The object was angular and clearly machined. It appeared to be steel, but the surface was heavily tarnished and pitted with tiny dents. Intricate etching, too fine to be seen at anything beyond arm’s length, covered the surface of it. Miriya saw an infinity of symbols all made from the same collection of lines and circles, engraved into the metal in ordered rows; they made her think of mathematical formulae she had studied as a girl in her classes at the schola.
There were two large pits in the surface of the artefact, and Miriya gingerly inserted her fingers into them. The object moved in her grip and she pulled. The rubble and the sand resisted for a moment, unwilling to give up the prize; then it shifted and came away.
It was twice the mass she had expected it to be, more than half of it hiding under the broken stones. The Battle Sister turned it over in her hands and went cold with a shock of sudden recognition.
The object wasn’t a realistic rendition, not with human proportions – indeed without those of ork, tau or any other alien she recognised – but it was very definitely a skull made of heavy, silvered metal. It had a drawn, long chin, a slit of a mouth and dead sockets where Miriya had put her fingers. Wisps of hair-fine cable dangled from where a neck would have been, and there were clear signs of heavy damage on the obverse surfaces. This was no strange piece of artwork or abstract statuary, it was a factory-built thing, and old with it. She looked at it and a shadow settled over her thoughts, a monstrous antipathy that was as difficult to place as it was powerful. Fragments of recall, things from vague mission briefings and half-remembered rumours, accreted in her thoughts. This is a xenos thing.
She looked up to see Sepherina coming closer. ‘Is this what killed our Sisters, mistress? Is this the face of it?’
The other woman nodded. ‘I know its name,’ the canoness repeated, ‘and now, so do you all.’
‘Necron,’ whispered Verity, her voice carrying through the sudden silence.
In the next second, the snarl of thrusters sounded overhead and shadows crossed the jagged rent in the dome, as the second flight of shuttles and landers dropped towards the courtyard.
With a sudden sneer on her lips, Sepherina reached out and snatched the machine-thing’s skull from Miriya’s hands and turned on her heel, her cloak snapping.
Tegas descended from the Aquila shuttle as if he were on rails, travelling without moving, the train of his rich brick-red robes pooling around him. To an outside observer, he would appear to drift to and fro without the crude piston-like actions of organic locomotion, but the keen-eyed might spot the momentary flicker of tiny spidery limbs along the line of the ground, forever concealed beneath the hem of his robes. If one could get close enough to look, they would have seen a vast legion of insectile mechanisms propelling him forwards. Tegas had been made of metal from the waist down for the last one hundred and eight years, and he was working on the upper part of himself all the time. He had used his voyage to Sanctuary 101 on the Tybalt for just such a thing, replacing some fleshy elements in the pieces that remained of his intestinal tract and painstakingly refurbishing an eyeborg module.
He let his mechadendrites wander a little, sampling the aura of the planet. He drank in the air and the temperature level, let his digital senses taste the gravity index and parse the radiation count. He looked with thermographic and etheric-trace vision clusters, taking in gigaquads of raw data on the physical make-up of the world.
The Adeptus Mechanicus had arrived, and now things would get done. He teased himself with a program that synthesized the effect of excitement, then dumped it and returned to his standard operating mode. The mundanes all around him, the women in armour and the lackey workers of either gender, they talked and he recorded it all. Tegas heard them saying things about the deadness of the planet and he mocked them in binary. They saw little with the crude jelly of blood vessels and nerves in their heads, crude in comparison to the questor’s superlative multi-sight. This world was alive on the microwave, ultraviolet and phototropic level in ways they would never be able to know.
Tegas sent burst-transmission orders to his retinue. There were eight in the party, five of them minor adepts the questor had chosen for their combination of pliancy and intelligence, the others carefully disguised combat skitarii that would pass as non-military Mechanicus helots to all but the most invasive of scans. They formed a cyberconcert and began to create a communal data pool for all the party members. Tegas left them to that chore and continued to glide around the landing pad. He used an encrypted vox-feed to tap into the virus program he had injected into the Tybalt’s machine-spirit back at Paramar, and sifted through the vessel’s orbital scans of the local continent.
As such, he was partly distracted when a mid-frequency noise sounded close at hand, and Tegas had to pause to remember it was the sound of his name being uttered at volume. He turned to the source of the voice, attempting to calculate its stressors and emotive index.
The canoness Sepherina approached him, her face locked in an expression of irritation. It was not the first time Tegas had seen it. Others from the Sororitas party were with her, skirting the unloading in progress all across the makeshift landing field. Tegas added identifier flags to his visual field so he could remember which of the females was which with a glance.
‘Esteemed canoness,’ he began, pre-empting her words with his own, each digitally modulated to project an air of concern and a non-threatening manner. ‘It is rewarding to be here at long last, is it not? I–’
‘What else have you kept from us?’ she demanded, cold fury in her gaze. ‘It goes without question that you conceal. It is what your kind do, questor, with your infinite assurance in the perfection of your machine intellects!’ Sepherina shook her head. ‘But this goes too far.’
Tegas decided to continue as before, and consider the woman’s discontinuous statement as he did so. ‘I am eager to begin our survey of this planet, praise be to the Omnissiah for guidance protocols.’ He was aware of the adepts in his party watching intently. ‘I have not kept that wish a secret, milady.’
‘What is it you told us you were looking for?’ The question came from the female-designate Sister Imogen, and it was like the bark of a canine to him. A moment of emotion-analogue came and went. The name of it was exasperation, he seemed to recall. ‘Relics from before the fall of Old Night?’
‘Enough subterfuge,’ Sepherina snapped, drawing something up from the folds of her battle-cloak. ‘You’re here for this, aren’t you?’ The woman’s hand blurred and she threw something in Tegas’s direction. The closest skitarii moved like lightning, racing to intercept on autonomic protection principles, but the questor belayed the order with a beam code pulse and snatched the object from the air with his serpentine manipulators.
He felt the thrill-program activate by its own volition and run swift. The relic held before him was a piece of xenos technology, of pure necrontyr origin, rad-scanned to an age of several million years, quite badly damaged but still relatively intact.
Tegas had to make an effort to stop himself from locking into a work-loop and losing himself in this glittering prize. He looked away, carefully ensuring that the metal skull was handed off to one of his subordinates. ‘How interesting. Thank you for this fascinating artefact, canoness.’
‘Necrons,’ said Sepherina, with open loathing. ‘What the Abbess and the Prioress council suspected is true, then. They destroyed this place.’ She stabbed a finger at him. ‘And the Adeptus Mechanicus knew all along!’
He allowed his shoulders to slump in an approximation of a human gesture of defeat. ‘We suspected,’ he admitted, altering the tone of his voice-synth to something less arch, more regretful. ‘Inquisitor Hoth gave little information about what might be found in the Kavir system… To both of our organisations.’
‘We should have been told.’ The female advanced on him. ‘You should have spoken of this. It changes everything.’
‘Does it?’ He asked the question innocently. ‘The dead are still dead,
the convent still in need of our cooperation to rebuild it. And this world may hold relics of a more human nature, ones that may have incalculable value.’ He cocked his head. ‘More than some piece of alien scrap.’
The lie was delicious; in truth he would have blithely sold the life of any one of the Sisters for such a thing.
Sepherina made a disgusted noise and folded her arms across her chest. ‘It becomes clear to me that you and your party will require more supervision on planet than I first expected. Until I say otherwise, you will do nothing and go nowhere without a Sororitas escort.’
‘That is unacceptable!’ In his affront, Tegas suddenly forgot his voice-modulation protocols. ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus is not under your authority! You have no right to give such an order.’
‘The Adepta Sororitas serves as the martial contingent in this mission,’ she replied. ‘And as military commander, it is my estimation that you will not be… safe… unless you are closely escorted.’
Was that a threat? Tegas could not be certain. He had lost the ability to measure the subtle tones of emotions in unmodified humans years ago. It was part of the reason why he disliked being forced to associate with them. ‘Canoness, I must insist that you–’
But once more she was speaking over him. Sepherina addressed the rest of her troops and the members of the workgangs. ‘Before all other requirements, before even our food and water and shelter, there is a deed that must be done in this place. A duty that has lain incomplete for over a decade. This night we will see to it.’ She shot an acid glare back at the questor. ‘No one leaves the convent. That is my decree, and it will be obeyed.’
A dozen different phrase-strings and sentence constructs presented themselves to Tegas, but he nulled them all. There was no point in talking; that was clear even to him. Better to humour the female for the moment and continue on as planned beyond her sight and her histrionics.
‘Of course.’ He bowed low, his hydraulics whining. ‘By your command, milady.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The preparations had been completed just before the planet’s short, eighteen-hour day concluded, and the canoness made demand to the captain of the Tybalt that the flights of the last few cargo shuttles be halted for the duration. She made it clear she would brook no interruption of the service.
Miriya stood at attention as Sepherina used her firebrand to light a ceremonial brazier, and in a steady, careful voice, the older woman read a passage from the Dominican Tracts on the importance of sacrifice and fealty.
All the Battle Sisters, the non-militants, the workgangers, even Tegas and his party, had been gathered to witness the moment, although the Sororitas had no doubt that the questor was disinterested in the event at hand. Tegas and his serviles became like statues, staring blankly at the stone walls behind the canoness, each of them ignoring this moment of human remembrance for some other kind of bland mechanical communion.
Are they inside their own heads, talking without speaking, mocking us? She imagined it was so. It was said that many of the Adeptus Mechanicus possessed the ability to communicate via wireless speech, as a telepath could voice from mind to mind. Miriya wondered what she might hear if she allowed the vox-module in her armour to seek their frequency.
She dismissed the thought and looked away. As Sepherina reached the end of her reading, Sister Imogen took up a place at her side, a data-slate in her hand. In the gloom, Miriya saw the glow of lettering across the face of the slate: lines of names. It was the roll-call of the dead, the missing.
Once again Miriya considered the actions of the Ordo Xenos. It sickened her to wonder what men like Inquisitor Hoth would want with the corpses of their departed Sisters. Did he have a pact with Tegas, using agents of the Magis Biologis to pick over the dead women’s remains, even now? Probing old wounds and pallid corpse-flesh for some vague inkling as to the function of the weapons that had killed them? The thought left a foul, ashen taste in her mouth.
Sepherina made the sign of the Imperial aquila, and then raised a hand to point into the sky. ‘There,’ she said, her voice husky with controlled emotion. ‘That distant light is Holy Terra.’
The assembled Sisters glanced up to see, but there were a million stars in the night overhead, and they showed nothing to distinguish one from another. Miriya did not question, however. She took it as an article of faith that the canoness’s indication was true.
‘For all the darkness that has touched this world, the God-Emperor’s Light has never left it. The breath of His divinity has not ceased, even in the blackest of times. We are the manifestation of that truth.’ She took a breath. ‘A spiritu dominatus. Domine, libra nos.’
The words in old High Gothic were the opening phrase of the Fede Imperialis, the great battle hymn of the Sisterhood. Normally sung with full voice and to greater glory, this night they joined to speak it like a litany.
‘From the lightning and the tempest, Our Emperor, deliver us.’ Miriya knew the words by heart, and closed her eyes as she became a part of the refrain. ‘From plague, deceit, temptation and war, Our Emperor, deliver us. From the scourge of the Kraken, Our Emperor, deliver us. From the blasphemy of the Fallen, Our Emperor, deliver us. From the begetting of daemons, Our Emperor, deliver us. From the curse of the mutant, Our Emperor, deliver us.’
On they went, their utterances in unity, the poetry of it echoing off the walls and out into the windblown night. Miriya picked out Isabel’s steady tones, the hard edges of Ananke’s declarations and, nearby, Verity’s gentle voice.
‘A morte perpetua. Domine, libra nos. That thou wouldst bring them only death, that thou shouldst spare none, that thou shouldst pardon none.’ She opened her eyes to say the final line, an ember of vengeance as yet unfulfilled stirring deep in her chest. ‘We beseech thee. Destroy them.’
Only Sister Imogen had not joined in the chorus; instead, as they had spoken the words of the hymnal, the canoness’s second had begun a litany of her own, reading out the names of the dead in a low monotone.
‘We will remember them all,’ said Sepherina, stepping towards a metallic cargo crate. ‘The Emperor knows their names.’
The canoness worked a latch on the box and it fell open, revealing rack upon rack of identical porcelain statuettes as long as a woman’s arm. Each was a machine-carved image of the Saint Katherine, knelt in a memorial pose. Sepherina bowed before the container, picked up the first of the statuettes, and carried it away to an area near the storm wall. The servitors had cleared the space before sunset, baring the ground in preparation for the ceremony.
Miriya watched her walk reverently to a point tagged on the dirt with a dye marker and erect the little cenotaph with quick, careful motions. As it settled in the dirt, an illuminator within the carving activated, giving off a soft, yellow glow. Sepherina bowed once again and walked away.
One by one, in orderly fashion, by rank and by squad, the Sisters went to the container and each took a stone icon, carried it to the open space and duplicated the actions of the canoness. Slowly and surely, the memorial garden began to grow, as line upon line of the figures spread across the ground. There was one statuette for every life lost on Sanctuary 101, and with the light from within, the etching of their names upon the face of the stones could be seen.
Miriya took her carving, and placed it as she was bid to. The name on the stone glittered briefly before her eyes.
Decima.
The Sororitas bowed her head and gave a silent prayer to the God-Emperor, hoping that the soul of her lost sister was now safe and eternal at His right hand.
When she rose and turned back to rejoin the others, she saw Tegas staring impassively back at her, his jewel-like eyes glowing red in the shadows of his hood.
The questor was elsewhere. His husk, the proud machine and slow meat of him, stood silently in the vast quad, but his consciousness was in another place, a stream of flexing data in the shared information pool that writhed invisibly between the other members of his party.
All
of them were here, all engaged in the connectivity of it. They shared the responsibility of processing the pool-data between them, utilising a variant form of swarm logic to bounce the cloud of information back and forth. Through machine-code and binary lingua, they communed by use of laser beams, each tuned to be beyond human sight into the far ultraviolet ranges.
The data they shared had many overlaps. The basic factual information about the planet, the environment, the numbers of the mundanes and the materials they had brought down with them, all that was affirmed and filed away. Other matters, like snatches of overheard conversation, were being parsed and edited together to provide a full surveillance of the day’s proceedings. These things occurred on a secondary, almost autonomic level of processing that to the adepts was as unthinking as breathing in and out.
What floated at the top of their data stacks was the discourse about what was to happen next. In strings of ones and zeroes, sometimes with hexadecimal epithets and complex octal-layer nuances, Tegas conversed with his operatives.
They shared questions and dismissals of the need for such activities as the memorial service. Of course they understood the call for such societal constructs, the sense of closure these rituals brought and so on – but they had no empathy for it. The funeral was a pointless thing, celebrating nothing, meaning nothing. It could not be compared to the importance of, say, a rite of activation upon a sacred device or the anointing of holy mech-oils upon an augmentation. What the Sisterhood engaged in was little more than the flailing of uneducated children, an attempt by the inept to catch the attention of beings far greater than themselves. The Adeptus Mechanicus, on the other hand, knew exactly how their rituals affected the matrix of the universe, down to the last piconeper. They measured and collated their prayers to the Omnissiah, encoded them on punch-cards and magnotape. Each entreaty to the Machine-God was precise and controlled, laid out to a flawless standard.
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