Carcharodons: Red Tithe

by Robbie MacNiven

  The canting of the acolytes arrayed in an eight-pointed star around the seven Chaos Space Marines neared its crescendo. The stooped, deformed thralls were all bleeding from their mouths, noses and ears. A few had collapsed, frothing and spasming uncontrollably on the hexagram-marked deck. Normally Shadraith, the Flayed Father, would have led the ritual, but he was still on board the captured prison ship, playing with whatever remained of the crew while he waited for the idiot Imperials to come and investigate.

  Cull focused his thoughts as he felt the heavy air of the chamber beginning to vibrate, running counterpoint to the quiet throb of the Last Breath’s masked engines. The shadows that clustered around the edges of the vault had started to stretch and elongate. The ancient, cobwebbed lumen orbs suspended from the ceiling flickered and failed, one by one. With each dousing, the darkness rushed forward to claim more of the fear-laden space. The etchings covering the deck had started to glow with a faint, sickly luminance.

  Another acolyte collapsed, then another, their mutated bodies thrashing uncontrollably, their choked cries blending with the chanting. The words of those still standing reached a crest of hideous noise, syllables gibbered and spat out in a rush of palpable terror. Cull gripped the flayed skin haft of his runesword tighter and felt his secondary heart kick in. Adrenaline and excitement flooded his system. The shadows – claws and talons and snapping maws that slid across the vibrating deck – lunged in unison, and the final lumens died. For a second the only light was the glow of the teleportation hexagram, and the unblinking red illumination of seven sets of battle helm lenses.

  Then, amidst disembodied snarls, the tearing of flesh and the screaming of the last of the acolytes, those too vanished.

  Nedzy was shouting up at him from the cell below, perched on top of his bunk, magnicled hands clutching the mesh wiring that separated them.

  ‘What’s going on, wyrdling?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Skell bawled back over the clattering of the alarms. His ears were starting to ache as badly as his forehead.

  ‘You always know, you little freak! Tell me!’

  ‘Go blow off some obscura, Nedzy!’

  ‘They should have stopped by now,’ Dolar moaned from the top bunk, hands clamped over his ears.

  Skell opened his mouth to shout a reply, then stopped. A sudden, indefinable sense of fear kept the words locked behind his jaw. He rose in his bunk, as far as his magnicles would allow. With the extra height he was able to get a view out of the cell hatch slit.

  The tiny space he shared with Dolar was on level forty-three of fifty. When Imperial colonists had first founded the primary mine head, Sink Shaft One, they had burrowed their habitations into the hole’s flanks. The great vertical tunnel digging into Zartak’s core was long exhausted, but was now the open-air nexus for the Burrow, the latticework of hundreds of secondary mines spreading like a subterranean web from the old shaft. The habitation honeycomb of the shaft itself had been converted into Zartak’s primary prison, its sheer, circular sides riddled with tens of thousands of tiny cells and cages like Dolar and Skell’s, jutting out into oblivion. The slip of vision afforded through the hatch gave Skell a view directly across to the outside of the cells on the opposite curve of the shaft, over a hundred yards away.

  It was still dark, and dawn was a long way off. For a while, Skell could see nothing but the flickering of the crimson emergency lights. Then he caught a hint of movement. He squinted, trying to focus.

  There were shadows flitting up the far side of the shaft. The emergency lights touched whatever metal plates they were wearing, staining their midnight surfaces like fresh blood. They weren’t so much climbing as darting upwards, strange-looking, archaic packs strapped to their backs offering them a means of propulsion up the sheer flanks of the prison pit. Skell counted seven of them, shadows within shadows. The light caught the flicker and flash of naked steel alongside the darker gleam of their armour.

  Skell had seen plenty of killers in his short life. He knew he was watching seven right now, ascending as though from the black heart of Zartak itself, like the sump-sink earth-shades of Fallowrain’s darkest legends, up towards the starry heavens beyond the edge of the pit. Up towards the base of the void shield generator, perched on the opposite side of the sink shaft.

  One of the shades paused, latching itself on to an overhanging gable jutting from between two of the prison cells. For a moment it seemed to dangle there, bat-like, inhuman and predatory. A chill ran through Skell as he realised the thing was facing him.

  ‘What is it?’ Dolar shouted over the alarms. He was struggling to lower himself from his bunk to Skell’s height, but he couldn’t get down to the same angle before his magnicles whirred taut and locked. He grunted with the effort.

  Skell ignored him. He was shaking. Every instinct was screaming at him to look away from the suspended figure, to get away from the hatch, get down in his bunk, cover his eyes and pray to a God-Emperor he’d never believed in before now. But he couldn’t. For some reason, he couldn’t look away. He felt sick. His skull throbbed.

  The flickering emergency lights caught the shade, illuminating its face for the first time. Its head was a winged death mask, its eyes glaring from the pits of bone-white sockets, meeting his gaze and holding it in a vice of cold iron. It was the same nightmare vision he had dreamt about, almost every night since he’d arrived on Zartak.

  They have come for you.

  As abruptly as they’d started, the alarms snapped off. Their aftershock echoed back from the circular cliff sides of the sink prison, rebounding within the inmates’ throbbing heads. With the alarms went the emergency lighting.

  Suddenly, there was nothing beyond the cell but darkness.

  First Kill froze. The darkness embraced them, like an old friend. Cull turned away from the cell across the sink shaft from him, his claws tightening around the plasteel gable. The sudden silence after the hammering of the alarms was startling. He blink-clicked Third Claw’s vox-channel.

  ‘Fexrath,’ he hissed. ‘We’re in position. Begin your assault.’

  They caught the Imperial Truth on its final approach to Zartak’s high orbit. Sholtz had relayed the good news that the ship’s crew still controlled its weapons systems. That meant Divine Retribution, an Imperial Navy fast cutter permanently seconded to the Zartak Adeptus Arbites garrison, was able to get in close before launching her boarding torpedoes.

  ‘Terminate with extreme prejudice,’ Macran said over the vox. Rannik shifted a shoulder plate into a more comfortable position, cursing the sweat that was running into her eyes behind her helmet’s lens. At least she could blame it on the infernal heat of the torpedo troop bay. The rest of the shock squad were packed around her, four behind and the rest in front. The two lead arbitrators already had their heavy ceramite suppression shields up. The metal tube of the torpedo’s narrow interior was bathed in ugly red light. A jagged warning bell started to clatter.

  ‘Brace,’ Macran ordered. Rannik just had time to snatch the handrail running along the top of the compartment before an impact battered her back into the armour of the arbitrator behind. She heard the man grunt and curse.

  For a second she thought they’d successfully impacted with the Imperial Truth’s outer hull. Then she realised the backwards thrust had been the torpedo’s dampener drives kicking in. The true impact occurred a moment later.

  This time she was able to stay upright as the false gravity of the boarding craft attempted to drive her forwards. The metal around her shuddered and groaned as the torpedo earthed itself into what Rannik prayed was the flank of the Imperial Truth’s bridge mast.

  The warning chime shut off, and for a second all Rannik could hear was her breath rasping in her ears.

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ crackled Macran’s voice. In her mind’s eye Rannik saw the heavy meltas arrayed around the torpedo’s snub prow blazing, the sounds of vaporised ada
mantium lost in the vacuum of the void. She saw the plasteel and ceramite sheath of the equaliser judder forwards on automatic lock hinges, covering the molten hole bored by the meltas. She heard the thump of compression, felt the magnetic seal shudder through the frame of the boarding vessel. She was suddenly, acutely aware of an itch in her right thigh. The sweat in her eyes stung. The Vox Legi shotgun, held by the stock in her free hand, seemed unbearably heavy.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ said Macran. ‘Make ready, arbitrators.’ The crack of primed weapons was loud in the close, heated space. Rannik let go of the overhead rail to rack her shotgun’s slide. The motion stabbed a fresh spike of adrenaline through her body.

  The warning chime sounded again, just once. The red light bathing the troop bay flashed amber, and then green. There was a crump of door clamps, a rush of steam, a burst of hissing, decompressed air.

  The shock squad were shouting. They were going forwards. Rannik was in amongst them, half advancing, half carried along by their black-armoured momentum. The bellowed oaths of the Statutes Imperialis were deliberately amplified over the arbitrators’ external vox-beads as they stormed the Imperial Truth, but their law-cries fell only on an empty corridor. Rannik ducked in beneath the fused, molten rim of the breach and found herself in the centre of a knot of arbitrators, the front rank holding their shields braced, those behind with shotguns raised.

  According to the snap-briefing delivered by Macran onboard the Divine Retribution, they would be entering via one of the many service corridors ringing the Imperial Truth’s aft bridge mast. As part of the prison ship’s outer shell, the narrow passageways acted as a network for the repair crews and maintenance servitors to quickly reach more important sections. They were narrow, dank places, rarely visited. Like the exterior veins of most starships, they were considered entirely non-vital, and provided with only a modicum of dingy lighting, heat and servicing.

  It was in just such a dim, confined world of rusting pipes and fungus-choked mesh decking that the shock squad now found themselves. There were no life signs.

  ‘Quiet,’ Macran ordered. ‘Reassemble. There should be a grav lift to the inner mast shaft fifty yards to the right. Felchet, take point.’

  The shock squad shook itself into a tightly spaced line, weapons still ready. Rannik kept her positioning, remembering to keep her finger off the Vox Legi’s trigger. She could do this. She could show them she was just as efficient, just as capable, as any arbitrator on Zartak.

  The tunnel bent continuously to the left, following the curve of the circular bridge mast. It resounded with the clang of the shock squad’s steel-shod boots and the rattle and grate of their carapace armour. Rannik tried to maintain her focus, scanning the pipe-lined walls as they passed, shotgun probing the shadows between the flickering lumen orbs. Macran had told them not to anticipate many contacts in the outer shell. Going by Captain Van Hoyt’s descriptions, the ship’s escaped prisoners were still disorganised. They were besieging the bridge and the enginarium, but had failed to capitalise on their numerical superiority by occupying much of the rest of the ship.

  It was a mistake the shock squads wouldn’t let them recover from. They were boarding from five separate breach points, targeting the starboard weapons batteries, the enginarium, the bridge mast, the Navigator’s tower and the primary armoury. The ship’s vital parts would be secured at a stroke, and the breakout suppressed. Macran had warned her teams she expected them to finish the job before the warden primary’s reinforcements had even made it up from Zartak’s surface.

  ‘Grav lift secure,’ came the vox-crackle from Felchet, the point man. It was a big servicing chute, large enough to carry stocks of replacement circulation pipes or sheets of adamantium plating to the outer hull. The arbitrators filed inside. Macran yanked the activation lever. With a judder and an unhealthy, grating whirr, the platform began to rise.

  As the lift climbed into the tower’s central shaft, reports from the other shock squads started filtering back over the vox. All four had made successful breaches in the outer hull. Thus far they had encountered no resistance. In fact, none of the teams were reporting any signs of life at all. The auspex readings were jagged and full of ghost returns, and heads-up tactical displays kept going dark. Even as Macran received the information, the vox shorted and jumped, chopped to pieces by static distortion.

  ‘Something’s interfering with our systems,’ she said over the short-range vox-torq. ‘The savlar may have been able to create some sort of jamming device from the main vox-relay. Taking it out will be our primary objective once the bridge is secure.’

  The grav lift juddered to a halt. The arbitrators closest to the door locked their suppression shields together, forming an impenetrable barrier of ceramite. The doors rolled back.

  Another empty corridor presented itself, the only noise the distant throb of the Imperial Truth’s still-active plasma drives. The shock squad moved smoothly out of the lift, shotguns tracking the flickering shadows. The bridge mast’s central shaft was far less dilapidated than the outer shell, but the lumen orbs still seemed to be on the verge of failing.

  Rannik tried to focus on maintaining her spacing and watching her zone. She felt ridiculously clumsy and out of place amidst the tightly drilled formation.

  ‘Stair shaft, next right,’ came the voice of Felchet.

  ‘It leads directly to the outer doors of the bridge,’ Macran added. ‘Stay alert.’

  There were still no contacts. Transmissions from the other shock squads had ceased. It was as though they’d penetrated a ghost ship, abandoned centuries earlier, listing through the void for eternity. Rannik’s skin prickled, and she almost smacked into the backplate of the arbitrator in front. The squad had come to a halt at the foot of the stairwell leading up to the bridge deck.

  The lumen orbs in the shaft had gone out completely. The darkness seemed to deny them, as firm and black as their suppression shields.

  ‘Stab lumens,’ Macran ordered. The lights flicked on, picking out corroded metal rungs and scabs of dark steam-mould. The beams wavered and shifted with the movements of the arbitrators’ shotguns.

  ‘Felchet, Hormand, switch out,’ Macran said. Felchet dropped back for the second arbitrator in line to take point up the stairs.

  ‘Move off.’

  The shock squad began to climb, the clanging of boots on plasteel ringing up through the stairwell. For the first time since boarding the lighter in the Precinct Fortress, Rannik felt something besides adrenaline and jaggy combat nerves – a dark, creeping sense of foreboding. Something wasn’t right.

  The feeling only grew when she realised what was missing. While the narrow space was still loud with the sounds of the arbitrators’ boots, none of those noises were coming from behind her any more.

  An icy shiver ran down her spine. She spun, shotgun up, the stab lumen beaming back down the stairwell.

  Of the four arbitrators who’d been bringing up the rear there was no sign.

  ‘We’ve reached the head of the stairs,’ crackled Hormand’s voice. ‘Still no contacts. I have a visual on the bridge blast doors. They’re not sealed.’

  ‘Wait,’ Rannik stammered over the vox-torq. ‘Stop. Everyone stop.’

  ‘Damn it, I told you to keep quiet,’ Macran snarled.

  ‘They’re behind us!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. The… the four behind me. They’re gone. I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘Squad, halt,’ Macran said. ‘Sound off.’

  Four names were missing from the roll. Rannik stared down at the last landing, bare and silent beneath her. She felt frozen, as though to move would trigger whatever mysterious fate had already befallen those who’d been following her. She realised, with a strange, chill sense of detachment, that her hands were shaking. The little involuntary movements were causing the light from her lumen to waver and dart across the mouldy
walls.

  Macran was still trying to reach the four missing arbitrators over the vox. None replied. The darkness seemed to creep in around the light of Rannik’s beam, hardening at the edges, like a predator tensing, ready to strike. Eventually Macran cut the vox-links.

  ‘We carry on,’ she said.

  ‘But–’ Rannik began.

  ‘We carry on, sub-warden. Unless you want me to report you to the primary once we get this warp-damned place secured?’

  Rannik backed all the way up the last steps. When she finally emerged at the top she found herself in a vaulted atrium. The lumens set into arched alcoves, though weak, were at least functioning.

  The far end of the atrium was dominated by a vast set of doors, twice Rannik’s height and stamped with the interlocking ‘I’ and ship’s wheel of the Imperial Navy. The bridge blast doors. The shock squad had assembled before them in a defensive semicircle.

  ‘Where are the prisoners?’ Rannik asked. ‘I thought you said they were attacking the brid–’

  ‘Quiet,’ Macran snapped. ‘Hormand?’

  ‘They’re not locked, sir,’ said the point man as he inspected the door’s brass-rimmed locking panel.

  ‘Nothing on the vox either,’ Macran said. ‘Maintain firing positions. Shield ranks, brace. Hormand, open it.’

  There was a clatter as the shock squad made ready. Rannik took position behind the stooping figure of one of the suppression shield bearers. She couldn’t resist the urge to glance back at the yawning darkness of the stairwell behind them, even as Hormand disengaged the blast door hinge clamp and hauled up the locking rod from its brace in the deck. The heavy adamantium plates rolled back smoothly, automatic hinges whirring.

  A foul stench wafted from within. It was immediately apparent that they were all much, much too late.