Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  Miriya turned her back on the engagement and broke into a sprint, her boots clanking on the steel floor as she went after the questor.

  The deathmark ignored the other humans as they fled the area of engagement. None of them appeared to possess anything approaching a weapon, nothing that the assassin’s external sensors registered as capable of penetrating its armour-hood.

  Unhurried, it marched across the vaulted hall with the disintegrator long-rifle raised to the shoulder, the discharger array in the muzzle humming with power. The target designator glowed in the virtual field of the necron soldier’s vision, shifting back and forth behind a low barricade of fallen masonry. The energy dispersal was unusual, outside standard parameters, and the assassin consulted the datum the nemesor had provided on the target organic once again for clarification.

  It was an atypical humanoid, heavily modified with necrontyr technology. The hunter’s mark flickered around a key element of the modifications, a mindshackle scarab module. Khaygis had supplied all data on that device as well, and it had made tracking the target a simple matter of homing in on the unit’s emissions.

  But now the reading was attenuating, becoming irregular. The marker glow was bisecting, behaving as if it were in two places at once.

  The deathmark halted and lowered the rifle. This was unusual, unprecedented. Two minutes had elapsed since designation. Time was passing now, out here in the universe, and the target was not yet terminated. These factors were converging. The kill needed to be made sooner rather than later.

  A sound split the air; a brutal scream of pain. The assassin noted it and continued onwards. A slit in reality opened briefly and the deathmark sealed its disintegrator back in the dimensional oubliette. It returned with a secondary weapon – a silver hyperphasic sword capable of cutting through all but the densest matter. The works of the dynasty’s assassin cadres were not always conducted at extreme range; sometimes the close-in kill was the better method. The necron marched towards the fallen pillar, raising the sword.

  The glow of the hunter’s mark split in two and went in opposite directions.

  The brass gauntlet on her hand wet with blood, Verity bolted from cover and ran for the door. The broken, twitching scarab device was still clutched in her fist, the needle-like legs kicking and pressing against her grip. It glowed with the same ethereal light that had framed Decima’s head, and she was very much aware that holding it made her as much a target.

  Then she made her mistake, the kind of error that a Battle Sister would not have indulged. She looked back.

  She had to. Removing the scarab like this, on the spur of the moment without any adequate preparation, with only the most basic of tools and a prayer to the God-Emperor for success… It was more than likely that doing so had given Decima the very mercy death Verity had argued against.

  She saw no sign of the injured, bleeding woman. The hospitaller thought of the raw, open wound on Decima’s neck, where she had peeled back the meat and scarred skin down to the bone…

  There was a chance, she had thought, that the deathmark would be confused by the forcible removal of the marked implant, perhaps even enough to defeat its targeting logic. That seemed foolish now.

  The necron was right behind her, and she stumbled as it slashed at her with a glittering sword.

  She lost the scarab in her fright. It clattered to the ground, where it began to wander in a circle, leaving a trail of Decima’s blood behind it. The deathmark gave it a dispassionate glance and stamped on it, destroying it outright, killing the glow.

  For a moment she thought it would kill her too, but the blank skull-face of the necron, polished to a mirror-bright sheen, only showed disinterest. It turned away, looking for Decima once again.

  The deathmark found her. The woman came screaming out of the shadows, her scarred face and neck wet with newly-shed blood. With the hunter’s mark on her, the glow made Decima into a terrifying sight; she was a spectre of vengeance, the unquiet spirit of her dead Sisters sent to exact payment on those who had killed them.

  In her hand, Decima had a piece of rockcrete larger than her head, and she slammed it into the Deathmark with such wild violence that the xenos assassin staggered under the blow.

  ++You cannot win++ howled the Watcher. ++You can never silence me++

  She rained down attack after attack upon it with the might and the pace of the feral, breaking the stone on its shiny metal ribcage as the alloy caved in and broke.

  ‘I will not fall to you,’ Decima shouted. ‘You are gone! I have killed you! Leave me!’ She was screaming, insane with her emotions. All of it had been bottled up inside, unable to find release; but no more.

  ++Never++ came the reply. ++I am in your head. I am in your psyche++

  The alien fought back, swiping with the sword, cutting air as it tried to slice the revenant in two. Decima feinted and came close, inside the deathmark’s guard. Before it could react, she grabbed the ball-joint of the necron’s arm and pivoted, forcing it against itself. The weight of the assassin-mechanoid shifted and it was unable to arrest the fall.

  ‘She tore out the machine,’ hissed the woman. ‘I don’t have to hear you any more. I take back my soul! I take it back!’

  Decima made sure the deathmark fell slowly, inescapably, onto the upturned tip of its own blade. With a scratching hiss, the hyperphasic sword entered its metal skull beneath the chin, and gently worked its way up to pierce the armour-hood.

  ++No++

  She glared at her own blood-stained reflection in the deathmark’s polished face, listening to the voice in her head die into silence.

  ++no++

  ‘I am not you!’ she spat venomously at it. ‘I was never you! Never!’

  The necron did not respond, the emerald light in its eye sockets fading to nothing.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The sandstorm was drawn to the valley by the static flashing into the air, as the blue-white flickers of tiny lightning charged the atmosphere. The clouds of oxide dust swirled and mingled with plumes of black smoke from untended fires, the hellish gloom they cast ignored by the invaders as they marched ever onwards. Around them, burning vehicles, shredded pergolas and the blackened husk of the mobile explorator module stood mute witness to the thoroughness of the alien assault. Human dead lay where they had fallen, ignored by their killers and abandoned by their comrades in the rush to fall back to safety.

  A bright hail of gauss-beams, tesla blasts and accelerated particle streams cascaded across the open courtyard, the angles of attack slowly shifting as the necrons advanced. The howling bolts of fire impacted the sheer, rounded sides of the last untouched structure inside the convent proper – the keep.

  The dark red stone of the towering donjon glittered with a heat-haze effect thrown up by a void shield generator. The energy barrier deflected the torrent of death, great ripples shuddering in the air all around it as the device laboured to protect the last stronghold on Sanctuary 101. Once, the force wall had been part of the arsenal of a great Battle Titan, and in the aftermath of the War of Faith in which it was lost, this component of it had been bequeathed to the Order of Our Martyred Lady. It had served them well for three hundred and eleven years, but now it teetered on the edge of a catastrophic overload, stressed beyond all limits.

  With each wall breached, the Sisters had fought until they were about to be overrun, using every weapon at their disposal. They set mines and flame pits, they used converging fire and counter-siege tactics that had been ancient before the days of Holy Terra’s Old Night. The necrons were destroyed, but the advance did not cease. The ranks that followed marched over their crippled fallen, and those that were obliterated simply vanished in crackles of green fire. For every one that was destroyed, another was there to step into the breach.

  The canoness ordered the Battle Sisters back, and back, and back, until at last there was nowhere else to go. Now they waited inside the keep, the Sororitas and a tiny handful of terrified survivors from the workgang
party and Questor Tegas’s Mechanicus contingent.

  From inside the transparent, purple-hued barrier, wounded and weary Sororitas looked out through gun slits as the inner ward of the convent became a mass of silver alloy skeletons. The necron numbers seemed endless, and their cold desire for battle relentless.

  Then, somewhere up on the third tier, a Battle Sister began to sing. The unmistakable refrain of the Fede Imperialis echoed down the corridors, and with each woman who heard it, a new voice was added to the choir. Soon, every Adepta Sororitas within the walls of the keep was at one with the words, the harmony of them swelling in a prayer. Above the crash of beam fire, the battle-hymn rose high.

  On the other side of the void shield, warriors and immortals in massed ranks concentrated their firepower on specific points of the energy barrier, loci that the Canoptek wraiths had scanned and determined as the ideal points of overload for the attack. A ring of steel remains ringed the edge of the crackling force wall, shredded pieces of attackers and a single ill-fated deathmark that had attempted to penetrate the barrier through hyperspatial transition. The humans had been careful, raising the power that coursed through the void shield until it was dimensionally impregnable. But the intensity required to do so was monstrously high, and it would exact a grave cost in time.

  The nemesor observed from his war-throne as his command Monolith cruised over the rubble that was all that remained of the outer walls. He sampled the data returns from tomb spyders scuttling around the perimeter of the void shield, reading their scans. Khaygis raised a taloned finger and at once all gunfire within the courtyard ceased. The only sounds were the crackle of static discharge, the thrum of contra-gravity motors, and faintly, of human voices in one of their peculiar tonal harmonies.

  He needed only to linger. Even if the massed necron army stood here, silent and waiting, there would come a point when the human barrier would reach the end of its operational lifespan and fall. The nemesor did not need to expend any more energy. The march of entropy would do the job for him. He made a quick calculation – in a few solar rotations, he estimated, no more.

  Of course, that time could be reduced to a single Kaviran day with sustained bombardment, perhaps even hours if he placed his Monolith’s particle whip and flux arc cannons to the deed.

  Or it could be dealt with now, at this very second.

  Khaygis raised his hand and made a motion, a gesture like beckoning. A new sound rose to join the others – grav-motors, but of a different calibre, faster and higher pitched. A flight of Tomb Blades droned out of the dust clouds at the edge of the valley, flanking a third craft that drifted slowly across the sands, its arched prow turning towards the central keep.

  The ground troops parted, creating a path for the barge to follow. Made of blackened carbon and bright alloy, the craft resembled an inverted steel ribcage, and at the stern a triarch praetorian sat wired into a battle chair, surrounded by glowing planes of systemry and function. Slung beneath the barge, running almost the entire length of it, was a cylindrical mechanism that held spirals of lethal radiation inside a maw crested with collimator vanes. Its designation was etched in glyphs along the rise of the scorpion-tail sail above the central deck. There were many names for the craft, honours and dedications presented by the Sautekh dynasty for all the battles it had won them. If its description could be translated into the poorly-nuanced tongue of the humans, they would have named it a Doomsday Ark.

  The barge halted and as the Tomb Blades made a cursory strafing run against the force wall, the great cannon along its spine moaned with power. Bright spears of discharge flashed from heat vanes, fusing sand to glass beneath it.

  When it was time, the nemesor closed his open claw into a fist, and the Doomsday Ark fired. Such was the power of the blast, it momentarily drained the potential of the barge, sending it dropping to the earth as it recovered; but the searing bolt of actinic plasma it unleashed roared across the courtyard like a spear made from the flesh of a star.

  Those Battle Sisters not behind their helmets or quick enough to seek cover were instantly and permanently blinded. They did not see the writhing charge of energy meet the haze of the void shield, did not see the massive release of contrary power as one overwhelmed the other.

  The barrier protecting the keep was shattered with a single blow, and monumental back-shock resonated through the generator’s beam-vanes. Down in the basement levels, the generator exploded, killing the operator crew and its guards. Fire caught and bedded in there.

  Silent but for the crunch of their metal feet on the sand and the rubble, the necron army began to advance on the naked, unprotected citadel, raising their guns to the ready. From every weapon slit and barred window, the Battle Sisters opened fire, lines of tracer, flame and plasma sleeting down at the wall of alien steel.

  Khaygis watched. In a few moments, the Doomsday Ark would be returning to active power levels, and soon after that it would have enough energy for a second blast from the main cannon. The nemesor plotted the best points of attack. The weapon would be able to bite chunks out of the thick stone walls of the central donjon, perhaps even undermine it enough to force a total collapse of the structure. He could hold back his troops, let the long guns do all the work. The humans would eventually perish.

  Except…

  Except that did not seem like it was enough. Khaygis reached deep to find the root of his thought and could not place it. He could only be certain that it was not enough to stand off and assail the human stronghold until it was ruins. These fleshthings needed to die with terror in their hearts, seeing the faces of the necrontyr as they perished.

  The nemesor would not compute the same errors that Cryptek Ossuar had allowed to progress. The humans had to perish, with a zero degree of survival. He would see to it personally, through the eyes of his soldiers. Through his own claws, if need be.

  Khaygis transmitted the kill command, and the walls of the keep were breached. He watched his troops swarm inside, re-enacting the massacre from twelve years ago with swift and perfect efficiency.

  How long have I been a traitor? The question rolled around Questor Tegas’s mind as he ran, letting the autonomic pathing processors in his scuttle-claw feet follow the route he had programmed for them.

  Treason is merely a matter of dates. The words rose up from some deep memory store, something that Tegas had absorbed from a data stack centuries ago, the origin and context of the truism lost to him.

  He didn’t truly consider himself a turncoat. To be that, he would need to go against the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars and the Omnissiah, and there would never be a moment in the questor’s life when that would occur. All weakness in that regard had long ago been burned from him.

  No, what he did now was the opposite of treason. He was committing a supreme act of total allegiance, freeing himself from the burdens that surrounded him so that he could return to the Mechanicus as a herald… And as a hero.

  Of course, some distasteful acts were required. The women, for example. He had to divest himself of the Battle Sisters for his plan to reach its conclusion. It surprised him how easily he was able to remotely interfere with the lowest levels of the necron hierarchy, beaming signals into the ambient network all around him. He was elated that it had actually worked, and already redundant subsections of his thought-process unit were busy evaluating the import of what had happened. Tegas had alerted the scarab-mechs, raised them up from dormancy to active attack mode. Could that possibly mean… By the Machine-God, what if I could command them?

  The possibility was delicious. For a brief second, Tegas imagined himself entering the Hall of Forges in Olympus Mons with a phalanx of necrons as his slaves.

  He pushed the thought away. This was no time to become distracted. He was deep within alien territory, undefended, on borrowed time. Tegas steeled himself, marshalling his thoughts towards the search for the prize – the Sororitas relic. With it in his possession, he would have all the coin he needed to pay his way to glory.

/>   The laboratorium was exactly as he had heard the hospitaller describe it to Canoness Sepherina. The questor slowed and moved as stealthily as he was capable, extending antennae and probes from his body through sewn holes in his robes. He broadcast a low-level electromagnetic signature to mimic the same outputs he had detected from a necron warrior, mouthing a prayer that the alien sensors inside the complex would not be intelligent enough to see through his digital masquerade.

  He approached a hexagonal door and it broke open in segments. Tegas pointed an eye-cluster back over his shoulder to ensure he was not being followed, and then advanced. At one moment, one of the females – Sister Miriya, he recalled – had been on him, but she had been waylaid by a warrior patrol Tegas had managed to avoid.

  Dead now, he decided, and entered the chamber.

  The dark stone and the sharp-cut walls stood out in shades of white and pale green to Tegas’s enhanced eyesight. He found the sensor strip on the floor, and with a burst of anticipation-analogue, he let the chamber illuminate around him.

  Tegas set himself to data-gathering mode and drank it all in. He looked through hundreds of eyes at the glassy globes and the organic remains they held in stasis, the holographic panes of alien data accompanying them. Some of the containers showed signs of recent damage and he made a negative noise. Doubtless that was the work of the Battle Sisters, blundering around in here like clumsy, ignorant children.

  He found a display of broken armour pieces and dead firearms, and there among them, discarded and ignored, was a grey, dust-caked metal drum etched with a fleur-de-lys.

  Tegas ran his hands over the container, scanning it for micro-fractures, energy bleed, booby traps, anything untoward. The sensors in the tips of his fingers registered nothing, and gingerly he gathered up the capsule, turning it over.

  It was undoubtedly the correct item. He found the bloodlock and the personal sigil of the previous canoness of Sanctuary 101, embedded in the seal that had remained undisturbed for over a decade. Tegas measured the weight of the object, and could not escape wondering what he would find if he opened it.