Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 27
He spoke words of power as he advanced, warding incantations that abjured the daemon and the roiling seas of emotion that birthed them. Each step was leaden, the sigils that decorated his power armour ablaze with witchfire as they fought to preserve his purity while he in turn fought to hold back the invisible etheric tide flooding the Pinnacle. In doing so, he kept the worst of the taint not just from himself, but from the minds, bodies and wargear of his brothers.
The strain of it would have liquified the mind of a lesser psyker and left their body infested with daemonic possession. Yet Te Kahurangi kept it at bay, his concentration singular, barely aware of the Carcharodons cutting down mutants and daemonspawn all around him. He kept going.
The objective lay at the far end of the chamber. It was a creature that no longer subscribed to logical definitions, a mountain of madness from which the rancid taint of Chaos poured. It repulsed Te Kahurangi almost beyond comprehension, and yet he continued to advance upon it, force staff raised. The relic’s green light blazed ahead of him, causing the flesh of the chamber to burn and searing the skin from the malformed bones of the horrors that flung themselves in his path.
He could not stop now. He could not falter. Not until the nightmare that was making its nest within the mountain was purged.
The primary engine of the Sire of Belaphrone was still intact, as sure a sign of Rangu’s favour as any Sharr had experienced since his exile. The Carcharodons had been able to establish that the body of the ship was still part of the remaining wreckage of the hulk, now settled atop Mount Antikythera’s peak. Whether its old means of propulsion was still functioning had been unclear until they actually reached the enginarium and its corresponding plasma generators.
‘You know how to awaken it?’ Khauri asked as Blood Eye began directing them around the main block, the coils underfoot already throbbing with power from the generator room.
‘I have already,’ Blood Eye said. ‘My only doubts were whether it survived planetary impact, and whether its systems remained uncorrupted.’
Khauri had joined the Exiles to ensure its purity. As Sharr and Talon aided Blood Eye in once again kickstarting the old ship’s heart, the Librarian paced around the chamber, muttering arcane phrases and anointing the various mechanisms. He had drawn a short, plain knife from his mag belt and had removed his gauntlet so he could cut his palm, using his own blood to make the sigils. Sharr had never pretended to understand the fell warpcraft of the Chapter’s Librarius, but he knew that such actions spoke of desperation and necessity.
Khauri was forced to wound himself repeatedly as his blood clotted almost instantly. Whether it would be enough to stop the sort of warp-induced malfunction that had thwarted them before the planetary collision, Sharr did not know.
Blood Eye muttered rites of his own in Lingua Technis as he laboured, hurrying to awaken the engines as quickly as possible. During the council of war he had assured the assembled leaders of the Third Company that, having already brought the engine online recently, he could re-prime it much more quickly. Sharr hoped he was correct – Third Company’s survival depended on it.
Under Blood Eye’s instruction, Sharr and Talon set about activating the secondary systems. There were a series of thudding sounds, and a steady throb began filling the air as power was fed through from the generators. Blood Eye continued to murmur as he moved around the block and directed the others, like a master craftsman overseeing his apprentices.
‘Be alert for possible xenos contact,’ Sharr said as he worked alongside Blood Eye. The Exile didn’t reply, his expression becoming briefly uncertain, as though he had forgotten the encounter with the lictor prior to planetfall.
It was as Sharr heaved down on a double lever atop one of the gantries that ran along the block’s flank that Khauri spoke, his red knife still in one hand, forearm glazed dark crimson with sear-clotted blood.
‘They’ve sensed us.’
No one asked him to elaborate. Blood Eye sped up his work, shifting to the main control panel. The vibrations were growing more intense, and a knocking sound was coming from the block, one that Sharr didn’t remember from the first time they had activated it.
The temperature was rising sharply as well, too fast to be ascribed to the engine alone. Soon it was infernally warm, reaching degrees Sharr would have only expected after the chamber had been operating at maximum output for hours. The air started to shimmer. Other things began distorting, too. As Sharr was instructed by Blood Eye to haul on another lever, setting a complex series of massive cogs in the engine’s side clanking and whirring, he saw the deck – a level below where he was standing – start to warp.
The metal plates were becoming molten and reshaping, rising up and assuming a form that was unmistakably humanoid. Liquified steel flowed back from fangs made of screws and sharpened bolts.
With a groan like tortured metal, it lunged up at Sharr, trying to snare him with its quicksilver claws.
Reaper’s roar filled the enginarium. Sharr swept the chainaxe down through the thing’s half-made form, shearing steel and sending gobbets of liquid metal flying. It started to reknit in the axe’s wake, until Sharr hit it again, finally unbinding its unnatural form and causing it to flow back into the deck.
Khauri was now calling out his psychomantic evocations loudly, but it wasn’t enough. The whole enginarium was starting to twist out of shape, skeletal, animalistic faces leering from the metalwork, clawed limbs straining from the bulkheads as the corruption that ran rampant from the heart of the Pinnacle possessed what remained of the Sire of Belaphrone. The markings made with Khauri’s blood on the main block and the power supply were visibly sizzling and bubbling, and the throb of the engine was rising to a vibrating growl.
‘How long before you can fully activate it?’ Sharr shouted at Blood Eye as he and Talon retreated towards the control console platform the former Techmarine was standing on, hacking at the amorphous warp spawn trying to drag them down as they went.
By way of an answer, Blood Eye unlocked his combat knife and, using the wrench head built into its base, clamped and twisted a heavy dial, then struck at the runic panel next to it.
The engine howled. Black smoke billowed from the mouths of the plasteel gargoyles fashioned into its flanks, and the corrupt metal around it rippled, as though struck by some great impact. Through the turmoil, Sharr felt further energies building – not the madness of the warp, but the raw physics of the material plane.
The Sire of Belaphrone had not only awoken once more. Its primary engine was now also blazing at maximum capacity, driving it slowly and inexorably into the mountain in which it had been buried. Forcing it down, little by little, onto the throne room below the hulk’s remains.
Kordi smashed his fist into the face of the screeching thing that was clawing its way from the slurry of intestines and tentacles that constituted most of the throne room’s floor, then snatched the lank, slick hair of its stitch-scarred scalp, hauling it up so he could saw the razored edge of his combat knife across what passed for its throat, practically decapitating it in the process.
He had no idea if he had killed it. He couldn’t tell if it was just one part of the greater morass of flesh and bone that the chamber had descended into.
Maintaining a coherent firebase and mutual squad support was almost impossible, yet the Carcharodons fought to do so, a wedge of grey ceramite befouled with the blood and oil and ichor and unidentifiable viscera of the hopelessly insane nightmares trying to force their way into reality all around them. Second Squad were at the centre of the spear’s right side, Third Squad and then First on their left, and the Devourers of Eighth holding the extreme right. Ninth Squad were to their rear along with the skitarii, unleashing their firepower on anything that broke through.
Kordi clamped his knife and cycled back to his boltgun, drilling half a dozen rounds into a sluglike spawn creature rearing up on back-jointed mechanical lower limbs to strike at him. The bolts blew the thing into steaming chunks of blubber, and Kordi snap-reloaded and switched back to his knife just in time to plough it into one of the eye clusters of a horrifically mutated servitor. Like most of the squad, he kept shifting fluidly between his bolter and his knife, leaving his chainsword clamped; maintaining the pace of the advance was vital, and he was able to go from boltgun to knife and back again faster than if he switched out the naked steel for his chainsword.
Despite the techno-warding of the Librarians and the Exile, Kordi’s visor display had almost completely decayed, markers glitching and distorting. He snatched a glance left and right, manually checking squad coherency. They were holding open order – halfway between the wide gaps that could be adopted in extended order and the tightness of the close order that Kordi expected the assault would soon adopt. Ateko, Ihu and Repat were on his left, sending controlled bursts of bolter fire into a maw-creature rising up like a surfacing leviathan from the slaughter-sea, blowing it to pieces as it emerged. To his right, Neku was in the process of reloading as Arrona fired, but Kordi immediately saw there was a danger to the squad’s right side. A rush of cult troopers came charging through the madness, their bodies deforming with mutations even as they flung themselves, howling, on the Carcharodons.
Kordi switched back to his bolter and added his firepower to Neku’s and Arrona’s, but he could already tell it wouldn’t be enough. The cultists were riven by insanity, oblivious to arms and limbs being blown off as they collided with the Carcharodons and clawed futilely at them.
A few dozen cultists in isolation would have been no threat, but they could easily mark the beginning of the end. The greatest danger was being overwhelmed. If that happened, the formation would be breached and start to disintegrate, and soon each Space Marine would be fighting alone and unsupported. Each one would take dozens, even hundreds, of the mutant chattels with them, but their enemies could afford such a price.
Neku and Arrona switched to their chain weaponry and began mowing down the shrieking, twisting wretches, but the cessation of fire meant more mutants came pouring into the gap. Kordi knew he had seconds to rectify the situation.
‘Wiremu, high-explosives, rip-tide!’ he bellowed, hoping his amplified vocaliser would drive his words over the thunderous cacophony.
Wiremu heard him. The heavy-weapons specialist was acting as the squad’s immediate reserve, standing unengaged a dozen yards behind Kordi. He switched the shot selector on his Executor heavy bolter and opened fire on the right-hand side of the squad.
The rounds he unleashed were primed to detonate early, before penetrating. This turned the air around Neku and Arrona into a hail of .998-calibre heavy bolt fragments, lethal to the lightly armoured cultists but unlikely to penetrate the battle plate of the two Space Marines. Wiremu was able to fire indiscriminately into the melee for a few precious seconds, carving apart the mutating heretics and giving Neku and Arrona the moments they needed to switch back to their bolters and lay down a curtain of fire, even as their power armour was perforated by shards and painted by the tainted blood of the lost and the damned.
Kordi reloaded and snatched another split-second assessment of the wider combat. Both Third on their left and the Devourers on their right had pushed forward while Second Squad had been stabilising. He had to close the gap that was appearing between the three units.
‘Move up,’ he barked, taking a step forward and firing as he went.
The advance resumed.
A machine-chimera attempted to tear through the tip of the iron-tide. Some foul entity had dragged together a conglomeration of cogitators and the more arcane engines littering the throne room, granting them bloodthirsty sentience. Now data-stacks were riven with gnashing iron-and-brass jaws, and part-mechanical, part-organic tendrils had burst from its jagged undercarriage, allowing it to rip itself free from its floor bolts and energy cables and drag itself forward.
Red Tane met the thing’s charge with a grunt and a crack of metal on coral. His shield’s refractor field had failed – not an overcharge but seemingly a permanent malfunction doubtless caused by the machine corruption seething through the throne room. The coral held firm though, the machine-chimera’s multiple sets of metal fangs scraping against it as tendrils squirmed over and under, sliding grotesquely around the Company Champion’s arms and legs.
Teeth gritted so he didn’t let out a sound, Red Tane hacked the Void Sword through the appendages, black ichor gouting over his limbs. The conglomeration let out a clattering squeal, hellish, ruddy light blazing from its interior, the primary maw – once a coolant unit – yawning as it came at him again.
Red Tane took his opening, ramming his relic blade through the maw and its corrupt processor, punching the tip out through the ridge of its upper stack.
The thing clattered to the ground. Red Tane wrenched the Void Sword free and stamped down on it once, caving in part of its brass chassis and crushing its warped flank into the meat floor.
He immediately checked the rest of First Squad’s position and that of Te Kahurangi, whom he had been instructed to treat the way he would the Company Master. Tama was gone, seeing to his duties keeping the rest of the company in the fight and retrieving progenoids from the fallen wherever he could. Nuritona was bringing down another possessed, fused mass of machines, chainsword shearing through it in a blaze of sparks that rapidly turned to stinking offal as the teeth reached the fleshy thing infesting the machine’s core. Te Kahurangi was behind him, within the protection of the spear’s tip, wreathed in witchfire. Despite the pale light that coiled across his blue armour, his gaunt face was lost in shadow, and as Red Tane glanced towards him he could have sworn that, just for a moment, the Chief Librarian’s features became a skeletal grin.
Red Tane looked away in time to see Ihaia step forward, his volkite caliver recharged. The ten-thousand-year-old weapon was helping clear a path, a channel of burning flesh and melting metal bored through the madness.
First Squad drove into the scorched wound. Ahead, a shape was rising ponderously up out of the smoke and steam and filth shrouding the deranged chamber. Red Tane understood that it must be the ziggurat that had once borne Fabricator General Digitas Horrum’s throne, the great tiered cogitator, though it was impossible to reconcile what he now saw with the space he had entered just days earlier. It had become a mountain of flesh, fronds waving in the foul air, putrid skin webbed over molten stone and melted, fused machinery. There were shapes writhing in the morass that Red Tane initially took to be large parasites or exposed organs, but which he realised were actually the bodies of the Martian priesthood, members of Horrum’s court who had been melded, body and soul, with the vile entity that had descended on Diamantus.
And entity it was, a single consciousness, deformed beyond all physical recognition. It had possessed the throne and its pyramid, and all of it was now starting to rise up, to rip its way out of the ground and lumber like a living nightmare towards the oncoming Carcharodons. Trying to fully comprehend its form, its dimensions, made Red Tane’s skull ache, so he stopped trying.
They were going to kill it, not attempt to understand it.
Mutants threw themselves at the Carcharodons, howling and raving. Red Tane shifted behind the coral shield, anticipating contact, but it never came.
Something ripped into the onrushing horde, sending shorn limbs and shredded torsos splattering against the Carcharodons. Red Tane, still braced, watched as the front of the heretic assault seemed to disintegrate, savaged by invisible forces, as though a shoal of ethereal predators had just descended on the Archenemy. He glanced back and saw Te Kahurangi with his staff raised.
The Pale Nomad’s voice rasped in his head.
Hold them a little while longer, my brothers, and watch for the turning of the tide.+
Te Kahurangi anchored himself using his staff, the ancient, carved bone vibrating. He knew he had to be quick, before the tide overwhelmed him and dashed him to pieces, yet he could not rush. He spoke the necessary words, and opened his mind’s eye.
He was not standing in the Pinnacle any more. Waves struck him – not the rancid currents of the empyrean, but a bitter sea, stretching out from a grey shore beneath dark clouds. The surf glittered, pearlescent, as it came sweeping in, the wind-driven spume taking on a multihued shimmer in the slowly gathering twilight. The view had a savage majesty to it, the air cold and quick and clear.
Te Kahurangi would have found himself missing it, if he’d had time for such luxuries.
He was standing on the shingle, the waves rushing up about his greaves, his blue armour damp with the salty air and his white hair lank and dripping. There was another figure just a few paces away. He was a man, dressed in simple russet-and-black robes, his cowl lowered. His left eye was an augmetic, the green lens a small disc of digital colour in the slate-grey landscape. The rest of his face was young and lean, his scalp shaved and inked with a numerical code.
‘Where am I?’ the young man asked as his gaze – flesh and machine both – fixed on Te Kahurangi.
‘I have brought you to my home,’ the Carcharodon answered. ‘Please, sit.’
He indicated a sea-drenched boulder standing between them. The adept did not move.
‘This is…’ He trailed off, and looked down at his hands in apparent confusion. They were skin and bone – the bionic eye was the only augmetic he had received thus far from his masters.
‘This is wrong,’ he said eventually.
‘What is wrong about it?’ Te Kahurangi asked.
The adept refused to answer.
‘Tell me your name,’ Te Kahurangi said. Still the adept was silent. He drew the sleeve of his robe back to inspect his arm, likewise flesh, seemingly confused by it.
