So his Claw had descended into the darkness to join their brothers. There were none more adept at the art of the hunt than his Raptors. They joined the Stalk, the first of three combat phases that the warband had long ago perfected. Slowly and patiently, the Night Lords located their enemy’s positions and moved to encircle them, slipping through the shadows with the unhurried precision that spoke of complete self-confidence. After they were in position the Terror would begin. The flare of arco-lightning, the screams of a thousand victims, the bark and hammer of weaponry, vox scramblers, distortion blasts and stun grenades – they would flay the minds of their enemies in a burst of purest, maddening terror.
Only then would they move in for the final, sweetest phase – the Kill.
Vorfex smiled as he reviewed the location of his brethren in the darkness around him. They would make prey out of those who believed themselves predators.
‘Area secured,’ Strike Leader Nuritona’s voice crackled over the vox. ‘Junction nine-three is clear.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Sharr replied. ‘Hold position. We are joining you.’
The tactical brethren of Third Company’s Second Squad had led the descent into the tunnels linking the sub-precinct to the primary mine works. They had encountered no sign of any enemy presence. Nuritona had halted their advance at a subway intersection, the single largest point connecting the two underground networks. Sharr had received a vox-message from Te Kahurangi moments earlier saying that he too had begun to descend into the underground, far to the north. The company’s Scout detachment was fanning out ahead of him, splitting up to hunt for the boy.
That was no longer Sharr’s concern. The primary mine had to be purged, and as quickly as possible. Only then could the Tithing begin.
He led his command squad down, first via grav lift and then along winding, narrow passages of rock, dirt and creaking plasteel. Down into the echoing embrace of Zartak’s inner dark. There, he found Nuritona and his Tactical squad waiting.
‘Possible contact ahead,’ the strike leader said, greeting his Company Master with a deferential nod. He was standing in the shelter of a packed, rusting ore skip, while his void brothers had spread out to all sides of the junction, crouched behind rusting rail maintenance carriages and track-changing gears. The air was cold and heavy, as though the sub-surface tunnel was holding its breath.
‘Possible contact?’ Sharr repeated. It was rare for the grizzled commander of Second Squad to deal in anything other than absolutes.
‘Affirmative. The shadows are playing tricks on us. There have been auto-sense malfunctions. I suspect some sort of advanced scrambling device is in effect nearby.’
There were few things in the galaxy capable of distorting the senses of Adeptus Astartes power armour. That alone was evidence enough that their enemy was close.
‘Nothing on auspex?’
‘Not yet.’
‘They know we’re here,’ Strike Veteran Dorthor growled. The command squad were assembled around their Company Master, scanning the darkness for movement. Signifier Niko had retracted the haft of the company’s banner by half in order to accommodate the ancient standard underground. Red Tane’s grip on the mag-locked Void Sword looked tighter than ever.
‘They’re waiting for us,’ Sharr surmised. ‘And I would not want them to grow bored. Hold your positions.’
He stood. The loco rail route going directly to Sink Shaft One led away from him. The lumen strips wired overhead had failed further up the tunnel, the track underfoot laddering off into darkness. A slight draught from some distant exhaust shaft stirred the ragged strips of the devotional readings nailed to the walls. Sharr’s lenses probed the shadows, but picked up only phantom returns and error blips. Nuritona was right – something was deliberately disrupting their visuals.
But sometimes the absence of the predator was a confirmation of its presence.
‘Company Master–’ Dorthor began, but Sharr cut him off.
‘Wait. They won’t strike unless they think I’m isolated. We must spring their trap.’
He advanced down the tunnel, alone. He sensed rather than saw the shadows shift and move, the darkness closing in around him like the creeping hunger-ache of cryo-sleep.
‘Company Master, if you go any further we’ll lose track of you,’ Dorthor said over the vox. ‘The auspex is beginning to malfunction.’
Sharr didn’t reply. His armour had started pumping combat stimms through his transhuman body, the injections automatically triggered by the spike in his heart rate. His saliva tasted coppery, and his muscles had started to burn with adrenaline. Reaper suddenly felt lighter, the great chainaxe grasped easily in both gauntlets.
Something thumped in the gravel of the track bed behind him. The noise was gentle, and had been perfectly timed to coincide with Sharr’s next step. A normal human would have missed it. But Sharr was far from a normal human.
He triggered Reaper and swung. The chainaxe howled into life, its adamantium-tipped teeth revving with sudden fury. They parted the chill air as Sharr turned on his heel, and then grated against the blades of a chainsword in a shower of sparks.
The Raptor that had dropped down behind Sharr recoiled at the force of the impact, even its auto-bracing power armour not able to absorb the force of the Company Master’s blow. Sharr followed up with an overarm swing. The Raptor, its own weapon now whirring to life, parried, and the two chainblades juddered away from one another, more sparks flying.
With a shriek, the rest of the Night Lords attacked. They’d been concealed around the edges of the tunnel, scuttling along the walls and roof space like huge, spiked arachnids. Now their jump packs flared and their vox-grilles shrilled with the screams of all the innocent, defenceless victims they’d murdered down the centuries. They came at Sharr from every side, lightning claws cutting the dark, chainswords roaring.
For a few desperate seconds the Master of Third Company stood alone. The flickering lightning threw the combat into hellish, blinking monochrome, like a stop-motion pict-feed. A spin turned aside a lunging chainsword. A set of ignited claws clashed off Reaper’s haft. Another bit grooves into the Carcharodon’s right pauldron. A third chainblade jarred off his backpack. A serrated combat knife nearly worked its way through his gorget.
Then Red Tane reached his side. Contrary to Sharr’s order, the Company Champion had risen from cover at the junction and followed him. If he hadn’t, the Reaper Prime’s first true blooding in his new role would have been his last.
The Void Sword took the first Raptor to attack Sharr in the lower back, beneath the brass-bound jets of its archaic jump pack. The unknown metal of the black blade parted the heretic’s power armour as surely as though it were wreathed in a disruptor field, severing the spine and dropping the Chaos Space Marine instantly.
Tane was already moving on, the refractor charge in the Champion’s Coral Shield cracking as it deflected a pair of lightning claws. The Void Sword came up, and a limb tumbled across the rail track, spurting dark blood.
Sharr managed to swing back in time to avoid four claws as they slashed for his helm. He thrust Reaper blindly into the shadows around him, teeth gritted. His senses were on a knife’s edge, the urge to kill triggered by the potent concoction of stimms and raw battle fury thundering through his veins. The Blindness was calling to him. He fought back against the desire to swing Reaper indiscriminately, maintaining his defensive posture and parrying with the weapon’s scarred adamantium haft. The rest of the command squad would be on their way. He only needed to survive until they arrived, and he couldn’t afford to lose control in front of them, not in his first real combat as Company Master.
Red Tane wasn’t so inhibited. The Champion derived his strength from the seemingly unique way he was able to blend instinctive blade work with the close combat savagery that was the genetic inheritance of the Carcharodons. Every blow was carefully placed, delivered w
ith a sheer, brute strength that even a hulking veteran like Kahu would have struggled to match. By the time the rest of the command squad reached Sharr’s side the Company Champion had put down another of the clawed nightmares.
It took a moment for Sharr to realise that the remainder had gone. The tunnel was suddenly empty. With typical efficiency, Strike Veteran Dorthor put a bolt-round through the helms of the three dead traitors lying at their feet.
‘First blood to you,’ Sharr said to Tane, who had gone perfectly still in the centre of his kills. He could hear the Space Marine’s heavy breathing over the vox, and knew he was struggling to let go of his own bloodlust, now that the killing – so sudden and so savage – was over. The Blindness was a danger to all of them, not just Sharr.
Yet Tane need not have bothered trying to contain himself. From the route leading back to the junction there came the roar of an explosion and the crash of falling earth. The tunnel leading back to the sub-precinct had collapsed, and the trap was sprung.
‘Vorfex!’ Cull had demanded over the vox. ‘Where is he?’
‘Sub-surface, my prince,’ Artar had replied, commander of the Fourth Claw. ‘One of the Loyalists triggered the ambush while we were still engaged in the Stalk.’
‘Warp take his soul,’ Cull had snarled. ‘He wasn’t supposed to be below the surface.’
‘The corpse worshippers are fully aware of our presence now.’
‘Proceed immediately to the Kill, before they regroup,’ Cull had ordered, and had switched channels. ‘Drac, blow the charges.’
When the Loyalists’ leading Tactical squad had first entered the mines from the prison vaults below Sub-Precinct Eight, they’d thoroughly scanned the route for explosives and traps. The auspex, however, hadn’t been able to penetrate the thick layers of rock around the tunnel or, more specifically, the layer between the route taken by Sharr and his brethren, and the lone rathole that wound above it. During orbital scans prior to the start of the harvest, Cull had realised that the rathole’s presence made the entrance to the sub-precinct the perfect trap.
The Night Lords were far too large to make it down the rathole, but the human cult infantry of the Black Hand weren’t. Ever since they’d seized control of Sink Shaft One, three of them had spent hours packing the narrow space with explosives, overseen by First Kill’s demolitions master, Drac. The result was that when the charges were blown, the pressure of the blast split the bedrock between the rathole and the tunnel beneath, and caused a collapse that cut the mines off from Sub-Precinct Eight.
Of that last fact, Sharr was almost immediately aware. The ear-clap sound of the explosion was still echoing away down the junction’s tunnels when the blast of smoke and debris came hammering through from the direction of the sub-precinct.
What came after was worse. From further down the rail line, and from the two other tunnels leading to the junction, bolters barked and spat.
‘Retreat,’ Sharr ordered tersely, turning away from the fire-streaked darkness and back towards the light of the junction. They ran, bolts kicking up gravel and blasting chunks of dirt from the walls on either side. Sharr felt one round crack hard off his left pauldron, denting the ceramite outer layer and the weaker plasteel beneath. Another detonated when it clipped his backpack, and a third struck fat, angry sparks from the loco rail running beneath his boots. The rune representing Soha on his visor display flashed yellow, and he heard the weapons expert grunt in rapidly suppressed pain as one round punched through the armour and then the flesh of his left calf. Sharr slowed his sprint a fraction to ensure they didn’t leave him behind.
Fire was whipping into the junction from the darkness at the mouths of the two other adjoining tunnels, the heavy muzzle flares revealing little but darting, red-eyed shadows.
‘Auspex is down,’ Strike Leader Nuritona said as Sharr and his team dropped into cover beside him. The packed ore skip shuddered as bolt-rounds punched through its far side and detonated impotently within.
‘The tunnel has been collapsed, Company Master,’ came the voice of Strike Leader Ruak of Third Squad. He’d been tasked with following First and Second into the junction, but had been left cut off on the sub-precinct side of the tunnel when the explosives had detonated.
‘Can you break through?’ Sharr demanded.
‘We’re scanning it now. It’s likely we can, but it will take time.’
Time the traitors weren’t going to give them. The weight of fire from their unseen attackers was increasing. Sharr suspected they were receiving reinforcements. Even as he formed the thought there was a whump and a frag rocket streaked from one of the adjoining tunnels with a firecracker shriek. It hammered into the gravel half a dozen yards ahead of a rusting, disused loco carriage, riddling it with shrapnel and setting the whole thing rocking on its rails.
A counter-attack was Codex procedure for dealing with such an ambush, but it was clear Nuritona had already tried that while Sharr had been pulling back to the junction. The bodies of two Carcharodons lay out in the open, their grey, dust-caked armour splashed with bright red blood. Occasionally one of the shadows firing from the tunnels would deliberately aim at the splayed bodies, making them twitch. Manic laughter accompanied each fresh hit.
‘We need to draw them into the open,’ Sharr said to Nuritona.
‘If we attack they’ll cut us down,’ the strike leader said, his eyes on the bodies of his two Tactical brethren.
‘We don’t attack. We withdraw.’
‘To where? They’ve blocked off the only route from here back to the sub-precinct.’
‘The mouth of the tunnel will have to do. That will draw them out into the junction.’
‘There’s no cover in the tunnel,’ Dorthor warned. ‘We’ll be decimated.’
‘And we’ll suffer the same fate if we try to hold them here unsupported,’ Sharr said. ‘Withdraw your squad by combat teams, back up the tunnel to the sub-precinct.’
The Carcharodons pulled out. The first half of Nuritona’s Tactical squad began to lay down a barrage of covering fire, sending bolts slamming blindly down the tunnels they were being attacked from. As they did so the second half rose and, kicking up gravel from the rail beds, made for the collapsed route back to the sub-precinct. They took hits as they went, hard rounds cracking off ceramite or drawing blood from weak points in their mismatching suits of grey armour. Yet they made it into the darkness of the tunnel without any fatalities.
‘Brothers, covering fire,’ Sharr ordered. The command squad opened up as Nuritona led the second half of his Tactical Marines after the first. Sharr unlocked his Umbra-Magnus bolt pistol and sent a stream of rounds down the mouth of the nearest tunnel. He doubted he was hitting anything, but that wasn’t the point. There was an ululating crack as Soha fired his volkite caliver after Sharr’s hard rounds. The incandescent spear of energy exploded harmlessly against one of the tunnel walls, but the snap-shot of blazing light illumined a glimpse of their attackers as it passed them by – leering skulls, dark battleplate and bloody, vicious claws. Te Kahurangi’s visions had been correct.
One of Nuritona’s Tactical Marines went down as he ran, a bolt penetrating his right side and blowing away part of his lower torso. Nuritona doubled back from the mouth of the tunnel and dragged his fallen brother through the gravel by both arms, shots striking and sparking around him.
‘Our turn,’ Sharr said as the two made it to the temporary safety of the tunnel entrance. ‘With me.’
The command squad broke from behind the bolt-riddled skip, firing as they went. From the sub-precinct tunnel those Tactical Marines nearest the entrance to the junction opened up, once more drilling streams of semi-auto into the confounding darkness.
Despite its logic, retreat still felt anathema to Sharr. He could almost hear Te Kahurangi’s voice scolding him for such foolish thoughts. He was the Company Master now, not some proud, nameless, raw-toothed
initiate in the Tenth. It was Akia’s bloody spirit speaking, not his own.
A bolt punched through the electronic sealant strip binding Dorthor’s vambrace, passing through the flesh of his elbow without detonating. Another almost split Tama’s white helm in half, while a third caught Niko behind the right knee plate, reducing his sprint to a pained limp. Typically, Red Tane made sure he was the last to withdraw, backing away from the junction with the Coral Shield raised, its refractor field flaring as it absorbed a barrage of bolts. Sharr snatched him by the backpack and hauled him forcefully the last few yards into the tunnel.
‘Push up as far as you can go,’ Sharr ordered Second Squad, gesturing for them to press against the collapsed earth a few dozen yards further up. He could hear the scraping of hands and blades from the other side of the hard-packed obstruction. ‘Ruak, report.’
‘We’re making progress, Company Master. Another ten minutes and I estimate we’ll be through to you.’
‘Ten minutes is too long.’
‘Brother Fellik has suggested we wire our krak grenades–’
‘Negative, we’re directly on the other side now. No grenades.’
‘We’ll keep digging.’
Sudden silence fell across the junction, broken only by the click-snap of magazine catches as both sides reloaded.
It didn’t take the traitors long to respond to the Loyalist withdrawal. They could taste victory, and they knew the grey-clad Imperials on the other side of the artificial collapse would be digging their way through the dirt and rock to support their brethren. Crouched at the entrance to the tunnel, Sharr saw the first of the heretics emerge into the lumen light of the junction. Their power armour was deepest blue, banded with bronze and gold. It contrasted with the bone-white and blood-red of the grinning winged skulls which adorned their breastplates and pauldrons.
The Chaos Space Marines spread out, occupying the battered cover scattered across the junction. They moved with a fluidity every bit as graceful and predatory as the Carcharodons, their sprints short and controlled, one group always holding and covering while the other repositioned. Within seconds a few had found an angle on the tunnel opening and were sending shots scything up it. Bereft of cover, all the Carcharodons could do was crouch against the sides of the dank, narrow space.
Carcharodons: Red Tithe Page 14