The formation of a cry left his lips, but it was abruptly cut off as he touched the event horizon of the portal and vanished into nothing, an emission of bright energy marking his passage.
A callous grin formed on Imogen’s face for a moment, then faded. ‘Squad ready, milady.’
‘Make certain he keeps his word.’ Sepherina bowed her head. ‘Blessings of the Golden Throne be upon you, my Sisters. Ave Imperator.’
‘Ave Imperator,’ chorused the Battle Sisters.
‘Good luck,’ said Verity, a forbidding tightness clasping at her chest.
Miriya paused at the threshold and threw her a nod; then she was stepping into the portal and light-flashes filled the chamber.
Decima watched the women go, one after another, her hooded eyes distant and unreadable.
The first assault had been a slow, steady approach. The necron commander had programmed it so, spending the attrition of his lesser troops to gauge the placing and the potency of the human defence forces inside the outpost.
The second attack was fast and fluid. In the cover of the low clouds of sand kicked up by the heat of the sunrise, the enemy approached the convent and broke into a swift march as they came within visual range of the defenders. Lychguards, immortals and warriors went in formation, flowing around rock outcroppings and rises in the dunes. They moved like a horde of locusts.
Leading them was an iron monster.
The Triarch Stalker was a towering, three-legged machine that walked on limbs that resembled great scything blades, the arrow-sharp tips planting pits in the sand where they fell. A cluster of sensor discs gave the impression of a spider-face across the mechanism’s central body, accentuated by manipulator talons that drooped like open mandibles. A triarch praetorian rode high in the control nexus above, all function from the necrontyr soldier subsumed into the greater body of the war machine. The first few shots – beams fired from long las-rifles wielded by the remnants of Tegas’s personal tech-guard – were absorbed harmlessly by the invisible panes of dispersal shields that hung around the stalker.
The maw of a glowing crimson cannon swept back and forth, searching for a suitable target, and then with a howl of flash-burnt dust, a rod of punishing fire leapt forth. The heat ray angled upwards and brushed the battlements over the main gate, where Tegas’s shooters had made their gun-nests. Rock turned dull crimson and flowed to lava, and the tech-guard were reduced to screaming torches.
It was the signal that the final clash had commenced. Every Battle Sister on the line went weapons free and opened fire on the necrons. Warriors and immortals returned their hate with the precise threads of flayer-beam, denaturing stone or ashing flesh wherever they found their marks. The lychguard led the way, blocking killing shots with the dispersion fields surrounding their long kite shields. With their warscythes, they sliced cleanly through lines of hastily-laid razor-web and anti-infantry spike traps. The stalker crabbed sideways across the approaches, dodging throbbing pulses of plasma as it tuned the heat ray to a wide dispersal and sprayed fire into the places where the wall had already been partly breached.
Up on the battlements, Sister Helena dropped as a shrieking hail of green lightning sliced the air where she had been standing. She cursed and scrambled forwards, pulling her bolter tight to her breastplate.
‘Report!’ she called out, as she spotted Sister Isabel. ‘My vox is down.’
‘All vox is down,’ Isabel corrected. ‘Don’t ask me how, but the machines have neutered all the frequencies.’ She had to shout to be heard over the sound of the other Battle Sisters around her, all of them firing down into the enemy advance in a cacophony of snarling bolters.
‘I feared as much. It is the Monolith,’ Helena said grimly. ‘Did you see it out there? Like a castle set adrift, in the distance at the rear of their lines… They broadcast electromagnetic fields, disrupt our comms. They’re trying to make us fight in isolation.’
‘They outnumber us,’ said Isabel. ‘Five-, perhaps ten-fold. Runners from the south and west walls say there are more coming in from across the sands.’
‘Bah!’ Helena spat and executed a pop-up shot, finding and beheading an immortal marching below them with a pinpoint bolt-round to the throat. ‘The God-Emperor damn us all if we let these clockwork toys repeat their desecration of this place!’
A woman’s scream sounded from behind her, and Helena turned in time to see a Sororitas tip over the edge of the wall and fall to the rocks below. The upper half of the Sister’s torso was a blackened ruin, trailing meat-smoke and embers. Seconds later, another heat beam slammed at the air, and the halo of it thundered over them both.
Isabel hissed like an angry cat and Helena swallowed a jolt of pain as the train of her hair crisped and caught aflame. She beat out the fire with the palm of her gauntlet and grimaced. ‘That bloody walker,’ growled the veteran. ‘We have to kill it.’
‘With what, song and sermons? It is shielded.’
Helena nodded bitterly. ‘The Tybalt is long gone, and with it our hopes of reinforcement or evacuation…’ She trailed off.
‘The latter would never be set to pass,’ said Isabel. ‘The Adepta Sororitas gave ground here once. We would dishonour those who died to do so again.’
‘Aye, that’s truth. But there’s another way,’ Helena replied. ‘How many grenades do you have?’
‘Four remaining.’
The veteran thrust hers into Isabel’s hands. ‘Take mine too, bind them, synchronise the fuses.’ She chanced a look over the battlement; the stalker was shifting in place, planting its feet and making ready to fire on the wall. If it widened the breach, the line would collapse. Helena watched the jerky motions of the crested necron wired into the machine’s core, visible behind the shield panes.
‘What are you planning, Sister?’
‘A daring and foolish thing, for an old crone like me. When the moment is right, pitch the grenades at the shield. I’ll do the rest.’ She didn’t wait for Isabel to reply. Instead, Helena broke into a sprint along the line of the battlements to the next tower, a burnt stump that had been torn open by sustained streaks of enemy fire.
The necrons bracketed the air around her with green flame and Helena felt it tear the air molecules from her lungs, filling her nostrils with acrid ozone. She made it to blackened nub of rock that was still searing hot to the touch and rolled to a ready position. Her marksmanship was unparalleled within the Order, or so the veteran liked to believe. Now she was going to prove it.
Isabel did exactly as she was meant to. A spinning cluster of tethered krak grenades described a narrow arc down towards the dorsal panels of the Triarch Stalker, and at the perfect moment, they detonated. The force of the blast was enough to weaken the quantum shields for an instant – long enough for Helena to lay a lethal three-round burst on the praetorian pilot.
The necron war machine lowed like an animal and stumbled off its axis, treading on a dozen of its own kind as it lost balance. Helena heard Isabel and some of the other women on the firing line give voice to a cry of triumph, but even as they did so, she knew they were premature.
The stalker was wounded, gravely indeed – but despite their desperate plot they had not killed it outright. Instead the mechanoid blundered straight into the wall and accomplished with sheer brute velocity what it had wanted all along.
With a noise like slow, tortuous thunder, the battlements cracked, sagged, and gave way. Helena saw black-armoured figures falling as the stone blocks lost cohesion and came apart from one another. The stalker collapsed to its knees and lay twitching, but like a brood spider engulfed by its hatchlings, the lines of necron soldiers swarmed over the carapace of their fallen battle engine and poured into the cracks in the convent wall.
Helena felt ice in the pit of her stomach and she dragged herself up, reloading as she went; and for the first time in what seemed like hours she looked back into the outpost proper.
The middle ward and the courtyard were a mass of smoke and gunfire, and t
his breach point was only the newest of several others. There were silver skeletons in droves, green lightning shrieking back and forth, screams and dust and death everywhere she laid her gaze.
The second fall of Sanctuary 101 had begun.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She steeled herself for the sensation once again, but nothing Miriya could do was enough to prepare her for the experience.
The giddy, sickening rush of motion-without-motion, the lurching twist that set her perceptions reeling, they engulfed her as she fell headlong into the portal. In that timeless non-space, she was no longer entering a doorway, but tumbling down an impossibly infinite well of light and sound, a void through which it seemed she would fall forever. Miriya was twisted inside out, exposed to dimensions that were unnatural to the human animal. She held on to her faith as she had before, and prayed until it was over.
The strange translucent ice left behind upon her by the force of the transit crackled as she took the next step. Metal rang under her boots and she angrily brushed at the thin rime of frost over her flesh, spitting out flecks of it. Her bare skin felt raw and wind-burnt.
‘Katherine’s Eyes…’ muttered Ananke, crouching close to the ground. ‘What in Hades was that?’
‘Just the opening of the door, Sister.’ Miriya offered the dour woman a hand up, and she took it.
‘When we are done here, I will walk back,’ came the reply, and the blank stubbornness of her words made Miriya’s lips split in a harsh grin.
All around them, the other Battle Sisters were recovering, gathering their wits and probing the gloom for enemy contact. Miriya blinked droplets of melt water off her eyelashes and cast around, taking in their point of arrival.
Behind them, a perfect square cut into the side of a small, black pyramid was rippling like a pool of water, but in defiance of gravity it stood upright. The glow it cast showed pyramids ranged away in a line before them, and Miriya had a jolt of recognition.
‘The Monolith yard, where we fled before,’ she began. ‘We’ve returned there.’
‘No,’ Imogen said, panning around with the beamlight beneath the barrel of her bolter. ‘Not the same place. This is another storehouse for their infernal machines, near-identical in form and function.’
As Miriya considered, she realised Imogen was right. There was far less ambient light here, the shadows deep and brooding, and the dormant Monoliths were of a different livery. She picked out rich lines of gold detailing lost under thick layers of dust.
‘Do you see that?’ said Pandora, pointing. ‘A glyph, there. It repeats on all of these craft.’ She indicated a shape that resembled a broken arrowhead, the tip blunted, the shaft barbed, with a circle cut into the blade.
‘I saw that before,’ said Miriya. ‘The creature we encountered, the cryptek… It bore that mark upon it.’ She tapped her chest-plate to indicate the location, her voice trailing off as she realised something was amiss. ‘Where is Tegas?’
The questor was nowhere to be seen. Each of the Battle Sisters activated their lamps, throwing stark white beams out through the dusty air. Behind them, the portal in the Monolith was fading, losing its power. Within a few seconds, it had reverted back to solidity, resembling little more than a pane of vitreous glass.
‘The damned cog was only a moment ahead of us…’ said Danae, scowling. ‘Did the machines take him?’
‘Do you hear that?’ Pandora had walked ahead of the group a few steps. She held up her hand for silence.
Miriya caught a sound in the dead air of the vast chamber: a peculiar, hollow tone, like a rattle. She pointed. ‘It came from over there.’
The Sister Superior hefted her gun and gestured for the squad to move forwards. ‘Tactical stance,’ ordered Imogen. ‘No weapons fire unless I give the word.’
Miriya fell into step behind Pandora and followed the slender woman through a narrow gap between two of the dormant necron craft.
Pandora glanced back at her, her pale brow furrowing. ‘What is that sound?’ she whispered.
The peculiar echo gave the noise a machine-like quality. It reminded Miriya of a running motor or the working of gears. They emerged into the next row of Monoliths and she realised that it was the rhythm of laughter.
Tegas was walking slowly down the line of the silent pyramids, his hands, his servo-arm, his mechadendrites extended to their full span, tracing lightly across the angled surfaces of each Monolith he passed, stroking them. Faint green sparks showed here and there, flicking between the alien machines and the questor. He tipped back his hooded head and made the stuttering motor-laugh again. The moment disquieted Miriya. It seemed improper to witness the Mechanicus lord expressing joy for such alien stimulus.
‘Tegas!’ she hissed. ‘Step away!’
He halted, turned and faced them, as Imogen and the others filed out through the gaps between the pyramids. ‘This…’ he began, shaking his head. ‘This is incredible.’ The questor looked up towards the high, iron-dome sky above them, where emerald lights moved back and forth in silence. ‘Oh, my dear Sister Miriya, if you could see with my eyes…’ He waved at the air, as if he were clutching as things only he could perceive. ‘Layers of data etched into the atmosphere itself. Quantum shift matrices, electromagnetically-encoded mnemonics, gardens of exotic particles singing in symphony…’ Tegas described a slow pirouette, folding in his limbs to prayer poses. ‘Is this what they perceive all the time, I wonder? It is like swimming in an ocean of data, one within another within another within another within another–’
‘Questor!’ Imogen snarled at him, and he fell silent. ‘Whatever machine-sorcery you are toying with, cease it! If we alert the xenos to our presence, we will be lost before we can begin!’
Tegas gave her a mocking look. ‘Sister Superior, think for a moment. We have just arrived inside this complex through a direct dimensional shunt corridor, forced into connection by brute means. If the necrons were awake down here, they would have sensed that immediately and come in their droves!’ He opened his hands, taking in the silent stone craft. ‘Anything? No. I have already intuited that this entire quadrant is in enforced dormancy, perhaps awaiting a greater battle to be fought. We have nothing to fear.’
‘All the same,’ Imogen went on, ‘I gave you an order. You will obey it.’
Tegas stiffened. ‘The Sisterhood have always looked down on my kind. You are happy to have us maintain your guns, forge your power armour, build your tanks and your starships… But you baulk at the idea of seeing us as equals. Your canoness’s treatment of me, disgracing my rank as if I were a slave to be cast about without a care! That is intolerable!’ His vocoder crackled, almost as if it had difficulty processing something like real emotion, real anger. But then his tone changed again. ‘But I forgive it. I am glad she sent me through first. The riches here are a thousand times the reward for that indignity.’ He wandered back towards the closest Monolith, reaching out to touch it once more. ‘So many riches,’ he cooed. ‘I want to take everything in this place to pieces, see how it works…’
‘I never thought his kind were capable of greed,’ Ananke said, out of the side of her mouth. ‘Isn’t that too human for them?’
Miriya stepped up and grabbed Tegas’s hand. The motors in the cybernetic arm whirred as they struggled against the Battle Sister’s enhanced strength. ‘Remember why we are here,’ she told him. ‘This sortie is not for your amusement. Your life rests in our hands.’ She raised her bolter.
Tegas relented and stepped away. ‘I remember,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Forgive me. The shock of the unusual… But you’re quite right, of course. We have a mission to complete.’
‘The power core,’ said Imogen. ‘Lead us to it.’
He bowed and set off, Pandora following close behind.
As Imogen drew level with Miriya, she leaned close to speak to her. ‘We have a mission to complete,’ she said, mirroring the questor’s words. ‘The relic. The hospitaller saw it in the laboratorium space you described. Ca
n you find it again?’
Miriya looked up, studying the gantries and giant moving components of the complex. ‘Perhaps. If I can orient myself, find one of the shifting platforms to the upper tiers.’
‘It is a… secondary objective.’ Miriya could see it cost Imogen to say that. ‘The Saint burn my eyes from me for speaking these words, but the destruction of the Obsidian Moon must take precedence. It is better we deny the relic to the future than save it only to allow these machines to blacken the stars.’
She knew the Sister Superior was right, but still Miriya could not stop the pulse of shock in her heart as the meaning of the order sank in. The Hammer and Anvil, truly lost, truly destroyed? Miriya wondered if even a lifetime among the Repentia would be enough to repay the guilt for allowing that to happen. ‘It won’t come to that,’ she managed.
Imogen’s hard manner returned. ‘Don’t be naïve,’ she said, marching on.
The noise of the war came down the corridors and it sounded like the ending of the world. Over the moans of the injured and the whisper and buzz of medicae tools, the crackle of near-distant bolt fire and alien energy weapons was constant. Every once in a while a massive explosion would make the walls tremble and quake, sending streamers of dust down upon the heads of the hospitallers and their charges.
The Sisters of the Order of Serenity had moved their temporary infirmary out of the exposure of the courtyard and into this chamber, a long, curved room with a vaulted roof, studded with pillars. It had been a garrison hall when the convent had first been built, and a handful of the sleeping pallets that remained in disarray had been repurposed for the injured among the Battle Sisters.
Verity, Zara and the others worked diligently. This was combat-zone protocol, where the wounded were stitched back together as swiftly as possible and sent back into the fray; but in truth there were very few who needed their skills. Most of those who took a hit from the necron guns died of it almost immediately, and those that did not were lying in shallow comas, their bodies shocked almost to the point of total physical shutdown by the raw trauma of a near-hit. She used a valetudinarian gauntlet to run over the flesh of a flash-burnt workganger whimpering in his drug-induced sleep. Scalpel blades, auto-sutures and remedial probes clicked out from mountings on the fingers of the metal glove, tracking over his skin. Using the gauntlet was like second nature to Verity, the device as much a part of her as a boltgun was to a Sister Militant.
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