by Danie Ware
More stories of the Sisters of Battle from Black Library
THE BLOODIED ROSE
A novella by Danie Ware
WRECK AND RUIN
A novella by Danie Ware
MERCY
A short story by Danie Ware
MARK OF FAITH
A novel by Rachel Harrison
OUR MARTYRED LADY
An audio drama by Gav Thorpe
REQUIEM INFERNAL
A novel by Peter Fehervari
CELESTINE: THE LIVING SAINT
A novel by Andy Clark
SISTERS OF BATTLE
An omnibus by James Swallow
featuring the novels Faith & Fire and Hammer & Anvil
plus many short stories
SHROUD OF NIGHT
A novel by Andy Clark
CULT OF THE WARMASON
A novel by C L Werner
IMPERIAL CREED
A novel by David Annandale
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Mark of Faith’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
Chapter One
A lone red star, cold and swollen with age.
A single satellite planet, ringed by a tumble of debris.
In the limitless data-vaults of the Adeptus Mechanicus, it was designated Forge World Vastum-01 – a place of industry and production, of flexsteel and ferrocrete, of the sparking towers of forge temples and the smoothly flowing code of its living machinery. Its moons were reported as abundant with mines, its surface crawling with every kind of manufactorum.
But Vastum was old. Finally stripped of its resources during the advance of the Iron Duke Glevan, it had been abandoned by its tech-priests centuries before. Their final act: to detonate the planet’s moons at their cores, and to claw free the last of that ore-rich rock.
Vastum was a world dying, valueless and lost.
But not – as yet – quite dead.
A tiny figure under the filthy ochre sky, her oil-black cloak flowing like liquid, the heretek 05-Ray knew more about Vastum’s contemporary history than did the databanks of the long-absent Mechanicus. 05-Ray had come here as a questor, two decades before, seeking the dormant secrets of the planet’s technology, and she had found many things.
To 05-Ray, this was not Vastum, abandoned and bereft of worth.
To 05-Ray, this was Lycheate, and a wealth of waste.
She knew it intimately.
As the old red sun sank slowly into brown dust, she moved swiftly, the rusting steel causeway creaking beneath her claws. Her form was wary and alert, her array of augmetic limbs deployed and ready. She was two-point-zero-four miles from the nearest manufacturing platform here, and taking care to ensure her own safety. 05-Ray may have abandoned her people and her home world of Incaladion, yet the sleeping might of this production planet still coaxed from her a silent binary prayer.
Her claw caught on a weld, and she paused.
Fault designation three-point-zero-six. Servitor call enabled. ETA five solar minutes and seventeen seconds.
She flicked through her files, closely analysing the structure of the metalwork below. Lycheate was a water world, built over by an endless fractal of elevated steel podia, the same efficient mathematical patterns repeated over and over again.
But she was far from their solidity, out here, and the waters below her were polluted with centuries of effluvium. Chemical composition – N, NO3-N, NH4-N, S2-, SO42-, PO43-, COD, dissolved solids (TDS), heavy metals. They ate at the causeway’s supports, corroding the ancient metal. If it gave way, her weak and human flesh – what there was left of it – would not survive the immersion.
Bodies floated past her, their skin eaten away.
The fault in the weld, however, was not serious. The servitor sent back its confirmation, and 05-Ray was freed to continue her mission.
The thought sent a spark through her nerve-clusters. Knowing what awaited her, her vestigial humanity shuddered with one of the few emotions she had remaining…
Hope.
Or possibly: Ambition.
She looked up.
Ahead of her, detectable by her human eye as a dark blur against the low umber clouds, her target rose into the sky.
Her other eye extended from the steel side of her skull, its telescopic lens closing focus.
Heading: ninety-four degrees south-south-west. Direct distance: one-point-eight-three miles. Actual distance: one-point-eight-five miles. Chances of interception: zero-point-zero-zero-one per cent.
Lycheate’s watery surface was broken by occasional scatterings of semi-active volcanic islands – the only landfall offered by this lost, corroding world. The largest of these now lay before her: a headless cone of black rock, basalt and granite. It seemed featureless, rising harsh from the flat metallic stillness of the sea, yet 05-Ray knew what waited within.
The holiest place on this battered world. Its designation: Vastum Forge Temple-01.
Now almost empty.
Gone were its tech-priests and enginseers, gone its worshippers and servitors. Its smoothly glittering black steps no longer felt feet or claws; its great columns and huge portico had long since been left to crumble. And purposeless spiked its endless, glinting vox-antennae…
Well, not quite.
05-Ray sent the greeting-code that announced her arrival, and flitted like a data-ghost up the black ash beach.
<01-Vius.>
She waited for the response to her call.
The old temple hung over her, huge and hollow, its ceiling riddled with stalactites, like fangs. Fear was a lost emotion to 05-Ray – only the faint memory-ghosts of childhood terrors – but still, this place made her human skin prickle, and interrupted the smooth flow of her data retrieval.
The building was broken, cracked through to its core. Its central aisle was buckled, and its interior columns stood half-tumbled, sagging against each other like tired streaks of black severity. Scattered fragments of mica and obsidian glittered scarlet with the hunger of the lava-light below.
But still, there lingered a presence here.
<05-Ray.>
&n
bsp; The reply did not come through her ears, nor was it her name – that was a human thing, frail and foolish. Rather, it was the string of binary that she had earned for herself, the record of her skills and discoveries. It came to her in a data-stream, a pulse like recognition.
She uploaded the images readily – the planet’s multiple factoria, their assembled machines all standing in rows. When the Litany of Activation was finally broadcast, they would flow with new life.
01-Vius accepted and assessed everything – their numbers and positions, their deployments of weaponry. He ran the full tactical analysis: in the space of milliseconds, he had extrapolated every eventuality, and secured the most functional.
His outline came back to her – their deployment, their speeds and routes.
Their muster point.
She answered him with a query. There was a piece of data that he had omitted from his calculations, but it was one that had stayed with her, like a bullet fragment lodged in her human skin.
At the upload, 01-Vius paused. The stream of his code halted as he considered the shifted parameters.
Greatly daring, 05-Ray sent the query again.
He did not respond.
Instead, in the deepest darkness of the temple, something moved.
Almost in spite of herself, 05-Ray backed up a step. She miscalculated the movements of her cloak and caught a claw on its hem, as clumsy as some newly augmented novice. The air around her was quiet now, emptier of information than the dead moons themselves.
A shadow-fragment detached itself from the darkness at the head of the altar steps.
Her telescopic twitched, but the analysis was redundant – she knew who this was.
Like her, he wore an oil-black cloak. Like her, he still carried the cog-and-skull of Incaladion – though upon 01-Vius, that mark was embossed in the pitted flexsteel of his face.
Unlike her, he had never defaced that mark.
It waited like a promise.
Air wheezed through the bellows in his chest, his jaw moved as he tested the cogs and cables of his vocal array. He was older than she, far older, and he reflected the rust and corrosion of Lycheate itself, almost like he had become a part of the planet’s machine-soul.
05-Ray wondered how long it had been since he had spoken aloud.
He said, ‘Sororitas.’
The word had no accompanying data – it hissed through the lava-glow of the temple like a threat.
‘Correct.’ Her response, too, was aloud, though she spoke more easily. 05-Ray still had business with normal humans, and she better remembered this ungainly, ineffectual communication.
They’d even had their own name for her – they’d called her ‘Rayos’.
01-Vius forced the air out of his chest. It was a moment before she understood that he was laughing.
She who had no fear – it chilled her to the core.
‘The Sisters of Battle will come,’ he said, the words grinding like rust. ‘And in numbers.’ She knew that he was calculating those numbers, running battle plans and assessing consequences, but he did not offer her the new data.
She waited.
Slowly, 01-Vius creaked down the stairs, his great shoulders hunched, his joints grinding. Beneath his cloak, his metal chest was scarred with rust and old wounds, and his multiple limbs were held folded, almost as if, like his voice, he no longer had need of them.
He came to stand before her, towering over her smaller form. The temple’s close heat radiated from his body.
Upon 01-Vius, there was no flesh remaining.
The word was out before she could stop it, ‘Master?’
‘The Sisters of Battle will come,’ he said again.
Holo-images flickered in the lava-light – red armour and righteous wrath, the faith and fury of the Adepta Sororitas.
05-Ray said, ‘Affirm.’
Again, that amused exhalation. Yet there was still no upload, and the info-vacuum was loud as a shout.
‘Let them,’ 01-Vius said. ‘My force is assembled. My data is correct. My extrapolations are without error. If they come, then they will die.’
The huge sun sank, its sullen light fading to a low glare.
An old doorway ground open against a layer of metallic dust. An expanding arc of illumination swelled across a silent floor.
Within it, a red boot came down, ceramite ringing on stone. It was followed by a second, both caked with the filth of Lycheate’s rusting evening; a black-and-white cloak fluttered above them, its hem newly repaired.
Sister Superior Augusta Santorus closed the heavy door behind her and stood silent, looking up a long, central aisle towards a set of unfamiliar steps.
A twenty-year veteran of the Adepta Sororitas, Augusta had spent her life in the chapels and cathedrals of the God-Emperor of Mankind, her head bared in humility, her weapons laid aside.
Yet this place felt…
Strange.
Ahead of her, the aisle was lit by huge metal bowls, electro-furnaces, a series of them marching up either side of a black stone path. They warmed the air, and they lit the walls pipes to a brassy, hellish glare. At the aisle’s far end, the steps led up, not to a chancel or altar, but to an intricate seethe of forgeworks, their twists and angles now glinting with the life of the flames.
At their centre, their holy symbol was still visible: a half-human, half-augmented skull, surrounded by its square-toothed cog.
The symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and of the Omnissiah.
Behind it, where the great glassaic window should have been, there hung a long banner, black and red and white – the mark of Augusta’s Order, the Bloody Rose. It had been raised by their canoness, Elvorix Ianthe, with a powerful service of hymns and prayers, and it had appropriated this ancient building to a whole new purpose…
This was no longer a forge temple.
This was a muster point.
Domine deduc me mi Imperatoris.
Guide me, my Emperor.
The Litany for Divine Guidance in her heart, Augusta reflexively looked for the servitor – for its borne trays upon which to lay her weapons – but there would be no such demand, not here. Her bolter and chainsword still at her hips, she walked up the aisle.
‘Sister Superior.’
She had taken barely six steps before there was a figure at her side, a young woman in scarlet armour that still squeaked with newness. Her helm was off, revealing a smoothly tanned face of barely twenty years, its fleur-de-lys tattoo still sharp.
‘I’m Kirah, Sister,’ she said. ‘The canoness is expecting you. Please, follow me.’
Augusta did as she was asked, following the younger Sister as she ducked between the furnaces, and out towards a narrow split in the pipes. There were no novices to attend the canoness’ orders, and Kirah must be running her messages…
And her summons.
Not showing her tension, the Sister Superior continued to pray.
Levis est mihi…
Show me to the light.
She had been waiting almost two weeks for this audience, cooling her heels in her squad’s temporary dormitorium – and she knew full well that the wait had been deliberate.
That the canoness was making her think about the consequences of her previous mission.
And Augusta understood its severity. There was every possibility that she would be stripped of her rank, her merits, her armour, and that she would find herself with the slavering fervour and eviscerator blade of the Sisters Repentia…
The thought sent a s
hudder up her spine.
But it was no more than she deserved.
As they approached the split, Sister Kirah glanced back over her shoulder. ‘Just a reminder, Sister, that we’re unable to use the vox until the full security procedure is completed. This is a heretek planet, its spirits unknown to us, and we cannot be sure that our information is… untainted. For now, please only use the vox in an emergency, and use only channel epsilon.’
‘Aye,’ Augusta said. She wondered if the words were a warning – telling her not to speak to her squad until she had been given permission.
The implied lack of trust made her shiver of tension worse, but she kept her chin lifted and her shoulders square.
Whatever the canoness’ judgement, she would face it like a warrior.
‘In here, Sister.’ The young woman stopped at the gap, and gestured for the Sister Superior to move ahead.
Steadying herself to stern discipline, Augusta stepped through the doorway.
And stopped.
The gap opened onto a small balcony, and a set of narrow steel steps leading around and down into a perfectly circular pit. The walls were one huge data-loom, a great ring of banks and wires and platforms, all now sleeping and covered with dust – but they were not what caught the Sister Superior’s attention.
In the middle of the floor, there was a hololith projector, currently showing the planet itself, turning slow and semi-transparent in the centre of the room. It was surrounded by red-armoured figures, every one of them bareheaded and heavily armed – Augusta knew many of them from the Convent Sanctorum, or from previous missions. The taciturn, dark-skinned Seraphim commander, Sister Nikaya. Eleni and Roku, Sisters Superior, both veterans like herself. The single unarmoured figure, grey-haired and stoop-shouldered – Rhene, the ageing Hospitaller. There were other figures that she did not know, but there was a glint of adamantine to every chaplet, a zealous flare to every gaze.
To the last woman, every one of them had stopped and looked up.
The holo-planet winked out; the silence was heavy as judgement. Augusta paused, still praying.
For truth, for strength.
For justice, in whatever manner He may decree.
Then she followed the metal stairway, around and down, and into the room. In the silence, her bootsteps clanged like bells.
