Fear And Fire Part 23

So Be It. LaHayn's dark eyes flashed as he gathered up a coil of killing psychic power. Miriya found Ver-ity at her side.

The Hospitaller gripped the careworn sliver of her votive rosary in one hand and pressed it into the Battle Sister's grip.

'Must not... suffer the witch... to live...' she man-aged, every word a monumental effort.

'Aye,' said Miriya, drawing her Sister to her. 'In the G.o.d-Emperor's name, we shall not bow before you, LaHayn!'

Die, Then, he said, unleas.h.i.+ng unhallowed flames upon the two of them, witchfire shrieking across the chamber.'Faith,' cried the women in one voice. 'Faith unfail-ing!'

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

A spiritu dominatus, Domine, libra nos.

The sacred words of the Fede Imperialis, the hal-lowed battle-prayer of the Adepta Sororitas, formed in the minds and hearts of Verity and Miriya. From the lightning and the tempest, Our Emperor, deliver us. From plague, deceit, temptation and war, Our Emperor, deliver us. From the scourge of the Kraken, Our Emperor, deliver us. The two women clung to one another, eyes averted from the h.e.l.l unfolding about them, each clasping the silver rosary chain.

The tiny thread of beads was a mere token, such a small thing, an icon of personal devotion with none of the pomp and glory of the church's great artefacts, and yet it was no less a key to the faith of Sister Verity, no less a symbol of fidelity to Sister Miriya. The witchfire thundered across the icy stone and engulfed them in blue lightning, but still they prayed. From the blas-phemy of the Fallen, Our Emperor, deliver us. From the begetting of daemons, Our Emperor, deliver us. From the curse of the mutant, Our Emperor, deliver us.

Legend had it that the faith of the Adepta Sorori-tas was so strong that no psyker could ever break their conviction, that only the most monstrous of the witchkin could threaten their purity. It was said that when a Sister was at her most pious, when she was at the moment of most virtuous sacrifice to the G.o.d-Emperor's spirit, the s.h.i.+eld of faith that sur-rounded her could turn any blow from the mind of the aberrant and unholy. Only when her faith was tested to the breaking point could a Sororitas truly know the power of her own zeal.

Miriya gripped the silver rosary and shouted the words of the invocation to the skies. A morte per-petual'

Verity's voice carried the final line over the crash of psychic flames. 'Domine, libra nos.'

As suddenly as it came, the searing, murderous heat faded away, back into the bone-chilling cold. Verity's eyes snapped open and she saw Miriya before her, holding on to her rosary for dear life. 'We... We are unharmed... By the Throne, we turned the killing blow. By faith alone we set our souls as armour!'

Miriya's eyes shone and she turned, raising her plasma gun in her mailed grip. Yes... Katherine pre-serve us, dear Sister, yes. We resisted!'

NO! LaHayn's rage made the chamber shake. This cannot be. You should be dead, you pestilent wh.o.r.es!

The Battle Sister released her grip on the rosary and faced their enemy. 'I will die when the G.o.d-Emperor calls me to His side, not at the whim of a crooked, insane freak. She sent a salvo of plasma bolts hissing into the priest-lord's aura. 'You failed to break us, LaHayn. Now the turn is yours!'

To Verity's shock, the Celestian threw herself into the glowing nimbus of energy, her black ceramite gauntlets sparking as they took purchase on the sur-face of one of the spinning rings. She called her name, but it was too late to stop her. With a sudden hot flash of bright lightning, Miriya was drawn into the deacon's psi-sphere by the motion of the loop. Inside the orbit of the halo, the woman seemed to s.h.i.+mmer, as if time moved at a different speed within the radius of the engine.

There was an abrupt and terrible awareness of dis-location. It was at once alien and familiar, bringing back the memory of an unnatural sensation each time she had been aboard a stars.h.i.+p plunging into the miasma of warp s.p.a.ce. Miriya's senses rebelled for a split-second and she forced bile down from her throat as the world about her s.h.i.+fted.

Inside the corona of the ancient device, she drifted as if in zero gravity, held fast only where she could cling to the turning hoops of phase-iron. It was like looking out through a sphere of frosted gla.s.s, the shapes and colours of the chamber beyond visible but clouded into distorted blurs. There were stri-dent, strange sounds in here with her, drawn-out shrieks and muttering cries, thoughts bleeding over from the minds of every other living being within the keep. For a moment, she thought she heard Tor-ris Vaun, yelling in agony, but then the echo faded.

LaHayn drifted above her, eyes aglow with hate as he stared down at her. 'How dare you approach me.

You soil this holy construct with your presence!'

'Heretic. she retorted. You have no right to speak of what is holy. You sacrificed the privilege of the church and your own humanity, the day you decided to revive this artefact!'

The priest threw up his hands and his anger flut-tered in red sparks. 'How can you be so wilfully blind, you arrogant wench? It is you who seeks to block the path of the Emperor, not I. You who can-not see the glory of this device!' He drifted closer to her, radiating power. 'I will know Him. I will peel back the veil of time and grasp the mind of the G.o.d-Emperor as no human has for ten thousand years!' LaHayn smiled.

'And when I do, when He shakes off the dust of eons and opens His eyes, it will be my face before Him. It will be my reward that is granted!'

Miriya levelled her gun. There are no words to plumb the depths to which you disgust me, priest. This madness ends here. She fired.

The deacon scrambled to throw up planes of force, dragging sheets of flickering radiation from the inner surfaces of the rings to block each s.h.i.+m-mering plasma bolt. The Sororitas saw blinks of panic in his eyes.

With her outside the spinning rings he had been able to marshal his power more easily, but with anadversary this close to him, he was finding it a challenge to maintain the upper hand. That this newborn witch had power beyond any she had encountered before was not in ques-tion, but LaHayn was new to the command of such abilities and he wielded them with clumsy applica-tion. He was on the defensive, reacting to her instead of fighting back.

She moved and fired, moved and fired, harrying him.

LaHayn spat with fury and did something with his free hand. Miriya felt another vertiginous s.h.i.+ft in the depths of her gut as the entire engine began to move across the chamber, the walls pa.s.sing slowly by beyond the gla.s.sy aura field.

'More. he growled beneath his breath, 'more power to me...'

Inexorably, the engine drifted out across the throat of the volcanic chimney, ascending to where geother-mal power conduits snaked up the inside of the basalt flue. The thick adamantium channels extended into the fluid core of Neva, to energy-exchange mecha-nisms of such advancement and age that their science was unknown to all but the most learned mechanicus adepts on Mars. LaHayn hissed and exercised his new strengths, drawing raw energy straight from the grids.

Miriya's shots pealed harmlessly off the s.h.i.+elds he placed in their way, every bolt melting. The Celestian felt the pressure within the engine sphere as the priest-lord engorged himself, his body resonating with potential.

LaHayn's wiry, whipcord frame was changing, gaining ma.s.s and presence by the moment. He was taking on the aspect of the G.o.d that he believed himself to be.

She kept firing, the plasma pistol growing hotter and hotter in her hands as the red rage of boiling magma churned beneath their feet. The emitter coils atop the breech of the weapon were glowing blue-white with discharge and the heat of the labouring gun touched her flesh through the flexsteel and ceramic plates of her gauntlet. Overload warning glyphs were blinking on the grip. But still she kept fir-ing.

'Why do you reject me?' shouted LaHayn. 'Don't you understand what I am doing? Do you want our Master to exist forever in stasis, frozen in eternal death, starved of life, the chance to complete His greatest work denied?'

'You are only a man. she shot back, 'and no man can dare to command the destiny of the Emperor!'

He leered at her through the haze of spent plas-matic gases. 'Put aside the weapon, Miriya. Your heart is pure, you have proven that. The G.o.d-Emperor will need souls as pious as yours when He awakens, you can become part of this new beginning... Think of it. cried the deacon. 'You will be the new Alicia Dominica, greater than any of the living saints!'

His invocation staggered her; the name of the great-est Sister of Battle, the hallowed Mother of Every Order, echoed in her mind. To be spoken of in the same breath as she... It was an incredible thing to consider.

You can be that woman. LaHayn pressed, sensing her hesitation, 'all your errors undone, all your fail-ures reversed, every death made a life - if only you stop resisting the truth.

Lethe and Iona. Portia and Reiko. She saw them all and more in her mind's eye, the imploring looks on their faces, and she had her answer. To give any other would have been to deny them the creed for which they had died, and to deny the truth that lay within her heart. 'In Katherine's name. she screamed. 'Death to the witch!'

Sparks stung her as the gun's delicate mechanisms began to boil, the heat radiating off it in waves and melting the ceramite on her fingertips. The plasma bolts, usually collimated and regular in form, spat from the pistol now in screeching ejections of fury, lengths of heat lightning crackling off the weapon. LaHayn snarled and fought away the attacks, enraged at her refusal to capitulate. The gun was sec-onds from a critical failure, and with a hissing snap the casing cracked along its length. The warning glyphs were a virulent red. At the last moment, Miriya let her muscles take over and she hurled the weapon at the priest-lord as hard as she could.

LaHayn's mistake was that he reacted as a man, not as a psyker. His nascent powers could have deflected the thrown gun in an eye blink, but he was too new to them for it to be a reflex. The deacon caught the weapon in his hands and howled as the scorching heat of it burned him, and in that instant the overloaded plasma pistol detonated in a fireball.

The blast ripped great strips of molten flesh from Viktor LaHayn, flas.h.i.+ng the soft tissues of his eyes to cinders, carving him open with daggers of flame as hot as a sun. His bone and marrow turned to molten slag, the opulent ministerial robes and golden icons he wore becoming blackened ashes in less than a second. Miriya's armour went slick and flowed like oil as she turned away. The ignition threw a bow wave of air compressed into a hazy white ring, slamming her out of the dying energy nimbus and against the sheer walls of the volcano's flue. She fell, clawing at black stone and adaman-tium decking.With their organic component abruptly immo-lated, the spinning rings lost all synchronisation and clashed with an ear-shattering cacophony. Met-als that had been forged in the hearts of long-dead neutron stars and etched with the blood of artisans from a thousand planets came apart. The rings frac-tured, dashed against one another, and lost all coherence. The aura field popped like a bubble and the machinery of the Emperor's lost engine fell the rest of the distance to the waiting deeps of the magma core. Somewhere down there, what remained of the High Ecclesiarch Lord Viktor LaHayn of Noroc boiled away into greasy vapours.

There was very, very much pain. The invisible knife rattling between her ribs was quite likely a broken bone piercing her lungs. The blood that bubbled out of her mouth with each exhalation virtually confirmed that.

Her right eye was gummed shut with fluid weeping from a gash on her scalp and when Miriya attempted to run a hand through her hair it came away daubed with crimson. The power pack on her back had shut down, forcing her to move the weight of her battle armour without a.s.sistance from the synthetic myomer muscles beneath the ceramite sheath. In turn, some joints in the armour had become fused together by the brief, intense heat.

She took a ragged breath laced with sulphur fumes and looked down from the metal ledge where her headlong fall had finally ended. Her vision swam, but she swallowed the moment of dis-orientation. Far below she could see the vast doors that opened on to the engine chamber, where Verity and the others Sisters still remained, but the fall of the machine had torn the conduits away; she had no way to descend to them. Miriya tapped her vox, but her reward was an earful of static. Reluctantly, she began to push her way upwards, towards the beckoning oval of sky above. Each movement was like torture, but she was resolute.

The clattering ruin of the falling machine brought silence in its wake among the three Sisters. Verity, Isabel and Ca.s.sandra knew that the destruction of the engine marked the execution of the heretic dea-con, but with it a dark fate for Miriya. Ash falls and coils of volcanic haze were thick about them, and rumbling tremors did their best to knock them off their feet.

Ca.s.sandra spat and threw a grimace at the entrance to the chamber. 'Rockfall,' she said in a weary voice.

The way is not clear to us.'

Isabel was on her haunches, her eyes lost beneath a makes.h.i.+ft bandage. 'Sister, speak plainly. Is there any way out of this lightforsaken cavern?'

'Not for us. came the reply. She glanced at the Hospitaller. 'Sister? What say you?'

Verity's attention was elsewhere. At the far corners of the chamber there seemed to be constellations of light gathering, small soundless flickers of colour that moved and flowed like mercury. 'Do you see that?'

she asked.

As she spoke, a large cl.u.s.ter of the light-wisps fused and crackled. The sound sent a s.h.i.+ver through the air, splintering the walls with its pa.s.sage. 'What was that?' demanded Isabel, instinctively grabbing her gun.

Ca.s.sandra paled. 'Oh, Throne. She pointed. There were more pinp.r.i.c.ks appearing by the moment, some of them hanging in the air like hovering insects. 'It's the warp. It's leaking through.

Verity found herself nodding. She had once been on a transport s.h.i.+p bound for a relief effort on behalf of the Ministorum where the vessel's Geller Field had suffered a dangerous fluctuation on enter-ing the empyrean. On the lower decks, where the field had been at its thinnest, similar phenomena had occurred.

Ghost lights, dancing dots of colour that were the tiniest pinp.r.i.c.ks of warp matter impinging on the real world. They were the probes of the intelligences that swarmed in warp s.p.a.ce, hungry to taste souls. The engine. she said. 'LaHayn's machine... It must have softened the bar-rier with the immaterium. Things...

will break in.

There!' Ca.s.sandra aimed and fired. For a split sec-ond Verity had the impression of something disc-shaped and trailing filaments emerging from a coruscating shadow, then the bolter ripped it apart. The Batde Sister quickly reloaded, frowning. 'Back to back, quickly. There will be more of them.'

The climb took agonising hours, or so it seemed. With blood pooling in her boots, Miriya pushed her-self over the lip of the volcanic vent and staggered down the sharp incline. A few hundred metres away she saw the artificial rock shelf where the oval land-ing pads sat. An aeronef laboured into the air as she approached, dangerously overloaded. It began to sink almost as soon as it took off. She estimated it would get no more than a kilometre away before it fell back into the wasteland.

An insistent droning circled her head and the Celestian tried to swat away whatever insect was causing it. She concentrated for a moment and realised that what she was hearing was the feed from her vox. Fumbling at her ear bead, she listened again. The citadel's arcane jamming systems did not oper-ate beyond the inside of the keep. It was a chorus of overlapping channels and commands - her vox had obviously been damaged in the fall - but she recog-nised the orders being flashed back and forth.

'Retreat?' she said aloud. To hear it said after all they had fought through clouded her expression with annoyance. Shespoke into her pickup. 'Say again. Miriya demanded. 'Whose gudess orders are these?

The reply buzzed in her ear. 'Miriya. For Katherine's sake, where are you?' The Canoness was furious.

'Atop the keep,' she replied. 'Who gave that order?'

'I did. The target zone is clear. You should be long gone!' Miriya could almost see the snarl on Galatea's face. You were ordered to rendezvous with the attack force. You were told to leave the keep!'

'I... intended to cany out that command in due time-'

You have contravened orders once more. shouted the distant voice, 'and now you'll pay the price for it.

'I chose to... chose to interpret your orders differ-ently, Canoness. I beg your forgiveness...' Miriya was close to the landing pads now. She saw two robed men working with frantic pace at an idling coleopter.

'Do you hear me?' spat Galatea. 'Let there be absolutely no room in your mind to interpret this command. Sister Superior Miriya, you are to desist in all combat activities immediately and evacuate the Null Keep to our rally point in the southern val-ley, where you will submit yourself for arrest. You have less than eleven standard minutes to comply!'

'Eleven minutes?' she repeated. 'Until what?'

'Until the orbital bombardment from the Mercutio reaches your co-ordinates. Pray tell, Sister, do I have your full and undivided attention now?'

Miriya choked on the words. 'A lance strike will reduce the entire citadel to rubble.

And whatever remains of LaHayn and his heretic army. replied her commander. 'Unless you wish to join them, I advise you to find transport, and quickly. Ten minutes and twenty-two seconds.

'My squad is still down there. she snapped.

She heard a sigh. 'Regrettable. They will be hon-oured for their service to the church.'

Miriya cut off the vox link and swore a gutter oath. Til not throw any more lives away for nothing,' she told herself, 'never again.'

With care, she approached the coleopter, letting the whine of the engine cover her footsteps. The ten-der didn't know she was there until he took a fist-sized lump of volcanic rock in the temple. He went sprawling and she used the motion to divest him of the long-barrelled lasgun he carried. The sec-ond man reacted with shock as he walked into view around the curve of the fuselage.

'You,' she snapped. 'Can you fly this aircraft?'

He gave a wary nod.

'Good. She aimed the lasgun and took the p.r.o.ne man's head off with one shot. You'll be next unless you do exactly, precisely what I tell you. Under-stand?'

Another nod, this time wooden and nervous.

She followed him into the c.o.c.kpit pod and pressed the still-warm muzzle to the back of his head. Take us down the throat of the mountain, quickly.

The man jerked in the chair and started to speak, but Miriya swatted him with the gun barrel. 'Remem-ber your a.s.sociate? Remember what I told you? Now do as I say!'

The coleopter's motors chattered up to full speed, and with a b.u.mp they left the landing pad, the blunt nose turning towards the steaming maw of the vol-cano.

The things that came through the holes in the air were horrors the like of which Verity had never dreamed: skinless things with hundreds of yellow-toothed mouths, screeching furies and spidery forms with too many clacking legs. These were the common predators of the warp, the mindless mon-strosities that infested the immaterium beyond human consciousness. The sounds they made as they died were terrible, the liquids spilling from them in garish colours that matched nothing in cre-ation. The gun Ca.s.sandra gave her spent the last of its bolt rounds all too quickly, and half in fright, half in fury, the Hospitaller threw it at the creatures.

Step by step, the encroaching fiends pushed the Sisters back to the very edge of the chamber, where the steep drop-off plunged hundreds of metres to the lava lake below. Torturous heat at their backs, and a ma.s.sing wall of Chaos beasts at their front. Verity, Ca.s.sandra and Isabel measured their lives by each breath of air.

The injured Sororitas snarled in despair as her bolter's breech snapped open, the last of her ammu-nition expended. 'I'm spent,' she told them.

The hordes hesitated. They seemed to understand that the prey was at the point of no return, and they giggled and snapped at one another in antic.i.p.ation.

Ca.s.sandra glanced at the sickle magazine in her bolter and blew out a breath. 'I have three rounds remaining. she said carefully. Her eyes tracked to Isabel and the wounded Battle Sister returned a weary nod. Then Ca.s.sandra looked at Verity with a hollow sadness on her face that the Hospitaller had never seen before. 'Sister? Do not fear. I'll make it quick.'

'No,' Verity shook her head, realising that tears were on her face. 'It is not us I feel sorry for, but our Sisters. They are the ones who will have to shoulder the pain of our loss.Ca.s.sandra nodded. You are brave, girl. I would not have thought it of you. I am glad you proved me wrong.

'And I. said Isabel. 'Lethe was proud of you. Now I understand why.

The honour was mine. Verity bowed her head and whispered a prayer, waiting for the Emperor's Peace, but in a roar of downwash, an entirely different sav-iour arrived.

Encouraged by a series of colourful threats and a shot through the canopy, Miriya forced the pilot to bring the coleopter into a hover by the open gates into the engine room. The situation imprinted on her refined tactical mind in an instant, the Sisters against the edge, the line of shapeless, hooting forms. There was a control board at her right hand and she stabbed the glyphs to activate the stubber guns in the flyer's nose. Rigged with cogitator sense engines, the weapon cupolas saw where she aimed them and busied them-selves by automatically opening fire on anything that moved. The pilot dutifully turned the coleopter to present its flank to the women below, and Miriya felt the aircraft pitch as they scrambled aboard.

'Here. she heard Verity call from the cramped rear compartment.

'Go. Miriya prodded the pilot with the lasgun, but he needed no more goading. More things were leak-ing through the expanding warp rifts and these new ones had wings and claws. At maximum thrust, the spindly flyer rose through the ash-fogged air and out into clear sky, turning southwards.

Ca.s.sandra came into the c.o.c.kpit and started to speak but Miriya held up a hand to silence her and pointed at the sky.