Sons of the Hydra

by Rob Sanders

  ‘Perhaps it’s too soon,’ Occam voxed back. ‘Perhaps the installation is more temporary than even we suspect, with resources going to another permanent facility being prepared elsewhere. Either way, this is good for us.’

  ‘They’re relying on patrols,’ Malik added, kicking at the frozen tracks beneath the soft blackness being deposited by the blizzard. ‘Vehicles pass through here regularly on their way back to base.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘By the depth of the imprint,’ Malik said, ‘every three or so hours.’

  ‘Vehicles?’

  ‘Something modelled on a Rhino chassis,’ the former Night Lord told him.

  The legionnaires of the Redacted all turned their helms as they heard something through the noise of the storm. The haunting shriek had a mournful quality, as though something large and not too distant was suffering out in the storm with the renegades.

  ‘Should we get off this trail?’ Sergeant Hasdrubal asked, trudging up behind. Tearing his gaze from the direction of the sound he looked back along the path of the frozen tracks.

  ‘No,’ Occam said, thoughtfully. He reached out towards Autolicon Phex, who knew the gesture well. Unclipping a melta bomb from his belt, Phex handed the grenade to the strike master. ‘We should definitely stick to the trail.’

  Sister Superior Invioletta rode out the rolling motion of the Pyra-Sanctora. The Immolator was a relic-vehicle of the Order of the August Vigil. A tracked transport, sections of its thick plating were carved into bas-relief and shallow representations of the Emperor’s great deeds. Its dozer blade cleared black snow from its path, while banners of the Orders Pronatus trailed behind it in the blizzard gale. As the Immolator’s engine plant growled, pushing the transport on through the frozen landscape, fire drizzled from the burnished barrels of its turret-mounted heavy flamers.

  ‘I have a faint return, Sister Superior,’ Sister Eupheme said, her breath misting on the gelid air of the compartment. She sat in the driver’s nest of gears and flickering runescreens. Invioletta leant in, her brutally shaved scalp brushing up against the driver’s own. Their bone-white plate lightly clattered. In the dull reflection of the scratched screen, Invioletta saw the glint of the staples across her missing right eye. She took in the ghostly augur reading. Squinting into the storm with her single eye, the Sister Superior peered through the slit of the viewport.

  ‘Probably some creature indigenous to this ice ball,’ the Battle Sister said. ‘Ursula.’

  Sister Ursula came forward from the rear of the compartment, leaving three other armoured Sisters. The Sisters Dominion cradled unprimed flamers in their white gauntlets. Sliding her helmet down over her shaved skull, Ursula popped the top hatch and admitted the howling storm.

  ‘Full stop!’ Invioletta called out as a hulking shape, darker than the surrounding oblivion, filled the viewport. Sister Eupheme hauled at the Immolator’s gears, back-thrashing the tracks. Invioletta saw that the Sister was struggling and felt the transport drift on the ice. Ursula was almost thrown forward by the force but managed to hold on to the open hatch and driver’s cradle.

  ‘Target,’ Invioletta called out, pulling on her own white helm. She slapped her gauntlet against the Immolator’s side door and threw it open, allowing the other three Sisters Dominion to exit the vehicle. The compartment was filled with the hiss and welcome warmth of flamer primers, to be almost immediately lost in the roar of the icy storm.

  The Sister Superior followed them, resting her gauntlet on the Inferno pistol sitting in her fur-lined belt holster. Outside, her armoured boots squelched through slush. Looking up she saw the shape of a large xenos creature, one of 54-Thermia’s wasteland predators. Larger than the Immolator, the small mountain of shaggy, barbed fur stood its ground, all yellowing claws and icicle-lined tusks. The Inquisition forces on the ice world had encountered several such creatures, one having found its way into the carved caverns of the ordo installation seeking shelter. Squaring up to a Sentinel powerlifter, which had been moving crates of classified cargo, the beast had killed the walker’s crew.

  After it had been put down by Invioletta’s squad of Sister Dominions, Palatine Sophirica and the lord inquisitor’s high explicator – Inigo Valdex – ordered all such monstrosities destroyed if found within the base perimeter.

  ‘Purge,’ the Sister Superior commanded. The wasteland gloom was suddenly lit up by two fat streams of sputtering promethium. Alight and guttering against the force of the surrounding storm, the streams coated the shaggy monster with sticky fuel and writhing flame. Spreading out about the alien predator, the Sisters of the August Vigil unleashed their flamers and hit the beast in the flanks with their own swirling streams of fiery death.

  ‘Cease,’ Invioletta called across her suit vox, ‘and save your holy fuel. The beast burns. Let the Emperor’s light take it.’

  The Battle Sisters stood there for the time it took the inferno to destroy the monster. Strangely, the creature did not shriek and wail like its waste-wandering kindred. Instead, it seemed content to sit there and burn until the storm doused its black, smouldering bones.

  Taking a long look around her, Invioletta stared into the depths of the blizzard. The cold was creeping in through her plate and chilling her bones. Finally satisfied, the Sister Superior directed her Dominions back into the Pyra-Sanctora. As Sister Ursula climbed down and locked off the top hatch, Invioletta laid a gauntlet on Eupheme’s pauldron and directed the driver on. Sister Eupheme gunned the Immolator’s engine. As before, the transport seemed to struggle.

  ‘What is it?’ Invioletta demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sister Eupheme told her. ‘Perhaps we are throwing a track. Hang on, that’s got it.’

  The Pyra-Sanctora lurched forward, its tracks biting back into the frozen ground. The vehicle’s dozer blade struck the scorched bones of the alien cadaver blocking the Immolator’s way, smashing the pyre to one side.

  ‘That’s it,’ Eupheme confirmed. Invioletta threw a few switches on the ceiling panel above the driver and patched in to the installation’s encoded vox-channel.

  ‘Pyra-Sanctora to Nemesis base, respond,’ the Sister Superior said, the signal crackling and warping with the surrounding storm. ‘Pyra-Sanctora checking in. Nemesis base, respond.’

  ‘Pyra-Sanctora, this is Nemesis,’ a sizzling voice returned finally. ‘You missed your transmission window. Protocols have been initiated.’

  Invioletta’s lip curled behind her faceplate. It was Sister Superior Assumpta. Sister Assumpta handled liaison between the Adepta Sororitas and Inquisition forces at the repository installation. While all Sisters considered themselves daughters of the Emperor and equal in His esteem, there were still tensions. Assumpta was a Sister-Chamberlain who belonged to the Order of the Veiled Mantle – one of the Orders Famulous. The Sisters of the Veiled Mantle had a special care for the Holy Ordos, Inquisitorial installations and the ordo lords who presided over them. Fielding for them diplomats and advisors, the Sisters Famulous were a point of contact between the clandestine agents of the Inquisition, the Sisterhood and other commandeered forces of the Imperium. As a Battle Sister, Invioletta – like Palatine Sophirica – did not enjoy taking orders from non-militants such as Sister Assumpta and the lord inquisitor’s aide, High Explicator Valdex – especially on matters of security.

  ‘Stand down protocols,’ Invioletta said. ‘Our patrol was delayed by an encounter with an indigenous lifeform. The threat has been purged and the base perimeter secured.’

  ‘Sister Superior,’ Assumpta said across the warping channel, ‘please ensure that all reports are delivered in pre-assigned transmission windows. High Explicator Valdex will expect an audience upon your return. Nemesis out.’

  Invioletta grunted, flicked the vox-switch and sat back down in the compartment. Eupheme turned to say something but Invioletta shook her head gently in response.

  It took another thirty minutes to reach the installation. Beyond the twinkling blue of arc lights in th
e storm, there was little to identify the site as a base at all. As the Immolator crunched through the old, frozen tracks of hundreds of previous patrols, the great rime-coated blast doors of the entrance began to rumble aside. Built into a hollow in a low, fat mountain and carved into the depths of the ice below, Nemesis base was all but hidden. As the transport churned its way through accumulating snow and into the cavern within, another Immolator left the base to go out on patrol. Flashing lamps at each other, the tracked transports passed, the blast doors closing between them, shutting out the storm. Compared to the black wastes beyond, the hangar within was a hive of activity.

  When the lord inquisitor had requested reinforcements from Cardinal Trazier, following the renegade attack on the ordo’s secret base on Nemesis Spectra, Invioletta and her palatine had been sent with one hundred Sisters Dominion to secure the temporary facility. As Sisters of the August Vigil, their duties included security of shrine worlds and some of the Ecclesiarchy’s most prized artefacts. On 54-Thermia, however, they were tasked with securing a frozen repository, freshly cut into the ice by Adeptus Mechanicus work crews, and ensuring the safe transport and instalment of heretical artefacts. Recovered by inquisitors and operatives of the Ordo Hereticus, these cursed items – many corrupted by Chaos and infused with xenos power – had to be kept safe from heretics and renegades who might use their potential against the Imperium. At least until the repository fortress on Lodovica IV had been refitted for the ordo’s permanent use.

  As well as the heretical artefacts and technologies, Invioletta and her Sisters had responsibility for the security of several prisoners who had been captured in the attack on Nemesis Spectra. These were renegades that Lord Inquisitor Van Leeuwen had wanted to interview himself, rather than turn over to another inquisitor or facility. He had instructed the Adeptus Mechanicus work crews to carve out oubliettes in the frozen bowels of Nemesis base for the express purpose of interrogating the renegades, to discover who it was who had attacked the Ordo Hereticus on Nemesis Spectra and why.

  As Eupheme brought the Pyra-Sanctora in to a maintenance station next to several other armoured transports, Invioletta could see Battle Sisters and Inquisitorial staff going about their business through the viewport.

  The cavern walls were ice and rock, while the centre of the large chamber was dominated by thousands of crates stacked in small mounds, with snow-lined walkways left in between. Generators struggled in the extreme cold and the ceiling lamps above the stacks filled the chamber with a flickering gloom. Sisters of the August Vigil in white plate patrolled the chamber in pairs, holding their primed flamers at the ready, while a small army of bonded servants, Mechanicus magi, priests and servitors moved through the massive collection. The crates came in various shapes and sizes, some no larger than a jewellery box while others were bigger than the Pyra-Sanctora. Each contained some damned artefact or piece of alien technology confiscated by the Ordo Hereticus from the many thousands of renegades and heretics they had persecuted in the sector. The crates were stamped with hexagrammic runes and hummed with small stasis field generators operating within.

  Ordo notaries were shadowed by servo-skulls, all working for High Explicator Valdex and the lord inquisitor. They catalogued the crates before having heavy servitors and sentinel power lifters move the containers to freight elevators that took the cargo down to frozen repositories far below the planet surface.

  As a Sister Dominion pulled aside the door for Invioletta, the Sister Superior stepped outside. Taking off her helmet, she took in the scene. It was still face-scaldingly cold in the cavern and her breath frosted on the air. She could hear the cacophony of hard work echo about the chamber. Sentinel walkers trudging by. Immolators idling. Bonded servants calling out to each other, their quills scratching on vellum and beeping off data-slates. Servo-skulls hovering overhead. Inquisitors with special interests could be heard shouting at their own notaries and servitors who stood silently by.

  ‘Have that track checked with the enginseers,’ Invioletta called back through the door at Eupheme, then to Sister Ursula, ‘and refuel the turret tanks.’

  ‘As you wish,’ the Sisters replied.

  ‘The same with your weapons,’ Invioletta said, turning to the Sisters Dominion who had exited the vehicle after her. ‘Then evening prayers, vespers and take your supper. Weapons check and meet back here for midnight patrol. Understood?’

  ‘Yes, Sister Superior,’ the squad answered.

  ‘Where will you be?’ Eupheme asked.

  ‘Where else?’ Invioletta said. ‘Making my report to the high explicator.’

  ι

  A Breed Apart

  The Redacted moved through the entrance chamber like ghosts.

  Their movements were slow but certain, their muffled servos and hydraulics carrying them through the crate stacks almost like dancers. With their plasma weaponry deactivated and concealed within their camo-cloaks, each Alpha Legionnaire clutched a silenced bolt pistol in his gauntlet. Every decision was considered. Each movement was undertaken with caution. They could not afford to be seen, and as such the warband moved as one. Their optics flashed everywhere, ensuring that their armoured forms did not enter the overlapping lines of sight of either the Battle Sisters sentries or the army of Inquisitorial repository staff.

  Entry to the installation had been difficult and no member of the squad wanted to be responsible for the Redacted being detected. Having hunted down and killed a xenos creature of the wastes, Occam had had his renegades drag the body across the ice and position it on the well-worn tracks of the base patrol. Setting off a melta bomb in the centre of the frozen tracks, before the hulking corpse, the legionnaires of the Redacted waded into the resulting crater of slush and allowed it to rapidly refreeze about them.

  When the next patrolling Battle Sisters transport stopped to dispatch what they took to be a threat blocking their path, Occam and his legionnaires had reached up from the freezing ice and tethered themselves to the underside of the vehicle. Allowing themselves to be dragged through the ice and snow, the Redacted had entered the Inquisitorial installation unnoticed. Unhooking themselves from the belly of the tracked transport while servitors attended to refuelling, the legionnaires escaped into the maze of crates and cargo dominating the centre of the cavern. One by one, avoiding the dull senses of the servitors and the pairs of Battle Sisters patrolling the periphery of the cavern, the renegades melted into the stacks.

  Inside the cavern, the legionnaires had detected no augur fields, trip beams or pict-streamers. With the base still in a state of unpacking and organisation, there had clearly been no time for such security measures. Occam led the way through the narrow gaps between the mounds, using stasis crates to hide his presence. His renegades followed, their armoured steps light and auto-senses helping them to pick their way through the cavern unseen. Hissing warnings across their suit channel and pointing out threats to one another, the legionnaires negotiated the labyrinthine stacks with stealth and superhuman patience.

  ‘Retreat and watch those corners,’ the strike master instructed under his breath.

  Moving back between two large humming containers to avoid a data-slate-consulting notary and his hydraulically clawed servitors, the legionnaires had to pass across an arterial route through the collection. Ensuring that no Battle Sisters sentries were about to cross the route on their patrol and glance down through the cargo stacks, the Redacted moved into a small cul-de-sac and knelt down in the snow.

  ‘Reznor,’ Occam uttered as a pair of servo-skulls glided overhead, scanning crate identica with their optics and recording notations with mandible-quills on draped vellum unspooling where their lower jaws had previously been. The warpsmith unhooked Beta, Zeta and Theta from his belt and activated the servo-automata. Moving with the same serpentine stealth as the warband and allowing a nest of mechatendrils to slither down out of their own skulls, the drones went hunting. Stalking the Inquisitorial servo-skulls through the crates like octopoid predators, Reznor’
s servo-automata seized the drones one by one. Within seconds the servo-skulls had been taken apart and destroyed.

  As the squad waited for bonded servants and consulting priests and Mechanicus magi to move on, the legionnaires produced their hand-to-hand combat weaponry.

  ‘Dissemble,’ the strike master hissed, provoking in the Redacted a chameleon-like change. As legionary colours, scales and cloaks turned dark crimson like the spreading gore of fresh wounds, the renegades assumed the surface appearance of Word Bearers Chaos Space Marines. Occam nodded his approval as the transformation completed. If the Redacted were to be captured by Inquisitorial forces, then Occam wanted them to be identified as Word Bearers. As far as the Imperial authorities were to be concerned, the Alpha Legion never set foot on 54-Thermia. Occam pointed with a single digit of his gauntlet: ‘Go.’

  The movement of the Redacted through the stacks and across the cavern was a thing of lethal beauty, all but unseen and unknown. Where cornered by converging Inquisitorial staff, the Alpha Legionnaires were forced to improvise with savage decisiveness.

  While Quoda and the warpsmith prised open stasis crates, taking an interest in the heretical contents, Malik and Sergeant Hasdrubal went to work with their powered blades. Grabbing bonded servants, notaries and priests with speed and power-armoured force they dragged their stunned bodies behind crates and slipped the soft crackle of their assassin’s weaponry through the flesh of their victims’ throats. Silent. Quick. Economical. Within moments, the corpses had been hastily buried in the ice and snow of the cavern floor and covered with crates or dumped in the stasis containers themselves.

  Where small groups had to be dispatched quickly, the legionnaires brought up their bolt pistols and punched silent Stalker rounds through the centre of chests or clean took off heads. During one desperate entanglement, near the cavern edge, Occam garrotted a young inquisitor with the crackling tendril blades of his power scourge. He held the agent of the Holy Ordos in a vice-like power-armoured hold, the scourge cutting slowly through the gristle, tendon and bone of his neck. All while the inquisitor’s acolytes and autosavants were put down with silent bolt blasts and the throat-stabbing thrust of blades.