Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  The necrons were everywhere she looked, fighting in hand-to-hand scrambles with Battle Sisters or engaging them in gun duels through the smoke and fire. She realised she was standing next to the grand altar, and lying at the base of the stone dais there were a dozen dead women who had perished at the foot of their Saint. Scattered among them were emptied weapons, ammunition boxes… And a silver-grey cylinder that resembled a scroll made of metal.

  Thrumming a bass note so deep it seemed to shake Verity’s ribcage inside her flesh, the Monolith progressed up the rubble-strewn aisle towards her, relentlessly closing the distance. She started towards the iron scroll as a fan of emerald laser light swept back and forth across the chamber. The beam crossed her and she gasped, expecting to be burned alive, but it was a harmless scanning ray, emitting from a device on the necron commander’s throne.

  The beam fell on the scroll and hesitated. The necron in the cloak raised his crackling gauntlet again and released a stream of green fire that reduced the device to molecular vapour.

  Verity’s stomach knotted with shock. The alien device was the portal to the Obsidian Moon, and although the manner in which it worked was beyond her understanding, the hospitaller knew that without it Miriya and the other Battle Sisters would be trapped. ‘You have killed them!’ she shouted, and fired on the alien commander. The mass-reactive rounds keened harmlessly off the fuselage of the Monolith, but still she pressed on. ‘No more! In the God-Emperor’s name, no more!’

  ‘No More! No More!’ From all around her, Verity’s cry was taken up by Battle Sisters who emerged from the smoke to lend their arms to her impassioned attack, and salvoes of bolt-shells and melta blasts crashed into the Monolith’s dense hull.

  A woman with a brazen sword in one hand and a bolt pistol in the other charged headlong past the hospitaller, the rich blood-crimson of the sanctified Aspiriate cloak at her back flaring as she ran. Canoness Sepherina sprinted up a fallen section of the roof, canted at an angle like a ramp, bringing her level with the battlements of the rumbling Monolith.

  As Verity looked on, blazing with righteous fury like the Saint she so revered, Sepherina threw herself into single combat with the necron commander.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Tegas’s internal chronometers, accelerometers and positioning sensors were finely-tuned pieces of archeotechnology, and operating in concert they were capable of telling him at any time, in any place, of his exact location against the greater skein of the universe.

  But not here, and not now. Energies out of balance with the questor’s understanding of space-time assailed him, and he was – for want of a better term – giddy. His claw-like hands found the safety rail running alongside the thin gantry where they had emerged, and he clung to it as if on the deck of a ship in a high gale. Tegas was tilting as his neural matrix tried to reorient itself against new fields of micro-gravitation. The Sisters of Battle, with their crude human sense organs, were barely affected by the shift in the invisible energy that webbed the air around them. They moved with stealth, silent and steady. The hard-faced one with the meltagun – Danae – glared at him accusingly, and motioned with the barrel of her weapon for him to keep moving.

  They could not see what he could see, the threads of neutrinos and bosons liberated and roiling all around them, the streamers made of high-energy particles so rare and charmed that their existence was only theorised by the high thinkers of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  All this emitted from the perfect white cube some five hundred metres below them. Like the access gantries that criss-crossed the core chamber, it was suspended by nothing, hanging there in defiance of both logic and physics.

  The chamber itself was a vast tetrahedron, four huge triangular slabs over three kilometres in length along each edge, assembled together into a pyramid-like structure. Walls of dull, mirrored metal rose up all around them, broken here and there by wide slots that opened out into the darkened service spaces of the Obsidian Moon. Each apex was an exposed cluster of crystals and metal rods, their purpose unknown. Beyond them, over their heads Tegas could see flat transport platforms bearing quiescent Monoliths and Ghost Arks, and far below, through to the space where the damaged Dolmen Gate was under repair.

  The cube floating in the middle of the chamber resisted all attempts from his mechadendrite sensors to take a read of its surface. Crackles of blue light formed a shifting aurora around the object where the output of a powerful electromagnetic field prevented it from interacting with anything larger than an air molecule. He could see busy tomb spyders moving on the lower walkways, and the floating shapes of Canoptek wraiths drifting around monitor podiums. Occasionally they would pause and adjust something on one of the control panels. The questor guessed they were there to regulate the flow of energy to and from the cube.

  ‘No defenders,’ said one of the women, in a low voice. ‘It may be a trap.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Danae. ‘Pandora is right. This place should be crawling with the xenos.’

  ‘They’re not here,’ Miriya told them. ‘They sent their armies away.’

  ‘Where?’ said the one called Pandora. But as the question left her lips, she must have realised the answer.

  Tegas had glimpsed the nemesor’s order-memes floating at the edges of the necron communications matrix when they first arrived. Almost every active combatant unit had been committed to the attack on Sanctuary 101, in an act of massive military excess. To do so was an almost human act of resentment and hubris, and Tegas found that to be most interesting. Perhaps the necrons were not as devoid of emotional response as they appeared to be. He noted the possibility for later consideration.

  His gaze was drawn back to the core. The cube. He could not help but turn every optic cluster, every sense module he had, onto it. Behind that barrier was a power source as primordial and as lethal as the forces of creation – a singularity. Tegas heard the women wondering aloud as to the nature of it, and for a nanosecond he considered attempting to explain the phenomenon to them. But they were only soldiers, and their minds, however tactically capable, were simply too limited to understand the awesome power before them.

  It was no surprise to Tegas that his sensors returned him only gibberish. The singularity was an elemental effect so uncommon that what mankind knew as the laws of physics simply ceased to apply within its influence. That the necrontyr could shackle such a power to their will was incredible, but then this was a species that apparently dated back millions of years, to an era when things half-recalled by race memory and distant myth walked the stars. The xenos had shown they had knowledge of forced spatial distortion, dimensional transit, teleportation, quantum gravity… The questor would have given much to plunder the mind of one of their scientists, if such a thing were possible.

  The singularity was an artificially-created event in space-time, shrouded by some form of exotic material acting as its event horizon. The energy differential between this plane of reality and the one where the singularity existed as an orbifold was being siphoned off, becoming self-reinforcing, bleeding cosmic amounts of radiation into its shell – or so he theorised. The science of it was staggering, and again Tegas felt hungry looking at the object. Somehow, the necrons had manufactured this thing and turned it to power not only the altered dimensional spaces of the Obsidian Moon, but also to the activation of the Dolmen Gate. He did not wish to contemplate what might occur when the necrons finished their repairs on the Gate and opened it. A day, a year, a century; however long it took them, in the end the Imperium would suffer for it.

  Tegas realised that he was being spoken to, and with effort, he disengaged himself and turned away. Sister Miriya was standing over him. ‘Tell me how to destroy it,’ she demanded, nodding towards the object.

  He reacted as if he had been slapped. The brutality of her order repelled him. ‘You do not understand,’ Tegas told the woman carefully. ‘To de-power this magnificent creation will take time.’ He pointed down towards the lower levels, to the monitoring platfor
ms where the wraiths were working in ignorance of being observed. ‘We will need to isolate each control station, perform a staged shutdown…’ He relished the idea of it, of getting into the heart of the necron machines and dismantling their code. ‘You will have to protect me as I work. It may take several hours, but I believe I can deactivate it.’

  The dark-skinned Battle Sister made a spitting sound and looked away.

  ‘What if that is impossible?’ said Miriya. ‘What if we are forced to destroy these… platforms?’

  Tegas shook his head. ‘If the singularity core enters an uncontrolled collapse, it will annihilate…’ He spread his hands. ‘All of this.’

  Miriya gave a slight nod, and peered over the edge of the rail. ‘Thank you, questor. You may consider your obligation fulfilled.’ She stepped away and called out ‘Grenades!’ as she snapped krak munitions from the clips where they hung at her belt. Tegas blinked as the rest of the Battle Sisters mirrored her actions. She set to work twisting a fusing dial near the trigger pin. ‘Set timers for staggered detonations.’

  ‘No! No!’ Tegas’s voice caught up with his panicked thoughts and he snarled, grabbing for Miriya’s arm. ‘No, you can’t! You will doom us all!’

  She shrugged him off. ‘Have faith, questor,’ Miriya said coldly. ‘I’ve done this sort of thing before.’ She glanced at the rest of the squad. ‘Ready. Ready. Release!’ A rain of grenades were dropped over the edge of the gantry and they fell towards the glowing, perfect cube.

  This time Tegas shouted so loudly that the echo of his voice bounced off the metal walls and down far enough for the wraiths to detect the sound. They were already lifting, anti-gravs propelling them up to deal with the intruders, when the first of the krak grenades detonated. It destroyed part of a lower gantry, and the walkway buckled, dropping down to collide with the halo of the electromagnetic field.

  The Battle Sisters were already firing, raking bolt-shells and melta blasts towards the monitor platforms that Tegas had indicated. He pounded his fists on his head in ferocity. ‘What have you done? You stupid, ignorant animals! That is something rare and faultless, and you are–’

  Ananke backhanded him and Tegas collapsed to the metal decking. His sensors went wild with random, contradictory readouts as the women methodically destroyed every governance system, every monitor and control unit they could reach from their high vantage point.

  He crawled to the edge of the gantry and dared to peek over the edge. Monstrous discharges of unrestrained force lashed at the necrons below them, ripples of gravity waves tearing supports from the walls and twisting walkways like paper. The flawless white cube rippled and began to crumble. As Tegas watched, wide-eyed, a rain of precipitated non-matter began to fall upwards, peeling away. He glimpsed a burning flare of radiation emerging beneath, but he could not look away.

  He reached out a hand towards the singularity, and the light radiating out from it shone through the metal of his cyberlimb; for a moment he saw through the steel and plastoid, glimpsing the intricate workings within. He struggled to understand.

  That was all he had ever wanted to do, to understand. Everything on this road had been towards that end, in the name of Mars and to the glory of the Omnissiah.

  Tegas was lost in the sight, barely aware of movement around him. The women were running, fleeing back the way they had come, out through the walls of the tetrahedron chamber. He watched the radiant glow shiver and brush against the walls as it cut loose, growing larger as it slipped its chains. Great gouges of metal simply vanished, reduced instantly to atomic particles.

  ‘Questor,’ Miriya had to shout to be heard over the sizzling crackles of energy. He looked up and found her standing before him.

  ‘You… are a weapon,’ he told her. ‘I see it now. All of you, weapons, blunt instruments of a blind church. You care only for vengeance.’ He tried and failed to stagger to his feet as the gantry rocked. ‘There are so many riches here! The necrontyr hold the keys to a cosmos of understanding!’ Tegas found his full voice and bellowed at the Battle Sister. ‘But you would rather shatter it all, and for what? In the name of a few corpses and a zealot four thousand years dead?’

  ‘I gave you a chance to redeem yourself,’ she told him, her eyes never leaving his as fire lashed around them. ‘Salvation.’

  ‘I brought you here!’ he spat. ‘Gave you what you want! Is that not enough?’ Tegas held out his hand. ‘Are you satisfied now? Help me up. At least I may live to tell of this!’

  ‘I promised you salvation,’ Miriya replied. ‘Not your life.’

  The Battle Sister raised her bolter, and the last sound Tegas heard was the roar of the shot.

  Locking her gun to the mag-plate on her armour, Miriya kicked the traitor’s twitching corpse over the rail and watched it spin away into the frothing mass of energy below. Cassandra was screaming at her to run, and she took her Sister’s advice, breaking into a sprint as shockwaves resonated across the chamber.

  Katherine, show me the way, she said to herself, the gantry shaking beneath her boots. In truth, she hadn’t expected to live this long. One look at the device in the core and she had known what would become of them. Perhaps the cog had been correct, perhaps if they had been granted the time it might have been possible to render the entirety of the necron complex power-dead and inert. But this was a war now, not a scientific experiment, and all the lies and the subterfuge were boiling over into battle. The only way now was to destroy, to attack whatever stood in their path and strive for victory.

  Or death.

  That was the nature of the Sisters of Our Martyred Lady. They were revenge made manifest. In this place, at this moment, Miriya and the others were the answering echo to the screams of the women who perished twelve years ago. The necrons had come to kill, but rather than punish them, men of weak character in the Imperial hierarchy had allowed their gaze to be turned by the prospect of alien knowledge. Decima’s ruined face flashed through her thoughts and she pushed the image away. It sickened her to consider it; the lesson this place had taught her was that nothing with its roots in the ways of the xenos could be trusted. It could not be tamed, or appeased, or allied with. It could only be killed.

  We cannot suffer the alien to live.

  ‘Miriya!’ Cassandra shouted her name in a warning, and she dared to look over her shoulder.

  The wild overspill of energy had punched through the triangular walls and raked the upper tiers. As the Battle Sister watched, great slabs of decking were liberated into free molecules by lightning strikes as big as warships. Monoliths, still glowing with internal power, their dimension gates shimmering, fell into the chamber through cracks in the walls and came crashing down towards her, ricocheting off the dull metal.

  She was almost at the hatchway when a black pyramid cut through the gantry she stood on, ripping her footing away from under her. Miriya grabbed at the rail as it twisted and bent, and suddenly she was dangling over an ocean of white as the cube came apart. The light threatened to burn her eyes from her head with its glare. She saw the Monolith touch the expanding bow-wave of the energy field and it cracked like glass.

  A strong, slender hand enveloped hers and she saw Sister Pandora dangling above, held in train by Cassandra and Ananke. ‘Come,’ she shouted. ‘The book! We must return with the book!’

  She hadn’t expected to live this long. Miriya had been ready, they all had been ready. The Battle Sister imagined a catastrophic and immediate liberation of energy from the necron core after she gave her command – a single moment of white light as precursor to awakening at the God-Emperor’s side. Better to perish and deny the Saint’s holy tome to the galaxy than risk its loss again. Katherine would understand. She would forgive her.

  Would she?

  ‘Sister! The mission is undone!’ Pandora screamed. ‘Take my hand!’

  Miriya reached up and let them help her the rest of the way.

  In the spaces beyond the wrecked gantry, the air was close and thick with ozone. Th
e outermost layer of the power armour worn by the Battle Sisters was cracked with heat damage, and the crimson of their combat cloaks was marred with ugly scorch marks from the nuclear fires they had fled.

  Danae led them to the spiral riser that threaded up through the decks, and they ran on in the hellish half-light, ignoring the rattle of the radiation detectors in their gauntlets and the inferno boiling beneath them. Ethereal fire rose like floodwaters, forever at their backs. Gravity itself began to malfunction, and they loped as they fled, desperate not to stumble, fall and be lost.

  They passed tiers where entire legions of necron warriors stood in silent formation, their command trains broken, without even the sentience to seek an escape as the Obsidian Moon came apart around them. In other places, clusters of flyers swarmed like flies in a bottle, trapped inside vast staging areas that were sealed tight by emergency lockdown commands. Stasis tombs that dwarfed the size of the greatest cathedrals of the Convent Sanctorum were consumed by the rippling fires of the singularity as it grew towards a point of critical mass. The necrons slumbering within them had been there for millions of years, since the time of the War in Heaven. Now they would never wake again.

  Up in the iron dome-sky far overhead, sections of the complex suspended by gravity shunts were suddenly cut loose to implode under their own impossible weight. Tesseract chambers holding isolated pocket dimensions exploded open and devoured themselves, unable to retain any stability in this reality.

  The Battle Sisters crossed paths with a unit of triarch praetorians, and a brief, furious combat ensued as both sides engaged knowing that they were fighting in a burning house. Blasts of emerald light from the triarch rods of covenant cut the stale, smoke-choked air, but the Sororitas had the advantage of numbers and sheer fury. They left the machine-forms crippled or disintegrating, but the fight had cost them time.