Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 23
As the skitarius spoke, Sharr saw Nuritona glance towards Te Kahurangi, who had remained off to one side, watching the augmented soldiers. The Pale Nomad looked back at Nuritona and, almost imperceptibly, nodded.
If he considered these skitarii uncorrupted, that was sufficient.
‘I will accept your subordination,’ Nuritona told Zeta. ‘And permit you access to our basic comms. Outside of any orders I or my brethren give, you are free to continue to command your maniple as you see fit.’
Zeta-One-One-Trio sheathed their weaponry and made the sign of the cog. Nuritona simply nodded.
Together, they advanced into the array.
CHAPTER XXIV
The stepper motor controlled the facing of the largest vox-antenna, which was sited directly above it. While the skitarii and the rest of the Carcharodons secured the wider chamber, Sharr and Talon remained with Blood Eye and Te Kahurangi at its control station.
‘Most of it looks manual,’ Blood Eye said, snap-assessing the array of levers and wheels that appeared to power the digital actuator, arrayed in a semicircle around the broad central column that plunged down through the reinforced struts of the ceiling. ‘Which is good. Less chance of Archenemy malfeasance.’
‘You have the orbital coordinates?’ Te Kahurangi asked.
‘I do,’ Blood Eye confirmed. Before setting out, Nuritona had agreed, with more than a hint of reluctance, to inload the last known location of the White Maw into Blood Eye’s systems. Using it, he would be able to ensure the antenna was aligned towards the correct orbital segment. It would be imprecise, especially if the strike cruiser had relocated, but set to a broad transmission it still offered the best chance of making contact.
Sharr found himself recalling their labours on the Sire of Belaphrone as Blood Eye directed them towards the necessary controls. With all else set, the disgraced former Techmarine heaved down on one particularly large cog-lever, muttering in Lingua Technis as he did so. There was a thud, and a deep groan rang through the array.
The central column began to rotate, grinding and creaking ponderously, cogs ticking. Above, the antenna would be realigning, angled so it was facing almost towards the Pinnacle.
‘That is a good start,’ Blood Eye said. Nuritona had marched over from where First Squad had secured the array’s inner door, and now addressed the Exiles and the Pale Nomad.
‘From the sounds outside, the other squads have engaged,’ he said. ‘I expect we have already overcome the Archenemy’s reserves outside. There will likely be little resistance.’
‘We should relocate to the transmission suite,’ Te Kahurangi observed. ‘The enemy are likely aware of our gambit, and deploying reinforcements. The longer we linger, the more certain it is we will also draw the attention of ever more dangerous foes.’
‘You will come with me to the suite, as will the Exile,’ Nuritona said, speaking to Te Kahurangi and gesturing tersely at Blood Eye.
‘All three of them will come,’ Te Kahurangi responded. ‘As my personal guard.’
The transmission suite seemed to have been captured almost without a fight, the stragglers defending it dispatched with brutal efficiency by Tangaroa’s Devourers.
‘The systems seem intact,’ the strike leader said as he led the new arrivals inside. The suite’s main room was centred around a nest of vox-grilles, brass horns and cogitator nodes, set into masses of cabling that snaked through reinforced hardwiring ducts into the neighbouring array for transmission via the primus antenna. There was no sign of the suite’s operators, except for half a dozen servitors, two of them hardwired into the systems while the other four were scattered around the room, standing like toys abandoned by an inattentive child. The only indication they still possessed some semblance of life was the fact that those with remaining organic eyes would occasionally, slowly blink.
Blood Eye moved to the cogitator nodes and set to work, bent forward over the runeboards. There was an audible click as the vox-speakers arrayed around him came online.
‘Make it fully audible,’ Nuritona ordered. ‘I don’t want to risk linking it into our own network.’
Blood Eye complied, and harsh static flooded the suite.
‘The channel is open,’ he told Nuritona, handing him a mesh pickup cone connected via a cable to the main array. ‘The signal from our end is strong and regular.’
Nuritona began to speak into the pickup, issuing a string of identification codes and calls for acknowledgement, first from the White Maw, and then from any Imperial forces who might be receiving the signal. After a while he paused, waiting.
The static from the speakers continued, a grating discordance.
Nuritona tried again, using a different set of signifiers, attempting to initialise a call-and-response interaction.
Again, nothing.
On the third attempt, there was a response.
The speakers blurted something. Sharr looked towards Blood Eye, as he worked with fluid intensity at the control panels and the runeboards, adjusting gain and signal width.
The blurting returned, and the Techmarine coaxed it into something partially coherent. A voice came through, and despite being chopped by the static, it clearly didn’t belong to either Shipmaster Teko or Captain Kino. It was a woman’s voice, and riven with panic, practically screaming.
‘…stop! Oh, Throne, they… want our blood! We should never have… still laughing.’
Nuritona attempted to speak to the woman on the other end, but she carried on, seemingly oblivious to his voice.
‘The whole ship… alive. Our own systems are… augmetics, gnawing at me!’
‘I’m data-scraping it,’ Blood Eye said urgently, crimson gauntlets dancing across the panel. ‘Time, location, nature of transmission… A few moments more…’
‘Identify yourself,’ Nuritona snapped into the vox-horn. ‘State your name, and the name or keel tag of your ship.’
‘Help us! Please, God-Emperor, help us!’
The woman said nothing more. The static rose up, drowning her, like someone slipping beneath the waves of a vicious sea for the last time.
The alpha cogitator chimed. Blood Eye’s activity ceased abruptly as he looked at the display.
‘Well?’ Nuritona demanded, the pickup discarded.
‘Transmission triangulated to orbital grid T12-A9,’ Blood Eye said slowly and carefully, as though doubting the evidence of his own eyes. ‘That is almost directly above us. I have a time and date stamp but… it is irregular.’
‘In what way?’
‘The message appears to have been transmitted at a time and date that has not yet passed. It is surely some kind of malfunction. I will attempt to re-triangulate–’
‘Do not,’ Te Kahurangi said abruptly, his tone quiet but firm. ‘We should depart, without delay.’
Sharr sensed questions on Blood Eye’s lips, but the other Carcharodons knew not to gainsay the Pale Nomad. Nuritona had just started snapping orders to the other squads to begin extracting when the ever-present static suddenly cut out.
The silence lasted only a few tense heartbeats.
‘Hello, little monstrosities.’
The voice was rich and sickly, and issued with absolute clarity from all of the suite’s speakers at once, even the ones showing as inactive.
Sharr had to make a conscious effort not to trigger Reaper. Other members of the strike force had raised bolters and blades.
‘I did not think to find your kind here, on my home world. Was Helsarch so desperate as to invite you here? Or have you come of your own will and imposed yourselves, as is the way with your kind?’
Nuritona was looking at Te Kahurangi, who shook his head, silently forbidding him from communicating with the intrusive voice. Sharr noted the Chief Librarian’s jaw was clenched, and his gauntlet clamped fast about his bone staff. The green stone that tipped it had started to glow more fiercely.
‘Do you not wish to converse?’ the voice demanded, an impatient note entering it. ‘Is that not why you came here? Or were you intending to speak with someone else? A call for help? A report to your brethren elsewhere? Yes, I understand now. Well, allow me to be the one to offer you aid. Let me free you, as I have already freed Helsarch and all his poor court.’
Te Kahurangi began to speak – not a direct answer to the voice, but catechisms of power, conjugations and ward-words to combat forces that Sharr could, for the moment, sense only as a creeping, sickening unease.
The voice seemed to hear Te Kahurangi’s efforts. It began to laugh.
‘Such defiance,’ it said jovially. ‘You are the one my imps whisper to me about while they cut my flesh. The one who has come from the nothing, and will return to nothing. Wanderer, scourge of shadows. You will not stop my designs, not after I have come this far. Speak with the dead and the doomed, Adeptus Astartes, and leave me to my labours!’
The voice ceased, replaced not by static but with a howling that knifed at the senses of every Carcharodon in the room. Sharr snarled in response, as Te Kahurangi raised his staff and began to shout his invocations.
The vox-speakers blew in unison, but somehow the terrible noise continued.
The servitors joined it. They had stood unmoving until that moment, hardly more living than any of the butchered corpses lying outside, but without warning they jerked into motion. They flung themselves at the Carcharodons, their motions swift and aggressive, possessing none of the sluggishness normally associated with lobotomised cyber-slaves.
And they screamed. They screamed with pain and horror, as though suddenly, impossibly, their reprogrammed brains had grasped the totality of the terrible things that had been done to them.
Sharr activated Reaper as one of the constructs came at him, its lower vice-limbs daring to clamp around the weapon’s haft as its upper servo-arm cracked off Sharr’s breastplate. He saw wildness in the thing’s one good eye, comprehension. In its mocking way, the corrupting madness of Chaos had given dark clarity to the slaves of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Sharr punched the thing’s brains out, the Carcharodons around him rapidly dispatching the others. The dark trick performed with the servitors was not the greatest threat.
The transmission suite’s cogitators had started to shake and rattle in their power sconces. The viewscreens lit a hellish, deep red, and then began to crack. As the howling from the broken vox continued, things started to push through from the far side of reality.
‘Destroy them,’ Nuritona barked.
Bolter fire exploded through the room, shattering crystalflex and bursting warp-meat. Still they came, however, keening, mewling Neverborn, desperate to escape the frigid torpor of their existence and bathe their newfound flesh-forms in the warmth of the materium.
‘It’s a trap,’ Te Kahurangi shouted. ‘Get out, while you can!’
He gripped his force staff two-handed and cracked it into the floor, its green light blazing. The Neverborn ceased their advance, torn half-free from the console banks, their cries rising to threaten the dominance of the vox-howl.
Ihaia, Tama and Nuritona began to drop back to the doorway, firing as they went. Talon and Blood Eye joined them, but Sharr could see that Te Kahurangi wasn’t moving. He seemed locked in place, visibly shuddering in his armour, his lips twitching as though with words that were impossible for Sharr to hear.
With a sickly pule, the warp spawn began their advance again, clawing their way from the broken viewscreens inch by inch. Sharr swung Reaper at the nearest, hacking at the mass of tentacles and spines and grimacing, beastly maws, the shifting and changing flesh reknitting itself as swiftly as Sharr savaged it.
As he swung, he could taste the filth of the warp like grease on his tongue, could feel it squirming on his skin within his armour, could feel it beating at his temples – a pain that defied the suppressants and the nerve-severed genhancements made to his brutal form. The air itself was shimmering as though in the grip of an intense heat haze, the very atmosphere starting to deform.
‘Reality is collapsing,’ Te Kahurangi shouted, gripping his staff now as if it were a viper trying to latch on to his throat. ‘Go! I will hold it while I can!’
‘You will hold nothing alone,’ Sharr growled, clapping his gauntlet on one of the Chief Librarian’s pauldrons. ‘Walk, old one, or I will carry you.’
With the effort carved into every line and scar on his ragged face, Te Kahurangi took one step back, then another. Sharr stayed at his side, swinging Reaper like an agri-labourer wielding a scythe against his crops. The amorphous nightmares came apart beneath the jagged bite and re-formed, closing in from all sides.
The entire structure was coming down around them. Plaster and powdered plascrete were cascading from the chamber’s ceiling as it began to crack, the groan of bending metal and the grinding of failing foundations making war on the daemonic cacophony. Te Kahurangi finally regained full control, lowering his staff and glancing briefly at Sharr.
Saying nothing more, the pair broke and ran for the exit.
Behind them, the transmission suite collapsed in on itself with a sound like splitting thunder. Sharr and Te Kahurangi came slamming from the main doorway just as it fell, outrunning the avalanche of descending masonry.
The Carcharodons and skitarii had withdrawn across the street, and watched as the building collapsed in their wake. Sharr turned halfway across the road, wary of any signs of pursuit, a part of him hoping that there would be – he did not want to cease wielding Reaper.
He quashed the unworthy desire, seeing only a settling mound of wreckage and ruin, heaped up against the side of the main array building.
‘Advance,’ Nuritona ordered his squads and the skitarii, hurrying out of the structure. ‘Check the rubble for any taint that might have survived. Purge whatever you find.’
Te Kahurangi made no move to join the cleansing operation, and Sharr stayed with him. The Pale Nomad had recovered his grave composure; Sharr had rarely witnessed him battling such strain.
‘It is more powerful than I feared,’ he admitted. ‘And its plans more twisted, more complex.’
‘In what way?’ Sharr asked.
‘I am not yet entirely certain. I must consult with Khauri. And you must take command of your company, before it is too late.’
‘Impossible,’ Sharr said immediately. ‘You know it is forbidden.’
‘And you know I have the ability to make it possible.’
‘That is untrue,’ Sharr said, refusing to humour such a claim. ‘Only the Reaper Lord of the Void can pardon an Exile.’
‘And who speaks with the authority of his voice?’ Te Kahurangi asked. ‘The master of the Red Brethren assigned to this company.’
‘Kino is Company Master now, no longer a member of the First, and besides, it was on his witness that I was banished,’ Sharr said, unable to stop the bitterness creeping into his tone.
‘His past subordinate, Rangon, now commands the Red Brethren assigned to the Third,’ Te Kahurangi agreed. ‘But he will do as his former strike leader instructs. Such is the nature of command.’
‘And why would Kino end my exile?’ Sharr demanded, exasperated now with the seemingly circular conversation. From the ruins, bolter fire rang out – not the sustained discharge of combat, but a few singular shots, as a Carcharodon executed whatever malformed monstrosity they had found trying to claw its way free.
‘I will do what the Librarius does, and advise him,’ Te Kahurangi said.
Sharr looked at him, and shook his head slowly.
‘I am not Reaper Prime. I have shamed this Shiver. They do not want me to return. I am not worthy of them.’
‘The sooner you let go of such foolish notions, the sooner you will begin to truly live up to the precepts of our Chapter,’ Te Kahurangi said, a rare flash of anger giving Sharr pause.
‘You are failing the Chapter more acutely now than you did when you lost yourself to the Blindness,’ the Pale Nomad continued. ‘If ever you even truly did. Overcome your obsession with shame and self-flagellation, and set aside your bitterness. Sacrifice your self-centred concerns for the good of the company, and through them the Chapter.’
Sharr remained silent, and Te Kahurangi carried on, his voice razor-sharp.
‘You yearned for it, did you not? You yearned to be banished, so that you would not have to face the failure of your defeat on the agri-platforms above Temperance. Kino would not have exiled you, but you demanded it, almost begged for it. You left him with no choice other than to send you away and assume command. That is the reality of how we have all come to be here. That was your true failure.’
‘The Blindness–’ Sharr began, but Te Kahurangi cut him off.
‘The Blindness is gone, if it gripped at all. You are cowering behind the notion of it. I have grown tired of indulging you. Face your past, overcome it, and remember that your duty is to Rangu, the Forgotten One and the Chapter. Concepts of shame and dishonour are luxuries we cannot afford if we are to survive, even more so in times such as these.’
‘What would you have me do?’ Sharr asked, his voice dangerously quiet as he sought to master his frustration, his realisation that his anger was a snare he had built for himself, and no other.
‘Lead,’ Te Kahurangi said, taking a grip on Sharr’s gorget, though the gesture was not aggressive. ‘Matters here are desperate. Diamantus has fallen, and Third Company faces annihilation. That is a loss the Chapter cannot afford. So forget your pride and honour – those dead things – and lead where Khauri and I point. Make good your Void Vows, and renew your loyalty to the Chapter.’
Te Kahurangi removed his grip, and Sharr looked down at Reaper. In the firelight that was suffusing the depths of the bleak Diamantus night, the blood on it glistened black.
