Somewhere in the darkness there moved weapons, and metal, and flesh.
Sister Caia had seen the Lycheate machines before – the Breacher that had assaulted them upon their arrival, the kastelans that had answered to Rayos, and to Scafidis Zale.
She had never seen anything like this.
These things were horror-spawned, from the corrupt mind of the heretek. They were wrong, somehow – their weapons lopsided or crudely built, their bodies twisted, their feet or tracks dragging sparks that flashed like the meetings of wires. She knew little about machine-spirits, but her heart understood: these were abominations.
The red lines of tanks had formed into an inverse arc, grouped before the now-open doorway. At the centre, now, the canoness stood in her Immolator with one hand aloft, holding back her troops’ desire to fire, and waiting for the enemy to fully reveal itself, sliding and grinding like corruption from the dark.
More sounds came from above them – the defence ports were sliding open. But Nikaya and the Seraphim were waiting, their jump packs holding them tight to the rock face and out of range of fire.
From the assembled Sisters, the unified words of the litany were like the threatening rumble of an avalanche – as if, once these machines entered the doorway itself, the might of the God-Emperor would bring the entire side of the mountain down upon them…
But Rayos was not that foolish.
Her force stopped, pausing just inside the cave’s huge mouth. It waited in the semi-dark, ragged and misshapen, listing and slumping, just as if the Ruinous Powers themselves had taken a hand in its formation.
And a voice, so familiar to Sister Caia, echoed from the stone, from the metal, from the twitching, jerking skulls of the Breachers and Destroyers…
‘Sisters,’ Rayos’ voice said. It was logic-cold, yet it somehow seemed to hiss with that same thin, cold humour that Caia remembered from their previous meeting. ‘You have erred. There is an eighty-nine-point-eight per cent chance that you will lose this confrontation. You, with your faith, and your weak and human flesh.’
The canoness did not respond, except with the continuing thud and threat of the litany, booming like military drums.
It echoed back from the mountainside.
Caia’s hand tightened on her bolter, though it was her auspex that she watched. She said, quietly, ‘There are more of them, waiting out of our line of sight.’
Ianthe gave a single, grave nod. ‘Estimation of total numbers, Sister Caia.’
Caia replied, ‘Maybe two hundred and fifty individual units.’
‘Their greatest concentration?’
‘At the very rear.’
‘Very well. Then let us finish this.’
Her shout came over the vox-coder, blasted through the pipes that still stood upon the top of her Immolator.
‘Immolators, Seraphim! Fire!’
And the Sisters’ wrath was loosed upon the enemy.
Deep in the mountain tunnels, that first rumble of gunfire echoed like the boom of some distant heartbeat.
Augusta felt Alcina, behind her, tense; heard Rhea catch her breath. Whatever happened down here, their Sisters were fighting and dying to give them time to achieve their goal.
And they dared not falter.
‘We must move,’ she said, a thrum of urgency to her tone. ‘This mission will not permit us to dawdle.’
Beside her, Mors nodded. His nose and cheeks had taken scattered burn damage from the acid drizzle, but he’d made no complaint, and they had not stopped.
Led only by Rhea’s scan and Akemi’s counting, they began to move more swiftly.
The distant thunder of weapons continued, and the crackling of the empty vox told the Sister Superior, more clearly than any shout of urgency, that they could not afford to delay.
She reviewed her new mission orders: once they had eliminated the force field, they were to retreat. The Kyrus would be beginning her countdown the moment she had a clear line of fire.
The citadel was large enough that the massed tanks of the Order would survive…
But Augusta’s squad were on foot.
Offer your lives to the Emperor.
She silenced the flicker of doubt with a flare of annoyance. Neither Mors nor Rufus had flinched, had shown the slightest fear. And she was Sororitas – if she were to perish in the line of her duty, then it would be with courage. Despite Istrix’s death, she would face the Golden Throne knowing she had died with her honour intact.
If it were possible, however, she would uphold her responsibilities. Her squad were blameless, following her orders, and she would allow her Sisters to retreat, survive…
Spare them Your wrath, she prayed. They have done nothing wrong.
She would face her fate alone.
Alone, or with these two young soldiers that had come so far.
Akemi paused by another marker, and told them to turn left.
They seemed to be moving in an arc, heading inwards, and still down. It was a long haul, but the corridors were steadily widening and the Sisters were beginning to watch for servitors, for skitarii, or for wherever Rayos may have left here to guard her main force.
Yet still, there was nothing. If there were foot-troops, then perhaps they, too, had been mustered outside to face the canoness.
And Ianthe would show them no mercy.
Then Sister Rhea said, ‘Wait.’
In the silence of the corridor, they paused.
The tunnels were still. Brass pipes ran like veins along their ceilings; wires clung to the stone, now bereft of information or power. The pict-screens flickered with vestiges of life, their half-formed data-ghosts striving to manifest. They sent odd, eerie lighting down the empty stone.
Mors said, his deep voice quiet, ‘It’s still getting warmer–’
‘The temperature has significantly risen,’ Sister Rhea confirmed, cutting him off. ‘I suspect there will be another lava flow ahead – a large one.’
‘We are very close now,’ Akemi said. ‘The central forge temple lies ahead.’
In the distance, the boom and rattle of gunfire continued.
‘Do not pause,’ Sister Alcina said sternly. ‘Our Sisters fight for our time, and we must achieve our target.’
Alcina’s repetition was unnecessary, but Augusta said nothing. Her new second was not wrong, and the Sister Superior was beginning to suspect that there might be another reason why there were no defences down there.
Rayos had no need of them.
‘Head right, then left, then right again,’ Akemi said.
‘Sister Rhea,’ Augusta commented. ‘You are familiar with the device that we seek?’
‘Yes, Sister,’ Rhea said. ‘I do not possess Sister Akemi’s literacy, but I have seen such things before, on Mete, and the Mechanicus remain obsessively consistent. I will be able to shut down the force field.’
‘We will proceed,’ Augusta said. ‘Walk swiftly, but with caution.’
‘Aye.’
They moved onwards. Augusta could not read the machine dialect that was now flickering on the half-dead pict-screens, but she could see that the strings of binary were becoming shorter.
Akemi was surely right – they were closing in on the central facility.
Mors had pulled his face veil back up over his nose – the air was becoming more sulphurous. And Augusta was beginning to see it: the light was changing. Amid the flickers of the pict-screens, there was a deeper, steadier illumination, a soft red glow that was gradually growing stronger.
The Sisters had seen this glow before.
The ruddy colour of bare lava, somewhere ahead of them.
Weapons roared alongside the vocal thunder of unified prayer. The air was thick with smoke and debris, with the flow and spark of living data, with the groaning and grinding of the strange, lopsided machines.
Surrounded by the rage of battle, the Sisters’ tanks held their position. Their stationary formation was intended to pull Rayos’ forces out of the mountain, and then bring the stone down upon them, but Rayos was too wily, and her lines did not advance.
Instead, her front rank opened fire.
Caia, still standing behind the canoness in the lead Immolator, wondered why she did not deign to duck back inside the vehicle – but the moment Ianthe raised her pistol and opened fire herself, Caia understood. A streak of yellow light hit the end Breacher and its chest simply exploded, spattering its tracked base with gore. In the remaining mess, its exposed cogs spun for a startled second, and then were still.
Caia opened her bolter to a full suppression, her rounds chewing holes in the next Breacher along. Its twisted human face showed no pain, no emotion, nothing – but it raised its shoulder and the weapon attached, and Caia knew that it would shoot straight at them.
Ianthe sang the litany like a call of trumpets, and dared it to even consider the action.
To either side of them, the surviving two Immolators were shooting with their heavy bolters, the weapons turning in suppression arcs. The two Repressors had remained still, waiting for the moment that the Order would roll forwards and into the cave mouth, but, for now, Ianthe was still holding them where they were. At the rear, the Exorcists were loaded and ready, but Rayos had been too clever. Calculating exactly the amount to raise the door, the arcing missiles did not have the necessary clearance, and their bolters could not shoot past the vehicles in the front.
Above her, Caia was aware of the Seraphim, flitting across the rock face. With her focus on the enemy, she caught them from the corners of her vision, each one holding her place below a shielded gun port, then jumping upwards to shoot clean through the slit and eliminate the servitor, or gunner, that had been about to fire. Four of the Seraphim defeated their static targets with almost perfect flying manoeuvres; the fifth was less blessed.
She missed, and the autocannon swivelled, catching her full in the chest.
She spasmed backwards, then fell, plummeting with a streak of flame behind her.
When she hit the ground, she crumpled like a broken thing. She did not move again.
For a split second, Caia blinked at the broken corpse, appalled at how suddenly a Sister could perish, torn from the air and the battle with the brief blast of a weapon…
But she stood before the Throne, her service completed.
Blessed be her memory.
Despite the loss, however, the Order was doing damage – the machines in the front were juddering under the heavy combined fire of the two Immolators and under the huge impacts of the canoness’ shooting.
It was only as the first rank tumbled, however, that Caia realised they’d been bolter-fodder.
And that the main attack was still to come.
‘Sisters,’ Akemi said. ‘We have reached corridor zero-zero-two, and the final junction. The side of the forge temple lies directly ahead.’
‘Hold.’ Augusta’s command brought both Akemi and Rhea to a stop.
Rhea, reflexively, responded, ‘Nothing moving, Sister, but the temperature is extreme.’
The squad had paused just short of the tunnel’s smooth and open mouth. Somewhere ahead of them, red light shone up from below, bathing the rock ceiling in a rich, ruddy sheen. Beside the Sister Superior, Mors was sagging, sheeted in sweat. His clothing was stained with it, but he still made no word of complaint.
Rhea added, her voice soft in the vox, ‘Sisters, we have reached our goal.’
Domine deduc me mi Imperatoris…
A prayer in her heart, Augusta moved forwards to see for herself.
And stopped.
Their tunnel opened out at the lip of a massive rift.
No, not a rift, a chasm. A great, jagged moat that cracked clean down through the stone – an abyss from which the lava-light rose like fire, before losing itself in the vast darkness overhead.
But that wasn’t all.
By the Light!
The Sister Superior held back the exclamation – she would show no fear, no doubt. But, out there ahead of her, on the far side of the rift, there rose a huge and mighty wall, black as basalt, and carved into vast square oriels and heavy, angled buttresses. It was clearly the wall of some immense cathedral, and yet it was layered with wheeled cogs, with folded cranes, with openings like vents and waste-chutes, and with colossal pipes, layered one upon another like a writhing mass of creeper. It stretched up and up, to the heights of the unseen roof, and down and down, far into the firepit below.
The pipes’ metal glowed red with the heat, but by some Mechanicus wonder that she could not begin to comprehend, it had neither melted nor faltered – and it lit the great building with a glow like pure hellfire.
‘Forge temple,’ she said, not hiding the awe in her tone. ‘In His name, I could never have imagined one so huge. Truly, this is a place of the Omnissiah, now fallen to the heretek’s corruption.’
Viola muttered a savage expletive, and Alcina silenced her with a snap. Akemi was still looking at the last set of numbers, consulting the dataslate she held in her hand. Mors had sagged against the wall, and was struggling to breathe.
‘Can we pass here?’ Alcina asked, her tone flat and unimpressed.
‘Akemi,’ Augusta ignored her second, and asked the obvious question. ‘Is there another route to the temple, or is this our only access?’
Akemi started to answer, but Alcina cut across her. ‘We must move swiftly. Our Sisters are dying while we dally.’
‘And it will avail them nothing if we also perish,’ Augusta told her shortly. ‘We have been tasked with a mission, and the success of that mission is our only purpose. Akemi?’
Akemi said, ‘There is a final junction, to corridor zero-zero-one, but it is very long. And I am not certain of its success.’
Alcina restated, ‘Sister Superior, we do not have the time for this. We must pass here.’
‘That decision is mine to take, Sister.’ Augusta’s tone was severe. ‘While offering our lives to the Golden Throne is the greatest honour a Sister may hope for, we are here to complete a mission.’
Alcina stepped forwards, her shoulders seeming to fill the tunnel.
‘It is my…’ she stopped herself, ‘…advice that we should seek passage at this point.’
Augusta did not permit herself the acid retort – such things were childish, left behind in the schola’s earliest years. But this was outright insubordination. She said, her tone flat, ‘You will do as you are commanded, Sister.’
Alcina loomed, her stance angry, but she did not push the point. Over a tight-beam channel on the vox, Melia’s voice said, ‘She is watching us. Waiting to see if we stumble.’
Augusta answered her, ‘I am aware of this. The witch touched us all too closely, and our loyalty is in question. Such doubt would insult both our honour and service, were it not based in reason. The success of this mission is imperative.’
‘Aye.’ Melia said nothing more.
At the front of the company, Rhea said, ‘Sisters, there is a way across the rift.’
Augusta turned back to the tunnel mouth. Beside her, leaning forwards over the gap, Viola muttered an epithet even more unsuitable than the first.
‘Enough,’ Augusta told her.
A distance to their right, hung above the red glow like some narrow and suspended shadow, there was a walkway, the same black stone as the wall. Heavy chains, like a drawbridge, held it, but even from here they could see that the chains were sorely corroded.
The fire lit its underside like pure, glowing hunger.
‘Sister Akemi,’ Augusta said, ‘can you give me a solid reason to not accept this alternative?’
‘I fear not, Sister Superior,’ Akemi said. Her voice carried the faintest twinge – guilt or regret – but she made no apology, and she faced the chasm without fear.
Augusta paused, aware of the eyes of the others, awaiting her decision. She had a very clear memory of the demented inquisitor, leading the squad into ambushes, traps, and probable death. Propelled by her insane belief, Istrix had sacrificed not only her faith, but her very reason…
‘Very well,’ Augusta said. ‘Once again, He has shown us the way. Three times, we have paused, and three times, we have been blessed with His guidance. Let us continue.’
Rhea nodded, and Viola stepped back, hissing through her teeth. Akemi reattached the dataslate to her hip, and Augusta was aware of Mors and Rufus, shoulder to shoulder, and all but leaning on each other for strength. With their lighter gear, they had a better chance of reaching the far side than did the Sisters, however the heat and the fumes were taking a heavy toll upon them both.
Rufus caught her looking, and offered her the sign of the aquila. ‘We will walk, Sister. We have no fear.’
‘Aye,’ Augusta said.
It was only as she offered the prayer for their courage and safety that she became aware of something else…
At some point, while they’d been discussing how to proceed, the sound of gunfire had stopped.