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  She caught hold with her free hand and felt others pulling her in. Miriya put her foot on the running board and discharged her bolter one-handed, firing blind into the broken lines of the Mechanicus soldiers.

  ‘Run for the gate,’ Imogen shouted over the vox. ‘Don’t wait for me, go!’ Miriya saw her moving and firing, trying to avoid salvoes of beam fire from a quad of skitarii.

  ‘Not without her,’ she snapped. ‘Cassandra, swing us around.’

  The other woman didn’t reply, but the Venator wallowed into a snarling turn and bounded back across the uneven ground, the tonnage of the rover bouncing to such an extent that the right-side wheels caught air under them before slamming back down on the axles.

  Even as they came towards her, Miriya saw the scowl on Imogen’s face at the disregarding of her orders. The Sister Superior broke into a sprint, tossing a krak grenade over her shoulder as she ran. The explosive bounced off the top of a workshack and detonated with a flat concussion that echoed down the box canyon.

  As the Venator passed her, Imogen threw herself at the open hatch and landed on the deck, las-bolts cutting crimson pits in the hull of the vehicle. ‘The gate!’ she roared. ‘Hurry!’

  ‘Too late,’ Xanthe replied. ‘Look!’

  Up ahead, the tech-priest’s minions were closing the metal barrier, the gap narrowing by the second. Even with its mass, the scout car would be wrecked if it attempted to ram the gates. And now, without Miriya or Imogen loose on the ground to draw their attention away, all the gun-servitors and skitarii were training their aim on the Venator.

  Miriya ducked in beneath the gull-wing hatch and tried to pull it closed behind her, but the mechanism had taken a hit and it was stuck solid.

  ‘You’ve trapped us,’ Imogen glared at her. ‘We needed to get out of here, raise the alarm!’

  ‘We are not dead yet,’ Miriya retorted.

  ‘The cavern!’ Cassandra gave a shout from the forward compartment. ‘There may be a way through, or–’

  ‘Do it,’ Imogen ordered, holding Miriya’s gaze a moment longer. She turned away. ‘The rest of you, firing positions. Beat them back!’

  Ferren sent furious streams of machine-code across the local network between himself and his adepts, trying to correlate and forecast the motions of the Sororitas, but like so many things commanded by the drives of organics, they were difficult to predict.

  At first, the unforeseen arrival of the females had sent him lurching towards a panic spiral. It was not enough that the questor had come here and overturned the careful order of things the tech-priest had set up within the compound. Now, through some process that Ferren could not know but did not doubt was Tegas’s fault, the Sisters of Battle had come searching the deserts and traced his superior’s route back to this place.

  Ferren calculated his options within a microsecond, evaluating and considering all possibilities he could see, and discarding those that did not suit him. He had considered obliterating the rover on the approach, killing it and everything within using a barrage of missiles from the launchers in the towers. He rejected it, instead intending to engage in a more subtle approach.

  If the vehicle could be taken intact… If the Sororitas squad could be terminated quickly and carefully… Ferren had assembled a plan to murder them and deposit their corpses out in the deep desert, where the local predators could pick the meat from them and the sands could rid him of everything else. And if they were located after the fact, they would be considered victims of misfortune, fools who had become lost in the dust clouds. The dig site would remain unknown, and his precious work would be protected. It was a good plan, a complex one, but a valid one.

  Now ashes, though. Ruined by the unpredictable actions of meat-brains who could not even show the logic to understand when they were beaten.

  A memory engram resurfaced in Ferren’s mind, brought up to the fore by the incident. It was of Tegas, in a time before the tech-priest had gained his current rank and stepped out from under the shadow of his teacher. The questor had mocked him for making every schema he created too elaborate, too clever by half. ‘Simplicity is the true measure of an intelligent mind,’ he had said. Now Ferren wondered if he should have listened. The missiles would have worked just as well.

  ‘End them,’ he cried, his annoyance expressing itself in human lingua.

  The Venator was damaged and trailing smoke, but like a wild beast it trampled on, unwilling to die, maddened by pain. He tried to touch its machine-spirit and recoiled in horror.

  Then the rover turned in his direction and put on a burst of new speed.

  Cassandra thrust the accelerator bar all the way forwards to full military power and the Venator bucked, indicator needles on the dash twitching into the red. The holy rosary hanging from the canopy snapped and clattered against the windscreen as the vehicle bore down on the treacherous adepts.

  At the last second, the tech-priest seemed to blur, his mechanoid legs coiling to project him out of the rover’s path. Instead, the bull-bars across the prow of the vehicle met the torso of a slow-moving gun-servitor and the helot crumpled across the hood of the engine compartment. Doggedly, it still tried to follow its task programming, arms ending in stubber muzzles scrapping across the bonnet, hammering at the windscreen; but without claws or manipulators, it could not find purchase. Metal squealing on metal, the blank-eyed servitor slipped off and under the wheels of the Venator. The vehicle’s tonnage crushed it into the dirt, bursting wire-implanted meat in a spatter of blood and processing fluids.

  Fighting through a skid, Cassandra pointed the front of the rover at the tunnel mouth cut into the sheer stone wall. The buzzing impact of laser hits became a steady cascade across the aft of the vehicle. A dull bang sounded and alert icons showed critical damage to the rearmost axle. The Venator began to drift, and Cassandra tried to resist it.

  In the crew compartment, the lurching passage of the rover threw the Sisters around like stones in a can, and it was difficult for any of them to maintain good firing discipline.

  ‘Reloading!’ grated Danae, dropping back from the open roof hatch to eject a spent fuel cartridge from her meltagun. Hot gases escaped from the breech, stinging Verity’s eyes. The hospitaller held on for dear life, pressing herself into the corner of the cabin.

  Xanthe bolted forwards, rising up to take the other woman’s place and Miriya was moving with her. The sounds of the battle were near-deafening, the roaring of the engine mingling with the howl of bolters and the air-splitting skirl of laser beams.

  ‘Almost there,’ Cassandra was shouting, ‘Hold on…’

  Verity’s attention was pulled away by the Battle Sister’s words. She turned back just in time to see Xanthe die.

  The younger Sororitas, her shoulders and head poking out of the roof hatch, gave a sudden, savage jerk before her knees gave way and she fell into the compartment. Xanthe came back trailing a mist of hot, pink vapour and the stink of burnt iron. Her face was a ruin of blackened meat, cored straight through by a las-bolt.

  Then darkness rolled over the vehicle as they crashed through barrier panels and into the cavern mouth.

  The rear axle finally snapped, sending fragments of itself into the fuel lines and pneumo-veins webbing the underside of the Venator. The wheels locked and the scout car juddered sideways to a halt.

  Crimson warning symbols filled the dashboard display. Cassandra kicked open the driver’s hatch and pulled herself free of the restraint web, pausing only to wrench her bolter from the magnetic mount at her side.

  She turned to see fingers of orange flame reaching up around the rear of the rover. Imogen and the other Sisters fled the stricken vehicle. The last was Danae, who shoved the hospitaller out before her, her teeth gritted.

  Cassandra counted them one short. ‘Xanthe…’

  ‘Dead,’ replied Miriya. ‘We need to move.’

  ‘Aye…’ Cassandra bit down on her sorrow. She was fond of Xanthe; her voice during the hymnals was something incredible
to hear.

  Imogen had the dead woman’s weapon in her hand and she forced it on Verity. ‘Take this. Make yourself useful.’ Without waiting to hear her response, she glared at Cassandra. ‘The vehicle–’

  ‘Too much damage. We’ll have to go deeper on foot.’

  Untended, the fire reached into the crew compartment and took hold. Black smoke belched from the open hatches, building in the confines of the cavern mouth. More laser bolts whickered past as the Mechanicus skitarii came running.

  ‘So be it, then.’ Imogen nodded. ‘With haste, go!’

  ‘Go where?’ Verity asked, kneading the grip of Xanthe’s bloodstained boltgun. ‘We have no map, no means of knowing where this tunnel leads.’ Her voice gave a hollow echo off the dark stony walls.

  ‘We stay, we die,’ said the Sister Superior, ill-tempered at the interruption. ‘Out there we are only targets. In here… We can better choose the circumstance of our fight. Move!’

  Danae had already advanced, leading with her meltagun. ‘This way,’ she called, her words resonating. The Battle Sister pointed the way into a black, fathomless passage that curved off, lit by bio-lume pods every hundred metres or so.

  Retreating, the squad drew away and down into the throat of the cave, the directionless, hazy glow of the daylight quickly fading to be replaced by the dimness of the rock tunnels. Cassandra heard their armoured boots crunching on crystalline sand as they ventured on, and smelled the tart odour of ozone. The temperature dropped sharply, the stone walls radiating a hard chill.

  She looked up and crossed glances with Sister Miriya. ‘This place feels like a tomb,’ she muttered.

  ‘If we tarry, it will be ours,’ replied the other Sororitas.

  ‘Are they still outside?’ Tegas asked the question even though he knew the answer.

  ‘Yes, questor,’ said Lumik. Since the static-flare, she had picked up an odd clicking reverberation in her vocoder unit.

  He ignored her and sent a command to the remote optics on the exterior of the laboratorium module. A slaved visual feed entered his cortex, and he saw the two Sisters of Battle at guard ready outside the main hatch, where he had left them hours earlier. They remained impassive, their faces set in identical masks of dour focus. Tegas ran a cycle of amusement at the expense of their pomposity, and shared it with his entourage as they worked on the metal scroll from the dig. It lay there on a glowing sensor bed, surrounded by scanner arms and manipulator tentacles.

  He orbited the workspace, considering. The Sororitas were fools. Outside, they believed they were in charge of this situation because of their guns and their stoic manner, as if somehow their blind faith made them superior to the Mechanicus. He did not doubt that if they had the means, the Battle Sisters assigned to be these so-called escorts to his staff would stand guard until the Kavir sun fell from the sky. They were single-minded that way, but what some called tenacity Tegas saw as evidence of limited intellects.

  The Sisters of Battle ascribed all things to the will of the God-Emperor. They did not question the structure of the universe or the order of things, as those highest among the Adeptus Mechanicus were born to do. Where the sons and daughters of the great thinkers of Mars sought union with the Omnissiah and pushed back the boundaries of knowledge, the Sisters… The Sisters were the very exemplar of the status quo. They were blunt instruments, the bludgeons of the Imperial Church. They were artless beings, lacking in vision.

  To say such things aloud would be to court suggestions of sedition, perhaps even heresy; and among some of his staff, Tegas knew there were those who would shy away from such daring thinking. But not one of these things was actually spoken, using crude flesh and air pushed through tubes of cartilage. Instead, they existed as vague thought-patterns rendered in binaric lingua, currents of concept floating through the shared data pool.

  Let the Sisters think they had the measure of this place. Let them strut about and rebuild their precious convent. None would dare venture into the laboratorium, for the law of the Ministorum classed the module as de facto territory of Mars, a tiny embassy of the Mechanicus light years from the solar system. Tegas would be within his rights to class any invasion of that space as an act of war.

  The edict granted him the isolation he needed to complete his own examination of Ferren’s relic. He drifted closer to the scroll, peering at it. Tegas had already absorbed every teraquad of data his errant protégé had gathered about the device, but he had ordered his own retinue to perform the same suite of tests again. He needed to be sure of what he was looking at.

  If Ferren’s data was correct, if his interpretations were sound, it seemed to suggest that the scroll-device was operating in discontinuous phase with the rest of space-time. It was acting through quantum linkages to gain access to instrumentality at levels undreamed of in Imperial computational devices. Information, stored in the very structure of subatomic particles. An infinity of facts, entire histories encoded within it; and most amazingly, all this on something that might be a trivial gewgaw to the beings who had manufactured it.

  Tegas was excited and agitated in equal measure. The thrilling possibility of the device’s library was compelling, but he chafed at the thought of how hard it would be to interpret it. It would not be just a life’s work, but several lives.

  He gave in to the impulse to touch it again, and pushed away the sensors, brushing his augmented fingers over the softly-glowing lines of glyphs. Understanding of it seemed so close, like something just out of reach, tantalising, daring him to make the connection.

  He lost himself in it. Time passed – hours or seconds? He disengaged his internal chronometer; and when the correlation at last snapped into focus in his mind, Tegas felt a rush that was orgiastic.

  The questor’s hands opened and subdivided into spider-leg shapes, moving and tracing over the symbols. The scroll’s unusual metal reformed itself, becoming a triangular section, almost the image of some great fan used by barony dowagers at the courts of the High Lords of Terra.

  Hololiths blossomed from the steel-grey surface in mad profusion, far more than he had seen beneath Ferren’s hesitant touch. Rings of virtual controls and what could only be command interfaces layered themselves atop one another, daring him to reach out and touch them. An invisible churn of electromagnetic radiation was building all about them, doubtless some side-effect of the device’s activation. Tegas ignored a twinge of vertigo and felt a wave of panic-analogue push through the data pool. Lumik and the other adepts were shocked and afraid by the reaction. They were counselling calm and care, suggesting that he back off, and progress no further. Data had to be gathered. Considered. Evaluated.

  All those things were true.

  ‘But no discovery is ever made without boldness,’ Tegas said aloud, reaching into the emerald glow.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Miriya heard the change in the structure of the caverns before she saw it, the hollow beat in the way the echo of their footfalls abruptly shifted. She glanced over her shoulder to where Sister Kora was taking the last place in the overwatch line, and then back.

  Ahead of her, Verity gasped and Cassandra muttered a quiet oath. The tunnel disgorged them into a cavern bigger than a Titan hangar, the vast space lit by shafts of sunlight that fell at steep angles through jagged rents in the rock. Bridges made of the strange greenish-black stone they had seen elsewhere joined the far sides of the open void, and there were tiers of a sort, plates of harder sandstone that protruded from the walls like fungal discs. Patches of the dark stone were more frequent in here, and when Miriya chanced to run her hand over them all the warmth from her fingers was stolen away, even through the ceramite of her gauntlets. In places it seemed as if the alien material had grown out of the Kaviran sandstone, as if one had been remade from the atoms of the other. She found the strange fusion unsettling.

  Avoiding the puddles of daylight, Imogen led the squad on a looping course around the perimeter of the chamber. Miriya looked back once more, and saw the faint glo
w of spot lamps bobbing along the walls of the tunnel behind them. She could hear the rat-scramble skittering of the Mechanicus’s soldiery following them, inexorably tracking the fleeing women with thermal scopes, pheremonic scans and other sensing technologies that the Battle Sisters could only guess at.

  Miriya’s gaze ranged around the chamber. It would be a good place to make a stand, to ambush the skitarii and discourage their pursuit. But there was little cover, and the sightlines between the mounds of dusty rubble were cluttered.

  Sister Danae halted and peered at something. Imogen saw and turned. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I am uncertain,’ said the other Sister, pointing.

  Like the black stone, out of place among the irregular shapes of the natural rock formations, there stood a thick pane of vitreous glass. Miriya estimated it was some eight metres tall, half as wide, and as thick as her fist. It was without doubt an artificially manufactured thing, the top and the sides of it cut sharply and perfectly level. It was like some strange free-standing window, anchored in the dirt.

  ‘Another one,’ called Verity, gesturing with Xanthe’s boltgun. ‘In the shadows.’

  ‘More over there,’ called Cassandra, casting around with her pin-light. ‘Throne… There’s dozens of them.’

  The glass panels were arranged in a loose circle, broad faces aimed outwards towards the walls. Miriya had a sudden flash of memory, recalling the hololithic paintings in the Museum of the Holy Synod, which were set out in a similar pattern for the troupes of pilgrims who came to pay homage. But this place was no gallery, and these were no works of art. Something in the brutal, geometric shape of them rang a wrong note with Miriya.

  ‘It is xenos,’ said Danae, giving voice to the suspicion they all shared. She looked away and spat. ‘We should leave this place. It was a mistake to come here.’

  Imogen shot her a hard look. ‘The choice was hardly open to us.’ The sounds of the skitarii approach were growing louder with each passing moment. ‘Look sharp, find cover. We’ll make our stand in here.’