Then the Moon was gone, falling into a pit of itself, imploding. Violent blasts of light marked the last expenditures of energy as the vast complex – with its billions of slumbering soldiers, its mammoth storehouses of weapons, battlecraft, its databanks packed with ancient knowledge – was utterly obliterated.
Khaygis felt a terrible emptiness open up in his thought-space as all the quantum filaments binding him back to the complex were suddenly severed. He saw it happening all around him, every necron losing their connection to their point of origin. In the web of the network, the phantom cords that bound them were flailing in the void, severed and bleeding.
Too late the nemesor realised what would come next. The torn dimensional links had nowhere to go, nothing to anchor themselves upon. With no terminus, the communion links entered a destructive feedback loop. The single driving impetus of the connection – to never be broken, to never allow a necron to truly die –overwhelmed all other functions of his army.
Like a wave of lightning, a cascade of green sparks advanced over the torsos of each necron on the planet’s surface, every warrior and war machine suddenly caught in the wake. The dead-man’s switch in their heads tripped, and the nemesor’s horde began to phase out, sucked into a dimensional non-space that existed in the voids between realities.
As one, the necrons emitted the same piercing death cry, unable to stop themselves from being dragged into the undertow of the moon’s destruction. Khaygis struck out, reeling from the effects. He was aware of other high-level warfighters trying to resist the compulsion of dissolution, the lychguards trying desperately to rewrite their own mind-code to ignore the recall order, failing and vanishing in flames.
Khaygis saw his command Monolith consumed by a shrieking bolus of jade fire, and watched his phalanx of immortals shudder into their own personal storms of self-destruction. He would not fall like this. He could not. He was chosen of the Stormlord, soldier of Eternity, the nemesor and meatkiller.
The necron general reached into his own digital matrix and found the compulsion-code dragging at him, begging him to submit to the recall command. An ordinary necron, one left after biotransference without the higher mental functions of a high born, would never have been able to hold it off – but Khaygis did. He perceived the communion links stretching away into the void, at last finding some unknown Tomb World hundreds of light years away. But he would not go, not yet. He could not. There was still a deed to be done.
‘How does it taste, xenos?’ spat the human commander, sensing his distress. His optic sensors penetrated her armour and her flesh. Her wounds were so grave she could not even rise to offer challenge to him. All that was left to her was to goad him with words, as useless as that was. The female nodded towards the halo of remains in the sky, the flecks of debris already catching fire as they entered the planet’s atmosphere. ‘My Sisters broke open your spider nest, shattered it! We have killed you! This is the God-Emperor’s will!’
Khaygis set his emotive-emulation of anger into a repeat cycle and allowed it to shiver through him. He unshackled his logic blocks and let himself feel for the first time in aeons ‘We are necrontyr,’ buzzed the nemesor, ‘We are undeath.’ He raised up his damaged gauntlet and brought forth the fires. ‘And this galaxy belongs to us, not the corpses that you worship.’
‘No!’ The scream distracted him from the moment of execution. The nemesor glimpsed the other female, the ineffectual one reeking of panic and fear-sweat, daring to raise a weapon towards him. A gunshot rang out and the bolt shell slammed into Khaygis’s chest, shattering the chains of ornate rank and high office dangling about his metallic neck.
He edited the pain-sense out of his experience, deleting it along with the recall command string. All around him, his soldiers were disintegrating or falling useless, rendered broken by the destructive meddling of these human animals. Fire rose all around, casting a hellish glow over his gleaming steel epidermis.
It was then that Khaygis saw the organiforms had surrounded him. The pitiful remnants of the human defenders, the females in their crude powered battle armour with their primitive ballistic firearms. All of them had hate in their eyes, oceans of it drawn up from fathomless depths of fanaticism. The nemesor understood what that was, now he had allowed himself to experience the same thing. It only confirmed what he had always believed: that flesh was worthless, a lesser thing that infested space like a disease. They had cursed him with their malaise, just as they had the foolish, arrogant cryptek.
A moment before, and the war had been in the necrons’ favour, but now his army were ghosts and it was Khaygis who found himself overmatched. Some distant part of his long-dead flesh-self wondered if this was the Stargods exacting their payment from him, reaching up from the grave for the betrayals of the necrontyr.
He recognised one of the organics, a female with a scarred face, black hair and a heavy, bladed weapon in her grip. ‘I am undeath,’ he told her, glaring as the woman and her cohorts drew into a ring around him.
‘We will put that to the test,’ said the Battle Sister, and without a word of command, all the humans came in to attack the nemesor at once. He gave them fire and arrows in return, but like his soldiers, they were ceaseless and fought as if they were beyond pain and injury. They were fuelled by madness, by faith, by something the xenos could never quantify.
With blades and war-axes, with clubs and stones torn up from the fallen masonry all around, they fell upon Khaygis and destroyed him.
EPILOGUE
‘Once, a Novice Cantus came to me, troubled and uncertain. A slip of a girl, only a few strides down the eternal path leading her to the Golden Throne. She asked me a question. She asked me how we can ever truly understand what faith is.’ The words carried in the cool night air. ‘I told her that there is no coin to measure what we feel in our hearts. There are no scales upon which we might weigh the faith of one woman against another. There is only duty and blood. There are only deeds and words. There is–’
Lightning flashed in the clouded sky and deep thunder growled, as a spear of yellow sunfire lashed down from high above and struck a point far distant, out in the desert. A low rumble echoed over the landscape as the lance barrages fell from orbit.
As the echo faded, the reading continued. ‘There is only the service to the God-Emperor, and the price that demands from each Sister can only be known by Him. But know that whatever fears must be faced, whatever hardships endured, that price is forever worth its full cost.’
With great reverence, Sister Miriya closed the cover of The Hammer and Anvil, and bowed to the book. She handed it to Pandora, who took it and wrapped the holy volume in a silk shroud. It was unusual that a woman of only a Sister Militant’s rank be allowed to speak in such a ceremony, but the memorial service had been at the express command of the canoness, and she had ordered it so.
Sepherina nodded from across the memorial garden, standing stiffly among the lines of tiny statues, cradling her ruined arm. She was still recovering from her fight with the necron general, and it would be many months before she was fully healed. Now that the starship Tybalt had returned with a support fleet from the Seltheaus system, there had been talk that she might be taken off-planet, to a world with a better valetudinarium, but Miriya knew better. Sepherina would never leave Sanctuary 101 again. She had sworn it so among the ruins of the Great Chapel on the day they had endured the necron invasion, sworn it on the names of all the dead.
Another streak of fire punched through the cloudbase and on the horizon there was a smoky flash as a far-off mesa was obliterated. The Imperial Navy had taken to the task of erasing all trace of the xenos from the outpost with lethal precision, bombarding every site in Adept Ferren’s records from low orbit with lance cannons and megalaser salvoes. The pulverised rock kicked up into the atmosphere would forever alter the ecology of the planet, but it was a small price to pay to expunge the necron taint.
In the weeks that followed what the women were now calling ‘the Second Battle
of Sanctuary 101’, survival had been difficult. Only a handful of them had remained, and some died from their wounds as they waited for rescue. But as their creed commanded, the Sororitas endured. This was the full cost.
Transports came with new cohorts of Battle Sisters, and the cycle began again. The daughters of Saint Katherine did not give up their ground. They had come to this world to rebuild, and they would do so. To conscience anything else was to admit weakness.
Others came, too. Delegations from the Adeptus Mechanicus in search of Tegas and Ferren, who feigned horror at the so-called ‘unauthorised works’ being undertaken by their adepts, as if they knew nothing of them. Miriya had been there when those men had arrived. Sepherina did not even allow them to step off the ramp of their shuttlecraft. She told them to turn around and return to Mars. She invoked ancient rules and declared Sanctuary 101 to be Mausoleum Valorum – a war grave world. She told them that nothing on this planet belonged to them, and if they ever dared to come grubbing in its sands again, the Order of Our Martyred Lady would see them all die for it.
The Mechanicus were not the only ones. It was rumoured that stealth craft from the Ordo Xenos – perhaps even the personal ship of Inquisitor Hoth himself – had passed close by and gone on their way, unwilling to test the patience of the Sisterhood any further.
A single, final lance beam flickered, casting white light over the faces of the assembled Battle Sisters, and the low rumble washed across the tumbledown walls of the convent. The replacement workgangs had been ordered to cease their reconstruction while the ceremony was taking place.
It was the last deed, the closing of the book on the horrors that had happened here. Nothing of the alien enemy was to remain. Every fragmentary scrap of necron metal that had been left behind, even the ink-black voidblade wielded by poor Decima, all had been loaded into a cargo pod and shot into the Kaviran sun under the eyes of the Sisters.
Sister Verity had been the one to pull the lever that sent that pod into the star. It was right and fitting for the task to fall to her, as the capsule contained something of far greater importance than alien debris. Decima’s body, forever marred by the machine-implants that had been forced upon her, was buried in the solar fires. There, her flesh would find liberation to join her soul at the God-Emperor’s side.
Miriya looked down at the votive statuette before her. Like many of the memorial stones, it had been damaged in the fighting, but the names etched upon each one were still clearly visible, and the eternal lights burning inside them glowed strong. Decima’s name had been joined by others – Imogen, Thalassa, Xanthe and Kora, and many more. She looked up and searched the faces of the women around her. Ananke and Danae both gave her solemn nods in return; Pandora was silent in her role as warden of the book; her steadfast kindred Cassandra and Isabel inclining their heads in a semblance of salute to their former commander; and Verity, who stood unafraid to present her tears of sorrow, showed her friend a rueful smile. Miriya gave silent thanks to the Golden Throne for preserving their lives along with hers.
So many of her Sisters had fed the sands of this remote world with their blood, and why? For faith? Could such a prize be worth that sacrifice?
That price is forever worth its full cost. Saint Katherine’s words echoed in her thoughts. ‘Aye,’ she whispered to herself. ‘It is.’
Sepherina spoke. ‘I told you all when we came to this place that the God-Emperor’s Light has never left this world, that the breath of His divinity never ceased. I did not lie to you then.’ She looked around, taking them all with the sweep of her remaining hand. ‘That we are here is that truth made real. That we persist is proof.’ The canoness bowed to the memorial stones, concluding the ceremony with the motion. ‘We endure through our faith. We ever will.’
Miriya remained as the others filed away from the garden. They all had tasks to occupy them, but something made the Battle Sister dwell a little longer.
‘We both came here for the same reason,’ said a voice. She did not turn as Verity walked up to stand beside her, before the flickering lights. ‘To seek peace.’
‘The God-Emperor had other plans.’
A long moment passed before the hospitaller spoke again. ‘I had doubts, Sister,’ she said. ‘After Neva, after my dearest Lethe’s death and all that followed… I had hoped this mission of reconsecration would give me time to think.’
‘And did it?’
Verity nodded. ‘I began to wonder if my faith was still strong.’
Miriya sighed. ‘You were not alone in that. For a time, I feared that I would never be able to serve the Church again, as I was meant to.’
‘As a warrior?’
‘As a soldier of faith. It is not the taste of blood that I need, Verity, though for a time I believed it might be so. It is the knowledge that I strive to fight the enemies of humanity and our creed.’ She looked down at Decima’s memorial. ‘I was reminded of the price and the duty. The oath we give cannot be broken. Decima proved that.’
‘A Sister’s faith never perishes,’ said Verity, quoting the Saint’s words. She was silent again for a while. ‘Do you think… that we have beaten them?
‘The necrontyr?’ The Battle Sister’s eyes narrowed. ‘On this world, aye. But there will always be other worlds. And if need be, I will kill those enemies again.’ Miriya turned away and looked up at the dark sky. ‘We should have died here, Sister. All of us. Why do we live now? Because of a fluke of battle? The hubris of the alien enemy?’
‘Because the God-Emperor wills it?’ offered the hospitaller. ‘That is what the preachers would say.’ She took a breath. ‘It fills me with sorrow that Decima did not live to see this day.’
The Sororitas watched as a break in the clouds revealed a scattering of evening stars beyond them. She found herself searching for the one that Sepherina had showed them on their arrival, the light of Sol and Holy Terra.
‘She had faith,’ Miriya told Verity. ‘As do we. And that will always be enough.’
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Andy Chambers, Pete Haines, Graham McNeill, Phil Kelly, Andy Hoare, Nick Kyme and Mat Ward for assistance with all things necron, and to Hardy Fowler for bringing Sister Miriya to life in a fantastic piece of artwork.
About the Author
James Swallow is an award-winning New York Times bestselling author, who lives in London. His fiction from the dark future of Warhammer 40,000 includes the Horus Heresy novels Nemesis and The Flight of the Eisenstein; Faith & Fire, Black Tide, Red Fury, Deus Encarmine and Deus Sanguinius (collected as The Blood Angels Omnibus); the audio books Red & Black, Heart of Rage, Oath of Moment and Legion of One; and short stories for Inferno!, What Price Victory, Tales of Heresy, Legends of the Space Marines, The Book of Blood, Age of Darkness and Victories of the Space Marines.
Among his other works are Deus Ex: Icarus Effect, Jade Dragon, The Butterfly Effect, the Sundowners series of ‘steampunk’ Westerns, and tales from the worlds of Star Trek, Doctor Who, Stargate and 2000AD, as well as anthologies such as Silent Night and Space Grunts.
His other credits include the non-fiction book Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, writing for Star Trek Voyager, scripts for videogames and audio dramas.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
Cover illustration by Hardy Fowler
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