Tomb World, page 20
‘Fall back to the Chimera!’
The squad immediately begin to step back without slacking in their fire, the action well drilled from months on the practice ground.
‘Where is Abisode?’ asks Murillen, the next-ranking arbitrator of the squad.
‘Dead.’ Sinos pushes aside the pang of regret that follows – Abisode is a casualty of the war that is erupting within Verongyl.
But not the first.
The swarm are closing in, the chatter of metal limbs on marble echoing around the atrium. Sinos is the last arbitrator through the open doors, firing until her pistol clicks empty. She throws both doors shut, but does not imagine for a moment that the heavy wood will keep the constructions at bay.
‘Into the Chimera.’
The crackle of las sounds behind her. The lieutenant and his auxilia squad are at their barricade, blazing away with their newly issued lasguns. Sinos’ squad drop behind the bulk of their Chimera, but the auxilia remain standing in the open, blazing away without regard for their own lives. Murillen’s shot hits one in the hip, all but severing her thigh. She topples without a sound, still scrabbling for her lasgun as her life empties from her body.
It only takes seconds. The lieutenant is the last to fall, blood soaking into his auxilia’s uniform. None of Sinos’ arbitrators are wounded, save for the awkward pain in her shoulder.
They bundle into the Chimera, Arbitrator Dixin climbing through into the driver’s compartment.
Sinos is breathless, but thumps the partition to get Dixin’s attention. ‘Get us moving, and get on the vox.’
‘To who?’
He is right. Pyrch, the clerk, the lieutenant and his squad. Whatever corruption turned them against their people will not be isolated to the mortuarium.
The armoured vehicle growls into life. Sinos has never been more relieved to hear the thump of hatches sealing shut. There are only five people on the entire planet whom Sinos now trusts, and they are all sitting within the Chimera’s cabin.
‘Raise the logisticator’s palace. Lock down the city. Nothing leaves without my express authority.’ It is the only logical act, even if it is far too late for that. Compliance or defiance of her order will determine who is corrupted.
‘What in Terra’s name are they?’ Murillen asks as the Chimera lumbers into motion.
Nothing human could birth such corruption. No artefact of the Mechanicus could make such monstrosities. There is only one conclusion, one enemy, that has been making a silent war on Orymous for two years.
Xenos.
Ahnuret awakens.
It is sudden, abrupt. Every sense comes alive in an instant, flooding perceptual centres that had been inert a moment before.
She is not where she had been. She is in her cell, seated on a stone chair. And it is not the praetorian standing before her. It is Kamoteph.
Assassin’s instincts, honed for decades before she was gifted her body of inviolate metal, respond despite her sensory distress. She drops a hand to her waist, and lifts her enmitic pistol.
The cryptek casually swings his staff into her arm, blocking her line of attack, then shuffles back quickly to show that he poses no threat. Ahnuret keeps her pistol in hand, but does not pursue him.
‘I require you,’ he says aloud. Kamoteph never connects with Ahnuret via the interstices.
‘What did she do to me?’ Ahnuret despises the weakness of the question, but she must know. She had been speaking with Khemet, and then she was… gone. Shut down. Switched off, as Ahnuret would shroud a lamp.
But not entirely. There was something, a fragment of thought that had lingered upon her waking.
‘A praetorian’s trick,’ says Kamoteph dismissively. ‘Now focus.’
Ahnuret is not listening. She is looking inwards, trying to chase down the engrammatic record of where her mind had been sent.
Kamoteph slams the butt of his staff down on the stone.
‘Deathmark. I require you. Now.’
‘I repeat, a priority-one cordon around the entire city. Scramble whatever air attack wing is closest and target anything that lifts off. Shut down the mass conveyors, and lock down the arterial roadways.’
Sinos has been shouting into a vox-horn since they made their escape from the mortuarium. The rest of her squad are doing the same, signalling every Imperial authority they can reach.
Some will be corrupted, but there is no avoiding that.
The only arbitrator not focused on spreading the word is Dixin, who steers the Chimera at a breakneck speed through the city.
‘Obstruction ahead, marshal.’
Sinos looks at the feed from the forward picter. They are thundering down the centre of a four-lane roadway, which in several hundred yards ends abruptly at a six-lane exchange.
‘Stop for nothing.’
‘Yes, sir.’ There is only one priority in matters of corruption – to spread the word.
The Chimera charges across the intersection. Its treads catch the front of a groundcar and flatten its engine block. Another is unable to brake in time and slams into its side armour, causing the barest jolt through the interior.
‘We have a flyer waiting for us at the Van Ryden aerodrome, marshal.’ Beska has been coordinating with the air traffic authorities, seeking anything with wings and an engine that will get them out of the city.
‘How long to Van Ryden?’
‘Six minutes,’ Dixin replies.
Beska hears him, and raises the vox-horn to her lips. ‘Six minutes, control. No one is to approach that machine, is that understood?’
Sinos trusts nothing, no object and certainly no person. She cannot shed the memory of the tiny insect Pyrch had attempted to place on her. Taint is the most insidious of all threats, for it strikes at the nature of Imperial authority. The agents of the Emperor are sanctioned with great power, and when corrupted, can do immeasurable harm.
The Chimera jerks beneath her, and then Sinos is thrown against the forward bulkhead. She shakes off the stars that burst into her sight.
‘Dixin?’ She looks through into the driver’s compartment.
Dixin lolls in his seat. Blood drips from beneath the visor of his helmet, but she can see no entry wound.
‘Out! Everybody, out!’
They spill from the Chimera’s rear hatch, shotguns up and turning. ‘Back away!’
Sinos searches the faces of the crowd, and sees only honest fear.
‘Marshal!’
Arbitrator Beska is pointing up, towards the roof of a brick building that forms the corner of the street. A skeletal figure is outlined against the white of angry snow clouds, an arcane rifle at its shoulder.
It fires something, a bead of blue, and Beska slumps back against the Chimera.
Sinos pushes Murillen forwards, dropping low behind the vehicle’s bulk. ‘Whatever happens, get to the aerodrome, and get out of the city.’
They dive into the crowd.
She could end them all.
She will end them all.
But not yet.
Ahnuret steps from one oubliette to another. From rooftop to rooftop, hunting always for her target. Screams follow in her wake, rising from the humans who glance up and see her silhouette against the sky.
She knows that this chase runs counter to the praetorian’s plans, but that is beyond her concern. Kamoteph, the crooked and deceitful creature that he is, has commanded her, and thus she must see his will done.
She has followed the praetorian’s orders thus far. The praetorian who looks at Ahnuret not with fear and disgust, but with pity and concern. She has followed them in spite of their obvious futility. If purgation is the goal, then what use is restraint? Why suffer life’s existence?
The humans are running from her, as they should. She is their doom, their nemesis.
Contrary to Khemet’s understanding, the Destroyer is not a madness. It is not a suppression of her higher faculties, but an enhancement. Those of the cult see more clearly the nature of the necron existence than any other. Theirs is a perfect existence, shorn of the corrupting factors of life. Mortality. Scarcity. Desire, in its most base and physical form. The C’tan freed the necrontyr from these aberrant aspects of existence.
And it is Ahnuret’s mission to rid the galaxy of them for good.
Her targets are wily, turning at random, pushing deeper into the crowd. They think this will save them, but they are wrong.
She descends from the rooftops as her target breaks out onto a roadway, narrowly avoiding a collision with one of the humans’ light conveyances. Ahnuret steps out of an oubliette into the centre of the roadway, disruptor levelled.
Something is thrown, out of panic or reflexive hatred, by a watching human. It knocks her aim aside, and the stream of particles goes wide.
Ahnuret’s movement bypasses all conscious thought. Her hand drops to her enmitic pistol, lifts, and fires in the time it takes the bold or foolish human to blink.
He bursts apart, unmade. There is no blood, there are no remains, just a flare of light and then a cloud of constituent molecules to drift away on the breeze.
Another Unclean screams, a high, piercing wail. Ahnuret draws and fires, which silences one voice but sets hundreds more alight.
There is another, and another. The crowd is running, leaving their spoor hanging in the cloud like a miasma. Even fleeing, the Unclean pollute the very air they occupy.
Ahnuret pursues them, not in madness but with icy clarity. Each one she kills is a degree of sanctity returned to this world. A fractional closure to the greatest peace, the peace Ahnuret seeks with all of her being.
A universe cleansed of life.
And when that is one’s goal, what use is restraint?
CHAPTER 10
‘In the name of the Triarch, what have you done?’
Khemet does not wait to travel around the world before she levels her accusation. She hurls her anger across the interstices, finding Hekasun and Kamoteph in conference without her.
‘You have revealed us to the humans. You have undone all that we have worked to achieve.’
‘It was a miscalculation,’ answers Kamoteph. ‘I erred in placing my trust in the deathmark.’
‘You blame Ahnuret for this? You are craven as well as a fool.’
In addition to imperilling her work, Ahnuret is now loose amid the humans. Khemet’s attempt to alleviate her condition has been undone by Kamoteph’s foolishness. She is shocked to find that this weighs so heavily on her mind.
‘Why are you so afraid of them, praetorian?’ asks Hekasun suddenly.
On the far side of the world, Khemet’s core exhausts flash. ‘I fear nothing.’
Kamoteph takes up his lord’s case. ‘They are human. The Unclean. You have danced around them for two years, nibbling at their flanks. Always careful. Always considered. Never direct.’
‘If you have not paid heed to my strategy for these past years, I see no point in explaining it to you now.’
‘We are necrontyr!’ sends Hekasun with the force of fury. ‘The Unclean claim the kemmeht of our world, and you dither. We should have marched from this tomb the moment we arrived and taken what is mine!’
‘Do you doubt our strength?’ asks Kamoteph. ‘Do you doubt our legions and our way of war? Or do you simply doubt yourself?’
Khemet’s only doubt is – has ever been – that in waging a precipitate war they will fight on the humans’ terms. She has pursued a careful and crushing war, tearing the capacity for resistance from them before the first gauss beam is fired. But now that elegant course is lost.
‘Very well. You wish to see fear?’ Khemet says. Hekasun and Kamoteph do not respond.
‘I will show you their fear. I will scourge the Unclean from this world, and I will do it in spite of your incompetence.’
The Valkyrie’s engines are still screaming when Sinos leaps from the passenger bay. She runs, or at least limps as swiftly as she is able, across the landing platform.
The rockcrete pad juts out from the side of the mountain, the only artificial construction in sight of its peak. Within it, however, is the sanctum of the planet’s sanctioned psykers, the telepaths and astropaths and mutants of every creed and ability.
A woman in a flowing grey robe is waiting at the pad’s edge. The blast door behind her is firmly closed.
‘You can go no further, marshal.’
Sinos’ leg is bleeding inside her armour, and her shoulder is a knot of fire. ‘I can go wherever I must.’
‘But not here,’ the woman insists. ‘Your presence would unbalance our charges.’
Sinos hesitates, as ill at ease as any Imperial citizen when forced to consider witchery.
‘You were alerted to my coming, therefore you know the message I carry.’
The woman shakes her head, her stare roaming Sinos’ battered armour. ‘I am merely a servant. I deal with the outer world.’
Sinos has no time or patience to decipher her cryptic phrasing. ‘Here.’ She thrusts the scrap of vellum into her hand. The woman reads. After a moment, one hand rises to cover her mouth. She looks at Sinos with tears in her eyes.
‘This message has the highest priority, by order of the lord-militant himself,’ says Sinos. Salvastari has no knowledge of her coming, but it does not matter. In this moment, Sinos would invoke whatever authority would most quickly see her will done. ‘It must be sent to this location before any other.’ She jabs the vellum, pointing to the intended receiving point.
‘I understand, marshal.’ The woman cuffs her eyes, finding the steel within herself. ‘I will convey your message to the choirmistress.’
‘Send it immediately. Do you understand? Immediately.’
‘I will see it done.’ She gives a quick bow, then turns and shuffles away, slippered feet moving at as close to a run as she can manage. The blast door retracts enough for her to dart inside, then slams shut.
The adrenaline of her flight from Verongyl is wearing off. Sinos can feel the start of the shakes. A lifetime of arrests, raids, and full-blown battles has yet to make Sinos immune to the physiological demands of her own body.
She slumps back into the Valkyrie. She can feel the exhaustion taking hold, and fights against it long enough to climb into a seat.
‘What now, marshal?’
She does not know. Getting word of the xenos incursion off the world has been the only imperative she has followed since evading their ambush in Verongyl. The taint must be contained, by any means. She has done all she can. The rest, she fears, will be out of her hands.
The ground flashes beneath the Night Shroud, greenery and rivers spoilt by the humans’ meagre constructions.
This is good terrain. It is rare for Khemet to indulge in such assessments, being so alien to her existence, but it is clear to see that this quarter of Qeretesh is made up of rich, fertile land.
Khemet keeps her mind on such trivial thoughts to avoid the colossal anger that boils in her core. All her planning, all her labour to carefully prime the ground for an effortless war has been undone.
She has puppeted the body of the Immortal pilot, rendering him a slave within his own form. Khemet is typically loath to do this, finding the projection of one’s self into another to be a profound violation. Nevertheless, she will not leave this task to others. After Kamoteph’s egregious error, she must adapt her plans.
A range of mountains crests the horizon, growing swiftly into jagged, snow-capped peaks.
This was always to be the first target of the war. The humans’ occult means of speaking across the interstellar void are not something she wholly understands. Nor does she wish to bend her mind to do so. She needs only a practical comprehension – there are aberrant strains of humans with the ability to broadcast their thoughts through the empyric medium. Thus, they must be the first humans on Orymous to die en masse.
A wing of human aircraft is approaching. She has made no attempt at stealth, for thanks to Kamoteph none is needed. It is better, now that their mask has been cast aside, for the humans to see their foe’s overwhelming superiority.
Though they are hundreds of khet away, still below the horizon, Khemet knows that her attackers are sixteen Lightning-class air-superiority craft of the Fifth Division of the Orymous defence forces. Their leader is most likely a human named Badern, Eyvgenia, designated air marshal.
Khemet has studied her opponents. Such knowledge may be trivial, giving too much respect to her enemy. But Khemet is a patient warrior, and no knowledge is worthless in war.
They close quickly, owing more to the Night Shroud’s airspeed than the humans’. No doubt Marshal Badern and her pilots are watching Khemet’s rapid approach with mounting alarm. Nothing they have faced will prepare them for the supremacy of necron warcraft.
A hologram winks into life on the Night Shroud’s console. The enemy fighters are painting her ship with their primitive scrying systems, the precursor to an attack with long-range ordnance.
Khemet dives, racing beneath the barrage of ordnance. The dumb rockets sail far over the bomber’s hull. Khemet heaves the Night Shroud back up, climbing more sharply than any mortal could withstand.
She rockets through the enemy formation nine seconds later. Two craft tumble in her wake, while the rest scatter in predictable patterns. Khemet does not bother to engage them. By the time they have turned their cumbersome craft, she will already be beyond their weapons’ range, and extending with every moment.
There are other defences, closer in to the humans’ mountain fastness. The Night Shroud detects them searching, lashing the sky with electromagnetic radiation. The humans are so crude.
Kamoteph’s intelligence places the mutant humans’ residence within the hollowed-out core of the tallest peak above the capital. When she crests the horizon, the Night Shroud’s scrying stalks see it immediately, looking beyond the rock to the metal complex within.
