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  The Sister Superior let a conveyor take her up the vertical spine of the Tybalt, past the gunnery tiers to the egress decks where the materiel for the mission was being assembled. The last few checks were being made, the final chances for any mistakes to be corrected. Once they nestled into orbit, the next phase of the operation would begin, and with all the sharp precision that the Sisters Militant were known for. Imogen entered the cavernous bay where ranks of Arvus- and Aquila-class shuttles were being attended by workgangs in leather oversuits and powerframes. The labourers were busy loading cargo pods, and prefabricated Phaeton-pattern construction units that could be assembled into any one of a hundred different modular buildings. They hummed and sang in low tones that resonated off the decks, around them the smell of promethium fuel mingling with sweat and coolants. Some of the helots were commissioned men in service to the Imperial Navy, but the majority were tithed workers bound by oath or deed of penance to the Sororitas. Some were minor criminals working off their debt to society through hard labour, others ordinary citizens who had willingly given up their rights in order to show their devotion to the church. They would be the army of restoration once planetfall had been made, and above them, marching back and forth along a suspended gantry, was the man who they called master.

  Imogen inclined her gaze as Deacon Uriahi Zeyn caught her eye and bobbed his head. The priest spared her only a cursory glance, quickly returning to his business of motivation and command. This he accomplished over the workgangers by use of a lengthy electro-whip and an implanted vocoder module in his throat. Zeyn’s machine-augmented voice blasted hymnals across the egress bay, punctuated with harsh snarls of oratory drawn from the Book of Atticus, The Rebuke or other devotional tomes. The whip he used now and then to underline his points, or to give a little discipline to those who tarried. The flashes of blue sparks it left behind illuminated his face.

  The deacon was a large, rangy man of pale face and small, deep-set eyes. He had a fierce beard of carroty-red and a halo of wild hair to match. Imogen found him quite coarse, uncouth for an anointed member of the cloth, but she could not deny that he drew great results from his charges. Without pausing to engage him, the Sister Superior walked on, her boots snapping across the iron decks in time to the rise and fall of the songs of the workers.

  Canoness Sepherina, Imogen’s commander and the mistress of this mission, would want a full and clear-eyed report on the delegation’s readiness before vespers, and so as she walked, the Sororitas became watchful. She looked for anything that hinted at a concern, intent that none would be found. The long journey from Holy Terra to the Eastern Galactic Rim was almost at an end, and at this late stage it would not serve Him Upon The Throne to falter.

  This would be Imogen’s first experience of a re-consecration, and like all her sisters, she understood the great import of such an event. In the Wars of Faith and the Great Service, it was a fact of life that many Adepta Sororitas would be called to the God-Emperor’s side as death claimed them. But once in a while, those deaths were of such magnitude and horror that the very ground on which they took place became… unholy. In the name of Imperial Truth, it was thus important to sift such earth of its darker resonances and return it by blessing to right and good. Zeyn’s workers would rebuild what physical damage had been done down on the planet, but it would be the canoness who would repair the spiritual wounds of the place. Together, the members of the mission would make it whole again.

  This was the deed that would be done at Sanctuary 101; but it was not the only one, nor was it the most important task of Sepherina’s sacred undertaking. In time, and if circumstances required it, then the full scope of things would be made clear to the rest of the Battle Sisters. For now, it was necessary to keep the secret for the good of the duty. Imogen understood this, and as with so many things in her service, she did not think to question it.

  So long a journey to get here; and yet she recalled the day when her orders were cut by the High Mistress of her Order as if it had only been a moment ago.

  Imogen had stood to arms in the role of adjutant and guardian to Sepherina at a meeting on Apophis, a repurposed asteroid in high orbit around Holy Terra. The site belonged to the Ordo Xenos, and what glimpses the Sisters had been granted of the complex’s interior were fleeting, giving rise to worrisome questions as to exactly what the Inquisition’s alien hunters did there. The thought of being in close proximity to anything connected to heathen non-human life made the woman’s skin crawl. Sister Imogen had fought the xenos many times, killing ork and eldar, and any number of other nameless things that aped the intellect and perfection of mankind. As they walked through the snaking lava-tube corridors inside Apophis, she had kept one hand close to her bolter, and the other on the chaplet that hung around her neck.

  Finally, Sepherina and her party had been shown into a meeting room laser-cut from the dense meteoric stone, and left to wait until the man who summoned them finally graced the Sisterhood with his presence.

  Inquisitor Hoth, a male of stocky build beneath a wide-brimmed preacher hat, entered with his own retinue: a pair of gunmen who showed the manner of mercenaries more than virtuous servants of the Golden Throne. The men surveyed the Sisters with eyes that were wary and predatory in equal measure. Imogen had let them look at her, concealing nothing. Better that they see the steel and plate of her power armour, better they know the presence of her gun and blade. She recognised men like them. They understood only crude vectors of approach, force and violence. Eventually, they looked away, and for the rest of the meeting kept their gazes turned elsewhere.

  Hoth, on the other hand, radiated a singular air of unconcern that bordered on condescension. He took a seat and busied himself with a data-slate, picking at icons on the screen, moving them back and forth like beads on an ancient abacus. Imogen was uncertain if he were actually working on something, or if he were toying with the device to amuse himself. The man behaved as if he was barely aware of them in the room with him.

  Hoth had granted them audience after a long silence. The deposition from the Sisterhood had come in person to ask again upon a request, which had been circling through the vast machine of Imperial bureaucracy for almost seven solar years. Such a period of time was little more than the blink of an eye, when measured against the monumental epochs of officialdom that weighed down most decisions made by the Adeptus Terra and the great organisations of the Imperium. But for the Order of Our Martyred Lady, it had been as if a century passed for each wasted day. Seven years before they met in that stone chamber, the convent at Sanctuary 101 had gone dark, the last communication from it an agonised scream.

  As ever, the engine of empire moved slowly, but the Sisters had made ready to set sail for the Kavir system, preparing ships and warriors, only to be prevented from departing by the Ministorum itself. It came to pass that on the advice of the Ordo Xenos and the personal diktat of Inquisitor Hoth, the Sisterhood were denied permission to return to Sanctuary 101 and determine what had happened there.

  Of all the Canoness Minoris in the Order, Sister Sepherina had been the most vocal over this insult to the authority of the Sororitas. The Ordo Xenos had no power over the Sisterhood, and yet Hoth had drawn on his own vast web of influence to convince those who did that he, not the Sisters, should be first to Sanctuary 101 in the wake of this mysterious event. The matter had created great enmity between the two organisations, and much in the way of politicking and sharp words, all of them for nothing. The inquisitor was known to Imogen’s Order, and his interest – some said his obsession – with certain strains of alien life was not a secret. But despite all the entreaties, the requests and veiled threats, Hoth had made sure the order remained in place.

  Until that day.

  Without explanation, without apology or acknowledgement of the Sisterhood’s great pain, he told them they now had leave to return to the planet and lay the ghosts of their dead to rest. ‘My interest,’ he said, ‘has shifted to other matters.’

  Sepher
ina exploded with questions and demands as Hoth stood up after making his pronouncement. What happened at the convent? Did anyone survive? Did you go there? The inquisitor ignored them all, and finally the canoness was railing at nothing as Hoth crossed back towards the door. It was the first time, in years of duty alongside the other woman, that Imogen had ever seen Sepherina lose her temper.

  Seven years of being banned from setting foot upon their own outpost world, with only the vaguest of justifications, seven years of rumours about the invasion of a new kind of alien form, all cast aside in a moment.

  And so, in the nine hundred and third year of the forty-first millennium of the Imperium of Man, Canoness Sepherina was empowered to command a mission back to the silent outpost. Even with good warp currents, six more years Terran standard time had elapsed as the starship Tybalt travelled first to Paramar to equip, and then on to the distant Kavir system.

  At Paramar they had taken on the last of what would be needed on Sanctuary 101, the hardware, the building supplies, the workgangers. During their voyage, this need had been communicated to the Sororitas by the Ordo Xenos through the sketchy reports the alien hunters had decided to give up. They supplied recordings of destruction across the entire keep and complex on the outpost planet but with no word of what had caused them or why. Images of fallen buildings that seemed to have been brought down by beam fire or in some cases, earthquake. The only direct question that the Ordo Xenos deigned to answer was on the issue of the planet’s safety. According to them, the so-called ‘threat vector’ to Kavir was gone, like a passing storm. There was nothing there now, they said.

  These words had come to the Sisterhood, and along with them, a new edict.

  Inwardly, Sister Imogen chafed at the thought of it. It was not enough that Hoth and his kind had trampled the death site of hundreds of loyal Sisters, doubtless indulging his sickening interest in all things inhuman; no, now the Lords of Terra, in some mercurial wisdom, had granted passage to a party of technologists from the Adeptus Mechanicus. They were led by Tegas, a wiry being of questor rank – Imogen hesitated to call him a ‘man’, for there seemed to be little of the flesh about him – and like Hoth, he too seemed to be more set on things outside the remit of the mission to reconsecrate the convent.

  The Sister Superior had a detail of women she trusted implicitly, each of them appointed to secretly observe Tegas and his small group. They had done this since Paramar, and so far the questor had shown no sign of being aware of the… secondary objective.

  Tegas’s orders were that he and his team assist the workgangs in the reconstruction on Sanctuary, but such a task was rarely given to an adept of his rank. She knew there was more to the cyborg’s company here, and she wondered if the canoness had been told the true reason. That was doubtful. Sepherina was as pragmatic as she was pious, and it was highly unlikely she would not choose to share this information with her trusted combat commander. Some of the other Sororitas wondered if Tegas might be on this voyage because of some misdeed he had committed, that he was joining them in sufferance and penance. It was as good a hypothesis as any, but Imogen did not hold to it. The oily questor walked like a rat on its hind legs, all snout, spindle and points, and the Sister’s instinctive dislike of Tegas made everything he did appear to be untrustworthy.

  Imogen dismissed the cyborg from her thoughts as she approached a squad of Battle Sisters of the line, the women drilling in loose formation with deactivated chainswords and bayonet-equipped bolters. They snapped to attention as she came closer, standing ramrod straight and proud, the rich crimson of their combat cloaks and war tabards framing the ebony shimmer of their battle armour. Imogen was not afraid to admit that her heart swelled in her breast each time she laid her gaze on her Sisters. If she ever needed a reminder as to what was right and purposeful, she had only to turn her face to look at these women and know that those qualities were embodied in them. In the ocean of uncertainty that was this dark universe, the Sisters of Battle were the unbreakable bulwark of humanity’s faith.

  It mattered little to Imogen if men like Hoth or Tegas looked upon them and muttered the word ‘fanatic’ behind their hands. They did not understand the divine truth that the Sisters of Battle knew in their souls, and they would never know the joy of true betrothal to the greatest creed in human history. The God-Emperor, in all his divine majesty, had made the Imperium to vouchsafe mankind and keep it protected from all threats. The heathen alien, the witch-psyker, the abhuman and the foulness of the mutant, even the sickening monstrosities of the Ruinous Powers – all these forces beat at the walls of humanity’s salvation and tried again and again to drag it screaming into impiety and damnation.

  None saw this as clearly as the Sisters of Battle. Oh, it was true that they did not fight this tide of enemies alone, but one could not expect the common soldiery of the Imperial Guard to weather such threats. The Inquisition, while companionable in some forms to the work of the Sororitas, often dallied too closely with the very things they set out to expunge. And the Adeptus Astartes, the Emperor’s Space Marines… They were a melange of conflicted, tribal warrior bands that embraced undependable psychics and the tenets of transhumanism. A few of their number were perhaps more tolerable than the others, and all were faithful to the Throne in their own crude conduct… But they were never to be trusted.

  In a way, Imogen pitied them. They would never understand the glory of pure faith, the freedom from doubt it gave.

  The Sister closest to her bowed her head slightly and saluted with the aquila, hands folding open over her chest. ‘Milady,’ she began. ‘If I may ask, when will we be ordered to embark?’ The woman nodded towards the waiting shuttles.

  Imogen studied her and said nothing. There had been other things brought aboard at Paramar, and among them came a contingent of additional Battle Sisters tasked to join the mission after the fact. This one was a member of that group, one of the latecomers who boarded with hospitallers and medicae support staff from the non-combatant Order of Serenity.

  Sister Miriya. Imogen remembered the woman’s name. The Sister Superior made it her business to maintain a watchful eye on Miriya. She had heard the barrack-hall rumours about the woman, the tales of a Sister with a wide independent streak and an overly forthright manner. Imogen’s gaze dropped to the chaplet around Miriya’s neck, and she reached out for it, running her thumb over the golden sigil and the line of adamantine beads it hung from. Miriya did not move.

  Each bead represented an act of great devotion to the church, be it the burning of a witch or a victory won. Miriya’s line was scuffed and damaged in a manner that could not be traced back to battle wear. It had been quite clearly and deliberately broken, cut short and then re-set. Imogen released the chaplet and let it fall free. Sister Miriya had once been a Celestian, serving as commander of her own squad at the rank of Eloheim, but now that honour was lost to her. Imogen did not know the full details of the incident, but she was aware that the woman had disobeyed a direct order given by Canoness Galatea of the Neva convent. The end result left Miriya reduced in rank to that of an ordinary Sister Militant.

  Imogen’s lips thinned as she considered her. Surely a Sister who broke the chain of command deserved far more punishing censure than this? Excommunication or even castigation into the ranks of the Repentia, there to self-flagellate and pray each day to redeem herself. Galatea’s mercy seemed… soft.

  ‘You will be told when it is time, and not before,’ Imogen snapped. She did not like Miriya, the way she held herself or the way she presumed to speak without first asking leave to do so. The Sister Superior studied her dark shock of ink-black hair, the scars that marred her face and the blood-red fleur-de-lys tattoo upon her cheek, searching the other woman for the air of defiance she knew hid beneath them. Had the choice been hers, Imogen would have refused the Sister’s petition to join the Tybalt’s mission, but Sepherina had ideas about leading by example. The canoness spoke of offering Miriya a place where she could touch upon her fealty to t
he God-Emperor, a role where she might find renewed purpose. Imogen had little time for such things. She believed in firm acts of piety and a constant, unchanging devotion. There was no place for the uncertain or the free-thinker here.

  The matter was not helped by the arrival of two other Sisters from Miriya’s former squad, who had also accepted reduced rank – the tall and muscular Cassandra, and the younger one, Isabel. The latter bore scars that were still new, and sported a pewter augmetic eye that had yet to lose its sheen. Whatever injuries these two had suffered, it had apparently hardened their bond with Miriya rather than weakened it; and even though their former commander was now their equal in rank, they still showed her an undue degree of respect, deferring to Miriya almost by force of habit.

  Imogen had watched them perform fight drills and it could not be denied that Sister Miriya and her cohorts had ample combat skills. But it was becoming increasingly clear that she would need to break them of their past patterns of behaviour, if they were to be of proper service during the mission.

  The former Celestian did not reply to Imogen’s words, but she did not look away either. The air of subtle defiance in the other woman was not undimmed. Miriya would never seek to challenge her openly, Imogen knew that. She was not a fool. But if the Battle Sister believed she would be able to erode Imogen’s command status in any fashion at all, there would be a reckoning.

  ‘Canoness Sepherina will address the ship’s company personally,’ continued the Sister Superior. ‘There will be a sermon and a hymnal of dedication before we set off for Sanctuary 101.’

  ‘We will be ready,’ Miriya replied, even though Imogen had not asked the question.

  She leaned closer to her subordinate so that when she spoke again her voice remained unheard to all the others around them. ‘The last word here is always mine, Sister Miriya. I would remind you never to forget that.’

  By reflex, Miriya opened her mouth to say something, but then she thought better of it, and at last lowered her head with a shallow nod. A start, Imogen told herself. Perhaps this one can be properly disciplined after all.