Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 22
‘I can perhaps improve our odds,’ Blood Eye interjected. ‘I am versed in a number of tech-rites… If you will accept my assistance.’
‘We shall,’ Te Kahurangi said without consulting the assembled squads. ‘Remain close to me when the assault begins, Epsilon-one-twelve-Hahono.’
Sharr caught the sound of Blood Eye’s breath catching, almost imperceptibly, over the Exiles’ shared vox. Te Kahurangi had just used his name, presumably the one he had borne while still a void brother. Sharr wondered how long it had been since the Exile had heard it spoken aloud.
‘Let us delay no longer,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Every second, the Archenemy advances towards their goals. It is time we cured their madness.’
Darkness had fallen as the Carcharodons slipped from the smelter and turned north. Megafactorum Primus had become a place akin to the sermons of an Ecclesiarchy preacher describing the fate that awaited blasphemers in the afterlife, all darkness and fire and distant wailing and sobbing. Cyclopean ruins loomed from the gloom and shapes scuttled in the shadows, feasting on the dead and the dying.
The Carcharodons passed through it like predators gliding through murky depths, a little under forty in number. They kept to secondary roads and subdistricts, seeking to avoid detection wherever possible.
At a crossroads outside a towering melta-turbine, they divided. One group moved north, uphill, another south-east, down the slope, while the third – consisting of First and Fourth Squads, Te Kahurangi and the Exiles – continued along it.
Red Tane sensed the tension among his brethren, something more than the coiled readiness of impending combat. Tama had retained his eternal silence, and neither Nuritona nor Ihaia had spoken about Sharr’s sudden reappearance, except briefly, as they had first moved out from the smelter.
‘Did he demand the axe?’ Nuritona had asked.
‘No,’ Red Tane had responded. ‘I demanded he take it.’
‘You should not have.’
Red Tane knew the strike veteran had never fully made peace with what Sharr had done. Most of the company kept any views they had about what had happened on the agri-platforms above Temperance to themselves, but Nuritona had told Red Tane, in the shivering misery of post-cryo drainage, that no good would come from Sharr’s exile. The inference was that his loss of control had not been so grave a sin in itself, but leaving the company to someone like Kino, who viewed it as little more than a cudgel to be wielded over and over until it shattered, was the greater of the two blasphemies. It seemed that by Nuritona’s reckoning, Sharr had chosen the easy path, and left the Third Company to take the harder.
But that was what Nuritona had said when none of them had ever thought they would see their old Reaper Prime again. Now he had returned, like memory manifesting as cold ceramite. Red Tane suspected the reticence he sensed from Nuritona was rooted in disbelief. The strike veteran had shouldered a great deal of the company’s leadership, and the temptation to relinquish it to his old commander must be great. But Nuritona was stronger than that. He would not take the easy road.
Red Tane knew it was not his place to debate such thoughts with Nuritona. He was simply thankful Sharr had returned, and he did not care who knew it. Kino had failed the company. If welcoming an Exile went against the teachings of the Chapter, then so be it. Ultimately, were they not all exiles? Was not the Chapter’s entire existence one of shame and banishment, and all that they had constructed merely an attempt to try to continue living, continue serving, while making room for that shame? To enable them to survive the crushing silence of the Outer Dark?
The vox-array stood ahead, rising above what remained of the rooftops between the Carcharodons and their objective. The primus antenna appeared to still be intact, a great concave shield illuminated from below by the firelight of burning buildings.
There was a booming sound, like a bass drum being struck. Soon after, lesser percussion became audible, the snapping of lasweaponry and the battering of hard-round small-arms.
The Carcharodons said nothing, but Red Tane drew the Void Sword, the black blade whispering free from its scabbard.
No more doubts, no more discord. They were hunting.
The Carcharodons moved through the ruination of a manufactorum, over mounds of rubble and past the bent remains of industrial machinery. They made little noise, bar the slight scrape of boots on fallen masonry and the soft purr and snarl of their power armour.
Red Tane was the first to reach the ruin’s far edge. The sounds of conflict were now loud and sustained, the night lit not only by the burning megalopolis but also by the staccato flare of weapons discharges.
A battle was raging below the vox-array. Red Tane crouched amongst the broken walls and twisted girders, like a carrion creature watching slaughter playing out, joined after a few moments by Nuritona, Tama and Ihaia.
It seemed not all of the Adeptus Mechanicus had fallen to corruption or been overrun by Archenemy hordes. Red Tane identified skitarii, likely belonging to multiple squads, engaged in a close-range firefight with heretic infantry and light armour around the array’s main building. In a few moments he read the angle and intensity of incoming and outgoing fire, the number of bodies and the patterns of advance, forming a tactical picture of the engagement.
The Mechanicus were attempting to storm barricades of rubble and wrecked machinery that had been erected along the array’s perimeter. They had broken through in some areas but fallen short in others, and what was left was a vicious, interlocked struggle with close-in firefights giving way to brief, frenzied melees.
The most immediate problem was the enemy’s armour superiority. The skitarii seemed to have mounted their attack supported by a single vehicle, a Skorpius Disintegrator, but it had fallen foul of a clutch of stalk tanks, lesser daemon engines that had scuttled close enough to rend its hull open. The Disintegrator had taken one of the tanks with it, but the second was still in the midst of the skitarii, the two great chainblades that made up its forelimbs shearing through everything it could reach.
‘The children of Mars have started our work for us,’ said Te Kahurangi from Red Tane’s side. The Champion had not noticed the Pale Nomad’s arrival. He glanced back, a flare of preysight picking up Fourth Squad and the Exiles still moving up through the manufactorum behind.
‘Not all the machine-men have been lost to corruption,’ Nuritona mused. ‘Unless it is a trap?’
‘A strange one, if so,’ Te Kahurangi replied. ‘I sense no concealed forces nearby. The enemy’s strength has been committed.’
‘Then we will strike,’ Nuritona said.
The plan had been for a three-pronged assault that would converge simultaneously on the array’s transmission suite, power generatorium and alignment spoke. The lattermost was the objective of First and Fourth Squads, directly beneath the primus antenna. Because anything other than inter-squad communications was unreliable, the combined assault was set to begin at a specific time – each strike leader had been maintaining a mental countdown since setting off, in case the chrono displays also betrayed them.
There was still time left before the other two prongs were in position. None of the Carcharodons would have hesitated to wait and let the skitarii perish in the name of tactical necessity, but logic dictated the defences around the centre of the array were vulnerable.
Fourth Squad and the Exiles had caught up.
‘We go now,’ Nuritona told them. ‘First leads, Fourth will provide a firebase. Sweep-tide pattern. Hit the stalk tank first.’
‘What of us?’ Sharr asked, the three Exiles standing in Te Kahurangi’s shadow like dire familiars the Librarian had summoned to aid him.
‘Watch the flanks,’ Nuritona said simply.
The Carcharodons burst from cover, pounding up the debris-littered street. Red Tane, leading the way, was within the first Archenemy barricade before any of the heretics manning it were able to switch fire from the skitarii engaging them from a neighbouring wall. He cut through them, only a few hard rounds spanking off his armour, wasps that he ignored.
The stalk tank was just ahead, mounting a separate barricade and eviscerating a skitarii rad-trooper behind it with a clumsy swipe of its massive chainblades. It was a baroque engine of warpsteel rimmed with brass and bone, its central cockpit circular and fashioned to resemble a great daemonic skull. Sensor spikes protruded from its half-open jaw and a battle cannon jutted from one of its eye sockets. Its horns ended in exhaust stacks, churning out bitter smoke and ash. Beneath the skull there was a hatch from which a many-eyed monstrosity bulged, mewling from maw-tears as the tank clattered forward on its mechanical limbs. Red Tane had no idea if the thing was part of its pilot, some kind of living sacrifice, or both.
‘Bring it down,’ Nuritona snarled over the vox.
Red Tane charged the daemon engine. It sensed him coming and swung down from its perch on the barricades, one huge chainblade swiping at him from the left. The Coral Shield’s refractor field flared, then overloaded with a crack and a stink of ozone. It had earthed the worst of the blow, allowing the shield itself to throw off the sawblades and give Red Tane time to bring the Void Sword round and lock the appendage. There was a horrific screech as the chainblade’s teeth juddered to a halt, straining to shatter the Champion’s blade. Red Tane gritted his teeth and held on, servos creaking, muscles taut, trusting the relic sword.
On his right, Nuritona and Tama had engaged the other weapon-limb, the strike veteran’s own chainsword sparking as he used it to batter aside the cleaver, refusing to lock it the way Red Tane had. They were only trying to keep its attention.
With the stalk tank’s forelimbs occupied, Ihaia seized his opportunity. He pounded in under the engine’s torso and fired his volkite caliver directly up into the flesh thing that formed part of its undercarriage. It ignited, the combustion searing into the walker’s core and causing it to deflagrate explosively.
Fire, burning slime and molten metal hammered at Red Tane. The resistance from the engine’s chainblade vanished as it was blown away, and the Coral Shield flared to life once more as it did its best to preserve him from the stalk tank’s destruction. By the time the fire and smoke cleared, nothing remained of the daemon engine besides the scorched, blown-off lower segments of its legs. Ihaia still stood between them, drenched in sizzling daemon ooze, his caliver’s barrel smoking.
Red Tane whipped the Void Sword round as shots from the nearest enemy barricade began to lash around them, checking the weapon’s edge. Despite being used to parry the huge chainblade, its black surface was still utterly unblemished.
‘They’re concentrating fire,’ Nuritona grunted as the hail of las-bolts and bullets being directed at them became a blizzard. The Coral Shield’s refractor field flared continuously as it robbed the incoming shots of potency, close to overloading again.
That was when Red Tane heard the roar. It was one he recognised, and it didn’t come from any throat or vox-caster or vocaliser. It brought a grim smile back to his lips.
It was the sound of Reaper being triggered.
The Exiles, along with Te Kahurangi, had used the distraction of First Squad’s headlong assault to circle along the street’s far edge, hitting the deepest section of the vox-array’s defensive cordon in the flank.
Sharr kicked his way through one of the mounds of rubble serving as a hasty barricade. The first heretic on the other side froze, staring up at the towering, grey-clad monster that had emerged beside them.
Sharr swung Reaper, and the heretic simply ceased to exist in any coherent way. The great, jagged adamantine teeth that made up the sawblade sheared down through skull, collarbone and ribs before cleaving the pelvis in half, reducing the heretic’s chest cavity to flying mulch in the process.
Blood and gore jetted over Sharr’s helmet and breastplate. Even within his armour, he would have sworn he could smell it, taste it, feel its warm vitality on his hard, scarred skin. It made him want to go wild, to vent the intoxicating surge of euphoria brought on by the brute devastation at his fingertips and the revulsion he felt for the enemies before him, all of it heightened by the jagged surging of stimms and battle hormones his armour and his body were sending thundering through his system.
He was annihilation incarnate, and yet he made no sound.
Reaper was his roar. It howled for him, as he obliterated another heretic, barely one pounding double-heartbeat after he had cleaved through the first. More were scrambling around him, turning their pathetic weapons on him, but too late. The others were with him, Talon’s club staving in a face and his claws raking another, while Blood Eye mounted the rubble and used the elevation to open fire with his boltgun, scything down the remainder of the barricade’s defenders.
Te Kahurangi was the last to pass through the shattered line, walking with an easy stride, the base of his force staff tapping the rockcrete underfoot. Heretic soldiers behind the neighbouring stretch of defences had witnessed the fate of their kindred, and the first hasty shots were starting to strike at the Exiles as they redirected their fire away from First Squad. The Pale Nomad cracked his staff against the ground once. Sharr didn’t even hear him utter an invocation, yet an invisible surge of psychic energy swept into the Archenemy position. The mound of rubble and girders acting as their barricades was slammed up against those seeking shelter behind it, as though struck by a tidal wave. Their remains were pounded to red smears against the wall of the vox-array at their backs.
The destruction of the enemy’s firebase had allowed First Squad to resume its assault. Fourth was sweeping forward too, the skitarii with them. The most advanced Adeptus Mechanicus section was close, and they and the Exiles arrived at the main entrance to the array at almost the same moment.
Sharr surveyed the rad-troopers, Reaper still growling in his grip, the teeth rotating now with slow, vicious threat. The skitarii watched him impassively in turn, through optic clusters and visor lenses, motionless until a binary imperative caused them to part ranks for one who Sharr immediately took to be their leader. This skitarius was taller, more upright, cybernetics overlaid with armour plating and helmet crested by a demi-cog, while a radium serpenta was gripped in one vice-gauntlet and a gladius in the other, the latter’s blade dark with blood.
‘Hail,’ the hyper-augmented warrior buzzed through their helmet’s vocaliser. ‘I am identified as Skitarius Optio Zeta-One-One-Trio. I have function control over the Alpha Maniple, in the name of Holy Diamantus and the blessed Omnissiah. Identify yourselves.’
Bail Sharr hesitated, loath to speak his own name, but thinking his mere number tag might not be sufficient.
‘We are Adeptus Astartes,’ he said, settling for generality. ‘Of the Carcharodon Astra.’
‘Well met, optio,’ said a new voice, speaking before Sharr could begin trying to explain. It was Nuritona, arriving at the hub’s entranceway. Zeta-One-One-Trio wheeled stiffly to face him.
‘Greetings once more, Omekra-five-one-Nuritona,’ the skitarii commander said. ‘Your intervention in the previous combat was timely. I am still inloading casualty informatics, but I anticipate losses to the Alpha Maniple would have been at least forty-one per cent higher had you not arrived when you did.’
‘It is heartening to see that not all the soldiers of Diamantus have fallen to the Archenemy’s madness,’ Nuritona replied.
‘Indeed,’ Zeta said in their relentlessly monotone voice. ‘I calculate that it is my duty to inform you of the fall of the Pinnacle.’
‘I was aware of the hulk’s collision with the summit,’ Nuritona said. ‘I assumed most of the Pinnacle was buried.’
‘Some of it,’ Zeta agreed. ‘Not all. It would have been preferable if it was. The techno-hereteks make their lair within the throne room of His Chromatic Eminence.’
‘You were there when it fell?’
‘For a short time, yes. Magos Domina Tyreka Six calculated that a fighting withdrawal was the most optimal strategy. She was forcefully shut down by techno-heretekal forces while buying time for the remains of the Alpha Maniple and me to retreat. Since then, I have been obeying standard resistance doctrines. I identified the secondary communications array as a location of strategic significance. My intention was to seek to re-establish wider communications and attempt to coordinate a more efficient response.’
‘Then we come here with much the same intention,’ Nuritona said. ‘Resistance is futile if it remains scattered and disjointed.’
‘We are in accordance,’ Zeta said. ‘Part of the programming inloaded into my function boards by Tyreka Six included response directives regarding any possible encounters with confirmed-loyal warriors of the Adeptus Astartes. Those directives have now been triggered. I am required to subordinate the command of myself and the Alpha Maniple to you.’
‘Is that so?’ Nuritona asked cautiously, clearly surprised at the idea of any member of the Adeptus Mechanicus, even a relatively lowly one such as a skitarii optio, willingly subordinating themselves to another arm of the Imperium’s military machine.
‘It is so,’ Zeta-One-One-Trio affirmed, deadpan.
‘If you wish to operate alongside my brethren, answer me this. How did you survive the madness, when so many of your machine kin have succumbed?’
‘I felt it,’ Zeta admitted, their dead voice doing nothing to even hint at the pain and horror the surviving skitarii had undoubtedly endured. ‘Catastrophic malfunctions. Scrapcode. Organic failure. Unauthorised program realignment. Viral invasion. Some were taken, some were not. I am unable to process the logic behind such matters. It is beyond my capacity as an optio of Alpha Maniple. My only hypothesis would be that the machines-militant of Diamantus are naturally encoded with better defensive measures than other members of the blessed priesthood, though even among my skitarii, there have been many losses. All those failing to obey their programming have been terminated with extreme prejudice. May the Omnissiah preserve their eternal code, for I could not.’
