He heard the man curse under his breath and speak a prayer to Holy Terra as he caught sight of the same thing. ‘They c-come,’ he blurted, his manner shifting once more, this time into raw fear. ‘If we see them, they are already surrounding us!’
Zeyn rounded on him. ‘Did your ordos masters do this?’ he demanded. ‘Are they here because you brought it on us?’
When Sijue looked up at him, his eyes were blank with absolute terror. ‘I have no wish to learn the answer.’ Something made a bony crunch inside the man’s mouth and Sijue lolled back, his eyes rolling to whites, a toxic pink froth gathering on his lips. His chest stuttered and was still.
The deacon looked away and saw lines of metal soldiers moving inexorably into the glow of the work-lamps, silent and purposeful.
Khaygis was disappointed.
He had yet to be challenged by the meat, on whatever worlds he faced them, in whatever form they opposed the might of his armies. Each time he awoke from the sarcophagus-sleep, he hoped that the next battle would be the one to truly test him – but that day had not yet come.
And even now, as he watched the phalanxes of his warriors and immortals advancing on the human outpost, he doubted that the organics who fled before their march would prove to be a worthwhile foe. He wondered if he ever would meet an enemy he could consider worthy, and thought it unlikely. After all, he was a soldier who had fought in the War in Heaven, once of those who had seen the Old Ones defeated in the time before the slumber. Millions of years later, and the galaxy saddened him with its inability to produce an opponent to match those he had killed so long ago.
He had been here before. It was the nemesor who had commanded the first assault on this compound, a dozen solar cycles ago. Then, fresh from the Atun pacification, it had seemed like a new test of his skills and his soldiers. The necrontyr had never faced this particular tribe of meat-being before, these females that called themselves ‘Soh-ror-it-az’, who emitted strange choral melodies as they fought, and refused to surrender.
But they died as easily as the rest. In the end, the assault on the outpost had been more an execution than a military strike. The females had been unprepared and poorly commanded. Khaygis, linked into the slave-minds of every last warrior under his authority, had flowed through their defences like liquid mercury, arriving by portal and Monolith. He had killed many with his own talons, and never been truly threatened along the way.
The humans died in their droves, not knowing what had destroyed them, unable to name it. He would ensure they would do so again, and this time he would be thorough.
Gauss flayer beams erupted in a wall of flames as the leading rank crested the broken wall, blazing into the backs of the organics who attempted to flee. Defensive gunfire from the towers and the unbroken stretches of wall answered back, and the nemesor sensed the first few shutdowns as warriors were knocked off-line by the massive kinetic impacts of ballistic rocket-shells. Even as they fell, they entered regeneration cycles, the living metal of their bodies knitting back together over their bloodless wounds. Khaygis stroked the resurrection orb at his side, hastening their return to battle with a small measure of the device’s powerful essence.
The immortals, true to their name, marched undying into the teeth of the human guns and let fly with their tesla carbines. Blue-white fire reflected off their morose skull-faces as chains of living lightning leapt into the human cohort, ripping from one organic to another, gathering power from the life-force they liberated with each screaming kill.
Alarm bells tolled inside the walled outpost, and with the great acuity of his vision band, the nemesor could pick out the arrival of more of the combatant females, a blaze of green reflecting off their space-dark battle armour. They did not rush to meet his first advance, but instead fell into defensive stances, setting up fire corridors and chokepoints.
He cocked his head. These ones were better prepared than the others had been; they had been waiting for an attack, not caught unawares by it. Perhaps they would be more of a challenge.
But that was unlikely. Khaygis turned away and transmitted a new order-meme to his forces. The constant, dusty wind picked up its tempo, and from high overhead, a new sound joined the melee.
The Tomb Blades came in fast, the scream of their repulsor drives resonating off the hillside. Resembling some strange combination of a cargo-crane’s claw and a metallic throne, the flyers shone dully in the wan light. A flight of three craft, each armed with a particle beam cannon, tore down over the walls and stitched lines of crackling red-orange light across the flagstones. The beams cut black lashes into the rock, and the workgangers who did not get to cover in time were flashed to wet clouds of cinders when the fire-light touched them.
Sweeping ahead of the advancing lines of the necron warriors, the flyers hammered at the defensive positions manned by the Battle Sisters, looping in the pre-dawn air and slicing into their barricades. The warrior mechanoids wired into the command trains of the Tomb Blades were less pilots than they were components in the killing machine, there only to process the complicated strings of attack data and combat patterns. They piloted their craft dispassionately, focussed blankly on the business of breaking the morale of the defenders so that the ground forces could progress more easily.
But the God-Emperor’s Sororitas were not ones to break. Years of duty, of unflinching discipline, of battle against all the foes humanity had to face made them ready to weather alien attack without hesitation.
The women who had died in Sanctuary 101 twelve years earlier perished because they had believed this world to be benign. They had allowed the desolation and the emptiness of the planet to lull them into a false sense of security – and they had paid for that with their blood, ending their lives in desperate defence of this remote outpost.
The women here now knew full well the dangers their Sisters had not seen, and they were ready for them.
As the Tomb Blades wheeled in the air and came back for another pass, a squad of Sister Danae’s Retributors took position and made ready. Experienced Battle Sisters to a woman, they were specially trained in the use of heavy weapons. They considered themselves to be the hammer of the Sororitas forces.
Danae gave the command for weapons free and the Retributors cut the sky. Heavy bolters thundered, dense mass-reactive rounds blasting the necron flyers. The searing bright discharges of meltaguns joined them, throwing brief flares of stark, juddering illumination over the courtyard.
They found their target, and the first true enemy casualty was struck as a Tomb Blade erupted in fire. The pilot within was so heavily damaged that not even its inbuilt reanimation protocols could overcome the storm of shot and shell, and the flyer disintegrated into a metallic rain, clattering down over the open quad.
Particle fire answered back and claimed the lives of Battle Sisters, the kills coming so fast that they were robbed of the chance to scream. The Retributors fought harder, avenging their kindred with defiant retaliation. A second Tomb Blade was hit, colliding with the third as it struggled to maintain airspeed. Both flyers, oozing thick and acrid smoke, broke off the attack and flipped over, rolling away towards the hills and into the embrace of the echo of engine noise. Their attack blunted for the moment, they retreated to repair and regenerate.
The Sororitas regrouped and gathered up their injured while the ranks of necron warriors, steady and unhurried, continued to approach.
Her red combat cloak flaring, Sister Isabel sprinted across the courtyard as flayer beams probed towards her, blind-firing bursts of bolter shells in the direction of the alien advance.
In a strange way, she felt relieved. Ever since the Sisterhood had returned to Sanctuary 101, an ominous air of foreboding had hung over everything. Isabel was not the only one who had felt it; the eerie graveyard emptiness of the desert planet had weighed heavily on the minds of many of her Sisters. Every day that passed on the surface tightened the rack of tension. Each of them held the secret fear that the xenos who wiped out the first colo
ny would return – and now they had, the terrible waiting was over. The threatened storm was breaking at last.
Silence and tedium dragged on Isabel’s nerves like razors on her skin, but battle she could embrace as if it were an old friend.
Her bolter’s slide snapped back as she expended the last shell in the clip, and she vaulted a low wall to drop down into cover behind the rubble of one of the destroyed statues.
Sister Ananke was close by, methodically aiming, firing, aiming, firing. She ignored the streaks of eldritch green flame that lashed at the stone around her. The pungent stink of burnt rock and fused sand soured the air. Isabel ducked and busied herself loading a fresh magazine.
‘How many of them have fallen?’ Isabel asked, without preamble. She scanned the enemy approach with her single cybernetic eye, drawing in target data. She counted many.
‘Hard to tell,’ Ananke replied, between shots. ‘We put them down and they resurrect, they rise again.’ She fired again. ‘I swear I have killed the same ones a dozen times now.’
Isabel executed a pop-up attack and blasted an immortal back into the dust. ‘Aye,’ she admitted, ‘they all look the same.’
With exaggerated, spindly motions, the necron machine dragged itself back to a standing position, and then walked on as if nothing had happened. Each of the immortals raked energy fire across the courtyard with each step nearer they took
Ananke followed Isabel’s lead and joined her as she attacked the same target again. This time, it dropped and disappeared behind the advancing line, but it was not clear to either of them if it was down and out, or if the necron would once more rise to plague them.
‘We need reinforcements,’ Ananke grated into her vox-bead. ‘Cutting and sniping at them won’t be enough.’
Isabel said nothing. She had come from the central keep, where the raising of the alarm had sent the Battle Sisters to combat ready, each standing a post to repel the invasion. From the crackles of weapons fire coming from the battlements to the west and the south, it seemed that the wall breach before her was not the only place where the xenos were making their assault. She had no idea if there was anyone who could come to their aid; but it was clear that they did not have enough guns to hold the line for long.
‘Steady your will,’ came a strident voice, so loud that both Battle Sisters heard it through the vox and the air. ‘Sing with me!’
A deep, bass voice bellowed out the first line of the hymn Holy Terra We Beseech Thee, and Isabel’s augmetic eye caught the movement of a figure bounding over the fallen statuary.
Lit by surges of green fire, Deacon Zeyn came running like a wild man, his hair streaming out behind him, his eyes lit with fervour. In one hand he gripped an industrial laser cutter liberated from the wall rebuild, and in the other his electro-whip spun and flashed. ‘Against the alien, we prevail!’ he shouted, burning white light across the line of the necron advance.
Isabel saw the immortals actually slow for a moment, as if they were startled by the sudden appearance of a lone human, coming in to fight them hand-to-hand. But then, they were only machines, were they not? The unpredictable ways of men were not known fully to them.
‘To the deacon!’ shouted Ananke, seeing the same opportunity. ‘Go!’ The dark-skinned Sororitas leapt from her cover, firing and running. Other Battle Sisters nearby heard her cry and followed suit.
Isabel grinned and mantled the plinth before her, leading with her gun. ‘We prevail!’
Zeyn’s whip lashed out and struck the leading elements of the necron line, discharging its full power into the machine-skeletons. They performed a mad dance as the electro-discharge misfired their motor controls, and one of the immortals jerked, sweeping up its gauss blaster while still firing, turning its gun over the torsos of its brethren.
Isabel used her cyber-eye to target and shoot without needing to raise her bolter to her shoulder, sprinting into the dithering necron skirmish line. The machines had been caught off-guard, but they were quick and they would adapt to the new circumstance in moments.
‘Sing!’ shouted Zeyn, and Isabel did, joining the Sororitas in the hymnal, letting the martial rhythm of the tune carry her forwards, shield her from doubt and hesitance. She killed an immortal with a salvo that took off its head, and the machine crumpled, disintegrating into a bright flash of light. Zeyn’s lash rose and fell, his makeshift laser weapon bisecting limbs and burning through steely skulls.
Other emerald flashes sparked along the assault line as the necrons staggered and finally broke formation. The bodies that did not fall to later rise seemed to melt into the energy flares, as if swept away by teleportation or some alien manner of techno-sorcery.
The immortals and their warrior cohorts tried to reform but the Sisters had the taste of blood in their mouths now, and they were closing the gate, forcing the machines back towards their breach. Zeyn’s mad, reckless charge had been all that was needed to rally the Sororitas.
All at once, a silent signal seemed to pass down the line of the necrons, and they fell back en masse, retreating towards the breach in the shield wall.
Something rang a wrong note with Isabel, and she skidded to a halt. ‘Wait…’
‘Follow them!’ roared Zeyn, scrambling up a low hill of rubble and fallen masonry. He raised his whip high, spinning it like a glittering rotor, daring the necrons to find him with their shots. ‘Our faith is our armour! In the God-Emperor’s name!’
Whatever instinct it was, either a trained warrior’s intuition or something of divine providence, Isabel’s attention was seized by a motion behind the mass of the defenders. She spun to see a group of spindly humanoid shapes loping across the courtyard from the western wall. They were inside! Behind us! How could they be inside?
The necron warriors raised their guns and fired as one, burning light lancing over her head as she dodged away.
The shots converged on Deacon Uriahi Zeyn and tore him out of existence. The last verse of the song from his lips extended into a blood-chilling shriek, as the gauss flayers did their work. His mane of hair and the ruddy skin of his face became ashes, the bones beneath briefly blackening before they too were made powder in the nimbus of jade fire.
‘It’s a feint! They are inside the walls!’ Isabel shouted into the general vox-channel. ‘The enemy is within!’
The moment the gunfire began to sound, Questor Tegas went to the barred door of the cell-crypt and called out to the Sororitas on guard. One of them, a woman with a hard face and narrow eyes, hove closer and glared at him.
Before she could speak he banged a metal fist on the inside of the door. ‘It is the xenos,’ he told her. ‘You cannot leave us in here while they attack the convent. We can be of assistance to the canoness!’
‘I have my orders,’ the Battle Sister replied. ‘And you are not to be trusted.’
Tegas’s mechadendrites trailed over the dusty floor of the cell, hissing trails through the dirt in unconscious reflection of his mood. Armed with the information gleaned by his surveillance probe, he was unwilling to sit out the conflict and allow Sepherina’s troops to engage the necrons alone. He was not prepared to place his life and that of his party in the hands of the Sororitas. ‘Honoured Sister,’ he began, biting down on his irritation and modulating his voice into something that would make her manner more pliant.
She shut him down with a crash of noise, slamming the butt of her bolter into the door. ‘Do not speak to me again!’ said the woman, spitting at him. ‘It is your lies–’
Tegas never learned what it was that his lies were responsible for. At that moment, the corridor outside the cells was filled with sound and light.
A shrieking sound of air molecules being slashed apart. A blazing viridian light that caused his optics to shunt to counter-glare settings.
The Battle Sister was caught in the nimbus of a necron flayer blast and her death-cry was lost in the howling discharge of the alien guns. The last of her Tegas saw was the woman’s flesh puffing into scraps that
resembled burnt paper.
Bands of colour searing the receptors of his artificial retinas, Tegas recoiled from the barred window in the cell-crypt door and pressed himself flat against the nearest wall, where any observer peering inside would be unable to see him.
He heard crashes of noise and more skirls of particle beam energy, registering reflected flickers of light off the stone that matched the albedo of the necron guns. Metal claws tore open cell doors and burned the interiors with millisecond bursts of kill-fire, advancing down the corridors towards his hiding place.
Tegas wondered how the aliens had managed to push so quickly into the outpost’s underground levels. Had they teleported in through those infernal gateways of theirs, or dug out through hidden tunnels? Were there paths into the convent that Imogen and her dogged Celestians had been too ignorant to see? It did not matter; all that mattered was that he was going to die in here, and the monumental unfairness of that struck Tegas like a bullet.
He found old hate and let it rise. Why had the Omnissiah cursed him so? How did it serve the grand design of the Machine-God to place the questor so close to such riches and then end him before he could reach them?
His hands found the sacred symbol of the Great Cog where it hung about his neck, and he traced the shape of it, hoping that his deity would be watching him.
Sister Isabel’s warning was redundant to the Sister Superior, having come too late for her to save the lives of the Sororitas at her sides. Within the central keep, from either side of the corridor, necron warriors had advanced seemingly from out of nowhere, and the Battle Sisters had died in the initial exchange of fire.
Imogen spent her last grenades to avoid the same fate, and dived into a stairwell as the machines fired towards her. The only escape route was upwards, and Imogen scrambled up the narrow spiral staircase, cursing her luck. Behind her, she could hear the inexorable scrape and crunch of iron feet. They were almost at her back, less than a turn or two behind her.
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