by C. L. Werner
‘Sister Kashibai, we are starting our advance,’ Virika announced across the vox. ‘It would be a disgrace if we allowed you to keep all the heretics for yourselves.’
‘You are welcome to claim your portion,’ Kashibai replied, wiping blood from her brow. ‘Emperor grant you good hunting.’
The boom of frag grenades revealed that Virika’s squad was moving into the slum. Clouds of debris rose from demolished shacks while steam and sludge gushed from damaged pipes. Howls of surprise rang out across the cavernous chamber, almost subhuman in their sound. The thunderous snarl of Sister Nagina’s heavy bolter silenced the cries nearest Virika’s squad, raking across the concealed enemy and the shacks hiding them.
The barrage that had only moments before seemed nigh overwhelming now began to falter. The autocannon had been silenced, either eliminated by Virika’s Sisters or else withdrawn by the enemy. The fury of the smaller weapons lessened as gunmen fell to grenades or retreated away from the threat they presented. The big laser made a few spiteful stabs at Kashibai’s squad, nearly managing to strike Sister Mridula with one of its shots. Kashibai tried to gauge how far back the vicious laser might be sited, but a far closer menace soon presented itself.
Directly before Kashibai was the strip of slums her flamer had turned into a burning inferno. All about the edges of the conflagration were the smouldering bodies of those caught by the fire or dropped by Reshma’s speedy shots. Even being grazed by a bolter’s shell was enough to cripple an ordinary man, much less leave him with the ability to fight. Kashibai had discounted the wounded left by Reshma as posing no further threat. Now she discovered a reason to rue her assumption.
Lunging out from the smoke was a huge man, his skin blackened by the flames, his clothes reduced to steaming strips of rag. Blood gushed from a ghastly wound in his side, a fist-sized hole punched through his abdomen by Reshma’s bolter. Instead of lying down to die, however, the urge to kill drove the brute back to his feet and sent him charging straight towards the woman who’d shot him. Before Reshma could react, the man was attacking her, swinging a crackling power pick at the Sister. The energised mining tool slammed into her, tossing her armoured body into the air like a child’s doll.
Kashibai swung around, ready to burn the pick-armed thug with her flamer. The sight of Reshma sprawled on the floor restrained her. It was just possible her comrade’s power armour had blunted the force of the blow. If she still lived, a blast from the flamer might finish her.
The hulking brute turned away from Reshma. He glared at Kashibai from the charred crust of what face he had left. She shuddered at the impossible viciousness of that gaze, the depthless hate that shone in his blemished eyes. She drew back, intending to scorch him from an angle that wouldn’t see Reshma in harm’s way. Again she underestimated the grisly vitality of her foe. By rights the thug should be dead on his feet, barely able to move with that wound in his side. Instead the man rushed at her even more quickly than he’d charged at Reshma.
The other Sisters in Kashibai’s squad were trying to suppress the sporadic shots coming at them from behind the pipes and hovels. It was left to Kashibai to deal with her hulking attacker. The injuries he’d suffered made him seem scarcely human. His body was disfigured by the knots of muscle that rippled beneath his charred skin, a physique of such grotesquery that she doubted even a lifetime in the ore-mines of Lubentina’s polar reaches could inflict upon human flesh. The man’s head seemed at once both compressed and elongated, as though his skull had been squeezed from the sides until its very shape became distorted. The broad hands that clenched the power pick were bound about in thick windings, crude mittens that couldn’t quite hide the alarming fact that he had only three thick, stumpy fingers on each extremity.
Mutant! The unclean word rang through Kashibai’s mind. The bestial nature and prodigious endurance of her enemy were explained. A mix of righteousness and disgust filled her as she met the brute’s attack. She felt the sizzling impact of the pick course down her arm as she parried the man’s assault with the barrel of her flamer. She winced as the barrel collapsed under the blow, nearly bent in half by the fury of the energised tool. She would offer a eulogy for the weapon’s machine-spirit when she returned to the convent. Allowing she survived to do so.
Kashibai’s right arm felt numb from the impact of the power pick, but her left was unimpaired. Deftly she plucked the combat knife from her belt and drove the blade up into her foe’s wound. She felt the blood of her antagonist – hideously cold and viscous – spurt across her face as she plunged the knife upwards, trying to dig her way to any organ vital enough to put the brute down.
The monstrous foeman screeched an atavistic cry of pain. The power pick fell from his hands as agony pulsed through his immense frame. But he failed to fall, refused to die despite the Sister’s stabbing blade. One three-fingered hand came whipping around, smashing across Kashibai’s face. The blow knocked teeth from her jaw and sent her tumbling to the ground. The thug glowered down at her. He reached into the wound in his side, plucking the knife from where she’d left it embedded in his flesh.
Before the brute could spring at Kashibai, the armoured figure of a Battle Sister interposed, setting herself between the subhuman hulk and the fallen woman. The rescuer wore a mantle of black silk over her ornately adorned power armour, purity seals and campaign honours fixed to her gorget, the badge of the Adepta Sororitas marked in gold upon her pauldrons. No helm concealed her dusky countenance nor hid the vengeful aspect that now possessed those features. Her eyes were like pits of iron as they matched the enemy’s glower.
‘Your breath has defiled this world long enough, filth,’ the warrior spat. The bolt pistol she held in her left hand barked once, bursting apart the brute’s shoulder and spilling him to the floor.
From where she lay on the ground, Kashibai cried out a warning to her commander. ‘Sister Superior! He’s still moving!’
True to Kashibai’s warning, life yet clung to the brute. He was crawling towards the power pick, reaching for it with his disfigured hand.
Sister Superior Trishala was in action even before Kashibai’s shout. Smoke still issued from the barrel of her bolt pistol when she moved against her stricken foe. In her right hand she held a gleaming sword, its guard fashioned in the shape of the aquila, its pommel aglow with the frightful energies ready to be unleashed by the blade. Even as the thug’s fingers closed about the grip of the pick, Trishala’s power sword was chopping down. The man’s malformed skull was reduced to pulp beneath the coruscating aura of blue light that rippled down the power sword’s blade.
Kashibai had regained her feet when Trishala turned away from the slain brute. The Sister Superior frowned when she noted the state of Kashibai’s flamer. ‘Virika’s squad is pressing them back on the left,’ Trishala said. She handed Kashibai her bolt pistol. ‘I need your squad to close the gap. Catch them between two fields of fire. By the Golden Throne, we’ll purge these mutants from Tharsis.’
‘Wasn’t our objective to find and relieve the militia patrol?’ Kashibai asked.
Trishala’s gaze remained a thing of ice and iron. ‘I’ve been unable to make contact with them over the vox. The platoon’s vox-caster must be unusable or the underground is interfering with transmissions. If we can’t coordinate with the survivors, then the safest way to extricate them is by exterminating these heretics.’ She noted that Kashibai was looking past her to the sprawled body of Reshma. Sister Pranjal had broken from cover to drag her injured comrade to cover. ‘Make an appreciation of her wounds,’ she said, ‘but understand that duty comes first. She must be left behind and you can spare no one to linger with her. We will need every gun.’
Kashibai felt Trishala’s command cut into her. She knew Trishala was right, but that only made it worse. She handed the bolt pistol back to the Sister Superior. ‘I’ll take Reshma’s bolter,’ she said.
‘We’ll need every gun,’ Kas
hibai said, echoing Trishala’s words.
Trishala noted the disapproval in Kashibai’s voice as the squad leader hurried away to muster her warriors and discover Reshma’s condition. The reaction was to be expected. The hardest thing for any warrior was to leave a comrade on the battlefield, yet there were times when it was necessary. Kashibai might dislike the order, but she was disciplined enough to execute it without protest. It was that dependability that made her so valuable to Trishala.
It was only a matter of moments before Kashibai’s squad was following Trishala through the devastated slumland. The Battle Sisters fanned out, sweeping ahead in an arc that would swing around to close up with Virika’s warriors, the point held by the militia survivors acting as the fulcrum of their advance. Moving through the destruction, their bolters blasted away at the sporadic gunfire still being directed against them by the enemy. The diminished capacities of their foe troubled Trishala more than any resurgence could have. There were any number of undocumented tunnels and passages running through the Cloisterfells, excavations wrought by work crews and expansions dug out by the wretches who called the underworld home. The fear in Trishala’s mind was that the bulk of the enemy had withdrawn, stolen back into the shadows of some secret network of forgotten corridors, leaving behind a rearguard to ensure the Sisters couldn’t follow their line of retreat.
‘Make haste!’ Trishala gave voice to the urgency that pounded through her veins. ‘By the Golden Throne, we can’t let them escape!’
The cry was barely given when the slashing light of the laser came stabbing out from among the shanties. The cutting beam ripped across the shacks, sending several of them crashing down. The Sisters could see a gang of men moving about beyond the rubble, each of them draped in cloaks of purple and red. Kashibai’s warriors opened up on them, picking off three and sending the rest scurrying for cover. Then the laser was stabbing out at them once more.
‘Where are they firing from?’ Kashibai called out, trying to focus her squad against the weapon that had bedevilled them since their entry into the vault.
‘There! In the pipe!’ Trishala shouted, triggering a burst from her bolt pistol at a huge section of pipe standing among the hovels. Crouched in the open face of the disused metal cylinder was a clutch of enemy fighters. They were clustered around the bulky frame of a large excavation laser that some fanatic had transformed into a vicious weapon by profaning its range inhibitor and perverting its safety thresholds.
The range was too great for Trishala’s pistol, but as the rounds clattered against the shacks around the laser’s crew, she succeeded in diverting their attention away from Kashibai and the other Sisters. The purple-garbed gunners pivoted the makeshift weapon on its crude framework and unleashed its malignant energies towards the Sister Superior.
Countless hours of training and years of experience to hone both reflexes and instincts saved Trishala from the cutting beam. She ducked down just as the laser came cleaving through the hovels. Shacks collapsed around her, spilling debris on top of her. She heard Kashibai shout in alarm, then her subordinate’s voice was lost in a renewed fury of gunfire. Bolters snarled as they answered the coughs of autoguns. Savage shrieks and snarls sounded from the enemy fighters as they broke cover and rushed at Kashibai’s warriors.
Trishala shoved against the rubble piled across her back, the enhanced strength afforded by her power armour allowing her to easily shrug aside the weight. As she extracted herself from the debris, she caught sight of something that flashed across one of the narrow paths between the shanties. It was just an impression, a blur of purple and crimson, but there was a quality about the way it moved that sent a chill rolling through her. Echoes from long ago strove to fill her mind with fear. Trishala beat the fear back with the white-hot heat of hate.
‘Sister Kashibai, continue your attack on the pipe,’ Trishala commanded. ‘There’s something moving on our flank. I’m going to see what it is. That will free your squad to achieve the objective.’
‘May the Warmason watch over you and the Emperor guide your steps,’ Kashibai voxed back.
Trishala drew her power sword from its scabbard and ran down the passage between the shacks. Her every sense was keyed to picking up the trail of the thing she’d so briefly glimpsed. She listened for the sound of its rushing feet, looked for the shiver of the flimsy shanties as it forced its way between the ramshackle shelters, tried to follow the cool oily stink it left in its wake. The mangled bodies of local militia troopers and underworld dregs flickered through her awareness; even the pale, gruesome corpses of enemy fighters couldn’t distract her from pursuit of her quarry.
From ahead there sounded the distinctive chatter of Sister Nagina’s heavy bolter. The shooting abruptly stopped, cut off by Nagina’s anguished scream and a grinding shriek that didn’t issue from anything human. Turning towards the violent sounds, Trishala drove her armoured body through the crude walls of the shacks, smashing through the hovels. Her violent passage through the slums soon brought her into an open space a few metres in width... and face to face with a horror that had haunted her dreams for a lifetime.
Sister Nagina’s body lay in a pool of blood, as did the corpse of another of Virika’s warriors. Their power armour was ruptured, broken open by the slashing claws of the thing that now loomed over their bodies. Its colouration diverged from the creatures Trishala had seen as a girl, its bony carapace a deep purple in hue while the exposed sinew and muscle between its shell-like segments were a bright red. Yet it was unmistakably of the same breed that had brought death to the hive cities of Primorus, a bestial humanoid with angular dorsal plates running down its hunched back, an abbreviated stump of tail protruding from its spine and vicious talons growing from its hoof-like feet. Two sets of arms grew from the abomination’s shoulders, one pair ending in dextrous fingers while the other terminated in scythe-like claws. The fiend’s head was a squashed bulb covered in a leathery hide and sporting a set of broad jaws lined with needle-like fangs. Its eyes were pale yellow, the pupils little pinpricks of black that shone with a malignance belonging to neither beast nor man.
Sight of the multi-armed horror stunned Trishala. For a terrible instant she found herself unable to move. In that instant, the monster sprang at her, uttering the same shrieking ululation it had voiced when slaughtering Nagina. Instinct rather than thought brought Trishala’s sword sweeping out, striking at the pouncing monstrosity. The energised blade slashed across the abomination. The shriek that sounded from its fanged jaws was now one of pain. It drew back, every muscle growing taut as its body tensed for another spring. Then the creature’s eyes grew distant, somehow disconnected from its surroundings.
To Trishala it seemed nothing less than the God-Emperor’s intervention when the monster spun around and retreated down a pathway between the hovels. Behind it, spattered with a glistening green ichor, the creature left one of its clawed hands, shorn away at the wrist by her sword.
The Sister Superior recovered quickly. She controlled the urge to chase after the stricken monster. It wasn’t the danger of trailing the wounded creature that held her back. Trishala had recognised the thing. She knew what it was and what its presence here meant.
Subduing her disgust, Trishala retrieved the severed claw from the floor. For weeks she’d been warning Palatine Yadav that the trouble building in the Cloisterfells was more than increased ganger activity or some upwelling of sedition among the dispossessed of Tharsis. Now, perhaps, he would listen to her.
The clamour of many bodies racing through the slums drew Trishala’s attention back to the narrow paths between the shacks. Charging towards her were a mass of men dressed in grubby coveralls and brandishing a motley variety of weapons. She saw one of the men, his face dominated by an inhumanly elongated mouth and bulbous forehead, point at her with a shaking fist and cry out a single word.
‘Infidel!’
A shot from Trishala’s pistol exploded th
e man’s malformed skull, but his shout had served its purpose. Provoked to a crazed fury, the rest of the mob surged towards her. Trishala sent shot after shot into the charging mass, dropping another half a dozen of them in the space of a few heartbeats, but even that wasn’t enough to stem the tide. Las-beams scored her armour, marring the surface but unable to pierce the heavy ceramite. Slugs from more primitive firearms ricocheted off, dancing away into the slums. The ineffectiveness of their shots only swelled their frenzy. Soon, Trishala’s sword was slashing out, hewing through writhing bodies as the mob converged on her.
‘Cleanse the mutant! Scourge the heretic!’ Kashibai’s shout sliced through the tumult as she led her Battle Sisters to stem the surge of enemies.
From the shacks behind Trishala, Kashibai and her squad sent a withering hail of shells into the enemy. The mob disintegrated under that fusillade, torn to bloody ribbons by the concentrated fire. A few survivors turned and fled back into the slums, but the majority of them died trying to reach Trishala, climbing over their own dead in their obsession to kill the Sister Superior.
The power sword crunched down through the sternum of the last enemy, a bald-headed youth who would never see his twentieth cycle. His features weren’t as abnormal as many of the others, somehow making the fanaticism gleaming in his eyes even more terrible to see. As he slumped at Trishala’s feet, he pawed at her belt with a trembling hand, trying to free the claw she’d cut from the monster.
‘Defiler,’ the youth snarled as life abandoned him. With a shudder he fell to the floor amid the wreckage of purple-clad bodies.
Trishala stared down at the youth, then laid her hand on the alien claw she’d taken. Turning towards Kashibai, she gave her subordinate new orders. ‘I need a liaison with the local militia. They have to pull out as soon as the way is clear. Impress that point on them. I want them out of here as fast as they can manage.’
