Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  She glanced at Thalassa, who lay half-awake, the bandages across her gut dark with blood from a wound yet to heal. The Battle Sister was grim-faced, staring at the stone roof and listening hard, as if she could piece together the course of the fight from the sounds it left behind.

  Verity turned away, in time to see Zara look up from the unmoving form of a Sister Dominion brought in from the west wall. Their gazes met across the infirmary and the other hospitaller gave a slight shake of the head, before pulling a death-shroud up over the Dominion’s face.

  ‘They keep coming,’ said a voice through gritted teeth. Decima stood in the lee of a broken pillar, watching. ‘Even now, they are forcing us back from barricade to barricade, drawing us closer to the central donjon. The tide is inescapable.’

  Verity wondered for a moment if Decima was reliving a memory of the past, or if she was describing the battle at hand. ‘Why are you here?’ she said.

  ‘The canoness took my weapon,’ she said. ‘Forbade me to fight. Told me to stay out of the way.’ Decima shook her head. ‘I cannot be trusted.’

  A familiar sharp stab of compassion cut into Verity once more. She felt such empathy for the broken-minded woman, a deep sorrow that Decima herself seemed unable to express. ‘I don’t believe that. You came here, to stand guard over us.’

  ‘I did?’ The question whispered from her lips. ‘I did,’ she repeated. Then with a sudden jerk of motion, Decima lashed out and grabbed Verity’s hand. ‘You are a medicae. Can you excise it? You know how to cut and stitch meat, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Verity’s reply was wary. ‘Decima, what do you mean?’

  ‘Decima,’ she repeated. ‘I want to be her. I can’t be sure.’ She balled a fist and screwed it into her eye. ‘There are memories, but they are locked away. I see them like picts on a screen, but they connect to nothing. I can’t know who they belong to. You tell me I am this woman. The Watcher tells me I am not… I am…’ She turned and shouted at her invisible tormentor. ‘Stop it! Stop talking!’ Verity was startled as Decima brutally slapped her own face. A trickle of thick, oily blood began to weep from the woman’s cracked lip. She stabbed violently at the meat of her neck with her bony fingers, at the place where Tegas had shown the damaged mindshackle implant lying beneath the skin. ‘This thing! This thing makes me ill! I can’t make it stop!’

  ‘How can I help you?’ Verity asked at length. She felt a cold hollow open up inside her, fearing the most final of options would be requested. It would not be the first time the hospitaller had been forced to grant someone the Emperor’s Peace, and with every occasion of it, it was as if she had lost a piece of her soul along with them.

  At last she looked up at the survivor, and saw something inexplicable. Like the glow of plasmatic discharge around the masts of a starship in the warp, a strange halo of eldritch light – faint but distinct – twinkled around Decima’s head.

  ‘Wh-what is that?’ Thalassa had seen it too, and was dragging herself up from her sickbed.

  Decima’s answer never came. Something caught her attention and suddenly she was screaming, howling like a furious animal. The revenant threw her weight into Verity and the two of them went tumbling across the garrison hall floor as a bright light flashed in the confines of the chamber, dazzling her.

  At first, Tegas thought he might need them.

  The danger inside the necron complex was, of course, incredible. If they so much as tripped a single alert, a phalanx of warriors would be dispatched to their location and they would be terminated. The questor had thought he would need the Battle Sisters for that eventuality. Not because he believed that they could win through by force of arms – no, that was idiotic – but because they would occupy any necron reaction force for a while by fighting and dying, giving him the time he needed to slip away.

  But now he was here, now Tegas had seen and swum through the invisible miasma of raw data filling this place like rich fog… He changed his mind.

  Already he was beginning to understand the first principles of how the necron network operated. With the correct quantum transmitter, it could be accessed from anywhere in the universe, instantaneously communicating through the entanglement phenomena of controlled quanta. Modification protocols inside Tegas’s internal systems were working on adapting one of his many communicator arrays to perform just that function. Already, he had gently sampled a few benign subroutines and chanced a low-level intrusion into the dormant sectors of the complex’s invisible grid. Soon, he would be ready to try something more pro-active.

  One of the subroutines was generously filling his redundant data-stacks with mapping data that showed the scope and design of the Obsidian Moon facility. He found it odd that the necrontyr did not keep all information under walls of heavy data-security, but then they were not like the Imperium. In the nation of the Emperor of Mankind, ignorance and fear were the core tools of rulership; and the best way for the Adeptus Terra to keep the people ignorant and fearful was to keep them unaware of even the most basic of truths. In many sectors of the Imperium, it was a capital crime for a common man to possess a star map without official sanction to do so. On some worlds, it was illegal even to read without a licence.

  But the necrontyr had no reason to keep their lower orders afraid and unaware. The roots of those things – of fear and the need to know – did not exist within their greater ranks. What the Imperium hoarded like gold was freely available among the necron species. Information abounded within their networks, uncountable near-infinite amounts of it there for the taking. Millions of years of data, and Tegas’s first impulse was to want it all.

  But that was impossible. Here he was, his memory stores colossal and robust by any definition, but even he was a cup attempting to hold an ocean.

  An emulation of frustration turned to pragmatism after a nanosecond or two. He could not encompass the whole of the alien matrix, nor should he try. Even with the new reams of data he had now, Tegas would be able to count himself the most knowledgeable authority on the necrontyr in human space. If he was able to survive and escape the conflict.

  He considered that. It pleased him, the idea of returning to Mars, swollen with gigaquads of information on the alien machines. Not only would it erase all question of any past errors of judgement in his service, not only would it see him raised into the ranks of the Lords of the Red Planet, but this gift would allow him to shift the balance of his relationship against Inquisitor Hoth and the Ordo Xenos from subordinate to superior. They would come to him on bended knee. The Adeptus Mechanicus would be shown the respect it was due.

  But he needed more. Sub-brain sectors of Tegas’s mind were formulating a plan for how he would be able to weather the storm of this little war, and had been for several days. He needed only to allow the necrons to wipe out the Sororitas again and ensure he did not draw their attention. Eventually, the machines would revert back to their dormant state, and a window of opportunity to flee would open.

  He would take a prize with him, though. Something that would be a bargaining chip to anyone who came to the rescue, be it Hoth’s agents or more of the Sisterhood. The relic; he would take The Hammer and Anvil.

  Tegas listened to everything. He heard Imogen and Miriya talking. On the planet, his probes had heard the hospitaller wench spill out her story about the necron laboratorium where the Sororitas artefact had been seen, and the maps the aliens did not guard told him where that was.

  The questor began to prepare a script in his mind. It would begin with his return to the convent, alone. He would be sorrowful at the deaths of Imogen’s entire unit. He would present Sepherina with the relic as a token of that – but there would be no time to be thankful. The necrons would be coming – he could broadcast on their communications lines and ensure they were alerted – and he would slip away in the fighting, keeping the artefact for himself.

  He looked up at the towering metal walls and intricate, crystalline machinery far overhead and simulated regret. Yes, it would be necessary to d
estroy this magnificent place as well, but perhaps one day they would come back and sift the remains for something of use. Hard choices needed to be made, if he were to live through this. After all, if he perished, this would all have been for nothing.

  In a battle, it would be easy for one intelligent being to hide in the cracks while the women and the machines annihilated one another. Tegas would need to play the long game, but it would be worth it.

  They halted at a four-way junction and he paused, sampling the air with the sensors on his servo-arm.

  He felt Sister Pandora’s presence behind him. ‘Which way now?’ she asked, the alien immensity of the place lost on her.

  Tegas eyed her. She was like all the others, too blinded by dogma to appreciate the strange geometries and incredible artistry of the complex’s design. The Sisters only hated, he told himself. It was foolish to expect anything else of them.

  The questor pointed with his servo-arm. ‘That way. The corridor will lead us closer to the main power core.’

  ‘You seem certain,’ Imogen sniped. ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘I am detecting the largest outflow of energy in this entire complex above us, in that direction. It can be nothing else.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ said the woman.

  He nodded obediently, and looked away, waiting for the right moment as he walked onwards.

  The moment had come.

  For the deathmark, the passing of time was something that registered in only a distant fashion, a set of numerals that shifted and changed from one optimal to another. Waypoints, in effect, marking the path of the weapon from activation to execution to re-tasking. The cycle endless, the progression constant.

  In silence, phase potentiality altered and softened a sector of space-time inside the human complex, and allowed the necron marksman to slip out of the hyperspatial oubliette where it had observed and prepared. The alien killer emerged from the dimensional blind and activated the hunter’s mark. The datum-jewel on the target provided by Nemesor Khaygis was rich with information and perfect for the sniper’s needs. The designator transmitter inside the deathmark’s armour-hood embedded the neutrino-boson template upon the target, tuning it so the marker glow would fluoresce across five-dimensional space. Wherever the objective went, if she made it to the immaterium or into a teleportation chamber, passed through chronometric barriers or the heart of a star, it would not matter. Until the decay-pattern fell below the receptor threshold – little more than an hour by human reckoning – the energy halo would denote the inescapable eye of the assassin upon her.

  It was unheard of for a target to outlast the mark upon them. This deathmark’s own records showed only one objective of note, an eldar exarch who managed to avoid termination for a full five minutes before the kill-shot claimed him. It anticipated no such challenge from this mind-damaged human.

  The deathmark raised its synaptic disintegrator rifle and fired, unleashing a streak of compressed lepton particles across the chamber.

  Decima’s answer never came.

  She slammed Verity into the flagstones as the burning streak of energy went wide of them, claiming poor Thalassa as its victim instead.

  The wounded Battle Sister released a bloodcurdling scream as the weapon ripped through her neural tissue, destroying all synaptic activity within her brain. She crumpled, her body a nerveless sack of meat, eyes open and turned to ruby. Blood trickled from her nostrils, her ears, pooling around her head. Horribly, she seemed to be still alive, dying slowly, her legs twitching as her ruined neural matter misfired and dissolved.

  Panic erupted in the infirmary as Verity and Decima scrambled to find cover.

  ‘Deathmark!’ said the revenant. ‘necrontyr assassin-cadre!’ She scowled at the strange glow shrouding her. ‘He’s here for me. I am targeted for termination. It must be the scarab implant… It has locked on to it.’

  Verity chanced a look around the side of the fallen pillar where they hid and saw Zara and the others leading a frantic evacuation of the infirmary. Further out along the length of the garrison hall, she glimpsed a shift of black mist and dull steel. A thread-thin laser beam, bright and green, swept the room.

  ‘Zara?’ Verity called into her vox. ‘Get them out, warn the Battle Sisters! We will keep it occupied!’

  ‘No!’ Decima shouted. ‘You must go! It only wants me! The deathmark will kill its target and then fade away. Let me die!’

  ‘Was that what you were going to ask of me? A moment ago, when you said you were not sure?’ She leaned closer, her voice trembling. ‘Did you want me to… release you?’

  ‘Yes.’ The reply was instant. ‘No. Yes. No. No. Yes.’ Decima ground her teeth together and bit out the word. ‘No.’

  Another streak of energy lashed over their heads, crackling into the stonework.

  ‘But the choice is not mine to make,’ said the survivor, with sudden clarity. ‘It has been taken from me.’

  Verity’s fear transformed inside her, becoming a fire, becoming power. ‘I refuse to accept that,’ she told her. She raised the gauntlet on her hand, the construct of brass filigree and complicated clockwork unfolding like a flower of blades and needles. ‘If you are willing to die, then are you willing to risk? Do you trust me?’

  Decima screwed her eyes tightly closed and Verity knew she was enduring the silent persecution of the voice in her head. ‘I trust you,’ she said, in a small voice.

  ‘There will be a lot of pain,’ Verity told her, reaching for Decima’s neck.

  They were somewhere above the Dolmen Gate, by Miriya’s reckoning, close to the same tier where they had arrived through the first set of portals. She looked around, trying to make sense of the repetitive, identical chambers. The laboratorium is nearby, the Sororitas told herself. I am certain of it.

  It was difficult to be certain, however. The structures of the necron complex were modular in design, thousands or even millions of identical components slotting together in harmony to build the vertiginous walls and endless corridors that ranged away into the gloom. There was none of the artistry or the elegance of a craftsman’s work that characterised the way things were made in the Imperium. No artisan had designed and constructed this place; the cavernous inner spaces of the Obsidian Moon had been built with all the cold and inhuman precision of a cogitator program.

  Through vents in the steel walls she glimpsed regular flashes of light dazzlingly bright, and her skin prickled with static electricity. On the far side of that barrier, vast amounts energy had been chained and put to work powering this place. She could only guess at what kind of science could create such a thing.

  ‘Access way, here!’ called Pandora, ahead at the point of the squad. With her gun she indicated a hexagonal tunnel at right angles to the passage they were in.

  ‘Show me,’ said Sister Imogen, stepping up to take a closer look.

  Miriya turned to Tegas, who had slowed to a halt. ‘Is this the way?’ she asked him. The questor didn’t answer at once, and she repeated her question more sternly.

  At last Tegas gave a slow nod. ‘Yes,’ he said at length.

  A crawling, nagging sense of disquiet pulled at Miriya’s thoughts. Tegas seemed distracted, his attention somewhere far away. He exhibited the same behaviour pattern he had days earlier, in the convent. Then, he had been silently communicating with his cohorts – but now? What was he doing now?

  ‘Those markings,’ said Danae. She nodded at the walls of the tunnel. ‘The etchings in the black stone…’

  Miriya looked and she went cold. She had seen the shapes carved into the dark walls before. Perfectly laser-cut ovals, shield-shaped designs with a single dull ruby at the top of the circumference. She heard the faint crunch of metal on rock.

  ‘No…’ She spun back towards Tegas. ‘Do not–’

  The ovals buckled in and inverted, and Imogen and Pandora were directly below them. Danae cried out, but it was too late. The walls of the tunnel – not an access way at all, but some sort of storage g
allery – came alive as iron insects boiled out of the stonework where they had been quiescent.

  A tide of chattering scarabs surged forwards at waist eight and Pandora spun away, knocked out of the path by the Sister Superior. Imogen’s gun cracked once as she got off a single shot, and then she was swallowed up by the writhing mass of insect-forms.

  Tegas battered Miriya with the heavy grasping pincer at the head of the servo-arm growing out of his back, and the blow knocked her off-balance. Suddenly the questor was fleeing, claw-feet flashing across the tiles as he raced away. She hesitated for a heartbeat, unsure of what target to prosecute.

  The other Battle Sisters engaged the massive scarab swarm, the horde that somehow Tegas had been able to summon. The wave of writhing metallic beetles came on and on, and did not slow. In the middle of the mass a shape moved, and to her horror Miriya saw Imogen stagger back to her feet through sheer force of will.

  The scarabs covered her like a coat of whispering chainmail. Blood ran in rivers from her bare flesh, and her power armour sparked and jerked where the machines were biting into the myomer muscle bunches and drive-trains. She beat at herself, clawing at the things as they ripped her with a hundred sets of razor-sharp mandibles.

  Imogen’s right eye had already been gouged out, but the other glared forth and found Miriya, angry and accusing. Over the buzz and whine and wet bone-crunch of the scarabs feasting on her, the Sister Superior managed to give voice to one final command.

  ‘Don’t fail!’ she choked, gurgling as a bright froth of blood fountained from her lips; then in the next second she was falling back into the mass of the swarm, the machines eager to take her to pieces.