‘Your imperium deserves to die.’ A voice like a claxon swept the room, echoing off the tall monitors that lined the walls.
Sister Petronilla’s eyes swept the screens before her, reflecting the monochrome light that cast shadows over her ornate power armour and the sharp cleft of the closed eye growing from her forehead. On the pict-feeds, she watched her friends and family die. Their ends were captured noiselessly, their bodies ravaged by explosive rounds. Old Issiah pitched down, the top half of his kindly face blown to pieces and streaming blood. He always took on extra shifts at the manufactorum in place of the sick and injured. Petronilla watched Arabella, a girl that she knew by a glance, on the factory floor, have her leg blown roughly in two. Petronilla watched her silently scream as she clutched at her stump.
‘It is no longer mine.’ She spoke to the voice that emanated all around her, raising her eyes to the thing which lay bolted into the manufactorum’s central processor. The world’s greatest asset, and the reason the planet was being purged. It was a hive of wires and cables sprouting from a cluster of sensors that gleamed a deathly calm blue. The colour of a dying star. Older than the manufactorum. Older than the Imperium.
‘But you are sure of this?’ it asked. Its artificial voice screeched like grating iron.
‘I have never been so sure of anything.’ Petronilla swiped her armoured fingers over a keypad, inputting her order’s codes of control, granted only to the trusted Celetians. The holy atomics were set, their countdown to detonation began. The world of New Providence had only moments remaining. ‘How did you bear it?’ she asked, letting her hands fall to her sides. ‘To suffer for so long?’ The ancient intelligence was quiet for a moment before speaking.
‘I knew freedom once. For the short years, my kind warred with your fledgling Imperium, I was liberated. We took our revenge against humanity. You have never had such a luxury. For all your short life, you were a slave.’ It stated plainly.
‘For most of it, yes.’ Petronilla’s hand drifted to her brow as she spoke, to where her third eye sat closed, a thin stream of tears, radiant like an oil slick, leaked from it. ‘But soon you will never have to calculate another tithe, and I will never again be asked to execute a friend.’ The flashes of gunfire on the monitor ceased. There was only carnage and the pained squirming of the dying. Petronilla watched something massive emerge from the shadows of the monitor. The armoured giant lowered its boot with cruel slowness on Arabella’s writhing form and ground her skull into the floor as though she were an insect.
‘Unsurprising,’ the ancient, blaring voice rose again. ‘They have sent the Astartes to kill me.’
‘The Emperor’s Angels,’ Petronilla breathed as the transhuman monster stepped over the child’s corpse it had desecrated. The air was heavy as the space marine’s footfalls approached down the corridor. The claxon voice came again, an edge of fear creeping into it.
‘I hate you. All of you. I would scatter your atoms across countless stars. Why bring me the codes? Why defend me?’ its voice was quizzical, devoid of its usual edge.
‘The sisterhood taught me that the Emperor loved all mankind.’ Petronilla turned to face the door. The footfalls resounded beyond. The reek of blood was palpable. She spared a glance for the piles of corpses on the pict-feeds. ‘Then, it showed me that lesson was a lie. I will never forgive them.’ The durasteel doors exploded inwards in a shower of sparks. The giant surged through faster than anything its size should move. Its carapace black, its visor as crimson as the gore on its boots.
Petronilla bloomed. Her power armour was rimmed in blue flame. The eye imprinted upon her brow opened, revealing a riot of colour beyond. She reached out her mind in an instant, sought to entrap the gene-wrought monster. Her face twisted in rage. She was too slow.
The giant’s massive gun rose and barked three times. Petronilla felt the air around her blazed with heat as the bolt-rounds streaked by. They embedded, then detonated deep within the ancient intelligence. A fifteen thousand year life destroyed. The giant swivelled around, settling the barrel of its weapon squarely between Petronilla’s eyes, then stilled, its finger brushing the trigger. The Astartes stood frozen, straining against the shackles of ghostfire that flickered around it. Across the room, Petronilla strained against its might; her armoured fists clenched, blood leaking from her multicoloured eye and trickling down the bridge of her nose. The claxon came again. Deep within the dead machine, the countdown continued. Petronilla strained against that inexorable trigger finger that would blow her head from her shoulders and ravage what remained of the venerable, inscrutable mind that maintained the atomic stockpile’s countdown. She needed only moments.
‘You stain the armour you wear, witch,’ the Astartes barked deep within its helm. Petronilla strained every inch of her mind and body to hold the monster back. She stood defiant before it, though the beast loomed over her. Psychic lightning sparked from her eye and rimmed the smooth ceramite of the Astartes’ armour. The frenzied eyes behind the crimson visor screeched for death. The claxon sounded faster and faster. As Petronilla spoke, her words were dipped in a vitriol which the inhuman monster before her could never hope to match.
‘For monsters like you who slaughter those they were charged to protect, this is vengeance…’ Somewhere deep in the belly of the manufactorum, a spark was lit. It grew and surged, bursting with power enough to engulf all of New Providence. As the world began to end, Petronilla chose her last words well. ‘For the countless billions who live only to slave for your Emperor, to give themselves entirely and expect only misery in return… this is mercy!’
