Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 28
‘Do you not remember it?’ Te Kahurangi asked him patiently. ‘Do you not remember your own self?’
‘Names have power,’ the adept murmured, almost to himself, then looked back up at Te Kahurangi, his expression hardening.
‘Names have power,’ he repeated, more firmly this time. ‘That is one of the Primordial Truths. All my life, I have sought truth. Truth leads to enlightenment, it leads to progress. It leads to power. And I do not wish you to have power over me.’
‘It would be nothing but the power to set you free,’ Te Kahurangi said.
‘A psyker’s trick,’ the adept replied, a faint smile passing over his damp lips. He glanced around as though he had only just properly awoken from a dream and come to terms with his surroundings. ‘Shouldn’t there be a regicide board for us to play over while we philosophise?’
‘I am not here to game, or philosophise,’ Te Kahurangi said with a phantom smile of his own. ‘I am here to destroy you.’
He snatched the adept by the back of the head and slammed his face into the boulder’s edge.
The whole enginarium was disintegrating around Khauri and the Exiles.
The generators and the engine block itself were blazing with frenzied wrath, whatever sane fragments of the Sire of Belaphrone’s ancient machine spirit remained finally roused to suicidal vengeance. Khauri hoped that, even without his wards and Blood Eye’s Lingua Technis benedictions, the ship would not relent.
Everything not warded was being rent asunder by the madness of the Arkifane. The fell powers had turned the very fabric of the ship against the Carcharodons, moulding terrors from the superstructure and setting them on the Space Marines. The decking plates were becoming bubbling pits of molten metal, while the walls and ceiling flowed and re-formed, reaching for them with liquid claws.
Khauri, Sharr and Talon rallied on the platform where Blood Eye was continuing to preside over the engine’s operation, the warding marks the Librarian had made in its structure keeping the molten-metal horde at bay, for the time being.
‘Will it hold?’ Sharr demanded, a sweep of Reaper’s head indicating the block. Part of its internals had caught fire, and the vibrations were shaking loose bolts and outer plates, even as everything around it was rent by maddening flux.
‘Rangu willing,’ Blood Eye grunted, not taking his eyes off his work as he adjusted a set of dials. Sharr glanced at Khauri.
‘Are you prepared for what comes next?’ he asked.
‘As much as I ever could be,’ the Codicier replied, looking grim. ‘My question is, are you?’
CHAPTER XXVIII
Third Company moved to close order around the tip of the spear, pauldron to pauldron. Red Tane was at the razor edge, feet planted, body burning with stimms and combat adrenaline as he worked. Block, stab, parry, slash. Scythe down the chaff. It was mechanical, lethal, and when it ended it was almost the death of him.
The Void Sword rebounded from something with a force that jarred up his arm. He had been so lost to the rhythm of the slaughter that he had failed to identify his next target as something more than screeching, scrabbling, twisting mutant scum.
It was tall, as tall as a Primaris, and riven with a kind of squalid machine-mutation beyond even those exhibited by the rest of the cult. As Red Tane adjusted to engage it properly, he saw metallic bones sheathe its squirming flesh in an exoskeleton; one abnormally bulky arm reshaped itself into a twisted-looking rifle with a bone-blade that formed a bayonet at the end. Red Tane’s blow rebounded from its semi-metallic shoulder, and it drove its freshly formed weapon inside his guard.
For the first time since going to close order, the Company Champion was forced to shift his stance. The bone-blade hammered against his flank with unnatural force, punching through ceramite and plasteel. His visor, its display a malfunctioning mess, stuttered as it attempted to inform him of his injury.
He slammed the Coral Shield against what passed for the weapon’s barrel, forcing it away from him, his blood running down his left side before the wound sealed.
Coral Shield up, drive back in, regain the initiative. He swung the Void Sword overhand, a kill-blow to the head. It cracked ferociously against the construct’s deformed skull but failed to split it, merely parting flesh to expose unyielding metal beneath. The blow deflected down against the shoulder and off to the side.
Red Tane had never encountered anything that could withstand such a strike from the relic weapon. As he watched, the flesh knitted back together, restoring the blasphemous rune inscribed into the thing’s forehead.
It drove at him again, its limbs whirring mechanically, shrieking in a voice that sounded like a garbled, pleading vox-transmission. The blade jarred off the Coral Shield, scarring its rough surface. Red Tane lunged in again, this time aiming between its ribs, trying to spear through into the meat of its body. Even as he did so, his subconscious view of the surrounding melee formed a grim realisation.
Whatever this possessed construct was, it wasn’t alone.
Te Kahurangi ransacked the monster’s mind.
He dived down through the filth of its consciousness, forging through the mire of corruption, feeling it gnawing at his own soul. It made him want to choke and retch, but he would not give up, would not let go.
Te Kahurangi saw the thing’s past, learned its name. Voldire, an adept of Diamantus, mistreated and misunderstood. Cast out of the priesthood, abandoned to wander a lonely path. But his mind was keen. His intellect was great, and it demanded expression. He had dabbled in ever-higher forms of knowledge, not seeing the chasm that yawned beneath him. And then, inevitably, he had fallen.
Chaos was the architect. Chaos had helped him build his palace of madness, sharpening and honing his mind almost beyond recognition even as it fought to likewise change his body. Voldire thought he could control it, master it, turn it towards noble ends. They always did.
But there was more to his homecoming than just a desire to inflict the curses that had befallen him on those who had once cast him out. Some scheme, birthed out of twisted logic, the device of a savant who had lost his mind. Te Kahurangi lashed through the psychic morass, grasped at it, and finally understood it.
They were back on the cold, hard shoreline. Blood poured from the young adept’s split skull. He was laughing though, laughing even as Te Kahurangi beat his head against the rock. His body had started to shift under his red-black robes, crunches and wet snapping sounds marking the splitting of bones and the swelling and rupturing of organs. The robes began to tear around blistering metal tumours. Unchecked machine growth wracked his form as the tide dashed against them both.
Te Kahurangi knew that he did not have the strength to destroy the monster, not while they were both still submerged in the empyrean.
He let go and returned to the throne room of Diamantus, shaking, struck blind, deaf and dumb by the etheric backlash. He mouthed litanies he had learned millennia ago in the silence engulfing him, his body freezing and rigid, until his mind was his own once more.
He stood again amidst the carnage of the Pinnacle. The thing that had once been Voldire was still dragging itself free from the rock of Diamantus, towering above the wedge of Space Marines and skitarii as they resisted the deranged hordes. Te Kahurangi inhaled the reeking, festering air, and made himself refocus, digging deeper into his reserves.
He could not destroy Voldire alone, but that had never been his intention.
He dared to reach out with his mind again, like a lone sailor in a coracle forging out into a vast storm.
Seeking the one who had called him here, the one he feared would yet be the undoing of them all.
Searching for Khauri.
Khauri screamed words that made Sharr’s ears bleed.
This was not High Gothic. It was not, he suspected, even the sanctified incantations practised by the Librarius. It was something that came from the darkest places, using knowledge he had not learned from any codex or grimoire in the Nicor’s gen-bays, knowledge which could only have been sanctioned by the Pale Nomad.
The space behind the engine’s control platform became blotched with darkness, like an ink spot spreading through the scalding air. It grew, and as Sharr gazed into it he realised it was a tunnel of shifting, umbral shapes, conjured into reality by Khauri’s curses.
‘Follow me,’ the Librarian said, voice tight with effort. ‘Do not listen to what the shadows tell you. Do not stray.’
Without further warning or explanation, he stepped from the platform and into the portal. The shadows reached for him, embracing him and drawing him on.
‘Warpcraft,’ Talon growled beside Sharr. ‘He leads us to damnation.’
‘We are already amidst it,’ Sharr said humourlessly, not needing to indicate the screaming, twisting metal surrounding them and the blood sigils sizzling below.
He took a step towards the portal, before being checked by Blood Eye’s words, shouted over the roaring of the engine and the howling of the warping chamber.
‘I will stay!’
‘It means death,’ Sharr told him.
‘It means ensuring the engine does not falter,’ Blood Eye replied. ‘I will remind it that vengeance is there for it to take. I will not let it go out a second time.’
Sharr nodded once, then glanced at Talon. The other Exile’s blunt, sweat-drenched features were set.
‘Lead on, Blind One,’ he said.
Reaper poised, Sharr turned his back on the furnace chamber and walked into the shadows’ embrace.
The line was beginning to break.
Kordi reloaded. Three magazines left. He had been conserving since the start of the engagement, but every round was now a prisoner. He switched out to his chainsword.
One of the chamber’s pillars was just ahead of Second Squad, and the corruption flooding from it was ceaseless. The firepower of the Carcharodons had heaped up a mound of burst-apart corpses and wrecked war engines ahead of it, yet still the nightmares clawed and crawled through. The pillar’s flesh was bleeding ichor as it split wider and wider, and an infernal skyline was visible beyond, a cursed forge that was trying to force its connection with the material plane, eternally corrupting Diamantus in the process.
The Carcharodons couldn’t hold them at bay forever. In close order they had stemmed the tide, but it was starting to lap around them now, bowing the flanks back and threatening to force a defensive circle. The Devourers of Seventh and Eighth Squad were drenched head to boot in viscera, working tirelessly to hold the edges of the formation.
‘More contacts,’ Kordi heard Neku shout, communication over vocaliser easier now the Space Marines were fighting almost shoulder to shoulder. He saw immediately what the veteran Firstborn meant. Another daemon engine was dragging its way through the pillar portal, a slab-like brute of burning warpsteel and thick knots of tendon cabling, moving on its heavy forearms like a hulking simian as it mounted the mound of its slaughtered kin. The metal fangs of its elongated head parted in a roar, etheric flames broiling from its gullet.
Kordi drove his chainsword through the chest of a spawn-thing beating at him with its spine-fists, revving until its cavity was gutted and then kicking the squealing remains back into the press. He was shouting for Wiremu even as he did so, but the heavy-weapons specialist appeared alongside him, uttering a single word as he cut down more mutants charging at them with his bolt pistol.
‘Out.’
Kordi realised the Executor was empty – it had likely used its last rounds shearing the legs off a stalk tank that had come scrambling out of the pillar minutes earlier. The heavy weapon was now slung and clamped to Wiremu’s side, leaving him with just his sidearm.
‘Grenades,’ Kordi said, seeing no alternative way of stopping the daemon engine. It was coming down off its corpse-perch, working up into a lumbering run. It knocked cultists out of its path with its heavy forelimbs, the vents along its back churning foetid smoke and the ashes of the mortals that had been fed to it as part of its binding ritual. If it kept coming, Kordi knew it would smash straight through Second Squad.
He snapped a grenade from his belt, just as the distinctive discharges of plasma weaponry rang out. Beams of crackling blue brilliance slammed into the machine-beast, scorching and deforming its armour plating and forcing it to put its head down as it came on, as though it was charging into the heart of a storm.
‘We are with you, Omekra-five-one-Kordi,’ said a now-familiar voice. Neku shifted to admit Ze-One-Prime to Kordi’s side, the hunched dominus regarding him with one optic stalk even as the other kept its gaze on the foe, allowing them to snap off a flurry of shots with their weaponised mechadendrites.
‘You’ve committed the reserve?’ Kordi demanded, seeing skitarii moving in amongst his brethren, adding their firepower to the waning fusillade. The cult infantry were cut apart, but the daemon engine came on, shaking off the plasma blasts from several rad-trooper gunners like a grox teased by bloodwasps.
‘I judged that waiting any longer would be suboptimal,’ Ze-One-Prime admitted as they continued to fire.
Kordi said nothing more to the dominus, but took the opportunity to step out of the line and look back for Ninth Squad. The heavy-weapons specialists had been providing fire support at the base of the spearhead, but he needed at least some of their strength with him on the right of the line.
‘Rapata,’ he bellowed, catching sight of two members of the squad, Rapata and Torvalu, reloading their missile launchers amidst a scattering of wrecked, smoking cogitators. Rapata raised a clenched gauntlet towards Kordi in acknowledgement.
For want of helmet interfacing and proper target locks, Kordi pointed his dripping chainsword towards the oncoming daemon engine, feeling the flesh beneath his boots begin to shudder with the impacts of the charging monstrosity.
‘Bring it down!’
Rapata rose and loped from his position towards Kordi, the strike leader dropping further back to make space for him in the line. The daemon engine was just a few dozen yards away now, head lowered, spumes of ichor and torn innards spurting around its limbs as they ploughed up the floor of the hell-cavern.
Rapata braced and fired. Twin missiles streaked from the tubes of his superkrak rocket launcher, the sanctified warheads barely able to arm before they collided with their target. One corkscrewed to the right at the last moment, clipping the engine’s hunched shoulder and detonating against one of its vents, wrenching it away without doing any further damage. The other struck true, impacting into the centre of the armoured cranium and drilling into the ferro-organic matter within before detonating.
The blast blew the engine’s head to splinters of burning metal and was channelled along its segmented neck and into the core of its being. Warpfire blazed from it, and its charge faltered, the ear-aching, metal-on-metal screeching of the daemon within as it was forcefully unbound rising over the carnage.
Kordi knew instantly that the engine’s death wouldn’t be enough to halt its charge. Even as Rapata fired he was snatching at Ze-One-Prime and hauling them to one side, barking at the rest of Second Squad to split. The daemon engine came careening on, falling as it went, blazing with venting warpfire, the steel of its chassis deforming with howling faces and yawning maws.
It ploughed a gory furrow through the infected flesh of the throne room’s floor, crushing several skitarii caught in its path. Its momentum only halted when it became fully ensnared in the intestinal wires covering the ground.
‘Close the breach,’ Kordi ordered, moving back towards the gap the engine had caused. It was still partially in between the squad, so he mounted one of its limbs, boots kicking out the smouldering hellfire and clamping to its krak-scarred shoulder as he switched back to his boltgun and sent a lightning-fast flurry of shots down into the mutants attempting to rush the sudden hole in the line.
It wasn’t enough. They were swarming the breach, clawing up onto the daemon engine and raining blows on the Carcharodons and skitarii on either side with fists and blades and disfigured appendages. Kordi spent the last of his frag grenades clearing his front, and there was a flurry of small detonations as Rapata mounted the wreckage next to him and fired his Castellan launcher.
‘I’m out,’ he said grimly, stowing the smoking weapon and switching to his bolt pistol. ‘Most of Ninth is the same.’
Kordi used the brief reprieve to make another assessment. From the vantage on top of the slain daemon engine he could see the tip of the spear, lit by the green glow of the Pale Nomad’s staff. The wedge was being even more desperately assailed than the other sections of the line. There was something beyond it as well, some gigantic, warped edifice drawing ponderously closer through the mist of shredded organics, warpfire and smoke. Kordi could only assume it was their objective.
There were Archenemy forces within the defensive perimeter too. They were a heartbeat from being overrun.
‘Ihu,’ he bellowed, down at where the void brother he was seeking was slamming his final magazine home into his boltgun. He looked up, and Kordi signalled whilst shouting.
‘It’s time! The beacon!’
A rune on the arm-rest of the White Maw’s command throne lit up.
Kino had been sitting in brooding silence for hours, listening to the slow, steady tremors that ran through the ship with each discharge of its prow macrocannon as it ploughed through the ruination above Mount Antikythera.
But the rune changed everything.
Techmarine Uthulu, working on the exposed internals of one of the bridge cogitators nearby, had noticed it too. He rose and approached the coral throne, speaking.
‘That is the teleport beacon alert,’ he said.
Kino knew as much. He stared at it, breath held, assessing each possibility in a flurry. Someone on the surface of Diamantus had activated one of the Third Company’s portable beacons, providing a geolocation fix and dramatically improving the possibility of a safe and accurate descent by teleportation.
