Sanctuary - Jonathan Green Read online

  Taran’s killer was crouched behind its victim like a spider about to spring.

  The marshal leapt at the genestealer, blasting at it with his bolt pistol as he brought his crackling power fist down on it. Shards of chitinous armour flew from the genestealer’s body where the explosive bolts impacted, its elongated skull bursting like an overripe fruit as the club-like fist connected.

  The Solemnus Crusade had come to this Emperor-forsaken world hunting orks, Brant considered, but had found the advance forces of the even more alien tyranid - and death.

  ‘Lord marshal!’ Brother Hale called, his voice almost drowned out by the roar of Terminator-Brother Nudd’s storm bolter. ‘Inquisitor Ourumov informs that his party are encountering heavy resistance at what he believes to be the heart of the enemy’s operations.’

  Genestealer uprising, Brant thought. It was obvious now.

  ‘Brother Hale, be so good as to inform the inquisitor that we too are engaged in combat with elements of the xenos cult,’ Brant stated darkly.

  Another hissing alien sprang at him, mouth wide open. Brant put a bolt between its jaws, blowing out the back of its skull in a mess of what passed for alien blood and brain matter. The creature fell at the marshal’s feet, half way through its lunge, twitching in its death-spasms, purple ichor spurting from the ruined dome of its skull and splashing the hem of Brant’s habit-robe.

  ‘Marshal Brant.’ It was Hale again. ‘Inquisitor Ourumov says that his squad will contain the menace and that the rest of us should exit the mine, return to the fleet and purge this world from orbit. He has given the order for Exterminatus.’

  An unreal silence seemed to descend over the Black Templars, even amidst the storm of battle.

  Brant bristled at being given orders, even if they did come from an Imperial inquisitor.

  ‘What, and condemn my men fighting with him to death?’ he railed. ‘We are brothers of the Black Templars Chapter, warriors of the holy Adeptus Astartes. We do not run from battle. We face it head on. No, this is our last crusade. By Sigismund, I will not leave a single man behind if I can help it!’

  Another two screaming alien creatures fell by the marshal’s hand, one to blasts from his bolt pistol, the other decapitated by a flat-handed chop from his lethal power fist.

  ‘Tell the inquisitor that there is another way. This place has already survived one orbital bombardment where our own mighty chapter keep fell to the self-same attackers. And after the Merethyl affair our fleet does not carry any Exterminatus measures.’

  ‘What is that other way lord?’ Initiate Carrado spoke up. One of the longest serving of Marshal Brant’s men, he could say what others dared not. ‘We are outnumbered. Uland has reported that Chaplain Wolfram’s squad are in the same position as, it would seem, are our battle-brothers who fight at the inquisitor’s side.

  ‘There has to be another way to bring this accursed mine down upon the foul xenos!’ Brant bellowed in frustrated anger.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ Tech-Marine Isendur announced calmly in that infuriatingly unemotional tone of his, hacking down a multi-limbed monstrosity as he did so. His crimson armour was awash with sticky purple fluid, as was the blade of his Mechanicus-forged power axe.

  ‘Well, what do you suggest?’ Brant growled over the roar of discharging weapons and the screams of the aliens.

  ‘Readings relayed to me by my suit’s machine-spirit suggest that the isotope vein that has been tapped in this gallery is unstable. It would not be difficult to set the appropriate explosive charges that would detonate the isotope, effectively turning it into a massively destructive bomb.’

  ‘Then do it!’ Brant commanded. ‘Inform our brethren that we will scour this place clean of its genestealer nest. And tell them to get out now, the inquisitor included!’

  Tech-Marine Isendur and Brother Hale gave their affirmative responses and the other brothers prepared to cover them as they carried out the marshal’s orders.

  ‘Hale,’ Brant added, the commanding tone of his voice causing the Templar to pause. ‘What of Chaplain Wolfram?’

  * * *

  CHAPLAIN WOLFRAM swung his sacred weapon in a wide arc, removing both the arm and half the head of one of the alien abominations. The widely swinging beams of the Templars’ suit lamps and the stuttering blasts of bolter fire threw the battle at the cave-in into stark strobing clarity, moments of battle caught in a tableau formed by the intermittent flashes of frozen light.

  Wolfram suddenly reeled, as a bolt of intense, raw emotional energy seemed to rip through him and twist in his gut. It felt like his mind had been stripped of all the emotional barriers he had built up in his life - devotion to the Emperor, zealous pride, righteous fury - until all that was left was primal fear, devouring him from within, and he was like a tiny child curled in foetal fear before the overwhelming evil of an alien-spawned psychic power.

  The chaplain, unprepared for such a devastating mental attack, fell to his knees, many of his brothers collapsing around him even in the face of the aliens’ attack. Both Naois and Kier were cut down, whilst at their most defenceless, as a result. Wolfram gripped the haft of his holy weapon in one hand taking hold of his blessed rosarius in the other and immediately felt the Emperor’s divine power start to fight back against the coldly burning psychic fire scouring the surface of his mind.

  Warpcraft, he thought, the word itself expressed as a curse in his mind. Whatever else the attack might have taken from him, he still had his faith.

  Wolfram opened his eyes, only then realising that they had been closed tight in light of the psychic strike. Standing behind the broken beams of the roof fall was a curiously robed figure, the bald and heavily boned dome of its head highlighted by the crackling nimbus of energy surrounding it. Its eyes glowed from within the shadowed pits beneath its heavy brow.

  Chaplain Wolfram rose to his feet, fighting against the fear-inducing psychic spell conjured by the cult magus with every muscle movement, hefting his crozius in both hands now. He could feel the hot wetness of blood dripping from his nose.

  ‘No… fear,’ he managed through gritted teeth. ‘No pity,’ he declared, staggering steps becoming a strong stride once again. ‘No remorse!’ he bellowed as he charged the magus.

  * * *

  INQUISITOR OURUMOV targeted another half-alien, half-human cultist with his laspistol and fired, putting an instantly cauterised hole through the middle of its brain with one clean shot. To either side of him the Templar brothers Ansgar and Meleagant stood, towering over the old man like two heroes from the golden age of the Imperium, firing into the cultist pack with their furiously-blazing boltguns.

  The purestrain genestealers that had initially engaged Ourumov’s party had soon been joined by the semi-human members of the alien cult as the bulkhead door had ground open. Where the aliens attacked with tooth and claw, their infected human brethren were armed with all manner of firearms and mining equipment, which was being used as makeshift weapons. The genestealers were deadly up close but posed little threat to the likes of Space Marines at a distance. Now that weakness had been compensated for.

  Ardus Ourumov now understood what must have happened here. The genestealer cult had already been well established on L-739 before the orks came but was trapped on this desolate rock, dependant on the arrival of vessels intended to transport the isotope mined here to other Imperium worlds for their means of spreading the xenos corruption further into the Emperor’s blessed realm.

  When the ork attack did come, the human contingent of the cult must have soon realised that they were outnumbered, and without the weapons silos required to defend against an attack from space, they retreated into the mine, sealing themselves inside the chambers they had already created at the bottom of the mine, shielded behind the heavy bulkhead to safeguard the patriarch, the foul ‘father’ of their heretical cult.

  However, there was now a means for the cultists to get off-planet, so that the perverse ‘family’ could continue to grow, with the presence of the explorator vessel Antiquitas and the Templar fleet. So it was that, as soon as the cult’s territory was invaded once again, and this time on a smaller scale, a higher, albeit primitive power spurred its members into aggressive action.

  Ourumov felt a sudden, hot stab of pain in his chest and then cold realisation swept through him and his body began to grow numb from that point outwards. He looked down, as if seeing himself through the eyes of another, and saw the spreading red stain around the ragged hole in his robe and the flesh beneath.

  A bullet wound, as simple as that, but in the right place fatal.

  He had served the Emperor’s Inquisition for over two hundred years, fighting the ‘enemy without’ across the Segmentum Solar and beyond. He had lived through raids by piratical eldar, suffered terrible injuries in duels with the mercenary kroot and even been shot with a hrud fusil rifle and survived. He had always believed that when the Emperor deemed it was time for Ardus Ourumov to join him in the world hereafter, it would be in some dramatic climax to a life-long career, not simply shot by a lucky half-human xenos cultist.

  But that was one of the unpredictable eccentricities of life, he told himself as he slipped into unconsciousness and, more importantly, death.

  * * *

  TECH-MARINE ISENDUR’S charges having been set, Marshal Brant’s party made for the surface again. The Space Marines continued to lay down a hail of fire as they made their fighting retreat, alien bodies piled three or four deep in their wake. They left behind also their fallen Battle-Brothers Taran, Drust and the aspiring Uchdryd.

  Twenty metres through the crust above them, Chaplain Wolfram brought his flaming cross-axe down on the head of the magus, splintering bone and splitting it in two down to the stump of the creature’s neck. At once the Templars were freed of the malign psyker influence. The wrathful warriors set about extracting their revenge on the remaining alien abominations, avenging the deaths of Brothers Naois, Keir and Wuhur. Their explorator guide also lay among the dead, disembowelled by a claw-handed fiend.

  At the bottom of the deepest mine shaft things looked even bleaker.

  * * *

  THE UNCONSCIOUS inquisitor slung over one broad armoured shoulder, Brother Ansgar strode towards the elevator, spraying furious bolter fire into the alien-human pack clawing at his heels.

  There was nothing the Templars could do for Ourumov here, in the middle of a battle. Besides, it looked serious for the old man. Not possessing the preternaturally quick-clotting blood of a Space Marine, he was bleeding to death through the wound blasted by the xenos-cursed bullet. Following his marshal’s orders, Ansgar and the rest of the squad were making their way back towards the surface, two thousand metres above.

  Brother-Initiate Josef and Neophyte Petrus were ahead of him, bundling Explorator Baldemar between them into the open cage of the lift. Veteran Sergeant Olaf was the one covering their escape now, retributional fire spewing from his boltgun, Meleagant and Rivalin having already having fallen beneath the swarming alien pack.

  There would be time to mourn them later. For now the priority for the survivors was to get back to the surface, so that the Black Templars might finish their work and purge Mining Facility Outpost Beta-Three of its infestation.

  Brother Ansgar stumbled, almost falling to his knees and dropping the inquisitor, as a bow wave of psychic energy hit them. The surge of warp power made his stomach turn over and his vision grey as he almost blacked out. Ourumov groaned weakly. Taking a deep breath, Ansgar managed to recover himself enough to stumble the last few steps to the elevator cage after his brothers, even as a genestealer sank its talons into a greave of his armour.

  Turning, he saw within the open bulkhead the silhouette of a grossly bloated, six-limbed fiend. The creature had the appearance of a genestealer but was many times larger. Everything about it was oversized, from its monstrous claws to its bulbous distended cranium. This, Ansgar knew, was the first of its kind on this world, the father of the cult, its patriarch.

  So imbued with instinctive psyker power was the alien that foul warp energy coruscated across its head, making the musty, stale air of the mine heavy with the tang of ozone and filling the Space Marines with a sick feeling to the very core of their being.

  It seemed to Ansgar that the alien patriarch fixed its black, soulless eyes on the Templars as they gunned down the genestealers still rushing towards them across the cavern. Then his knees buckled again as another wave of sickening psyker energy hit the party full on. Baldemar vomited and the other Space Marines also wavered, Neophyte Petrus falling against the side of the cage with a resounding clang of ceramite on steel.

  The only one who seemed resistant to the psychic attack was Olaf. Before anyone else could do anything, the veteran sergeant turned back to face the alien onslaught, striding away from the elevator. The only word he uttered was, ‘Go!’

  Tearing bodies apart with bolter fire and chainsword, proclaiming the glory of the Emperor and the damnation of the alien as written in the same scriptures inscribed upon his holy firearm, he marched into the midst of the attacking cult.

  Without further hesitation, Brother Josef slammed his hand against the ascent-rune inscribed button. With a wailing of klaxons, yellow hazard lights cycling and a noisy grinding sound, the elevator cage began to climb.

  Ansgar stared into the cavern below as Veteran Sergeant Olaf fought his way through the cult-pack, against insurmountable odds, towards the grotesquely swollen form of the patriarch, which towered over even this armoured giant, bellowing the battle-cry of the Black Templars, until the scene of carnage disappeared, the lift rising beyond the roof of the cave.

  A moment later he saw purple and blue bodies forcing themselves into the shaft itself and begin to ascend, the six limbs of the purestrain genestealers allowing them to move as quickly up the scarred-rock sides of the shaft as across open ground.

  ‘Brothers!’ Ansgar warned, indicating the approaching aliens through the grilled floor of the cage-lift with his boltgun. ‘We are not rid of the xenos yet.’

  Taking careful aim between the bars, the Templars fired their weapons in a deafening clattering cacophony of explosive-shelled retribution.

  As the elevator sped upwards through the darkness, the Space Marines’ bolter fire lit up the space beneath the cage, briefly illuminating the scrambling forms of alien bodies racing up the tunnel after the lift, before they tumbled back into the darkness screeching, their bodies ripped open by bolter shells. The openings to tunnels and galleries leading off from the main shaft flashed past, square black holes picked out in the momentary passing sodium light.

  Even over the roar of their guns Ansgar heard the dull boom of the explosion. The allotted time having past, Tech-Marine Isendur’s charges had detonated, turning the unstable isotope seam into a devastating seismic bomb. As well as purging the mine workings with fire, the explosion would collapse the tunnels and bury the mine. There was a series of further explosions causing the elevator to rock violently within the shaft. As the isotope vein erupted, and the very bedrock of the planet fractured, genestealers were shaken free of their precarious grasp on the tunnel walls and plunged back down into the bowels of the planet.

  For a moment, as the cage rattled on the end of twanging stress-straining cables, Brother Ansgar wondered if the survivors of Ourumov’s party would be joining the doomed aliens. Then the quake subsided and the elevator resumed its ascent. In the distant depths Ansgar could see a point of fiery light blossom in the blackness and swell as the fireball roared up the shaft, consuming those aliens in its path still clinging to the sides of the borehole.

  There was nothing Ansgar and the other Templars could do now but pray to the Emperor, their primarch Rogal Dorn and the saintly Lord Sigismund for their divine protection. So pray they did.

  * * *

  THE SURVIVING Black Templars burst from the mine head, those cathedral ruins previously still standing tumbling down around them. Sergeant Lohengrin’s squad, who had been left on the surface, covered their escape, making sure that none of the alien abominations followed their battle-brothers out of the mine.

  The men of the three parties that had penetrated the mine sprinted from the facility, despite the strain their bodies were beginning to feel from battling the genestealer cult, escaping just before the entire facility was swallowed by the planet, with a primordial roar, as massive subsidence following in the wake of the devastating explosion caused the mine beneath it to collapse utterly.

  Of the twenty-three warriors who had entered the accursed labyrinth beneath L-739, only fourteen had returned to the surface. There had been other casualties too, of course, the explorator guides among them, but most notably Inquisitor Ardus Ourumov himself. The ground still shaking, as Fulgerium Mining Outpost Beta-Three continued to disintegrate behind them, Brother Ansgar laid the inquisitor’s body on the ground in the shadow cast by the Paladin.

  Marshal Brant, his ornate armour and habit-robe drenched with alien blood, looked down at the inquisitor. They were too late. There was nothing more they could do for him. The man who knew the identity of the greenskins who followed the icon of the scarred ork, the man who held the key to them accomplishing their last crusade, the man who had led a hundred purges on a hundred worlds, and who had been a feared and respected member of the Ordo Xenos for the last two centuries, was dead. And so too was the information Brant had crossed light years to recover.

  Cautiously Interrogator Helquist approached the glowering Space Marine, the baleful red optical implant making Brant’s expression appear even more threatening and malevolent.

  ‘My lord marshal,’ Helquist said deferentially, ‘I know that had Inquisitor Ourumov survived, he would have told you what you wanted to know.’

  ‘Had he survived,’ Brant growled.

  ‘And he still might,’ Helquist went on.