‘Counter-attack,’ Sharr said over the vox, addressing all Carcharodons holding the apse and pulpit. It didn’t take the experience of over a century of combat combined with genhanced battle tactics to realise that if the swarm turned its strength against Itako, the Venerable Dreadnought would eventually be brought low. Between him and the rest of his void brethren, however, there may be a chance to snare and slaughter the patriarch.
‘First and Tenth, supporting fire,’ Sharr ordered. ‘Eighth and command, on me. Focus on the patriarch, no matter the cost.’
Sharr led the remains of his battle-brothers down from the altar and into the carnage spreading out to the chancel from the nave. The swarm met them. The Reaper Prime was only dimly aware of point-blank bolter fire ripping into the hybrids either side of him as he stormed their centre, Reaper’s roar his battle cry. The chainaxe tore xenos flesh, unstoppable as ever. Sharr could see the patriarch over the heads of its brood-kin, leaping for Itako. It mounted the Dreadnought’s torso with ease, its talons raking metal, but though the wicked claws gouged great slices of plasteel and ceramite away, they could not reach the thing housed within. Itako bellowed with rage, a twist and a swing of his great gauntlets causing the alien to dart off to one side, hissing. Had either of the Dreadnought’s two fists caught the genestealer they would have butchered it with ease, but the patriarch was far too intelligent and far too fast. It came in low, ducking beneath the flames that burst from the Dreadnought’s torso and then leaping up once more as they fluttered out, movements preternaturally swift and fluid.
It latched its talons around Itako’s great helm, set low in his armour-plated shoulders. Claws sparked as they sheared metal, and it was all Sharr could do not to let out a great roar of anger as he strove to hack his way to the Dreadnought and his attacker. If the Wandering Ancient fell, the last means of resisting the patriarch would be gone.
Itako attempted to strike the lithe xenos, but could not bring his weapon-arms to bear before the creature had moved again, scuttling up over his heavy shoulders to scrape more long, jagged rents in his plate. The great genestealer moved yet again as Itako shifted his bulk to throw it off, released its death-grip on the towering war machine and darted in among its followers as the great drill bits and blades of the Dreadnought’s arms scythed only air.
Yet as Itako struggled to turn once more to face the patriarch, the xenos did not move to attack again. It had sensed something, something approaching the cathedra’s bloody space, something that even Sharr, unattuned though he was, picked up after a few moments.
A presence had entered in among the heaving, slashing, stabbing bodies, one that Sharr recognised, yet did not fully believe until he saw the Librarian striding through the melee around him.
Khauri had returned, and he brought with him the power of the void.
‘Is this how it ends?’ Atea asked, his stoic voice turned heavy. The prow pict-casters of the Nicor, those which had withstood the bombardment of bio-plasma, acidic ichor and spore mines, now showed nothing but a yawning, fanged maw, a mile wide. The hive ship leading the tyranid fleet’s vanguard had finally snared the Nicor, and was now hauling its battered form towards the orifice in its chitinous prow that constituted something approaching a primary mouth.
The Nicor’s mighty plasma destructor had seared a dozen great holes in the monstrosity, but its vents were glowing white in the void vacuum and its weapons systems were on the brink of meltdown. Tyberos had ordered the gunnery terminal to cease fire, conserving the final plasma blast for when they were all but within the creature’s gullet.
Te Kahurangi assessed the tactical readouts for what felt like the hundredth time, but they offered no more hope. The combat element of the Carcharodons fleet was fully engaged, each ship fighting for its life against a swarm of fleshy bio-vessels. In the ponderous logistics of void warfare, the Nicor was already gone, already consumed whole by the behemoth. It was a fate unbefitting for such a venerable warship, yet it was the only one the Chief Librarian could see among the future possibilities his mind sought out. Closing his eyes and seeking the silent inner core of concentration, all he saw was ruin.
And then, suddenly, discord. The possibilities revealed by his inner eye changed, switched, like a deck of Tarot cards newly shuffled. As Te Kahurangi tried to make sense of them, a message came to the command platform from the bridge’s sensorium pit.
Something was about to break from the warp into the Outer Dark, and it was going to do so right into the midst of the engagement.
‘Identification?’ Atea demanded. The serfs didn’t answer. The return to real space was being conducted so nearby, in such fraught conditions, that the Nicor’s embattled sensor arrays had only just picked up on it. But Te Kahurangi didn’t need the ship’s consciousness to realise who was about to plunge into the heart of the battle. He had seen them already, had felt the presence of his brother’s approach. The slenderest smile twitched at his thin lips.
‘The Ashen Claws have come,’ he rasped.
The Wicked Claw tore its way into reality just starboard of the hive ship. Te Kahurangi’s warp sight granted him a view of its arrival, reality buckling and tearing in a corona of purple lightning, a clutch of small bio-ships caught too close to the rift atomised by the disruption. Such a return to real space, made far from a warp jump point and into the midst of a heavily contested battle zone, spoke volumes of the abilities of the Wicked Claw’s Navigator, and the determination of its commander.
The Infernus-class heavy cruiser had materialised not side-on to the hive ship dragging in the Nicor, but with its own prow facing the beast’s flank. Te Kahurangi knew why before the energy spike across the Nicor’s augur arrays confirmed it – the ancient warship was about to unleash the fury of its exo-lance. The spine-mounted weapon began to charge the instant the Wicked Claw completed its warp jump, and Te Kahurangi realised that the heavy cruiser had neither raised its shields nor activated its plasma drives. It was routing all of its power to the exo-lance, activating it as rapidly as possible.
For once, the silence on the Nicor’s bridge was born out of expectation, rather than doctrine. The energy readouts of the sensorium spiked. The Wicked Claw had fired. Moments later, the Nicor’s augurs began to flood back with damage reports. The pict screens caught only partial images, even their flare-resistance overwhelmed by the fury of the lance strike.
The entire left side of the hive ship had been liquidated, annihilated in a blaze of crimson energy. Great entrails and an ocean’s worth of vital fluids burst into the void, where they crystallised and froze. The behemoth yawed to the side, its tendrils unlatching from the Nicor as the dozens of great hearts pumping vile life through the monstrosity struggled to carry on. It was a testament to the hive ship’s size and strength that it had taken a direct hit from a weapon that would have atomised most capital ships.
The Wicked Claw fired again. This time the result was certain. Te Kahurangi scanned the displays beneath him, already knowing what they would read – the master of the swarm’s vanguard had been reduced to continent-sized globules of flesh.
‘The synapse link with the vanguard will be broken,’ Atea said, indicating the holochart icons representing the drones that had formerly been clustered around their mothership. Already they were showing signs of disorganisation, their previously perfect formation disrupted. Even as the Nomad Predation Fleet bore down on them, the warp convulsed once more.
The rest of the Ashen Claws fleet had arrived.
Khauri strode from the east transept into the ruinous carnage of the nave. His power armour had almost been reduced to its under-layers and servos, slashed and crusted with his own blood and congealed xenos ichor. His eyes were glowing an electric blue, sparking with power, and his stave likewise crackled with charge, its basic psy-reactive material barely able to channel the energies generated by the young Carcharodon. None could approach him. Lightning lashed from his stave a
t the first few hybrids that tried, their twisted skeletons visible for brief glimpses within their pallid flesh as they were riven and burned by the strength of the discharge.
The patriarch sensed the potency of the new challenger. Its enemies lay around it at its mercy, defeated. The shrine-city was on the brink of belonging to its accursed brood. The whole of Piety V would surely follow, and when the full might of the hive fleets arrived, the worshippers of the great shrine world would look to the convulsing skies and, rather than cowering in fear, give praise and rejoice.
The patriarch hissed, and leapt for Khauri. It did so with such speed that Sharr could not follow it, until the psyker intervened. One moment the great genestealer was a blur of clawed, chitinous motion, the next it was perfectly still, suspended in mid-air, its talons less than a foot from Khauri’s head. It remained frozen, as though time itself had ceased to function, though round about it the lightning of Khauri’s stave still crackled and snapped.
The Carcharodon reached out with a single gauntlet, the motion unhurried. A collective shriek went up all through the cathedra as the xenos saw their father threatened, yet none could move to its defence. It was as though the entire space had been removed from the considerations of reality, reduced to a place where Khauri did as he pleased and all was bent to his will.
The Librarian touched the patriarch’s distended brow. A single bare forefinger pressed against the veined, purple flesh. The reaction was immediate. The patriarch’s skull exploded, blasted to a pulp, a shower of grey matter splattering Khauri and everything within a dozen paces. It was as though a wave of immense, focused pressure had hit the trapped alien, pummelling its way through its body in a ripple, splitting its carapace, shattering its chitin, bursting its organs and ripping away its flesh all the way down to its thick, spiked tail. In barely a second, the founder and master of Piety V’s genestealer cult was obliterated.
The impossible stillness that had gripped the cathedra disappeared the moment the last of the patriarch’s remains showered down. The shrieks of genestealers and hybrids alike redoubled. Khauri, however, was not finished. Eyes still wreathed in balefire, he slammed his stave into the cathedra’s bloody flagstones, cracking those beneath his feet. More power arced from the staff, striking the nearest hybrids and then darting between them, igniting their clothing and bursting their alien skulls apart in a drumbeat succession of detonations.
There was no let up in the slaughter. The idea that the patriarch’s death precipitated the total collapse of the cult was at best an exaggeration – even as Khauri decimated the swarm filling the cathedra, more came at him and the Carcharodons. Sharr brought Reaper round just in time to tear its motorised teeth through the carapace of a purestrain as it leapt at him, its maw-tongue darting out to latch on to the Reaper Prime’s gorget even as it was bisected. He reached up and tore the fleshy proboscis free, fighting back a snarl of frustration mixed with hate-fuelled anger. They were all going to die here, xenos and Adeptus Astartes alike, mutually butchered, slaughtered in an orgy of bloodletting. It didn’t matter, he forced himself to recall. They had done it. They had killed the patriarch, and broken the psychic beacon it and its magus had been projecting into the Outer Dark. Regardless of what became of any of them, of Piety V itself, the Great Devourer had been turned away.
Now they fought for survival alone.
‘The augurs…’ The serf who had called up from the Nicor’s sensorium bay trailed off. The Carcharodons on the command platform waited in silence for him to collect himself.
‘The augurs are reading a… withdrawal of the enemy fleet,’ he eventually managed to say. Te Kahurangi stepped from the command platform down to the sensorium, where the augur arrays were presented on the viewscreens and cogitator printouts in detail. He looked from one to another, assessing the combined data output, probing for any mistake from the analysts or lie among the patterns of the xenos swarm. The report was incontrovertible, though – from the vanguard to the great mass that lay beyond, the great hive ships were turning ponderously away, their drone swarms flowing around them as they receded once again into the Outer Dark. One by one, the constellation of contacts dropped off the sensorium arrays. One by one, the combined guns of the Carcharodons and Ashen Claws fleets fell silent as the remnants of the swarm drew out of range.
Te Kahurangi looked up at Tyberos, and nodded. The Red Wake uttered a single order, his deathly voice breathing out across the quiet bridge.
‘Hold.’
The plasma drives gradually slowed to idle, as shields knocked down by bio-plasma and borer pods flickered back to life. Macrocannon batteries were reloaded and lances recharged, but they remained silent. The hive fleet continued its slow progress away from the twin fleets, away from the Imperium’s undefended heart, back out into the darkness far below the galactic plane.
Sharr fell.
His armour was screaming at him. It was dying, penetrated in half a dozen places by talons and blades. One of the hybrids had latched itself around his left leg, stabbing into the sealant joint behind his knee plate while another dragged down his right arm. He had gone down, Reaper locked in the chest cavity of a corpse just out of reach, and now a purestrain was pinning him to the ground, two of its limbs on his other arm while its upper two dug at his gorget, seeking the bare flesh of his neck.
A force struck the xenos piling on top of him like a tidal wave, snatching the hybrids and snapping necks and limbs as it sent them flying into the air. Khauri stood over Sharr, wreathed in power, arcing energies pulverising anything that came at him. The Reaper Prime tried to rise, but his left leg wouldn’t respond. He managed to unlock his bolt pistol and open fire from the floor. Ahead Ancient Itako was still butchering an implacable path through the cathedra, a mountain of scarred, ichor-drenched metal, both fists heavy with the remains of the deformed things still throwing themselves at him.
Apothecary Tama knelt at Sharr’s side and helped him up, both warriors firing their bolt pistols into the press.
‘They have come,’ Khauri said, not looking at them, and when he spoke it was like a dozen voices uttering the words at once.
‘Who?’ Sharr asked tersely, reloading.
‘Our brothers.’
The Ashen Claws descended on Piety V, three companies’ worth of battle-brothers deploying via Dreadclaws and Stormbirds across the shrine-city. They cleared drop zones with murderous efficiency, point-blank bolter barrages and massed flamers slaughtering and immolating the disorganised, poorly equipped rioters. Xenos, hybrids and those simply swept up in the uprising, they were all purged as the renegade Space Marines moved into the surrounding streets and squares, clearing shrines broken into by the mobs as they went.
Two squads of Ashen Claws Terminators, clad in archaic Cataphractii armour, teleported directly onto the edge of Absolution Square and immediately set about carving a red path into the cathedra. They slaughtered the hybrids still attempting to break into Maxima Alba before one squad formed a cordon around the cathedra’s broken doors. The other carried on inside, combi-bolters drumming a savage tattoo from the bullet-riddled stone columns and the shattered dome ceiling. The Carcharodons and the Ashen Claws met amidst a storm of fire and slaughter.
The remnants of the cult collapsed. The battle of Absolution Square was over.
The Wicked Claw hadn’t powered down its weapon systems.
As the tyranid fleet receded back into the depths of the void, the Ashen Claws flagship and its escorts had come to new headings, headings that brought their guns to bear on the Carcharodon Astra. The Wicked Claw was still routing vast amounts of power to its exo-lance, and it was target-locked on the Nicor.
‘Incoming pict transmission from the Wicked Claw,’ one of the vox-serfs called up from the communications pits beneath the Nicor’s command deck.
‘On screen,’ Tyberos rasped.
The pict monitors above the platform flickered into life,
resolving into an image of a throne of black stone. On it was Nehat Nev, clad in the dark power armour of the Ashen Claws, his pale features as firmly set as the stone he sat upon.
‘The Reaper Lord of the Void,’ said Nev, his voice crackling from the Nicor’s vox-speakers. ‘Is it still the Red Wake who wears that battleplate, or has Tyberos changed once again?’
‘You know me, Ashen Claw,’ Tyberos replied.
‘I know what you carry as well, Carcharodon. Your fists are clad in the property of my Chapter.’
‘I was going to offer thanks for your intervention,’ Tyberos said. ‘Perhaps I should save my breath?’
‘You know why I am here, Red Wake.’
‘You are mistaken, Ashen Claw. Is there more to your arrival than the honouring of ancient pledges?’
‘You mock me,’ Nev snarled. ‘I was promised the return of what is mine by right. Hunger and Slake.’
Carcharodons: Outer Dark Page 27