Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 30
‘The enginarium?’
‘Active,’ Khauri answered. ‘We likely have minutes before it overloads, or drives the remnants of the ship down through our midst.’
That had always been the plan. The frontal assault by the greater part of the company had been designed to draw the Archenemy’s attention while Khauri’s small infiltration force sought to do what the Exiles had already attempted – reigniting the engine of one of the ships buried in the remains of Grim Destiny. The level of destruction that would follow was the best hope of unmaking the blasphemous work being carried out in the Pinnacle.
‘We should withdraw, while we yet can,’ Khauri suggested.
‘We cannot,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Our intuitions were correct. The master of this part of the Cult of the Arkifane does not just seek to open portals and wed Diamantus with the hell-forges of his master. He is attempting to fashion immortality. I read his mind. Tried to destroy it, but…’
He trailed off, likely loath to admit that, in the midst of the broiling wrath of the empyrean churning through the Pinnacle, he had been unable to vanquish the foulness that now reigned over the planet.
‘Will the ship’s destruction not be enough to end it all?’ Khauri asked.
‘I am no longer certain. This fallen priest may already have claimed his eternal reward.’
‘All such slaves of Chaos seek ascension,’ Khauri said.
‘But this one, Voldire, and his coven do not seek it in the usual manner, they…’ Te Kahurangi paused again, baring his sharpened teeth in exhausted frustration. He clearly had neither the time nor strength for explanations. Instead, he reached up and pressed his index and middle fingers to Khauri’s brow.
The Codicier hissed at the pain that spiked through his skull, but it brought with it understanding, a psychic imprint of the horrors the Pale Nomad had been delving into.
Voldire the Datagnost, former adept of the forge world of Diamantus, was a genius. He was also irredeemably insane. He had been working with similarly twisted polymaths in the Dark Mechanicum and the Cult of the Arkifane to induce daemonic ascension. While all other adherents to the Ruinous Powers viewed the possibility of daemonic immortality as an unknowable boon that could only be won through faith and bloody sacrifice, Voldire treated it as a quantifiable scientific trial. As part of an increasingly warped quest for enlightenment, he compiled lengthy experimentation – at the cost of billions of lives and the destruction of whole worlds – into the theory that daemonic ascension was something that could be engineered.
‘He wishes to become a daemon prince by scientific artifice,’ Khauri said disbelievingly. ‘He believes he can count the exact number of sacrifices, the correct litanies, the Rituals of Sympathy…’
‘And that is the outcome of his ambitions,’ Te Kahurangi replied, and gestured with his staff.
Khauri looked up and saw damnation towering over them. The thing that had once been Adept Voldire was a mountain of writhing horror, dragging itself ponderously nearer to the Carcharodons, looming larger with every moment.
‘I do not know if what we had planned before will destroy him,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘And I cannot break his mind alone. But together, we might have a chance.’
‘Not if it is only the two of us,’ Khauri said.
Sharr killed, and in doing so discovered that he was free.
Mutated experiments, cackling mechanoidal daemons, raving cult soldiers, squirming spawn – Reaper took them all, and Sharr felt nothing. Behind every vicious swing, punch and stamp, every parry and block and counter, there was a cold oblivion. With it he was able to find focus, the keenness of a blade that, after years of disuse, had finally been given a fresh edge.
He was destruction, the doom of the Imperium’s enemies, but he was also something more. Third Company was with him, and that gave him purpose, something beyond the slaughter.
He could not account for how he had come to be in the nightmare chamber. He remembered the Pale Nomad’s light blazing into his eyes, then nothingness, and the next thing his mind registered was impacts against his armour and the feeling of Reaper shivering in his grip as it chewed through the body of a mewling spawn-thing. He had found Red Tane before him, the Third Battle Company around him, and his mind whole once more.
Khauri had survived his witchcraft. His words intruded on the killing, spoken into the nothingness of Sharr’s inner being.
Return to us.+
Sharr obeyed almost instinctively, disengaging. He stepped back into the tip of the company’s spearhead, through the twitching, trampled, dismembered channel he had carved into the heart of the Archenemy assault.
The master of the madness towered over him. It had dragged itself into view through the miasma of filth that fogged the chamber, the most horrifically warped, deformed monstrosity Sharr had ever gazed upon. Whether it had been summoned from one of the warp portals ripping space itself apart around them, or whether it had somehow been created in this very place, Sharr neither knew nor cared. The sight of it made his skull throb and inspired the purest kind of revulsion.
And yet, he withdrew before it, back behind Red Tane and Nuritona, Tama and Ihaia, to where Khauri and Te Kahurangi stood, gaunt, drained, ferocious. Talon was with them as well, having made it through the shadows with Sharr.
‘We must destroy it,’ Te Kahurangi rasped. ‘But it is strong. Its corruption runs deep. The assault must be physical as well as mental.’
‘I will butcher it,’ Sharr said bluntly.
‘That will take longer than we have. Your work in the Sire of Belaphrone will soon be complete, but it may not be enough. That is why we must make sure.’
‘What of the rest of the company?’ Sharr demanded.
The Librarians said nothing.
‘Nuritona,’ Sharr barked, turning away from them. He saw the strike veteran kick the mutating cultist he’d just gutted off him and take a half-step back, enough to glance towards Sharr.
‘Begin withdrawing the company, ebb-tide pattern,’ Sharr ordered. ‘First Squad and the Red Brethren will form the rearguard.’
‘You do not give orders here, Exile,’ shouted a voice. Kino came thundering through the carnage, his power fist ignited, the twin barrels of his storm bolter smoking.
‘I am your Company Master, and you obey me,’ the former First Company veteran snapped at Nuritona, pointing with one heavy, lightning-infused digit. ‘Not these witches, and certainly not this damned Exile!’
‘Then what are your orders, Company Master?’ Nuritona asked woodenly.
‘Resume the advance, and destroy that… thing,’ Kino spat, glancing up at the mutant monstrosity as it let out a groan that made the chamber’s flesh shudder and the intestines underfoot writhe and squirm like serpents.
‘This entire chamber is about to be destroyed,’ Khauri said. ‘This assault is a diversion. We have overloaded one of the space hulk’s ship engines, embedded above us.’
‘You brought me here to die?’ Kino snarled.
‘We brought you here to help us buy time,’ Khauri said. ‘But we have done all we can. The company must withdraw, or be destroyed.’
‘My Codicier and Bail Sharr will remain, to ensure the destruction of the Archenemy,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘But the Third Company must be preserved, if possible. So I urge you, Reaper Prime, withdraw while you still can.’
The words were directed at Kino, and seemed to go some way towards piercing his rage. His helmeted head nodded, once.
‘Ebb-tide pattern,’ he ordered Nuritona. ‘Red Brethren, to me!’
As the head of the offensive wedge began to shift, Te Kahurangi looked at Sharr.
‘Go,’ the Pale Nomad said.
Sharr needed neither advice nor further instruction. He hefted Reaper, turned towards the mountain of madness, and charged.
Te Kahurangi and Khauri spoke words of power, alternating each one between them as they bound their spirits and prepared to cast off one more time into the tides of insanity.
Reality had almost completely collapsed in the Pinnacle, rent and torn and holed over and over. Warp entities crowded through into the visible spectrum – not just the daemonic machinery birthed from the infernal forges, but unaligned predators, great shoals of monstrosities drawn by blood and the promise of the materium’s addictive warmth. They ripped their way into the chamber in a feeding frenzy, and the Pale Nomad and his apprentice no longer had the strength to stop them.
They had to spend what they had left wisely. Voldire’s deranged experiment could not be allowed to reach completion.
‘Bring the tide,’ Te Kahurangi told Khauri, so untethered now that he wasn’t sure if he spoke the words, if his lips even moved, or if he slipped the command into the other Librarian’s mind directly.
Their incorporeal essence swept up from the base of Voldire’s form, passing Bail Sharr as he began to storm the flesh-slope, parting only for a moment as they dived around him on either side and turned the hereteks trying to stop him into ragged carcasses. Then they were whole once more and striking with the former Reaper Prime at the peak, at the shrieking, throbbing thing that had once been Voldire the Datagnost.
‘Hold formation,’ Kordi bellowed as he reloaded.
He was down to his last magazine, even after Uthulu’s restock.
Word had come from the tip of the spear. Withdrawal pattern, ebb-tide. Second Squad would join one of the Terminator battle squads in re-forming the vanguard, tasked with punching the company out of the hell-chamber.
Easier said than done. The tactical situation had almost completely collapsed. The throne room was so mutated that the floor was physically attacking the Carcharodons now, limbs and oozing flesh rising to try and drag them down, maws yawning and snapping, growths of bone and metal punching up through the morass without warning. The attacking horde was an indistinguishable wall of pulsating insanity.
Still the formation held, just. Second Squad began to cut their way to the rear, drowning as they went in a sea of warp filth.
Kordi spent half his magazine’s clip on a trio of cultists that had fused themselves into one amorphous nightmare, then locked the firearm, intending to save the last few rounds. His chainsword roared, ploughing through the head-growth of another spawn-thing as it wrenched the bionic limbs from a skitarii rad-trooper.
‘Magos dominus, are you with us?’ he shouted as he pushed to the forefront of the advance, only his squad and the Red Brethren immediately visible around him.
‘Affirmative, Omekra-five-one-Kordi,’ came the tech-priest’s voice, and Kordi caught a glimpse as they struck down a devolving cult soldier with their cane, weapon mounts smoking, drained, their rad-troopers rallying to them.
The whole space had started to quake. The pillars were bursting entirely open, admitting a rush of monstrosities whose wailing intruded through even the hyper-focus of the battling Space Marines. Gobbets of meat and waterfalls of ichor fell upon them from the slowly collapsing ceiling. The daemonic sky visible through the gouge torn by Grim Destiny had started to crack and shatter, like some vast mirror slowly being pressed from above.
‘Hold formation,’ Kordi roared again, the only noise being uttered by the Carcharodons as they struggled through hell. The Terminator to his right – Kordi knew neither his name nor number signifier – was drenched in reeking offal as his power fist demolished a bloated, cable-studded Neverborn.
Kordi forced his way on through the press, chainsword juddering as it continued to chew apart the things that came at him. On his left, he saw that Ateko had been brought down. There was a spider-limbed thing hunched over him, ripping away his visor to feed on his face. Ihu blew it off and hauled Ateko up, the young Carcharodon’s features torn, half blinded.
On his right, Neku had fallen too. A spawn, its brute, muscular frame entirely fleshless and its squirming innards exposed, had latched on to the Firstborn’s leg with a fang-frilled maw. Its gullet was partly translucent, and it was possible to see the acid and rows of teeth gnawing through Neku’s ceramite and plasteel and then his flesh and bone, all while the Carcharodon hacked wildly at the thing with his combat knife.
Kordi shifted right, teeth bared in a silent rictus of effort as he ploughed his chainsword into the spawn, until he’d hewn it in two. Neku tried to rise, but the horror that had once been his right leg gave out.
‘Tama,’ Kordi shouted, having no idea if the Apothecary was anywhere nearby. He reached down and heaved Neku up, helping support him while two of the Red Brethren pushed forward to cover the momentary weakness in the line.
Tama appeared, his white armour almost unrecognisable under the chamber’s vileness. He immediately jabbed a stimm aggressor into one of Neku’s armour interface ports and applied a dose of synth-skin from his narthecium to the worst of the leg’s ruination.
‘Can you take him?’ Kordi demanded.
Tama nodded.
‘Leave me,’ Neku grunted.
‘Ignore the old man,’ Kordi said, passing Neku over and addressing him as he did so. ‘I’ll see you outside.’
Kordi rejoined the edge of the formation just as one of the Terminators with an assault cannon opened fire into the baying mob, scything down everything around the vanguard. The doorway-maw the company had first entered through was visible ahead, amidst the carnage. Melta charges had burned its flesh and fused its teeth, but the gaping, ragged wound was slowly starting to constrict, as though the chamber itself was trying to consume them.
‘Keep it open,’ Kordi barked. The assault cannon buzzed again as the Terminator switched his aim, hard rounds chewing into the portal and gouging it wide.
Kordi was the first through. There was no reprieve. Mutants and Neverborn flung themselves against him on the other side, a sea of monstrosities begging to be slaughtered.
They were going to have to fight their way up and out of the mountain.
‘We must clear a path,’ rasped the assault cannon-wielding Terminator, the first to follow Kordi out.
‘Every step of the way,’ he snarled back grimly, driving on with his chainsword. ‘Every step.’
From being at the tip of the spear, First Squad found itself with the rearguard, Kino and the second Terminator combat squad joining them as they covered the company’s retreat.
Here, the Archenemy assault was at its most ferocious. The chamber had entirely degenerated, the ground seeking to consume the Carcharodons, sizzling black rain from the slowly shattering sky pelting them. Red Tane witnessed one Terminator rendered immobile, his armour betraying him the way the Champion’s once had. Before the others could even hack their way to his side, he simply disappeared beneath the maddening avalanche.
Through it all, Red Tane could still see the Librarians they had been guarding, almost abandoned now against the rising tide of Chaos. The light from Te Kahurangi’s staff was keeping the worst of the monstrosities from attacking them, and one of the Exiles stood guard beside them.
Beyond, the architect of corruption heaved itself closer, yet it no longer did so unopposed. Red Tane could see a figure beginning to climb its side, towards its damnable peak. A figure he recognised.
‘Strike veteran,’ he said, addressing Nuritona even as he cleaved apart a squirming cable-spawn wrapping itself around his ankles. ‘May I have permission to go to Bail Sharr’s side?’
Nuritona had seen what was happening. He glanced towards Kino, who had just sundered another of the daemon constructs with his power fist, then nodded once.
‘If you wish, Champion. Bring him back to us.’
Sharr climbed slopes made of twitching skin and grasping tendrils, snapping maws and roving eyeballs, towards an apex of impossible depravity.
Reaper swung almost every step of the way, cleaving through growths and the wailing remains of the Fabricator General’s court. The great chainaxe wreaked devastation with every stroke, but the sensation of flesh parting and metal shearing, of blood-oil and ichor and unidentifiable filth bursting beneath each vicious bite, meant nothing to Sharr. He was barely even conscious of the carnage, his primary focus on climbing higher. The frenzy that would once have gripped him was gone, only the dullest satisfaction now accompanying the sensation of his relic weapon juddering in his grasp.
He dealt destruction because it served a purpose. It drew the attention of the mountain and its minions away from the Librarians, anchoring the chamber’s foul consciousness on the more obvious threat. On the Reaper Prime, returned.
The hereteks tried to stop him. The architects of Diamantus’ nightmare came at him from left and right, black-robed, mutated machine-things that shrieked binary gibberish. He hewed them down like timber, ignoring their blows, even as the arcane weapons they wielded cracked and split his old armour. The robes of one gaunt, hooded figure parted as it flew at him, emitting a hail of razor-toothed cogs that slammed into his armour, studding his breastplate. Reaper’s strike demolished its blasphemous form. Another heretek launched jars at him that shattered to emit phantoms formed from screeds of numbers and jagged lengths of data-script. He drove on through their ghostly assault, teeth gritted at the chill and the pain that pierced his core.
At one ledge, formed by a spur of bone interwoven with the glittering fractals of circuitry wiring, he dared snatch a glance back. Te Kahurangi and Khauri were still at the slope’s base, guarded by Talon and by the light of the Pale Nomad’s staff. Beyond them, half veiled by the miasma, it looked as though the remnants of Third Company had almost reached the chamber’s entrance.
That was the reassurance Bail Sharr needed. On he climbed, as the black rain slashed down and the chamber began to shake itself to death, on as the mountain clawed at him, as he trampled it and those who worshipped it, on as his hearts pounded and his limbs burned, as flash-clotted blood sealed one of his eyes shut and the lunge of a Mechanicus halberd gouged the left side of his jaw to the bone.
