Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  It had been Ossuar’s manoeuvrings in the Royarch’s court that provided the solution. The cryptek used his influence to ensure that the suggestion did not appear to come from him, but in the end it was only he who could direct it.

  The Stormlord could gather his fleet and depart; but someone would need to remain behind, to stand as custodian to the Obsidian Moon while the repairs progressed. Ossuar nobly offered himself in service to that role, to watch over the reconstruction of the Dolmen Gate and the slumbering army, freeing the war fleet to move on and seek new objectives. When the work was done, the fleet would return,

  And if, in the performance of this duty, Ossuar was allowed to indulge his own interests in the dissection of organics and experimentation upon them, then so much the better. Alone, unburdened by the drive to battle, he would have his time.

  But trust did not come easily to the Stormlord, and indeed it would be a foolish Royarch who allowed a cryptek to stand as de facto master of such an important – if still inert – resource. Rebellions had emerged from such mistakes, and it was the nature of harbingers like Ossuar to seek ways to aggrandise themselves.

  Khaygis was the watchman left to oversee Ossuar, placed in suspension while his soldier-mechs followed the cryptek’s every move. Should he go against his master’s wishes, Ossuar would be nullified, his biopattern engrams deleted and his machine-frame repurposed as a warrior drone.

  ‘All this I know,’ said the nemesor. ‘I was there. Show me what happened while I slept.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Ossuar opened more of his memories, and braced himself for the inevitable torrent of invective he knew would come.

  After the fleet departed, Khaygis had soon grown weary of watching the cryptek study the dusty halls of the lunar complex, and tormenting the handful of survivors from the human colony to their death-state. Eventually he chose to embrace the Sleep until such times as the Dolmen Gate was ready. That had been nine solar cycles ago, by the local reckoning.

  And now Khaygis saw what had gone on beneath his slumber. Ossuar’s experimentation and the agonies he had inflicted upon the survivors. The arrival of more organic ships, drawn by the death-cries of their colony. Humans from those vessels, allowed to grub in the dirt and touch the relics of necrontyr greatness.

  The nemesor’s claw slipped around the Cryptek’s iron neck. ‘What have you done, fool?’ he demanded. ‘You allowed the organic vermin to return to the planet and you did not exterminate them?’ Something like confusion entered his tone as Khaygis scanned the rest of the data. ‘More of them? Why, Ossuar? What reason could you possibly compute to let these parasites run free?’ The ephemeral, invisible data stream between them abruptly ceased as the general cut himself off.

  ‘They fascinate me,’ admitted the cryptek. There was little point in denying it. ‘I saw no harm. They were ignorant of us.’ He cocked his head. ‘We were once like them. The recursion of evolutionary patterns is most compelling. I learn so much from deconstructing them.’

  Khaygis emitted an angry buzz and shoved Ossuar away, stalking towards the annex. ‘I see now I should never have taken the Sleep, even for a moment. You have treated this duty like your own private science experiment.’ He glared at him. ‘You harbingers always think you are subject to no rules but your own!’

  ‘It is only my boundless curiosity that–’

  The nemesor gathered up an ornate fire gauntlet and silenced Ossuar with a flicker of green flame though his fingers. ‘Curiosity?’ he echoed. Khaygis reached for a tachyon arrow launcher and secured it around his other wrist. ‘That is nothing but the cloak about your desires for power above your station.’ He pointed a talon-finger. ‘You have put us at risk. What if more of these organics are coming here? With a fleet of ships? Enough to destroy us?’

  ‘They are only humans.’ Ossuar could not keep the mocking tone from his vocoder. ‘Parasites, as you said. What threat are they?’

  ‘If they are no threat, then why did you wake me?’ Khaygis boomed. ‘You are in error and you know it full well! And now you have created this mess you panic and come to me to repair the damage for you!’

  ‘Panic is an unproductive emotional state that I do not emulate,’ Ossuar insisted. ‘The need for it has long since been edited from my consciousness.’ He turned as heavy footfalls signalled the arrival of the two lychguards. The cryptek realised that Khaygis must have summoned them via beam-signal.

  The dark blades of the warscythes in the hands of the towering guardians turned towards him, directed by the nemesor’s silent commands. ‘I should have you decompiled,’ said Khaygis.

  ‘And when the Stormlord’s fleet returns, what would you tell him?’ Ossuar retorted. ‘That I suffered a damaged actuator and accidentally fell upon an upturned blade?’ He pointed at the warscythes. ‘The Royarch expects much. The repairs to the dolmen will never be complete without my stewardship!’

  At length, Khaygis nodded. ‘Know that you remain intact only because of that truth.’

  Ossuar allowed himself to bow slightly. ‘I beg forgiveness for my presumption. I see the error, indeed. I ask you for your aid in terminating the organics.’

  ‘At last, a directive I can compute.’ Khaygis waved the lychguards away and came close to the cryptek. ‘How it must sear you to be forced to emulate submission to me. What analogues of resentment do you process at this moment, Ossuar?’

  ‘I exist only to serve the will of the Royarch,’ replied the cryptek.

  ‘Then do so by following my every command as if it were that of the Stormlord himself,’ Khaygis grated. ‘And curb your own petty obsessions until the work is done. Once the Gate is repaired and the army here wakes, you will have enough humans to cut upon and dissect to sate your curiosity.’

  The hood fell, and Verity heard the collective gasp as the Sisters in the chapel looked upon the revenant’s face and beheld the damage there.

  Slowly and carefully, the woman shrugged off the tattered, ragged robe and picked at streamers of cloth, so old and dirt-stained that they tore like strips of sloughed epidermis as she peeled them from her arms and her throat. She mumbled to herself, so low and hollow that Verity could not make out the words.

  A human female, indeed, but mutilated by callous intention. Implants of alien design, some of steel, others green crystal or metallic stone, emerged from pockets of sunburnt flesh or pressed up from beneath translucent skin. The works that had been done to her lacked the ritual nature of bio-organ embedding used by the Adeptus Astartes, or even the embrace of machine parts practised by Tegas’s precious Mechanicus. She was a tormented woman who carried her tortures with her, inside her.

  ‘Throne and Blood,’ whispered Sister Pandora. ‘How can she still be alive?’

  ‘How indeed,’ accused Tegas. ‘The scars, canoness. Do you see the scars on her?’

  Verity looked, and she saw. Self-inflicted marks along malnourished limbs and bare skin, lines and circles that mimicked the arrangement of the necron glyphs she had seen inside the alien complex.

  ‘An agent of the xenos, after all…’ Imogen was saying. ‘I was right to suspect.’ She raised her boltgun.

  Suddenly, the hospitaller was stepping forwards, putting herself between the revenant and the muzzle of Imogen’s gun. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘No, you will not do this!’

  ‘Step aside, nursemaid,’ said the Sister Superior. ‘Truth must out, and force will see to it. First the hybrid and then the adept.’

  ‘No!’ Verity shouted the denial again, her voice booming across the chapel. ‘You are so quick to hate you do not take a second to think! Do you not question how she came to be here, or who she is?’ The young woman pointed at the sorrowful, emaciated figure behind her. The revenant’s cheeks were wet with tears. ‘You must look with better eyes than that!’

  ‘They did that to her,’ said Miriya. ‘The necrons… The cryptek.’

  Verity crossed to the great altar, careful to keep herself in Imogen’s sightline, and found what she was look
ing for among the fresh votives and prayer tapers; a data-slate. She gathered it up and crossed back.

  ‘From the moment I glimpsed her face two nights ago,’ she began, paging through the slate’s contents, ‘I knew. When I saw her within this chamber, I knew this woman was a kindred spirit.’

  ‘I…’ The revenant bowed her head. ‘I don’t know why I came here.’

  ‘I do,’ Verity replied. ‘This slate contains the memorial record of every Sister who perished at Sanctuary 101, all the faces and names of the dead we honoured outside.’ She halted, a gasp escaping her lips as she found what she was looking for. ‘I was uncertain before… But no longer.’

  The hospitaller pressed the slate into the cracked, dirt-smeared hands of the other woman. ‘What… is this?’ she asked, looking down at the device. Teardrops splashed across the glowing screen.

  ‘This is you,’ Verity told her, her heart hammering behind her ribs. She turned back to face the canoness. ‘Her name is–’

  ‘Decima,’ said the revenant, the word catching in a sob. ‘My name is Decima.’

  On the slate, an unblemished mirror of her ruined face stared back from a decade past.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For a moment, Miriya’s attention was stolen away from the task before her and she stared at the living dead. The woman – her Sister in arms? – wept openly, gentle sobs echoing across the Great Chapel.

  No one seemed able to speak. It was as if the revelation was so powerful that it silenced them all, robbing them of the power to challenge it.

  But then Imogen finally gave voice and the moment shattered like glass. ‘Sister Decima is dead. Perished along with all our kindred. There were no survivors of Sanctuary 101.’ She made the statement a command.

  ‘I beg to differ,’ Verity replied. With deft, practised motions, the hospitaller opened the narthecium pack on her belt and produced a needle, with which she pricked the revenant’s bare skin. She ran the needle into a slot on the auspex she carried and let its internal cogitator work, whispering a litany of operation to it. The device gave a chime and she held it up for all to see. ‘A blood match. I swear on the Golden Throne, she is Decima.’

  ‘I… am Decima,’ mumbled the ragged woman.

  ‘What she was is irrelevant,’ Tegas insisted. ‘What she is… is a necron plaything.’ He glared at the canoness. ‘Ask her something, milady. Go on. Ask her a question that only an Adepta Sororitas of this convent could answer.’

  Sepherina’s glower shifted and she eyed the weeping woman. ‘Calm yourself,’ she told her, ‘and tell me the name of the abbess who commanded here.’

  Miriya saw Decima’s face tighten in pain as she tried to dredge up the fragment of recollection. It seemed to wound her just to make the attempt.

  ‘That…’ She paused, panting for breath. ‘I don’t…’ Abruptly, she gave a savage jerk as if swatting away an invisible insect. ‘Shut up!’ she hissed.

  ‘Who do you speak to?’ Verity asked gently.

  ‘I don’t know!’ shouted the woman. Then she looked to Sepherina and repeated the words with deep sorrow. ‘I don’t know. Her name… is lost to me. So much is lost to me. I am all that is left.’

  ‘Convenient,’ Tegas muttered.

  ‘They cut it from her,’ Verity interposed. She pointed up, at scarred skin over the revenant’s skull. ‘We cannot know what they took.’

  ‘Or what they left behind,’ said the questor darkly.

  Miriya’s patience for the adept was running thin and she shoved him with the muzzle of her bolter. ‘Run your mouth some more. I dare you.’

  Sepherina stepped forwards, ignoring a warning look from Sister Imogen, and ran her hand over the woman’s face. ‘Is it possible?’ she wondered aloud. ‘A single survivor? Alive after all this time?’

  ‘He did not want to kill us all at once, milady,’ came the reply.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The cryptek. Ossuar. The one who tormented me.’

  Nearby, Sister Pandora ventured a nod. ‘Human experimentation. The xenos abused her flesh so it could better learn how to kill us.’

  ‘I am… so sorry…’ said the woman, trembling beneath Sepherina’s touch. She was barely holding herself together, and Miriya could see Verity’s eyes were wet with sympathetic emotion.

  ‘Decima.’ At last the canoness said the name. ‘How can we know she is you? The adept, curse him, speaks the truth.’ Sepherina held up her chaplet-dagger. ‘It would be safer to kill you.’

  ‘It matters little now,’ came the reply, thick with emotion. ‘I weep for us all. We are all dead.’

  ‘Her mind is broken,’ said Imogen. ‘Let me end her, mistress. I will make it quick. A kindness.’

  Sepherina raised her hand to the Sister Superior, but did not break eye contact with the revenant woman. ‘Do you mean to threaten us?’

  She gave a slow shake of the head, her gaze dropping until she was glaring at Questor Tegas. ‘I mean to tell you,’ she began. ‘His kind are to blame. I watched them come, watched them cut open the desert and the rock as if it were theirs to toy with as they pleased. Before… Before, the machines were sleeping. Once before they had awoken and fought one another, and we died in the crossfire.’

  Tegas said nothing, his synthetic face impassive.

  ‘His kind have disturbed the machines.’ She pointed a skeletal finger at the questor. ‘The ones in the canyon, his servants… I studied them, tried to stop them. Killed one or two… But I could not prevent it. They have drawn the attention of the necrontyr, stirred them from stupor and indifference… Just as the Sisterhood did before. ’ She shuddered. ‘We paid with blood then. The cost will be the same now.’

  ‘If that is so,’ Tegas said, refusing to remain silent. ‘Then why now, hybrid? What have you done to stir up the hornet’s nest?’

  ‘Not I,’ she insisted. ‘You did this. You should have stayed away. The cryptek… He ignored all the clumsy digging in the sands, as long as it was of no consequence. But no longer.’ She looked back at the canoness. ‘Heed my warning. The machines will rise from their stasis-tombs. Many more of them. They will not return to their sleep until this world is devoid of all alien life.’

  ‘They are the aliens!’ Imogen snarled. ‘Not us!’

  ‘Not so,’ said the woman, shaking her head. ‘Not here.’

  Her words brought the chapel back to the long silence once more. At length, Sepherina turned away, retracting the blade into her chaplet. The canoness glanced at Sister Imogen. ‘Send a message to the Tybalt. Tell the captain to return here immediately.’

  ‘The ship has been gone for several days,’ noted the Sister Superior. ‘They may have already entered warp space.’

  ‘Even if they are still within the Kavir system, a vox-signal may not reach them in time,’ added Pandora. The party dispatched to reconsecrate the convent had no astropath among them. The Sisterhood were well-known for their abhorrence of even the sanctioned slave-psychics used by the Adeptus Terra, and it had been a point of honour that no such being would be among them on this hallowed duty.

  ‘Send it anyway,’ Sepherina told them. ‘The Imperium must be warned. Inquisitor Hoth was gravely mistaken. The necrons are at large on Sanctuary 101.’

  ‘They never left,’ mumbled Decima.

  Imogen eyed her. ‘If this one is to live for the moment, then we need to know all we can about the threats we face here. She must tell us what she knows.’ The Sister Superior shared a look with the canoness that only Miriya seemed to notice. A silent communication passed between them, and the Sororitas wondered once more what they had yet to speak of to the rest of the Sisterhood.

  ‘Her mind is damaged, anyone can see that,’ said Pandora. ‘How can we know truth from illusion?’

  ‘There is a way,’ Verity replied.

  The great machine moved about the business of warfare, gantries and rails interlocking so that carrier frames could approach the great cog-shaped embarkation deck and deposit their loads.


  Ossuar tuned his expressionless iron face up to watch as an Annihilation Barge detached from a magnetic clamp and floated on humming impellors to the metal decking. The nemesor rode down with it, and he was dressed in his opulent battle robes and chain-tresses. The gold and silver of his matched battle gauntlets glittered in the half-light.

  Khaygis’s hooded gaze found the cryptek and the warlord graced him with a nod. ‘Come to watch, harbinger?’ Before he could reply, the general continued. ‘Stay out of my way. You have interfered enough.’

  Ossuar bowed slightly, spending his irritation in the tight grip he kept on his abyssal staff. The black rod whispered with power, but he kept it in check. Even the smallest exhibition of defiance here and now could have dangerous consequences. It was better to let the braggart strut about and have his posturing. At the end of the matter, when the humans had been exterminated, Khaygis would grow bored again and drift back to slumber… And Ossuar would be in charge once more.

  When the first warning had come – when it had been made clear that the idiot organics were playing with the scroll they had happened upon, ignorant of the great powers it contained – the cryptek had sent out a phalanx of warrior drones with simple kill orders and assumed that would be enough. His error had been to underestimate the ingenuity of the humans, specifically the females who against all odds had turned his attack back upon itself, and infiltrated the complex.

  Ossuar would never admit the blame for that rested with him. He knew it, but he would never voice it where Khaygis could hear. Any admission of error would be taken by the general and used as a knife to carve him with. He could not afford to weaken his position, so it was with cloaked resentment that he allowed the nemesor to strut and snarl.