salve the machine spirit’s pain!’
Sharr began to snarl the litanies through gritted teeth, High Gothic catechisms he had learned as an aspirant, when he had first tended to the very same suit of armour. What he now thought of as aged and incomplete he had once viewed with reverential awe, holy relics of the Chapter that had been passed on into his care. He reminded the wounded soul of his wargear of that, asked for its forgiveness, and called upon the Void Father and the Forgotten One to ward away whatever malfunction had taken hold.
Blood Eye regained control first. He started to move freely again, and shifted behind Sharr, working manually on his reactor pack while muttering in Lingua Technis. Sharr felt a thrumming surge of energy run through the actuators, and suddenly the terrible weight was gone as power returned.
Blood Eye moved to Talon and Shadow, aiding them as Sharr spoke.
‘What happened?’
‘I do not know,’ Blood Eye admitted, his expression still dark as he got Shadow moving. Sharr pulled his helmet back on, finding the vox functional, though it seemed that many of his suit’s secondary systems were still offline, and the power bar was fluctuating along the mid-to-upper range.
‘It was as if our own armour rebelled against us,’ Talon growled.
‘Not just our armour.’ Blood Eye moved back to the engine interface panel he had been working on. The others gathered around, and he gestured at a filmy meter reading displaying analogue ticker numbers along the panel’s upper side.
‘We’re losing power here as well,’ he said, laying one red gauntlet against the huge engine’s flank, like an agri labourer listening for a heartbeat in a fallen grox. ‘But the generator coils are still functioning. There is no reason, no sign of any mechanical failure.’
‘Listen,’ Shadow said. Sharr did so, picking up what the younger Carcharodon had already detected over the steadily declining throb of the engines and the distant shuddering of the bombardment striking the hulk.
There were shrieking noises, and the ringing of feet on decking plates and walkways, rising up through the prow sections of the Sire of Belaphrone.
‘The hulk has awoken,’ Shadow said.
‘Now that the cult has reached Diamantus, it has become fully active,’ Blood Eye agreed. ‘The corruption spreads. Anything mechanical is especially susceptible. I have lost control of the engine. Even our armour should now be considered unreliable, while we are still on board.’
‘What if we tried to detonate the engine instead of just igniting it?’ Sharr demanded. ‘Is there not a chance we could start a chain reaction?’
Blood Eye set to turning wheels and yanking levers across several of the engine panels, but the great block showed no sign of arrested decline.
‘It does not obey its manual inputs any longer,’ he said. ‘Its mind is no longer its own. Something else is in control.’
‘They are coming for us,’ Shadow said. He had moved to the enginarium’s main entrance hatch and was gazing through to the generator chamber, still listening.
‘The auspex is down,’ Sharr added after another glance at his visor display.
‘We have failed,’ Talon said, his tone bitter. ‘Even if we are able to reclaim the primary engine, we will not be able to destroy Grim Destiny, or force it to deviate before it is too late. Our time is up.’
The chrono display had mere minutes remaining. Sharr felt a potent surge of anger. Failure was anathema, especially in the face of the filth they had encountered aboard the cursed derelict.
‘Let us meet these warp spawn and purge their vile existence,’ he spat. ‘We must slaughter as many as we can!’
‘That would be a pointless sacrifice,’ Blood Eye replied over Sharr’s rising bloodlust.
Sharr stared at him. ‘No death is pointless if it is given in the service of the Void Father and the Chapter.’
‘And no sacrifice should be made unless no other option remains,’ Blood Eye said. ‘We are not permitted to cast our lives away.’
‘I agree with the Blind One,’ Talon said. ‘What other option is there?’
‘You have memories of the Sire of Belaphrone’s schematics, yes?’ Blood Eye said. ‘The ship’s bridge still stands proud of the main bulk of Grim Destiny, like the engines. That means its salvation pod banks do as well, with clear launch arcs on the port side.’
Sharr grasped Blood Eye’s meaning. The hulk would soon be entering Diamantus’ orbit, if it hadn’t done so already. If the salvation pods were large enough, and still functioning, they would be able to reach the planet below.
‘If we make planetfall, then what?’ he asked, thoughts still rebelling at the idea of what amounted to the abandonment of their mission.
‘Then we can meet the invasion on the ground,’ Blood Eye said.
‘And die there instead of here?’
‘Imperial forces will be operating on Diamantus. We can coordinate, provide greater resistance than we might here.’
Sharr wondered how much of the plan to evacuate to the forge world’s surface stemmed from Blood Eye’s desire to fight alongside fellow tech-adepts, but as ever, it was difficult to find fault with his logic.
‘We’ve talked enough,’ Shadow said. ‘Our duty is clear.’
‘I will take point,’ Sharr snarled.
The Neverborn came for the Void Exiles as they made their way back down through the Sire of Belaphrone.
Sharr had not faced their like before. They were freakish amalgamations of metal and meat, still slick from the womb-like cysts they had gestated in and the orifices that had spat them out. They were like the playthings of some mad inventor, no two alike, and they threw themselves at the Carcharodons with shrieking vox howls and tears and laughter.
Sharr banished them. The Blindness clawed at him, but he managed to hold it off. The anger he felt now was cold and bitter, and it gave him a period of focus he did not intend to waste.
The daemons were not the only threat the Carcharodons faced. The hulk itself was now fully active, and whatever dark consciousness infested it had turned the Sire of Belaphrone against the intruders. On several occasions open hatchways slammed shut on the Carcharodons as they passed through them, jarring brutally against their armour. Still, they forced their way through, prising open protesting doors or splitting them apart with krak grenades. Along one corridor, coils of cabling rose up and attacked them like a horde of serpents, wrapping around limbs, gorgets and backpack directional jets. The Void Exiles hacked their way through, Sharr bellowing his rage as he sawed his serrated knife into bundles of wires, ignoring the discharge that sparked across his battle plate.
The armour itself continued to malfunction. Fluctuations in power output occasionally made Sharr’s servos barely functional, forcing him to drive on using his brute strength alone. Shadow’s armour entirely locked up as they fought their way up a stairwell, and Talon and Sharr had to hold the keening horde at bay for precious moments while Blood Eye administered the tech-rites that got the other Exile underway once more.
They reached the bridge, cutting into one of the tertiary corridors. Most Imperial vessels possessed little to no means of evacuation, but as an Imperial Navy capital ship the Sire of Belaphrone had several dozen salvation pods along the flanks of its command tower, intended for the use of senior officers or vital personnel.
‘Here,’ Blood Eye declared as they reached the port-side launch bay. Within were the entrances to a line of one-man pods.
‘I will need a moment to attempt to activate them and gain access,’ Blood Eye said. ‘They were likely gene-coded to the ship’s last officers, so I will have to enact overrides. If they still function at all.’
‘Do it,’ Sharr snapped. ‘I will hold them off.’
Without waiting for a response he strode back out into the corridor.
Neverborn were already careening down the steps leading back up to the bridge. Sharr didn’t wait for them. He charged, shaking the deck beneath him, his roar competing with the howl of his chainsword.
He slaughtered, and rejoiced in the purity of his purpose. He was no longer a commander, no longer a leader among his brethren. He currently had no objectives, no missions that demanded his attention, and no requirements other than the very purpose for which he had been first created and then remoulded – to kill.
He heaped the stairs with ripped horrors and broken machinery, spattering his armour with dark blood and black oil, slashing and stabbing, punching and kicking, breaking apart the things that should not be. He ignored where they struck him, when they jammed scissor-limbs against his joints in an effort to pierce his armour or hacked at him with saws or cutters or metal claws.
He let the Blindness take him. He butchered the enemies of the Void Father and the Forgotten One, sundered their malformed, pathetic bodies with chainsword and knife blade. He broke each freakish experiment that came at him or tried to pass him by, until the stairs from the Sire of Belaphrone’s bridge to the launch bay were drenched with a running river of viscera and broken, pounded scrap metal.
And then his armour locked.
His violent motions suddenly ceased. Moving all but his right arm felt like trying to drag himself through thick, clinging tar. At first he thought his armour had lost power again, but he saw among the few functioning icons on his display that his reactor pack was still working. It was his servos that had locked out, the way they should have done for but a split second when his auto-senses detected a major impact. Yet they continued to do so, jamming him into his last stance, grating as he tried to force them to move manually.
Once again, his wargear had betrayed him.
The daemons were on him. They tried to bear him down and bury him under their blades, shrieking and gibbering from semi-mechanical throats and making hissing noises that sounded like vox-static.
Sharr could barely move, let alone defend himself, but he refused to go down, to yield even a single step.
Then an object struck his helm. It bounced off and came to rest against one greave. A severed head, one of the machine-Neverborn’s, this one entirely metal and fashioned like that of a vice-jawed hound. Sparks and electrical corposant still danced from the severed cabling of its neck.
The pressure of the daemons around Sharr decreased. They had sensed something behind them.
It wasn’t any of Sharr’s brothers. It was a blur, not merely because of the speed of its movements, but because of the nature of its body – it seemed to ripple and morph into its surroundings, a kind of chameleonic effect that Sharr had seen mimicked on the capes worn by the Chapter’s Scouts.
Despite that, it was close enough, and Sharr’s mind was sharp enough, to be able to lock down its general features in a few double-heartbeats – it was tall, taller even than he was, with multiple upper limbs, the highest of which ended in huge talon blades. Its head was elongated, its body animalistic in nature, but moving with the kind of speed and precise skill that betrayed true intelligence.
It was not a creature Sharr had anticipated encountering on Grim Destiny, but he identified it without difficulty, seared as it was onto his consciousness by all manner of indoctrinations, combat briefings, and one even more salient point: he had killed a number of its kind before.
Tyranid. Lictor. Scout-infiltrator bioform. Deathleaper sub-genus, a particularly lethal breed.
More primal instincts ran beneath the current of imprinted tactical responses, a recognition that had been with humanity since long before the first Days of Exile, and which no amount of genetic restructuring, mental conditioning or physical training could wholly erase.
Predator.
He knew he had identified the entity responsible for the slaughtered heretics they had come across before, and at least one of the things that he had sensed stalking them through the hulk’s madness. He gave only a split second’s thought as to how it had come to be on board – the tendrils of the hive fleets were everywhere, especially on old stellar craft. Such a creature could have been haunting the space hulk for decades. It might not even be alone.
It certainly knew how to massacre Neverborn. It used the steps to its advantage, lunging with its long upper talons to cut down some, then drawing the rest up and into the hatch leading to the bridge, where their numbers hindered them and they met with the shorter, diamond-hard claws of its lower limbs. In just a few moments the last daemonspawn from the pack had been ripped open, the lictor neatly wrenching its servo-arm from the organic components of the rest of its body before bisecting it with a scything talon. The remains of the daemon disintegrated into unidentifiable offal and broken machine parts.
As it came apart, Sharr’s servos suddenly kicked in. In one motion he unlocked his bolt pistol, raised it and fired.
By the time he had loosed his first shot the xenos was on him, seeking to throw him down the stairs using its weight and momentum. He met it and matched it with a grunt, chitin cracking against ceramite, the hue of the former shifting to grey as it mirrored Sharr.
It was fast and strong, but he knew its kind. Like all veteran Carcharodons, he had fought enough of its kindred during the War in the Deeps.
It gouged deep into the ceramite of his vambrace, deeper than the scrap daemons had, trying to sever his durametallic coil tendons and render his hand unable to grip. He let it try, holding his bolt pistol away from them both, and punched his knife in his other hand up under its chestplate, then ripped sideways between two ribs. It let out a hiss – the first noise it had made – and shifted its grip with its lower arms, clutching his pauldron.
With impressive strength, the lictor held him and slammed him sideways into the wall. His knife was torn free still in his fist, and he brought it up to saw it into the alien’s gullet, but it snatched his wrist in its clawed grasp and pinned it to the wall, restraining both arms.
It leaned in close, the mass of tendrils that constituted its lower face flaring outwards and gripping wetly on to the front of Sharr’s visor, like the tentacles of a cephalopod, immobilising his head as well. He drove himself back against it, trying to get an angle with his bolt pistol, but it was in too close now. And as it kept him at bay it began to bring down its longer, uppermost talons – not in great decapitating sweeps, but slowly and precisely, almost vertically, aiming for the slender gap between Sharr’s helm and gorget that would allow it to spear down inside his plated ribcage and puncture his hearts and lungs.
This tyranid had fought Space Marines before.
He also realised the Blindness was gone. He was back in control again, his mind clear, keen in a way that wasn’t wholly focused on kill imperatives. This was a test of strength and skill and cunning, not the mindless butchery he had grown so accustomed to indulging in. Anger would not serve him here, and some subconscious part of his mind had accepted that.
He brought his knee up, cracking his poleyn into the thing’s leg then stamping on its hoof, feeling the satisfaction of chitin cracking. The lictor shivered but maintained its grip, its black eyes inches from Sharr. Despite the strain, they were emotionless, and he saw his own black lenses reflected back in them.
He had seen those eyes before.
The upper talons began to bite home, scraping between ceramite. Then there was a crash, the discharge of a bolter.
The pressure against Sharr immediately disappeared. The lictor let go as hard rounds battered and burst against its carapace and sliced through the colour-shifting membrane that shrouded its lower body.
Sharr seized the moment, back on the offensive. His own bolt pistol fired, punching rounds into its flank and spraying stinking, purplish ichor over the already-slick stairway. Then the lictor was off him, darting back up towards the hatch. Sharr took a step after it, his pistol empty, but knew immediately that pursuit was useless – it was gone, as swift and as silent as it had first appeared.
He looked back down the corridor, and found Blood Eye reloading his bolter.
‘You were called,’ the other Exile said simply.
‘I am not some war hound, to be brought to heel,’ Sharr responded.
For a second he thought Blood Eye was actually going to contend that point, but instead he gestured tersely back into the launch bay he had emerged from.
‘The hulk is disintegrating. We have moments remaining.’
Sharr swept into the bay after Blood Eye, neither of them saying anything about the xenos contact. With Rangu’s blessings it would perish with Grim Destiny.
As he had suspected, there was almost no room in the salvation pod Blood Eye directed him to, and the single restraint harness was far too small to accommodate him. He stood as best he could, activating his auto-stabilisers and mag-locking himself to the small craft’s interior. Then he glanced through the hatch at Blood Eye. The other Exile nodded once, and sealed the entrance.
Sharr triggered the pod’s final firing protocols. He found himself doing so with swift, icy efficiency. The desire to slaughter, the disgust at being asked to retreat, both had gone.
He recalled the gaze of the lictor, so utterly inhuman in its lack of any identifiable emotion. There was no hate, no rage, no pain, no hunger, even as they had both struggled in a death grip.
Sharr hit the salvation pod’s launch rune.
CHAPTER XII
The discordance began as a ringing in Volv’s ears, a tinny distortion across the channels of his vox-implants.
He barely noticed it at first, so fixated was he on the annihilation being inflicted on threat marker 0.00.1.0.
Then one of the command nexus’ adepts surged to her feet and started shrieking.
Volv was about to snap for her to be shut down and unplugged when a jolt ran through the cables binding him to ODP/01. He experienced a sudden bolt of raging agony, surging through every circuit and nerve ending, making him arch his spine and scrape his circuit-claws against the inside of his cradle’s interface screen.
