Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 20
‘I am not Reaper Prime.’
The words burst from his lips like gunshots, ringing through the darkling space. They had both ceased their pacing.
The pillars sparked again, seemingly in answer to his denial, the snapshot of illumination playing over Sharr’s emotionless helm and the gaunt, lined features of the Chief Librarian. He was smiling, the expression swallowed swiftly by the dark.
‘You are whatever the Chapter demands you be,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘That is true of all of us. Exile or Chief Librarian, we all have a master.’
‘The Chapter has demanded my exile. I will not break it. I will not dishonour–’
‘Honour is a dead thing.’
Sharr bowed his head in frustration, fists clenched.
‘Was it truly the Chapter that demanded your exile?’ Te Kahurangi pressed. ‘Or did you sentence yourself?’
Still, Sharr said nothing.
‘Have you tasted the Blindness since planetfall?’ Te Kahurangi went on, motioning for them to begin walking once more.
‘Clarify,’ Sharr demanded, beginning to follow, forcing himself through his anger.
‘Have you lost control since setting foot on Diamantus?’
‘I am uncertain,’ he said, truthfully. Parts of the recent combat were a haze, one that it would take time and concentration to strip back.
His thoughts returned to the lictor he had encountered just before evacuating Grim Destiny. He knew the nature of the hive fleets such creatures scouted for. He knew that each organism was akin to a cell in a living body, uncomprehending as it fulfilled its function without emotion or hesitation. He remembered the void of its black, dead eyes. The lictor understood its actions, its very existence, as little as a sword or club would.
‘What is it you wish to say to me, Pale Nomad?’ Sharr asked, his patience at an end.
‘I wish to test the weave of your future, to follow its threads as far as I can, to see where they lead.’
‘Why do Librarians speak with such ridiculous obfuscation?’
‘Because it is difficult for one touched by the warp to pare back their experiences into something understandable to one who is not.’
‘My lack of comprehension appears to be a reoccurring problem.’
‘Then let me torment you no longer. I have advice you would do well to heed while I leave you for a time. Go south-west with the Exiles, following the edge of the mountain slope. You will find more of your Shiver. Do not spurn their company. Once you are reunited with them, I shall return.’
‘Why do you leave us?’ Sharr demanded.
‘Third Company is scattered and broken. We must all play a part in making it whole again.’
Sharr wanted to snap at him, to repeat that he was not a member of his old brotherhood any longer. He knew it would do no good. He was being subordinated to the Chief Librarian’s schemes, as had so often happened in the past.
‘I am inloading the Third Company’s full suite of tactical data,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘I have purged it of the discordance these servants of the Archenemy have brought with them. I am unable to mend the vox, however. That requires a level of knowledge of the machine that is beyond me. Our best hope of re-establishing full communications between the company is securing the city’s secondary vox-array.’
‘Is that our objective?’ Sharr asked.
‘In time. For now, your task is to defeat the shame that hobbles you. If you do that, Blind One, you might yet recover your sight.’
CHAPTER XXI
First Squad linked up with Fourth Squad as they withdrew from a forge temple further up the slope of Mount Antikythera, just as darkness was beginning to fall. They were the first Carcharodons First Squad had found since the hulk had started pounding the city. Red Tane could only hope they would not be the last.
He suspected their strike leader, Aaradi, had taken it upon himself to secure the most defensible site he could. Amidst the fire and tumult of the sundered city, the temple, carved out of Diamantus’ bedrock and adamantine, would have seemed like the perfect fortress.
But it had turned into a trap. The forges themselves had started to rise up, possessed by the madness that now reigned over the heart of the megafactorum. They had sought to consume the Carcharodons, and had succeeded in devouring one of the void brothers in the now-sentient, blackened steel jaws of their furnaces.
At the same time, hordes of Chaotic monstrosities spilling from the impact sites had besieged the temple. It was as the remains of Fourth Squad fought their way out that First Squad reached them.
‘Red Tane, get the attention of that mutant filth,’ Nuritona instructed as they shifted along a workflow alley and into the street leading to the forge temple’s main entrance. Fourth Squad had just broken free from the main doors and were driving out into the baying mob beyond, whilst behind them the walls of the structure were torn down by the machine-monsters seeking to free themselves from their former housing.
Red Tane loped ahead, a predator let loose. The Chapter forbade war cries, but in this instance he had permission to issue a challenge. He set his helmet’s vocaliser to maximum output, and roared at the rearmost ranks of the horde.
The deformed horrors turned, hissing, and a cry went up as they began to scramble towards him instead, splitting the mass assailing Fourth Squad.
The Void Sword took the bloated, horned head from the first thing to reach him. The second had its fang-metal face staved in by the Coral Shield. Red Tane killed the way few others in the Shiver killed – not just with the brute strength all Space Marines possessed, nor with that razor-sharp speed and grace that was the preserve of the finest swordsmen. He melded the bloody savagery that his brethren were known for in combat with a ferocious economy, an efficiency that was almost machine-like. He rarely overextended, rarely missed his mark.
When he did, he hated himself.
Blade-skill or not, the Archenemy chattels would have surrounded him in a few moments, but then Nuritona, Tama and Ihaia were there. The latter’s volkite caliver lashed into the heretics on Red Tane’s left, deflagrating them in surges of fire and ash, the shots so close his armour registered the heat wash. Nuritona slammed bolts into the ones on his right, then was there with his chainsword, shifting wide to ensure he did not impede the swings and strokes of the Void Sword. Normally that would have been Henno’s place, wielding his spear just off Red Tane’s right shoulder while the Reaper Prime fought on the Champion’s left, but each member of the command squad was capable of fighting in any position. Losses could not be allowed to undermine the purity of the purge.
The remnants of Fourth Squad punched through to them, using frag grenades to help clear a channel. Behind them the forge temple seemed to be rising up on its foundations, fire blazing like a draconic exhalation from what had once been its front doors.
‘Withdraw,’ Nuritona ordered as the two squads linked up. Fourth had clearly suffered losses, within the forge temple and elsewhere – only four void brethren remained. Tama signed about the possibility of gene-seed recovery, but Nuritona simply shook his head.
First Squad covered their withdrawal, letting them pass through their ranks and back down the street.
Red Tane disengaged. It took more mental than physical effort, an unspoken catechism that reminded him of the silence and the stillness that brought to an end the killing frenzy that was forever trying to take hold.
The Blindness would not claim him.
‘Stalk tanks on both flanks,’ Ihaia warned. ‘Probably daemon engines.’
The weapons specialist’s observation was a keen one – there were scuttling shapes moving down the alleyways to the left and right, seemingly drawn to the ponderously rising monstrosity that had once been the forge temple. The nearest emerged onto the street, a demi-mechanical fiend with an autocannon sutured into its ichor-leaking, insectoid cranium. The weapon began to rattle over the heads of the horde still flinging themselves after the Carcharodons, stitching a row of impacts across the buildings further down the street.
‘We need to channel them,’ Aaradi suggested as the two squads continued to drop back, alternating firing and loading as they went. ‘Negate their numbers, impede their pursuit.’
‘There,’ Nuritona said after only the briefest pause, indicating a mag-rail cutting to the left of the street. It ran between the lesser manufactoria that clustered around the forge temple, a narrow channel passing between their grimy, red-bricked bulk.
‘Fourth Squad will take point,’ Nuritona said. ‘First will act as rearguard.’
The Carcharodons dropped down into the cutting, gravel crunching beneath their weight. They set off, moving quickly, following the line between the industrial buildings rising into the gloom on either side. The horde pursued them with abandon, tumbling like a living tide down onto the track bed. Red Tane fought the urge to turn at bay every step of the way, pacing himself as he moved forward behind Fourth Squad, Tama, Ihaia and Nuritona alternating to send firepower streaking back into their pursuers.
They reached an overpass, a footbridge crossing over the cutting. Red Tane stopped beneath it, letting Ihaia catch up around a bend in the track. Nuritona and Tama had already moved further down the line. The pressure of the pursuit was lessening, but the hideous screeching of those mutants who still had their scent was continuing to barrel down the confined space.
Ihaia paused beside him, clearly not expecting to find him waiting, motionless.
Red Tane did not care. The position was a good one. The cutting was still channelling those in pursuit, while the bridge offered protection to the flanks and overhead.
‘Go,’ he told Ihaia.
‘This is no time for senseless sacrifice,’ Ihaia said. ‘The company has lost enough.’
‘No sacrifice,’ Red Tane said tersely. ‘I am going to delay them, and I can do that better without worrying about blocking your fire lanes.’
‘You have sixty seconds,’ Nuritona’s voice crackled over the inter-squad vox. ‘I will revoke your right to solitary confinement on board the White Maw if you take any longer than that to rejoin us.’
Ihaia looked at him a moment longer. Red Tane could sense his lingering disapproval even behind his helmet’s maw-painted visor, but a combat situation was no time for disagreements. He set off after the others, volkite caliver whining as it recharged.
Red Tane had not been truly facetious towards Ihaia; he suspected there was only about a fifty per cent chance he would die here, on this worn old mag line. He had faced down far worse odds before.
The tide of biomechanical aberrations came surging round the bend in the track, like a pack of cyber-hounds with their hunt/kill imperatives dialled up to maximum.
Red Tane realised he was grinning.
The Carcharodon Astra rarely told stories, at least not as other Chapters did. Not for them the bombastic sagas or battle poems of the Space Wolves or White Scars, nor the rolls of honour or litanies of service beloved of the likes of the Ultramarines or Imperial Fists. If any of that had once been part of their culture, it had withered and died in the Outer Dark, like so much else, atrophying during that long, lonely exile.
Red Tane knew that his death, when it came, would be assessed for tactical insights, so that the Chapter might learn and thus better fulfil its duties, becoming sharper with the whetstone of experience. Besides that, however, there would be little to no eulogising. Perhaps a short reading from Beyond the Veil of Stars, nothing more. Just the silence. That was as it should be.
But that did not mean he didn’t relish a chance to make a stand against desperate odds. It was that brazen attitude that had helped make him Champion of the Third Company. And it was the same attitude, he assumed, that would speed him on the way to that deep, eternal silence.
The mutants reached him, and he began to kill them. The ground was good – no more than a scattering were able to get past along the cutting channel, certainly not enough to trouble Ihaia, Tama and Nuritona. His wargear was enduring some dissonance, with lag in a few servos and glitches on his visor. It reminded him of the brief failure beneath the rubble of the promethium extraction plant.
It would only become a problem if his armour locked out again. He murmured to its spirit as he did his bloody work, alternating thanks, cajolement and upbraiding in a manner that would likely have drawn a sharp rebuke from Techmarine Uthulu. Yet that was how he interacted with his battle plate, and it had not failed him yet, not fully.
He heard the sound of impacts in the gravel behind him and turned, slashing open another patchwork nightmare as it lunged at him. They were on the bridge overhead and had started dropping down, beginning to surround him.
If he was going to withdraw, the time was now.
He hesitated. The Blindness was not just raw savagery. It could also manifest as cold nihilism, a disregard for life that extended even to the self. He felt its tug. What did it matter if he stayed and perished here? Did the Chapter not teach, over and over, that the individual was unimportant? That the only worth was to be found in the fulfilment of duty unto death?
As though summoned by the cold, bitter siren song of his thoughts, bolt-rounds ripped into his attackers. There was an instinctive moment of anger as the mutant he was about to strike folded, its torso split apart. The feeling was replaced almost instantly by confusion, as he turned sharply, the Coral Shield ignited.
There were other Space Marines in the cutting – Carcharodons, but not of the Shiver. One kept to the edge, sending bolts into the mutant mass, while a second dashed into the melee at Red Tane’s side, wielding a club and a set of wicked bone talons.
The intrusion would scarcely have been welcomed if it was First or Fourth Squads, returned to aid him. That was before he noted the lack of markings on their armour.
Exiles. Outcasts, anathema who were not part of the brotherhoods of the battle companies. Lone Carcharodons, forced to band together on the most desperate of operations, often stripped of their most valuable arms and armour, and sometimes even of their memories. Red Tane felt a moment’s concern, and something akin to pity. They were wretched beings, their mere presence evoking the dread associated with the idea of failing the Chapter in some way. Red Tane had not been aware of any assigned to Diamantus. Certainly none had travelled with the Third Company fleet.
Then he saw the wargear of the third one.
He had dropped into the cutting last of all, wielding only a combat knife. While the one with the club and talons ripped open the mutants to Red Tane’s right, this one charged in on his left, working off the Champion’s shield arm with an efficiency that spoke of familiarity.
It took barely a minute for the four Space Marines to butcher their way through the remaining heretics. No further threat came either across the drenched gravel or from the sides of the cutting. Red Tane assumed his new allies had already dispatched the heretic forces on the bridge before dropping down.
He swung the Void Sword to let the worst of the ichor and oil-blood drizzle off it, sheathed it, then turned to the Exile who had fought on his left. He looked the warrior up and down, trying to decide if it could really be true.
There was no mistake. He had known who he was the moment he had dropped in alongside during the melee, even before analysing his worn battle plate.
It had been many decades since he had last seen that armour. When its wearer had borne it, Red Tane had only just been promoted to the rank of Champion, likely the youngest in the Third Company’s history. A matter of months later the suit of battle plate had been put into storage in the White Maw’s armoury, as its owner had taken on the equipment he had inherited as Company Master.
Red Tane knelt.
‘Reaper Prime,’ he said.
Bail Sharr stood motionless, dark lenses unreadable, silent. Red Tane knew what he was doing was wrong. Sharr was no longer Company Master. He had disgraced himself and, by extension, the entire Third Company. But that did not change Red Tane’s instinctive response.
Still kneeling, he reached back and carefully unlocked Reaper from beside his reactor pack. He turned it and held it up in both hands, its chainblade facing downwards towards the bloodied gravel.
‘Take it from me, I implore you,’ Red Tane urged. ‘It weighs upon me.’
‘If the current Company Master does not favour it, why not leave it in the aft armoury on the White Maw?’ Sharr asked, his voice scraping like the hiss of a ghostly revenant from his helm’s maw grille.
‘He demanded it be borne into battle, but I could not wield it myself. Such a thing would be a disgrace, master.’
‘According to who?’ Sharr demanded. ‘Such superstitions do not befit Chapter doctrines. You have made that up, Champion.’
Red Tane pursed his lips, not intending to argue. He raised his head to look into the lenses of Sharr’s helm, but did not lower the proffered axe.
‘That may be. But the company bleeds, and there are none more capable of carrying it. If not for honour, then for the necessity of battle. Take it.’
Sharr raised his hand. Red Tane briefly thought he was going to strike him. Instead, he found Sharr’s fist gripping the scarred old haft. Suddenly, the weight of Reaper was gone.
Red Tane bowed his head in silent thanks, then stood.
‘What are your orders?’ he asked, gazing at Sharr as the Exile appeared to test the great weapon’s weight, hunting for any change since he had last wielded it.
‘I have no orders,’ he replied without taking his gaze from the chainaxe. ‘I am an Exile. Even if I wished to, I am forbidden from instructing the void brethren. And I do not wish to.’
‘We have been advised to continue linking with the elements of the Third Company,’ Blood Eye stated, his helm’s lenses an unusual shade of crimson. ‘Chief Librarian Te Kahurangi stated as much.’
