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The Buried Beast – Extract

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THE BURIED BEAST

By Gary Kloster

‘And in that time, there was brought a message to the Order that a great beast had risen from the River Rue, and blood and despair flowed heavy in the dark waters. The fisherfolk begged for succour, for vengeance, but the Order was much reduced–’

‘Stop.’

The servo-skull ended its recitation, the vox-speaker fixed between its teeth going silent. Grey light filled the stateroom, the dull radiance of a ruined moon, barely enough to illuminate the circuit-wrapped skull or the man who stood straight and still in the centre of the space.

Much reduced.

Lazarus, master of the Dark Angels Fifth Company, repeated the words silently to himself as he stared through the narrow viewport that let in the moonlight. The story spilling from the servo-skull was from long-lost Caliban, the words a dialect of Low Gothic not spoken for millennia, but their meaning… it fitted the grey death-light and the dark mood that had gripped Lazarus ever since he’d died.

The moon outside was Cinero, one of dozens that circled a storm-ridden gas giant. Its face was scarred with strip mines and stippled with the light of a million lumens, a pitiful echo of the stars that spread beyond. Lazarus would have appreciated the view not so long ago – his long service as a Space Marine had only sharpened his awe of the infinite, not reduced it. But now, after the agonising apothecal miracle of his resurrection…

When he looked at the stars now, Lazarus saw their bright points flicker. Flicker and change into flames, terrible and bright, wrapping around him, burning into him and tearing him apart.

Lazarus stared at the stars as the flames ran through him, and the heavy muscles of his remade body went rigid with remembered pain. He silently recited the Litany of Horrors Past, and the familiar words slowly pushed away the flames, but when they were gone, when the stars were steady and bright points fixed in their terrible distance again, Lazarus caught the dim ghost of his own reflection in the armoured viewport. Short-cropped grey hair and dark eyes, pale skin split by a dark scar that ran from his hairline almost to his lips, it was a hard face that had settled long ago into stern watchfulness. A face that should have been as familiar to his eyes as the grip of his sword was to his hand, but the sight of it shook the calm the litany had given him. The stars trembled again behind his reflection, and in his head the fire threatened to rekindle again…

And then the door chimed, and Lazarus fought to ease the tension that had seized his muscles again.

‘Lumens,’ he said, and the lights snapped on, washing away the grey moonlight and the trembling stars. ‘Open,’ he ordered, and the heavy hatch of his stateroom slid aside.

Waiting in the corridor beyond were two figures, hulking in their dark green power armour. The men had their helmets off, but Lazarus could have recognised them in full armour. He was master of the Fifth, and every one of the Unrelenting was known to him. These two he knew well enough to sense their hesitation as they saw him standing before them dressed only in simple ship cloth, his own armour standing empty against the wall, surrounded by the broken standards of a hundred different conquered enemies. But neither of them said anything as they stepped in.

‘Chaplain Demetrius,’ Lazarus said. ‘Lieutenant Amad. What word from Cinero?’

‘Master Lazarus,’ Demetrius said, nodding his shaved head to Lazarus. The Chaplain was the oldest man in the unit, but he fell silent after giving his greeting, leaving Amad to speak.

‘I have spoken to Planetary Governor Ruus. I told her why we have come.’

‘And?’ Lazarus asked.

‘She did not wish to speak of the Lion’s Blade. She did not even want to admit that she knew the name,’ Amad said. ‘But I was able to finally break that admission from her. She knows the ship, and where it crashed, but she would not give me the location.’ Amad frowned. The man liked to think he was as skilled at getting answers from mortals as an inquisitor, without having to resort to their particular skillset. ‘She is quite insistent that the wreck should remain hidden, and would not tell me why.’

‘Unacceptable,’ Lazarus said. ‘The Lion’s Blade is ours. No matter that it has been buried on this rock for ten thousand years.’

‘I told the governor that. And that we would tear this moon apart to find it, if she did not give us its location.’ Amad shook his head. ‘Still she refused me, until I thought we might have to carry out the threat. But I salvaged it, in the end. Catherine Ruus will not tell me where the Lion’s Blade lies, but she says that she will tell you, if you meet with her face to face.’

‘Face to face.’ Lazarus thought about the request. He’d gone over all the records they had on Cinero when the orders had come through to them from the Rock. This moon was an old mining colony, barren, thick with radiation, worthy only in that it was a source of adamantium. That rare metal had made the colony prosperous, and it had always been loyal to the Imperium, its governors diligent in filling their quotas. A trick seemed unlikely, but Lazarus didn’t like the request. They were Adeptus Astartes. They did not bargain.

Lazarus looked through the viewport, to the grey, battered moon, and he could feel the stars try to shift, until he looked away. He wanted away from this place, wanted to return to the Rock, most of all wanted to have the flames and the horrible feeling of dissociation that came with them gone.

‘She wants to see me?’ he said. ‘Then tell her I will come. Now.’

‘They will be in their sleep cycle now,’ Amad said. ‘The governor will barely have time to ready herself before your Thunderhawk lands.’ He smiled and started out. ‘I will send word to Cinero.’

They watched him go, then Lazarus turned his focus back to Chaplain Demetrius. Long ago, a plasma blast had taken half the man’s face and his left eye, and the skin that had regrown around the gleaming green cybernetic replacement was a deep black, in contrast to the warm brown of the rest of his skin. It made the artificial eye look like an emerald star floating in shadow, and for a moment Lazarus could see himself reflected in its shining lens. His face, not his face, and the flames threatened to grow across his vision again. Then he wrenched himself back into control.

Demetrius tilted his head, a tiny movement. ‘What do you see, Captain Lazarus?’

‘I see…’

For a moment, Lazarus almost wanted to tell him. But what would he say? That after the flames he didn’t recognise himself any more? That since his miraculous rebirth, when he looked at himself, he saw a stranger?

‘I see delay, Demetrius. One I wish to be rid of.’ He turned away from the Chaplain, half expecting Demetrius to say something more, but his brother did not, and Lazarus heard the door slide shut as he stepped out, leaving Lazarus alone in the silence.

‘Resume recitation,’ he said, opening the gleaming armour, and the servo-skull drifted out of the corner it had retreated to, its vox-speaker crackling to life.

‘–was much reduced by other battles with the great beasts that ravaged Caliban. But there was one, the knight Chene, who stepped forward, wounded but unbowed, and he told the broken people to take him to the lair of the beast.’

The corridor was carved from the grey stone of Cinero, but it had been polished to a mirror sheen, so that the floor and walls reflected Lazarus as he strode to his meeting. A massive figure in dark green ceramite accented in gold, a cloak of white edged in red slung around it. The bright lumens of the corridor gleamed off the power armour, showing every detail of its deadly precision, perfect and clean.

Lazarus was not used to such perfection.

The armour he’d worn before, the armour that had burned around him when he’d died, had been ancient. It had been well cared for, by him and his predecessors, but it had survived a thousand battles over as many years and bore the marks of its use, the scars from blows that it had taken. That armour had been smashed, trying to save him. It had broken, and then he’d died, but here he was, alive and walking, in a body as new and different as the armour that now wrapped around it.

The Rubicon Primaris was a terrible thing. The long, painful procedure was the only way for one of the older Firstborn Space Marines to be reborn as a Primaris Marine, the next generation of the Emperor’s chosen warriors, the new-forged blade meant to cut the heart from the enemies of humanity. The reward for crossing this painful Rubicon was great, but the risks were steep. Not all who attempted it survived, and so many brothers hesitated. Not out of fear, for the Adeptus Astartes feared nothing, especially death. But they were keenly aware of how few of them there were, standing against humanity’s countless enemies, and they would not risk reducing those numbers. So many of them chose to remain as Firstborn.

That was the choice Lazarus had made. Until it was taken from him by death.

Before him, the doors to the Governor’s Hall stood open. The keen sensors of his new armour’s auspex swept ahead and found one life form waiting in the space beyond: a human woman, unarmed. Her, and something else, something just inside the chamber. Something alive and not alive, and Lazarus focused on it without breaking stride, one gauntleted hand resting on the hilt of his sword. A servitor, his auspex told him, a cyborg built into the wall, its desiccated organic parts kept functioning by the eldritch electronics buried in the stone. The thing was unarmed too, helpless in its unliving prison, and Lazarus ignored it as he walked through the doors, the ceramite treads of his armoured boots grinding the polish off the floor beneath him.

‘He comes!’ The servitor spoke as he passed, its deep voice rolling out of a throat formed of broken flesh, polished stone and profane circuitry. ‘Lazarus! Master of the Fifth Company. Master of the Unrelenting. Brother of the Dark Angels. Adeptus Astartes, the son of Lion El’Jonson, a child of the Emperor Divine!’

The Governor’s Hall was a dome of clear glasscrete, supported by polished stone arches, and the words of the servitor crashed like waves off their hard surfaces. For a moment the echoes of his announcement sounded like the roar of flames, and the hard points of the stars through the glasscrete dome shimmered – and Lazarus stopped. His hand gripped his sword hilt as he stared at the unsteady stars, forcing them to still as he spoke the Litany of Horrors Past silently to himself, pushing the flames away.

The stars went still, and the master of the Fifth stood in the centre of the Governor’s Hall of Cinero, and the planetary governor stood in his shadow. She seemed poised, resolute… but in her eyes Lazarus saw a growing terror.

Catherine Ruus was tall, so tall the top of her head was higher than the centre of his chest, but her body was drawn out, slim, like a sculpture made of knotted wire beneath the silver silk of her robe. The skin of her narrow face was as grey as the polished stone of the arches, and her hair and eyes were black. The low gravity and harsh radiation of this moon had changed its people, made them almost abhuman, but the traces of adamantium found in the metallic core of Cinero were valuable enough to the Imperium that such alterations were deemed acceptable.

‘Master Lazarus,’ she said, bending into a graceful curtsey. ‘With the voice of all Cinero, I greet you–’

‘Enough.’ The echoes of the servitor’s announcement were still grating at the edges of Lazarus’ auspex, the very light of the stars above was threatening to dissolve into flames, and the Fifth’s captain wanted nothing more than to be done with this. ‘I know you, Governor Ruus, and you know me and my purpose. Servant of the Throne, minion of the Administratum, I order you to obey your oaths and render unto me what is my due. Tell me where lies the wreck of the Lion’s Blade.’

Governor Ruus straightened, clearly uncomfortable with looking up at him. But she forced herself to, and when she spoke her voice was steady. ‘I do obey my oaths, Master Lazarus, and that is why I have asked you to come.’ She folded her hands into her sleeves, to hide their tiny tremble. ‘Long ago, when this mining colony was barely begun, the Lion’s Blade broke out of warp and crashed here. Its warriors told the miners that they were under attack by some fell beast, a vile servant of the Ruinous Powers that had set itself upon them in the warp. They were fighting, but it was killing them, and their chance at besting it was slipping away. They meant to drop their ship into the heart of one of the great volcanoes that ring this moon’s equator, to drown the beast in fire, but the engines of the Lion’s Blade failed them and they crashed short, smashing through the volcano’s slope instead, into the dead lava tubes beneath.

‘After the crash, there was one last message. The last Dark Angels ordered us to collapse the tunnels and bury the Lion’s Blade. They ordered my ancestors to make them a tomb, then made them swear to hide their grave and to never allow it to be disturbed, lest we set free the beast. And so my family made an oath, and kept it. For hundreds of generations, we have kept it, Master Lazarus. And now you come, and ask me to break it.’

Lazarus looked at her carefully. He could hear the speed of her heart, smell the fear sweat on her, see the tremor in the muscles of her face. No ordinary human could have sensed the mix of fear and anger and pride that underlay that calm recitation. But he could, and he believed her. This story was a truth, handed down to her by her family over the countless years, and it was as important to her as the oaths she had sworn to the Throne.

Slowly, Lazarus raised his hands. His gauntlets touched his winged helm, and with a low hiss it opened and came free. He pulled it off, cradling it in the crook of his left arm. Face bare, he stared down at Ruus.

‘Your family did well.’ When his orders had come from the Rock, the Dark Angels’ home, they had only stated that records of an ancient crash of one of their ships had been discovered. There had been no indication of why the ship had gone down, but it had happened some time during the terrible years of the Heresy or its aftermath. Much had been lost then, and he believed her. ‘You will not break your oath with me, Governor Ruus,’ Lazarus said. ‘I am no fool of a miner. I am a Dark Angel, brother to those who died sealing that monster away.’

‘I understand that, Master Lazarus.’ Governor Ruus looked up at him, and then away again, unable to meet his eyes for long. ‘I know I should tell you the location of the site. I know I will.’ Those last words came slowly, and they were a terrible mix of relief and fear. ‘I will tell you, but before I do, I will make confession to you. I fear what will happen when you go there. I know your might, but… I fear.’

She looked again out at the barren moon, the black sky, the distant fire of the stars, and now the fear in her voice was clear.

‘I fear that you will free the beast, and we will all die.’

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