Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 19
Sharr knew the blade’s resistance would not last. He threw his chainsword to the side, kicking down another mutant trying to scrabble at him from under the Defiler’s chassis, and snatched hold of the limb he had partly incapacitated. Krak grenade still gripped in one hand, he used the other to haul himself up the way Shadow had, taking advantage of the engine’s wicked decoration.
He scaled the thing’s hull, his auto-senses registering that the metal was scalding to the touch, as though it had just clambered forth from its forge. It had hatches, just as an ordinary war machine might, but they were all sealed, chained, and inscribed with blasphemous runes. Prising one open would take too long with the weapons Sharr had to hand. But he had already identified a different means of penetration for the grenade.
He mounted the top of the hull. The engine bucked like some wild beast, trying to throw him off, but he had mag-clamped to its armour. Both his hearts were now beating out a furious tattoo.
The battle cannon that formed part of its maw was directly under him, and he planted himself above it, priming the grenade and reaching out to throw it down the barrel. Except suddenly, what should have been a killing blow became impossible to deliver. His battle plate had locked again, the servos disobeying him, seizing up. The grenade, primed and gripped in his armoured left hand, was stuck fast.
Sharr’s mind, razor-keen with battle focus, knew he had a fraction over three seconds before detonation. He could keep hold of the grenade, aware that it would likely kill him, or at least cost him an arm, and hope that the proximity of the blast would also damage the Defiler, or he could try and let it go, dropping it and wasting it – it was one of the few remaining krak grenades the Exiles had left. Either way, Shadow wouldn’t be able to hold on for much longer.
Sharr made his choice with two seconds remaining, hissing with effort as he tried to force open his fist. The krak grenade slipped from his grasp and detonated just in front of the daemon engine.
The Defiler buckled, and Sharr fell, his stabilisers deactivated. He hit the rubble beneath hard, but found as he did so that he could move again – the momentary immobilisation had vanished. He found his feet, mutant scum scrabbling at him from beneath the walker’s bulk, snarling and shrieking.
The krak grenade had damaged the daemon engine’s muzzle cannon, leaving it twisted and bent, but seemed to have done it no further harm. Shadow was still struggling in its foreclaws, trying to prise himself free. Talon and Blood Eye were focusing on hacking the engine’s other limbs out from under it.
Shadow’s combat knife shattered.
There was a cracking noise, followed by a wet crunch. Blood jetted over the Defiler’s talons as the huge blades finally scissored shut, cutting Shadow in half. The bisected parts tumbled heavily down almost on top of Sharr, a wave of blood drenching him.
The rage took him. A roar built in his throat, and for a moment he was lost. He was aware of blows against his armour, his knife finding flesh. More blood. He choked, his bellow of fury unfulfilled as he found himself taking a step towards the Defiler, tossing aside the savaged remains of one of the stitched-together mutants that had been trying to reach him.
The Defiler hadn’t even noticed him, perhaps sensing that the only thing he had left to harm it with was his knife. It swept back round to try and scythe apart Blood Eye and Talon, stumbling slightly on its damaged limbs.
Sharr, a bloody spectre amidst the carnage, made to leap at the daemon engine once more, to gouge open its hatches and rip asunder whatever malevolent spirit infested its hull with his bare hands. But an invisible force stopped him – not the warp-induced malfunctioning of his battle plate but a sudden, familiar presence that he felt in his mind, before hearing it made it real.
A voice boomed out from the direction of the street. It spoke a mixed tongue, some of it High Gothic, some of it a language Sharr knew he would not, and should not, understand.
It had an immediate effect on the Defiler. The machine punched its talons into the rubble and arched itself up, almost like a feline reacting with fear and anger. It tried to lumber around to face the sound, and Sharr saw that steam was now rising from its black frame, as though the hot metal were being doused.
His own sudden anger had left him, replaced by disbelief. Even the mutated horde had ceased trying to claw past the Defiler’s limbs to get at the Space Marines – they wailed and cringed back, as if the idol they worshipped had just been cast down and shattered.
A light suffused the whorling smoke and dust, a green glimmer. The words grew ever louder, until they were booming in Sharr’s ears, making them ache and causing the broken stones underfoot to shudder.
The Defiler shuddered too. It tried to back away from the light, its front limbs now up and clacking in agitation, its twisted muzzle swinging from side to side with distress. There was a popping sound as rivets burst and bolts came unstuck. The walker’s hatches had started to rip open, shattering their chains, burning out their binding runes.
Through the possessed war machine’s limbs, Sharr saw what was tormenting it. A Space Marine, clad in blue, bearing a bone staff with a shard of green stone wedged in its tip. His face was uncovered, gaunt and terrible, eyes blazing with the sick fires of the warp. Ghost lights flitted and played over his psychic hood and staff.
It was Te Kahurangi, the Pale Nomad, come seemingly from the ether itself, like a revenant materialising to ensure the remaining Exiles did not experience the release of death before they had earned it.
The Defiler shrieked with a voice of tortured metal. Te Kahurangi was excising it, banishing the daemon bound inside. Such an effort would have been beyond all but the most powerful sanctioned psyker, yet the Pale Nomad showed no hesitation, bearing down on the war machine towering above him, his staff held high, a locus for the terrible powers he was calling upon.
The daemon engine’s hatches split open, all in unison, with a resounding bang. A wailing noise followed, like the rushing of a gale through a thicket of razor-trees, stabbing into Sharr’s ears like needles. He flinched, even his transhuman body unable to cancel out the pain.
The final phrases of Te Kahurangi’s rite rang out, words of abjuration and admonishment, booming as though from a laud-hailer. The Defiler stumbled to the side, the way a man dealt a mortal blow to the head might stagger. Black light blazed from every gaping hatch, and the screaming reached a pitch no longer detectable on the mortal plane. Sharr’s auto-senses overloaded, his aural implants on the point of rupture.
And then, it was done. With a crash the Defiler collapsed, legs curled under it, and slumped to the side on the rubble. It remained there, steam still rising gently from its jagged form. It was metal now and nothing more, the malice burned out of it.
The sacred silence the Carcharodons were taught to venerate returned to the ruins. Sharr half turned, but the mutant horde had already gone, fleeing so they did not have to witness the destruction of one of their demigods.
Te Kahurangi approached the trio of Exiles, bone staff clacking on broken bricks, its green light now extinguished. He passed the daemon engine, paying no heed to the mechanical abomination he had just defeated.
Bail Sharr knelt among the blood and bodies. The other Exiles swiftly did likewise. All knew the figure of the Pale Nomad.
‘Greetings, brothers,’ Te Kahurangi said. None of the Exiles responded. To address him in fraternal terms would have been a violation of Chapter doctrine.
‘Stand,’ he instructed. They did so. Sharr looked at him. A single line of dark blood was running from the Chief Librarian’s nose and over his thin lips. Te Kahurangi wiped it away with the thumb of his gauntlet.
‘See to your fallen,’ he instructed.
Blood Eye shifted to the bisected remains of Shadow, and took his boltgun, magazines and sole remaining fragmentation grenade. He had no means of salvaging his progenoids, but he tagged the body’s location on the auspex. Then he stood, and nodded to Te Kahurangi.
There were no rites for Shadow, no talk of an exile concluded or memorialisation of bold deeds in the service of Rangu and the Forgotten One. He was dead, and that was the end of it.
‘Come,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Let us be gone, before they return.’
CHAPTER XX
The dim lighting of the White Maw’s bridge dipped and shuddered as the strike cruiser’s shields were dealt more impacts. Techmarine Uthulu looked to Teko, but the shipmaster’s whole attention was given over to the navigational pit he had descended into, towering over the serfs operating the cogitator stations and sub-holos. The bodies of those crew members who had been terminated by the Red Brethren still lay underfoot, their blood drooling through the bridge’s grate decking, forgotten for now.
‘Well?’ Kino snapped. He had finally risen from the coral block of the command throne, his Red Brethren bodyguard arrayed around the raised platform, silent, fists still dripping crimson.
Teko refused to reply immediately, shifting from one display to another. Eventually he turned, gazing up at the nominal Reaper Prime.
‘I am charting as best a course as I can through the wreckage, but it is densest above the point you wish to geo-lock, Mount Antikythera.’
‘What about communications?’ Kino asked.
‘Still down,’ Uthulu said from the station he had taken up, amongst the vox-banks and their implanted, shaven-headed serf operators. ‘Discordance reigns over every channel beyond the White Maw’s own. I have been unable to reach any of the Third Company over any band or frequency. The Adeptus Mechanicus’ communication channels are either shut or static-corrupted. The ship’s machine spirit is actively rejecting any attempt to commune with the noosphere – I suspect it is the vehicle of much of the taint.’
‘We are useless up here,’ Kino snarled. ‘Blind and muzzled!’
Neither Teko nor Uthulu offered any comment on their Company Master’s assessment. It would do no good to point out that it had been Kino’s decision to remain on the White Maw prior to the hulk’s collision. He had envisaged an orbital battle where he might prove himself at the head of his old First Company brethren, without the aid of his new Shiver. Now, he was locked in orbit, the White Maw bombarded by the debris of defence platforms and those parts of the hulk that hadn’t crashed into the planet. Diamantus’ atmosphere, choked with dust and detritus, would not permit even the company’s Thunderhawk gunships to make planetfall.
‘We are still suffering malfunctions and traces of scrapcode invasion,’ Teko said, climbing up out of the nav pit and approaching Kino. Briefly Uthulu thought the shipmaster was going to seek to reclaim his throne, but he stopped short of the wall of Red Brethren, continuing to speak.
‘That strongly suggests whatever malignant force was behind the outages we suffered during the hulk’s collision is still in operation. It is possibly now emanating from the surface.’
‘How long until the atmosphere is clear enough to launch our atmospheric assets?’
‘That is difficult to calculate so soon after the primary impact, but certainly a day-cycle, at least.’
Kino growled audibly. Uthulu pursed his lips, silently disgusted by how visibly unsettled the Company Master was. Such base frustrations were a dereliction of the Chapter’s doctrines of control.
‘Techmarine, prepare the teleportation chamber,’ Kino ordered, turning his attention on Uthulu, who moved across the bridge to stand beside Teko.
‘As I told you before, Company Master, teleportation given current circumstances, without an active beacon to lock on to, would be extremely fraught,’ he said, hardly bothering to veil the scorn he felt. ‘And that is without factoring in the malfunctions we are suffering. It will take time for me to purge and reconsecrate the teleportarium, time I do not currently have if the shipmaster and I are to keep the rest of the White Maw functioning. Besides, we are not yet in a position to mount a teleportation strike on the surface coordinates you have demanded.’
There was another brief power dip as the shields took another hit, the strike cruiser colliding with lesser wreckage as it was forced, on Kino’s orders, through the broken, burning debris towards the epicentre of where the hulk had come apart. The Company Master wanted to strike directly into the heart of Mount Antikythera, but the capital ship was still some distance from reaching a point above the surface eminence.
‘Open fire on the wreckage,’ Kino ordered.
‘It will take days to forge a suitable path–’ Teko began, but Kino spoke over him.
‘Then all the more reason to start now! I am going to Diamantus, and I don’t care whether I have to break this ship in half to get there!’
The Pale Nomad took the Exiles to the edge of the mountain, downwards, to the point where the lesser industrial sprawl met with the habzones and the slope became level ground. There the forces of the Archenemy had not yet fully encroached, and while the destitute, ordinary people who made up Diamantus’ workforce wailed and cowered and fled before the four giants who loomed from out of the death pall gripping their city, they did not attack them.
‘The warp-taint here is rooted in the mechanical,’ Te Kahurangi explained as he led the three surviving Void Exiles off the street and into a derelict-looking generatorium. ‘Madness has not gripped the common populace, yet.’
‘Have the machine-men fallen to it?’ Talon asked.
‘Many, but not all.’
The generatorium had failed. Its cavernous interior lay in darkness, except for the occasional actinic flare of light as dying discharges sparked and lashed between the orbs of the motive force pillars that loomed up all around.
‘I must request that you go on overwatch, and guard this place for a short while,’ Te Kahurangi told Blood Eye and Talon. ‘There are only two entrances, fore and aft of this chamber.’
Wordlessly, the two Exiles moved to locate and defend the access points, leaving Sharr and Te Kahurangi alone.
‘Walk with me,’ the Chief Librarian said.
Like the other Exiles, Sharr complied without comment, falling in alongside the Pale Nomad as he started to pace steadily between the sparking pillars of cabling and brass.
When he had first seen the Chief Librarian advancing on the Defiler, he had wondered if he was in the grip of some cruel form of warp madness. The Pale Nomad was like a spectre, risen from another life, another existence that Sharr was slowly starting to forget. His reappearance left him with a strange, haunting sense of doubt, unwelcome amidst circumstances so desperate. So far he had refused to explain anything, refused to ward away that uncertainty with clear advice or instructions.
‘You are much changed, Bail Sharr,’ Te Kahurangi said.
‘That is not my name,’ Sharr said immediately.
‘What is it then?’
‘Aleph–’
‘Our tag designates are not our names, by design. What do the ones you keep company with call you?’
‘Blind One.’
‘You do not seem blind to me.’
To Sharr, the words sounded dangerously close to mockery. He held his tongue.
‘What did you feel, when you found the bodies of Ruku and Warak?’ Te Kahurangi asked.
Sharr had not told him of how they had discovered the two slain members of the Third Company, but the extent of the Chief Librarian’s knowledge was never a surprise.
‘Anger,’ Sharr said. ‘The root of my Blindness.’
‘What else?’
‘I do not understand what–’
‘You are not without emotion, Bail Sharr. Adeptus Astartes have little to nothing in common with those we are sworn to protect, and our brotherhood even more so. But we are not automata. We are not like the servitors of this world, or even their tech-priest masters. There is more inside you than anger.’
‘Frustration.’ Sharr almost spat the word. ‘And… sorrow. Perhaps regret is more accurate. I do not know.’
‘We are rarely, if ever, called upon to interrogate such feelings,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘I have heard it said that the Adeptus Astartes are less than men. That might seem a strange claim, for we are so much more in so many ways. Superior in every physical regard. Yet in a few little, vital comparisons, we fall short. We do not feel as a man might feel, understand as he understands.’
Sharr said nothing. More phantom electricity sparked and snapped from the pillars as they moved between them, throwing the briefest illumination on the two.
‘We cannot easily undertake bouts of introspection,’ Te Kahurangi went on. ‘Our brotherhood especially. And in that sense we are something less than human. Much less. We have been remade, by gene-engineering and by doctrinal adherence, and by our long, shared exile, so that we do not consider. Reforged only to act, to do. We are like the blade that cuts, the club that beats, and knows not what it does.’
‘Good. Such purity of purpose is a blessing from the Void Father.’
‘You say that because you do not know any better. Because you are incapable of comprehension, as I have just said.’
‘This is an ill time for your philosophising, Pale Nomad.’
‘Tell me what you instructed when you discovered Ruku and Warak.’
‘I advised their progenoids be retrieved.’
‘Yes. And those instructions – orders, not advice – were given with frustration and sorrow. They were born out of the considerations of a Company Master performing his duties.’
‘To retrieve gene-seed from our fallen is not only the preserve of a Company Master,’ Sharr said. ‘Had I not been present, the others would have still considered it.’
‘But it was not their first priority. Their first thoughts were to restock ammunition and consider the defensibility of the surrounding structure. They have never led a battle company. They are not as keenly aware as you are of the need to preserve our genetic heritage, our future legacy. They do not think like the Reaper Prime.’
