Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  ‘It is not that,’ Verity managed, but Sepherina silenced her with a look.

  ‘You are dismissed,’ said Imogen, taking her cue.

  Verity frowned, and she bowed and walked away.

  When they were alone again, Imogen glanced across at the canoness. ‘Milady,’ she began. ‘I hesitate to say so, but the girl is right. There will come a time when we need to inform our Sisters.’

  Sepherina looked away. ‘Yes. But I’ll not allow a nursemaid to tell me when that moment has come.’

  The Watched knew where the interlopers were going, the men with their clanking metal limbs and their ever-present stink of machine oil. It wasn’t a difficult assumption to make. There was only one destination, and it was a place visited before. Many times, in fact.

  The ragged figure scrambled down the sheer face of the rock into the arroyo, knowing instinctively where the handholds and foot wells were. There were places to hide from the red-robed men when they drifted past on impellor platforms, places where the Watched had sat and observed. A memory of the day they had arrived resurfaced. The revenant thought of the solid, unflinching certainty from that moment. A knowledge that these visitors were here to do ill, and in secrecy. A sense of wrongness.

  Towards the bottom of the steep-sided canyon, it always seemed as if the ghost-soul voice of the Watcher inside the revenant’s head was dimmer, as if it were attenuated. But never quite gone, though. There was nowhere on the planet where it could be silenced.

  The Watched took care to descend into the encampment without being seen by the guards patrolling the site, drawing close its ragged cloak to remain nothing but a shadow. And inside that ruined mind, thoughts ground against each other like flints, throwing sparks of emotion that were hard to parse. The Watched sifted through the wreckage of a shattered self, trying to understand.

  Only one thing was clear; something had changed now that the convent had been reoccupied, and these intruders were a part of it. If only one could understand what these things meant to one another. If only these pieces of disparate jigsaw images could be remade.

  The machine did not lay dead upon the iron slab. Rather, it twitched and clicked and hummed in desultory, shuddering motions that seemed pathetic. On its back, the construct’s six hinge-like legs wavered in the air, and Tegas could see where the null-grav coils along its thorax had been forcibly removed. The stumps of metal limbs were tied down with steel hawsers, the lengths of them cut in half.

  Ferren saw where the questor was looking and nodded sagely. ‘I had the manipulator claws severed after we captured it. It killed two helots with them.’

  ‘A sensible precaution,’ Tegas muttered, although something in him was offended by the careless and brutal manner in which the cutting had been done. The machine’s sensor head tilted up in an attempt to peer at him as he approached, but it too was strapped down. He glimpsed a cluster of milky emerald eyes and broken visi-lenses between the figures in Mechanicus red, who surrounded the alien robot like carrion eaters plucking at a corpse. Servo-arms and serpentine actuators worked in the guts of the construct, causing spits of sparking discharge as they delved into the machine’s body.

  ‘I believe we will have it fully dismantled in the next few days.’ Ferren was proud of his work here. ‘A nigh-intact tomb spyder, broken down and collated in every detail.’

  Tegas watched his former student’s men working and was not impressed. They lacked the finesse he would have demanded, and he lamented at the thought of how much data was being lost through their crude experimentation. ‘How is it that you have this automaton to begin with?’

  ‘A survey party disturbed it,’ Ferren replied, something in his manner making it clear there were details he didn’t want to dwell upon. ‘It was only just emerging from a dormant state… One of my tech-guard managed to englobe it with a stasis sphere before it could fully awaken.’

  ‘You were favoured by random probability, then.’ Tegas watched the machine-autopsy continue, the stink of hot metal and strange lubricants thick in his olfactory sensors. ‘This is your great prize?’

  Ferren shook his head, his body language showing dismay. ‘No. No, my lord. But I thought you would be pleased… It is rare that such a find–’

  ‘Yes,’ Tegas broke in, becoming impatient. ‘I am aware. But your communiqué made many vague promises, adept. I wish to see something new, something that I have never encountered before.’ He gestured towards the tomb spyder. ‘This is not even a true necron, it is one of their tools. Your findings show potential… So please, tell me you have more to show me than just stone towers and broken automata? I want more than theories to take back to Utopia Planatia, Ferren. I want knowledge that will change the galaxy.’

  The tech-priest hesitated, then shot a burst of machine-code at one of the lesser adepts working at the dismantling. ‘Get the artefact,’ he commanded.

  The tomb spyder’s head twitched as it tried to follow them about the room, and from somewhere deep within its casing the alien device issued out a thin humming that echoed like a cry of animal pain.

  Tegas glanced back. ‘You are tormenting it,’ he noted dispassionately.

  ‘I do hope so,’ Ferren replied.

  The Watched had been here before. It knew the layout of the place, having stalked across the rooftops of the lab modules and dormitoria in the deep of night, spying on the red-robes without really understanding the reason why. Once or twice, the ragged figure had even entered the stone hallways inside the rock face, there where the men had cut away the rubble to reveal the alien geometry within. But the Watched did not like to tarry there. Inside that echoing place, it felt as if a million eyes were turned inwards, and the weight of something vast, black and nameless drifted just out of sight. Waiting for the moment to emerge and consume everything.

  Listening now, the revenant clung to the top of an equipment shed. The mutter and buzz of the red-robes passed by. They were agitated about something, but the cause was unclear. Hidden in the folds of the torn, filthy hood, a scarred face twisted in a grimace, fighting with itself for any small scrap of knowledge. It was such torment! To see a thing clearly and not to be able to name it, even though the word danced on the edge of understanding. The Watched suffered this pain every day, but at this moment it felt so much worse. The new arrivals had made this happen; they had shone a bright light into the voids in memory, and the revelation was shocking. So much lost. So much lost.

  ‘What is this?’ The words fell away in a breathy whisper.

  Then there was the crunch of sand beneath a boot, and one of the red-robe soldiers was suddenly there, a face spindly and sharp like that of a snake sculpted from iron. A lasgun in one clamp-fist grip. A mouth full of lenses and blue-glowing eyespots.

  The Watched surrendered to animal impetus and attacked. Hood flapping, the ragged figure threw itself from the top of the shed and collided with the soldier, knocking it to the ground. Hands that ended in broken gauntlets dressed with crude claws of scrap metal lashed out and cut gouges in the pasty, grey skin of the red-robe soldier.

  They struggled with the lasgun, then lost it between them in the sands. Reinforced cyborg limbs went against wiry bone and muscle, one powered by energetic battery cells, the other by sheer force of madness. Floodgates of emotion opened up inside the mind of The Watched and tears came again even as anger boiled beneath them. The cyborg staggered, losing ground, clawed feet slipping in the drifts of dust.

  The ragged figure’s free hand vanished into the stained, dirty robes and came back with a black blade, a shortsword made of a material that only barely existed in the real world. It went into the soldier’s biogenerator implants, through the solar plexus with a sound like whispers. Oily blood spattered on the sand from the exit wound as the two combatants embraced.

  The cyborg’s last act was to tip back its head and emit a silent scream in the ultrasonic ranges beyond normal human hearing.

  ‘Tell me about the deaths,’ said Tegas, drawing up the crew c
omplement data that Ferren had sent him on his arrival. ‘The information you provided is incomplete.’

  ‘It is basic, I admit,’ said the tech-priest, shifting on his splay-toed iron feet. ‘But I felt it expedient not to waste time with extraneous data. Suffice to say that an expedition like ours is not without its hazards. I have lost operatives and skitarii to cave-ins and traps left by the xenos to secure their tombs.’

  Tegas’s tolerance for Ferren’s manner was thinning. ‘What are you trying to conceal? What is it that you were afraid to admit on an open channel?’ He drifted closer to his subordinate. ‘The necrons… Your reports to Mars said you had found only sub-level forms, nothing humanoid or demi-intelligent. Did you lie?’

  Ferren reverted back to a blink-code of panicked denials transmitted in the infra-red wavebands. ‘No. Nothing like that. I am certain.’

  Tegas scanned the stress levels in the reply and discarded it. ‘You are not.’

  ‘I am!’ Ferren retorted. ‘We have echo-mapped the entire interior space of the underspaces beneath the alien towers! We have encountered nothing there beyond the complexity of insect-machines! Whatever was here is gone!’

  ‘Gone?’ The questor turned on Ferren, a moment of pure, almost forgotten humanity rippling through him; the emotion of anger. ‘I have travelled light-years to this ball of worthless rock on your word, adept, on the promise of something incredible! But now you suggest that all you have is another empty tomb and a theory I have heard before?’

  ‘No,’ Ferren repeated. ‘I have more.’ The lesser adept trundled back, proffering an object in outstretched hands to the questor. ‘Look. See for yourself.’

  Tegas took the artefact. It was a scroll, like those used in ancient days upon Terra to store knowledge before the advent of bookbinding. But it was not made of anything resembling paper. The sensing modules in his fingertips registered an incredibly ordered level of atomic structure in it, and attempts to identify the nature of the scroll’s make-up classed it as some form of metallic crystal. It was thin, flexible and light.

  He drew it open, and the action of light falling on the scroll’s surface brought it to life. A silent waterfall of images and complex mathematical structures fell across the revealed page. Infinitely long lines of text revealed themselves, resembling the circle-spar iconography of the necrontyr. The scroll showed orb-like panes of data growing out of each other, and when Tegas tilted it, the images changed to reveal even more script layered atop them. It moved past with incredible speed, a library’s weight in texts passing by in a second, more following, more and never ending. The questor saw glimpses of known necron constructs – the dark pyramidal Monoliths, the skeletal forms of their warriors, the glowing emerald spears of gauss weapons and the scimitar curves of vast interstellar ships – but there were other things there as well, forms made out of arcs of grey steel that clawed at the ground, elongated skulls with cyclopean eyes and tripedal walking machines that could only be war engines. He was looking through a tiny window into the heart of the necron machine, and what he saw there was beyond the scope of his imaginings.

  ‘I theorise that the iron scroll is some form of information storage apparatus,’ said Ferren, ‘and possibly more besides. It may even be a remote, portable terminal for a larger expert system.’

  Another human emotion pushed to the fore of Tegas’s thoughts; the one he liked the most, the one he found it the hardest to part with. ‘I take back my doubts,’ he said, greed colouring his every utterance. ‘This is impressive, Ferren.’

  The tech-priest said something in reply, but Tegas was no longer paying attention to him. All that occupied him now was the desire to take this object to his own laboratorium unit back at the convent. It would be important to move swiftly so as to secure credit for this discovery for himself, he mused. Someone of adept’s rank could not be allowed to deal with a find of this magnitude, this thing that could be the Rosetta Stone for all understanding of the necrontyr race. It had to be contained, managed… And properly exploited. In the right hands, the alien artefact could carry a man from the rank and file up to the giddy heights of High Adept of Mars, and Questor Tegas had entered into many bargains and accords in his life in the attempt to make that ascent.

  More importantly, Tegas would have to consider how to handle the Ordo Xenos, who would throw aside any pretence at a slow and steady partnership and wade in with weapons and warships to secure the iron scroll, once they learned of its existence. If they learned of it.

  Tegas folded the scroll closed, saddened to stop the rich flow of information, but it would be easy to become seduced by its potency. He watched Ferren wilt a little when it became clear he was not going to hand the object back to him. ‘I will deal with this,’ he said. ‘You understand the need for that.’

  Ferren’s reply was lost in the sudden ultrasonic shriek of the camp’s alert siren.

  They scrambled out into the dusty gloom and into a chorus of laser fire. Tegas saw streaks of bright yellow flashing up at the wall of stone above them, blasting divots out of the red rock in crackling concussions.

  ‘What is it?’ he brayed. ‘What are you shooting at?’ Even as the demand was made, the questor spotted a blink of movement up on the sheer stone mass. A figure, humanoid in form, scaling the towering side of the arroyo in leaps and jerks, vanishing in and out of shadow as it moved. He immediately scanned in a dozen variant vision modes to pinpoint the intruder, but it was difficult to achieve. Something about the hooded cloak that hid the creature caused his sensor returns to simply slide off it. Already it was getting beyond the range of the tech-guard’s laser weapons, and they were reluctant to open up with anything heavier than shoulder arms for fear of bringing the rocks down on the encampment.

  Tegas turned on Ferren. The adept was doing his best to show a neutral aspect, but the questor knew him well enough to see straight through it. ‘What is that?’ He pointed towards the diminishing figure. He saw lifter platforms rising up in pursuit, but they were too slow to catch the fast-moving intruder.

  ‘The deaths,’ Ferren bleated. ‘Some were murders.’

  Tegas looked away and found the crumpled corpse of a skitarii. The biosynthetic innards of the soldier-cyborg formed a pool around it as the body twitched, mech-agumented nerve clusters still firing after meat-death. ‘You were going to keep this from me…’ He spun and whipped at Ferren with two of his mechadendrites, swatting the tech-priest into the wall of a gear shed. ‘Explain now!’

  ‘It has been plaguing us for months,’ he admitted. Ferren began to spill it all out, as if relieved to be able to divest himself of a burden. ‘I suspect it may be some kind of guardian left behind after the xenos left the planet.’

  ‘Necron?’ Tegas spat the word, broadcasting a stream of binary curses with it. ‘There is a live alien on this planet, and you simply omitted that fact from your reports?’

  ‘You would never have come if you thought there was danger!’ Ferren became shrill. ‘The Ordo Xenos would have arrived instead and all this would be lost to us! Hoth monitors all our signals! He would know!’

  Tegas’s fury built, and partly at the realisation that Ferren was correct. He spat oil into the dirt, reverting back to a human action in this moment of high anger. ‘Why is it still alive?’

  ‘We can’t catch it,’ admitted the tech-priest. ‘We need help. Perhaps you could influence the Sororitas to–’

  Tegas whipped at him once more to make Ferren fall silent. ‘Imbecile! Has living out in this wilderness clogged your processors with sand? The Sisterhood cannot know of this! That thing must be killed by the Adeptus Mechanicus. Do you not understand? It knows the existence of this camp!’ He pointed into the air. ‘I am very disappointed in you, Ferren. It seems I have arrived just in time.’

  ‘I. I. I–’ The tech-priest was making stuttering noises.

  ‘I am taking full command of this expeditionary force,’ snapped Tegas. ‘This is so ordered.’ He looked inwards, encoded the directive into
machine-code and transmitted it on wide-band.

  All of Ferren’s men stopped what they were doing and bowed to the questor.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was night, and Sister Miriya found herself in the memorial garden once more.

  The Sororitas on Sanctuary 101 had taken to calling it that – the garden – despite the fact that nothing grew from the sand-clogged ground except the stone markers bearing the names of the dead. She walked with reverence between the ordered rows of little statues, her path illuminated by the glow of the eternal lamps inside each sculpture of Saint Katherine. Ghost-light flickered like candles in the shadow of the shield wall looming above, the saw-toothed battlements cutting a jagged line across a clear, dark sky. Miriya saw a figure move up there; it was Sister Pandora, her bolter in her hands, walking her circuit of the perimeter. The other woman glanced down, her face hidden behind her Sabbat-pattern helmet. By rights, it was against orders for anyone to be outside after curfew had been called, but Pandora said nothing. She merely gave the other woman a solemn, understanding nod and moved on.

  Miriya looked away, her gaze drawn back to the rows of statuettes. She felt churlish, betrayed by her own venality. Unable to find sleep in the makeshift barracks that had been set up in the convent’s exercise halls, the Battle Sister had stolen away in her duty robes and walked out into the cool night, in search of… What?

  ‘Why am I here?’ she asked softly, to the air, to the dead, to the image of the Saint. None gave her an answer.

  If one wanted only a factual, colourless reply to that question, there was ample explanation. Miriya was here because of her mistakes.

  First, her errors in allowing her second-in-command, Sister Lethe Catena, to be killed during the escape of a dangerous psyker captive; then her inability to widen her focus and the near-obsession with which she pursued her former prisoner. These things had caused her to fall into the orbit of the Lord Deacon Viktor LaHayn, a man of such hubris that his plans dared to shake the pillars of the Golden Throne itself. In the end, LaHayn and his sacrilege were obliterated and Miriya found some measure of reprisal, but there had been a high price to pay.