‘Reaper Prime,’ said Teko, drawing Sharr’s gaze to the great coral block that was the bridge’s command throne.
‘We are coming up on the penal ship,’ the shipmaster said. ‘Ident scans and the keel tag confirm it’s the convict hauler Imperial Truth. What are your orders?’
‘You’ve hailed her?’
‘Affirmative. She is unresponsive. Close-range augur traces have detected only minimal life signs. A shuttle jettisoned from her approximately ten minutes ago, heading for Zartak’s surface. We lost its trajectory on the far side of the ship.’
‘The murderers will already have had their fun,’ Kahu said. ‘It will be nothing but a charnel house.’
‘True,’ Sharr said. ‘But if there are still prisoners on board it would be wasteful to destroy the ship from afar. They may be able to provide intelligence before we make planetfall.’
‘The traitors will have broken them,’ Kahu said dispassionately. ‘Boarding her would be a waste of time.’
Sharr watched the viewscreens. Even without pict magnification the Imperial Truth was now clearly discernible, its blocky, unlovely bulk framed by the swirling green-and-white orb of Zartak. What had become of her crew? What now festered on board, in the darkness that had claimed her decks and holds?
‘Boarding her isn’t a waste of time if it renders up our first Tithe prisoners,’ Sharr said. ‘That is why we are here.’
‘You really do want first blood,’ Kahu surmised. ‘Akia’s spirit is strong in you, Company Master.’
‘And I will have it, Kahu,’ Sharr said, ignoring the barbed comparison. ‘Whether on board that ship or on the planet below. Prepare Third and Fourth Squads and the Devourers. And prime the Ursus Claws.’
The Ursus Claws were terrible weapons. White Maw possessed two, each capable of being launched from its port or starboard flanks. Both were fashioned like vast harpoons, nearly the size of the escort ships accompanying the capital vessel. As White Maw drew alongside the Imperial Truth sections of its adamantium bulkheads levered back. On Sharr’s orders the great barbs launched, the plasma thrusters clustered beneath their tips blazing. They arced silently through the void, uncoiling link by link as they powered towards their prey.
The Imperial Truth was struck fore of its starboard engine bays and aft of the primary cargo holds. The adamantium tips of the two great spears plunged into the vessel’s outer shell, plasma drives burning out as they drove the Ursus Claws through layers of reinforced bulkheads, service corridors and maintenance shafts. Once the tips had been buried the barbs sprung outwards, hooks the size of super heavy battle tanks digging into the ship’s guts and lodging there with a flare of magnetic fusion. For a second the Imperial Truth shuddered, impaled and helpless. Then the Ursus Claws began to pull.
Great rotor coils embedded in the White Maw’s flank turned, powered by energy diverted from the ship’s plasma drives. The links connecting the Ursus Claw tips to their housing in the strike cruiser were dragged slowly taut. Little by little, the Ursus Claws started to retract, and with them they hauled the Imperial Truth. The prison ship listed, without any propulsion of its own, metal shrieking and groaning as the starboard decks began to buckle. But the Ursus Claws had dug deep – they held.
Sharr felt the assault torpedo around him shudder as it launched. Behind, First Squad stood unmoving, fully armed and armoured, their auto-stabilisers and mag-locks keeping them upright as the torpedo blazed towards the Imperial Truth’s flank. White Maw had dragged the penal ship in close, close enough to ensure that whatever defensive systems it possessed would be unable to lock on to the Carcharodons assault craft as they tore through the narrow void between the two ships. The chrono display on Sharr’s visor barely reached fifteen seconds before the proximity alarms chimed and the narrow metal troop bay was filled with vicious red light.
‘Brace,’ Sharr ordered, setting his stabilisers to maximum. Just as his armour locked he felt the retro-thrust dampening a headlong collision, moments before the impact itself. He grunted, his power armour absorbing the violent gravitational changes. The torpedo seemed to settle for a moment, then fresh vibrations throbbed through the deck underfoot as the meltas in its prow burned through the Imperial Truth’s outer hull.
Sharr unclamped Reaper. Behind him be could feel First Squad’s desire to kill. They had waited long enough. Sharr found himself praying there were no prisoners left alive aboard the ship. Nothing to complicate the bloodshed. His only desire was to slaughter. He thrust the bloody emotions aside, seeking focus. He was not Akia.
But he could kill like Akia. The frag plates on the boarding torpedo’s prow burst with a dull thud, followed by the sound of auto-bolts grating back. The troop bay lighting flickered from red to green. Sharr was already moving as the ramp fell, Reaper a roaring counterpoint to his deathly silence.
Beyond was shrieking darkness. Sharr’s auto-senses picked out misshapen, unnatural forms, further distorted by the fragmentation bursts that had shredded the corridor the torpedo had penetrated. Sharr’s sensors reported the unmistakable, sickening stench of the warp.
The Carcharodon decimated the first daemons to rear up at him from the darkness, Reaper tearing them to globules of shredded meat and black ichor. He stamped down on their writhing remains, his sharpened teeth bared with hatred. The malformed horrors would have torn the sanity of most mortals – even as Sharr pressed on they rose up around him, sucking maws and fleshy appendages writhing and clutching at grey battleplate, nightmares made manifest.
But nightmares meant nothing in the Outer Dark. Sharr cut them apart, Reaper sending gouts of black filth splattering across Akia’s armour. Across his armour. A surge of revulsion drove Sharr on down the corridor, the fury of his great chainaxe filling the confined space. The life essence of the squealing, mewling things infesting the ship was soon dripping from him, an unworthy tribute to the Void Father. This was no blooding; it was an extermination, a culling of something vile. The anger only made Sharr strike harder.
Behind him First Squad followed in his frenzied wake. Dorthor and Red Tane put down the daemonspawn savaged by the Company Master, single bolt-rounds dissolving their unnatural flesh. Tane hadn’t even deigned to draw the Void Sword, unwilling to sully the relic blade with daemonic ichor. Soha was protecting the squad’s rear, his volkite caliver buzzing with power as he reduced the horrors further down the corridor to bursts of fire and ash, the crimson rays of the ancient weapon illuminating the violent scene with bursts of hellish light.
The last daemon came apart in Sharr’s fist, dissolving back into the immaterium. Before him an access hatch lay open. He shouldered his way through it, scanning for fresh prey, his transhuman body screaming silently for more kills.
His auto-senses showed him the slaughterhouse he’d stepped into. What had once been the ship’s medicae bay was awash with blood and hung with bloody skins. The insane abattoir was crawling with hunchbacked, cloaked creatures, cultists that cringed away from Sharr’s presence.
The Carcharodon didn’t hesitate. He added their tainted blood to the daemon ichor spraying from his chainaxe, ripping through their squealing forms. They clawed and beat at one another in their efforts to get away from him, helpless before the grey-plated giant. The rest of First Squad simply watched as Sharr massacred them.
‘No prisoners,’ Strike Veteran Dorthor said, assessing the carnage as the last cultist’s shriek was cut off by Reaper’s howl. Sharr stood breathing heavily, viscera dripping from his ancient armour. He fought to control himself, fought to master the urge to keep killing. To shed more blood. He was not Akia. He was not. He acknowledged a trio of situation reports on his visor, transmitted from the Devourer Assault squads and the Third Tactical Squad as they penetrated other parts of the ship.
‘No human survivors,’ he said, confirming Dorthor’s statement. ‘And no sign of the renegades. Yet.’
‘We’re missing one
boarding party,’ Signifier Niko muttered. Sharr realised he was correct.
Fourth Squad had yet to report in.
Kordi killed while the memories came at him. He had been dreaming, though of what it was hard to remember. Sun-drenched shingle and crashing waves, perhaps. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was shedding blood, for the Chapter and the Void Father.
Focus. He reloaded, movements smooth, none of his mental turmoil evident in the well-honed actions. He opened fire, his Phobos R/017 bolter joining those of his void brothers. Fourth Squad had penetrated the base of the Imperial Truth’s command spire, their boarding torpedo crushing an access chute. They’d fought their way upwards, through stairwells haunted by horrors of morphing warp flesh and grasping claws. The Carcharodons were splattered with the daemonspawn’s gore, a foul patina that did nothing to slake the simmering bloodlust of the Adeptus Astartes. Strike Leader Ekara’s terse commands were the only thing keeping them in formation, a triple knot of void brothers advancing one after the other up the stairwells, providing each other with mutual fire support.
‘Purged,’ Kordi said tersely, as the daemon that had reared at him from the shadows of the stairwell came apart. The Tactical Marines pressed on, moving with the fluidity of natural-born predators.
Te Kahurangi was with them. The Chief Librarian had insisted on accompanying the strike up towards the bridge, presumably drawn by some arcane desire or knowledge. He led Fourth Squad from the fore, the green stone tipping his bone force staff lighting the dire, warp-stinking darkness that wreathed the ship.
More fire came from up ahead. Kordi joined the lead void brothers as they engaged a fresh mass of spawn infesting the top of the spire’s final set of stairs. Mass-reactive rounds detonated by the dozen, bass thunderclaps punctuating the wet thump of tearing flesh. Writhing tentacles grasped at the Carcharodons, one sinuous length wrapping around the greaves of Beta-eight-three-Rua and trying to drag him down towards a distended maw filled with needle teeth and grinning secondary mouths. The Carcharodon unlocked his combat knife and, in a silent rage, hacked the boneless limb apart, sawing the razorblade through thick layers of purple flesh and rancid yellow fat.
‘Cease,’ Ekara ordered. It took a few moments for the words to register with Kordi, and a few more for him to stop his automatic fire. Around him the rest of Fourth Squad likewise eased fingers from triggers. The daemons were gone.
The blast doors to the ship’s bridge lay open before them. The inside stank of death.
‘Advance,’ Ekara ordered.
‘Watch all angles,’ Te Kahurangi added. ‘And above.’ The Librarian’s voice was terse, as though he was speaking through gritted teeth. Whatever his warp sight was showing him, it wasn’t good.
The Carcharodons secured the bridge in silence, alert for further contacts. There were none. Kordi scanned the darkness of the arching chamber’s hanging rafters, hung with shadows. His mind saw an endless expanse of clear blue sky, mirroring the open waters below. He thrust the unwelcome memory angrily aside, turning his attention to the gristly remains of the corpses beneath his feet. They were a mixture of Imperial Navy bridge staff and Adeptus Arbites lawmen, united by a single aspect – they had been cut down with bolters, chainblades and worse. It was the work of their dark brothers, that much was certain.
Te Kahurangi was standing on the edge of the bridge’s primary vox-pit, looking down at the carpet of Navy corpses and the body of a single female arbitrator. One headless corpse had been pinned to the vox-hub.
‘We are too late,’ the Chief Librarian said. ‘They have all gone.’
‘Scythe Four, come in,’ said the voice of Company Master Sharr over the vox. ‘Repeat, Scythe Four, come in.’
‘The bridge is secure,’ Te Kahurangi said before Ekara could respond. ‘They’ve already slaughtered the last prisoners. The murderers have done their work well. They’ve used vox trickery and dark sorcery to infiltrate the system.’
‘We have found none of them in the medicae bay either, but evidence of their dark rituals abound.’
‘The Dead Skin was on board. I can sense the lingering pain of his presence, like an aftershock.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Below the surface, hunting the boy. We must hurry.’
‘I will have Voidspear and Razortooth pick us up from the shuttle bays, and White Maw will destroy this hulk from afar. Send word to Ari to bring his initiates as well. They will accompany you once we reach the surface.’
‘With me, brethren,’ Te Kahurangi said, addressing Fourth Squad. Kordi and the others closed around the ancient Librarian as he departed for the Imperial Truth’s shuttle bays, casting one last lingering look at the headless corpse pinned to the vox-bay below.
‘All void brethren,’ Sharr’s voice clicked over the company-wide vox-channel. ‘New objective coordinates uploading. Lock on to Imperial surface installation Gamma-eight-three, tagged Sub-Precinct Eight.’
Rannik looked at herself in the tiny mirror plate in Sub-Precinct Eight’s ablution cell. The face that stared back at her was nightmarish – the blood and gristle that had caked it flowed in pink lines where the arbitrator was trying to wash it away, plastering her dark hair to her scalp and stinging her eyes. Her hands shook as she splashed more water over her head. She told herself it was because of the cold, and not the fear that still gripped her.
The arbitrators manning the walls reported that the shadows edging the treeline beyond the sub-precinct were moving. The rain had let up, giving way to pallid, watery sunlight, but the darkness beneath the boughs only seemed to have deepened. There had been no more gunfire. The headless corpse of the arbitrator brought down trying to get Rannik inside still lay in the churned-up mulch beyond the south gate.
First Arbitrator Jaken had briefed Rannik in the sub-precinct’s small control room. Klenn, the facility’s commander, had departed for the session review the day before. Word had come through that the shock squads were being scrambled to investigate an unauthorised high-orbital entry. The garrison had been stood to. There had been a blurt of panicked, contradictory messages from the Precinct Fortress, and then nothing. That was when the darkness had started to encroach, in the hours before the dawn. Jaken had triggered the sub-precinct’s distress beacon, and waited. They’d seen the re-entry of Rannik’s salvation pod burning a trail through the morning sky, and sent a team to investigate. The attack on them confirmed what Rannik had feared – the monsters had made it planetside.
She hadn’t spoken of them. She’d told Jaken that the Imperial Truth had been a trap, that the dark forces of the Archenemy had come to Zartak and that they may well be the only survivors still resisting. But she hadn’t said anything of the towering, shrieking things that had fallen upon them from the darkness, how they had been impervious to a whole clip of Vox Legi shells, how they had crushed skulls and snapped necks with the gleeful ease of a child at play.
She certainly hadn’t told them how one, his midnight-blue armour splattered with Macran’s blood, had not only spared her but returned her planetside via the salvation pod. The memory made her want to be sick again. She didn’t know why she’d been saved. Was she tainted? Had some sort of corruption been planted in her soul? She gripped the sides of the sink, head bowed, trying to stop shaking, watching the pink water swill down the plughole.
Jaken wanted to kill the convicts. Rannik had refused, not because she considered it the wrong thing to do, but because she simply hadn’t known what to do. Nothing in her progenium training had prepared her for this.
The ablution cell had been part of Klenn’s private quarters. Rannik had been at loggerheads with the older sub-warden from the day she had arrived on Zartak, but she’d have given anything right then to have him present. She wondered what had happened to her own sub-precinct, to First Arbitrator Nellis and the rest of her men. And what had become of the Precinct Fortress? What was she supp
osed to do next? Send a force to investigate? Hold tight, and watch the shadows creep closer? The memory of the slaughter on board the Imperial Truth returned, and she shuddered.
‘Sub-warden, sir,’ called Jaken from outside the cell’s hatch. ‘The augur is detecting an entry approach from orbit. Two signals, both Imperial, but the identification isn’t coming up in the databanks. Also, we’re getting returns on a large detonation in high orbit. We suspect a ship has just been destroyed.’
‘I’ll be right there,’ Rannik replied, cuffing water from her face. Looking at her pale, red-eyed reflection, she felt a sudden bout of anger. She was an officer of the Adeptus Arbites. Regardless of the fate that had befallen the rest of Zartak, the situation in Sub-Precinct Eight was stable. It was her duty to keep it that way until the Imperium finally realised what was happening, and help arrived. Whenever that might be. She tugged her carapace plate straight, scooped her newly requisitioned helmet from the bare rockcrete floor and opened the hatch. Jaken was waiting for her.
‘Prime the aerial defence batteries,’ she ordered the first arbitrator. ‘They could be from the Imperial Truth, which means they’re not ours any more.’
‘Sir, they don’t appear to be from the prison ship,’ Jaken replied. ‘They check out as some sort of gunship, of a much older pattern.’
‘Do we have visuals?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Rannik strode out into the dirt parade ground set before the sub-precinct’s central keep. The garrison were manning the walls of the rockcrete bastions that ringed the central block. The multi-barrelled Hydra flak cannons that crowned the keep’s roof were inert, their servitor targeting systems not locking on to the friendly signal being broadcast by the approaching fliers.
Rannik took the magnoculars handed to her by Jaken. Whatever they were, the aircraft certainly didn’t look friendly. The viewfinder’s enhanced scopes stripped away the distance and cloud cover to reveal two heavy-looking, snub-nosed gunships streaking towards the sub-precinct, the pallid sunlight glinting from their stubby, grey-plated wings and the barrels of their bristling weaponry. As Rannik watched, one stooped to begin what could only be a descent run, while the other held off in a holding pattern.
Carcharodons: Red Tithe Page 12