Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 9
Shadows moved and shifted around Sharr, and he brought up his bolt pistol, before realising he had caught the movement of his own reflection in the crystal. It was not truly him, though – it was broken and diffracted along the uneven surfaces, and showed a raw-eyed being in pallid armour, smeared with streaks of bright crimson, as if a child had daubed the figure with red paint. The others were all dark, wreathed in shadows, though Talon’s form also flickered with a hint of actinic power.
‘It mocks us,’ the clawed Carcharodon growled as they carried on.
‘Stay the course,’ Blood Eye instructed. ‘Do not look at the reflections.’
It seemed to take hours to traverse the cavern, but finally they found another arch, this one resembling a gateway in an old citadel, with an iron portcullis that slowly rose of its own accord ahead of them.
Past it was a shoreline. There was no ceiling above, but a sky filled with numberless stars, all of them ruddy and dying, their light like blood. To the right, old walls towered over them, fortifications, their ramparts cracked and slighted and empty. On the left was an ocean, vast and endless, its waters black. Sharr saw that the waves were, impossibly, flowing away from the shoreline.
Blood Eye knelt briefly and ran one of his gauntlets through what appeared to be rust-coloured sand underfoot.
‘It is metal,’ he said as he sifted it. ‘Countless filings, reduced to dust.’
They began to walk once more, under the crimson glow. Sharr knew that what they were experiencing was true corruption, more than the mere flesh-filth that was the effluvium, the waste product of Chaos. This was the raw insanity of the immaterium, manifesting in the deepest corners of the space hulk. It was as though they had crossed a threshold into another realm of existence. Sharr supposed that was entirely possible.
The Carcharodons endured it all in cold silence, simply continuing onwards. Beyond the strange shore, through another gateway in the old fortifications, they found themselves back in something at least resembling a spacefaring ship.
It looked like a section of bridge, but the pits beneath the empty command platform that had once housed the likes of comms, shields, engines and navigational control were now filled with bodies and foulness and covered over by a membranous substance. As the Carcharodons passed between them they stirred, but did not break free from their birth sacs.
The distant beating of industry had returned, shaking the deck and making the creatures twitch.
‘Displays back to full functionality,’ Blood Eye murmured, the chrono, auspex and other ancillary signifiers once more ticking over.
‘It is like the ship is slumbering,’ Shadow pointed out over the sealed vox as they passed more of the foul pits. ‘And we are passing through its dreams. Outside of the workshops, so much seems to be dormant.’
‘Presumably this is how they travel the Outer Dark,’ Blood Eye said. ‘But we must assume this hibernation will end soon. Time is running out.’
Sharr knew what the other Exile meant. The renewed chrono display was showing that they had a little over three standard day-cycles remaining. After that, it would be too late.
‘We could destroy all of these with a few grenades,’ he suggested, highlighting the infested pits.
‘Not our objective,’ Blood Eye said tersely.
They climbed, along more stairways and passages. As they went, it became clearer they were leaving the worst of the madness that had infected the middle decks behind. Systems, where they were active, were functioning normally, and even the flesh growths were now few and far between.
Still, Sharr felt something following them, more than the verminous things that flitted and scampered in their wake.
Then, just before the Exiles reached the Sire of Belaphrone, his control finally deserted him.
CHAPTER VIII
It happened in an old generator hold, part of a ship whose sections seemed so ancient and arcane that Blood Eye commented briefly that they likely pre-dated the Chapter’s first Day of Exile. Mega electro-combustion engines, comprising huge sections of pipes and vents and dormant static nodes, towered like primeval menhirs amidst the latticework of catwalks that allowed access to their different levels. They were cobwebbed and caked with dust, but didn’t seem to be infested with anything worse than scurrying rats.
That was until the Carcharodons picked up traces of the cultists, patrolling the echoing space. The auspex detected several platoon-sized sections, and the Exiles caught visuals of one group as they passed along one of the upper walkways above them.
These weren’t desperate menials and their cruel overseers, or the deranged and corrupt tech-priests they had encountered. They were warriors, armed with las- and hard-round weaponry and armoured in patchworks of flak and plasteel. Like their masters, many bore crude bionic augmentations. Some showed signs of mutation.
The Carcharodons sheltered briefly in the lee of one of the mega engines.
‘Strange, to find active patrols now that we have passed through the hulk’s core,’ Shadow muttered. ‘Perhaps they are guarding this area specifically?’
‘Or hunting us,’ Talon said. ‘Dormant or not, the hulk has been aware of our presence since the beginning. There have been things following us.’
‘We should thread a path through them,’ Blood Eye suggested. ‘We are drawing near to the first objective.’
They set off, following a route plotted by the auspex. Many of the catwalk ladders and walkways creaked dangerously beneath the Space Marines, but none buckled. At times they were forced to pause as a patrol passed under or above them on a different level, but none spotted the four crouching shadows. That was until they were nearing the far side of the hold.
The auspex showed that one patrol was now on the same level, and was about to cross past their rear at an intersection. The Carcharodons weren’t far enough from it to avoid being spotted if one of the heretics so much as glanced to their right.
Sharr was bringing up the rear. Without thinking, he turned and began to run, ignoring the signifiers highlighted by the others on his visor.
The walkway beneath him started to shudder rhythmically with the pounding of his boots. The cultists hadn’t yet reached the junction, and only caught sight of him at the last moment as he rounded the nearest mega engine.
He assessed them in an instant – six combat effectives, all equipped with small-arms and an assortment of bladed weaponry. They had frozen, their confusion at the swaying of the catwalk turning to palpable shock as the grey-clad giant materialised before them.
Sharr charged. He left his bolt pistol and his chainsword clamped, only his combat knife unsheathed.
He was on the first heretic before the man could raise his lasrifle. Sharr didn’t bother with the knife, simply backhanding the cultist as he went. Skull broken and neck snapped, he was slammed off the walkway and into the mega engine before tumbling away like a rag doll, out of sight.
The second cultist received the full weight of Sharr’s charge. He was trampled, throat crushed by the stamp of a boot. The third had raised his autogun, a keening noise crackling over the vox that had been hardwired into his jaw. Sharr beheaded him with a vicious swipe of his knife before he could fire, blood squirting upwards and pattering down on the Carcharodon like a shower from a fountain.
Sharr wasn’t shouting, but neither was he silent, a low, feral snarl rising up out of his chest as he slaughtered, hyper-focus rapidly turning into a crimson fug.
The fourth cultist tried a desperate, foolish lunge with the serrated bayonet fixed to the end of her autogun. Sharr simply let the blade jar off his breastplate, the bayonet snapping, while stamping forward and driving the point of his combat knife into her torso. Her flakplate armour was little protection. He ripped the knife through her stomach and intestines, disembowelling her while, at the same time, his other fist crashed against her face, staving in the front of her skull and stilling her scream before it was made.
He didn’t know exactly what happened to the fifth cultist, or the sixth. He didn’t know if they fired, if they shouted, if they screamed. All he was sure of was the blood, and the burning strength of his body, and the primal satisfaction of feeling his knife sawing through meat and bone.
There was a presence behind him.
He turned, arm raised to punch his slick blade down and through the next threat.
Blood Eye’s crimson gauntlet caught his vambrace.
For a second he strained, his body refusing to relinquish the need to kill. The servos of the two warriors whirred and locked tight. Then Sharr finally reasserted a level of control, and eased off.
‘That was unwise,’ Blood Eye stated, still holding his vambrace. ‘One errant shot, one scream, and we would have been detected.’
Sharr ripped his wrist free, but lowered his blade. He looked at the dripping mess smeared across the catwalk, and glanced briefly at the shared auspex display. The markers signifying the other patrols showed no sign of changing direction, no indication that they had heard the massacre of their warped kindred.
‘Targets eliminated,’ Sharr said, feeling the rage draining away. ‘Lead on.’
They exfiltrated the generator hold without being discovered, moving up a series of gangways that were tilted at such a steep angle it required the activation of their auto-stabilisers. As they went, Blood Eye highlighted part of what the auspex was showing him.
‘These schematics are the ones we’ve been looking for,’ he said. ‘The sections ahead are the remains of the Sire of Belaphrone, an Imperial Navy capital ship lost to the tides of the empyrean a little over five thousand years ago.’
The same information intruded on Sharr’s thoughts, a word-for-word repetition of the relevant hypno-briefing, dredged up from his mind as he heard the ship’s name and noted the layout of the passages and decks ahead.
‘Are you certain its aft sections are still intact?’ he asked.
‘We will know soon enough,’ Blood Eye answered.
They found the first obvious sign of the creature that had been stalking them just within the lower decks of the Sire of Belaphrone.
‘Bodies,’ Talon said. He had taken point, and his meaning became clear as the Carcharodons moved along an inter-deck passageway littered with remains.
‘More cult soldiers,’ Shadow said. ‘Still fresh. They can’t have been slain more than an hour ago.’
‘Few signs of defensive efforts,’ Blood Eye added, highlighting the small scattering of las-scorches and hard-round impacts on the walls. ‘They were taken by surprise, and terminated swiftly.’
‘It has been following us for some time,’ Sharr growled.
‘What has?’ Blood Eye asked.
‘I do not know, yet. Have none of you felt it?’
‘I have,’ Talon confirmed. ‘I assumed it was some warp spawn. But why would it attack its own?’
‘The slaves of Chaos fight one another more than they do the Imperium,’ Shadow pointed out.
‘We have had little sign of that here, though,’ Blood Eye said. ‘As you said, the hulk slumbers. And these killings do not bear the hallmarks of some thirsting Neverborn on a rampage.’
He indicated several of the corpses. They had been cleanly decapitated by what could only be an extremely keen blade.
‘Too much precision. No sign of savaging or excessive aggression.’
‘The patrols near here were deemed unusual,’ Shadow said. ‘Perhaps they are not intended to guard this area, or seek us out. Perhaps they are hunting for this “other”. And it is hunting them.’
‘Whatever it is, it is ancillary to our primary objectives,’ Blood Eye said. ‘Let us continue.’
The taint was almost completely absent as they climbed through the Sire of Belaphrone. By Sharr’s reckoning they had passed around the bulk of the hulk and its infested core and were now mounting its spine, nearing what equated to the top of the deranged conglomeration. The scans they had all had imprinted onto their memories showed the old Imperial Navy ship forming a prominent part of the detritus wedged in that particular section of the hulk, with its prow long buried and its aft section and engines still jutting proud of the rest. That was what had made it the strike team’s primary target.
‘The first objective lies just ahead,’ Blood Eye declared. ‘No sign of contacts, but remain vigilant.’
Talon was again on point, following the new burst map Blood Eye had thrown up. They passed through the twisted remains of what had once been a blast door, long ago wrenched open. Beyond it was another generator chamber, not as huge as the hold that lay adjacent to the Sire of Belaphrone’s buried prow, but large enough to house an alpha-grade plasma turbine and auxiliary electrical support nodes.
The Carcharodons secured the space before Blood Eye moved to the main control node, running one of his gauntlets almost reverently over the panel of rune keys, dials and levers. He began to work the aged instruments, while the other three took post at the chamber entrances.
It took time, but eventually there was a ticking sound, and Blood Eye spoke.
‘There is power.’
As though to underline his statement, the plasma turbine began to light up an actinic blue, the ribs of its magnetic accelerator coils glowing.
As a thrum filled the air, the former Techmarine led Sharr and the other Exiles onwards, through to what Sharr’s memories of the schematics told him was the lost ship’s primary enginarium. It was a cathedral-like space, dominated by the engine itself. The size of a hab-block, it comprised innumerable pipelines and valves, riddled with vents and heat exhausts whose maws were fashioned into plasteel gargoyles perched around its edges. Sharr imagined that the chamber would have been a desperate place when the Sire of Belaphrone had still traversed the stars of her own free will, hot as a furnace and vibrating with the vast power and pressures that provided motion to so great a craft. At full capacity it would have been tended to by a whole congregation of tech-priests and enginseers and stoked by hundreds of menials. Nor was it even the Sire of Belaphrone’s only engine, merely its primary one.
‘Can you ignite it?’ Shadow asked as the four Carcharodons stood before the monolithic edifice.
‘We have power, and where there is power, there is a way,’ Blood Eye replied. ‘But I will need assistance from all of you, and it will take at least another two day-cycles.’
Sharr glanced at the chrono display. It showed just over two cycles to impact.
The Exiles set to work.
Voldire lived.
The Mother-of-Them-All woke him. He did not know how long he had been slumbering, or even if he had truly been asleep and not walking elsewhere, far beyond the confines of the great vessel.
He felt its heartbeat all around him, the pulse of its flesh and the vital thrum of its systems. Their acceleration was what had dredged him up from the slurry of god-dreams and false memories and impossible futures his mind had slipped into. In doing so, the Mother-of-Them-All spoke to him.
Arise, my child. It is time.
Voldire cried out, his body arching in the warm, wet embrace of the embryo-cables. He choked on black nutrient fluids, spat, and sat up, gasping.
The first thing he felt was the pain – the blessed pain. His imps were still at work, and had been throughout his slumber. There were a dozen of them, little flesh-and-machine creatures, each one unique, each one fashioned by the hand of the divine, precious and sacred. They were cutting him. Some used scalpels grafted into their spindly arms, others saws or scissors, one even a short lasburner. They scrambled over his hulking frame and they cut, slicing the growths, carving away the ever-swelling tumours, polyps and cysts that threatened to swallow him up, to overwhelm and bury both his flesh and the form of the machines grafted onto it. The imps had been a gift from his saviour, and in cutting his swollen, changing body, they kept him whole.
Voldire moaned and snatched a loop of intestine cabling above, dragging himself with great difficulty up from his ark’s embrace. He swallowed, tasting bitter blood and sweet, maddening scrapcode. The filth of his slumbers dripped and drooled from him, and the embryo-cables that bristled from him pulled taut. One by one they began to snap free, spraying their stinking, viscous contents, until only the mother-link, a spine-like column of bone and wire tendons, remained connecting him to the ark.
Voldire clenched his black, glistening iron fangs, reached awkwardly round with his one flesh-arm, and with a wet crunch, ripped the appendage away, fracturing his own spine as he did so.
His augmetics came online. He screamed, and the scream was answered by the wailing of his congregants, those hereteks who had sensed his awakening in the changing rhythms of the Mother-of-Them-All and assembled before the ark at her core.
He could see. His flesh-eye had been functioning since he had awoken, but the other was a bionic lens, one he had borne since the earliest days of his induction into the Way of the Machine. It had changed as he had changed, and now it showed him eternity.
For some time he stood overwhelmed, his bulbous flesh shuddering, his machine parts locked stiff, the imps still scurrying across his frame as they battled to keep the ever-morphing and swelling growths at bay. There was no sound, other than the panting rasps of his breathing and the slopping as slabs of freshly hacked meat smacked down into the black soup now swilling in the ark’s bottom.
He could feel his strength slowly returning and, along with it, his focus. He forced his augmetic eye to return to the present, to cease showing him the glories of the warp and to instead show him what lay before him.
His faculty had assembled. Fellow seekers of enlightenment, academics and philosophers, those who sought the union of body and machine in pursuit of the divine.
It pleased him to see that so many had survived the voyage. There was Markel Vost, his mechadendrite tentacles writhing with anticipation, and beside him old Keegon of the Broken Cog, his form veiled by the black Mechanicum robes that hung from his unnaturally tall, lean body. There the conjoined, ever-arguing Zeen twins, and Milner Krost, burdened beneath his soul jars, and old Professor Glokken, borne up on his palanquin by his cabal-students.
