Carcharodons: Outer Dark

by Robbie MacNiven

  The Nicor shook as another wave of bio-plasma evaporated against its bulkheads. Its last remaining shields had dropped ten minutes earlier, overwhelmed by the organic weaponry of the hive ship spearheading the tyranid fleet’s assault. It was three or four times the size of the Nicor, a great, bloated expanse of chitin, craggy flesh and solar tendrils that flailed ponderously as they sought to ensnare the Carcharodons flagship.

  ‘We have a breach on fore-deck sigma-five,’ Te Kahurangi said, his eyes scanning the bridge’s cogitator viewscreens. ‘Plasma erosion has breached the hull. The damaged section is being void-sealed. There are no survivors.’

  Tyberos said nothing. He hadn’t moved since the forward edge of the tyranid fleet had entered the Nicor’s engagement zone. Te Kahurangi could sense the Chapter Master’s anger building despite his cold exterior. A more prudent commander would have given ground before an opponent as vast as the hive ship, or at the very least called upon the forward capital ships and escorts to come and assist. Instead, the Annihilation and Scyla had turned their guns against the drone-minnows that formed a screen around the hive vessel, following the Red Wake’s orders and not targeting the mothership directly.

  It was dragging itself ponderously towards the Nicor, blindly feeling it out with its tendrils while apparently impervious to the firepower blasting great gouts of flesh and ichor from its hull-hide at point-blank range.

  ‘The xenos are going to attempt to board us,’ Tyberos said. They were the first words he had spoken since the order had been given to open fire.

  ‘Increase prow augur magnification,’ he added. ‘Focus on its maw.’

  The sensorium serfs did as ordered, directing the ship’s remaining bow pict-casters towards the hideous, fleshy mouth-like orifice that constituted the hive ship’s prow. It swam into view across the displays, row upon row of incisors the size of escort ships backed by billions of waving latch-fronds, all coated in icy streamers of digestive juices and ectoplasm. Around the gaping hole other, smaller orifices were puckering, the softer flesh surrounding them writhing with vile, subdermal motion. As Te Kahurangi watched the openings contracted and belched forth a stream of hideous fluid, followed by what looked like hook-nosed flesh darts. There were dozens of them, and they left their rapidly freezing afterbirth behind as they shot towards the Nicor.

  ‘Focus close-range defence systems,’ Tyberos ordered. Gunnery relayed the command over the vox, and within a minute the Nicor’s close protection batteries were firing, lighting up the void around it with laddering spears of munitions and energy bursts. Te Kahurangi saw one boarding pod after another hit and burst apart, spilling effluvium into the vacuum, shuddering and writhing in their death-throes. The flesh of the hive ship beyond rippled as it birthed another wave of the organic attack craft, all the while bearing down on the Carcharodons flagship.

  ‘Pale Nomad, with me,’ Tyberos said. ‘Atea, you have the bridge.’

  ‘Where to, my lord?’ Te Kahurangi asked as he joined the Red Wake in descending from the command platform.

  ‘The defence batteries won’t be able to stop them all,’ Tyberos said.

  Rannik and Khauri almost made it to the cathedra before they met opposition. The route chosen by the Carcharodon had taken them into the church building the downed flier had half demolished and into its undercroft, where the Librarian had broken into the tomb network that honeycombed Pontifrax’s underworld. It was far removed from the disused, tangled mess that had been burrowed into by the slum-dwellers – here most of the crypts were fully intact, and didn’t spill over into the sewer networks or maintenance tunnels.

  Nor did they come across any evidence of cult activity. It seemed that, while happy to infect the city’s outskirts, the patriarch and his children hadn’t wished to risk extending their fiefdom below the very feet of the Ecclesiarchy on Piety V, not with the constant arrival of off-world supplicants who at times wished to view the grim grandeur of the shrine-city’s bone-stacked catacombs.

  It was only when they entered the cathedra’s outlying tombs that Rannik felt a change. It was intangible at first, but it grew with every step she took into the cold darkness. She paused between two ancient grave markers, Khauri at her side. The undercroft was silent. Even the thunder of the battle happening above couldn’t penetrate so deep underground.

  Rannik turned, shotgun raised, but nothing stirred ahead or behind. The ice running down her spine didn’t go away, though.

  ‘She’s here,’ she murmured.

  ‘I know,’ Khauri said. He advanced deeper into the crypt, his stave aloft. Blue witchfire ignited around its tip, illuminating the leering stone effigies and mouldering tombs beneath the ancient cathedra. The shadows around them seemed to cringe and scuttle, fleeing from Khauri’s light as they slithered back into their alcoves and cracks with its passing. As her gaze twitched about the chamber it felt as though the graven images in the corner of her vision would lean in or twitch, only to freeze once again when she refocused. A fresh shiver ran up her spine.

  ‘The cathedra’s main space is directly above us,’ the Librarian said before pausing abruptly. Rannik did likewise, straining to catch what the genhanced warrior had already detected. Finally, she heard it – the distant tattoo of weapons fire, drumming through the crumbling stonework around them. They had gone a long way down.

  ‘We’re not too late,’ she said, trying her vox-bead. Static burst in her ear, making her flinch.

  ‘We are too deep,’ Khauri said. ‘We must find a way into a more current undercroft, not these deeper, older burial sites. Something that will give us access to the cathedra.’

  ‘If this crypt is disused it was probably bricked up a long time ago,’ Rannik pointed out.

  ‘If there is not a path I will make one,’ the Carcharodon said stoically.

  Rannik didn’t reply. A sudden scraping sound made her turn, shotgun raised and probing the darkness. The sharp light of her stab lumen picked out a faceless mortuary statue, its features long obscured by rot-lichens. After a moment’s breathless tension, she eased her finger off the trigger.

  ‘Probably just vermin,’ she said, her breath frosting in front of her.

  ‘No,’ Khauri said. She turned to ask what he meant, then froze.

  There was a figure in one of the alcoves. Rannik didn’t know if she had initially dismissed it as another statue, or whether there hadn’t been anything there before she looked. There was something now, though, a tall, slender shape draped in the shadows that haunted the abandoned space. Rannik didn’t aim her stab lumen at it. She didn’t need to.

  ‘What are you?’ she snapped. ‘What do you want with us?’

  ‘Do not speak to it,’ Khauri said. ‘It is a creature of the warp. A daemon.’

  ‘How can that be?’ Rannik asked. ‘How has it been able to follow me? How has it manifested here?’

  ‘It is bound to me,’ Khauri said softly, his eyes on the shadowed apparition. ‘And to those linked to me.’

  More than you could know, snarled a voice. Rannik let out a gasp, one hand going up to her head. The voice hadn’t come from the shadowed woman, or even from anywhere else in the crypt. It had issued directly inside her skull, a deep voice, edged with cruelty, cold as the crypt’s chill air.

  ‘Pay no heed to its words,’ Khauri ordered, striding towards the alcove where the apparition waited. ‘Its banishment is at hand.’

  No, Mika Doren Skell, exclaimed the unnatural voice. Our partnership is only just beginning. I still have so much to teach you, young shark.

  ‘You have no place with me, warp spawn,’ Khauri snapped. The flames around his stave flared, illuminating the creature in the alcove – the black mourning dress, the grave dirt. This time, however, there was no veil. This time, the thing’s face was laid bare.

  Section T-16 had been breached. One of the tyranid boarding pods had made it through the Nicor’s pr
otective barrage, wounded and trailing ichor, but with its internal gestation sacks intact. The Nicor’s external pict-casters had caught it as it latched its lamprey-like maw on to a section of hull and began to gnaw, the grinding motion of its rows of serrated teeth aided by the toxic bile continuously spewed by its acidic gut.

  Section T-16 was the first part of the ship beyond the armour plating the creature had attached itself to. It was an external service corridor, largely disused, lying frigid and dark, its bare metal walls and pipes scummed with void mould. Tyberos and Te Kahurangi entered it just as the boarding creature’s bile burned its way through the last of the plasteel and adamantium, spilling out into the corridor in a stinking yellow tide writhing with alien insects.

  The two Carcharodons had descended into the service corridor alone. Te Kahurangi knew better than to question the Red Wake’s decision not to bring any of the Red Brethren to the breach. There were times when the Reaper Lord of the Void brooked no competition for the kill.

  ‘Close the void lock,’ Tyberos ordered over the ship-wide vox-channel. The heavy doors leading to the service tunnel could be closed in the event of a hull breach, sealing the resultant vacuum off from the rest of the ship. Doing so meant the Red Wake and the Pale Nomad would be trapped until the disengagement protocols allowed the lock to be opened once more. It also meant the xenos would take longer to access the rest of the ship.

  A buzzer sounded, and the corridor shuddered as the doors behind Tyberos and Te Kahurangi ground shut. The lighting began to flicker as this section of the ship switched to reserve power. The bile spurting from the breach had reduced to a trickle, leaking through the molten hole burrowed in the Nicor’s hull. For a moment there was nothing but the patter of the alien fluids and the distant, vibrating heartbeats of the battle-barge’s engines and weapons systems.

  Then the first xenos emerged. It dragged itself from the fleshy depths of the boarding creature and out through the breach, splashing down amidst the spreading bile on four of its six limbs. It was large, a tyranid warrior genus, modified for boarding operations. The digits of its upper limbs ended in diamond-hard claws useful for rending open bulkheads, while those lower down were a ranged bio-weapon mesh that drooled more acidic bile. Its front was more heavily armoured than usual, chitin plates protecting its torso and elongated skull in the confines of the narrow tunnels and corridors it had been bred to kill in. Its entire body was slick and dripping with embryonic fluids. Still on four limbs, it turned its head slowly towards the two Carcharodons at the end of the corridor, and emitted a low, warning hiss.

  ‘Remain behind me, Pale Nomad,’ Tyberos said, beginning to advance towards the xenos. The creature stood and began to move towards the Red Wake, picking up speed. Behind it another was dragging itself through the breach, claws scraping fused adamantium. Te Kahurangi gripped his force staff tighter, the green stone at its tip glowing with psychic power.

  The first warrior shrieked and broke into a charge, its hooves drumming on the deck plates. Tyberos answered it with a great, electrified crack as his talons sprang forwards from their gauntlets, bathed in blue energy. Hunger and Slake had awoken.

  She’s not what she seems! She’s here, down among the tombs and the crypts and the dead! She has come back for you! She thirsts! She thirsts!

  – Vox recording of the final words,

  screamed in unison, of Piety V’s

  astropathic choristorum.

  _________ Chapter XII

  The firing in Absolution Square was no longer one way. Hybrids had occupied the rooftops of the chancellery and the ­Ecclesiarchy court on the far side of the square. Small-arms fire gave way to the rattle of a heavy stubber, followed by the throatier beats of an autocannon. The fire was inaccurate, chewing up the flagstones around the Carcharodons, but within a minute of their unmasking two void brothers had been hit, one fatally. The cathedra’s steps were devoid of cover, and Sharr knew that they couldn’t divert sufficient firepower from the swarm’s attacking edge to pin down or eliminate the rooftop gunmen from range.

  More traditional methods would need to be utilised.

  ‘Seventh Squad, advance and assault the heavy weapons on the rooftop emplacements. Fourth Squad will push the perimeter fifty yards forward and provide a base of fire. Tenth Squad will provide cover. Acknowledge.’

  Confirmation snapped back over the vox from the strike leaders.

  ‘Advance,’ Sharr said.

  Kordi reloaded and signalled to the rest of Fourth Squad.

  ‘Dawn Tide pattern, maintain formation. I will lead off.’

  There was a series of clacks as the rest of the tactical squad finished reloading. Kordi began to advance towards the mass of purple-veined flesh and rags bearing down on them, Fourth Squad forming up around him. The attack was measured, a wedge that extended and then detached itself from the Carcharodons gunline. They fired as they went, Kordi letting his auto-senses ping him targets – a three-armed hybrid swinging an improvised club, a swollen-headed creature in soiled Devotati robes, a Ministorum shrine-attendant with a mouth full of fangs. They all went down, their insides shredded by mass-reactive rounds, Kordi’s auto-stabilisers, recoil lock and targeting matrices meaning he could fire on the move with almost no loss of accuracy.

  The Carcharodons advance was cold, clinical and unyielding. The fire of Kordi’s brothers alone, however, would not have been sufficient to drive the assault immediately ahead of them back without the focused support of Tenth Squad. Lakari’s Devastators lacerated the morass of xenos with frag rockets and searing bursts of plasma, scything apart and immolating the densest parts of their formation. Together the two squads were able to project a cone of firepower that drove a semicircle of clear ground into the heart of the swarm.

  ‘Fifty yards, halt and stabilise,’ Kordi said, then blink-clicked the vox to the company-wide channel. ‘Fourth Squad is in position.’

  The Tactical Marines halted amidst the broken bodies and blood-splashed flagstones that marked the extent of the xenos advance. Kordi glanced back as he ejected his spent magazine and unclamped a fresh one, the rest of Fourth Squad holding the now-static wedge around him. Behind, Seventh Squad had moved up from their reserve position just within the cathedra’s open doors, and were now moving down the steps and across the square at a run.

  Kordi’s attention snapped back to his front as his armour auto-senses warned him of incoming fire. The hybrids on the far rooftops were focusing on them. Heavy calibre autocannon rounds chewed splinters from the stone around Kordi. Brother Ranga took a hard glancing hit on his left pauldron, and Brother Motako had a part of his right bicep torn away, blood turning the grey armour of his right arm red. There was a pause as the heavy weapon operators reloaded. Another minute and Kordi and his squad would be decimated.

  But the xenos didn’t have a minute. Seventh Squad had arrived, occupying the cleared space just behind Fourth. The Assault Marines were in position, Kordi’s advance and the covering fire from the Devastators allowing them to get within striking distance of the far rooftops without having to hack their way into the endless tide of xenos swarming the square. The fifty-yard advance had brought the heavy weapons within range of their jump packs, and there was a whoosh-crump of thrust as the Assault Marines soared over Kordi’s head, their chainswords and axes roaring to life in mid-air.

  ‘Keep your fire focused,’ Kordi warned the rest of his squad. Takari had opened up with his heavy bolter, its explosive rounds tearing away rank after rank of onrushing creatures, its roar clapping back from the buildings surrounding them. Despite its destructive power, and even with the support of the Devastators, the cultists were gaining ground. Kordi was firing into them from barely a dozen yards, almost close enough to be hit by the viscera of the hybrids his bolt-rounds were tearing apart.

  His boltgun clacked empty again. Too close to reload. He mag-locked the weapon and unclamped his bolt pistol and chainswor
d. He didn’t have time to activate the latter before the first hybrid was on him, gibbering manically. The weight of his swing was enough to split its skull, and as the creature went down, the weapon’s motor roared to life, tearing the warped, snarling face from the next thing scrabbling at Kordi over its kindred’s corpses.

  ‘Warak,’ he grunted over the vox. ‘Now.’

  The tactical squad’s weapons specialist didn’t respond, but his flames did. There was a whoosh as a great gout of burning promethium speared out over the mass trying to swarm Fourth Squad and envelop its flanks. The hateful screaming of the hybrids rose to a cacophony of agonised, alien shrieks as they were engulfed, rags igniting and skin blackening and searing away in the ­liquid inferno. Warak guided the spear of immolation left and then right of Kordi, the fires spreading as the burning cultists staggered blindly into one another. Black flames blew back over the Tactical Marines and the stink of roasting flesh and cooking organs even penetrated the filters of Kordi’s armour.

  The flamer’s wrath was answered by the smouldering power of Seventh Squad’s roaring Mark II jump packs. Their swords, axes and armour plates were slick with the blood of the heavy weapons teams, who now lay slaughtered across the chancellery and court house rooftops, their weapons broken. The Assault Marines dropped back down behind Kordi, the stone underfoot shuddering with the successive impacts. A glance at his display showed them taking up position among his tactical brethren, adding their bolt pistol fire to the curtain of shots narrowly keeping the horde at bay.

  ‘Withdraw, Harvester pattern,’ Kordi ordered, patching Strike Leader Garanga and the rest of Seventh in. The combined squad disengaged amidst a flurry of fragmentation grenades, Kordi locking his chainsword and sending one of his own into the savaged, burning mass in front of him. The bloody detonations cleared a swathe of space and allowed the Carcharodons to pull back, holding formation and firing as they went. Kordi yanked the pin on another grenade and sent it underarm, snapping off well-placed shots with his bolt pistol as he backed up. The pressure of the rising tide of xenos decreased as the Space Marines successfully broke contact, and it wasn’t long before Kordi realised they had rejoined the main firing line, Seventh Squad continuing on up the cathedra steps and back into reserve.