Part 12 (1/2)
Sherring eyed him. 'And you? What of the help that you promised me? Where are the weapons of LaHayn's own creation you said we would turn on him?'
'Here. smiled Vaun, gesturing at the woman and the man. 'Presenting my comrades Abb the Blinded and the girl Suki.
It was the baron's turn to be amused. 'Surely you jest? A skinny female and a sighdess man? What use are they?'
Vaun inclined his head. 'Show our friend Holt, will you?'
Suki shrank in on herself, and for a moment Sher-ring thought she might vomit on his rich carpets but then she let out a deep-throated yowl from her mouth and brought a gout of stinking fire along with it. The nearest of his bodyguards was caught in the nimbus of her dragon breath and he died on his feet.
The second guardian had his gun in his hand as the blind man pointed a crooked finger at him. Milky eyes surveyed the room as if they could still see, centring on Sherring's man. Veins on Abb's brow throbbed and the soldier screamed. Smoke plumed from his nostrils and mouth, and he fell to the floor, roasting fromwithin.
Terra protect me. whispered the baron. 'Pyro-kenes!'
Vaun's smile grew. 'Impressive, yes? I'm granting you the service of these two as a gesture of solidar-ity.
'Of... of course...' Sherring recoiled, the smell of burnt human meat sickening in his nostrils.
They sent in the flyers to strafe the Sisterhood's war machines, the same flight of oval coleopters that Vaun had used to sweep into Noroc during the Blessing of the Wound. That night, the capital's city guard had been slack and paid for its inattention with death, but Galatea's troops were more than ready for an aerial bombardment. Baron Sherring's affection for flyers and aeronefs was well docu-mented, and the Sisters of Battle had come prepared.
The coleopters thrummed through the cowl of smoke growing up about Metis's tall West Gate, lighting up the slow-moving lines of tanks with bolter sh.e.l.ls and laser fire. They came in low, counting on surprise, but that tactic had already been exhausted of its value.
Units of Sister Dominions, the special weapons caste of the Sororitas, switched targets from the turret emplacements and gun servitors of the cavalry. Storm bolters and meltaguns converged and brought the first of the disc-shaped aircraft out of the sky, shedding turbine blades and hull metal as it tumbled end over end into the smouldering tree line. The flames outside Metis were spreading now, coiled around the southern and western slopes in a flickering orange tore about the neck of the city.
Two more of the s.h.i.+ps collided in panic as their pilots realised too late that the Sisters were not the easy targets they had bombed in Noroc. A third, burning fuel trailing out behind it in a blaz-ing comet tail, turned into the line of armoured Rhinos, and metal met ceramite plate as the two vehicles collided.
The blast made the ground ripple and twitch. The Shockwave of the explosion fanned up the hillside and tucked under the rear quarter of the Rhino where Sister Verity rode. Her world turned about as the steel box suddenly rotated around her, throwing the women and hardware inside into disarray. Blood streaked her vision as Verity's head rang off the decking and she was whipped about. The clinical, detached part of her mind caught the sound of somebody's neck snapping as one of the Battle Sisters with her was struck by a loose ammunition crate. A warm darkness stole the rest of the dizzying impacts from her and then abruptly with no apparent dislocation between moments, the young woman found herself lying in the ankle-length gra.s.s, her body tight with dozens of new bruises.
Verity moved and took a wave of agony from her joints. A strong set of hands cupped under her armpits and helped her to her feet. She blinked, blurred vision clearing gradually to reveal a flock of red-pink shapes. There was a peculiar noise hereabouts, a tinny insect buzzing.
'Hospitaller, heal thyself. she mumbled thickly, the words bubbling up with an edge of hysteria. She straggled to make her eyes see properly and when they snapped back into focus, she regretted it. There before her was the wreckage of the Rhino, volatile promethium fuel pooling beneath it amid a paste of Sororitas corpses. Her gut turned over and she gasped.
'The Emperor watches over you,' said a voice close to her ear. 'He has a plan for you, Sister. No other survived from that transport.
Verity focussed on the speaker, the grogginess in her mind fading with every pa.s.sing second. She looked down to see a pale, scarred hand holding her up. She followed it to a face beneath a torn red hood and choked out a breath. 'Repentia...'
'By the Emperor's grace. replied Iona, hefting her idling eviscerator chainblade. 'Your life will be forfeit if you remain here. He did not spare you so that could happen.
The Mistress, a dark armoured figure with neural whips heavy in her hands, rose into sight and pointed toward the melee. 'The medicae is in our care. Take heed as we press forward. Her life is to be protected!'
Then they were advancing forwards, women in red rags and high rage all about her as the battle swung closer.
CHAPTER TEN.
A backwash of raw heat seared Sister Miriya's cheek and she leaned into the firing controls, bringing the turret ring of the Immolator about in a hard arc. In the lee of the closest autocannon emplacement, a cavalryman with more bravery than intellect worked at a portable mortar, jamming a fresh sh.e.l.l into the breech. The Battle Sister lit up the meltas and drew a line of wavering heat across the ferrocrete and mud to where he stood, burning him down in a flas.h.i.+ng scar of detonation.
Attracted by the activity, the cogitator brain in the turret began a ponderous turn to bear on the tank. Miriya kicked at a control switch by her feet and spoke a quick prayer to the G.o.d-Emperor and His tech-priests.
The switch brought the blessing of power to a single-shot tube launcher that clung to the flank of the Immolator. Words of consecration wrapped about it on streams of parchment and theshapes of holy seals in red and white wax sheathed its exhaust vents.
Miriya pointed at the gun emplacement and glanced at the Canoness. 'With your permission, honoured Sister?'
'You may remove the obstacle. nodded Galatea. 'The hunter is yours to command.
'Aye. Miriya needed no more encouragement, turning an ornate bra.s.s key inset on the turret's dashboard.
The tube chugged out a fat flower of white smoke, and from the middle of that bloom came a wicked projectile, the tip saw-toothed and barbed. Through a means that was beyond Sister Miriya's understanding, the hunter-killer missile spoke directly to the machine spirit of the Immo-lator and its auspex, there in the few seconds between leaving its birth chamber and turning to its target. The rocket went up into the grey air as a salmon leaps from a river, then turned about its own axis and penetrated the top of the autocan-non turret.
The gun emplacement burst open in a black and red flash, unspent sh.e.l.ls ripping the air as they ignited in the inferno. Along the line of enemy turrets, a ripple of electric shock streaked through the cables connecting the servitor-brains inside each, and the maws of guns twitched in confusion.
'Press the attack. screamed Galatea, vox micro-phones in her armour taking her words and amplifying them through the loud hailers of her tank.
'Faith unfailing. Every sister on the field replied in kind, backing up their war cry with bolt sh.e.l.l, fire and fury. The Exorcists and Immolators angled and fired upon the mechanical gun bunkers one by one, opening them so that the butchered ma.s.ses of once-human brains within were boiled into the air.
The echo of multiple detonations sank into the smoke, falling at the feet of the charging Adepta Sororitas. In their trenches and boltholes beyond the towers of the West Gate, soldiers broke and ran at the sight of the women. Red cloaks snapped at the backs of the Battle Sisters and what faint sunlight made it through the war mist flashed off their black power armour. Those who were unhooded showed faces of wrath framed by tresses in ashen or jet. The pa.s.sion of the G.o.d-Emperor was among them, the spirit of Katherine the Martyr their s.h.i.+eld and their sword.
The defenders of Metis gave return fire but on came the women, a force of nature made manifest.
The Repentia carried Verity with them as a wave might have carried a piece of driftwood out to sea. She was beyond her own control, guided and pushed by the hands of the red hoods and their Mis-tress, inside but isolated from their small band. The Hospitaller pulled her own robes around her, better to cover her face from the roaring madness of the battle. There was nowhere she could look that the b.l.o.o.d.y ruin of war was not laid out for her to see.
Here, the ill.u.s.tration from a medicae script made real, where the shattered gla.s.s egg of a servitor was spread about the ferrocrete; there, a man cored like an apple, bones white in a red ma.s.s of singed meats.
Verity had come across wounds as savage as these and more so, but those had always been at a dis-tance.
She had seen the dead and the dying once removed from the field of conflict, the thought of where those wounds had originated some abstract, dislocated concept. Now, she watched the inflicting of those damages, she smelled the familiar burnt-copper aroma made new and horrible by those sights.
Verity staggered and the Mistress caught her arm and stopped her from falling. The Sisters Repentia stormed on before them, throwing themselves heedlessly over barbed wire bales and into the depths of trenches behind. Lesions covering them across every centimetre of skin, the Repentia called down death in banshee wails. Their heavy eviscer-ator chainswords made short work of the men, spinning razors of teeth shredding flesh, bone and cloth on the down stroke, the blunt iron edge on the weapon's other face caving in skulls and ribcages on the upswing.
The one called Iona, the woman that had invoked the Catechism of the Penitent after failing to save Lethe from death, worked at the craft of killing with blank frenzy. Verity watched her drive her sword through the sternum of a screaming cavalry officer, and found the most terrible thing to behold was the empty, doll-like glaze in Iona's eyes. The Hospitaller felt the conflict of emotions returning, the same hurricane of anger, sorrow and regret that had taken her the day she arrived on Neva. Had Iona felt the same? Had she been so scarred by Lethe's brutal killing, that all she could do was throw herself to the mercy of a blood-spattered redemption?
Verity was troubled to realise that on some level, she could empathise with the pale woman.
'Advance!' screamed the Mistress. 'Take only sins, not prisoners. Leave only flesh, not corruption.
Onward. Onward'
Verity was taken with them, into the trenches and tunnels that led to the city.
Local legends said that the West Gate of Metis had been forged from the hull metal of the first human colony s.h.i.+p to arrive on Neva, back in the time of expansion when the stars were new to mankind's touch.
They were, in their own way, relics of great import to the people of this planet, but the gate dared to bar theway of the G.o.d-Emperor's chosen agents. The steel which had travelled a million light years from the place of its forging was shattered by a hundred Sororitas guns, and with a sound like the collapse of heaven, the four-storey gate was felled.
The razor-prowed Repressors bit into the debris scattered across the highway, tracks spinning as they fought to gain purchase on the ferrocrete. Dead men and killed machines were forced into gutters as the Daughters of the Emperor marched in skirmish lines behind an armoured fist of tanks. Their blood was up, and down the streets before them the wind carried their hymnals.
The last line of defence left by panicked officers, laser-armed snipers in the outer buildings st.i.tched crimson threads into the Sisters. Miriya and the other women in the tank turrets paid them back tenfold with plasma and rockets, tearing the upper floors from stone tenements and razing the wood and tile of others. At their backs, the fires from the forest advanced in with them, the curling smoke and flames hissing over the b.l.o.o.d.y trenches.
Metis was a city of riches. Like so many conur-bations on Neva, the scars of poverty and lawlessness that touched the faces of many hive worlds and colonies were absent, or, at least they were elsewhere, s.h.i.+fted to the factory moons where the poor and the desperate could be corralled. The most down-market districts were veritable palaces compared to the rat-warren hovels that Sister Miriya had seen on some rim worlds.