Carcharodons: Outer Dark

by Robbie MacNiven

  She sent three more shots slashing across the courtyard, keeping their heads down, before ducking back and reloading. Nzogwu had his plasma pistol out, rosette in his other hand.

  ‘I am an inquisitor of the God-Emperor’s Holy Ordos!’ he bellowed. ‘Cease fire!’

  The answer came in the form of another spray of rounds that battered at Rannik’s pillar, chewing chunks out of it. Nzogwu stepped round on his uninjured leg and fired. Rannik looked away in time to avoid the sunburst brilliance of the discharge. There was a violent whip-crack, and the sound of the better part of one of the opposing pillars being blown away in a blaze of plasma. Rannik swung round to fire again just as one of the frateris stumbled into view, shrieking. The pillar he had been behind was a mess of broken stonework, glassy from the fury of the plasma burst. The gunman himself was wreathed in blue fire, howling with agony. Rannik put him down with two shots, her pistol braced in both hands.

  ‘Surrender!’ Nzogwu shouted again. This time the remaining gunman stayed behind cover. There was a ping as the inquisitor’s plasma pistol completed its recharging cycle.

  ‘May the Emperor have mercy on your traitorous soul,’ the inquisitor said. But before he could fire there was the bang of a door opening further along the courtyard’s south side. It was followed by the scuffle of combat boots as more frateris burst into the cloisters, a kill-team of four.

  Rannik and Nzogwu opened fire in unison, the furious blast of the inquisitor’s pistol turning one of the militiamen to ash in a blaze of light. The rest managed to hit pillars and start returning fire, cutting in at their position from the right. The surviving gunman to their front also added his fire, forcing them both to press back behind their cover.

  ‘This is a tight one,’ Nzogwu snarled, pistol pinging again.

  ‘We’ve had worse,’ Rannik said, as a hard round hit the flagstones inches from her left boot and ricocheted up to crack off the wall in front of her. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’ve sent an emergency burst over the vox, Damar is nowhere near, though,’ Nzogwu answered.

  ‘Another sixty seconds would be too long anyway if they open up another angle on us.’

  ‘Where in the Emperor’s name are the devotati?’ Nzogwu wondered aloud. Rannik began to answer, but a near miss made her flinch away. Chips from the disintegrating pillar behind her had already drawn blood from her arm and grazed her cheek. They had a matter of seconds before they started to take critical hits.

  The door they had been about to pass through when the ambush had been sprung burst open. A frateris militiaman came through, cowl drawn up, autogun raised, less than a dozen paces from Rannik and on her side of the pillar. She managed to get a shot off, the stopping power of the heavy Stygies X autopistol saving her life as it punched a round into the man’s gut and doubled him over. She put him down with another shot then sent the remainder of the clip into the doorway, keeping the other gunmen behind the first pinned back.

  ‘We’ve got to break for the main doors,’ Nzogwu said, gesturing back through the archway they had entered by. Rannik knew running from cover now would be all but suicidal. They were completely surrounded.

  Apparently sensing the hopelessness of their targets’ situation, or perhaps hoping to lure them out, the frateris ceased fire. In the brief pause, as she reached for a fresh magazine, Rannik heard a rumbling sound followed by a clatter that seemed to come from beyond the Cloisterum’s walls. The noise grew louder, filling the courtyard, vibrating up through the pillar against Rannik’s back and causing the broken masonry underfoot to judder.

  ‘What–’ she began to say. She got no further. There was a crash as the archway collapsed, caved in by the impact of something truly monstrous. Stone and splintered timber slammed inwards in a great cloud of dust, a wall of debris flooding the middle of the courtyard. A hail of shattered masonry pounded past Rannik and Nzogwu. Three of the frateris were caught in the collapse and simply vanished, crushed and broken by the Cloisterum’s remains.

  The beast responsible for the destruction came with the debris, shaking shattered stone from its treads and frontal glacis. It was a battle tank, one of the largest Rannik had ever seen. A solid box of grey plasteel and adamantium, it had simply driven through the devotati headquarters checkpoint, the initial archway and now the cloister block, its sloping armour plates scarred silver by the grinding impact of tonnes of stone.

  It growled to a stop just inside the courtyard, the wreckage of its passage settling behind it. Even idling the potency of its engines made the stonework around Rannik shudder and caused her teeth to vibrate. The great guns that studded the war machine’s prow and flanks remained inert, but the disembarkation ramp in its front disengaged with a thud, and clanged down into the rubble spread before it like a tidemark.

  Rannik stared as figures began to emerge from the belly of the beast, giants in grey-and-black power armour, grasping huge bolt weapons that swung back and forth as they fanned out from their transport. Rannik recognised them, recognised the colour of their battleplate, the white crests on their pauldrons and the sides of the tank, even the individual designs of the swirling markings covering parts of their power armour. She had seen them all before, a long time ago, and saw them again every time the nightmares came for her, tearing her sleep to shreds and snatching her to sweat-streaked, panting wakefulness.

  They had come back. They had come for her.

  The surviving frateris militiaman recovered before either Nzogwu or Rannik. Howling, he opened fire from behind his pillar, sending wild shots at the squad of Space Marines deploying into the Cloisterum. The hard rounds cracked impotently from their armour and the battered hull of their transport.

  The response was immediate. One of the grey-clad warriors returned fire, the booming report of his bolter eclipsing the autogun and making Rannik flinch back halfway behind her pillar. She saw the traitor militiaman’s own cover simply disintegrate, the bursts of shattered stone and grey dust turning red as the gunman was blasted open by mass-reactive bolts.

  The other Space Marines had noticed Rannik and Nzogwu. They approached, weapons raised, their heavy footfalls grinding rubble against the cracked flagstones beneath. Rannik found herself standing out between the cloisters, as though in a daze. This was a dream, another terrible nightmare, and any second she would awake to a cramped transit ship bunk or a safehouse bed with a scream on her lips.

  As the grey giants loomed, their predatory shadows falling across her, she realised that in truth she had known this day would come. She had been praying for it for a long time. Fury gripped her.

  Screaming with rage and hatred, she raised her autopistol, and fired.

  The woman’s pistol clicked empty. Dorthor, towering over her, raised his bolter, a heartbeat away from annihilating his would-be killer.

  ‘Hold your fire,’ Sharr ordered, striding to his strike veteran’s side. At the same moment the man who had been behind the pillar next to the woman tackled her to one side, wrestling with her pistol as she furiously attempted to reload.

  ‘Wait!’ the man shouted, raising his left hand as he pushed his companion back from the Carcharodons. He was holding an Inquisitorial token.

  ‘Contact in the doorway,’ Dorthor said over the command squad’s internal vox, bringing his bolter back up. There was a flicker in the archway beyond the two humans, the flash of a raised autorifle. Dorthor put the gunman down with two shots, blood splattering up the heavy wood panelling of the courtyard door. The reports caused the inquisitor and the woman to stumble back, hands clapped against their ears.

  ‘Sweep the complex,’ Sharr ordered, unclamping Reaper. ‘By twos.’

  Behind the command squad Khauri, Korro and his Red Brethren had disembarked from the Land Raider, their mighty Terminator armour whirring and grinding as they crunched across the courtyard’s remains. Each of the First Company veterans paired with a member of the command squad as
they headed for separate doorways in the cloistered walls.

  ‘What about these two?’ Dorthor asked, nodding towards the inquisitor. The man had managed to calm his companion somewhat, wrestling the pistol from her grip, but she was still glaring with a furious hatred up at the Carcharodons, apparently devoid of fear. Something about her made Sharr’s memories stir, but he pushed the recognition aside – now was no time for retrospection.

  ‘Carcharodon Astra.’ It was the inquisitor who spoke. Both Space Marines turned to him. He smiled, and there was triumph in his expression, not wholly eclipsed by the fear.

  ‘You are surprised that I know of you,’ he said, interposing himself between the Space Marines and the woman. ‘We both do. We have been waiting for this day for a very long time.’

  ‘This complex is infested with xenos taint,’ Sharr said. ‘We have no time for niceties. If you are a servant of the Imperium you will leave immediately.’

  ‘I am Augim Nzogwu, inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus,’ the man said firmly. ‘And if you serve the Emperor as I do then we will purge this taint together.’

  ‘Do as you please,’ Sharr said dismissively, signalling Dorthor to cover him through the doorway in front of them. ‘But do not hinder us. If you know who we are, you know the fate of those who obstruct us.’

  The Carcharodons spread through the Cloisterum Devotati. They found it deserted. Side chapels, scriptorums and a librarium block were all unoccupied, and the sleeping halls the Space Marines moved through showed signs of recent abandonment. Frateris and devotati, all seemed to have vanished.

  ‘The auspex is picking up lifeforms in a large chamber beyond this corridor,’ Dorthor said as they left another hastily deserted dorm. ‘Over four hundred. It could be the primary chapel or refectory.’

  ‘Squads, converge,’ Sharr said, marking the area on the heads-up map of the complex that their linked auto-senses had pieced together during the sweep of the buildings. He approached the double doors leading to the chamber beyond, Reaper in both hands, the great chainaxe inactive but hungry.

  ‘I am breaching,’ he said coldly and, without waiting for Dorthor, kicked in the doors.

  They came apart with a crash of bending metal and splintered wood. Hundreds of pale faces turned. Sharr found himself entering what had to be the main chapel. It was a stone-flagged space with high wooden beams and a raised altar platform at the far end. At one point carved wooden gargoyles had occupied the rafters, but they had been replaced with works that, judging by the fresh cut of the wood, were recent additions. At first glance they looked like any other imp perched upon the walls of Imperial places of worship, but there was something unnatural in their elongated skulls, and in the long, multiple sets of limbs they bore, outstretched over the congregation below. The pews beneath them were packed with black-robed monks – apparently the entirety of the Cloisterum’s brotherhood – while frateris lined the walls. Their autorifles had been trained on the devotati, but as Sharr stormed the main doors they turned them on the Space Marines.

  The chapel resounded with gunfire. Sharr’s armour registered hits, but nothing penetrated. He triggered Reaper, its frenzied howl easily overwhelming the sounds of autogun fire.

  Sharr charged at the frateris along the left-hand wall. He was vaguely aware of Dorthor going right, the thunder of his bolter joining Reaper’s righteous exclamation. The monks were wailing and either throwing themselves to the ground or trying to scramble towards the far end of the hall, over the pews and one another. The frateris were also going back, but too slowly. Reaper hit the first one as he brought his autorifle up over his head, trying to block the two-handed downward swing. The chainaxe barely paused. It sheared the plasteel and plastek of the weapon, spitting sparks, and then the man’s skull and torso, all the way down to his groin. Blood, gore and shards of bone splattered Sharr’s armour and every­thing around him as the halves of the hapless militiaman came apart, flopping like so much butchered meat to the floor.

  The Reaper Prime went over them, a sideways swipe cleaving another frateris to his spine. One of the militiamen’s wild shots found its mark, penetrating the joint between his thigh plate and his hip but barely drawing blood. Another ricocheted off Reaper’s adamantium haft to strike him squarely in the visor, but failed to do more than scratch the grey plate.

  The eight frateris on the left side of the chapel were all dead in under a minute, gutted and eviscerated by Reaper or broken by Sharr’s gauntlets. A hard round to the right cheek of his helmet twitched his head to one side, and alerted him to the fact his auto-senses were also registering shots from across the hall. He turned, expecting to find some of the gunmen across the nave not yet cut down by Dorthor firing on him over the cowering devotati.

  Instead he realised the devotati themselves were shooting at him. Two had plucked pistols from beneath their black habits and were firing on the Carcharodon, faces twisted with rictus expressions of hatred. Sharr didn’t hesitate, advancing on them amidst their scattering brethren. His fist broke the skull of the first, while Reaper took the second, drenching the screaming monks around him in blood and reducing a pew to a hail of splinters.

  More shots, again from among the devotati. Sharr turned. A side door on the chapel’s right-hand side had crashed inwards, emitting Khauri and one of the Red Brethren into the hall. Korro and Red Tane had entered through the main doors and were wading into the carnage, the Terminator’s power fist ignited. Sharr fought down a snarl of frustration mixed with fury as more pathetic gunfire jarred off his left pauldron and right tasset.

  ‘Kill them all,’ he snapped into the vox.

  The massacre lasted only a few minutes. The Carcharodons opened fire into the black-clad mass, or waded in with chainblades and power fists, slaughtering the brotherhood like penned cattle. Sharr felt the rage rising as he killed, the dark ennui that haunted every member of the void brotherhood gripping him. Keep killing. Spill their blood. Leave no survivors. It was like an itch in the tips of his fingers, phlegm at the back of his throat, choking him. He swallowed it, focused through it, his mind silent even as the chapel resounded with screams and butchers’ chops.

  Baldichi was the last. The praeses majoris had backed off all the way to the high altar, cringing away from the red-drenched killer who stalked towards him. The Carcharodons had deactivated their chain weapons, and a cold, dripping silence had fallen across the carnage of the hall. Sharr reached out and grasped the misshapen man’s habit before giving it a brutal tug. It tore and the creature masquerading as the master of the devotati’s headquarters wailed as his corrupt form was revealed – a third atrophied limb, ending in a crab-like purple claw, had been strapped up across the thing’s back.

  ‘I find you guilty of consorting with xenoforms,’ Sharr said, his icy words filling the hall. ‘The sentence is death.’

  Before Baldichi could respond, Sharr reached up and crushed his windpipe, dropping the tainted monk instantly.

  Sharr turned. Khauri, Korro and the rest of the Carcharodons strike force had all assembled among the bloody remains. The two humans, the inquisitor and his henchman, had witnessed the entire event, standing at the entrance Sharr had burst through. Khauri’s voice clicked over the vox.

  ‘The city authorities are approaching. I can sense them.’

  ‘Prepare to move out,’ Sharr replied, then addressed Nzogwu from across the hall.

  ‘Inspect them all if you wish. You will find the taint has run rampant. If this place is anything to go by, I would not be surprised to discover that this world is infested with xenos filth.’

  ‘And you are to be the judge of it?’ Nzogwu asked.

  ‘If you will not act, inquisitor, you may rest assured the Carcharodon Astra will.’

  Nzogwu stayed close to Rannik as they stepped out into the rubble that had once been the Cloisterum’s entrance arch. The arbitrator was shaking, the empty pistol still in her grip. Nzo
gwu understood a good deal of what she was suffering through. When he had arrived on Zartak a decade earlier to investigate the prison colony’s mysterious silence, he had found nightmarish scenes – thousands dead, massacred in the mining plate’s underworld. He had also found Rannik. She had been the only survivor, the only one not killed or abducted. Her stories, backed by the evidence of pict footage captured from the arbitrator base, had first introduced Nzogwu to the existence of the Carcharodon Astra. They had haunted him ever since, a background presence that informed far too many of his undertakings across the Imperium. To be face to face with them now was to experience terror edged with fascination, excitement coloured by angry disbelief. For Rannik the feelings had to be even more extreme.

  The great tank that had brought the Space Marines to the Cloisterum had turned in the courtyard and was now grinding back down Justicia Hill. The Carcharodons hadn’t embarked but were advancing alongside it, spread out. Nzogwu and Rannik followed in their wake, the inquisitor moving so he was between the arbitrator and the Adeptus Astartes. If her weapon had been loaded when she’d tried to fire on the grey killers, he had no doubt they would both already be dead.

  Their reprieve might be short-lived, he realised. As they stepped out through the broken rubble of the Cloisterum’s breach, they were afforded a view of the shrine-city and the slums that surrounded it like cancerous growths. The vista of cliff-like gothic spires and arches giving way to endless shacks and prefabbed hab blocks would have been impressive, had there not been more immediate concerns. Half a dozen Chimera transports had drawn up just beyond the remains of the Cloisterum’s checkpoint, their engines turning over, multi-lasers and heavy bolters trained on the Carcharodons. Spread before the armoured transports were several platoons of frateris, autorifles unmasked. Brant was at their forefront, his expression darkening visibly as the Space Marine tank ground into view over the powdered rubble of Piety V’s wealthiest monastery. In an instant of foresight, Nzogwu saw the sickening violence he had witnessed in the Cloisterum’s chapel play out again in the open air of the hillside.