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Carcharodons: Void Exile – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER I

The Mother-of-Them-All had devoured more fodder, and that meant there was glory to be won.

‘Move, scum,’ Hazek spat, and swung his electro-whip, the combined crack of sinew and voltage causing the laggards of his herd to yelp and scamper away, deeper into the bowels of the wreckage.

He followed them at a more measured pace. It was not his job to worm his way into the dark, between cold, buckled plasteel and over broken decking plates. Still, he did not refuse to accompany his herd, like those among his fellow forge-feeders who never left the comforts of the middle decks. If anything of value was discovered, he wished to be the first to know, and that meant going in amidst the salvage.

Hazek had killed two men for such an honour. When the rumours started to circulate, he had staked his claim against theirs. It had started, as it often did, with tremors, those hints of deep-space impacts, shivering through the Mother-of-Them-All, making her metal bulkheads groan and her flesh moan.

Hearsay had followed hard on the heels of the vibrations. The ghosts in the vox and the continual thrum of the lumens and generators had murmured things, and members of the herd and then other forge-feeders had started repeating them. Soon the middle decks were alive with accounts, rife with conflictions but agreeing on the most important point.

The Mother-of-Them-All had consumed, and a prize now lay in the depths of the great hulk, unclaimed, waiting to propel the brave and the strong to immortality.

As the herds had threatened to descend into a frenzy, the forge-feeders had contended. Three had demanded they be given the honour of recovering the salvage: Hazek, Ugal and Jarran. They had fought in one of the old ore pits, jeered and howled at by the Unblessed, those common labourers who toiled eternally in the middle decks.

Hazek could still feel the pain in his right thigh and left arm, caused by Jarran’s serrated scalping knife, and his skull ached from the repeated blows of Ugal’s smelter hammer. None of that mattered though. What mattered was that he had opened Jarran’s throats – both of them – with the clawed steel of his right hand, and burned out every nerve ending in Ugal’s body with his electro-whip. Unlike Jarran, Ugal hadn’t died, but he’d been left a twitching, senseless wreck, and had swiftly been snatched by the Unblessed, for what purpose Hazek neither knew nor cared.

Now Ugal’s and Jarran’s herds obeyed him, and he led them all, down into the depths.

The journey had taken over two day-cycles – as far as such things existed with any kind of regularity on board the Mother-of-Them-All – and had not been without incident. They had been ambushed by feral scavengers and by clatterfiends. At the Deepgate, Hazek had been forced to make sacrifices and speak words that had cut the inside of his throat, all in an effort to appease the mechanical angel who guarded the most reliable passage into the hulk’s lowest reaches.

It had been enough. They had progressed, until finally they had entered the Gullet, the series of cavernous spaces buried in the deepest depths of the Mother-of-Them-All. This was a deathly place, dark and frigid, far from the glorious, burning heat of the forges. Nothing lived down here, not for any length of time, not even the cakosparks or lawless, machine-less scavengers.

They picked their way through the old refuse – ships the Mother had devoured during the centuries of her slow progress. As the gargantuan vessel passed on her way through deep space, guided by the will of the Infernal Architect, she consumed debris adrift in her path. Stellar remains, wreckage, ancient parts of ancient vessels and way stations all now choked the Gullet. Most of it had been picked through a thousand times already, stripped bare of anything of value by the rapacious herds and their forge-feeder masters. Occasionally work crews of Unblessed would make the journey down from the middle decks too, and hack apart and remove even the broken frames of the ships, taking them as fodder for the furnaces. In this way, the Mother-of-Them-All continued to feed her children, that they might in turn do their master’s bidding.

It took the better part of another cycle to traverse the Gullet towards its upper end. There they finally reached the prize – fresh salvage. It had been snagged between the hulk’s vast jaws, jagged sheets of plasteel the size of small islands that were now, mercifully, sealed shut.

Obeying the gravity of the Mother-of-Them-All, the wreckage had crashed in amidst the older debris before starting to settle. It was still unstable as the herd boarded it ahead of Hazek, creaking and groaning dangerously.

The forge-feeder had been on worse, and besides, time was of the essence. Only a fool would linger in a place like this.

‘Hurry,’ he urged the herd, his voice ringing down the dark, broken corridors he found himself in after clambering through what appeared to have once been a docking bay. He triggered the stab-lumen on the shoulder of the work rig he wore, the small circle of harsh white light picking out a slanting passageway ahead.

He tried to discern exactly what the hulk had claimed as he moved through it, the awkward tilt of the deck underfoot forcing him to walk partly bent and clutching at old coolant pipes on the walls. It was an Imperial vessel, unlovely and crude in construction. A merchant’s lugger, some pot-bellied, lumbering beast of burden that had moved vast tonnages of mortals and material between the worlds that worshipped the Corpse Throne. What had befallen it, Hazek could not tell.

What mattered was that it was dead. The Mother-of-Them-All lived, thrived with the heat of her forges and crucibles and the pulsating of her flesh and the quickness of the millions of racing minds and beating hearts that inhabited her. That was not so with this vessel. It was hollow and frigid, an interstellar corpse, and the gloomy darkness of its bent corridors held nothing but the allure of possible relics.

‘Get to work,’ Hazek snapped, cracking his whip again for good measure. Much of the herd was now out of sight, dispersing through the broken ship, but those still in the corridor Hazek was moving down began to feverishly pry open wall pipes and decking plates with their crude tools, stripping out electrical cabling and lumens and dismantling lengths of metalwork. Such petty prizes still had value, for the forges were always hungry, but Hazek needed something more. Something to take back to the middle decks, to prove to the other forge-feeders that he bore the Infernal Architect’s favour.

Those who found worthy prizes amid the salvage would receive gifts. Hazek himself had been blessed lately with a new arm, an initially vestigial growth pushing out from between the ribs on the right side of his torso. It was now slowly but surely beginning to strengthen and find recognisable form. In order to show his thanks for such a gift, he had enlisted the aid of his fellow forge-feeders, who had held him down and sawed off his original right arm just below the elbow before grafting on an augmetic replacement, a clawed thing of wire sinews and oil-blood, its steel still hot from the smelter. That was a right and proper means of veneration. Flesh for metal, and metal for flesh, the way it had always been and the way it would always be.

He flexed his right hands now, both the soft, pale fingers of his new limb and the steel talons of the one that had replaced his old hand. There was power in both, but he wanted more. Was that not always the way?

He worked along the corridor and deeper into the salvage, descending a dark stairwell. The sounds of the herd’s labours were echoing through the old remains now, hammering and drilling and sawing and burning, stripping the wreck like carrion tearing flesh from the bones of a corpse. The noises of industry, a worthy orison to the Infernal Architect.

But where were the real corpses? That was the only thing that had surprised Hazek so far. Even if this ship had been adrift for decades, centuries even, the deep cold of space should have mummified and preserved any bodies on board. It seemed unlikely that a mass-conveyance freighter would have possessed salvation pods or the capacity to evacuate passengers, but there was only one other alternative to explain the lack of remains.

Someone, or something, had already scavenged them before he arrived.

The possibility was unthinkable. He began to hurry, reaching one of the freighter’s cavernous, empty cargo holds, where the vox sutured into the right side of his head clicked with an incoming transmission.

Hazek heard the voice of his lash-hand, Kyree, speaking loud and clear.

‘We’ve found something in one of the secondary berths. Midships. The wall stencilling says it’s deck thirteen.’

As lash-hand, Kyree was Hazek’s immediate subordinate, and potential successor. He had found her to be adept at disciplining and motivating the herd, and she was wise enough to continue to show him sufficient deference – her predecessor, Skaro, had met a swift end after failing to display similar wisdom.

‘What have you found?’ Hazek demanded, beginning to scan the hold’s exits for a means to ascend to the deck she was on.

‘I’m… not sure, my forge-feeder. Best you see it for yourself.’

Uncertainty was not like Kyree. Hazek found another stairwell out of the hold and began to climb once again, his heavy boots clanging on the plasteel rungs.

The shaft around him groaned, the deep, sombre tones of straining metal. The wreckage was still settling in the Gullet. There would doubtless be deck collapses, cave-ins, all manner of dangers. Just another reason to hurry.

Wheezing with the exertion, Hazek finally identified a wall stencil with his stab-lumen, marking the next hatch as deck thirteen. He clambered through it, into a corridor that seemed to lead to a number of secondary power-generation hubs. It made sense – he suspected they were close to the enginarium. That was always a place of rich pickings when it came to salvage, and he had no doubt Kyree had been heading there directly when whatever she had discovered had stopped her in her tracks.

‘Where on deck thirteen?’ Hazek demanded over the vox.

‘It’s marked “hub seven”. It looks like an old generator berth.’

He counted himself along. The other berths were already filled with the herd, busy sawing out old cogitators and power banks, scrapping among themselves as they fought over the honour of lugging the parts back up to the middle decks. Hazek ignored them, locating the correct hatchway and stepping inside.

The first thing he noticed was the water. His boots splashed into it, ankle-deep. That was another surprise. With the ship’s systems dead, all water on board should have frozen or evaporated a long time ago.

He quickly coiled his whip more tightly around the heavy gauntlet he wore over his left hand, wary lest the charged thong should trail.

His rig’s lumen picked out Kyree and a gaggle of the herd, her underlings all stooped, malnourished creatures wearing crude patchwork survival suits. As befitted her station, Kyree’s garb was better, mostly semi-insulated hides that meant she wasn’t left a pale, shivering wreck in the frigid depths of the Mother-of-Them-All. She wore an ugly, blocky resp-mask over her lower face – Hazek had never seen her without it, and wasn’t sure if it was a mere affectation, or whether some blessing or curse had left it physically fused to her skin. Her scalp was shaven and scarred with symbols of the Sacred Geometries he had ritually cut into her when she had been promoted to lash-hand, though her hair was beginning to grow in again in tufts around the puckered skin.

She carried a whip of her own, though it didn’t possess the electrical capacities of Hazek’s. Keeping it coiled, she gestured curtly with it, and the herd scrambled to make way for their forge-feeder, splashing across the tilting, waterlogged deck.

Hazek moved between them, looking past Kyree at what she had discovered. He immediately understood her hesitation. He had expected to find a reserve generator, nothing as valuable as the main engine block or the warp drives, but a secondary system designed to keep the lumens on in this part of the freighter’s midship. But what he was looking at was no generator.

There were two glassy containers set against the wall, ribbed with brass bands. They had been plugged into the cable cradles that would once have held a generator unit, though there was no sign that they were still receiving power. Even stranger, the front of both lay open, as if someone had removed their contents and, perhaps in doing so, had caused the localised flooding in the hub berth.

‘What are they?’ Kyree dared ask as Hazek came to a stop next to her, gazing at the mysterious containers.

‘Cryo-chambers,’ he said after pondering the sight for a moment longer.

‘These systems look advanced for a wreck like this,’ Kyree said quietly.

Hazek agreed. They represented the possibility of valuable salvage, but he had a new, even more pressing concern.

‘This berth is flooded,’ he said. ‘The water would have frozen or drained away if it had been here any length of time. That means it is fresh. It was melted by something. Probably by disengagement protocols.’ He kicked at the deck for emphasis, causing the water underfoot to splash.

‘But what would have been held in the water, or the ice?’ Kyree asked, still looking at the two upright tanks. ‘Not a person. They are too big.’

Hazek had been wondering the same thing, and was trying to come up with an answer that would not leave his lash-hand questioning his intellect, when he noticed the herd were making a noise. The usual snivelling, grunting and hissing of the pathetic menials had been replaced by a whining sound, like a dog displaying fear.

‘They’ve noticed something,’ Kyree said, looking at the herd now rather than her discovery.

‘Quiet,’ Hazek barked, raising his whip, still coiled. The puling cut off in the face of his wrath, leaving nothing but silence.

That, he suspected, was what had disturbed his workers.

There had not been silence since entering the wreck. The cold, dark holds, berths, corridors and stations had echoed with the scampering and labouring of the herd. But now, all that had stopped. Even the wreckage itself seemed to have ceased its senile creaking.

A chill ran through Hazek, more bitter and biting than even the frigid temperatures of the Gullet.

‘Something is wrong,’ he said to Kyree. ‘We are leaving.’

‘But my forge-feeder, the salvage,’ Kyree began to say, dismay in her voice, but Hazek ignored her, striding back out of the berth and towards the nearest stairwell.

Danger abounded on the Mother-of-Them-All, and Hazek had long ago developed the ability to sense when it was approaching. Not all salvage was worth the risk, and this wreck suddenly didn’t seem to be as dead as it had first appeared.

Kyree began to snap at the herd to follow, but Hazek paid them no heed. What mattered right now was getting off the broken freighter.

He hastened down the stairwell, trying to remember the deck number he had first emerged onto. He was almost at the bottom when he tripped and stumbled. His new limb helped save him, snatching at the pipework on the wall and arresting his fall.

His lumen picked out what had snagged him. There was a body sprawled on the stairs, clad in a crude protective suit and labourer’s rig. One of the herd. Something had pulverised its skull, its head now nothing but a dark, glistening mulch spread over three of the stairs. Another of Hazek’s menials lay slumped against the next hatchway, disembowelled, dead hands clutching at its entrails like a doll holding its own stuffing.

Hazek was finding corpses after all.

He hurried on, bursting out onto what he thought was the deck that would offer him a means of escape through the cargo bay. As he went, he raised Kyree on the vox.

‘There is something on board with us. What deck did you enter through?’

He passed along another corridor, this one so twisted and broken that he had to partially walk along one of the walls and leap across several open hatches. He climbed a short ladder through a sleeping berth, panting now. The vox remained silent, cold and seemingly empty like the ship around him.

‘Answer me, you wretch,’ he barked, but still there was no reply.

He doubled back towards the stairwell. This was the wrong exit. He needed to go deeper.

What was on board with them? What had they disturbed? His mind raced through the possibilities, and he found that he was mumbling a prayer as he went, the black binharic, an approximation of the noises he had heard the divine things he served speaking.

Just inside the stairwell his boot connected with something, kicking it against the far wall. A severed head. Hazek recognised the scars on its scalp, put there by his own blade. He realised Kyree’s resp-mask hadn’t been fused to her face after all.

He began to run.

Which deck? Which damned deck? He stumbled out onto another level, into another frigid corridor, the ringing of his boots the only sound. More corpses – a dozen this time, all part of the herd, all butchered. How had he not heard their deaths? How could such violence have been committed so quietly?

He stepped over and through the remains, feet splashing in blood, ducking past another hatch.

Wrong way. This was a sleeping cabin, the metal frames of bunk beds still bolted to the deck and walls.

But there was something already inside it, standing in the darkness at the far end, motionless, as though it had been there all along, for the decades that the wreck had drifted through deep space, waiting in the shadows and the stillness just for Hazek to arrive.

During a lifetime spent in the service of the Infernal Architect, he had borne witness to many great and terrible sights. Beings he thought of as demigods and angels, some flesh, some machine, some both. He had seen monsters too. This was one of those.

It resembled a giant, clad in featureless grey armour. The black lenses of its helmet gleamed in the harsh light of the stab-lumen. It carried a blade as long as Hazek’s new arm, red with the blood of the herd.

‘Architect preserve me,’ Hazek whispered breathlessly.

It moved, faster than anything so large had any right to.

The instinctive aggression that had saved Hazek over the years spent battling for survival on board the Mother-of-Them-All took hold. He snarled and lashed out with his electro-whip.

There was an ear-splitting crack and a flare of light. The monster stopped, towering over him. It had raised its left arm, and the whip had snagged and coiled around its vambrace. Electricity exploded along the whip’s length and surged over the surfaces of the monster’s armour, dancing and snapping.

Hazek tugged, but the coils were lashed fast.

The monster moved again.

Seemingly untroubled by the whip’s ferocious current, it snatched Hazek by the throat with its other hand and, using the coils around its forearm as an anchor, wrapped the remainder of the cord of Hazek’s own whip around his neck.

He tried to scream, but could not. The whip sawed into his throat, pulled impossibly tight by the monster’s strength.

The pain of the electricity that transfused him was beyond his body’s ability to process. Even as the charge continued to play over its armour, the monster tightened its grip, the cabin filled with surging, actinic light and crackling discharge.

The metal of Hazek’s clawed augmetic began to melt. His heart exploded, his brain ruptured, and his organs liquified. His skin blackened and caught fire. His last thoughts were nothing but pure agony.

Eventually the whip overloaded, a bang ringing through the cabin as the last of the electricity earthed itself. With a few curt motions, the monster unspooled the cord from both Hazek’s blackened neck and its own forearm, and tossed the broken weapon aside.

The charred, smoking corpse that had once been Forge-Feeder Hazek collapsed to the deck with a thump.

The silence returned.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2025.
This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Cheol Joo Lee.

Carcharodons: Void Exile © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2025. Carcharodons: Void Exile, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-83609-031-1

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

For my Dad, my greatest inspiration,
and a man who can never have enough book dedications.

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