Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  Behind her, the thunder of bolters sounded as the Battle Sisters duelled with the wraiths. The ghost-machines dogged them at every step, dancing in and out of reality. She had seen them use that tactic before, forcing their enemy to waste their ammunition, wearing them down.

  In the brief moments they did become solid, the baleful light of their exile beamers flashed. Anything caught in the rays cast by the devices vanished, dimension-shifted into some random otherwhere.

  ++You wonder how you know these things++ said the Watcher. ++Surrender and you will understand++

  This time she did not give any reply. Her hands crossed the surface of another silent Monolith and at last she felt the touch of what she had been searching for. ‘Here!’ she cried. ‘To me, quickly.’

  More footfalls sounded from along the corridor, and she glimpsed three more of the armoured women approaching from the other direction. Far behind them, the floor undulated and shifted, a metallic carpet of hissing, chittering forms moving in a slow wave. The scarabs were coming to dissemble them and carry their corpses to the reclamators.

  ++If you are fortunate++

  ‘We are trapped,’ said the one called Cassandra. ‘What escape is this?’

  ‘I have a way,’ she told them, and she meant it. ‘It will cost me much…’

  ‘More than your life?’ asked the dark-haired one with the scar on her face. Miriya, that was her name. The one who had stalked her through the halls of the convent.

  ‘Yes,’ she told her, with brutal honesty.

  She let herself fall into the fugue state and touch the horrors inside her own mind. There she found the geometric shapes and the patterns she needed, the equations that would activate the mechanisms and find a pathway from this place. Back to the planet. Back to the ruins and the dust.

  They reached out to her, these fragments of alien knowledge. They tried to grab her, drag her down into the dark of herself. It was hard to fight back, and they took a toll, breaking pieces of her off, hoarding them.

  But it was done. The dull pane of polished stone across the face of the Monolith ran like a vertical puddle, eldritch light pooling upon it. The necron craft hummed and rose off the ground, impelled by internal powers she had awakened.

  ‘Another portal…’ said Cassandra. ‘And where will this one take us, witchling?’

  She answered the question by stepping through.

  The scarabs and the wraiths were all around them, and the Sisters had nowhere else to go. Miriya heard Verity cry out as one of the insectoid machines bit her and she shook it off.

  The flash of light from the portal gate in the front of the Monolith bathed them all in an eerie glow. The woman in the hood didn’t hesitate; she vanished into it.

  ‘We seem to be making a habit of this,’ growled Danae, and she propelled the hospitaller before her, firing at the wraiths. ‘Do we even have a choice but to follow?’

  Imogen’s pale face darkened with chained fury, but she said nothing as she followed the revenant once more into the unknown.

  The cryptek arrived to see the dimensional interface cycle ending, the conduit phase collapsing back into the structure of the Monolith. The pyramid settled back to the deck, inert once more, and the serviles milled around, waiting for a new command. He dismissed the scarabs and had the wraiths scan the chamber for damage estimates. The organics were careless with their weapons; the ruination these humans had caused in the gallery alone would take many of their man-years to mend.

  Ossuar traced the activation runes on the Monolith and entertained a concern. No organic should have been able to operate this mechanism. It was simply impossible to comprehend.

  Yet it had been done. He drew a recall of the instant from the groupmind memory bank of the scarabs and examined it.

  A distant sensation awoke in Ossuar. It had been so long since he had experienced such a thing it took a while to process and identify it. At last, he found a name for it: an emotion.

  The cryptek filed it away for later consideration and studied the dead portal.

  It was clear that the situation on the planet was moving beyond his capacity to control. Here, inside the Hub, Ossuar had a perfect understanding of his capabilities and the powers he had to draw upon. But there? Outside in that realm, beyond these hallowed corridors… He reluctantly conceded that it required the talents of a different entity.

  The time had come to awaken the nemesor.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There had been a time – so many centuries gone now that it was almost a dream and less than a memory – when Tegas had been fully human.

  Then, barely a youth, he had been recruited out of the schola progenium where the evaluators of the Adeptus Mechanicus had found him. Recruited, if one were to use that word as a synonym for taken.

  Young Tegas had been foolish, stupid. It embarrassed the questor to consider him now, regarding that frightened boy as little better than an infant, fouling itself and incapable of feeding without assistance.

  On the way to Mars he had tried to take his own life, utterly ignorant of what glories the Machine-God would open to him upon his arrival. He had eaten poison aboard the transport ship, and almost succumbed to the potency of it. In the end, the toxins had only hastened the need for the excision of many of his internal organs and the implantation of newer, better replacements.

  The only sense-memory he still carried from that moment was how the poison felt as it ran through him. The sickening disconnection it brought between his thought and his action, the sense of a body dying outside of his control. The fear.

  He remembered that clearly, all these years later, as Adept Lumik fretted over him, plucking at him to help him rise from where he had fallen.

  Gathering his wits, Questor Tegas swatted her away and got up, shaking off the ill-effects of… What?

  He reviewed his internal program loops. He had made this happen. In his eagerness to probe the secret of the iron scroll, something Tegas had done had released a surge of electromagnetic energy unlike any he recognised. The alien radiation swamped the interior of the laboratorium, and the efficient ray-shields that so cleverly protected the module from outside surveillance or imaging had trapped the force of it inside.

  The questor’s timebase was so corrupted he could not immediately ascertain how long he had been inert. Parts of his internals were still off-line, cycling through reboot phases. He grunted and staggered to the workstation.

  The scroll was still there, sheathed in an emerald glow, mocking him with its complexity. I did do something, he told himself. The back-shock had not been some kind of security measure, but the side-effect of a larger event. Tegas knew what he had seen in the holograph glow of the scroll’s interface. Control. The virtual switches he had tripped, they had sent signals along quantum filaments, the electromagnetic surge spilling out around them. I did something. He smiled. I summoned something.

  A fear reaction would have been more logical at this juncture, he reasoned, but strangely, even the smallest glimmer of that emotion escaped him. This was experimentation, he told himself. It was not without risk, even to one’s self, and whatever data or effect was generated from the result, he was confident he could address it. Tegas did not consider this arrogance.

  What is that ancient axiom I have heard soldiers spout at moments of extreme crisis? Tegas cocked his head, thinking aloud. ‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger.’ Or in my case, smarter.

  ‘L-lord?’ stuttered Lumik, hanging on his words. Her tics were becoming more pronounced. ‘I d-do not understand–’

  He rounded on her. ‘Are we secure? The Sororitas, outside… Are they aware of anything amiss? Have we suffered damage?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently n-not. One death.’ She answered his questions in quick succession.

  ‘Good.’ He gestured at the iron scroll. ‘We will make it inert, examine our recorded data and then proceed from there.’

  ‘Lord,’ Lumik went on. ‘We cannot. We have been trying to revive you
for fifty-seven minutes.’ She pointed a mecha-tentacle at the alien artefact. ‘The device is drawing on power from an unknown source. Speculation: extradimensional. It resists all attempts to enquiet it.’

  ‘What?’ He pushed her aside, listing as he stomped across the lab chamber’s metal decking. This was not right. The device had never shown any sign of being self-sustaining in its actions, not in Tegas’s examinations or any of the tedious studies run on it by Tech-priest Ferren.

  ‘W-what did you do?’ she asked him, unable to keep accusation from her tone. ‘We were supposed to observe, evaluate, collate. Nothing more. Those w-were the orders.’

  ‘Orders?’ Tegas said in harsh echo. ‘Ah yes, the so-called “suggestions” of Inquisitor Hoth and the Ordo Xenos.’ He turned an eye-cluster to glare at her. ‘We are the children of the Omnissiah and all knowledge belongs to us. For Mars’s sake, we do not adhere to the demands of the Inquisition! If that were so, then those stunted minds would have shackled every last creative thought from our species long ago!’

  He crossed to the scroll, ignoring the other adepts who seemed afraid to venture too close to it. The alien holograms were flooded with glyphs that moved so fast even his enhanced cognition subroutines could not interpret them. The sight of the icons made him feel pleasantly giddy, as a flesh-and-blood man might react to a potent glass of amasec.

  ‘What are you doing, you lovely thing?’ he asked it, his smile widening.

  The device chose to answer him.

  The iron scroll had shown many interesting characteristics, including a capacity to alter itself on an atomic level by moving sheets of molecules back and forth. At first it was a roll of metallic paper, then a fan of thin, feather-like blades. And now, it changed once again.

  It opened.

  Radiance, a rippling emerald shimmer like captured lightning, emerged from the edges of the scroll as it unfolded along its length. The device deconstructed itself, a sculpture formed of metal paper unmaking its shape. As Tegas and his adepts watched in stunned awe, organo-metalloid materials deformed as new molecular patterns stored deep in particle waveforms imposed themselves.

  The scroll became the fan, the fan became a pennant, the pennant bending into a thin spline, curving up and growing. Chains of molecules reordered and knitted in new configurations, mimicking an accelerated biological growth cycle.

  The questor watched it with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety. Lumik stuttered and jerked as she pulled at the hem of his robes, begging Tegas to stop it, but even if he had been capable, he would not have done so. He was enrapt by the dance of reconstruction, the living metal cresting to make itself into a ring of chrome a little over two metres in diameter.

  Across the disc of the ring a net of crackling green sparks formed, merging, reforming. A liquid effect, the visual component of exotic radiations interacting with air molecules, appeared. It was like a child’s toy, the membrane of a giant bubble held tense in the hoop.

  Tegas and the others studied the effect with senses that perceived realms beyond human sight, sound, smell. The questor’s probes danced in the air around him, sampling and tasting. Unusual particulates that resembled ozone, calcites and other elements were being generated by the membrane, wafting invisibly into the laboratorium. Waves of radiant, invisible energy spilled out with them, and Tegas felt the passage of air on the few pieces of skin that formed his face.

  On an impulse he could not fully quantify, he reached up his hand towards the glowing, filmy light. Tegas wanted to touch it. He knew that it would give under his steel digits. He wanted to sift the energy in his fingers, like sand.

  The membrane quivered and burst before he could reach it.

  Displaced air screamed and crashed in tiny thunderclaps, and the ring vomited shapes wreathed in clouds of icy vapour . Human figures exploded into the room. A hooded form, then others in flashing black armour and crimson capes crusted with rimes of frost. They crashed across the workstation and landed in disarray, colliding with examination gimbals and servitors too slow to get out of their way.

  Battle Sisters. The surreality of their arrival caused a brief computational error cluster in the questor’s thoughts before his mind caught up to what he was seeing. The adept had been right – extradimensional energy was the key. The scroll had been the information repository, the fan, the control matrix and the ring…

  The ring was a portal…

  Tegas’s train of thought was broken as Lumik generated a droning scream of alarm, and he flinched backwards as the disorder ensued.

  A green bolt of energy emerged from the shuddering membrane and flashed out across the chamber, destroying a cogitator console in a pulse of black smoke. The questor saw other things emerging at the foot of the ring, slower than the first arrivals: beetle-sculptures made of steel and emerald glass, venturing forth – no, coming through – with slow machine cunning. Tegas remembered the construct Ferren had been tormenting, the tomb spyder; these were the smaller cousins of the same automata, the so-called scarabs.

  ‘Get back!’ shouted one of the Sororitas, a woman with dark hair and a fierce aspect, directing her command at Lumik. Without waiting for the adept to obey, she opened fire with a bolter and destroyed the first of the mechanoids with pinpoint shots.

  The woman who had come through first – the one in a stained and torn robe that stank of old, soiled matter – lurched back towards the ring and snatched at it. Reflexively, afraid that she would destroy this incredible piece of technology, Tegas tried to stop her.

  Without pause, she batted him away and he crumpled to the deck. In that instant, he got a scan of her and the data returned was a confused mix that was hard to interpret. Hot and cold thermal patches, low-yield radiation, organic resonances, evidence of biomech implantation. She did not make sense. The scan was closer to a Mechanicus cyborg than a Sister of Battle.

  The question was pushed away when the woman snatched at one of the threads of silver fibre making up the lines of the ring. Impossibly, it broke, and like the tension in a bow string failing, the perfect hoop of alien steel came apart with a blinding crackle of spent power. Lashing across the room, the metal cut a line of orange sparks over ceiling and deck, bisecting illuminator strips and severing the arm of a gun-servitor that had wandered too close. Tegas watched in amazement as the metal did its trick once again, retreating into itself. Within seconds, it was weaving back into the shape of the scroll, as if nothing had happened.

  He marvelled at what he had seen. If these modes of function were available to this necron construct, then the questor could not help but wonder what other shapes it could take. Poor Ferren, he mused, he has no understanding of what he discovered. He was a child grubbing in the dirt for lost coins, who found a God’s ransom instead.

  He would have laughed if not for the circumstances he was now forced to face.

  Tegas turned and found Sister Superior Imogen’s gun pointing at his head. He gave the very smallest of bows. ‘Milady,’ he offered, as if greeting her at evening prayers. ‘Welcome.’

  ‘The laboratorium…’ Among the Sororitas, a hospitaller with a drawn, pale face, peered at her surroundings. ‘We have been returned to the surface.’ Her comrades were swiftly getting their bearings, and they did not like what they saw.

  Lumik and the other adepts were cross-communicating silently, and the shared data pool was in danger of brimming over with questions. Where did the Sororitas come from? How does the device work? Who is the hooded one? Has the dig site been compromised?

  The answer to the last of those he saw in Imogen’s eyes. She didn’t need to say it and he felt no need to conceal the lie any longer. Now was the time to exercise damage control, before things could spiral into violence. The Adepta Sororitas were a pious lot and largely narrow of mind, but once roused to anger they would carry their rancour until the death of time itself. Tegas did not wish to find himself at the sharp end of their wrath.

  Not now he had something so perfect within his grasp.r />
  ‘This object,’ rasped the hooded one, tracing a bony finger around the closing scroll. ‘I sought the closest way back to the convent and the Monolith interpreted that wish literally. It repurposed this device to form a temporary endpoint to the conduit.’

  ‘Where did you find it?’ Imogen demanded of him. ‘Speak, questor!’

  ‘It is good fortune that I did so,’ Tegas deflected. ‘It came from the desert… I was able to fathom some of its functions.’ That was almost a truth, and he pressed on. ‘If I had not, perhaps you would have never made it back from…’ He let the words hang, and predictably, one of the other Sisters filled the silence with the answer.

  ‘We found the caverns,’ said the one carrying the meltagun. ‘Your secret outpost!’

  The unaugmented were so easy to manipulate, he reflected, unable to avoid giving voice when caught in the highest of emotional states. ‘I can explain.’ Tegas modulated his tone to appear contrite. ‘I fear we have all been misled–’

  ‘More lies will only bury you deeper, you boneless clockwork!’ Imogen growled. ‘Your men tried to kill us.’

  Tegas silently cursed Ferren’s lack of restraint, but said nothing.

  ‘Their actions summoned the xenos,’ Imogen went on, ‘and for that we may all perish!’

  There were so many things he wanted to know, but the questor realised that his next utterance would be his final one unless he acquiesced. Beaming an order to the other adepts to give no resistance, he bowed to the Sororitas in surrender. ‘I am sure there is an explanation for all of this.’

  ‘We will see.’ Imogen beckoned her second in command. ‘Bring him!’ spat the Sister Superior. ‘And his toy as well. The canoness must know what we have seen.’ Imogen glared back at Tegas. ‘You will have a steep price to pay for what you concealed from us, maggot.’

  ‘Sister,’ said one of the others. ‘What about… her?’ She pointed at the woman in the hooded robe.