Hammer and Anvil

by James Swallow

  ‘You are certain of this course of action?’ said Imogen.

  Sepherina nodded. ‘If we do nothing, Sanctuary 101 will fall silent once more. History will repeat itself.’

  The ghost of a smile twisted Tegas’s not-quite-face and faded as fast as it had appeared, perhaps an emotive artefact of the questor’s true feelings. He was behaving as if he had won a victory, Miriya realised.

  She decided to challenge him. ‘Why do we need to put our trust in the Adeptus Mechanicus? We have among our ranks a Sister of Battle whose knowledge of the necrons outstrips that of Lord Tegas.’ She inclined her head towards Decima.

  The other woman reacted, wringing her hands. ‘No,’ she slurred, ‘No, no. Don’t go. Be silent! I don’t want to go back again.’

  ‘You would trust this…’ Tegas paused, struggling to find the right word. ‘This damaged, broken soul over me?’ He approached her, and Decima shied away. ‘Do you have any idea what she really is?’

  ‘The necrons did that to her. The cryptek, the one that called itself Ossuar.’ Decima flinched as Verity said the name. It was strange; inside the caverns and the alien complex, the lost Battle Sister had been strong and defiant, but here and now she was cowed and fretful.

  ‘We lose if we wait,’ she whispered, eyes set on some unknowable, distant point. ‘Yes. Yes.’

  Tegas opened his cloak with a theatrical gesture. ‘It seems that the only way I can cement my trustworthiness to you is by example. So, I will give it. I will show you what this poor, pathetic wretch really is.’

  ‘She is a human being!’ Verity insisted.

  ‘Like a Space Marine is a human being?’ said Tegas. ‘Like a psyker? Or a ratling, or an ogryn? Like I am?’ He flared his manipulators before Decima and she stood her ground, chewing on her scarred lip.

  The tip of one of Tegas’s mechadendrites snapped open like a metal bloom. A fan of glassy triangles emerged from it and spun into a circle, clicking into place. The pieces created a device that resembled an outsized magnifier. The lens misted and grew definition as Tegas ran it over Decima’s limbs, a few centimetres from the surface of her flesh. Terahertz waves bombarded her harmlessly, reflecting through the meat and bone of her to display a three-dimensional image. The myriad of metal implants forced into her flesh became starkly visible.

  ‘A test bed, I think,’ Tegas said, becoming distant and clinical. ‘This necron scientist you named… He was experimenting on the human form. But I would need a full dissection to be certain as to what he was trying to prove.’

  ‘You won’t touch her,’ Miriya said firmly.

  ‘No?’ Tegas moved the lens up towards Decima’s head and she tried to back away, making small, whimpering noises. ‘When you see this, you will change your mind.’

  The lens framed a model of the revenant’s skull, rendered in layers of colour and photic density. Visible clearly, clasped to the occipital region, was a device that Miriya had seen before, inside the halls of the Obsidian Moon.

  It was a variant design of a necron scarab mechanoid; smaller than the others, the malevolent beetle-form buried in the meat of her neck, its needle-like legs embedded in her spinal column. As she watched, the Battle Sister could see it moving slightly, as if it were alive.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Decima began to weep. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…’

  ‘We don’t know what name the xenos have for them,’ Tegas said, in a hectoring tone. ‘Inquisitor Hoth called them “mindshackles”, although I find the term overly fanciful myself.’

  Cassandra’s bolter was raised. ‘A mind-control device?’

  ‘Aye,’ nodded Tegas. ‘But this one appears to be damaged.’ He indicated places in the scan where the machine’s carapace was darkened. ‘I’d warrant that the malfunction of the shackle scarab was what allowed her to flee the necrons all those years ago. It let her have some free will back.’

  Verity looked ill. She placed a hand on Decima’s arm and the other woman shrank back as if she had been burned. ‘She hears voices in her head. Is it the cryptek, tormenting her?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Tegas. ‘But it could just be the damage to her mind expressing itself. The effects of trauma on the human psyche have such unpredictable effects.’

  Imogen frowned. ‘It does not matter. Either way, she cannot be trusted.’

  ‘I could say the same for him,’ Miriya retorted, pointing at the questor.

  ‘No,’ came a quiet voice. The revenant’s gaze crossed over them. ‘What the cog says is true. I am flawed. I am dangerous to you. If you bring me too close, Ossuar will see… He might see through my eyes.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ insisted Verity.

  ‘You cannot take the risk, Sisters,’ Decima said, with grave finality.

  From the throne atop his personal command Monolith, Nemesor Khaygis surveyed the ranks of his troops. Lines of warriors stood ready, some freshly advanced through portals from the orbital complex, others returned and regenerated after the initial attack wave. Immortals and lychguard waited motionless for his word to strike. His army was frozen in time, waiting to reanimate, waiting to kill.

  The nemesor gazed over the Monolith’s battlements, the contra-gravity motors beneath him emitting a steady, resonant thrumming that beat at the air. Khaygis paused to take a moment of communion; he connected his intellect to the broad control matrix that spread out among all his lesser soldiers, sampling their recent memories and collating the data there.

  The warriors were barely sentient in the true sense of the word. Before the Great Uplifting and the sweet release of biotransference, they had been the lowest of the necrontyr castes, the workers, the menials and the poor. The Stargods had freed them from the tyranny of conscious thought, stripping away all emotion and character until only the very core of being remained. The smallest possible spark of animate life, rendered soulless and servile.

  How content they must be, Khaygis mused, for never having the need to think for themselves again.

  Their superiors, the immortals, had been the soldiers of the dynasts in the fleshtime, and their reborn forms reflected that fact. The immortals were better armed, better armoured, and they retained a tiny fraction more of what they had once been. Not enough to give them a name or a persona, of course, but enough that their martial training remained intact. It was an efficiency, after all, not to waste the time and effort that had been put into training them. But they too did not have the intellect to exist anywhere beyond the moment. Both were walking weapons, tools of killing, and they performed those functions admirably.

  Khaygis did not remember his biotransference. All he recalled was awakening in this machine body, rippling with power and lethal potential. His overriding recollection of that glorious moment was a sense of incredible freedom – freedom from petty things, like the decay of his organic form and the worthless moral codes of mortal beings.

  The nemesor did not remember who he had been before the Uplifting. That part of him had been edited out and discarded. He must have been a man of great rank to be allowed to retain any elements of self, and that was explanation enough for him. The first act Khaygis had performed in his new machine-form was to kneel before his master, the Stormlord Imotekh.

  Others were not so lucky, of course. Some did not pass through the eye of the transformation without suffering damage, and some were warped by distortions of self in ways that took millennia to manifest themselves. There were the destroyers, the berserker kin of the necrontyr who sought only to obliterate all that lay before them. Their minds were stripped down to the killing urge and nothing more, broken by engram decay and consumed by nihilism. But they were nothing compared to the loathsome horror of the flayed ones, who flocked to the shedding of organic blood like carrion eaters. Driven by a compulsion that the harbingers called a ‘curse’, the flayed ones garbed themselves in the skins of dead flesh-forms and plundered battlefields for the meat of corpses. Some said that they were possessed by a madness that drove them to an obses
sion with the flesh they had lost – as if they were trying to rebuild it from the bodies of those who died opposing the necrons. Others spoke of one of the murdered Stargods, his last act before perishing in the War in Heaven the release of a virus that would one day turn them all to the same path.

  Khaygis detested both these aberrant kind, and would never allow his forces to enter battle with either counted among them. Perhaps it was an element of self he retained from the being he had once been, but the nemesor saw combat as a sacrosanct thing, a place where all truths could be put to the test, where will and might would answer all questions. If he had still been capable of such an emotional state, it might have been true to say that Khaygis cherished warfare in the way a parent would love their offspring.

  He completed his collation of the data, and the nemesor sifted through it. At once he saw it all, every single sporadic contact, every engagement, every melee kill, flayer strike, tesla blast. A map of death drew itself in his mind as the necron general experienced a hundred little wars from the perspectives of his soldiers, all in unison, laid atop one another. He saw where the fallen had been defeated, he saw where the victorious were mighty. For those brief moments, Khaygis sat at the heart of the network and absorbed.

  When he was ready, the nemesor disengaged and the emerald light of his eyes glowed brightly. He had his plan, gathered from the aftermath and replay of the first assault. He had his soldiers, outnumbering the females inside the outpost by a very significant factor.

  In his mind, Khaygis already had his victory. It was inevitable that the necrons would overwhelm the human invaders. All that remained now was the tedious business of the actual killings. The theorem of death he had posited needed to be proven.

  Behind him, harsh jade-coloured light spilled out from the power crystal atop the Monolith, framing the nemesor with shifting aurorae as he pointed with his fire gauntlet. Khaygis aimed the glowing glove out across the desert wastes, towards the near-distant valley where the organics were marking out their last moments of mortality.

  He transmitted the battle plan to his assemblage, every detail of it perfect in their minds, with no space for misinterpretation or alteration. He told them all where to go and what to kill.

  Then Khaygis spoke a single word, and vocoder relays in his machine-frame relayed the sound out through the Monolith’s onboard resonator arrays. It was not required for him to do so, but the ritual of it, the finality of the gesture, appealed to him.

  The word was ‘Execute’, and without battle-cries or elation, without fear or hesitation, the necron army began its march towards Sanctuary 101.

  ‘This could be a ploy,’ Verity said quietly, pitching her words so that only Miriya could hear them.

  The Battle Sister glanced up at her from where she crouched, in the middle of checking her combat gear before she set off on her mission. ‘You think that I have not considered that?’

  Verity looked around at the walls of the Great Chapel and grimaced. ‘It is not enough that you must do this, but that the xenos machine must be activated here, in this holy place…’

  ‘Is is the best-protected part of the convent, Sister,’ Miriya reminded her.

  ‘Indeed,’ Verity replied, ‘but it still feels like sacrilege.’

  ‘I do not disagree,’ said the other woman gravely. She paused. ‘I am well aware of Tegas’s intentions. I have a bolt-round put aside just for him, when the moment comes.’

  ‘The Adeptus Mechanicus are not faithful, not like us,’ Verity insisted.

  ‘Don’t tar them all with his brush,’ came the reply. ‘I have fought alongside adepts who acquitted themselves with honour in service to the Golden Throne. Tegas is not the best of them, by any measure.’

  ‘They serve an adulterated deity,’ the hospitaller continued. ‘They worship a Machine-God, only an aspect of the God-Emperor… How can any of them ever see His true glory as we do?’

  ‘We can debate theology if you wish, Sister Verity,’ Tegas called out from across the cavernous room as he approached, flanked by Cassandra and Danae. ‘But forgive me if I suggest that this is neither the place nor the time for such things.’

  ‘He hears me…’ Verity whispered.

  Miriya made a motion near her ear. ‘With all the augmetics crammed inside his bones, I imagine he could hear the tread of every sand-fly within these walls, if he wished it.’

  ‘And more besides,’ said the questor, a cold and avaricious smile in the words.

  ‘Enough,’ said the canoness, standing nearby. She beckoned to Sister Ananke, who approached holding a storage pod. At Sepherina’s direction, she warily opened the container and removed the grey shape of the iron scroll. Ananke seemed physically revolted by her proximity to the device. Decima lurked in the shadows of the pillars behind her, watching the events unfold from beneath her hood.

  ‘Give it to him,’ ordered the canoness.

  Ananke did so, only too pleased to be rid of the xenos artefact. Tegas took it eagerly, and she backed away, unlimbering her bolter. Nearby, Sister Imogen and a trio of other Sororitas were already at weapons drawn, taking aim at Tegas’s head.

  He feigned a disappointed sigh. ‘Is this really necessary? I have given my word that I will cooperate with you.’

  Sepherina made no move to have the other Battle Sisters lower their weapons. ‘Make it work,’ she told him, ‘and know that if you betray us in any way, you will not live to see the fruits of it.’

  ‘Perish the thought,’ the questor replied. ‘After all, my dear canoness, we both want the same thing.’

  ‘Do it!’ Imogen barked, her patience wearing thin. ‘Now!’

  ‘As you wish.’ Tegas turned his manipulators in towards the scroll and moved them over the surface of the device, tracing circles and lines, making alien symbols.

  Verity’s attention was caught as she heard Decima give voice to a soft whimper, and then in the next second the necron artefact went from a piece of inert metal to a glowing, writhing cord of green fire.

  Tegas reacted with shock, his cyber-limbs going rigid, but he held on tightly to the device. The living alien metal shivered in his grip, changing its forms with a disturbing fluidity that made Verity’s skin crawl. First it opened into the scroll, alive with symbols and texts, then it became the fan of angled panes, emitting light and colour. It was briefly a cube, then a rod, before finally unravelling into thin wires that wafted in the air like grass stalks in a breeze.

  ‘Yes!’ The questor was elated. ‘I have it now!’ The human emotion seemed ill-fitting and out of place coming from the Mechanicus adept.

  The spline-threads grew in length and diameter, Tegas releasing the reforming device to be free to find its ultimate expression of form. It began to re-knit itself, making curves that turned slowly to bring their sparkling tips towards one another. The alien metal came together with a ringing sound to form a hoop large enough for a human to step through. A haze of energy wove across the span of it, glistening with exotic radiation. Verity was drawn in by the play of light and colour, mesmerising, almost seductive…

  And alien. She shook her head and forced herself to break eye-contact. The portal’s membrane quivered, seeming harmless as it stood there – but Verity had seen with her own eyes what lay on the other side of that threshold, the infinite armies and their incomprehensible machines waiting for the moment to wake.

  The very thought of being asked to go back there filled her with an ice-cold dread. She chanced a sideways look at the canoness. Would Sepherina order her to do so? Verity felt ashamed by her fear, but could not stop herself from silently praying that the command would not come.

  She had never been in a place like the necron complex, a place where the absence of spirit was almost a tangible thing that could be touched and tasted. The hospitaller struggled to frame her thoughts, to find the right words to describe the sensation she had felt up there. It was simply… emptiness. A void like no other, a place where faith itself could hold no purchase.
/>   She shuddered at the thought, as Decima ventured to speak.

  ‘You have little time,’ said the ragged woman. ‘Extended use of the device will draw their attention. You must hurry.’

  Sepherina closed on Tegas. ‘It is done?’

  ‘Indeed,’ he nodded twice.

  The canoness looked away, towards the Sister Superior. ‘Imogen. Assemble a squad and proceed to the alien stronghold. Your orders are to destroy it or die in the attempt.’

  The other woman gave a crisp salute. ‘Understood.’ Imogen searched the faces of the other Battle Sisters surrounding her. ‘I need five women whose souls are strong, who are ready to meet the God-Emperor this day. We may never return from this mission. We may die on alien soil. Who will join me?’

  ‘I will.’ Miriya was the first to step up, the last question barely out of the Sister Superior’s lips. Verity had expected no less of her friend.

  ‘And I.’ Danae hefted her meltagun. At her side, Sister Ananke gave a solemn nod of agreement.

  ‘Here or there,’ said Cassandra, coming to the ready. ‘Where we end matters little, as long as it is in His name.’

  Sister Pandora was the last, mirroring Imogen’s salute. ‘Aye.’

  ‘Noble,’ offered Tegas primly. He took a breath. ‘I should think it would be best to send a proxy first…’ He looked towards his junior adepts, and Verity saw them shrink back in fear. None of them wanted to pass through the portal, to be the one who might set foot in a necron trap.

  ‘You said it was done,’ Sepherina said, coming close to Tegas. ‘The passage is open, yes?’

  ‘Yes, but prudence–’

  She never let him finish. In a swift flourish of motion, the canoness grabbed fistfuls of the questor’s cloak, and with the enhanced strength borne of her power armour’s artificial musculature, she lifted Tegas off his feet and threw him bodily into the shimmering membrane.