Carcharodons: Outer Dark

by Robbie MacNiven

  ‘Void Father willing,’ Nikora said. ‘Perform your duty, Techmarine.’

  Uthulu hefted the cog-edged hammer he carried and began breaking the chains binding one of the Dreadnoughts to the plinth. Each blow rang through the cavern and shuddered through the rock, a herald for the start of a ritual rarely attempted. When the final heavy link splashed into the rising swell, the Techmarine locked the teeth of the heavy tool into the panel at the base of the basalt stone. A clicking sound echoed around the high chamber as he turned it like a great wrench, setting ancient gears in motion. After a moment’s muscle-straining effort he removed it and swung, smashing the shark-stamped activation rune at the base of the plinth with a shuddering clang.

  A hum of charged power shuddered through the nodes that ran deep into the rock, accompanying the slow grinding of the newly activated gears. Uthulu and Nikora stepped back towards the shallows, the Chaplain’s devotional cant melting with his brother’s mechanically delivered lingua-technis.

  The humming rose in pitch, and there was a crack of discharged energy that sent ripples out through the meltwater, followed by the familiar whir of armour servos. For a moment all was still. For a moment, both Uthulu and Nikora wondered whether their supplications had been insufficient.

  Then the unchained Dreadnought moved. Its helm shifted slowly, and there was a ponderous thud as it took a step towards the edge of its dais. Uthulu and Nikora both went down on their knees in the ice-skimmed shallows, heads bowed.

  ‘Hail to you, Wandering Ancestor Itako,’ Nikora said, following the ritual response to the awakening ceremony. ‘Arise, for there is blood in the water. Your judgement awaits.’

  For a moment the Dreadnought didn’t respond. For a moment, the Chaplain feared he had failed – Ancient Itako had once more slipped back into slumber, his mind lost in the void of dream-memories he had spent so long swimming through.

  Then there was a click, and a harsh blurt of static as the great Contemptor’s external vox-units came online. The sound was followed by another, altogether greater and more terrible.

  With a howl of purest, frenzied rage, Ancient Itako heralded his own awakening.

  Rannik’s shotgun blast passed through the daemonic apparition in the undercroft without meeting resistance. It twisted on her, the form of the Space Marine it had adopted flickering and unravelling as it shrieked. Rannik screamed and clutched her skull, the Vox Legi clattering to the floor once more as her mind was flooded with the searing chill of the void.

  A few seconds of exposure to the daemon’s wrath would likely have killed her. Khauri took his opportunity. He lunged, stave outstretched, and plunged the psy-conduit into the centre of the morass of shadows. His roar of pain and exertion joined the daemon’s own shrieks and Rannik’s agony as she collapsed onto her knees, her mind riven with the horror of what she was witnessing. The blue flames flickering around the Librarian flared, his roar growing deeper and more furious as he channelled every ounce of power he possessed into the stave. It throbbed and vibrated, as though it were about to shatter, the daemonic essence it had plunged into writhing and twisting around it like a nest of grasping tentacles.

  Then, abruptly, it was over. There was a crack, and a shock wave of energy blasted from the struggling combatants out through the crypt, shattering every tomb and splintering a hundred bones and skulls into shards. The shadow daemon gave way, expelled in a corona of white light that seared its incorporeal being to nothingness. A shriek lingered in the energy-suffused space for a moment, an aftershock of pain and anger, the false memory of a thousand future atrocities denied.

  And then, silence.

  Rannik blinked and groaned. The creature’s banishment had instantly alleviated the skull-splitting pain in her head, but in its place it had left an ache that infused her whole body. The memories that it had forced back into her mind made her want to retch, but she took a slow breath and controlled them, binding them away in the manner she had been taught. She was not a young arbitrator cowering in the dark any more, and she never would be again.

  ‘I am going above,’ said a voice. Khauri stood over her. He looked wholly unlike the Space Marine Rannik had first seen when she joined the strike column. His bare flesh was raked and bloodied, and still glowed with a suffusion of unearthly power. His eyes were lit by witchfire, and his voice rebounded with an unnatural tremor.

  ‘I… have to find my master,’ Rannik said, rising to her feet.

  ‘You will not,’ Khauri said. ‘Not living. You are too late.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ Rannik said, knowing he was right.

  ‘Do as you will. Regardless, we shall meet again.’

  Rannik looked at the Space Marine psyker, at his black eyes riven now with lightning. Her own expression darkened, and she nodded.

  ‘Yes, Carcharodon. We shall.’

  Where once the Cathedra of Saint Solomon had resounded with praise, now it echoed with the sounds of slaughter. The xenos had risen like a tide, and like grey rock the Carcharodons resisted.

  Kordi was reloading when the thing came at him from out of the bloody press. It was a hybrid, but a warped one at that, its human features barely recognisable any more, given way to purple claws and hardened chitin. It barrelled into him full on as his magazine clicked home, its talons punching deep into both sides of his breastplate. He grunted as they drew blood, scraping his fused ribs. The thing hissed in his face, fangs snapping, its dead black eyes wide.

  He headbutted it. There was a crunch. One of its claws was still locked in his side. Dropping his bolter, he reached up and broke its neck with a violent twist.

  The pain pushed him to the edge. He was already near it, already dangerously close to dropping off into the Blindness, becoming consumed by the violence that haunted his Chapter. Visions of a sun-streaked beach and crashing blue waves flashed before his eyes, pre-induction memories that hadn’t stirred for years.

  Those were behind him now. He was Carcharodon Astra. He was in control.

  He unclamped his chainsword and set about the hybrid’s shrieking kindred. Around him the remains of his tactical squad were doing likewise. They had been driven back to one of the cathedra’s great stone pillars, carved in the style of Piety V’s tree sigil. One, Void Brother Takari, had fallen, his body lost in the press as the seemingly endless tide of cultists continued to scramble over their own dead and dying and deeper into the cathedra. The Carcharodons had been pinned back to the sides and towards the apse and its altar, above which the company banner still hung. Sharr was there with most of the Devastators and Assault Marines, a semi­circle of hammering bolters and roaring chain weapons that shrank little by little. The thunder of the battle, rebounding from the great vaults above, was deafening even for Adeptus Astartes, and Kordi had been forced to use his Lyman’s ear to filter much of it out.

  When the end began, it did so abruptly. Kordi realised that the attack had paused. Everywhere the hybrids’ forward momentum disappeared as they ceased throwing themselves against the increasingly separated hard points of the Carcharodons’ defence. Though the Space Marines continued to cut down those nearest, an unnatural, disconnected hush had fallen over the cathedra.

  Kordi realised why as the front ranks of the xenos parted. The patriarch had arrived.

  Sharr watched as the master of Piety V’s genestealer cult made its entrance. The creature was twice the size of its lesser brood-kin, its muscular purple limbs enclosed in thick plates of black chitin, its foot-long talons scraping the flagstones as it prowled into the cathedra on all fours. Its skull, bulbous and swollen, swung from side to side as it took in the carnage around it, its sinuous tongue tasting the air. Its kindred flanked it like the honour guard of some ancient monarch, providing the deferential space given to an alpha predator.

  A hush had fallen across the cultists as the creatures entered their presence, and some dropped their weapons and fell to th
eir knees in mind-numbed rapture as the monster’s psychic aura washed over them. The pall of the hive mind had fallen across the entire cathedra – Sharr could feel its maddening buzz in the back of his every thought, the hideous scraping of its claws on the inside of his skull. The king of the swarm had arrived.

  It seemed to sense his attention. Its small, glittering black eyes fell on him. It stopped and stood up on its rear limbs. The motion was hideous – in an instant it turned from being an utterly alien, animalistic predator to being something almost human. Sharr realised more clearly than ever before how pervasive the threat of the cult could be. This was not an invasive species, easily uprooted from where it did not belong. It was a mimic, an infiltrator, a supremely intelligent being capable of secreting itself among its prey, and then twisting those around it to more closely resemble its own damned visage.

  And its eyes were utterly enthralling.

  Not now, Reaper Prime,+ snapped a voice. Sharr realised it was Khauri, and the words had come from inside his head. They broke the spell of the patriarch’s powerful hypnosis, the same alien gaze that had come so close to enslaving an entire planet.

  Realising its trickery had failed, the creature shrieked and attacked. Even by the standards of its alien breed, it was impossibly fast. Two of Lakari’s Devastators were on their knees almost before Sharr had raised Reaper, disembowelled, and Lakari himself followed a heartbeat later, his severed head, still in its helmet, bouncing out into the chancel. Sharr knew, in that moment, that the thing would slaughter them all without pause.

  He had failed.

  That was when the soaring domed roof of the Cathedra of Saint Solomon – the life’s work of the great Ecclesiarchy architect-deacon Rozarius, pride of Piety and one of the Seven Wonders of the Under-Sectors – came crashing in.

  The Wandering Ancient had arrived.

  The Red Wake had gutted the interior of the tyranid boarding pod. He returned to Te Kahurangi drenched in viscera, every inch of his Terminator armour slick, Hunger and Slake drooling thick strings of gore and shredded flesh. He had carved his way through the birthing sacks and the limpet-like creature’s great organs, ripping its vile heart to pieces with the clawed tips of his gauntlets. It was now nothing more than a dead husk, still latched by its barbed teeth to the exterior of the Nicor’s hull.

  The service corridor was unsealed, and the two Carcharodons returned to the flagship’s bridge. In the time it had taken Tyberos to slaughter the alien boarders, the hive ship assailing the Space Marine battle-barge had drawn the warship within reach of its slowly rippling fronds and tendrils. The vast xenos was slowly enveloping the Nicor in its flesh, even as the Carcharodons vessel pounded it with every gun and battery, blasting great globules of alien meat and milky, pus-like fluids into the freezing void.

  ‘The rest of the fleet has engaged, my lord,’ Atea said as Tyberos and Te Kahurangi returned to their positions on the command platform. The Red Wake remained silent, the lights of the viewscreens and oculus stands winking across the fathomless black of his helmet’s eye-lenses. Te Kahurangi surveyed the readouts from the augur charts, his genhanced mind mapping out the location and status of the Nomad Predation Fleet in seconds.

  The Annihilation and Scyla had advanced upon the flanks of the hive ship, and had been hammering it from either side until more drones had swooped in and forced both vessels to divert fire to their own defence. More elements of the Carcharodons fleet had come up and engaged the increasingly numerous bio-ships, until a full, sprawling general engagement had developed over the space of a little more than an hour.

  Beyond the void battle, the bulk of the hive fleet continued to bear down on Piety. The long-range augurs were simply unable to compute the numbers still approaching from the Outer Dark, continuously feeding into the battle with the Carcharodons fleet. Even the great hive ship attempting to drag in the Nicor, acting as the lynchpin of the swarm’s vanguard, was a minnow compared to some of the beasts ponderously approaching from beyond the reach of the Carcharodons’ scopes. In all of his long service, Te Kahurangi had never witnessed a threat so vast, or so unrelenting. The Nomad Predation Fleet would not be able to stop it. They would not even be able to slow it. It would consume them all and strike the Imperium deep within its borders, tearing the heart from mankind’s empire among the stars. In a moment of the coldest clarity the ancient Librarian saw a galaxy stripped bare, a constellation of dead rocks and barren worlds devoured by a hunger that was as old as it was insatiable.

  He saw the death of the entire galaxy. And he saw the only one who could save it. In the great cathedra of Piety V, Bail Sharr fought on.

  [Intercepted high-anchorage vox traffic, bandwidth 88-91, between Imperial Navy defence monitors Overwatch and Eagle, Piety System]

  [Identified as Captain Maska, officer commanding the Overwatch] + + + What in the name of Terra’s Golden Throne is happening down there? + + +

  [Identified as Captain Shelim, officer commanding the Eagle] + + + I told you, I don’t know. We’re getting no returns from the Theocratica, or anyone else for that matter. The vox traffic is frecked. + + +

  [Maska] + + + There’s reports of riots, fighting. My augurs are picking up fires breaking out all over Pontifrax. + + +

  [Shelim] + + + Perhaps the agri-collectives or the shrine-towns know more? + + +

  [Maska] + + + Unresponsive too. + + +

  [Shelim] + + + Throne damn it. I’m telling you, it’s an uprising… + + +

  [Maska] + + + How can it be this abrupt? There’s been no intelligence, no rumours? + + +

  [Shelim] + + + You think the arrival of an Adeptus Astartes warfleet is a coincidence? + + +

  [Maska] + + + Wait, augurs are spiking. + + +

  [Shelim] + + + What? What is it? + + +

  [Maska] + + + The strike cruiser… It just launched something straight at Pontifrax. + + +

  [Shelim] + + + Munitions? Has it just opened fire? + + +

  [Maska] + + + No… I think it might be worse. + + +

  [End of transmission intercept]

  _________ Chapter XIV

  Ancient Itako’s arrival on Piety V shattered the grand dome of the Theocratica’s cathedra. Almost half of it caved in when it was hit by the huge Dreadnought drop pod, descending in a cascade of shattered rubble. The drop pod itself hammered into the centre of the nave, reducing over a dozen xenos to gory smears and flinging countless more through the air along with a storm of broken flagstones and splintered pews. Yet more were crushed by the collapsing masonry, the thunder of falling debris competing with the howls and shrieks of the hybrids and their masters.

  For a moment, it seemed as though the entire roof of the cathedra would collapse, forever burying both the Carcharodons and their attackers. The structure held, though, even as parts of it continued to crumble down onto those below. Stones were still pattering from the scarred hull of the great drop pod when its trio of hatches fell open with a resounding clang.

  None knew for sure just how Wandering Ancestor Itako had first fallen. The Chaplains of the Carcharodon Astra, guardians of the Chapter’s ancient, near-mythic past, told different stories depending on the occasion. Some said he had been a Reaper Prime who had held a fortress breach for two days and a night alone, against a horde of insectoid Krulid, filling the gap with their twitching carcasses before succumbing to their poisons. Others said he had been the champion of the Third Company who had fought a Chaos lord during one of the earliest Black Crusades. While the traitor had cut him down with his final mighty blow, Itako had struck the warrior’s head from his shoulders, turning back his warband before the darkness took him.

  The truth would likely never be known, but whatever combat had first seen him confined to his armoured sarcophagus, the towering Contemptor Dreadnought had eclipsed it with a dozen mighty feats since. From the Outer Dark to the Under-Sectors, the grey-and-black-plated war machine had decimated arm
ies and butchered warlords in a frenzy of bloodletting.

  Sharr had seen him in action once, decades ago. It had been years since any of the Third Company’s Ancients had been woken from their deep, cold slumber, years since they had faced a threat so dire that Nikora and Uthulu had dared to drag one of the resurrected heroes back to full consciousness.

  Itako screamed. It was a horrible noise, part human, part machine, grating and grinding from the vox-grille set in the war machine’s breastplate. It was something inimical to the void brethren in the cathedra, a shattering of traditions, a reminder that whatever was now nestled within the Contemptor’s armoured shell, it was far removed from the warrior that had once been.

  Such was the price of waking one of the Wandering Ancestors. Once unleashed, there was little that could be predicted, bar that they would wreak devastation.

  Itako took two steps, out from the frame of his drop pod, great metal foot-plates ringing off plasteel. He swivelled his body slightly as he went, as though surveying the carnage wreaked by his impact into the cathedra. The xenos surge had stopped momentarily, the heart of the assault broken by the mere arrival of the Dreadnought. Even the patriarch and its purestrain had broken off, slinking about the chancel before the altar platform, heads darting between the Carcharodons and the clanking monstrosity suddenly in their midst.

  Itako screamed again, part rage, part pain. This time the terrible noise was followed by a roaring whoosh of igniting air, as the twin heavy flamers built into the Dreadnought’s torso loosed a sheet of burning promethium on the cultists picking themselves up around him. The cathedra descended once more into chaos as the Carcharodons opened fire and the cultists surged forwards, more frenzied than ever.

  Itako met them. While the flamers guttered out, their blackened nozzles still spilling short gouts, the Contemptor’s two great fists swung into action. The right, a great siege claw, snapped shut over the first hybrid to fling itself at the Dreadnought, shearing the creature into four pieces with a single clench of the great blades. At the same time his left-side armament, a triple-headed siege drill, roared into action, the three rotating adamantium bits ploughing into another hybrid and reducing it to a red haze in a heartbeat. Arterial blood and ichor slashed the grey front of the great walker as he swung ponderously with both weapons, the force of each blow unstoppable, eviscerating, gouging and shredding two or three xenos at a time. For their own part, the Dreadnought’s attackers were unable to harm him, their talons and blades ­scraping his flanks and rear, autorifle shots and las-blasts scarring his breastplate and heavy-set shoulders. Seemingly bored with the slaughter he had unleashed, the towering Contemptor turned, crushing another clawed later-strain hybrid beneath his bulk as he shifted. He had sensed the patriarch and its bodyguard, who were in turn moving to face him, allowing the weaker strains of hybrids and their genestealer masters to block the firing lanes of the other Carcharodons and soak up the bolter rounds that otherwise might have decimated them.