Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 29
‘Get me coordinates,’ Kino demanded of Teko, who had risen from the fire control pit, where he had been overseeing the ongoing destruction of the debris that lay between the strike cruiser and the orbital point directly above Mount Antikythera.
The shipmaster strode to a viewscreen and linked the data that had just pinged to the ship’s cogitator.
‘It appears to be within the Pinnacle of Mount Antikythera,’ he said after a moment’s analysis. ‘I have inloaded the exact coordinates to your armour.’
‘Third Company is there,’ Kino declared.
‘Not necessarily,’ Teko cautioned. ‘It could be a malfunction of either the beacon or our own sensors, accidental or part of the Archenemy’s malfeasance. Or the beacon may have been captured and triggered deliberately. It could be a trap. We have no way of telling what you would be teleporting into.’
‘I know,’ Kino said tersely. ‘The other alternative is that the company are engaged in the defence of the Pinnacle, and have conceived of the beacon as both a signal and a means of bringing down reinforcements. That is how I would use it. Uthulu, have you finished the re-sanctification of the teleportarium?’
‘To the best of my abilities, yes,’ Uthulu said. ‘I would be more reassured if Codicier Khauri had reinscribed the wards, but it is functioning.’
‘And with a beacon to lock on to, what would you say the odds of a successful translation are?’
Uthulu hesitated, but only for a moment.
‘I cannot vouch for how the Archenemy’s trickery might change things. I have never known such tech-heresy, and everything the venerable shipmaster has suggested could be true. But with the beacon active, I estimate that the odds are fair.’
‘Ready the teleportarium,’ Kino ordered him.
‘Should we also awaken the Ancients?’ Teko wondered. ‘We may need every weapon in the Third Company’s arsenal.’
‘It is unlikely a traditional orbital descent could penetrate both the choked atmosphere and the wreckage atop the Pinnacle,’ Uthulu pointed out. ‘It may even risk their destruction.’
‘The Dreadnoughts will remain undisturbed,’ Kino said before starting to issue orders to the Terminators arrayed around his commandeered throne.
‘I request that I be allowed to accompany you, Company Master,’ Uthulu said, daring to interrupt. ‘I understand Chapter doctrine about our preservation, but this has the hallmarks of a point of decision, and remaining here would be a dereliction of my duty.’
‘You understand the risks,’ Kino said. ‘On that basis, I grant you permission.’
The Company Master turned his attention to Teko.
‘How long until we’ve achieved geo-lock above the mountain?’
‘We are almost through the last of the debris,’ Teko said. ‘We can likely force the remainder, though it will overwhelm the shields and cause damage to the White Maw’s superstructure.’
‘A necessary sacrifice,’ Kino said without hesitation. ‘The time to strike is long overdue.’
Khauri walked among shadows.
Some clawed at him and some caressed him, whispering things he refused to understand. They formed a tunnel of smoke and shifting shapes ahead of him, coiling and dancing around the harsh light of his stab-lumen. The heat and fury of the enginarium was like a dream he had awoken from, already fading into oblivion.
He halted for a moment, muttering his wards and looking back for the two Exiles. They were with him still, their expressions dark.
‘Stay close, do not stray,’ he ordered, suspecting the instructions were unnecessary.
They forged on into the dark. The smoke that comprised the tunnel eddied, as though churned into motion by an ethereal wind. It parted in places, and while Khauri did his best to keep his eyes fixed on the inky nothingness ahead, he couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of what lay to the side.
It was a stone passage, rough-hewn through bedrock. A secondary tunnel branched off to the right, revealed by the parting shadows. There were three figures in it, all in grubby prison overalls. One was prostrated on the floor while the other two beat and struck at him.
The figure on the ground looked up at Khauri, crying out, reaching, as though pleading for his help. His voice sounded distant, as if echoing from some fathomless space that was swallowing him up.
Despite his mental warding, and despite the fact that he did not recognise the face of the pleading figure, a moment’s anguish gripped Khauri, a regret so potent, so palpable, that it left a bitter taste in his mouth.
He forced himself to walk on, and the shadows coiled back over the scene just as, with a hideously loud crunch, one of the attackers split the pleading man’s head open.
A few steps further, and he heard a growl coming from behind. He turned sharply and snatched Bail Sharr’s wrist. The Exile looked at him as if only seeing him for the first time. He had been about to fully trigger Reaper, the chainaxe snarling softly in his grip.
‘They are not real,’ Khauri told him, not even asking what it was the former Company Master had seen in the shadows. ‘Keep walking.’
That seemed to anger the shadows. They grew closer as the trio carried on, scraping against Khauri’s pauldrons. He could feel their breath on his bared face. Distant screaming drifted through the sinister passage – voices in eternal torment. Or were they klaxons, marking an end to the day’s toil?
‘Hurry,’ Khauri urged, without looking back.
His head had started to ache.
Sharr passed through the tunnel of shades, fighting the urge to lash out as they cackled and leered at him.
He saw things as he went, scenes of horror that played out wherever the curtain of smoke drew back. At one point he witnessed terrible, predatory beings wielding chainswords that rose and fell as they chopped apart pleading men and women like so many butcher’s carcasses. In another, an old woman begged as she was hauled by grey-armoured giants towards the yawning maws of beached landing shuttles. She reached out to Sharr as though she knew him, calling a name he did not recognise.
He recalled none of what he was seeing, and yet a part of him understood it all. They were the things that had been buried and forgotten in the dark, but not destroyed. It was the shadow cast by his soul, summoned by the potency of Khauri’s witchcraft.
He saw the phantom of the Pale Nomad, black eyes boring into his own, speaking the name he had first given him centuries ago. He saw another visage he had not witnessed for so long, the pale, tattooed, vicious face of Akia, his old Company Master. And he saw another Space Marine, this one no loyal servant of the Imperium but a butcher in baroque battle plate, wielding a chainaxe of his own.
That was when it had almost become too much, when he had felt the Blindness rising once more, hands tense on Reaper’s haft and trigger. Khauri had turned and admonished him, and had been right to do so. This was warpcraft, trying to weaken and trick. He could tell from Talon’s short, panted breathing that the other Exile was wrestling with visions that were goading him to bloodlust. Sharr briefly grasped Talon’s wrist in the way Khauri had held his, looking him in the eye.
‘Focus,’ he said. ‘There are no answers in this place. It will not be our ending.’
They pressed on after Khauri, and as they went the passage seemed to constrict. The shadows grew more vicious, pressing in and striking at them, their whispers turning to spiteful hisses. One drew blood from Sharr’s cheek, phantom claws causing corporeal damage. Sharr bared his teeth and carried on, until instinct brought him up just short of Khauri’s reactor pack.
The Librarian had halted. He realised why a heartbeat later.
They were not in a tunnel any more. The cloying darkness remained, but it was clear now that the space they occupied was larger, yawning around them. The whispering and hissing and snarling had intensified as well, an unsettling susurration that frayed at the very edges of Sharr’s consciousness, inspiring instinctive aggression.
‘I have lost the path,’ the Librarian whispered, voice a dry rasp. ‘It was right here, but…’
The whispering turned to laughter, soft giggling at first, but rising to a manic cacophony.
Claws raked at Sharr. He activated Reaper and swung, teeth bared, but the things simply disintegrated and re-formed.
The three Space Marines went back to back, weapons held defensively, as a blizzard of razored darkness descended on them, slashing and screeching.
‘Damn you, witch, you’ve doomed us,’ Talon bellowed as he swung his club, trying in vain to ward off the ghostly assault.
Khauri was too busy chanting to reply. Witchfire kindled around the head of his force staff, and for a brief moment the shades drew back from the pale luminance, their shrieks of laughter guttering and fading.
‘Look for the path,’ Khauri said. ‘I can still feel it.’
‘There,’ Talon said, pointing with his club. Sharr followed the gesture, and saw a glimmering beyond the small sphere of light Khauri had cast. He recognised it.
‘Go,’ Khauri said.
They moved towards it.
Coldness bit Khauri to the core, and it was all he could do to keep his staff raised and follow after the two Exiles.
He should never have brought them here. Better to have perished in the enginarium with a chance at leaving their souls intact than become an eternal feast for the thing that called this place home.
It was Te Kahurangi who might yet save them, Te Kahurangi whose light had become a beacon in the dark. That, or he was simply another illusion, a trick designed to hasten them on the last few steps to damnation.
The Exiles had almost reached the green light, so bright now it was almost blinding. Khauri could hear the Pale Nomad’s voice echoing distantly through his thoughts.
Hurry. I cannot hold it for long.+
The shapes of the two Carcharodons were becoming indistinct as they stepped into the blaze.
A shadow, greater than all the others, billowed before Khauri, forcing him to stop. It did not retreat before his witchfire. It leered over him, its words like knives in his skull.
Why are you leaving me, my apprentice?
‘You are not my master,’ Khauri snarled.
The apparition laughed at him. It had a shape now, less nebulous than roiling shadows, a tall, slender woman garbed in a black dress, her face covered by a mourning veil.
Yet I have taught you so much, hissed the voice. I, and not that weak fool you now run to.
The woman reached towards him, yet it was no longer a woman, but another Space Marine, helmet horned, a scythe clutched in one fist. Midnight-clad. It reached out and grasped the top of his staff, snuffing out his witchfire.
Khauri jerked back.
You will never escape, the voice told him. I have marked you, Mika Doren Skell.
Pain suffused his back, and he felt blood running from the scars there, from injuries he had borne since before his initiation into the Chapter. Wounds he knew would never truly heal.
The shadows surged around him, screeching, clawing. He drove through them, incantations on his lips, hoarfrost coating his armour and numbing his skin. On he went, through the screaming dark and towards where the last of the Pale Nomad’s luminance was guttering out.
With a final, desperate effort, he threw himself at the light.
CHAPTER XXIX
With a flash like lightning and a crash like thunder, Kino and the Red Brethren materialised in the centre of the Carcharodons’ formation.
The Terminators assessed the situation with the speed of veterans who had fought in dozens of teleportation assaults. Kino split his squad into two wings and sent them to bolster the bowing flanks, while he strode towards the formation’s head.
Uthulu was with them. He began canting in Lingua Technis while dispensing the extra ammunition he had clamped across his armour.
‘You are a welcome sight, brother,’ Kordi called down from atop the slain daemon engine, catching a spare magazine tossed up to him.
‘Half thought this was going to be a trap,’ Uthulu replied as he moved on down the line.
‘Who says it isn’t?’ Kordi said, picking his next target.
The Red Brethren joined the line, moving up between Second and Third Squads. Incaladion-pattern storm bolters and a Mark II Absinia heavy assault cannon decimated the next wave of mutants, sweeping them aside before focusing on another stalk tank that was vomiting disintegrating toxic slurry over a knot of Ze-One-Prime’s skitarii. The machine was ripped open and broken into pieces by the concentrated firepower.
Kordi took the moment’s reprieve to clamber down from the engine’s back and re-establish the line. Ze-One-Prime and the remains of their skitarii were still alongside them.
‘Is this what you hoped for, when you spoke of vengeance?’ Kordi asked them, indicating the devastation being wreaked. The magos dominus, their serene mask spattered with daemonic ichor, let out a dry laugh from their vox-stalk.
‘It is a start, Omekra-five-one-Kordi.’
Red Tane knocked down and impaled the daemon construct so ferociously that he drove the Void Sword through its ribs to the hilt, the black blade carving through its biomechanical innards and into the infested floor underneath.
He knelt on its chest as it clawed at him and slammed the rim of the Coral Shield down against its face over and over and over, until there was a cracking sound. An eye socket fractured, then its nose, then its metallic teeth. It continued to warp and change even as he beat it to death, but eventually the cranium came apart in a flare of warpfire. The mutated, scrapcode-infected remains slumped, their mutations finally ceasing.
Red Tane reversed his grip on his sword’s hilt and wrenched it free with a low growl. He had been cut and gouged in half a dozen places, and his left pauldron had been sawed almost in two. He had found they could be killed, though, and that was all that mattered.
There were more of them assaulting the tip of the spear, and without the sudden rush of skitarii reinforcements, they would have been overwhelmed. Red Tane turned to his right, where another of the deformed horrors had just discharged its strange rifle, point-blank, at several Mechanicus soldiers. It spewed mutating, multicoloured warpflames, igniting the robes of the skitarii and sending their organic components into spasms of uncontrolled change. Their vocal units let out scraping shrieks as they collapsed, devolving into mewling spawn, still fused to their augmetics.
Red Tane charged the infested construct that had fired at them, knowing it was about to breach the line. The barrel of its burning weapon swung towards him, but the Coral Shield was equal to its second discharge, the corrupting flames blazing from its scarred surface but failing to find purchase in Red Tane’s flesh.
He struck a blow to the morass of metallic tendrils that seemed to pass for its head, forcing it to raise its flesh-fused weapon limbs to parry before going for the centre of its morphing body mass, hoping to lance the corruption churning through it. Instead, the construct just took the hits and slammed back.
This time it was Red Tane’s turn to be unbalanced. He was forced to retreat, creating the danger of a gap in the line. The monstrosity kept driving at him, swinging the sawblade on the end of its barrel as its tendrils writhed and twitched, catching the Coral Shield and hooking it to the right. It stamped at him next with one cloven metal hoof that smouldered with perpetual forge-fire, the unnatural metal connecting with his greave. There was a crack as ceramite split, and this time Red Tane couldn’t resist the combination of force and gravity’s pull. He fell back, ichor spurting over him as his landing crushed a section of the mulch floor.
The thing took a pace forward so it was standing over him, the skin of its chest peeling back like an overripe fruit to expose slick machine parts that in turn shrieked open into a yawning maw. Behind it, Red Tane saw an even greater madness rising up out of the fog of battle, a monstrosity born from impossibility. The flesh-mountain was dragging itself towards the Carcharodons, bearing down on them now. Its sheer bulk alone would crush them, absorbing them into its foulness.
The mutant machine planted its metal hoof on Red Tane’s chest, pinning him, and raised its rifle to his helm.
The Blindness gripped the Company Champion. Panting with mindless rage, he hacked the Void Sword into the thing’s shin, but the blade simply rebounded. He saw the sickly light within the monster’s remoulded weapon flare, heard the shrieking of the daemonic flames as they rose to spew from the jagged maw-muzzle and engulf him.
Then a greater sound eclipsed them.
Reaper came roaring from nowhere, striking the construct in what passed for its throat. Black ichor and bursts of sparks flew and the chainaxe’s roar became a splitting howl as Bail Sharr stepped over Red Tane and revved the motor while applying every ounce of strength in his body.
The mutant construct juddered, forced to one side by the sheer power of Sharr’s strike. With one last screech, it was decapitated, the warpfire fuelling it blazing and howling from it as it began to unravel and break down.
Sharr reached down and offered a hand. Red Tane grasped his forearm with the arm the Coral Shield was clamped to, accepting the Exile’s assistance in hauling himself up out of the intestinal muck. His frenzy was gone, banished by the sudden appearance of his old Company Master.
He made to thank Sharr, but he had already moved on, deeper into the fray.
Khauri regained full consciousness as he clambered to his feet. He didn’t remember what had happened as he plunged for the light, but the shadows were gone.
He was in a place of chaos and carnage, but Te Kahurangi was with him.
‘I heard you,’ Khauri said, briefly clasping Te Kahurangi’s gauntlet. The Pale Nomad looked more worn than he had ever seen him, and when he spoke, his voice was a deathly, urgent rasp.
