Sanctuary - Jonathan Green Read online

  Sanctuary

  Jonathan Green

  MARSHAL BRANT of the Solemnus Crusade watched as the ochre sphere rotated lazily above the hololithic display plate, projected within the centre of the nave-like bridge of the battle barge. Almost devoid of cloud cover, the hololithic image of the planet flickered and jerked occasionally as grainy static washed through it.

  Seven years had passed since they had begun their quest. A quest for vengeance, to recover their honour, stolen from them on that dark day years ago and a thousand light years away. Seven years since the foul ork horde had fallen on the feudal world of Solemnus to wreak untold devastation. Seven years since the aliens’ asteroid-fortress abomination had descended on that sacred world and levelled one of the mightiest Chapter keeps ever constructed in the long history of the greatest crusade ever undertaken by the warriors of the holy Adeptus Astartes.

  It had been one of the darkest of days recorded in the annals of the Emperor’s most devout of Astartes Chapters, a black mark that could only be washed clean with the blood of the alien perpetrators of this heinous crime. And so for seven years the Black Templars of the Solemnus Crusade had hunted the greenskins who followed the banner of the scarred ork across the galaxy, knowing neither where they had come from nor where they were going to, not even knowing the name of the warmongering tribe responsible for the outrage committed against them, nor the savage alien warlord who led the horde in its rampage across the dominion of the Emperor of Mankind.

  And after seven years the hunt had brought the Templars here, to a world so devoid of life that it had not been named beyond its initial planetary classification of L-739. According to Imperial records, the world had only been colonised fifty years ago, for the sole purpose of extracting the one thing that L-739 had to offer the hard-pressed Imperium. Survey teams had discovered fulgerium on the planet, an isotope that was used in some of the power sources still manufactured by certain Adeptus Mechanicus forge worlds. It was used to power everything from ancient Titan war engines to interplanetary craft.

  But now the colony mining world was abandoned, the only life-sign readings the Divine Fury’s surveyor and augury arrays registered on the planet below being those of the away team who had arrived aboard the other vessel in orbit around the dust ball planet.

  Slowly Brant circled the hololithic display, his ceramite boots ringing on the stone flags in the vaulted space. Peering closely he could see the spinning, three-dimensional icon of the skull-cross insignia of the Black Templars Chapter denoting the fleet’s position in geostationary orbit over the arid wilderness world. Next to it was an altogether different logo - a cog-toothed symbol. Below both the badges a red target icon flashed steadily, gothic runes projected next to it designating it as Fulgerium Mining Outpost Beta-Three.

  Through one eye L-739 appeared to Brant as an ochre sphere rotating lazily within the void of space. Through the other - a red-lensed bionic optical implant - the planet appeared as a malevolent crimson orb, as if soaked in the blood of innocents. He had seen a dozen worlds through this blood-tinted augmetic and on those same worlds death had followed in the wake of the Solemnus Crusade. Was what he was seeing now a premonition of what was to come?

  A dark chill passed momentarily through the marshal’s body. It was not fear: Space Marines knew no fear, for they were fear incarnate. No, this was merely an extra-sensory feeling of impending doom, perhaps a warning sent by the Emperor to this marshal of His Imperial Majesty’s most devout and fanatical order of the Black Templars Adeptus Astartes Chapter.

  It was not fulgerium that had brought Brant’s fleet to L-739. Having no leads as to the whereabouts of his brotherhood’s mortal enemy, for the last two years of his noble crusade Marshal Brant had sought out the clandestine keepers of the most secret and forbidden knowledge the Imperium possessed regarding the foul greenskinned aliens. But the Ordo Xenos of His Majesty’s Holy Inquisition did not give up such information lightly. During those two years, as well as battling the followers of the warp-spawned dark gods for a time, Brant had had to recover an ancient artefact of alien origin for the shadowy masters of the Ordo Xenos before they would even reveal to him the whereabouts of the sector’s foremost, and possibly least well-known, authority on ork-kind - the infamous Inquisitor Ardus Ourumov.

  Brant focussed again on the cog-toothed insignia visible next to the Divine Fury on the hololith display.

  ‘Open a vox-channel to the vessel in orbit,’ he instructed his bridge crew.

  ‘Channel open, my lord,’ an initiate informed him a moment later.

  ‘This is Marshal Brant of the Black Templar battle barge Divine Fury,’ the crusader fleet’s master intoned, his booming voice echoing from the buttresses and pillars of the nave-bridge. ‘Identify yourself.’

  A voice, less confident or strident than the marshal’s echoed ethereally in response from crackling vox-casters within the bridge: ‘This is Magos-Captain Olandus of the Adeptus Mechanicus Explorator vessel Antiquitas.’

  ‘Am I correct in thinking that the esteemed Inquisitor Ourumov has accompanied you here?’

  * * *

  MARSHAL BRANT gazed through the armourplas windshield at the ochre planet that now filled the field of vision through the front of the Thunderhawk gunship. Just visible amidst the crazed fissures of a plateau-plain, still a hundred kilometres beneath them, was the black shape of the mining facility, looking like some alien spider clinging limpet-like to the surface of L-739.

  Sanctuary. That was what the colonist-miners had named Fulgerium Mining Outpost Beta-Three. A sanctuary from the months of warp travel. A sanctuary from the humid, stinking squalor of life aboard the transport freighters. But what happened to this one small safe haven for it to have been abandoned? And would it prove to be the sanctuary Brant and the Black Templars hoped it would be from the endless quest for vengeance and retribution? The answer lay below with the elusive Inquisitor Ourumov.

  The marshal looked back at the men strapped into their seats within the hold of the Thunderhawk. The Paladin had seen worthy service in the seven years since the Solemnus Crusade commenced and in the years before, particularly during the Diabolus Campaign and the insurrection and the Thunderhawk was the object of Brother-Pilot Brehus’s honour and pride.

  The three squads of devout warriors arrayed behind him were among the finest in the Chapter. Between them their years of experience, gained on over a hundred battlefields, amounted to more than thirty centuries of combat practice.

  Each of the three fighting companies of the Solemnus Crusade were represented here, in recognition of the fact that the mission they were pursuing was one of the utmost importance and shared by all the Templars who had called Solemnus home. It also recognised the fact that the marshal had complete and utter faith in all of the men under his command.

  Marshal Brant fixed his men with the blood-red stare of his augmetic eye -gained during a boarding action carried out by devotee-crew of the unspeakable Blood God cruiser Red Slaughter. Chaplain Wolfram gazed back at him from behind the ruby-quartz lenses of his skull-faced helm, a grim reminder to every battle-brother who fought with him of their own mortality - and that they could offer the divine Emperor no greater service than to die in his name.

  Laid out across the chaplain’s knees, gripped firmly in both gauntleted hands, was his combined rod of office and instrument of the Emperor’s wrath, his crozius arcanum. No two crozius were ever the same. Chaplain Wolfram’s looked like the cross insignia of the Black Templars Chapter, joined to a metal haft incorporating an energy source and disruptor field generator. The blade-edges of the cross had been honed to cruel sharpness. And if that was not enough to penetrate the armour or hide of Wolfram’s enemies, the hum
ming blue energy field would mean that any blow struck by the crozius would leave the chaplain’s vengeful mark upon them.

  Seated next to the chaplain was his personal protector, Bodyguard Koldo. Brant could also see Techmarine Isendur, his crimson armour and additional servo-limb making him stand out from the other Black Templars aboard the Paladin.

  He caught the eye of Veteran Sergeant Olaf of Fighting Company Gerhard, the gleaming bolt pistol he held proudly to his chest inscribed with intricately incised verses of holy litany. Others from Gerhard’s company included Brother-Initiate Meleagant, Rivalin, Initiate Josef and his charge of the last eight years, Neophyte Petrus.

  On the other side of the Thunderhawk’s interior sat the men Marshal Brant had hand-picked from the guard of his own household, among them Veteran Sergeant Lohengrin, Terminator-Brother Nudd and Protector Folke. In the seven years since their holy crusade began, individual brothers had earned titles that would be unknown amongst other Astartes chapters, in conflicts fought across thousands of light years.

  Marshal Brant knew that the sole purpose of this mission was to finally meet with the enigmatic Inquisitor Ourumov and recover the information he possessed that could help the Black Templars pursue their righteous quest. But during that same quest he had come upon many unexpected things on otherwise benign-seeming worlds - the cultists of Zuhl, the invasion of Yenkatta - and it was only an unwise commander who did not prepare for the unexpected. After all, something had drawn Ardus Ourumov to this Emperor-forsaken planet - and where the Ordo Xenos were involved you could be sure that iniquity, insurgency and alien infestation weren’t far away.

  * * *

  THE PALADIN touched down at the edge of the contorted ruins of the Fulgerium Mining Outpost Beta-Three’s spaceport, the backwash from its jets throwing up obscuring clouds of dust and sand, as Brother-Pilot Brehus, quite possibly the best pilot in the fleet, guided the Paladin in as smoothly as if he were landing a replica in the simulatio chamber aboard the forgeship Goliath.

  With a grinding hiss of hydraulics, the disembarkation ramp lowered and the Black Templars exited the craft, the glaring sunlight harsh and unremitting after the gloom of the Thunderhawk’s interior. Led by their marshal, his habit-cloak flapping in the wind of the Thunderhawk’s engine wash, the Space Marines fell into line as they advanced across the broken plaza before the mining facility, to where two wind-blown figures stood awaiting them.

  The rockcrete of the plaza had been thrown up in great fractured craters and was scored with deep, heat-melted gouges. Some of these gouges opened into fissures as if something had sundered the very bedrock of the planet itself.

  Outpost Beta-Three - Sanctuary - had fared no better. The mine workings were located at the end of a high-walled and otherwise desolate desert rift valley. The surface structures of the mine workings were centred on a vast cathedral-like building. Gothic-arched and baroque-buttressed cloisters led to smelting works, processing plants, worker habs and storage barns, forming a wheel with the cathedral at its hub.

  But those same gothic arches and the baroque, gargoyle-infested facade of the structure were now no more than twisted, blackened ruins. Much of the roof of the Mechanicus edifice was gone and entire outbuildings had been flattened in what must have been a bombardment of phenomenal power. There were girders cut in half by laser beams more furious than those of a Stormblade tank’s lascannons and charred impact craters where whole structures had been obliterated. The droid-skull icon of the Machina Opus, which must once have adorned the lintel over the cathedral-mine’s great double doors, was lying on the ground, riddled with bullet-holes and shell impacts, having been blasted from its mountings.

  For this was not the result of any natural disaster. All the signs were there of an orbital attack. Brother Ansgar knew, for he had seen such a thing before. With a sharp intake of breath, the Space Marine gasped. He had seen many horrors fighting in the Emperor’s name and had visited the ruins left after insurrections and invasions on a dozen Imperial worlds. But what he saw now took him back to Solemnus and the ruins of the mighty Chapter Keep. A fortress that had stood for a thousand years and never been conquered had been levelled in one attack by a host of the foul greenskins of the abominable ork race from an, as yet, unknown tribe. And it was for that one reason that the Black Templars had come now to L-739 in search of Ardus Ourumov.

  Brother Ansgar turned and looked back past the landing pad to where the valley opened outwards to a plain beyond. For an area of several hectares the rugged rocky ground had been melted and reformed into a shallow bowl as smooth as glass. It was just as it had been on Solemnus when the Black Templars descended from the orbiting fleet like avenging angels, bringing the Emperor’s wrath down upon the sacrilegious orks.

  The Space Marine turned back, hearing the marshal’s voice raised in annoyance, to observe the interchange taking place between Marshal Brant’s honour guard and those unfortunate souls who had been delegated the task of meeting the Templars.

  The Space Marines - imposing two and a half metre tall colossi clad in armour as thick as that of a Leman Russ tank -dwarfed the two men standing at the edge of the spaceport plaza. One was tall and thin, wearing a long leather storm coat and a pair of scratch-lensed goggles pushed up on his forehead, keeping his unkempt shock of dirty dark brown hair out of his face. The second was shorter and appeared to be younger. He was wearing a plain grey tunic, jodhpurs and knee-length leather boots. His hair formed a widow’s peak and his beard had been cut into little more than a narrow, right-angled outline, moustache and goatee. Ansgar could not help noticing the Inquisitorial rosette pinned to the man’s breast.

  But something was wrong: this apparently wasn’t the man they were seeking. Marshal Brant did not appear happy about this either. His authoritarian tones carried across the plaza towards the serried ranks of the other Templars.

  ‘Where is Inquisitor Ourumov?’ the marshal was demanding. ‘I was expecting to be met by him personally, not by some ordo lackey. My fleet has travelled countless light years to find him and having arrived at last, after years of searching, I expect to be met by the princeps and not some junior tech-adept, to use an analogy of our Mechanicus brethren. Do you understand?’

  This was an appalling breach of protocol. As if the battle-brothers of the Solemnus Crusade had not suffered a terrible enough affront to their honour already, this situation was intolerable.

  ‘I am Interrogator Helquist, of Inquisitor Ourumov’s staff, and this is Chief Explorator Magos Baldemar,’ the younger man explained. His companion bowed to the marshal.

  ‘Has the inquisitor been informed of our arrival?’ Brant demanded.

  To give him his due, Helquist was not cowed by the ceramite-armoured giant’s dressing down. Brother Ansgar was both impressed and appalled by the man’s audacity, standing up to a marshal of the Black Templars Chapter.

  ‘Please accept my humble apologies, lord marshal. We are honoured indeed to be graced by the presence of brothers of the Emperor’s most devout Chapter of the Black Templars,’ the man spoke calmly and without any apparent anxiety. ‘It is just that my master is occupied in a matter of pressing importance.’

  ‘What? This is appalling-‘

  ‘But Master Ourumov did ask me to bring you to him as soon as you had arrived. If you would follow me?’

  Without waiting for an answer, Interrogator Helquist turned on his heel and, accompanied by the gangly Baldemar, made his way towards the splintered broad stone steps leading up to the cathedral’s entrance.

  A speechless Marshal Brant had little choice but to follow.

  * * *

  ‘INQUISITOR ARDUS Ourumov, I presume,’ Marshal Brant declaimed upon entering the broken nave of the cathedral building. How it reminded him of the chapter keep on Solemnus, as he first saw it on returning from his pilgrimage to the Apollo sector.

  A small, stooped man, bent over a pile of debris, looked up from his examination of the rubble, his round face an inscrutable mask of
indifference even though he was being addressed by a noble warrior of the Adeptus Astartes. The man straightened stiffly and walked over to the towering space marine commander.

  ‘And you must be Marshal Brant,’ he said, seemingly underwhelmed.

  The inquisitor did not appear to be at all taken aback by the giant now addressing him, with his one ugly optical implant of an eye, a scarred face like thunder, and a look like the fury of a rad-storm barely contained behind his good right eye.

  However, Marshal Brant was somewhat taken aback by Ourumov. From the man’s reputation he had been expecting someone taller, stronger-looking, younger. Someone who looked like they could at least command some authority.

  But instead, here he was faced with a stooped old man with a balding pate. He looked very much like an elderly adept of the Mechanicus cult who had spent too long crouched in the labyrinthine duct-passageways of a Titan war machine, crossed with an aging rogue trader.

  His robe and posture looked like those of a tech-adept, whilst his paunch, finest orox-hide boots and master-crafted holstered laspistol were those of an aging merchant comfortably retired to some hive-world palace. There was only one visible sign that anything unusual or exciting had ever happened to Ourumov and that was a three-pronged scar that traversed his head from the crown down to his jaw line.

  ‘Baldemar, look at this,’ the old inquisitor suddenly said, calling over the explorator and ignoring the Space Marine commander again as he returned to sifting the pile of debris. ‘It’s just as we expected.’ He paused, then looked up at Brant again. ‘Marshal Brant, you might be interested in this too.’

  After a few more irritated exchanges with the capricious inquisitor, it became apparent to the Black Templars that the fate that had befallen the Sanctuary colony was indeed the same as that suffered by the chapter keep on Solemnus seven years before.

  The findings of Ourumov and Baldemar’s explorator team revealed that the mining colony had been attacked several months ago by the foul xenos of ork-kind. Just as on Solemnus, the orks had devastated the surface structures and there were signs that a violent struggle had taken place here. The evidence was all around them, from the bullet-holes riddling the stucco plastered walls of the cathedral and toppled columns to the crater impacts and gouges of heavier weapons fire.