Sanctuary - Jonathan Green Read online

  But what were missing were the bodies. It appeared that either all of the colonists had been slaughtered, taken by the orks when they quit the planet, or that the miners and their families had abandoned the facility of their own accord. The last option seemed unlikely, as there had been no word from the colony for months.

  ‘And you say that orks following the banner of a scar-faced greenskin were responsible for the destruction of your great keep?’ Inquisitor Ourumov asked, turning his full attention back to the marshal, his eyes keen and full of curiosity.

  ‘They attacked without warning, their abomination of a hulk and its attendant terror ships bombarding the site from orbit whilst something I have not seen anywhere else in all my decades of service to the Emperor - a floating asteroid-fortress - descended to the planet’s surface and scoured the site with weapons of apocalyptic power.’

  ‘Like this place, you mean?’ Ourumov said, bending down and tugging something loose of the rubble at his feet.

  ‘It would appear so, yes,’ Brant replied.

  ‘And I would concur.’ The inquisitor brushed the dust from the object he had recovered from the debris with the hem of his robe and held it up for the marshal to see. ‘And this, I believe, is our proof.’

  The object was obviously part of something larger. Despite the fact that more than half of it being missing, Brant could still recognise the jagged outline of an orkish head partially disfigured by a red-painted lightning scar. It was the device of the scarred ork.

  ‘That is it!’ the Space Marine commander declared excitedly. ‘But do you know which tribe marches beneath this blasphemous totem?’

  ‘Yes, I believe I do,’ the old man said, craning his neck back to look up into the Space Marine’s grim-set visage.

  ‘Then tell me,’ Brant demanded, fire in his voice. ‘Tell me the name of that accursed tribe, that I might hunt them down and exact vengeance for the great dishonour they did our noble and righteous brotherhood!’

  The old man was frustratingly quiet for a moment. Then he said, even more frustratingly, ‘Before I help you, marshal, there is something that you and your Templars may assist me with.’

  ‘What?’ Brant fumed, barely able to keep his anger in check.

  ‘Like for like, marshal. Like for like.’

  ‘Very well.’

  The old inquisitor shuffled over to Brant and lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘I have stumbled upon something of an anomaly here. You yourself may have noticed the same thing.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Brant conceded, his curiosity subduing his anger. ‘Despite the obvious signs of battle, and the ork invasion you tell me took place here, there are no bodies.’

  ‘Indeed, my dear marshal, indeed. I have spent more years than I care to remember studying the alien ways of orks, and the eco-culture that seems to follow them wherever they go, and I know that orks would not bother to take the bodies of dead humans with them. Trophies in the form of hands or heads certainly but never whole bodies, or at least never in such numbers.’

  Inquisitor Ourumov raised a hand to his face, subconsciously tracing the indenture of his scar.

  ‘Neither have we seen evidence of any colonists scratching a living here in the months since the ork rok attack. Therefore we can surmise that none of the colonists survived to bury their dead. Besides, Chief Baldemar’s team have not found any obvious gravesites in the vicinity and nor have there been any responses to numerous hails to the planet. There are no indigenous life-forms on L-739, so the question we are left with is: who took the bodies?’

  Ourumov paused, letting the implications of what he had said sink in.

  ‘Despite all the evidence to the contrary it would appear that there is something still here.’

  ‘What do you want me and my men to do?’ Brant asked resignedly. He knew when he was being given an order by one of the Emperor’s Inquisition, no matter how masked it might be, and he knew better than to refuse. He had waited two years for this moment. He would simply have to wait a little longer.

  ‘Chief Baldemar has a number of servitor teams scouring the mine-workings already but with your presence here I am rather minded of the old Necromundan saying, “Why have blindsnake when you can have amasec?” Two of your squads of noble warriors should be enough. It might be wise that the rest remain above ground. Just in case.’

  Brant was suddenly aware of a commotion some metres away, where the chief explorator was now in heated discussion with a panicked adept. The adept in tow, Baldemar suddenly turned and strode towards Brant and Ourumov, his coat tails flapping around his legs.

  ‘Excuse the interruption, my lord inquisitor,’ the tall man said, ‘but something dire has happened.’

  ‘What?’ the inquisitor asked urgently.

  ‘We have lost contact with servitor-teams secundus and tertius,’ Baldemar said.

  ‘Recall Team Primus,’ Ourumov instructed.

  ‘Fintor is doing that now, lord.’ Baldemar indicated the adept standing behind him who, Brant noticed, had a vox-set slung around his neck.

  ‘Control to Team Primus. Return to initial location,’ Fintor said into the vox-caster horn.

  ‘Team Primus to control,’ an electronically augmented voice, that might once have been human, grated back through a wash of static. ‘Message received and understood. Returning to b-zzzkkkzzz’

  There was a sudden sharp burst of interference, then the link went dead.

  ‘What happened?’ Baldemar demanded.

  ‘I’ve lost contact with Team Primus, magos.’

  Inquisitor Ourumov turned to Marshal Brant and looked up into his eyes, one steely and unforgiving, the other a soulless red-lensed augmetic.

  ‘It would appear we have need of you sooner than I thought,’ he said. ‘Shall we go?’

  At Marshal Brant’s behest, Veteran Sergeant Lohengrin headed up a squad to safeguard the Paladin. The rest of the landing party formed up into three squads under Marshal Brant, Chaplain Wolfram and Inquisitor Ourumov. Without further delay the three squads entered the extensive mine workings beneath planet L-739’s surface, intent on discovering the fate of the servitor-teams and what had happened to the human colonists of Sanctuary. Each squad was accompanied by a nervous member of Baldemar’s exploratory team, the chief explorator himself guiding Inquisitor Ourumov’s party into the dark echoing depths beneath this Emperor-forsaken world.

  There were kilometres of tunnels, shafts, galleries and natural caverns extending from the wreckage of the stricken facility on the surface world down into the planet’s mineral-rich crust. It seemed an impossible task to search them all, but then again they would not need to. They knew roughly where the servitor teams had been when contact was been lost and that was where they would begin their search for answers. One squad for each lost team. That was how Ourumov was going to play this.

  * * *

  THE CLUMPING steps of the Space Marines’ armoured boots resounded through the vaulted tunnels of the mine as they marched on, the ground uneven beneath their feet. The only light was provided by the lamps built into their armoured suits, the mine’s own system of glow-globes having been down since the orbital attack on the outpost destroyed the generators that powered them.

  The beams from Brother Ansgar’s armour illuminated occasional black puddles on the floor of the tunnel Ourumov’s party were proceeding along, and also picked out endless sagging cabling hanging from stanchions hammered into the high rough roof of the passageway. The tunnel, cut by some burrowing Mechanicus machine, no doubt, was wide enough for Ourumov’s party to all walk abreast had they so wished. It was one of the main access shafts running through this level of the mine, rail tracks running the length of the passage next to the crude roadway the Templars, the inquisitor and the Chief Explorator were walking along. It had survived the devastation of the ork attack above remarkably well, the only obvious damage being a series of fractures in the ceiling two hundred metres back, detected by Initiate Rivalin’s auspex. The party walked on for perhaps another two hundred metres before Chief Explorator Baldemar called a halt.

  ‘You’re sure this is the place?’ Inquisitor Ourumov asked.

  ‘Based on the average pace of the servitors, the last clear signal we received from them and the time reference we have for that transmission, we should have come across them in the last fifty metres or so,’ Baldemar confirmed.

  ‘Sigismund’s sword, there’s no sign of them now,’ Veteran Sergeant Olaf of Castellan Gerhard’s company muttered gruffly.

  ‘Yes there is,’ Initiate Josef contradicted. Rivalin trained one of his suit lamp beams on a section of tunnel wall, revealing the smear of blood and grease-oil for all to see.

  ‘So where are they now?’ Neophyte Petrus asked, uncertainty in his voice.

  ‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ the inquisitor said.

  * * *

  ‘IT’S A DEFINITE contact, Chaplain Wolfram,’ Brother Wuhur stated, adjusting a knurled brass dial on the side of his auspex.

  ‘And it’s just the one?’ Wolfram asked.

  ‘Yes, brother.’

  The chaplain peered through the ruby-eyes of his skull-face helmet into the gloom at the other end of the mine-tunnel, hefting his crozius arcanum in both gauntleted hands. Veteran-Brother Elidor trained his boltgun on the cave-in, while Gauthier aimed his plasma pistol into the enveloping darkness that was barely penetrated by the illumination of their suit lamps. Chaplain Wolfram took a step forwards.

  ‘Be watchful, lord,’ Koldo, Wolfram’s sworn bodyguard, warned his master.

  ‘But of course,’ the chaplain chided. After all, does not the Emperor protect?’

  Offering a swift prayer to the Emperor, that he might indeed protect his inquisitive servant, Wolfram continued
his advance towards the rockfall. He assumed the damage had been caused by the orks’ orbital bombardment. If it had happened before the attack, the miners would surely have made the necessary repairs or cordoned off the area.

  There was a scrabbling sound ahead of him and a swift-moving shadow passed before the chaplain’s enhanced vision and behind a broken spar.

  ‘Chaplain Wolfram!’ It was Wuhur again. ‘Am now reading four contacts - no, six, seven… multiple contacts, and closing.’

  ‘Sons of Sigismund!’ Wolfram declared with furious zeal. ‘Prepare to be enlightened!’

  * * *

  ‘NOTHING,’ THE Space Marine commander stated, his voice heavy with foreboding. ‘The place is clean, just like the outpost above.’

  Marshal Brant’s party were standing at the edge of a vast gallery that had been cut through the rock of the planet to a height, or depth, of a hundred metres. High above them a network of grilled metal walkways criss-crossed the hollowed out space that looked large enough to contain the exploratory vessel Antiquitas. His suit’s auto-senses and his own heightened olfactory senses told him that the still air in the chamber was dust dry. But there was something else too.

  ‘So what happened to the colonists?’ Brother Hale asked uneasily.

  ‘Something took them,’ Apostle-Brother Uchdryd suggested ominously. Uchdryd had an uncanny sense of the otherworldly, although there was nothing of the psyker about him, otherwise he would never have been admitted to the holy order, but his prophetic sixth sense had marked him out as a potential chaplain, a warrior-priest amongst an order of warrior-monks.

  ‘Marshal Brant, I have multiple targets incoming from the west,’ the crimson-armoured Tech-Marine Isendur stated, no hint of emotion, excitement or anxiety, in his voice, his servo-arm twitching as if with a life of its own.

  Brant cast his gaze to the far end of the gallery. Even through the genetor-engineered enhanced vision of his good right eye he could not yet see anything. The optical implant that stood in place of his left eye whirred and clicked as lenses strained to see into the distant gloom. There was a dull click and then an image came into resolution. There was something moving at the far end of the gallery.

  ‘We have multiple incoming contacts, men. Offer yourselves to the Emperor, pray that you might know the righteous zeal of Lord Sigismund and prepare to engage.’

  There was the clattering of weapons being readied behind the marshal. Brant raised his left arm into the air, his black-painted power fist crackling with a scintillating blue energy field.

  ‘No pity!’ the Black Templar marshal bellowed, commencing the traditional battle cry of his holy Chapter. ‘No remorse!’ The first of the rapidly advancing attackers came within visual range of the other battle-brothers. ‘No fear!’

  A crashing cacophony of sound swelled into the darkened vault of the mine as the Black Templars fired their battle-consecrated weapons.

  * * *

  WITH A GRINDING, descending pitched whine the elevator slowed and stopped with a rattling clunk and Inquisitor Ourumov’s party stepped out. Brother Ansgar took in this new location, ever watchful for signs of danger, defensible positions or, if necessary, potential escape routes.

  They were standing outside the bottom of the service elevator shaft in the deepest part of the mine. The scoping beams of the Space Marines’ suit-lamps partially illuminated a large, natural cavern. Ancient stalactites hung from the domed roof while organic matter growing on the mineral deposits glowed with a faint luminescence. The air down here smelt damp and musty.

  Some alterations had been made to the cave-chamber. Power couplings snaked from the spools of wire at the foot of the grilled elevator shaft across the uneven cavern floor to unlit glow-globes, and a number of anonymous packing crates and barrels had been stacked seemingly haphazardly at various points throughout the cavern.

  The whole space was as large as the nave of the command bridge aboard the battle-barge Divine Fury waiting in orbit a hundred kilometres above their current location, Ansgar thought. But the one thing that dominated the chamber was the solid steel bulkhead built into the wall on the other side of the cavern space.

  ‘Aha!’ Inquisitor Ourumov announced abruptly. ‘Just as I thought.’

  ‘You know what lies beyond this bulkhead?’ Veteran Sergeant Olaf inquired, his distrust of the erratic old man apparent in his tone.

  ‘Yes, my dear sergeant,’ Ourumov replied, almost condescendingly, ‘the answer to the question of what happened to the colonists.’

  They all heard the sudden panicked bleeping of Rivalin’s auspex and turned as one to face him, Brother-Initiate Meleagant raising his chainsword and preparing to activate its ignition rune.

  ‘Inquisitor, brothers,’ Rivalin said, ‘I am picking up multiple contacts moving this way at speed.’

  ‘From where, brother Templar? From where?’ Ourumov demanded.

  As he did so, Brother Ansgar and the others shone their suit beams into the shadowed corners of the cave and up at the stalactite festooned dome above them. Things were moving there, clambering among the jagged rock formations and crawling from crevices in the cavern walls, using their unnatural, taloned limbs to maintain a purchase.

  ‘From everywhere,’ Rivalin replied.

  THE ROAR OF bolter fire, the zealous shouts of the Marines and Chaplain Wolfram’s own bellowed battle-prayers urging the Templars on, echoed deafeningly from the tunnel walls: The cacophony was swelled by the screaming cries of their attackers. Amidst the press of the black-armoured giants, the explorator assigned to Wolfram’s squad screamed in hysterical fear, no use to anyone.

  The inevitable battle had begun in the confined, half-collapsed tunnel, the fighting hard and furious. And the enemy was relentless.

  The mine was infested. They came at the Templars in their dozens, armoured hides mottled pink, purple and blue, glistening wetly, springing forward on muscular legs, grabbing with clawing hands, while a third pair of limbs slashed at the holy warriors with oversized talons. Where these dreadful claws struck the verse-inscribed ceramite of the Black Templars’ armour they gouged great grooves in the surface, even cutting through as deeply as the Space Marines locked inside them.

  A ravening creature sprang at Wolfram, beady black eyes set in the dome of its bulbous head fixing on his behind the ruby-quartz visor of his skull-helm. It opened its fang-filled jaws, emitting a screeching cry that cut through the veteran chaplain.

  With a roar born of righteous fury, Wolfram brought the blazing head of his crozius arcanum up into what passed for the monster’s midriff. In a mess of purple ichor, ropes of intestines flopped from the creature’s body, coiling around the haft of the power axe as the flaring razor-edged blades of its Templar-cross head burst from the alien’s back in a blaze of blue sparks.

  Genestealers, the chaplain thought. An abomination in the eyes of all Emperor-fearing people and their presence a foul stain on the face of His Imperial Majesty’s galaxy-spanning realm.

  Oh, how he hated the foul xenos spawn.

  * * *

  LETTING OFF controlled bursts of weapons fire into the mass of alien bodies scrambling towards them, Marshal Brant and his men held then-position at the entrance to the gallery. As the grotesque genestealers flung themselves at the embattled Space Marines, in wave after wave, the ardent Black Templars cut them down with sustained bolter, melta and plasma fire.

  One or two rapidly moving creatures managed to evade this curtain of fire, flinging themselves at the gunning Templars with phenomenal bursts of speed. These were felled by chainsword, combat knife and crippling blows from armoured fists powered by muscles strong enough to lift the end of a truck.

  Brant heard a stifled cry behind him. Darting a glance backwards he saw Brother Taran, his meltagun dropped on the ground in front of him, trying to stem the geyser of blood fountaining from his neck where one of the alien abominations had punched a taloned limb right through his power armour and into the flesh beneath. Even Taran’s genetically altered body could not hope to overcome such a terrible injury and he collapsed to his knees before keeling over onto his face, his lifeblood pumping from his dying body.