Carcharadons void exile, p.4
Carcharadons: Void Exile, page 4
Horrum spoke again, presumably oblivious to the shielded conversation.
‘What you suggest is only the most temporary of solutions. You must send word to your captain, and tell him to return here and remove his forces immediately.’
‘I will speak to him, but I doubt he will abandon this world,’ Khauri said. ‘Both the sensorium scans of our fleet and my own prognostications all point to a dire threat on board the approaching hulk. The forces of the Archenemy infest it. The risings we have witnessed here are merely a prelude.’
‘I tire of repeating myself,’ Horrum’s little servitor hissed. ‘We are equal to the task.’
‘Then let us speak of this no more,’ Khauri said, taking up his staff and rising, his power armour purring with the motion. ‘The battle company will depart to the base of Mount Antikythera.’
‘And you will tell your captain of my requirements,’ Horrum added. ‘I will deal with his lackeys no longer. If he has not made contact within the next labour cycle, my skitarii will find you all again.’
‘We understand,’ Khauri said, offering a bow. ‘May the blessings of the Omnissiah abound across your systems, Fabricator General.’
Horrum offered no benediction in return, and Khauri turned away, followed by the other Carcharodons.
‘Fall in with me,’ the Librarian added tersely over the vox. First Squad did so, Nuritona taking the lead, Red Tane bringing up the rear. He was aware of the continued target locks every step of the way out of the mountain.
‘The Company Master will not approve of the change of dispositions,’ Nuritona observed as they progressed up the tunnel towards the Pinnacle’s entrance. ‘What brought you here anyway?’
‘I saw your update on the display, and predicted difficulties,’ Khauri said, the Librarian and the strike veteran now walking side by side. ‘Was I mistaken?’
‘We have not come here to negotiate,’ Nuritona pointed out.
‘I think you made that clear enough to the Fabricator General.’
‘Bail Sharr would not have refused to meet with the Mechanicus over these matters,’ Nuritona admitted. Khauri grimaced as he replied.
‘Living in the past will not serve our present, strike veteran. For good or for ill, Bail Sharr is no longer the Reaper Prime.’
CHAPTER IV
Consciousness returned, though he wished it had not.
His body ached. That was the first thing he became aware of. Ache, and a deep, bitter coldness, gnawing its way to his core. For a long time his mind struggled to latch on to anything else, find any other stimuli besides that piercing frigidity.
Then he opened his eyes.
Darkness surrounded him, interspersed with flickers of illumination – ghost lights that danced and flitted before him. He tried to reach towards one, finding his movements sluggish, painful. His hand, sheathed in ceramite, connected with something solid, blocking him.
He was underwater, he realised. Armoured, but unhelmeted, entirely submerged in icy liquid, breathing through a resp-mask.
There was no meaning to grasp, no understanding conferred by what he perceived around him. He had been deep in the dark – not the Outer Dark but the Inner – lost in the silence, in the nothingness, in the oblivion he had come to crave.
He saw something in the dim, dancing lights. Something on the other side of the barrier that stood between him and the rest of reality. His brain tried to register it as anything it could recognise, a face perhaps, but it was not a face, not in any natural sense of the word. There were eyes, though. Black eyes, cold and bottomless as the deeps in which his thoughts had been swimming. They leaned in, barely separated from him, surveying him with cold, keen intelligence. Then, with a brief flash of red, they were gone.
The strange vision sent a shudder through him, pure revulsion, and in that moment, he knew who he was.
Bail Sharr clenched his fist and punched it free from the cryo-chamber’s crystalflex front.
He found something in his grasp. Something that struggled.
There were more red flashes. He recognised them now. Weapon discharges from a lasgun.
He squeezed, baring his razored teeth in a snarl. There was a crunch, and resistance gave way to something soft and yielding. With it came a vicious sense of satisfaction.
There, at last, was his purpose, his understanding.
He let go of the man whose skull he’d just splintered, ripped away the resp-mask muzzling his face, and slammed his other hand against the glassplex barrier. This time it shattered completely, a sheet of icy water cascading away around him.
The Carcharodon stepped out of the broken cryo-tank, and immediately found himself under fire. More red las-bolts spat at him, cracking from his right arm and pauldron, hissing and sizzling through the water pouring from him.
He responded without thinking. His left hand unclamped his combat knife from his waist and then he was moving, the ache and stiffness suffusing his body deleted from his mind by centuries of battle conditioning and a heart-racing shock of stimms automatically dispensed into his system.
He could smell blood.
The things shooting at him were clad in patched vac-suits and chainmail. The nearest was trying to reload, but had dropped its power pack into the water rapidly flooding the rusting corridor Sharr had been entombed in. The Carcharodon simply slammed past, throwing the wretch against the wall and taking the second one as they fired.
Sharr’s knife speared through the ghoulish, patchwork respirator hood the thing was wearing with a crunch, slamming up to its hilt through an eye socket, the tip punching out the back of its head in an arcing jet of crimson.
He twisted and wrenched the blade free, the heretic dropping without a sound, then rounded on the one he had cast aside, finding it struggling to rise, most of its ribs likely broken.
Sharr punched it, and it died.
His senses, sharpened to a razor’s edge now by the wicked concoction of stimulants hammering through his system, locked on to a new threat. A shape loomed in the hatchway leading into the corridor, far more potent than the pathetic things he had just killed. He reversed his grip on his combat knife and reached for his chainsword with his other hand, before recognition finally pierced the tunnel his thoughts had narrowed into.
The Carcharodon Sharr knew only as Blood Eye stepped towards him, boots splashing in the water that had flooded from the shattered cryo-chamber.
‘Welcome back,’ he said, voice hissing from his helm’s arched vox-grille.
Sharr did not reply immediately. The urge to kill remained with him, the need to taste and smell more blood. He overcame it only with difficulty, standing facing the grey spectre, like his own mirror image glaring him down.
Slowly, the urges ebbed away, leaving behind the hollowness, and the shivering aftermath of an unregulated cryo-resuscitation.
He began to truly remember who he was, and what he had become.
Outcast. Anathema. Void Exile.
He and the others had been mind-wiped while being transported in-system, receiving hypno-briefings en route that were only now beginning to resurface. Sharr did not know how he had come to be in the wreckage where the cryo-chamber had been embedded, or where he had been or what he had done between the current and the previous operations. Life since the beginning of his exile had been little more than a continuous chain of violence, with none of the meditative silence the Carcharodon Astra used to salve their souls between campaigns.
What he did know was the information pertinent to this mission. He and the others had been tasked with stopping the space hulk code-tagged Grim Destiny from reaching a forge world known as Diamantus. So few Carcharodons against the vast, infested macro-vessel seemed like impossible odds. But there was a plan.
‘Where are the others?’ Sharr asked Blood Eye. His voice was a deathly rasp. He wondered how long it had been since he had last used it. Months? Or years?
‘They are hunting,’ Blood Eye said. ‘Throwing off the after-effects of entombment.’
Sharr locked his knife back to his hip and flexed the servos in his armour. He thought about the un-face he had seen, watching him through the glassplex as he had struggled to awaken from the cryo-sleep. He remembered how it had vanished in a flash of crimson.
The cultists had been shooting at it, not at Sharr, not until he had emerged.
‘You are troubled,’ Blood Eye suggested.
‘There was something here, before the heretics found me,’ Sharr said after a brief hesitation. ‘I was not able to identify it. I had only just awoken.’
‘The slaves of the Archenemy are many and monstrous,’ Blood Eye said. ‘There is no doubt they infest this hulk from these depths to its uppermost decks. We must remain vigilant.’
Sharr did not respond. He felt suddenly sick and weak. His reawakening was catching up with him, made worse by the fact he had been roused while the reheating and drainage protocols were still underway.
But he had experienced it all a thousand times before. He spat, tasting acid, swallowed, shook out his neck and rolled his shoulders, then slammed his boot down on the last cultist he had killed. The wretch’s body burst, spattering offal halfway up the nearest wall and turning the water swilling around their feet crimson.
‘Let us be on our way,’ he said, pulling on his helmet and rousing his armour’s auto-senses. ‘The countdown has already begun.’
The Exiles moved up, carefully, through the bowels of hell.
Blood Eye led them. He carried the squad’s auspex, and used its faintly glowing green display to navigate the detritus of the lowermost levels and up towards their objective.
It was slow going. None of them remembered exactly how they had got where they were now. The combination of mind-wipes and solitary stasis confinement meant they had seen no other void brothers besides each other for years. They had been sealed in the frigid torpor of the cryo-chambers installed on board the old wreckage, and none of them really knew how long they had spent there, adrift in space, seeded in the hulk’s path.
The jarring impacts of collision had triggered the activation protocols and woken them from dreamless depths – four Void Exiles, cast out from their Shivers. Four former brothers, stripped of their names and, in some cases, the arms and armour they had wielded for decades. Four Carcharodon Astra, together but bitterly alone, banished from their companies, set adrift to kill and die on the edges of the Outer Dark.
Blood Eye paused briefly at the top of a steep metal corridor, then took a right turn. Decking plates groaned and creaked beneath the weight of the four. There was no light, the systems of whatever ship this had once been long dead, the Carcharodons working on preysight and instinct.
They advanced through the dark in single file, going slowly higher as they left behind the wreckage-choked halls that formed the hulk’s underbelly. None of them spoke. They rarely conversed, unless it was relevant to current operations. There was no Chapter edict against it, but what was there to say? None of them sought comradeship from those who were lost. Still, over the past four years Sharr had watched, and had learned things about his unwilling companions.
Epsilon-one-twelve – known as Blood Eye – had the easiest past to discern, at least in part. His unofficial name came from the dark crimson eyes of his helmet, unusual among the Carcharodons. Most helms in the Chapter bore dark yellow or black lenses. Added to that was the fact that the corners of his grey battle plate were scabbed with deep red, where a layer of paint had been callously scraped away to re-expose the old, original colouration. If those physical signs were not enough, his knowledge of all matters mechanical made it clear that he had once been a Techmarine.
The other two were opaquer. The one they called Shadow – Theta-six-seven – was young, his flesh barely scarred and unmarked by exile tattoos. Sharr suspected he had hardly reached the rank of void brother before his banishment. Exiled or not, he still bore the arrogance of youth, and his face, when his helmet was off, had a cruel twist to it.
The other – Omekra-seven-three – was known as Talon, in no small part because of one of the weapons he affected, a trio of long claws, fashioned onto the back of one gauntlet. He combined them with a traditionalist club, and his preference for fighting up close, along with the Devourer tattoos Sharr had seen on his arms, indicated he had once been a member of one of the Chapter’s assault squads.
Blood Eye, Shadow and Talon. There had been others, but they were gone now, and Sharr barely remembered them.
Sometimes, he wondered what they had discerned of him over the years. He had no doubt they had all noted, on the rare occasions when his helmet was removed, that he bore the shark-and-scythe tattoo on his left temple. It marked him out as Reaper Prime, an honorific traditionally belonging to the Master of the Third Company. For a master to suffer banishment was almost unheard of.
The shame of that reality was now little more than a background ache. Such emotions were nothing, just as honour and pride were nothing. Distractions, detracting from the clarity of duty, from the requirements of the Edicts of Exile. The Chapter taught that such things were meaningless. Sharr had always found that to be true. Until the Blindness had taken him.
It was the Blindness and its mindless rage that had brought him here. It was one of the Chapter’s curses, born out of its malformed genetic heritage. It had broken him and remade him into what he had always dreaded he would one day become. That was why, when combat-cant necessitated brevity, Blood Eye, Shadow or Talon addressed him as Blind One. The Blindness – not a true lack of vision, but bouts of chilling despair that gave way to mindless fury – was all he had left, the only emotions that had survived the Outer Dark and still held any meaning for him.
None of the other Exiles had asked him what blasphemies he had committed, what depravities he had condoned to earn a place among the lost, and nor had he ever sought the details of their crimes. Such a thing would be anathema. It did not matter anyway. What mattered was that each now trod his own road to damnation, and there could be no reprieve except in slaughter.
That road turned from a figurative to a literal one on board Grim Destiny. The four Exiles experienced the first signs of life since leaving the boarding wreckage about one day-cycle into the operation. Sharr caught a flicker of movement amidst a debris-choked hallway they were stalking through. There were skittering noises too, claws on metal.
Shadow’s marker on the shared visor display blinked up with the runes for contact and a question-signifier.
‘Nothing that need concern us,’ Blood Eye answered, his gaze not leaving his auspex.
Sharr did not trust his fellow Exile enough to let his guard down, but nothing came of the occasional scurrying sounds.
The Blindness’ early stages were with him as they traversed the hulk’s depths, the icy simmering that marked his existence between the short bouts of hyper-violence his life now revolved around. His thoughts remained clear. He followed Blood Eye, he watched, and he waited for the inevitable. For the killing time.
Blood Eye came to a halt next to a circular bulkhead hatch, the green of the auspex blinking over his scabbed helm as he paused to consult it. It was unlike him to be so uncertain. Sharr was about to demand an explanation when the other Exile spoke, his voice a dry rasp over the vox.
‘The auspex is malfunctioning, but there appears to be a presence ahead.’
‘Alternative route?’ Talon asked.
‘Negative. The passageways converge, all but a few crawl spaces and shafts that would likely be too small and unstable. The area ahead forms a gateway, a link between the lower and middle decks.’
‘And it is guarded,’ Shadow surmised.
‘In some way, yes. The auspex won’t tell me more. It is as if… the machine spirit is afraid.’
None of the Carcharodons responded to the claim. Fear was something they simply did not understand.
‘If not around, then through,’ Talon said, slipping free his club from its strap across his cuisse.
‘I’m mapping what readings I can onto the tactical display,’ Blood Eye said, working the auspex dials. Fresh data scrawled over Sharr’s vision, including a map burst of the area ahead. It was as Blood Eye had described – a confluence of passages and gangways, a fusion of what looked like the structures of several different ships that had long ago become enmeshed together.
The chart was flickering and uncertain, some sections blinking and changing before realigning with their previous orientation. It was cringing and twitching. And at the centre of it was a presence, or perhaps more accurately an absence. No data, no output, as though the heart of the corridors ahead somehow did not exist.
The Carcharodons prepared their weaponry, and advanced.
Sharr had come to terms with the loss of the armour he had worn for over eight decades. When he had been stripped of his ranks, he had also been stripped of the relic wargear that each Reaper Prime inherited. He had gone back to what remained of his old Mark V battle plate – what hadn’t been scavenged and cannibalised over the years to provide for other void brothers. Part of it had to be modified with the few pieces of Mark X armour available from the Nomad Predation Fleet’s reserves, adjusting the original to the changes he had undergone in the intervening period, the brutal modifications of the Rubicon Primaris. Despite such shortcomings, he had eventually reconnected with what remained of the original panoply and its patchwork of pieces, the worn, wounded old machine spirit accepting his return.
Reaper was a more acute loss.
The great, two-handed chainaxe was one of the Reaper Prime’s tools and symbols of office, an ancient relic weapon that was passed from one Company Master to the next. Like much of the wargear he had been stripped of, Sharr had taken custodianship of Reaper after the death of the previous Third Company master, Akia, just prior to the Red Tithe conducted on the prison world of Zartak. Sharr had carried it ever since, and had almost forgotten what it meant to fight without the mighty weapon and the devastating carnage it could unleash.
