Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  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

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. 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 will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  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. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The howling sand found its way into everything.

  Every crevice in her breastplate, every tiny void in her battledress, every moving part of her wargear. It was almost a ritual on this wasteland world, the daily regimen of cleaning a new sacrament to be performed alongside the usual rites of the convent laid down by the High Canoness. In corridors and rooms, in spaces large and small, the sand would accrete in drifts if not properly dealt with. It seemed that no amount of baffles or electromagnetic fields could keep it entirely at bay.

  Sister Elspeth had once joked that perhaps the sand was alive, that it might be some sort of mite-sized swarming animal that craved warmth and shadowed corners. Elspeth was dead now, killed just after matins when the attack came. The sand had been her grave, her life leaking into it from her ragged wounds. Decima held her hand at the end, as the sand drank in all she gave it, the pale orange dust shading slowly into crimson mud.

  Decima thought about Elspeth as she struggled across the dunes, hunched forward against the force of the endless winds, the dust dragging at her heels and the gusts jerking the shemagh wrapped around her face. Clever Elspeth, who was good at regicide and games of tall card, pious Elspeth who sometimes mumbled the catechisms in her sleep. But dead now. And killed by something the like of which no Sister had ever seen.

  She shivered, despite the sullen, intimate heat of the day. The burden pulled against her arm, the cord around it twisting, and Decima threw a glance back at the container. The metal drum was grey and grimy, and it left a trail vanishing into the sandstorm, a line leading back towards the convent. Decima squinted along the path she had left behind her.

  How far was it now? Not for the first time, she cursed herself for leaving in such a hurry, without first securing the helmet twinned with her Sabbat-pattern power armour; the infra-red sensing lenses and preysight mechanisms within the helm would have been of great use at this moment.

  But there had been no time. The order came with the demand for instant obedience. Go now, the canoness had said, her voice hard and sharp. Take it and go.

  Decima wanted to believe that it was some spark of courage the senior Sister saw in her that had rewarded the young woman with so important a task, but in her heart she knew it was not so. The role of custodian had fallen to Decima simply because she was there when no other was at hand. She had no high rank, no great sigils of courage to her name, barely a few beads upon her chaplet. Her status might have been far elevated over the ordinary masses of the Imperium, but still Decima was only a line Sister Militant, just a foot soldier in the Wars of Faith.

  She dared to wonder; might this moment be the calling of her to greatness? She pushed the thought away. To consider such things was to aggrandise one’s self, and that was a sin.

  Her lot was to be at the command of He Upon the Golden Throne, the God-Emperor of Mankind whose light illuminated the stars. Decima had been inducted into her order while still a child, recruited like a myriad of other orphans from the schola progenium for the varied organs of the Imperial machine, and like them she knew no life but one of service. Decima and a legion of her kindred were the Sisters of the Adepta Sororitas, the army of right in the employ of humanity’s great church.

  What her church needed in so distant and desolate a world as this had never been made clear to Decima, but it was not her place to ask such questions. She was to do as she had been commanded to, and be grateful that she had so clearly defined a purpose in the universe. Others – commoners – were cursed with the need to search for meaning in their lives. Not so for Decima; the church was there to give significance to her as it saw fit. That burden, at least, was lifted from her.

  At this moment, her purpose dragged behind her, forming a bolus of sand at its blunt prow, resolutely digging itself in and doubling the effort needed to move it. Decima muttered a sanctioned curse through the cloth covering her mouth and turned back to the metal drum. Her bolter, mag-locked to her backpack, caught on the red cloak over her shoulder, clattering against her black armour. She didn’t like the idea of not having a hand free to grab the weapon if she needed to, but the sluggish pace of her encumbrance overcame her concern.

  In a moment, Decima had the metal container in her arms, cradling it as one might hold a fat child in swaddling clothes. She tried not to think about what it contained. The emotional weight of her burden dwarfed its physical mass, and it pulled at Decima’s heart. It made her fearful, an emotion she seldom experienced on the battlefield. She had never expected to bear such responsibility, but she had been chosen because she was alive, and because Sisters far better trained in the arts of warfare than she – Celestians and Retributors among them – even now gave themselves up to ensure her escape.

  Cowed by this thought, the enormity of her duty fully asserted itself, and Decima pressed on with renewed pace. With each footfall she spoke a word from the Prayer of the Released, pacing herself through the sands.

  The storm robbed her of all but the most basic senses. A digicompass in the vambrace of her armour was the only thing she was willing to trust. In her time on this world, Decima had learned that the sands and the strange rocky towers they shaped could confuse and disorient the unwary traveller. On the old galactic maps, this ball of stone and dust had been christened after the star it orbited – Kavir – but in the ninth century of the forty-first millennium it went by the unremarkable name Decima’s Order had given it. To the Sisterho
od of the Order of Our Martyred Lady, this world was known as Sanctuary 101.

  It was difficult to reckon the passage of time. Little of the weak light of the yellow-white Kavir sun penetrated through the swirling clouds, so charting the advance of the hours proved fruitless. Instead Decima went on, one foot in front of the other, watching the sand shift beneath her boots. More than once she fell, losing her step as she crested one of the dunes, tumbling, then scrambling after the container when it rolled away, afraid it might split open. But it remained intact; the metal pod was crafted using lost techniques from the Dark Age of Technology, and would have survived a fall from orbit unharmed.

  The desert played other tricks on her. At times, Decima thought she saw shapes at the very edge of her perception, ghostly forms close by, but not so close that she could define them. Humanoid shapes? Or was it just the dance of the dust in the wind and her tired mind making patterns where none existed?

  She remembered the glimpses she had caught of the things that had come to kill them, the forms that ended Elspeth and the others. In the gloomy corridors of the convent, the attackers had first shut down the fusion reactor and plunged the outpost into darkness as the storm took hold. Decima did not know how, as the power core was locked away behind thick shield doors and protected by gun-servitors. Still, it had been done.

  So, in the dark, then. She only had impressions of them, blink-fast moments captured by the cruciform flare of muzzle flashes. Emaciated things that reflected any illumination, like torchlight off tarnished brass or the muddy rainbow of oil on water. A sickly green glow following them wherever they went. Silver cutting blades. Those things, and the screaming. Inhuman sounds of tortured air molecules being torn apart before lances of searing light. Decima remembered the purple after-images burned into her retinas, even as she tried to forget the smell of ancient soil and warm blood.

  The sounds of the conflict, the skirl of beam fire and the chattering of bolters, these had followed her out onto the sands as she fled with the burden in tow. The noises were soon swallowed up by the clouds, along with any sight of the convent’s central tower, the keep and outer guardian walls. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  She passed beyond the outer markers, skirting the narrow buttes that surrounded the valley where the outpost lay, and went on into the open erg. Decima had never ventured so far from the convent alone and without a vehicle.

  As she began to wonder if she was far enough away, the digicompass transmitted a vibrating pulse down to the palm of her glove. Decima hesitated, studying it. Yes. She had entered the canyon at the base of the wind-sculpted towers far to the west, a point of relative calm among the more horrific of the planet’s storm zones. The worst could sandblast flesh and strip an unprotected woman to the bone, or bury a stalled transport so it might never be found again. Lives had been lost from the convent’s population through both manners of death over the years.

  Decima fell into the lee of a tall, spindly finger of ruddy marble and shook dust from where it pooled in the clefts of her wargear, her combat cloak snapping as the wind ran over it. The ground became rocky here, islands of stone protruding from the sand, but in turn the airborne dust was harsher. Fines of powder became specks of flint, and Decima narrowed her eyes, pulling the shemagh tighter.

  Working as quickly as she dared, the Battle Sister found a spot out of the weak sunlight and twisted a single grenade into the sand, turning it until it was almost hidden in the dust. She yanked the primer pin and sprinted away to a safe distance. Like the sounds of death and conflict from the outpost, the muffled grunt of the detonation was flattened and consumed by the sandstorm.

  Decima brought the container back to the hollow her makeshift demolition had cut and climbed in with it. The grenade had excavated a space large enough to serve as a foxhole, but the woman had other plans. With great care, she laid the metal container at the bottom of the hollow and took a precise reading from the compass; then, using the butt of her bolter as a makeshift shovel, Decima started to bury the pod.

  She had only made two or three passes when she paused, her heart tight in her chest. The Sororitas thought about what she was doing, about the priceless value of the object she was consigning to the embrace of the desert, and it stopped her dead. Decima imagined herself like a mother interring the corpse of an infant, suddenly afraid to turn another spade of earth over its face for fear it might suddenly awaken in terror. Was it right to do this? To bury such a treasure in this wilderness where it might never be found again?

  The artefact must never fall to the xenos. The voice of Canoness Agnes echoed in her thoughts. This is my last command to you, Sister Decima.

  Her last command. By now, the canoness had to be dead. The battle had been lost even before Decima had fled. She had known it was inevitable when the order had been given. All human life at the outpost colony on Sanctuary 101 was in the process of being exterminated, and Decima’s deed was the final action to be taken.

  But what will happen to me? The thought crystallised for the first time in Decima’s mind, and she trembled. She allowed herself to think beyond her mission, beyond the collective of the Order’s will and to her own survival. She would bury the capsule and then… Return to the convent? Sit atop these rocks and wait to starve? The nearest Imperial colony was months away across the savage currents of the warp. Rescue, if it were ever to come, would mean a long, long wait–

  There was motion in the sand near her boots. Something was in the hollow with her, lurking in the gravel. Something like silver or tarnished brass.

  Decima exploded from the pit and rolled away, bringing up her boltgun, working the slide to clear it of any fouling by force of habit. Clumps of oily sand puffed out from the weapon as half-glimpsed shapes moved through the veil of the dust cloud, closing in. She saw gelid emerald light burning within iron skulls and limbs made of dead metal.

  The bolter spoke, and she made every shot count, blowing open frames that mocked the bone-forms of human ribcages. Others mantled their fallen in silence, drawing a closing ring around her, advancing, inexorable.

  Decima killed them – or so it seemed – and they melted into the sand, crackling green fire dissembling them, fading the things from her sight. They resembled machines, but on some level the Battle Sister knew that they were nothing so simple. There was an ephemeral quality about their manner and motion, an unquantifiable something that hinted at a deeper truth. Whatever these things were, a living mind animated them. No machine could ever radiate such malice. This understanding came to Decima like a blow, even as she knew it would count for nothing.

  The bolter ran dry, the slide locking open as the clip was spent, and Sister Decima, last survivor of Sanctuary 101, regretted that she had not saved the final round for herself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The noise from the vox was like rainfall.

  Imogen remembered the sound from her years as a novice on Ophelia VII, walking the halls of the Convent Sanctorum as grey skies emptied themselves over the panes of stained-glass windows five hundred metres tall. The rain, she remembered, would sluice down the faces of saints as if they were weeping.

  None wept now, so it seemed. None shed tears for the mottled orange sphere hanging out there in the distance before her, all surface detail upon it hazed by cloud and distortion.

  The Sister Superior stood in silence before the speaker grille, which protruded from the observer’s desk in the guise of a cherub’s face; in turn, the desk itself lay across the watch gallery below the starship Tybalt’s keel sail. At this station, a crew serf could stand to take readings with a laser sextant should the whiskered sensor barbs at the cruiser’s prow ever malfunction, but most often it stood unattended. The vox-unit was typically inactive, but Sister Imogen’s hand had strayed to it when she entered, tracing the sigil of the holy aquila as invocation before switching it on.

  Her eyes narrowed, pulling her face tight beneath its frame of rich henna-red hair. She couldn’t quite frame the impulse that h
ad made her do it. Imogen had come here to take a look at their destination, just a passing notion to fix it in her mind, and reached for the vox control without conscious thought. The communications system was self-tuning, automatically skipping across standard Imperial frequencies as its simple machine-spirit looked for a signal to lock on to.

  The planet gave no purchase. The rain-sound of the static from the brass child-face of the cherub went on and on like a mournful, whispering dirge. If there had ever been any cries into the void from the desert world, then they had long since passed into the blackness. More than a decade on from the day the attack had come, and there remained nothing but the endless hiss of cosmic background radiation, the strange kind of anti-silence that was more solemn than the tranquillity of any sepulchre.

  Imogen switched off the vox and frowned. Soon the Tybalt would fire its manoeuvring drives for a close planetary approach and the naval cruiser would settle into low orbit. Even now, the helots and servitors on the warship’s command deck were poring over their scry-screens, analysing the returns from the vessel’s sensors. Would they find anything that differed from the second-hand readings the Ordo Xenos had given them, she wondered? It was hard to be sure; all the Sister Superior knew was that the Inquisition’s data had been heavily censored before the Sororitas had received it. Not for the first time, she asked herself what truths had been edited from those documents before they were passed to the Order of Our Martyred Lady.

  She turned her back on Kavir – on Sanctuary 101 – and left the observation gallery. Imogen would see it at close hand soon enough.