The Beast of Calth - Graham McNeill Read online

  Milotas followed Suzaku with a waddling gait, scanning the surface of his slate and surveying the extent of the cavern.

  ‘One hundred and ninety-three point seven six metres high at its apex, six point seven five kilometres long and with a mean width of six hundred and fifty point two metres. Small, by Calth’s standards.’

  Regardless of its size, the cavern was filled with activity. Two Defence Auxilia Chimeras were parked up at the outskirts of a collection of structures that looked much like every other settlement in Calth’s underground warrens. Imperial architecture tended to modularity, and the dwelling places of Calth were no exception, but Suzaku had to admit the proportions, integrity and aesthetic of Ultramar’s buildings were more pleasing to the eye than most.

  Sitting apart from the Chimeras was a solitary Rhino, painted a vivid blue and with the pristine white symbol of the Ultramarines emblazoned on its assault doors. Superficially, it was no different to Suzaku’s transport, but where hers was laden with gene-locked librarium engines, surveyor gear and the tools of her vocation, this vehicle seemed somehow heavier, tougher and altogether more solid.

  This was a vehicle forged for war, an armoured chariot designed to deliver the deadliest fighters in the galaxy into the heart of an enemy battle-line. The moment Suzaku had seen that the summons to this cavern was prefixed by an Ultramarines vox-stamp, she had known that this would be no simple matter.

  ‘Does this place have a name?’ she asked, taking her Inquisitorial rosette from her storm coat as a squad of Defence Auxilia troopers moved to intercept them.

  ‘Checking now,’ said Milotas, his agile fingers pinching, sweeping and tapping at the slate. ‘Ah, yes, here it is. Had to dig into the Mechanicus files to get it. It was called Pelasgia Theta 66. It used to be a refinery station for a series of stull-stope mines worked into the face of the wide chasm upon which the settlement perches.’

  ‘Used to be? Why was it abandoned?’

  ‘Some of the stulls, that’s the supports, collapsed and brought down a number of the sloping shafts, which in turn caused the upper ledge of the cliff to collapse. A hundred and fifty-four people died.’

  ‘And they just abandoned it after one accident?’

  ‘Yes. A hundred and fifty-four deaths isn’t a lot by Mechanicus standards, but on Ultramar it’s considered disastrous. The workers felt the Martian priests weren’t taking enough safety precautions and most of them just moved away.’

  The Defence Auxilia stopped before them and Suzaku felt the tension in the posture of her bodyguards ratchet up a notch. They didn’t like anyone with guns coming near her, even ones garbed in the uniforms of Ultramar.

  ‘Identification, if you please,’ said a trooper with a face only a mother could love. His stripes and the letters stencilled over the inverted omega on his right breast identified him as Sergeant Lerato.

  Suzaku held her rosette out and said, ‘Inquisitor Namira Suzaku.’

  Though she had been in Ultramar for over a year, it still felt strange to announce herself so obviously. A lifetime spent working in the shadows was not shed without some unease. Lerato studied her symbol of authority carefully and swept a signifier wand over the seal of red, black and silver. Where most people blanched at such a feared icon of Imperial authority, the sergeant simply nodded as a light at the base of the signifier wand base flashed green.

  ‘Pass, inquisitor,’ said Lerato, stepping away with a short bow.

  Suzaku slide her rosette back into her storm coat and gave him a respectful nod, knowing that even Roboute Guilliman would need to present some form of identification before Sergeant Lerato would allow him past.

  ‘Thank you, sergeant,’ she said.

  ‘You’re welcome, ma’am,’ said Lerato. ‘I’m glad you’re here. It’s a bad one in there. Real nasty. Has the touch of the Archenemy to it.’

  Suzaku felt the hammer tattoo on her wrist itch, and her earlier instinct that this would be no ordinary day returned with even greater force.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ she asked, gratified to see a hint of unease in Lerato’s face.

  ‘The blood,’ said Lerato. ‘Nothing of Ultramar did that to Sergeant Joelle’s squad. That’s the work of something damned, that is.’

  Suzaku interpolated the gaps in her knowledge quickly. Calth’s underground clearance patrols were systematically sweeping the lower caverns for any trace of the Bloodborn. They kept in touch with regular vox-checks, and if any check was missed, it immediately raised a red flag. Clearly this Sergeant Joelle had missed a check, which had brought Sergeant Lerato’s squad to Pelasgia Theta 66.

  ‘You found Sergeant Joelle’s squad?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ confirmed Lerato.

  ‘Come with me,’ said Suzaku, turning on her heel and marching into the settlement. Knowing the value of first-hand information better than anyone, she wanted Lerato with her. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘After she missed her vox-check, I led my squad down to where she’d last reported in,’ said Lerato, matching her quickened pace. ‘We found their Chimera at the edge of the abandoned settlement and moved in. Didn’t take long to find the poor bastards. Begging your pardon for the profanity, ma’am, but it was a mess.’

  Suzaku studied the sergeant’s face as he shook his head at the memory. ‘I fought at Four Valleys and I saw things there I never want to remember, but this was worse, much worse.’

  ‘Her squad were all dead?’

  ‘No, Trooper Kellan survived,’ said Lerato with a shudder. ‘That’s what made it worse.’

  Sergeant Dante was waiting in the cramped central square of the settlement, his vast bulk unmoving and solid as a statue. The plates of his armour glistened with moisture, the blue plates, golden eagle and emerald green edging shining brightly in the drab light of the cavern. It had been some time since Suzaku had met with a warrior of the Ultramarines; only token forces were left on worlds declared free of taint while the majority of the Chapter was engaged in driving the last remnants of the Bloodborn from Ultramar.

  Suzaku smelled the blood before she saw it, the unmistakable aroma that some said smelled of copper or tin, but which had always reminded her of a faulty voltaic battery. A great deal had been spilled here, and the plain walls were liberally streaked with arterial squirts and fans whipped from the edge of a blade. Amid the blood spatters, bizarre symbols had been drawn in the same vital fluid, eight-pointed stars and skull motifs that looked almost childish in their crudity.

  ‘Emperor’s mercy,’ said Milotas, and Suzaku heard a soft inhalation of breath from her bodyguards. Though Sergeant Lerato had witnessed this sight before, even he gave a low moan of disgust. Suzaku had expected a scene of slaughter – such things were not new to her – but the hideous assembly of dismembered flesh, flensed skin and wanton mutilation in the centre of the square was shocking in its theatrical grotesquery.

  ‘Inquisitor,’ said Dante, breaking from his immobility as she approached and making no attempt to disguise his guardedness.

  ‘You are Sergeant Dante?’ she asked, like there could be any doubt.

  The Space Marine nodded. ‘I am Dante, Fourth Company.’

  ‘Can you tell me what happened here?’

  ‘I am hoping you can tell me,’ said Dante, removing his helmet to reveal a deeply tanned and lined face of wide cheekbones, noble features and eyes of silver-flecked amber. His hair was as white as hers, and the glittering studs embedded in his forehead spoke of a lifetime of service to the Ultramarines. Dante was handsome in a strange, unattainable way, shaped like a bronze cast by a heroic sculptor of antiquity.

  ‘Has anything like this ever happened on Calth before?’ asked Suzaku, kneeling beside the dreadful arrangement of body parts and pooled blood.

  Dante looked offended by the question, but shook his head.

  ‘No, never,’ he said, without fear of contradiction.

  ‘You’re sure? No incidences of psychotic breakdown? It’s not uncommon in
the aftermath of a war, especially one fought against the Ruinous Powers.’

  ‘Never,’ repeated Dante, the threat in his tone unmistakable. ‘You are the expert on all things blasphemous, but I know the people of Calth.’

  Suzaku understood the source of his simmering hostility and was not offended; she had encountered it many times before with pious servants of the Imperium. To fight an enemy, one first had to understand that enemy, but such knowledge was dangerous and more than one inquisitor had succumbed to the temptations offered by such potent secrets. To Dante, she was just another heretic and daemon consort waiting to happen.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, taking a moment to study the scene and swallow back her revulsion. To objectively examine the carnage she needed her faculties to be unclouded by horror and sickness, which was easier said than done. She stood and circled the arrangement of body parts, letting her eyes roam dispassionately over the detestable violations. Images of horror were stored in her meme-coils as she blink-clicked snapshots of the murdered troopers.

  ‘They were killed here, that much is obvious,’ said Milotas, circling in the opposite direction and holding his mirrored slate up to the blood-streaked walls.

  ‘How can you be sure?’ asked Dante, looking at Milotas as though the savant’s awkward gait was some kind of mutation instead of an injury received in service of the Imperium.

  ‘The volume of blood on the walls and pooled on the ground is sufficient to make such an assertion with a ninety-three point six five percent probability of accuracy,’ replied Milotas, oblivious to Dante’s scrutiny. ‘If these troopers had been killed elsewhere, there would have been significant blood trails leading into this square. No such trails exist, therefore it is not unreasonable to assert that they died here.’

  ‘You trust this man’s knowledge of such things?’ asked Dante.

  ‘If Milotas Adelmo says they were killed here, then they were killed here,’ said Suzaku with more than a hint of pride. ‘Before he was seconded to my staff, my savant was engaged by the Kar Duniash precinct houses of the Adeptus Arbites. Trust me, his statistical analysis of blood spatter patterns sent more murderers to their deaths than any Scipio-pattern shotcannon.’

  Dante looked unconvinced, but said nothing more.

  Suzaku stepped back to examine the staging of the bodies, for it was immediately apparent they were lying in a pattern that had been deliberately arranged. Legs had been broken at the knees and used to form a crude circle, within which was a smaller circle formed from pieces of arms. Severed fingers formed radiating points that linked the two circles, and fanned out strips of skinned flesh had been laid out like the pages of some blasphemous book of blood.

  At the top of the circle, eyeless heads were stacked in a pile, and meaningless symbols had been smeared on their cheeks and foreheads in their own blood. Suzaku did not recognise them as representative of any of the more common Archenemy sigils, and like the symbols daubed on the walls, they had a haphazard look to them, as though the killer hadn’t really known what he was doing.

  ‘How many were in Joelle’s squad?’ she asked Lerato.

  ‘One sergeant and four troopers,’ replied Lerato, keeping his eyes averted.

  ‘You said there was one survivor, but there are only three bodies here,’ she said, though it hadn’t been clear at first how many she was looking at, such was the thoroughness of butchery. Only the stacked human heads told how many lives had been ended here.

  Dante knelt beside the pile of heads and said, ‘There are four heads here.’

  ‘Mistress Suzaku is correct, my lord,’ said Milotas. ‘Readings based on mean weight of Defence Auxilia personnel indicate only enough mass for three individuals.’

  ‘So we have three bodies and one survivor,’ said Dante. ‘The question then becomes, where is the fourth body?’

  ‘Impossible to say for sure,’ said Suzaku. ‘Perhaps the killer took it with him.’

  ‘Why would he do such a thing?’

  ‘Perhaps as a trophy,’ said Suzaku, kneeling beside the severed heads and bending to examine the flesh at the edge of the cuts that had removed them from their bodies. ‘Maybe he requires it for some dark ritual. Or…’

  ‘Or?’ prompted Dante, when Suzaku didn’t continue.

  ‘Or perhaps he took the last body to eat.’

  ‘A cannibal?’ hissed Dante, horrified at the notion.

  ‘It’s possible,’ said Suzaku. ‘The Archenemy are not like us, and the mores of civilised behaviour that you and I adhere to do not apply to them. The person that did this has been here for six months at least, and if it is the kind of individual I think it is, then the eating of human meat would hold no terror.’

  Dante knelt beside Suzaku. ‘So what manner of individual do you think did this?’

  ‘You see these neck wounds?’ she said, indicating the precise cuts that had severed the heads. ‘These wounds were made with one blow, and only a warrior with incredible strength and a heavy, razor-sharp blade like yours could do that with such exactitude.’

  Dante understood the significance of Suzaku’s words in a heartbeat.

  ‘A Traitor Space Marine did this,’ he hissed.

  ‘We need to talk to the survivor,’ said Suzaku. ‘There’s an Iron Warrior still on Calth.’

  Leaving Sergeant Lerato and his squad to clean up the mess of body parts in Pelasgia Theta 66, Suzaku followed Sergeant Dante back to his azure Rhino. Seen up close, it was even more formidable, its paintwork still bearing the bare-metal scrapes of daemonic claws and the dented craters of weapon impacts. Its engine rumbled as they approached, like a sleeping dragon sensing intruders within its lair. The matt-black weapons on the forward-mounted cupola spun around to face them and targeting augurs whirred with clattering belligerence. Dante paid the guns no mind, but Suzaku felt the red range-finding lens scan them with the passive detectors incorporated in the arcane mechanics of her eyes.

  ‘Those guns are primed and ready to fire, ma’am,’ said one of her bodyguards, his own combat augmetics registering the same thing.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Make no threatening move or it will shoot you dead.’

  The man powered down the implanted weaponry in his arm, and the weapons on the Rhino returned to their idle position.

  Dante hammered a fist on the vehicle’s rear assault ramp, and tapped out an unseen code into the oversized keypad enclosed by a blast shield. The door whined on well-maintained hydraulics as it lowered, and the mixed aroma of engine oil, counterseptic, blood and aromatic unguents pleasing to the primal heart of the Rhino gusted out like fragrant breath.

  Trooper Kellan lay within, looking absurdly small on a gauze-covered stretcher designed to bear a wounded Space Marine. Three enormous warriors in burnished blue war plate with green trims on the shoulder guards sat at the farthest extent of the crew compartment. They held their monstrous boltguns between their knees and spared Suzaku and Milotas only the most cursory glance as the ramp opened.

  Suzaku felt their instant appraisal, and anger touched her at the speed with which they had dismissed her as a threat. She shook off the irrational feeling as a fourth Space Marine, encased in armour of dusty white, bent over Kellan. Gurgling tubes coiled from vac-sealed cylinders on his back, and a flipped-up hololithic display on his enormous forearm flickered with the erratic bio-rhythms of the injured man.

  The serpent-wrapped staff with flared wings on the warrior’s shoulder guard told Suzaku that he was an Apothecary, a healer of the Adeptus Astartes. The Apothecary attached monitoring cables and intravenous fluid lines to the man’s body, but Suzaku couldn’t yet see the extent of his injuries. She wondered what one trained in restoring the bodies of super-engineered humans knew of frail mortal anatomy, but decided this wasn’t the time to ask.

  ‘Get in and close the door behind you,’ snapped the Apothecary.

  ‘Better do as he says,’ advised Dante. ‘Apothecary Selenus is known for his foul temper.’

  Selenus spun
around to face them, and Suzaku saw his stern features were perfectly angular, like a bust carved by one to whom gentle curves were unknown.

  ‘A fact you would do well to remember if you want me to put you back together when next we go to war,’ said Selenus, jabbing Dante in the centre of his chest as he climbed into the crew compartment.

  Suzaku and Milotas followed Dante up the ramp, and she was immediately struck by the apparent space within the Rhino. A Space Marine vehicle was stripped down to the bare bones, every non-essential system removed to give it greater speed and manoeuvrability. Where other Rhinos made concessions, albeit half-hearted ones, to the crew’s ability to function, this was simply an armoured shell designed to keep the warriors within safe. Any available space was taken up with stowage for weapons or ammunition, and Suzaku was forced to admire the spartan aesthetic.

  ‘Duly noted, Apothecary,’ said Dante, moving around the stretcher. ‘It’s not my fault you aren’t with the Swords of Calth just now.’

  ‘I should be with my battle brothers,’ retorted Selenus, rising to Dante’s obvious bait. ‘I should be fighting alongside my captain, not nursemaiding a mortal who didn’t have the good sense to get himself killed instead of burdening me with his stupidly fragile body.’

  ‘I’m sure Captain Ventris will be fine, it’s only a search and rescue mission,’ said Dante dismissively. ‘In any case, he has Petronius Nero at his side, and neither Hadrianus nor Cyprian will let anything happen to the captain. Not to mention Peleus. He’ll put a round through the eye of anyone stupid enough to attack the Swords.’

  ‘And if they don’t protect him?’ asked Selenus. ‘Who’ll be there to pick up the pieces? Tell me that, Korvin Dante.’

  Despite the apparent hostility, Suzaku sensed a fierce loyalty between these warriors, a fraternal bond that only those who have shed blood in common cause can know. Though they spoke with gruff harshness, she felt the great respect and friendship between them.

  She approached the stretcher upon which Trooper Izaak Kellan lay, and no sooner had she laid eyes on his face than she was grateful a gauze covering obscured the rest of his body.