Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 8
Below the service tunnel, an infernal workshop sprawled. The cavernous space might once have been a cargo ship’s hangar bay, but it was now given over to the industry of nightmares. Dozens of conveyor belts clattered as they transported great mounds of scrap metal through a maze of churning pistons and hammering smelters. Fang-mawed furnaces blazed and roared, their heat making the air around them writhe, as though in pain. Cranes hefted white-hot sheets of metal into steaming cooling vats, and a forest of part-mechanical, part-organic auto-arms worked along assembly lines, showers of sparks lighting up the fiery half-dark. Sharr’s auto-senses picked up the stench of ash and scorched flesh and burnt metal and the addictive, sickly-sweet taint of the warp.
Keeping the machines working was a legion of menials – bedraggled, wretched creatures clad in rags and befouled from head to foot with soot and grease. They were held to their tasks, manually hefting materials and turning engine wheels and cogs, by hulking, crudely augmented and foully mutated overseers, who lashed at them with electro-whips and wicked prongs.
Sharr noted that it wasn’t only metals and raw minerals acting as fodder. Several of the conveyor belts were heaped not with scrap but with body parts – severed limbs, heads, opened torsos, human offal, and viscera that tumbled wetly into the flames. Another forge pit had a queue of menials that snaked and twisted around it like a tail. Those at the front of the line were leaping without hesitation into the blazing furnace, one after the other. There was a brief scuffle along part of the queue, and a small knot broke free from the rest. Sharr wondered briefly if the condemned were seeking to escape their fate, only to see them charge past the rest of the line and throw themselves wildly into the furnace, shrieking with apparent delight as those waiting patiently for their turn wailed with dismay and shouted angrily at the overseers.
It was a scene of utter bedlam, and again Sharr had to master the urge to descend and wreak the Void Father’s vengeance upon it all.
‘These decks are the nexus of production, and worship,’ Blood Eye said, the other Exiles clearly having seen what lay beneath as they passed by. ‘To this cult, those things are one and the same.’
‘It is madness,’ Shadow said. ‘What are they building?’
‘I doubt any of them know, and I would not try to guess,’ Blood Eye said darkly, his normally emotionless voice shot through with disgust.
The duct finally gave way to a conjoining corridor, the Carcharodons able to stand straight once more. Sharr tried to wipe some of the flesh-slurry off his armour, but it was futile. It would take lengthy rites of purification and appeasement after the operation’s conclusion if the machine spirit of the aged wargear was to be cleansed.
Beyond the corridor lay a cyclopean hallway that resembled some dark parody of an Imperial cathedral. There were upright sarcophagi arrayed around the walls, each one plugged into a nest of cables that ran into what appeared to have once been arched windows. The front of each was partly sheeted with bronze and etched with blasphemous runes, and filmy glassplex screens showed the murky filth within, disturbed by the occasional twitch of motion. Each of the upright coffins shook slightly with the pounding ringing out from the neighbouring workshop.
‘Leave them,’ Blood Eye warned.
They ghosted silently through the sepulchral space and passed without hindrance through the doors at the far end, then up a flight of stairs lit by stuttering old lumen globes, the metal rungs creaking beneath their tread.
‘Are we on schedule?’ Shadow murmured as they continued to climb. There was a chrono display ticking down in the shared visor display, but only Blood Eye was in a position to understand exactly how far through the hulk they had travelled. It was a necessary part of the operation, for to reach their objective within the nightmarish macro-vessel after the timer had elapsed would mean they had failed. Adding further shame to the burdens they already carried was unthinkable.
‘Just keep climbing,’ Blood Eye said.
It followed.
For a long time It had existed in a state of low-level hibernation, rousing Itself only to avoid approaching threats or to switch the location of Its bio-cocoon. It did this semi-regularly to further evade detection, but for the most part It remained dormant, conserving energy. It had existed for decades on board the hulk, and was capable of existing for decades more, as long as It remained undisturbed.
But that was about to change. It had already caught the prey’s scent in the lower depths, where It had been resting. Its consciousness had stirred even as Its body remained still, Its vital signs barely a murmur. Hyper-sensitive olfactory glands had flared and inhaled, drawing in smell-traces It recognised – metals doused with oils, and the skin and hair within the shells, impregnated deeply with an overabundance of steroids, chemicals and glanded stimulants. A veritable cocktail, and one that It knew well.
This was exactly the kind of prey-creature It was intended to stalk. They held promise, unlike the things It had been forced to share Its existence with for so many years. And, importantly, they were not sick.
It did not understand the concept of sickness – indeed It understood very little of anything, from a higher sentient point of view – but then Its purpose was not to understand, any more than a lower life form’s organs were expected to comprehend their place and function within a body. And just as a body’s white blood cells might react with aggressive efficiency to signs of infection without being able to rationalise the actual meaning of the concept of ‘infection’, so It knew to avoid the vast majority of the beings on the hulk. They were not prey. It had no use for them.
Now, though, It had found something useful.
It had started to stalk them in the lower depths. The prey’s path had brought It into hunting grounds only lately abandoned, but they would not go much farther. Soon, the time would be right.
It followed.
The chrono counters on each Exile’s helmet display continued to count down as they climbed ever higher, keeping to the side passages and working their way through the tangle of lesser berths and stations wherever possible. At one point a section of decking gave way beneath Talon, and he was forced to snag hold of a set of pipes with his claws to avoid plunging into the abyss. Later, they had to scale a bulkhead that had seemingly collapsed down through the hulk’s upper levels and was now barring their path, using their combat knives and mag-clamps to work their way up the sheer sheet of metal.
With every step, Sharr’s sense that something was following them grew.
The area of the hulk they were moving through turned for a while from the gangways of old ships to rock tunnels, part of the asteroid that made up the monstrous vessel’s bulk. For the most part the passages were rugged and natural, though others showed evidence of having been deliberately bored out. In one there were even strange statues cut into alcoves in the walls, their forms following no known patterns of anatomy.
It was there that the infiltration was nearly undone.
‘Contacts approaching,’ Blood Eye said over the vox. ‘Numerous.’
The problem was immediately clear – the tunnel had no alternative entrances or exits, and the Carcharodons had been following its winding path for hours.
‘Double back?’ Shadow suggested.
‘Too far,’ Sharr growled.
Blood Eye seemed to agree. He highlighted the statue alcoves.
‘Get in place behind them. They will conceal us while whatever is coming passes by, or at least offer a rudimentary ambush point.’
The Exiles split between the statues on either side, forcing themselves in behind the ugly stonework as best they could. Sharr could hear a sonorous chanting, interspersed with what sounded like mechanical gibberish, rising steadily over the ever-present pounding of the workshops.
He kept his chainsword clamped but unlocked his knife. This would be close work in the tunnel’s confines, a place for a short blade, brute strength, and not much else.
‘Do not engage unless we are detected,’ Blood Eye voxed, as though sensing Sharr’s thoughts.
A glimmer of light showed around the nearest corner, and the discordant chanting intensified. Shuffling figures came into view, stooped and swathed in black robes. They were like dark parodies of the Adeptus Mechanicus, with spiked augmentations and mechadendrites that, in some places, had morphed into fleshy tentacles.
The ones at the front carried burning torches and a series of blasphemous icons beaten out of rough-hewn metal. Those behind were heaving something on a litter borne on their shoulders and backs, though it was not immediately clear what it was.
The Void Exiles reduced the output of their reactor packs to minimum and shut down all but the most vital auto-senses, killing electrical and heat traces, waiting in taut silence.
The thing on the palanquin came fully into view. It looked like a large cogitator stack, but its corruption was obvious, for human eyes were blinking and roving around in what had once been its interface ports. It seemed to speak as well, machine blurts burbling up from vox-plates along its sides. It was linked by a tangle of cables to two servitors limping behind its palanquin, both the constructs fused with generator units, acting as mobile power banks. Exactly what purpose the warped engine served, or where the procession was taking it, remained a mystery.
Sharr held his knife against his chestplate as the thing passed him by, seeking to put himself elsewhere. For a moment, it seemed impossible that he wouldn’t kick over the statue and tear into the blasphemous coterie. He could feel the roar pushing up from his chest, desperate to be free. They were so close he could almost reach out and touch them.
Not now. He put his mind elsewhere, trying to focus on the Silent Litanies, to remember the transience of his rage and his existence beyond it.
It felt like an age, but finally the last of the procession passed by, disappearing around a bend in the tunnel, their twisted doggerel beginning to fade.
Sharr found he had been holding his breath. He let it out, flexed his grip on his knife’s hilt, and reawakened his armour.
The Exiles stalked through a vault packed with hideously mutated servitors, their organic components warped with misplaced teeth and eyes and tentacle-growths. They were all dormant, ranked side by side, plugged into rusting charging banks via cortex sockets.
The Carcharodons picked their way carefully and quietly between them.
At the far end of the vault, a great eyeball had grown in the space that had once been the exit hatch. It rolled in the hatch’s socket, seeming to find a degree of focus as it looked at the approaching Space Marines. Its iris was violet, and disconcertingly human.
‘Is this the exit?’ Talon demanded, sounding disgusted.
‘It is,’ Blood Eye confirmed, and, without another word, took his combat knife and punched it through the giant eye’s membrane. It rolled back and shivered in pain as clear fluid squirted free. Sharr heard the servitors behind them begin to rattle and stutter, and a moan rose up from their warped lips.
‘Hurry,’ Shadow muttered.
Blood Eye and Talon hacked at the eyeball, clawing out its vitreous body, bursting it apart. The four Space Marines then pushed through the gelatinous mess, as though forcing their way along the optic nerve of some giant monster and into its skull.
Darkness yawned, interspersed with flashes of lightning. A black chasm opened up ahead, intersected by an arching bridge carved out of the rock of the asteroid. The far walls, the ceiling and the floor were all lost in darkness, and a storm seemed to be rumbling in the depths, making the stone underfoot shiver. Sharr’s auto-senses recoiled from the surrounding space, unable to compute distances, heights or depths. He also noticed that the auspex display had decayed into static once more, and the chrono that had been counting down since the cryo-tanks had drained was frozen.
‘Maximum vigilance,’ Blood Eye voxed. ‘I am not sure we are on the hulk any longer.’
The Carcharodons moved cautiously out onto the bridge. It arched upwards in its centre, and was too narrow to pass along in anything other than single file. Sharr noticed that its underside was bristling with chains and wires, from which hung hundreds of skeletal remains, dangling over the yawning blackness.
‘Look up,’ Shadow voxed. Sharr did so, and saw that a mirror image had appeared above them. A perfect representation of the bridge ran above their heads, following the same course, except it was upside down, the skeletal remains that should have been under it jutting directly upwards instead. Sharr found himself looking into his own helmet’s lenses, as four Carcharodons followed their movements, each one a perfect representation, as though a vast mirror had been hung directly above them. Perhaps it had.
‘There are things in the darkness below,’ Talon pointed out as they carried on. ‘Or above. It is difficult to tell.’
Sharr knew what he meant – he could hear what sounded like the rustle and buzz of wings, and a cacophony of chilling cries rising up out of the black depths, competing with the rumbling of the storm. Something was approaching from far below. The rustling rose to a roar.
‘Run,’ Blood Eye voxed.
Sharr broke into a sprint just as the creatures exploded upwards on either side of the bridge, twisting and flocking all around the Space Marines. They were metallic fiends, resembling machined versions of the leering gargoyles that were such common motifs in Imperial architecture. They fell upon the Carcharodons in a blizzard of razor-claws and hooked beaks.
Sharr already had his knife up, deflecting the first strike against his head as he unlocked and primed his bolt pistol with his other hand. Blood Eye and Shadow opened fire, the booming report of their boltguns seeming small and insignificant compared to the rush of the wicked machines and the thunder below them.
Hard rounds ripped apart the furies in hails of sparks and shorn metal, but more were already diving through the wreckage of their disintegrating kin, falling atop the Space Marines. Sharr had time to put a bolt through one before a second was on his shoulders, scissor-talons scraping at his helmet, his armour pinging warnings to him as he stumbled.
He simply fired his pistol up at the thing, blowing away its top half and sending its spasming remains tumbling off into the lightning-clad darkness. Others were striking at him, gouging his pauldrons. One clamped vice-like limbs around his right arm, digging into the ceramite. Its metallic wings were a buzzing blur as it tried to drag him off the edge of the bridge, its saw-toothed snout cackling in Sharr’s face.
With a bellow, Sharr ripped his arm free, not needing his armour’s servos to overcome the creature. The fury’s metal limbs sheared off with a shriek, spraying blood-like oil. He kicked it away from him and gained a few more yards, both hearts hammering in his chest as he forced himself to keep going even with blows raining down on him from all sides.
Blood Eye reached the far end of the bridge and turned, pouring controlled bursts of bolter fire into the air directly above his struggling brethren. Shadow made it to the end moments later and added his own firepower. Sharr pushed on, the lower half of the bridge now swarming with the creatures, like a glittering, barbed carapace that was clawing its way arm-over-arm up the skeletal corpses dangling from the structure’s underside, reaching up for Sharr and threatening to drag him down. He emptied his pistol’s clip around his feet, then locked it and reached for his chainsword.
The weapon juddered in his grip as it sheared through another of the plunging mechanical monstrosities, cleaving it in half so that it clattered to the deck on either side of him. Talon was just in front, stamping on another he had brought down with his hooked claws.
More exploded all around them as the other two Carcharodons provided pinpoint covering fire. They ran the last section of the bridge’s span, the stone beneath shuddering as thunder boomed all around them.
The storm seemed to be following the swarm up from the depths, and with it came something even more terrible. As lightning flared deep below, it illuminated some vast leviathan, its tendrils questing ponderously upwards, silhouetted by the flickering blue-white display.
‘Through the door,’ Blood Eye instructed, reloading as he spoke. The flying swarm had momentarily broken off, but it was re-forming and wheeling around, a great, malicious flock twinning perfectly with the one reflected above.
Sharr reloaded his bolt pistol without thinking about it, looking to the side as he did so and seeing the doorway. It had been cut into the rockface, edged with an arch of skulls and bones. Brilliant light shone through it.
Talon took point. They entered the glare, only to swiftly find themselves in darkness once more. Sharr kept his helmet’s vision overlays on regular, the auto-senses finding a faint glimmer of light and dragging it in to enhance his new surroundings.
They were in a cavern, its floor, walls and ceiling studded with crystalline shards. There was no hint of the storm they had just passed through, nor even the eternal heartbeat of the workshops. When Sharr looked back, he found no sign of the doorway.
The Carcharodons said nothing, simply advancing into the jagged forest. The crystals were making a faint keening noise, like a blade being tapped lightly against the side of a decanter. It started to grate at Sharr’s ears, so he deleted it from his consciousness.
There was no obvious source for the weak light illuminating the cave, besides the crystals themselves. The substance crunched under the Space Marines’ boots and scraped against their armour where they were forced to push their way between the bristling growths. The auspex was still offline, not even showing static now.
