The Reaping Time - Robbie MacNiven Read online

  Any normal enemy would have been left maimed and dying by the blasting charges. But the Space Marines, though battered, were not even remotely stunned. The veterans of First Squad responded with immediate, brute force. The shrill war cries of the miners were drowned by a bestial, throbbing howl as half a dozen chainaxes roared to life, their volume a deafening counterpoint to the chill silence observed by the Carcharodons. Without a word Dorthor and Karra, Tama, Raggen and Toa set about their assailants with hard butcher’s strokes.

  Most brutal of all was Akia himself. The initial blast had split his helm, shattering one black lens and cracking the faceplate. Even as Te Kahurangi fought he could sense the Company Master’s monstrous fury, the rage he was battling to keep in check. The Blindness was beckoning to him, that precipice poised above a black sea of hatred and needless slaughter-sacrifice.

  Blood was in the air, and Akia had its scent.

  The Company Master’s great chainaxe, Reaper, roared through flesh and bone. Akia wielded it with short, furious strokes, confined by the narrowness of the tunnel. The constraints only seemed to drive him to greater butchery – his pale armour was soon dripping and red. Nothing faced him and lived.

  Te Kahurangi marshalled his own strength, the thrust and lunge of his force staff breaking bones and shattering skulls. One attacker managed to strike him with the beam of his lascutter while the Librarian smashed down his comrade, the powerful tool searing through his right vambrace. Warning markers blinked across his visor as pain registered from the burn wound, swiftly suppressed. He lashed out with an invisible wave of psychic force, focusing the crushing weight of an entire ocean upon a single point of the man’s forehead. The attacker’s skull burst beneath the pressure and he crumpled.

  It was over as abruptly as it had begun. Suddenly the damaged tunnel was empty. One by one the Carcharodons deactivated their chainaxes, thick strings of gore pattering slowly from their armour, their breathing raspy over the vox system.

  Te Kahurangi flexed his fingers on the grip of his staff, feeling his secondary heart decelerating. Caderik and Maudlin still lived. His foresight and reflexes had saved them. Their thermoweave suits were ragged and torn, but a quick scan revealed that they were unharmed. Besides the shock. It grew worse when Akia removed his cracked helmet.

  ‘Next time, warn us,’ the Company Master said to Te Kahurangi.

  ‘If time permits,’ the Chief Librarian allowed. He could see Caderik and Maudlin staring at Akia’s exposed head. The Carcharodon’s pale, grey features had been revealed, the exile tattoos that swirled about his throat and jaw giving way to eyes as black and bottomless as the lenses of his helm. His words revealed razor-sharp teeth in a hard, square jaw, their whiteness matching the shock of hair that ran in a strip from the Reaper Prime’s brow to the back of his head. Such a nightmare visage was the last thing most humans expected to see when they gazed upon the face of one of Rangu’s killer angels. Te Kahurangi suspected Akia hadn’t even realised the affect he was having on the two mortals. The Librarian pressed his mind into theirs, mentally quelling the terror and shock that had paralysed them.

  ‘Damage assessment,’ Akia demanded. Te Kahurangi checked his visor display. His backpack had taken a beating from the mining blast, and he had las wounds on his chest, right forearm and left thigh. Beyond that, however, he was unharmed. The rest of the squad were similarly battered but unbowed.

  ‘We carry on,’ Akia said. ‘Before they can marshal their strength. Darkness there and nothing more.’

  The miners were not done with them. As Caderik took them back into sink shaft 1’s primary tunnels there were more ambushes. The journey through the works became a blur of blood and combat stimms. Overall-clad miners and turncoat Guard, local defence and guild militia came at them in waves of desperate fear, blades and pick tools glinting in the flickering tunnel lights, their screaming hoarse.

  Only Te Kahurangi’s presence averted disaster. The psyker’s premonitions twice warded them away from cave-in traps. On other occasions the Carcharodons would use the opportunity to take different routes at the last minute, cutting all but their most vital servos and auto-senses. They melded with the shadows, black-eyed, statuesque revenants looming silently in the darkness of access-ways and ore chutes while their erstwhile hunters passed by.

  Two levels below their objective, they encountered the first free Zartakians that weren’t trying to kill them. Caderik’s shrill warning stopped Toa, in the vanguard, a second before the void sword cut down one of the men who’d started from the shadows of a sub loco-rail haulage line.

  ‘We know him,’ Maudlin said as the man cringed back. He was wearing the respirator, ochre smelt-suit and rudimentary black flakplate of a guilder mine-militiaman.

  ‘Master Caderik?’ he said and then, when he caught sight of Maudlin, offered a hasty bow. ‘Guildmistress! It does me well to see you after all these years.’

  ‘Guildmarshal Calent,’ Maudlin said. ‘I didn’t think you still lived.’

  ‘By the Emperor’s grace,’ the militiaman said. Te Kahurangi sensed more men further back down the haulage line. ‘We’ve been waiting for this day for six years. As soon as news reached us of fighting in the Sub-Western works we took up arms again. For Groundworks Corp.’

  ‘We do not have time to waste,’ Akia said. Calent cringed visibly as the huge, bloody warrior spoke.

  ‘These men will be of use to us,’ Maudlin said. ‘They are armed and loyal.’

  ‘We are sufficient,’ Akia replied.

  ‘We can follow in your wake,’ Calent said. ‘We won’t slow you.’

  ‘I hope for your sake that you do not,’ Akia said.

  They went higher, the loyalist militia falling in behind the Adeptus Astartes. The tunnels seemed empty again, as though the rebels had withdrawn, even as the Space Marines pressed towards their command centre. The reason became apparent as they secured the loading bay ambulatory outside the quota hall described by Caderik.

  Only a dozen rebels stood between them and the hall’s barred doors. These ones, however, were well equipped. Each one was piloting a mining drill walker, a heavy gauge engine that stood on two stubby, thick-set legs. Their torsos were covered with heavy sheets of plasteel plating, reinforced with adamantium rods, designed to withstand cave-ins while the machines continued to work. A shielded cluster of optic nodes and stab-lumens constituted their heads, set into their thick shoulder supports, while multiple mechanical limbs ended in diamond-hard drill borers and rocksaws.

  The mechanised miners didn’t approach with military coordination, but each one at their own wary pace, mechanisms wheezing and clanking, like pugilists sizing up a fight. Akia triggered Reaper, its hungry roar followed by the chainaxes of his void brothers. This time, however, there was an answer. The heavy drill heads and rocksaw rotors filled the air with spinning metal.

  ‘Get back,’ Te Kahurangi said to the human loyalists.

  ‘There’s another way into the hall,’ Caderik shouted above the din. ‘The ratholes above lead straight into the maintenance vent shafts.’

  ‘They will be too small,’ Te Kahurangi replied.

  ‘Not for us.’

  ‘Then go,’ the Chief Librarian said. There was no more time for words. The walkers were lumbering into close combat. Shots from First Squad’s bolters cracked harmlessly from their reinforced frontal armour. Te Kahurangi began to draw and bind together strands of psychic energy, muttering focus litanies as he channelled power into his force staff. His Lyman’s ear blocked out the first sounds of chainblades striking steel as he crafted annihilation. His genhanced muscles clenched, and his keen senses were suddenly full of a greasy, pervasive stench. The throbbing in his temple built. His vision flickered. With a final, short word, he unleashed the beast.

  The floor beneath two of the advancing walkers buckled. Stone deformed and shattered, pulled apart and reshaped by his will. Th
e bedrock of Zartak churned upwards, forming great jaws of jagged stone that slammed shut around the twin walkers with a splitting crash.

  Few engines besides the walkers could have withstood such an impact. Their thick armour meant nothing, however, when the earth beneath them had disappeared. The great jaw of debris fell away into the sink hole its rise had created, dragging the two machines down. Te Kahurangi released his psychic grip, skull throbbing.

  Around him, his void brothers were not faring as well. The chainaxes made little impression on the thick plate of the drill walkers, scarring and chewing but failing to penetrate. And, though lumbering, the things were powerful. One snagged Karra’s arm in a vice-claw before swinging down its rocksaw. Sparks flew as the vicious blade sheared first through ceramite and plasteel and then pale, tattooed flesh. Even as his arm was lopped off, the Carcharodon Signifier made no sound, swinging his chainblade down to amputate the machine’s own saw-limb. Blood and fyceline splattered together onto the floor as the two combatants remained locked.

  Toa did better. He plunged the void sword straight through the torso of one of the walkers, the obsidian-like relic blade parting the machine’s armour with ease. Its drill chewed against the Champion’s Coral Shield but found no purchase, not even scarring the rugged surface. As Toa slide his blade free the walker slumped, its green optic clusters fading.

  Another walker was coming at Te Kahurangi, negotiating the rubble unearthed by the Librarian. He clutched at the strands of power dissipating from his rending maw and swung his staff in an arc, binding the eddying psychic energies into a bow wave. Even as the walker reached for him, its drills screeching, he sent the invisible fury of the warp crashing into its torso. The frontal plate buckled as though hit by some great fist, and its forward movement juddered to a halt, the pilot within crushed.

  Beside the Librarian, Dorthor went down wordlessly, a rocksaw scything deep into his thigh plate. Only the narrowness of the ambulatory corridor, stopping the walkers from surrounding them, was keeping the Carcharodons alive. Te Kahurangi moved to help Dorthor, force staff raised, but another of the lumbering mine engines slammed into him with a crack of unyielding plasteel, its sheer bulk forcing him to the ground. Before he could rise, the walker placed one splayed metal hoof on his breastplate, pinning him in place. His auto-senses chimed a warning as the pressure threatened to burst organs and crush his fused ribcage.

  That was when Akia struck. The Company Master was lost to his death-frenzy, the Blindness exerting almost total mastery. Reaper howled like a primordial beast as it took the walker at full swing, striking its cranial block like a hammer meeting an anvil. Optics shattered. Metal buckled. Reaper tore on, powered as much by Akia’s terrifying genhanced strength as its own revving motor. Armour plating sheared off, hundreds of shards of razor metal spinning away in all directions as the chainaxe’s wicked teeth bit and bit.

  Eventually, they locked. Finally, the blow lost momentum. Then Akia ripped the weapon free and struck again.

  The walker went back, its grip on Te Kahurangi lost, bending before the Carcharodon’s fury. Finally, its armour split. Finally, Reaper tasted flesh. The machine crumpled, blood pouring from its shattered metalwork. Akia’s voice grated out a single order over the vox.

  ‘Kill.’

  Te Kahurangi found his feet. Just in time to meet the next machine.

  The sounds of battle from beyond the quota-hall doors were making the guilders moan with fear. Thornvyl glared at them, unable to hide his own tension any more, hand on the butt of his laspistol.

  A grating noise disturbed the sounds of bloodshed from outside. The guilders around Thornvyl jumped, searching for the source of the noise. Only when a vent covering clanged against the floor did any of them look up.

  A figure followed the covering into the room. It rolled as Thornvyl raised his laspistol and fired, the shot punching into the floor beside it. Before he could correct his aim another assailant had followed the first, and then another. The hall’s buzzing lumen strips gleamed from the autogun barrels levelled at Thornvyl.

  ‘Drop it,’ ordered the mine-militiaman with the rifle. The ornate laspistol clattered to the floor.

  ‘Keep up your aim,’ the last figure to come down through the vent ordered. He was little more than a boy, but he was a boy Thornvyl recognised.

  ‘I remember the day you came for my family,’ Caderik said. Thornvyl said nothing. Caderik turned to the militia, and Guildmarshal Calent.

  ‘Unbar those doors and bring them in.’

  In the hall ambulatory, the drill walkers were winning. Although less than half still functioned, they had driven the Carcharodons back against the stone walls, leaving them savaged and bloody. The crack of Thornvyl’s laspistol, seized by Caderik, made them pause, rotor weapons still spinning.

  ‘It’s over!’ the boy shouted as the mine-militia hauled the captured guilders out at gunpoint. ‘Stop resisting.’

  The walkers turned awkwardly, optic clusters scanning the new arrivals. A guild soldier was keeping Thornvyl, head bowed in defeat, on his knees before Caderik. The boy waved his pistol.

  ‘You may kill these god-warriors,’ he said. ‘But more will come. They will slaughter you. If you stop now, I promise to have you spared. All of you. Our colony has seen enough bloodshed.’

  Still the walkers remained immobile. More loyalist guild soldiers appeared at the far end of the ambulatory, led by Maudlin, her face grim.

  ‘This is your last chance,’ Caderik said.

  One by one, the walkers deactivated their drilling tools. One by one, the torso plating juddered open on damaged servos, and the sweat-streaked, half-naked pilots within clambered out, hair tousled, eyes blinking, expressions caught between exhaustion, fear and defiance.

  The Carcharodons had stopped fighting the moment the walkers had ceased their own attacks. As soon as the last pilot left his machine, they formed a tight phalanx that strode towards Caderik and the guildmaster prisoners. They were a terrible sight – their armour had been beaten and rent by lasrifles and autoguns, bayonets, mining tools and blast charges, and then the brutal implements of the drill walkers. They were all wounded, several grievously – one had lost an arm, another had the white gleam of bone showing amidst the torn ruin of his thigh. All were covered almost head to foot in blood, their own and their enemy’s. And yet, since making planetfall, not one had fallen. Few had even uttered a sound.

  ‘This is the leader of the rebellion?’ the one with the horrific, bared head demanded, looming over Caderik and Thornvyl. The boy nodded, suddenly lost for words. Without hesitation or ceremony, the giant snatched Thornvyl and snapped his neck.

  ‘No,’ Maudlin cried out. ‘You can’t! We need due process. We need to display them publicly to the rest of the colony.’

  ‘You can still display them,’ the giant said, stepping over Thornvyl’s twitching corpse.

  ‘I-I said they could live,’ Caderik stammered, cringing back from the Space Marine.

  ‘I came to this world to reap, not to judge,’ the Carcharodon said. ‘And that is what I will do.’

  The gore-streaked monster hefted his chainaxe. The executions did not take long.

  The rebellion was over. The population of sink shaft 1 gathered on the walkways and gantries that lined the inside of their great burrow hole. Maudlin, flanked by Caderik, Calent and the guild guard, spoke to them from the minehead, the address spur jutting from the sink shaft’s pinnacle.

  ‘We have done the God-Emperor’s will here today,’ she said, her stern voice reverberating through the shaft via vox hailers, gargoyle-headed claxon maws and shift change announcers. ‘After six long years of treachery and misrule, the corrupt men and women who betrayed our colony have finally tasted justice.’

  The crowd’s gaze turned to the horrific, dripping remains hanging from one of the heavy haulage cranes that jutted like industrial teeth from t
he sink shaft’s upper sides.

  ‘And what justice it is,’ Maudlin went on, voice hoarse. ‘Administered by our glorious Emperor’s holy angels.’

  The crowd gasped as Akia, Te Kahurangi and the rest of First Squad emerged onto the spur behind Maudlin. They looked more like monsters than angels, the few parts of their armour that weren’t coated with drying viscera gleaming a scarred, pitted silver. Maudlin gestured once again to the silent giants towering behind her.

  ‘These are our protectors! Salvation sent to purge away our sins! We owe them our thanks, and our devotion. As part of our great debt, they will take the tithe that is now so long overdue.’

  None of the Carcharodons moved, though a clicking sound betrayed their internal communications. Moments later, a rising shriek filled the sink shaft. Leaden shapes plummeted from the skies, heavy grey gunships that lowered into landing plates ringing the jungle surface around the great burrow. From the darkness of their open holds came more giant warriors, their ashen armour unblemished by battle. They began to move down into the mine habitat, corralling and manhandling the colonists along the walkways. Maudlin turned to Akia.

  ‘What is happening?’ she demanded over the rising noise filling the sink shaft. ‘You have come for our missing tithe? We are ready to pay it in full, and much more besides.’

  ‘We know nothing of this,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Your debts do not concern us. We have come to take a tithe of our own. The Red Tithe.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Maudlin said. ‘Guildmarshal–’

  Guildmarshal Calent went for his pistol. He never laid a hand on it. A black blade cut his head from his shoulders.

  As the sink shaft descended into screaming chaos, Te Kahurangi watched Caderik. The boy alone didn’t react as those around him were snatched and subdued by the silent giants. He didn’t react as his shrieking grandmother was picked up, as easily as a parent might lift a child, and taken towards the waiting fliers. He didn’t react as the skies filled with the fat-bellied shuttle sows that would take the population of Zartak to the White Maw’s slave bays. He watched it all with dull, dead eyes. Te Kahurangi touched upon his mind, and knew that the boy had already begun his first steps towards Initiation. If he survived he would bear an honour-name, a rarity among the Carcharodon Astra.