Hammer and Anvil Page 6

  What Canoness Sepherina was doing here was little more than noise, like trying to liberate hydrogen and oxygen from water by singing to it. Tegas shared with the others a complicated logic train in an old programming language, which when run revealed a mocking comment on the Battle Sisters. The adepts devoted a single clock cycle to an amusement simulation and then deleted it.

  The matter at hand occupied them now. All of them felt the same emotive analogue that Tegas had originated. They chafed under Sepherina’s overly strict dictates, her commands that the group remain within the walls of the convent and effectively under guard by the Sororitas. Even now, they were kept from their own resources; up on the Tybalt was a self-contained portable laboratorium unit, a rare example of an STC construct built for the Mechanicus’s use. Normally, it would be one of the first pieces of hardware deployed to a planet’s surface, but the canoness had ensured it would not arrive until the last flight of cargo shuttles. It was the latest in a long line of indignities the questor’s party had been forced to suffer.

  This was not a tenable state and Tegas’s group could not be expected to remain so corralled. Every moment that the Mechanicus team remained at the site, they squandered the most valuable of resources – time.

  The questor wanted to be gone from this place and his analysis of the canoness’s behaviour – backed up by referent studies from his cohorts – made it clear that the woman would not alter her orders any time soon. Thus, logic dictated the consideration and implementation of an alternative process. One that risked censure and perhaps even open violence.

  The cargo shuttles had brought down a number of small ground vehicles, including Rhino transports for the Battle Sisters and more general all-terrain rovers for use where the heavy APCs could not venture. One of the skitarii had already observed and marked the location of an unarmed Venator-pattern scout car that would serve their needs. Tegas would have preferred a contra-gravity craft like a land speeder instead, but there was no other choice.

  In the space of a few seconds, they assembled what data they had on the probable patterns for the guard patrols, the weather forecast for the next few hours and a rudimentary route map for their exit route.

  Comparing the typical sleep patterns of the Sororitas with the biorhythms of females of their body mass provided intelligence on the optimal moment for the group to move. Unaugmented humans were prey to fatigue and distraction in a way a cyborg could never be. It was simply a matter of predicting a moment of inattention and exploiting it. The plan accreted in the data pool and became solid.

  Tegas saw the program of it unfold in his enhanced mind, rendered like a thought-experiment simulacra. At a time index exactly four-point-two-six hours Terran from now, they would assemble at the Venator, where the vehicle’s engine spirit would be lulled into temporary quietus; then, in silence, the skitarii would manually propel the scout beyond the fallen quadrant of the southern wall and into the lee of the prevailing winds. Once into the haze of the storm front, the Venator could be driven at speed and the Sisters would never hear it. Probability percentage of successful egress without detection eighty-seven point six-six recurring. Adequate odds.

  Across the courtyard, Sister Imogen continued to drone on and on. Used to processing communications at great speed, to the questor the vocalisations of the Battle Sister seemed infinitely slow and tedious in the extreme. In that way, she resembled much about the unimproved mass of humanity that Tegas found so tiresome.

  Somewhere in the data pool, an errant voice floated the question of the legality of what was being done. After all, Canoness Sepherina had not lied when she spoke of her Sisterhood’s military authority here.

  The dissenting voice was noiselessly shouted down. To underline the point, Tegas briefly switched back from millisecond-fast machine code to the laborious configurations of actual human language. Using the archaic dot-dash forms of orskode he broadcast to his assembled group. ‘The Order of Our Martyred Lady have been allowed to believe that they are in control of Sanctuary 101 because it is expedient to do so. But that mistaken belief will not be allowed to prevent our mission from being fulfilled.’

  There were no other arguments. Instead, Tegas opened up the sealed info-philes buried in his cortex processor for just this moment, and shared them. The data within revealed advanced topographic reports and an understanding of the planet’s geography, details rendered so finely that they could only have come from observers who had spend months – if not years – on the surface of Sanctuary 101.

  The maps were just one piece of the knowledge Tegas had that the Sisters did not, and he had no intention of revealing any of it to them.

  ++Why are you here?++ said the Watcher.

  The revenant did not answer, instead remaining motionless against the curvature of the tall pillar of red rock. Pressed flat into a cleft in the dark-coloured stone, it was possible to remain hidden and still observe most of the keep and the walls down in the shallow valley. Soft droplets of yellow light were appearing inside the broken walls, breathed into being by the motion of figures in dark cloaks. The lights slowly formed a grid, dots making lines.

  There was meaning in them, but it escaped comprehension. The ragged figure peered out of the darkness, owlish and frustrated. Understanding refused to surrender itself.

  ++Answer me++ demanded the Watcher. ++Answer me++ ++Answer me++

  The reply fell away into the night. ‘I am doing what you do. I am watching.’

  ++Why?++

  ‘Stop asking me questions you know I cannot answer.’ The Watched slapped at the skin of a dirty, malnourished face. ‘You are in my head, so you see the holes in it. Stop trying to make me fill them with your lies.’

  The Watcher went quiet. Perhaps it was ruminating on that thought, or perhaps it had merely become bored. This sometimes happened. There were times when the voice went away for a long time, a long time indeed. Even moments when it seemed like the revenant would be free of it.

  It came back each time, though. In a way, it was like one of the parasite ticks that dug themselves into the fur of the burrower rodents that lived to the north. It was in too deep to ever fully be excised. And cutting it out would likely kill the host.

  Eyes that were exhausted and hollow turned back to observe the motions of the ritual being performed inside the tumbledown ruins. Figures clad in shining black armour moved back and forth, red cloaks glittering under the cold stars. Every few moments, when the breath of the winds shifted and dropped, sound carried over the dunes and the rocks to the hiding place. Voices, but not harsh and judgemental like the one that came from the air. Soft and gentle tones, resembling things buried deep in old memory. Things that swam disconnected from the here and now, searching for meaning, finding ritual shapes.

  Ritual…

  The word carried weight for a reason that did not seem immediately clear. What did it mean? Probing at the thoughts it brought with it was like pulling at the tap-roots of a complex cactus bed. They came away in clumps, tugging on one another, ripping and tearing, spilling precious moisture, wasting it.

  But instead of water, there was a swelling of something else. Emotion. A gasp escaped into the night air, dragging up a horrible dark tide of sorrow with it. Fingers clenched and limbs trembled, a shockwave of feeling resonating through them. Shifting like a collapsing dune-front, the Watched experienced particles of what could only be memory, but they shimmered so fast that they were gone before they could be focussed upon. Torn away. Disintegrating.

  ++You do not understand what you are doing++ said the Watcher, the discordant words melting out of the gloom.

  The Watched tried not to listen, tried to focus on the figures in the ruins. This was important. It meant something special, something that could be understood if only the right words were found to explain it, the right sense to frame the emotion.

  Those things were missing, however. Those things had fallen into the holes in the revenant’s head, vanished into black and distant voids.

/>   ++You disgust me++

  The trembling hands, cracked by age and the tribulations of survival in the arid desert, rose up and touched the dirty flesh about those fatigued eyes. They came away moist; streaks of wetness flowed over cheeks, cutting lines down through years of ingrained grime.

  The Watched blinked and vision blurred. ‘What does this mean?’

  The voice was cruel. ++It means you are weak and you should die++

  Verity arose with the dawn to find her fellow hospitallers already at work in the temporary pergolas set up in the courtyard, preparing a field medicae clinic for the members of the mission. She gave morning prayers; her internal body clock was having difficulty synchronising with the Kaviran day-night cycle, and months living in shift-patterns aboard the Tybalt had not helped smooth the transition.

  A pair of workgangers were the clinic’s first visitors. Both men were marked with whip-wounds from Deacon Zeyn’s flail, having been beaten hard for some minor infraction. They were edgy and eager to return to their detail, fear riding high in them that Zeyn would be less forgiving the next time.

  The hospitaller had fallen asleep to the sounds of the deacon’s exhortations to his serviles. He seemed tireless, burning with a zealous frenzy that made itself known through barked hymns or the snapping tip of his electro-whip. Verity made her excuses and left the pergola, crossing the quad to observe.

  Zeyn was there, shouldering away a massive piece of fallen masonry, singing harshly as he did so. All around him, vacant-eyed servitors and sweating, red-faced workgangers toiled in the growing heat. They were in the process of clearing the rubble from the foot of the southern wall, in preparation for repairs to the fallen section of battlements.

  In other circumstances, the chants Zeyn led – The Emperor’s Prayer, Holy Terra We Beseech Thee, Praise For The Throne, and all the others – they would have given Verity a swell of pious love. But somehow, when the words were spat from the deacon’s mouth like a spray of bullets, they became hard upon her ears and her heart. The duality of the thought made her uncomfortable; and then it became of no consequence as the noise of the singing was lost in the shriek of thruster noise as the last sortie of Arvus lighters and Aquila shuttles dropped into the valley.

  She looked up, shielding her eyes. Two of the boxy lighters carried a complicated rig of cables between them, and caught in its cradle was a long, slender capsule made of dull steel. It resembled the fuselage of an aircraft or a vast shell casing, and Verity saw ports in the hull where armoured windows nestled next to thick airlock doors. The construct bore code symbols that did not quite resemble numbers. The only recognisable sigil was a disc that bore the cyborg skull and cogwheel device of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  The lighter pilots brought the module down towards the courtyard, and the pod extruded a series of skeletal support legs as the ground approached. But the moment the steel feet touched the surface, there came a great howling thunder from the earth beneath the hospitaller’s feet.

  Verity stumbled against the sudden earthquake, falling against a stand of cargo drums. She saw the ground under the pod crack and give way. The stones there, already weakened by whatever battle had swept through the convent in the past, were stressed past their limits by the weight of the module.

  The engines of the Arvus transports keened, the support cables twanging as they were pulled tight. The Mechanicus’s laboratorium module swung wide like a massive demolition ball, clipping a tall plinth and shattering it. Verity ducked by reflex as it thrummed over her head, the wind of its passage pulling at her wimple.

  Where the pilots had tried to put it down, a sudden sinkhole appeared, and through it could briefly be glimpsed the structures of the convent’s myriad underground crypts and passageways. Verity heard screams over the roar of the engines as hapless workgangers too slow on their feet were knocked aside and to their deaths in the spaces below.

  The courtyard resonated as the laboratorium was finally deposited on the stones a few metres distant, and by the Emperor’s grace the ground there was firm and unmoving. Gathering herself, Verity ventured forwards from behind the cargo drums, gingerly peering into the cracks. She heard Zeyn exhorting the workgangers to leave those of their fallen number to their fate.

  ‘Hospitaller.’ She turned to see Sister Imogen crossing the quad. ‘Stay back. This area is unsafe.’

  ‘There could be wounded–’

  The Sororitas spoke over her. ‘This may be deliberate sabotage.’ Imogen stabbed a finger at the laboratorium, where a group of Battle Sisters were taking up positions around it, boltguns at the ready. ‘Stay back,’ she repeated.

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Verity. ‘This is an accident, nothing more. The convent grounds are known to be unstable. How can–’

  Once more Imogen ignored her words. ‘Questor Tegas and his retinue have vanished. Something is afoot, nursemaid.’

  Verity went cold. Vanished? Did she mean abducted, or killed?

  The other woman must have seen the question in her eyes. ‘We have been played for fools,’ she snarled, marching onwards.

  The chamber had formerly served the convent as a tertiary mess hall for the novices of Sanctuary 101, but for the moment it had been repurposed for Canoness Sepherina to use as her interim command post. The electrocandles hanging by votive chains from the walls were still twitching from the aftershock of the collapse in the courtyard, throwing shifting shadows in the places where the daylight did not reach.

  ‘The casualty report is still being collated, mistress,’ said Miriya, with a bow. ‘But Sister Xanthe reports we have lost several of the workers.’

  Sepherina accepted her account with a vague gesture of her hand, without turning away from the vox-unit on the stone table before her. ‘You heard that, captain?’

  ‘Aye, milady,’ came a tinny reply from the vox’s speaker grille. ‘I think this may just have been an unlucky coincidence.’ The voice of the Tybalt’s commander was riddled with feedback and static, his words becoming echoes as the starship continued to move further out of planetary orbit.

  ‘I do not believe in such things,’ Sepherina insisted. ‘This happens now, at the very hour when your obligation to the Order is at an end? I suspect cunning in it.’

  ‘With all due respect,’ said the captain, ‘these issues are now yours to deal with, canoness. The Imperial Navy has its own timetable to keep to and the Emperor’s summons waits for no man. My ship is urgently needed in the Cynnamal system to reinforce the line against an ork incursion. Tybalt’s shuttles are in recovery, and we are preparing for warp translation.’

  Miriya saw Sepherina’s mailed fist tighten. ‘Tegas did this deliberately,’ she went on. ‘He knew your schedule. The questor has defied me and stolen away into the night. A rover was taken, and we do not know as to where.’

  At first, when the discovery had been made just before dawn, Sister Imogen had aired the thought that the Mechanicus party might have fallen victim to an outside force. However, it had soon become clear that Tegas had absconded with the vehicle for reasons known only to the adept. The Battle Sisters on guard duty had already been chastised and given over to Deacon Zeyn for reprimand, but the damage was done.

  ‘If you cannot remain to assist me in this matter, then I ask you to grant me one request before you depart,’ said the canoness. ‘Your vessel’s scry-sensors. Make a cast over the surface in the sector surrounding the convent. Tell me what you detect.’

  ‘I anticipated your request, milady, and this was done,’ buzzed the captain. ‘A datum transit of the scan is now in progress, although I warn you it will not be pleasing.’ Miriya heard the chatter of a typehead as a slot on the bulky vox mechanism began to spew out a thin streamer of paper. ‘I put it to you that Questor Tegas has allowed his enthusiasm for this mission to outstrip his good sense. If I were you, I would allow him to exercise it and let the man be damned for any hardships it brings to his party. Ave Imperator, canoness.’

  ‘Ave Imperator, captain
.’ The vox-speaker bubbled static and finally went silent. Sepherina snatched at the paper strip and threaded it through her fingers, her expression stony.

  Miriya glanced over her shoulder as Sister Imogen entered the chamber. The Celestian gave her a dismissive glance.

  ‘Report,’ said Sepherina, without looking up.

  ‘I sent out a squad of scouts and they tracked the Venator’s path to the edge of the valley, but there the sands become unreadable. We could follow no more.’

  The canoness nodded once. ‘Tegas appears to have masked the rover’s locator beacon. According to the Tybalt’s sensors, the vehicle was moving southwards when it was consumed by a magnitude seven sandstorm. Energetic interference prevented any further tracking.’ She let the paper strip fall from her slender fingers. ‘He knew that would happen.’

  Miriya swallowed. ‘If I may,’ she began. ‘A small party in another of the rovers might be able to pick up some traces after the storm passes.’

  Sepherina and Imogen shared a look that Miriya could not read, and then the Celestian answered for her commander. ‘No. Let Tegas go. He has cost us one Venator already, more than likely got himself buried under ten metres of sand by the drifts out there.’

  The canoness nodded again. ‘If the adept wishes to perish in the desert, I see no reason why we should not allow him to do so. I will take the advice of the good captain. We have far more important deeds to do here in the convent. The reconsecration has begun. I shall not see it abandoned because of one foolish man’s recklessness.’ She brought her hands together. ‘We complete our sacred deeds first, and perhaps then we will consider sending out a search party.’

  Imogen turned to Miriya. ‘Gather a tactical squad and assemble at the gates of the central keep.’

  ‘If it pleases the Celestian, may I ask why?’

  The other Battle Sister eyed her. ‘We do as the canoness ordered. We go to secure the lower levels of the convent.’

  ‘Be careful down there,’ added Sepherina. Miriya sensed the caution carried more meaning that she could see, but the fullness of it escaped her.