Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 5
The chainsword he had wielded before his promotion had long been granted to another brother, so Reaper had been replaced with some aged weapon from the Chapter’s armoury, a chainsword whose motor didn’t even function consistently. He had also kept his combat knife and Phobos bolt pistol.
He checked the sidearm briefly, then mag-locked it back to his hip, choosing to wield the chainsword and the knife. Each of the Exiles bore a similar mismatch of weaponry: Blood Eye had an Umbra-pattern boltgun, even more ancient-looking than Sharr’s Phobos, while Shadow carried an Umbra-Ferrox bolter with a high-capacity box magazine, along with a viciously curved and serrated knife. Talon wielded his claws – Sharr presumed they were some trophy claimed from a predator the former Devourer had defeated – and his old club, fashioned from worn, unidentified xenos bone, its head studded with adamantine spikes. He bore no firearms.
The Carcharodons prowled forward, forced to stoop along a particularly low corridor. Blood Eye dropped down through the open hatch beyond, and the display they shared over the helmet link blinked with a new marker as Sharr followed him out.
Objective sighted.
They had descended into a wide space of rusting metalwork. Hatches and entrances branched off all around, but the room was dominated by one set of doors on the far side. They towered over the hive-like honeycomb of lesser entranceways, solid, dark metal, scarred and pitted and sealed shut.
Yet none of them held Sharr’s gaze. The source of the auspex’s disruption had become clear. There was something at the far end of the chamber. Its shape was humanoid, but it was large, the size of a Dreadnought. Its form appeared metallic, composed of finely crafted plates of black and silver steel trimmed with brass. It sat cross-legged, long, slender arms crossed over its chest, head bowed.
It was bound, Sharr realised. Silver chains shackled it to the decking plates beneath. It did not seem to be aware of their presence as the Carcharodons dropped into the chamber with it.
‘Daemonspawn,’ Talon growled.
‘A guardian, for what lies beyond?’ Shadow wondered. Sharr looked past the strange creature at the gateway it sat before.
‘Blast doors, likely once from a ship’s enginarium,’ Blood Eye commented. ‘Now serving as a passage between the lower and middle decks.’
‘And guarded,’ Shadow said.
‘It seems dormant,’ Blood Eye pointed out.
‘A trap?’ Talon said.
‘Likely,’ Blood Eye agreed.
‘We won’t know until we spring it,’ Sharr told them, and without waiting for further assessment, he advanced towards the thing chained before the doors.
As he approached, he realised that the decking plates that formed the floor of the crossroads were littered with wreckage. Much of it was unidentifiable, though a particularly large heap of cogs appeared to have been piled up around the daemon. Then, as he reached it, it stirred.
It lifted its head slowly to look at them, and Sharr gazed upon its face. It was covered by a mask of black iron, its features picked out with silver. The obvious, delicate craftmanship on display could have been considered artisanal, had it not been worked into something so nightmarish and grim. The mask’s mouth was overlarge and downturned, exposing row upon row of glittering teeth that could have been fused together as part of its construction, or may indeed have belonged to the creature that wore it. Its eyes were exposed too, lidless, their unblinking rawness combining with the maw to give the thing a fixed expression of horror.
It groaned. The sound was not so much the noise of an animal as the creaking of an ageing engine or a bulkhead being placed under strain.
Then, it spoke.
There was a screech of interference over the vox, followed by a babbling noise, like a deep voice being run through audio manipulation. It was scrambled and nonsensical, yet felt close enough to true speech for Sharr to half imagine he was hearing real words amidst the mess.
He did not know if it was mocking them, damning them, or trying to ward them away. He did not care. He wished only to destroy it.
As well as the noise, his auto-senses registered light and motion. He highlighted it for the others with a blink-click, but need hardly have bothered – the cogs had started to rise up, accompanied by a strengthening glimmer. Sharr saw purple flames flaring from within the mound of machine parts, seemingly summoned by the monstrosity.
‘Break it, before its powers can fully materialise,’ he spat into the vox.
He broke into a run, but had only managed a few steps before the shockwave hit him. It picked up and blasted the scattered wreckage against the walls, and struck Sharr with the force of a battle cannon shell, slamming him back onto his reactor pack. He was on his feet again almost instantly, forcing the aged, battered servos of his armour to respond to his will, throwing himself forward.
The daemon had risen, its chains now pulled taut. Up close, Sharr could see between the warpsteel plates sheathing its outer body. Its insides were exposed between the cracks; at first he thought it was a machine, before realising that the cogs were made of grinding bone and the pistons and valves were pulsing, hammering organs.
It was an organic being, fashioned like some parody of a machine. Whether it was a mortal host that had been terribly reshaped or a daemon that had been forced to manifest into such a strange and unnatural form was impossible to tell.
Before Sharr could strike at it, the metal cogs that had been kindling around it surged upwards, some invisible, damnable motion causing them to spin. They formed an unstable constellation around the daemon, constantly shifting and moving, swirling around the babbling, chained monstrosity that was the centre of their corrupt gravity.
The vox screamed in Sharr’s ear.
It was challenging him.
He felt his rage flare. He embraced it, as he had learned to. He did what would have been unthinkable years before, when he had still been bound by the Chapter’s tenets. When he had still been in control.
He roared. It was an answer to the daemon’s challenge. And as he charged, his world reduced, narrowed down to a point of supreme focus by ruthless conditioning. His secondary heart had kicked in, his vitals flushed with combat stimulants, rising like a thunderous discharge within him, desperate to be released.
He wasn’t consciously aware of clutching the lever that kickstarted the motor of his old chainsword. He did feel its triggering in some distant hind part of his brain, though – a primal and vicious satisfaction as the throb of the spinning blades ran through the worn grip of the haft and up his arm. His combat knife was in his other fist, and he was leaping, howling out his hatred, letting it blaze.
His first blow struck the cogs shielding the daemon. Sparks flew, accompanied by a metallic shriek that was impossible to disentangle from the howl still scarring the vox. He drove his knife in with his other hand, aiming not for the spinning metal but for the monstrosity at their heart.
The cogs slammed in before he could land a blow. They crashed against his armour and sheared at it, his auto-senses registering multiple strikes. They were spinning so fast that they hit like buzzsaws, chewing into the grey ceramite.
He hit back. The swing of the chainsword was so ferocious that it knocked one of the cogs out of its orbit, shattering it and sending it thumping into the deck.
He forced himself through the metal storm. His armour registered more hits, his visor stuttering, scrambled by the arcane interference of the flesh-and-metal monstrosity. Sharr didn’t care. Every remaining conscious thought was enslaved to the need to destroy. He stabbed his knife into a split in the daemon’s side, the razored blade like a bolt of steel lightning. It bit through machine-meat, spurting stinking black oil and ichor, and again Sharr found himself thrown back trailing warpfire.
He landed on his feet, sparks and dust kicked up from the deck as he scraped back along it before coming to a halt. Other stimuli forced themselves into his consciousness.
The daemon was not alone. Its infestation extended to the rest of the scrap metal heaped around the chamber, which was beginning to rise and attack the other Exiles. Crude and jagged constructs, lit from within by wisps of the same hellfire animating the cogs, were stumbling towards the Carcharodons from all sides, their movements jerky and puppet-like. They were lashing at Talon and Shadow with wicked plasteel limbs and claws formed from shards of armaplas.
The roar of bolter discharges filled the embattled space. Shadow opened fire, explosive rounds splitting and buckling the constructs with metallic shrieks. Talon set about with his vicious weapons, both Carcharodons refusing to utter a sound as they purged the Neverborn manifestations.
Sharr’s focus returned to the primary threat just as a hail of lesser scraps of metal were plucked up from the floor and hurled at him. They scratched and clattered from his armour, some wedging fast. He advanced again into the storm of steel, left arm raised as though struggling into a gale. The daemon’s vox-roar filled his ears, but his mind automatically wiped away the pain and discord.
He struck. More sparks blazed in the fire-shot darkness as another cog was cleaved through. Others pounded at him, a whirlwind, jarring and bouncing from his battle plate. His visor’s edges were filled with screeds of red warning text, but he didn’t care.
He existed to destroy, and destroy he would.
The chained daemon howled, its masked jaws still sealed in a perpetual wail, its lidless eyes bulging manically. He lashed it, chainsword sparking and juddering as it cleaved through one plated shoulder and chewed into the foul meat mechanism within. A cog crashed off Sharr’s helmet, knocking his head to the side and almost causing him to stumble. He felt the rage surge, roaring again as he smashed spinning metal from the air.
Then Blood Eye was at his side. Sharr became aware of the other Exile as he drove his own knife into the Neverborn’s torso and twisted, levering away one of the finely crafted plates to further expose the horror within.
Sharr struck into it with his chainsword, ploughing through the thing’s innards. Blood Eye was chanting as he hacked open another plate – Sharr had anticipated verses from the Chapter’s rites or perhaps even the Imperial Creed, but it wasn’t the usual tenets of faith the Exile was drawing upon. The phrases were not High Gothic but Lingua Technis, the esoteric cant of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Techmarines bore a close affiliation with the Cult of Mars, and knew the secrets of their language and religious rites. Through the haze of his fury, Sharr understood that his exiled brother was calling down those rites now against the semi-mechanical abomination guarding the gateway.
The daemon shuddered, its howl becoming a piercing whine, the cogs guarding it spinning less violently. Sharr threw himself against it, his sharpened teeth bared in a snarl behind the dented ceramite of his visor.
He hacked at the monstrosity’s faceplate. At some point his chainsword’s motor had failed, but he wielded it like a toothed club, battering at the thing’s head over and over.
Warpsteel bent and buckled. One leering eye was pulped, spurting down the dented remains of the mask. The thing tried to twist away, but was held in place by its chains, writhing in vain against them.
Blood Eye struck with him, stabbing its innards and sundering its steel shell. The cogs had started to not only decelerate, but to sway and drop out of their wild orbit, some clattering to the deck. Others still struck at the two Exiles, hammering their pauldrons, reactor packs and helms, chewing chips from the ceramite.
The Carcharodons would not relent. Behind Sharr and Blood Eye, Talon and Shadow were fighting back to back against the rising tide of scrap, the constructs scraping frenziedly at their armour. The Exiles had hewn and beaten the metal into pieces, but still it rose and attacked them, trying to drag them down and pin them to the decks.
Blood Eye was roaring in Lingua Technis. Coruscating warpfire played over him but did not burn him. Sharr strove forward, clamping his knife and grabbing on to one of the chains. He yanked on it with all his strength, dragging the daemon down into a stoop and working his chainsword’s trigger. The weapon finally reignited, and Sharr hewed it into the knotted flesh-cables of the Neverborn’s neck. Sparks flew, then shorn metal, then gouts of ichor as he chewed his weapon through, inch by inch, the daemon spasming and wailing.
The head came away in a final gout of black slime, striking the deck with a sonorous clang and a blaze of sickly yellow warpfire.
The vox screaming ended. The remains of the daemon crumpled in on themselves, as though crushed by some great, invisible fist, leaking the broken and mulched organic matter within. There came more crashing impacts as the scrap fiends that had been assailing Talon and Shadow were unmade, abruptly returning to inanimate junk as the dark will that had been puppeteering them was banished.
Stillness and silence returned slowly to the confluence of tunnels. Sharr stood with one boot atop the broken daemon, in the middle of a circle of shattered cogs, the decking plates beneath him scorched, his own armour smouldering. He panted as his body decelerated from its combat apex. All Space Marines experienced something in the aftermath of a fight, usually a drained or numbing sensation. For Sharr, it had become even more acute in the years since his exile. It was an emptiness, frigid and bitter, left behind in the wake of the Blindness.
He forced himself to pay attention to the reports of his auto-senses, checking the damage done to his armour. Most of it was superficial. Actuators were still functioning and the power of his reactor pack remained uninterrupted.
He locked his chainsword to his hip and pulled out several shards of metal that had embedded themselves in his pauldrons and breastplate, tossing each aside in turn.
He said nothing to the other Exiles as they approached. Apparently of its own volition, the heavy doorway they had been fighting their way towards ground open on rusting internal mechanisms, exposing a single wide, dark passageway beyond.
‘How inviting,’ Shadow said humourlessly.
‘It is rare to encounter a Neverborn like that,’ Talon observed as they picked their way through the littering of cogs, gazing upon the pathetic, smoking remains of the bound daemon. ‘It is as much machine as it is flesh.’
‘A strange form of daemon engine,’ Blood Eye agreed. ‘I have no more doubts. This hulk is in the possession of hereteks undertaking the most severe of tech-heresies. Extremely dangerous, even by the standards of the Archenemy.’
‘All the more reason to purge this place of their foulness,’ Talon muttered.
‘That is not why we are here,’ Blood Eye pointed out. ‘We have another objective.’
‘Will this cult’s abilities render our plan obsolete?’ Shadow asked.
‘Uncertain,’ the former Techmarine admitted. ‘I recommend maintaining our current course and reacting as operational strategy dictates.’
‘Onwards then,’ Sharr said, already tiring of the discussion, looking ahead towards the new corridor. ‘Our work lies before us.’
CHAPTER V
Strike Leader Kordi slammed his boot down on the cultist’s skull as he attempted to rise, pulping it and conjuring a halo of brain matter and broken bone across the rockcrete rooftop.
The new deployment zone did not meet with his approval.
‘The chasm is a liability,’ he told Neku as he stepped off the twitching remains, hearing the sounds of more bolter fire ringing out from the structure’s lower levels. The rest of Second Squad were sweeping the refinery’s chambers, exterminating the last of the rebellious workforce who had occupied it.
Neku grunted. He was the oldest member of the squad, the only one of the eight Carcharodons who had served longer than Kordi, and the only remaining Firstborn. He was also the only one besides Kordi to have been red-scarred, the veteran’s crimson jag striped down the vox-uplink bar that ran along the top of his helmet. There were few members of the company left with such an honorific.
‘The approach ways are short and narrow, and that structure provides a danger of vertical envelopment,’ Kordi went on, highlighting the waste-disposal plant immediately east of the refinery on their shared display.
Neku made no reply. Even for a Chapter renowned for being taciturn, he said little.
The two Carcharodons were standing on the roof of the refinery’s main block, amidst the stacks and flumes. They had tracked a final fragment of resistance from the uprising down the slope to its lower levels. Now, as they cleansed the last of it, orders had come through for them to hold position rather than return back up the mountainside to their previous base of operations. There had been no explanation for the instructions, but the inference was clear enough given there was a record of First Squad meeting with the Adeptus Mechanicus at the Pinnacle: Diamantus’ ruler had clearly forced the relocation.
‘Compared to the last post, it is barely defensible,’ Kordi said. Second Squad had been occupying a forge mill higher up the slope, using it as a stronghold while conducting sweeps of the surrounding sector. That former position had possessed walls thick enough to withstand most artillery strikes and good arcs of fire out over the surrounding sprawl. The refinery had none of that.
‘The skybridge is the key,’ Neku finally offered. Kordi knew that was true, but it didn’t help matters. The refinery stood on the edge of a deep gouge in Diamantus’ crust, a gorge that ran almost the full length of Megafactorum Primus, bisecting the city to the east of Mount Antikythera. It had likely been the site of a river once, but now its bottom was a sluggish sea of brown toxic waste interspersed with islands of junk, a refuse point for the eastern half of the megalopolis.
The great gap was spanned by hundreds of pipelines, monorail spurs and haulage links, but all of them were dwarfed by the skybridge, a huge structure that crossed the chasm just to the south of the refinery, looming up like some sort of megalith from the cloying smog. It was fortified at both ends, and garrisoned by skitarii. Kordi had already briefly considered shifting his new deployment to its walls instead, but occupying pre-existing military structures on Diamantus had been forbidden in the deployment orders, and he had no wish to become ensnared in an argument with whoever had command of the bridge and its defences.
