The deck beneath their boots was trembling as the slow approach of the energy surge rose closer with each passing second; and at last Danae dared to ask the question none of them wanted to voice.
‘Where do we run to now?’ she asked. ‘Or shall we kneel here and take a last prayer before the flames consume us?’ The veteran looked around. ‘We cannot outrun death.’
‘You… We will die when the God-Emperor wills it, and not before’ Miriya replied, raising her voice to be heard by all of them.
‘I think that moment may be here, Sister,’ said Pandora, grim-faced.
She turned on the other woman. ‘If that is so, then why did you pull me up from the gantry? I thought as you did, but what if… What if we are wrong!’
‘There is no greater destiny for us!’ Danae bellowed, with sudden fury. ‘We succeed but we fail! The alien complex will destroy itself, but the book will burn with us. This is our lot!’
Miriya shook her head. ‘I refuse to accept that.’ She glared at Danae. ‘Do you remember what Sister Imogen said, when we arrived in this blighted place?’
‘We are the daughters of Saint Katherine, honour to her glory,’ repeated Danae.
‘Honour to her glory,’ said Miriya, with Pandora, Cassandra and Ananke mirroring her words.
‘And what else?’ Miriya went on.
‘We are not here to die,’ said Danae, recalling the moment.
Miriya pushed past her and moved towards a chamber along the line of the closest tier. ‘The necrons we dispatched, they were guarding this area.’
She didn’t look back as the other Sororitas, all of them battle-weary and fatigued, followed her one last time.
In the chamber stood hundreds of empty transport racks, the same sort of support frames that Miriya had seen the first time she came to the Obsidian Moon. They were the carriage for the necron warriors. The skeletal machines slept upon them, hung like slaughtered animals, released only when they went to war.
And before the racks stood thick, glassy panes, several of them glowing with ghostly light. Mirror looking into mirrors. Corridors made of infinity, spiralling away.
‘Gateways,’ said Danae. ‘The same as the ones we found in the cavern on the planet...’
‘This is the way,’ said Miriya. ‘The God-Emperor shows us the path.’ With her boltgun and chainsword drawn, she chose the closest portal and walked towards it without hesitation.
There was no way to know where it would lead to. There was nothing but faith and prayer that could carry them now, into the non-space of the necron dimensional corridor and on to an uncertain fate.
Miriya marched with the words of a prayer on her lips, but her thoughts rang with the words that Imogen had spoken an eternity earlier.
The Saint will curse you for this.
The audacity of the human commander was incredible. The organic actually believed that she was a match for the nemesor. She seemed to think that by force of fury and daring alone, she would be able to meet Khaygis in single combat and beat him. It was such folly.
The female dared to throw herself aboard his command Monolith and dirty the flawless hull with her flesh. Some distant, long-forgotten part of Khaygis was recalled, and with it the sense of repulsion.
The meat-things could not see themselves the way that a necron could. They could not detect the invisible cloud of crude chemical exhalations emitted by every pore and orifice on their body, they could not detect the oily matter and trails of sloughed hair and skin cells that were left behind them wherever they went. The microscopic effluent registered to the nemesor’s enhanced machine senses in trails that clouded the atmosphere. Each lungful of air the female breathed out polluted the space around her. Khaygis was disgusted by her presence.
Braying a challenge in her crude human language, she went at him with an energy-enhanced sword, and the nemesor parried it away with his fire gauntlet in a puff of sparks. There was little room to manoeuvre atop the Monolith’s battlements, and Khaygis feinted backwards past his command throne, gaining room. The burning brightness of the power crystal rising from the pyramid’s peak cast everything with a stark light.
The human fired a shot from a hand weapon and the necron swept up the length of his iron cloak, allowing the metal shroud to deflect the kinetic impact of the bolt-round. The mass-reactive shot exploded and cost him a moment’s balance.
The sword flashed, and swept down and across in a lethal arc. Khaygis dodged the blow, but the blade carved into his throne and tore open the delicate mechanisms within it.
In return, Khaygis loosed a tachyon arrow, which keened from the launcher atop his other gauntlet and missed the human by a fraction. Sounds emerged from the female’s lips – the nemesor probed his memory banks and found the recall of the same harmonics. They had been sung on the day the first humans had been terminated on this desolate world, and now they were echoing here.
Khaygis disliked the noise. He wanted it silenced.
The nemesor drew back his gauntlet and conjured a globe of green flame, moulding it with the care of an artisan, coiling it to maximise the kill power of the molecular inferno; but in the next instant his concentration was broken by a strident, noiseless warning that struck at him from out of nowhere. The fire guttered and ebbed.
An alarm cried in Khaygis’s machine-mind. Resonating instantly down the quantum linkages of the necron communication network, a sudden cacophony of alerts were being broadcast to him from the automated systems up on the Obsidian Moon. He looked up on reflex, glaring out through the fallen roof of the chapel and into the sky. The satellite was visible up there, a pale ghost of visible light, but seen through necron eyes, in frequencies of radiation and energy, ripples of deadly invisible force shimmered all around it.
The core. The warnings screamed at him. Something was amiss in the singularity core.
He swung back towards the human female, for the first time deigning to grace her with words in her own tongue. ‘What have you done?’
She answered by firing at him, laying two close-range bolt impacts in his torso. Khaygis howled at the pain-analogue feedback through his synthetic nerves and rushed at her. Before the woman could disengage, the nemesor was on her, and he closed the talons of the fire gauntlet around her bolt pistol and the fingers that held it.
Bright flame surged, enveloping the weapon and the human’s armoured hand. The ancient metals of the bolt pistol grew white-hot in an instant, and the woman grunted in pain, struggling to free herself.
Khaygis intensified the fire and the gun exploded, the last rounds in the near-empty magazine combusting with the heat of it. The human screamed and fell, her arm now ending at the bloody stump of an elbow, her chest and face peppered with fragmentation wounds. The nemesor’s gauntlet was damaged, and it jerked as the motivators within it malfunctioned. He was unconcerned, however. All that mattered was making the human suffer.
Before she could recover, Khaygis found her fallen sword and broke it in two with a stamp of his foot. She managed to scramble to her feet, cursing him.
He gave her the grace of another arrow in the chest, the kinetic force of the dart impact throwing her over the battlements of the hovering Monolith. She clattered into the rubble below, leaving trails of blood across the broken stone.
Bolt-shells cracked off the black stone crenels around him, but he paid them no heed. The clarion of alarms in his thoughts was growing louder and more insistent by the second, and he struggled to maintain his focus. The nemesor’s mind needed to be here in the battle-zone, not torn between this place and the unfolding situation in the orbital complex.
He leapt down from his vantage point and went after the human commander on foot. To kill her in brutal fashion would break the will of her troops to fight on, and the necrons would be able to complete their cull of this place swiftly. This time, it would be done correctly, and with thoroughness.
Khaygis sent a meme-signal back through the network as he advanced on the injured woman, a terse comma
nd to the cryptek to deal with any human infestation on the Obsidian Moon. A null response returned to him, and the nemesor immediately knew that Ossuar’s functions had been terminally halted. The fool had let them destroy him. Had the moment not been so critical, Khaygis might have been amused by the irony of the event.
Command trains broadcast from the tomb complex inside the moon were breaking down, and the sensor relays from the central nexus were losing parity. The irritating, galling tenacity of the humans drew out what little emotion Khaygis still retained, and fury rose in his mind-frame.
With a silent summons, the nemesor sent a directive into the necron thought-web, ordering every active unit within the complex to disembark immediately. He sensed the dimensional corridor housed in the heart of his Monolith as it became active, opening a pathway between the shimmering gateway to the portals within the tombs. Sickly light splashed over the ruins and fallen pillars as Khaygis stalked forwards through a hail of weapons fire, finding his quarry slumped against the base of a wide stone altar. The alien glow framed him, casting a sharp-edged shadow over the woman.
Several of the great tapestries still hanging along the walls of the chapel had caught fire, and the thick cloth burned with a cloying smoke that churned about the chamber, mingling with the acrid tang of cordite discharges, the windblown sand and the ashes of the burnt dead.
Verity stood and fought with the Battle Sisters as best she could, in the shadow of Canoness Sepherina’s single combat with the necron general. But to her untrained eyes, the fight seemed like anarchy and she had nowhere to focus her righteous anger. The smoke smothered her and robbed the hospitaller of her momentum. She became lost in the melee.
She met Sisters and necrons in equal measure, staying out of the way of the Sororitas, daring to engage marching warriors and scuttling scarabs where she could. A half-melted immortal tried to cut her open with the war-blades clustered around the barrel of its gauss blaster, and she shot back with the gun the canoness had gifted to her. Verity was keenly aware of her dwindling stock of shells, and she thought of the single loose round she had hidden in the pocket of her duty armour.
The immortal was sluggish, half its motivators damaged by melta blasts, but it retained the relentless manner of its kind, resolutely limping after her. Too late, the hospitaller realised the alien machine had been trying to herd her, backing her up towards the thrumming shape of the Monolith. Panic gripped Verity, and she expended all the rounds in the bolt pistol’s magazine. By the grace of the God-Emperor, the necron tottered – and fell. Lightning crackled over its twitching form, and it gave out the now-familiar death shriek as a cowl of energy reclaimed it. The flash of light seared Verity’s retinas and she spun away, eyes watering.
A shape trailing blood tumbled from above and crashed to the stones. She heard the crunch of cracked ceramite and broken bones at the point of impact.
Surprise hit Verity like an icy wave as she came to the fallen woman’s side and saw Sepherina’s face there, beneath a mask of blood. The hospitaller’s training took over and she activated her medicae glove, injecting the canoness with a cocktail of drugs designed to keep the woman alive.
Sepherina gasped and her back arched as the medicine-load shocked her back to full awareness. ‘Nursemaid…’ she said thickly. ‘It’s not over yet.’
‘I know,’ Verity told her, and put her shoulder under the canoness’s weight. It was a great effort to lift the woman and her heavy armour back to her feet, but the hospitaller managed it. Together, they staggered and stumbled away. Sepherina was dazed, her eyes unfocussed. Verity knew the signs; the woman had suffered severe loss of blood and concussion. She had to get her to safety.
But battle raged all around them. Nowhere on Sanctuary 101 was safe now.
‘It comes,’ Sepherina managed.
Verity heard the crunch of iron-clawed feet on broken stone, and she dared to glance over her shoulder. A gaunt, spindly figure was casting around, nothing but an angular shadow made of rods.
The canoness gave her a shove and pushed away. ‘Stand aside,’ she growled, the effort hard on her. ‘I will not meet my final enemy upon your shoulders.’
The necron commander stalked through the wreathes of smoke, its complete focus now on Sepherina. Behind it, other tall forms were gathering, making their last advance towards the altar. Verity backed away, fumbling at her pockets. She was suddenly very aware of the tempo of the battle; the gunfire and the cries of the wounded were tailing off, the air humming with the resonance of the Monolith’s anti-gravs. At last, Verity found her bolt shell, and with trembling hands, she loaded it into the pistol.
The xenos heard the snap of the breech locking closed and turned its malignant gaze on her for a moment. She froze. Verity saw nothing in those soulless, glowing eyes that could connect to any human experience. It was not the blank gaze of an animal predator, not the madness of a witch or the ruined of mind. It was alien, in the ultimate sense of the word.
It twitched, as if in reaction to some distant sound only it could hear. Then, with cold dismissal, it turned away again, ignoring her in favour of its target.
‘Come, then,’ Sepherina called, pain threading through her voice. ‘Bring your army to the foot of my Saint and my God. Do what you must, creature, but know their eternal wrath will find you!’
New, unearthly light blazed across the chamber, illuminating the necrons gathering around them. The watery glow spilled from the strange doorway in the Monolith’s face, and Verity knew what it meant. More of them were coming. If an army had not been enough, there would soon be a swarm, a multitude of machine-life overwhelming everything human on this blighted world.
If someone comes to seek us, as we sought those who perished before, Verity thought, they will find no trace. The xenos will leave nothing but dust.
In the haze, new shapes formed out of the glowing portal, but they moved differently, in random and chaotic paths, running as if the Ruinous Powers themselves were at their heels. Cloaks trailed behind them, revealing night-black power armour and human faces.
‘Miriya?’ Her friend’s name fell from Verity’s lips in disbelief. She had counted the Battle Sister lost, and all her squad along with her.
And then, high in the sky, a new star was born and died in a blinding pulse of light.
The nemesor had barely processed the datum of the new transit when the collapse event entered its terminal phase. Even within a synthetic intellect capable of collating information at near light-velocity, he was unable to parse all the conflicting streams of sensor data at once.
The reinforcements he had called for did not arrive. Instead of triarch praetorians, more of the foul humans spilled through the dimension corridor he had opened to the tomb complex. In that instant, he understood the meaning of hate again. The organics were like the viral codes used by some of the more honourless necrontyr dynasts, endlessly replicating, hiding and striking, hitting and fading, seemingly impossible to eradicate. And now Khaygis understood what had transpired inside the Obsidian Moon. Ossuar’s failings had been the doorway to let these parasites into their realm. His laxity had allowed them to steal the scroll-tool and turn it to their advantage.
If only he had killed them all this would not have come to be!
But the matter of the humans was dwarfed by the magnitude of what they had done to the Sautekh’s prize, the complex taken by force of arms from the Atun Dynasty. Khaygis did not for one nanosecond consider the fact that his eagerness to hammer the humans into the sands had left the singularity core underprotected. He was incapable of conceiving of an error on his part. The nemesor was the perfect solider; his past had been erased and he had been built anew in gleaming steel form. A perfect reflection of his infallibility. He did not experience shock or surprise, but he kindled the newfound hate as he looked up into the Kaviran sky.
The shrieking alarms fed him the last few instants of the complex’s existence, deluging him in reams of data that showed the moment in flawless detail.
Every necron, from the lowliest of scarabs maintaining the tombs to the exalted lordship of Great Imotekh himself, carried in their braincase a communion link. The device allowed signalling over near-infinite distances, the ability to transmit data instantly through the arcane control of quantum entanglement phenomena.
Khaygis knew of some lesser species that spoke of ethereal cords connecting their physical forms in the real world with their spiritual ones in the phantasmal. That was idiocy, of course, but the Stargods had gifted the necrontyr with many technologies when they embraced biotransference, and this link was one of them, a near-literal expression of that mystical ideal. Each necron was connected in part or in whole to an invisible network that spanned the galaxy, broken only by lines of dynasty and fealty. When their physical structures suffered critical levels of damage, it was the quantum link that was the means by which their digital consciousness and their damaged forms were reeled back to the closest World Engine or Tomb Planet.
And through that link, the nemesor watched the Obsidian Moon die.
The singularity core, so dutifully maintained by the worker-drones of the Atun since the age of the Great Sleep, distorted and fractured. For one infinite second, the space-time event concealed within it was exposed as the electromagnetic barriers that surrounded it were broken. Mass from this reality was acted upon by gravitation akin to that at the event horizon of a black hole, and the orbiting complex was torn inside out by the collapsar in its heart.
But the effect could not sustain itself. It was unnatural, not the product of a sun’s slow death and fall to darkness. It had been forced into existence, the rules of nature twisted violently by the necrontyr who had built it with Stargod knowledge so many millennia ago. Now, reality wanted it expunged, and it crushed the anomaly. Massive sheets of radiation sloughed off the crumbling singularity, ripping into the exospheric layers of the colony world’s atmosphere, dragging on the planet’s heavy iron core with sudden gravitation. It did not die quietly, lashing out with such force that Sanctuary 101’s orbit was shifted by several degrees.
Hammer and Anvil Page 33