‘If they survive,’ Cull said. The prisoners had been herded together here and at half a dozen other points on the westernmost curve of the sink shaft. They probably assumed they were about to be slaughtered. If it weren’t for Cull, that was probably what would have happened.
‘There’s enough,’ he said. ‘Send them. All of them.’
Something moved at the far end of the tunnel. Kordi, in the vanguard of his squad’s advance, came to a sharp stop.
‘Halt,’ he said. Behind him the Tactical Marines of Fourth Squad crouched against the rough-hewn walls of the burrow seam.
‘Possible contacts,’ he said, bringing his boltgun up. ‘Assume overwatch.’
The squad waited. Kordi had heard something, something more than the false sounds that eternally echoed through the old mine’s honeycomb labyrinth, the sounds that were automatically filtered out by his armour’s auto-senses. Voices, and the patter of unarmoured, running feet.
‘Contacts confirmed,’ Kordi said, bouncing the message through to the command channel.
‘Do you have a visual?’ asked Strike Leader Ekara. Since being caught cold by the Predator tank in junction 44-5, Fourth Squad had been eager to atone for its losses. Ekara was being careful, his orders reining in his more bloodthirsty, less experienced void brothers. They could not afford to suffer more losses.
‘Negative,’ Kordi replied, his senses probing the darkness at the end of the burrow. He’d switched his retinal display to infrared, the shadows painted in dead shades of black and blue. The sound grew louder, and the earth began to vibrate. Something was definitely coming.
‘Make ready,’ Ekara ordered. Kordi’s grip tightened on his venerable bolter. He felt the battle-hunger flare in him. His lenses scanned for a target lock.
Abruptly, he had one. Life signs burst into the burrow, appearing on his visor as a riot of violent reds, yellows and greens. Figures, packed so tightly that their individual body signatures melded into one amorphous mass of heat traces, swarmed up from the darkness. They were stampeding straight along the burrow seam, like a herd of grox triggered by the scent of a predator, apparently blind to the battle-scarred squad of Adeptus Astartes ahead.
‘Prisoners,’ Kordi said. ‘Coming this way. Unarmed.’
‘Hold your fire,’ Ekara ordered.
‘They’ll overrun us,’ Kordi warned.
‘We’re here to Tithe them, not gun them down,’ Ekara said. ‘Brace yourselves.’
Kordi activated his stabilisers, attempting to fathom what in the name of the Void Father could have resulted in such a critical mass of bodies being funnelled directly at them.
‘Reports of similar mobs coming in from every front-line squad,’ Ekara said, listening to the vox chatter of his fellow strike leaders. ‘The tunnels are full.’
It wasn’t an advance, Kordi realised. The prisoners weren’t attacking them. They were trying to get past them. He pressed himself into the dirt wall between two of the plasteel ribs propping the seam open, and dug in his heels. He found himself taking a breath, as he would have done moments before plunging beneath the surface of the aquatic drill chamber on board the White Maw.
The rising tide of screaming, dirty flesh and rags struck. Even braced, the sheer mass of bodies made the Space Marines buckle, and physically pushed them back into the dirt of the walls. There were hideous crunching noises audible over the thunder as prisoners were driven against the unyielding armour of the Carcharodons, crushed there by the mindless force of those behind. More thrust past, channelled relentlessly on down the seam and out towards the sub shaft beyond.
Hands and limbs grasped and battered vainly at Kordi’s breastplate and pauldrons before being snatched away. He caught a few faces, snapshots amidst the rushing press, contorted with terror and desperation. There was nothing that could be done now, either to help or hinder them. All the Carcharodons could do was hold on and ride out the flood.
Something intruded on Kordi’s consciousness, an anomaly, distinct from the mass of bodies. One of the prisoners had a crude leather gas hood on, different from the respiration masks worn by the others. The figure seemed to sense Kordi’s sudden attention as he drew near and turned to meet his gaze. The eyes behind the filmy, bug-like lenses of the hood were bloodshot and burning with hatred. Kordi lunged towards the threat, blink-clicking the inter-squad vox-channel.
‘Contact,’ he shouted. ‘Contact in the–’
He was too late. Whatever device was flung down the tunnel by the cultist infiltrator, it detonated half a dozen yards away from where Kordi stood. The Carcharodons, pinned against the wall by the flood, could do nothing but die.
The explosion hit, and for a few brief seconds Kordi lost consciousness. His genhanced physiology kicked him awake almost immediately, sending a potent cocktail of stimms thumping through his muscles. He realised he was lying on his back, staring up at the low seam ceiling. His armour’s warning systems were chiming – the integrity of his right shoulder plate was badly compromised, his right vambrace was buckled, and his breastplate had suffered three impact penetrations. Vitae signs showed low-level blood loss from wounds in his right arm and abdomen. The pain was almost non-existent, already killed off by the stimms and his enhanced nervous system. There was something obscuring his visor’s right lens, something he suspected was blood.
He sat up, the servos in the damaged sections of his battleplate grating badly. His visor stripped away the fug of smoke, dirt and misted organics that clogged the dank air.
Unidentifiable viscera plastered almost every inch of the damaged tunnel. The plasteel beams buckled outwards, and dirt was cascading down from the ruptured ceiling. The explosion had broken the seam’s structural integrity. He had a few minutes at best before the roof caved in.
A few minutes that weren’t enough. Transhuman though he was, it still took Kordi a few seconds to register the figures moving swiftly through the swirling after-effects of the blast – he got an impression of gas hoods and robes. His instincts screamed at him to get up, get up and fight.
The seam resounded with the unmistakable clack-clack of shotgun slides being wracked. A shape appeared before him, eyes glaring through the lenses of its hood mask. The barrel of an autorifle came up, gaping at him. The levelled firearm finally triggered a set of deeply ingrained muscle reflexes. He slapped the weapon aside even as it discharged, burying a spray of rounds into the dirt beside him. At the same time Kordi’s leg lashed out, striking the cultist’s shin. There was a snap and a scream as the man toppled.
Kordi was up in a second, forcing the damaged servos in his armour to obey. The cultist’s neck snapped easily under his gauntlets. He realised he was panting, body flooded with combat hormones and thrilling with the early onset of the Blindness. His bolter was gone, so he unclamped his chainsword. Its roar filled the bloody space.
His brothers were dead. Pahu and Rua lay either side of him. The former had taken the worst of the blast – his right side was a gory mess of shorn armour and exposed innards. A point-blank shotgun blast had burst Rua’s helmet, splattering the scarred walls of the tunnel with cranial matter.
The heretics rushed him. He gutted the first, revving his chainsword before kicking the butchered remains off the spinning blades. The urge to cry out, to roar his hatred and his fury, choked him. He resisted, obeying the Chapter’s hypno-indoctrination, decapitating a second cultist with icy silence.
He would avenge them. He would avenge all of them. The blood-wrath gripped him. His muscles burned with potency as he waded into the clutch of cultists assaulting him with blade and rifle butt, cutting them down with brutally efficient blows. He wanted to tear his gore-splattered helmet off and bury his teeth into the flesh of these degenerate cowards. The Blindness burned away his thoughts, demanded he sell himself dearly, telling him to kill and keep on killing. He used his own body as a weapon, slamming a pair of cultists up against
a support beam when they tried to work their way round him, crushing them between ceramite and plasteel with a crack of splintering bones.
The traitors opened fire point-blank. He waded through the blizzard of shots, a red-streaked revenant in the swirling cloud of dirt and dust. Death came with every blow, splitting skulls and opening torsos with wet crunches, his chainsword howling out for more even as his own jaw remained bitterly locked.
Darkness surged up from the dust, flinging aside the last of the cultist execution squad. The new arrival’s eyes burned like red coals from the gloom, redolent with ancient malice. Its armour was the colour of night, shot through with stylised bolts of lightning. Vox-casters built into its maw grille moaned with fear.
The Night Lord came at Kordi with a strength and speed to match his own, a curving chainsabre cutting the air overhead. Kordi parried and dragged the blow to one side, the teeth of their weapons juddering and locked. He turned the deflection into a back-cut designed to open the traitor’s stomach, but the Chaos Space Marine darted away from the blow. The teeth of Kordi’s weapon scarred its breastplate silver.
‘Too slow, lapdog,’ taunted the traitor, its voice scraping from its winged helm’s vox maw. Kordi didn’t respond. He stabbed his chainsword, two-handed, towards the Chaos Space Marine’s abdomen, the confines of the tunnel restricting the range of his combat abilities. The traitor went back again, avoiding the lunge. Too late, Kordi realised it was drawing him on. Focused on the heretic’s every move, his feet snagged on a fallen plasteel support beam, disguised by the bloody remains that carpeted the tunnel floor.
The slight imbalance was all the traitor needed. It came at him again, as fast as the lightning painted onto its armour, slipping a blow through Kordi’s guard. The chainblade bit, sawing through the left side of his breastplate in a hail of sparks. Metal teeth found flesh.
Kordi grunted and thrust himself away from the blow, thumping into the right-hand wall. The seam shuddered, more earth collapsing from the roof. The traitor lashed out with a boot while Kordi was still recovering, kicking him down onto his knees. His armour, damaged by the earlier blast, was refusing to respond in time. The Night Lord brought his chainsabre back for the killing slash.
The woman smiled at him, the sand warm between his toes. He was going home.
Something banged Kordi’s head and thumped through the left eye socket of the winged skull embossed on the traitor’s breastplate. Dark blood spouted from the hole as the bolt-round detonated inside the Chaos Space Marine’s chest cavity. It staggered for a moment, chainsabre still revving. A second round smacked through its vox maw and blasted black matter out from the back of its shattered helmet. It collapsed in the dirt before Kordi.
The Carcharodon shuddered, his vision blinking. He’d clamped one hand over the wound in his side. Even his advanced Larraman’s cells were struggling to staunch the blood flowing from the ripped flesh. He felt a hand beneath his arm, helping him up. The servos in his armour complained bitterly.
It was Ekara who had saved him. The strike leader had been reduced to using his bolt pistol – his right arm ended in a bloody stump just above the wrist. Brothers Haru and Tonga were behind him, both of them also wounded but alive.
‘They’re using the prisoners as a screen to infiltrate our lines,’ said Ekara, supporting Kordi with his remaining hand. ‘We have to regroup at the last junction and set up a proper defensive position.’
Kordi never got the chance to respond. There was a shriek of tortured metal as the last remaining plasteel ribs supporting the seam gave out. With a thunder that spoke of the pent-up wrath of Zartak’s scarred and defiled bedrock, tonnes of dirt came hammering down on the last survivors of Fourth Squad.
+ + Gene scan complete + + +
+ + Access granted + + +
+ + Beginning mem-bank entry log + + +
+ + Date check, 3677875.M41 + + +
Day 91, Zartak local.
The prisoners have all gone. I’ve taken Worren and the combat servitors down into the cell vaults beneath the sub-precinct. The hatches have all been opened and the magnicles disarmed and unlocked. There is no sign of where the inmates have gone. The routes into the mine works are all breached too. I have decided to send a situation report package to Lord Rozenkranz, but I will not delay further exploration in order to wait for his response. I’ve sent servo-skull 2486 ahead into the works proper, and have linked its pict-feed to the viewscreens in the sub-precinct’s control room. The connection is not ideal, but Tech-Adept Julio is updating the captures as I write. I will return to this log when I know more.
Signed,
Interrogator Augim Nzogwu.
+ + Mem-bank entry log ends + + +
+ + Thought for the Day: The means to enact the Emperor’s will never requires justification + + +
Chapter XI
The lead squads were reporting contacts.
From where he was waiting in the junction just beyond sifting chamber 9, Sharr had given the order not to fire on the oncoming prisoners. Even from beyond the grave he could feel Kahu’s judgement scolding him. If they massacred the convicts there would be no Tithe. The Chapter needed its meat living and preferably strong, not freshly butchered.
He’d ordered the two Devastator squads in reserve forwards to corral the sudden flood of mangy humans in the wider loco rail tunnel junctions behind the front line. Hundreds of prisoners had been packed into the space beneath the levelled guns of the Carcharodons blocking off the other tunnel routes. The frenzied momentum that had driven them on past the vanguard had finally dissipated enough for them to be halted and herded together. They now crouched and cringed beneath where Sharr had climbed up onto the back of an overturned loco carriage. It was the same in the junctions to the north and south – they had just inadvertently seized thousands of prisoners.
What Sharr hadn’t anticipated was the reason behind the mass exodus. Clearly the traitors had been massing them on the edge of Sink Shaft One and were now driving them as one back into the advancing Loyalists. They were using them as a screen.
Infiltration. The heretics had laced the prisoner masses with their own cultists. When the five Tactical squads leading the Carcharodons’ final strike towards Sink Shaft One had started allowing the prisoners to pass them by, they’d inadvertently lowered their guard. The heretics had not hesitated to strike. Judging by the vox reports trickling back, strike forces of heavily armed cultist infantry supported by a handful of Chaos Space Marines were assaulting the Tactical squads in the wake of bombing attacks, striking while the Loyalists were still bloodied and disorientated.
‘We hold the Tithe here,’ Sharr said to First Squad, gesturing at the junction crossroads spread out before them. He’d already ordered the Tactical squads to fall back on this position. The loco rail crossroads held by Sharr’s First Squad and the Devastators of Ninth Squad – junction 15-0 – was one of four that constituted the width of the subterranean front set up by Third Company. The Devourer squads – the Seventh and the Eighth – held the two lying approximately northwards, one on the upper and one on the mid level. The junction to the south, on the lower level, was being covered by the final Devastator squad, the Tenth. The ragged remains of the Tactical squads – Second through Sixth – were pulling back towards the two centremost junctions. There had been no word at all from Fourth Squad. Strike Leader Ekara was as experienced and effective a combat leader as any in the Third Company’s hard-bitten upper ranks, but Sharr suspected the worst. In the rush to follow up on their early successes, the Carcharodons had overextended and allowed themselves to be caught flat-footed. They needed time to regroup, time they did not have.
‘Our flanks are exposed,’ Te Kahurangi said from the foot of the overturned carriage. ‘The Seventh Squad to the north and the Tenth to the south are unsupported. The Night Lords will attack them first.’
‘You’ve seen it?’ Sharr asked tersely
.
‘I have.’
‘Strike Leader Ari,’ he called across the junction to the Scout commander. With the bodies of the Red Brethren returned to the White Maw, Ari’s Scouts were helping to keep the prisoners herded together. Their exposed pale features and razor-toothed snarls were enough to cause the dirty humans to comply.
‘Company Master?’ Ari said, turning away from the work of his initiates.
‘Divide the remainder of the Scouts and deploy them to reinforce junctions four-one and eight-eight, immediately.’
‘Affirmative, Company Master.’
Te Kahurangi nodded. ‘That will be enough, for now.’
‘For now,’ Sharr echoed darkly. ‘We cannot keep all these prisoners here and still operate effectively. If we release them, they will flee to the surface and disperse among the jungles. We will not be able to take a Tithe of them before an Imperial response arrives in-system. And we both know we cannot still be here when that happens.’
‘So use the humans in the sub-precinct,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Leave them behind to guard this flock.’
‘I have considered it. There are not enough of them left to be of any use to us.’
‘Not just the arbitrators. Use the convicts they still hold in the cells below the sub-precinct as well.’ Sharr shook his head.
‘We cannot possibly arm them. They may turn on us.’
‘The vast majority would, yes. But we do not require the service of the vast majority. A few hundred of the more trustworthy inmates will be enough. I would hope I could find that many able to serve loyally. I will seek out the thoughts of those who will do our bidding, either through fear or through proper devotion.’
There was truth in that, Sharr supposed. Te Kahurangi’s mental abilities were more than capable of measuring the mettle of a man’s thoughts. A few hundred armed and loyal convicts would be enough to keep the rest in line until the fighting was done, one way or another.
Carcharodons: Red Tithe Page 20