The gang had not been the only prisoners they’d encountered. There were others still fleeing in ones or twos, many of them unarmed, desperate to simply get away from the mad, mindless bloodshed that was emanating from the central works. They’d let them live, on Te Kahurangi’s orders. They were here to take a Tithe, not purge the colony. The Chapter needed fresh meat, and once the nameless Scouts had assisted their Chief Librarian, they would help to harvest it.
Te Kahurangi slowed his breathing, reaching out with his wandering spirit-self once more. The tendrils of his consciousness found nothing but pain, anger and murder, none of it specifically linked to Skell. With the unthinking desperation of a cornered animal, the boy had psychically lashed out and driven the Carcharodon’s guiding influence from his mind. He was alone now. Within hours he could be in any part of the primary mine works.
The Pale Nomad recalled his thoughts and refocused them on the beacon of hatred and arrogance emanating from nearby. The Dead Skin was still confounded by the glamour Te Kahurangi had woven about him. The traitor had ignored the advice of his daemonic ally, and underestimated the Chief Librarian. Te Kahurangi and his brethren understood a darkness nothing like that enjoyed by the foul VIII Legion. The Carcharodons knew the blackness of oblivion, a place untouched by the vile emotions that gave birth to the daemonspawn the traitors now courted. The yawning maw of the psychic void summoned by Te Kahurangi had swallowed the sorcerer, blinding him to Skell’s presence.
But he was fighting back. Just like Skell, the Night Lord was trying to throw off the influence Te Kahurangi was casting through the mines. The Pale Nomad struggled with him mentally. His mind was being assaulted on two fronts – while the Dead Skin turned his attention towards breaking through Te Kahurangi’s psychic barriers, his unspeakable daemonic ally was striving to make contact with him once more, drawn by the Chaos sorcerer’s increasingly bloody, violent sacrifices.
Te Kahurangi knew he wouldn’t be able to keep them separate for much longer. He could barely even move forwards through the mine workings any more, rooted to the spot by the mental strain of keeping them apart. Once the sorcerer was again able to call upon the aid of the daemon, the boy would be well within their grasp. Te Kahurangi was almost out of time. His only hope was to press on, and pray he stumbled across Skell before the traitor.
‘Continue,’ the Chief Librarian said. Wordlessly, seven-seven and one-sixteen moved off once more. They didn’t get far.
The Fifth and Seventh Squads received their first blooding on Zartak at traverse SC7. It was near the start of Third Company’s drive towards Sink Shaft One. With the junction secured by Sharr and Kahu, the grey-clad combat squads started to filter into the mines proper, first via the larger, wider arterial routes and loco rails, and then in smaller fire teams amongst the ore shafts, exhaust corridors and grub-burrows.
The void brothers of Fifth Squad stayed together. Even with their auto-senses thrown into occasional bouts of jittering discord by the disruption of the traitor’s arcane scrambling equipment, they were still entirely aware of the enemy occupying traverse SC7, a secondary route through the mines of Mid-South. Void brother Sigmus-three-eight-Torrik, taking point along the secondary tunnel section, reported contacts ahead: unaugmented heretic infantry, roughly platoon-sized in number, clad in dark blue robes and fatigues, with their hands and forearms painted black. They wore bug-eyed gas hoods, and carried freshly seized Adeptus Arbites weaponry.
The enemy infantry appeared to have halted, either to rest or regain their bearings. They were occupying an ore shuttle waystation, its single lumen strip the only lighting in the whole corridor. The space it picked out was little more than a scoop in the traverse’s rock walls. A lone statue, crudely carved into the heavily armoured likeness of an arbitrator overseer, had been knocked into the dirt.
Strike Leader Kartli, commander of Fifth, knew exactly what was about to happen. He paused for a moment to check that the Devourers of Seventh Squad – the company’s Assault Marines – were in position, then gave Torrik permission to engage.
The Carcharodons launched their assault without a word. The only sound was the thumping of boots on the dirt of the traverse floor, and the rapid whirring of servos. Hearing the sounds approaching from the darkness ahead, the heretics snatched at shotguns and autorifles.
Only when he burst into the flickering patch of light cast by the waystation’s lumen did Torrik trigger his unclamped chainaxe. The monstrous roar of the close combat weapon reverberated from the corridor sides. The closest heretic only managed to get a single shot off with his new autorifle as he fumbled with the unfamiliar safety, the hard round pinging uselessly from Torrik’s breastplate. Those behind couldn’t fire at the Carcharodon without running the risk of hitting their comrade. They opened up anyway, turning the lead traitor to a ragged puppet of blood and meat before Torrik had even reached him.
The Carcharodon powered on through the mess, smacking it against the corridor’s rock wall with a grisly crack. Still, the Space Marine didn’t utter a sound.
Torrik let his venerable chainaxe be his battle-cry. Half a dozen slaughtered heretics joined the first member of their cult-squad within the space of a dozen seconds, hacked to crimson oblivion by the blur of saw-toothed death that Torrik had become. Shots struck him, fired wildly as the humans sought to scramble back and put more distance between themselves and the silent grey butcher. None penetrated his scarred battleplate. The hammering of discharges in the narrow confines only served to leave the heretics dazed and confused.
The extra room offered by the waystation allowed the rest of Fifth Squad to bloody themselves. Chainblades ripped and tore, splitting flak armour, flesh and bone with contemptuous ease. The heretic’s viscera painted the floor, walls and ceiling a dripping, steaming red. It was over in seconds.
Except, in truth, it had only just begun. As the stamp of Strike Leader Kartli’s boot brutally cut off the last scream, the rock wall at the back of the waystation erupted inwards. Brother Pelu, caught too close to the blast, was pulverised by a blizzard of stone, his flesh hammered to a pulp within his buckled and broken power armour. The rest of the squad stumbled, the shock wave of the blast and the wall of dust and grit forcing them to activate their auto-stabilisers.
The instant the breach had been made, fresh screams filled the underground space. Shadows darted through the swirling dust, their hateful red eyes burning bright amidst the gloom. Bolters barked, muzzle flares catching reflections in the dirt haze that now choked the traverse.
Brothers Lorro and Marcu, the closest to the breach after Pelu, went down immediately amidst a hail of bolter fire. Reacting to the ambush, Kartli signalled Fifth Squad to withdraw back the way they’d come, into the darkness beyond the waystation and its bloody remains.
Such shadows meant nothing to the Night Lords. With their preysight activated they pressed eagerly out from the adjacent reverse corridor where they’d been lying in wait, triggering their chainswords in the anticipation of a brief and bloody hunt in the dark. The roaring of the blades in the narrowness of the corridor was enough to mask the approach of the real hunters.
The Carcharodons of Fifth Squad turned suddenly at bay, meeting the Chaos Space Marines head on. The crash of ceramite meeting ceramite and the savage teeth of chainblades locking against one another set the very bedrock of Zartak shaking, dislodging dirt from the ceiling and causing the lone lumen back at the waystation to blink and crack. Too late, the traitors realised that, in their eagerness to follow up on enemies they thought they’d outwitted, they had in turn exposed themselves.
The Devourers of Seventh Squad had spent the better part of an hour digging out a rathole that wound its way through the dirt and rock above traverse SC7, running parallel to the larger corridor below. They had been aware of the presence of the Traitor Space Marines using their human devotees as bait, and had used the moment they had blasted in from the neighbouring corr
idor to detonate their own krak charges, dropping down through the resulting hole into the traverse corridor further up from the waystation. Kartli’s withdrawal had pulled the traitors out into the corridor with their backs to the newly arrived Devourers – Seventh Squad wasted no time in closing the distance with the rearmost heretics.
Both of the Devourer squads of the Third Company had left their cylindrical jet engine Mark II jump packs in the sub-precinct base. There was little use – and even less space – for such ancient technology deep below the earth. The Assault veterans of Seventh didn’t need their cryogenic fuel canisters and coolant systems to savage their enemies, especially when they caught them with their backs turned.
Seconds after the counter-ambush struck home, the traitors realised what was happening. They understood they were caught between an enemy they’d underestimated, and that they were outnumbered more than two to one. They fought with the savagery of the daemons they refused to worship, back to back, armour scraping the sides of the narrow traverse, matching the Carcharodons blow for blow, blood for blood.
The Loyalists would not be denied though, not this time. Between them Fifth and Seventh Squad slaughtered every single traitor. The final one, caught between them, was torn limb from limb, the pre-recorded screams issuing from his vox-caster silenced with a savage blow from a clenched gauntlet. The twisted metal grille sparked and smoked amidst the blood pooling across the traverse’s uneven floor.
Throughout the carnage, the Carcharodons hadn’t uttered a sound.
There was a Predator at junction 44-5. Its armour was deepest blue and its hull was covered with the remains of rotting cadavers, snagged with coils of rusty razor wire. Its turret autocannon and sponson heavy bolters spat death at the Carcharodons, the reports echoing back like thunderclaps to accompany the white bolts of lightning painted onto the tank’s plasteel plating.
The armour had been hull-down behind the broken, overturned remains of a loco carriage, its shape distorted with rubble and grit from a nearby waste chute. The heretics had deliberately destroyed the junction’s lumen orbs, plunging the open space into darkness. It made little difference to either their preysight or the Loyalist’s auto-senses, but it filled the underground with the stab of muzzle flashes and the glint of helmet lenses. In such conditions the Night Lords thrived.
The Carcharodons of Fourth Squad had been caught out by the presence of the battle tank lurking in their midst. The Third Company’s own heavy armour was still on the surface, bolstering the meagre defences of the sub-precinct in case of an overground assault. The Predator’s opening heavy autocannon salvo had bisected Fourth Squad’s anti-tank specialist, Brother Omecra-three-three-Ungu, leaving his missile launcher lying useless in the rail grit a dozen yards in front of the armour’s position.
Strike Leader Ekara had gone to ground along with the rest of his Tactical Marines, occupying the waste skips and haulage conveyers scattered around the four-way tunnel junction. The Predator was not alone – it was supported by two sections of cultist infantry – but their autogun fire was little threat to the Space Marines. The tank, however, was a far more serious problem. A concentrated burst from its turret cannon battered an ore deposit crate to jagged, bullet-riddled oblivion, tearing through the metal and the spoil within to wound the void brothers crouched behind it, Kiri and Rua. At the same time the twin heavy bolters mounted on the Predator’s flanks tracked back and forth between the other Carcharodons’ positions, the machine’s ancient battle-spirit keeping the Loyalists expertly pinned.
‘Keep their infantry down,’ Ekara ordered, unwilling to yield the fight. The void brothers either side of him, Kordi and Haru, opened fire on the cultist positions arrayed around the tank. Auto rounds and las-bolts snapped back, trying in vain to penetrate the Carcharodons’ power armour.
Ekara voxed in for support. Sharr, monitoring the advance from the first junction, dispatched the closest reserve element – Tenth Squad.
Even by the standards of most Carcharodons, Strike Leader Waraki was a bloodied veteran. The Tenth Squad commander divided his void brothers into two combat squads and, using the heads-up schematic display uploaded to the visors of the Third Company from the sub-precinct’s database, outflanked the heretics from both sides. The five Devastator brethren coming from the south struck first, a krak rocket from a Proteus-pattern missile launcher screaming from the darkness of the haulage tunnel. It struck the Predator’s left side just above its sponson, ricocheting upwards before splitting the air above the tank.
The Predator’s turret immediately began to traverse, its crew suddenly presented with a greater threat than Ekara’s Tactical Marines. As it did so the second half of the Devastator squad opened fire from the northern tunnel. A lascannon bolt slammed into the tank’s engine block, punching with ease through the fifty-five-millimetre armour. The quad Mark II adaptable thermic combustor reactor detonated spectacularly, gutting the ancient battle tank and sending out a wave of twisted metal laced with the meat of the victims that had once adorned its hull.
The echoes of the detonation were still clapping down the adjoining tunnels when Ekara led his squad up out of their cover, storming the cultist infantry while they were still reeling from the Predator’s fiery death. In barely a minute, junction 44-5 was in Imperial hands once more. Ekara took Fourth Squad on into the darkness, while Waraki and Tenth Squad resumed their holding positions, another tally added to their long list of kill-notches. Slowly the Carcharodons were closing in on the core of Sink Shaft One. The traitors would have nowhere left to hide, and once they had been purged the Tithing could finally begin.
In borehole 23, Kahu and his Red Brethren engaged first a mob of armed prison escapees nearly a hundred strong, and then a small traitor band withdrawing from a brief but vicious engagement with the Devourers of Eighth Squad in Upper 9 South.
Kahu led the initial slaughter of the prisoners with uncharacteristic reluctance. Killing them went against the very reason for the Third Company’s presence on Zartak. Corpses couldn’t be Tithed.
Regardless, the humans had chosen to resist, terrified of the massive, white-armoured monsters that rose up out of the grav lifts from the depths of Lower 9. Almost all of them had procured firearms, no doubt supplied by the heretics seeking to plunge the underworld into further anarchy. The bravest among them opened fire as they started entering Upper South’s largest borehole shaft, a great tunnel of rock with surfaces left uneven by the biting work of a Triplex Phall megaborer.
The Terminators cut down those who resisted with controlled bursts of storm bolter fire, seeking to conserve precious ammunition. The initial flight of the prisoners from the seemingly unkillable metal giants was checked when the Chaos Space Marines, withdrawing from a separate engagement, appeared at the far side of the borehole through an adjoining boltspace. The resultant massacre left the tunnel carpeted with human corpses, blown apart or decimated by chainswords and power fists.
Kahu’s Terminators carried on into the Night Lords. Unable to disengage, they fought back all the harder. Brother Eti, who had been wounded in the thigh by the lightning claws of a Raptor at the first junction fight, was brought down by two of the heretics, who instinctively focused their attacks on the weakest target. He was the first of the Red Brethren to fall on Zartak.
He would not be the last.
Kahu almost single-handedly destroyed the remnants of the heretic squad, his power fist a weighty blur of actinic energy. By the time it was over he was splattered from helm to boot in dripping viscera, his fist painted bright red. They held the position until a combat squad from Ninth could come and remove Eti’s body back up to the sub-precinct, to retrieve both the Terminator’s precious gene-seed and his equally precious patched and reworked Tactical Dreadnought armour.
The advance continued.
The Prince of Thorns watched the destruction of his warband from the viewscreens of the Centrum Dominus.
&n
bsp; He seethed, claws clenching and unclenching. The Loyalists had systematically broken the pict recorders in every tunnel, junction, shaft, chute and level they’d come across, but he could still see enough to know the first clashes had gone against the VIII Legion.
Much as they might refuse to admit any responsibility, the reason for the setback was as clear as it was simple. They had underestimated their enemy. The warband was young by the standards of most Chaos Space Marines – Cull himself had only faced fellow Adeptus Astartes on four occasions before. Each of those four had been from Chapters of a similarly recent Founding, and each time the ancient advice of Bar’ghul, delivered by Shadraith, had led him to victory. The daemon had warned him not to be overconfident. He hadn’t listened.
These Loyalists were different from the ones he’d outwitted in the past. None of his Claw leaders reported having ever encountered them before. Even Shadraith was seemingly without answers, practically abandoned by his pathetic daemonic patron. Their fighting style was not one Cull recognised. If anything, it seemed eerily like the Night Lords’ own doctrines. The brethren of the Red Knights – a young successor to the Blood Angels – had displayed a violent savagery when Cull had engaged them in orbit above Quelos, and he had heard of the brutality of the Space Wolves. These grey-clad Loyalists matched the bloodthirsty violence of both Chapters, and yet there were unsettling differences. Reports from the Claw leaders claimed they made no noise in combat. Nor was their bloodlust in any way unrestrained. While apparently eager for hand-to-hand combat, they seemed to retain complete tactical awareness. Twice Cull had watched in silent fury as Loyalist squads had refused to take the bait and follow up on retreating cultist squads that would have led them into carefully laid ambushes. And on the single occasion where the Night Lords had gained the upper hand – where Artar’s Fourth Claw had managed to split and outflank a Loyalist squad that had pushed too far ahead of the support in the tunnels either side – the corpse-worshippers had broken from combat and disengaged. Their close combat fury was matched only by their discipline and self-control.
Carcharodons: Red Tithe Page 16