[Warhammer 40K] - Sons of Dorn

by Chris Roberson - (ebook by Undead)

  From the indicator lights and viewscreens that surrounded them on all sides came a faint reddish glow, giving the control room a vaguely hellish appearance. The gold armour of Veteran-Sergeant Hilts and Scouts du Queste and Rhomec were cast in monochromatic tones, and could as easily have been white and black or any other opposing values. And their eyes seemed to glow with an inner light, pupils dilated wide and reflecting back the instruments’ glow.

  “Try again,” Hilts ordered, glancing over to Scout du Queste at the next station. “See if you can bring the controls online now.”

  Scout du Queste nodded in reply, and punched in the initialisation sequence yet another time. But when he’d hit the final keys in the sequence, he was answered now with another series of braying tones that made clear that the communication systems were still inoperative.

  “No good, sergeant,” du Queste said unnecessarily, shaking his head and scowling.

  Veteran-Sergeant Hilts scowled, as well, but could not disagree.

  “Scout Rhomec,” Hilts went on, turning from the waist to glance back at the Scout on the opposite side of the small room. “Anything on your end?”

  “Nothing,” Rhomec said simply, turning his scarred visage to look back at Hilts for a brief instant. So many Imperial Fists wore the white nicks of ancient duelling scars on their cheeks, badges of honour from the Arena Restricta, but the young ex-pitfighter had brought his battle scars with him. And lacking the expert hand of an Apothecary or the protective properties of the Astartes implants to aid in the healing process, the chainsword-gashes in Rhomec’s cheeks had not healed down to delicate white scars, but were jagged mutilations. Still, the ex-pitfighter seemed to bear them with as much pride as any battle-brother of the Imperial Fists did his own duelling scars.

  “Emperor give me strength!” the veteran-sergeant snapped.

  Word had come down from Captain Taelos that the self-elected leaders of the refugee community in the Bastion had informed him that they did not possess the access codes needed to gain control of the automated planetary defences, and that they feared the communication systems had been damaged. According to the Vernalian nobles, the codes had been lost when the last officers of the Vernalis Planetary Defence Force had fallen to a barrage of enemy fire. The refugee leaders had doubted that even Imperial default override codes would suffice, given the modifications made to the system since its installation long years before, but since none of them had access to such codes they couldn’t say for certain.

  When Taelos had ordered Hilts to survey the controls of the automated planetary defences, and relayed to him the refugee leaders’ concerns about the access codes, Hilts had been forced to suppress his immediate reaction. He had served the Chapter as battle-brother and as Scout sergeant for longer than any of these normal men and women had even been alive, and he had forgotten more than they ever knew about planetary defence—and considering Hilts’ near-perfect recall, that meant that the refugee leaders did not know much.

  But when he and the two Scouts accompanying him had made their way to the control room buried deep beneath the mountain’s peak, and Hilts had entered the most common of the standard Imperial override codes, he had been greeted with disappointment.

  Hilts had gained control of the defence systems immediately, and it appeared that the nobles had been correct. The communications systems were inoperative, and after hours of attempted repairs remained stubbornly so.

  They now had access to the master controls which governed the servitors in all of the defence systems around the planet, but they were unable to use the Bastion’s broadcast array to boost their own vox’s transmission through Vernalis’ atmospheric interference. Any vessel that approached the surface without transmitting the appropriate clearance codes would be fired upon—but the Imperial Fists in the Bastion could still not maintain communication with their own Thunderhawks in the air.

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Veteran-Sergeant Hilts said after a pause. “Du Queste, Rhomec.” He turned to meet the gazes of the two Scouts. “I’ll keep at it in here, but I want you two to get busy with the rest of our survey. I want to know all of the tunnels and other access points that lead to and from this control room, starting with the corridors which we came through and then continuing out until you hit solid rock. Think you can manage it?”

  Scouts du Queste and Rhomec both snapped to attention, ramrod-straight.

  “Then to your duties,” Hilts said, and waved them away.

  As the two Scouts hurried from the control room, the veteran-sergeant turned his attention back to the main control station, and resisted the temptation to draw his bolter and shoot the thing to pieces.

  “Very well, you Emperor-forsaken thing,” Hilts snarled in a low voice, leaning in close to the controls, “let’s try this one more time…”

  The cavernous chambers which had been cut into the living rock of the mountain had evidently been intended for the long-term storage of heavy machinery. Servitors still trundled back and forth along the periphery, squealing to one another in their binary machine-code and tending to the massive mechanical components and drilling apparatuses that were doubtless destined to replace broken or dilapidated elements on the drilling and pumping rigs. But over the sour odour of lubricating oil and the ozone tang of electrics another scent now pervaded, filling Scout Zatori’s nostrils entirely—the smell of humanity.

  The storage bays and loading docks of the Bastion were crowded with the tattered remnants of Vernalis’ civilian population, who huddled with dead-eyed and hollow-cheeked expressions everywhere in sight, alone or in pairs or in clusters of family members or friends. None of them had been able to wash in days, if not weeks, and even with the vaulting roofs of the chambers the air still filled with the sour smell of bodies, intermingled with the palpable scent of fear.

  Scout Zatori stood with Scouts Valen and Sandor at the entrance to one of the larger storage bays, dimly lit by fixtures high overhead. The bay was enormous, nearly spacious enough to house an entire space cruiser. But it struck Zatori how quiet the chamber was, all things considered. If he closed his eyes and stopped breathing in for a moment, he would never know that more than ten thousand refugees were crowded into such a relatively small space. Whispers echoed through the hall, slight susurrations of sound so faint that even his Lyman’s ear could not pick out their meanings, but there was no shouting or laughing or crying, and hardly anyone even speaking at a normal conversational tone. It was as if tens of thousands of men, women and children had been robbed of some essential vitality, left as hollow husks capable of breathing and blinking and perspiring, but little else besides.

  “This chamber’s the same as the rest,” Scout Sandor said in evident distaste. He glanced from the data-slate that displayed the Bastion’s internal schematics to the ceiling overhead. “Some ductwork in the walls and ceiling, large enough for a full-grown man to crawl through, and drains in the floor leading to the drainage system.”

  Zatori glanced in Sandor’s direction and replied with a curt nod. Though they were not especially close, Zatori knew Sandor about as well as he knew any of the other Scouts in Squad Pardus, and knew that Sandor’s youth on a sparsely populated agri-world had left him with no real affinity for large crowds. Sandor had grown accustomed to assemblages of Imperial Fists in his years onboard the Phalanx, but it seemed that his newfound ability to allow for the proximity of hundreds of Astartes and Scouts did not extend to the masses of unaugmented humanity. Faced with so many refugees in chamber after chamber, it appeared that Sandor was becoming increasingly annoyed.

  “I read just over twelve thousand humans in the bay,” Scout Valen said, not looking up from his auspex. “They’re packed in fairly tight.”

  Valen had been raised on a mining world, and seemed perfectly at home in the dimly lit subterranean corridors and chambers which bored through the heart of the Bastion mountain. Zatori knew that Valen must have spent his youth in chambers just such as this one. And while the tunnels an
d vaults of his home world might not always have been as thickly populated, it was surely a difference of degree, not of kind. How else to explain the matter-of-fact way that Valen looked upon each of the rooms and passages through which they’d walked so far, casting a disinterested and clinical eye on his surroundings, hardly affected in the slightest by what he had seen?

  “It appears that the entrance to the next corridor is on the far side of the bay,” Zatori said, pointing a finger at the far wall, a considerable distance away. “We should be moving on. There are many more passages left to survey.”

  As the three Scouts picked their way across the floor of the bay, stepping over the bodies of those refugees who lay sleeping and around those who sat huddled or stood in their path, Zatori considered his response to their surroundings. His earliest experiences were not those of his two squadmates, the Sipang of his youth being neither as sparsely populated as Sandor’s agri-world or as confined and crowded as Valen’s mines. His own reactions to the cramped conditions and the mass of huddled refugees was, perhaps, midway between those of the other two Scouts. Zatori had spent his years as a squire living in one of the largest cities in Sipang, and it was not until he went to live among the Imperial Fists that he learned that his home world was less populated and considerably less technologically advanced than was typical for Imperial worlds, but still Zatori recalled the sense of awe he’d felt on seeing the steepled roofs of the Sovereign’s palace towering over the city streets, or the claustrophobic sensation he’d felt when he’d first mingled with the crowds that gathered in their thousands outside the gates of the Royal Court.

  So finding himself amongst the hordes of hollow-eyed refugees did not discomfit him as much as it seemed to do Scout Sandor, and yet he was not as clinical and detached as Valen.

  If anything, Zatori found himself thinking more about the refugees as individuals than either of his squadmates appeared capable of doing. He recalled one of his first experiences with normal unaugmented humans after leaving Triandr and joining the ranks of the Imperial Fists neophytes, when he had gone with the rest of Squad Pardus on an undertaking to the world of Tunis. Zatori had been struck by how the normal men and women of that dry and desolate world had looked upon him, a lowly Scout, with fearful awe, and it had reminded Zatori of his first glimpse of a member of the Adeptus Astartes on the green fields of Eokaroe.

  But Zatori saw little of that kind of awe or fear on the faces of the refugees huddled in the storage bay. Instead, he saw on each of the faces that he passed a kind of numb resignation, as though the experiences of the invasion by the Roaring Blades and their masters in the Emperor’s Children had already drained the refugees of all horror and outrage, and that they had nothing left over to give.

  It was not until he and his squadmates had nearly reached the far wall of the storage bay, where a corridor led away into a still-deeper section of the Bastion, that one of the refugees seemed to react to the presence of the Scouts at all. A young boy, about the age that Zatori had been when he had been sold into Father Nei’s indentured servitude, looked up as the three Scouts passed and locked eyes with Zatori.

  “Master,” the child said in a voice like the wailing of distant winds, “how much longer before death comes for us? We’ve been waiting such a long time.”

  Zatori was stopped short for a brief moment, unsure what to say. Then, motioning Valen and Sandor to halt a moment, he knelt and put a hand on the child’s shoulder.

  “Don’t fear, child,” Zatori said, in as comforting a tone as he could manage, “you shall have a long life ahead of you, and will continue to wait for death for many years to come.”

  The child met Zatori’s gaze for a moment, and then dropped his eyes towards the floor. “Oh, well,” the child said simply, seeming let down by Zatori’s words. He sighed, his thin chest rising and falling as he did. “That’s all right, I suppose.”

  Zatori looked into the eyes of the child, who seemed disappointed that he had not yet died, a child whom life had treated so badly that death would come only as a release. And he could not help but stop and think—We shouldn’t be here. This isn’t what a Space Marine does…

  Scout du Queste banged his head against the passageway’s low ceiling for the fifth time and clenched his hands into fists in angry frustration. Only a day before he’d finally felt himself falling into the sublime rhythms of combat and the blade, testing his mettle against the enemy’s swords. But now here he was, only a night and a day later, being forced to crab his way through narrow access passages in the dark and dusty heart of the mountain. To make matters worse he was not allowed to endure this unpleasantness alone, but had to contend with Scout Rhomec the whole time.

  “We should have taken the right-hand fork at that last branch,” Rhomec said again, as though Jean-Robur might have escaped hearing him the first two times he said it. “If we continue this way it will just take us back the way we’ve been.”

  Jean-Robur stopped in his tracks, and after taking a calming breath—remembering all of the times that an ill-considered word to one of his fellow neophytes had landed him once more in the pain-glove—he turned as best he could in the narrow confines of the passageway and glared back over his left shoulder at his squadmate.

  “I heard you,” Jean-Robur said with more acid than he intended. “Of course I heard you. You are less than a metre behind me and braying at the top of your lungs in a tunnel in which there is little place else for the sound to go but into my ears. I heard you.” He paused, taking another break. “You believe we should have taken the right-hand fork, this way will lead us back the way we’ve been, and so on, and so forth, yes?”

  Rhomec just treated him to one of his grins, and nodded.

  “Perhaps it would interest you to know that I am aware of the fact that this will take us back the way we have been,” Jean-Robur continued, “and that my intention in doing so is to determine if any additional passages fork off from it that we aren’t yet aware of.” He pointed with his right hand to the dim-lit passageway ahead of them, and in particular to the circular shadow upon the wall a few paces ahead. “Such as that one.”

  Rhomec craned his neck to peer past Jean-Robur down the passageway. Then he slid back on his heels and treated his squadmate to another of his maddening grins. “Ah. Then why didn’t you say so, du Queste?” He waved a hand imperiously at Jean-Robur. “Why the delay? Lead on, why don’t you?”

  Jean-Robur managed to ignore Rhomec’s amused chuckle, but only just. He turned back, the occu-lobe implanted behind his eyes giving him the keenness of vision to see in a gloom that would have appeared pitch black to a normal human. There ahead, as he had anticipated, another passage branched off from the main trunk, even smaller and more confined than the cramped passageway through which he and Rhomec now crabbed.

  Pausing at the mouth of the passageway, Jean-Robur held his auspex up and took a full spectrum of readings. “It continues at a slightly elevated grade for at least a kilometre or more before turning,” he said aloud to Rhomec, who made a show of dutifully recording the information in the data-slate he carried. “If it continues at that same pitch after the turn, it likely reaches the surface somewhere within a half-dozen kilometres, assuming it doesn’t hit another tunnel first. May have been intended as a conduit of some type, but ultimately never put to use.”

  Rhomec waved Jean-Robur a step further down the passageway, and came to stand beside him at the mouth of the branching passage. “Not much more than half a metre in circumference,” Rhomec said, resting a hand on the mouth’s edge. “One of us could likely traverse it, but it wouldn’t be easy going. Don’t know how much we could gain in doing so, though.”

  Jean-Robur nodded, hardly relishing the thought of crawling for kilometres through a cramped tunnel, just to see what might lie at the other end. “Let’s hope Veteran-Sergeant Hilts agrees with you, shall we?”

  Meanwhile, on the far side of the world, an Imperial Fists gunship was flashing across a moonless sky, chasing
daylight. Veteran-Sergeant Derex and Scout Grigor had joined the pilot on the flight deck, while the rest of Squad Ursus were strapped into grav-harnesses back in the Thunderhawk’s troop transport compartment, where they had been since the gunship had lifted off from the petrochem shores east of the Bastion early that morning.

  The Thunderhawk was flying low over the ground just east of the terminus between night and day. Though the skies were dark above them, they could see less than a kilometre ahead of them the trailing edge of daylight. It was as though they were speeding through the moonless night, trying to punch back into day.

  Since setting out from the shores near the Bastion, the Squad Ursus Thunderhawk had been hunting for any sign of enemy activity, flying surveillance patterns over huge swathes of the southern hemisphere, alternating low-altitude and high-altitude passes, employing all of the sensor arrays at their disposal. But so far they had found no hint of enemy forces.

  They had found countless signs of the recent incursion by Chaotic forces, of course. And not just in the form of ruined structures, no doubt used as low-occupancy habitats for the workers who serviced the southern rigs and pipelines. There were still-burning pyres of the dead, the black smoke curling up into an unforgiving sky. There were countless flayed corpses scattered on the rocky ground, their skin flapping like macabre banners from posts made of human bones. The landscape seemed polluted by the mere presence of Chaos, a taint that would take long ages to scourge, if it were ever to come clean.

  But aside from the scars of the recent invasion, they saw nothing that indicated a continued enemy presence.

  Not until it was too late.

  “Sergeant!” Scout Grigor called out from the monitoring station. “I’m picking up—”

  But before Derex could even respond, the hunter-killer anti-aircraft missile struck home. The charge exploded on contact, blowing a hole clean through the front glacis armour plate shielding the flight deck.