Nuritona reached up to his helmet, likely communicating with the rest of his strike team, before speaking.
‘Very well. Stay close to Strike Leader Kordi or Librarian Khauri. We are moving now. This place is too exposed to remain stationary.’
Rannik hefted her shotgun and sprinted to the most advanced Rhino, Damar behind her. It was getting infernally hot, her black bodyglove slicked with sweat, and her flak plate grating and uncomfortable. Ahead of her was another Carcharodons squad, including one warrior in blue battleplate carrying a bone staff.
‘You are Damar and Rannik?’ he asked as they approached.
‘We are,’ Damar replied.
‘This is Strike Leader Kordi,’ the Librarian, presumably Khauri, responded, indicating one of his grey-clad brethren. Before either Rannik or Damar could respond, the Librarian made a sudden motion, twisting away from the humans to scan the buildings to their left. He spoke.
‘We are about to come under attack.’
There was a crack. In the same moment the head of the Space Marine named Kordi snapped to one side, his helmet split. More gunshots rang out, and the crowd’s wails of fear turned to screams of terror.
Rannik and Damar both hit the sides of the Rhino at the same time, using its brutal outline to minimise the angles around them. The Space Marines exhibited no similar concerns regarding cover or self-defence – they had already opened fire on half a dozen of the shack windows and entrances to the column’s left, apparently guided by their psyker’s prescience. Plasterboard and rotting timber burst and splintered while beneath, the crowd recoiled, surrounding the Carcharodons with a maelstrom of churning, filthy, panicked bodies.
‘I’ve got nothing!’ Damar shouted over the thunder of the bolter fire, lasgun shouldered and twitching from one fire-lacerated opening to the next.
Rannik didn’t respond. The Carcharodons sergeant, Kordi, had disengaged his broken helmet, revealing the face of her nightmares – deathly pale, black-eyed, with wickedly sharp teeth. For a moment, the thunderstorm barrage surrounding her seemed to fade, and she was back in among the cold darkness of Zartak’s depths, alone, afraid, hunted by death-faced killers in dark battleplate.
The sergeant’s words, addressed to her directly, cut brutally through the waking memories.
‘We are moving up to the shrine. First Squad will secure it while we push underground!’
She managed to nod and tap Damar’s shoulder. They moved away from the Rhino just as the transport gunned its engines, jetting black smoke from its exhausts. The tracks started to roll, the Space Marines and the two humans moving forwards either side of it. Rannik realised they were still under fire – though she couldn’t hear the discharges, she saw a round crack off the flank of the Rhino beside her, and another score the pauldron of one of the Space Marines ahead. She kept her Vox Legi up, but there were no easy targets. She caught snatches of movement in windows, alleys and lean-tos all around, as well as more deliberate, aggressive movements in the crowd still scattering around them, but the gunmen were too fast and the Carcharodons’ fire suppression too intense to get a good fix. They were surrounded.
There was a building directly blocking the route of their advance, a ramshackle construction of old freight containers and mismatched multiweave boards. The Predator tank had slewed to the side, demolishing a section of ramshackle lean-tos and opening the route for the transports behind. The first Rhino didn’t slow. It hit the base of the shack and ground on through it, rusting metal crumpling and wood splitting. The building came crashing apart, the Carcharodons continuing through its remains as the treads of their transport kicked out dust and debris.
‘Objective ahead,’ Rannik heard Khauri call out as she and Damar clambered through the wreckage. The Librarian hadn’t drawn his bolt pistol, but held his staff aloft as the column pressed on. In the pall kicked up by the building’s demolition, she realised it was glowing with a faint blue luminescence.
The shrine lay before them. There was little to distinguish it from the surrounding shacks – a rusting Imperial eagle, scavenged from an altar or ceremonial panel, hung over the door to a hovel dwelling constructed from broken plasteel shipping plates, scabbed with mould blotches.
The Carcharodons didn’t bother stacking and breaching. Kordi simply kicked the door down – making the whole structure shudder – and swung inside. Damar and Rannik entered after half the squad, the rest remaining outside covering the approach.
The space within was low and cramped, and littered with refuse in various stages of decay. It was also deserted. Rannik would have assumed it was a hovel like any other were it not for the tokens that had been hammered into the far wall, above a low table littered with offerings of grubby cloth and scrap metal. The tokens themselves were mostly crude crescent shapes like the one Damar had first recovered, rendered in the likeness of snarling worm-like alien creatures. There was a larger and more sinister object at the centre of the display, though. A harvest doll had been woven from straw, presumably from the agri-collectives that supplied Pontifrax with bread for the monastic orders and alms houses. It might have been mistaken for human, had it not possessed six twig-limbs instead of just four.
‘It was like this when we first found it,’ Damar said, carbine slung by its strap as he knelt and brushed decaying litter away from a patch on the floor. ‘Ro’s scans found this.’
He prised his fingers under one of the stained flaxen mats carpeting the floor and lifted it up. The swirl of dust and debris revealed a hole in the floor, a narrow earthen staircase picked out by the luminator in Damar’s other hand.
‘We went down, but not far,’ he said, looking up at Rannik and the Space Marines. ‘It connects to the sewer tunnels and burial caverns running beneath the rest of the slum. It probably goes all the way to Pontifrax.’
‘There is a presence down there,’ Khauri said, gesturing at the stairs. ‘I will take point.’
‘As you wish, Librarian,’ Kordi said, slamming home a fresh magazine.
‘We’re with you,’ Rannik said, Damar rising to stand beside her.
‘It is not advised,’ Khauri began, then seemed to think better of it. He nodded.
Khauri and the two humans were the first down, the Space Marine barely fitting through the narrow opening in the shrine’s floor. The Librarian began to descend into the darkness, Rannik and Damar close behind. The tactical squad followed, Kordi taking up the rear. As they descended, the stink of the slums was replaced by an even worse stench, that of overflowing waste mixed with decaying remains. Rannik gagged but carried on, knowing the reflexive revulsion would pass. Damar had locked his luminator to his carbine’s lug, and the light danced around the tunnel they found themselves in.
It was quickly apparent that there was little rhyme or reason to the subterranean construction. A few dozen paces on and they found themselves standing before four different possible routes – one led a short way to a gushing waste chute, its sides scummed with brown froth. Another looked as though it had recently been walled in at its far end, while the third, unlike the first two, was burrow-like and completely earthen, with only a few timber supports seemingly keeping it from collapsing. The final one looked to lead through an old crypt that had been broken open, its tombs long ago shattered and ransacked.
‘We could divide,’ Kordi said, moving up from the rear. ‘The auspex appears to show that the crypt tunnel directly ahead goes the furthest.’
‘No,’ said Khauri abruptly. He had been looking down the crypt tunnel, but turned sharply back. ‘It is a trap. This whole place is. We have to get back to the surface immediately.’
Rannik saw the one called Kordi hesitate for a moment, his pallid features lost in the tunnel’s shadows. The Librarian seemed on the brink of speaking again when he began snapping orders back to his squad.
‘Withdraw back up the tunnel, Receding Tide formation. Rangaru, take point
.’
The Carcharodons made for the stairs. Khauri, Rannik and Damar brought up the rear.
‘What is it?’ Rannik asked, twisting to look back at the Librarian. He didn’t reply.
They reached the foot of the stairs. Kordi was already up, back in the shrine above. Khauri motioned to the last member of the squad, who had been covering the withdrawal. He turned and began to climb ahead of the two humans and the Librarian.
Rannik tried not to think about the fact that she was trapped between her night terrors on a narrow dirt staircase. She only managed a few steps before a heavy grip took hold of her shoulder, dragging her back and knocking her into Damar. She yelled in protest as she found herself falling back down into the tunnels, hauled by the Librarian’s unyielding grip.
‘Too late,’ the Space Marine said, depositing Rannik and Damar into the dirt at the foot of the stairs and moving to get between them and the entrance.
The charges buried in the bare earth of the stairway walls detonated. Rannik caught a snapshot of the Space Marine who had been climbing above her, hit from both sides by the full force of the twin blasts halfway up the stairs. He was torn apart in a welter of shorn plasteel and blood, before the storm of dirt buried him. The blast roaring down the stairway was blocked by Khauri, who interposed himself between the explosion and the two humans he had thrown to the tunnel floor. The Librarian took a single step forwards as he hunched against the hail of debris, and Rannik was forced to bow her head as the detonation rolled over them. Her ears burst, and her mind struggled to react as she tried to cuff grit from her eyes, coughing and choking. The stairway was gone, reduced to a wall of shifting earth, and the tunnel was fogged with smoke and dust.
She scrambled to her feet and spat a wad of dirt, her vision swimming. The ringing in her ears was driven out by the boom of another discharge, and another. Flashes lit the subterranean gloom, competing with the smoky glare of Damar’s luminator. She dimly realised that someone was firing a sidearm.
It was the Carcharodon. He had moved from the caved-in stair entrance to the other side of Damar and Rannik, his back to them now as he fired a bolt pistol down the tunnel at some unseen target. Shielding the two humans from the blast had left his backpack badly dented and pitted, and his blue armour scarred silver. Rannik stared at his towering form for what felt like an age, each booming report of his pistol making her ears ache.
Damar brought her back to the present. He dragged her back onto her feet and pressed her shotgun into her hands. The light of his luminator made his face a jagged contrast of light and dark as he pressed it close to hers.
‘The cultists are here! Come on!’
Then he was gone, forward to crouch at the Carcharodon’s side, the bolts of his lasgun sending streaks of red light into the dark. There, a sea of snarling, white faces and snapping fangs rose towards the two warriors.
Teeth gritted and grip tight on her Vox Legi, Rannik joined them.
In the depths of the Outer Dark, the hive fleet approached.
The number of returns on the Nicor’s powerful augur arrays were beyond computation. The flagship of the Carcharodon Astra had taken the van of the assembled fleet, its decks cleared for action and its guns run out. It was flanked by the Annihilation and Scyla, the battle-barges of the Red Brethren and the Second Company. The trio of warships would have been enough to break the back of a sector fleet. Early analysis from the cogitator banks estimated they would last between three and five hours against what was approaching.
The leading edge of the hive fleet – two dozen crustacean-like organisms about the size of Imperial escort ships – were slowly approaching the Nomad Predation Fleet’s engagement zone. Te Kahurangi watched them on the oculus screens of the Nicor’s bridge, the great flagship’s primary viewing port closed and sealed for the coming engagement. The things marking the extreme edge of the tyranid swarm were just minnows compared to the leviathan-like bulk of the hive ships following them. As they drew closer, those command and control vessels blotted out the stars with the hideous bulk of their void-scarred chitin and orifice-studded underbellies.
‘The rest of the Nomad Predation Fleet is in position,’ the Chief Librarian said to the Red Wake. Tyberos was standing on the edge of the Nicor’s command platform, watching over the silent activity of the bridge below. Te Kahurangi and Atea flanked him, their eyes on the secondary displays below. Both Librarians could feel the skin-crawling, thought-numbing psychic horror of the approaching swarm. The size of it was utterly overwhelming, like a tidal wave that threatened to snatch up individual minds and drag them out to be swallowed whole. Te Kahurangi had never encountered such an alien power before, had never felt the way it scratched and scraped inside his skull or slithered along his flesh. His psychic hood throbbed, and his grip was tight on his force staff. Going by Atea’s drawn features, he was similarly strained by the strength of the hive mind. It only reinforced the necessity of stopping it here, before it could dig its claws into the soft underbelly of the Imperium.
‘They are breaking to attack us,’ Tyberos said, his helmeted head swinging back and forth as he surveyed the data charts mapping out as close an approximation of the swarm’s formation as possible. Te Kahurangi realised he was right – a solid wedge of red, representing perhaps as many as a hundred major void-born organisms, was driving ahead of the ponderous mass that constituted the main part of the fleet. Even now yet more bio-ships were entering the sensorium range of the Carcharodons vessels, a seemingly endless procession of larger alien creatures. Te Kahurangi feared that even given the size of the swarm that had arrived so far – over a million organisms – they were viewing but a fraction of the primary fleet, the vanguard of a force that, when massed together, would be large enough to swallow up the greater part of the Segmentum Solar. The sheer scale was almost incomprehensible.
‘Message to all ships,’ Tyberos said, routing his words across the bridge’s individual vox-units. ‘Hold position.’
He did not need to explain the reasoning behind the unusually static defence. The longer it took the tyranids to engage them, the more time they bought for Third Company to complete their mission. Te Kahurangi had heard nothing since the last astropathic transmission, and this close to the hive mind he was unable to find the silence needed to scry Khauri’s whereabouts. All they had now was hope, hope that the Reaper Prime was close enough to cornering the patriarch, and hope that the warships of the Nomad Predation Fleet were strong enough to resist until he did.
It had been a trap. Damar admitted he realised that now. Initially tailing groups to the slum shrine, groups that were aware of his presence all along, had resulted in the strike force assault that had now left the ex-Guardsman, Rannik and Khauri trapped below ground. The cultists probably hadn’t expected half as much success luring investigators out into their subterranean realm.
‘I should have seen it,’ Damar said. Neither Rannik nor Khauri replied. The three were picking their way down the crypt tunnel by the light of Damar’s luminator, over the corpses of those xenos-worshippers who had charged them after the detonation of the stairwell explosives. They had lost vox contact with the surface, though the trackers Nzogwu had given Damar and Rannik were both still working, giving them an idea of their location in concert with the pocket chart Rannik had unfolded from her fatigues.
‘We need to find an exfil point,’ she said, slipping into Arbites combat-cant without realising as she held the chart out to catch the light from Damar’s luminator. ‘That probably means keeping to the sewer tunnels until we reach a manhole. Throne knows where those other burrows lead to.’
The walls around them shuddered with some sort of distant impact, sending a stream of dirt cascading from the ceiling. Rannik looked at Damar, and they both looked at Khauri, but the Space Marine remained inscrutable, the hard plates of his scarred power armour gleaming in the artificial light.
‘Along this tunnel again,
then right,’ Rannik said, glancing at the chart again. ‘We should be able to pick up one of the larger waste chutes.’
‘Don’t you have any advice?’ Damar asked Khauri directly, his voice strained. ‘You… you can see things. How do we get out of here?’
‘The arbitrator’s plan is a good one,’ Khauri said. ‘Down here it is difficult for me to walk my visions. We are close to an extremely powerful psychic presence. It scratches along inside my skull. Its ache drives out all other thoughts.’
Rannik and Damar exchanged glances again. There was another mysterious, distant impact, shuddering through the tunnels.
‘Let’s move,’ Rannik said.
They picked up the waste tunnel, travelling north-west. At some point Pontifrax’s authorities had given up trying to provide amenities to the slums that crowded their city, and the sewer systems had consequently broken down. Some tunnels were overflowing with pouring filth, while others had been cut off and dried up. The tunnel they had found was among the latter, its floor now a stagnant quagmire, shin-deep and black. The stench was almost overpowering.
‘There are no vermin down here,’ Damar said as they went. ‘How can that be, in a place like this?’
‘They won’t go near it,’ Khauri said. ‘Its presence drives out everything not under its sway.’
‘What’s “it”?’
‘The patriarch.’
Rannik halted them both before Damar could reply. The sewage tunnel had come to an abrupt end. Before her was a wall of dirt, seemingly freshly disturbed, blocking off the passage.
‘This is a recent collapse,’ she said.
‘That explains the tremors we felt,’ Damar said. ‘They must be caving tunnels around us still.’
‘We go back,’ Rannik said. ‘There’s no way they can seal off every route in the slum. We just have to hurry.’
They made their way out of the sewer system and north, into another crypt that had been broken into in order to expand the subterranean network. This was a high, desolate place, its arching vaults thickly cobwebbed. The tombs themselves appeared undisturbed, graven effigies that cast long shadows in Damar’s luminator beam.
Carcharodons: Outer Dark Page 20