TE TĀ, Book 2: Tā

A Carcharodons Astra Novel

Tā: to strike; to mark. One word for the blow and the needle.

They took everything. His name. His shore. His brother. The machine scraped an eleven-year-old boy out of his own skull and poured a weapon into the space where he used to be.

But three things survived, worn too deep for the wires to reach. A shape traced into the palm of his right hand. A single syllable of a drowned language. And an ache with no face on it: somewhere there is a hand that makes. It is owed your keeping. It is the thing you are for.

He doesn't know they're there. He doesn't know anything anymore.

Now comes the making. Thirty years of it. The surgeries, endured awake. The drowning-vats, again and again, until the dark side of drowning feels like home. The hypno-cages that fill his emptied mind with another people's words. The kill-squares, the void, the lightless belly of the ship and the things penned inside it. A designation instead of a name. Absolute silence, to the last breath, because in this Chapter, a sound is a wound.

The Carcharodons Astra do not make Space Marines. They make apex predators of the outer dark, and this boy, raised over a trench by an ocean that never loved him, takes to their darkness like something coming home. His masters see it. One of them, a grey lord haunted by his own drowned ghosts, has been watching since the pit, holding a small carved pendant the boy will never remember owning, waiting to see what comes out of the machine.

And decks below, in the serf-dark, a carver keeps a promise to a dead father. A keeper lives. He doesn't know the thing he swore to keep is still alive, four decks up, being made into a god of murder.

The brotherhood is not dead. It is buried alive.

TĀ spans thirty years, from the vat to the first tattoo: the strike and the mark, meeting at last in one arm.

Book 2 of TE TĀ, a six-book Warhammer 40,000 fan work following the Carcharodons Astra. Book 1: WAI is complete and should be read first.

Fan fiction set in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe; no ownership of the setting is claimed.